What Should One Do About Conspiracy Theories?

March 20, 2023
Politics
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I.

You may or may not have been following all of the twists and turns in the “Who blew up the Nord Stream?” blame game. The whole thing kicked off when Seymour Hersh published an expose claiming that the US was responsible. It got a lot of attention but not a lot of press. 

What got less attention was a thorough debunking, written by Oliver Alexander. He meticulously pointed out the numerous problems with Hersh’s story. I skimmed both and in the end I think the debunking succeeded. I came away convinced that the specific story Hersh outlined is most likely (90% confidence) false. But, by Alexander’s own admission, just because you’ve falsified one version of events, doesn’t mean that you’ve verified another. We’ve eliminated one possibility, hundreds more remain. As it turns out, a Sherlockian process of eliminating all the impossible things until the only thing remaining is the truth, is exceptionally difficult to pull off.  

Fortunately Alexander is not just in the business of shooting down theories. In a subsequent post he offers his own theory for what might have happened. He points out that only one of the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines exploded and that happened 80 km away from the site of the Nord Stream 1 (NS1) explosions and 17 hours beforehand. I had not heard this bit of information, and it does raise a lot of questions. Based on this discontinuity in number, time and space Alexander theorizes that someone had already rigged the NS1 pipeline with explosives, and when one of the NS2 pipes exploded accidently, these people figured that would prompt an inspection of NS1, which would uncover the explosives which had already been placed. This potential forced the hand of the saboteurs and they decided to detonate the two NS1 pipelines while they still could rather than risk detection.

The next question is who would want to rig the NS1 pipelines to explode, but not the NS2 pipelines. Alexander claims that this would be in the interests of Russia. That US/NATO would want both blown up, but Russia would be the only one that would want just NS1 to blow up. I’m not sure I entirely buy his explanation, and he doesn’t go into a lot of detail. Apparently it’s something along the lines of the NS1 being in bad shape and difficult to repair. Here’s the relevant section from his post:

Destroying Nord Stream 1 would allow Russia to increase pressure on Germany, while at the same time not being a massive loss, as they stated that it was “out of commission”. Russia had stated that the decreased flow and eventual shutdown of Nord Stream 1 was caused by European Union sanctions against Russia, which had resulted in technical problems they could not remedy.

I had kind of assumed that when they said the NS1 was having technical problems that this was just a cover. I imagine, if I dug around some more, that Alexander gives a more detailed explanation for these problems. Nevertheless I don’t find his description of motivation entirely convincing. Still motive isn’t his only evidence linking things to Russia:

I believe explosives were planted on the two lines of Nord Stream 1, possibly by the Minerva Julie. This ship had a very strange track directly above the location of the NS1 explosions from the 5th September to 13th September while on route to Saint Petersburg. This was also directly after Russia cut gas supplies through Nord Stream 1 on August 31st 2022. The Minerva Julie left Rotterdam on September 1st.

An interesting Twitter thread suggests that the owner of “Minerva Marine”, the company that owns the Minerva Julie has connections to Putin, Shoigu, Medvedev and other high ranking Russian officials.

This is all very suggestive, but hardly conclusive. And this is where things stood at the end of February when I first started working on this piece, (I took a break to do the Cautionary Tale piece) but then a couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a story claiming that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible for the sabotage. I was, of course, immediately curious what Alexander would have to say about this claim. I was not disappointed, the NYT didn’t provide a lot of details which could be corroborated, but Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, did. From this Alexander was able to pin down the actual yacht they suspect of participating, and from there comes to the conclusion that it’s unlikely that this yacht could have pulled it off on its own. Which is to say, he’s not buying it. You would expect that Russia would jump all over the idea that it was pro-Ukrainian forces, but apparently not. According to Alexander:

It is interesting to note that the Russian government is strongly denying this series of events and sticking firmly with the Seymour Hersh story that I have previously debunked. Today Dmitry Peskov [the Russian Press Secretary] was quoted saying “As for some kind of pro-Ukrainian” Dr. Evil “, who organized all this, it’s hard to believe in it.” This raises some questions as to why Russia is so keen to completely dismiss a scenario that implicates Ukraine in the destruction of Nord Stream.

We see in this all of the standard elements associated with controversial events. Some unexpected, consequential event happens. Given that it’s unexpected people start searching for explanations. Perhaps a generally accepted explanation quickly emerges: Osama Bin Laden was behind 9/11, Trump lost in 2020 because he got fewer votes. But occasionally, as is the case of Nord Stream, we don’t end up with a generally accepted explanation. (Though previous to the NYT story a lot of people figured the Russians did it, which never made sense to me.)

Whether there’s a mainstream explanation or not, if something is consequential enough then competing explanations are going to emerge. To the extent that a specific explanation is outside of the mainstream, people will label it a conspiracy theory. You can choose to engage with the various explanations — dive into the conspiracies — or you can ignore them and go on with your life. Should you choose to engage you will quickly discover that in the age of the internet there are fire hoses of information available, and within that deluge there are lies, misrepresentations, fake evidence, biased reasoning, insinuations, overconfidence, things that look suspicious but aren’t, things that look suspicious and might be, and things that are, in fact, definitely suspicious. If you’re lucky, tenacious and search long enough you will find data that is actually illuminating, but even so, it’s rarely conclusive. Which is to say the variability is a lot greater, both accurate and inaccurate information are much easier to find, and it’s hard to tell whether we’re better off.

Still, when you do come across accurate information, and I would say that Alexander’s site falls into this last category — it’s actually kind of amazing. His newsletters contain an impressive amount of good data. His secret weapon appears to be publically accessible route information on all the ships in the North Sea above a certain size. (Which unfortunately does not include the yacht implicated in the recent pro-Ukrainian explanation.) But despite this wealth of data (and the wealth of data we have in general these days) and the feeling that you’re getting closer to the truth, we still haven’t reached it. We still don’t know who blew up the pipelines.

Also Hersh’s story which, after considering Alexander’s debunking, seems likely to be false, has 12,000 likes on Substack. Alexander’s has 112 (including one from me), and I assume that it wouldn’t even have that many if it wasn’t linked to Hersh’s. His alternative explanation (which seems far more solid than Hersh’s even if I personally remain unconvinced) has all of 14 likes. His rebuttal to the NYT, pro-Ukrainian story has 30. 

II.

So where do we go from here? How are we to handle all of the competing explanations, all the information we have available in the age of the internet? Even if we’re attempting to simplify we still have three radically different theories: Hersh’s, Alexander’s and the NYT’s. Our first question might be to ask: does it even matter? And by this I’m not asking whether it matters on a geopolitical level, of course it does, and we’ll get to that, but does it matter for the normal individual if they figure out who blew up the pipelines? Probably not. You might counter that it could be important when it comes time to vote, and still I would argue, not really. First, your vote carries so little power at the national level, even in a swing state, that it’s arguably not even worth the time it takes you to cast a vote to say nothing of the time you might spend researching this one issue. Secondly, even if one candidate wanted to continue helping Ukraine and one wanted to stop, the pipeline explosion would be just a tiny part of deciding whether that’s a good idea or not, and your vote an even tinier part of the process for selecting who gets to make that decision. 

Certainly these sorts of things are interesting, and as a way to pass the time it’s probably better than a lot of activities you could engage in, but it’s important to remember that the people in power are mostly going to do what they’re going to do and the fact that you’ve decided the NYT is wrong because you read something in a blog, isn’t going to change that.

Okay, so getting to the bottom of the Nord Stream explosions may not be all that consequential for any given individual, but are there other conspiracies where it is important for you to get to the bottom of them? If not, is having a correct world view about the possibility of conspiracies in general important? I would say the answers to those two questions are “mostly no” and “mostly yes”. Allow me to elaborate.

On the first question, we can imagine that any given conspiracy theory has both a level of impact (if true) and a level of acceptance. Theories like the moon landing being fake or the Earth being flat have huge potential impact but very low acceptance. They’re both well outside the Overton Window. On the other hand the theory that Oswald didn’t act alone in assassinating Kennedy has a low impact (now, probably not then) and very high acceptance. For it to be important for every individual, or indeed any individual to “get to the bottom of things” it has to be high on both counts. It has to have a broad impact enough for it to affect the individual, and a broad enough acceptance that there’s sufficient backing to do something about it. And I’m not really seeing much in that category. Conceivably the idea that the 2020 election was stolen? If true (it’s not) it would certainly be impactful, and given that as of the midterms, 40% of people believe that it might have been, there’s no lack of allies. But even if you are in this 40% your time is better spent changing election laws and volunteering as an observer than it is trying to really “get to the bottom” of whether it’s true or not. 

As a less controversial example perhaps Jeffrey Epstein falls into this category. In one of his recent mailbag’s Matt Yglesias was asked “Which widely despised conspiracy theory do you believe in, or at least find most intriguing?” Yglesias answered by holding forth on Jeffrey Epstein, though mostly from the angle that there are far more suspicious circumstances linking Epstein to Republicans than there are linking him to Democrats. Epstein might just be that rare conspiracy where both the impact and the support are high enough that it is worth it for an individual to try to get at the truth. Additionally some of the proposed remedies are small enough to be tractable. And indeed when I just looked, one of those remedies is already moving forward. Apparently they are going to release the names of all of his associates, and some of the allegations.

However, you may have noticed that Yglesias ducked the question. I don’t think anyone would claim Epstein conspiracies are “widely despised”. Which leads me to my second question, if it’s not worth it to investigate any individual conspiracies, does that mean you should dismiss the very idea of government conspiracies? No. I don’t think so. In fact I think it’s becoming increasingly apparent that there are shenanigans happening behind closed doors all the time. I just don’t think they’re as sophisticated and pervasive as the hardcore theorists want to imagine. As we saw from the Nord Stream example, at a certain point there’s very little additional knowledge to be gained by digging ever deeper. Which is to say that it’s probably not worth diving super deep on any one conspiracy theory, but it’s definitely worth doing a deep dive on the presence of conspiracies and the quality of information in general. 

III.

In addition to the back and forth over the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, two other things made me think about this topic recently. The Twitter Files and reading America and Iran by John Ghazvinian (see my short review here). 

Starting with the Twitter Files we see all kinds of shenanigans happening, and I certainly don’t have the time or space to cover even a fraction of them in this post. (See here, here, and here if you want a list of takeaways. Or just read the actual info dumps on Twitter itself.) But a couple of things stand out:

First, the government clearly has a lot of influence behind the scenes. So to the points that many people make, yes the government does bad things and it’s not always immediately obvious that they are. The Twitter Files is proof that there are shadowy things afoot. But what they also illustrate is that, once revealed, these efforts look less like a cleverly wielded scalpel and more like a sledgehammer.

Second, the reason they don’t get talked about, or revealed sooner is not because it’s a secret conspiracy known to only a few, but rather because it’s a legal and bureaucratic nightmare that scares away the peons and implicates the higher-ups. It’s clear that there were lots of people at Twitter who could have made similar allegations to those found in the Twitter files, but they would be risking their job, and tangling with the government, and it’s unclear, after all of this, if they’d even be believed. Fear of repercussions, not elegant conspiracies, is how the government gets away with stuff. 

Of course we don’t have the same level of access to the internal workings of other social media companies like Facebook and YouTube, though, based on the Twitter Files, it seems safe to infer that similar things were happening. But what does the world look like in the absence of the Twitter Files? Would the government have gotten away with it? That seems doubtful. Certainly I think they would have gotten away with it for longer, but when you look at the scale of the operation, and the number of people involved, there’s no way they would have kept it secret forever. In fact it was already starting to leak out, you just had to dig a little bit. 

We see these same things when we consider the United States meddling behind the scenes in Iran. Three events are worth considering:

First, the 1953 Coup: Clearly the US and the UK worked behind the scenes to overthrow a democratically elected prime minister. It was a bad thing, and it was done in secret. But it wasn’t an enormously complicated undertaking, nor did it remain secret forever. Consequently this should encourage us to update our view on how complicated a real conspiracy can be (certainly faking the moon landing seems way too complicated). And also how much effort we should actually spend trying to get to the bottom, if the truth will, eventually, end up being widely known and accepted anyway.

Second, the 1979 Revolution: One reason to doubt that governments are pulling off masterful conspiracies behind the scenes is to look at the far more numerous examples of their massive incompetence. If someone were compiling such a list the lead-up to the 1979 Revolution would have to rank pretty high. The total blindness of the US intelligence community, State Department, and the Executive Branch to the building unrest is just breathtaking. In Ghazvinian’s book he titles the chapter about the revolution “The Unthinkable” because that’s what it was. The American government didn’t think revolution was a low probability outcome, they didn’t think about it as a possibility, period. 

Third, the release of the hostages: Here we have an actual conspiracy, one where details have emerged in the period since I started writing. You may have missed it, but we got new information over the weekend. The NYT ran a story wherein Ben Barnes confessed to accompanying his mentor John B. Connally Jr., on a trip to the Middle East where Connally made it known to Middle Eastern leaders that the Iranians should delay releasing the hostages until after the election. Barnes’ story checks out, as much as such a thing can 43 years after the fact, but even so we’re still not looking at definitive proof. This particular example has some instructive features. The scale of the conspiracy is interesting. It was a small effort, not a lot of moving parts, and not a lot of people involved. Also I don’t think the truth was that far off from actual mainstream opinion. The timing of the release was always super suspicious, and had you asked the average American if such a deal was conceivable they probably would have answered in the affirmative.

IV.

After considering all of this I return to my initial advice. I don’t think it’s especially important or impactful to spend lots of time trying to get to the bottom of any particular conspiracy theory — to uncover the truth behind a specific event. But I do think it’s important to get a feel for the potential of conspiracies, what governments (and individuals) might be capable of pulling off. And on the flip side of that, while I haven’t spent a lot of time on it, to get a feel for the range of their incompetence as well. 

This is all well and good, but how does one go about it, and does the modern firehose of data make this effort more or less difficult? I would say “Both”. It makes it very difficult to be deeply educated about more than a few theories, without completely giving your life over to it, which has its own dangers. And, if you let your guard down it’s easy to get drowned by the colossal deluge of bad information.

On the other hand — to completely mix metaphors — while they are deeply buried, there are nuggets of truth in that firehose. Truth of a purity undreamt of before the internet. But you’re going to have to wade through a lot of shit to get to it. 

I suspect that somewhere in this post was a fact you hadn’t previously come across. If so consider donating, and if not consider telling me the secret of your expansive wisdom. Perhaps it is I who should be donating to you.

The 12 Books I Finished in February

March 7, 2023
Book Reviews
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  1. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by: David Graeber and David Wengrow
  2. America and Iran: A History 1720 to the Present by: John Ghazvinian
  3. Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by: M. Nolan Gray
  4. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by: Ben R. Rich
  5. The Hedonistic Imperative by: David Pearce
  6. Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health—and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by: Christopher M. Palmer MD 
  7. Nicomachean Ethics by: Aristotle
  8. Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction by: Jonathan Barnes
  9. Dungeon Crawler Carl: A LitRPG/Gamelit Adventure by: Matt Dinniman
  10. Carl’s Doomsday Scenario: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2 by: Matt Dinniman
  11. The Magician’s Nephew by: C. S. Lewis
  12. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by: C. S. Lewis

February I turned 52, and I felt the need to do something epic. Something that showed that I still have it. So I and a boon companion (who ended up being almost a sherpa) set off to camp in The Maze, down in Southern Utah, which has been labeled the most remote area in the lower 48. (I’m not sure how they arrived at that, but I’m going with it.) It was a crazy treacherous road which was only passable with a truly tricked out Jeep. But it was beautiful. Here are a couple of pictures:

Make sure you can spot our tent in the second one.

Beyond that it was kind of a crazy month (see my Cautionary Tale post). And the trip made things even crazier, but I’m glad I did it. I guess I’m not dead yet.

I- Eschatological Reviews

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by: David Graeber and David Wengrow

Published: 2021

704 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The multitudinous variety of pre-modern societies, and the way in which modern political scientists have incorrectly imposed a teleological interpretation on history, making assumptions which are clearly refuted if you look at the anthropological record.

What’s the author’s angle?

Graeber, who died right as the book was going to print, was a noted anarchist, and if you read this book as an attack on modern state power you wouldn’t be far off. 

Who should read this book?

This is a fascinating book, and the details it gives about pre-modern societies are startling and surprising. If you like expansive and deep non-fiction, then I think you’ll like this book.

General Thoughts

Midway through chapter one, the book references a quote from Benjamin Franklin, one I’ve talked about before in this space. 

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived a while with them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

A French émigré named Hector de Crèvecoeur, writing in 1782, made a similar observation:

Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European.

In a sense the rest of the book is dedicated to showing why this might be. It does this along three major routes.

First the book shows that there was a huge variety of social organization in the past. There were slave-holding tribes next to tribes that considered slavery an abomination. There were tribes which were loose, nearly anarchic groups during some parts of the year, and absolute dictatorships during other parts. And there were tribes where on some subjects they were strictly patriarchal and on other subjects strictly matriarchal. 

Second, the fact of this huge variety suggests that we ought to be more open to experimentation. The authors go so far as to ask:

…is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. Of course, to exercise that capacity implies that there should be something meaningful to decide in the first place.

Finally, they take issue with the idea of political progress in general, that we’re continually advancing from worse to better political systems, and that we’re at or near the end of that process. And to the extent that modern systems possess admirable qualities like a respect for freedom and equality, these ideas represent pale imitations of concepts that were originally introduced to the Europeans by Native Americans. 

To return to the quotes, if people never willingly choose the European option, then is it not possible that there’s a form of government that’s better than what we have and we should be experimenting more in an attempt to find it? Should we not be less attached to the idea that we’ve reached some kind of pinnacle?

There’s definitely quite a bit more to the book than these points, though I think they’re the main ones. The authors talk a lot about agriculture, arguing that it wasn’t an invention which, once created, locked us into spiraling misery and inequality, but rather something that was picked up and put down many times by groups, and often used in combination with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They also put forth a theory for societal control which involves three elements: control of force, control of information, and charisma. And then there’s the concept of schismogenesis, which posits that cultures often define themselves in opposition to surrounding cultures. All of this is very interesting, and they do a good job of exploring it.

To return to their central point, I’m totally on board with the idea that there was far more variety among human societies historically than we imagine. And that we’ve papered over this variety because it serves our interests and plays to our biases. This point has been minimized or ignored by people like Pinker and Fukuyama (who are singled out for condemnation by the authors), and this book does good work in bringing attention to it. But when they try to apply all of this to the present day as some vaguely aspirational, anarchic project I think they go from being wise and insightful to being irrational and naive. Which takes us to:

Eschatological Implications

I’ve become something of a reluctant apologist for Fukuyama, and his claim that we have reached the “end of history”. Not because I think we’ve actually reached the end of history, but because I think Fukuyama (at his best) was making a subtler point, one that I kind of think Graeber and Wengrow completely missed. 

They do not make the mistake of claiming that Fukuyama literally said that history was over, that nothing was going to happen, unlike so many. They at least go one level deeper to Fukuyama’s claim that western liberal democracy has no remaining, viable, ideological competitors. Here their retort is that if you look at all of the myriad ways in which humans organized themselves historically that somewhere in that assemblage there must be something that can compete with WLD. I suppose anything is possible, but in order to really grapple with that question they need to go deeper still, to the level that very few of Fukuyama’s critics reach: the reason WLD has no remaining competition, they’re just much better at waging war.

At the moment, when one considers the situation in Ukraine, the ability of WLDs to wage war is looking pretty good. Just the assistance of WLDs has changed something that nearly everyone thought would be a cakewalk for Russia into a stalemate. And while it is true that China might eventually surpass us, or Russia might flip the table using nukes, that doesn’t do much to support Graeber and Wengrow’s point. Because while neither is exactly a WLD, they’re a lot closer to that, than the sorts of societies described in this book. Which is to say that on some level Graeber and Wengrow might be right, there might be some other form of government, some different way of organizing society that’s better for some definition of “better”. But how does that government stack up militarily with a modern nation state? How does it avoid being conquered, pillaged, or just annexed? And while it may have once been true that no one voluntarily chose to be a European if they could be an Indian. These days very few people choose to live in a less-developed country when they can live in a WLD. 

Now I bow to no one in my criticism of WLDs. And I think this book makes many very interesting points. But if there is an alternative to WLDs I don’t think we’re going to pluck it from the past. Yes, perhaps there is some inspiration to be had. And yes, I too think that we should be more open to experimentation. But for all their faults and for all that they might not represent the end point of social organization, I think only some kind of singularity will dislodge them, and if anything that’s the opposite of what Graeber and Wengrow are offering.

II- Capsule Reviews

America and Iran: A History 1720 to the Present

by: John Ghazvinian

Published: 2021

688 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A comprehensive history of the relationship between the USA and Iran, with every twist and turn meticulously detailed. In particular it describes how much Iran worked to have a relationship with the US up until the 1979 Revolution.

What’s the author’s angle?

Ghazvinian was born in Iran, though he left when he was one. Still he seems to have a pretty pro-Iran bias, though perhaps it only feels that way because I’ve been marinating in anti-Iranian bias for so long.

Who should read this book?

This is a pretty long book, but if you really want an in depth look at one of the most contentious geopolitical flashpoints from the last 50 years, this book is fantastic. It’s also incredibly useful if you’re looking to steelman the Iranian position.

General Thoughts

I can’t possibly do this book justice in this space. I’ve considered doing a comprehensive book review, and I may yet do that, but for now I will just say that, having read the book, I am much more sympathetic to the Iranians than I was previous to reading the book. I don’t think Ghazvinian gets everything right, but he brings up a lot of things I had not previously known.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

by: M. Nolan Gray

Published: 2022

256 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The weirdness of US zoning regulations and the problems they cause.

What’s the author’s angle?

Gray is the Research Director for California YIMBY, so he definitely has a dog in this fight.

Who should read this book?

If you’re already inclined towards YIMBYism, this book isn’t going to add much. And if you aren’t inclined that way then I don’t think this book will do much to push you in that direction. I guess if you were really interested in the history of zoning, and how it came to be, along with examples of how other countries do it, then it might be worth your time.

General Thoughts

This was February’s selection for the local SSC/ACX book club I belong to. It definitely makes a strong case for getting rid of zoning, or vastly curtailing it, but it felt pretty wonkish. As I have mentioned in the past, I have a (some would say) unfortunate bias towards sweeping narratives and big trends. Zoning is not that. It belongs in a bucket with the countless other petty annoyances brought on by bureaucracy and rent-seeking. I totally get that progress is made up of thousands of small victories, and I’m glad that the YIMBYs appear to be making progress. But…

This issue feels like an example of decadence rather than a cure for it. Which is to say, I’m not struck by the benefits which will accrue from zoning regulation, I’m struck by how difficult it is to accomplish even small improvements when dealing with large and entrenched bureaucracies. I didn’t dislike the book because zoning is unimportant, I disliked the book because it shouldn’t need to exist. The case seems pretty obvious. It shouldn’t require a book-length treatment to lay it out. But apparently it does and even the most straightforward laws end up getting undermined. 

When I discovered that the author worked for California YIMBY, I recalled that there had been some laws which were recently passed in California which seemed hopeful. So I looked through their site for details, and I mostly found articles saying things like this:

  • SB 9 aimed to legalize duplexes and fourplexes in residential districts across California. Yet recent research suggests that many municipalities are adopting local ordinances that subvert the law.
  • The data largely reflects this: most of the municipalities surveyed didn’t permit a single SB 9 unit in 2022, while Los Angeles permitted fewer than 40 units—a far cry from the permitting boom we’ve seen with accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

So I guess things have been mixed, at best? For an issue that’s getting a ton of attention, I find that depressing.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by: Ben R. Rich

Published: 1994

372 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

An under the hood view of the legendary Skunk Works division of Lockheed, which was responsible for planes like the U-2, the SR-71, and the F-117 stealth fighter. 

What’s the author’s angle?

Rich’s career straddled the transition in military procurement from the simple, post-war era of Eisenhower to the horribly bureaucratic procurement system which was in place by the end of the cold war. He obviously prefers the earlier simpler version, and the book does a good job of making the case for why.

Who should read this book?

If you’re a military buff, I would definitely recommend this book. I think business people who like to glean management advice from unconventional sources will also enjoy this book. But even if you’re not in either of these two categories it’s still a pretty great book. 

General Thoughts

This was a great book, and it proceeds about how you’d expect. Heroic engineers in the afterglow of WW2 but also with a nuclear Sword of Damocles hanging over their head, pull off incredibly innovative spy and stealth planes. That’s the surface level. Underneath are questions of how best to create disruptive technology, government procurement, and speed of innovation.

There’s two ways of longing for the 50’s and 60s. Some people long for the culture, a more conservative time, when kids had two parents, and gender dysphoria was something only spoken of by psychologists. Other people long for the effectiveness of the 50’s and 60’s when we could still get things done. When we had an overhang of optimism and manufacturing capacity left over from the war, and bureaucracy was light. This book evokes that second form longing, and it is interesting to compare the effectiveness of Skunk Work’s various projects from this era with the disaster that is the F-35. The question is can we ever get back to that?

Rich offers some ideas, but he offered them basically 30 years ago, and from my perspective things have only gotten worse. There seems to be an inexorable trend of inefficiency that moves forward regardless of how obviously bad the results are. I suspect that it’s not quite as bad as my worst fears, but when you read about how good it once was —the amazing things a dedicated group of engineers could accomplish on reasonable budgets and in short time frames — it sure makes you want to figure out some way of recapturing it. 

The Hedonistic Imperative

by: David Pearce

Published: 1995

200 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

It will shortly be possible to eliminate suffering through genetic engineering, neurosurgery, nanotechnology and drugs. And if it can be done, it should be. Our ethical imperative is to aim for a post-human future of extreme motivation, meaning and pleasure.

What’s the author’s angle?

Pearce is a transhumanist philosopher. This book is his manifesto.

Who should read this book?

It’s definitely an interesting, if fringe, philosophy, so if you’re the kind of person who likes that sort of thing. But if you’re on the fence at all I would recommend against reading it. It’s very tendentious, and the kind of book that’s not very long, but feels super long.

General Thoughts

Pearce imagines a time in the future when we will have completely eliminated suffering. Not merely for humans but for all species who might be said to suffer. I’m just going to focus on humans, but the inclusion of all life should give you a sense of his ambition. 

In place of suffering we would experience benign mania — so the most productive and ambitious you’ve ever been, and then some — and gradations of pleasure, ranging from a deep sense of well-being all the way up to incandescent orgasmic pleasure of an intensity we can barely imagine. So in essence wireheading, but in a fashion that delivers not only amazing pleasure, but incredible productivity as well.

Now if we could flip a switch and place a thousand volunteers into this state to make sure there aren’t any strange second order effects, and if necessary flip a switch and bring them all back, then I would have no problem running this experiment. Unfortunately it’s not possible to jump straight to the conditions Pearce describes. Nor can we easily unwind things.

Rather this destination lies on the other side of a fog-shrouded valley, and to get there we have to descend into that valley, exploring as we go. Pearce seems to imagine that getting halfway to the destination would get us some percentage of the benefits with no additional disadvantages. But in the time since he wrote the book we’ve had the opportunity to descend part way into the valley and it hasn’t worked that way at all.

Exhibit A would be the opioid epidemic. You can read more about what happened in some of my previous posts. But when doctors decided to declare that pain was the fifth vital sign, they were following a weak version of Pearce’s hedonic imperative. And rather than getting closer to utopia we ended up with tens, if not hundreds of thousands of additional dead opioid addicts. 

Arguably video games and porn are lesser examples of the same phenomenon. I’m not arguing that they’re as bad as the opioid crisis, but they’re certainly instruments of hedonism, and I think there’s good reason to believe that, on net, we’d be better off without them. 

In addition to problems which might arise as part of the journey, I’m not sure the destination is going to be as great as he imagines either. At a minimum it’s completely undiscovered territory. As you can see below I read some of Aristotle’s thinking on ethics this month, and it still resonates because we’re basically the same people, grappling with the same problems we had 2300 years ago. But the people Pearce envisions, those who’ve reached hedonic mastery, are entirely different in nearly every way. They might as well be aliens. Now perhaps they’ll be awesome aliens, and everything will work out perfectly, but if it doesn’t. If there are problems. They will be problems the likes of which we’ve never seen, and one’s we’ll be ill-equipped to deal with. 

Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health—and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More

by: Christopher M. Palmer MD 

Published: 2022

320 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A grand-unified theory of mental illness that grounds everything in metabolic disorders, particularly at the mitochondrial level.

What’s the author’s angle?

This theory is basically the brainchild of Dr. Palmer, and this book (similar to the last book) is his manifesto.

Who should read this book?

I suspect what most people want is a list of recommendations which flow from this theory. “Okay, I get it, it’s the mitochondria. So what should I be doing based on that in order to feel better.” And on that front, the book is kind of light. It definitely has recommendations, particularly near the end. But the majority of the book is devoted to looking at the scientific basis for the theory. If you’re just looking for recommendations on what to do, you’re probably better tracking down a podcast appearance. (For example he was on Tim Ferris’ show.)

General Thoughts

I thought Dr. Palmer’s theory made a lot of sense, and the data seems to back it up as well. Whether it will bring about a revolution in the treatment of mental health remains to be seen. Going from theory to practical recommendations can still be difficult. He does come out pretty strongly in favor of intermittent fasting and ketogenic diets, but he also admits that this sort of thing isn’t the answer for all people. Even if we’re vastly simplifying the metabolism it can still be overactive or underactive and different treatments are recommended for each. And if you actually try to dig into what the metabolism looks like there are fantastically crazy flow charts that will make your brain hurt.

Still, for those struggling with any of the conditions listed in the title (anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD) or any other mental problem, or who has loved one’s who are struggling, this does seem to offer a new and evidence based approach to treating issues that have hitherto been pretty intractable. 

Nicomachean Ethics

by: Aristotle

Published: ~330 BC

171 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

How virtue and ethics are foundational to a good life. That good behavior generally is found at the mean between two extremes. Too much courage is rashness, too little is cowardice. Oh, and also friendship is magic. 

Who should read this book?

I’m not sure. I think you should check back with me. There may be other works by Aristotle you should read instead of this one. At least to start

General Thoughts

NM started well and was surprisingly readable. The deeper it got, the harder it made you work. Of course Aristotle scholars will point out that most of his extant works weren’t designed to be read, they were probably lecture notes. And an arc — where things get progressively more difficult as the lecture goes on — makes sense. But I also got the feeling that Aristotle had a model and he started with things that easily fit into his model and then gradually worked his way towards things where fitting them to the model was more difficult. 

Of course the hard thing when you’re reviewing something like this is to say something unique, which I’ve probably already failed at. So let me talk about the “great books” project in general.

When you’re reading someone like Aristotle there’s an enormous amount of commentary. This holds for all of the “great books” but it’s particularly true when it comes to philosophy. So if I want to study Aristotle, what percentage of that study should be actually reading Aristotle, and what percentage should be reading what other people have to say about him? And does this ratio differ for different philosophers? Are some philosophers so inscrutable that you should read hardly any primary text and spend most of your time on commentary? While some are so accessible that you should just read the primary text and forget the commentary?

Having read NM I suspect that Aristotle falls somewhere in the middle. Maybe 50% primary text and 50% commentary, which takes me to:

Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction

by: Jonathan Barnes

Published: 2001

176 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A short overview of Aristotle’s life and thinking. 

What’s the author’s angle?

Well let’s just say they don’t hire critics to write these introductory books.

Who should read this book?

I think if you have a goal, like I do, to get maximum Aristotle knowledge with minimum effort, this is a great way to go about that.

General Thoughts

I decided to read this after the Nicomachean Ethics. I think it would have been better to read it before. But also it’s short enough that you can imagine using it to bookend one’s study of Aristotle. Read it first, read a bunch of Aristotle and then read it at the end as a way to cement things in. The book did give me a greater appreciation for Aristotle as an empirical scientist, which was not something I expected.

Dungeon Crawler Carl Series

by: Matt Dinniman

Dungeon Crawler Carl: A LitRPG/Gamelit Adventure

Published: 2020

444 Pages

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2

Published: 2021

364 Pages

Briefly, what is this series about?

Aliens show up, take possession of the Earth, kill most of its inhabitants and make the rest participate in a real life fantasy dungeon crawl computer game. The series revolves around Carl and his sentient, talking cat, Princess Donut. 

Who should read this book?

If you’re looking for light, pulpy fun, that would be rated R for language and PG-13 for everything else. These books go down pretty easily. (I listened to Book 2 in a single day.)

General Thoughts

This series was recommended to me by the same person who recommended the Expeditionary Force series. And it’s got a similar feel, though at this point I think there are aspects of it that I like better. But caution is in order. I got to the end of EF and decided that it probably wasn’t worth 100 hours. Also this series is probably farther away from being completed. Book 6 has been written, but audio is only available up through book 5. Why do I say it’s farther away? Well the dungeon has 18 levels, and so far book 1 covered two levels, and book 2 covered just one level. I could probably find out how far they are by the end of book 6, but I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but I’d hazard a guess that the series is going to end up in a rhythm where each book covers one level. Which would mean we’ve got a long way to go.

For the moment I’m going to continue, but view it strictly as mindless recreation. Similar to playing a video game, and one I can do at the same time as walking… 

III- Religious Reviews

The Chronicles of Narnia

By: C. S. Lewis

The Magician’s Nephew

Published: 1955

183 Pages

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Published: 1950

172 Pages

Briefly, what is this series about?

The adventures of British children, and others in the magical realm of Narnia. Adventures that generally end up being Christian allegories. 

Who should read this book?

Everyone. Though not necessarily in this order. This is the first time I’ve tried reading The Magician’s Nephew first, and whatever the author’s preference (which is weaker than the publisher claims). The Magician’s Nephew contains spoilers for LWW. Not big spoilers, so it’s not a huge deal, but in my opinion it’s enough to tip the scales.

General Thoughts

One of the reasons I’ve given for being unsure about reading the pulpy books (see the previous review) is that I could be doing something even better with that time. Like re-reading books I already know I like. In what is either an elegant compromise or a way to waste even more time, I decided that I would commit to re-read at least one great book for every pulpy book I read. And since it’s been probably 30 years since I last read the Chronicles of Narnia, it seemed a good place to start. (Also the Narnia books are short enough that I’m going to finish all of them before reading another Dungeon Crawler Carl book.)

First off, they’re just as delightful as I remember. And in some respects even more so, because they’re so different from most modern fantasy. Sanderson can barely introduce a character in 172 pages. And these days fantasy has to include actual scenes of poverty and suffering.

I found myself thinking of this during the amazing dinner provided to the children by Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. Isn’t it in the middle of winter? Hasn’t it been winter for a really long time? They seem to live pretty well given that the castle of the White Witch is close enough to walk to. 

Initially I found such thoughts annoying, but after a while they just made me appreciate the books more. They make delightful bedtime stories, and the child wouldn’t have moved out before I was done reading them.

Beyond that, being much older and reading them with an eye that’s more geared towards the allegorical nature of the books, I was struck by the differences between my Christianity and Lewis’. In particular the normal Christian doctrine of Original Sin as allegorized in The Magician’s Nephew. I thought Lewis did an excellent job with it, but I still think it doesn’t make as much sense as the LDS version.

12 books in 28 days. At that rate I’m not sure if that’s impressive or a sign that there’s something wrong with me – Probably the latter. If you’d like to make sure that I (and others) get the help they need, consider donating.

Eschatologist #26 – A Crisis of Change and Choice

February 28, 2023
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In my last newsletter we talked about spiritual health, and a few options for acquiring that health, such as overcoming suffering or, alternatively, gaining material abundance. In this newsletter we’re going to go beyond talking about the merits of different options to discussing the way in which these options have multiplied. 

Go back a few centuries, and there was one religion, one staple crop, and one way of doing things. These days, however, we’re spoiled for choices and options for both spiritual and physical health, and beyond that our emotional and mental health as well. We have countless religions to choose from: some secular, some informal. Beyond that there are a bewildering variety of diet and exercise programs, and tens of thousands of self-help books. We are offered a truly insane number of choices, all backed up by a deluge of data drawing sometimes contradictory conclusions. Everybody wants to be happy and live a good life, but which of the thousands of options best accomplishes that?

I am far from the first person to cover the idea that more options may, in fact, not be a good thing. There was a whole book written about it called The Paradox of Choice. Along with that there’s the associated concept of decision fatigue. Nor am I the first person to point out that acquiring more data can, somewhat paradoxically, make picking the correct path or even any single path more difficult. 

On top of all the complexities already mentioned, technology has introduced new options which seem like paths to happiness but which are actually engineered to hijack that impulse. Perhaps you’ve been following Jonathan Haidt’s new substack where he lays out the way social media has done this  — promising a world of connection that brings health and happiness, but actually delivering a huge increase in teen mental illness, particularly among girls. Nor are the problems created by technology likely to get better as it becomes smarter (AI) and more immersive (VR).

This abundance of change and choice is historically unprecedented. For the vast majority of our existence (the countless millennia previous to the industrial revolution) the choices were simple, and our knowledge essentially static. Centuries could go by without much changing. Now we’re lucky to make it a full year. The ground is continually shifting under our feet. There may have been less potential for health and happiness in all its forms, but more actual contentment, by virtue of the fact that they knew what the limits were.

If you’re anything like me this brings to mind the depression era policies of FDR. (That’s a joke. No one is like me.) In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shales points out how bad things still were in 1937 eight years into the depression. She ascribes this in part to FDR’s mania for experimentation with government policy. We normally think that experimentation is good because it’s the best method for arriving at the right answer. But what if we just need an answer? Shales points out that businesses were left in a state of uncertainty by all the changes and felt unable to move forward with plans because at any moment things could change. The experimentation significantly slowed the economic recovery. What the country really needed at that point, Shales contends, was a solid unchanging foundation to build on.

I wonder if we’re in a situation similar to those businesses. I don’t want to discount the benefits of information and innovation, choices and change. But perhaps what we really need right now is a solid foundation, some way of pausing for a moment so we can get a handle on things.

It seems unlikely that the world is going to pause, which means this effort has to be driven by individuals and families, though I wouldn’t discount the importance of religious communities either. Given that they’ve provided a solid foundation for millions of people for hundreds of years. A foundation which the modern world has perhaps been too hasty at casting aside.

Religions are also valuable for the methodological example they provide. In place of conclusions, changes, and choices, they offer faith, solidity and limitations. And the point of this newsletter is not to say that that first list is bad. But rather my point is that they make a good house but a poor foundation. As someone very wise once observed, it’s a foundation of sand, and what we really need is to build our house upon the rock. Because the rains and the floods are coming…

Come for the discussion of religion, stay for the obscure references to FDR’s Great Depression policy. You know who’s also going through a great depression? My friend Mark. Remember that for the next couple of weeks, all donations are earmarked for him. 

A Cautionary Tale

February 25, 2023
Technology
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I forget when Mark first told me about Becky. (All names have been changed for reasons which will shortly become obvious.) They met at work, I know that much. Mark didn’t have many friends, and he definitely didn’t have many, or perhaps even any, female friends, so Becky appeared to be a positive development.

It was early summer or maybe late spring of last year when Mark said that Becky was moving in with him. I was told that it was completely platonic, and she had a boyfriend. (I later found out that his name was David.) At the time I had no reason to doubt the platonic part, or the boyfriend part. Though the arrangement still struck me as being a little bit weird. The story was that she wanted to sell her home while the market was hot, and consequently she needed a place to stay. Mark’s house isn’t very large, two bedrooms, one bath, definitely less than a thousand square feet, so it was going to be tight, but I was told it was just temporary, while she waited for her boyfriend to finish a job in Canada.

As the months passed I heard rumblings that whatever the boyfriend was doing in Canada was taking longer and costing more than it should have, and, as a result, he was delayed. This annoyed Mark, because it prolonged the inconvenience, but otherwise things seemed to be okay. Over the last few weeks I got the feeling that tensions were starting to simmer but I assumed it was related to the stress of trying to cram two adults and two households worth of stuff into too little space. But supposedly it would all be over soon. Becky had sent her boyfriend some money to finish off the last of the job, and it would all be wrapped up any day now. 

The true nature of the situation was finally revealed to me last week. Mark approached me asking for advice, but what he really needed was money. The story he told me appeared plausible at first glance. The boyfriend had contracted with Suncor Energy to build an oil rig, and in between the pandemic and the subsequent supply chain issues, he was over-budget, and out of money, but if he could just finish the job he would get paid the remainder of his fees and he could make everyone whole. And all it would take to finish the job was $15,000 so he could purchase one final diesel generator. Mark came to me because it was urgent, David was being sued, and was facing jail time. 

I immediately questioned the idea of jail time for a civil matter, but when Mark assured me that he had looked it up, I let the matter drop. It’s very common for people to offload their critical thinking to other people. No one has the time to critically examine every piece of information. This is why doctors, lawyers, scientists and republican governments exist. And I assumed that Mark had already done significant due diligence, particularly when he mentioned that he had given David (via Becky) a considerable sum of his own money. So while a couple of warning lights were active, my entire dashboard wasn’t lit up, at least not yet. Fortunately those couple of warning lights were more than sufficient to keep me from handing over any money without documentation. But, honestly, I kind of expected it would be a formality. 

In response they sent me this:

And this:

Okay… apparently it wasn’t a formality, apparently we have some very lazy scammers on our hands. The letter has all kinds of typos, and what on Earth is “Please accept our congratulations” doing in there? As far as the second document, I’m not even sure what it’s supposed to represent. Also I have had the unfortunate experience of being sued and nothing about the process ever amounted to a single page.

Still there was part of me that resisted the obvious conclusion because if I was right, and I had stumbled onto the last stages of an advance-fee scam, it meant that my friend Mark, and his friend Becky were out a LOT of money. Even with changing the name, “Mark” would rather I didn’t reveal how much money it was, but between the two of them it was well into the six figures. Also I was under the impression that David and Becky had met before he went to Canada, which didn’t seem to fit the fraud narrative. I later found out that they had in fact met on the internet. Which cast everything in a completely different light.

It was in fact a tragedy of colossal proportions. Becky was retired, and on social security. She had already sent “David” and his “attorney” all of the proceeds from the sale of her house, plus every last dime she could beg, borrow, or steal. Which is how she ended up convincing Mark to do something similar, including taking out a HELOC on his house, which, previous to this, had been paid off. 

I resisted immediately saying it was a scam, and instead took the tack with Mark and Becky that if David really was being sued they ought to be able to bury me in documents. Just the initial complaint ought to be 20+ pages. Becky said she would see what she could do, but she really needed the money that very day. David and his lawyer were desperate, and kept calling her. No problem, I told her, have them call me. In response I was texted the attorney’s name, Brandon, and number, 813-551-1668 along with the caution that he had an accent.

I tried calling the number. It rang, and rang and rang, never even going to voicemail. I finally hung up. A few minutes later the “attorney” called me back. His number came in as “Scam Likely” and from the second I got on the phone whatever hopes or doubts I had vanished. Just from the way he answered the phone I knew this was no attorney, and yes there was an accent. I didn’t talk to him long enough that I could place it, but it wasn’t the accent of a native English speaker (Becky claimed he was British). He may have mentioned diesel generators, but I immediately asked for his last name so I could look him up on the internet. There was silence on the other end of the line. I asked him again more forcefully. He hung up. The following text conversation ensued:

I forwarded that to Mark. I’m not sure how much he told Becky, but she promised she would get me more documents, but that David and his lawyer were super busy in court, and that’s why they couldn’t send me stuff…

In the end I got three more documents:

There’s lots that could be said about these documents, but my point is not to dive into the minutia of the scam. Though I did find it interesting that all the “court” documents, despite only being a single page in length, always make sure to mention that the money is just out there waiting to be paid the minute the job is finished. 

Also while I couldn’t find anything on the internet about the people or the case or the job (which is to be expected) Paul-Jean Charest, the signer of the last document, is an actual employee of the Cour du Québec, and I located his email. I sent him the document and asked him if it had been issued by his office. I wasn’t sure if he’d respond. Having your email on the internet probably attracts a lot of spam, but he did, the next day with an emphatic “No”. He wanted my number so he could call and talk to me. He has yet to do that, but perhaps I’ll call him at some point. I haven’t done so already because I’m very doubtful he’ll be able to do anything to help.

Given the disaster it represents it’s not surprising that Mark was somewhat resistant to completely giving up hope, but the email from Monsieur Charest was the final nail in the coffin. Becky unfortunately still believes. This is the last text message I got from her:

I don’t share this message to in any way mock Becky, but as a further illustration of the tragedy, and as bad as this tragedy is, as you might imagine, there’s more to come. There’s the obvious point at which Becky realizes it’s a scam, that she never had a boyfriend, only a very wicked person pretending to love her so he could take all of her money and then some. And what is Mark to do about Becky? She’s living at his house and now doesn’t have any money with which to move out. I’m not sure her SSI would even get her an apartment (particularly given that she has a dog.) So the story will continue, but we’ve reached the end of it for now.

Is this one of those stories that ends with a moral? One would hope so. I’d like to think there’s some lesson we can gain from the disaster. Some small benefit we can pluck from the carnage.

And one that goes beyond just “There are bad people out there doing bad things. Watch out!” I’m aware that this is an N=1 situation (or maybe N=3 if you count Mark, Becky and myself) so to the extent there is a moral, it’s based on one anecdote, not extensive data, but hopefully it will carry some utility regardless. With that caveat in place here’s a few things that stand out to me.

I’d obviously like to talk to Becky and get more of the details on how things began. How long before “David” asked for money. One of the documents mentions 2019, and I think they said it had been going on four years at some point, but obviously the pandemic and the supply chain issues were huge gifts to the scammers. Suddenly whatever they claimed as far as delays and cost overruns made perfect sense. 

But even without the gift of the pandemic, the narrative and story behind this particular advance fee scheme strikes me as being far more sophisticated and believable than the ones I’ve heard about in the past — the traditional Nigerian Prince scam, and the one’s which just claim that there’s a huge amount of money locked up in an account. Those traditional schemes seemed so ridiculous on their face that you could imagine that only greedy people would fall for them. Such that we might comfort ourselves by saying that they got what they deserved. This scheme wasn’t driven by greed, but by love. At no time did Becky ever offer me double my money back, or something like that. It was always “Help my boyfriend and I’ll promise to pay you back. Even if I have to do it myself.” That said, I’m sure the romance angle isn’t new, still it seems more pernicious, and also easier to pull off now that online dating is far more common. 

Speaking of which, is this scam easier to pull off in general these days than it was in the past? The documents she sent look reasonably authentic. It’s mostly only the content (or lack thereof) that is suspicious. They have watermarks, logos and stamps. Obviously the technology required for this level of fakery has been around for a couple of decades, but what about new technology? How long before ChatGPT or something similar could have given me the 20+ page complaint I expected? Or craft a believable news story with pictures? Headline: “Provo business man secures lucrative $17.5 million dollar contract.” Perhaps the resources available to detect such scams is also greater? Maybe so, but Becky would have had to choose to avail herself of those resources. Or even know they exist.

A quick internet search would seem to indicate that such scams are in fact on the rise. Here’s a headline from CNBC: Consumers lost $5.8 billion to fraud last year — up 70% over 2020. A 70% year over year increase is huge. Also of note, the article reveals that the average amount lost to an imposter scam is $1000, so Mark and Becky are giant outliers in the amount they lost. 

If we allow ourselves to get even more speculative, I have to wonder if there’s something about the modern world that made Mark particularly vulnerable. Some background: he had a career in tech, but it got derailed by the dot-com bust. I’m sure he could have resurrected it if he’d worked hard enough, but instead he drifted into a series of service sector jobs. This was mostly fine. Being single he didn’t need much money, and up until he got enmeshed in this scam he was doing pretty well. His house was paid off, and he had enough money to avail himself of all the comforts of modernity (streaming services, eating out, pursuing his hobbies) and have a surplus on top of that. In other words, Mark didn’t fall prey to the scam because he was bad with money. He was great at living within his means. So how did this particular scam end up being his Achilles heel?

As I said we’re in more speculative territory. I think having few friends and fewer family contributed. Mark’s parents are both dead. He cut off his brother for being a conspiracy-obsessed Trump supporter, and his remaining sibling, a sister, lives out of state, nor are they very close. One imagines that if Mark hadn’t been so atomized, if he had had a large community, that it would have helped. Though perhaps I’m wrong about that. Mormons are famous for having strong communities, and also for their susceptibility to affinity scams. Maybe Mark had precisely the wrong amount of community, enough to be snared by Becky, but not enough that anyone cautioned him. 

What about marriage? If he had been married to Becky, or married, period, it wouldn’t have happened. Instead he ended up deep in white knight mode, another thing modernity seems to have made far more common. This first started when he agreed to let Becky move in, but it then progressed to the point that he gave her all his money. One also detects something of Richard Hanania’s Women’s Tears observation, and by Mark’s report there were a lot of tears shed. 

If anyone out there has any ideas for recovering the money I’m all ears. But I’m guessing it’s gone, and shortly “David” and the “attorney” will disappear as well. Leaving only a wound that will haunt Mark and Becky for the rest of their lives.

It doesn’t feel like the time for jokes, but it does feel like a time where it might be appropriate to ask for money. I am helping Mark out somewhat, but if anyone also feels like helping, I will take any pledges which come in over the next couple of weeks and give them entirely to Mark, for the duration of that pledge. (So if you sign up for $3/month on patreon, I’ll make sure Mark get’s $3 every month as long as it lasts.) 

Polycrises or Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

February 16, 2023
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There are people who are optimistic about the future. I am not one of them. (I do have religious faith, but that’s different.) I am open to the idea that I should be more optimistic, but that doesn’t seem supported by “facts on the ground” as they say.

Some might argue that I have a bias for ignoring the good facts and focusing on the bad ones. That’s certainly possible, but I have put forth considerable effort to expose myself to people making the case for optimism. Here are links to some of my reviews of Pinker, perhaps the most notable of our current modern optimists. Beyond Pinker I’ve read books by Fukuyama, Deutsch, Yglesias, Zeihan and Cowen, and while these authors might not have quite the optimism of Pinker, they nevertheless put forth optimistic arguments. Finally if any of you have recommendations for optimists I’ve missed, I promise I’ll read them. (Assuming I haven’t already. That list of authors is not exhaustive.)

After doing all this reading, why do I remain unconvinced and expect to remain that way, regardless of what else I end up coming across? To understand that we first have to understand their case for optimism. It generally rests on two pillars:

First, they emphasize the amazing progress we’ve made over the last few centuries and in particular over the last few decades. And indeed there has been enormous progress in things like violence, poverty, health, infant mortality, minority rights, etc. They assume, with some justification, that this progress will continue. Generally it is dicey to try predicting the future, but they have a pretty good reason for believing that this time it’s different. Through the tools of science and reason we have created a perpetual knowledge generation machine, and increasing knowledge leads to increasing progress. Or so their argument goes.

Second, they’ll examine the things we’re worried about and make the case that they’re not as bad as people think. That certain groups are incentivized, either because it attracts an audience or there’s money involved, or because of their individual biases to engage in fearmongering. Highlighting the most apocalyptic scenarios and data, while downplaying things that paint a more moderate picture. Pinker is famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, for his optimism about global warming. Which is not to say that he doesn’t think it’s a problem, merely that he believes the same tools of knowledge generation that solved, or mitigated, many of our past problems will be up to the task of mitigating, or outright solving the problem of climate change as well.

In both of these categories Pinker and the other’s make excellent and compelling points. And, on balance, they’re entirely correct. Despite the pandemic, despite the war in Ukraine, despite the opioid epidemic, and a lot of other things (many of them mentioned in this space) 2023 is just about the best time to be alive, ever. Notice I said “just about”. Life expectancy has actually been going down recently, and yes the pandemic played a big role in that, but it had been stagnant since 2010. Teen mental health has gotten worse. Murders are on the rise. This is a US-centric view, but outside of the US there’s the aforementioned war in Ukraine, but also famine is on the rise in much of Africa. With these statistics in mind it certainly seems possible that as great as 2023 is that 2010 was better. 

Does this mean that we’ve peaked? That things are going to get steadily worse from here on out? Or are we on something of a plateau, waiting for the next big breakthrough. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of commercializing fusion power, or of widespread enhancements from genetic engineering, or perhaps the AI singularity. 2023 does have ChatGPT which 2010 did not. Or are our current difficulties just noise? If they look back on things from the year 2500 will everything look like one smooth exponential curve? This last possibility is basically what Pinker and the others say is happening, though some are less bullish than Pinker, and some, like Deutsch, are more bullish. 

And, to be clear, on this first point, which is largely focused on human capacity, they may be right. I’m familiar with the seemingly insoluble manure crisis of the late 1800s. And how it suddenly was a complete non-issue once the automobile came along. Still, evidence continues to mount that things are slowing down, that civilization has plateaued. That science, the great engine powering all of our advances, is producing fewer great and disruptive inventions, and resistance to innovation is increasing. If it is, that would mark the big difference between now and the late 1800’s. Back then science still had a lot of juice. Now? That’s questionable. And we might be lucky if it turns out to just be a plateau, the odds that we’re actually going backwards are higher than they’ll admit. But this isn’t the primary focus of this post. I’m more interested in their second claim, that the bad things people are worried about aren’t all that bad. 

In general, albeit in a limited fashion, I also agree with this point. I think if you take any individual problem and sample public opinion, that you will find a bias towards the apocalyptic. One that isn’t supported by the data. As an example many, many people believe that global warming is an extinction level event. It’s not. Of course this assumes that people know about the problem in the first place. There’s a lot of ignorance out there, but it’s human nature that those who are worried about a problem, likely worry more than is warranted. And Pinker, et al. are correct to point it out. That’s not the problem, the problem arises from two other sources.

First, and here I am using Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now as my primary example, there’s an unwarranted assumption of comprehensiveness. In the book, Pinker goes through everything from nuclear war, to AI Risk, to global warming, and several more subjects besides. And when it’s over you’re left with the implication of: “See you don’t need to worry about the future, I’ve comprehensively shown how all of the potential catastrophes are overblown. You can proceed with optimism!” If you’ve been reading my posts closely you may have noticed that on occasion (see for instance the book review in my last post of A Poison Like No Other) I will point out that the potential catastrophe I’ve been discussing is not one covered by Pinker.

Of course, if Pinker just missed a couple of relatively unimportant problems then this oversight is probably no big deal. He covered the big threats, and the smaller threats will probably end up being resolved in a similar fashion. The problem is we don’t know how many threats he missed. Such is the nature of possible catastrophes, there’s not some cheat sheet where they’re all listed, in order of severity. Rather the list is constantly changing, catastrophes are added and subtracted (mostly added) and their potential severity is, at best, an educated guess. Some of them are going to be overblown, as Pinker correctly points out. Some are going to be underestimated, which might end up being the case with microplastics. I’m not sure how big of a problem it will eventually end up being, but given that it didn’t even make it into Pinker’s book, I suspect he’s too dismissive of it. But beyond those catastrophes where our estimate of the severity is off, there’s the most dangerous category of all. Catastrophes that take us completely by surprise. I would offer up social media as an example of a catastrophe in this last category.

As I said, the problems of the optimists arise from two sources. The first is the assumption of comprehensiveness, the second is the ignorance of connectedness. To illustrate this I’d like to go back to a post I wrote back in 2020 about Fermi’s Paradox.

At the time I was responding to a post by Scott Alexander who argued that we shouldn’t fear that the Great Filter is ahead of us. For those who need a refresher on what that means. Fermi’s Paradox is paradoxical because if the Earth is an average example of a planet, then there should be aliens everywhere, but they’re not. Where are they? Somewhere between the millions Earthlike planets out there, and becoming an interstellar civilization there must be a filter. And it must be a great filter because seemingly no one makes it past it. Perhaps the great filter is developing life in the first place. Perhaps it’s going from single celled, to multicellular life. Or perhaps it’s ahead of us. Perhaps it’s easy to get to the point of intelligent life, but then that intelligent life inevitably destroys itself in a nuclear holocaust. In his post Alexander lists four potential great filters which might lie ahead of us and demonstrates how each of them is probably not THE filter. I bring all of this up because it’s a great example of what I’ve been talking about.

First off he makes the same assumption of comprehensiveness I accused Pinker of making — listing four possibilities and then assuming that the issue is closed when there are dozens of potential future great filters. But it’s also an example of the second problem, the way the problems are connected. As I said at the time:

(Also, any technologically advanced civilization would probably have to deal with all these problems at the same time, i.e. if you can create nukes you’re probably close to creating an AI, or exhausting a single planet’s resources. Perhaps individually [none of them is that worrisome] but what about the combination of all of them?)

Yes, Pinker and Alexander may be correct that we don’t have to worry about nuclear war, AI risk, or global warming, when considered individually. But when we combine these elements we get a whole different set of risks. Sure, rather than armageddon there’s an argument to be made that nuclear weapons actually created the Long Peace through the threat of mutually assured destruction, but what happens to that if you add in millions of climate refugees? Does MAD continue to operate? Or, maybe climate refugees won’t materialize (though it seems like we’ve got a pretty bad refugee problem even without tacking the word climate onto things). Are smaller countries going to use AI to engage in asymmetric warfare because nukes are prohibitively expensive and easy to detect? Will this end up causing enough damage that those nations with nukes will retaliate. And then there’s of course the combination of all three things: Are small nations suffering from climatic shifts going to be incentivized to misuse new technology like AI and destabilize the balance created by nukes?

This is just three items which produces only six possible catastrophes. But our list of potential, individual catastrophes is probably in the triple digits by this point. Even if we just limit it to the top ten, that’s 3.6 million potential combinatorial catastrophes. 

Once you start to look for the way our problems combine, you see it everywhere:

  • Microplastics are an annoying pollutant all on their own, but there’s some evidence they contribute to infertility, which worsens the fertility crisis. They get ingested by marine life which heightens the problems of overfishing. Finally, they appear to inhibit plant growth, which makes potential food crises worse as well.
  • You may have seen something about the recent report released by the CDC saying that adolescent girls were reporting record rates of sadness, suicidal ideation, and sexual violence. Obviously social media has to be suspect #1 for this crisis. But I’m not sure it can be blamed for the increase in sexual violence. Isn’t the standard narrative that kids stay home on their phones rather than going out with friends. Don’t you have to be with people to suffer from sexual violence? I’d honestly be surprised if pornography didn’t play a role, but regardless this is definitely a case where two problems are interacting in bad ways.
  • If you believe that climate change is going to exacerbate natural disasters (and there’s evidence for and against that) then these disasters are coming at a particularly bad time. Lots of our infrastructure dates from the 50s and 60s and much of it from even before that. But because of the pensions crisis being suffered by municipalities. We don’t have the money to conduct even normal repairs, let alone repair the additional damage caused by disasters. And most projections indicate that both the disaster problem and the pension problem are just going to get a lot worse. 
  • I’m not the only one who’s noticed this combinatorial effect. Search for polycrisis. There are all sorts of potential crises brewing, and most of the lists (see for example here) don’t even mention the first two sets of items on my list, and they only partially cover the third one.

You may think that one or more of the things I listed are not actually big deals. You may be right, but there are so many problems operating in so many combinations, that we can be wrong about a lot of them, and still have a situation where everything, everywhere is catastrophic all at once.

Pinker and the rest are absolutely correct about the human potential to do amazing good. But they have a tendency to overlook the human potential to cause amazing harm as well. In the past, before things were so interconnected, before our powers were so great. Just a few things had to go right for us to end up with the abundance we currently experience. But to stay where we are, nearly everything has to go right, and nothing, very much, can go wrong.

If you’re curious I did enjoy the Michelle Yeoh movie referenced in the title. I’d like to say that I got the idea for this post from the everything bagel doomsday device. But I didn’t. Still I like bagels, particularly with lox. If you’d like to buy me one, consider donating. 

The 9 Books I Finished in January

February 8, 2023
Book Reviews
3 Comments

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  1. A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by: Matt Simon
  2. Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by: Helen Thompson
  3. The Captive Mind by: Czeslaw Milosz
  4. Antinet Zettelkasten: A Knowledge System That Will Turn You Into a Prolific Reader, Researcher and Writer by: Scott P. Scheper
  5. The Farthest Shore by: Ursula K. Le Guin
  6. All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1) by: Martha Wells
  7. The Mind of the Maker by: Dorothy L. Sayers
  8. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by: G. K. Chesterton 
  9. Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations by: Alex & Brett Harris

January is the time for resolutions, for changing course, and doing better. My essay consistency was not great in 2022, but I’ve already talked about the various reasons why that was at some length. It’s time to look forward. What am I hoping to accomplish in 2023?

I really want this to be the year that I publish a book. It may not be the greatest book, or the longest book, but I want there to be a book. I know some of you following along at home have every reason to doubt that such a thing will ever happen, let alone soon, but I’ve decided to always spend at least the first fifteen minutes of my morning writing block working on a book. 

This is not the first time I’ve made this commitment, but hopefully it will stick this time. The problem is that it will be going great but I’ll get behind on my normal blog posts, and end up deciding to skip working on the book for a few days “just until I catch up”. But if I go for too long then it becomes hard to get back into things. So no matter how far behind I feel my new resolution is to never skip this writing.

Of course it would be great if I never felt like I was behind, and as you may have already figured out, being more consistent about getting essays out, and being more consistent about working on my book are contradictory. I’m hoping the structure of all of this helps somewhat, but also I am once again resolving to try and keep at least some of my essays shorter. I mean there’s my newsletter, which is always short, but I think there’s also some space for pieces between that and the 4500 word pieces I seem to have drifted into. Ideally each month I would do my newsletter, my book review round-ups, one or two short essays and one long essay. And perhaps by doing this I can improve the quality at all levels.

In the end there is always going to be a tension between building and keeping an audience’s attention — putting out content frequently — and creating something which really deserves an audience — a fully formed book length treatment of some interesting subject.

In any case, regardless of what happens in 2023 I hope you’ll stick around.

I- Eschatological Reviews

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies

By: Matt Simon

Published: 2022

252 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The way in which we have covered the Earth in microplastics, the potential effects of that, and the possibility of mitigation.

What’s the author’s angle?

Simon has been on the environmental beat for awhile, mostly as a writer for WIRED. You get the feeling that he’s pretty passionate about the subject.

Who should read this book?

If you’re a doomer and you want something else to worry about, this is a great book. If you don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of things you can get a good sense of the scale of the problem just reading this WIRED article Simon adapted from the book.

General Thoughts

I’ve been aware that there’s a potential “problem with plastics” for quite a while, but I hadn’t really read very deeply on the subject. Thinking back, I feel like I assumed that it was connected to the worry about disposing of all the trash we create. Since that disposal problem is overblown I guess I kind of figured the plastics problem was as well. This is not to say I was unaware of the problem of BPA and endocrine disrupting chemicals, but I put that in a separate bucket, when in reality it’s just one big catastrophe. As you can tell the book caused me to “update some of my priors” as they say, the question is by how much? To put it another way, I have become convinced that the plastic problem is serious, but I’m still not clear on exactly how serious. At this point I think I’m somewhere between “definitely causing some harm, but mostly around the edges” and “from an environmental perspective it’s worse than global warming”.

Yes, we do have plenty of space for new landfills, but plastic waste is different from conventional waste in three key ways:

  1. It can last for thousands of years
  2. Despite its longevity, small bits of it are breaking off all the time. You’ve probably heard the term microplastics, the book also talks about nanoplastics.
  3. Each of these bits may contain potentially 10,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which, according to the book, “scientists consider to be of concern”.

The book opens with a trip to the top of Beaver Mountain in Utah, past the ski resort where I happen to go skiing every year, to collect rainwater and see how much plastic it contains. And as Janice, the person doing this collection says, “what the hell, there’s so much plastic in here”. And it’s not just on mountaintops in Utah. 

Everywhere scientists look, they find plastic particles, from the depths of the Mariana Trench to the tippy top of Mount Everest and every place in between.

Simon spends much of the book putting numbers to the “what the hell?” amount. The thousands of particles we ingest each day, the millions of threads shed by our synthetic clothes every wash. The billion particles a formula fed baby ends up consuming just because of the plastic bottles and that’s on top of the microplastics they ingest by crawling around on the floor. An amount 10x higher than what adults ingest.

Even if we stopped producing plastics right now, the plastic that is already in the environment would keep shedding microplastics. But obviously that’s not about to happen, our appetite for plastics continues to grow. 

Eschatological Implications

So we’ve got a situation where we’ve covered the planet in microscopic plastic particles that contain “concerning” chemicals. And it’s just going to get worse for the foreseeable future. How are we supposed to decide on the scope of that problem? 

At first glance it seems tractable. We can do science. We can collect data. We can pass laws. Sure, the absolute ubiquity of plastic makes it impossible to have a control. And, to play off the title a bit, the dose makes the poison. You could have some chemical that is no big deal below a certain threshold and worse than smoking at a somewhat higher level. Also if someone were to argue that, by the time we get a grip on the problem, we’ll be too late to do anything about it, I wouldn’t immediately accuse them of alarmism. But all those issues aside, there are people trying to get a handle on this problem. 

Simon includes studies of plastics’ effect on fishes and coral reefs and plants, and speculation on the effects it might be having on fertility, along with a host of other studies. And it’s all bad. (Though I guess some of the potential problems could cancel each other out. If we’re heading into Children of Men territory with fertility, then it might not matter if microplastics start reducing crop yields.) But we’re still left with the question of how bad? Where does it fall on my aforementioned continuum between some harm around the edges, and worse than global warming? I don’t know that this comparison is actually productive, but CO2 went from 320 to 420 ppm since 1960. Plastic production went from around zero to 420 million tons in the same period. And it’s projected to hit 1.5 trillion tons in 2050. And remember this is not the amount of plastic in existence, this is new plastic being added. Which is to say the curve is massively more exponential. 

I know this is a big number, and the book is full of big numbers, but what sort of harm are we talking about? Is this a forget global warming, forget Ukraine and potential nuclear armageddon and focus entirely on plastics? Or is this, yeah as long as we stop using plastic shopping bags and require better filters on washing machines and dryers we’ll be fine. Simon seems to lean towards the latter, but I’m pretty sure that he figures if he makes the problem sound too intractable that people will just give up. 

It does sound pretty intractable, so I guess I hope it’s one of those things where the curve goes straight up, but it’s fine. Though we have a lot of things where the curve is going straight up and they can’t all be fine…

II- Capsule Reviews

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

By: Helen Thompson

Published: 2022

384 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The book has three sections: oil and geopolitics, economic craziness post Bretton Woods, and modern democratic weakness. Thompson ties these things together in a complicated source of our current difficulties. 

What’s the author’s angle?

Thompson is a Cambridge professor, so while written for the masses, it is still pretty dense. Which is to say there is a degree to which she wants to display her erudition, which is significant. 

Who should read this book?

If it sounds interesting then you might want to read it. It adds a lot of detail to our current problems, but I don’t know that it brings any really fresh perspective. Thompson’s command of the details is amazing, but if you don’t care about every twist and turn, then you probably won’t enjoy this book.

General Thoughts

For me, the first section covered the ground I was the most unfamiliar with. Of course I knew that oil had played a major role in the world, but Thompson lays out, in rigorous detail, how access to oil drove nearly all major geopolitical decisions in the 20th century. Even if it was one or two steps removed, it was always in there if you dug deep enough. Certainly, it’s possible that she overemphasized oil’s role in some respects, but I wouldn’t want to get into a debate with her about it. I think she would slaughter me.

The second section was interesting, though I came across one review that was pretty critical of it. The review was in Foreign Policy, and the guy seemed to know what he was talking about. (This all gets back to the hard job of deciding between experts I brought up in my last set of reviews.) He didn’t have a problem with the details, rather he felt that Thompson placed too much emphasis on structural factors and not enough on avoidable mistakes made by individuals in power. Otherwise he seemed broadly on board with Thompson’s prognosis. Which is that the Euro-zone is a mess, and that it’s only gotten messier. (The reviewer did say he thoroughly enjoyed the first section however.) 

The third section was the one I was the most interested in, and it sparked the thinking that led the second essay of last month, The Optimal Dosage of War, or at least the conclusion. (Though to be clear it was written before the invasion.) I was particularly intrigued by her idea that you need a strong national identity in order to maintain a democracy within that nation. When one nation is trying to destroy another nation through the medium of war, it automatically provides that. But where does it come from in the absence of war, when the country has ceded decision making to ephemeral international organizations? When it’s mostly seen by its citizens as the provider of spoils to be fought over? 

Having read section three I was somewhat disappointed, she once again gave a very detailed recounting of recent events, but I found those details more distracting than illuminating. This is almost certainly something that reflects poorly on me.  I have a tendency to prefer grand philosophical theories, and balk at the hard work of fitting the details to those theories. And if I were going to use one word to describe this book, it would be “detailed”. And my criticism would be that the details come too quickly. But in a sense that just illustrates her point, the modern world is a complicated structure. And more and more it looks like we’re unequal to the task of managing it.

The Captive Mind 

By: Czeslaw Milosz

Published: 1953

272 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Milosz defected from Poland to the West in 1951. This book is something of a post mortem of his time there both as a writer and as a close observer of other writers., both under the Nazis, but more importantly under the communists.

What’s the author’s angle?

Milosz is attempting to explain some of the paradoxes of communism to people in the West. And he can’t help but add a dash of apologetics in there. “Yes, me and my fellow intellectuals did stupid things, but here’s why.”

Who should read this book?

When I read books like this I end up noticing parallels between how things worked under communism and how they work today in America. I’m sure that this is in large part due to my particular biases, but even for people without those same biases I think it might be useful to see both the strangeness and the similarities between now and the Eastern Bloc in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

General Thoughts

As I mentioned there did appear to be some similarities between the things Milosz described and things that are happening now. Obviously one doesn’t want to make too much of these similarities — 2023 is a vastly better place than the Eastern Bloc during the time of Stalin — but I still think there is some wisdom which might be gleaned. In particular this book dovetailed and illuminated a couple of other books I read recently. The first was Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Milosz spends quite a bit of time talking about socialist realism, for example:

“Socialist realism” is much more than a matter of taste, of preference for one style of painting or music rather than another. It is concerned with the beliefs which lie at the foundation of human existence. In the field of literature it forbids what has in every age been the writer’s essential task—to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole.

It’s hard to be knowledgeable about everything and before reading Capitalist Realism I was unfamiliar with the idea of socialist realism, now that I’ve had it explained by someone who lived through it, I have a better sense of what Fisher was going for. Not to get too far off track, but Milosz was saying that socialist realism channeled all art into a very specific groove, you could only speak about one thing (the awesomeness and power of socialism). Dissent and rebelliousness were unthinkable. Fisher was making an analogous point, that capitalism, despite not having the top down dictatorial nature of socialism, nevertheless seems to similarly funnel everything into a specific groove. It does this not by disallowing dissent and rebelliousness but by absorbing and neutering it. I’m not claiming that Fisher was correct, but I understand where he was going much better now.

The second book it helped to illuminate was The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet. Milosz describes two totalitarian systems, the Nazis and the Communists. In both cases the desire to impose order was very overt, and explicitly ideological, and the order thus imposed was pretty awful. Desmet argued in his book that the desire to impose order is a property of modernity, not something specific just to certain ideologies. Certain ideologies move more quickly in their attempts to impose order, but all modern systems are headed in that direction.

As I read Milosz’s descriptions of the narrowing window of acceptable art, and the pressure being placed on authors and artists to conform, it did feel like that situation and our situation now bore some depressing similarities. Again, I’m sure I’ve got some biases on this front, but I would nevertheless argue that we’re dealing with similar impulses.

Antinet Zettelkasten: A Knowledge System That Will Turn You Into a Prolific Reader, Researcher and Writer

By: Scott P. Scheper

Published: 2022

594 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The one true method of notetaking. It’s Analog, Numeric-Alpha, Tree, and Indexed (thus the acronym ANTI). Based on Niklas Luhman’s actual system, not a modern digital bastardization of it!

What’s the author’s angle?

The “one true” part is a big deal. Scheper spends a lot of time (as in probably 70% of the book) explaining why the true Zettelkasten has to be done his way and how everyone else working in the space has perverted and undermined Luhman’s initial genius

Who should read this book?

If you are mostly convinced that digital is the way to go, but before you go all in you want someone to steelman analog. Or if you want to take good notes, and you want to understand analog note-taking down to its roots. If you just want an overview of Scheper’s system then you can probably do that more efficiently by watching his videos.

General Thoughts

I’ve been using Roam for the last couple of years. It’s pretty cool, but I have a hard time finding time to really take advantage of it, and thus far I haven’t gotten much benefit from old notes. I will think something is worth recording for future use, and then it will never come up again. I imagine that it might end up being useful for writing books (refer back to the intro) but overall I don’t think I’m currently great at taking notes. The question is why? Am I a bad note taker inherently? Is it just an issue of time? Or am I using the wrong system?

I feel like I have an above average memory, and that I’ve probably coasted on that for long enough that at this point I’m disposed to be a bad note taker. As far as time, Scheper confidently asserts that his system only takes two hours a day, which includes the associated reading. I think it’s clear that I read more than average, and I’m still very lucky to get 30 minutes a day where I’m reading an actual book with pen in hand — more often it’s closer to 10 minutes. Obviously I can work on my desire, or I can try to carve out more time, but it seems my best bet is finding a more efficient and effective system, which is why I read this book, and as you can imagine his two hour assertion was already a strike against it.

On the positive side, I definitely came away from the book with some ideas on how to improve things. In particular he had three recommendations that I’m going to try:

  1. He placed a big emphasis on selectivity, and it is easy with modern tools to just dump in everything and let search sort it out.
  2. Closely related to that, he also talked me into the idea of creating a network of knowledge, that rather than just throwing out tags willy-nilly you should carefully consider where to attach a given insight, and that if it attaches to everything it attaches to nothing.
  3. Finally, his idea of having a system that encourages review and re-engagement resonated with me. I re-read old journal entries and the daily notes I took in Roam already and that has been very illuminating. I think a directed subject matter review could work even better.

That’s the good. Here’s the bad. He is a huge advocate for analog, as in writing everything down on cards that get put in actual file drawers. I would guess that 80% of the book amounts to an analog polemic. And despite hundreds of pages of this advocacy I ended the book unconvinced. Sure if I had all the time in the world I would probably do analog, but I don’t. 

He understands that analog is a big ask, and he promises that if you really can’t do it he will tell you how to create a digital version.  And eventually in one of the appendices he does. It takes up all of five pages, and he spends a page and a half emphasizing that the whole thing is a dumb idea and you really should do analog. He then spends two pages offering examples of analog notes as part of the process of establishing a character limit (see step 2 below). Which leaves the final page and a half for actual instructions. Here are the bullet points:

  1. Don’t do it.
  2. Establish a character limit.
  3. Disable editing and deleting.
  4. Make sure it mimics his analog rules as closely as possible.
  5. Disable copy and paste.
  6. Disable tags and backlinks.
  7. No really, don’t do it. Delete the whole thing and go analog.

So his advice is to take everything that might save you time, everything that’s an advantage of digital, and dump it. And then pretend it’s analog, only you’re typing not writing.

The book has some good ideas that I’m actually going to try out, but I had to wade through a lot of “The one true way to take notes is precisely the way I’m doing it” to get to it.

The Farthest Shore

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Published: 1972

272 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The further adventures of Sparrowhawk/Ged. This time around he and his young companion, Arren must sail to distant lands to investigate the disappearance of magic.

Who should read this book?

This is another classic of children’s fantasy literature. If you’ve ever enjoyed anything that fits into that category you will probably enjoy this, though you should start with A Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan. 

General Thoughts

The book opens with Prince Arren arriving on Roke, the Isle of the Mages. He bears a disturbing report from his father, the king: wizards and sorcerers are forgetting how to perform magic. By this point in the series Ged is the Archmage, and he decides that he needs to investigate, and invites Arren to accompany him. They soon discover that someone has overcome death, and that in the absence of death magic gradually ceases to function.

The relationship between Ged and Arren is well told, and after spending two other books with Ged it’s nice to see him at the point of maximum wisdom. But what I most enjoyed about the book was Le Guin’s description of what the world looks like in the absence of death and magic. 

I am almost certainly overfitting the events of the novel into my current preoccupations, but the novel felt prescient. The world Le Guin described felt very similar to our own. The lack of death led to a lack of striving, and from there a lack of art and accomplishment. We haven’t conquered death, but we’ve certainly eliminated a lot of it. We’ve also been marinating ourselves in comfort, something I’ve touched on in the last couple of posts. Out of this we seem to be suffering from a malaise similar to what’s described in the book. 

As I said I’m almost certainly overfitting, but it still gave the book a deeper sadness than it had for me on previous readings.

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1) 

By: Martha Wells

Published: 2017

160 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A security cyborg manages to hack its governor module, which allows it to finally experience something resembling freewill. Because of an unfortunate incident in its past, it calls itself “murderbot”.

Who should read this book?

This was actually a novella, not a novel, and thus only 3 hours on Audible. Most of us listen to podcasts longer than that. (The latest Hardcore History anyone?) At that length a book doesn’t have to be a classic for the ages. It just has to be entertaining, and this definitely was.

General Thoughts

This book won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for the best novella, and I’m not sure what to make of that. As I’ve already said it was definitely entertaining, but it wasn’t out of this world. I felt like Wells could have done more with the premise, and the plot was relatively light weight. As a result it actually could have benefited from a greater length. I mean, you could almost double the length and it still would have been a really short book. 

As usual the question now is whether I should continue with this series. The other entries are equally short, so perhaps I will. 

III- Religious Reviews

The Mind of the Maker 

By: Dorothy L. Sayers

Published: 1941

246 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The way that the creative process illuminates the nature of the Trinity and vice versa.

What’s the author’s angle?

Beyond being a devout Christian, Sayers was a devout defender of the various creeds (Athanasian, Nicene). This book is a defense of their verity from an unconventional angle. Though one Sayers had experience with since she was best known as a mystery writer.

Who should read this book?

I’m not a trinitarian, and I nevertheless enjoyed the book. I think it’s applicable even if you’re an Arian heretic, but I valued it mostly for the great advice she dispensed on creativity and writing. 

General Thoughts

The book is written in a denser, some might even say, old fashioned style. And while I enjoyed nearly all of it, Sayer seemed to really hit her stride only in the last third of the book. But as I said if you’re a writer, and particularly if you’re a Christian writer, I definitely think this book is worth reading. 

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare 

by: G. K. Chesterton 

Published: 1908

330 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A Scotland Yard detective, who has been tasked with combating negative philosophies, ends up being elected as one of seven members (each named for a day of the week) of the governing council of anarchists. And then strangeness ensues.

Who should read this book?

Chesterton’s writing is always delightful and this book is thought to have inspired Kafka and Bourges. Which I did not expect. Kingsley Amis called it “The most thrilling book I have ever read.” 

General Thoughts

I have a bad habit of reading plot summaries of books. If you’re reading as many books as I do you need all the help you can get keeping things straight. That was a mistake with this book. If you’re going to read it you should definitely do it unspoiled. That said, even knowing how it ends I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Chesterton is one of those people that I would enjoy reading even if he were just describing an average day at the office. 

As something of an example of that, he has his main character defend the poetry of train schedules, and it’s brilliant. I wonder that more neoliberals haven’t adopted it as something of a motto. 

As I said, this is definitely one you should go into unspoiled, so I won’t say anything further, except that it was a great book.

Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations 

By: Alex & Brett Harris

Published: 2008

320 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

A case for getting teenagers to take on bigger tasks and more responsibility. With a particular emphasis on finding a “holy calling” and doing what it takes to fulfill that.

What’s the author’s angle?

At the time the book was written the authors were teens themselves, running a very popular Christian youth website. I’m assuming that the book was, in part, written to promote their wider efforts.

Who should read this book?

If my kids were still teenagers I would have them read this book. There are probably better books than this one if you’re approaching things as a parent. But overall I found it very worthwhile.

General Thoughts

This came up as I was writing my blog post Challenging Children, and since it seemed directly on point to my discussion of hard things, I decided to read it before publishing. In the end I didn’t use very much from it since that post was trying to make the case largely without recourse to religion and as this book was explicitly religious. It was a great book, but I wanted to make the point in a different fashion. 

Beyond that, most books like this fall on a continuum. On the one end are hard facts, studies and data. “Teens who take on greater responsibilities are 50% less suicidal than teens who play video games all day.” (That’s an example I made up btw, not a real statistic.) “These are some proven steps which have been shown to increase children’s ability to be responsible.” Etc.

On the other end of the continuum are inspirational stories. “Fifteen year old Connor, inspired by a magazine showing the lack of clean water in Africa, decided to raise money to dig wells. In the end he provided clean water for twenty thousand people and saved hundreds of lives.” (That is a real story from the book by the way.)

This was pretty firmly on the latter end of things. Lots of great stories, some specific recommendations for how to act but mostly lacking in hard data. Which to be clear is fine, but that’s part of why I think it’s more geared towards teens themselves than their parents. You’re not looking to prove to teens that it’s a good thing to be responsible, you’re trying to inspire them, individually, to choose to be responsible and do hard things.

As I mentioned I already did a whole post on this subject, so I obviously think it’s tremendously important, and this book is a great addition to the effort. If you have teenagers I think you should get them to read this book.

If I had a nickel for every particle of microplastic you breathed in while reading my blog, I wouldn’t be a wealthy man, but I might be able to quit my day job. I’d take even a penny per microplastic particle. If for some reason this strange logic appeals to you, consider donating. 

Eschatologist #25 – Spiritual Health and Suffering

January 31, 2023
Newsletter
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If you’re one of those masochists who read my overly long winded essays in addition to my newsletter you may have noticed that recently I’ve been fixated on the idea of healthy suffering.

When discussing suffering, you inevitably end up also discussing what makes a good life, since for most it’s synonymous with a lack of suffering. The many defenders of modernity will argue that this is its chief benefit. Technology and progress have reduced the level of material suffering for billions. But is a reduction of material suffering all it takes to give someone a good life? Or do people have needs other than the material, and might it take some amount of constructive suffering to fulfill those other needs?

There is an ongoing debate around this subject, and many people increasingly feel that whatever success modernity has had with the material, it has been an abject failure elsewhere. As evidence they will cite deaths of despair, the loneliness epidemic, and a general worsening of mental health. 

As is frequently the case, over time the discussion has been simplified down to two qualities: spiritual health and material health. I would argue that a lot of things which aren’t technically spiritual are getting dumped into that bucket — that it’s more “problems that can’t be directly solved with money” like the social, emotional, and psychological. But, with that caveat in place, I’ll also use the term spiritual going forward. And, to lay my cards on the table, I agree with the diagnosis of spiritual malaise in both the specific and the broader sense.

Certainly there are some who grant that modernity has not improved our spiritual health, but they will quickly follow up by saying that it was never meant to. That the two things are separate magisteria. Isn’t it enough that it’s done so much for us materially? Can’t we handle spiritual health on our own? This seems like a reasonable position, but it assumes that if modernity has not benefited our spiritual health, it has not damaged it either, which is not something I’m ready to grant. Still this argument is not the one that concerns me. Rather, my beef is with people who argue that progress and technology have done just as much for spiritual well-being as they have for material well-being. 

The other day I came across this very claim in an essay titled The spiritual benefits of material progress, by Jason Crawford. And it was very interesting to see the case stated so plainly. Crawford’s essential argument is that the modern world allows us greater opportunity to do whatever we want, and being able to do whatever we want is more likely to result in spiritual health than having less opportunity to do that. But is this actually true? Crawford doesn’t offer any proof. I can only assume that he feels it’s axiomatic that being able to act on your desires equals spiritual health and happiness, and being prevented from doing so equals suffering.  

His evidence consists of listing the opportunities afforded by the modern world: you can live wherever you want and do whatever work makes you happy. You can spend time “grasping the abstract truths revealed by math and science” and “correspond with other people for business or pleasure”. His list ends up reading more like instructions for winning a video game, than general advice for being spiritually healthy. Particularly since the vast majority of people do not get to live wherever they want, work at whatever they feel like, and spend their leisure time grasping abstract truths. Yes, I understand that more people get to do this than historically, but if this is what’s required for spiritual health, is it forever going to be the preserve of the top 1% globally?

For those of you that know people who are wealthy enough to live wherever they want and do whatever they want to do, are they paragons of spiritual health? Of emotional, psychological and social well being? You can have money, time, options, and the whole world at your feet, but still live a meaningless, mechanical life. And on top of everything else you’re still going to die. 

On the other hand there are people out there who have faced death, who have suffered, and come out the other side. Who not only despite this, but because of this are happy and healthy. Perhaps you know people like this. Their spiritual health did not come from playing life on god-mode. They were playing a game, but it was the grubby, high-stakes poker that the vast majority of us play. And like most us they had a crappy hand, but they played the hell out of it.

I should mention that I actually spend most of my free time “grasping the abstract truths revealed by math and science”. I’m not very good at it, but as it turns out you don’t need to be in order to be happy. You’d probably like to know my secret. Well it is a secret but perhaps a small donation might convince me to spill it…

The Optimal Dosage of War

January 28, 2023
War
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My sense is that, ever since the 2009 Eurozone Crisis, opinions about the long term prospects for Europe have tended to be pessimistic. This pessimism ebbs and flows, but it always seems most acute when people look at really long term trends. If you want an incredibly detailed breakdown of the structural and economic reasons for that pessimism I would suggest reading Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson. (Review coming in the next roundup.) If you want a right-wing, immigration-skeptical case for pessimism I’d recommend the Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray. And if you don’t want to have to read a whole book, here’s an article from Politico which provides a decent snapshot of Europe’s problems at the beginning of 2020. 

The point of this essay is not to get into the specific reasons for this pessimism, though everyone seems to agree that the financial union is a mess, migrant assimilation is not going very smoothly, and even if they figure those two things out, low birthrates will doom Europe eventually regardless. 

This was the primary reason given by Richard Hanania for assuming that Ukraine wouldn’t put up much of a fight if Russia did invade:

Even setting aside the geography of the country, there is no instance I’m aware of in which a country or region with a total fertility rate below replacement has fought a serious insurgency. Once you’re the kind of people who can’t inconvenience yourselves enough to have kids, you are not going to risk your lives for a political ideal.

That, along with everything I’ve mentioned thus far was written before the invasion. So where does that sense of pessimism stand now? How are the people who couldn’t inconvenience themselves enough to have kids doing against the might of Russia? Pretty well all things considered, nor did the rest of Europe decide to sit things out. Sure, Germany dragged its feet quite a bit before eventually agreeing to send 14 tanks, and there are certainly pockets of people who think that the war is either a money pit or risks nuclear escalation, but by and large the governments in Europe have done a good job of coming together. Enough so that you almost detect a spirit of optimism, or at least a can-do attitude that appeared to be missing before the invasion.

I’m not saying that level of optimism is huge, or even durable, but after 11 months of fighting people seem to be working together better, and moving towards something. And it always helps to feel like your side is doing well. And whether Ukraine is winning or not, they’re definitely not losing which is what everyone expected. Russia turned out to not be as scary as people thought. Also, the winter has been unusually mild so there hasn’t really been an energy crisis. Lastly, it feels like the financial mess has also receded into the background. For me at least it feels like there’s a vitality which wasn’t there before the invasion.

It’s not just in Europe that we’ve seen this switch. Here in America, we allocated $40 billion in aid, and while federal spending has reached a point where it’s hard to tell what a truly significant sum is anymore, that is still a lot of money. And the biggest miracle of all, basically 85%, in both houses, voted for it. It was that rarest of all things in politics these days, a significant piece of legislation that didn’t boil down to a straight party line vote. Beyond that I have it on reliable authority that Ukrainian flags are flying outside not only homes in upscale urban neighborhoods, but also in trailer parks in the deep south. 

You genuinely get the sense that after years of the two sides racing apart and only thinking the worst of their opponents. That a spirit of optimism and cooperation has taken root. To the extent that I’m correct (and I think I am) it’s still very limited — it’s entirely located with things related to the war in Ukraine. We’ve yet to come together on much of anything else. Still maybe it’s a start. 

More importantly, from my perspective I think it’s evidence of the thesis I laid out in my post The Solution to Conflict Is More Conflict. For those who aren’t familiar with my entire back catalog, here it is:

The chief reason for the current level of conflict within the nation is the lack of external, unifying threats to the nation. 

In the post I spent a lot of time laying a foundation for that thesis, bringing in the book American Carnage by Tim Alberta, and his discussion of the tension between individual liberalism and democratic homogeneity, really it was good stuff, but for our purposes I said that the Long Peace was an undiscussed phenomenon when considering why politics had gotten so nasty. From that post:

[T]he question I started with was how did we achieve democratic homogeneity for so long and why has it disappeared recently? With this [thesis] in hand, the answer boils down to: war.  Or to look at it from the other direction, the Long Peace. The lack of wars between the great powers since the end of World War II and the development so beloved by people like Steven Pinker, has, somewhat paradoxically, led to another kind of war, the current internal political war. Just as Pashtun Tribesmen will stop fighting their cousins in order to fight the Americans, Republicans will stop fighting Democrats in order to fight the Nazis. But go back to this fight once those external enemies are defeated.

You may argue that the problems with unity didn’t start in 1946, and that’s a fair point, but even though the Cold War didn’t feature any direct hostilities between great powers, there were lots of proxy wars and as someone who grew up while the Soviet Union still existed, I can tell you it definitely felt like they were a threat. As further evidence of unity I offer up the Cold War policy that politics stops at the water’s edge. Something which definitely is not in effect now, and which can’t all be blamed on Trump either.

With the invasion of Ukraine, war returned, and just as I predicted, when we began to focus on fighting Russia, we focused a little less on fighting each other. But this is a very risky and expensive way to achieve that outcome. And our first question, after noticing the connection, is can we achieve this effect without war?

There have been various progressive attempts to frame things this way; to frame things as a war to get the benefits of unity and mobilization without the downsides of the destruction and death that accompany an actual war. There was Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty and Carter declared that the energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war”, though the phrase first appeared in a William James speech given in 1906. At the time he was considering the same problem we are: maintaining unity and civic virtue in the absence of war or some other credible threat. I’m not sure if progressives, who now use the language of war and mobilization with respect to global warming, are concerned about the same thing that James, but if the war framing works it won’t matter. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to. In fact, if anything, these efforts have seemed to deepen the disunity between the parties.

If we can’t achieve unity in the absence of war through conventional means, perhaps there are more exotic options. I mean basically this is a problem with the way humans are wired right? What if we could change that wiring? We use immunosuppressants to dial down overactive immune systems. Could we do something similar with the humanities overactive threat detection? We’ll call this the transhumanist answer to the problem, and in addition to rewiring humans, we should also toss AI based solutions into this bucket. Perhaps an AI would be able to fine tune the information we receive in the perfect way, allowing us to feel just the right level of threat for just the right reasons, but no more.

Interestingly enough this was the solution offered by the book War What Is It Good For, by Ian Morris (see my review here.) He expects that war will inevitably return once the US Hegemony collapses, which he expects to happen no later than the 2050’s, but as many people are predicting the singularity to arrive in the 2040’s, he hopes that just as the Long Peace ends AI will be ready to take over.

I agree that the possibility of a transhumanist solution is not entirely ridiculous. One of them certainly could happen, but rewiring humans at the scale required would be a gigantic problem with insane logistics that are still mostly in the realm of science fiction. The AI solution seems closer — though I continue to maintain that it’s farther away than people think — but we still have to solve the alignment problem, or the AI could easily be making war against us.

If war is in fact the only potential solution to this problem, we should at least check to see whether it carries any other benefits. I covered this in a previous post, so I’m not going to go too deep here, but many people have theorized that, in addition to political unity, wars turbocharge innovation, act to cull dysfunctional regimes, lessen overall violence, and result in larger nations with greater economies of scale.

One benefit I didn’t cover in that previous post was war’s effect on the aforementioned fertility rate of the belligerents. The most famous bump in fertility, the baby boom, happened in the immediate aftermath of a war. Perhaps we’ll see a similar increase in Ukraine and Russia either after or during the current war? Is it possible the increase will be big enough to replace all the casualties and then some? Most nations experienced a baby boom similar to America’s immediately following WWII, and while I didn’t actually work through the math, if I eyeball things, it looks like the excess births were vastly greater than the deaths caused by the war. You may have noticed I said most nations. Russia was one of the exceptions, but WWII was immediately followed by a famine, and despite this one-two punch, their population had recovered to pre-war levels by 1953. The causal relationship is very speculative, but it should be mentioned that Russia’s population has been flat since the end of the Cold War. It will be interesting to see if the war in Ukraine moves the needle at all. Obviously we’re pretty far into hypotheticals at this point, but if that were the case it would pose an interesting quandary to those whose biggest concern is demographic collapse. 

I mentioned innovation and it’s worth going into that a little bit deeper, given that many people have started to worry that our rate of innovation is slowing. And, if you don’t want to regress to a lower level of technology, continued innovation is required to solve the problems innovation has already created. The big example of this for most people is global warming. While there are some who advocate retreating to a less resource intensive lifestyle, the political will simply isn’t there. The only solution that is both effective and politically palatable is to keep pushing forward with new technology. Of course many would argue, myself included, that we already dropped the ball when we stopped building new nuclear reactors. It’s interesting to imagine how that might have played if we’d been involved in an actual great power conflict. You may disagree, but I think we would have never ended up being derailed and eventually consumed by safetyism.

To return to the topic we started with, it seems increasingly likely that wars may be bad for the health of dictatorships, but good for the health of democracies. I mentioned the renewed optimism, but on top of that war is one of the few things that reduces inequality. You may not be worried about inequality as such, but democracies are always vulnerable to being gutted out by an oligarchic elite. Wars serve to prevent that. Not only do they defuse the power of the entrenched interests. (If you don’t prioritize efficiency over connections you eventually lose wars.) They also help to tie groups of selfish individuals into nations. If you have a strong national identity democracies can work, if you don’t they begin to collapse (as we’re starting to see.) War is the best way of creating that identity, and Ukraine is a powerful example of exactly this process. 

Finally there’s the question implied by the title of the post. Is there some optimum level of war? We have long imagined that the answer was zero, and I think most people, including myself, would hope that that’s the case. But just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean that it is. There comes a time when you have to deal with the world as it is, not the world as you wish it to be. But if we decide that some level of war above zero is optimal, how would we ever manage that?

A theme I keep returning to (see my last post) is that in the past the world naturally provided all the challenges necessary to keep us healthy, but that’s no longer the case. These days the idea of intentionally starting a war would be considered barbaric, even if we were doing it in order to get our “recommended annual dosage of war”. If we were able to surmount those monumental objections we would need to ensure that these wars didn’t escalate into an out of control exchange of nukes. If we were able to navigate all of these challenges, one final challenge remains, would people react the same to artificial war as they do to actual war? Would it provide the unity, the desired sacrifice, and the necessary innovation? Probably not. 

This is one of the reasons why past examples of this effect have been fleeting. Certainly there was a vast amount of unity in the wake of 9/11, but how long did it actually last? A couple of years? We didn’t really get any major boost to unity out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukraine might be the exception, but how long do you expect the unity generated by the invasion to actually endure? Polling would indicate that we’re already starting to tire of it. Even if we’re not, it’s impossible to imagine that we won’t at some point. 

What is to be done? Certainly one tactic would be to hope that I’m overstating things, or entirely wrong. That is one way to bet, but it doesn’t seem to be the way the evidence points. Though, such evidence will always, by necessity, but mostly anecdotal, there are not enough wars and not enough nations for it to be otherwise. Beyond that I’m not sure. It does appear to be a particularly thorny problem, to be added to the vast collection of thorny problems we’re already dealing with.

An example of another thorny problem created by modernity: the issue of getting paid for content when things can be copied trivially and distributed freely. I don’t know that I’m any closer to solving that than I am to solving the problem of unity in the absence of war, but while I’m thinking about it consider donating. Maybe it will help…

Challenging Children

January 24, 2023
Religious
2 Comments

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I.

The story of Adam and his father in my last essay, The Ineffability of Conservatism, generated a lot of pushback. The negative reactions mostly came from people who were never religious or who had left religion in a fashion similar to Adam. None had taken that journey when they were quite so young, but some wished that they had. And while I think religion had an important role to play in the story, a role I’ll be returning to before the end, I also think that its inclusion may have obscured the fundamental message. (Though using the word “ineffability” in the title probably didn’t help.)

Actually, I take that back. The fundamental problem is still somewhat opaque to me, which means that the fundamental message must necessarily be as well. But, the presence of religion made some points less clear than they could have been. So I decided to take another stab at the topic from a different direction. 

For those unfamiliar with the previous essay, I told the story of Adam, a young man who had decided he no longer believed in the religion of his family and local community. In an attempt to influence him towards staying, the bishop/pastor had arranged for Adam’s father to teach his Sunday School class. Adam, upon seeing that his father was going to teach, very publicly left, despite his father’s entreaties to stay. Much of the post was a reflection on how it would have never even occurred to people of my generation to do such a thing. 

As you can see the story had a very heavy religious angle. It was clearly about young people leaving the faith of their fathers. Which is happening a lot. But it’s also a story about raising children, and parenting. So I decided to write a follow up post where I approach it from that side of things. I think doing so might make certain points easier to get to.

Perhaps there’s something in the water because the minute I made that decision I came across some other people making points similar to the ones I would like to make. Let’s start with Freddie deBoer. Freddie opened the new year with a post titled, Resilience, Another Thing We Can’t Talk About. As you may or may not know, Freddie is no fan of religion. (His second post of the year bemoaned the fact that Richard Dawkins style atheism/skepticism has fallen out of fashion.) But, despite our diametrically opposed religious views, his discussion of resilience is definitely heading in the same direction I plan on going:

If I know one thing is true about every single person reading this, it’s that at some point in 2023, they will suffer. Teaching people how to suffer, how to respond to suffering and survive suffering and grow from suffering, is one of the most essential tasks of any community. Because suffering is inevitable. And I do think that we have lost sight of this essential element of growing up in contemporary society, as armies of helicopter parents pull the leash on their kids tighter and tighter and as harm reduction has eaten every other element of left politics.

Suffering is a big topic, and while Freddie seems mostly focused on involuntary suffering, people also choose to suffer. In my extended family, we frame this latter form of suffering as “doing hard things”. And it’s my contention (and perhaps Freddie’s as well) that teaching children how to do hard things is one of the central tasks of a parent. Your children are definitely going to be confronted with hard things once they’re adults, and if they haven’t mastered that skill or at least practiced it, they’re likely going to fail — maybe catastrophically.

Even if someone agrees that it’s useful to have children do hard things, they may balk at putting all suffering in the same bucket. There is an argument to be made that the challenge of studying hard enough to get a scholarship is a completely different thing than being bullied at school, and that the challenge of attending church when you would rather not, is yet a third sort of challenge. Part of the purpose of this post will be to demonstrate that there’s less difference than you might think, and I will further argue that, even if there is, the skills developed to deal with voluntary suffering can help with involuntary suffering as well. 

Unfortunately, as Freddie points out, a large part of society does not even agree with the need for voluntary suffering. Freddie asserts that everyone will end up suffering at some point during the next year, and this is true, but suffering isn’t guaranteed the way it once was. And while the effect has been gradual, this has led some to decide that suffering can and largely should be eliminated — both the involuntary and the voluntary. Often these people are parents. Freddie calls them “helicopter parents”. I prefer the more recent term “snowplow parents”, parents who clear the path in front of the child, pushing aside all obstacles. Obviously some examples of such parents are more extreme than others. But it’s gotten to the point where lots of these attitudes have spread to society at large and become the default. The question is how did this happen? And can anything be done?

II.

One of the major themes in my previous post was the difference between the conditions teenagers experience now and the conditions I experienced when I was a teenager. These differences are numerous and run the gamut from really large things, like the internet, to small things, like the proliferation of memes. We’ll examine some of the bigger things in a moment, but I would also argue that simply making a list doesn’t do justice to the profound difference between now and 40 years ago. First, we’re almost certainly overlooking some of the things which have changed, because they’re either too small to measure or no one has bothered to measure them. But more importantly, I think that we’ve yet to fully grasp the way changes combine and feed off one another. 

Out of all this, clearly one difference is a broad reduction in the amount of material suffering: The infant mortality rate in the US has nearly halved just since 1990. The child poverty rate has been reduced from 20% to 5% since 1983. And, while these numbers are harder to quantify, childhood injuries appear to also be declining. The obvious progress we’ve made has encouraged parents, who were already predisposed to do everything they can for their kids, to look for ways to eliminate all the suffering which still remains. Given our previous successes, it’s worth asking, “What’s the harm in that?” Unfortunately the answer might be “substantial”.

Obviously I’m not the first person to make this argument, nor will I be the last, but it’s worth reviewing the arguments in light of the different ways suffering can manifest. Probably the best known book to tackle this subject is The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. We don’t have the space to go into everything but a few years ago I did spend a couple of posts talking about it. The Coddling of the American Mind puts forth the idea that there are three great untruths which have spread far and wide through the education system, and society as a whole. As part of our current discussion we’re just going to look at the first one:

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

Freddie calls this untruth the quest for “harm reduction [which] has eaten every other element of left politics.” Lukianoff and Haidt argue that it really kicked in on college campuses starting around 2013, so children born starting in 1995. They mention that this maps to the cohort Jean Twenge labeled as iGen, in her book of the same name. On the opposite side of things from these college kids there is, of course, Nietzsche, from whom the authors adapted their label. And, as you might imagine, since they call it an untruth, Lukianoff and Haidt, who make the case that college students (and humans in general) are antifragile — exposure to stress and suffering make them stronger, up to a point.

That last bit “up to a point” is where most of the fighting takes place. My guess is that most people reading this, and indeed most people, period, agree that children need some challenges. (If you don’t think children need to be strong and resilient this post is not for you.) The fight is over where to draw the line. Which sorts of stress and suffering should be put in the beneficial bucket and which sorts of stress and suffering should be put in the garbage? Obviously involuntary suffering, by definition, can’t be disposed of. So, taken together, we’ve identified three buckets: 

  1. Challenges you can’t avoid.
  2. Challenges you can avoid but choose not to.
  3. Challenges you can avoid and choose to.

Some people would argue that the greater ability to move things from bucket one to bucket three is the whole point of progress. And while humans have been moving things from one to three since at least the dawn of agriculture, lately we’ve gotten a lot better at it, to the point where some would argue that we’re within shouting distance of emptying bucket one. (Which might be a serviceable definition of transhumanism.)

While this movement from one to three is interesting, the subject of this post mostly hinges on whether, if the challenge is in fact voluntary, we should ever place it in bucket two rather than bucket three. And beyond that, under what circumstances the parent should be empowered to put a challenge in bucket two when the child really wants it to be in bucket three.

As I mentioned, our ability to move things out of the first bucket has been increasing for a long time, but Lukianoff and Haidt are arguing that the desirability of moving things from backet two to three has dramatically increased in just the last ten years. There are certainly lots of reasons why this has happened, and getting into the actual causes would take us too far afield, but what Lukianoff and Haidt, and for that matter deBoer are arguing is that it’s spread far and wide enough to have become a societal expectation. Particularly when you’re making the choice between bucket two and three for someone else, i.e. your kids. 

To put it in more blunt terms: it would be insane to argue that we should be maximizing the suffering of children, but on the other hand it seems equally obvious that they need some amount of resilience, some ability to do hard things. So where do we draw the line? If we need to put something into bucket two, what criteria should we use? And perhaps more importantly what criteria should be culturally acceptable? Because if there’s a disconnect between the criteria we “should” be using and the criteria society finds acceptable then society is eventually going to win.

III.

At this point we’re still dealing with fairly crude divisions. If we’re going to get to the heart of the issue we’re going to have to start slicing things more finely, if at all possible. We need to start differentiating between various kinds of stress and suffering, and specific sorts of challenges. 

To start with, homework and other associated educational activities seem to be pretty mainstream, bucket two items. Beyond that some people feel that forcing kids to take music lessons is entirely appropriate. Still other parents are going to very strongly encourage their kids to play sports. By looking at activities like these we should be able to extract some attributes that allow us to differentiate between challenges that should be in bucket two versus those that should be in bucket three. Though, before we do so, it’s sobering to note that even within these broadly unobjectionable categories the expectations we place on kids have been eroding over the last few decades. A trend that was only accelerated by the pandemic.

As a final thought, It’s probably worth mentioning a subcategory of challenges within the preceding examples that involve having children confront their fears, particularly if those fears are irrational, like performing in front of people. Thus the phenomenon music recitals and actual competition with sports. 

We’ve covered, however briefly, forcing or at least strongly encouraging kids to do certain things. What about the flip side of that, restricting kids from doing things? The challenge we’re giving them here is not to do hard things, but to avoid pleasurable things. (Though such avoidance can certainly end up being a hard thing to pull off.) Here again we notice a cultural and societal shift. Certain restrictions against pleasurable things are as old as time itself, but recently both the number and the availability of pleasurable things has increased. Which means we have to implement broader restrictions, starting much younger than in the past. The expanded scope of this task has made the problem much larger than it was in the past.

We’ve already mentioned antifragility in this space, and I think most of the things we’ve mentioned can be placed in that framework. What does this framework look like? Well as it turns out you can graph it:

Antifragility comes from paying small fixed costs which cumulatively increase the chances of massive returns. (For the purposes of our discussion the variable is time.) So if a teenager pays the cost of being a diligent student they increase their chances of getting into a good school and from there landing a great job. On the other hand if the teenager spends all of their time on social media or video games, that’s the bottom graph. They get small fixed amounts of pleasure, but that path leads towards the greater likelihood that they’ll incur some large cost in the future. Perhaps they won’t go to college at all, and end up in a crappy job, or, worse, living at home and unemployed. Obviously none of this is guaranteed, and outliers abound, but remember we’re trying to have a discussion at the level of the entire society. 

Every parent who cares about doing a good job recognizes these trade-offs instinctively. We don’t make our children do hard things because we’re gunning for them. We make them do hard things and avoid short term pleasures because over the long run we think it will make them happier, more successful people. This is what all of the things I listed, and many more that could have been listed, have in common. They require short term pain but provide long term benefits. If your children do challenging things now they’ll be able to do challenging things later, and challenging things are rewarding, both monetarily and psychologically. On the other side of things we counsel against indiscretions, even small ones, because there’s always a chance they’ll lead to irreparable harm. No one tries drugs for the first time thinking they’re going to end up hopelessly addicted to opiods, but yet that does happen. (These days far more often than it should.) 

We’ve managed to spend a lot of time giving examples of antifragile challenges, and even offering up charts, but we’re still a long way from defining at exactly what point exposure to stress and suffering goes from making kids stronger to harming them. Also it’s tempting to imagine that we can separate actually suffering from challenging activities when we seek to encourage resilience. And perhaps you can to a very limited extent, but while involuntary suffering may help you deal with voluntary challenges, I don’t think the inverse is true. I think there’s a danger in trying to move too much out of bucket one. This is the whole basis of the hygiene hypothesis with its connection to the rise of asthma and potentially fatal allergies.

As far as this post is concerned, we may have gone as far as we’re going to in defining the perfect amount of stress and suffering, and as I said, that isn’t very far. Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that this is a new problem. It’s only been very recently that we’ve had the option to adjust the level of stress and suffering across a broad enough area for it to make a difference. Accordingly we haven’t accumulated a lot of wisdom on which to draw from. 

Historically the environment was challenging enough to give children all the stress and suffering they could ever possibly need in order to be strong — in order for them to be antifragile. And then in far too many instances went beyond that point to cause them harm or even death. Though it is interesting to note that from what we can tell psychological harm appears to have been rarer during those times. So it is good that we can now dial it back, but our tendency is always going to defer to the person who wants it to go the lowest. Which is to say advocating for more suffering — more things in bucket two, and especially bucket one — is always going to be difficult to defend. 

This tendency to err on the side of suffering mitigation might not be so bad if our control and understanding of the nature of challenging children was more precise. But we don’t have the ability to fine tune challenges, particularly anything in bucket one, which as deBoer points out, continues to be a thing. And even voluntary challenges vary quite a bit in difficulty as a result of individual differences. There are a few kids who love learning to play the piano, most find it difficult and boring. All of this means that efforts to calibrate how challenging we make things are going to be very crude for the foreseeable future. Given this and our natural proclivity to lessen suffering, we should probably consciously create a counter-bias towards erring on the side of greater difficulty. Instead society has done the exact opposite, and in a way that largely overlooks the complexity and ramifications of this decision.

IV.

As we adjust the dials of suffering — using technology to move suffering from bucket one, or challenges from bucket two, into bucket three — we’re playing with a machine we scarcely understand. The goal is easy to understand: make the world better. And it’s obviously admirable. But our understanding of how moving the dials relates to achieving that goal is crude and incomplete.

This ties into another piece I came across recently which appeared to be making a point similar to mine:. The Social Recession: By the Numbers by Anton Cebalo. I ended my previous post by talking about the incel phenomenon and the staggering number of people not having sex. He uses that to open the piece and ties it to a larger phenomenon:

…a marked decline in all spheres of social life, including close friends, intimate relationships, trust, labor participation, and community involvement. The trend looks to have worsened since the pandemic, although it will take some years before this is clearly established.

The decline comes alongside a documented rise in mental illness, diseases of despair, and poor health more generally. In August 2022, the CDC announced that U.S. life expectancy has fallen further and is now where it was in 1996…even before the pandemic, the years 2015-2017 saw the longest sustained decline in U.S. life expectancy since 1915-18. While my intended angle here is not health-related, general sociability is closely linked to health. The ongoing shift has been called the “friendship recession” or the “social recession.”

What he describes fits under the broad definition of suffering. The decline in sociability robs us of tools to mitigate suffering. And the rise in poor mental and physical health, causes suffering we are therefore ill-equipped to deal with. 

So how is it, if we’re turning down (what appears to be) the suffering dial, that actual suffering is going up? Are we sure we understand how the machine works? Could it be that we have no clue? To be clear I’m not claiming I understand the machine either. I don’t. But that’s precisely why I think we should be very wary about messing with the dials.

To take things from another direction Cebalo is arguing that our culture has become more fragile, and correspondingly less antifragile. Also that our fragile culture appears to be composed of fragile individuals. Of course, fragile things eventually break, which is what Cebalo is worried about, but given that our culture hasn’t broken yet, it must not have been fragile for long. What was the quality of culture before all the things Cabalo describes started happening?

The whole concept of antifragility comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and for Taleb there are only three categories. Something can be antifragile, robust, or fragile. Fragile things, by their nature, don’t stick around for very long. Things that do stick around for a long time are therefore either robust or antifragile. In practice very few things are robust — neither harmed nor helped by stress — so long standing elements are generally antifragile.

Children have been around for a long time, and, as Haidt and Lukianoff point out, they’re antifragile. Much of what falls under the heading of culture, particularly as it stood 40 years ago, has also been around for a long time and is also probably antifragile. When something persists for a long time it evolves, a process that’s great at producing things that are antifragile. When this happens with culture we call it cultural evolution, and while we understand how it works, we don’t always correctly identify which elements of culture are antifragile products of this process and which are just dumb ideas some person in power came up with. To be more specific, when your thinking about something that used to happen but no longer does it can fall into three categories:

  1. Barbaric relics of the past which never served a useful purpose.
  2. Practices which are still useful, but we’ve incorrectly identified them as barbaric relics of the past, and dispensed with them.
  3. Practices which were useful, but through progress and technology we have ended up duplicating their utility in some other way. 

To take an example (as discussed in the previous post) dragging your disrespectful kid outside and walloping them, i.e. corporal punishment. Does this practice belong in category one, something that was never appropriate or useful? Category two? It’s still useful, but temporary cultural fads have incorrectly identified it as barbaric? Or category three? It was useful, but is no longer because we have different ways of punishing kids and/or the need for obedience is not life or death, like it used to be?

You may also notice some parallels between these three categories and the buckets we’ve been discussing, though it’s not perfect. But just like with the buckets, I think we’re bad at deciding what things should be in categories two vs. category three. We’re convinced we’ve grown beyond certain things, but in reality we might just be temporarily tired of them. 

As to the separation between categories one and two, I’ve talked about that in the past, and this post has already taken way longer than it should to write. But perhaps you’re familiar with the case of manioc and cyanide. It’s a great example of cultural evolution. Tribes in South America who lived off manioc did things that seemed completely unnecessary (category one) but when the cyanide content of the manioc was actually tested it turned out that those, seemingly unnecessary steps were absolutely critical (category 2). Finally we can presumably eliminate the cyanide through industrial processing (category 3). 

The point of the discussion of categories and manioc is the idea that it can be difficult to identify practices and behavior which result in antifragility. This is both the danger of turning dials and the ineffability of conservatism. We often sense that things are important without having the data to back it up. And from all of this we finally return to religion and church attendance. Which many people, including myself, strongly feel the importance of. Though also, fortunately, we also have some data. Returning to Cebalo’s post he makes a special point of highlighting the precipitous decline in church membership since the turn of the century:

As you can see from the caption he relates this decline to the larger point Robert D. Putnam brought up in his book Bowling Alone, but I think the decline in church membership has a larger impact than just one factor among many for the increase in loneliness. Though that’s certainly a non-trivial consideration.

Even if you think I’m misinterpreting the data. It would seem foolish to dismiss the trend in the chart above as inconsequential. Something big is happening. I suppose it could be because religion was always in category one, or that it has recently been successfully moved to category three, but given the incredibly long time it’s been around, I think it’s far more likely that it’s part of the culture that has evolved to make us antifragile. I.e. it’s in category two and society has dispensed with it to its detriment. 

The chart is interesting and even startling, but it’s not the best evidence for the connection between religion and better mental health. There’s actually quite a bit of more direct evidence. To take just one example I recently came across a working paper titled: “Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion”. Here’s the abstract:

In recent decades, death rates from poisonings, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease have dramatically increased in the United States. We show that these “deaths of despair” began to increase relative to trend in the early 1990s, that this increase was preceded by a decline in religious participation, and that both trends were driven by middle-aged white Americans. Using repeals of blue laws as a shock to religiosity, we confirm that religious practice has significant effects on these mortality rates. Our findings show that social factors such as organized religion can play an important role in understanding deaths of despair.

So religion helps us deal with despair. I understand the leap I’m taking when I make that assertion. But perhaps as we draw things to their conclusion you’re willing to entertain the idea that religion is an important source of antifragility. That in making us do small hard things it enables us to do large challenging things, and moreover to survive the intense, involuntary suffering that is still humanity’s lot. Religion doesn’t just provide practice at attending long, boring meetings, though I understand that it often gives that impression, it’s part of a whole network for doing challenging things, and mitigating suffering. It’s how we used to do hard things as a community, and through its transition to civic religion it’s how we still occasionally do hard things, though that form of religion is fraying as well. 

Sure, as many people brought up, it’s also a hard thing to leave a religion, and that probably gives an individual a certain amount of toughness, but we’re not interested in individual toughness, eventually any truly great endeavor requires societal toughness. And here, at the very end, I would like you to take a moment and reflect on how tough your ancestors were. And how much they probably suffered for their religion. Why? Because however much they suffered, religion offered relief from even greater suffering. It helped them deal with despair. It’s part of what made them tough. And yes it’s a good thing that we’ve been able to move things out of bucket one, that our children no longer die, that plagues are mild, and famine is rare. But in exchange, is it too much to ask that our children sit still for a couple of hours every week and do their best to understand the faith of those incredibly tough ancestors?

Paying for writing is one of the many things which got moved out of bucket one by the internet. Now you can choose whether to bear a cost for writing. You get to choose whether it should be bucket two or bucket three. I think the mere fact that I explained the buckets to you should make it a bucket two item. 

The 6 Books I Finished in December

January 7, 2023
Book Reviews
5 Comments

If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:

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  1. The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left by: Garett Jones
  2. The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by: Michael Easter
  3. Infinite Jest by: David Foster Wallace
  4. What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by: Randall Munroe
  5. The Sandman: Book One by: Neil Gaiman
  6. Failure Mode: Expeditionary Force, Book 15 by: Craig Alanson

It’s the start of 2023, so it’s probably a good time to look back at 2022. It was pretty crazy. To start with, I moved. Two words shouldn’t be able to conceal so much effort, but the process was ridiculously disruptive and time consuming. Then, the minute that was done, I went to Ireland for two and a half weeks, which was fun, but also quite time-consuming. 

In a somewhat unfortunate coincidence (I applied before deciding to move) this was also the year that I got accepted into the Goldman Sachs 10K Small Business program, a 14 week intensive business course, entirely paid for by Goldman. I think it can best be described as a mini-MBA. Not only did the course itself take a lot of time and attention it encouraged me to make some major changes to my business which took still more time and attention. 

Despite all that, I ended up setting a record for the amount I read: 113 books, clocking in at just over 38k pages (so an average of 336 pages per book). It was not my intention to set a record, in fact at various points when I was buried by stuff, I thought I should do less reading. I’m way ahead. And I sort of did, but I mostly didn’t.

Of course, I need to acknowledge the contribution to the total made by the Expeditionary Force series. That was 15 books out of the total, so definitely a non-trivial contribution. I finished the final book this month so I guess it’s time to pass judgment on whether that reading was beneficial or a waste of time.

I’m hoping that 2023 will be significantly calmer. Will that result in even more books? You’ll have to keep following along to find out.

I- Eschatological Reviews

The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left

By: Garett Jones

Published: 2022

228 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

That some immigrants are of a higher quality than other immigrants, that this quality persists across multiple generations, and corresponds very closely to the technological history since 1500 of their nation of origin. 

What’s the author’s angle?

Jones definitely has a controversial streak. This is the third book in what he calls his “Singapore Trilogy”. The first book was about national IQ. The second book made the case for “10% less democracy”. This is the third book and it might actually be the least controversial. Since Jones is basically pro-immigration, he just thinks some immigrants are better than others and we should prioritize the better ones.

Who should read this book?

Anyone interested in heterodox opinions in general will probably benefit from this book. If however you’re looking for something comprehensive, this isn’t it.

General Thoughts

This was the December pick for the local SSC book club. A couple of the members of the group are alums of GMU where Jones teaches, so one of them invited him to participate. We expected that, if he did so, it would be remotely, but he actually flew out and attended in person which was very generous of him. In addition to coming to the book club we also had dinner with him beforehand which was very enjoyable. Obviously none of this has much to do with the actual content of the book, but the whole experience of meeting the author in person did introduce certain biases. But enough about Jones, what about his book?

As I already mentioned the book makes some controversial claims and several people, including Jones’s colleague Bryan Caplan, have been pretty critical of these claims. In the process of preparing for Jones’ visit members of the book club came across these criticisms and decided to bring them up. I wasn’t entirely sure how this was going to play out, but I imagined that things might get heated. They did not, instead Jones effortlessly answered all of the criticisms though in a somewhat technical fashion. This is probably the way criticisms should be answered, particularly in writing, but when you’re having a discussion it makes follow up hard. When Jones says that he analyzed the same data and got a different result, what else can you say but “interesting…” Whatever problems it presented for the questioners, Jones’ responses made him very convincing in person.

At this point I assume you want me to provide a specific example. Well, I wasn’t taking notes or anything, but I can speak a little bit about his rebuttal of the Caplan criticisms I mentioned earlier, but before I do I need to lay out Jones’ model. He uses three attributes to quantify immigrant quality:

  • State History since 0 AD
  • Agricultural History in thousands of years
  • Technological History since 1500

Together this is the SAT of a country (not to be confused with the test). The book focuses on presenting data that these three factors have predictive power for the amount of prosocial behavior the immigrant and his descendants will likely possess. But of the three, the attribute with the most predictive power is T, the technological history of the country of origin.

Jones’ rebuttal to Caplan is that Caplan only considers S and A, while neglecting T. Now I read Caplan’s book, and in addition to the initial review I did another whole essay about it. But at the moment, sitting there with Jones, despite these efforts, I had no idea whether Caplan had neglected to include T in his analysis. Nor, you will be sad to hear, have I had a chance to confirm it since then (mostly because the Caplan book is in a box somewhere.) Now, I had a couple of big problems with Caplan’s book, so I’m inclined to believe Jones, but talking to him in person just illustrated how difficult epistemology has become these days. A point I’ll return to in just a second, but before I do I’d like to bring up one final point.

If you’re using Jones’ SAT to evaluate different nations, China comes out very near the top, and indeed Jones spends quite a bit of time talking about all of the SE Asian countries who have benefitted from Chinese immigration. Many of his critics have pounced on this to discredit his thesis. If China has such a high SAT and if so many countries have benefited from Chinese immigrants, why is China itself such a basket case? This is an excellent question, but it once again illustrates the epistemic difficulties. China has been a rockstar for most of the 3000+ years of its existence. Should it be disqualified because it’s had a rough patch for the last 5% of that period? Maybe? How would you answer that question? What countries would you compare China to? What hard data would you assemble? I completely understand that this is a point that bears discussion, but how could you ever be certain one way or the other?

Eschatological Implications

This, then, is the problem. “How much immigration to allow and from where?” is one of the many large questions facing the world. Everyone seems to agree that the effects of policies which implement one answer over another will be large and consequential. The problem is that there is vast disagreement on whether the effects will be large, consequential and positive, or whether they will be large, consequential and negative. So how are we to resolve this? How does one decide between Bryan Caplan and his book showing that unlimited immigration will be awesome and Garett Jones and his book showing that unlimited immigration would devastate innovation and make the country’s culture unrecognizable?

I think the answer is that people largely decide based on their biases. And you probably can’t blame them, because there doesn’t appear to be any other way of deciding. Certainly I haven’t had any luck with other methods.

I’m not saying that I put forth the maximum amount of effort I possibly could to answer the question of how much immigration to allow, but I’ve put forth a lot. I’ve read and reviewed multiple books. I interacted with Caplan on Twitter and Jones in person. I’ve asked questions, and gotten answers. I’ve read at least a hundred essays, and the abstracts of at least a dozen papers. Beyond all that I’ve thought long and hard about it. In short I’ve done probably 100x as much as one could reasonably expect out of the average individual, and yet I suspect that whatever certainty I feel about my opinions is largely based on my initial biases, and only a small amount on the data. And I’m running out of ideas on how to change that.

II- Capsule Reviews

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self 

By: Michael Easter

Published: 2021

304 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

That our pursuit of comfort and convenience has led, at best, to an unprecedented experiment in changing our environment, and, at worst, to a huge array of harmful second order effects.

What’s the author’s angle?

Easter is an editor for Men’s Health, and a writer for Outside Magazine, so he’s obviously predisposed to be a proponent of “uncomfortable” outdoor activities.

Who should read this book?

This is very close to being an “everyone”. The way in which he summarizes research in a broad array of fields makes it both generally applicable and interesting. But if you’re already mostly on top of your health you could probably get by with just listening to one of his podcast appearances. I heard him on Peter Attia’s, but he was also on Rogan. (Which I haven’t listened to.)

General Thoughts

A full review of this book will appear in the second issue of American Hombre (Subscribe today!) So I’m leaving the meat of my discussion for that space. I will however steal one paragraph from that review:

Before we get to the actual content of the book, I have to say something about the subtitle: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. If you’re anything like me, it might be giving you second thoughts about reading the book. It shouldn’t. I have to assume that this phrase was added at the insistence of the publisher. No version of that phrase occurs in the actual text (not even “healthy self”) and even the word “reclaim” only occurs once, and it’s unrelated. The subtitle isn’t wrong exactly, but I don’t think it strikes the right tone. If I had been in charge of subtitling the book I would have gone with: Wrestle Discomfort to Salvage Your Life Before You Die of Depression or Diabetes. But who knows if that subtitle would have sold as well.

Infinite Jest 

by: David Foster Wallace

Published: 1996

1079 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

This is one of those books where it’s impossible to give a brief summation. But if you were looking for a main theme “addiction” would have to be near the top of the list.

Who should read this book?

If you’re looking for a gripping plot, if tangents annoy you, or if you’ve never read a 1000+ page book then this is probably not the book for you. On the other hand if you’re looking for a deep, beautifully written, discursive magnum opus that’s also full of wisdom, then you might decide this is one of the best books ever.

General Thoughts

For me Infinite Jest seemed pretty daunting. Not merely because it’s long, it also seems pretty dense. And then there are the legendary footnotes, some of which go on for pages and have footnotes of their own. As a result I ended up taking three stabs at it:

My first attempt was last year, and my plan was to listen to the audiobook while walking with a physical copy of the book, so that whenever a footnote came up I could stop listening, pull the book out of my satchel, and read the footnote. The difficulty of coordinating all of this plus the length of some of the footnotes created enough friction that I stopped doing it for long enough that I felt like I needed to start over.

The second attempt was earlier this year, and this attempt flamed out when I realized that despite listening to the first 8 hours of the book a second time, and reading all the footnotes that I was still confused. This is when I picked up A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest (which I finished in September and reviewed here). That book helped, and it was nice, but in the end I’m going to say it was unnecessary. 

This takes us to the third attempt. Armed with a knowledge of all the characters and a plot summary I could refer to I set off again, from the beginning. And having made it all the way to the end here’s what I would recommend. Just listen to the book and focus on enjoying it. The footnotes are interesting, but you can also safely ignore them. Knowledge of the characters is helpful, but all of the important character information will become clear.

As is so often the case, if you’re going to tackle a really long book, audio is the way to go. Infinite Jest has numerous different styles and having a great narrator who can switch between these styles and do all the voices made listening a delight. And that’s really what this book is, a series of delightful stories with a moderate level of connection, but each scene is a gem, and you should just enjoy them.

I was accused recently of assuming that length is automatically a bad quality. The idea being that if you really enjoyed something wouldn’t you want it to go on as long as possible? The answer is that of course I would, but it’s pretty rare for that to happen. Well, it happened here. I would have been happy if the book had been 25% longer (but probably not more than that. It is a super long book.)

What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by: Randall Munroe

Published: 2022

368 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The subtitle gives a pretty good description, though I would also mention that the book is full of delightful stick figure illustrations.

Who should read this book?

I assume that a significant number of you are already familiar with Randall Munroe and his webcomic XKCD. In which case you’ve probably already made up your mind. If you aren’t familiar with it, well then what’s wrong with you? As penance you should probably read this book.

General Thoughts

This is another book where I would have been totally fine if it were longer. It went by all too quickly. Here are some of the questions Munroe answers:

What would happen if the Earth’s Rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second?

What if I want to heat my house using toasters. How many do I need?

If the universe stopped expanding right now, how long would it take for a human to drive a car all the way to the edge of the universe?

The last one includes illustrations of the moon-sized quantity of gasoline that would be required, along with an illustration of the 10^17 tons of snacks which would be required, but he spends most of the space talking about how difficult it would be to fill the time. It would be a very, very long road trip.

The Sandman Book One 

by: Neil Gaiman

Published: The comics were originally published starting in 1989.

560 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The strange adventures of Dream/Morpheus/Sandman, starting with his decades long imprisonment and escape and then continuing on with his efforts to rebuild his domain. 

Who should read this book?

Sandman is everywhere at the moment. There’s the Netflix series and the Audible adaptation. But the comic books came first, so if you’re interested in things perhaps this is where you should start.

General Thoughts

I have long had the goal to read comic book series. I even bought the nice leatherbound collections, but that actually slowed me down because those seemed too nice to just read, and procrastination was easy and low cost. But then suddenly, as I already mentioned, it was everywhere, and the task became more urgent. I take great pleasure, when someone asks me about a TV show or a movie, of being able to archly respond, “No, but I’ve read the book.” And I was in danger of losing that small joy. So I bought this, less fancy collection, and read it.

It was good, but not revelatory. I think over the years I’d built it up too much in my mind. Which is not to say I’m going to stop reading it, merely that it might not be the greatest thing ever. So far the main character is cool, but kind of one-dimensional. The supporting characters are where it’s at. And really the best part of all is the world-building. The alternate universe Gaiman lays out here is really rich and interesting.

It is very definitely for mature audiences, unlike most of the stuff I review, so keep that in mind. 

Having read the book, the question then becomes do I watch the series and/or listen to the adaptation? That’s always been a tough question for me. If I enjoy something then it’s nice to go deep, but on the other hand surely there are better things to do than hear the same story told slightly differently for a third time? 

I guess I’ll finish all the books first and then see where I’m at.

Failure Mode: Expeditionary Force, Book 15 

by: Craig Alanson

Published: 2022

697 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The conclusion to the Expeditionary Force series where the cliffhanger of Book 14 gets resolved and everyone, hopefully, lives happily ever after.

Who should read this book?

If you’ve read the first 14 books, then you should definitely read this one. The bigger question is that now, knowing how it all ends, should you start the series in the first place? Well…

General Thoughts

I listened to this series, and if you add it all up (including books 3.5 and 7.5 which I also listened to) it comes to 286 hours. Now, of course, I didn’t listen to it at normal speed. R.C. Bray, the narrator, isn’t the slowest narrator out there, or the best at enunciation (he’s fine, just not exceptional) so I think I ended up dialing things in at around 2.7x, maybe 2.8? We’ll go with 2.8 which would put me at just over 100 hours — two and a half weeks of full time work. Obviously I was doing other things while I listened: walking, driving, cleaning, etc. And early on, the series was so enjoyable that I was listening to it even when I normally wouldn’t bother. Like during the five minutes it took me to go upstairs to get some food. In other words the initial 30 hours of the series went faster than 30 hours of listening normally would.

As part of that, the series made me realize that I could and probably should be reading more books just for the enjoyment of it. I think over the last few years, as I’ve publicly reviewed every book I read, that the amount of reading I do strictly because I enjoy it has declined. So if nothing else the series made a positive improvement on that front. And I appreciate it for doing that, but it also illustrates why, in the end, it wasn’t a good use of my time, and it’s probably not a good use of your time. This isn’t a hard and fast warning, if you really want to read the series you shouldn’t let me talk you out of it. But just based on that standard I know that there are several books I could have re-read that would have provided more pleasure than the 286 hours of Expeditionary Force. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is only 111 hours and I know I want to re-read that. 

You might now be wondering if there’s some portion of the series that’s worth reading. A stopping place where the expected value is positive? Possibly the first four books? But that’s a very weak suggestion. I think the middle books get pretty repetitive, and the final books, while slightly less repetitive, end up being more ridiculous. But it’s not as if the first four books are masterpieces. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all fun, but even if you stop early I’m not sure that fun vs. time spent is ever definitely positive.

I might be singing a different tune if he had stuck the landing, but he didn’t. Part of what kept me reading was the world building, and the mysteries he hinted would eventually be revealed. On this front he did better than some. I don’t think he left any of the mysteries unresolved, but the reveals were underwhelming, particularly the very biggest mystery. I don’t want to oversell how bad it was. Ending things is very difficult and more often than not I end up feeling let down by them, so on that front the EF ending was average. Not especially bad, but not especially good either. If it had been exceptionally good, then perhaps that 100 hours would have been worth it. Unfortunately it wasn’t, and if you’re already eight books in, and I had something to do with that, then I apologize. I’m not saying that reading the final seven books won’t be enjoyable, I’m just saying that it will be time consuming.

Speaking of time consuming endeavors followed by mediocre endings, here we are closing out another long post, though this one was on the short side for one of my book review round ups. I keep saying I’m going to try to keep them shorter, and look at this! I kind of, sort of, succeeded. If you’re impressed by my kind of, sort of victory, then you should kind of, sort of consider donating.