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Last week anime culture war news was rather unwelcome here, so it is time for another.
The topic of last week xitter storm was anime.
Is anime weird? If so, what should parents do to make sure their kids never watch anime and become normal members of the crowd?
Fitting with the crowd as end in itself was always seen as moral duty in small c conservative tradition, nothing unusual with it.
It is clear who the bad people are and why they are bad.
Nevertheless, massive arguments for and against torn xitter asunder and joined with even bigger arguments whether normie existence in 2020's North America is really something you should strive for or whether much better, happier, nobler and more fulfilling life can be found elsewhere.
If you examine all parts of normie life, from such basics as school, regular employnment, transportation or house building and find this is worthwhile prize, and then find out that your kid is not normie, you should indeed tell them:
"For your whole life, you will live as undercover agent in enemy territory. As Otto von Stierlitz had to pass as Nazi, you must learn how to pass as normie."
(using Eastern archetype here, in Western culture heroes are men of action facing adversity directly and challenging enemy in honorable combat, not sus characters skulking in shadows)
But parents are usually extremely bad judges what is "weird" and what isn't. They remember what was normal and what wasn't in high school in early 1980's, and are unable to comprehend that times are changing. And this is the problem barely noticed, the problem that makes this whole discourse waste of time.
Whenever I start to worry that I'm not a very successful or well-adjusted person, I just attend an anime screening at my local cinema and I'm like "actually, you know what? I'm fine."
Last night they were showing Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg, which neither I nor my fiancée had seen, but she wanted to go. The movie was incomprehensible nonsense (disappointing as I thoroughly enjoyed both Ghost in the Shell films), but the real validation came from seeing the other people in attendance. The obese; the gender-confused male attending solo, with breasts that I honestly couldn't tell if they were the product of HRT, gynaecomastia, or both; the man wearing makeup and a headscarf like fucking Professor Quirrell; the couple who smelled so bad we moved a few seats further down the aisle; and of course a gender-confused female (I think?) with a cane she obviously didn't need and which she wasn't even pretending to rely on for support.* These people truly are the dregs of society: even the junkies I walked past on my way home seemed to be having more fun. At least none of these nerds literally yelled at the screen, as I had the displeasure of witnessing during a screening of Akira some years back.
I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". "Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds". But believe me when I say that there is no way I could possibly be mistaken for one of these individuals, if for no better reason than because I haven't needed to be reminded to bathe since secondary school. (Seriously, what is it with nerds and smelling bad? Why is it such a universal thing in any country where nerds are to be found? Do they just not notice?)
In late prepubescence and early adolescence I dabbled in anime and manga, watching the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell and Akira and reading their respective source comics. Watching this parade of overweight smelly malcontents, congenitally incapable, to a man, of making eye contact for more than a second at a time – it made me feel enormously grateful that my interest in these things never progressed beyond mere curiosity. Some of the people in attendance even looked like they could have turned out perfectly normally (not to mention more successful and subjectively happier) had they not allowed their interest in nerdy things to become an entire lifestyle, had their parents not indulged their every idiosyncrasy and passing whim, had they been bullied a little more rather than less (s/o to @100ProofTollBooth). There but for the grace of God go I.
*This was the second female person carrying a meticulously decorated cane as a fashion statement I saw that day. Yet another thing I do not understand about the woke: they'll be the first to tell you that a white girl putting her hair in cornrows is cultural appropriation and utterly inexcusable, but trying to pass oneself off as physically disabled is A-OK?
Me attending any major fandom convention.
I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.
Part of me is like "well don't deny a person their escapism" but there's also another thinking "you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."
Ultimately it makes me do some self-assessment: "Do I want to walk down a path that could end up being THAT type of person?" And often has me actively deciding to limit my intake of the media in question. Kinda like seeing an alcoholic passed out on a bench, his pants soaked with urine, and deciding "I'll just skip the bar tonight."
It goes towards my other theory that many subcultures (even outside explicit 'nerd' hobbies) end up driving away 'attractive' and 'normal' people because they are usually governed by the most obsessive types, who have the most time on their hands, and often have NOTHING ELSE TO DO but gatekeep and bully and since this is the one tiny bit of power they have, they will drive away any possible competitors.
I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to. Of course there must be people with nerdy interests who still maintain normal standards of grooming and bodily hygiene, but once the people who don't reach a critical mass within a club/DnD group/whatever, then sooner or later the people who do will start to drift away, either from finding the smelly dudes personally repulsive or simply not wanting to be seen with them. The process is recursive and accelerative, as with every non-smelly dude who leaves, the smelliness of the average member increases, making the group increasingly unattractive to prospective members: you might join a club with ten clean-cut guys and one smelly one, but the only people who'll join a club in which the smelly outnumber the non-smelly are – you guessed it! – smelly people. Before long, the only people left in this group are smelly unemployable losers who've never felt a woman's touch, while the high-functioning nerds have long since departed for greener pastures. See also Scott's Living by the Sword and Neutral vs. Conservative, which describe a similar dynamic. Any community which conspicuously advertises that its members aren't expected to adhere to the standards of behaviour expected of society in general will inevitably find itself overrun and colonised by some of the most dysfunctional people society has to offer.
Weirdly enough, this seems like a great argument in favour of broken windows policing. You might think that it isn't fair to throw someone in jail over a relatively minor crime, and if you're doing that across the board, maybe it's better to simply not bothering enforcing these "minor" laws. But every time you fail to enforce a "minor" law, you're making the environment in question less attractive to the law-abiding citizens, who will eventually get fed up and leave. And once word gets round that $Jurisdiction isn't seriously enforcing minor laws, inevitably it'll start to attract people who habitually violate said laws: and people who habitually violate minor laws tend also to violate major ones, on a long enough timescale.
Take it one step further, and it's a great argument against immigration (or granting asylum) from dysfunctional countries.
The trouble is, the one study it was based on was fraudulent. https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/#kelly-2025-section
Yeah, I've been meaning to take on the (LLM-assisted) project of reviewing every citation in The Sequences to see which ones are bunk. The Sequences were written before the replication crisis (was named/noted) and so much of EW's work is based on cognitive and other social science. I'm starting to suspect that a majority of the science behind his arguments is just BS.
I'm tempted to say "But the core of what he wrote is still so true and valuable!" It sounds like special pleading. If it works just as well with all the science, then why was all the science there in the first place?
It's a modus ponens/modus tollens thing. In the conclusion to the book Opening Skinner's Box, which I mentioned downthread, the author observes that, a hundred years in, psychologists still struggle to define what psychology is exactly, and if it's even meaningfully distinct from philosophy in any way. Sometimes when you ask psychologists to name discoveries their field has given us, they'll list off a handful that will sound quite impressive and which haven't fallen afoul of the replication crisis. But you quickly realise that when they say "we discovered X", they really mean "we gave a fancy scientific-sounding name to an observation about human nature which long predates our field". People had been talking about the concept of confirmation bias millennia before some academic slapped that label on it (Ctrl-F "Thucydides"). They didn't "discover" shit. To paraphrase Franklin, the findings of psychology are both true and original to it – but the parts that are true are not original to it, and the parts that are original to it are not true.
Eliezer wanted STEMlords to get onboard with his project, so he had to present the Sequences like they were a work of science, with lots of citations and superscript numbers and so on. But really, they're philosophy, and philosophers by their very nature does not demean themselves by justifying their opinions with sources and citations, the way that commoners have to. It would be cool to see a new edition of the Sequences, but purged of any pretension of being anything other than philosophy.
I was a psych major (well, double-major, I also did pre-law) and I ultimately think I want a refund on the psych part.
Psych really does have an identity crisis insofar as it tries to present as this grand theory of how the structure of the human brain maps to all the observed behaviors from the individual level all the way up to the, arguably, nation-state level, and thus someone who has mastered the science of psychology should be pretty good at predicting human behavior (not perfect!) in the same way someone who has mastered meteorology should be pretty good at predicting the weather.
But there's gaping holes in said theory at the very core, and it gets rattier and more tattered as the scale increases. "Social Psychology" regarding groups of people is like 90% woo.
Some areas like developmental psych (which has done a pretty good job at categorizing human development stages) and cognitive psych (which actually does succeed at mapping the human brain to human behaviors) are actually useful at understanding the world, so I argue work as 'sciences.'
And then you can plug in some neuroscience and it FEELS like you're gaining a deep understanding of how human decisionmaking and actions work. But what can you DO with that purported understanding?
The big condemnation of the field, leaving aside the replication crisis, is the failure to show results from applied clinical psychology. Most forms of therapy and 'mental illness' treatment just don't really work, at least not at effecting permanent 'fixes.' Scott used to talk about this quite a bit. Psychiatrists/therapists might be able to help a patient address one area of their dysfunction for a short period of time. True 'healing' is almost nonexistent.
If the application of your science to real life doesn't produce tangible results, its a sign that its been built on foundations of questionable value.
One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.
Operant conditioning also works, although perhaps less effectively in humans than you'd expect. Its good to have some study of the unsurprising fact that "humans respond to incentives!"
But you have to be very exacting and apply some serious skepticism to pull out the useful parts of psych from the whole edifice, which is why the field as a whole is rotten. It hasn't reckoned with its own shortcomings and expelled the failed ideas.
And, of course, it likes to cover up one of its most patently useful and robust findings of the field: IQ testing.
You wanna know what happens to psychology discoveries that actually work at changing behavior? They become marketing.
Except when it doesn’t, of course. I have a phobia of wasps (and by adjacency bees because they look so similar but consider bumblebess to be harmless because their colors and flight are immediately distinguishable). While researching wasp traps it wasn’t hard at all to find many accounts of people who had gone through exposure therapy without any improvement. So YMMV.
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You have to be very cautious about this, it's mostly an exaggerated self-deprecating meme - large subfields of psychiatry and psychology work great.
Criticisms are often stemming from narrow areas such as SLS (shit life syndrome) driven depression and through exaggerated posting by a heavily loud population of patients with serious mental illness and Anosognosia.
For instance medications work great for the traditional serious mental illness - Schizophrenia and related disorders and Bipolar. It helps that these are more directly biochemically mediated. Now patients relapse but it's usually through poor choices (stopping medication, drugs).
A more restrictive society does not have that problem. To some extent the other conditions have the same problem. If the treatment for your depression is to get off your ass and to stop smoking weed as much as it is taking an SSRI, then a society that doesn't keep you away from weed isn't going to be able to do shit.
Much of mental illness is as much a political and ethical problem as it is a treatment problem.
Even with the area where what you are saying is more true (the classic "SSRIs don't really do shit for depression and anxiety" critique) has a lot of nuance.
For example SSRIs are one of the worst treatment for depression. They are first line because they don't have side effects like "eat a certain type of cheese and die" or the image problem of ECT.
Scott likely writes about this less because he finds that the medications and treatment do actually help, and as a heterodox nerdy person he likely had a lot of exposure to people with personality disorders being treated with medication and with mild symptoms. Both types of people medicine doesn't have much to offer.
As your clinical practice expands you see stuff work and less marginal pathology.
The vast majority of doctors in the vast majority of specialities have consulted psych and watched them fairy dust some magic bullshit with a few pills. The average person is going to care about life satisfaction issues and mild to moderate depression and anxiety but that's a small fraction of the morbidity and nearly zero of the mortality.
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Ironically, while we were unable to replicate the result of people persisting their beliefs when they encounter crushing counterevidence among the classically religious, we may succeed in doing so among Rationalists.
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