On Predicting Divorce

Divorce, like death, is one of those things that deep down everyone assumes will only happen to other people. People believe this despite all the statistics and reasoning to the contrary. Also like death, it usually takes a divorce happening to someone close to you for the full gravity and horror of the situation to become apparent. But if it comes, there's a good chance it will take you by surprise. Maybe your marriage gets randomly run over by a bus. Maybe it develops a debilitating and malignant lung cancer, until when the end finally arrives it almost comes as a relief. Of course, divorce doesn’t have to happen to you. But maybe that’s just because the other inevitability steps in first. On a long enough time frame, the survival rate for everybody drops to zero, after all. If we lived for a million years, would any marriage last that long?

I have not been divorced. I have not even been married. Which makes me wholly unqualified to talk on the subject. But then again, even the most ardent real life students of the topic probably only have a few first-hand experiences on the subject. And knowledge on the subject is almost by construction going to be piecemeal. The people with the most firsthand experience of what it’s like to go through one are likely those with relatively less understanding of why it tends to occur. Or they’re bizarre gluttons for punishment.

If one is interested in forestalling divorce, there are two questions to ask. The first is how you should act in a marriage, conditional on your spouse. For this you can go to your local marriage counselor, or Dalrock, or Heartiste. Weight the three according to taste.

But there’s a second question – whom should you marry in the first place? I’ve probably spent more time thinking about this question, because it’s the Russian Roulette of high-stakes inference. And if I spend more time thinking about it than most people, perhaps oddly so, I at least have the defense that I think that most people spend an insufficient time thinking about it in cold, concrete terms.

So what might be things I’d look for?

The first, which doesn’t require much insight, is divorced parents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, etc. Everything is partly heritable, so a fair amount of behavior will come from genetics. But this is one of those cases where you don’t really care where the predictive power comes from. The bit that’s environmental is being passed down too. Freud may have been wrong about the specific hypotheses he had on how children relate to their parents, but he was right on one thing – if you want to understand the child, look at their parents, and the child’s relationship with their parents.

Some people end up explicitly modeling themselves as a rejection and reaction against their parents’ failings. But most people end up subconsciously taking in expectations of what “normal” behavior looks like. Marital breakdown is like a car crash. Because crashes are quite infrequent, you probably want to spend more time analyzing near misses, where there’s a lot more frequent data to go on. In the marital domain, I find a quite illuminating question to be “how often did your parents tend to argue when you were a kid”? Everyone assumes their answer holds across the board for everyone. It doesn’t. Try it out.

So then we turn to characteristics of the person themselves. What traits are worrying?

To me, the biggest personality trait I’d worry about is selfishness and self-centredness, broadly defined. And importantly, you can’t look to how they are with you. You have to look at how they are with other people, especially those they don’t really like. Sacrificing and making an effort when in the first flush of excitement and love is very different than doing it after ten years when you’ve got two young children and you’re chronically underslept. The latter is when it actually matters. How does the person behave when they’re tired, and stressed, and having to do something they don’t really like?

Selfishness and self-centredness aren’t the same thing, of course, but they overlap. Selfishness is probably something that people are more apt to notice and avoid instinctively – is the person just stingy and rarely generous in unsolicited ways, unless they’re getting something out of it? This is probably likely to make your marriage unpleasant, leading to a visible deterioration. But it’s also something that is likely to make you avoid marrying someone in the first place just as an experiential aspect, regardless of the specific divorce question.

I suspect that self-centredness is both harder to diagnose, and more likely to get you blind-sided by a surprise divorce. In other words, does the person think that the main question to be answered is “Is this marriage something that makes me happy?”. If this is the relevant question, you might be surprised how their behavior turns on a dime when the answer switches to “no”. When things are going well and marriage makes them happy, a self-centred person might do lots of nice things for their spouse. But once it doesn’t, suddenly their desire to be generous decreases a lot in a way that seems surprising from the outside.

So how do you spot someone who’s not self-centred? Self-centredness can have a number of opposite traits, which manifest in different ways. One is empathy – genuine empathy, that is. Genuine empathy frequently asks the question “I wonder how that would feel to the other person?”. Someone who asks this frequently will wonder far in advance what divorce would be like for their husband, and their children. Self-centredness can coexist with kindness to others, and even compassion. This is the main way people don’t tend to spot it. Doing well-understood nice things to other people, because it feels good, is not the same thing as habitually thinking about how one’s words and actions will affect those around them. A self-centred person might do sweet things like buy a present for someone, but then later inadvertently hurt them with some carelessly chosen phrase, because they just weren’t really thinking about how it would impact the other person.

Another opposite trait is a sense of duty. Duty is a very old-fashioned word. Someone who has a concept of the duties of a wife is not just thinking about themselves. I suspect that a general sense of duty across the board is useful. Do they call their parents often, for instance? Do they have a sense of religious obligation? Even beyond their specific views on marriage, duty says that there are more important questions than just whether something makes you happy in the short term, or even at all. Some things just ought be done. And the broad sense of duty does not need to require a specific set of saint-like devotion to husbandly happiness. Good luck finding that in the Current Year (or, honestly, probably in any year). It’s probably enough to just have a stubborn insistence that one is obligated to work out one’s marital problems no matter what, because divorce is just not done.

Between the two, empathy avoids self-centredness by being able to reason on-the-fly about what other people around them are thinking and feeling. Duty is the conservative, Chesterton’s Fence version – because most people will insufficiently be able to reason out all the ways to make social arrangements work, we should roughly codify the parts that seem to be best practice. The former is more useful in a wide range of social situations, but probably also harder to find. The latter is scalable to more people, but of course we as a society don’t bother doing that scaling anymore.

There’s an additional component at play here, but it requires more honest introspection. Having a partner who isn’t self-centred is especially important if you yourself are self-centred. Because that’s exactly the nightmare kind of situation. When you’re both in the first flush of love, it will bring you pleasure to do nice things for each other, the other person’s nice behavior will bring out more niceness in you, and you’ll think it will last that way forever. But when things deteriorate, you’ll both start making excuses to start looking out for number one.

The one trait that I think is a) true and b) more likely to be emphasized by marriage counselors than Heartiste is the other person's ability to communicate about problems, figure out reasonable solutions, and stick to them. If I don’t dwell on this one at length, it’s not because I think it’s less important, just that I think it’s sufficiently obvious that you don’t need to come here to hear about it.

The final trait I would look at is the extent to which the person bears grudges, or how they act towards people they hate. Do they just try to move on and remain civil, or do they dwell a lot on the subject of people they dislike? It’s not so much that this predicts the possibility of divorce, but I suspect it surely predicts how they will act if and when it comes about. The central mistake that causes people to underestimate how bitter their divorce will be is that when they imagine the process of divorce, they’re imagining their wife or girlfriend now who loves them deeply. This is a terrible failure to do statistical conditioning. Conditional on getting divorced, the person hates your guts. So how does this person act towards people whose guts they hate? More importantly, are they willing to be reasonable and compromise, or are they willing to pay a price to stick it to someone they hate? This is the difference between a grudging and terse two hour conversation about who gets what and $500 in lawyers fees, vs $200K and two years of utter misery. Once the arms race train gets started, it’s very hard to stop. And people underestimate the arms race. Your lawyers will emphasise the part that ends with the divorce settlement. They won’t emphasise what it’s like to have to see that person you now loathe every second weekend to pick up the kids.

But sometimes, to paraphrase Sherlock (not Shylock) Holmes, we have to decide when the R² of the regression is not as good as we would like it to be. And this is one of those cases. It is hard not to feel that, when all is said and done, one’s best calculations may not help one much here. One cannot, after all, pick a constellation of personality traits. One can only evaluate the girlfriend or boyfriend in front of you, and make a call one way or the other without knowing in any concrete way who the actual counterfactual girlfriend you haven’t yet met is. So you go with your gut, and roll the dice.

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The good news is that, having rolled the dice, one can then (or hopefully sooner) turn all one’s attention to the second question of what to do once you’re in a marriage.

The bad news is that that, too, is subject to the Kundera problem.

Sometimes, despite everything, death happens to you too.

The Briar Patch Strategy

Suppose that one has reached the depressing conclusion that the United States is broken, ungovernable, and heading for some kind of protracted civil conflict as the Cold Civil War eventually turns hot.

Well, I'm just some guy with a blog, and you're just some guy reading a blog, so chances are we're both screwed.

My current plan is:

Plan A: Wait until the porridge hits the propeller, and hope that there will be enough commercial flights out of the country in the last days of Saigon that I can afford to get the hell out of here back to Oz with whatever Bitcoin I have and figure the rest out when I arrive. If this fails, then on to:

Plan B: Bend over and kiss my @** goodbye

This is obviously not a good plan, but at least it's realistic.

But suppose we had some way to actually influence the course of events. What's the best, realistic alternative that one could aim for?

War is nearly always the worst outcome. Ronald Coase's ghost is not amused by the wanton destruction of lives and property. Since this destruction is predictable ahead of time, you'd think people would just come to an agreement on whatever was in dispute. Even if this just means one side surrendering. Other than the glory of dying in a last stand, if you're going to lose anyway, you may as well avoid getting your country destroyed in the process. So war is usually the result of overconfidence - both sides thinking they're going to come out ahead.

You saw a lot of this in the 1860's with the South thinking they'd beat the soft Northerners in quick succession. And you get eerie echoes of it today, with conservatives consoling themselves that they own all the guns and hence would win any actual military conflict.

I'm not so sure. If it comes down to co-ordination, bet on the progressive leviathan (and it usually does, because you've got to get those guns to point in the same direction at once, as Nick B. Steves put it).

So anything that avoids the conflict is preferable.

Reforming the government would be preferable, so it stopped doing such insane things. Invade the world, invite the world, in hock to the world (in the immortal Sailer formulation).

But this inevitably brings you into conflict with people who benefit from the status quo.

Probably the best idea in this regard is Moldbug's Formalism. Find who has power under the current system, and convert it into equivalent cash flow rights under a new and better system. In other words, rather than try to expropriate the current owners and reform the system, just acknowledge the current owners, whoever they happen to be, and try to reform the system to their benefit. At least then you might get a less insane system with less of a deadweight loss.

The problem, however, is that at the level of the overall governing apparatus, it's very tricky to actually say who owns what in terms of shares of power and influence. What fraction of power does the New York Times have? You see the problem. Which means that in practice, changes of governing system usually end up being both changes of structure and expropriation of the existing owners.

This means that actually reforming the whole government will inevitably have a lot of opposition. It can be done, but it guarantees that the job will be hard, as the current structures either need to be subverted or destroyed.

However, there is another way to think of the formal ownership of the United States, and that is on geographical lines.

You see this in every election. The tribes of the United States are laid out pretty clearly in terms of their voting patterns, culture, ethnicity, etc. Like most cases, the borders are sometimes fuzzy, and you get small holdouts in opposing territory (Austin, New Hampshire).

But the key aspect is that pretty much everyone knows what goes in which category. Which ought to be the heart of any formalist settlement. If we think of the item to be allocated as "governing power over the continental US", it is very hard to say who owns what. But if we think that the United States has a couple of tribes (two? four?), once we're agreed on the number of tribes, it's fairly easy to answer the question "which tribe owns Kansas?", or "Which tribe owns New York City?".

And this is a good starting point for people to be reasonable about possible formal settlements of the cold civil war. The progressive state doesn’t really own Montana or Alabama, certainly not in the way they own San Francisco and New York City. And they pretty much know it. Even to the extent they’re somewhat in charge, they’re more in the position of a hostile power exercising some authority over a permanently restive province.

In other words, there is a reasonable case for the idea that secession, done right, looks quite a lot like a formalist division of America and allocation to each group based on the geography they actually own.

The idea of dividing up America in order to salvage some part of it, rather than lose the whole thing, is obviously not without its downsides. Psychologically, retreating in the face of enemy encroachment smells a lot more like delayed defeat than a stepping stone to impending victory. And there is a real question of whether Prog-istan would actually tolerate a genuinely reactionary state anywhere in the world, let alone on their border. (Ask Apartheid South Africa, that notable threat to world peace and stability).

I’ve written before about the reasons why secession might not be tolerated. And I stand by those difficulties. But there is a key assumption there which probably needs to be spelled out. Secession is probably likely to be fiercely resisted by the Cathedral if it is perceived that it is being imposed upon them against their will. And if push comes to shove, I suspect they’d win, for the reasons outlined before.

But what about the alternative possibility – could the Cathedral be convinced that letting red state America secede is actually in the Cathedral's interests?

Strangely enough, the informal division of cash flow rights makes this more likely. Sovereign land is very valuable, but it’s tempting to evaluate it under its current inefficient government. Any state that is currently a net tax drain (and there are many) might be able to be spun as a loss-making enterprise that it’s better to be rid of. In other words, the fact that we don’t have a clear shadow price for what sovereign Mississippi would be valued at if governed properly makes it much harder to calculate exactly what’s being given away. And if there isn’t going to be a competent takeover any time soon, then there’s a decent argument that the net tax position is not a bad assessment. It’s one thing to pay money to keep an area you like and value. It’s another thing to pay money to keep an area you hate, filled with people you hate, who hate you right back.

It takes no special insight to notice that red state and blue state America simply don’t like each other. They haven’t for a very long time. What’s more surprising is how little the idea of just separating is discussed. Partly I think this just comes from inertia. Partly it comes from residual attachment to the symbols that the country has in common, like the flag and the 4^th of July.

Though I think the more important aspect to convincing progressives of the virtue of leaving is actually psychological.

The more progressives can be made to think that secession is a) their choice, and b) a victory that inflicts pain upon the hated red state America, the more likely it is that they’ll go along with it.

The right must follow the Briar Patch strategy.

In one tale, Br'er Fox constructs a doll out of a lump of tar and dresses it with some clothes. When Br'er Rabbit comes along he addresses the Tar-Baby amiably, but receives no response. Br'er Rabbit becomes offended by what he perceives as the Tar-Baby's lack of manners, punches it, and in doing so becomes stuck. The more Br'er Rabbit punches and kicks the tar "baby" out of rage, the more he gets stuck. When Br'er Fox reveals himself, the helpless but cunning Br'er Rabbit pleads, "please, Br'er Fox, don't fling me in dat brier-patch," prompting Fox to do exactly that. As rabbits are at home in thickets, the resourceful Br'er Rabbit uses the thorns and briers to escape.

"Please don't abandon me, Blue State America! I'm so dumb and poor and backwards, dependent on your tax transfers that I'll never survive without being part of your country!"

In other words, the aim is not for red state America to secede. The aim is to get blue state America to secede. If we're splitting the place up into pieces, it doesn't matter in practical terms who called the whole thing off. But it matters immensely to psychology. Both being dumped and doing the dumping result in the end of a relationship, but it feels very different to be on each side.

And this may the single biggest hope of the Trump presidency. It's becoming increasingly apparent that Trump is unlikely to enact any major right-wing reforms. But he is supremely good at one thing, namely driving progressives insane with rage. If somehow he manages to survive the Republican loss of the House in 2018, the ramping up of the Mueller deep state coup attempt, and then wins the 2020 election, he may just sufficiently enrage Californians that they decide to leave themselves rather than put up with four more years of misery and impotent rage.

Indeed, before the American Civil War, there was a decent fraction of radical Northern abolitionists who also favored the breakup of the Union, forming an odd single-issue alliance with the Southern secessionists. George Lunt talks about this in the Origins of the Late War:

But there were those in the North as well as in the South who both wished and hoped for the dissolution of the Union. The latter deemed their position unsafe in view of the increasing power and uncertain disposition of the free States; the former doubted whether the slave power would renew its alliance with the Northern Democracy, and prevent the accomplishment of their own ambitious purposes. The Southern secessionists trusted to effect a peaceable separation with the concurrence of the fanatical disunionists of the North.

Mr Wade a Senator from Ohio made the following declarations in a published speech:"And after all this to talk of a Union! Sir I have said you have no Union. I say you have no Union to day worthy of the name. I am here a conservative man, knowing as I do that the only salvation to your Union [that is, according to the resolve of Mr Wade and others] is that you divest it entirely from all the taints of slavery. If we can't have that then I go for no Union at all - but I go for a fight." 

On the other hand, Mr Chase appears to have wanted a dissolution without a fight. In a published letter of Gen FP Blair he says "I know Mr Chase tolerably well. When the rebellion broke out, Mr Chase held this language: "The South it not worth fighting for." Several gentlemen of high position in the country heard him utter this sentiment substantially. He was at that time Secretary of the Treasury. Jeff Davis said "Let us alone." Chase said "Let them alone."

Of course Southern members of Congress must have had the opportunity of knowing the private opinions of Northern members of the two branches, and, probably of those members of the administration whose views of the situation more or less coincided with those of the Secretary of the Treasury. Even General Scott, at the head of the military force of the Union on the 3d of March 1861, the day after Mr Greeley's announcement of his views, in his published letter to Mr Seward proposed as his final and apparently favorite alternative, "in the highly disordered condition of our so late happy and glorious Union, 'Say to the seceded States: Wayward sisters, depart in peace!'  "

It seems hard to imagine now, that the North who fought so bitterly to maintain the Union might have almost just decided to not bother. If you think that these decisions are made based on firm geostrategic considerations, it seems inconceivable. But if you think that many decisions of state get made out of feelings of wounded pride and nationalism, then it's not nearly so surprising.

Once Fort Sumter happened, those voices got entirely marginalised. Once it became a point of pride, the North was willing to grind out 4 years of brutal war to reintegrate the states that, by this point, they hated.

Whereas the same dislike, chanelled slightly differently, could have potentially convinced them that it's just easier to be done with these damn Southerners.

This seems especially true today. Modern Americans have little appetite for actually shooting each other, but they have many more years of explicit dislike, fighting over notional control of the increasingly powerful federal government. 

The key lesson from the Civil War appears to be: never fire the first shot. The first shot wounds the most important of enemy assets - their pride. This ensures that they won't back down, and then you have to brute force the issue (which, if you were strong enough to do, you probably wouldn't have to secede in the first place). And even if you succeed, the costs of war are still horrifying.

Resisting firing the first shot may or may not be possible. But to the extent it is, delay, hassle, low level antagonism and simple intransigence are probably much better strategies.

The best strategy is to do that, while making it seem like the decision to leave is their decision. 

To the extent that progressives would ever listen to anything said by conservatives, you might think that the best message would be something sensible that appeals to the idea of mutual gain: let's end this unhappy marriage.

But I suspect the much better message would be: Let's punish the red states! They say they hate big government, well let's see how much they like it when they don't have us around to keep paying for their broke, Jesus-and-welfare slums. Let's rehabilitate our world image by refusing to be associated with these gun-loving hicks. Let's run our own progressive utopia free from Fox News and the bitter clingers!

If I were running /pol/ and were trying to set up a psyop campaign, that's what I'd be devoting all my effort to at the moment. False flag campaigns for California to secede.

I may be a pessimist. But the other options I see look much worse, for all concerned.

On Propaganda

What, exactly, is propaganda?

To most people, it resembles Justice Potter Stewart's description of pornography - they know it when they see it. 

If you pushed most of these people to describe what approximately it is that causes them to see it, they would likely have the sense of someone trying to manipulate public opinion for selfish political ends, to encourage conformity in viewpoint and values, particularly with regard to biased or untrue viewpoints.

But how exactly do we distinguish propaganda from public service announcements, or statements of shared values, or celebration of historical symbols and rituals, or any other number of related concepts?

One of the good lessons I remember from reading Less Wrong back in the day is the general pointlessness of arguing over definitions. If you're tempted to argue over what is or what isn't X, you're almost certainly better off just redefining X into its component pieces, and just saying what corresponds to what. 

So to me, there is one concept that can be defined in fairly value-neutral terms - attempting to influence public opinion. This covers a wide range of the examples above.

And layered on top of that is the pejorative sense - the perceived bias or bad faith of the messenger.

This latter part, of course, is mostly where people disagree.

And so in this sense, what people perceive as being propaganda is a far more interesting question.

As is often the case, one google image search is worth a thousand essays on the subject (see, for instance, here).

So here are some:

Propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda

These are just some samples. Your own image search will work just as well.

As always, it is a useful corrective to let data change your mind, even just if in small ways. My guess ahead of time was that the strongest association with "propaganda" would be "Nazi", but none of the images on the first pages are German. I didn't expect nearly as many American entries, but then again this might just reflect the preference for being able to easily understand the text.

So what are the common themes?

The overwhelming principle is that people perceive propaganda as being mostly from World War 2 and the surrounding era. 

One potential explanation is Moldbug's observation that the propaganda of the 30's and 40's was particularly crude (he cites this video as an example).

There's a certain truth to that. The images definitely look dated. But I suspect a large part of this is just that they use paintings where today we would use photographs, the fonts aren't computer-rendered, and the voiceovers emphasise the neutral mid-Atlantic broadcaster pronunciation. If you had given Goebbels some rudimentary training in Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Video Editor, I doubt it would have taken him long to get equally slick, modern-looking production values.

The small number of modern examples that show up are actually the most revealing. The two that seem to register as being of the same class tend to ape the old poster designs, with Soviet-style drawings, bold clashing colours, and over-the-top symbolism. In this regard, you usually have to be quite overt to trigger the propaganda label.

But there's another aspect here that ties together the past images and the small number of present images.

To wit: people only view things as propaganda when they don't actually share the viewpoint being pushed.

To share the underlying viewpoint is to suspend one's disbelief about the nature of the messaging, and the desire to convert the unbelievers. One cannot see the strings being dangled and the puppets being manipulated, because when one believes the same thing, they simply come across as the truth. The truth needs no justification other than itself. Hence anybody pushing it is not trying to influence the rubes in the general public, they're just delivering a genuine public service.

In this regard, the images above may seem strange at first glance - why are there so many American examples? The answer, I think, is that the cultural values of America in World War 2 are almost as alien to us as those of the Soviets of the time. Which is why crude racial caricatures and related national symbolism seem so jarring today. They are aimed at an audience that is very different from modern Americans, and so it's easy to perceive the messaging. 

And crucially, the only modern examples which show up are those covering the most partisan political issues.

Donald Trump in front of an American flag is propaganda, if you are a Democrat.

A Muslim women wrapped in an American flag as a hijab is propaganda, if you are a Republican.

But no Republican would have the first spring to mind as a symmetric example of propaganda, and no Democrat would think of the second.

Which makes one wonder - what are the types of propaganda that (at least in polite society) don't have an opposing partisan to point them out? What are the things that, in David Foster Wallace's wonderful essay, are simply the water that we swim about in and don't even notice? 

Or equivalently, what are the opinions that are taken for granted today, but which might be seen as propaganda by people in 50 or 100 years? These ideas almost certainly share a lot of overlap with Paul Graham's idea of "What You Can't Say". But sometimes it's not just things you'd get massive flak for disagreeing with, as just things most people wouldn't think to disagree with.

When I tell you to imagine "Communist propaganda" or "Nazi propaganda", you can picture an image.

When I tell you to imagine "Republican Propaganda" or "Democratic [Party] Propaganda", you can probably do the same.

But when I tell you to imagine "Democracy Propaganda", especially if I limit you to modern examples, your mind draws a blank. There is no cached entry there.

Isn't that strange?

Sometimes, it's helpful to proceed by way of analogy. So let's start with an example that we can all now look back on as having an enormous propaganda aspect - the Nazi concept of Aryan. 

Aryan Propaganda



Aryan Propaganda



Aryan Propaganda

With the benefit of hindsight, aryanism is a strange concept. It conveyed a sense of the canonical blue-eyed, blonde-haired German ethnic pride. It managed to be a hybrid mix of appearance, nationality, ethnicity, and character. It was an amorphous ideal that somehow conveyed positive connotations from ideas of racial uniformity, especially as applied to Germans and Nordic-looking people. Given its many uses, providing a concrete definition is non-trivial, let alone the difficulty of trying to explain why exactly aryanism was meant to be a good thing.

You can see this water. You can understand it intellectually, as an anthropological phenomenon. But it is utterly alien. You simply cannot see it as a German in 1941 would have seen it.

So, the question is - is there a modern equivalent of aryanism?

Is there a term that most Americans understand with approximately the same sense that Germans understood aryanism in 1941? Maybe there isn't one. Maybe modern readers, so inured to the constant bombardment of marketing images, couldn't possibly fall for such a peculiar and loaded term.

One possible answer is below the fold.