Resident Contrarian

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Pre-TLDR: This is an update article on my personal life/employment, mostly just me making sure people know I’m fine now and that I’m happy.

My last job was very good in a few senses:

It was the first job I ever had that really pushed my income to middle-class-ish levels, which is a whole different ballgame of life
It was partially unearned; I did not work my way up from the writing mines to writing mine management - I was just sort of noticed and given work
For a while, the company needed a lot of writing work done.

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

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

Looking for a new job, I wanted several things:

Proof that I could sort of be at the new income level long-term - that it wasn’t a one-off and I could do things like own houses and buying my kids stuff
A job with duties focused on the one thing I do particularly well and enjoy (writing) in the same way programmers aren’t really expected to do much besides programming. So no “20% writing, 80% cold outreach recruiting” situations, if I could avoid them
A job that could credibly promise that they wouldn’t “run out” of writing tasks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article below.

I write for a living.

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

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

That’s what I’m here for.

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

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

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

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

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

Writing (Usually) Can’t be Consistently ViralDo you know what you call a writer who can consistently generate millions-of-hits-articles? I’m joking, but only a bit. The best writers in the world are consistently good and often great, but writers who can generate massive hit after massive hit at will are rare to the point of non-existence. Most of a writer’s work is putting out the best they can, week after week; they are trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

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

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

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

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

Writing Can’t Give You Ideas You Don’t HaveI’ve been approached to write thought leadership pieces, and a few occasions stand out. In these cases, my very first question — usually “What ideas and opinions would you like to put forward?” — was met with confusion or even shock. Their expectation was that I’d use my own thoughts - and just my own thoughts - to make them a thought leader.

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

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

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

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

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

Writing Can’t Fool Your Employees Into Thinking Your Culture Is Different Than It IsI’ve anonymized every part of this story to protect the (mostly) innocent.

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

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

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

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

Writing is a tool, often an incredibly effective one.

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

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

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

Revealing The Unexpected GoodI once had a conversation with someone who worked at a payments company called Wave.

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

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

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

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

Explaining The Difficult-To-UnderstandYou know the hottest market for good-paying writing jobs right now? It’s technical writing. Do you know why?

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

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

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

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

It’s a big deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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***Author’s note:

Some of you have been following along on my unemployment journey, and I’m glad to say I’m now gainfully employed once more. I’m publishing an update on that tomorrow, so if you want more details on that (it’s not an article in the truest sense) that’s where you’d go. I’ll link it here once it’s up.***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s making her feel better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1For people who don’t work on cars, this is really bad. Bad stuff happens to your finger when you do this.

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Hi, everyone! I have a guest post up at Jay Rollin’s wonderland rules here. Enjoy!

The Wonderland RulesOn Boxer's ConfidenceThis guest post is from Resident Contrarian. RC is a Christian, a father, a blogger of long standing (he’s got a “hundreds of paid subscribers” checkmark on Substack, which means he’s doing something right), and both one of the most thoughtful writers and one of the nicest people I’ve ever encountered. He’s one of those …Read more2 hours ago · 5 likes · 7 comments · Resident Contrarian

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It’s been a while since I’ve looked for a job; for a while, I was on the other side of the process and had the opportunity to examine it from the no-pressure side of things. Now I’m back on the lesser side of the coin, experiencing once more the employment version of seeing an old friend only to be reminded of why you don’t hang out with them anymore.

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

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

Resume-first applications are poisonImagine the following scene:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody hires based on a resumeImagine angels coming down from administrative heaven bearing a golden curriculum vitae; it is in every way a perfect resume. They touch it to your lips, which impart the very essence of the gestalt that is you upon the document. All who read it are filled with a subtle joy and come to know every intricacy of every skill you possess, all relayed to them in a way most flattering to you, and have their lifespan extended by five years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1The tech recession started being a news story during this process and the company initiated a hiring freeze, or I’d probably be there now.

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It’s time for the periodic plugpost, in which I plug things. This post is a little different than most, so for context:

Getting exposure as a new writer or someone with a new product is really important. The story of “this was a good blog with promise, but never got lucky enough to get any readers” is incredibly common and I watch blogs fail for that reason constantly.
The internet hates any attempts you might make to promote your work. If you write a great article about naked mole rats and post it to a subreddit about that very thing so people can see it, r/nakedmolerats mods will unleash the fires of hell on you, burning your life to the ground and ensuring you never feel love again.

When you see successful art posts on reddit, they always say “my friend did this…” or “this guy does…”. This is a lie. Those posts are by the creator. They are trying to circumvent the hatred the internet has for new creators; you are seeing the people who are successful at this. 3. Because the internet hates self-promotion, the bulk of the stuff you see is a product of journalist, academic, or other types of incest - basically, the easiest way to get famous is to get boosted by another famous person. 4. Most of the rest of what you see is people (like me) who got really lucky and got boosted by some big names early on (Tyler Cowen, Scott Alexander). But for most people this is a chicken/egg trap - unless you have unusual fortune, you can’t be seen by those guys until you have readers who share your stuff and you can’t get readers until they share you.

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

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

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

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

Things I’m promotingRead Something Interesting

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

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

William Collen’s RUINS Art Blog

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

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

Papyrus Rampant

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

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

Star Trekking

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

This is that.

James Harris’ Stiff Upper Quip

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

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

Cade Stuart’s Letters on our World

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

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

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

Jonah seems to be a perfectly reasonably person and I think he’s nice. He’s also a political analyst and says interesting things about that.
Jonah has a Substack, linked above. In which he only has a few pieces, because it’s really really hard to keep your writing going if nobody is reading and it’s really really hard to get initial readers.

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

John Carter’s Postcards From Barsoom

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

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

Jay Rollins, Wonderland Rules

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

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

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

Mark Bisone

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

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

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

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

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

Creator Experiments

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

Digital Masters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotion Stuff

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

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

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

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

Practical stuff

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

I was reasonably close (first interview went well) to a job with a reader app company the other day, but it didn’t end up going anywhere. This came about because a person who knows me and knows the company made the connection - I have several people trying to do similar things, with the normal conflicts between what I can actually do, what I want to get paid, etc. in play.
The “find a job that’s just like your old job” bit is a little harder right now because most companies that hire someone who does the exact thing I do (outward-facing casual language explanations of complex things) are broke right now; most would rather have copy that’s a little worse (cheap freelance) than a full human making decent money.
I have some freelance offers that will fill up part of the gap, but I’ve been treating them poorly in terms of getting the work out fast. Today/tomorrow are dedicated to doing a lot of work to get them all up to date as fast as I can and generally stopping being shitty.

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

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

That’s pretty much everything.

Send me more stuff to linkHey, some of you are out there saying something like this:

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

What you should be doing is saying this:

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

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

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

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1If someone stopped being my friend because of this pun I’d understand.

2This footnote is only really relevant if you are very, very rich. There’s a subset of people where I often think “oh, it would be nice if a very very rich person just… supported a large portion of their work, like how patrons used to be”. Jay is one of the ones I think about for this - like, he’s a writer. He does writing stuff for money. You could probably fund his entire career for less than you spend on cars.

This is broadly true for anyone who is hyper-rich who reads my stuff, but there’s a lot of writers out there who could do more and better work if they were actually able to make it their work; the majority of them are fitting in what writing they can around making enough money to survive. For the low low price of like a million dollars a year, you could fund like 10-20 of these guys.

It’s weird to me that this doesn’t happen more often, particularly on the political right - the left has a lot of machine built up to promote and maintain commentator talent, and the right just basically ignores that potential. Thus the left beats the ever-loving shit out of the right in the public discourse; it’s right that they do so, because they are the ones willing to pay for it.

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There’s this genre of writing called isekai, which I think roughly translates to “other world”. In isekai novels, the main character is wisked away from our normal, boring word to another place by some means. This new realm usually has swords, magic, and plenty of opportunities to use them on things that would otherwise kill you; the protagonist walks around figuring out how all this works while slaughtering goblins wholesale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1This is especially dangerous because I love drinking - it makes me happy, relieves every stress, and (if I drink enough, which is a lot) makes me wake up the next morning chipper, full of energy, and ready to face the world.

I only drink about once every month and a half.

2This is actually a funny trope, and it’s common enough that the transfer to the isekai world is often called “getting trucked”, even when a truck isn’t involved. It’s just too convenient a form of sudden death befalling an otherwise healthy person to ignore.

The funniest form of this I’ve ever seen involved a character who was walking down the road, listening to music on headphones (and thus decreasing their situational awareness) and in general just having no idea what was about to hit them. And in the background, there’s these cut-aways to this group of criminals speeding away from the cops in a big truck towing a trailer.

This builds and builds as the character approaches the intersection, which the now-out-of-control truck is hurtling towards. As the character steps off the curb, the truck crosses the intersection, narrowly missing them and crashing into a light post. AT WHICH TIME the trailer they are towing bursts open and releases a terrified herd of horses who trample the main character to death.

3My biggest doubts are philosophy and porn, in that order.

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So one thing you find out when you spend a long time at lower parts of the socio-economic ladder is that networking is sort of an important thing; most people who get really good jobs are one or both of “very, very skilled, at least on paper” and “well-connected in a way that lets them hopscotch the nightmare that is job applications”.

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

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

I am now out of work with about 3 weeks’ severance. This is pretty damn short-feeling to me but it’s not really legally mandated, so I doubt there’s a lot I can/should do about it.
I have a few highly developed skills (predominantly writing, which is why we know each other in the first place) but I’m not entirely sure how marketable they are.
I have been informed by others that I wasn’t actually overpaid, but I felt overpaid, and generally “pure writer” doesn’t make that much as a job title. I’m not initially sure I can or can’t replace the income I currently make.

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

I’m not exactly begging for work, but obviously I’m very interested in talking to anyone who thinks they might have use for me. I am available by email at residentcontrarian@substack.com, gearratiossc@gmail.com, and on discord at GearRatio#1059.

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

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

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

Thanks!

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The other day, Silicon Valley Bank ran into some problems of the bank-run sort; Peter Theil told all of the people who listen to him about things to pull their money out, and the way banks work is if even a surprisingly small amount of people do that, they run out of money to honor deposits with. Once Theil’s people pulled out, other people panicked and pulled out, and it got to be an entire thing.

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

There’s a good chance the company I work for (which is a startup, in the very broad sense “start-up” is used these days)
If this goes poorly, they might lose access to the VC money they use to operate
I’m probably sort of a luxury employee
1-3 should be best defined at the direst end of their probability scale - i.e. I feel like the worst-case scenario on each is absolutely true
I’m definitely getting fired when I get into work on Monday, my life will fall apart, and I will die alone, remembered only as history’s greatest monster.

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

I have a job that pays well
This is unusual
I’m not sure my skills are good enough and diverse enough to maintain that
It is thus completely sure that any day now someone is going to start a Slack huddle to explain that they have realized I suck and am getting fired
I will not get severance or be able to replace my income, my life will fall apart, and I will die alone hiding from the allies in Argentina.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1As a person who is this “type of crazy” in a lot of ways, including my marriage, I actually am a decent person to talk about this with. I am, as they say, familiar with the patterns.

2 (I’m mostly writing at myself here, honestly.

3This is interesting to me because the person who can’t imagine they are wrong sometimes ends up feeling very wronged in this situation at some point. They’ve been doing some negative thing to the other person and fully writing off complaints the other person has as unreasonable, and eventually the other person moves from a calm “hey, please stop doing this thing that bothers me” to some much more fed-up-with-this-shit reaction, like an explosive argument or a (somehow worse) freeze-the-other-guy-out distancing.

Since the person has never up to this point considered they might be wrong, this comes out of left field from their perspective in a “why is this suddenly a big deal” sort of way.

And even more oddly, there’s a version of this where “oh, they are really upset about this” does make an impact and correct the bad behavior even if they go on not believing the other person makes valid complaints, because the consequences themselves are undeniable and seem worthwhile to avoid.

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The most troublesome arguments to try to make are those that are both very specific and limited (and are by nature of that more or less non-controversial) but are roommates with much bigger and more contentious targets. You say one thing, but the entire topic is so incredibly pre-loaded for everyone listening that they all walk away with a different opinion on what you were arguing - like blind men learning about elephants, except you are the elephant and everyone is mad at you.

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

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

To start us out, here’s a story:

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

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

You can choose to try and extinguish the fire

You can choose to try and escape the fire

You can resign yourself to your fate, lay back down, and either asphixiate on smoke or burn to death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note that whatever external source they derive the truth of their religion from makes a certain claim (In this case that hell exists, and that a god is reliable/honest)
Decide for reasons unrelated to the dogma of the religion that this claim is unacceptable - that whatever standards the religion might have to justify it are in conflict and subordinate to some other standard
Decide that since the belief is unacceptable, they should sub in some other belief for it that they like better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While the agnostic might have a model something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1Editor Nick said something to the extent of “I think it’s a mistake to not address the ‘benevolence is incompatible with hell existing” aspect of things”, basically because there’s a way of looking at this where if those things really are incompatible, then there’s a “well, if that’s so, you MUST pick one” alternative to the “I’m being told to pick and choose beliefs to accept based on what I like” thing I eventually get to.

I’m not doing this here, broadly because this isn’t an article about The Problem of Evil. But even if it was an article about the The Problem of Evil, we wouldn’t probably focus down on one individual perceived evil like this; we’d tackle the whole thing. And if it was an article about the problem of evil and Dave’s prior held (if a bad thing exists, then god can’t) we wouldn’t stop at getting rid of hell - we’d stop at getting rid of god.

There’s some minor ways this looks different than the problem of evil, but I don’t think they are substantial - the argument of The Problem of Evil has always been something like “bad thing exists - and there could be no reason god would let it be so except meanness.” The assumption here (to the extent it’s relevant to either of our arguments) is pretty much the same.

2The argument made here is almost always a secular argument. David, for instance, isn’t arguing that the Bible supports what he’s saying in any way. Sort of the opposite; he’s saying that even if the Bible said god didn’t lie, that it wouldn’t count as evidence he didn’t.

3I’m not changing this. I think it’s funny and I don’t care what you think of me.

4Still funny.

5Conversely, and working on the same principle, the astronomer friend also couldn’t cause a new planet to exist just by wanting one real bad and ignoring the non-existence of wobbles. Things are either real or not, in the conventional usage of “real”.

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Hidden Articles are not sent out as newsletters. They are usually “different” in some way - either they aren’t big enough topics to sustain an entire article, retreads of older thinking, or just something weird I wanted to try.

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron: The wires are too short?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write inter-dependant paragraphsWeird formatting to make a point:

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

—>

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

—>

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

Here’s a badly written nonsense example:

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

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

Now consider this alternative:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—>

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

—>

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

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

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

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Note: I’m pretty sure there’s at least some stuff in this article that’s interesting to a general audience, but it’s pretty firmly aimed at talking generally about hiring/recruiting, and mostly in terms of tech-world stuff. If that’s the kind of thing that’s very boring to you, this article will be very boring to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A certain amount of people don’t give two shits about your company mission and that’s actually fineI had a conversation with a chief-of-staff type person a while back which, when paraphrased to protect the innocent, resulted in the following story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who figures out the false negative problem will rule the worldDan Luu (who is a surprisingly nice guy who thinks about stuff really hard) sometimes talks about the dangers of false negatives in hiring processes:

Dan Luu @altluu@munificentbob @danluu I agree that companies are trying to filter out people who are difficult to work with and/or cause problems for the org but, IMO, filters at the large companies I've worked for seem pretty ineffective at achieving their goals while filtering out a lot of people who would be good.11:56 PM ∙ Jan 10, 2022I can’t find his better Tweets explaining it, but the basic concept goes like this: Every hire you make has a chance of being a false positive - i.e. someone bad who causes some level of damage who you eventually have to fire. When this happens, it’s obvious; they do bad work or cause workforce morale problems in some way, and you get rid of them. Companies are used to this and have ways of dealing with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I caution you not to ignore the possibility you are rejecting people for counter-productive reasons; it’s easy to overlook, but it’s probably the biggest unaddressed problem in hiring.
The people you are trying to hire care about your false negative rate. Right or wrong, they wouldn’t usually apply to your company if they didn’t think they could do good work there, good candidates included. The more you show you’ve thought about this problem and take action to protect them from it, the more confident any particular individual is going to be that applying with you isn’t a waste of time.
If you have steps that are likely to cause false negatives but that you feel you can’t get rid of, front-load them in the hiring process. If you are going to prioritize false-positive protectiveness over false-negative minimalization, then the least you can do is get it out of the way in the phone screener and not a month into the conversation.

Once you’ve figured out how to do this, tell people you do it - tell them the steps you’ve taken that show you value their time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicomachean ExhortationsHow to live well from the greatest philosopher of all timeBy Shadow RebbeThe Presence of EverythingThis is a blog that centers around various kinds of spirituality and the implications thereof. I like it because it pushes back on general new-atheism (and thus is aligned with me) but dislike it because it’s not specifically Christian (and thus sort of counter to what I want in a different direction).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good folks
Lurkers, who might be good folks
Me talking about bass guitars and nobody caring
A place you can recommend articles
A blood arena in which people rip each other to shreds
Me asking you to proof-read my articles, which I’m bad at
Pictures of my pets, and sometimes pictures that don’t focus on but still contain images of my unusually small hands
Cassander being an arch-capitalist
Nick making fun for me for trying to spell the name of the philosopher Neitche without looking it up first

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(Foggy Memory Warning: This is my best recollection of something that happened when I was much younger and significantly less resistant to overreactions over perceived injustices. I’m doing my best, but you should probably mentally adjust for the distortions the decade-old memories of a 20-something might produce.)

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

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

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

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

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

The Googler-as-Writer TrapTo write an article at Cracked, a beginner writer had to follow a relatively simple roadmap:

Gain access to the writer’s forums. Depending on the era, there were a few relatively minimal steps to doing this, usually among the types of tasks you’d expect from a place trying to keep spammers out of its workspace.
Pitch an article in a listicle format. Again, listicles are those “10 surprising things you might not have known about Kate Moss” formats you see pop up on Twitter even today. Beginner writers were entirely limited to this format, so this was the first place writers would start to filter themselves out; many wanted to join to do the more individual kind of work the higher-tier columnists did, and this was strictly disallowed.
Find sourced examples. This step generally occurred concurrently with #2; you were expected to bring a few interesting examples of potential list items to the table. These examples would be approved piece-meal by the forum mods/editors, and you were expected to have a minimum of five examples before an article would be sent up the ladder for editorial review.
Get told no by the editors. When articles were sent up the ladder for final review, they would sometimes make it through that review unchanged, but as a general rule they would be sent back for more sourcing. At this point, I want you to note that potential writers have still to write a single word.
Reiterate until the article is approved for writing.
Write a draft of the article.
The article is published with your byline - great kudos are now yours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of this was fine until it was generally known.

“The Applebees of Writing”Within the hierarchy of the outsourced writing masses of Cracked, the pecking order looked something like this:

Contributors. These were the first-tier disposables of the process I described above, and at any given time there were thousands of them.
Forum mods. Forum mods were just what they sounded like - people who kept the writer forums clean and churning by doing mechanical moderation tasks. They generally were folks that had a decent enough grasp of what Cracked was looking for in content proposals to do a first-pass filter of the clearly bad stuff. They were not paid for this outside of compensation in the form of a bit of shoulder-rubbing with the higher-ups and a small amount of preferential consideration of their own submissions.
Freelance editors. Freelance editors were a latter-day addition to the ranks of Cracked and were essentially people who had written close-enough first drafts enough time to be recognized as first-pass editors. They got regular freelance work doing this, essentially taking more low-level tasks off the plate of Cracked’s actual salaried staff.1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you haven’t figured it out from the rest of the article, the number of people who Cracked ever promoted from the inside was a rounding error on zero. They very much preferred to bring in talent from the outside. There were thousands of contributors, perhaps a dozen mods, and a few freelance editors. In my couple-of-years-there experience, I think something like two people got promoted to staff; the filter was just too powerful and the staff too small to offer more.

But it was still generally known that if you wanted so much as a chance at breathing that rarified air, you needed to be politically in line with staff. This might be a coincidence (anything might)m but the people who did get promoted to staff were vocally left and made sure that showed in their work. The most conservative person on staff was David Wong, and I once saw him uphold a ban on someone from the forums for questioning whether an off-hand mention of Ron Paul was enough to write a celebrity off as garbage.

I don’t think this is particularly surprising in a California-based company of comedians, but it also wasn’t exactly mentioned in the big cattle calls for new writers - roughly half of the people who showed up for those were getting handed type-B fame scratchers cards with “Fuck you, Nazi!” written under the foil. Nothing about this should have been a shock, but there were still almost certainly some people working hard to climb the ladder who never knew it was de-facto banned for non-Clinton voters. 2. Sourcing articles was really weird, because the average intellectual firepower wielded by a Cracked staffer was born and died in “I read it in the NYT” territory. So, for instance: say you wanted to write an article about things newspapers got wrong, and one of those newspapers was big and left-leaning. You’d immediately run into a pretty hard wall of dealing with a person who had never seriously considered that a respected source could possibly be wrong, even if contradicted by the primary source the article was reporting on.

The flip side of this was that any site that wasn’t a known-left publication was effectively banned for use, at least in the case of articles that covered any sort of politics. Since sources were required, this amounted to a soft, only-sometimes-circumventable ban on disagreeing with the left on anything important.3 3. It affected content in a pretty big way. As the staff got less and less “young artists trying to make it” and more and more “old jaded artists who feel entitled to do real art that really matters”, they became more and more heavy-handed about what was and wasn’t politically aligned enough to be funny. And fans noticed; posts like this were everywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(nearly) Everyone got spoiledHere’s an old story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1Later on, almost past my time there, I understand that Cracked opened up a sort of hybrid role between these three categories and being an actual salaried staffer, in which a very veteran and very well-liked contributor could pitch articles that “broke the mold” a bit and ventured more into the “my opinions, my voice” territory staffers mostly monopolized. I should talk about this more (and would like comments on it if anyone has insider insights) but I just don’t have enough knowledge about it, and it wouldn’t have made much difference given my understanding of the timeline of Cracked’s eventual fall.

2OK, so, holy shit this particular line has stuck with me. Imagine a friend comes to you and is very proud of becoming a chef, and is presenting it as “I’m finally a chef!” and then reveals that they are a chef at Applebees, where you are vaguely aware they have very limited executive freedom to the point where “chef” doesn’t quite seem the right term anymore. Certainly you’d still be nice about it and the right reaction is NOT to make them feel bad about it, but this example makes you feel that conflict in your bones - like if I said I was an architect and built 100 houses last year, and you found out they were dollhouses built from pattern-stamped balsa.

I have for years now been curious as to who this person was; it’s such a great line and such an effective mental image that I’ve just never really stopped thinking about it. I will never know who this (evidently good) writer was. I am haunted.

3One thing that I wish I had more time to talk about is how much different of an era it was, even just 5-10 years ago. “Woke” was not a term in common use; the usual term for someone performatively doing their best to ban dissenting viewpoints from their space was Social Justice Warrior, which carried a different set of secondary connotations (considered annoying instead of a major censorship threat, more-racial-less-sexual-except-just-Lesbian-and-Gay-issues-and-still-less-even-then, etc.).

But more importantly, counter-left media hadn’t made nearly as much headway showing how often, say, Rolling Stone or NYT played fast and loose with facts. People didn’t question “the media” as much as a unified body of usually lying people, and the left was basically making a lot of hay selectively pointing out the (often real) failures of Fox News, guilt-by-associationing all other right-wing sources, and ignoring all other problems.

This made for some weird situations where, for instance, you could probably use Jon Stewart as a source (because he was trustably left and thus incapable of error, and also would have provided a fun clip) but would have had trouble using Charles Krauthammer.

4You might say “But who wasn’t spoiled?” and the answer, as near as I can tell, is Dan O’Brien. There were probably others! There were good people there.

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About once a year, the blog fairy descends from the sky and grants you permission to bore your audience with data about your audience. With a graceful wave of their wand, an author is finally freed to do what he has wanted to the whole time: to explain, in exhausting detail, why they think they aren’t as big as they could be right now.

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

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

Free Sub GrowthConventional blog theory on how to grow a blog goes something like this:

Write a bunch of really good articles, or at least the best articles you can.
Try to write stuff that a bunch of people want to read, which is sort of distinct from 1. if you think about it long enough.
Balance 1-2 in a way that makes sure you won’t lose respectability. Respectability is important! People don’t pay people they don’t respect, so don’t pander unless you can pander enough to make that your entire business model.
Once you’ve completed 1-3, try to get your stuff in front of tens of thousands of viewers. If you’ve done your job really really well, you will have a low-single-digit conversion to subscribers. Now you have some options:
Option 1: Withhold some amount of your output from people who don’t pay.
Option 2: Give people an option to pay, but don’t withhold any work and hope they pay for no particular reason - just from goodwill or something.
Option 3: Don’t give people an option to pay, but find some wealthy benefactor who pays for your work and who (hopefully) will not commit massive fraud and go to prison. Do not reflect on how often “will give tens of thousands of dollars to an OK writer on a whim” and “will commit massive fraud” overlap on Venn Diagrams.
Live the enviable life of an independent artist as portrayed in a Hallmark movie - buy a house in the woods, meet a person from a very different walk of life who teaches you the real meaning of creative output, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t do a great job of giving people reasons to pay. I’m pretty open about my financial straits being much better lately. If you look at last November compared to today, I’ve had 50% revenue growth during a time my readership tripled. But last November most people knew me from an article that was explicitly about me being poor - I think that made a lot of people feel bad for me and give (which, by the way, thank you for being nice in that way).
Substack is now pretty old, as such things go. A lot of people were excited about the “Here is a platform that works against free speech restrictions from group X” aspect of Substack at first and subscribed to a lot of stuff - you see less of that now. A lot of people are already paying for everything they want to pay for.
I’m not being particularly consistent in both the quality and quantity of my work. If I was better at getting articles up weekly, this number would probably be higher. If I was full-time and really managing the community/making more kinds of posts, even better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write more consistently. This is always a goal, and it’s made hard by having to fit a life around it. I had 37 “real” articles last year, meaning you missed out on 15 articles I should have written in addition to some extra content you got in lieu of that.
Find new ways to share my work. Recommendations have been big, and Hackernews has paid out a few times, but I continue to be bad at Twitter/Reddit and don’t have any other great ways to grow my audience outside of those three things.
Be better at engagement. I’m good at responding to comments, but terrible at making opportunities for people to chat/make friends/build community.

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

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

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

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

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1Sometimes X dollars is some significantly high multiplier of X, which reinforces my guesses about “one time gift in support” payers.

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(For legal reasons, every time I say anyone did anything in this article, I mean that it’s alleged that they did it. The evidence here seems to be about as strong as evidence can be, but I’m not a court.)

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

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

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

Sam Bankman-Fried is/was a very rich guy who made his money by running a crypto exchange, which is kind of a platform where you can park your crypto and have it be used in various hard-to-explain investments to grow your principal.
SBF was at the very least expected not to take funds from that exchange and use them in a bunch of tricky/risky ways to prop up other businesses he owned or had close connections to. He did this anyway, and people noticed.
Once people noticed, there was a run on the bank itself - people withdrew their funds as quickly as possible. Many people lost some or all of their investments. The value of Crypto tanked. Everything went to shit in big, confusing ways which nonetheless hurt a lot of real people in a very real way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SBF genuinely subscribed to an act-utilitarian philosophy that is not uncommon or controversial in EA circles.
EA philosophy encouraged risk-taking in a way that caused and could have been expected to cause SBF to be irresponsible in the way he seems to have been.
The overall scope of EA involvement with SBF makes them partially or wholly responsible for SBF; he’s a product of their environment, and exists as a result of things they think and do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SBF shows up and offers you $2m to support your efforts to convert mosquitos into clean drinking water in Nicaragua.
You ask “Hey, are you a good guy who doesn’t do horrible felonies?”. He says he isn’t, that he’s a nice guy who gives to charity.
You do some Googling and find he’s some sort of Crypto guy who isn’t thought to be a mob boss or anything, and that he’s given a bunch of people money in a way that generally seems to be normal, if in greater numbers than usual.
You do some further Googling and find out there’s no way to tell if any particular crypto thing is a scam, but he runs an exchange that seems legitimate.
You… contact the FBI? The FBI says they don’t talk about that kind of stuff and that it’s weird that you are calling them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Being Buddy-Buddy With The DevilThe next accusation I’ve heard goes something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah.

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

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

Sam Bankman-Fried: Completely agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Author’s note: I do not really write fiction. With the exception of a few video scripts I wrote years ago, I haven’t really written any fiction at all. I don’t know if that makes this story bad, but I also don’t know if it will end up good. I wanted to do something different over the holiday weekend, and this is that, for better or worse.

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Contra Contra Contra

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Like pet cats, there are some articles you choose, while others choose you. This is one of the examples of an article that was foisted on me, specifically by Editor-Nick, who thought it was that Emily Oster’s Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty was the kind of thing I’d usually talk about, and noted that it was weird that I hadn’t yet.

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The other day Scott Alexander wrote a piece focusing on a few of the various jhana states of meditation. This falls pretty firmly into the category of “stuff I don’t know much about”, but he linked to an explainer of the general states here: As you reach each jhanic level, your mind will be tempted to remain at the previous jhanic state. Simply keep a balanced mind with no clinging to the pleasant or unpleasant and you will progress to the higher levels. The nine levels of jhana are:

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Because every once in a while I remember I'm supposed to do these

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Note: This is a shorter article about being stressed out. It might stress you out; if you don’t want that, you might avoid it. I haven’t written in a few weeks and wanted to get something out before I forgot how keyboards work, and this isn’t a normal-format article. I think there’s some value in writing pieces that describe the process of working through difficulties - at least I’ve found them helpful in the past.

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I have been described, in a negative way, as particularly “mercenary” compared to other writers. By this, the person meant that more of how I think about writing is related to money and the acquisition of the same than other writers, who presumably do it more out of a love of the art or a desire to tell their story than I do.

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(Author’s note: I have about fifty different friends who would all like this article to go in slightly different directions. They aren’t by any means being terrible about it, but I wanted whatever ends up in this article to be what I think about this topic, minimally influenced by who I like better and identify more with or who simply is more forceful at me in a way that makes me uncomfortable disagreeing.

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You can't build a vinegar house on baking soda foundations

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I don’t normally care that much about the titles of my articles, to the point where this is one of the leading complaints about my work. “How dare he?” says the HackerNews Commenter, noting that there are some small irregularities in my article title about an absurdist football novel featuring both Tim Tebow and an ancient, hidden techno-utopia who airdrops Happy Meals and

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I guess I spent a week making something weird again

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(BIG IMPORTANT NOTE: This post is related to another post introducing a game, and the game itself. If you haven’t seen either, it will make no sense to you.) Well, you’ve gotten tired of the game; welcome back. You are in questionable company, because I’m also really tired of the game as well. I love writing stuff for you, but this blog is far from my fulltime job. If a normal article takes one unit of time to write, this ended up taking five or six units.

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I definitely forgot the book club yesterday. I’m very sorry. This week’s discussion revolves around Book 1 of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. I’ll be dropping a big comment on my impressions a bit later today (maybe as late as tonight) but feel free to get the party started without me.

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There once was a guy who was very, very broke. To be clear, he wasn’t the brokest guy you’ve ever heard of. There were poorer people (he knew some, even) but he did spend a long, long time trying to raise a family on not a lot of money; think “a family of four on 35k or less in a major metropolitan area” destitute.

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Welcome back to the discussion thread. I’m trying to get this on a normal schedule but long-time readers will know having a job outside of this makes me really bad at anything more granular than “about once a week, I guess” in terms of publishing rhythm. I hope I improve on this, but for now enjoy the small amount of premium uncertainty I provide.

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A while back I wrote an article about my dad, who died several years ago. As many as several people liked it a lot; as a result, I ended up having several conversations about the article itself on a meta-level. People were interested to know about the process of writing an article like that - what it felt like, what effect it had on me, etc.

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I'm already married but it's time to build some engagement

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Your moral system is only as good as its enforcement mechanism

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For dozens of people I know, loneliness is the biggest problem in their lives. It eclipses every single other thing. It’s bigger than poverty; it overwhelms wealth. It is the first and most fundamental need they have and yet the need most likely to go unfulfilled.

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In which someone else does a better job so I don't have to do mine

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Hi Everyone! I have a full article coming later this week (expect it on Friday!). But I wanted to point you towards this interview over at Infovores - this should be the first of at-least-a-couple interviews and podcasts I’m doing in the near future.

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Previous entry here. Where we left off, we were still in the process of looking at the deductive side of SMTM’s arguments; that is, where they are reinforcing the strength of their eventual argument by trying to show other possible explanations for the obesity epidemic are unworkable.

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Note: This article has a fair amount of overlap with this one. Be forewarned and trust your priors on whether or not you’ll enjoy another. I’ve been running this blog for about a year and a half, and it’s been a blast. Part of that is just having a chance to write in a place people will actually see it. But I’m lucky to have that; in the same year and a half, I’ve seen multiple blogs made by reasonably proficient writers come into being only to stop existing a few months later because they couldn’t find an audience.

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Note: This article is about a religious figure, one who spends a lot of time instructing people in his religion on what he thinks God demands of them. As such this is gonna get pretty dang religious at some points. If you aren’t into that, cool. I just wanted to let you know.

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Entry 1 of ?: CICO/Willpower/Habit dismissal

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OK, so, there’s this thing where if you write a bunch you hope you eventually build up some trust with your audience. You try to be generally reliable and trustworthy in hopes that they come to believe you are generally reasonable, that you wouldn’t try to trick them, and that you aren’t David French. If any of these three things aren’t true, they rightfully come to distrust you.

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I once wrote an article about being poor, and I started it out with a story about a friend who had spent some time explaining to my wife (who, at the time, was struggling to maintain a household of four on entry-level retail money) how hard up for funds they were, and how stressful it was. The zinger of the story, such as it was, was that the woman and her husband were both doctors. They weren’t bad people, but they came from a context where things like “being broke” had entirely different meanings.

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(Author’s note: I’m not sure how much of a work in progress this article is. Usually, when I post something like this, people will hit me up with things I might have missed, or errors I’ve made/they think I’ve made. I think this is an important piece to be right on, so the piece itself might change a bit as time goes on.)

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Combat effectiveness for frequent library patrons

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I have been not-great at keeping up on this, but I do want to do it and I appreciate all the suggestions. Here’s what people have brought up (I haven’t double-checked all the author names/titles so minor mistakes may exist). I made a new section of the newsletter for this called “RC Interactive”. I think you have to subscribe to that section seperately and manually to get notifications about this. If that doesn’t seem to work, please let me know and I’ll figure it out. Let the voting begin!

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As I begin to write this post, you can probably figure out where I’m going with it. I’m conservative and I’m from Arizona; predictably, I hate the new Babylon that is California with a xenophobic passion that rivals a stomped ant nest. I think it’s reasonable to assume I wouldn’t write this article at all if in the end it turned out there actually wasn’t any problem and that the issues were the invention of a crazed right-wing media machine.

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One review to end them all and free me from this unending torment

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Like the Beggin' Strips Dog, I don't read

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This is how you remind you of who you really are

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What seems like a long time ago, The Atlantic had a section called Notes. The idea behind Notes was something between a curated comments section and letters to the editor; it was thought that various TA writers would be encouraged to respond to the strongest good-faith dissents related to articles they themselves had published on the main site. The plan was to eventually have multiple threads of conversation keeping things straight as the authors engaged in back-and forth on their own work. The expectation was that a reader could pop in and see several conversations evolving and growing in any given week, purposefully optimized for quality of thought and taking advantage of TA’s then-pretty-good readership to create a unique kind of content.

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A while back there was a writer known in communities I frequent (call her Jane) who wrote a think-piece explaining she was very, very upset about an issue. It was, by Jane’s telling, something like the great national sin of our age; it was a human rights violation of epic proportions. This was during the Trump presidency, when ostensibly genocide-equivalent human rights violations were a dime a dozen and dominated every moment of every cable news broadcast.

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Normally when I talk about individual writers on the blog, it’s - as the blog’s name indicates - to disagree with them. And to the extent I talk about anybody, I’m very likely to talk about Scott Alexander. I don’t read nearly as much as you might think, but I do consistently read his output, which I notice I disagree with him more often than anyone else.

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On jumbled prose, non-evidence and alternative explanations

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Here is where, when you have to ask me something, I have to answer.

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Entry one of probably several

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When I was younger, joke-telling was extremely important in my family culture. I have multiple memories of my dad hearing a new joke, calling one of his brothers to tell him the joke, and then immediately calling the next sibling in line so he could prevent the sibling

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Successes, Failure, and a Near-Complete Lack of Marketing Skills

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A few days ago, the big internet thing was, of all things, a restaurant review. The restaurant being reviewed was a Michelin-starred affair in southern Italy, represented by the authors as being the kind of place you go to not so much to eat as to feel as if you a special for eating there. They put it this way:

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Hello all, Very few people use this section, but I wanted to make sure it doesn’t look “dead” in case anyone needs it. As always, this is just for any advice, friendship or conversation you might need - I’m almost always available to talk.

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You wake up in an alien spaceship, carefully watched by an alien in a chair across the room. It’s apparently going to be one of those days.

Seeing you wake, the alien crosses the room and begins speaking.

I’ll make this really quick. I’m one of the bad kinds of aliens, by your reckoning. Specifically, I’m the ‘callous experimenter who doesn’t care that much about how you feel’ kind. I’ve stumbled into concept some of your people claim they believe they believe; they say individuals should be made to benefit groups or humanity as a whole, rather than just individuals. As the bad kind of alien, this obviously strikes me as the kind of thing people just say to make themselves look better, but I thought I’d give you the chance to prove me wrong.

The alien leads you to a room that’s empty except for a single waist-high pillar complete with the kind of red button you associate with nuclear launches or emergency cut-off switches on industrial equipment. He explains that if you don’t hit the button, humanity is doomed; he will wipe all human life off the face of the earth and build a vacation home there. If you push the button humanity will be saved, but at a cost: his computer will randomly select 1000 people, who will each be moved to an empty space outside of time; though no time will pass in the outside world, they will each individually experience a year alone in white-walled room with nothing to do.

It’s not a hard choice for you; that’s going to suck for the people chosen, but “destruction of the human race” clearly outweighs “a bad year for 1000 people”. You hit the button. The alien looks surprised but merely makes some notes without comment and teleports you home. Over the next few weeks, you see news stories indicating the alien was true to his word; patients are popping up in psych wards throughout the world, clearly traumatized and claiming they had the exact experience the alien claimed they would. A couple papers come out describing “hermitage syndrome”, but the world moves on pretty quickly; only you know the truth.

A few weeks later, you wake up in the spaceship again. The alien is visibly excited, and explains he just realized he made a very basic mistake:

So there I was, sitting around thinking about the experiment when it hit me: I only tested whether or not you’d make choices benefiting the group at the cost of a smaller amount of individuals. What I didn’t test – and this seems obvious now – is whether or not a particular earthling would make a choice that benefits humanity at a great cost to themselves.

He brings you to the button-room again and explains the cost/benefit math to pushing the button hasn’t changed at all, but instead of spreading the cost and making 1000 people spend a year in the room, he’s applying it directly to you. Either humanity is doomed, or you experience a millennia in a room, alone, with nothing but your thoughts to occupy you.

I think about this sometimes when I’m feeling good about how moral I’d like to think I am. More specifically, I think about scenarios like this where the right answer seems clear to me but where choosing it would come at some significant cost or difficulty. Would I, given the opportunity, hit a button that sacrificed my family to save the population of a country? Would I allow myself to be cast into some hell in place of one of my sons? Would I indeed manage to stay faithful to my wife during five years lost and unrecovered on naked woman island?

What matters in this particular mental exercise isn’t determining whether or not I choose the correct options – I think in each situation it would be very easy to say I would, but that outside the harsh reality of the actual confrontational moment these self-assurances don’t mean a whole lot. In each case, either the utility of the thing is clear, or my duties as self-defined and voluntarily sworn are. There’s no confusion as to what I should do, but I wouldn’t know where to even start in setting the odds that I would do them. And lest the extreme nature of the examples above mislead you, understand I’m similarly unsure I’d pass much more minor tests; I’m unsure, for example, that I could be consistently trusted to wake up at 2 AM, get dressed, and drive seven hours to Los Angeles to pick up a stranded friend.

Christianity is not unique among philosophical systems in acknowledging that the morality of man is weak and flawed, but as far as I know it makes the biggest deal out of the fact of all the major religions. In the dogma, all men are sinful and fall short of higher standards; repeated failure is not only known as a risk but absolutely expected of anyone. From the perspective of being within my religion, mental exercises like those above are useful to me in terms of correcting my mindset about myself from the inaccurate “I guess I’m a pretty decent guy; I’m as good as anyone else” to the less pleasing but more accurate “I’m one projected lever-pull from dooming humanity to save myself a comparatively small inconvenience, and one easy excuse from leaving a friend panicked and alone in a terrible city”.

EDITED TO ADD: When writing this, I was in the passenger seat while my wife took her shift driving back from LA. Not 30 minutes later, the engine on our car decided it wasn’t imploding nearly enough; we spent four hours at a gas station before we could get a tow truck and a friend to drive us home. Thanks, Michael!

Case in point: I have the good fortune of having a few subscribers to this blog who see fit to pay me, and thus some people I have a clear duty to in terms of creating content they might enjoy. I’ve had a very busy couple of months, but nothing beginning to touch on making me so busy I couldn’t have eked out a couple hours here and there to write a weekly article as I’m supposed to. But I didn’t; I had some level of obligation, and it was incredibly natural to simply ignore this obligation and watch a British priest solve mysteries instead of fulfilling it. This makes no sense if I’m a fundamentally good person who does good things from reflex, but it makes perfect sense if I’m a fundamentally flawed person who defaults to maximizing his own comforts and rewards above all else.

I highly suspect that if everyone acknowledged and kept front-of-mind the idea that they are in a moral car with shot alignment that without conscious correction constantly veers towards “bad stuff”, we’d live in a better world. I think moral behavior takes constant practice and a healthy amount of distrust of self. But I’m similarly suspicious that what I’ve done here in terms of trying to cast the color of my religion over the subject is going to convince approximately nobody of that point – I likely have just about everybody I can expect to win over with that tactic already.

What I’m interested in is figuring out how to communicate this concept or one with similar implications to a secular audience in a way that’s universally palatable to everyone. That’s a good deal harder than “God wants you to”, but I’ll give it a shot.

I’ve recently begun working in the world of technology start-ups, and in doing writing in that space I’ve found there’s a consistent philosophy among the companies there. Whatever words they decide to use to talk about it, it parses out to something like “good enough is not good enough”. There’s an idea that when you make products that are often intangible, entrenching yourself is much harder and offers much less safety. Companies that made their way by using better methodologies to destroy business models that had existed for generations are profoundly aware that the same could happen to them; if scrum and agile let them displace entire industries, some scrum or agile 2.0 edition could be utilized just as easily to put them out of a job. What was cutting edge enough to change the world ten years ago is bog-standard now, and bog-standard gets out-competed by the exceptional ten times out of ten.

CS Lewis talks about the idea that a rich person giving a great amount away might despite making a large impact be doing something that’s fundamentally easy for them; people they know are going to pat them on the back, and their riches might be such that a half-million dollars for them represents a smaller portion of their actual wealth than five dollars does to you. On the other hand, he says, some small dubious mercy from a street thug might be much more personally costly to the thug than the given fortune was to the wealthy man; his friends might mock him for it, and he’d potentially lose position and respect in a real way. The Bible’s story of the widow and her penny is similar; both stories paint a picture of giving as judged not only by the absolute value of the gift, but also as gaining a more profound spiritual weight when we judge the cost to the giver.

I think combining these things gets me in striking distance of what I want to talk about. The secular example speaks to the idea of evolving competitive environments; adequate is not a static concept. If the same is true of morality, and if one’s actions are judged relative to and in comparison to the actions of others, the person who coasts on yesterday’s ideas of morality is liable to get left in the dust by the guy who practices, keeps up with today’s methodologies and looks for new and exciting ways to innovate goodness. Of course, this only holds if you believe that excellence in this field is worth pursuing, but you probably do even if you aren’t particularly interested in actually doing it.

On the other side of things, you also live in a changing environment as far as resources are concerned; as a whole society is trending towards more resources, not less. It’s also trending towards more inequality, not less, especially in COVID times (I’m looking at you, software-engineer types who have done better, not worse during the pandemic. I’m in that boat; I know it’s a thing.). So for the most part we can say that those that have the resources to give have more than they’ve ever had and also have more opportunities to give of their wealth than ever. I’m not talking solely about money here; if you are socially rich, a quick look around will show you a sea of people absolutely drowning for want of other humans.

Staying competitive in a changing environment demands some sort of control mechanism to keep you on track. Whether or not you believe you are inherently veering towards bad, it would take a pretty healthy ego to believe you are naturally veering towards competitive excellence. Unless you have genuine faith that you are just naturally better than most people without even trying, you want some sort of system built up that nudges you towards the good. This is where the religious examples shine; they provide a signal light for the doing-enough threshold most of us would say we want to cross. And that signal light is, more than anything else, pain.

If you’ve accepted that the value of a good act includes relative personal cost in addition to the absolute value of the act itself, you’ve already moved into a world of proportions and percentages. It means that you are looking to verify that you are looking to feel the pinch as a confirmation that you’ve given a pinch-worthy sacrifice, something or a pile of somethings that add up to something that actually encroaches on your limits in an uncomfortable way. This is especially true if you want to continually improve; a workout that fails to leave you short of breath is one you’ve outgrown and a sign you are ready to move onto something more intense.

Please, please do not take this too be religious bragging. I’m not saying I’m good at any of this at all. When I go to look to see if I’m being a good friend to people, the answer is usually no. When I look to see how much of my money I break off for people who need it, it’s usually not impressive in terms of absolute value OR how much it hurt to give. And if you’ve been following along for any length of time you know a large part of my personality is becoming enraged at people over sometimes-small disagreements.

But I do want to do better, and I don’t think that’s exclusive to me or my religious brethren. I think atheists and fake Dave Matthews both agree in large part that being good is good; I think most would agree that being more good is even better. And I suspect that whether or not you get on board with a “humans are default-bad” framing, most people’s efforts to be good would see a benefit from staying actively aware that better-than-default goodness can only result from more-than-default effort, from more-than-default introspection and honesty in self-inspection, and more-than-default tolerance for sometimes-painful sacrifice.

I think it’s becoming more and more apparent as time goes on that good enough really isn’t good enough anymore; maybe it never was. I think the best we’ve probably got from letting “good person” be a title one can earn just by not being actively bad is people who are just that – usually not actively bad, even if they are sometimes aggressively mediocre at best. I’m one of those mediocre, but I think moving to a mindset of putting active effort into being a good person and thinking of that as something that takes work and active effort to maintain is the first step in moving from good to better.

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If I’m writing unfair generalizations about people of political alignments in the US, I might come up with something like this:

If I’m accusing a person on the political right of stealing my car, he might defend himself a lot of ways. He could say he didn’t do it. He could say I gave him permission and forgot. He could say someone else stole it, or that I just lost it. He could even say “tough luck, man. take it back if you can.” It’s not that a person on the left is that different - they might use all the same excuses.

But only a person on the left would think to tell me that they personally define cars as having three wheels, and that they couldn’t have possibly “stolen my car” when the object in question has four.

That’s not the best example I’ve ever written, but it’s also not wrong: the left loves to play fast and loose with words, changing the meanings to whatever fits their needs best at the moment. I thought about writing a long explainer on how this works, but examples are probably better and faster here:

The term racist used to mean a person who thought another race was inferior and would mistreat them because of that; now it means either someone who isn’t actively working against Ibram Kendi’s very specific definition of racism or anyone who disagrees with the left-at-large on any matter pertaining to race whatsoever (see also: white supremacy).
Man and Woman used to refer to biological sex, but now refer to the sex one feels most comfortable being. For a while people were resistant to this, so the term gender was used as a stop-gap to explain the difference between the sex one physically born as and the gender one felt or wished they were, but that’s now done. Having amassed enough social momentum, nobody in the elite social left talks about gender anymore, but simply demands that trans women and trans men are women and men, full stop.

Note that in both cases, the terms replace another term that gave us useful information; most people are still interested in knowing how a person would be classified in the original sex definition. Enough people are interested in knowing if someone actually dislikes people of another race as opposed to not voting a left ticket that the phrase “actual racist” is in pretty heavy use at the street level.

But in both cases the people actually replacing the meanings of the word have shown very little interest in replacing the words themselves; the goal has always been to supplant the meanings, to excise a part of the language and replace it with a meaning meant to reinforce a certain worldview. So where man now doesn’t mean “a person born male who is an adult” there’s no proposal to actually give us a word that means the same thing; the idea is not only to create a new definition, but to destroy the old one as well.

Finally, note that while the meaning of the word has changed, there’s an implicit demand that the impact or weight that the word originally carried doesn’t. As an object example, recall the “punch nazis” Twitter rhetoric of a few years ago. Nazi had at that point already been redefined, like racist, to functionally mean “anyone who disagrees with us significantly on any matter of race whatsoever”. But at the same time the desired weight of the word was one where the people described deserved anything that happened to them, to include physical violence. Ditto racist, where anybody accused of it should lose their job and be banished from discourse. Ditto woman or man, where the demand is that the new definitions have the same implications as the old, crossing over into things like the implications on sports teams and if your romantic choices make you a bigot.

But directly redefining terms as opposed to changing the terms used is only one way this happens. As a example, the euphemistic treadmill is the exact opposite; the term itself is changed but not the direct meaning, which is hoped to change in the minds of people over time (think undocumented immigrant vs. illegal immigrant.).

This kind of control over words is powerful. The left often demands we change a word, and when successful demands that reality itself has changed to accommodate the new language standard. They control words that based on their historic meanings have tremendous power to condemn, but can contort the meanings in any direction that’s useful to them at the moment. Their ability to do this has changed the entire media and political landscape a huge amount in a distressingly short amount of time; it’s now pretty much accepted that any racial misstep (again, as defined by the left) is enough to get someone fired so they serve as a warning to anyone else who might step out of line.

I’m anonymous on Substack for this reason - it would be really, really easy for almost anyone on the left to declare I fall under the flexible definition of a word they control and absolutely destroy me; they’ve done it to much bigger and better defended people before. Couple that kind of power with the fact that the right is traditionally really, really bad at using the same tools and the reality that the left’s power to do this is greatly amplified by their near-complete control of mainstream and social media, and you can start to see how this power is a very, very big deal to them.

But recently I’ve begun to see what I think are signs that the power isn’t working as well anymore; if I’m right, it’s going to mean a sea change for the power of the left to persuade and convince the masses.

Part of the reason tactics like these work is because language is already pretty fluid even before we consider efforts to exploit that fluidity. To pick an example, consider the term weeaboo. It originated from a (very weird and possibly NSFW?) comic, and was later recast to mean something like “Anglo westerner who likes Japanese culture a lot”. The abbreviated term “weeb” is used that way, but also sometimes as generically as “mega-nerd”.

If a person who had just used weeb to mean “western person who likes Japanese culture a lot, possibly too much” was countered by someone saying “No, that’s not what that word means; the original use was to describe a very bizarre way of wasting company time in a weird comic”, they’d have a complaint: the description of the original usage is technically correct, but it’s also ignoring the way the use of the word has organically changed over time.

If 2021 has a buzzword besides “Covid” it’s probably CRT; you already know that this stands for critical race theory, and technically originally referred to a specific legal framework dealing with interactions between race and law. It’s also used at least sometimes to refer in a more general way to the same kind of interactions as the relate to the social and political. At the most vague end of things, CRT is often used as a derogative term by the right, often as a scare-quotes term meant to draw out a sort of “Weird and unreasonable race stuff the left is trying to pull” impression in listeners.

The right figured out that pushing the vague definition of CRT was an effective way of riling up their base, especially as applied to teaching regarding race, race relations and their implications in a K-12 environment. By doing this, they hoped to get parents who were concerned about how these things were being taught to recoil from the political/elite left, which broadly if subtly supports a method of teaching these things that might, say, rely on the writings of Ibram Kendi or similar writers with modern, relatively extreme views on racial issues. To some extent at least this was working; many parents were broadly worried about the issue.

I’m lucky in that I don’t actually have to interrogate which of the many definitions of CRT is the correct one; you can believe any or all of them are appropriate and it doesn’t affect what came next. What’s important is how the left tried to deal with the issue of parents being concerned about what was being taught in schools under any name, and the disaster this brought down on them.

Broadly, the left settled on a simple tactic: they would use their usually-ironclad control of words to point out that CRT was not being taught in schools in the sense that elementary school students weren’t literally being put through classes on CRT as it was defined in the “strictly a legal framework taught in legal school” sense. This was technically true, but they then tried to leverage it into a much more daring move: trying to convince parents that since CRT wasn’t being taught in schools by their narrow definition, that nothing the parents could reasonably object to was happening in schools, and that being at all concerned about any potential teachings in that vein was irrational and possibly racist.

That sounds really harsh, but here’s Terry McAuliffe making that argument and invoking trump as part of his campaign for Governor of Virginia:

RNC Research @RNCResearchWATCH: Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe falsely claims Critical Race Theory is “made up." October 10th 2021

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I really hate to see what Glenn Youngkin is trying to do to Virginia what Donald Trump did with our country. I really hate to see the division, the hatred we’re putting these children in this horrible position. Let’s just be clear - we don’t teach critical race theory. This is just a made up, this is a Trump, Betsy DeVos, Glenn Younkin Plan to divide people.

Post-election, you still saw pieces like this from MSNBC:

Ultimately, his campaign settled on a game plan that seemed to resonate deeply with white voters in Virginia: targeting school lesson plans that address inequality and social justice. Youngkin adopted the conservative strategy of falsely grouping these lesson plans under the label of “critical race theory,” and he promised to ban such teachings “on day one” if elected. Critical race theory is a college-level field of study that’s not taught in Virginia K-12 schools, but it’s become a catchall phrase for intellectually lazy people — many of them white — who want to stigmatize any discussion about American racism.

Overall the messaging was pretty clear - this isn’t CRT, since CRT is only a college thing; thus, there’s nothing going on at all. Anybody who thought different was either being fully tricked (if you believe McAuliffe) or a dumb racist (from MSNBC’s point of view). This was a slightly different kind of word-control from the examples before; here, they claimed a label didn’t apply to something people were worried about, and thus that the thing they were worried about didn’t exist at all.

I have to say I thought this had a good chance of working; in that, I think the evidence shows I was joined by McAuliffe, MSNBC, et al. But it didn’t; as you know by now Virginia went very, very poorly for Democrats. The tactic didn’t work; parents went on being very worried about what was taught to their children.

Again, I’m not actually here to interrogate who was right on CRT in this case. I’m looking at a tactic that you’d normally expect to work just fine, the kind of playing fast-and-loose with the definition of words that traditionally has let them destroy people with minimal effort. And it not only didn’t work, they lost big in a place they should have won.

And that’s not the only thing that’s cracking. When was the last time you saw an accusation of “racist” carry any weight outside of, say, a company as large and explicitly (forgive me) woke-friendly as Disney. The phrase “actual racist” is in heavy play among normal people as something to disambiguate between the new definition of the word as opposed to someone who might actually hurt someone, treat someone badly or even think less of someone based on their race. People are fairly heavily resisting the shift from demands that people use the words man and woman for trans men and trans women as opposed to actually treating them as exactly equivalent in all cases. White Supremacy is completely broken as a term at this point; it’s so bad it’s impossible to know what someone is even accusing someone of when it’s used unless you read the surrounding context (which is still no guarantee).

It’s also worth noting again that Republicans are traditionally pretty bad at using the same tactics; they just aren’t very good at redefining terms and getting new meanings for terms into circulation. But that wasn’t true here - for better or worse they’ve been able to take CRT and turn it from it’s original usage into something useful for them. Whether or not that describes something real to people (the voters thought it did), that’s abnormal for them; it’s something they wouldn’t normally be successful at. So what changed?

People build up callouses when exposed to repeated stimulus. I’m obviously someone who leans to the right, and I can speak from experience saying that hearing someone on Twitter call someone a racist or a bigot doesn’t have any effect on me anymore. I think that’s broadly true for most people on the right; having accusations aimed at their cultural tribe is just something we broadly tune out at this point, at least until we can get the full facts.

The right got used to this trick sooner than anyone else, by virtue of being the people who took the brunt of the cultural damage from it’s use, but it makes sense that eventually that desensitization would spread out from the usual targets to people who were merely hearing the accusations and seeing them used. People if nothing else get bored with stuff like this, and get to where another person being called a white supremacist (or whatever) stops having the excitement necessary to hold their interest.

That’s especially true if they have anything - anything at all - that helps to discourage them from resisting these word-games. In the case, you had parents who were legitimately worried that school had shifted even further to being a place where the state’s kids were brought up to state viewpoint standards as opposed to being a place that taught their kids things they actually wanted them to learn, and it failed. But it’s easy to imagine it working; the people using the tactic of going “no, see, this exact word doesn’t apply here so there’s no problems at all. Unless you are, perhaps, a racist?” is something that the left at least thought would work. I think it’s at least plausible something changed here.

In the case that I’m right, it’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this is. The left controls the widely available national dialogue; they have the sympathy and help (or at least fear and subsequent deference) of nearly every large news source and virtually every social media company. A big part of how they’ve grown that control and maintain it in the last few decades is using their better-than-the-right control language as an enforcement tool.

If their ability to convince people that reality has changed just because words have is lessened, that’s something we’d expect to have a huge impact on their ability to do business. It’s something I’ll be watching; the writing isn’t exactly on the wall, but I think the cracks are starting to show.

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Like most people, I had a long period where I felt somewhat underutilized at work (and, to a lesser extent, in my life). I had long, easy hours of completely meaningless paperwork to do at low pay and very little in the way of socio-economic status rewards. Whatever was keeping me going wasn’t work, except perhaps on the days I’d make myself “best secretary ever” certificates using company-owned printers and paper.

Now, at the same time, I had good friends and family, but I’ve found that most people aren’t satisfied with any single good aspect in their lives; they need a stack of things, some permutation of family, work, hobbies, faith, friends and giving eventually gaining enough diversion-mass to fill their days. To the extent my work left a void, I filled it with a video game.

Tales of Maj E’yal (TOME, for short) is a punishingly hard top-down dungeon crawling affair once called Tales of Middle Earth before the Tolkien family proved itself not above getting litigious with a small-time one-man-show video game developer. It’s in the Roguelike genre, which for those who aren’t familiar basically means there’s minimal safety nets and high stakes by video game standards. If you die in TOME, your character stays dead; no matter how close to victory you were, you are restarting from the very beginning.

Note that as weeby as it might be to some for me to write articles about playing video games, knowing more about TOME would likely raise whatever mental image of my nerdiness you might have about me an order of a magnitude. For one, despite being for the most part a combat-and-exploration affair, TOME is a slow-paced, turn based and surprisingly tactical type of game of the sort where you make (hopefully thoughtful) choices about your next move based on the cooldowns of a dozen slightly different attacks and often spend at least as much time fleeing like a coward as you do filling monsters with arrows (or whatever; not everyone plays archer).

Oh, and if you were expecting the graphics to prop the thing up, know that it looks like this:

This is a hard, hard game with few bells and whistles; one of the major appeals or demerits of the experience is that it’s punishingly difficult, to the extent that it’s a matter of much debate among friends I’ve browbeat into playing the game whether or not TOME is even fun. I’d like to forcefully disagree with them, but that’s hard; half the time, I’m not sure if I enjoy it myself. It’s clunky. There’s hardly any plot and exactly zero compelling characters. The game itself isn’t incredibly long, and the gameplay is fairly repetitive. There’s a lot to hate.

With all that said, I have owned this game for seven years, and during that time I have logged more than a fulltime work-year playing it.

When I first bought TOME, I was a gigantic failure. I had tried and failed to be a small businessman, and was several additional failures deep into finding anything resembling good-paying or meaningful work. In fact, that’s probably part of why I bought it; TOME is ~$7 now; at the time it was under $5. It was very likely all I could afford at the time.

Having limited options was actually probably a good thing as far as TOME/me relations went, because it’s the kind of game you start and hit rage-quit levels of dying in almost immediately. It has a steep learning curve; it was, as I recall, months and dozens of perma-deaths before I managed to claw my way to the end and keep the bad guys from destroying the world, or whatever they were up to. But I found that barely squeaking out that particular victory simulated something I was missing from my life at the time. The victory didn’t matter, but it felt like it did.

One thing that TOME is not short of is difficulty levels, so I started working my way through them. For whatever reason, the particular ways I’m not entirely neurotypical demand that I play the game as a skeleton archer; it was as a skeleton archer that I made my way through normal, nightmare, and insane difficulty levels. Only madness remains.

Yes, “Madness” is the name of the difficulty level. And yes, it’s appropriate. The way TOME difficulty levels work is that they both increase enemy buffs (think taking twice as many hits to kill a bear) and by increasing randomness (some bears are now named enemies who can shoot fireballs, basically mini-bosses). The flavor text is not exaggerating when it describes the last difficulty level as an “absolutely unfair game setting”; by the time you reach madness, any given bear has a chance of appearing as a unique demi-god skilled in the use of time magic who can’t be harmed with physical weapons.

Winning at the game I’m describing isn’t just a matter of skill or dedication; winning on madness shares more in common with hitting a $50,000 jackpot on a slot machine than it does with skill or making wise gameplay decisions. This is a game where sometimes you run into enemies you can’t hurt. There are whole bonus levels that would be necessary for you to clear in order to be strong enough to kill the end bosses on normal difficulty that you can’t actually enter without dying on madness (I’m officially sorry to TOME’s lame love interest character for not actually trying to save her from optional-dungeon cultists for the last four years, by the way). Sometimes you walk around a corner and an invisible enemy you had no chance of even knowing was there kills you in a single shot - no mistakes made, but you are starting from scratch anyway.

Lest you think I’m just really really bad at this game, know that what I’m trying to do is hard enough that nobody has ever actually done it; there’s an official archive in which one can look up game wins, and across the nearly a decade TOME has existed nobody has beat a madness run with a skeleton archer. If I was to do it, I’d be the only person in history to have done it; I’d have a gold medal in something nobody cares about, the champion of a thing nobody does.

I actually checked in with some people in the TOME discord involved in the development of the game to see if I was reading the archive correctly, and they confirmed a few things I had suspected; Not only has nobody ever beaten the game as a madness skeleton archer, but madness wins themselves are rare. The majority of them are considered to be hacks of some kind or another. But more importantly, beating the game as a skeleton archer probably isn’t doable in any conventional sense. It’s one of several builds that isn’t considered “viable” at the upper levels of the game; it’s more weird that I’ve even gotten as far as I have.

The makers of the game basically consider what I’m trying to do impossible. I’m still not sure I will ever stop trying to do it.

In trying to find comparisons to what I’m trying to do, this video jumped to mind:

That video is 20 minutes long, so don’t feel like you have to watch it. The quick summary is this: in 1998, a Doom speedrunner set a record for beating the very first level of the game in just under ten seconds. This record was so insanely near frame-for-frame perfection, adhering so closely to what’s even possible, that it stood for 20 years before it was broken by almost a full second, which doesn’t sound like much until you remember that’s a >10% improvement.

The guy who beat the record says what he did is beatable, but before you hold your breath waiting for someone to get to sub-8-second times, understand that it’s not as easy as it sounds. Not only does it require frame-perfect play of the bouncing off of doors as you wait for them to open so you can build momentum before you scrape through with a hair’s clearance variety, there’s also a lot of random elements in play; enemy movement is random, so they may or may not be in the way of any given run.

Worse than that, part of beating the level in record time is the enemies failing to shoot you in the face (which is random) as you run towards them but succeeding in shooting you in the back as you run away from them with frame-perfect randomly-determined timing (still random, and also supremely unlikely). So it’s no wonder it took the record-breaker tens of thousands of tries to do what he did, and that only two people have gotten close to the same performance since. But - and I mean this, no matter how nerdy it sounds - can you imagine how good breaking that record must have felt?

I used to think about the concept of being really good at tying one’s shoes. Everybody can do it; most people can do it pretty well. Some people have seen this TED talk and can do it correctly. But somewhere in the world there’s a guy who is the best at it; he can tie his shoes quicker than any other living person, better than anybody else in the history of mankind. And yes, probably nobody cares. But isn’t it something? Even if it doesn’t matter to anybody, doesn’t it still matter in some spiritual, universal sense, like Plato is somewhere appreciating that particular ideal?

Some of you will remember this commercial for Yoohoo, the ultra-gross chocolate milk analogue nobody likes that somehow still exists:

Somewhere in the persistent fantasy universe of 90’s beverage commercials, this kid’s brother still exists, and there’s no way he’s successful. This isn’t the kind of guy who goes to college or gets marketable skills; this is a guy who unwittingly gets too close to a ponzi scheme and is subsequently used as a scapegoat when everything comes crashing down, whose resultant criminal record means he’s in the pay-by-the-week apartment class of living, barely scraping by, wearing the same outfit to the family Christmas party every year because it’s the only button-down shirt he owns.

But you know what? The kid is right; he can nail a cross-room no-net Yoohoo cap shot into a fishbowl he uses exclusively for that purpose at will. And that’s not nothing. Nobody cares about it, but it actually is something; the kid isn’t wrong to appreciate it. With the eyes of youth, he has accurately assessed the beauty of the accomplishment. I sound like I’m kidding; I’m not.

I spent something like a decade drowning in unsuccess; anything I tried to do wilted like a poisoned weed. The jobs I wanted I couldn’t get; the jobs that seemed like they were leading into something better didn’t. This is the dumbest and truest thing I will say all week: there were a lot of times when trying to do this stupid, nothing thing was the only thing that gave me enough of an illusion of progress that I could keep going. It doesn’t matter, but it mattered so much.

I once asked my dad why people would spend their whole lives (up to a point, at least) doing things like discus and shot put; they are objectively boring to watch, and seemed an awful lot like they were objectively boring to do. He told me that Olympic sports were supposed to be things like that; the point wasn’t that it was incredible to watch, but instead that it was something you could work on making perfect. That records in those sports were still being improved on after however many centuries. Later in my life I met an Olympic gold medalist, and I understood; the dude had a presence. Here was a guy who had brushed so close to perfection that he could smell it, who had approached the limits of what was possible.

And then there’s competitive long-distance dry casters:

And, yes, it’s a very different kind of guy than an Olympic shot-put medalist. But they are actually still doing the same thing - they’ve picked something, and they are working on making it better, on doing better at it than anyone has ever done. It’s fundamentally the same, even if nobody thinks so.

There’s a story about a guy who stops to ask a stoneworker why he’s spending so much time carving details into the top of a pillar since top of the pillar would end up so far off the ground that nobody would ever see the intricacy. The stoneworker looks up at the guy and says “God will see."

I’m realistically never going to beat this video game. I’m not sure I even want to at this point. It’s possible some power-gamer will read this and go “I’ll show him!” and go beat it before I can - I think if that happened I’d find another unbeatable class and start grinding that. I’m not sure it’s about winning; I think I just want to feel like I’m brushing up against some human limit, stretching some corner of what we can do out a little further, even if it’s in an objectively dumb way.

Someone reading this probably has something similar - there’s certainly enough guys I’ve known who were proud of being able to really tie a tie or pack a bowl or whatever that I know there has to be some guy out there who is putting some amount of self-worth on how well he tills his garden or fries an egg, or something. I have a friend who plays an obscure puzzle game, and he’s the best guy in the world at it. He’s proud of it, but I’m not sure he’s proud enough - that matters, right? He found this thing and made it better; no human has ever gone so far in that realm. It’s something.

To that guy: I get it. I may not understand what you are doing, but I think I understand why it’s important to you. More than that, I think I understand why it’s important in general; it’s the expression of an abstractly good human impulse to push on limits and to move towards excellence. So keep doing it, especially if, like me, you need to to get through your days. But know it’s not just you; there’s at least one other person who understands that it matters.

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I really owe an awful lot to Scott Alexander. If nothing else, he’s had a huge influence on the way I write. I first became acquainted with his work in my twenties, and I’ve read virtually everything he’s written since then. He’s a solid writer, and he was and remains one of the few people I’m aware of who tackles complex subjects in an in-depth way both effectively and without hiding behind big words or academia-speak. If my writing sometimes comes off as being produced by a discount-brand Scott, there’s a reason for that.

He also taught me a few important lessons, one of which is that it shouldn’t ever be acceptable to make shitty arguments to people you know will agree with you. As an agnostic mostly-left type of guy he’s very much not in my bubble in most ways, but where I find myself disagreeing with him it’s not because he’s counting on his choir to accept his preaching - he has always worked pretty hard on his arguments. When I started reading Slate Star Codex, the world was awash in people making arguments just good enough to be accepted by their in-groups; SSC set a higher standard.

So he’s a decent guy, really solid writer whose work I love and who is a huge influence on me. I appreciate him, and to this very day I continue to read basically everything he writes.

And then he goes and writes stuff like this, and my heart breaks.

The linked article above is a response to a recent controversy regarding a Rolling Stone article claiming that patients are overdosing on the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin, and are flooding Oklahoma emergency rooms to such an extent that gunshot victims are being left on the side of the road to die. Further, these would mostly or entirely be instances of people self-medicating, often with doses of the drug meant for animals. If true, the practical implications would be pretty bad; it would mean that a group of people were disregarding expert advice and imposing serious, lethal externalities on uninvolved parties.

The implications are also heavily politically coded. In the US, ivermectin is widely regarded as a right-wing thing (two separate links there, mind you). To the extent this article is true, it reads to anyone familiar with US journalists as something like “See? Conservatives everywhere are selfish murderers. This is a Trump thing, right? Trump is pretty bad” or similar. For the very left-leaning Rolling Stone, this is absolutely a hard jab at their out-group; it confirms everything they already knew about the idiocy of those who lack less than complete confidence in the FDA, the CDC or their overall handling of the pandemic. The bigger and worse this is, the better they are and the worse their enemies look.

If you’ve already clicked the linked article above, you are at least partially aware that this claim has not gone well for Rolling Stone. A hospital in Oklahoma at which the doctor quoted in their article had worked tried to step out of the crossfire by revealing that they hadn’t had a single patient with any kind of ivermectin complications at all, let alone enough that they were leaving people to die in order to treat horse-medicine self-dosers. This in turn caused basically everyone to turn around and ask “You didn’t rush to print this claim on the unsubstantiated word of a single previously unknown doctor, right?” Rolling Stone’s confirmed that, yeah, basically they did:

Update: One hospital has denied Dr. Jason McElyea’s claim that ivermectin overdoses are causing emergency room backlogs and delays in medical care in rural Oklahoma, and Rolling Stone has been unable to independently verify any such cases as of the time of this update….Following widespread publication of his statements, one hospital that the doctor’s group serves, NHS Sequoyah, said its ER has not treated any ivermectin overdoses and that it has not had to turn away anyone seeking care. This and other hospitals that the doctor’s group serves did not respond to requests for comment and the doctor has not responded to requests for further comment. We will update if we receive more information.

Note that at this point, RS has played pretty dirty regardless of whether the claims end being true or not. A nobody showed up and made an incredible claim, and they printed the claim as true without the slightest bit of verification. This is bad. It’s worse if you think that you should have anything like a higher standard of proof when you are printing an article that tickles your biases and makes your enemies look bad, but even discounting that it’s pretty terrible journalism.

It’s a bit worse because the available data on ivermectin overdose seems to indicate the story’s conclusions aren’t even possible. Scott linked to this Yglesias tweet:

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesiasIn percentage-wise terms there has been a huge increase in Ivermectin-related poison control calls but it’s from a low base.

But the good news is the scorn and mockery seems to be working and the numbers are going back down.

piper.filecamp.com/uniq/ZO3aGrYGX… September 5th 2021

46 Retweets385 LikesSomething like 9% of ivermectin exposures were bad enough to perhaps require hospitalization; that’s ~100 people. Even if they were all in Oklahoma as opposed to the 2-5 we’d expect, that’s probably not enough to overload all the emergency rooms in the way described.

We find ourselves with a pretty straightforward story - Rolling Stone played dirty/lazy, got caught, and immediately backed off. Anybody writing about this in a normal way has a pretty easy job; they just report someone misbehaved and got called on it. But as you probably already guessed, this isn’t what happened.

Presented with the story above, Scott wrote this article (I know I’ve linked it twice; please go read it). As opposed to my take above, Scott casts this as a “everyone is trying to trick you” sort of read; he essentially acknowledges that Rolling Stone printed an extraordinary claim that is by all important measures false, but takes a surprising turn when assessing the people who called them on it; he treats them as if they are liars as well, coequal partners in deceit. Here’s his phrasing when revealing that Rolling stone is full of shit:

The media was already looking to discredit ivermectin. So the report of one doctor - without even a phone call to confirm - was good enough for Rolling Stone, The Guardian, BBC, etc. It was “too good to check”.

He then doubles back, revealing that Tweets like this:

Were equally bullshit:

So I tried checking, and noticed that the third reply to the original tweet was this:

In case you’re as confused as I am, NHS here = “Northeastern Health System”, an Oklahoma health care group. Britain is not involved.This…turns out to be completely true. The story never mentions Sequoyah Hospital! Dr. McElyea has worked at Sequoyah in the past, but he’s a traveling doctor and works lots of places. Plausibly Sequoyah just wanted to clarify that they weren’t like the hospitals in the story, they’re not turning away gunshot victims, and if you happen to be a gunshot victim you’re still welcome to go to Sequoyah and can expect timely care.

Apparently I’m not the only person who doesn’t scroll down to the third tweet. The right-wing Washington Examiner has an article on how Rolling Stone’s Ivermectin Fiction Shows Why Republicans Don’t Trust Media. Fox has an article on Rolling Stone Forced To Issue Update After Viral Ivermectin Story Turns Out To Be False. One Redditor puts it more bluntly: “Dr. Jason McElyea, who has been claiming that emergency rooms have been turning away gunshot victims because of Ivermectin overdoses, is a liar.” None of these sources mentioned that the original article had never claimed Sequoyah Hospital was involved.

Their story was - I guess - too good to check.

This makes sense at first glance, but Scott actually has to be incredibly contorted to get into this position. He’s a good writer and hides it, but to break it down:

Rolling Stone has printed an article coded to stick it to those stupid conservative republicans on the word of a single here-to-fore unknown doctor. This is already absolutely very bad no matter what the truth ends up being here.
Scott is saying conservative outlets are wrong for pointing this out, because they are relying on the official press release of an Oklahoma hospital reporting that the situation on the scene is that nobody has showed up for any ivermectin-related problems at all, which is 100% inconsistent with what you’d expect if the claims of the doctor in question were true.

It’s not impossible to honestly believe both 1 and 2, so long as you believe that one Oklahoma hospital in the territory in which that doctor works is so atypical in some way that it can have zero ivermectin cases while other hospitals are absolutely overloaded. But Scott doesn’t seem to actually believe this:

Sequoyah Hospital might not be the particular hospital that the doctor in the story was thinking of. But isn’t it suspicious that other hospitals are so packed with ivermectin cases that they have to delay care to gunshot victims, yet Sequoyah says that it “has not treated any patients due to complications of treating ivermectin”? Seems weird for there to be that much difference.

Stripped of all the careful framing, Scott’s asking you to look at a situation where a publication made an incredibly unlikely claim relying on a single source of unknown quality, got called on it with very reasonable evidence that its claims were false and conclude that both the people committing the journalistic assault on an outgroup and those defending themselves from it are equally wrong. And he’s asking you to believe this in a situation where even the original offending publication has pretty much thrown up its hands and gone “Welp, you caught us… haha, right? Crazy how we did that.”

It’s hard to say what could have prevented this “everybody was equally wrong” framing. An awful lot of the work Rolling Stone should have done to vet this story has already been done for them. It’s hard to pin down how much Scott would need here before he’d be OK with people noting that the already-unbelievable claim was incredibly likely to be factually false; would official statements from 20% of Oklahoma hospitals have been enough? Would missing a single hospital and thus leaving open a slight possibility that there was a hospital at which this was true be insufficient?

I obviously think he’s wrong here, but the reasons why I think he’s wrong is this way probably aren’t what you think.

In 2018, Scott wrote an article sketching out the differences between conflict theory and mistake theory as explanations for political differences between groups. The article is worth a read, but a quick summary of both is that conflict theorists believe they are involved in a high-stakes war driven purely by passion where facts don’t matter at all, and that mistake theorists understand we are all involved in an ongoing debate where good faith and good ideas will eventually prevail - as opposed to conflict theorists who believe their opponents are ruthlessly trying to destroy them and thus must be ruthlessly destroyed, mistake theorists believe differences in opinion are primarily due to simple mistakes one or more parties have made and that calmly talking them out will solve them.

If this seems like an oversimplification and that no person should believe his opponents are acting entirely in good faith or that dialogue should be abandoned even if they aren’t, I agree. But the article has none of that nuance. Scott describes mistake theorists in words that make them seem like good-hearted logicians beaming love down from a Bayesian Olympus, while conflict theorists get language seemingly meant to invoke bloody communist revolutions:

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

Mistake theorists view debate as essential. We all bring different forms of expertise to the table, and once we all understand the whole situation, we can use wisdom-of-crowds to converge on the treatment plan that best fits the need of our mutual patient, the State. Who wins on any particular issue is less important creating an environment where truth can generally prevail over the long term.

Conflict theorists view debate as having a minor clarifying role at best. You can “debate” with your boss over whether or not you get a raise, but only with the shared understanding that you’re naturally on opposite sides, and the “winner” will be based less on objective moral principles than on how much power each of you has. If your boss appeals too many times to objective moral principles, he’s probably offering you a crappy deal.

Note that he assigns all good qualities to people who don’t believe there’s a conflict, and all the questionable qualities to people who do. I think this makes more sense when you consider that Scott cut his teeth in an era where polarization was already increasing at an alarming pace, and was broadly successful at least partially because he was so damn reasonable; he went to great lengths to give both sides an equal shake and to work hard to weigh things dispassionately, and most of his fame-related rewards came out of that.

Where that becomes a negative is in situations like this. Scott is so very, very deeply committed to the “Conflict = Bad” line of thinking and mentally avoiding all instances of “my side is right” that he simply won’t deviate from it even when non-deviation means his commentary is substantially wrong, as I believe is the case (and as I believe he knows is the case) here. His commitment to both-sides-are-fine-let’s-come-together thinking is so strong that he’s basically incapable of calling out one side more than another; he’d no sooner acknowledge one side was worse here than he would be to use a term like “libtard”, and for what I suspect are for him internally consistent reasons.

The easiest and most accessible reason for why Scott is like this is simple political bias; a lot of people think that he’s simply more politically attuned to the left, and cuts them extra slack. On a surface level this makes sense. He’s a San Francisco kind of guy who lives in some kind of commune. He’s in a profession where most of his colleagues are going to lean very far to the left. I think that it’s reasonable to assume he likes the left better than the right (see the link in the next paragraph for why), but I don’t really think that’s the sole driver here.

If I’m accusing Scott of enforcing a reasoning on himself that often makes him wrong, I at least want to acknowledge that he puts his money where his mouth is to a greater extent than I’d expect from anyone else. Where the NYT decided to dox him in what sure-as-shit looked like a pretty blatant hit piece that was only partially averted by a massive public outcry, he was pretty consistent to this principle; at least outwardly he pretty much blamed himself equally with them. At the time I said this:

When you combine these two things, you get what you are seeing: Scott desperately wants to believe that he can win over the left and be accepted and important in their world, even though the left has made it clear they want none of this to the extent a non-monolithic group can make things clear. At the same time, this desire makes it really easy to correct towards over-charitability - even when it’s clear the NYT has treated him unfairly for reasons that almost certainly have to do with politics, he believes he can’t and shouldn’t acknowledge the most probable explanation.

I do think his political leanings played into how he reacted to his persecution at the time, but I want to be clear: for most people in a similar situation, I’d expect political leanings and bias would go out the window as soon as they themselves were threatened. The fact that Scott’s reactions were still “nobody can ever be blamed for anything in a way that can be construed as partisan” says something about him; he’s really really ridiculously committed to this principle.

That means Scott is a really mixed bag as far as reliability is concerned. For all the problems that you would expect when someone is uncharitable to their opponents (problems I’m prone to, for the record), he’s going to be very reliable; nobody is going to work harder to be fair to a fault than Scott is. This is far from worthless. If this was all he had, he’d be unique enough to be worth reading because of it; his excellent writing and research skills are icing on a cake that was already birthday party ready.

But when you look at the obverse side of the coin, he’s going to be supremely unreliable in situations where “somebody did something wrong, and should be blamed for it” is part of the equation necessary to get to a maximally accurate answer. He just can’t do it, and to all appearances never will.

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*In February of 2025, the first cases of the Epsilon virus are documented in Argentina. Epsilon is not actually a Coronavirus, but by the time this information is beaten through the thick-ish skulls of legacy media, the name has stuck; the longer official name of the virus goes mainly unused.

Lacking the backing of a robust tradition of epidemiology, the initial data gathered is sparse but frightening. Once adjustments for the generally low quality of Belizian rural healthcare are taken into account, it looks like Epsilon will be similarly contagious as compared to Covid-19, but roughly 10 times as fatal if nothing else changes in our general handling of epidemics.*

To get possible confusion out of the way quickly, this is a parable; there’s no Epsilon right now, as far as I know. This article is about talking about what we can probably expect if there was; if you were getting ready to panic purely because you thought this was a real thing today, then take a deep breath - everything is pretty much as under control today as it was yesterday.

On the flip side, this article is definitely about getting you to panic for other reasons, or at least getting you to panic in ways consistent with your own personal stated hysteria thresholds. It’s also about what we say we care about being thrown into contrast with what we focus on; this always matters, but especially matters here when you likely feel either lives or lifestyles are on the line.

I think the first thing to cover here is how easily this all could have been worse. In the italics-world I’m projecting above, we are talking about something like a 1000% increase in deaths. Is this extreme or unlikely? Possibly. But it’s certainly not impossible.

With the CDC currently estimating 120,200,000 US cases of Covid and something like 720,000 deaths, that’s a death rate of ~0.6%. A 6% death rate might seem outside of the realm of possibility, but some 6 million people were hospitalized for Covid, and our hospitals were stretched to bursting in a lot of cases accommodating those - any increase in severity or transmission rates would likely have a disproportionate effect on death rates beyond what you’d expect from a flat increase in numbers alone.

Or, to think of it another way: about six million people were hospitalized for Covid; if covid was severe enough that about 50% of those hospitalizations resulted in death, we’d be at 5x based on that.

Or, to think about it another way: You probably don’t think Covid was an intentionally engineered super-weapon, but you also likely understand that the technology to weaponize viruses on the scale of global pandemics isn’t that far off in any case. If we haven’t seen a 10x Covid virus yet, it would still be weirder than not if one didn’t exist in the next 20 years even if only in a petri dish.

If you just can’t imagine something worse than Covid, I get it; it’s not a strictly enforced prerequisite for reading the article. But even if Covid is a providence-enforced modern-age epidemic maximum and we will never see anything worse, it honestly should be bad enough; 720k deaths is huge. The effect on the economy was horrifying. Even on a cultural/social level we paid huge costs in terms of lost time with friends and family and involuntary hermit-like existence.

Covid could have been much, much worse, but even if it couldn’t it’s nothing we want to experience again.

The good news is that Moderna and Pfizer aren’t sitting on their hands. Well before the general public is aware of the enormity of the threat posed by Epsilon, they have a working vaccine in hand, just as was the case with Covid-19. Better news is that the vaccines are broadly similar to the mRNA vaccines used for Covid; the ramp up times necessary for production of the vaccine in the last pandemic are essentially eliminated here.

If we were are Utilitarians, we would probably broadly probably want similar things out of our next potential pandemic regardless of our individual beliefs on what’s “really happening”. In particular, we’d all want vaccines to be available quickly - whether you believe a risk is real (or not) or that the vaccine is dangerous (or not), you want it on the market post-haste; even at a minimum pandemic-is-real-and-vaccines-are-good belief buy-in, you at least know the powers that be won’t let your life go back to normal until there’s some treatment on the market they can point to and cheer for.

In the case of Covid, we all had a pretty good idea that it was going to be a big deal around March. As is now generally known, a working Covid vaccine was on the ground in late February; if we had been able to get it into serious production fast, an awful lot of lock-downs and deaths could have been mitigated. But we weren’t fast, really; as the article above notes, late-stage testing wasn’t underway until nearly August, and doses weren’t truly being put into arms until December, nine or 10 months after even laymen know this was a pretty big deal.

I wrote about this before, basically blasting the FDA for being incredibly inflexible with the way they test drugs, prioritizing the elimination of a relatively small risk to a relatively small amount of test subjects (who were begging to be allowed to participate in challenge trials) against the almost sure deaths of millions if they didn’t move quickly.

At the time, there were two criticisms I found pretty compelling about why it might have been harder to move quickly on the vaccine than I understood. The first was that ramp-up times for the actual production of the drugs might not have actually lagged FDA approvals by that much, that the production capacity wasn’t and couldn’t be in place to produce enough mRNA vaccines any faster. If that’s the case, the FDA taking their sweet-ass time to make sure they have sufficient pieces of paper in filing cabinets to outweigh millions of deaths doesn’t matter; we couldn’t get any shots any quicker anyway.

The second criticism is that mRNA treatments and particularly mRNA vaccines were pretty new; there might have been some hidden fears about them that were legitimate for the FDA to hold but not particularly public at the time (or now, for that matter).

Both those criticisms might have been valid, but neither are valid now - mRNA-vaccine facilities are up and running and pumping out millions of doses, and we have a much better understanding of people’s reaction to them. The only hurdle left is FDA approvals — if they do what’s needed to get a reasonable assurance of safety and give a thumbs up to the Pharma companies, our hypothetical Epsilon virus could potentially be taking hits from a vaccine in half the time or less than it took in the case of Covid.

The only hang-up is the FDA has no intention of doing this, and is signaling as hard as they can that they hate the idea of this with every single fiber of their being. If you think Covid is bad and think that vaccines play a major role in stopping it, the thing you should want the very most right now is for the FDA to grant full approval to the vaccines; it would increase confidence in the vaccines a bit, get more people to take the shot, and we’d be that much closer to the promised land.

And there’s no reason for the FDA not to do this right now from a safety perspective. Note that the entire world is on the “jab as many arms as possible” train; literally everyone except the hard-core anti-vax think this is a good idea and a huge net positive. Even if it wasn’t, over half of everyone in the US has already got the shot; it’s a done deal. The only plausible reason left for the FDA to want to slow-play this at this point is to cover their asses, but “cover our asses” is the only thing the FDA has ever cared about, so if a few more million people die, it’s no big deal to them.

There’s no indication at all we won’t wait nine months or a year for the next vaccine, no matter what the projected death tolls are. The FDA is telling us as loud as it can that it would be completely fine with hundreds of millions of people dying as long as it could stick to it’s habits, and we aren’t listening.

Another potential difference in how the world will approach Epsilon is understated but important — preparedness. Lockdowns and the disruptions that come with them are as expensive as epidemic-related deaths are horrible, but preventative measures are relatively cheap. Masks can be stockpiled; money can be pumped to pharma companies to maintain production capacity. Early detection of viruses like Epsilon can be emphasized. There’s dozens of practical ways to get on top of the disease quicker and reduce it’s impact that have nothing to do with vaccines - we just have to do them.

Covid was expensive. I’ve seen estimates of double-digit trillions of dollars of pandemic related impact, and while I am pretty strictly not quant these don’t seem inherently unreasonable to me. Given that, you’d think we’d be scrambling to establish some level of reasonable spending to try and prevent or minimize that kind of impact in the future.

Of course they aren’t doing this. You knew they wouldn’t be before you even checked.

The CARES act alone was something like $2 trillion. Just the portion paid out directly as stimulus to taxpayers was something like $300 billion; that’s three times what was initially proposed to put towards getting ready for other potentially worse pandemics to come. All the news we have on this is that there’s basically no interest in paying anything but lip service to getting ready for anything.

In the end, Epsilon plays out in entirely predictable ways; in the US alone, 6 million people die before vaccines are widely available roughly a year later. We end up being no more prepared for it than we were for Covid; we move no faster and try no harder. Lockdowns are much more severe and infinitely more necessary. One out of every 35 people you know is dead, the global economy is in shambles such as have never been seen before. Everyone agrees that this is terrible out loud, but there is a silent, implicit agreement that we will never do anything differently or change how we handle anything at all.

That last set of italics is hyperbolic; I’m aware of this, but I’m also pretty upset, so I’m leaving it as-is perhaps against my better judgement.

Before Covid hit, the idea of a pandemic causing 700k deaths in the US would have seemed outlandish to most of us. If I had asked then if it would be reasonable for, say, the FDA to take a year to approve a complete, working vaccine in that situation, many would have called me silly for asking that - of course there would be some emergency measure that would make it go faster.

If I asked you if after that kind of body-bag count whether or not it would be sane for the government to balk at spending a tiny fraction of the known costs of a pandemic to perhaps prepare for the next one, the reaction would be the same. Of course we should work on getting ready for the next one; of course we wouldn’t sit around just waiting for a new disaster to hit us upside the head with a baseball bat without doing anything at all.

I pushed the idea of a disease with 10 times the death toll of Covid for a reason — 700k deaths (millions worldwide) is the new norm; it probably doesn’t have the same impact now as a reality that it would have had as an unrealistic hypothetical back then. I want you to think about this in terms of crazy, insane numbers of potential deaths, because seven hundred thousand deaths should still feel crazy to you, even if it doesn’t.

The FDA particularly and the government in general are signaling that they are pretty much OK with Covid levels of loss or worse happening again and again; they are letting you know loud and clear that they don’t actually mind this kind of thing enough to get even a little bit out of their comfort zone. In response to this, we are generally quiet — most people retain a religious belief that the FDA really should let millions of people die for nebulously defined reasons like “maintaining trust” without any evidence or arguments for why indirectly murdering people would promote such confidence. Virtually nobody cares about government preparedness.

We should absolutely be doing more than this. We should be demanding some sort of stated plan for expediting vaccines in emergency situations, something better than “whenever we get to it - this is how it’s always been done”. We should be asking for some level of planning for the next big virus — globalism and CRISPR basically guarantee something like Epsilon is coming sooner or later. This is probably the lamest thing I’ll say all week, but I’m saying it anyway: You should probably write your Senator. He or she doesn’t realistically care if you die or not, but they do care an awful lot about staying in their jobs. Actual demands that they push plans to mitigate the next disaster might work, so long as we actually make them. With the internet, it won’t even cost you a stamp.

If I’m a bit hysterical about this, it’s because I really do think we should be a bit hysterical at this point. I now live in a world where I can say things like “so many people died last year that used cars got way more expensive somehow” and not be substantially wrong. We have a choice between panicking and making demands now, or doing it later after the damage is already done. I say we be productive now. Make some noise.

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Only a few people reading now will remember, but the original concept of this blog was to deconstruct bad arguments. My thinking was that every week I’d find someone making a shitty argument of some kind, and I’d attack just the argument itself. It wouldn’t matter if their conclusions were right or wrong or if they were on my side; I’d just pick holes in the way they were saying it, examining the validity of the methods they’d use to convince people of various things. It turned out very quickly that it was more fun to write other things as well, and I gave the “attack only arguments” concept a rest, which I think suits everyone better.

And so it was, until I was betrayed by John McWhorter and Andrew Sullivan. And David French, a little.

Understand that I actually like McWhorter and Sullivan a lot (I’ve tried and failed to get into French multiple times, for what it’s worth). I agree with them on more than I disagree with them on. I think both are brilliant writers. And then they drop this:

John McWhorter @JohnHMcWhorterI agree. The laws are too broad. They are, indeed, speech codes, and unnecessary ones. Opinion | We Disagree on a Lot of Things. Except the Danger of Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws.We differ in our views on critical race theory. But we agree that the current attempts to ban it from K-12 education are misguided and dangerous.nytimes.comJuly 6th 2021

120 Retweets864 LikesAnd this:

Andrew Sullivan @sullydish@JohnHMcWhorter I agree too. Sue them for violating the CRA; get on the school boards. But let’s not delude ourselves. This is designed to end liberal democracy. And, unchallenged, it will.July 6th 2021

12 Retweets155 LikesAnd both these things are dumb. These are smart guys, but they are both saying something that’s wrong on multiple levels, and they are both smart enough that they probably know they are. And so now I’m sucked back into the argument disassembly game, whether I like it or not. May god have mercy on your souls.

To spice up what might otherwise turn into a bit of a slog, I’ll try to break down how I approach things like this. Like pyramids, there’s a lot of levels to clamber up before I get to the point. Also like pyramids, sometimes the point is missing entirely.

The first level is semantics - basically looking to see if what they are saying is technically true. Sullivan is fine here (if a bit hyperbolic), but McWhorter is instantly pretty off the mark. (Note: Since Sullivan’s tweet here was responding to McWhorter’s, I’m going to verbally treat them as a team for most of this article. This isn’t quite correct, but it’s much, much easier than wrangling pronouns the whole article) He’s quoting French’s use of “speech codes” here because it’s scary sounding even if you don’t have an opinion on them already. The words smell faintly of oppression and totalitarians; they have a certain built-in negativity. But the NYT article he’s talking about mentions laws like this:

Tennessee House Bill SB 0623, for example, bans any teaching that could lead an individual to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” In addition to this vague proscription, it restricts teaching that leads to “division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class or class of people.”

Texas House Bill 3979 goes further, forbidding teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States.” It also bars any classroom from requiring “an understanding of the 1619 Project” — The New York Times Magazine’s special issue devoted to a reframing of the nation’s founding — and hence prohibits assigning any part of it as required reading.

McWhorter is banking on you seeing “teaching” and understanding these are laws that affect schools and associating them with speech codes, which also have to do with both those things. But here’s FIRE’s definition:

FIRE defines a “speech code” as any university regulation or policy that prohibits expression that would be protected by the First Amendment in society at large. Any policy—such as a harassment policy, a protest and demonstration policy, or an IT acceptable use policy—can be a speech code if it prohibits protected speech or expression.

Many speech codes impermissibly prohibit speech on the basis of content and/or viewpoint. An example of this type of policy would be a ban on “offensive language” or “disparaging remarks.”

And here’s Wikipedia:

A speech code is any rule or regulation that limits, restricts, or bans speech beyond the strict legal limitations upon freedom of speech or press found in the legal definitions of harassment, slander, libel, and fighting words. Such codes are common in the workplace, in universities,[1] and in private organizations. The term may be applied to regulations that do not explicitly prohibit particular words or sentences. Speech codes are often applied for the purpose of suppressing hate speech or forms of social discourse thought to be disagreeable to the implementers.

Or Forbes:

Today’s conventional wisdom seems to be that university speech codes banning “offensive” expression on campus are a distant relic of the heyday of political correctness in the 1980s and 90s. But in truth, speech codes—university policies prohibiting expression protected by the First Amendment in society at large—are nearly as popular as ever.

Note the through-line: speech codes are codes that limit speech at a workplace or especially at a school that restrict speech more than the usual narrow restrictions on people’s free speech. But teachers speaking in a classroom are not people, at least as far as free speech is concerned. From ACLU:

Example 4: You are instructed not to discuss with students your personal opinion on political matters. In a classroom discussion on racial issues in America, you let your students know that you have recently participated in a Black Lives Matter demonstration. This “speech” may not be protected. Courts have found that teachers can be disciplined for departing from the curriculum adopted by the school district, and inserting your personal experience as a protester could be considered such a departure. This is because school districts have the authority to control course content and teaching methods. It is not as clear whether the First Amendment would protect you if you had not been specifically instructed not to share your political beliefs. Some courts have ruled that schools may not discipline teachers for sharing certain controversial words or concepts in class that are relevant to the curriculum.

This is pretty damn well established, and for good reason: teachers are, while teaching in a classroom, the government rather than people. This is a pretty good summary of the issue in play, but to the extent the government has free speech it has those protections as an entity, in the interests of being able to function. It doesn’t need those protections to be able to speak (since it’s the government, and can shoot you if you try to stop it) but it does need them to be able to have a consistent message. So while they can say whatever they want in their free time, while on-the-job a government employee is generally constrained to saying only those things the government wants them to say. If a government couldn’t do that, it couldn’t have a coherent message - every agent of the government could represent the government as thinking and wanting whatever they (as individuals) might like. Put short, when acting they as private citizens have the right to say whatever they’d like; as agents of a government, they can only say things the government wants to say.

So while speech codes are generally aimed at students or at least are generally aimed at restricting speech that isn’t already well-established as restricted, this isn’t that - it’s a separate issue with separate implications. You can like that separate issue or hate it - this isn’t a value judgement. But McWhorter and French sort of know that if they try to scare you by accurately describing this as a normal, well established element of how government speech works you won’t get properly frightened, so they try to tuck it under a creepier umbrella on the sly.

So we’ve looked to see if they were tricking you with word choice; they sort of were. But if I stop there, the next thing I hear from someone, somewhere is that “I know what they mean” - that yes, maybe the words were poorly chosen, but it’s not fair to pick apart the words of a tweet and that in their heart-of-hearts they meant something more reasonable. So now we have to look at what they appear to want you to end up believing as a result of reading those tweets - the opinion they were hoping they could get you to hold.

McWhorter wants you to be scared, as we mentioned before; that’s why he used a scare phrase to scare you. But Sullivan and McWhorter both want you to believe something else: that legislative intervention here is weird and clearly wrong, and that literally any other way of blocking this would be better.

Sullivan suggests, for instance, that instead of going to elected officials to correct this, you should instead “get on the school board”. But school boards are either elected officials or serve at the pleasure of elected officials, as a general rule. And there’s no particular reason to think they’d be less OR more overbroad than a legislature; he’s just asking you kick the can down the road a bit further in hopes you lose it in a ditch.

French, on the other hand, pushes a muddled concept of “proposing better curriculums” and lawsuits:

A wiser response to problematic elements of what is being labeled critical race theory would be twofold: propose better curriculums and enforce existing civil rights laws. Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act both prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, and they are rooted in a considerable body of case law that provides administrators with far more concrete guidance on how to proceed. In fact, there is already an Education Department Office of Civil Rights complaint and federal lawsuit aimed at programs that allegedly attempt to place students or teachers into racial “affinity groups.”

It’s unclear what means by “propose better curriculums” here. He might mean that legislatures should kindly suggest them to schools who, without the weight of a law mandating it will tell them to screw right off. Or he might mean that legislatures pick and enforce specific curriculums with the full force of the law, but he doesn’t actually; he’s already calling bans of specific ideas speech codes and saying they are terrible abuses; there’s no way he’d take the legislature mandating every word of a curriculum to exclude them (which would be necessary to stop them) to be less forced-speechy. This half of his recommendation is just straight up gibberish as a result; he doesn’t seem mean anything by it except “give up and drown”.

When called on the apparent weak-sauce no-legislation ask of his article, French suddenly clarified that “propose better curriculums” had meant legislation all along:

Here he completely renders himself incoherent. If this version of French’s position is the real one, then he’s essentially saying “Don’t ban specific topics - that would be forced speech.” on one hand, while saying “Just completely define the curriculum so nothing BUT what you want can be said, that would be fine and not forced speech at all.” on the other. If you’ve read any French at all, there’s no way he believes this, but here he is saying it. Make your own judgement as to why.

He also proposes lawsuits as an alternative. Lawsuits are a little more defensible as an option presenting an actual difference in outcome, since we would expect them to be narrower in scope. But a lawsuit trying to get curriculum banned is something you do when you’ve already lost the conversation, as French knows - it’s risky. A loss in a lawsuit is immediately entrenched in a way a failure to pass a law isn’t. More than that, French gives the impression that a lawsuit is likely to accomplish everything a law could, but this is far from clear - decisions in lawsuits are often distressingly narrow; a win might feel nice, but very well could end up preventing only the very most visible forms of the issue.

The end result of all of this is people asking others to pursue only the lowest-probability and highest effort options to solve the problem they can. The only real difference between pursuing bans at a state legislature level and the lowest levels that have any actual authority is that it forces CRT opponents to fight dozens or hundreds of battles in their states instead of one; it makes it harder to succeed and infinitely harder to reverse. Basically, they seem to want this to be messy; there’s no other benefit gained. Or, where they can’t get messy, they will take something like “uncertain, time consuming, expensive and more irreversible” in addition to the fight-it-on-a-thousand-fronts option, which what suing under CRA pans out to be.

And, you know what? They can argue those points. Maybe the over-broadness of the laws exists and outweighs all the downsides of their other proposed solutions. But note that if those decisions are overbroad, they are the reactions of elected officials to their electorate - under our system of government, those overbroad decisions represent what the people who voted those legislatures in want. Moreover, they are super-easy to reverse compared to anything other proposed solution. Statewide laws can be reversed by flipping the legislature, if the voters want it. Court rulings are potentially eternal.

Making their argument a little weaker is the face that none of this is new or really all that unusual; a lot of decisions like this are handled at the state level. From Wikipedia:

On February 19, 2008, the Florida State Board of Education adopted new science standards in a 4-3 vote. The new science curriculum standards explicitly require the teaching of the "scientific theory of evolution,"[26] whereas the previous standards only referenced evolution using the words "change over time."[27]

In Florida, the state board serves at the pleasure of the Governor; in any real sense, this was a decision under the control of a single person. I chose something that’s broadly from the other end of the political spectrum in terms of what a person might support on purpose - if you support, say, a Governor or an elected state school board possessing the power to mandate curriculum changes in one case, you should also support it in the other. - if you feel split, that’s an issue of what you think should or shouldn’t be taught, not who you think should mandate it.

This is necessarily the weakest kind of argument out of the layers - as you can tell reading through, I’m mapping a lot of stuff onto Sully and French that they may not believe, even if their words seem to imply it. I think there’s a summary here that’s defensible - that Sully and French want you to think some elected officials with power over what schools teach should be able to exercise it, while others shouldn’t, and that they fail to defend it very well. But I can’t prove that; this layer is inherently open to attack as well, the subject of those attacks in this instance being my own bias and strawmen. So we need to go a bit deeper.

A phrase I use a lot is talking about someone’s “ask”, which I use to basically mean what they’d get if you gave them everything they wanted. The next layer deals with that, and it’s probably the most important layer, since we are now starting to get into the practical implications of their argument and the kind of things you’d have to deal with if you let their argument win you over.

Sully, McWhorter and French’s first ask has to do with specificity. In both cases they are saying these decisions are overbroad - French does the same thing here (paywalled):

Rather than view Trump’s unconstitutional order as a cautionary tale of government overreach, red states viewed it as a model—leadership by example. And thus the race to ban CRT was on. As I’ve written before, red state after red state (including my own state of Tennessee) is hustling to ban not just advocacy for “divisive concepts” or CRT (often poorly and imprecisely defined), but also even inclusion of such concepts in a course.

Recall too that above McWhorter called these laws overbroad and unnecessary; Sullivan agreed and said they spell the end of liberal democracy. Now go look to each them for more specific regulations that could work. Hear those crickets? None of them ever gets into anything close to specifics on what sort of bans would be specific enough to work - there’s just some handwaving in the direction of literally any other solution besides the one that is working from the perspective of people who don’t want CRT in schools.

If the proposed laws are overbroad, they could certainly (and will probably) be tightened as they go through the process of passage. But note that none of the three is asking for this - they don’t propose more specific laws or phrasings they’d accept. They say the broadness is the issue, but instead of proposing the broadness be corrected they just handwave vaguely towards other options as de facto better and leave it at that - this doesn’t mean they aren’t really concerned about the vagueness of the laws as much as other unstated things, but it sure as hell hints at it.

In effect, their ask to parents who oppose this as far as broadness goes is:

A. That they abandon the strategy that’s working

B. That they adopt the strategy of trying to convince school boards (which hasn’t been working), elect new school boards to make the bans instead of the legislature (which wouldn’t affect broadness), or to take it to court (require a huge amount of expense and likely a long amount of time, with very uncertain but ultimately semi-permanent results).

Another way to put this is that Sullivan, McWhorter and French are all three asking these people to stop winning and maybe lose. They are asking them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and retreat to a losing battlefield with no promised advantage to counterbalance their loss. One of my friends suggested that this is because they are inherently uncomfortable with conservative wins, that they think of victories from the right as an affront against nature. I can’t prove this is the case, but it’s sure as hell not inconsistent with that.

To put it into clearer perspective, think of it this way: pretend these laws were up for a popular vote instead of being decided on by state governments, and there were two competing forms. The first form was to ban CRT, and the second was to enshrine it. If McWhorter et al advised people who like CRT to not vote in their own interests and let the other side get their law passed just so they could later challenge it in court, you’d think they would be crazy - why would they let the other side steal a march like that?

But they are doing something similar here - note that they are putting all the responsibility of taking this to court on exactly one side. There’s no suggestion that other people should let it pass and then challenge it in court - after all, they might lose and the law might stand. Only CRT opponents are asked to accept a tactical disadvantage; one side is free to entrench perhaps for years in the meantime while leaving all the hard parts to the other team.

If the last couple sections were long, this last layer is blessedly short: I think it’s always a good idea to round these things off by looking for the most conspicuous thing the opponents are ignoring.

The basis of French’s arguments (and, to a lesser but still real degree McWhorter’s and Sullivan’s) is that by making these kind of overbroad laws, people end up giving the state a great deal of control over what their children learn, and that this power can be turned around on them just as easily.

Now, I could easily point to the fact that the state already has a great deal of power. For instance, the state demands that you pay for schools that they then demand you send your kids to on threat of significant punishments - jail, fines, or in extreme cases the loss of the children themselves.. I could further point to the fact that no new powers are being established here - that legislatures have always had this power and could have always exercised it in this way. These things matter, because to some extent McWhorter and crew are cautioning people away from these laws because they grant states power, without noting that the states already have the specific powers discussed.

Those would be pretty conspicuous things that are either being ignored entirely or handwaved. They are not, however, the biggest thing they are ignoring.

There’s a bit in the movie I am Legend where Nanny McPhee is on television explaining a great new medicine she’s developed to cure cancer by hijacking the measles virus. She says unaltered, measles is like a very fast car being driven by a very bad man; it could cause a lot of damage. But if you put in a cop in it, it could do a lot of good. I reverse this concept sometimes and describe building an invincible tank - it’s very nice to have an invincible tank if you are the one who gets to drive, and not so good if your enemies end up stealing it.

The French/Sully/McWhorter trio all warn against something similar - that CRT-in-schools opponents might be building an unstoppable weapon that might be used against them. Which sounds great - until you realize the audience they are trying to convince are people who are already in the sights of the big guns of a tank that’s already forcing them into a situation identical to what they warn about. Essentially they are saying “Are you crazy? If you pass laws like this, you run the risk of the state having the power to force you to give them your kids and brainwash them with an enemy ideology!”. Well, yes, guys. That’s sort of what this whole thing is about; pretending you don’t know that is too cute by half.

Ignoring that these people are fighting back against a school system they are compelled to pay for and send their kids to that has already been subverted by an enemy ideology is a bit crazy. Asking them to do it while stating that the big advantage is that they they might avoid the very situation they already find themselves in from occurring is insane - it speaks of motivations that knowingly or unknowingly are very much not in the interests of the people they are trying to convince.

At this point you have probably zeroed in on the fact that I’m not a big fan of CRT in schools; this is the correct impression to have. It doesn’t affect me as much as you’d think (we homeschool), but I still don’t love the idea that schools are being weaponized by a super-minority of crazies to push some ultra-extreme racial guilt quasi-religion on kids.

The crazier part is that this article isn’t about that at all; I really have no goal of getting you to decide one way or the other on CRT here. The last paragraph’s description is how I feel, but I understand you might not view it to be as much of a threat as I do, and I don’t expect any of this to change that. One of the difficulties of making a very narrow argument is convincing people that you aren’t going for something broader, but in this case it’s true.

If French, Sullivan and McWhorter were say that CRT shouldn’t be opposed in this way because conservative wins give them the willies I wouldn’t have an article to write, even though I’d still disagree with their stance. It’s the fake bill of goods I don’t like - the part where they tell you you can get everything you want by abandoning the best chance of getting anything at all I object to. I don’t live in their hearts, so I can’t confirm their motivations absolutely, but it’s pretty clear “get CRT out of schools” isn’t all that high on it - otherwise, they’d push for a narrower but equally insured win instead of an uncertain one.

I’m not asking that you agree with me on CRT, or even that you support my preferred solution to the problem (honestly, I’m not sure I even know what that solution is). And I want to reiterate that I like two out of three of these authors a great deal - I agree with them on a lot, and there’s a lot they are right about. To his credit, Sully in particular actually courts the kind of pushback I’m giving here - he has a long history of maintaining dialogue with his readers so he can correct and improve himself as he goes. McWhorter is a genius who I think is remarkably principled in a lot of ways I really admire. David French deserves to exist.

I honestly think here they just got carried away - I’m not immune to the same effect. But at the same time, we deserve better arguments - arguments that acknowledge downsides, arguments that honestly represent the goals of the arguers, and arguments that stand up to more than a few second’s scrutiny before you realize the arguer was asking for something else entirely than what he initially represented. I think we can get better arguments, but the only way to make that happen is to push back on the worse ones. And to push back, we have to do the work of looking close.

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Meta-Note: The more observant among you have noticed I put a new section up on the blog. It’s called RC Advice, and it’s mostly just a place you can ask me for questions, advice, a friendly ear or whatever. I’m going to answer every comment in there at least until it gets time consuming enough that I can’t keep up with it. I have it set so when I post in there you won’t get an extra email, so unless I messed something up it shouldn’t be bothering you when you aren’t in need of it.

Some things just feel untrue. For instance, remember the more extreme versions of the "food desert” story? There were millions of people getting robbed of healthful food by evil capitalists who for some never-discussed reason were willing to sacrifice millions of supposedly eager-to-pay customers and all the associated profit for no personal gain. It’s only believable if you have a special kind of logic that only checks to see if things sound cool before deciding they are true. Predictably, any time you check to see what was actually going on you find the truth is pretty much anything but what they said it was.

I’m not sure how often this untruth-detecting radar actually works for me (I don’t keep a spreadsheet, although I should) but I can tell you that nothing trips my hippy-logic detector more than the concept of Walkability, the idea that neighborhoods and cities both can be measured in terms of how easy they are to traverse on foot and should be optimized to maximize the same metric. It’s too perfect; it’s too easy. It’s the exact kind of thing that sounds good enough that nobody ever questions it in any real way, and then I look up ten years later and there’s a law going through congress forcing my wife to wear a beret and buy (but never drive) a smart car, or something.

The entry-level sales pitch for the concept is pretty simple. If you go to almost any “what’s walkability?” article on the internet, you get hit with pictures like this:

Source: "Cobblestone streets in Beacon Hill area of Boston." by denisbin is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

You wouldn’t expect anybody to not want that - it’s literally as pretty as a picture. You can practically smell the handmade scones baking just around the corner at some charming corner bistro. At least on the “asked about it in a survey” front, most people like the idea of living in a walkable neighborhood and prefer an idealized version of it to a suburban-home-with-long-commute scenario:

But of course we’d expect people to support it when that’s the pitch; there’s no downsides, it costs nothing, and you get to live in a cobblestone paradise built by Moses himself. I think this is probably the level at which most people understand walkability - it’s about the same level where communism sounds like a really neat idea. As you’d expect, this makes all my internal don’t-get-fooled alarms go off at once - I have a surprisingly strong adversarial response to the entire idea.

The next level of understanding is what I think of as the city-planning-and-real-estate level - it’s represented by things like the commercial-friendly Walk Score, which starts to formalize things the tiniest bit by looking at metrics like the distance from a particular address to places a person needs to visit regularly in their day-to-day life. At this level, walkability is almost entirely about logistics and math. If you can walk to a grocery store, your church or any other often-needed location in a reasonable amount of time everything is cool and your score goes up. The more you need a car to live your daily non-commute life, the lower your score is.

If Walk Score was as complex as walkability gets, I don’t think I’d be able to get an article out of walkability in the first place. But like a lot things, it doesn’t stop there; in the same way things like vegetarianism ramp up pretty quickly to more intense forms, walkability has both its casuals and its level 5 vegan ultra-enthusiasts. It’s these enthusiasts I want to focus in on, because with them you get a better picture of where unchecked walkability would choose to take us.

Becoming one with the StroadIf you were the kind of giant nerd who gets into an argument about walkability with internet friends and then decided to revenge-research the subject to death, there’s a fairly high probability the first website you will run into is Strong Towns. Strong Towns is sort of a one-stop shop for articles and information on how to convince your local city planners of the superiority of narrow streets and European-looking plazas.

When I first started digging into walkability, a few friends (who may or may not end up annoyed with me for writing this) supplied articles from this source. One of the more prominent claims of the site, something that pops up again and again in different articles, is that the cardinal sin of modern city planning is something called a Stroad. There’s a very basic description of it here:

Back in 2013, Strong Towns coined a word (“stroad”) to describe the multilane thoroughfares that are dangerous and financially unproductive, yet somehow also ubiquitous in North America. The stroad is what you get when you try to combine a street with a road. Yes, there’s a difference. Streets are platforms for creating value and building wealth; with narrow streets and wide sidewalks, they’re designed for people. Roads are efficient connections designed to get you from one productive place to another; they’re designed to move cars fast. The stroad is something else altogether, a street-road hybrid. By trying to do two things at once, it does neither well, and Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn has described the stroad as “the futon of transportation”:

So a Stroad is a by-definition-bad combination of a street and a road, trying to do two things and failing at both. Strong Towns hates it, and consistently presents it as an unnatural thing of terror, something obviously and clearly to be avoided at all costs. Separating the two is, Strong Towns maintains, similar in that it’s clearly good - doing so would fix a lot of problems with absolutely no downsides they ever mention or acknowledge in any way.

It’s possible you didn’t know that the definition of street was so complex, included a bunch of commerce/wealth building sub-clauses, and that they are “designed for people” (as opposed to cars). You probably also didn’t know that a road had cars in its definition (Ancient Rome is also surprised). Don’t feel bad; I didn’t know either. If you - like me! - thought that a road was just something you travelled on and a street was a road inside a town, that’s because the dictionary definition of road and street are just as I said - Strong Towns made up the definitions it’s using here and pretends they are normal to try to sell the harder-to-swallow Stroad concept.

This odd attempt to mislead doesn’t mean they are wrong that Stroads suck, but it does mean we have to look closer at what they actually want. My experience is that if someone is weirdly obscuring things like basic definitions, they might be being weird about other stuff. But it’s surprisingly hard to pin them down to anything solid.

If you read that article I linked, you find that they argue a point like someone who never gets seriously challenged, making big, vague claims that demand a lot of action but don’t provide a lot of specifics in terms of support or desired direction (see: Kendi, Ibram). For instance, in the quote I provided they simultaneously claim that Stroads are bad at moving cars, but also that cars on Stroads move much too fast - these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but the incongruity seems to require some level of explanation to mesh the two (like, maybe the streetlights are supposed to suck out all the extra speed, or something). Strong Towns hates putting those definitions in one place, so I went digging.

So first we need to know what a road really is to Strong Towns. We can start here, where they include this infographic and quote:

We should not allow extraneous accesses onto our roads. Intersections, on-ramps and exit ramps slow down traffic and artificially create congestion. Interchanges should be many miles apart and should focus on moving traffic, not facilitating development. We should not mine — or allow others to mine — the large public investment in roadway capacity for the short term economic gain of a few (i.e. those who live or work near the on- and off-ramps or intersections). That is what we are doing when we add accesses to our roads. We are stealing pennies from everyone and throwing most of them away while giving a handful to the adjacent land owners. It’s bankrupting us.

Where we anticipate, or desire, people outside of automobiles — walking, biking, etc. — we need to do that on separate facilities. There is no way to safely bike five or ten feet away from automobiles moving 40, 50 or 60+ miles per hour. The margin of error is unacceptably small. Biking and walking should be completely separated from a road.

The bolds there are mine. From the infographic and the quote, we’ve already been able to put together some rules:

Roads don’t have buildings next to them, or at least we shouldn’t build buildings next to them.
To get on a road, you might have to drive “many miles” to find an on-ramp; they are ideally intentionally difficult to access and exit.
Any “street” has a top speed (for now!) of 40 miles per hour - the quote says pedestrians should never be near a speed that high, so while we don’t know if Strong Towns would let a street go as fast as 40 MPH, we know it wouldn’t allow anything faster.

None of these rules are bad, but we have to look closer. For instance, that 40 MPH estimate gets adjusted downwards a lot when we look at our next article:

I advocate for a 20 mph speed limit, a number not based on pragmatic lobbying but on empirical evidence. I believe that, where such a speed limit is called for -- anywhere where we anticipate automobiles will be in the proximity of humans outside of a vehicle -- it is the responsibility of the engineer to design the street so that only a handful of deviants exceed the desired speed, a proportion of the population that can be dealt with through law enforcement.

How do engineers do this? They do it by making the street feel unsafe for the typical driver once their automobile exceeds the desired speed limit. Only when drivers feel as vulnerable as people walking and biking will our streets actually be safe.

So our streets are a little better defined now; they are at maximum 20 MPH zones with a bunch of speedbumps (or something) that make it very hard to drive faster than that on them. If you are me and you want to go places faster than school-zone speeds sometimes, that takes you to your next question - how does a Strong Towns approved pedestrian cross a Strong Towns approved road?

We already know one way; it can slow down to <20 MPH and become a street, at which point strong towns is OK with a crosswalk. But then it’s not a road anymore. The big, usable solution that pops to mind is pedestrian bridges, big raised walkways that route pedestrians over traffic instead of through it. They keep pedestrians well away from traffic, are safe, and don’t require traffic to slow from road-speeds to street-speeds. They allow for pedestrians and roads to co-exist in close proximity while not getting in each other’s way. They’d be perfect except for one thing: Strong Towns freaking hates them.

Most elaborate “pedestrian” infrastructure is really car infrastructure. As an example, let’s have a look at Lake Mary, Florida, a suburb of Orlando. Like much of suburban Florida, Lake Mary is a grid of multi-lane arterials. One of the city’s highest crash locations, according to its transportation plan, is the intersection of Lake Mary Boulevard and Country Club Road. Lake Mary Boulevard is seven lanes wide, with turn-lanes and through-traffic lanes, and is a daunting obstacle for pedestrians—so the city has constructed two pedestrian bridges over the highway, with a 153-foot span…

These elaborate and expensive pedestrian bridges are at best a remedial effort to minimize the danger this environment poses to anyone who isn’t in a car. They don’t really make the area any more desirable for walking. The real problem is not the infrastructure, or lack thereof, but a built environment that’s inhospitable to walking and cycling.

So you can’t cross a road with a crosswalk - it’s dangerous, because of the high speeds. And you can’t cross it in any safe way that’s slightly inconvenient for walkers, either. Later in that same article they reveal what they’d accept, which is (again) <20 MPH roads. You’d assume they’d also allow us to bury the roads, but this isn’t all that clear, and there’s no way in hell we could afford to do it nationwide anyway.

I had another thought - I live in Phoenix, Arizona. We have a lot of freeways. Strong Towns wouldn’t like them because you can get on and off them every mile or so, but they do have some things going for them: at every on-ramp and off-ramp in the metro area, the non-highway roads either go over or under the highway in a pretty seamless way. Essentially our freeways are “buried” for all intents and purposes. Would Strong Towns be OK with freeways with very, very limited entry and exit points?

No, of course they wouldn’t. But the reasons are very vague here and absolutely reek of hippy logic. For instance, freeways are bad because some guy can make them seem bad while playing a video game:

A Youtuber who goes by Donoteat is creating a fascinating series called Power, Politics & Planning that brilliantly uses Cities:Skylines as a storytelling tool. Subverting the tidy abstractions of this game and its genre, Donoteat uses the in-game graphics as a prop to reveal to us the messy, sometimes ugly human consequences of planning hubris that sees a city as a collection of roads and buildings.

Episode 2 is all about urban freeways, and to tell the story, Donoteat constructs a remarkably believable and richly rendered city whose rowhouse blocks bear more than a passing resemblance to Baltimore, Washington, or maybe Chicago. We watch as he plans a freeway which requires the demolition of a slice of this historic neighborhood—and then, as he clicks the button to remove each building condemned by eminent domain, tells us a bit about the life and fate of its inhabitant. These aren’t real stories, but they feel real—and might as well be. They begin to capture the gravity and the tragedy of the way freeways snuffed out the rich social fabric of real communities, consigned to the wrecking ball in the interest of speedy suburban commutes.

Or here, because they let people choose where to live and it turns out they don’t want to live in ultra-crowded city centers like Strong Towns-type urbanists prefer:

This simple fact, because of the rapidity of the change these freeways unleashed, had unimaginably destructive consequences for cities. The following series of stylized graphics shows what happened to dozens of metropolitan regions across the continent as a result of that first cataclysmic wave of urban freeway construction…

Every time a billion-dollar freeway or bridge project—or, yes, even a public transit project such as a rail line—is implemented, it changes the geography of access within its region, and may do so suddenly and destructively. Certain places become more convenient to live, work, and own property than before. Other places lose their comparative advantage.

Where we end up is that Strong Towns-type walkability people want a system where freeways are removed and all streets in a city are <20 MPH, except where no pedestrian might ever want to cross. For convenience, I’ve highlighted in sparkling, animated purple every place they would allow you to drive faster than 20 MPH in NYC:

If you didn’t catch the joke, there’s no highlighting there; there’s no place to put a road under that rule system. Same with Dallas:

Or in Boston:

That’s all very snarky of me, but I think it’s called for here. These are people who want a very, very specific thing (all city traffic being limited to 20 MPH) and won’t say it. That’s likely because they want your support, but know they couldn’t get it if they told you what they actually want. It’s dishonest.

But Strong Towns trying to trick you doesn’t mean their ideas are de facto bad - they might be very good ideas that happens to be promoted by guys who don’t shoot all that straight. So next let’s examine what this kind of walkability actually costs - because it does cost something beyond the baked-in slow travel speeds.

You Have to Make it Up With Density, Prices, or Worse StuffLet’s say you like some kind of larger store - I’m rare in that I actually like Walmart, but I know most of you don’t. Let’s say you like some other big store of some kind, like REI or Costco; maybe you like a one-stop shop for trail needs or buying massive amounts of food all at once to save money. As of today, you can totally have those things because enough people can get to them to support them - that lends itself to all kinds of economies of scale, and you get more selection in one place for cheaper.

Or let’s say you want something really niche - say it’s a metal detector store, or a coffee shop entirely staffed by fitness models, or something. You can also have that (probably) because people can get to it; there might not be a lot of people that want any exact niche thing on your city block, but combining enough city blocks suddenly lets you have pinball machine dealers and dog-friendly ice-cream shops.

People don’t really think about “distance” in terms of distance - they think about it in terms of travel time. Dropping all town and city speed limits to <20 MPH makes these things farther away in the way that matters to people; that means less people live within a reasonable travel distance from any particular spot in the city. That means, all things the same, that you get less big-box stores and specialty shops.

One thing you can change that prevents this is price - if things are more expensive, a shop can support itself with less customers. But this is as close to a pure downside as you can get - it’s the same stuff, you are just paying more now. Or you could just do without those specialty stores and big-box stores, but that’s another clear-bad thing; you are just getting less utility and fun.

Strong Towns-type sites don’t really mention these downsides, but I don’t think that’s because they are trying hide them in this case. It’s more because their actual solution for this problem is something different: Density.

That Costco or your vegan cat cafe are theoretically viable even serving limited areas in a car-hostile world so long as those areas have sufficient population; this means more duplexes, fourplexes and apartment complexes; it means living a lot closer to a lot more people. Now, you may not like density (I absolutely hate it, more on this later) but it really would solve some of these problems - you don’t have to pay more for your stuff or have less of it, you just have to pack people together a little closer.

As you’d expect, Strong Towns’ takes on density are confusing:

Anyone who remotely comprehends the number of variables at play here would never ask such a ridiculous question. How valuable are the units? How well is the street maintained? What is the inflation rate for construction costs? What is the city’s bond rating? Will the association properly maintain the roof of the building? What will happen to the building across the street currently in probate? Does the city’s code empower NIMBY’s?

I could go on and on and on…. If density matters for anything, it is a byproduct of success, not its cause. And I’m not even sold on that.

That article is sort of down on density as a metric, saying it should be mostly ignored, but it’s not really saying it’s bad. This one seems to imply it’s good/necessary, but doesn’t come out and say it. I picked through a bunch of these, but couldn’t really pin them down to anything you’d call an opinion. That’s weird to me - again, you can’t limit access to stores and expect to have the same amount or quality of them a bigger customer base would support - but at least hide-what-you-want isn’t out of character here.

The Good Points Walkability MakesI know this article has been really, really down on walkability so far. This is something I’m supposed to be careful of because, as you might have guessed, I hate housing density a great deal and downtown-lifestyles more. I have had the near-mythical experience of someone pooping on my stoop; I have had years of wandering drug addicts in the neighborhood causing trouble. I have had multiple bikes stolen and tent cities form within a half mile of my house. If this blogging thing ever takes off in a real way, I’m moving to the woods so fast my arrival will incinerate adjacent squirrels.

Worse, it’s been down on one particular brand of the thing. I want to make something really clear: I’m not actually against people being able to walk places, and I don’t want to weakman the whole movement with one variety of travelling-on-foot super-fans who really don’t like to clearly define their actual positions.

One thing that’s come up again and again in casual conversations with walkability friends that strikes me as fair are complaints about zoning restrictions. For instance, here’s an article about minimum lot sizes - in a lot of places, it’s illegal to build houses smaller than a certain size, which artificially limits density in places where it might make sense. I’ve heard similar things about minimum street widths, a situation in which mandatory rules making streets wider artificially limit density while also making traffic move faster through neighborhoods.

This seems like an easy win to hand to the Strong Towns people - I don’t think they should have carte blanche to do all the public anti-car initiatives they want, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a legitimate grievance when the government restricts them from building certain ways on privately owned land. There are a lot of places where it makes sense to let the market decide, and this is one; if someone wants to build a walker’s utopia suburb, they should be able to, provided the market will support it.

(BIG NOTE: I’m about to mention a book, because the book as explained to me holds some concepts I think are relevant. I have not had the chance to read this book in its entirety. I’m working off summaries here, so if I misrepresent it that’s entirely my bad. With that being said, what I have seen of it is great.)

I recently had a great conversation1 prompted by an embarrassing misunderstanding that introduced me to some of the concepts in Alain Bertaud’s Order Without Design . The idea behind the book as represented to me is that the author looks at city infrastructure primarily as a method of moving labor towards labor markets - getting you from your house to your job. I was further told that what makes sense in that model is examining all land right down to each particular square meter in terms of its economic value, and making your decisions based off that - in some cases, it might make economic sense to tear down some parks to build some highways. In others, it might make sense to tear down the same highways to build high-rise buildings.

I’m not sure I agree with the ideas here whole-cloth; for one, I don’t know where something like a park would ever make sense in that model. The author might very well address this, but abstract economic ideas often don’t translate very well into the messy, un-abstract real world we live in. But it does tickle some of my more libertarian biases none-the-less.

I want to live in the suburbs and have the advantages of driving at reasonably high speeds, but that doesn’t mean everyone does. Some people want to live in super-dense urban environments, even if I don’t. I don’t want Strong Towns to be able to force me to drive everywhere at sub-bicycle speeds, but my general principles also demand that it’s equally wrong to ban them from building out individual areas that way, if they want and can use private-domain solutions to make that happen. This market approach even solves the problem of Strong Towns muddling the waters around their actual demands - let them build whatever; if it doesn’t work, the customers will let them know. I have a reader who builds self-contained communities where you don’t need a car - I actually love the idea, even if I don’t want to live there. And if enough people do want to live there, it will succeed. Simple as that.

For me, that’s the magic of revealed preference - so long as we don’t ban each other from doing what we wish, the economics of the thing usually work out such that we all end up with what we (collectively, in a distributed way) want.

1OK, so this is sort of a great story. One of my readers is, as mentioned, an entrepreneur who builds self-contained communities designed in such a way that you don’t need a car. He was pinging me about a different article, and I mentioned I was writing this one; he was super excited about it, since walkability is one of his favorite subjects.

I sprung at the chance to ask him for a phone call to talk about the article, since I wanted some balance on it. He was down. We get on the phone and he’s giving me pure gold - he absolutely knows his shit, he’s giving me all this great perspective and I’m just learning a ton. And I tell him “I was actually going to mention you anyway, because of what you are building”. And he says “Wait, what?”

IT’S AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT GUY. I have a lot of trouble with names; I can’t remember them most of the time. And their names are just similar that my brain scanned the email and went “Yup, same guy. Totally the same guy, no need to check or anything.”

Now, I feel very lucky to have had that phone conversation - the person I talked to was absolutely the expert I needed even if he wasn’t the expert I expected. But holy hell was I embarrassed. Dude, if you are reading this, you absolutely made this article better. Thank you so much.

(The gentleman in question didn’t want his name mentioned, but absolutely wanted to get the word out on his favorite book about city infrastructure, Order Without Design, which I linked to above).

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Hey everyone!

An awful lot of people have been nice to me. I am inherently a complaining sort; a lot of people have shown me sympathy anyway. I’ve needed a lot of friendship and have always had a lot of friends. Ditto advice. Ditto helping me move every time I changed houses, for that matter. So in a very trite and hackneyed way I sort of owe a lot more than I’ve ever paid into the “goodwill towards humanity” pool.

This is just an experiment to see if I can pay some of that back. If you have something you want to talk about (or just want to talk!), post a comment here and I’ll respond. If you need some advice, I’ll try to give some. Fair warning: I’m religious, so some of the advice might derive from there even if it’s not explicitly religious. If you don’t feel like posting here, residentcontrarian@substack.com is always available to you as well.

Since this is a public kind of thing, this also calls for some rules:

The assumption here is that people making a post here are trying to talk to me, unless they say otherwise. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to reply to someone if you have something to add, but if they aren’t under any obligation to respond. If they explicitly state they don’t want non-me replies, that’s totally cool - respect that.
Understand there’s some advice I can’t give - if you are asking for a great way to get away with adultery or something, I’m not going to be able to help you a lot besides to say “don’t adultery, please”.
Nothing in here should ever really be linked to from anywhere else. While that’s a rule, understand this isn’t inherently that secure of an environment; if it’s something that absolutely must be kept under wraps, you should opt for emailing me.

These rules are subject to change suddenly and wildly at any given time, but I’ll announce it if they do.

I understand this part of my site might be a permanent ghost town. If that’s the case, no problem. But if you need me, I’m around.

-RC

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I haven’t been posting enough. Once a week seems like a fair minimum, especially now that a significant amount of people are paying subscribers. Since a few of my recent posts were a bit higher effort, I ended up taking a lot longer on them than I initially expected. In recompense, I’m going to try and feed in a few bonus articles here and there until I’ve paid off my word-debt. This week I’m doing something on walkability that’s almost done, but I wanted an extra night to work on it, so now seems like a pretty good time to drop one of the catch-up posts so you get two this week.

For this article, I wanted to give quick updates on what I think now of various articles I’ve written; on some of them I’ve refined my thinking a little, while on others I’ve had significant criticism. One fun thing about poor long-term memory is that I almost immediately forget the details of any given article I’ve written, so some of the older articles are pretty fresh to me now.

I’ll be moving through these in reverse chronological order, going from the oldest to newest. For the sake of everyone I’ll mostly confine myself to articles I either particularly liked or that did particularly well - if it got crickets and I thought it was so-so, I’ll spare you.

Kendi vs. McWhorterIf you are here after following a link from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish, this article is probably why. I have a fairly long-standing internet friendship with Dish Co-founder and really-solid-guy Chris Bodenner, hearkening back to his days at The Atlantic. I sent him this article to get feedback, and he put it in the eyeline of thousands and thousands of people, because he’s rad.

This was the first real traffic I got - other articles since have done much better, but without this early boost I’m not sure how well I would have done at keeping things going.

When I wrote this, the idea was still to make 100% of the articles about picking apart other people’s bad arguments - Kendi’s arguments are very, very bad and he was going after a person (John McWhorter) that I generally like so this seemed like a warm-up. John McWhorter is still great and Kendi is still generally a hack, so there’s not a ton of update there. Case in point:

John McWhorter @JohnHMcWhorterIn which academic discipline is this circular, naive, deer-caught-in-the-headlights response to a basic and urgent question considered insightful or excellent?

A national culture exempting this (which, sadly, is typical of him) from judgment is unintentionally racist itself. June 1st 2021

1,404 Retweets7,099 LikesThis man will die of old age in bed, having never worked a day in his life, and never having said anything more thought-rich than this. That’s some kind of racket.

On the Exciting Subject of Earwax and Unsupported Medical ArgumentsWhen I first conceived of this article, I was pretty sure it would get zero hits. I had a conversation with my wife that went something like this:

RC: Wife, I think I’m going to write about that thing I talk about all the time - how there’s not actually any real evidence that Q-tips are bad for your ears.

Wife: Is that a good idea? Would anybody care?

RC: Not a chance in hell. But I don’t have any better ideas this week.

A few days after the article went up, I became aware of Tyler Cowen’s grant for up-and-coming blogs and figured it was a low-risk high-reward kind of thing to send him an email; I included this as one of the links. I didn’t get the grant, but he did link this out, which gave me some access to both his audience and, by proxy, the Hacker News/Y Combinator set.

I also expected that at some point a very well educated ENT would show up and mention all the evidence I had missed showing that Q-tips cause impacted earwax, rather than just being associated with it. I was wrong. At least in terms of feedback I was able to find, it all stopped pretty firmly at the “well, we all know this is true, even if it isn’t substantiated” level of criticism.

That’s not nothing; the accumulated experience of a bunch of doctors does count for something - I’d trust it more than the accumulated opinions of a bunch of circus clowns or trial lawyers talking on the subject of occluded eardrums. But in terms of “oh, we’ve observed this happening with cameras or something” or better studies than what I put forth, there wasn’t much. Whatever opinions you had on this article before, there’s not much reason to update that I’ve seen. With that said, if you see anything on the subject that should change my mind, please let me know; it’s not the kind of thing I want to keep being wrong on if I am in fact wrong.

On Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren’tIf you are reading this update post, there’s a very good chance that it’s because of the Poor-ish article. By my standards, it blew up in a huge way; It sat on top of Hacker News for the better part of an afternoon and I just got a massive, massive amount of traffic from it (again, by my standards, which are modest). I’m the kind of person who likes watching numbers going up, to the point where I have to be careful not to play games in the “Idle” genre lest I waste an entire weekend on nothing. This was a dream version of that - a ton of people were reading something I wrote, and that felt nice.

Then the feedback started rolling in.

I heard from other people who were on the poorer side of things or had been in the past, who offered a lot of solidarity and sympathy. One thing I want to emphasize is that so many people have had it significantly harder than me - I talked to some people who were living on very limited disability, or who had grown up in a kind of poverty as distant (for the worse) from mine as mine would have been from, say, a successful graphic designer. I have had difficulties, but some people have had hell; it helped put some stuff in perspective.

There were a few people who had little sympathy, basically saying that the kind of challenges I had were the result of poor planning and choices. These people, frankly, were at least partially right. In the long view, I certainly could have planned for better career paths and more education; I didn’t then and don’t now want to blame anybody else for that. In the short view, they were still partially right - there are always ways to economize or better manage resources than what you are doing now, and I don’t want to pretend I had maxed out all those options.

The biggest surprise for me were all the people who wanted to help. The first type of this I saw were people who just offered money, flat out; they had extra and wanted to share. If you were one of these, thank you; it was very nice. For what it’s worth, I turned all of these down. At the time we were paying our bills and didn’t have any emergencies to deal with. It didn’t seem right to take charity where I didn’t really need it, especially when there are people doing worse, as I noted above.

The second category was different - some people wanted to employ me. If my count is right, I think I got three offers at this time. One of these came early and was a really decent offer, allowing me to do more interesting work than I’ve done before at a much improved level of pay (more on this in a moment) and I’m incredibly thankful for it. It was a lifechanging thing that’s made a large amount of things in my life much, much easier/better/less stressful.

Two came a bit later, after I had already accepted the first offer. One, amazingly, got caught in my spam filter and I didn’t notice it until basically yesterday. Those two are no less appreciated; I keep in contact with the one I didn’t accidentally ignore because of my spam filter, and he’s an incredibly nice person and someone I’m glad to know (thanks, ML). The other seemed like a great guy as well (thanks and sorry for losing track of you, KO).

When I started this blog, I was pretty substantially depressed, and I had an awful lot of stress on top of that. I asked my wife to make me a logo for a blog I hadn’t made any content for because I figured it would make me feel obligated to put out at least a few posts, and I hoped that would help shake me out of what wasn’t a very good emotional state.

A few months later, I found myself in a really cool job with a very surprisingly reduced amount of stress. It turns out that when you can pay all your bills without contorting yourself in crazy ways, it’s a lot easier to let the small things slide. What’s almost weirder is the amount of stress that remains - I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop and for things to get harder again.

You’ve probably heard of imposter syndrome; that’s the feeling some people get where they feel it’s only a matter of time before people figure out they are faking competence or worth, and that some point someone is going to figure it out and everything will crash down around them. I have that. It’s getting better over time, but it’s going to take some time before I feel really secure. That’s not to say things aren’t much, much better - they are - but it did a lot to help me understand how people can have good income and still be stressed.

Assuming this brave new world doesn’t explode around me any time soon, I’m eventually going to write something on being middle-class-ish and the unexpected differences in lifestyle from the perspective of someone having them for the first time. I need to accumulate a few more of them before that will be an interesting article, but keep an eye out.

The FDA Could Be Better, But Nobody Will Ever Ask Them to BeI haven’t really updated my opinions on this. Although it wasn’t referenced directly, I did see a couple different bigger names later on talk about how articles like this bothered them - that the idea that it could have happened faster was silly, and that things like this take time; the idea is that there’s simply no way to do a drug approval process that takes less than ~75% of a year.

I still think these people are very, very wrong. Challenge trials would have let us move faster with better, clearer results per test subject. This is was not and is not without risk, but that was an is counterbalanced by the fact that we knew millions of lives were at stake. I occasionally see this acknowledged, but it’s always with the mindset that there’s not any possible way to proceed besides taking months and months longer than necessary to get to human testing, and then handling the paperwork and approval only slightly faster than we would a novel treatment for warts.

Not that I expected it, but there has been no widespread call for the FDA to create anything like a pull-out-the-stops emergency protocol for illnesses we know will threaten millions. The next time something like COVID pops ups (which with mutations to COVID might be sooner than we think) the FDA has full, complete permission from the people of the world to sacrifice another few million people to institutional inertia and old fashioned CYA tactics.

What’s NextThere are other posts I’d like to re-cap, but I think that covers enough of the “old stuff” that we can wait until the next good timing for a clip-show. I really can’t find adequate words to express how surprised and pleased I am that you all are here, reading actual words I really wrote. I’d like to give something back, to the extent I can.

One thing that I’ve always been thankful for is that people would listen to me complain and offer advice, even when it must have been taxing for them. I want to give back on that front a little. Sometime next week I’m going to launch a section that gives fairly unlimited access to me. I’m not necessarily all that great, and I can’t guarantee that any advice I’d give would be useful or even sane by classical measures, but I’d like to be available if anyone needs me. I’m trying to figure out how to set this up so it isn’t pinging y’all with unwanted emails all the time, but as soon as I get that worked out I’ll have it up.

I mentioned this a bit already, but I also don’t feel like I’m posting enough. Part of this has to do with time - an article I’m happy enough with to post takes several hours, and having a job and family (both of which I want to keep!) takes a lot of my waking hours. As mentioned at the head of the article, a significant amount of you are paying customers now (thank you!) but I’m orders of magnitude from being at the point where I can make this my full-time work yet. I’ll eventually figure out some features that I can pump out on the regular to provide some extra content, but I want to make sure that’s worthwhile for the readers. Once I figure out some options for that, I’ll let you know; until then, suggestions are welcome.

Thanks, and I’ll be back with a full article in a few days!

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I’m five years old; I’m laying in bed in Salem, Oregon with a silly-big teddy bear that, in retrospect, must have reeked of little boy and pee. My dad comes in to tuck me in and to give me a hug and kiss goodnight. I have somehow through the dim fuzziness of childhood cognition picked up something subconscious about men and women, something related to women being for affection and softness and men being for friends and rough-and-tumble play, or something. His big beard is to rough, or something. It isn’t a fleshed out thought, but I tell my dad that I don’t want the hug and the kiss; that’s for mom to do. He says “Oh, ok”. He never gives me a hug and kiss goodnight again.

I’m five years old and I find what in retrospect must have been a tampon applicator in the garbage; somewhere in my child’s cognition I recognize it as a potential toy boat. I am found playing with it by my older sister, who takes it away. I’m upset by this, and my dad says he will soon buy me another toy boat, an actual toy boat. I don’t lack for toys, but I do lack for a sense of what “soon” is and ask him again later that night when he’s going to get it. It’s probably 7:00 PM. I think there are guests over, but at the very least he’s watching TV and having his evening, and he gets up and goes and spends a couple bucks and 30 minutes of his time on a toy. I don’t lack for toys; he just wants me to have this particular one and to be happy.

That Christmas I’m asked what I want. I say a ruby ring; the better of the two enchanted rings in Zelda is red, and I think it’s a ruby. My dad buys me what I believe to this day was an actual gold ring with an actual small ruby but in the days leading up to Christmas tells me that the small ring-box sized present actually contains rabbit poop. I open the present in secret to verify it’s a ring; I am almost immediately found out and am not allowed to have the ring until the day after Christmas. I later lose the ring in a floor vent in the house re-enacting a scene from the movie Space Balls. I do not realize until later that this story means that we are, at that time, rich.

I’m six years old, and I’m the fifth of six children. Two of these children aren’t children, really; one is over 18 and hasn’t left yet, and the other one is not yet ready to leave for the Navy. Things are busy around the house and I have no concept of death or danger, so words like “double bypass” don’t really register for me any more than the week-long absence of my father does. Somewhere in the middle of that week my mom drives us all down to the hospital; my dad has them put me on the hospital bed with him and shows me how to play a solitaire game with playing cards you don’t need a table for. Nothing is wrong; dads do not get hurt.

I’m still six, and I eat some ant granules on the ground by the back door. My mom informs me that at this stage she used to find me in the garden eating root vegetables that still had a good deal of heavy Willamette Valley soil clinging to them. My mom freaks out; I have eaten poison. My dad asks me if I feel bad; I don’t, since the LD50 of octaborate tetrahydrate might be something, but it’s not “two crumbs of ant bait”. He doesn’t know this, but he informs me that most of the time you shouldn’t go to the doctor unless you actually feel sick; if I start feeling sick I should tell him, but otherwise we will hang out and he will keep an eye on me. I do not die, and I begin a lifetime of subconsciously not going to the doctor.

I’m STILL six, and we are moving. Irv, the man my father sold his business to, has gone bankrupt. This means the payments on the business have stop coming and my dad is no longer retired. The school year ends; I have finished first grade, which is the highest level of education I will ever officially achieve. We move to Estes Park, Colorado, where my Aunt runs a bed and breakfast. My dad rents a house that always has a herd of Elk in the yard. Always a salesman, he buys several VCRs and someone’s very extensive VHS collection; that summer he runs a delivery service bringing people staying at the local hotels VCRs and VHS tapes on-demand. It isn’t successful enough to keep doing, but the rest of my childhood we have hundreds and hundreds of VHS tapes, spotty in the way a personal VHS collection is. I have seen Ghostbusters 2 hundreds of times; I have seen Ghostbusters 1 twice.

I do not realize until later that this means that we were, at that time, poor.

I’m seven, and the summer in Colorado is over; my dad has either sued Irv or convinced him he would and Irv has given him a half-finished house in Phoenix. The house has an upstairs and a basement, but perhaps more notably does not have a ground floor; there’s a 4’x20’ landing that feeds in to both floors, but nothing else. We are homeschooled here; not in the “my parents do drugs and don’t want truancy charges” way but in the conservative Christian way with a room set up for class inside the house and Bob Jones University press history books. We do Hake Saxon Math and my mom tries and fails to teach a single one of us how to draw.

It’s Christmas, and we are doing better financially; my dad has bought a bunch of rugs from the LA garment district and is selling them on street corners. He makes good money doing this, which does not surprise us because the old man had always been a salesman. He brings all our presents downstairs in a big hefty trash bag. We never believed in Santa; this was no loss because the old man never failed to look exactly like Santa.

I’m eight, and my great-grandfather has died. Part of why we came back to Arizona was because Grandpa was in his mid-90’s and my dad didn’t want to miss seeing him some more. Someone calls my dad and lets him know that grandpa was lifted out of his bath that day and indicated to my aunt and grandmother that it was time for him to go and that he passed away to the voices of two people singing Amazing Grace. My father weeps. I haven’t seen this happen before. He sees me looking and tells me “I’m crying because someone died. It’s not wrong to cry. It’s especially not wrong when someone dies.” Later on I try to cry, but can’t; death isn’t real to me and I didn’t know my great-grandfather well enough for his passing to make it so.

I’m eight-almost-nine and my father has purchased a ‘83 Fleetwood Pace Arrow motorhome, and we are going travel the country. By we, I mean my mother, my father, the three of my siblings who remain at home, and myself. It’s not a huge motorhome by any means. He builds some bunks into the back of it and him and my mom sleep on a pull-out couch. We travel to Salem, where my sister still is and summer there. The motorhome pulls a trailer with the rugs. My dad figures out that moving town to town allows him to do more business per day and we slowly see most of the western United States.

During this time my dad asks us questions. Sometimes these quizzes - state capitols, doing quick mental math off word problems, that kind of thing. Sometimes the questions are more philosophical in nature. He asks us what side we’d be on during the civil war, if we lived in those times. My brothers and sisters all quickly claim allegiance to The North; I say it would probably depend where I was born, since everyone I’d know would be fighting for that side. My siblings object that they wouldn’t do that, but my dad explains that this is exactly how approximately everybody chose their side during the civil war. He approves of me. I decide to be smart.

I’m nine and I want a baseball mitt; my dad finds a second-baseman’s glove somewhere, the kind with the exaggerated lip on the blade of the hand, and he buys a few baseballs. I go chuck the baseballs at trees; we do not play catch. My oldest brother was the jock, and my dad was his coach in a lot of sports through high school, so he’s pretty over the sports thing. I had somehow got my hands on a bunch of 70’s era sports books with names like “Mr. Quarterback” and, in proper nerd fashion, had fixated on the idea of scholarships stemming from sports allowing me to go to college for free. I am convinced I can do this, despite being demonstrably bad at any kind of athletic effort whatsoever.

My dad takes me aside at some point and says “Listen, son. You aren’t going to beat them that way; that’s not what you are good at. You are going to beat them; just not like that. Focus on what you can do.” I give up on the idea a lot sooner than I otherwise would have, in a healthy way that causes no damage.

I’m 10 and I bust my eyebrow open on a table re-enacting a scene from the very worst Rocky movie. My dad takes me to the hospital and makes a lot of jokes about me losing a fight. He tells me his dad had a crippled leg and thus had learned to end fights in one hit; he says he was the only person to ever knock him out with a jab, and he jabbed good enough that my dad never figured out what to do about this. I do not reflect that this level of tactical knowledge of one’s father meant that my grandfather had on more than one occasion punched my father in the face, or what that might mean. My father wouldn’t have told me the story if he thought I would have.

I don’t remember when he told me this, but my father used to steal newspapers and sell them door to door, until someone saw him doing it and told him to sell the avocados from their orchard door to door instead. This story was always related to him talking about his sales skill. It was never related to what it meant to be seven or eight years old in the 50’s, selling things door to door so his family could eat during one of the many absences of his father.

I’m 12 and we are back in Estes Park, this time to take care of my Aunt and her bed and breakfast while she dies of cancer. My dad has us spend a lot of time taking care of the cabins and fishing and chasing down rabbits so we don’t spend a lot of time watching my Aunt slowly succumb to her illness.

During the summer when he’s not taking care of her, my dad slowly converts a Bluebird flat-nose diesel-pusher bus into a much larger motorhome than what we had. He does not know how to do this; he is not a craftsman. He catches himself several times with an angle grinder, somehow never severely injuring himself. He frequently works with hot wires and shocks himself, sitting down each time and explaining that when you shock yourself with house voltage you should sit down so you don’t give yourself a heart attack. I do not think about the fact that at this point he has actually had two heart attacks; he’s fine. Dads do not actually die. He eventually gets the bus livable; that is home for a year or so more.

My Aunt eventually dies; I am not present to see my dad cry this time. He later tells me that shortly before her death, the pastor of the small church she attended came over and sang her a hymn. She told the pastor “Jess, I once heard a dirty song set to the tune of that hymn!” and proceeded to sing it for him. The pastor smiled, and continued his visit. After he left, my Aunt told my father that “the best part about being on morphine is you can sing a dirty song to your pastor, and he just smiles”. My dad liked happy stories, especially when speaking of the dead.

I’m 13 and my oldest brother has asked my dad to start a business that he can be a part of. My dad returns to Phoenix with all of us in tow and starts another pest control business, this time probably internally aware of the idea that selling it to Irv would be a bad idea. He is immediately successful; this is not weird to any of us, since the old man can sell anything. I start going to church, woefully behind on social skills but by this point much, much smarter than I should have been at 13. It takes me about a year to establish a friend group that I still maintain today.

My dad is always proud of me for having friends, and always happy when we have friends over; he doesn’t get in the way, he’s just glad it’s happening. My dad had two or three friends that I was aware of growing up; as they died or grew away he didn’t replace them. I didn’t know and still don’t know if that was intentional; in his later life all his friends were relatives. He was, for what it’s worth, very proud of us for fitting in with the other kids, for being popular.

I’m 15 and I want to go to public school. I think I wanted to go because I thought this would help me find a girlfriend (at the time, it would not have helped me do that). My dad and mom agree that this is not going to happen. The vocalized reason for this was that there wasn’t any great reason for me to go to school; this may or may not have been true. The unspoken reason, since confirmed by friends who knew me at the time, was that the US school system would have brutalized me emotionally. One of my closer friends says it would have “dimmed my light”. I am blissfully unaware of any of this.

My dad is building a Y2K bunker in a small town in northern Arizona. He’s stockpiling food and buys a 2000 gallon water tank. He does not fully expect Y2K to happen, though he mostly says he does. In a more candid moment, he tells me that it’s no loss if it doesn’t happen; he has always wanted to build a bunker. I begin my lifelong dream of owning a defensible building in the woods with arable soil and a reliable water source.

I’m being kind of a jerk about the school thing, though. To the extent I rebelled as a teenager, this was it; I was insufferable about it. At some point he takes me out in front of the bunker (actually a mobile home) and shoves me several times, telling me to cut it out, to stop being an asshole about it. I say shove, but he barely touches me. He visibly scares himself doing this, and stops. I stop whining about the school thing forever, and continue on course to be me instead of someone else.

The old man never talks about this again, but he’s noticeably on eggshells around me for a while. I never reflect that this might have anything to do with how thoroughly aware he as of his own father’s punching power and speed.

I’m 16 and it’s time for the Senior Banquet, a sort of sexless prom substitute put on by the very large Baptist church I attend. I’m at my Aunt’s house surrounded by my 100 or so local relatives, which means it’s either thanksgiving or a wake; I don’t remember which. My eldest brother and my brother-in-law are asking me if I feel confident I can find a girl to take. I inform them I could find five girls to take, if I wanted to. This quickly becomes a bet; terms are negotiated in which if I bring ten girls to the prom my brother and brother-in-law will go halfsies on a limo to transport them; if I fail, then my humiliation will be their reward. My only-slightly-older brother is observing this and desperately trying to warn them that this is a bad idea.

My dad walks through and gets wind of what’s happening and asks my brother and brother in law if they had already shook hands on the bet; on finding they had, he grunted out a laugh and went into the other room.

I picked up my gigantic Sprint touch-to-talk walkie-talkie phone and pinned down commitments from four or five girls in the next half hour or so. Later on I was walking through the room my father was in and someone asked him if he had heard I already had four girls; he had. They asked him how that was possible (which is less insulting than it sounds; I was a bizarre looking kid). He didn’t know I was there, and said “RC has something none of the rest of us have.” For the rest of my life, I had something nobody else had.

He never said anything nice about me when I could hear him. He’d laugh at jokes; he liked me, but he never said “RC, you are smart. I’m proud of you”. For a very short while I was worried about this. I once told John, an adoptive grandfather figure I loved and named my son after about this worry, that my father would have rather had a more normal son, one who was more standard and dealt with the world in more standard ways. John and I both worked for my father at the time to keep busy in his old age. He had known my dad as a young man, and thought of him when he needed work.

John heard my worry, looked at me and said “You idiot. A day or two after I started working here, your dad called me into the office. Do you know what he said? He asked me if I had met you yet. I said ‘Sure, I’ve talked to him’. Your dad asked me what I thought of you, I said you seemed fine. He leaned in to me and said ‘He’s brilliant, John. He’s brilliant.’” I never cried about this until now.

I once told my dad something to the effect of “This brother has a thing - he plays sports. And I have the whole funny and weird thing. But this brother, I’m not sure if he has a thing.” My dad said “Never say that again. Your brother is a sharp dresser, he’s a good salesman; people like him. He’s good looking, and he’s good to people. He has a thing. He’s a good person.” I never thought about what it meant that my dad couldn’t say these things directly to us, that he believed them and would defend them to death but that he couldn’t say it to us. I never thought about what it meant that he loved me but couldn’t hug me except with great difficulty.

I’m 17 and I’m explaining to my dad that my friend has some emotional damage, that something he did that was a little off is probably because his dad had left his mother for his secretary and it put a big scar on his heart. My dad says “My dad left, lots of times. He cheated, lots of times. It hurts you. But you have a choice about how you treat people after that.” My dad never once fails to take care of me or to help me when I need it.

One time I come home from some Church event or something, I haven’t slept much in a few days and I’m hysterical. I don’t remember why; there might not have even been a reason besides the horrifying loneliness of being young. My dad hears me come in the back door (the front was locked) and sees that I’m crying and asks me what’s wrong. I say it’s nothing, and he doesn’t ask again. He couldn’t deal with crying very well; he spent most of his time trying to prevent it.

That year I’m in a car wreck. My friend falls asleep driving us home, and we crash into a yard a few doors down from my house. I’m not horribly injured, but the seatbelt gives me a bad scrape down my side and the airbag splits my lip. I wasn’t supposed to be out that late; he had told me to come home earlier than that. He takes me home and wipes the blood off the doorknobs I had touched and tells me we will deal with it in the morning.

The next morning my mom drives me into work, and she’s hysterical - she almost lost her son. She says I’m going to have to deal with my dad, that he’s pissed. I get to work and go into his office. He says “Sit down.” and points at a chair. I do. He stares at me. The silence is heavy. He says “you look like shit.” I laugh, and my lip splits open again and starts bleeding. He laughs and says I’m already punished, and I can go.

I’m 20 and I’ve met my wife, although we aren’t married yet; I take her to meet my parents, and my dad suggest that her eyeglasses prescription is probably out of date; she can do better. He’s incorrect on the former point but correct on the latter. He never fails to treat my wife well; he never says a single negative thing about her.

I’m 22 and I’m getting married; my dad is at my wedding. One of my groomsman has secured permission from my wife to wear cowboy boots. My dad walks in, sees the boots, and tells him to wear normal shoes. My friend immediately and without question changes shoes, because “Mr. Contrarian said I should”. My dad loves all my friends. My friends all love my dad.

My dad had supplied my wife’s engagement ring and wedding ring, because I was dead broke. He gives her a beautiful necklace to wear. She wears it as we swear our vows. She’s beautiful. He loves her; she is his daughter now.

We visit him and mom in Kentucky shortly after we get married; he looks in the rearview mirror and says “Val, you are incredibly beautiful”. I say “You should have seen her last night - she was naked”. He laughs for a solid 15 minutes, then calls me an asshole. Getting called an asshole was how you knew it was a genuinely funny joke, one he just couldn’t deal with in any other way.

I’m 25; I have two kids. He’s met both of them and loves both of them. Him and mom have moved back to Arizona to be closer to us; I don’t know that this is because the damage to his heart and some minor strokes are starting to build up and he wants to see us more. I don’t visit him enough.

He watches our kids here and there; he loves both of them, but for whatever reason loves the smaller one more; he lets him ride on his lap in his electric wheelchair which he has despite being invincible and strong and lets him use the controls, running into walls and things. He loves him especially much compared to most of the grandkids, my mom tells me; she never thought to ask why and neither did I.

He calls me one day and tells me his TV is broken, that he is confident I can probably figure out how to fix a broken TV and I’m welcome to try if I want it. I get the TV, pop the cover off the back and quickly diagnose it as a $2 repair, which I then perform. I call him to let him know it wasn’t really broken and he can have it back; he tells me it WAS broken, that he couldn’t have fixed it, that it’s weird that I can and that it’s mine now. I don’t realize until later he just needed an excuse to give me the TV and the fuse was a convenient excuse to have; it’s later on that I realize he never actually doubted that I could fix a mysteriously broken television with little effort.

I’m 25 and I talk a lot about how my mom and my dad are always together, almost 24 hours a day. I never reflect that this isn’t how marriages usually are, except as an exceptional positive, or that this might reflect controlling behavior. I never think about what it meant to be a person with an abusive father who built his whole life around his family, or what fear of abandonment is. I live most of my life with my wife nearby, and it’s a problem we occasionally have to talk about because in my mind it’s normal to have her nearby at all times.

At some point he tells me he’s dying, that the doctors are saying he doesn’t have long to go. I hear him say it but it has zero meaning to me - my mind ignores it, because my father doesn’t lie, but fathers also don’t die. About a week after that, he lowers himself down from his wheelchair and spends an hour weeding my mom’s garden, because it was something he could do for her. I later find out this kind of behavior isn’t uncommon in his situation.

I’m 25, and my dad is driving down the road with my little brother’s wife and my mom in the truck with him when his heart explodes like a grenade inside his chest. He says “Oh, shit”, and somehow pulls the car off the freeway, off the offramp and almost halfway to the closest parking lot before he passes out. My mom can’t shift him; he’s huge and diabetic. She manages to get his leg off the accelerator and steers the car into a Lowes sign. A cop sees this happen, assumes they are on drugs, finds out they aren’t and gets him to the hospital.

I’m 25 and I get a call, but I live in central Phoenix and they live on the western edge. I pack up the kids and the wife and we race down, but I never had a chance. His heart was likely stopped before he got off the freeway, from what I’ve gathered; given how long he controlled the car, there’s a good chance he was trying to protect his family while by most measures he was already dead.

I’m 25 and I’m standing by my father’s corpse, and I can’t cry; death isn’t real and fathers don’t die; people who are important to you can’t die. I go out into the waiting room a bit after and somebody, an Uncle or something, asks me if I’m OK and I tell them my blood sugar is low; they get an apple juice from somewhere. Struggling to talk to me, to see why I’m calm and if I’m ok, they ask me how the apple juice is. I say “It tastes like piss” with perfect comic timing and the kind of face I know sells a joke even when it’s not funny. This is how I will always deal with everything, but especially this.

I’m 25 and I leave the hospital and pull out my cell phone to call my dad and tell him he’s dead. I have no emotions yet but I start to understand on an intellectual level that this is a big deal.

A week later I’m at my dad’s house going through things and I see a belt buckle he had always had, it has bear claws in it, but one is loose and falls out. He had been planning on getting it fixed and had told me so. I realize it’s never going to be fixed, now. I start crying for the first time. My wife is on one side of me and my older sister is on the other and a small noiseless conflict breaks out over whose lap I’m going to collapse on; my sister considered me her belonging long before my wife did, after all. My sister lets my wife win, and I weep. I am unable to cry at the funeral, but at least then I do. I don’t cry again about it for years. I cry at sad things on TV; I don’t cry about that.

I’m 28 I haven’t really dealt with anything for years, but I feel guilty about not visiting more near the end. I feel guilty because he told me to get ready for it, to talk to him about it, and I didn’t; I wouldn’t listen. I make jokes about it. I become more afraid of people I love getting hurt; I become overcautious with my kids and wife to a greater degree than before. I don’t deal with anything.

My dad once told me he didn’t think people in Heaven could observe people on Earth, because if they could they would be sad, and sadness is not a thing for people in Heaven. I tend to agree with him on this point. I’m glad for him; I’m glad I believe the way I believe.

I’m 28 and I have a dream. My dad is in a hospital bed, playing solitaire. I see him, I run over, he has me sit with him on the bed; we talk, we make jokes. I tell him I’m sorry I didn’t see him more at the end; he tells me it’s fine. I don’t think he can see me from Heaven, but I think Heaven has a hand in the dream anyway. I start to deal with things years after the fact.

There’s no real ending to this. I’m not sure if this is the right place to write about this kind of thing in the first place.

Some advice: My brother wrote a letter to my dad telling him what he had meant to him, and gave it to him before my dad passed. They found the letter afterwards it had been folded and unfolded almost to death. My dad had clearly read it hundreds of times. This is my letter, and while it’s certainly longer, it will never have those fold marks. You are a fine reader, and I appreciate you, but you are strictly the wrong audience for this. If you have the chance still, write your letters to your people today; it’s not too early. Early here is good, not bad. Write them for everybody.

Thanks for reading this; I know he wasn’t your father, but he was mine and I miss him. For better or worse this is the only way besides jokes I can deal with anything or talk about anything serious; thanks for helping me do that.

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Listen now | I have a couple friends who are significantly interested in a particular pocket of the internet that you could refer to as something like “posts about relationship problems with ridiculous or unreasonable causes. One of them sent me this gem: My wife divorced me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink. It seems so unreasonable when you put it that way. It makes her seem ridiculous and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations.

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Note: I’m trying out audio narration for at least a few articles to see how much value people get out of it, but it takes a fair amount of time to do. Please don’t be shy with the feedback if it’s something you use - feedback helps.

Isaac Asimov’s Dreaming Is a Private Thing is a short story about a sort of VR tech where the superior daydreams of talented imaginers called Dreamers are piped directly to the brains of less gifted viewers as a form of entertainment. The story’s focus is Jesse Weill, a non-dreaming producer of this kind of media; he’s the sort of talent-wrangling executive who makes things happen behind the scenes.

One of his Weill’s responsibilities is identifying children with the potential to be Dreamers, and at some point in the story he is confronted by the father of one such prospect, who has been guaranteed intense training for the boy by one of Weill’s competitors:

Weill sighed. "Mr. Slutsky, I don't like to talk against a competitor. If they say they'll guarantee training, they'll do as they say, but they can't make a boy a dreamer if he hasn't got it in him, training or not. If they take a plain boy without the proper talent and put him through a development course, they'll ruin him. A dreamer he won't be, that I guarantee you. And a normal human being he won't be, either. Don't take the chance of doing it to your son.

Dreaming is one of Asimov’s best short stories, and I think about this particular quote often because it overlaps with something I believe to be true: not every skill can be taught to every kind of person, and sometimes it’s harmful to try.

As a for-instance, think of sales. Here I’m talking specifically about what’s called hard selling, where a person has a pitch and a short time frame to either make the sale or not (think: door-to-door vacuum salesmen or telemarketers). This is as opposed to soft sales, which focus on building a relationship over time (think: a sales rep servicing corporate accounts at a chemical supplier).

Soft salesmen come in a variety of personality shapes and sizes, but if you spend enough time around hard salespeople, you come to notice they are a pretty specific personality type: usually very motivated, grindy, high-energy people with a exceptionally high ability to read social cues and react to them. Really good salespeople often couple that high level of people-reading empathy with a lack of other kinds of empathy, essentially knowing how you feel but not caring much about it beyond how it applies to their ability to close the sale.

There’s a whole industry of books and paid lectures dedicated to taking people from the opposite personality type and training them up, to converting timid people to real-deal closers. You can drop hundreds of dollars to go to a conference where speaker after speaker pushes sales states-of-mind and techniques on salespeople and bookish librarian-types alike. The salespeople leave hyped and maybe have a few new techniques to try; the librarians leave… pretty much the same guys.

More time doesn’t help; I’ve seen people try to train these guys up in sales environments, giving them pitches, rebuttals, roadmaps to success, etc. and they do get better, but it just doesn’t make enough of a difference to make them effective. There’s exceptions to the rule - I’ve seen a few timid people brute force their way through and be successful, but just a few. It’s something that for the most part you either have or you don’t.

Or we could talk about actors. If you’ve been around community theater long enough, you’ve noticed that occasionally someone is just great; they aren’t perfect or refined but they “get it” on a fundamental level. The opposite person also exists - so clearly bad you know they are missing some important self-awareness component that would allow them to be good - they can see good acting on a screen or stage and recognize it as such but they can’t map it onto their own actions.

I’ve asked committed and professional acting-teacher friends about this and they generally relate that they can make any actor better, perhaps making a good actor great or a terrible actor tolerable. What they can’t usually do is make a bad actor great, even if that actor is dedicated and hard-working. They are improving people within a limited spectrum, a range determined in part by elements of personality and self-awareness that aren’t necessarily changeable.

Or think about writing - especially the parts of writing that fall under the “prose” classification. I know a lot of people who are smarter and better educated than me who just can’t write. They know more about sentence structure and grammar than I do; they’d whup my ass hard in a proofreading competition. They’ve had the English classes and have read the relevant creative writing books. Some of them have practiced writing to a much greater extent, time-wise, than I have. But it doesn’t take. There’s something missing that keeps them from anything more interesting to read than very short, spare declarative sentences, something that a dozen college classes on the subject didn’t and couldn’t fix. (Note: Nick from the RC Proofreader Death Corps would like me to clarify that I’m not talking about him and that he writes just fine.)

None of this of course means that everyone who is currently not-great at something is that way because they are constitutionally incapable of improving. I’m sure a lot of people really do just lack for practice; if you want to do something, try. Heck, even do it if you are bad at it - the whole fun of community theater as mentioned above is that nobody is a professional, and everyone is just showing up to do something they like for the kind of person who likes to watch people try their best. But that doesn’t erase the part where not everyone can excel at the things they’d like to be great at. In the case of theater or writing, training them at least does no harm; in the case of trying to shoehorn a non-sales person into a sales job, it can do a little more but it’s still not necessarily a life and death thing - we’ve all had a job that was a bad fit.

These are all imperfect examples, but they roughly circle around what I want to talk about. Sometimes we have an impulse to think that equal training will get everyone to an equal place as if everyone’s capabilities and skillsets were the same - we see this in our high school system being conspicuously devoid of trade-school alternatives, or when we suggest that a bunch of out-of-work coal miners and factory workers should learn to code. This refusal to look at people as different from each other (sometimes in fundamental, limiting ways) isn’t just unrealistic. In some situations, it’s harmful.

Super-long intro aside, this article is about Common Core math. I’m about ten years too late to the party to pretend to be the first to notice that it appears crazy. To anyone who grew up with the conventional old ways of doing work it does tend tolook insane, but in case anybody needs getting caught up, the meme representations of common core are usually something like this:

Or here, more conspiratorially:

Or here, with a bat-s**t-crazy Chick Tract-level illustration that feels mildly racist in a way I can’t adequately explain:

That last example is long division, if you can’t tell.

I’ll start by defending Common Core a little bit, which seems fair because I’m going to go after it pretty hard later. Yes, it looks crazy to anyone brought up on more “conventional” math. But that would be necessary of any significantly new method for teaching math - if it’s different enough to matter, it’s going to look drastically different than the rote algorithms we are used to. And since new things aren’t by default bad, you can’t blame them for that in an honest, fair way.

Moving on from that, we have to then look at the substance of what they are trying to do. Common Core people trying to explain the advantages Common Core offers often use the term “number sense”. What they are trying to give a child, they say, is a more intuitive understanding of numbers and how math works, so that the child gets something beyond rote-step following and learns to understand the “why” of how a math problem works.

To understand how they try to do this, think of it this way: what’s 20 * 11? You probably got to the answer really quickly by breaking it down to something like (20 * 10) + 20, which is easier. 2525 becomes (25 20) + (25 * 5). These are shortcuts; they are the kind of little tricks reasonably intelligent people develop themselves after spending enough time with the old-style rote math algorithms.

Common Core is the result of developing new teaching techniques after looking at kids with this kind high-comfort-level manipulation. Specifically, it’s what you come up with if you assume those techniques are the cause of being good at rote math algorithms, as opposed to being something that flow out of it.

This left friendly idealistic everyone-can-use-smart-kid-methods line of thought is explained here by Vox, who predictably loves the hell out of it:

Even though you can already tell I don’t really buy the philosophy behind common core, I want to stress that it would be absolutely fabulous if we look and find it works - we’d expect to see a bunch of kids who have an intuitive grasp of math that really would move us one step closer to the everyone-in-STEM Andrew Yang utopia that a certain sector of America dreams about. Luckily, we are now far enough past the implementation of Common Core to answer that Laconic If. Unluckily, it doesn’t look great.

In deciding how critically and closely I need to examine something, I end up using a particular rule of thumb a lot: If there are very few studies available on an issue where you’d expect to see tons of research and discussion, something is probably up. This is doubly true when the field is dominated by a particular political ideology (education: check!) and where studies might disprove a preferred view of that ideology (any difference in outcomes is primarily due to to some government-changeable force external to the student: check!).

So when there’s really only one recent review that itself only can find a few studies actually looking at student outcomes, a suspicious person already knows what’s coming. The study does its best to obscure what’s coming next, first by spending a huge amount of time talking about Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation studies (Common Core is Bill and Melinda’s baby, for reference) of how teachers feel common core is going:

Teachers also reported positive changes in student learning. Even though the CCSS was not fully implemented until the 2013–2014 school year in many states, over half (53%) of the teachers in CCSS adopting states reported in 2014 that they had already seen a positive change in their students’ ability to think critically and use reasoning skills as a results of CCSS implementation, and an even higher percentage (68%) of the teachers in schools where CCSS implementation was fully complete in 2012–13 or earlier reported the same (Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2014).

Eventually, the authors run out of excuses and get around to talking about their findings on actual student performance:

This paper presents findings about the effects of states’ implementation of the new CCR standards on student achievement as measured by NAEP. Contrary to our expectation, we found that the CCR standards had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores. The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small, ranging from -0.10 to -0.06 SDs.

Note here that things are getting worse over time; the authors measured at 1, 3, 5 and 7 years after implementation; each measurement is worse than the last. Making things worse in a way the authors don’t acknowledge is this tidbit:

For states that adopted the CCR standards in 2010, almost half of the states were still in their first year of full implementation when they participated in the 2015 NAEP assessments—5 years after adopting the new standards. Thus, findings from this study largely reflect early effects of states’ implementation of the CCR Standards during the transition period, which may be different from the effects after the new standards became fully implemented.

The authors admirably take the exact wrong lesson from this. Since this is from a section headed by “There are a number of potential reasons for the lack of positive effects that we had hoped to find in this study”, they are using data indicating Common Core caused more harm the more fully implemented it was to say something that boils down to “yes, our own analysis shows this is harmful - it’s a shame it didn’t have more time to work, since we all know eventually it must end up being a good thing”.

The authors are right when they say the effect is small, so this doesn’t really prove Common Core is the worst. But “I guess we don’t have proof it’s hurting people much yet” isn’t really the best thing to hear about an expensive new program.

I don’t really blame Common Core proponents for the type of thinking they did, at least when judging it completely within the mental acceptable-thought ecosystem they’ve built for themselves. If you are absolutely dedicated to the thought that everybody should be in STEM and firmly believe that all student-to-student differences must be the result of things you can fix, the logical solution is to find boxes successful student A ticked that successful student B didn’t, and make them tick the same boxes.

The danger, such as it is, comes around when you won’t believe or even acknowledge the possibility of things outside of that ecosystem. So while “normal” people mostly understand that not everyone should be in STEM and that most people don’t need much past long division in terms of math knowledge to make their way through the world, these guys are stuck.

They need every student to have a deep, non-rote understanding of how math works; they can’t be engineers without it. They need it to be true that math-successful kids’ “math sense” is causing their success rather than stemming from it, because to believe otherwise would mean that some kids can’t be forced to like and excel at math by the kind of interventions the government has plausible access to. And this is even before we get into the Kendi-believer set. Even though I’m talking about individual variation here, to them the suggestion that causes of variation in individual outcome exist beyond the control of policy and resource allocation is racist on its face.

Believe it or not, I’m actually not hostile to things like Common Core; I think there must be better ways to teach that can be discovered and used and that this room for improvement implies an obligation to try to find them. But we can only do that one of two ways. We can approach the search for solutions with an open mind that takes into account individual variation in capability and tastes, the limitation of government action and the importance of resources. Or we could instead allow preferred-reality biases to set the limits on our available options, but that limits our successes to broken-clocks-are-right-twice-a-day scenarios.

“Cheap” forms of experimentation do exist (see: charter schools) but they are subject to the normal limitations - it’s easy to dismiss an experiment that works at one or two schools as an outlier or an intentional manipulation of data. National-level tests like Common Core enjoyed are at least somewhat proof against those weaknesses, but are expensive enough that opportunities for them are rare. I think it’s fair to argue that if the current evidence of Common Core’s failure holds up, we wasted our opportunity this round. Worse, if we wasted it we did so because we let the way we wish the world was color our understanding of how the world might actually be. This is important. Let’s not waste our next chance.

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