The Fourth Wall of Psychology

The fourth wall of psychology, which you break at your peril, is the assumption that the "you" of today is the same as the "you" of yesterday and tomorrow. This underpins all planning and deferred gratification, without which you won't weight, let alone defer to, future selves.

It is also the basis for past memories being happy - it is still "you" that did those pleasant things, which gives a form of comfort (as opposed to "I" want that, and can't have it, which is also true, but a much more miserable way to reflect on your past).

Once, years ago, I broke this fourth wall by accident. It was during one such happy time that I knew I wasn't likely to be able to repeat. For some reason, out of the blue, the thought occurred to me "Sucks for you, future Shylock, that you won’t get to do this, and I do!”

As soon as this thought passed, it felt like I had accidentally opened a door to a strange and dark portal, through which lay a basilisk of second-guessing, unhappiness and intrusive thoughts. I was determined not to ponder it too long, and not to encourage this thought to persist. I didn’t think I would actually start making impulsive decisions based on a philosophical conviction that amounted to “lol, discount rates should be infinity”. But the various versions of me were, up to that point, always linked by a strong sense of mudita, or sympathetic joy. If the me of the past experienced something, happy days. If the me of the future gets to experience it, happy days. A world where this base psychic cooperation doesn’t exist seemed like a world of madness and deformity.

You might think that nobody could possibly operate this way. But there are good reasons to suspect that other people’s internal psychic states can be radically, wildly different from your own, and you might not know it. We know that people have enormously different abilities to form mental images, with one end being eidetic imaging where mental imagery pictures are completely crystal clear and photographic, and the other being aphantasia where they are completely absent. While this fact could have been known any time in human history, as the tech needed for it involves the complicated process of “asking people some basic but unusual questions”, as far as we can tell it wasn’t discovered until Francis Galton figured it out in 1880.

We know that people also vary in whether they have an internal monologue, a voice in their head talking to them consciously like a conversation. I have seem numbers on this for the population placed at 30-50%, from lazy googling of the subject. Like before, both the people with it, and the people without it, can’t quite believe that the other group exists, until this is pointed out.

And even here, if you believe the context described in Julian Jaynes’ “Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, it is not always obvious that this monologue, if it exists, was conceived the same way. That is, if you have one, you probably think that the voice is “you”. Jaynes argued that in the Bronze Age, people thought that the voice was the gods, commanding them to do things. Which is to say, you probably never wondered whether the voice is really you, and just assumed, like all this stuff, that your assumptions on the matter were universal. But they probably aren’t.

I wonder whether people who are impulsive and sufficiently low IQ actually lack this instinct of psychic unity across time, or have a very underdeveloped sense of it. I imagine they also just don't think about it much. But it is one possible answer to what "very high time preference" might mean as an underlying foundation.

At a minimum, a sufficiently high time preference becomes had to distinguish from the outside from failing to incorporate futures selves as the same as present self. If I were to guess, I suspect that this basilisk, rather like Roko’s Basilisk, only applies to a certain kind of abstract thinker. Which is to say, most people with low time preference think that the two selves are the same instinctively. Most people who have high time preference just don’t think about the matter at all. Not many people would be interested enough to wonder, and philosophically inclined enough to seriously get concerned. But the question of what exactly it is that makes “you” you is quite thorny. Indeed, one simple answer to Roko’s Basilisk is the view that an atomically identical version of you is actually better thought of as a twin, and not you. In that case, if a future superintelligent AI tortures my twin, yeah that sucks for him, but that’s life sometimes. Ironically, this means that there’s no value in torturing said twin, because it’s not going to affect me today. Just take the one box, bro.

Incidentally, there’s a revealed preference test for whether you really believe that an atomically identical you is really you. Suppose someone had a cloning machine. They had cloned you against your will, and were threatening to make an exact copy on Mars. You can press a button, and transfer half your net wealth to a bank account controllable only by that person. Do you press it? What if they make another copy? And another?

Like so many things, when you ask people to actually pay for their beliefs, you might be surprised by how many people take the practical, basilisk-proof answer.

But if the atomically identical version isn’t you, why is the much less similar version from 20 years ago, or from 20 years in the future? It is surprisingly hard to say.

Good, consistent decision-making turns out to be supported by a giant Newcomb’s Box rock, overhanging a cliff. Take the second box, and it vanishes.

I hope I haven’t seeded anything too bad here.

And with that, I strongly encourage you to go back to the usual movie. It is an occasional humorous incongruity when movies break the fourth wall. But it is nearly always better when the fourth wall is respected, without which, the whole concept of the movie quickly breaks down.

On Avoiding Being the Boiled Frog

It is hard to know when to exit something that was once good, and might still be good, but isn’t really right now.

There have been two fantastically-timed exits in my lifetime. The first was Satoshi Nakamoto, who left before Bitcoin was big, but once it seemed to be on a sufficient path to success, in his mind. The second was Jerry Seinfeld, ending his show when it was still funny, turning down a ton of money to keep the show going when it might have still been funny a little longer, or might have started to slide into irrelevance. Of the two, Satoshi is always a singular example in so many respects, and hard to apply. But Seinfeld is the one we can hope to aspire to. In principle, lots of people ought to be able to identify when some cherished project of theirs is no longer quite what it was, and finish it early. But in practice, it is very, very hard. More people end up going for the John Howard exit (running for PM again and again, until at last you lose your own seat in Parliament and have to get carried out in a box), or the Michael Jordan exit (retire, regret it, start playing again, retire again, regret it again, come back a third time and eventually dwindle into embarrassing irrelevance). This is especially so when the admission of decline and choice to exit involves a blow to one’s ego or self-image. Very few people have the self-awareness to be honest assessors of this.

If we narrow this matter to the domain of the political, there is a related question to ponder. In the French revolution, once it got rolling, who was the person or group of people you most wanted to be, if you could?

The answer is the Emigres. The best choice you could have picked is to not be there, if you had the resources. Doing this was easy at the start, and increasingly hard as the revolution began to devour more and more of its children.

Part of the problem, I think, is that in situations of social decline, people end up being the frog getting boiled. Things get worse, and some minor previous compromise gets breached, and then some escalation happens, and then some counter escalation, but then things cool off for a bit, and maybe it’s not so bad.

And then before you know it, you’re in the middle of Sulla’s proscriptions, or The Terror, or other equivalent disasters. And then it’s too late.

The best method I have found to stop yourself being thus boiled is that you need to identify trigger points ahead of time that will tell you when things have crossed an acceptable threshold. You can’t just hope to identify it from gut feel at the time, because your gut will probably be like everyone else’s gut, and only really get twisted and panicked once things have already become catastrophic.

One example of this I remember distinctly was the start of the Russia/Ukraine war. When war first broke out, I was overseas, and seriously wondering whether I should return back to America or not. In particular, when uncertainty and tension was at maximum height a few days in, the question I kept pondering was “what is the chance that this turns into a nuclear exchange within, say, two weeks?”

Bear in mind that various estimates of the unconditional base rate of nuclear war are maybe 1% per year. This time was surely higher than that. But how high? And how do you estimate the conditional odds at each day, and decide when the risk is too high, that it’s worth gambling your job to GTFO?

If you wait for the nuclear alert SMS to come, it’s too late. You’re just going to die getting nuked in a traffic jam.

The trigger point I decided on was if America declared a no-fly-zone over Ukraine. The only way this would work is for America to start shooting Russian planes, bombing Russian anti-aircraft batteries, etc. Not through Ukranian proxies, but directly on its own account. This would involve US aircraft being shot down as well, and there are a lot of ways that this could escalate pretty badly and pretty quickly.

But here’s the thing. If, in our hypothetical timeline when the US announced a no-fly-zone in the first week of the war, you booked the first direct flight out of the US to, say, anywhere in Central or South America with a plan to get an AirBnB and figure out the rest later, I am pretty sure you would have been able to do it, no problem. Not many people would have seen it as an immediate trigger that it’s time to GTFO. Which is fortunate, because if they all had, the flights would all be booked, the roads would be jammed, and the plan wouldn’t work.

Which is to say, a general property of most successful bugout plans is that they have to be triggered before most people realize it’s time to bug out. In other words, they need to be done when the outcome is still uncertain, and it might actually all amount to nothing. And they need to be done at the point that the median person will think that you are weird and paranoid.

Thankfully with Russia, this never happened. Enough people with enough sense decided to limit escalations to moderate things that were unlikely to immediately turn into total war. The calculation above then became a curious intellectual exercise, but one people can’t even do honestly, because hindsight bias is too strong for them to form honest assessments of what they thought at the time. I took my scheduled flight back to the US, but I did monitor the news very carefully for the next two months, until the risk seemed to have reduced.

Parenthetically, we actually ended up with a sort-of-no-fly-zone over Ukraine anyway, both for Russian and Ukranian planes, though we got here for very different reasons – it’s that fighter aircraft seem to be basically expensive and vulnerable targets that everyone leaves at home rather than getting them blown up, and they just uses drones instead.

With political escalations, rather than military ones, the good news is that you typically have more time to decide. In both the French and Russian revolutions, there were actually two revolutions in each case. In the early one, the old order got toppled, but things seemed like they might have settled down to a new, peaceful constitutional order. In the second, the killing and chaos really started to begin in earnest. But the gap between them was roughly 3 years for the French revolution, and 8 months for the Russian. If you had figured out which way the wind was blowing after the first one, you actually had a good amount of time to get your affairs in order and leave. It’s hard to think of political crises that went from “not much” to “mass murder” in a matter of days. The Saint Bartholemew’s Day Massacre is one, but there aren’t a ton.

More broadly, America, to me, has quite strong “Late Roman Republic” energy about it. If you place Trump on the Roman timeline, to me he doesn’t look like Caesar. He looks more like the Gracchi brothers – using populist tactics to disrupt an elite that hated them and the populists, and winding up getting killed over it. They didn’t directly succeed, but they showed a path that others would take to its logical conclusions – Marius, then Sulla, then Julius Caesar, then Augustus.

But if you think that we might be somewhere on a timeline that won’t be the same as this, but might have some echoes, where are we exactly, and how do you decide what your trigger point is?

A number of years ago, I forget when, but I think it was maybe 2018 or so, I came up with an answer. I told myself that if Donald Trump ever got sent to prison, that this was a decent possible trigger point for when it might be time to leave America. I told myself this, because at the time, there was no suggestion of criminal wrongdoing, even the impeachment had gone nowhere, the media was still on the “it will never happen” phase of the idea, before they seamlessly move as always to “it’s happening, and it’s a good thing that it is”. But Blog.jim was already on this train, and it seemed like a good out of sample test. I wanted to tell myself that, from the vantage of 2018 – not just the vantage of the median normie in 2018, but from my vantage in 2018, as an interested and skeptical-bordering-on-cynical observer of the political process, the idea of sending political opponents to prison on trumped up charges (pardon the pun) was considered a shocking and dramatic development, a massive flagrant breach of the status quo political compromise that keeps democracy civil, and a large escalation that had a decent chance of triggering some counter escalation, but probably more escalation to come. I wanted to tell myself this, because I forecast that if I didn't, there was a real chance I would forget it when the time came. 

Well, dear reader, here we are. Trump has now been convicted on charges for which the main substance of the actions was reported on as a minor humorous news item back in 2018. As Mr Dylan asked - how does it feel?

Even with the trigger, you still second guess yourself. It will probably get overturned on appeal. Maybe he will escape ever being in prison. Even if he doesn’t, plenty of countries routinely send political opponents to prison and survive as polities (Lula in Brazil was president, then was in jail, then got his conviction overturned, and now is president again). Maybe it’s not so bad. I mean, yes, it’s bad. But is it “uproot your life” bad?

And yet – whose perspective should you trust more? The current you, who has lots of additional nuanced knowledge of facts on the ground, but who might have a tendency to spin themselves comforting lies? Or the you from 2018, who could see that if outlandish counterfactuals came to pass, this was very big news, no matter what people said at the time?

I do not know. But I think the case for trusting the 2018 me is considerably stronger than you might think.

A key note here is that all of the above is significantly related to being a foreign-born ex-pat. If you are an American whose ancestors have lived here for hundreds of years, it is a much more thorny question, and the moral and aesthetic arguments for staying to fight it out, whatever comes, because this place is yours, are quite decent.

But if the place is not yours, why exactly do you still want to be here?

There is one other technique that I’ve found helps, from a different point of view. One of the reasons the frog gets boiled is inertia and the status quo bias. People default to doing nothing, and they need a particular impetus to act. This burden is generally quite high, and especially high when acting goes against social consensus. This arises both for reasons of psychology, but also the practicalities of life’s circumstances. You see what you are giving up, and it is large and a pain in the ass. You do not see what might happen in the future, either the realities of a new life, but also what would happen if you stay.

Seinfeld is still funny! They are still offering you fat checks to keep going! Are you really going to turn down the money? How many people ever turn down the money?

So one way around this psychological status quo bias is to mentally reverse the presumption of the status quo, and see how the problem looks then.

Which is to say – suppose you didn’t live in America already. Suppose you were living in some relatively safe other country. If someone offered you a chance to move to America, right now, would you take it? Even for somewhat more money than you currently make?

No. Hell no. Are you crazy? Look at the place! Be honest – is there anyone who is actually optimistic about America right now? Inside or outside America, the answer is the same. The idea that America’s best days are behind her is probably the single most bipartisan poll question going around these days.

Would the answer change if they offered you a 50% pay raise.

Maaaybe. But you’d still be pretty wary. I suspect for a lot of people, the answer is still “no thanks.

But even if your answer is just “probably not”, then status quo bias aside, it is probably worth taking a 33% pay cut to leave.

I say all this, dear reader, but do not be fooled. I am working through my thoughts on this page, trying to convince myself as much as you that the logic is sound, because it is confronting logic indeed. In some ways, this is a therapy post. I resolved to avoid writing therapy posts as much as possible, because they tend to have the highest likelihood of me later realizing I said things that were dumb or cringe to try to make myself feel better.

This isn’t quite that.

But the stakes are high, and this is very bad news. Not because you have to love Trump. But because this is a major erosion of one of the key pillars that keeps political disagreement in the US civil and nonviolent.

I do not think this will stop here. The Democrats cheering this are contemptible fools, heaping logs on a bonfire that has a significant chance of consuming their own house.

It is too early to tell if the porridge is really going to hit the propellor, and if so whether this happens in six months, 5 years, or 30 years. It may not happen at all

But one thing seems very likely. If it does hit the propellor, a whole lot of people are going to find themselves learning the hard way Paul Fussell’s wonderful description of the three mindsets that soldiers gradually go through in wartime

    1. It can’t happen to me.

    2. It could happen to me, so I need to be more careful

    3. It is going to happen to me, and only my not being here will prevent it.

You are strongly advised to figure this out before everyone else does.

Letters to My Great Grandchildren, Part 1: Obesity and Bewilderment

Let me begin with the obvious. I do not actually expect you to actually read these. The dead, as Kipling observed, are only borne in mind for a little, little span. Digital preservation being what it is right now, I don't even really expect it to survive. And even if you do somehow read it, it is hard to know what will strike you as interesting about my time. Assuredly, the things that I find noteworthy about modernity may have nothing to do with what interests you. A lot of your questions will probably relate to things like "what was life like without [indispensable invention X]?". Alas, I cannot tell you - it seems pretty normal to me! One throws this note in a bottle into the digital sea - the modern version of the same impulse that made men once paint on cave walls.

One thing I can tell you, however. In certain respects, the early 21st century is a bewildering time to be alive. And this is especially so in a respect that I imagine will strike you as especially jarring when you look at photos from this time. Namely, why is everybody so enormously fat and unhealthy-looking? 

The immediate question you are probably wondering is how we didn't figure this out. Didn't they look around and notice there was a huge problem? How could you possibly fail to spot the obvious answer of [cause Y]? 

To take the obvious first - we definitely noticed. Human nature did not change so much that the obese failed to observe that they were obese. Nor did they fail to observe the health and lifestyle costs. Indeed, in the sexual marketplace, the fewer people who are thin and in shape, the higher the payoffs to those traits, making the perception even more acute. 

It is glaringly obvious that, at least in this respect, something has gone very wrong with modernity in the last 60 years or so. Obesity, testosterone, sperm counts, the list is long. But time series changes are incredibly difficult things to parse out. The problem is that dozens, if not hundreds, of things are changing all at once. The curse of knowledge is always a tough one to circumvent. When you know something, it will always seem like it ought to be obvious to people who don't know that thing. But it isn't. It turns out it is more difficult than you think to credibly put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know, in this case, why everyone got so fat.

To begin with one aspect that makes the problem hard. Across different categories, there is a large difference in regulation about what can occur, and how much data collection and notification goes into it. To take one example, which may or may not be relevant to obesity (which is the most glaring and acute of the modern problems). There are a lot of requirements about labeling the ingredients in food. But there are almost none about labeling the chemicals used the packaging that the food comes in. There is some attention paid to the composition of trace chemicals in the water people drink, but it depends a lot on which chemical. There is little attention paid to the amount and type of radiation people are exposed to. Lack of regulation and lack of interest is strongly correlated with lack of data to test hypotheses well. The hardest of which is not "does this increase weight in controlled settings", but "does this quantitatively explain the world around us?" 

Are any of the examples above actually *important*? That, future reader, is the aspect I most want to discuss. The problem is not the lack of plausible theories, or possible contributing causes, or partial remedies. The problem is the complete surplus of them, and the difficulty of sifting between them. Smart, motivated, curious people live in a world of leaping from one lead to the next. They have a scarce budget of time and attention and effort, but great confusion as to where to allocate it to solve a problem that seems all pervasive. The obvious candidates are things associated with modernity, broadly defined. But which ones? Do you need to be reducing the amount of carbs you eat? Do you need to cut back on seed oils? Less salt? Do you need to limit the hours in a day when you eat? Or perhaps the problem is chemical in nature. Do we need to work to reduce our exposure to  polyfluoroalkyl substances? BPA? Microplastics? Lithium? Antibiotics? Glyphosate? Blue light? 5G radiation?

Or is the problem even thornier - that we were simply evolved for a world of calorie scarcity, and our hardwired instincts are now pathological in a world of permanent calorie excess, moths circling a flame of our own making, consisting of hamburgers and doritos? Because, as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, we can do what we want, but we cannot want what we want? It is striking that the unusual period in history when we consume too many calories is the same period, and same places, that our houses now routinely accumulate junk possessions which occupy much time and effort getting rid of. Both problems would seem bizarre to people a hundred years ago. 

I have no doubt this list will seem comical and insane by the time you read it. But this is the point. To live in 2024, and spend any time pondering not just obesity, but the various other maladies that seem to afflicted us more than in the past, is to have a complicated and uneasy relationship with the modern world. There are many things that are probably in the category that the distribution of effect sizes starts at zero, and includes small negatives and considerable negatives. That is to say, not many people seem to think you should be *increasing* your consumption of microplastics. But is it a small problem, or a large one, or actually not really a big deal? That's the difficulty. You can try to play it safe, as it were. But the precautionary principle breaks down very fast when the space of possible things to avoid is sufficiently large. And many of them carry tradeoffs that only become obvious in hindsight, because some of the things are so prevalent. You might be worried about contaminants in your water, perhaps. So you buy a cheap water filter, except now all your water runs through a plastic container made of whatever as-bad-or-worse BPA substitute they're using these days. You take supplements to try to improve your health. But you buy the easy to swallow ones without thinking about it, and end up consuming a lot of whatever is included in the dubious term "gel caps". One ends up being pushed towards rejecting more and more of the modern world, where the end point is rejecting it wholesale, like the Unabomber, or the Amish, or Boko Haram. We don't want this, of course. We still want to be able to write our essays on the internet. 

You can guess at the outlines, of course. It has to be pervasive, hard to avoid entirely. Every area of every country seems to have gotten fatter. It has to be associated with modernity, probably the 1960s/70s onwards, but also increasing over that time. In the cross section, who is affected more seems to be largely genetic, from the twin studies. But since genes haven't changed much in 70 years, this means either genes are a big determinant of response to a time series change, or genes determine willpower, and the ability to use effort to overcome the force pushing you in the same direction. It doesn't seem to be from cross-sectional environmental exposure. Which is weird, since a large time series change sounds a lot like environment. 

You're probably thinking to yourself, that's it? Well, not exactly. There is lots more specific evidence, but this is much more murky and open to interpretation. If you want to know how to control obesity, you've got a larger set of options, with their own limited success. But, for instance, it seems very unlikely that the rise of obesity in the 1980s came from people abandoning their previous one-meal-a-day keto diet, even if you think that might be a decent remedy for the underlying cause. If people stick to it. The distinction between "this would work, if people actually do it", and "this is a thing that the average person could credibly do" is also surprising blurry in the way matters are discussed. 

The other aspect, which you might not guess, is what the response is to this confusion. You would probably guess at there being a frank acknowledgement of the lack of understanding. But there's not. There appears to be some strange aspect where in the face of intractible problems, people would rather believe vehemently in some theory or other, and that it just hasn't been tried hard enough. People would rather hear a wrong theory, vigorously and persuasively espoused, than to frankly admit that all their theories aren't working, and they're largely out of ideas until big pharma invents the right drug. There is a need for action, even partial or unsatisfactory or pointless or symbolic or improbable-to-be-successful action. And once this has occurred, cognitive dissonance takes care of a lot of the rest, changing beliefs to match the actions already taken. 

People believe passionately in their particular theory of weight loss and weight gain. Their passion is strangely out of all proportion with the actual level of confidence that you could attach to intent to treat estimates. That is, if you think the problem is seed oils, is this the same as making a concrete prediction that everyone who cuts seed oils from their diet by, say, 90%, and makes no other changes, will obtain and maintain a healthy BMI? I mean, it would probably help, at least a little. But that's not the same thing. Notably, they believe this much more passionately than for things where knowledge is straightforward. Nobody is passionate about vitamin C being a cure for scurvy. Hell, nobody is even especially passionate about whether Ozempic tends to produce weight loss, because it does. This is just boring, ordinary knowledge. But why everyone got fat in the first place? The honest assessment, that we just don't really know, is the one you are perhaps least likely to hear. 

So here we are. In these strange times, to admit to this plight, is to have some sympathy for the Carthaginians. Nature abhors a causality vacuum. It is more comforting to sacrifice some children to the gods to try to bring rain, than it is to sit there powerless, day after day, not doing anything, not able to even really know what you should be doing. 

For now, Ozempic has been a small light at the end of the tunnel. Once better drugs get invented, and it perhaps gets fully solved, it might eventually just be a subject of later academic or historical interest as to what it was all about in the first place, rather like what caused the decline of the Roman empire. In the shorter term, if we do find out the answer, the people so strongly clinging to this or that theory of diet will forget that they ever did so. Cognitive dissonance is strange like that.

In other words, your likely bewilderment looking at photos and videos of us is matched only by our own bewilderment in looking at ourselves. It is a strange time, but alas, we have no other. 

Anyway, I hope to write some more of these soon. Life is busy, not least from looking after your grandparent and great uncle or aunt. 

With all my love, 

[Shylock]