site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32874 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The 'National Day of Hate' - Anatomy of a Propaganda Hoax

The Dissident-Right Telegramsphere was bemused last month to hear alarmed media reports of a "National Day of Hate" allegedly planned for February 25th. Despite the fact that nobody had heard anything from anyone about such a plan, the story seemed to grow and grow. The episode is recounted in this article, 'National Day of Hate' was ADL hoax. Within the DR sphere it was of course immediately recognized as such. It seems the ADL was the first to spread the claim, and at least one research group also pointed the finger at the ADL. On February 9th:

ADL has been monitoring plans for a day of antisemitic action set to take place nationwide on 2/25. This day may include antisemitic and white supremacist propaganda distributions and banner drops. At this time, ADL has not tracked any direct or specific threats of violence.

The ADL continued to push the story, with Greenblatt tweeting on Feb. 23:

@ADL is closely monitoring the nationwide extremist "Day of Hate" campaign planned for this Saturday. The Jewish community may be the target of vile antisemitic hate, but we shall not be intimidated. Instead, let's celebrate #SabbatOfPeaceNotHate

And with this, the ADL was able to mobilize law enforcement and national security action across the country.

We have been notified that this coming Shabbat, Saturday February 25th, a group of violent extremists are planning to come out and protest against Jewish communities across the country. NYPD Counter-terrorism Bureau has released a statement notifying the Jewish community in NYC of this group's plans. Shmira has been in direct contact with the NYPD 112th and 107th precincts and were reassured that there will be an increased police presence at Synagogues this week. The precincts will be utilizing all necessary means of man power such as, House of Worship auto, counter-terrorism units, precinct sector cars, and auxiliary units who will all be rotating posts at different key locations throughout our neighborhoods.

The allegation trended on Twitter and within the Jewish community. The Israeli ambassador to the US made a tweet that went viral:

How can it be that less than a century after the Holocaust, a Neo-Nazi group in the U.S. calls for a National Day of Hate against the Jews - and there’s no uproar? Have we learned nothing? Have we forgotten that words lead to actions? I pray for a peaceful Shabbat for everyone.

The story made the rounds among various blue checkmarks:

There’s a day of hate planned against Jews this coming Shabbat. So being an American Jew in 2023 is choosing between 1) taking my kids to pray, anxiously looking at the exits worried about their safety or 2) staying home and letting the anti-Semites define my Jewishness.

And an interesting reply from another blue checkmark to that tweet provides an interesting tidbit of information:

We are locked and loaded in my shul. There is training available specifically for shuls. There are also homeland security grants for guards.

Related to my bolded emphasis above, on February 23rd the ADL tweeted:

When neo-Nazis threaten the Jewish community with a National “Day of Hate,” we respond with resolve & solidarity. Celebrate a #ShabbatOfPeaceNotHate this weekend & let everyone know we won't be intimidated. Retweet this & sign our ADL call for action now

The call for action:

Earlier this week, the Jewish community learned of an attempt by white supremacist groups to organize coordinated antisemitic activity as a National Day of Hate this coming weekend. While ADL is not aware of any specific threats, we know that these groups are hoping for increased antisemitic flier distributions, small protests and graffiti. We know this is frightening; it is completely unacceptable that any faith should be targeted in this way.

We all deserve to feel safe in our communities. To protect the safety of our synagogues, mosques, churches, temples, and other houses of worship or religious gathering places, nonprofits are forced to spend their limited funds on security measures. A federal grant program already exists and is being utilized by nonprofit institutions across the country but Congress must increase funding to meet the rising threats of hate and extremism.

Please join ADL in urging your members of Congress to fully fund the Nonprofit Security Grant Program at $360 million

Following the money, the Nonprofit Security Grant Program appeared to begin in 2016 with a total funding of $20 million. This allocation has grown enormously year over year to a 2023 allocation of $305 million.

Last year I took note of the Biden administration promising Jewish groups more federal funding for security at the White House Menorah lighting. On February 17th, about a week before the 'National Day of Hate', the Biden Administration declared it had followed through on that promise:

In fiscal year 2022, implemented a nearly 40% increase in funding – from $180 million to $250 million – in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), which provides support for increasing the physical security of nonprofit organizations, including houses of worship and other religious affiliated entities. In his fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, President Biden called for $360 million for this key program. The omnibus spending package for fiscal year 2023 funded this program at $304 million.

In its call to action, the ADL is lobbying for the "fully funded" $360 million proposed by the Biden administration. A quick search through Google News of the "Nonprofit Security Grant Program" shows that this lobbying effort extends to over a hundred Jewish organizations:

More than 120 Jewish Federations urged House and Senate Appropriations committees to increase funding for security of faith-based communities...

“As you look to the next fiscal year, we write on behalf of the Jewish community, represented by the Jewish Federations of North America, to urge you to prioritize spending programs to secure faith and other vulnerable communities, fight antisemitism and hate crimes, care for Holocaust survivors and other vulnerable populations, and promote peace and security in the Middle East,” the Jewish leaders wrote in their letter on Thursday.

Both the Biden administration and ADL talk about places of worship and religion in a general sense as being the recipients of these funds, but I would like to see exactly how these funds are allocated. This is an enormous growth in funding- with one observer calling "nonprofits" the "big winners" of FY2023 Homeland Security Grants.

Looking at the FEMA datasets, they only record bulk allocations to state institutions who then allocate the funds to grantees. I would like to do more digging to see if I can find data on one or more states to analyze which nonprofits are receiving these grants. If anyone has experience data sleuthing grant allocations and can point me in the right direction that would be helpful.

While digging through the Google News surrounding the Nonprofit Security Grant Program when writing this post, I came across this article published yesterday in Jewish Currents, which to its credit, independently reaches the same conclusions I have here.

Ben Lorber writes a somewhat odd and revealing subtitle to his article:

In the lead-up to the recent Day of Hate, national Jewish defense organizations—along with media and law enforcement—played right into white supremacists’ strategy.

Lorber tries to say that this hoax somehow works to the benefit of "white supremacists", but how? Lorber writes that it "plays into white supremacists' strategy", but this entire affair has been the strategy of the Jewish lobby, which worked to spectacular effect. The ADL isn't playing into their strategy, it's playing its own strategy and in doing so showing that the 'white supremacists' are right, which are not the same thing.

But that's only something that actually matters if non-Jews are willing to criticize this behavior. As long as this public criticism is restricted by right to "in-house" criticism in Jewish publications, there's no check to this sort of behavior.

If I'm able to find a dataset on which non-profits are receiving these grants, I'll follow-up with additional analysis on the NSGP.

Awesome post. I had done some research but was too lazy to make a detailed post. Can you edit yours to include some of this information?

  • Between 75% and 97% of NSGP funding goes to Jewish groups. source 1 source 2 source 3

  • The group who “found” the extremism threat is Thomas Kaplan’s Counter Extremism Project. Kaplan is a big funder in getting us into war with Iran, funds the most prominent Jewish org 92nd street Y, and he funds (quite racist) ultra orthodox groups.

  • The threat originally came from Crew 319’s Telegram channel. Here Crew 319 talks about how he is just one person (2:30 in?) and has 20 subscribers on telegram.

  • Kaplan’s UANI lobbies to prevent medical goods from going to Iran through a name and shame strategy. Salon says he “is betting on war with Iran”

  • Kaplan has used his power to get academics fired for criticizing Israel’s war crimes in Palestine

  • “Kaplan, 47, regularly hobnobs with some of the most powerful Jewish philanthropists in New York. He and his wife, Daphna Recanati, a member of one of Israel’s wealthiest and best-known families, also support major scholarship programs for arts education at the Y and have given millions to other charitable causes in Israel and the United States. Separately, Kaplan—who wrote a 788-page Oxford dissertation on Malaysia’s geopolitical positioning during the Cold War before, in 1994, opening a firm that prospected silver mines with financial backing from George and Paul Soros”

  • The earliest chatter on the day of hate, after the ADL, was Lakewood-aligned orthodox groups and rabbis

  • In Florida, shortly before the day of hate, a man named Barry Nockowitz walked to a bus station and grabbed a four-year-old child and threw them against a wall. When the police came, he said he was “tired of the anti-semitism” and that he was looking for another child to attack. Barry was actually born Baruch Nockowitz, and he’s a Chabad-aligned Orthodox Jew. Baruch has a YouTube page still up, and on that page he posted a video of a black community leader speaking to a rabbi and talking how Jews and blacks ought to come together to fight a common enemy. Baruch almost certainly heard about the Day of Hate, and it’s likely his assault on the child was motivated by anti-gentile stochastic terrorism.

Some more info: we can be sure Kaplan is the primary funder of CEP because the advisor of his fund sits as the head, as well as a few other employees, and he is the only publicly-known funder. Ultra orthodox groups in NJ are no strangers to massive hoaxes and fraud. A few years ago they were caught doing welfare fraud in the millions and received no jail time, and the famous “cars for kids” commercial fraud is from Lakewood NJ.

very late edit for posterity and neuroticism: The CEP had a huge write up on this which, in addition to the news talking about “telegram channels investigated by the CEP”, make me 100% certain they were chiefly involved. However, I only saved passages from their article, because why would I have to save an archive if I can just google the passage? Welp, the original page that I read was deleted. The original article contained: “The event has been promoted in online channels by the Goyim Defense League (GDL), National Socialist Movement (NSM), Crew 319, and Clockwork Crew […] Crew 319 and Clockwork Crew are known to operate in Iowa (Des Moines) and Southern California, respectively.” This now brings up zero results from the CEP, which sucks because their original article was all about how they were the ones who started the investigation. In fact, it was linked to by the ADL.

Between 75% and 97% of NSGP funding goes to Jewish groups. source 1 source 2 source 3

... U.S. Jewish NGOs to Get 97% of Homeland Security's Defense Grant in 2012

Well that saves me some time, thanks. I strongly suspected that but good to see it confirmed.

Greenblatt has the chutzpah to talk about churches getting these funds in his public statements.

It was absolutely a hoax. The “Islamist parallel” would be a random Islamist with no following making a tweet where he told his followers to distribute pamphlets about how Christians are evil and/or control the world. Such an irrelevant tweet with no views or engagement is utterly mundane on social media. There are threats with more engagement made every day. I don’t even know if this guy is real or a fed but it’s not even possible to find his content except on his irrelevant telegram channel crew_319.

Remember that the threat was to… distribute fliers about how Jews have an outsize influence on media. 🤔

You’re assenting that there is an organized grift to steal government funding. Why do you suppose that there is not an organized grift to pay less taxes, like Phil Knight? The problem with grift is that it tends to take over other aspects of life, too, even making grifts to cheat God’s Law and not just taxes.

What was the threat?

And no, I don't see any reality in which a tweet made by an Islamist with low engagement spirals into this sort of nationwide PR campaign that dovetails with lobbying for millions in Homeland Security grants. That's a hoax full and through. It was obvious to everyone in the DR that there was never such a thing, and as the weeks went by the PR campaign continued even though it was obvious to everyone that such a thing was not happening.

You even have an ambassador from Israel chastising the country for not being more outraged... at nothing. This is a hoax.

Yeah the ‘threat’ that killed 4000 Americans during 9/11.

Yeah the ‘threat’ that killed 4000 Americans during 9/11.

As Scott pointed out loooong ago, this is fewer than the number of Americans who are killed by fridges annually.

9/11 was fake news. Not in the sense that it was fake, but in the sense that it wasn't news. Sure, it's flashy, but 4000 fatalities is, in the grand scheme of things, a nothingburger.

  • -11

As Scott pointed out loooong ago, this is fewer than the number of Americans who are killed by fridges annually.

Not even close. About 10 are killed by a fridge falling on them. About 15 per year suffocated back when the doors actually latched; this was considered enough of a problem to ban said latches, and it is very rare now; in the rare cases where it does it almost always turns out to be a very old fridge with a latch.

Is there not significant violence and discord in France, Sweden, and Britain due to small Islamic minority in those places? Riots, honor killings, grooming gangs, bombings, etc? US muslims aren't as bad, but that is mostly, because they are high socio-economic-status immigrants. If we actually had large numbers of muslim peasants who really believed in their religion who were here and allowed to vote it would be a very different situation.

There's still that Building 7 that just collapsed without getting hit by a plane that was kind of fake?

What was the threat? There was no threat. But the ADL worked very hard to convince a lot of people that there was a threat, with Jewish blue check marks tweeting about how they were scared to go outside. That is a hoax, it's not normal or acceptable behavior that should be tolerated.

That is a hoax, it's not normal or acceptable behavior that should be tolerated.

Okay, so what should we all do about it?

For a start we shouldn't reward that behavior with a half a billion dollar slush fund. We should also keep this in mind the next time these same groups ask for special favors because of their alleged persecution.

Kaplan has used his power to get academics fired for criticizing Israel’s war crimes in Palestine

Framed like that it seems like you assume that Israel's war crimes in Palestine are settled fact. I don't think this is the case.

Do you think Ken Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, might have some valid criticisms about Israel illegally taking over Palestinian land? Because that’s the academic who was cancelled by the ironically extremist funder of the Counter Extremism Project.

Do you think Ken Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, might have some valid criticisms

No. The same as I discard wholesale the ADL accusations of antisemitism. Their job is to generate noise and false positives and take money. All kinds of professional activists - I feel nothing but contempt for them.

And taking land does not fit the definition of a war crime to begin with. It is the whole point of conquest.

Between 75% and 97% of NSGP funding goes to Jewish groups. source 1 source 2 source 3

I am not sure why you are using the present tense when your citations are a decade old.

Regardless, this states that, from 1994-2020, "[i]n 14 of the 21 years between 1994 and 2019 in which fatal terrorist attacks occurred, the majority of deaths resulted from right-wing attacks. In eight of these years, right-wing attackers caused all of the fatalities, and in three more—including 2018 and 2019—they were responsible for more than 90 percent of annual fatalities.11 Moreover, "All of the religious attacks and plots in the CSIS data set were committed by terrorists who ascribed to a Salafi-jihadist ideology." Similar trends are in the data here. It is fair to expect that Jewish organizations are vastly overrepresented in those targeted by people like that, so, since the grants are meant for "nonprofit organizations that are at high risk of terrorist attack," perhaps the grant numbers are not inappropriate.

The NSGP is designed to do what its lobbyists have lobbied for. The lobbyists are overwhelmingly Jewish groups. A sane analysis would not warrant 200mil a year for security enhancement grants when there is <1 terrorist attack at a synagogue per year. Since 2019 there have been three attacks which could conceivably be prevented at a synagogue. Many of the security upgrades are inessential and would have been purchased anyway, like security cameras and gates.

Synagogues are not more likely to face a crime, when looking at newspaper analysis and NIBRS reporting 1 2.

A sane analysis would not warrant 200mil a year for security enhancement grants when there is <1 terrorist attack at a synagogue per year

Since $200 million is a pittance, whether a sane analysis would warrant that spending depends entirely upon the dollar value of the benefits derived from the program, which you do not provide.

Many of the security upgrades are inessential and would have been purchased anyway,

They were both inessential yet nevertheless would have been purchased anyway? That seems unlikely. Surely it is essential things that are purchased anyway.

Wait a minute- so the national day of hate was a hoax(duh) by the ADL(unsurprising) to justify grants to synagogues(a little too on the nose) for security expenses(almost self parody now)?

Wait a minute- so the national day of hate was a hoax(duh) by the ADL(unsurprising) to justify grants to synagogues(a little too on the nose) for security expenses(almost self parody now)?

The most uncertain part of that is how much of these funds go to security and how much are just embezzled, with a confidence that nobody is ever going to be held to account.

Well sure, I’m assuming a lot of those security expenses are generous consulting fees to extremism experts who then recommend an off duty police officer(as anyone would at any point ever).

I haven't read your links yet; this is some complex stuff with lots of plausible deniability. One of the reasons I'm grateful for my Russian background is precisely that everything is so much cruder than in the West, even though directionally similar, with comparable demographics, history and memes. Contrasting those two worlds, I think, lets one learn more about both.

In this case, I've been looking into «PMC Ryodan», an utterly bizarre… thing that has just happened. You can read the story on Bellingcat (actually a decent source) and whatever this outlet cited by Yahoo news is. Since the motto of the day is «believe women Ukraine», the story of security-minded Ukraininan boomers is cited without comment:

Tymoshko believes the youngsters were gathered in the city by Russian security services through “manipulation and deception, and they should have started a fight so the Russian TV could use it.”

Besides the violence, PMC Ryodan is also notorious for its intolerance of migrants and the Muslim population living in Russia’s Caucasus region.

PMC Ryodan, the acronym short for “Private Military Company,” reportedly took its name from a group of ruthless bandits in the popular anime and manga series “Hunter x Hunter,” created by Yoshihiro Togashi

As one could expect, Russian boomers accuse Ryodan of being a Ukrainian psyop, and zoomers on both sides are having the time of their lives (except those who have to fight the actual war).

But this isn't the point. The point is: it isn't really something that is happening for real. There is no PMC Ryodan, outside of the Hunter X Hunter universe at least – or rather, there wasn't. Just some weeb teens who bought HxH merch, and a couple online groups that used the PMC meme, and kids who were assaulted by gopniks in a food court. Everything else was spun out of this seed – including, unfortunately, the minor campaign by actual thugs to hunt weebs, in a mockery of a turf war.

…Actually, this isn't the point either, as you may expect. While checking out the Ryodan stuff on the Russian Reddit analog (Pikabu), I've seen this story as a comment (abridged):

I have wanted to tell this story for a long time, for it is damning and instructive in terms of the perception of information, the value of eyewitness accounts, the spread of rumours and the ability to find the essence based on media coverage. I just wanted at least 200-500 people to read it, and not the way I usually have 20-50 (apparently my rating is not enough), and then I might lose interest… or get sclerosis… or Pikabu may get canceled…

So... it was the distant year 2000, I was a young detective in one of the city's district offices, it was a warm September day, I'm busy with detection and prevention and stuff... and a message by pager: «Go to the District Police Department XXX, there's an attack, pogrom and a generally crazy mess, you will assist local operatives».

So here's the deal:

There's a school in their neighborhood, and not just any school, but a Jewish one. That day it got attacked by extremists/Nazis/Fascists and such. They broke down the doors, threw desks and chairs, beat everyone with sticks and chains, drew a Star of David on the forehead of an elderly teacher with a marker, and then spat on it. Children and Jews are terrified, demanding security, defense and retribution. And because the governor, the police chief and the prosecutor are on the chase, and soon the UN will fly in, Interpol will be involved… and if these scum aren't caught and punished, it will be an international scandal and the whole police department will get circumcised.

Of course I asked them if I could go with the riot police to the safe houses and places where the rabble gathers, so to speak... and procure the enemies of the Jewish people there?

You see, the answer was, in fact, that there was no need to look for anybody, because that's not exactly how it happened. Two local kids looked into the class where that Most Victimized Teacher was giving a lesson, and asked out Izya... let it be Сockpoonberg... to go have a beer around the corner together, or for a loan, it's not clear any more. The teacher, of course, was against such a breakdown of discipline (or the issuance of loans without guarantors) and kicked them out... They said «ew, Jewish snoot», spat (but it's not exactly clear where) and some shit happened while pulling the door at each other, resulting in the glass breaking (but it's also unclear, maybe it was slammed, maybe even kicked). So they ran away at once.
 The teacher could not tolerate the humiliation and immediately told the school principal, who called in all his connections, and then, as Harrison said: «…a bird dropping, falling on a snowy mountainside, rolls down, accretes snow...» And so now we have a high-profile case that will never be solved, despite the demands of all the controllers to solve it as soon as possible.
 Why? Well, how do we solve it now? Either everybody has to admit that they blatantly inflated the event and gave false evidence, or make terrorists out of those guys and put them in jail for 10 years (remember, that was 2000, now I think option B would be picked in a heartbeat).
 That's why we are sitting there writing/searching.

Then the highway patrolmen bring in a guy, early 20s, who got busted a couple of years ago in some shady companies for either fighting or petty hooliganism. Obviously no one was going to tie him to this case, but he could provide the most valuable information on what kind of Nazis our city has come to harbor and where to find them. After a long "tell me something about the wonderful world of extremism" conversation, the guy told me the following:

Back then he fell in with some skinheads… or Punks, among whom there were two-three really colourful characters, some «Awl, Bullet and Loaf», but that's not certain: one even had white laces on his combat boots [in 90s-00s Russia it used to be popular with Neo-Nazis/WNs, theoretically only allowed after you've killed a non-White or distinguished yourself in a fight; really there was no enforcement], the second had leather trousers, and the third had a skull earring (possibly even human-skull-shaped!!!). He hung out with them once after a concert, got wasted and started quarrelling with someone, after which they got nicked. Since then he''s no longer friends with any skulls and white shoelaces, doesn't go to concerts and only ever drinks kefir.

That's it, think how much paperwork you can put into it! All-points bulletins went around the region, such and such – Awl, Bullet and Loaf wanted for implication in an assault, all wearing white laces, leather trousers and skulls on all sides, identify, apprehend, orient… I spent like a whole another month on these orientations, wrote all kinds of papers about trying my best to find these scoundrels, and even one of the detainees told me that he saw a man wearing white shoes with black laces, but can't recall where, because was freaking out from withdrawal. What am I saying… all the police, Minors Affairs and district officers were writing volumes of reports, and the police department was supervising them… cases were not going to blow themselves up. 
 I honestly don't know how it ended, but judging by the fact that I don't know, it ended with nothing, as was the plan. The Jewish community (its individual representatives) waited in vain for their retribution; the high-profile case became lowercase, the journos guzzled away their fees, and now somewhere in the depths of the Department of Internal Affairs there rests a massive case about a terrible pogrom in a school.

But now, when I am told, «We have studied the declassified archives and, in fact, the truth is this, 100%» – I smile condescendingly.

Yes, that's where they usually ask for proofs... well, enjoy:

https://www.ng.ru/events/2000-10-07/1_pogrom.html

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/17743

https://lenta.ru/news/2000/09/25/pogrom/

From the above:

…Pupils hid under their desks and ran to their teachers, who tried to talk sense into the young Nazis: «Guys, please go away, there are children here». One of the female teachers said:

– I lost my bearings. The scumbags should have been kicked out, but I was afraid that if I raised my voice at them or said something rude, they would disfigure the children.

The pogrom lasted about five minutes. Then the command sounded: «Stand up!» The rioters lined up, raised their hands in the Nazi salute and shouted, «Sieg Heil!», and then leisurely walked out of the destroyed school. One of them turned around and shouted: «We'll be back!»

– By happy coincidence, no one got physically hurt, but the psychological shock was very strong, – says Leonid Reznikov, head of the Jewish community. – Now parents are afraid to send their children to Sunday school, fearing for their lives. The way the rioters acted showed that they had been preparing for this operation beforehand. There are several distinctly anti-Semitic organizations in Ryazan. But the local authorities are inactive. Next time a pogrom could end in blood» […]

Investigator Irina Novikova refused to talk to Kommersant about anything to do with the pogrom at the Jewish Sunday school in the Soviet district of Ryazan.

The day after the pogrom, a leaflet appeared on the wall of the school with a swastika and the text: «Death to the Jews! We will be back».

One is free to choose what to believe.

If you just read one link I would read the Jewish Currents article by Ben Lorber, it sums things up nicely. Primarily I think it shows that the ADL doesn't really have a lot of plausible deniability here. Everyone in the DR knows that telegram channels are closely monitored by an army of Jewish NGOs with ung-dly amounts of funding (incidentally, the same NGO that keeps the archive of all Reddit comments there), and that apparently includes rapidly-growing funding from DHS.

Lorber is a good example of an "expert account" by someone monitoring that network who could quite clearly see that there was nothing resembling some national day of anti-semitic action actually being organized. Of course even the alt-right in its heyday could have never organized such a thing. But the ADL drummed up anxiety and law enforcement response across the country.

Nobody following DR telegram, experts or followers, thought that this was a thing. The ADL signal-boosted a narrative that nobody who follows these channels could have plausibly believed, and Lorber attests to that as a witness. Particularly as the day approached, i.e. Feb 23rd, the ADL narrative intensified when nobody acquainted with the DR could have plausibly believed that this was an actual thing that was going to happen.

They have too many experts for plausible deniability here- they knew better but they were being strategic in manipulating a national response to their canned narrative and to put pressure on Congress for their grants.

This should've been a toplevel post tbh, imo more interesting than most of week's toplevels but it didn't get much visibility due to being a late reply. Honestly not a fan of the 'timely topic' focus of most toplevel posts vs the rarer 'non-timely interesting topic' ones

If you mean the Ryodan thing, it's developing rapidly, so maybe some other time. I'll plug this post for the second part.

From the Twitter thread you linked:

During our investigation and ongoing monitoring of extremist groups, Knightsbridge found no evidence that any “National Day of Hate” was planned outside of a few small groups with very little influence nationally

Unless you're claiming the ADL was behind these "few small groups" Knightsbridge mentioned, hoax is too strong a term here. Sounds to me like there was a credible-but-low-risk threat that the ADL reacted to for either political/financial reasons. It's also possible ADL blaring this as loud as possible deterred those few small groups from actually going through on their plans. It's one thing to hit a target that's not expecting you, it's quite another to hit a target with beefed-up security.

EDIT: Added a link to the specific tweet.

I think hoax is a perfectly adequate term. There are billions of people in the world, there's a near certainity that there will be someone, somewhere who will vaguely fit the profile of what scenario you wish to conjure up. But the scenario itself is still fictitious, a deliberate choice to misrepresent (and necessarily fabricate) information.

Even if you want to make the 'well, technically there was at least one dude somewhere saying something along those lines, so it's not a hoax' the obvious and immediate counter-argument is that the hoax is not the fact there is that one guy somewhere, but rather the hoax is the deliberate misreprentation of a non-credible threat as a credible threat, in a situation where it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence it's a non-credible threat, least of all supposed 'hate crime experts' like the ADL.

On principle, this is not dissimilar to a situation where someone sees a bunch of mischievous teenagers messing about with some paintball guns, this someone knows they're nothing but mischievous teenagers with paintball guns (who might even talk a big game but everyone including the someone knows are harmless), calling the police on them as an active shooter situtation,where people are being shot and 'potentally' killed then literally everyone believes and parrots the caller, up to the top level of government and media, no one does any due diligence investigating because it plays into their political incentives (an active shooter situation is great fodder for gun control politics). Oh, and it turns out the caller is a owner of a private security firm who tends to gets a lot of contracts after something like this occurs. What would you call that situation, if not a hoax?

What would you call that situation, if not a hoax?

A plot? A scheme?

Yeah, maybe like a scheme to maliciously deceive a mass audience... wait, that's a hoax...

I mean, the goal seems to be for money rather than pure mastery-of-reality, I guess it's a hoax in the same way as something like the jackalope and less like the normal conspiracy theory inflection the word "hoax" might have.

I would firmly say it is a hoax because (1) crew 319 is approximately one weird person, (2) the request was to distribute fliers, (3) the telegram post has only 1000 views when I saw it (absurdly low, and this was after it went viral) plus only four reactions. The hoax is in the nation-wide coverage that led to 150,000 tweets, because someone on telegram told his followers to distribute flyers

Hoax calls to mind the Smollet incident or some kind of false flag. "Over-reaction" or "exploiting an opportunity" seems a better descriptor.

I don’t think “over react” conveys the magnitude of the exaggeration. “Hate groups declare” -> it was one guy. “A day of hate” -> it was putting up flyer. “Police order extra patrols” -> no one found any serious threat.

For example, if the story was titled “nation in horror as rabbi takes to street to hunt children on racist day of hating gentiles”, would this convey the singular incident of Baruch Nockowitz attacking a child? Or would it be a 1000x exaggeration which would benefit antisemites?

I'm equally okay with both this incident and your hypothetical story-title being classified as exaggerations instead of hoaxes. If you can find me some evidence the Crew 319 is really an ADL plant, then I'll call it a hoax.

Russ Roberts talks about how inserting money into things can change the culture around said thing. The example he often goes to is that of day care centers. Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.

Prior to the fee, parents had a cultural incentive to try to pick up their kids on time. 'I would feel bad if I was late and the workers at the center had to stay later than planned.' After the fee, a person could reasonably believe, 'Well, they set the fee at a rate that appropriately compensates them for the trouble, so as long as it's worth it to me to pay the fee, everyone wins.' And so the culture around how people viewed their choices changed; parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time... and so late pickups went up.

There have been a lot of discussions lately about financial incentives to have kids. I'd like to finally share an experience I had recently with my wife. We were on a trip in the southern US, and we happened to be out at a restaurant for breakfast on a Sunday morning. The place was pretty busy, and there were a lot of families there with little children. These kids were pretty much all quite well-behaved, and the families seemed pretty happy.

...the sight of this was apparently a crying experience for my wife. Parents actually like their kids?! They're all able to enjoy a nice breakfast out and have just an all-around pleasant morning?! What even is this world?!

You see, my wife immigrated from Canada, where they pretty straightforwardly pay people for having children. The payments are relatively substantial. Her sister is a prime example. Sister doesn't work; sister's husband works a pretty low-paying entry-level job, without a whole lot of hope in sight for significant advances anytime soon; sister and her husband already have two children, will probably be having more. Wife basically thinks that sister is just an example of a phenomenon that she thinks is common in her home country - people basically treating their kids as sources of income.

When I told wife about Hungary's schemes that have been talked about here, she immediately started thinking about how people would game it, how they'd make choices to just barely satisfy the governmental requirements, and how it would change the culture around how people view these choices. She also has gobs of experience with how employees game out the parental leave time and unemployment and so on, so she knows the way these games will be played (she's already confident that many people make choices of how to space out their kids based on how much leave you get, then how many hours you need to work again before you become eligible for another huge chunk of parental leave; you can string along several years of barely working at all if you do it right). "So, around 28-29, every woman will be figuring out when the best time is to hit up a sperm bank, given their job situation and ensuring a high probability of it working prior to 30."

I'm not going to confidently predict that there is going to be some particular unintended consequence (e.g., maybe people who might have otherwise had more than one kid just have their "gov't mandated, sperm bank one", they hate the thing, and overall fertility declines). But hot damn am I sure that there will be some unintended consequences to the culture around having kids if people go to some of the extremes of the financial incentives talked about here. Like, yes, injecting money will produce incentives that will change behavior. Will the resulting behavior be something that we like? Ohhhhh boy. We're in for a wild ride. Mostly, I'm sort of just amazed that this group generally leans right and would be incredibly quick to point out the possibility of unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed by the left, but is relatively uncritical about possible unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed to increase fertility.

I'm not a fan of large social engineering projects, and wasn't one of the people advocating for fertility stuff.

The problem will eventually work itself out. The higher fertility places and cultures will become more dominant. It will just happen on timelines that are too long for people to care about. Probably at least two or three generations 40-60 years.

The scenario you bring up reminded me of something ... people like to start by fixing problems at a societal level. They want the federal government to just step in and wave a magic wand to fix things. But if you are forced to actually solve a problem, this is a backwards way of thinking about things. Instead of thinking at the national level, people should be thinking at the personal and local level. "What would make me have more kids?" and then "What would make my close family and neighbors have more kids?"

Me and my wife have good jobs so I don't really find myself money constrained when thinking about having more kids. We are actively trying to have more kids right now. (which will be number three, but earlier in my life I thought about having four kids, and now I don't think I can do it). I feel kid constrained because of time, stress, and space constraints. The two kids I do have I feel like they require a ton of effort, it feels impossible to just get everything done that needs to get done. The time spent hanging out with my kids is often one of the best times to get a bunch of important tasks done.

I tend to feel more stressed, because there is a local expectation of closely watching your kid. There is a playground right behind my house. I'd be able to see my kids from my house if they went to this playground. I think my parents might have just let me wander off and go play at the playground when I was my kids age, but I feel like if I did that for my kids it would be frowned upon.

Our house is a decent size, but we'd like to expand it if we were having more kids. We can't expand it due to regulatory constraints. We might be able to get around these regulatory constraints, but it will take time and stress (areas where I already feel resource constrained).

When I look around at my family and neighbors, the main additional constraint is medical (some of them have trouble having kids).

Its not that money isn't a true constraint for anyone, its just kinda lower on the list. And maybe if we had enough money some of the other constraints could be handled. I've considered hiring a personal assistant to deal with more of my life problems, but my wife hates that idea.

For me, and maybe some of my family and neighbors, we would be having more kids if the following things happened:

  1. Reduced local regulatory constraints on housing expansion.

  2. More communal child care opportunities. (things like birthday parties are great, my kids can get in some social time, and so can I). Its a pain for someone to host these, but everyone else usually enjoys coming along.

  3. More relaxed social attitudes, aka allow free range kids.

  4. Less bullshit bureaucratic things I have to deal with. Car stuff, taxes, and recently the city changed all our street addresses (cuz the old ones were racist or something). Those are annoyances that I wouldn't choose to deal with. But there are also things I choose to deal with that feel like they are made more difficult because of regulatory crap. I am trying to become a wedding officiant for my sister's wedding, trying to get banquet license for a recreational event, trying to setup doctors appointments for myself, trying to apply to some private schools for my daughters, etc. This is just the current stuff that is on my mind, but it feels like I've had a list of things just as long for the last few years even though I keep knocking things off the list every month.

The last one is the real kicker for me. Each one thing is usually no big deal on its own, but there are these constant bureaucratic bullshit things added on top of them that make each item take longer. And the kind of impulse people have that says "the federal government should do a thing to solve some societal issue" is exactly why I think that list of bureaucratic bullshit keeps growing. Everyone always thinks their one issue is so important, and they always think that any minor costs imposed by imposing their top down solution are very minimal. But the shit adds up. I can only imagine the nightmare that a national kids registry might choose to impose. How long before they start tying your kid benefits to other crap they care about. Oh, you can't get your child tax credit unless they have x doctor visits a year, because we need to actually make sure your kid is being taken care of. Submit the reports made by your daycare, or the child visitation officer who comes to inspect your home.

If there is one big societal problem that I want the federal government to fix then it is this one: people having the desire to fix big societal problems all at once via the federal government. I want a federal agency that makes it their goal to determine how much time the average American spends on bureaucracy, and when that number gets too high they have the power to go around axing bureaucratic requirements at other agencies. You think your issue is so important? Too bad, we are gutting your "save everyone at once at the federal level" program that requires hours of every American's time.

That is my little pipe dream. Just writing this should have been a stress reliever. But I feel more stressed now, I could have spent these moments of coffee fueled productivity to slog through another government form. And now I am one day closer to multiple deadlines hanging over my head.

I mean, in theory all "throwing money around" programs are just giving back to people money they gave the government. Plus the overhead of all the salaries of all the bureaucrats involved in the process. Being allowed to keep more of what you earned because decades of government policy have made it borderline impossible to afford to raise a family is kind of a solution. But then boiling it back down to "The government pays you to have children" seems to just assume the government owns all the money and we just borrow it.

Fuck. That might actually be more accurate.

God damnit. Nevermind I guess. I had a point I was striving to get to, but I think I just black pilled myself out of it.

Edit: I guess to talk about the cultural aspects of having kids, I was talking about that with my wife a few nights ago. She was lamenting, and I was in a similar situation, that we never grew up around babies. We had vanishingly few, and inconsistent, examples of how to be parents to babies. Our aunts and uncles, mostly white collar, spread to the 4 winds following career and education opportunities. They provided us with vanishingly few cousins that we rarely saw. And zero of those cousins ever had kids of their own. Both our family trees have gone through the shredder of modernity and we're basically all that's left.

Compared to my friends who are more religious, it's night and day. They all have large extended, mostly blue collar, families that they live near and see regularly. Some cousin or sibling is always having a kid, because they have like 20-30 of them. There is almost always a new baby they see at least once a month. The institutional knowledge of how to be a family is always being renewed and passed on.

Not so for myself or my wife, and it's been a struggle. It's had consequences. Namely utterly dashing my hopes of having a larger family. Frankly it's been depressing.

Yes, this is a hugely important aspect of this all that doesn't seem to get much attention. It's clear to me that, generally speaking, the more rare babies and small children are in your vicinity, the more it erodes your inclination to have children of your own, and not just for the reason you mentioned. After all, you know that if you have a child of your own, there'll be vanishingly few children of similar age for him/her to play/socialize with, that playgrounds will be sparsely visited or even empty on occasions etc. It's one reason why I believe that demographic implosion is a self-reinforcing trend that ultimately results in the extinction of the affected genus/population as it existed.

It's not clear to me that being around more kids moves the needle one way or another. As an anecdotal counterpoint, I have 11 nieces and nephews and it hasn't increased my inclination to have children at all.

I think it can go not only either but indeed both ways:

During university years I found myself living in a very strongly communitarian, church-oriented subculture, which made me excited about the idea of having kids of my own one day: I was surrounded by good models of strong families and the kind of "village" that makes raising kids seem not too daunting. Alas, things didn't work out as I might have hoped, due to my poor social skills and atheist (or at least strongly agnostic) views disqualifying me as a partner for essentially my entire peer group.

Latterly, during the pandemic, I had front row seats to my sibling's family; I still love my nephew and niece a great deal but seeing the day-to-day reality of raising a family absent a strongly family-positive community—and the strain it put upon the parent's relationship, which eventually dissolved—makes me now terribly reluctant to consider that path for myself.

How many kids do you have? What is the sticking point for more kids? An older nanny might be able to help you with some informal child-rearing lessons.

But then boiling it back down to "The government pays you to have children" seems to just assume the government owns all the money and we just borrow it.

There really is a Yes Minister quote for every occasion.

Jim - 5 billion for tax cuts, and what do I find? -

Humphrey- What do you find, Prime Minister?

J- The Chancellor opposes me. A great chance to be popular with the voters and he says no. Doesn't that surprise you? H- No.

J- Why doesn't it surprise you?

H- He's advised by the Treasury and they don't believe in giving money back.

J- It's not theirs, it's the taxpayers'!

H- That's one view, it's not the view the Treasury takes

Having said that, I actually agree with the Treasury here, and it I don't think that's cause for despair. After all, without the state there would be no society at all in which one could earn a living.

Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.

I've heard that story before and I always feel like it's being subtly misinterpreted. The original source for that anecdote is this paper and the fee was 10 NIS in 1998. Converting from Israeli shekels to USD and then adjusting for inflation, that's a $5 fee.

I would argue that this isn't so much "inserting money changes the culture", it's that putting a fee on something is a signal of how much you want to discourage it, and a fee of $5 is sending a very clear signal that you don't really mind all that much. You would get the same effect if you signalled "I only care about this as much as a cup of coffee" by any other non-monetary means.

Right. If an increase in parents picking up children late is a problem, you're not charging enough. If you charge the right price, either parents will pick their kids up on time, or you'll make enough money from the late fee that you don't care.

I don't think those two interpretations are at odds. Like I had said, "parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time". Such a relation can be changed by jacking up the amount of the fee, past the amount of value parents get from picking up their kids late. That's not really the important one of the two relations. The important one of the two relations is the one that involves the cultural value - that people didn't pick their kids up late when the monetary cost was $0. Attempting to signal that picking up kids late is bad, but doing so poorly and actually signalling that picking up kids late isn't nearly as bad as you thought it was actually does change the culture around picking up your kids.

The fee was absolutely not high enough. From the original source the fine was 10 NIS in 1998 (which works out to about $5 if you convert to 1998 USD and then adjust for inflation). They provide some comparable values in the paper for various fines in 1998 Israel: this was 0.13x the fine for illegal parking, 3% of the fine for not collecting your dog poop, or 1% of the fine for running a red light.

This study is almost always misreported. What it really shows is that if you blatantly signal "this isn't a big deal" by putting an absurdly low price on something, people will do that thing. This doesn't mean that using money caused that, the money was just a way to communicate to everybody that "hey, I care about this about as much as a cup of coffee".

In the absence of any such signal people used their own best judgement and figured that late pickups were probably a pretty big deal. When the parents saw a price of $5 they thought "Oh, I guess it's not that big of a deal to them after all!" and acted accordingly.

misreported

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

I think it does. Unless you go with Scott and think that you can be as misleading as you want as long as you are literally true.

I don't think that you can be as misleading as you want as long as you are literally true. I think that there is nothing in what I've said that is "misreporting" the result. I very clearly stated:

parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time

Which is 100% consistent with the comment above. The value they got from paying the fee and picking their kids up late was more than the value they got from picking their kids up on time. If you jack the fee up (as the commenter suggested), this would change at some point (different points for different consumers). There is nothing misreported here. What do you think is misreported?

It leaves out the information that the fee is so small that it could be taken to mean that to mean that it's unimportant to the center.

"Whether the amount they pay is more than the value they get" is not the only basis on which humans in the real world make such decisions. The information that implies that there are other plausible bases for that decision has been omitted.

I wrote:

After the fee, a person could reasonably believe, 'Well, they set the fee at a rate that appropriately compensates them for the trouble, so as long as it's worth it to me to pay the fee, everyone wins.'

What do you think is "misreported"?

Real human beings don't make decisions that way. They would assume that it's only even possible to appropriately compensate them for the trouble if the fee is very small, and that a larger fee is meant as punishment, which is not the same thing as compensation. It misreports this by omitting the information that the fee is small.

The incident is commonly reported to mean "people will treat any fee as compensation" when the facts don't support this, and instead support "people will treat a small fee as compensation".

More comments

optimization problem. having multi-their fine structure for habitual offenders is a common strategy.

eg. many theoretically good small restaurants fail because their owners literally have no idea how to price food based on their costs and average covers/occupancy).

I must have the cheap gene because, despite being wealthy, at restaurants I scan the menu and try to pick out the best values. At a fancy restaurant, I'll often order a bunch of dishes which end up being similar to a tasting menu but like half the price. Maybe I should stop doing that. I'm just playing a zero sum game with the restaurant owner, I'm better at it, and they need the money more that I do.

But I just love bargains. Can't help it.

I don't understand why you'd use a monetary fee—just add a line to the registration form "we know plans change, and keep the pick-up window open 24 hours a day—and no matter how late the hour, we guarantee a fast pick up with no questions of a child similar to the one you dropped off."

Thank you for providing the citation. That is a substantial amount of money, especially for a couple that is otherwise living off of one entry-level income. Shit, in other conversations where we're talking about UBI, that's not that far off from the line at which a... let's go with "not insubstantial" (heh) percentage of folks said they'd be willing to quit their jobs and just live off of UBI. And that's just for two kids.

Define "cost of living". I'm pretty confident wife's sister's husband doesn't make as much as that random source says is necessary to live. Are you saying that if Canada wasn't paying them to have children, they'd be dead? Boy is that a substantial monetary incentive to have children....

Typically "cost of living" is "a made up number to justify wealth redistribution".

I can't recall ever seeing a "cost of living" number that was lower than the 70-80'th percentile of global income after adjusting for PPP.

Whether they're being "paid to have kids" is a claim that is not reflected in the legislation

So wait, you don't get

a maximum annual benefit of $6,833 per child to help with the cost of raising a family.

$6,833 per year ($569.41 per month) for each eligible child under the age of 6

$5,765 per year ($480.41 per month) for each eligible child aged 6 to 17

?? I thought you had a citation and everything!

on the whole I'd say it is paying people who have had children, not "paid to have kids."

This is a textbook example of a distinction without a difference. The whole premise of the original comment was the oodles of conversations here about using financial incentives, given to people who have had children, in order to nudge people in general to have more kids. Do you just think that, as a matter of first principles, this theory of incentivization doesn't actually conceptually link? This would be a novel challenge to the prevailing view around here, and you should really flesh it out. Preferably in a long-form top comment rather than buried here. I think lots of folks here would be interested in subscribing to your newsletter hearing your theory.

More comments

That's one program. If you're in Ontario, you're also going to get $1,500ish/year for the Ontario Child Benefit, another $1,500ish/year from Trillium. Don't know the exact numbers, but you'll also get a boost in GST and Carbon Tax, probably around $1,000/year combined.

If you're on welfare, you'll probably get around $1,000/month if you have a kid, taking you up to $22,000/year. Might also get some subsidized housing (either public or private; I think the rent-geared-to-income program would cap your rent at like $226?). You'd basically be making the same as someone working fulltime at minimum wage, except you don't have to put 40 hours in each week, and your expenses are lower. Plus you'll have easier access to a multitude of programs and benefits, and the time to do so.

Does that include other means tested benefits where the number of children you have affects how much you need to make to qualify? At least in the US food stamps and other welfare programs are easier to qualify for if you have more kids.

https://www.uah.org/get-help/snap

Mostly, I'm sort of just amazed that this group generally leans right and would be incredibly quick to point out the possibility of unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed by the left, but is relatively uncritical about possible unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed to increase fertility.

The dysgenic effect of some of these schemes and the track record of failure of others gets pointed out all the time.

It seems odd to me to classify following the rules of the benefits / incentive program as 'gaming' . If you follow the rules and have the children, it seems like it's producing the desired outcome.

Doesn't the Hungarian model require marriage beforehand?

I don't think were going to sperm bank and single mother our way out of low fertility. Certainly that would produce negative consequences.

It seems odd to me to classify following the rules of the benefits / incentive program as 'gaming' . If you follow the rules and have the children, it seems like it's producing the desired outcome.

I think this would come under following the letter rather than spirit of the law.

That said, I don't think any government currently extant understands how to set up a system immune to this kind of thing, they're rather unimaginative.

I understand the letter vs spirit distinction I don't see how it applies here.

How is spacing the births in order to benefit under the programs rules, gaming?

Simply having more children is (or should be) a part of the greater goal, which is to raise fertility and produce functional families. Improving fertility just so that you can have a generation full of ticking time bombs raised in dysfunctional homes is only a marginal improvement over the default of people having fewer kids.

We don't need to swell the fertility of the bottom quintile or increase the representation of single mothers. I don't see how spacing births to benefit under a program does either.

Arguably the spacing cohort is able to plan / delay in order to meet program requirements.

My wife also occasionally mentions a girl she went to school with who at this point has like 4-5 kids (I can't remember how many), each with a different baby daddy. "She finds some guy who is about to make a bunch of money working in the oil industry, convinces him that she loves him, and that lasts just as long as it takes for her to have another kid."

By her account, this woman is able to plan/delay in order to meet the requirements of the 'program' that she is pursuing. That doesn't imply that these are the types of behaviors we really want to promote as a society.

But in any event, the spacing/repetition to go several years with minimal working isn't, itself, an example of an atrocious consequence. It's just an example of how people will make adjustments to just barely meet the requirements, and we may or may not end up liking the results.

This sounds a bit like the dependapotamus seen near military bases.

It's distintinctly different from an employed women having a child every two years to receive a maternity leave benefit.

In your example is she really delaying, or does it just take some time to find a new mark and gain his confidence?

Different things are different, yes. But on the core question of whether they require planning/delaying/spacing/whatever, I think they're similar. At least, because I had thought that you were basically just resting something on the "ability" to plan/delay, as though such ability implied something about functionality/dysfunctionality of a family relationship. Dependapotamus isn't just a slave to her passions in the moment; she's not going home with broke-ass dude from the bar. She's capable of planning her strategy out according to the rules of the game she thinks she's playing.

In related news, Texas has proposed property tax breaks to large families. The structure of it would make the typical welfare queens ineligible, but I do wonder what the behavior effects of offering middle class families with 3 kids thousands of dollars cash in perpetuity to have a fourth.

Mostly, I'm sort of just amazed that this group generally leans right and would be incredibly quick to point out the possibility of unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed by the left, but is relatively uncritical about possible unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed to increase fertility.

As others pointed out, these things are pointed out a lot and for quite a some time. Welfare queen is the term used since the Great Society program was enacted by the right as a description of abuse of these types of policies. I also think that there is a growing opposition to what amounts to "nationalization" of basic roles of the family, the so called "cradle to grave" welfare system. In this system, atomic individual is basically just source of taxes and everything else is taken care of by the state be it child rearing through kindergartens and school system, healthcare as well as nationalized pension system. I think this system is unsustainable because it is full of various perverse incentives, it has agent-principal problems and is prone to corruption and gaming of the system. It goes against the very basic idea of subsidiarity where instead of families who are close to the problem you offer some centralized solution on national level. It is great system for population control but at the expense of basic human needs ingrained in each and every one of us, not to even speak about efficiency in its own supposed terms.

Russ Roberts talks about how inserting money into things can change the culture around said thing. The example he often goes to is that of day care centers. Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.

Yeah this has been cited in endless TED talks and business and pop science books. It makes sense. Elite status are things in which money alone is insufficient, like academic prestige, top college admissions, etc. As soon as a price tag is put on something, suddenly it becomes more commonplace, even luxury goods and fancy cars, which thanks to social media and Americans becoming much wealthier overall on a real basis, seem so commonplace nowadays. Harvard knows it has to keep a tight lid on its enrollment if it's to maintain its prestige even if that means possibly leaving some $ on the table.

The criminal justice system works in this way too, in which justice is blind to wealth (at least in theory, but the evidence does suggest some truth to this in America, as huge white collar sentences have shown). Otherwise, we'd have a situation like in South America, Russia, etc. in which corruption is far worse due to bribery.

In the case of governments paying people to have kids, I don't think this is as effective because the incentive structure does not work as well. For two reasons: it does not confer status or some privilege, such wealthy parents donating to elite colleges (kids are common, unlike Ivy League degrees). Second, it does not buy connivence, like the example regarding late parents paying a fine. Sure, you get extra money, but kids are also a lot of money and time. Since it fails in both of these, the value proposition is not that good.

Elite status are things in which money alone is insufficient, like academic prestige, top college admissions, etc. As soon as a price tag is put on something, suddenly it becomes more commonplace

Marketing BS had a good article on this recently and how "paying for status" has led to interesting dynamics in a few different markets that had explicit "status" markers.

Here's my proposal:

10% of what a kid pays in income taxes instead goes to their parents*. Kids can opt out of the program** and just pay regular taxes instead if the want to.

This aligns all incentives pretty well. There's a degree of luck in the program but it doesn't look like the kind of luck people dislike or feel is unfair.

*payments are in proportion to time spent being primary custodian during ages 0-17, to handle adoptees, strange family situations and avoid an adult-adoption loophole.

**opt-out is granular, e.g. you can chose to opt out your dad but not your mom.

That doesn't help at all. People need the money when the kids are kids, not when they have grown up to be tax payers.

I think the purpose of this program isn't to fund the parents, but rather to provide incentives to the parents to raise their kids as if they love them instead of as if they're meal tickets. I'm skeptical this would be at all effective, partially since receiving money from one's kids in the future seems like a relatively low incentive compared to other factors when it comes to how one treats one's kids. Also, parents most likely to treat their kids in a way that would make their kids prefer to give taxes to the government instead of them also seem likely to have higher time preference and thus less likely to be moved by such a policy.

If you anticipate future income but need cash now, maybe there could be a bank where you could go to borrow against your projected future income.

Isn't that every bank?

See also The Unincorporated Man.

Like Warren, I blame double-income lifestyle becoming the norm. If I were to suggest my own idea of how to stimulate the TFR using heavy-handed government regulations that would never get implemented and probably wouldn't work, I would ban working full-time with one exception.

You are not allowed to work more than 20 hours a week. If you want to have a full-time job, you have to get married and have a homemaker spouse. He or she can't go back to work unless you move back to part-time.

  • what about picking up a second job? Not allowed unless you're married and have a homemaker spouse, every employer has to register its employees with the state.

  • what about running a business? Not allowed unless you're married and have a homemaker spouse, because you need a business license from the government.

  • what about driving an Uber or working another gig job? It's running a business, see above.

  • what about illegal immigrants working full time? Yes, what about them? How can you hope to fix the fertility rates if you can't fix immigration?

  • what about single mothers who can't support their family on a single part-time paycheck? I recommend adoption.

  • won't this place an undue stress on the businesses? Not really, the total compensation should stay more or less the same. It will increase at first because they will have to compete with each other to double the headcount, but:

    • I'm quite sure we will learn that people working part-time do more in 20 hours that a full-timer does, so we won't need to literally double the headcount

    • the businesses will eliminate a lot of useless positions themselves to reassign people to the positions where increasing the headcount is necessary

what about illegal immigrants working full time? Yes, what about them? How can you hope to fix the fertility rates if you can't fix immigration?

Good recipe for land of omnipresent black markets and universal snitching and snooping (nothing like laws that ban something everyone does and everyone has to do to survive).

Such countries have many problems, but illegal immigration is not one of them. Such countries do not need big and beautiful border walls, such countries need strong anti-fascist protection barriers.

everyone does and everyone has to do to survive

.. everyone needs illegal immigrants ?

I am talking about whole of OP's clever plan, forbidding people to work for living (not even private patch of potato allowed).

Such times and places existed, but they were not immigration magnets, to put it mildly.

Money and exchange directs economic activity. "the total compensation should stay more or less the same" may be true in nominal dollars, but if the number of hours worked goes down dramatically, output, i.e. things produced or useful activity undertaken, necessarily decreases as well. And when "amount of money" stays the same but "output" decreases ... you have the same share of a smaller pie. Some jobs are straightforwardly "hours worked = output" - like they're manual labor jobs, simple service jobs (hours spent serving customers), etc. Even in other jobs, just because some of 40 hours are wasted doesn't mean a 20hr work week will cut the less-efficient hours disproportionately. The less efficient hours are often background work necessary for the more 'efficient' hours (commute, wind-up and wind-down, general coordination, finding clients), and in ""knowledge work"" each hour builds ... knowledge that makes a worker more productive over time.

Just by econ 101, this has massive deadweight loss over the 'tax single people', like a pigouvian tax vs a production restriction. If an unmarried person wants to work 40 hours a week and donate half their income (and actualized productive activity) to the married, isn't that better than working 20 hours a week and spending the other 20 on video games?

I think I may have just fallen in love with you.

On a more serious note, I wish this was brought up more! It’s amazing how even though double income full time only happened a few decades ago it’s so ingrained in the culture people can’t fathom going back. Capitalism is a gnarly beast.

I prefer apparently gender-neutral policies.

Ah, but what if I don't want to restore gender roles?

What if I as a man want to be the one staying at home???

The alternative is the fertility rate cratering to new record lows on an annual basis as it is now. Under our current framework of liberalism you aren't allowed to use sticks to nudge/coerce people in that direction, so you're left with carrots and the easiest and most accessible carrot from a policy perspective is tossing some cash around. Barring some religious revival a la another great awakening or some very illiberal governments coming in that don't mind swinging a stick dropping stacks of cash will probably be about all that gets done.

I didn't get around to writing a comment about it on that thread, but I was thinking that the policies don't necessarily have to be as narrowly focused on carefully only giving money to people with children. There's multiple issues going on, but one of them is certainly that there's people who would want children but can't imagine ever affording them, which could be significantly improved by making (family-sized, i.e. 2-3+ bedroom) housing and education less expensive (leaving aside precisely what policies would best accomplish those goals). That's not a direct subsidy to people having children, but it makes those wanting to have children more able to do so.

I fully agree that there'd be unintended consequences and dysgenics, plus many countries would need to spend about 2% of GDP on the subsidies to have any effect. And that's an optimistic estimate.

I talked about this earlier: https://www.themotte.org/post/370/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/66987?context=8#context

I think a better option is to manipulate status such that parents or married people can more easily find jobs and high-end education. But even this would have perverse consequences as well. Maybe you can have a social credit scheme such that if your child behaves well and learns in school the parent would get a reward, or if not a punishment. But that could be gamed as well or produce excessive stress on stupid students, who knows?

Yet we don't really have a choice here. Fertility must be raised if human civilization is to be maintained. It's generally good to avoid perverse incentives but sometimes you just have to say 'damn the torpedoes' and press on at maximum speed.

Quran damaged at school recorded as ‘hate incident’ by police

The home secretary has expressed concern after the police recorded a “hate incident” at a school where four pupils allegedly caused “slight damage” to a copy of the Quran.

West Yorkshire police became involved at Kettlethorpe High School, Wakefield, after a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game. It was damaged, allegedly after being dropped in a busy corridor.Four pupils were suspended for a week and the police intervened as false rumours spread that it had been set alight.

Inspector Andy Thornton addressed concerned parents at the local mosque and told them the damage was being treated as a “hate incident”.

Tudor Griffiths, the headmaster, said there had been “no malicious intent” but the pupils’ actions were “unacceptable”. Wakefield council said the Quran had suffered “slight damage”.

You can also watch this hostage apology video from the mother, apologizing, earnestly explaining Islamic dogma while wearing a hijab like she's some Dhimmi. I don't know how to put my contempt for that entire situation into words.

This to me seems like more confirmation of by now an ancient belief of mine: being an alleged victim group that's willing to kill people is worth more than the sum of its parts. If everyone just admitted that the fear here was that Muslims would riot, hurt the family or just generally misbehave there would be no doubt that what happened was deeply ominous and the police - and everyone - would have to pick a side.

However, because there's the patina of victimhood, actions that should be deeply worrisome instead get to be written off as defending against racism. A Swedish man being able to reliably trigger violence by burning a book is somehow not a worrying signal from the minority group, it's about Swedish "far right" types. We wasted a lot of time debating whether Charlie Hebdo was "Islamophobic" , as if it had anything to do with the price of tea in China.

The desire to cast all ethnic groups as oppressors and victims prevents basic analysis here.

The standard argument I've seen against hate speech law is that we can't punish what's in people's minds. But maybe we can add: you can't trust people to treat minorities and their differences sensibly. As in: we're apparently doomed to conflate "racism" against "gooks" for owning all of the grocery stories with being worried about groups that can be reliably triggered into illiberalism and, even worse, outgroup violence by not-even violations of medieval norms (this isn't the first time that straight lies have been used to enflame this issue)

And nobody can do anything with this information. Cause it's racist.

And yes, I think it possible the police acted quickly (and out of proportion) to forestall the sort of drama we've seen elsewhere when Islamic norms are violated. Hell, it might have even been to the boy's benefit for people to hear that the police are on it so they don't seek self-help (until everyone lets it go). But, if that's your local maximum, you're far too close to Pakistan for my liking.

Having a blended political/violent approach is a pretty well-established way to accomplish political goals (although I doubt Muslims are doing it deliberately here).

Many terrorist groups have a political arm. The IRA had the Sinn Fein, etc.. The implication is always "give us what we want or our less civilized brethren might do something unfortunate". It seems to be pretty effective as it allows different people to respond to different parts of the message. You don't burn the Quran because it's intolerant. I don't burn it because I don't want to be beheaded.

although I doubt Muslims are doing it deliberately here

Both sides didn't come together and make a plan but the more peaceful illiberals ARE aware of the value of the violent element. IIRC this was basically obliquely stated in exactly the way you described by at least one activist during the row over LGBT education that got a teacher suspended.

TBH, how could they not be? It takes a particularly dim actor to not understand that violence colors the entire taboo here, especially when a lot of these discussions take place in the wake of threats or even violent action.

And, imo, anyone who comes out during such times to argue for "tolerance" while ignoring or downplaying the actual basis of this tolerance is at best a useful idiot, and at worst someone who is consciously providing a velvet covering for the steel fist.

I mean, there’s a reason why American red tribers are the only people who don’t care about violating Islamic taboos, even as plenty of others are happy to say offensive things about almost anyone else.

I'm not a red triber, at least not by my own estimates and I have gone out of my way to offend Islam.

I haven’t really had the opportunity, but I’d endorse doing so.

Astafgorilla! this is beyond parody.

Although you could have made that exact same statement about every nudge that got the UK to where it is now and be just as accurate. But that phrase has lost all meaning by now.

Reading through the responses in the common UK subreddit it seems to be unanimous condemnation/shock at this chain of events. Usually, there is some ambiguity that allows the wokes to argue for the Muslims, but that doesn't seem to be evident for this specific case. Nonetheless, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything positive change to arise from this.

The UK really backed themselves into a corner with their Muslim issue, it seems to me they are going to end up like the US where they have to permanently deal with a group of people that hates their guts and causes much mischief but there is absolutely nothing that they can do about it, and given birth rate trends, the Muslims will eventually within a generation or two reach a sizeable enough mass that you can't just beat them into submission like the UK could (totally should) do right now. The silver lining is that many of these problems arise because the non-Muslims have to actually mix and mingle with the Muslims, if they end up becoming like Blacks in the US, they will eventually segregate to the point that both groups are out of sight out of mind for both groups. I am sure quite a few parents updated their priors about Muslims in the UK proceeding this event. Going to take a few more.

This is doubly funny for me, someone who lives in a Muslim country that refused to let in any Syrian refugees and cracks down on any instance of radicalism (within its borders) with the might of the sun. All the west had to do was to deal with radicalism with extreme prejudice and point towards the Muslim Gulf states that do the exact same thing for plausible deniability. But no one said mind viruses can't kill their hosts.

Astafgorilla

Huh? What does this mean?

I don’t think England is big enough to self-segregate. America ended up like this thanks to huge tracts of land and ludicrous mobility. And, you know, the historical starting conditions of a population legally bound to one region…

Its a mockery of the phrase "أَسْتَغْفِرُ اللّٰهَ" usually transliterated as "Astagfirullah" meaning " I seek forgiveness from Allah". Muslims usually say that when they see/hear/experience/think of something bad.

As for segregation can't we model the UK as a US state? There are US states with stark segregation where you can go from peaceful neighborhood to shitstorm by crossing the street.

Edit: Didn't think about population density.

Ah, makes sense.

And yeah, I guess that’s a fair size comparison. Though I think those small-distance American segregations pale in comparison to the difference between, say, a Midwestern and Deep South state.

the Muslims will eventually within a generation or two reach a sizeable enough mass that you can't just beat them into submission like the UK could (totally should) do right now

Muslims birthrates are getting lower everywhere but in Britain ? I understand their minority is mostly derived from some very rural part of Pakistan, that's thought of as 'country bumpkins' even in Pakistan, but given even modest pressure from the institutions, they should stop being such a problem.

One thing I absolutely do not understand is, why Britain hasn't banned their first cousin marriage practices, which they do serially, which resulted in a 3% minority being 10 fold overrepresented in the category of severely disabled people. I was told that first cousin marriage, practiced serially is almost the same thing as brother-sister incest.

Optics of warehousing vast amounts of disabled people aside, this is probably harming them as a group in a major way, as inbreeding depresses IQ substantially. (~10 pts was found in inbred Muslim children in India vs their non-inbred Muslim neighbors)

but given even modest pressure from the institutions, they should stop being such a problem.

Yes, this was the counsel of hope that was endlessly given over the years. Basically a "hang tight" to all of the immigration skeptics. It was all supposed to work out (and, cynically, if it doesn't you can't exactly unscramble the eggs).

I don't know if there was ever good reason for believing this, or Europeans just looked across the pond at the integration of Irishmen and Hindu-Americans and assumed it would be the same for them with Muslims.

It's been a few years since I've checked on the issue, but iirc there was an issue in polling of younger Muslims being too or perhaps even more radical than their parents.

There was notable enough illiberalism in polling that public figures originally pushing for limitations on "Islamophobia" had to admit it didn't go as smoothly as expected

It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs. Twenty years ago, when, as chair of the Runnymede Trust, I published the report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of new communities was discrimination against Muslims. Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong. We estimated that the Muslim population of the UK would be approaching 2m by 2020. We underestimated by nearly a million. We predicted that the most lethal threat to Muslims would come from racial attacks and social exclusion. We completely failed to foresee the urban conflicts of 2001 that ravaged our northern cities. And of course we didn’t dream of 9/11 and the atrocities in Madrid, Paris, Istanbul, Brussels and London.

For a long time, I too thought that Europe’s Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain’s diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.

...

It should come as no surprise that Muslim liberals are in despair. They knew all of this long ago. And unlike the political elite and the liberal media, they recognise that British Muslim opinion is hardening against them. The journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has had to seek police protection because of her liberal views, argues that the optimistic belief that time and social contact will naturally lead to the integration of Muslims is mistaken: “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”

Almost the platonic ideal of "act like all minorities are the same then get mugged by reality"

This is part of the reason I’ve basically decided to admit I’m a bigot up front so I can have intellectual honesty.

After the DOE came out saying lab leak seems correct (or possible or likely etc) I first came across on Reddit people parroting the belief that they could discuss lab leak earlier because it led to Asian hate and violence against Asians (which I think was mostly just reclassify normal violence as hate violence; also widely done by blacks and not the people who were talking about lab leak early on). Then I came across official lefties spreading that message and understood why it was being parroted further into the internet as the official tribe “narrative”.

This is a I would say worse than your example - with Muslims I do think it’s direspectful to purposely damage another groups sacred objects and the group of kids actually did something wrong; though blown massively out of proportion. In the lab leak case there’s nothing wrong with doing scientific analysis (I guess only my view) trying to figure out why a deadly pandemic occurred. But “violence” is nonetheless the cited reason why it can’t be talked about (or that might be a euphemism for Trump talked about it and he can’t be right).

And to a third degree labeling something “racism” or “violent” that a group is talking about can then cause “violence” on the group labeled “racists”. We’ve had violence against conservatives by crazy people who now associated those people with being actual Nazis.

At this point I’m not sure how humans can even talk about anything since any discussion could make a group look bad and then be justification by some crazy person to do violence against them.

I first came across on Reddit people parroting the belief that they could discuss lab leak earlier because it led to Asian hate and violence against Asians

Discussing the possibility that covid leaked from a very specific facility hosted in China: Racist

Insisting that covid happened because Chinese people eat weird shit: Not Racist, apparently?

The reality is that the mechanism went the other way. Discussing the possibility of a lab leak needed to be tabooed for the sake of certain political ambitions. Calling it racist is just the go-to for doing that.

The reality is that the mechanism went the other way. Discussing the possibility of a lab leak needed to be tabooed for the sake of certain political ambitions

It might honestly come down to "Trump said it first". Which is scary.

To steelman the distinction, I believe would be something like this:

Accusations that COVID was created in a lab by the Chinese is racist because it means to imply that Chinese people were either lazy, incompetent or malicious enough to create a lethal bioweapon that has caused many deaths, and so are to blame for these deaths.*

Accusations that COVID emerged because Chinese people eat weird shit is not racist because we are expected to understand that different cultures have different traditions and that framing their customs as being weird is the racist part so the non racist option is to give them plausible deniability because hey, it's weird to eat [pineapple on pizza or whatever else people from X culture eats] too.

Not saying I agree with the above, but I just feel the need to point it out in case anyone really didn't already understand the reasoning behind it. I do agree that your framing does make the distinction seem a bit ridiculous.

*Incidentally, now that tensions between the US and China are rising, federal opinions are starting to like the sound of this theory more and more.

Actually strongly agree pushing Chinaman ate the head of a bat and started COVID doesn’t seem worse for them than a US funded lab had bad safety protocols.

So yes saying latter led to Asian violence makes no sense to me.

The whole 'Anti Asian Hate' rhetoric has always felt like a weird attempt to bandwagon racial animosity/'Me Too' the whole BLM thing.

In the vast majority of Western nations, especially the developed post-colonial ones, Asians have the best average life outcomes in terms of education, income, crime, lifespan etc.

As an aside: Early during Covid there was a narrative for a couple of weeks of east Asian business owners experiencing racism from the majority population in them not visiting their businesses out of fear of covid. Plenty of people repeated this on twitter, opinion columns were written and even state officials made mild comments in that same direction.

Then a news paper did a small investigation where they went around and asked Asian restaurant owners what their experience was and it turned out that yes they were suffering economic hardships but not because the native Swedes didn't come, because they still did, but because their co-ethnics didn't, because they consumed a lot of Chinese media...

It wasn't the Asians trying to start this and noone had even really bothered to ask them what was going on before they ran with the xenophobia narrative.

I don't mean this to challenge. merely to ask. do you remember that exact newspaper? I'd love to have that saved for posterity when arguing about this in person in the future.

I believe it was SvD but it could have been DN as well, I can't find the article though after googling a little. The whole issue quickly became moot when the country locked down a month later.

The one article I found that explicitly mentioned the number of customers was in Expressen though and it's behind a paywall so can't tell you what it's says beyond the headline. I don't read Expressen though so I doubt I remember it from there.

Also, it seems I had forgotten that the Chinese ambassador was trying to stir up shit as usual, but that's its own issue.

Where can I read this article?

Clearly there are groups out there terrified of deserving the blame for violence. Or, I suppose, trying to use that fear as a rhetorical bludgeon. Alright.

Why does that suggest admitting bigotry?

When in this case the lefts accusing the “lab leak” early conspiracy people of being bad people and the reason they didn’t take it seriously….and yada yada yada inciting violence against asias. So they are basically just using bigotry as a bludgeon. Bigot, the “bad man”, etc seems to be a favored rhetorical tool. I basically just want to disarm that tool and say ok I’m the bad guy but here’s my arguments for the opinion.

The disparity between how those that harm books American leftists favour vs those they oppose defend themselves is noteworthy.

When a supporter of the BLM movement engaged in a tradition (sci-hub mirror) that goes at least decades back, of destroying books he perceived to be too right-wing, his justification was that he was merely following protocol.

Here, the perpetrators at least feint regret.

a Year 10 pupil said to be autistic was told to bring in a copy of the Islamic holy book by friends after losing a video game.

Notice how they don't mention why he was told to bring in a Quran after losing a video game. The book falling out of a bag on its own is nothing big and certainly not deserving of the extreme response it got, but an extreme response it did get which makes me suspect that the child was told to bring the Quran to school by his "friends" so they could do something nefarious to it, and they were caught before they could begin their act. This could be what the mother was (quite rightly) apologising for, not the book suffering light damage.

The book falling out of a bag on its own is nothing big and certainly not deserving of the extreme response it got, but an extreme response it did get which makes me suspect that the child was told to bring the Quran to school by his "friends" so they could do something nefarious to it, and they were caught before they could begin their act.

This religious community's calling card is an extreme response to nothing. And pure speculation, belied by the article :

A boy had taken the Quran to school last week and given it to another pupil who read out passages on the tennis court, according to Akef Akbar, a councillor who is working with the school. He said the book was later taken inside, where it fell on the floor before being put in a pupil’s bag.

In any event, it would be nothing to apologize for, burning the coran is a public service at this point.

When he made up his religion, muhammad took care not to declare artifacts holy, so no one could do to him what he did to the little statues of the old gods of mecca. Thankfully, his flock has not followed his lead in this matter, so anticlericals have a clean attack angle. It should be burning on public television constantly, giving muslims a chance to return to the True Islam.

The local imam said that anyone who resorted to threats “is not truly following the teaching of Islam”. He added that Muslims would not tolerate disrespect of the Quran.

No threats, just the violence I guess. OK

One could argue that all religions’ calling cards are extreme responses to nothing…

Even the Jains?

I’m actually not familiar with the spiritual doctrine of the Jains. I’d imagine they, too, have built elaborate castles of abstraction on no worldly evidence.

Do you think not eating onions or garlic, because they must have some rudimentary consciousness, because they live through multiple seasons, is not an extreme response to nothing? Not to mention all the other insane behaviors designed to prevent the accumulation of negative karma.

Could just be bullying if they knew he was autistic. Are you implying his friends were Muslim, too?

Book Review: “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” by T.J. Stiles

“ Alexis de Toqueville later would observe that the ‘respect, attachment, and service’ that held men together in aristocratic societies had disappeared in America; now they were bound by 'money only' "

T.J. Stiles’ Pulitzer Prize winning biography is a great story of Vanderbilt the man, but an equally engaging portrait of the seismic changes that America went through from the revolution through the nineteenth century. When Vanderbilt was born the US was an agrarian nation largely dominated by a hereditary elite transplanted from the old world. Most people worked on independent farms or ran their own stores and few had really heard of a “corporation”. The early American market was essentially crony capitalism - some important family was given a legal monopoly to handle all the passenger boats on the Hudson, for instance. Competition just wasn’t really a thing in many major industries.

Into this old money world strode Vanderbilt, a half-literate rough guy who grew up on the shipping docks, a world where disputes were regularly settled with fistfights. Stiles describes him as epitome of the “commercial man,” with a complete disregard for any human niceties if they didn’t make dollars and sense. He even made his wife pay for their (ten!) kids’ food and education out of her own purse, despite his growing wealth, and rarely saw his family at all. In fact he lived on his boat so that he could make passenger runs seven days a week, his life and business inseparable to such an extent that when his ship was destroyed in a fire, the news reported he had literally lost every article of clothing he owned.

Vanderbilt didn’t give a crap about the monopolies, they were in his way; “law, rank, the traditional social bonds -- these things meant nothing to him. Only power earned his respect”. Soon he met William Gibbons, a plantation owning aristocrat who was to play hero to the common man and the common market, because he developed a profound grudge against the (identical) old money family that commanded New York’s shipping monopoly, and decided he would dedicate his fortune to destroying them. Vanderbilt ended up being his chief in this battle, running competitor ships at rock bottom rates to force the monopolists to lower their own rates past what they could afford.

Stiles takes pains to illustrate what an unusual idea this was, for two businesses to compete with one another in a way that resulted in things being cheaper for customers. Again and again he quotes intellectuals and leading families describing how aghast they are at this ungentlemanly practice. The battle raged on with hilarious twists and turns, such as Gibbons lobbying the New Jersey government to pass a law that said he could impound any rivals ships if they impounded his own under New York monopoly law, or Vanderbilt escaping the New York police by having his men cut the ship loose from the dock as soon as the police boarded, and then explaining to them that they had lost their jurisdiction after floating into New Jersey waters.

All this culminated in the Supreme Court ruling Gibbons vs Ogden, which largely spelled the death knell of old families being simply given monopoly rights by a certain state over a major industry. For the first time raw competition was a major dynamic being introduced into the American market, seismically changing the culture and economy from sclerotic aristocratic fiefdoms into a frenzy of hustlers, producers and entrepreneurs. The elites losing their economic privilege is spelled out over a backdrop of them losing many of their political and cultural privileges as well. Martin Van Buren’s Bucktails oversaw the expansion, against the screams of the conservative aristocrat families, of the right to vote to almost all white men, and soon Andrew Jackson ushered in the “era of the common man”.

While the Jacksonians shared Vanderbilt’s hatred of an elite given special favors by the government, they differed in a general distrust of the emerging, advanced, “artificial” economic arrangements. They considered banks no different than shipping monopolies, and the practice of lending in excess of reserves to be no better than a ponzi scheme. As for the defining economic innovation of the era: “the implications were frightful. Since [corporations] ‘live forever,' fretted Massachusetts governor Marcus Morteon, their property was 'holden in perpetual succession' - unlike individuals, whose estates were divided upon death. Eventually corporations would own everything”.

T.J. Stiles describes here America on the precipice of great change, of a “real” world of builders and farmers, of the self-employed, of money linked to hard gold, into a world of abstractions, of corporations, finance, and fiat currency, of men divided into capitalists and laborers. And herein lies the beginning of the end of Vanderbilt as hero of the common man, because while he shared their love of competition, he became master of these new economic instruments.

Vanderbilt’s steamboat lines multiplied many times over and he became an incredibly rich man. After the establishment of the Oregon territory, to integrate the nation, mail and people had to be shipped down to Nicaragua, transported overland and then sail back up to California. Here Vanderbilt competed directly with government subsidized shipping lines and came to provide an essential part of the modern American infrastructure of expansion and gold rush settlements. When filibuster William Walker conquered Nicaragua, Vanderbilt out of his own pocket financed the Costa Rican effort to overthrow him.

From ships to horses to trains, of course trains. One by one Vanderbilt bought up train lines and turned them into one gigantic, interconnected system that was to form the backbone of the exploding postwar economy. Up until then, corporations were still thought of as being created for some specific public service, commissioned by the government, and given a temporary lifespan with a clear ending. It was railroads that truly pulled corporations out of this mold and established them as enterprises owned wholly by private individuals, for profit, and able to continue on forever. Railroads became the largest single industry in America by far, the first real industry (along with telegraphs) that crossed state lines and directly knit together different corners and markets of the country. Their vast, complex nature necessitated the creation of workers entirely dedicated to managing the endless staff and bureaucratic needs of the era’s new behemoths. Likewise, the rise of a mass of workers who would now work their entire life as wage laborers, rather than as independent farmers, shopkeepers or artisans, became complete as well, and with the modern battle lines of capitalists and laborers now made real, the rise of mass unionization and labor conflict soon emerged as well.

As Vanderbilt went from being hero of the common man to villain, his arc paralleled the seismic changes of the broader era. When elites of old were dividing the economy into their personal fiefdoms, his competition was hailed as populist and radical, finally bringing down prices and proving that ordinary folk could take a stab at the market and make something of themselves. However, as he and the tycoons become more and more powerful, till their market dominance allowed them incredible sway over the economy, the free market came to be seen as the conservative tool of the new elites, and populist forces demanded regulation. Did the end result end up replicating the old order of the aristocrats? Well, I’ll let you be the judge. I’ll close by quoting at length:

It was clear that the forces he helped to put in motion were remaking the economic, political, social, and cultural landscape of the United States. There was the transparently obvious: the dramatically improved transportation facilities that allowed Americans to fill in the continent, the creation of enormous wealth in new business enterprises; and the railroads’ economic integration of the nation, bringing distant farms, ranches, mines, workshops, and factories into a single market, one that both lowered prices and dislocated communities (The new availability of western foodstuffs, for example, uprooted New England farmers.) And there was the less obvious, such as the emergence of a new political matrix in which Americans struggled to balance the wealth, productivity and mobility wrought by the railroads and other industries with their anxiety over the concentration of vast economic power into the hands of a few gigantic corporations...

Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence - what scholar Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation of America,” a cultural dimension of “managerial revolution” or “visible hand” that business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. identified. More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household; the young Jay Gould, for example, had helped families determine when the sun was at its height so they could set their clocks to noon. But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883, writes Trachtenberg, these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”...

At the forefront stood Cornelius Vanderbilt, child of the eighteenth century, master of the nineteenth, maker of the centuries to come.

I enjoyed this, wish it got more interaction. I'll say that in response to:

Did the end result end up replicating the old order of the aristocrats?

Absolutely not! In my opinion we got a worse system in many ways. Yes there is mobility for the few people who can hack it, but overall our leaders are worse. Instead of having a small political and intellectual elite who are trained from birth to lead, and have severe social consequences for screwing up, we instead have a class of politicians that can vie for power with little real consequence to themselves if they make mistakes.

There's no sense of noblesse oblige from the rich anymore either. In fact it's the opposite - many rich people in America take a sort of "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude where instead of giving back, they try to turn and kick the ladder down. With a bloodline based aristocracy this behavior was minimized because there was no way for the peasantry to meaningfully try and climb the ladder.

Unlike @2rafa, I'm not necessarily saying we need a return to the aristocratic days. I do however think we should take a hard look at the cons of our current arrangement and see if there are ways to engender or enforce a sense of societal responsibility in the modern rich, especially billionaires and others with absurd amounts of wealth.

Noblesse didn’t oblige them to anything. They treated commoners like they were ten levels of shit below friendly human contact. They’d steal from them every day of the week and kill them for a slight. And when this degenerate elite was finally replaced, economic and, ironically, military performance instantly improved ten-fold. The leadership they provided, if any, was of very low quality. They didn’t produce anything. The people were starving. In what ways were they giving back?

During some time periods nobles were terrible yes, especially right before the revolutions. Before that though they contributed to art, religious theory and knowledge. The Renaissance and the enlightenment both directly came from noble classes pursuing knowledge, and at least in the case of Alexander vin Humboldt and Darwin, they claimed that giving back and helping society were a strong motivation.

From a consequentialist point of view even if they didn’t care they drastically improved the lives of peasants over the long run.

Anachronistic justification. They didn’t think their station in life was justified by scientific, philosophic or artistic accomplishments. When they dabbled in those things, it was more often as patrons than practitioners.

Not nobles: erasmus, spinoza, leonardo, luther, shakespeare.

How are nobles responsible for the renaissance and the enlightenment?

Maybe I’m just romanticizing the past, fuckduck. I’m simply deeply disappointed in the political class of today.

Indeed Dag, that would be my guess. Alhough I can’t entirely exclude the hypothesis that the french education system did such a great propaganda job on me that rolling back the revolution seems inconceivable. Clearly peasants now are better off, but it's hard to disentangle that from technological progress. That leaves us with concurrent societies and, all else being equal, imo societies with entrenched blood-based 'sword aristocracy' didn't do well against more liberal competitors (best example being india).

Much appreciated.

I have a lot of trouble evaluating whether the pre-capitalist leadership was genuinely better. I think the question for me kind of is: even if they were better at leadership, would that outweigh the economic growth we got under the new order? Competition leading to lower prices and maximizing consumer surplus and growth seems to have really not been a component of the old system at all. A lot of aristocrats did decide to go into business eventually as they lost their other privileges, but it seems like they really didn't make that transition till they were forced into it by new entrepreneurs. Would the industrial revolution still have happened if no one shattered that stasis? Capitalists might be selfish "I've got mine" types but they did produce benefits for the overall society - an excerpt about the Gilded Age, likely the height of the capitalist dominion:

The giant corporation would bring Americans of all stripes into its orbit with remarkable speed. A professional and managerial middle class began to emerge as the educated and skilled went to work as engineers, lawyers, technical experts, clerks, and middle managers for large companies. The ranks of permanent wage workers swelled, both within railroads and in the industries that fed their needs or expanded with the new markets they opened up. Labor prospered during the postwar boom, enjoying a 40 percent growth in average real income from 1865 through late 1873

Inaugurating my participation at themotte.org with a new handle because I'm not sure I want the following post to be connected to me in real life.

Every time the psychology of trans stuff comes up at ACX or here I want to write this essay; this time I finally did.

Toward an Etiology of Trans

Part I: Two Stories

Our first story is about a boy who we will call Sam. From well before puberty, Sam had thoughts about wanting to be a girl. A favorite passage in his children's books was the one in The Land of Oz where the enchantment on the hero Tip is undone, transforming the boy into the princess Ozma. He didn't much like the things that motivated other boys: sewing and crochet were more interesting than sports. And his sense of aesthetics was (and remained) more feminine than masculine -- pastel colors and flowers, not bold colors and cars. He especially liked cut gemstones, and wanted to wear rings.

As he got older, Sam would frequently fantasize about being magically transformed into a girl; in puberty, his very minor gynecomastia (just little nodules under the nipples) provided fuel for these fantasies. As a teen, he discovered in an old development textbook a description of "transsexual reassignment", which occupied his attention for a while, though it seemed no more realistic than his fantasies of magical transformation. A sexual side to his fantasies was emerging, too: autogynephilia (though he had no word for it); but the fantasies were not only sexual ones. As well as a female body, Sam wanted feminine traits: beauty and sweetness and the freedom to adorn oneself with dresses and jewels.

Sam observed that his fondest nighttime dreams were ones where he was a girl. He practiced lucid dreaming and experimented with self-hypnosis largely in order to encourage these dreams, and to better imagine and better half-believe, in that partly-conscious realm at the boundary to sleep, in his feminine transformation.

These fantasies continued, more-or-less, into his young adulthood. He practiced less deliberate lucid dreaming, but savored the dreams when they came. But he kept them secret -- how weird it would be, for a man to confess to wishing he could become a woman, much less that these fantasies were often arousing. And in any case, they were impossible desires for what could only happen by magic; Ozma and Tiresias don't exist in the real world.

Our second story is about another boy; we will call him Hilary. Hilary was a typical boy of the nerdy type. He liked dinosaurs and astronomy and collected rocks and coins. He was especially good at math, and liked to spend time playing video games and learning to program in Basic.

When Hilary hit puberty and middle school, he had his first intense crush on a girl, which of course went nowhere. That didn't stop; his life from then on was a series of such crushes, of course on all of the smartest girls he knew, and each of them life-shattering (hah). In the meantime he excelled at math competitions, learned more programming, and played Civ and Starcraft and similar games. He fantasized about someday being a great mathematician.

Hilary finally had a girlfriend in college, though it didn't work out. A while after college, he found a woman who was pretty and smart and who consented to marry him. He has a happy marriage, a satisfying life and community, and a job in tech.

Sam, of course, seems like a clear example of the MtF trans type. /r/egg_irl would have a field day. Hilary, on the other hand, is pretty clearly a standard, well-adjusted man, though in the "nerd" rather than the "jock" mold. Pretty different, right?

The reader will have guessed that, of course, Sam and Hilary are one and the same person, whose story is simply told from different points of view.

The astute reader will have also guessed that they are both me.

Part II: Trans is not a Fundamental Category

The trans movement, to the extent to which it can be said to have a coherent philosophy and not just a number of disagreeing proponents, appears to assert two things:

  • Male and Female, Man and Woman, are not fundamental, biological things. Whatever their specific theories, the "trans X are X" formulation and all manner of similar things imply that one can "really be" a man or woman according to one's choice, perhaps with some hormonal help, not subject to the diktat of mere biology.

  • Being Trans, on the other hand, is a fundamental part of one's identity. One can see this by the typical reaction to statements to the effect that social transition, hormone treatments, and surgeries are misguided and harmful to the people undergoing them: the immediate outcry is that the speaker wants to "harm Trans people", or is "transphobic", or worse.

The first part of my thesis is that this is the reverse of the truth. Male and Female are fundamental, biological things; notwithstanding edge cases like intersex conditions, and social dimensions to behavior and dress, there really are fundamental differences between men and woman. Many of these differences are gross physical ones associated with sexual reproduction. Others are secondary, but highly, highly correlated (I'll leave the obligatory discussion of clusters in high-dimensional space to the reader's imagination). In the vast majority of these ways, the vast majority of trans people fit their natal sex better than their desired/chosen one, and the medical treatments provide at best poor facsimiles (the dreams of an actual transformation from man to woman or the reverse remain fully in the realm of fantasy).

On the other hand, Trans as an identity is largely chosen and a social matter. Now, let me make clear what I am saying and not saying here. Taking the example of MtF, I affirm that the following are real things:

  • Desiring to have a female body, whether this desire is sexual (autogynephilia), nonsexual, or (more likely) both.

  • Desiring to be feminine (in other ways).

  • Having some key interests or tastes which are more typically feminine than masculine.

  • Feeling uncomfortable in one's male body.

  • Having distaste for masculine things / feeling unsuited for a masculine role.

(I am avoiding the term "gender dysphoria" -- it's a vague description, covering multiple of the above items, which frequently masquerades as an explanation.)

But the choice to label having some assortment of these feelings as "Trans" is a choice, not a natural category or fundamental identity, and is highly subject to social norms and pressures, as evinced in the recent explosion of Trans identification.

While both positive (wanting-to-be) and negative (wanting-to-not-be) feelings do frequently co-occur (and from the movement rhetoric, there is the expectation that they will always co-occur), I get the impression, partly from anecdotal evidence and partly from introspection, that often one set is primary and the other is secondary -- with the secondary one perhaps caused by fixation on the primary. Much has already been written about the etiology of negative-primary trans, particularly in FtM cases, where young women who are depressed and generally uncomfortable with their bodies due to puberty and for social (or other) reasons become convinced that their femaleness is the problem and that they would be happier if they were male or sexless.

The other major case, positive-primary in MtF, seems stuck in either the Blanchard-Bailey categorization, which asserts that most of these are driven by autogynephilia, or in its emphatic denial.

(Continued in reply)

Part III: On Desire

Let's take a step back and do a little philosophy.

Desire is a funny thing. It seems to refer to several different things, but these things are connected and bleed into each other. At the least, I can identify four different types:

  1. Desire-as-passion: thus the desire to eat when hungry, to have sex when horny, to engage in violence when angry, and so on. The 'animal' level, so to speak.

  2. Desire-to-experience: thus the desire for beautiful scenery, like a waterfall or a sunset, or to see a great painting.

  3. Desire-to-possess: Not necessarily as property, but being able to call that which is desired one's own, in some sense. Thus a man might desire a wife (or to marry a particular person); or someone might desire to have a best friend. But ownership, too, as one might desire to have one's own house and to put one's own stamp on it.

  4. Desire-to-be: Thus a person who desires strength wishes to be strong; a person who desires virtue wishes to be virtuous.

Some things are properly (up to you whether this refers to natural law or merely to normal psychology; it works either way) desired in one way or another, and some in multiple ways. Thus it is proper to desire-to-experience a beautiful waterfall, a little silly and quite selfish to desire-to-possess it, and ludicrous to desire-to-be the waterfall. On the other hand, particular skill is something that one might reasonably both desire-to-experience (to see the master at work) and desire-to-be (to become a master one's self).

The above may not be the best possible classification of desire, but it will do for our purposes.

Part IV: Bleeding Desires as Etiology of Positive-Primary Trans

When I had my first crush, at around age 11, I was fixated on the object of my affection in all the usual awkward ways that a boy having his first crush does. I'll spare you the embarrassing details. But one thought, so potent and so strange that it has stuck with me for the decades since, was this: "I want to be her; but failing that, being with her is a good second-best."

Which is to say, my normal desire-to-possess had thoroughly bled into an unusual desire-to-be.

The thing about the Blanchard autogynephilic typing is that it is obviously true. A lot of MtF trans people were, apparently, highly masculine (c.f. Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner) before transitioning, and a lot of them seemed to have sexual fetishes around being a woman. The other thing about the Blanchard autogynephilic typing is that it is obviously false. A lot of MtF trans people that the Blanchard typology would categorize in that way report that there was a lot going on other than autogynephilia, and that the autogynephilia was not the primary consideration.

The standard Blanchardian answer, as I understand it, is that (a) autogynephilia is an "erotic target location error", and that (b) the other feelings reported by the autogynephilic types are sublimations of this erotic feeling. While this is not entirely implausible, it seems like too much of a false-consciousness hypothesis and gives too little credence to the internal reports of the people themselves. Moreover, it is rather contradicted by my own experience, to which I am inclined to give a good bit of credit.

Instead, I propose that the real source, of both the autogynephilia and the other parts of the often intense desire to be female (to posess a female body, to have feminine qualities, to present in a feminine way), is this bleeding of desire. A man will properly desire-to-experience and desire-to-possess femininity, to see and touch a woman, to call her his wife, to admire her, and so one; he will properly desire-to-be some masculine qualities and virtues (strength, stoic steadfastness, etc.). But what happens if these desires bleed and mingle; if desire-to-experience and desire-to-possess are also experienced as desire-to-be? "I want to be her." Or, more generally: "I want to be female, with a female body and feminine characteristics."

Now, say that these are your feelings. You dive a little too deep into these desires; take them a little too seriously; allow them to shape your self-image and identity (and the "trans" label and memeplex certainly encourages that! though it can absolutely happen in its absence) -- and now, maybe, you start to believe in them; to believe that you really are, deep down a woman or girl, not a man or boy; to believe that you will be fundamentally unhappy if your desires are unrealized; to be horribly uncomfortable with your maleness and male body because it means that you are not female with a female body...

Part V: A Self-Indulgent Epilogue

So, given that the egg_irl bait story at the beginning was me, how is it that I didn't fall down the trans slippery slope I just described, and am happy and successful as a mostly normal (albeit very nerdy) man?

  • I grew up in a setting where "trans" was not in the water. It wasn't until I found that brief treatment in a textbook that I even knew anything in that vicinity was a thing.

  • I correctly identified my fantasies as fantasy. That my desire to be female had the same likelihood of being fulfilled as the childhood desire to magically fly under my own power as in Peter Pan; which is to say, none at all.

  • I had (and have) religious beliefs that preclude acting on these desires.

  • Eventually, introspection on my feelings and thoughts led me to the above assessment of their source. Knowing why I have this disordered desire is a great step to overcoming it.

Even still, the desires and fantasies were sometimes overwhelmingly strong (see the part about lucid dreaming and self-hypnosis). I don't think I'm at risk anymore, but in the absence of the above factors, I think that younger-me could have, to his massive detriment, gone the other way.

Frankly, I think I dodged a bullet.

The reader will have guessed that, of course, Sam and Hilary are one and the same person, whose story is simply told from different points of view.

The astute reader will have also guessed that they are both me.

I actually didn't see this coming at all. I thought the twist would be that Hilary transitioned at some point MTF later in life, hence the choice in name, rather than that Hilary and Sam were the same person.

I want to say, your experience is somewhat similar to mine, though of course most of the details are different. I recall when I learned about what "autogynephilia" was, probably about 5-10 years ago, I immediately knew it was a real thing, because I knew I had it or at least had had it. It was never particularly strong, not enough to want to be my childhood/teenage crushes rather than being with them or dreaming about being a woman, much less seeking out lucid dreaming to do more of it (though I did get into lucid dreaming at one point for more generic reasons). But I recall being fascinated by sex-change surgery when I was growing up and fantasizing sometimes/often about living in a scifi world where that was actually possible in a truly "passing" sense, and how much I wished I could do that.

I never had any force like religion pushing me away from trans-ness, and living in some of the bluest of blue areas in the US, I probably encountered trans people earlier, more often, and more normalized than most people. But I also didn't grow up in an environment like now, where there are many powerful and popular forces trying their best to pull trans kids "out of the closet," so to speak. I simply "outgrew" it, and like you, I think I might have dodged a bullet, given the permanent changes that I might have gone through in a different environment. Then again, given that my autogynephilia never seemed that strong, perhaps even in an environment like now, I wouldn't have been pulled into transitioning. But the likelihood of it having happened certainly seems non-zero and significant, and it makes me wonder how many boys right now might be being pulled into transitioning when they would have grown up to be perfectly fine with being a cis male like me.

This, of course, ties in pretty neatly with the post below about Scott Alexander's book review of The Geography of Madness; having "MTF Trans" as a neat little groove that one can slot right into will almost certainly push people on the margins (which I might have been, or at least I was close to the margins) with autogynephilia into identifying as MTF Trans. Particularly when it's clear that there's status to be gained within certain circles from doing so. This is one reason why I think all the pretty words about "empathy" and "acceptance" from the activists claiming to support trans people rings hollow for me; there's clearly a cost to this as well, and it's not at all clear to me that these people even recognize this cost, much less have done the incredibly difficult work of doing an attempted rigorous cost-benefit analysis to figure out if what they're asking for would actually be of benefit to people. It just looks to me like it's a bunch of people for whom transitioning was beneficial projecting that onto anyone who could possibly be on the margins and doing their darndest to take out every brake and barrier on the way in the misguided notion that because that would have been helpful to themselves, that will be helpful to everyone. Someone linked this blog post here about a week ago, and the line "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people" really resonated with me (this post seems to have been written 5 years ago; given where ChatGPT is now, such an AI might actually become reality soon).

It just looks to me like it's a bunch of people for whom transitioning was beneficial projecting that onto anyone who could possibly be on the margins

I'm not even convinced it's that. I think a bunch of them are profoundly miserable in a way they wouldn't have been if they had tried to make peace with their reality. I think there's a subset of them that just wants company for their misery, to drag others down the path they were guided down.

From observing some of my acquaintances who have gone down that path, the desire to evangelise has appeared in every single one of them, making "jokes" about slipping pills to people and asking "so when are you going to come out too?" Frankly it absolutely disgusts me.

I think a bunch of them are profoundly miserable in a way they wouldn't have been if they had tried to make peace with their reality.

I think I agree with this.

I think there's a subset of them that just wants company for their misery, to drag others down the path they were guided down.

They do say that "misery loves company," and I wouldn't rule out there being some people like that, but... that seems uncharitable? Like, I'd find it more likely that these people have an ideological commitment to a mistaken idea of what's good for them and others than that they are being actively malicious.

From observing some of my acquaintances who have gone down that path, the desire to evangelise has appeared in every single one of them, making "jokes" about slipping pills to people and asking "so when are you going to come out too?"

Joking about slipping pills to people is pretty concerning. The evangelizing thing is interesting; I guess (loose categorization here) there's 3 major (not mutually exclusive) reasons people evangelize for something:

  1. They love it and are super excited to share it.

  2. They think they have a moral imperative to evangelize.

  3. They are themselves uncertain of or insecure in their decision, so they evangelize partly to convince themselves that it's a good idea.

Without, hopefully, trying to mind-read too much, your acquaintances sound like number 3.

I think a bunch of them are profoundly miserable in a way they wouldn't have been if they had tried to make peace with their reality.

There are a lot of accounts from trans people who transitioned who say it's made them much happier. I think calling people en masse liars and secretly miserable is usually wrong. I think 07muk's analysis sounds a lot more accurate.

Most of the ones I see on, say, reddit, especially in the places like egg_irl where conversion of people is attempted, are profoundly depressed. It's not really a secret to anyone. Their post histories are public.

And they'll say that they were even unhappier before transitioning. That seems perfectly plausible to me.

Also I think a lot of trans redditors who're depressed probably post that they're depressed, where as very few trans redditors who're doing alright post explicitly that they're doing alright

I thought the twist would be that Hilary transitioned at some point MTF later in life, hence the choice in name, rather than that Hilary and Sam were the same person.

That's funny; I didn't actually think of that interpretation at all. I chose the name "Hilary" (an ancient name, almost always male until the 20th century) because of its meaning, since "Hilary's" story had a happy ending.

it makes me wonder how many boys right now might be being pulled into transitioning when they would have grown up to be perfectly fine with being a cis male like me.

I suspect the answer is pretty large, and it's one of the things that frankly makes me most angry about trans activism. It's part of why I felt compelled to write my thoughts down.

Someone linked this blog post here about a week ago

I'm almost certain I read that blog post shortly after it was published, when it was linked back on Reddit. And yet somehow I missed this line:

as if my brain just doesn't draw that much of a distinction between people I want to be with and people I want to be like

which echoes my own experience so much (though the blog author's actions... don't) that I can't fathom how I didn't latch onto it the first time. Another data point for my theory, I guess?

Thank you for sharing your experience. I've never actually looked at /r/egg_irl, but everything I hear about it makes it sound pretty terrible. I agree that many people right now are too quick to act as though being trans is an immutable and easily recognisable category. There are edge cases who are sort of in between being trans and not; there are odd cases (meaning no judgment) of people whose sense of gender simply fluctuates. Treating gender nonconforming people well requires acknowledging this complexity.

I only perused that subreddit once; perhaps unsurprisingly when it was linked from the Motte a few years back. The impression I got was that the users would interpret every little thing as proof that the author was trans (overwhelmingly MtF). Posts were either in the "I wanted to wear pretty dresses, and I thought about being a girl. I just realized that means I'm 100% trans!" vein, or were point-and-laugh at some internet content and deciding that the creator was totally trans but in denial, with the same standards of evidence. (I think that second one was the purpose of the sub. I don't know why so many subreddits not only engaged in point-and-laugh behavior, but made it their raison d'etre; it's invariably toxic.) The result was trans-maximalist groupthink, I guess?

I hope I didn't create the impression that my experience was the only possible one; I can't see into everyone's heart, of course.

FYI, some of my comments (Including the OP and a reply to @07mk) have taken / are taking many hours to appear for me when I'm not logged in. Possibly it's a new account thing. Edit: all my earlier comments have now appeared.

I wanted to add a few notes that didn't really fit in with the original essay, or that occurred to me afterwards.

  1. I'm not sure how much "autogynephilia" is supposed to overlap with what I've described. Certainly in the "it's a fetish" sense (which seems is the plain meaning, since as far as I'm aware that's how "-philia" is used in this context) it is much more narrow, to the point of being wrong. I suspect some of its proponents might claim that it covers all of the feelings I described, but I disagree, for exactly the same reason that I disagree that affection and "being in love" are the same thing as lust; they are related, but not identical. And at any rate the "it's a fetish" sense seems to be how it is present in popular consciousness.

  2. I hope I did not imply that my analysis is exhaustive. The same end result can have disparate causes, and I can't read others' minds. I do suspect it accounts for a lot, though, and in a better way than the dominant narratives.

  3. I think our culture has a terrible narrative around desires, which seems to be something like, "Desires are good! They are also a fundamental part of you, so if you have especially strong desires, you should build your identity around them! Unless your desires are just obviously evil, in which case you are a bad person for even having them." I find the approach found in ancient Christian thought (and elsewhere) to be much better: "You can have rightly or wrongly ordered desires. You can desire something good, but in a bad way; you can desire something that is good, but less important, more than something that is better and more important; you can desire something that is in fact bad, because you erroneously feel it is good. Having disordered desires is bad, but it's bad in the way that being sick is bad; it's not morally equivalent to acting on those desires. You should strive to rightly order your desires, and in the meantime to not act wrongly on account of them; this will make you better off in the long run."

  4. Rereading, I may have created the false impression that my experience was of this as an all-consuming thing. In reality, though it was a big part of my inner life (I wouldn't have gone out of my way to engage in fantasizing if it wasn't) for a number of years, it was not the biggest or most important part.

  5. Based on a couple of the comments, apparently I was miscalibrated about how obvious my twist at the beginning was. If I'd known, I would have written the reveal differently! For whatever it's worth (and at the risk of overexplaining the joke), here's why I thought people would guess it: (a) the tone of the "stories" was that these were archetypes or composites, created for the sake of illustration, but (b) there were too many incongruous or unique details (at least in the first one), suggestive that these stories were of real people, and that the tone was for the sake of producing a twist; then (c) the details that were included or left out were somewhat complementary, but not technically contradictory, suggesting the "it's the same person" reveal over other twists, (d) the details, at least for the first, are rather intimate and indicate that the author knows the subject really well, so probably it's autobiographical.

People are drawn to that beauty and the imagination of it. “I want to be her” is common among women too. It’s common because the experience is unique, impossible to replicate, impossible to learn, impossible to buy (unless you’re very, very close and can finish the job with cosmetic surgery in your mid teens). And that impossibility of attainment (if you’re not already there) is true for men and women alike. A lot of autogynephilia that transwomen experience seems, to me, to be this almost gender-neutral impulse.

This seems very analogous to a similar and mirrored phenomenon I've been noticing in a non-trans context. Which is, feminists looking at the lives of extremely successful men and ascertaining that but for the patriarchy keeping them down, women could all live lives like those 99th percentile men. When, in fact, the lives of a 99th percentile man is just as out of reach for basically every man as it is for every woman.

One particularly acute example of this I saw recently was in the show Velma - which I haven't watched but watched this clip of - which involved the title character, an Indian-American girl, dressing up as a man and immediately being considered attractive by all the women in school while doing gross things like burping or eating garbage, getting a job over a woman by handing in a paper scribble resume saying "I'm male," winning an art competition over a woman who painted an intricate beautiful painting by rubbing "his" butt over some paint and then over some canvas, and immediately being listened to when taking over a stage during a dance party to order people to go home. The idea that a short, chubby, effeminate Indian boy would enjoy such social/professional advantages in such settings is... something I would consider delusional at best, and the delusion is understandable if the thinking is that every man goes through life like a 99th percentile man.

More broadly, these just seem like the Apex Fallacy.

This is actually a really astute take that I've never considered or even seen implied before. But it rings very true.

It also kind of reminds me of my weird opinion on drag queens. I can't stand drag queens because I instinctively feel an aggressive competitiveness when I see them. They are basically men performing femininity in a competitive (masculine) way. They make me mad because I feel like I could be a better drag queen than them, which is a really masculine response to have, but simultaneously it implies that I am good at performing femininity, which is an irritating realization I have to contend with.

If an MTF trans woman wants to join the 1% of beautiful women, in my mind, that is an essentially male/competitive worldview bulldozing the reality of the 99% of femininity and what it is to be female, in a way.

I'm not quite sure how to respond to this, so forgive me if I come off as too defensive, but...

There's clearly some truth in what you're saying, in that no boy who wants to be a girl, or man who wants to be a woman, really knows what it's like to be the other sex, and fills in their lack of knowledge with rosy fantasy in their imagination. But I don't think that this is (usually) an implicit comparison to the 99th percentile, just some amount of generic idealization. My first crush, the one I had weird thoughts about wanting to be, was just some sweet-but-awkward girl who went to my church; and maybe I was just relatively oblivious but I doubt an 11-year-old has any concept, accurate or not, of what kind of life a spectacularly beautiful woman would lead.

"I want to be her; but failing that, being with her is a good second-best."

I had a somewhat similar experience, though probably not quite so strong. The emotional reasoning chain went something like [I like her] leads to [I admire her] leads to [I want to be like her], the last of which bleeds through into all aspects of being similar to someone, including physical aspects, rather than sensibly stopping at things like "I want to be charismatic and funny" and "I want to be graceful and competent." So I wouldn't agree that my "desire to possess" bled into a "desire to be", rather I had a perfectly reasonable "desire to be" which just bled outwards a little bit.

I think actually the phenomenon you are describing is more common in reverse. People notice positive qualities in their same-gendered friends, and rather than interpreting that as desire-to-be they interpret that as homosexual desire-to-possess.

I was never really at risk of transitioning at all for many reasons, but perhaps the most relevant to this discussion is just that I had (and still have) much bigger priorities than my own comfort. There are things which are both more fun to think about and more important, so they naturally pushed any disordered admiration entirely to the wayside.

That's an interesting thought about desires bleeding in the other direction. One thinks of the phenomena of hero-worship, or parasocial relationships, which might have something of that in them? I'm not sure about that being a common source of homosexual feeling -- my sense is that there's something else going on, there, at least in the central case. I'll try not to speculate about that, though; I am in agreement with C.S. Lewis here: "I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed."

I'm definitely in agreement that having bigger priorities makes things less of a big deal. I don't think that's always sufficient, though; people can have sincere bigger priorities and still be tormented by contradictory desires (and even act on them, c.f. St. Paul: "For the good that I will to do, that I do not do, but the evil that I will not to do, that I practice.") for a long time.

How does it feel to share tribulations with Theodore Kaczynski? It seems you picked the same path with the same help of spiritual resolve on this particular road.

I've delved in this topic before on the old website, but it feels appropriate to again here recommend Anne Lawrance's Men Trapped in Men's Bodies which, while not exactly a light read is a rarely authentic and unbiased account of the experience of autogynephiliacs.

I feel like anyone who is honestly interested in improving their lot ought to have deeper knowledge of this experience than the dangerously trite memes that ended up producing egg_irl.

I wasn't aware of that episode in Kaczynski's life. The Wikipedia article makes it seem like his response was rather different than mine, though -- is it misleading on this?

(I share other things with Kaczynski too, like fascination with mathematics. It doesn't really bother me; I have things in common with people whose actions I abhor as well as with people I admire...)

I haven't read that book, though I had heard of it. The title is absolutely genius. I might give it a look, if for no other reason than to see to what extent others' stories support my analysis or not.

The reader will have guessed that, of course, Sam and Hilary are one and the same person, whose story is simply told from different points of view.

Actually, I did not - I took you at your word when you said that Hilary was "another" boy. If you're going to try and do something sneaky like that, you are at least obligated not to lie outright.

At the end of the day, from my experience, gender identity is downstream of self esteem and our ability to disentangle our desires for ourselves, from our desires for our partners, from what we believe we're capable of being for someone else.

Personally, I lacked self esteem growing up and had a lot of anxieties surrounding my ability to be masculine. (I'm a gay man.) So I was drawn to doing feminine things, which I also believed in my adolescent brain would attract a man (men are attracted to femininity right? Or so I thought.) But as I aged I realized that it's extremely gratifying to me to have my masculinity affirmed by other masculine men, and I don't really feel the gender anxiety I used to feel when I was younger. It is a matter of being more comfortable with myself than I was when I was younger. I too could have been trans, though I also felt physical horror at the thought of having my penis removed which helped me realize that perhaps it wasn't for me.

I wanted to see myself as an object of mens' desires, and I thought that being feminine would do so. If I was straight, perhaps I would want to see myself as the object of a woman's desires, and perhaps conflate the traits of femininity with what women desire, and so want to become feminine so as to possess those traits which women find desirable and become an autogynephile.

Some of you may have read Scott Alexander’s recent post, Book Review: The Geography of Madness. The couple of paragraph summary is:

A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too.

Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities - many cultures have something related to the penis or witches - but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it.

THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit that will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions - not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%,” you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing.


The thrust of Scott’s argument is that humans have an amazing propensity to change their subjective experience based on their beliefs. Here, I'm not talking about rationally held or carefully reasoned beliefs, but deep-seated beliefs that aren’t easy to change, even if you know for a fact they're irrational. Typically, these beliefs seem to be formed through social or cultural channels, and once formed, they can be very difficult to change unless your cultural narrative also changes.

This idea ties into other work on the placebo effect and the ways it shaped our culture, for instance, John Vervaeke’s take on shamanism. The basic idea being that shamanism was highly advantageous from an evolutionary perspective because it allowed groups of humans to harness the placebo effect to overcome illness and manage social problems.

In short, despite the rational pretensions our culture has, our irrational beliefs have extremely strong effects on our perception of pain and other subjective experiences. However, an important nuance is that no cultural disorder is 100% ‘in your head;’ on the contrary, these disorders are very real and can have strong physical effects.

Some of the big examples that Scott gives, and some I think might be (mostly) culturally mediated, are:

  • Anorexia

  • Post-traumatic stress disorder

  • Anxiety

  • Depression

  • Gender dysphoria

  • Chronic pain

  • TikTok Tourettes

  • Long Covid

Now, based on the bent of this forum, many people might be tempted to jump on the gender dysphoria issue. While it’s certainly a loud and vibrant battle in the culture war, I’d ask that we instead focus on other problems. In my opinion, if this thesis holds true, then gender dysphoria is a red herring.

The evidence clearly suggests that we are inflicting massive amounts of pain and suffering on ourselves through our cultural beliefs and practices. The fact that so many of our cultural problems - from overdose deaths and suicides to chronic pain and crippling anxiety - are unforced errors is truly shocking.

Think about it - one fourth of the adult U.S. population experiencing chronic pain? That's a staggering number, and it seems largely due to the fact that we have been conditioned to believe that our pain must have an acute physical cause. We've been taught to view pain as something that must be cured with medication or surgery, when in fact many cases of chronic pain can be alleviated by simply changing our beliefs about it.

The truly shocking revelation here is that so many of our cultural problems - massive amounts of overdose deaths, suicides, one fourth of the adult population experiencing chronic pain, crippling anxiety causing young people to retreat from society, and many more issues - are clear unforced errors. We are inflicting this pain on ourselves.

If this theory is true it may very well be one of the most important and impactful frameworks with which to view the issues of post modernity. We wouldn’t need endless medications or miraculous scientific breakthroughs - we could already have the power to end massive amounts of truly pointless suffering.

ETA: is another perfect example of this type of illness.


From a personal perspective, I can attest that this theory confirms my priors. I’ve dealt with chronic pain for a decade and have long suspected that it was mostly psychosomatic. Even with this realization, it is a difficult battle to fight. Ironically, support groups where people confirm and commiserate seem to make the issue worse. In fact, many modern studies on pain recommend not even using the word "pain" and replacing it with something else to trick your mind into understanding that your pain doesn’t have an acute physical cause.

So many of us in the rationalist community focus on object-level reasons as to why our society may be stagnating or why we have so many cultural problems. At the end of the day, it turns out that our beliefs themselves may be throwing us into a twisted, absurd, and horrific self-fulfilling prophecy.

It may be time to stop assuming that the causes of our problems originate directly from the outside world and update to a view that many more major problems could be solved if we simply change our cultural beliefs.

I would add Long Covid to this list of illnesses. Of course, post-viral symptoms from a nasty viral infection are a real thing that impact some non-trivial number of people, but the distribution of Long Covid doesn't make much sense if it's that. We have a disease that can't be identified with reliable physical markers; per the CDC:

A positive SARS-CoV-2 viral test (i.e., nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) or antigen test) or serologic (antibody) test can help assess for current or previous infection; however, these laboratory tests are not required to establish a diagnosis of post-COVID conditions. SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR and antigen testing are not 100% sensitive. Further, testing capacity was limited early in the pandemic so some infected and recovered persons had no opportunity to obtain laboratory confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Finally, some patients who develop post-COVID conditions were asymptomatic with their acute infection and would not have had a reason to be tested.

Even more strikingly, Long Covid correlates with belief in having Covid rather than positive tests:

Conclusions and Relevance The findings of this cross-sectional analysis of a large, population-based French cohort suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection may be associated more with the belief in having been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than with having laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection. Further research in this area should consider underlying mechanisms that may not be specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A medical evaluation of these patients may be needed to prevent symptoms due to another disease being erroneously attributed to “long COVID.”

The CDC demographic breakdown of who says they've had Long Covid is fascinating - women report it much more frequently than men, but transgendered people more still, bisexuals report Long Covid much more than straight or gay people, and there doesn't look like any correlation between races and states that makes sense with infection rates or severity of illness. Other work shows much higher rates among people with self-reported histories of anxiety.

As Scott suggests, I'm not saying that these people aren't experiencing something quite unpleasant, but I am saying that it's often not a product of a strictly viral or immunologic cause.

I would add Long Covid to this list of illnesses. Of course, post-viral symptoms from a nasty viral infection are a real thing that impact some non-trivial number of people, but the distribution of Long Covid doesn't make much sense if it's that.

Good call, added to the list.

From a personal perspective, I can attest that this theory confirms my prior beliefs. I’ve dealt with chronic pain for a decade and have long suspected that it was mostly psychosomatic. Even with this realization, it is a difficult battle to fight. Ironically, support groups where people confirm and commiserate seem to make the issue worse. In fact, many modern studies on pain recommend not even using the word "pain" and replacing it with something else to trick your mind into understanding that your pain doesn’t have an acute physical cause.

So many of us in the rationalist community focus on object-level reasons as to why our society may be stagnating or why we have so many cultural problems. At the end of the day, it turns out that our beliefs themselves may be throwing us into a twisted, absurd, and horrific self-fulfilling prophecy.

It may be time to stop assuming that the causes of our problems originate directly from the outside world and update to a view that many more major problems could be solved if we simply change our cultural beliefs.

You know another common thread? Neuroticism. That inability to just tune out something negative and get on with your fucking life. Extrapolating every bad thing that has ever happened to you or which you've ever experienced into infinity and beyond. And by and large, I believe our therapy culture, our support group culture, our subreddit for everything echo chamber culture just encourages this.

Go work with your hands. Or touch grass. Or something. Get out of your head, and especially stay away from people who just want to wallow in their own misery.

My wife and I have been talking about this quite a bit lately with regard to physical pain and suffering. What do other people experience? Of course, we can never know that for sure, but it's interesting to ponder. One place this came up is in the context of footraces, where the expected norm for anyone that cares even a little bit is deliberately incurring a large amount of cardiovascular stress and suffering, sometimes to the point of collapsing and vomiting after finishing. I have some reasonable degree of confidence that in this context I'm significant tougher than someone that isn't trained at all, but how could I have any idea whether I'm tougher than the guy that I'm racing against on a given day? I suspect that the difference isn't large, but I don't know, I might be gutting by someone strictly because I'm more willing to hurt than they are, but it might also be true that I'm a total pussy and they were able to drain their tank a lot more to even keep a race even. In any case, I know that people that habitually run as fast as they are physically capable of for a few miles will have more ability to tolerate this sort of suffering than people that get winded from going up a flight of stairs.

So how does that translate to the rest of life? When someone says that their back is sore or that they're feeling under the weather, are they experiencing something different than me? It seems to me that they must be, based on the way they react to illness. The number of times per year that I'm too ill to pull up a computer and work is maybe a couple days per year, but I've talked to other people that think it's completely unreasonable that a given company (with strictly non-physical work) only allows a couple weeks per year of sick time. We must be feeling quite different, right? I ultimately don't know, but I suspect that these differences in tolerance translate to differences in experience and result in part of the gap between people that allow setbacks to wreck them long-term relative to bouncing back and getting right. Treating everything as massively damaging seems like a form of anti-resilience that will lead to continually diminished physical and mental capacity to deal with future insults. Sub-cultures that treat these insults and corresponding diminished capacity as an identity unto themselves seem likely to spiral this further, possibly to the point where you have people lying in bed, convinced that they can't do anything, and they're actually correct.

RE: Illness, as I've gotten older, the brain fog I get from even a simple cold has gotten worse. To the point where there isn't much sense in me logging into work to sling some code, when I know I'm running at maybe 50% speed, and most of the code I write won't work either.

Doesn't help that I get sicker, more often, on account of having a kid in school who drags home everything and insist on sharing/stealing my breakfast every morning. I could say no... and sometimes I do when she's especially booger faced. But giving her half my bagel and egg in the morning is a nice daddy/daughter ritual I'd rather not give up. Plus it's one of the surest ways to get food in her before school.

At least she's not eating chocolate frosted sugar bombs.

The number of times per year that I'm too ill to pull up a computer and work is maybe a couple days per year, but I've talked to other people that think it's completely unreasonable that a given company (with strictly non-physical work) only allows a couple weeks per year of sick time. We must be feeling quite different, right?

I think part of this might be, as you say, subjective differences regarding the experience of the same illness, but this could also be just a difference in immune systems/health in general.

That is to say, I wouldn't be surprised if the gap there may be doubly influenced by your running- first in just being healthier and getting sick less/getting less sick and second by then being better at coping with whatever level of discomfort you get from that sickness.

Edit: There is also the noted vicious cycle for chronic illness (real or perceived) where feeling like shit makes you less likely to practice the habits which make you less likely to feel like shit, which then causes you to feel like shit even more/more often. Once again to some extent this applies mentally, but is also a very real thing physically.

This topic hit way closer to home than I had anticipated. I have been experiencing my own type of delusional paranoia that is remarkably similar to the topic you explain. I had an acid trip around New Years that turned very bad, and long story short I then became extremely paranoid about my health, and particularly my heart and lungs. I've regularly vaped for more than five years and I became anxious to exercise because i believed that it would inflame my cardiovascular system. It got to the point where I had my first panic attack at 26 years old because of it, ambulance and all. I became convinced that I had some type of congenital defect or some vaccine related myocarditis. I got a full check up, EKG, X-rays, blood tests, you name it. Everything came out fine. 177 cm, 165 Ibs. My doctor told me that my health was immaculate. It was literally all in my head. But it was so real. I literally felt like I was going to collapse and die at any moment, I was convinced of it. I felt every heartbeat, and every bed pain from sleeping wrong was misinterpreted as a coming disaster. It turns out that all it really boiled down to was that I was spending a little too much time by myself in my apartment, and consumed a little too much nicotine and caffeine that elevated my heart rate. It is incredible what your mind can convince itself of in the right circumstances.

Sorry to hear you've been through that. I've never experienced anything quite so acute, but I've had my fair share of harrowing moments that later turned out to be nothing.

But it was so real. I literally felt like I was going to collapse and die at any moment, I was convinced of it. I felt every heartbeat, and every bed pain from sleeping wrong was misinterpreted as a coming disaster.

I relate to this so much more than I can express here. I try not to refer to these episodes as "panic attacks" because of the aforementioned issues, but have definitely been there.

It's a type of experience that I think is uniquely difficult to put into words. People who haven't gone through that sort of thing literally just cannot grasp the magnitude of it I find, and I don't blame them. But over time the meaningless platitudes people spout when you open up really drives you to others who understand.

Then of course a whole subculture forms, and the problem reinforces itself. It's a nasty spiral.

I’m going through…almost an identical situation to you. No psychedelics, but similar height, weight, age, and newly developed fear of my heart/lungs giving out. It’s so obviously anxiety—but that doesn’t help in the moment, not when the symptoms of a panic attack include all the vague signs of my vascular system losing it. Lately it’s been a sudden awareness of my heart pounding, especially if I dare try to sleep on my left side, even when I’m at a nice 70 BPM.

SSRIs help, and it’s gotten me to start exercising for the first time since the pandemic. Knowing has helped keep me from throwing myself at the medical system. But it fucking sucks.

A lot of the examples you mention, besides the “you hear about it and then convince yourself you have it,” mechanism, seem to go further and have communities dedicated to actively spreading the condition and making sure people who have the condition keep having it. This often seems to be exacerbated by the architecture of modern social discourse: Victims of the disease congregate online and can wall themselves off from opposing viewpoints, meanwhile there’s kind of a “recruiting” community (e.g., /r/egg_irl) which sources new members. Illnesses whose communities build these recruiting hubs are more successful in spreading. Some are even so successful that the hijack public institutions.

These are literal meme (in the old sense of a self-replicating idea) mental viruses that compete and thrive in the 21st century social lattice. Put that way it seems like no surprise whatsoever that societies with less developed communication infrastructure have a lower prevalence of these diseases.

I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of these on a population. Is there some kind of immunizing treatment? Alternatively does the same mechanism that tends to make “real” illnesses become less severe also exist here?

I wonder if a society with much more restrictive communication like China has less of this. I would support “internet mask wearing” to combat this but at least in the west I’m pretty sure the people in control of making these decisions already have the disease.

I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of these on a population. Is there some kind of immunizing treatment?

I’ll go with the boring classical libertarian answer and say that the answer to free speech is more free speech.

Encouraging a culture in which people are able to freely and publicly criticize these memes would cause them to lose a lot of their contagious force. Becoming trans would be a lot less appealing if the average reaction in polite society was “uh, you know that you’re still a dude, right?” instead of “please tell me your preferred pronouns so I can affirm your identity”.

I think we have seen the consequence of that. The free marketplace of ideas ends up just like the free market. With government interventions, monopolies and all the other fun stuff.

I am not sure I see how it follows from allowing more speech to the median reaction to trans people being to deny their identity. My impression is most people (myself included) who affirm trans people's identities do so for reasons other than fear of social censure. I am not trans myself but it is also my impression there is no lack of media or content which they can be exposed to that denies their preferred identity, often including quite popular and mainstream publications depending on their location.

Any culture that exists gets identified. Once it has been identified it can be mocked. Once it gets mocked those who stand on the outside of that process will steer away from it and look for new cultures that have not been identified yet and are therefor free of mockery. Until we repeat the cycle.

Emo, scene, hipster, goth, metal head, jock, nerd, car guy, metrosexual or whatever other 'culture' that exists within a population.

Now imagine if we had enshrined some of the cultures with an inordinate amount of media and political power. Being emo is actually a medically recognized thing. There are special news stories every week about the emo suicide rate and how emo kids are bullied in school and how that is a giant social problem and how society as a whole has to come together and fix these issues that afflict this very special group. There are support groups and specific institutions and outlets dedicated to the group specifically.

How about instead of media mocking the whole emo thing as being a phase for insecure teenage girls who lack personality and are looking for attention and an excuse to use excessive amounts of make up whilst pretending their PMS is chronic suicidal ideation, we rather make laws that outlaw such verbiage.

Regardless of anything else, I'm sure being emo would still exist today if it had been sanctified in victimary discourse instead of having been mocked. Let alone if it was a pathway to some form of power or social capital.

Now, I think there are reasons outside of all of this that contribute much more to the survivability of LGBTQ stuff compared to things like being emo. But I do think it's an important element. If the words to describe what you see are removed from your brain, all attempts to discuss it will be in vain.

I'm sure being emo would still exist today

It does, I see dozens of these kids every day. It's like 2007 all over again, except they use vapes and smartphones rather than rollies and Nokias.

In Western news media, emos, goths, juggalos etc. are presented in at best a neutral light and at worst a very negative one, and yet all three still exist in some capacity. Some subcultures can apparently withstand decades of mockery and belittlement and survive. There might even be an oppositional component, where being mocked by the mainstream causes people to dig deeper into their subculture more than they would have otherwise.

I don't know if it's the same. It might be the 'next generation of the neurotype' for a lack of a better term, but when I think of emo I think of things like this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GaNFqd5eTX0 or this https://youtube.com/watch?v=s1o8WpTXfCY

Where the group identity itself is known as being something more than just a fashion trend, where there is an obvious ingroup and outgroup dynamic going on. Where you distinguish yourself as being something through your expression, i.e. makeup and clothing, and are recognized as being different by other groups.

But maybe it is the same where you live, I would not know.

I think of things like this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GaNFqd5eTX0 or this https://youtube.com/watch?v=s1o8WpTXfCY

I understand, and I see teenagers dressed exactly like that every day. Granted, it was in remission for a few years, but now it's back with a vengeance.

Maybe it is my cultural milieu but my impression is basically every culture you list ("Emo, scene, hipster, goth, metal head, jock, nerd, car guy, metrosexual") all still exist. I think it is likely some marginal people who may have become members of those groups didn't because of that mockery, but my impression is certainly not that these cultures are totally failing to attract new members. Searching for things like "#goth" or "#emo" on TikTok bring up videos with collectively billions of views. Most of those videos seem, at a glance, to be people in the appropriate subculture rather than being mocked as well. It is also not clear to me that "being trans" is more like "being goth" or "being emo" as compared to "being gay."

You are reading into 'existing' too literally. The 'look' still exists, but emo as an identity exists today the same way being trans existed in 2001. In other words it's people putting on a costume in isolation. Outside of that every culture I listed still exists and I never said they didn't.

It is also not clear to me that "being trans" is more like "being goth" or "being emo" as compared to "being gay."

What's the difference? As groups there's no distinction. Gays have always existed but not as a group like we see today.

I am not sure I see how it follows from allowing more speech to the median reaction to trans people being to deny their identity. My impression is most people (myself included) who affirm trans people's identities do so for reasons other than fear of social censure.

One plausible mechanism I could see is that those other reasons are often downstream from forms of social censure. The social milieu I inhabit is almost exclusively people who affirm trans people's identities, out of a genuine belief that the affirmation is the right thing to do. And that genuine belief is formed in an environment in which the idea that anything other than such affirmation could be acceptable is censured harshly. As you write, media that put forth such an idea isn't in short supply, but such things only exist in this environment as objects of derision, a target of a Two Minute Hate at best. As such, I think if such censure didn't exist and people were left free to argue that sometimes affirmation might not be the only acceptable thing, then fewer people would genuinely believe that it's the only acceptable thing, and a higher proportion of people would respond with the "uh, you know that you’re still a dude, right?" instead of "please tell me your preferred pronouns so I can affirm your identity."

No idea if the numbers would shift enough to make the former the average reaction, though. Given the massive incentive for preference falsification in this subject, I'm not sure it's possible to make any meaningful estimates.

  • Anorexia

  • Post-traumatic stress disorder

  • Anxiety

  • Depression

  • Gender dysphoria

  • Chronic pain

I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of these on a population.

I mean, my first impulse would be to remove them from the K-12 curriculum, but that's just me. I don't buy into this learned helplessness. The federal government should not be actively propagating mental illnesses, at a minimum. After this most basic of steps has been taken, we can agonize over echo chambers and misinformation on the internet.

Edit: Jeeze, I really fucked up the formatting on that list, apologies, but I can't seem to find a way to make it work.

I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of [literal memes] on a population.

I think there is also a question of determining which memes are harmful, which on the edges is fuzzier than it sounds. There are plenty of positive memes (the notions of democratic governance and enlightenment liberalism come to mind), and some negative ones like suicide clusters are pretty universally seen as harmful -- barring a crowd of unironic nihilists out there. But the more nuanced memes tend to draw disagreement, often becoming fodder for the Kulturkampf. Is organized religion a harmful meme? Personally, not in most cases, but many arguments to the contrary have been made earnestly.

Even if there were a mechanism for minimizing memes (beyond the simple "countermeme harder" which just raises the temperature), I'd be concerned about exactly what you'd choose to target with it.

I don't think it's possible to have nothing occupy the memetic vacuum of social media, perhaps we can fill it useful identity memes instead? I'd suggest traditional ones like maternal or paternal but I'm not necessarily against modern versions so long as they're healthy. We destroyed the traditional gender roles people fit into and replaced their with nothing. To paraphrase a meme on /r/theschism, one person's cage is another's frame to build on. If given no frame many people will poorly build something themselves and it won't be as tested as ones we've lived with for all of human history.

At least to some types of people, those communities are extremely dangerous. I fell for the old 'me_irl' memes of old during a few years when I spend a lot of time at home due to illness. I've never really been one to be tricked into believing things when speaking to people in the real world, however those kind of reddit communities manages to warp my mind a lot. Despite never even commenting. Some combination of being tired, agreeable and a bit neurotic?

I see so many people in real life everyday suffering from similar things and I just want to shake them and tell them to throw the phone away. But I don't know how. I wonder what will be said in the future about this time period.

We wouldn’t need endless medications or miraculous scientific breakthroughs - we could already have the power to end massive amounts of truly pointless suffering.

You think changing culture is easier than making a pill? I'm not sure it's the case. It may be possible to change the culture by the pill (e.g. - oral contraceptives?), but if somebody gave me two options of achieving the same goal - either by inventing the pill or by figuring out how to change the culture - I'd go for the pill. I think semaglutide has a better chance to make the dent in the obesity epidemic than 1000 public awareness campaigns.

Ahh yes, you might like Scott’s older post Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable.

The problem with this model is that if these illnesses are truly caused from cultural issues, there can’t be a pill that fixes them. Sure we can try to use the placebo affect but doctors already do that by prescribing Gabapentin or other weak drugs for everything.

If it's culture+biology, then we still can attack the biology part. We have a choice then which part to concentrate on, I'm just saying biology may be easier.

P.S. read Scott's post - yeah, he pretty much says all what I meant. Haven't seen it before, thanks for pointing it out.

I agree but there's an elephant in the room in the form of subsidies and welfare.

If the Romans had welfare programs specifically for ex-legionaries who were traumatized, there'd be a lot more of them! This isn't to say that all PTSD is made up but that it's surely magnified by incentives. Same with chronic pain, anxiety and some others. That helps normalize it as a concept, something that people can have.

All kinds of students have 'fluctuating conditions' or 'anxiety' since it gets them more favorable conditions in exams (at least in my country). I highly doubt that they do that in China or South Korea where they'd probably laugh at you if you said you were anxious about studying 12 hours a day. In many countries you can get welfare for these conditions. If you pay for something, you get more of it.

I recall reading veteran comments about having some PTSD but never seeking any treatment for it, because when they did, and it was some group therapy, they realised 80% of those in the room were faking it and walking away from it in disgust.

Ironically, support groups where people confirm and commiserate seem to make the issue worse. In fact, many modern studies on pain recommend not even using the word "pain" and replacing it with something else to trick your mind into understanding that your pain doesn’t have an acute physical cause.

And, to add a button to this dynamic, the mode of therapy for these kinds of issues seems to have changed from correcting them -- aiming to help the patient reconcile their delusions with reality -- to normalizing the delusions, including cultural reinforcement of this normalization.

And even create them. Modern therapeutic culture absolutely creates the preconditions for getting a mental illness. We teach through culture that you’re supposed to be happy and healthy and successful and that failure to achieve a life like that is a failure mode of life. And expectations are absurdly high. You have been told to get rich doing a job you love, to find a soul mate, and hobbies you’re passionate about, lots of friends, and be absolutely authentic all the time. Nobody actually has a life like that, or at least not anyone born into the leisure class. And worse, when the failures come and you feel bad, the general message is to focus on that one thing that’s broken. Incels are doing exactly what the culture has taught them, in a sense. They are supposed to have a wife, or at least date. But, for various reasons it isn’t working. So they focus on it. And they focus on how bad it feels to not only not date, but how bad it feels to feel that bad. If I wanted to create a toxic brew for mental illness, this is how I’d do it. Create absurdly high expectations, blame the victim for failures, and tell them to focus on their failures and how bad they feel as a failure. If I could do that, I guarantee I can create anxiety and depression.

Man, that reminds me of an exchange I got into on Discord. I probably should have known better, but for whatever reason this discord about funny youtube videos devolved into everyone talking about their mental illnesses and describing their therapy and self help books.

I said mine was "Shut The Fuck Up" By Dr Denis Leary. Nobody got the joke. People said they'd never heard of it, so I posted the bit. It was a joke. I was making a joke. This being a discord for funny youtube videos and all.

It.... did not go well. One person was especially triggered, accusing me of attacking them and wanting them to die. The mods eventually had to step in and make peace.

I don't understand the neurotic wound picking that seems to have become the predominant culture on nearly every web based community I traverse.

That might be a more effective response than my go to, which is “uh…y’all having fun in here?”

For some reason the people who want to broadcast their home/romance/gender struggles in #offtopic don’t tend to take that hint.

I would assume something like that was an attack, to be quite honest. The alternative interpretation is that you were trying to change the subject to funny youtube videos when people want to wallow (already a faux pas), and just by accident picking the one that looks exactly like an attack on the wallowing people. Unless I knew you to be extremely socially unaware I wouldn't assume such an unlikely scenario.

Incels are doing exactly what the culture has taught them, in a sense. They are supposed to have a wife, or at least date. But, for various reasons it isn’t working. So they focus on it. And they focus on how bad it feels to not only not date, but how bad it feels to feel that bad. If I wanted to create a toxic brew for mental illness, this is how I’d do it.

How would this square with the fact that polygamous societies are less stable due to the issues caused by unhappy, unmarriageable young men?

Are lower-class Somali men steeped in the over-ruminating logic of (bad) Western psychiatry?

Is that true?

I assume you’re thinking of trans issues. That’s the only thing on OP’s list where I’ve seen treatment focused on bringing the physical in line with the mental. Well, there’s physical therapy and prosthetics, but that’s beside the point. Anxiety, depression, et cetera…the intent is to mitigate them.

DBT was developed for people who experience extreme emotional responses to certain situations. “It’s essentially about learning how to think in a way that calms you down in moments of crisis,” explains Johnsen. “The goal is to center yourself so that you can get back to rational thought and behavior more quickly. Eventually, you should be able to catch yourself and learn to curb overreaction before it occurs.”

DBT is a “gold standard” in treating conditions like borderline personality disorder (a chronic behavior pattern that may include mood instability, difficulty with interpersonal relationships, and self-injury) and histrionic personality disorder (which entails constant attention-seeking, emotional overreaction, and seductive behavior) but can be used to treat anyone who experiences over-reactivity in certain scenarios. “It’s an in-the-moment technique that a person can use to regulate super-strong emotions, and get to a place where those emotions are bearable and surmountable.”

Source. The last couple options on that page lean away from coping strategies, but they still aren’t normalizing the symptoms.

It might also be worth noting that the response to mental illness isn’t exactly coordinated. Political slogans, softball media coverage, and Twitter—avenues of cultural reinforcement—don’t fall in line with therapists. Arguably, it’s the other way around, since motivated patients can select their way to a sympathetic therapist.

Anxiety, depression, et cetera…the intent is to mitigate them.

I'm not sure exactly what the modes of mitigation are, and if they're applied consistently. I guess I'm reacting more to the "pop psychology" reaction to these issues that you see in the media, and the effusive affirmations that now greet announcements of mental illness.

For anxiety and depression, my assumption is that the treatment for these has at least shifted from a "get over it" approach to a "this is very normal and valid" approach, even if the latter was originally intended as a way to end-run around the obvious objections to "get over it" while still helping them get over it. Now, the mode seems to be helping the patient feel better about their affliction rather than removing the affliction, as if the stigma of a mental health problem is more important than the mental health problem.

I'm wondering if it might also depend on the demographics of the patient. I have a hard time imagining that the treatment approach (across a broad swath of therapists) would be the same for a middle-aged white man who feels paranoid anxiety over romantic issues with women and a young black woman who feels paranoid anxiety over racial discrimination. Is one more likely to be asked to look for internal causes/solutions to their predicament while the other is tasked with better coping skills in the face of injustice? Is a profession that has fallen almost completely in-line with a radically progressive approach to trans issues not going to see that same context start to inform their other treatments?

hasn't it mostly transitioned to therapy and maybe prescribing antidepressants?

Highly recommend reading Ian Hacking's Making Up People which was a decade ahead of The Geography of Madness in describing this phenomenon.

Around 1970, there arose a few paradigm cases of strange behaviour similar to phenomena discussed a century earlier and largely forgotten. A few psychiatrists began to diagnose multiple personality. It was rather sensational. More and more unhappy people started manifesting these symptoms. At first they had the symptoms they were expected to have, but then they became more and more bizarre. First, a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters. Psychiatrists cast around for causes, and created a primitive, easily understood pseudo-Freudian aetiology of early sexual abuse, coupled with repressed memories. Knowing this was the cause, the patients obligingly retrieved the memories. More than that, this became a way to be a person. In 1986, I wrote that there could never be ‘split’ bars, analogous to gay bars. In 1991 I went to my first split bar.

This story can be placed in a five-part framework. We have (a) a classification, multiple personality, associated with what at the time was called a ‘disorder’. This kind of person is now a moving target. We have (b) the people, those I call ‘unhappy’, ‘unable to cope’, or whatever relatively non-judgmental term you might prefer. There are (c) institutions, which include clinics, annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, afternoon talkshows on television (Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera made a big thing of multiples, once upon a time), and weekend training programmes for therapists, some of which I attended. There is (d) the knowledge: not justified true belief, once the mantra of analytic philosophers, but knowledge in Popper’s sense of conjectural knowledge, and, more specifically, the presumptions that are taught, disseminated and refined within the context of the institutions. Especially the basic facts (not ‘so-called facts’, or ‘facts’ in scare-quotes): for example, that multiple personality is caused by early sexual abuse, that 5 per cent of the population suffer from it, and the like. There is expert knowledge, the knowledge of the professionals, and there is popular knowledge, shared by a significant part of the interested population. There was a time, partly thanks to those talkshows and other media, when ‘everyone’ believed that multiple personality was caused by early sexual abuse. Finally, there are (e) the experts or professionals who generate (d) the knowledge, judge its validity, and use it in their practice. They work within (c) institutions that guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity and status as experts. They study, try to help, or advise on the control of (b) the people who are (a) classified as of a given kind.

This banal framework can be used for many examples, but roles and weights will be different in every case. There is no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories of two different instances of making up people. There is also an obvious complication: there are different schools of thought. In this first instance, there was the multiple movement, a loose alliance of patients, therapists and psychiatric theorists, on the one hand, who believed in this diagnosis and in a certain kind of person, the multiple. There was the larger psychiatric establishment that rejected the diagnosis altogether: a doctor in Ontario, for example, who, when a patient arrives announcing she has multiple personality, demands to be shown her Ontario Health Insurance card (which has a photograph and a name on it) and says: ‘This is the person I am treating, nobody else.’ Thus there are rival frameworks, and reactions and counter-actions between them further contribute to the working out of this kind of person, the multiple personality. If my sceptical colleague convinces his potential patient, she will very probably become a very different kind of person from the one she would have been had she been treated for multiple personality by a believer.

I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful philosophical language is not prepared for it. Pedantry is in order. Distinguish two sentences:

A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were many in 1985.

B. In 1955 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.

As I see it, both A and B are true. An enthusiast for what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder will say, however, that A is false, because people with several ‘alter personalities’ undoubtedly existed in 1955, but were not diagnosed. A sceptic will also say that A is false, but for exactly the opposite reason: namely, that multiple personality has always been a specious diagnosis, and there were no real multiples in 1985 either. Statement A leads to heated but pointless debates about the reality of multiple personality, but in my opinion both sceptics and enthusiasts can peacefully agree to B. When I speak of making up people, it is B that I have in mind, and it is through B that the looping effect occurs.

Multiple personality was renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. But that was more than an act of diagnostic house-cleaning. Symptoms evolve, patients are no longer expected to come with a roster of altogether distinct personalities, and they don’t. This disorder is an example of what in my book Mad Travellers (1998) I called a ‘transient mental illness’. ‘Transient’ not in the sense of affecting a single person for a while and then going away, but in the sense of existing only at a certain time and place. Transient mental illnesses can best be looked at in terms of the ecological niches in which they can appear and thrive. They are easy cases for making up people, precisely because their very transience leads cynics to suspect they are not really real, and so could plausibly be said to be made up.

I could say the same thing about other possible incidences of fake science.

A. There were no flying saucers in the 1900s. There were many in the 1950's.

B. In the 1900s, people did not interpret mysterious things in the sky to be flying saucers and in the 1950s they did.

A is only true if by "flying saucers" you mean an observational phenomenon. And that's a motte and bailey, because when people say that flying saucers, or multiple personalities exist, they are not trying to communicate "this phenomenon exists", they are trying to communicate a particular claim about the underlying reality behind that phenomenon. If all you mean by A is is that the phenomenon exists, A and B are true, but not very interesting, because nobody cares about that.

I think this distinguishing between, say, the brute facts (or underlying reality) of some phenomena X and a socio-cultural narrative about X is exactly what Hacking is trying to get at with his distinction. Further in the paper he writes of autism:

Now let’s try out A and B for high-functioning autism:

A. There were no high-functioning autists in 1950; there were many in 2000.

B. In 1950 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 2000 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.

As I said, A in my view is true for multiple personality. But it is absolutely false for high-functioning autism. It is almost as absurd as saying that autism did not exist before 1943, when Kanner introduced the name. But B, I believe, is true. Before 1950, maybe even before 1975, high-functioning autism was not a way to be a person. There probably were a few individuals who were regarded as retarded and worse, who recovered, retaining the kinds of foible that high-functioning autistic people have today. But people didn’t experience themselves in this way, they didn’t interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in the way they do now.

I think if Hacking were applying his model to your A and B he'd come to the same conclusion as with autism, that your (A) is false but (B) is true. Whatever phenomena we see with the naked eye that we interpret as being "flying saucers" almost certainly existed before we had the socio-cultural narrative of "flying saucers." I take Hackings point to be that having certain kinds of socio-culutural or medical narratives can both change the way we interpret some observed phenomena (as in the case of autism, or flying saucers) but also can give rise to entirely new phenomena (as in multiple personality disorders).

You can say all you want that you're talking about the sociocultural narrative, but everyone else isn't. You know, or should know, that the other people who claim that multiple personalities exist (or don't exist) aren't talking about a narrative. Saying "sure they exist" in reference to a narrative is a way to be the motte to their bailey by pretending to agree with them, but really agreeing with a much easier to defend version that misses the point.

Fascinating write-up - thanks for sharing. I wonder how many critiques of psychology (and other fields) like this are lost because of the fact that the current narrative doesn't support them.

I wish someone would write a counterfactual history where the mythopoetic Jungian psychologists stayed in power and kept developing their narratives into the mainstream. I feel like we might be in a better spot regarding mental health. Psychology has a lot to answer for....

This sounds like a plausible Orson Scott Card novel.

MPD makes sense to me. People already engage in various forms of "mask-wearing": if you're a performer, you're consciously putting on a very elaborate mask of the character you're portraying. But even outside the world of theatre, consciously or unconsciously, you're wearing one mask in front of your parents, the other in front of your partner, the third one in front of your friends, the fourth one in front of your coworkers, the fifth one in front of a cop, the sixth one on The Motte and so on. Some people narrate their internal monologue as a dialogue.

It's not a huge leap to get from putting a mask on unconsciously, to putting one on consciously, to deliberately crafting and enhancing such a mask, to treating an advanced mask as a person, especially when you have learned that treating masks as separate people is something people do.

That's not what MPD is though. Like, the way I talk on this site vs 4chan are wildly different, and it's sorta plausible to say they're different "masks" or "personalities", even though they both come from the same goals / values / etc. But that's just 'purposeful action that depends on context and conditions', not 'different people'. Your 'thinking' or 'ideas' aren't fixed into one mask or context, you can remember something that happened in a seriouspost and make a joke about it later. And sometimes you make a seriouspost on rdrama, sometimes you tell a joke here. (And I'd personally prefer a motte where bizzare enraging shitposts are mixed with the seriousposts, but am aware it wouldn't work, both because they don't want to see the shitposts and they'd bait them away from making interesting posts.)

But someone with MPD claims to have 'fully separate' personalities that they 'can't control' - you'll switch semi-uncontrollably between one and another, you can't remember things on one personality that another can. They'll have different 'traits' in the same contexts, depending on what "person" they claim is fronting at the moment. This isn't just - sometimes you act silly and other times serious - which is entirely normal and unremarkable. It's saying that "Serious You" is "Joe" and joe is extraverted and likes doing math and watching cartoons, but "Silly You" is "Sally" and sally is introverted and likes moodboards and Harry Potter. This is just weird. Why not be ""extraverted"" about harry potter or ""introverted"" about math, depending on the circumstance? (and it really is that dumb - 'Having DID is wild [...] or a certain song will come on and suddenly I'm wearing different clothes and it's two hours later and I'm like "oh right"'). There's no use for that - each of those things can be engaged in independently. And the 'can't remember stuff from one personality in another one' isn't at all biologically plausible. They're just larping.

There’s a bit of motte and bailey going on. Or maybe sanewashing, I don’t know.

The defensible example is what you’re saying—everyone does social adaptation, some probably do it via dialogue, the long tails of that distribution could look like multiple personalities. There’s long-standing rationalist blogposts about having such dialogue, fiction with characters who use it, along with a general credulousness when talking about weird mental states. It’s also what Scott defends in his post:

For example, the person might be kind of a pushover, and then one time after they watched Star Wars ten times in a row, someone bossed them around particularly badly, and they imagined Darth Vader telling them to give into their anger and fight back…They emphasize that it really feels like Vader is in their head giving them advice, or that they sometimes “become” Vader - and in particular they emphasize that this is different from just asking themselves “what would Darth Vader do in this situation?”. They understand that most people learning about their situation would expect that they’re exaggerating a much more boring “just ask yourself what Vader would do” situation, and they’re fine with people believing that if they want, but insist that it’s actually something different and more interesting than that.

Something weird but comprehensible, plausibly an exaggeration, plausibly as “real” as anything else going on in one’s head. More importantly, it’s easy to empathize if one can relate it to the very normal dynamics of acting, role playing, whatever.

Now start adding accommodations.

This is the spicier claim: that the other personalities are, on their own, valid persons. That they may (or should) be addressed separately. That memories may not be shared, and any inconsistencies are framed as personality differences rather than a mercurial disposition. Perhaps that different pronouns are appropriate, since communities which buy into this dynamic are much, much more likely to be deeply and passionately aware of gender.

I don’t mean this as an attack. I’m really conflicted about the phenomenon, in part because it has such a reasonable motte. Also in part because one of my best friends has been diving headfirst into this community, and I’m worried about her. There is clearly a complex of social obligations which entangles the community with trans issues and transhumanist issues alike.

I've long believed something that rhymes with this and becoming more familiar with modern psychiatry has done nothing but increase the feeling that we're both pathologizing normal human variance and create more extreme cases by creating identity molds for people to slot themselves into. I could have made a case for having many different issues, depression, anxiety, and attention defeciet, ect. It would be easy, maybe some of them at some points of my life would be even true.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood, to this day I am not sure if that is a diagnosis that just means nearly nothing or if it was a miss diagnosis. I do indeed read slower than many peers, but I'm not even sure how cleanly I can separate cause and effect there, perhaps the diagnosis gave me an excuse and in fact a neat little special marker that overcoming or discarding the diagnosis would actual rob me of. I'd just be a normal.

Anyways I mostly forgot about the whole thing for years but recent it's resurfaced in my consciousness as some excuse for some behavior and in resurfacing I now really do seem to be finding it relevant more and more. I find myself even more preferring audio to text, even more not putting in the effort to improve. On the other hand without the diagnosis I might have thought I was dimmer than I otherwise am, the identity package included strengths with the weaknesses and might have cause dme to lean more into math and engineering subjects than I otherwise would have.

I know you see the trans question as a red Haring but this is another reason I find the topic impossible to ignore. It's the meme equivalent of a bullet with my name on it. There but for the grace of God go I as it is exactly the kind of thing I might have been susceptible to.

Crystallizing this further, I think particularly in the case of depression / anxiety / ADHD, what happens is that a cultural meme develops that some common facet of the human experience is caused by some specific disease, and that the appropriate way to fix this is to obtain treatment.

Examples:

  • Alice notices that she does not enjoy things that she's "supposed" to enjoy. She's heard that this can be a symptom of depression. She looks up "how to tell if you have depression", and reads that common symptoms include apathy, lack of interest, excessive sleepiness, and insomnia. Now, every time she has trouble falling asleep, she thinks "wow, this depression sucks" and not "I am having trouble falling asleep". She looks up "what to do if you have depression", and sees the usual suggestions about sunlight / therapy / medication. She thinks "well, they were definitely right about my symptoms, so they're probably right about the treatment as well", and gets a therapist and a sunlamp.

  • Bob notices that he's having a lot of trouble focusing on his job as Senior Manipulator of Boring Numbers. He has heard that trouble focusing can be indicative of ADHD. He looks up "symptoms of ADHD", sees fidgeting, absent-mindedness, difficulty focusing, and forgetfulness. Now, the next time he is introduced to a room full of people and has trouble remembering their names, he thinks "wow, ADHD sucks" and not "wow, I'm bad at names". He obtains some amphetamines, which is what you do when you have ADHD.

  • Carol notices that her heart rate is elevated and her muscles are tense before her board meeting. This has happened before the last three board meetings too. She googles "elevated heart rate tense muscles" and sees that, according to WebMD, she either has anxiety or lupus. She knows that WebMD is strangely likely to say that people have lupus, but the description of anxiety is on-point. Additionally, there are some new ones on there, like "difficulty concentrating", which she didn't think were caused by the same thing as the thing where she gets way too nervous before important meetings, but maybe it is after all. She talks to a therapist, and learns that indeed, all of her problems are because she has a disease called "Anxiety", but with the proper therapy schedule and medications, she can probably live some semblance of a normal life.

  • Dan notices that he's been having trouble with his sexual performance. He goes to the friendly neighborhood elder, who informs him that this is a common symptom of being cursed by witches. When you are cursed by witches, lots of bad things can happen, including livestock death, sudden inexplicable vomiting, and impotence, and in extreme cases, your penis sometimes even disappears! The next day, one of Dan's chickens keels over and dies for no apparent reason, and what's worse, he starts violently vomiting after eating the dead chicken. And oddly his penis feels smaller than usual. What was it that elder said he should hang above his door again?

Hypothesis if this is a usefully predictive model of the world: People who read their horoscope on a daily basis are more likely to experience chronic pain than those who don't, even when controlling for all of the obvious confounding factors. I expect that this would be the case because I expect "reads the horoscope daily" to be a reasonably good proxy for both "is searching for an overarching narrative of why things are they way things are" and also "is prone to confirmation bias", and I expect that "you have chronic pain" is one of those things you're more likely to believe if you're searching for an overarching explanation and tend to look for evidence under streetlamps.

Crackpot theory time: It would be possible to significantly reduce the burden on chronic pain by doing something like the following:

  1. Experienced debilitating, chronic pain for some period of time

  2. Changed something plausible about their lives

  3. Immediately after making the change, noticed something that was an obvious consequence of making the change

  4. Now mostly find that, while they do sometimes experience pain, the pain is no longer continuous, is usually telling them something specific, and usually does not interfere with their ability to function

and then loudly broadcast the existence of this group of people at people who have chronic pain. I expect that this intervention would work even if people knew you were doing it, as long as you (correctly, I think) pointed out that your narrative is more plausible than the narrative of "sometime in the recent past, a phenomenon started happening where otherwise-healthy people started experiencing significant pain for no apparent reason, and found themselves unable to live their lives normally due to that pain, and found that, though the pain might sometimes temporarily improve, it always comes back". Because "I do sometimes experience pain, but it's not continuous" and "I sometimes experience a reduction in pain to the point where it's not noticeable, but the pain always comes back" in fact describe exactly the same set of experiences.

Crackpot theory

See also: Duplex’s tithing experience in the Friday thread.

Crackpot theory time: It would be possible to significantly reduce the burden on chronic pain by doing something like the following:

*Experienced debilitating, chronic pain for some period of time

*Changed something plausible about their lives

*Immediately after making the change, noticed something that was an obvious consequence of making the change

*Now mostly find that, while they do sometimes experience pain, the pain is no longer continuous, is usually telling them something specific, and usually does not interfere with their ability to function

I don't really understand this - can you give a concrete example?

Think of a certain sort of televangelist.

  1. Find someone with debilitating but nonvisible illness

  2. Loudly invoke the power of the LORD

  3. Patient experiences one of the socially expected consequences, like speaking in tongues or collapsing

  4. wow pain is gone

And then there’s step 5: televise this for awareness and/or profit.

It doesn’t have to be religious, but that’s probably the most visible narrative that deals with life transformation. I guess you could make a similar narrative for gender dysphoria…

I will note that it is an important part of my world model that people with chronic pain, or with gender dysphoria, are in fact experiencing sensations which they interpret as aversive. And, while there exist humans who can execute the mental motion of "recontextualize your experiences such that the pain is not suffering", I don't think telling people to do that directly is likely to be a winning strategy.

"There is no such thing as an unmediated experience" is a true fact about the world (one that people in our particular corner of the internet are particularly bad at acknowledging - see all of the "I didn't fall for that optical illusion" types). In isolation, is is not usually a helpful fact about the world. However, rephrasing it as "here are some different lenses you can view your experiences through, keep trying out different lenses until you find one you like" is an approach that I expect will work more often.

For some examples, see the comments of the link posted upthread. For example, pjeby's comment on that LW post:

1. Experienced debilitating, chronic pain for some period of time

I used to have wrist pain a lot, and tried a ridiculous number of things to deal with it

2. Changed something plausible about their lives:

until I discovered the trigger point concept. Over time I've learned to identify which trigger points produce what symptoms for me, and what postures or behaviors set off the trigger points. [...]

3. Immediately after making the change, noticed something that was an obvious consequence of making the change

My dentist referred me to an oral surgeon twice for things that later turned out to be trigger points: my teeth had gotten sensitive after dental work, but it turned out that I developed trigger points from having my mouth open for hours during the procedure. Now I know where to massage my neck and jaw to prevent tooth sensitivity from arising in certain areas of my mouth after dental work

4. Now mostly find that, while they do sometimes experience pain, the pain is no longer continuous, is usually telling them something specific, and usually does not interfere with their ability to function

Anyway, my prior now for "mysterious chronic pain" is "check for trigger points creating referred pain". Most often this consists of following the nearest muscles, nerves, or blood vessels in the direction of the spine or brain, checking for tenderness. A sharply sensitive spot is likely a trigger point, so I press deeply on it for a minute (as in 60 seconds) and see if the original pain is made worse or better. If nothing happens to it, it's probably not the trigger point. (Pressing on a trigger point can make the pain temporarily worse, but the pain will reduce again when the trigger point releases or un-knots.)

So pjeby mostly reconceptualized what the pain meant. If you have a job that involves a lot of typing, and your wrist starts hurting, a natural hypothesis might be "the typing caused the wrist pain", which suggests the action of "reduce the amount of typing you do until the pain goes away". The idea of "trigger points" gives an alternative hypothesis of "I am feeling referred pain", and suggests the action of "look at the chart and massage the indicated areas until the pain recedes".

Now obviously, if the "trigger points exist, and pressing them causes the pain signals to diminish" model of the world is just factually correct, that would explain why pjeby saw such good results. But even if the world-model is not fully correct, it might still be less wrong than the original world-model where pain was caused by strain and should be solved by using rest. And in the case of chronic, debilitating pain where the sufferer has rested for an extended period and the pain is not improving, there is fairly strong (not insurmountable, but fairly strong) evidence that the "rest will make the pain go away" model is not helpful, and replacing it with a different plausible model is likely to be a good idea.

For the sake of clarity, there is a thing which sounds a lot like what I am saying, but is emphatically not what I am saying. That thing is "trigger points are bullshit placebos, and they only appear to work because chronic pain is fake". If that is what you are getting from my post, please let me know and I'll try to come at it from a different angle.

Thanks for your perspective. Dyslexia is another good example of one of these potentially culturally bound illnesses.

I know you see the trans question as a red Haring but this is another reason I find the topic impossible to ignore. It's the meme equivalent of a bullet with my name on it. There but for the grace of God go I as it is exactly the kind of thing I might have been susceptible to.

I suppose I think that compared to depression, anxiety, chronic pain, anorexia, and other issues I see trans as something that doesn't cause nearly as much harm, but generates a disproportionate amount of outrage. It's definitely one of the best examples of a subculture driving mental illness though.

I suppose I think that compared to depression, anxiety, chronic pain, anorexia, and other issues I see trans as something that doesn't cause nearly as much harm

I find this difficult to understand. Just on a trivial metric transgendered people seem to have a higher suicide rate than depressed people. You may be right on chronic pain but that does seem less memetically contagious and much less identity forming so it Amy make up in pure volume what chronic pain has in raw level of misery caused. I can't say which I would choose if I had to make such a choice, but it is far from obvious to me that transgendered is the least of the options on that list.

Fair! I suppose I thought depression/anxiety etc were much more broadly diagnosed and well known in society.

Then again, I'm also a bit tired of all the constant debates about trans on here. ;)

It’s pretty clear that it is much, much worse to be trans than cis, so it would be a pretty central example of a subculture driven mental illness really hurting people.

I do agree that Trans in of itself generates less harm, but the sheer massive correlations with other mental illnesses seems to be indicative of an issue.

simply

Ay, there’s the rub.

How would you implement such a change in perspective? How could you do so without significant change in the outside world?

I’m reminded of the teen pregnancy discussion a couple weeks back. It didn’t go down because everyone decided to make a societal change. Instead, the confluence of social signaling, costs, new technology, and coordinated efforts shifted the calculus.

One of the early touchstones of the community was raising the sanity waterline. Getting people, in general, to believe true things and avoid bias. This was rightly recognized as rather hard. Quite a bit of the early rationalist canon was dedicated to actually changing your mind. (Also, wow, the community was so much more vocally atheist back then.) Sociogenic mental illness fits right in: just get people to stop thinking in the bad way.

It’s also…kind of the steelman for therapy? Back in Freud’s day the strategy was digging up whatever had stunted emotional development in hopes that it would be resolved. Today we’re a little more sophisticated and try to teach strategies and mental patterns to redirect the mind. CBT, DBT, IFS…at least there’s some effort to measure and test their effectiveness.

But that’s the bar for changing people’s minds. At best, you’re operating in the same regime as modern therapy with all its pitfalls. At worst, you’ve got to rebuild a large chunk of culture to accommodate the new idea. It ain’t simple.

How would you implement such a change in perspective? How could you do so without significant change in the outside world?

I’m reminded of the teen pregnancy discussion a couple weeks back. It didn’t go down because everyone decided to make a societal change. Instead, the confluence of social signaling, costs, new technology, and coordinated efforts shifted the calculus.

I'm skeptical that you necessarily need to change everyone's sanity at once. Effective Altruism is a good example of a movement that can get a lot of narrow work done without making everyone involved significantly smarter. You get smart people at the top directing others, and build a hierarchy that (hopefully) selects for competence.

Now EA may be in troubled times, but it has certainly had a massive impact. If we could make this sort of awareness into a cause area I think we'd get significant movement. At least better than a counterfactual without some sort of movement.

I’ve dealt with chronic pain for a decade and have long suspected that it was mostly psychosomatic.

I guess you know this post?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgBJqPv5ogsX4fLka/the-mind-body-vicious-cycle-model-of-rsi-and-back-pain

There are some (strange? common?) testimonials about miracle curing chronic pain.

Woah I had not seen this! Bookmarked, thanks for sharing.

The fact that chronic pain is so well correlated with aging suggests that for the majority of people there is some underlying physical degeneration coupled with a culturally/psychologically mediated experience of pain. It's possible we're spreading cultural memes about aging that causes old people to hyperfixate on minor and aches and pains but the cultural universality of old people's body's hurting makes that seem iffy to me. It could be that technological advances of having pain treatments available primes people to fixate on total pain alleviation and medical treatments while past generations would simply learned to tolerate the unchangeable pain.

I know an old hippie lady who had chronic back pain that kept her in bed a lot. She loves to tell the story of how she 'cured' it by meditating intensely, talking to the pain in the form of a wol, and fully internalizing the idea that it was a part of her body trying to protect her not a sign she was being harmed. She's relatively mobile in day to day life and in some sense was healed, but she's still an old lady and moves gingerly and there's no way she could work in a warehouse or something. That's to say that there's substantial mobility and pain reduction to be gained through psychologically and culturally mediating pain like that but, not infinite improvement in most cases. Even when pain has identifiable biological causes there's still a lot of reduction that can be accomplished through psychological means.

The fact that chronic pain is so well correlated with aging suggests that for the majority of people there is some underlying physical degeneration coupled with a culturally/psychologically mediated experience of pain.

Not necessarily. Perhaps it suggests that "everyone knows" chronic pain is well correlated with ageing, so only old people can overcome the subconscious suspension of disbelief and delude themselves that they have it.

In the same way that no Malaysian-Chinese women worry about penis theft. It's all in their heads, but the scenario in their heads has boundaries.

Maybe with the propagation of gender theory Malaysian-Chinese women start worrying about that. After all, if you can become a woman just by declaring it, why can't you identify as a woman whose penis has been stolen? Moreover, the same ideology would require the doctors, on the pain of being fired and de-licensed, to treat such cases as the actual disappearance of the actual penis. You can't contradict somebody's living experience!

It seems to me that there could easily be two separate and sometimes overlapping things going on here.

There could be one group with the underlying physical cause and then the usual neurotic demographics that develop the same condition psychosomatically after it gets promoted for some reason (or people sorting their own different physical condition in under whatever label is hip or gets them resources and/or sympathy).

Or people have some more or less severe physical condition but the consequences of it gets magnified psychosomatically by the cultural understanding of the (or a similar) condition.

Sometimes I will start thinking that I'm stressed and my heart rate will increase as I start to feel miserable and sort of "lose agency" in the sense that I will begin to engage in mildly self-destructive behaviors such as playing a videogame when I should be working. These periods are generally caused by real stressors, but without fail I can introspect a bit and notice that most of my behavior comes because I am pretending to be stressed. When I simply ignore it and deny that I'm stressed at all, the stress generally goes away and I just get back to work, no harm done.

I wouldn't necessarily call this a cultural illness, though culture certainly has an effect. It's more that I think our brains don't perfectly record their own thoughts, so we as humans are particularly bad at interpreting and explaining our own emotions, memories, behaviors, etc. in ways that can compound on themselves. I have noticed this in myself in many different areas. Basically any time I seem to be making bad choices, I can reason through why those choices are being made and come to the conclusion that I seem to be emulating what I think someone else would do, e.g. I feel like I must be stressed out so I'm emulating a stressed person, or same for someone who is angry or sad.

That said, I have experienced chronic pain (but do not currently) and that was definitely 100% real. Certainly it can be psychosomatic for some people but let's be clear that it often has a purely physical cause.

That said, I have experienced chronic pain (but do not currently) and that was definitely 100% real. Certainly it can be psychosomatic for some people but let's be clear that it often has a purely physical cause.

It can absolutely have a physical cause, but more than a few months and I'd be willing to bet it's mostly psychosomatic. My understanding is that most chronic pain starts with an acute injury and spirals from there. The brain feels the body get hurt, tenses up, and a vicious cycle ensues.

At the end of the day the line between the two is blurry.

As far as I am aware one leading explanation isn't that it really is psychosomatic in the regular sense but rather than the system for sending pain signals from the spinal cord to the brain gets messed up by and self triggering from having some sort of long term pain, which leads to it continuing sending signals to the brain despite the injury healing.

The brain isn't at fault, it receives real signals, it's just that the signals doesn't have a injury as a cause (any more).

Eh, I think this one is genuinely real. As for other types of chronic pain, I'd be willing to believe they're mostly psychosomatic, but it's hard to know for sure without having experienced it. Sorry to be the "well acktually" guy but there really are real sources of chronic pain.

Hah you’re fine. I think the terminology here is mostly to blame, “real” and “psychosomatic” don’t really map onto what we’re getting at. Maybe culturally-induced vs mechanical?

Sure, IDK if it's really "cultural" though, psychosomatic seems more accurate. I think even if you were a hermit with absolutely no culture you could still fool yourself into a lot of these things.

I wouldn't consider gender dysphoria to be a red herring, it's more of a flagship. The most prominent example due to it being deliberately spread and promoted above and beyond what most of the others are, and therefore the most obvious example of this trend.

But yes, it is but one example among many, and probably noncentral given that it has significant opposition and thus culture war effects while the others mostly go unnoticed and unopposed.

To quote my response to @aqouta below:

I suppose I think that compared to depression, anxiety, chronic pain, anorexia, and other issues I see trans as something that doesn't cause nearly as much harm, but generates a disproportionate amount of outrage. It's definitely one of the best examples of a subculture driving mental illness though.

Are you talking about in absolute terms? That is, transgenderism is significantly rarer than most of those conditions, and therefore fixing it would be less significant in total value than fixing one of the others.

Or do you mean per person? Because transgenderism causes significant distress in many of its sufferers, driving many to suicide, social ostracism, and mental anguish up to the point where they are willing to undergo expensive and permanent surgeries, including castration, in an attempt to alleviate it. The more serious cases (people who seek actual physical transition) seem comparable to the more serious cases of depression and anorexia, which also lead to suicide, self harm, and other forms of self-imposed physical harm to otherwise physically healthy people.

A transtrender who dresses up like the other sex and uses a different name for a few years before going back to normal isn't especially suffering, but neither is someone with minor social anxiety or self-diagnosed ADHD.

I think in comparing like to like it's pretty comparable to most of the others, aside from the disproportionate promotion/opposition it receives from each political side.

Yes in absolute quantitative terms. I don't particularly care about whether individual trans people have it worse than depressed or anxious people, I think the question is beyond confused anyway.

When you're looking at societal issues it makes sense to focus it on the aggregate, in my view. Why the heck would anyone talk about a mental illness 100 people had? (Obviously trans is larger but the media massively overplays the numbers.)

This is a reasonable point.

I still think it is appropriate to talk about in disproportion to its prevalence due to the unique nature of its advocacy. That is, it is deliberately being promoted and celebrated and spread, as opposed to incidentally spread via cultural knowledge as the other conditions are. As a result:

  1. It is increasing at a faster rate than the other conditions are. So its prevalence in the future may be greater than theirs even if its current prevalence is not

  2. It is significantly simpler to reduce. Stop digging the hole. Mental health conditions which are treated as mental health conditions and spread via general cultural knowledge of them would require deliberate anti-awareness campaigns or other anti-memetic shenanigans to reduce this way. Transgenderism just requires you to stop celebrating it. Or, it would have, the cat's probably out of the bag now and it's probably going to stick around for a long time even if a consensus were to be reached that it's negative for its sufferers. But at the very least, stopping its increase would improve mental health in the future. So it's possible to create more value per effort, at least in theory, because of its current position in the culture war.

People being depressed don’t gain access to facilities they would otherwise be barred from.

It’s a 50 episode series attempting to build a framework for meaning and consciousness. It’s actually quite good although it takes a while to build.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats