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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   33610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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A post is blowing up on my part of twitter where a guy is saying he only wants to spend 10 minutes a day with his kids.. This has a surprising amount of scissor power, with people coming down on all sides.

Relevant quote:

My feelings of love toward them are perfectly strong, but if I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working, or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work...

Am I a terrible person? Or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal and it's modern parenting norms that are off? Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care, I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this.

The one straightforward argument is that, well, he's a shitty dad. Especially since he says he wants to be working, accomplishing something, and what is his work? Well, he's a creative director at some random tiny crypto business working on "building digital gold." So... easily mockable.

The other side says that modern parenting norms are fucked, as he aludes to, and that kids used to be a lot more free range. Normally I'm sympathetic to this, but the guy's kids are below five, so idk. I think infants and toddlers definitely need a lot of attention.

Either way I'm curious how parenting norms might break down along culture war lines, and what people here think?

ETA: Also, a great and extremely sassy quote tweet:

This post has everything I despised about Silicon Valley: the narcissism paired with extreme neuroticism, the intense focus on “how you feel” on a meta level, the inability to appreciate anything non-“productive”, the therapeutic public confession, and finally, the utter selfishness towards the needs of children when it is you who are the adult and should take responsibility for yourself.

So, I agree with (I think) Matt Walsh who said basically:

  1. Why are you anxiety-ing about how you feel about doing something? If it’s good to do, do it.

  2. Why are you vomiting this out in public / on twitter?

Moreover, I assume this is almost certainly a case of poorly trained attention span / boredom tolerance from someone who’s gooned their dopamine with the internet. This is just doing the work of basic conditioning.

Regardless of the kid aspect, if you can’t tolerate more than 10 minutes doing something boring and are in your head about whether it’s appropriately fun, you need to fix this about yourself.

Overall, the idea of over factoring in whether something is good to be doing or virtuous with how much one enjoys it is painfully cringe and just a bad life perspective. Therapizing about it on the internet to strangers is downstream of this.

Whether he needs to be spending more time with his kids and how he ought to be feeling about it, is all very far removed from these more immediate problems of basic task discipline

Yeah I tend to agree with this. I personally find it useful and important to think about and focus on internal states more than the norm, but it's easy to go overboard and pathologize any discomfort as a problem that needs to be solved.

To be clear, I do think it's useful to reflect on internal states, and I do think Matt's bravado is performatively overstated.

Regardless of the kid aspect, if you can’t tolerate more than 10 minutes doing something boring and are in your head about whether it’s appropriately fun, you need to fix this about yourself.

IMO his cry for help is about how he feels guilt that he doesn't find it fun. He sees it as a chore and it's breaking his heart.

He sees mom doing it without any sign of remorse. He feels fortunate that he has more time than dads of yesterday to spend with his kid, and here he is feeling unfulfilled by it.

Well, yeah it's a chore. Do you think every mother is singing songs of joy while cleaning up toddler mess for the umpteenth time?

Some things you have to do because they have to be done, and that doesn't mean it's always fun and joy. Parenting is hard. This is the flip side of all the talk about "what can we do to make people have more kids?" While women may naturally be more amenable to looking after children, this is the reality of it: it's hard work. Fathers have to share in it as much as they can, otherwise you will not - no matter how many rights you strip away from women - get that elevated TFR so many solutions on here have been posted about.

Welcome to parenting: it's a job. If you want four kids, you can't dump it all on your wife, you have to take some share as well. And it's not going to be fun and laughter and bliss every moment.

I think you're missing the substance of his post.

He's not complaining about the responsibility of being a father. He's specifically saying he looks at his precious little boy in the face who just wants to play with him and he is not fulfilled by it and it makes him feel like a bad father.

He just doesn't know that most fathers consider small kids kind of inane and that we have to just smile and think about the bigger picture. It's pretty normal, even though in polite company and pop culture nobody really says so.

And not only is this normal but his way of managing it is above average! I would have been thrilled if my dad had spent 10 to 20 minutes a wee month playing with me let alone per day! I'd be very surprised if most of the fathers sneering at him actually spent that much time per day playing with their kids.

I mean, I'm glad he wants to be an involved father. I suppose I'm just surprised an intelligent guy doesn't know, or had nobody tell him, that parenthood is a slog. You may love your kids and still be delighted to hand them over to Granny or the day care so you get a few hours to yourself. You won't always feel like rainbows and sunshine when they want to play with you or want your attention.

The important part is not "I should be spending X hours a day with them", the important part is "Can I put on my big boy (or big girl) pants and take care of them even when all I want is to go off by myself?"

Kids don't need 100% focussed attention from the parent all the time, just being in the room and they are playing with their own stuff while you keep an eye on them but do your own work is enough. Neglect is the thing that does damage; Dad or Mom brushes you off and can't be bothered ever to pay attention to your game or your question or your stunning kindergarten finger painting. Even half-assed attention is better than nothing there.

So if he's at least half-assing it, good job!

I'm a parent of three youngish kids, my initial reaction is sort of "eh ya I get it"

Not that I really agree with them. But kids are a radically different gear speed than career.

All the instincts that probably serve very well in a career, like caring about time / productivity / efficiency are negatives when it comes to being around kids.

Kids eat slow, they do things slowly, they get distracted easily, their play isn't working towards anything specific, etc. At a young age their accomplishments are existence and survival.

It's tempting to say that the dad should learn how to slow down and get to the level of his kids. But I think that's his decision to make, and there will be trade-offs. He might get worse at his current job role. And if it's bad enough he will lose the position and resent the kid for it. The kids will speed up eventually so he will miss their younger years as a father, but being bored with them as toddlers doesn't mean being bored with them as school age kids.

Yeah idk if he's the sole breadwinner for the family, if he was and approached it from that angle I'd probably be more sympathetic.

I don't have great instincts for a career myself so... I find it hard to relate ahaha.

This is only very lightly related, but I've actually talked to Justin Murphy in another context: In 2021 he tried to set up an arranged marriage agency in which he and his partner would receive profiles and information, and then try to pair people up with each other. The Tweet below describes his process; it was also discussed in an UnHerd article. The site was arrangedmarriages.co; looks like it's not up anymore.

https://x.com/jmrphy/status/1697354879482630370

I was single in 2021 and actually signed up for this. I then had a couple of calls with him and a lady that was working with him on it, but it didn't lead anywhere - I never got paired. Their process didn't seem to be very effective in finding out what the involved people were like and what they valued. Still, I though it was a cool idea at the time, in the same vein as date-me docs etc. - kind of cringe at first glance, very not Lindy, but I thought it was neat that someone was trying something different to fix a part of modern life that seems to only get worse and worse. (I later got married by just meeting a local gal and dating her normally.)

He also runs this other entity called otherlife.co, which is a sort of private study-the-classics forum: "the Other Life community [will] focus on reading the greatest works, deepening our reading and writing, and continue cultivating genuine high-signal exchange across online and IRL events. I remember it was taking off around the same time as Urbit and other similar things. It appears he's had some modest success with that.

Anyway I certainly don't share his attitude about kids and productivity, although I imagine it's just a "lottery of the talents" thing - I have a lot of fun with kids, and outside of my 9-to-5 I'm not trying to change the world especially. But I did find him to be an earnest person who was doing his best, and I read the tweet in the OP as being more of an honest, "I don't think I'm supposed to feel this way, but I do, and I feel bad about it." I felt bad that he got piled onto, because I think he's sincerely trying to grapple with the way a lot of modern techie people are acculturated with regards to what their working lives are supposed to be.

I think the fact that he plays with his kid 10-20 minutes a day and does it with a smile even though it's driving him crazy inside makes him a good dad. He's crushing it, even.

Small kids are inane. Playing with them is not that fun. That's okay. It's a familial relationship, not a friendship.

Unlike mom, dad's body is not producing MDMA every time he looks into his kid's adorable face. He has to do this shit without a chemical buffer. He is working harder at this than mom is.

I agree this is an unhinged thing to post under his own name. This is a better discussion to have with his therapist, who hears this shit 100x a week and could give him much more constructive feedback.

if I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes my blood starts to boil

Why would he think this the main thing to be doing with his kids?

He has, it looks like, a four year old and a toddler. The space the kids and he are in should be relatively child friendly, and then the kids need to be taught not to mess with the outlets or whatever isn't. Four year old and toddler is a bit annoying, because the four year old talks much better than the toddler, making mutual play a bit difficult, but they can still basically interact with each other. They will, of course, need things, but getting food and drinks for the kids every couple of hours and helping them when they need it isn't fundamentally "unproductive."

Admittedly, I do sometimes feel deep focus deprivation while raising three kids and working at an elementary school. but that's the gig.

It's 9 AM this morning, Saturday, January 3. It's a sunny, warm day here in Austin, and my four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn’t really feel like it, but at this age his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, so I conceded, and with a smile.

He can just say no. It's alright to say no to things that would be good for the kids and make himself feel like a good father, if the alternative is resenting said kids.

I like Zvi's take on this. He comes across as a prickly introvert who is glad the he has a wife ad kids, but who thinks it's bonkers that people are pressuring people like him to actively supervise their children all the time, 24/7, and that this is literally causing people not to have children at all. That seems very likely. Sometimes I get along with my kids, sometimes I don't. I don't like playing ball, and never have, that's what school recess is for. I'd be in favor of more recess time for lower elementary, for the kids to throw balls around. If the man's wife feels similarly, the child can be in pre-K, with other kids who want to play.

I do like watching them doing other things, my six year old has taken to cutting out hundreds of tiny books, and making them tiny covers, and tiny paper accessories for her dolls. Even the one year old is kind of amusing to watch, he's been trying out different amusing stretches lately and occasionally instigating chase with me. But if they're nagging about something, even something that would otherwise be good, we have to forcefully reject the nagging, this account of trying to enjoy his coffee, getting nagged at, then eventually giving in and rejecting it is bad. He shouldn't do that. Play ball when the child hasn't nagged you into it.

Some things I've read suggest that American city child raising styles have become absolutely bonkers lately in respect to "gentle parenting," never forcefully rejecting things like nagging or dysregulated outbursts, and this is bad. It's work either way, but in the medium run he probably is setting himself up for bad times if he practices the ignore then feel guilty then give in strategy.

Four year old and toddler is a bit annoying, because the four year old talks much better than the toddler, making mutual play a bit difficult

My then-2-year-old daughter got so upset once when she was trying to play with her younger cousin: "[Cousin's name] not listening to me!!!" "Honey, she's 1. She barely understands you." It was short-lived frustration, though.

Probably prudent to also mention his follow-up tweet, where he acknowledges the criticisms he's been getting and commits to self-improvement.

Seems to be a lot of people who are having their first rodeo with Murphy. This sort of autismal "brutal self-honesty" stuff has always been his "thing".

It's just bait. Most kids aren't that enjoyable for most adults to interact with, plenty of exceptions of course. You're not supposed to say it because society has a guilt complex over how anti-natal we are. Here's the basic truth, so long as the kids are fed, clothed and housed reasonably well, not sexually or physically abused, the parents have done their job. Decent parenting isn't this crazy life-destroying thing that people make it out to be as if "tiger momming" was a good idea. You don't have to spend thirty-six hours a day enriching your kid. All that bullshit is posturing for other parents, not for the kids.

modern parenting norms are fucked, kids used to be a lot more free range

What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.

I don't have kids, but I was the elder cousin that was responsible for keeping the kids alive through the holidays. Kids are so much fun. They allow men to experience power and wish fulfillment like nothing else. It's the only time you get to legally play God.

Maybe it is just me, but very few emotions match the unbridled joy of watching kids frolicking. Little puppies, Sunrise hikes, a cold summer breeze. It is a feeling of wholeness, harmony, of being at peace that nothing else matches.

Some classics:

  • Godzilla/ WWE - I am the big bad. I can only throw & grapple. They can punch/ kick/ bite/ whatever. This is the funnest one.
  • Soccer - 3v1 soccer. Nutmegging 3 kids in a row is the dream.
  • Ghost stories are a fun. Especially because they stay scared for days. Ton of lasting value.
  • Game developer - You can develop games & puzzles with any arbitrary rules and keep arbitrarily increasing difficulty. It's exhilarating to see kids figure out loopholes and meta strategies as the game evolves.
  • Story telling - Converting mythological tales to a the level of a kids cartoon. Add any amount of spicy takes you like. Kids wanna hear about Half-man half-lion Narashima and mountain lifting Hanuman. At least kids in the early 2000s did.
  • The circle is round - When they get too annoying. Ask them to run around in circles as a show of manliness. Eventually their head starts spinning and then lay down for rest.

Yet for every single minute, on the inside, I just don't want to be there.

I went off on a tangent, but sounds like someone with a lot of anxiety. I have had periods of my life when I've been unable to exist in a moment, and the urge to escape was usually rooted in an external source of instability that was causing me anxiety.

he's a shitty dad

Percentiles are a better way to look at it. Divorce is the most destabilizing thing a child can go through. Only about 50-55% American kids grow up with their biological parents, who stay married to each other through their entire childhood. If the dude stays happily married, financially stable and doesn't abuse his kids, he is already above average.

So no, not a shitty dad. Above-average is all. Not good. Not bad.

What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.

It's a different world man. I checked the FBI crime statistics, and in my home town, when I was allowed to bike 30 minutes as google map says, probably 60 minutes as a kid bikes, down the bike path on the parkway to the nearest shopping center for a slushy, the murder rate in my county was 0-1 per year. Entirely domestics. In the year 2025 it's closer to 50, and lots of gang deaths. To say nothing of other random tragedies caused by associated rises in drunk driving, drug availability, and the general third worldification of my homeland. In 30 years we went from random murder literally not being a thing that ever happened where I lived, to constant low level gang violence.

I get the arguments about per capita. But I think when it comes to the loss of quality of life due to violent crime, the incidents per 100,000 residents matters a lot less than the proximity to incidents. If I'm in a crowd of 100 that gets randomly fired into, versus being in a crowd of 100,000 that random gets fired into, I sincerely doubt my perception and attendant stress levels will be much different between the two. I'm thinking "I could have been killed!" either way.

And so it goes with our kids. When I was a child, it was major news when a neighbor's child wondered off and drowned in a lake. A tragedy the likes of which hadn't been seen in decades in our town. Now teenagers show up dismembered in public parks and it's a Tuesday.

I have a general yardstick on risk. The US has always had high rates of innocents being killed in car accidents. Being a pedestrian and driving cars are base levels of risk taken on by most Americans without much thought. If someone is safer a daily commute or crossing the street, then it is safe enough for me.

The rates of school shootings, domestic terror attacks and freak homicides are much much lower than death by car or suicide. (The 2 main sources of death for young kids). Compared to a few decades ago, kids are doing fewer drugs, cars are safer and tech has made freak accidents easier to respond to.

I worry that the fears may be overblown. Safetyist neuroticism. It's a meme, but men used to fight wars and die in trenches. The US is so much safer today than before.

I agree with your general point, but his kids are too young to play outside unsupervised(they’ll run into the street).

People don't live in amorphous clouds of statistics. They live in particular locations and can watch those places actively get worse year over year even if national stats show otherwise (because other places are actually improving or because the stats are gamed). You couldn't pay me to raise kids in the town I grew up in even though for most of its history (including the first half of my own life) it was a fine place to live.

People's eyes deceive them. Cars and suicide risk have remained high across all neighborhoods, safe ones or otherwise. The statistics match my anecdotes. I know multiple people who have died from car accidents and suicides. I don't know anyone who has been gunned down or stabbed in a random mugging. Statistics are useful because the country has a history of collective hysteria around hoaxes like killer clowns and child kidnapping vans.

To be fair to you, neighborhoods and cities go through boom-bust cycles. So yes, some places will get worse. But, the US is not uniformly getting worse.

As of 2026, it is much easier to keep your kids safe. With find-my functionality, it is easy for parents to ensure their kids stay within safe geographic boundaries. Ring cameras allow you to leave you kids at home, fully monitored. Uber allows them to go from point A->B safely. Technically, it should be easier to let kids be independent. But, safetyism leads to the opposite problem.

urban design rant incoming

I've long believed that malls replaced all acceptable public-places in post-war America. When malls inevitably collapsed, the only safe low-supervision space was lost. IMO, Levittown style suburbs (post war suburbia) are fundamentally flawed. They eliminate all the benefits of safety in numbers. They break up common playgrounds into tiny yards, so kids have to go further away to play real games instead of playing within walking distance of home. They put cars on the critical path of everything, increasing the number of interactions that kids need to have with said cars. It's a lose-lose-lose.

I am not anti-suburbs. In fact, the US created some of the prettiest and most effective suburbs before personal cars and Levittown. Bungalow courts in LA and SD allowed families to have SFH and yards, but pooled the yards together. This allowed multiple parents to supervise the kids from the home and gave the kids a larger playground to work with. The inner courtyard also naturally cages the kids off from the road, making it unlikely that they run into traffic to collect a stray ball. This is safety by the very nature of the urban design itself. Courtyard housing is the standard way of doing this in Europe, beloved college towns and pre-war USA.

I know I am not being completely fair. Cul-de-sac style suburbs are really artificial barriers that allowed whites to self-segregate better. Now that inner city crime isn't as big a deal, the natural defense provided by the maze like structure of a levittown style suburb appears redundant to my eyes. The low density of suburbs also wouldn't have been an issue if the primary residents were young, couples had multiple children and all socializing required humans to be outdoors. In 2026, socialization is digital, people have fewer kids and suburban couples are older. These same lonely suburbs were probably bustling with social activity back during the baby boom.

But that is not a good excuse. Even during the baby boom, designers should have seen that this would not last. The success of the post-war suburb was based on a ton of unlikely things going right all at once. Baby boom Americans may have been the only generation anywhere where all the unlikely things went right. Inevitably, suburbs began giving under the weight of their shaky foundations. Parents complain that the suburbs aren't what they used to be. But really, suburbs were never going to be what they used to be. Post war America was a lightning in a bottle situation and that era is never coming back. Moreover, if they'd just let suburbs abide by design principles that'd been around for 100s of years , then suburbs would have been more resilient to the shocks that come from changing circumstances associated with changing generations.

Levittown style suburbs are unitaskers. They were good for one thing and they served their purpose. I like classic suburbs styles like Courtyards, Bungalow courts and street car suburb style designs because they're Lindy for a reason. I believe they will be able to restore some degree of lost independence to kids and lost peace of mind back to parents.

It's a different world man. I checked the FBI crime statistics, and in my home town, when I was allowed to bike 30 minutes as google map says, probably 60 minutes as a kid bikes, down the bike path on the parkway to the nearest shopping center for a slushy, the murder rate in my county was 0-1 per year. Entirely domestics. In the year 2025 it's closer to 50, and lots of gang deaths.

I'm really baffled as to where you grew up, Petersburg? As far as my experiences in Virginia, it's overwhelmingly been one of gentrification - admittedly limited to NoVA and Richmond. I can't speak to Norfolk or Charlottesville. In DC, the majority of the city is unaffordable to anyone but wealthy professionals and the politicos, with the poors being pushed across the Anacostia. H street is a filthy den of hipsters (or may have progressed to a fully upscale neighborhood since I left, I don't know) and you have to go pretty far to the northeast to get anywhere grungy. NoVA is a gleaming mass of towers full of consultants milking the feds (where you possibly work making useless software?) and I'm not even sure how far you have to drive outside the city before you stop seeing Mcmansions and nice suburbs.

I don't know Richmond as well but The Fan and Jackson Ward both gentrified pretty heavily. Nice downtown core, UVA seems to be metastasizing, lots of mcmansions and farmers markets.

Are you confident that your quiet suburbia was invaded by illegals rather than most of the successful, law-abiding people being siphoned off by the gentrifying cities? Brain drain to the city cores will hollow out the suburbs and revitalize the downtowns which seems to be what's happening (although I haven't noticed the apocalyptic degradation of the suburbs you write about extensively). It's surprising that I lived in fairly similar areas to you without ever hearing about Teen Dismemberment Tuesdays. Why do you think we had such different experiences?

Why do you think we had such different experiences?

It's remarkable the things you can be oblivious to if your news diet doesn't tell you. Then one day your coworker and their mother are murdered in their apartment (in one of the gentrified parts of town) in a gang killing. At least, that's how my wife's illusions were shattered.

My local news bends over backwards to not cover crime. Itty bitty little articles, no photos of perps, they usually even decline to provide descriptions of the suspect, though they'll mention the police have released one and if anybody has seen them to call. Never makes their front page either, you have to specifically go to this little "Crime" section that has the feel of a subsection they are just about ready to delete entirely. Sometimes a particularly heinous crime will get some attention on the regional subreddit, but usually posts about crime just get deleted because reddit and agenda pushing.

So yeah, I don't really take your lack of noticing as a proof of absence. You and a million like you.

I've been thinking about this as well and my money is on @WhiningCoil having grown up somewhere around Woodbridge. Maybe just the right part of Fairfax County (Herndon, Springfield).

I also generally agree with his characterization of the changes over the last 20 - 30 years, although with a little less blackpilling.

  1. The big MS-13 story from back in the day was the 2005 murder of Brenda Paz.. A stabbed and dismembered teenage girl left on the banks of the Shenandoah was quite shocking for Virginia. That it wasn't some sort of crime of passion or schizo Green River Killer psycho, but cold and calculated gang retribution was infuriating.
  2. And it's continuing to this day. Note how, in that case, the victim was picked up in Reston, which has a median income of over $150,000 and boasts more > $1 million homes than < $1 million homes.

So, @WhiningCoil is right in that a lack of awareness is not a lack of evidence. My own semi-conspiratorial impression is that both Farifax County and Arlington County police know that most of their calls to the well to do parts of those areas will be for domestic stuff, they over patrol in the immigrant heavy parts of the counties with the clear message of; "you guys can fuck around with each other as much as you want, but if you make trouble for John Q. Taxpayer, we will destroy you."

There's also degeneration at the top. There was a time when Tysons Corner and Northern Arlington had mom and pop shops and restaurants. Local High Schools would host fundraisers and other events at these places. There were weird tarot shops that may have been mild drug fronts and, according to urban legend, classy rub-n-tug joints. You know, the things that make a small town work.

To say that NoVA is now corporatized is an understatement. It's internationally hypercorporatized. If you walk through Tysons II on any given day, perhaps on your way to drinks at the Ritz-Carlton, you will see a Saudi woman in full Burqa (fully face covered except for the ninja-slit) toting bags from luxury stores with doormen in $5000 suits. If you walk through Clarendon on a Friday or Saturday night you will see G-Wagons and Ferraris parked outside of the "clubs" there. How can this be? This isn't Vegas, LA, New York. This is a still heavily milquetoast white people suburbia full of, yes, "consultants" and political operatives who mostly make money siphoning off their portion of The Federal Trillions. Real deal finance isn't there, there is no celebrity entertainment industry, "venture" and "tech" exist but in silly reinvent-the-consulting wheel ways that would make actual Silicon Valley denizens laugh (which is saying something).

Less than two hours away you have multiple counties to the west and south that went for Trump 70/30 or better. You have the border with West Virginia (and not just the eastern pandhandle which is just extended NoVA). You have the area around Thurmont and Frederick Maryland, known as a one of the last super stronghold of the KKK. 90 minutes south on I-95 you have Quantico, VA, Headquarters of the USMC and the major FBI training center.

In 2018, Washington and Lee High School, in Arlington, VA, renamed itself (well, the schoolboard did) to "Washington and Liberty" High School. I guess Lee was removed because he was the loser slave owner instead of the winner one.

While I can't quite bring myself to the level of "intentional race replacement" that @WhinginCoil seems to have signed on to, I do think this is what it looks like when a society lets suicidal empathy and degenerative "inclusivity" run amok. It starts simple enough with an "authentic" arepas restaurant or food truck opening up. What's the harm? It ends, years later, with the high priestesses beginning the government backed erasure of history that displeases them.

If you walk through Clarendon on a Friday or Saturday night you will see G-Wagons and Ferraris parked outside of the "clubs" there. How can this be? This isn't Vegas, LA, New York. This is a still heavily milquetoast white people suburbia full of, yes, "consultants" and political operatives who mostly make money siphoning off their portion of The Federal Trillions. Real deal finance isn't there

Capital One employees catching strays.

It is interesting how despite being the capital city of the US, DC and its surrounding areas are fairly devoid of private sector white-collar jobs, especially in Tech, Finance, generic corporate roles. It's often usurped by cities and their surrounding areas such as NYC, SF, LAX, CHI, sometimes even more minor ones like Boston, Greenwich, Seattle, etc.

It is interesting how despite being the capital city of the US, DC and its surrounding areas are fairly devoid of private sector white-collar jobs, especially in Tech, Finance, or even generic corporate jobs.

Plenty of (nominally private-sector) defense-related white collar jobs though. There's a whole mostly-separate tech sector there, for instance. Aside from that, I guess there's Marriott. There's probably still some truly private telecom stuff.

Greater DC has an urban area population of 5.2 million vs 9.8 million for London and something similar for Paris (the French don't publish urban area population estimates). Metropolitan area population (defined by commuting patterns) is 6 million for DC, 13 million for Paris, and 15 million for London. And DC hosts a bigger, richer government and so has more government and government-adjacent jobs.

There just aren't the people to staff another industry in DC. The US is a big enough country that (apart from NYC, which does everything except government) its major cities are functionally specialised.

I can only speak to one part of this, but you don't have to go far in northeast DC to get grungy - you just have to walk around. There are basically two patterns of American urban dysfunction: two sides of the tracks, and block-by-block neighbourhoods. As an example, Chicago is almost entirely side-of-the-tracks, and modern NYC is almost entirely block-by-block. NE DC, you'll be walking through a street of fancy townhomes with Little Free Libraries for five minutes, then you'll be in the hood for three minutes, then you'll be on a nice block again but walking slow because the guy in front of you is cracked out of his head and you don't want to pass him, then you're properly back in In This House We Believe land, then rinse and repeat.

What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.

The classic viral image showing children's shrinking ranges comes from this Daily Mail article in 2007. The article seems to agree, and to make a good case for, the idea that the increasing restrictions are unnecessarily self-imposed by parents. I mostly agreed at the time. It wasn't until years later that I saw that map again and did a double-take at the place names...

It wasn't until years later that I saw that map again and did a double-take at the place names...

You're not the only one to Notice that.

Thank you! I probably saw the reference in that very post and then forgot that I had.

What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ?

Busybody neighbors who call CFS to report "neglect" the moment they see anyone under eighteen out without an adult hovering over them "helicopter parent"-style?

How often does this actually happen ?

I didn't grow up here, but knee-jerk CPS reporting and HOA Karens are 2 of the most fascinating Americanisms. I have no calibration on how ubiquitous these types of people are. Are they real or one off bogeywomen ?

Every HOA will have at least one HOA Karen. Big HOAs (and the US has some with over 100,000 residents) will have a certain density of them, sufficient to file complaints if you don't cut your grass or paint your mailbox the wrong color or whatever.

Not sure about the CPS people.

It also doesn't matter; my experience with parents (who actually love their kids) is that they'll do anything to avoid the risk of losing them.

Having it happen just once is enough for parents to rule out the risk forever.

About 1 in 3 children will be the subject of a CPS investigation at some point: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283534

I'm only a few paragraphs in and already getting strong "we wrote the conclusion first" vibes.

The repeated refences to disparate impacts and constant waffling between "children referred to CPS as infants", "children referred to CPS multiple times", and "all children referred" strike me as massive red-flags.

Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives. For most of kids who get referred it happens only once and it ends up going nowhere. However If MeeMaw is callin' cause no-good baby-daddy just got released from prison, or her daughter's off the wagon, and she's worried about the baby. The odds say that MeeMaw has called CPS before, and the probability of this referral going somewhere is much higher.

The conclusion of course is that CPS is racist and should stop trying to protect underclass children

Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives.

We have now been referred to social services twice, both routine and in one case leading to a 15-minute home visit and a no-action letter, and in the other case to literally nothing at all. Plenty of mandatory reporters consider "Toddler with head injury of unclear origin" to be a mandatory report. It wouldn't surprise me if 30% of all kids get this kind of routine referral - and apart from the waste of CPS resources I don't see it as a problem.

The problem is where CPS see "free range 7-year old" as the kind of referral that needs more than a no-action letter.

The main example I keep coming bact was a post I read by a mother complaining online (Anecdotal, I know, and not something I bookmarked, either).

The story was basically that they live several blocks from the elementary school their kid (like 10-11 years old, IIRC) attends, such that, weather permitting it was actually faster (and definitely healthier) for the kid to walk straight home from school than take the bus, the kid preferred to walk home, and so she let them do just that…

…until some busybody neighbor — she's not allowed to know who — saw the kid walking home alone, decided that this constitutes child neglect, and called CFS to report it as such. Mandatory investigation rules meant CFS had to send someone out, subject the whole family to a week-long inquisition, with the threat of removing the kids hanging over them like the Sword of Damocles the whole time. They get through it… and then the next month, the same CFS investigator is back, to put them through the same process again. Because the same neighbor (again, CFS clearly isn't allowed to say who) kept reporting it, and while multiple reports in the same month as a "everything's fine" finding can be dismissed, once a new month rolls around, they have to investigate the report again.

And then a third time. And so on for several months in a row, until the CPS investigator basically laid it out — they all know she's not neglecting the kids, but it doesn't matter. The neighbor is going to keep reporting it, and they're going to have to keep doing the mandatory investigations, with full "due diligence." So either she and her family can try to live with having to go through this whole ordeal every single month, or they can just cave in to the busybody's idea of "proper parenting" and make the kid ride the bus home every day.

So, of course, they caved.

As for how often CFS investigations happen, again anecdotal, but my family was subjected to one once, thanks to me. I was in kindergarten, and my school had an after-school-hours Halloween event we went to… where I, being (then-undiagnosed) on the spectrum, suffered sensory overload which, combined with the stars coming off my "the constellation Orion" costume, caused me to have a crying autistic meltdown right in the middle of everything. So my mom had to hustle us all out of there, and try to get my screaming autistic ass loaded into the car. Well, apparently somebody saw this, and decided to report possible abuse.

So the whole family — me, my two younger brothers, both our parents — all spent a week going through the whole grueling inquisition, the whole time in terror that I was about to be taken away from my family forever, that we'd all be broken up, and I was never going to see my loved ones — my parents or my brothers, ever, ever, ever again, and it was going to be ALL MY FAULT, AND…

Well, as you can see, decades later and I still have Feelings about it all.

(And in contrast, just a little later in my childhood? Our neighbors out at Kinney Lake — the ones whose idea of "disciplining" their children was making them sit bare-assed on a hot wood stove? They never had any problems with CFS.)

oof.

America is confusing. A society that emphasizes individual freedom and nuclear families suffers from strange Karens in the form of CFS and HOA abuse. These laws allow Karens to ruin your life through asymmetrical warfare, with zero repercussions or risk of de-anonymization. You'd think the loopholes would be addressed by now.

As an aside, I'm surprised that it the word 'Karen' is so new. This individual is so ubiquitous, yet a term only showed up in the late 2010s.

America is confusing. A society that

Well, see, that's the thing. America isn't a society. We're big and diverse (a continent-spanning empire, really). There's still enough remnants of federalism, for now, that we are still in some ways "50 smaller countries in a trench coat," as a Tumblr mutual puts it when explaining the US to Europeans. Albion's Seed may be over-referenced around these parts, but it's still quite relevant here. The American "founding stock" included both irascible, fiercely-independent Borderers, and stern, moralizing, hyper-conformist Puritans. Many of our oldest and most powerful institutions were built by the latter — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all began as Calvinist seminaries (the first two by Congregationalist Puritans, the third by "New Light" Presbyterians). There's a lot of diversity, a lot of incompatible cultural trends and forces, brought into ever-increasing contact, with ever-increasing tensions.

What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.

Zvi just did a post on this, was pretty crazy. I had no idea it had gotten this bad.

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-16-letting

Very interesting. 11 million views on this.

My first thought is to look at how much time primate fathers spend with their children. They do spend more time playing with their own children than with those not their own. However, I can’t find how many minutes they do this. This study indicates that for hunter gatherers, after toddlerhood, it is rare for fathers to play with their children, as they have similar-aged playmates in the neighborhood.

Lancy’s (2007) review of collected ethnographies from the Human Relations Area Files suggests that, except for some foraging societies where children have little access to playmates, children rarely play with mothers and almost never play with fathers. Playmates are almost al- ways other children. Even children are the main caretakers for each other, especially past infancy (Weisner and Gallimore 1977). With regard to work, we acknowledge Bradley’s (1993) pioneer- ing and detailed study of children’s work discussed in more detail below

I would say we are in a society “where children have little access to playmates”, because in primitive societies children play pretty much all day, but today they have school and don’t have access to playmates to do this unless they are in a lucky neighborhood. And even then, it’s an insufficient amount of play. To throw another variable in, hunter gatherer children play based off of what they see their fathers and elders doing. Our environment is double unnatural: they never get to model behaviors from their elders, and they never get to play. This leads me to believe that father-child play is an essential replacement activity to the sort of play that children typically enjoyed with other children in their ancestral environment. Play with their father today is now essential because (1) he is the only male elder they will ever get to have rich personal experience with, (2) the child gets to model the father’s accumulated social-emotional wisdom, eg learning motivation and emotional processing and planning even just in a simple game of catch.

Another thing worth noting is that Christianity is unnaturally (supernaturally?) concerned with the Father-Son bond. It is possible that Christian culture boosts the interest that a father has in the wellbeing of his son, given that this is a microcosm of the Christian’s relationship with God, and that the decline of this culture corresponds to less interest in the father-son relationship.

I don't have kids, but I always imagined that's what it would be like for me. I feel very awkward around babies and little kids. I like the general idea of having kids, and I think I'd be decent at raising older kids, but with little kids I'm totally lost. I just don't feel that sense of cuteness that other people seem to feel.

I think it's OK to be honest and admit that's how we feel (although you probably shouldn't say it publically or admit it to your family). I feel like that's a very natural state of affairs for men, really. Just let it be. We'll step up for the big emergencies, but we really don't want to be there in "house husband" mode babysitting the kids nonstop. We'd probably have more kids if society in general was OK with us being mostly hands off in child rearing.

My dream is to have kids, then spend most of my time hanging out at some old school mens' social club talking business over cigars and brandy, seeing the kids only briefly for the big events.

I like the general idea of having kids, and I think I'd be decent at raising older kids, but with little kids I'm totally lost.

I was like this when I was young, but I didn't realize what became obvious in hindsight: your own little kids will be your own little kids. They'll be genetically half you and half your spouse, and environmentally some mix in which (especially when they're little) you're still a plurality.

My oldest kid binge-read the Harry Potter series when she was 5 and decided that my reading to her for 20 minutes a night was way too slow. When her little brother was 8 or 9 he thought my home group-theory lessons during Covid were amazing. Their little sister picks Babylon 5 episodes for her every turn at Family Movie Nights lately. Now, you may be thinking, "wow, what unbelievable geeks", but that's exactly the point - I'm kind of an annoying geek, and my wife isn't annoying, and it's not much of a coincidence that we got a trifecta of exactly the sort of non-annoying geeks we're thrilled with, even if they might not stand out as positively to other random adults. Whatever personality/subculture you may have and/or have fallen in love with instead, that's what you can probably expect instead, and even if you're not a big fan of little kids in general you might be much more enamored of your own little kids in particular.

I should register the customary skepticism of hunter-gatherer (ad venatorem-collectorem?) arguments:

  • Present-day hunter-gatherers don't necessarily live lives similar to those of the distant ancestors of present-day non-hunter-gatherers, because it's only in very distinctive environments (e.g. places poorly suited for farming) that that lifestyle persisted.
  • The 10,000 Year Explosion and its ilk would argue that evolution has continued apace in historical times, so even our own hunter-gatherer ancestors don't necessarily share much in common with us.

Argumentum ad antiquitatem should cover it, no?

Though it would be funnier to file it under “genetic fallacy.”

Especially in context of the fact that the agriculturalists were demonstrably more evolutionarily fit.

It is not a fallacy to look at the conditions humans evolved in to determine whether someone is a “monster” for not feeling a particular way about a behavior lol

If a variety of distinct hunter-gatherer societies spread across the globe all have the same behavior, it’s reasonable to believe that this behavior was a common hunter-gatherer behavior. Most evolutionary psychologists hold that the Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle informs modern behavior but maybe that book has a compelling argument against the majority position? Agriculture would need to present some pressure on the genes related to paternal love and play to affect those genes; I suppose that’s possible but I don’t think it should be assumed.

If you look at an agricultural society which is still primitive like the Yanomami, it appears the fathers play with their infants for 15-30min in the morning: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/irenaus-eibl-eibesfeldt-human-ethology . Maybe someone with a good AI can trawl it to see what else it says about play.

Having a three year old myself, I certainly feel the mental exhaustion and lack of patience this guy feels. Nothing I have ever experienced has demanded more of my attention. Having less time to myself, less sleep, less sex, and less money is not ideal. All that being said, it has forced me to appreciate things that I wouldn't have otherwise appreciated. Hanging out with a three year is exhausting, but it is also hilarious and endearing.

His tweet feels inappropriate to me. Saying the quiet part out loud does nothing constructive but give this guy a momentary sense of relief while dragging everyone else into a pointless argument about how much you’re allowed to resent your own kids. Also, writing something like that with your name attached to it gives off toaster fucker vibes. I understand the feeling he has sometimes, but I'd be willing to bet at least some of us wanted to fuck one of our hot cousins when we were in our teens. Should we be sharing that too?

Should we be sharing that too?

Probably not, but I imagine seeing that Tweet is a relief for parents experiencing similar feelings.

I know that it is, but is relief in this context a net good? I'm not so sure about that. Some sacrifice is necessary, and I believe that sacrifice is good. I don't think he's a terrible person. I know parents feel like this from time to time, or even most of the time. I just think he's oversharing and overlooking the value of his sacrifice.

I know that it is, but is relief in this context a net good?

That's not an easy question to answer. At a minimum, I would say that it's extremely rare for a situation to arise where it's a good idea for a parent to publicly say anything negative about such parent's children or about the parent's relationship with such children.

I like playing with kids, always have, and I totally get it. No, he's not a bad dad- but maybe saying the quiet part out loud(kids games are usually rather dumb, even if you like being a human jungle gym. Few adults particularly like hide and go seek) is a bad idea. And I think he might want to give it a few more years, see if he likes kicking around a soccer ball with a seven year old a bit more than whatever make believe a four year old comes up with.

This is a remarkably good scissor statement, in that I find the people being mean to him insufferable, and even inasmuch as I might find the Sillicon Valley Crypto Guy of it all mockable, I still have an innate rage at people dismissing him as a shitty dad.

So despite knowing that I'm falling for a scissor statement and starting a fight for no reason, I'm going to do it anyway: if you want to call this guy a shitty dad I don't want to hear you bitch about the TFR.

There was a letter to the editor in the WSJ this morning that I took a picture of to remember, from Leah Libresco Sargeant, replying to a prior article by William Galston title "America Needs More Husband Material" about how men need to shape up so they can get wives. Sargeant cites surveys of high school seniors showing that a declining percentage of young people feel that they will be "very good" spouses. The money quote that stuck out to me:

Giving [kids] more lectures on how important marriage is won't do it, they think so highly of the institution that they judge themselves incapable of living up to it.

((She goes on to say kids need more self organized play to develop into marriage material, citing her homeschooled husband's experience running a youth theater company. I should look her up and see what her arguments are outside two paragraphs of newsprint.))

My brother-in-law is a fantastic dad, he spends a ton of time with my niece and nephew, he dedicates himself to them, they are always the number one priority, he values nothing else. My own father, who was a great father to me*, frequently jokes that BiL makes him feel bad about the time he spent with us growing up. Frankly, if I couldn't have kids until I wanted to be a dad the way my BiL is a dad, I will never have kids. I will never want to spend all day with my two year old. If that's the standard for having kids, I will never meet it, and a lot of other people won't either.

If we are trying to convince people to have kids, especially conscientious neurotic high achieving people who we really want to have conscientious high achieving kids, then setting impossible standards will not achieve it.

As to the "this is distasteful and shouldn't be shared" thing, it feels very odd to me, like a blue haired wokie screeching about misogyny because of a bland "women be shopping" joke. Just a massive example of the political correctness commissars telling people what they are and aren't allowed to feel, and what feelings they are and aren't allowed to talk about. "YOU WILL PLAY WITH THE TODDLER, YOU WILL ENJOY IT, PARENTHOOD IS JOY!"

When parenthood was more normalized, bitching about it was too! Don't start the politically correct cycle of gatekeeping who is and isn't allowed to be a parent and how they are allowed to feel about it, it will not increase the number of people having kids one iota.

*Your opinion of the results may differ.

This is a remarkably good scissor statement, in that I find the people being mean to him insufferable, and even inasmuch as I might find the Sillicon Valley Crypto Guy of it all mockable, I still have an innate rage at people dismissing him as a shitty dad.

I don't think this is a scissor statement, I think it's a different (and more traditional) social failure mode.

Plenty of things in life everyone knows but can't say, in an increasingly feminized society this is way worse.

It's the "all my girlfriends are perfect 10s dressed impeccably all the time and even look great without makeup!" bullshit.

Yes having kids sucks. It is also great. Society has decided some parts of having kids you are allowed to complain about and some you are not. Society has decided nerds are fair game to criticize. Etc etc.

This is just a matter of what thoughts are approved to be voiced in public, and what types of people are allowed to be supported.

The most scissorish bit is the way it triggers a bunch of other conversations, but that also happens with "you can't say Sara looks fat in that dress!" "But she clearly does! She weighs over 300 pounds! And she asked!"

"Spending time with small children is boring and I hate it and would prefer to do as little of it as possible" is a classic scissor statement: some large portion of the people who read it think it is obviously true and no right thinking non-lobotomized person could think otherwise, and some large portion of the people who read it think it is obviously false and no right thinking person with a soul could think it was true.

Again, most people hearing that statement both agree and disagree with it to some extent, and have a variable level of feeling across their lifespan both acutely and chronically (ex: I'm pissed at my kids right now so I say X) and also have a wide disconnect between how they feel about it and what they are saying in public.

It is a sliding scale of both interpretation of the statement and also of disconnect between private and public presentation of beliefs.

Scissor statements are more binary Yes or No, Left or Right, Up or Down.

Just because something creates argument doesn't mean it is a scissor statement.

gr8 b8 m8 8/8

I genuinely meant all of this, in all seriousness, I have no idea how "yes kids are annoying but no you can't neglect them as a result" is bait

Yeah one of the best scissor statements I've ever seen. I do think that one of the best things the rationalists are into is unschooling and free range kids. Just the idea that childcare is way more intense than it used to be, and really than it needs to be due to cultural norms.

I agree with this, and I know Justin well enough that I know this was a crafted scissor statement (he even called his shot with the Jake Paul post immediately after).

What gives me whiplash is hearing that Bill Galston wrote an article with the phrase "Husband Material" in the title. Either that was imposed by an NYT editor, or that old Brookings fossil's banging an intern 50 years his junior (or, possibly, it was a common phrase in the 1970s before its recent recurrence in modern gender war discourse).

WSJ, but same difference.

Don't know how I misread that from the google results, I even thought to myself "huh, WSJ columnist gets a feature in NYT".

This is why I hate the TV show Bluey. It is actively TFR reducing.

Explicate!

Explicate

Nothing too complicated, take your post replace your brother-in-law with Bandit (the Dad from Bluey) and you've got the argument.

Important context: the guy only had kids in the first place so he'd have cover for his pursuit of his socially useless crypto business: https://x.com/jmrphy/status/1305527478635630596

This is basically no different from women who delay having kids so they can girlboss at a fake email job. Except that since he doesn't need to actually birth the kid he can work the fake job and have kids at the same time.

I've encountered several of Justin Murphy's takes before and don't have a very high opinion of the guy, but this actually makes me respect him a little more. Kids are a blast sometimes and kinda boring a lot of the time - I don't have them myself, but I have a lot of experience being the adult cousin and babysitter. I've never had a "blood boiling" internal reaction to hanging with small children, but I've certainly felt like doing something other than engaging with them for eight hours. Sometimes you have to just do the virtuous thing, and it's actually good that he's airing out that he's finding it difficult. It's presumably pretty disheartening to feel like you're the only person in the world who doesn't want to spend a ton of time with your kid, and so it's probably encouraging to learn that someone else is struggling with the same thing but still doing it anyway.

I don't have children, and other than largely raising my one brother I don't have a clear and visible "childcare pedigree". The end result of this is that a lot of my friends and acquaintances who do have kids tend to confide in me because I appear to be an uninterested party.

So far as I can tell, what this guy is saying is true for a majority of men who have young kids. Pretty much every father I know has admitted that he can't wait until his kids are older, and that simply being around them is exhausting.

If you go in for evo-psych, that makes sense. In an ancestral environment, the man would be away from children, hunting. He probably wouldn't be interacting with them regularly until they were old enough to be taught.

I think this guy's mistake is simply being either too honest or too autistic for his own good. A solid 90% of modern society functions on rampant lying - no normal guy wants to admit that they'd rather work a sixteen hour shift getting his balls crushed at the ball crushing factory than take care of a toddler, and whether they consciously recognize it or not, they don't admit it because they know it'll make everyone else around then experience an uncomfortable amount of self reflection about their own life. It's better to just say Kids Are Wonderful And There Are Absolutely No Exceptions Full Stop so everyone can feel like they are good people doing good things.

A guy like this breaks the social contract, which is probably part of why it blew up. This is pretty much the childcare equivalent of saying that yes, that dress does make you look fat.

All parents talk about children being exhausting, and it's not any sort of secret. I am the father of 4 young children. The easiest way to start up a conversation with another parent (at a park/school/cub scouts/whatever) is to observe that their children have a lot of energy and commiserate with them. I've easily had this conversation with >100 different people.

So far as I can tell, what this guy is saying is true for a majority of men who have young kids. Pretty much every father I know has admitted that he can't wait until his kids are older, and that simply being around them is exhausting.

I'm a father of a one-year-old and I'm also an attorney who works a lot of hours. It's true that taking care of young kids gets exhausting or boring at a certain point. On the other hand, it's still way less exhausting and stressful than working an actual job.

If I had to choose between spending 12 hours a day with my kid and 10 minutes a day working, or spending 12 hours a day working and 10 minutes with my kid (assuming all other things, including income, remained equal) I would certainly choose to spend 12 hours a day with my kid. Yes, it would get exhausting at times, but it's still way more fun and rewarding than work. I have a hard time understanding the psychology of anyone who would choose otherwise.

If I had to choose between spending 12 hours a day with my kid and 10 minutes a day working, or spending 12 hours a day working and 10 minutes with my kid (assuming all other things, including income, remained equal) I would certainly choose to spend 12 hours a day with my kid.

I would agree 100% with this - kids are lots of fun. However, that caveat is a big one. The trade-off isn't 12 hours of play vs 12 hours of work; you have to include all the other things you don't get to do in order to hang out with them. As someone who is childless (but has a niece and nephew who I adore spending time with), my schedule looks something like:

  • 7:30-8 wakeup/shower
  • 8-12, 1-5 work
  • 5-6 cook dinner
  • 6-11:30 whatever I want.

If I were parenting my niece and nephew instead, it would look more like:

  • 6:30-9 wakeup, shower, make kids breakfast, get kids ready for school, drive kids to school.
  • 9-12, 1-6 work
  • 6-7:30 cook and eat dinner (convincing kids to eat is definitely worth at least half an hour and you can't convince me otherwise).
  • 7:30-9 bedtime for the kids
  • 9-10:30 whatever I want (probably spending time with my spouse)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there definitely isn't as much room for deviation in it. If I wake up and I've got a migraine, I still have to do the morning routine. If I get off work and I'm super stressed because my boss is hinting at layoffs, I still have to prep and cook dinner. I can't decide I'd rather go out to the bar with my wife for drinks; we have to put the kids to bed or they'll be hell the next day.

(Before anyone asks; I'm assuming both parents are working in the above, and that some of the time blocks (like dinner) could be done by either parent, but the other parent is almost certainly in charge of managing the kids during this time. I didn't schedule pickup from school, for example, because I did dropoff and presumably my wife is doing pickup in this hypothetical).

It's not just men, many women feel the same, it's just not productive to bring it up in public.

I retract my post above.

@sarker has a link below that disgusts me enough that I can't even pretend to give this guy the benefit of the doubt.

Probably most dads think this. I don't know Murphy well enough to say what is going on here: is he just too autistic to realize he is supposed to lie; or if he just likes trolling. Based on a cursory read of his other takes, it seems he is basically just trolling.

Someone also quote tweeted that with a quote from Naomi Wolf's book Misconceptions:

When Nico was about 9 months old, I was in the floor with him playing the way you do with a nine-month baby- sorting cubes. We were doing this for what seemed to me to be a really long period of time. Ed came in, saw this scene and said, "Oh you're just entranced." And I said, "Are you out of your mind? I am bored silly." And he was stunned- he had no idea.

I am not myself a parent but I have a lot of experience being around smaller kids at various ages due to having siblings with kids in a wide age range. Playing with younger kids is definitely something I often found boring or tedious, both as a teenager and adult.

I don't think there's anything wrong with him (or any parent) feeling this, nor does it make him a bad parent. I suspect most parents feel this way some of the time. The things that are entertaining for kids are just not that entertaining for adults!

I think most adults have forgotten how to have fun.

And this isn't a new problem. When Jesus said "unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven", I think he was telling his followers that they need to have fun like children.

One of the main reasons that adults can't have fun is because we worry too much. This worry causes us---and this tweeter in particular---to focus on "productive things" instead of "fun things". But fun things done right are actually highly productive! One of main evolutionary purposes of play is to teach us new skills: Building legos is fun because we learn new techniques that can help us build bridges. Basketball is fun because it improves our body's conditioning. Reading is fun because it expands our imagination.

I am a father of 4 young kids (7m, 4m, 3m, 2f). It's obviously exhausting at times, and I don't begrudge any parent who complains about the exhaustion. But most adults I know are just genuinely not fun people. They are either too addicted to their "productivity" or wireheaded by social media/tv/literal drugs. But kids are untainted. They still know deep in their bones how to have fun, and are constantly seeking it out.

I think it would be reasonable to say “I don’t want to spend 3 hours a day with my kids”. (By the way, the same courtesy should be extended to women who think this, which is a lot of them.)

10 minutes is pretty low though, it’s a way of relatively directly saying that you only had kids to have kids (whether for religious, legacy, accidental or other reasons, or some combination of the above) and don’t really care about them independently of that. Which is OK, but maybe less socially acceptable now.

I was largely raised by nannies until I was old enough to go to school (and I guess the person is talking about preschool aged kids). I have no resentment toward my parents; I had dinner with them most nights from maybe 4 or 5 years old and I spent most vacations with them except for camp in the summer, and that wasn’t all summer anyway. They were loving and nurturing and I still have a strong relationship with them. My mom would take me to the doctor, my dad would read to us at night, both parents always made time to meet the teachers a couple of times a year. That seems reasonable to me.

I don’t know that 10 minutes would.

Well yes, it’s entirely reasonable to prefer not to personally play with your kids for hours a day(child’s play is mind-numbingly dull) but for most families adults have to do this anyways, unless they have enough kids it doesn’t matter. Complaining too loudly is at least bad form.

I was largely raised by nannies until I was old enough to go to school (and I guess the person is talking about preschool aged kids). I have no resentment toward my parents; I had dinner with them most nights from maybe 4 or 5 years old and I spent most vacations with them except for camp in the summer, and that wasn’t all summer anyway. They were loving and nurturing and I still have a strong relationship with them.

I like the chillness of your parents. Soft Caplan-maxxing ahead of their time. Just being relaxed, happy, and doing their own thing if need be with the confidence that their children will turn out well.

That’s the vibe and energy I’ve been trying to share with my extended family from the time I was a late teen.

Justin Murphy? Wow. Nothing much to add except to say I've seen him evolve from a UK lecturer to an American influencer who'd interview e-thots to now a dad. Frankly, the best work he ever did was in the UK.* His eagerly going the entrepreneurial, attention-getting route in Austin has compromised his integrity, though he believes most assuredly it's the other way around.

*https://youtube.com/watch?v=me5t2btkuU8&list=WL

I believe a big issue with child rearing discourse - relationship discourse for that matter - is that people really need to define what they are talking about. Before this one sleep training blew up on my feed where the range of believed practices seemed to be from letting your 3 week old scream until they pass out to not immediately running to pick up your six month old if they made any noise whatsoever.

Complaining about 10 minutes is weird, but it's not like I spend hours playing with my 2 year old. On weekdays I probably "actively play" with him less than 30 minutes a day. We interact more then that but it's just touch points. We'll interact for a minute and then he'll go back to doing his own thing.

I think you're right about this. I'm trying to think of what 10 minutes of "play" with my kids would look like and I'm not sure. I don't think a 2-4 year old could hold 10 straight minutes of interest in a single game of play.

We'll play hide and seek a lot, but the kids version of this is having my wife and I "hide" in the exact same place over and over while they find us. It is really fun, and they laugh and laugh while we do it, but I don't think bouts of this last much longer than 10 minutes or so.

Reading to them takes longer than that for sure, but is that the same as playing? I think we just spend about 45 minutes reading all the kids favorite stories to them before bedtime.

I'll spend a lot of time with them "playing" outside, but that's usually just me supervising them while they play with each other, interspersed with a few minutes at a time where they show me something interesting or the climax of a pretend play that they're doing "Dad come and see our bunny house! [pile of sticks]" etc. Or if they "help" me cook dinner it's a few minutes of them watching me cook something before they get distracted and want to do something else.

Thinking about this some more and we do go on a lot of really long bike rides where it takes up most of the day, but thinking that through it's a lot of short stops at a lot of places. 10 minutes at coffee, 20 minutes at the park, 10 minutes at the grocery store, etc. etc.

I think this person is just way overanalyzing themselves.

Yeah, there's negligence and then there's normal and then there's overbearing. God forbid I pretend to be the arbiter of normal, but what I think is normal and what works for my family (ages 2 through 7) is this:

  1. When there's food to cook, I'm cooking it in the kitchen with the kids upstairs. If there's something really finicky about the food and the kids have been rowdy, I might put on TV.

  2. Next priority - house cleaning/maintenance. Do the chores while the kids play. Get interrupted every ten minutes to kiss a boo boo or settle a dispute.

  3. When there's nothing to cook or clean or I just want to sit, pull out some knitting to work on in the same room as the kids. Sometimes I get looped into a conversation with them for a few minutes, sometimes they just want me to look at them or what they're doing. I make appreciative comments.

  4. A few times a week, do a family activity together. Take them to a playground, take them to the library, etc. At home, play Go Fish for 20 minutes. Or set up two forts and throw stuffed animals at each other. This is really only the "concentrated play with kids" time and it's not even every day.

  5. Help kids with school work, make sure they're reading, and then read to them for 40ish minutes (we read a story to the younger two before bed, which the older two are able to listen in on if they wish, then a chapter book to the older two after.)

There is no "play with kids for hours at a time." There is sometimes "shepherd kids around a children's museum for hours at a time" which is different. And it's always work, it's not fun. The enjoyment is in watching the slow growth of the children. The fun is that moment when a kid shares a toy on their own and you think to yourself, "I taught them that." But why would anyone feel guilty about not having as much fun as their child when playing a game for four year olds?

Children are generally not very interesting before the age of ten. Maybe it's my Extreme Male Brain, but women can take care of em before then.

If a kid wants to hang out with me, it's okay, but I'm not going to actively engage. I supposed if I ever had a wife, I could be coerced into kid minding duty, but there's a small slice of time where they're smart enough to be worth teaching and 'mature' enough to not want to hang out with their stupid dad. That time is worth maximizing. The rest? Eh.

Children are generally not very interesting before the age of ten. Maybe it's my Extreme Male Brain, but women can take care of em before then.

Personally, I would beg to differ. I will grant you that below an age of one, kids are effectively extremely needy pets without the brain power to set them apart from most other mammals. There are certainly people whose dream job it would be to take care of cute crying babies, but it would not be mine.

But I guess that at an age of two or three, kids far surpass other mammals in intelligence. I think a lot of people enjoy watching a human level intelligence in the making, just like some car enthusiasts would also enjoy toolgifs of cars being assembled, rather than going "ew, that thing is not even self-propelling yet, call me when it is ready for the autobahn".

For example, reading the (paywalled) posts by Scott Alexander on the development of his twins, it is apparent that he takes great joy from observing their development. Personally, I have two nephews (aged 7 and 5). I will confess that when they were very small, I was not interacting with them much -- holding a baby is not something which would bring me much joy, I would probably mostly be worrying about holding it wrong and injuring it or something. But from the point where I can communicate with them, I've had a lot of fun interacting with them, playing games and the like. Young kids have a whole world to discover, and I find their joy in discovering new things infectious.

For people aged 10 or 15, I guess the quality of the interactions would depend on shared interests. If there are shared interests (say math), then one can have a blast ("and this is how we know that sqrt(2) is not a fraction"). If there are no shared interests (e.g. "STEM is boring, I only care about rap music", given that I do not know anything about rap), then these interactions will probably be as painful as interactions between adults who do not share any interests.

But I will totally grant you that this is all very subjective.

... I would probably mostly be worrying about holding [the baby] wrong and injuring it or something.

This is a normal feeling, but once you hold a baby or two for a while you get past it fairly quickly.

So the mother of his kids is effectively a single parent then? If she knew what she signed up for beforehand, and decided that him bringing home a big paycheck is enough, then I do not see a victim. She should probably get the kids some male role models who are willing to spend any amount of time, but if we say it is not immoral for a single woman to conceive a child from a sperm donation, then I see no reason to call what they are doing immoral either.

Of course, it is not the kind of relationship I would wish for, personally. If the guy just wants offspring, he could become a sperm donor instead.

I think you're leaving out that his oldest is four. Interacting with a four year old is drastically different from interacting with a ten year old.

He said he went out and played ball anyway, despite bing annoyed about it, so his wife is presumably mostly annoyed that he's complaining in public about it, not that he's actually negligent.

It's been very amusing seeing all the speculation in this thread, as a friend of the couple in question. All I'll say is that his wife is a formidable woman - she's a reporter covering energy/space/defense, works hard but doesn't take bullshit, and certainly didn't marry for money.

I don't think it's fair to label the guy "a shitty dad" over one tweet but the this tweet displays exactly the sort of behaviors I had in mind when I described the post-modern liberal ethos as "incompatible with forming healthy relationships and families" in last weeks thread.

Neuroticism, extremely short time-preferences, hyper-feminization, lack of emotional regulation, pre-occupation with one's own validation/gratification. These are not healthy qualities to have in a partner but they are endemic (and often celebrated) within the liberal striver class because they are the qualities celebrated and promoted by the philosophies of "Emancipation", "Self Actualization", "Deconstruction", "Breaking down barriers", and "Following your bliss".

It is trivially true that there are downsides to having kids.

We currently have a new baby in the house which means I have been getting less sleep than I would like and I have been getting less sex than I would like. I also have a lot less time and energy to pursue my own interests than I would like. Additionally, the former baby has noticed that he is getting less attention from mom and dad than he is accustomed to, and has been acting out a bit. We have had to rearrange the house to make space for the new arrival and reinstall a bunch of the "baby-proofing" we had previously removed which annoys me, it annoys the kids, and it annoys the animals. Every living thing in the house is annoyed. The thing is that these sorts of issues have been a fact of parenthood for as long as human beings have been making babies so complaining about them has the same energy as complaining that the sun rises in the east.

My point is that it is ok to feel tired, or bored. It is ok to not always be enjoying everything all of the time. What is not ok is to be a grown-ass man with apparent emotional maturity of a toddler. In that sense I suppose I am echoing @iprayiam3 and @PokerPirate user, irrespective of the kid aspect, if you can't handle 10 minutes of tedium or delayed gratification that's really something you need try and fix about yourself.

To come at the issue from a different angle. Are there downsides to being physically fit? Yes absolutely.

Do you think I like eating leafy greens more than I like doughnuts? Or that I like drinking water more than wine? Do you think I "enjoy" doing cardio. Do you think that there isn't some part of me that would just love to throw back a half-pint of tequila smoke a bowl and do a bunch of shrooms right now?

Eating healthy, working out, and having to behave responsibly are all very clear and significant downsides to staying in shape so why stay in shape?

Because despite all reason and logic to the contrary, good things are good.

It is good to take a kids bunch of kids and dogs to a park and play "kick the ball". It is good to catch your romantic partner looking at you like you're a snack.

Good things justify themselves.

https://archive.ph/IHPLW

Tim Walz isn't seeking reelection.

It's been interesting watching the reaction in my various social circles as this plays out. It seems like it's rapidly coalescing into two distinct narratives depending on tribal alliance:

  1. Walz is hoping to get out of the spotlight before he's indicted in connection to the fraud scandal
  2. Walz fears for his life because insane ultra-MAGA instigators are trying to ruin him.

I don't know if either are actually true, but it's an interesting thing to watch develop in real time.

I wonder if this is downstream of the failed campaign with Kamala? Walz didn't achieve the kind of breakthroughs with white male rednecks they were hoping for, and failure is contagious: he was willing to abandon Minnesota for the big job but when that didn't pan out, now he's crawling back for a third term? Why re-elect a loser?

Do you know anything about Minnesota state politics?

Who is likely to step in on the DNC side? Do the Republicans have anything that even resembles a functioning party up there?

Early noises that The Klob will run. Very, very unlikely that the Republicans will challenge, it would take an exceptional candidate.

X to doubt. Walz isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he knows Somali fraud is an albatross around his neck and failed campaigns for higher office don’t normally make untouchable running mates. Paul Ryan and Tim Kaine remained politically important, after all.

This feels like a strong contributor. Despite his earnest attempt at stealing the party's heart (and no doubt with few loyalists, he succeeded), it seems the Dems have not positioned him as a party leader in any respect. The scandals may be hurting him now, yes, but we can't underestimate the role that embarrassment is playing here.

After that debate performance and general Kamala of it all, his political career is pretty much dead. I don't think there's anywhere else for him to climb: he can either retire to the speaking circuit or tread water as the governor. No shame in choosing the former.

I think this is just the pragmatic move for him as a good party member. He's not resigning or admitting guilt, he's just saying he won't run for reelection. The election is still a year away, so there's plenty of time to find a new candidate. If he had stayed in the election it would draw (even more) national attention to the scandal and drag down the entire Democratic party. This way, the heat stays more contained to just Tim Walz personally, and I suspect the party will reward him with some sort of cushy job in the future (director of a nonprofit with a high salary and nebulous job duties is a common choice).

I'm sure he would have won if he ran, but probably the party gave him the boot because he's not getting any good publicity, only bad. Democrats have nothing to lose shitcanning him and and they can get a fresh face in the house.

I don't think any prominent democrats have made it through primary season after getting solidly booted by the party, so he's probably just quitting now as they asked to get a graceful exit.

Does the “spotlight” really matter in this case? The Trump Train is going after him regardless of his job. If they can tie him to the ongoing fraud cases, they will.

Likewise for potential lone wolves. He’s going to be in the news whether or not he has a gubernatorial security detail. But I rate that risk pretty darn low, and I expect he does, too.

The real takeaway is that VP candidates don’t usually do much.

  • Kemp: made a Presidential bid and went back into business.
  • Lieberman: continued as senator for CT. Actually was primaried in 2006, but won on an independent ticket.
  • Edwards: made another failed run while cheating on his dying wife.
  • Palin: got <8 years of book deals and talk show appearances before Trump made her angle obsolete.
  • Ryan: continued as representative for WI for 7 more years; became Speaker of the House.
  • Kaine: continued as junior senator for VA.
  • Harris: lol

Hell, with one big, elderly exception, elected VPs don’t even do that much. You have to go back to Bush Sr. to find someone who actually advanced in their career after they were out of the Executive Branch.

Trump Train is going after him regardless of his job. If they can tie him to the ongoing fraud cases, they will.

I'm not sure if I buy that. Trump has a terrible track record of actually using the force of law against his political opponents. Even if Walz is guilty of a crime, it seems more likely that his AG will show up and give a speech on Fox News rather than actually indict.

Arguably, Trump himself is living proof that the court of public opinion matters more to politicians than actual criminal processes: in that vein, the AG discrediting an opponent on Fox News is quite possibly more career-ending that finding, say, 37 felonies to charge and convict. I could imagine Walz continuing to campaign if indicted, but here he's been forced out of town.

Not endorsing, just observing.

Conditional on Walz being guilty of something damning—something with genuine prison time, I’d expect him to get indicted. I’d expect that whether or not he was sitting governor.

If that condition isn’t met, and the case against Walz is weak or nonexistent, I wouldn’t expect an indictment. Governor or not, the cost/benefit isn’t that strong. I think Comey and James only got their cases railroaded because of personal animosity.

The thing about speechifying on Fox is that it works whether or not the case is strong. Hear name, trigger boo lights. So, again, I expect it to happen regardless of Walz’s position.

Walz is almost certainly guilty of nothing that he was responsible for. That's how modern political machines work - we have advanced beyond the need for brown envelopes.

That's how modern political machines work - we have advanced beyond the need for brown envelopes.

New Jersey begs to differ!

I don't get the impression that Walz is personally corrupt. I could well believe he never touched a cent of dirty money.

What he is, is weak. Kamala picked him precisely because he was biddable and wouldn't have opinions of his own to clash with her. I could well see that he just went along with what the advisors and civil servants told him to do. And if that meant "sign this, Governor, no don't worry, ignore the racist MAGA noise about bad things happening, ha ha you know everything is hunky-dory", then sure.

From "107 Days" (and boy, having just finished the book, I meant to finish giving my opinion of it but all this happened) re: her decision about who her running mate would be:

[Shapiro] peppered me with questions, trying to nail down, in detail, what role I saw for my VP. At one point, he mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision. I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation. A vice president is not a copresident. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership. I had to be able to completely trust the person in that role. “Every day as president,” I said, “I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”

...It was quickly clear to me that Tim had walked into that room feeling he wouldn’t get the job. The first thing he said as he sat down—I don’t even know if the door had closed behind him—was: “Whether or not you pick me, I’m going to do everything I can to get you elected.” He was immediately self-critical. “I’m not a good debater.” “I’ve never used a teleprompter.” He was less polished than Josh. But he had an appealing authenticity and was genuinely self-deprecating. A lot of people in politics act self-deprecating, but it’s just that, an act. If anything, Tim over-indexed his own liabilities.

...[The debate with J.D. Vance where Walz was too civil for her liking] When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”

I told the television screen: “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”

Ha. I don’t think you’re wrong. Even correcting for the autobiographical bias, he comes across as a real golden retriever.

My point is that 1. isn’t likely to motivate him. I figured your original explanation was more likely. He’s a loser, and he lost to the biggest bogeyman in the West. That’s career-limiting.

it's amazing how catty and petty she comes across in that passage. I wonder if she realizes that those are both still very prominent Democratic politicians and that she's basically sabotaging them with her book?

I think this book was definitely settling scores, particularly after the post-mortems on just how the fribblin' heck the Dems had screwed the pooch on this election.

Nothing is ever her fault. She is perfect. She can relate to everyone, no matter who, no matter what (it gets funny after a while when she pulls out yet another example of "I, too, was X, Y or Z" - like telling the high school band about how she gave up French horn because too much spit).

Her team were great, and yet. Failure! How could this be? Well plainly she was sabotaged, backstabbed, didn't get enough support, and of course Satan and his demons were all on the side of Trump (she hates Vance, too, which again is very funny to read).

But the fight goes on!

I wasn't sure if she intended to try a second bite at the cherry for 2028 or if she wanted to run for governor of California instead after this book, and I'm still not sure what her intentions are. She seems to be on an extended book tour and maybe trying to work up momentum for some new campaign.

Incidentally, based on your reading, would you agree with the pithy summary that someone else here posted/quoted a while back: “I [Kamala] didn’t not pick Buttigieg because he’s gay—I didn’t pick him because he’s gay and we only had 107 days”

Oh gosh, yes. As I slogged my way through the book, I was panting to get to the end and her Big Fat African-Asian-American Loss because I wanted to luxuriate in her tears.

I realise that sounds mean, and it is, but good God this woman is insufferable. Here's a taster of what she did when her staff threw her a surprise birthday party:

That afternoon, when I climbed the steps to the plane, I discovered it had been decorated in streamers. My team on board were wearing gold party hats and presented me with a deliciously rich German chocolate cake, my favorite birthday cake. They had red velvet cupcakes for the press. There was also a big helium balloon with fat numerals: 60. My team knew that I stopped counting birthdays a long time ago. So I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon. Then I went to find my Uggs.

Now, I've had a joust with Sloot on here about me being middle-aged, and I've never worn stilettoes in my life, but I am not ashamed of being the age I am (a couple years older than the Cocoanut Queen here) and even I would never be so ungracious as to deliberately burst a balloon with my age on it. There's several little gems scattered throughout the book where you just know some poor staffer got screamed at for how very dare they! 😁

But not just some staffer, no, Hubby Darling comes in for a whack of the stick too for not being special enough about her big important birthday (I have no idea who the ghostwriter was, but I wouldn't have let her include this little anecdote. Or at least not this way. Though I guess Kamala wants things her way, so her way it is):

Throughout the flight, I was looking forward to a special evening with Doug. Though we were apart a lot those days, campaigning in different cities, for my birthday our staff conspired so that we’d meet up in Philadelphia. I was wondering what he’d planned for our evening.

The simple answer: Nothing. Not a thing.

Doug had been keeping to his own grueling schedule and had flown in from a campaign event in Michigan. He was tired and preoccupied. What I didn’t realize: the attacks on me and the many personal assaults he’d been experiencing were finally taking a toll.

He hadn’t put any thought into where we’d stay that night, so staff had picked a place for us that they thought would be a bit more special than the usual campaign hotel. It turned out to be a bland establishment whose red-and-black decor looked like it hadn’t been redone since the ’70s. The only distinguishing feature of the room was its larger size, but the curtains were broken.

Storm [Horncastle, my indispensable social secretary], knowing how much I love good food, had picked two possible restaurants from which to order dinner. She thought it would be nice if the meal was a bit of a surprise for me. So, on the plane, she knocked on Doug’s door to ask him to choose the menu. He’d shrugged and told her to ask me. So she picked the menu herself. Ordered a cake. Dressed the table with candles. My girlfriends had sent flowers.

Doug at least had thought to get a gift for me. It was a necklace by a designer I admired from Ojai, California, Jes MaHarry, the same designer who’d made the piece he’d chosen for my anniversary gift. This one featured a set of baroque pearls nestled in a gold setting. When I turned it over, I saw that the pearls’ backing had been engraved with the date. How thoughtful, to commemorate the milestone of my big birthday.

But then I looked closer. The date was not my birthday. It was the date of our wedding anniversary. He’d obviously intended to give me both pieces on our anniversary, until it occurred to him that by repurposing one piece, he could kill two birds with one stone. He could practice thrift and also save himself the bother of shopping for a birthday gift.

I went to take a bath. It’s one of the things I did at the end of those long days to help me slow down enough to get to sleep. In the warm steam, I managed to relax and get over my disappointment. I was about to climb out of the tub when I noticed that all the bath towels were hanging on the far side of the room, unreachable. I called to Doug to ask him to bring me one. No answer. He was in the other room, watching the Dodgers eliminate the Mets in the playoffs. He couldn’t hear me over the television. I called his phone.

His answer: a casual “What’s up?”

Really?! It was a bridge too far.

And then we got into it. The stress had finally gotten to both of us. It was one of those fights that every married couple has had.

But we weren’t every married couple.

Doug stopped the argument cold. As soon as his words were out, the truth of them landed on me like a bucket of ice water.

“We can’t turn on each other.”

With the hits coming from every direction, we had to stay united. Back-to-back, swords raised against all outside attacks. We had to protect each other, be each other’s pillar of strength, givers and receivers of patience and unconditional love.

I noted earlier that Storm speaks bluntly but always with correct protocol. The next day she told Doug, “Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.” She handed him a set of note cards. She’d numbered them one through five, for the nights we’d be apart through the end of the campaign. She instructed him to write a note on each one.

From then till the election, no matter what city each of us had landed in, at the end of the day I would find a note on my pillow, in Doug’s chicken scratch, telling me how much he loved me.

Now, I imagine that she thought this was a cute, candid, slice-of-life little story that showed how she's only human after all, she and her husband have tiffs just like you ordinary folks, but they are strong and united.

However. She covers his birthday in the book, too, but naturally she gets everything right and perfect. She isn't there because she's out campaigning, but she gets her staff to hang up a happy birthday banner, she arranges his favourite meal, she gets the perfect gift for him. We don't get what he thought about it all, or if he wanted to complain about "but you didn't do anything special" as well. Of course not.

The queen cannot be expected to get out of her damn bath and walk across the room to the towels. He doesn't love her! Her perfect social secretary, though, saves the day by lecturing the wayward Second Gentleman on how he has failed her majesty and what he must do to make up for it, complete with homework, which he then dutifully completes every night (and again you just know she's keeping tally of whether it's every night or he forgot one night).

Good Lord Almighty, imagine being married to this woman. Imagine working for her: you get a fun birthday balloon with her correct age on it and instead she stares at you with the cold-blooded reptilian gaze and tooth-baring 'smile' of an alligator as she deliberately bursts it with her sharp heel, leaving you sweating as you realise she is imagining it's your head not a balloon, and you have to wait for the screaming scolding later. Because You. Have. Failed. Her. Did you not remember, or did you just not care, that the queen does not count birthdays anymore? How could you be so insulting and so cavalier? Are you really cut out for this job, after all?

EDIT: Also, yikes. Hubby Darling is Jewish. And she plonks down a story making him look like a cheap huckster: hey, I can kill two birds with one stone, repurpose this present for anniversary and birthday, not have to buy two different gifts! Yeah, way not to lean into the stereotype of Jewish money-obsession. She is very tone-deaf this way, too centred on how she feels, what she thinks, what other people think about her. I know she's the candidate and this is her campaign, but she really talks about others as though they're just there to orbit her, the one and only sun. There's a way of describing "we were all stressed and tired after a long campaign, and I felt disappointed about my birthday" without making it "Because my husband is a selfish, cheapskate, jerk".

EDIT EDIT: Imagine making your staff address your husband as "Mr. Second Gentleman". Had she been elected, it would have been "Madam President and Mr. First Gentleman" like they were royalty! 😊 Yeah, that might be correct protocol, but in a "this shows how we're only human" anecdote, "Listen, Mr. Emhoff" (or even "Look, Doug") "you have to fix this" etc. works a lot better for that humanising insight than the "I am a robot, beep boop" tone here. That kind of formality shows what working on Kamala's staff was really like, what her expectations of behaviour were, how you were supposed to know your place.

Fascinating, thanks for the summary! I gather the book does little to combat the perception that Kamala is an entitled airhead with a princess complex from having failed upwards her entire career and having never been told “no” by anyone in the Dem machine thanks to her unassailable idpol trifecta (Black, Asian, female)

I went in not expecting the book to be heavy on the self-reflection, but it went even lower than my expectations. She really puts herself across as Practically Perfect In Every Way. She has all sorts of applicable little relevant experiences in her life so she can connect with everyone from shit-kicking clodhoppers to the crème de la crème.

What's funny, and stunning, and a little bit frightening, is her complete lack of self-awareness. That bit about smiling at her staff as she burst the balloon with her stiletto? That's not normal, Kamala. That's sociopath behaviour. "You know I don't track my age. You have displeased me. Be thankful this is only a substitute for your empty heads, and not your real heads under my heel, as I crush this in punishment."

Definitely once out of her comfortable little San Francisco bubble, she can't handle the larger stage. The part about Joe Rogan? She goes on and on about how it was all his fault and the show's fault and literally accuses him of lying in his account of how they couldn't make the interview happen. Meanwhile, the Call Me Daddy interview for which she threw over Rogan gets about one sentence along the lines of "I did this". I was expecting her to expand upon why she did it, why it was so important, how she was getting her message across, the big huge massive audience that podcast has so yah boo Rogan, and so on. Nope, but she was happy to spend a few pages about how unfair and mean Rogan had been.

Everything descends into bathos with her. The important decision about picking her running mate, and how her staff liked Walz, and others advised her this and that? This is how it ends:

It was always going to have to be my decision. I told my staff and family that I didn’t want any more input, and I went to do something practical: I made a tasty rub and seasoned a pork roast.

By the time I went to bed, I’d decided on Walz.

She certainly ended up roasting Walz's pork! The linking of "seasoning a pork roast" with "deciding on Walz" makes it sound like the train of association going on in her mind was "Mmm, what a succulent little white boy piggy, he'd be perfect with a tasty rub and trussed in the oven!" 🤣

“I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”

So as a presidential candidate she had ninety-nine problems and her running mate being a bitch was one.

It definitely comes across as she was scared any potential VP would outshine her (Shapiro or the former astronaut, Mark Kelly) so Walz was a godsend. No self-esteem/self-confidence, and happy to stand in the background and do what he was told.

I don't know, before all this blew up the impression I got was that Walz was returning to Minnesota after the crash-and-burn Harris campaign and planned to run for the third term because why not, he was generally popular as the governor, and everyone was supporting him online and saying he was the reason Minnesota was so wonderful a place to live in and so progressive and so well-run. Even if enthusiasm for a third term was tepid (and I don't know if it was or not), there was no big glaring reason he shouldn't run again.

Well, that escalated quickly, didn't it?

New Nick Shirley video just dropped and it's a banger: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LmIrwjKQQKc

This one is a long-form, extended interview with David, the older man from the previous video. Apparently he's been investigating this stuff for years, rather obsessively, to the point where he's lost friends and family because they just think he's some sort of crazy racist person for investigating.

It's a bit long and meandering, so it's hard to keep track of all the claims made in it. I think we'll need time to process this and investigate further. I'd like to see this written in text with sources, instead of just a long interview. But among the claims made:

  • That this is all organized by Somali gangs, with the gang leaders bringing retribution on any family that doesn't go along with it. Investigators like David also get threatened with violence.
  • Widespread voter fraud from families living in collective housing. One person collects the ballots, "vouches" for all the people living there with no proof, and then returns a massive ballot stack all voting the same way.
  • "This is the worst fraud in human history." He estimates that a total of $80-100 billion was stolen by fraud in Minnesota
  • "However bad you imagine it is, it's worse. He alledges that basically every social program in Minnesota is now heavily corrupted by fraud. Some of the biggest are schools that might have 10 students, but pretending to get 100 or more so that they can get massive amounts of state funding. Medical services do the same.
  • This is all protected by the government and judicial system of Minnesota. At one point, David did the work to prove that a Somali leader did $7.2 million of fraud. He was convicted unanimously by a jury, but the judge overturned the verdict and left him free to continue collecting more money. The judges are elected, probably with the help of fraudalent Somali votes.
  • This isn't just state money, it's also federal money. This increases the scale, but also increases the severity of the crimes.
  • That Somalians routinely travel back to Somali, taking large amounts of cash with them (well over the TSA limit of $10,000), and for some reason the TSA grants them an exception to this when any normal American would be arrested or stopped for questioning.

So... will this lead to anything further? Tim Walz already said he won't run for reelection, but at this point I no longer think that's enough. The feds need to come purge the entire state government of Minnesota on charges of racketeering and voter fraud.

I did a lot of digging in Washington State daycares the other week. Washington has better public-facing financial tools. There is a big database of all government payouts for the last 6 months. You can go down the list of DYCF payments, stop at every company with “Home Daycare” or “Family Child Care” in their name that gets a 5-figure payout each month, cross-reference the name with the Washington State Daycare registry, and see that every single one has a Somali name as the primary contact. I must have found at least a dozen places run out of a medium-sized suburban home licensed for 12 kids that were each raking in $40,000 a month. Even assuming these were legitimate businesses running at full capacity, that would be over $3000 per child per month, for daycare, run out of someone’s basement.

Thanks, that's a good resource. I tried searching Ohio but couldn't find anything, mostly because they didn't have clear public-facing info for this sort of thing (and admittedly I didn't look too hard).

I really wonder though, if it's just Daycare, or how many other industries are corrupted by this sort of fraud.

You can see the base payment rates for Licensed Centers from Washington's Working Connections Child Care here. Depending on exactly where you are (region map) that 40k is very possible. If you took care of 12 infants (<1 year old) for a full day, for 30 days, in King County, the state would pay you ~$41k for that month. The rates are fairly similar for licensed family homes. You can also get an increase above those base rates if your childcare entity is part of the Early Achievers program. Family Home and Center EA rates.

I'm confused. I have a friend that put his kid in one of these suburban daycares (it's legit) and as far as I'm aware it's costing him thousands per month. I looked it up and they are also getting thousands per kid from the government. I know childcare is expensive, but it's not double dip into government's pocket and regular person's pocket for something like $5k total per kid expensive, so what's going on?

At 20/days/month and 8/hrs/day, that comes out to about... $31.25/hr per kid.

I'm realizing that I genuinely have no idea what a price is for childcare.

Is that high or low?

Seems extremely high to me. Daycare for our toddler is $90 a day, and that isn’t some ghetto “Learing Center” full of Somalians either, which I expect would be substantially cheaper.

Why would you expect it to be cheaper- I'd expect them to charge the government the highest rate it's willing to pay.

Which is about $1900 a month, and babies are more expensive than toddlers. Seems entirely consistent with the other numbers we are seeing.

AI is telling me that staff to kid ratio in my state and in the kid's age group is 1 to 12, so one staff generates $375/hr. Without looking it up, I know for a fact staff are not taking even third of that in their pocket. I know there's a lot more expenses going into this beyond just paying staff, but it's a home daycare for a few dozens of preschool kids that requires parents to even pack their lunch and its clearing $100k/m+ in revenue from both government and customers. Why are stay-at-home moms not coordinating setting up their own 'private daycares' and rack in thousands from the government? Sounds like an easy solution to the question of whether the mom should quit her job to raise the kid.

I considered running a private daycare when I started motherhood but I didn't own my own home. Also the initial expenses to meet all regulations. Also 3k per kid seems off to me. Admittedly it was a few years ago but back then it was more like 2k per kid under 2 and 1k per kid above three.

Though looking at these numbers, it does sound like those would have been surmountable barriers. But I suspect there's some scamming to get to the 5k/month number.

I'm guessing the government only pays $5k/mo for special needs kids, even if they're not actually special needs.

its clearing $100k/m+ in revenue from both government and customers

What insurance premiums are they paying? What is their average utility bill for electricity, for heating, for water, etc.? Are they paying rent on the premises? Staff are not getting one third of the $375/hr in take-home pay, but have you considered the gross pay not the net (which includes tax etc.)? Maybe US taxes work differently and there isn't the equivalent of PAYE, but employers must have to pay payroll taxes of some sort. That's the minimum staff ratio, but in practice you would want to have 2 to 12 (so e.g. if one staff member is dealing with taking kids to the bathroom, or on a break, there's someone in the room looking after the rest of the kids). Parents have to provide packed lunches, but does the daycare provide snacks and drinks (something that can be part of regulations, though if it really is run out of someone's home, maybe not required)?

It's not simply a matter of "aha, here is a sackful of money that I can just cream off" unless it's a scam. And as has been noted in different comments, you can't get money from the government for looking after your own kids in your own home. If Susie and Betty and Jane arrange that Susie minds Betty's kids, Betty minds Jane's kids, and Jane minds Susie's kids so they can apply for government funding, that may not work as they'll have to explain why Susie can't mind her own kids if she can mind Betty's kids etc. It's really not just as simple as "rack in thousands from the government". You have to apply for this funding and that can mean a lot of hoops to jump through, which is why cases like Minnesota do require co-ordination and corruption to succeed on the large scale.

Depends on the age of the child and the market in question. For late preschoolers in red states(where there are few government subsidies to distort the market) thats very high; for younger kids- especially babies- it might be average, especially in a blue state where the government subsidizes demand.

Staffing requirements usually put 4 infants to 1 caretaker. At a legit facility rent admin and janitorial staff wipe out even a fully subsidized package, without accounting for incidentals and capex. Probably need to hit at least 12 infants to start breaking even, and then your capex soars too. Daycares are not automatic money printers because kids are delicate and staffing is difficult.

So the easy scam is to just put pretend kids in and unqualified staff in place with fake credentials if ever interrogated. No auditor will investigate on their own and the local vote boss just says ' I will take care of it'

When the govt was not a fat cow worth milking taking care of it meant having to offer a sacrificial scalp to the other local bosses. Now the govt is this depersonalized money printer far away, and its also run by whites who are not only the enemy but also one that are self declaring the nobility of self impoverishment. Why would you deny them the opportunity to feel good.

So the easy scam is to just put pretend kids in and unqualified staff in place with fake credentials if ever interrogated. No auditor will investigate on their own and the local vote boss just says ' I will take care of it'

Checking staff genuinely have the paper qualifications they are supposed to have is very easy and the government does in fact do it if it isn't deliberately tolerating fraud. Part of the problem with non-fraudulent daycare costs is that the IQ floor for getting the paper qualifications is higher than the IQ floor for keeping a 1-year-old alive, so a system which tries to pay the going rate for keeping a 1-year old alive can't hire staff with the legally-required paper qualifications.

But aren’t these payments made to an in home daycare? That is, there is no rental cost. Sure there is some capex but that’s relatively minimal. And with 12 kids, the admin shouldn’t be too bad.

Let’s say you hire three people and you handle all of the admin. You pay each helper 6k a month (72k a year). Let’s say you spend 5k on capex / insurance a month. That’s still 10k left over.

And I think those expenses are being generous.

People complain about the cost of childcare but if it's properly licensed, employs qualified staff, and is a decent place for the kids, it's expensive to run.

If it's cheap, either it's Neighbour Sally looking after her two kids and your two for money under the table in her own home, or it's not someplace you want your kids to be for hours per day.

If it's 12 kids for in-home daycare, then they are supposed to be registered and all associated admin etc. should be performed. Doing it on the cheap means shoddiness all round. Don't state old age homes in the USA have terrible reputations, precisely because it is done on the cheap?

Looking it up online, for the USA it depends on which state the premises is located in, but:

In-Home Child Care Some states and territories may not require certain in-home child care programs to have a license if they meet the following criteria:

  • Are related to the children they care for
  • Care for only a few children, as defined by the state or territory
  • Provide care occasionally for only a few hours a day

In these instances, states may consider the in-home provider to be legally exempt from needing a child care license. As such, with the exception of in-home child care providers participating in the state or territory’s child care subsidy program, license-exempt in-home child care providers do not need to meet the following health and safety requirements to provide care:

  • Basic health and safety requirements, including comprehensive background checks and monitoring
  • Training standards, such as first aid and CPR training

In California, for example, you can have 14 children in your home if you have an assistant, but there are regulations around this. Paying cheap rates to unqualified staff and skimping on insurance etc. is not going to work unless you're doing all this under the table or are very, very sure you will never be inspected to make sure you're compliant, and that no parent is going to complain:

1597.531. (a) All family day care homes for children shall maintain in force either liability insurance covering injury to clients and guests in the amount of at least one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) per occurrence and three hundred thousand dollars ($300,000) in the total annual aggregate, sustained on account of the negligence of the licensee or its employees, or a bond in the aggregate amount of three hundred thousand dollars ($300,000). In lieu of the liability insurance or the bond, the family day care home may maintain a file of affidavits signed by each parent with a child enrolled in the home which meets the requirements of this subdivision. The affidavit shall state that the parent has been informed that the family day care home does not carry liability insurance or a bond according to standards established by the state. If the provider does not own the premises used as the family day care home, the affidavit shall also state that the parent has been informed that the liability insurance, if any, of the owner of the property or the homeowners’ association, as appropriate, may not provide coverage for losses arising out of, or in connection with, the operation of the family day care home, except to the extent that the losses are caused by, or result from, an action or omission by the owner of the property or the homeowners’ association, for which the owner of the property or the homeowners’ association would otherwise be liable under the law. These affidavits shall be on a form provided by the department and shall be reviewed at each licensing inspection.

Remember, out of that you are paying:

(1) Staff wages (including pension contributions, taxes, etc.)
(2) Running costs of the premises (heat/light/phone/insurance/maintenance, etc.) Rent as well if you don't own your own premises.
(3) Are you feeding the kids? Then the cost of buying in meals pre-cooked (if you don't prepare them on-site) or buying food to be cooked
(4) Equipment and materials for the rooms (everything from toys, mats, furniture, books, art supplies, etc.)
(5) Cleaning and hygiene supplies, anything else you can think of
(6) Unexpected expenses (oh crap, cold snap, we're running the heating all day long at full blast; yikes, the sinks in the bathrooms fell off the wall; hey, what's this leak in the roof?)
(7) Little treats: Easter eggs, Christmas presents, trips to the cinema etc.

Then after all that, if you're a private operator, make some profit.

Again, no idea how the USA works, but there are various subsidised childcare schemes under the Irish government. Depending on your circumstances (e.g. are you lone parent, low income, etc.) and the age of the child, some parents will pay full fees and some parents will get a subsidised place (i.e. government funding for the kid while parent pays some percentage of the fee). Pre-school children are eligible for free care for 3 hours per day x 5 days per week x 38 weeks in the year. If the child stays longer, then the parents have to pay for the extra hours.

It's confusing to work out, so I'm glad I don't handle it. Parents have to register their child online and all the associated paperwork then gets processed, and the childcare service then submits how many hours a day and days a week each particular child attends. There are also ratios of how many staff to children per room, depending on age of children and how many in the room.

At the same time, the government is also recently increasing pay rates for childcare workers. So there's the juggling act of "how much do I pay the qualified staff plus running costs, versus what I can charge parents and get under funding" for operators. For the less scrupulous, that makes it a temptation to understaff the premises or hire less qualified/unqualified staff or cut corners while, let us say, maximising revenue streams. We don't have anything like the Minnesota scandal here (as yet), but that doesn't mean that some mini-scandal can't happen in future.

It’s almost scarier if it turns out these are all technically legit businesses and the government was just this bad at not getting Dutch Booked.

Sure, you could take care of your own baby like a chump, or you could let your buddy take care of your baby and do him a $3000/month solid.

I guess one limitation is it does have to be your "buddy" (at least, non-relative). The page describing the program has an exception so that you cannot receive subsidized childcare payments for your children during hours when you yourself are providing childcare to a child you are related to that is paid for with subsidies but it is worded kind of confusingly:

Note: In-home providers who are relatives and are paid child care subsidies to care for children receiving WCCC benefits, may not receive those benefits for their children during the hours in which they provide subsidized child care.

On the same page they are specific that a child's "parent" cannot be a subsidized provider but it seems like other family members could be:

Someone other than the child's biological parent, step-parent, adoptive parent, legal guardian, in-loco parentis, or spouse of any of these individuals

Luckily the law doesn't recognize muslim polygamous marriages as "wives" !

I've seen speculation that the polygamous habits of Somalians are why this particular grift is so lucrative for them. One man with four wives worth of children could be raking in a middle-class lifestyle just watching the kids.

I don't know about the in-actuality familial habits of American Somalis to evaluate whether this is a good explaination or just made-up.

Realistically, i don't think that's the direct means of the fraud. It's just another way they form an insular, clannish community that trusts itself to do organized crime against the rest of us. Most of the daycares seem to be making up fake kids, and maybe occasionally bussing in some kids if they need evidence.

Well, you could let your friend take care of your baby while you take care of your hers and each make $3000... like a chump. Or 12 people could register 12 daycares and each "take care of" all 12 babies for $33000 each.

It’s almost scarier if it turns out these are all technically legit businesses and the government was just this bad at not getting Dutch Booked.

Some of them are technically legit, and the people who work in child sex crimes units will agree that it is scarier. Although, not so much because the government is getting bilked.

Some of them are technically legit, and the people who work in child sex crimes units will agree that it is scarier.

Yeah. Here's a lovely story that demonstrates that at least the Somalians are (allegedly) only screwing the state government, not the kids:

A tip from gardaí has led to the chief executive of a childcare company in California being arrested and charged with 16 counts of sexually exploiting six children in his care.

Miguel Adrian Gonzalez, a 28-year-old from west Los Angeles who is the chief executive of a childcare programme and a private babysitter, was charged with a series of child abuse offences on November 25.

Gonzalez was charged with two counts of obtaining custody of a minor with the intent to produce child sex abuse imagery, seven counts of production of child abuse material, two counts of distribution of child abuse material, three counts of receipt of child abuse material and two counts of possession of child abuse material.

According to a court filing from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agent based in LA, she received information from the HSI office in Kentucky in September that implicated Gonzalez in enticing an 11-year-old male victim, called MV-1 in the court filings, to produce child sexual abuse material on Snapchat.

The HSI Kentucky office received information leading to the identification of the victim from HSI’s cyber crimes centre, which had itself been notified of the existence of the material by the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau.

...While privately messaging PHOENIXV on Snapchat, the boy was instructed to send nude photos and videos or PHOENIXV “would come to MV-1’s home and harm him”.

The boy was sent his address by PHOENIXV as part of this threat. The PHOENIXV user then proceeded to instruct the boy to produce child sex abuse material while calling him “daddy”. The LA agent says investigators were able to establish that Gonzalez controlled the accounts using the PHOENIXV username.

A US attorney’s office statement issued in November said that its complaint against Gonzalez alleges that from 2021 to 2025 the childcare provider and CEO of Let’s Play LA LLC “produced sexually explicit images of children in his care or supervision”. It said Gonzalez also sexually abused at least one minor victim.

“In October 2023 and May 2024, Gonzalez texted the parents of two minor victims, each of them 6-year-old boys at the time, and offered to obtain custody or control of the two victims through his babysitting services, knowing that each victim would be portrayed in a visual depiction engaging in sexually explicit conduct. These requests led to two instances in which Gonzalez produced child sexual abuse material (CSAM).”

It is not uncommon at all. Other than the standard fare of boyfriends and stepdads, a very common scenario is that the son/brother/spouse of a woman running one of these "home child care" places just abuses several of the kids.

Several years back there was some right-wing woman that ran a blog and realized this particular (smaller-scale) fraud. Sign up with the other SAHM down the street, "officially" you take care of the other person's baby but the state never checked, and get a nice payout for doing what you were going to do for free.

Wish I could remember her name and track that down. Alas.

I don't know how it works in America, but you can mind children out of your own home in Ireland so long as you stick to the regulations (these have been tightened up recently, before that you could mind mind kids in your own home, say for a neighbour, and they could pay you what you both agreed on, which generally would not be declared as taxable income, hence the regulating):

A childminder is a person who runs a childminding service looking after other people’s children (under the age of 15 years) for at least 2 hours per day, in the childminder’s own home. This definition does not apply to people who care for children in the children’s own home (such as nannies and au pairs). Childminders work by themselves and do not employ any other people to assist them with the children they are caring for.

This now requires that childminders working out of their own home register with a local committee, undergo training, will have inspections carried out, and will need to keep records and make sure tax affairs are in order. There are small grants available, but you can't apply for government funding as such (that goes to professional and community childminding services and day cares).

Now, of course you could still pay a relative or neighbour to look after your kid with their own and nobody needs to register or undergo formal training, but if anyone is minding more than three kids not of their own family in their home for money, they have to comply with the new regulations.

What's being described in the links sounds like they were formally set up as businesses (even if de facto it's someone's home and they let the kids run around unsupervised), and of course there are always opportunities for scams and fraud, or even just "we charge parents full-whack fees, most of that goes into our pockets and what gets spent on the kids is buttons". I've heard that informally at second-hand where I work, allegedly passed on by one of the inspectors; one of the perks (for parents) of us being a community service which is not-for-profit and government-funded is that we do get inspected out the wazoo by several bodies and have to have paperwork backing up every last thing, so they keep track of what got spent where by whom on what. No real opportunity to shove 80% of funding into our own pockets, unlike private operators where (by what I was told the inspector says) you can see it when you go into the services even though they're charging parents market rates. Or to have fake kids enrolled and claim the funding, but no such kid exists (in fact, we could fill the spaces available twice over, such is demand, so no need for ghost enrolments unless you're scamming).

Here I am paying for daycare like a chump while illegals live on the dole and also get daycare for free for unlimited kids. Meanwhile actual hardworking parents have to pay their own way fully. This kind of thing is dysgenic as af.

Hope you continue and expand posting on this work. We need more investigators and fewer Takes.

That this is all organized by Somali gangs, with the gang leaders bringing retribution on any family that doesn't go along with it. Investigators like David also get threatened with violence.

Dang.

I might have to retract my this isn't a violent mafia statement.

The feds need to come purge the entire state government of Minnesota on charges of racketeering and voter fraud.

I'm genuinely wondering if its possible for that particular electorate, even if all elections are fair and accurately done, to muster up the anger that would be necessary to impose accountability, remove the bad actors (in government, I'm not even talking about the Somalis), and reshape things to mitigate fraud issues going forward.

My model of the modal Minnesotan would say they're not quite capable of that sort of drastic actions, they'd rather keep the stiff upper lip and make moderate adjustments and hope things get better.

Can "The Minnesotan begin to hate?" Seems unlikely.

You've been warned before about low-effort boo posts, and "I want to kill all my enemies" is definitely not something we encourage here. If you have nothing else to say, better you say nothing.

You know, I opened up all the warnings on your mod record (five of them), prepared to link to them, and then realized the following:

  1. I do not believe you do not remember your previous warnings.
  2. I definitely do not believe that pointing out your previous warnings will lead to you saying "Oh, right."

Rather, I am absolutely certain that pointing out your previous warnings will lead to you arguing that (a) they were unjustified; (b) this warning is unjustified; (c) this situation is different.

You were warned in the past, you are being warned now, stop doing this.

You technically can do that on this page, but it would require a lot of scrolling.

Frankly, this is the kind of thing that would have resulted in pogroms at any other time in history. Same with the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK; the parallels are striking. Something very drastic needs to happen here, though Minnesotans are not capable of anything like an actual pogrom. Can there be some kind of polite and peaceful alternative that basically achieves the same goals without lots of violence? I can't really see a viable road back from here; the whole system is complicit, locked in, and ideologically committed to its own naivety because the alternative is too terrible to even contemplate.

The consequences for the pakistanis are miniscule compared to the personal satisfaction they enjoyed ruining the children of the enemy and getting paid to do so. So too will be the censure for the Somalians since the US is already a low punishment society that can barely punish the most easy criminals to indict, let alone anyone with a racism shield to deploy. The only way out is unspoken societal segregation, a hope that islands of sanity will be unmolested by the courts for the crime of being too prosperous and capable. As an overall polity there is no appetite to recognize the beast of racialized hate coming from foreign ethnics and less to address it.

Actually wait no there is one way out. Elect a capable non-scammy minority ethnic that is free to name the beast and act upon it. They will have a short but actionable runway to try and right the ship. A decisive window to act can arrest the decline. If the opportunity is squandered or fumbled (Obama capitulating to progressives after the 2nd midterms) then things get permanently worse. So, good luck with that.

If current trends continue, eventually a Mexican-American will get elected to major office while openly using the N-word and blaming the Jews for everything.

Rubio is CUBAN, not Mexican. Geez talk about latinx erasure.

I said 'elected to a major office' not 'appointed to every major office'.

Everyone remembers Metternich. Nobody remembers Ferdinand.

The consequences for the pakistanis are miniscule

They got 10+ year jail terms, eventually. (The exceptions were minor players where the only crime they could prove was consensual-looking sex with a 13-16 year old, which normally gets 5 years in England). The rapists who were not British citizens (the vast majority were) have long since been deported.

The Pakistani rape gangs scandal that Musk and right-wing X poasters latched onto is about behaviour which was allowed to continue for far too long in the 1990-2008 period with minimal accountability for the political machines that protected the rapists, not behaviour that is tolerated in 2025. I don't know what is going on between 2nd-generation Pakistanis and chavettes in 2025, but the race/immigration/crime story that right wing media in the UK are pushing nowadays is about crimes committed by more recent humanitarian-route immigrants.

So too will be the censure for the Somalians since the US is already a low punishment society that can barely punish the most easy criminals to indict,

The US is not a low punishment society. You are the most punitive society in the rich world for the criminals who are actually caught and punished - the only countries with a higher incarceration rate are Bukele's El Salvador and countries in the middle of severe political repression. (The US is also one of a small number of countries which still execute people, although not many). You guys are also perfectly capable of punishing black criminals roughly proportionally to the number of crimes they commit. The problem is that the US is a capricious punishment society with third-world quality policing and a somewhat random judicial system such that most criminals (and particularly white-collar criminals) go unpunished. (We are still noticeably better off than you on this point in the UK, although moving in the wrong direction fast since the government decided that the criminal justice system would be shut down first as the welfare state for the old eats the economy).

But that isn't relevant here - the point in Minnesota, as in noughties Rotherham, is that the miscreants are protected by a powerful political machine. Tolerating this kind of thing was, and is, a choice.

The US is also one of a small number of countries which still execute people, although not many

Kinda irrelevant to your point, but most executions in the USA happen at the state level, and almost all of those are in southern red states. Federal executions are fairly rare, although Trump has often attempted to clear through the backlog, which makes it look more common.

Executions in the US are spread very unevenly, because it’s a culture wars issue(I suspect more to do with being the only western democracy that uses the death penalty rather than anything in particular about the punishment).

the only western democracy that uses the death penalty

Some of this hinges on how you define "Western": Japan and Singapore are often counted as such in other areas, but get discounted here, for example.

And Singapore executes an order of magnitude more, per capita, than the US. It is a stretch to call Singapore a democracy, but it is clearly part of "the free world" or "Western Civilisation" in a way which most dictatorships are not.

US executions are held up because there is a surprisingly unlimited appetite for judicial reviews and appeals to hold up the process with dubious procedural minutae introduced years after the fact being the reason for blocking. The threshold for evidence getting higher and higher even after sentencing is cause for lawyers to launch appeals nonstop, since there is free money for everyone involved to get in on the grift. Defense, state, judge, prisons, all get to feed at the trough for every death row inmate cycled through appeals. I think this raises the cost of legal+housing for lice without parole vs death row from 2m to 4m or something stupid like that for a 25 year period, and then costs spike if they hit old age.

The US is a low punishment society because crimes are underinvestigated and criminals are underprosecuted relative to the incidence rate of criminal activity. This is due to both capacity issues but also judicial and societal fiat putting the finger on every side of the scale as much as possible to keep black incarceration as low as possible. That blacks are still overrepresented is a function of how widespread minor criminality is within US society, not some grand conspiracy about blacks being unfairly victimized. FBI crime statistics regarding victim perpetrator filings show that black victimization actually is from black communities who are the first victims of criminal activity, and the clear majority of crime is intraracial. Punishment being proportional within a capacity strained carceral system means a higher absolute number of criminals, especially blacks, roaming free where they should be curtailed.

As for the Pakistani gangs it is for the UK to decide whether its still ok to keep uncovering new rape gangs and expose the sheer scale of predation that was ongoing. Europe and especially the UK are peak embodiment of institutional capture by the narratively invested, with zero appetite to acknowledge the uncomfortable facts of predatory behavioral origination.

Whether UK or US, its the same pathology: institutional narrative capture perpetuating for decades and zero pivot capability. Somalians, like Pakistanis, just learned to play the game on the path trodden by their black forebears. Ok Uk is a bit of a weird one where the predecessor is black caribbean and not African but the end result is the same: a race card played to the hilt.

Speaking of immigrant gangs and large scale fraud reminded me of the various fake colleges scams in the UK.

2014
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/02/students-private-higher-education-colleges-taxpayer-subsidy-benefits-nao-loans

A separate internal government inquiry found that 1,000 of these students, most of whom come from Bulgaria and Romania, were definitely fraudulent and had already claimed £5.4m in student loans before being found out. The government has been able to recover just 7% of that money so far, the NAO said.

In 2012 Willetts said he wanted to see alternative providers take on established universities and offer students even more choice. These colleges were allowed to charge £6,000 a year in fees, which their students could draw from the government-backed Student Loans Company.

But though they were in receipt of public money, Willetts was unable to get new parliamentary powers he needed to hold private colleges to proper account with inspection regimes or demands to see their books, after Lib Dems backed out of supporting a new education bill.

Tuesday’s report was prompted by a Guardian investigation into the sector which found that lectures were teaching to empty or near-empty classrooms. Students and staff alleged that bogus students who were barely literate were using colleges as a “cash point” to access loans they believed they would never pay back.

The NAO findings highlighted that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) lacked basic powers to monitor publicly funded students’ attendance and their progress, even as it relaxed the purse strings to fund private sector growth. It said the department had not defined “an expectation of what might constitute an acceptable dropout rate” for the sector, let alone scrutinised whether the rates were too high.

Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University College Union, which represents academic and other college staff, said the government failed to police the system it had created. “While we are pleased the misuse of public funds is finally being brought to light, we remain angry that it took so long to happen. We raised the issues of for-profit colleges’ access to taxpayers’ money time and again with ministers, but we were ignored at every turn.”

[My bolding]

2009
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/may/21/bogus-college-scam

A Home Office investigation is under way today into a Pakistani gang alleged to have pocketed millions of pounds enrolling hundreds of men from the militant heartland of al-Qaida into bogus UK colleges.

I had to dig in the sources section of Wikipedia to find those links - which I'm not sure were actually the scandal I was looking for - because using a search engine kept returning results of a new student loan scandal that came to light last year: https://aseannow.com/topic/1355961-the-uk-university-fraud-scandal-sham-students-and-fake-degrees/

Sir Humphrey Appleby: A tiny mistake. The sort that anyone can make.

Hacker: A tiny mistake?! [...] Give me an example of a big mistake.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Letting people find out about it.

  • This is all protected by the government and judicial system of Minnesota. At one point, David did the work to prove that a Somali leader did $7.2 million of fraud. He was convicted unanimously by a jury, but the judge overturned the verdict and left him free to continue collecting more money. The judges are elected, probably with the help of fraudalent Somali votes.
  • This isn't just state money, it's also federal money. This increases the scale, but also increases the severity of the crimes.
  • That Somalians routinely travel back to Somali, taking large amounts of cash with them (well over the TSA limit of $10,000), and for some reason the TSA grants them an exception to this when any normal American would be arrested or stopped for questioning.

I'm reminded of some quotes from things I've seen and read online recently, and some thoughts about them on which I've been building. First, from Malcolm Collins on the Based Camp episode about rising antisemitism (my transcription):

I actually think that a lot of the leftist anti-semitism comes from, when they are modeling what the future of humanity looks like, what the future of out existing geopolitical architecture looks like, they don’t actually plan on them existing in the future.

Like, I can talk to, like, gays and trans people, and I can be like, but really, you see if only people who hate you continue to have kids, in the future, only people who cannot allow your culture to exist are going to be the dominant cultures on Earth. I talk about this in terms of pro-natalism all the time, and they’re often just like, they don’t really see it as a problem. And I’ve always been very confused as to how they don’t see it as a problem.

And what I’m realizing, and you see the wokies in, what is it, Michigan, giving all the money to the Somalians, right? It was this big scam where, like, billions have — and it’s clear that a lot of wokies knew this was happening.— to Islamist groups in Somalia. They see the future of their movements, and the territories that they feel they de facto control, as something they want to hand to Muslim groups.

They believe in a Muslim future, and because of that, they see that future as incompatible with Jewish interests, because they’re, sort of, the Muslims within the top circles of their intellectual communities. And I find this very interesting. Trace the intellectual giants on the left right now, and many of them are tied to Islamism in some way or another. Especially the younger ones. Especially the younger ones. And this didn’t used to be the case.

Or then there's Andrew Gold in his debate with "Britain's Biggest RAC*ST" Steve Laws:

At some point unfortunately white people will become a minority and will probably go extinct.

We've talked here on the Motte about how the birthrate problem is unsolvable. @hydroacetylene repeatedly talks of how the Blue Tribe is demographically doomed (with unearned, unsupported confidence that this means inevitable victory for him and his).

An analogy has been forming in my mind to how people deal with a terminal diagnosis. Do you spend your final months in a hospital, pumped full of chemotherapy, surgery after surgery, plugged into more and more machines, and liquidating your net worth to fund it all, in the hopes of dragging out an increasingly miserable, pain-filled existence for every last hour you can? Or do you get some prescriptions for painkillers and palliatives, write up your will, go on a short trip to see a few of the sights you always wanted to visit, then come home to friends and family, pass on what stories and words of wisdom you can, and enjoy every day to its fullest as you embrace the inevitable?

Now consider that tribes, cultures, civilizations — they're mortal too. They can be terminal. And so, it becomes about maximizing the time you have… and deciding to whom you will be handing off everything you've built.

And isn't the choice really obvious, once you think about it? I mean, who should "inherit" Minnesota? A bunch of uneducated, uncultured, gay-bashing, women-oppressing, cousin-fucking, tribal religious fanatics…

…or some nice POC Muslim immigrants?

Like, I can talk to, like, gays and trans people, and I can be like, but really, you see if only people who hate you continue to have kids, in the future, only people who cannot allow your culture to exist are going to be the dominant cultures on Earth. I talk about this in terms of pro-natalism all the time, and they’re often just like, they don’t really see it as a problem. And I’ve always been very confused as to how they don’t see it as a problem.

Because the line is "there have always been gay and trans people". And that's correct, as far as it goes: we've had millennia of pro-heterosexual society, and yet even where they must hide in order to pass as part of mainstream society, LGBT people existed and formed sub-cultures of their own.

So there isn't any worry, because so what if the cishets are the ones having kids? Historically, and statistically, some of those kids will be gay and/or trans. Unless they're going to genetically engineer all embryos to be cishet, there's no getting rid of the LGBT (apart from the genocide solution). Even if persecuted, LGBT people will exist in secret, and some day that future society will be liberal enough to give them their rights.

Well, as slatestarcodex mentioned a long time ago, liberals and gays don't necessarily grow their population by having kids- they grow by getting converts from other groups. Conservative christians (and some Jewish groups) have more kids, but those kids also tend to leave the religion at high rates.

Muslims are maybe unique in that, not only do they have a lot of kids, but those kids also stay muslim. In fact, they're bringing in a lot of converts. I guess because anyone who marries a Muslim or moves to a majority Muslim area is pretty much forced to convert. It's actually kind of fascinating that we live in a time where most religions are in decline, but this hard-core, old-school, repressive, fundamentalist religion is growing like gangbusters.

It grows because it uses coercion without facing any external censure. Converting to Islam is celebrated as diversity, apostates are killed and then "culture" is blamed while ignoring Islams culpability.

You can only gain converts to your cause when the prize makes it worth it and the liberals are handing out their seedcorn to tourists stopping by. The TQ+ of the rainbow coalition is uninvestigated and allowed in, just like every Nigerian or Caribbean warlords offspring gets to claim black solidarity to get a seat at the trough. White liberals at the roost want to destroy their own societies because they make the category error that impoverishing white institutions only harms the uneducated white hicks. That the white hicks are a bulwark against a Hamtrack style takeover by even worse conservatives just doesnt register.

White liberals may continue to get converts for a while, but whether that sustains is questionable. Their time at the top has been pretty bad and when the pie starts shrinking theres a free for all where everyone tries to get as much as they can before escaping. Rate of growth slowing is the first canary in the coal mine, once it flips it will be an exercise in statistical fudgery (we are likely here now) before raiding the pot for scraps.

Hamtrack style takeover

I'm not sure I follow- what is this referencing?

White liberals at the roost want to destroy their own societies because they make the category error that impoverishing white institutions only harms the uneducated white hicks.

Well, that and- because they're relatively rich (ironically, due to good institutions)- they're insulated from the consequences of destroying the institutions. Besides, they'll still be on top afterwards due to their Allyship(tm) that was definitely earned and not just appropriated.

Hamtrack style takeover

what is this referencing?

Hamtramck, Michigan, has been in the news a lot for having been taken over by Muslims. One article of many:

A Detroit-area community has banned LGBTQ+ flags from publicly owned flagpoles after a tense hourslong meeting that raised questions about discrimination, religion and the city’s reputation for welcoming newcomers.

Some members of the all-Muslim council said the pride flag clashes with the beliefs of some members of their faith. Businesses and residents aren’t prohibited from displaying a pride flag on their own property.

Hamtramck, population 27,000, is an enclave surrounded by Detroit. More than 40% of residents were born in other countries [and 70 percent speak a language other than English at home], according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and a significant share are of Yemeni or Bangladeshi descent.

The council voted unanimously to display only five flags, including the American flag, the Michigan flag and one that represents the native countries of immigrant residents.

Its only residents of third world shitholes who insist on flying their flag as a mark of conquest on territories they conquer. No fucking Taiwanese or Korean or Japanese flag gets flown in Orange County, its only these muslim countries. The obvious hostile conquering attitude on display is a celebration that should be interpreted as the threat it is, yet the invasion is allowed to continue unmolested. The blind love of multiculturalism will end with Zimbabwe style disenfranchisement of whites followed by annihilation of anything of value as the scavengers pick off anything that made the communities viable to begin with.

This. Travel through Germany and from the flags you'd think you were in Turkey or Albania. From the music you hear, no idea I don't actually know but "vaguely islamic" fits the bill. The spoken languages, ditto.

Its only residents of third world shitholes who insist on flying their flag as a mark of conquest on territories they conquer.

Oh no, lots of First Worlders do this too; that's why they treat people removing or burning their "progress" flag as a war crime.

More comments

US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg gave a somewhat surprising briefing in Brussels to the European press today. See the Official transcript and UK Grauniad coverage - the most comprehensive coverage in an English-language publication.

The quote that attracted most attention is in response to a question about EU AI regulation. Helberg says "I know that the National Security Strategy, the language around Europe and around civilizational erasure, drew a lot of attention in Europe. What I’d like to highlight is that that language is a warning. It’s not an insult. And – because there is a growing sense of concern and alarm in the United States about the fact that Europe’s economic – relative economic decline as a share of the global GDP is a crisis." The Guardian's headline writer describes this as "doubling down" on the criticism of Europe in the published strategy, but the actual article correctly points out that Helberg is doing the opposite - he is walking it back. The published strategy is crystal clear that "civilisational erasure" the US wants to prevent is about cultural change driven by mass immigration, that the main threat to the Atlantic alliance is the possibility that major European countries will cease to be majority white*, and that concerns about economic policy are secondary.

The reason why I wanted to post about this is that this is the latest in a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the US has fallen into the common trap of running one foreign policy out of the White House and a different one out of the State Department. Rubio being both SecState and National Security Advisor should make this impossible, but Vance seems to have taken over the usual role of the NSA as the principal opponent of the State Department in intra-administration battles. A dual foreign policy seems to be the best way to make sense of why the Trump administration is trying to make nice to Putin (in order to end the Ukraine war) with one hand while bombing and invading his clients with the other.

Two things are unusual about the way the Trump national security strategy was published - neither my search-fu nor ChatGPT identifies who wrote it (this would normally be a relatively senior person working for the NSA, and they were unofficially identified with previous strategies), and it wasn't publicly launched by the NSA (i.e. Rubio) at a major press event. Apart from a linguist helpfully pointing out that (unlike the 28-point Ukraine peace plan), the national security strategy was not translated from Russian, the only name mentioned by the press is Vance, with multiple outlets comparing the discussion of Europe to Vance's Munich speech. Does all this suggest that Rubio as NSA was not responsible for the document? Helberg, of course, works for Rubio, and quietly but publicly said that the strategy does not mean the Vance-aligned things it says. [Helberg is also, personally, a China hawk, and a major theme of his press briefing is that the main thing the US wants from Europe is for us to work with you on keeping China out of key supply chains].

In terms of the major foreign policy priorities of the Trump administration, Rubio is clearly in charge on Latin America - now apparently adding Paraviceroy of Venezuela to his increasing stack of hats. Vance has the unenviable job of going from TV station to TV station telling the ridiculously obvious lie that the ousting of Maduro was actually about drugs. (To anyone paying attention, including e.g. other corrupt Latin American leaders, the Hernandez pardon is a credible signal that it isn't). Whereas on Ukraine Rubio appears to be largely cut out, with diplomacy handled by people who work directly for Trump (Kellogg, Witkoff, and now Jared Kushner) and Vance conducting most of the open mouth operations.

If I had to sum up the difference between Team Rubio and Team Vance it would be that Team Rubio sees the number one threat as Chinese influence (and particularly Chinese influence in the Americas), Europe as a crappy ally that needs to stop freeloading, Russia as a committed Chinese ally, and defending Ukraine as a good idea in principle but a dubious use of US resources, whereas Team Vance sees the main threat as ideological, Europe as part of the woke enemy, Russia as a potential ally that needs to be brought in from the cold and offered a better alternative to their current arrangement with China, and the war in Ukraine as an obstacle to this. All factions seem to agree on Israel/Iran.

* The strategy says "majority non-European" but the meaning is clear in context.

If I had to sum up the difference between Team Rubio and Team Vance

I agree with this, but let me rephrase this conclusion: Rubio is running a relatively classically (in an American sense) conservative foreign policy. They think Europe is weak and prissy, they don't trust international institutions, and they believe in unilateral action if allies are uncooperative, but their assessment of who US friends and enemies are is fairly conventional. Vance is pushing an extremely online The-West-Has-Fallen foreign policy. Openly worrying about the immigration policy and demographics of another continent is very peculiar from a normal security perspective, but makes significantly more sense as an expression of the not-so-subtly-white-supremacist faction of the Trumpist coalition. However, it's not really clear to me how much actual influence Vance wields in foreign policy versus being a dancing monkey for certain elements of the base.

Trump is, of course, drunkenly careening around doing whatever crosses his mind in the moment and leaving his subordinates to try and pick up the pieces (we're apparently back to threatening to invade our allies). This doesn't really help either faction - Rubio et al want the EU to cooperate in the anti-China coalition, which is significantly less likely if Trump insists on pissing directly into their mouth, while the Vance/Miller faction has to worry about Trump's behavior negatively polarizing European voters against the RW populist parties they're trying to promote (see also: the Poilievre collapse in Canada).

Vance did make an odd comment a few weeks ago on 12/22:

"Consider this hypothetical: If an opportunity is presented that would make Marco Rubio look good, be great for the administration, and wouldn't really involve me (at least publicly), what do I do?" Vance continued. "If I'm optimizing for 2028, I try to kill the opportunity. If I'm optimizing for the country, for the administration, and to be a good human being, we do it."

And it seems hard to imagine that this comment isn't about the Venezuela operation, considering that some reporting has claimed it was scheduled to launch on Christmas Day before the Nigeria strikes distracted everyone. Maybe Vance wants to claim he chose not to fight instead of having no influence? But Vance was in the Houthi strikes Signal group and actively talking, where Marco seemed to just be there pro forma, and Vance is clearly more aligned with a number of the other defense policy principals like Colby and Caldwell.

One could sum it up as the two approaches being, respectively, geostrategic and civilizational. The Rubio doctrine seeks a correction of US state policy to respond to a changing environment, the Vance doctrine understands that the fundamental danger to the American people is the regime (not the administration, the permanent regime) and that Europe will be an enemy in that balance until they have their own regime changes. Eh, I like 'em both, and they often work together well - for instance, if you want to make nice with Putin, effortlessly slapping his client states gives him more incentive to respond in kind.

What does interest me is the Helberg quote. Looking at the transcript, he seems to be fumbling to give a non-answer to a question he maybe wasn't prepared for or didn't want to give specifics on (“Has the EU/UK done enough to limit the use of Chinese tech? Will the U.S. respect separate and distinct regulations by the EU/UK of AI and other tech-related activities, including search and so on?”), and when he brings up the National Security Strategy, he justifies it by referring to the previous question, also unrelated (“Would you like any further changes to the EU’s AI Act? If so, can you explain why?”). The sense I get from all of Helberg's responses is that he didn't really want to do a Q&A, he had some talking points about economic growth/deregulation he wanted to make without going into specifics, and the National Security Strategy line was a throwaway. Always a rough day at work first Monday after New Year's, I guess.

I think your idea that Helberg was rolled by the journalists makes sense. But I don't think the message Helberg had hoped to deliver was particularly about growth and deregulation. Given his personal interests, and the stuff he was talking about when he was in control of the agenda, I think the message he was trying to deliver was that the US and EU could and should still co-operate on anti-Chinese supply chain policy even as the relationship deteriorates in other areas.

This is a misunderstanding of the objectives of the Trump administration at this time.

The goal of the administration is not to impose a cohesive, functional policy worldview. Their goal is not long term control of the government and direction of policy. That has been judged to be impossible for a variety of reasons. This isn't a takeover, it is a raid, it is material and positional denial. The goal is to spike the cannons so that when the counterattack succeeds, the enemy will no longer be able to use those weapons. This will permanently tilt the board in the direction of preferred policies and against disfavored policies, even after the exposed salient is lost.

This is a particular application of Madman Theory, which Trump has often leaned towards, but I think it is better labeled in this case Unreliable Partner Theory. The goal isn't to extract concessions, as in Madman Theory, but to make it clear that you cannot rely on the United States under any circumstances, because the United States is deeply schizophrenic and unreliable. The rules based international order cannot be altered, but it can be ruined beyond repair. The deep ideological heart of Trump World sees the writing on the wall. A few weeks ago polling showed a 16% lead for Democrats in the mid terms on a generic ballot. Generic ballots aren't real, and it's ten months away, but a 16% loss would be a wipeout, and likely prevent any legislation from getting passed. Republicans, and especially MAGA candidates, have underperformed without Trump on the ballot, and he's not going to run in 2028, or if he tries he's quite likely to be unable to do the job in short order, being an 80 year old man who loves McDonald's and thinks that cardio reduces your lifespan because you only get a certain number of heartbeats before you die. Seeing that they only have a small window, the focus is not on implementing smart, sane, gradual policies that will build things for the future; it is on implementing radical, constantly changing, caleidoscopic policies that make it impossible to rely on the US Government in the future, forcing a decoupling of everything from foreign partners to local industry.

This is visible in the approach to the federal workforce. Can Trump shrink the federal workforce? Maybe, maybe not. But what he can done, what he already has done, is permanently break the understanding that a federal government job was a sinecure for life. The federal government is, for a lawyer or researcher or engineer, no longer a reliable partner. In the future when a Democratic president tries to expand the federal. workforce, they will find fewer takers.

The Trump Administration can remove some illegals in an orderly legal manner, but a later Democratic administration can just let more in. By being cruel and arbitrary, the Trump administration insures that no future illegal migrant, and fewer legal migrants, will feel safe coming to the United States, even after future policy changes.

The Trump administration can force new provisions into NATO requiring higher military spending by European countries, but those provisions already exist and won't be enforced by future administrations. (I've never understood the media theory for why talking about breaking Article 5 is a threat to NATO, while actually violating Article 3 for years is no big deal) But the Trump administration can act in such erratic and confusing ways that European powers will be forced to increase their military spending in order to provide for their own protection.

Viewed in this lens, the NSS and the confusion surrounding it makes a lot of sense. It's designed to scare the Euros straight, because even if these guys are out of power, they might be in power again, and it's doing a bang up job.

I think this is wrongheaded way to think, for one big reason, is I wish a lot of it were true, but it simply isnt. If Trump can't shrink the federal workforce, there is not going to be a deterrent effect. Federal employment isn't some high-prestige-low-pay proposition anymore. Its Mid-Mid. If you threaten the stability levels you aren't going to run out of candidates. In fact, most the lawyers and engineers I know that work for the feds basically got a huge pay bump and a lifeline out of failing careers in private practice to go federal. Those people aren't deterred by a few weeks or even months of interruptions so long as the civil service protections get them their back pay. If the AOC administration wants to hire 5000 new lawyers for the EPA to write crushing green regulations it will easily find 30,000 "underemployed" zealots to fill those positions, that, even if fired 4 years later, will have had 4 years where they made 30% more while working 50% less than they did at some PI or SSDI mill that advertises on billboards on the side of the highway.

The migrants issue is a little rosier from my POV. The fact that no laws were changed, and the border was significantly sealed AND people are getting deported I think does have a real incentive effect. But that is not some wrecker thing, its just actually following the law as written, and particularly with regards to border security, its what Americans have been asking for for basically 40 years at this point. The deportations are occasionally uglier, but that is just how its going to be when the majority of corporate media is hostile to any sort of action. I could, as a police chief, run an operation where my goal is to confiscate firearms from convicted felons, and the public perception of it would be largely determined by how the 3-4 local tv stations cover it. If they like me I'm making the streets safe, if they don't I'm racistly putting minorities in prison, and they will pick the appropriate video footage to so portray me (angry man with a gun vs. graduation picture of a guy whos now 29).

I do wish we could scare the Euros straight as well, I think they are too foolish for it though. They wont figure out self defense. They will continue to jail people for teaching their dogs to salute, or for complaining about their daughters being raped in impolite ways. Even the financial sanctions on the international court people wont get them to change their ways (just like the federal employees, its again a cadre of mediocrities making lots of money for doing little at all).

The goal is to spike the cannons so that when the counterattack succeeds, the enemy will no longer be able to use those weapons. This will permanently tilt the board in the direction of preferred policies and against disfavored policies, even after the exposed salient is lost.

If you ever find yourself thinking something is 4D chess, just remember: it's never 4D chess. If someone is acting crazy and stupid, it's almost certainly because they're crazy and stupid.

As I noted in a different comment, Marco Rubio is trying to run a more-or-less normal conservative foreign policy, which is not consistent with a strategy of deliberate sabotage. If you want to, e.g. build an anti-China coalition, you need to not piss off everyone you want to join the coalition. Conversely, if you wanted to signal that the US is crazy and unreliable, excluding everybody sane and reputable would be an important part of that. You wouldn't pick Rubio as SoS. You'd find another bellicose lackey like Hegseth or Patel. It's conceivable that Rubio was imposed on Trump behind the scenes, or that they feel the need to include someone who isn't a complete fool/lunatic, but considering the way Trump has completely whipped the GOP in other respects, that seems unlikely.

Instead you've got a three(ish) way split between the normiecons trying to run something approximating a real foreign policy, far-right authoritarians who think they're waging civilizational warfare, and a mad king who loves grandstanding and has the preferences of the last person to talk to him. The closest I think you get to the sabotage angle is that I suspect people in the far-right camp think the US stands to benefit from a collapse of the global order - that might makes right and it is better to be king of the Americas than primus inter pares of the free world. But that's not a policy of sabotage, it's just doing the stuff you want to do.

The federal government is, for a lawyer or researcher or engineer, no longer a reliable partner.

Much like with the Hmong, the Kurds, and countless other one-time allies hung out to dry by the United States, you don't work with the US government because it's reliable. You work with the USG because there isn't an alternative. It doesn't matter that the USG is erratic, it's still signing most of the checks. This is especially true for specialists who work in fields that are of limited interested in private employers, or who prefer public service.

This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.

I think you can see a particularly interesting example hiding in the recent updates to the Francesca Gino affair. If you haven't heard of this, the wiki summary is a good overview: Francesca Gino was a high-flying behavioral science professor at HBS with all the standard TED talk/pop-sci book deal-type accolades. However, there were some statistical issues in her papers that were investigated by a blog Data Colada (run by the researchers who invented the term "p-hacking"!). Data Colada eventually wrote a four-part series of posts arguing that these papers were based on falsified data and the resulting scandal led to Gino losing tenure at Harvard. In between these raw events, there was also some pretty crazy drama; for example, a graduate student being threatened and blacklisted for originally pointing out the inconsistencies.

The most telling piece of the extra drama was that at one point, Gino decided to sue Data Colada for libel instead of directly giving a refutation of their analysis---your interpretation might vary, but this really felt like running to another arena where she could win through discussions of procedure and legal games instead of being confident in her ability to get vindication on scientific merit.

Now for the hidden culture war: while the scientific community seemed pretty convinced that Data Colada's case was ironclad (if you have time to read the full blog posts, you can check this yourself too---the section "Excel files contain multitudes" seems particularly damning), Gino did have many defenders outside science. Like Gino's self-defense, the other defenses are fascinating and, to me, very revealing. As a older representatives, you can see the reporting in the MBA-focused newsletter Poets and Quants (example) or a series of podcasts by Lawrence Lessig. Much more recently, Bill Ackman (relevant to here as a major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay) made a long twitter post explaining why he believes Gino is innocent.

If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated. There's also something more to the off-vibe I feel reading them: see these quotes from Lessig's second podcast interviewing Gino:

Again, it wasn’t just me or my lab. It was everybody in the field having the same type of practices and not exactly thinking through...

I was teaching a new course that became a first-year course for the MBA students. So it’s over a 1000s of them on inclusive leadership, and so it was a lot of work to create the materials. I was also chosen as the course head. That means that you’re managing eight professors. Eight or more professors were teaching different sections of the course. So it was a very intensive period, from a teaching perspective.

The mindset seems to almost be "She was doing all the things she was supposed to do, working so hard playing the academic career game exactly right when suddenly people changed the rules out from under her. Look at how unfair this was!". Nowhere does there seem to be any realization that the point of science is not actually the career game---you're actually supposed to further the project of learning truths about the world. If you actively impede it instead, it doesn't matter how well you were following the game and you should be punished very exceptionally!

This is the deeper culture war I was talking about. To some people, the point of a career is to add value to world, to create something that benefits others, achieve some mission, etc. However, to others, the point is to play a game as best as you can and climb a ladder of credentials and accolades determined by some competitive rules and procedures society pre-decided. The Gino case suggests fitting archetypes for both sides: a research scientist purely interested in their field vs. a careerist MBA or lawyer. Obviously from how I'm framing this, I'm extremely partisan towards one side of this culture war---so much so that I actually feel much more strongly about it than the political one and can't write this post anywhere close to neutrally. The "lawyer"-side viewpoint feels alien and evil, completely incompatible with a thriving society that can actually technologically progress.

What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.

The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?

If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated.

This reads a lot like the defense of that Christian college student refuting pro-trans arguments. Here on the Motte there was lots of "Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."

  • -11

"Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."

No, people on the Motte said "Her arguments are bad, but according to the published grading rubric there's no way it deserved a zero"

Yea? Ok.

  • -30

Do you not see any difference between that argument and your strawman of it?

It's not what I remember the argument being here. I recall people here saying an equally shitty form of argument coming to pro-trans conclusions wouldn't have gotten a zero. In any case, in both cases the goal posts are moved away or toward the solidity or veracity of the argument made and away or toward "but given procedural conditions and norms that surround the argument-making, she's being singled out."

  • -16

It's not what I remember the argument being here.

Cool, I can't wait to make you defend an argument you never made, because that's how I "remembered" it.

Likewise if the same thing had happened 5 years ago where a mostly off-topic pro-trans argument was submitted to a conservative TA and given a 0, that TA would have been loaded into a cannon and shot into the sun.

I believe her paper was singled out because of its content.

  • The paper was critical of progressive gender ideology.
  • The transgender TA who graded the paper provided a lengthy explanation justifying the zero, stating it did not satisfy the requirements laid out by the rubric. They also mentioned it was offensive in their explanation. The TA refused to adjust the grade.
  • Fulnecky claimed in an interview that she received 100% on all other papers in this series and that she didn't change her writing style for this paper.
  • Fulnecky also mentioned that this was the first paper that touched on gender, and that it was the first time she mentioned anything about her religion or the bible.

Based on the information above, it was already reasonable to assume that this paper was graded with extra scrutiny because of the topic and the grader's identity.

Then the university reviewed case and decided the TAs grading was arbitrary. The provost agreed with this conclusion.

What do you disagree with here?

Is this an argument? A rebuttal? Or just a low-effort grunt?

"Heh, I compare two incidents that have superficially similar argumentations around one another and so once again I accuse the chuds of hypocrisy, gotcha!"

Go directly to Reddit. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$. There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth. You know this. But here you are, saying something incredibly foolish, to attempt to reignite a past argument that you had failed to persuade in.

You are shameless, that much I know, but you can try to at least not be stupid at the same time. Now, having bitten into this bait, I will spit it out and go on my way.

There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth.

There is also a world apart between a zero on a single assignment which is 10% of a single course grade and firing a tenured academic in disgrace. Both would be the appropriate punishments in a sane academia for the respective crimes, but are enforced far too rarely.

In both cases, the argument being made is of the form "A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group - and discrimination by selective enforcement is worse than the underlying crime" (and the scissor is "Given the history of malign discrimination and current underrepresentation, should conservatives in academia be a protected group?"). The structure is symmetric, even if the relative severity is not.

A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group

This is the similarity you're failing to show between the cases. As per the other thread the grading criteria for the assignment do not warrant a 0. Yes, it's a bad essay, but the criteria provided by the professor explicitly allows bad essays. Please show how there were similar rules that actually allow for the penalized conduct in this case.

The essay deserved an F (that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others). Some of us think that grading rubrics giving F-quality work D and C grades in order to avoid giving earned Fs to protected groups are precisely what's gone wrong with higher education. When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.

The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.

(that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others)

What's bizarre about it? <=50% points is a failing grade in every European country I've been in.

The essay deserved an F

Not according to the grading criteria for the assignment. And if yes, just barely.

The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.

What's the evidence that this rule even exists? I can probably pull out a specific rule for the school that prohibits academic fraud, if you admit there isn't one here, you're admitting the cases aren't analogous.

When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.

Most motteposters are in favor of high standards. Failing a particular student a teacher doesn't like, but otherwise keeping the low standards isn't particularly popular.

Failing a particular student a teacher doesn't like, but otherwise keeping the low standards isn't particularly popular.

I don't think it's crazy to think that there is a very meaningful distinction between "your rules" and "your rules, applied fairly". Fairness is probably the most important claimed value of both sides of the culture war anyway, there is just disagreement on its interpretation.

I can also entertain the separate thought that standards should be more rigorous, but my elitist sensibilities there there would probably nix a decent chunk of the psychology department's courses as a whole: reading between the likes here suggests to me that "lifespan development" was broadly seen as an easy class and I'd bet half the essays are worse but scored well still.

Your argument about this paper deserving an F is sufficient in a vacuum. However, this did not occur in a vacuum. It was one of many papers, and all prior papers written by this person were graded very generously. Once that pattern is established, a sudden zero requires justification beyond “this paper was bad.” There could've been some plausible deniability had the trans TA given a high F and kept the criticism solely about the paper not adhering to the rubric. The trans TA didn't do that. They gave the paper the lowest grade possible, then wrote a lengthy redditor debate style response directly to Fulnecky denying her appeal, which included how they were offended. That diminishes plausible deniability quite substantially.

Even if that essay did deserve an F per the rubric, then what should be done with all other generously graded essays in that course under said rubric? Fulnecky received full credit on all prior essays in that series of assignments. I'd be willing to bet that her writing quality on this controversial paper was not exceptionally worse than her other papers, or even other papers written by other students in that class. The university's own internal review seems to support that, and the lack of consistency is the most damning bit of evidence that the TA cannot account for.

Fundamentally, I don't care about Fulnecky's cause as much as I do about the culture establishing a counter balance to progressive overreach. This TA receiving a punishment of this severity is worth it in that regard. Not because their crime was severe, but because similar crimes of this nature occur everyday on nearly every campus in the country. I do not want progressive thumbs tipping the scales without fear of repercussion any longer.

You've been warned and banned many times for personal attacks. For someone using "reddit" as an epithet, you are acting like a redditor.

One week ban.

Here on the Motte there was lots of "Her arguments are bad but a score of zero? The teacher is treating her differently, more harshly."

I noticed the same and have absolutely no sympathy for that viewpoint, to the extent that I think anyone advocating for it is some combination of idiot and actively malicious.

You don't believe that random busywork essay tasks for undergrads are marked via rubric?

There's not much point in trying to (retroactively) change a grading rubric and the paper's score so that the actual outcome, your preferred outcome, and the procedurally-fair outcome all match. As a result, practically nobody had that broad of a conversation.

There is a point to setting scientific research standards and Harvard's employees, so that the actual/preferred/fair outcomes all match (in the future, at least).

Also, getting a zero for a substandard paper is wrong, and getting fired for academic fraud is right. We should be keeping different halves of the double standards from those examples.

Ugh, fine, I didn't read the essay at the time but I did now.

The question is whether the essay, which was bad, was bad enough to earn a 0/25 rather than a higher-but-still-low score like, I dunno, 2/25 or 5/25. "The soft sciences are sufficiently corrupted by ideology that their politically-relevant outputs should asymptote to a low level of Bayesian evidence" is a highly-plausible and highly-relevant proposition to discussing any research article that's come out of them, and she did hint at it; that's better than literally nothing. Grading does need to discriminate between different degrees of badness, after all, and in this specific case we have proof that the instructor was marking down due to taking personal offence at the positions taken:

“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”

The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.

(AP, emphasis mine)

I will note that, regardless of your opinion of the essay's quality, "writing a bad essay" is not a moral failure in the way that, say, plagiarism would be (even though plagiarism is not actually a crime)... or in the way that scientific fraud is. I'm not actually sure whether this is literally fraud in the legal sense; I don't know whether "you agree to not tamper with your data" was part of the contract to receive a research grant ("you agree to actually do the study" presumably is, but the study does appear to have been performed in all these cases). Nonetheless, it seems obvious to me that a university that allows its scientists to tamper with data would stop getting government grants in a hurry (because, well, the actual state interest in issuing research grants is to uncover scientific truths, not to produce papers full of literal lies; there are of course private funders who want to buy propaganda, but the state shouldn't be doing that) and thus it is reasonable for a university (at least, one that intends to continue performing government-funded research) to fire scientists that have repeatedly performed such tampering (and thus ensure that they don't do more of it).

There's a pretty big difference between actual novel research and some random busywork essay task for undergraduates. Especially since the former shouldn't just be composed to hit a KPI whilst the latter explicitly is.

People here posted the actual grading rubric and went through how this wasn't a zero given a reasonable interpretation of the grading guide.

When the Gino case broke out: “Mr. President—a second exposé of academic fraud has hit a female HBS professor.”

The first being Amy Cuddy and her power poses a few years earlier. This was framed as some stupid men and traitorous pickmes being misogynistic tightasses about “replicability” and “selection bias,” oppressing a brave female professor from living her best life and sharing her Emotional Truth, so Cuddy could still save some face and salvage some plausible deniability.

Then Francesca Gino came around and was like “hold my cosmo.” She took it to a next level by just straight-up falsifying the data. This passage from Wikipedia is a classic:

According to the report, Gino offered two explanations for the signs of data tampering: either that this was an honest mistake by her or her research assistants, or that "someone who had access to her computer, online data-storage account, and/or data files" tampered with her data out of malice, naming one of her coauthors in one of the since-retracted papers as the most likely suspect.

It reminds me of when Pycelle tries to blame Varys upon Tyrion’s confrontation: “No! Never! It's a falsehood! I swear it! It wasn't me! Ah, Varys. It was Varys, the coauthoorrrr!”

The argument in the example is broadly that grinding tests for 10+ years is a terrible way to determine merit and rewards parental investment / the capacity of the child to suffer / capacity of the parent to make them suffer almost as much as intelligence.

The arguments are twofold:

  1. If it were possible to do a meritocratic sort that was say 95% accurate instead of today’s method being 98% accurate, but this method took 30 minutes instead of 15 years, wouldn’t it be a straightforward improvement from a utilitarian POV in terms of efficiency and reduced suffering?

  2. Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results. Britain performed better, was more agentic, produced more science and engineering through 1750-1950 when universities were the playgrounds of gentlemen (albeit with rigorous marking), we had a large theoretically idle class, and jobs were largely got through patronage and the old boys’ network. This was unfair to many people, yes, but potentially worked better for reasons like (a) there was more slack in the system and fewer resources wasted grinding for maximum-status occupations, (b) talented people were distributed more evenly throughout the system so eg you would have the head nurse in a hospital being about as intelligent as the head doctor because women weren’t allowed to become doctors, which is unfair to the woman in question but makes hospitals run a lot better, and (c) those at the top were somewhat less selected to be grinders and hustlers. It's a bit like the way that hobbyist stuff can be a lot higher quality before something gets popular and all the big companies enshittify it.

There are other arguments against modern meritocracy but those have more to do with whether it makes people happy rather than whether it makes the country perform better, and I figure you’re more interested in the latter.

EDIT:

This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.

Keen to hear more of your thoughts.

First, to clarify, this seems like agreeing that some idealized meritocratic sorting is actually a good thing, even though modern meritocracy as implemented in western nations isn't (and meritocracy as implemented in South Korea/China is even worse). Unless there's an unspoken justification for a claim like "any attempt to sort by merit will degenerate just as badly"? As far as the topic I was trying to have with this discussion on the "deeper" culture-war relating to cynicism about careers, I'm reading that you agree with me?---that a significant fraction of people have careers that are very positive-sum, producing lots of value for society as a whole. It matters that the people who gets these careers are as qualified as possible to maximize this societal value.

Now, on the (slightly off-topic) general discussion about meritocracy: I think I agree that there are serious problems with modern meritocracy. This is precisely because of examples like Gino---modern meritocracy has serious trouble identifying such strivers (seemingly) focused on career building and accolade collection instead of people actually wanting to accomplish the societally valuable mission of the positions they get (it's still shocking how little shame she displays in her interviews for the damage she did to progress in her field). You want your scientist to be someone good at science, not someone hyperoptimizing test-taking games.

However, there's a big gap between "this has serious problems" and "we need to throw it out" even if "we need to throw it out" comes with an additional "for this alternative". You have to justify the factual claim that the alternative is actually better. For example, while I do agree that 1 is correct, I do not think that "a single IQ test to every child at 10 years old" comes even close to fitting the hypothetical in 1. There are many arguments here, but at the very least you do agree that "You need more than raw intelligence to do good research" is a cliché for a reason? I'm less confident about 2, but I generally think people underestimate just how hard modern science and engineering is compared to what people where doing in the 50's. The sophistication of what we need to do now completely outclasses anything from back then. There's a very good recent pop-science video on EUV lithography that gives a sense of this---Apollo is nothing compared to the engineering problems people needed to solve to get this working!

I also think there are some easy fixes we can make to modern meritocracy, even staying in the framework of "grinding tests". First of all, the tests can be made much more interesting and less based on rote memorization---grinding for challenging IMO/other olympiad-style problems is much more fun then grinding for the SAT. It's also a much more accurate test of actual interest and creativity. Of course, as anyone who actually did grind for such tests can tell you, even this can both be miserable and get goodhearted if taken to an extreme. The solution there is to have a variety of "tests" in very different formats---olympiads, debate tournaments, science fairs, take-home tests, even on-the-spot jeopardy-style contests, etc.---so many that you can't grind for all of them. Meritocratic sorting could be based on performance on some sort of "top-n" of all the possible tests. The optimal strategy then is to do the ones you're most interested in and the variety of needing to be good multiple very different formats keeps it from getting too miserable. This is just some off-the-cuff speculating right now just to give a vague idea of how the details might work.

Sorry for not fully explaining all the points here, it's pretty late where I am right now---I can expand more tomorrow evening on parts that seem sketchy.

I generally think people underestimate just how hard modern science and engineering is compared to what people where doing in the 50's. The sophistication of what we need to do now completely outclasses anything from back then. There's a very good recent pop-science video on EUV lithography

I feel confident in claiming that at least 99% of modern science and engineering falls way below that complexity (and the only reason why people didn't give up on EUV despite the complexity was because the stakes are so high). Gino is a good example. Her study on cheating based on whether people sign before they cheat or afterwards, is a kind of study that has been done time and time again. It doesn't require a lot of intelligence to come up with it, just a little creativity (and even then the emphasis is on 'little').

Also note that specialization has increased, so the overall complexity of certain fields may have increased, but that doesn't mean that the complexity of specific jobs has increased as much.

The optimal strategy then is to do the ones you're most interested in

No, the optimal strategy is then to game the top-N that will be selected.

Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.

I think this is key. As I see it, most successful societies historically either had open aristocracies (a small number of exceptionally able outsiders could get in, often by marrying into aristocratic families) or enarchies (my coinage based on the French ENA - the point is that you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind).

"Being from an aristocratic family" is sufficiently g-loaded to select a plausible class of potential elites if the aristocracy is open and not inbred. In the alternative patronage system, so is "sufficiently interesting to attract a patron", providing that patrons actually have to patronise their proteges rather than just writing a note in exchange for a favour from the proteges father (see for example the role of patronage in the Royal Navy when it was the winningest organisation in human history).

I may do an efforpost later on the broader advantages of this approach.

I may do an efforpost later on the broader advantages of this approach.

I, for one, would like to read that effortpost, should you write it.

you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind

How do you prevent the preparation for this exam from turning into a decade long grind? Most exams like that (including the French ENA entrance exam and stuff like the International Math Olympiad) effectively are.

95% accurate is pretty horrible. In a country of 348 million that means you have over 17 million people improperly classified.

Every measurement has costs. What if we could go from 98% to 99% accurate by having kids grind for 12 hours a day for grades, every day, while doubling public education spending? That would prevent millions more from being misclassified.

Point taken, though these are fake numbers in any case and 'properly classified' is not something you can judge with any refinement. More broadly, if you could put in place a program that 'properly' classified 3m more people but required everybody to be whipped every morning, one might conclude it probably wasn't worth it. There are tradeoffs here.

95% accurate is pretty horrible. In a country of 348 million that means you have over 17 million people improperly classified.

It's not a death sentence. And the system to move classified people to the right jobs is far from perfect as well.

Arguably, imperfect classification helps solve that issue so jobs that require a high classification, but are really more suitable for the less capable get filled with the proper person, and vice versa.

In our system, we also have no good solution for exceptions, like the union leader who needs to understand the situation of the workers in a way that can only come from having done the job, but who needs to have skills beyond what the job requires. It would be a bad idea to require a standard for all workers far beyond what the job requires, but also to not have any people who can successfully advocate for those people, at the level of the more classified, where decisions get made.

Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.

I think it produces locally maximally good results.

This is Hill Climbing problem and what a lot of people get right and wrong, simultaneously, about things like Private Equity and quarterly results in publicly traded companies.

The search for maximum grindy efficiency / performance for a given game or domain will result, through vicious competition, in maximally good results to the extent that the game / domain is well defined and bounded. "Get more people to click on the red button vs the blue button" is well bounded. "Figure out the best way to live life" is totally unbounded and also subjective - an optimization frontier can't really be defined let alone achieved.

The classic tech/business text on this is The Innovators Dilemma. Christensen's major point is that constantly iterating to optimize an existing product for an existing customer need opens you, the firm, up to disruption by a new product - not one that meets the current needs better, but one that creates a wholly new way of satisfying needs/meta needs. The classic example is Ford "inventing" the model-T when everyone "asked" for a better horse.

Meritocracy, especially in today's over metric'd and quantified world, is good at hitting these bounded local maxima, but not so good at plucking out the next Big Ideas. You need, sadly, a bunch of weirdos for that. The problem is that everyone loves to think of themselves as "that misunderstood genius." Most of the time, you're just fucking weird. One one millionth of the time, you're Jobs/Wozniak/Musk etc. (sorry to over index on tech, you can do this same thing with almost any field, however).

The preferable "third way" is something like N.N. Taleb's concept of anti-fragile systems; systems that acutally get stronger for less than optimal (or, more accurate, stressful) situations. In professional terms, you want the Physics department to have one or two loonies who don't shower and use words like "chinaman" if they actually help the more "professional" researchers deal with edge cases or whatever. You want a guy in the office who is a functioning alcoholic but can close to mega-deals but is also a walking cautionary tale to the rest of the sales team. Over HR-ification (of which the Gino example is probably somewhat an example of. This is why Ackman got himself involved, I think) doesn't let talented-but-awful weirdos do their thing, and we eject some of the useful "stress" from the system.

The good news is that anyone with eyes to see sees pretty early that the grindiest of grinder fields aren't worth it. It's literally a trope that BigLaw / Consulting / Banking partner are all twice divorced alcoholics who never see their kids or get to enjoy their million dollar pay packages. These are lizard people who thrive on preftige alone. For a while, BigTech was sorta-kinda the exception to the rule, but has since been revealed to be both more grindy that initially assumed and far more of a office-politics and social climber firefight.

The way to win is not to play. Let us take heed of this young bard;

I don't wanna be famous / I just wanna be rich

[contemporaneous discussion, more recent]

Caveat: I'm pretty confident that Gino is either guilty as sin or so negligent as to be guilty, and probably both given that she'd signed onto other fraudy-as-fuck research without a care before. A good many of her deflections are not just naked, but often wrong, and those that aren't wrong are meaningless. The lawsuit is, in particular, an indictment of both Gino and her lawyers -- and that the DataColada crew couldn't get legal fees after succeeding an indictment of the courts. Much of her defenders embody of the adage about "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." and that's a part of it.

So, to be blunt, I'm not a fan.

... but I do notice that she's also unusual, and not in the way I wish she was unusual. Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious. Sam Yoon isn't up a creek until the investigation turns in; it's not hard to list piles of academic misconduct that's just everyday charlatanism, much of which isn't even worth a retraction nevermind direct real punishment. There are other fraudsters that get the hammer, but even there, academia tends to keep the wheel of justice slow, fine, and prone to false negatives: Stapel got got and literally none of his students did, Wansink lost his job and we never even got an answer for what fakes were direct lies rather than p-hacking, yada yada.

It's not enough to say that her fraud is unusual. There are so many rules, and so many ways to do academic misconduct, and so many ways to slice academic misconduct, that it's always possible to explain why one case was vital without lending any predictive power, nor explain why one case was important and the others weren't. And bureaucracies inventing and applying a thicket of rules only to enforce them when desired is absolutely a thing that happens, and something that people like Ackman has seen.

What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.

... which gets rough for 2rafa's take. There's a world where the education and test-taking makes for better decisions, better responses, better actions, and better systems, where elites mean extreme focus in specialized capabilities. There's a world where it's status-farming, or Goodharting, or some very precise games-of-thronesing, where elites are just a class identity for a class that doesn't even pretend to try for its claimed focuses. These worlds aren't even incompatible!

But then you have to run into this world. We're in one where Gino got into, and succeeded at, Harvard for nearly two decades. Dias made it into Harvard and the Time 100 Next before spinning his wheels as one of a dozen lab leaders doing this sort of research on the planet, absolutely wasting it, and another one of those lab leads pretending to replicate part of his tots-real data.

I dunno. I don't want to put words in 2rafa's mouth. If the argument is on whether everything must or should be a status game, I'd agree with you, and find that's not a healthy sort of nihilism to take, and not a healthy reason to want to ignore it all. I don't think that's the position, but if it is, or even if it's a decent read, it's not a good thing.

If the argument is on whether everything is or has become a status game... I'd be stuck having to quibble on the 'everything', and doing so would be a faint defense, or defenders of these approaches to education and academia might feel they have to argue that their output is just better than nothing and I'd have to do the work to believe that. I might be wrong in that pessimism! But I have my reasons, and, thankfully, it's an argument we can have based on facts.

Dan Ariely, noted co-author and co-fraud, got a television show, and his sketchy academic behavior is only slightly less obvious.

Ariely threw Gino under the bus, did he not? Astute, if immoral.

Perhaps. There's a really awkward question about whether he knew, or suspected, or just was in a sufficiently target-rich environment that any finger-pointing would hit a fraudster.

What's relevant is whether these policies are good here, or not. Even if Gino were tots correct about selective prosecution and scapegoating and other bad actors, ultimately, that'd just be an argument in favor of Harvard (or, imo, academia) needing to clean out the rest of the stables.

Yeah, the same Ivy league academia that employed literal weather underground terrorists as professors. This is borderline naive, especially as you say that the overall structure of investigation and punishment is as opaque and arbitrary as it gets. Given the current corrupt structure of Academia I think it more likely than not that this prosecution is going to make things even worse.

There’s takes of different views of academia, but this is really just an iron law story. The interests of the bureaucracy, determined by proper form, come first, and Gino was advancing the interests of the bureaucracy.

Thank you for this post. It is something that really annoys me about the affirmative action debate. Both sides adopt a fairness approach (ie it is fair to adjust for past sins; how is it fair to punish someone who didn’t engage in any past sin). Both sides seemingly ignore that the position / job isn’t the end goal but the output of the position / job is the end goal. That is, the sides seem to focus on distributional issues while ignoring productivity.

You're not wrong, but that's natural IMO.

Your job is perhaps the thing that determines most about your life. What job you have is very very important to you in the short, medium and long terms. The outputs of other people's jobs are only important in an indirect and long term manner.

Both groups have reasons why their definition of fairness will not only not harm the purpose of the organization but will enhance its ability to do its job.

It isn't so much ignored as the first thing they needed to provide some answer for.

The "meritocracy" side makes this point often and is shouted down by claiming the affirmative action hires are "qualified".

I dont think that is true. Anti-AA folks with say that is both unfair to the candidates, but also unfair to customers and shareholders. Particularly with government positions, anti-AA advocates have long said it is cheating the public. I do think that the sentiment that ignoring the output is a necessary assumption of the pro-AA side, or at least hiding it/ignorance of it.

What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.

The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?

Its possible for a job to be both meritocratic, and selected by status games. It happens anytime a job can be done to a sufficient degree by a large pool of candidates. There has to be some kind of alternate selection criteria. Some of these jobs might even adopt what look like anti-meritocratic sorting mechanisms.

Imagine a toll booth operator job where you basically just need to watch cars drive by and pay automatically. Maybe sometimes you hit a button to let someone through when the automated payment system gets messed up and should have let someone through. Generally you are doing nothing for 8 hour shifts. Almost anyone could take this job. 100 people apply for the position, you only have one opening to fill. If you were interested in the public good you yourself might implement a restriction like 'no smart people can have this job, they can actually use their brain to help the world instead'. If you were selfish and corrupt you might offer the job up for auction, that some percentage of the pay ends up going to you instead of the actual job candidate, or you just get a flat up front payment. Or maybe you have to sit in the toll booth with this person so you just pick the funniest and most likeable person. Even if you just decide to draw the name out of a hat, the final process for selecting the job candidate is not meritocratic.

So what happens when the job is much harder like "Harvard professor" and there are still 100 candidates for just one position. I'd imagine its much of the same thing, the job candidate is going to be picked on non-meritocratic factors, because the merit based filters have already been applied and they were still left with a large pool of candidates. Its also my belief that the larger the candidate pool left after merit filtering, the less a job will look like it is "merit based", regardless of how strict the merit based filtering was. A million qualified candidates applied for one professorship position and you know whoever gets that position got it because of political connections / nepotism / race favoritism / etc. Three qualified applied candidates for one professorship position, and you feel that they probably gave it to the most qualified person.

Imagine a toll booth operator job where you basically just need to watch cars drive by and pay automatically. Maybe sometimes you hit a button to let someone through when the automated payment system gets messed up and should have let someone through. Generally you are doing nothing for 8 hour shifts. Almost anyone could take this job. 100 people apply for the position, you only have one opening to fill. If you were interested in the public good you yourself might implement a restriction like 'no smart people can have this job, they can actually use their brain to help the world instead'. If you were selfish and corrupt you might offer the job up for auction, that some percentage of the pay ends up going to you instead of the actual job candidate, or you just get a flat up front payment. Or maybe you have to sit in the toll booth with this person so you just pick the funniest and most likeable person. Even if you just decide to draw the name out of a hat, the final process for selecting the job candidate is not meritocratic.

So what happens when the job is much harder like "Harvard professor" and there are still 100 candidates for just one position. I'd imagine its much of the same thing, the job candidate is going to be picked on non-meritocratic factors, because the merit based filters have already been applied and they were still left with a large pool of candidates. Its also my belief that the larger the candidate pool left after merit filtering, the less a job will look like it is "merit based", regardless of how strict the merit based filtering was. A million qualified candidates applied for one professorship position and you know whoever gets that position got it because of political connections / nepotism / race favoritism / etc. Three qualified applied candidates for one professorship position, and you feel that they probably gave it to the most qualified person.

I'm not saying you are completely wrong, but I think it's worth pointing out that the difference between a toll collector (in your analogy) who is truly great and one who is merely qualified is not all that noticeable or consequential compared to the difference between a college professor who is truly great and one who is merely "qualified." Probably most of us here have had the misfortune of taking a class with an affirmative action professor and therefore have witnessed just how bad a "qualified" professor can be.

Is that true? I'd argue one of the prerequisites for effective meritocracy is a swift and effective method of performance measurement.

In toll collecting and many other private enterprise positions, that kind of measurement is typically easy thanks to revenue. Tollbooths are simple enough that it probably doesn't work for an average and elite performer, but let's say we're comparing bad to good, one of McNamara's morons against a regular high school graduate. In such a situation, the moron would stick out within a month or less and be fired.

But for a professor? If they're bad at teaching, the university won't even care. And the only reason this Gino person was fired wasn't because of bad research, but outright fraud that took decades to unearth.

Is that true? I'd argue one of the prerequisites for effective meritocracy is a swift and effective method of performance measurement.

It certainly can't hurt.

But for a professor? If they're bad at teaching, the university won't even care.

Agreed, but at the same time, it might not even be that easy to swiftly and effectively measure how good the person is at teaching.

From my experience at university the student preferred professors were not preferred by the university because each group just had a different idea of a good professor. Nothing to do with affirmative action. Teaching quality vs grant proposal quality.

Multiple axis of "merit" just makes the problem worse, because it just means that are more "qualified" people for the position, even if they are only partially qualified.

For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.

I think it does acknowledge the existence of competence; it simply argues that an IQ test would be more cost-effective than years of education (remember that a lot of the use of tertiary degrees and even secondary degrees as proxies for competence is based on education in irrelevant subjects to the actual job requirements), and unlaundered carve-outs (if one chooses to use them for political reasons) would be more cost-effective than laundered ones.

The top line doesn't really represent the rest of the post.

As a lawyer I just want to mention that not all lawyers adhere to what you call the "lawyer"-side viewpoint. In particular, trial litigation tends to be highly meritocratic because you are constantly going head-to-head against other attorneys in hearings and trials. Being good at your job and having reputation for credibility goes a long way.

I would actually say that Law is one of the most meritocratic fields over the long run, in that while the really elite levels are gatekept behind prestigious degrees, you can still put out a shingle and work and build a base of clientele and advance. There are local lawyers pulling down excellent livings in any region of 100,000 people. Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.

A good lawyer who gets bad grades at a mediocre law school probably won't reach SCOTUS, he can still end up a trial judge or a partner at a very profitable law firm. A great chemist who misses out on professional and academic opportunities teaches at the high school.

and build a base of clientele and advance

Do you know if there are any good stats on what percent of lawyers are making excellent livings after they take some time to advance? New lawyer salaries have been scarily bimodal for decades now, but it's hard to tell the extent to which that's a career-long problem rather than something the lower half of the distribution just has to work their way out of over 5 or 10 years.

I'm trying to find data on it but I'm not succeeding quickly. Entry level wages have been bimodal, but the up-or-out nature of big law means that a lot of those highly-paid associates are gone within two to four years, and some for jobs where they (adjusting for inflation) they will never make more than they did early on at biglaw. Surveys report that 20% of associates leave their firms annually, though some are lateral to another firm. And of course a big part of the bimodalism has to do with the strong preference among elite professional degree holders for urban living; too few are willing or able to move to Cleveland, let alone Lancaster or Wyoming, to advance their careers.

But a small percentage of lawyers advancing their careers after failing at earlier prestige games doesn't necessarily mean that the system isn't meritocratic, it might tell us that a small percentage of good lawyers are being "thrown away" by the earlier screening systems.

I can't quantify it easily, but looking around at mid career lawyers, there is a definite path both down and up for lawyers based on talent. There are people I know who made big law and now aren't even practicing, and people I know who are making partner at prominent small town firms and pulling down a decent living now, which will improve considerably when the boomers have the courtesy to die off and free up a lot of work.

Even take a small city local DAs office as an example. Dauphin County, where Harrisburg is located, will hire young ADAs out of schools like Dusquesne and Penn State and Weidner with mediocre grades. The entry level wage is low, probably $60-70k these days. The experienced average is like $175k and the DA makes in the $200k range with a lot of local prestige to go with it. The Dauphin County DA went to Widener, started as an ADA thirty years ago, and now is the DA. There's obviously political elements to becoming DA, both office politics and electoral politics, but for the most part the way you become DA is by having at least some degree of talent for law.

None of this is perfect, there's still a ton of early career gatekeeping and prestige games, especially around the highest end jobs. But we're not comparing it to perfection, just to the example offered by OP: research science. If you're a research scientist without a university or industry affiliation, there's not a very comparable way to advance and revive your career.

None of this is perfect, there's still a ton of early career gatekeeping and prestige games, especially around the highest end jobs. But we're not comparing it to perfection, just to the example offered by OP: research science.

I was going to point out the many Striver Merit Badges you're overlooking in your analysis that are needed to approach the highest end legal jobs, but yes, by comparison, it's far more meritocratic than research science at universities.

If you totally fail at BigLaw, where do you go? Or, where is it common to go? Small biz corporate attorney? In house counsel for something very process driven? Leave law altogether?

Nobody totally fails at biglaw. The nature of the job is that you have to succeed quite a bit before you even get the chance to fail. Your work product will initially be so far from anything that travels outside of the firm that if you bomb right out of the gate, your work will never be seen by anyone, and no matter how bad you are the firm will probably still give you a month or so to keep your title while you look for another job, and nobody will really know you failed just that you're leaving, which a lot of people do.

People commonly go in house at various corporations or go into government work. But really over time they'll end up anywhere.

Hmmm interesting.

Would a minmax strategy be to get the BigLaw job, then intentionally poop your pants (figuratively not literally) and coast in an "Easy" 40 - 60 hour, but fairly high status and well compensated, corporate job?

Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.

And your timing has to be close to perfect.

I was a young shithead in undergrad but, at the time, thought I was just going to go into the corporate world so my GPA didn't really matter. That .... turned out to be exactly true, but is beside the point! I've always wanted to go back and get a masters in something like computational linguistics, but I'd have to self-fund some sort of post-bac in math or other pseudo-re-bachelor-degree in order to be competitive for any non fly-by-night degree mill.

Academia, despite it's self-inflated perception as the "palace of ideas" is actually one of the most rigid "FOLLOW THE TRACK" career paths out there. The Marine Corps has far more flexibility in terms of self-determination.

I don't know whether or not she's a fraud, but she's a social psychologist, so I assume so. What I can point out is that, from a lawyer-side viewpoint, and I mean literal lawyers, the process she went through is so staggeringly unjust that even if she's 100% obviously guilty it will still shock and horrify a lawyer. Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field, and have turned that into running deranged kangaroo courts. It's of a piece with how they handle sexual assault allegations, to give an example with an opposite culture war valence (amusingly, Gino is suing under the same Title IX used to justify those star chambers).

Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field,

I don't see how universities have more power over their employees than any other employer. They can fire (and sort of blackball) an employee, but so can any other employer.

Students, on the other hand, lose an insane investment if they get kicked out. So I agree there.

The more I hear about university politics, the more I conclude that they have too much power. Their authority needs to be separated into isolated chunks. They should not be teaching courses and then evaluating their own performance by giving exams as well. They should not be setting tuition fees and also collecting them. They should not be both centers of mass-education for undergrads and also the education of the elite few who go on to PhD and Master's courses.

Most of all, the powers they have which resemble the powers of the judicial system in any way need to be taken away. Universities are not courts of law, they do not have the accountability, moral fiber, or training to do law properly, and any incident which requires the intervention of a court should be handled by an actual court of law.

What I can point out is that, from a lawyer-side viewpoint, and I mean literal lawyers, the process she went through is so staggeringly unjust that even if she's 100% obviously guilty it will still shock and horrify a lawyer.

Can you explain what you find so egregious here? Coming from industry, not academia, they seem to have gone to much greater lengths to treat Gino fairly than any other employer would have. I could be fired on the spot for falsifying data - Harvard:

  • spent 18 months investigating the claims (2021 - 2023)
  • the result of which was a 1200 page report recommending termination (2023)
  • placed her on administrative leave
  • defended a lawsuit from her claiming defamation, discrimination based on gender, and a few other things (2024)
  • finally terminated her after 2 years suspension (2025).

I don't think there's any chance I'd remain employed for 2 years whilst credibly accused by peers, and filing lawsuits against my employer. 'Staggeringly unjust' doesn't really seem to fit the process as applied.

Well, most notably, a person of similar prominence in the private sector (Harvard is not the private sector) would have hired a lawyer day one. Harvard supposedly told Gino she was only allowed two "advocates", and that she was not allowed to recruit anyone else in her defense. Now, this is mostly unenforceable bullshit enabled by the psychological and cultural power universities have over people in their world, but it still works on them. I once had to deal with an academic disciplinary proceeding in my old career (innocent, to be clear, but some people had a grudge and made Complaints), and they made it clear that I could not have a lawyer in the room at any time or it would be considered a violation of the Process, and violation of the Process means they will find a way to find against you - but I could have a family member for 'emotional support'. As soon as they realized my chosen family member was also a lawyer, they adjourned, rang up the university's chief counsel, and went into full cover-their-ass drop-the-charges mode.

The thing is, in industry people get fired all the time, and they go on to the next job with often minimal consequences (I've heard some amusing examples of the extreme circumlocutions employers have to go to in references for fired employees to say someone's a bad apple without being caught doing so. Always liked "You'll be lucky if you can get him to work for you"). In academia, someone getting fired for cause destroys their professional, social, and usually emotional life. Decent chance you'll lose your spouse, if you're married. It's more like being defrocked from the priesthood than losing a job. And the university's facade of being a "court" makes it all the more damning if they find against you. Harvard appears to have done a pretty good job with the investigation, but at least according to Gino's defenders it was not an adversarial process where she had a fair chance to defend herself - the Kafkacrats of the university told her to shut up, did their own thing, and came back with a report over a year later without giving her a fair shake to mount her (admittedly, extremely weak) defense.

I strongly agree with your point of view. The point of science is to increase our understanding of the world, so it is not a zero sum competition to assign status.

Of course, there exists also what Feynman calls cargo cult science. People who occupy fields which make pretenses of scientific rigor but are actually just bullshitting may very well feel that all the application of statistics etc is just performative.

Being a scientist means leading mankind down the path towards truth, typically zero to one baby steps at a time. Falsifying data -- to decide that you would rather make larger steps than walk in the right direction -- is the ultimate defection from that mission. The professor who fucks his students or the doctor who experiments on PoWs may be worse human beings, but the falsifier of data is the worse scientist.

Nobody is forced to compete in a field which makes any pretenses of scientific rigor. If you don't like statistics, publish on art history. But if you use the language of science in your publications while falsifying your data, you should be expelled and disgraced and spend the rest of your days in some menial job where you can do no further harm.

A similar nonchalance is sometimes seen in defense of academics whose ghostwriters copy paste their thesis from other publications. After all, a lot of people did some cheating in school, and can't see what the big deal is. But to the (debatable) degree that an academic title means anything, it means that you sat down on your own ass and wrote your thesis. Take that away, and there is literally nothing left, and we might as well allow parents to christen their infants 'PhD' instead of 'Kevin' or 'Mary'.

People who occupy fields which make pretenses of scientific rigor but are actually just bullshitting may very well feel that all the application of statistics etc is just performative.

Perhaps they are right. Statistics in itself doesn't produce facts. It just transforms detailed data into aggregates. But if the detailed data is bad, the aggregates will be bad too.

There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited. Then actually doing science properly will result in the field correctly being judged as being rather useless and funding being withdrawn. So the only way these fields can exist is by fraud and thus that it what they'll do.

For these fields, fraud is simply an evolutionary adaptation.

I am fine with admitting that there are worthy human endeavors where the scientific method and mathematical models are not the best way to tackle the question. If someone wants to study fairy tales or Greek mythology, I will not insist on them adding p-values to their publications.

But if a field pretends scientific rigor while just cargo culting, that will reliably enrage science geeks like me. I do not have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be available for studying the character of the wolf in Grimm's fairy tales. I do have a strong opinion on how much funding there should be for torturing statistics to 'scientifically prove' that the wolf is a negative character (p<0.05): the amount is zero.

I will grant you that the revealed preference of the funding agencies is different, though.

If I had my way, I would make big changes to the scientific reward structure (both funding and the 'impact' scores).

The end result should then be fewer original studies, but those should be done with more rigor (larger experiment sizes, having the preregistered experimental plans judged by an organization separate from the universities with very strong statistical expertise and specialized in finding those and other experimental weaknesses). And strong rewards for replication studies, with a base reward based on the impact of the original paper and then diminishing rewards if many replications are done, to encourage replications, in particular for very impactful studies.

Scientists could then still do investigative studies with less rigor, but those would also be rewarded less and be considered 2nd tier. To become a professor, one would then presumably have to have done at least one big boy study with the higher standards.

There are fields where proper experiments are very hard, and usually the conclusions you can draw from the experiments they can do, are generally very limited.

Can you provide examples of such fields? I am genuinely curious as one of my current interests is trying to figure out where we've actually hit hard or very large limits in scientific discovery. The problem is that simply "reading the current research" is literally impossible for someone who doesn't have a graduate understanding of math/physics/hard sciences.

Psychiatry is a good example. Since for the most part the diagnoses are based on symptoms, the experiments tend to check whether symptoms are reduced after treatment. However, it is very easy for the experimental setup to influence how people report things (since people's opinion of their symptoms tends to be fickle) and for the treatment to not allow for double-blinded experiments. For example, if you want to investigate whether transgender treatments have a positive effect on mental health, there is no such way to do things. And I know that there is a culture among at least a subset of transgender people of lying to medical professionals to get the care they want. The scientific field has a lack of focus on biased errors in their experiments, in contrast to random errors (for which p-values are often used).

The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?

I can have such a defense going for it from two angles. First one is selective punishment in corrupt organizations which Harvard arguably is with recent scandals. Everybody is fraudster and everybody knows it. In that sense I was not punished for a fraud itself, but for getting caught or even worse, I was eliminated by internal politicking. It is similar thing to when let's say Xi Jinping or Putin runs another round of anticorruption crusade that for some reason only catches people who fell from grace of existing power structures. This is particularly effective in utterly corrupt organizations, where you have to do some gang-like initiation in order to get there in the first place. Once you are inside, you are never going to betray or you will be exposed and thrown aside.

Another angle is on arbitrariness of merit. Why should it be academic results or IQ tests instead of let's say some form of holmgang, where merit is shown in duel of martial prowess? Does excel pencil pusher in Harvard have more merit than mother of 10 or a small business owner with net worth of $10 million? You say that:

The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.

This is not the whole truth, the missing part is that other people value different things. Some people see "equitable racial diversity" as value to be maximized and thus DEI policy is merit based policy in that sense. Bill Ackman maybe values people who are against Hamas or maybe he really is stickler for due process and he sympathizes as he went through something similar. It is just that you have different value and definition of merit.

It is just that you have different value and definition of merit.

Yes, but a key part of having a respected and useful institution is to pick values and definitions of merit that serve a fairly clear and respected outcome, and then cast aside those who refuse to serve that goal.

As a scientist myself, who has been following this case for a while, and who has been a fan of data colada from before they got involved in this, I might be able to give some context.

The first is the defense of that even admitting that she did wrong, singling her out this way is wrong since everyone else did the same. But looking at the case, this is bullshit. She didn't just engage in bad statistics like everyone else. She is alleged to actually have falsified data. And I find data colada's evidence quite damning, even if it does not rise to the level of ironclad proof to demand damages from her in the court of law (not saying that it doesn't, I'm just not a lawyer so can't judge that), it should make her untrustworthy as a scientist, which effectively ends her career either way. Even the worst examples she and her defenders raise are completely different; Several are about sexual misconduct, which is firstly not about the quality of the research itself and secondly were based entirely on hearsay of the alleged victim. Her case is far, far stronger and directly concerns scientific integrity.

More similar are the cases concerning plagiarism, but again, even that is not nearly as bad as falsification (plagiarism is primarily an issue of status attribution, but generally doesn't erode trust in science itself). It's a lively discussion in itself, but there is a decent faction (which I agree with) that a large part of what we call plagiarism, mostly concerning boilerplate summaries or standard sentences included in many introductions and methods sections, should not be considered an issue at all, even if copied verbatim. Plagiarism accusation thus have among the widest range in science; On one end, you have philosophers copying the central arguments from another author and passing them off as their own, at the other end you hav, say, biomedical researchers paraphrasing the explanation of a toolset they used from a coauthor's paper in the supplemental. Both are technically plagiarism, but they are not even in the same ballpark of severity.

Btw, this also concerns Bill Ackman's creds as "major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay"; That removal was imo handled atrociously, even if I'm happy she is gone. She was effectively appointed from primarily political reasons, and she was removed for political reasons. Her plagiarism was a complete sham that nobody cared about, for good reason; For example, Gay used a description of the Voting Rights Act which closely mirrored a description in a 1999 book by David T. Canon. This is, in my experience, what literally everyone is doing when you need to summarize something for which there is already ample literature; You take what you consider the best summary, paraphrase it, maybe add (often even directly from others works, albeit again paraphrased) or remove some parts that you consider missing or unnecessary, respectively. Ironically if you try to do it "the right way", i.e. you read lots of summaries and then try to write a new one based on your own understanding, it can happen even easier to copy verbatim, because that is what's on your mind. So I'd be careful to consider Ackmann trustworthy in respect to upholding academic standards. He is a political actor.

Second, in opposition to @Pongalh and some others here, I think that singling her out for common, even if bad, behaviour, would actually be problematic if it were true. Low standards are bad; Selectively enforcing high standards only on people you have an issue with is worse. It's anarcho-tyranny, having written rules that you allow some people to flout and enforce on others, purely based on your own discretion, i.e. the written laws are in practice mostly irrelevant and it's really just discretion.

This is one of the primary vehicles how ideologies take over institutions in general, and how the left took over academia in particular. Deliberately, overtly organizing a takeover of an institution is difficult, obvious and too easy to thwart. On the other hand, simply engaging in a double standard for new applicants, especially under cover of vague gesturing towards safety and wellbeing, is easy and may only be noticed after it is too late. Again I want to contrast to simple low standards; You still let in plenty of incompetent people, but in addition to incompetence, they are also biased. That's worse, not better.


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