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.

Moving Porn

[Meta disclaimer: When I look back at some of the posts I've written that I think I got wrong, they're often in the category of what I'd call "therapy posts" - trying to universalise or rationalise some thought process of my own as a general life lesson, especially if I'm trying to convince myself that my actions make sense. I resolved at some point to try to stop writing those. I don't think this is one, but I'm not always a good judge of these matters, at least at the time.]

As Covid worries seem to fade into the rearview mirror, and life slowly gets back to normal, I find myself reflecting on the the strange way that being at home for a long period of time strongly exacerbated the idea of moving porn. Not as in emotionally touching depictions of sexual acts, but the fantasy, sometimes followed through on, that a better life awaits if only we move to somewhere else. 

This is always a hard one for me to think about. I don't want to say that everyone should just stay where they are. It is obviously, trivially false that every place is as good as every other place. So there really are changes in life happiness to be had for certain people in moving somewhere else. Indeed, I've had at least one myself, that I'm very glad about. 

In my case, after enough months of roaming around the same apartment, I had a strong desire to just get out. Maybe temporarily, but probably permanently. I started writing this post back when these feelings were still there fairly strongly, but already subsiding. From the number of stories about this, I don't think I was alone in this. Covid seemed to really send this urge into overdrive among a certain class of aspirational mobile white collar worker. 

There are two stories that can be written about this. The first, and most discussed, is the role of remote work. Covid made lots of educated people's jobs suddenly remote, so they could now move anywhere, at least temporarily. The big obstacle to moving is generally the coordination aspect - a city you want to live in, where you know people, where you can get a good job, where your husband or wife can also get a good job. Take away two of those conditional statements, and the choice set gets a lot bigger. 

But the second part is the one that I think is more interesting. The professional class were also, as a rule, more likely to comply with lockdowns and general social distancing. The net effect was a whole lot of people who hadn't actually spent any time in person with many (or any) of their friends or relatives, for maybe a year at a stretch. The effect of this was to enormously crank up the background sense of ennui and isolation that seems to be a large part of modernity. 

I remember this being one of the stranger aspects of educated Americans when I first moved here. If you grow up in Europe or South America or Asia, you are generally from somewhere. Your sense of place is typically a city. Whereas I'd meet quite a number of Americans whose story was something like "Well, I was born in Cleveland, and lived there for the first two years, then I was in Chicago until age 8, then we moved to Phoenix, then I went to college in Atlanta...". The typical educated American, by the time they reach graduate school, might be on their fourth set of friends, between high school, college, and first work stretch. Their parents may or may not still be living in the place where they were when they were born. 

In other words, the background feeling for a lot of people in the educated classes is already a vague sense of social isolation. Your friends, even your good friends, might pack up and move in a year or two's time. You have to keep investing in new friendships in order to maintain a steady state inventory. 

I can only guess, but I think this feeling is rather widespread, at least to a certain extent. But if it is, then moving cities to try to escape the sense of ennui you've developed is a very high risk strategy. You feel isolated and unhappy because you don't have enough close friends and family. It might indeed be hard to make friends where you are. But when you move to somewhere new, you go back to square one. Rather like changing lines in the customs queue at the airport, you'd better hope the new one is faster, because you start out at the back. 

I don't know how to balance out these two stories in terms of their prevalence. The first one is just a good news story - people can finally leave San Francisco (a city that is desperate to disprove the Lebowski dictum that the bums always lose) and go somewhere less shambolic, while still keeping their tech job. The latter is much less obvious. If your problem was that being rootless made you unhappy, digging up what shallow roots you currently have is not obviously going to help matters. Ironically, it resembles San Francisco's way of dealing with the homeless - the ameliorative steps to solve the current problem in fact just lead to the problem getting worse.  

In terms of telling these two versions apart, one aspect that is striking is the sense of where all these newly mobile people actually wanted to go. It tended to be the same places. Austin, Miami, or sometimes Nashville.

Don't get me wrong, I like all these cities! But still, it's striking that these form such a focal point for a large number of people who are all starting somewhere quite different. To hazard a guess, the main linking factor seems to be "better weather, some fun nightlife, increasingly trendy so my friends won't look at me too weirdly, but still cheaper than NY, SF, or Boston." They are always cities that are described as fun. Which seems to be a shorthand for sociable and full of interesting people to hang out with.

But if the problem you faced in Dallas or wherever is that you weren't able to meet people to hang out with, how exactly do you plan to find your fun circle of friends once you get to Austin? I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that most of the credible plans you would implement to solve this problem in Austin could also have been implemented to some extent in Dallas. 

The only exception to this rule is if the place you're moving to already has more old friends and relatives in it than the place you're at (and they're likely to stay there). To me, I think this is generally the only good reason to move to a place to escape ennui. 

The fact that all these people wanted to move to the same places tends to imply that this wasn't what was at stake. Maybe Austin helped a ton of people suddenly solve the coordination problem of where to live at the same time. But I don't think that's what's going on.  

If I'm right (and I'm not sure I am), I suspect a bunch of these people are going to wind up disappointed.

How can one tell if this seems like a credible description of one's mindset? I suspect that one telling aspect is the question of how specific and detailed are the ideas of what exactly you plan to do differently when you get to Austin. It's a Saturday. You're in your somewhat larger house, now that you don't live in the Mission any more. You've got the whole day ahead of you. What are you going to do that you can't do in San Francisco? Next day is Sunday. Same question. Then the weekend after. And so on.

I have a feeling that if you don't have a clear answer to that question, you are probably going to find that Austin does not make you as happy as you imagine. 

I would be delighted to be wrong. Austin, Miami and Nashville are all in fact cool cities. I hope everyone who moved there finds it awesome, and pities us saps that stayed put. But I can't help but wonder about the Last Psychiatrist's description of some of how change is often not really change at all: 

The unconscious doesn't care about happiness, or sadness, or gifts, or bullets.  It has one single goal, protect the ego, protect status quo.  Do not change and you will not die.  It will allow you to go to college across the country to escape your parents, but turn up the volume of their pre-recorded soundbites when you get there.  It will trick you into thinking you're making a huge life change, moving to this new city or marrying that great guy, even as everyone else around you can see what you can't, that Boulder is exactly like Oakland and he is just like the last guys.

Lest this all sound like meandering, there is a concrete prediction that can be made here. If I'm right, I expect the number of relocations to drop fairly quickly as life gets back to normal. If you haven't packed up and moved by now, I'll guess that you're not going to. Because as people actually start hanging out with their friends again, they'll slowly remember that the place they're in isn't actually as bad as it seemed in April 2020 when it felt like we were going to be locked up forever.

If you're still on the fence, take advantage of the warm weather to invite all your friends over for a party first. It did me a world of good. 

Some Thoughts Occasioned Upon Recent Fatherhood

Friends, I’m very happy to report that my daughter and firstborn child recently arrived into this world. The acute feelings of anxiety and then great relief at the birth itself slowly become replaced with the pleasant slight haze of the everyday. But since this journal is as much for myself as for my readers, I wanted to write down the thoughts I recall before they slip away.

Most people are more alike than they think. This is part of the reason why most heartfelt sentiments - whether joy at birth, sadness at the death of a loved one, celebration of someone’s birthday, and many others – end up sounding like clichés. The more important something is, oddly the more likely your feelings are similar to everyone else’s. Because of this, sometimes the repeated forms are okay for the important sentiments. As a friend’s priest said about Christmas sermons – if you’re hearing anything genuinely new in it, it’s probably heresy.

I learned this the hard way when emailing friends about the birth. I said something about how she’d been sleeping well and eating a lot so far, and joked that one could obviously extrapolate this out indefinitely. From one or two slightly snarky responses, I realized too late that, even in jest, this is a little like the newborn equivalent of those ghastly “My child is on the honor roll at XYZ Elementary” bumper stickers, but for a much more emotionally fraught subject. (Which painful door would you rather open? “I’m a bad parent” or “My beloved child is just difficult, and experiencing misery that I can do nothing about”? Por que no los dos!) I’ve refrained from bring up the subject since then, and just instead reflect on the ancient Greek observation that no man should be declared happy until he is dead. You have a well-behaved child once they’re married with children of their own. 

Nonetheless, there was one part about my wife’s period of late pregnancy and birth that was quite striking, in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

There is a certain level of narcissism and egocentrism that is inherent to everybody. The way the Last Psychiatrist put it is quite memorable:

“The essence, the defining characteristic of narcissism is the isolated worldview, the one in which everyone else is not fully real, only part a person, and only the part the impacts you.”

I, like a lot of people, always wake up in my dreams just as I’m about to die. There is some fundamental stumbling block that cannot quite comprehend a world without me in it. If the only part of everything else that is real is the part that interacts with you, then your death is literally the end of the universe.

This much gets commented on quite a lot. One can intellectualise death, and imagine the world going on without you. But one cannot really feel it. It just doesn’t compute.

But the strange part, that I hadn’t really  appreciated, is that something similar happens (at least to me) at the early end too.

Having my own child was literally the first time I’d been forced to contemplate in concrete detail what my parents’ life might have been like around the time I and my siblings were first born. The standard way this is described is that until one has children oneself, one doesn’t quite realise how much thankless work goes into changing thousands of nappies and not sleeping properly for months on end.

But at least for me, it’s more than that. I just hadn’t given much thought to the subject. I have images of my parents’ life before me, pieced together from photographs, and stories they’d tell with my uncle sitting around the dining room table after dinner. But these tended to mostly focus on the period when they first met, before they got married. There were some stories after that, about their lives, living with my grandmother, buying a small shack in the countryside and planting trees there, and things like that. But then there was a large gap, a chunk of the map shrouded in cloud, of what it might have actually felt like when we children were first born.

And I think part of the reason for this (at least with me) is the narcissistic tendency. People are only real to the extent they interact with you. And the part of you that counts is the part you can remember. In my case, the earlies memories are from around age 3. When I’m forced to contemplate it, I simply have no empathetic concept of me before that time. To consider myself as a one-year old, or as a newborn breast-feeding, or while in the womb, is every bit as alien to the actual narcissistic self-conception as to think of myself as being dead. I can imagine it. But there is simply no capacity to relate. Without memory and capacity for self-conception, the chain of "I"-ness gets broken. 

Take away this inherent interest and understanding, and the parts of the characters immediately before I mentally appear on the scene simply don’t quite register. The stories my parents explicitly told me register, and those I feel warmly about. And indeed, I can think about times before I was even an idea, what my parents were like as children or teenagers. But the part that interacts with me, in the period where “me” is not something I instinctively empathise with, tends to be a strange and glaring gap.

Until my own child arrives. Then, I'm forced concretely to imagine all sorts of things I didn’t really consider. The scene of sea and sky suddenly inverts to a dizzying new perspective - one in which my parents are fully real, but I am only partially real, and only the part that interacts with them (since the part that is "me" doesn't yet exist). And one sees the whole path of the same scene repeating again and again. My daughter, currently totally helpless, having not the vaguest clue of what my wife and I do to keep her alive, and no real sense of gratitude or even contemplation, until one day, several decades hence, when (hopefully!) her own time comes to pay it forward with her own children, and the cycle repeats.

Thank you, Mum and Dad. At last, just a teensy bit, I understand. I suspect you knew this already.

Welcome to the world, little one. We’re so glad to have you.

The thorny problem of inconstant judges

One of the periodic themes of this journal is that the reality of power is everywhere and always messy. I have described my conception that the most important high-level problem to be solved is well-defined and secure property rights in the state itself. This is a slightly more formalized way of saying "secure power".  I'm certainly not claiming originality in this idea - Moldbug's formalism is what got me started thinking about this.

In viewing matters this way, I think it's important to know what we're studying. Perfectly secure power in a governing regime seems to be somewhat akin to a perfectly efficient engine. 

In both cases, it's easy to design one on paper. The process is entirely straightforward! Fuel is mixed with air, then inducted into the cylinder, then the spark plug ignites it. What could be easier than that? There's an absolute monarch, and everyone just follows his orders.

And then when you actually implement the thing, you find all sorts of leakages due to annoying complications in details of the machine that you'd largely abstracted away from. Understanding these turns out in many ways to be more of an engineering problem than a pure science problem. 

But even though the perfectly efficient engine or perfectly secure monarch may be a platonic ideal, that doesn't mean that the forces preventing you from getting there should be viewed as mysterious. Indeed, if you do that, you'll have a very hard time improving things. Maybe you can be a menshevik, and slightly improve the design. Maybe you need bolshevism, to start with a new design that doesn't produce these specific frictions (although, of course, it will produce others, perhaps others you hadn't encountered or thought about).

More importantly, in either case you should care very much about how far away you are from the platonic ideal. Otherwise you're just committing Asimov's Relativity of Wrong. Is your government the equivalent of a nuclear power plant, or a coal power plant? And if the latter, how might you change that? Moreover, the messy world of the social sciences makes things hard. Physicists love to mock the social sciences as being unscientific, but there's no escaping the fact that we have to design this particular power plant based on the computational output of a large number of meat sacks, all designed slightly differently, all interacting with each other. 

The modern world presents us with very few serious monarchs to examine. This also liberates us from focusing on the specifics of what went wrong in any one case (what could Louis XVI have done differently? Lots of things, as it turns out). 

A lot of people on the dissident right have thought hard about the problem of delegation, which is definitely a first order problem, probably the largest one. No man rules alone, and the sovereign's decisions have to implemented by his subordinates. What are their incentives to implement it honestly, or competently, or not divert resources to themselves?

But there is another problem that I think gets relatively less focus. Which is the following: how does the monarch prevent himself from being psychologically manipulated or pressured by those around him?

Among the closest modern analogs to an absolute monarch is a US Supreme Court Justice. The analogy is not exact, because there's a very small-scale democracy going on within the nine of them. But this is voting at a level where your vote often might matter, and you know the parties, and it's a repeated game. 

In the court context, the delegation problem is how to make sure the court's decisions get implemented by lower courts, and by other governmental agencies. This is still challenging - what happens if lower courts routinely ignore your precedent, and you have to slap them down over and over (or just let your decision get undermined)? What happens if people just refuse to follow it? That used to be a big problem but is less so these days. 

But if you're on the right, the delegation question is not the central problem with the court today. The Republicans have long made a point of trying to get better, more conservative justices appointed to the court. And yet, as night follows day, maybe half of the supposedly conservative justices turn out to become liberals. Maybe if we vote for Trump, we can get some more rock-ribbed conservative justices like Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, John Roberts, or, increasingly, Neil Gorsuch. 

This problem seems to be wonderfully emblematic of the failures of the mainstream right. They keep losing. They know they keep losing. They are unhappy about the fact that they keep losing. And yet, their state of the art solution is just "push harder!". More of the same should do the trick! More voting. More rallies. More donations to National Review. More Republican Senators and Presidents, so we can get more Republican-appointed judges, just like...the same ones that put us in the unsatisfying position.  For republicans, it's basically a coin flip. Appoint the guy to the court, and maybe he turns out to be a stalwart judicial conservative, like Scalia or Thomas. Maybe he turns out to be mushy, like Roberts. Maybe he turns out to be a complete liberal, like Souter. 

If your best case scenario is a 50/50 chance at being right, congratulations, you getting to appoint every single judge results in a random walk over judicial appointments. Lose a single election, and it's downward drift.

At almost no point does it seem to occur to the mainstream right- why do half the Justices we appoint turn out to be traitors? And more importantly, what can we do to stop this happening? 

Perhaps, dear Republicans, this is a problem you ought to spend more time seriously studying, rather than just turning the same crank over and over and expecting different results

There are a few ways to think about what might be going on.

The first possibility is treachery. Everyone has to hew to a narrow set of Overton Window beliefs to get appointed. Prospective Supreme Court Justices are all skilled at concealing their true feelings, if such feelings should be undiplomatic. They're experts at saying the right thing to get ahead. Republican party chiefs will just never know what a person will do until he's finally unconstrained. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton put it. These guys don't get absolute power, but they get enough of it that when you can't force them to do what you want, they do as they please.

The main problem with this hypothesis is that it stumbles on the fact that Democrats never seem to have this problem. When the chips are down, and the issue before the court is politically charged, rather than just some arcane matter of trusts law, Democrat appointees always seem to toe the party line.

So if this is our explanation, we've largely just kicked the can down the road a little. Why is there treachery among Republican appointees, but not Democrat ones? Even if the field is littered with sociopath traitors, is there nobody talented enough to get appointed by a Democrat, then drop the mask and reveal their inner Scalia?

Let us instead consider an alternative. All these justices started out intending to be conservative, but instead buckle under the social pressure brought to bear upon them. 

From the comfortable distance of one's armchair, this seems like a small thing. So what if some law school students don't like you? 

Reader, do you know what it's like to be hated? I mean, viciously hated, smeared in the New York Times, denounced as a stoolie or a rapist or sexual harasser or an Uncle Tom, day in, day out? Publicly stabbed in the back by people you helped and trusted, over and over? Like the pressure brought to bear on people by hostile journalists and the police, this is something that it's easy to sneer at until it happens to you. 

The reality is that most people just aren't good at dealing with being hated in a vicious and public manner. Despite their best intentions, it sways their choices. 

It's tempting to explain this in terms of concrete quid pro quo arrangements. If you switch to writing liberal judgments, you get invited to better parties and events, or have more fun friends or whatnot. This is definitely part of it. But I suspect there's a pure psychology aspect too. 

To pile metaphor on metaphor, look at the home team advantage in sports. Mosokowitz and Wertheim looked at this. The main driver of the home field advantage is not that it makes the players perform better. I was always skeptical of this myself,even before this study. These are professional athletes, with huge amounts of money at stake. Do they just not try their hardest without cheering? As it turns out, no, the effect seems to mostly be on the referees. And this is nothing but pure psychological pressure, on people literally selected and professionally rewarded for impartiality. The referee is anonymous. He's not getting invited to any swank parties. Even if he makes a lousy call, it's very unlikely that he's going to be harassed by name. The cost is just fifty thousand angry people yelling at you if you grant the penalty kick, and the same fifty thousand cheering if you just let it slide. 

And I suspect this is a large part of what's going on with Republican appointed justices too. Most of these people are law school strivers. They've been groomed for success for a long time, told they were the smartest in their class, voted most likely to succeed in high school, all that stuff. Then, they get made into some lower court judge, where they get less power, but almost total deference. Yes, your honor! No, your honor. And if you do something controversial, what happens?  You are mostly just "a federal court judge in Hawaii". You are the epitome of the machine - a cog, implementing something, replaceable with another cog. No sense hating the cog! But once you're on the Supreme Court, you are now Chief Justice Roberts, and your choices reflect on you, not the machine. 

Look at smiling John Roberts in his confirmation hearing:

Do you think that, before he took on the job, this guy had any experience of being hated? To ask is to laugh. The words on everyone's lips were "looks like nice guy". Good luck with that. He's a nice guy alright.

This is part of what soft power is. It's not always just a euphemism for hard power in disguise, the polite note before the US air force crushes your town. The reality is that psychological constraints are real constraints. We can't see them, but that doesn't mean they're not there. Most people simply aren't good at dealing with this pressure, or at a minimum, will be worse at dealing with this pressure than they think they will be if they haven't yet been subjected to it. It's reminiscent of the Randall Collins point about violence. Most people also don't like inflicting random violence on people, except in a limited range of circumstances. 

Most people also don't like being yelled at with curses and hatred, even if that hatred is very unlikely to result in actual violence to them. Monkey brain knows what's going on. Monkey brain knows that an angry crowd yelling at you is highly correlated with you being dismembered. Monkey brain responds, for the same reason that you get queasy when walking on a glass floored skyscraper walkway. 

To solve the problem of the social pressure being brought to bear on Supreme Court Justices is probably a coup-complete or regime-complete problem - something you can't solve without first changing the government. A good giveaway for such things is if at any point they involve the step "next, we reform or replace the New York Times".

But if you were of the menshevik mindset, there is probably still progress that can be made. The petrol engine can be improved, even if we can't yet turn it into a fusion engine. 

In particular, one useful rule of thumb when judging appointees - what experience do they have with being smeared and hated? And do they have a personality likely to be more resistant to this, inasmuch as it's possible to forecast this. Are they naturally combative and devil-may-care, like Scalia? Do they thrive on having haters? Do they have a history of being outspoken? Unfortunately, this tends to make it hard to get confirmed in the first place these days, so that may not be possible.

In an ideal world, they might have some concrete experience with similar jobs. One obvious case - running a medium sized business, and having to fire people. Yeah, you'd better believe that will toughen you up. Can you inflict pain upon people, and deal with their anger and contempt, while keeping your eye on the larger purpose? Have you had to command troops in battle, and know that making the wrong call on whether to breach that door will likely result in either your guys getting shot, or civilians being shot?

Ironically, the main pre-job exposure people have to being hated is from Democratic and media efforts during the confirmation hearings. While you have very small number of observations here, I suspect that Clarence Thomas being viciously smeared before he started probably had a searing effect on his choices. It likely made him permanently bitter, as there was basically no worse smears that could be thrown at him than what he faced before he started the job. But he knew what his enemies were like,  and exactly what their good opinions were worth, and wasn't going to cave to them after that. 

An interesting question will be to see what happens to Kavanaugh. I think it's easy to overextrapolate the Thomas outcome, and ignore the possibility that some people overreact in the other direction - they cave harder sooner in order to make the smearing stop, or they rationalise it. I'll show I'm the bigger man by not being the right wing monster they accused me of being, and instead implement this unprincipled exception for liberalism. 

You may think this doesn't really apply to monarchs. They can just fire the hostile press, or implement lese majeste laws to execute people who insult them. 

But remember, the pain point is psychology. What if you get a monarch who just really wants to be loved, and can't deal with being despised, or even just with causing necessary pain on citizens? 

I don't hold myself out as any kind of expert, but that's certainly the description I've read of Louis XVI. He wore civilian attire, rather than military. A man of the people! That worked out well for him.

Maybe you think this is all old hat. Very well. Here's a simple test. Take the sentence 

"Previously conservative judges are susceptible to public pressure, and probably will end up changing their views to conform to it."

Ask yourself - would this apply to...me? Would I be susceptible to public pressure, and change my views to conform to it?

Ha, no, of course not. Biases for thee, cold-iron robotic logic for me. 

If you are certain that the answer is "no", and yet you've never had any firm experience of resisting exactly such pressure, I suggest that there is a large chance that you may be greatly underestimating the forces at work here. 

To paraphrase one half of my nom-de-plume:

Hath not a judge eyes? hath not a judge hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you scream in his face, does he not flinch? If you mock him, does he not feel stung? If you slander him, does he not bristle? If you selectively apply pain, does he not learn the lesson?

How to interact with potentially hostile journalists

One of the things I have started to suspect recently is that most people’s estimations of a journalist’s personal trustworthiness seem to suffer a kind of reverse Gel-Mann amnesia effect. The phenomenon was wonderfully described by Michael Crichton: 

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

In other words, there is a systematic gap between estimates of the journalist’s bare competence in things you know well, and things of which you’re ignorant. In general journalists get the benefit of the doubt, except where your personal knowledge comes in.

However, consider the perspective of the political right on the question of a journalist’s trustworthiness, rather than their competence. Here the effect is reversed.

In general, most people with any sense tend to believe that journalists are mendacious, dishonest scum, who will say almost anything to get you to talk, and then regardless of past assurances, will distort your quotes to paint you in the worst possible light. Your best strategy is to ignore them. This applies orders of magnitude more if you hold any vaguely right wing opinions, and the media wants to talk to you about them out of the blue.

But for some reason, when a particular journalist comes to talk to you, wanting to let you tell your side of the story on an article they’re planning on writing about you, people forget this. Rather, they suddenly assume that it’s somehow a good idea to talk to the person, because this specific journalist actually seems pretty reasonable, so what’s the worst that can happen? Like Crichton observed, they forget what they know. And like night follows day, the journalist was lying, and they smear you and stitch you up, and somehow the result comes as a surprise.

It’s one thing for the average normie who believes that the press is honest to get suckered like this. But this happens over and over again to people who not only ought to know better, but actually do know better.

Here’s what happened to Nick Fuentes, of “America First” fame:

“In February 2018, a production company called “Karga7” reached out and said they were interested in filming an episode of MTV True Life about me and my show. They spent a full week filming at my house but never released any of the footage until tonight, almost two years later.

Pete and a team from Karga7 came to my house and filmed for a week, doing hours of interviews, B-Roll, they filmed me doing my show and they covered my periscope of an anti-gun rally in Chicago. This is what my mother texted to Pete Ritchie at the end of the shoot:‘Same Pete, you seem like a genuine person. We are relieved. See you then! Promise Al will be in boarding school.’ “

Psych, there was no episode of MTV True Life. Instead, all the footage ended up in a documentary titled “White Supremacy Destroyed My Life”. No kidding! You don’t need to watch it to know how that turned out for Fuentes and his family.

Okay, you might say, maybe Nick Fuentes is just a naïve fool. But this happened to Curtis Yarvin! That’s right, Mencius Moldbug, the man who taught me more than anyone else about how the media operates, and its role in the power structure of the modern west. He used to have a medium post about the experience, but it seems to be gone now, so I’m paraphrasing the story from memory. It turns out that nearly all of Yarvin’s enemies are too stupid or lazy to actually read through his voluminous and meandering writings (which, to be fair, is a very polarizing writing style – I love it, but others I know and respect find it offputting). So instead, everyone relies on one leftist guy who bothered to read things and happened to find a single infelicitously-phrased remark relating to how the early Spanish in the Americas tended to prefer imported African populations as slaves, rather than the indigenous population. Anyway, one day Yarvin gets a bunch of ridiculous and obviously muck-raking questions from a journalist asking if he supports slavery (something nobody who has read his actual writings could conceivably believe). He writes back a fascinating a thoughtful paragraph exploring the concept through the lens of Robert Nozick’s disturbing and compelling “Tale of a Slave” (read that if you haven’t already, it’s very short and extremely good). The journalist ignores the whole thing, repeats the question again if he supports slavery and insists on only a yes or no response. Yarvin answers “No”. Journalist, predictably, writes article anyway accusing him of supporting slavery.

At this point, dear reader, I think we ought to take seriously the possibility that something strange is at play here, something which we don’t fully understand. How does Curtis Yarvin, of all people, end up getting stitched up by some idiot journalist?

I think the starting point of understanding is that this actually is very similar to what happens with the other major group whose profession it is to get people to talk, when it’s very much in their interests to shut up. I’m referring, of course, to the police. Your mental model of journalists ought to be able to incorporate why people regularly confess to the police, often without realizing that that’s what they’re doing.

If you haven’t already, watch all 46 minutes of James Duane’s presentation on the subject. For the general subject of why you shouldn’t talk to the police, watch the first half, with James Duane, the law professor. But to understand why people talk to the police anyway, watch the second half, which is from a police offer. It’s eye-opening stuff.

 Hardened criminals have no problem talking to the police. People like to tell their story. And they’ll sit in that room and think about it. There’s one chair here, there’s a desk, there’s another chair. What’s the one thing you want the most, right at that point? To get out of that room. To be out of that room. The police officer’s shift is ending in fifteen minutes. Does the police officer want to get out of that room? My overtime rate is $58 an hour, do I want to get out of that room? I have no problem, I’ll stay there for ten hours. I’ll take that six hundred dollars. So I have no motivation to want to leave, and you do, and that’s how we get you to try to talk. …

[S]ay you wanted to go into a boxing match. A hundred dollars if you win. You’ve never boxed before. You have to face somebody who’s an Olympic boxer. You’re going to lose. You’re going to face somebody who’s been interviewing people for, in my case, 28 years. You’re going to lose. Unless you’re purely innocent. Now, on the other side of it, I don’t want to put anyone who’s innocent in jail. But I try not to bring anyone into the interview room who’s innocent.…

And then I have to determine what kind of person I have. And there’s two types. There’s the one like I mentioned earlier, where I have to talk to them, talk to them about different things, get into their own skin, as it were, and try to get them to talk to me and discuss things. I had a sexual assault case. I had to talk to the guy about how hot the woman was, and I understood where he was coming from. And when I said that, we were buds, and he started talking to me. He’s still sitting in prison. …

The other type of person is the one that likes to tell a story. … I said, tell me what happened. And he told me this beautiful story about what happened. … And I didn’t even question about it, after he finished his whole story, very implausible but very beautiful story, I sat there and listened to it for fifteen minutes, and I looked at him and I said “You stole the stuff from your boss, didn’t you?”. “Yes sir, I did.” I had nothing, I really had nothing except the fact that he’d sold it. …

Just sit there, and wait for them to start talking, and they will. People want to communicate, they hate silence. “  

I am quite certain that a New York Times journalist interviewing right wring people for a story views their job in a very similar fashion. If they’re calling you, you’re already guilty in their mind. Most people don’t know this. They think it’s all a misunderstanding. The whole point of Duane’s talk is why even the innocent should never speak to the police. If you’re guilty, you absolutely shouldn’t talk to them. From the perspective of the New York Times, I have bad news. If you’re reading this, you’re guilty. Never mind what of. They’ll come up with something, just like the police when they’re sure someone is a criminal.

I think there are several things at play here. The first of them is that one should never underestimate journalists. Like the police, they are professionals at getting people to say things against their interest. You have to assume that they will have all sorts of tricks for getting you to do this. Not only this, but you don’t know what those tricks are. You can plan in advance, but there will inevitably be aspects you still don’t foresee.

Like the police officer, part of their job is to convince you of their trustworthiness. Most people do not have much experience with professional liars. We all like to think that we’re good judges of character, but most of the sample that we deal with in our everyday life is not comprised of sociopath manipulators. Even if the person isn’t completely cold and cynical, remember, they likely view you as an enemy of society. You have to expect that they will have no compunctions about trying to delude you into thinking that they are on your side, or at least might be on your side, if you just say the right things.

People also overestimate how convincing their own arguments are. I’m convinced that I’m a good person who holds reasonable views. Surely, these people who disagree just haven’t had things explained to them properly. You know what? I’m just going to go down to the station and clear this whole thing up right now.

He’s still sitting in prison.

In the case of journalists, another classic trick they pull is to increase the time pressure. They call you on the phone, and immediately start asking questions. Do you have the wherewithal, on the spot, to not answer? How strong is your presence of mind in this situation? Or they write you an email at 3pm and tell you they have a 5pm deadline, and that they want you to comment immediately, otherwise they’ll have to print that you refused to comment.

The starting point of wisdom is this – if they call you, you’re already dead. You cannot talk them out of writing the story, any more than you can talk the police officer out of arresting you. Accept that, as a base line, you will get a bad story written about you, with the extra addendum that you refused to comment. In the distribution of things, this is a good outcome. Them distorting your words to have an even more incriminating quote is much worse.

But people love to tell their story. Give them a chance and a little prodding, and a lot of the time, they want to tell you everything. Dostoyevsky described this vividly in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov has an overwhelming urge to confess to the murder he committed, and keeps engaging in self-sabotaging behavior that leads him into the hands of the police officer, Porfiry. For a long time, I viewed this as being about guilt, and thus it all seemed kind of implausible. Sometimes people really do feel guilty, and I have no idea what the guilt feels like from committing a senseless murder. But I suspect that cognitive dissonance tends to resolve the dilemma mostly the other way. I killed him, so he must have deserved it, because I’m fundamentally a good person. So why the urge to confess? Well, maybe Dostoyevsky was just wrong, and the description is implausible. But maybe people also have a general desire to tell their secrets, no matter what they are. To be understood, even if the ultimate consequence is disaster. Not all people, and not at all times. But this urge is there. And the police and journalists know it. Their job depends on them knowing it, and how to manipulate this instinct in you.

Like with the police, one central problem is that only the incriminating words get shown to the jury of readers. You come up with some very clever quips, and send them off. They just chop them to pick the worst bit.

“Sorry, I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Mr Smith, when reached for comment, accused the New York Times of being terrorists.

Now you sound both hysterical and evasive. You said almost nothing, and it was still worse than literally nothing.

But we still haven’t cracked the underlying mystery. Don’t you think Moldbug knows all this already? Of course he does.

I would wager the following, though I’ll never be able to test it. Suppose I could go back in time five years, and speak to an earlier version of Yarvin. “Curtis”, I’d ask. “In a few years time, a journalist will contact you with obviously absurd questions about whether you support slavery. Will you give them further potentially incriminating quotes, or will you sensibly choose to stay silent?”

I suspect that the earlier versions of both Yarvin and Fuentes would have been surprised at how things turned out. They would be surprised by their own future behavior.

In other words, I think to begin to understand the puzzle, we have to recognise that we’re likely dealing with some considerable time-inconsistency. To make matters worse, in the terminology of Matthew Rabin, people are unsophisticated about their biases – they are biased, but they don’t know they are biased. So they don’t even prepare properly.

To my mind, far and away the most useful all-purpose model of time-inconsistent behavior is the hot-cold empathy gap. George Loewenstein did a lot of great work on this. The Wikipedia summary is pretty good, but as always, you’re generally better off reading the original article, which is quite accessible to a general audience.

People generally have two types of states. “Hot” states are emotionally aroused states – sexual arousal, fear, jealousy, hunger, pain, whatever. “Cold” states are the general calm, background state – a regular Tuesday morning with not much going on.

The trivial insight is that people make quite different decisions in these two types of states. Everyone knows this. The bigger insight of Loewenstein’s is the empathy gap. People in each state are predictably bad at forecasting what decisions they themselves will make in the other state, and how they will feel about the matter then. On a Tuesday morning, a high school girl doesn’t think that when she’s drunk and horny on a Saturday night, she’ll have unprotected sex with Chad from the football team. And when she’s drunk and horny on a Saturday night, she can’t think about how disastrous this choice is going to seem next Tuesday morning. In every state, our future and past selves of the opposite state are like strangers to us, and strangers whose behavior we never seem to figure out. If we had, we might have taken additional precautions, like going on the pill or carrying condoms.

I’ve written about this several times before, if you’re curious.

So how does this fit in with journalists?

I am also quite sure that if you played back the language of police interviews and the language of journalists’ interviews with people they are antagonistic towards, they would sound quite similar. The Police officer is a representative of the state, with the implicit power and backing of the state to throw you in a cell. The journalist is a representative of the cathedral, with the implicit backing of the real power centers to render you socially shunned and unemployable.

In other words, the starting point of understanding is this.

Your forecast and planning must assume that when a journalist calls you to tell you they are writing a story about your crimethink, at that point you will be incredibly scared and panicking.

The press is no joke. If they want to destroy your life, they have many avenues to do it. And despite whatever braggadocio you may have now about the lamestream media, when they come calling, your monkey brain will understand immediately what’s at stake. For millions of years, social ostracism meant death, often immediately, but in any case not long afterwards if you’re a hairless ape trying to survive on your own in the wild.

So one must immediately assume, especially if you’re never had it happen to you before, that you will be under immense pressure and stress, and will likely make bad, panicked decisions at the time. Just like the person in the police station, you want nothing more than to get out of the situation, to be told that it’s all a misunderstanding and that they’re going to call off the story. You will be like a drowning man, clawing desperately at anything that might make this happen.

In other words, you have to assume that you don’t actually know how you’ll react if the New York Times comes calling. You think you do, but you don’t. Cold State Cameron is always sure that he’ll be cool and calm under pressure. Hot State Harry usually isn’t.

And when you understand this, you realize why smart people can get themselves badly led astray, because they’re preparing for the wrong set of failure modes. The more you’re sure you understand how the media works, the more likely you’re probably overestimating how calm and collected you’ll be in the heat of the moment.

It’s like the difference between learning Tae Kwon Do and getting in your first street fight. Same problem. Things will be unexpected. And no amount of training in the dojo will replicate the gut-level panic you feel, and how that will make all your old training disappear, unless you’ve drilled and drilled. And even then, it still may not work.

We can, however, train to revert to autopilot. But it has to be the right autopilot.

What’s a bad but plausible autopilot? “If a journalist calls me, I immediately hang up.”

This would be a good plan, if you implemented it. But here’s a test. When telemarketers call you, do you immediately hang up, or do you feel some social pressure to first say that you’re not interested, or listen to their spiel, or what not? If you do, imagine this cranked up to 11. Hanging up the phone is physically easy, but psychologically sometimes hard. It’s not as hard as staring someone eye to eye in silence for five minutes in a police room. But it’s not easy when you’re panicking. You’ll want to talk your way out.

So the autopilots we train for must be those that work on a psychological basis. And what is the single, cardinal rule we’re aiming for?

Get yourself out of the situation of communicating with the journalist while in a hot state panic as soon as possible, before you make any irreversibly bad choices.

Hanging up the phone immediately is hard. So what do you say instead?

“I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t answer any questions by phone. I’ll only communicate by email. My email address is blah. (Give them time to take it down). You can email me there, and if a response is warranted, I’ll send it to you. Goodbye.”

Repeat this sentence to yourself, right now, fifty times, word for word. You must know it by heart, the same way you’re only going to have any hope of throwing an effective punch in a fight if you’ve drilled it thousands of times.

You’ve already given them something. You acknowledge they exist, and now they have an email address for you (ideally, use a throwaway one, though it’s hard to have the presence of mind to remember this). This is not ideal, but that’s not the point. The point is to delay. It now takes them some time to type up their questions. More importantly, when you get them, you’ve got time to ponder the question for longer of exactly what you want to say. You can think about every single word choice, and whether that sentence is really a good idea. You’ve got time to calm down, at least a little. And most importantly, you’ve ended the conversation before you’ve said anything stupid. This is key, key, key. As part of this, you’ve ended the conversation without even a minor breach of social decorum! This sounds stupid, but it’s really important. Social decorum dictates behavior all the time, and so you must have your default response be psychologically easy.

The next step, after you hang up the phone (and again when you finally get their questions), is to phone somebody whose opinion you trust (ideally someone as close as possible to the cold state, well-informed version of you), and tell them what happened. You may be panicking, but the other person will be in a cold state. They will help calm you down, at least somewhat. A second opinion from a trusted cold state source is incredibly valuable. They’ll likely know what cold state you knows – the best response is usually to shut up.

Then the journalist emails you questions. What next?

The only response they should get is this:

“I wish to enter a binding legal contract with you, your editors and your publication. I will only answer your questions on the condition that you either print my answer in its entirety, or not at all.  If you and your editor agree to these terms, please both let me know.”

This may be surprising, but journalists will mostly stick to these agreements. This immediately disarms one of their most powerful weapons, namely cutting and pasting your quotes to make you look bad. Secondly, even if they don’t print your answer, this makes it much harder to say that you refused to comment. You did comment, they just refused to print it. Journalists can smear, and distort, and omit, and deceive by suggestion. But outright lies about bare facts (did he respond or not?) are more apt to get them in professional trouble, so are taken more seriously. 

And now, you can decide what, if any, very carefully worded and brief answer is appropriate. Run this by multiple people. If you have someone you trust a lot, but who doesn't share your political views, they are especially valuable to include. If the journalist says they have a 5pm deadline, say that won’t be enough time, but you should (not "will") be able to give them an answer by 5pm the next day.

The more you delay, the more you talk to other people, the more likely it is that you’ll make the right choice. The more you do anything on the spur of the moment, the more likely it is that it will be rash, foolish, and ill-advised, and you will spend years regretting it. If in doubt, try to condition your panic response to be silence and delay.

It’s not for nothing that the header image at Overcoming Bias is Ulysses tied to the mast, while his mariners have their ears stopped up. We don’t have anything quite that foolproof. But the principle is the same.

When the sirens seduce you with their song of promises that you can talk your way out of this, you must know that you’ll be enormously tempted, in ways you can’t fathom now.

And you must plan accordingly.

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.