You might have more accurately called what I was beaten down. I was poor, so poor that public school teachers seemed rich and secure to me. I had what I felt were some talents but no way to show them with my credentials, which meant that for all intents and purposes I could comprehend I had none at all.

And then, one day, I asked my wife to make a logo for a blog. My thinking behind this was that if she put in some effort on the logo, I’d be guilty enough about asking her to do that to force myself to write at least two articles. Maybe three, if I were lucky and made the most of the momentum.

And then a bunch of stuff happened. I think that for a lot of people, the story I’m about to tell will be a little bit boring, but to me it was ten impossible things stacked on top of each other, day after day, stuff that I didn’t think could happen that did, and that for once wasn’t some new version of bad and difficult.

This intro is kind of a summary. Not all of you are going to want to read all this, and I don’t blame you. For those, here are the bullet points:

1. Some bad stuff happened that at some point turned into a bunch of bad, recurring mental stuff, and though I was able to keep up my duties as breadwinner by doing a bunch of weird feats of writing, this is about the first time since I “left” the blog that I’ve been healthy enough to address it at all.

2. I probably won’t ever pick up regular posting here again. If you still have any kind of subscription to the blog (those SHOULD all be gone/cancelled a long time ago) you can feel free to remove it. I’m very sorry about this, but there are reasons, as they say.

3. I’m first immensely thankful to anyone who has ever read this blog.

4. I’m immensely SORRY to anyone who ever relied on me for help, who was subsequently hurt when I sort of disappeared. There’s one or two of you who probably are guessing I mean you particularly, and you are probably right.

5. I still write. Currently I’m working with some good people at Snowing Pine who are thinking about AI in a couple different ways. Some of our first posts revolve around what writing looks like in the LLM future, why LLM’s aren’t getting better at it, how they might, and how good human writers interact with that.

   
   We are still in the early days of figuring out what exact directions the effort will take, but if you are an LLM-world person who wants to work with bright people focusing on LLM writing quality, contact Richard.

6. While I’m not making any guarantees, I still technically have an email at gearratiossc@gmail.com, and anyone who want to work together, talk, whatever can still try to reach me there. I’m open to talking about jobs, too, especially those that fall into the “We mostly need you to improve our voice” category of work.

---

When I first started writing for real, the first big question I had to deal with was what I was going to name the blog. I decided to look closely at who I was at that time, and found that most of who I was as a human thinker-type had to do with who I disagreed with. I found it much easier to find an argument that seemed wrong, to pick it apart, and then to let that lead into what I individually thought about those issues than to start from square one and just confidently state a view.

That’s why you got Resident Contrarian. It wasn’t really a choice that came out of strength. It was more a case of someone looking at their own idiosyncratic weaknesses and trying to figure out how to turn them into strength, to harness a lack of expertise into sort of a general response to all things.

At the same time, believe it or not, I am (or at least was) sort of nice. I made friends quickly and was willing to do a lot for even a new friend. I tried to make sure people around me were taken care of, to the extent I could take care of them. Like a lot of people who read this kind of blog, I was probably smarter than a lot of people around me in a raw-processing-power sense but never thought that meant very much about our relative values.

So there was always a conflict there. At the beginning, the way I handled combining things like [wants to disagree with everyone] with [wants to be a good guy who treats everyone nice] was to disagree, broadly, with either general groups of people and views, or else people so distant and unassociated that some rando crying they were wrong in the wilderness wouldn’t matter to them much.

This, somehow, meant that I started the blog by writing a few articles that I’m pretty sure might read as nonsense to some not-insignificant amount of the eventual audience. But then I found a muse that actually had legs in some limited way: Earwax. I wrote a whole article about how little actual evidence there is that you shouldn’t use Q-tips to clean your ears, wrote about it pretty well, and hit publish.

It seemed right, because it was pretty much as close to the concept of RC as I could get at the time. Here was something that was being stated very confidently for which there was basically no documented evidence, here was logic accessible to normal people that said the confident statements were silly, and here was a chance to say “I don’t think anybody knows this for sure, but there’s a good chance the other guy was wrong.”

On a whim, I sent it over to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. He sent a one sentence reply saying he’d read it, which I read as a dismissal and was fine with. Then, somehow, he actually posted it. Readers started pouring in (at least by my standards then) and the article spread in some respectable semi-viral way, and suddenly I had a small but real readership.

I dove into the blog harder, thinking more about what messaging I had to share that would actually teach anyone anything. Note to everyone: I am not an expert in anything but the act of pretty typing, but I did find one subject I had at least a strong layman’s grasp of that almost none of my readers did - being poor.

The resulting article was an exercise in my trying to stay calm while I wrote about things that really upset me. I didn’t like being poor. I didn’t like the part where life was hard in all ways related to anything that cost so much as a dollar. Somehow, I held it together long enough to go “this is kind of how it’s hard for me, and it’s even harder for people poorer than me” without being too whiny about it (I think).

To some sections of the internet, this article was a revelation. I remember getting multiple emails and comments about, oddly enough, the idea that the water company could turn off your water if you didn’t pay them. A few of these were from people in jurisdictions where that isn’t true, but the bulk were just people with so much money that they didn’t know why they were paying their water bills. They were just paying them because everyone else did, or something. Like culturally mandated charity to infrastructure experts, I guess.

That article got shared to Hackernews, where it “won” by occupying the top slot on that site for almost a whole day. It got tens of thousands of views in no time at all. People thought it was good. I called a friend and said, “This won’t sound like anything to you, but this is a big deal. This is going to change everything about my life.”

At the time I didn’t believe that. But within a few days, I had multiple people who actually controlled jobs contacting me. Up to that point, I had made a habit of applying for any writing job I saw, and I just didn’t have the credentials to make any progress there. Without a degree, writing-job job applications are essentially exercises in non-writers who have no idea how to assess what good writing is trying to find signals they understand to guide the hire.

Since “the signals they understand” are degrees in marketing or writing-related fields, they don’t even look at applications that don’t have them. I had submitted hundreds and hundreds of writing job applications at that point, and I doubt anyone ever took a word of what I wrote in them seriously.

And yet, somehow, within a week or so I found myself working a corporate writing job, courtesy of a very gracious choice by Wei Deng of Clipboard Health to take a shot on someone without any credentials, who she did not in fact actually know.

---

I want to stop here for a moment and revisit the idea that I was once depressed in a way money could cure, because it’s true. For a long time after I got the job at Clipboard, I had no problems. If anything, I had anti-problems, solutions that money provided that went beyond “keep my lifestyle afloat” and ventured into the world of “improve my lifestyle” and even “provide some sense of safety and security”.

There were inconveniences and annoyances, but those were manageable, especially considering I was able to somehow buy a house, get into cars that were more or less reliable, and eat at Wendy’s without worrying about not being able to pay rent (a real conflict in my life for a long time!).

I think more importantly, this was the first time I didn’t feel like a failure. I had one and only one real writing success before this, and it was writing reader letters so very popular they got a guy named Chris at The Atlantic fired (or at least mis-matched enough that he quit, I was never entirely clear on what happened here) for giving a platform to a dirty righty.

People were sometimes reading my words, taking them serious, and even learning things from them. I had a decent job. Things felt really good.

Then two things happened.

---

The first bad thing that happened, as I see it, was that at some point I started to get mean.

I picked beef with people who didn’t need, want, or deserve been. You know Scott Alexander? He’s always been nice to me. Promoted the blog, was a reader, and so on. Since I stopped writing I’ve gone to him for help a few times and he’s always helped. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’s always been kind to me.

I spent a lot of effort doing stuff that kind of maps to trying to start a fight with him, and I don’t even know why. There were other things like this, not a ton of them, but enough that I found I was spending a lot of time and effort just to not fly off the handle at internet people who didn’t even know me, and who weren’t interacting with me.

There’s a lot of articles I wrote in those latter days that sort of map to “Here’s a bad person”. Not really “Here’s a person with a view that’s wrong and the right replacement view”, but “You shouldn’t like this person. Align against them.”

I’m not sure, but I think if I had kept writing at that point, the blog would have kept morphing into something nastier/meaner than I ever wanted it to be. When I now try to go back to my headspace from that time, I think it might have been frustration that the blog never got truly big (it was medium-sized or small, by most standards, never close to being a full income).

Maybe I was just souring in nice-life complacency. I don’t really know. But in any case I don’t think I could have gone on writing the blog forever in a healthy way; I was spinning my wheels, running an unloaded motor and threatening to burn it out without actually accomplishing any work.

---

The second bad thing was a lot of things. Not all of them were negative. Some of them were even good; the bad part was that all of them happened in a time frame that seemed more or less all at once, and that revealed me to be fragile in ways I hadn’t expected.

I lost the job at Clipboard Health. This was not their fault at all, except to the extent that they were one half of a fit that didn’t quite work long-term. I’m still on good terms with them, and consider Wei a friend.

It wasn’t even the worst moment in my life, because I now had credentials, the magic ability to apply for jobs and actually get a chance to explain why I should have them. But it was a period of turmoil and stress, which made what happened next worse.

I can’t go into details here. I also won’t. But as a person who has always had a lot of difficulty with trust, it was particularly damaging when first one and then eventually two of my closest friends ended up lying to me in ways that mapped out to “betrayal.” What happened wasn’t uniquely focused on me, and I wasn’t the only person hurt by it, but it added to the pile.

Then I got another job writing corporate content, which (somehow!) morphed into a job writing genre-fantasy litRPG novels, fell into a writing cycle of something like 20 novels in about two years, and managed to pay my bills during what was, in the end, the complete and total collapse of my mental health and the partial-but-significant collapse of my sanity.

---

I no longer remember anything that happened to me more than about three years ago. I remember the narratives surrounding those things if I told them as stories, so in some sense I remember some large part of events like “births of my sons” and “death of my father.” But the actual images of those times are unclear now, or missing entirely. Maybe that’s just how everyone’s memory works, and I sometimes suspect that I’m looking at a normal, not particularly disabling degridation of what I can recall and making a bigger deal of it than I should, simply because it happened during a time of change.

One of the changes that defined that era was that I learned just enough about human fallibility to alter my model of other people to something like “Anyone will sell you out completely to get something they only kind of want.” I’m intellectually aware this isn’t really the case, and I’m working on tempering the spiritual belief that it’s so, but I’ve only had limited success there. I walk through life waiting for the next inter-personal shoe to drop, wondering how people who have always treated me well are going to suddenly reveal themselves to be capable of monstrous things.

I now know what it’s like to know what kind of suicide I’d do if I were to do one. I’m not in any danger now. I want to be clear about that. But there were very low points along the way. When I sometimes think about reviving this blog, the fact that those low points and the era when I was Resident Contrarian are both behind me convince me of the wisdom of not retracing old steps.

---

The practical upshot of all this is that I once wrote a blog that, at least in some ways, offered advice and told people what to believe. I was probably never really qualified for this, but I’m really, really not now.

I can hold down a job. I can write. I can feed my family. I can’t do a whole lot more than that, and I certainly can’t gaze down on the burning wreckage of certain aspects of what I once was and feel qualified to tell people what to think.

So the blog isn’t coming back. I mean, it might someday. Things change in unexpected ways. That’s a lesson I’ve learned; that both the very good and very bad don’t herald themselves before they happen. One day I might recover enough to say, hey, I think I have something valuable to share. In terms of not-especially-social-cultural writing, I think that’s true now, but business writing is a very different beast. More factual. Harder to get wrong, in ways that matter here.

But this type of writing is on the shelf for now, a mostly-good memory that pushed me into an almost entirely different life in ways that weren’t all good but that nonetheless gave me most of the good things I ever asked for.

---

Again, I at some point tried to work with Substack to cancel anything paid on this blog, and I think that happened. I also got into the settings today and clicked as many “No, this blog shouldn’t be taking payments from anyone” buttons as I could find, and I’m hoping that fixed anything the Substack-CS communications didn’t.

I’ve tried to cover those bases repeatedly from the backend a few times over the last few years, and I’m terrified I’m misunderstanding something about the process even now. If you are still getting charged for anything after all that, please, please unsubscribe. I don’t need that money, I’m not getting it anyway, and you shouldn’t be spending it on someone who outputs nothing at all.

If you are working anywhere in the realm of AI, writing, and thinking about how those things intersect with tech and business, please say hi. Or, alternatively, just subscribe to follow along with our work; we are working on some neat stuff.

If you want to work with me as a writer in some other capacity, I’m an expert in all things non-fiction, fiction, and voice-driven and can be reached at gearratiossc@gmail.com.

Otherwise, I’m really thankful to all of you for reading my ramblings. Even if reading was all you did, you had an instrumental role in all the better changes my life saw. Take care, and I’ll see you when I see you.

My last job was very good in a few senses:

1. It was the first job I ever had that really pushed my income to middle-class-ish levels, which is a whole different ballgame of life

2. It was partially unearned; I did not work my way up from the writing mines to writing mine management - I was just sort of noticed and given work

3. For a while, the company needed a lot of writing work done.

2-3 ended up working backwards to fuel my always-on stress machinery, because 2. meant that I wasn’t sure I could get another job like it if I ever got fired, and 3. meant that eventually said company would run out of bulk-writing needs such as necessitate a full-time writer, and then things would get awkward.

This running-out-of-writing happened, and then I was there for another six months to a year. It wasn’t a great time, including for people around me who had to hear me whine about it not being a great time. Then I got fired, which also wasn’t a great time. It was non-great times all around.

Looking for a new job, I wanted several things:

1. Proof that I could sort of be at the new income level long-term - that it wasn’t a one-off and I could do things like own houses and buying my kids stuff

2. A job with duties focused on the one thing I do particularly well and enjoy (writing) in the same way programmers aren’t really expected to do much besides programming. So no “20% writing, 80% cold outreach recruiting” situations, if I could avoid them

3. A job that could credibly promise that they wouldn’t “run out” of writing tasks

I frankly didn’t think I could get all these things, and I wasn’t confident I could get any of them. Then a couple of things happened: A lot of readers popped out of the woodwork trying to help, and the CEO of old-company-that-fired me and I were still on good terms, and she very kindly took some time to pitch me around to various other CEO-founder types.

Because of those efforts, I got to have a lot of conversations. And the practical upshot is: I have a job, it’s a good job, and everything is not just fine but very arguably better.

I accepted an offer letter to and am currently working at a relatively new writing agency called Quill, which is run by Richard Kong and Dan Bogachek. The agency makes/improves content for startup founders/startups, basically taking their ideas and outlines and turning them into content of various kinds, mainly writing.

Wonder of wonders, I can talk about this job - because we are mostly ghost-writing bespoke content that either carries the agency byline or none at all, I can just exist there as RC without any big identity issues.

A few of you use me for freelance, and I think the practical implication of this is that some small one-off need type of stuff (“RC, can you write me a single article, or critique something I’ve written?”) might still use me directly, while people who need anything more than that (“RC, can you fill some regular need and/or take over my content calendar?”) would use Quill.

I’ve been working on some internal thought-piece stuff for Quill, and below is one that might eventually go up on the site. It’s been through our editing process so it’s a little bit different than my normal voice, but close enough that I thought it would be fun to post as bonus content, and an example of the kind of work I’m doing. I won’t be talking about the job all the time (i.e. the blog is still the blog in the same way) but I figured this was as good a time to give context on the new job as I’m gonna get.

That’s about it - I’m in a good spot. Thank you very much to everyone who tried to help me during the tough time, and for everyone who reached out to make sure I was doing OK. It meant a lot, and it helped me get through.

Article below.

I write for a living.

More specifically, I write business content. It’s a broad category, ranging from white papers to company blogs to advertisements and website copy. On any given day, I write thousands of words for businesses who want to communicate well.

Our clients are smart people with interesting ideas. Often, they are really smart; they are looking to communicate how they do things because they are the best in their specific domain, and have a lot of value to communicate. They have ideas; what they often lack, however, is the ability to communicate clearly.

That’s what I’m here for.

Good writers take complex ideas and make them easy to understand — for whoever the audience might be. The job is half writing, half research. Someone asks you to write about something, you learn about it, then you produce a piece. If you do this right, you restate the exact message they wanted to send in slightly better prose, and the combined effort of both parties produces a worthwhile read for their readers.

There are a lot of reasons companies are willing to pay for this content. Good writing sets a company apart from its competitors. It can shorten sales cycles. It can be a magnet in recruiting.

But there are many things it’s not good for at all.

What Writing Can’t Do (Or Can’t Do Well)

I’ve done a lot of work both as a freelancer and as an employee of companies that wanted large amounts of writing. Sometimes, clients will come to you and ask you to do something that writing just can’t do, something that stretches the bounds of the likely and gets you into awkward “let’s control our expectations here” conversations.

This is nowhere truer than in the world of startups. It’s a fast, big-results environment that wants fast, big results from writing, and so often asks for a bit more than writing can reliably provide.

Writing (Usually) Can’t be Consistently Viral

Do you know what you call a writer who can consistently generate millions-of-hits-articles? I’m joking, but only a bit. The best writers in the world are consistently good and often great, but writers who can generate massive hit after massive hit at will are rare to the point of non-existence. Most of a writer’s work is putting out the best they can, week after week; they are trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

Individual pieces of content go viral because they are exceptional. They go viral because they are the best thing that week. They go viral because they strike a chord and hit a synergy nobody expected between subject matter, tone, and timing.

Put short: a lot of stuff has to happen at once for your article to get a million hits.

It’s not that good article performance never happens; it does. And it’s not that a good writing agency can’t help you market the work they make for you - they can and do. But great writers often work their whole careers to gain only modest fame; catching lightning in a bottle is possible, but very few people can do it at will.

A good writing agency (or individual freelancer) creates good work. A very good writing agency enhances the work a bit beyond what you expected - they build a bit on your ideas, and they market the work a little better than you could yourself. Make no mistake: this is magic, and it’s hard to do. But it’s not a guarantee of virality; we can’t always make the near-impossible happen.

Writing Can’t Give You Ideas You Don’t Have

I’ve been approached to write thought leadership pieces, and a few occasions stand out. In these cases, my very first question — usually “What ideas and opinions would you like to put forward?” — was met with confusion or even shock. Their expectation was that I’d use my own thoughts - and just my own thoughts - to make them a thought leader.

I really do wish I could do this, but while writers have their own ideas, philosophies, and opinions like everyone else, we can’t express a client’s exciting new ideas if they don’t exist.

Thankfully, a founder of a company who has spent a lot of time managing people in a certain style usually has plenty of that kind of personal context to work from. Better yet, they often have a specific, unique context earned through experience. When a client brings that to the table, a writer can often mill that wheat into an astounding amount of flour - that’s our job.

When that doesn’t happen, we do our best with generics, and the client gets a generic product.

And like I mentioned, it isn’t the case the writers don’t have ideas. We do! It’s quite common that we find new angles and ideas which enhance the message as we work to express the client’s thoughts.

What we often don’t have - what we are most hungry for - is clear context on what you want to say. Give us that, and we can weave the thoughts into narratives.

Writing Can’t Fool Your Employees Into Thinking Your Culture Is Different Than It Is

I’ve anonymized every part of this story to protect the (mostly) innocent.

I once had a new freelance client come to me and ask me to write a culture piece that would help explain that his company worked hard to maintain an environment of freedom - that they made space for people to do their best work in the way that seemed best to them.

This isn’t common, but they gave me some access to talk to a few team members about how they experienced that freedom so I could have a little more contextual richness to work from. I talked to two or three of them, and each of them independently revealed the reason the article was needed: the founder was a micromanager’s micromanager, a person who kept a finger in every pie and never, ever left a single or project alone for longer than a few seconds.

Writing is great for talking about culture, but it doesn’t replace it. I could write the most compelling piece ever created about how great your company was at merit-based promotions, and it’s not going to change anything if you don’t actually promote based on merit. I could talk all day about your friendly and intimate team culture, but it’s not going to have any effect on the mood of a team who are barely avoiding stabbing each other as is.

What Writing Does Well

Given the limitations I’m setting, it’s fair to ask: What can writing do? I frequently ask people for money to write for them. Almost as often, they actually pay me. What are they getting?

Writing is a tool, often an incredibly effective one.

Providing The Expected Minimum

Imagine you are trying to hire for a high-value position. You want to make sure you have the best applicants possible, so you go on various hiring platforms and do cold outreach to high-quality candidates. If those candidates are at all interested, the first thing they’ll do is try to learn more about your company, and the first way most people do this is by going to your website.

Now imagine your website either has poorly written copy - e.g. typos, bad grammar, awkward language - or that it barely exists at all and there’s hardly anything for them to learn about you. The candidate can’t figure out what you do, why you do it, or why they should care about you. The candidate is now one you are very unlikely to hear back from — they expected to see quality, and didn’t find it.

Having the kind of writing people already expect to see is the bare minimum for keeping them engaged. Of course, this goes hand in hand with a few other essentials (web design, abstract messaging) but it’s likely the biggest part - a minimalist website with correct grammar might make it where a fancy page with no substance won’t.

Revealing The Unexpected Good

I once had a conversation with someone who worked at a payments company called Wave.

If “payments company, I guess” was all you knew about them, they’d fall into a mental queue with thousands of other nondescript payments companies. You wouldn’t want to invest there, work there, or talk about them.

But then you might find out that Dan Luu worked there, and had a hand in their thinking on tech. Or that, while they are a payments company, they are the payments company best positioned to make a positive difference in how the people of Africa interact with money.

Now, all of a sudden, we are dealing with a company with a backstory and a purpose. Now it’s compelling; you can see someone learning these things and wanting to work there because of them.

It still might not be a good fit for everyone, but that’s not the point — before, there wasn’t enough information for it to be a good fit for anyone. Writing made it a fit for someone.

Explaining The Difficult-To-Understand

You know the hottest market for good-paying writing jobs right now? It’s technical writing. Do you know why?

It’s because technical stuff is really, really hard to explain. Do you know what the difference between Argon2 and bcrypt is? Or DeFi yield farming? Maybe, maybe not (depending on who’s reading this). For people to be interested in what a company is doing, they have to first understand what it is.

Every writer has a different specialty. Some people tell emotive stories; some people write ads that make you click. There’s a whole subset of us that specialize in reading heady technical stuff, getting an accurate sense of what’s going on, and then explaining it to non-specialists.

Everyone can at least kind of write, in the sense that they can get words down on a page that attempt to convey information. Good writers go far beyond this by doing the same thing clearly; great writers do it clearly in a way that’s easy and fun to read. But there are fewer and fewer writers at every tier, and no tier contains a rarer skill than “writer who can explain an uber-complex tech concept in a way that doesn’t make your eyes roll back in your head”.

For companies that need that kind of complexity explained, good writing is often the difference between widespread adoption and crickets. It’s the difference between hiring good engineers who are interested in what they do or settling for “I’ll take anything” hires. It’s the difference between interested investors and running out of runway.

It’s a big deal.

I’m not writing this to bash on clients; I love them.

They let me spend my life doing the one thing I like to do most - arranging words in a way that helps people understand things better, do better work, and know more. But as stated in the intro, a big part of my job lies in managing expectations. This isn’t just practical; giving people an accurate idea of what they can (and can’t) expect from me is something I consider to be a moral responsibility.

Used correctly and with good direction, writing can do a ton for you. It can let your users know what each new product feature does and how to get the most out of it. It can let your applicants know who you are and how you work, which helps you get better applicants and applicant groups that are better filtered to fit your needs. It can let investors know why they’d want to take a bet on you, or even get them to take a look at you in the first place.

So yeah: There are some things I can’t do for you, or at least can’t do on command.

But the things I can do are a significant help, and more often than not, help companies chase down their goals.

Writing isn’t all-powerful, but there are few things that are as worthwhile.

Quill is an agency helping startups convert complex ideas into revenue-generating content. We’d love to talk to you - contact us at richard@hirequill.com.

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Every once in a while, a movie comes out that is immediately deemed to be the movie everyone talks about that year. It’s a work of great genius, breaking new ground in film. It’s a visual spectacle, but not in a Transformers kind of way; it has offbeat elements, some kind of faux highbrow hook that makes it OK to like the explosions.

I am not a very visual person and some absurdly high percentage of my personality is dedicated to disagreeing with people. I almost always hate these movies.

Previous entries in the field have included movies like Inception and Mad Max Fury Road, both of which I hated. But I hated those movies mostly because they were optimized for visuals; Mad Max in particular had almost no plot at all. Inception had a cast in which fully half the actors were calling it in, once again counting on special effects to make it all work. I understand why people like them, but I don’t get anything out of the visual aspect except as it frames the words being said so I don’t get much out of them myself.

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (EE from here on out, because I’m not typing that over and over) is the newest entry in that field, and if that was all there was to talk about it would be enough that I wouldn’t be a huge fan of it for the same reasons. But it happens, in this case, that I’m not a fan of it for different reasons - reasons that revolve around abuse, depression, and how we talk about those things.

The first step in the journey of a thousand problems with a movie is a single disclaimer: I understand it’s just a movie. And I understand, at least on an academic level, that there’s a 10,000 faces of the Torah aspect to all this where a lot of people are going to approach this elephant and come away with different impressions. I get it, and I want to be really clear that it’s OK to like this movie for a variety of reasons.

From here on out there be spoilers; if you have not watched this now-old movie and care about that, please go watch it.

Here’s a semi-accurate description of the plot of the movie:

EE follows the story of Evelyn, a Chinese immigrant who gave up whatever potential she had in her home country to marry a man her family didn’t approve of. She and he moved to the US, had a child, and purchased a laundromat. In the decades since, Evelyn has become depressed; she keenly feels that her potential is squandered in the laundromat, and despairs.

This despair and hurt makes it difficult for her to maintain her family relationships. As she walks around in a fog, she is unable to see that her relationships are weakening and coming to a point of crisis. Her business is in trouble and she’s surrounded by stress. Her troubled relationship with her father is thrust front and center, further confusing things.

As her family crisis nears an unrepairable status, another crisis hits. But this crisis can only be solved by her using the very potential she’s been unable to utilize for most of her adult life. In using that potential, she begins to find peace with who she is - in finding peace with who she is, she is able to gain the resources to bring peace, happiness, and healing to her family.

I think that’s the version most people walked away with, and why most people liked the movie if it wasn’t for specific checks-diversity-boxes reasons. Here is a person who is depressed - and indeed, aren’t most of us depressed? Here’s a person who feels underutilized and unsatisfied. Isn’t that us?

Evelyn is the audience surrogate for an entire world of people who report they feel like they are floundering. The movie is fantasy fulfillment - what if you were important? What if it turned out you were good at things? What if people not only noticed but forced you to accept that you were important and powerful?

But here’s a description of the movie from the opposite side of the rose-tinted glasses spectrum:

EE is unique in centering it’s story not around a hero, but the antagonist. It tells the story of Evelyn, a woman surrounded by family clamoring for even a small piece of her attention and love, which she denies them.

She is a woman who superficially accepts her daughter’s homosexuality, framing this as a reason she’s better than other Culturally Chinese mothers, but lies about her father having a huge problem with it so she can still disapprove of it in private.

Evelyn takes up hobbies so she can further draw into herself and ignore her family, hobbies that she often can’t afford. Her family’s abandonment crisis is thus amplified by financial and legal problems stemming from her efforts to defraud the government by claiming her hobbies as expenses - Evelyn is willing to risk her family’s well-being in pursuit of more and more completely abandoning them.

Evelyns husband spends the majority of the movie asking for even a small amount of her attention as Evelyn treats him as an annoying fly to be batted away. We eventually learn the depths of his desperation when we are shown that he has drawn up mock divorce papers that he does not actually intend to file; it’s just that he knows from what appears to be years-long, repeated, bitter experience that Evelyn will never pay attention to anything but herself unless forced to by some crisis. In manufacturing one, he hopes to get the barest of chances to revive his relationship.

Evelyn successfully ignores even these papers for a time until her real, preferred crisis comes in a form centered entirely around her; she is suddenly acknowledged as important, talented and needed by people outside of her family. To these, she gives her undivided attention; to this mission, she gives everything she has.

It’s making her feel better.

Eventually she feels much better, and she’s able to resolve each of her relationships - her dad has hurt her, so she tells him that she no longer cares, and she can now be happy. Her daughter, who she feels strong ownership over, is convinced to stay; now Evelyn doesn’t have to take any loss. Her husband proves himself useful to resolving Evelyn’s preferred crisis and helping her be happy, and, so she is able to at least temporarily accept him. As she expects, all she has to do to get him to stay is not leave; he’s assumed to regenerate his hurt automatically, like an emotional troll.

The crisis resolves; Evelyn, near as we can tell, is happy that circumstances have finally conspired to make her happy enough that the happiness of the people around her matters. She finally has enough surplus resources that she has something left to spend on other people once she’s taken care of herself.

I really do get that this is a movie; I understand the first interpretation is valid, and probably what the director was going for. I understand the second is maximally negative, and not the message that I was supposed to get at all. But that didn’t keep me from spending the entire first half of the movie cringing; for me, this was a tale of abuse-as-understandable, as neglect-as-necessary.

There’s a really harsh moral concept that I try, as much as I can, to follow: to the extent it has a name, it’s something like Handle Your Own Shit. And the way that goes is that, basically, life isn’t always going to be perfect. It’s usually not even going to be all that good - you are going to sometimes have bad jobs. You are rarely going to have enough money. People you trust are going to betray you, and people who owe you social debts are going to renege. You are often going to be treated unfairly.

And, the moral concept says, you still need to handle your own shit. You need to do your duty. You do not have an excuse to not do what’s right.

There’s another much nicer moral concept that I try, as much as I can, to follow: people are often going through some really tough stuff. Sometimes their lives are really hard. Sometimes you yourself aren’t giving them everything they need to easily do the things they should do. Sometimes they literally don’t have the resources they need to function.

And, the moral concept says, you need to have pity on them; you need to have mercy and forgiveness for them. Life really is hard. It’s not entirely about you. You need to grant grace - you need to have a willingness to grant clemency. And you need to do this knowing you won’t always get the same consideration, just because it’s right.

If these two things seem like they are in conflict, it’s because they sort of are. Someone might say “Listen, if the second thing about understanding people sometimes might not have the resources that make it easy to be good is true, it’s true of you sometimes as well”, and they’d be right. And someone might say “Listen, if you should handle your stuff, that means that other people should too. You aren’t special; you aren’t especially strong” and they’d be right too.

And so I get stuck, because there really is a conflict there. And I stay stuck until I consider a bunch of religious stuff I won’t talk about and one secular thing I will: What kind of world do I want to live in?

There’s a thing where sometimes a secular social scientist will say something like “Oh, thank goodness for puritanical ethics - they built Western society.”. And the reason they generally think this is that Christianity/Puritanism have an assumption that you are working from a moral points deficit; that you are worse than you should be, and that you should be playing extra hard to try to catch up. The idea is that if everybody believes this (and for a while, a whole lot of people did) everyone works a little bit harder - they go a little bit above and beyond - and suddenly you have industry and improved agriculture and solid, old-world craftsmanship. Everything is better.

When I try to apply that to this, it means bad things for me. Because the deal is that the first moral dichotomy above has one obvious strength - it pushes me towards handling the things that are available for me to handle. It tells me I should pull the levers I can pull.

And that leaves me in situations where, say, I run my finger through an automotive accessory belt1 and I should still go to work the next day, even though I'm in pain, because I have people to feed. Or where someone breaks some big important social contract with me, and I'm hurt, but I should look for the ways I contributed to the problem and solve them, and do my best to do all the moral things I would have been obligated to do if there wasn't a betrayal in the first place.

And I should do that knowing that I’m going to keep getting injured and hurt, by circumstances and people. And that’s honestly really, really hard. And it’s not just hard for me - it’s hard for anybody. It’s harder when you are depressed, or sick. It’s harder when people are sad. It’s harder when things haven’t worked out. It’s harder when things are unfair.

So I end up in a place where I feel uncomfortable telling anyone else to do this. That’s partially because I know it’s hard, sometimes to the point of impossibility. And because I know I don’t know every aspect of what they are going through. And because “be nice and forgiving to this person” is a lever that I can move, that’s on my side of the relationship. And because taking on responsibility for blame and pain and shame is sometimes right, even if the other person is also wrong, or more wrong.

But I still don’t feel like I can cut myself that slack because, frankly, a world full of Evelyns is a world that never gets better. It’s a world that’s waiting on a bunch of unlikely stuff to happen so Evelyn can feel good enough to finally give the people around her what they need. And while that world waits, everyone is getting worse - everyone has less support, less forgiveness, and less love to work with.

From the perspective of looking at just Evelyn, you say “Oh, it’s understandable - let’s wait until other people give her what she needs to be nice”. But when you broaden that out to the entire world, it’s an entire world with its hand out, waiting to be given to. And nobody’s giving, because things are hard for everyone everywhere.

It’s hard, because depression and sadness are real. And there’s some people who don’t have the resources to do anything at all - who are so far in a hole that they legitimately aren’t in any position to help. Where it is understandable that they don’t have a lot to give or give back. Where they almost can’t be expected to take care of anything but themselves, and things might be worse if they don’t take care of themselves first.

And that’s often true of me, as well. There’s a lot of daylight between “I think this is correct, philosophically” and “I do this well”, and I live in that space. Nobody is 100% at this; people fail. And there are legitimately some people for whom “take care of others even though…” would translate not as “costly” but as “harmful and counterproductive”, and I don’t want to guilt anybody into hurting themselves like that.

And I’m not saying you don’t deserve good things and shouldn’t expect them from other people. I’m saying, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Sometimes it’s not going to happen. In those movements, people often have choices.

To the extent a person can control things - to the extent that they can make things better - it’s often by making things better for people around them. It’s playing through the pain. And it’s hoping that by doing this you give people the resources they need to give you resources back - that by treating them more-than-fairly you create the space for them that they need to treat you well.

And I don’t think it’s fair for anyone. But I think that might be the only way things get better.

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I think the worst part of it so far is remembering that applications that start and often end with the submission of resumes exist. Because I hate them. I hate them an irrational amount, to the point where I’m actually seriously going to advise you that you should only take about 10% of this article seriously - the rest of it is a verbal manifestation of pure ire so salty you could pickle things in it.

A word of warning related to that: Because I both hate resume-first hiring processes and I’m talking about applicant-side problems, a lot of this is going to read as a condemnation of employers as a class - it’s not that, and I’ll explain why as we go.

Resume-first applications are poison

Imagine the following scene:

An applicant goes to an employer and asks for work. The employer explains that the only work he has requires a certain set of skills, and says:

“Listen - I’m a busy guy. I can’t listen to your entire life story; even if I could, I couldn’t listen to every life story of everyone who comes to me for work.

I know it’s a big ask, but could you write down everything you’ve ever done? I’m an expert on what it takes to survive in this job, and I will read it when I have time, then honestly tell you if you are in the ballpark of what I need. From there, we can both have a conversation with the assurance that you are a close fit - it makes sure neither you nor I waste our time, and benefits us both.”

This is a reasonable request, and as stated it’s the main reason we can’t get rid of resumes. Some significant percentage of applicants are delusional and nowhere near qualified; you have to weed them out somehow. And the actual honest-to-god boss of a company can honestly claim he doesn’t have the time to talk to everyone - he has to have some sort of filter or he drowns.

But the resume story above is the idealist teenager’s version of what’s actually happening. Here’s a more realistic picture:

An group of 50 applicants submit resumes for a job. 10 or so of them are delusional, and get cut. That leaves a field of 40 more-or-less qualified people who have at this point all committed a significant amount of time doing unpaid labor for a company to manage the company’s risk and hiring costs.

Of the remaining 40, 35 are rejected not because they are unqualified, but because the company wants to further reduce its costs. They are rejected by an HR person who has nothing to do with the role they are going to fill. Since the HR person is not familiar with the role beyond some bulletpoints they were sent, these rejection reasons are often unrelated to their ability to actually do the job. This group not only never sees an upside to their unpaid labor, but often weren’t even given fair consideration for the role.

This leaves five candidates - a hand-picked elite, a top 12.5% of qualified candidates. They will never demand the employer consider them elite, and will instead feel lucky to be allowed to do even more unpaid labor with uncertain rewards. The employer will never consider them a hand-picked elite, and will with every action and word indicate that the group of five completely qualified candidates should feel lucky to have gotten this far.

Four of those candidates will eventually be rejected, leaving a best-of-50 candidate who will be paid as if he’s barely qualified, with the expectation that he act overjoyed about this.

In the actual real-world model, all the obligations are on the applicant’s side, with no guaranteed benefit; they can’t even reliably count on a form rejection email. All the benefits are on the employer side - they save time, reduce costs, reduce company risks, and create an environment where they can reliably lowball candidates on salary.

Now that I’ve laid that out, I need to take a paragraph to be fair: First, I don’t think most employers think of this process like this - yes, they run it like this, and yes, the actual practical implications are like this. But they aren’t sitting around rubbing their hands together and gleefully cackling about screwing the little guy - like most forms of evil, the vileness of the resume-based hiring process is banal and often unintentional.

Second, I don’t think there’s always an alternative. If I have a random position open and my only option for filling it is to post an ad somewhere that’s going to draw in 500 applications, I don’t necessarily have any options that both keep my time outlay at a reasonable level and treat every (or any) applicant fairly. It’s shitty, it’s exploitative, and it’s 100% a more powerful party bullying a smaller, weaker person. But until someone invents an alternative, what’s to be done?

Nobody hires based on a resume

Imagine angels coming down from administrative heaven bearing a golden curriculum vitae; it is in every way a perfect resume. They touch it to your lips, which impart the very essence of the gestalt that is you upon the document. All who read it are filled with a subtle joy and come to know every intricacy of every skill you possess, all relayed to them in a way most flattering to you, and have their lifespan extended by five years.

That’s very nice, but assuming you had a pretty decent resume already, it didn’t increase your chances of getting hired at all.

This sounds fatalistic, but consider that everything the resume is supposed to do (illustrate that you are qualified for the job, give them an idea of your experience, describe your overall career and skills) is all stuff they are going to do again in phone screens, the interviews, and the reference checks. The employer is very, very clear in terms of everything they do that they don’t trust your resume even a little and give it exactly zero weight - else they wouldn’t waste manager time interviewing you to get you to rehash it.

In a resume-first hiring process, your resume is at best a raffle ticket that might pay off and grant you admission to the actual hiring process. That’s it. That’s all.

A weird resume is a death sentence

Everything I’ve been describing so far assumes that the person submitting the resume is what I call “tracked” - they are an individual that went to high school-then-university and then got into relevant-to-the-new-potential-position work and maintained it right up until the date of their application.

This particular golden child thus can submit a resume that is parsable by even the dimmest of bulbs as being clearly relevant to the job. If the job is piano-polishing, there’s no confusion that they are anything but a piano-polisher, and every entry makes that clear.

But say you are trying to change your career trajectory a little (or, god forbid, a lot) - what are your chances of squeaking by HR now? I have like 15 years of poverty experience that says “basically none”; like, I know it’s possible, I know people have done it. But going the conventional route with a weird resume is automatically in the “send out hundreds or thousands of applications, hope you get lucky” realm of things.

Again, this isn’t supposed to be me calling out hiring managers and bosses everywhere - I’m not sure they have a choice. But that doesn’t change the fact that limiting yourself to resume-first hiring processes is about the worst deal you could possibly take - the fact that it feels normal doesn’t mean it’s good.

Skipping to the middle part

I’m as convinced as a person can be that the resume-first hiring processes are just marginally worse than doing nothing at all. I spent 15 years tweaking resumes, writing cover letters, and generally taking all the very good advice I got only to have it never turn a cent of profit for me.

What finally got me out of that pattern was a really odd situation where one of my articles got just enough heat on it that I was allowed to circumvent the middle part of the interview process and go straight to hiring manager interviews. And it was a whole different ballgame because I was now talking to someone who had both the power and desire to hire someone for a position, as opposed to someone whose biggest goal was keeping sufficient people away from that stage to keep them out of trouble.

And make no mistake, that middle part is where the hiring happens. Some hiring managers still look at your resume once you are there, but my experience is that look is on the glance-ier side of things. It can be, because at the middle part of the process you get into actual conversations, actually take the measure of the person, and often subject them to actual tests of ability that at least somewhat track with their general capability.

From the applicant’s perspective, this means that all the advantages lie with skipping as far past the resume as they can, in making it an afterthought if it exists at all.

The most traditional way to do this is by knowing someone who can vouch for you. Case in point: I’ve put in a few applications recently, all of which were for jobs that were almost entirely writing, and all of which mentioned that I’m for better or worse pretty verifiably OK at that particular skill. This has been completely ineffective because nobody cares if you can actually do the work at the resume stage.

Contrast that with what happened when one pretty good internet friend said “Hey, I know a guy is pretty good at writing and you have been talking about hiring a writer - want to talk to him?”. I didn’t end up getting the job, but I got fairly close with very little effort - the recommendation let me skip straight to the middle part, and that’s where what you actually can do matters.

I don’t want to say it’s easy, but it’s actually surprisingly doable to skip to that part. A year or so ago I got pretty close to another job at better pay by asking someone for advice on how to grow my blog; that person happened to work at a company that needed a writer1. And when you get in that way - as a human being considered as an individual as opposed to "the lucky one" who doesn't end up entirely unrewarded - it's just a better experience all around.

I think there’s probably an argument to be made that while the chances of getting a job by cold-emailing CEOs and asking for one are pretty low, the chances of getting a good job that way are likely higher.

I know none of this is particularly new intellectual ground, and there’s tons of exceptions to what I’m talking about. We just got out of a period of time where basically every engineer had their pick of the litter jobwise, and even though things are now “tougher” it’s still not impossible for good engineers to find work when they need it. Some people just have skills that are developed or rare enough that they really can consistently negotiate from a position of power.

There’s a reason people sometimes get very serious about networking; for the most part, that’s how good jobs are found. And in defense of the employers of the world, it generally takes very little to shake them out of their funk - a word from a person they trust is often enough, as is some small amount of novelty in approach. It’s not like they love Indeed-style hiring; as far as I know, they hate it too. But they lack options.

I think the main takeaway here is just how shocked I am to remember how bad hiring as a whole is on the applicant side. Every part of how we do it is geared to give companies an advantage at often significant costs to applicants; there’s no place in the “conventional” path to getting a job that indicates anything close to an even power dynamic. It’s in your best interest (and mine, at the moment) to do anything you can do to get around it.

Authors note: I think this is going to be the last time I talk about work/job stuff for a little while, so don’t despair too much if it’s getting old. I have a guest post at Wonderland Rules this weekend that’s more in the “not whining about jobs” style, and I think next week I’ll have something about using Craigslist to buy things.

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1. Getting exposure as a new writer or someone with a new product is really important. The story of “this was a good blog with promise, but never got lucky enough to get any readers” is incredibly common and I watch blogs fail for that reason constantly.

2. The internet hates any attempts you might make to promote your work. If you write a great article about naked mole rats and post it to a subreddit about that very thing so people can see it, r/nakedmolerats mods will unleash the fires of hell on you, burning your life to the ground and ensuring you never feel love again.
   
   When you see successful art posts on reddit, they always say “my friend did this…” or “this guy does…”. This is a lie. Those posts are by the creator. They are trying to circumvent the hatred the internet has for new creators; you are seeing the people who are successful at this.

3. Because the internet hates self-promotion, the bulk of the stuff you see is a product of journalist, academic, or other types of incest - basically, the easiest way to get famous is to get boosted by another famous person.

4. Most of the rest of what you see is people (like me) who got really lucky and got boosted by some big names early on (Tyler Cowen, Scott Alexander). But for most people this is a chicken/egg trap - unless you have unusual fortune, you can’t be seen by those guys until you have readers who share your stuff and you can’t get readers until they share you.

This linkstorm differs from most because I will promote anyone who asks, up to a really, really liberal cut-off line of “Counterproductive to my aims or actively hostile to my religion”. When I say liberal, I mean it - Carlos will confirm I don’t agree with him about a single damn thing but we are still mostly friendly and I’ve promoted his shit.

This means you can come to me to promote your shit and I eventually will. Do this. I’m glad to help.

I’m also doing updates on my personal situation but these are boring and thus are at the bottom of the article so I don’t use up your attention span before you click on all the submissions.

Here’s the links, in rough order of when they were submitted to me:

Things I’m promoting

Read Something Interesting

You know that thing where you go on ChatGPT and say “write me a short story about a naked molerat rising against capitalism, only to be cut down in his prime”? You do this because you are bored and wish you had a random-content-dispenser. but ChatGPT isn’t a good writer - you want something that more reliably gives you interesting stuff to read.

This site is curated in a way I don’t understand, but it works: There’s a “random article” button that, should you push it, gives you a random high-quality interesting article. It’s neat!

William Collen’s RUINS Art Blog

I sometimes talk to my wife about the hypothetical subset of “reading Christians” - the subset of Christians who read a lot of heady articles and books. I bemoan the fact that I can’t reach these people, becuase if there was a great way to tell them I exist en masse I’d be a gajillionaire.

William Collen’s RUINS has a similar problem - he writes a pretty good blog on art appreciation, which is already a niche, from the perspective of a religious person, which makes it even nichier. But it’s good! It deserves to be read! This is a good example of something that’s hard to promote but deserves to exist - go read it.

Papyrus Rampant

I know the guy who writes this one, in the sense that he’s an internet person I know that I’ve met in real life. He’s a nice guy, and he knows a bunch of shit I don’t. So take this article about the mess surrounding the election of 1800 or this one about stories that fail becuase they are told through the wrong lens. Both are good, both deal with subjects I don’t know much about.

One thing I’ll say here is that Evan can write - he has really good voice. This is I think one of the more important elements of someone who writes to teach you about topics you aren’t already expert in - you have to get through the article to learn, and you need a writer who is a good enough to keep you engaged until you do. Evan does.

Star Trekking

It’s been a while since I’ve thought about trekkies, in the sense that trekkies mostly got swallowed up by greater nerd culture and it’s now rare to see something that’s explicitely about all things Star Trek. And you want that sometimes! You want to just bask in this weird show that’s existed since the beginning of time, and nothing else. You want a guy who notices “tribble” license plates out in the wild and tells you about them. You want someone who is reading 100% of the Star Trek content and dishing you out the particularly delicious tidbits.

This is that.

James Harris’ Stiff Upper Quip

There’s a bunch of people I know because they are writers at a similar stage, and I know James from various writing forums/co-ops I’m in. He’s a nice guy, he’s always been nice to me, and he’s british; despite the implications of the last on improper fork usage, I’m eager to promote his stuff.

Stiff Upper Quip is politics-and-culture as written by a wry comedian. He’s got voice, he talks about art, and he talks about life. This is another one where the fact that he’s pretty good drives the appeal - when someone writes about a variety of things, they have to be better at writing to keep you. James tends to keep people who find him.

Cade Stuart’s Letters on our World

Cade writes about politics, psychology, and economics. That’s a big net, so it’s important that he’s good at picking out interesting topics. I think if you like this you will probably like him, and I think that piece is pretty dang good.

Jonah Davids: I can’t remember if I’m promoting him as a person or his Substack

Here we have a failure of my memory: the link I saved for Jonah was for his twitter, not his Substack. And I can’t remember which I’m promoting, so here’s both:

1. Jonah seems to be a perfectly reasonably person and I think he’s nice. He’s also a political analyst and says interesting things about that.

2. Jonah has a Substack, linked above. In which he only has a few pieces, because it’s really really hard to keep your writing going if nobody is reading and it’s really really hard to get initial readers.

I read what he does have there and it’s good. Go read his stuff, and if you have room in your reading calendar, subscribe. This is a good chance for you, as a reader, to encourage potential work.

John Carter’s Postcards From Barsoom

Apologies to John, but I’m using him as an example: There’s some sort of controversy around John I haven’t looked into. So there’s a possibility someone might later come to me and go “Hey, RC, did you know John did unpopular thing X?”. I want to make really clear that this isn’t something I particularly care about for the purposes of these kinds of posts. I’m not doing that kind of parsing here.

Weird caveat aside, John writes well about stuff like masculinity and Canada. I know, I know; why are all the writers who write about masculinity from Canada? I don’t know either. It’s tru, deau1.

Jay Rollins, Wonderland Rules

Jay is a writer who I know from the internet, and I like him a lot. He’s been a consistent booster of my stuff, thinks I’m a better writer than I am, and has always been nice to me. His blog is good, and Chuck Palahnuik thinks he’s a good writer despite not having been all that great after Choke.

Right now Jay is on a vacation of sorts - like all writers, it’s sort of “something something work jobs something” problems for him. He’s filling his blog with a bunch of pretty good guest posts, and he has a full archive of good work to pick through.

One of those guest posts is me, going up this Sunday I think. But I’m not sure! I can’t remember things! The only way to get around my quasi-disability to recall particulars is to subscribe to Jay’s blog2!

Mark Bisone

Mark writes about history stuff. I know less about Mark’s writing than most stuff here; Jay Rollins likes him AFAIK. I’m going to be honest this is the part of the linkspost where I’m starting to get tired; depression is a hell of a thing.

That said, here’s a line from this article I really liked, because it agrees with me:

The problem as I see it is when people confuse this story-editing process with an unearthing of the Actual, or even of the Truth. That is something human beings simply cannot do. It’s a lie we tell ourselves about our capabilities.

Or worse, it’s a lie that others tell us, in order to gain power over our minds and lives.

And that line is within an article that I suspect I broadly disagree with, which means an interesting thing: It’s a guy who is thinking, and touching on some of the same points as me with some of the same mental processing methods, but who is coming to different conclusions. I like that; that’s the kind of stuff I look for.

Creator Experiments

This is of pretty niche interest, Scott Britton runs a Substack about growing a Substack, which seems to be itself growing pretty fast and doing pretty well. If you are a creator looking to drive your growth more proactively, it’s worth a read.

Digital Masters

Also niche, this one is about using digital tools to create content. This is more-not-less relevant than when they sent me the link initially.

Pete’s two newsletters: This is bullshit and so can you, Psychology Onions

Imagine someone sent me two blogs instead of one - would I link to both? I would. But I’m also getting really tired, so I’m mostly pointing you towards Psychology Onions, because that’s the one that stuck with me more after an initial viewing.

I think that’s because it’s a person with a mental illness talking about the mental illness, which I’m overall into - I think people who are depressed, have OCD, etc. should be able to mention those things and talk to audiences who also suffer from similar ailments without it being a big thing.

Scott is a GM who has done DnD games for me before

Sometimes you want to play DnD, and you need a DM to make that happen, and you don’t know how to find one so you can be in a regular internet game. You want someone who is pretty good and knows how internet-tools for DM stuff work, and who doesn’t suck.

Scott has DMed games for me before in which I had a very good time, and he uses internet tools well. I endorse his services. The way I think this works is he has X amount of games he’s running at any given time, and if there’s an open seat you pay to take it and just start playing.

Updates

OK, so, no job yet. And I’ve found the questions about this are split into two groups. the first is the more emotional/supportive focus of questions like “hey, buddy - how you holding up?”. The second is “give me the nuts and bolts of your situation, what’s going on mechanically”.

Because of that, I’m answering in two ways:

Emotion Stuff

I am mildly depressed. This sounds bad until you realize, hey, that guy is almost always kind of depressed - it’s sort of a chronic ailment I manage at all times. Once that’s taken into account, I’m honestly pretty up-beat compared to the withered husk of a man I assumed I’d be if this ever happened.

Dozens and dozens of people have been really nice to me through this and it’s helped a lot. I was driving along with my 12-year-old a week or so ago, and he said “You know, there’s a lot of people in the world who just got fired, but most of them don’t have thousands of people they can tell about it. That’s an advantage”. And it’s really true - not just in a practical sense, but in a “feeling supported” sense.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have moments - I’ve been down to curb-level a few times since the firing. But I’m doing OK overall.

The worst part of this was that last week I got pretty sick. It wouldn’t have been a big deal except I often get sick without much in the way of symptoms besides pretty extreme fatigue/energy loss; I didn’t really realize I was sick until Sunday, after about 4-5 days of having a lot of trouble getting up off the couch and chalking it up to depression. I’m feeling much better now! I’ve written a bunch of posts and stuff!

Practical stuff

I think the ideal version of near-future events in my head is something like “I get a job that covers most of my income needs, and maybe fill in the gaps with some freelance”. Here’s how that’s going:

1. I was reasonably close (first interview went well) to a job with a reader app company the other day, but it didn’t end up going anywhere. This came about because a person who knows me and knows the company made the connection - I have several people trying to do similar things, with the normal conflicts between what I can actually do, what I want to get paid, etc. in play.

2. The “find a job that’s just like your old job” bit is a little harder right now because most companies that hire someone who does the exact thing I do (outward-facing casual language explanations of complex things) are broke right now; most would rather have copy that’s a little worse (cheap freelance) than a full human making decent money.

3. I have some freelance offers that will fill up part of the gap, but I’ve been treating them poorly in terms of getting the work out fast. Today/tomorrow are dedicated to doing a lot of work to get them all up to date as fast as I can and generally stopping being shitty.

And that’s pretty much it. Ideally a job that’s like 80% writing and 20% random tasks a smart layman can figure out would fall from the sky tomorrow at the pay-rate I’m used to, but I am going to have to be pretty proactive to get even close to that in a way I haven’t been so far.

Mostly I just need to get my shit together, do the freelance work I’m supposed to do, spend a mandatory 10 hours a day either writing or looking for work, and stop treating people who are trying to help me poorly.

That’s pretty much everything.

Send me more stuff to link

Hey, some of you are out there saying something like this:

I want to contact RC to get him to plug my stuff, but I’ve heard of him before so this will probably cause undefined problems, or he just won’t do it.

What you should be doing is saying this:

RC has said he will post my stuff, and is a relatively average suburban father who is 40 pounds overweight and who, I have heard, talks too much. I am not intimidated to send him my stuff to plug, because his cardio is (probably) not that great.

If you have anything you want plugged, let me know. There’s a very good chance I’ll do so. I don’t do these posts all the time, but I plugged literally everything anyone sent me (I think. If I missed you, it’s not because I rejected it. Send it again.).

I’m glad to help, but you need to ask.

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I’m emotionally about eight years old, so I end up reading a lot of this stuff, and as per The Law of Mayo Joe Biden I have become somewhat refined in my tastes, focusing from the more general field down towards more specific subgenres. The first stop on this train is “litRPG”, which is (usually) isekai in which the world the character goes to runs on role-playing game mechanics - he levels up from doing things, can distribute the stats as he sees fit, and generally accumulates all manner of superpowers.

I have to be really, really careful how much isekai I read right now.

I come from a family line of powerful, elite alcoholics; my rule about drinking is that I never, ever do it when I’m sad. If I’m already happy, I sometimes drink to amplify the joy. But if I’m sad - and I sometimes am - I don’t touch alcohol. The problem is not so much that it amplifies the sadness (although it sometimes can do this, it usually doesn’t) as it is that it represents an effective way to create a change in the status quo. If I drink to be happy, I’ll end up drinking every time I feel like I need to be happy, and I’ll basically always be drinking1.

Isekai works sort of the same way, but with feeling useful. Isekai is about escape in a much more literal way than most genres - it’s explicitly about your life being bad or boring and having a way to change that. More importantly, it’s about having a way to change that that doesn’t have anything to do with your own effort or initiative; the most traditional way to send the character to the new world is by having them be hit and sorta-kinda killed by a truck2. This isn’t something they have to drive themselves - it’s something that happens to them, that gives them meaning and purpose without them having to dirty their hands making it happen.

With the right catalyst, this is an insidious and deadly poison.

LitRPG is a little bit worse, because the allure of litRPG is that it grants the audience surrogate a clear and almost inescapable way to move himself forward. At first, he needs to survive, but the mere act of surviving makes him stronger. From there, he just needs to keep checking boxes - he stabs a few more ogres, and he gets a bit better at ogre stabbing in a way he can see. He collects gold and magic items, saves some villages, and everyone is very impressed as he fails to fail at getting pressed into a niche he didn’t have carve.

When you are unemployed, unhappy, un-pathed (or some combination of the three), the temptation is to read these and feel like you aren’t. Through the magic of reading, you too can get whisked to a new, fantastic world where you matter and are doing well. You can feel like you are accomplishing without having to accomplish. You can make it without having to go anywhere.

There’s this video game called Powerwash Simulator, in which one plays the role of an aspiring powerwasher ala the power-washing porn subreddit. You go to little fun locales that happen to be very, very dirty indeed and clean them up. You watch things go from depressing and black to bright, cheery, and new. There’s no timer. You don’t have to hustle to get new work. It’s just redemption that occurs by means of the work of your hands, the banishing of shadow in favor of the light as commanded by the force of your labor.

And it’s all fake. You didn’t really clean those things.

There’s this thing called watching sports, where you sit around and watch people who are better at something than you could ever be do that thing at levels humans shouldn’t even be able to reach. They run faster than people can; they jump higher than human limits seem to imply is possible. They are very, very much not you, which is sort of half of the point of the thing - they do things you can’t do, and you pay them so you can see those things done.

The other half of the point is that the culture around sportsing is such that you are not only allowed but fully expected to pretend like you yourself are part of making that happen - you can go to a store and buy a complete uniform just like your favorite sports guy wears, and then wear it. You can be superstitious about making sure you watch every sports game because it’s acceptable to pretend you have some effect on the outcome.

You can even make friends and enemies based on your favorite-sports-team-alignment. Arizona has a couple of big universities you don’t have to try very hard to get into, but even if you didn’t end up even trying to get in you can declare your allegiance to one or the other and then have banter with other people who did the same, or especially with other people who didn’t.

Meanwhile, for some values of “you” it is factually true that you don’t even jog.

There’s this thing called porn where the kind of people you want to (based on appearance) have a relationship with convince you that relationships are mostly just sex and then purport to sell you sex for the low low price of free. They don’t actually sell you sex (this is more expensive and more dangerous) but they do a pretty good job of facilitating a fantasy where you can pretend they did.

When I was growing up, one of the churches I went to had a pastor whose big thing was talking about his porn addiction; he did this despite it being arguably counterproductive to do so in a very conservative baptist church that would have, all things the same, rather had the sex stuff just be alluded to. And what stuck with me about that is him saying something like “Here are all these women, and it feels like they are doing what you ask - like they are doing it for you. Like you earned it, and you deserve it. You get to pretend you are more desirable than you are.”

There’s some people who think porn is a powerful enough stimulus in this way that it’s sort of destroying the fabric of society. I’m not sure they are wrong.

I once heard about a thing called “philosophy”, which is a sort of scavenger hunt game combined with literary critic role-play. You read all these books that talk about how humans should live, and how they should think about concepts like “good” and “virtue”. Each book has an at least slightly different take on how you should think about these things, and there’s millions of them to sift through.

Some philosophies are drastically different than others, but there’s absolutely no consensus on which is right or wrong - you can pick one that says that nothing you do matters or one that says that every waking moment should be spent in service to some concept of good, and each choice is exactly as legitimate within the context of philosophy as the other. You get to say you are a philosopher (or that you appreciate their work) in either case.

The most common way to interact with moral philosophy is to collect a bunch of favorite moral positions, then to sit around arguing with people about how correct you are in your opinions about what you theoretically could do with those moral philosophies. Nobody will ever check to see if you actually put them into action, and you will look very smart.

I think the biggest danger to myself and my family right now is that while my actual life that I’m actually living is a little bit painful right now, I have options. I don’t actually have to grapple with the hurty bits of my current and persistent realities. I have isekai. I have power-washing video games. I have looking very smart. I have dozens of avenues that result in a deepening groove in my couch that reflects my ever-closer relationship with gravity but do nothing to help me keep my family fed, clothed, and surrounded by a pretty nice lawn.

I hope it’s obvious that for at least most of these examples, I think there’s perfectly healthy ways to enjoy them3. Very specifically I'm not saying you should swear off video games, sports, or anything else you enjoy if you are currently enjoying them in a way that doesn't hurt you. Whatever your mental model of me is, you should know I'm not a prohibitionist for the most part; mostly, I think people should be allowed to do things.

I’m more concerned about the work each of those examples does - of being aware of what you (and I) are using them for. Because at least most of those examples have wholesome, healthy uses - a sports guy often uses sports to have fun with his friends and family, for instance, while a litRPG appreciator might just want the pure, unadulterated entertainment value of a guy obtaining a series of progressively better swords.

I’m not even against escape; the world really is hard at times. Sometimes a small escape from the things you have to do (and the person you are trying to be) is worthwhile; rest is an important part of effort. But where the real becomes neglected or replaced by the fake, it’s a danger. Right now that danger is especially real to me, but I think it’s real to all of us all the time, even if the exact appearance of the danger is different from person to person.

So I’m being careful, especially right now. I urge you show caution as well. Real life is too important to ignore.

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This is relevant for me at the moment because this morning three people joined my weekly manager sync instead of two, and one of them was the “firing person” the company employs to fire people. I’m sure she does other things, but her joining a meeting is a lot like someone showing up to a casual lunch with an executioner’s axe - it’s usually not a good sign, and it wasn’t here.

Besides adding some valuable circumstantial context to the “I’m crazy because I always think I’m about to get fired” article, this has a couple implications for me which I’ll try to present as dryly as possible:

1. I am now out of work with about 3 weeks’ severance. This is pretty damn short-feeling to me but it’s not really legally mandated, so I doubt there’s a lot I can/should do about it.

2. I have a few highly developed skills (predominantly writing, which is why we know each other in the first place) but I’m not entirely sure how marketable they are.

3. I have been informed by others that I wasn’t actually overpaid, but I *felt* overpaid, and generally “pure writer” doesn’t make that much as a job title. I’m not initially sure I can or can’t replace the income I currently make.

All that to say I’m in a period of transition. And, honestly, I don’t know exactly what that means for y’all as readers. I haven’t tried to write through a period like this before so I have as much reason to believe this will increase my posting frequency as decrease it. As always, all content I make is free - about 80 of you pay, and as always should feel very comfortable not paying if I’m not living up to the standards of whatever it is that made you pay in the first place.

I’m not exactly begging for work, but obviously I’m very interested in talking to anyone who thinks they might have use for me. I am available by email at residentcontrarian@substack.com, gearratiossc@gmail.com, and on discord at GearRatio#1059 (Editor Nick says you might have to send a friend request first for this last one to work).

The main promise I can make related to that is that I do attempt to be very honest about what skills I do and don’t have. I am open to having a very frank conversation about both the beautiful and ugly parts of my skill set. After that conversation, if I was a good fit for you, you’d know; if I wasn’t, you’d know that too.

If you are someone who was thinking about reaching out to me for advice or help, please still do. Even if I find myself in a weird emotional place where I can’t help as much as I’d like, I’ll find someone else who can.

As a religious person, I welcome both prayers and well-wishes on this matter. Otherwise, I think that’s about it. I’m very much hoping I find a way to land on my feet here, but I’m very glad as always that you all choose to read what I write and I want you to know you are already helping just by being around.

Thanks!

RC

I guess it’s all resolved now, but it wasn’t when I initially ran into the story while on a trip to see a bunch of people I know from online stuff. I sat in a hotel room in the short time frame between a quick shower and going back out to be social, going through a thought process that looked a little like this:

1. There’s a good chance the company I work for (which is a startup, in the very broad sense “start-up” is used these days) banks there

2. If this goes poorly, they might lose access to the VC money they use to operate

3. I’m probably sort of a luxury employee

4. 1-3 should be best defined at the direst end of their probability scale - i.e. I feel like the worst-case scenario on each is absolutely true

5. I’m definitely getting fired when I get into work on Monday, my life will fall apart, and I will die alone, remembered only as history’s greatest monster

If that point-to-point sweep seems a little extreme, I agree; I’ve even written about it before. To save you time on reading that article, incidents like the SVB bank run are basically running over an all-the-time mental framework that follows the same basic pattern:

1. I have a job that pays well

2. This is unusual

3. I’m not sure my skills are good enough and diverse enough to maintain that

4. It is thus completely sure that any day now someone is going to start a Slack huddle to explain that they have realized I suck and am getting fired

5. I will not get severance or be able to replace my income, my life will fall apart, and I will die alone hiding from the allies in Argentina.

If the extreme negativity and the fact that I’m still employed don’t tip you off, this isn’t exactly a process that’s taking place in the most academic, well-reasoned part of my brain. We don’t say “crazy” anymore, but essentially I’m a little bit crazy about things that revolve around feeling secure - I’m afraid of things like cars breaking down, job loss, and subsequent under-performance when finding a new gig in maximally dark ways that don’t track reality.

But, crucially, I know this. I’m aware I’m like this - so why not fix it?

During the trip, multiple people asked me how my job stuff was going, and I carefully explained that I’m probably the worst person on Earth to ask about it - since I interpret everything negatively, that means I want to say “I’m getting fired tomorrow for taking a day off”. But at the same time, it’s not like understanding that I’ve interpreted something wrong automatically feeds me the right interpretation, either.

So I ended up telling them something like “I would not be surprised if a year or so from now I was at the same company, and I would be equally unsurprised to find I didn’t have a job Monday.” I think they mostly recognized this for what it was (an unsatisfying and uninformative hedge), but it’s sort of the first step in managing the madness; I have to acknowledge that I’m not a good source of information. I lie to myself.

There’s a pop psychologist named Dr. Drew who works with Adam Carolla a lot, and who used to run a show called Loveline. I’m not sure how legit he is, but I once heard him talking to a woman who had frequently fallen in with mildly-to-moderately abusive men and overall had bad luck in relationships. She asked what she could do to find men who weren’t the absolute worst, and he said something that I remember like this:

Giving you advice on “how to find the right man” is hard, but it’s easy to tell you how to not find a really bad man: don’t trust your instincts at all. Your history means that you are a perfectly calibrated instrument, but that you are perfectly calibrated to get excited about guys that are going to treat you poorly and make you unhappy.

So when you meet a guy and find yourself thrilled with him, the first step is to realize that means he’s bad and do anything else besides get involved with him.

My signals are not as clear as that woman’s, in that any of my impressions of doom might be true, but the actions I want to take based on them are broadly counterproductive - they fall into the “just quit, it’s not like it’s going to last anyway” realm of things. And while I can’t rule out that “quit and find something different” might end up being a great choice, I know that I’d be making it semi-randomly and avoid it until better evidence I should do that emerges.

What I end up doing is something like an iterative chain of bet-hedging. I try to perform as well as I can at my job while sort of keeping half an eye on the market for skilled writing, but not so much that I’m actively looking for jobs in a way that would upset my current one. I show up for work and do the best I can, I write “don’t freak out” in big letters on top of everything my brain is trying to do, and I plow through.

In general, I basically acknowledge that in a purely me-communicating-with-me sense, I have a long history of being a horrifically unreliable liar, and I treat me-to-me messaging accordingly.

One of the things that happens when you are very visibly weird is that people who suspect they have unusual or unacceptable problems seek you out to talk about them, hoping you might give them advice that doesn’t boil down to “you are a monster for being sad in a particular way”. This is particularly true for things you write about a lot, and I write about marriage a lot and end up giving a lot of marriage advice.

Because men generally have a smaller set of marriage problems that are considered “OK to have”, this is generally-but-not-always a conversation I have with dudes.

A typical way this goes is a guy explains that his wife is very important to him and that he loves her a great deal. These are usually credible claims to the extent claims on the internet tend can be, and you can tell by how upset they are; something has gone wrong in their relationship, and it’s wrecking them.

An example of this I’ve run into repeatedly is something like “My wife had suddenly stopped having sex with me”, or some other kind of sudden perceived emotional abandonment. This is often a really big deal to the husband and just as often something they don’t have a good person to discuss it with1.

The first step in this process is always, always to get permission from that person to talk about this from an outside point of view - to sort of ask them questions about why they think their wife might be doing this and what the causes are. Usually, the husband (who loves his wife, and who is more reasonable/honest about things he tells others than what he tells himself) will actually be pretty good at telling you the very reasonable reasons his wife might have for feeling less sexual (or supportive, or whatever) lately.

This often (but not always) gets you most of the way to the person feeling better, because the process of actually talking about what’s going on sometimes makes them notice that there are in fact a lot of reasons this is happening that don’t necessarily have to do with their wife stopping loving them all the sudden, and while they still have a pretty good-sized problem, it’s not usually as dire; they just needed someone they trusted more than themselves at that moment to give them perspective on some less-dark possibilities.

To the extent I’m writing at you,2 I’m trying to shake your belief in yourself as a reliable source of information about yourself and your direct situations.

There’s some reasons I shouldn’t be doing this. For one, you might not be crazy in the same way I am - I suspect there are people out there who really are good sources of information and who give themselves a much more factual/reasonable picture of their own predicaments and situations. And when that’s true, they are the only people with the advantage of really knowing the entirety of their own context - of what’s going on, what they want, and what they’ve experienced.

But I’ve also seen people who move from big city to big city while clearly hating big cities because the only narrative they will let themselves believe is that moving to a small city is some kind of clear failure that they’d hate. Or I’ve seen people talk themselves out of good relationships and regret it later because they convinced themselves of a false narrative surrounding that relationship.

Or, hell, I’ve seen people go the exact opposite of the poor-self-confidence route I’ve described here and treat people poorly because they can’t imagine a situation in which they are wrong3. Or who sit down and figure they can rewrite some centuries-old cultural tradition in a way that will work better, and can't imagine they aren't the right person for that and that there's a chance they will fail.

You may take a closer look at what you tell yourself as a result of all this and find out it’s bad advice for you - that things really are terrible, and need action to fix. Or that other people really don’t have a valid complaint, and that you move forward as before. Or that you really do like living in cramped cities “because of the culture” or whatever. I’m not saying that I know how you might be telling yourself things that aren’t true.

But I am saying that’s a thing that happens. Whether or not you find you’ve been telling yourself lies, you deserve better than taking yourself at your word.

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To start off, here’s a couple of things this article isn’t. It’s first and foremost not an attempt to convert you to Christianity, except in the sense that everything I do is kind of that. Careful readers will notice that I don’t say “and that’s why Christianity is right, and you should immediately convert” anywhere in this piece - that’s because it’s not what this piece is for, and it would be shitty at it if it was.

It’s also not an argument that any view besides mine is dumb to hold in general. This is a very specific response to a very specific ask the non-religious often make in my hearing; I’m trying to relate how that argument is heard and what it means to the people to whom it’s being made.

To start us out, here’s a story:

You wake up one night to the blaring of fire alarms, and it doesn’t take you very long to figure out what set them off: your bedroom is on fire. This isn’t a small fire; a substantial part of your wall is in flames.

The immediate danger brings you a moment of clarity, and you realize you have a very limited set of options:

1. You can choose to try and extinguish the fire
2. You can choose to try and escape the fire
3. You can resign yourself to your fate, lay back down, and either asphixiate on smoke or burn to death.

You choose to escape, and do so successfully. Later on you are relating that story - specifically the bits about your moment of clarity - to a friend, who says “OK, but why not a fourth choice? It seems to me that it would have been much easier and more comfortable to decide that the fire wouldn’t burn you, or that it was much smaller and more contained. Why make it so hard on yourself?”.

There’s a lot of aspects of this metaphor that aren’t going to map perfectly to what I’m talking about, so for now let’s focus on just one: there is a clear and real inconsistency between how you think about the fire and how you friend thinks about it - you are relating a story about a real fire with real characteristics, and he’s treating them as something other than that.

It’s possible your friend believes in fire and that fire has all the characteristics we usually associate with it (hot, burns you to death, spreads rapidly, makes smoke which chokes you, etc.), but doesn’t believe you actually saw any. Or it’s possible something weirder is going on and he doesn’t think fire exists at all. But it’s clear that he at least doesn’t believe that your fire was “real” in the normal way we say real - that it existed and had characteristics that mattered to other realities.

This story is being presented because it’s related to the way we usually use the words “real” and “believe”. If you really think a piano will fall where you are standing, you generally move out of the way; you do this because a real falling piano has real implications you can’t get it to stop having simply by wanting them away.

For the record, I like David Friedman. I think he generally argues in good faith and I have never known him to be mean. I think you should read his Substack and generally be nice to him, but he has the best example of what I’m talking about I have access to right now and it happens the article it’s in is short enough that I can quote it in its entirety:

One  problem for Christians is how to make the existence of Hell, eternal torture for sinners, consistent with the existence of a benevolent and all powerful God. A possible solution is to deny that Christian doctrine requires the existence of Hell. Observing an online argument over that question, one  based on interpretations of the text of scripture, it occurred to me that there is a simpler solution to the problem of making scriptural references to Hell consistent with a benevolent God, a solution that should be obvious to an economist if not to a theologian.

The belief in Hell is useful as an incentive not to sin. Once a sinner has died, torturing him serves no useful purpose, so there is no reason for a benevolent God to go through with it. If it is still possible for the sinner to reform and be saved he should be given another chance, as portrayed by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce. If he is a hopeless case he can be painlessly removed from existence.

The obvious explanation of the available evidence, the explanation consistent with both the text and divine benevolence, is that scriptural references to Hell are a strategic lie. I do not know if there is evidence in scripture that God sometimes lies but I do not see how there could be evidence that he never does.

Now’s the time where I take a short moment to remind you what this article isn’t: It’s not an argument for Christianity as such. So what I’m interested in here is not the idea that hell does exist or doesn’t, or that sending people there could or couldn’t be fair or consistent with a benevolent god. David here takes it as a given that it’s not consistent, but that also doesn’t matter except to the extent that we note that the given was taken1.

What I want to point out is that something weird is being asked for here, something that requires a special usage of the words “real” and “believe” that don’t parse well if you use those words as you normally would - as you’d use them for a housefire or a thrown rock. David is proposing that a believer should and could do something like the following:

1. Note that whatever external source they derive the truth of their religion from makes a certain claim (In this case that hell exists, and that a god is reliable/honest)

2. Decide for reasons unrelated to the dogma of the religion that this claim is unacceptable - that whatever standards the religion might have to justify it are in conflict and subordinate to some other standard

3. Decide that since the belief is unacceptable, they should sub in some other belief for it that they like better.

In this case David’s 3 is to decide that, irrespective of what the text actually says, to say something like “Where god says he’s something I don’t like much, I can simply hum loudly over it, and pretend something else was said - that he was just being tricky, and secretly agrees with me.”. He’s saying, specifically, that a good solution for religious readers finding a specific stated characteristic of god uncomfortable is to simply wish it not so, as one might wish a falling piano into lightness.

Note that these are all things you’d be very uncomfortable doing if you awoke to a housefire. A housefire, by nature of its realness, does not care very much if you explain to it that you don’t like that it’s hot and smoky; it will burn you to death either way. And you yourself would be unlikely to try to do so in that situation unless you yourself thought the housefire was imaginary (and thus subject to the influence of your decision on what it should be).

Whether or not David is making the argument here (from comments on the article, I think he is), with demands like these there is often an implication of:

4. Say and believe that your ability to do 1-3 has no bearing on the nature of your belief - that you can do 1-3 and still say that you “believe” in god, and that he’s “real”.

David’s argument is pretty specific and as such might not (from an outside perspective) seems that generally important to a religious person. To zoom out a few specificity steps and make this a bit more general, consider this argument, as might be presented by an atheist or an agnostic:

While I respect your belief and know you genuinely hold it, you should be comfortable admitting that ALL religions are real and true, and equally valid. To do otherwise would be arrogant - you would be telling everyone in every other religion that they were wrong, and believed lies.

This statement is from some perspectives very reasonable; it allows for a sort of understanding where nobody ever has to say they believe something that’s in direct conflict with some other belief, and that as a consequence the other belief is wrong. It feels nice and enlightened, it avoids fights and from the perspective of an atheist or agnostic there’s no reason NOT to do it.

We don’t do this with any other kind of belief - if someone believes that dark matter exists, and says so, they are by implication saying that anybody who believes that dark matter doesn’t exist is wrong, and believes something that’s false. Nobody has a problem with this or considers it particularly arrogant; people are generally allowed to think they are right about things, and then we argue about them.

So why the difference here? First, there’s a bad-faith version of this argument. In this argument, the atheist or agnostic is burying the lede of not only not believing in what you believe, but also thinking it’s their job, by hook or crook, to get you to stop doing so. They are trying to back-door their way into getting you to admit that you don’t really believe all that stupid stuff - to get you to deny some small part of the religion so they can bring it up later as evidence that your belief is, in their experience, pretty conditional after all.

When the good-faith agnostic and good-faith atheist make the same argument, it would be really easy to conclude that the same thing is happening here - that they simply are using a different tactic to dissuade you from having faith at all. But I’ve had a lot of these arguments and I think something different is happening - that the atheist and agnostic are asking you to do something that would be reasonable if they did it, but not considering that it might mean something very different from a house-fire belief context.

So, for example, the atheist might be running a mental model something like this:

I have examined the evidence and think it’s very clear there’s no god. Thus I’d also conclude that for me it would be very weird and rude to say, for instance, that Shiva is less real than the Abrahamic god - they are both clearly very fake indeed. This is definitionally true of my positioning; I think both the Shiva-worshipper and the Abrahamic-God-Worshipper are both similarly and clearly wrong.

While the agnostic might have a model something like this:

I don’t know if there’s a god or not, so I’ve consciously made a decision to say that given the evidence I’ve seen, I don’t think it would be reasonable for me to have a belief or claim about who god is or what he’s up to. At most I think I might be able to derive some general information about him/her/it about things religions seem to mostly agree on, but where they conflict I have no opinion. I certainly wouldn’t be arrogant enough to claim that someone is right or wrong about belief in a particular god - they might be, or might not be.

If they aren’t thinking real hard about it, both parties will then turn to someone who actually believes their religion is real and say “Hey, could you just treat it exactly like it’s something you aren’t convinced is real in the first place?”, which makes perfect sense to both from their respective vantage points of “it’s fake” and “it’s unknowable”.

They are then really, really confused when the person who actually believes this stuff in the way that the atheist or agnostic might believe in rocks gets offended at the suggestion that they change some sincerely held belief to stay in compliance with secular whims2.

Orion, a guy I know on the internet, beta-read this article and handed me a concept that I’m shamelessly stealing. So while we’ve already talked about housefire beliefs, it’s now useful to talk about what he terms Neptune Beliefs - specifically beliefs about things that you are inferring based on the best information you have at hand.

Neptune is a planet that was discovered “at the point of a pen” - that is, it was inferred from wobbles observed in Uranus3 rather than direct observation. Orion's more charitable take on David's argument is something like "David is the kind of guy who finds math fun, and what math-is-fun guys do with their time is exactly stuff like this; their whole thing is sitting around talking about what's plausible, consistent, and fun to believe in."

I think there’s a level at which this makes sense. Certainly it makes a lot of sense if you are discovering Neptune; I don’t know how else you’d do it. But there’s limitations to the subjects it works well on, and one is religion, or at least religion of certain kinds.

If someone were to tell you they could estimate the size and orbit of a yet unobserved planet, you might ask them why. They might explain that while Neptune wasn’t directly observable, they were able to calculate out, with great mathematical certainty, that something like Neptune might exist, based on its effects on Uranus4. And if you asked about how they knew about those effects, they would tell you they observed them with a telescope.

If you told them (and could somehow enforce) that they weren't allowed to consider what the telescope told them, one of two things would happen: they'd either stop believing in Neptune entirely, or they'd be reduced to guess that a new planet might exist that had any number of characteristics, based almost entirely off their own preferences about what kind of planets they liked to imagine. Neptune would still exist, and would go on having the same gravitational effects it had always had, discovered or not5.

Your astronomer would in effect stop have stopped believing in Neptune in either case, but only in the latter would he have also changed his standard of belief.

The problem arises once you realize that a lot of religions believe they have a telescope - some method of knowing about god that goes beyond just imagining how cool he’d be if he was exactly the way they wanted. For Christianity, this mostly just the Bible, which (most or all, depending on who you ask) Christians believe is an accurate, trustworthy communication about who God is.

Beyond having something at least a little like a Bible, a religion otherwise might rely on something like a divine revelation - an individual might think that God is in some way indicating the truth to them. Deists thought this was happening through nature, prophets might think it’s happening through direct communications or dreams.

Once you strip away those two things, there’s little to rely on but imagination; without either, people are reduced to pretending they hold a belief in Neptune, while trying to find clever ways to phrase “I imagined this up and I like it a lot, you don’t have to worry about me letting it affect anything truly important” while not sacrificing the warm feels of spirituality.

David’s argument does this more explicitly than the others by simultaneously saying both the text and the god are unreliable - any communications from both are suspect in his model. The generic atheist/agnostic argument is a little less explicit, but does the same thing by tacitly assuming (and asking you to acknowledge) that your telescope is shitty and there’s no way it could have accurate information on Neptune.

What all three have in common is that they are asking you to revert to a pretend-neptune version of belief, where you either claim uncertainty about any given aspect of any particular god, or stop claiming belief in them entirely. In other words, that you become an atheist or agnostic, but with a few extra steps and a bunch of extra window dressing.

Not everyone who makes that kind of request of a housefire believer is looking to club them with it later, but that doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of people who are loathe to pass up a convenient bludgeon. We can easily imagine a hostile Reddit atheist making the logical accusation if I went along with the usual request:

Remember that time you didn’t like something the Bible said, so you just ignored it and said that where you and your god disagreed on who he was or what he said he wanted, you were allowed to either just ignore it or decide, unilaterally, that that wasn’t really what he said or meant? That’s not something you can do with real entities, man. Like you can’t say you believe I’m a committed theist and just suddenly have it be true because you’d rather it was.

The fact that you even thought you could sort of proves you don’t believe in your own god - I don’t even have to argue what it’s already clear you think I’m right about.

They’d be pointing out that using the definitions of “real” and “believe” that everyone uses in pretty much every situation but this one, I didn’t really believe in god. I’m not even getting down on this hypothetical Redditor for doing it - in that situation, he’d be totally right.

This being a bubble-busting article, it’s worth talking about what house-fire beliefs actually look like from the inside. And I think the first part of that is acknowledging that, if I actually believe what I believe, I should live somewhat differently - I should get angry less, I should help people more, and just generally be better in a lot of ways.

Since this whole article is me saying I do believe in that way, it’s reasonable to ask why I still sort of broadly suck. This is actually a pretty common (and one of the more understandable/legitimate) argument against Christianity - Christians very notably often do not act like they’ve had an infinite sin-debt paid by the sacrifice of a deity or that eternal reward is on the line. This is actually something that gets talked about internally, for what it’s worth - I’ve had a friend say “you know, I don’t know quite how to phrase this, but if we really believed…” and make much the same complaint about us himself.

We can sort of imagine a type of belief that works this way - for the purposes of this conversation, we will call it “perfect belief”. And in a world of generally imperfect people, we find that perfect beliefs are rare to the point of non-existence. We find utilitarians that do things that work against utility, or virtue ethics guys who don’t pursue ideal virtues at all times. Christianity is no exception here - we often suck.

That knife cuts both ways, though. Just as the utilitarian actually often really does believe in utility as he fails to maximize it, the Christian knows he’s transgressed a rule and feels guilty about it specifically because he actually thinks there’s a rule to have transgressed and someone who gave him the rule to follow in the first place.

In a similar vein, it’s not typical for a Christian to believe they have absolutely correct views on what the Bible actually says. Part of this is because of the sheer size of the sucker - it’s a big book.

This drives a common internet objection to Christianity in which the objector notes that Christians often disagree on the exact stuff the Bible says. Which is true! We do, we spend a lot of time arguing about it, in fact. But in a way specifically relevant to this article, that’s because each person actually believes there’s a truth that can be known - one that it’s possible to get to and understand.

So, yeah. I have a lot of atheist and agnostic readers, but frequent readers will note a big dearth of articles in which I try to convert them to Christianity. This one is no exception - I’m around if anyone wants to talk about that, certainly, but that’s not the explicit goal here.

I’m also not trying to convince you that it’s somehow beyond the pale for you to say “hey, I don’t think you are right in believing what you believe - I think it’s false, and that you should stop”. I have more than a few friends, some relatively close, who do that all the time. It’s an honest argument. It doesn’t work, but it’s not like it’s sneaky.

The argument I do mind comes from a different place - one where someone is trying to be enlightened and kind by not attacking beliefs they disagree with. That’s nice enough (and appreciated, as motivations go) but it loses most of its positive force when you dig down a little and find that the beliefs they envisioned are mostly fake double-speaky pretending of a kind they imagined carried no actual force or sincerity - the kind you can claim to have while simultaneously negating as they become socially embarrassing when judged by an ever-changing secular standard of right.

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In a very particular sense, I don’t know how to write. It is generally known that I have a minimal-at-best level of education, the kind where “highest completed” pulldowns in my job applications generally get set to “GED/Didn’t Graduate”.

In the sense that there’s a set of rules that comprise “the best way to write”, it generally revolves around the kinds of things that get trained into you, like knowing the name of every part of a sentence, using the approved sentence structures, and being careful not to use intensifiers like “very” and “really” unless someone’s life is on the line.

I don’t have that training, which means I tend to focus on a different set of things than most when I give writing advice (or at least have a very different balance of focus on the same things). This doesn’t mean the advice I give is inherently good -I think all writing advice is potentially good or bad depending on the audience; more on that later - but it is at least distinct.

Assume a human will read what you write

I’m the kind of guy who reads articles about basses, and there’s a bass guitar maker named Carl Thompson who in an interview transcript I once read gave me an offhand quote on creating things for other people that I think about a lot:

Carl: I’m having trouble getting it out. I do believe that and I make instruments like that. And that goes into every instrument. When I put the controls in. As you notice, if you have to go in here and take these controls, and take that control plate off of there. Guess what happens? You can actually take it, turn it over and look at it. I’ve seen some guys who again make perfect instruments. Somebody comes in and says “my pots-can you look at it?” “Oh yeah, no problem.” Got to take the pickups out, you’ve got to go through all kinds of things just to look at it because…

Aaron: The wires are too short?

Carl: Yeah, they made the wires exactly the right length. This is where the controller is, this is where the pickup is, I got to make the wire that long. So whenever you do want to look at it you’ve got to go — believe me that’s part of it. That’s part of making a perfect instrument. A perfect instrument is one where you’ve got a bit of room where you can look at it. That’s a perfect instrument.

When Carl makes an instrument, he’s not trying to make an instrument that is technically perfect in the sense that everything is absolute optimized to precision; he’s making one that’s as perfect as he can get it to be while keeping in mind that a human being has to own and use it. He imagines that they might have to open it up to fix it later, and makes that easy. He understands the fretboard might eventually need repair, so he makes it thick enough that someone can do that.

I’m picking this out of a hat, but now think about that in terms of something like “communicating a concept to your reader”. Your reader is (presumably) a human person; they have a limited attention span. You (presumably) think what you are writing is important for them to know. Keep both of those things in mind when you read the following incredibly popular and widely adopted writing advice from Scott Adams:

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

Is this bad advice? Not entirely. There’s a place for short, saltine-dry sentences. But putting that in a “human will read this” context makes it easy to imagine a person getting bored halfway through your article in the same way you’d find it hard to finish a large bowl of very bland soup. Short declarative sentences are generally clearer, but that doesn’t do you any good when your reader has long since switched to skim-mode or stopped reading entirely.

To show you the same problem from the opposite side, I’ve selected a bit of advice from the most overlong masturbatory writing essay I’ve ever seen. Note that what I’m about to show you is probably the least wordy, most succinct part of the entire article; the rest of it is much worse:

1. Always use the word that most exactly means what you wish to say, in utter indifference to how common or familiar that word happens to be. A writer should never fret over what his or her readers may or may not know, and should worry only about underestimating them. As Nabokov said, a good reader always comes prepared with a dictionary and never resents being introduced to a new term.

Imagine thinking this - that your reader is so committed to slogging through your impenetrable horror of pinky-out tea-drinker writing that they are both willing and happy to stop reading, open a dictionary, and find the definition of some college-word you learned so you could think you were winning at parties back before people stopped inviting you to them.

Both of these pieces of advice were given as absolutes, presented as if they were the final say on the “correct way to write”. They aren’t. That’s not because they are bad; even if they are, the problem is more general and foundational than that.

All writing advice for “keeping in mind”

Return your attention to Scott Adam’s advice from the last section. Do you know where that writing advice is actually very relevant? Business writing. That’s where he got the advice in the first place, and it’s great for that context: If you absolutely need Bonnie to show up to a meeting at 3:00 PM, then “Bonnie, please report to the meeting room at 3:00 PM” does just fine and avoids confusion.

Scott Adam’s writing advice rippled out through the tech-writing sphere really fast, because it’s also a bit applicable there; tech people have a tendency to be information-gobblers, and in their pursuit of little discrete pieces of data will on average tolerate dry, stripped-down writing other people.

Now consider the writing advice from the long-winded guy, who, again, writes like this:

This, from Ecclesiastes, is definitely a grand and gradual music, luminously clear in many respects; but it is not exactly austere; it is also quite complex in its cadences and syntax. True, its gleaming paratactic flow contrasts strikingly with Browne’s massy hypotactic architectonics.

And yes, this is terrible - it’s the worst. But there’s audiences for it, and you know who they are? People who primarily aren’t there to learn or be entertained. It’s for people who want to read something that makes them feel smart, and for whom smart is things like “Reads Shakespeare” and “plays chess”. That’s not generally my market (at least in the sense that it’s the primary thing my readers want), but it’s a real market that deserves to get served.

The failure mode comes in when you take these things to be rules, and end up writing a piece that’s meant to convey valuable information in the latter style, where it can only be absorbed by someone who knows what “hypotactic architectonics” are without looking it up. Or when you take the Scott Adams advice to be true, and try to relate anything but news stories, business related writing, or valuable discrete data-driven concepts with it.

The trick is to treat all writing advice as something to keep in mind. You want to think of writing advice as someone pointing out a possible failure mode to you, and examine your writing in the context of what you are trying to convey to a particular audience, and then adjust as needed to actually serve your audience in the particular context of your piece.

This is a little bit harder because all writing advice is given by someone who thinks it’s worked well for them, myself included. They don’t always have varied context of the kind that lets them know that your heart-felt memory of the best summer you ever had doesn’t necessarily benefit from stripped-down language, or that you might not be good at stripped-down language in the first place. They don’t know that kind of thing about you, but you can; you have to adjust for it yourself or your writing will suffer.

Writing advice is rules of thumb, not law. Read it, take what you need, keep it in mind, and move on.

Write inter-dependant paragraphs

Weird formatting to make a point:

People tend to be pretty good at keeping track of the flow of sentences; it’s hard not to. —> Words like “but”, “however” and however you reword “thusly” so you don’t sound like a robot help with that. —> You’ve probably even noticed me varying the length and tone of my sentences to keep your eyes happy - you understand that I’m doing my best to keep a rhythm going. —> The language you’ve been taught since you were a child focused on individual paragraphs and it’s likely you are good at flow in that context.

—>

I assume that most people are good at that kind of sentence-to-sentence continuity, you included. But are you good at paragraph flow? Can you transition one paragraph to the next in a way your reader not only can follow, but can’t fail to follow? Do your paragraphs support each other? Does one paragraph lead into the next? Does the next paragraph build off the last?

—>

Ideally, your paragraphs do flow into each other. I’m going to stop with the weird emphasis arrow thing now, but I think you get it; it’s fundamentally harder to transition from paragraph to paragraph than it is from one sentence to the next. Where I see newer writers failing to maintain flow, it’s more often because of this than any other factor.

Here’s a badly written nonsense example:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go.

Horses eat grass. Horses handle difficult terrain well, better than most motorized vehicles. They have iron shoes that win fights against rocks. Bob switched to horses, and it made all the difference.

Now consider this alternative:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go.

Things changed when Bob realized a simple fact: horses aren’t cars. Horses don’t need gas; they eat grass. They don’t get stuck in the mud. Their iron shoes are much more likely to win battles with sharp rocks than soft rubber tires. Bob made the switch to horses, and it made all the difference.

The second is fundamentally better writing - it flows where the first one fails to do so. This is because both paragraphs in the first example can do without each other - they are both whole and complete without each other’s context. They don’t need each other, which means on a fundamental level they aren’t interacting with each other, which means that it’s impossible for them to create a good reading flow.

Here’s a good example of paragraph flow from Freddie DeBoer:

Inevitably, what gets lost is the notion that music has any inherent quality at all. As I said at the time, the problem with Liz Phair’s self-titled album - that the music is utter dogshit that causes the listener to question their existing affection for her earlier work - can’t be fixed through reference to the place of women in serious music discussion in 2003. Because it’s a dreadful album. And writing a freshman Women’s Studies paper about it rather than a review of it as a collection of music is in fact the biggest disrespect of all.

It’s for this reason that I find Larson’s criticism of the reasons that some might like Måneskin to be hypocritical and lacking in self-knowledge; he’s writing in the temple of treating music as a badge for identifying the kind of person you are while complaining that other people are doing the same thing.

The second paragraph can’t live without the first. Without the first paragraph, it makes no sense, which also means that the paragraphs are fundamentally dependent on each other - Freddie couldn’t have written that paragraph transition without having a working understanding of what he was trying to say and the general path he wanted to take to get there.

When someone reads Freddie’s article (what article? you can’t know without the last paragraph, right?), they are in a steady current that pulls them from example to example - by the time they reach the conclusion, they’ve been feeling the direction of that flow for a while and are anticipating the conclusion. It’s good writing.

Now, say you want that good writing (oh, I remember “good writing” as a concept introduced in the last paragraph, I see where he’s going), and you are working on a piece and want to integrate this kind of paragraph transition handshaking into it. Your first temptation is going to be to use one of a few cheater tools to accomplish this by shoe-horning your pre-existing sentence-to-sentence flow mastery over paragraph-to-paragraph needs.

For example, let’s return to the riveting tale of Bob’s CarHorse:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go.

However, horses eat grass and handle difficult terrain as well or better than most motorized vehicles. They have iron shoes that win fights against rocks. Bob switched to horses, and it made all the difference.

That “however” transition works, and it’s better than our first “broken” version of this story. It introduces some flow. But it’s fundamentally a sentence-to-sentence tool, like the “but” at the head of this one. Besides being a bit overlong, you will notice that the new passage works just as well as a single paragraph as it does two:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go. However, horses eat grass and handle difficult terrain as well or better than most motorized vehicles. They have iron shoes that win fights against rocks. Bob switched to horses, and it made all the difference.

Writing rules being guidelines, I want to shoot straight with you and admit that both of the last two examples aren’t exactly broken; they work. The first of the last two even works well enough that some people might prefer it to the first “fixed” version I showed you - it has a certain spareness to it that reads just fine and might suit certain voices.

—>

So what am I up to? What I’m actually doing here is trying to get you to notice this interdependence a bit more than you have before. Some paragraphs don’t and shouldn’t handshake - you will try to get them to do it and they will fight back until you realize that you’ve hit an exception.

—>

In that situation, you have full permission to ignore me. I want you to have that flexibility. But if you’ve never thought about this before, go back and look at previous writing you’ve done. I’ll all but guarantee you it either doesn’t flow as well as you’d like, or that “however” occurs dozens of times an article.

Thinking about this kind of thing primes you to notice that and build better and better-thought-out paragraphs that more naturally work with each other to make a cohesive whole that your reader can follow.

That’s it for now! If you’ve found this article, thanks - it’s good to know you check even when you don’t get emails. I’m welcoming feedback on the idea of the “hidden article”, so if you particularly like it or don’t like it let me know in the comments.

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People who are interested in this specific topic (i.e start-up world stuff, growth) might do well to go check out Srivatsan Venkatesan’s just-launched growth blog here. I’m probably not going to talk about this kind of stuff very often, Srivatsan presumably will, and he knows more about it than I do.

When a person plans a start-up, they do a certain amount of wishful thinking; If consumer uptake of product X proceeds at rate Y, they will be able to get more funding, further accelerate growth, and make hundreds of millions of dollars. This vast wealth then allows them a 40-square-foot Bay Area room to live in, complete with a reasonable 60k salary for a person who busses in from beyond Oakland to powerwash the hobo-poop from their door.

The cruel rug-pull comes not in product-market fit or technical feasibility but from a more banal and overlooked direction. To build a software product, it turns out you need engineers, and our hypothetical startup guy eventually gets slapped in the face with the reality that hiring an engineer is a trick that most people can’t pull off.

In a complex way, this is because software engineers make a lot of money. If you are trying to hire money-motivated engineers, this is a problem simply because you probably can’t consistently outbid Google, Uber and the other big boys - they have a huge appetite for talent and are (almost) always hiring at (almost always) higher rates than you are likely to be able to afford/want to pay.

Counterintuitively, It’s also a problem if you are trying to hire an engineer who makes so much money that he isn’t money motivated - say a 22-year-old kid with no significant expenses beyond rent who makes low-six-figures money fresh out of college with every expectation of moving to low-mid sixes in the next five years. When this kid asks you why he should work at your company, he isn’t thinking about money; he already has more of that than he can spend.

This is where people doing employee value prop work enter the picture. If you want to hire that money-motivated engineer, you need someone making the case that your job opening offers him a kind of eventual income potential that he won’t get at a Google. If you want to hire a young person who already makes more money than he needs and knows it, you have to be willing to talk to him about the things he does care about.

I’ve done some employee value prop work - it’s part of my day job, and one of the parts I actually enjoy. I’ve talked to tons of applicants and I hang out with tech people, and I’ve learned a lot about how people talk about their companies, how potential employees hear that kind of communication, and how companies hire.

There’s a “liar’s version” of everything you want to say

Silicon Valley tech-job job descriptions go through cycles and different things go in and out of vogue. In the past, these trends have encompassed anything from nap rooms in the office to razor-scooter riding to free snacks to eat while you get company-sponsored guided meditation sessions. In the bay area, this stuff catches on quickly; if people hear that a company managed to hire a top-shelf engineer by offering in-house shoe accessories, a week later every office in the entire bay area will have free designer shoelace stands in the break room.

One more recent and far-reaching example of these trends was unlimited time off, the general idea being that you’d be more likely to hire an engineer if he knew he could intersperse his 115-hour two-week sprints with enough vacation time that he wouldn’t have a stress-related psychotic break at the ripe old age of 24.

This is now slowly falling out of favor, mostly because it’s stopped working; having unlimited time off used to be a big bump to recruiting efforts, and now it barely makes a dent. Part of the reason for that is that it’s much less rare to see it now - people tune it out. But a bigger part is that for every company that offered unlimited time off in an honest way, there was another company lying about it.

The dark side of unlimited paid time off is that it’s only as good as your ability to actually use it, and a lot of companies intentionally or unintentionally just aren’t set up to let people take significant amounts of time off. So Bob goes to his boss and mentions he’d like to use a couple weeks of his time off, and gets something like this:

I mean, yeah, you have unlimited time off. But that’s built around your ability to keep up with your workload, and I think we both know that you are attached to too many projects that need your input to be out of office for that long right now.

Sometimes this is true both in fact and in sentiment, and Bob can take the time off later. But there’s an awful lot of Bobs who face down the end of every work-year knowing they took less than two weeks time off, and in a strict “takes vacations” sense have a worse job than a janitor. In other companies, they might be paid for accrued but unused vacation time, but unlimited time off doesn’t accrue; there is no number the less lucky Bobs can point to as a quantified debt that needs to be repaid.

Applicants get wise to this kind of thing. Are you representing that you have a can-do, fast-moving culture? Everyone who applies knows that’s sometimes code for “We work you until you literally die”. Do you have a culture of personal ownership of projects leading to personally owned impact and acclaim? People know that sometimes means “we leave you on your own without resources to perhaps drown”.

The takeaway here is that people are right to be cautious, even if your particular version of these things is genuine and beneficial. If you want your perks to draw people in, you have to somehow work around that caution and convince them that what you offer is the “good universe” version - the one they actually benefit from. This takes us to the next section:

Liabilities are the next big thing

In accounting, a liability is (approximately, leave me alone accountants) a debt that needs to be repaid in the future. In accounting, you have to keep track of these; if you issue a financial report, you generally have to acknowledge them. If the debts are called, you have to pay them back. They are a solid, acknowledged obligation of sorts.

With that (probably inaccurate, don’t email me, accountants) definition in mind, consider the following variation on unlimited time off, which I’ve simulated based on several job ads I’ve seen:

Our company offers unlimited time off, and we consider it important that you actually use it. We have a promise and expectation that you take a minimum of four weeks off a year - if you look like you aren’t going to, expect your manager to force the issue.

Right now, this is the believable version of unlimited time off - it’s the one people suspect is going to actually result in them working in a culture where taking time off isn’t a big, difficult ordeal. Now consider this description of a fragment of company culture:

We are looking for someone who exercises real ownership over their projects and can work independently to bring about quantifiable results. But we don’t expect you to do that without help - you aren’t expected to bear the blame if your project doesn’t move forward as the result of a lack of resources, help, or because roadblocks other people put up in your way.

Our pledge to you is that we create the kind of environment where you have the freedom to do your work in the way that makes the most sense as well as the help you need to bring your projects home. Keep notes. If you find you can’t work effectively in our environment, tell us so we can fix it.

What both these things have in common is company-held liability. They have concrete bits employees can point to if they need to show that promises aren’t being kept, worded in ways difficult for the company to weasel out of with precise-wording games when it’s their turn to be held to account.

Not every company is willing to level the playing field like this, but if you aren’t prepared to put some skin in the game here, don’t be surprised when people accurately interpret that as a losing situation for them and fail to apply as a result. There’s an increasing amount of places that are adopting this already; it’s not like the applicant won’t have choices.

A certain amount of people don’t give two shits about your company mission and that’s actually fine

I had a conversation with a chief-of-staff type person a while back which, when paraphrased to protect the innocent, resulted in the following story:

I wanted to hire the guy, but as part of my conversation with him I had to mention that he shouldn’t bring up salary at all until the later stages of the application. I told him to talk about it with me, but not with anyone else he spoke to until he was almost to the offer-letter stage.

Both the applicant and me were from backgrounds where we understood that good pay was both important and sometimes failed to materialize at the end of application processes. Everyone else in the company knew that on some level, but had bought into a “our mission is important and we want mission-based-buy-in” narrative as well, and saw people asking about money as an indication they wouldn’t go on to do good work.

Some car dealerships take your ID away from you as soon as they can - they say they can’t let you on the lot to see cars without some level of collateral, or some other rationale why it’s reasonable. They need those rationales to distract you from the real reason they want your ID: You won’t be able to leave without it, and it’s much easier to make you wait around when leaving means asking for it and having to convince a trained salesman to go get it for you. The longer you wait, the more committed you are to the process - whether you like it or not.

You know who knows about this trick, even if they never experienced the car version of it? Pretty much every person who has ever looked for a job in the US. And they are so very, very sick of it.

The people who are doing the whole “we want mission commitment, so we don’t talk about pay” thing can be broadly split into two groups: those who really don’t get that people care about how much money they make, and people who fully know that but are actively exploiting is a disparity in power to push people into a disadvantageous position. Applicants who have been around the block a few times are going to assume you are the latter because it’s safer for them, and probably true anyway.

Given the justified doubt most applicants hold about why you are obscuring important information, a decision to obscure pay levels when there is a choice to reveal them (sometimes there isn’t, more on this later) is often actively dumb. A company is usually looking to hire someone competent; they want a person who thinks about things deeply and turns those thoughts into efficacy. That kind of person is incredibly likely to know the value of both their work and their time and is surprisingly often willing to say “oh, I just won’t apply then” when it seems like you are wasting both.

I’m not entirely without sympathy here. It’s actively hard to tell how good some types of workers are before you have a couple of conversations with them, which means that in jobs that have a lot of pay variance based on competence (like engineers), it’s hard to pin down an exact amount you might want to pay them.

The solution here is to publish pay ranges and make that explicit - let people know how you classify your engineers based on skill, and give them an idea how much you pay in each range so they at least have a ballpark. If you don’t know how to do that, figure it out.

But for the love of good, please stop pretending like people shouldn’t care about money - they should, and for the exact same reason you wouldn’t accept it if they revealed they didn’t want to work very hard. I know some of you are saying something like “But our mission!” here, but stop; it’s bullshit. You are an employer. You are asking someone to do work. Tell them what you are willing to pay for it.

The man who figures out the false negative problem will rule the world

Dan Luu (who is a surprisingly nice guy who thinks about stuff really hard) sometimes talks about the dangers of false negatives in hiring processes:

I can’t find his better Tweets explaining it, but the basic concept goes like this: Every hire you make has a chance of being a false positive - i.e. someone bad who causes some level of damage who you eventually have to fire. When this happens, it’s obvious; they do bad work or cause workforce morale problems in some way, and you get rid of them. Companies are used to this and have ways of dealing with it.

False negatives are much more subtle. A false negative is an applicant who you should have hired, but didn’t. Maybe they flubbed the living hell out of an important question despite knowing the answer to it, or were having a bad day when you interviewed them. Maybe it’s something more insidious, like not hiring a person because they are honest about pay demands, like I mentioned above.

When that happens, a company misses out on benefit, even if they never realize that’s the case. They are now forever weaker and slower than they should have been, but in a way that’s invisible to them; from their viewpoint, there was just some guy who they interviewed who didn’t make it, and that happens about ten times a week.

This can also happen surprisingly early in a process, like when a hiring manager says “Well, my experience is that we are just better off without people who would have a problem with X; if people aren’t applying because the job description says X, then I’m glad - that’s just self-filtering.”. In this case, the false negative is even more invisible - not only did the good worker not end up getting hired, but the company managed to not give themselves a chance to make that decision at all.

Not only does this weaken companies, but it makes every aspect of recruiting more expensive. Do you normally have to interview 20 people to hire one? A false negative rate of 5% is robbing you of an extra employee you could have had for “free” every time you run that 20-interview cycle. Are you losing out on, say, $100,000 a month’s worth of progress because you are understaffed? A high false negative rate is making that worse.

So why not solve this? It’s partially because all the risks are real and all the solutions are hard. New hires take a lot of manager time to get situated, so managers are reluctant to approve hires if they aren’t extra-super-sure, which increases the false negative rate. Some companies are overly-afraid of overhiring and are afraid of firing without an awful lot of just cause.

These visible, obvious downsides are potentially serious things that people really want to avoid. When you go to explain to a hiring manager that they are being too picky, they justifiably point out that you are asking them to be less careful, then point at that big list of real risks, and the conversation stalls.

If you want to counter that, you need solutions, but what are they? You would need to start by quantifying false negative rates and identifying individual false-negative applicants so you could adjust processes to avoid those mistakes, but how do you do that? Yeah, Bob might have ended up in a good position at a better/bigger more desirable company than yours after you rejected him, but that doesn’t tell you a lot about how he’s doing there or how he would have done in your presumably different working environment. Most publically observable direct indicators you can think of are like that - there isn’t enough context to draw real data from.

So you need probably need indirect indicators, like doing a ton of surveys over a long period of time that you can then analyze against direct indicators like longevity at new companies and pay increases over time. But how do you get rejected applicants to fill out those surveys?

At some point, someone smarter than me is going to figure out this problem in a way that lets people improve their false negative rates a few percentage points, productize it, and make enough money to buy the statue of liberty. For now, though, consider this:

1. I caution you not to ignore the possibility you are rejecting people for counter-productive reasons; it’s easy to overlook, but it’s probably the biggest unaddressed problem in hiring.

2. The people you are trying to hire care about your false negative rate. Right or wrong, they wouldn’t usually apply to your company if they didn’t think they could do good work there, good candidates included. The more you show you’ve thought about this problem and take action to protect them from it, the more confident any particular individual is going to be that applying with you isn’t a waste of time.

3. If you have steps that are likely to cause false negatives but that you feel you can’t get rid of, front-load them in the hiring process. If you are going to prioritize false-positive protectiveness over false-negative minimalization, then the least you can do is get it out of the way in the phone screener and not a month into the conversation.
   
   Once you’ve figured out how to do this, tell people you do it - tell them the steps you’ve taken that show you value their time.

Like I said at the top, I’m aware this isn’t the most interesting article in the world for most people. And I don’t only mean “it’s boring for people who aren’t involved in hiring”. I suspect most people who are in hiring find it boring as well, or I wouldn’t see so many company job pages that treat compensation as an afterthought, or that don’t take as much as a paragraph to describe company hiring processes.

I had a conversation with a consultant once who had done some work quantifying what benefit well-funded startups was attributable to a “good hire” over the course if their first year, and his eventual estimate was something like $50,000-$100,000. At the same time, I’ve talked to a friend before about offering a service that goes to a new company, helps them work out the kind of internal culture they want and are willing to commit to, and then helps them communicate that and other aspects of their company to applicants in a reasonably comprehensive way. For us to do this well, we’d probably have to charge about $50,000-$150,000 per job, and get 5-10 jobs a year doing it.

We’ve never done this. Could we make a tool for companies that would let them get an extra needed hire a year? Yup. we just aren’t sure enough that we could get that much work. Despite the abundance of companies that have trouble hiring good people, there just aren’t that many who care about it enough to respect the people they are trying to hire and give them a full picture of who they are and what they want to do.

If you are a hirer, this is worth thinking about. It’s not just a matter of efficacy (although that’s in play here). It’s also oddly a sort of moral thing. I don’t think you can read an article like this without getting a sense that I’m sort of sour grapes about the whole subject; that’s an accurate impression because I’ve been burned by incomplete or dishonest company communications so many times that now I do work to try to stop it from happening to others.

You probably don’t want to be the kind of person who misses out on good applications or makes the application harder on people than it needs to be, but avoiding both of those negatives takes effort. Do the work.

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It’s hard to do off-topic comments in articles that are specifically about something. If you want to ask me something or talk about something I don’t normally talk about, feel free to do so in the comments below.

Plugs

I have stated this before, but I will literally plug anyone at any time for almost anything. There’s a few exceptions (I won’t plug things that are actively working against my religion or are aimed at hurting hurting me in some way without a lot of counterbalance) but otherwise I’m pretty wide open for this.

This is something I wish was more common - writers need some initial mass of subscribers to get the motivation to keep going long-term, and that’s a very hard and luck-based thing to do. If any of these fit into the kinds of genres you read, subscribe to them - it’s a chance to have an outsized effect on some writer, somewhere.

Nicomachean Exhortations

A blog that is exactly what it says on the label - it’s deep-dive articles on Nicomachean philosophy. If you are curious as to what that is and want me to explain it, too bad - I’d do a real shitty job at it and this blog does a good one. Just go there.

Nicomachean Exhortations

How to live well from the greatest philosopher of all time

By Shadow Rebbe

The Presence of Everything

This is a blog that centers around various kinds of spirituality and the implications thereof. I like it because it pushes back on general new-atheism (and thus is aligned with me) but dislike it because it’s not specifically Christian (and thus sort of counter to what I want in a different direction).

The Presence of Everything

Better stories for a better world

By Carlos

Dadsfordads

This blog (link in headline, and here) is a non-Substacker who found me through alternate means. It’s aimed at helping train dads into being better, more committed fathers, which I’m into. It’s also written from a similar perspective to mine (Christian, more-or-less conservative) although the author, paraphrased, said something like this:

I’m Christian and conservative, but the blog is specifically aimed at being welcoming to people who aren’t. There’s no profit for anyone in saying “oh, I’m writing something specifically to exclude a lot of people who could also benefit from it.

If you need credentials, said guy is to my knowledge an exceptionally good Dad; as a so-so dad, I appreciate his hustle.

Data Secrets Lox

DSL is a forum I use that came out of the SlateStarCodex NYT-hit-piece diaspora. It’s rationalist-lite discussion of various topics. Like Aslan, I am also there but under a different name, and also like Aslan I’m convinced you can where’s-waldo find me there if you look hard enough for someone who shares my characteristics.

This is the only discussion forum I like enough to actually post in.

Yakread

Jacob, who makes Yakread, is a longstanding internet friend. He made The Sample, which I’ve talked about before and like.

I am not smart enough this early in the day to be like “here’s how Yakread works” but it’s something something learns from you as you read to give you better stuff to read something something. He has explained it to me several times, and it’s gone now.

Normally I’d be suspect of that but everything I’ve used that Jacob built manages to do learning-algo stuff in a way that actually gets me better stuff to read, so I’m into this.

Please note: Both the links to Jacob’s sites are cross-promotion links, which means that if you sign up for either thing through them he gives me advertising credit. Last time I did this, I got enough credit that I basically broke the system and learned to control the matrix, and then got to give him shit about that for months. I’d really, really like to do the same thing again.

The Discord Server

If you go out to my main page, there’s a link to my discord server, in which you can lose respect for me at previously unimagined rates. Things the discord server has:

1. Good folks

2. Lurkers, who might be good folks

3. Me talking about bass guitars and nobody caring

4. A place you can recommend articles

5. A blood arena in which people rip each other to shreds

6. Me asking you to proof-read my articles, which I’m bad at

7. Pictures of my pets, and sometimes pictures that don’t focus on but still contain images of my unusually small hands

8. Cassander being an arch-capitalist

9. Nick making fun for me for trying to spell the name of the philosopher Neitche without looking it up first

I keep thinking I’m going to stop posting about the server, but every time I do it we get a few more people who just missed other times I’ve talked about it. It’s important to me purely because I want people to be able to have access to me if they need it for any reason - whether that’s critiques, friendship, advice, or just a generic need to know more about vintage cast iron pans.

Updates/Housekeeping

Guest Spots

I’m going to be trying to do more podcast appearances/guest spots here and there moving forward. Most of you saw the crosspost between me and Karlstack; it should mostly look like that. If there’s some reason I shouldn’t do this, you should tell me now.

Podcasts

I really, really like doing podcasts and want to do more of them. I’ve managed to stumble into a few opportunities like this, but I have an unlimited appetite for more.

The difficulty with this is that the best way to never go on a podcast is to ask the person who runs it to interview you - it comes off as needy, or something. So if you have a podcast you listen to that you want me on, you should mention it to the podcaster themselves - if I try to do it, it won’t work.

Non-Newsletter Articles

If I make too many posts, people unsubscribe. I’ve usually interpreted this in a way that makes me do 3-4 posts a month, but no more than that; I also try to keep various posts in long-form article format.

Sometimes I want to do stuff that isn’t that, like “how-to” stuff, or rehashes of things I’ve written before documenting changes in how I think about it now. My current plan is to post these, but not send them out as newsletters.

From your end, that means you wouldn’t be bugged unless you went looking for these, but also means you’d have to periodically go looking for them and would probably miss some. I’m fine with that, but let me know if that’s a bad idea for any reason.

Ask me to plug your stuff

You can always ask me to plug your stuff, regardless of what it is. There’s a very narrow band of stuff I say no to, but for the most part I try to do this as a service; don’t worry about things like “is this good enough” or “is this in his genre”. I’m specifically trying to help you get going; please take advantage of my medium-sized audience to make that happen.

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Theoretically, some people do what they do out of pure, undiluted love of excellence. They get up every day and grind their skills ever finer, like coffee grounds they never intend to brew. They put the output of their genius in a box and keep it as a hidden testimony to the pursuit of art, never to be seen by any but the eyes of providence.

You aren’t really supposed to talk about this, but most people aren’t like that. Some large perhaps-a-majority proportion of people who create are looking for some sort of payout in the form of various forms of legitimacy - if they write for X, they are now the sort of person who can write for X. Some people are looking for money. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about the art/craft parts of the pursuit (they usually still do), but it does mean that there’s an awful lot of people out there looking for places to get their work out in front of people in a way that “pays out”.

In 2010-2017 or thereabouts, the publication doing the best job of pitching themselves to writers as a place to put your goods on display was Cracked.com, a website phoenix rising from the ashes of an old print MAD magazine competitor (one which had met its unceremonious end through an actual literal anthrax attempt - really!). Cracked had invested heavily in the list-based article “listicle” format, and links to their work were waiting around every internet corner, brandishing endless bathroom-break optimized pages promising to tell you five crazy things you didn’t know about a mundane thing X.

At Cracked, a young writer was told, you could access potentially millions of views on a single article. You’d join a list of people from which several successful, known names had sprung. You’d also be paid! Real money! They don’t pay real money to people who aren’t real writers!

And yet it was the worst. Now, fair warning: I’m among some of the most negative-on-Cracked people to have ever got past the lowest tier of their internal writer ecosystem. There’s a lot of people who will tell you a different-sounding story. But for what it’s worth, here’s what I saw there.

The Googler-as-Writer Trap

To write an article at Cracked, a beginner writer had to follow a relatively simple roadmap:

1. Gain access to the writer’s forums. Depending on the era, there were a few relatively minimal steps to doing this, usually among the types of tasks you’d expect from a place trying to keep spammers out of its workspace.

2. Pitch an article in a listicle format. Again, listicles are those “10 surprising things you might not have known about Kate Moss” formats you see pop up on Twitter even today. Beginner writers were entirely limited to this format, so this was the first place writers would start to filter themselves out; many wanted to join to do the more individual kind of work the higher-tier columnists did, and this was strictly disallowed.

3. Find sourced examples. This step generally occurred concurrently with #2; you were expected to bring a few interesting examples of potential list items to the table. These examples would be approved piece-meal by the forum mods/editors, and you were expected to have a minimum of five examples before an article would be sent up the ladder for editorial review.

4. Get told no by the editors. When articles were sent up the ladder for final review, they would sometimes make it through that review unchanged, but as a general rule they would be sent back for more sourcing. At this point, I want you to note that potential writers have still to write a single word.

5. Reiterate until the article is approved for writing.

6. Write a draft of the article.

7. The article is published with your byline - great kudos are now yours.

The observant might have already noticed this, but take a look at how short that “write the article” section of the roadmap is compared to the Googling-and-sourcing tasks. That is because of a massive negative that Cracked usually advertised as a positive: Every article with sufficient sources and an approved format would be edited/rewritten into a Cracked-voice compliant form by either a hand-selected veteran forum member or (more usually) a paid member of the actual Cracked.com staff.

Superficially, this aspect of the process looked great. A person could come to the table with exactly zero developed writing skills, still get something published, still get paid, and be able to see how a better, more advanced writer would have approached the same topic. To be fair, there is some value there; every now and again a comparable-or-better writer will handle a topic I’ve also done work on, and it’s usually very instructive.

In actual practice, this ended up being bad for most of the people who wrote there. At the time I was working in that space, one of the perpetual top producers of articles was pretty well known to not be able to write at all, and he never improved; whether or not he was capable of it, he had no Cracked-provided motivation to do so. His stuff would get published either way.

The trap here, such as it was, was that Cracked had no shortage of actual, salaried staff capable of creating the half-dozen or so pieces of content they needed every day; if all they needed was word count, they could handle it on their own. so long as those people had a ready, eternal supply of topics to write about.

What they didn’t have (and couldn’t have) was a stable of people with the same amount of talent who could come up with fresh ideas every day and who were willing to devote the massive amount of research time each article required. So they took a page out of the book of their E-How-and-Livestrong-owning Demand Media parent company’s book and outsourced that bit to the masses.

The important bit of the process - the part that got you paid - was the research bit. You could have low-level ESL English skills and still “write” for Cracked, and people did. They got bylines like everyone else, and got paid the same, but were at their foundation a corps of researchers-not-writers.

All of this was fine until it was generally known.

“The Applebees of Writing”

Within the hierarchy of the outsourced writing masses of Cracked, the pecking order looked something like this:

1. Contributors. These were the first-tier disposables of the process I described above, and at any given time there were thousands of them.

2. Forum mods. Forum mods were just what they sounded like - people who kept the writer forums clean and churning by doing mechanical moderation tasks. They generally were folks that had a decent enough grasp of what Cracked was looking for in content proposals to do a first-pass filter of the clearly bad stuff. They were not paid for this outside of compensation in the form of a bit of shoulder-rubbing with the higher-ups and a small amount of preferential consideration of their own submissions.

3. Freelance editors. Freelance editors were a latter-day addition to the ranks of Cracked and were essentially people who had written close-enough first drafts enough time to be recognized as first-pass editors. They got regular freelance work doing this, essentially taking more low-level tasks off the plate of Cracked’s actual salaried staff.1

At some point, it became known that one of the longstanding tier 2 moderators was being promoted to tier 3. This was, as I recall, a very nice person; she was sincere, polite, and worked hard. And this was a big deal for her; she had worked hard, and was now at the highest position one could rise to before being promoted to actual staff (or not being promoted; more on this later).

The way the story circulated, she went to one of her close friends (also a writer) and told her about this so she could share in her joy. The friend said, in as close of a quote as I can remember, something like “Oh, honey, that’s great for you. But isn’t Cracked sort of the Applebees of writing?”2

In the early days of Cracked, before hirers became familiar with how they did business, stories like this (from the link in the introduction) were at least somewhat known, if not common:

Sometime in 2009, as a result of my work at Cracked I landed a job doing freelance writing for a pair of music and movie sites. Later I was hired to run another comedy site, and from there I was offered a job writing for a new site owned by Playboy. So to summarize, less than four years after signing up to write for Cracked, I quit my day job to work full time for Playboy. I know what you're wondering, and the answer is yes, I did get to go to the Playboy Mansion. Only once, though. And I had to pay for the flight myself. But still, if I had never responded to that call for writers back in 2007, I never would have even been invited. And I most certainly wouldn't be where I am right now.

When Playboy sold off their digital business to an international porn conglomerate, I saw it as a good time to explore my options. As luck would have it, Cracked was hiring. After a few telephone chats, I agreed to come on board as a full-time editor (hello again, health insurance!) at Cracked.com in December 2011. Eventually, I left South Dakota, and after stops in New York and San Francisco, I moved to Los Angeles to work from the Cracked offices. You can see the ocean from the room where we have our editorial meetings. Things are a lot better for me now than they were on that brutally cold Thanksgiving Day in South Dakota in 2007.

But note that he’s talking about 2009 - he was an early Cracked contributor, one who got in before Cracked’s system was nearly as codified and stiff. Even after Cracked put the whole process on no-skill-needed rails, they never stopped making promises like this:

Get all the degrees you want, but nothing is going to look better to a prospective writing employer than verifiable proof that your words are capable of entertaining a lot of people.

Non-Cracked writing employers got wise all the same; after a while the only places a Cracked reference worked particularly well were other, lesser listicle producers/clickbait makers. To be fair, this wasn’t an absolute effect - not everyone would have been intimately familiar with Cracked’s researcher-as-writer formula, and “I have written somewhere” was still very much better than nothing.

Did Wokeness Kill Cracked?

There is, as you are probably aware, a media property called Pokémon. You are a little less likely to be aware of this, but it’s the most successful media franchise in existence. Kids love it. Adults love it. It’s a big thing, and it’s been a big thing since Kerry Strugg brought home the Olympic gold in a stunning display of gymnastics bravery unmatched through history or since.

Cracked, for some reason, would not allow people to write about it. During my time there, I saw dozens of workable Pokémon related pitches; the vast majority of them were rejected because “Nobody on staff likes Pokémon, or understands it very well”. Newbies would come in, make the entirely justified assumption that it was an underserved topic that would generate a bunch of traffic, then run up against that wall; without some other kind of leverage, it was an unassailable and clearly counterproductive rule that stayed in place for literal years.

Now, to be very clear: This isn’t a big deal to me, personally. I never pitched a Pokémon article and I’m not bitter about this on an individual sour grapes level. I bring it up to illustrate a single point: Cracked was completely OK with quashing articles they didn’t like much, audience-and-traffic be damned.

This in turn mattered because if there was one thing Cracked hated more than Pokémon, it was anything to the right of a very conventional California-left worldview. This panned out weird in a lot of ways:

1. If you haven’t figured it out from the rest of the article, the number of people who Cracked ever promoted from the inside was a rounding error on zero. They very much preferred to bring in talent from the outside. There were thousands of contributors, perhaps a dozen mods, and a few freelance editors. In my couple-of-years-there experience, I think something like two people got promoted to staff; the filter was just too powerful and the staff too small to offer more.
   
   But it was still generally known that if you wanted so much as a chance at breathing that rarified air, you needed to be politically in line with staff. This might be a coincidence (anything might)m but the people who did get promoted to staff were vocally left and made sure that showed in their work. The most conservative person on staff was David Wong, and I once saw him uphold a ban on someone from the forums for questioning whether an off-hand mention of Ron Paul was enough to write a celebrity off as garbage.
   
   I don’t think this is particularly surprising in a California-based company of comedians, but it also wasn’t exactly mentioned in the big cattle calls for new writers - roughly half of the people who showed up for those were getting handed type-B fame scratchers cards with “Fuck you, Nazi!” written under the foil. Nothing about this should have been a shock, but there were still almost certainly some people working hard to climb the ladder who never knew it was de-facto banned for non-Clinton voters.

2. Sourcing articles was really weird, because the average intellectual firepower wielded by a Cracked staffer was born and died in “I read it in the NYT” territory. So, for instance: say you wanted to write an article about things newspapers got wrong, and one of those newspapers was big and left-leaning. You’d immediately run into a pretty hard wall of dealing with a person who had never seriously considered that a respected source could possibly be wrong, even if contradicted by the primary source the article was reporting on.

   
   The flip side of this was that any site that wasn’t a known-left publication was effectively banned for use, at least in the case of articles that covered any sort of politics. Since sources were required, this amounted to a soft, only-sometimes-circumventable ban on disagreeing with the left on anything important.3

3. It affected content in a pretty big way. As the staff got less and less “young artists trying to make it” and more and more “old jaded artists who feel entitled to do real art that really matters”, they became more and more heavy-handed about what was and wasn’t politically aligned enough to be funny. And fans noticed; posts like this were everywhere.

This sort of general “don’t even try if you aren’t consistent with our views” environment was nowhere as apparent as it was in the unspoken-rule restrictions on Cracked’s “I am a” personal experience articles.

These IAMA articles were created under the heavy influence of Robert Evans, who now makes a living screaming about how Nazis are going to eat the pacific northwest and documenting how great Antifa is, or something; in a left-of-center group of California creatives, he was visibly the farthest left by a fair margin. This post isn’t a great authoritative source, but it reinforces my impression there was a subset of life experiences that were deemed both interesting enough to be readable AND left-friendly enough to satisfy the Staff; anything else got axed.

To this day, if you find a person from Cracked’s staff talking about #3, they will swear up and down that the site never drifted significantly leftward or that the drift, if it did exist, could have ever penalized someone for having a divergent viewpoint. To be fair, this is a pretty subjective subject; it’s hard to pin down solid, provable truths in this kind of conversation.

What was less in question was that something like a third of Cracked’s audience felt constantly alienated by Cracked’s content. The natural question that flows from that is “So is that why Cracked imploded and suddenly dropped off everyone’s radar?”. It’s a reasonable question. Media websites tend to live and die by traffic, and any actions taken to reduce that traffic make sense as possible causes of death to consider during any website’s postmortem.

As much as I’d like to say yes, the answer is probably no. At its height, Cracked had millions and millions of uniques a month; even if they successfully alienated every single conservative, the effect would have been more in the “scaling back staff” realm of things than the “our site suddenly fails forever and ever, becoming a shadow of its former self”.

I don’t personally think that moving Leftward was the cause of their fall - hell, pandering to one’s biggest audience components might have even helped them delay it. But just because something isn’t a cause doesn’t mean it’s not illustrative of the environment that caused the fall, and so I believe it is here.

So what can cause a comedy site to shift farther and farther to the left that also causes it to fail?

(nearly) Everyone got spoiled

Here’s an old story:

A young actor works his whole life honing his craft, hoping against the odds that he is noticed among the masses and allowed to be successful - that he can appear in movies, become rich, and be acknowledged as famous. Against all odds, this happens; he’s joined an elite few and is the envy of millions of aspirants in his craft.

A year later, he does an interview explaining that he’s kind of over the whole actor thing and is ready to direct.

Everyone working at Cracked during the golden age was envied in the way that actor was - every single contributor in that forum wanted to hang out with them, and would have done just about anything to join them at “the top”, such as it was. But being envied doesn’t keep you from getting spoiled, it just convinces you that it’s OK when you do.

I can’t find it now, but there was once a really really bad video that came out, and I was discussing it with a higher-up in the editorial staff. They said (I’m getting this as close as I can) that the video was the result of a bunch of people forgetting they have fans - of being spoiled, and of making stuff purely for themselves. And a lot of senior-staff output went that way; they wrote fewer and fewer articles and made more and more videos that were outside the realm of what their fans wanted to see.

I don’t think that any of this was really a mortal sin; I can’t really look at a group of creatives and tell them they should have stopped pushing for bigger and better things. And it wasn’t like the output was that bad - they still made a bunch of really entertaining stuff. But then the whole world changed, for it was then that Facebook announced the Pivot to Video.

If you don’t know about the Pivot to Video, good - you probably have meaningful relationships. But for those that don’t know and didn’t click the link, it was essentially a period when Facebook announced, unbidden, that the future of the internet was entirely video and that non-video content would eventually do poorly on Facebook. It later proved to be false, but for a site like Cracked (which was heavily reliant on Facebook views, and increasingly dying of revenues lost to ad-blockers) it would have been a compelling threat to take seriously, one that would have justified big, big bets.

Cracked bet nearly everything on video. They geared up hard, spent a ton of money on increased production capacity, bet hard on a few series and were thus mostly ready for the Pivot to Video. And then, you know, it never happened. All the bets failed to pay out, and Cracked almost instantly sold to Scripps, who seemed to have little interest in Cracked beyond using them as a tax write-off in ways I don’t fully understand.

Can I say for sure that a less-spoiled staff4 that Wouldn’t have made huge bets on special effects and focused clever writing rather than special effects and demo-reel-friendly clips would have weathered the storm better? I can’t, but it sure seems like a possibility.

And Yet I Am Thankful

It’s really easy to be bitter about stuff, but I’m actually sort of glad in a lot of ways that Cracked wasn’t a great environment for me. You know who would have been miserable living in LA with a bunch of people who thought they were smart because they read a lot of Newsweek? This guy.

Even more than that, I have to acknowledge that even if they didn’t give me a place where I could write from ever-higher rungs on a clearly defined advancement ladder like they kind of implied I could, they did give me a place to write - I got to talk to a lot of young writers about what we were trying, and I got to have some interactions with people who were (then and now) more successful at what they did than I was/am.

And that’s, you know, that’s sort of how it is. If I was smart, I wouldn’t write at all - it’s a hard world, and one where success doesn’t always follow hard work. For every Cracked that does well for a while, there’s thousands of sites that wither and die. It’s easy to criticize choices they made after the fact and say I would have done things differently, but it’s also possible the fix was in no matter what they did; nobody wins king-of-the-hill forever except Mike Judge.

So I’m (mostly) thankful. I don’t think these people were perfect, and there’s some stuff I wish they didn’t do. But they gave a lot of people a place to write, and if nothing else also gave them a place to realize how hard of a world writing is, and that success there is mainly something you can’t rely on other people to provide.

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Then, in a touching end-of-film scene, the author learns the fairy wasn’t needed - the whining was inside of them, the entire time. They just needed to believe in themselves.

Without further ado and with no more adornment, I give you the 2022 statspost. May God have mercy on your souls.

Free Sub Growth

Conventional blog theory on how to grow a blog goes something like this:

1. Write a bunch of really good articles, or at least the best articles you can.

2. Try to write stuff that a bunch of people want to read, which is sort of distinct from 1. if you think about it long enough.

3. Balance 1-2 in a way that makes sure you won’t lose respectability. Respectability is important! People don’t pay people they don’t respect, so don’t pander unless you can pander enough to make that your entire business model.

4. Once you’ve completed 1-3, try to get your stuff in front of tens of thousands of viewers. If you’ve done your job really really well, you will have a low-single-digit conversion to subscribers. Now you have some options:

5. Option 1: Withhold some amount of your output from people who don’t pay.

6. Option 2: Give people an option to pay, but don’t withhold any work and hope they pay for no particular reason - just from goodwill or something.

7. Option 3: Don’t give people an option to pay, but find some wealthy benefactor who pays for your work and who (hopefully) will not commit massive fraud and go to prison. Do not reflect on how often “will give tens of thousands of dollars to an OK writer on a whim” and “will commit massive fraud” overlap on Venn Diagrams.

8. Live the enviable life of an independent artist as portrayed in a Hallmark movie - buy a house in the woods, meet a person from a very different walk of life who teaches you the real meaning of creative output, etc.

This all implies, in a weird way, that free subscribers are the most important subscribers - they are upstream of everything else you want. Within their teeming masses hide paid subs, just waiting to make themselves known with sweet, sweet financial gains.

Sickening financial incentives aside, they are more important in a different way: If your work matters, they are the people it helps. The more people who read your stuff the more good you do, and free subs represent the vast bulk of words-read.

Thus I’m glad to say that this year has been good for subs:

At the end of the first year of writing, I had just under 1000 subs. Now I have 3296, which is, you know, nice. A math friend assures me this is technically exponential growth, which is the best kind of exponential growth. In addition to that, a certain amount of you dial in via RSS, which I can’t really track. Feedly says it’s at least 171 of you:

But there’s almost certainly more than that, given that Feedly isn’t the entire RSS market. So there’s about 3500 of you, or more! That’s good! I’m glad you are here and glad you put up with me.

Free Subscription Sources

Substack is really, really bad at telling me where subs come from. I’m not sure this is their fault, since everyone seems bad at this - I have Google Analytics tracking, and it’s not better. I have other tools, and they aren’t better. I sometimes randomly email people who just signed up to ask how they found me, and they are mostly (and justifiably) creeped out by this and don’t answer. It’s just hard to know where people are finding your writing, which I’ve come to accept.

That said, I do have some probably-broadly-correct guesses. If you take a look at my overall subscriber growth in the graph above, you will note that things start picking up in April, and then really kick into gear around September. The first is when Substack introduced its recommendation feature, which lets me recommend various blogs to you (and vice versa). This was the first time Substack did anything substantial to leverage the platform into small-creator reader growth, and it worked well.

September-ish is when ACX started recommending me. This was a very nice thing to do for a couple of reasons: the first is that Scott is really big compared to most Substack folks, which means he can send a lot of traffic, but also means that a certain amount of people categorize him as “more than a man” in a way that makes them take his recommendations more seriously. The second is that Scott is really trusted. This lends even more legitimacy to the recommendation, which makes even more people come over. It was, as they say, a good get.

Substack claims that I have about 1377 subs from that recommend (it’s probably higher since the errors here seem to trend towards omission), and of those, 888 are from Scott. Other big contributors include Karlstack, David’s Overthinking Everything, Samstack, Tom’s Curiosity Shop, and Parrhesia’s Newsletter.

Other big sources exist, but are much, much harder to track. A lot of you found me from me having various arguments with people - mostly I don’t know that’s how I got you. Some of you found me from placing in Scott’s book review contest - I mostly don’t know that’s how you came here. Ditto Hackernews folks. Ditto everywhere else.

If you can, I’d love to get some comments on this, especially if you came to the blog some way I haven’t mentioned. I want to cater to you to the extent I can without subverting my morals! I really do. But It’s hard to do that without knowing who you are. I’m especially interested in folks who are here for “I’m a member of group X, and you are an attempt to be outside my bubble” and “I’m a religious person who reads a lot, and you are one of those things I read” reasons.

Paid Subs

Talking about paid subs is icky - it’s important to me, not at all important to most of you, makes me seem money-motivated (which is especially normed against in tech/startup/programmer communities, which a lot of you live in), and tends to be boring. But I’m doing it anyway, because it’s important-ish to get the whole picture.

The way paid subs work on Substack is that they come in two forms: lump sum and monthly. Lump sum people are supposed to be paying for the whole year and getting a discount, but my prices are already as low as they can be, so they are more often people who are trying to give me a one-time gift of X dollars.1 For the most part, a year’s subscription obtained either way costs you about $60 and I get about $50 of that after Substack and Stripe take their (substantial) cuts.

As mentioned above, I have three main ways I can work within that model are to rope off some content for paid subscribers, to leave everything open (which is better for free sub growth and for maximizing total readers) and hope people pay anyway, or to not allow people to pay at all and hope some rich person funds me for some unknown reasons (or just be OK with not having a paid option). I have always done the “let people pay if they want, like a tip jar” model, which results in numbers like this:

That’s about a 2% conversion rate, which is fine (It’s always been surprising to me that people choose to pay at all) but also pretty low compared to some - I’ve seen 10% conversion rates out in the wild. I think several things are driving this:

1. I don’t do a great job of giving people reasons to pay. I’m pretty open about my financial straits being much better lately. If you look at last November compared to today, I’ve had 50% revenue growth during a time my readership tripled. But last November most people knew me from an article that was explicitly about me being poor - I think that made a lot of people feel bad for me and give (which, by the way, thank you for being nice in that way).

2. Substack is now pretty old, as such things go. A lot of people were excited about the “Here is a platform that works against free speech restrictions from group X” aspect of Substack at first and subscribed to a lot of stuff - you see less of that now. A lot of people are already paying for everything they want to pay for.

3. I’m not being particularly consistent in both the quality and quantity of my work. If I was better at getting articles up weekly, this number would probably be higher. If I was full-time and really managing the community/making more kinds of posts, even better.

So this is high enough in some senses - I’m happy about it - but could be higher if I did some of the stuff I’m supposed to do. Note that this isn’t a call for more of you to pay; I’m glad you are here, and it’s free on purpose. But hopefully, I’ll get a few things under control and be able to write a little more this year, which would make it make more sense for more people in a position to pay to choose to do so instead of understandably not relying on me as a consistent content production source.

Traffic

Traffic is distinct but connected to subs in a weird, highly visible way. Last year, my average “real” article (excluding weird stuff and stuff I didn’t mail out, but posted anyway) had 6469.05 views, a number that’s at least somewhat inflated by Substack double-counting viewers a bit. The number is further inflated by articles that did well elsewhere and brought in a ton of hits; last year’s top performer had 42922 hits, which juices the stats a bit.

If you take the five best-performing articles out of the running, that number drops to 3589. That’s y’all - subscribers who regularly tune in, plus direct shares to friends. And in 2022, those numbers grew somewhat; my last ten articles (omitting my very most recent, which is still gaining numbers) averaged 4812.6.

That view count didn’t keep up with subscriber growth, but I consider that natural - I’m losing and gaining subscribers all the time, and it makes sense that people who have subscribed to me longer think of me more as a core must-read and open emails as a result.

Traffic is impossible to track well. It just is. Sorry. If you want the broad strokes, it’s probably a lot like my subscriber sources summary above - most people find me one of a few ways.

Progress and Goals

Overall it’s been a good growth year. I haven’t shrunk, which is always a fear, and I’ve become much bigger judging by some-but-not-all metrics, which is good.

Earlier I mentioned that a friend had called the growth exponential, which is true-ish but also a pattern I don’t expect to continue unless something changes. Most of my growth this year has been based on recommendations; that’s great, but at best I’ll maintain linear growth if so.

My current goals, such as they are, are these:

1. Write more consistently. This is always a goal, and it’s made hard by having to fit a life around it. I had 37 “real” articles last year, meaning you missed out on 15 articles I should have written in addition to some extra content you got in lieu of that.

2. Find new ways to share my work. Recommendations have been big, and Hackernews has paid out a few times, but I continue to be bad at Twitter/Reddit and don’t have any other great ways to grow my audience outside of those three things.

3. Be better at engagement. I’m good at responding to comments, but terrible at making opportunities for people to chat/make friends/build community.

If you have good goals for me not listed here - let me know. I’m a good writer but I’m also fundamentally dumb in a lot of ways; advice is always appreciated.

I think my long-term goal is still to grow enough that I can do this full-time; I’m nowhere near that right now. To replace my current income, I’d have to do something like 25x my audience (or else increase paid conversion rate while still experiencing high-but-lesser growth) so I’m not expecting that to happen very soon.

You are helping just by being here and reading - that’s already more than I deserve a lot of weeks, and I’m thankful for it. The blog will remain free-with-tipjar for the foreseeable future, so don’t worry about that; I don’t expect the average person to pay, and I suspect there’s a lot of you for which paying would undercut some more important responsibility (family, friends, basic needs, etc.) and who I’d actively discourage from doing so if I knew.

If you feel inspired to help me along, I always appreciate shares to any audience that might like my stuff, especially if it’s an audience you suspect is outside of my normal reach. Otherwise, I’m glad you are here; I hope you continue to enjoy the blog, and happy new year!

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There’s a limited timeframe for writing an article on a topical subject, or at least there’s supposed to be. The general idea is that you want to get something out as quickly as you are able while still maintaining quality. If you get lucky, you might get to be one of the official articles people use to explain the issue to other people on Twitter, and thus get a zillion views, money, fame, and a big bump to your household-name levels.

I’m way past that timeline as relates to the whole Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF, so I don’t have to keep typing it out) fraud story. I got a little too into the holidays, sorry.

After my last podcast appearance, the feedback from some friends was that it was very nice, but they were also normal people with lives and didn’t necessarily know what I was talking about at all points. I’m taking that to heart; some of you probably don’t know much about this story. In that spirit, here are some bullet points:

1. Sam Bankman-Fried is/was a very rich guy who made his money by running a crypto exchange, which is kind of a platform where you can park your crypto and have it be used in various hard-to-explain investments to grow your principal.

2. SBF was at the very least expected not to take funds from that exchange and use them in a bunch of tricky/risky ways to prop up other businesses he owned or had close connections to. He did this anyway, and people noticed.

3. Once people noticed, there was a run on the bank itself - people withdrew their funds as quickly as possible. Many people lost some or all of their investments. The value of Crypto tanked. Everything went to shit in big, confusing ways which nonetheless hurt a lot of real people in a very real way.

This was all very crazy, but it was even more significant for a lot of my audience because of SBF’s involvement in the Effective Altruist movement. SBF was a major millions-and-millions of dollars funder of various EA causes, and was/is inextricably linked to the movement for most people in the know about both entities.

A lot of people don’t like the EAs for a lot of reasons, and as such this whole debacle represented an opportunity to count coup; for a lot of folks, it was proof of all their worst fears and validation of all their EA-induced willies.

I’m on record as having a sort of instinctual revulsion of the EA movement, so all this should be red meat for me. When people assert that EAs should feel bad about this, I should probably just feel great as a result and let it ride. I even did that for a while, but recently I’ve thought better of it; I think the EAs are probably getting somewhat rougher treatment here than they deserve.

With great frustration on my part, here’s a partial defense of the EA in the matter of the SBF debacle.

The Hoel-esque Take

Erik Hoel does a pretty good job writing what I feel is the winner of the well-explained, EAs-caused-this-and-should-feel-very-bad-indeed takes to come out of the SBF mess. I’m broadly responding to what I believe to be an amalgamation of the argument he makes there and others like it that I’ve heard - that EA philosophy made something like SBF inevitable, that it was destined to happen, and wholly attributable to EA in the sense that they are responsible for it.

I’m repeating that you should absolutely read his article, but I perceive Hoel’s and others’ arguments to revolve around a few specific ideas:

1. SBF genuinely subscribed to an act-utilitarian philosophy that is not uncommon or controversial in EA circles.

2. EA philosophy encouraged risk-taking in a way that caused and could have been expected to cause SBF to be irresponsible in the way he seems to have been.

3. The overall scope of EA involvement with SBF makes them partially or wholly responsible for SBF; he’s a product of their environment, and exists as a result of things they think and do.

Note that I’m responding to an amalgam here; not all the views in the article are Hoel’s and shouldn’t be taken as such.

On Taking Money

To my eye, the strongest/most strident form of EA/SBF criticism is that the EAs shouldn’t have taken his money at all and in doing so irreparably tainted the movement.

I sort of daydream about getting blog funding. The way these particular fantasies work is that someone (anyone, really) comes in and says something like this:

Hey, RC! I’ve just read through your entire archive, and I liked it a lot. I think you are doing some real good, and I’d like to fund that so you can write more. Here’s an amount of money that replaces your day-job income! Go and write! Take more naps!

I know it’s not incredibly likely that this will happen but I think about it a lot, to the point where there are variations on the theme; sometimes I win the lottery, while other times about 2500% more people voluntarily pay for the blog than do right now. But at no point in the fantasy do I ever say “Hey, wait - could you please prove in some firm way that you are a good guy who is not currently doing felonies?”

And it’s not just that I’m acknowledging here that I like money and that I’m lazy (both of these things are true); it’s that I’m not sure that anybody should be doing this, or that they could if they wanted to without crippling the ability of charities to raise funds in general. There’s no reliable, easy way to confirm that someone is a great guy who is never, ever going to do anything bad.

Any process I can think of that EAs might have pursued ends up looking something like this:

1. SBF shows up and offers you $2m to support your efforts to convert mosquitos into clean drinking water in Nicaragua.

2. You ask “Hey, are you a good guy who doesn’t do horrible felonies?”. He says he isn’t, that he’s a nice guy who gives to charity.

3. You do some Googling and find he’s some sort of Crypto guy who isn’t thought to be a mob boss or anything, and that he’s given a bunch of people money in a way that generally seems to be normal, if in greater numbers than usual.

4. You do some further Googling and find out there’s no way to tell if any particular crypto thing is a scam, but he runs an exchange that seems legitimate.

5. You… contact the FBI? The FBI says they don’t talk about that kind of stuff and that it’s weird that you are calling them.

If you were a charity in this situation, you’d find that SBF didn’t have any current, confirmable felonies on the table to find. He wanted to give money for you to do work you thought was important, and not taking it would mean you would do less of that work. Anything more intense than this (say, asking to see the entirety of a giver’s financial records) would run a high chance of scaring them off, if you hadn’t already.

Against all odds, I have a friend who has worked at a high level for series of named charities you’ve heard of. I poked him to get some context for this, basically asking what the normative responsibilities of non-political charities are in verifying the moral fiber of their benefactors. He said this:

And that follows; there’s just no way to meaningfully vet most givers that still allows you to take in money efficiently - the level of scrutiny EAs would have had to apply to SBF is both unscalable and would set up a hurdle between givers and giving that most would fail to get over.

So while I might want to morally indict the EAs over this, it’s not clear how I can in a justified way. I can sort of cobble together something like this:

See, this is different because he gave so much money, and to so many different parties. There should be a bigger burden there.

But that’s post-hoc reasoning (since that norm doesn’t seem to exist otherwise) and is made worse by the fact that most due-diligence processes probably wouldn’t have caught SBF anyway. Right up until one of his competitors spent a bunch of time examining his balance sheets, nobody knew this was going on; the subset of things that would have made accepting his money “safe” seems to be entirely composed of things that would keep people from accepting charitable funds at all, and nobody wants that.

On Being Buddy-Buddy With The Devil

The next accusation I’ve heard goes something like this:

Yeah, I mean, maybe you take the money. But EA went a step beyond that; they lionized the guy. They did interviews with him and held him up as an example of what everyone should be doing. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and they fell for it.

This is a bit subjective in the sense that it’s hard to know what is or isn’t over-enthusiastic, but let’s take it at face value for now. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend you could find an article that indicts EA people perfectly here - say it’s written by The President of All EA People. Let’s say that the article held SBF up as a Jesus-type figure of exceptionally generous giving; here, the article says, was someone who is doing it right - he was making a ton of money with the goal of being charitable, then following through by actually giving it away.

I think most would intuitively agree that it would be reasonable for the author of that article to feel embarrassed in hindsight, but should he feel like he transgressed a moral rule? Which one? These are utilitarians; “hold up the shining example to drive more funding to create better outcomes” is completely in line with their moral system.

Even if they were deontologists, I can’t think of any system that has a rule that reads “If someone wants to donate money to your cause, you can take it but you should be very careful in terms of lauding them for doing so, having near-100% confidence they are deep down a good guy who won’t, in the future, turn out to be terrible in a way nobody had evidence would happen”.

Mostly this seems like something most charities might do - when someone gives them a bunch of money, they give them credit for it to create an incentive for others to follow suit. There might be something I’m missing here, but this seems like another place I can’t fully crucify the EAs; there’s just not enough tree to support the nails.

On Marginal Moral Activity

Pretend that from birth you’ve been a member of Moral System X, which you think is superior to all other moral systems. When you were young, it seemed clear that every other moral system would fail when tried, that the foundations of other moral systems were so clearly wrong that they’d inevitably fail to compel meaningful moral behavior.

One day that all changed. You got out into the real world a bit and met a bunch of different kinds of people, and eventually you ran into someone from another moral system whose behavior was in all ways superior to yours. They were kinder; they treated people better and thought of them more generously. They were more active; they took time to proactively pursue good.

At the same time, people started pointing out the bad players in your moral system - the conmen, cheats, and liars that every moral system ends up with (hell, even Gandhi was some kind of weird sex pervert). You then probably pointed out that their system had bad players as well, and eventually came to the conclusion that there’s some variance in how moral/good/nice people are that is just inherent to their character in a way that operates independently from the moral system they subscribe to.

Coming back to reality, I think most people would look at SBF and conclude that he was naturally inclined to risk-taking and flights of ego that would tend to drive him to bad behavior of the kind he was eventually caught doing. In other words, he was born as a three on the 1-10 moral scale; it’s far from sure, but it’s imaginable that given no other inputs, he’d probably naturally be a pretty bad guy.

In the Hoel article I linked above, Hoel asks this question:

The question is not: did anyone in EA (outside of the EA members of FTX) know about its shady dealings? The question is: was the FTX implosion a consequence of the moral philosophy of EA brought to its logical conclusion? This latter question is why some people are trying to create as much distance between SBF and EA as possible.

I disagree with that framing a bit. Hoel is asking whether or not EA-type morality drove SBF inevitably towards this behavior, but I think that probably makes an assumption about morality that isn’t exactly true - that subscription to a moral system has an unlimited influence on one’s behavior. Simple observation of the world shows that this isn’t so, and it’s clearly visible in Christians who act in opposition to scriptural law or utilitarians who routinely create disutility.

I think a better framing is one of marginal moral activity, which I’m defining as the distance a person moves towards “good person” or “bad person” on an imagined sliding scale as a direct effect of their moral system. Viewed through that prism, the relevant question isn’t “Is EA philosophy entirely responsible for SBF’s sins?” but instead something like this:

Did EA philosophy cause SBF to commit fraud where he otherwise wouldn’t have done so? If so, why did it compel him to do that, and how much work did it do above and beyond his normal personality to achieve the bad result?

If he would have always done the bad thing with or without EA, why wasn’t EA philosophy sufficient to stop him? What would it have had to have been to have an effect here?

Hoel’s conclusion is something like “Utilitarianism says that there are no hard and fast rules, so long as what you are doing is likely to create good outcomes. It would have been really easy for SBF to convince himself that an effectively unlimited amount of risky behavior was justifiable here.”. As Hoel notes, SBF wasn’t all that shy about this, and it wasn’t that inconsistent with the sort of high-theoretical musings of EA people:

Also within the mainstream was SBF’s idea of maximizing the expected value of his giving via risky business ventures. Here’s him with EA leader Rob Wiblin from 80,000 Hours:

Sam Bankman-Fried: . . . Even if we [FTX] were probably going to fail, in expectation, I think it was actually still quite good.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah.

Or, in plenty of cases, it was the EA leaders who laid out reasoning about risk taking, and SBF was the one nodding.

Rob Wiblin: But when it comes to doing good. . . you kind of want to just be risk neutral. As an individual, to make a bet where it’s like, “I’m going to gamble my $10 billion and either get $20 billion or $0, with equal probability” would be madness. But from an altruistic point of view, it’s not so crazy. Maybe that’s an even bet, but you should be much more open to making radical gambles like that.

Sam Bankman-Fried: Completely agree.

In conclusion: none of SBF’s beliefs seem particularly unusual by EA standards, except that he took these principles to such literal extremes in his own life.

When your moral system is “there is no bad except bad outcomes”, the only thing that would have kept SBF on the straight-and-narrow would be if he thought he was capable of failure. But every indication is that this isn’t a thought he’s capable of thinking:

Behold the absolute confidence; this isn’t a man who does well with “do whatever you want, so long as you are confident about it” moral systems. Where Hoel and I agree, it’s that utilitarian-type morality doesn’t do much to stop this kind of ego-monster.

But even while I’m arguing that there’s nothing in EA morality we’d expect to stop SBF in this scenario - that it didn’t inspire marginal moral activity to keep him from badness - I’m still reluctant to say they created him whole cloth in the way that Hoel seems confident they did.

Some things really are built-from-scratch monsters, as Hoel says. But as Gessler notes, some boots are just bad from birth.

Again, I’d much rather be scorched-earth-destroying my cultural outgroup right now. If you’ve ever done that, you know it’s fun - you get to feel a lot better about yourself without actually doing much work to make it happen. It’s the same reason I watch COPS.

But when I go to do that, I have to think about whether or not I would have caught this. And, frankly, much smarter-in-that-way people than me were watching FTX/SBF and didn’t catch it. I don’t just mean EA people; the Feds didn’t catch it, either. Anti-EA people didn’t catch it. Hell, at some point EA groups were pushing tens of thousands of dollars into prize money for (they claimed) essays criticizing them, and I don’t think any of them were titled “How SBF is clearly a criminal type and this will obviously blow up in your faces”.

I have to think about whether or not my own moral system is 100% effective at stopping frauds from gaining a foothold, and it just isn’t; there’s Joel Osteens everywhere you look, being weird and scummy and doing weird scummy things. It turns out “I am Christian/Utilitarian/Hindu” isn’t that great of a statement when it comes to guaranteeing that someone is actually committed to good outcomes when it costs them something, and wolves still have no trouble finding sheep’s clothing.

Hoel’s take - again, not one I entirely disagree with - seems to be that EA philosophy was uniquely suited to create an SBF, and that this is a dagger that has already been sheathed in the heart of the movement:

Perhaps inevitably, a young college-age elite with a lot of potential and connections came along, and he ended up coming to the logical conclusion that EA should be taken as seriously as possible, and this, mixed with hubris borrowed from Wall Street and risk borrowed from crypto, was likely the Aristotelian formal cause of FTX’s collapse.

That’s why I think EA never recovers. Oh, many EA charities might be active in ten years, I don’t doubt. I certainly hope so, as in their outputs they often do a lot of good. But the intellectual and cultural momentum of EA will be forever sapped, and EA will likely dilute away into merely a set of successful institutions, some of whom barely mention their origins.

And yes, this is an indicator that we-do-what-lord-math-commands morality that assumes a humanity skilled at egoless, selfless activity often leads down monstrous roads; it’s a system that is just waiting for an SBF to judge that utility is best served by taking huge, unauthorized risks with other people’s money to enrich his pocket and pride to trigger a disaster.

And yet: Most utilitarians wouldn’t actually do what SBF did, I think. And at least some deontologists would. Yes, EA did not dissuade him, but that’s no guarantee that deontology could have. Created and uncorrected are not the same, and neither is proved here. Without that proof, it’s unclear that one man’s behavior can indicate the total failure of a movement; if one man’s behavior could, I’m not sure any movement would survive.

What I think is sure, however, is that what comes next is all-important. The effective altruists have been given a bloody nose here from a fist made out of indicators that a change of course is needed. They have a pretty good sign that spreadsheet morality, unchecked, causes plenty of unexpected disasters as the inputs curve toward infinity.

They at least kind of know the failure-mode of “anything is OK, so long as you guess it will turn out well”.

Presumably, a big part of keeping that “effective” letter E in the EA title is being able to adjust as new information comes available - being able to think hard about the kind of marginal morality their chosen moral system does or doesn’t inspire. It will be interesting to see if they do.

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I’m sending this out unedited and keeping open the possibility of editing it into something different later. If by some miracle you particularly like this version, you might want to save it as a PDF or something - it might change substantially later.

There are some themes of self-harm in this. If that would be bad for you to read, you might not want to read this.

The judge at Bob’s trial (not that anyone called it that, even now) had apparently been chosen with looks in mind. He was every inch the apparent sage. Wisdom virtually dripped off him to the extent that Bob suspected he would have managed to look like a trustworthy source of advice while, say, going down a waterslide or participating in a marshmallow-eating contest.

Bob, who had been born without a Grandfather, had often adopted them. Faced with a septuagenarian paragon of the highest quality some part of Bob cried out to collect him like a trading card, but wiser and more academic parts of his brain prevailed in convincing him that now was not the time.

The judge banged his gavel, every inch of his beard swaying with the weight of decades of wise counsel. “I call this hearing to order,” he said, “To decide the fate of Bob Campbell.”. While saying Bob’s name, he glanced at him and recoiled slightly before regaining his composure and settling back somewhat further into the leather of his judicial seat.

“Let the record show that I did not say trial, and that this was intentional; to our knowledge, Bob has committed no crime. If anything, we break our own laws by holding him, but the world has agreed we have little choice. We do not believe in magic, and we cannot prove the supernatural, but there is no denying the truth of Bob, or the need to contain him.”

“For better or worse, we have to acknowledge the truth of our own experience. Bob is gross.”

Months ago, Bob had woken up in a very normal way on what seemed to be a very normal Sunday laying and had rolled over to look at his wife, who he both liked and loved a great deal. He sometimes tried to determine which of the two was truer - while they had been through a lot together and had built up a great deal of love and commitment, they also got along very well in the “like” sense of things. They found a lot of the same things funny, and she would often say those things. They watched a lot of the same shows.

That morning, he decided that while he might love her more the other six days of the week, he was almost sure he liked her more on Sundays because that was the day they both kept completely free to do what they wished. They’d often go out and eat huge breakfasts, then return home to work them off by watching movies. Sometimes they would go do other things. It didn’t matter to Bob what specific things they did; just that they were the kind of things they would both choose to do and that they did them together was enough.

Bob reached over to shake her awake. He expected she might be hungry, in which case they’d go get food. Some Sundays she’d feel lazy and they’d eat cereal and watch TV. On some blessed and lucky Sundays, she’d wake up with the kind of energy that would result in 15 or 20 minutes longer in bed than usual, followed by even more intense laziness for the remainder of the day.

Bob did not know which of these to expect, but what he did not expect was for her to wake up, look deeply into her husband’s eyes, and begin screaming at the top of her lungs. He did not anticipate that she would roll off the bed so suddenly she hit the floors with a pangful banging sound and scoot backward away from him to the farthest corner of the room, terrified and retching.

Bob tried and failed to calm her down, but it quickly became clear that he himself was the cause of her distress. It was only after his desperation convinced him to leave her to go get help that he found he was the cause of everyone’s distress, and only still later that he found how universal the word “everyone” could be.

“This is a court of justice, but we will find no justice here today. What we do today, we do for lack of other choices.” The judge’s words would have cowed even the loudest of courtroom observers, but today they provoked an especially complete silence; save for him and Bob, the court was empty. They were kept company only by two cameras, each of them dedicated to capturing video of one of the two humans in the room.

Despite agreeing with the judge that justice was not being served, Bob found it hard to hold a grudge. The world had come a long way since less civilized times; nobody had ever tried to hurt Bob. He had instead been protected from the less careful or less moral who might try to. Scientists had worked at what Bob understood to be great costs to themselves to find causes and cures for his condition, to no avail.

Bob was to all dry, robotic and academic appearances completely normal. He was 30, a normal age. He was a normal weight; he was of average attractiveness. Whatever average happiness he had enjoyed in the past was now shattered, but any test run on him revealed a simple, mundane man.

The world of the future did not believe, as the judge said, in magic. It had little confidence in the supernatural. But the lived and stated experience of nearly human on Earth agreed that Bob was revolting beyond all reason. To learn of him, even through text, was to be filled with a deep and disturbing unease. To see him was to feel your breakfast attempt to leave your stomach. To be touched by him was to forget a decade of love in a terror so deep you pissed on the floor; to be trapped in a room with him was to feel as if the inside of your mouth was filled with a live, angry bat.

Lacking a diagnosis, it was no surprise when treatments and cures failed to materialize. The world had learned only a few things about Bob: it was better to be far from him, better to know he was contained, and better to know where he was than where he wasn’t. A man in Australia who was safely assured that Bob was in a prison cell in Akron was not thrilled, but he could live his life, assured that any time he worried about Bob he could check a live feed and prove to himself that he was in no immediate danger of encountering him.

With execution off the table, work had immediately begun on a containment facility. It was built with the full and generous contributions of every nation working in lockstep towards a shared goal. It was perfect, distant, and self-contained but was most importantly inescapable. There was not an inch of it not covered by cameras, and it was built to last ten more lifetimes than the one it needed.

The not-a-trial was short. The flight to Bob’s new home was longer, as flights to the farthest corners of the world are wont to be. As he sat alone on a series of remotely controlled flights, Bob took the time to learn more about the judge. It was widely agreed that he had been chosen not for looks, but for a reputation of restraint; The world had deemed that Bob had deserved to be sentenced face to face, and had found someone who could look dignified while doing it.

It was only later that Bob found the effort of doing so was too much for his aged and learned heart, and that Bob’s small dignity had cost the kind Grandfather his life.

Bob wandered around his mansion slash prison, taking it in. Everything was nice. More than nice, really - he sat on the bed, and his immediate impression was that of a rich-people mattress, the kind that costs as much as a used car. Everything he saw (or nearly so) was like that - at least somewhat better than “can’t complain”, often approaching luxury. Yet as he walked around, he felt a sense of incompleteness he couldn’t quite place - something was missing.

“You are probably wondering why there aren’t any chairs, right?”

Bob turned around and found himself face to face with an honest-to-god robot. Not the cheap fake kind that was programmed to act like a butler and do simple tasks, either, but the real kind; the kind that could plan, direct itself and have conversations. Bob could have bought a small town for what this robot probably cost.

“The deal with the chairs is actually pretty funny,” said the robot, not missing a beat. “When another human thinks about you, or anything related to you, they get grossed out. And that does funny things to their ability to pay close attention, and they miss things. Like chairs. There’s dozens of weird things like that around here. I don’t think there’s ever been a whole house designed by someone who was about to puke before, but they should do it more. It’s hilarious.”

Bob learned that the robot had been a last-minute addition to the plans - it hadn’t been mentioned to him because the manufacturer hadn’t been sure they could get it done on time, or at all.

”The deal is that nobody will say it, but you are magic as shit. Or cursed, or a dread disgusting demigod, or something - pick your poison. So much so that any even kind-of sentient being is grossed out by you. Dogs, cats, pigs, whatever. And that’s true of robots, too,” The robot said. “I have a circuit in me that could run a whole city, completely dedicated just to making it so I can tolerate you. You could buy what’s left of Detroit with it.”

The robot did its job well. As it showed Bob around the mansion, he learned that they had used as much of Bob’s psych profile as they could tolerate looking at to program it. He might have been mostly metal, but the robot was the exact kind of dude Bob got along with; he felt like he was talking to an old friend from high school or the perfect college roommate. But it was only when they got to the rope that he found out the robot could not lie.

“Yup, that’s a good rope.” said the robot. “It’s not like the kind you buy at a store to tie down a tarp. This is a REAL rope. Like they use on boats. You could hang 20 of you on it.”

The rope was nice, at least as nice as anything else in the mansion. It hung from a hook on the ceiling, knotted into a perfect noose, above a similarly high-quality stepstool. Bob was surprised at how blatant the invitation to suicide was, and told the robot as much.

“Oh, that. So, yeah, the thought behind the rope was that you should have choices. It was very important to some people that you knew you had an out.”

Bob told the robot he was surprised; an awful lot had been done to preserve his life to leave it up to chance and impression.

“Oh, so don’t get me wrong - you aren’t actually allowed to kill yourself. I’m monitoring your mood and a bunch of other stuff at all times; if you ever were really at risk of using the rope, I’d take it away. The point is just to make you think you have options.”

Even if the robot wasn’t incapable of lying, he wouldn’t have been lying about the hilarity of the house.

The mansion was huge, inflated in size and quality by the guilt of an essentially gentle people who, while revolted by Bob, did not like thinking of themselves as the kind of people who would imprison an innocent man for life. Thus Bob had a mansion with everything automated building and delivery robots could provide, except what ickiness-muddled architects and logistics people forgot to tell them to do, or told them to do in error.

Bob had in the weeks since his arrival found several instances of this kind of weirdness; he had a box of several hundred cellphones, but no socks; he had what amounted to a working holodeck, but no shampoo.

The robot moved to correct these issues as quickly as he could, as well as providing whatever companionship and help Bob would accept. But as entertaining as a very friendly robot, unlimited airdropped wealth, and riding through the virtual steppes with Ghengis Khan could be, it failed to do much to satisfy Bob’s only lasting problem: he missed his wife.

Communications of all kinds were counterproductive. Bob was not as gross over video as in person, but even taped messages were still effective at reminding her of what he now was; it was impossible to have a real conversation when one side hates the very core of another’s being and the other side knows it. Letters were similar - any messages that sprang from Bob’s hand were loathsome to the reader.

After a few months in prison, Bob asked the robot to check in on his wife and heard back that she was doing fine, or at least as fine as she could under the circumstances. The governments of the world had guaranteed her financial and physical well-being to the extent they could, which was substantial. She could not be said to miss Bob, exactly, since he remained an image of eternal sickening terror to her. But she missed the Bob-that-was, the husband she had lost.

It was the miscommunication between designers and builders due to the gross-induced fog Bob provided that eventually gave him an idea. Every message Bob sent was gross, even when transcribed or garbled to carry the same message. The scientists who studied Bob had checked. But what they hadn’t checked is what would happen if a person who couldn’t catch any of that nuance - a near-illiterate, for instance - read one of those letters and relayed the messaging verbally as best he could, like some sort of idiot Christian to his disgusting Cyrano.

It could be that the person couldn’t relay the grossness just due to lacking the raw ability to do so. It wouldn’t be perfect, but imperfection looks a lot better in the face of desperation. Excited, he ran the idea past the robot.

“I mean, it’s possible, Bob. But if I’m being honest I’m a little worried about it. You’ve been doing a good job of holding it together, but I think we both know that’s pretty fragile. I’m worried about what happens when this doesn’t work. I can’t tell you no, but I wish you wouldn’t make me tell you yes.”

Bob made him tell him yes.

Finding an illiterate in a semi-utopian future society proved to be a bit more trouble than Bob had thought it would be, especially with his reputation. After some weeks Bob’s distant handlers finally found someone willing to give it a shot; like Bob, he had once had a better life before a traumatic brain injury had left him unable to do as much as he once had.

He was more sympathetic to Bob than most, or at least felt more obligated to try. At the same time, Bob-related work paid very well indeed; beyond some discomfort, there were no losses to be had that wouldn’t be made up to some extent.

Bob spent an entire day and half a night drafting and redrafting a message, trying to get it perfect. He wanted to tell her how her hair smelled to him and what it was like living near her. He tried a hundred different ways to capture how happy he was during the years they had together and how much he missed her, but Bob was not a poet. He eventually settled on just describing what it was like to wake up next to her on Sundays, closed his eyes, hit send, and after much effort went to sleep.

Bob could have slept 10 hours but got only two before he was shaken awake by a very excited robot.

“Bob, you aren’t going to believe this shit. It worked.”

Oh, Bob.

I have no idea how this can work, but I’ll take it. I’m going to tell you right now that this isn’t perfect - the translator isn’t good, which I guess is the point. But he can say “I love you”, and you have no idea how much that means to hear from you, even like this.

I’m sorry. I feel like I betrayed you, but I know you have to understand that there’s nothing I can do. I miss Sunday mornings too. I miss going to breakfast. I miss you waking me up.

I miss you. Please keep writing.

Bob did keep writing. He would send a letter just about how her hands felt to him, or just about how funny a joke she had once told was. She would write back and remember things about him - how he was before the change, and how happy she had been.

It wasn’t perfect, but sharing memories of what they had together was something. To Bob, reliving the memories had a faint flavor of living new ones, and in a way they were. A conversation was being had. He couldn’t be with his wife, but he could talk to her. It was the closest he could get to her, and because of that was the most important thing to him.

Bob was happy. He was content not to think about a lot of things as long as he could focus on this one.

Among the things Bob didn’t think about was what it’s like to be suddenly alone and to know the husband you loved is, in a sense, dead - not only one who was absent and never coming back, but who also no longer existed for his wife in most senses that matter.

He didn’t consider the difference between being in a world that keeps moving and having to opt out of moving with it, as opposed to being trapped in a world that stays still in which the letters were the only injection of movement.

He didn’t consider what it would be like for his wife to hear how beautiful she was and how much she deserved love from someone else’s mouth in someone else’s words, or that the person delivering them might be a pretty good guy despite not reading as well as other people.

He didn’t consider that the things he loved about his wife might translate just fine to someone else, especially when that person was told about them by the person who know them best.

It was decided that the robot should break the news, mostly by the robot himself. He let Bob down as easily as he could. He spent a lot of time with him over the next few days, playing video games and joking, and generally distracting Bob as well as he could.

Bob reflected that in the end, it wasn’t that different than things had been before. The letters had always been a long shot, and they were just letters; he had known he was never going to get his life back. If he thought about it, he decided, he was glad that his wife had moved on; he wanted her to be happy. He was fine.

It was only several days later on his way to breakfast that he noticed an empty hook on the ceiling, and that the robot had quietly and without a word gotten rid of the noose.

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I don’t agree with most of Scott Alexander’s conclusions about how social stuff does or should work. We live in very different areas, around very different people, and see the world in very different ways. Given that, it’s not surprising when you look back through my archive and see something like a half-dozen articles with topics that boil down to “Scott was wrong on the internet!”.

It was inevitable, I think, that he’d someday take enough exception with one of these to respond to it, and so he has.

In reading his response (and my response to his response) keep in mind that Scott is generally pretty nice to me despite probably agreeing with me on very little, and has a “bank” of about half a dozen unanswered swipes from me to finance stiffly-worded responses from; I don’t think he could overstep on the response without making fun of my weird tiny hands or something similarly sensitive.

There’s some stuff I agree with him on, but more that I don’t, so this is a long article even judging by my already-wordy standards. Get ready, folks; I used all my words.

Context

The basic story is that Scott wrote an article talking about Jhana meditative states, essentially different meditative milestones that meditators state they click into at different levels of meditation mastery.

Claims about what each stage of the Jhanas actually feels like vary quite a bit, but Scott picked pretty extreme examples (relative to what I’ve seen); a guy claiming it was better than sex, made him quit (or use less) recreation drugs, eat less dessert, and drink less coffee (because it sensitized his brain to caffeine). There was also a person (I think a woman) who claimed that she (or he) would sometime later almost (or actually?) orgasm from touching blankets in Target as a result of previous Jhana use.

Aftereffects notwithstanding, Jhana practitioners claim exactly no downsides from using this; they say there is no addiction or loss of function of any kind associated with these states. In fact, they say that the states are so very non-addictive that they often forget to do them at all; there are not only no cravings but indeed no impulse to get at them at all.

Some people called bullshit in the comments. Scott pointed out that the states are both plausible (since brains do crazy stuff) and claimed by a lot of people (“thousands”) and that given this it was weird to question Jhana states where you wouldn’t question, say, hunger.

You have probably already read my previous article or Scott’s summary of it, and if you’ve read most of my work outside that you know I enjoy a scrap. That said, I’m not right on every single thing here - I’ll be walking back my weak stuff before trying to poke holes in Scott’s.

Spoonies again

Scott says this:

Telling doctors that you’re adopted in order to get genetic tests seems more genuinely deceptive and counterproductive. But it seems like the sort of deception that you would come up with if you were suffering a lot and wanted to maximize chances of your doctor figuring out why, without really understanding how genetic tests worked.

But based on a few circumstantial things like these, people keep tarring all “spoonies” as fakers. I had a patient like this recently. They had some weird symptoms that pattern-matched to “the type of thing someone might make up”, the two or three most common tests didn’t find anything, a succession of doctors accused them of making the symptoms up, and they had absolutely awful quality of life for a year or two. Finally some doctor (not me, I was their psychiatrist) dug a little deeper and found a tumor the size of a tennis ball, removal of which relieved all of their symptoms.

I don’t think he’s entirely wrong here. Directly after writing the original article, I got a lot of comments and emails that all boiled down to something like this:

I think at the very least you are using the term spoonies wrong; it predates the popularity of the “fake spoonie” narrative. There are lots of us who have diagnoses that were hard to get but are legitimate, and treatments we are getting that have cured/lessened/helped our problems.

Think about it: do you think that diagnostic medicine is perfect? If you do, do you think every doctor is perfect at it? Do you think doctors, who are all humans, are doing their jobs well at all times?

And no, I don’t. I was trying to use a term I don’t think I fully understood in a universal pejorative way, and I think if I had thought about it a bit longer I would have said “you know, it’s pretty much assured that there are at least some significant amount of people with some combination of hard-to-diagnose diseases and shitty doctors I’m lumping into this category”.

That leaves me in a weird spot because everything we know about the world says there are going to be sick people having needlessly tough experiences getting care. But if I’m right about “some people lie for attention” at all, there’s going to be at least some of those mixed in with the spoonies. But even if there’s sort of a lot of fakers, that would be additive to actually-sick people, not reductive; the bad players would make them more sympathetic, not less.

Scott pegs bad-type-spoonie numbers at very minimal:

Are all spoonies like this? No. My totally made-up wild guess, which might be completely wrong, is that about 20% have some physical illness we understand perfectly well (like a tumor) that just hasn’t been detected yet, 30% have some physical illness we haven’t discovered/characterized/understood yet, 45% have some psychosomatic condition, and 5% are consciously faking for attention.

If he’s right about these numbers, it would matter in terms of the kinds of policies you’d want. If most of everyone is just getting mistreated by the system, and <1% are fakers taking advantage of that system for funzies, the funzies-havers are not-great but should be ignored in favor of the much-superior “make sure the 99% are taken seriously” messaging.

I’m not sure that Scott is right about 50% of everybody who is sitting in doctors’ offices going “I don’t care what your tests say, I’m sick” is perfectly legit, but I also have no great way of confidently saying what the correct level is.

I think I’d be less hard on myself if I had said “there’s certainly a ton of legit people but this is still a problem because it’s a growing threat and we have to carefully balance taking care of the sick or kicking out the shitty so we get an optimal outcome”, and I have some text in there that kind of does this, but not enough.

So really I shouldn’t have talked about this group or should have thought about it hard enough to put nuance into the argument. That’s bad and I feel bad about it. I’ll be talking about them more later (especially as it relates to psychosomatic pain), but I wanted to address this upfront; I’m accusing of Scott veering too-trustful, but I very probably veer too untrustful, and this is an example of how that fails.

DID, Appeals to Friends-of-Opponent, Bias as Evidence, Etc.

If you read my original article, you know I brought up a variety of people making a variety of claims I think are wild and should be distrusted, inclusive of Spoonies (see the last section), TikTok DiD people, Jhana-havers, and people who said they caught Mew in 1st gen Pokemon in 19981.

While all these examples were fun to write, they were included because (at least at the time) I thought they were doing a specific thing that furthered an argument. I was looking for examples of things you might have seen and intuitively distrusted in the past, especially where there wasn’t much at stake besides internet points.

Eventually, this all resolved into the conclusion I want you to draw if I’ve done my job well:

Anyway, the point is this: I’m arguing for a concept of a reasonable middle between “running up to everyone who says they have long COVID and calling them dirty, filthy liars” and “accepting every unproven claim of any sort as face-value true”.

If I get you from A to B here, it’s because I’ve reminded you that sometimes people relay false information, pointed out that we all often decide we don’t believe some claim or another, and that this is a good reason to think want a norm where you can acknowledge you don’t buy something without it carrying the same weight as calling someone an out-and-out liar.

The easiest way to destroy this argument is to show that people don’t relay false information like I’m saying they do. Scott goes a different route on DiD:

They emphasize that it really feels like Vader is in their head giving them advice, or that they sometimes “become” Vader - and in particular they emphasize that this is different from just asking themselves “what would Darth Vader do in this situation?”. They understand that most people learning about their situation would expect that they’re exaggerating a much more boring “just ask yourself what Vader would do” situation, and they’re fine with people believing that if they want, but insist that it’s actually something different and more interesting than that...

I find this all pretty believable for a few reasons. Lots of people (Buddhists, philosophers, psychologists) talk about how the ego is an illusion. And if you’re going to have an illusion, it doesn’t seem significantly weirder to have two illusions. Reading Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind (see my review here) convinced me that all theories of mind are made up, that different cultures make up their theories of mind differently, and that theories of mind which separate the ego and superego and whatever into different entities aren’t inherently dumber or harder to work with than theories which count them all as the same entity.

I have to consider this in tandem with a quote from the last section:

Also, everyone on TikTok is terrible and shouldn’t be considered a representative of their respective communities.

Following that quote, it feels like he’s saying “reasonable sounding versions of this claim exist”. But the point of bringing up hyper-crazy versions of this kind of thing wasn’t to show that everyone making these claims was as easy to identify as lying as TikTok folks; it was to show a place where Scott’s “Lots of people make this claim, and it’s plausible, so there’s no reason to question it” logic fails.

There’s no bright-line reason the TikTok people’s 20 wacky alters are less believable than his friends’ contagious-but-mild multiple personalities. If “brains are crazy and we don’t fully understand them, and they say it’s so, and it’s not like you are a mindreader” works for one, it works for the other; if it’s not enough for one then it’s also not enough for another. I agree that his friend’s version seems a lot more believable - but that opens the door to “seems”, and a whole can of worms.

To differentiate between the two, you have to dip into the messy well of personal judgments, judgments based on tone, biases about what kind of claims you’ve found to be true in the past, etc. that his original justification left out. That’s reinforced here:

The evidence for jhanas is thousands of people over thousands of years saying they’ve experienced it, a bunch of my friends who I trust a lot saying it worked for them,

I have at least three acquaintances who are in the category RC talks about - people who say they have some sort of multiple personality type thing going on, that it’s fine, they live with it, it’s no big problem.

He’s bringing up personal reasons - things based on friendship, feels, and social experience - to say something like “Listen, I vibe hard with these folks. For reasons not directly related to this claim, I find them mostly trustworthy; this is evidence”. But if social stuff like this works in one direction, it should work well in both; if you can find someone trustworthy based on judgment, you can also find them untrustworthy based on the same.

What I don’t think you can do, fairly, is say “These people vibe as trustworthy for me, and that should go in the formula” then balk when people do the opposite2. If vibes don’t belong here at all, that's an argument that we can make. If they belong, there should be a pretty stiff argumentative burden to say you can only put them in the “pro” column3.

On RC’s Magic Lie Detection Abilities

Long quote:

RC goes on to use these two cases as proof that sometimes large groups of people lie, even if they don’t seem to have much motivation:

The why-would-they-lie argument doesn’t hold water; you can point to countless groups who conveyed information that was false as a group. You can see the obvious falseness mixed into Spoonieism and DID TikTok fads.

…and then makes an argument I find pretty bizarre. He quotes a Douglas Adams piece on how predicting the trajectory of a baseball seems to require advanced physics, but many children and ignorant people can do it anyway by instinct, then concludes:

It is not a secret that people who trend towards rationalism (or tech, with which rationalism has significant overlap) are not, on average, considered to be exceptionally socially skilled. A placement on the autism spectrum or some other form of neurodivergence is considered to be the norm rather than the exception to the rule amongst them. I don’t think this is bad; if anything, it’s where the group’s value comes from in the first place.

But with that comes a group-wide expectation that things that can’t be quantified with math are thus default-unknowable. A statement like “I could tell he was lying” isn’t quite taboo nonsense there, but it carries much less weight than in other places. People are less able or less willing to point out that someone looks less credible for socially understood reasons than in other less-enlightened-more-practical contexts.

Sometimes this is nice, but at some extremes, it ends up being a lot like if someone looked at [Douglas Adams’] description of a person catching a baseball above, realized that they can’t really explain how that happens, and then concluded that baseball catching was not a skill that does or could exist.

At the extremes of those extremes, you see things like the jhana thing: where it’s something that seems unlikely to most but is unfalsifiable, and because of that unfalsifiability is then assumed to be true because it was claimed at all. By Scott’s standard above, we would basically assume that any claim we couldn’t disprove was true, provided we could find at least a few thousand people who claimed it.

This sounds like: “I, RC, have the mysterious mental ability to detect liars. I admit I can’t prove this, but come on, you should probably just trust me because it’s perfectly reasonable to think other people have mysterious mental abilities you don’t.”

But that’s the exact point he’s been arguing against this whole time! Either we trust trustworthy-sounding people who we like, when they say stuff that sounds kind of plausible - or we apply extreme skepticism about every not-immediately-verifiable claim!

This is the only part of the entire complaint (most of which was reasonable) that seems like a malicious misreading to me4.

This Douglas Adams quote points out that humans can do things that often go far beyond what they could work out on a spreadsheet - that some stuff is automatic in a way that, as Adams puts it, would allow you to catch a baseball without several minutes worth of calculations. That this is weird, but it’s also true.

The reason I bring it up is pretty clear: I’m arguing against what I perceive to be an over-simplified justification for belief, one that excludes stuff like “Your decades of experience being around and observing people and the various truthfulness algos you developed over that time”.

I think that rationalist-type people at some point addressed the problem of people who refused to look at data, and quite rightly corrected towards an expectation of “the data has to be part of this; you can’t go entirely off your gut”. But I also argue that at some point they overcorrected past what was reasonable, eventually saying that your gut shouldn’t factor in at all - or, as guessed above, that you can’t use it to decide someone is lying the same way you’d use it to reinforce a decision that they were truthful.

Essentially, I’m saying that rationalists tend towards hearing someone say something didn’t have the ring of truth to it, and saying something equivalent to “no, that’s an unreasonable thought to have; there’s no way you could have done the math on it” in much the same way as they wouldn’t say “Nobody could possibly catch a baseball without a Ph.D. in physics and an awful lot of time”.

Note that you can certainly argue that I’m wrong in my perception of rationalism there, or misreading Scott’s argument, or that I’m over-weighting things like “feelings you get based off experiences” - both are reasonable arguments to make. But what I wish you wouldn’t do is say “He’s claiming he has a special superpower here”5 because I’m claiming some group has over-corrected away from normal human social abilities6.

On Semantics

There are some levels of this disagreement where I use “lie” differently than Scott does7, who in turn uses belief differently from me. Scott says this:

RC is doing an old trick: summing up his opponent’s position as an extreme absolute, then summing up his own position as “it’s diverse and complicated and a middle ground”.

I reject this characterization. Everything is a middle ground. The whole point of all this Bayes stuff is that “the middle ground” is wide and worth fighting over. We can have a non-absolute middle ground with 1% probability, a non-absolute middle ground with 99% probability, or anything in between. I’m not doing the morality/etiquette thing of demanding a norm that you believe people, I’m doing an epistemic thing of providing justifications for a prior that you believe people.

Which seems reasonable, until you get to this, which you want to read really carefully:

You should believe the spoonies! You should believe the DID people! You should believe that people experience astral projection - it’s just a cheap off-brand lucid dream, and I’ve personally tried lucid dreaming and can confirm it’s real!

At which point, full-stop, we now have to reassess the entirety of this conversation. We have to set up stupid argumentative frameworks and do a bunch of other shit because we are no longer talking about the same shit.

So let’s imagine that for any claim, a person might mean one of two things: Whatever they claimed, or that they know what the word “sandwich” means. And say a person comes to you and says “I can literally fly through the clouds; I have literally and not at all figuratively touched the sun”. Though they used those words, you now have to remember: they might just mean they know what a sandwich is.

In that framework, it becomes immensely important to sort of pin down whether or not anyone is talking about a sandwich at any given time, or you can’t know what they actually mean. It’s easy to imagine it getting inconvenient enough that people started to have a standard where you just said “I know what a sandwich is” for the sandwich meanings and “I can eat a cannonball” or whatever for anything that wasn’t knowing what a sandwich was.

Above, Scott deals with claims of astral projection. I’m sure there are some Wiccans/whatever that if asked if astral projection was actually leaving your body in spirit form and observing things in other dimensions/other locations would say “Naw, man, it’s just that I’ve seen sandwiches.”. But at least some are actually claiming that they do magic shit8 and would get mad at you if you said "No, I believe you, it's just that I believe you in the sense that I believe you know what sandwiches are, not all that other shit you said".

The other day I was talking to an old coworker - someone I really like - and he told me he had experienced Jhanas. I asked him how that worked for him, and he said this:

Moderate corporal and mental bliss that comes in waves, induced spontaneously by breathing meditation, which I’ve been doing in and off for 25 years. Can’t really go looking for it.

Instead of bliss, a good word would just be pleasure. More relatable.

It’s all kind of banal, actually. But it happens. And then you get up and have a cup of coffee and go to work… 

And then compare it to a claim like this, amalgamated from a bunch of sources:

My Jhana experience is one of intense, unworldly pleasure; it surpasses all things, indeed anything I can imagine. I can initiate it at will. It has no negative aftereffects but several positive ones, literally rewiring my behavior in purely beneficial ways that work in my interest. Also, it makes me orgasm at big-box stores.

Let's say I am inclined to believe more modest claims like my friend's where I wouldn't believe others.9. I could then downgrade the more-intense latter explanation to the more sandwichy claim of my friend, but it’s actively confusing to do that and still call it belief. It feels like saying “Yes, I know that’s not what was claimed - but I believe them anyway, so long as I don't have to believe what they actually said”.

This might feel pretty nitpicky, but consider the video that was originally featured in the Spoonie section. When she relates the experience of a doctor saying something that translates very closely to “I believe you might be experiencing something, but I’m moving forward in another direction without expressing disbelief because I think something related-but-different is happening”, the reaction in the video is pretty intense. The woman uses a stupid-doctor impression and heavy eye-rolls to indicate she’s very much not OK with the doctor believing some alternate, more reasonable-in-their-view version of what the woman (or the people she’s talking to) has claimed.

In some cases like this, people are as clear as they can be that they are making a specific claim and that they will be pissed if that specific claim they are making is not treated as true in a way consistent with the specifics of the claim. There’s no sense that they’d be OK with “listen, you are probably in the 45% for whom this pain is indicative of a mental health sort of thing, and we should probably do the specific treatments for that instead”10.

It might be that this is good - that she's actually sick, and advocating for herself in a way that will end up getting her more appropriate care - but what's absolute is that she doesn't consider modified-belief-in-something-like-that to be enough. She wants her actual claim she actually made believed as-is.

I’m confident there are people who would be satisfied with “I believe some modified version of your claim that lines up with what I think is actually happening while still allowing for the possibility that you experienced something”, and I’m confident that there are some situations where believing some modified claim leads to the same practical implications. But it’s not hard to imagine differences in both scenarios that matter, and at some point your “what’s appropriate to do based on what I see” is going to butt up against your desire to believe everyone in all situations.

Very much too long; I forgive your “didn’t read”

Here’s the basic summary of what I’m trying to and might not be succeeding in saying, both in this article and the last: Sometimes it matters if a claim is true. It’s often not possible to prove or disprove a claim, and people assess claims against a wide variety of stuff when deciding how they react to it.

Some of that stuff - the gold standard - is actual data, actually applicable math that maps cleanly on the situation and tells you “I once jumped to the moon” is an implausible claim and shouldn’t be believed. But there’s a whole realm of plausible claims you can’t prove or disprove with data, which is why this argument exists in the first place.

I think Scott11 thinks people lie only rarely, using a pretty constrained definition of "lie" that requires a pretty high level of intentionality, a sort of conscious "I'm heading out to trick some people" level of deception. In relation, I think he uses a pretty broad definition of "believe" that allows for using the phrase when you think at least something sorta like what's claimed is happening - that you believe they astral project in the sense that you believe they probably had a really vivid dream.

I think people lie pretty often, using a pretty broad definition of lie that assumes an active duty to try to make sure your statements are as close to true-as-stated as you can get them, and that doing this well takes a fair amount of practice/work.12 I use a pretty narrow definition of "believe" that corresponds to that - that I think someone told me something load-bearing in a way where I can model actions on it.

I think there are good reasons to want to listen to Scott here. He’s arguing from what I think is a more generous place than I am, out of assumptions about the world that I don’t agree with but also can’t disprove - that people are mostly good, lie rarely, and can and should often be accommodated with belief in the face of uncertainty.

I’m arguing from a colder place - one where I acknowledge the difficulties of saying “I don’t believe this”, but think it’s often justified to do it anyway. Sometimes, probably most of the time, this is internal - i.e. someone tells you that you could have access to unlimited bliss with a few months worth of effort and you don’t end up doing that because you don’t quite buy it. Sometimes this is external, in a way they’d know about, but it’s called for - i.e. you shouldn’t pick fights unnecessarily, but there’s a practical implication that doesn’t let you take the better part of valor.

There are some other things we haven’t talked about - incentives and how they affect how much dishonesty we see at a societal level is one of the big ones - but I think it’s OK to think of it like that for now. And it’s OK, I think, to go either way on it - I’m not pretending to have settled this here.

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He’s not wrong. Even if you disregard the low-hanging fruit of noticing the near-perfect “pandamnesty” portmanteau opportunities, it’s still a wonderland for guys like me. It’s an article written in (seemingly) intentionally indistinct language; it heavily relies on emotion to make Oster’s point without considering any possible downsides.

Oster herself is also incredibly well-liked; she wrote a series of very popular books on data-driven child-bearing and has a lot of well-earned respect thereby. Like all people who desperately need to be liked, I am slightly and unreasonably jealous of all this, and instinctively resent her for it. This is the kind of personal flaw I’m aware of and try to control, but I can’t pretend that some deeply elemental level of my psyche wants to take her down a notch.

The article itself falls into a hard-to-criticize category of superficially good-feeling calls for good feelings, as well. Oster makes general call for a sort of blame-amnesty; she acknowledges that some mistakes were made by various parties in the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, but asks that we forget about them for the sake of progress. At first glance, this seems like the kind of thing you should go along with. As a people of multiple available glances, we can do a bit better.

The article starts out like this:

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

This refrain that they didn’t know - that in fact nobody knew very much at the onset of the pandemic - is both true and offered as a blanket justification for everything that any side of any political or social aisle did to anyone else. In her telling, it’s a panacea, curing all ills and excusing all behavior.

To be very clear: Oster has a point here. At the beginning of the pandemic, nobody knew what to expect, inclusive of the public health establishment. While I’m not a fan of public health’s omnipresent “Something must be done; this is something, so we must do this” approach to all things or their deification of maxed-out precautionary principle adherence, this was potentially a very big deal; some precaution was in order.

Oster’s take is that at least some of the precautions and initial decisions made would end up being wrong, and that nobody should be held accountable to an unachievable 100% accuracy standard. She explains how counterproductive she sees this to be:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

And, yes, she should use more paragraph breaks. But more than that, she’s right on some elements here, as well. People do tend to entrench after pushback. They might do so counterproductively. But for Oster to get the progress-towards-better she wants, it’s necessary to think about every incentive created, just as it’s necessary to apply the amnesty evenly to all sides. Oster does not want to do either.

Some people really, really did not want to wear masks. They were very clear about it.

During the pandemic, the weight of the world fell on them. They were selfish Karens; they were murderers and killers. They were yelled at in public. Laws were passed to force them to do so. Endless TikTok videos were made mocking them.

The logic behind this was not unsound: if masks significantly slowed the spread of COVID, and an individual’s refusal to wear a mask made it significantly more likely that someone else would die, not wearing the mask would be a lot like drunk driving - something we’d rightfully push back on, and something we’d vilify people for doing.

Ditto closing churches. Yes, to some people they are more important than the risk of death, but you can see coming down really hard on it at the societal level as reasonable, should it really put a lot of lives outside of the voluntary attendees at risk.

Ditto vaccine mandates.

Ditto closed schools.

Ditto lost jobs and a wrecked economy.

Ditto, I guess, dying old, alone, and scared, separated from your family, confused and isolated in a bed in an unfamiliar room.

I often say that it’s actually important if the things we say are true; that it matters. I’m not assessing each of those claims above in the sense that I’m here to say “masks for-sure worked” or “masks were always security theater”. But I am saying that it matters which of those statements is true.

Imagine an old man who was separated from his wife, who subsequently died alone. Now imagine a scenario where he finds out that this was unnecessary - that what we now know indicates it wasn’t necessary. You’d imagine he’d be pretty peeved about this, and have an interest in making sure it didn’t happen to other people.

Imagine someone who didn’t want to wear a mask, who really didn’t like it, who found out it was arbitrary theater that was never revisited once we knew more. You’d imagine they’d be pretty pissed about being forced to wear the mask, or else dealing with endless vilification if they didn’t. They probably wouldn’t want that to happen again, right?

Now imagine you are a government that rushed ahead with mask mandates and various kinds of isolation. Imagine you’ve now found out that in the direct context of COVID-19, these things were wrong to do; they had the known downsides but not the promised upsides. But you feel justified in having told people they absolutely had to do this, because who at that time knew? And you knew they wouldn’t listen if you expressed uncertainty, so you don’t feel bad about saying you were certain this was needed back then; it was the only way to accomplish your aims.

I want to be very clear that I’m not making the case for either side here about what actually happened. I’m not within the confines of this piece trying to convince you that mask mandates were or weren’t necessary. But I am saying that the government in the examples above is going to do the exact same thing it does in the hypothetical again and again if Oster gets what she wants, because Oster’s proposal makes it costless for them to do so.

Oster’s proposal, boiled down, is “In any place that someone can credibly express uncertainty about whether or not their recommendations were right, anything they did might be unfortunate, but they can’t and shouldn’t be blamed for it.”.

She’s agnostic on the confidence in which the recommendations were made; she does not consider whether or not things that were uncertain were presented as proven truths. She does not consider the idea that coercive policy should be justified by a known reality as opposed to a guess or a desire to do something-anything-at-all.

In doing so, she completely discounts the interests of those in the hypothetical who were lied to or forced to have worse lives and who would not like the same thing to happen again. Within her request, they aren’t allowed to do a single thing to prevent it from happening again; all the benefit that comes from Oster’s request is concentrated on a particular set of folks, and it’s not them.

It’s at this point I should throw this quote into the mix:

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high.

The bolded word here (look close, you’ll find it) is mine. When Oster thinks of herself, she thinks of herself as academic/public health class - she’s in the decision-making class, guiding others, making decisions for them that they will then have to live by. To this class - the we to which she belongs - she gives full clemency: there was no possible way they could have known.

Having a We implies a non-we, an outsider group. And Oster, talking as a public health-aligned person to a left-of-center audience who would have been super, duper into COVID-as-a-hobby, defines them as follows:

Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad.

I don’t want to pretend like injecting yourself with bleach is good; I think you probably shouldn’t do that. But we should note she’s bringing up this thing that probably never happened, a sort of clearly-implausible fever dream substantiated by the kind of trash data that accompanies virtually every survey - what Scott Alexander calls the lizardman constant, and what adheres to the 4-5% of crazy answers he predicts random survey-givers to provide.

Yes, she should have Googled that before pushing the idea that the public health community “had to” spend a lot of time and resources fighting a practice that probably never existed1. But what’s more important isn’t that she used a crappy factoid as a crowbar, but what she wanted to use the crowbar to access:

Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

A play in .1 acts2:

Emily: Stuff we made up and foisted on others, often at great cost to them, should be forgiven; we were acting from uncertainty. The only way to move forward is to grant anyone who did this broad clemency.

RC: What about people in your outgroup? Like people to whom it seemed that masks were BS, or who didn’t want schools closed, or who thought there was a possibility that COVID was lab-leaked or stuff like that? Same clemency? I know you were an early supporter of school reopenings, but what about people who opposed other forms of overreach for similar reasons?

Emily: Listen, I understand what you are saying. But I’m pitching this to a group of left-aligned readers, and they are going to want some out-group blood. I’m not sure I don’t want some outgroup blood. At the very least, I’m not going to risk my in-group clemency to protect non-members. Sorry.

RC: It seems as if you might have to, right? Since we have to take you at your word that 100% of your in-group’s mistakes were from perfect, gold-star good faith, it seems like that opens up for anyone to make the same good faith claims and get the same grace.

Emily: I actually have a thing for that! See, our mistakes are good-faith errors that should be assumed to be understandable necessities of our search for good outcomes. The outgroup’s errors are misinformation, which is a super-convenient pre-existing term for “statements that in any way substantially disagree with government-approved public health policy”.

It’s coded right-wing, so I’m able to say “When we are wrong, it’s good-faith errors that should be forgiven; when your enemies are wrong, it’s misinformation meant to hurt people and make them poison themselves.”. And they will drink it up.

RC: Did they really make people drink bleach?

Emily: It doesn’t matter. If they didn’t, just add it to the good-faith-error pile.

There’s versions of this where Oster’s article is the right article to have written - where all things misinformation were willful attempts to hurt people; where government-requested social media censorship was right for social media companies to grant, where no public health officials got high on their own supply, etc.

It might be true, as Oster’s-argument-but-not-Oster-herself heavily implies, that there’s no need for amnesty at all - that instead, no wrongs were ever done; just good people working for the good of all with no ill-will or bias playing in at all.

But where it fails on any point - where the same logic that says that only Republican gatherings can spread COVID is untrue - this kind of logic begins to seem suspect to people, and this:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.

Begins to look a lot like a sort of one-sided amnesty, one where it’s OK to demand forgiveness from others while not actually providing any forgiveness to others. And it begins to look a lot like something that would incentivize people to do work from the same exact playbook next pandemic - after all, it was decided there would be no costs for errors in the last one.

But for anyone who, say, wants mask mandates actually examined, or who wants people to have some level of certainty of the effectiveness of school closures or social distancing determined before they become law-of-the-land moral imperatives, this looks worse. For anyone who wants to avoid being socially and legally bludgeoned for non-compliance until after there’s some evidence that what they are being asked to do is necessary, this doesn’t appeal in the same way.

I’m not against forgiveness here, or in general. But I am a little against slitting my own throat - I’d like to know that I’m not establishing a standard that lets Oster and Co. acquire infinitely reusable get-out-of-trouble-free cards to use working against my interests while I get nothing in return.

To put it another way: I’ll forgive, but I’ll still hold the other side accountable as their wrongs become clear - at the very least until it’s clear that they might have considered they’ve done anything wrong at all.

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As you reach each jhanic level, your mind will be tempted to remain at the previous jhanic state. Simply keep a balanced mind with no clinging to the pleasant or unpleasant and you will progress to the higher levels. The nine levels of jhana are:

Delightful Sensations

Joy

Contentment

Utter peacefulness

Infinity of space

Infinity of consciousness

No-thingness

Neither perception nor non-perception

Cessation

Scott’s article focuses mainly on the first two because he’s mostly commenting on the claimed experience of Nick Cammarata, who describes his experience with them like this:

These are, for better or worse, pretty big claims. Being more in control of pleasure-seeking behavior would be a very big deal for people who like getting stuff done and thus would also be a game-changer all by itself. Something being 1000-10000% better than sex has an appeal all its own, or at least would for me if it didn’t sound potentially fatal; I’m not sure if my wiring can keep up with that.

If that weren’t enough to make you want what he’s got, he reveals that it also directly quasi-cured his drug use, helps him maintain a healthy diet, and rewired his brain to be more sensitive to caffeine so he can get by with less:

Or, to inflate the promised goods in the more carnal direction, someone else mentions that jhana states might make you spiritually jizz whilst touching blankets in Target:

To be very clear, this makes all my woo-alarms go off. In a purely instinctive/reactive way, I am strongly inclined against believing any of this. To be even more clear, I also can’t disprove any of this. I haven’t adhered to a months-to-years-long daily meditation schedule after reading up on how to do it correctly. I can’t peer inside their mental state and say that I know for sure that they are reporting inaccurate information.

I also don’t think that these claims are entirely implausible. Brains are weird and do weird stuff. If optical illusions can make me see colors that don’t exist or objectively misinterpret the color of a dress, that should make me more confident that my brain wiring can be tricked. If there’s a flower with seeds that can (processed correctly) make me immune to pain, that should make me less confident that my brain runs on pure, incontrovertible reality. Whether or not I feel that it’s likely what jhana practitioners claim is happening, I can’t (fairly) say “I’m sure it’s not”.

Like everything else that’s ever happened, this makes for weird social situations.

If you came up to me and asked “RC, should I dedicate a bunch of my life to meditation in pursuit of a mystical bliss state that also makes me quit drugs, eat better, and perhaps directly cause mop-ups in aisle six?” I’d probably tell you that you shouldn’t, at least to the extent you are motivated by that reason alone. And I clearly wouldn’t do so myself - it’s a big outlay of time and effort for a payoff I’m not confident in.

For several people who are reading this, I think that’s probably mildly insulting. They have relayed a personal experience, and I’m doubting it - how is that not an accusation of lying? And why would I disbelieve it when I believe other similar subjective statements regarding unfalsifiable experiences every day?

Scott frames the same problem like this:

I consider this to be a pretty decent point in terms of, say, telling someone “I doubt it!” when they say they are hungry. Why would you do that? And why would you go straight to assuming they aren’t? It’s fair to point out that people tell you about subjective internal experiences every day - that they are happy, sad, or have a headache - and that we mostly take it as true based on faith.

I think other parts of this comment do a little less well under close scrutiny. Scott points out that thousands of people claim to have reached jhanas (in what I assume he means are the ways described here), and that this should be strong evidence that the states exist. He also applies a fairly confident impression of implausibility that people inflated how they perceived or communicated a good mood; he doesn’t seem to think that could happen.

I don’t really want to do the part of this article that’s about how it’s reasonable to doubt people in some contexts. But to get to the part I want to talk about, I sort of have to.

There is a thriving community of people pretending to have a bunch of multiple personalities on TikTok. They are (they say) composed of many quirky little somebodies, complete with different fun backstories. They get millions of views talking about how great life is when lived as multiples, and yet almost everyone who encounters these videos in the wild goes “What the hell is this? Who pretends about this kind of stuff?”

There’s an internet community of people, mostly young women, who pretend to be sick. They call themselves Spoonies; it’s a name derived from the idea that physically and mentally well people have unlimited “spoons”, or mental/physical resources they use to deal with their day. Spoonies are claiming to have fewer spoons, but also en masse have undiagnosable illnesses. They trade tips on how to force their doctors to give them diagnoses:

In a TikTok video, a woman with over 30,000 followers offers advice on how to lie to your doctor. “If you have learned to eat salt and follow internet instructions and buy compression socks and squeeze your thighs before you stand up to not faint…and you would faint without those things, go into that appointment and tell them you faint.” Translation: You know your body best. And if twisting the facts (like saying you faint when you don’t) will get you what you want (a diagnosis, meds), then go for it. One commenter added, “I tell docs I'm adopted. They'll order every test under the sun”—because adoption means there may be no family history to help with diagnoses.

And doctors note being able to sort of track when particular versions of illnesses get flavor-of-the-week status:

Over the pandemic, neurologists across the globe noticed a sharp uptick in teen girls with tics, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Many at one clinic in Chicago were exhibiting the same tic: uncontrollably blurting out the word “beans.” It turned out the teens were taking after a popular British TikToker with over 15 million followers. The neurologist who discovered the “beans” thread, Dr. Caroline Olvera at Rush University Medical Center, declined to speak with me—because of “the negativity that can come from the TikTok community,” according to a university spokesperson.  

Almost no one who encounters them assumes they are actually sick.

Are there individuals in each of these communities that are “for real”? Probably, especially in the case of the Spoonies; undiagnosed or undiagnosable illnesses are a real thing. Are most of them legitimate? The answer seems to be a pretty clear “no”.

I’m not bringing them up to bully them; I suspect that there are profiteers and villains in both communities, but there’s also going to be a lot of people driven to it as a form of coping with something else, like how we used to regard cutting and similar forms of self-harm. And, you know, a spectrum of people in between those two poles, like you’d expect with nearly anything.

But it’s relevant to bring up because there seem to be far more Spoonies and DID TikTok-fad folks than people who say they orgasm looking at blankets because they did some hard thinking (or non-thinking) earlier. So when Scott says something that boils down to “this is credible, because a lot of people say they experience this”, I have to mention that there’s groups that say they experience a lot of stuff in just the same way that basically nobody believes is experiencing anything close to what they say they are.

A story: when I was a kid, a new series of games called Pokémon came out. To give you an idea of how into the games I got, I just typed the acute E in the title using alt-codes from memory.

For those who never dreamed of becoming a Pokémon master, the original two games worked like this: As the protagonist, you were trying to catch little cute animals so you could fight them against other cute animals until you became the animal-fighting champion. There were 150 generally accessible pokémon, provided you had money (since there were two versions of the game, and each game had an exclusive subset of creatures). These were the ones you could get pretty easily. There was also one you could get if you manipulated a glitch.

But then there was Mew, the one hundred and fifty-first non-glitch pokémon, and the only legitimate way to get him was to go to in-person Pokémon events. Since none but the most child-dominated of parents would take their kids to one of these events, people looked for other ways to make it happen.

Thus it was that I found my way onto an Angelfire-hosted site with a small message board, and found a guy who knew how to get Mew.

Between two cities in the game, he said, there was a particular small patch of grass, seemingly exactly like the other patches of grass in which you’d normally walk to flush out animal-fighting fodder. And in that patch of grass, and no other, there was a very small chance of encountering Mew, who could then be caught.

I tried to do this forever, and it didn’t work. I was just young enough to not really question lies of that sort. It was only years later that I thought back to the claim, realized it was a lie, and then contemplated how weird it was that someone would lie like that.

But it was only years after that when I considered that, as time went on, multiple people joined the forum and then eventually came to claim that they too had also caught Mew using this method that didn’t work. The lie, dumb as it was, had proved contagious.

“Why would I lie about this?” is a compelling argument. Because it’s really hard to confidently point to why someone (in the hypothetical) would lie about/confer false information to themselves or others about something like intense meditation-joy. And when you can’t do this - when you go “I have no idea why they would lie about this”, it seems reasonable, up-front, for someone to say “See? That should lend this credibility.”

But the why-would-they-lie argument doesn’t hold water; you can point to countless groups who conveyed information that was false as a group. You can see the obvious falseness mixed into Spoonieism and DID TikTok fads; you can learn about dishonesty from Pokémon forums; you can reference the approximately one zillion people who are “a little psychic, sometimes” or who can see auras.

Most notably, you can notice that you don’t actually need to know why people lie to themselves or others (or both!) to note that they sometimes do.

A different Scott, one who let us hitchhike around the galaxy, (Author’s note: An actual different Scott, Scott Lawrence, has pointed out that I’m a dumbass who can’t tell the difference between the Dilbert guy and the Hitchhiker’s guy, albeit more gently than I said it. Fixed but left in so you don’t trust me as much) Douglas Adams once wrote this:

We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin.

And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball.

People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything.

It is not a secret that people who trend towards rationalism (or tech, with which rationalism has significant overlap) are not, on average, considered to be exceptionally socially skilled. A placement on the autism spectrum or some other form of neurodivergence is considered to be the norm rather than the exception to the rule amongst them. I don’t think this is bad; if anything, it’s where the group’s value comes from in the first place.

But with that comes a group-wide expectation that things that can’t be quantified with math are thus default-unknowable. A statement like “I could tell he was lying” isn’t quite taboo nonsense there, but it carries much less weight than in other places. People are less able or less willing to point out that someone looks less credible for socially understood reasons than in other less-enlightened-more-practical contexts.

Sometimes this is nice, but at some extremes, it ends up being a lot like if someone looked at Scott Douglas Adam’s description of a person catching a baseball above, realized that they can’t really explain how that happens, and then concluded that baseball catching was not a skill that does or could exist.

At the extremes of those extremes, you see things like the jhana thing: where it’s something that seems unlikely to most but is unfalsifiable, and because of that unfalsifiability is then assumed to be true because it was claimed at all. By Scott’s standard above, we would basically assume that any claim we couldn’t disprove was true, provided we could find at least a few thousand people who claimed it.

In the real world, people don’t usually end up making the assumption from the last section. Consider if I bet on the jhana thing being true and decided that was a thing I wanted (and, frankly, I think I would want it). The price of verifying that it was true (if it was true, mind you) to myself would be steep - I’d have to spend hundreds or thousands of hours in meditation before I got there.

But the price of verifying it false is unlimited - at any particular juncture, no matter how many hours I got into the process, the fault in my failure might lie in some limitation of my mind or spirit; I might just be “doing it wrong”.

Faced with that kind of dynamic, people make choices all the time about what they believe. Note that I’m not saying it’s about what they disbelieve. Belief, real belief, is often something that demands action - that a person do something about it, or else know they did wrong or took a loss in not doing it. I don’t believe in jhana in that active sense, so I won’t commit hundreds or thousands of hours to achieve it.

At the same time, I noted above that it’s at least possible that jhana is real; I can’t disprove it.

The wrinkle is this: to a jhana person, this sounds like “you are a liar”, full-stop. It’s impolite. And if you are sensitive to that kind of thing, if that’s a behavior you want to avoid doing, you can get caught pretty easily in a net where you feel like you have to treat something like jhana as true despite being unconvinced of it.

Anyway, the point is this: I’m arguing for a concept of a reasonable middle between “running up to everyone who says they have long COVID and calling them dirty, filthy liars” and “accepting every unproven claim of any sort as face-value true”.

And you might expect that there’s already something like this, but there really isn’t, or at least it’s not standardized. I flat-out guarantee you I’ve offended someone while writing this article, even in the group (jhana folks) that I treated the most gently. And I have at least one person I consider myself friendly with (Jay) who (if I’m remembering right) belongs to that group, and probably more that I don’t know about.

Note here that if the claims of jhana folks were widely believed in the active “I’ll do something about that” sense, we’d expect to see millions of people trying this and reporting back on their successes or failures - the fact that we don’t very probably means that I’m not alone in my passive disbelief. To put that another way: most people who encounter these claims conclude that they are likely enough to be false that they aren’t worth betting time and effort on.

I think people encounter this kind of doubt related to claims they are making and are shocked by it the worst when they come from predominantly atheist backgrounds. If you’ve spent most of your lives making claims that don’t rely on internal experiences that answer to most of the descriptors of spirituality, then you are used to either being believed based on nothing but trust or else being believed or disbelieved based on physical evidence.

Religious folks are often necessarily used to “listen, I get that you are claiming a certainty you feel about this topic, but I don’t buy it” in a way the average not-religious-besides-meditation type of person isn’t.

I’d like to accommodate the jhana-claimer and to be politely credulous, but consider this: if I went with believing the jhanists based on the level of evidence they provide, I’d also have to believe both the Spoonies, the DID people, the astral-projecting Wiccans, people who see auras, and John Edwards (pick one; almost any John Edwards works for this sentence).

More to the point: the kind of norm that’s being demanded here requires you to believe almost any claim, provided you can’t immediately falsify it. Or barring that to at least say you do, even if you don’t do the stuff that belief would imply you should.

I’m a proponent of honesty. It’s sort of one of my things. I’m not necessarily especially good at it, but I put in some effort toward the goal of being honest; I think about honesty kind of a lot.

There’s a line of political thinking that says “Listen, you can’t make too many things illegal, because even if they are just nominally illegal in a way that isn’t enforced, you will create more instances where more kinds of people are likely to break the law. You will eventually condition people to think of themselves as lawbreakers, or else to think of laws as something that it’s OK to break, and that’s going to be something you regret after the fact”.

I tend to agree with that, and I tend to think of “don’t create situations where lying is the norm” in the same way. This goes beyond the practical aspects of believing unproven claims; even though those exist, I don’t think most of us expect a huge upsurge in actual honest-to-god meditation from jhana claims, even if we expect more claims whether they are connected to practice or not. People will go on assessing confidence in claims and acting (or not acting) as appropriate, regardless of what they say.

But what you might expect, I think, is that honesty itself is harmed - that people conditioned to lying about small things (say, pretending to buy jhana when they don’t) end up more likely to lie about more and bigger things, especially when they can attach it to an intent to do good - by, say, believing that it’s necessary to lie to be polite and kind.

I think it’s better to acknowledge a middle position - one where someone is not actively believed, where the listener remains unconvinced, without having the default assumption being that they are by doing this committing an act indistinct from flat-out accusations of dishonestly. In other words: People should be able to express reasonable, honestly-felt doubt without being thought of as expressing hate or disdain.

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