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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29375 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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I don’t think it’s cynicism as a belief as much as a genetic type we’re talking about. Subclinical sociopathy is the most important thing our culture selects for after intelligence. The cynics in question are acting out their genes and not a philosophical belief they cultivated, because our schools and culture do not really teach cynicism, but teach that fairness and equality and goodness and philanthropy and so forth are objective values.

For every choice in youth which influences the chance of mainstream successful, the sociopath has the edge over the healthy-minded individual. Has a reading in English class triggered an intrinsic interest in the author and a desire to read more? You’ve clogged your mind and schedule with a distraction, while the sociopath continues to gun the next reading assignment. Did your grandma die and it had a big impact on you because you were close to her? Again you have worse odds. Are you, as a normal person, unwilling to a create brazenly false life event? The sociopath beats you on every college essay. Do you make a friendship with someone less fortunate, and in accordance with every moral belief system allocate energy and attention to their wellbeing? This might spell the difference between a B+ or an A. When you had to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no 2 for a music performance, does it take you on an emotional adventure that leaves you stunned the rest of the night? No Stendhal are you, you have a calculus test tomorrow. Do you have religious inclinations which require talking to the Divine or reading virtue-inducing works that don’t leave a measurable result? You’re screwed. Do you feel guilt at the state of the world and does it compel you to learn about it? Your sociopathic competitor has no such compunction.

The sociopath wants power and control and dominance and is insensitive to any emotional distraction or guilt or empathetic concern. A healthy youth ought to be distracted by things outside of school as a natural byproduct of their curiosity, inclinations, and sense of social purpose. There are people like Fields Medalist June Huh who are simply deselected out of the upper echelons of society despite being exactly what we want in our all of our key positions:

Huh applied to about a dozen doctoral programs in the U.S. But because of his undistinguished undergraduate experience, he was rejected by all of them save one. In 2009, he began his studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before transferring to the University of Michigan in 2011 to complete his doctorate.

To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read. He felt an urge to revisit books he’d first encountered when he was younger — including Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and several novels by the German author Hermann Hesse — so that’s what he did. “Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.”

When he was 16 years old and in the middle of his first year in high school (which lasts for three years in South Korea), he decided to drop out to write poetry. He was something of a romantic. “I could literally physically cry after listening to good music,” he said. He wrote about nature and about his own experiences. He planned to complete his masterpiece in the two years before he’d have to attend university. “So that didn’t happen,” he laughed.

That poetic detour has since proved crucial to his mathematical breakthroughs. His artistry, according to his colleagues, is evident in the way he uncovers those just-right objects at the center of his work, and in the way he seeks a deeper significance in everything he does. “Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty,” said Federico Ardila-Mantilla, a mathematician at San Francisco State University and one of Huh’s collaborators. “But I think in his case, it’s really pronounced. And I just really like his taste. He makes beautiful things.”

Mathematicians were also impressed by his demeanor. His talks at conferences were always accessible and concrete; in speaking with him, it was clear that he was thinking both deeply and broadly about the concepts he was working with. “He was ridiculously mature for a graduate student,” said Matthew Baker, a mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology. After Baker met him for the first time, “I was just like, who is this guy?”

According to Mircea Mustaţă, Huh’s adviser at the University of Michigan, he required almost no supervision or guidance. Unlike most graduate students, he already had a program in mind, and ideas about how to pursue it. “He was more like a colleague,” Mustaţă said. “He already had his own way of looking at things.” Many of his collaborators note that he’s incredibly humble and down-to-earth. When he learned he’d won the Fields Medal, “it didn’t really feel that good,” Huh said. “Of course you are happy, but deep down, you’re a little bit worried that they might eventually figure out that you’re not actually that good. I am a reasonably good mathematician, but am I Fields Medal-worthy?”

Obviously there’s a spectrum between a June Huh and a Sam Bankman-Fried, and June Huh is like the comical ideal. But there are probably June Huns of other social/cultural roles that we just have no way of finding and selecting. I mean, in math and programming, you can trivially prove that you have the skills, but this is harder for anything involving political leadership and the humanities.

edit remembered that a good example of this is PirateSoftware. YouTube has endless analyses for anyone unfamiliar. But for those familiar: his lying and scheming made him the top streamer in the world for a while. He used his supreme reputation to attack the pro-consumer initiative Stop Killing Games. He benefitting personally from attacking this initiative because it ingratiated him with big business, and he has no empathetic tie to the common man / consumer. Our political class is awfully like PirateSoftware.

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