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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Math Prof Daniel Litt talks about LLMs and math proofs

It seems to me to be a balanced take. He's bullish and hopeful on the future, while trying to be accurate/realistic about current capabilities, while remaining somewhat concerned about possible problems. For example on the bullish/hopeful side:

I think I have been underrating the pace of model improvements. In March 2025 I made a bet with Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of RL environment company Mechanize, that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers I judge to be at a level comparable to that of the best few papers published in 2025, at comparable cost to human experts, by 2030. I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.

For discussion the current state, he focuses on "First Proof", which is a set of ten lemmas from current researchers' unpublished papers. He discusses the performance of different groups, different models, different scaffolding. There are positive and negative notes. One personal example section from his own endeavors:

One of the ways I like to test the models is to give them a hard problem, and then see how long it takes me to cajole/guide/bully them into giving me a correct solution. For a lemma from one of my papers, it is typically quite difficult or impossible to get a complete proof without any hints. In one case I devoted, as an experiment, 8 hours (admittedly some of which I spent away from the keyboard in frustration) trying to get GPT 5 Pro to produce a relatively simple counterexample to some statement without hints. The models do much better if one gives them a hint. Frontier models can often execute arguments I would consider "routine" if one explains the general idea in a sentence or two. It's easy to take this as evidence for usefulness, but against automatability. This is wrong. Instead of saying, *it takes 8 hours of human labor, or giving away the main idea(, we should say all it takes is 8 hours of labor or the one-sentence main idea.

My sense is that he's doing this with problems where he knows the solution (to some level; I could probably write a whole post on the different levels of "knowing" a solution for a piece of mathematics). There is great promise here, but also a note of concern. To state that concern somewhat more concisely, he writes:

In the near term, we're in trouble. Models are able to produce both correct, interesting mathematics, as well as incorrect mathematics that is exceedingly labor-intensive to detect. Academic mathematics is simply not prepared to handle this.

This again seems reasonable to me, given my own experiences. Yes yes, I haven't used every model and every scaffold (some of the systems he discusses are not publicly available at any price). When I've known the solution, I can probably get it there. When I've not known the solution, I have to say that at best, it's been good at helping me find other results in the literature that might be helpful. It is, indeed, labor-intensive and quite frustrating to have to carefully pore over every detail, trying to see if it went astray when generating a mountain of text. Then, when you find something wrong, maybe not even having verified the rest of it, it'll happily produce another mountain of text, and it feels like you're starting from square one. When you're already confident that you know a method will work, then it's mostly just a test of will to see if you can get it to figure it out. When you don't know, the question of whether you potentially waste mountains of time on what may be a dead end or just proceed on your own becomes far more difficult, and you have to make that decision repeatedly along the way.

I hate to bring this up, but it's also quite frustrating that when I say things like this, the most common response is that it's a "skill issue" or that I'm just not paying the right quantity of dollars for so-and-so's preferred model. So, maybe this testimony will help allay some of those concerns.

And yeah, Sagan help us when it comes to reviewing the mountain of papers we're going to get submitted to journals/conferences that are more LLM than human in the meantime.

He ends very hopeful:

Let us take this to an absurd extreme. Suppose we had a library filled with proofs of every theorem of ZFC, as well as excellent guides that could, given a question, take us to the answer and explain it. What would a mathematician do in such a library?

If you ask the question this way, the answer becomes clear: they would be unbelievably excited, and immediately get to work. They would immediately start asking questions: how does one prove the Riemann hypothesis? The Hodge conjecture? Their own pet obsession (in my case, the Grothendieck-Katz p-curvature conjecture)? Then they would work until they understood the answer. The job would not be done, not even close.

I do not mean to suggest, even, that humans necessarily have an intrinsic edge in asking mathematical questions that are interesting to humans; that is certainly the case now (and I suspect it will be for some time), but I see no principled reason it should be true. I just mean that this is why we got into mathematics: we want to understand. That's the goal.

Totally agreed. And something like LLMs with automated theorem provers seem incredibly well-suited to potentially get us toward something like this. It seemed natural that they'd be great at translating between humans and machines in terms of code, and we've seen great strides there. It seems natural here, too. We're not there yet, but there's hope.

And something like LLMs with automated theorem provers seem incredibly well-suited to potentially get us toward something like this.

This would have been my suggestion as well. If an LLM can produce mathematics on a PhD student level, then surely it can also formalize that to the point where it can be verified by a theorem verifier.

So you can run them in tandem: an unreliable LLM prone to hallucination, but somewhat creative, and a deterministic small verifier with a small code base.

That it is much easier to verify a result than to come up with it is a pretty unique property of mathematics (though certain analogues exist in CS). Contrast with experimental particle physics: there is most emphatically no verifier with a small code base which can test if a given data analysis is sound or unsound (which is foten a bit of a judgement call, in any case).

I think alignment might be easier if we focused solely on proof generating AIs. Of course, even then it is not impossible that an ASI might create proofs which contain infohazards which will cause humans to set it free, but an ASI would have to be a lot more powerful to deduce how to hack humans just from knowing what kinds of math they have invented instead of being literally trained with the accumulated knowledge of mankind.

Sadly, this is not where the money is expected to be, so we won't do that.

something like LLMs with automated theorem provers seem incredibly well-suited

I find the whole thing around verifiable proofs with lean to be fascinating. It seems like it's similar (but not exactly the same) to np problems, where a solution is easily verifiable, but searching for that solution in the space is intractable via brute force.

It seems like for alot of these math questions, the llm acts as a pretty smart heuristic in where to search, to guide the searching algorithm towards more fruitful paths so that a solution can actually be found. Though I don't know the exact details.

I'm also wondering if the erdos problems are not actually that hard to solve, it's just that with thousands of them, humans haven't been putting a serious effort into solving them all. Though having computers able to lower the cost of proving math problems, even if relatively mundane, is still a quite important advancement.

I hate to bring this up, but it's also quite frustrating that when I say things like this, the most common response is that it's a "skill issue" or that I'm just not paying the right quantity of dollars for so-and-so's preferred model. So, maybe this testimony will help allay some of those concerns.

The model mentioned (GPT5-Pro) is not even OpenAI's SotA model, let alone the the only SotA model. I just don't understand this insistence of not looking at the frontier, yet insisting where it is. Several top level posts have boiled down to posters thinking that the free model one can demo on the LLM's developers website, represents the best that developer is able offer.

For mathematics, a measured list of what SotA LLM's are able to do is the following table and this paper.

You won't find claims in the above two links that an undergrad can prove a major long-standing conjecture, or that mathematicians are to be replaced soon. Every claim about the capabilities of LLMs precisely qualified, these aren't hype pieces.

But you will also notice the absense of issues you are facing.

Several top level posts have boiled down to posters thinking that the free model one can demo on the LLM's developers website, represents the best that developer is able offer.

But the OP says:

Yes yes, I haven't used every model and every scaffold (some of the systems he discusses are not publicly available at any price).

There is also a quote about the use of frontier models.

This is the second time this week where you have not engaged with the the actual content and delivered this "free models" swipe. What's going on here?

It is not logically impossible that @Poug is completely right and “But you’re not using the best model” is the actually correct answer to every complaint about LLMs.

Several top level posts have boiled down to posters thinking that the free model one can demo on the LLM's developers website, represents the best that developer is able offer.

It is eminently reasonable for people to take the "try our product for free and see if you like it" offering as representative of what the paid offering can do. That is, indeed, the whole point to such an offering: give people a taste so they want more and are willing to pay for it.

I mean if you had no way to gather other information this would be a defensible epistemics, but it's willful ignorance to take the capability of a free tier as the actual frontier when told otherwise in a debate forum. You can read any benchmark, it's a known fact that the free tier is months to a year behind the sota models, this isn't even seriously disputed.

it's willful ignorance to take the capability of a free tier as the actual frontier when told otherwise in a debate forum

No, that is believing the evidence which is available to me. AI bros have been claiming that (insert paid model here) is so much better for a long time now (since GPT-4). It's never been true, and every time those models become available for free use I have seen that they still have the same problems as the previous model did. At this point claims that the state of the art is better than the free tier have no credibility at all, thanks to years of false claims to that effect. Maybe the claims will eventually be proven true this time, but I sincerely doubt it based on past performance.

No, that is believing the evidence which is available to me.

It's $20 dude, this isn't a "you need to have a personal particle accelerator to participate in the conversation" level of gate keeping. It's "you are saying things about the new york times article that are plainly shown to be untrue to anyone with a subscription", it's fine if you don't want to subscribe to the new york times and can't be bothered to find a pirated copy, but if that's the case you should just not have an opinion on the contested lines of the piece. things are moving quick, 4.5 was a big step up and 4.6 was a big step up from 4.5 if for no other reason than the vastly expanded context window.

AI bros have been claiming that (insert paid model here) is so much better for a long time now (since GPT-4). It's never been true

It was true during gpt-4 and it's true now. Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person. The underlying disputed claims have shifted as the models have shifted so the less ambitious claims of gpt-4 capabilities have since been absorbed into the past, back then people were saying asinine things like that being unable to count the r's in 'strawberry' was proof of the inescapable limitation of AI. Approximately no one was claiming gpt-4 had the capabilities that 5.2 or opus 4.6 have. You might be able to argue that gpt-4 advocates oversold gpt-4(I'd dispute but whatever) but in the wider picture the overselling would be a rounding error, ahead of reality by no more than six months.

These strength gaps between free and paid models aren't vibes, there's a whole industry of benchmarks and evaluations. The free and paid model gap is huge and not disputed by anyone serious.

Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.

I dispute it. Both suffer exactly the same problem: the output they produce is frequently wrong in subtle and insidious ways. This makes both equally useless for work that requires correctness, especially correctness you can't write unit tests for.

That's like saying Einstein and a village idiot both suffer from the "same" problem, they stub their toes at equal rates. Or saying that a drunk Asian grandma and a professional F1 driver are as incompetent because F1 drivers crash their cars too.

How often they fail is important.

That's the thing, I haven't notice the frequency of incorrect output to go down significantly! It just gets more and more difficult to detect the errors.

Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.

I guess I'm not a thinking person then, because GPT-4 was not in my opinion any better than GPT-3. As such I won't continue to waste your time with my brainless ramblings.

Now that's actual insanity. I presume you mean you used GPT 3.5 (because that was the version in the first public ChatGPT release) vs GPT-4.

The actual GPT-3 was a base model, it wasn't instruction tuned.

I actively used GPT 3.5 when I was learning how to code, and found it useful but frustratingly inaccurate. I remember trying GPT-4 during the same period, and it was so much better that I gave up all aspirations of directly switching from medicine to programming and ended up becoming a psychiatrist. Regardless of how good the AI was, I noticed that it was getting better, faster than I was. An excellent choice in hindsight.

If that is your serious opinion, then that is a genuine reason to discount anything you have to say about LLMs. You didn't even need benchmarks, it was as obvious as the performance difference between a rickety tuktuk and a Honda Civic.

Thank you for the correction, I did mean ChatGPT base but mistakenly believed it launched with 3 and not 3.5. But no, there was not a meaningful difference between the two models in my opinion (based on my usage of the two). I appreciate you at least not insulting me, but unfortunately I don't think we will ever see eye to eye on this.

More comments

The article discusses Erdos problems and Aletheia's performance on "First Proof".

Why is there always someone who blows up with such attitude, yet appearing to not really engage with anything?

But you will also notice the absense of issues you are facing.

Let's turn it around. What version mathematician are we dealing with here? What's your h-index? Have you used any particular LLMs, regardless of particular model/scaffold to solve components of your own publishable mathematics research? Can you personally attest to not encountering any issues like this? I just don't understand this insistence of not looking at the frontier, yet insisting where it is.

I do not think it's fair to say that @Poug didn't engage with your post.

If you say:

It seems to me to be a balanced take. He's bullish and hopeful on the future, while trying to be accurate/realistic about current capabilities, while remaining somewhat concerned about possible problems

Then it is entirely fair to point out that the person you're using as an authority isn't using cutting-edge models that correctly capture "current capabilities". A few months is a very long time indeed when it comes to LLMs.

That is all I have to say, and I mean it. I'm not a professional mathematician, I can't attest to their peak capabilities as a primary source. The last time I was able to was when I got my younger cousin (a Masters student then, now postgrad in one of the more prestigious institutions here) to examine their capabilities in my presence.

"Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?" was a problem that I could actually understand, after he showed me the correct answer. The LLMs of the time were almost always wrong, 6 months later we got mixed results , but as early as a year ago, they get it right every time (when restricting ourselves to reasoning models, and you shouldn't use anything else for maths).

Now? He went from being skeptical about my claims of near-term AI parity in mathematics to what I can only describe as grim resignation.

(Now being six months ago, last time I saw him.)

In the interest of fairness, I think @Poug is probably incorrect when he says:

But you will also notice the absense of issues you are facing

I'm not saying this with confidence, because that's just my recollection of what actual mathematicians say these days, including Tao himself. I just mention it to hopefully demonstrate that I'm trying very hard not to be a partisan about things.

You know what? I don't think he is engaging with the article. The article specifically mentions GPT 5.2 Pro seven times, two of which seem, to my read, to imply that that's what he's using. There is one moment where he just says "GPT 5 Pro". Perhaps he just happened to leave off the ".X" in this one spot. Perhaps I'm reading the other seven mentions of GPT 5.2 Pro wrong, and the dirty secret is that he's using 5.0. I suppose he doesn't say in big bold highlighted words, "I'm definitely using 5.2 and not 5.0," so sure, maybe one could say that it would be nice to have a clear statement.

...but to come in, with one sketchy textual inference, and just boldly declare that the only way anyone could possibly be reporting the experience they're reporting is obviously just because they're using a six month old model, and that obviously it's now totally fixed... it's the same SMH annoyance at someone being annoying and arrogant.

In fairness, perhaps he only read my comment and not the article (thus, not engaging with the article), and in fairness, I did blockquote the one spot where he seemed to have left off the ".X". But yeah, "I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to boldly declare that I've diagnosed exactly what's going on, using the same tired objection," is pretty cold comfort.

You know what? I don't think he is engaging with the article. The article specifically mentions GPT 5.2 Pro seven times, two of which seem, to my read, to imply that that's what he's using. There is one moment where he just says "GPT 5 Pro". Perhaps he just happened to leave off the ".X" in this one spot. Perhaps I'm reading the other seven mentions of GPT 5.2 Pro wrong, and the dirty secret is that he's using 5.0. I suppose he doesn't say in big bold highlighted words, "I'm definitely using 5.2 and not 5.0," so sure, maybe one could say that it would be nice to have a clear statement.

I checked, and this seems correct.

On that basis, I can't really disagree with your claim that @Poug didn't engage with the article. Being charitable, it's exceedingly common to see this happen in the wild, so he might have jumped to conclusions, but neither you, nor the author, seems to have made that kind of error and it's unfair to criticize you on those grounds.

Oh no he used gpt-5 pro not gpt-5.2 pro!!!!

In all seriousness this isn't going to make a huge difference. If it was really that much better, openai would make number go up more, but as it is, 5.2 is not going to unlock any revolutionary capabilities that 5 pro doesn't have. Caude and gemini are both better than the best gpt right now, but still, they are not better in a revolutionary way.

EDIT: hat tip to ControlsFreak: This entire comment chain is about an anecdote from his past, not the main thrust of the paper. He described one somewhat-bad experience with GPT-5 Pro (presumably actually 5, not 5.1 or 5.2), but the rest was about 5.2. Ctrl+F "5" in the article to see that the mention is unique. It might be worth mentioning GPT 5.3 now (he mentions using Codex, so the restrictions don't completely lock him out), but even I think being three weeks behind the state of the art is fine.

I'm not sure about 14.6% vs. 31.3% pass rate on research-level math questions being a huge difference, but it's definitely noticeable.

Also, using a six-month-old model is better than usual for Science. If they had been 12 months behind 5.2 Pro (itself two months old by now) instead of four, then they would be dealing with a zero percent pass rate as o3 wouldn't have been released yet.

Tell me about it. I was looking for published research on administering human IQ tests to LLMs, and the most recent example I could find is a preprint that tested cutting edge models like 4o and Sonnet 3.5. Damn thing hadn't even made it through peer review. I had to settle for a relatively niche website that independently administers the Mensa IQ test to the latest models, and while that's much better than nothing, it demonstrates that standard academia is entirely unable to keep up with the frontier.

Academia has been obsolete since the 2000s. By the time a paper comes out, it has been discussed to hell and back in the blogosphere, and everybody knows where they stand on it. The only point of journals now is to determine who gets to become a tenured professor.

One philosophy question I've wondered about is how pure pure mathematics truly is: questions like whether "the integers" a true abstract concept, or can it only be explained to an intelligence that has a world model that includes the notion of "counting" or something similar. The math definitions seem crafted to be purely abstract, but my thinking about them always ends up grounded in the real world. Can a true abstract intelligence (which an LLM trained on human text isn't, but is perhaps closer than a flesh-and-blood human) derive all of modern mathematics given only the selected axioms? Some of this, I think, comes back to the IMO still-poorly-answered "what is intelligence?" question.

You don't need a notion of "counting" to be able to define the natural numbers. Upward Lowenheim-Skolem means that there are models of Peano arithmetic of every infinite cardinality, so the "rules" that give rise to the naturals also give rise to structures where you have "natural" numbers which are infinite and can never be arrived at by starting from 0 and taking the successor finitely many times. They're called the hypernaturals and are a fascinating object of study, completely divorced from the ordinary "counting" way people think about numbers, and yet they satisfy all the standard rules of arithmetic.

I would be rather interested to interact with an intelligence that only knows the natural numbers on this basis, but I suspect all the existing LLMs are too polluted with children's books with counting.

They're called the hypernaturals and are a fascinating object of study, completely divorced from the ordinary "counting" way people think about numbers

I've never understood why mathematicians say nonsense like this. My 3,4, and 8yo boys regularly get into "who loves daddy more" fights, and as soon as one of them says "I love daddy infinity", the next one immediately says "I love daddy infinity plus one!". Obviously to them infinity plus one is an entirely different and meaningfully bigger quantity than infinity. My experience is that kids universally understand this simple concept, and that it takes a calculus teacher to beat such sensible reasoning out of them.

Don't get me started on the 0.9999... = 1 nonsense, where non-mathematicians are obviously reasoning using hyperreals and the stupid mathematicians insist on limiting themselves to the ordinary reals.

(I have a math phd and teach in a college math dept, so I feel like this is a fair insider criticism.)

My experience is that kids universally understand this simple concept, and that it takes a calculus teacher to beat such sensible reasoning out of them.

Normally I have a least a tiny bit of sympathy for educational "mainstreaming", but this really is the sort of thing that ought to be handled well before calculus by at least having some geeky books on hand for the faster kids to read while the kids who need review are covering fractions for the fourth time. Maybe most kids can't learn the standard stuff faster without getting stuck completely out of sync with the teachers' lessons, but asides like "infinity as a limit" vs "infinities in cardinal numbers" vs "infinities in ordinal numbers" ought to be written up in a child-friendly presentation somewhere, right?

I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me a month or two ago with the question "is infinity a number". I managed to avoid diving into set theory and losing them, but went through enough of the "things you call numbers today that weren't originally thought of as numbers" (zero, fractions, negatives, irrationals) and "things you'll call numbers later that you don't think of as numbers today" (imaginaries) to get across that names like "number" are a matter of definition.

I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me

Wow, I had no idea that was still even a Thing!

It seems to be a bigger thing than it was when I was a kid, even. Difficulty has increased by roughly one level (school->chapter, chapter->state, state->national, national->good-luck) over the past few decades, and that seems to be well-calibrated to account for how much more intense the competition is.

It's excellent to see you living up to the latter half of your username. Here, have a cookie for good behavior.

Yum, free cookie.

The ‘Kathoey’ or Ladyboy designation is a more honest way of categorizing both very effeminate / camp gay men and most ‘straight’, feminine transwomen (HSTS in Blanchardian typology).

Transwomen of a kind are obviously very common. I understand there is still some social discrimination, but probably 70% of Sephora sales assistants in Thailand are ladyboys/transwomen/kathoey/your preferred term here. This is even more common than in Seattle, which I wrote about previously. In my local Sephoras (London Westfield - Shepherd’s Bush NOT Stratford, please - and Soho on Broadway I guess) there are some transwomen and a large number of very feminine, makeup wearing gay men, but something about the experience in Thailand just underscored to me how similar the two are.

It reminded me of a pioneering British local TV documentary I’d written about before, produced in the 1980s about gay life in London in the 1930s. One of the things the men make very clear is that the gay community, such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of camp, effeminate men who were to the man, in terms of sexual role, bottoms. Often they described each other, semi-ironically, with female pronouns or roles (queen etc) which are still used by many camp gay men today. The tops they had sex with were not considered part of this community. In a very real sense, they were not considered gay at all, even and perhaps most clearly by the men they were having sex with.

This wasn’t a legal distinction - a ‘top’ was still committing a crime at the time under British law in having sex with another man, and would flee the night club in the event of a police raid all the same - but it was a clear social one. The femme men themselves didn’t have sex with each other (this is, at least, implied in the documentary), only with the ‘straight’ or ‘topping’ men whom they solicited in clubs, parks, outside barracks and so on. More broadly, the sexual and communal landscape the men discuss seems to be by far the most common way in which human societies have historically understood effeminate or camp males who are primarily sexually attracted to other men. The ladyboys don’t have sex with each other for the same reason that the gay ‘queens’ of 1930 London didn’t. And then men who have sex with ladyboys - or who had sex with those men in the thirties - aren’t or weren’t gay in the same way that they were. That isn’t to say they’re straight, or not bisexual, or not anything else, but it’s clearly not the same thing. The modern Western gay identity, in which tops and bottoms (and indeed lesbians and gay men) are grouped together is essentially a consequence of the civil rights movement and AIDS crisis; it is ahistorical and unusual compared to all historical treatment of non-mainstream forms of gender and sexual identity.

Blanchard’s key contribution to the understanding of transsexualism was that he acknowledged - based on his own practice - that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness. HSTS fundamentally existed along the spectrum of camp male femininity, expressed both sexually and generally. As I understand it, the gay man at Sephora who wears a skirt, a full face of makeup and speaks in a camp, exaggerated feminine voice is - even if he is not on hormones - considered a kathoey in Thailand. And this makes sense - camp femme gay men who are sexually submissive, may wear drag etc and HSTS transwomen are often divided solely by the extent to which they are committed to presenting as female (that commitment ultimately expressed in medical intervention), and nothing else in terms of dress, presentation, sexual preference, interests and so on.

The reason why Blanchard is controversial is not his categorisation of HSTS, of course, but its inverse. The non-HSTS, the top-who-transitions, the man (often in Blanchard’s own experience) who decides after 30+ years of normal heterosexual life, marriage, children, relationships with only women etc, that he is actually a woman, is not part of this long continuity of effeminate homosexual males. He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity. In naming the autogynephilic transsexual man, Blanchard acknowledged a sexual identity largely divorced from sexuality (consider that many if not most AGP are attracted to women at least before heroic doses of female hormones, meaning their sexual identity is not a key part of their transition). The AGP male is closer to the archetypal modern fetishist (I won’t name examples because inevitably that will devolve into a pointless argument), except that the object of his attraction is inverted. His motivations for womanhood are completely different to those of the HSTS, but our understanding of trans identity doesn’t allow us to acknowledge this essential difference.

If an argument one occasionally hears about clearly differentiating HSTS and AGP is that it is impossible to tell the difference, I think the Thai example is a good counterargument. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen. They are, of course, interested in relationships with men, with males, because they are gay males, but that is about it. They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.

I think I understand AGP as a phenomenon (for a loose value of understand, nobody has a strong grasp on what causes it at a mechanical level). It seems like a good way to describe and conceptualize a large chunk of trans people, and I know many who willingly endorse it as an accurate model of their internal cognition.

What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...

Hmm. Now that I've articulated this, I can only shrug and say that human sexuality is messy and complicated. Firstly, we have bisexual men, who might be willing to sleep with both men and women, but find it easier to sleep with other men. Solve for the equilibrium.

Second, even straight men have diverse tastes in women. Some like girly-girls, others, like me, are Tomboy Respecters. If I was making the Perfect Woman in a lab, she'd be a man (in terms of personality and interests) who just happens to be in a woman's body. Well, +2-3 SD of being nurturing and caring, but the point stands.

What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...

I feel like the butch and femme dynamic among lesbians is similar. While I get the feeling it is a lot less prevalent as a dynamic in modern lesbian spaces in the West, I have seen plenty of Tumblr posts where lesbian women fawn over tall, muscular women presenting in a mannish style, so there must be something to it.

My best guess is that the human brain generally tries to detect two things in mates: man/woman and masculine/feminine (or perhaps dominant/submissive.) In most people they are attracted to a congruent set (man+masculine/dominant or woman+feminine/submissive), but a minority of the population end up attracted to an incongruent set (man+feminine or woman+masculine.) This is why a small percentage of men love the idea of Amazon warrior women, or orcish women. And why you get some gay men attracted to femboys, and some lesbian women attracted to butch lumberjack women.

What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...

find it easier to sleep with other men. Solve for the equilibrium.

I think you came to the answer on your own.

Another element that 2rafa doesn't mention, but I think gestures in the direction of, is the whore/madonna split. There's some fraction of bisexual men who see women as beautiful angels deserving of devotion, nothing as icky as raw sexual lust, but see twinks/femboys/trans women as essentially fallen women by default, and therefore worthy of sexual instrumentalization. Add to that the fact that the folks in this group are often unironically eager for sexual instrumentalization in a way only a minority of cis women are (and even then, they need foreplay and trust first), and well, the opportunity to derive gains from trade (my favorite of all Scott's jokes) emerges.

As I wrote a few months ago:

As self_made_human has realized, getting sexual attention from gay men is trivial, and so is both easy to obtain and less valuable per-interaction. So madonna/whoring your mindset and searching for disposable sexual attention from men (whores) while seeking out reliable partnership with women (madonnas) is something you can do, if you're so inclined.

The other thing is that gay men, particularly ones who are interested in companionship more than disposability, often feel trapped by the expectations of gay dating, and are jealous of straight men for whom long-term commitment, exclusivity, and broad social acceptance feel like table stakes. So bisexual men can be "traitors": taking from gay men whatever they can get from them and then fleeing to the arms of a woman when one arises.

This has been somewhat sexualized lately, with the "femboy bf"/"femboy hooters" meme culture which prompts great recrimination in the ongoing femininine-man/trans-woman civil war, but of course that also comes with the corollary memes of "breaking up with my femboy bf because I met a real woman." (I have no idea what the actual prevalence of this stuff is, I'm just way too extremely online.)

Intriguingly, this pattern seems to mirror many complaints about women's sexual behavior from men, and women's complaints about the sexual behavior of extremely attractive straight men: if sexual attention is abundant, using it for temporary affirmation while utterly disposing of your partners' interests and needs is a real possibility.

There's also a bit of the "cis women are so awful, hoeflation is abysmal, women are terrible whores who don't know how to please a man" -- I'm not pulling these out of my own head, these are things I've been told by people in this orbit -- both on the offering and the receiving end of this kind of transaction. There's an element to this subculture that's kind of the male version of political lesbianism.

This very dynamic actually showed up on the motte once, several months ago:

As dating grows more complex, and sometimes risky for men, we’re seeing the rise of alternatives: AI girlfriends, VR porn, sex robots. Add to that a growing visibility of trans women in romantic spaces, and a strange new question emerges:

What happens when women can no longer command attention?

I think of this memeplex as the "strong independent man don't need no woman" imaginary rebellion, but of course it involves consorting with men, because for these guys somebody's gotta appease the sexual appetite they're angry at women for not satisfying.

As I wrote back then:

Sometimes straight men like to proclaim, "maybe I will go gay!" like a kind of protest, same way that women annoyed with men sometimes start investigating political lesbianism, but same-sex pairings are just different in important ways due to biological and cultural factors. The grass is rarely greener on the other side. Fantasies aren't going to save you, and trans women aren’t your fantasy. They’d be the first people to tell you that.

Almost uniformly, trans women of the HSTS/transmedical bent are massively and uncompromisingly angry about the whole thing, and a decent amount of the discourse around trans chasers is trying to imprecisely talk about this dynamic. Obviously, "you're my substitute for a real woman because real women are hoes and I'm looking for the poophole loophole" isn't exactly what this demographic has in mind when they talk about wanting romantic attention from men. In particular, they tend to strongly dislike gay culture, to which this dynamic is directly adjacent, and if you'll excuse a purile pun, into which it penetrates without commitment.

Some fraction, however, of femboys, crossdressers, and twinks are more than happy to play along with it though -- especially if it means they pull a straight man. Or a "straight" man.

(AGPs, however, are obviously not particularly interested in men anyway, and themselves have kind of a madonna/whore thing going on -- where women are madonnas, and men are whores, and they wanna be madonna: "like a virgin." Some of your confusion may have to do with the fact that the West often glorifies and literally angelifies women as innocent and fundamentally decent, in ways that the rest of the world doesn't, and we're now dealing with the cultural fallout of a world in which this is colliding with women attaining positions of power.)

Whenever this discussion topic comes up, I always wish I had a "summon gattsuru" button. I usually understand... at least half of his posts, but on this topic he's far more familiar with the terrain than I am.

This is true but it doesn’t answer the specific question of purely homosexual gay tops attracted to femme men. That a bisexual top would be attracted to feminine men is comparatively unsurprising, both feminine men and most women present along the femme continuum. That a purely homosexual gay top attracted to relatively masculine or male-presenting men wouldn’t be attracted to women is likewise unsurprising, since this is a man who is physically attracted to maleness and masculinity. But a man who enjoys dominant penetrative sex with feminine-presenting men but is unattracted entirely to women is harder to explain.

I'll caveat that my tastes are ... unusual, and a lot of the part I can relay aren't necessarily representative, and those that are representative are going to reflect more 'masked' environments (eg, tumblr, blahaj programmer world) than unmasked ones (eg, furry fandom stuff).

There's some fraction of bisexual men who see women as beautiful angels deserving of devotion, nothing as icky as raw sexual lust, but see twinks/femboys/trans women as essentially fallen women by default, and therefore worthy of sexual instrumentalization.

To some extent, although from inside my personal experience is less about who was worthy, and more about who could have a thing done, in a way that worked successfully. I haven't exactly had an easy or good time in gay dating spaces. But I don't get the same 'learn a foreign language' feeling.

I like to use the metaphor of the dishwasher here. Most people who've loaded a dishwasher end up with The One True Way to do it. Getting into a long-term relationship, you're going to find out that some people do things in crazy ways: forks facing up in the silverware holders, putting bowls on the top rack and cups on the bottom, running it on a daily basis even if it's almost empty, so on.

Almost uniformly, trans women of the HSTS/transmedical bent are massively and uncompromisingly angry about the whole thing, and a decent amount of the discourse around trans chasers is trying to imprecisely talk about this dynamic. Obviously, "you're my substitute for a real woman because real women are hoes and I'm looking for the poophole loophole" isn't exactly what this demographic has in mind when they talk about wanting romantic attention from men. In particular, they tend to strongly dislike gay culture, to which this dynamic is directly adjacent, and if you'll excuse a purile pun, into which it penetrates without commitment.

That's definitely part of it, but there's also a lot of ugly physical ramifications about Guys Who Think Transwomen Are Always Up For X. The central argument that trans activists bring up is the guy who's post-nut-clarity devolves into horror or even violence, but you can usually get the admission that, in the modern era, that's at least unusual (especially outside of sex work), or where the chaser is only interested in trans women as seen on porn. There's still a lot of room for disagreement, and when a sexual partner's change of presentation or mutability of presentation is part of the attraction to start with, even honest and well-intended trans chasers that are genuinely interested in a longer-term relationship can be Trouble.

At the most overt and crude level, someone that's explicitly interested in trans women qua "chicks-with-dicks" is going to have a really complex negotiation if their sexual partner wants or has had bottom surgery. Someone that's really focused on the idea of being pegged by a real penis is going to have problem with a large number of trans women who, even if they're planning on keeping their dick, don't particularly want to penetrate anything with it and definitely don't like having someone focusing on it. There's a lot of stuff that's built around the fetish and isn't actually built for the person. There's a lot of sissy and sissification stuff that's really common in gay porn and you might think would be catnip for the actual-AGPs, but a sizable number of trans women (even some actually-AGP ones!) find so overtly mocking that it puts them entirely out of their rhythm.

(tbf, because most of it is mocking the sub, just in a way a cis sub gay guy's going to like; for those not too squicked out by the content, contrast tyroo as a trans sub take and vonepitaph as a cis sub take.).

And that goes far beyond sex stuff itself. Like people who chase Asian women, you get some chasers that think that trans-femininity is going to mean a ultra-submissive barefoot-and-in-kitchen trad-wifing that doesn't seem to actually be that desired by that many trans women.

There's also the gay culture problem and 'quality' problem, where a lot of 'discrete masc tops' are... just not very good people or physically appealing in the market-for-lemons manner that plagues a lot of dating spheres. I still think they layer on top of that first one, though.

((This can go the other direction, although for obvious reasons FTM complain about it less since guys don't bitch like that. For all the 'bonus hole' porn out there, there's a lot of trans guys who either don't want to or physically can't take a dick there. There's a lot of gay tops that really like the idea of breeding someone, but actual ramifications of a working reproductive system squick them the fuck out. And the ramifications of a near-inevitable hysterectomy put massive pressures on romantic development. The 'bisexual' guys who treat FTMs like dyke-breaking do get a lot of complaints, and with pretty fair reason imo.))

There's a lot of gay tops that really like the idea of breeding someone, but actual ramifications of a working reproductive system squick them the fuck out

Are those ramifications like "if you think about it that's not really a man, because by virtue of breeding it's evidently a woman, and women are squicky", or more like "the sex part sounds hot but the last thing I want is an actual baby, babies are squicky".

Sometimes, but more... with some warning about more explicit detail than you'd probably want to know:

Stuff like 'it's that time of the month' or 'there's no level of prep that will let you go that deep in this hole' or 'no you can't jerk off and then finger me safely' are kinda unavoidable parts about how that whole thing works. You'd think it wouldn't be that gross compared to what prepping for anal sex is like, but if you've been screwing guys for years surprise blood is something that's a lot more of a danger sign where a straight dude might just need to evaluate if they're willing to earn their red wings. A lot of gay guys, top or bottom, put a lot of self-worth into their ability to get their partner aroused and to orgasm, and while the effects of testosterone on the clitoris can make this a little bit easier than with cis women, it's still really easy to get wrapped up in your own head about whether a trans man is actually enjoying things or just performing enjoying things. And if you're a top that likes to frot, it's an entirely different set of motions; if you're a 'top' that's a switch, well, best-case trans guys that want to top don't have the stamina or sensation feedback (yet, growth mindset) a cis guy would, and a number just don't want to top period.

Pregnancy concerns specifically get complicated. There's a lot of ways to avoid them pretty effectively, and some gay guys are under the (not entirely correct) impression that just being on testosterone is itself effective birth control. But you do see some who are really into the idea in fictional contexts and get grossed out because an IUD isn't perfect.

((And they tend to be polarizing for trans guys, where either it's something out of Alien as a fate-worse-than-death, or they get out of high school with an exact number of kids that they want. But I have met a few exceptions who like the idea but aren't sure they're ready for it, a la Daxhush, and there's a lot of cis woman who have similar divisions, so not sure how much of that's downstream of trans stuff as how much is downstream of the whole progressive culture.))

pls breed. no pregnant, only breed

To some extent, although from inside my personal experience is less about who was worthy, and more about who could have a thing done, in a way that worked successfully. I haven't exactly had an easy or good time in gay dating spaces. But I don't get the same 'learn a foreign language' feeling.

Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?

you get some chasers that think that trans-femininity is going to mean a ultra-submissive barefoot-and-in-kitchen trad-wifing that doesn't seem to actually be that desired by that many trans women

Yeah - that's what I was gesturing at with the "cis women are bitches, I'm going to date a *trans-*woman" protests. I think there's some level of belief some folks have, as in the motte post I quoted, that dating trans women is a kind of Konami code to unlock "super extra real hardcore femininity mode" and get the goods that cis women aren't giving them.

That said -- I recall once reading a reddit thread where a trans person actually endorsed that framing to a degree, to many upvotes. I tried to find it, but alas I couldn't. If I recall correctly, it went something like:

We should assume that as the cis dating world grows increasingly rough, that some portion of straight men who are open to dating trans women will start seeking us out. The best relationship I've had in my life started because I met a guy on grindr who said he was a straight man only looking for trans women.

That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.

Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?

Uh... sorry, trying not to get too prurient.

There's a lot of scripts and modes of discussion that occur between potential or new romantic partners. They vary a lot between the sexes and sexual orientations. At least in my experience, the ones for a man going after women, or propositioning sex within an existing but new relationship, are kinda a mess, filled with minefields and potential miscommunications and active hostility. It's not that the gay versions are always easier to read, or always work, or avoid costly side effects, or are even that different -- I've got my horror stories, it's definitely easy to swing and miss, and that's on top of the alcoholism problems.

The straight scripts seem just fucked.

I might want to invite someone over for tea and some good cardio regardless of gender, so it's not seeing the women as Madonnas and the men as whores. But I can probably come up with a plan, even a likely-doomed plan, for the latter. Even inside established relationships, there's a lot of expectations that men initiate sex or perform desire, but only in the ways that the women want done to them, and that's a list that is neither well-documented nor consistent.

That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.

Can't find it, but it's certainly a believable result. The median chaser-trans interaction is probably pretty rough, but ultimately, they are just guys with a lot of focus on a kink. That doesn't necessarily make them bad people, just a potential trouble that has to be negotiated. Part of why the discourse gets so toxic in reddit environments is that it's something that should be solvable.

I suppose it's like drag; that's taking certain elements of femininity and exaggerating them to the nth degree (and hence why some old-school feminists don't like drag).

Some MTF do go the hyper-feminine, everything pink and sparkly, skirt go spinny! route, so if you're a straight guy you're getting the "womanly woman" stuff without the "treat me like a person not a pair of tits" demands (or at least I imagine that's the perceived attraction; someone who is delighted to be treated as a pair of tits, because that chimes with their notions of what being a woman is about - the physical attributes of femininity).

To be fair, I have seen some cis women doing the same "treat me like a brainless dumb bimbo who is perpetually stupid and perpetually horny" stuff and I have no idea why they do it, even if it is some kind of 'I'm selling porn to subscribers' model where this is the product the consumers want. But there we go.

Some cis woman 'bimboization' is about not wanting to be responsible for her own desires (or missteps) or cognizant of her own fears or shame, especially in written formats. Not a common kink, but neither is it anywhere near as rare as you'd think. For cis guys who like the kink, it seems more about ease of access and forwardness of desire.

In addition to the other answers, which make good points, I think there’s an aspect to male top psychology that enjoys the sexual dominance or humiliation of other men specifically. Many tops, after all, aren’t bisexual, something that can’t fully be explained by the ‘gay sex is easy’ meme when many entirely homosexual tops are traditionally handsome and masculine men, good conversationalists, friends with many women etc who could easily find female partners at least on occasion.

at least on occasion

You really, actually, genuinely have no idea of male sexuality, do you? If a man can't reliably have at least two different partners in the same day, that man is a failure.

Wat???

I’m serious, what on earth do you mean?

The main thrust is that "at least on occasion" is pathetically bad and is not a refutation of anything.

Any man can have two partner in the same day (even women ones), a loser trucker can have two truck stop whores in a day. That’s not what it’s about.

You are not autistic to require clarification of the lack of explicit payment, so I can't see any good faith reading of your reply.

I suspect there is some novelty to “chicks with dicks”. I imagine there’s some small population of transsexuals that are indistinguishable from women (except for extremely close inspection) who also have a dick. High sex drive or otherwise perverted men may find that interesting. Of course there’s a spectrum to the chicks with dicks and the men who experience them. But it seems pretty simple to me.

I always had the impression that there is a real category of men that can be described as "attracted to women and femininity, but finds actual women too alien", and therefore prefers male sex/life partners who they can actually empathise with/relate to/theory-of-mind. Relatedly, futanari (so much material reading as "it would be hot if a woman did/experienced this, but it requires having a dick"). On the other side of the aisle, lesbians who are into butch/masculine or (in East Asia especially) "prince-like" handsome women also seem to be a thing, which I'd readily analyse in the same way. (Mirroring futa, perhaps, mpreg?)

that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness.

While it is probably not intentional, the term homosexual transsexual would mean different things to different people (because some would consider a trans-woman who is into women homosexual (e.g. lesbian), while Blanchard considers the trans-woman who is into men the HSTS), and is thus probably best avoided. I am open to formulations which are less clunky than 'transwomen who are into women'.

I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen.

I think that there are some trans women who want titties so that (more) men will want to fuck them (which includes your Thais), and some trans women who love titties so much that they want their own. The latter might ideally want a ciswomen partner, but might find that few women are attracted both to tits and dicks. I imagine trans for trans is more of a pragmatic strategy in the absence of interested ciswomen. Of course, the ones who are into men don't have this problem because men as a collective will pretty much fuck anything with a pulse.

They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.

I think an arrangement like that would calm down all the qualms about "men in women's bathrooms", except that a proportion of trans activists would scream and cry over that. It would be discriminatory, it would be harmful, it would encourage dysmorphia! It would be denying trans women are real women and trans men are real men! It would be forcing men (trans) and women (trans) to share a bathroom and didn't you just say you didn't want men in women's spaces? And if the majority of the population answered "well yeah, we don't think you are really a woman or that person is really a man, but we'll be polite about calling you 'ma'am'" then that would cause more explosions.

I’ve hardly ever seen a gender neutral bathroom in all the European countries I’ve visited, apart from the occasional accessible bathroom available to all. I don’t think it’s realistic to retrofit all public toilets everywhere to have a separate gender neutral section, just for a tiny percentage of the population. Maybe a law could mandate it for new builds or substantial renovations, but that’s going to take multiple decades to be widespread.

Personally I’m a trans woman and I switched to using the women’s bathroom after I started getting too many stares, and the occasional comment saying I was in the wrong place when trying to use the men’s. No one has made a fuss about me since, and I’ve gone to the loo with female friends and chatted with people in there too. As far as social issues go, it’s a ridiculously minor one.

A lot of new builds around here just have a pile of individual, gender-neutral cubicles accessible from a hallway, which I find to be great (but tbf we have a fair amount of space -- it's definitely less compact, and I'm sure there are other concerns, although whether you think forcing men to share in female-toilet-queues instead of having an express lane is undoubtedly its own culture war in the wings).

I share your experience with bathrooms. I just use the one where I get fewer (in fact no) weird looks. I default to the separate gender-neutral disabled bathroom if it's available, and hope I don't inconvenience any disabled people too much. Otherwise I've had nothing but good experiences using the women's bathrooms, including chatting with other people in the queue about the movie we just got out of or whatever. Hopefully people aren't secretly bothered. Changing rooms are a different story and way more difficult to figure out; so far I just avoid any activities that involve changing in public.

That said I do see the concerns around breaking down norms around biologically male people using women's bathrooms. It presents a lot of opportunities for bad actors.

I'm not sure I completely understand, but it sounds like your point is that your typical trans-identifying-man is insincere.

Maybe not the typical one, but there sure are some online specimens who very much look like "this is a fetish" and "part of my fetish is forcing you to treat me like I'm a girl even though we both know that's not the case".

I'm thinking of the specimen who made little TikToks or other videos about how (s)he was being stabbed! through the heart! every time they were deliberately and maliciously misgendered!

Except that (1) it was all waitstaff and servers who clearly were English as a Second Language speakers who were doing the 'deliberate' misgendering (2) this was SF, baby, so how could they tell you were a Real Woman and not a gay guy in drag or a non-binary personette dressing femme today? who would be highly offended if you called them "miss" and not whatever their neopronoun of the moment was and (3) this specimen was trying to get misgendered so they could do their shocked, appalled, hurt and stabbed little act for views (the language was suspiciously always the same, almost like a script, about being stabbed in the heart).

So yeah. Some people, it's a fetish.

Maybe not the typical one,

FWIW I think it's pretty typical. For me, what gives the game away is things like (1) trans-identifying men frequently dress in an exaggeratedly feminine style, which can be contrasted with an average woman who doesn't constantly wear skirts, dresses, heels, and so on; (2) trans-identifying men display sexual attraction to women at a rate far higher than biological women; (3) trans-identifying-men frequently choose women's names which are associated with young women, as opposed to women who are roughly the same age as the trans-identifying man.

All of this interest in sexuality and sexual attractiveness is consistent with the trans-identifying man being into the sexual fantasy of being a sexy attractive woman. As opposed to just feeling like a woman.

The other thing is that it's relatively common for straight men (not trans-identifying) to fantasize about being a woman. In my day, a lot of those men, known as "transvestites," would cross-dress, not because they thought they were women but rather because they got off on pretending to be women. This fetish is sufficiently common that it's reasonable to assume that it plays a big role in the modern trans phenomenon. Especially since the ubiquity of pornography is desensitizing a lot of people to sexual stimulation, making them seek out more strange and intense stimulus.

The complexity of inter-homo-binary-transitional relationship terminology makes it difficult both to track and to discuss [the man-who-liked-men-before-becoming-a-woman-who-likes-men, vs the 2/5/17 other combinations]. Maybe German style additive word construction would be better than the standard Greek derived combinations.

The major difference of AGP would appear to be the A. Auto.

The weird bit is firstly that, while I can't speak for them, it's a fairly uncontroversial idea that heterosexual women can be as aroused by being an object of desire as they are by direct observation of what they desire. Apparently this is a very common theme in popular women's erotica.

Secondly there's the complication of what gay men want versus what they can offer. Like your example of the camp, openly gay queens who don't have sex with each other. Why not? Because they don't want a faggy queen, they want the kind of highly masculine man who... has gay sex with faggy queens. I believe the phenomenon persists in the preponderance of bottoms vs tops, and their ideal fantasy partner being a straight man. If masculinity is what gay men are attracted to then logically they should masc-maxx, but if femininity is what masculine men want then it would make more sense to trans-max, so that they can "go straight" to fulfill their gay fantasy of straight sex. I've never looked at gay porn but I have a hunch it focuses a lot more on blue collar bodybuilder types than on lisping waifs with frilly cuffs.

And then we have the AGP, who fetishises women to such an extent (a very male hetero mindset) that they become maximally feminine (a homosexual characteristic in men) so that they can embody themselves as their own object of desire (a female hetero mindset, maybe?) in their own eyes, the eyes of a heterosexual man. It's a muddle.

This is where grouping all men who have sex with men as a single “gay” monolith goes wrong.

Because they don't want a faggy queen, they want the kind of highly masculine man who... has gay sex with faggy queens.

This kind of man exists in very high numbers, they just aren’t open about it. Go on Grindr and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of “discrete” tops who love twinks and femboys, and not enough supply to meet the demand.

If masculinity is what gay men are attracted to then logically they should masc-maxx, but if femininity is what masculine men want then it would make more sense to trans-max, so that they can "go straight" to fulfill their gay fantasy of straight sex.

Today a large number of gay men do actually masc-maxx, but just because you can look masculine doesn’t mean you can act masculine. Even if you convincingly manage to imitate masculinity, it’s still just a façade. Two partners pretending to be something they’re not in order to stay attracted to each other is just sad.

But again, there’s multiple kinds of gay men. The very feminine “faggy queens” are highly likely to transition today, not because they want a masculine man, but because they want a man who’s attracted to them as a woman, which they’ll never get if they masc-maxx. It’s not just about how you see your partner, but also about how your partner sees you.

But the vast majority of gay men today are absolutely fine with their partner seeing them as a man. I’ve seen quite a few gay couples where it’s just two regular looking guys, generally a bit fruity sure, but not excessively so and not enough to turn each other off.

but just because you can look masculine doesn’t mean you can act masculine. Even if you convincingly manage to imitate masculinity, it’s still just a façade.

Who manages to act masculine in a fallen world where the Secretary of War has a makeup studio in the pentagon, the president loves broadway musicals, and the Bears QB paints his nails?

No doubt, just trying to tease apart the alignments, misalignments and re-alignments. The potential combinations multiply rapidly.

no shortage of “discrete” tops who love twinks and femboys, and not enough supply to meet the demand.

Fair play, I was under the impression it was the other way around. Maybe that's a function of their discretion. But then why the discretion?

Well firstly the “top shortage” is greatly overstated anyway. Most statistics suggest that for gay men, it’s about half vers, quarter tops and quarter bottoms, within a few percentage points.

But the men who are exclusively into twinks and femboys are almost all bisexual, and bisexual men have a lot to lose by being out. A large amount of straight women would not date a bisexual man, their masculinity would be questioned by their peers, and a lot of people believe bisexual men don’t even exist and that they’re just gay and in denial.

By being on the down low, they can have their cake and eat it too: continue dating women as a straight man, have access to easy, promiscuous sex (relatively speaking), and not deal with having to explain anything to anybody.

This kind of man exists in very high numbers, they just aren’t open about it. Go on Grindr and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of “discrete” tops who love twinks and femboys, and not enough supply to meet the demand.

The general complaint among the, uh, supply is that the demand is high, but extremely low-quality, even by gay hookup culture standards of quality, precisely because the demand is from people who are principally heterosexual, and probably have deep roots in heterosexual culture -- including, possibly, a wife. Therefore they're exceptionally flaky/indifferent/uncertain, leading to the kind of debasement I discussed in my other reply to you as a desperate attempt to lock-down any reasonably qualified leads. So I'm not sure this is a lopsided market in the way you're suggesting; it's more of a matching market where neither side seems to be happy. Cf all other dating environments.

However, by far the most common kind of pairing you find for this type of person is actually femme-to-femme, both because the masculine options are so low-quality, and because some meaningful fraction of this group is bisexual or AGP. In our earlier discussion on this topic, I was talking about this sub-population; when you assumed I was talking about transmasc-transfemme pairings, I was actually confused! When you said that transitioning "is weirdly common among men willing to openly date trans women," well, that wasn't surprising or confusing at all to me, and it was interesting to see that it was confusing to you.

IMO, trans women who try to date men are, for obvious reasons, often pulling from the pool Blanchard described as "gynandromorphophiles", which are often also AGP. Gender transitioning, for this pool of individuals, is often both appealing in the AGP sense, and appealing in the sense that it gives them "skin in the game" that establishes cred among bisexual trans women who treat cis men with suspicion.

Yeah, there is that whole category of "men who have sex with men" but don't consider themselves gay. I suppose it's the very old distinction of "if you're doing the penetrating/getting your cock sucked, you're a man but if you're getting penetrated/sucking the cock you're female-coded".

Go on Grindr and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of “discrete” tops

As opposed to continuous tops, also known as homeosexuals

Spelling/grammar corrections and puns; two things of which I will never tire!

Well, I laughed!

The weird bit is firstly that, while I can't speak for them, it's a fairly uncontroversial idea that heterosexual women can be as aroused by being an object of desire as they are by direct observation of what they desire. Apparently this is a very common theme in popular women's erotica.

Attraction to someone in particular being attracted to you and being attracted to a fantasy of yourself as a woman are two quite different things, in my opinion.

I agree with the distinction, I disagree that it's new, but the expression technologically is.

Human sexuality is pretty broad and subject to a lot of social context. In many societies today, homosexual contact isn't considered gay for the top. This is historically the case, from ancient persia and greece on to modern afghanistan. There is a typology of feminine gay men, but there is also a typology of hyper-masculine bisexual men. The modern agp phenomenon is just the latter run through modern technology, legal codes, academic cant and social hysteria. Several thousand years ago, olympic athletes and professional soldiers who liked a bit of dude wouldn't pretend to be chicks, they'd just join the Sacred Band or whatever. Le Monsieur had special armor made so he could assault cities in a dress.

The only thing that's new is the religious and legal aspects of the metaphysical claims made by these dudes.

? My understanding is that the lumberjack-type gay men, while outnumbered, are not the same thing as AGP transgenders.

There's several takes on what exactly AGP are, but the lumberjack-type bearded gays are not one of them. I'm personally partial to the idea that they're mostly newish, a product of endocrine disruptors, and historical examples of AGP like Elegabalus are severe mental illness, with things like the hijras and other third genders being something totally different. But there's another school of thought which merges the phenomena.

Elagabalus reads more as camp fem gay rather than AGP.

Reads more to me as a puppet of his grandmother and mother, who plotted to get him elevated to the throne and then granny later instigated his assassination and replacement with a more acceptable to the people cousin, another grandson of hers. I definitely get the feeling granny wanted him weak, so she could control him, and that the internal family power struggle (maybe mom felt that as mother of the emperor she could oust granny as matriarch of the family) was behind his fall. Having him concentrate on being the priest of the Sun God Elagabal, with the practices associated with that, instead of consolidating his hold on the army and the politics of Rome, was one way of ensuring that the reins of power stayed with granny.

There is a typology of feminine gay men, but there is also a typology of hyper-masculine bisexual men. The modern agp phenomenon is just the latter run through modern technology, legal codes, academic cant and social hysteria.

The bisexual top phenomenon is real and distinct, but it’s not the same as AGP even if it overlaps with it. If you want to be a hyper masculine gay man who fucks men, this is after all a desirable gay niche today, at least as far as I understand it. Certainly there is no incentive to transition.

Historically, it would also come with significant changes in one's legal status to pretend to be chicks and be taken seriously as such.

Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there. Of course, it was more accurate than the previous view at the time which would lump them all together in a single one.

He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity.

I don’t think AGP males are a product of modernity - the only thing that’s new is ability to transition using hormones and surgery, and to do it openly without it being instant social and professional suicide (not that there are no social costs now, but it’s completely different to say, the 1950s).

Men who are sexually into wearing female clothing and find the idea of being a woman erotic have probably been around since the earliest proto civilisations (see François-Timoléon de Choisy, who probably lied about seeing the royal family dressed as a woman, but not about being aroused by wearing a corset).

A trans identity that’s truly the product of modernity would be the autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind (both trans masculine and trans feminine). A 50 year old masculine married man with children who transitions after years of hiding his crossdressing habit from his wife, is not the same as teen for whom transitioning is an escape from the social and physiological pressures of their biological sex. Body dysmorphia, sensory issues, discomfort with heterosexual norms, etc. would be the primary motivations - maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.

It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man. The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.

It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man.

Agreed.

The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.

Reminds me of "Attunements", a story written by Eliezer Yudkowsky's ex-wife that compares having children to being infected with spores that rewrite your life goals.

But being afraid of one's values and personality being altered by parenthood or puberty seems to me a little ridiculous? Both are fundamentally natural parts of our lifecycle, and the alternative is to remain stunted forever.

The funny thing about puberty is that it's presented as a phase that you go through when really, in physical terms at least, childhood is the phase and so-called "puberty" is the enduring stable state.

The thing about puberty is that, in our social script, its onset coincides with compulsory education, which is a very artificial (and extremely harmful) environment. How an adult will behave once they graduate can indeed be very different from how they behaved while they were still studying, the same way people in prison behave differently once they get outside.

Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there. Of course, it was more accurate than the previous view at the time which would lump them all together in a single one.

I'm curious, what would your typologies of trans people look like, if you were to describe the different categories you've seen?

Men who are sexually into wearing female clothing and find the idea of being a woman erotic have probably been around since the earliest proto civilisations (see François-Timoléon de Choisy, who probably lied about seeing the royal family dressed as a woman, but not about being aroused by wearing a corset).

One thing that I often like to note is that the Blanchard typology misses an important detail, which is that "men who find the idea of being a woman erotic" isn't exclusively a thing for men attracted to women; it's in fact extremely common among men attracted to men. So the idea of lust for women being misdirected into self-lust for the state of being a woman has never struck me as an exhaustive explanation for the crossdresser-to-trans pipeline, or even the primary one.

I think there's a mode that's almost something akin to vagina-envy, where the default attraction for most men is to women, and therefore attaining womanhood is a means of becoming the archetypal appeal to the male gaze. I've certainly known people who've seemed to fit that bill.

That said, I don't know that the general public would find this cluster more sympathetic than the AGPs -- there are often a lot of immensely sexist assumptions baked into their idea of what attaining womanhood to appeal to the male gaze would look like. You know, "I exist to serve men, my body is a means of satisfaction for men," often combined with an intense desire to appeal to bisexual or bicurious men by insisting on their willingness to debase themselves for men in ways cis women will not. What exactly that debasement might entail is left as an exercise for the reader.

Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there.

I agree that the "autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind" of trans person is in a category of its own compared to homosexual males or archetypal AGPs. I also think the etiology behind trans-identification in females is completely different from that behind trans identification in males. "Gender dysphoria" isn't a condition like "lung cancer" or "depression" which affects males and females in the same way, and diagnosing males and females with the same condition hides more than it illuminates.

maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.

I've been thinking about this a lot. As much as people criticise Catholic institutions, they were a very effective Chesterton's fence for a particular kind of person who felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wasn't terribly interested in forming romantic relationships. It makes me sad thinking about all the young women who've gotten double mastectomies they'll likely regret, who would've been perfectly happy as nuns if they'd been born a couple of generations earlier.

I've been thinking about this a lot. As much as people criticise Catholic institutions, they were a very effective Chesterton's fence for a particular kind of person who felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wasn't terribly interested in forming romantic relationships. It makes me sad thinking about all the young women who've gotten double mastectomies they'll likely regret, who would've been perfectly happy as nuns if they'd been born a couple of generations earlier.

A couple of generations here meaning what, 600 years? The convents were dissolved in the Anglosphere in the sixteenth century, and the kinds of elite families producing trans ‘sons’ have never been Catholic.

It’s also inaccurate to point to mid-20th-century convents and monasteries as performing a warehousing function; they were high status institutions that recruited widely from a broad spectrum of the population and tended to reject overwhelming oddballs. If you go back to the pre-Pian church you saw lots of upper class women who didn’t fit in sent to the convent so they don’t have to deal with men(and autistic or downright odd monks), but this was well on its way out by the time of living memory of the boomers. The post-Pian reform RCC overproduced clergy and religious beyond its ability to accommodate, there were things like shortened formation periods to try to cope; this changed with Vatican II, of course, but it wasn’t really for unusual people- although warehoused Sheldon Cooper types in the monastery were part of the story of the reformation.

Of course, there were sects of nuns that got double mastectomies anyway. But maybe not all of the trans-adjacent women would join those.

Reading that essay, it appears that Duncan's primary error is that he over-values the 10-year-old-self. Liking transformer robots and looking like Jimmy Neutron is no more optimal than liking the process of sex just because liking the process of sex comes later.

It’s not about either preference being more optimal, or consciously valuing the 10 year old self more than the present self. It’s about sexuality being this uncontrollable compulsion that’s suddenly injected in your brain, and in people like Duncan (and I, before I transitioned), it doesn’t feel like it’s “you” that likes or wants sex.

Like I’m absolutely fine with my preferences shifting across time, discovering new hobbies, becoming a mature adult with a mortgage and a pension fund. But in my case, a preference for sex didn’t feel like I tried something new, liked it, and consciously decided to keep doing it. It felt like there was an alien invader in my brain that I had to pacify so I could get back to doing the things I actually liked. I didn’t actually want sex in the way that my biology was pushing me to want it. It felt like losing control over who I was, in the same way someone might suffer from binge eating when stressed - a completely different experience from being a foodie who occasionally overeats when they go to a very good restaurant.

Most people don’t seem to have trouble integrating their sexuality into their selves. They see their sexual preferences as “theirs”. Maybe something about being autistic can lead to your sense of self crystallise too early and prevents you from tolerating changes, or maybe it causes a mental separation between the self and “base” desires, I don’t know.

But at the end of the day, my happiness and quality of life is enhanced when I take medication that lets me feel like my sexuality is on my own terms.

I can relate a lot with this, which is precisely the reason why I consider the trans-movement so scary. I've written about me & my wife's childhoods before: https://www.themotte.org/post/1794/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/311570?context=8#context

In short, this is what puberty is like for many of us, sadly. Before puberty, you might look at teens with hate and disgust. During your own teenage years, you feel like shit and hate yourself. I dunno who said this, but male puberty is like being given a completely out-of-control wild horse, against your will, and you have to tame it or else it will trash your place and piss of everyone. And it takes years. Hell, I still regularly get pissed off at my sexuality. Female puberty is different, but no less difficult.

But at the end, as an adult, you've done the work and it has simply become a part of you. You're different now, sure, but trying to forgo that transformation makes about as much sense as a caterpillar not wanting to become a butterfly because it's too different from the life it has gotten used to.

Not saying that there are exactly zero people who have so massive problems with their biological sex that medication or other changes might become a reasonable option, but in about 99.999% of cases if a teen asks "I feel uncomfortable with my sex, what should I do?" the correct answer is trying to help them find ways to become more comfortable with their body and realize that there isn't just exactly one way to be for each sex, and that a lot of stuff is, while certainly strongly correlated with sex, actually mostly superfluous for it.

I was fairly similar to you in that I eventually mostly accepted my situation after 2 years or so of puberty. The problem was when I opened Pandora’s box again and tried things outside the default heterosexual male experience, and the same feelings came back up, because holy crap what do you mean I don’t have to take care of this annoying wild horse that’s always at risk of trashing my place?

I'm very much a cis male, but I do find this relatable. In some ways the impulses of male sexuality are annoying and distracting rather than fulfilling.

But in my case there are a lot of hypotheses that can easily explain it without reference to an etiological mismatch: religious upbringing, teenage dissatisfaction, but especially being inundated with feminist memes from tumblr when I was young, that have me walking on eggshells to know what's helpful. In a sense you could say that every superegoistic (to borrow without endorsement a Freudian term) influence on me has been about how my sexuality could go wrong, so it's very, very hard for me to intuitively know where it could go right. It's a lot easier to eject sexuality from your conception of the self if you see it as corrupting rather than enlivening. Repression and/or viewing sexuality as egodystonic seems like a common result of that kind of pressure, as it sometimes is for me.

I do wonder if some of the 'flight from masculinity' you talked about some men having has to do with that; the male sexual role asks much, and in modern times with limited and radically contradictory guidance, and I think it's much harder for men these days to understand who they're supposed to be than it might have been in the past. I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.

I've been meaning to write an effortpost on how male sexuality and male romanticism align or sometimes don't align, but I'm often reluctant because, as much as my posts here are highly confessional, I worry about exposing too much of my internal gears to culture war analysis, and anyway I'm concerned about reinforcing the belief that men are walking sex pests whose sexuality is inherently disordered rather than simply a biological urge that you can deal with in a healthy or an unhealthy way.

I’d love to read more about your perspective and experience on this! Growing up I felt like I was the only one having trouble integrating male sexuality into my sense of self, and standard narrative, from my peers, media, parents was just completely alien. Obviously I gave up in the end and went with the nuclear option, but maybe there would be a world where I didn’t had if the discourse was different.

Or maybe not. I didn’t even have the external pressures you described. My upbringing was irreligious and vaguely sex-positive, and I grew up before Tumblr was even a thing back when “boys will be boys” was still used unironically as an excuse. I’m not sure the problem is lack of guidance. I was already uncomfortable being told the default heterosexual dating script, and if was told explicitly by society that as a man, I must be (all the things that were the opposite of my personality and desires), I probably would have given up much earlier.

I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.

What happens if you don’t put on the mask and just stay who you are when interacting romantically or in the bedroom?

I feel like you’d be missing out on so much if you can’t be authentically yourself with your partner. Sex when you’re just acting out a persona in order to please your partner… that just means you’re both getting cheated out of real human connection, no? What’s the point then?

Hey Rae, I took my time with this response because I wanted to get it right. February, like @OliveTapenade said, was gender month on the motte, and it seems like February won't be much different.

A Portrait of Urquan

I wouldn't say that I struggled to integrate male sexuality with my self identity, but more that I struggled to reconcile my personal sexuality and experience of the world, which I've always experienced as male or as cis-by-default, with what was expected of me by society. I've never experienced gender dysphoria, or felt that my penis and the various things which one might endeavor to do with the penis, were strange or foreign to me.

Now, I do have some personality traits that are commonly considered more 'feminine', and have created tension for me in male friendships. I don't enjoy competitive hobbies, like team sports or multiplayer video games. I'm not socially dominant, I don't enjoy teasing-as-bonding, and I tend to be more of a listener in a conversation. It's frequent that after hanging out with someone or going on a date, the other person will say, "Wow, I really talked your ears off, didn't I? I'm sorry I monopolized the conversation."

I enjoy feelings-talk as much as ideas-talk, and my preferred mode of social bonding is to be with one person, or a small group, and listen to how they tell the story of their life, what moves them, what kind of dreams they have, what they care about, what the meaning of life is to them. I enjoy deep chats about life and meaning.

It's a frequent occurrence that any time I try to hang out with male friends, they will proceed to play some kind of competitive local multiplayer video game like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, in the old days Halo, etc. I will often be sitting off to the sidelines because I don't enjoy that kind of experience, and it's been a real tension in male friendship groups I've been a part of that I'm the odd one out, people try to include me, I reassure them that I'm enjoying watching... it's kind of like when you invite your girlfriend to a hangout with the guys and she ends up playing with the dog. That's me, but I'm one of the guys.

When I play video games, I prefer to immerse myself in the story, build a character that I give a backstory to, and use creative tools in the game to express my character's position and identity in the world. Stardew Valley (which a friend once described as "such a girl game") is one of my favorite games of all time. I see video games as interactive stories and creative expression tools, not mechanics in which to demonstrate mastery. I play games on story mode.

Basically the only social experiences that leave me with a feeling of satisfaction are one-on-one, deep chats. I enjoy laughing and having fun with people, but I just am a very intense, and very private, person, and I enjoy bringing other people into my world, and seeing what their world looks like to them.

Love According to Urquan

As I've shared before on the motte, my model of intimacy and relationships is deep and passionate. I see romance as a means of seeing oneself in the other. It's not principally about resources or even sex-qua-sex, but about being close to someone in the special way that romance brings you close. I don't know how to describe it or break it down. There's a je ne sais quoi to romantic intimacy that I can't describe to people who've never experienced it. It's not lust, it's the desire for union of the soul, where someone else becomes an extension of yourself. It's butterflies and it's the feeling that you've entered the kairos -- the special time, the appointed time, when even going to work and doing boring work things feels buoyant. Where the world feels enchanted and beautiful again, the way it always felt when I was young.

When I was a teenager I wrote this:

I believe in love. Not the altruistic compassion of the teachers and philosophers, nor the euphemistically-concealed erotic passion of sexual intercourse, but the kind of love that erupts with joy and strains the sinews of the heart — the sort of love that is held with such conviction that it disables the other functions of the mind, that is so pure and so powerful that you cannot but think about the object of the love, that makes all you do worth the struggle of life because they live, and that colors the world beautiful because they are beautiful.

Oh - and I'm also into classic poetry. Can't you tell?

The main tensions with the male social role I've had have been that I struggle to "slot in" seamlessly to male social groups, as I've suggested, and that I've struggled to find the kind of intimacy that's meaningful to me. A lot of flirting includes the very kind of social engagement that I find unintuitive or unnatural: playful teasing, inexplicit boundary testing, displays of bravado and confidence, sexual confidence. But if it's supremely creepy to begin a conversation with a woman by saying you want to sleep with her, it's massively more insane to begin a conversation by saying, "I'm looking for the kind of love that makes the world beautiful and I want to merge our souls together." But that's what I've always looked for: someone to whom I can expose the reality of my capacity for passion, someone whose eyes I can stare deeply into, someone whose vulnerability and pain I can absorb and comfort.

Because I see love as a means of intimate union and mutual vulnerability, I come into tension both with the expectations of men and of women. In general, men find that kind of thing to be 'girl-talk,' suitable for 'chick-lit,' the kind of thing you invent to reassure your girlfriend, not a mode of thought you inhabit for yourself. Women find it, in men, somewhere between "impossible to find" and "impossible to exist," and there exists few to no kinds of reliable signals that can communicate to a woman that's what you're looking for. Because establishing a relationship where those concepts make sense requires early-stage flirting and dating, I've often felt like I have to suppress the very motivation that drives me to seek intimacy in order to engage in meaningless banter and playful teasing. That doesn't feel like me.

There's also the sexual shame element, I personally am low in sociosexuality, and I find the idea of having sex with someone I don't know well to be deeply uncomfortable. I've done it, but always with regret and a feeling of emptiness and being used that made me want to scrub my body with such an immensity of soap that my skin would burn. So I feel like I've often swam massively against the current, having to compete with hookup bros in a market for lemons, and facing skepticism from women who expect from me a kind of sexual bravado and indifference to social convention that feels totally foreign to me.

I don't see any of my traits as incompatible with being a man. I just see them as incompatible with the carrots and the sticks that surround the socially-constructed model of what a man is. That kind of model is obviously based in reality -- men really do prefer playing multiplayer games together instead of talking about their feelings, as my own experiences would attest -- but what men reward in other men, and especially what women reward in men, operate according to a certain pattern which isn't necessarily my own.

Queer Theory-ing Urquan

There's a stereotype of gay men among normies that they're sensitive, moody, artistic, poetic, romantic boys who just need a well. Accordingly, I was sometimes bullied as a kid for being 'gay' in that sense. This stereotype shows up all over popular culture; one of the more absurd examples is "The Battle of Schrute Farms" from The American Office, where this purported Civil War battle is actually a gay commune, described thus:

But the Battle at Schrute Farms was no battle at all. It was a code used by pacifists from both North and South who turned the Pennsylvania farmhouse into an artistic community and a refuge from the war. You have to understand. Poets, artists, dancers – these kind of men preferred peace to war. These delicate lovely men found a place of refuge among the Schrutes at Schrute Farms. Amidst the macho brutality of war this was a place where dandies and dreamers could put on plays and sing tender ballads and dance in the moonlight. I like to think of Schrute Farms as the Underground Railroad for the sensitive... and well... fabulous.

In other words, if you're a pacifist, if you're artistic, if you like poetry, if you're not socially dominant, it logically follows that you really must want to suck cock. Seems we have some professors of logic down at the university of science who put a lot of thought into that one.

Our scripts of masculinity have taken everything found "unmanly," bundled them into an archetype, and slapped the label 'queer' on them. The Romantic poets of the past who wrote elegies about their romances with women would be labeled as the queerest queers who ever queered by our modern views of gender, even among progressives. Maybe especially among progressives, for dumb reasons.

Supposedly I'm doing "queer theory" right now, but if you actually sit in a university classroom where undergraduates try to use queer theory as an interpretive lens for historical literature, it's basically the least queer-theory interpretation possible because it consists of viewing any friendly or intimate connection between men as homoerotic. Postmodernism consists of incredulity toward metanarratives, except of course the metanarratives where everybody's fucking gay.

(I will give them the theater kids, though, the majority of the theater kids at my high school were gay or lesbian. I will also give the bisexuals Shakespeare if they wish to have him.)

Maybe such feminine traits are more common among gay men than straight men -- I don't know -- but I do suspect that whatever such traits exist are themselves ground down by the cock and the whip the carrot and the stick that gay men have to face, where intimacy is damnable heteronormativity and hookups are liberatory. You will suck the cock after five minutes of chatting and you will like it.

I'm principally attracted to women, though with a limited ability to find very femme men attractive (stereotype fulfillment?). My youthful explorations of the gay social scene gave me the impression that, there, I'd find it much harder to locate the kind of intimacy I actually find valuable. It was like looking for love in a world filled only "with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls." What I think Ginsberg missed is that the ecstatic sexual world is as much a part of Moloch as any number of demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses!, or indeed granite cocks!, to those who do not fit its rigid vision of freedom.

Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

I can understand why someone with a personality such as you've described about yourself would find gender transition appealing. The default for an AMAB individual with an attraction to men is the gay social scene, which amplifies most of the very things I find discomforting about the male sexual role into almost a comedic parody. I note with almost existential irony the fact that the ultimate immoral mistake for a man to make when flirting with a woman is to send her an unrequested dick pic, while gay men treat dick pics almost as the equivalent of a hello. I'd be interested if @gattsuru has a more nuanced take -- my own experiences of the gay social world were basically college activists and horny college twinks, and they... have their own peculiar way of things.

I don't know what sensitive men like me are supposed to do, or what the world expects of us. We are strange to men, and invisible to women.

(Edited to add: Exhibit A. See what I mean about carrots and sticks?)

The Masked Urquan

Now, let me answer your direct question:

What happens if you don’t put on the mask and just stay who you are when interacting romantically or in the bedroom?

I feel like you’d be missing out on so much if you can’t be authentically yourself with your partner. Sex when you’re just acting out a persona in order to please your partner… that just means you’re both getting cheated out of real human connection, no? What’s the point then?

Well, the honest answer is, "nothing happens," and there is no "bedroom" in which sex would happen, regardless. At least in early stage flirting, I have to go outside my comfort zone to get to the point where I could be more like myself.

But as for the second part, I guess it's partway related to the fact that I've dated some more... kinky women. My imagined model of a sexual encounter is very personal, very intimate, low and slow, "I love you so much," kissing, holding each other while going at it -- that sort of thing. I've had that, and I value it a lot. That's typically the "porn for women" script, and it's what stereotypes tend to assume women want from sex.

But stereotypes often also assume that women just... don't want sex that much at all, which isn't true. In the post-Fifty-Shades era, it's pretty clear that a decent chunk of women like dirty, kinky, dom/sub, rough, dirty talking behavior in the bedroom. That's the element that felt more foreign to me when I first encountered it. I never had as much trouble as the "Yeah...you like that, you fucking retard?" guy, but it definitely was hard to adapt to it.

But I feel you, sex is for me about 'real human connection,' just like you said. I guess I've tolerated that stuff because, well, it really turned them on, and women are hard enough to please sexually that if something just does it for them, I'm happy for the opportunity to give it. In the post-orgasm-gap-discussion world, the assumption that vaginal intercourse to completion on male terms constitutes the sex act has collapsed, and you're pretty much obligated as a man to do something that isn't necessarily your #1 thing in order to please your partner sexually.

I hope that answers your question. Obviously I'm exposing some vulnerable things on the forum here, but you've been open with me and I felt compelled to return the favor. If anything stands out to you, I'm happy to elaborate to an extent.

Yeah, but crossdressing/transvestism was not considered the same as transsexuality until we got the idea that it was all transgenderism and that was an entire separate identity of its own. The modern notion of "identities" and especially what I'm seeing online with trans issues that if you are not 100% X then of course you must be Y is what is unique, and what is driving all this.

Before, if someone was crossdressing for whatever reasons (and they're not always erotic/fetish ones), you are correct - it was something to be hidden, something considered shameful. Now, it's a protected identity that you can be proud of, now you can crossdress 100% of the time! And all you have to do is say that really you are a woman. Maybe you go on hormones, maybe you don't. You can still be sexually attracted to women, just say you're a lesbian.

Indeed, again from what I'm picking up at second- and third-hand, the push is on to shove people into adopting it as an identity: you don't just feel better psychologically when dressed and behaving as your feminine anima, it's an identity and you are trans.

What occasioned this reflection?

For what it's worth for me, I'm not wholly convinced of the Blanchard typology, if presented as something like a law of nature, but just extensionally I find it has the ring of truth. The two basic categories he lays out - I think of them, perhaps a bit crassly, as the more-gay-than-gay camp, and the heterosexual camp, that is, the one so obsessed with/attracted to women that they want to become one - can be roughly applied to trans women that I've known. It may not be wholly perfect, but it feels close enough that I hear Blanchard's descriptions and think, "Yeah, I've seen people like that" and "Oh, just like this other person I know".

I agree that it has the ring of truth. Where I think it collapses some is that:

  • Social contagion isn’t a dynamic unique to FTMs
  • The male version of social contagion tends to be more crudely sexual in nature, spreading through vectors like pornography and fetish communities
  • Regardless of the apparently lower rate of bisexuality in males, this sexualized MTF social contagion disproportionately affects men for whom both the HSTS and AGP pitches have meaningful appeal

this sexualized MTF social contagion disproportionately affects men for whom both the HSTS and AGP pitches have meaningful appeal

The technical term for this cluster is “sissy.” Don’t look this up unless you’re looking for NSFW content.

Quillette did a series talking about, among other things, social contagion among boys. I agree that there's a lot of heavily sexualised, fetishised social contagion, but with younger boys there's also the anime-influenced variant, which, though sometimes about sex, is also sometimes a longing for a kind of 'soft' world full of coddling and gentleness.

Alex was adrift. He often misunderstood social cues, and his habit of talking like a college professor made him seem pedantic.

Young men such as Alex tend to prize autonomy, be it intellectual, creative, or physical: they react badly to being reined in.

Certainly, for jockish boys and the girls on the cheerleading squad, the purported gender/sex distinction isn’t of any particular interest. By contrast, many of the smart kids, gamers and hobbyists who spend a lot of time inside their own minds, may already be aware that they don’t quite fit in, and often being bored and underchallenged, have more time to spend on the abstract mental game of “What if?”

There’s a useful word in the German language, fachidiot, that describes a particular kind of cleverness. The first syllable, fach, translates to “subject” or “field of study,” as well as “drawer,” implying a distinct category of knowledge. The second part means—well, it means “idiot.” Fachidioten are specialists who can describe in mesmerizing detail the many reasons for the collapse of Byzantium, or the mechanics of pasteurization, or the influence of African rhythms on the various musicological substrata of modern jazz. Yet while they hold forth on such arcana, a petty thief walking past might ask the Fachidiot for his phone, just so he can “make a quick call,” and the Fachidiot will cheerfully oblige. When the parents I spoke with impress upon me how gifted their children are, they are not suggesting to me that they are intellectually overbearing or arrogant. Just the opposite: Many of them are keen to stress that their boys couldn’t successfully make a doctor’s appointment, or catch the right bus. As Rosalee puts it, “He couldn’t even tie his laces.”

As a toddler, he burst into tears in a diner because the ceiling fan wasn’t turned on. Ceiling fans are machines; machines should work; and the fact that it was just sitting there doing nothing indicated that the world had somehow fallen ever so slightly into disrepair.

I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

Never considered gender transition, though. I think my cohort was a bit too old for that. I'm also enough of a weirdo that I'm suspicious of putting myself in any category, even the weird ones, which I guess was protective.

I do increasingly notice it in these kinds of, for lack of a better term, autistic, socially inept, geek-intellectual kinds of spaces. That's a demographic that naturally tends to inhabit a kind of fantasy world of the imagination, and online it is easier and easier to disconnect from a sense of one's own physical body. Reinventing yourself as an imagined cute girl - pretending to be the thing you want - seems easy. I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand it, though it is a helpful reminder that, as FiveHourMarathon says and I've commented also, the grass always seems greener on the other side.

I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass. Getting off the computer and doing real, physical work in the world makes you more aware of your own body. Successfully doing things with your physical body feels great and is inherently affirming. Some level of fantasy is healthy, but the kind of obsessive, body-negating, self-fleeing fantasy that you get in these demographics is poison.

I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass.

I think this is the "draw the rest of the owl" kind of problem.

Another issue is that a lot of people who grow up with these sorts of traits have trouble making friends, especially in youth. I think the cause of the kind of fantasy we're talking about is a disconnect from the social world as much as from the physical one, and atypical traits make that more difficult. Motion/body disconnect is often part of a syndrome with social phobia; I myself often have experienced a kind of hyper-body awareness in certain social situations that are particularly anxiety-provoking, where you kind of move manually and are dissociated from the normal coherence of your body, like when you consciously start to control your breathing -- as you are now, that I've mentioned it. That's common among people with social phobia.

I think masculinity is fundamentally a good thing, but I think there is a real tension between the broad male phenome -- the sum of all the ways in which men are like -- and various models of masculinity. A common underlying set of traits is hierarchical competition, or resource provision, or physical strength... but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat. IMO, a great deal of the extremely online stuff we see is caused by people who have suffered (or perceive themselves to have suffered) social defeat trying in some sense to construct a social hierarchy where they can win. See, for instance, NEETs playing competitive online games.

I think the main issue with any model of masculinity is that it's typically enforced in one of two ways: the carrot of women's attention, and the stick of men's violence. You can see that, for instance, in the military, where boot camps, strict regimentation, and obsessive hierarchicalism force men into a mold. In World War I, the British government ran a program allied with prominent suffragettes in which women gave unenlisted men white feathers in a shame ritual calling them cowards. I hold that one of the major reasons the USA became unable to run a successful conscription campaign for the Vietnam War is that the military lost the support of young women, who began rewarding rebels against the system with adulation for their courage. The same I think is true of gang violence in minority neighborhoods; men enforce compliance with guns, and, often, the women from these communities reward status in organized crime with attention. You get from men what men enforce and women reward.

So any model of masculinity and positive male role models have to have women and girls on board. The issue is that, in the West, it's not clear what women and girls are on board with, and in fact the dominant social mode of discussions of masculinity are to discuss its abberations and possibility for harm, or occasionally to praise men for doing things according to what women desire of them (and not praising them for being masculine on its own terms). The people who do talk about masculinity on its own terms are often selling their own inane fantasy, like the bodybuilder RAW MEAT influencers. The social inflection behind "man" as a category is incredibly negative; it's no wonder to me that some young men are going, "well, that's not me! Teehee!"

I don't think it's just about wanting to be with women, but I also think the kinds of men we're talking about place a high premium on being seen as fundamentally good by women; the "creep" designation, in a sense the white feather of the day, carries so much stigma precisely because "being a threat to women" is considered deeply wrong by both men and women writ large, for good reasons. But I think young men feel like there's no stable and broadly-recognized way to do this. Sometimes religious subcultures do a better job at this than the secular world -- I often noted when I spent time with the young Catholics group at my college that the men and women got along much better than those outside, and generally considered each other trustworthy and worthy of respect -- but it's not guaranteed, and in a world where the Church is optional as a social institution and increasingly at odds with secular assumptions, "just leaving" is an option that many people are going to take. As, obviously, transitioners tend to do.

The grass, of course, is never greener on the other side. I never struggled with gender identity issues -- clearly I'm a man, the idea of being a woman seems nebulous and foreign to me, and has no appeal. I know enough from having female friends that women are entangled in their own thorny world of backstabbing and status competition about which I'm not jealous. Even if someone could transition perfectly, magically, I don't think that men would find women's social world astounding or grand in the way they imagine.

Certainly if I think about the way I've encountered some of this, there's, albeit usually in inchoate form, a desperate attraction to or craving for the feminine, and a sense that the masculine is ugly, violent, repulsive, brutish, or otherwise undesirable. The confused, sensitive young boy knows that he does not want to be his image of 'a man', which is probably a heavily jock- or pop-culture-inspired vision of a brute, and that he is attracted to things that are soft, gentle, and female-coded. But he cannot exist in a predominantly female space as a man, because he has come to see masculinity as, by its mere existence, a kind of violence or degradation upon that space. He wants the innocent and feminine, but sees himself as something that cannot coexist with that. He probably also has a Scott-like terror of engaging with women, of expressing male heterosexual desire, and so on. His picture of femininity and of women's lives is highly idealised - he's not actually hanging out with or spending much time with girls, and therefore does not know what they are really like. But he knows the glittering facade, and he wants it.

The result is a drive to purge himself of masculine traits, to expurgate the taint by any means possible, in the hope that through reinventing himself (possibly with chemical or surgical assistance, at the higher end), he can get himself out of this cursed category, and enter the idealised female one. This is how I interpret some of the drama you sometimes get around women's spaces, or businesses or services for women - there's a kind of trans woman who needs to constantly press into those spaces, for the sake of constant affirmation that, yes, he really has left masculinity behind entirely. The deeper you are into the process of transition or feminisation, the more important it is that every last sign of acceptance be validated, every last scrap of the male be rooted out and denied.

There's a lot of personal variation in this, but I do thus see, in my experience, a kind of performative misandry that you sometimes get in toxic trans spaces. (This is, it's fair to say, entirely AGP as a phenomenon.) It doesn't always present very strongly - sometimes just in the form of casual jokes about how male things are gross - but sometimes it does a lot more. I usually try to be charitable, on the basis that someone who has spent years and a great deal of effort trying to appear less male is not going to be a big fan of male-looking things, and it doesn't need to mean any actual malice towards men, but I've come to think there's a bit more to it than that. Masculinity is the problem, in this world.

To me one of the ways around this or out of this has to be via promoting a positive model of masculinity, but there are a few issues here. Firstly, it can't be just a dudebro model, so to speak. These boys already know they don't like that. There have to be ways to be strongly masculine and capable that are nonetheless in some way sensitive, courteous, intellectual, compassionate, and so on. Those are good traits and they need to take on appealingly masculine forms. Secondly, it has to be approved of by women. Female approval does matter. Now this probably isn't as hard as it actually sounds, because most real women do like men, but remember that the boys in this position don't have much contact with actual women; and also the media is a very unhelpful distorting factor here. But regardless, it must be something that women like.

Unfortunately, put like that it's obvious what the failure-state is - it's feminist messaging about 'good men', the kind that feels corporate and sanitised and frankly just wussy. It's that Gillette ad that everyone hated. So perhaps to this we should add a third requirement: it should be something that men themselves like. It has to appeal to men. If it feels like being lectured by an HR lady, it won't have any traction.

Recently I read an essay by Oliver Traldi about the portrayal of masculinity, and female sexual desire, in films, and in particular about the role of the 'monster'. It's fair to say that the monster, the compelling, sexually charismatic brute, is something that the sensitive boy flees from. I cannot blame him for that; I don't want to be the monster either. But there is nonetheless something in many women that thrills to imagine just a bit of the monster. Just a bit. Is reconciling those desires the problem? That the attractive, desirable man is supposed to combine two impossible things, firstly the polite, obliging, non-threateningly capable man who does everything a woman wants, and secondly, the powerful, dominating, or ravishing man, who makes the woman feel like the object of this compellingly rough desire? I'm a bit skeptical here because I think it might be rolling together the diverse desires of many women together into a single uber-woman, and then acting confused when they turn out to be contradictory, but even so, I am very struck by his conclusion:

A very different kind of film, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, features the thought-provoking line: “You are what you love, not what loves you.” And why shouldn’t we think of men as characterized by the gentleness they seek, and women by the brutality they demand, rather than vice versa?

Maybe so. And if so, then I feel like what's going on with plenty of boys - certainly something that was going on with myself, though fortunately I never took the trans path (thank heavens I grew up before trans was a thing among teenagers!) - is that they struggle to find a way to unite their desire for the feminine with their identity as the masculine. Maybe they need a bit of what Eneasz Brodski talks about - liking and valuing the feminine, as the feminine, yet without seeking to become the feminine.

Maybe we need more honest-to-goodness complementarianism, that Robert-Jordan-esque understanding that the male and the female need each other, that they complete and enhance each other, and recognising and even loving that difference is the only way forward.

But maybe I'm just a cranky ageing Christian romantic. Who knows?

but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat.

I believe this to be true right now in our very fucked up social reality, but there's a ton of historical prescription for how to remedy this.

Male only small groups.

The last remnants of this today are found in the military. You can be totally average across the board and even below average in a few things and still be considered to be a "good marine" if you just get the basics right; show up on time, clean uniform, clean rifle, Yes Sir, No Sir, can exeucte orders. You may not ever progress up the hierarchical ladder, but you can still enjoy the esteem of your peers and superiors within the group because you're a net benefit, however small, to the overall group mission.

Hyperindividualism turns this "collective net benefit" into an adversarial ranking in which you are competing both with the defined "enemy" (who is preventing you from accomplishing your mission) and within the group itself for status.

People bemoans the lack of "loyalty" from companies to their employees, even long tenured ones. It's worth noting that this concept was its strongest when the workforce was still strongly majority male.

Male only small groups.

Illegal, thanks to women.

Remember, men are in societal surplus right now; and thus they are too weak as a class to check the inherent sociobiological/instinctual interest of women to destroy all other avenues that aren't "competing for woman's affection".
(Which, I will point out, is a common complaint from men about women who demand access to those spaces).

If you’re comparing being a heterosexual man to a heterosexual woman, sure. But if you’re a relatively effeminate male and primarily attracted to men, it’s very hard to feel like the grass isn’t greener on the other side. The “carrot” doesn’t look appetising and the idea of an escape from the “stick” of masculinity seems very appealing. The reality of transition is different from the ideal of course, but that only further increases the feelings of envy.

There’s also another aspect to this. Today there is broad consensus among most single men that dating as such is a big pain in the neck. In the old days, however, when the word ‘dating’ had a slightly different meaning and was generally understood not to entail sexual acts, it was specifically meant to be fun.

Did men who weren't Chad ever like dating?

More comments

This does track, rather frustratingly, with my experience. I like meeting people and talking to people, and I like women, obviously, but I do not like the experience that we have packaged together and called 'dating'.

I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them;

Explicitly refuting the "men are evil" messaging pervading society and those pushing it would probably be a plus too.

Getting off the computer and doing real, physical work in the world makes you more aware of your own body. Successfully doing things with your physical body feels great and is inherently affirming.

No, it really isn't. Maybe there are some people for whom that is true, but not everyone finds this affirming.

Not every instance of labour feels life-affirming, obviously, but I think I would stand by the idea that some level of physical accomplishment is affirming. We're embodied creatures, and doing things with our bodies feels good.

One of the most common memes among men online is that women have it insanely easy. One can easily see the trap that a confused man could fall into.

One of the most common memes among men online is that women have it insanely easy.

It has also been happening the other way around for decades. This phenomenon is not without social context.

What occasioned this reflection?

I suppose that I think the TERF treatment of HSTS is unnecessarily harsh, but that such a judgment requires a clearer categorization.

My impression was that radical feminists don't particularly care about HSTS individuals. Radical feminists are concerned with women and their experiences, so male homosexuality is not really on their radar.

I think the TERF treatment of HSTS is unnecessarily harsh

How so? In my experience, most TERFs are far more sympathetic to homosexual trans-identified men than they are to AGPs.

Note that this post was written shortly after seeing the News so it's likely modestly incoherent, and only given the most basic of editing pass. As always, hopefully there's enough meat for discussion.

Link to article below, but today I was greeted by an IGN article titled:

Phil Spencer Retiring, Sarah Bond Out, Matt Booty Promoted as Microsoft AI Exec Asha Sharma Named New Xbox Boss

That in the same breath IGN and Microsoft feel the need to announce Matt Booty's promotion, is... indicative of how they perceive the public reception of this announcement. Kiwi Farmers are likely feeling vindicated, and potentially mounting despair, as even under the most anti-DEI culture we've had in ages, a man retires and is replaced by a woman, chosen by the venerable Satya Nadella.

IGN provides this quote:

Sharma is a former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta and former Instacart COO who is also a board member of The Home Depot. She joined Microsoft in 2024. In her email to Microsoft staff, she wrote, in part: "My first job is simple: understand what makes this work and protect it. That starts with three commitments. First, great games. Everything begins here. We must have great games beloved by players before we do anything. Unforgettable characters, stories that make us feel, innovative game play, and creative excellence. We will empower our studios, invest in iconic franchises, and back bold new ideas. We will take risks. We will enter new categories and markets where we can add real value, grounded in what players care about most. I promoted Matt Booty in honor of this commitment. He understands the craft and the challenges of building great games, has led teams that deliver award-winning work, and has earned the trust of game developers across the industry.

Now, I'm going to ignore all the fluff as it was incredibly well-prepared and likely approved by multiple PR people to have the just-right wording. I am be tempted to ask Satya: What was the point of letting (or directing) the closing of all those existing, profitable studios? You wouldn't need to back these ideas. Xbox has historically been a money-printer and the most present in consumers' minds, the one people would argue on forums and reddit and making youtube videos for days defending your honor? Such that even fanboys are rapidly admitting the rot has occurred under your feet?

And now, Gamers are left with shit on plates and eating it over the last 5 years, as Microsoft has done everything they can to push the limits of their fans' loyalties.

Xbox was already struggling under the thumbs of Phil Spencer, someone that actually enjoyed and was from gaming and gamer culture. Whether or not normies are going to Notice these canned and prepared responses and coincidental promotion alongside her remains to be actually seen, but even worse: the woman appears to have comparable-or-less Gamer Credentials than Zoe Quinn, so Sharma has to tap another person to be the internal "voice" of games. Probably already being talked about on one of the chans at any rate, so I'll leave that discourse to Those Places for the time being.

That said, unless I am blind and failed my reading comprehension like an average "Gamer", as far as I can tell, Sharma has done basically nothing related to games or gaming throughout her career. So the open-ended question is: why would Satya take that risk despite the general consumer climate?

Again, another quote:

The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming will be Asha Sharma, currently the President of Microsoft’s CoreAI product.

So yes, I'm sure consumers, who have been finally pushed off the edge onto switching off windows, and upset that they literally cannot afford gaming hardware any more are extremely excited for the lady that put Copilot into notepad.exe and the beleagured and oft-derided Microsoft Recall.

We will build agentic applications with memory, entitlements, and action space that will inherit powerful model capabilities. And we will adapt these capabilities for enhanced performance and safety across roles, business processes, and industry domains. Further, how we build, deploy, and maintain code for these AI applications is also fundamentally changing and becoming agentic.

Satya really loves his wordsoup that's for sure.

Loose thoughts that don't fit anywhere else in this already-eclectic post, and may be duplicated:

  • Notably, as far as I can read she does not have any qualifications or past interest in gaming.

  • Seems that Satya wants more wordsalad and wordsoup to throw at consumers to sound like they're Super Advanced and Definitely Things Will Get Better. Watch for more wordsoupification of the Xbox and microsoft gaming division.

  • More push into renting in order to play games.

    • LLM's getting more deeply integrated into games?
    • More blank-slate RPG characters that are canvas-like?
    • Perhaps using the LLM's to generate scripts and enemy placement for prompted levels?
    • More realtime 3D diffusion?

  • CoreAI is one of Microsoft's largest money-sinks in the company-- they have done their absolute best not to discuss the cost vs revenue during earning calls.

  • Having been at both Meta and Instacart and head over the CoreAI department, means Sharma has some credible credentials toward running large teams and driving some level of product.

    • That said, at a certain point, a credential at Meta should start being a mark indicating that you should not hire this person. Or at the very least, a warning bell to consumers that the thing you like is turning to shit.

  • The incessant ai push means microsoft has gobs of compute, and gamers are being starved of what little compute they did have access to even a year ago

At any rate, if you're a capital-G Gamer, the sign was on the wall, but if you're actually invested in the future of the hobby, you probably want to migrate off Xbox before your xbox turns into an diffusion-ran agenticifed gas town, maximizing memory, entitlements, and workflows for such world-changing ideas as Microsoft has clearly been driving forward with such ... vision.

I think it could work well. The CEO might influence culture, but it’s not like they’re going to make the games. The best CEOs tend to let the talent be the talent with minimal interference from the top. That sounds like what the new CEO wants.

When the CEO says they're going to let the talent be the talent, expect micromanagement within the week.

Xbox has historically been a money-printer

When? The original Xbox was meant to realize Bill Gates dream of putting a computer in every livingroom, a general purpose computer for the livingroom, the games were supposed to be just the beachhead.

The original xbox did not sell well. The Xbox 360 did sell very well, especially in the US, but it was also marred by hardware problems, the servicing of which put the xbox division in the negative for years. I don't know if they ever came out of it, if they did it must have been between 2010 and the launch of the xbox one.

The xbox one was of course supposed to be the coronation of the old livingroom computer dream, its launch was all about watching TV and controlling all of your other entertainment devices. Nobody liked that and it didn't sell well, less than the original NES. And the opaquely named Seris X/S sold even less (of course the current generation of consoles is more of a competition over who can suck the most, so whatever).

Which is probably why since 2021 they've been talking about turning xbox into a platform. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the direction they will keep going in: divesting from hardware and become more of a publisher of sorts.Going with a woman on that role might not even be a bad thing, I think at this point the only people who can tell people to cut the woke bullshit are going to be women, developers aren't going to take it from a man. The worst that can happen is if things keep going like they've been going in the past 10 years and western devs keep putting out woke flops and the money keeps getting tight and gaming keeps moving east and to the PC.

Hot on her heels is talk of more Indian fraud:

Odd story building up on Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma. Part of an ongoing rabbit-hole of a discovery concerning Microsoft's new Gaming Division CEO Asha Sharma. We have been told that the new CEO of Xbox will be good for the brand the Microsoft's Gaming Division. That we should just ignore or disregard the incompatible skillset of her work history vs the proper demands as the head of Gaming. Ok fine...but well problems start to arise when the new CEO showed her Xbox account to "dispel doubts". People started scrutinising, and odd things started cropping up:

  1. the very FIRST achievement she unlocked was dated...16 January 2026, Halo MC Collection. So it is at best a one month old account.
  2. achievements for multiple games unlocked on the same date, implying non organic grinding of various distinct games within the span of one day.
  3. 100% completion in short "walking sims" type games like Firewatch (Jan 20, 3-4 hours total), Gone Home, A Short Hike, Townscaper, and BALL x PIT (she played for 43 hours in one week?)
  4. How does the future CEO of Xbox have this much time to no-life so many different video games at once in such a short span of time? I doubt the future CEO has this much time to just play games if we are led to believe all her playtime is legit. IF its legit, it also raises questions about her procrastinating in her roles, playing games instead of actually doing work.

So what does this mean? Welp people are suspecting that New CEO here, got someone from Microsoft to Stage an Xbox account for her, to manufacture legitimacy and trying to get people to stop scrutinising her nonexistent work experience in Video Games and possibly non-passion for it. Well if that is the case, firstly - they're doing an extremely bad job at it, and secondly - lying to Gamers' faces is just going anger them even more. I would have hoped Satya and Asha realised that, if it turned out Asha's entire Xbox account was really just staged.

https://x.com/givemebanhammer/status/2025525203762073950

This behavior from microsoft and sharma makes it incredibly difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt in any capacity.

The people bringing up "wokeness is the real enemy" is darkly ironic, as if whites are not watching a DEI hire be chosen over someone with plausible credentials.

Ok, the fact that she shared an obviously staged Xbox account is a hilarious unforced error, like Elizabeth Warren getting the genetic ancestry test. They realize she has a perception problem, but instead of just... ignoring it, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they insisted on trying to appeal to it. They legitimately could go, "she's not from gaming, but she's a good leader, and we think she's the best for the role," but instead they have to try to make up word salad about gaming passion and fabricate a record of gaming. Gamers are going to hate Microsoft no matter what they do, it's just in the culture, why are they trying to appeal to them? Make some good games and it won't matter whether a trained seal is in charge of the gaming division.

They realize she has a perception problem, but instead of just... ignoring it, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they insisted on trying to appeal to it.

Well, exactly, and (to put on my armchair psychologist hat) this makes Sharma seem so much worse. There’s been a bunch of talk on the less salubrious corners of the Internet about the concept of “izzat”, an Indian cultural practice whereby faking credentials is seen as just as good as having the credentials because the real merit, to the Indian psyche, is in Dedication To The Facade, not in the distinction between facade and the reality. For an izzat-brained Indian, setting up a fake account is the smart, meritorious move, because it proves your hustle, your dedication to fake it until you make it, your savvy use of shortcuts, which is better than putting in the leg work like a chump and actually having achievements.

Ignoring a bunch of basement-dwelling no-life babies until they go away is not possible to a person who got where they are due to izzat, because she knows that spiritually, she is also a basement-dwelling no-life baby. Which might explain why she got her little brother to fake her account, idk.

I agree with this and think it applies even more broadly to a global personality type beyond just the sub-continent.

This shares an interesting with the Elon Musk Diablo controversy. The TLDR is that Elon went on Joe Rogan and randomly mentioned how he was ranked in the Top 10 of all online Diablo players. The internet rightly immediately went "lol. whut? How does the CEO of like 5 different mega companies have time to grind Diablo?" The ONLY way to get that high of a ranking is to grind. There is no giga-brained shortcut. You have to put in the hours. The immediate conclusion was that he was paying someone to ghost-play his account to boost ratings.

Well, Elon wanted to shut up the haterz and so live-streamed himself playing. It went as well as you would expect. A bunch of actual Diablo mega-grinders immediately pointed out tactics that Elon used that were dead giveaways that he didn't know what he was doing. IIRC, Elon eventually admitted that he did pay someone to grind for him.

Why in the hell would a literal centi-billionaire care so much about online video game rankings? Isn't it just enough to be the (future) Prince of Mars, the face of American rocketry, and to have had 14 - maybe 100 kids?

Elon and this Sharma lady both suffer from a personality deficiency where they don't actually model social esteem systems well. When a value system is totally objective and external - profit and less, share value, rocket re-use cost - their Autism engines get a turbo boost. But when it's more interpersonally subjective and based on relative-social status within niches (video games or, perhaps, dancing being excellent examples) they lose all bearing. I think it literally flips the "flight or fight" level of anxiety and they reflexively react by trying to "do the thing" at the same level of all-or-nothing that the dedicate to their primary pursuits.

These people don't have a real interpersonal or social core. The "sense of self" in a very immediate flesh and blood way isn't there. This is part of the genesis of the "Musk is an alien" memes. When he was on SNL he opined he may have autism or asperger's (self-diagnosed). Perhaps, but color be doubtful. I don't think it has anything to do with "brain chemistry" (a term I loathe) or even real-deal mental health (i.e. BPD, MDD, Schizo-class disorders). Instead, it's a socially rooted character underdevelopment that never was addressed precisely because they were hyper-indexing on whatever optimization problem was in front of them.

Elon musk and Ms. Sharma know that the piles of money they make are valuable because money can be exchanged for goods and services but they fail to make the domain transition and realize that having lots and lots and lots of money also creates real social value (and, if deployed correctly, political value as well. Musk has tried to do this but keeps fucking up because he truly doesn't get politics or government. His DOGE failure should be more heavily highlighted, IMHO).

As @urquan says, gamers are never going to "vibe" with MSFT because MSFT is an evil corporation that kills all the good games. And also makes them too, or whatever. The point is that the point isn't getting gamers to "like" you but to buy your products. Musk doesn't understand that Chinese EV buyers don't actually care if you can dance so long as you can sell them fucking robot EVs. These people aren't real because they don't conceive of themselves as totally human.

If she was not a public figure I would assume that save files from non-Xbox-account-registered copies of the games were imported. But the CEO of Xbox can't very well say she's been playing pirated games, can she?

As some of the other posters note, I'm not sure what overall point you are making here? Microsoft has switched out one (massive failure) corpo for another - an Indian(!) woman(!) - and this suggests all kinds of disasters?

Phil Spencer was a capital-G Gamer. He successfully reversed the absolute disaster that was the Xbone... and then succeeded in little else but spaffing hundreds of billions up the wall on poor acquisitions. He's one of many, many gamer leaders who have been shit at their jobs. You clearly understand the damage he's done, mentioning Xbox's shocking reputation at multiple points. Is there any reason to believe a non-gamer could do any worse?

You also state:

I am be tempted to ask Satya: What was the point of letting (or directing) the closing of all those existing, profitable studios? You wouldn't need to back these ideas. Xbox has historically been a money-printer and the most present in consumers' minds

My only response is: What?? What Xbox are you thinking of? It's also been a giant money sink, fortunate that it's an irrelevance to MS's balance sheet or else it would surely have been killed a decade ago. Most recently they sunk another 70bil into Activision just to watch the latest CoD have a disastrous reception. The most shocking thing about this announcement is that Microsoft have actually published this news and are pushing Sharma as some kind of saviour, instead of abandoning it once and for all.

As for Sharma herself, is there any reason to suspect she's not a perfectly capable corpo? As you note, time at Meta is almost an anti-signal at this point, but given her other experience and several years now at Microsoft, it would be a surprise if she was useless. I suppose you could see it as Indian nepotism, but if anything this a downgrade for the woman. She's gone from Microsoft main focus, the all-important AI push, to their failing, irrelevant gaming division, which is surely on its last roll of the dice. She must be confident in her ability to turn it around.

As for her AI experience, well, she also worked at Instacart. Why is no one assuming Xbox is getting into the grocery business?

Anyone gamer with any sense would have long ago abandoned the Xbox brand. Indeed, Spencer ensured such a thing by pivoting so heavily towards their PC presence and gamepass. I don't see much reason to assume it could get any worse.

I actually wanted to post something on this myself, but in a completely different direction. I saw on another forum the most curious reaction to the news:

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aa23o5w4w2afknay44oqxqz6/post/3mfdtqu5wjk2x

Oh no. Oh nooooo. Xbox's new CEO is a natalist/birthrater. How did MS miss this in their opsec? Literal stone's throw away from the likes of Palmer Luckey.

"Will my son have classmates in the future? ...the fertility rates are declining." Then she suggests the fix is... AI?

The linked post is a negative reaction from noted game journalist Jeff Gerstmann.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but this is absolutely insane. Merely expressing concern over birth rates - from a minority woman no less - is enough to immediately get cast as some kind of super Chud. Sure, the AI angle is an easy attack point for some of the more obsessed members of Bluesky, but for that to filter out to a relatively normie game journo is another step.

Gerstmann, from what I know of him, has never been particularly lambasted as a woke or poor journalist. GiantBomb was popular as far as I was aware. Has game journalism become so poisoned that everyone has to jump onto the latest left-wing fad or risk being cancelled?

GiantBomb was popular as far as I was aware

10 years ago, sure.

Has game journalism become so poisoned that everyone has to jump onto the latest left-wing fad or risk being cancelled?

gallows_first_time.jpg

Gamergate does feel like it was a thousand years ago.

Is it any more complicated than he's Indian, she's Indian, this is promoting a fellow in-group person to a meaningless but important-sounding position?

I hope so! But i may concede that Satya is just racist.

The most important new thing for me in this announcement is that XBOX is still alive.

The other is that Indian sounding C level names is the coupling constant of the enshittification field.

A successful stint at Meta tends to imply you have been able to bring some order to sprawling, argumentative chaos.

LLM's getting more deeply integrated into games?

I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?

Open source communities have gone out of their way to set up general-purpose AIs to play Minecraft with you in the crudest ways imaginable and it kind of works. Microsoft literally owns Minecraft and they have a ludicrous amount of compute. They could make a minecraft-specific AI model, special servers where the player (players?) could be warlords with whole armies they direct and manage. The sky is the limit. This is a GAAS subscription goldmine just waiting to happen if they can cut down the inference costs, which they should definitely be able to do with a specialist model.

The real problem Microsoft has is dysfunctional culture. It's really not that hard to make Halo Infinite and have it be actually good. They have the money but not the necessary organizational skills. How hard can it be to make Windows 11 run smoothly enough for people to risk their computers and 'upgrade'? Windows 10 was OK...

I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?

I think an your typical AAA game needs LLM-powered NPCs as much as a drowning man needs a rock. If nobody thought to give the NPCs more dialogue, filling the gaps with AI slop is not going to help.

I think an LLM might substitute for a mediocre DM in an RPG, though. Certainly in text-based formats, but possibly also in something with graphics (e.g. Neverwinter Nights). The benefit would be that it could accommodate player character ideas. So rather than saying "You can not play a lycrantrophic half-elf changeling", it would modify the setting. Perhaps figure out how the fey fit into the cosmology and the overall plot. Invent relevant side quests, just like a human DM would.

The problem with this approach is that presently, if I have to pick between a pre-generated character with a questline written by humans (BG3) and a character of my own invention with quests written by AI, then I would much rather stick to BG3. Likewise, even if I were totally into dinosaurs, it seems highly unlikely that I would enjoy a version of Tolkien's epos where all the non-hominid animals (horses, ponies, eagles, black wings, dragons, spiders, etc) are replaced by appropriate dinos better than the original, simply because AI is nowhere good enough to write something like LotR from the scratch.

Ah but the typical AAA game is not Baldur's Gate III.

Mass Effect Andromeda. Or Dragon Age Veilguard. Or Concord. This is what I'm thinking of: https://x.com/celestesangels/status/2003911076988260714

https://x.com/deadlock/status/2015887428964266047

An underlying issue is that the people who can't write good dialogue surely can't write good prompts or lora/finetunes for AIs either.

Still, some fun can definitely be had in a version of LOTR where Saruman is shilling NordVPN: "50% off with code ISTAR15". I saw an AI make a great pun about Isengard's no-logs policy.

Trying to replicate the peak of human literature should not be the target for AI gaming, better to focus on things that only it can do in terms of reactivity and dynamism to create new kinds of fun.

I was using chatbots to help me train dynamic Japanese vocabulary recall or whatever. Discussing random topics with it wasn't working, as those tended to focus on abstract vocabulary. I had the idea of trying to play RPGs with the AI, with the AI being dungeon master and posing scenarios I would need to use more concrete vocabulary to interact with. Should have been simple, right? It's got all sorts of RPGs in its dataset to crib from. Anyways, the results were one of the many things that totally dispelled any illusion that LLMs possess intelligence for me. I can't provide a total summary of its extreme and numerous flaws, but everything it tried to do as dungeon master ended up being cliché, nonsensical, unstructured, inappropriate from every point of view, and it quickly lost context of what was going on after only a few prompts. You could probably create a much better virtual DM through pre-LLM computer generation technology.

How hard can it be to make Windows 11 run smoothly enough for people to risk their computers and 'upgrade'? Windows 10 was OK...

This would only require ousting Satya and a purge of every manager and new hire in the windows division, firing all the h1bs and rehiring the old microsoft os engineers and QA divisions and an eight-year long purge of the last few years of slopcode.

Just don't accidentally go all the way back to Windows ME.

I didn't play it any real depth but recent Chinese triple A game Where Winds Meet did the AI chatbot npc thing I believe. There's some funny memes of people hacking them off topic but I think there are some enjoyers.

It depends on implementation (as with everything...)

Consider: AI art. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks this and this look absolutely tasteless. If companies start replacing even background elements with slop, their games will look noticeably worse.

I'm ambivalent regarding coding agents. In my experience, they are very useful, but you still need real skill to avoid writing horrible code. They write code in one shot that "just works"...except there are small issues: outdated patterns, slow algorithms, unnecessary operations (e.g. copying), missed opportunities for abstraction, no high-level design. It really does just work, and quite often does not work for edge-cases. Except, my understanding is that most video game code is already like this, and AAA games regularly get flamed for buggy launches, so I have a hard time imagining worse. Hence I'm ambivalent.

A genuinely good use of AI would be for more human-like, or at least more fun, NPCs and enemies. AI-generated writing is like AI art, very bland, but if the NPCs are more dynamic that could be interesting. Perhaps the best use I can imagine is playing a single-player game and getting a multi-player experience, against players who are at my skill level and have good etiquette. But can LLMs do that?

I wonder if populating generated worlds and settings and such would be a better place to start.

It'd be super cool to have access to a Google Genie like world-model game, perhaps with an AI 'dungeon master' overseeing a larger storyline or controlling game mechanics. In a more freeform mode, you can type in something and it just happens (apparently this was too fun and interesting for the public demo of Genie 3 but it exists in principle, since it literally just generates everything you see).

More of a longer-term thing though since world models are quite costly to run in real time.

We've known since the middle ages that some parts of any picture are important and others are less important. Masters who supervised junior artists would farm out parts of a painting and then come in to paint the most difficult or important parts.

It would seem like AI could be used similarly, to fill the background and let an artist do the important parts of the image. A composite like this would mean the artist could make more pictures with the same time and critical eyes would see human made things in the parts of the image that matter (the clouds see fine for example and too basically no human time to make).

Or transitional frames in animation. Not sure there is much reason for humans to do that, beyond possibly some impact frames.

Perhaps the best use I can imagine is playing a single-player game and getting a multi-player experience, against players who are at my skill level and have good etiquette. But can LLMs do that?

Not if their training data includes chat from real multiplayer humans, no.

AI slop was unheard of even a few years ago - where’s your imagination?

Look at what Seamless2 is doing now … this shit will be unbelievably real in a few years time.

Every year even on forums like these people are showing examples of how bad AI is but every year it’s monumentally better than the year prior.

LLMs really are the best argument for GAAS I can think of. They would sway me, if done well, and I've literally never paid for a game that's on a subscription model.

There are significant costs involved in serving tokens, and the average consumer/gamer can't run very good models on local hardware (especially if they need to run a remotely demanding game at the same time).

The Chinese are already doing it, with positive sentiment. I predicted and continue to predict they'll become ubiquitous, and a genuine improvement.

There are significant costs involved in serving tokens

Both you and @RandomRanger expressed this sentiment, and I'm a little perplexed. When I've noted concerns about the financials of some of these big AI companies, people have assured me that the inference side of things is profitable. Is this a different enough use case that it would be a significant cost, or are you including all the infrastructure necessary for it in this calculation as well?

I think the inference side of things is profitable. That's precisely why they need to make it more efficient for gaming purposes...

The general trend is that businesses looking to make money will spend a lot more than consumers looking for fun. Coders have a huge appetite for the highest-quality tokens. Consider the GPU shortage, the RAM shortage, compute is being reallocated from consumer command to commercial demand via pricing... Gamers are not prepared to pay that much money, there's already a lot of unhappiness about GAAS, a move up beyond 60 USD games.

It would be stupid for Microsoft to lower their margins by reallocating compute from lucrative Azure to less-lucrative Minecraft gaming. They need to keep margins high or raise them by reducing cost of production. And they should definitely be able to get better results at lower prices with a dedicated minecraft AI, even if it's just a finetune. It's like the Chinese paper where they finetuned an AI to play Genshin Impact, solve puzzles, complete hours long missions... Presumably that's quite expensive to run since it's a full video model that plays like its a human. But Microsoft could easily make a smaller text model that gets data directly from the game, maybe it calls stronger models for particularly difficult building tasks.

Cheap tokens have to be paid for anyway. If you're using an LLM to stream tokens to users, or doing something more complex like AI voices, then you have continuous running costs above and beyond whatever costs you were paying for the multiplayer servers etc.

This is completely unrelated to the profitability of AI companies. They charge you a subscription, or a per-token basis on the API. The game dev/publisher has to pay those costs, and unless they go for aggressive rate limiting, it's possible for power users to cost them more than a single up-front sticker price for a game can manage. The ideal solution would be local LLMs, since the consumer shoulders the burden, but they're not good enough because the average consumer doesn't have the hardware to both serve the model and play games at once.

I've fooled around with AI chats for like DND-level RP and found the inherent 'yesman' aspect making it hard to have a genuinely adversial interaction. They're fine for cursory NPCs though.

There's probably a level between static dialog trees and completely open conversations with memory to keep npcs interesting without letting them off the guardrails or hearing about that arrow they took to the knee for the 100th time.

Properly-done NPCs wouldn't have the same "yesman" prompt as the current chatbots. LLMs are a brand new kind of magic and we're all still figuring out the right incantations. There's going to be a big learning curve as we figure out how to make AI-driven NPCs that feel natural, but IMO it's perfectly possible to get there (once the cost of decent models falls to where it makes economic sense).

Head of XBox role is closest to a producer role.

Your job is to be a ruthless bean counter while individual studios focus on the core creative pursuit. This is especially true for Microsoft, which unlike Nintendo isn't as strongly coupled to its 1st party IP. Zenimax, Bethesda, Activision & Blizzard will probably keep doing their own thing.
Xbox should not be driving forward with vision. It should be funding game directors with vision, and keeping them on a leash of the correct length.

Todd Howard has maintained control over Bethesda, Sam Houser still runs Rockstar. Still no Elderscrolls 6 or GTA 6. Despite being run by 'capital G gamers', AAA Game studios are dysfunctional frankenstiein's monsters.

The primary thing that gives me pause about Asha's Linkedin is

VP Product & Engineering

Meta

Head of Product across Messenger + Instagram Direct and GM of calling, video, + kids experiences. Previously: Director, Social Impact Products

hmm.....

Only tangentially related, but is there a single Microsoft product that is prevalent by virtue of its actual quality, as opposed to inertia from widespread business adoption decades ago? Windows is so much worse than OS X. Outlook is so much worse than Gmail. Teams is so much worse than Zoom. XBox is so much worse than PlayStation/Nintendo. I don't know a single person who uses anything from Microsoft by choice.

Windows is so much worse than OS X.

Strongly disagree. Windows is going downhill, but OS X has always been inferior to Windows.

I've always found OS X to be extremely barebones as far as functionality goes. I do like that, but I also like most DEs except for maybe GNOME 3, so maybe I'm not the best judge.

Windows does a lot more, especially because it allowed itself to advance beyond the state of the art in 1984 (or rather, 1980, since OS X is just a copy of OS 1 is just a rip-off of what Xerox was doing at PARC). The Start Menu, and searching within it, is far and away superior to the way macOS handles applications (and Linux splits the difference and fails at both; both KDE and Gnome suffer from this, though in different ways).

OS X still has some weird bullshit, too- specifically the way it fails to allow you to copy folders in anything resembling an intuitive way. "So you don't get confused"? Yeah, not buying it.

Oh yeah, and keyboard shortcuts belong on Ctrl, not Alt/Command. It's a stupid compromise and Apple is just straight-up wrong here- I get you can customize it but it's still bad. I mean, they literally had the NOMODES guy [Larry Tesler] working for them and they still couldn't figure out that the ergonomics of holding down Alt-C are strictly inferior to Ctrl-C? Come on.

By the way, the best mobile OS ever designed was webOS and I will not hear slander otherwise. Yes, iOS and Android ripped off some of the good parts, but they didn't get all of it...

The Start Menu, and searching within it, is far and away superior to the way macOS handles applications (and Linux splits the difference and fails at both; both KDE and Gnome suffer from this, though in different ways).

The superior way to start an application is to type the name of the binary, optionally followed by a space and arguments, optionally followed by an ampersand, followed by the enter key.

I have about 4k different programs in /usr/bin/. Menus are tolerable if there are a few options to pick, like at the ATM: Do you want to withdraw money, see your balance, recharge a prepaid card or quit? I certainly do not want to specify twelve bits using some GUI. Yes, keyboard searching might make that more tolerable, but can only hope to approach the comfort of the command line interface. (I should mention that I am not some purist, I think that it is fine to use a GUI and mouse for things which map very well upon a concept of a 2d surface, such as vector graphics, CAD or first person shooters. But 'pick a program to run' is not one of the problems which has an intrinsic 2d representation.)

Apart from that, judging operating systems by their user interface is a bit like judging a motor vehicle by its infotainment system: sure, it is relevant, if the navigation system is too painful that is bad. But at the end of the day, most vehicles are not picked for their infotainment system, but for a mixture of other factors such as signaling, price, capabilities, TCO and so on.

But 'pick a program to run' is not one of the problems which has an intrinsic 2d representation.

I respectfully disagree; 2D ancillary menus have several significant benefits over a bare terminal, but they still need a 1D terminal in that menu. And I get that there was a significant time period, specifically between 1986 through 2006, where this wasn't the case.

The superior way to start an application is to type the name of the binary

But when I have two programs that start with the same name, like say Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, I'd have to type out the entire name to access the second application. (I'd also have to know the name of the binary, that doesn't necessarily match the name on the box, and sometimes it isn't even a binary, but a part of one [so now you have to memorize the launch argument, and tab-autocomplete generally won't help you with that].) With a proper menu representation (and I admit the Windows 10 and 11 are very much not this; StartAllBack is mandatory on Windows machines), the sequence is 'vis' (or similar) + [down arrow] + Enter, speed the terminal cannot hope to match (unless you decide to manually configure an alias for it- but a general purpose solution for this is a lot more convenient, because it works everywhere, which is the same argument vi users make about learning it).

Selecting text and objects is something else that has an intrinsic 2D representation for reasons that become obvious if you don't know how long the line is (which you kind of have to for terminal-based selection), or if you need to see the document you're copying from as well as the document you're pasting to.

Menus are tolerable if there are a few options to pick, like at the ATM

Menus are preferable here because, on an ATM, they're literally just keyboard buttons that map directly to the action. If you want to withdraw 200 dollars, you don't have to translate '1. View Balance. 2. Deposit. 3. Withdraw.' -> 'Enter amount to withdraw' into keyboard commands, you press the [equivalent of the] 'Withdraw' keyboard key, and then the '200 dollars' key. There's no potential of anyone misreading or mistranslating the input, since the menu changes based exactly on what's relevant at the time; it's drastically more intuitive.

Yes, keyboard searching might make that more tolerable, but can only hope to approach the comfort of the command line interface.

Computer interfaces have legitimately advanced since 1970 and that's OK. They took a huge leap forward back when the OS wars weren't yet won, then slowed down, then came back for a time when OS X became relevant again, then desktop UX took a backseat to mobile UX. (Which made a great leap forward in 2007, then another just as large one in 2009 with webOS, and then regressed to where we are today.)

In my opinion the world is overdue for a new desktop UX paradigm, since unlike the 2010s it's now crystal clear that desktop PCs (including laptops) will never go away, and it's time we go after the things we missed the last time, like how to display text in readable locations and not to truncate the important parts (which is also something the terminals still have problems with in applications that show data in tabs). Maybe once someone figures out how to get an LLM to spit out all the hooks and hacks you need to reliably replace explorer.exe (not that the Windows source code isn't in LLM training sets already, of course), we'll finally get someone applying the UX research the rest of the way.

But at the end of the day, most vehicles are not picked for their infotainment system

Yeah, they're clearly picked in spite of it.

Unless you're Tesla or (to a point) Rivian, but those are software companies that just happen to make cars. Every "X drives" video I watch on YouTube has the infotainment clearly lagging by a half second or more, and with the absurd power of even 15 year old computers this is just not a thing that should happen. Car UX was legitimately better when the engineers (or rather, the execs directing the engineers) were forced into the simplest embedded development; as soon as they got access to something more advanced than embedded C it all went to shit.

And at this point I think good car UX is dead and buried because consumers aren't even in any position to care. Hey, at least the auto lanekeep will stop you from leaving the lane after you get flashbanged by drivers who are too brain-dead to turn their fucking brights off (or you're too busy fucking with the infotainment's lack of switches to be able to stay in your lane).

Vscode was a breath of fresh air when it released.

Microsoft teams was quite good at release. They made it progressively worse, but its V1 was pretty good. Then they added the telemetry.

Windows 7 was excellent.

Github copilot was an excellent V1. They failed to capitalize on it, conceding ground to cursor and later Claude code. But, the first release was magical.

Linkedin has stayed good-ish. For a platform that was meant to be corporate-slop by design, it has stayed inoffensive. Compared to the decline of Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook & Twitter, Linkedin is the only era-1 social network that still functions the way it is supposed to.

If we imagine a possible world where Linux was widely adopted so that all common software ran out of the box on both Linux and Windows, are there any advantages that remain for Windows 7 over a contemporary Linux distro with a straightforward GUI (say Ubuntu)?

I've spent years using both Ubuntu and windows on different occasions. Ubuntu is never as simple as it's touted to be. It has many of the same jankiness problems of windows while having odd driver & config problems that screw you over when you aren't looking.

I liked windows 7 because it was stable and there was 1 way to do most things. Windows 8 introduced the Tile UX, app store and touch apps which turned windows into 3 operating systems in a trench coat.

I dislike Ubuntu & Linux as an end user because there are a million ways to do things. That's just a million ways to break things. App store, snap, apt, flat pack....fuck off. The laptop is a tool. It should do what I need it to, reliably.

I have since moved to mac, and it correctly understands the assignment. I still miss window's workspace management, screen splitting and the explorer experience. Finder is trash. Screen management and workspaces in mac are unintuitive. But, that I can work with.

Well, I've used plenty of windows and unfortunately still have to use it for my job and I've been using Ubuntu for ~15 years now and I guess we just have very different preferences. It's not that I've never had issues with Linux that would have been solved by using Windows, but all those issues stem from people making software for Windows rather than Linux, not some inherent issue of Linux itself. I also feel like Ubuntu/Linux and just the whole suite of common opensource software around it has improved significantly in recent years. Although to be fair we were talking about Windows 7, not the current situation. Admittedly maybe my current positive experiences with Linux and negative experiences with Microsoft have biased me a little bit when looking at the past. I've always had a strong preference for basic, clean, minimalistic software, which does what I tell it to and nothing more has always made me prefer Linux over Windows. But in recent years the feature bloat and the clunky annoying UI of Microsoft - not just in the OS but in every single piece of software they make - has really been out of control. I feel zero temptation to ever switch back to Windows currently.

As for mac, I've never used it. It's probably fine, but the fact it runs on overpriced devices and tries to get you locked-in on a bunch of Apple hardware and software is enough for me to have never seriously considered using it.

It's not that I've never had issues with Linux that would have been solved by using Windows, but all those issues stem from people making software for Windows rather than Linux, not some inherent issue of Linux itself.

I love Linux, but hard disagree here. FlatPak (or snaps or apparmor or whatever) have fixed the worst of these issues, but Linux made it needlessly hard for non-technical users to install software that wasn't part of your distro's repositories for years. There's even a video of Linus talking to a conference full of distro maintainers about how obnoxious an issue it is.

On Windows, for better or for worse, you can usually just download an executable and run it.

After a decade of fighting config decay on one Linux distro after another I landed on nixos and have stuck here since, I think exactly because it avoids the problem you're describing.

If you don't fight the paradigm it's pushing (your system definition is explicit, you shouldn't try to make changes outside of the explicit system definition, package your projects for nix) there is only one way to perform each task and mistakes are all recoverable - no chasing down a nest of udev rules from the last time you tried to flash an arduino.

The downside is you have to learn their system definition language, though most relatively-modern LLMs can handle it well enough.

Vscode was a breath of fresh air when it released.

Windows 10 was actually amazing on (pre)release -- I still have somewhere an install disk from one of the first Tech Preview versions that I wouldn't mind figuring out how to hack the time-bomb on. It ran great on old Core2 era laptops, and was generally unobtrusive -- I even put it on an original Intel (white) Imac, and it was miles ahead of Snow Leopard or whatever OS Apple decided to abandon those with.

Since then basically everything about the OS has gotten worse -- work put Win11 on my laptop, and it's not so much a new OS as a slightly shittier Win10 -- essentially just following the pattern of previous Win10 update versions.

It's like they have a competent team who builds stuff, and then hands it off to the enshittification team who fails (for instance) eliminate the remaining XP-era dialog boxes and fucks around with misfeatures and generally bogging things down.

It's like they have a competent team who builds stuff, and then hands it off to the enshittification team who fails (for instance) eliminate the remaining XP-era dialog boxes and fucks around with misfeatures and generally bogging things down.

My favorite is that with the newer settings you can only have a single instance of settings open at a time. From my old help desk and sysadmin days, it was a very regular occurrence for me to have both network settings and printers opened at the same time.

Those are the consumer facing products, Microsoft makes the majority of their money through selling to other companies, in particular cloud services and servers like with Azure/GitHub/SQL Server/etc and Microsoft office products like Excel. Even Windows now is mostly a product for other businesses to pay.

C#/.NET is rock solid, that's about the only one I'd give them credit for.

Microsoft Excel is better than other spreadsheet software.

So the US Supreme Court struck down most (all?) of Trump's tariffs in a 6-3 ruling, ruling that its use exceeded the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This appears to have largely been done under the major questions doctrine, the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. The majority ruling is that Trump's attempt to claim and leverage emergency powers overstepped this, plus doubtless other nuances I'm not noting. The Court also opened an entirely different set of worms, as it did not adjudicate if the tariff revenue that had been collected has to be refunded, or even who a refund would go to. I predict great long !lawyer bills~ debates over how, if tariffs are taxes on Americans, which Americans are owed the tax refunds.

(Do I predict the Trump administration will try to use this as a basis to give money to the electorate in a totally-not-buying-votes-before-mid-terms scheme? No, but I think it would be funny if political bedfellows put Democrats on the side of big business importers who will make claims on the refunds even if they passed on costs to American consumers.)

Trump will reportedly make comments soon. While this will be a major policy loss for the Trump administration, and promises to make the next many months 'interesting,' part of my curiosity is what this ruling might hold (or have held) for other court cases in the dockets, there will also be significant geopolitical reflections on this for months and years to come. This ruling wasn't entirely a surprise, and various countries (and the European trade block) had been hedging in part to let the court case play out. We'll see where things go from here, particularly since not all Trump tariff threats were derived from the IEEPA, and so there will probably be some conflation/confusion/ambiguity over various issues.

While I will defer to others for the legalese analysis, I am also interested in what sorts of quid-pro-quos the internal court politics might have had for Roberts to have led the majority here. There are a host of cases on the docket this term, with politically-relevant issues ranging from mail-in ballots to redistricting. While I think the tariffs case was outside any typical 'we accept this case in exchange for accepting that case' deal over which cases get heard, I will be interested if the administration gets any 'surprise' wins.

For longer commentary from Amy Howe of the SCOTUS Blog-

In a major ruling on presidential power, the Supreme Court on Friday struck down the sweeping tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed in a series of executive orders. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the tariffs exceed the powers given to the president by Congress under a 1977 law providing him the authority to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats.

The court did not weigh in, however, on whether or how the federal government should provide refunds to the importers who have paid the tariffs, estimated in 2025 at more than $200 billion.

The law at the center of the case is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA, which authorizes the president to use the law “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the president declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.” A separate provision of the law provides that when there is a national emergency, the president may “regulate … importation or exportation” of “property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”

The dispute at the center of Friday’s opinion began last year, when Trump issued a series of executive orders imposing the tariffs. Lawsuits filed by small businesses and a group of states, all of which say that they are affected by the increased tariffs, were filed in the lower courts, which agreed with the challengers that IEEPA did not authorize Trump’s tariffs. But those rulings were put on hold, allowing the government to continue to collect the tariffs while the Supreme Court proceedings moved forward.

In a splintered decision on Friday, the Supreme Court agreed with the challengers that IEEPA did not give Trump the power to impose the tariffs. “Based on two words separated by 16 others in … IEEPA—‘regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “Those words,” he continued, “cannot bear such weight.” “IEEPA,” Roberts added, “contains no reference to tariffs or duties.” Moreover, “until now no President has read IEEPA to confer such power.”

In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. “When Congress has delegated its tariff powers,” Roberts said, “it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” a test that Trump’s tariffs failed here.

The court’s three Democratic appointees – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – joined another part of the Roberts opinion, holding that Trump’s tariffs were also not supported by the text of IEEPA. “The U.S. Code,” Roberts noted, “is replete with statutes granting the Executive the authority to ‘regulate’ someone or something. Yet the Government cannot identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the main dissent, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In his view, Trump had the authority under IEEPA to impose the tariffs because they “are a traditional and common tool to regulate importation.” Moreover, he suggested, although “I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward … because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.”

Kavanaugh also warned that “[i]n the meantime, however, the interim effects of the Court’s decision could be substantial. The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.”

(And apologies to @Gillitrut, who posted while I was drafting this.)

the Government cannot identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax.

To tax is to regulate and to regulate is to tax, in free market economies.

A functioning Congress is only possible if the senate filibuster is overturned. 51 votes must be able to pass any constitutional law.

More and more people say this. It use to be considered a very necessary check and balance. Now it’s basically made things ungovernable except thru a strong Presidency with the court in your pocket which Trump almost has but not 100%.

I don’t see an issue with the GOP getting rid of the filibuster. They really should never lose the Senate for a generation if they are doing things with some competency.

As it works now it basically means congress never has to do a hard vote.

Well, a tool used in the wrong place and time breaks things. At best a lot of the checks and balances were conceived as “stop horrible thing from happening,” and were meant to be used judiciously and only to stop seriously bad things from happening. Now, basically, no bills can pass unless they beat the filibuster, and since congress is pretty evenly split, most bills don’t meet the standard.

If either party was doing things with some competency the country wouldn't be in this mess.

I'm pretty sure one reason why they keep the filibuster around is that it's a great way to keep votes from happening that they don't want without everyone having to tip their hand and vote against.

Discourse around politics love to treat idealogies as a hivemind but the reality is that there's a lot of disagreement between people who are otherwise allied with each other. Even without the filibuster why should we expect a Trump tariff bill to pass? Democrats are opposed to Trump having more power and (this might be shocking to some youth who have only experienced Trump) many Republicans are still capitalists and free traders who believe in free trade and free markets.

So if you have the filibuster then you can just have the few known for crossing the lines take the fall and defect away from the president while you get to still vote for the tariffs you don't actually like or want and not draw his ire. There are even multiple examples of senators/house representatives doing a similar reverse style strategy that if you already have enough votes to pass then you can be one of the "good ones" and follow the party line even if you don't support it.

Opponents of the tariffs technically won both votes, thanks to a small faction of Republicans who broke ranks. But the margins were so thin that a presidential veto seems inevitable and likely insurmountable.

There are more opponents of Trump's tariffs than just the people who broke ranks, but just like Rep McClintock they had no reason to take aggro when the votes were already there to win. Reason calls it cowardly, I agree but I think it's a rather reasonable cowardness.

It lets politicians have their cake and eat it too. They don't have to push through things they don't actually agree with while also not having to upset the base (or increasingly the child president) by getting to say "nothing we can do". Signal your loyalty without having to sacrifice your beliefsOnly drawback is that it's harder to do the stuff they do like, but it's a cost they've accepted.

I'm not sure this reasoning works; tariffs were actually in place for more than a year. Are you, hypothetical republican senator that doesn't want tariffs but also doesn't want to offend Trump or his loyalists, satisfied with how things played out? You get to preserve the appearance of loyalty... but you also get tariffs. How would you be worse off if you held your nose and voted for tariffs if you get them either way? Or if tariffs are truly unacceptable to you, wouldn't you want to be able to vote them down?

I can maybe see a way to thread this needle -- the tariffs were eventually struck down, after all... only to be immediately replaced with 'new' tariffs under a different legal theory. Theoretically this one has a time limit, but who at this point believes such technicalities will stop Trump from doing whatever he wants? He'll just come up with some other excuse.

And, actually, this way you get the worst of both worlds; if the tariffs stood, you'd at least get the revenue. This way you get all the economic damage -- the true harm done by tariffs is in the transactions that don't take place, not in the ones that do -- and a $200 billion hole in the budget. And it's not even as though consumers will be made whole. Refunds will go to the people who filed the paperwork, because that's easy, and not to the people who actually bore the incidence of the tax, which has essentially no relation to those accounting details.

I think the actual reason the Senate doesn't want to govern is simpler and more cynical: if voters can't recall a single thing their senator did, they re-elect them. With a baseline 90%+ incumbent re-election rate, there's just nothing to be gained by rocking the boat. (That is, if maintaining their position is the only thing they care about, which is a model I've been given little reason to doubt.)

My naive take was that it's almost impossible for the game of partisan tit for tat to not end with the filibuster gone.

But the Senate has been resistant to going all the way despite Trump suggesting it. I suppose their desire to matter outweighs their desire to stick it to the other team.

The senate has a different dynamic driven by very, very long terms of service. Eventually, yes, they'll yeet the filibuster in a fit of partisan shitflinging- but there just hasn't been enough turnover. I suspect the democrat optimates will come to regret it, but eh, it's gonna go.

ROBERTS, C. J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II–A–1, and II–B, in which SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, GORSUCH, BARRETT, and JACKSON, JJ., joined, and an opinion with respect to Parts II–A–2 and III, in which GORSUCH and BARRETT, JJ., joined. GORSUCH, J., and BARRETT, J., filed concurring opinions. KAGAN, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which SOTOMAYOR and JACKSON, JJ., joined. JACKSON, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion. KAVANAUGH, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS and ALITO, JJ., joined.

If you ever see an opinion announcement like that, you are about to read some grade-A incomprehensible giberish. I didn't even bother reading the opinion after that. Good luck to the lawyers of the future tasked with figuring out which parts are holdings and which parts are dicta.

I don't know why the court even bothers issuing these kinds of rulings. Fractured opinions are always worse than useless, sowing confusion and wasting everyone's time. Better to GVR and at least not fuck up the precedent any more than you have to.

looks like something that costs $1000/hour to read

I, II-A-1, and II-B are holdings. The only major difference was that the conservatives in the majority invoked the Major Question Doctrine and the liberals thought the statutory language was sufficient. The upshot is that the president can't unilaterally invoke tariffs under the Act.

Eh, it's pretty simple. The 6 in the majority only really disagreed about whether the result is reached by MJD (R,G,B) or by regular statutory construction (S,K,J).

Gorsuch's concurrence doesn't add more except to call out both the dissenters and the liberal wing for their hypocrisy, and especially to roast Thomas.

Hardly incomprehensible, but I totally agree that there isn't now a clear marker of whether future arguments that hinge on MJD will stand or not.

Gorsuch's concurrence doesn't add more except to call out both the dissenters and the liberal wing for their hypocrisy, and especially to roast Thomas.

I think Gorsuch's concurrence is going to be the most-cited part of this case going forward simply because he finally takes the court to task for the MQD and actually engages with it in a meaningful and internally consistent way. At the very least it's going to spawn a decade of law review articles.

The across the board tariffs are back already, under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. And the per-country tariffs are on their way back. Trump really has learned from his opposition. Just drag out unfavorable decisions, then make a small change and start the process all over again.

This would still leave him with having to pay back some 200 billion dollars, I think.

And nobody would assume that SCOTUS would let get Trump away with his next harebrained tariff scheme, so the money companies pay in tariffs might just be considered a credit extended to the US.

This would still leave him with having to pay back some 200 billion dollars, I think.

No, since SCOTUS didn't say the money had to be refunded, that'll be ANOTHER court case. And he'll probably claim the new tariffs are retroactive, which will be yet another case.

And nobody would assume that SCOTUS would let get Trump away with his next harebrained tariff scheme

All commentators seem to agree the Section 122 tariffs are on solid ground for at least 150 days. After that, Congress has to approve to renew... but Trump could just declare another emergency if they're not, and if anyone objects... well, it's ANOTHER court case.

It's the Star Wars meme.

Now that the Supreme Court got rid of the tariffs, the prices are going to go down!

...the prices are going to go down, right?

It would be... silly to assume that these situations weren't gamed out WELL in advance.

It wouldn't even require coordinating with any of the Justices. Just have three backup plans ready to go, open the appropriate box based on what the decision says.

An LLM could write up a viable alternative with <10 minutes of prompting too, once fed the opinion.

Welcome to the future, kids.

Actually that hits on another thing that's been nagging at me.

I don't think our Justice system is AT ALLLLLLLLLL prepared for handling a deluge of litigation fueled by savvy (key point) attorneys who use LLMs to craft aggressive motions, and draft clever briefs in support, and then if they lose on appeal, find gaps in the decision to keep on doing the thing they wanted to do, but with a different underlying justification.

Supreme Court took a year to make one ruling on the Tariff issue. The Administration hops through the gaps left in said decision. If it takes another year for any other case to reach them, the Admin will presumably hop through the gaps in the next decision too.

I will bring up an old suggestion I've made before: Train up 9 LLMs on the writings of the most famous SCOTUS Justices in our history, selecting for some ideological diversity... then let them rule on cases.

It is unclear to me how the existence of LLMs creates or exacerbates this problem when,

a) the current amount of legal writing vastly exceeds the amount which will ever be appealed, and probably exceeds by one hundredfold the amount which will ever reach the Supreme Court

b) lawyers already have a tremendous amount of incentive to find and close/open gaps in arguments or decisions, and draft clever briefs

c) there is an upper limit to how clever or insightful a slurry of writing can be, given that it still has to be relatable to the people reading it (unless you're venturing far into Sapir-Whorf theory) and grounded in their ideas or principles. I am not skeptical that in (3/5/10/40) years a good LLM or similar machine will be able to, for example, take 20 terabytes of code or data and do brilliant and useful and efficient things to it - but I don't think there are 25 legitimate and continually-deepening modes of analyzing the effect the 1973 fisheries act has on some relevant constitutional or administrative law/principle that would require responses by the SC.

the current amount of legal writing vastly exceeds the amount which will ever be appealed, and probably exceeds by one hundredfold the amount which will ever reach the Supreme Court

Yes, this is why SCOTUS has a ton of informal and formal criteria for selecting which cases are worth their time to hear.

But it seems obvious to me that there was a hard bottleneck on how quickly litigants can react to new caselaw and that Courts intentionally avoid making drastic rulings that cause sweeping changes so any given court decision is going to have gaps in it which they will likewise be slow to 'plug.'

I suspect now its as easy as "read this Appellate decision and find me six possible loopholes or procedural methods to delay its implementation to achieve my client's goals, make sure to check the entire corpus of Law Journal Articles for creative arguments or possible alternative interpretations of existing law. Make no mistakes."

(and I'm leaving aside the issue of JUDGES using LLMs to find and create bases for favorable rulings)

There gonna start just one strike your out disbarment for LLM usage they really don’t have a choice for a lot of reasons

I could imagine adding CivPro rules that discourage wanton LLM use. I don't see how they effectively enforce them.

hallucination appears in your brief = disbarment

I suspect now its as easy as "read this Appellate decision and find me six possible loopholes or procedural methods to delay its implementation to achieve my client's goals, make sure to check the entire corpus of Law Journal Articles for creative arguments or possible alternative interpretations of existing law. Make no mistakes."

I don't know that this is a big improvement over Westlaw, at the societal level. At the level of an individual lawyer, maybe, but bigshot appellate firms have a lot of legal hours to noodle on these problems and clients who will pay for those hours.

And my impression is litigants react to changes in caselaw very quickly. If SCOTUS makes a major decision, interested litigators will move very rapidly to bring cases under that new decision. Look at how many shots gun rights groups have taken at SCOTUS recently.

If SCOTUS makes a major decision, interested litigators will move very rapidly to bring cases under that new decision. Look at how many shots gun rights groups have taken at SCOTUS recently.

I don't disagree with this overall, but I want to make it clear that I think they'll be even faster.

Bruen was handed down in 2022 and it took a couple years for states to get really creative rules and rulings on the books... and of course SCOTUS has been agonizingly slow to address these matters.

I'm suggesting that in this new world, SCOTUS could hand down a decision, and by the next week various state legislatures could be passing bills that are competently written specifically to thwart/loophole those decisions.

So my definition of "reacts very quickly" assumes speedier action due to LLM assistance.

I'm suggesting that in this new world, SCOTUS could hand down a decision, and by the next week various state legislatures could be passing bills that are competently written specifically to thwart/loophole those decisions.

Are you sure this hasn't already happened? Trigger laws already exist, which accomplish the same thing in substance.

Either way, it seems to me that the bottleneck now is mostly the legislative schedule and the court's hearing schedule. If legislatures and courts use LLMs to speed things up (far-out now but not impossible), I could see real gains being made to the speed there the entire cycle.

I guess the logical end-point of this is multi-agent negotiation between the LLM representatives of the state, the legislature, the courts, and various interest groups, all negotiating, passing, and striking down new laws millions of times a year. Humans might not notice this, of course, since at this point the laws might mostly bind the LLMs...

(Hope this isn't a repost, looks like my first comment got eaten by the cyber gremlins!)

More comments

In a society as litigious as the US, the slowness of the courts is effectively an Omnicausal problem at this point. Not just in taking a year to decide on tariffs for the SC, but even state and local courts are swamped.

Why do more than 95% of criminal cases end up in plea bargains? Because the court simply can not handle actually taking them to trial unless you wanted a trial set long after everyone involved is dead. And plea bargains suck, they punish innocents (who can't afford to wait the absurd amount of time for an actual trial) and let guilty criminals get away with lesser punishments (because the terms have to be really generous compared to what a trial sentence may end up in). Seriously look at almost any case where someone got off absurdly light for a crime and you'll also notice that they almost always pled guilty in it because again, over 95% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain of some kind.

The clogging up of immigration courts is one major part of the crisis we had, asylum applicants could take years an average of four for a case to be resolved. Keeping them locked up for that whole time is wasteful and inhumane, but letting them out creates an obvious exploit.

How about other issues like say, a landlord wanting to evict a bad tenant? A hearing in some of the busier counties could take you a few months. Want to build an energy transmission line? Have fun spending more than a decade on various legal challenges. You might be a parent unable to see your child for more than a year because of custody disputes being unsettled.

This ain't just a US problem either, Canada and the UK apparently have it even worse with the backlogs in some areas. It didn't use to be this bad so clearly it's possible for a functional court system to actually go at a timely manner, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is causing this issue and how to fix it.

IANAL but it seems to me that a big part of the problem comes from common law resting on case law and therefore requiring that complex cases are ground out to a satisfactory conclusion. There seems to be no concept of ‘it would take a year to solve this complex case and all the claims and counter claims but you’ve got a week so do whatever you can’.

Also it feels that the nature of case law means that over any reasonable amount of time there will naturally be erosion of the original intent.

Which due to sheer population, judge polarization and information sharing circa today is going faster and faster

It could genuinely be fixed (in the short term) by spending a LOT more money on the court system to get competent judges, clerks, assistants to process cases in a timely fashion, update systems to modern tech to increase throughput, and Marshall necessary resources to enforce the court's rulings too.

But Courts are inherently a cost center for any government. Indeed, in Florida, the statutory trend is to draft laws to discourage litigation at every turn. Requiring extra procedural hoops before filing is permitted, forcing pre-suit negotiations or even mediation, and now they're starting to restrict the ability to collect attorney's fees.

No government that I know of actively expands its judicial resources to scale with its economy or population.

There are some issues that have to funnel through the courts (Probate, the disposition of a dead person's stuff, being one of them), but beyond that, in their function as dispute resolver can still 'work' by making the process as ardurous and unpleasant as necessary for the parties to consider cooperation the strictly superior option.

My REAL suspicion is that AI will get good enough at predicting case outcomes that it will discourage active litigation/encourage quick settlements, as you can go to Claude, Grok, and Gemini and feed it all the facts and evidence and it can spit out "75% chance of favorable verdict, likely awards range from $150,000 to $300,000, and it will probably take 19-24 months to reach trial."

And if the other party finds this credible, the incentive for solving things cooperatively become obvious.

Didn't the Qing make a law that reporting a crime to the police, where the accused was found not guilty, would be punished more severely than the actual crime, so as to discourage undue involvement of the legal system in people's affairs? Or am I remembering wrong?

I don't know that LLMs really could add much since any lawyer would be able to give you a ballpark on likelihood of success and the award range. The thing with civil litigation is that discovery can take time, and high value cases with good evidence will always be given priority. For the trial docket I work off of, a case can go from filing to trial in under a year, and most cases don't take much longer. And this is a relatively complex type of litigation where that's already pushing it as far as having enough time to develop the case is concerned. But cases that are if lower value or have evidentiary issues can take a decade to resolve, not through any fault of the court but because the attorney responsible isn't motivated to list them for trial until the ducks are all in a row.

not through any fault of the court but because the attorney responsible isn't motivated to list them for trial until the ducks are all in a row

I mean, I'd just point out that this answers your initial thought:

I don't know that LLMs really could add much since any lawyer would be able to give you a ballpark on likelihood of success and the award range.

Any lawyer can give you the ballpark, but the LLM now makes it 'viable' to file and prosecute a suit as long as it is expected to be barely EV positive.

The cost of getting 'all ducks in a row' should go down substantially.

By getting all your ducks in a row I'm not referring to anything that an LLM can accomplish. I'm referring to things like making sure you have witnesses lined up for deposition and things of that nature, since you don't want to wait until the start of discovery before looking for them. This is mostly and issue in wrongful death cases, where you can't just depose the plaintiff to get the evidence and often need to track down third parties. Whether or not you can get a case off the trial list after discovery closes depends on the custom of the attorneys in the area in which you're practicing. There's one firm I deal with a lot that has a habit of listing cases they don't do anything with and having them removed (some trial terms my caseload is disproportionately made up of these perennials that never seem to go off, including one from 2013 with a crazy plaintiff who refuses to settle anything and whose attorney keeps listing it and removing it to keep the guy happy, or so I assume); I never oppose these motions, because I (and my clients) prefer to maintain a good working relationship with the firm over forcing the issue to get a single case dismissed. Other practice areas aren't so cordial and laid back, and plaintiff's attorneys aren't going to list cases unless they're sure they'll actually go off.

My REAL suspicion is that AI will get good enough at predicting case outcomes that it will discourage active litigation/encourage quick settlements, as you can go to Claude, Grok, and Gemini and feed it all the facts and evidence and it can spit out "75% chance of favorable verdict, likely awards range from $150,000 to $300,000, and it will probably take 19-24 months to reach trial."

As I understand it a lot of commercial / divorce / etc outcomes are already predictable and it doesn’t make people less litigious.

SORT OF.

In the more emotionally-driven areas (so yeah, outside of commercial), like divorce and contested probate, sometimes people genuinely just want to inflict the process as a punishment on the other side... and sometimes emotions flip and what looked like a surefire drawn-out fight gets resolved in a weekend.

Lawyers are still bound to do what their clients want, after all. But if a lawyer can pull up their AI Case Analyzer and say "Look, its not just my opinion, the Computer is telling you that even if we drag this out for two years your best outcome is an additional 10-15k over the offer that's on the table now" maybe we avoid some conflict.

(one can hope that clients can see reason, this might be a fool's bet)

It will be interesting to see if people view the LLM as more authoritative, though. Lawyers will take losing cases if they are going to be paid for them.

Especially at the smaller scale where there's a ton of emotive considerations and people are infrequently engaged with the legal system.

I don't think justice systems in general are ready for this. Indeed, they're already vulnerable to this now, and they depend on other social institutions to carry out their will (just as they always have done- courts don't actually have legions).

That said, what prejudice (and the dismissal thereupon) is also happens to be defined by the court. As is who even takes appeals.

[At least it's an argument for having fewer laws- but then, that might not be advantageous since "just ban everything and never hear any appeals because fuck you lolol" is already what happens most of the time in 2A cases and doesn't even require dismissing cases like that.]

Another win for the free market, another win for the free people.

Kavanaugh also warned that “[i]n the meantime, however, the interim effects of the Court’s decision could be substantial. The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.”

I seem to recall the argument for why they didn't need to grant a stay on the tariffs was that resolving them after would be easy. (Edit, yes they did claim this and they were very certain about it too) Did something change in the meantime or was that claim a lie? But even more so the argument doesn't make much sense to begin with "they shouldn't have to return stolen money because it would be difficult" just encourages stealing more money.

There is a simple solution to this, President Trump could try to get his tariff agenda passed in Congress. Unfortunately for him we all know this won't happen in part because many of his fellow Republicans don't support it and won't put their name to a pro tariff bill because the people do not want it

This is a win for American democracy, where a single election does not give full permission for every unpopular idiosyncracy and niche policy a politician wants. They must convince the others. A point that justice Gorsuch makes himself

President Trump could try to get his tariff agenda passed in Congress.

Even if unnecessary legally, this would be preferable because it would curb the enthusiasm of other governments to try to wait it out for a few years.

This is a win for American democracy

Really more of a win for checks and balances on democracy. These tariffs are a perfect example of how democracy run amok can be destructive. Having the supreme court in place can save the people from their own bad decisions.

I seem to recall the argument for why they didn't need to grant a stay on the tariffs was that resolving them after would be easy. Did something change in the meantime or was that claim a lie? But even more so the argument doesn't make much sense to begin with "they shouldn't have to return stolen money because it would be difficult" just encourages stealing more money.

Not having stopped this with a temporary injunction is a total fuckup on the SCOTUS part.

And of course any tariffs paid will have to be paid back, but the damage to the economy is already done.

There is a simple solution to this, President Trump could try to get his tariff agenda passed in Congress.

Of course, even that would not save him from having to pay back the tariffs people already paid, because anything else would be retroactive.

Of course, even that would not save him from having to pay back the tariffs people already paid, because anything else would be retroactive.

Theres no rule against retroactive tariffs and taxes, only retroactive criminal law.

Okay, not a constitutional rule.

But I suppose it might actually be against WTO rules.

Basically, any country which makes use of retroactive tariffs is not someone you would want to do business with. Nothing stopping them from nationalizing your company by retroactively applying a 500% tariff on all of the goods you have been importing in the last decade. This would not be much better or worse than just deciding to nationalize your company outright. Investors and creditors tend to hate such things.

Now, in this particular case, the retroactive tariffs would merely replace the unconstitutional ones. So one might frame it as "dear Mr foreigner, we had a minor judicial hiccup with the precise process of how to enact the tariffs, but don't worry, the amount on your bill is still correct".

Of course, the situation might be more accurately described as a chief of police deciding that local shops will need to pay for protection, and when a court says that this is not actually how things work, the city council instead tries to reframe the protection money as taxes so that they can keep it.

But if Congress will not authorize Trump's tariffs (which I believe and hope they won't), then all of that is moot.

A good indicator would be what a claim against the US gov for bogus tariffs is worth on the market at the moment, but it seems that these are not publically traded.

Sure in general. In this case where a retroactive tariff is merely enforcing an original tariff that was rescinded for technical legal reason seems different.

Basically, any country which makes use of retroactive tariffs is not someone you would want to do business with. Nothing stopping them from nationalizing your company by retroactively applying a 500% tariff on all of the goods you have been importing in the last decade.

And yet companies keep doing business with countries which are known to outright nationalize companies. It would be nice if doing shit like that had the high cost you might expect, but they don't.

Especially in the case where the retroactive change is meant to fix an issue with an existing tax. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/512/26

a win for American democracy

And specifically an advantage of it over Westminster systems, where the Executive is just the party with the most votes in the Legislature (even if a minority government) and actually have the power to impose retaliatory tariffs at the snap of their fingers.

I don't think a parliamentary system would typically find itself in this particular mess, where the executive wants to do something that he could not possibly find the votes for in the legislature.

That still often requires some amount of buy-in within the coalition (or additional support from outside when people within disagree) instead of just a single person getting to impose their personal will on every policy.

Another win for the free market, another win for the free people.

Another moment of absolute chaos, in which half-assed policies make it basically impossible for the hypothetical manufacturer looking to plan to produce goods in America to plan ahead and invest.

Luckily things are looking to be a bit more stable now at least. Admins typically put their best foot forward legally speaking so this one getting struck down greatly increases the likelyhood of other tariff arguments in the same manner, which we can assume are weaker than the best foot forward, getting struck too.

Trump might be able to find a more watered down version that does work, the same way Biden found a watered down form of student loan forgiveness but just the same it'll be watered down.

Speaking of chaos though, the admin is definitely going to try to make refunds a mess. And unfortunately even if they do it properly many Americans may now end up effectively double taxed due to paying tariff surcharges passed on by the importers and paying the refunds back for the illegal tariffs to those same importers. A lot of it going to Howard Lutnick's son whose firm has been buying up tariff refund privileges in exchange for immediate cash to handle the additional costs his father's actions helped cause!

Luckily things are looking to be a bit more stable now at least.

Not bloody likely. Trump is going to threaten to put tariffs on again, making very unclear when things will be settled.

Relatively more stable, at least until he starts arguing that him not liking someone's tone of voice is also a national security issue needing tariffs IG. But point being now that businesses can expect the more obviously BS tariffs to be struck down (even if it takes a while) it allows for a little bit more predictability.

Still absurdly chaotic, but 80 chaos is better than 100 chaos.

The Court also opened an entirely different set of worms, as it did not adjudicate if the tariff revenue that had been collected has to be refunded, or even who a refund would go to. I predict great long !lawyer bills~ debates over how, if tariffs are taxes on Americans, which Americans are owed the tax refunds.

I feel like the only practicable way to do this is to pay refunds to the people who paid the tariffs to the government. In some sense increased costs to consumers were caused by the tariffs but good luck proving that to a court (absent some kind of contractual provision for the scenario).

While I will defer to others for the legalese analysis, I am also interested in what sorts of quid-pro-quos the internal court politics might have had for Roberts to have led the majority here. There are a host of cases on the docket this term, with politically-relevant issues ranging from mail-in ballots to redistricting. While I think the tariffs case was outside any typical 'we accept this case in exchange for accepting that case' deal over which cases get heard, I will be interested if the administration gets any 'surprise' wins.

In terms of decision authorship the general process is that:

1. If the Chief Justice is in the majority, they decide who authors the opinion of the court.

2. If the Chief Justice is not in the majority, the most senior justice in the majority decides.

I think the justices try to maintain roughly even ratios of opinion authorship so maybe Roberts authoring this one meant foregoing authoring some other one but ultimately he's the one in control over who authors an opinion he's in the majority of. I am skeptical there was any horse trading involved to get to 6 votes either. Gorsuch's concurrence has a length section where he disagrees with the dissent's analysis, which would be enough for 5.

I feel like the only practicable way to do this is to pay refunds to the people who paid the tariffs to the government. In some sense increased costs to consumers were caused by the tariffs but good luck proving that to a court (absent some kind of contractual provision for the scenario).

This is such a nightmare to me, because the company-I-work-for's customers absolutely would expect for me to refund the tariff back to them in return, and that's going to be a full time role to calculate and disburse those funds.

Like most Supreme Court rulings, I think this is entirely correct. I don't have anything against the concept of tariffs per se, but this nonsense about using the Executive to go around the Legislative needs to stop. Congress is supposed to govern, not shrug and let the President do whatever he wants (without even specifically authorizing him to do so).

Ubi enim senatus? For where is the Senate? Now empty… America burns.

Rather pointless to complain about what the legislative branch “should” be doing. If’s a dead body. The country is ruled by the President, the Courts, and the Oligarchy. The legislative branch is irrelevant.

This is the fact of how America functions in practice. I don’t really take the text of the ruling seriously at all. The Justices who struck down the tariffs did so because they thought they were a bad policy, and those who dissented thought they were a good policy.

Worse than that - Kavanaugh (definitely) and Alito/Thomas/Sotomayor/Kagan/Jackson (probably) didn't even vote based on their view of the policy merits of the tariffs - they voted based on their partisan attitude to the President who imposed them.

We can't tell whether Roberts/Gorsuch/Barrett votes based on the law or their policy preferences because both their view on the law and their view on the policy are consistent, being downstream of their establishment libertarianish worldview. Their opinion has the advantage of being short and obviously correct - if you think the Major Questions Doctrine exists at all, this is an easy MQD case.

The Kav dissent is right about one thing - given this President and this Congress, the practical consequences of the decision are going to be that the clownshow gets worse.

Gorsuch calling out everyone except himself and Roberts for hypocrisy on the MQD is also obviously correct and great fun to read, but probably bad judicial behaviour. The Barrett (arguing with Gorsuch about whether the MQD comes from the Constitution or is just common sense, with no impact on the case) and Thomas (responding to an argument about nondelegation that the majority didn't make) concurrences are entirely unnecessary bloviations. The Jackson concurrence is making an important point about the legislative history of IIEPA that none of the other justices reach for reasons that are not clear to me.

Since it's the Winter Olympics, here is my skating scores (out of 6.0) for the various opinions:

  • Roberts (+Gorsuch/Barrett) majority: Technical merit - 5.9 Artistic impression - 5.7
  • Gorsuch concurrence: Technical merit - 5.8 Artistic impression - 6.0
  • Barrett concurrence: Technical merit - 5.5 Artistic impression - 5.5
  • Kagan (+2 other libs) concurrence: Technical merit - 5.5 Artistic impression - 5.8
  • Jackson concurrence: Technical merit - 5.9 (if you believe in using legislative history in statutory interpretation, 4.5 if you don't) Artistic impression - 5.6
  • Thomas dissent: Technical merit - 4.0 Artistic impression - 5.5
  • Kav (+ 2 cons) dissent: Technical merit - 5.7 Artistic impression - 5.6. Particularly impressive given that their theory of the case (that the MQD is real and important and somehow doesn't apply to tariffs) is indefensible.

After reading the whole thing, my first reaction is "typical Gorsuch beast mode." As you said, it was a tremendously fun and interesting read, and he is certainly among the more gifted interlocutors in this crop of justices. The careful but not nitpicking argumentation on display here sits alongside Bostock v. Clayton county in my mind.

I agree that it was a little odd for him to go about repudiating every other opinion, but I think it's telling. With zero evidence at all, I would speculate that he is scared of judicial activism under the Trump administration and wants to get some of his logic on the board so it can be cited later. While it's not binding on its own, I think his choice to rhetorically bludgeon Clarence Thomas was tactful and sets the tone for his brand of textualism to persist. Keeping it to himself would fail to promote his specific reasoning. I'm just glad the Obviously Correct result won out, thanks MQD.

Gorsuch’s opinion will be taught in law schools as setting out the doctrinal elements of MQD. It is a tour de force.

Kavanaugh's issue isn't partisanship, it's that he overweights "disruption" to an even greater extent than Roberts does. We saw this when he agreed that the CDC rent freeze was unconstitutional and allowed it anyway, and we see it here with him complaining about the practical effects of refunds.

And, for an even more overt examples, I'll point to Snope. He previously even written -- in Heller II over a decade before! -- calling for more serious scrutiny of that very class of law. But they were busy that day.

We'll see if he can't punt any further on Monday.

I disagree. Kavanaugh makes a strong argument that given the Nixon tariff, the meaning at the time of the statue would’ve been clearly understood to include tariffs and therefore MQD is not applicable. The fact presidents haven’t used it since is largely irrelevant.

He also points to the historic understanding to again ground the definition to obviously include tariffs. Finally, he makes a compelling point that the majority seems to believe the statue permits a bull elephant in this elephant hole (the ability to prevent any imports from a country) yet the majority believes the statute precludes a baby elephant (ie a tariff). This is of course an inversion of how MQD typically work.

I think the reality is that in the merits of interpreting regulating imports Kavanaugh has the better of it. But I think what really bothers the conservative members of the majority is the statute envisages an emergency. But how could our trade balance—which has existed for decades—be an emergency?

So while that part wasn’t really reviewable I think the majority imprecisely used MQD to say no way even if doctrinally Kavanaugh has the better of it.

I disagree. Kavanaugh makes a strong argument that given the Nixon tariff, the meaning at the time of the statue would’ve been clearly understood to include tariffs and therefore MQD is not applicable. The fact presidents haven’t used it since is largely irrelevant.

And Jackson makes a stronger argument based on the Congressional Record that the statute was not, in fact, clearly understood to include tariffs at the time it was passed. I am a textualist, and I would prefer to interpret IIEPA according to its text (which makes this an easy MQD case). But if we want to know what Congress thought IIEPA meant, they told us.

I don’t found her analysis compelling at all (putting aside whether legislative history ought to even be considered).

It seems to me that regulating (the word used in the legislative history) easily can include tariffs. Moreover, I think she is wrong that tariffs goal is to raise revenue. It is impart revenue raising but many defenses of tariffs are not about revenue raising (eg protecting nascent industries, protecting strategically important industries). Tariffs categorically could easily fit within the legislative history.

But me finding a Jackson opinion lacking is like me finding steak delicious. It’s expected.

Finally, he makes a compelling point that the majority seems to believe the statue permits a bull elephant in this elephant hole (the ability to prevent any imports from a country) yet the majority believes the statute precludes a baby elephant (ie a tariff). This is of course an inversion of how MQD typically work.

I don't think this point is that compelling. A power that can be controlled precisely is greater than a power that can only be used completely or not at all, so a tariff that can go from 0 to a percentage that is indistinguishable than a ban is actually a greater power than to merely ban or not.

Alex Tabarrok just made this point as well, and he has useful analogies to illustrate it. I'm not 100% it's entirely correct, but it's definitely plausible and a point that is surely to be bouncing around in my mind for a while.

But the problem for Alex is that the majority also concedes that quotas are also permitted. So contra Alex the statute isn’t an all or nothing approach. The president can per the majority say “instead of the importing 100 widgets we will only permit 80 widgets.”

That is, quotas allow the more fine tuning that Alex claims Congress was trying to preclude since it was designed for an emergency.

That's fair enough as a concern for this case, but I would say that it is a different argument from the way that 'the lesser power is included in the greater' is typically invoked. His formulation shows that, perhaps, more granularity is not even a 'lesser' power. It's still not completely conceptually clear to me, but there's something to be said for a more careful analysis.

What you seem to be saying is that, even if one supposes that the granular tariff power is, in some sense, a 'greater' power than shutting off trade entirely, there is still a sort of equivalent 'greater' power in quotas. Again, this is plausible, and I'd want more conceptual exploration of how law should treat cases where there seem to be roughly equivalent, but (I don't know what to call it) "different track" powers.

But the majority also allows quotas (so not 0-100). Functionally, a quota functions somewhat similar to a tariff in economic impact.

Also the bull elephant isn't in a hole of any kind - it is on the face of the statute. The statute grants a number of powers expressly, including to prohibit trade. The Kavanaugh interpretation is that all of these, plus tariffs, are implicit in "regulate".

We can argue about whether it is rational to delegate a power to ban trade without also delegating the lesser power to tariff it. (In wartime, which was the original context of the legislation, it obviously is.) But if you interpret the text of IIEPA as limited to its express words (under the MQD or any other canon of strict construction) then that is what Congress did.

You misunderstand the metaphor.

The origination of the phrase is that Congress doesn’t hide elephants in mole holes (or anthills — I forget the specifics). The concept was the statue prima facie gave the authority (ie the hole) but the nature of bill was such that Congress clearly wasn’t intended to give a massive power to the executive.

Inverting the phrase (i.e., elephant in an elephant hole) is simply saying yes there was a massive grant of authority (ie the hole) but obviously Congress was intended to give the grant (thus the hole being elephant sized; not mole sized).

It is thus curious that Congress gave this large power but failed to include a smaller power within the catch all. Note this is the opposite of how MQD typically works.

Re wartime you have it exactly backwards. Tariffs become more important in wartime; not less. You are thinking about it in the context of the enemy. But the provision can be used for not just the enemy but third parties. As the executive, you may want to raise revenue, keep a supply of a vital good going while encouraging domestic production, or utilize the threat of tariffs to pressure third parties. It’s obviously a key wartime power and in the event of an actual war I believe SCOtUS would rule 9-0 there is a power to tariff.

Again, I think the real problem here is that there clearly was no emergency and thus Trump was abusing the statute. I think BK is correct that the statute envisages a tariff but am sympathetic to the majority that Congress was not envisioning its use in the way Trump has used the statute.

Scalia is the author of the original quote:

Congress, we have held, does not alter the fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague terms or ancillary provisions-it does not, one might say, hide elephants in mouseholes.

Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, Inc., 531 U.S. 457 (2001)

The question is how do we get there from where we are. Congress is supposed to govern but is some combination of unwilling/unable to do so.

Honestly? More money in politics. If Congressional and Senate seats were actually sold to the highest bidder I think you'd get a higher quality of official than you have now.

If that seat cost fifty million dollars then you can be sure that whoever is in it will be both willing and able to govern. And they would be willing to compromise with the other side because they're prioritizing using the office they spent money on to pass legislation, not using the office they won in a popularity contest to make money by insider trading.

Although, I think you could probably do better than Simony as a system of government. It does have certain obvious drawbacks. I'm just saying the bar is currently on the floor.

Use random appointments to congress. Most people aren't deranged ideologues; deranged in other ways, yes, but not particularly ideological. We can replace our problems with different ones.

Well, at the least the official salary could be $1-2M.

As it is, senators make less on paper than some random car dealership owner or Silicon Valley engineers.

A larger House actually cuts against the Simony argument. Right now a serious House campaign costs $2-5 million minimum, which means you need a party machine, donor network, or both. That's the uniparty/duopoly's real structural advantage.

Scale from 435 to even 1,568 seats (1910 ratio) and the average district drops to 211,000 people. Push it to 3,344 seats (1850 ratio - 99,111 people) and you'd have the largest representative body on earth, a distinction currently held by China. You'd get more money in politics overall, but far less per seat. Suddenly a small business owner or local pastor can run a credible campaign for $300k. You don't need the apparatus anymore. Third parties and independents already outperform at the local level precisely because the electorate is small enough that you can actually know your constituents.

Bigger House, cheaper seats, less uniparty dependency. The opposite of Simony and probably more functional. The bar is on the floor but making seats more expensive doesn't raise it, it just guarantees the same people keep buying them.

Honestly? More money in politics. If Congressional and Senate seats were actually sold to the highest bidder I think you'd get a higher quality of official than you have now.

If I'm Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan just bought a dozen House seats, I am going to put a star legislator in one of them (who I can then get onto important committees and represent my interests) and 11 donkeys who will vote as instructed in the others. When seats in the British House of Commons could be bought, people didn't buy them planning to sit in them themselves. Some of the nominated MPs were younger sons from aristocratic families where the Lord owned the seat (and couldn't sit in it because peers were disqualified from the Commons), and some of those were exceptionally able, but most went to uninspired placemen who could be trusted not to think for themselves.

One talented leader and nine blindly obedient followers tend to function better than ten talented leaders leading in different directions. I still think it would result in a higher quality of official.


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