Category: Philosophy

The Anguish of Young Men in a Broken Society

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

There are a great many young men who feel lost and hopeless in the modern world and many of them spend a lot of time on the internet complaining about it. This tends to rub older, moderately successful men wrong—very, very wrong. (Very roughly: men in their mid-thirties or older who have a wife and at least one child.) I’ve wondered about this for a while because I find this reaction in myself—I start out sympathetic but I verge on angry most times I try to interact with such men. I think I’ve finally figured it out: it has to do with the traditional role of adult men in raising other people’s young men into manhood.

Good parents love their children unconditionally and this is incredibly important to children and their healthy development. However, as children make their way to being adults, they are going to have to face other environments than the environment of home; they will have to face indifferent and even adverse environments. For most of human history (and much of the present, outside of some atypical but decreasingly atypical situations), this was especially true of boys. Somebody had to fight the wild animals who wanted to eat one’s children; somebody had to fight the other human beings who wanted to kill one and take one’s things. Defending against these and many other threats were usually best done in groups, often of people near in age, and that means working with people who were not one’s parents and who love one only conditionally. Preparing a boy for these environments is usually best done not by the boy’s father, but by friends of the boy’s father, or at least other adults males of good will. These are mentors.

Mentors do not love the boy unconditionally, as his father does (in the ideal, at least), but are willing to be more generous to the boy than the boy is yet capable of deserving. This mentorship forms a bridge for the boy to become a man. When a mentor demands more independence of the boy, this does not prevent the boy going to his father for unconditional love; by giving the role of being generously and patiently harsh to another man, the father can be a source of support for his son when that is too difficult, restoring the son’s strength, and enabling the son to go back to his difficult work of becoming a man.

This role of mentor is a bit tricky, since it does involve carefully gauging what the boy is currently capable of and only asking of him what he can do—as opposed to asking of the boy what would most benefit the mentor, as one does with, for example, a plumber1. But it does involve challenging the boy and pushing him to be able to deal with circumstances in which he has no support right now, to get him to use his “emotional muscles” to self-regulate and be able to deal with difficult circumstances, so that those “emotional muscles” grow. Because the time is coming when it will not matter how the now-boy feels, it only matters how he will fight in a battle and protect his fellow soldiers, or chase away the wolves, or do the unpleasant work before bad things happen because the work is not done.

Older men who are at least moderately successful (I mean in absolute terms, not as a euphemism for being rich) have the instinct that they should look for older boys and young men who need this kind of mentorship to transition into being fully independent men, and to provide this kind of supportive-challenging environment to help them to grow.

But the thing is, this relationship is very much a mutual one. The boy has to enter into it wanting to become a man. He has to want to be challenged. He has to want to rise to that challenge. All students must, in the end, learn for themselves; a teacher can only give the student what he needs in order to learn.

When you put all this together, I believe this explains why young men complaining about how unfair society is in its current configuration rubs us older men so wrong. This may all be true, but it’s not helpful in learning how to become a man. And a boy is better off becoming a man even in a bad society—there is no society where boys are better off staying permanently childish. Coming to us rubs us so wrong because we’re not the ones that young men should come to for this kind of sympathy. In fact, it would (often) be actively harmful to them to if we gave it to them, because it would discourage them from finishing growing up.

We all have our roles in society according to our station in life. For older men, our role is to act as mentors like this to young men. When young men come to us for sympathy, it feels a bit like coming to us for what they’re supposed to—mentorship—but then they reject attempts at mentorship, which confuses and frustrates us. Young men aren’t supposed to look to mentors for sympathy—they’re supposed to look elsewhere for that. It may be entirely legitimate that they are looking for sympathy everywhere because they can’t find it anywhere, but it’s a problem that this actively gets in the way of us fulfilling our proper role of mentor.

I don’t know what the solution to this is. I doubt it’s for us older men to just to give up on mentorship and become surrogate fathers to younger men, because that would still leave them stunted in their development and unable to fulfill their potential. God knows the answer; I don’t. At least, not yet. But identifying a problem is the first step towards solving it, and I think that this is, at least, a correct identification of the problem.

  1. This is perfectly fair with tradesmen because the tradesman is a full adult who trades what is best for the customer in exchange for money, which the tradesman needs more than whatever minor comfort he gives up in doing the work he is skilled at. ↩︎

Feminism is a Mostly Useless Word

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Rhetoric, Uncategorized1 Comment

Most words have multiple meanings, but there are problems when you can’t tell the meanings apart by context. The word “feminism” has exactly this problem because it has been used to refer to people doing superficially similar things in the same contexts which are actually quite different. There have been many feminisms, some of which have been absolutely terrible (especially Marxist feminism). A full taxonomy of them would take more than a little time and probably not actually be very interesting, but there are two types that I would like to distinguish in order to illustrate this point: the feminism of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (in 1848) and 2000s era internet feminism.

The 1848 version of feminism was about the context in which there existed places in America where women could not own property in their own name (the legal context of mid-nineteenth century America was far more heterogenous than modern America) and in some places could not be legally held accountable for their own crimes. In fact, one of the articles in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was that it was not just that, in some places, a father or husband would be held legally liable for a woman’s crimes and not she herself. That is, they asked for a reform to the laws that would involve holding women criminally liable for their own crimes. (Please note: I am not, thereby, saying that this was all that was in the declarations of sentiments or that it was a perfect or an unalloyed good; I’m not interested in discussing that one way or another. My only point is that one of its major concerns was both legal rights and responsibilities, many of which amounted to bringing American law in line with European and especially British legal traditions, rather than innovating.)

By contrast, 2000s era internet feminism was largely selfish people telling obvious lies to justify why they shouldn’t have to treat people decently or even take the trouble of developing basic social skills. You can see this today in the wretches who complain about “emotional labor” and when you look into what they mean, it turns out that they’re talking about the work of living in a society and having to treat other people better than as chattel slaves.

Of course, I’m not saying to never use the word “Feminism.” My point is, rather, that one should rarely, if ever, use it in an unqualified way. When talking about some feminism, it would be much better to say things like “equal property rights feminism,” “suffragette feminism,” “Marxist feminism,” “sexual liberation feminism,” “2000s era internet feminism,” etc. It is more cumbersome, of course, but it drastically improves the likelihood of actually being understood; all the more so as many people are only familiar with some of these and if they’re not familiar with the one you’re talking about they’re going to assume it’s one of the ones they do know about. By adding the qualifiers, this will be especially helpful in this case as their reaction will be “what are you talking about?” rather than “you idiot.” “What are you talking about?” can be an excellent starting point to mutual understanding. “You idiot,” pretty much never is.

Hell Is Purgatory Where You Don’t Let Go Of the Sins?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

In his excellent book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis depicts Hell and Purgatory as the same place, with the difference being whether people consent to leave or whether they decide to stay. Truth to tell, it’s a bit of timid description of purgatory because Lewis was trying to be non-denominational and so he was trying to avoid offending people who are rabidly anti-Catholic in their biases (possibly including himself—He was born in Belfast where anti-Catholicism was in the water). But it’s a very interesting idea which could really use a bit more development, especially with regard to the more fiery depictions of Hell and the more actively unpleasant depictions of Purgatory.

Purgatory is an oft-misunderstood doctrine, but its etymology is a good place to start understanding it. “Purgatory” comes from the same root as the word “purge,” as in “to clean” or “to make clean”. The doctrine of purgatory is a straightforward logical deduction from starting off sinful at death and being sinless in heaven. Something must happen between those two steps, and the thing that happens which cleanses people of their sins was called, very practically, “cleaning,” except it happened to come from the Latin rather than the German roots of English, and hence, “purge”→”Purgatory”.

If you consider how cleaning normally works, on physical objects, you do it by abrading the surface until all of the dirt is gone. If you want to do a thorough job, you often have to be rough with the thing being cleaned—which is why children do not like baths, especially baths which get them thoroughly clean, including, for example, under their fingernails. If we move from the physical to the spiritual, how much more invasive must the cleaning be which cleanses your soul from things like lust, greed, envy, hatred, etc?

From here, it’s a relatively short jump to the metaphor of using fire to purify metal. If you heat metal up roughly to its melting point, any organic contamination will burn away and you will be left with pure metal. (In practice, it will probably need a polishing afterwards, but this doesn’t matter to the metaphor.) And this metaphor for cleaning happens to work very well with the description of Hell as a burning grounds.

That Hell is a burning grounds with constant fire is taken to be metaphorical for the obvious reason that it can’t actually be completely literal. Quite apart from literal fire requiring the afterlife to be just more of the same, rather than different in important ways, if the fire consumes the damned, then they’re not there later be burnt anymore. If the fires don’t consume the damned, they’re not being burnt. It would be, at worst, like chili peppers—awful at first, but if you spend enough time with them you get used to them because you know the sensation doesn’t actually mean anything bad. Since orthodox Christians do not presume God to be incompetent, the fires must be, to some degree at least, metaphorical.

If you put these together, it produces an interesting version of C.S. Lewis’s presentation of Hell in The Great Divorce: if all of the souls go through something which is incompatible with sin, analogous to a bath or purifying metal with fire, and they let go of their sins, this is Purgatory, and they emerge from that process made fit for being perfectly happy being eternally in God’s presence. (Let me emphasize, due to the context of some odd heresies existing, that we are made clean entirely by God’s grace, and entirely by his power. This cleaning is purely receptive on our part and we merely cooperate with it.)

But if the person refuses to let go of their sin, this cleaning never finishes, and therefore becomes eternal—specifically, eternal punishment.

This actually goes quite well with the idea I saw somewhere (I think in G.K. Chesterton) that the fires of Hell are actually the burning love of God, rejected. Bishop Barron used the analogy of a person at a party who doesn’t want to be there, who hates everything that is making the people who do want to be there happy. But if we stick with the metaphor of fire, the light of God’s truth works quite well as a purifying fire that burns away all impurities, since all sin is some kind of lie, and light also heats. In the fullness of the light of God’s truth, unveiled, all lies will burn away, and if a person lets them go, they have been cleaned of the dirt of these lies. But if they will not let go, if they shield the dirt from the burning light of God with their own bodies, then they eternally are tormented by trying to do what they can’t—believe the lies.

This is all, of course, highly speculative metaphor. I’m not trying to say that this is exactly what will happen after we die. For one thing, I have no special revelation so I don’t know. For another, I doubt that any language we humans have on this side of death even contains the words needed to describe what actually happens after death. (The fact that our Lord never tried to tell us strongly suggests, to me, at least, that this is so.)

But I think that this does at least suggest an answer, or at least part of an answer, to the question of how eternal punishment can be just. The point isn’t really to identify the answer, though of course that would be nice. The point is to show that an answer is possible, and therefore any argument which relies on it being impossible is wrong.

Women Want Men To Show Emotion

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

A few days ago a tweet went viral about men showing emotion:

wish men understood how attractive it is when they can feel & openly show their emotions instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall

A great many people objected to this because, if a man follows this simply as described, the results are pretty much always a disaster. That’s because there’s a communication gap going on. What she wants is not, in fact, men “openly showing their emotions.” Men have very big emotions and many of them women would find terrifying if exposed to the full force of them. Also, if you’re speaking in the context of people who are merely dating, a man blubbering, out of control, will probably kill any attraction that the woman felt to him.

What she’s actually talking about but not saying clearly is that she wants communication. There’s an old saying in writing fiction that when people give feedback about your story, they’re usually right in what the problem is and wrong about what the solution is. This is a good example of that. If you ignore the suggested solution and focus on the problem, you can see that it’s a real problem.

instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall

If you focus on this part, you can see that this is a legitimate problem. If a man does not communicate anything about his emotional state, at any time, to any degree, his wife will have no idea what’s going on, where he stands, where they stand, whether she can support him, whether it’s a good time to ask for things that eventually need to be done, etc. etc. etc.

And bear in mind that when I talk about her supporting him, I’m not primarily talking about giving him a shoulder to cry on so he can “get it out.” Men mostly don’t work that way. We don’t “get it out.” Talking about feelings does not exhaust them, or reduce them, or put them in perspective. If anything, it amplifies them and makes them harder to deal with. But within a marriage, there are many things each spouse does to support the other. This can range from things like getting the other one a food they particularly like to spending time with them in a way that’s relaxing or fun to letting them know that you’re fine with any outcome. (“Even if it doesn’t work out, we’ll be fine” can take a lot of stress out of many situations.)

For this and other reasons, reliable communication about how the man is doing, emotionally, is extremely helpful to his wife. (I’m talking about wives; all of this is merely prospective when it’s about a girlfriend because she is subconsciously evaluating what life will be like as a wife.) But the key things about this communication is that it is reliable and intelligible. None of this requires it to be performative. You do not need to cry to tell a woman that you’re feeling sad. You do not need to shout to tell her that you’re angry or laugh giddily to tell her that you’re happy. There is substantial individual variation, of course, but it is, in general, quite sufficient to simply describe your feelings in kind and magnitude. Things such as, “I’m not looking forward to work today. Nothing’s wrong, I’m just tired and I haven’t had a break in a while,” and “This problem at work is really stressing me. We’re going to be fine, but the customer is losing $1000 a day and calls us like every hour to see how it’s going” are usually quite sufficient, so long as they’re said with an intonation consonant with the meaning. (All bets are off if you sound like an android when you speak.)

This communicates what she needs to know in order to be a loving wife who works with you to try to make a happy household in which you are raising happy children. However much you deal with your own problems, doing so will inevitably use some of the resources you have for dealing with other problems such as family members making mistakes and being annoying or hurtful or whatever; when they know that you’re dealing with something big they can take extra trouble to not bother you and be extra tolerant if you snap. This is exactly the same as how you treat a person who has a headache or a cold with extra care and are more tolerant—which is why it’s important to tell people when you have a headache or a cold.

But that’s the thing—you want to tell them. The goal is not to simply give up all control and show people exactly how you’re feeling. You want to communicate like a rational human being who trusts the people to whom he is communicating.

And, indeed, this is attractive to women. If you communicate in a controlled way, she will feel that she is able to actually bond with you and form a relationship with you but will not feel that you are weak. Indeed; by letting her know how you feel, she is better able to gauge your strength. Weak people need to conceal their weakness for fear that it will be exploited, just as injured animals like to curl up in a place where no one can get at them and snarl viciously at anything that comes near so it doesn’t get closer. If you do not communicate at all, that can come across as being afraid of her getting close to you, which is weakness. Which is fair, because it often is. It is only strong people who are willing to be vulnerable. The key to the whole thing is: vulnerable in a rational, self-controlled way. What women want is communication, not emotional incontinence.

The Red-Headed League Shows How Evil Contains the Seeds of Its Own Destruction

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

The Red-Headed League is, justly, one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories. But while it is mostly known for the cleverness of the plot, I really appreciate that its structure shows how thieves are often their own worst enemies.

The most notable quality of a thief is that they are not willing to do the just work to get what they want. Outside of a highly developed economy this mostly means that they are not willing to build, or husband animals, or plant crops, or spin or weave or whatever it takes to get what they want. Within a developed economy this means that they’re not willing to pay for what they want with money that they have earned. And while most of the time this means that they take money from others, it also means that they are not above getting people to do work and then not paying them. And this was the downfall of the Red-Headed League.

The reason that Sherlock Holmes foiled the bank robbery for which the Red-Headed League was set up is that Mr. Jabez Wilson came to him to find out what the Red-Headed League was about. The reason that Mr. Jabez Wilson came to Sherlock Holmes was because the Red-Headed League was summarily dissolved and all efforts to try to contact the representative of the Red-Headed League showed that something underhanded had taken place. The reason that the Red-Headed League was dissolved was because the tunnel that they were digging into the bank had been completed. They no longer needed Mr. Wilson out of the way so they invested no more time or money in him. I think it is not coincidence that this took place on the day that Mr. Wilson was to be paid for the previous week’s work. Had Mr “Duncan Ross” of the Red-Headed League showed up and paid Mr. Jabez Wilson the four pounds, Mr. Wilson would have gone home happy that Saturday and not contacted Holmes.

Saving four pounds cost the thieves £30,000.

On its face this might sound stupid but the brilliant part of the story is that it is stupid in exactly the sort of way that thieves often are. It’s not that they didn’t think of this at all; they did and just thought it sufficient for Vincent Spaulding to tell Mr. Wilson to wait for a letter in the mail. That is, they trusted that instead of spending money (and thereby doing work) they could instead trick Mr. Wilson into doing what they wanted.

This is excellent symbolic structure in the story because the fundamental problem with stealing is that it does not actually work; stealing is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. If only the criminals had been a bit more diligent, they would have gotten away with it… means, in the end, that they would have succeeded if they were not the sort of people who are thieves.

(There are always exceptions; the world is only ever partially fallen because, to be completely fallen, it would have to not exist. You will occasionally find people who are oddly virtuous in pursuit of some vice, but it is always a temporary thing. Vice is a degenerative disease because virtue is only ever maintained through constant renewal, and the renewal comes from aiming at something higher. When someone gives up on the higher aim to the point of becoming a career criminal, they have abandoned the source of renewal that will maintain their virtue. And so they will degenerate.)

AI Exposes a Major Problem with Universities

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

I’ve heard that AI, or more properly, Large Language Models (LLMs), are a disaster for colleges and universities. Many people take this to be an indictment of the students, and there is some truth to that, but they’re missing the degree to which this is a damning indictment of Academia. If your tests give excellent grades to statistical text generators, you weren’t testing what you thought you were and the grades you gave didn’t mean what you thought they meant.

Of course, it’s been an open secret that grades have meant less and less over the years. The quality of both students and professors has been going down, though no one wants to admit it. This is, however, a simple consequence of the number of students and professors growing so much over the last 50 or so years. In the USA, something like 60% of people over the age of 25 have attended college with close to 40% of them having a degree. 60% of people can’t all be in the top 1%. 40% of people also can’t all be in the top 1%. At most, in fact, 1% of people can be in the top 1%. When a thing becomes widespread, it must trend toward mediocrity.

So this really isn’t a surprise. Nor, frankly, is it a surprise that Universities held on to prestige for so much longer than they deserved it—very few human beings have the honesty to give up the good opinion of others that they don’t deserve, and the more people who pile onto a ponzi scheme, the more people have a strong interest in trying to keep up the pretence.

Which is probably why Academics are reacting so desperately and so foolishly to the existence of chatGPT and other LLMs. They’re desperately trying to prevent people from using the tools in the hope that this will keep up their social status. But this is a doomed enterprise. The mere fact that the statistical text generator can get excellent grades means that the grades are no longer worth more than the statistical text generator. And to be clear: this is not a blow for humanity, only for grades.

To explain what I mean, let me tell you about my recent experiences with using LLM-powered tools for writing software. (For those who don’t know, my day job is being head of the programming department at a small company.) I’ve been using several, mostly preferring GitHub Co-Pilot for inline suggestions and Aider using DeepSeek V3 0324 for larger amounts of code generation. They’re extremely useful tools, but also extremely limited. Kind of in the way that a back hoe can dig an enormous amount of dirt compared to a shovel, but it still needs an operator to decide what to dig.

What I and all of my programmer friends who have been trying LLM-powered tools have found is that “vibe coding,” where you just tell the LLM what you want and it designs it, tends to be an unmaintainable disaster above a low level of complexity. However, where it shines is in implementing the “leaf nodes” of a decision tree. A decision tree is a name for how human beings handle complex problems: we can’t actually solve complex problems, but we can break them down into a series of simpler problems that, when they’re all solved, solve the complex problem. But usually these simpler problems are still complex, and so they need to be broken down into yet-simpler problems. And this process of breaking each sub-problem down eventually ends in problems simple enough that any (competent) idiot can just directly solve it. These are the leaf nodes of the decision tree. And these simple problems are what LLMs are actually good at.

This is because what LLMs actually do is transforms in highly multi-dimensional spaces, or in less technical language, they reproduce patterns that existed in their training data. They excel at any problem which can be modeled as taking input and turning it into a pattern that existed in its training data, but with the details of the input substituted for the details in the training data. This is why they’re so good at solving the problems that any competent idiot can solve—solutions to those problems were abundant in its training data.

The LLMs will, of course, produce code for more complex things for which the solution did not already exist in its training data, but the quality of these solutions usually range from terrible to not-even-a-solution. (There are lots of people who will take your money and promise you more than this; there are always people who will use hype to try to separate people from their money. I’ve yet to hear of the case where they are not best ignored.)

Now, I’ve encountered the exact problem of a test being rendered obsolete by LLMs. In hiring programmers, I’ve had excellent results making the first interview a programming sample specification that people had 5 business days to complete. (To prove good faith, I’d give them my implementation to it right after they submitted theirs.) It was a single page, fairly detailed specification, but it left room for creativity, too. However, you can throw it into any high-end LLM these days and get a perfectly workmanlike result. This is obviously not useful as a first interview anymore.

One possible response would be to try to prevent the use of LLMs, such as by asking people to write it in front of me (e.g. during a video call with a shared screen). But what would be the point of that? If we hired the person, I’d expect them to use LLMs as a tool at work. (Used properly, they increase productivity and decrease stress.)

It only took a minute or two of thinking about this to realize that the problem is not that LLMs can implement the programming sample, but that the programming sample was only slightly getting at what I wanted to find out about the person. What I want to know is whether they can design good software, not whether they can rapidly implement the same kind of code that everyone (competent) has written ten times at least.

So I came up with a different first interview sample. Instead of having people do something which is 10% what I want to see and 90% detail work, I have switched to asking the candidates to write a data format for our products, focusing on size efficiency balanced with robustness and future expansion based on where they think our products might go in the future. This actually gets at what I want to know—what is the person’s judgement like—and uses very little of their time doing anything an LLM could do faster.

I haven’t hired anyone since making this change, so I’m not in a position to say how well this particular solution to the problem works. I’m only bringing it up to show the kind of thinking that is necessary—asking yourself what it is that you are actually trying to get at, rather than just assuming that your approach is getting at that. (In my defense, it did work quite a lot better for the intended purpose than FizzBuzz, which we had used before. So it was very much a step in the right direction.)

That Academia’s response to LLMs is to try to just get rid of them, rather than to use them to figure out what the weakness in their testing have been, tells you quite a lot about what a hollow shell Academia has become.

An Interesting Lesson From A Woman Who Complains About Her Husband

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I ran across an interesting TikTok on Twitter which I think is a useful jumping-off point to some practical aspects of how to interpret low-context things on the internet:

@sheisapaigeturner

I am not alone in this experience. Many women have been in this exact same position. The work required to manage a home and a family is not something that one person should ever have to carry alone. It is possible to change these dynamics. It is hard but with the right tools and support it’s possible and it’s so much better on the other side. #marriageadvice #mentalload #mentalloadofmotherhood #divorced #divorcedmom #parentingadvice #default

♬ original sound – Paige

The first question you need to ask about anyone making almost any kind of argument is who are they and why are they making this argument. In theory this shouldn’t be necessary because arguments are supposed to stand on their own. And some in fact do. It doesn’t matter who is making the argument for God from contingency and necessity because that argument actually does stand on its own. You can simply examine its premises and the logical links in it and that’s sufficient. But for most arguments that people make, when you examine the argument, you will see that people use themselves as an authority in their argument. In technical language, their argument uses premises whose truth value can only be known by themselves, so you can only know it by trusting them when they vouch for it. The TikTok above is exactly such a thing; the premises in her argument are very much things no viewer can evaluate apart from her trustworthiness.

So the first question is: who is this woman? Of course, I’ve no idea who this particular woman is, but we do know a few things about her just from the video. First, we know that she is publicly complaining about her spouse, so we know that she has bad judgement. Second, if you’re familiar with human beings, you don’t even need the sound on to see that she is neurotic, but if you do turn the sound on, you can tell with near-certainty that she is highly neurotic. (You can also tell from how she’s dressed and the house that she filmed this in that she’s upper middle class and very concerned with status.) All of which means that she is not to be trusted on any premises she offers which require good judgement, stability, courage, or humility to be correct about.

She begins by talking about how she does all of the household work, and while I don’t necessarily doubt that she does almost all of the work that she notices, what I don’t trust her in the slightest about is that most of this work needs to be done.

Don’t get me wrong, kids are a lot of work. I’ve got three so I’m quite familiar with this. What I’m also quite familiar with is that it’s easy to multiply the work that needs to be done if you set up rules for yourself that don’t match reality. And this is where her bad judgement and neuroticism come in. It is not even a little plausible that her workflow is streamlined and matches reality. Indeed, her evident desire for status and suspiciously immaculate kitchen very strongly suggest that much of her workload in the morning is about conforming to rules that, in her mind, gives her the status she craves.

A very strong indication that what she wants is not, in fact, help with the labor is the that she complains that, when she told her husband she was overwhelmed, that he asked her what she wanted him to do (i.e. how he could help). If her actual problem was more work than she can do, the last thing in the world she would want would be someone just starting to do things without coordinating with her. No rational person wants someone to take over randomly selected jobs from them without coordinating first. Equally, no rational person thinks that another person magically knows, without communication, everything he does and how he does it and how all of the details fit into each other. Moreover, any even slightly competent adult who is overwhelmed by work and who wants help will identify which tasks they can offload with less work than doing them themselves and directly ask for help with those. The woman in this video may be unpleasant, but she’s clearly an adult and not a complete idiot, so the obvious conclusion is that what she wants is not, in fact, help with some of the household work.

(Some additional evidence of this is the particular example she cites of when she considered divorcing her husband: a particular time he didn’t take out the trash in the morning because he was running late and so she took it out and ended up being late to work as a result. Now, the odds that she was late to work because she took out the trash are, in themselves, tiny, unless their garbage cans are a quarter mile hike over difficult terrain away. But even more to the point is that she can’t possibly have needed to take out the trash in order to do anything necessary in the morning. In a reasonable worst-case scenario if she needed to throw something out that couldn’t just be left on a counter she could have just pulled out another garbage bag and left it on the floor. If they didn’t have a spare garbage bag, she could have put it in a spare plastic grocery bag. Or in a ziplock bag. Nothing irreparable or unsanitary will happen to garbage left in a bag on the floor of an empty house for eight hours. She can only have been forced to take out the trash and therefore be late to work by some unnecessary rule she has imposed on herself.)

Given that she’s got bad judgement and is almost certainly neurotic and status-seeking, what she almost certainly actually wants is someone to force her to calm down. That is, she wants someone to override her worrying so she doesn’t worry so much.

In theory this could be her husband, if he’s sufficiently manly and confident and she’s willing to trust him. Far more likely to be successful, though, is another woman that she respects. A good friend might work, but an older female relative that she respects would probably be the most effective at it. She needs to feel like she has permission from the society whose status she craves to not do these things, such that she won’t lose status for doing them. So it needs to be someone who, in her mind, can grant her that permission.

There are, of course, almost certainly some other things going on too. She’s going to want to feel valued and appreciated, but she probably can’t feel those things as long as her life and her interactions with others are dominated by status-seeking unnecessary work because very few people are any good at thanking somebody for them wasting their time, in theory on your behalf but in reality for their own sake. But this is only probable based on how human beings behave; it is less in evidence from the video.

But, to bring it back to the general: when you’re not dealing with someone wise, the problem is almost never the stated problem. As a Lindy Hop instructor of mine once put it: when you see something go wrong, the problem is usually two steps earlier.

Online Acrimony

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It is much commented on that there is far more anger, acrimony, and ascerbic speech online than in real life. There is, of course, more than one reason for this. Anonymity reducing people’s normal inhibitions is a commonly cited one, and there is, no doubt, some truth to it. Sometimes a lot of truth. But I think that an often under-appreciated aspect to this is the non-interactive nature of online interaction. The people we interact with online don’t react like we’re build to expect them to, and that screws with our social instincts.

In normal human interaction, that is, interactions that take place face-to-face with people in the same place, the person listening reacts to what the other person is saying through body language. But they don’t wait to react; they react while the other person is speaking. And we look for this while we’re speaking. In the normal course of events, the other person’s reactions as we’re talking may well change how we finish our sentences, to say nothing of what the next sentences are. If we are saying something important to us, we look to see that the other person is giving us their full attention—a sign that they understand the importance of what we’re saying. And here’s the crucial part: if we don’t see that they get how important this is, we amplify our intensity.

That might mean using greater volume, or it might mean using intensifiers like “dirty words”, or it might mean intensifying the thing being said. A person might go from “there’s a problem” to “There’s a !@#$ problem” or they might go to “This is a catastrophe.”

If that doesn’t work, the next intensifier available is to indicate that the relationship between the speaker and the person listening is threatened. This will tend to take the form of insults, because a person is only willing to insult someone that they are willing to do without. This is true in theory much more than in practice, of course; a great deal of insulting is really an attempt to signal where things are headed rather than to indicate where they currently are.

If we consider the nature of online interactions, it should immediately jump out that they all lack real-time feedback. But unlike previous technologically-intermediated means of communication, such as books and letters, the online ones feel far more immediate. When you write a book or a letter, you know that, if you get a response, it will be days or weeks in the future. Online, you might receive a reply in the time it takes someone to type a sentence. This can kick our processing of what they say into real-time processing, as we prepare to immediately respond to them. But our real-time processing relies very heavily on the many aspects of communication apart from the words being spoken and it’s easy to forget how much of the person’s response we actually lack.

We lack it first because most of the time we’re using text so there is neither tone nor cadence nor facial expression nor volume conveyed, all of which are very important to understanding how to interpret the words. The other problem is that the space limitations of text mean that we have to pick and choose what we respond to in what the other person said. But this act of picking and choosing, coupled with the lack of facial expressions/body language as they were speaking, means that they got precisely zero feedback on everything else they said.

It is extremely easy, under these circumstances, for people who have shifted into real-time processing to take this as complete indifference to their attempts to communicate the importance of what they were saying. When this happens, their instinct is to do what they would do in person—amplify and exaggerate.

The instinct to exaggerate, here, is really about accuracy within a context. If a person who is hard of hearing doesn’t hear you, the polite thing to do is to repeat yourself. If you’ve ever had a loved one who suffered from hearing loss in the age before ubiquitous hearing aids, this might get to the point of almost shouting into the person’s ear so they can hear you. In like manner, if you say that a problem is a problem and the other person pays no attention, and you say it’s a catastrophe and they pay no attention, and finally you say that the world is about to end and they finally rouse themselves to listen to you, the intention is to clearly communicate that there is a problem, not to stimulate them into a panicked rush. (This is distinct from people who use exaggeration in order to achieve disproportionate effects, but these people usually start off exaggerating, they don’t start off reasonable. And even the approach meant to accurately calibrate to the insensitivity of the other is fraught with problems, and I’m only trying to describe it, not defend it.)

The other thing that people may do when they perceive that the importance of what they’re saying isn’t being appreciated, you will recall, is to start indicating that the relationship is in danger of being breached. That is, they may start insulting the other person to get their attention.

I suspect that this explains more than a little bit of the acrimony that we see online.

Don’t Optimize the Fun Out of Everything

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A while back I started playing the MMORPG1 Hypixel Skyblock so that I could play it with my sons. It’s an interesting game because it has a functional economy and (accidentally) teaches some important economics lessons in a way even older children can understand. We ended up dividing the labor, with me specializing in mining in order to earn (pretend) money to buy equipment for dungeon runs we’d go on, and I noticed something very interesting about other players who were earning (pretend) money in the game: they had optimized all the fun out of it.

The game was set up such that there was quite a lot of (pretend) money to earn in order to buy the tip-top best stuff, taking potentially a thousand hours of game play or more. Many people wanted to minimize the time they spent earning the (pretend) money, so they figured out how to absolutely maximize the (pretend) money they earned per hour. The problem with that is that fun comes from making decisions, even if very small decisions such as aiming, and decisions take time. The efficiency-maxers worked hard to eliminate every possible decision point so that every second could be spent earning money. That is, they inadvertently optimized the fun out of the game.

And they complained about how the game was no fun. Quite a lot. It was, perhaps, the most popular subject in the in-game chat in the mining areas.

I took a more laid-back approach, aiming to get to about 90% of the maximum amount of (pretend) money I could earn per hour, while doing a bit of exploring and mining whatever I found, and for me mining was a pleasant and relaxing activity. It wasn’t nearly as fun as playing in the dungeons with my sons, but I enjoyed doing it for what was probably a few hundred hours over the more-than-a-year I did it, while many others burned out.

I think that this lesson generalizes.

  1. Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game ↩︎

The Trouble With Secular Priests

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

There seems to be a kind of person who really, really wants a job which consists of conducting rituals rather than doing something where the outcome matters. That’s not illegitimate. Rituals matter to community. But I think we’ve made way too many secular priests.

Perhaps the chief example I’ve seen of secular priests are academics. Not all, of course. Hence why some people like to focus on STEM1. But a lot of them. And a big part of the problem with these secular priests is that the rituals they do are hidden away. They’ve become untethered from the community they (theoretically) serve.

This is a partial explanation for why people are getting PhDs with dissertations that argue that complaining about smells associated with the transmission of disease is racist. I’m sure the academic who wrote that convinced herself it’s true, but that wasn’t the point. The point was writing a dissertation. If it wasn’t this topic, it was going to be something. The point wasn’t the contents of the book, but the book itself. The point wasn’t what was said in the viva voces (aka thesis defense), the point was that things were said in from of a thesis committee. The point was the performance of the ritual.

In itself, the point being the performance of the ritual is not necessarily a problem. Rituals, by their nature, exist because doing them has some benefit apart from the things they effect. In this case, though, the ritual is completely divorced from the community that the ritual is supposed to unify. The result is that the ritual has become weird.

I started out by saying that the people who want to be secular priests want jobs where outcome doesn’t matter, but that’s not actually an accurate description of what priests do. If you look at any religion which has existed for centuries, you will see that its rituals change over time.

Sometimes more, sometimes less, but they change.

This is because the authorities responsible for the rituals are in touch with the people and look at the effect that the rituals have, and modify them. Sometimes it’s explicit, as in the case of the Catholic Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which publishes authoritative manuals on how rituals are to be performed within the Catholic Church. Sometimes it’s just that some rituals are more popular than others and the popular ones survive while the unpopular ones wither away. But whatever the mechanism, the rituals change over time in response to changes in the people and how existing rituals affect them.

In Academia, which is a secular religion that’s been around for perhaps a hundred years or so, we’ve managed to create a secular class of priests who conduct all of the rituals behind closed doors. Which means that there’s no feedback loop on what effect the rituals are having on the community, which means that the only feedback loop is on what effect the rituals are having on the secular priests. This has the effect of being an unchecked amplification loop, as each new generation of academics tries to outdo the previous one, and doesn’t really try to do anything else.

And I don’t think that it has entirely escape the notice of the academics that their rituals aren’t doing anyone any good. In fact, I suspect that’s one reason why insane2 social justice movements have become popular with them. They must be insane, because otherwise they would just be ordinary work where the outcome matters. But they are about social justice because this has a (theoretical) relationship to the community to whose benefit the rituals are done.

On some level, they know that they’re supposed to be doing someone some good.

1. “Science Technology Engineering and Math”

2. I mean that the means have no rational relationship to the goals and no reasonable person would think that the proposed means would achieve the stated goals.

The Science of Test Driving a Potential Spouse

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently saw someone try to support the idea of “test driving” a potential marriage partner prior to getting married in order to ensure that they are “sexually compatible”, and then in the ensuing discussion I was told to look up the research on “the wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”. My understanding is that what research in this “field” exists doesn’t support the importance of “test driving” a potential marriage partner, but that’s irrelevant because there simply can’t be any good science on this subject. We can tell that by the simple expedient of asking what kinds of experiments could get us the data we want, and discovering that it’s not possible to do them.

So, what kind of experiment would show us that “there’s a wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”? Clearly, we’ll need to have a large number of females copulate with a wide variety of partners and measure their responsiveness during each copulation, then compare the things to which each female maximally responded to in order to see how big the range is. You can’t leave off any of these things; if you only study a few women, you won’t have the statistical power to conclude anything. If you leave off the wide variety of partners, then you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to versus there simply being a wide variety in the degree to which women respond at all. If you leave off measuring, instead relying on surveys, you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to and there being a wide variety in how women describe their response.

This experiment is both impractical and impossible; let’s discuss the impracticality of it first. One obvious problem is recruitment: there are very few people willing to copulate with a large number of strangers in a laboratory, covered in probes to measure responsiveness, and observed by experts, on command. Also, since you will have to pay the participants and this amounts to prostitution, there are relatively few places you can legally conduct this experiment, especially since bringing in the variety of women you want may well count as sex trafficking, doubly so because of the use of blindfolds to eliminate attractiveness as a confounding factor when measuring the effect of physical variations of anatomy. Moreover, getting this approved by an IRB (ethics committee) is pretty dicey. Never say never, of course.

But supposing one were to manage to work all of these practicalities out and conduct the experiment, it would not produce any data relevant to real life because people’s enjoyment and satisfaction in copulation is largely determined by their relationship to the person with whom they are copulating. Married people frequently report greater enjoyment of sex after five or ten years of marriage than right at the beginning, and it is impossible to have your experimental subjects form real relationships for years to each of the many subjects with whom they will be paired. If nothing else human beings don’t live that long, but repeated pair bonding is also well known to weaken subsequent bonds, especially without time between them. Plus people don’t form real bonds on command.

It is thus impossible, even in theory, to scientifically study the kinds of things which might support the idiotic idea of “test driving” a potential spouse. And bad science is worse than no science.

I should probably mention that the idea of test driving a spouse, in addition to being immoral, is also idiotic because it’s predicated on two premises, both of which are false:

  1. people can’t learn
  2. people don’t change

Young people are told to not pay too much attention to the looks of a potential husband or wife because looks are only skin deep and virtue, character, and personality matter far more. This is all quite true, but it’s also the case that selecting a husband or wife based on their looks is futile anyway because their looks will change as they age. You can find this with any celebrity who is in their sixties—just look at pictures of them from the various decades and while they are recognizable, they will be quite different. And celebrities tend to be selected for being people who change the least as they age.

In the same way, people’s tastes and preferences change. Women’s bodies change after pregnancy and childbirth. Quite apart from the immorality of the thing, the idea that finding who people who happen to match each other in their sexual enjoyments will be conducive to lasting happiness is simply unrelated to reality. Everyone must learn and adapt. There are no exceptions to that in this world.

Mary Harrington on Lily Phillips and Possession

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mary Harrington wrote about our modern day Messalina, Lily Phillips, who recently and famously fornicated with 100 men in a day as a PR stunt for her pornographic OnlyFans channel. This event would be fairly unremarkable, given what society is presently like, except that a documentary film was being made of it and her immediate reaction upon finishing was deep distress, which has spawned a great deal of commentary. In the face of most people arguing about individual responsibility vs. responsibility to others, Ms. Harrington’s piece suggests an unusual framing: that of possession. (Demonic if you are tough enough for solid food, symbolic if you haven’t yet been weaned, though of course she doesn’t put it that way and for all I know doesn’t think of it that way.) This is a very interesting framing, and I’d like to explore it a bit.

Before I get into the main part, I do want to make some notes about demons, possession, and demonic influence which I think will be helpful to ensure that we’re all on the same page because popular culture tends to depict demons in egregiously stupid ways.

The first thing that I want to note is that within Catholic philosophy, the symbolic interpretation of things like demonic possession is not exclusive of the literal interpretation of them. They can be both at the same time, just in the way that a father can feed his child when the child is hungry as a simple physical act but, at the same time, this also archetypally represents all manner of things from God’s act of creation to a teacher teaching a student. None of these is wrong or one real while the others are fake. They’re different, but all legitimate as themselves.

The second thing is that full-on possession2 is not the same thing as a person being influenced by a demon; demons are capable of subtlety. Demons are simply angels who reject the good; they are beings of pure spirit and greater intelligence than humans, so they’re capable of more subtlety and cunning than human beings are. They can make bad ideas seem good and let us do the rest. If you are taking the symbolic interpretation alone, the complexities of social interactions are more complex than an individual, and can mislead us without completely overwhelming us.

The third thing to note is that demonic possession is not necessarily adversarial with the person possessed. A human being is capable of cooperating with a demon, in whole or in part. Demons make promises, which are usually empty, and people may well cooperate with the demon because of them. In the purely symbolic interpretation, you can see this in something like a person who takes foolish risks or a reality show contestant.

The fourth and perhaps most important thing to note is that demonic possession is not exclusive of things like psychological or social pressures. A person can be possessed by a demon and also worry about what his neighbor will think of him and be anxious about how to pay his bills.

OK, so that common ground established, I’d like to consider Ms. Harrington’s framing of Lily Phillips’ stunt as possession, or the alternative phrase she offers, an “egregore”. (An egregore is “a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals”.) Put very abstractly, the question which arises when one hears of Lily Phillips’ stunt and how predictably bad she felt afterwards is: how could anyone choose to do something so foolish? And the answer of possession or an egregore is, basically, that she didn’t choose this, she is a slave to a wicked master, and that master chose it for her.

To modern ears this can sound like trying to shift blame. And indeed, some people are trying to do that; to some degree that’s what Louise Perry’s article, The Myth of Female Agency, is about (though it is more complex than that). Properly understood, though, demonic possession is not about shifting blame. It’s about understanding that we are not gods. We must serve something; the most important choice in our lives is who or what we will serve.

Ms. Harrington quotes the story from the gospel of Luke where Jesus asks a demon its name and it replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” More illustrative is when Jesus describes what happens when an unclean spirit is driven out:

When an unclean spirit goes out of someone it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says, “I will go back to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it wept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, and so that person ends up worse off than before.

If you merely reject a spirit because you don’t like it—even if you just want to think of it as the zeitgeist or spirit of the age or an egregore—if you do not replace it with something, you will remain empty until it comes back. But nature abhors a vacuum, and your emptiness will pull in more than just what you drove off, because you will take in several things hoping they’ll fill the emptiness. You’ll probably think that you’re just trying them or considering them, but you’ll take them in.

On a technical level, this is because your life must have some kind of purpose for you to do anything at all. People who have merely absorbed their purpose from the zeitgeist will often doubt this because they’ve never paused to consider what the purpose of their life is and so can foolishly believe they don’t have a purpose, but they eventually tend to notice this as they get older and especially if they’re successful at the purpose they absorbed. “I’ve gone to school and gotten a job and paid for therapy so I can be better at my job so I can afford more therapy so I can be better at my job—but what’s it all for? Is this it?”

The only people who make their own purpose are madmen—this is necessarily so on the technical level since people who make their own purpose cannot work toward the same goals as others except accidentally and cannot be intelligible to others who do not share their purpose. Moreover, we find ourselves in a physical world we did not create with physical properties we did not create that requires us to do things we do not choose in order to stay alive. Whatever purpose we create for ourselves must necessarily include these things that we did not choose, which is a simple contradiction. You can’t create something you didn’t choose. If you are to survive, you must discover a purpose, not create it. And our purpose is just another way of saying who or what we serve. Which brings us back to Lily Phillips and possession.

Lily claimed, in the weeks leading up to her stunt, that she was serving herself. She wanted to bang 100 men in a day, was excited for it and looking forward to it, etc. etc. etc. Then when it happened, she was devastated. There’s a good reason why my favorite part of the Catholic baptismal promises are “Do you reject Satan? And all his empty promises?” Lilly Phillips was not serving herself, since that’s not really possible, and, critically, she was not serving anyone she held to be worth serving. Feminism told women that it was there for them, that if they just gave it their souls, they would not die, but would be gods. It turns out that’s an old story. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun3.

So, ultimately, I think that Ms. Harrington is right to frame this in terms of possession, though it is important to understand that this is a voluntary possession. Lily became an OnlyFans prostitute because of the spirit of the age meeting her particular circumstances; she came up with this stunt for some reason then felt an obligation to her fans to go through with it and to not let them down—she served many masters, and none of them were good. And there is only one outcome to serving a bad master.

1 . Wife of Emperor Claudius, who famously held a contest with a prostitute to see who could copulate with the largest number of men in a day. (Messalina won.)

2. Technically, there is a form of possession where there is no cooperation and the demon literally possesses the body of the person against their will. Philosophically speaking, this is very akin to a viral infection and, from reports by exorcists, is incredibly rare and far more akin to the kind of thing you see in a movie like The Exorcist. An unfortunate person in this state may be confusable with someone in the throws of deep mental illness, but not with a normal person making bad choices, so this kind of thing is irrelevant. I will be using the term “possession” in the sense of persistent influence or cooperative possession, rather than this sense, because Ms. Harrington does and because this sense is so sui generis that no reasonable person will mistake the two.

3. Except Christianity. True or false, before Christianity no one had the idea of God taking on flesh and becoming his own creature in order to offer himself as an innocent blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of his creatures and so make them fit to become incorporated into the divine life.

When Libertines Advocate Self Control

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Several years ago, a British feminist by the name of Louise Perry wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve read a bunch of things Ms. Perry has written, including her own description of the book. She is careful to explain that she does not want to return to the sexual morality of before the sexual revolution, just to avoid the excesses of the sexual revolution. And I recently read an essay (originally published in 2022) which discusses the book, by libertine writer Bridget Phetasy, titled I Regret Being a Slut. She, too, does not want to return to traditional sexual morality, she just doesn’t like the results of the sexual revolution either. And neither of these women is at all unique.

In both cases, their writing is a bit like a man who talks about how it’s exhilarating to jump off a building, but not to hit the ground, so it’s best to continually fall past the seventh floor. That might be the point in one’s fall which is the most fun, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.

The problem with this kind of thinking—it applies to all libertines who want the benefits of self-control without the downsides of self-control—is that it is, at its core, utilitarianism. There are many problems with utilitarianism (see Why Consequentialism Doesn’t Work), but the relevant problem is that it has no power to motivate people. Forgoing certain short-term benefit for the sake of uncertain long-term gain is very tricky to justify. And even if you can, a justification which is best done in a complicated Excel spreadsheet will, at best, be lifeless and dull, even if it does manage to convince someone in the abstract. And that’s ignoring the problem that, since we can’t know the probabilities with any certainty, you can always doubt the conclusion by quibbling with some of the numbers.

To put it more concretely, forgoing certain short-term benefit for uncertain long-term benefit only makes sense under one of two conditions:

  1. Extreme optimism
  2. A principle which says that you should even if it doesn’t benefit you

Very few people are extremely optimistic, for the simple reason that, in a secular sense, it’s stupid to be that optimistic. Lots of people are unlucky. And there’s a further problem: if you’re this optimistic, you might just as easily be optimistic that you can have both the short-term and long-term benefits.

That only leaves option #2: principle. But principles are exactly the thing that the libertines don’t want.

To take it back to the example from which this started: the libertine feminist advocating for sexual restraint is in the awkward position of saying that people should be free to have as much sex as they want before marriage, if they even want to get married, but they shouldn’t want sex before marriage and should want to get married because that works out better in the long run. The problem is that, if something actually does work out better in the long run, it means that you’re wise to do it and foolish to not do it. And it’s bad to be foolish.

That’s the thing which always sabotages this kind of quasi-libertine in the end: they want people to make good decisions about everything except for who to associate with. Because the only people who willingly associate with fools are other fools1. Deciding who we depend on is very nearly the most important decision we can make; asking people to exercise good judgement except for in their associations is nonsensical. Doubly so when it’s a particular kind of association that you want them to exercise good judgement on.

If a person has been sexually promiscuous, and it is accepted that sexual promiscuity is bad judgement, it means that the person has bad judgement. This is, by the way, as true of men as of women. If you read old literature instead of modern pornography set in older times, you will find that a male being sexually continent was praiseworthy and expected, while being sexually promiscuous was something he was quite desirous of hiding. The only difference was that a male was, typically, not dependent on forming a marriage to pay for his upkeep because there was a great deal of difficult work to be done in the world (soldiering, sailing, and the like) and so even as an outcast from polite society he could at least feed himself on his own. Also, people just didn’t care as much what happened to males. (You can find stories where a male who does need to make a good marriage will go to great lengths to hide his promiscuity, such as the King of Bohemia in the Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia.)

Anyway, the point is that you can’t have a society in which it is accepted that only fools with poor self control are sexually promiscuous and it’s also considered just fine to be sexually promiscuous if a person wants to be. You can see this exact problem with alcohol. No one wants to associate with a drunkard (except for other drunkards2) and anyone considering marriage with a drunkard will be warned off of it by all of their friends and family. The same is true of gambling addictions, or narcotic addictions. In fact, you will be very hard pressed to find any behavior that is generally regarded as extremely foolish where only low-self-control people engage in it that people would not try to dissuade someone from marrying into.

Which is why a libertine cannot make an effective case for self-control. If they manage to make it, the world will cease to be one in which people can freely do whatever the libertine is trying to discourage.

I don’t have much patience for people who discuss sex and marriage without relation to children and child-rearing, but there is something especially tiresome about people trying to do so in order to promote things which are much better argued in reference to children and child-rearing. Perhaps this is done in order to soothe the reader; to lull her into a false sense of security so she’ll actually hear the authoress out. I have my doubts that any such deception will work, and I gravely doubt that it will work in the long-term, because it will damage the trust placed in the authoress.

Though perhaps, for the intended audience, this is one of those “white lies” like the stereotypical answer to the stereotypical woman asking her stereotypical husband whether a stereotypical hideous dress she is going to wear anyway looks good. Perhaps no one believes it, so no one will be deceived, but the willingness to tell the superficial lie signifies that the person is on the other’s side. “I’m only telling you to exercise a bit of self control. I’m not telling you that you have to believe in God or listen to your grandma or do anything for anyone else.”

Well, there are a lot of very weak and timid people in the world.

1. And saints who are trying to help them. But there aren’t many saints to go around, and they don’t associate in the same way anyway. A saint may well take on the company of a young fool and advise them, but the saint doesn’t marry the young fool or depend on them in any other way.

2. See 1.

Clearing Plates at Family Gatherings

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

In America, Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to be occasions for family gatherings with a large meal. People often talk while they eat, and when people are done eating and only talking, it is extremely common to see the women of the family get up and start clearing the plates away while the males continue to talk. Around this time, a few unpleasant women who don’t understand human beings very well will write articles complaining about this. So for the sake of young people who might be taken in by one of those articles, I will explain what’s going on.

Unless you’re really into cooking, making thanksgiving dinner isn’t actually a lot of work. It takes perhaps fifteen minutes to put the turkey on a tray, season the skin, and put it in the oven at 325F for 3-5 hours (depending on size). Mashed potatoes or if you have better taste mashed sweet potatoes are another fifteen minutes of work. Bread, you can easily just buy at the store. If you’re not making it from scratch, add another fifteen minutes for the stuffing. Putting that all together, it’s an hour of work for a single person. That’s not trivial, but it’s not that much work. I’ve done significantly more work than that for minor dinner parties, and it’s not more work than one might do barbecuing food at a cookout. Cleaning up a dozen plates from a table is, if you’re doing it yourself, perhaps five minutes. If you have a dishwasher (as everyone who writes articles complaining that men talk instead of helping does), add another five minutes for scraping food off of plates and loading them into the dishwasher. If this is a major amount of work for you which might break you unless you get help, as the kids would say, you’re NGMI (not gonna make it).

Of course, that’s not what’s going on. Except for the occasional host with significant health problems—and the family member with significant health problems almost never hosts family gatherings—the host of family gatherings is not overwhelmed by the work involved and doesn’t need help. The reason why all the women help is because this is an expression of female social bonding. Identifying ways to help each other and helping unasked is a way that women reinforce their social bonds. When there’s nothing to do, asking, “what can I do to help” is a next best thing, which is why you will see it asked even when there’s obviously nothing to do to help. The point isn’t the actual work, but the affirmation of the social bond in the offer. This is also why the typical response is, “there’s nothing right now,” followed by a list of what’s going on. The point of this is not the actual inventory, but the affirmation of the bond by sharing concerns and implicitly inviting the other woman to help monitor them. (There’s actually a bit of an art to this because a woman can give offense by usurping some decision-making in her effort to help; young women generally watch their elders navigate this and learn the art by the time they’re old enough to take part as adults.) This is why when one woman gets up and starts to collect plates, the rest of the women jump up and start collecting plates too—they are affirming their social bonds by all working together.

This type of social bonding is markedly different from male social bonding, which can be readily observed at a cookout, where it’s traditionally the males who do most of the work. Males can, without giving offense, make a perfunctory offer of assistance to the male host, but mostly they don’t because assuming that another man can handle everything is a sign of respect. Further letting the male host do whatever grilling and other work is involved in hosting without interference is also an implicit sign of respect. Males will, however, make a point of hanging out with and talking to the host, because conversation about interesting subjects is a primary way adult males affirm social bonds.

So at the big family meal, when the women clean the plates together and the males keep talking, both are engaging in their sex’s typical form of social bonding. The two groups bond with each other by the men showing appreciation for the (in truth, quite small) labor of the women, and the women bond with the males by enabling the conversation which is maintained. The males can be rude by taking the generosity of the women for granted, the women can be rude by interrupting the conversation with work that can easily be left for after people are done talking.

The unpleasant women who write articles complaining about this dynamic at social gatherings are people with poorly developed social skills that don’t know how male social dynamics work and who assume that female social dynamics are the only social dynamics and so regard males as dysfunctional women. So they’re trying to guilt them into being functional women. (They’re also trying to parasocially bond with other women with poor social skills who don’t understand the full range of social dynamics by communal complaining.)

Useful Mistakes, or The Three Principle Virtues of a Perl Programmer

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a great meme that goes around on occasion, which is a motivational poster of some kind with the words:

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a reference to a line from JFK’s famous speech, justifying the moon program:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

There is truth in Kennedy’s approach—it is the basic foundation of how we teach children—but it is extremely rarely done by adults for the simple reason that adults usually have better things to do. The truth is that the moon shot program wasn’t really about human advancement. It was a massive game of capture-the-flag played with the Soviets as a PR stunt, which is why we and they both stopped shortly after the US captured the flag (by which I mean, planted a flag on the moon).

Which gets us back to the original quote: there are a lot of times when somebody does something useful because he thought it was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be, but by the time he put a lot of time into it he found that the harder version was actually worth doing, especially because he was now in a place to do it with a lot less work than if he was starting from scratch. And this is an example of what I would call a useful mistake. Another example would be what Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language, famously called the three principle virtues of a Perl programmer.

Those virtues were: laziness, impatience, and hubris. These are, of course, rhetorical, since laziness, impatience, and hubris are actually vices. What Larry meant (and explained in his own words) was that there are things that look like these things, but are actually good habits. What he called laziness is really foresight; good design so as to avoid having to do excess work in the future. What he called impatience is really ambition, or the desire to solve problems—to not be willing to sit through endless drudge-work when it was possible to write a program to do the drudge-work instead. And what he called hubris was really faith—the faith that one could see the task through to its conclusion. “I can do this,” in spite of not (yet) being able to point to conclusive evidence that you can.

The ideal would be, of course, to have a perfectly accurate estimation of both the amount and difficulty of the work to be done, and also of one’s ability to get it done. We very rarely achieve perfection, though, and so choosing the kind of failure mode we want is important. Would we prefer to fail at our estimations in a way that makes us start more projects, or start fewer projects? That is, is it better to waste time when we make imperfect estimations of difficulty and our ability, or to leave undone things we could have accomplished? I think that there is much to be said for the former, because we can always give up when it turns out that something was too difficult for us, and this will help to refine our skill at estimating difficulty. If we bias our failures towards leaving things undone, there’s no reason we’d ever decide to start up, and there will be nothing giving us feedback about our accuracy of estimating difficulty.

So I think that there’s a lot to be said for slightly under-estimating how hard things will be; your life will tend to be better off for it. And to counter-balance people saying that you should be humble about your abilities, this is just being humble about your ability to estimate how difficult something is. Ultimately, when it comes to worthwhile things, we never know what we’re getting ourselves into, so we have to live by the faith that something good will come of our efforts. This is really just making the decision to have some faith.

There Are Two Kinds of Extremists

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

J.D. Vance once made the observation that the real danger of social media isn’t living in an echo chamber, it’s only being exposed to the most extreme versions of the positions of people who disagree with us. I think that this is an important insight, and speaks to how it is important to seek out the reasonable version of extreme views that we see made fun of. That said, there are two kinds of extremists, and the more reasonable version is only important for one of them.

Let’s start with that kind: the extremist who is a monomaniac. This kind of extremist is extreme because he has abandoned most kinds of good in life and cares only about one kind of good. To make up an example so as to not be accidentally controversial, let us suppose that there is a man who loves the color blue. If he merely loves blue, but loves other things as well, he may well have many blue things in his house but he will not seek to paint the whole world blue, because he knows that trees and grass need to be green, and have their own value. If he was a monomaniac in his love for blue, he would not recognize the good of grass and trees and so would not care that they need to be green to achieve it (I’m speaking of photosynthesis, not of their aesthetics), and so he would seek to pain the grass and trees green, and would kill them. This kind of extremist, though highly concentrated online, is rare in real life. Most people love more than one kind of goodness, and so no matter how much free reign they are given to realize their ideal world, they will balance out competing goods and not wreck the world. These kinds of reasonable people are important to seek out. (I should also note that this highly simplified form of extremist is not what one typically meets online; I need to explain the other kind before I can clarify further.)

The other kind of extremist is a man who is dedicated to a philosophy of life and is not afraid of the opinions of his fellow man, but takes his philosophy to its logical conclusion. This is the Catholic saint, the Protestant Puritan, the Buddhist ascetic, and the Soviet dictator. People who are not extremists of this kind are not people who balance out goods, but merely people who lack the courage of their convictions. They do not live out their philosophy of life, not because they think it lacks something, but because they lack something. Most of the time, it’s social sanction that they lack. That’s why, for this kind of extremist, it is precisely the extremists you should pay the most attention to. If society were ever to adopt their beliefs, it would become more like them.

Now that I’ve explained the second kind of extremist, I can describe where you are actually most likely to meet the first kind of extremist: as someone posing as the second kind of extremist. The technical term for this is a heretic, though it’s an unpopular word with baggage, so let’s stick to “monomaniacal extremist.” For that same reason I will avoid religious examples, so let’s take a secular one: environmentalism. There are plenty of people who want to take care of the planet on which we live in a balanced way. They consider measures to ensure that we don’t poison our water supply, but also consider other goods like industrial production, nice housing, having pets, growing food, and a myriad of other goods that need to balance each other out. Then you have the monomaniac who only loves nature where it has not been affected by human beings, and so champions anything that removes human influence, at the fullness of expression being the human self-extinction project.

This example also shows the importance of distinguishing the two types of extremist. On the one hand, it is important to figure out that the monomaniacal environmentalist merely hates people, he doesn’t love the environment as one good among many, and so he does not represent the views or policies or much of anything of the people who merely consider clean air and water and an interesting variety of wildlife to be goods to balance out among other goods. On the other hand, the people who are members of the human self-extinction project are merely the monomaniacal environmentalists with the courage of their convictions. One should not ignore the human self-extinction people and seek out the more moderate “strangle the economy with regulation” environmentalists because those are only distinguished from the human self-extinction people by being unwilling to say what they really mean.

The Communist Manifesto is Unbelievably Bad

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read The Communist Manifesto (in English translation, of course) since from time to time I read primary sources and I literally have great difficulty actually believing how bad it is. It does not really contain either a political philosophy or an economic philosophy; it has a few scant elements of these, and is about as much a considered work of political philosophy as is Star Trek: The Next Generation.

For those not familiar, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a TV show set in the twenty fourth century where it is a post-scarcity world in which everyone has an unlimited amount of whatever they want without effort. In TNG (as it is commonly called for brevity) this is accomplished through free energy by unspecified means coupled with “replicators” that can make anything, instantly, with no cost. (I believe various unauthoritative technical manuals suggest there is some hidden feed-stock of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but there is never any kind of limit to what replicators can replicate, and there are episodes where feed stock is clearly not required.) I bring this up not as a tangent, but as oddly similar: it is fairly clear, from TCM (as I will call The Communist Manifest, for brevity) as well as several FAQs (which Marx called a “catechism”) that Marx believed that the industrial revolution was bringing about a post-scarcity world.

TCM was published when Marx was 30 years old, and I’ve been told it’s not why he was influential—that was Capital, or Das Kapital, as it is often known, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, which is it’s full title. That book is around 1,000 pages long, and I don’t find it even slightly plausible that communists read the whole thing, so I’m still quite unsure of what to make of it. I’m willing to believe that Capital did flesh Marx’s ideas out somewhat, since they were basically only a few partial bones in TCM. Capital was published when Marx was 48, and presumably the intervening 18 years and the extra 970 pages lent themselves to a little more thought. I have trouble believing much, since the author of TCM was clearly not a thoughtful man.

It’s difficult to even critique TCM because there’s so little to it. It begins with the idea that the key to understanding history is class conflict, which is just wrong. That’s not the key. It mostly doesn’t even apply. It’s like saying that the key to understanding history is belts. I mean, yeah, you can identify belts at times and places in history, but if you think that they’re the key to understanding history you’re just a moron (assuming you’re older than fifteen; if you are fifteen you just need to think about this more). There is no single key to understanding history, because human history is as complex as human beings. And if there was a single key, interdependence would unlock quite a lot more of history than class conflict would.

Marx’s arguments are often beyond asinine, too. When he tries to address objections to abolishing the family, he starts by saying that families don’t really exist anyway so nothing will be lost. He defends all women being held in common, rather than marrying, by saying that the bourgeoisie has extramarital affairs so often that they effectively hold all women in common anyway. This is just rhetoric, not an argument, and it’s not even good rhetoric. Moreover, it’s rhetoric where actual ideas would be most natural, highlighting that there are no ideas.

To give another example of idiocy: among the general points that a communist system would have (there are only 10), Marx says that factories will be interspersed with agriculture such that there will no longer be a town/country distinction. This is only starting to become sort-of possible in certain types of manufacturing with modern high-end 3D printers in low-volume markets. In Marx’s time, when factories were enormous and required the labor of a huge number of people, this was pure insanity. Ignoring how factories would get in the way of farmers, this would require either factories so small as to be unproductive or absolutely enormous commutes to work at a time when horse was the dominant form of transportation. To say nothing of the great difficult of transporting raw materials to random locations and finished goods from them. (Factories were often on rivers because river transport is so much cheaper than overland transport; they were often near each other because one factory’s output might be used as an input by another, and not needing to transport these goods hundreds of miles was far more efficient.) If you even begin to try to work through what randomly locating factories throughout the countryside would entail in terms of transport and coordination, of the running of rail lines through farm fields and so on, it becomes immediately clear that Marx never gave a moment’s thought to what this goal would entail.

And that’s a theme of TCM. There is zero thought given to how to accomplish… anything. For example, he states that all property will be owned by the state, but he never so much as raises the question of how the state will say what will be done with its property, let alone provide even a hint of an outline of an answer to the question.

Incidentally, this is a point which a lot of people sympathetic to socialist rhetoric seem to miss: any form of socialism where the means of production are owned by The People is necessarily totalitarian, for the simple reason that if The People own the means of production, they clearly will have to say what gets done with their means of production. That computer in the apartment in which you live—that can be used to write things, so the people should get to say what their computer gets used to write. The oven in the common area of the apartment building in which you live produces cooked food, so The People should say what food their oven is used to cook.

Socialist-sympathizers will balk at this and say that all manner of things are excluded from ownership by The People, but all they’re doing is saying that what they actually want is only a little bit of socialism—often, in practice, only socialism of the things that they don’t want to own, but then most human beings are hypocrites.

Anyway, Marx says nothing in TCM about how The People (or The State) will say what happens with all of its property. He gives not a word to how this will, in his way of looking at things, only set up a new class conflict between the bureaucrats and the civilians, or between the politicians and the civilians, since clearly you can’t say what happens to everything by direct democracy. Especially since nations will fade away and there will only be one worldwide government.

A world government is, of course, a recipe for minimum accountability, but that requires some minimum of knowledge of how human beings work, which was clearly beyond Marx, or perhaps against his beliefs; but I would have expected him to at least give some vague hints about how the world government is supposed to work, even if it was beyond him to say how it wouldn’t work and what to do to correct against its failings.

Science Is Only As Good As Its Instruments

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, Uncategorized2 Comments

There’s a popular myth that science progressed because of a revolution in the way people approach knowledge. This is a self-serving myth that arose in the 1600s by people who wanted to claim special authority. This is why they came up with the marketing term “The Enlightenment” for their philosophical movement. If you look into the actual history of science, scientific discoveries pretty much invariably arose a little while after the technology which enabled their discovery was invented.

There is a reason we did not get the heliocentric (really, Copernican) theory of the solar system until a little while after the invention of the telescope. There is a reason why we did not get cell biology until a little while after the invention of the microscope. If you dig into the history of specific scientific discoveries, it’s often the case that several people discovered the same thing within months of each other and the person we credit with the discovery is generally the one who published first.

This is not to say that there are never flashes of insight or brilliance. So far as I can tell Einstein’s theory that E=mc2 was not merely the obvious result of measuring things using new technology. That said, it would almost certainly never have happened had radioactivity not been discovered a decade earlier, which would not have been possible without certain kinds of photographic plates existing (radioactive decay was discovered by Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie in the 1890s as they were studying phosphorescence and exposed photographic plates wrapped in black paper, which showed that something else was going on besides phosphorescence, many further experiments clarified what was going on by the time Einstein was working on the mass-energy equivalence).

Which gets me to modern science: there are a lot of things that we want to know, for which the relevant technology does not seem to exist. Nutrition is a great example. What are the long-term health effects of eating a high carbohydrate diet? How can you find out? It’s not practical to run a double-blind study of one group of people eating a high carbohydrate diet and the other eating a low-carbohydrate diet for fifty years. The current approach follows the fundamental principle of science (assume anything necessary in order to publish): it studies people for a few weeks or months, and measures various things assumed to correlate perfectly to good long-term health. That works for publishing, but if you’re more concerned with accuracy to reality than you are with being able to publish (and if you’re reading the study, you have to be), that’s more than a little iffy. Then if you spend any effort digging into the actual specifics, let’s just say that the top ten best reasons to believe these assumptions are all related group-think and the unpleasantness of being in the out-group. (Please actually look into this for yourself; the only way you’ll know what happens if you don’t just take people’s word for something is by not taking their word for it, including mine.)

And the problem with science, at the moment, when it comes to things like long-term nutrition is that the technology to actually study it just isn’t there. (It’s different if you want to study things like acute stimulation of muscle protein synthesis related to protein intake timing or the effects on serum glucose in the six hours following a meal.) And when the technology to do good studies doesn’t exist, all that can exist are bad studies.

This is why we see so much of people turning to anecdotes and wild speculation. Anecdotes and wild speculation are at least as good as bad studies. And when the bad studies tend to cluster (for obvious reasons unrelated to truth) on answers that seem very likely to be wrong, anecdotes and wild speculation are better than bad studies.

That doesn’t mean that anecdotes and wild theories are good. It would be so much better to have good studies. But we can’t have good studies just because we want them, just as people before the microscope couldn’t have cell biology no matter how much they wanted it. The ancient Greeks would have loved to have known about bacteria and viruses, but without microscopes, x-ray crystallography, and PCR, they were never going to find out about them.

As, indeed, they didn’t.

What Causes Inflation

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There are two things which are meant by inflation, the first being the primary cause of the second. The first is an increase in the money supply. This is the straightforward meaning of “inflation,” it’s like more air being blown into a balloon—the balloon gets bigger. The second meaning is a universal increase in prices. An increase in the amount of money without an increase in the amount of goods and services to buy with them means that more money is chasing the same amount of goods and services, so the prices of them will rise until an equilibrium is reached.

How It Happens

The main cause of inflation is the creation by a government of money faster than the increase of goods and services. (The latter is, generally, caused by increases in economic productivity, chief of which is an increase in population.) Colloquially this is referred to as governments “printing money,” though it’s been many decades since the majority of money existed as printed currency. This is possible because virtually all people use what is called a “fiat currency,” that is, a currency which exists because a government said that it does. This is a reference to the latin translation of the first words of God after creating the heavens and the earth, when the earth was a formless void and darkness was over the deep: fiat lux. (“Let there be light,” is the common English translation.)

Prior to fiat currencies, which were widely adopted in the 1900s, precious metals tended to be used as currencies. These do increase, though their increases are limited by the amount of them that can be found. That said, while it is far harder to inflate a currency through mining precious metals, it has happened in history, though usually only on a local scale.

Why It’s Bad

If a government announced a date on which it would double the money supply and on that date doubled the money supply instantly and instantly handed the money out uniformly to people according to how much they already had, such that everyone received an extra dollar for every dollar he had, everyone would double their prices and other than the math for transactions being slightly harder and everyone selling anything facing the inconvenience of printing up new price tags, nothing would change. That is not, however, how governments do it.

What they universally do, because it is a fallen world, is to give themselves the money and not tell anyone that they did. They then spend this in order to be able to buy more than what the taxes they brought in would allow them to. This slowly filters into the economy, raising prices first in the places where they are buying things, then rippling out as those people buy from their suppliers. (Since governments rarely do this exactly uniformly, it also has a tendency to create economic bubbles where increased demand gets met with increased production and then demand falls off, but that’s a story for another day.) If they stop making the new money, eventually these ripples go throughout the economy, everyone has more money, prices are increased, and a new equilibrium is reached. But people are impacted; the people who have not yet received income increases have to pay more before they receive more, and often have to dip into their savings to make up the difference. Anyone who has saved is penalized for this savings, because they receive nothing extra for their savings and their savings is now worth less. Thus governments inflating the currency is a kind of stealth taxation. (This is why it was an excellent idea, when it became clear that the government’s response to COVID was to create massive amounts of new money, to make any large purchases of durable goods with one’s savings, locking in that value before the stealth taxation hit. E.g. buying a weight set, a new car, a new water heater, re-roofing one’s house now rather than in a year, etc.)

Other Causes of Universal Price Increases

There is another causes of universal price increases besides inflation: a contraction in the amount of goods and services available for purchase while the supply of money stays the same. This can be caused by the population shrinking, but that has been (so far) pretty uncommon in human experience. Not unheard of, but uncommon.

A more common cause of the contraction in goods and services are wars: wars consume large fractions of the productive capacity of people and literally throw the results away. Granted, they often throw them away for military purposes, as in the shooting of bullets or the dropping of bombs. Still, bullets and bombs are not economically productive. Further, soldiers at war are not part of the economy, and thus their labor is removed from the economy.

Another cause of a contraction in goods and services is the expansion of the regulatory state. Regulators do not produce anything (besides regulation). People who are employed as regulators are, therefore, not contributing to economic production and the more people who are shifted from the economy to the regulatory state, the smaller the pool of laborers and the fewer goods and services there will be to purchase. (This is not a value judgement on regulation; experience has shown that some regulation is necessary for the common good; it just must be understood that regulation is in no sense free.)

Another cause of a contraction in goods and services is the limitation of the resources to produce them. For example, if energy policy reduces the amount of energy available to the economy, fewer goods and services will be able to be produced. This can be effected either through the direct limitation of energy production or by the taxation of energy production.

Always Question Science

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

One of the great things about science is that, when done properly, it’s easy to scrutinize it. So whenever you see someone cite a scientific study, always look into it. A friend recently gave me a link to this article in the NY Post titled, A Third of Women Only Date Men Because of the Free Food: Study. (note: he didn’t endorse it, just provided it for context).

If you look at the article, it links to this article in The Society for Personality and Social Psychology. This article describes the study in slightly more detail, but we need to look at the actual study, which is titled Foodie Calls: When Women Date Men for a Free Meal (Rather Than a Relationship).

So, first question: what was the study? (There were actually two, since my purpose is to illustrate why one should read the original paper critically, for brevity I’m going to only discuss the first study; go read the paper for the second one.) It was a survey of 820 women on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service who were paid $.26 to answer a survey. (If you’re not familiar, Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s service where people are paid small amounts to do extremely short, simple tasks; it works because Amazon streamlines the process of getting many small tasks in succession so it’s worth it to the people doing it.) These were then filtered down to 698 self-identified heterosexual women. They were given personality questions as well as the question which makes the headline.

Have you ever agreed to date someone (who you were not interested in a relationship with) because he might pay for your meal?

Right off the bat, I dislike the phrasing on this because I’m used to “date” as a transitive verb meaning to be in a relationship with someone where the couple regularly go on dates. Which would make this question nonsense because it would be asking whether the women have been in a relationship with someone they were not interested in a relationship with. Clearly, by “date someone” they mean “go on a date with someone,” but this weird usage is going to influence how people respond. Among the possible reactions is to interpret the question more loosely, which means that both “yes” and “no” answers will mean a wider variety of things depending on how the responder interpreted the question.

And that’s apart from the way that people may well vary in interpreting the question. I could easily see women interpreting this to mean, “Did you ever go on a date with a man who hadn’t piqued your interest but, since he was paying for the meal, you thought you’d give him a chance to see if he improved on acquaintance?”

If what they wanted to ask was whether the woman ever intentionally misled a man into thinking she was open to a relationship with him when all she wanted as free food, why didn’t they ask that? Because such harsh language would color the results? Because if they said what they actually meant women might be embarrassed to admit it? So what was the goal? To try to trick them into revealing the truth?

I’m going to get back to that in a moment, but let’s take a short break to point out that when you read the paper, a third of women answered positively to the question, which only asks if they’ve ever done this even once. The study had a followup question about frequency; 20% of the women who went on a “foodie call” did so frequently or very frequently; since that’s 20% of 33%, that works out to 6.6% of all women. This is a long ways away from “a third of women only date men because of the free food.”

But back to the question: I imagine that people would try to defend the ambiguous language because words lie “deceive” imply judgement, and so will discourage respondents. Perhaps, but that’s because the thing being described is bad. Anyway way that the person understands of describing the intentional deception of a person to defraud them out of material goods will sound bad, because it is bad. The only way to make it sound not-bad is to phrase it in such a way that the respondent doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

Which gets me to the bigger point about this kind of psychological research: the simple expedient of phrasing your question ambiguously guarantees you publishable results. There’s no need to engage in p-hacking or other statistical tricks. Unlike with some of the stricter sciences like biology, getting fake results can be done with everything being completely above-board. It’s a great racket, which is why it will keep going for quite some time. Which is why you should never trust a summary of the results. Always track down the study and find out what the actual questions were.

Always question science. Good science is made to be questioned.

Secular People Still Need to Explain Religious Truths

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There are a lot of stupid secular theories abounding today, such as red pill dating advice or mimetic-rivalry-hoe-phase-theory, which receive a lot of criticism from people who are sane. But this criticism usually has no effect because, to believers in these theories, it amounts to nitpicking. This is because they are secular people trying to explain religious truths. Their theories are (necessarily) secular and when you try to explain religious truths with secular theories, the theories have to be idiotic, for the same reason that if you jam a square peg into a round hole, it will end up as a very funny looking square.

The religious truths that people are trying to explain are the necessity of having ideals and the impossibility of achieving the ideals, or to give them their proper names, everything has a nature and it is a fallen world. God created the world to be perfect, but the world chose sin over perfection, but God has not abandoned the world and is working to save it. Within this religious framing, it’s easy to explain why it is that we must strive to achieve perfection and also why we must accept quite a bit of imperfection. You do not need to throw out the ideal for one which seems achievable, and you do not need to worry (overmuch) about not achieving it.

This framework is not available to secular people. Secular people can, of course, have lofty ideals and, in pure pragmatism, accept that no one achieves it and keep going anyway. Most people want some kind of rational relationship between their thoughts and actions, even if they are completely incapable of expressing that rational relationship in words. So for the vast majority who can’t just hold incompatible beliefs with no explanation, they either come up with an explanation (which doesn’t make sense if you look at it too closely) or alter the beliefs.

Red pill dating and hoe-phase-theory are the same basic philosophical move of throwing out the ideal and substituting one that they think is achievable. The benefit to this is that trying to achieve the ideal is actually a rational activity since the ideal is achievable. The downside, of course, is that it’s an evil ideal.

Modern ideas about marriage are the opposite, though with a bit of a twist. Modern ideas of marriage demand the perfect realization of the ideal, which is no small part of why so many people aren’t marrying (though by no means the only cause). The twist is that the ideal is modified to one which makes sense within the secular worldview, so we get marriage not as a covenental relationship or as the mutual self-sacrifice of the parents for the sake of their children, but as a thing which is supposed to be mutually fulfilling. That is, marriage is supposed to fill both parties up so that they are happy. And this happiness is increasingly demanded; where it is lacking this is taken as a sign that the marriage isn’t real and so divorce is just recognizing the reality of the failure to form a real marriage. This is not particularly more sane than the red pill dating ideas, though its insanity is less spectacular.

I am reminded of a wonderful section of G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive, about being happy in marriage:

“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they– they do attract women, I don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night. They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment– you’ve got used to your drinks and things–I shan’t be pretty much longer–“

“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I, for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute– a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”

“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, “and do you really want to marry me?”

“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man–that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself– yourself, yourself, yourself–the only companion that is never satisfied– and never satisfactory.”

(It must be born in mind that Michael Moon is his own character and not a mouthpiece for Chesterton; Michael does have some good points among his mad ramblings, even if he doesn’t have the fullness of appreciation of the committed single vocation.)

But his fundamental point is quite sound: it is a mistake to try, as one’s primary goal, to be happy in that earthly sense of the word happiness. There will always be pain and sorrow and trials, and worst of all we will let ourselves and each other down. The big thing is whether we always pick ourselves up again. But happiness is a terrible goal in marriage, because marriage exists to accomplish wonderful things—making new people and teaching them how to be human—and trying to be happy gets in the way of accomplishing things. There’s so much more to aim for in this life than happiness.

Happiness in the sense of smiling and having a good time and enjoying yourself, that is. Happiness in the sense of the Greek makarios, which can also be translated as “blessed”—that’s quite a different thing. But in that sense, it’s important to remember that this is a painting of the happiest man alive:

I’m sure that Chesterton has said it before me, but the problem with reasonable goals is that they always end up being completely unreasonable. And that’s because this world is about God, and so doesn’t make sense on its own. And every attempt to make sense of it in itself, without reference to God, will fail in one of only a few ways.

Why Modern Art is Bad

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

My title is a little over-broad, as there is Modern art which isn’t bad. But a large enough fraction of it is to justify the title, and I’d like to talk about why that is. Because it’s not an accident.

The first reason is that Modern art arose from Modern Philosophy, which jettisoned the idea of truth. (If you only know a little bit about Modern Philosophy this might sound odd; a few hundreds more hours of reading it will clear things up.) Since beauty, like truth and goodness, is a kind of apprehension of being, the rejection of truth was also a rejection of beauty. Art without beauty quickly becomes very strange, and also bad. That is, it becomes deconstructive. There is a thing which can be called deconstruction whose purpose is to give insight into the inner workings of something good, in order to better be able to appreciate it or to make goodness oneself; this is not what happens, though sometimes in the early stages it is what people pretend is going on. A complete rejection of truth and beauty means that deconstruction can only be for the purpose of destruction; the only enjoyment the feeling of power which comes from ending something which is good. Of course, not all Modern art embodies this perfectly. God is the only one who accomplishes all things according to His will, so human artists with bad intentions sometimes fail and make good art by accident. And, of course, not all Modern artists even fully buy into the idea.

The other major reason why Modern art is bad is because it is a status symbol of the upper classes. Well, not just that it’s a status symbol, because they don’t have to bad. Ideally, status symbols are good, and can be when the highest quality is limited in availability. Ermine furs and imperial purple dyes were both high-status and beautiful in the days when they were incredibly hard to get. The problem is when beauty becomes cheap, as modern chemistry has largely rendered it. Exclusive items with quality can still go together, as in the case of fancy wrist watches or luxury cars. But cheap reproduction and efficient markets have made beautiful art (relatively) easy to come by, so the only way for art to become exclusive is to artificially limit it to only certain producers. Modern art, being ugly, helps in this, because people won’t pick the selected artists by accident, that is, merely because they happen to like the art. Because no one naturally likes the art. High status people train themselves to enjoy the art because enjoying it confers status.

You can learn to enjoy Modern art, but the same skill would allow you to enjoy any random patch of dirt on the ground. Dirt is actually interesting stuff, if you take the time and trouble to look closely at it. But dirt is common; dirt is cheap. It’s dirt cheap, in fact. In consequence, few people have the humility to learn to appreciate dirt. If you learn to appreciate dirt, you will probably be happier, but no one but you and God will know it.

The World’s Top Scientists and Doctors

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a cartoon going around which shows a man pointing at his computer and calling out, “Honey, come look! I’ve found some information all the world’s top scientists and doctors missed!” It’s been roundly and deservedly criticized, but I’d like to focus on a few points I haven’t been touched on.

The first point is the level of generality that is used (“all the world’s”) when “top” scientists and doctors are all specialists. If the guy may have discovered some information about whether dietary fructose causes insulin resistance, what does it matter whether the world’s greatest geologists don’t know this? Who cares whether the best heart surgeons know it? Would anyone be surprised if the world’s greatest ophthalmologist knows nothing about it? The cartoon makes it sound like tens of thousands of brilliant people have all been studying the exact question the guy has been researching, but the reality of specialization is that the number of people who are actively studying whatever exactly the guy may have found may well number less than a dozen. There’s no guarantee that this small handful of people are among the best and the brightest, except in the narrow sense that someone who took bronze in a competition with only three people in his division is the best in the world who showed up at that meet.

This, of course, is even assuming that anyone is actively studying the field. The inclusion of “doctors” suggests that what the man has found relates to health, and the number of things being studied in health is absolutely dwarfed by the things that there are to study. It’s entirely possible that there are no experts in the specific subject that the guy believes he’s found information in because no one has funded research into it in the last twenty years. And even if they had, it’s entirely possible to be an expert in only one aspect of a subject; a scientist who conducted the world’s greatest trial on the effect of aspirin in reducing heart attack incidence may be completely ignorant as to whether it’s effective for treating lower back pain.

Then we come to the thorny problem that many people are not courageous enough to consider: who has declared these people to be the world’s top scientists and doctors? Was it themselves? In theory, there is no one more qualified to identify the best in a field than the best in the field. But, of course, a man saying that he’s the greatest is worthless. So is it the world’s average doctors and scientists? But how do they know that these other people are better than they are? How did they even form this opinion? Where would a heart surgeon get the information necessary to know how good another heart surgeon is? Do they, in their copious free time, watch each other perform surgery? And what of researchers? Are we to suppose that scientists drop in and conduct audits of each other’s labs to see how well they’re actually conducting their research? Or does this all come from people who are not experts at all, observing? That might be valid for doctors like heart surgeons for whom we can collect easily evaluated data such as “how often was the surgery successful” and “how often did the patient die on the table”. Though even there, any system which relies on measurement can be gamed. A surgeon can look fabulous by only accepting the healthiest patients compared to one who takes on the riskiest patients. And most fields in science and medicine do not admit of even this kind of measurement. No one expects everyone with chronic back pain to become pain free, and the only reliable way to judge a doctor’s nutritional advice is to wait until all his patients die and see how old they were, and what their qualify of life was over the years. Since they may well outlive the doctor, this is useless.

So suppose you find a doctor who says that fructose induces insulin resistance and you need to limit your sugar intake, while a government-sponsored doctor says that you should eat as much fructose as you want but limit your fat intake. How do you know that the government-sponsored doctor is the top doctor and not merely the doctor with the best political connections? How do you know that the doctor with the plain office is not, in fact, the top doctor, in terms of ability?

People really want infallible oracles that they can query for whatever knowledge they want, but it’s just not available.

And, truth to tell, even if they found it, most people would reject it because they wouldn’t like the answers that it gives.

Conservative vs. Progressive Artistic Talent

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, TV & Movies, Uncategorized2 Comments

A debate which comes up from time to time is about why are most artists “progressives” and is this because conservatives don’t have artistic talent. There is, perhaps, something to be said for the idea that the kind of extreme creativity involved in artistic work tends to be unbalancing to a person’s sense of how the real world works, so a wildly creative person is more apt to believe absurd things (like socialism) will work in the real world, but I doubt that this explains the majority of what causes the tremendous skew towards progressivism in the arts. For that, we need to look at selective pressures, envy, and the defense against envy.

First, let’s consider selective pressures. Most of what is called conservatism is about producing the best environments possible for the raising of children. This puts all sorts of restraints on parents and communities for the sake of children. Included in these is needing to earn one’s living in a reliable way, because children (and sometimes a spouse) are relying on one to provide their living for them. The arts, in general, are an extremely unreliable way to earn a living. There’s an excellent reason that the words “starving” and “artist” go so well together. Thus there is a massive selective pressure against people who value family and the raising of children. And the talents that underlie art can, generally, be put to more practical uses, and practical uses pay better. This is especially true if the person with artistic talent has other talents, too.

From this we can see that it’s no accident that a large fraction of artists come from broken homes. Not only does coming from a broken home make a person less likely to understand the value of raising children well (though it can have the opposite effect), it also makes them more likely to seek attention. Putting the talents which underlie art to practical use tends to get you a paycheck but not nearly so often praise. (Don’t get me wrong, people can make art out of love. But it takes a lot of love. It takes a lot less love if you also have a deep-seated psychological need for approval.)

There is a secondary selective pressure on art to appeal to buyers or (in the case of advertising-subsidized art) viewers. This can be done through quality, but it is easier to do it through adding pornography. There is an absurdly large market for pornography that comes with social sanction or plausible deniability. Just check out the short film It’s Not Porn, It’s HBO. The success that this kind of pseudo-pornography brings allows for bigger budgets which makes for higher quality in the output (largely by being able to pay more people to work on it).

The other major thing to consider is envy. If you study history for even a few minutes, one of the most dominant themes you will find is that if somebody put in the work to make something worth having, someone else wants to take it from him rather than make it himself. This gets modified slightly when it comes to competition, where envy wants to win by dragging down others. “He did not deserve first place, I did.” You see this kind of envy constantly in third-rate artists. And progressivism is practical just codified envy; the progressive ideal is that all men are equal by dragging down any who are ahead, justified by fairy tales about how they only got ahead by cheating. This explains why third rates artists are so often progressives. But what of first-rate artists?

Here we come to the universal need of the successful to defend against envy. On an international scale, the primary defense against envy is a powerful army. On an international scale, if you want to steal what others have built, you must take it with an army, and their army being large enough to defeat your army protects them. This does not work within a nation, though, where the state retains to itself most of the use of violence. There are still defenses against envy using direct violence, such as front doors with locks and the police. But within a nation the envious can work within the legal system to enact laws to use this machinery of the state to take what belongs to others and give it to themselves. This is the reason why the rich are usually politically connected; as long as the laws are crafted in a way to allow loopholes, it doesn’t matter what the law is meant to achieve. And this is why, wherever you have a progressive party with enough power, the rich are always members of the progressive party. But it’s not the only reason. It also defends them against excessive envy being directed at them, personally. And this is why we see successful artists being progressives—it (partially) defends them against the envy of third rate artists.

(It should be noted that the individual political views of the artists making it don’t matter very much on collaborative projects, because most artists, and especially most progressive artists, will do whatever they are paid to do. The people who made movies were not wonderfully better people during the days of the Hayes Code, they just did what the men with the money told them to do, and that happened to be to make morally decent movies. So they did. It’s very easy to find the documentation that they didn’t want to.)

About Threats To Democracy

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

These days one periodically hears about how someone or something is a “threat to democracy,” often from people who are also in favor of things that go against the democratically enacted constitution, laws, safeguards, popular votes, etc. of their nation. The curious thing is that they’re not hypocrites: they’re just using a different definition of democracy than you are. But it’s not a new one.

What they mean by democracy is, roughly, that their guy is in power. But not in a self-serving way. They genuinely believe that the overwhelming majority of people agree with them and so anything which goes against what they want is thwarting the will of the people.

This kind of thinking is nothing new. You see it in all of the communist dictatorships which called themselves “Democratic.” This was not mere branding; they actually believed it. The essence of democracy, they said, is not voting, but rule by the people. Wherever you have voting the people get hoodwinked, lied to, cheated, etc. Wherever they elect representatives, the representatives are bribed, lied to, etc. etc. Thus the will of the people is never enacted, but often things that they do not want are. True democracy is doing the will of the people, which requires a strong leader who is not beholden to special interests, who is immune to the lies of the rich, etc. etc.

This is the sense in which the people who scream about threats to democracy use the word “democracy.” This is in strong contrast to the understanding that the rest of us have, which is the sense that Winston Churchill was talking about when he famously said that democracy is the worst form of government, aside from all of the others that have been tried in this world of sin and woe. This sense of democracy is, basically, using voting as a non-violent proxy for war. This is why it has things like a constitution which is difficult to change which provides safeguards against the worst vicissitudes of short-term victories. If people are to agree to be bound by this proxy for a war with real weapons they may be able to win, they must be guaranteed a limit to what the people who win by voting are allowed to do. Those limitations and safeguards make no sense to the democrat who only cares about the will of the people, because they can only mean, to him, the thwarting of the will of the people.

Abstract Goodness Allows Actual Evil

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, PhilosophyLeave a comment

C.S. Lewi’s book The Screwtape Letters is a real masterpiece when it comes to modern wisdom literature. It’s filled with psychological insights into how we go wrong and fool ourselves while doing it. There’s one insight in particular I want to talk about, though it also is found, at least in part, in Lewis’s essay The Dangers of National Repentance, which is included in the collection God in the Dock. That insight is: when we concentrate our effort on abstract goodness, we give ourselves the space for actual evil.

Though it’s not ideal—being a saint is ideal—most of us keep a mental tally sheet of good that we do vs. bad that we do, and as long as the good column has significantly more marks in it than the bad column, we figure that we’re doing already. We could stand some improvement, but everyone can, so if there’s hope for anyone, there’s probably hope for us, too. A major weakness of this approach is how it makes all good and evil equivalent—it all comes down to a tally mark. When we put down a tally mark in the good column for something abstract like being “in favor” of something good, like reducing pollution, and also a tally mark in the bad column for something real, like being rude to a family member and making their day worse, this comes out even in our mind. But being “in favor” of reducing pollution does no one any good, while being rude to our family member does a real person real harm.

Of course, our abstract good is usually not quite that abstract. We can come up with trivial and easy but concrete things to do ostensibly in aid of our abstract good, such as (to continue my example) recycling a piece of paper or remembering to turn off the lights when we leave a room. The actual amount of good from this is absolutely trivial, but it counts as a tally mark and the technically-greather-than-zero effort we put in makes it feel justified to put it down as a tally mark.

I think that this is becoming increasingly important as so much of life moves online and ignoring the real people that we interact with becomes ever easier, together with abstractions all requiring greater-than-zero effort like posting about something. You can call it “raising awareness” or “owning the libs” or “calling out stupidity” or any other flavor of virtual-doing-something, but if you never pause to consider the actual amount of good done to actual people—and social media’s making disconnect of not knowing who’s reading what we post makes it easy to not do this—it’s way, way too easy to fool yourself into thinking that you’re being good when you’re only pretending to be good, and to use this pretend good to justify the real harm that you do, especially if it isn’t bad enough to cause permanent physical damage to anyone.

To give this a vivid image to summarize what I mean: the people I know who are in favor of increasing taxes and putting that money into public welfare programs have walked past 100% of the beggars in the street asking for help that we’ve passed together without giving them anything.

Reviewing Good Episodes is Harder

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Recently I’ve been working on my review of the Murder, She Wrote episode Death Takes a Curtain Call. It’s a really good episode and has one of my favorite characters in it. Ironically, though I was excited to get to it, I’m finding it much harder to finish the episode review than I normally do precisely because it is such a good episode. There’s a lot to say, and praising a thing well is much harder than criticizing self-evident problems. There’s a lesson in there, I think.

This may be related to why C.S. Lewis said that he wrote The Screwtape Letters only from the demons’ perspective, which left the book unbalanced. The problem was that letters from an archangel to the man’s guardian angel would need to have all of the virtues that a perfect being of superhuman intellect would naturally imbue into them, and to do that Lewis would need to have an equal intellect and equal perfection. This was a wise choice for The Screwtape Letters, but I think that the difficulty in praising a thing well causes problems in the case when there is no requirement for the praise to be perfect. That is, it makes it very tempting for people to leave off praising things that they should praise. And that’s a mistake, because it tends to lead other people to have a distorted view of life. As Dale Carnegie rightly observed, any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. As a result, there tends to be tons of complaining in life, while the better things often go unpraised. When the good things are praised, it’s often by people who don’t appreciate the difficulty of praising things well and in consequence give mediocre if not outright bad praise.

So next time you hesitate to praise something, give yourself an extra push to do it. It’s probably better for the world than keeping silent.

And I’ll get to work on that Murder, She Wrote review.

What Makes an Expert

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

I was recently re-watching the 2009 documentary Fat Head, mostly for nostalgia because I enjoyed it and it did me a lot of good back when I watched it circa 2010.

If you haven’t seen it and are curious, it’s available (officially, from its distributor) on YouTube. (Weirdly, it’s age-restricted so I can’t embed it.)

This was back when the documentary Super Size Me blaming McDonalds for people being fat was only five years old and people still remembered it. Fat Head was a response-documentary criticizing Super Size Me, but it actually spent more of its time discussing the lipid hypothesis (the idea that fat and especially saturated fat causes heart disease) and the problems with it. Throughout the documentary, Tom Naughton (the filmmaker and narrator) continually refers to “the experts,” by which he mostly means the people who give official advice, such as the USDA giving food recommendations or various medical organizations telling everyone to reduce their saturated fat intake as much as possible.

“Expert,” of course, ordinarily means a person who is extremely knowledgeable in a subject or very good at it. But “expert” is also a social designation for special people to whom ordinary people are supposed to defer, generally with the assumption that they are expert in the first sense. But this introduces a problem: how do you know that someone is an expert in the first sense?

The easy way to do this is to be an expert yourself. Expertise will generally be good at recognizing expertise, as well as recognizing what is not expertise. That’s great, but if you’re an expert yourself you don’t need to know who else is an expert so you can defer to them.

So what if you’re not an expert?

Well, it gets a lot harder.

You can, of course, punt the problem to someone that you trust, but that is a general solution: it works for literally every question. How do you calculate the circumference of a circle given its diameter? Ask someone you trust.

But let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that you want to find an expert and aren’t going to just have someone else do the work. How can you do this—again, assuming that you, yourself, are not an expert?

It certainly cannot be in the same way that an expert would, that is, by evaluating how the person does what they do. There is something left, though it’s not nearly so efficient: you can see whether the person can achieve what only an expert could achieve.

In most of the places where this is possible, it’s fairly obvious. If you want to know if a man is an expert archer, you ask him to shoot at a few things which are very difficult to hit. If you want to know if a man is an expert lock pick, you ask him to pick a difficult lock.

There are some intermediate situations, which do not admit of demonstrations which only take a moment. If you want to know if a man is an expert painter, it is not practical to ask him to go to all of the trouble of painting a painting in your sight. But you can ask him to show you paintings which he has painted, and then after he shows you some impressive paintings you have only the ordinary problem of finding out whether he’s an honest man and really is the one who painted them.

But then we come to problems which are far more difficult. How can you tell if a man is an expert teacher? The only practical effect of a good teacher is a learned student. If you have access to the students to test them, you mostly can only tell in the negative—a student who obviously knows nothing—since the whole reason to seek out a teacher is to be taught. (There are exceptions for things such as being an expert in Greek but not in teaching Greek, and you want to find an excellent teacher for your child. Let us set that aside as a special case which is easier than the one we’re trying to deal with.) However, even in the best case this is not a pure evaluation of the teacher because the end results also depends upon the quality of the student. This is clear in the case of athletics. Some people have bodies which are proportioned exceedingly well for the sport and when this is married to a disposition which finds physical activities intuitive, they would come to be very good in their sport regardless of who their teacher is; an excellent teacher will make them better but a bad teacher will still make them good (unless he gets them injured).

Medicine is an interesting hybrid of this. It is possible to evaluate a trauma surgeon mostly based on results because how well one patches up a man after a knife would or a gun shot or a bear mauling does not depend very much on the constitution of the victim. It does depend on the wound, of course, but it’s not that hard to evaluate wounds based on criteria such as their rate of blood flow or the amount of the victim which is missing.

It is nowhere near as possible to evaluate an internal medicine doctor’s treatment of chronic conditions. The human body is an unbelievably complex thing—I mean that literally; most people can’t believe the complexity involved. Biology keeps on making new discoveries that things are more complex than previous believed. All of this complexity can go wrong, and there are far fewer kinds of symptoms. In short, we have no way of evaluating what is actually wrong with a patient or how bad it actually is. Not everything is fixable; how much that doesn’t get better is the fault of the doctor and how much is the fault of the disease? We have no way of knowing, certainly not for the purpose of evaluating the doctor.

So what about the kinds of experts who give health and nutrition advice?

The first thing to notice is that the time scales are not favorable. Being healthy over decades is a thing that takes decades, and that’s a really long time over which to evaluate someone’s advice in order to determine whether their advice is worth following. And we’ve also got a problem much like in evaluating internal medicine doctors: we’re talking about how to optimize an unbelievably complex system (the human body). Worse, though, is that this kind of advice is general, and the population itself varies. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that the same dietary advice is equally good advice for all members of the population. For all we know, Frenchmen do better eating baguettes than Germans do and Germans are healthier eating sausages than Frenchmen are. For all we know, there might be two brothers and one does well on pasta while the other will get fat and sick on it. At least internal medicine doctors treat individual patients; experts who give general advice on health and nutrition give the same advice to everyone. That might be fine—no one should eat uranium, for example—but it’s not obviously fine. For all we know (without be experts ourselves) universal dietary guidelines are intrinsically a bad idea that no true expert would do, just as no true fencing expert fences with reverse grip or by holding the tip and trying to thrust the hilt into his opponent.

But even if we grant the idea, for some reason, that a true expert would give general dietary advice, how do we evaluate the expertise of a particular expert giving it? The effect that we could measure would be the superior health and fitness of the people who follow this advice to what they would have had if they didn’t follow this advice.

OK, but how on earth do you measure that? How do you identify the people who follow the advice. How do you figure out how healthy they would have been had they not followed the advice?

That last part is important because it’s extremely easy for advice which does nothing to select for people who are generally superior. To give a silly but clear example: if you give advice on how to grow taller and it’s to dunk a basketball ten times a day, every day, and then measure the average height of the adherents and the average height of the non-adherents, you’ll find that the adherents are, in fact, taller. No taller than they would have been otherwise, but certainly taller than the non-adherents. Or if your advice for strength is to pick up a three hundred pound rock and carry it five hundred feet each day, you’ll certainly find that the adherents are stronger than the non-adherents, since only very strong people will even try to follow this advice. In like manner, if you recommend that people eat a pound of arugula a day, it’s quite possible that only people who are very healthy would even consider putting the stuff in their mouth given how much (if you don’t disguise its flavor with oil or sugar) it tastes like poison. (Because it is; the bitter taste of many plants come from natural pesticides they make in order to dissuade bugs from eating them. These are just poisons that have little to no effect on us since we’re mammals and not insects.)

The basic answer is that you can’t. Not to any important degree.

There’s a related issue to the question of “how can you tell if someone is an expert?” and that’s “how does someone become an expert?” It’s related because, oversimplifying, the way you become an expert is to evaluate whether you can do what an expert can do and then change what you’re doing until you can do those things. If there’s no way to evaluate whether you’re getting better at the things an expert could do, there’s no way to tell whether the things that you’re doing are making you any better, which means that there’s no way to actually become an expert. (I’ve oversimplified quite a bit; this really deserves its own blog post.)

So what does that mean for fields where it’s not possible to tell who’s an expert?

Effectively, it means that there are no experts in that field.

Frustrations Can Be Very Frustrating

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve been trying to work out a way to use a teleprompter to be able to read scripts for my YouTube channel without having to do any editing. (My traditional scripted videos, which use an audio track with pictures meant for illustration is extremely time-consuming and I just don’t have the time right now.) I’m trying the teleprompter because I’ve found that if you can see a human being speaking, it’s not a big deal if they occasionally correct themselves, but it feels really weird for that if it’s a disembodied voice.

Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to read a script off of a teleprompter, there’s no substitute for actually trying the thing and seeing how it goes. Which means I’ve had various takes of five to twenty minutes that were no good and had to be thrown out. In several cases these got junked by having the teleprompter settings off (too slow/wrong font size) or the AI teleprompter which uses speech recognition to advance the words losing track and giving up. In some cases, it was finding all of the settings on my laptop to have it stop going to sleep automatically. And in one case I had a complete take where I accidentally left something in frame which ruined the take.

All of this was very, deeply frustrating. I lost hours to this stuff at a time in my life when minutes are precious.

But that’s just how life goes, sometimes.

If you spend enough time doing creative work to do anything worthwhile, you’re going to encounter frustrations and wastes of time. For this reason, a man’s ability to make worthwhile creative things is only partially determined by his skill. That’s necessary, of course, but it’s not enough on its own. Equally necessary is the ability to not give up in the face of great frustration.

This is, of course, the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. If life is thought of as a race, it is won, not by whoever happens to be fastest at the moment, but by those who do not give up.

This is also why forgiveness is such a critical skill, particularly being able to forgive oneself. It does matter greatly how often one stumbles and falls so long as one gets up every time. Indeed, the man who gives up the first time he falls will fall only once—and will not finish the race.

It’s also the same idea as Woody Allen’s quip that “80 percent of success is showing up.” It’s not so much showing up the first time that’s hard, but showing up all the time.

What Should Christians Make of AI?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Missing the Mark, Philosophy, YouTube Channel1 Comment

In this video, I answer a viewer’s question about what Christians should make of AI. (It’s really the same thing that everyone should make of AI.

Basically, there are two senses of AI:

  1. Like us
  2. Something that does what we would do by intelligence.

All AI that exists is AI in sense 2, not in sense 1, though sense 1 wouldn’t be a massive problem if it did exist.