Zephyr Dear

We all know you can’t measure health or beauty on a scale, and that the thin ideal is a tool of capitalist oppression designed to keep women weak, self-hating, and distracted from dismantling the patriarchy, right?

Right.

But we also know that in this patriarchy, which has not yet been dismantled, women are more likely to be taken seriously as “experts” when you can see their hipbones. The thinner I am,the higher my IQ seems, the more pure my intentions appear, and, the more sexually appealing (PDF) my body is – and of course the more sexually appealing a woman’s body is (i.e., the more it conforms to the culturally constructed ideal), the more she knows about sex. Of course.

So I lost 15% of my body weight in preparation for the book tour.

I did it because I know that my white woman’s body communicates “intelligence” most efficiently when it is small.

I did it because my body fat is a culturally encoded proxy for my morality – am I lazy and greedy and disorganized? or am I industrious and self-abnegating and orderly? – and when a woman talks about sex science, she has to be morally irreproachable.

I did it because I decided I would do anything and everything I could ethically, healthfully do, to maximize the amplification of my message.

I did it gradually and healthfully…  but I did it because I wanted to change how I look on the book tour. And I do look different.

I’m not “thin” – “thin” isn’t something that exists for a woman like me, with the lean mass of a man my height and breasts outside the size range sold at Victoria’s Secret. I’m also non-conforming in other ways: my hair is short and, oh yeah, blue. I wear giant glasses.

But I do conform more closely now to the culturally constructed ideal.

Result?

It’s weird. Men pay more attention to me. Women are more suspicious of me. Students are more deferential. All three of those things are very, very weird. Am I behaving differently without being aware of it? I don’t think so… but people are definitely responding differently to me.

I think the message of the book is genuinely important and helpful, and I want people to hear it and be curious about it. I want people to read the book. On the blog – even in the book – my body isn’t part of the equation. On the phone, on the radio, my body doesn’t matter. But in person, on video… the shape, size, color, and energy of my body is the first thing people experience. My body is a medium of communication.

And the research tells me that I’ll persuade more people if my body is smaller.

For women who are sex educators and researchers, our appearances are fraught with layers of meaning.  Being transparent about my strategies for negotiating all those layers is the best way I can think of to stay honest about what it’s like to be a sex educator.

In the book’s Acknowlegements, I thank you, the blog readers, for the ways you’ve kept me intellectually and emotionally honest for five years now. I’m a better sex educator, more aware of what my language choices and my presence in a room does to my message, because of you all. It seemed fair to talk about this issue.

I’m a programmer by trade. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 17 years doing this professionally, it’s that everything old is new again. There are really only so many patterns, and they just circle back around with new (and often more ridiculous) names.  

It’s rare that something really new comes along. I’d argue that the web, more specifically http, offered up the last truly new paradigm in computing. It is a single, elegant standard for distributed systems. We should all take the time every now and then to think about the beauty, power, and simplicity of this standard.

I’ve always had a similar affinity for RSS. If content is going to be distributed all over the world, it’s essential to have an elegant system for syndicating and subscribing to content sources. On top of that, a huge percentage of content sites adopted this standard years ago and still maintain it to this day. Man, are we lucky.  I can’t believe how many people still browse from site to site or just take what they can get from Twitter, et al.

It’s easy to get swept up in the latest trends in technology. Hardware, apps, development frameworks, social networks and so on. It’s never ending. But too often it takes us away from what I really want to be able to do with technology. Give me a browser, an RSS reader, and an email account and I’m all set. These are the standards that are built to last. Everything else just comes and goes.

Over recent months I've become increasingly interested in the stark and fairly recent, even sudden, changes in the global energy economy. We're all seeing lower gas prices, which affects all of us as consumers - either directly or indirectly. These sustained low oil prices, though, may well bankrupt a series of countries around the world which cannot survive with oil stuck around 50 dollars a barrel - something that may persist for two or three years. The growing role of the US as an energy producer is also driving changes in global currency flows in ways that deepen global US financial dominance. Meanwhile the role of oil is declining in the global energy economy with rising use of gas (not so bad) and coal (really, really bad). But happening amidst all of this over the last couple years is a surprising (at least to me) run-up in the use of wind and solar power. We've commissioned a five part series of Prime longform pieces (sub req), looking at all these changes with a particular focus on growth in the wind and solar space. We'll be running this series over the course of the spring.

There are already too many proposed causes for the secular decline in crime, but I can’t resist suggesting one more. A couple of months ago Nydwracu asked me whether it could be related to the secular decline in testosterone. The answer turns out to be “Maybe”.

This secular decline in testosterone is pretty dramatic. Our best source is A Population-Level Decline In Serum Testosterone Levels In American Men, which finds that from 1987 to 2004, average testosterone declined from 501 ng/dl to 391 ng/dl, with an even more dramatic decline in bioavailable levels of the hormone. That’s about minus 1% per year.

No one knows exactly why this is happening. Some people blame increasing obesity and decreasing tobacco use (wait? Smoking increases testosterone levels? THOSE TV COWBOYS WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG!). Other people have tried to adjust for these and found they don’t explain the entire effect, leading to a host of other theories. Recent scrutiny has focused on the role of feminizing chemicals in the water supply, probably a combination of industrial pollutants and discarded medications; the worst-affected areas are marked by an epidemic of transsexual fish (really).

(A quick aside – since these chemicals are gender-bending fish, frogs, and various other animals, could they be responsible for transgender in humans? This theory seems to still be in crackpot territory, but I don’t know why. Research shows that male-assigned-at-birth children exposed to diethylstilbestrol in the womb are more likely to become transgender than the general population. Other than that, there just seems to be one unpublished paper on the subject. Get to work, scientists!)

Annnnnyway, testosterone has been found to correlate a bit with violent crime. In a study of 692 male criminals, Dabbs et al found that those in prison for more violent crimes had higher testosterone than those in prison for nonviolent offenses. It’s hard to say exactly how much higher because they report their testosterone in a different way that doesn’t correlate to anyone else’s – I think part of it is that it’s salivary rather than serum testosterone but it’s still confusing even after I adjust for that. If we use relative rather than absolute, they do mention that 66% of inmates in the upper third of testosterone levels committed violent crimes compared to 46% in the lower third. High-T inmates were twice as likely to be in for murder as low-T inmates. Interestingly, testosterone was the highest risk factor for sex crimes, such as child molestation and (especially) rape – high-T inmates were four times as likely to be in for rape as low-T inmates. On the other hand, low-T inmates were about twice as likely to be in prison for drug offenses.

This “which criminals are worse” study is obviously not as good as an “are high-T people more likely to be criminals at all” study, but I can’t fin any of those with a good sample size. You can read a review of the research here.

According to the population decline study, testosterone levels declined about 110 ng/dL in 15 years. They don’t give me a standard deviation, but from this site I get one a bit less than 200. So testosterone declines by one standard deviation about 25 years? That means that a person in the top third of testosterone levels today would have been in the bottom third fifty years ago. Which – and I realize I’m doing all sorts of horrible things here to cover up my lack of actually useful data – if we extrapolate wildly from the results of these studies, we could sort of justify murder halving in about fifty years by falling testosterone alone.

The first problem with this is that we can’t really use data on prison inmates as representative of the population.

The second problem is that murder has halved in way less than fifty years. It seems to have halved between 1994 and 2004.

The third problem is that crime didn’t start falling until the early 1990s, but testosterone was falling since at least 1987 and probably earlier. This site, which doesn’t cite sources, says testosterone was higher in the 1940s, though they might be confusing that with “in men born in the 1940s, as studied in the 1980s”, which is of uncertain significance. Sperm count has been declining since the 30s, according to an article called Sperm Quality & Quantity Declining, Mounting Evidence Suggests

(it looks like somebody was not quite as virtuous as this Twitter user).

The fourth problem is that there’s contradictory evidence about whether testosterone is even falling at all, according to a a study that looked at the faces of Major League Baseball players of the past 120 years. This sort of makes sense – face width-height ratio is affected by testosterone (one reason women’s faces look different than men’s) and baseball players had standardized photographs taken of them for that time period. They find that, at least based on the face ratios, testosterone was increasing during that period, which would be interesting if it didn’t contradict everybody else. As it is, I suspect it just means baseball players were differently representative of the general population. For example, if baseball requires high testosterone, and scouts became better at selecting the highest-testosterone people over that period, that’d do it. Or if the nature of baseball changed to more of a “power game” rather than a “finesse game” (I think some people have said this) that’d do it too. Or if all baseball players suddenly started taking powerful testosterone-analogue chemicals at some point…hmmmmmmmmm…On the other hand – literally on the hand – we have the digit ratios of Lithuanians over 120 years. Someone in 1880 measured the length of Lithuanians’ fingers – which can be a proxy for testosterone levels – and then the experiment was repeated recently and the results compared. It did find the expected increase in testosterone, though no word on whether that was throughout the entire period or just concentrated in the past couple of years. So this sort of turned out to be a non-problem.

The fifth problem is that crime is dropping in women at the same rate as in men – women never really committed that many crimes, but now they’re committing fewer. Women do have some testosterone, so it’s possible that declining testosterone could affect female violence as well, but it wouldn’t be the first thing I expected. Also, I’m not sure if there are any secular trends in female testosterone levels, though I’d be fascinated to see data.

So overall while I like the approach of this hypothesis, I don’t think it gets the time window right. It would be a nice way to explain a gradual fifty-year decrease in violent crime starting in the 50s and continuing to the present day. Instead, we have a big spike in the 50s and a big drop in the 90s, which were not particularly abnormal in terms of testosterone decline.

This doesn’t really make sense to me. If testosterone is declining, it should cause a decrease in crime. One might argue that testosterone levels have been steadily operating behind the scenes causing very long term declines while other things account for the more visible short-term trends, but that seems like a cop-out.

I’d like to see studies comparing testosterone levels in violent criminals (both male and female) to those in the general population.

Also, we have cemeteries full of millions of dead people from every era of history, all carefully marked with what age they were when they died. Somebody needs to dig some of them up and measure their digit ratios – I assume you can still measure the digit ratio of bones, the overall length is still there. Then we can have a good answer for whether testosterone levels in men (and women) have been declining over time, when it started, and whether it’s been picking up recently. If it has been, the chance that it hasn’t had an important effect on our society worth exploring is pretty much nil.

I know, just once I want to get through an entire blog post without a call for disinterring the dead, but this is important.

Chess may have its “black vs. white” color scheme, but for video games it’s often “red vs. blue.” It’s the kind of matchup that you find in dozens of games once you go looking for it, whether it’s the color of your avatar, the heads up display, or both. Sometimes you’re randomly assigned to a team when you join, but other times you can choose. Is there any advantage to picking red? Or blue?

Yes. Well, maybe. A bit.

Image credit: DeviantArt user TonyC445.

I just finished reading the book Drunk Tank Pink and Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave by Adam Alter.1 One chapter deals with how the color of a uniform can affect performance in a competitive sport. Alter cites a 2005 study that looked at Olympic athletes participating in one-on-one “combat sports” like boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling, and freestyle wrestling.2 The rules of the Olympics stipulate that one competetor is randomly assigned a blue outfit while the other gets red. Thus it was a great opportunity for a natural experiment on the effects of uniform color on performance.

The researchers found that those wearing red uniforms won a statistically significantly larger portion of their matches:

Taken from Hill & Barton (2005).

Hill and Barton’s theory (which is also Drunk Tank Pink author Adam Alter’s theory) is that throughout nature the color red is associated with heightened agression, dominance, and testosterone levels (think mating season and/or fighting season). Skin gets flushed and animals display the red bits of their bodies while engaging in dominant and aggressive behavior. I know; it sounds a bit far fetched in the context of humans participating in sports, but the idea is simply that wearing the color red primes competitors to think more about being particularly aggressive and dominating. That is, it makes thoughts about those concepts come to mind quicker and more easily. In sports like boxing or tae kwon do where agression makes you more competitive, this matters. Wearing red, the researchers argue, essentially makes it just a little easier for you to get pumped up and visualize the kind of behavior that wins bouts. And the competitor in blue might compound the effect by perceiving his/her red opponent as more intimidating or imposing. This might even all be subconscious. Probably is, in fact.

And the athletes aren’t the only ones affected. Alter also cites another study that showed how referees can be affected by the same principle.3 In the study, professional tae kwon do referees watched recordings of red and blue competitors trying to knock the stuffing out of each other. Per the official rules of the World Taekwondo Federation, the referees awarded points to specific types of blows. Here’s the trick, though: for half of the referees, the researchers digitally altered the footage to swap the red/blue colors on the athletes’ uniforms. So the footage was exactly the same as that seen by the other referees, except that blue competitors were now the red and vice versa.

The result? Both sets of referees gave more points on average to those athletes in red uniforms and less to those in blue. The color of the uniform affected their judgement independent of their performance, presumably because it tapped in to some unconscious bias the judges had for thinking that someone in red was more agressive and more dominating. This wasn’t the first study on uniform color, either. Back in the 1980s Mark Frank and Thomas Gilovich looked at the number of penalties earned by teams in the National Football League and National Hockey League that wore black uniforms.4 They found that those wearing black –a color typically associated with the wardrobes of the villainous– were found by referees to be more guilty of infractions, fouls, and rule violations relative to those wearing light colored jerseys.

Does the same thing happen in video games? Sometimes, at least. One 2008 study published in the journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior5 scraped data from 1,347 Unreal Tournament 2004 matches. 6 They found that red teams won about 5% more matches than blue, which is far more than you would expect from chance alone.

There is a caveat to this, though: this “seeing red” effect isn’t huge and won’t be the deciding factor in anything but a very close competition. The 2004 study by Hill & Barton confirmed this: when competitors were mismatched (such as a a heavyweight boxer wailing on a middleweight) the advantage afforded by wearing a red uniform went away. Similarly, a pro gamer isn’t goint to lose to a scrub simply because she was randomly assigned to Blue.

So should you pick the red team when in a video game when you have the choice? More research on games is needed, but all else being equal these studies suggest it couldn’t hurt. It might help, actually.7

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Some people say the War on Drugs is ‘unwinnable’. But there’s actually a foolproof solution that cures drug addiction approximately 100% of the time. That solution is – put people on welfare in Tennessee.

Or at least that is what I am led to believe by articles like Mic’s A Shocking Thing Happened When Tennesee Decided To Drug Test Its Welfare Recipients, which describes said shocking thing as:

1 out of 812 applicants tested positive for drugs. One. Single. Person. Tennessee conservatives suspicious that welfare recipients are a bunch of drug-addicted slackers were proven dead wrong. Big surprise!

After instituting dehumanizing drug-testing requirements to welfare recipients on July 1, 10 people total were flagged for possible drug use and asked to submit to testing. Five others tested negative, and four were rejected after refusing. As Think Progress notes, that means that just 0.12% of all people applying for cash assistance in Tennessee have tested positive for drugs, compared to the 8% who have reported using drugs in the past month among the state’s general population. If you assume the four people who refused were on drugs, it’s still a paltry 0.61%.

In other words, the plan intended to verify right-wing beliefs that welfare recipients are a bunch of drug-addicted slackers looking for a handout has demonstrated exactly the opposite.

The article has 11,000 notes on Tumblr right now, I’ve seen it all over my Facebook feed as well, and the same story has been taken up, with the same editorial line, by a host of other news sources. Jezebel: State Drug Program Busts A Whopping 37 Welfare Applicants. Wall Street Journal: Few Welfare Applicants Caught In Drug Screening Net So Far. New Republic: Red States’ New Tax On The Poor. Daily Kos: Tennessee Just Wasted A Lot Of Money Drug Testing Welfare Recipients. ReverbPress: Another GOP Fail: 0.2% Of Tennessee Welfare Recipients Found To Use Illegal Drugs. Mommyish: Results Of State Drug Testing Prove Gross Assumptions About Welfare Applicants Are Wrong. Washington Post: Scott Walker’s Yellow Politics.

These stories all make the point that we have many stereotypes about the poor, and one such stereotype is that the use lots of drugs, but in fact these sorts of welfare programs find them to use fewer drugs than the general population, and therefore we should stop being so prejudiced.

And if they were found to use only two-thirds, or half as many drugs as the general population, this might indeed be the lesson.

But look at the numbers in the quoted Mic article. Welfare users use only about one percent as many drugs as the general population. Really?

No. Not really at all. According to legitimate research in this area, poor people use as many drugs as anyone else and probably more. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that illegal drug use was slightly higher in families on government assistance (9.6%) than families not on government assistance (6.8%). The National Coalition For The Homeless notes that about 26% of them use drugs, which is about 2.5x as high as the general population. I crunched some data I have from the hospital I work at, and it shows that poor people (defined as people who get health insurance through an aid program) have moderately higher rates of drug use related problems than the general population. So these articles are reporting a drug use rate in the Tennessee population about one percent of that ever reported in any comparable poor population anywhere else.

Kate from Gruntled and Hinged brings up another curious inconsistency. The false positive rate for drug tests is – well, it depends on the test procedure, but it’s usually at least 1%. So if every single welfare user in Tennessee was 100% clean, we would still expect between 1% to 5% positive drug tests. Instead, they got 0.12% positive drug tests. This isn’t just suspiciously good, it’s impossibly good.

So what’s going on here?

Before I explain, here’s a collage of the stock photos displayed above some of those news stories I linked to.

I now have a picture on my website called urine_collage.png

If you’re familiar with the state of the American media, you won’t be surprised to learn that urine was not involved in the ovewhelming majority of this program’s drug tests.

So how did they test people for drugs?

They gave them a written test, where the test question was basically “do you use illegal drugs or not?” You can see the exact procedure on the sidebar here.

And lo and behold, the overwhelming majority of people answered that they didn’t.

A more accurate stock photo they could have used

Now the numbers make sense. It’s not that only 0.2% of welfare recipients use drugs. All this tells us, if anything, is that 0.2% of welfare recipients are on so many drugs they can’t figure out how to check “NO” on a form.

Why would the government do something like this? As best I can tell, the plan was originally to give everyone urine checks, but in Florida the courts decided that urine-checking people without prior suspicion was unconstitutional. The Republicans were pretty attached to their “drug test welfare recipients” plan and didn’t want to look like they were wimps who backed down just because of one little court case, so they decided to give people the written test in the hopes of having prior suspicion for the people who said yes. Sure, it made no sense, but they could still tell their constituents they were drug testing those welfare recipients, and in principle they’d won an important victory. Or something.

Which raises another interesting question – how did Florida’s urine-based program do before the courts struck it down?

According to the media, abysmally. MSNBC: Drug Testing Welfare Recipients Looks Even Worse, “[Florida Governor] Scott’s policy was an embarrassing flop. Only about 2 percent of applicants tested positive, and Florida actually lost money”. TBO: Welfare Drug Testing Yields 2% Positive Results, “Newton said that’s proof the drug-testing program is based on a stereotype, not hard facts.” ATTN: Why Drug Testing Poor People Is A Waste Of Time And Money, “Florida tested welfare recipients for four months before its drug test mandate was thrown out by the courts. Only 2.6 percent of welfare recipients tested positive. The rest of the Florida’s population use drugs at a rate of 8 percent. So, again, welfare recipients used drugs less than everyone else.”

Now we’re merely at one-quarter of the drug use rate people with good methodologies find. Improvement!

So I looked up exactly how this works. Apparently welfare recipients were asked to pay for their own drug tests, and would be reimbursed if the results came back negative. 7000 welfare users did this, but 1600 declined to do so – numbers that were not mentioned in most of the pieces above.

Opponents of the program say that maybe those 1600 people could not find drug testing centers near them, or couldn’t afford to pay for the tests even with the promise of reimbursement later, or something like that. I am sure that some of them did indeed decline for reasons like those.

But also, people on welfare don’t have very much money [citation needed]. If I were a welfare recipient, and they were going to drug test me and not reimburse me if I came out positive, and I was on drugs, I would decline the hell out of that test.

Suppose that the poor in Florida use drugs at the same rate as the poor in various studies and surveys – about 10%. We have 8600 welfare recipients, so we would expect 860 drug users. Of the 7000 who agreed to testing, we know that 2.5% are drug users – that’s 175 people. That in turn would suggest that of the 1600 who refused testing, about 685 were drug users – 40% or so. That would imply that about 80% of drug users versus about 12% of nonusers refused testing.

These numbers seem pretty reasonable to me. Most welfare users want to keep their benefits, so the majority will agree to testing, but a few will inevitably fall through the cracks because they can’t reach a testing center or because they have moral objections to the tests. On the other hand, clued-in drug users will realize that for them, testing means a major inconvenience and monetary charge without any likely corresponding gain. So we would expect drug users to decline testing at a higher rate than nonusers. In order to use the Florida data to say that welfare recipients in general use drugs at a rate of 2%, we would need to assume that drug users were no more likely to refuse drug testing than nonusers, even though the testing rewarded non-use with money but punished use with a loss of money.

(note that there are some different numbers in different places for Florida. I assume that these represent different years, stages of testing, parts of Florida, etc, but I’m not sure. The only one that is seriously different from what I’m saying above is the one that says “only 1% of people declined testing”. After some search, I’m pretty sure that’s referring to that only 1% of people made appointments for testing, then cancelled later. But I am less confident in the Florida numbers than in the analysis of Tennessee)

So the Florida numbers are consistent with welfare recipients using drugs less, more, or the same amount as the general population.

So I have a question for you guys.

How come Brian Williams is being dragged over the coals for lying in the media, but everyone who publishes these kinds of articles gets off scot-free?

If I understand correctly, Williams said that his helicopter got shot at when he was in Iraq, but in reality he was just in a helicopter in Iraq at the same time as some other helicopter nearby was getting shot at. This is obviously stretching the truth, but it seems to me it could have been worse. No important policy decisions are going to hinge upon exactly which helicopter Brian Williams was in. And he didn’t get it infinitely wrong – for example, there was, in some sense, a war in Iraq.

On the other hand, discussions of how many poor people use drugs is pretty important for all sorts of policy questions, and these people completely dropped the ball. So why does nobody get reprimanded for this kind of thing?

You might argue that Brian Williams’ actions were obviously malicious and deceitful, but that screwing up drug numbers is an excusable mistake. I say it’s exactly the opposite. Brian Williams did exactly what I unfortunately do all the time – unthinkingly tell a story the much cooler way it should have happened, the way it happened in my head – rather than the way it actually did happen (my colleagues elsewhere in the psychiatry blogosphere go further and call this “normal brain function”).

On the other hand, I have more trouble imagining a situation in which I would accept the claim “only 0.1% of poor people use drugs, which is barely one percent of the rate in the general population” without wanting to do a little more research to see if it is true. If your reporters are capable of making this mistake honestly, get better reporters.

But I’m not sure it’s honest. A lot of these sources admit they took their story from a Think Progress piece on the issue. Think Progress does mention that the tests are a sham, although only in one sentence that is easy to miss. Either the secondary reporters didn’t read Think Progress thoroughly, or they consciously decided not to mention it.

But even if it was an honest mistake, I still have trouble excusing their arrogance. I mean look at that Jezebel article. The writer says this proves that people who think welfare recipients use drugs “consider ‘facts’ troublesome” and that their “entire social philosophy boils down to ‘Ew, poor people.'”

You’re saying that’s not as bad as a helicopter-related embellishment?

Yes, okay, drug testing welfare applicants is in fact probably a bad idea. It’s a bad idea because the courts have banned doing it in a way more effective than asking them politely if they use drugs or not, but it was a bad idea even before that. It’s a bad idea because drug tests have frequent false positives, but it’s a bad idea even without that. It’s a bad idea because quitting drugs is really hard and denying people benefits isn’t going to help.

But if, in the service of proving this to be a bad idea, you decide it’s acceptable to fudge the numbers to make your point, horrible things happen. First, you contribute to a culture of telling lies and lose the opportunity to protest when the other side does it. Second, you make it harder to trust you on anything else.

But most important, tell one lie and the truth is forever after your enemy. I recently argued that we need to reform suboxone prescribing laws, because it’s the best anti-addiction medicine we’ve got and right now poor people can’t access it. . Why should anyone listen to me now? They can just answer “Actually, that would be a waste of money. As per an article I read in Jezebel, pretty much no poor person has ever been addicted to drugs.” Then the laws don’t get reformed and people die.

Yknow, theres a lot of criticisms of porn to make, but one i never really hear is simply that it is hard to enjoy with others. It’s inherently alienating because of your solitary preference. Few things are so enjoyable that can’t be shared with friends.

I’ve been in a poly relationship with my current partner, call him A, for the past year and a half, and while I have always been curious about polyamory, I’ve been monogamous all my life. Even in my relationship with A, I was never emotionally or romantically involved with anyone else but occasionally would have sex with other men. 

Then I met S through a mutual friend who let me know that he was interested in hooking up with me, and I was also attracted to him. The problem was that he was already in a long-distance monogamous relationship. I call this a problem because I really do believe in the principles of ethical non-monogamy and do not think cheating is ok at all.  But inexplicably, I completely ignored this basic rule and got involved with S. Things got even more complicated when we realized very soon that we were both developing an emotional/romantic attachment to each other. Also, as I got to know him better, I realized that he was a “serial cheater”, in that he’s never been monogamous in his life. But I really believe that he enjoys the poly lifestyle, and gets along very well with my partner A. He might get into relationships with still more women, and we often discuss it, and he’s usually honest to me about it, although I’m not sure he would be honest to any new lovers about his relationship with me or his long-distance girlfriend.

I have gone through endless moral agonizing over this situation and talked to S about it too. He’s usually ready to talk and seems to be able to deal with this situation with hardly any problems. I don’t agree with his rationalizations, which are mostly regarding how his girlfriend is happier this way, would be able to deal with his real nature, etc. I know I stand on very shaky, even non-existent moral ground here. This is very disconcerting for me because I have always thought of myself as highly ethical but looking back, I am unable to understand how I got into this situation or what I was thinking then (no doubt I had flawed rationalizations of my own.)

I know this is a doomed relationship and things are going to end between us eventually, but I just discovered your blog today and wanted to write and ask for your advice about whether anything can salvage this situation at all.  Should I try to convince him to come clean with his girlfriend and embrace the poly lifestyle more honestly?

I am of course completely aware of my own culpability and moral ambiguity in this situation, and that is something I am working through, but I would really appreciate your help and advice nevertheless.

Shame-facedly,
Morally Ambiguous.

Yes, participating in cheating can poison a relationship.  Don’t I know it! I’ve been where you are, and I never could bring myself to trust the person fully after that.   It’s one of the reasons I shout so loudly against participating in cheating.   I do believe if he will cheat to be with you, he will cheat on you.

When you find yourself not living up to your own moral code, you need to examine things and decide.  Are you going to chuck the code, or are you going to chuck the behavior?  Both options are gonna hurt, no doubt about it.  If you’re asking is there a way out of hurting here, there isn’t.

I’m glad you’re looking at yourself here.  For what it is worth,  it is very human to fall short of our own view of ourselves and wonder how in the world we ever decided to make the choices we did.   The best answer I can give in terms of how you got there is that you probably were making internal excuses.   When the emotions (and really satisfying sex) get involved, we humans do that.  It’s a thing.

I could make some guesses about S.  That he’s a serial cheater and well able to justify his actions says that he’s probably incredibly charming and good at getting people to go along with his desires, as well as skilled at encouraging people to abandon their principles.  I’m not going to do the armchair shrink thing and slap any sort of diagnostic label from an e-mail, but you might want to do some reading about those character traits and what they can mean for the people who have them.

But that aside, I’d also encourage you to give one other thing some thought.  I don’t give a damn how high your moral principles are, you will rise or sink to bring your behavior more into alignment of those you socialize with most.  It’s not about strength or not. It’s about being a human being.  We accept the values of the in-group when it comes to behavior, even if those were not the values we started with.  So, it behooves you to choose carefully what values you have, what values and behavior you want to actually live through action, then surround yourself with people who have those values. Or, to put it more simply: who do you want to be?  Hang out with people who act that way.

I have nothing but sympathy for the hole you’ve dug yourself, here. I’ve been there, not only in terms of dating someone who participated in cheating, but in being involved on a daily basis with a social circle that did not exactly encourage me to behave the way I thought was best.   If you can get yourself out of that, and choose what influences you expose yourself to with care and forethought, it’ll help.

This is not necessarily going to be a simple process, and you’re going to find yourself questioning and refining this your entire life. It’s not  free pass to sit in judgement on people, either, which is easy to do when you start developing that mindset.   There’s a balance here, and genuine compassion — both to yourself and the people you’re thinking about hanging out with or not, is totally worthwhile.

I hope you can straighten this out and find yourself in a better situation soon.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a chilling and heartbreaking article in this week’s The New Yorker about the attempt to bring the surviving apparatchiks of the Holocaust to justice, seven decades after the Second World War’s ending.

She writes of three generations of effort to prosecute and try these men and women. In the second phase, many—most of them mid-level perpetrators—got off.

In 1974, an Auschwitz commander named Willi Sawatzki was put on trial for having participated in the murder of four hundred Hungarian Jewish children, who were pushed into a pit and burned alive. (The camp’s supply of Zyklon B had run short.) Sawatzki was acquitted after the prosecution’s key witness was deemed unfit to testify.

Approximately a million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, and along with them at least a hundred thousand Polish, Roma, and Soviet prisoners. According to Andreas Eichmüller, a German historian in Munich, sixty-five hundred S.S. members who served at the camp survived the war. Of these, fewer than a hundred were ever tried for their crimes in German courts, and only fifty were convicted.

In response to the verdict [of John Demjanjuk, at his second trial, in 2011], Germany’s central office for investigating Nazi crimes announced that it was looking to build cases against fifty former Auschwitz guards. “In view of the monstrosity of these crimes, one owes it to the survivors and the victims not to simply say ‘a certain time has passed,’ ” the head of the office, Kurt Schrimm, said.

But, of course, time had passed—from an actuarial point of view, way too much time. In September, 2013, the office announced that nine of the fifty guards on the roster had, in the intervening months, died. Others simply could not be located. The list of possible defendants was whittled down to thirty. In February, 2014, investigators presented twelve of the suspects with search warrants; the youngest was eighty-eight, the oldest a hundred. Three were taken into custody, then quickly released. One former Auschwitz guard, Johann Breyer, was living in Philadelphia. A judge ordered his extradition, only to be informed that Breyer had died the night before the extradition order was signed. Meanwhile, Demjanjuk, too, had died, in a nursing home outside Munich, while awaiting his case’s appeal.

In principle, the Demjanjuk verdict opened up “hundreds of thousands” to prosecution; as a practical matter, hardly any were left. And this makes it difficult to know how to feel about the latest wave of investigations. Is it a final reckoning with German guilt, or just the opposite? What does it say about the law’s capacity for self-correction that the correction came only when it no longer really matters?

Martin Luther King is eloquent on the long arc of justice and also on the short time available for action: “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”

The piece also made me think, though, about the initial reaction to Israel’s decision to try Adolf Eichmann.

The response to that decision, as historians like Peter Novick and Deborah Lipstadt have shown, was rife with anti-Semitism. The Wall Street Journal warned darkly of “an atmosphere of Old Testament retribution.” A Unitarian minister, according to Novick, claimed “he could see little ethical difference between ‘the Jew-pursuing Nazi and the Nazi-pursuing Jew.’” Those unitarian universalists.

The worst offender, though, was National Review. Combining all the elements of anticommunism, Christian homiletics, and ancient Jew-hatred, William F. Buckley’s magazine castigated the Israelis—really, the Jews, those Shylocks of vengeance and memory—for their inability to let bygones be bygones.

In one editorial, the magazine wrote:

We are in for a great deal of Eichmann in the weeks ahead….We predict the country will tire of it all, and for perfectly healthy reasons. The Christian Church focuses hard on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ for only one week out of the year. Three months—that is the minimum estimate made by the Israeli Government for the duration of the trial—is too long….Everyone knows the facts, and has known them for years. There is no more drama or suspense in store for us. …Beyond that there are the luridities….The counting of corpses, and gas ovens, and kilos of gold wrenched out of dead men’s teeth….There is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany….it is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims.

Update (2 pm)

On Twitter, Michael Moynihan, who’s a columnist at The Daily Beast, tweeted at me several times about that National Review editorial:

 It’s a terrible editorial. And Novick’s book is good. But those ellipses make it worse than it is.

“advancement of communist aims” is a response to something in the New Statesman, not trial in general

Again, terrible piece. But it changes some of the context, like the “advancement of communist aims” line

Then Moynihan tweeted this—

What I meant: bowdlerized quote makes it sound like the idea of prosecuting Eichmann was a victory for communism.

In the editorial, National Review asks, “What are some of the political and legal ramifications of the Eichmann trial?” It proceeds to answer that “there is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion on Germany” and then offers a lengthy quote—also with many ellipses—from a letter to the New Statesman and Nation, a left-wing magazine in Britain. The letter that the National Review cites makes some rather unremarkable claims about the continuity in government personnel between Nazi and postwar Germany (a well known fact) but dresses that up with some overblown, albeit qualified, rhetoric about the Germans under Adenauer sharing the same aims as the Germans under Hitler.

At the conclusion of the quote from that letter, the National Review editorial says this:

That—let us hope—is an extreme statement of the spirit that will be promoted by the trial. But it is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims, the cultivation of pacifism . . .

I disagree. When read in context, it’s clear that the editorial is making two claims: first, that the letter writer and the perpetrators of the Eichmann trial share the same spirit; second, that the best one can hope for is that the letter writer is only exhibiting a more extreme version of the spirit that animates the perpetrators of the trial. In other words, the anti-German spirit and anticommunist contribution of the trial may well wind up being as extreme as that of the letter writer.

Long story, short: National Review is in fact saying that the advancement of Communist aims is among the elements of the Eichmann trial.

But there’s a little bonus in that editorial, if you read through to the end:

And finally, who will undertake to give as much publicity to those wretched persons, Jews and non-Jews, who are alive today, but will be dead before this trial is over—the continuing victims of Communist persecution, in China and Russia and Laos and Indonesia and Tibet and Hungary?

In response to Israel’s decision to capture and try Eichmann in a court of law, National Review replied, “What about Tibet?” Sound familiar? Why are you singling out Eichmann?

The correlation between bigotry and stupidity has been widely observed but also, I think, largely misunderstood.

Consider, for example, the recent illustration of this correlation from the great state of Vermont, as summarized by Doktor Zoom:

Here’s a sweet little story of Democracy in Action. A bright eighth grader writes to her state legislator with an idea for a law: Vermont doesn’t have an official Latin motto, so why not adopt one? And for that matter, make it a reference to history? Neato!

So state Sen. Joe Benning — a Republican who was actually trying to do a good thing, which he has probably learned to never try again — introduced a bill to adopt the motto “Stella quarta decima fulgeat” — “May the fourteenth star shine bright.” Because Vermont was the 14th state, see? Benning noted that when Vermont briefly minted its own currency, it was engraved with “Stella Quarta Deccima,” so the phrase had real historical cachet.

And then Burlington TV station WCAX put the story on its Facebook page with the headline, “Should Vermont have an official Latin motto?” and all Stupid broke loose when morons thought that Vermont was knuckling under to a bunch of goddamned illegal immigrants.

Charles Topher collected some of the most vivid examples of the xenophobic backlash:

There were hundreds of similar responses. All just as angry, aggrieved and resentful toward some vague, imaginary Other. Hundreds of examples of hundreds of Vermonters expressing the same jaw-dropping ignorance and stupidity.

The correlation between bigotry and ignorance seems obvious here. Hundreds of eager volunteers have stepped forward to demonstrate their own defiant combination of the two.

One theory to explain this correlation, then, would be to say that bigotry is an expression of ignorance. Or, in other words, to say that ignorance causes bigotry — to say that those who are ignorant will tend to be hateful (or, more precisely, that those who are ignorant will tend to be fearful and that those who are fearful will tend to be hateful).

If we accept that theory, then we must commit ourselves to education. Education is the antidote to ignorance, and therefore education could be the antidote to bigotry.

But what if what we’re seeing here from these angry anti-Latinists isn’t simple ignorance? What if it is, instead, actual rank stupidity?

The distinction matters. Ignorance, after all, is a universal aspect of the human condition. None of us can know everything. Our essential human finitude means, for all of us, that the number of things we don’t know will always exceed the number of things we do.

But we have evidence here that these Go Back to Latin-land commenters are displaying something more serious than simple, innocent ignorance. Their anger, grievance and resentment prove that cannot be the case. That emotional investment shows us that this is a subject about which they claim to be concerned — a matter that they have given their attention and focus. If their anger is genuine, and they are truly concerned, then we cannot conclude that their enduring ignorance is simply a matter of inexperience — of not knowing any better. It must be, rather, an inability to know any better — an inability to perceive, comprehend and absorb the clear facts that are right in front of their nose.

That means what we’re seeing here is not ignorance, but stupidity. Education can be an effective way of banishing ignorance, but stupidity is impervious to it. Education may be a remedy for bigotry caused by ignorance, but it will prove useless against bigotry resulting from stupidity.

The good news, though, is that there’s another possible explanation, another theory to explain the correlation seen here between bigotry and ignorance/stupidity. It could be the case that cause-and-effect flow in the other direction. The stupidity we’re seeing here could be an expression of the bigotry on display.

Or, in other words, it could be that bigotry causes stupidity.

I think there’s evidence to support this alternative theory — evidence provided by the very same indignant Vermonters making the audaciously stupid comments about the state’s proposed Latin motto.

Those comments, please note, aren’t just a little bit stupid. This is an astonishing breed of off-the-charts stupidity. It’s the kind of stupidity that makes you wonder how it’s possible that these people are able to tie their own shoes, to feed themselves or to cross a busy street without getting killed (presuming, for the sake of argument, that Vermont has any busy streets). And yet most of these people, in other contexts, seem surprisingly capable of intelligent behavior.

What we see here, in other words, is the kind of stupidity that we might expect from people with a diminished mental capacity, yet it comes from people who otherwise show that they do not have a diminished mental capacity. What they’re displaying, then, is not a lack of mental capacity, but a rejection of it. They are choosing to be stupid — choosing to behave as though they were stupid.

Thus it seems that bigotry is not the product of diminished mental capacity. Rather, bigotry forecloses mental capacity. It constrains and limits it artificially.

That means, in turn, that education is not the antidote to bigotry. The opposite is true. Bigotry is the antidote to education.

You may be wondering why I described this as good news. I think it’s good news because it means that bigotry is a consequence of a moral choice. And that means that bigotry can be cured by making a different choice.

We shouldn’t over-simplify this. The chosen stupidity of bigotry is, like all choices, conditioned and qualified and shaped by a thousand variables — education, ignorance, environment, nurture, experience, lack of experience, etc. And, like all choices, it is shaped above all by prior choices.

But we shouldn’t over-complicate this either. Those choices still matter. Bigotry, hate and resentment are always an option, but they are never the only option.

Normally, I do this kind of thinking-out-loud on my own blog, where about thirty people are paying attention. But then Charlie said "hey, I've got this guest spot, come make yourself vulnerable visible here!" And sure, why not?

Hi, my name's Laura Anne, and while in the past I've mostly been known for urban fantasy (of the modern-magic-and-mystery variety) and the fact that I convinced a publisher to pay me to write three books about wine-based magic (and got a Nebula nomination for it!), my next project decided that it was going to drag me screaming and kicking somewhere slightly more problematic: American history.

Now, the talk in genre these days is about diversity, calling for more characters of color and alternative cultures, and more writers of color and non-Western backgrounds.  And I'm 100% behind that  - not because I'm a guilty white liberal.  Because I'm needy.

There.  I admit it.

Yes, literature - genre or mainstream - is a mirror.  We look into it to see ourselves, through whatever reflects back. And that's why it's important for there to be diversity - so everyone gets a chance to see themselves.  But literature is also a window.  It's how we see things that aren't us, that bring new views, new light into who we are

So I want to see more stories set in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, in cultures that aren't mine, with characters who aren't me, in race, religion, color or sexuality, because they let me see something else, something I can't get any other way.  I need more of that, please!

But where does that call for diversity, and cultural authenticity, leave me as a writer?  I'm of mixed and muddled background - four different bloodlines each carrying several different countries on their backs and continents in their wake.  But for me to claim one of them as my mirror?  Would be false, because I'm not a member of those cultures: I'm American, three generations deep.   So how much of American culture can I claim? 

The modern side, absolutely - I've spent ten books, three novellas and a number of short stories writing about the American immigrant and integration culture through the Cosa Nostradamus novels. I think I've done a reasonably good job, there.

But what about where all that formed? If my next book were, say, set in a divergent history of pre-1800's North America - is that my culture? Is that my mirror, too? Or is it a window?

Was I appropriating something that didn't belong to me?

That's a thought to stop a writer dead in their tracks, if we're being honest. Both the fear of being called out for it, rightly or wrongly, and the inevitability of getting it wrong, because short of growing up immersed in something, we WILL get things wrong, and "but alternate history!" only buys you so much wiggle room.

But I had a story I needed to tell, things I needed to say, and this was how they were going to be told and said. So it was important for me to figure it out.

The book - the working title was THE DEVIL'S WEST - plays with the idea that rather than the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 that doubled the size of the United States with a pen stroke and a large check, that area was left in the hands of an entity known in the newspapers of the time as The Devil: an entire Territory within which the tribes remained unmolested, and any people of any nation who wanted to settle there needed to play by the devil's rules - or else.

I thought I could write my main character Isobel's point of view reasonably well - she's a first generation immigrant who thinks of this land as her own, as her home. But what of those she encounters, on both sides of the colonization argument?

The real history that created this setting is at heart the history of the hundreds of tribes and dozens of confederations that western incursion pushed to the side. In that sense, I am the outsider, the observer through the window. And for a non-Native American, writing about that portion of our history is deeply problematic on pretty much every level. I could not imagine what life had been like back then; the truest histories are locked away from me by nature of my skin and language, and I have access only to the things that were written down and shared - and too often when they were shared, elements were reserved, lost, or destroyed. I could only be true to what I could see through that window, and be aware that there was much beyond that window, out of my sight.

But the settlers who chose to risk, to go to a new world and find their fortune and their future, knowing that they left all security and certainty behind? I knew those people, though these were none of mine, coming predominantly from western and northern Europe. I knew what it felt to hope for a welcome somewhere else, to plant the seeds of your future in that hope - and to arrive only to discover that the streets were not paved in gold, but rather hardship and distrust. There was my mirror, the familiar things I can study, and know.

And so that was how I approached my research, and my story: as a mirror reflecting into a window, casting a third image. And there were a lot of days I couldn't write, because what I'd researched required me to tear up things I'd thought I'd known, or stop and process something I hadn't known. And knowing that this was necessary, for the story and for my own ability to tell the story, ended up being small comfort.

Did I stay on the line of respect and accuracy, while playing with real history, and real cultures? I hope so - for my sake, and the sake of those who shared their knowledge with me.

Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. Because in a very real sense, that is the legacy of my nation, that is the culture I've been born into; problematic from the start, sometimes blending and sometimes clashing, the things that are good and the things that are bad, the things we are proud of and what we regret. My country, tis of thee I write.

As to how the whole thing turned out.... That, the future will have to tell (October 2015, to be exact).

As part of his excellent Every Frame a Painting series on film analysis, Tony Zhou has a wonderful three-minute look at the framing techniques used by Nicolas Winding Refn in his excellent 2011 film Drive.

If you like Zhou’s work as much as I do, do what I just did and sign up at Patreon to kick in a few bucks for each new video in the series.

I am the last person with a right to complain about Internet articles being too long. But if I did have that right, I think I would exercise it on Dying To Be Free, the Huffington Post’s 20,000-word article on the current state of heroin addiction treatment. I feel like it could have been about a quarter the size without losing much.

It’s too bad that most people will probably shy away from reading it, because it gets a lot of stuff really right.

The article’s thesis is also its subtitle: “There’s a treatment for heroin addiction that actually works; why aren’t we using it?” To save you the obligatory introductory human interest story: that treatment is suboxone. Its active ingredient is the drug buprenorphine, which is kind of like a safer version of methadone. Suboxone is slow-acting, gentle, doesn’t really get people high, and is pretty safe as long as you don’t go mixing it with weird stuff. People on suboxone don’t experience opiate withdrawal and have greatly decreased cravings for heroin. I work at a hospital that’s an area leader in suboxone prescription, I’ve gotten to see it in action, and it’s literally a life-saver.

Conventional heroin treatment is abysmal. Rehab centers aren’t licensed or regulated and most have little interest in being evidence-based. Many are associated with churches or weird quasi-religious groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. They don’t necessarily have doctors or psychologists, and some actively mistrust them. All of this I knew. What I didn’t know until reading the article was that – well, it’s not just that some of them try to brainwash addicts. It’s more that some of them try to cargo cult brainwashing, do the sorts of things that sound like brainwashing to them, without really knowing how brainwashing works assuming it’s even a coherent goal to aspire to. Their concept of brainwashing is mostly just creating a really unpleasant environment, yelling at people a lot, enforcing intentionally over-strict rules, and in some cases even having struggle-session-type-things where everyone in the group sits in a circle, scream at the other patients, and tell them they’re terrible and disgusting. There’s a strong culture of accusing anyone who questions or balks at any of it of just being an addict, or “not really wanting to quit”.

I have no problem with “tough love” when it works, but in this case it doesn’t. Rehab programs make every effort to obfuscate their effectiveness statistics – I blogged about this before in Part II here – but the best guesses by outside observers is that for a lot of them about 80% to 90% of their graduates relapse within a couple of years. Even this paints too rosy a picture, because it excludes the people who gave up halfway through.

Suboxone treatment isn’t perfect, and relapse is still a big problem, but it’s a heck of a lot better than most rehabs. Suboxone gives people their dose of opiate and mostly removes the biological half of addiction. There’s still the psychological half of addiction – whatever it was that made people want to get high in the first place – but people have a much easier time dealing with that after the biological imperative to get a new dose is gone. Almost all clinical trials have found treatment with methadone or suboxone to be more effective than traditional rehab. Even Cochrane Review, which is notorious for never giving a straight answer to anything besides “more evidence is needed”, agrees that methadone and suboxone are effective treatments.

Some people stay on suboxone forever and do just fine – it has few side effects and doesn’t interfere with functioning. Other people stay on it until they reach a point in their lives when they feel ready to come off, then taper down slowly under medical supervision, often with good success. It’s a good medication, and the growing suspicion it might help treat depression is just icing on the cake.

There are two big roadblocks to wider use of suboxone, and both are enraging.

The first roadblock is the #@$%ing government. They are worried that suboxone, being an opiate, might be addictive, and so doctors might turn into drug pushers. So suboxone is possibly the most highly regulated drug in the United States. If I want to give out OxyContin like candy, I have no limits but the number of pages on my prescription pad. If I want to prescribe you Walter-White-level quantities of methamphetamine for weight loss, nothing is stopping me but common sense. But if I want to give even a single suboxone prescription to a single patient, I have to take a special course on suboxone prescribing, and even then I am limited to only being able to give it to thirty patients a year (eventually rising to one hundred patients when I get more experience with it). The (generally safe) treatment for addiction is more highly regulated than the (very dangerous) addictive drugs it is supposed to replace. Only 3% of doctors bother to jump through all the regulatory hoops, and their hundred-patient limits get saturated almost immediately. As per the laws of suppy and demand, this makes suboxone prescriptions very expensive, and guess what social class most heroin addicts come from? Also, heroin addicts often don’t have access to good transportation, which means that if the nearest suboxone provider is thirty miles from their house they’re out of luck. The List Of Reasons To End The Patient Limits On Buprenorphine expands upon and clarifies some of these points.

(in case you think maybe the government just honestly believes the drug is dangerous – nope. You’re allowed to prescribe without restriction for any reason except opiate addiction)

The second roadblock is the @#$%ing rehab industry. They hear that suboxone is an opiate, and their religious or quasi-religious fanaticism goes into high gear. “What these people need is Jesus and/or their Nondenominational Higher Power, not more drugs! You’re just pushing a new addiction on them! Once an addict, always an addict until they complete their spiritual struggle and come clean!” And so a lot of programs bar suboxone users from participating.

This doesn’t sound so bad given the quality of a lot of the programs. Problem is, a lot of these are closely integrated with the social services and legal system. So suppose somebody’s doing well on suboxone treatment, and gets in trouble for a drug offense. Could be that they relapsed on heroin one time, could be that they’re using something entirely different like cocaine. Judge says go to a treatment program or go to jail. Treatment program says they can’t use suboxone. So maybe they go in to deal with their cocaine problem, and by the time they come out they have a cocaine problem and a heroin problem.

And…okay, time for a personal story. One of my patients is a homeless man who used to have a heroin problem. He was put on suboxone and it went pretty well. He came back with an alcohol problem, and we wanted to deal with that and his homelessness at the same time. There are these organizations called three-quarters houses – think “halfway houses” after inflation – that take people with drug problems and give them an insurance-sponsored place to live. But the catch is you can’t be using drugs. And they consider suboxone to be a drug. So of about half a dozen three-quarters houses in the local area, none of them would accept this guy. I called up the one he wanted to go to, said that he really needed a place to stay, said that without this care he was in danger of relapsing into his alcoholism, begged them to accept. They said no drugs. I said I was a doctor, and he had my permission to be on suboxone. They said no drugs. I said that seriously, they were telling me that my DRUG ADDICTED patient who was ADDICTED TO DRUGS couldn’t go to their DRUG ADDICTION center because he was on a medication for treating DRUG ADDICTION? They said that was correct. I hung up in disgust.

So I agree with the pessimistic picture painted by the article. I think we’re ignoring our best treatment option for heroin addiction and I don’t see much sign that this is going to change in the future.

But the health care system not being very good at using medications effectively isn’t news. I also thought this article was interesting because it touches on some of the issues we discuss here a lot:

The value of ritual and community. A lot of the most intelligent conservatives I know base their conservativism on the idea that we can only get good outcomes in “tight communities” that are allowed to violate modern liberal social atomization to build stronger bonds. The Army, which essentially hazes people with boot camp, ritualizes every aspect of their life, then demands strict obedience and ideological conformity, is a good example. I do sometimes have a lot of respect for this position. But modern rehab programs seem like a really damning counterexample. If you read the article, you will see that this rehabs are trying their best to create a tightly-integrated religiously-inspired community of exactly that sort, and they have abilities to control their members and force their conformity – sometimes in ways that approach outright abuse – that most institutions can’t even dream of. But their effectiveness is abysmal. The entire thing is for nothing. I’m not sure whether this represents a basic failure in the idea of tight communities, or whether it just means that you can’t force them to exist ex nihilo over a couple of months. But I find it interesting.

My love-hate relationship with libertarianism. Also about the rehabs. They’re minimally regulated. There’s no credentialing process or anything. There are many different kinds, each privately led, and low entry costs to creating a new one. They can be very profitable – pretty much any rehab will cost thousands of dollars, and the big-name ones cost much more. This should be a perfect setup for a hundred different models blooming, experimenting, and then selecting for excellence as consumers drift towards the most effective centers. Instead, we get rampant abuse, charlatanry, and uselessness.

On the other hand, when the government rode in on a white horse to try to fix things, all they did was take the one effective treatment, regulate it practically out of existence, then ride right back out again. So I would be ashamed to be taking either the market’s or the state’s side here. At this point I think our best option is to ask the paraconsistent logic people to figure out something that’s neither government nor not-government, then put that in charge of everything.

Society is fixed, biology is mutable. People have tried everything to fix drug abuse. Being harsh and sending drug users to jail. Being nice and sending them to nice treatment centers that focus on rehabilitation. Old timey religion where fire-and-brimstone preachers talk about how Jesus wants them to stay off drugs. Flaky New Age religion where counselors tell you about how drug abuse is keeping you from your true self. Government programs. University programs. Private programs. Giving people money. Fining people money. Being unusually nice. Being unusually mean. More social support. Less social support. This school of therapy. That school of therapy. What works is just giving people a chemical to saturate the brain receptor directly. We know it works. The studies show it works. And we’re still collectively beating our heads against the wall of finding a social solution.

queercommunist:

An ideology that see cisness and transness as positioned into a new binary where they are completely opposite experiences and identities isn’t radical or liberatory, and telling people that they MUST be cis unless they are trans imposes only a new set of gender regulations in place of traditional cissexist regulations.

[BLOG NOTE: from the title, it should be obvious that this is not a rerun.]

I.

The nice thing about writing a blog post a month after anyone stopped being interested in Thing is that you get to link to other people making your points better than you would. So I recommend Nothing Is Mere for a summary of the situation and Muga Sofer’s essay on anti-feminist superweapons (which probably took a couple thousand words out of this post by itself, thanks dude).

II.

Scott Aaronson wanted to kill himself.

The thing about wanting to kill yourself is that… if you genuinely wish to be dead, you are, by the consensus of the psychiatric community, Not Sane. The DSM-V is less into generalized assessments of functioning but in the DSM-IV wanting to be dead is enough to catapult you into the functioning level of schizophrenics.

And this is something that really doesn’t get mentioned in any of the discussion of Scott Aaronson’s post. The feminist consensus is “you just have mental health issues, you’re not not structurally oppressed”– but mental illness is, in fact, an axis of structural oppression. Therefore he is oppressed. Because he is mentally ill. For fuck’s sake. Like, do I need to make a Non-Suicidal Privilege Checklist here?

Non-Suicidal Privilege:

1) It is not legal to kidnap me and imprison me.
2) I can describe my emotions to my friends without everyone freaking the fuck out.
3) I have never had to glare at someone while they explained to me that I was so strong and I could get through this because the night is darkest before the dawn
4) … well, you get the point.

III.

On the other hand: clinical depression is pretty much the ordinary human response to being really fucking miserable. Some people are just prone to become depressed in general; they have a job and friends and a romantic partner, everything is going right for them, but they just hurt all the time and can’t get out of bed. But for a lot of people depression is a response to something. “I’m depressed because I’m lonely.” “I’m depressed because people keep bullying me.” “I’m depressed because I have to live with my abusive parents.” “I’m depressed because I’m poor and I don’t have any options to not become poor.” “I’m depressed because my mom just died.”

You may be depressed if your mother died! (Scott informs me antidepressants help with grief as much as they do with depression.) But by the “depressed people are oppressed” argument, that would mean that you’re oppressed because your mother died! I don’t think that’s quite right.

I think it’s necessary to take a nuanced approach. If you’re suicidally depressed because your mom died, you’re oppressed as a depressed person. You’re as likely to be legally kidnapped as anyone else. But this does not magically transmutate your mom dying into a form of oppression, as opposed to an ordinary form of suffering. Similarly, if Aaronson was depressed because he was lonely, that doesn’t mean his loneliness is a form of oppression.

IV.

On the third hand: I am pretty damn confident that if you are seeking chemical castration because you are afraid of your sexuality, you are not totally and 100% neurotypical.

One of the most useful concepts I picked up from Catholicism is scrupulosity, which I recently introduced into the Less Wrong community. Scrupulosity is excessive guilt, in much the same way that an anxiety disorder is excessive fear. The iconic Catholic example is related to the fact that one must fast before Communion. The normal person just doesn’t eat for a couple hours. The scrupulous person frets. Is brushing your teeth breaking the fast? Is accidentally swallowing a bug breaking the fast? What if the priest gives a very short homily and starts distributing communion when you haven’t fasted for long enough? You could have committed a mortal sin without knowing!

(Note that this is not the same thing as the OCD symptom scrupulosity; while we have many things in common, and OCD medication was remarkably helpful in treating my scrupulosity, most people I know who identify as scrupulous have not been diagnosed with OCD.)

Now, Amanda Marcotte, Arthur Chu, &co really enjoy talking about how this is Aaronson’s own personal mental health problems and between him and his therapist and not a matter of Structural Oppression. But… okay, it is my own personal mental health problems when I break down crying because buying concert tickets makes me basically a murderer because I didn’t spend the money on malaria nets. I admit this. If I were a sane person, I would probably cry about being a murderer much less. Maybe not at all! However, I feel like the child in the pond argument is, at the very least, not helping?

(…if you’re prone to scrupulosity and don’t know what I’m referring to don’t read that link.)

It’s true that the authors who gave Scott Aaronson the ideas that led to his seeking chemical castration did not intend “hey, I’m going to make some random nerdy dude seek castration! That sounds hilarious!” Most of them had no idea that their ideas would be taken in this way! They would probably be horrified if they found out! It really isn’t their fault.

And yet… he wouldn’t have been hurt if people weren’t constantly telling him what a bad person he is. Like: Amanda Marcotte responded to a comment about how Scott Aaronson didn’t hit on women because he was afraid of hurting them with his sexuality by proposing that he had so much male entitlement that he expected women to just fall into his lap without him doing anything.

That shit is fucking crazymaking. You follow all the rules! Somebody says that X is okay and someone else says it’s bad and you don’t do it, just to be on the safe side. You read Elevatorgate and are puzzled until you find out the problem is hitting on women in elevators, and then you worry about all the other spaces you shouldn’t hit on women in that you don’t know about because they didn’t get a -gate suffix. You try to read body language, but you don’t know how and all the instructions are confusing, so you just assume everyone is rejecting you. You don’t hit on people because it might creep them out and that hurts people and you don’t want to hurt people, you don’t want to do things that are wrong. And then, when you’ve just about resigned yourself to eternal loneliness with your feminist halo, Marcotte comes along and says that that’s not good enough and you have to follow all those vaguely defined, mutually contradictory rules and still ask people out. If you don’t, you are Male Entitled Expects Women To Fall Into His Lap. Don’t think you can escape your evil just by being celibate, men!

Yes, I know you didn’t mean to. I remember a phrase social justice people really like using. Something about intent? And magic?

I know. People say that rhetoric for reasons. “Creeps are evil terrible no-good very-bad people” allows women to be upset by something that causes them a great deal of pain. Some people need to hear the child-in-the-pond argument to get past their apathy for Africans. You can decide that the suffering of me and Scott Aaronson are the price you’re paying for stronger rhetoric. That might even be a correct decision.

But don’t fucking pretend you aren’t hurting us.

Don’t look me in the eye and say that my guilt is imaginary, made up, a product of me being an evil person and if I were just less evil I could take everything you’re saying with a clear conscience. Be honest about the price you’re paying. Say to yourself, “I know that what I’m saying will cause some people to be suicidal, and I’m fine with that, and I think it’s worth it.” Or don’t fucking say it.

V.

Seriously, nerdy dudes: care less about creeping women out. I mean, don’t deliberately do things you suspect may creep a woman out, but making mistakes is a natural part of learning. Being creeped out by one random dude is not The Worst Pain People Can Ever Experience and it’s certainly not worth dooming you to an eternal life of loneliness over. She’ll live.

VII.

Here’s the thing: nerd culture is sexist. I am not going to make any statements about whether it is more sexist or less sexist than any other culture; I can only speak of the communities I’ve been in, and I have no idea how you’d measure relative sexism anyway. But it is sexist, and it has kinds of sexism that are particularly common for nerd culture.

For example: I was recently made aware of this Patrick Rothfuss post, in which Rothfuss creates a metaphor about having a crush on a socially awkward, smart girl who reads lots of books, and then several years later finding a porn video of her and she’s gorgeous and great at sex and kinky. And he says, “This girl has nothing in common with your high-school crush except for her social security number. Everything you loved about her is gone.”

Of course, perhaps he has a little bit of a point: part of what Teenage Boy was attracted to was that High School Crush was his equal sexually– not scary, not threatening, someone just as likely as you to fuck up during sex. And High School Crush no longer has that trait. But, presumably, she is still smart and socially awkward and an avid reader and good at chemistry. A while back, you could find me taking off my clothes for money on the Internet, and this does not seem to have magically given me social skills or stopped me from being constantly in the middle of five books at once or given me less fervent feelings about Admiral Thrawn.

This is an example of the common sexist division of women into the Madonna (saintly, pedestalized) and the Whore (sexual, degraded). But it also, I think, has a certain nerd flavor. The Madonna is an idealized nerd girl: she reads! she knows chemistry! she makes Star Wars references! And it’s not just the idea that sex makes someone worth less, it’s the idea that sex makes someone not a nerd: that one cannot be hot or sexual and also, on a certain level, feel like a robot surrounded by humans it doesn’t quite understand. (Of course, a certain– how shall we put it– conventional unattractiveness is a common trait of nerdfolk; but so is mental illness, and no one has proposed that getting therapy means you get kicked out of the tribe.) When I talk about nerd sexism, this is an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about.

VIII.

Nevertheless, I am somewhat skeptical when non-nerd feminists start going on about how sexist nerds are.

Here’s a metaphor feminists may find helpful: imagine an anti-feminist going on about toxicity and bullying within social justice culture. You may agree with them that social justice culture is often toxic and bullying; you may agree with every example they choose and criticism they make. However, you probably have the sneaking suspicion that the anti-feminist is not actually motivated by a pure and selfless desire to help the feminist movement be the best that it can be. You probably think that the anti-feminist disagrees with some very core values of yours such as “in general, it is bad to make fun of people because they’re behaving in ways that are not typical for their gender”, and that their critiques of social justice (however accurate) are a tool to advance this value you find despicable. And, in practice, it usually turns out that said anti-feminists will say something about man-hating hairy-legged bra-burning dykes, and thus your suspicion turns out to be totally justified.

Similarly, in my experience, non-nerd feminists often seem to be have values that I, personally, find repugnant, such as “omg isn’t it creepy when an ugly person dares to express sexual desire? Ew! Gross!”, and that their critiques of nerd culture– even the critiques I think are accurate– are a tool to advance said values. And, in practice, non-nerd feminists have this disturbing tendency to go on about fat ugly autistic neckbeards who have mental health issues and live in their parents’ basement and act like Sheldon Cooper.

And… you know, the primary victims of toxic social justice are other social justice people, for the obvious reason that social justice people spend a lot of time hanging out with each other. Similarly, the primary victims of nerd sexism are, well, female nerds. It ain’t you guys they’re putting up on the pedestal. And I sort of have to wonder why y’all are so invested, in the same way I wonder why anti-feminists are so invested in feminists bullying each other.

Why don’t you let us deal with our own shit?

IX.

Man, I get so annoyed when people throw Dworkin under the bus. Especially Arthur Chu! Dude, if you’re down for using any tactic in the war for Justice– if your response to “bad idea gets counterargument, does not get bullet, never ever ever” is “we’re in a war, you moron, my survival and that of my friends is on the line, I’m not going to disarm myself just to indulge your squeamishness”– you should be all over Dworkin.

Some people have no sense of history or of our foremothers and that is why you are all weak and will not survive the winter.

X.

I have interacted with a lot of non-sexist men over the course of my life. For a lot of them, they believed sexist things, and then they discovered feminism, and then they were like “oh god! I believe so many sexist things! I have to stop doing that!” These are usually the men who are very sold on feminism.

I have also, over the course of my life, interacted with a fair number of men who, out of moral luck, have happened not to have absorbed many sexist ideas. Then they encounter feminists saying “God, men need to stop shaming sluts! They need to stop pressuring women into wearing lipstick and then calling women ‘shallow’ when they wear lipstick! They really, really need to stop sexually harassing women!” And it would not occur to those men to sexually harass women, or pressure women into wearing lipstick and then think they’re shallow when they do, or think less of a woman for having sex. And they don’t notice their male friends doing those things. Maybe because they don’t have any sexist male friends. More likely it’s because it’s hard to notice people being assholes if their assholery doesn’t affect you. It’s the same principle as the one at work when coming out as trans mysteriously transmutes previously innocuous comedies into horrific transmisogynist shitfests.

(we will now have a five-minute break for Ozy to quietly weep about Life of Brian)

So those non-sexist men’s instant reaction is to conclude that feminists are looking for sexism where none exists, or to round feminists’ complaint to the nearest thing they would do and then say “wow! These feminists think it is sexual harassment just to ask a girl out!”

There is a cost to pointing this out, which is that a bunch of sexist men will conclude they are actually super awesome high-level not sexist, because sexists are not generally known for their self-awareness w.r.t. sexism. Suffice it to say that if you’ve ever opined that a fat woman is just not taking care of herself you are not in the category which I am discussing, and that if you are contemplating linking this post to explain to someone that your anti-feminism is the result of super awesome high-level not-sexism then you are definitely not in the category which I am discussing.

Non-sexist men: I would like to point out the possibility that feminists keep getting upset about men who aren’t you. That when feminists say “it is bad when men think less of women for having sex,” they are in fact referring to an actually existing group of people, which many women have interacted with and who cause them a great deal of distress, and of which you are not a member. Therefore, the fact that you wouldn’t do that does not mean that other men wouldn’t do that. Other men are assholes. I’m sorry.

XI.

I really feel like I need to preface this section with “what about the womenz?” but… what makes you think this is a shy nerdy male problem?

It is true that being asked out is usually easier for socially anxious people than asking people out. (Well, not for me, but I’m unusual.) Unfortunately, that sort of requires that people actually ask you out.

Hot, socially adroit people are usually not that interested in us ugly awkward weirdos. They’re off doing their own thing going to… bars? Parties? The Super Bowl? Whatever. This would work out fine if the shy nerdy female’s natural mate, the shy nerdy male, asked them out. But they don’t. That is literally what this whole discussion is about.

Now, the shy nerdy females can ask people out! But asking people out is really hard. (Citation: this entire conversation.) And remember, we have this whole culture that is constantly telling women that Men Do The Asking and Women Get Asked. You might know that everyone has a crush on so-and-so, but shy nerdy women aren’t actually telepathic. And if you know that men ask you out when they’re into you, and men don’t ask you out, it is really easy to conclude that the reason is that you’re hideous and ugly and nobody likes you.

Our problems are the same problems, inflected differently.

I leave it as an exercise for the shy nerdy male reader how often they’ve crushingly rejected women they were into.

XII.

Sexual harassers are not confused about social rules.

Sexual harassers like to claim that they are confused about social rules. “It was an accident!” they cry. “How was I supposed to know that I’m not supposed to mime masturbation at my hot coworker? Lo! These social rules! So complicated!”

For some reason I have never been quite able to comprehend, everyone seems to have collectively said to themselves, “Gosh! People desperately trying to get out of punishment for harming others! Those seem like exactly the sort of people who would be accurate self-reporters of their own motivations and thought processes!”

Look: in the vast majority of sexual harassment policies I have read, there is a requirement that the harassee inform the harasser that the behavior is unwelcome and they should stop. If you keep doing something after the person you’re doing it to has told you that it is unwelcome and you should stop, then your problem is not a “confused about social rules” problem. “Don’t tell sexual jokes that the person says are unwelcome” is a very simple social rule, and 100% of the confused-about-social-rules people I have interacted with (and I have interacted with a lot) have completely understood it. Similarly, it is very difficult for me to understand how a shy, terrified nerd would manage to grope someone, or ask someone out multiple times after that person had said ‘no’, or threaten to spread a rumor that someone is a slut if that person doesn’t go out with them.

I am not going to say that there has never been a case of someone so confused about social rules that they groped someone in the workplace. The world is wide and contains many things. But I think as a general assumption we can all collectively agree that confused-about-social-rules people are making a mistake in the totally opposite direction.

XIII.

On my outline, this point is literally a link to this comment and the phrase “aaaaaaaaaa.”

Scott Aaronson, I see what you’re going for there! It’s a really natural urge to kick all the assholes out of your group. And like I said before, I don’t think there’s a genuine epidemic of people who don’t want to sexually harass anyone but are sufficiently confused about socializing that they wind up doing so by mistake, and I am totally supportive of anything that points out this obvious yet constantly missed fact.

But the thing is… words don’t work like that! Even if you say “in this conversation, ‘shy nerdy male’ means someone who is so scared of harassing girls that they don’t ask them out”, in the wider world “shy nerdy male” is connected to a lot of things like “acne” and “playing D&D” and “programming” and “having really, really strong opinions about Admiral Thrawn, like, you have no idea how strong my Admiral Thrawn opinions are.” And there are totally people who have really strong opinions about Admiral Thrawn and harass people, or abuse them, or rape them. The guy who sexually assaulted me fucking wrote Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace fanfic, you know?

And people like that often equivocate between the two definitions! They are like “I am an acne-ridden, D&D-playing, fanfic-writing programmer with strong opinions about Star Wars; therefore, I am a shy male nerd; therefore, if I am sexually harassing people, it is because I don’t understand social rules and you should be really kind and understanding and not get mad at me or tell my friends I’m being an asshole.”

And… remember how I said that nerd sexism mostly affects female nerds? If you don’t understand social rules, it’s also hard to set boundaries. If you’re terrified of people, it’s scary to tell someone to stop, especially if they have power over you. It’s easy to just shut up and take it and hurt, especially when the person hurting you is shy and awkward and doesn’t understand, and you’re also shy and awkward and don’t understand, and you think about all those rules that are so confusing and contradictory and you don’t want to punish someone like you for not understanding them, and…

Our problems are the same problems, inflected differently.

Please be kind.

XIV.

In middle school they used to grope me. It was a joke. The punchline was that no one would really be attracted to someone as ugly as me.

When I got my nerves together to tell an adult (not about the groping– I couldn’t, it was too embarrassing– but about some of the harassment), they said that boys in the smart-kid classes don’t know how to relate to girls, because they were shy. They probably had a crush on me and didn’t know how to show it.

I stopped telling adults when they hurt me. I buried myself in fanfic. I went to high school, learned to be less weird, and made friends. I didn’t get bullied anymore as long as I didn’t take classes without my friends in them and avoided listening to any rumors. I went to college and was okay for a year and a half and then I tried to kill myself and I couldn’t leave the house because there are people out there and I have to hit on people first because being hit on makes me have panic attacks and sometimes I can’t listen to music with lyrics because I’m scared the singer is laughing at me and now I’m an adult and no one bullies me anymore and I’m writing this blog post about my tragic backstory instead of studying JavaScript to become one of those Not Men In STEM y’all keep talking about and it was only recently that I realized, really, that that was something bad that happened to me, that that is something I could be angry about, if I wanted to.

That’s my traumatizing story, I guess, since we’re all sharing.

[Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.]

I.

I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it’s so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160. Since IQ this high only appears in 1/10,000 people or so, it beggars coincidence to believe this represents anything but a very strong filter for IQ (or something correlated with it) in reaching that level. If you saw a group of dozens of people who were 7’0 tall on average, you’d assume it was a basketball team or some other group selected for height, not a bunch of botanists who were all very tall by coincidence.

A lot of people find this pretty depressing. Some worry that taking it seriously might damage the “growth mindset” people need to fully actualize their potential. This is important and I want to discuss it eventually, but not now. What I want to discuss now is people who feel personally depressed. For example, a comment from last week:

I’m sorry to leave self a self absorbed comment, but reading this really upset me and I just need to get this off my chest…How is a person supposed to stay sane in a culture that prizes intelligence above everything else – especially if, as Scott suggests, Human Intelligence Really Is the Key to the Future – when they themselves are not particularly intelligent and, apparently, have no potential to ever become intelligent? Right now I basically feel like pond scum.

I hear these kinds of responses every so often, so I should probably learn to expect them. I never do. They seem to me precisely backwards. There’s a moral gulf here, and I want to throw stories and intuitions at it until enough of them pile up at the bottom to make a passable bridge. But first, a comparison:

Some people think body weight is biologically/genetically determined. Other people think it’s based purely on willpower – how strictly you diet, how much you can bring yourself to exercise. These people get into some pretty acrimonious debates.

Overweight people, and especially people who feel unfairly stigmatized for being overweight, tend to cluster on the biologically determined side. And although not all believers in complete voluntary control of weight are mean to fat people, the people who are mean to fat people pretty much all insist that weight is voluntary and easily changeable.

Although there’s a lot of debate over the science here, there seems to be broad agreement on both sides that the more compassionate, sympathetic, progressive position, the position promoted by the kind of people who are really worried about stigma and self-esteem, is that weight is biologically determined.

And the same is true of mental illness. Sometimes I see depressed patients whose families really don’t get it. They say “Sure, my daughter feels down, but she needs to realize that’s no excuse for shirking her responsibilities. She needs to just pick herself up and get on with her life.” On the other hand, most depressed people say that their depression is more fundamental than that, not a thing that can be overcome by willpower, certainly not a thing you can just ‘shake off’.

Once again, the compassionate/sympathetic/progressive side of the debate is that depression is something like biological, and cannot easily be overcome with willpower and hard work.

One more example of this pattern. There are frequent political debates in which conservatives (or straw conservatives) argue that financial success is the result of hard work, so poor people are just too lazy to get out of poverty. Then a liberal (or straw liberal) protests that hard work has nothing to do with it, success is determined by accidents of birth like who your parents are and what your skin color is et cetera, so the poor are blameless in their own predicament.

I’m oversimplifying things, but again the compassionate/sympathetic/progressive side of the debate – and the side endorsed by many of the poor themselves – is supposed to be that success is due to accidents of birth, and the less compassionate side is that success depends on hard work and perseverance and grit and willpower.

The obvious pattern is that attributing outcomes to things like genes, biology, and accidents of birth is kind and sympathetic. Attributing them to who works harder and who’s “really trying” can stigmatize people who end up with bad outcomes and is generally viewed as Not A Nice Thing To Do.

And the weird thing, the thing I’ve never understood, is that intellectual achievement is the one domain that breaks this pattern.

Here it’s would-be hard-headed conservatives arguing that intellectual greatness comes from genetics and the accidents of birth and demanding we “accept” this “unpleasant truth”.

And it’s would-be compassionate progressives who are insisting that no, it depends on who works harder, claiming anybody can be brilliant if they really try, warning us not to “stigmatize” the less intelligent as “genetically inferior”.

I can come up with a few explanations for the sudden switch, but none of them are very principled and none of them, to me, seem to break the fundamental symmetry of the situation. I choose to maintain consistency by preserving the belief that overweight people, depressed people, and poor people aren’t fully to blame for their situation – and neither are unintelligent people. It’s accidents of birth all the way down. Intelligence is mostly genetic and determined at birth – and we’ve already determined in every other sphere that “mostly genetic and determined at birth” means you don’t have to feel bad if you got the short end of the stick.

Consider for a moment Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He grew up in poverty in a one-room house in small-town India. He taught himself mathematics by borrowing books from local college students and working through the problems on his own until he reached the end of the solveable ones and had nowhere else to go but inventing ways to solve the unsolveable ones.

There are a lot of poor people in the United States today whose life circumstances prevented their parents from reading books to them as a child, prevented them from getting into the best schools, prevented them from attending college, et cetera. And pretty much all of those people still got more educational opportunities than Ramanujan did.

And from there we can go in one of two directions. First, we can say that a lot of intelligence is innate, that Ramanujan was a genius, and that we mortals cannot be expected to replicate his accomplishments.

Or second, we can say those poor people are just not trying hard enough.

Take “innate ability” out of the picture, and if you meet a poor person on the street begging for food, saying he never had a chance, your reply must be “Well, if you’d just borrowed a couple of math textbooks from the local library at age 12, you would have been a Fields Medalist by now. I hear that pays pretty well.”

The best reason not to say that is that we view Ramanujan as intellectually gifted. But the very phrase tells us where we should classify that belief. Ramanujan’s genius is a “gift” in much the same way your parents giving you a trust fund on your eighteenth birthday is a “gift”, and it should be weighted accordingly in the moral calculus.

II.

I shouldn’t pretend I’m worried about this for the sake of the poor. I’m worried for me.

My last IQ-ish test was my SATs in high school. I got a perfect score in Verbal, and a good-but-not-great score in Math.

And in high school English, I got A++s in all my classes, Principal’s Gold Medals, 100%s on tests, first prize in various state-wide essay contests, etc. In Math, I just barely by the skin of my teeth scraped together a pass in Calculus with a C-.

Every time I won some kind of prize in English my parents would praise me and say I was good and should feel good. My teachers would hold me up as an example and say other kids should try to be more like me. Meanwhile, when I would bring home a report card with a C- in math, my parents would have concerned faces and tell me they were disappointed and I wasn’t living up to my potential and I needed to work harder et cetera.

And I don’t know which part bothered me more.

Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To praise me for any of it seemed and still seems utterly unjust.

On the other hand, to this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.”

And without some notion of innate ability, I don’t know what to do with this experience. I don’t want to have to accept the blame for being a lazy person who just didn’t try hard enough in Math. But I really don’t want to have to accept the credit for being a virtuous and studious English student who worked harder than his peers. I know there were people who worked harder than I did in English, who poured their heart and soul into that course – and who still got Cs and Ds. To deny innate ability is to devalue their efforts and sacrifice, while simultaneously giving me credit I don’t deserve.

Meanwhile, there were some students who did better than I did in Math with seemingly zero effort. I didn’t begrudge those students. But if they’d started trying to say they had exactly the same level of innate ability as I did, and the only difference was they were trying while I was slacking off, then I sure as hell would have begrudged them. Especially if I knew they were lazing around on the beach while I was poring over a textbook.

I tend to think of social norms as contracts bargained between different groups. In the case of attitudes towards intelligence, those two groups are smart people and dumb people. Since I was both at once, I got to make the bargain with myself, which simplified the bargaining process immensely. The deal I came up with was that I wasn’t going to beat myself up over the areas I was bad at, but I also didn’t get to become too cocky about the areas I was good at. It was all genetic luck of the draw either way. In the meantime, I would try to press as hard as I could to exploit my strengths and cover up my deficiencies. So far I’ve found this to be a really healthy way of treating myself, and it’s the way I try to treat others as well.

III.

The theme continues to be “Scott Relives His Childhood Inadequacies”. So:

When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.

A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class.

A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.

A little while later, Yamaha USA flew him to Japan to show him off before the Yamaha corporate honchos there.

Well, one thing led to another, and right now if you Google my brother’s name you get a bunch of articles like this one:

The evidence that Jeremy [Alexander] is among the top jazz pianists of his generation is quickly becoming overwhelming: at age 26, Alexander is the winner of the Nottingham International Jazz Piano Competition, a second-place finisher in the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, a two-time finalist for the American Pianist Association’s Cole Porter Fellowship, and a two-time second-place finisher at the Phillips Jazz Competition. Alexander, who was recently named a Professor of Piano at Western Michigan University’s School of Music, made a sold-out solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 2012, performing Debussy’s Etudes in the first half and jazz improvisations in the second half.

Meanwhile, I was always a mediocre student at Yamaha. When the time came to try an instrument in elementary school, I went with the violin to see if maybe I’d find it more to my tastes than the piano. I was quickly sorted into the remedial class because I couldn’t figure out how to make my instrument stop sounding like a wounded cat. After a year or so of this, I decided to switch to fulfilling my music requirement through a choir, and everyone who’d had to listen to me breathed a sigh of relief.

Every so often I wonder if somewhere deep inside me there is the potential to be “among the top musicians of my generation.” I try to recollect whether my brother practiced harder than I did. My memories are hazy, but I don’t think he practiced much harder until well after his career as a child prodigy had taken off. The cycle seemed to be that every time he practiced, things came fluidly to him and he would produce beautiful music and everyone would be amazed. And this must have felt great, and incentivized him to practice more, and that made him even better, so that the beautiful music came even more fluidly, and the praise became more effusive, until eventually he chose a full-time career in music and became amazing. Meanwhile, when I started practicing it always sounded like wounded cats, and I would get very cautious praise like “Good job, Scott, it sounded like that cat was hurt a little less badly than usual,” and it made me frustrated, and want to practice less, which made me even worse, until eventually I quit in disgust.

On the other hand, I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years.

But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to. Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing, and it’s exactly the same virtuous cycle as my brother got from his piano practice.

And so I think it would be too easy to say something like “There’s no innate component at all. Your brother practiced piano really hard but almost never writes. You write all the time, but wimped out of practicing piano. So what do you expect? You both got what you deserved.”

I tried to practice piano as hard as he did. I really tried. But every moment was a struggle. I could keep it up for a while, and then we’d go on vacation, and there’d be no piano easily available, and I would be breathing a sigh of relief at having a ready-made excuse, and he’d be heading off to look for a piano somewhere to practice on. Meanwhile, I am writing this post in short breaks between running around hospital corridors responding to psychiatric emergencies, and there’s probably someone very impressed with that, someone saying “But you had such a great excuse to get out of your writing practice!”

I dunno. But I don’t think of myself as working hard at any of the things I am good at, in the sense of “exerting vast willpower to force myself kicking and screaming to do them”. It’s possible I do work hard, and that an outside observer would accuse me of eliding how hard I work, but it’s not a conscious elision and I don’t feel that way from the inside.

Ramanujan worked very hard at math. But I don’t think he thought of it as work. He obtained a scholarship to the local college, but dropped out almost immediately because he couldn’t make himself study any subject other than math. Then he got accepted to another college, and dropped out again because they made him study non-mathematical subjects and he failed a physiology class. Then he nearly starved to death because he had no money and no scholarship. To me, this doesn’t sound like a person who just happens to be very hard-working; if he had the ability to study other subjects he would have, for no reason other than that it would have allowed him to stay in college so he could keep studying math. It seems to me that in some sense Ramanujan was incapable of putting hard work into non-math subjects.

I really wanted to learn math and failed, but I did graduate with honors from medical school. Ramanujan really wanted to learn physiology and failed, but he did become one of history’s great mathematicians. So which one of us was the hard worker?

People used to ask me for writing advice. And I, in all earnestness, would say “Just transcribe your thoughts onto paper exactly like they sound in your head.” It turns out that doesn’t work for other people. Maybe it doesn’t work for me either, and it just feels like it does.

But you know what? When asked about one of his discoveries, a method of simplifying a very difficult problem to a continued fraction, Ramanujan described his thought process as: “It is simple. The minute I heard the problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction. ‘Which continued fraction?’ I asked myself. Then the answer came to my mind”.

And again, maybe that’s just how it feels to him, and the real answer is “study math so hard that you flunk out of college twice, and eventually you develop so much intuition that you can solve problems without thinking about them.”

(or maybe the real answer is “have dreams where obscure Hindu gods appear to you as drops of blood and reveal mathematical formulae”. Ramanujan was weird).

But I still feel like there’s something going on here where the solution to me being bad at math and piano isn’t just “sweat blood and push through your brain’s aversion to these subjects until you make it stick”. When I read biographies of Ramanujan and other famous mathematicians, there’s no sense that they ever had to do that with math. When I talk to my brother, I never get a sense that he had to do that with piano. And if I am good enough at writing to qualify to have an opinion on being good at things, then I don’t feel like I ever went through that process myself.

So this too is part of my deal with myself. I’ll try to do my best at things, but if there’s something I really hate, something where I have to go uphill every step of the way, then it’s okay to admit mediocrity. I won’t beat myself up for not forcing myself kicking and screaming to practice piano. And in return I won’t become too cocky about practicing writing a lot. It’s probably some kind of luck of the draw either way.

IV.

I said before that this wasn’t just about poor people, it was about me being selfishly worried for my own sake. I think I might have given the mistaken impression that I merely need to justify to myself why I can’t get an A in math or play the piano. But it’s much worse than that.

The rationalist community tends to get a lot of high-scrupulosity people, people who tend to beat themselves up for not doing more than they are. It’s why I push giving 10% to charity, not as some kind of amazing stretch goal that we need to guilt people into doing, but as a crutch, a sort of “don’t worry, you’re still okay if you only give ten percent”. It’s why there’s so much emphasis on “heroic responsibility” and how you, yes you, have to solve all the world’s problems personally. It’s why I see red when anyone accuses us of entitlement, since it goes about as well as calling an anorexic person fat.

And we really aren’t doing ourselves any favors. For example, Nick Bostrom writes:

Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral imperative. The sooner we start a focused research program, the sooner we will get results. It matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather than in 24 years: a population greater than that of Canada would die as a result.

If that bothers you, you definitely shouldn’t read Astronomical Waste.

Yet here I am, not doing anti-aging research. Why not?

Because I tried doing biology research a few times and it was really hard and made me miserable. You know how in every science class, when the teacher says “Okay, pour the white chemical into the grey chemical, and notice how it turns green and begins to bubble,” there’s always one student who pours the white chemical into the grey chemical, and it just forms a greyish-white mixture and sits there? That was me. I hated it, I didn’t have the dexterity or the precision of mind to do it well, and when I finally finished my required experimental science classes I was happy never to think about it again. Even the abstract intellectual part of it – the one where you go through data about genes and ligands and receptors in supercentenarians and shake it until data comes out – requires exactly the kind of math skills that I don’t have.

Insofar as this is a matter of innate aptitude – some people are cut out for biology research and I’m not one of them – all is well, and my decision to get a job I’m good at instead is entirely justified.

But insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, just hard work and grit – then by not being gritty enough, I’m a monster who’s complicit in the death of a population greater than that of Canada.

Insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, I have no excuse for not being Aubrey de Grey. Or if Aubrey de Grey doesn’t impress you much, Norman Borlaug. Or if you don’t know who either of those two people are, Elon Musk.

I once heard a friend, upon his first use of modafinil, wonder aloud if the way they felt on that stimulant was the way Elon Musk felt all the time. That tied a lot of things together for me, gave me an intuitive understanding of what it might “feel like from the inside” to be Elon Musk. And it gave me a good tool to discuss biological variation with. Most of us agree that people on stimulants can perform in ways it’s difficult for people off stimulants to match. Most of us agree that there’s nothing magical about stimulants, just changes to the levels of dopamine, histamine, norepinephrine et cetera in the brain. And most of us agree there’s a lot of natural variation in these chemicals anyone. So “me on stimulants is that guy’s normal” seems like a good way of cutting through some of the philosophical difficulties around this issue.

…which is all kind of a big tangent. The point I want to make is that for me, what’s at stake in talking about natural variations in ability isn’t just whether I have to feel like a failure for not getting an A in high school calculus, or not being as good at music as my brother. It’s whether I’m a failure for not being Elon Musk. Specifically, it’s whether I can say “No, I’m really not cut out to be Elon Musk” and go do something else I’m better at without worrying that I’m killing everyone in Canada.

V.

The proverb says: “Everyone has somebody better off than they are and somebody worse off than they are, with two exceptions.” When we accept that we’re all in the “not Elon Musk” boat together (with one exception) a lot of the status games around innate ability start to seem less important.

Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to Johann von Neumann.

So there’s not much point in me feeling inadequate compared to my brother, because even if I was as good at music as my brother, I’d probably just feel inadequate for not being Mozart.

And asking “Well what if you just worked harder?” can elide small distinctions, but not bigger ones. If my only goal is short-term preservation of my self-esteem, I can imagine that if only things had gone a little differently I could have practiced more and ended up as talented as my brother. It’s a lot harder for me to imagine the course of events where I do something different and become Mozart. Only one in a billion people reach a Mozart level of achievement; why would it be me?

If I loved music for its own sake and wanted to be a talented musician so I could express the melodies dancing within my heart, then none of this matters. But insofar as I want to be good at music because I feel bad that other people are better than me at music, that’s a road without an end.

This is also how I feel of when some people on this blog complain they feel dumb for not being as smart as some of the other commenters on this blog.

I happen to have all of your IQ scores in a spreadsheet right here (remember that survey you took?). Not a single person is below the population average. The first percentile for IQ here – the one such that 1% of respondents are lower and 99% of respondents are higher – is – corresponds to the 85th percentile of the general population. So even if you’re in the first percentile here, you’re still pretty high up in the broader scheme of things.

At that point we’re back on the road without end. I am pretty sure we can raise your IQ as much as you want and you will still feel like pond scum. If we raise it twenty points, you’ll try reading Quantum Computing since Democritus and feel like pond scum. If we raise it forty, you’ll just go to Terence Tao’s blog and feel like pond scum there. Maybe if you were literally the highest-IQ person in the entire world you would feel good about yourself, but any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.

People say we should stop talking about ability differences so that stupid people don’t feel bad. I say that there’s more than enough room for everybody to feel bad, smart and stupid alike, and not talking about it won’t help. What will help is fundamentally uncoupling perception of intelligence from perception of self-worth.

I work with psychiatric patients who tend to have cognitive difficulties. Starting out in the Detroit ghetto doesn’t do them any favors, and then they get conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that actively lower IQ for poorly understood neurological reasons.

The standard psychiatric evaluation includes an assessment of cognitive ability; the one I use is a quick test with three questions. The questions are – “What is 100 minus 7?”, “What do an apple and an orange have in common?”, and “Remember these three words for one minute, then repeat them back to me: house, blue, and tulip”.

There are a lot of people – and I don’t mean floridly psychotic people who don’t know their own name, I mean ordinary reasonable people just like you and me – who can’t answer these questions. And we know why they can’t answer these questions, and it is pretty darned biological.

And if our answer to “I feel dumb and worthless because my IQ isn’t high enough” is “don’t worry, you’re not worthless, I’m sure you can be a great scientist if you just try hard enough”, then we are implicitly throwing under the bus all of these people who are definitely not going to be great scientists no matter how hard they try. Talking about trying harder can obfuscate the little differences, but once we’re talking about the homeless schizophrenic guy from Detroit who can’t tell me 100 minus 7 to save his life, you can’t just magic the problem away with a wave of your hand and say “I’m sure he can be the next Ramanujan if he keeps a positive attitude!” You either need to condemn him as worthless or else stop fricking tying worth to innate intellectual ability.

This is getting pretty close to what I was talking about in my post on burdens. When I get a suicidal patient who thinks they’re a burden on society, it’s nice to be able to point out ten important things they’ve done for society recently and prove them wrong. But sometimes it’s not that easy, and the only thing you can say is “f#@k that s#!t”. Yes, society has organized itself in a way that excludes and impoverishes a bunch of people who could have been perfectly happy in the state of nature picking berries and hunting aurochs. It’s not your fault, and if they’re going to give you compensation you take it. And we had better make this perfectly clear now, so that when everything becomes automated and run by robots and we’re all behind the curve, everybody agrees that us continuing to exist is still okay.

Likewise with intellectual ability. When someone feels sad because they can’t be a great scientist, it is nice to be able to point out all of their intellectual strengths and tell them “Yes you can, if only you put your mind to it!” But this is often not true. At that point you have to say “f@#k it” and tell them to stop tying their self-worth to being a great scientist. And we had better establish that now, before transhumanists succeed in creating superintelligence and we all have to come to terms with our intellectual inferiority.

VI.

But I think the situation can also be somewhat rosier than that.

Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.

Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.

(in real life this doesn’t work for a couple of reasons, but who cares about real life when we have a theory?)

After some thought, I was also inspired by this.

I’m never going to be a great mathematician or Elon Musk. But if I pursue my comparative advantage, which right now is medicine, I can still make money. And if I feel like it, I can donate it to mathematics research. Or anti-aging research. Or the same people Elon Musk donates his money to. They will use it to hire smart people with important talents that I lack, and I will be at least partially responsible for those people’s successes.

If I had an IQ of 70, I think I would still want to pursue my comparative advantage – even if that was ditch-digging, or whatever, and donate that money to important causes. It might not be very much money, but it would be some.

Our modern word “talent” comes from the Greek word talenton, a certain amount of precious metal sometimes used as a denomination of money. The etymology passes through a parable of Jesus’. A master calls three servants to him and gives the first five talents, the second two talents, and the third one talent. The first two servants invest the money and double it. The third literally buries it in a hole. The master comes back later and praises the first two servants, but sends the third servant to Hell (metaphor? what metaphor?).

Various people have come up with various interpretations, but the most popular says that God gives all of us different amounts of resources, and He will judge us based on how well we use these resources rather than on how many He gave us. It would be stupid to give your first servant five loads of silver, then your second servant two loads of silver, then immediately start chewing out the second servant for having less silver than the first one. And if both servants invested their silver wisely, it would be silly to chew out the second one for ending up with less profit when he started with less seed capital. The moral seems to be that if you take what God gives you and use it wisely, you’re fine.

The modern word “talent” comes from this parable. It implies “a thing God has given you which you can invest and give back”.

So if I were a ditch-digger, I think I would dig ditches, donate a portion of the small amount I made, and trust that I had done what I could with the talents I was given.

VII.

The Jews also talk about how God judges you for your gifts. Rabbi Zusya once said that when he died, he wasn’t worried that God would ask him “Why weren’t you Moses?” or “Why weren’t you Solomon?” But he did worry that God might ask “Why weren’t you Rabbi Zusya?”

And this is part of why it’s important for me to believe in innate ability, and especially differences in innate ability. If everything comes down to hard work and positive attitude, then God has every right to ask me “Why weren’t you Srinivasa Ramanujan?” or “Why weren’t you Elon Musk?”

If everyone is legitimately a different person with a different brain and different talents and abilities, then all God gets to ask me is whether or not I was Scott Alexander.

This seems like a gratifyingly low bar.

[more to come on this subject later]

in case you’re looking for a shoujo ai manga where a boy is turned into a girl by aliens

Early spring.  That sucks, I know, and I’m sorry….but I’ll have a big announcement to make then and it’ll involve the making of more Lackadaisy comics more often.

A proposed new law in Texas would allow teachers to use lethal force against students to protect school property.

Auric and I played all that Satie had written for the piano; one of us would play with him what he composed for four hands. Once, after we had played Morceau en forme de poire, I asked our hero, whom we called mon bon Maître, why he gave such a title, Pieces in the shape of a pear, to this ravishing music. He answered with a twinkle in his eyes: ‘You do know that I visit Debussy quite often; I admire him immensely and he seems to think much of whatever talent I may have. Nevertheless, one day when I showed him a piece I had just composed, he remarked, “Satie, you never had two greater admirers than Ravel and myself; many of your early works had a great influence on our writing. … Now, as a true friend may I warn you that from time to time there is in your art a certain lack of form.” All I did,’ added Satie, ‘was to write Morceau en forme de poire. I brought them to Debussy who asked, “Why such a title?” Why? simply, mon cher ami, because you cannot criticize my Pieces in the shape of a pear. If they are en forme de poire they cannot be shapeless.’

— Vladimir Golschmann, “Golschmann Remembers Erik Satie,” High Fidelity/Musical America, August 1972

(Thanks, Dan.)

By now you’ve probably heard that Jonathan Chait has written an article for New York magazine decrying modern liberalism for becoming little more than a series of Twitter-based convulsions of outrage. You may have heard that he has a point there. Or maybe you heard it was an argument against Political Correctness—a dragon from 1991 who has reared up wearing a crop top, ‘70s jeans and 14-hole Doc Marten’s, and is taking the pain of her infected belly-button piercing out on others in inappropriate ways—and the reign of terror this dread P.C. has engendered in liberal academia. Or maybe you heard that a previously moderately well-regarded author has gone to the #slatepitch side of the Force. Or, perhaps, that Jonathan Chait has a skin so thin that he cries when someone gets the butter knife out of the drawer anywhere within six blocks of his apartment, and is also so allergic to his own tears that he then needs to use his EpiPen and ARE YOU HAPPY NOW BLACK FEMINISTS1/1//! Unfortunately for Jonathan Chait, modern liberalism, the state of the publishing industry, feminism, concerns about racial equality, the extent to which previously marginalized voices can now pipe up and be heard in critical discourse, and all of us, it’s actually that last thing.

But what about his maybe having a point? The thing is, Chait has about 75% of perhaps two points, but the wheat/arsenic-laced chaff ratio is bad. Very bad. How so? The article is actually about how his feelings got hurt by people who say mean things on the internet—in the sense that this is the actual motive for writing it. ‘They claim to be too sensitive to take criticism or even hear discussion of sensitive topics, and that shuts down debate!’ whines sensitive man whose feelings have been hurt by criticism from the internet. ‘They are destroying our political project and they won’t even listen to my concern trolling crucial critique because I am…a white man!’ [Faints on couch.] How did New York Magazine tease this article? “Can a white, liberal man critique a culture of political correctness?” Spoiler alert: YES.

Chait claims that modern liberalism has devolved into outrage farming Saturnalia. Hierarchies have been inverted and whoever can claim membership of the most marginalized group automatically wins every debate. “I’m a queer Latino. I win the internet.” “Not so fast! I’m a black trans woman. Hahahah look upon my works ye mighty and despair! I have so much actual power right now, compared to some chump straight white guy who pens 2500 word hymns to objectivity in New York magazine! It is literally impossible to overstate how many physical resources I control now, and to what degree society is being molded by black trans women like myself!” If you re-frame this more charitably you can get most of a point in there somewhere, probably. There is some element of pulling rank in questions about privilege.

The second thing on which he might have a point is campus culture. He claims that professors are cowering in fear, unwilling to express banal views lest they be given an intellectual beat-down, some horrible pile-on where their words get re-tweeted a million times as evidence of rape culture, or something. This sounds…dubious to me. Also, however much political conservatives like to claim that universities are the vanguard of inevitable social changes (for good or ill) the fact is that campuses are strange, insular places that don’t have a very big impact on society outside them. But could well-intentioned political correctness ever run amok on some college campus and have it be the case that for six years it was a weird place to be? OK sure maybe.

[UPDATE: commenter JM Hatch reminds me that Chait cites examples of straight-up vandalism in which people’s signs were torn from their hands b/c they expressed the wrong views. This, plus the dude in the opening para, merits one full argumentative point.]

What about the rest of Chait’s article? Reader, it’s bullshit. But why is it the way it is? Well, last year Jonathan Chait and Ta-Nehesi Coates got into an extended, very polite, back and forth in which Chait was offering up a bland yet poisonous Moynihan-report “black people suffer from cultural problems” line and Coates was just not having any of it. At all. Coates won the argument. Handily. But good friend and former colleague Andrew Sullivan saw things elsewise. It caused him to lament how Ta-Nehesi had just taken that Trayvon Martin stuff too personally and had gotten to be all negative, had taken, indeed, a “recent turn toward profound gloom.” It even caused Andrew Sullivan to do something so breathtaking that I have never really recovered my composure with regards to him. Via the passive snark of a reader, Sullivan’s page boasted an approving comparison between Coates and Bell Curve author Charles Murray.

“I know Ta-Nehisi would fume at any comparison of him to Charles Murray, but “intractable” and “until this country passes into the dust” are two sides of the same coin – a coin sharing a bleak, unchanging view of race relations, with white oppression and black inferiority the permanent state of things.”

Yes. It said that. On Sullivan’s blog. You can just, sort of, go pour yourself a tumbler of gin or something, I’ll be right here.

Anyway, this leads me to the second well-spring of Jonathan Chait’s whining about “Political Correctness gone mad,” or, as I like to call it, “people criticizing me forcefully, in such a way as to call my liberal bona fides into question, and pretty much just calling me racist, when actually I was only adjacent to racists, and people should look into these things more carefully before they say something that might hurt someone’s feelings.” And that is the shutting down last year of the storied magazine The New Republic, aka “The Even The Liberal.” When the magazine folded, Jonathan Chait wanted everyone to dab at their eyes with folded, clean linen handkerchiefs and mourn the death of A Higher Journalistic Calling. Instead, many writers reminded people that Marty Peretz more or less called for genocide against the Palestinians, whom he regularly called animals and savages, every issue. Every issue tho. Also, remember The Bell Curve? Remember how then-editor Andrew Sullivan pushed that to the forefront of American political discourse more or less single-handedly, and then claimed that the vigorous debate about the book was retroactive justification for the choice, and proved that Murray was one of the most prominent social scientists of his day, rather than the racist loon he was? Remember how the magazine never retracted its articles, howsoever much people offered statistical debunking of every kind, which would have offered the magazine a graceful exit on scientific and internal consistency grounds, not just “wow that was a bunch of racist tripe we published” grounds? Ta-Nehisi Coates was at the forefront of those chronicling the unlamentable history of The “E.T.L” New Republic. So Chait didn’t get the glorious send-off he wanted. He got a lot of fully deserved hits coming his way. So what lesson has he learned from this? That people should stop saying mean things about him on Twitter, and that the fact that you might ever hear a trans woman’s voice loud and clear in the noise of public intellectual life means somebody is letting those bitches get way too loud. Letting them talk just because of who they are. Letting queerness count for something. Letting being disabled count for something. Letting someone’s being politically weak and historically silenced be a reason for others on the left to react with, “hey, let’s be quiet for a minute and see what this person has to say.”

98% of what people angrily claim is “Political Correctness” is just manners. Politeness. If something I were saying at a dinner party offended another guest and my host explained why, I would stop saying that thing, in all likelihood. I myself used to call things “retarded” all the time when I was a kid, and I carried it into adulthood, and then people on the internet made it clear that they found this hurtful and demeaning, so I stopped. I explained to my children, I have a left-over bad habit in that I will occasionally call something retarded and it’s not an appropriate thing to say; will you please correct me when I do it? Thinking about what I wanted my children to say helped me here. Likewise, although I don’t know that I said anything particularly unpleasant about it ever, I was comparatively ignorant about issues facing trans people until some years back. Does this make me angry because the word “cisgender” exists now? No, because I’m not an asshole. Jezebel has very recently promoted its former commenter sub-blog to a whole site, ROYGBIV, and I recommend it highly. (It’s intended for LGBTQ issues in general but the woman who was the former author and now (I imagine) edits is trans. Check out this article for why individual unisex bathrooms are crucial for her safety as a trans person.) I read but don’t comment, because I don’t have anything that valuable to offer there, and other people do. Is this killing me? No. Chait brings the hot take: “Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.” Yes. That’s correct, Jon. Can we help you out any more here? I’m sorry your point maps so perfectly onto mysteriously huffy conservative complaints about ‘why can black people say nigger and I can’t? No fair,’ but you made your bed and you can just lie right down in that. Oh god, re-reading I see I haven’t addressed like 12 other weaksauce points, such as that outrage farming is a moneymaker (that’s why everyone’s always hiring queer disabled minority men to…wait, WTF?) And also the complaining about trigger warnings AAAAAGH. Just don’t read Shakesville, no one’s making you! Chait says SCIENCE has proved trigger warnings don’t work and people should be re-exposed to traumatic things. I, personally, have wanted and needed trigger warnings at various times. I’m a rape survivor who can normally read about rapes just fine. Sometimes I realize I shouldn’t have clicked through on an article about Congo, but since that happens to everyone who reads the article… But at times in the past when I was actively depressed I have wanted John to tell me in advance about a book, whether there’s rape in it or not, and then I won’t read it right then. My home did not suddenly become a den of feminist groupthink in which John was forbidden to speak. I just maybe didn’t read this one graphic novel until a year later one time. Seriously, fuck right the fuck off, Chait.

Is there a word for the thing where someone gets away with terrible behavior by being terrible in such bizarre ways that no one quite believes it or knows how to respond to it?

Like, if someone hits you that’s clearly an assault, but if they pour a jar of strawberry jelly over your head, that’s unwanted and unpleasant and malicious but you just have no playbook for this situation.  If you go to the authorities they’ll either laugh or be at a loss for how to respond, and if you try to deal with the person directly, “don’t pour jelly on my head” just feels too absurd to even say.

I need a word for this, because it keeps happening in my life and a word would make it a lot easier to put these incidents in a shared context instead of just a confused blur of “I think that was a bad thing but what the hell even just happened?”

Yanis Varoufakis used to manage in-game economies in games like Counter-Strike; now he's finance minister for a Greek government that has set its sights on reforming the entire basis of austerity and debt service in the Eurozone. Read the rest

Ambassador Dermer: Netanyahu has "sacred duty" to speak before Congress to attack President's Iran policy.

I have been really enjoying literarystarbucks.tumblr.com, which publishes complicated jokes about what famous authors and fictional characters order at Starbucks. I like it so much I wish I knew more great literature, so I could get more of the jokes.

Since the creators seem to be restricting themselves to the literary world, I hope they won’t mind if I fail to resist the temptation to steal their technique for my own field of interest. Disclaimer: two of these are widely-known philosophy jokes and not original to me.

Parmenides goes up to the counter. “Same as always?” asks the barista. Parmenides nods.

Pythagoras goes up to the counter and orders a caffe Americano. “Mmmmm,” he says, tasting it. “How do you guys make such good coffee?” “It’s made from the freshest beans,” the barista answers. Pythagoras screams and runs out of the store.

Thales goes up to the counter, says he’s trying to break his caffeine habit, and orders a decaf. The barista hands it to him. He takes a sip and spits it out. “Yuck!” he says. “What is this, water?”

Gottfried Leibniz goes up to the counter and orders a muffin. The barista says he’s lucky since there is only one muffin left. Isaac Newton shoves his way up to the counter, saying Leibniz cut in line and he was first. Leibniz insists that he was first. The two of them come to blows.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel goes up to the counter and gives a tremendously long custom order in German, specifying exactly how much of each sort of syrup he wants, various espresso shots, cream in exactly the right pattern, and a bunch of toppings, all added in a specific order at a specific temperature. The barista can’t follow him, so just gives up and hands him a small plain coffee. He walks away. The people behind him in line are very impressed with his apparent expertise, and they all order the same thing Hegel got. The barista gives each of them a small plain coffee, and they all remark on how delicious it tastes and what a remarkable coffee connoisseur that Hegel is. “The Hegel” becomes a new Starbucks special and is wildly popular for the next seventy years.

Socrates goes up to the counter. “What would you like?” asks the barista. “What would you recommend?” asks Socrates. “I would go with the pumpkin spice latte,” says the barista. “Why?” asks Socrates. “It’s seasonal,” she answers. “But why exactly is a seasonal drink better than a non-seasonal drink?” “Well,” said the barista, “I guess it helps to connect you to the rhythm of the changing seasons.” “But do you do other things to connect yourself to that rhythm?” asked Socrates. “Like wear seasonal clothing? Or read seasonal books? If not, how come it’s only drinks that are seasonal?” “I’m not sure,” says the barista. “Think about it,” says Socrates, and leaves without getting anything.

Rene Descartes goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “I think not,” says Descartes, and he ceases to exist.

Jean-Paul Sartre goes up to the counter. “What do you want?” asks the barista. Sartre thinks for a long while. “What do? I want?” he asks, and wanders off with a dazed look on his face.

William of Occam goes up to the counter. He orders a coffee.

Adam Smith goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a muffin,” he says. “Sorry,” says the barista, “but those two are fighting over the last muffin.” She points to Leibniz and Newton, who are still beating each other up. “I’ll pay $2 more than the sticker price, and you can keep the extra,” says Smith. The barista hands him the muffin.

John Buridan goes up to the counter and stares at the menu indecisively.

Ludwig Wittgenstein goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a small toffee mocha,” he says. “We don’t have small,” says the barista. “Then what sizes do you have?” “Just tall, grande, and venti.” “Then doesn’t that make ‘tall’ a ‘small’?” “We call it tall,” says the barista. Wittgenstein pounds his fist on the counter. “Tall has no meaning separate from the way it is used! You are just playing meaningless language games!” He storms out in a huff.

St. Anselm goes up to the counter and considers the greatest coffee of which it is possible to conceive. Since existence is more perfect than nonexistence, the coffee must exist. He brings it back to his table and drinks it.

Ayn Rand goes up to the counter. “What do you want?” asks the barista. “Exactly the relevant question. As a rational human being, it is my desires that are paramount. Since as a reasoning animal I have the power to choose, and since I am not bound by any demand to subordinate my desires to that of an outside party who wishes to use force or guilt to make me sacrifice my values to their values or to the values of some purely hypothetical collective, it is what I want that is imperative in this transaction. However, since I am dealing with you, and you are also a rational human being, under capitalism we have an opportunity to mutually satisfy our values in a way that leaves both of us richer and more fully human. You participate in the project of affirming my values by providing me with the coffee I want, and by paying you I am not only incentivizing you for the transaction, but giving you a chance to excel as a human being in the field of producing coffee. You do not produce the coffee because I am demanding it, or because I will use force against you if you do not, but because it most thoroughly represents your own values, particularly the value of creation. You would not make this coffee for me if it did not serve you in some way, and therefore by satisfying my desires you also reaffirm yourself. Insofar as you make inferior coffee, I will reject it and you will go bankrupt, but insofar as your coffee is truly excellent, a reflection of the excellence in your own soul and your achievement as a rationalist being, it will attract more people to your store, you will gain wealth, and you will be able to use that wealth further in pursuit of excellence as you, rather than some bureaucracy or collective, understand it. That is what it truly means to be a superior human.” “Okay, but what do you want?” asks the barista. “Really I just wanted to give that speech,” Rand says, and leaves.

Voltaire goes up to the counter and orders an espresso. He takes it and goes to his seat. The barista politely reminds him he has not yet paid. Voltaire stays seated, saying “I believe in freedom of espresso.”

Thomas Malthus goes up to the counter and orders a muffin. The barista tells him somebody just took the last one. Malthus grumbles that the Starbucks is getting too crowded and there’s never enough food for everybody.

Immanuel Kant goes up to the counter at exactly 8:14 AM. The barista has just finished making his iced cinnamon dolce latte, and hands it to him. He sips it for eight minutes and thirty seconds, then walks out the door.

Bertrand Russell goes up to the counter and orders the Hegel. He takes one sip, then exclaims “This just tastes like plain coffee! Why is everyone making such a big deal over it?”

Pierre Proudhon goes up to the counter and orders a Tazo Green Tea with toffee nut syrup, two espresso shots, and pumpkin spice mixed in. The barista warns him that this will taste terrible. “Pfah!” scoffs Proudhon. “Proper tea is theft!”

Sigmund Freud goes up to the counter. “I’ll have ass sex, presto,” he says. “What?!” asks the barista. “I said I’ll have iced espresso.” “Oh,” said the barista. “For a moment I misheard you.” “Yeah,” Freud tells her. “I fucked my mother. People say that.” “WHAT?!” asks the barista. “I said, all of the time other people say that.”

Jeremy Bentham goes up to the counter, holding a $50 bill. “What’s the cheapest drink you have?” he asks. “That would be our decaf roast, for only $1.99,” says the barista. “Good,” says Bentham and hands her the $50. “I’ll buy those for the next twenty-five people who show up.”

Patricia Churchland walks up to the counter and orders a latte. She sits down at a table and sips it. “Are you enjoying your beverage?” the barista asks. “No,” says Churchland.

Friedrich Nietzsche goes up to the counter. “I’ll have a scone,” he says. “Would you like juice with that?” asks the barista. “No, I hate juice,” says Nietzsche. The barista misinterprets him as saying “I hate Jews”, so she kills all the Jews in Europe.