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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   33936 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Long time motteizen, new pseudonym for extra privacy.

Some friends and I are launching a new anonymous group blog: https://www.theprotocols.net/ Many of us have interesting culture-war related takes that we post on forums like these, or on our group chats, but we felt like we needed a place to more permanently publish things that deserved a wider audience. Subscribe via ye olde email or RSS to see posts as they come out.

Our first post is "Regulated Banks Are Just Stealing Your Money Slowly". Here is the TLDR:

In the wake of yet another crypto scam blowing up, smug commenters are shaking their heads and saying: “This disaster is the consequence of jettisoning 100-years of regulatory progress. Traditional FDIC insured banks have never lost customer funds this way, not even in the 2008 crash.”

...Newsflash: FDIC insured banks are stealing your money. They do it very slowly, but the total amount is very significant.

Well, to be more accurate, it is the government stealing your money, not the banks. Actually, to be more accurate, it is impossible to pin down who exactly is stealing your money, because banks should be seen as arms of the state, and the state is the arm of an ecosystem of elites and elite clients, and the entire thing has grown fiendishly complex because it is in everyones interest to allow it to be complex. In fact, the real bandit may be your neighbor who bought a million dollar home with a 30-year, 2% interest rate loan. Or maybe the thief is your friend who cashed out on Apple stock after Apple funded a stock buyback with a loan at 1% interest. (Don’t go screaming at your friend – hate the game not the player).

Complaints about the “banks” or “guvmint” stealing money via inflation are very old and are often seen as the ravings of cranks – but I don’t think many people appreciate how bad the problem has become in the last two decades. Let us go through the numbers, courtesy of the St. Louis Fed. Well, to be more accurate, it is the government stealing your money, not the banks. Actually, to be more accurate, it is impossible to pin down who exactly is stealing your money, because banks should be seen as arms of the state, and the state is the arm of an ecosystem of elites and elite clients, and the entire thing has grown fiendishly complex because it is in everyones interest to allow it to be complex. In fact, the real bandit may be your neighbor who bought a million dollar home with a 30-year, 2% interest rate loan. Or maybe the thief is your friend who cashed out on Apple stock after Apple funded a stock buyback with a loan at 1% interest. (Don’t go screaming at your friend – hate the game not the player).

...We start with a simple yeoman saver who wants to exchange present labor for some sort of medium-of-saving...So he does the simplest thing: he puts his money in a 3-month certificate of deposit at his local regulated, FDIC insured, plain vanilla bank and continually rolls it over. No default risk, no interest rate risk.

If our yeoman made a deposit in 2002, according to Fed data, his account would have gained a total of 36% over the last twenty years thanks to the the interest paid out. But during that time the Consumer Price Index rose 68%! In 20 years, our yeoman would have lost 19% of his purchasing power! Actually it’s worse than that. The amount his money was diluted is actually more than CPI inflation, but since economic productivity increased, his effective purchasing power was not decreased by the full amount of the dilution....

The distinction between monetary dilution and CPI inflation is ignored in most college economic courses, but it is very important. Think of it this way: Imagine I buy a stock in a boring, stable company. A share of the stock happens to have the same price as ten 50” TVs. Over 20 years, the CEO and the board fraudulently and secretly dilute the stock by 50%, making my shares 50% less valuable. So if productivity had stayed constant, my shares would lose half their purchasing power, only being tradable for 5 TVs instead of 10. However, productivity did not stay constant, Chinese factory workers have made it 40% more efficient to buy TVs. Thus one share can now buy seven 50” TVs. My ability to turn my shares into the real good of a TV only decreased by 30%. Now given all this is it fair for the CEO to say, “hey, I only diluted you by 30%, not 50%!” Or, consider if TV factory productivity had doubled, and thus my purchasing power held constant, would it be fair for the CEO to say, “I didn’t steal from you at all, since you can still buy the same number of TVs with your share of stock.” No and no. The dilution is a completely separate issue from the price of tea (or TV’s) in China.

When we look at National Income change over the last 20 years, we see that our simple account owner lost 40% of his money. That’s not quite an FTX-level scam, but that is pretty serious theft.

We could also look at the performance of our yeoman saver’s bank deposits versus holding assets that are much harder to dilute – such as gold or silver. This shows us our depositor lost 50% to 60% of his savings. We could also compare against alternative investments, such as the S&P 500 ETF or real estate. Here is the full chart:

Purchasing-power-lost.png

No matter how you look at it, our yeoman saver has been jobbed. Even if he chooses a modestly longer duration for his store of value, such as a 3-year U.S. Treasury, our saver loses 12% relative to CPI and 35% relative to monetary dilution.

In order to simply stay in place, he must make a risky investment. Our saver could get a higher interest rate by purchasing a long-term bond. But that introduces large interest rate risks. Our depositor who bought a 30-year bond last year when interest rates were historically low would have just lost 30% of his money.

Now hopefully you see why we live in the golden age of asset bubbles. By default, if you put your money in the stodgy, regulated bank, you will lose your money via dilution. So everyone is looking for a place simply to stash their money that won’t get diluted. All the savings in the world sloshes around chasing some asset that can hold value. As any given asset becomes popular it shoots up in bubble, with the greedy and the scammers piling on too. Even the prudent investor cannot discern what asset is in a bubble, and what asset is properly priced. Is Silicon Valley real estate currently in a bubble? Or is it properly priced based on expectations in the next 20 years of lower interest rates and more monetary dilution? Is the stock market over-valued based on a long-term analysis of P/E ratio? Or is this the new normal based on a government that will inflate and lower interest rates in order to “make number go up”?

So here is our plea to any political influencer who thinks the answer to banking crises and crypto crises is just moar regulation: the number one priority should be ensuring the average person has a place where they can simply deposit their money and not have it diluted or inflated away. As long as the default state is to lose much of your money, people will be seeking a riskier, higher-yielding outlet – whether that be the type of money market accounts that crashed in 2008 or a “Nyan Cat” NFT....

To any reader who just wants to save for retirement – well, we don’t want to give financial advice because we would feel bad if we reverse our view next month and forget to tell you. And are you really going to trust a brand-new anonymous zine for investing tips? We can tell you that we here at Protocol have our own internal debates between bitcoin maximalists and those who believe in more diversification. Generally, we have our own net worth spread out among: short-term U.S. treasuries, dividend paying stocks, American and international equity index funds, gold, bitcoin, Urbit stars, our own startups, and our own homes. “Crypto” is bad, bitcoin is great, but do learn how to self-custody.

Myself (and the author of the post through this account) will be happy to answer any questions or respond to comments about this post.

Also, we are open to publishing guest blog posts if you have something you need to get off your chest and want to publish anonymously to the web. You can DM me here or email the contact address on the web site. Cheers!

EDIT: Looks like I did a really poor job of making a TLDR for the original post. I've added a bit more context, but I advise clicking through and reading the whole thing before leaving a comment.

Do some of you work at banks? I can't imagine a world where writing this post would be seen as dangerous. Maybe this is just the initial offering meant to be as inoffensive as possible?

As for the content, I agree and don't have much to say about it.

Maybe this is just the initial offering meant to be as inoffensive as possible?

This.

I work at a bank and the post really doesn't strike me as a well thought out critique of the banking system. I'm quite a fan of moving to crypto for other reasons so I definitely think there are good critiques of the banking system, but that they don't pay much interest on zero risk deposits is not one of them.

Maybe this is just the initial offering meant to be as inoffensive as possible?

Based on the domain name? Buckle up for a wild ride.

Which is a shame, really. I'd love to see some serious examination of what the net effects of modern seigniorage are. Is it effectively a progressive wealth tax, because it only directly hits people with accumulated cash? Is it regressive overall (above what level of wealth?) because anybody with real wealth has most of it properly invested, or at least can afford longer term bonds, because there's only so much cash you need to have safe and liquid for emergencies? Is it also effectively a fee the US charges the rest of the world, either legitimately (a reserve currency with a nice stable slow inflation being better than most other "safe" stores of wealth) or illegitimately (insert petrowarfare conspiracy theory here)? Is it a systemic risk, because of the vicious cycle of inflation we'd expect if the dollar ever ceases being the obvious world reserve currency?

But I'm going to be sadly unsurprised if this just turns out to be "In my country there is problem", only aimed at a different target audience and not ironic.

See our explanation of the domain name here: https://www.themotte.org/post/221/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/39692?context=8#context

Based on the domain name?

TIL that withheldforprivacy.com (used along with namecheap to register that site back in July) has a listed business address at Kalkofnsvegur 2, 101 Reykjavík, Ísland, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

All I could find with a casual search was this cease and desist related to a crypto scam run from such a withheld address. How curious.

Edit: I clicked your last link and now I understand the strategy much better.

Most likely the scam site before the domain was seized was registered using the same privacy service. It's a standard add-in offered by namecheap and every website registered with that service will list that address on the domain rather that whoever purchased it.

Money printing is a complicated topic but if we just take inflation aspect I'd argue it's best for the class of people for whom mortgages are a significant portion of their wealth and have a stable job that gives inflation adjusted raises. The very rich are pretty insulated as their wealth is invested and the poor don't have the money in the first places but may not have their pay as regularly raised to keep up with inflation. The benefit of the extra incentive to invest probably dominates and makes everyone better off.

Maybe you can invite this woman to write a guest post.

I’m not sure what your point here is. Interest rates are determined by the market. Monetary policy doesn’t effect real interest rates in the long run and fiscal policy has been extremely expansionary and that increases real interest rates. This isn’t a failure of the banking system it’s just the fact there is a glut of capital. Lots of savings chasing few investments.

Interest rates are determined by the market. Monetary policy doesn’t effect real interest rates in the long run

Nonsense.

fiscal policy has been extremely expansionary

True, this matters too.

and that increases real interest rates

Expansionary fiscal policy causes CPI inflation which lowers CPI-adjusted interest rates.

Long time motteizen, new pseudonym for extra privacy.

I am very curious about this. What is it about a theory that banks are "stealing" your money via inflation that makes you feel the need for extra anonymity? And I too have noted your username and domain name. Would you be willing to explain how you chose it, and why you and your friends are being so mysterious?

It's an obvious reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; you best ban him before he posts an anti-Semitism.

That wasn't the first reference that came to my mind, I was thinking of "protocols" as something along these lines.

So perhaps it was "obvious" to you but not to me. This is the same problem around racism, sexism, transphobia, anti-Semitism, etc; someone says "that statement was an obvious dog-whistle, ban them!" but other people don't see what it is supposed to be whistling about until it's explained to them.

So is there really hidden bad intent, or is it just something the observer imagined was there?

Your sarcasm is noted. So let me spell it out for you: people are allowed to be "anti-Semitic" so long as they can stay within the boundaries of the rules (which people who want to pull out the Protocols and the full ZOG manifesto are rarely able to do). But we do require speaking plainly, and this looks and smells like someone either trolling or trying to "hide their power level."

If the OP actually comes clean and is honest and straightforward about their agenda, they'll get more slack than if they think being clever about it means they can slip stuff in.

You’re probably aware that an anti-Semitism, even several of them, is not cause for a ban here.

I don’t imagine Amadan is confused about the reference. I too would like to know what the OP is hoping to gain by hiding his power level.

We are going to have more spicy posts in the future on all the hot button issues -- race, sex, etc -- of the kind that might attract doxxing and cancellation mobs. The name "protocol" comes from the original definition: "Protocol" -- "1. The first leaf glued to the rolls of papyrus and the notarial documents, on which the date was written 2. The original copy of any writing, as of a deed, treaty, dispatch, or other instrument." So we had the idea of a very sparse web site with a simple dispatch and a date in the upper corner (a million satoshis to anyone who can figure out what system the date is using). But "protocol" also has the association with modern tech stuff. And yes, there is the hint of edginess due to the association with a forged document from a long time ago, though we don't plan on writing much or anything about that kind of topic.

forged document

Allegedly forged, that is.

Whenever interest rates are lower than the rate of inflation or monetary dilution, the incentive will always be to load up on debt and purchase assets that can appreciate – whether that be Brooklyn brownstones or Dogecoin.

Yes, but even if the value of the brownstone decreases, you still have a brownstone. Where as crypto markets are speculation absent any underlying asset. And it’s even a bit unfair to call it currency speculation at present, given how few transactions are conducted with it.

What U.S. currency and the regulated banking system has behind it is the U.S. state. Whereas crypto has hopes, dreams, and Bahamian bucket shops.

Cash, properly invested, is not guaranteed to lose to inflation. https://portfoliocharts.com/2017/05/12/understanding-cash-will-make-you-a-better-and-happier-investor/

Additionally, cash as a position in a portfolio has done better than risk assets for this calendar year.

Cash can be fine in times and places where government has handled currency dilution and interest rates responsibly. The United States since 2002 has not been such a place, which is the point of the post.

The United States since 1933 has not been such a place.

Congrats on founding your blog, I wish you and your companions well.

The problem with the theory that there is anywhere better to put your money than a bank is that you have to spend money to secure it. A significant lump of gold doesn't hold its value for you over time. The gold itself holds its value, but not for you. You have to guard it, you might lose it. If you lose it, you lose it all.

If you don't guard it, you risk theft and total loss. Your hypothetical yeoman saver is going to have, what, let's say $10,000.00. So he buys 5 ounces of gold. He can choose to keep it on him, like a pimp, but if he gets mugged there goes his life savings. Ditto keeping it at home, he better not get burgled when he isn't at home, better make sure no one ever finds out you're a goldbug. So while any single hypothetical yeoman farmer might get lucky and hang onto his retirement savings throughout his life, we should discount the value of physical savings like gold and silver by the odds of theft of that gold in the course of that 20 years. Of course, your level of personal security varies with who you are as a person. You might be big, tough, and live in a town where everybody knows you and either likes you well enough to protect you or knows that too many others like you too much to risk messing with you. But the unbanked small, weak, the stranger, the unloved, those who the police aren't interested in protecting, they can't carry their wealth with them; without banking they pretty much just never accumulate much mobile wealth at all in a modern and disconnected world.

The alternative in non-financial/banking investments in something concrete and productive like land. But land must be worked to give produce. Either by the owner or by a tenant. Any landlord will tell you, good tenant's are hard to find. Worth their weight in gold. The tenant who does his own repairs, pays his own costs, pays his rent on time, is rare. So if you want to invest in land, you're paying the costs (either by labor or by percentage) every year you own it. In cultures that are built around those kinds of leases, the costs are lower. But we don't live in those cultures.

I won't even countenance the idea of investing directly in a small business in this day and age. The risk of total loss without an owner putting blood, sweat, and tears into the business is basically 100%; even with that it's pretty high over 20 years.

So we probably need to start with eliminating the cash economy, the lack of connection and community among atomized individuals. But failing that, you're gonna need a bank.

Bitcoin does not cost anything to store, though you do have to spend some time learning how to self-custody securely. It's a lot easier than it was ten years ago, very low risk of losing your keys or having them stolen if you do it well.

Storage costs of gold are overblown. You can fit a million dollars of gold in a standard $70 a year safe deposit box. GoldMoney.com or BullionVault.com will store it for you with high security for 0.1% a year -- so that is a 2% loss over 20 years. That is far less than the numbers cited in the article for the monetary dilution losses from holding cash in a bank.

very low risk of losing your keys or having them stolen if you do it well.

Unless someone knows that in your brain is the key to $100,000 of untraceable, irrecoverable currency, in which case a 9mm held to your knee is sort of a universal key. With crypto transactions being, ideally, irreversible and untraceable, it's much riskier than gold coins because you can't even catch the guy with the gold. Alternatively, if crypto transactions are traceable and reversible, you are at the mercy of the government system, they can confiscate your money without even sending out the goon squad.

You have me on the safe deposit box, but I'm not sure I'd really trust a storage company with a significant fraction of my net worth. My bank can't fiddle with the numbers, I can show my math and my records. What do you do if your gold comes out lighter. Probably paranoia, I'm not sure that any of that is accurate, just vibes.

Unless someone knows that in your brain is the key to $100,000 of untraceable, irrecoverable currency, in which case a 9mm held to your knee is sort of a universal key.

Do not tell anyone who much crypto you have. For a wrench attack, the thief would have to know how much you have, otherwise you just open up a side wallet and only give them a small portion of your funds. Also, you can use multisig or split up your seed so that you literally could not give an attacker your keys on the spot even if you wanted to.

But yeah, given a high enough rate of crime, nothing is safe, kidnapping loved ones is always a risk, no matter what form of wealth you hold.

You have me on the safe deposit box, but I'm not sure I'd really trust a storage company with a significant fraction of my net worth.

Safe deposit boxes aren't perfect as bank customer service has declined. There are horror stories about banks shutting down a branch and not properly notifying customers and the deposit boxes ending up in limbo somewhere.

Do not tell anyone who much crypto you have.

Which is practical, as long as Crypto is an extremely marginal aspect of both the world economy and your personal net worth, or you live as a kind of digital nomad cyberpunk gray man. But it rather precludes it as a primary store of value for settled individuals and communities as a whole. If we ever reached a point where most wealth was stored through crypto, you would just have to target random rich people.

Unfortunately safe deposit boxes are steadily disappearing as a bank service across the US. And they're not exactly safe from Government intervention either.

Even if you assume there's no risk, though, the loss to inflation is still there. Even if I don't secure my cash an no one steals it, it's still going to lose value even compared to the modest return a savings account or CD would offer me. Investing in gold is just another commodity subject to the normal swings of commodity markets—it may prove to be a good investment, it may not be.

Gold doesn't inflate, it fluctuates. At least until we can rip atoms apart and rearrange them.

Mining increases the global gold supply by 2% every year.

I wonder how much is lost per year from accidents, caching/hoarding, wear, etc. The best figure I can get for wear is silver coins losing 5% weight over a lifetime.

Probably much less of an issue these days: nobody's sunk any spanish treasure ships lately, and fewer people are burying valuables to hide them from raiders. Plus more gold gets kept in bar form rather than being periodically switched between plates/ornaments and coinage, with whatever losses are involved.

banks” . . . stealing money via inflation

This seems to imply that banks want high inflation. But the opposite is true; because banks make money by making loans, and because high inflation means that loans are paid back in less valuable dollars, banks want inflation to be low. Hence, it is not surprising that the Fed, which represents banks, prioritizes keeping inflation low over keeping unemployment low, and why debtors have historically advocated for inflationary policies.

Moreover, the assumption that, because my savings are worth less because of inflation, that therefore someone has "stolen" money from me does not work. I have only two options re what to do with my money; 1) I can spend it; or 2) I can save it. If I choose to save it, then I have many options, but they are of two general categories: a) High risk / high return; and b) low risk / low return. Federally insured bank accounts are at the far end of the low risk spectrum (just above burying it in my backyard), so of course those accounts pay low interest. That isn't theft; it is reality. Calling that theft is like complaining that gravity is stealing my water when it flows down the drain.

The TLDR cut out the more full explanation that is not actually the bank itself that is benefiting from the theft-via-dilution. Who benefits is a fiendishly difficult question:

Well, to be more accurate, it is the government stealing your money, not the banks. Actually, to be more accurate, it is impossible to pin down who exactly is stealing your money, because banks should be seen as arms of the state, and the state is the arm of an ecosystem of elites and elite clients, and the entire thing has grown fiendishly complex because it is in everyones interest to allow it to be complex. In fact, the real bandit may be your neighbor who bought a million dollar home with a 30-year, 2% interest rate loan. Or maybe the thief is your friend who cashed out on Apple stock after Apple funded a stock buyback with a loan at 1% interest. (Don’t go screaming at your friend – hate the game not the player).

Moreover, the assumption that, because my savings are worth less because of inflation, that therefore someone has "stolen" money from me does not work.

Dilution is theft. If the board of a company secretly prints new shares and gives it to their friends that is theft.

If I choose to save it, then I have many options, but they are of two general categories: a) High risk / high return; and b) low risk / low return.

Our put is that option b) is actually low risk negative return and that this is a big problem.

I don’t see why it matters that it is a negative return. That is the price I pay for, among other things, insurance on my deposits. And, banks are very clear on how much interest they pay on their various accounts, and it is completely obvious how that compares to the inflation rate. If I don’t like those term, I am free to put my money elsewhere. Nor is that at all analogous to a board secretly and fraudulently diluting the value of company shares.

When we look at National Income change over the last 20 years, we see that our simple account owner lost 40% of his money. That’s not quite an FTX-level scam, but that is pretty serious theft.

Big difference between losing all your $ overnight vs. gradual loss of purchasing power.

...We start with a simple yeoman saver who wants to exchange present labor for some sort of medium-of-saving...So he does the simplest thing: he puts his money in a 3-month certificate of deposit at his local regulated, FDIC insured, plain vanilla bank and continually rolls it over. No default risk, no interest rate risk.

Or he could buy real estate, stocks, etc. which tend to not lose value to inflation. Or consumer goods. few people just park their discretionary income in savings accounts and do nothing else with it forever.

Why do you think savers deserve risks free high return investment products or that any “government” agency is stealing from people.

People can invest in the real economy. If the real economy is offering few investment possibilities that are high return then banks won’t be able to pay a high interest rate and reinvest profitably

Being that traditional banks haven’t crushed it lately why do you think not just lack of investment opportunities.

Honestly I think you just don’t understand banking or interest rates. The fed doesn’t control real rates.

The fed doesn’t control real rates.

We despise the term "real" rate is as in plain English the "real" rate is the rate a person sees at the bank, the number that economists call the "real rate" is the rate adjusted by the price of a basket of goods in en enormously complex calculation filled with arbitrary and subjective decisions. But going with your term "real rate", this is a function of the nominal rate and the CPI, so no the fed does not control the CPI, although their actions do influence it as cheap money can in circumstances , nobody sets the CPI exactly, but the Fed does set the nominal rate, and when they set the nominal rate below the rate of monetary dilution, that is really bad for ordinary savers.

Why do you think savers deserve risks free high return investment products or that any “government” agency is stealing from people.

Savers deserve simply to keep their money and not have it diluted away. We don't demand that they be able to keep up with the stock market, but they shouldn't be losing ground relative to everything. Did you click through and see the image that was linked? This one: https://www.theprotocols.net/attachments/post-3---6-y9m_NavZtJ5NLIGpnLv8HfGVg/Purchasing-power-lost.png

Then why don’t they just invest in lumber or whichever product you find that a savings account has underperformed?

Money is a fake thing. There’s nothing stopping people from investing in real things. Banks can’t make money borrowing at rates that are above their returns.

The globe is aging which means theirs more people that want spending power in decades and fewer people who want to spend today. This causes rates to fall.

People can buy gold or oil and pay storage costs. No one is forced to to invest in cash. Everyone can invest in real things to avoid your issues with negative returns in cash. In fact I have negative cash positions.

The issue your presenting is more people want risk less high return assets than people who provide high return low risks investments. And the banking system can’t create an asset that doesn’t exists in the real world.

But again the fed doesn’t set the nominal interest rate for more than a few months. If they tried to set it too high then borrowers would quit borrowing and banks would reject deposits due to lack of investment options.

Right. I’m pretty sure they covered the “risk free” option in Econ 101, and it’s stashing one’s money under the mattress. Why should the government subsidize that asset instead of consumer spending or investing in capital? If there’s a reason, it’s not because of memecoins.

Why do you think savers deserve risks free high return investment products or that any “government” agency is stealing from people.

because bankers hate savers

Highly competitive business with no barriers to entry. Bankers don’t have much power over what they lend at and what they borrow at.

This post is silly for several reasons.

At the broadest level, there's a question as to whether the government should target 0 inflation or not. Most mainstream economists agree that a small amount of inflation is good for a variety of reasons (incentive to invest, implicit cheaper cost of borrowing, relief valve for employers in lean times, etc.). I feel that reasonable people could disagree on these points, however, and there are some interesting points to be made for the overall net-benefits calculus of targeting a lower inflation rate. Certainly the recent inflation has been much higher than what anyone wants, which is why the Fed has been jacking up interest rates.

But instead of having that discussion, this post goes off in another direction. Firstly, the target of this article is simply wrong. Main street banks aren't stealing your money because they're not the ones causing inflation. The same loss of purchasing power would occur if you took your money and stuffed it under your mattress. It's the federal government's decision to target a positive nonzero inflation rate that's causing the issue, and that decision is no more of a "theft" of your money than simple taxation is. Some people might think the implicit tax of inflation is sneaky and therefore illegitimate, but there's nothing really secret about it.

The second, larger issue is that this post compares bank savings to gold, real estate, or the S&P 500 index. The problem is that these investments entail a significant amount of risk, so what's really being done here is an analysis of opportunity cost that the post tries to smuggle in as an argument towards the magnitude of supposed "theft". If you specifically want to save with inflation-protection as your main goal, there are investments specifically designed for that purpose. If you don't want to bother with something specialized for long-term savings like that, you can just put your money in a target date fund geared towards your retirement horizon and inflation shouldn't be an issue.

Finally, comparing inflation to the fraud (at least that's how I currently understand what happened) that happened with FTX is just goofy. The effects of inflation are known, and it's not hard to prevent erosion of purchasing power with minimal risk if that's your main goal. On the other hand, taking clients' money under pretenses that they couldn't discover without insider information like what FTX did is quite a different issue, and is something that regulation could indeed help with.

Firstly, the target of this article is simply wrong. Main street banks aren't stealing your money because they're not the ones causing inflation. The same loss of purchasing power would occur if you took your money and stuffed it under your mattress. It's the federal government's decision to target a positive nonzero inflation rate that's causing the issue, and that decision is no more of a "theft" of your money than simple taxation is.

The TLDR in my post cut out a more full explanation of this:

Well, to be more accurate, it is the government stealing your money, not the banks. Actually, to be more accurate, it is impossible to pin down who exactly is stealing your money, because banks should be seen as arms of the state, and the state is the arm of an ecosystem of elites and elite clients, and the entire thing has grown fiendishly complex because it is in everyones interest to allow it to be complex. In fact, the real bandit may be your neighbor who bought a million dollar home with a 30-year, 2% interest rate loan. Or maybe the thief is your friend who cashed out on Apple stock after Apple funded a stock buyback with a loan at 1% interest. (Don’t go screaming at your friend – hate the game not the player).

and that decision is no more of a "theft" of your money than simple taxation is. Some people might think the implicit tax of inflation is sneaky and therefore illegitimate, but there's nothing really secret about it.

Diluting the currency in the modern system is far, far, far less transparent in terms of how much dilution is occuring and who is getting it. It is far less transparent than taxation, and far less transparent than when a company board publicly votes new shares to be created to reward employees with bonuses.

The effects of inflation are known, and it's not hard to prevent erosion of purchasing power with minimal risk if that's your main goal.

"It's not a fraud because everyone knows it is a fraud and so avoids it." For a normie steel-worker retiring in 2013 it was not at all obvious that they needed to invest in the stock market simply to preserve purchasing power. The standard Vanguard retiree fund has lost out compared to inflation: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vasix#price

But actually it is really difficult to preserve purchasing power, because it requires buying extremely volatile assets and it is difficult to know if said assets are in a bubble or not. Consider the historically high P/E ratios we are experiencing -- are stocks still in a bubble or is this the new normal?

Your point about banks "stealing" seems more reasonable in context, as it seems you're casting the "stealing" label broadly which... I don't agree with, but I can see why you're doing from a writing standpoint. It's definitely worth summarizing more conscientiously, as not everyone will go read your entire post.

The point about inflation being bad because it's sneaky in some ways is understandable, but we live in a complicated world, and in the grand scheme of things inflation isn't that hard to understand. I can't speak for everyone, but I at least had a vague idea of what it was many years ago before I had any deep knowledge of economics. Any financial planner will be able to tell you about inflation quite easily if you ask. In a world where the legal system is impenetrable without the help of a lawyer, where medicine is impenetrable without the help of a specialized doctor, and where even taxes can be impenetrable without an accountant (or at least software like Turbotax), the sneakiness of inflation really isn't that bad. And the federal government isn't doing it because it's sneaky, at least for the most part. There are genuine arguments in favor of positive nonzero inflation that I detailed earlier.

The standard Vanguard retiree fund has lost out compared to inflation: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vasix#price

Firstly, this isn't a "standard retiree fund" as it's actually quite conservative, with ~80% of the assets being in bonds. Second, your math isn't right because it gives returns in an annualized format. A dollar invested from the start of the fund in 1994 to the present day would be worth about $4.50, whereas a dollar indexed to inflation from 1994 to today would only be worth about $2.00.

But actually it is really difficult to preserve purchasing power, because it requires buying extremely volatile assets

Again, if you just want to preserve your purchasing power while minimizing return/risk, TIPS are the exact opposite of "extremely volatile".

But instead of having that discussion, this post goes off in another direction. Firstly, the target of this article is simply wrong. Main street banks aren't stealing your money because they're not the ones causing inflation. The same loss of purchasing power would occur if you took your money and stuffed it under your mattress. It's the federal government's decision to target a positive nonzero inflation rate that's causing the issue, and that decision is no more of a "theft" of your money than simple taxation is. Some people might think the implicit tax of inflation is sneaky and therefore illegitimate, but there's nothing really secret about it.

I think a case can be made if banks are not paying full interest on deposits. For example, savings accounts yielding less than the federal funds rate.

The purpose of savings accounts is convenience in not having to store physical currency under your mattress. The selling point of savings accounts has never been returns or inflation protection or as a long-term retirement vehicle. If you want those things instead, then... go for a financial product that gives them.

I feel like a key issue in the "theft" metaphor is a distinction between the literal property (some number of dollars) and what that property can be exchanged for (its purchasing power). The "theft" that happens due to inflation does not actually entail taking any of my literal property, just a decrease in what that property can be exchanged for. The "theft" accomplished by FTX and other crypto exchanges involves the taking of actual property. The same logic that says inflation is "theft" to people who save currency would suggest it is "theft" from homeowners when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates and causes home prices to fall or that Elon Musk "steals" from $TSLA owners when his own sales decrease the price of the stock.

That aside, I also don't see how the conclusion follows from the premises or arguments. "We shouldn't put more regulations on cryptocurrency or banks because consumers don't have a risk-free way to preserve their purchasing power over some time horizon" is how I would summarize that final paragraph in the quote (and penultimate paragraph in the article). I just don't see how the argument connects to the conclusion.

It could be considered theft of wages.

I work, and rather than immediately spend my money, I save it in a bank account hoping to spend it later. However, due to negative real interest rates, the value of my savings goes down 40%. And what's more, it is reckless government spending that is responsible for much of the devaluation.

Sure I could gamble on stocks, or hoard gold in my basement, but one of the advantages of living in a society is the ability to save my wages for later when I need them. Losing this ability is a strong negative. Just ask people in Argentina or Venezuela.

Money has never been all that stable. Inflation and deflation (mostly inflation) have been with us for all of modernity. There was a nice little blip in the middle where ordinary banks could provide decent returns on savings accounts, but there was never any reason to expect those conditions to remain constant forever.

For most of the 20th century, real interest rates in the United States were positive.

Expanding our window, yes life was nasty, brutish, and short for most of history. But the value to society of sound money is great and its loss should be avoided or at least mourned.

Most of the 20th century banks have global wars and then rebuilding massive continents to invest in. This raised the amount borrowers were willing to pay for investment capital. Today banks have apps to invest in. Completely different environment. Maybe if we boosted military spending back to 10% it could raise borrow demand for capital

Sure I could gamble on stocks, or hoard gold in my basement, but one of the advantages of living in a society is the ability to save my wages for later when I need them. Losing this ability is a strong negative. Just ask people in Argentina or Venezuela.

No asset has any sort of guaranteed return on investment. The role of society is to preserve property rights, not to ensure that you are rich. When countries used precious metals, governments couldn't arbitrarily print money, but the value of your gold stores could still fluctuate wildly when e.g. new supplies of gold were found, or some foreign country changed their currency.

I feel like there's a confusion in both this post and the OP about what banks do. What banks do is play custodian for certain kinds of assets and give you access to those assets on particular terms. The interests rates that banks pay for being that custodian is compensation for the risk of having a third party be custodian of your assets. The interest rate is small because the risk is small. What banks do not (and cannot) do is save the purchasing power of your assets (i.e. some rate of relative exchange between your assets and other assets) at some time t_0 so it has the same power at time t_1.

I am not confused by what banks do, and I doubt the OP is either. Yes, I am aware that it is not banks that control interest rates, just as gas stations do not control oil prices. I was speaking in the context that everyone understands we are really talking about Federal Reserve and government policy. If not, I apologize for contributing to a banal discussion about banks.

Federal Reserve does NOT control interest rates. People who know monetary policy know the fed can maybe manipulate rates for 6 months but they have zero control over what the average real rate will be over 30 years.

Maybe not officially, but they absolutely have been controlling (or at least strongly influencing) interest rates via setting the FFR and also QE. If the Fed didn't step up to buy trillions in treasuries during Covid, who would have bought them at the comically low interest rates that were on offer?

And why do you think the market will jump 6% on news about Fed policy? The Fed has immense power.

They act second. It’s like you get -20 degree day and the Fed puts on a coat. That doesn’t mean the fed is controlling rates (putting on a coat) it just means natural rates moved (weather changed) and the fed followed the weather.

Are you a Scott Sumner fan? This reminds me of his arguments, and which I always found to be just plain wrong. But in order to actually have a productive conversation about it we need to go in full "rectification of names" mode.

Then I am confused by your comment. Your comment makes it seem like you have an expectation that you ought to be able to put money in a bank account and thereby be able to exchange it for certain particular goods at particular rates at some future time that are similar to the rates when you put it in. Even in a world that was absent the Federal Reserve and an inflationary government policy this would not be the case. It's not like individual bank-issued currencies held their value particularly constant against classes of goods in a pre-Federal-Reserve world.

Your comment makes it seem like you have an expectation that you ought to be able to put money in a bank account and thereby be able to exchange it for certain particular goods at particular rates at some future time that are similar to the rates when you put it in.

And that's just what I was able to do for much of the 20th century in the United States. Sometimes, I would even came out ahead.

I am confused by your objection. Perhaps you don't realize the role of the Federal Reserve in controlling interest rates. For example, in the Post-WWII period, the fed used Yield Curve Control to maintain low rates in the face of high inflation. This allowed the government to deflate the substantial debt it had accrued during the war. The patriots who bought war bonds lost out big time.

While the Fed is not explicitly using yield curve control now, the unprecedented government stimulus during Covid drove real interest rates to extremely low levels, reaching something like negative 8% at one point. Europe, of course, is much worse, and countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Turkey have destroyed their currencies through political interference in central bank policy. That is starting to become a possibility in the United States as well with both Trump and several prominent Democrats calling on the Fed to lower interest rates to give a short-term boost to the economy at the expense of savers.

The fleecing of bond investors to reduce the US war debt was done through capital controls and other regulations, not monetary policy.

Gillitrut's objection is the overwhelming consensus among people who have researched monetary policy. A possible explanation for why you do not follow this objection is that you do not understand this research.

You sound pretty sure, but the U.S. did indeed use YCC to maintain hugely negative interest rates after WWII.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/august/what-yield-curve-control

YCC in the U.S.

The U.S. incurred massive debt expenditures to finance World War II, and the Fed capped yields in order to keep borrowing costs low and stable. In April 1942, short- and long-term (25 years and longer) interest rates were pegged at 3/8 percent and 2.5%, respectively. These rate caps were largely arbitrary and were set at approximately pre-1942 levels.

As the U.S. continued to incur debt, the Fed was obligated to keep buying securities to maintain the targeted rates—forfeiting some control of its balance sheet and the money stock. The public generally preferred to hold higher-yielding, longer-term bonds. Consequently, the Fed purchased a large amount of short-term bills, which also increased the money supply, to maintain the low interest rate peg.

After the war ended, FOMC members grew more concerned with addressing the rapid inflation that materialized. However, President Harry S. Truman and his treasury secretary still favored a policy that maintained YCC (which also protected the value of wartime bonds by implying a price floor). By 1947, inflation was over 17%, as measured by the year-over-year percent change in the consumer price index (CPI), so the Fed ended the peg on short-term rates in an attempt to combat developing inflationary pressures.

In combination with rising debt from the U.S. entering the Korean War in 1950, the peg on longer-term rates contributed to faster money growth and increased inflationary pressures. In 1951, annualized inflation was over 20%, and monetary policymakers insisted on combating inflation. Against the desires of fiscal policymakers, interest rate targeting was brought to an end by the Treasury-Fed Accord in March 1951.

More comments

Your comment makes it seem like you have an expectation that you ought to be able to put money in a bank account and thereby be able to exchange it for certain particular goods at particular rates at some future time that are similar to the rates when you put it in.

We would have the expectation that we should be able to save and be able to preserve our claim on a share of the economy. If output genuinely falls, if there was a grain famine, then we would not expect our purchasing power of grain to hold steady. But if output increases greatly, then we should benefit from that too.

Why? You say should, so I assume this is a values based claim, ought rather than is, so what is the underpinning to this belief?

Not to say I disagree necessarily, but I am interested in where this value comes from, more so than the value itself.

I feel like this comment evinces an even more confused conception of the economy. Why does being compensated some number of dollars at time t_0, which could be exchanged for some fraction of total economic output, entitle you to a similar share of total economic output at time t_1? Are you under the impression that large increases in output, under the current system, have not generally resulted in benefits to individuals due to inflation? I think that would be a pretty hard case to make!

Dilution is a form of theft. If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft, even if the price of shares actually rose during that period due to other factors. Tesla shares rising or falling is not theft.

"We shouldn't put more regulations on cryptocurrency or banks because consumers don't have a risk-free way to preserve their purchasing power over some time horizon"

Some amount of well-thought out regulation is fine. My point is that demand for scams and get-rich-quick schemes will exceed state capacity to police them as long as people must find an alternative to simple savings deposits in order to simply preserve purchasing power for retirement.

Dilution is a form of theft. If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft, even if the price of shares actually rose during that period due to other factors. Tesla shares rising or falling is not theft.

I continue to be confused. So the theft is not the loss of purchasing power of the dollars, but the literal printing of dollars? Is the takeaway supposed to be the government should stop printing new currency so as to stop the dilution? Given that economic output generally increases year over year this would almost certainly be a strongly deflationary position. Maybe that's good for currency hoarders with no debt, but it's pretty bad for everyone else.

Some amount of well-thought out regulation is fine. My point is that demand for scams and get-rich-quick schemes will exceed state capacity to police them as long as people must find an alternative to simple savings deposits in order to simply preserve purchasing power for retirement.

I wish this position was in the article! I can find nothing in the article that discusses state capacity to police get-rich-quick schemes or their relative frequency with regards to inflation.

Dilution is a form of theft. If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft,

Not if that was legal for him to do it is not. If so, then anyone buying shares should have priced in the chance of further shares being issued in to how much they valued the shares at when they purchased them. In that case they have implicitly consented to Musk creating more shares in buying the shares in the first place.

The dilution itself then is not theft, only if done illegally or in breach of a contract. At which point that is the issue not the dilution in and of itself. Better to rephrase it to say that Dilution can in some cases be similar to theft, if carried out illegally.

Taking something from someone isn't in and of itself theft either. It entirely depends on the circumstances.

Not if that was legal for him to do it is not.

That's... a bit like saying "primae noctis" wouldn't be rape. Technically correct, I suppose.

The best kind of correct. If we want to argue that it is morally wrong, that is absolutely fine, and arguably correct in both cases, but then we should take care to use terms appropriately.

We could say:" If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be morally wrong and comparable in outcome to theft."

or "If, Musk, without his shareholders knowledge or consent, in breach of the law, printed entirely new shares of Tesla and gave them to himself or his cronies, this would be theft"

then those are both plausibly correct.

We shouldn't put more regulations on cryptocurrency or banks because consumers don't have a risk-free way to preserve their purchasing power over some time horizon

The second part here is false. You can put money into TIPS, but there is an opportunity cost, so people tend not to do so.

The post conflates actual theft with some weird definition of theft which is nonsensical/wrong.

I find that I'm somewhat confused by who the advice is targeted at. If the typical yeoman saver is supposed to be someone that never accrues any significant net worth, it's fairly irrelevant whether their $5K in savings does more poorly than some other store of wealth over time. If, instead, we're talking about people accumulating fairly high net worth, I think you'll find that they already store most of their wealth elsewhere. The most obvious categories of wealth store are in their personal homes and in retirement funds, which I would wager is where people with six-figure (but not seven-figure) net worth tend to have the majority of net worth. For people with seven-figure net worth, they will (I think) tend to have business assets, property assets, and diversified paper asset portfolios.

Is there actually some significant subset of people that stores large percentages of their high net worth in banks?

Is there actually some significant subset of people that stores large percentages of their high net worth in banks?

Fewer and fewer because people have caught on that their money will be diluted away if left in banks. Thus, they pursue much more volatile assets like homes, stock portfolios and long-term bonds. This is a problem because when everyone is piling into these assets simply to escape dilution it becomes very hard to tell what is a bubble and what is not. Stocks have been at historically high P/E ratios. So are they in a bubble? Or is it the new normal.

Also, retirees close to retirement generally move to a more bond heavy portfolio, or at least this was the traditional advice. But if you put your money in Vanguard's retiree fund -- https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vasix#price -- you would have lost considerably to inflation or to alternative stores of value in the last 10 years of artificially low interest rates and high inflation.

Uhh... interesting domain name choice.

let's not do what the ADL/SPLC does and read racist motives into everything

I don't know, you have this name of the domain and the first blog there is how banks in cahoots with government are stealing money from people. Let's say that my originally neutral Bayesian prior moved a little bit toward "red flag" area.

Look, I think it's hard not to look at it as spicy bait, this isn't a Greenblatt-esque overreaction. If anything, I think your post is overreacting/correcting in response to czr.

Yeah. I didn't see anyone else mention it, so I thought I'd be the one. Of course, it's probably innocuous, but I can't deny that's immediately where my mind went.

What's interesting about it?

It's been hinted at downthread but to explain the joke, this.

See our explanation here: https://www.themotte.org/post/221/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/39692?context=8#context

I want to think critically about who gets attention on the non-mainstream political internet.

There's a few models we can imagine for how this works. One is a perfect meritocracy. The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like. This is the naive view and it's what I imagined for a long time. I'm betting most people imagine that it works like this.

I don't think it works like this. When you try to compare the merit of big attention getters vs. smaller attention getters, you get weird, even creepy results. It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you. They are allowed to recieve attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it. This means their takes aren't really real. They're kind of fake, permitted, virtual, simulated; what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say? Most obviously, they can't criticize their allowers. More than that, they can't disagree with their allowers fundamentally. On a deep level, they just can't be honest. They're not honest. Honesty is not allowed. Keep this in mind -- I think if people were more critical about how establishment their favorite commentors are, the equation would tilt a little bit more toward a pure meritocracy.

Say more. I think there's some influence from higher powers, but the internet is much more meritocratic than any mainstream outlet. Do you think Moldbug, Scott, BAP, etc. would get any play whatsoever if it weren't for the internet? I don't. That means that, if establishment players are pushing particular outsider commentators, they're doing so while holding their noses, at least a little bit.

I do think the internet increased the extent of meritocracy, we're just far from a pure one still. In fact there might be a case that it was purer 10-15 years ago and now it's saturated, corporatized, censored, and centralized much more than before.

I don't think that "establishment players" necessarily resent the internet. Some seem to love it. It's cheaper to buy attention now.

I'll echo what some others have said and say that, while I think you have a bit of a point in that sometimes the best in a field are not the most well-known and instead the most well-connected get the spotlight, I think Scott and Yud are not great examples here. Status451 is probably mostly known for the Days of Rage book review; while an important work in our Internet Contrarian Nerd Canon that also includes many of Scott's works, that's mostly kind of it?

Meanwhile, I doubt that the Shadowy Cabals Running The World have ever heard of The Sequences or read Meditations on Moloch or Unsong, as your post seems to imply--the kinds of people who could probably nudge the course of history with a single phone call don't seem to act like they have, at least (with the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried being a possible, possible exception--and that's stretching it, since I think you could argue his history-changing power has been severely curtailed now).

David Hines who did that review (along with three articles on reading radical lefty organizing books) isn’t a main author on status451 anyways more of a guest writer. He’s more a regular contributor to The American Conservative and his Twitter feed has echoes of this place with his focus on civility while his politics are just mostly lukewarm conservatism and then there’s the typical dad posting. Which is to say he’s not exactly the modal status451 author back when they were still writing at all.

That probably makes it even worse! Probably the most well-known thing from that site, and it's a guest contribution!

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

huh? I cannot recall any entertainers endorsing either of those individuals.

It seems like this post is more about having a bone to pick with Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky being undeservedly popular.

I didn't get that either - maybe he means 'other bloggers'? SA is well read by some rich SV people though, as well as 'mainstream' people more generally. matty reads scott! But many people here were SA readers relatively much earlier, so

So you think it's a pure meritocracy then? What would I gain from "picking a bone" with Scott Alexander on The Motte?

few things in life are strictly a meritocracy . anything that is subjective , like writing, by definition cannot be a pure meritocracy.

By meritocracy I just mean selected for some trait of the work, so popularity can be both "subjective" and a "meritocracy."

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

I think there is some

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

Nope. Now let's turn the question back on you: why are you recommending these two guys? What's in it for you? What do you get out of it, what favours do you owe them or hope to have them owing you?

Because that's how it works, by your own words: "The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you". Why are you trying to put Status 451 and John Nerst in front of me?

"Oh, I just think they're really really good and deserve to be better-known and more popular"? Well, maybe, but if I agree with your contention that it's all nepotism, then I have to consider that nepotism is at work here with your recommendations.

This is just another version of the complaint about bands: "They're not as good as they used to be, before they became popular. They sold out." Scott's fame, for what it's worth, got a target painted on his back by a jealous guy who funnelled rumours to Cade Metz at the NYT and resulted in that hit piece on rationalists (to tie-in with Metz' book on A.I. research but the article is not about Silicon Valley AI) and more explicitly, on Scott. And that it talks about Scott and Slate Star Codex is down to the guy who later bragged about having slipped Metz anonymous rumours to aim him at Scott.

So that's why people are wondering if you, too, have a bone to pick with Scott or why you're using him as an example of someone who is a manufactured 'celebrity' put out there by mysterious "allowers".

Do you agree that there's a significant amount of nepotism going on?

What do you mean by "nepotism" in this context?

Why would thinking that it's a meritocracy imply you were picking a bone?

Grabbing eyeballs is not a meritocracy. It doesn't matter how worthy your prose; if it's turgid and boring to wade through, people are not going to bother and they'll go for the more entertaining, more enjoyable blog or Substack. Darkly hinting that it's all a sham and Scott is a puppet of "allowers" whom he can't criticise or disagree with, while people like [two names I don't know and don't care to know] are not Big Superstars - well, by your own theory, if they were Big Superstars it would be because they sold out and are in the thrall of "allowers".

The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like.

This right here can be bent to suit the situation: they key metrics is attracting other influencers who in turn attract other people. This is standard metric in marketing as well and it is a reason why companies go for endorsements from popular athletes, celebrities or social media stars. I vaguely remember some taste tests between Pepsi and Coke with Pepsi being preferred in blind tests but Coke being preferred if brand was on display. One explanation that saves "meritocratic" concept is that the relevant product is not just the soda, but rather it is the whole experience that is influenced also by things like brand value and recognition. That is the relevant metric here.

Another similar dynamics is when it comes to inventions. You have many stories where some groundbreaking innovation was simultaneously invented by multiple people. And the story always goes that if one inventor was from some Bumfuck, Nowhere and another one was well networked guy from New York, everybody knows which one was successful. Again, one can argue also on merit that networking skills and connections are type of earned advantage - even if not by the person themselves, but maybe the advantage was created by their parents and ancestors.

This right here can be bent to suit the situation: they key metrics is attracting other influencers who in turn attract other people.

This doesn't save the meritocracy concept because what I mean is democratic meritocracy. If a few people get 10,000 votes each, that's the nepotism model.

Then you have a very strange concept of meritocracy as it is all about people of merit having more say. If I am about to give a grant for physics research, of course it will be scientists sitting on grant committee as opposed to random people from the street. Can you explain how this "democratic meritocracy" is supposed to work? Even if the goal is to improve the lot of the masses, it will mean that people with merit will get more resources and status to work on behalf of people. So if let's say influencer is going to convince his flock about the importance of supposedly "good" Effective Altruism, it is supposed to still be in line with merit, right?

You know who else claimed to know better sources than the mainstream? Hipsters.

Consider a few alternative explanations:

  • it isn’t a meritocracy, just emergent patterns from the signaling and countersignaling of eight billion status games

  • it isn’t a meritocracy, just the human brain imagining trends where there are none

  • it is a meritocracy, but it is noisy and slow to act, so some chaff remains in with the wheat

  • it is a “meritocracy,” but truth doesn’t play any part in its metric of memetic fitness

  • it is a meritocracy, and the rich and influential actually have better taste than you

It’d be rather hard to tell these apart based on two data points.

Worse, it could be a combination: the public eye is fickle, and optimizes for dumb things like “outrage” and “tits.” Meanwhile, a million elites push two million competing causes, and billions of proles struggle to read those tea leaves for personal status. Out of the multitudes asserting their love for the Truth, few agree on what should qualify. Hipsters claim to know of a quality blog; counter-hipsters descend to explain how it is Problematic or perhaps a mouthpiece for the Cathedral. God forbid that someone wade in with less-than-pure motives!

If you’ve untangled this knot, then tell me: what is good, Phaedrus?

it isn’t a meritocracy, just emergent patterns from the signaling and countersignaling of eight billion status games

This is what I mean by meritocracy.

it isn’t a meritocracy, just the human brain imagining trends where there are none

Status 451 and John Nerst get as many viewers/comments/likes as SA/EY?

it is a meritocracy, but it is noisy and slow to act, so some chaff remains in with the wheat

10 years is too slow?

it is a “meritocracy,” but truth doesn’t play any part in its metric of memetic fitness

Still a meritocracy.

it is a meritocracy, and the rich and influential actually have better taste than you

The rich have a more democratic taste? I wouldn't call that better, and do you think their tastes are identical down to the point where themselves being criticized is A-OK, and how do you account for the lack of such criticism?

Meanwhile, a million elites push two million competing causes, and billions of proles struggle to read those tea leaves for personal status.

Divide by 1000 and I'd say you're onto something.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst.

That reminds me, whatever happened to ClarkHat? I remember Popehat eventually had to break up with him publicly on his blog. Presumably because Popehat was getting respectable mainstream attention and no longer needed the cover of "Look, I can cohort with diverse views I disagree with!"

Then Clarkhat got banned from Twitter for reasons I don't even remember. Looks like he quit posting on Status 451 in 2016. I was slightly hopeful he'd have gotten his twitter back in that amnesty Musk declared, but alas, still suspended. Not that I think he'd come back. I'm more just curious what exactly it was he was writing back then that was so completely bonkers his colleagues broke up with him and he got banned.

He wrote that immigration parable about Nazi aliens seeking asylum on Earth that led to a lot of handwringing in the comments and was apparently too much for Ken White.

I'd like to know if he's still around, too. He was pretty entertaining.

I kind of like it; it's fairly plausible.

Also, damn, I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar parable that ended up with the guy advocating in for letting in Hitlerite refugees getting kicked to death by some. (I believe Alexander Kruel wrote that one)

There was also the small matter of the Vox Day affair. As you may recall, Ken White was one of VD's bête noires, while Clark was a friend of both of them. The way I remember it, some of Ken's followers started calling Clark out on his association with VD, and Clark defended VD as an honorable and unfairly villified man, while also insisting that he and Ken were bffs and if VD ever dared to go low (such as mocking Ken's mental illness) in his spats with Ken, Clark would "rain hellfire" on VD.

VD promptly went low and wrote a series of vitriolic, mocking posts poking at every one of White's exposed weaknesses. (Ken had, probably unwisely when in the middle of a public fight with one of the most proudly cruel, no-holds-barred partisans on the Internet, written openly about his depression and mental illness.) VD even took shots at Ken's adopted Korean-born child.

Response from Clark: crickets.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

That's about the time when you stopped seeing him around. To all appearances, when called upon to back up his claims of loyalty, he quietly picked up his hat and slipped out of the room.

I don't get it.

I respect Vox Day, he's intelligent, a solid writer and a good editor.

He can also be charitably described as an egomaniacal crank who's overly credulous and always sure of himself.

I also prefer not having him around, certainly online. (he's probably one of those guys who's raving lunatic online and a mostly normal bloke offline)

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Denouncing him should be a rather easy moral choice.

Bluntly, I think Clark was a coward who was hoping his buddy Vox wouldn't call his bluff. That he thought Vox wouldn't indicates he also wasn't very smart.

Certainly, if he had "rained hellfire" on Vox for attacking Ken White, Vox would have turned his saber wit on Clark as well (as he's done on many other former allies), and Clark didn't fancy being at the receiving end of Vox's vitriol and his followers' scorn himself.

An interpretation that's likely to be true.

The one that got him booted from Popehat was his weird scifi “Hitlerite” allegory about Muslim immigrants to Europe that hasn’t been scrubbed. Weirdly the silence caused by his ban on Twitter seems better for his brand than whatever broke in Kens brain with Trump and his Twitter posting. Even back before the boot Clark’s long form writing wasn’t very interesting to me but his Twitter was amusing at least.

It's the same everywhere. Look at this Graphtreon ranking. Pay attention to the following creators:

  • DarkCookie ($60k per month)

  • Sad Crab ($25k per month)

  • Dream Now ($6k per month)

DarkCookie has made a good game that has been stuck in development hell for months. He's hemorrhaging patrons (I remember him getting $100k per month), but he's still one of the top earners.

Sad Crab have a stellar artist, but their game has been stuck in development hell for months as well. Yes, their game is worse than DarkCookie's Summertime Saga, so earning 2x-4x less sounds fair, doesn't it?

Dream Now is making a game that is suffering from every known fault known to adult games (an episodic fiction in general): weird pacing, plot that goes nowhere, but so does every other game. Unlike the previous two, the creator actually manages to squeeze out a release every few months. Is his game 10x worse than Summertime Saga? Is it 4x worse than Innocent Witches? Hell no.

No adult game maker has been favored by the rich and by other entertainers. They do cross-promotions, but some of them are on this chart, and some of them are not at all, despite making games that easily rival the three I've covered.

Meritocracy doesn't mean "flawless and perfect meritocracy", it means 'merit' is a very important factor. Random chance, idiosyncratic contingency, structural flaws, etc can explain why genius_1 gets lots of blog views and genius_2 doesn't. Human society is incredibly complicated. Many factors matter - for one, everythingstudies and status451 post less than once per month, while scott posts a few times per week. Some people who have more insight than scott just don't post, so we can't hear them at all! So the existence of smart people who are less popular than slightly less smart people, even in an honest meritocracy, isn't surprising at all! That said, quickly skimming Status 451, he's a significantly less skilled writer than scott and yud.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

maybe they're favored by 'the rich and other entertainers' for the same reason they're favored by large groups of people - because they're smart and write well?

The people you pay attention to are probably put in front of you

"put in front of you" in the sense that they're downstream of very complex and shaped processes, and "put in front of you" in the sense that the elite are intentionally putting controlled opposition intellectuals in front of you to hide the dark truth, are different!

what are you not seeing that allowed attention getters can't say

scott clearly and reasonably believes in a somewhat-strong form of HBD, and often hints at it. another person popular among the 'rich' and 'other entertainers' is moldbug (apparently glenn greenwald was introduced to moldbug by an unnamed billionaire) , who says a number of not-allowed things. Yet another person popular among 'other entertainers' (he's sometimes retweeted by people like jack posobiec and cernovich, relatively-mainstream right wing media figures) is BAP, whose regularly retweets literal nazi propaganda (not using this to condemn, just illustrate evidence against your point)! So I'm not sure this theory works.

This goes for all entertainment sources, though. Who actually ends up capturing lightning in a bottle/the zeitgeist is pretty random, especially in the jump between 'known by enthusiasts of X' and 'known by the broader public'

You should read Influence by Robert Cialdini. Both yud and Scott have. There's also a lot of stuff that can only be described as memetic fitness - being from the same culture and having the same language as your readers, presenting the right image, getting and making the right references that they will recognise, talent expressing yourself, etc.

Also keep in mind that the closer you are to the centre the more you will appeal to both sides of the fight. Scott and yud are both closer than 451.

I'm a little unclear on what your argument is stating, so I will respond to what I think you're saying and try to specify anywhere I think there is ambiguity.

The ones who get the most attention produce the best content along the metric(s) that measure what audiences like.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. *

I'm reading your evidentiary claim/question as something like: Why do some writers/creators blow up, while others who are just as talented get nothing? Why is it that (made up number incoming) if there are 10,000 people who want to read grey-tribe CW analysis, and ten writers who are all about as talented as SA at writing blog posts, that SA gets 9,500 readers and the other nine split the remaining 500? Or, hell, let's even give SA that his content is 5% better, why does that translate to 95% of the spoils? The answer is, as ever, the network effects created by tribal and status signaling.

The value of the Western Canon historically is that references to one work in another work form layered meanings that help us create and decipher the meanings of other works. Knowing the mythological corpus of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Hesiod's Theogony allows you to understand Homer's Iliad, allows you to understand Plato's dialogues, the Bible sneaks in about here, allows you to understand Augustine, allows you to understand Shakespeare, and so on to Nietszche and Joyce and, hell, all the authors after Joyce** just wish their work could be as important as Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, real genre killers those. When you've read the Canon you can reference Dante and other educated men will get the references, and beyond the inherent enjoyment of the reference, and the enhancement of understanding and meaning produced by the metaphor, you get the benefit of signaling that you too are an educated man.***

The LW canon isn't that cool, but it works roughly the same way. Anywhere in the SSC-verse of subreddits and forums, you can reference SA, and other people will get it, and not only will it enhance the meaning of what you're saying by in a single phrase ("Moloch" or "Barber Pole"), you signal your in-group status. I'm one of you. This enhances your credibility. So I have no interest in reading another blogger who is "just as good" a writer when I get the additional value from being able to understand and make references to a better known work.

  • As an aside, this crabs-in-a-barrel grasping criticism lobbed at obscure figures (SA and Big Yud) in favor of even more obscure figures reminds me of what pissed me off so much about this TheAmericanConservative hit piece on Rogue Fitness. TLDR: Rogue is bad because it is using its market dominance in niche fitness spaces to trademark products and so prevents smaller innovative American companies from growing. The myopia and ignorance of that take is obvious: the market for strength and fitness equipment isn't limited to Rogue and American upstarts, it isn't even dominated by Rogue, it is dominated by cheap Chinese junk churned out to no-name brands off Amazon like Yes4All, Titan, and whoever owns the CAP name these days. Rogue is the upstart, because they market extremely high quality niche strength stuff that is at least occasionally made in USA. That as soon as they get a little bit of a business going their own team turns against them as sell-outs is maddening, the real war is out there, man. Emo Phillips' joke about the Narcissism of Small Differences strikes again.

** If you read Joyce or Nietzsche without having read, or at least familiarized yourself with, the majority of the Western canon you are missing out on the vast majority of it. Given the amount of references I pick up on, and my own sore lack of having read it all, I can only imagine how many I'm missing. And I can't imagine how pointless reading a work so dense in references is if you don't get the fraction that I'm getting. I guess that's why they make those annotated reading books that go along line by line and tell you Joyce's meanings; but the experience must be so completely different for someone who really gets it all. I find the gap in my, and my contemporaries, knowledge tends to be the music, opera and musical theater, that were part of culture. So few of the neo Western Traditionalists know their Gilbert and Sullivan.

*** The difference between Status as socioeconomic etc. status and Status as just being a member of one group among many coequals is just one of context. There isn't any mechanical difference between signaling you are a Victorian gentleman and signaling you are a Goth middle schooler, it is all in the eye of the beholder.

In fairness, Rogue's tactic very much does sound like the no-fun-allowed type of IP shenanigans that already plague other industries and fields. There's probably no reason they couldn't continue their made-in-America strategy and build a good reputation without trying to center themselves as "official"--plenty of other companies in other industries build good reputations without having to rest on popular trademarks or official partnerships, a la Coke.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst.

Okay, I had to look up the latter two, and while their sites are okay, there's nothing there that would really interest me. I don't follow Yudkowsky or hang out on Less Wrong. I certainly didn't come to Scott via "the rich and other entertainers", but via following various Catholic blogs.

You seem to be attributing success on their part to "nepotism", i.e. they know rich, influential people who boost them, while the meritorious artists who are starving in garrets get no attention.

My take on that? Starve away, if I don't want to read you, I won't - even if you are recommended by Taylor Swift and other nefarious string-pullers.

They are allowed to receive attention by people with more traditional forms of power and lower forms of attention, the kind that isn't paid by consumers but rather is of a nature such that they are willing to buy it.

Thanks, not in the market for conspiracy theories right now and I'm all out of tin foil, so I have to pass on this.

I think the implication is that other Catholic blogs were the “entertainers,” aka existing successful content-producers. This is, naturally, a fully general theory, one vague enough to avoid falsification...

It's not unfalsifiable, I've just left quantifying it as an exercise for the reader.

It's unclear why Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky are better than Status 451 and John Nerst. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Wrong level of zoom.

Why are Ben Shapiro and Nathan Robinson "better" than Scott Alexander?

Your model should account for;

  1. Network effects and the resulting power-law distribution in attention density.

  2. Different variables that make up merit (in the context of the media landscape). Yarvin might have more "correct"/meritocratic takes than Scott, but Scott is infinitely more pleasing to read (to me).

  3. Audience. Scotts writing probably is incomprehensible to someone below 100 IQ. They might be able to parrot what Scott said. They can memorize the teacher's password. But they won't "get" it. Try explaining the idea of Moloch to everyone you meet and see how that goes. There is a marginal area where people do consume content they don't get, but parrot ("I fucking love science"). But most good political commentators don't pander to that audience.

  4. What do they want? Does everyone want {your favorite political commentator's unbiased insight}? Or do they want to shit on the outgroup with the justification as window dressing?

  5. Don't confuse good for {I like this commentator}.

  6. Weirdness points. Imagine two software engineers. Both are excellent programmers, but one looks like a homeless person. All else being equal, who will get hired over the other? Apply this exact mechanism to commentators and on the margins in an extremely competitive market. Even marginal amounts of weirdness will fuck you over. This is different from being pleasing, it's not being displeasing. This is the "Rule 2" of writing.

  7. Randomness. Luck.

extremely competitive market, power law

I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe. SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money. This is the openish secret that is kept from us -- hey, it's only fair that someone who gets to tell everyone what to think, or think about at least, gets his privacy!

Randomness. Luck.

How do you square this with the law of large numbers?

I don't see it as very competitive since it's trivial for someone to press subscribe

This presupposes you see things you subscribed to and things you could potentially subscribe to on even footing, which is no longer the case the moment you subscribe to anything. You see more of what you subscribe to, that's what subscription is.

How do you square this with the law of large numbers?

Path dependency.

SA must really be way better than John Nerst in some way, but we can't see it as readers, because I believe that way is his friends who also have attention and who have money.

Wow, who are these rich friends and how can I get money off them, because they certainly never paid me to go read Scott! I demand my share of the swag!

You are sounding like "It's so unfair those guys got to be big name rich famous rockstars and my band didn't, we're every bit as good as they are!" Well, yeah, that's how it goes.

When I don't have energy for cooking and go to eat out, 9 out of 10 times it's a cafeteria with a small fixed menu. They serve a soup, a few bread buns, a fresh salad, and a dish with decent amount of chicken (12 options, realistically 5), all for something like $4,8. Right now I'm feeling cheeky so I'm in a mid-tier Iranian restaurant where Fesenjan and other delicious things can be had – for about 300% more. It leaves a better sensation after the fact, more giddy lightness than stuffed stomach; might just be saffron. Maybe I'll come here once more in my life.

Admittedly, this is unsolicited blogging and the moral of the story could as well be conveyed with McDonalds vs. fancy burgers, or with Scott's own musings on Coca-Cola in How The West HWas Won. I much prefer Wyclif's commentary. But there's no mystery in why Scott is a star of greater magnitude than Wyclif.

I've also wondered about prominence of rationalist thought leaders. But after all is said and done – this is cope, sorry. We know Scott's history and we know Eliezer's, it's all in the open, and many of us have been there for much, or all, of the way, long before they received any establishment attention. What makes those guys special is that they are, indeed, that good. Or rather – they're good at this niche public nerd-intellectual schtick. Good enough to have reasonably long shelf lives.

The first virtue of a public intellectual is productivity. The output must be consistent, voluminous, topical, wide-ranging, and ideally give the impression of effortlessness. A proper PI must be able to write about anything and, perhaps, write anything – from poetry to meta-analysis to an alchemical treatise; all in the same recognizable but immensely varied voice, a one-man magazine. It's a bit of a sports performance – namely, verbal gymnastics. Like Andrey Plakhov says:

…As those who download the pdf [of SSC blog] may notice, there are 9,500 pages. These are high-quality, well-written, thoughtful texts. To have prepared much of it, the author had to read dozens of articles, comprehend and conduct meaningful meta-analysis. Scott Alexander accomplished all of this in about seven years, while also managing to become and remain a practicing medical specialist (and this in the States, where the second task itself is often described as «the race of a lifetime»). Purely quantitatively, this is more than I thought possible for a human being. Personally, I'm not able to write at that rate even for days at a time, and even while on vacation (for clarity, let's drop the quality issue). But this is not something superhuman and does not make me suspect a «collective of authors». Rather, my feelings are similar to those of an amateur athlete who has watched how training of an Olympic champion looks like. Great motivation. [...]

Why am I all about numbers. Because we are faced with a case where it doesn't even translate into quality, but is quality in and of itself. On any topic, from the highly specialized to the generally important, Scott Alexander is able to fit a text of a couple of dozen pages long, stimulating further reflection simply by the mass of associations and unexpected angles that arise. Where I disagree with him, the disagreement is closer to «Wait, there might be another explanation,» or to «This line should have been thought through rather than brushed off,» rather than to «God, why am I reading this at all.»

Adding to that, Scott had his Annus Mirabilis of 2014, writing an entire book's worth of important articles! And they are all very accessible. That's the second virtue: clarity. Or put another way, being able to distinguish the job of a public intellectual and an academic performer. There is a niche for obscurantism, as Moldbug has demonstrated, but it is not large. People who'll read you are mostly not geniuses, but neither are they fools who can be intimidated and amazed by big words. Many of them just want an entertaining, clear narration and commentary of ideas they could as well write about themselves, had they more time.

Plakhov then proceeds to criticize Eliezer. I won't touch Eliezer beyond saying that he has essentially cultivated the community and intellectual culture where Scott got promoted, wrote an entire mini-Talmud of rationality and a very voluminous, popular work of fiction with the intention to peddle his ideas to the masses – an accomplishment that's harder than it might look. And this is the third virtue of a public intellectual – working in the context of a public-facing intellectual tradition, and molding it, and contributing to its growth. You can't get far on your own; nobody will care about a loquacious manifesto-shitting crank, even if by some miracle your manifestos are actually great so long as one looks past the inevitable lack of polish. So you've got to live in a society. It's not different from what aspiring artists (or sex workers) do, reposting and boosting each other. But these two have done more than others.

The fourth virtue is letting your personality shine through your texts - and better if it's a likeable personality for a wide enough audience. Author-clientele relationships are parasocial. Many very smart people would rather keep their identity small; so it takes reading 20x as much to get a good feeling for who Gwern is. It's perhaps a more authentic impression than one you get with a single note by Scott – but people like the latter more, and they like that it happens so naturally. But you mustn't be larger than life – that's the turf of life coaches, and it's nauseating for the target audience of intellectual commentary.

And only the fifth virtue, I'd say, is sticking to the confines of the Overton window, and thus preventing the loss of people who feel uncomfortable outside.

By the way, why do I know what Plakhov says? Because sometimes I get engrossed, perhaps infatuated, studying a hitherto ignored smartass, amazed that something so good, so obviously beyond my ken, was so readily available; and in a few days I skim his entire output, and in a few days+1 I am disappointed and see what should have been done and said better. But I did not. Because I'm not that productive and not that good.

There may be some factors loosely along the lines you hint at. Bluntly, they both are cult leader figures («rightful caliph» jokes are not just jokes), or perhaps intuitively exploiting the Learned Rabbi archetype of their ancestral culture. When I saw people debating Sequences IRL, it was hard to distinguish from a chavruta following a Shiur; or from an underground Marxist circle, acolytes diligently inspecting the complex wisdom in teacher's words. That's funny to see. That could contribute to the resiliency of their fame. That can be at most a part of it.

It may not be a perfect meritocracy. But it does select for the fittest.

The first virtue of a public intellectual is productivity.

Speaking of - when are you posting something on your substack, you lazy bum? I wanted to sponsor my favorite Russkie-in-exile, but you just won't let me.

Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.

As someone who has lurked and been around since 2011, this is so out of touch as to be hilarious. Scott / Eliezer are reasonably well read and well known now because they have produced a prodigious amount of writing that is both intelligent and enjoyable to read. They have done so consistently for years.

I assure you in the early 2010s they were neither popular nor well-known, they got there because of the quality of their work.

Everything in there that is useful was written by someone else in a more succinct and engaging way elsewhere.

Why should someone refuse to enjoy anything but the absolute most succinct and engaging presentation of every idea they encounter?

I refuse to believe people actually enjoyed reading the sequences

there sure are an awful lot of people who claim otherwise

Everything in there that is useful was written by someone else in a more succinct and engaging way elsewhere

examples? yud being a 'top 1000 writer' instead of a 'top 1 writer' isn't surprising, nobody said he's the best writer, but he's still better than a ton of other people.

Also, consider HPMOR, which took off as harry potter fanfiction mostly independently, just because random people thought it was great writing.

Terrible argument! One can write great books and make retarded tweets. Whatever you think of King, I learned a new phrase today: going goblin. I intend to use it at every opportunity. is a few tiers below his books.

Also, how did HPMOR become top 3 HP fanfictions on fanfiction.net if he's a terrible writer? Admittedly, 95% of the competition there was teenage girls.

This is highly dishonest view of him. While I did not read all of the sequences, his Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for beginners is one of the best written pieces of "popular" philosophy out there. Even if you disagree, he introduces a lot of interesting concepts in very approachable way - although I'd argue that this does not apply to Mathematics and Logic" part, which requires a lot more knowledge. One thing I'd argue is that this sequence is misplaced as it also touched on nature of reality (ontology) as well as on moral facts and other moral concepts (axiology).

Now one thing I will give you is that Yud started the annoying practice of inventing convoluted parables involving aliens and 3,000 words to explain a concept that could be tackled in one paragraph worth of analogy. On the other hand it is a form of entertainment for many people (sadly not me), I'd rather have whole fanfiction like HPMOR or Unsong for that.

This morning, I started thinking about the ethics of AI-generated porn. One of the arguments I've heard against AI-generated porn is that it could be used to generate child porn. That got me thinking: is AI-generated child porn unethical? There are no children involved, so no one is being directly harmed. So the question seems to be how consumption of generated child porn by paedophiles would affect their likelihood to commit paedophilic acts.

One possibility is that consuming the stuff would increase the urge of paedophiles to commit paedophilic acts. Another possibility is it sates some inner urge and makes them less likely to harm children.

Anyone have opinions on this?

Before the reports come in - we already disallowed this as a top-level post. Yes, we (multiple mods) suspect trolling (if you're not trolling, @ShockJock, then sorry, but picking a username like that and dropping in with this as your introductory post sure looks and smells like a troll). But we told him he could post it in the CW thread.

I ran a little experiment this week. Deep within a thread from last week @motteposting and I were discussing the Hunter Biden laptop story. The quick context necessary here is that some emails discussing a deal with the Chinese company CEFC mentioned "the big guy" getting a 10% cut of the deal. I already think it's obvious that Hunter Biden was getting sweetheart board of directors positions and other highly lucrative financial opportunities almost entirely because of who his father is. But the theory here is that it wasn't just Hunter cashing in on his name, but that Joe Biden was explicitly contemplated as receiving kickbacks from these kinds of deals.

[For the record I agree that exploiting one's own political positions for monetary gain is not good. Even if nothing untoward actually happens, it's still a really bad look for the son of a president to be involved in deals and investments, especially with foreign governments where the influence-peddling concern would be at its apex.]

The evidence that motteposting presented that Joe Biden is indeed the "big guy" is that one of the people involved in negotiating the CEFC deal, Tony Bobulinski, personally confirmed that fact. I hadn't heard of Bobulinski before and didn't know why I should believe what he said. You can click through the thread for the details but I highlighted a few reasons why I would be skeptical of Bobulinski, but none of it was really a smoking gun. If you were to ask me to describe my actual belief it would be "Bobulinski's claim is certainly plausible but this other stuff kind of contradicts him so overall I'm skeptical but leaning towards not believing him." Motteposting was definitely not as skeptical as I was, and I found it curious that he (sorry if I misgendered you) appeared primed to believe Bobulinski in ways that seemed highly credulous.

This reminded me of another instance where someone's credibility was being evaluated as a result of a bombastic claim they made. Think back to six months ago, when Cassidy Hutchinson was in the news. For those who don't remember, Cassidy is the White House aide who gave the bombshell testimony about Trump lunging at the wheel of his Secret Service vehicle and at an agent when he was told he wasn't going to the capitol on January 6th. Everyone here knows I really don't like Trump so theoretically I would be primed to believe something that paints him in an embarrassing light. But similar to Bobulinski, I never heard of Cassidy before and don't know who she is but my opinion of her claims regarding the steering wheel incident hasn't changed: it cuts against her that she's relying on hearsay within hearsay ("someone told me someone else said this happened") but she at least names every level of the hearsay. Immediately after her testimony came out, multiple news outfits cited an anonymous source close to the Secret Service that two agents were prepared to testify that the lunging incident never happened. As far as I can tell these agents never came forward publicly but maybe that's still in the works. Similar to Bobulinski above, if you were to ask me to describe my belief it would be "Cassidy's claim is tenuously supported but is neither implausible nor substantially contradicted, so I would lean towards believing her but wouldn't bet the farm."

So back to the thread about Bobulinski, instead of writing my own position about him transparently, I wrote this instead:

One possible explanation is that Bobulinski is apparently still very upset with Jim and Hunter Biden over a deal he missed out on. He said himself the two brothers "defrauded" him of at least $5 million. This seems like good evidence he's at least partly motivated by payback. The Hunter Laptop saga hasn't really delivered and people lost interest over the years, which means right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are especially excited to herald Bobulinski with a moment in the spotlight. It doesn't matter if all that Bobulinski has is uncorroborated gossip, they know they can shore up ratings by resurrecting a dead story on a political figure their audience loathes.

If any of this comes across as weirdly stilted, I was intentionally trying to mirror what motteposting writing about Cassidy Hutchinson:

Simpler hypothesis: Cassidy Hutchinson is a former employee of Meadows’s who had a falling out with him and was subsequently passed over for a post-WH job in Trumpworld. This is her revenge tour. And the January 6th Committee is only too happy to turn to tabloid gossip because their ratings sucked and it worked well for some of their members three straight years during the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory heyday.

My suspicion was that motteposting was primed to believe Bobulinski and not believe Cassidy solely because he liked one conclusion but not the other. Obviously the two scenarios are not precisely comparable 1:1 but I think they have enough clear parallels for this to be an instructive exercise. If I'm being fully honest, the scenario I would find the most emotionally satisfying and personally motivated towards pulling off would be where motteposting blunders haplessly into my trap and exposes himself as a complete hypocritical partisan about the standards of credibility he applies. I must admit that I did not get that, and I'll specifically give credit for things he did that were commendable.

The first thing motteposting hones in on is that Cassidy has a motive to lie. The evidence he cites is entirely just this:

But there was a falling out between Hutchinson and Meadows in 2021, a former White House aide told CNN. She was supposed to become permanent staff at Mar-a-Lago, but those plans fell through, the outlet reported. The New Jersey native has yet to hold a full-time job since leaving the White House, the Washington Post reported.

So an anonymous source told CNN that Cassidy was supposed to have a job at a Mar-a-Lago but didn't, and now she's still unemployed. Based on this alone motteposting comfortably claims that Cassidy's testimony is "her revenge tour". I can see how being passed up for a job might make someone bitter, but it seems highly implausible that's enough to motivate someone into a public scorched earth campaign of defamation (and this didn't come out until later but the Daily Caller obtained text messages where Cassidy expresses annoyance at being subpoenaed to testify).

In contrast, Bobulinski claims Hunter Biden "defrauded" him of $5 million, which seems a much sharper indication of personal animus. To motteposting's credit he at least gives a concession of this point with "Maybe so. That's something to take into account." and "I agree that his motive for revenge means what he says should be taken with a grain of salt." But why is this not enough to conclude "This is Bobulinski's revenge tour" in the same way he concluded about Cassidy?

The second thing mentioned is that Cassidy's audience (J6 committee) is motivated to accept her lies because their TV ratings suck. That's a plausible explanation but it seems to apply at least as much to cable news pundits who rely on a content pipeline constantly running for their living. But unlike with Cassidy, motteposting does not appear to think audience credulity is a salient point in Bobulinsky's case.

I think motteposting made some good points about the structure of the CEFC deal. The fact that Hunter Biden was getting double the shares (20%) compared to his partners is compelling evidence he was going to hold it for someone else. If that's the surreptitious structure, then it makes sense for Joe Biden's name not to be on the agreement itself. There's good reasons to not believe Gilliar's denial that Joe Biden was involved, since there are text messages where he tells Bobulinski not to talk about Joe Biden's involvement except in face-to-face. Bobulinski also appears to be cooperating with the FBI and I agree that raises his credibility. Overall, motteposting did a good job convincing me that Bobulinski is telling the truth and that Joe Biden was at least contemplated to receive a cut of a deal that fell through. I updated my belief to "I have questions about some details but Bobulinski is probably telling the truth."

It still seems that motteposting was unusually primed to denounce Cassidy as a vindictive liar on a revenge tour. I think it's helpful to investigate to what extent our biases motivate us towards credulity and away from skepticism when presented with conclusions we already favor. If you ever suspect me of doing that, you should call me out.

This reads like “boo my interlocutor.”

"I'll specifically give credit for things he did that were commendable." ... "To motteposting's credit" ... "I think motteposting made some good points" ... "Overall, motteposting did a good job convincing me that Bobulinski is telling the truth" ... "I updated my belief to"

Nobody in this community should be unfamiliar with the idea of meeting the criteria of the rules while violating them in spirit. Zeke did not say "this is just boo my interlocutor".

I think this theory makes sense. There are a wide avenue of opportunities available to Joe Biden to really rake in the cash if he wanted to that don't involve trusting his drug addicted son to pally around with shady characters. The lack of motive seems strong to me. I'm guessing the fact that he hasn't been as mercenary as the Obamas and Clintons might have something to do with waiting until after he's done being president to cash in.

I concede that Joe Biden was at least contemplated as being part of the CEFC deal that fell through, that much seems clear to me. Whether that was just bloviating big talk from Hunter, I don't know but it seems plausible as you explain. I'm not aware of any other evidence that Joe Biden actually profited from anything that Hunter cooked up, but I suppose that's possible if the regular practice is under the table kickbacks as is alleged in the CEFC deal. The amount of Hunter's private information that they've had access to makes me think the "big guy" email is the worst thing they could find (though to be fair there's repeated allusions about making sure not to discuss details in writing), and overall I don't really find the story all that compelling, especially when compared to what the baseline nepotistic corruption might be (say, for example, the kids of another president).

I don't think Joe was actively taking bribes. I wonder - since Hunter is such a mess, as everyone agrees, and that Joe has indulged/supported him for years, was this Hunter's way of maybe trying to pay back Dad for all the money he's sponged off him? Being Hunter, he can't be legit even if he tries, but he sets aside a percentage of his slush money to repay Joe (and try to show Dad that he's finally stopped being a fuckup)?

Of course, being Hunter, he manages to make it sound like Joe is taking a cut of the bribe money.

I agree, the attempts to tie Joe Biden to individual payments from corrupt actors probably ignore the structure of how these things work, they work off a model of Joe Biden that isn't sophisticated enough. Joe doesn't function by stealing money and spending it, Joe functions by existing at the center of a network of favors and family. Joe never pays for anything, someone else is always picking up the tab. Even in Delaware ((Unsourced personal rumors incoming)) he was notorious for failing to pay his contractors and telling them "If you ever need anything call me, my office can help you out of a jam." With the implication that if you ever try to sue me, it probably won't go well for you. If Joe and Jill fell on hard times, they wouldn't sweat it, Hunter or somebody else entirely would help them out, they have no need to accumulate personal wealth. Especially at 80, when most men are working for their kids/legacies anyway.

The only honest reason to look for some direct transfer to Biden is to hope he screwed up at least once and you can nail him to the wall, but that is unlikely to be the case.

Just so I know I have this straight.

5 months ago @motteposting wrote a post about Cassidy Hutchinson's claim that Trump tried to hijack the presidential limousine and drive it to the Capitol. The post is explicitly using Occam's razor to provide an alternative hypothesis to @Rov_Scam's theory that it was a devious trap, and suggests instead that Hutchinson was simply making it up out of TDS (for the record, I don't consider @Rov_Scam's hypothesis implausible at all.)

Then 3 days ago @motteposting wrote a post about the Biden laptop scandal in reply to you providing evidence in support of his conclusion that Biden was complicit in Hunter's influence peddling. After @motteposting doesn't buy the idea that the lack of records of a secret deal with a Chinese company proves he wasn't involved, you then wrote a post 'mirroring' the post he wrote 5 months ago about a totally different thing 'as a social experiment'.

And now you have published your findings, in the form of a top level post primarily continuing the argument you were having last week that you have apparently changed your belief about.

This post smacks of desperation. Yes, as has been pointed out, you gave the right signs and followed the rituals of the motte, but even so it still reads like you are calling out @motteposting and you decorated it with the trappings of this place's values.

While there are a lot of things that make me think it reads that way (like how it doesn't read like any other 'I've updated my mistaken beliefs' post I've ever read, and the way nobody used it to talk about biases and instead everybody used it to talk more about the Biden laptop scandal) the primary one is simple - you didn't need @motteposting.

Examining biases and how they influence credulity would be a great topic for discussion, and if you wanted to talk about bias and credulity, it would have been simple. All you would have to do is - instead of using @motteposting's post - use your own posts. It's not easy to spot our own biases, but it isn't impossible either. You just needed to apply the same scrutiny you applied to @motteposting's logic to your own thoughts.

Why do you think Hutchinson's claim is plausible when it is based on hearsay about hearsay? What exactly about these two events do you think is similar aside from the use of unsubstantiated evidence? Why would you present the lack of written proof of the back room deal as evidence it didn't happen when you know they tried to make sure there was no written proof of their back room deals? Most importantly - if you really agree that nepotism is bad, and a really bad look for a president, then why do you find the Biden laptop scandal uncompelling? And have you really updated your belief if you think Bobulinski was telling the truth but otherwise maintain the exact same position you did before?

Any of these would have been suitable on-ramps to a discussion about bias and credulity, and you wouldn't have to write a top level post putting another user on the spot the way you did. Which, to be clear, I don't have a problem with in general - I admire good trolling for what it is and does, and in fact two years ago I would have wasted some money buying you reddit gold for this post, because as a troll it is a work of art. But I have come to understand what zorba and the team are going for (I think) and I appreciate the motte for what it is. And I think top level call outs, or things that look so much like top level call outs as to be no different, will destroy the motte, because nobody else is going to do it with this much finesse. So here I am, calling you out.

If I had to summarize my post it would be "I started to suspect that motteposting was potentially arguing in bad faith or being inconsistent, so I laid a trap to see how he'd react to his own argument. Despite what I emotionally desired, motteposting demonstrated commendable consistency, although there were a few questions at the fringe. In the course of the discussion, he also changed my mind about something. The end."

it doesn't read like any other 'I've updated my mistaken beliefs' post I've ever read

I don't know what this means, what exactly do you find suspicious?

if you wanted to talk about bias and credulity, it would have been simple. All you would have to do is - instead of using @motteposting's post - use your own posts. It's not easy to spot our own biases, but it isn't impossible either.

I think I understand the general pushback against focusing too much on a single user's actions but I believe it was appropriate here because it's difficult to discuss these topics in the abstract. And I'm not at all opposed to examining my own biases, but I have to admit that I have blindspots like everyone else. I like to think that I'm sufficiently scrutinizing but that's going to reek of "we've investigated ourselves and concluded we did nothing wrong."

I'll answer your questions in turn:

Why do you think Hutchinson's claim is plausible when it is based on hearsay about hearsay?

There's two parts here, Hutchinson's claim of what she heard, and whether what she heard actually happened. On what she heard, Hutchinson to me came across as credible because she doesn't appear to have either a motive or a history of lying. She described the events with sufficient detail, and named every person that was privy to the conversation. She provided this testimony under oath and was annoyed at being subpoenaed. As falsification, if Hutchinson wanted to lie and make up something damning about Trump to get back at him or whatever, the far easier thing for her to have done would be to talk about a scenario that did not involve her listening in on a conversation with 3 other people (who are available to refute what she said). If I was playing the role of Lying Hutchinson, I would've conjured up something salacious that only Trump would be in the position of denying (e.g. sexual harassment).

Regarding the claims about the steering wheel lunging incident, it seems plausible to me. Trump does not strike me as someone with good temperament control, especially in private away from the cameras. There was testimony from other people that corroborated how thrilled he was about what his supporters were doing on J6, and how much he wanted to be in the thick of it. The other testimony also established how surprised his security detail was when he declared during his speech that he was going to walk down to the capitol, because they had not prepared anything like that. Two secret service agents claimed to contradict Hutchinson's ultimate lunging claim and apparently said they were willing to testify back in June, but they haven't materialized. All that leads me to think it makes sense that Trump really wanted to go to the capitol, that his security detail said no, and that he's impulsive enough to act out the way he did.

What exactly about these two events do you think is similar aside from the use of unsubstantiated evidence?

At the time I wrote it, the parallels were kind of basic and mostly along the lines of "This person we know little about made a claim with no real corroborating evidence, should we believe them?" I realized after that there was a lot more corroborating evidence from Bobulinski I didn't know about (motteposting's first reply to me didn't mention any of it).

Why would you present the lack of written proof of the back room deal as evidence it didn't happen when you know they tried to make sure there was no written proof of their back room deals?

The lack of written proof wouldn't necessarily settle the issue on its own, but my operating assumption is that a deal like this would leave a paper trail of some kind, and all we had were very vague terse lines about "H holding 10 for the big guy." I did not know about their insistence not to discuss the deal in writing until I saw the Gilliar text messages after, and also Hunter saying somewhere that Joe Biden prefers talking on the phone. That is a compelling explanation for why the paper trail I was looking for and expecting would not exist.

Most importantly - if you really agree that nepotism is bad, and a really bad look for a president, then why do you find the Biden laptop scandal uncompelling?

Because they've had access to so much of Hunter's files for so long, my assumption is that the CEFC deal is is the most damning thing they could nail on Joe Biden (since that's the real goal). But the CEFC deal was only talked about and never happened. I also find 2rafa's idea that Hunter was largely talking a big game about his dad's involvement to generate clout to make a lot of sense given the lack of solid detail of Joe Biden's involvement. Even with their insistence not to discuss the deal in writing, I know from experience that people fuck up and break security protocol, and I still would expect some sort of corroborating evidence that Hunter was funneling money to his dad (e.g. "can't smoke crack 2nite, gotta wire $ to dad" or something). What we're left with is that "Joe Biden was at least contemplated to receive a cut of a deal that fell through" which seems like a dud.

The other dimension is considering the baseline. I was happy that Biden won the election, but only because it meant Trump lost. Biden is kind of boring which I do find refreshing, but as a libertarian I'm struggling to think of any of his policies that I actually support, and I'll never forgive him for his role in vastly expanding the carceral state. As a person, although he seems to have calmed down in recent years, his habit of sniffing girls/women's hair was really bizarre, and I'm still inclined to believe Tara Reade's accusation that he tried to force himself on her.

Which is why it almost feels unfair, akin to beating a dead horse, to even mention the Trump family nepotism, because it's so wildly and flagrantly out of proportion. Trump hires his own family as White House advisors, doesn't release his finances, doesn't put anything in a blind trust, openly invites foreign dignitaries to stay in his hotels, neither he nor his family stop from using his name to secure deals across the world, and etc etc. The comparison here is comically unfair. I expect a certain level of corruption from politicians (and I find things like Clinton's ridiculous $500k speaking engagement fees and government officials retiring into cushy "consulting" gigs to all be deplorable) but I'm never going to see "zero" so I'll settle for "way less than the other guy".

And have you really updated your belief if you think Bobulinski was telling the truth but otherwise maintain the exact same position you did before?

I didn't know about Bobulinski until motteposting mentioned him. When I initially looked at his claims I saw some things that didn't add up and concluded that he might be twisting the truth for his own clout. Later examining other evidence I wasn't aware of changed my mind and I revised my conclusion to Bobulinski most likely telling the truth. I'm not sure what you mean by "exact same position". If you're talking about Joe Biden's involvement, see the previous answer.

I genuinely really appreciate you taking me to task on the above topic. Answering your questions prompted me to seriously reflect on my position, and I really wish more people did that to me.

A key difference between these situations is that there's no corroborating evidence for Cassidy's claim. It's not the case that the Presidential limo was seen suddenly swerving on camera, and Cassidy's claim is an explanation for what happened.

In the case of the Bidens, we have the email where Hunter is to hold 10% for "the big guy" and Bobulinski is explaining who the big guy is. We also, as far as I know, have no alternative theory on who "the big guy" is. Who else is in Hunter's orbit is a good candidate for "the big guy?"

To be fair Cassidy's claim was that someone (Tony Ornato) told her someone told him he saw someone do something. The only thing that is reliant on her credibility is the "someone told her" part of the chain. Ornato seems to have met with J6 committee and may be testifying soon, so he would be someone that can refute Cassidy's claims.

A key difference between these situations is that there's no corroborating evidence for Cassidy's claim.

Another key difference is simply "likelihood."

How likely is it that someone in the backseat of a large car might lunge for the steering wheel? It seems unlikely to me that someone in the backseat of a Volkswagen Rabbit would be able to make any serious play for a steering wheel, let along someone in a more spacious luxury SUV or limo or whatever. Even before you get into the political alliances, this sounds like a made-up story.

Again, removing political alliances, how likely is that a powerful politician is profiting in some way off of the connections he makes for his family members? Moderate to very likely?

Whether there is evidence of either, of course, weakens or strengthens the case. But purely in a "Could I see this happening?" model, one seems physically difficult, at best, while the other seems like the way things usually work.

If I remember correctly, it was said Trump lunged for the wheel of The Beast, but he was on video being driven in an SUV that day, which would be a huge counterfactual.

But why is this not enough to conclude "This is Bobulinski's revenge tour" in the same way he concluded about Cassidy?

He didn't conclude that, read his post again. He explicitly calls this a "hypothesis".

To your broader point though, of course our biases will inform how much credibility we give someone. To some extent I think this is actually mathematically correct. If someone tells me they went outside and saw a bird I'll believe them without question, if they tell me they went outside and saw an alien I'll start looking for reasons why they might be lying or mistaken. This is in line with bayesian reasoning because my prior probability for someone seeing a bird is much higher than my prior for them lying about seeing a bird whereas the opposite of true for aliens.

The place where it gets tricky is when we start adjusting our credence not based upon how likely the claim is but instead based upon how much we want it to be true. There are things I don't want to be true that are unfortunately still quite likely and things I want to be true that are very unlikely. It's tempting but mathematically invalid to interpret evidence in line with my desires rather than my unbiased assessments.

He didn't conclude that, read his post again. He explicitly calls this a "hypothesis".

To the extent that post was a pure hypothesis, this is a fair point. But I also assume that if he's posting a hypothesis it's because he finds it at least somewhat persuasive which is why I framed my mirror attempt as "one possible explanation" and asked if he found any of what I wrote convincing. The idea was to see how motteposting reacts to motteposting's hypothesis.

I don't think that this is a sufficiently persuasive argument, although I do appreciate regular bias-checks, as well as your honesty regarding your ultimate conclusions. Here is why I am unpersuaded that these cases were not relevantly similar: With Trump, we had already seen the same song-and-dance a hundred times - someone works for him or his family, has a falling-out, then leaves his administration/entourage to go tell the press salacious things that make him sound like an insane person or a psychopath, much of which subsequently either fails to be verified or is outright refuted. See e.g. Michael Cohen, the Mooch, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, etc. There is not just one article devoted exclusively to listing such people, there are many. No such context exists around Joe Biden, or at least no such context existed when the laptop and Bobulinski made their initial appearances. When even mere hints that Cassidy Hutchinson fell into this same pattern appeared, of course my expectation was that she fit the by-then well-established mold. And because we'd already had 4+ years of ridiculous lies about Trump's supposed personal derangement, my default credence in any story of that general type had already been greatly lowered. So very little further was required to merit (at least prima facie) dismissal at that point. I don't find that unreasonable at all, even if it may superficially appear to be so when you evaluate things in complete abstraction from their contexts.

By contrast, "Trump opponent peddles influence to foreign potentates via family venture(s)" had already turned out to be true at least once on the Presidential stage, and politicians being prosaically corrupt in that fashion is entirely plausible anyway. I don't think being inclined to believe the former over the latter, even given the same caliber of direct evidence against each, is remotely worthy of criticism. For it simply rests on eminently reasonable priors, plus plenty of previous evidence in the former case.

That's a plausible explanation but it seems to apply at least as much to cable news pundits who rely on a content pipeline constantly running for their living.

Well it's not cable news pundits who were testifying about the contents of the emails, nor did I invoke them to shore up Bobulinski's credibility. To be fair, it wasn't the J6 committee who were testifying about Trump trying to choke out a Secret Service agent either. But (IIRC) the whole reason I brought up the J6 committee's ratings was to explain why they'd push her even if she wasn't that credible, to counter the notion that the J6 committee wouldn't run her unless they rigorously verified her story or somesuch. However, I made no claim that Bobulinski was believable because the cable news guys having him on would vet him or something, so I don't really see the parallel there.

By contrast, "Trump opponent peddles influence to foreign potentates via family venture(s)" had already turned out to be true at least once on the Presidential stage, and politicians being prosaically corrupt in that fashion is entirely plausible anyway. I don't think being inclined to believe the former over the latter, even given the same caliber of direct evidence against each, is remotely worthy of criticism. For it simply rests on eminently reasonable priors, plus plenty of previous evidence in the former case.

I appreciate that you took the time to respond and for outlining your heuristics transparently, but I'm having trouble understanding how your heuristics for prima facie assessments map exactly. I agree with you that politicians being prosaically corrupt is entirely plausible, but I find it odd that you specifically cleave along the "Trump opponent peddles influence" axis. What is the basis for carving out a territory shaped like that? Unless you can explain how members of a group share a trait relevant to the prediction, it seems like a suspiciously arbitrary designator.

For example, if I made the claim that "Trump peddles influence to foreign potentates via family venture(s)" would you find the claim on its face plausible because you use your "politicians are corrupt" heuristic or implausible because it doesn't match your "Trump opponent peddles influence" heuristic?

I was being a little glib, but my point was just that Hillary Clinton sold influence via her family too and she happened to be Trump’s only prior Presidential opponent (the frequentist probability is 100%! /s). I think “Trump opponent peddles influence” falls under “politician peddles influence,” so I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump were involved in various and sundry corruption too.

Political influencers have influence because of a web of connections based around other people with the same or similar political views. That's why having one increases your prior for having more. "Trump" and "Trump opponents" have different political views, and won't be connected.

Do you believe the proclivity for peddling influence is different enough between those two groups that it warrants separate heuristic categories?

They probably are equally likely to use what influence they have, but aren't equally likely to have the same amount of influence in the first place. I don't know if that counts as having the same proclivity.

I don't care about the Hutchinson story or about Trump "lunging" at the wheel. This is not a principled stance - it may well be important - but it doesn't grab my attention and so I leave the discussion to those who do care about it.

However, please note that the concern that Joe Biden is "the big guy" in Hunter's emails does not just come from Bobulinski. The person who originally referenced "the big guy" in writing was James Gilliar, a Brit working with Hunter Biden on a Chinese energy firm deal. When the Hunter Laptop story broke, Gilliar texted with an unnamed person, who was concerned that the Bidens (mentioning both Joe and Hunter) would throw them under the bus. In discussing Joe Biden's incentives whether or not he won the then-ongoing election campaign, Gilliar again referred to Biden as "the Big Guy"..

Please also note that we don't just have Bobulinski's word. He has also provided text messages with Gilliar wherein Gilliar specifically instructs Bobulinski to take special care to hide Joe Biden's involvement in Hunter's business deals. (see the above-linked article).

Yes, I mentioned Gilliar's text messages already above. It's one of the reasons why I updated my position to believe Bobulinski is most likely telling the truth.

So I've been spending some time on the radfem pipeline. It's been my opinion for some time that radical feminists, like Marxists, are correct on their analysis of their subjects, with no regard to one might think about their solutions. Take the topic of promiscuity; a trait that was historically seen as far more taboo in women that it was in men. Double standards?

The argument is that the male desire seeks virgin wives and prostitutes. The whores will provide sexual release without reproduction and emotional investment to minimise the demand on men’s resources. On the other hand, virgin wives are meant to provide both sexual and reproductive services but exclusively to him so that his resources and labour are spent on his family and progeny alone. While relations with promiscuous women are intended to be secretive and secondary. Essentially, they play the role of sexual garbage collectors who clear the excesses when no one's watching. This is especially true for fighting men, who are separated from their families for extended periods in foreign places and under hard conditions. They miss female company, they seek comfort, relief from loneliness, sexual desire, and recreation. War-like conditions create a huge demand for such promiscuous women, who either seek financial reward in exchange, or security, or both. And so, when a woman has multiple partners, she is slotted into the whore sub-class automatically. This sub-class doesn't demand respect or commitment, they knows their place and that they're not likely to move up the ladder, and so they're viewed as the lowest value women. And in an age before industrialisation when paternity tests weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eyes, and of constant conflict and strife, such promiscuous women with kids especially would lose out of the support structure. Perhaps these standards did make sense in this period. But what role do such standards play now, in ultra societies like the West, with large populations, high levels of specialisation, divisions of labour, lasting peace and advances in medicine? The breakdown of families comes to mind, which is of course for a myriad reasons, to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain. We still have sufficient demographics and functional infrastructure and institutions to keep civilisation alive, even if we reach SK levels of atomisation.

So here's where I'm less certain; will decadence necessarily mean decline? Or maybe we'll just draw out the inevitable and decline will come very slowly, say over a few centuries? Should we turn to traditional norms to reverse this trend? If so, how can traditional norms become tenable enough to be a potential solution?

Take the topic of promiscuity; a trait that was historically seen as far more taboo in women that it was in men. Double standards?

I don't know about that, considering how many of the same feminists will turn around and say it's fine for only women to have reproductive rights since they're the ones that bear the consequences of accidental pregnancy. Surely this should be the same thing?

It seems difficult to argue against that both historically and in the general population today, female promiscuity is viewed less positively than men. Yes, there are small numbers of sex negative feminists who believe male promiscuity is evil and female promiscuity is more or less amoral in the sense of being value neutral. There are larger numbers of people who view male sexuality as potentially threatening within a broader framework where both sexes' promiscuities are viewed as about equal(and some of these people are on the left, with promiscuity viewed positively, while some are on the right, with promiscuity viewed negatively). But most people today still view male promiscuity positively-to-neutrally and female promiscuity negatively. I find that people on the motte.com tend to overestimate how woke the general population is(spoiler alert- not very, although they're also not tradcons). And historically the default society tends to think it's very important for women to be virgins at marriage, and for a man, quite strange or very rude to ask.

Yes, many feminists think that women should have reproductive rights and men shouldn't. To be frank, this is mostly about trying to benefit women as a class and not give their opponents ammunition(can you imagine the amount of ammo it would give to the pro-life movement if men had the power to demand their partners get abortions, or otherwise had some legal method of exerting pressure to that effect?), not disapproval of male promiscuity. Demanding men who don't want to be a father be required to get a vasectomy is actually evidence in favor of this model; after all, a vasectomy by definition preserves the ability to have sex while preventing impregnation.

And so, when a woman has multiple partners, she is slotted into the whore sub-class automatically

Nope. That's not how it works - a women with very high bodycount are pursued for long term relationships and some with way lower than them are viewed only as warmer, self cleaning flesh lights. The buckets mostly exist. But the criteria for sorting them is not the body count.

to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain.

Can you expand on why you think families are too expensive to maintain?

will decadence necessarily mean decline?

I believe so, and I think it might take a century or two. The future will belong to the people who "show up" genetically which means eventually the vast majority will have hardcore trad parents and or grandparents, hardcore in the sense that they resisted the current corrosive liberalism by virtue of their personality traits, cultural or religious tradition, or whatever. There was some triumphalism during the age of New Atheism about how fast many faiths were hemorrhaging members, but I think that those were the easy pickings and eventually a hard core will remain, and the numbers will stabilize and then reverse course. Of course, it's possible by then that the groups will be small enough that they can successfully be painted as "dangerous to democracy" by liberals and destroyed with punitive laws, taxation, lawfare, and targeted propaganda. Who knows.

how can traditional norms become tenable enough to be a potential solution?

I've come to believe that this is impossible, or at least unbelievably difficult. Liberalism, scientism, and humanism have thoroughly penetrated every level of education, entertainment, and "common sense" morality, to the point where it's the water in which every westerner has been swimming for at least several generations. This is a trumph for the secular humanist/liberal projects, but unfortunately it turns out that the axioms in which these projects rest lead to beliefs that are incompatible with societal flourishing (while being great for - a certain definition of - atomized individual flourishing). It's hard enough to remain Christian swimming in this water, nevermind trying to convert the fish who believe they are totally at home in it! It would be like parachuting into North Korea and trying to convince a random North Korean farmer --while you are both still in North Korea -- that the U.S. president is actually a good guy and Americans mean them no harm and that they should unilaterally disarm and then engage in trade with the archenemy. Even if the farmer wanted to, the years of slogans, of propaganda, of emotional speeches by the dear leader would make it extremely painful to change his mind, and even if he did, he would be under constant mental and emotional pressure to "deconvert." So it goes with traditional values today. Absent an authoritarian right wing theocratic coup, I think you're out of luck.

I believe so, and I think it might take a century or two. The future will belong to the people who "show up" genetically which means eventually the vast majority will have hardcore trad parents and or grandparents, hardcore in the sense that they resisted the current corrosive liberalism by virtue of their personality traits, cultural or religious tradition, or whatever.

Do not expect any "religious gene" or "trad gene". If there is any genetic trait that insular religious sects select for in their members, it is going to be WORM type of brain.

"In your childhood, listen carefully to authority figures and never ever in your whole life question what you have learned."

Just like insects on small islands with nowhere to fly tend to lose wings, the new type of human will lose any curiosity or "openness of mind".

If there is any genetic trait that insular religious sects select for in their members, it is going to be WORM type of brain.

Citation sorely needed. This just sounds like some uncharitable "all religions are cults and believers are just brainless automatons" claptrap.

"In your childhood, listen carefully to authority figures and never ever in your whole life question what you have learned."

But their parents will have spent their entire lives actively resisting and disobeying authority figures to adhere to their traditions? That sounds like the opposite of your 1-dimensional strawman.

As a side note, I've engaged with you several times here and you're only ever abrasive and uncharitable. I'm not really sure what your goal is, but it doesn't seem to be to convince those who may disagree with you, so I'll probably reply less going forward. Feel free to have the last word.

Maybe he phrased it churlishly, but I see what he means. The trads are less defying authority than they are preferring one authority over another. Among the traditionally-minded there are many highly intelligent people. In my little homeschooling circle there are computer programmers, a guy with a phd in engineering physics, a woman with a masters in musical accompaniment, etc. They are also all evangelical Christians. Normally we don’t think of evangelicals as highly-educated, but these people border on hyper-educated. Except that both their education and religious inclination depend on strict adherence to agreed-upon truths. I, a de facto wordcel, show up and try to make conversation about ideas- their ideas! Physics! Music! Code! and it’s the embodiment of the NPC meme. They absolutely cannot think outside their boxes, and even thinking inside their boxes takes the form of mere recitation of principles. If the regeneration of the West ever comes, it will come after the traditionalists’ descendants recreate something like worst aspects of the middle ages. So expect it in 400 years, not 200.

That's an interesting anecdote, thanks for sharing. I'm not too surprised to hear it since I've come to believe that the overwhelming majority of people are the way you describe. I work in tech in a very blue tribe and progressive company. The engineers here are smart, heck even the salespeople here are pretty smart relative to most salespeople I've met. In my first year here I (perhaps unwisely) tried to discuss ideas with some of my closer colleagues. Each time, I was met with talking points or indifference. I think that the vast majority of people are just uninterested in and/or incapable of contributing to a discussion about complex abstract ideas. Now I mostly talk about TV shows, beer, or people to get along.

If the regeneration of the West ever comes, it will come after the traditionalists’ descendants recreate something like worst aspects of the middle ages.

The "respect for authority" gene can't be mutually exclusive with creativity. If it were, humanity would never have gotten to where it is today. Widespread suspicion and rejection of authority is a very recent and, I suspect, very American phenomenon. The vast majority of people in history just took the authority of their rulers and social betters as a given, and yet somehow they managed to produce beautiful art and novel ideas all the same.

Also, I think this depends heavily on your definition of "regeneration." If it means "a return to liberal secular humanist values, the sexual revolution, and atomized individualism" then yes, I agree. But to me that would be degeneration, not regeneration.

If these supposedly stultified traditionalists built a society based on respect for hierarchy and love of God, county, family, and peace, I would see that as a regeneration of Western society to its former glory. A modern observer might think therewould be less "creative ferment" because there might be no more tumorous postmodern skyscrapers, no more "piss Christ" exhibits, no more international NGOs evangelizing an ever expanding list of "human rights" to coerce societies to ever greater levels of "freedom." But then he might be missing the innovations in classical architecture, the Renaissance in symbolic religious art, or the flourishing of local "intermediate institutions" binding communities and families closer together in a way that is sorely missing in his own time.

Sure, but among my tradcath circle there's many people who have large families and will then talk philosophy or speculative linguistics or musical composition or literature until they're blue in the face. My anecdata is more or less the opposite of yours.

The trads are less defying authority than they are preferring one authority over another.

Is this not equally true of non-trads in general? In the words of the poet:

"I'm an emo kid, non-conforming as can be

you'd be non-conforming too if you were just like me."

Have you seen a general population of normies that actually qualify as "defying authority" or "thinking for themselves" or "persuing individualism" in some truly rigorous sense?

Almost definitionally, no, because normies are ‘people more conformist than the reference group’.

eh, for this purpose, read "normie" as "normal", "not unusual", "not outstanding."

Take the Atheist community. Is it your experience that the average atheist in, say, 2010 was unusually non-conformist?

I am finding myself increasingly convinced that very few people value such things as "openness of mind" or "freedom" as ends in themselves, anyway. (Some who do tend to be "fools who take things seriously," as I call myself, which would be a type pretty overrepresented here.)

I mean, I, who have at least convinced myself that such things are good, would justify them something like this: freedom (and curiosity and so forth) are important because we can never be perfectly sure that we have things right. We could still be wrong about something terribly important, and so, to avoid trapping ourselves in a Hell of ignorance, we forswear the ability to ever secure ourselves into any supposed Heaven of enlightenment. (After all, reaching such a standard of absolute perfection is infinitely unlikely, so intellectual humility tells me.)

But a lot of people don't share that view of intellectual humility. A lot of people believe that they already do have the way to produce that Heaven on Earth, and if only people would stop disagreeing or disobeying, everything would be perfect. In light of this, "freedom" and "openness of mind" and "intellectual humility" and "democracy" (Erdogan: "Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.") are valued ultimately as pretenses or covers just to keep the current hegemons from cracking down on them long enough to get The Right People with The Right Ideas into power. And after that, it's time to pull the ladder up behind them; slam and lock the door, to ensure that the ways by which the truth came in would never tempt anyone away.

This doesn't even particularly depend on the beliefs themselves: it isn't some flaw unique to the "trad" or to the "woke" or that can't be shared by anyone, really. It's just a question of confidence versus humility: after all, if you really did know for sure the Ultimate Truth, wouldn't all the process of truth-seeking from then on really be just a dangerous temptation from which no good can come, that nobody should be permitted to bother with? Even I would agree, but no matter how sure I am in my beliefs or how important they are to me, I forswear the right to say that I really for sure have the ultimate truth, for if everybody who thought that way before me was wrong - I should be chastened by the fact that the odds are very much against me, so I will give up the right to secure my Heaven so I don't end up creating Hell.

Isn't it pretty well established that likelihood of having religious beliefs, and social conservatism, are both at least partially genetic?

Unfortunately the intellectual commons are just barren nowadays. I think it was a mistake to throw open the doors to allowing everyone to comment on politics/society etc. We should've kept the masses happy with bred and circuses, while a trained aristocratic class a la @2rafa quietly keeps things running in the background.

Ironically it's easier to be liberal when you're in a constrained, elite social group, because you can select for high decouplers.

When we had a trained aristocratic class, they went all-in on Marxism. This does not strike me as a great idea.

We should've kept the masses happy with bred and circuses, while a trained aristocratic class a la @2rafa quietly keeps things running in the background.

Be very cautious of endorsing an unaccountable set of leaders, for they may very well decide you and yours are next on the chopping block.

I'm pretty sure it's the trained aristocratic class that's keeping the intellectual commons barren.

I believe so, and I think it might take a century or two. The future will belong to the people who "show up" genetically which means eventually the vast majority will have hardcore trad parents and or grandparents

What about once we get solid tech for 'test-tube babies' or otherwise take out the inconvenience and risk of pregnancy? I don't see this talked about often, but the time is coming. Much of the conceptual work has been done on artificial wombs, what's really holding us back is regulation. To point to your own username, don't you think that this type of advance will change the game when it comes to reproduction?

Color me doubtful on artificial wombs. You basically need to implement an artificial version of every single organ in order to build a proper artificial womb, and all of those other artificial organs will be much more profitable sold to elderly people with deep pockets and failing organs.

That's before you even manage to convince a zygote to implant on your artificial membrane.

And keep in mind, we're having difficulty keeping baby formula on the shelves.

Why would it? Fear of pregnancy is not the main reason for childlessness. "Kids are unaffordable" may or may not be true, but it's not usually intended as a reference to the cost of childbirth.

Modern people who don't have kids don't have them because they don't want to raise them, not because they don't want to make them.

You'll still need people to actually raise the children, and the time and effort required for childrearing is unattractive in a society that offers lots of other pleasures for far, far less commitment.

I suppose test tube babies could have a large impact if we reach a point where the family has been so discredited as an institution that people are comfortable with the government creating and raising children. But even then I imagine there would be objections on progressive grounds -- why create more children in a planet that's already overpopulated? Why not just allow still more immigrants to come in if we simply need more people?

There's also the fact that the dissident right and reactionary logic more generally is outside the mainstream, and women are mostly conformist. Plus their often open misogyny in the true sense of the word- not the sometimes-charming view of women as needing to be taken care of, but something that often fades into outright hatred.

If you find reactionaries with trad values and a victorian view that women need to be protected and taken care of, they often have gender ratios close to even, even if that view entails restricting women's freedom for their own good. I'm not going to claim this view is popular, but it isn't notably less popular among women. It's the hatred of women that drives them away.

I agree with a lot of your post, but your actual original premise ("Radical feminism is essentially an unhelpful defensive response to the sexual revolution") is untrue. For two pretty straightforward reasons: One, radical feminism predates the sexual revolution. Two, most of the early radical feminist literature supported sexual liberation, if not outright sexual libertinism. People (in this thread even) who argue the sexual revolution was mostly just a ploy by men to get access to sex are wrong. Not that there's no truth to the idea some men loved the idea of free non-committal sex and supported it for this reason, but the idea that feminism and women more generally did not play an active and leading role in the sexual revolution is false.

Radical feminist ("second wave") texts such as Beauvoir's 1949 The Second Sex, Friedan's 1963 The Feminine Mystique predate or coincide with the beginning of the sexual revolution.

Other, slightly later radical feminist texts, such as Firestone's 1970 The Dialectic of Sex or Millet's 1970 Sexual Politics, call for sexual liberation, either explicitly or implicitly (it's explicit with Firestone, it's more implicit with Millet who says sexual repression of women is an oppressive tool of patriarchy). The idea that radical feminism is a defensive response to the sexual revolution is historical revisionism by more contemporary radical feminists who realise that the sexual revolution actually was negative for women (and the majority of men for that matter, not that it matters to them), but don't actually want to condemn earlier feminists works or the whole political project of feminism so the 'reinterpret' them or otherwise reframe it (most often is the "true sexual liberation has never been tried"). "Men created ('false') sexual liberation for sexual access" is unironically a radical feminist revisionist myth.

So what was Women's Movement, and all the people who supported it then? Just unwitting pawns of Big Sexual Entertainment, too stupid to see their strings being pulled by Hugh Hefner and Hollywood? I don't buy it. Even if Hefner and co did contribute to it (which they did to some small degree), these women and feminists did still have agency. It's also just begging the question of why did women accept the Sexual Liberation narrative, when women had long been the sexual moral arbitrators? Why wasn't Hefner and co suppressed like in any other moral panic that women are so capable of? If you want to attribute it to something than other feminism itself, you're better off looking at birth control, domestic technologies and other technologies in the postwar era.

How about ‘true sexual liberation has been tried at least to some extent, and is inherently exploitative of women (and children), under pretty much any economic system’?

I was making a humorous reference to the 'true communism has never been tried'. Many contemporary radical feminists will still support the notion of a 'sexually liberated society' in the same way communists will support the idea of a communist utopia. The joke being that communism has been tried and failed, and similarly that sexual liberation has been tried and failed. But it doesn't stop the radical feminists continually idealising how next time ("real" sexual liberation) will work.

The women's movement and sexual liberation movements were separate movements, even if parts of them were at times connected and at other times different parts were counterposed to each other. (Many) women accepted the sexual liberation narrative for the same reason many men did: because they wanted to have sex. Some of these women called themselves feminist and others didn't.

Some of these women called themselves feminist and others didn't.

So how many called themselves feminist, how many anti-feminist, and how many rejected to orient themselves on this axis?

Because for any policy, no matter how closely it is associated with some ideology, there were those that wouldn't identify themselves with that ideology, and some that did identify with it, but opposed that policy.

Thus rendering, by your reasoning, any statement that implies a correlation exists between support for X and idenfying as Y, false.

almost as little discussed as that the Tianenmen Square protests began as nationalist riots by students who opposed African exchange students sleeping with Chinese women

I think you are confusing these protests with the Nanjing protests of 1988-1989. A common mistake.

There were students who opposed African exchange students at Tiananmen Square, but the preciptating event was the death of Hu Yaobang, who had nothing particularly to do with African exchange students. In fact, there weren't many African exchange students left in China by that point.

By "a direct line of continuity" are you saying that opposition to African students had a profound impact on TS or that it was how TS began?

impossible to decouple them

What do you mean "decouple"?

It's been my opinion for some time that radical feminists, like Marxists, are correct on their analysis of their subjects

I disagree in general. Maybe they might be right on some things, but in general their analysis usually suffers from having to always frame things into a position that women are oppressed, even when it doesn't really make sense. They have a whole term for this, "benevolent sexism". When men hold doors for women, to a feminist it's not because society values women and wants to treat women well, it's because society erroneously thinks women are too weak to hold their open doors. When men stand up for women, it's because men think women need their saving, etc. When women get less severe prison sentencing then men, and there are fewer homeless women, it's somehow because society hates women. I think they're way off base in their analyses of these sorts of things.

Well, is it not true that women are often afforded more gentleness and kindness than men would be in many situations, due to a sense that they're physically and mentally weaker? Children are also not punished as harshly when they engage in criminal action and while it would be absurd to suggest this betrays a hatred for children on the part of adults, I think it would be uncontroversial to argue this does stem from a widespread perception that children are the social, intellectual, emotional and to an extent moral inferiors of adults (more innocent, but less able to accurately judge the moral weight of their actions).

To my mind women occupied a position in society quite similar to the one children hold today until fairly recently; considered precious and in need of protection, but also undoubtedly the social inferiors of men. And I think in spite of how socially stigmatised open sexism is against women today, traces of that old arrangement do linger and lead to things like women being treated with kid gloves. While this isn't oppression and is beneficial (a man's life is literally considered less valuable than a woman's, just as an adult's is considered less valuable than a child's) it's not hard to see why feminists would object.

Children are also not punished as harshly when they engage in criminal action and while it would be absurd to suggest this betrays a hatred for children on the part of adults, I think it would be uncontroversial to argue this does stem from a widespread perception that children are the social, intellectual, emotional and to an extent moral inferiors of adults (more innocent, but less able to accurately judge the moral weight of their actions).

Two things can be true at once. We love children and we think they are inept. We don't love them because they are inept. The two are not causally linked.

We don't love them because they are inept.

I'm not sure where I gave the impression I believed that. Maybe it sounded as if I was saying the ineptness of children was the only reason they're not punished as harshly as adults? Of course adults have instinctual feelings of love and protectiveness towards kids independent of their belief in the children's ineptness, and those are part of it too, but much of the argument against trying them as adults centres on their inability to understand the full consequences of their actions. So, you know, it's both - the "benevolent ageism" in this case stems both from love of children and knowledge of their inferior faculties.

Yes, but even if that were the root for the "benevolent sexism" against women (which really is just a euphemism for special treatment), I don't see how you can twist that around and argue that, no really, this massive perk is actually a disadvantage because...?

It is not like this ostensible presumption of female weakness or inferiority works to their disadvantage anywhere. We are not talking about two sides of one coin here. The argument goes like this:

  1. Women have a clear advantage in one specific field

  2. This advantage is really because of disdain for women

  3. No, I can't point to any instances where this disdain has any negative effects for women

  4. The clear advantage is therefore a disadvantage!

  5. QED women are oppressed

I did say it is beneficial and not oppression (I grant feminists would probably disagree with that assessment) but nonetheless if you are a feminist whose goal is to attain for women the same level of respect afforded to men, having men treat you with kid gloves all the time could be seen as patronising, if indeed it does stem from a lack of faith in your abilities. And a lack of faith in your abilities could lead them to be unwilling to trust you with large amounts of power or responsibility. Even just being seen to receive this treatment could reinforce the notion that you need it and couldn't succeed on your own.

I could believe that the special treatment that women receive is patronizing and demeaning if feminists didn't demand it

The other crazy thing about 'benevolent sexism' is that it was necessary! How would women feel if, after women joined the workforce, men had treated them like any other men? Apoplectic. We're not even allowed to mention our dick and balls anymore, let alone slap them onto a table to win an argument and impress the senior partners.

let alone slap them onto a table to win an argument and impress the senior partners

People did that…?

edit: i mean i’m rather taking this metaphorically but out of morbid curiosity…did people really do that?

More comments

Charitably, the core of feminist analysis would be that gender norms exist, and if you fall outside them, you will have a worse life than if you met them. Even if you meet them, there'll be parts of them that meaningfully hurt your well-being. I think few people would argue against this, and it's not a huge leap to go from there to saying that they should be loosened if not dismantled.

Where much feminist analysis falls short is in trying to shove all gender norms into the oppressor/oppressed dynamic. I'd go so far as to say it's self undermining: if women inherently lack all agency in the matter and are just flotsam on the tides of the patriarchy, it removes all recognition of the individual agency women have to dismantle those norms.

To take your analogy at face value:

There is no norm re. drinking hydrofluoric acid. You are free to purchase, free to imbibe, and free to die stupidly.

Likewise gender rolls. Even if they provide some sort of benefit along the lines of not drinking deadly acid, that still doesn't mean they should be enforced. People should be allowed to make idiot decisions as long as they only kill them selves, and let Darwin sort it out on the back end.

Not if gender roles are something which requires collective buy in to exist. If so, then defectors are in fact harming the group, and thus something you would want discouraged, in the same way you would want to treat any other tragedy of the commons defector.

Counterpoint- if people for some reason wanted to drink hydrofluoric acid, it would quickly be made illegal. Heroine(far less harmful) is illegal for that reason.

Likewise if we determine that gender roles are necessary and good, then not officially providing state favoritism to them is, from non-libertarian frameworks, no longer the default- it has to be specifically justified.

Radfems are wrong not only about men, they're also wrong about pretty much the entirety of gender relations and how it operates currently and historically. But I am used to seeing this kind of thing, at this point. It seems to be a general trend even among heterodox communities and the anti-woke that the ideological precepts of their opposition that they're most likely to accept (comparatively speaking) are the feminist ones, which is evident in the utterly bizarre conservative-TERF allyship that seems to be going on at the moment. There's also a similarity in the moral typecasting that feminists and conservatives (and many other people, too) engage in - to them, men are a by default "degenerate" group who need to be reined in and obligated to provide protection to the women around them, and women are a group deserving of special protections. They differ on many things, but on these fundamental perceptions I don't see any difference at all. Even the blank-slatist intersectionalists who believe that men engage in bad behaviour simply because of patriarchal norms still fundamentally engage in the same knee-jerk moral typecasting, they just attribute it to a different cause to make it fit with their blank-slatism.

It seems that if the community isn't an explicitly anti-feminist community (and sometimes even if it is), there's going to be an instinctual legitimacy assigned to feminist claims that doesn't get assigned to any other woke factions because they align with certain entrenched preconceptions and moral judgements that the other woke factions do not appeal to. Any group which is purportedly dedicated to "protecting women" tends to immediately align with most people's sensibilities. No matter how objectionable the rhetoric they churn out is, a base-level feeling of agreement with some of their precepts still seems to exist. There is something profoundly instinctual about the women-are-wonderful effect that makes it exist in most political factions, and it seems to me that any ideology that espouses these base talking points will always have some level of congruence with our knee-jerk beliefs that automatically confers upon it a huge advantage regardless of its validity.

Almost all sexual violence is committed by young men.

Years ago, I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t really the case. Maybe historically?

(Note the three- to four-fold difference between lifetime female-victim rape rates and male-victim made-to-penetrate rates, which I would consider “large majority” but not quite “almost all”, and how the 12-month male-victim made-to-penetrate rates are actually higher than female-victim rape rates, comparing table 3.1 to 3.5.

There isn’t a breakdown for 12-month assaults by sex of perpetrator, but if we wanted to use the lifetime rates of perpetration (as shown in tables 3.4 and 3.8) to adjust the 12-month victimization rates so we only include cross-sex victimization, it only makes the rates of victimization between M->F and F->M almost exactly comparable.

I was extremely surprised by this when I dug it up and looked at the stats. I recall that I couldn’t seem to do the same for the 2015 and 2018 reports, because they seem to have removed the 12-month rates and/or the perpetrator sex breakdown. I recall also wanting to find similar statistics for other countries, but that was more difficult, so I gave up.

So for some reason male perpetration has gone down over decades, but female perpetration has gone up, so much so that the sexes are raping each other at similar rates (at least in the US)!

Even given that I might’ve fucked up this very simple analysis, the rates of victimization alone are very different from what we expect from the zeitgeist.)

Yep, I was wondering if I should tackle this topic in my comment but decided it was already lengthy enough as it was and wanted to refrain from unceremoniously burying them in data from the outset. I'm glad someone else brought it up though.

There's not only the NISVS, either, there's other corroborating data which indicates that women are no angels when it comes to sexual offending. For example, here is a 2012 research paper using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's nationally representative National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC, 2001-02). It found in a sample of 43,000 adults little difference in the sex of selfreported sexual perpetrators. Of those who affirmed that they had “ever force[d] someone to have sex … against their will,” 43.6% were female and 56.4% were male.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-012-9943-5

Young men commit the vast majority of violent crime in every population on earth.

And are we going to acknowledge the flip side of this, too? I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.

Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599

"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."

In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.

"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."

Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full

"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."

I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund

This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=AsgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA210&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=nine%20out%20of%20every%2010&f=false

"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235720134_Who_are_the_Heroes_Characteristics_of_People_Who_Rescue_Others#:%7E:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20males,%2C%20violence%20and%20traffic%20accidents

When it comes to men there's very much a misleading tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of their tendency towards public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.

And also the next problem with your point is that it basically ignores the role women play in creating violence. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.

The tradcon-terf alliance really isn't that weird- tradcons have numbers(compared to terfs) and terfs have institutional respectability(compared to tradcons), and they both have a similar goal(tell trans people to pound sand because their interests aren't important). And both of them are historically willing to align with groups they don't like very much to accomplish goals. And terfs judge correctly that tradcons have far less ability to pose an existential threat to them compared to wokes, while tradcons correctly judge that terfs are too abrasive and fractious to actually consolidate power.

I don't understand your argument.

The breakdown of families comes to mind, which is of course for a myriad reasons, to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain

What does this have to do with men seeking virgin wives and prostitutes?

So here's where I'm less certain; will decadence necessarily mean decline?

What decadence? Decadence of men seeking virgin wives and prostitutes or decadence of men failing to seek virgin wives and prostitutes? Decadence of prostitues not suffering enough consequences from being prostitutes? Decadence in the number of virgin wives? Also what decline? Of fertility? Of families? How does it relate to the topic of men seeking virgin wives and prostitutes?

Should we turn to traditional norms to reverse this trend?

What traditional norms? The traditional norm of men seeking virign wives and prostitutes? And also which trend? And how do they help? And why did these traditional norms go away?

This analysis is shallow. Look further, past sociology to biology, evolution, existentialism.

Men and women, life and death. Two-track sexual reproduction, r/k selection, oxytocin, genetic imperatives, labor specialization, class war.

Monogamy is a temporary peace treaty, not a utopian end-state.

Family bonds and the gatekeeping of them rises and falls with the necessity of the family. Peace and prosperity tend to reduce this necessity, which increases the number of people outside functional family structures. If peace continues indefinitely and prosperity increases endlessly, this works fine. But, if either stop, family value increases rapidly and those caught outside are going to have a rough go of things, especially those already marginal in some way. Individualism is a luxury good.

Radical feminists have the same simplistic and faulty “analysis” as Marxists. For traditional Marxists, all history is to be analyzed as class struggle between workers and capitalists. Capitalists use their privilege in form of property of capital to allienate workers and politically oppress them in order to perpetuate and reproduce that whole system called capitalism.

For radfems, the history is to be analyzed as a gender struggle between men and women. Men use their male privilege to oppress women to perpetuate the whole system called patriarchy.

To me all these new causes are basically the same recycled template of dialectical leftist conspiracy theory - just with a new name for oppressed and boogiemen. They just change the name for this boogiemen secret power group and for the system they create. What they all share is the Manichean dichotomy of these forces, analysis that is always reduced to simplistic power relations and the name of the whole conspiracy. So you have whites vs POC, white privilege and white supremacy. You have cishetero vs queer people, normalcy and cisheteronormativity and so on.

As with all conspiracy theories, there may be some grains of truth of various sizes in there, you can have some fancy sounding language and so forth. But similarly to any other conspiracy theories, the analysis runs backwards from belief to “arguments”.

So I've been spending some time on the radfem pipeline. It's been my opinion for some time that radical feminists, like Marxists, are correct on their analysis of their subjects, with no regard to one might think about their solutions. Take the topic of promiscuity; a trait that was historically seen as far more taboo in women that it was in men. Double standards?

Yes, but as Aristotle reminds us, unequal treatment of unequal things can be called for. Women stand to lose much more from sex than men and are hence much choosier. Being chosen for sex by a woman translates to "you are so attractive that the risk of carrying your offspring is a price I am either willing to pay or actively seek". Being chosen for sex by a man just means you are above a certain fuckability threshold.

This differential means that women have always been able to garner favours in exchange for (the promise or suggestion of) sex. Most feminist activism after the first wave is about how this transaction is to be structured. The traditional marriage model exchanges security of paternity plus household chores and child rearing for a wholsesale package of protection and provision. Social changes of the past couple of decades have lead to most women now getting most of that for free, via the state taxing (mostly male) productive labour.

So now we have two battlefields: one is to extract more favours for women as a class (favourable hiring conditions, female-exclusive professional perks, female quotas, all kinds of handouts) in exchange for... women existing. And the second is an inter-sex fight: should attractive women be allowed to collect additional favours from men via trading (the promise of) sex away? Isn't that mean to the women who can't or won't do that? And doesn't that lower the exchange rate of sex? This is what it is mostly about, all the window dressing about this being all about the big ol' mean patriarchy is a distraction.

It’s interesting how even in in this comment you buy utterly into the ‘women as a class’ Marxian conception of “gender conflict”.

Given that this is how the conflict is presented and fought and how its spoils are distributed, it rather becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What makes it different from other class conflicts though is that there is absolutely no class solidarity on the other side. Men see other men as friends or rivals, not as brothers-in-arms in the sex wars.

For women it's:

Women see other women as friends or rivals, AND as sisters-in-arms in the sex wars.

Yes, but as Aristotle reminds us, unequal treatment of unequal things can be called for. Women stand to lose much more from sex than men and are hence much choosier. Being chosen for sex by a woman translates to "you are so attractive that the risk of carrying your offspring is a price I am either willing to pay or actively seek". Being chosen for sex by a man just means you are above a certain fuckability threshold.

This differential means that women have always been able to garner favours in exchange for sex.

And this dynamic of women being able to garner favours in exchange for sex is what leads to the generalised condemnation of promiscuity in women. Contrary to basically all established belief, it is women and not men who stand to gain from the repression of female sexuality. The fact is that restricting women's willingness to provide men with premarital or extramarital sex through several methods serves women's interests in an important way. It restricts men's ability to access sex, and since the supply has been restricted this means women can push the price of sex up to incredible levels (demanding long-term commitment through marriage, transfers of wealth and resources, and so on). The more they restrict their sexuality, the more they can relitigate sex relations in their favour. Even when she is already in a partnership the widespread suppression of female sexuality can benefit her by indirectly restricting her mate's sexuality - it prevents her partner from simply going out and finding another woman (an especially salient risk once she is old and her mate value has declined). So the promiscuous woman is scorned, not primarily by men, but by other women. It is a female sex cartel, a union enforced for the interests of the group as a whole. Here is a blog post containing plenty of evidence in favour of this view.

As a case study that allows us a glimpse into a very extreme version of this dynamic, we can look at the phenomenon of FGM, responsibility for which often erroneously gets shifted onto men. The fact is, the practice is most zealously supported by women, and the female peer group teases girls who have not had the operation. There are studies of men in these countries which do not indicate that they prefer women with the operation (so this can't be argued to be a reflection of their preferences), rather, they actually prize women without the operation because they enjoy sex more. Link. Fieldwork in villages that at the time were newly beginning to adopt FGM as a practice shows that the impetus for the practice comes from the girls themselves. The girls were going out to other villages and getting excisors to cut them regardless of the fact that their parents and the tribal chiefs hated the practice and strongly condemned them for doing so, and over time it became culturally entrenched. Link 2.

All this seems congenial to the theory that the cause of female genital cutting and its subsequent spread likely comes from females themselves, with male acceptance and support for the practice (and their consequent attitudes surrounding it) merely being secondary to and following from widespread female uptake of and support for the practice. Really it's very clear to me that the feminist viewpoint of "patriarchal oppression" is just utterly misleading, and I'm a bit dismayed (though not surprised) that people still give it the time of day.

I don't have too much to say here because I don't have too many opinions on how society should look on this issue, but I will note that I always find it pretty funny how people on both ends of an issue (like sex-positives and sex-negatives) will often frame their preferences in terms of how it would benefit women, without too much concern for what that would do to men. On the other hand, a benefit to men is generally framed as negative and generally contextualised with how it would hurt women. It's based on a foundational idea that women are the appropriate beneficiaries of social norms, so rigging the system in women's favour is viewed as legitimate, whereas doing so for men (or even just relaxing women's attempts at rigging things to benefit themselves, like their attempts at artificial price-fixing in the sexual marketplace) is bad.

EDIT: clarity

So the promiscuous woman is scorned, not primarily by men, but by other women.

This always made sense to me and seemed to match what I encountered and saw in the world. That is, until gen-z men started to become visible to me on the internet about 5 years ago, who seemed to be the ones lashing out at women with shaming language about 'thots' and 'thirst-traps' (any women publicly using their good looks on youtube/twitch/etc). By my priors, I would have expected men to be quite fine with women dominating instagram/streaming/asmr/whatever, while some women would be trying to enforce against the defectors with various levels of slut-shaming. And by my reading, the young men aren't simply playing catch-up with new norms and trying to signal their new virtues -- it's more like: "damn you for tempting me to donate my hard earned money!" Am I misreading this as a phenomenon?

I'm pretty certain that this is a selected very online group you're looking at, because the loudest voices on the internet will tend to be people who are not representative of the general population. A huge portion of terminally online people will likely be lonely men who are suffering from lack of sex and companionship and relationships (which I think is something that's very important to people), and who will be frustrated that they can only obtain any semblance of these things through a paywall. They likely see women starting accounts, getting huge amounts of attention from men around the world, and they compare and contrast that with their own situation where they get so little attention that they're tempted to pay for a simulacrum of attention and desire. I can imagine it feels miserable, and it's hard for me not to be at least a little bit sympathetic.

In other words, I think there is a massive difference between the lashing out at Twitch thots you're describing and actually wanting to restrict female sexual behaviour. The lashing out is not because they think women make themselves too sexually accessible and want to restrict their activity, it's precisely because of the opposite reason: because women are not accessible to them. Furthermore, I doubt this attitude can be extrapolated to the general male population out there for the aforementioned reasons, and would caution against any hasty generalisations.

I disagree with what I think the thrust of your post is, namely that social pressures are artificially "restricting" or "repressing" female sexuality. I think it's pretty much entirely biological.

I would hazard to guess that in an imaginary society where female sexuality was completely unfettered and unstigmatized...that female humans would still want sex less than male humans, and would still be choosier in their partners than males. In every mammalian species this dynamic exists, especially for placental mammals - because the investment necessary during pregnancy is so high. Female humans have particularly invasive placentas, very risky pregnancy and birth because of head size, and particularly helpless young that demand an extreme amount of care relative to other mammalian young (even other great apes). It is not surprising, therefore, that female humans have been selected to be discerning rather than horny.

Fieldwork in villages that at the time were newly beginning to adopt FGM as a practice shows that the impetus for the practice comes from the girls themselves.

Forgive me, but I've looked at your links and read your comment multiple times. Do we actually know why girls would go seek out surgery themselves, seemingly believing that it will benefit them individually? It seems that it would be something to be imposed on the young, not something the young volunteer for. Thank you.

Because adolescent girls are extremely susceptible to social pressure?

Incidentally, the west currently has a lot of adolescent girls seeking double mastectomies under the mistaken impression that it will benefit them.

It certainly is bizarre, but we can theorise on the reasons why. In both villages covered in the article, male desires certainly do not seem to have driven it. In Myabe, the prevailing view at the time of adoption was that men prefer uncut women as sex partners. Similarly, in Bakum, where the practice was adopted at an earlier date, whether a girl was cut or not had little effect on her ability to marry, and that only changed once the practice was already entrenched. Parents and authority figures do not seem to have been the driving force, either, in fact parents and chiefs were extremely strongly opposed to the practice and its spread. In Bakum, their acceptance and participation in the cutting ceremonies only happened after it was already common. So the pressures leading to its emergence have to come from somewhere else.

Some evidence in the article seems to suggest that other girls do, even at an early stage of adoption of the practice, provide pressure. For example in Myabe, where female genital cutting was a recent phenomenon at the time of the study, "The girls attribute their desire to participate in the cutting ceremonies to pressure from peers and to the spectacle of the coming-out ceremony that follows the period of healing. The event draws a great deal of attention in the village." Although there are few long-term consequences for not getting cut, girls do admit to "teasing friends who opted not to attend" cutting ceremonies, so there is evidence there that seems to suggest that the girls were experiencing some level of soft social pressure from other girls who did have the operation. Similarly, in Bakum, some of the first girls in the village to be cut were taunted by their friends "on the other side of the river" and enticed by them into participating.

It makes sense to me that it would be primarily the female peer group promoting it, and not parents or authorities or some shadowy patriarchal cabal. As mentioned earlier the female peer group at large benefits from restricting female willingness to provide sex and girls would therefore be concerned with getting those in their peer group to adhere to a set of sexuality restrictions. So I think this looks like the organic bottom-up emergence of the "female sex cartel" I mentioned earlier.


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