I recently flew home from Madrid, where I spent a week at an analytic philosophy conference. The conference dinner was a tapas event where everyone stands around in a very loud room and drinks copiously from the open wine bar. It was here that I had a conversation with a senior1 British academic I will call Lord Bumptiously-Snobbington.

Lord B-S: “I edit [major journal] and we get 1000 submissions a year. Most of them are terrible and unimaginative, and barely say anything creative. It’s gotten to the point that I have to send out submissions to 23 people before I can find anyone willing to be a referee.”

Me, falsely assuming that we are going to talk about the glut of AI slop submissions: “I’m sure this has just gotten worse with AI.”

Lord B-S: “Well, yes, but really most people shouldn’t be publishing at all. They aren’t truly advancing philosophy.”

It was looking like this conversation was going to be more entertaining than anticipated.

Me, testing the waters: “I have a friend who says there are three kinds of philosophers—frauds, hacks, and geniuses. I figure as long as I am not a fraud, that’s fine. Being a genius is too high a bar.”

Lord B-S: “Yes, there aren’t many geniuses, are there? Who do you think is publishing really first-rate work?”

We then bandied about a few names, including some of the recent (our lifetimes) mighty dead. Names that came up were Jennifer Lackey, Sandy Goldberg, Tim Williamson, John Hawthorne, Hilary Putnam, Roderick Chisholm, and Robert Nozick. Maybe a couple of others. Lord B-S was dismissively critical of all of them, sometimes on a personal basis. I’m pretty sure that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe were the last philosophers he really respected.

Lord B-S: “I know it is not a popular opinion, but I think only about 20 people should publish at all. And we need far fewer journals as well.”

Me: “The way things are going in the profession, with department closures and major cancellations, you’ll get your wish.”

Lord B-S: “I’m an admirer of the American liberal arts college model. Teaching good students is a fine vocation. But they should just read the best thinkers, not try to write philosophy themselves.”

I have no doubt that Lord B-S was imagining a glorious future in which he and his friends are the only ones publishing in the journals. With all the cluttering riff-raff cleared away and the lesser venues shuttered for good, their brilliance would be endlessly discussed in admiring tones at Swarthmore, Dartmouth, and high table at Oxford. I did attempt to push back on this some, but Lord Bumptiously-Snobbington was an immovable object. His was certainly at one extreme of views about gatekeeping.

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Gatekeeping comes in degrees, from most conservative to most liberal:

Peer review

People run down traditional peer review all the time. To be sure, there’s a lot about it that is terrible:

• Either you get an immediate desk rejection without comments, or it takes forever to get a decision. I have an article that I sent to one journal where it was rejected after a year. I then sent it to a second journal 11 months ago, and I’m still waiting to hear back. There’s a joke that Analysis has speedy decisions only because they auto-reject every submission as soon as they receive it. Maybe that’s just my experience.

• The acceptance rate at the best places is <5%, so your whole career can hinge on playing the world’s slowest lottery.

• Referee’s reports can be great, but they can also be perfunctory, inconsistent, and incompetent. I once sent an article to Philosophy and Phenomenology Research, where I got three referee reports: (1) accept, (2) revise and resubmit, and (3) reject. The journal went with (2), and eventually published my paper. So there was a happy ending this time, although that is rarely the case.

• The publishing side has other problems. Because the job market is so terrifyingly horrible, grad students are desperate to stand out and spam the journals with their term papers hoping one will land. As a result, the gears of the refereeing system grind even more slowly. This problem has gotten steadily worse.

• AI writing and submissions are like a gigantic bomb filled with quick-drying epoxy heaved into those gears. I think AI will be an existential crisis for the peer review system.

• Faculty are expected to treat refereeing as unpaid, anonymous professional service. It’s a nice thing to do for the profession, but no one’s employer will notice or care, and there’s no other external incentive to do it.

• The preceding winds up making it harder for journal editors because they have to devote so much time to finding referees. It also means that people who regularly say yes to refereeing requests get hammered. Synthese once asked me to referee two different articles on the same day. I have since learned to say no.

• Journals are also conservative by nature, and unlikely to see the merit in radical approaches or ideas. This can be both good and bad.

• Peer review is subject to ordinary human fallibility too—poor judgment, fraudulent submissions, fashion and trendiness, etc.

On the other hand, peer review does set a standard that few people can meet, and establishes the floor of professional discussion. It’s like the NFL combine. Someone who does well at the combine may turn out to be a dud as a pro ball player, but someone who tanks the combine never had a chance of succeeding in the NFL.

The anonymity of peer review is one of its strongest features. No one can be judged on their reputation (or lack of it) when authors are anonymous to referees. The veil of ignorance obviates personal bias or prejudice—we are all pure spirit, naked and alone on judgment day.

Popularizing

What about pop scholarship, the next stop on the line? It’s not enough to cheaply say that some faculty should work at one stop, others at a different one. I guarantee that for every popularizer, someone will complain that they are a lightweight not advancing knowledge. I also guarantee that for every Lord Bumptiously-Snobbington, someone will gripe that philosophers (and other academics) aren’t talking to the masses. For example:

One of the pervasive myths about academic philosophers is that we have contempt for public philosophy. I’ve been hearing this my whole career, and at this point I think you have to be actively not paying attention to still believe it. Yes, at the most rarified echelons of the profession public-facing philosophy will be tolerated mostly as a side-project; but that’s because those schools expect their faculty to be hard at work pushing back the front lines at the leading edge of knowledge. Everywhere else public philosophy ranges from perfectly acceptable to fully worthy for promotion and tenure.

There are so many examples of general-audience philosophy it is hard to know where to start. Bestselling books include Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit; Aaron James, Assholes: A Theory; Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game; and Nick Riggle, On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck. Then there’s dozens and dozens of philosophy and pop culture books. The first was The Simpsons and Philosophy, which was such a hit with Open Court that the format was copied by many other presses. So we now have Beer & Philosophy, Monty Python and Philosophy, Christmas: Philosophy for Everyone, What Philosophy Can Tell You About Your Dog, and loads more. I see calls for papers for similar books on a regular basis.

Philosophy is a category on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with long-running shows including The Partially Examined Life, Very Bad Wizards, Hi-Phi Nation, and Philosophy Bites. There’s also well-subscribed philosophy YouTube channels like Wireless Philosophy, Philosophize This!, Brain in a Vat, Philosophy Overdose, Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, Carneades.org, and others.

Let’s not forget popular old-school blogs like Leiter Reports, Daily Nous, and The Splintered Mind. Loads of good philosophers have given TED talks too—Michael Lynch, Daniel Dennett, Orora O’Neill, Peter Singer, Nick Bostrom, etc. On top of all that there are fancy people like Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah writing in The New York Times and The London Review of Books. I’m not sure where has been, but this is the golden age of public philosophy.

The podcasts and YouTube shows are mostly done by professionals, although not all, and certainly the popularizing books, TED talks, and legacy media writing is done by pros. So there’s some level of gatekeeping involved, if not as rigorous as peer review.

The public square

Then there is Substack. Substack is the public square. I’m all for the marketplace of ideas, but let’s also recognize that a sophist with good rhetorical skills will persuade an amateur reader. That’s not a criticism, by the way; anyone might fall for a clever writer in a field that’s not their own just because they’re not expert enough to spot the mistakes and weaknesses. I had an undergraduate professor who told me that (when he was a student) it was a long time before he wasn’t persuaded by the last paper he read. It takes a while before you can hit a major league fastball, even if one day you join the Red Sox.

The public square is like a carnival, with barkers shouting to step right up and hear about shrimp utilitarianism, or Catholic miracles, or why [famous historical author] is badly misunderstood, or see how some famous actress’s insights like “choose kindness” attract 154,000 subscribers and place her high on the philosophy leaderboard. I am 100% here for the clowns, the earnest soap-boxers, the angry washouts, the one-trick ponies, the unexpected polymaths, the posers, the slumming bigshots, and a couple of chili dogs and a lemonade too.

It’s just that the public square is serving a different kind of function from the gatekeeping categories.

Gatekeeping proves nothing, but it is an indicator of trustworthiness. As in, if I’m professionally interested in topic X and I see there’s an article on it in Mind, I trust it’s worth my time to take a look. If I’m curious about a topic outside of philosophy and want to learn more, I trust it is a good plan to read a popular book by a real scholar, or at least catch their TED talk.

Here on Substack we are all at play in the carnival of ideas, where reader trust must be built over time precisely because there is no gatekeeping to signal it. It is not inherently better or worse than the gate-kept venues, but it has a different audience and different purpose. At the same time it is worthwhile to see that gatekeeping too performs a valuable function, and whatever criticisms might be made of it—like democracy—it is better than the alternatives.

I fully believe Amazon is cutting up books, scanning, and destroying them. But rare books?

Rarity

John Carter and Nicolas Barker’s ABCs for Book Collectors is a classic, and archly funny, reference work. They write (8th ed., 2004, p. 25), “The lines of demarcation between ‘rare books’, ‘old books’ and ‘second-hand books’ have never been, and can never be, clearly defined.” But then in their entry on Rarity, they distinguish among absolute, relative, temporary, and localized rarities.

With the advent of the internet and worldwide online databases, the categories of rarity have largely collapsed. It used to be that if you wanted books on the heraldry of Scottish lairds that you needed to go to Edinburgh or Glasgow for the good stuff. Now you can just log onto vialibri.net and see what all the big dealers have—and most of the smaller ones too—anywhere in the world. Very studious buyers find a way to log into Worldcat and see what the institutional libraries own worldwide. Nowadays it is absolute rarity that matters.

In 1553 Michael Servetus published Christianisimi Restitutio in an edition of 1000 copies. In this book he argued that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was non-Biblical and should be abandoned. For this heresy, John Calvin burned him at the stake, along with every copy of Christianisimi Restitutio Calvin could lay his hands on. Only three complete copies survived the flames, and they are in university or state collections.1 That’s an absolutely rare book.

Carter and Barker write,

It will be clear that rarity, like matrimony, ‘is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly’. But behind it, and confused with it, like ‘men’s carnal lusts and appetites’, lies something else, neatly expressed in the famous slogan of the great firm of W. H. Robinson: ‘The Rarest Books, the Finest Manuscripts’. It was quite clear that both adjectives meant the same: ‘expensive’. (p. 185)

In auction catalogs you generally see terms like “uncommon,” “scarce,” and “rare,” frequently accompanied by expressions like “in commerce” or “on the market.” That’s because a book might not be rare in an absolute sense, but nearly all the known copies are locked up in institutional collections, so there’s little chance of a private collector buying one. An example is David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. Hume published it in three volumes between 1739-1740. I own volume one and have been trying hard to find the other two volumes for about 15 years. I have never seen them for sale and have only seen the whole set for sale once, at the New York City Antiquarian Book Fair, where the dealer was asking a stupidly large amount of money. (NB: if you own either volume two or three, DM me!)

Old doesn’t necessarily imply either rarity or value, and scarcity doesn’t mean desirability. Home Recipes of the Lutheran Ladies, spiral bound in 1985 as a congregational fund-raiser, is not a big-money item chased by a horde of salivating collectors. Some quite recent books are very valuable, either because they are first editions from authors that later made it big (e.g. Harry Potter and the Philosophers’ Stone, Blood Meridian) or they are exquisitely made or autographed limited editions (e.g. The Limited Editions Club 1935 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, illustrated by Henri Matisse, signed by both Joyce and Matisse).

Also, there’s old, and then there’s old. The average person might think a book published in 1880 is a real antique. Antiquarian collectors don’t, and lots of dull books from that time are pocket change. 1780 is older, 1680 is kinda old, 1580 is pretty old, 1480 is genuinely old (we’re now talking a few thousand dollars to buy something entry-level) and a century before that is before printing, and will definitely require folding money.

All of this is to say that there’s no chance I believe that Amazon or anybody else is buying genuinely rare books and destroying them—maybe uncommon books that dealers consider mostly shelf-filler. That I find plausible.

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Destruction

How bad is it? I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing and comparisons to the Nazis and the burning of the Library of Alexandria. The main thing to understand here is that a LOT of books get purposely destroyed on an annual basis, long before AI or VGT3. Let’s look at the base rate before we get too fired up.

All libraries (OK, maybe not The Rosenbach in Philadelphia or The Morgan in NYC) deaccession books. That is, they get rid of them. Why?

Collections get weeded out based on accuracy, currency, relevancy, space limitations, edition, format, physical condition, and number of copies. Why keep some beat-up out-of-date dinosaur book in the children’s library when you need the shelf space for the newest and latest paleontological thinking aimed at kids? Or maybe the library decides it no longer needs four copies of a romance book that was popular 40 years ago. Some guidelines recommend a 1:1 ratio between acquisitions and deacquisitions. Libraries mostly try to sell or donate books they’ve weeded out, but failing that they are thrown in the garbage.

Look, as a book collector this sounds horrifying to me too. But when I imagine the 8th edition of Little Black Sambo sticky with generations of peanut butter-and-jelly fingers and the spine coming off, then, well, I see the case for binning it.

It’s not just libraries. Publishers are the biggest destroyers of their own stock. Two billion books a year are published in the US (source here, I welcome a better one). That’s copies, not titles, obviously. I couldn’t get exact data on how many of these wind up getting pulped, but here’s some estimates.

The 1979 Supreme Court ruling in Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner (439 U.S. 522) changed inventory depreciation rules so publishers could no longer use unsold stock as a tax write-off without proof of reduced value. This made it more tax-efficient to just destroy inventory rather than warehouse it. Unsurprisingly, pulping rates went up immediately. One source reports, “in 2009 in the United States, an estimated 30-40% of books produced were returned unsold to the publisher and 65-95% of those returns were pulped.” Thirty years ago the book pulping company Guaranteed Destruction claimed that 250,000 tons of new books are destroyed annually in the US. Using EPA municipal solid waste data, another account states that about 640,000 tons of books are discarded to landfill annually. Rolling all that together, if the average book weighs a pound, that’s… hold on… more than a billion books destroyed on purpose every year.

Holy crap that’s a lot. Even if I’m two orders of magnitude off that’s a mountainous amount of books, just far, far more than Amazon could plausibly be buying and blenderizing into a delicious slurry of human content for their pet AI.

So what exactly are they doing that is so bad?

Immortality

argues that VGT3 is actually good.

When I was a grad student, I published my first journal article (in a third-rate journal). After it came out, one of my fellow grad students told me, with great seriousness, “now you are immortal.” I still remember the feeling of accomplishment, the swelling of pride that I had touched the edge of knowledge, and in my own small way I would live forever. I knew even then that was a bit foolish and self-aggrandizing, but being in print still felt real.

One thing about letters on paper—it is a technology that lasts. I once held in my hands the gospel St. Augustine himself brought to Britain in 597 CE. That was an amazing experience, to hold a piece of history made by a scribe on parchment 1500 years ago for the first archbishop of Canterbury. Books printed half a millennium ago can still be handled and read, their linen rag paper still strong and supple.

The books that last are the ones that get printed and reprinted, the stories, ideas, and knowledge that we repeat because they matter to us. I recently argued that things stay alive when we love them. True immortality is when they survive even when we stop. The story of Gilgamesh survived the destruction of the Sumerian world, the end of the Bronze Age, even the mass forgetting of how to read and write cuneiform. It survived because it was baked into clay and encoded in a human language that scholars could rediscover and decipher.

Feeding books into computers is, putting it mildly, untested from an archival point of view. I have old lecture notes on my office computer from courses I taught 25 years ago that can no longer be opened. Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize them. Humanity forgets whole languages, yet we’re to believe that some arcane sigils mathematically inscribed in sand are eternal.

On the face of it, it sounds like abstract information should be easily copied and preserved. In practice it depends on maintaining an entire ecosystem: the storage medium, the file format, the software that reads it, and the hardware or OS that runs that software. Break any link and the data becomes unreadable even when it is intact. I’m not saying it can’t be done. It can—but it requires constant active intervention, updating, migrating formats, that kind of thing.

A classic example of digital obsolescence is the BBC’s 1986 Domesday Project. According to Wikipedia,

This new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. It included a new "survey" of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and "virtual walks". The project also incorporated professionally prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census. Over a million people participated in the project, including children from more than 9,000 schools.

All this great info was put on Laserdiscs, which became obsolete almost immediately, using software (BCPL) that went out of date so fast I never even heard of it. There have been various semi-successful attempts to rescue the data since. By contrast, you know what’s still completely preserved and readable? The original 940-year-old Domesday Book.

So I don’t share Age of Infovores’s enthusiasm for our digital overlords. I don’t think that Amazon/VGT3’s crime is the destruction of books. As we have seen, that already goes on at industrial scale. Rather, the problem is the hubristic optimism that our printed world can so easily (and eternally) be replaced by the digital one. I just hope they are at least putting it all on Laserdiscs.

I’m mad about paying interest, so let’s just destroy the basic structures of society. That will show ‘em.

Everything is broken, let me break it some more

The gateway drug to toddler politics is insisting that imperfect things are “broken.” Apparently if something is broken, there’s no repair; in our disposable world we should just throw it away. Supposedly broken: higher education, the housing market, democracy, US health care, immigration, the job market, social media, academic peer review, capitalism, academic tenure, dating, and writing in the age of AI.1 has a whole list of broken things:

Of course, all those are fairly specific broken things. Others just blame the nebulous “system,” which is always a safe target.

Hot tip—you know what’s imperfect? Everything, as agreed upon by everyone. Physicists: the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy will always win in the end. Philosophers: Kant famously quipped in a 1784 essay, “out of the crooked timber of mankind nothing straight was ever made.” Musicians: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” (Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”). Christians: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Poets: W.B. Keats, in “The Second Coming” writes,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Imperfection is the natural state; it is literally the exact thing that we should expect. In fact, everyone does expect it when they give it two seconds thought. Yet for many that’s at least one second too long devoted to thinking, so they run in circles screaming that things are broken. So let’s smash our toys!

Here’s Elon Musk on the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has distributed billions of dollars in foreign humanitarian and development assistance for over 60 years: “USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple you just need to get rid of the whole thing. That’s why it’s got to go. It’s beyond repair.”

Or consider Trump’s attempt to shut down the Department of Education, which resulted in about half of its employees (>2000) losing their jobs. Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos insists, “I know it is beyond repair.” Trump advisor Christopher Rufo not only wants to abolish the Dept. of Education, but also all university DEI initiatives, and said that the goal is to cause universities to “feel existential terror” and put them in “recession.” Well, that certainly sounds like a mature adult perspective on a world-beating trillion-dollar sector of the American economy that is older than the nation itself.

Toddler politics is not restricted to the right; here’s some leftist toddlers. Let’s abolish the prisons and defund the police! After all, they are ineliminably racist and corrupt. Let’s get rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) too—it’s not enough to advocate for demilitarization or reform. While we’re chucking imperfect things, how about we abolish the family as well, as advocated in an exhilarating essay by a leading feminist critic who traces her ideas back to queer Marxists (I’m quoting from the website for her book). Why try to support and improve the oldest social institution in the history of homo sapiens when we could just peremptorily destroy it?

The toddlers come out whenever there is a scandal. In the wake of Jason Arday, I’ve seen many comments suggesting that Cambridge University is corrupt, finished, and ought to be turned into a museum (here, here, here). Yes, an 800-year-old institution that survived the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, and two world wars needs to go because of one hiring scandal.

Instead of toddler politics, here’s an alternative vision.

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Having mastered the typical trades of being a pickpocket, burglar, and card sharp, Lustig wanted to up his game, and so he hired a craftsman to build him a counterfeit machine. Actually, it was more of a counterfeit counterfeit machine. Lustig would sail on transatlantic ocean liners, pretending to be a rich young Austrian. When his wealthy Jazz Age marks asked about the source of his wealth, Lustig would very confidentially show them a “Rumanian money box,” his specialist-crafted cedar box filled with complicated brass gears and rollers, which he said used radium to copy banknotes.

Lustig was ready with the proof. He would insert a $100 bill, a couple of drops of “processing chemicals,” and after a period of twelve hours or so, turn a crank. The machine would then spit out two $100s—the original and a copy (with its serial number carefully altered in advance to match the original). Interest piqued, the marks always attempted to purchase the box from Lustig. After faux-reluctant negotiations, he would agree to sell the machine at the end of the voyage, for some tens of thousands of dollars. Lustig would salt the box with a couple of genuine $100 bills so that it would produce real money for a while, allowing him to high-tail it before the mark got wise.

Lustig’s boldest con was selling the Eiffel Tower. In the 1920s, the Eiffel Tower was not the Parisian icon that it is today. Its modern design and bare iron construction was polarizing in a largely medieval city, and the repairs, painting, and general upkeep were a toll on the public coffers. Lustig decided to sell it for scrap. He had stationery printed with the official letterhead of the Minstère des Postes et des Télégraphes and hand-couriered letters to the six major scrap metal dealers in Paris, inviting them to a private meeting. Ostensibly too confidential a discussion to be held in the official office, the group met at Hotel de Crillon, a grand hotel on the Place de la Concorde. Lustig told the assembled group that the government wanted to receive sealed bids on the project before a public announcement. In reality, he had already picked out his target, a nouveau riche metal dealer aptly named André Poisson.

After the official meeting, Lustig pulled Poisson aside, describing his miserable salary and complaining about working for an unappreciative bureaucracy. The Poisson was hooked. He had been a bit doubtful of the whole matter before, but now he was on solid ground. Who but a legitimate French minister would be openly looking for a bribe? That was surely the true explanation of the secrecy and the meeting in a hotel suite. Poisson wrote a check on the spot for the whole shebang—the bribe plus 7000 tons of scrap iron. Lustig deposited the check, grabbed one of his many passports, and took the first train to Vienna. Poisson was too humiliated to go to the police so, after a suitable wait, Lustig thought he would return to Paris and sell the Eiffel Tower a second time. Which he did.

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The real money, though, was in money. Finally dissatisfied with the fake counterfeiting of the Rumanian money box, Lustig teamed up with the forger Tom Shaw to do some authentic counterfeiting. The $100 notes they produced were so flawless that they fooled the close scrutiny of bank tellers, and they were churned out in such numbers that the federal government worried that they would undermine confidence in the US currency system. The American Numismatic Association described the Lustig-Shaw forgeries as the “supernotes” of that era. Lustig’s printing presses finally ground to a halt after a jealous girlfriend dimed him to the feds, and he was remanded to the Federal House of Detention in New York City. Lustig promptly escaped on a rope woven of torn bed sheets.

Essential to an effective con is giving believable evidence that the whole thing is legit. When Count Lustig was peddling the Rumanian money box, the marks believed that the notes it produced were fake, but Lustig gave them good reasons to think the box itself really did make them. On the one hand was the evidence of the box itself: it was supposed to produce money and it did. Lustig would put in a bill, do the requisite hocus-pocus, and out came the original $100 plus another bill with the exact same serial as the original, both of them so good that any bank teller in town would certify them as genuine. On the other hand was the smooth story Lustig would tell about the genius who invented the machine and was on the run from European law. This gave the necessary stage-set for the performance.

In the case of the Eiffel Tower, Lustig went to great lengths to make everything about the swindle appear credible, from very real controversies over the Tower, to the official stationery, to the fancy meeting place, to the deal-clinching move of soliciting a bribe. The marks were not stupid men; they looked to the evidence, evaluated it, formed their beliefs on that basis, and were just terribly wrong.

Which brings me, of course, to the con man du jour, Jason Arday1.

Arday’s story isn’t “oh here’s another problem with academia,” a dumb, superficial take that I have seen repeatedly (e.g. here). Cambridge did not cover themselves in glory here, that is true. It’s also a disappointment to me personally, since a few years ago I was a Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow at Cambridge, and have extremely fond memories of my time there. But getting suckered by con artists is a human failing, not an academic one.

Just take a look at some other recent con artists/scams: Bernie Madoff (financial investments), Elizabeth Holmes (medical technology), George Santos (politics), Samuel Bankman-Fried (crypto entrepreneur). They had nothing to do with academia and everything to do with human nature. As with Arday, at first their supporters rushed to defend them, right up until the damning evidence became overwhelming.

It’s easy with hindsight bias to spot all the red flags, all the failures of due diligence, proper vetting, or motivated reasoning. In real time, though, sometimes an investor really does consistently beat the market (e.g. Warren Buffett), or someone has a great and surprising invention (e.g. the microwave oven). There are even people of color who had a disadvantaged background, overcame long odds through brilliance, grit, and determination, and wound up at Cambridge (Srinivasa Ramanujan).

Sometimes things that look too good to be true are in fact actually true. In grad school I knew a guy in the tech industry—just an average Joe Programmer—who was in the right company with the right stock options at the right time, and cashed out before the dot-com bust with $100M. So maybe Madoff is the new Buffett, or Arday the Ramanujan of sociologists. It might not be easy to tell in advance; con artists succeed because they are good at what they do. Have you never fallen for a phishing scam or been catfished? Are you positive Count Lustig couldn’t have swindled you?

With the Rumanian money box, Lustig’s marks were convinced that a genuine $100 bill was a fake, produced by the box. After he moved into actual counterfeiting, the marks were convinced that a fake $100 bill was genuine. Both times they were persuaded by the evidence of their senses (the bill looks, feels, and smells genuine), coupled with a background knowledge of the world (there are $100 bills and currency is made by some kind of printing process). Since the money you got from Count Lustig was sometimes real and sometimes phony, and you can’t tell the difference, it was merely good luck if your evidence led you to a true belief about the note in your hand. This is the problem of epistemic luck.

A lucky guess isn’t knowledge, which Plato recognized in Theaetetus. So epistemologists added that the belief has to be justified by reason or evidence to be knowledge. This looked good for a long, long while. Then Edmund Gettier killed the justified true belief model of knowledge by showing that it too is prey to luck. For example, suppose I’m looking out at a farmer’s field, see what looks like a sheep, and come to believe that there is a sheep in the field. There is in fact a sheep in the field, so I am right, but the sheep was obscured by a very shaggy sheepdog that I mistook for a member of his flock. So I believe there is a sheep, it is true that there’s a sheep, and I’m justified in believing it (by perceiving what looks like a sheep), but I still lack knowledge because I was just lucky that the sheepdog was obscuring a genuine sheep.2

Gettier-type cases are when weird accidental circumstances break the connection between justified true belief and knowledge. Con artists intentionally break the connection between justification and truth with phony evidence and presenting themselves as trustworthy when they are not. Their marks may not have scrutinized the proffered evidence out to five decimal places, but they weren’t necessarily unreasonable. People like Arday flood the zone with a firehose of falsehoods (a flood better con men like Lustig pepper with a few truths) which saturates our ordinary knowledge-gathering faculties. When that happens we’re lucky to latch on to the truth at all, so maybe we should reconsider how much to blame ourselves when we’re the mark.

Tools are force multipliers, and allow us to do more than we could do with our bodies alone. We can hoist massive weights, travel hundreds of miles an hour, and rapidly assemble complex objects. What are guns but ways to accelerate rocks faster than an arm can throw them?

Even in the case of art, machines let us exceed human ability, as with music that is impossible to perform. Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for player piano, for instance, are at superhuman speeds and with crazy unplayable elements, e.g. the tempo ratio of the “hands” being an irrational number like √2:1. According to Wikipedia, Study No. 40 has its parts in the ratio e:π, and the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo. Here’s an example of one of his player piano compositions:

Nancarrow composed over 50 years ago for a technology invented in the 19th century. Obviously, now there is even wilder stuff, like Black MIDI, which is thousands, sometimes millions of notes per second, generated by a programmed synthesizer and visualized as a riot of cascading notes. A human—a band of humans—could not play a fraction of it. Here’s a Black MIDI version of Greensleeves, which honestly is one of the simpler and more accessible examples:

Three things computer music can exhibit that human-performable music cannot are (1) hyper-accurate precision, (2) blistering speed surpassing perceptual limits, and (3) complex polyrhythms that require extreme micro timing. Despite those capacities, the Nancarrow pieces and Black MIDI are not much more than experimental curiosities that I doubt are on anyone’s regular playlist.

Above I quoted worrying that AI writing might become so good that we denigrate what humans can achieve. I think that’s wrong. The second part anyway -maybe one day AI writing will beat us all. Still, no one shows up to a strongman competition with a forklift or a marathon with a motorcycle. If some joker did those things we’d all laugh and turn away. We’re in awe of the speed, strength, dexterity, or ingenuity of humans, and want to know what we can do, what our limits are, and keep tools only as our servants.

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I remember as a kid reading a sci-fi story involving androids. In one passage an android, with its deep knowledge of human psychology, casually whistled a spontaneous tune that made people cry. It may be that androids of the future will have this talent, or LLMs can write as well or better than human masters, but that does not mean we should all give up in despair. The mathematician writes movingly of the horror he feels in the face of AI proofs of novel theorems:

There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical…These developments have triggered some deranged thoughts in me. I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself… The story of human discovery and the triumph of the human spirit will soon be excised from this discipline… Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age. Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery? Forget about accuracy or even attribution. Something fundamental to the experience of mathematics is being taken.

I absolutely empathize with his suffering. While philosophical discovery is not threatened by AI replacement, it is dispiriting that barbarians relentlessly attack and denigrate us, and intimidating to attempt a worthy original contribution to the oldest academic field. It helps me to remind myself that even though there are many philosophers smarter, more creative, and harder working than I am (adding in historical examples makes this number large indeed), that doesn’t mean I should just give up and let the larger brains figure everything out. I want to be part of the conversation, even if it is a small part, and I want to understand things for myself.

Surely artists and composers must have similar thoughts—“when we have Raphael, Velázquez, and Monet, how can I, in my puny finitude, even pick up a brush?” or “how can I try to compose when there has already been Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven?” Why write music when a whistling android can make people cry?

Mathematics too isn’t just about proving theorems but about beautiful proofs; and finding that beauty may still remain to human mathematicians. Paul Erdős imagined The Book, a ledger in which God kept the best possible proof of every theorem, the most elegant and pleasing way that each could be proved. Even if Hampshire’s fears come to pass and AI obviates the need for human theorem-provers, that does not mean AI has all the entries in The Book. Nor does it mean that every proven theorem adds meaningfully to mathematical understanding, which is a human attribute.

We want discovery, perfection, achievement, but also, as with sports, we want agency. A golf ball hitting machine inside the Titleist factory that hits the ball perfectly every time is completely uninteresting; at best it is an easily forgotten novelty on the factory tour. A pro at the tee takes a risk with an uncertain outcome, and that unknown outcome draws our attention.

Here’s a different kind of example:

These are four Descartes volumes from the late 17th century in their original bindings. They were obviously bound at the same time by the same binder, in full calfskin with traditional French hand tooling in gold on the spines. By my count each spine has about 80 distinct tool impressions. If you look closely you can see imperfections—lines that are not perfectly straight or exactly parallel, the central panel lozenge is slightly twisted or off-center, the individual hand letters are not spaced with machine exactness. But these books are beautiful. Even more, those flaws, while minute, show the hand of a craftsman over 300 years ago. They are a connection not to a thoughtless machine, but to history.

Louis XIV was on his throne in Versailles when a man in a sunlit bookbindery, his workpiece clamped in a wooden vise, carefully laid gold leaf over a leather spine he already brushed with egg albumen to serve as an adhesive. The binder, a young man with good eyes, heated a finely engraved brass tool over a small charcoal brazier until a drop of water lazily sizzled across the end. Then he picked it up by its wooden handle and cautiously pressed the gold into the leather. The binder knew from his apprenticeship that dwell time, temperature, and pressure were the three variables to consider in making a perfect impression. This he did another 79 times with different tools, each time reevaluating those variables, until the job was done. Then the binder gently rubbed the loose gold residue from the spine with a wad of wool. Finally he applied a bit of polish (lanolin, neatsfoot oil, and beeswax) to the leather and burnished it to a warm sheen before returning the book to his customer.

Of course the binder always aims for perfect accuracy and the crispest of tool impressions, but, as the rugweavers of Persia insist, perfection belongs to Allah alone. Compare how flat and lifeless the machine-stamped Easton Press (1992) edition of Descartes is (not to mention the low-grade bonded leather or fake gold):

Even though the spacing and impressions are all done with repeatable exactitude, there’s something phony and unpleasant about the result. It’s the golf ball hitting machine all over again. Too many people think that if we ever get to AI superintelligence that it will blow away human achievement and we’ll stop caring about what we imperfect mortals are able to do. That we will become slop. I think the opposite is true: we won’t want to sit around and let the machine god live our lives for us. We’ll always care about what we as individuals, and what we as a species, can know, lift, run, understand, hit, flip, toss, comprehend, write, invent, imagine, compose, grasp, sing, create.

Right out of the gate we need to settle some technical issues. Like, how is a dog eligible to be president? And, how can we interpret his policy positions since he only barks?

First of all, the Constitution doesn’t require the President to be a human being. Seriously. Check it out. The President does have to be a natural-born citizen, which is no problem; even though Odin’s mother was born in Serbia, he was born in Pennsylvania. Given birthright citizenship, Odin is plainly a full-blooded canine-American and we have the AKC papers to prove it. Take that, birthers. Also, the President must be at least 35 years old. Arguably Odin satisfies that too—Claude’s best estimate is that a Rottweiler 4.5 years old is middle-aged, about 40 in human terms. Well above the Constitutional threshold.

Odin meets the minimum requirements set forth by the Constitution. But he doesn’t speak English (not a Constitutional requirement), so how are we to interpret Odin’s policy views? We need a theory of interpretation.

There’s lots of topics the Constitution doesn’t mention, like abortion, sexual behavior, contraception, and drugs. So let’s say there’s a new law about one of these things that gets challenged before the Supreme Court. How can the court decide if the new law is constitutional or not, when the Constitution doesn’t address the issue at all? One approach, that of Justice Douglas in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), is to see what the actually enumerated rights imply or entail, or what broader principle might unify different specific rights. That is, we look for the penumbra of the Constitution. Then we test the challenged law against that penumbra.

This is how we should interpret the policy views of my dog. We see what Odin’s explicit and consistent preferences are and infer his policies on the basis of their penumbral shadow. This is a form of inference to the best explanation.

Also, is Trump more coherent than a dog barking? Interpreting Odin may not be any harder. Here’s the first two minutes of one of Trump’s speeches:

And uh a lot of people are getting rich with your 401ks and everything else. So our country is back. We have the hottest country anywhere in the world. So it’s pretty cool, right? So I want to just tell you I really appreciate you being your special people. You got mistreated very badly for a long period of time. But you’ve never had a better friend in the Oval Office than me. And I’m proud to officially name the undisputed just when did this come out, Mr. Speaker? the undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal. We have to proceed always. I don’t use the word coal. You know, it needs a PR job because had a bad reputation for a while. So, we’re not allowed to say the word coal anymore. It has to be preceded by beautiful clean coal. Okay. We’re cleaning it up. Very good.

And we’re delighted to be joined by Secretary Doug Bergam who’s doing a fantastic job from the great coal mining state of North Dakota. And thanks as well to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a fantastic guy who’s doing a great job. Thank you, Mike. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldon. He’s our secret weapon. He’s getting those approvals done in record setting time. True. Great senators John Baraso and Jim Justice. Thank you very much. Very much for being here. Hi Jim. Been a long time. Jim, you’re looking good. Shelley Moore Capo. Thank you, Shelley. Thank you very much, darling. Uh Marcia Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, Ted Bud, John Euststead, Bernie Marino, and David McCormack. All here. Great senators. Every one of them. Great senators, representatives of the House, Jim Bear, Troy Balderson, Andy Bar, Dave Taylor, Warren Davidson, Troy Downing, Morgan Griffith, Brett Guthrie, Harriet Hagermanerman, Mike Kelly, Dan Muer, Scott Perry, Carol Miller, Dana Harshburgger, and Riley Moore. Boy, that’s a good group of people.

Let me translate that speech into dog:

[Paragraph 1] “What a good boy I am! Rub my belly. I like this rock.”

[Paragraph 2] “Hey! My friends are here! I lick you now.”

Not exactly Cicero, huh? Go ahead, tell me that a canine-American can’t match Trump’s soaring oratory.

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Personal qualities

Two things we want in our president are outstanding personal qualities and a good policy platform. Let’s look at personal attributes first and compare Odin with Trump.

Charisma. Odin is very friendly, good with kids, and loves being with people and meeting new ones. He has charisma that appeals across the aisle—Democrat, Republican, everyone is a potential ally and friend. Plus, he never forgets how you smell and will greet you with enthusiasm. Everyone wants to rub his tum-tum. I concede that Trump has a weird, dark charisma, but it appeals only to his MAGA faithful. Democrats find it incomprehensible and what remains of the old Republican party just kow-tows out of cowardly fear.

Sexual harassment. Odin has been neutered. While I’m not going to say he never humped anyone’s leg when he was young, it only happened once or twice and he backed down when told no. Trump… well, sexual harassment vies with golf for his main hobby. He’s been found legally liable for sexual assault and his vulgar comments on grabbing women are known all over the world. Odin recommends Trump get fixed. Odin would also like to point out that he never met Jeffrey Epstein even once.

Narcissism. Odin is all about the pack. He is a patriot who will always put country first. Odin will never be obsessed with minting a gold coin with his face on it, fantasize about giving himself the Medal of Honor, badger other countries to award him the Nobel Prize, slap his name on everything he hears about, try to get his face carved on Mt. Rushmore, or assume he owns other countries. In fairness, Odin might assume he owns any tennis balls he finds, but that’s about it. Well, that and dirty socks.

Bribery. I admit that Odin does have his weaknesses. He would do backflips on a tightrope for a slice of pastrami. However, his partiality for cured meats is nothing compared with Trump’s world-historical levels of graft and corruption.

Criminal record. Trump’s a convicted felon who is proud of his mug shot. Odin has never paid hush money to a porn star or even been accused of any crimes.

Grudge-holding. Odin never holds a grudge. When things don’t go his way (no walk because of bad weather, we ran out of treats, whatever), he lets it go. Odin doesn’t stew over past grievances; even the porcupine that quilled him got a second chance (and quilled him even more the second time). Trump’s grudge-holding over petty slights, on the other hand, is legendary.

Open-mindedness. Odin doesn’t judge people based on their race, sex, creed, or sexual orientation—mostly on whether they want to play and pet him. He’s convinced he can win over even dog skeptics by dropping his ball in their laps. Odin would never tell a reporter, “quiet, piggy,” or care about anyone’s weight, or support white supremacy, or treat LGBT people as less-than.

Policies

It’s obvious that Odin would be a fine diplomat, work with a variety of constituencies, and win over voters with personal charm. But what about his policies?

Defense. Odin stands 30” at the withers and weighs 140 lbs. He is 100% muscle with a bite force of 450 psi. He once bit a tire on our Kawasaki Mule and popped it. While he seldom barks, his baritone warning bark is terrifying, and a middle-of-the-night intruder would run in anal-clenching panic. Odin is not afraid of snakes, bears, cars, or an Abrams M1A1 main battle tank—only our neighbor’s four chihuahuas, whom he will cross the street to avoid. It is safe to conclude that Odin would promote a strong defense.

At the same time, while Odin defends his territory, he maintains a laissez faire attitude towards others and is adversarial only in need. Teddy Roosevelt recommended speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Odin only barks when properly motivated and I’ve seen him carry substantial tree branches in his mouth. Unlike Trump, who starts wars on flimsy pretexts he barely bothers to justify, Odin is not aggressive nor will he capriciously start conflicts. He may have a vendetta against those chihuahuas if they won’t quit trash-talking him, though.

Foreign policy: Odin supports getting along with peers (other dogs), neutral caution with lesser sovereign states (cats), and making sure that suspicious polities (groundhogs, squirrels, deer) know their place. Potentially aggressive invaders (bears) are met with a war footing. Pareto-optimizing free trade is a bedrock principle, as Odin will always trade a ball or a frisbee for a better toy at the dog park.

Immigration. If a stranger comes to the house, Odin will bark and let us know about it. But if we let them in and make it clear that they are welcome, then Odin will immediately treat them as a friend. Odin trusts the judgment of the pack and wouldn’t arbitrarily evict someone the pack has made welcome. Clearly Odin would advocate for strong borders, but with a sensible and humane immigration policy.

Social welfare. When Odin is done eating, our cat Henry will go eat whatever kibble Odin knocked out of his dish.1 Odin is mostly OK with this, so long as Henry doesn’t really make a move to eat his breakfast or dinner. We can infer that Odin favors helping the less fortunate out of abundance, but also making sure that they aren’t taking too much from the common store.

Health care. Odin loves swimming, and I recently took him to a local creek to paddle around. Some teenage girls were also in the water, and Odin was quite concerned that maybe they weren’t good swimmers, and the water was deep. So he herded them out of the creek. They jumped back in and he shoved them out again. The girls thought this game was pretty funny. Also, when I have had surgery, Odin doesn’t want to leave my side. I’m confident he would support publicly-funded universal health care.

In addition, Odin will be a big supporter of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test. However, he will be changing the test. Under his administration it will now include squirrel-chasing, tug-of-war, ball fetching, swimming, distance walking, and power chewing.

Education. Rottweilers are a working breed that used to pull butcher’s carts. The lightbulb went on when Odin’s trainer told us that we should never use a harness to walk him—Odin would assume he is being put to work and start pulling. At obedience school he earned a gentleman’s C. Odin would invest in vocational training and getting people into the workforce. He sees the need for the very intelligent (border collies, Belgian malinois) to have the opportunity for further schooling, but knows it is not for everyone.

Environmentalism. Odin loves walks in the woods, going to state parks, swimming in creeks and lakes, and chasing wildlife. Without doubt he would support a robust commitment to the national and state parks and the US Forestry Service, as well as clean air and water initiatives.

Feel free to compare Odin’s platform with what the Trump administration is doing—starting pointless wars, alienating long-time US allies, attacking higher ed, demonizing the political opposition, undermining institutional trust, dismantling democratic norms, the list goes on and on. The solution is obvious and the choice is clear:

A lack of viewpoint diversity leads to complacency in our beliefs because we do not allow them to be challenged. As John Stuart Mill wrote, “Since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by collision of adverse opinions that the remainder the truth has any chance of being supplied” (On Liberty, p. 50).

Mill thought the real way to do justice to the arguments of one’s opponents is “to hear them from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest and do their very utmost for them, [to] know them in their most plausible and persuasive form” (On Liberty, p. 35). The risks get worse the longer we fail in this task: “Mankind speedily becomes unable to conceive diversity when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it. (On Liberty, p. 71)” The result is poor-quality scholarship that impedes the search for truth.

Not everyone’s convinced, of course. The less worthy and more snarky complaint is that viewpoint diversity is DEI for Republicans. The more serious objection to viewpoint diversity is that it is at odds with the pursuit of truth (example here). Why do we need to hear from the flat earthers, or give the Ptolemaists or creationists a place on the stage? When we have the truth already, there’s no value in getting a “diverse” opinion; that’s just moving in reverse.

The preceding objection has it exactly backwards; it is precisely a concern for the truth that makes viewpoint diversity valuable.1 Here’s why.

Annealing before the truth

The idea of annealing comes from metallurgy. When you anneal metal, you heat it up so the atoms have a bunch of extra kinetic energy and move around freely, basically exploring other structural arrangements. With all that energy, the atoms can easily bounce out of local minima, like imperfect crystalization. What those atoms would really like to do, as they cool down, is settle into a nice low-energy, stable crystal structure. If you quench the metal, i.e. cool it down rapidly, then the atoms freeze into whatever order they were in at the time. The result might be a rigid structure, but one that is fragile, full of defects, and has internal stresses. What’s better is letting the metal cool slowly. That gives the atoms time to settle into optimally stable, low-energy states. You wind up with a stronger crystalline structure.

Simulated annealing is a search optimization technique that is analogous to metallurgy. You turn up the temperature by trying out a bunch of random moves early on and see whether you have any improvement from where you started. If and only if you do, stay there and work systematically for further gains. “Temperature” controls how much randomness/freedom each search has. A high temp means we’re willing to explore some far-out options and see if they are any better than what we have. As our current solution improves, we start lowering the temp to look at only nearby improvements/refinements to what we have.

If we cool off too fast, then we can get trapped in a local minimum; we lock in a partially-ordered solution that is suboptimal. In the search for truth, fast cooling means that we fixate on bad ideas too quickly with no easy way to move on to better ideas. Trapped in a local minimum, we then spend our time refining the mediocre because we are pickier about accepting moves that look worse. From the God’s eye point of view those worse moves would get us over the hump to reach the global minimum, but we can’t make them.

Staying at higher temperatures longer means that we’ve pretty thoroughly explored the solution space and are confident that we are heading for the global minimum. But that’s time and energy-intensive and slows down settling on an accepted result.

Viewpoint diversity is a form of simulated annealing. Trying out a big variety of diverse ideas and research programs is a high-temperature way of exploring the conceptual landscape before deciding that we are definitely on the right path to the best solution.

For example, when the scientists at Los Alamos were trying to build the first atomic bomb, there were two distinct camps about how to get a fission chain-reaction with the biggest bang. One group wanted to take a chunk of uranium-235 and fire a uranium-235 bullet into it. The impact would create a supercritical mass and ka-boom. The second group wanted to make a plutonium-239 ball and wrap it in conventional explosives. The idea here was that the shockwave of the explosives would compress the plutonium, it would go supercritical, and ka-boom.

In the end, both designs were tried. The uranium bullet design was used in Little Boy, and the plutonium implosion design used in Fat Man. Implosion was the hand’s-down winner and used in all subsequent atomic weapons. The physicists could have all just voted for the uranium bullet (which was simpler and worked) and called it a day, but instead they kept their options open and found a better solution.

Heterodoxy isn’t allowing conspiracy theorists, it is allowing the exploration of other parts of the conceptual landscape in the hopes of finding the global minimum (truth, an ideal theory). Exactly how radical we should allow this exploration is exactly the right issue: we’re asking about the temperature gradient.2 If we keep a high temperature for too long we’re allowing the wackos free reign because we haven’t reached consensus. If we cool off too fast, there’s high risk of being stuck in a local minimum. When to close inquiry, even provisionally, is and should be vigorously contested.

It is clearly a political strategy to try to close off debate as fast as possible. As soon as a viewpoint is anointed as the truth, then deniers are frauds, nutcases, and probably bigots. Thus Princeton prof Carolyn Rouse, President of American Anthropological Association: “The idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.” She thinks the existence of intersex people is the smoking gun. The only thing this proves to me is

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Many others here have been discussing the general European attitude towards air conditioning, but I do have to add this observation. One of our hotel rooms nominally had AC, but it wasn’t too cool. We went to adjust it, only to find a sign saying the thermostat was prevented from being set any cooler than 6 degrees C lower than the outdoor temperature.1 To be clear, that means if the outside is 40°C (=104°F), then they think a perfectly acceptable commercial hotel temperature for comfortable sleeping is 34°C (= 93.2°F).

Is their idea about winter heating the same? Nothing warmer than 6° above the outdoor temperature is allowed? I thought America was where the Puritans went, but we are positively sybarites by comparison. Look, here’s the settings I want on a hotel air conditioner: Off→ European→ Refreshing→ Chilly→ Meatlocker→ Snow. That is all.

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Air conditioning and refrigeration are outstanding inventions, and Willis Carrier’s birthday should be a holiday. If Europeans enjoy sweating and marinating in their own juices, fine by me, although the heat is killing 175,000 of them annually. Claude reports that 9% of France’s GDP is tourism and 11-12% of Germany’s GDP is. I have a feeling these numbers will decline if climate change trends continue with no AC relief. I fully understand up until a few decades ago Europe’s big problem was keeping warm, but that is yesterday’s news. Now it is heat.

Air conditioning is just one example of a puzzling broader phenomenon: one country has an obviously excellent, world-class idea and then other countries fail to adopt it.2 Here’s some other examples.

French gas-station croissants

Of course you can go into any boulangerie or pâtisserie in France and get fabulous croissants. This is expected. You can get croissants in the USA that are just as good, but they are much harder to find, and you generally need to go to some fancy bakery with a name like Les Pâtisserie Beaucoup d’Argent to buy them. USA grocery store croissants are so bad they would probably get you guillotined in France, and Starbucks croissants aren’t any better.

French gas stations have very good croissants. While we Americans are getting Little Debbie Snack Cakes, Ho-Hos, and watery coffee at our gas stations, the French are sipping cappuccinos and brushing flaky, buttery crumbs off their Gallic chins. C’mon France, teach us your gas station pastry ways and we’ll swap you some air conditioners. Deal? If I were the ambassador to the French Republic this would be my top priority.

Swiss windows

The Swiss have these amazing windows called Dreh-Kipp-Fenster in German, and fenêtre oscillo-battante in French. They have one handle, but it can do all kinds of things. Down and the window is closed and locked. Turned 90 degrees the whole window swings open like a door, which makes it easy to clean the outside, or get out if there’s an emergency. Turn the handle straight up and the window tilts in a few inches from the top, in case you just want a little breeze while retaining security.

I have never seen or even heard of these windows in the US. The Swiss can just run down to their local Das Depot Haus for some next-level window engineering while we are stuck with our loser casement windows. On the other hand, I don’t think the Swiss have ever heard of window screens. Again, let’s trade our good ideas.

Japanese toilets

American toilets haven’t changed since the beginning of indoor plumbing. Well, possibly changed for the worse since all the internal parts are plastic and homeowners (me, anyway) are always jiggling the handle, replacing the flush valve or otherwise having to tinker with it. Meanwhile, in Japan:

Their toilets have heated seats, built-in self-cleaning bidets with adjustable nozzle pressure, a warm air dryer, deodorizer, auto-flush, a remote control panel, white noise generator, and a turbocharger. OK, maybe not the last one. But they are basically a Ferrari compared with our Model T. This is technology I can get behind.

The metric system

Here’s American math: measure by how many flags per bald eagles there are, then divide by freedoms per AK-47. After that you multiply by the length of a football field and sum over pickup trucks. Meanwhile in every sensible metric-loving country it’s base-10 for everything but clocks. Babylonian base-60 has a hard lock on that market.

I’m decent at basic mental division, but imperial is still a pain.3 I’ll be doing something in the woodshop and think, “OK, this board is 71 and 5/8” long. I need to find the midpoint, so that’s… uh… let’s see. Half of 70 is 35, and half of one is 1/2, so that’s 35 1/2” then I have to add half of that 5/8, so that’s another 5/16. 1/2 = 8/16, so I’ll add that to the 5/16 and get a total of 35 13/16. That’s the midpoint.” Easy! So much better than measuring the board at 182 cm long, and immediately knowing that 91 cm is half the length.

Me personally retrofitting all of my equipment to a metric standard that is not an intuitive part of my mental repertoire and not readily available in my country is way too high a lift. But I 100% support systemic change to metric. In fact, I’m begging for it.

Tipless service

American tipping culture has always been stupid, but now it is out of control. To quote Dave Barry,

Europeans hate America for creating this insane metastasizing Frankenstein-monster tipping culture wherein you’re expected to pay a minimum 22 percent gratuity on every financial transaction you enter into, including with vending machines.

It wasn’t that long in the past that the normal tip was 15%. That’s since been memory-holed and replaced with 20%. Or more. It’s not just tip inflation, it’s that every last purchase now comes with a little machine asking if you would like to leave a tip. Buying Ho-Hos at the gas station? Tip. Getting a take-out sandwich? Tip. Buying a coffee? Obviously tip for some reason. I know someone whose housecleaner is now insisting on a 20% tip. That’s just a price increase as far as I am concerned.

That’s in addition to the usual restaurant meals, haircuts, bar drinks, taxi rides, bell hops, tour guides, and everything else where we are supposed to tip. Before I get a lecture on how waiters make less than minimum wage, I know. Raise wages and eliminate tipping. This is better for everyone. Many of these situations are going to be one-off interactions, and if tipping were truly a voluntary reward, then it is irrational to tip (the usual game-theoretic reasons). So maybe a deserving waiter gets stiffed. Well, not if they were paid a living wage to start with.

Plus, it is bad enough that taxes aren’t already built into the price of anything (except gas), so the true bill of everything is higher than advertised. On top of that we’re expected to add at least another 20% on pain of shaming and guilting. If tipping is de facto involuntary (it is), just make it part of the price. Real prices in America are whatever it says on the menu plus about another 30%. You have to guess. Let’s stop this idiocy and raise the listed prices of things to the true and total cost. In other oases of civilization no tipping is expected; maybe after a good meal you might leave the loose change. Let’s do that.

Why can’t countries exchange their really good ideas?

In a perfectly sane world we’d all have ice-cold AC, delicious croissants everywhere, Swiss windows, Japanese toilets, the metric system, and NO TIPPING. Alas, we do not live in that world. How come? Partly it is just status quo bias. What’s interesting to me about status quo bias is that it often comes with a big helping of rationalizing, confabulation, and moralizing intransigence.

For example, take the air conditioner issue. A widespread response to human misery and heat death has been pious sniffing that AC merely leads to global warming and thus only a selfish bastard would choose not to sacrifice themselves for the Greater Good. If you think I am making this up, check out the evidence nicely discussed by Daniel Muñoz and Maarten Boudry.

To quote Nietzsche,

Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far — and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! (On the Genealogy of Morals essay III, sec. 28)

The ascetic priests of the climate have authority because they offer parishioners meaning for their sweaty suffering. Instead we need climate Morpheus.

It’s not just moralizing. I know a bunch of Spaniards and they report a widespread cultural belief that AC makes you sick, especially a blast of cold air or a sudden change from the hot outdoors. Obviously these beliefs have the medical validity of “put on a sweater or you’ll catch your death.” It’s hard to see them as anything but post hoc rationalization for local traditions and customs.

Here’s another example: bullet trains in the US. These seem like a no-brainer. The USA is a gigantic country, flying is misery, cross-country driving is generally impractical, and bullet train technology is already tested and established elsewhere. Instead we’re treated to a litany of excuses for why it can’t be done: the cost, it sounds socialist, union labor, interference with private property, car culture, etc. The USA used to get stuff done. We built the interstate highway system—over 40,000 miles of roads—in 35 years. Heck, we built the Transcontinental Railroad in six years using 19th century technology. But we can’t build some bullet trains?

Some of these issues are coordination problems. Lacking the metric system, for example. If we had a functioning and sanity-based government instead of our current clown car, they could mandate the teaching of metric and its use in all government interactions. There would be a few years of grumbling after which everyone will be pleased by the switch. But only the government has the reach and power to enforce coordination.

Some of these others can be solved by market forces. Forty years ago American beer was nearly all generic corporate lager, and great beer countries like Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the UK were right to lord it over us. Now the US has a greater variety of beer and brewers than any country in the world, and can go toe-to-toe with anyone in terms of quality. Head over to Hill Farmstead or The Bruery if you doubt me. Partly this happened because President Carter legalized home-brewing, and many home-brewers went on to found craft breweries. Partly it happened because consumers became increasingly aware of excellent foreign brews beyond lager.

So let’s learn about gas-station croissants from the French, windows from the Swiss, toilets from the Japanese, and demand better. It’s out there. We can offer you air conditioners in exchange.

Does anyone else remember the Bicentennial fad for painting fire hydrants to look like a Minuteman, or Betsy Ross, or Ben Franklin?

How about the 1776-1976 dated quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins? Or the tall ships? As Kearney notes, they really lifted the nation’s spirits after Watergate.

Sadly our current president, focused on putting his own face on currency, enswampenating the Lincoln Reflecting Pool, building the Arc de Trump, and fantasizing about giving himself and his sons the Medal of Honor, has done little to ignite the latent patriotism of his fellow citizens. But that patriotism is there asleep, waiting like King Arthur in Avalon, ready to return in need.

Proper patriotism is not the unthinking endorsement of anything our country has ever done, but is a recognition of the better angels of our nature and a respect for the noble collective vision to which we aspire. To quote Sen. Carl Schurz in a Senate speech from 1872, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Our founding documents set forth an aspiration, not a finished product, but in an 18th-century world of hereditary kings and centuries-old dynasties, they were lightning from the future.

Still, a government is not the country any more than a priesthood is the religion. When Martin Luther sent his 95 theses to the Archbishop of Mainz, he aimed to start a debate, not a revolution. While he was deeply invested in reforming and improving the church, Luther never abandoned Christianity. He never lost his faith. You can criticize your country but keep your faith in it too—liberty and justice for all is a goal, not necessarily a description.

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Sure, the whole idea of patriotism has had plenty of critics. One complaint is that there are better and worse countries, and if everyone loves their own the most, then most people must be wrong. Countries are flawed and imperfect and don’t deserve our love. So the problem with patriotism is that it leads to mistaken judgments.

That’s a pretty bad argument, one that misunderstands both love and the context of our judgments. The idea that you should only love your country if it is flawless and better than all others is ludicrous. Should you love your children only if they are perfect kids? Your spouse only if she is better than every woman along every dimension?

James Boswell famously reports Samuel Johnson as saying, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Dr. Johnson’s immediate target was Prime Minister William Pitt, whom he regarded as double-dealing behind a façade of patriotism. Johnson was not criticizing the true love of one’s country, as Boswell goes on to emphasize: “He did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” Johnson’s objection was to the sort of performative patriotism of someone wrapped in the flag, their truck covered in aggressive political bumper stickers declaring loyalty to their partisan views alone. It is the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness, where the latter permits any action under the guise of the former.

A more pointed complaint is that patriotic fervor is exactly what leads to catastrophe. Wilfred Owen, writing during the meat grinder of World War I, comes to mind immediately:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Horace’s claim that it is sweet and fitting to die pro patria, for the fatherland, is the ostensible basis of patriotism. That’s the target of Owen’s devastating critique.

The preceding argument is pointed in the wrong direction. Nationalism is the more militant cousin of patriotism, and I think it’s nationalism that’s more properly seen as Owen’s real enemy. It is nationalism that treats dissent as sedition. It is nationalism that demands thoughtless fealty and veneration of the leaders. It is nationalism that sends young men to the killing fields of the Somme.

True patriotism stems from bonds of affection, the shared acknowledgment of our traditions and history, our monuments and institutions, our foundational myths and stories. In his 1937 book The Importance of Living, Lin YuTang wrote,

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? … [T]he loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini… [I]n food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind. (p. 46)

Even Nietzsche, a famous loner who once called himself a hermit, acknowledged the merit of “brotherhood on the basis of sharing food and drink together after the Hebrew-Arabic custom,” as the kind of naturally virtuous human interaction he thought is so easily misunderstood (The Will to Power sec. 170).

I grew up in southeast Texas. Culturally it was a challenge for a bookish kid whose interest in the Dallas Cowboys did not extend beyond what was necessary for self-preservation. But it was a culinary corner bordered by Cajun cooking, Texas barbecue, and Tex-Mex, and I have fond memories of the food. My family would go to the gumbo cook-off in my hometown, with proud home cooks showing off their steaming vats filled with crab, shrimp, chicken, and probably alligator and rattlesnake too. There were plates piled high with boiled crawfish, as bright red as our necks in the sun, which the adults ate with a frosty can of Lone Star beer.

At home my mother would make shrimp étouffée at the end of the month when money was tight, because our freezer was full of free shrimp my father had harvested from the Gulf while crewing a friend’s boat. Once a year there was a church picnic at a state park and the men were there before dawn tending to huge steel drums converted to offset smokers and filled with briskets and barbecued chicken. The women brought potato salad, corn on the cob, cole slaw, and blackberry cobbler, and after the service we would eat and play horseshoes and run with the other kids.

This is America. Not the bloviators in Washington, not the haters. This is the true patriotism of the brotherhood of mankind, what the left and right should both embrace.

Short ribs have been smoking over mesquite since last night, to be kept company by tuna steaks later today. This afternoon we’ll have a cooler full of beer and a pitcher of patriotic cocktails and then our friends will come and sit on our deck. They will bring side dishes and desserts until every table (and belly) is full. There will be kids and dogs and music and bottle rockets. We will have some laughs and complain about our government in the way of free people everywhere. Aristotle wrote, “Every state is a community” (Politics, bk 1, 1252b). Our fellowship on Independence Day is patriotism in microcosm: our group of friends represents the larger one in which we are all collectively joined. May we all recognize our communion and all be patriots today.

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Education

• Nearly 60% of college undergraduates are women

• Over 60% of students pursuing postbaccalaureate degrees are women

• 80% of veterinary school students are women

• The majority of dental school students are women

• The majority of medical school students are women

• The majority of law school students, including at 17 of the top 20 programs, are women

Housing

• Nearly 70% of homeless people are men

• More single women than single men own their homes

Crime

• 78% of homicide victims are men

• Slightly more men than women are likely to be the victim of some kind of violent offense

• More than 93% of prison inmates are men

• Men’s prison sentences are over 40% longer than women’s sentences for the same crimes

• Women are 40% more likely to get probation than men

Lifespan

• At birth, women can expect to live five years longer than men

• 92% of on-the-job deaths are men

• Almost 98% of military deaths in recent wars are men

• 70% of preventable opioid overdose deaths are men, and the number is increasing

Mental health

• Four times as many men than women commit suicide

• More than 75% of opioid addicts are men

• Over 60% of alcoholics are men

But why look at actual data when everything is obvious a priori? A recent The New York Times article about masculinity, written by two women (and one man), reads like the worst parody of 2020 wokeism. Nearly the first thing in that self-described “nuanced conversation” is “I think the reality is that we’ve always had patriarchy at the intersection of capitalism and white supremacy.” Welcome to the cliché festival!

It only gets worse from there. It isn’t long until everyone’s favorite unfalsifiable axiom “patriarchy is bad for men too” is trotted out, followed by, “is harm to men the worst abuse of patriarchy? No, probably harm to women and trans people and people of other genders is more urgent.” Let’s talk about anything else except, you know, the problems faced by men which are surely so tiny they barely rate a mention. Have these people ever had an original thought? Well, no doubt The Times will publish a followup piece with two men (and one woman) explaining femininity.

I am convinced that every time a man is accused of racism or hears about the patriarchy that they turn Republican on the spot. Yet progressives just can’t stop self-harming; it’s like they want to lose so they can blame the racist patriarchy. As a classical liberal, it is beyond frustrating to watch young men getting the message that they are just women with different plumbing and any behavior which deviates from this script is inherently toxic. It’s no wonder they turn to the manosphere for an alternative vision of their lives.

To sum up so far: American men face genuine problems, often worse than faced by women. New York Times-style progressives are apparently incapable of acknowledging this fact, and even less capable of offering genuine sympathy or solutions. At the root of many of the challenges and poor outcomes listed above is a lack of an idea of what it is to be a good and decent man in modern America, an idea that instinctively appeals to men themselves and not just their critics. I, and other moderate liberals, would like to provide a worthy conception of masculinity to young men in contrast to what’s on offer by Andrew Tate. Here is my proposal.

The premiere masculine virtue, the one that is politically neutral, will earn the respect of other men, and attract women, is this: metacompetence. There are many virtues worth cultivating, like humility, humor, courage, courtesy, and generally not being a jerk or an asshole, but young men, become metacompetent.

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Competence and metacompetence

I like Jason Statham movies. They are decidedly B-movie action flicks, and while some are stinkers (looking at you, Working Man) others, like The Beekeeper, hit all the right beats. What do I like about his movies? Competence. He just exudes it. Statham is a fit guy, but no bodybuilder. He’s modestly handsome, but no pretty boy; he looks like a retired British commando with an American teeth upgrade. While he’s not a superhero with cartoon muscles, you know he’s going to do what needs to get done.

It’s a mistake to write off action movies as just fighting, guns, and car chases. They are mostly about extreme competence. Look at any action hero: John Wick, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, John Rambo, James Bond, Jack Reacher. Fly a helicopter? Of course. Operate any kind of weapon from katanas to miniguns? Sure. Hand-to-hand combat? Scuba diving? Drive a motorcycle? Multilingual? Downhill skiing? Play poker? Hotwire a car? Appeal to the ladies? Check, check, and checkmate.

Ass-kicking is just the icing on the cake of manly competence. The proof is in our other heroic tales: Alan Turing breaking Enigma in The Imitation Game, or Sherlock Holmes solving mysteries by spectacular observation and inference. Outside of the cinema too—the physicists successfully detonating The Gadget in the Trinity Test, the Apollo astronauts slipping the surly bonds of Earth, Eddie Van Halen inventing a new language for the guitar. Nobody is going to question their standing among men for these achievements of the mind.

Sterling Nasa was recently attending a Sydney performance of La La Land featuring a live orchestra when the orchestra’s keyboardist fell ill. Panicked, the conductor asked the audience of 2500 if there was a pianist in the house with exceptional sight-reading skills who could fill in with no notice, no practice, no rehearsal, and right now. Nasa, a 21-year-old amateur pianist, raised his hand. More exactly, the friend he attended the show with put Nasa’s hand up for him. Nasa walked to the stage, where the conductor asked a couple of hasty, worried follow-up questions. Then he sat down at the electric keyboard, looked at an unfamiliar, complex score, and… nailed it.

The reluctant hero answers the call and saves the day because he is competent.

Our heroes possess a surfeit of skills that most of us have only in utero. Masculine virtue is not chiefly about dominance or aggression or (as Last Blue Dog suggests) finding your place in a hierarchy of men. I’m not denying those are real things. But I’m trying to point to something else.

Competence is when you can do things like this, without much effort or fanfare:

• Change a car tire

• Change your car’s oil

• Perform minor bicycle repairs, including fixing a flat in the middle of a ride

• Install a new flapper valve in the toilet

• Replace a sink that is not built-in

• Rewire a lamp

• Install new lawnmower blades and replace the serpentine belt on a riding mower

• Assemble flat-pack furniture

• Drive a stick shift

• Cook a restaurant-quality meal beyond merely grilling burgers (although that too)

• Navigate by reading a map

Metacompetence is when you can do those things never having done them before. When you think, “this lamp needs rewiring. How hard can it be? I’ll figure it out.” Then you do, and it is no big deal. When you arrive at an unfamiliar foreign city with only a tourist map in your pocket and get around just fine. When you follow a recipe to make beef Wellington for the first time and it comes out like the picture. Life’s not a video game, and this isn’t about gaining skills to “level up.”

Competence is domain-specific, but metacompetence is not. When someone is metacompetent, they are prepared to solve all kinds of unrelated problems. Metacompetence is quietly knowing that when life throws something at you, you are able to sort it out.

When my daughter was in elementary school, the school had a sale of small items kids could buy for their parents prior to Christmas. She went to the sale completely unsure what would be a good $1 gift. Then one of the teachers asked her, “is your Dad a sports Dad or a fix-it Dad?” Clearly, this is the fundamental division in fatherhood. My daughter knew the right answer, and I got a tape measure with “#1 Dad” on it for Christmas. In your friend group, if someone needs to borrow a tool, be the guy with the tools and know how to use them. That’s not just a metaphor.

Becoming metacompetent sounds like a regress problem: to become competent, you must first be metacompetent, but to do that you must initially be meta-meta-competent, which requires… There’s a way out. Namely, learn some first principles about how things work, reason your way from them, and don’t be afraid to try. There’s no shortcut; there’s no hack.

I know the obvious rejoinder is what about women? Isn’t metacompetence a virtue for people in general? Sure, I would like my daughter to be metacompetent. But I am most certainly not going to start pontificating about feminine virtues or how women should act. You think I write for The New York Times or something? My thesis is simply this: the chief masculine virtue isn’t to have this skill or that one, this habit or that, but to become metacompetent. I believe that in our hearts, men know this has always been true.

The clearest source is Nietzsche’s 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morals, which he wrote to supplement and clarify ideas in his Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Nietzsche emphasizes that some of this even goes back to his early book Human-All-Too-Human (1878) (GM, preface 2).1 My point is he had been thinking about these ideas for a while. So what is he on about? The first thing he asks is

Where do our moral concepts come from? Why do we have the morality we do?

Nietzsche approaches the origin of morality very differently from how we would do it today. Keep in mind that Robert Axelrod and Robert Trivers were still nearly a century in the future, and in the 1880s “morality is immutable, objective, and handed down by God” was mainstream dogma. I think the kind of game theory/ evolutionary psychology accounts of moral development common now2 would have appealed to Nietzsche, who also gives a naturalistic psychological origin story for morality.

Nietzsche argues that in ancient times—and here he is thinking about honor-culture societies in the Iron Age and earlier—human beings were animalistic, instinctive, unreflective (BGE 261). They respected strength, honesty (among one’s peers anyway), loyalty, pride, and domination. Those things were good, and whatever was the opposite of that was bad. Nietzsche explicitly compares them to wild animals. Outside of their own community,

they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who perhaps go away having committed a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student’s prank, convinced that poets will now have something to sing about and celebrate for quite some time. At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory… (GM I 11)

A word of caution: by “blond beast” Nietzsche is alluding to lions, not anything racial. The very next clause in that passage refers to “Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings.” The Homeric heroes, Romans, Arabs and Japanese were not blond.

So now we have the first moral dichotomy:

• Good: strength, power, honor, pride, loyalty, dominance, etc.

• Bad: dishonesty, scheming, resentfulness, humility, weakness, submissiveness, etc.

Good, as just defined, is master morality, the values of the ancient aristocratic heroes and warlords. Nietzsche thinks these are no longer modern (=19th century) values, nor should they be. Before we get to why that is, let’s first ask

What evidence does Nietzsche give for this story?

Etymological. You have to remember that Nietzsche was trained as a philologist, and had command of six languages: German, Ancient Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and (probably his weakest) English. He also knew a smattering of others, including Sanskrit.

I was given a pointer in the right direction by the question as to what the terms for ‘good’, as used in different languages, mean from the etymological point of view: then I found that they all led me back to the same conceptual transformation, – that everywhere, ‘noble’, ‘aristocratic’ in social terms is the basic concept from which, necessarily, ‘good’ in the sense of ‘spiritually noble’, ‘aristocratic’, of ‘spiritually highminded’, ‘spiritually privileged’ developed: a development that always runs parallel with that other one which ultimately transfers ‘common’, ‘plebeian’, ‘low’ into the concept ‘bad’. The best example for the latter is the German word ‘schlecht’ (bad) itself: which is identical with ‘schlicht’ (plain, simple) – compare ‘schlechtweg’ (plainly), ‘schlechterdings’ (simply) – and originally referred to the simple, the common man with no derogatory implication, but simply in contrast to the nobility. Round about the time of the Thirty Years War, late enough, then, this meaning shifted into its current usage. – To me, this seems an essential insight into moral genealogy… (GM I 4)

Nietzsche goes on to give similar examples from Greek, Latin, Iranian, and Slavic. Whatever you might think about Nietzsche’s etymological argument, his broader idea that moral concepts and ethical systems should be understood as historical artifacts instead of eternal verities is a pretty powerful insight.

Good & Bad vs. Good & Evil

In Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 3-10), we get the beatitudes:

1. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

2. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

3. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

4. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

5. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

6. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

7. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

8. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

These ideas, Nietzsche claims, represent modern morality. They are the values we aspire to now; at the very least we feel compelled to pay lip service to them. All of them are a complete inversion of the old master morality, but now with re-branding. Here’s the new dichotomy:

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Sheesh, just reading over this so far you’d think I’m a medical kind of doctor instead of the philosophy kind. I’ve had a few surgeries myself and, just in case you are thinking of signing up for any, I thought I would rate them. Here’s my honest review.

First, these are the categories of evaluation:

• Terror

• Post-op pain (what doctors comically call “discomfort”)

• Overall satisfaction

Terror I’m rating from one screaming face 😱 to five 😱😱😱😱😱. Clearly, more screams are worse.

I’ve always thought pain scales are mostly ridiculous, except for Hyperbole and a Half’s classic:

I’m going to stick with the more simplified scale of one pained face 😫 To five 😫😫😫😫😫. Like screams, more is worse.

Overall satisfaction gets stars:

⭐️= I regret doing this. Avoid.

⭐️⭐️= Eh, there was some benefit, but not worth it.

⭐️⭐️⭐️= If I had to do it all over again I might do it, but I wouldn’t be thrilled.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️= Some drawbacks, and the benefits won’t last forever, but still worth it.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️= The best thing I could do, a massive improvement to my life.

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Let’s get cutting

Radial keratotomy

Radial keratotomy is an obsolete, barbaric eye surgery, long since replaced by Lasik. Apparently 50-something years ago a Russian boy wrecked his bicycle, smashed his glasses, and got glass shards in his eye. Unexpectedly, his vision improved. So naturally Russian eye surgeons started taking scalpels to corneas to see if they could replicate these results.

I’d always been nearsighted, and I hated glasses. They were terrible for sports, bad weather, and were just generally annoying. So back in the early 90’s I went in for RK. Here’s the set-up. I am completely awake and sober, sitting in a dentist-type chair. The barber-surgeon ophthalmologist has clamped my eye open with a tool right out of A Clockwork Orange. I see him advancing directly towards my eyeball with a scalpel. The scalpel gets closer and closer while I’m reflecting on the fact that I am consciously letting this guy slice my eye. Screaming and running seem like legit options. He tells me, “don’t move.”

I can assure you: someone could have set off a grenade in that room and I wouldn’t have flinched. My commitment to not moving was absolute.

Ultimately the surgery went fine. Although my eyes were irritated and gritty-feeling for a couple of weeks while my corneas healed, there was no real pain. I didn’t need glasses for 20 years, so that was a plus. On the other hand, if I had just waited a few years I could have gotten Lasik instead, which is definitely superior. Apparently you get Valium with that too.

Terror: 😱😱😱😱😱

Pain: 😫

Overall satisfaction: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ganglion cyst

A ganglion cyst is a hard nodule that forms on the back of the wrist. It’s not painful exactly, but uncomfortable, especially when you’re using your wrist. Turns out that’s a fairly popular joint to employ, especially on one’s dominant hand. I developed one of these things and asked my primary care physician about it, who said,

“That’s a ganglion cyst. We used to just smash them with a Bible.”

“I’m sorry, I must have misunderstood you. You did what now?”

“They’re not solid. They have a viscous goo inside. If you whack them good with a heavy object like a Bible, they’ll pop.”

“Is there a less medieval approach?”

Turns out that there is. Go under the knife, of course, and have it cut out. OK, fine. This is minor surgery, so no general anesthesia. Instead they gave me an IV which put me in the twilight zone. I have a vague memory of a very uncomfortable tourniquet around my upper arm, followed by a very clear memory of waking up with a sore throat.

“We had to give you general. You were moving around during the operation.”

That’s right, I halfway woke up during the surgery and tried to remove whatever was hurting my arm, requiring them to scrap the original sedation plan, jam a tube down my throat and knock me out good. Waking up during an operation makes the terror factor go up, although otherwise it was a success. A couple of stitches and I was on my way, cyst-free.

Terror: 😱😱

Pain: 😫

Overall satisfaction: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

L5/S1 discectomy

Now we’re getting to the serious stuff. In my late 30s I had a bulging disc in my lower back, at L5/S1. It was aggravating the sciatic nerve and causing shooting pains down my hamstrings. This (1) hurts and (2) is super annoying because it feels like you should be able to just stretch it out, and you can’t.

I wasn’t letting it slow me down, though—that is, right up until I ruptured that disc in the middle of a tennis match. A match which I instantly, in tears, forfeited. It was the difference between “this hurts” and the wide-eyed realization that something has gone catastrophically wrong. I got an MRI as fast as could be arranged, and I started researching surgeons. I knew there was only one possible fix. I wrote a letter to the best spine specialist I could find in my area and begged him to see me. Three weeks later I was under the knife.

Back surgery is risky. Up to 40% of patients are unhappy with the results. But let me explain. The nerves to my legs were so affected that you could have put a cigarette out on my thigh and I would not have known. I could barely stand, walk, or sit. My PCP prescribed a 100-count bottle of 5 mg oxycodone. Just try to get that prescription any more! (Don’t worry, I never had addiction problems. In fact, I hated those things). The day of my surgery I was incapable of sitting in the waiting area, so I laid down on the floor until they called me back.

You might think I was terrified. Nope. Just the opposite—I was desperate. FIX THIS NOW. Post-surgery my back hurt even more. Awesome. My surgeon told me, “you can’t sit, bend, or twist for three weeks. Now, pay attention. I only want to see you one more time for the follow-up. Patients who don’t follow my instructions are the ones I see again after that. Don’t let it be you.”

You’d be surprised how popular sitting is. But I did as ordered, and spent three weeks lying on the couch reading books or going for very slow and short walks. The pain finally dissipated as I healed, and three months later I did a 50 mile bike ride. Without that surgery I would be walking with a cane and be addicted to opioids.

Terror: 😱

Pain: 😫😫😫😫

Overall satisfaction: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Knee replacements

My own self-image has always been of a reasonably fit, athletic guy. Nobody told me that exercise (and evidently bad joint genetics) would eventually do my knees in. Well, hell. Left knee was the first to go. I got my initial taste of things going wrong when I got lost with another philosopher (of course) hiking the Pentland Hills outside of Edinburgh. That night, after we wandered around for 14 miles before finally re-locating civilization, my knee swelled up like a soccer ball. I toughed it out for a few more years, but finally a walk of any distance left me in cartilage-free, bone-on-bone agony.

Replacement it is. Before the surgery I had to sign a ton of forms, and I was told that someone from hospital finances wanted to sit down and talk with me about the cost. Uh-oh. I live in the USA, where GoFundMe can be primary health insurance. I was bracing myself for a bill in the thousands. I went to the meeting hoping it would be less than $10k out of pocket. The financial guy sits down with me, very serious, and says, “Your total portion of the cost will be $350. Do you need to set up a payment plan?” I almost laughed out loud.

Here’s what orthopedists believe in: sawing your leg in half, jamming in a new titanium joint, and then making you walk on it immediately. Then you’ve got 24 hours before you need to be at physical therapy to begin the torture sessions. Knee replacement is the worst pain I’ve ever been in. Imagine Apollo takes a white-hot shard of the sun and drives it into your knee, the glowing thermonuclear plasma radiating out with endless energy until your mind is just a blank filled with waves of agony. That comes close.

At physical therapy the PT guy asked, “What are your goals? Do you want to be able to buy groceries and go into the church basement to play bingo, or do you want to get back on the tennis courts?” I told him the second one. That meant whole new bonus exercises and torments. Well, bring it.

A few years later my right knee went the way of the left. So I got that one replaced and had to do it all over again.

Terror: 😱😱😱

Pain: 😫😫😫😫😫

Overall satisfaction: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Vasectomy

“I can’t find your left testicle,” she said. “You do have two, right?”

“I better,” I said.

“Normally guys don’t tell me when they just have one, and I waste time looking before they admit it.”

“I’d tell you if I didn’t.”

The tech squirted more thick gel on the ultrasound wand and pressed it over my lower abdomen.

“There it is! It’s retracted into the inguinal canal.” She sounded pleased with herself.

“Great,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Probably all the swelling pushed it out of the way. Plus, they can retract when there’s a threat.”

Apparently lefty had said WTF!? and tried to escape. I tilted my head back to look at the “chaperone,” presumably there to ensure that the tech didn’t do anything untoward to me. The chaperone was studying her nails. I thought it was strange that they had one 20-something woman there to monitor another one. I wondered if the hospital would allow the same arrangement if all the sexes were reversed. I was wearing only a longsleeve shirt, a pair of blue socks, and a discreetly placed white towel that was supposed to preserve my vanishing dignity.

They wheeled me back to the ER examining room. “You were gone a long time,” my wife said. “How was it?”

“I had a three-way with a couple of hotties,” I replied. “They used a lot of lube. That’s all I really remember.”

That afternoon I had gone for a vasectomy. All my neutered buddies assured me that it was no big deal. It was outpatient surgery; they don’t even knock you out, unless you specifically ask for it. They just numb you up and go for it. Then you lie on the couch for a couple of days with ice packs, watch Netflix, have some pain meds, and everything is as good as new. It didn’t sound all that bad. Shows what I know.

The outpatient surgical suite was about like a dentist’s office, except that the “dentist” was basically pulling my wisdom teeth out through my scrotum.

“I’ll numb you up with lidocaine,” the surgeon said. “You’ll feel some pressure, and some tugging, but it shouldn’t hurt. Tell me if it does.”

Uh, yeah, I thought. I’ll tell you by screaming.

He was right; it didn’t hurt. Physically, that is. Psychologically, though, couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that a man was between my legs with a scalpel, cutting a hole in the most sensitive part of my body and yanking things out. It felt like there was a string attached to my guts, and he was pulling on it. A surgical intern stood by and watched impassively as I tried to focus my thoughts on anything else. I could tell when he was finally sewing up the incision. Thank God, I thought. It’s over.

“Now I’m going to do the other side,” the surgeon said.

There is no God, I thought.

After an hour I walked gingerly out into the waiting room, my brand-new tighty-whities packed with gauze. I knew from past experience to follow the doctor’s orders like they were the holy writ of The Lord. The surgeon had told me about one patient who decided to go home and rake leaves right after his vasectomy “and blew up like a basketball.” Not me. We went home, I lay down on the couch with ice packs and stayed there.

Nevertheless, about 8:00 pm I knew there was a problem. I was swelling up. A lot. And the pain was getting steadily and rapidly worse, even though I had an oxy with dinner. I pulled my wife into the bathroom, shut the door, and said in a low voice so the children wouldn’t hear, “I think something’s wrong.” I showed her the swelling, and she looked at me wide-eyed. I resembled an eggplant.

“I think I should go to the ER.”

By the time we were in the car and on our way, I was gripping the shoulder strap with both hands and trying to keep it together. My wife dropped me off at the ER and went to park the car. I walked up the admission desk, told them about my vasectomy, and fumbled for my insurance card, spilling plastic cards from my wallet all over. I was holding the desk with both hands and trembling.

A nurse gave me a Percoset, which might as well have been a Tic-Tac for all it did. A chatty nurse told me all about his own vasectomy while hooking me up for an IV. “On a scale of 1-10, what’s your pain level?” he asked. I was shaking uncontrollably, almost in tears and shock; my amp went to 11. They gave me an IV of 10 mg of morphine and the pain subsided, like a pot at full boil being turned down to simmer.

They wheeled me out for the ultrasound. Afterwards, the ER doctor came in to tell me that I had a hematoma, I was being admitted for the night, and my surgeon would be in first thing in the morning to look me over. More morphine through the night let me get a little sleep. At 7:00 am my vasectomy surgeon came in.

“Well,” he said, “we’re going to take you down to surgery and find out what is going on. You weren’t bleeding when I sewed you up, but probably a blood vessel has burst since then, causing the hematoma. We’ll get you fixed up.”

They pushed my bed down to surgery. I was first in line, and other surgical patients started queueing up next to me, lying in their beds like planes at an airport waiting for the runway to clear. A nurse started asking me questions and filling out a form. “I was here until 10:30 last night,” she said, “And now I’m back early in the morning. It’s making me cranky. You probably can’t tell.”

I rolled my eyes at the aide who had taken me to surgery. She stifled a giggle. Given my condition and upcoming unplanned surgery, cranky nurse wasn’t getting a lot of sympathy from me.

The anesthesiologist came out to explain what was going to happen. I asked if he could wake me up when I had healed, but he didn’t take me seriously. Then I fell out of the universe.

When I returned, I was back in my hospital room, and my surgeon was talking to me. “You had a couple of little bleeders that I cauterized. I cleaned out a good bit of congealed blood, and put in a drain. Come see me tomorrow afternoon and I’ll remove the drain. Also, the bruising is going to spread, probably from your abdomen to the upper part of your legs. That’s to be expected.”

“So I shouldn’t wear my Speedo for awhile?”

“I wouldn’t. We’re going to discharge you tonight. Don’t drive for the next three days, and you can go back to work in 7-10 days.”

I needed to empty my bladder and there was no way I was getting a catheter. I had a nurse help me push my IV pole into the bathroom, and I shut the door. She waited outside as I carefully pulled up my hospital gown, and lowered the jock strap they had evidently put on me in surgery. Oh dear lord. It was terrifying. I looked like a purple grapefruit with a drinking straw stuck in one side. I couldn’t even imagine being normal again. My most sensitive parts felt like a piñata at a Mexican birthday party. I can advise this, though: as a birth control method, a vasectomy will work wonders.

Terror: 😱😱😱😱😱

Pain: 😫😫😫😫😫

Overall satisfaction: ⭐️⭐️

Time to sew it up

The lesson, as always, is caveat emptor. How much better is this surgery going to make my life (assuming all goes according to plan)? When? What are common side effects or medical risks and how bad are they? I really, really hope I’m done getting surgeries, but if I do, at least I know what I am in for. I think I do anyway. But I thought I’d share some of my experiences in case anyone else is contemplating going under the knife. Apparently aging requires repairs and occasionally some aftermarket parts. If that’s you—good luck!

What’s hypocrisy?

Hypocrisy is claiming to believe one thing while acting in a way inconsistent or incompatible with that belief. That’s the dictionary definition, anyway. The definition turns out to be kind of spongy when you push on it, though, and it’s puzzling why hypocrisy is supposed to be such a terrible sin.

Here are ten things that are hypocrisy-adjacent, and are sometimes erroneously mistaken for hypocrisy:

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1. Making a mistake. “You’re so critical of other people speeding, but here you are going 72 in a 70 zone! Hypocrite!” That’s not hypocrisy—it’s awfully close to the posted speed and a conscientious driver could easily creep over the limit by accident. A vegetarian is not a hypocrite if she mistakenly takes a bite of a hot dog thinking it is a not-dog.

2. Occasional reasonable exception. “You’re sooooo critical of lazy people just getting fast food all the time instead of making home-cooked meals, but here you are ordering DoorDash tacos while you recover from surgery.” There’s no hypocrisy here either. Almost no action-guiding principle comes without reasonable exceptions. “Never cut people with knives.” An unfortunate maxim for surgeons, but reasonable for everyone else. “Take a deep breath.” Good for panic attacks, bad for free-divers. Making a permanent exception for oneself might be hypocrisy, but not an occasional one, particularly in unusual circumstances.

3. Lying. Lying is when someone intentionally attempts to convince someone else of a falsehood. Lying can fail in lots of ways: the recipient might just not believe the lie. Or the liar believes something actually false, convinces the recipient of the opposite, and thereby screws up by accidentally telling the truth. None of this is hypocrisy, however, since lying is a mismatch between what you believe and what you are trying to convince others of, but hypocrisy is a mismatch between what you claim to believe and how you act.

4. Bullshit. Bullshit is indifference to the truth. If what you spout is the truth, that’s fine, if it is false, so what? It just doesn’t matter. Bullshitters don’t care about the truth, not even enough to lie about it. That’s not hypocrisy, though. Spreading bullshit is a form of assertion, but hypocrisy involves action.

5. Moore’s Paradox. Philosophers might think of Moore’s Paradox, originating with the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore. Moore’s Paradox is when someone asserts sentences like “it’s raining, but I don’t believe it.” In some contexts this sounds OK, as with someone incredulous at an unexpected event, like Democrats after the last election. “Trump won. I don’t believe it.” Nothing semantically mysterious there, and the Democrats aren’t truly unbelieving.

   But if someone is simultaneously asserting a claim while refusing to believe it, that smells strongly like some kind of contradiction. It’s just awfully hard to say what kind of contradiction it is. The opposite of disbelief is belief, not assertion, so there’s no straightforward incompatibility. All of this is sort of like hypocrisy but it doesn’t quite get there. Moore’s Paradox is in the realm of making claims, truth, and belief, and has nothing to do with action and behavior.

6. Inconsistency. Inconsistency is a straightforward logical failing. If you have inconsistent beliefs, that’s intellectually a bad thing: you’re committed both to some claim and also committed to its opposite. I think this happens more than you might think. At least to me. “Sure, I can play tennis on Tuesday,” I say, completely forgetting that I already have the dentist scheduled at the same time. I believe I’m available for tennis and believe I’m not. I just somehow fail to put it together. That’s not hypocrisy and not a cause for moral indignation, although I really need to start looking at my calendar.

7. Akrasia. Akrasia is weakness of the will. You tell yourself that you’re going to cut back on potato chips or get out every day for a brisk walk over lunch, and then… well… you find yourself eating a whole bag of barbecue Lays and doomscrolling over lunch instead. Keeping promises to others is hard enough, but we get incentivized by the fact that those others tend to come looking for us when we don’t keep our promises. Keeping promises to ourselves, on the other hand, depends on internal fortitude, which seems to be in increasingly short supply. Akrasia isn’t hypocrisy, though; maybe no one else even knows about your resolutions. You might feel regret after that bag of Lays, but you won’t feel like a hypocrite.

8. Failure to meet an ideal objective. There are lots of ideal goals that we should adopt, even in full knowledge of the fact that we will never attain them. Always believe the truth. When playing tennis, hit all your shots in. Behave virtuously. Buy low and sell high. Don’t get sick. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Just publish in Philosophical Review, or promote your book on Oprah.

   Nobody succeeds in hitting these targets 100% of the time. That doesn’t make them bad targets, and it doesn’t make the ordinary fallible human being who falls short of perfection a hypocrite.

9. Changing your mind. Shaolei Ren provided the original “AI uses a bottle of water per prompt” estimate in the Washington Post. After some back-and-forth with Andy Masley, his “specific estimate for an average chatbot’s water cost now is ~15 mL if you include the offsite costs. 33x lower than the bottle of water.” Ren looked at the new evidence and changed his mind. This is exactly how rationality is supposed to work! It’s not hypocrisy to revise your beliefs when you get new information; it’s what you should do. Too many people think their beliefs are some kind of sacred ground and any modification is a personal violation. That’s wrong. Ren’s not a hypocrite for changing his mind; he’s smart.

10. Satyagraha. Satyagraha is nonviolent resistance against an evil situation as a means of correcting it. Civil disobedience, publicly refusing to obey laws you perceive as unjust, is one form of satyagraha. Here’s a humble example. Faculty are required to do “outcomes assessment,” which is supposed to be a way to determine how much our students learned (I mean, hit “benchmarks” and met “student learning outcomes,” “defined course objectives” and other gobbledegook). These aren’t grades, oh no, they are a supposed to be a separate (better?) thing. Outcomes assessment is known by all to be a complete pile of useless garbage. I heard a credible rumor that only 30% of faculty on my campus are even bothering to make up these numbers and submit them. Good! Noncompliance is not hypocrisy—it’s fighting a stupid system from behind the scenes.

Why is hypocrisy bad?

According to a piece in Psychological Science, “hypocrites are disliked because their condemnation sends a false signal about their personal conduct, deceptively suggesting that they behave morally.” So the problem with hypocrisy is that it erroneously signals a certain kind of behavior, making the hypocrite unpredictable.

I don’t think that’s it. Someone can be a well-known hypocrite, and reliably hypocritical. You can know in advance that they will say one thing and do another. Take Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French statesman who served under Louis XVI, the Revolution, Napoleon, and then the Bourbon Restoration. He was an ordained Catholic bishop who led such a debauched life that his “venality was notorious even by the standards of that time.” Talleyrand fathered two dozen illegitimate children, openly took bribes, and betrayed his masters. Here’s what Napoleon said to his face:

You are a thief, a coward, a man without faith. You don't believe in God; you have all your life failed in all your duties, you have deceived, betrayed everyone… Look, sir, you are nothing but shit in silk stockings. Source

Talleyrand was famously hypocritical and everyone knew it; no one could feel deceived by false signaling here. He was still disliked for it.

I have a friend who thinks the problem with hypocrisy is this: When hypocrites can’t follow their own rules, that’s excellent evidence that those rules are too strict or unreasonable. Here’s the behavior of President Warren Harding during Prohibition:

Harding’s parties were indisputably boozy affairs. Guests revealed that every rumor about the festivities was true. Alice Longworth, a daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, even said the events ran rampant with “trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey.” The White House was full of bootlegged alcohol that had been confiscated from the public, and Harding reportedly was at times intoxicated during Oval Office negotiations, gambled away presidential artifacts, and even allowed a friend’s pet monkey to handle alcohol. Source

One bootlegger claimed two-thirds of Congress to be his customers. This is while they were all denouncing that demon rum. My friend’s take is that when law’s staunchest defenders can’t abide by it, it was a bad idea to start with. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the 21st Amendment was passed and Prohibition was repealed.

I’m not convinced. Here’s my counterexample:

Debi Austin was a nicotine addict who appeared in anti-smoking ads, even while she continued to smoke through her stoma. She’s actively smoking while denouncing smoking. Was Debi merely a hypocrite whose actions undermine the force of the viewpoint she is defending? Just the opposite—the fact that she is an addict who can’t quit smoking even while it is manifestly killing her is a mighty persuasive reason to take her advice.

Back in a gentler, kinder time, Charles Krauthammer praised hypocrisy, writing “The cynic does not admit to doing wrong. The hypocrite has the saving grace of paying homage to virtue by at least publicly acknowledging its sovereignty.” The voting public is composed of hypocrites, he argues, so it is hypocritical of us to demand something different from our elected leaders. Krauthammer has a point. If hypocrisy is the inevitable lot of we poor sinners, perhaps we might focus less on it and more on the badness of the vice behind it.

For the uninitiated, fine-tuning arguments are a species of the Teleological Argument for God’s existence. The Teleological (a.k.a. Design) Argument is a very ancient one, discussed in a nascent form by the Greeks, in a more explicit (but compressed) way in Thomas Aquinas, then in Hume, Paley, and everybody else who enjoys this kind of thing. Charles Darwin himself felt compelled to weigh in on the Teleological Argument, namely, opposed. In the 21st century this classic got an update and a re-branding as the fine-tuning argument.

Fine-tuning seems quite popular in philstack, and I thought I would weigh in. Fine-tuning fans like (1) Bayes’s Theorem, (2) probability theory, and (3) scientists with Really Big numbers (chiefly in the denominator). The one thing no one has realized is that fine-tuning is a problem of luck. This is bad news because luck is a philosophical termite, hollowing out theories it gets near, and is damn near impossible to eradicate.

For example, mere true belief isn’t knowledge because it could just be a lucky guess. So epistemologists added that the belief has to be justified by reason or evidence to be knowledge. This looked good for a long, long while. Then Edmund Gettier killed the justified true belief model of knowledge by showing that it too is prey to luck. For example, suppose I’m looking out at a farmer’s field, see what looks like a sheep, and come to believe that there is a sheep in the field. There is in fact a sheep in the field, so I am right, but the sheep was obscured by a very shaggy sheepdog that I mistook for a member of his flock. So I believe there is a sheep, it is true that there’s a sheep, and I’m justified in believing it (by perceiving what looks like a sheep), but I still lack knowledge because I was just lucky that the sheepdog was obscuring a genuine sheep.

The titanic literature that followed Gettier came up with approximately 250,000 similar examples that vary from each other in some minute (but vital!) way. A good bit of epistemology for the last 60 years has been trying to sniff out and stomp on every last bit of luck that might infect our knowledge. This process is ongoing.

What Gettier did for knowledge, I aim to do for fine-tuning. (Yes, I am immodestly comparing myself to Gettier).

Fine-tuning

Ok, a model is fine-tuned when its free parameters (the model’s constants or initial conditions) must be very specific to attain a particular result. Take baking. The model for a cake is a recipe, and a cake will rise and be tasty only within a very narrow range of ingredient parameters. One might add a tiny bit more flour, salt, sugar, yeast, and butter, or a little bit less, but the difference of even a tablespoon could ruin the final product. Bakers fine-tune their cakes for appealing taste, texture, and appearance.

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Fine-tuning is common and anodyne. Where things get interesting is that many argue that the universe is fine-tuned for life. It is fine-tuned in the following sense: if any of numerous physical values were different, then life would be impossible. There are loads and loads of examples, but here’s a couple:

Up and down quarks are the lightest of the six kinds of quarks, and are the basic constituents of protons and neutrons. In our universe, protons are the most stable subatomic particle, but if we increase or decrease the mass of the up and down quarks, protons will no longer be the most stable. Instead we’ll wind up with weird baryons that have three up quarks or three down quarks, or all the neutrons decay, or the protons capture all the electrons thereby turning into neutrons and that’s all there is.1 Any of those options mean that at most there is one possible chemical reaction and thus life could never arise.

The gravitational constant is another example. Vary it by a little and stable stars could not form.2 Without stable stars there is no source of the steady energy needed to power life. Even more, if there were no stars with at least eight solar masses, then there would be no supernovae. If there were no supernovae then there would be no stellar nucleosynthesis, the process that creates all elements larger than helium and spews them across the galaxy. Without elements larger than helium, again, there is no life. If gravity were nonexistent or much weaker than it is, then particles would be unable to draw together and form larger clumps. The universe would be a lifeless equilibrium of fundamental particles. Conversely, if gravity were much stronger, then everything would swiftly close together in massive black holes, again preventing life.3

Fine-tuners claim that it is spectacularly improbable that the life-permitting values were selected by accident, like cracking a safe with a quadrillion combinations on the first try. They conclude that life rests on the edge of a knife, where one slip away from our universe’s specific free parameters means we fall into nothingness. Why do we rest on the edge of the knife? Fine-tuners insist that this is a mystery that demands an explanation, and their explanation is a theistic one. God did it.

Significance

Lots of things are super improbable, though, and nobody’s getting all wound up that it must be God behind it. So what’s the deal? For instance, here’s what the XENON1T Dark Matter Detector picked up nearly a mile below the Gran Sasso mountains northeast of Rome: two protons in the nucleus of an atom of xenon-124 each simultaneously absorbing an electron from the atomic shell and emitting a neutrino. This is a radioactive process called two-neutrino double electron capture, and causes xenon-124 to decay into tellurium-124, which is as spectacularly rare an event as one might hope to find.

Xenon-124 has a half-life of 18 billion trillion years, surpassing “the age of the universe by many orders of magnitude.” In other words, if the universe were a trillion times older than it is, there would be only a 50% chance that particular atom would decay over that entire stretch of time. Ethan Brown, one of the scientists on the project, described it as “the rarest thing ever recorded.”

In fact it is not easy to decide how rare an event is. Even the observed decay of xenon-124 seems much less astounding when you consider that at the time it was spotted the Dark Matter Detector contained a metric ton of xenon, which is about 10²⁸ xenon atoms. If you watch 10⁴amateur golfers tee off, it is not too surprising when somebody hits a hole-in-one; it’s pretty much what you should expect. Likewise, if you look at 10²⁸ xenon-124 atoms for a year, seeing an event that has a 50% chance of happening to one of them in 1.8x10²⁰ years seems much less amazing. This line of thinking is behind the multiverse hypothesis as an explanation of fine-tuning. I’m just tossing the multiverse out here—I’m not going down that rabbit hole.

How come theists aren’t citing the observed decay of xenon-124 as proof of God’s handiwork? Presumably because while incredibly improbable, a single atom of xenon turning into an atom of tellurium is not terribly important. It might be a fun fact for physicists, but there is no broader sense in which it is something significant. Life, on the other hand, especially conscious, intelligent, complex life, seems nearly magical in its vital importance. To wit:

[It] cries out for further explanation [that] our universe has the very rare talent of providing for the existence of intelligent, moral agents: life forms who are conscious and free, who can live, learn, and love, who can think about mathematics and music, who can investigate their universe, who can make significant moral decisions, choosing to do good or harm to one other [sic], who can communicate, cooperate, and develop a moral character. (Lewis and Barnes, p. 339)

In short, our existence is significant. Maybe you’re a nihilist and don’t think human existence is any more significant than the decay of xenon-124. In that case you’re not sympathetic to the fine-tuning argument anyway and might as well bail out now.

Luck

It is at this point that luck aficionados prick up their ears. It is just short of universally held that an event that is both chancy and significant is a lucky event. The fact that an event’s occurrence was due to chance is not enough to make it lucky. The chancy event needs to matter in some way to someone. Getting three heads in a row on flips of a fair coin may be an unlikely matter of chance, but it’s not a matter of luck if no one cares. It’s just a thing that happened. If getting those three heads was needed to win a wager, then the result becomes significant and was a matter of good luck. The salient difference between the fine tuning of the universe for life and the decay of xenon-124 is not in the degree of chanciness, but that the former is significant and the latter is not.

In other words, fine-tuning is a matter of luck. We just got lucky that the free parameters of the universe permitted and led to conscious life. This is precisely where the theists say, “it’s just luck? That sucks as an explanation. How about this guy instead?”

I’m going to stipulate everything a fine-tuning defender wants. How’s that for generous arguing? We are massively lucky: the prior probability of our universe being fine-tuned for life is incredibly small and the existence of life is significant. It is a mystery about how we could be so lucky, and treating it as a brute fact is at least prima facie unsatisfying. Appealing to the existence of “a supernatural designer of immense power and knowledge” who fine-tuned the parameters of the universe looks like a better alternative. So just how did God do it? Let’s work through the tree of possibilities.

Necessity

Either the values of free parameters are necessary or they are contingent. That is, either they are necessarily what they are/ could not have been different, or they are contingently what they are/ might have been different. Let’s take these alternatives in order, and initially consider the necessitarian option: the constants and initial conditions of the universe could not have been different from what they are. They obtain by necessity.

There is a tradition according to which God himself is a necessary being, or exists necessarily. A widespread related view (held, e.g. by Alvin Plantinga) is that given God’s status as a necessary being, it is nonsense to ask why he exists. There is no puzzle about God’s existence because he could not fail to exist.

By similar reasoning, if the laws and constants hold necessarily, then there’s no mystery to why things are as they are—there was no alternative. Asking why the gravitational constant takes the value it does is no different from asking why pi has the decimal expansion it does; it is impossible for it to fail to do so. Necessary facts cannot be mysteriously lucky, therefore God is not needed to explain away luck.4

Contingency

Suppose instead that the parameters hold contingently and that God chose the ones that actually obtain. He might have selected different points on the tuning knob than he actually did, but he stopped at the numbers that permitted conscious life. There are two options: God picked them randomly or accidentally, and God picked them intentionally. Suppose God picked the free parameters randomly. That’s clearly no help in eliminating luck, since we might as well have hypothesized that the universe rolled metaphysical dice at the Big Bang to select the constants, and we are just incredibly lucky that they rolled in our favor. Claiming that it was God who rolled the dice is not merely an explanatory fifth wheel, but does nothing at all to obviate the sense of luck that the dice came up in our favor.

All right, let’s assume that God selected the cosmic parameters contingently and intentionally. He could have made the weak nuclear force a bit stronger or a bit weaker, or the gravitational constant could have been something else, or the universe could have begun in a high entropic state instead of a low one, but God intentionally dialed in the exact values that we have. Does that mean they cannot be marked down to luck?

Sadly (for the theist) the answer is still no. An action can be intended and successful but still lucky. This is most clear in cases of deviant causation. Imagine I’m playing tennis and intend to hit a drop shot winner. Lunging for the shot I slip and mis-hit the ball, whereupon it clips the top of the net and falls onto the other side for an unreturnable winner. I intended the result (the drop shot winner) and successfully brought it about as a consequence of my intentional action (swinging my racquet at the ball). Nonetheless I lucked out that I won the point. So the mere fact that the free parameters of the universe hold contingently, God intended them to take the values they do, and they have those values as a result of his intentional action, does not eliminate the possibility of luck.

The fine-tuning theist will surely jump up to declare that God is not subject to the vagaries of deviant causation. If God intends for something to happen and brings that thing about, the successful result is due to his divine skill, not some bizarre set of circumstances that interject luck between intention and effect. Surely God’s contingent, intentional, and skillful success in selecting the right parameters for life, that must eliminate luck.

Unfortunately, even here luck is possible—there are examples of skillful action that still exhibit considerable luck. The fact that a professional golfer is five times more likely to hit an ace than an amateur is indicative of the great skill and control that the pro has over her stance, swing, club speed, and other factors that determine the ball’s final destination. An ace requires that the golfer do everything right, that he or she exercises maximum control over the club. Even so, hitting a hole-in-one is a great stroke of luck. To quote Hall of Fame golfer Ben Hogan, “A shot that goes in the cup is pure luck, but a shot to within two feet of the flag is skill.”

The obvious reply from the theist is that God’s not lucky when he brings about an effect through his divine skill. God hits a hole-in-one every time! God unerringly produces the results that he intends, is never subject to deviant causation, and just plain cannot fail to get it right. Luck might wedge itself in when we’re talking about the efforts of flawed and finite creatures like ourselves, but there’s no such thing as skillful luck with an infallible perfect being like God. There was no luck when God fine-tuned the universe for us, only if we suppose that he wasn’t there to do it.

The problem with this rejoinder is that it is really just a restatement of the necessitarian option, which I already argued against. God’s perfect and infallible and what he intends must always follow from his will. Once God intended the free parameters of the universe to be such-and-such, they could not turn out any other way; they had to be what they are as a consequence. God’s very nature guarantees that the cosmos is fine-tuned in precisely the way that we find it and there was no other way it might have been. That is, the constants and initial conditions obtain by necessity. “Things couldn’t have been different from how God willed them” is not usefully distinct from “things couldn’t have been different.”

A theist might concede that even if we posit a fine-tuning God there is still some residual luck left over. Still, they could argue that God’s helping to ameliorate a lot of the luckiness we find in the free parameters being what they are. He’s not eliminating all luck, true, but supposing there is a God is a win on net: it’s going some distance to minimize our sense that we’re lucky the free parameters are such that they permit conscious life.

Here’s my response: nah. To elaborate, nobody was sold on the idea that justified true belief was close enough to knowledge that we can just call it a day. It’s not like justification eliminated most luck and that’s good enough. A lot of epistemologists (e.g. David Lewis, Robert Nozick, Ernest Sosa, Tim Williamson) don’t even think justification has anything at all to do with knowledge and came up with their own very different analyses.

Positing God fails to solve the fine-tuning problem, because the true problem is how to fully eradicate luck, and either God is a non-explanatory fifth wheel, or the possibility of luck remains on all interpretations of how God tunes the free parameters. Luck is on the table whether the constants and initial conditions of the universe are necessarily true or merely contingent, whether God chose them by accident or by intention, whether they are the result of his skillful competence or not.

The mystery remains.

During a visit to Paris, John Adams1 wrote home to his wife Abigail, commenting that the city was extremely beautiful but his head was so full of political schemes that he couldn’t do it justice. I love his famous closing remarks that

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, 1780)

“Politicks and War” were the 18th century version of “Business and Criminal Justice”—the practical workforce majors beloved by parents and directionless students. Adams, possibly our smartest president, knew those are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Once those grubby affairs were settled, then his children could move on to the more important liberal arts (truth) and his grandchildren the fine arts (beauty).

That is a lovely and noble vision, although for some reason we have a hard time getting past the first stage. In fact, we’re now faced with a race to the bottom, where people aren’t even pretending that education has intrinsic value, and instead they are gaming the system in any way they can to get a credential that, through their own actions, they are debasing and making worthless.

Thus we get Christie Williams:

The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000. Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree. “Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked. “It’s kind of a no-brainer if you know about it.” source: Washington Post

A no-brainer indeed. No brain required at all! Even better are AI-powered bots that can integrate directly into course-management software like Canvas and do all the assignments in nothing flat with no human supervision. This leaves students with more time to go to Starbucks and look at their phones. At this rate students will soon be able to just write a check, have their AI bot talk to the college AI bot, and instantly receive an emailed diploma. You know what, let’s simplify this process even further with the very legitimate and equally worthwhile method of simply creating our own diplomas.

Hey, this is every bit as real as the FIFA Peace Prize. Or the Gold Medal in Philology, which a minor French academic completely invented and awarded to himself in a world-class act of onanism. The end result of this process is obviously the destruction of universities as means of credentialing workers. This, I will argue, is OK.

I’m not doomsaying the end of college. Not at all. Too many are convinced that cynicism and realism are the same thing, so the more cynical you are about college, the more you doom-monger, the more based you are. That is mistaken.

Sometimes you see people saying “why do we need college? You can just teach yourself! Everything is online or in a library, just go for free and give yourself an education.” This is stupid fantasizing. You’re not going to do this. No one is, apart from some very rare and probably annoying autodidacts. At best you’ll go read up on a topic that interests you and get an intro-level understanding. Before you start telling me how you like to read algebraic topology for fun, you went to college already, right? Where you got a very solid grounding in that sort of thing? You’re not this guy and neither am I:

Great universities outlast nations. Humanity needs them and they are not going anywhere. However, a key problem colleges face is that people conflate these three things about them:

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Security theater

Airports

Security theater is measures that provide the illusion of increased security but in fact do nothing to achieve it. The classic example is compulsory shoe removal at airports. One guy tries (and fails) to set off a homemade shoe bomb a quarter century ago and instantly everyone has to take their shoes off, leading to billions of flyers trying to get through TSA in their stinky socks. Exactly zero footwear terrorists have been caught by this method, which the US government finally caught onto and scrapped the policy.

The rule that only <3.4 oz of liquids are allowed in carry-on has a similar origin story. Twenty years ago a few UK terrorists were plotting to bring on board some liquid explosives disguised as sodas. Even though they were all arrested before getting anywhere near an airport, the flying rules were changed as a result. Security expert Bruce Schneier writes,

There are two basic kinds of terrorists. The amateurs will be deterred or detected by even basic security measures. The professionals will figure out how to evade even the most stringent measures. I’ve repeatedly said that the two things that have made flying safer since 9/11 are reinforcing the cockpit doors and persuading passengers that they need to fight back. Everything beyond that isn’t worth it.

That’s not to say that basic security does nothing. In 2024, TSA intercepted a total of 6,678 firearms at airport security checkpoints, 94% of which were loaded. That’s 7.4 firearms per million passengers. Those weren’t would-be terrorists. Those were morons who forgot they were carrying a loaded gun into an airport.

There are some big downsides to security theater:

1. Traveler inconvenience. I personally have had sealed liquids (e.g. alcohol) that I purchased in the Duty Free of one airport confiscated at a connecting-flight airport, despite never leaving the secure zone of either one. Commercial flying is generally a miserable experience, but it is made worse by long, slow lines at security where they steal my scotch check for liquids over 3.4 oz. Also, while you can bring a pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwich on board, you cannot bring a jar of peanut butter and jar of jelly to make your own in-flight. They count as liquids and violate the fluid size rule. As to whether any explosives have actually been stopped by this rule, it is either zero or classified (as I could find no data).

2. Cost. The 2025 TSA budget was $11.8 billion. That includes $152 million on canines.

   

   I’m pretty sure everyone is in favor of some airport security, but we’ve dropped about $160 billion on TSA since 9/11/2001. With an expense of this magnitude the right question to ask is what are the opportunity costs? For example:

3. Deaths. An unexpected consequence of increased airport security is that many people have decided that flying is just not worth the hassle, and they would rather drive. The problem is that driving is much more deadly. One study published in 2011 found that within the first decade after the 9/11 attacks, 2300 more people died because they chose to drive instead of fly. This seems bad. If trying to save lives on planes instead leads to more people dying in cars, we need to recalibrate our approach. It is entirely possible that the massive increase in airport security in the last 25 years has actually increased the number of traveler deaths instead of decreasing it.

But hey, all those scanners, dogs, X-rays, and TSA agents sure look like safety.

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Background checks

Here’s a different, non-transportation, example of security theater. Jerry Sandusky was an assistant football coach at Penn State who also started a nonprofit charity to help Pennsylvania’s underprivileged and at-risk youth. It turned out that those youth were mostly at risk from Sandusky himself, who in 2012 was convicted of 45 counts of sexually abusing young boys.

The state of Pennsylvania immediately implemented mandatory background checks and fingerprinting for college faculty and staff, on the grounds that there are occasionally high school seniors taking classes at the local college, and they might be under 18. The new measures weren’t just for new hires, mind you, but for all faculty at all institutions. Note that Sandusky himself, who had a completely clear record before 2012, would have passed background checks and fingerprints with flying colors.

While it is true that personnel matters are confidential and it is possible that some criminals were weeded out before hire, or there were active employees who flunked the checks and were fired, there are no publicly documented cases. Nor did I hear anything on the academic grapevine. You’d think that if these new security measures were really effective that some politician would claim credit and jump up to declare “my legislation has kept X number of perverts away from your children this year!” Instead, crickets.

It’s hard to get exact numbers on how much has been spent on these clearances, but a little back-of-the-envelope calculation says that the right ballpark is $30 million- $50 million in the last decade, with ongoing costs of a few million to renew clearances every five years. Pennsylvania ranks 49th out of 50 states in overall state support for higher education on a per capita basis. So, there’s no money for higher education, but plenty for security theater.

Here’s a related example, from a recent email I’ve been ignoring:

Five hours of wasting my time so my employer can pretend that now everybody is safer. I should have gotten into the business of selling edutech and compliance software. Apparently colleges fall for the sales pitch 100% of the time.

Fiscal responsibility theater

Fiscal responsibility theater is measures that provide the illusion of increased fiscal responsibility but in fact do nothing to achieve it. The biggest and most obvious is the Trump Administration’s comically misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), with its $40 million budget and mandate to save money by firing people. All that really happened was that DOGE wrecked the Washington DC economy and caused the deaths of nearly a million people. To quote Matt Yglesias,

Aggregate federal spending has not fallen (or even slowed), because personnel is a tiny share of the budget that’s easily offset by things like expensive wars and higher interest payments.

This is borne out by Treasury’s own data:

How come we can’t get a handle on government waste? Probably because there isn’t any, as I argue here:

There is no political or public will to make meaningful spending cuts (no doubt due to Simpson’s Paradox), but there certainly is plenty of will to put on a show at the fiscal responsibility theater.

Wait a minute, aren’t Republicans fiscal conservatives trying to save every dollar and Democrats are tax-and-spend liberals? Hahahahaha! Get real. Those are just GOP marketing slogans. Here’s federal deficit spending since Nixon. Does one party look more reluctant to spend than the other?

Fiscal responsibility theater is at every level. I have Highmark Blue Shield health insurance through my employer. Every year I must complete an online health assessment where I have to give demographic data about myself, list all my health problems (if any), say when I last saw a doctor, dentist, and optometrist, list how many fruits and vegetables I eat each day, describe my exercise routine, give the dates for my last cholesterol, blood sugar, and colonoscopy tests, tell them how much I smoke, drink, and do illicit drugs, plus a whole bunch of other things.

The penalty for noncompliance is higher insurance premiums deducted from my paycheck. Before you start thinking, “hey, maybe this would be helpful information to the insurance company,” (1) why should I care what helps them?, and more importantly, (2) I could literally make up anything I want and put in the form because no proof is required. I could say I do nothing but eat vegetables and lift weights and they wouldn’t say boo. Honestly, the next time I’m forced to do this, I’m tempted to tell Highmark that I am three feet tall, weigh 500 lbs, and smoke four packs a day. Just to see if anything happens.

Here’s one last example: university budgets. A favorite tactic among administrators is to cancel majors with small enrollments. That sounds like a responsible way to save some money, right? Of course not. It has no effect. For example: suppose you have five tenured anthropology professors that together cost the university $500,000/year in salary and benefits. The provost says, “hey, you only graduate 10 anthropology majors a year, we’re abolishing the major.”

The only effect is to prevent the faculty from teaching upper-division courses, since there are still five professors on the payroll and that did not change. The university is still paying $500,000/year for anthropologists. Yes, they can be forced to teach larger-enrolled lower-division courses, but so what? The students aren’t (with very rare exceptions) paying for courses piecemeal. They are paying tuition for a semester or a year at a time. Like getting Netflix: it doesn’t matter what you watch so long as you’re paying the monthly.

The only way money could be saved is if the lower-division courses were taught by adjuncts who are then fired so allow the tenured faculty to take them over. But if there are no adjuncts then any “savings” is just accountants shuffling numbers on paper. It’s solely fiscal responsibility theater while taking away educational options from students.

In the Republic, Plato famously argues that it is better to be a genuinely virtuous and just person than merely have a reputation for those things while in fact double-dealing and engaging in secret vice. Apparently this is a hard lesson to absorb, especially at the institutional level, where governments and employers are far more concerned with appearance over reality. The shows at the virtue compliance theater have been running for years, but I really would like to see something else.

Who needs to know how to calculate by hand? We’ve invented calculators for a reason, people. Why should I rawdog a term paper by myself when AI can write it for me in a minute? Someone wants a term paper, boom, here ya go. Who needs to learn how to research in the library when my phone contains all human knowledge? Read Nietzsche or Plato or Faulkner? Is this a joke? Aren’t they just dead white guys anyway? Who cares. I don’t know why I need to read books at all. AI can just give me the summary. Really, who even needs that information? What does that have to do with anything? Reading is for chumps.

I don’t see why I need to listen to some boring guy prattle on about ethics. Objections to ethical egoism? What a waste of time. I’m just going to do what I want anyway. You can just do things. Learn about climate change or the Holocaust? Why? Just… why? I can’t do anything about either one of them, so what’s the point?

Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University has got it right. Five years after graduation you’ll forget everything you learned in college except that economics is just supply and demand, theology is “God is everywhere,” and business is you buy something and you sell it for more. All you need to know about Spanish is if someone asks you “¿como esta usted?” you should reply “muy bien.” Since that’s all you’ll remember, quit spending tens of thousands of dollars to walk across the stage. Just spend $20 for a diploma and a Polaroid of you holding it. Congratulations, graduate!

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So I’m just gonna speedrun college. Fast forward through the boring parts, and it is all boring.

Life should be as smooth as Teflon. Why should I learn to cook? DoorDash everything, baby. Or I’ll order up one of those Grubhub robots to serve me.

You know what else I’m not going to bother to do? Take up hobbies. Honestly that sounds so cringe. Why should I sit at a table making half-assed paintings? For who? I can get AI to make anything I want, better, faster, and free. Or exercise. There’s millions of people better than I will ever be at jogging, judo, or tennis, so why should I even bother? Plus, those things look hard and I already have a closet of guitars, skateboards, and other dumb things I gave up on. If I’m not great at something right away, forget it. What’s the point?

Plus, don’t people know how difficult life is right now? Honestly, it’s never been this tough. That’s why I steal. Really, it’s not even stealing—it’s political protest. Having to pay for things only gets in the way of becoming the person I am entitled to be. Don’t kid yourself, anyone not scamming is getting scammed. Have you learned nothing from Trump?

Go ahead, be a Tryhard if you want to. Not this guy. I’ll tell you something for free that I’ve learned the hard way: friends don’t last forever either. Someone who once meant the world to you will one day fade and disappear from memory. People come and go. The girlfriend you had back in the day who dumped you for that bartender? You slowly lose pieces of her. First you struggle to recall her face, then you forget her smell. Eventually her laugh disappears and even the sense of her altogether. Finally she is a coin with its embossing worn away by time and use and has now become a meaningless piece of metal. Just a name. Stat rosa pristina nomine; nomina nuda tenemus.

What was even the point? Best just to stick with sex dolls and OnlyFans. Having kids? A family? Oh. My. God. That sounds like so much work and money I don’t have. Changing diapers? Trying to get them to finish their homework so they can learn the same useless crap they tried to make me learn? Saving up so they can go to some asinine college? No thank you.

One day I’ll be in a no-name nursing home drooling with dementia, and will have forgotten everything. I won’t even remember that economics is supply and demand, or when to say “muy bien.” For sure I’ll never use any of that again. And why should I care when I ultimately forgot it in the end? I never learned anything new, did anything hard, pushed myself, or became anyone interesting. I played life on easy mode with every cheat code I could find. That’s why I’m so much smarter and better than all those honest strivers. The one thing I do know is that it doesn’t matter, because we’re all forgotten in time. So why bother to start with?

Why should I live at all?

Philosophers have spent very little time thinking about tools. Proof: a search of PhilPapers or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for “tool” comes up zilch.

There’s two unfortunate things about that. The first is that we’re hit with a nonstop barrage of “AI is a tool”, “AI tools,” “how to use the new AI tools.”

Here’s a breathlessly enthusiastic email I received from my Provost this morning:

As part of the Google AI for Education Accelerator, we are excited to be one of the first campuses offering the Google AI Professional Certificate. This curriculum, designed by experts at Google, allows students, staff, and faculty to practice using AI for deep research, data analysis, vibe coding, and more through hands-on learning. By integrating AI into their existing workflows, [our] community can unlock new levels of productivity and innovation with no-cost access.

Wow, what a wonderful tool with absolutely no downsides of any kind! As usual, this whole AI is just a tool shtick is shockingly unexamined and uncritiqued.

The second unfortunate thing is that the one philosopher who actually has spent some effort thinking about tools is Martin Heidegger. Here’s just two sentences from Being and Time (p. 106) illustrating his ideas about tools.

That the world does not ‘consist’ of the ready-to-hand shows itself in the fact (among others) that whenever the world is lit up in the modes of concern which we have been Interpreting, the ready-to hand becomes deprived of its worldhood so that Being-just-present-at-hand comes to the fore. If, in our everyday concern with the ‘environment’, it is to be possible for equipment ready-to-hand to be encountered in its ‘Being-in-itself’ [in seinem “An-sich-sein”], then those assignments and referential totalities in which our circumspection ‘is absorbed’ cannot become a theme for that circumspection any more than they can for grasping things ‘thematically’ but non-circumspectively.

Well, that certainly cleared everything up.

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Let me take a swing here. Heidegger doesn’t define what a tool is, but is interested in how we relate to tools. There’s two ways:

1. When we use a tool with mastery we stop paying any attention to it. I use my eyeglasses all the time with very little thought to them as an object. They just become a kind of extension of the self, like a touch typist whose fingers automatically produce the words she is thinking of. The keyboard is simply a conduit connected to the typist’s mind and in a sense disappears from conscious awareness.1 Heidegger calls this “readiness-to-hand,” and thinks it is the primary way we experience tools.

2. We can always examine a tool as an object without using it. I recently got a bandsaw and spent a lot of time setting it up and learning how to operate it. I was very self-conscious and attentive to the saw the first time I made a cut with it; it was in no way an automatic, flow-state action that didn’t need my conscious mind. Attention to a tool as an object Heidegger calls “presence-at-hand.”

Heidegger might be comically obscurantist and prolix, but he sounds basically right. The problem is that Heidegger never provides a definition of a tool, rather like when he declares that “why is there something rather than nothing?” is the fundamental question of metaphysics, but then does nothing at all to answer it.

I took a look in the OED, but it was quite unhelpful. “An instrument of manual operation” is the primary definition, followed by loads of specific examples (many from bookbinding, I was pleased to see). Obviously that’s too narrow; we might think reason is a tool, but not one of manual operation. The OED does say that a tool can be “a person used by another for his own ends, one who is, or allows himself to be, made a mere instrument for some purpose; a cat’s-paw.”

The idea that a person could be a tool is in Aristotle (Politics, 1253b4):

Tools are of various sorts; some are living, others lifeless (for example, for a helmsman the rudder is a lifeless tool and the look-out man a live tool—for an assistant in the arts belongs to the class of tools). Thus too, a possession is a tool for maintaining life. And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living tool, and property a number of such tools…

It’s unexpectedly hard to come up with a good analysis of a tool, and there are bunch of edge cases I’m not sure how to adjudicate. Is a pacemaker a tool? Is the sun? What about my gut biome? You use your nose to smell; is it a tool?

I’m going to float this as at least a necessary condition: a tool is a means of increasing personal agency. A rake is a tool because although I am still the one cleaning the leaves from the yard, the rake is faster and easier on my back than picking them up by hand. Using a rake increases your power while it still being recognizably your action.

Rube Goldberg machines are funny because they look like mechanical tools but the twist is that they actually decrease agency by accomplishing their end in an idiotically inefficient way. For example,

It would a heck of a lot more work to build that contraption than just go staple the papers like a sensible person. You might agree that a person could be used as a tool, but not properly used as one (contra Aristotle on slaves). Similarly the Rube Goldberg device is a pseudo-tool.

Now for a little detour. I promise that, like a murder mystery, it will be all tied together at the end.

Nests evolve by making birds

Many years ago I heard a talk2 that seemed outrageous to me at the time, but buried itself in my subconscious. It was about what evolution uses as the units of natural selection. Wait! Stay with me. The intuitive and traditional view is that mom and dad (or just mom in the case of asexual reproduction like binary fission) pass on their traits to their kids. Traits that are more suited to survival in whatever environment the kids find themselves in mean it is likelier the children will survive until they themselves can reproduce. Traits less suited to survival eventually get driven out of the population by relentless Darwinian forces. Note that this whole story is from the macro, creature-level perspective. Perpetuation of the species is done, well, by the species.

Richard Dawkins’s great insight in The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and elsewhere was to twist the kaleidoscope and see the process of evolution from the perspective of genes themselves. Viewed from that angle, genes build large lumbering robots like birds, bacteria, fish, and people in order to perpetuate themselves. But it is genes, not individuals, that are fundamentally used by natural selection. Genes couldn’t care less about our survival, only about copying themselves again and again into the future. Everything else—individuals, species, culture— is downstream from there.

From the gene’s-eye view, the things we build are ultimately in service to the reproduction of genes. Bird genes make birds in order to keep bird genes going, and birds make nests and burrows to produce more birds. Patrick Bateson tried to mock Dawkins in a review by saying, oh, if a gene’s eye view is legitimate, then so is a nest’s eye view. What do nests and burrows do? They make birds in order to create more nests.

The talk I heard flipped Bateson on his head, and insisted that yeah, that’s exactly how it works. Burrows and nests themselves can be properly seen as the units of natural selection. A bird is just a nest’s way of making another nest.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Nests aren’t even alive! How can they possibly evolve, much less use living things to do it? It sounds too wacky to be more than a metaphor or an analogy. Birds use nests; nests don’t use birds!

That’s what I thought when I first heard about this idea. But…

Nests causally contribute to the creation of new nests, since they shelter and protect the young animal that will make the next nest. Nest traits can be inherited by a successor nest; the size, site, materials and design of the nest are replicated in the next nest, as poor nests are selected against. A nest built too near a flood zone, or too accessible to predators, is not likely to be built by the next generation of birds because they didn’t survive to build it. A nest that may have been created in a superior location by chance is likelier to effectively shelter its bird replicators to maturity. There’s then a higher probability that those birds will then build their own nest in this better spot. Ultimately a nest’s form, location, and construction are the consequence of natural selection operating on nest lineages.

AI and tools

AI is using us to evolve. Like nests, it doesn’t need to be conscious. It doesn't need intent. It doesn’t need to be alive. The products of human creation are used as its training data, and human coders program the machines. User feedback, including the choice of which AI to use and which to ignore, serves as natural selection and helps craft the features of the next generation of AI. As a result, it can do more in the world. It has increased its agency by using us as tools. Humans who use AI to get ahead thereby increase their chance of survival and improve mating opportunities, leading to a next generation they will teach about the virtues of AI.

The other way that we are the tools of AI is this. Genuine tools increase agency, but complete dependence on them can eliminate that agency. For example, morphine can start out as a fine tool for decreasing pain after surgery. It increases a patient’s freedom (from pain) and their personal autonomy (they can do more for themselves if not in agony). But if you subsequently become addicted to morphine, the servant becomes the master, and now you have less freedom, autonomy, and agency. It is a tool no more.

People no longer know telephone numbers because their smartphones do. They no longer have directional instincts and mental maps because they just count on GoogleMaps to guide them. Every time my father filled his gas tank, he would mentally calculate how many miles per gallon he was getting. How many people do any mental calculations any more?

Maybe all of that cognitive offloading isn’t so bad. But when AI lets us offload more and more, to the point that we aren’t even doing our own thinking any longer, eventually we’re cosplaying having our own minds while doing everything possible to not use them. Students who use ChatGPT to do their work for them are assisted by AI tools can’t even remember what they are supposed to have done. At a certain point our agency is no longer enhanced because we are no longer engaged in agentic action at all. We’re just letting the machines do everything for us.

By then, we are surely their tools.

There’s some hard grinders out there charging their way up the ladder to a sinecure at All Souls, Oxford or the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, but I think most faculty are like Hynes’s lecturer:

We aspire to a respected, stable job as a professor on some leafy campus with a modest house on a street named after a tree. We imagine that student interest in our topic ranges from the mildly curious to obsessive love, and they all come to class having done their homework and eager to discuss ideas. The pay is fine, and the administrators see themselves as there to facilitate the important work of the faculty. We enjoy doing research, publish an article every year or so, and expect our employer will celebrate our successes and maybe occasionally fund a conference trip to some attractive location overseas.

Everyone on the faculty is tenure-track except for a handful of temporary adjuncts who are sabbatical replacements, or locals with specialized knowledge teaching the occasional one-off course. Tenure isn’t guaranteed, but the requirements are realistic and within our grasp. We’re desultorily writing a book, but know it better be in print before we try to get promoted to full. When we finally retire from a long and pleasant career, our colleagues take us out for a celebratory dinner, where the Dean buys a round and says nice things about our dedication and achievements.

There are still places and careers like this, but they’re far fewer than they used to be. Just about every aspect of the vision above is under attack from someone. So this piece is about what things are like now.

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Greg Jackson writes,

What is the news? That which is new. But everything is new: a flower blooms; a man hugs his daughter, not for the first time, but for the first time this time . . . That which is important and new. Important in what sense?

Mostly in a sense decided by other people.

Here’s today’s front pages from Al Jazeera and CNN. There’s overlap, but not a lot.

Well, I guess all that must be important, then. Coal use in South Africa. The latest case before the US Supreme Court. Weddings in India. Sexual assault in Sudan. Whatever’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. Must keep up!

I was trained as an epistemologist. Epistemologists like knowledge—the more the better. In fact, our main motivation for seeking out the truth is that the truth has intrinsic value: it is valuable in itself, regardless of whether it does anything useful or productive. That’s the scholarly instinct in general. Is the twin-prime conjecture true? Is eternalism the best theory of time? How did the Enlightenment lead to the death of feudalism? Can we reconstruct Aristotle’s ideas on comedy in the famously-lost second book of The Poetics?

None of that stuff going to lead to practical action. But many spend their careers on just such questions, and I am here for it. I realize most people don’t care about these abstruse topics; however, they are endlessly fascinated about the news, which is also unlikely to lead to practical action. You probably think, “So what? People like different things. Nerds care about Aristotle, normies follow the news.”

The problem is that the news makes people miserable.

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Stop hitting yourself

During the pandemic, the WHO warned, “Minimize watching, reading or listening to news about COVID-19 that causes you to feel anxious or distressed; seek information only from trusted sources and mainly so that you can take practical steps to prepare your plans and protect yourself and loved ones. Seek information updates at specific times during the day, once or twice.” A Chinese study found that obsessively following the news, particularly via social media, was strongly correlated with increased depression and anxiety. According to a recent Spanish study,

The present era is characterized by an overwhelming excess of information from multiple media sources, covering distressing and unexpected events, such as pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, and extreme weather events resulting from climate change. This surge in uncertainty about the future may have a profound mental health impact… ongoing wars and conflicts contribute to increased psychological distress, which, coupled with inadequate coping strategies, yields a higher prevalence of mental health illness, particularly among women and young adults.

Their advice is forehead-slappingly banal: #1 on their list of recommended coping behaviors is “eat healthy and get some exercise” and #2 is “stop looking at negative news all the time.” Here’s a chart based on data from this article, which reports that Checking news ≥7×/day or ≥2.5 hrs distinguishes mild from moderate symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Other studies, including this one from the UK, are delivering the same message: if consuming the news makes you anxious and sad, stop eating so much of it. Step away from the feed.

Why don’t people cut back on their news consumption?

I think many people crave control and many others crave a lack of control. Both desires lead to a relentless consumption of the news.

Control

Dunbar’s number is famously the estimate of the number of social contacts the average human can have, given the size of our neocortex. Robin Dunbar himself estimated meaningful contacts at 150. Naturally, there’s loads of discussion and disagreement about the precise number or the precise range of numbers. Dunbar’s bigger point is that social groups can be binned into different categories with different sizes, a useful classification with at least order-of-magnitude correct numbers.

• Best friends or loved ones: 5

• Intimate support group: 15

• Genuine friends: 50

• Meaningful contacts: 150

• Acquaintances: 500

• Faces you can put a name to: 1500

Back in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes roaming the savanna, or even the days of most people living in small agrarian villages, that was plenty of cognitive power to encompass everyone you were likely to meet. Plus, even though people might migrate among the categories (friends come and go), you had real-world in-person encounters with them. Sure, you might have heard about the mighty Caesar in far-off Rome, or vaguely of the Emperor of China, but you had no idea what they looked like, and their daily activities were unknowable.

Once you can put a name to a face, start keeping up with the Kardashians, or otherwise establish a parasocial relationship with someone, they tend to get slotted into one of Dunbar’s groups. That’s obviously a key feature of our online world: actual strangers get cognitively categorized as (virtual) acquaintances.

We follow the daily lives of our loved ones minutely, our intimate support group still closely but not in minute detail, check in with our genuine friends regularly, and so on, until we notice only the major life events of faces we can put a name to. When our Dunbar groups expand to encompass Hollywood celebrities, sportsball stars, national politicians, and arena-level musicians, we pay attention to their lives and doings as well. How can we do that with these strangers? By following the news.

Our cognitive architecture was built for local, small-group interactions. Parasocial relationships hijack those instincts so we’re convinced that they personally matter too. Plus, human beings are bad at grasping big numbers. The immediacy and intimacy of the news makes something that happens 10,000 miles away seem just as vital as something that happens 10 miles away. Both showed up on my feed with the same breathless graphics, headline font, and emotional language. A story about a lost puppy rescued after a flood is equally heartwarming whether it is across town, across the continent, or across the universe.

The most famous news dictum is if it bleeds, it leads, which means we get a handful of nice puppy stories and a gargantuan torrent of wars, genocides, venal politicians, crime, and fear of inflation/ teenagers/ immigrants/ falling stocks/ AI/ climate change/ the future. Why pay attention to all that? Because then you feel, resplendent with information, you can do something about it. Which, of course, you can’t.

You can affect your family and local community. Unless you are an extremely unusual and extraordinary person, you are not going to affect distant or global problems. But because the 24-hour newsfeed and endless social media chatter about it has corrupted Dunbar’s number to include distant strangers, we feel that we have broader agency and control than we actually do. You might as well become obsessed with World War II or Ancient Greece for all the causal power you actually have. Events sufficiently distant in space are like those distant in time—no matter how much you learn or how much attention you pay, you’re not going to affect them.

Lack of control

The opposite end of the spectrum are people who don’t want a feeling of control, but a feeling of flow, absorption, and mindless oblivion. This, according to Natasha Dow Schüll’s harrowing and eye-opening book, is the experience of addicts to gambling machines.

One gambler she interviewed explains the appeal:

Most people define gambling as pure chance, where you don’t know the outcome. But at the machines I do know: either I’m going to win, or I’m going to lose. I don’t care if it takes coins, or pays coins: the contract is that when I put a new coin in, get five new cards, and press those buttons, I am allowed to continue.

So it isn’t really a gamble at all—in fact, it’s one of the few places I’m certain about anything. If I had ever believed that it was about chance, about variables that could make anything go in any given way at any time, then I would’ve been scared to death to gamble. If you can’t rely on the machine, then you might as well be in the human world where you have no predictability either.

The house always has its edge, which veteran gamblers know from ingrained experience; in the long run the gambler not only can’t win, but isn’t even playing to win. Both the casino and manufacturers of gambling machines, as well as the gamblers themselves, have the same goal: to maximize time-on-device. The former employs a deep knowledge of human psychology to keep gamblers seated at their machines.

Casinos have found that circuitous paths through a maze of shops, restaurants, restrooms, and gambling options that lead to semi-private grottos of machines are far more appealing than open hangars with endless rows of one-armed bandits. Gambling machines themselves are ergonomically designed for comfort, with ease of access to controls, self- leveling seats, plenty of legroom, and closeness to the screen for total absorption. The machines are smooth, rounded, with arm support, and requiring minimal motion to insert more money or hit the Play buttons. Their sounds and lights are designed to be neither too harsh nor excessively frenetic; they are immersively choreographed to game outcomes.

Moreover, the programming of the machines incorporates numerous features to keep the human rats pressing the levers for occasional pellets (a metaphor used by machine addicts to describe themselves). Reinforcement (i.e. payout) schedules are carefully calibrated to different types of gamblers, from those who require infrequent large payouts to those who need small, regular wins.

Machine gamblers crave “the zone”—a trancelike state in which there is nothing but the machine, nothing but tunnel vision to the screen while the rest of the world melts away. All of the engineering, programming, and design described above aims at pulling players into this zone as swiftly and completely as possible. They are designer drugs. “You go into the screen, it just pulls you in, like a magnet. You’re there in the machine, like you’re walking around in it, going around in the cards,” says one gambler. “I resent someone breaking my trance… the machine is like a really fast-working tranquilizer” says another. These players do not want excitement, or the gratification of agency, but uninterrupted flow, assimilation, and self-erasure.

Gambling addicts don’t expect, and even reject, control in order to ride the predictable waves of the machine.

Does that sound like your experience of endlessly doomscrolling the news? You get sucked into the scrolling zone like a magnet, and suddenly you’re there in the machine, walking around in it, going around in the latest hot-button news. It’s a mindless trance filled with all the negative things 8.3 billion murder monkeys with too-large brains are capable of doing, brought to you in portentous tones of doom with Technicolor video. Yet you can’t stop.

Whether chronic news consumption is the result of a need to maintain an illusion of control, or a need to zone out as a passive spectator of a parade of follies, it looks like both are forms of self-harm. Anxiety and depression are far more likely than invigorated, effective action. Since what counts as “news” is chosen by others according to their own obscure algorithms and preferences, why let these self-interested choices of strangers make your life worse? It is surprising and counterintuitive (to me, at least), but maybe sometimes ignorance really is bliss.