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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14409 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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It's yesterday's news at this point, but the recent University of Oklahoma essay controversy has continued to fester in my brain for the sheer incongruence of reactions. In case you haven't heard, Samantha Fulnecky, a junior studying Psychology, received a 0 for submitting an essay whose central argument was essentially a blunt appeal to Biblical inerrancy. While I find this a suspect choice in even most religious studies courses, the assignment tasked her with reviewing a journal article about the effects of social pressures on adolescent gender presentation and identification - hardly something the Bible addresses directly. In response, the graduate student instructor, who is trans, gave her a zero. Fulnecky, in her (apparent) indignance, complained to the local chapter of TPUSA that this is an act of religious discrimination, and sparks flew. And they've kept flying. Fulnecky received an honorary award from the Oklahoma state Congress and has been speaking about her situation on Fox News. The university has sided with Fulnecky, placing the instructor on indefinite administrative leave until...the situation blows over? It's unclear how much "investigation" this really requires, but it is clear that Fulnecky has won the battle.

I am more interested in the war. Conservative scuffles at universities seem dime-a-dozen at this point, which makes it all the more surprising that this one has climbed out of the Twitter pit to receive national attention. For one, the essay is not particularly high-quality. This is not a case where a student submitted a carefully argued theological analysis, but instead appealed to the most straightforward of scriptural arguments and didn't even cite the verses in question! While the resulting grade of 0 seems slightly punitive and I don't doubt it was motivated by some level of personal offense, the professor's response hardly could be considered discriminatory. I've heard some grumblings that the instructor gave this grade specifically because she is trans - so it hurt more, or something - but I think most cis psychology profs these days would have a similar reaction. I think Fulnecky deserved some points, but not many. She lacks one of the most foundational skills a college-level writer needs: adapting your ideas to your audience.

Speculation on Twitter is running wild, suggesting that Fulnecky intentionally submitted a poor essay to gain some conservative street-cred, that her lawyer mother is involved, and plenty of other mental gymnastics. I don't blame the gymnasts - this case has been elevated to levels that are suspiciously unjustified, in my view. The banal reason is that it's easy pickings for conservative commentators who are salivating for any story they can nut-pick to put on the evening news block. But is that really all it takes? Can a religious person do any wrong in the eyes of the New Right? I realize writing this that I sound completely incredulous that the media could blow up a story, but seeing it happen in real-time has been pretty mind boggling. Read the essay and let me know what you think. I don't want to be mistaken for consensus-building here, and I would welcome any and all steelmans for the pro-Fulnecky position. Maybe I've been cut by yet another scissor statement (in this case, essay).

This is further evidence to me that red-tribers have completely abandoned most institutes of higher education. It's no longer a question of "we must reform the universities and stop them from being ideologically possessed!" but "the universities are ideologically possessed and the only way out is avoidance/destruction." It doesn't help when college graduates seem to be fleeing the red tribe like it's got the plague - it's much easier to prop up a controversy when the remaining red tribers lacks the personal experience to vet it properly. All this to say: I think universities are really going to have it rough under this administration. They've already been sued to hell and back. If the red tribe couldn't turn the university system around by playing nice, they're going to do it by force - social, legal, or otherwise.

To properly assess it, we sadly need other essays from the class. Did similar levels of progressive pap get a C+? What did the A essays look like?

Scott Alexander just released another "Much More than You Wanted to Know" article, this time on the Vibecession.

He goes through all of the traditional arguments in his standard exhaustive way: is it housing? no. is it wealth inequality? no. is it wages down? no. is it overall GDP down? maybe, but no.

Ultimately he makes the case that the economy is doing well, and the younger cohort is doing great. Many economic indicators do seem to show that in real terms, they are doing better than ever! Reading this article I was excited to see that he might get to what I consider the real problem, but alas, he concludes in a very lukewarm way with:

Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.

Because of concentration of jobs in high-priced metro areas, effective cost-of-living for people pursuing these jobs has increased even though real cost-of-living (ie for a given good in a given location) hasn’t. This effect is multiplied since it’s concentrated among exactly the sorts of elites most likely to set the tone of the national conversation (eg journalists).

Homeownership has become substantially more expensive since the pandemic (although the increase in rents is much less). This on its own can’t justify the entire vibecession, because most vibecessioneers are renters, and the house price change is relatively recent. But it may discourage people for whom homeownership was a big part of the American dream.

But even if these three factors are really making things worse, so what? Have previous generations never had three factors making things worse? Is our focus on the few things getting worse, instead of all the other things getting better or staying the same, itself downstream of negative media vibes?

I find this hard to believe, but am unable to find the smoking gun that definitively rules it out. I hope this post will serve as a starting point for further investigation: now that we’re all on the same page about which purported explanations don’t work, we can more fruitfully investigate alternatives.

I hope that eventually Scott comes around to the idea that economic indicators are a proxy for community, emotional and spiritual health! Ultimately the average person doesn't really care much about the economy or their wealth, instead they care about how easy their life is. How pleasant their interactions are. What the emotional tone is of the people they interact with the most.

Scott does briefly get into this talking about the 'negative media vibes,' but for some reason he doesn't dig in there more?

My take is that our culture and religious framework have been breaking down at an increasing speed for the last couple centuries, and the last few decades we have accelerated into freefall. It's complete chaos out there, the Meaning Crisis meaning that young people have zero clue what to do with their lives, no consistent role models to follow, and as we discussed in a post below, they basically are told that they're doing great even if by objective standards they are fucking things up terribly.

The younger cohort has lost connection to any greater framework of values that teaches them how to actually live in a positive and healthy way. Instead, they are awash in technological substitutes for intimacy, cheap hedonistic advertising, and an increasing propensity to fall back to vicious, tribal infighting based on characteristics like race, gender (or lack thereof), or economic status.

Overall the vibes are bleak not because of any material wealth issues, but because the spirit of the West is deeply, deeply sick.

Thanks for writing this up, I have been wanting to write something very similar to this all day, but I have not had the chance.

My favorite comment from the SSC sub:

This was less than I wanted to know.

But my favorite substantive comment, from the Substack:

Something that gets hidden in the aggregate is that consumer sentiment among democrats is much higher than among republicans from 2021 until 2025, and then they switch. This seems relevant.

https://en.macromicro.me/charts/110438/us-michigan-consumer-sentiment-index-within-political-party

This feeds into the "media" argument, too, given that news and entertainment media are both aligned with the blue tribe. And this doesn't even just have to be a purely tribalistic thing; if you're an illegal immigrant from Mexico, there are probably very obvious reasons for you to have felt more optimistic about the state of things in 2022 than you do in 2025 (namely, in 2022 you probably weren't too worried about ICE raids, and in 2025 you probably are more worried about ICE raids, even if in absolute terms your risk hasn't actually changed much).

I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?" I feel like he probably has a better grasp of the relevant data than I do, but that may also be why he didn't hit this angle? It would surely be outside the Overton window to suggest that the "vibecession" is just the natural result of decades of broadly unchecked immigration from low-trust societies, but to me that seems like the most obvious hypothesis. Economic "Brazilification" (as explained by Faceh and discussed by me) would also, presumably, underwrite "vibe" Brazilification. Whether the gaps between rich and poor actually widen, or are merely seen to widen, is irrelevant to the vibe. Whether politics is genuinely polarized, or only seems polarized: again, the vibe is the same. Whether public infrastructure really is garbage, or only seems to be garbage--and so on. Importing the attitudes of developing nations transforms those attitudes into a self-fulfilling prophecy concerning the state of things.

I think it doesn't help that the industries dominated by Democrats have far worse career prognoses as the American economy is consumed more and more by financial services and information technology. I recently read a book called What Design Can't Do, wherein the author, a graphic designer, basically says the wheels have completely fallen off the graphic design profession with the proliferation of easy design tools and AI and shares polls to show that morale has absolutely cratered. I'd imagine the same is true for many filmmakers, visual artists, authors, and even teachers. I'm speculating a bit, but many Democrat-majority careers have low wage ceilings, but are compensated instead with social prestige, artistry, and feelings of ownership. Economic metrics may be up, but the well of status that many careers once offered seems to be running dry, particularly for Democrats. The partisan media effect is definitely paying a role in the discrepancy, but I think there is genuine reason to believe Democrats will fare much worse, at least in social capital, after the economic transformations currently looming overhead.

For Scott in particular, and probably the majority of people here, the by-party consumer sentiment explains a lot. Republican consumer sentiment is back up to post-COVID pre-Biden levels. Democratic consumer sentiment is not only much lower than Republican (presumably because Trump) but lower than post-COVID pre-Biden levels And Scott pretty much has contact only with Democrats, so he's getting a skewed view of sentiment.

"is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"

Maybe. But, the demographics of America have been stable through the last 10 years. Large transitions take generations. The viibecession was sudden 2020s phenomenon.

My hypothesis is that covid killed local offline life and America moved to the internet enmasse. Media was already in a negativity spiral, but now it affected the entire country rather than just the terminally online.

It amped up changes that were already in motion. Local politics became national politics, national politics because global politics. Freed from the shackles of institutional decorum, Tiktok influencers introduced a new level of hysteria.

Overall vibes = True vibes * social media negativity factor * % people engaging in social media

All 3 got worse after covid.

I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"

This doesn't explain why there's a step change in consumer sentiment after 2020. A society doesn't become low trust overnight, but the vibes basically shifted overnight (and remain low despite the end of covid). In fact, social trust has been declining since the seventies, but has been on the upswing for the past ten years. That's fatal to the social trust theory of the vibecession without stooping to something like "I know the trust measures are bogus because I disagree".

That fact alone is enough, in my view, to discount explanations founded on secular trends in community, etc that have been going on for sixty years or more. Perhaps only high mortgage rates and a frozen housing market remain as plausible explanations of "wtf happened in 2020".

wtf happened in 2020 is COVID happened in 2020?? I'm confused why you think that isn't a sufficient explanation.

Depending on who you ask, half the country decided the other half wanted them dead rather than doing simple common sense things, and the other half thought the first half wanted them unemployed or in camps. I could write paragraphs more on this but I feel like that simple fact explains a lot.

I admit this could be my bubble but nobody I know still cares about covid, or what people did during covid, despite me knowing several people who were very covid paranoid.

I think it's not that COVID itself is still an issue, but that it carved paths in the sand that still have relevance today. Anecdotally, I don't know a single person who was partisan during COVID who didn't get much more partisan. Those changes in attitude didn't disappear once mask mandates were lifted.

A society doesn't become low trust overnight, but the vibes basically shifted overnight (and remain low despite the end of covid).

Sure, but preference cascades from the long term deterioration of trust can happen overnight, especially if there's a big inciting incident like COVID to trigger the cascade.

Very much cosign all of what you're saying here. The breakdown of societal trust and good will towards one another is another way to say that we are spiritually sick, to my mind.

The numbers are heavily manipulated. Very few people, especially in industry, actually look at them. I occasionally talk about accounting and metrics, e.g. imputed rent where the rental value of assets are included in economic growth without actually being measured - accounting for all of these, yearly growth numbers can be greatly reduced. Quality adjustments and awkward exclusions make CPI almost irrelevant - not counting housing/rent at all (while it's imputed to 10% of GDP). Healthcare and insurance are covered by CPI, but in a very distorted way (while this is 20-25% of total GDP... they only include out of pocket expenses, while employer-paid premiums skyrocket ... and are actual compensation, another 1-20% everyone forcibly allocates to the cartel):

In different periods, the proportions of spending vary greatly, e.g. 40% of income on food, 10% on housing, 20% on clothing etc. to 50% housing, 15% food, 20% mandatory car... Inflation calculations do not account for this, but measure the overall basket's change. My company buys people's personal budget histories to see what actual costs and spending habits look like. From my Christian perspective, consumption patterns have grown to 30% sin. From my growth-is-good perspective, people are using less molecules. When it costs millions of dollars to change an electrical pole because of increased bureaucracy, there's no increase in utility but everyone in the community is saddled with more debt.

At the core, utility is about ranking choices, preferences. Unfortunately, our society has shown preference for sin and our system enables wealth-destroying consumption and work-breaking with seductive choices, gambling, easy debt, taxation increases etc.

Healthcare and insurance are covered by CPI, but in a very distorted way (while this is 20-25% of total GDP... they only include out of pocket expenses, while employer-paid premiums skyrocket ... and are actual compensation, another 1-20% everyone forcibly allocates to the cartel):

PCE inflation includes these, and the trends aren't different. CPI actually tends to be higher when inflation spikes.

The entire idea of "disposable" income is, to me, the biggest mismatch between Boomers and today. We all agree on the "necessary" expenditures; housing, food, basic clothing, and utilities. Then, we have the modern additions to utilities; internet and cell service. It is not even possible for me to even search for a job if I don't have one or both of these things. Yes, yes, economists will tell you that the relative value or marginal utility or whatever of a cell phone is so much better than land line service in the 1970s. But I'm paying for it because I have to.

Then, however, we have things like clothing, consumer electronics, restaurants, and "cheap" entertainment (subscriptions). These seem basic but stack up and stack up in recursive ways (like I mentioned above) that aren't captured in traditional methods of inflation. Are these truly optional goods that I am choosing to spend on?

"Well sorry, snowflake" Bruno the Boomer says, "Maybe in stead of watching your TikyToks and Netflixes, you should just read a book!"

And Bruno the Boomer is right in that specific circumstance. These are, purely speaking, "optional" purchases. But it leads to much trickier problem: What am I supposed to do with my time if the jump between "basic" living and comfortable spending is so high? Incentives matter. You can find many interesting graphs out there that show how, in some cities in the US and many countries in Europe, there exist harsh tax cliffs that _DIS_incentivize making more money. If I lose $10,000 in benefits after increasing my income by less than $10,000, I've given myself a pay cut by earning more (yes that sentence is valid).

This same logic applies to marginal consumption and disposable income. If I can pay for all of my basic necessities, but leveling up to dinner out once or twice a week, guilt free streaming service subscriptions, a new-ish but not top of the line car, and a couple home goods (big couch, whatever) necessitates another $15,000k in annual income (on which I will be taxed substantially) .... then why even bother? Cheap beer, free or pirated porn movies and YouTube clips can sustain my entertainment needs and living in a shitty apartment is .... what all of my friends do. People are being asked not to take the next step on a steep trail, but to leap across a valley of income for ... marginal benefit.

And I think this is the common cause behind things like quiet quitting, the massive rise in the permanently non-working (disabled and NEETs etc.), inceldom, and the various flavors of nomadic forever-festival going weirdos, permanent expats, and semi-grifter YouTubers. It's interesting that I posted a top level comment on Shagbark earlier this week. Being a semi-bum in 2025 does seem to have roughly the same life satisfaction of every group up to about the top 20% income. And this is because we've eliminated real poverty -- not having enough to eat, being so unstable in housing that death from exposure might actually be on the menu.

Was consumerism really so different in years past? YesChad.jpeg. People forget that real, true poverty did exist, at least in pockets of the US, well into the 1970s. In extremely infrastructure-isolated places, it persisted even longer. After WW2, the consumer economy actually functioned as a compounding system for people to get out of poverty. Buying an electric oven meant a household was saving meaningful time and effort. The ever increasing reliability of cars (while maintaining price relative to inflation) meant people could get to and from work with high confidence - and, therefore, earn more. A television meant actual awareness of the outside world and a source of information that could lead to better decision making. A telephone allowed for the creation and sustainment of social relationships and communities outside of face to face interaction, which also meant the ability to generate more business relationships (i.e. find new jobs, find local customers etc.).

Today, my new oven has fun little chimes when it pre-heats. It's also more energy efficient (so I am told). New trucks are less reliable because of fuel emission fuckery and mostly cost more because the seats are heated and my phone connects to the radio for some fucking reason. My TV has a resolution I can't comprehend, with unlimited semi-AI slop available for consumption. It stays off unless sports are on. And my telephone, which lives in my pocket, mostly harasses me with beeps and dings to remind me to interact with apps so that my data can be sold to hedge funds.

Consumerism, today, has inverted its relationship with consumers. Before, consumer level products really did make your life better. Today, consumer products are like carnival rides; it's fun for a while and only costs a few dollars. It doesn't improve my life.

The Vibecession, to me, is a reaction to some harsh nonlinearities that have developed over the past 40 years. Before, you might never get into the upper class, but you could see your life improve just a bit almost every year. Now, we're asking kids exiting college (which didn't teach them anything and saddled them with debt) to live like a monk for 10 - 15 years so that, on the other side, they can move into a home they still can't afford. In the interim, they can enjoy consumer products that help dull this drudgery, but don't act as compounders. Who in the hell would take this deal?

my phone connects to the radio for some fucking reason

I use this feature every day and love it.

How much, and I'm requesting you express it quantitatively, more happy does this make you in terms of whole of life satisfaction than an ipod with an aux cord, or a collection of CDs?

Now, we're asking kids exiting college (which didn't teach them anything and saddled them with debt) to live like a monk for 10 - 15 years so that, on the other side, they can move into a home they still can't afford. In the interim, they can enjoy consumer products that help dull this drudgery, but don't act as compounders. Who in the hell would take this deal?

Generation X. It was the only one on offer. Well except we didn't have the consumer products.

I think you're right.

This sets up a whole other piece about how they were hoodwinked into it. Probably something about the false promises being hard to see before 2008, as well as a lot more social pressure from Boomers to conform.

Oh, another thing that adds to bad vibes: the proliferation of cash discounts again. This happened during the big post-COVID inflation, but it's remained. Cash is a pain in the butt, but since 4% is 4%, eschewing the cash discount feels like throwing away money, and dealing with cash to get that little bit of money makes me feel poorer.

Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same),

So he isn't taking into account the Indians (here, but more obviously in Call Centers overseas), the Latin Americans (and their growing remitance money to their countries of origin) and the Chinese (trained in american schools and and employed in chinese companies).

Your grandfather had to be the best of his city, your father the best of the state and you, you have to be the best in the world.

you, you have to be the best in the world.

Not actually as hard as it sounds, given patio11's "narrowing your professional Venn-diagram" thing -- it's hard to be the best software dev in the world, but "best available English speaking dev with deep domain expertise in X and track record of Y" is eminently acheivable.

what is the niche in which you are the best in the world?

Your grandfather had to be the best of his city, your father the best of the state and you, you have to be the best in the world.

Yeah I think this is a huge part of it, having to compete with people from all over the world. He does talk about the instability of things at some point, but quickly brushes over it. That your grandfather could have a good life working 30 years at one company, now people have to hop from job to job to get a similar level of wealth.

I'll offer my pet theory (if you can call it that) as an explanation.

For decades the social life of Western nations was broadly based on four basic assumptions.

#1 - If you bust your ass, study hard, live a dull and normie life and finish college, you'll find a job in the field you majored in reasonably fast

#2 - Credit is reasonably cheap; even if your earnings are crap and you have no accumulated wealth, you'll still be able to get a house/flat and a car

#3 - There's pretty much no inflation; even if your earnings are sort of crap and you're working a crummy dead-end job, at least your money isn't depreciating and you can plan and buy accordingly

#4 - Consumer goods will become cheaper and cheaper as globalization spreads and the entire world becomes ever more interconnected and tariffs gradually disappear; maybe you're not earning much but the electronics and whatnot that you want are reasonably cheap

Number 1 and 2 crumbled into dust after 2008. Number 3 and 4 did so as a result of COVID restrictions and the Ukrainian War. Now the precariat of the West is staring into the abyss bereft of any illusions, with the threat of a new great war on the horizon to boot.

But two big factors here seem to describe only a portion of the economy for a portion period of time. College? It was only since the mid teens that the US got over 1/3rd college degree attainment. Now it's pushing toward 40%, but college as a social norm is relatively new. Truly cheap credit is a post-2008 phenomena; a lot of the politics of the 90s were about how the cost of credit was quite high and was a push behind the Clinton deficit reduction - the average mortgage interest rate was in the 8s as recent as 2000, hanging out in the 5s and 6s during the 2000s before 08. Inflation and rapidly improving consumer goods I will definitely grant have been good since the early 90s, but half of this western social life package being suggested is really about the post-Great Recession period, so I'm not really convinced this is the core of economic sentiment for people in their 40s and 50s.

In the last century there were fairly high paying manufacturing jobs that could give you a middle class lifestyle. So in the United States from about WWII to 2008, you could be middle class if you worked hard. The route gradually changed but the rule mostly held.

How does $26.50 an hour in 2024 dollars sound? And that was after the first big drop in manufacturing employment (circa 2000)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1OtQZ

I used to post stuff like Scott's article before COVID, because from the viewpoint of an Xer who lived through the late 70s and early 80s, redditors complaining about how great things were for the Boomers were really annoying. It was true then, I think. But it's not true now. Before COVID, house prices were rising but more slowly and interest rates were crazy low. Now interest rates are higher and house prices even higher. Unemployment was falling then, it's rising now. Real wages had been rising for a long time then, they fell precipitously and are rising slightly more slowly now and are still below trend. And that's with higher unemployment, which typically makes wages look higher (because the unemployed aren't factored in and usually unemployment eats at the bottom of the market).

i do think there's some manipulation going on too -- both for financial reasons (the big uptick in "AI is a bubble" stories shortly before NVidia reported earnings seemed quite suspicious to me), and political reasons (Democrats want sentiment to be bad). I said earlier I think a good test is going to be holiday spending. So far, it looks better than sentiment, but only modestly so.

Spirit? Meaning? These have been dead longer than I've been alive. They're not what's causing bad vibes.

Spirit? Meaning? These have been dead longer than I've been alive. They're not what's causing bad vibes.

X to doubt. They have been dead for the intellectual class for a long time, the last few decades is when the same nihilistic worldview has spread to the masses.

Reading the article, I can't help but feel that Scott is doing that thing he does where he's very credulous of the official stats when it suits the article he wants to write.

Back in 2020 - 2023ish, when prices on everything were taking off like bottle rockets, the official inflation rate was fairly flat. Hell, various outlets even changed the definition of "recession" so we didn't have to admit to being in one. I'm not sure if those political moves ever got cleaned up in the data.

He gives lip service to that idea when discussing Noah Smith, but goes right back to it when talking about the CPI again.

Personally, my grocery bill has doubled in the last ten years. My house has more than doubled in value - I'm fairly well off, and I couldn't afford to live in my neighborhood now. A new model of the same car I'm driving (5 years old) would cost $20,000 more. My employment situation feels more precarious than ever, and the horror stories I hear from acquaintances who have been laid off recently make me wonder if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed. Even the clothes I buy are lower quality and fall apart in ways that they didn't less than a decade ago. Every retail center in my region has so many closed up shops that it looks like a mouth with missing teeth.

I'm sure Scott could disregard all this by saying that I'm making more money than I used to be, but if this is a healthy economy, maybe we should reevaluate what healthy looks like.

Personally, my grocery bill has doubled in the last ten years. My house has more than doubled in value - I'm fairly well off, and I couldn't afford to live in my neighborhood now. A new model of the same car I'm driving (5 years old) would cost $20,000 more

My understanding is that a lot of economic inflation models depend on "hedonic regression" adjustments for these prices. So they argue like, "sure the prices in nominal dollars are up. But now your groceries include Flamin' Hot Doritos instead of boring old potato chips, the new car has Automatic Lane Stabilization to keep you safe, and your neighborhood is much safer now that all the people there have gotten older."

if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed

You could of course sell your assets, move to Asia or South America and live well...

You could of course sell your assets, move to Asia or South America and live well...

You can do that if you're a certain kind of person, who can be comfortable living in a foreign culture. Most people aren't; even most expatriates aren't, which is why there are expatriate communities.

Personally, my grocery bill has doubled in the last ten years. My house has more than doubled in value - I'm fairly well off, and I couldn't afford to live in my neighborhood now. A new model of the same car I'm driving (5 years old) would cost $20,000 more. My employment situation feels more precarious than ever, and the horror stories I hear from acquaintances who have been laid off recently make me wonder if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed. Even the clothes I buy are lower quality and fall apart in ways that they didn't less than a decade ago. Every retail center in my region has so many closed up shops that it looks like a mouth with missing teeth.

It's this part. When I can see how my purchasing power has fallen in the past decade, or how it's gone off a cliff compared to what my parents had in 2000, I don't see much merit in arguments that life is great because Big Line Go Up and phones/weed/gambling/porn.

Back in 2020 - 2023ish, when prices on everything were taking off like bottle rockets, the official inflation rate was fairly flat.

No, it was not. It hit its highest value since the 1980s recession, 9.1%. During the GFC it hit 5.3%, in 1990 it hit 6.4%; inflation was really high, but it showed in the numbers.

Where did you find 9.1%? Looking at Fred, I didn't see it as reported above seven.

I got it from Investopedia, but the FRED data agrees. One correction: the GFC is at 5.6% and 1990 at 6.3%

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1OtOP

Thanks. On revisiting this, I realize that I am retarded and was looking at the wrong graph.

Yes, it's absolutely this. Inflation numbers are the main one, but I don't know how you can watch, for example, the job numbers be revised in the same direction every time and then go take the revisions as truth too, instead of the most plausible lie.

For inflation, we should be able to see it from M2 alone.

Job numbers don't get revised in the same direction every time.

https://infogram.com/2023-to-2025-and-differences-1h7v4pdkqr1084k

This is missing the recent downard adjustment of 900k, but the trend is obvious - numbers are frequently adjusted up as well. In November 2021 job numbers were adjusted upwards by nearly half a million.

I agree that the Meaning Crisis is real for many young people, but that doesn't explain the Vibecession. Young people aren't complaining about being awash in material wealth with no direction in their lives, they're complaining that the economy is doing poorly and getting worse, that they have no opportunity to advance, that they earn less money than their parents and grand-parents, that housing has unaffordable while boomers could get a house on a single blue collar salary, etc., despite every single official statistic contradicting them.

housing has unaffordable while boomers could get a house on a single blue collar salary, etc., despite every single official statistic contradicting them.

It was the generation before the boomers who really had cheap houses. Fun fact: the 1940s jump from 75 to 110 on the inflation-adjusted Case-Shiller index was called a "housing shortage", and people back then expected to see prices eventually brought down again, in a decade or two tops, not further doubled.

To be fair, houses have also skyrocketed in average size (50% IIRC) and quality (part of that 1940s price increase was that luxuries like "indoor plumbing" were becoming universal) since that time. We can also naturally afford to spend more of our income on houses than we could during the Great Depression or WW2, and we tend to still have more disposable income left over.

I'd still cut the kids some slack on this one. We're still (hopefully!) at a housing price peak today, despite mortgage rates more than doubling a few years ago. Double the cost of their houses, then double the cost of borrowing the cost of their houses, and pretty soon we're talking about serious money!

The mortgage-cost chart in Scott's article shows we've almost reached the early 1980s peak of unaffordability. As in the 1940s, I do expect this to go down again, but for a different reason; back then we were building and thus increasing supply, but in the next decade or two, the boomers will be dying and thus reducing demand. That's a pretty long time though. It would be better if we could build but decades of anti-growth, anti-sprawl propaganda, along with (and partially causing) the re-centralization of employment in cities, has worked its magic.

The economy is basically the stand-in for God for many people in modern consumerist America. I'm saying that they don't know what they're talking about, and that they would be happy with even less material wealth if they were spiritually sound.

If you read the article, Scott tears all the economic arguments to pieces. Even housing is not really THAT expensive, and you can own a house on less than $100k combined income in a decent area if you don't blow your money and spend wisely. I don't buy the economic arguments at all.

"Even housing is not really THAT expensive, and you can own a house on less than $100k combined income in a decent area if you don't blow your money and spend wisely."

Absolutely not, not even close. I don't even live in a particularly expensive area - Hampton Roads - and 100k combined would be far beyond my ability to afford. Where are you people pulling these numbers from? No, Scott did not "tear the economic arguments to shreds;" he, like you, are just naively accepting blatantly fraudulent employment and inflation numbers as gospel truth, and demanding I believe you and not my empty bank account.

The other thing is that people aren't comparing like for like. NYC in the 1960s was a much smaller city than NYC today. If you look at similar sized cities as NYC was in the 60s today the pricing of housing in a similar area in real terms is basically the same as it was in NYC in the 60s.

EDIT: This is wrong.

The second largest city in the US, by population, is Los Angeles, at 3.9 million to NYCs 8.5 million. NYC's population in the 1960s was about 7.8 million, considerably larger than Los Angeles today. There are no US cities of similar size to New York City in the 1960s today, so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check.

so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check

Fair enough, I remember reading something like this somewhere on the internet a few years ago and so brought it up. I fully accept that I didn't even bother to check, and yes, I should have done that.

Let nobody say that I don't admit to making bad points when I actually make bad points.

Props, man.

Eh, technically true, but Manhattan in particular was more populous and much more dense in the first half of the 20th century. Not that anyone really wants to go back to that level of housing quality, though.

My father bought a property at CAD $200k in 2000 (approximately $375k today at 2.5% annualized inflation) when he was my age. The property today is worth $2500k today, in actual numbers. It was a 5 bed 2 bath with an unfinished basement, and a backyard - so a very good place to raise a family of 5.

I bought a condo in a cheaper city this year for $500k. It is a 2 bed 2 bath with about 800sq feet of space, and I only got it because recent Airbnb regulations made it need to be sold in a hurry. It has no yard, and is in a much worse neighborhood than my father purchased.

The median private sector wage in Canada in 2000 was approximately $45k a year (approximately $83k a year today at 2.5% annualized inflation). The median private sector wage in Canada in 2025 is approximately $69k a year.

It's not a vibe-session. That's just what the government and economists claim so we don't mount their heads on pikes as a warning to others.

You're talking about Canada, not the US, which has had much stronger economic growth compared to nearly every other developed country, and yet the economic vibes don't reflect that.

To be fair, I think the Canadian economy is in a much different place than the United States. Off the top of my head you guys are dealing with much stronger demographic and labor issues, not to mention absolute housing insanity. At least in the U.S., I can still feel some semblence of economic growth even if much of it comes from tenuous/unsatisfying/rent-seeking pursuits and the areas that were hollowed out over the past 30 years (i.e. Rust Belt) seem to have at least stabilized in their decline. It feels much more like stagnation than outright collapse. The Canadian situation appears to be inching toward the latter.

I bought a condo in a cheaper city this year for $500k. It is a 2 bed 2 bath with about 800sq feet of space

As an non Canadian, what the fuck?

This probably deserves a bit of explanation.

So an important thing to note is that Canada is a resource-intensive economy that refuses to actually exploit our resources; we're kind of dumb that way.

Way back (around 20+ years ago), Canada created a program called the "Temporary Foreign Workers" program, which was intended for seasonal agricultural workers. The thought was that our farmers could not necessarily make enough profit to bother growing their own fruit if they had to deal with pesky things like living wages and human rights, so Canada created a program that was designed for temporary people to show up, do some work, get paid better than they would be back in whatever country they hailed from, but way worse than a Canadian would be in the same position.

Our prime minister twice ago, Harper, decided to expand this program - basically, he upped the number of entries by a fairly large portion (I think it went from about 30000 a year to 60000, but these numbers are off the top of my head). We also started really getting into what would eventually become woke around this point, which culminated in electing a Trudeau in 2015.

A very important thing to note is that Trudeau, for us, is kind of like a Bush or a Kennedy for you Americans - he has a trust fund that is around 0.1% of the size of our entire GDP. The first Trudeau, Pierre, was a very controversial Prime Minister, as he spent like a drunken sailor and invoked the War Measures act after some Quebecois separatists abducted and murdered a MP.

Not wanting to be outdone by his father, Justin Trudeau immediately began spending money at an absolutely unprecedented rate; the amount of debt generated by every other Prime Minister, put together, is less than the amount of debt he generated over his term. He also appointed a large amount of judges who have been pushing a rather expansive view of human rights; namely, that everyone but Canadians are entitled to them. Combined, we ended up in a situation where Trudeau absolutely nuked our economy.

Rather than let the country fall into a recession, Trudeau came up with the bright idea of simply importing enough new voters potential generators of corporate value that the number would still go up. Roughly 20% of the population of the country arrived within the last 5 years. The judges, meanwhile, decided that if the imported workers were non-Canadian, obviously they deserved a full pathway to citizenship - and that even if a person came in as a student then declared himself a refugee when the student visa expired, he still needed to be given a lengthy chance to protest the issue.

Now, one problem with going from a country of 37.5 million to 43 million over such a short timeframe is that houses can physically not be built that fast; the immigrants we pulled in tend to be happier living 10 to a bedroom (not even exaggerating - look up Brampton some time), so a lot of old stock Canadians realized that they could make bank by leveraging their existing property into buying more, then renting it out for exorbitant prices. As a result, our housing costs went up by around 100% over the course of a decade, then did the same again over the next decade. When I graduated university, my friend bought a condo for $300k. That condo is now worth around $750k.

It's hilarious you're shocked by this because (I'm also Canadian) the fact there even exists a <$500k condo period, let alone a 2bed, in 2025 is absolutely insane to me

#JustTorontoThings

I have a bit more sympathy for Canadians given that their country isn't dotted coast-to-coast with small cities and large towns. If you can't affort Toronto or Vancouver, where do you go? Calgary?

That's positively cheap for even the outskirts of London or even 2nd tier UK cities, remember the figure is CAD.

Sometimes I forget just how urban this site skews. I live in an "expensive" area for my region. My house is a basic, 1300 sq ft, 1950s cape cod on a quarter acre, and it would probably sell for $300k - $350k. If you were willing to drive 20 minutes, that much money would buy you 50% more square footage.

My "starter home" was a 500 sq ft condo, 1br, in a sketchy area, that ran $680k a decade ago. Sigh, urbanity.

In my neighborhood -- a middling NYC suburb -- such a Cape would be half a million. And have taxes to knock your socks off.

The recent React code execution bug seems expose the current shallow reasoning behaviour of LLMs. So the react framework has had a serious security issue recently involving serialisation which apparently can cause arbitrary code execution. Some people have tried to generate exploits based on the patch using LLMs but this has failed. For example: https://github.com/ejpir/CVE-2025-55182-research/blob/main/TECHNICAL-ANALYSIS.md which assumes that the server would whitelist very unsafe modules for remote access (https://react2shell.com/). Of course the criticism of the LLM in the situation should be taken with a grain of salt because whoever is driving the LLM seems to have no idea what they are doing. It might be possible that someone who knows what they are doing is able to drive the LLM to a solution, but then question is how useful is the LLM. One advantage of the LLM in this situation is it allows someone with very little context of React and their bizzaro RPC protocols to quickly generate valid payloads that would generate weird behaviour and this could be used to generate a chain that would lead to code execution.

Without saying too much I'll say I've been part of an effort by my employer to use LLMs to identify security issues. They do a good job analyzing pieces of code in isolation for particular issues but a limited context window prevents them from finding end to end issues. For example, the LLM might flag that there's no input validation for function XYZ, but that's because the input validation happened much earlier in the scenario. Thinking about this the reverse way, generating exploits, probably means assuming that you've gotten the payload you want in the place where it will be parsed how you want which can often be the hard part.

As an aside Jesus Christ this is ugly code. I am very glad the brief time I spent working with Javascript was with Typescript.

This is just grifters and idiots who don't know how to code and got a claude pro subscription and think they can be the next great super hacker. In fact they are worse than the script kiddies of the old days.

You at least have to know about computer security in general as a concept to even be able to ask the ai the right question. But even if you do, eVen the best models have no shortage of hallucinations and lazy behavior.

As someone interested in true crime, this is fascinating:

FBI arrests man in Jan. 6 DC pipe bomber investigation, sources say

Jan 6th pipe bomber arrested

This concludes a five year investigation.

My biggest question, and the question on others' mind is, how was he caught when there is apparently so little evidence? A grainy video, a sneaker brand, and that was it pretty much it. The FBI has even outdone the 4chan geolocators, which describes a community of online sleuths who “dox” targets by analyzing geographic details such as weather patterns, cloud formations, and other environmental cues in photos, who were unable to identify him (of course, the FBI has much more resources, evidence and extralegal powers).

The affidavit is available here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.287327/gov.uscourts.dcd.287327.1.1.pdf

One thing to note is previously the FBI had stated that cellphone data was not available due to corruption (https://vinnews.com/2023/06/19/in-stunning-testimony-former-fbi-official-says-j6-pipe-bomber-could-not-be-located-due-to-corrupted-phone-data/). However, now in the affidavit cellphone data is able to place Cole at the scene of the crime. That seems to indicate that someone is either lied to congress or someone screwed up their job. Because its possible the FBI queried one cellular network for data and the network claimed the data was corrupted and then the FBI made no further queries to other providers and then went to congress and claimed the data was corrupted. This is probably not technically lying (its ok to be deliberately mislead your audience as long as you don't make a clear lie!) but this would be gross incompetence. The data was clearly available because now we know the government was able to access it and these were provider records (presumably, from the carrier) not information from Cole's own cellphone. I guess its possible in the affidavit the government is being misleading when they say 'provider' and they mean some kind of other third party location data ('google') but I feel like that would be misleading the court because they refer to Provider's 'cell site records'.

The congressional testimony also claimed the provider in question was aggressively deleting cell site records (presumably to protect the privacy of their customers and to save money). But now we find out that after 4 years the cell site records are available. I presume the FBI was able to collect cell site records from other providers at the time but for some reason was able to claim to congress because they were missing information from one provider that it was not possible to use the records to identify suspects. Of course its also possible that some providers are keeping cell site records for a 4 year period but that seems very unlikely due to the storage costs. The other possible explanation is the government has another crazy data collection program where they are thieving huge amounts of metadata from the cellular networks and storing this somewhere and this is classic government lying to the court to hide their data collection methods.

I presume any trial is going to be a complete shit show where the defence is going to ask how these cellphone records mysteriously appeared after law enforcement officials testified to congress that they were not available. I also now have a bit more empathy for congressional witnesses who claim they are unable to talk about ongoing investigations.

Also, I assume this is not the full evidence of the State's case against Cole. But it has Steve Baker gait analysis vibes. This guy bought some stuff related to bomb making and then his cellphone was in the area of where the pipe bombs were planted. Hopefully, there is some more solid evidence linking him to the crime. Though, the cellphone data would seem to be much stronger than the gait analysis since presumably there would not be that many people in that area at the time, whereas presumably there are many people would match the gait.

Of course its also possible that some providers are keeping cell site records for a 4 year period but that seems very unlikely due to the storage costs

I'm confused. How the hell are they storying cell site records? This should be dirt cheap. Unique identifier for cell tower plus unique identifier for cell phone, plus minute by minute records.

Or at least that is my intuition. I guess I'll do the math.

(128bits + 128bits) * 1440 (minutes per day) = 46.08 kilobytes for a daily record of cell phone locations for an individual. (Assuming no attempts to simplify the data, like only storing the location changes).

46.08 kilobytes * 365(days) * 5(years) * 400 million(customers) = 33.6096 petabytes (about 8 days of YouTube uploads)

Petabytes of storage cost in the range of a million dollars a year. I'll say 2 million to account for deflation in the costs of storage over time.

So at most about $66 million for a 5 year nationwide database of all cell phone location records. This is chump change for any organization with the ability to collect such records. And I was estimating on the high end wherever possible. There are absolutely going to be a bunch of optimizations that would cut this cost by orders of magnitude.

And companies don't delete data to save money. That's insane. They all hoard data like there might be some nugget of gold in there if only they can algorithm it hard enough. Data deletion happens mostly by accident or neglect. Some piece of data is too old or has been mined so many times and produced nothing. It gets put on a server somewhere, but the server goes down and there wasn't a good enough back up, and the IT guys that proposed triple backup data protocol were turned down this one time because no one could figure out the business value of this data. The process of data degradation takes a decade or more.

The other process of data deletion is a legal request from the EU.

My experience is the opposite. Nobody wants to keep anything they don't absolutely have to, because a) it's deadweight. Even if the storage costs aren't prohibitive, no one wants to spend millions of dollars maintaining records that aren't of any use; and b) to limit their discovery risks/costs in the event of a lawsuit. Plaintiffs/regulators can't find incriminating old emails if the data retention policy deletes them after 90 days, the FBI can't force you to turn over customer data you don't have, etc.

Though granted I don't have much experience with the internal practices of tech or telecom companies, so that could explain the disconnect. I could imagine places like google and major cell providers having a bit more of a hoarding mentality when it comes to data.

I agree no one wants data about themselves kept. But everyone is happy to keep data about others.

At the medium sized tech company I worked at it was often impossible to track your own work history beyond a year or two back. Emails deleted automatically. Jira was cleaned up regularly. Git repos were sometimes moved losing all commit history (I know there are ways to avoid losing the commit history, but they didn't do it). In person meeting notes were almost never kept.

However, any American customer data was maintained almost indefinitely. With the right levels of access you could see the full data tables of the first customers from two decades earlier. All of this data was backed up in triplicate to make sure no random data storage problem would cause us to lose it. They spent the time and effort to migrate that data through many schema changes, and multiple SQL database version upgrades.

Interesting, thanks for the insight!

You could get a LTO-9 robotic tape library capable of storing a lot more data than that for a few million.

A combination of non-public information like CCTV footage, plate tracking, cell tracking, physical and digital forensics (including, as the below reply suggests, credit card data which they can run models on to pull relevant and unusual patterns literally trained on previous cases) make the FBI far more powerful than 4chan. The timing is what’s more convenient. It could be this is someone the last administration didn’t want to arrest on the chance they lost the case.

It could be this is someone the last administration didn’t want to arrest on the chance they lost the case.

Yeah, I wonder. Credit card purchases, cell phone location, and a license plate reader hit all seems like evidence they should've had for years.

I suspect that the widespread advent of AI has (even if these aren’t transformer models, although they could be) significantly increased the utility and usage of things like transaction modelling tools over the past couple of years. Before you would maybe check transactions at local stores for specific ingredients or review the purchase history of suspects. Now you can do much more complex and computationally expensive ML on the whole national or regional body of credit card data that can actually find that needle in a haystack.

I suspect that the widespread advent of AI has (even if these aren’t transformer models, although they could be) significantly increased the utility and usage of things like transaction modelling tools over the past couple of years. Before you would maybe check transactions at local stores for specific ingredients or review the purchase history of suspects. Now you can do much more complex and computationally expensive ML on the whole national or regional body of credit card data that can actually find that needle in a haystack.

I agree that's probably a factor. It seems like this suspect was smart enough to split his bomb-making purchases over multiple visits to different stores. Once you are down to a couple suspects, it's probably not too hard to look at all the various databases and confirm that you have your man. But as you say, it's a much bigger challenge to start with a universe of data and find the needle in a haystack and it seems like advanced computer systems would be very helpful in terms of finding that needle in the haystack.

That being said, there's nothing in the Affidavit which says how they identified that suspect in the first place. Possibly they just analyzed and cross-referenced the cell phone, credit card, and purchase records, but it's also possible some completely different method was used. Maybe he told his girlfriend who reported him a few years later after a bitter breakup and the FBI doesn't want to get the girlfriend into trouble. Maybe he came to the FBI's attention as a result of some investigative technique which is confidential or even illegal. It certainly wouldn't shock me to learn that the FBI has informants in anti-government chat servers; hacks into email systems; etc.

There's really know way to know. Obviously the FBI is smart enough to construct a plausible story about how the investigation was done and how it led to this person.

Here is the FBI agent affidavit in support of probable cause for his arrest. The evidence breaks down like:

1. Based on Cole's credit card transaction history he purchased all the parts that were themselves part of the bombs as well as other safety tools one might use to make a bomb across 2019/2020. Sample paragraph (not gonna quote all of them):

Both pipe bombs were manufactured using a 1” x 8” galvanized pipe with markings consistent with a particular manufacturer’s (the “Pipe Manufacturer”) product labeling. COLE purchased a total of six galvanized pipes of this size and shape on or about June 1, June 8, and November 16, 2020. The purchases were made at two different Home Depot location in northern Virginia. According to the Pipe Manufacturer, approximately 26,000 of these items from Pipe Manufacturer were sold in 2020, and over 22,000 of these items were sold to Home Depot.

(continue for the end caps, wiring, steel wool, kitchen timers, etc.)

2. Analysis of cellphone data shows that Cole's phone was connected to towers in the vicinity of where the bombs were placed at the same time surveillance footage shows the bomb planter in the area. Sample paragraph (5 or so of these, covering from 7:39 to 8:24):

At approximately 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 59323, which faces southeast (approximately 120˚) from its location at 103 G Street, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector A”). Also at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 126187, which faces east (approximately 90˚) from its location at 200 Independence Avenue, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector B”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:39:32 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked westbound on D Street, Southeast and then turned southbound on South Capitol Street, Southeast. These locations are consistent with the coverage areas of Sector A and B.

3. A license plate reader caught Cole's vehicle in the area shortly before the first security camera footage captures the bomb planter. Cole's cell phone also starts communicating with towers in the area shortly after.

COLE is the registered owner of a 2017 Nissan Sentra with a Virginia license plate. On January 5, 2021, at approximately 7:10 p.m., COLE’s Nissan Sentra was observed driving past a License Plate Reader at the South Capitol Street exit from Interstate 395 South, which is less than one-half mile from the location where the individual who placed the devices was first observed on foot near North Carolina and New Jersey Avenues, Southeast at 7:34 p.m. Approximately 5 minutes later, at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE began to interact with Provider towers in the area.

You'd have to be stupid to commit a serious federal crime and expect to get away. There feds have so many resources and so determined, and also it does not help that the vast majority of criminals are not masterminds and make in hindsight stupid mistakes.

You'd have to be stupid to commit a serious federal crime and expect to get away.

Well I think that's true today with surveillance cameras; cell phone records; DNA; and so on. But in the past, a serious criminal had a better chance. Look at the Unabomber -- the only reason he was caught is that his brother read the Unambomber manifesto and recognized the style.

Over the last 20 years, it's become basically impossible to commit a serious crime on US soil and avoid getting caught* (if the government is willing to devote the resources to catching you) but I think it is taking time for awareness of this fact to seep into public knowledge.

*I would make an exception for situations where the criminal has the support of a serious state actor.

I think it is taking time for awareness of this fact to seep into public knowledge.

Well, that's largely because of this part

if the government is willing to devote the resources to catching you

It's just pure anarcho tyranny. We aren't as far gone as the UK where they are releasing foreign rape gangs to make room for people who got a little too mouthy criticizing foreign rape gangs. But it's inching there. Only enemies of the deep state get the full weight of the law and it's infinite spying capabilities thrown at them. Everyone else basically has to commit the crime in such a lazy manner in front of hundreds of witnesses who can identify them, and then a Soros DA might get pressured into lazily pressing charges and then cutting a probation only plea deal once it's out of the news.

Now, the obvious flaw in that narrative is this very arrest. Are the tools of the deep state finally getting yanked out of their hands by the current administration? Maybe. There is a story where deep state FBI agents were purposely fucking up the investigation, and Kash put a fresh team of loyalist on it who immediately solved the case with no new evidence. If that is happening, it's a process, not an event however. Anarcho Tyranny is not "solved" on the basis of a single prosecution, just like Cancel Culture wasn't cancelled on the basis of Jimmy Kimmel getting his show back. It's who/whom trench warfare and bureaucratic defense in depth until the point where the only solution is to drop the pretenses and start killing each other in the war we are obviously already in.

I mean, agreed you have to stupid or mentally ill to do something like this since there is no upside, but maybe use cash and turn off your cell phone, bro? License plate alone wouldn’t be enough to build a case.

Even the license plate is easy to obscure. If you're carrying a bike on a rear rack a plate reader won't work. Some hitch racks fold up when not in use and will block the plate on some sedans. I rode the turnpike for free for years with a rack like this until I got pulled over for it and decided I didn't want to risk the ticket, but that only happens if a cop is directly behind you and can't read the plate, and is bored enough to make an issue out of it. There was a news article a while back about how much revenue the turnpike was losing from people carrying bikes, saying that they were pulling some people over for foiling the readers, but this isn't something a cop is realistically going to pull you over for in and of itself (the cop who pulled me over said that they wouldn't do it if someone were carrying a bike), only if you were getting free rides as a consequence. I think that they realistically understand that this is a lost cause, though.

Who buys bomb equipment with credit cards?

Who brings their cell phone with them to commit crimes?

To be honest, lots of criminals. A lot of crimes are solved by police departments with a lot less resources than the FBI using some pretty hard to pin down evidence. Cell tower + LPR hits can often get you down to only a very small pool of individuals that need to be investigated further. One prosecutor friend of mine got a conviction for an armed robbery based on basically cell towers, LPRS, and a photo of underwear.

Eh, IDK -- yes it's easy to understand some gang-banger bringing his phone on a driveby under the assumption that he'll never be caught and anyways needs the phone in case somebody calls about some crack -- or just general dumb-criminalness.

But when you get to the point of planting bombs in the vicinity of the seat of government of the US of fuckin A in the year of our Lord 2025 -- this is pretty cloak & dagger stuff! The guy was obviously somewhat concerned about being tracked given the way that he structured his pipe-bomb purchases -- "don't take your phone on your anarchist bombing mission" seems like an implausibly low bar not to clear?

people who commit crimes and get caught make bad decisions. this is the simple explanation for everything. of course in this particular situation the timing is very weird because you have the grifter news site making bombshell accusations about capitol police being involved in the pipe bombing. but there is even a explanation for the timing which is grifter news site is making FBI look bad even if the grifter story is false so FBI now allocates resources on this particular case instead of whatever 'higher' priority the FBI would otherwise use their resources.

also, if this is an FBI coverup this confirms the republican party is the washington generals.

Criminals. I mean, if I were building and planting a bomb I'd make use of salvaged stuff as much as possible, anything I couldn't would be bought with cash (thought that didn't help here), the cell phone would stay at home, I'd try to note the location of CCTV cameras and such and at least try to make me and my car get lost in the noise if I couldn't avoid them, etc. I also would NOT do Google, Bing, or even DDG searches of bomb-making and stuff from devices that could be associated with me (including other people's phones at my house). But

a) I'm also not going to build or plant a bomb.

and

b) Blowing shit up is fun, but this would be a lot of work and who goes into crime to do a lot of work?

c) If you're going to bomb the Capitol as part of an attempt to overthrow the government, the least you expect afterward is the boogaloo, the most you expect is that your people get into power. You don't plan to evade the FBI because after the bombing the FBI either won't exist or won't have power over you.

If it's not confirmed I'm very confident DC is under wide-area persistent surveillance. You have to spend a lot of time figuring out CCTV locations to defeat it.

Who brings their cell phone with them to commit crimes?

From experience as a defense attorney, just about everyone. Obviously, selection bias since there might be hordes of people leaving their cell phones at home, committing crimes, and not getting arrested, and I would never see them.

Yeah and I'm glad for it, still, I'd think someone conscientious enough to make a delayed fuse bomb and have all 10 fingers would be conscious enough to not bring their cell phone while planting said bombs.

Well if that isn't proof we're living in a panopticon, nothing is. They were able to trace his month-old purchases of 9V battery connectors that he made with cash:

COLE purchased five of the Nine Volt Distributor’s nine-volt battery connectors from Micro Center in northern Virginia on or about November 12 and December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction.

December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction.

Isn't that a cash transaction that was over a year old that they tracked, not just months?

Also, is the "including" saying he made both credit and cash purchases at that same December transaction?

Ah, yes, right, over a year. If you're not tracking everything, how do you track that?

It sounds like he split the purchase, putting part of it on cash and part of it on a card. When I was a cashier in high school people would occasionally do this, though these days I don't know the motivation (back then it was people using food stamps and paying the balance in cash or using cash they had and charging the rest before charging was a thing rich people did to rack up points).

Card maxed out, maybe? Needed to break a $50 at the same time because the ATM sometimes gives those out instead of $20s and I hate that?

I mean, we’ve known this since Snowden haven’t we? I guess until now they were just sitting on all data in the universe and not doing anything with it.

Not the cash part.

I'm not really sure what this proves though - once they have his license plate, there are enough security cameras or automatic license plate readers in Northern Virginia that a sufficiently determined federal agency can look through footage to figure out where you were driving, and large companies have had video footage of the registers for ages. Court decisions on using license plate readers to track movements are a decade old at this point.

He bought 9V connectors at the end of 2019 and planted the bomb in the beginning of 2021. Are we to believe that microcenter retained CCTV footage of every cash register for over a year?

I mean they must have? The only way they'd know he paid cash was via security footage, or if he did the transaction 50% cash / 50% card so that the receipt info could be traced to him

Microcenter likes to register you as a customer. If he put his phone number into the system when he made his cash purchase, then the purchase would still be recorded under his account.

Yes, point reward systems are also part of the panopticon.

More comments

I will lodge a prediction that this guy just happens to have a terminal illness which ensures his passing before ever seeing jail time, and that he also has suspicious lapses in his work history.

I’ll take that bet.

Maybe not the lapses. There are plenty of reasons a guy like this would fail to hold down a job. But I bet he makes it to sentencing and jail (prison?)

A few possibilities in no particular order:

  • This guy is a patsy, thrown against the wall by Kash Patel in a desperate attempt to keep his job.

  • The FBI has had this guy as a suspect for a long time, but they didn’t have the evidence they thought they needed for an obvious conviction in a politically-charged case.

  • Nome of their other January 6 leads ever tied-in to the attempted pipe-bombing. Because of this, they assumed that the incident was unrelated to the other more-important conspiracies that played out that day.

  • The FBI know early-on that the suspect was a leftist or otherwise clearly non-MAGA. It was politically unacceptable to give the impression that any part of January 6 was not the fault of Trump or Republicans, so the case was dropped.

  • The team originally assigned to the case was legitimately incompetent, and nobody ever checked their work.

  • The suspect is himself a fed (unlikely IMO, but the situation is strange enough that we have to keep the possibility open).

EDIT - One more idea after reading Gillirut’s breakdown of the evidence:

  • The FBI only recently got the go-ahead to use Palantir technology on the giant NSA databank of all internet activity to find the suspect.

The FBI only recently got the go-ahead to use Palantir technology on the giant NSA databank of all internet activity to find the suspect.

'they kept clicking "solve case" with every new release of the FBI crime database software and this time it finally worked' is the most reasonable guess

The gait analysis pegged a Capitol Police officer. No movement for years, then outsider media identifies a suspect independently, and within a month a different patsy is suddenly identified and arrested.

If you couldn't tell, I'm skeptical.

There is always the possibility dude is still a patsy. He could have been induced into building the bombs by an FBI informant, and then he handed them off to the previously identified law enforcement lady in the vicinity who lazily planted them around the block. I haven't exhaustively gone over the evidence to see if this story is still a fit, but on a cursory read it doesn't seem impossible.

Not that I'm particularly attached to that theory either. Just saying, it's possible, maybe?

Looping in @netstack, @Quantumfreakonomics, and @greyenlightenment

I discussed this when the case first came out, and while I said at the time that I didn't need to get into the deep dive I did on gait analysis while at the DMV, it's apparent that I now do. First, to reiterate, when they say 94% match or whatever, what they're saying is that they measure certain features of gait like knee flexion angle and come up with a profile. If 6% of the population is expected to have a similar gait profile, then it would be a 94% match because it theoretically excludes 94% of the population. The reason I went through all the categories of description in my previous post was to demonstrate that anything below 90% isn't even really a match, and anything below 99% is of extremely limited utility. Identifying the suspect is a black female is a 94% match right there, because about 12% of the population is black and half of those are female. Given that the comment was well-received without much pushback and awarded an AAQC, I naively thought that I had made my case, evidently I was wrong. So let's get into why that 94% or 98% is bullshit in and of itself:

  • Forensic gait analysis relies on the assumption that every person has a unique or nearly unique gait. While this may be true, the extent to which we can determine that it is true is limited by the accuracy with which we can make the relevant measurements. There is currently no evidence to support this assertion.

  • In some cases, the level of accuracy is not good to begin with if relying on video. For instance, I read about one angle that we could accurately measure to within five degrees. But the total normal variation was seven degrees.

  • Most of the available research into gait was conducted in a clinical setting. Most of what we know about normal gait comes from studies where we were comparing broadly-defined normal gait to abnormal gait, not from studies where we were looking to categorize subtle differences among normal gaits. This second kind of research has been limited.

  • There is accordingly no credible database that allows us to assess the frequency of either normal or abnormal gait characteristics.

  • In the research that exists (which is again mostly clinical), the subjects are analyzed walking at a designated speed indoors, barefoot, wearing minimal clothing to facilitate measurement, are well lit, and are photographed from fixed angles. In other words, the process is standardized.

  • This standardization, however, is limited to the individual experiment. There is no industry-wide standardized methodology for analyzing, comparing, and reporting gait characteristics.

  • Gait characteristics are usually dependent, i.e. someone with Characteristic A may be more likely to have Characteristic B. For example, if statistics show that 1 in 17 people have their right knee pointing inwards and 1 in 17 have their right foot pointing inwards, it may be tempting to say that 1 in 238 have both pointing inwards. But in the study I pulled that number from, 1 in 27 had both pointing inwards. Unless we can determine the level of dependence for each gait characteristic, we have to treat any frequency estimates with caution.

  • Gait on an individual can change over time based on: Walking speed, evenness of surface, grade, footwear, whether the person is carrying something, whether the person is trying to avoid obstacles (as in a crowd), minor injuries/aches and pains, clothing, how tired the person is, and even whether they're talking on a cell phone.

  • The best available method to determine the reliability of gait analysis would be to conduct a study where various practitioners would view video footage similar to what is used in court proceedings. Some clips would be paired with the same individual and others would be paired with different individuals. The results would then be used to calculate false positive and false negative rates. No such study has ever been conducted.

  • The only similar study that was ever done asked seven "experienced analysts" to match one individual from five examples. The failure rate was 29%.

  • Ideally, sample data should be reviewed by three independent experts. Expert A reviews the reference sample, Expert B reviews the comparison sample, and Expert C performs the comparison. Ideally, the reference sample should be of the suspect walking in a standardized manner.

Take all that into consideration and further consider that we don't even have a reference sample here. We're talking about two different surveillance videos of varying quality, in one of which the suspect is intentionally wearing bulky clothing, is carrying a backpack, and is moseying at varying speed along a vacant sidewalk. In the other, the accused woman is in a police uniform with all the police accessories wearing different footwear and working in a crowded area. The Blaze hasn't posted the video they're using for comparison, only screenshots of it, and those look like they were taken at an entirely different angle than the surveillance video of the suspect. And they also apparently use video of her playing soccer to make the comparison. I checked my copy of the SEAK, Inc. Expert Witness Directory, and it doesn't have a heading for forensic gait analysts. It has a heading for gait, but most of those are the kind of person you hire if your gait has been affected by a car crash or medical malpractice. The few I could find all had backgrounds in podiatry, orthopedics, neurology, or some related medical field. I don't know what background the "veteran analyst" for The Blaze had because they don't tell us who he is. They don't produce an expert report. They don't even have him discuss the analysis other than mentioning that it's "closer to a 98 percent match". It's not clear who this bozo is or what he did.

And if you're still not convinced that all of this is complete bullshit, keep in mind that this story didn't disappear as soon as we turned over to a new Culture War Roundup. It turns out that Ms. Kerkhoff was already the object of far-right MAGA fringe ire, as she fired pepper balls into the crowd on January 6 and testified in related prosecutions, and has the distinction of being the first witness to testify in the first January 6 prosecution. Her name was not selected at random. In fact, someone had already submitted a tip to her employer and she was placed on administrative leave while the FBI investigated. The FBI had, in fact, cleared her, before the story even ran. She was quickly able to produce video of herself playing with her dogs the night the bombs were planted, and that was the end of it as far as the FBI was concerned. Beck himself, who hyped the story in advance as being among the biggest in his lifetime, was walking it back by Monday, refusing to name the woman on his podcast, reminding listeners that a match did not equal guilt, and saying that she was still a private citizen who was innocent until proven guilty. I think it's safe to say that this story is dead.

How often is someone convicted off “gait evidence”?

I read “The program struggles with certain visual cues, so I’d peg it as closer to 98%” with about as much skepticism as “the software says you’re 85% racist.” People can say whatever they want. Besides, why did Mr. Seraphin wait four years to blow the whistle?

What does “94% match” mean in this context?

Does it mean that the capitol officer matches the suspect’s gait more closely than 94% of people?

Does it mean that the capitol officer is 94% likely to be the suspect?

Does it mean that 94% of the abstract computer analysis indices are within the arbitrary “match” range for both of them?

How many people exist in the Washington DC Metro that would be at least a 94% match? Without knowing that this information is approximately useless. That is what we need in order to do a basic Bayesian analysis.

Oh, it’s much higher than that. The guy who ran the analysis thinks it’s closer to 98%.

What does that mean? It probably means he pulled the numbers out of his ass.

No movement for years, then outsider media identifies a suspect independently, and within a month a different patsy is suddenly identified and arrested.

This timing makes me skeptical as well.

Yeah , but even 94% is not enough to secure a conviction. They need it to be it airtight . I can understand the skepticism. Trust in agencies and government at historic lows.

Sure, not enough to convict, but plenty enough to become the default answer, and that's what can't be allowed. So, now that there's a culprit put forward, the spooks* needed an alternate to distract from the fact it was an inside job.

*
Kerkhoff, who was a Capitol Police officer for four and a half years, left the department in mid-2021 for a security detail at the Central Intelligence Agency, sources told Blaze News.

For me the strongest indicator will be whether or not Kerkhoff decides to sue Glenn Beck et al for defamation or not. A refusal to sue in what should be a slam dunk easy payday means they're afraid of what discovery will turn up.

Discovery is something the Plaintiff gets from the Defendant. It's also something you get from a company, not a private person. Those statements aren't technically 100% true all the time, but realistically, that's the way it works. I represent defendants and I do send out discovery requests to plaintiffs. These consist exclusively of interrogatories and requests for admission, and I send them out to protect the record and not because I expect them to contain any useful information. Half the time I don't get responses. Actually, I don't know how often they respond because when they do respond I seldom look at the responses. Private citizens simply don't have the kind of records that companies do. If Wal-Mart doesn't plow their parking lot and I slip on ice and get hurt I can request copies of relevant policies, the employee schedule for the day, a copy of their plow contract, and all kinds of other stuff. If I slip on some random guy's driveway, what do you think I'm requesting? If there really is some kind of government conspiracy here, do you seriously think that Shauni Kerkhoff has been keeping records of it in her possession for the past 5 years? The most discovery they'll get is the opportunity to depose her, which might not even be their deposition if her attorneys put her up first. They might even have to put her up first to avoid summary judgment. But there will be no lawsuit, because any attorney worth his retainer will have The Blaze on the horn immediately and tell them he has a release ready to go if the price is right. No lawsuit necessary.

The modern public education system is an expensive daycare at best and a Potemkin village at worst. Kids lack any internal or external motivation to learn, discipline is basically forbidden, and any mark under 85 is cause for meetings and interventions and BS special ed plans. Many teachers don't think this is a problem- school should be a "safe space" for children (though to what end, they usually can't say). Any teacher that does think it's a problem is either too cowardly (or agreeable, same thing) to fight the decline or too attached to the sweet, sweet benefits of the job (even sweeter in Canada!) to die on this hill. They console themselves, however, by muttering about how "these kids are in for a big surprise when they get to university." Well, ti appears that there will be no surprise:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/?gift=o6MjJQpusU9ebnFuymVdsFCUJZQ0G9lMNnLXcGfnS-w

At elite US universities, huge numbers of students (20-30%) receive accommodations for intellectual "disabilities." Since these schools are much more selective than other schools, and intellectual disabilities make you worse at school, we should expect to find even higher rates of disability at less selective schools, but we don't. So either the upper class families are fortunate enough to have the means to ensure their kids get the help they need while less affluent students are struggling unassisted, or they're gaming the system to inflate their marks when the most common grade is already A. You know in your heart which one it is.

The main "accommodation" these kids get, at university and K-12, is extra time. This almost makes sense on final exams, but day-to-day they also demand it. The problem is that there is no "extra" time; there is only one time and it is limited. "Extra time" on anything is an illusion, because you are taking your own time from something else. This is not just a metaphysical quibble- parents will demand that a kid get extra time (which usually means double time) on anything the kid finds difficult. Since time cannot be created, a kid who finds the material difficult will take an entire class period for a short quiz, thereby missing a bunch of material and falling behind, ensuring that he finds future material difficult as well and requiring even more "extra" time. Parents rarely understand this, even when it is explained to them.

Kids and parents universally defend this practice because it allows the kid to do their "best work." The assumption is that if other kids do their best work in half an hour, but your kid needs an hour to do his best work, that's academic justice. We're here to find the kids best work, after all (this is never questioned and any discussion of speed is not even understood, let alone allowed). The "best work" that this system produces is never good- work expands to fill the time allotted, so if you were going to write a C+ essay in an hour, and now you have two hours, it now takes you twice as long to be just as mediocre. Other absurdities abound, which I've mentioned before, like the "separate exam space" having more kids in it than the regular exam room or kids getting the reading test read to them, but the time thing is the biggest one.

Goodhart's Law is driving all of this. We used to use marks as the best available way to measure how smart or educated kids were, but then it started getting gamed and now marks are totally meaningless (note that parents and Good Teachers will assert, in the same sentence, that marks are not a full measure of a person's worth/intelligence/etc and also demand these accommodations so that the kid's marks are propped up because the kid is good or valuable). A colleague just had a meeting about a kid failing Gr 11 advanced math. It's too late to drop the course. He reassured her that if she takes Gr 12 basic math the kid will retroactively receive a Gr 11 basic math credit, and her graduation will not be threatened. The mother freaked because this would still leave "Gr 11 advanced math: 44%" on the kid's transcript, as though there were a situation where you needed a good gr 11 advanced math mark but didn't actually have to be good at math (in Canada, there is no such situation- any scholarship or admission that would have this kind of demand is going to the kids in Gr 12 advanced math anyway).

These are pretty standard complaints about the ed system, but now lets talk about The Last Psychiatrist. His bugbear was narcissism. Not the swaggering bravado we normally associate with narcissism, but insecure or compensatory narcissism that causes empty people to act out a character rather than to be their authentic selves (they don't have authentic selves in the first place). "Main character syndrome" probably comes from his writing, though I don't think he used that exact phrase. So a narcissistic man would demand that his wife get breast implants, not because he loves busty women, but because cool dudes like him have wives with huge knockers. He is trying to shape everything but himself to project the identity he wishes he had. It's normal for kids to try out different identities, get tough-guy tatoos or act like Taylor Swift, but well-adjusted people grow out of it and start actually doing things, and the things they do become the basis for stable identities. TLP alleged that people in the West have stopped growing out of it and are trapped in juvenile psychology where identity is totally decoupled from action. So you can go every day to your actuary job and estimate health insurance risk and go home and scroll Twitter all night, but since you own a guitar you actually think of yourself as a musician. This has all kinds of bad effects on you personally, on the people around you, and on society. Read his oeuvre to find out more.

This kind of narcissism is a natural, though regrettable, phase of growing up, and it's bad if you don't grow out of it. It's even worse, though, if all the adults around you are actively inculcating it in you. Accommodations are the main way society is doing this. "Marks are just one way of evaluating people" is perfectly true. If you really believe this, you won't be that worried about your kid getting a 60, unless he's slacking off, in which case you chain him up for a while until he gets his act together. But if you tell your kid, and doctors tell your kid, and the school tells your kid, and TikTok tells your kid (this, to your kid, is tantamount to the entire world telling him), that actually he's really smart even though he doesn't do anything smart, and that actually what needs to happen is for the world around him to change (=accommodations) then you are encouraging a mindset which life should actually be beating out of him.

People around here often object to The Last Psychiatrist's style, Sadly Porn is weird, etc, but he dropped the shtick and wrote a more obviously serious book called Watch What You Hear, about dream interpretation in the Odyssey. The big takeaway in the book (for psychology) is that insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience. "Omniscience" here means seeing clearly what your problems are, seeing through you. For example, a guy who thinks of himself as a woman has his whole world rocked if someone treats him like a man, or a girlboss feminist has a breakdown if someone suggests that all she wants is a baby. Instead, narcissists demand omnipotence- the trans guy wants the world rearranged to validate his feminine identity and the girlboss wants childfree spaces enforced, as though every else has the power to deliver affirmation/happiness/fulfillment/ for them.

We have allowed the education system to formally endorse this narcissistic demand for omnipotence over omniscience. The school/teacher/exam must not be allowed to correctly rate the student's intelligence, potential, actualisation or anything else. Whether that science is omni is beside the point; parents and students fear and believe that it is, which is why they lose their #$%ing minds when anyone suggests that if the kid gets 70 in every class then maybe he's just kinda a 70. The omnipotence they demand of everyone is the power to make their kid above-average. In some cases they believe this can be done, in other cases they demand the trappings of academic success without the substance (identity divorced from actions). This is TLP narcissism codified and is far worse for society than some lame teacher trying to get kids to like her by saying she's bisexual or whatever.

(I know that economic anxiety is a huge driver here, that parents fear that their kid will end up destitute if he doesn't get into engineering or something, but again, in what world will he be a successful engineer if you explicitly demanded that we cover up his lack of discipline, drive, and ability with fake marks? A world where, with regard to your kid, everyone else is omnipotent without being omniscient)

I guess my point is that the dominant objections here to public education rest on the system's financial or ideological effects, and while those are bad, the psychological effects are much worse and go much deeper than "I was bored and my reward was more work". The financial and ideological objections have more to do with the ed system being mainly made up of the outgroup, but they'll eventually all be dead. It's fine to dream of the day when the system is dissolved or otherwise rendered powerless, but until then, stop demanding accommodations for your kids. It's much worse for them than reading gay comics in English class.

  • The problem is that there is no "extra" time; there is only one time and it is limited. "Extra time" on anything is an illusion, because you are taking your own time from something else. This is not just a metaphysical quibble- parents will demand that a kid get extra time (which usually means double time) on anything the kid finds difficult. Since time cannot be created, a kid who finds the material difficult will take an entire class period for a short quiz, thereby missing a bunch of material and falling behind, ensuring that he finds future material difficult as well and requiring even more "extra" time. Parents rarely understand this, even when it is explained to them.

Disaagree. Unless I am misunderstanding, there is unlimited time outside of school. i can take as much time as I want to complete something. Even at work except for , ironically , low-skilled jobs where you're expected to 'clock in', there is much more flexibility than observed in academia/school. Projects are always being delayed, excuses, people late to work, vacation, emergencies, sick time ,etc. hardly anything is set in stone. The irony is that jobs that require the least amount of credentials have the least accommodations.

I agree though that undeserved accommodations are bad, because it's unfair to others and creates hassle. But I don't think it has much applicability for the real world either, because we see the opposite for many jobs and circumstances.

We can disagree on whether humans are mortal, I guess. The real question is why you would want to take all that time. Any system that leads you to spend hours and hours on schoolwork to game a 4% increase in your mark is not serving you or the people it is training you to serve.

That 4% could be the difference between a track leading to a seat on the Supreme Court and one leading to handling divorce cases day in and day out until you drink yourself to death.

Anyone on that track has already had their marks compressed up into the 98-100 range. We're talking 71 going up to 75 here.

How much of this is…well…real?

  • 20+% of students at elite U.S. universities are getting some sort of accommodation.
  • Such accommodations are less common in less selective schools.
  • TLP says a bunch of stuff about narcissism.

I think everything else in your comment is either anecdotal or outright speculation. I was going to ask for sources on a couple of the claims, but there were just too many. Who’s muttering about how they’ll get the wake-up call? How is failure to “fight the decline” cowardly? Why do you think TLP’s model is reasonable?

Actually, let’s go into that one. “Insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience” is vacuous. It’s a fully general argument. Any time you want me to do something, you’re demanding omnipotence, and any time I dare to disagree with you, I’m just mad about your omniscience. “They hated Him because He told the truth,” huh?

Goodhart’s law is not narcissism. It is a race to the bottom brought on by normal, familiar self-interest. People game metrics when they value the rewards more than the integrity of the system. No psychoanalysis necessary.

“Insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience” is vacuous. It’s a fully general argument. Any time you want me to do something, you’re demanding omnipotence, and any time I dare to disagree with you, I’m just mad about your omniscience.

I understand if you find TLP's writing style and personal vocabulary frustrating in a Continental philosophy sort of way (hell, I agree with you: Sadly, Porn was probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read, bar none). But this is really just a flowery way of saying "insecure narcissists demand that the world bend over backwards to validate their preferred image of themselves, and become extremely hostile and defensive when the world refuses to do so, seeing the narcissist as he is rather than as he would like to be seen." Maybe you disagree with @gog's application of the concept in this context, but the concept in itself seems sound – pretty close to a dictionary definition of what an insecure narcissist is, really.

How is failure to “fight the decline” cowardly?

That almost sounds like a tautological statement. If something is getting worse over time, you're in a position where you could do something to arrest that decline, and you choose not to – well, maybe not "cowardly" by definition, but do we have any positive adjectives for the person who makes that choice? Selfish? Lazy? Shiftless? More-than-me-job's-worth? Above my pay grade? Head in the sand?

It assumes that they are, in fact, in position to arrest the decline.

My experience with teachers is that they may be powerless, but are rarely cowardly.

If the decline is in part caused by schools being too willing to indulge blatantly unwarranted requests for "accommodations" for students who clearly do not suffer from any disabilities which would have a meaningful impact on their academic performance, at whose feet should we lay the blame for this state of affairs? The administrators? Legislators? Assorted departments of education?

at whose feet should we lay the blame for this state of affairs? The administrators? Legislators? Assorted departments of education?

The ones who mandate that schools provide such obvious performance improving ”accommodations” in the first place. I don’t really see how actually meaningful true accommodations would significantly improve performance for regular students.

Say someone is dyslexic and requires accommodation? No problem, don’t grade anyone on irrelevant typos (outside core writing courses in elementary / high school)

Another person has adhd with faulty executive function and requires extra time to return an assignment? Again no problem, they get to return it a day or two late but with a third of the max points subtracted (or similar significant but not immediately ruinous amount).

A person can’t handle doing the exam with distractions around them? They get to do it in a sparse room under TA surveillance.

Someone's "not a good test taker" and needs to redo? Again, simple. Everyone gets say one redo attempt and anyone needing more than that has to return an extra 20 solved problems before being allowed to retake. The catch: said problems are hard level and simply being able to solve them at all essentially guarantees that you've studied enough to pass with a good grade (this is how I passed Circuit Theory 2 with all the Laplace stuff and transmission lines).

The point is that those accommodations only help against actual problems but don’t provide any meaningful benefit for someone who doesn’t truly require them (and in some cases outright reduce their grade / require significant extra work).

The ADA which created the mess by making “mental illness” ( which is by definition hard to detect and verify unless it’s really bad) something that public places are required to accept and accommodate. It’s not just a problem for schools, but workplaces as well. Psychiatric disorders are pretty much a get out of jail free card and being diagnosed with one has more to do with access to psychiatric care than anything going on in the brain of the patient. A rich family with high end medical insurance can find a doctor to fill in the forms and diagnose their underperforming child with a bevy of developmental issues and mental health problems that require teachers to give those accommodations.

Speculation is half the game around here.

-The problem is that the people I’m talking about have confused the metrics for the reward and this has deleterious personal and social consequences. We’re not talking about breeding cobras, here, we’re talking about apparently irrecoverable psychological damage on a wide scale.

-Narcissists really do hate people who tell them the truth, yes. If you object to the n-word, just consider whether you’d want any kind of relationship with someone who hates being told the truth. It doesn’t matter what the clinical name is. Do you want to do business with guy? Do you want to date that woman? Want them as a neighbour?

-The omnipotence in question is granted by the narcissist to everyone else to affirm their identity, and he demands that they use it. They’re not asking you to move a couch, they’re asking you to affirm their self-image, and because that image is baseless (it is not backed by deeds) your affirmation is all they have.

You can advance this discussion by denying either the phenomena I’m describing, the causal links between them, or the significance any of it. I can’t advance it by giving you any sources since the system keeps finding itself to be working just fine.

See, I don’t think most people have confused the metric and the reward. A college degree gives you some combination of skills and prestige. Gaming a disability policy decouples your degree from your skills, but it doesn’t stop you from claiming some of the prestige. Maybe even a lot of it, depending on your field. Connections, investment, political backing, all sorts of benefits.

If what you most value is skill, you suck it up and go to a non-elite school. You’ll get most of the skill and none of the prestige. If you crave the latter, though, gaming the system is a rational choice.

The emperor’s sycophants complimented his new clothes because they were afraid of his anger. In your model, why are the universities going along with it? Are they stupid?

I think the narcissism label is a way to sneer at people one thinks are delusional. If they’re actually making a rational decision, it’s not a useful framing.

Echoing @gog below, I agree that gaming the system isn't necessarily indicative of TLP-style narcissism, if you're fully aware that that's what you're doing and have no illusions about it.

Think back to the Varsity Blues scandal, in which various wealthy parents (including your woman from Desperate Housewives) were found to have bribed elite universities to get their children places.

Now, if these parents were thinking "I know Little Jimmy isn't too bright, but I really want him to go to Harvard, and if that means I have to pay some apparatchik under the table, so be it", that's not narcissism.

But if, on the other hand, they were thinking "Little Jimmy is a genius, but he has a special kind of intelligence that can't be captured by a blunt instrument like the SAT. I know that once he gets to Harvard he'll flourish, and if I need to pay someone off to get him in, so be it" - well, yeah. You see where I'm going with this.

In real life, I imagine there are some parents who have no illusions about how smart or capable their children are, and are just using every exploit they can think of to get their kids into top universities they never could on their own merit, including specious requests for accommodations for disabilities their children don't have. Nothing narcissistic about that – dishonest, yes; selfish, yes; burning the commons, yes; making it harder for the legitimately disabled to be taken seriously, yes – but not narcissistic.

But I agree with @gog that there are a nonzero amount of parents who really think their children are exceptionally intelligent in a way which, for some reason, never manifests in an SAT-legible form, and for which special accommodations are required so that it can express itself. That is narcissism.

I recall reading an article a few years ago (I'll see if I can dig it out*) that claimed that the absolute number of black Americans with engineering degrees actually declined in the years after affirmative action in university admissions was introduced.

The reasoning was elegantly simple. Like it or not, everyone in a classroom setting is acutely aware of where they sit in the hierarchy of their peers when it comes to how effectively they are understanding the material: people at the top of the class know they are, people who are struggling know it, people who are getting by know it. If you're a mediocre student in a mediocre school, you'll be doing okay: if you move that mediocre student into an elite school, he will be struggling, almost by definition. Ask yourself who's more likely to drop out of an elite school: someone getting straight As with ease, or someone barely scraping by with Ds?

This article argued that affirmative action in university admissions essentially migrated a huge number of mediocre students out of mid-tier colleges (in which their skill level would have matched the content they were expected to master, at the pace they were expected to master it) and into elite Ivy League colleges (in which they were bound to be near the bottom of the classroom distribution: if they wouldn't be, they wouldn't have needed affirmative action to get in). Faced with the demoralising prospect of always being near the bottom of the class, far more of these students dropped out before completing their degree, when compared to an earlier cohort of black students who attended mid-tier colleges. I don't know about you, but I think going to a mid-tier college and getting a degree is more impressive than going to Yale and dropping out after a year because you can't hack it.

It wouldn't surprise me if we end up observing a similar trend here. No genuinely smart student actually needs "accommodations" to get into an elite college, so the only ones who try to game the disability system to do so will be mediocre students. Like the black students in the paragraph above, they will find themselves near the bottom of the classroom hierarchy, constantly struggling to grasp material their classmates master with ease. Consequently, they will be far more likely to drop out with receiving a degree.

You're correct that getting the skills and the credentials is only one reason people go to college, end networking opportunities and so on are also a big part of it. But if you're doing a four-year degree and you drop out one year in, you'll have max one-quarter the networking opportunities that someone who completes their degree will have, so it may end up being a waste of your time anyway.

*I'm not sure if this is the article I was thinking of, but it makes the same general argument.

It wouldn't surprise me if we end up observing a similar trend here. No genuinely smart student actually needs "accommodations" to get into an elite college, so the only ones who try to game the disability system to do so will be mediocre students. Like the black students in the paragraph above, they will find themselves near the bottom of the classroom hierarchy, constantly struggling to grasp material their classmates master with ease. Consequently, they will be far more likely to drop out with receiving a degree.

I think the overall point here is good, but that it only misses the magic “civilization is fucked” sauce.

In the 1970s, the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking didn’t exist. Even elite colleges were at least somewhat more likely to cut loose the lowest performers. But now, thanks to the wonders of journamalism, graduation rate is the single most gameable factor in maintaining school prestige.

Graduation and retention rates (21%): the proportion of each entering class earning a degree in six years or less (16%), and the proportion of first-year entering students who returned the following fall (5%)

Graduation rate performance (10%): actual six-year graduation rates compared with predictions for the fall 2014 entering class

Social mobility (11%): how well schools graduated students who received federal Pell Grants (6%), and graduation rates and performance of first generation students (5%)

42% of the score is strictly about graduation rates.

Harvard has a 98% graduation rate and the most common grade is an A. These kids are not going to drop out like a merely above-average black engineer might have in 1975. They don’t even know to be ashamed, and the college will do everything it can to prevent them from feeling shame.

We are not prepared for the stunningly brave world’s first Down Syndrome judge.

They are delusional.

It’s only rational and not inculcating narcissism if you admit to yourself that you are gaming the system. Remember that I’m talking about high school, which affects many more students at more critical ages. These parents and their kids really believe that the kid is really smart even though there is no evidence this. They handwave the lack of evidence, and teach the kid to handwave it, because schools are there to say “don’t worry about actions, we will affirm your kid’s identity (that you, the parent, picked for him, usually as a projection of your own) by giving him extra equal treatment.” So you have all these vectors adding up to “your actions have nothing to do with who you are.” You can dispute whether that is really so bad, but you can’t dispute that it’s the implicit (and often explicit) message of all this.

Universities go along with it because of stuff like human rights law. I didn’t think that was controversial.

Sometimes I sincerely wonder if our education system was deliberately sabotaged. If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia. The failures of modern pedagogy are stark and baffling, and no matter how bad it gets, somehow the pedagogues find a way to make it even worse. There hasn't been a single policy promoted by pedagogues I can think of in the last 40 years that has actually improved education. The singular exception seems to be the "Mississippi Miracle", which the expert class seems absolutely committed to explaining away as a fluke or trickery. Also cell phone bans seem to have helped, but those mostly only seem to occur due to a groundswell of popular support.

Well, that's true on its face. The long march is real. Also I'm pretty sure Common Core math was designed to tank the performance of the smarter students down to the level of those who barely pass. Same with "Whole language" learning instead of phonics.

Not sure about Common Core math, but Whole Language learning would have the opposite effect -- phonics is the system which works for almost everyone, whereas whole-language learning requires more cognitive ability. And the smarter kids would have likely been taught the "cheat code" of phonics before even getting into school.

Whole language as it is taught is more about manipulating how children "feel" about specific words than their meaning, it's also marxist poison through and through. Also "Critical Literacy", check this video out if you have the time, I can't really explain it better than she does already. [link]

If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia.

It’s a Prussian conspiracy. The vile Hun could not beat America on the battlefield in any of their three attempts (1776, 1918, 1945) so they turned their autistic minds to devious conspiracy.

Prussia was on Washington's side in the first one of those; the British allies were Hessian.

Damned Prussians, they ruined Germany!

AP testing technically dates back to the 50s, but I don’t believe it really took off until the 90s. They certainly have their own problems.

I’m actually having a hard time naming any pedagogy newer than the 1950s. There’s the common core math, which sucks. Different learning types (kinesthetic, visual…) were introduced in ‘83; they’re still popular, maybe even useful.

Best I could find was immersion learning for languages, which spread through schools some time after 1971.

Sometimes I sincerely wonder if our education system was deliberately sabotaged. If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia.

Conquest's 3rd law: The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

There is also the Iowahawk restatement.

It may just be the quality of people who attend and staff education schools. In other countries, admission is highly competitive; in the US, it's close to "we'll take anyone we can get." Smart people in the US have better jobs available than teaching, while it's probably one of the better careers available in other countries. And so we get some of the duller crayons in the box becoming teachers, doing research, and deciding education policy. And, since math and statistics is hard, you get much more emphasis on autoethnography and social theory than empirical research.

‘Those who can’t, teach’- except that American schools actually do very well. Once adjusted for race American schools are the best in the world.

They engage in lots of very expensive boondoggles, yes, and could improve pedagogy, but that’s just normal waste in an institution that is immune from criticism and oversight.

At one of our local courthouses a kid fresh out of law school applied to be a judicial clerk. For those of you unfamiliar, a judicial clerk is a mix of an assistant to the judge, and doing the judge's actual job for him, with the percentages varying with the judge and the clerk. Most of the judicial opinions that form the law of the land are written primarily not by judges in black robes but by anonymous clerks whose names are nowhere in the text.

This guy claimed all kinds of mental disabilities along those lines (ADHD and the gang), and before he even started the job, during the application process he was pointing to various accommodations he would need to function within the role of judicial clerk. He would need extra time on assignments, he claimed to be incapable of following speech and taking notes without a laptop or of engaging in live debate because he couldn't process speech fast enough or something.

To even ask for these things reflects an entire misunderstanding of how work works, of the whole idea of a professional. You don't get extra time on assignments, the assignments exist and you get them done. If you don't complete the work necessary in your allotted hours, you have to finish it outside of your allotted hours. If your allotted hours produce less work than the average worker, you are less valuable than the average worker. At no point in the application process did this young man seem to think of the problem as "I'm going to need to work more hours" but always in terms of "You're going to have to go easy on me." I know it's the government, but still, there's not even the illusion of caring about productivity or value for a dollar.

And what offends me most is to lead with it proudly! As @FtttG says below, Hyprocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. One ought to at least have the decency to be ashamed of being a slow worker, or disabled, and hide it until after one is hired in a cushy government sinecure from which one cannot practically speaking be fired.

I used to struggle with this in law school, the idea of extra time or drugs to help someone focus on legal work strikes me as absurd in a professional school that is explicitly preparing the majority of its students to function through billable hours. It seemed obvious to me that it was good to provide help to kids who needed it in elementary school, but that it should stop by professional school. I didn't recognize how slippery the slope was. Standards must be standardized, or they are useless. People we pretended were good at one level always trickle down to the next level and demand we pretend they are good at that too.

This young man is now shipwrecked, with a professional degree and probably a great deal of debt, and no real way to make money at it except by conning others into "accommodating" him. Left to his own devices, as the mythical solo practitioner with a shingle out, he will need to work absurd hours to achieve a livable income. Working for others, he will be fired repeatedly, or barely tolerated for fear of a lawsuit. That's no kind of life. And I don't know how you pull someone out of it.

We're well past the point of "a bunch of kids in colleges," this is now at the point of taking over the workplace.

I used to struggle with this in law school, the idea of extra time or drugs to help someone focus on legal work strikes me as absurd in a professional school that is explicitly preparing the majority of its students to function through billable hours.

Why are drugs (Adderall etc.?) at all akin to extra time, or generally the problem you discuss? Someone who takes Adderall to complete the job in the allotted time still completes it in the allotted time.

Not that the analogy is perfect, but if anything, the restriction of access to drugs feels more similar to "accommodations" here: rather than letting the law of the jungle do its work and give the job to whoever is willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to do it best and fastest, it artificially levels the playing field for the benefit of those who would not augment their performance with drugs, even if the job to be done suffers for it. Presumably the reasoning is that for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value the undrugged equilibrium higher than the best possible legal work, just as disability accommodations are justified because for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value equity higher than the best possible legal work.

(edit, I see @fmaa made the same point below. Should have refreshed before posting)

To be honest, it was a separate train of thought that was combined in my head incorrectly. Both are manifestations of doctor shopping based grubbing in law school, but you're right, the valence is precisely opposite.

I had a roommate in law school with a prescription for addies, and he started dating a friend of mine 1L year, and right before finals I caught her walk of shaming out of there when I was making Turkish coffee. I of course offered her coffee, she scurried out. My roommate proceeded to tell me that she had asked him if she could buy some adderall off him, and he had said "Oh, you'll find a way to earn it..." and I started laughing and said "Jeez, if y'all were black and lived in Baltimore they'd call this prostitution for amphetamines."

to even ask for these things reflects an entire misunderstanding of how work works, of the whole idea of a professional. You don't get extra time on assignments, the assignments exist and you get them done. If you don't complete the work necessary in your allotted hours, you have to finish it outside of your allotted hours. If your allotted hours produce less work than the average worker, you are less valuable than the average worker. At no point in the application process did this young man seem to think of the problem as "I'm going to need to work more hours" but always in terms of "You're going to have to go easy on me." I know it's the government, but still, there's not even the illusion of caring about productivity or value for a dollar.

A friend in a big city indigent defense office was telling me about the office hiring 2 recently-licensed attorneys who had attended top-10 law schools. Both ended up being unmitigated disasters who could not handle the work (that other attorneys from mediocre schools could handle). It appeared they had been "accommodated" for many years to get by and being given actual work with deadlines, clients, etc. was too much for them.

[There is the suspicion that anyone from a top-10 school applying to a public defense office is not the best from the school, but quite a few students end up doing that (or a prosecution job) to get a few years of trial work and showing they care about the little people or whatever before moving up in the world, so I don't think these two were from the bottom 10% of their schools (and per my friend, they had impressive transcripts/resumes).]

The alarming part of the story is that one went to HR and HR sided with them, resulting in their caseload being reduced and moved to other attorneys. This person is now being paid the same as those other attorneys to do much less work, and because of the way it all went down, all those other attorneys are very aware of everything that happened.

This sets up an unsustainable race to the bottom where every attorney is now incentivized to get a diagnosis and claim a need for accommodations to get less work, and any attorney who does not will end up with much more work. The justice system creaks along rather poorly, and defense offices are usually understaffed already. Requiring twice as many attorneys because caseloads are being cut in half to accommodate them is not practical, and it wouldn't be practical on the prosecution side, either (I haven't heard of it happening, but it seems like a matter of time until the knowledge of claiming a need for accommodation spreads).

People talk about it, but I don't think it has really sunk in for many what the legal system (or other systems) are going to look like when the Boomers/elder Xers are fully gone and they're replaced with people like those I discuss above.

The alarming part of the story is that one went to HR and HR sided with them, resulting in their caseload being reduced and moved to other attorneys. This person is now being paid the same as those other attorneys to do much less work, and because of the way it all went down, all those other attorneys are very aware of everything that happened.

Are you serious? I... didn't think it was possible for lawyers to hate money like this.

Are you serious? I... didn't think it was possible for lawyers to hate money like this.

I am serious, and these are salaried government attorneys, so they aren't hating money. They're getting the same salaries as others to do less work.

Oh! Okay that explains everything. I thought you were talking about a private practice and my head exploded.

I'm confused why you're putting extra time and drugs into the same category here. He can keep taking the drugs for those billable hours.

In fact, I think being against performance enhancing drugs is part of the same confused attitude to work you otherwise decry. Where there's a "proper" way to study/practice law, and doing it on adderall is cheating. Instead of there being an actual service that he's performing with an output/price ratio.

It's "cheating" because the people of X nation don't want to open the door to the Deus Ex world where you have to pay to take the drug for the rest of your natural life or die from being unable to compete with your peers (that can afford it), hence the compact against doing that, and why taking the drug anyway is treated as defection.

Compare "but I can't afford insulin" in the US; while amphetamines are cheaper than that, the next generation of them may not be, in which case a norm that you take them to work might become very costly indeed.

Performance-enhancing drugs can also fuck up your judgement when abused. See DOGE, FTX among many others.

It's less that it's cheating and more that it creates perverse incentives to demand that all employees are on drugs (or that the load is too high for natties). It's why I'd object to performance enhancing drugs, anyway.

Most of the judicial opinions that form the law of the land are written primarily not by judges in black robes but by anonymous clerks whose names are nowhere in the text. (…) To even ask for these things reflects an entire misunderstanding of how work works, of the whole idea of a professional.

I think there's an interesting tension here. If we're looking at the position of judicial clerk as just a menial job within a capitalist economy - there's stuff that needs doing, the market selects for the most efficient person willing to do them for what they're worth - then I get you. But if, de facto, the opinions of judicial clerks genuinely shape the law of the land, then it's clearly unjust for able-bodied fast workers to be over-represented among them. Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.

(Of course, some might argue the problem starts at "judicial legal clerks hired off the street have an outsized influence on the law of the land". Perhaps it would make more sense for anyone with that much power to be elected, or otherwise more clearly accountable to the public; we could then restrict these kinds of disability accommodations to the accountable elected public servants, without needing to provide them for the genuinely politically-irrelevant coffee-fetcher.)

I think there's an interesting tension here. If we're looking at the position of judicial clerk as just a menial job within a capitalist economy - there's stuff that needs doing, the market selects for the most efficient person willing to do them for what they're worth - then I get you. But if, de facto, the opinions of judicial clerks genuinely shape the law of the land, then it's clearly unjust for able-bodied fast workers to be over-represented among them. Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.

Kinder and better are at tension with respect to laws concerning disability accommodations.

Certainly I can see why someone would think that. Personally I believe that kindness is the overriding moral imperative governing human behavior; therefore insofar as laws serve to constrain and standardize human behavior, they should strive to be kind before anything else. The only thing that you should trade kindness against when designing laws, IMO, is the long-term survival of the legal system itself - which might apply to things like violent crime and even immigration, but surely not disability accommodations.

Kindness, even among other vague descriptors, seems like an exceedingly terrible terminal goal to have. Kindness could justify just about any atrocity, terrible system of governance, or scheme. Is it kind to allow a third generation of imbecile, allow colonizers to continue to poison mother earth with their existence, or even to fail to secure a future for a people?

You could say that you are talking about net kindness, but that doesn't solve any issue because any unkindness can be weighed as worth the cost, and humans are notorious for not weighting the unkindness done to others against kindness done to them fairly.

Kindness runs into the problem that kindness to one person is often unkindness to another. Which means your system devolves to who/whom.... who is deserving of kindness and to whom it can be told that they can just suck it up.

kindness to one person is often unkindness to another

Not necessarily.

Some comments above I wrote some suggested accommodations in school where one is being allowed to return assignments late but reducing significant amount of points for that. How is that unkind to people who return theirs in time? They get better grade while in turn the late returner doesn't get an automatic fail.

Kindness to one person may be unkindness to another but this isn't remotely axiomatic like it's treated here.

The teacher/TA that is doing the grading would likely prefer to have all their work ready at once rather than piecemeal as it trickles in, especially because they will often have more than one class to grade and those classes have many sequential assignments so added time for one pushes into the time for the next.

It might not even be kind to the student asking for more time, as the extra time they take for this assignment/chapter bleeds into the time they have available for the next one. Even extra test time eats into the time they have available for other classes, relaxation, and extra-curriculars.

Not necessarily, but frequently enough to be a serious problem that doesn't get much attention and thus sabotages the goodwill necessary in cases where it isn't.

You could spend the GDP on disability accommodations and still leave the disabled complaining. Such is the path to ruin.

So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they? We can’t have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there. -- Senator Roman L. Hruska (who, unsurprisingly, did not persuade his colleagues on this nomination)

I disagree. I think smarter people do a better job for everyone. I think it is incumbent upon all entrusted with Other People's Money to spend it well, and that means getting as much work for as little as you can pay. Anyway the subset of laws related to disability is small, hearing the voices of the disabled can be achieved through things like Amicus briefs in the few decisive cases. But at any rate, we should probably cut off this thread of argument because I don't want to do that annoying thing where I provide additional details from my real world example that I didn't provide initially in order to refute your points which you made in good faith based on your limited knowledge of the situation, and I feel like that's going to become inevitable fast.

A little learning is a dangerous thing ; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring : There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

Sheer intelligence is very valuable, but it's not actually that important in the bulk of jobs (although there's a clear floor that you want people to be above). Diligence and consistency, paired with a moderatively above average level of intelligence, seems like the sweet spot for most jobs. I'm not sure the legal system really needs brilliant people to implement correctly; and, to the extent it does, that's a failing of the legal system.

Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.

Your use of the word "kinder" is rather a transparent applause light. I don't doubt that disabled lawmakers would be more likely to pass laws or make legal judgements which will favour the interests of disabled people (at least in the short-term), but I'm not at all persuaded that this would be beneficial for society at large.

I mean, sure, if a country which passed a law which made it illegal for an employer to fire anyone with a disability, I guess this would be "kinder" to any currently gainfully employed disabled people. But I would have a hard time describing such a law as "better" legislation than what a reasonable person would come up with.

I actually used "kinder" as well as "better" specifically to be transparent about the fact that I consider kindness an inherently valuable quality for a law to possess, for moral reasons, separately from other ways in which a policy can be "good" for society (i.e. instrumentally). Because I wanted to avoid people saying I was begging the question by simply saying "better" and taking it for granted that kinder laws are better. I'm at a loss as to how else I could have communicated my point at this point.

Because I wanted to avoid people saying I was begging the question by simply saying "better" and taking it for granted that kinder laws are better.

That's exactly how your original comment came off to me.

Also you seem to have an unorthodox definition of "kind".

But if, de facto, the opinions of judicial clerk genuinely shape the law of the land, then it's clearly unjust for able-bodied fast workers to be over-represented among them. Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.

This is not, in fact, clearly the more just outcome. Your argument is circular; you're assuming that "kinder" disability accommodations are desirable and using that to argue that judicial clerks should obtain those accommodations.

Not really. My preferred policy would be for disabled people to get guaranteed allocations, which they get to keep even if they then choose to be proactive and get extra money from gainful employment (at which they would not get these kinds of accommodations). This is noticeably different from the accommodations which I believe should be provided to democratically-elected members of the government so as to allow disabled people an equal shot at shaping government policy. I have no doubt you disagree with this, but I don't think it's circular - both halves simply flow from the same underlying premise of "kindness is good".

Do you think this young man ever had the practical chance of having a normal, productive life in an alternate universe?

I mean if he could finish law school he could have a nice career as an accountant or teacher or something.

With ADHD and other mental disabilities?

Even assuming they’re real, which they may not be, there’s plenty of jobs that would be OK for his conditions.

Probably, but not as a lawyer. And once you are so far down that path, you've taken on a lot of financial-temporal-moral debt that creates path dependance.

If he had the ability to finish law school at all, he has the ability to do some job in the economy. But rather than looking for a profession that he could perform well in, he was allowed to drift into a profession despite failing (under even circumstances) every test designed to filter for the talent required to perform well. Now he's likely in significant debt, he's three years older, and if he tries to do anything else it's understood that he failed as a lawyer.

Someone who can't function within time limits is never going to do well in a business built on billable hours. A lower pressure role, or one where having one great idea every week is better than doing 50 hours of competent drudge work might be fine.

As a lawyer, there's plenty of smaller niches lawyers can fall into that don't go bonkers over billables in the same way the big firms do. For example, plaintiff's-side firms doing most of their work on contingency, or in-house regulatory compliance practice work.

I had a friend who I know worked at small firm in a pretty small 'big city' doing what sounded to me like paralegal work (filing forms on evictions, repossessions to the court). She said she made $50k a year but liked it because she didn't have to get clients. I think she got her grandma to foot the bill for law school (and wasn't paying her back any interest). Lived at home, and just consumed media and hated Trump, would wonder why she had no friends and would call me with grievances from her childhood.

I knew a guy who worked at a specialist firm which almost exclusively dealt with gas station franchising and environmental cleanup/compliance work. Didn't make BigLaw money, but did a lot better than $50k/yr. There's lots of weird niches of law you can get into and pick up specialist work without stressing about billables. Not saying that having craptastic time management will be a good thing, but it won't be as automatically fatal as it would be in BigLaw, Insurance Defense, etc.

People need to be weeded out as fast possible. Relaxing standards push off the ultimate failure until after someone is pot committed.

I was real excited about an education post, but I'm finding this a bit incoherent.

Kids lack any internal or external motivation to learn, discipline is basically forbidden, and any mark under 85 is cause for meetings and interventions and BS special ed plans. Many teachers don't think this is a problem

Are you an educational determinist? Can a somewhat-stupid student earn good grades? Should they? If so, how? Say nothing about the ridiculous assertion that many teachers somehow don't care about their students learning. I'd say rather than them not caring, teachers have been taught tools that don't work very well and gaslit into believing that they do. See: "inquiry-based learning" and its plague on math. Most observers around here claim that the real problem is disconnected parents, so it's strange to see that you seem to be claiming that the real problem is that the parents are too connected to modern educational trends.

So either the upper class families are fortunate enough to have the means to ensure their kids get the help they need while less affluent students are struggling unassisted, or they're gaming the system to inflate their marks when the most common grade is already A. You know in your heart which one it is.

Obviously both are true...? You know better than to use this strawman/false dichotomy.

The "best work" that this system produces is never good- work expands to fill the time allotted, so if you were going to write a C+ essay in an hour, and now you have two hours, it now takes you twice as long to be just as mediocre.

So is extra time unfair? Or merely a poor use of time-resources? I'm willing to buy the latter, but you aren't doing anything to justify the former. Under this stated opinion, extra time "should" be useless, long-term. I think that's your point, that head-burying is more trendy and desirable than black-and-white analysis and accurate grades, and it's certainly true that grade inflation has accompanies lowering state test scores relative to some previous cadres (although IIRC the data isn't super compelling so far that this recent mini-generation is, say, worse off educationally than those of the 80's, but I haven't dug that deep) but claiming that extra time doesn't produce better work is a little misguided. It objectively does. Better scores at least, for certain, in many if not most cases.

Modern neuroscience seems to be suggesting that kids actually all learn in similarly optimal ways but at different rates, and sometimes this is true on a per-subject basis too. If true, this actually, ironically even, suggests that "extra time" in fact be the better solution. A solution best paired with differentiated instruction of the truest type: leveling and creating tiered classes that move at different speeds.

To say nothing about intrinsic or external learning motivation. As far as I can tell, this is mostly a mystery still to everyone including the neuroscientists. All we really know for sure is that there's a lot of wisdom to the general idea that people rise or fall to the level of the expectations put on them. And that includes self-expectations. As a matter of fact, identity is a major driver of human behavior. I think you're insisting that this is a fragile foundation, but I don't think that's a widely supported view. Rather, most experts seem to think that rather than kick against the pricks, it's better simply to focus on which aspects of self-identity are most useful and least problematic.

At any rate, I require some clarification:

  • Are tests useless or accurate measures of student learning? How entangled are these scores with raw talent?

  • How involved and/or harmful are parents' efforts at the moment? Are most too engaged in the wrong ways, or unengaged entirely, or what?

  • Do teachers (and/or administrators) care about learning, or just about the day-care aspects of stuff? Do they even care about that?

  • Are wealthy, non-stupid recipients of accommodations actually hurting themselves, or is such hurt limited to vague psychological hypotheses of yours? Why should we care if so? Or is everyone being hurt, via some unspecified coddling (presumably 'good unearned grades')?

  • What do you actually want to see from schooling? Better inculcated mindsets? Civic mindedness? Raw educational attainment? Good test scores? College preparedness? Career aptitude? Plenty of options, or fewer but more-reliable options?

-Even mid-quality tests under universal intellectual standards (so, not counting braille, etc) are accurate measures of both student learning and student rank. Society (this includes teachers and students) expects both measures from schools. When even a small number of people get special intellectual standards (different time constraints, faster writing tools, someone to read the questions to them, etc) even the best tests no longer measure either of the things they are supposed to measure. "But schools are designed to teach conformity, man"- well, they're not even doing that if everyone gets special treatment.

-Parents are deeply involved in grade-grubbing (the trappings of success) but uninvolved in actual education (the substance of success). A parent who was worried that their kid wasn't learning chemistry would either take responsibility for the kids chemistry knowledge and find/be a better teacher, or demand that the school clean up its act. Very few parents are out there demanding more educational rigor, and we admittedly can't tell how many are silently tutoring their kids, but there are certainly lots of parents who have taken a third path and demanded that the chemistry test be made easier for their own personal kid. This often requires expensive diagnosis shopping (though it takes less and less shopping every year) and wild amounts of time spent in meetings and consultations, and the effect of all this expense is to produce the trappings for good parenting ("I'm Serious(tm) about education") instead of the substance of good parenting ("I learned chemistry to help my kid"). And of course this shouldn't be necessary, the school should handle it, but here we are and this is what parents have done. And of course your kid's personal worth as a human doesn't depend on his grade 12 chem mark, but then why are we trying everything (except learning chemistry) to make that number go up?

-Administrators do not care about learning, hands down. If any learning should accidentally occur in one of their schools, they're fine with it, but not at the cost of graduation rates or parent complaints, which are the two measures on which they are formally and informally evaluated. You can hope for some sleeper cell of serious teachers to worm their way into the upper ranks, but the admin system actually does select for conformity, so the people in charge already know which of their former colleagues are the good ones (interpreted either way, the result is the same).

-Most teachers also don't care about learning, even if they once did. Teachers are mostly women, and the modal woman cares even less than the modal man about learning stuff, especially academic stuff. Those women who achieve academic success are usually motivated by approval and they bring that model with them when they become teachers, so you get girls with straight As because their notes are neatly written (a kid last week was explaining to me how she should actually be really good at math and, as evidence of this, showed me her magifnicent notes. She didn't understand them, but they were beautiful.) Where this is not the case, among both women and men, teachers are often motivated by an interest in the subject (which 99% of students do not share) or an actual desire to see students learn (which 99% of students do not do in any appreciable way past grade 2). As you find that kids don't care about your subject, or aren't learning it, or both, you either quit, kill yourself, double down and become the Mean Teacher (me), or redefine your job to preserve your ego. You tell yourself that actually you can look anything up on Wikipedia now, so what really matters is critical thinking, and so you just talk about DEI all day. Or you tell yourself that these kids' parents are all bigots and will abuse them if they find out their kids are gay, so you go fishing for closeted gay kids so you can be their confidante. When it turns out that there are very few gay kids, you go all in trans stuff, etc. Or you say that your real job is to spark a love of learning, so you have the kids in Gr 10 advanced English read Harry Potter with no actual demands just so they see that reading is fun. If you ever crack down and try to make the kids learn, you can't talk about DEI, they won't think of you as Cool, they won't think learning is fun, etc. "But learning can be fun!" Only up to a certain point- after that it takes effort, and effort feels really bad if you aren't used to it. Kids These Days are not used to it.

-Wealthy, non-stupid kids gaming the system are hurting themselves a bit, because most of them lack the self-awareness of the ones interviewed in the article. The average accommodation-demanding student truly believes that their poor academic performance is excused by their test anxiety, ADHD, or whatever else. They believe that they really are just as smart/driven as actually successful students, they just haven't been given "a chance to show what they know." But if you got into Harvard, someone will see to it that you are looked after. The bigger worry are kids like the law clerk mentioned in this thread, who doesn't get that his test results were just a measure, not the actual goal, and doesn't see how the real work isn't gameable like school was.

-Everyone is hurt by this, though, because it encourages insecure narcissism during the prime years when you should be growing out of it. You really do have to read TLP to get a full explanation of why, but if you believe your success depends entirely on the efforts of the people around you, and happiness is a form of success, then you will make unreasonable demands of your wife, kids, job, friends, etc and become a hell to be around. This will make you solitary and isolated and cause you to think that if you could just get people to do what you want, you'd be happy. But they didn't do what you wanted before, so why would it work now? Well, you'll become a different person. But since change is hard and you were actively robbed of the opportunity to substantially change while you were growing up, you will instead change personas. So you start taking roids to make up for your lack of rizz (RizzNotRoids would be a good username) or you buy a bunch of Funko pops to feel like part of a community, or you get botox because pretty girls have friends, or whatever. It's bad, and it doesn't work, and it's widespread. My contention in the post was that this is the biggest problem with grade inflation and broken schools- it actively encourages this mindset when it used to shake you out of it.

-I want schools to deliver value proportionate to their cost. They will not be abolished, so they should be reformed. They can be reformed in 5 ways:

(1) Students can man up and either accept their results or put in the work to improve them instead of making bs excuses to get their parents off their backs. This will never happen.

(2) Parents can act like they actually believe either of their two claims: That marks are not a meaningful measure of anything (this frees the school to use them to accurately measure things by stopping the grade-grubbing) or that getting good results is really important (which would translate into pressure on kids and schools to actually deliver on learning). This may happen, but it's unlikely that the culture will shift all at once without some external force being applied, and it's hard to imagine what that force could be. Russian dominance in the space-race, I guess?

(3)Teachers could grow a backbone and just stop giving in to parental pressure. Grade-grubbers grub grades because grubbing gets the grades grubbed, and this includes accommodations. There are lots of ways to increase friction in the accommodation system. If a kid demands double time on quizzes, have a quiz every day- now it is chronologically impossible for him to have double time. If a kid needs someone to type for him (very common) do everything orally and see how he likes that. If a kid says "Look, I'm not trying to play the special ed card here . . ." point out that that's exactly what they're doing (this is amazingly effective). This has the advantage that no formal systemic changes are required- we got here by teachers informally taking the path of least resistance over and over for many years. It has the disadvantage that teachers are mostly very agreeable, hate conflict, and don't think the current situation is a big problem, so they will never all spontaneously coordinate to do this.

(4) Administrators could do the same thing. But they are even more filtered for allegiance to the current system, so this won't happen.

(5) The government could actually impose standards. Curricula and codes of education, as they are written, are usually pretty strict. The legal basis for a tougher ed system is there but governments have permitted too much drift, mainly because of law suits and human-rights legislation-from-the-bench. There are workaround to all this, especially in Canada where nearly all rights avowedly exist at the pleasure of the monarchy-inspired state (see sec. 1 and 33 of the CCRF). Politically, this would be feasible if you circled around incompetent teachers' unions for a few years (easy to do) and then proposed that we actually make those clowns do their jobs instead of (or in addition to) trying to get rid of this or that gay book. You could spin accommodations and fluff classes as a ploy by teachers to paper over bad teaching and connect accommodations to grift on the part of the system, rather than on the part of parents and students. Even though this would require ways to prevent teachers from gaming results, you can just decide to do that, whereas solutions 1-4 all depend mainly on hope. So this is what I want from schools.

You can't count on universities or the private sector to create their own exams, because cash-strapped universities will take anyone now and the private sector has revealed its preference for low-salaries at the cost of almost all else, so most jobs would require a trivial test. "If that's all most jobs require, why make schools do all this stuff?"- Because schools aren't going away and they cost a fortune, so we might as well try to get an educated population for the money. If they do go away, or become really cheap, that changes the entire debate completely.

This often requires expensive diagnosis shopping (though it takes less and less shopping every year) and

Correct me if I’m wrong, but while learning deficit diagnoses are still cartoonishly easy to get, they’ve actually gotten harder since they entered the popular consciousness in the bush era. ADHD is still almost always a garbage bag diagnosis but in theory it now actually requires at least some supporting evidence, when in the past it did not.

I think the first important thing that absolutely has to happen is that you have to be willing to take the parents out of the loop. If the kid is flunking, then either he improves such that he learns the material or he fails and repeats the material until he can do the work. No more requests to make it easier, no cheats from ADA-diagnosed fake disability, no retests, no open book/note, no extra credit or participation points (all of which are just dressing up the urge to remove rigor so your kids pass). Either Johnny reads at grade level and learns his math to grade level or he doesn’t pass.

Second, I think we have to get back to basics here. Reading and maths and science long before any other fluff. Read real books, learn to do maths, learn how to do physics and chemistry. Personally, im very much in favor of the classical model of education, but I wouldn’t oppose the modern system if the kids had managed to read adult level literature by the time they graduated high school and were able to do advanced algebra.

Semi-seriously, it would be funny (and not really wrong, at some level) for people to start suggesting we adopt Japanese or Korean schooling methods because they show better outcomes as the mirror to everyone suggesting European-style healthcare systems for the same reasons. And part of that is that, as I understand, their systems are structured more like you're suggesting.

Although there are plenty of other concerns (fertility, for example) in adopting that wholesale.

As with the healthcare systems, those Japanese or Korean schooling methods have some pretty nasty drawbacks of their own (as you note). And I think historically when the US attempts to copy them we end up (temporarily) with the worst of both worlds -- kids grind but learn nothing. The Sputnik Shock worked better for primary and secondary education, but the resulting National Defense Education Act also set us up for the student loan crisis.

Russian dominance in the space-race, I guess?

One would think the prospect of Chinese dominance in the AGI race would be the present-day equivalent, but, well, gestures broadly at everything

Yeah it seems like OP is bouncing back and forth between the signalling and capital formation models of schooling as needed.

  1. Tests in both models should be useful. For signalling it lets you differentiate. For capital formation it lets you know if the teachers are doing their job well. So ruining testing in any way is a bad move by education.
  2. Parental engagement with education seems tied to wealth and class. With the middle class being engaged to some degree, and everyone else involved to a lesser degree.
  3. Teachers unions seem to mostly care about the quality and pay of the job itself. Administrators seem most concerned with the day care aspects. Individual teachers care to carrying degrees about the education itself. The level of care and ability to push education outcomes makes for good or bad teachers. But it doesn't seem that there is a systemic force within education that cares about education, while there are at least two forces pushing against education for other goals they follow.
  4. Coddling is bad for the recipient and neutral for everyone else in the capital formation model of schooling. In the signalling model of education coddling is bad for everyone else, and good for the recipient. So the people asking for coddling seem to be treating education as a signalling exercise. Coddling is at best zero sum, and at worst negative for the recipient.

As a parent of young kids I have a wishlist for schooling:

  1. Rigorous Testing. Tests are either letting me know teachers are doing their job. Or fairly measuring relative ability and achievement. It would be best for me if my kids had an advantage, but it seems the current environment makes you jump through a bunch of hoops to acquire those advantages. I'd rather just let no one get the advantage. This hasn't come up much yet for my kids, but the stories I've heard have me weary.
  2. Consistent child care. Yes it is a day care to some extent. But it is also the worst day care ever for working parents. We are almost halfway through the school year and there have been maybe three full weeks of school, i.e. no half days, teacher work days, holidays, elections, etc. There is an after school program but the wait-list for it is twice as long as the number of spots available in the program itself. Schools also completely failed this function during COVID.
  3. Learning progress tracking. I'd like to know where my child is at with math, reading, and anything else the school thinks is valuable to teach. I'm happy with how the school is doing this right now, no complaints. I just want to make sure it doesn't go away.
  4. Progress relevant education. After you spend all the time tracking where a student is at you should know what they can be learning. If they know addition you can stop teaching addition and move onto subtraction. The school mostly fails at this. Large class sizes and teachers with big hearts means that the class teaches to the lowest common denominator. My kid has complained about being bored of learning about patterns and shapes, the class has apparently been learning about them for three months. I apparently need to get my kid into the gifted programs as soon as possible to avoid the boredom issues. But that is apparently something that requires active parental involvement, but it should just be default based on where the kids education progress is at (which the school knows because they are doing a good job of tracking it).
  5. Less state religion. Recycling, environmental worship, diversity worship, nice little lies about how government works, etc. I know this is least likely to happen. It's what you get when you have government funded schools. But this is my wishlist, and it would be nice if I didn't have to worry about them teaching my children crap.

So…is it not the maximally uncharitable but nevertheless correct take on the entire education system that its sole relevant social role is to ensure that

  • schoolchildren are put under official supervision during the day so that their parents won’t have to worry about them
  • working-class children receive their minimal level of socialization in high school so that they form social circles and pair-bond after graduating
  • middle-class and upper-class children form the necessary social networks in college that enable them to preserve their social status later in life and also preferably compel them to pair-bond after graduating

?

The modern education system (specifically, post-Cold War) exists solely as a make-work program.

Actually, there's a lot of make-work programs, but this one is the largest of its kind. It works so well that most people don't even understand it is one, and will actually defend its secondary aims as if the secondary aim, education, was the intention.

(And to be fair to more industrious countries- the US in particular- it can work far better at that secondary aim than is commonly given credit. After all, it would otherwise be mind-numbingly boring.)

It takes a massive chunk bite out of the least productive part of the unnecessariat: all children, all young adults up to around 20 or so, and a significant fraction of college-educated women. The social fiction that this is important is load-bearing to a country's stability due to the sheer size of the cross-section of the population warehoused there- if it went out, recession would instantly follow. There's not enough work to employ these people (we've been punting on this problem since the 1930s) and we have enough food for everyone; making them feel useful keeps society stable.

Oh, no, you can get less charitable while being more correct. An old Eliezer Yudkowsky quote I saved:

Education is not secretly intended to turn adolescents into conforming factory workers. If 'they' were trying to produce factory workers 'they' would take advantage of elementary modern research on conditioning, reinforcement, and shaping to produce much better factory workers, rather than making conformity so unpleasant and unrewarding. If schools were actually trying to teach things they would take advantage of modern research on spaced repetition. If grade schools and high schools were secretly babysitting institutions, they would offer more flexible hours. If colleges had been designed by employers to weed out anyone with trouble submitting to authority, then there would be harsher enforcement of drug rules or more prohibitive sexual regulations as tests; as it stands, many students who gain a college credential will still have trouble submitting in a workplace. The educational process has no agenda, hidden or otherwise. The overall process of going to college might have the intention of gaining a piece of paper, but the actual day-to-day activities of college are not being optimized for any intended consequence, by anyone.

There are a lot of relevant social roles played by various educational institutions. There are no relevant social roles being played as well as they could be by these institutions. It's not exactly that nobody is trying to optimize for any particular consequence, though, it's just that handling any one of their roles perfectly well would conflict with a different role being played for a different interest group, and trying to optimize for both at once would interfere with the desires of a third interest group, and so on.

I think he misses the part that is the point at this point: The point of the education system is to employ educators. To be specific to employ educators, a slightly competent group of employees, at far above market rates (when accounting for competency, hours, and benefits). All the other parts are carrots, sticks, and rhetoric. The stick is the childcare. Childcare is expensive (even in public schools, but parents don't pay the full cost), hard to procure on short notice, etc. Thus teacher's strikes are overwhelmingly painful to parents, and thus they are very good at succeeding. The rhetoric is teaching. The cope is weeding out bad employees.

Mandatory public education seems like a big Chesterton's Fence.

… except that in Chesterton’s original fence analogy, the naive reformer did not know for what purpose the fence was originally built. In this case, we do know, to some extent: we in the US have a bastardized mélange of rationales with the Prussian model of education as the basal substrate, plus a healthy dose of American civic religion, daycare services for working parents, and concessions to public sector unions and the DEI commissariat on top.

There is much truth to the Big Yud quote above, about how modern schooling isn’t optimized for any of the usually-stated goals (viz. the production of manual laborers, well-informed and civic-minded voters, intelligent and conformist office drones). But this is because the system has been pulled in different and mutually-incompatible directions over the years as the fortunes of the various interest groups involved have waxed and waned.

Returning to your point: Chesterton himself was OK with fence-removal in some cases, provided that the original purpose of the fence was known, as indeed it is. And moreover, we have decades of experience now with tearing down this particular fence in gradual, incremental, localized ways (viz. homeschooling, unschooling, and certain private or charter schools), which incidentally is exactly how Chesterton would advise us to begin the process of doing away with the fence.

But if you tell your kid, and doctors tell your kid, and the school tells your kid, and TikTok tells your kid (this, to your kid, is tantamount to the entire world telling him), that actually he's really smart even though he doesn't do anything smart, and that actually what needs to happen is for the world around him to change (=accommodations) then you are encouraging a mindset which life should actually be beating out of him.

This idea of "you are smart even though you don't do anything smart" reminds me of a book Freddie deBoer reviewed, Amy Lutz's Chasing the Intact Mind. From reading the review, Lutz's thesis appears to be that the parents of severely mentally disabled children often seem to believe (explicitly or implicitly) that, while their non-verbal autistic or cerebral palsied etc. child gives no outward appearance of engaging in high-level cognition of any kind, somewhere inside there's an "intact" mind which is fully conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level reasoning. Their desperation to communicate with this "intact mind" leads them down a range of garden paths, such as pseudoscientific nonsense like facilitated communication: a technique wherein a non-verbal person can purportedly communicate through an intermediary. Countless studies have demonstrated that facilitated communication is bunk, the product of wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect: the non-verbal person is effectively being used as a Ouija board. The belief in an "intact mind" residing somewhere inside the body of a non-verbal or even vegetative person amounts to a modern form of mind-body dualism.

(Some people might be tempted to point to the existence of people with locked-in syndrome, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby, as a counter-example. The difference here is that Bauby was unambiguously capable of high-level cognition prior to the stroke which caused his condition, living an entirely independent life; and after the stroke his communication did not need to be "facilitated" in the manner described above. Contrast this with a child who has never given any indication of higher-level brain function.)

I wonder if there's a less extreme version of the same phenomenon going on here. Much as proponents of the "intact mind" believe that every human being is equally conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level cognition, and some people just need more accommodations to express themselves than others — perhaps by the same token there are people who believe that everyone is born equally intelligent, and some people just need more accommodations to express that intelligence than others (or they're only intelligent in a nonstandard domain unrelated to verbal or numerical reasoning).

There are several obvious retorts to this worldview:

  • If Bob takes three hours to do what Alice can do in two; or if Bob can score a C in an exam provided he is allowed to sit it in a quiet room containing only himself and an invigilator, while Alice can ace it while sitting in a noisy exam hall surrounded by hundreds of her classmates — then Alice just is more intelligent than Bob, almost by definition.
  • "Multiple intelligences" strikes me as something of a motte-and-bailey argument. No one disputes that some people are bad at maths and good at music, or shape-rotators but not wordcels. I think the degree to which talent in one domain is orthogonal to talent in other domains has been vastly overstated: I think you would have a very hard time locating someone who scores in the 90th percentile of numerical reasoning but the 10th percentile of verbal reasoning. (The whole concept seems very prone to Berkson's paradox.) Likewise, we can debate how many distinct "intelligences" there really are: while social skills are definitely a thing, I'm sceptical of how useful a category "emotional intelligence" is, and I've even seen straight-faced claims that "spiritual intelligence" is a meaningful concept in an undergrad psychology textbook. But even if we grant that all of the proposed intelligences really exist and are not strongly correlated with one another (such that you can be good at one and bad at another): the law of averages nonetheless dictates that there are bound to be people who are unintelligent on every possible axis. Bad with numbers, bad with words, can't sing, physically uncoordinated, lacking in social skills, lacking in self-awareness and so on and so forth. I say "the law of averages dictates" like I'm describing some statistical certainty I've never personally observed, but obviously if you want to see the kind of person I'm describing, you just need to walk down to your nearest school for developmentally disabled children. None of these children will be winning Nobels, Grammys or Olympic gold medals any time soon, no matter how many accommodations we make for them.

From reading the review, Lutz's thesis appears to be that the parents of severely mentally disabled children often seem to believe (explicitly or implicitly) that, while their non-verbal autistic or cerebral palsied etc. child gives no outward appearance of engaging in high-level cognition of any kind, somewhere inside there's an "intact" mind which is fully conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level reasoning. Their desperation to communicate with this "intact mind" leads them down a range of garden paths, such as pseudoscientific nonsense like facilitated communication: a technique wherein a non-verbal person can purportedly communicate through an intermediary. Countless studies have demonstrated that facilitated communication is bunk, the product of wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect: the non-verbal person is effectively being used as a Ouija board. The belief in an "intact mind" residing somewhere inside the body of a non-verbal or even vegetative person amounts to a modern form of mind-body dualism.

The parallels with Western racial progressivism came to mind.

Low-achievement minorities can attain the same outcomes as whites if we just dedicate evermore money, resources, opportunities, toward them. If said low-achievement minorities don't attain the same level of achievement despite our efforts, it just means we need to dedicate moar, or perhaps that they have Other Ways of Knowing not captured by racist evaluations such as test scores.

Exactly, it's blank-slate thinking all the way down.

One might have thought that even progressives would be willing to concede that a non-verbal child who is physically unable to feed himself or use the toilet is not as intelligent as Albert Einstein – but apparently not, according to Lutz.

I think you would have a very hard time locating someone who scores in the 90th percentile of numerical reasoning but the 10th percentile of verbal reasoning.

I recently indulged in a little smack-talk about how Math majors have higher SAT verbal scores than English majors, but now it's bothering me that I don't even know what the correlation is between SAT math and verbal scores ... and I'm not even sure how to find out! Google searches and AI summaries seem to be so polluted with stat questions about correlations in hypothetical SAT results that I can't quickly find anything with results for the correlation in actual SAT results. Even the College Board's annual report, which is at least statistically literate enough to define and report standard deviations for each subtest, doesn't report the correlation between subtests. They have other reports of correlations between paper and digital SATs, between SAT results and future college grades... They'll even report separate correlations of subtest scores with other tests and with HS GPA without mentioning the subtests' correlation with each other!

Well wait I do find this: A report from Connecticut estimates a 0.89-0.9 correlation based on an observed 0.82-0.85 correlation. N=1,343 but I'll take it. Then with the bivariate normal distribution CDF from Octave/Matlab, I ask for 0.1-bvncdf([norminv(0.1, 0, 1) -norminv(0.1, 0, 1)], [0 0], [1 0.9; 0.9 1]), which is ... 1.5e-10? About one person in seven billion? (as opposed to the one person in a hundred we'd get if there was no correlation). If I go with that 0.82 correlation I still only get one person in 2 million, so that kind of test score would probably be a thing that's happened before, but only because the kid was having a lucky day with math and bad luck with reading simultaneously, not because you'd expect to see a score like that again on a retest.

Of course SAT scores aren't actually a Gaussian distribution, but I think that thought experiment still strongly suggests you're right, and anyway there's no way we're finding data with higher moments. Even if we got our hands on raw data, I'd bet that a kid with 650+ math and sub-380 reading is much more likely to be a recent immigrant who's still struggling with English, not someone who's actually got poor verbal reasoning skills in general.

Among a more range-restricted sample set, and likely even more affected by the low-quant ceiling and high-quant low-verbal foreign test-takers than the SAT, the GRE still reports a Quant-Verbal correlation of 0.45.

Not only among this sample is the Quant-Verbal correlation not distinctly negative as would be wish-casted by those who propose a tradeoff between supposed various intelligences—it's Noticeably positive, despite the wishes of those who hope there are multiple intelligences and that stat-points are equally distributed across intelligences. For many Westerners, especially Americans, there are some headwinds to admitting that some people are smarter than others, much less that some groups of people are smarter, on average, than other groups of people.

Available in the technical manual appendix:

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-suite-assessments-technical-manual-appendix-pt-1.pdf

Page 136, Table A-6.9.1.

Found via Gemini. Interestingly, I'm told it drops significantly for students who attend elite schools, to around 0.6, due to restriction of range effects.

"Multiple intelligences" strikes me as something of a motte-and-bailey argument. No one disputes that some people are bad at maths and good at music, or shape-rotators but not wordcels.

My attitude towards claims of different forms of intelligence is that it is obviously true on its face, but that one can safely assume that when one is talking to someone claiming that they have a "different" form of intelligence than the ones that can be measured they probably don't rate highly in any form of intelligence.

Other forms of intelligence have their observable markers. The person with great emotional intelligence has a ton of friends, is a great salesman, can start a conversation with anyone off the street. The person with great spiritual intelligence is one who is always moral, a holy man who always does the right thing and knows the right thing to do, a saint. Someone with artistic talent produces art. I've known men who could barely read, but possessed some kind of innate mechanical ability to fix anything. People who truly possess these talents are quick to acknowledge that they are dumb, their talents and the rewards thereof provide the recompense for their stupidity.

By contrast, you have the person who loudly proclaims their emotional intelligence, such a person almost certainly lacks emotional intelligence as that is not a very emotionally intelligent thing to say to people. The person who talks about their intense charisma but has no friends, or the person who speaks of their spirituality but is a bad person. Or the worst of the worst: street smarts, common sense. The number of abject failures who crow about their common sense is a clear indictment of the concept, if it exists it clearly has limited value! And as a country bumpkin, I was eternally treated in my younger years to college friends telling me I lacked "street smarts," which always amounted to some kind of useless local knowledge at best, and just urban myths at worst.

I can say that different forms of intelligence exist from personal experience, in that I consistently rate much higher on any classic test that measures intelligence than I function in day to day life, I overperform on tests. I'm a mediocre mechanic, even though I would trounce anyone at the dealership in an LSAT; and I could never cut hair even if my IQ qualifies me for the job. But when one claims all the forms of intelligence that can't be measured, and has no evidence to back it up, it's easy to dismiss them as a liar.

Or the worst of the worst: street smarts, common sense.

I don't know man. I have always spent majority of my time among high and above high intelligence people (or at least people doing well in fields that put serious cognitive load on the person) - and some of them quite easily fall for scams, cons, ideologies, mlm or flat out inability at a glance to figure out some danger.

There is some naivety in some people that the life must beat out of them and for a lot of people of the scholarly kind due to variety of reasons it comes late.

My own mental model of people who are very smart in STEM fields is that they will have ridiculous crank-tier beliefs about other topics. Isaac Newton's obsession with hidden codes in the Bible is basically the Ur example of this.

It's not that I disdain the concept of common sense or street smarts, or that I don't believe in the book smart genius who is a babe in the woods in life.

It's that I find that stating out loud, constantly, boasting, identifying that one is "street smart" instead of "book smart" is poorly correlated or even anti-correlated with actual street smarts. The people I know who brag about their street smarts are often just as if not more likely to fall constantly for scams, cons, flimflams etc. The perpetual victims in my life, the ones who are always buying the wrong car or dating the wrong woman or telling me about some magic product they bought from a weird website the lowers their electricity bill using technology developed by Nikola Tesla, they are exactly the people telling me they aren't book-smart but they have common sense.

So assess people based on the visible evidence that results from their intelligence, not based on their claims. For common sense, that looks like somebody who runs their life well. Someone who doesn't fall for scams, who always knows the score, who always gets a deal, who has a guy for that, a contact over there, a trick for getting things done. That guy has street smarts. The guy who claims he has street smarts, he is most typically falling back on the way of identifying himself that people won't call him out on the way they would book smarts. Always check for receipts.

We have a word for genuine street smarts- wisdom. You’ll notice these people rarely call themselves, or are described as, wise.

There’s definitely wise men who are not so good at math or books. And there’s definitely math whizzes and literary geniuses who are not so wise. But the first group doesn’t tend to use the word ‘street smarts’.

By contrast, you have the person who loudly proclaims their emotional intelligence, such a person almost certainly lacks emotional intelligence as that is not a very emotionally intelligent thing to say to people.

True, and weirdly enough, these people bear a strong familial resemblance to those people who seem extremely invested in their IQ score or MENSA membership, as a substitute for their paucity of actual intellectual achievements. Genuinely smart people don't care about their IQ score or what fruity little club they're a member of: they demonstrate their intelligence through their actions.

Or the worst of the worst: street smarts, common sense.

My favourite critique of this concept came from Malcolm in the Middle:

Ida: Your pretty words don't hide your fear.

Malcolm: What?

Ida: You are afraid of the next trial because it is a test of intelligence. You are afraid to find out who is really the smart one in the family. He goes around with his nose in a book, sucking in facts. He doesn't have what we have. You and I have street smarts.

Malcolm: Oh, here we go. Every moron who's willing to act like a criminal is loaded with street smarts. Well, let me tell you something, Grandma, you're either smart or you're not. Saying you have street smarts just means you're willing to do things that smart, sensitive people are too decent to do. That's not a sign of intelligence. It's not. It's not!

Saying you have street smarts just means you're willing to do things that smart, sensitive people are too decent to do.

That's not really what street smarts is supposed to mean. Street smarts is things like knowing when someone's trying to con you, being able to tell what strangers you should to be civil to and who you shouldn't, knowing how to avoid getting robbed or caught in the middle of a fight, how to project dangerousness without aggressiveness so people will leave you alone, things like that.

That's what it should mean, in reality when I hear people use street smart day-to-day, it's offered as a contrast and salve to a lack of "book smarts." The lack of books smarts is obvious in a lack of education, a low wage job, or simply in speaking to him; the claim of street smarts is treated as unverifiable, there's no standardized testing for speaking to strangers or dodging a con man.

I'm contending that if one doesn't see evidence of competence in how they handle themselves, one should treat claims of street smarts as unverifiable and subject to being rejected without evidence.

That's what it should mean, in reality when I here people use street smart day-to-day, it's offered as a contrast and salve to a lack of "book smarts."

Indeed, like how 'curvy' or 'unconventionally attractive' are used.

I agree that "street smarts" means more than that, traditionally referring to métis in the Seeing Like a State sense (in contrast to we "rationalist" mistake-theorist quokkas who can't quite believe people would go on the internet and tell lies, or try to take advantage of others).

But it's surprising how often the term gets used in a manner indistinguishable from the usage Malcolm outlined above. It sort of reminds me of those people who "discovered this cool life hack", which amounts to them lying and cheating other people and abusing the social contract. "I discovered this cool life hack: if you print off a fake handicapped parking permit, most people won't bother to check and you can park in the handicapped spaces." Hate to break it to you dude, but the reason we aren't doing that isn't because we didn't think of it.

The person who talks about their intense charisma but has no friends

I mostly agree, but I don't necessarily consider these two in tension with one another. Consider the archetypal charming psycho-/socio-path in fiction, who could maintain friendships and relationships if he wanted to, but doesn't see any value in doing so, and yet is unquestionably adept at charming and manipulating people in the short-term (e.g. con artists, cads, politicians with shit-eating grins).

I suppose this hinges on the question of what "charisma" means. To take a stab at it, I'd say it means the ability to make people like you, feel at ease around you, trust you — and especially the ability to do this in a very short timeframe. When considered as a goal-oriented skill, it's the ability to get people to do things for you because they find you prestigious rather than dominant. I see no reason why a person couldn't be good at this (even exceptionally good at it) and also have no use for friends, approaching every interpersonal relationship as a mark to be exploited.

I think we're talking past each other on the definition of friend, my friend. You seem to be using it to mean a true mutual understanding between two people, while I'm using it to mean more along the lines of "people who like you."

The con artist may have no real friends, in the sense that he doesn't actually like or value these people around him. But many people are under the impression that they are friends with him, that's how he conned them. Bernie Madoff conned his friends, so you may say he wasn't friends with them, but they trusted him and allowed themselves to be conned because they thought of him as a friend. The cad may not love his conquests, but they are all under the impression that he does. Politicians function by getting people to believe they care, even when they don't, and getting people to throw themselves under every passing bus requires that those people like you.

Someone with charisma may be a sociopath (though I hate that tired and fake archetype) who approaches every interaction as one of exploitation, but that's only his interior life, from the outside you won't know that really. From the outside, in terms of visible or measurable outcomes, you'll see someone with a lot of friends and admirers, tons of people willing to do him favors. While you might be able to construct a hypothetical toy example where it behooves the charming sociopath to have no friends, I don't really think it's a common case, in nearly every situation it is better to have people like you than to have people dislike you. Life is nearly always easier when people like you, and your brilliant sociopath is basically never going to calculate otherwise.

So when someone has genuine charisma, from the outside you're going to see someone with a lot of friends. Even if on the inside he disdains them, from the outside that's what you'll see, and if you don't see it no charisma exists.

The opposite case is rare enough that it strikes me as another cope, in which people who lack charisma pretend that they have stealth-charisma, and despite the fact that everyone hates them it is all really a clever manipulation game they are playing.

Yeah, that's fair enough. If no one likes you (even if it's not reciprocated), you have no business calling yourself charismatic.

The law of averages doesn't dictate how extreme these clusters are, though, and only loosely bounds how big they can be. Theoretically, all skills could be heavily right-tailed and so extremely large groups could lie within close range of the median person (in all areas, which is definitely what most people mean when they say "average", they don't mean a literal arithmetic average).

Of course, there's a utility aspect to it too. Even if we were to grant that your thesis were true, there's the weird human psychology thing where telling people it's true can have certain self-fulfilling prophesy effects, although their extremity is debated. Motivation is weird.

Even if we were to grant that your thesis were true, there's the weird human psychology thing where telling people it's true can have certain self-fulfilling prophesy effects

You mean stereotype threat?

In any case, I'm sceptical about whether the extremely mentally disabled people I'm describing are even capable of the reasoning required to understand the concept of being unintelligent on multiple axes, never mind fall victim to the self-fulfilling prophecy it implies. If you're referring to 90 IQ people who read this comment and decide there's no point in trying any more, that's not the category of person I'm referring to.

People are always trying retarded shit to see what they can get away with. I think with modernity you just see the enforcement incentives are very different to smaller tight-knit communities. Everyone has so little to gain, and there are so many more interactions, and it is hard to coordinate because people are more atomised, and the person you are trying to enforce the norm on can just tantrum and you have to deal with that.

I think this "humour my bullshit or I'll throw a tantrum" is always present, just harder to enforce against in modernity. So you get a race to the bottom.

This problem is much less bad in rural areas due to this dynamic.

Also the elderly. I can see the tendency but they have grown up in a world where they feared repercussions if they did this.

Yeah, university is a complete joke. Effort required was very low even prior to modern AI. Plenty of people would do a course and not actually read anything if they could at all avoid it. It was kind of funny seeing different teachers be at different points on the 'anger, grief, acceptance' scale, some gave up entirely and just aimed to maximize student ratings with shameless pandering and niceness.

This is what a decline in social trust looks like. People used to assume that nobody would cheat (dishonorable), students would work hard, there were rigorous standards. But that's clearly not a thing. University courses are designed to look rigorous to suckers, then accept any idiot (even if they can't do basic maths or write a vaguely decent essay) and extract their money.

Participating honestly today is being a sucker. Why would you work hard when that's not necessary to get through? I began to loathe the imbecilic, patronizing, childish box-ticking BS that lecturers inflicted. Some of them were fools too, they didn't have a clue about what they were supposed to be teaching. Better to read a book on the subject, faster and cheaper too. It's extremely demoralizing to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for this worthless, time-wasting garbage.

If I just tossed that money into crypto or shares, at least there's some possibility of returns on the investment.

The job market has little demand for skill or degrees either, it wants people with the right connections or wearing a cute dress or from a politically correct background.

Yeah, university is a complete joke. Effort required was very low even prior to modern AI.

Just what sorts of universities did you people attend?

Because I can say that having to study things like calculus on the complex plane, Laplace transforms (I still shudder from thinking of the nearly 10 page long calculations for just a single problem), electromagnetic field theory or multirate filterbanks certainly didn’t feel ”very low effort” to me!

Humanities (at a fairly prestigious university in Australia). The most mathematics I did was cubic polynomials at one point (that course was also the most challenging). I can't speak for the STEM side of things but I'd estimate that the majority of students were in limp-wristed and unrigorous degrees.

There were people going through via plagiarism alone, foreign students who couldn't really speak English that well and domestic students who were quite stupid.

That sounds a bit like what they call "university of applied sciences" here which are basically souped up community colleges and have the reputation to go with that.

You should have known better than to go to engineering school. Stick with CS, if you must take physics, take physics for physics majors where the problems will all have round numbers, and whatever you do, DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS, and you can get by with much less effort.

(I took differential equations. It left scars)

DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS, and you can get by with much less effort.
(I took differential equations. It left scars)

I thought DE was challenging but it was far from the worst class I took. By the time I was done, I could do integration by parts in my head for not-too-complex setups (very helpful in later eng classes). No danger of me doing that now. Depressing how much those skills have atrophied.

You should have known better than to go to engineering school. Stick with CS

Alas, that wouldn't have helped what with requiring more formal math and logic theory in turn. I already only passed the one required logic course by bribing my ex-gf to do the mandatory course project for me.

<whatever you do, DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIO<NS, and you can get by with much less effort.

Ah, see... Things didn't (and still don't) work like that over here. The basic math courses and physics courses were largely the same and the difference was more complex analysis for EE vs more formal stuff for CE/CS and that isn't even getting into the horrors of discrete mathematics. So I did the only thing a reasonable person could do and passed most of the maths courses with the minimum passing grade (mostly on second try) and put it all behind me by burning the course book the next summer (Adams' Calculus, gods I hated that book). Pro tip: Make sure you have enough lighter fluid because those books are really hard to burn.

Alas, that wouldn't have helped what with requiring more formal math and logic theory in turn. I already only passed the one required logic course by bribing my ex-gf to do the mandatory course project for me.

Ah, logic and discrete math didn't bother me. Stuff that requires 10 pages of for a single problem did, because it was so easy to make a mistake early on and produce 20 pages of nonsense instead. And actual advanced math I'd tend to just bounce off the notation and terminology, which there's so much of.

actual advanced math I'd tend to just bounce off the notation and terminology, which there's so much of.

I'm pretty sure I have some sort of math "symbol blindness". If you wrote equations using regular letters and abbreviations, I'd say "Yeah, that's tricky but not too horrible" while using greek letters and math symbols would immediately result in "WTF is this shit I can't even...".

if you must take physics, take physics for physics majors where the problems will all have round numbers

It's all fun and games until you get to the physics for physicists and the are no numbers. At some point it's more abstract math than anything else, and as they say in the biz: Math ain't about numbers.

It's all fun and games until you get to the physics for physicists and the are no numbers.

Hell, by the time I passed the last mandatory EE math course in university, the only numbers in the formulae were single digits. We were allowed to take regular calculators but were (correctly) told that we aren't going to need them for anything.

For physics at my university, DiffEq was required for Advanced E&M. I did not know that, and somehow took Advanced E&M first. The experience was... humbling. DiffEq itself later on was much more manageable.

Relatedly, I know at least three people who developed serious depression by taking Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning. I can still scare one of them by saying the words "rigorous proofs" in a Russian accent.

I can still scare one of them by saying the words "rigorous proofs" in a Russian accent.

Or "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrisation of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold". (Боже мой!)

"Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrisation of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold"

A true Lovecraftian tome.

It really depends on the program/major. Its pretty easy to figure out which is which by looking at how much time students spend studying every week.

Only engineering and medicine reach 40h a week, with the median for other programs being less than 10h including lessons.

Law school is somewhere in-between with people putting in some 18h a week on average, although my understanding is that top students spend in excess of 40h a week and if you just want to pass you can spend far less.

Its a bit funny when you read about some "elite" school where people apparently only spend 12h a week on school, with the implicit understanding that the students are expected to do full time internships concurrently with the education. The purpose of the education itself is just providing a really barebones foundation and act as a competence filter for internships.

Lack of rigor barely describes how bad modern university education is.

I recently started an online master's program for computer science through the University of Colorado (Boulder). The amount of difficult work and overall rigor in the courses has been, uh, lacking to say the least. My undergraduate degree is in a humanities related discipline and all of my CS knowledge is self-taught, just to give you some context.

All assignments except for the final exam in each class have unlimited attempts, which makes the multiple choice quiz assignments a joke. But even the actual programming assignments haven't been any serious work. So far I've finished the general networking and Linux networking classes, and the assignments have been things like:

Analyze some packet dumps and find the maximum amount of TCP datagrams that are in flight at any given point in the stream.

Create ethernet devices in 4 different containers, connect them to a bridge in a 5th container, then run this premade script to ping between them and submit the packet dump.

Modify half a dozen lines in a couple of BGP config files, then turn off some ethernet interfaces, ping between two endpoints, and submit a packet dump showing that your BGP config worked correctly after turning off the interfaces.

The finals have been worth 10% of the total grade in the general networking class and 20% in the Linux networking class, and you only need a B in the first three networking classes to be admitted into the full computer science program (where, as the saying goes, C's get degrees, at least for the elective courses that make up half of the degree; you still only need B's in the required breadth courses).

And this degree doesn't have a special "online" caveat attached to it, it will appear exactly the same to employers as a Computer Science master's obtained in person at CU Boulder.

It makes more sense when you realize that many master's programs are just busywork to justify a student visa and a follow-on graduate STEM OPT work permit (two years that can be converted to a green card or H1).

They are optimizing for the user experience of someone who wants the fastest, lowest effort way to get entry into the US white collar labor market, not actual learning.

Not just that, its also grade inflation where due to the erosion of standards and enforcement, 3 year bachelor degrees are often not enough for professional graduate intakes. Also some 'blue collar' positions now require college time (eg NYPD needs 24 semester credits / 1 year of college time), or a degree where it used to be trade school (nursing in some Western nations).

Wasn’t nursing always a college track? It used to only require an associates degree(and as a legal matter, still does- nurses getting bachelors is mostly employer driven rather than regulatory) but it was never ‘trade school’.

LVNs are vocational school nurses and are still around. A legally separate group of RNs have college degrees.

RNs typically only needed a certificate program. Requirements in many places that they get a full Bachelors are recent.

Yeah, the only reason I'm in the program is because I want to boost my resume for future employment (especially since my undergrad degree isn't in a STEM field), and because my current employer is paying for it. I have actually learned some useful things from it, but only because I applied myself more than someone just looking to pass the class would need to. And everything I did learn from it I could have learned on my own without the program, the program just provided a minimal amount of guidance and direction as to what to learn.

I did find out I can take some electives from the electrical engineering master's program and have them count for my degree, so I'll probably do that since a lot of them seem more interesting (and hopefully more rigorous).

As I keep saying, if you have a 'disability' that makes it difficult to do well in school, your grades should just reflect being bad at school. Unfortunately, parents really want their kids to have high grades, and teachers serve the system(which cares about its own internal numbers, not whether those numbers reflect reality). C'est la vie, it's a clearly ridiculous example of the iron law, but it's far from the worst.

Employing Ockham's Razor, isn't it likelier that this is just... POSIWID? Hippies have been pointing out for decades that the US public school system, maintained at enormous expense by the state, seems mostly about... serving the interests of the state. And that primarily means raising children to be conformist tools of whatever the state needs.

US public schools were originally designed to get immigrant urchins off the streets, subdue their disorderly tendencies, and get their parents back into the factories; so of course the early curriculum stressed English grammar, commercial arithmetic and romantic-nationalist mythology like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," in the context of ruthlessly enforced obedience to authority. Need soldiers for the great wars? Phys ed programs and high school football.

Now it's the 50s, the state needs people to instead consume regularly, resist communism, and prep for nuclear war/space race... ok, more home ec, more arts and literature with reminders that creativity is anti-collectivist, more project-based learning because same. And STEM, lots more STEM.

Now it's the 2000s, the economy is contracting, Turchin's cycle is at its maximum "elite value extraction" position, state capacity is at an all-time high with massive investments in surveillance and social engineering (and that's leaving out AI!). Why would the state need or want a citizenry with a lot of self-reliance, initiative, independence and self-awareness at a time like this? Self-reliant people are trouble. Damaged people with enormous needs, by contrast, make great pets.

In one of The Last Psychiatrist (hereafter Edward Teach)'s articles, as an exercise, he challenged the reader to describe themselves without using the word "am".

Given that English speakers habitually describe their professions this way ("I'm a fisherman" rather than "I catch fish"), completing the exercise can be surprisingly difficult.

I've long thought that there has never been an interesting sentence beginning with "I identify as", but Teach's writings illustrated to me that such a framework can be not just tedious and navel-gazing, but actively harmful to oneself and those around you.

When I criticise sentences beginning with "I identify as", I am of course referring to our modern fixation on "identities" in the sense of "identity politics" ("I identify as a QPOC agender neurodivergent...") but also in the sense of "identifying as" something wholly removed from any corresponding action associated therewith. As you point out, being a musician is seen as high-status in a way that selling insurance isn't: there are innumerable people who still call themselves musicians (namely in their Instagram handles) despite never having recorded a single note of music or having gone years without playing a gig (if ever); likewise for people calling themselves "writers" without having written anything, never mind published. This worldview is starting to affect more traditional identity categories as well: a majority of American women who call themselves lesbians have had sex with at least one man (6% in the last year); there are sexually active people who call themselves asexual; there are self-identified vegans who subscribe to a non-standard definition of veganism. "Inclusivity" has become so valorised and "gatekeeping" so stigmatised that it's seen as poor form to tell a meat-eater that they aren't vegan; a person who's diagnosed themselves with autism that they aren't really neurodivergent; a chronic masturbator that they aren't asexual; a bearded, penised male in jeans and a t-shirt that he isn't a woman. Identity has become wholly uncoupled from essential rule-in criteria or adherence to a standard of behaviour (broadly defined): vague, unfalsifiable "vibes" are the order of the day. I wonder if you could draw a bright line between the relaxation of academic standards you outline in your post, and the relaxation of standards of behaviour for who is and isn't a "lesbian".

"Why are you getting so incensed, @FtttG? It's just some kids on college campuses – who cares if a woman with multiple male sexual partners and zero female ones calls herself a lesbian?"

But I actually think it's much more insidious than that. I think the relaxation of standards such that anyone can call themselves a musician (without playing a note of music) and anyone can call themselves queer (while exclusively pursuing hetero relationships) – and that anyone who calls them a fake and a poseur is an exclusive elitist gatekeeper – can lead to some extremely toxic habits of mind, ultimately causing people to "identify as" the only thing anyone should aspire to be: a good person.

Because if you don't have to write anything to call yourself a writer, and you don't have to adhere to a plant-based diet to call yourself a vegan – if it's all just vague, unfalsifiable, unquantifiable vibes – it stands to reason that you can "be a good person" without once doing anything good, without once doing anything to improve the lot of the people around you. How does that cash out in the real world?

  • Obsessive fixation on the cheap talk of good person signifiers (when admonishing people to be more woke, woke activists sometimes point out that it costs nothing to put a Palestine or pride flag in your Instagram bio, or your pronouns in your email signature. They're right: it costs nothing, meaning it's a cheap signal easily exploited by bad actors);
  • Obsessive fixation on all the bad things you haven't done, with a corresponding effort to downplay or undermine the positive achievements of others;
  • Obsessive fixation on the bad things other people have done that you haven't (the more cartoonishly evil, the better*);
  • Periodic paroxysms of performative self-loathing after a particularly atrocious instance of bad behaviour, followed by immediate resumption of business as usual (including said bad behaviour); and
  • A hypertrophied fundamental attribution error mindset, in which exculpatory circumstances for every bad thing you've ever done can always be found or confected (but every person who hurts or upsets you in any way is a toxic narcissistic abuser who's just going out of their way to hurt you out of sheer bloody-mindedness)

As Teach pointed out, the last bullet point is particularly unsustainable for forming a real sense of self and personal identity. In principle, one could take full responsibility for all of one's impressive achievements while refusing to take responsibility for all of one's failures (moral and otherwise), but most people are no good at that kind of compartmentalization. If you've gotten into the habit of refusing to take accountability for your fuckups, it's only a matter of time before your positive achievements don't really feel like "yours" either. Thus, impostor syndrome.

I suppose it could be worse: identifying as a good person hasn't yet become wholly uncoupled from consistent pro-social behaviour. Believing you're a good person because you've never set a cat on fire is a low bar, but it's a hell of a lot better than thinking there's literally no difference between someone who sets a cat on fire and someone who doesn't. Insincere performative virtue signalling still acknowledges that there is a thing which exists called "virtue"; aspiring through one's actions (namely insincere performative virtue signalling) to be seen as a virtuous person still acknowledges that virtuous behaviour is a precondition for being a virtuous person. Reflexive invention of exculpatory circumstances to explain away one's bad behaviour still acknowledges that said behaviour requires explanation. "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue" and all that. Still, two decades ago anyone who called himself autistic without having ever consulted a mental health professional would have attracted a lot of funny looks – nowadays it largely passes without comment. (Indeed, the concept of "social awkwardness" no longer exists: every such person is reflexively assumed to be "on the spectrum".) I worry about where this train leads. Will we end up with innumerable tautological Templars running around, who no longer even feel any need to explain away their bad behaviour; who sincerely believe that, as a PoG (person of good), everything they do is good, because they did it?

Anglophone Gen Zers were raised in a discursive environment which tells them they're smart (even if they've never done a smart thing in their lives); which tells them they can be queer (even if they've never done anything queer in their lives and have no desire to); which tells them they're beautiful – even, dare I say, a certified bad bitch (even if no one wants to have sex with them); and, most toxically of all, tells them they're good, even if they've never carried out a single selfless act, maybe provided they parrot a catechism of cookie-cutter woke catchphrases they don't even understand never mind positively endorse. No wonder they go into adulthood with no idea of who they are, what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they want from life, how they come off to other people, what makes them them. They can list off all the identity categories they fall into like a math nerd reciting digits of pi, but they couldn't begin to tell you who they, personally, are. No wonder they report unprecedented rates of mental illness**, sexlessness and social isolation. How can you begin to make friends based on common interests if you don't have any interests (besides rotting in your bed watching Netflix), and neither does anyone around you? What does it even mean to be attracted to another person if you've been consistently told all your life that all bodies are equally attractive? How can you form a relationship with another person if you don't even know what you want out of life? How can you and your partner have shared relationship goals if you don't have any goals of any kind?

*I used to occasionally read an online article which I found so insightful and perceptive that I felt like the author had cracked one of life's cheat codes: this was the first time I can remember it happening. One of the most recent times I had such a feeling was when I read the TLP article linked under "periodic paroxysms" above. The second time was when I read my first post of Scott's, "The Toxoplasma of Rage". And he succeeded in inducing that feeling in me again, and again, and again – and now he mostly sucks. Nothing good lasts forever.

**To bring it back to the subject of the OP, I have no doubt that this is partly an artifact of young people or their parents attempting to game disability frameworks to secure carve-outs and accommodations – an extra hour in an exam for a student diagnosed with anxiety or depression is a low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. But I don't think that's the whole story: I think there's a real signal of Gen Z being miserable in a way and at a scale that previous generations weren't. Yes it's the phones, but it's not just the phones.

a majority of American women who call themselves lesbians have had sex with at least one man (6% in the last year)

What are the figures for Greek women?

In one of The Last Psychiatrist (hereafter Edward Teach)'s articles, as an exercise, he challenged the reader to describe themselves without using the word "am".

Should be noted that this actually goes back to Korzybski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

It's funny: I know this isn't the first time I've heard of this concept, and yet every time I come across it, I immediately think "is this a Scientology thing?" I don't know why.

Probably because the "E-Meter" (aka "electropsychometer", "Hubbard Electrometer") is used in Scientology's "auditing" process.

That's exactly it, thank you.

I'm curious to probe why we have all chosen to use primarily left-coded examples, when the same examples on the right abound. The identitarian rot runs so deep in our culture that everything is infected.

Only half of self identified evangelicals attend church weekly. Two thirds of evangelicals have premarital sex. There's no expectation that one's activities must justify one's self-identification.

The universe of Tradwife and conservative girl influencers and followers seems to consist of women who claim tradition as an identity, while rarely being willing to commit to actual values when it requires sacrifice.

Country music has been infected by poseurs, self identified "country boys" who grew up nowhere near a farm. Men who make up their lack of masculinity with a leather clad pickup truck. People who buy hunting themed stuff, but never hunt. There's no expectation that one must do something to earn credibility.

And most confusing to me, men who talk about supporting the troops and honoring the troops and loving the troops, and never tried to serve.

We have financial analysts who self-identify as blue collar, and day laborers who self identify as entrepreneurs. The poison is so deep in the American system, that I don't know how we get it out anymore.

It's easy to see the flaws in one's opponents, it's hard to see them in one's allies, it's near to impossible to self examine.

Only half of self identified evangelicals attend church weekly.

On this topic in particular: a survey conducted in Ireland over a decade ago found that nearly two-thirds of self-identified Catholics don't believe that the communion wafer literally transforms into the body of Christ.

Never mind the fact that they're non-observant: from a theological perspective, most Irish Catholics are Protestant in all but name. And that's not even mentioning how many of them voted to legalise abortion and gay marriage.

Which is more important to identity, ideological orthodoxy or activity? I would say having one or the other allows one a claim to identify as X, while having neither prevents it, and having both makes it impossible to avoid the identification.

Interesting. Imagine four people who call themselves Catholic:

  1. Alice goes to Mass every day, observes the Sabbath, and follows every papal edict to the letter.

  2. Bob professes to believe every papal edict and tenet of his faith – but in practice, he never goes to Mass, doesn't observe the Sabbath, eats meat on Fridays, doesn't give up anything for Lent etc.

  3. Carol goes to Mass every day, observes the Sabbath, gives something up for Lent etc. – but her actual worldview is functionally indistinguishable from any of her woke friends, which entails major doctrinal disagreements with the Church on abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, divorce etc. She also doesn't believe in transubstantiation.

  4. Like Bob, David is non-observant, and like Carol he has major doctrinal disagreements with the Church, including disbelieving transubstantiation (I think this accurately describes an absolute majority of nominal Irish Catholics).

I'm sure most people would say that Alice is the "most" Catholic, or most "authentically" Catholic, or a "central example" of what we call Catholic. Equally, most people would say that David is only nominally Catholic, neither walking the walk nor talking the talk.

I'm torn on whether Bob is "more" Catholic than Carol, or vice versa. On the one hand, Carol "walks the walk" in making at least some of the sacrifices her faith demands of her, including getting up early on Sundays. On the other hand, if Catholicism is a belief system first and foremost, then holding the correct beliefs ought to be seen as far more important as following the rituals – observing the rituals when you don't believe in any of the beliefs underpinning them strikes me as sort of insincere and performative.

[Edit: by pure coincidence, the morning after writing this post I was re-reading an old post of Scott's which includes this gem of a quote from CS Lewis: "Going to church does not make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car."]

Authentic membership in a religion is a special case, as it's usually determined based on privately-held beliefs and active, observable behaviour. For a lot of the other categories I discussed above, authenticity is often based on only one or the other. While support for animal rights and opposition to factory farming are beliefs commonly held by vegetarians, they're not generally considered rule-in criteria: as far as I'm concerned, anyone who doesn't eat meat is a vegetarian, regardless of their worldview. Saying "I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat meat, but I don't really have a problem with factory farming" doesn't sound incoherent to me in the way that "I'm Catholic and I go to Mass, but I don't believe in transubstantiation" does.

Catholicism is probably a bad example to debate, in that the Catholic view of this is that if Alice, Bob, Carol, and David were all Confirmed Catholics at some point in their lives, then they are all Catholics. One can lapse, or be in a state of apostasy or heresy or excommunication, but one cannot cease to be Catholic once one has become one, Catholic identity is an indelible mark even should one wish to shed it. Essentially the view is, in your terms, that if one does a sufficient quantum of activity+belief at any point in one's life (typically but not necessarily while young) then one has become Catholic and remains Catholic forever. One can be more pious than another, or in Communion with Rome as opposed to lapsed, etc. But one is always Catholic.

That all being said, within any belief system I think there are multiple types and layers we have to distinguish, some of which Catholicism has traditionally taken note of.

One should distinguish between sins, where one fails to meet the standard that one believes in as we are all weak and fallen, and dissenting beliefs. Somebody who slips up on occasion and does something against the teachings of the faith while still believing in the teachings of the faith, is different from someone who believes the teachings of the faith are wrong. Then there's the difference between dissent, believing the church is wrong, and error in ignorance where an individual is either insufficiently Cathechized or just too dumb to understand the finer points of doctrine. Obscure theological points, or third order logical conclusions, just won't be properly comprehended by a lot of people, and a skilled sophist could lead them through clever phrasing to deny them. And there's a difference again between His Holiness' Loyal Opposition, a reformer who dissents from church policy and wants to change it, and someone who hates the church whole cloth.

At any rate, we should recenter the question. I don't really care what you call yourself, I care about how seriously I have to take it. A constant problem within the legal cases surrounding Freedom of Religion in the United States is how do we know who is a believer? I want to see a broadened freedom of religion, but I also want to see enhanced tests of belief to access those protections. Similarly socially and ethically. It's fine for anyone to call themselves a Christian or a Jew or a Pastafarian, it's not fine for that to impose requirements on me to take their beliefs seriously.

Carol would generally be regarded as more Catholic than Bob by most practicing Catholics and by the church hierarchy. This matrix is a live question and the Catholic Church has a literal definition of the minimum standards to be accounted a practicing Catholic- the six precepts of the church.

If Carol was a public figure she might be subject to church discipline for heretical views(Nancy Pelosi notably is), which would change the equation. But church discipline is not levied against random people for heresy.

Only half of self identified evangelicals attend church weekly.

Oh it’s worse than that. There’s three methods of counting church attendance-

  1. is survey data- just asking people how often they go to church. For social desirability reasons, this tends to be biased upwards, but it’s probably close enough for government work to the monthly rate, or the Christmas and Easter rate.

  2. is checking attendance counts at the churches themselves, which suffers from poor and inconsistent methodology. There’s also usually no way to tell which people are going to church here.

  3. is cell phone tracking data. This is almost certainly an undercount for a wide variety of technical reasons- notably reception tends to be worse in church buildings and attendees tend to ping less than elsewhere because of behavior at church(lots of people have their cell phones off, for example).

So basically we have no way of knowing what actual church attendance rates are, except that the ‘official’ rates are overestimates.

Interesting, I never thought about it like that, but you're probably right!

You're right that a disproportionate number of examples in my post were left-coded, which was unfair of me. In my defense, at the time of writing I was sincerely thinking of "identifying as a good person even though you've never done anything good" as a bipartisan phenomenon. When we hear a term like "performative virtue signalling" our mind reflexively goes to AWFL women sharing black squares on Instagram, but it's equally applicable to boomer wine aunts who share posts on their Facebook pages about violent criminals coupled with demands that the UK "bring back hanging". When it comes to slave morality, the kinds of people described in Hillbilly Elegy are just as prone to self-destructive crabs-in-a-bucket begrudgery as the residents of any urban ghetto. And a lurid fixation on the nastiest crimes committed by others (as a means of downplaying one's own moral shortcomings) can and does afflict anyone regardless of tribal or political affiliation.

As for the self-examination piece: well, earlier this year I released a solo album on an actual legit indie record label, and completed an (as yet unpublished) novel — and yet I would still feel hesitant to describe myself as a "musician" or a "writer". (I'm not saying you can't call yourself one of these things until you make a living from it, but it has to be a major part of your lifestyle, not just a hobby.) I have no illusions about having enjoyed a privileged middle-class upbringing (attempting to pass oneself off as coming from a more underprivileged background than you really did — class-Dolezalism — is endemic in Ireland and the UK, and equally common regardless of political stripe), although with the qualification that I did earn a partial scholarship to my private secondary school. In the past I had a very bad habit of really "identifying" with the fact that I'd been diagnosed with depression as a convenient excuse for my various shortcomings (ethical and otherwise), but I don't do this anymore and can't honestly say I've suffered from depression for many years, if I ever did. Offhand, I truly can't think of any way I habitually describe myself without "walking the walk" or meeting the traditional criteria for such a designation.

As for the "identifying as a good person" bit: the main reason I abhor performative virtue signalling of all stripes is because it reduces the preconditions for being a "good person" to simply holding the "correct" opinions, making pro-social actions completely irrelevant to the moral calculus. To give a current example: over the past two years I've donated somewhere in the region of €1,700 to assistance for Gaza (via charitable foundations such as Médecins sans Frontières, Medical Aid for Palestine and Realign for Palestine) — not a vast sum, either in absolute terms or as a percentage of my income, and yet I can only assume it's a damn sight more than most of the people accusing Israel of genocide have donated over the same period, by either metric. (As I've mentioned before, there are few things that infuriate me more than being lectured and scolded about how I ought to do more to help the less fortunate — by a person who is doing a damn sight less to help the less fortunate than I am.) The belief seems to be that, because I'm not terribly sympathetic to the cause of Palestinian statehood and acknowledge Israel's right to exist, I am forever and always unclean, whereas a person who holds the "correct" opinions on this cause is therefore One of the Good Ones, regardless of what actions they undertake. My friends and family members won't actually come out and say that Alice (who has the "correct" opinions on the Jewish Israel Question, but who hasn't donated a penny to helping the people of Gaza) is morally superior to Bob (who's donated a decent chunk of cheddar to helping the people of Gaza, but who acknowledges Israel's right to exist, doesn't think they're committing a genocide [while acknowledging they've committed war crimes], has minimal sympathy for the cause of Palestinian statehood and zero sympathy for Hamas) — but it's abundantly clear that's what they believe, at least subconsciously. It seems at some point the idea that "well, he hasn't done much, but he means well: at least his heart's in the right place" was surreptitiously supplanted with "because his heart's in the right place, he has therefore discharged his moral responsibilities and no longer needs to lift a finger to help others — he is already One of the Good Ones".

To be a good person, you have to do good things: people's lives are saved with bandages and splints, not retweets and vibes.

As for the self-examination piece: well, earlier this year I released a solo album on an actual legit indie record label, and completed an (as yet unpublished) novel — and yet I would still feel hesitant to describe myself as a "musician" or a "writer".

You can release a solo album, but they won’t call you a musician. You can complete a novel, but they won’t call you a writer. If you fuck one goat, though…

Country music

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CORANvT8l9A "Got a beer in my beer, and a chevy in my truck..."

This is my new favourite country song. For the full experience, read the lyrics.

I've never found a study like this about vegans, but one study indicates that 60% of vegetarians had eaten meat in the past day. To be fair, I had a boomer coworker who claimed to be a vegetarian despite eating fish ("I consider fish to be vegetables"). He was a health vegetarian though, so there's presumably a variety of reasons that meat eaters call themselves vegetarians besides virtue signalling.

A quick Google led me to this article. A study of 11,399 adults of varying diets were recruited from a representative group of Americans. Five out of six people who give up meat eventually abandon vegetarianism. Vegans are less likely to backslide than vegetarians (70% vegans, 86% of vegetarians).

That's a different question, of course - they presumably stop calling themselves vegetarians.

Sounds like your coworker needs to learn about pescetarianism.

I tried to tell him. He wasn't having it.

To be fair, I had a boomer coworker who claimed to be a vegetarian despite eating fish ("I consider fish to be vegetables").

Is it @thejdizzler who's vegan except for oysters?

so there's presumably a variety of reasons that meat eaters call themselves vegetarians besides virtue signalling.

Regardless of their motivations, calling yourself vegetarian when you eat meat is simply a misuse of the word, surely?

Be reasonable, @thejdizzler is not a boomer.

Regardless of their motivations, calling yourself vegetarian when you eat meat is simply a misuse of the word, surely?

Yes. My point is that the misuse of the labels is not always exclusively due to TLP's narcissism theory.

My point is that the misuse of the labels is not always exclusively due to TLP's narcissism theory.

Agreed, and I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was using it as an example of a once-strict identity category for which the boundaries seem to have become more porous over time.

I've also said here that I describe myself as a vegetarian, despite eating bivalves (and roadkill, and caviar, and etc...)

It's just much less work to do that than explain to a restaurant the exact things I do eat. There is a word--ostrovegan--that kind of describes it, but most people would be confused by it, as it's obscure enough to be overly precious.

That's just communicating dietary requirements, though, in the not especially common scenario when I need to. I wouldn't say I identify as any particular terms associated with dietary restrictions.

despite eating bivalves (and roadkill, and caviar, and etc...)

Really burying the lede there.

Roadkill doesn't necessarily mean it's been sitting out in the sun for days. In fact most larger animals struck by a car are left crippled and then need to be shot- the police will donate it to the zoo for lion food, but if legal it doesn't really make much difference if you/your redneck neighbor shoots it and takes it to the freezer.

Roadkill doesn't necessarily mean it's been sitting out in the sun for days.

Yes, I'm aware. I've eaten harvested roadkill. It's more the "vegetarian with exception for roadkill" that's an eyebrow-raiser.

It makes perfect sense for ethical vegans/vegetarians to see roadkill as different from butchered meat. I disagree with their perspective strongly, but it has considerable internal logic, and is endorsed by PETA(albeit in typical clown show fashion).

I had a great-uncle who would apparently listen to police scanners at night so he could be the first to roadkill strikes for the free meat.

I salvaged a deer and pretty much every vegetarian I know said they would eat it. Most didn't know you could legally (it depends on the state) salvage roadkill and thought it was pretty cool. In my case I also dispatched it, so time from death to fridge was faster than most harvested deer.

Minor culture war angle: A Muslim guy had "called dibs" on the deer and didn't want me to kill it because then it wouldn't be halal. Said he had his brother on the phone and he was going to come butcher it. The deer was suffering greatly and I said if his brother wasn't almost here I was going to kill it. He wouldn't tell me how far away his brother was. Heard him derogatorily call me a cowboy between whatever he was speaking. I'm not nearly that cool.

Bewarned- in most of the bigger states this is deer poaching. If you hit a deer with your car, you're supposed to call a police officer to come dispatch it humanely.

In practice, you may not get caught, and the main penalty(loss of hunting license) is irrelevant to non-hunters. But it is de jure illegal.

It does greatly depend on state, but I live in a cool state. I used to work for F&G it's de facto here, you have 24 hours to get the salvage tag. Cops showed up after I'd dispatched it, we had a pleasant chat before they took off.

It's worth checking your state laws for sure, cause I know in Wisconsin at least it's perfectly legal. In fact, you're even entitled to take the carcass if you didn't hit it with your car - the driver who hit it has dibs, but after that whoever comes across it can take it if they want.

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This is a great story. I'd love to come across a dead deer like that.

Makes for a solid venison chili, though more of something from my youth than present (illegal to collect in CA).

I do eat oysters and other bivalves, but I no longer label myself vegan.

Why not?

1). I now eat bottom-feeding fish (sardines, anchovies, tilapia). This is too far to call myself vegan anymore. 2). I no longer believe that veganism is nutritionally beneficial due to big mental health changes from eating fish. I still think largely plant-based is the way to go however. 3). I no longer believe in the purity culture associated with veganism. The way forward for animal rights is by a large number of people making small changes to their diets, not through a couple million extremists trying to argue people into diets they will not comply with.

Why did you decide to start eating those fish?

A couple reasons. A blogger I used to follow (rintrah) who used to be vegan found out he was extremely deficient in Omega-3s and this had been negatively impacting his mood and behavior. I noticed similar symptoms in myself. Also the canned fish were right next to the oysters in the supermarket and I found myself craving sardines every time I bought oysters.

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Ah, fair enough.

I also wouldn't say it's egregious if someone who eats oysters calls themselves mostly vegan or even vegan for simplicity.

As mollusks are invertebrates it's not even clear they have the ability to perceive experience. So, at least some, of the ethical considerations for veganism are moot. I know, I know, they still have nerves. It's not clear if there is still proper concept of pain or suffering from those structures or if the nerves just allow for reflexive action like a silver maple turning over a damaged leaf. They can also be farmed relatively sustainably, so some of the environmental considerations are also moot. It's probably a lot easier to explain to a normi "I'm mostly vegan" than to say I'm a vegan, but I cleave the phylogenetic tree at Nephrozoa not Animalia.

Pescetarians calling themselves vegetarians is relatively more potentially confusing, though also understandable if they come from a tradition of giving up only carne (in the flesh from that which walks the earth sense) for lent or on Fridays, etc.

Cephalopods are mollusks, too. I'm not sure about the nervous systems of gastropods, either. It's mostly bivalves that are effectively meat-plants. outside of mollusks, some echinoderms had, then lost brains at some point, but display far more complex behavior than bivalves, so IDK. Sea Anenemies (HTF do you pell that I've tried like 6 ways and can't get any spellcheck suggestions) seem fairly plant-like, but does anyone actually eat them? Does anyone eat echinoderms besides seacucumbers?

Sea Anenemies (HTF do you pell that I've tried like 6 ways and can't get any spellcheck suggestions) seem fairly plant-like, but does anyone actually eat them?

Wikipedia article

In southwestern Spain and Sardinia, the snakelocks anemone is consumed as a delicacy. Anemones are also a source of food for fisherman communities on the east coast of Sabah, Borneo, as well as in the Thousand Islands of Southeast Asia and in Taizhou, Zhejiang.

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Technically speaking the current Catholic definition of meat requires the animal to be both land dwelling and warm blooded. Older Cajuns will think reptile meat is vegetarian, including things like rattlesnake. It makes sense from a culinary definition, if not nutritional.

The church also declared beavers to be cold-blooded water dwellers and therefore perfectly suitable to eat during Friday fasts. The rules get weird around the edges.

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This rather famously resulted in some awkward loopholes around the capybara. Thankfully, 1800s Catholics had not yet discovered the swamp rabbit.

I think this is representative of a general societal movement that holds, basically, that discipline should be done away with and replaced with more nurturing. The stick is just sadistic cruelty, and does much more harm than good, and whatever good it does do can be done all the better with extra carrots.

And I can see where people may be coming from on that, in that the downsides of discipline - the consequences of overdiscipline - are dramatic and immediate. Too much harshness leaves people shattered on the spot. The downsides of nurturing, though - the consequences of overnurturing - are comparatively dull and delayed. Too much nurturing leaves people stunted, but without any single, immediate, dramatic event that can be pointed to to say "see! That shows that they were treated wrongly!"

(I suppose it's an eternal human way to trade obvious, immediate problems for less-immediate ones.)

But it's not just academia: just as it would be inhumane to hold students to academic standards, in light of their Circumstances and Conditions, so too it would be inhumane to, for example, hold petty criminals to legal standards, in light of their Circumstances and Conditions. Instead of punishing anybody to stop their bad behavior, it is better to connect with them, to build relationships and trust, and constructively help them out of whatever pit they were in that made them feel they had to act out.

Which sounds lovely, but it just, well, doesn't work.

(I'm sure it would be pointed out if I don't do so now that the vanguards of civilized behavior who deplore discipline are real quick to grab the stick whenever somebody they don't like does something that really bothers them. That language policing is carried out with enthusiasm by those who detest regular policing. That would seem to point to just a different hierarchy of values, rather than a consistent stance against discipline...)

And I can see where people may be coming from on that, in that the downsides of discipline - the consequences of overdiscipline - are dramatic and immediate. Too much harshness leaves people shattered on the spot. The downsides of nurturing, though - the consequences of overnurturing - are comparatively dull and delayed.

I like this framing because I think it highlights just how pernicious overnurturing is.

Overdiscipline is easy to spot. We call it abuse. If I steal from the cookie jar and my mother gives me a sharp crack about the ear, that's discipline - perhaps harsh and a bit pre-1972, but still within the acceptable definition of discipline. If, however, she wails on me with a wooden spoon for 10 minutes, that's abuse.

Grown up abuse is often called hazing. If I am at Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina and I screw up my locker inspection, the Senior Drill Instructor may respond by making me do pushups for some amount of time or repetitions. Discipline. If he throws the locker at me, that's hazing (if it seriously injures me, that's actually illegal, but it'll be covered up.)

Abuse or hazing, that it is fairly easy to draw the line makes it easier to manage, imho.

Not so with the over-nurturing. Returning to the cookie jar example, after my mother has caught me red handed, she takes 15 minutes to "gentle parent" me about how stealing is wrong because it makes other people sad and that too many cookies might make my tummy hurt and she knows I just like cookies, which is great, but right now we (why are we using the plural all of a sudden?) just can't have any cookies. Now, I don't even know if I did anything wrong. I don't know if I was just subjected to that ... event ... arbitrarily or in response to something I did directly.

Fast forward the tape and now I'm being arrested because I stole a couple doze iPhones with my friends from the mall. The cop is placing me into the back of his squad car because ... why? I wanted the iPhones so I took them. I'm not thinking about Apple, Inc. or the employees at the store because nobody (like, for instance, my mother) ever told me to do that much less associated direct consequences with the failure to do that. It's as if the entire concept of causality has been so watered down in my brain that I am an observer of my own actions instead of their source.

Sound familiar?

Every police interaction video online where the person who is obviously resisting arrest shouts "I didn't no nothin!" is, perhaps, a person who literally cannot associate their actions through time with a chain of causality. If it weren't so socially destructive, I'd feel bad for them -- like they're forced to watch a movie of their own life that's nothing but jump cuts.

Overdiscipline can lead to a damage deficit that may take years for a person to overcome. Extreme enough and it may never be totally overcome. But there is still the potential to overcome it and people will have the ability to work to do that. With overnurturing, it seems to me, they are utterly robbed of that ability to overcome. It's a complete short-changing of some core developmental pathways that turn children into adolescents into young adults that lack even the vague concept that they have control over their own actions which then influence the outcome of life and circumstance around them. If I drop you into the middle of a Japanese accounting firm and tell you to reconcile the balance sheet of Hashimori Corp in 90 minutes, you're going to laugh, throw up your hands, and just kind of let the world roll over you. You don't even have a sense for where or how to begin because you have zero contextual history or familiarity with this environment.

And that's a non-trivial part of younger millenials, Gen-Z, and whatever laboratory goo babies follow after them.

Is that actually a thing, where 'gentle parenting' results in kids who are stealing iphones or doing more or less organized crime? I genuinely have no idea.

I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment. You'd never see them rob some 2 metre tall bodybuilder, even those 'schizophrenics' who push people onto subway lines or whatever, they'll go for someone weaker than themselves. Maybe the payoff for killing is hatred or jealousy rather than pure monetary gain...

I agree that swift discipline is the cure but I think that they all have some ability to judge, even if it's some reptile-brain 'this guy looks alpha better not attack him' level. More specifically I think some middle-class coddled brat is going to be really whiny and irritating when running into some obstacle but won't rob a store because he/she assesses 'I can just get my parents to pay for it'. Whereas the hardened thief calculates more along the line of 'who cares if I go to prison, my mate Bronco is there, I know lots of people who went to prison, and I don't want to look like a pussy and I need this cash fast'.

Yes, I'm not sure that claims of innocence when caught red-handed necessarily shed light on a deeper worldview than "these beautiful, magical words are supposed to make my enemies stop in their tracks." There's at least an understanding of cause and effect there, for sure, but soldier-arguments often don't stake out their issuer's actual beliefs.

Frieren: "Why call out to a mother? Demons are monsters, and like all monsters, they don't raise their young. Once born, you are abandoned. You walk this world alone. That makes you ruthless, solitary creatures. Lone wolves with no concept of what family means. Explain."

Demon Child: "It's simple. That word stops humans. It keeps them from murdering us. Isn't that magical?"

"these beautiful, magical words are supposed to make my enemies stop in their tracks."

This is it, and why some bodycam videos have suspects running full-speed from officers while shouting, "I can't breathe."

I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment.

More than that, most thieves can make a moral analysis of why what they did was acceptable, perhaps even righteous. It will be skewed, absurd, even ridiculous, but they can do it. When they say I didn't do nuthin, the [wrong] is implied.

I stole from the store, but insurance will cover it. Or it's a big corporation so it doesn't count, they'll never know the difference. I stole from my employer, but he underpays me so I deserved it. Sure, I robbed that woman in the street, but she has more than me and I gotta eat.

The thief understands cause and effect and morality, they simply find a warped enough reasoning to justify their actions.

I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment

You'd think this, but then there are endless videos of criminals doing things that just seem completely insane to anyone who has a normally functioning understanding of cause and effect, like reaching for a cop's gun inside of a police precinct. A mere knave wouldn't do that.

This is because a certain category of criminals are simply that slice of humanity that has very low impulse control and is incapable of modeling the consequences of actions, or at least incapable of letting that affect their judgement. Watch enough footage and you'll recognize them.

Lots are just pretending they don't understand because they think that this will let them get away with it, but the small slice of people who genuinely have no impulse control exists and is most of those people who are arrested hundreds of times for the same petty crime.

Career criminals as you mentally model them also exist but they're a different breed.

I think this is representative of a general societal movement that holds, basically, that discipline should be done away with and replaced with more nurturing. The stick is just sadistic cruelty, and does much more harm than good, and whatever good it does do can be done all the better with extra carrots.

Indeed. Except the second you suggest otherwise, they're happy to "give you what you want" by using the stick on you and people like you while continuing to "nurture" people they like.

...much in the same way as, when someone advocates redistribution of wealth, they are met with calls to redistribute their wealth specifically while not redistributing the wealth of their richer, less compassionate neighbours.

I'd say this is legitimate. It's easy to support very harmful actions based on abstract principles when the harmful consequences don't fall on yourself. Sometimes you need to do this anyway (punishing criminals, not allowing underage drinking) but it's often a warning sign that someone is applying principles in a very self-justifying way.

when the harmful consequences don't fall on yourself.

That does not apply to that to which I was referring.

If Alice calls for 'redistribute Bob's wealth; do not redistribute Alice's wealth', your argument might be valid; however, I am referring to when Alice calls for 'redistribute a fraction of both Alice's wealth and Bob's wealth' and Bob counter-proposes 'redistribute Alice's wealth; do not redistribute Bob's wealth'.

That language policing is carried out with enthusiasm by those who detest regular policing.

They're even against language policing when it polices them: see all of the discussion about "correct" English and how marginalized groups speak correctly in their own dialects (AAVE, for example).

I teach at an expensive private college (cost per year >$90k) and I used to teach at the state school down the street (cost per year $20k). There is definitely a difference in the quality of the education, but the private school is at most 1.5x better than the state school. (For some majors, the state school would be 1.5x better than the private school.) The amenities (food, gym, clubs, etc.) are basically the same.

The main difference---and what the parents are really paying for---is that the admin of the private college is VERY hands on. The private college has something like 10x the number of deans per student, and those deans have very busy jobs interacting with the students. One of their jobs is to ensure that every student is registered for whatever accommodations they might be eligible for. They see themselves as "cutting the red tape" for the students and "helping them navigate the bureaucracy". At the private school, I deal with these deans every semester, and your stat (20-30% of students on accommodations) matches my experience here. The public school is very different. There are no deans helping students get these accommodations, and a student must be very proactive in order to get them. (My sense is that basically none of the engineering students I had would have even known accommodations existed.) Teaching at the public school for 6 years, I literally never had to deal with the deans about student accommodations.

I don't think accommodations are the only reason for the price difference between public/private colleges (the administrators do a lot of other things as well), but I'm sure they make a substantial part.

How many deans are we talking about here? My alma mater had fewer than ten deans for seven thousand students. Is "dean" not a title for a small group of department leaders in your school?

At the private school: Under the "dean of students" office, I count 10 people with the title of dean (or vice/assistant dean), 4 with the title of director, and 5 administrative assistants. We have about 1500 undergrads.

At the public school: There are 3 people total in the "dean of students" office: The dean, a vice dean, and an administrative assistant. They have 25000 undergrads.

Both schools have separate deans for managing the faculty and the dean:faculty ratio is similar between both schools. Both schools also have separate "student-centered" departments (not part of dean of students) for financial aide, study abroad, career center, the gym, varsity sports, etc.


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