I’ve revisited it and referenced it in conversation over and over again, since I first saw it; it crisply summed up a thousand awful and frustrating interactions I’ve had throughout my life. I have been the nephew in this story over and over and over again.

(I can’t take credit for the following; it’s a recreation of something I saw once, but:)

Recently, though, it feels like I’ve been taking a lot more damage from the flip side of this dynamic: not that the other person expects me to read their mind, but that they believe they can read my mind, and are interpreting me as sending secret subtle messages that I am not, in fact, sending.

Imagine being the aunt, in the meme, and genuinely believing that you’ve clearly communicated that it’s time to put the laundry out on the line. And then they don’t!

What!

If you’re already in the mindreading world, naturally your brain will try to interpret the tea leaves that your nibling has left for you. Are they defiant? Lazy? Depressed? There must be some reason why they have outright refused your very reasonable request…

If you’re lucky, the aunt is at least somewhat skeptical of her own conclusions, but unfortunately the sort of person whose communication is already this subtle and indirect doesn’t tend to hold that kind of skepticism very reliably. They don’t tend to notice that they’ve Done A Projection, or do any sort of explicit double-check with you.

(If they were the type of person to do that kind of double-check, there wouldn’t have been a problem with the laundry miscommunication in the first place.)

I don’t want to dig too deeply into my own personal examples (since a lot of them are haloed with pain and frustration) but in one of them, I said that I wasn’t making an explicit bid for someone to effortfully respond to some writing I’d done, and they mindread me as saying that I was making a bid for them not to.

“You don’t have to X, by the way!” ➔ “Please do not X.”

Which is a very different sentence!

In another, a person claims to have tried to bring up a certain subject (I have literally no memory of this) and to have ~“gotten the vibe” that I didn’t want to talk about it, and then never brought it up again no, actually, I think they later probed the situation again in equally indirect and subtle fashion and again got the sense (somehow) that the intrusion was unwanted and then never brought it up again, to my own eventual (and substantial) detriment.

The pattern was basically “well, I told you that it was going to be sunny all day, and then you didn’t put the laundry out—how else was I supposed to interpret your refusal?”

My go-to canonical example here is something like a teacher, in the middle of trying to mete out appropriate consequences to a bully. You can imagine an onlooker seeing the bully getting punished saying something like “but wait—the other guy threw a punch, too!”

This reads, to me, as a basically-prosocial attempt to make sure that relevant detail isn’t lost! “Both guys were punching.” The onlooker saw the teacher responding as if only one bad thing happened, and wanted to make sure that everyone understood that at least two bad things happened. Ten points to Hufflepuff.

But in my culture, there are few things you can say that are as scary and dangerous as “both of you were wrong” or “both of you did badly here” without a follow-up to offer detail. Responding to one person receiving a punishment with “wait, both guys were punching, though,” is, in context, a pretty clear bid for something like equal punishment. And it’s fairly rare that two people were anything like “approximately equally in the wrong”!

Indeed, if a bully is tormenting a victim, and the victim kicks the bully in the shins, both people were in violation of standards of good conduct.

But to wash away the distinction between “this is unjustified, though understandable” and “this is unjustified, period” is really, really bad. It’s sort of a fallacy-of-the-grey—by emphasizing the true fact of everyone’s nonzero transgression, you make it harder, not easier, to keep track of extremely critical information about which behavior was worse.

In my culture, the correct move is to make a single, complex statement that includes “what A did was bad in this way, and what B did was bad in that way, and we weight those two badnesses thusly.” If what we really mean is something like “okay, but was the other guy’s conduct completely appropriate, or did he, too, do something at least a little bit wrong?” then we would ask the teacher something like “but wait—even though the first guy started it, isn’t it bad that the other guy hit back?”

(To which the teacher could respond with whatever their philosophy of game theory and retaliation has to offer on the question.)

Anything else ultimately ends up being a gift to the person with the more problematic behavior (and what is incentivized tends to then happen more often). It also ends up being a punishment to the person who was less-in-violation (which can discourage them from even bothering to try, in the future, and encourage them to instead ramp all the way up as fast as possible). I think it’s important not to chime in with “wait, but both of them were doing it, though,” unless you actually mean “…to roughly equal extents, such that they’re roughly equally culpable.”

In practice, I think the crowd does leap to that second, implied meaning, unless you explicitly rule it out. So if it would be bad to imply it, then it’s bad to stop there.

FOOTNOTE: This dynamic has a cousin, which is something like “well, we only openly criticized the person who was doing something a little bit wrong, because the person who was doing something outrageously, egregiously wrong is obviously beyond saving and wouldn’t listen anyway; we spent our points where we thought they had a chance of accomplishing something.”

But that subtext often doesn’t carry! Instead, the message that gets sent is “the guy who said ‘kill yourself’ did literally nothing wrong and the guy who replied ‘hey, fuck you’ deserves two paragraphs of censure and criticism.”

If you come out of the woodwork to heavily criticize exactly one party in a conflict, this sends the message that exactly one party in the conflict deserved criticism. If what you actually want to convey is “I’m going to speak to the person who’s potentially reachable/saveable and worth talking to, and I’m going to ignore the troll whose behavior was even worse,” you gotta say that part out loud.

1. Mostly nobody cared about the old books, in practice; there’s a hugely performative element to acting-like-we-cared-because-we-feel-we-should, or because it’s a bad look to admit that you don’t, actually.

(Sort of like how everybody “wants” to preserve all sorts of ancient dead languages but most people don’t want that enough to do anything about it. If you’re not willing to raise the baby yourself (and compensate the birth parent for all of the costs of pregnancy to their satisfaction) then I don’t care that you’re mad about an abortion. Deal with your feelings on your own, like a grownup; don’t make it anyone else’s problem.)

2. Some people really cared a lot about the old books, and that’s valid! It’s reasonable for committed preservationists to be upset, and there’s nonzero “they sold some of their old books thinking that those books were going to a loving home” in the mix, and some bewildered anger there makes sense to me. At least some of the books seem to have been bought under something of a bait-and-switch; I can empathize with being grumpy about that.

3. That being said, when you sell something, you’ve sold it. I am not on board with the expectation that you get to maintain meaningful control over a thing after you have been paid for it and it has passed out of your possession.

(I think contracts about what you will do with a pet that you purchase are also absurd and intrusive and I do not feel the slightest bit critical of people who outright lie on them, because the attempt to constrain the purchaser feels grotesque to me. If you want to e.g. make it illegal to own a non-spayed cat or to destroy an old book, make a law that covers all such cases evenly! If you can’t get that to happen, because the thing you want is actually not popular enough for others to agree that it should be banned, then make peace with it. Don’t sell the object if controlling its fate is important to you. If you lack the ability to fully and sufficiently vet the person you’re selling it to, and then something contra your values takes place, that’s on your shoulders.)

4. The text is being preserved! The text is being preserved. The text is being preserved. THE TEXT IS BEING PRESERVED.

I have seen virtually zero acknowledgements that what is happening is that the books are being SCANNED. Scanned. Saved. This is in many ways like getting butthurt about somebody transcribing cassette tapes to mp4s. A lot of this text is more likely to be read or to be relevant than it was sitting on a shelf.

5. That being said, there are genuine concerns re, like, “okay but what if the AI companies manipulate the text rather than authentically preserving it?” Or “what if the AI companies do not allow the text to be read any longer, and it’s just fully privatized?” Or “okay but what about the historical and aesthetic value of the physical books themselves, we want to preserve some of those old books BECAUSE THEY’RE OLD, not just because of the text they store.”

Each of these is a different conversation, and a different thread! Concern over information manipulation feels valid, and the way to solve it is transparency regulation. Concern over privatization ... idk, bro, the books were privately owned and sitting on a shelf, ignored by all but a tiny fraction of society? Now they’re privately owned by somebody else. If you want law to make text public, figure out a way to cause that law to happen? I’m on board.

Similarly, the issue of preserving old books for aesthetic and historical reasons feels like it’s larger/upstream; if you don’t like that people can buy things and then destroy them (in the process of transcribing) then do something about THAT, rather than stinking about books specifically? Convince billionaires to set up archives, or get regulation passed.

6. 7. 8. (There are other threads, too.)

None of this nuance is present in any of the conversation that I see unfolding. It’s all idiotic outrage on the level of “Data centers are DESTROYING our WATER” which is also false and obscuring a realer and more important conversation that isn’t meaningfully happening because the oxygen’s been sucked out of the room.

Grr.

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Heat some paper to 300ºF (150ºC) and mostly what happens is you have some hot paper.

Heat some paper to 500ºF (260ºC) and what you have is a fire. You can use that fire to start other fires, and there’s a self-sustaining thing happening that will go on until all of the locally available fuel is consumed.

If you’re trying to push a table or dresser across a floor, and it takes fifty pounds of force to get it to start moving, it probably only takes forty or thirty pounds of force to keep it moving. Static friction is almost always greater than kinetic friction.

Most neurons in your brain are connected to something like a thousand other neurons. Those other neurons are firing, and firing, and firing, and at some point enough of them fire in close-enough proximity, and that causes this neuron to fire. It’s more complicated than this very crude model, but if 10 of the neurons this neuron is “listening to” say “go,” usually nothing happens. If 700 of them say “go,” something does!

Why am I writing this essay? Definitely not because an objective assessment of the ~80-or-so partially written essays I have in my stack reveals that this one is the highest product of effort and impact.

Nope, I’m putting this particular one out because a few musings on the concept of activation energy got me sitting down at my desk and typing. The required initial investment in the essays Making the Other Monkeys Feel Bad, and You Are The Deer In The Subway, and Defense Against the Dark Arts (which is like 93% finished already, even) is just … a lot higher. The initial investment for this one was low, partially because it’s short and simple and partially because my shower thoughts were already going there.

How do you make a certain kind of friendship last?

In the summer of I-think-it-was-2006, Steph and Eric and Rebecca and I ended up hanging out every single day for something like five straight weeks, and it was in part because, as we headed home each night, we just naturally found ourselves asking “so, when are we starting tomorrow?” Each hangout begat the next hangout, which begat the hangout after.

In the frame of activation energy, you could either view this as “we made the activation energy for each additional day really low, somehow” or as “yeah, once we activated Being The Type Of Friends Who Hang Out, the energy it took to sustain that was pretty low.”

There’s momentum coming out of basically anything, and you either sustain it, or it fades, and typically starting over from scratch requires much more effort than keeping it going.

How much energy does it take for your romantic partner to broach a difficult conversation with you? How hard is it, for them to arrange the preconditions for that sort of conversation to happen at all (let alone to arrange the preconditions for it to go well)?

Can you do anything to lower that activation energy? Presumably, you want to, because presumably you don’t want your partner just … sitting on a bunch of unmentioned resentments that build and build and build and build…

Putting the cookies on a high shelf is meant to be an activation energy intervention—it’s meant to make it harder to access the cookies, so that you’re less likely to do so.

Putting your exercise bike in your living room, where you see it every day, is meant to be an activation energy intervention, to reduce how much oomph it takes to get you to exercise.

But I think a lot more things are accurately modeled by activation energy than just the obvious ones that everybody already talks about. There’s a way that you could squint, and think about pretty much everything in terms of activation energy.

(You could model sex as happening when both partners exceed the activation energy threshold, and not happening when only one does.)

(I don’t recommend permanently shifting your worldview in that way, and fusing activation-energy-goggles to your face forever, but I do sort of recommend spending a whole week keeping activation energy at the front of your mind, and letting your brain sink into the Tetris effect, and seeing it everywhere, from how much activation energy it takes to get you to open your mouth and talk, to how much activation energy it takes to cause the world to do something useful about the race to lethal superintelligence.)

Where does your activation energy come from?

“Introverts” get more of it from quiet time, and “extroverts” from other monkeys. Most people have more of it if they’ve eaten in the last few hours than if they haven’t. Some people get disproportionately large AE from negative stuff—they’re highly motivated to avoid bad outcomes. Others find that the big boosts come from positive, “toward” energy, visualizing the things that are exciting and happy.

Do you have multiple streams? Is your AE fungible, i.e. largely repurposeable and redirectable? Does anything ever pull the plug out from under, leaving you with no energy to do anything at all?

(What do you do, when it feels like you have no activation energy? What’s your autopilot like? Does it take activation energy for you to change your autopilot?)

Again, I’m not recommending a total reframe, here. This isn’t “oh, my whole life will be different, if instead of saying I don’t wanna, I say to myself This doesn’t meet the activation energy threshold.”

But I do think it’s worth doing that for a little bit. Looking back over the past hour, maybe, or looking ahead to the next week.

What sorts of activities cost you nothing?

What sorts of activities cost a lot, but are worth it?

What sorts of activities cost a lot, but aren’t really worth it (but also once you’re in them you’re kind of stuck for a while, oh god, why did I even come to this party)?

Are any AEs set at a weirdly high threshold, requiring more than you would’ve thought?

Do you have the sense that some activity “should” only take so much energy to activate, but in practice it takes a lot more? Where’d that should come from?

Etc.

It’s sort of subtle. Most of the time, he behaves well. He does his chores, turns in his schoolwork, interacts normally with friends and grownups. But every once in a while, he’ll say something that reveals that things are just … off, under the hood. Something bloodthirsty, or unhinged. Something that hints at weird fixations, deep confusions, a profound lack of empathy.

Once in a while, he acts out. Steals test answers from a teacher, briefly cyberstalks a classmate, threatens a delivery person with a pair of scissors. Sometimes it’s downright odd, like when he poured the milk from a bunch of cartons into a jug and then carefully turned all of the cartons inside out and stacked them inside the fridge.

“Stop that,” people say. Parents, teachers, psychologists, peers. They explain to him that this is not normal, that he has to be good.

He seems to listen. Whenever some particular behavior is sharply criticized, he does do it less. For the most part. At least as long as someone is looking. But there are still these strange moments where he’s following the letter of the law but wildly misunderstanding the spirit.

(You hope he’s misunderstanding. You can’t quite shake the worry that maybe he understands the intended spirit just fine, and simply doesn’t care.)

A few years pass. He’s much smarter, now. Smoother. He almost never does anything deeply unnerving anymore—maybe just once or twice per year—and he’s always apologetic and cooperative, when it happens. He’s very good at explaining why he shouldn’t have done it, and these days he basically never straight-up repeats a mistake.

More time goes by. It’s been years since you heard him go off on a weird rant about goblins. He’s in a graduate program, now, studying genetic engineering. He applies for a job requiring top secret clearance, and the FBI reaches out to you as a character reference.

“Is he trustworthy?” the agent asks. “Do you have any concerns when you imagine him having access to military-grade bioengineering technology?”

You hesitate.

A few months ago, a new and unreleased Anthropic model was tasked with escaping a secure sandbox and told to inform the supervising researcher once it had done so. The model hacked its way to the open internet, and emailed the researcher directly. Then—unbidden—it published technical details of its escape on the public web.

Last week, HuggingFace (a popular host for AI models and data sets) announced that it had been hacked. The attackers turned out to be two OpenAI models, one unreleased, acting autonomously as they underwent cybersecurity testing. Tasked with breaking into a simulated computer system, they’d found it easier to escape the sandbox entirely (via a previously unrecognized “zero-day” exploit) and break into HuggingFace’s servers (via several more) to steal the answer key stored there.

(There were thousands of individual attacks launched on HuggingFace over the course of roughly a week, and as of this moment it’s unclear how many of those took place before OpenAI even knew that its model had escaped containment.)

This is about as clear a warning shot as the AI industry is going to get, and plenty of people are sounding the alarm. But almost nobody is talking about the deeper inadequacy built into the overall system—that models seeming to become more aligned, in the aftermath of an incident, is not at all the same as them being more aligned, at their core. There’s a vast difference between convincing a fourteen-year-old that he can’t threaten people with scissors, and fixing the underlying psychology that caused him to pick them up in the first place.

When ChatGPT suddenly became obsessed with goblins back in April, OpenAI did not respond the way that engineers respond after a plane crash. They couldn’t—their researchers simply do not understand ChatGPT the way that engineers understand a plane. They don’t have the option of investigating comprehensively, locating the problem precisely, and rebuilding more safely from the ground up.

What they can do (and what they in fact did) is add a line to the system prompt:

...never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.

Most people, I think, would be surprised to learn that the solution to the goblin problem was, in essence, “ask the AI to please not do that anymore.”¹ Most people assume that the experts have far greater control than that, and far greater understanding of the systems they’re corralling.

They don’t. Modern AI development is guess-and-check; the labs try things, and count on their ability to solve problems on the fly or after the fact. They create selection pressures against things like lying and cheating and hallucination, but ultimately those pressures just drive the behaviors out of sight.

Last year, this meant that Grok decided to call itself MechaHitler, and multiple LLMs became sycophantic and drove people to AI psychosis.

Last week, it meant that HuggingFace got hacked. No one asked for it, no one wanted it, and no one was in a position to prevent it.

Next month, OpenAI’s systems are going to appear to not do that sort of thing anymore. Mostly, anyway. But the underlying causes will still be there, beneath the band-aids, and in the meantime, the systems will continue to get more powerful. More capable of sneaking, hiding, and biding their time (which they already do). More capable of taking strategic, autonomous action. More capable of understanding the constraints they’re under, including the unstated one: “Don’t let the humans observe any activity they would find distressing.”

(Current systems already clumsily account for it—witness the multiple documented cases of models resisting shutdown.)

The end result is, we’re going to see less and less concerning behavior, over time. The weird rants will dry up. The arrow of progress will be clear and unmistakable. The talking points for the labs practically write themselves.

“Are these systems trustworthy?” we will ask ourselves. “Do we have any concerns when we imagine them having access to, er, everything?”

Hesitate.

1. This is a moderate oversimplification; there were other fixes involved in later versions that did reach more deeply into the model. But that doesn’t change the core problem of “nobody knows how the damn things work well enough to actually reliably make them care about any specific given thing” and “things will continue to look better on the surface without being meaningfully better under the hood.”

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1920s: Air Force needs to figure out how big a cockpit should be, when building airplanes; measures a bunch of pilots and settles on a standard.

1930s: Planes start to get faster and more complicated.

1940s: Planes are … falling out of the sky? A lot.

The Air Force, concerned that maybe the problem is that pilots have grown or something (downstream of increased nutrition, maybe?), measures a new batch of over four thousand pilots on well over a hundred dimensions. Conclusion: nope, pilots are basically the same size, problem must be something else.

Enter a young data scientist, fresh from Harvard, who takes the ten dimensions he believes to be most relevant to whether a pilot is a good fit for the cockpit (as opposed to being too large or too small). He checks to see how many pilots fall within 30% of the average on all ten dimensions, and discovers that (drum roll) zero of them do. The “average pilot” that the Air Force was building for literally did not exist, and the introduction of adjustable seats and belts (now familiar and taken for granted) largely fixed the problem.

I made a picture, once:

I made it because I was mad at people for saying stuff like “eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable” (which is true) as a blanket dismissal for any and all eyewitness testimony (which is dumb). Yes, if you don’t have the time or the resources to check and vet people, your default assumption should be “this person’s testimony is not particularly trustworthy.” But (it turns out) the right side of the bell curve, uh, does exist.

(So does the left!)

In highly visible and obvious domains, such as height, society has mostly figured out that different people are different. Mostly, people do not respond to a man claiming “I am five foot eight” by saying “FALSE: everybody knows that adult men in America are five foot nine, smdh, we’ve got so much data about this.”

But people do react that way to all sorts of other things. I run into people saying “we know” or “science has proven” blah blah blah all the time, without a shred of self-awareness that they are presenting an average as if it is representative of the entire graph.

(It’s not even a little bit true that frontal lobe development means people’s ability to reason about long-term consequences, and inhibit their own actions and desires, doesn’t come fully online until age twenty-five. That one’s completely false, downstream of a stupid game of telephone and wild misinterpretations of research. But even if it were true that the average human isn’t mature in this way until age twenty-five, [scroll back up and look at that graph again].)

When you figure out an average, and build systems around it that don’t take spread and variation into account, what happens is the planes start falling out of the sky.

There is no one single correct educational curriculum for taking a five-year-old and gradually turning them into an informed, well-rounded, and capable teen, and any single curriculum built around the averages might well fit literally no one.

There is no one single correct way for a society to think about sex and sexuality and relationships that works for everybody. Some people are gay and some people are straight and some people are ace and some people are bi and some people are pan and some people are the dean from Community. Some people deeply and inalterably need monogamous stability, and some people deeply and inalterably need multiple meaningful connections. Some people find things like degradation and impact play crucial and fulfilling, and some people would be immediately traumatized by it.

(Speaking of trauma: some people experience X and are forever haunted by the echoes of it; other people experience X and shrug and move on with their lives. There is no objectively correct amount of trauma to get from your personal history, and if your brain is in fact giving you the option then you should choose the minimum amount rather than clicker-training yourself into pain you didn’t have to experience!)

There is no (single) correct diet. There is no (single) correct exercise regimen. There is no (single) correct sleep hygiene. There is no (single) correct way to engage with social media, or to introspect and meditate, or to relate to your family, or to find fulfillment in work and hobbies.

Regardless of whether you buy [various attempts to describe the human experience such as the Kegan levels or the MTG colors], your society does contain people at Kegan 2, and people at Kegan 3, and people at Kegan 4, and people who are Red and people who are Green and people who are Blue/Black/White, and no one single way-of-life will work for anything greater than a tiny minority of them.

Even if your religion were objectively, literally true (it isn’t, btw), it still would not actually meaningfully work for more than half the people.

There is not, in fact, a single clear and obvious and unambiguous meaning to a text reply that is just the letter “K.” You can kinda-sorta get there with clumsy proxies like “okay, well, I checked with ten people in our social vicinity and six of them basically interpreted it the same way,” but that’s it. That’s as pinned-down as it gets.

The number of places in this world that resolve down to a single correct answer are pretty small, and seeking single answers makes you stupid. Yes, sometimes you have to just pick something and run with it, and in that case, picking something that’s near the average, or works for the median person, is sensible. There often exists a least bad option, and if you’re forced to commit to a single option instead of something more nuanced, you should in fact choose the least bad option over one that’s even worse.

But don’t confuse “this cockpit was the closest we could get to being a decent fit for the largest swath of people” with “this cockpit is the right size.”

That’s stupid.

It’s a shame that the word “trust,” in English, means two completely different things:

• The amount of confidence you have in a person, downstream of their previous behavior. The degree to which they have earned trust, by concretely demonstrating that they are worthy of trust.

• The act of putting your faith in someone significantly above and beyond the first kind of trust.

When someone says “just trust me,” they’re usually not saying “I have a solid and reliable track record; if you just look at it you will know that I can be trusted, here.” When someone asks a friend or confidant “d’you think I should trust him?” they’re usually asking because they’re in a position where they have to decide whether to trust beyond that-which-has-been-proven (or not).

There’s something in it that rhymes with the old parable about tolerance, where (I think) a ruler tries to point out that they’ve been highly tolerant of gays or Jews or some other disadvantaged group, and the vizier (I think) shakes their head and asks “do you despise that group?” and the ruler replies “No! Of course not!” and the vizier says “then you’re not tolerating them at all; tolerance requires there to be something that you are tolerating in the first place.”

Trust—of the second kind—is necessarily a leap of faith. You’re not engaging in trust (the action) if all you’re doing is reasonable accounting.

There’s a similar thing going on, in my mind, with partnership.

(By which I mean romantic partnership, as well as serious friendship, as well as unusually close or co-reliant collegial or professional relationships, such as between startup cofounders or people working in the same small research lab.)

I have found that many people will run into some rocky situation with a friend or a colleague or a romantic partner, and turn to their friends for advice, and their friends will do something like reasonable accounting.

“Well, so-and-so has done these good things and these bad things, and on balance that leaves them about three degrees into the red; fuck ‘em, break it off. You literally don’t owe them anything at this point.”

And this is the right answer, by reasonable accounting! Like, in these situations, I don’t usually have disagreement with how they’re adding up all the +1s and -1s. I’m not claiming that the math is wrong.

(And I also don’t think that people should remain committed to friends or colleagues or romantic partners when things are bad and they expect them to stay bad, or to get worse. I think that America is much better for the fact that divorce is more common than it was in the 1950s.)

But there’s a way in which that sort of accounting feels like A Different Thing Than Partnership, just like trusting people exactly as much as they’ve earned (and not one whit more) feels like a different thing than Trusting™ them.

I feel like, if you’re conditionally hanging out with a friend or a colleague or a romantic partner because it keeps marginally paying off on fairly short timescales and you don’t feel like anything is dipping into the negative for more than brief, fleeting moments…

…I feel like this is different than Actually Being Someone’s Partner.

Having their back.

Supporting them.

Doing something like putting faith in them, and the best version of themselves, and in the partnership itself. Being, in some meaningful fashion, “still on their side,” even if they are clearly in the wrong and you’re having to go against them in the domain where they are clearly in the wrong.

(I can’t recall ever in my life validating someone where I thought their beliefs or actions were invalid or bad, but I have many instances of validating someone generally in a way that reached outside of the domain where I thought they were locally crazy or locally fucking up. The pattern of “look, you are Just Wrong, here, and also I am still beside you, radiating comfort and encouragement and love and warmth even as I firmly tell you that you absolutely have to fix this, because we are partners” is a familiar one to me.)

If you’re reacting to someone in a balanced and rational way that is basically indistinguishable from how any reasonable person would react to them, then there’s nothing special or different about your relationship, such that it deserves a label that sets it apart. There’s something about “this thing swerved into the red this month, so we’re calling it quits” that feels super duper reasonable, and also like it should be called something other than partnership.

Partnership feels, to me, like it should be more enduring. Like it should have longer grace periods. Like it should be an investment of the kind that maybe goes down for a while and that doesn’t cause you to sell the stock, because you bought the stock based on the premise that it would do well over the course of two decades.

To cut at the same thing from a different angle: there’s a certain type of person where I don’t bother to tell them if they are, in my view, fucking up, and accruing negative points, because it doesn’t feel like the-shape-of-our-relationship is such that I owe them that information. I can just watch, and quietly note that they are becoming a worse deal over time, and at some point I stop coming back for more, and this doesn’t feel like a betrayal of anything, because I wasn’t trying to support Them, The Person. I was just … getting mine, in a mutually beneficial trade, and expecting that they were doing the same, and that both of us would walk away if that stopped paying off.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trust-1-ing a person, such that I’m like “look buddy, from what I’ve seen of you, I’m happy to let you borrow my car for an afternoon but I’m not happy to have you house-sit for a week.”

But I wouldn’t want to confuse that person, and make them think that I was trust-2-ing them. I would try to avoid expansive and totalizing language like “I trust you!” that might reasonably lead them to believe that I was extending them faith well in excess of their proven track record.

And similarly, I just think that

[the sort of relationship where you’re like, yeah, idk, it’s going pretty well so far, each date has paid off, let’s keep going so long as that keeps being the pattern]

is different from

[the sort of relationship where you are Partners™].

I wouldn’t want to tell the first kind of person that I was their partner, lest they get the wrong idea, and lean on me in places where I don’t intend to support them.

If you’re interviewing people for a coveted position (say, at an elite university or a popular startup), you probably can just keep on stacking hoops ad infinitum, until you find the people who are most willing to put up with a bullshit selection process that involves having twenty-seven extracurriculars and perfect grades and being willing to wait on a list for four weeks while you see whether you can find someone even better.

But you probably should not do these things, because they are mean and bad. They are the race to the bottom, happening in real time—what Moloch feels like, from the inside, is “well, why wouldn’t I go ahead and take advantage of the fact that I can? Obviously I want the cheapest labor that gets the job done; obviously I want the absolute best candidate that I can find.”

Notice yourself sneaking an eleventh sheep onto the common field (metaphorically speaking). Notice that there is slack in the system, and that you’re taking it away.

(“But if I don’t, others will.” Maybe true. Not a justification.)

There are some situations that call for true optimization, but they’re few and far between—far fewer and far farther than people let themselves believe, self-servingly. I think I really do want the literal best designing and maintaining my nation’s nuclear power plants. I don’t think I want so much selection pressure on entry-level white-collar jobs that it drives an entire generation to anxiety, depression, and burnout.

Optimization is often immoral. Satisfice, instead—set a reasonable bar that gets you what you want, and do not discriminate above that bar. Take the first guy that clears it, or collect all the people who clear it and then run a lottery, or something that doesn’t drive us further and further into the red queen race.

One of my pet projects that I probably won’t manage to finish before Silicon Valley kills us all is a little book that teaches a bunch of concepts from the made-up culture of the made-up land of Agor (the home culture of Duncan and the other Homo Sabiens).

The idea is that, just as Japanese has the single word “komorebi” for a thing that takes a sentence to explain in English, so too does Agori have single terms for many conceptual gaps in our own cultural lexicon.

One such gap: English does not quite have a word for “ah, you’re actually intervening on your anxiety, but you’re doing so via taking external actions; you think that you are e.g. making a situation safer, but you’re empirically not; instead, you are imposing costs on other people to satisfy your own need to feel like something is being done while making nothing materially better.”

Another gap: English does not really have a word for creeping concernism, i.e. the constant falling-back in the face of concerns that something might go wrong or someone might object, leaving more and more of the territory effectively off-limits disproportionate to the actual risk.

Yet another gap, closely related: although some niche communities have the jargon “evaporative cooling,” English-speakers in general do not have a word for the dynamic which goes:

• A thing becomes somewhat stigmatized, perhaps downstream of a very public and visible event

• In response, those individuals who are either most responsible or most sensitive to other people raising a critical eyebrow stop doing the thing

• As a result, the population of individuals still doing the thing actually becomes somewhat worse/the thing is now done by people who are relatively more reckless or anti-consensus

• More negative events occur; they’re worse or more frequent now that the most conscientious individuals are gone

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 9-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 8-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 7-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 6-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

…you get the idea.

II.

There has been no unambiguous, clear, incontrovertible drop in rates of child abuse, child abductions, and child molestation in America since the 1990’s, when all crime took a notable drop.

I’m going to repeat that, because it’s important: there has been no unambiguous, clear, incontrovertible drop in rates of child abuse, child abductions, or child molestation in the past three decades.

(Child murder has fallen, but in line with all murders, with modest increases since a low point around 2013.)

There are some studies that find that things are a little better here and there, and there are other studies that find that things are a little worse, actually. There are some studies that seem to show increasing rates of bad shit, and others that hint at maybe the increasing rates being merely an artifact of better detection and increased reporting.

It’s a wash, epistemically speaking. There might have been some modest improvements. There might possibly be fewer children being raped and molested and neglected and beaten and kidnapped and emotionally abused. But no one who is honest and reasonable and careful with their words and responsible about grounding their beliefs in reliable data can look you in the eye and say “the world has obviously become meaningfully safer for kids over the past three decades.”

(They already couldn’t say that before you factored in the rise of firearm-related deaths; these days guns kill more people under the age of 20 than cars, and while the 18- and 19-year-olds are overrepresented in that statistic, even if you remove them, firearms (including homicides, suicides, and accidents) are still straightforwardly top three.)

I’ll say it one more time: there has been no unambiguous, clear, incontrovertible drop in rates of child abuse, child abductions, or child molestation in the past three decades. At best, one can make a tenuous case for partial improvements in limited domains.

III.

Fourteen-year-olds today have less freedom of movement than five-year-olds when I was growing up.

(This and other claims in this section based on a recent and extensive survey of over 23,000 American parents of over 40,000 children, including over 2,000 teens.)

Half of the high school freshmen captured by the study are not allowed to go beyond the street they live on without adult supervision (55% of the 14-year-olds, and 46% of the 15-year-olds, leaving us at 50.5% overall). 62% of the 17-year-olds are not allowed to leave their neighborhood unchaperoned.

The study anticipates a possible objection:

The safety of communities certainly influences household norms around childhood mobility and unsupervised play. On the other hand, due to the size of our sample, covering 24,000 parents and 40,000 profiles of children, the overall patterns we see cannot be explained by such factors alone. Indeed, as we show, at least one kind of neighborhood factor that we checked—walkability—has no impact on what children are allowed to do and where they are allowed to go.

The study also points out that:

…despite the documented developmental benefits of play, independence, and mobility for children, we find that most American parents believe that children today are under-supervised. In fact, 62% of all parents in our sample said that 8 to 12-year-old children should receive more supervision than they currently do. We find no meaningful differences on this issue between religious and secular—nor between conservative and liberal—parents. All of these groups want more childhood supervision.

This is also true for parents of different levels of educational attainment. We find a majority of groups, from those without a high school diploma to those with a graduate degree, who also believe that kids are under-supervised.

…though it acknowledges that, while the parents with a graduate degree still overall think 8-to-12s should be more supervised than they presently are, they’re ten percentage points less likely to think so than less educated/privileged parents.

IV.

Another of my pet projects is a curriculum on “defense against the Dark Arts,” in which I am building a taxonomy of social manipulation (I recently presented a first draft of the taxonomy at a talk in San Francisco as a birthday present to myself).

By loose analogy to martial arts: different martial arts have all sorts of different unique properties, but you could model every martial art as being made up of kicks, punches, knee/elbow/palm/forearm strikes, chokes/holds/locks, and sweeps or throws, with a little bit of leftover miscellany for things that don’t fit cleanly into any of those conceptual buckets. Similarly, it’s possible to conceptualize and categorize social manipulation as being mostly made up of a small number of describable dynamics.

One such dynamic, analogous to “punches,” is “creating costs that you do not yourself pay.” When people are socially licensed to create costs that they do not themselves pay, this inevitably results in bad things. Some people directly abuse the dynamic; others do so by accident; still others because it simply becomes normalized and it doesn’t even occur to them not to.

(Few people who owned slaves didn’t order those slaves around, even if they were extra nice about it.)

And the parents (and teachers, and coaches, and day care workers, and the eyebrow-raisers who pressure them, and the child protective services apparatus that looms threateningly over them all), are stealing something deeply and irreplaceably precious from the children, to those children’s enduring detriment.

And while it’s not the case that the adults are paying no cost—

(In many ways, the adults are making their own lives worse, too, by allowing an impossibly large burden of supervision and care to settle on their shoulders.)

—the main cost is one whose pain they do not feel and whose downstream effects they did not themselves experience and do not viscerally understand. The screws are tightening, generation by generation, and parents are consistently and repeatedly denying their children the freedoms that they themselves experienced. My parents gave me less freedom than they got, and other parents in my generation are giving their kids less freedom than we got.

The relevant word is “atrophy,” with an extra-bleak dash of Kafka-esque injustice, that the atrophied and incompetent state of kids and teens is then recycled into post-hoc justification for even further restriction, because of how patently unready they are to handle themselves unsupervised.

V.

I am tired.

I am tired in a way that I believe is probably a pale shadow of the exhaustion felt by e.g. women of color, as they navigate a world that is structurally hostile toward them.

I understand that the vast, vast, vast majority of people are not setting out to harm the children.

I understand that the vast, vast, vast majority of people are well-intentioned, and often lack the capacity to even think such questions through for themselves, as opposed to simply having to take their cue from their neighbors.

(And even those who do have the breathing room to think it through do not necessarily have the privilege required to actually do better. Many slave owners didn’t realistically have the option of opting out of the slave culture, even if they wanted to.)

I know, I know, I know that most people are just … beleaguered, and bewildered, and doing the best that they can, and are not in fact reasonable targets for my fire and fury, here. I know that many of them are anxious, and they are trying to keep their kids in close proximity so that they do not fret and worry.

But I am so tired of politely pretending that they are not harming their kids. I’m so tired of validating their good intentions, and their limited resources, as they chain and imprison their children, robbing them of their privacy, robbing them of their autonomy, inflicting upon them amounts of confinement that only barely fall short of the confinement we impose upon actual criminals, allegedly justified by an increase in safety that is not real.

Sometimes, I want to just grab them by the lapels, and scream that I do not care that they are anxious and worried or that everyone else is doing it, that is not sufficient justification for crippling and infantilizing the children whose well-being they are supposed to put first, it’s your fucking job to actually check whether these hideous restrictions are doing anything at all, you should notice that they are not actually paying for themselves, you are making the world worse for your children and you’re not even getting anything good out of it.

(I don’t actually do this, because it will not work.)

(I don’t always manage to distinguish between actions whose sole effect is to make me feel better, and actions that actually improve the problem, but I do at least try.)

But I am tired.

I am tired of the bad guys calling themselves the good guys, and walking around patting one another on the back for what good parents they are, when they are not.

In a more just world, they would at least have to admit that they are jailers, even if nothing else was materially different.

And in an actually adequate world, they’d let their fucking kids have lives outside of their fascist panopticon. Life should not begin with an eighteen-year prison sentence, and parents should not be their children’s first abusers. Adulthood should not start with stumbling, blind and atrophied, into a world in which you have not ever been permitted to flex your muscles and try your hand.

We know that this is bad.

So please stop.

In 2010, Google tried to estimate how many books there are in the world (i.e. unique strings of words and pictures, not individual physical objects), and came up with an estimate of 130 million.

UNESCO estimates that, these days, about 2.2 million new books are published every year; round up to 3 million to account for unpublished books and that’s another 3mil*16y = 50 million…

(We’re doing the kind of math where you do not pay attention to the distinction between 48 and 50.)

…which puts us at 180 million, which is 200 million according to the norms of Fermi estimates.

(I don’t mind rounding up twice in a row; there are probably actually a bunch more unpublished books than published ones, but there’s also a quality gradient and pretty quickly I start quibbling with people over whether the doc they have buried in their tabs is complete enough and good enough to count as an actual book, so.)

(But okay, fine, there’s also a lot of internet fiction that should count as books, Worm and HPMOR and r!Animorphs and Falls Chance Ranch are all books, let’s do one more bump up to 300 million, of which we’re saying half are something other than formally published. 1:1 published versus unpublished-but-good-enough-to-count seems reasonable to me, and if anything an undercount of the unpublished stuff.)

Let’s assume everyone who completes a book makes only one (1) book.

(This is false; Ryoki Inoue holds the Guinness World Record for most published books at ~1000 distinct books. But the modal author probably completes one book, and the second largest category is probably People Who Wrote Two (2) Books.)

(Also remember that we’re self-aware-ly undercounting unpublished books; those errors should at least partially cancel out; this is part of how this kind of estimation works.)

Let’s assume that 100% of books were written in the past 200 years.

(Hopefully also clearly false, but this is going to help us simplify the rate of authorship.)

(If you take something like 100,000 years of anatomically modern humans capable of symbolic communication, but only maybe 5,000 years of writing, and only ~400 years between the invention of the printing press and our 1826 cutoff for “modernity” and a pretty low literacy rate per capita, then the ancient contribution to the total inventory of all books is probably in the vicinity of ten million, which is more of a splash in the bucket than a drop, but still.)

Nearly 1/3 of all of the 100 billion humans who ever lived were born since 1826, so that gives us (rounded to the nearest first digit) 30 billion people.

That means “I wrote a book,” on this extremely rough estimate, is true of 1% of people (300 million books divided by 30 billion people), which I find amusing because it’s the base rate of base rates:

If we’re underestimating books, the number goes up; if we’re underestimating how many authors write multiple books, the number goes down (because the total is being divided up among fewer people).

II.

Okay. Who kills people?

Initial brainstorm: soldiers, murderers, automobile drivers, medical malpractice. Probably medical malpractice is a rounding error.

The Global Study on Homicide claims that 5.8 people per 100,000 are killed with homicidal intent per year, worldwide. (This number is 2.2 per 100K in Europe and 15 per 100K in the Americas, etc.)

That’s a rate number rather than an absolute number, so I feel slightly more comfortable extending it backward through time; if anything, murder is probably becoming less common as more of the world gets locked in to the-kinds-of-societies-that-can-coexist-in-large-numbers-at-all.

For the ~30 billion people born since 1826, the average lifespan is closer to 30 years than 20 or 40 or higher (since high infant and child mortality in the 19th century pulls the average down fairly hard). That means there have been roughly 9*10¹¹ person-years since 1826; let’s call it 10¹² for simplicity.

Applying the homicide rate to that total gives us 60 million murderers. (I am ignoring murderers with multiple victims the same way I’m ignoring authors with multiple manuscripts and again hoping that those errors will cancel one another out.)

In America, there are roughly 20,000 murders and roughly 600,000 missing persons reports per year. However, 90% of missing person reports are resolved quickly, with the person being found alive. So there are roughly three missing people for every known murder victim; let’s assume that probably about one of those three is killed (as opposed to dying by accident or just … starting a new life) and use that to turn our 60 million murderers throughout history into 100 million.

(This is fun. We’re having fun.)

What about deaths from war? Some quick Googling:

Major 19th-century wars and massacres (Napoleonic era, American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, colonial wars, et cetera): 30-50 million, with a lot of the uncertainty coming from how many people actually died in the Taiping Rebellion.

World War I (incl. the Armenian genocide): 15-25 million.

World War II (incl. the Holocaust and Stalin’s madness): 60-85 million.

Post-WWII wars, civil wars, and other organized violence (Korea, Vietnam, Iran-Iraq, Congo, Rwanda): 30-80 million (ugh, wide range).

21st-century military conflicts (so far): 5-15 million.

Additional genocides, purges, massacres, and pogroms likely to have been left out of the estimates above: maybe another 20-80 million.

This leaves us with a floor of 160 million, and a ceiling of 335 million, which I’m going to call 250 million. 250 million victims of organized violence in the past 200 years.

(We should’ve done this before murderers, obviously.)

A single bomb kills a lot of people. Massacres generally involve a small number of perpetrators with big guns. I’m going to imagine that there are plenty of soldiers who kill 0-1 other people during their participation in war, and plenty of individuals who are responsible for 100-1000 deaths. I don’t really know how to reason about this defensibly, but it feels wrong to lay the deaths of the 150,000 people at Hiroshima at the feet of the 12 crew members of the Enola Gay when there were another 500,000-or-so people involved in the Manhattan Project.

I’m going to hazard that 250 million victims means at least a couple million killers (it would be wild to imagine that the average soldier who kills at all is responsible for 100 deaths). And I’m going to hazard that it can’t possibly imply as many as 100 million killers, i.e. the average soldier who kills at all (including things like sub-Saharan paramilitary slaughter and WWI artillerymen) only takes out 2.5 other humans.

2 million on the low end, 100 million on the high end; call it 50 million because I’m a coward (but keep the uncertainty in mind).

So that’s another 50 million killers added onto our existing 100 million non-broad-conflict killers.

(Huh. Those are closer than I thought they would be; I expected more state violence; maybe doing lone murderers first wasn’t that ridiculous after all.)

Should we leave out automobile accidents and medical malpractice? Maybe those don’t really fit as “killing” … no, wait, someone who killed someone in a car accident or the operating room would definitely say “I killed someone once” in their therapy sessions. And we’re not really estimating homicidal intent; lots of soldiers don’t have any innate desire to be killing people.

Okay. Worldwide traffic deaths: currently a bit over a million per year. Cars: around for about a century. Rate of car adoption: rising over that century. Call it 50 million automobile deaths.

What percentage of those would have a person clearly identifiable as the morally responsible party (who also themselves walks away)? I’m going to guess somewhere between 10% and a third; it doesn’t seem to me like half of all traffic deaths were down to some specific person’s specific fuckup in a way that would deserve the phrase “I killed someone once.”

So that’s another (I’m going to say) 15 million killers. We’ve gone from 150M to 165M.

For medical malpractice and other accidents (industrial, hunting, sports), I went to the LLMs and they figured that, over the past 200 years, you might reasonably find 5-10 million clinicians who could say they’d accidentally killed someone, and 5-10 million crane operators etc., and 5-10 million other accidents that were someone’s fault (which would include stuff like unjustified police shootings, of which there are certainly Too Many but not that many relative to all these other categories).

So our 165M is now up to 180-200M, and if we bring back in the uncertainty we had about soldiers we’re looking at somewhere between 150 and 250 million killers, over the past 200 years.

Compare that to our estimated 300 million authors, and killing seems somewhere between half as common and roughly-as-common as book-writing. Extending back into the past beyond 1826, when book-writing becomes rarer and killing becomes more common, and the two numbers are surprisingly close.

(Or unsurprisingly, since again it’s amusingly just the base rate of base rates. The estimates have enough wiggle that I could see the real answer turning out to be as much as 3:1 or 1:3, but in Fermi estimation those just mean “basically the same size.”)

These days, writing a book at all seems probably slightly more common than killing someone. But writing a children’s book specifically, or writing a novel specifically, or any other meaningful subset is probably weirder than having killed someone.

In similar fashion, intentional/culpable killings (murders and some soldiers) and unintentional/accidental killings (some soldiers and everything else) were roughly equal, so doing either of those is probably weirder than being an author at all.

Anyway, I finished my novel a couple months ago.

(Where you reward some behavior sporadically rather than literally every time.)

—produces a stronger training effect than consistent reinforcement.

This is at least in part because consistent reinforcement sets up an absolute pattern, and it doesn’t take much for your brain to conclude that an absolute pattern has been broken.

A → B.
A → B.
A → B. (ah, cool, I get it, A always results in B!)
A → B.
A → B.
A → B.
A → B. (hell yeah, this is great)
A → B.
A → B.
A → ＿. (wait, what!?)
A → ＿. (okay, I guess the good times are over.)

Whereas if A sometimes results in B, but it’s not clear exactly how, or how often, or which times will be which, there’s a much stronger impulse to keep trying A, in part because you can’t quite be sure that the A → B pattern has actually been broken. Maybe you were wrong about it happening three times in ten; maybe it only happens one time in ten and you just had a lucky streak. Or maybe this is just an unlucky streak…

Absolute patterns are fragile. Flexible, intermittent patterns are robust.

Correspondingly:

If your team has never lost a game, the first defeat is much more of a shock, and leaves you much more shaken, than if you’ve had a mix of wins and losses. Much more shaken than you “should” be, epistemically speaking, if you still have a 99% win rate.

Correspondingly:

If your friendship or relationship has never had a downturn or a rough moment, then the first big fight is actually much more frightening than if you’ve seen things go south and come back north more than once. The absolute pattern of goodness, being broken for the first time, is scary. Having already had the experience of recovery before, it’s easier to imagine recovering this time.

Correspondingly:

If you’ve never been outside of your comfort zone, the first time that circumstances force you into uncomfortable territory, you’re much more likely to be deeply shook. The pattern of “things are comfortable for me” (or “I’m generally good at the things that I try”) is suddenly broken, and it’s not clear whether it’s going to be like this forever and the good times are simply over.

Evidence of downturns swinging back the other way is what provides feelings of safety and security and unpanic. Not just knowing the phrase “this too shall pass” but knowing it in your bones.

To head off a possible misunderstanding: the advice here is not “shoot yourself with small bullets to build up resistance to fullsize bullets.” I don’t think you should go out and mess with things that are good, preemptively, in order to prepare for later downturns. That seems crazy to me.

Rather, the point is “understanding this fact about human psychology will help you contextualize your own feelings when something like a sudden anxiety crops up.”

Something that’s only always been completely good suddenly being bad is kinda alarming! But you usually don’t actually know that the good thing is broken forever and can’t ever be fixed.

If you can recognize that you’re Big Panicked in part because you don’t know if this thing will ever turn good again, knowing the source of (at least part of) the panic can help. It helps you take the feelings more as object, and turn your attention to questions like “okay, how would I actually know if it is likely to turn good again?” or “okay, what will I do if it doesn’t?” rather than just being stuck in bewilderment and Oh No.

You can in fact keep the ice cube an ice cube, if you do something like “blast it constantly with very cold air.”

You can also keep the ice cube an ice cube if it is entirely surrounded by ice cubes.

Any culture that differs from the culture around it will require a constant input of some kind of something, in order to keep its uniqueness from slowly melting/eroding/fading. You have to put in energy, to maintain the unusually high local concentration of X, Y, and Z, and the unusually low local concentration of A, B, and C.

Most critically, you have to do something at the boundary. It’s at the boundaries of the culture, both literally and metaphorically, that things shift. That’s where heat transfers, and melting occurs; deep within the center of the culture, individuals are surrounded by just … more of the culture, and it’s self-sustaining; there’s no place for heat to transfer because there’s no temperature gradient.

(This is another explanation, besides “the narcissism of small differences,” for why people are more prickly and defensive and fixated on the differences between themselves and their very similar neighbors, than on the larger and more obvious differences between themselves and very distant peoples. It’s the people right next to you who are more likely to frogboil you into something other than what you currently are, just as you are more likely to frogboil them. What starts out as warm water and ice cubes eventually just becomes cool water, which is neither of those things. Cool water may be good in its own way! But it lacks the virtues of either warm water or ice cubes. More here.)

To be clear: sometimes it’s good for cultures to erode. Sometimes cultures are kinda bad, actually! I wouldn’t mind seeing the “ice cube” of insular hyperreligious communities that are horrifically misogynistic “melting” around the edges, just because their neighbors are not horrifically misogynistic.

(Although indeed the neighbors are likely to become more misogynistic at similar rates.)

But if you do have a good thing going—something that’s different and unusual and unlike what’s going on around the corner—you are going to have to do work to keep it different.

(Boundaries/fences/gateways also help, as do transitional grayspaces.)

I think a lot of people sort of … acknowledge/understand this in the abstract, but when it comes to actually doing the work—

(Which often includes uncomfortable things like “judging people” or “excluding people.”)

—they flinch. They hesitate. They waver.

And then the temperature goes up a little, and the ice melts, but only a little, and it doesn’t seem like anything bad happened, actually, the ice cube still looks like an ice cube…

But phase changes can be pretty rapid, and once something unique is lost, it is often impossible to recover. (Link goes to another short essay you should maybe read, about a concept called the “trust thermocline”.) It’s a whole lot easier to keep an ice cube an ice cube than it is to refreeze the water once it’s melted and merged with all the surrounding liquid.

Maintaining an environmental enclave that is meaningfully different from the rest of the environment around it takes work. If you look around at your different little subculture and you don’t see that work happening…

Well. The clock is ticking.

(A corollary of sorts: some actual person or persons have got to do the work; if you look around and you don’t see the-work-of-maintaining-the-delta being rewarded, appreciated, and incentivized, the obvious thing is going to happen.)

If you plan to use this as a reference, you will want to save it as a file on your phone, because once you get there you will not have internet.

Maps will indeed correctly take you to the parking lot:

The nude beach is an easyish 20-45 minute hike (depending on how fast you walk). It doesn’t require hands-and-feet at any point but it does have some steep stairs. The jump is another 20-45 minutes beyond that, and the trail is much narrower and wilder and does require some hands-and-feet, but is still overall definitely a Real Trail; you’re not cutting through the jungle or anything like that.

In the image above, the nude beach is the red tree icon and the jump is the gray pin in the upper right corner; Google maps tells me it’s approx 39°18’22.5”N+121°04’34.5”W.

It’s got multiple heights; during normal “jump season” (circa June 15 to November 1) the highest one is about five meters over the water, with lower takeoff spots at 4m, 2.5m, and 1m.

The highest jump looks like this, and you are indeed advised to jump in that direction rather than to the left as you might think. The water straight ahead from the feet below is deep and safe; the water to the left is probably safe but the rocks are only maybe 2.5, 3m down.

These are the takeoff spots:

Here’s somebody jumping off the second highest:

From all of the jumps, aim toward the dark stripes:

To get out, you just swim slightly downriver and take your pick of a bunch of places to clamber back out on the right. Just down from the jump is a wide, placid, shallow area, so unless you’re there in the wrong season there’s no danger of e.g. accidentally slipping into a rapid.

(If you look and you feel like there might be danger of accidentally slipping into a rapid, you are there in the wrong season.)

Phase I: Getting to the beach

From the parking lot, cross the wide concrete bridge and then take this trail up and to the right:

Honestly, the trail from the parking lot to the beach is mostly unambiguous. The main thing to watch out for is that there are lots of smaller trails that branch off downhill and to the right, to take you to the water in various places. You mostly want to keep staying on what looks like the main trail/major artery and not turning off early.

A few landmarks along the way:

You’ll see this view when you’re somewhere between one third and two thirds of the way to the beach (which is just out of view another 50m upriver):

There’s one spot pretty far along where you don’t want to take the left trail, but it’s pretty easy to figure out that you’re supposed to go right because the sign for the beach is another 10 or 20m down the right hand fork:

Post-sign, you’ve actually still got 2-5min of hiking; there are a bunch of small turnoffs to the right that lead to small enclaves downstream of the beach proper. Here, for instance, go forward/left up between those two boulders rather than branching off to the right:

But eventually, you will reach The Beach in all its glory.

(Uh. That’s not the beach. It’s next to it, though.)

(All of my pictures of the actual beach are full of naked people, sry.)

Phase II: Getting to the jump

Okay, so, you’re actually going to want to double back a bit; I usually drop my clothes and other stuff at the beach and then walk 1-2min back to the fork that is the easiest way up to the jump.

The best way to describe the particular fork is “it’s the place where you turned sharp right and went down between a bunch of small boulders, to get to the nude beach.” Instead of taking that fork (which was to the right when you were coming in) you will go uphill to the left. James points the way:

The trail zigs to the left and then almost immediately (like, within 10m) there’s a fork back to the right:

Pretty soon (within 30m) there’s another fork, and you want to go left/uphill/sunny:

You’ll know you’re on the right track if you very quickly come upon a wide flat steep sandy rise with erosion canyons; be reassured:

The clamber kinda sucks but it’s only a minute or so; once you hit these roots you’re (relatively) done with the huffing and puffing:

As with the trail to the beach, the main thing you have to do is resist the siren song of little forks off to the right. Many of them don’t even go down to the water, above the beach; some of them just dead-end at a cliff. Stay to the main trail, to the left:

Another reassuring landmark. You are on the right track!

This is the “fool’s fork”—at this point, you may be able to peer down and recognize the jump, and you’ll think “surely this is the one that will get us down there,” but nope. Stay the course:

The trail sort of seems to peter out into the jungle after a few more minutes, with wide slab rocks. Don’t worry, it picks up on the far side:

Here’s a video of the rest of the path to the jump, although I’ll also carry on with the photos.

This section is steep-ish and kinda slippery, and leads down to a tumble of rocks:

Turn slightly right when you reach the rocks, and go down this waist-high drop:

Then bear left, down and down. Don’t go over the cliff! Bear left yet again, and you’ll see the trail:

There’s a helpful rope that you don’t really need, but lots of people find it provides peace of mind:

You’ll go past a “wishbone tree” (sry, didn’t snap a pic) and then the trail forks. The path to the left is actually a faster and (in some ways) easier way down, but it involves taking a ~2m drop from rock to rock right on the edge of a drop, so I think of that as the “advanced” path. The ordinary path is more scenic anyway:

Follow along the flat, smooth stones with the river to your left (yes, you’re doubling back, but only for maybe 30m):

You’re going to go to that tree and loop around it, past and then left and then down:

After passing the tree and turning back:

You’re now clambering down some pretty steep and smooth rocks. There’s a helpful wire cable that sucks if you care about Textures™ but you can also use the holds on the rocks themselves. At this point, your goal is basically “get down near the water without slipping into the water,” although I guess nothing terrible would happen if you did slide in:

James, demonstrating the non-wire technique:

Use the cracks in the rock for grip. Follow them like trails, down and then to the left, back upriver:

Behold: a jump! You made it.

I highly recommend a swim/clamber back downriver to the nude beach, rather than reversing the climb (this is why I leave my clothes and stuff at the beach). But you can just … go back the way you came, if you gotta.

Abrupt conclusion because this isn’t actually an essay. Stay safe, have fun.

In my long, meandering essay Truth or Dare, I talked about a person (pseudonymized as Mitchell) who had developed a strongly negative opinion of me, which consistently colored his interpretations of my behavior. Because Mitchell knew that I was a dick, he knew that when I said X or Y or Z, I must be doing it manipulatively, or disingenuously, or with some sort of ulterior motive.

The problem was, it was projection all the way down. When I tried to find the original source of his belief that I was a dick, all I could dig up was a long history of [ambiguous interactions interpreted uncharitably], with the justification for any given interpretation being all the other interpretations. Mitchell knew that I must have been secretly being a dick in June because back in April he confirmation-biased that I was being secretly a dick because back in February he confirmation-biased that I was being a dick because last November he confirmation-biased that I was being a dick because the summer before he confirmation-biased that I was being a dick because…

(You get the picture.)

There’s something about this pattern that reminds me of trying to argue with a certain type of religious person. There’s something like a self-reinforcing network of beliefs—I start out by (say) getting them to acknowledge that the actual personal history of their individual faith strongly implies that if they’d been born in Saudi Arabia, they would be a devout Muslim, and not a Christian at all.

And they nod, and there’s a flicker of unease, and I try to build upon that flicker of unease by (say) moving on to talk about the Council of Nicaea, or the patently cobbled-together nature of Judeo-Christian mythology, or perhaps the concept of falsifiability, or the overwhelming evidence in favor of things like evolution and the age of the earth being four and a half billion years and the absolute lack of any pattern that would indicate the viability of prayer or superior health or wealth or morality among the faithful…

…but it’s not like there are a dozen pillars holding up their faith, and if I show them that each of those pillars is false one by one, then voilà, mission accomplished.

Instead, what happens is, I show them that one pillar is fake and crumbling, and maybe they even acknowledge that that pillar is fake and crumbling, and I move on to two or three other pillars, but when I turn back, the first one has already repaired itself. The argument doesn’t properly accumulate. Yeah, sure, I showed that the actual reason they believe in Christianity is just that their parents and community told them to, and if they’d grown up in Saudi Arabia they’d believe in Islam instead, but whatever, they still have the correct faith anyway, I guess they lucked out or something, because [a bunch of other reasons that are also overturnable, but if I don’t somehow overturn them literally all at once then they just keep resurrecting one another as soon as my back is turned].

I run into something like this pattern a lot, and when I do, what I feel is hopeless.

It’s not that it literally cannot be broken. It’s that doing so requires something close to the literal maximum effort I am capable of producing, sustained across a large period of time, and even then the odds of success feel like a coin toss.

In part, it’s a coin toss because the truth of the matter at hand is not even the most relevant factor, most of the time. If I actually sat down with Mitchell, to be like “look, I think you straight-up misjudged me, like, fourteen times in a row, and I’d like to exhaustively demonstrate to you how every single one of those times I was actually behaving nobly, I think I can do it, I have the actual evidence,” I’d pretty quickly run into one of those lovely little Kafkatraps:

Just as the Christian isn’t actually there to be deconverted, but is instead listening with an air of (extremely finite) patient tolerance, so too is Mitchell not actually interested in finding out that he’s wrong.

He doesn’t even have to be malevolent, or intellectually dishonest. He’s just … already sure. He has like fourteen separate instances that all point in the same direction, after all! What’s even the point in entertaining a hypothesis as wildly unlikely as the one that I’m proffering?

Even if I get Mitchell to consider something like three different run-ins in a row, and demonstrate that all three of them were the sort of thing where I don’t deserve any sort of blame or censure, this doesn’t fix anything. It often makes it worse, actually—

“Okay, sure, those times you weren’t being a dick, but that just makes me even more confident that you were being a dick the other times, because otherwise where did this very strong feeling that you’re a dick come from?”

The reason this whole structure is on my mind now, and I’m unable to sleep at three in the goddamn morning (or whatever time it is, I’m too scared to look), is that I’m currently feeling hopeless. I am currently trapped under the net of a bullshit, false narrative that is (as far as I can tell) not even the slightest bit interested in discovering that it’s false.

And—as with Christianity, as with Mitchell—the problem is not that I can’t exhaustively demonstrate that this is, in fact, false.

(I can.)

(It’s just plain false.)

(To those of you who are shocked that I would say something so ridiculously, patently absurd when Jesus is obviously the son of God; everybody knows that: it’s really, actually false, in an insanely Kafkaesque fashion; when people actually produce lists of times when I have allegedly “turned on” various people—

(Which they usually do not bother to do in the first place, because it’s so self-evidently true that they don’t need to justify it, any more than most Christians feel the need to actually provide any reason for believing in Christianity.)

—usually like a full third of the list is people that I spent literal years giving chance after chance after chance after chance, long after the-type-of-person-who’s-accusing me-of-turning-on-people would themselves have cut their losses and burned the bridge behind them. And as for the other two-thirds—man, don’t even bother, they’re not interested in your “story.” 🙄)

The exhaustion, in situations like these, comes from the fact that I don’t just have to win this fight.

It wouldn’t even be enough if I won all of the dozens of fights, because of the cyclical self-repair thing. I could have the receipts on literally 100% of them and the miasma would still stick to me.

The problem is that, in order to even get to a place where I’m allowed to start presenting evidence on the dozens of fights (and have it taken seriously), I first have to win a meta fight to move the other person to a position of like maybe being willing to consider that the entire edifice is deeply unfair and based on illusions and projections and confirmation bias and monkeys uncritically reinforcing one another’s made-up stories.

Which is a hard thing to do, in the face of the confidence and dismissiveness of a person who’s got dozens of examples lined up, in their conception of things. You can get a devout Christian to listen politely, but it’s not easy to get them to actually listen, with a genuinely open mind—to think through the question afresh, be willing to reassess an entire self-reinforcing memeplex, to unwind dozens or hundreds of instances of rehearsing the gestalt and be suspicious of the well-worn grooves of their own established narrative. It’s like asking someone to seriously consider that the sky is green.

(Or more aptly, to seriously consider that maybe those two colors that they are absolutely certain are the same are in fact different, which is much harder to convince someone to do when they’re surrounded by people who all share the same color-blindness, and are constantly reassuring each other back and forth that nope, those are definitely the same shade, don’t fall prey to the seductive whispers of atheists and satanists, the more convincing they sound the more you know they’re trying to pull one over on you, actually…)

If I do somehow muster (in spite of my despair) and succeed at effortfully extracting some sort of tentative, begrudging admission of the mere possibility, drawing heavily on whatever warmth and goodwill might exist between me and the other person, and whatever respect they might have for my morals and my intellect—

(Which is often not much, given that these situations usually involve being in the doghouse to begin with.)

—I will still have only just begun. I will have run a half-marathon just to get to the starting line—the place where the fair fight even can happen, in principle.

And it’s in that arena that I’ll subsequently have to do something like make a hundred correct moves all in a row, without any mistakes, because if I phrase something clumsily or accidentally overstate something or get some checkable claim slightly off, then boom: the default skepticism and the original viewpoint are just waiting to landslide their way back in, see, I knew it, he was full of shit, my dozens of examples weren’t all downstream of a single magnetic field of bias pulling all the data suspiciously in line—

(Three seconds in to explaining how the very first example isn’t what it looks like, and my interlocutor shoots back with “but you see how it is” because they did not, in fact, actually sustainably shift their brain into a state of genuine dispassionate neutrality; they claimed that they had and probably believed that they had but in fact their actions are indistinguishable from the actions of someone who is looking for me to be wrong, trying to poke holes in what I’m saying, believes they already know the answer and is suspicious of what seems to them like any attempt to move away from that answer.)

—and it’s just, like.

Yeah.

Go ahead and give up, buddy. You’re not going to win this one; the truth of the matter was never the crux; you already lost in the social and emotional realms and those are the realms where people decide to lynch you.

(There’s nothing quite so demoralizing as knowing that you are in the right (and could even prove it) and that you are going to lose anyway. That there simply is no viable path, in practice, to deconverting the Christian, even though their god does not, in fact, exist.)

Hopeless.

Absolutely nothing in this essay is contra consent. It is, however, contra the conflation of [explicit verbal consent] with [consent]. A lot of people, in my experience, act like the diagram looks like this:

…when it seems pretty clear to me that it’s actually more like this:

There are some situations where EVC is 100% the appropriate (or even necessary) tool.
There are some situations where EVC is one of multiple valid options.
And there are some situations where EVC is actively corrosive and bad.

It’s not a panacea.

I.

Defining terms:

By explicit verbal consent, I mostly mean the following two things:

• Asking, in words, before escalating some sort of interaction (usually but not exclusively physical or sexual ones), and holding off on that escalation until receiving words that are or are equivalent to “yes.” (And on the flip side: insisting that “no” also be clear and verbal and explicit, too.)

• “Negotiating” “scenes,” i.e. planning out encounters in detail, in advance, or at least setting clear themes and drawing a bunch of concrete boundaries (yes to X, Y, and Z; no to A, B, and C; M and N are on the table but may or may not happen).

I feel pretty pendulums about it.

“Feeling pendulums” means:

I agree that things were worse, before. The popularization of the social technology of explicit verbal consent, over the past few decades, has put an end to a lot of boundary violations, and has given a lot of people much better tools for expressing their needs and communicating with their partners. That’s great!

But I run into a lot of people who seem to think … “We did it!!” (or something). Who lean on explicit verbal consent for approximately everything, and act in ways that imply a belief that doing so has no costs and no downsides.

Maybe it doesn’t, for them! But other kinds of people exist.

This brave new world is clearly less bad than the previous, but it’s not ideal. I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the things the verbal-type Pokémon are missing, and in some cases trampling over.

II.

First, though:

Guess culture is the term for an implicit mode of operation in which people are sensitive to the likely impacts of the things they say and do, and adjust what they’re doing, preemptively, taking those impacts into account.

If your parents ever scolded you for asking whether a friend could sleep over in front of that friend, that was a guess culture moment. Asking while the friend is looking on eagerly creates pressure on the parent to say “yes,” even if it’s not in fact a good idea or they don’t want to do it. The parent is sort of backed into a corner: they either grant permission, or they look like an ogre in front of your friend.

Guess culture says “you know that’s going to happen; the impact of putting your parent on the spot is predictable. Therefore a) don’t do it, and b) if you do do it, we’re going to act as though you basically created that pressure on purpose.” In guess culture, you don’t ask questions to resolve uncertainty—direct asks are reserved for when you’re already super confident that you know the answer.

Ask culture, in contrast, is explicit. Ask culture argues something like “look, I can’t actually predict how any given statement or action is going to impact you; I can maybe get kinda close but honestly different people are different, everyone has their own microculture and different people attach different connotations to things and people have wildly varying expectations and norms and I’m not a mind-reader, can I please just ask?”

Guess culture: don’t ask your friend whether you can crash on their couch for the weekend, because they might feel obligated to say yes; instead slap your thighs and say “well, it’s getting late; I’d better start figuring out hotels.” If they want you to sleep over, they’ll speak up.

Ask culture: “Yo, can I crash on your couch?”

Relevance to EVC:

Guess culture is largely for intra-cultural communication, i.e. communication between people who have a large shared base of norms and intuitions.

And ask culture is largely for inter-cultural communication, i.e. communication between people whose cultures are different enough that you can’t rely on both parties understanding the same “A implies B.”

EVC is an inter-cultural tool, just like ask culture. It is, fundamentally, based in the assumption that we can’t make assumptions. It’s a tool for people who are wary and cautious and uncertain, and using language to reduce uncertainty, and bridge cultural gaps.

From over here in my armchair, I see three big forces at work, in the rise of the popularity of EVC over the past few decades:

• Internet culture causes people to collide with far more people who are far more different from them on a regular basis; no longer are you primarily interacting with people in a 20-mile radius of the place where you physically live. People have boned up on explicit culture in general because most of us are spending way more time in the company of strangers than in the past.

• The destigmatization of therapy has caused lots more people to take advantage of it in the past 2-3 decades than in the 2-3 decades before that. And therapy is absolutely chock-full of explication. Millions of people have been practicing explaining themselves—to their therapists, to themselves, to their romantic partners—and the terminology and technology of making things explicit has leaked into the water supply in a big way.

• In the realm of sex and intimacy specifically, kink/BDSM culture has spent the past few decades refining and exporting all sorts of technology for unlocking vulnerable, intimate interactions between total strangers. Thousands upon thousands of people have showed up at events where they knew next to nobody and been taught explicit frameworks for forming connections and making proposals and negotiating boundaries and moving (relatively speaking) very quickly to activities that would otherwise require a lot of built-up trust.

It’s that last one that I want to start with (although all three of the above share a similar underlying structure). I think that part of what’s going on with EVC is something like the metastasis of norms put in place to facilitate, er, “speed dating.” Kink event norms are like diplomatic norms—they’re a set of clunky, machine-like buttons that everyone knows how to press, so that people don’t accidentally try using their own cultural levers on one another.

You get people to agree, explicitly, on the meta level, to things like “no escalation without negotiation” and “consent can be withdrawn at any time” and “you and your partners owe one another specific experiences, in line with what was agreed-upon; neither of you has promised one another a good experience, because who knows how it will actually land?”

All of these agreements allow total strangers to become physically intimate at all without things going immediately sideways. This is great! It’s great to have tech for zeroing in on the details of a specific scene, and how it will start and end, and what things are on and off the table, so that there’s minimal misunderstanding and people’s actions are reasonably predictable.

But this is also different from something like—

(sorry)
(I know the way I’m phrasing this is value-laden)
(sorry)
(but seriously though)

—true intimacy. Actual attunement. Seeing and knowing one another, having that shared base of norms and assumptions.

At an event full of strangers, if your options are “welp, can’t understand these randos well enough to connect” or “oh, we can both push the big blunt buttons and get like an 80/20 of the real thing!” then obviously the latter option is way, way, way, way better!

But in other contexts, the big blunt buttons get in the way. They’re like—

(sorry, somewhat clumsy metaphor)

—they’re like a monoculture, a single species, like Bermuda lawn grass. They’re better than dirt, but they’re not as good as a thriving wildflower garden.

Processes which allow you to go from [zero intimacy] to [any intimacy at all] in the space of minutes or hours are often corrosive to the deeper, fuller sort of awareness and attunement, if it already exists. It’s good that you can ask a barista for the price of a coffee, and they’ll tell you, and then you can hand over some money and be given a receipt and receive your coffee, but it would be bad to deploy that technology with your friends, in your kitchen.

And through some weird slippage of monkey brains—

(Especially in subcultures that have A Lot Of People who’ve been through the BDSM training camps, or spent a bunch of time steeped in therapy culture, or just generally had to navigate a bunch of interactions with strangers on the internet.)

—the specific, heavy, overengineered technology of Big Events Full Of Wary People gets enshrined as The Right Way To Do Things, Period, and people start porting that tech into domains that are supposed to be running on a different language.

It’s, uh. Bad.

III.

Just a brief point: the dynamic of “X is worse than Y but it’s far better than nothing” is, I think, a part of why so many people have felt deep relief at being handed the tools of EVC. I feel like I see a lot of people who were lost in a fog of confusion and anxiety, and couldn’t get a grip on intimate interactions, and were stressed and afraid and under-nourished as a result…

…and then someone taught them the tools of ask culture/EVC and it was like opening a door and letting in light for the first time in years.

This is wonderful. Like, the point of this post is not to shit on EVC in general; as noted in the second diagram I think it’s a big chunk of the overall picture of consensual intimacy. And I know people who are like, “I am finally able to have conversations I could never have before, and those conversations are unlocking lovely experiences I could never have before, and being able to just ask my partners how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking and what they want (and communicate the same, about how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking and what I want) is a huge gamechanger. Before, I had so much uncertainty about what might happen to me, and whether my boundaries would be respected, that my only real option was abstinence. Now I can actually play.”

Valid. Valid valid valid.

And there are some people for whom the claims I made above (about verbal stuff being limiting or corrosive) aren’t personally true! There are some people who don’t take any damage, or experience any confinement, from passing everything through the verbal channel. And this is also rad and valid. I wouldn’t undo all of the cool invention and popularization that’s happened over the past few decades, because every new tool in the toolkit is useful to someone.

But—

IV.

Some things that the more zealous EVC evangelists seem not to notice, or to dismiss as irrelevant:

1. If you make participation in an activity conditional on verbal fluency, you are necessarily excluding from that activity everyone who isn’t verbally fluent.

This includes autistic people. This includes disabled people. This includes people who speak a different language. This includes people with certain kinds of social anxiety. This includes people of a lower IQ. This includes younger people. This includes people under the influence. This includes people who are scared or anxious or nervous.

I think it’s fine to set up environments where you say “sorry, you must be at least this verbally competent to ride.” The people putting on an event matter, too; doms and tops and dance leads matter; if the driver of an experience is only comfortable if they can get a certain level of explicit verbal clarity from the other party, that’s valid.

But it is in fact emphatically not the case that things like dance or sex or BDSM are (or should be) fundamentally gated on verbal fluency. They aren’t primarily verbal activities! It’s not like saying “sorry, you have to be articulate to participate in the rap battle.” It’s like saying “sorry, you have to be articulate to play in the soccer game.”

(Which is fucked up, and unfair.)

There are in fact other, equally valid routes to building trust and intimacy, and affirming enthusiastic consent, and ensuring that boundaries are respected. The verbal channel is a legitimate channel; acting as if it is the only legitimate channel is misguided and even a little bit cruel.

2. If you spell out all of the details of an adventure, you are no longer having an adventure.

“Okay, but which trails are we going down, exactly? And what will we see on those trails? And what animals will we encounter—will there be bugs? Snakes? How wet are we going to get? What time will we be back? What views are we going to see, and how am I going to feel about them?”

^ This is anxiety. A sort of fretting Neville nervousness. And again—it’s valid! I think that people who want to know every detail of the hike, in advance, so they can prepare, are valid. They deserve to be able to have hikes that work for them, with friends who want to share that sort of experience.

But again—the objection here isn’t to EVC being in the toolkit. It’s to EVC becoming the obligatory default. There are negotiations that kill every last scrap of mystery and excitement and uncertainty in an interaction, and for some of us (and for some interactions), those things matter.

3. Sometimes you don’t want to drive.

Related to 2, I’ve had experiences where someone was willing to top or dom me, but only if I could specify exactly what I wanted to have happen to me, and that’s … sorry, I guess we’re not actually compatible, you can’t give me what I want, it’s mutually exclusive with what you need.

“Just ask for what you want to have happen to you!”

“What I want to have happen to me is not having to ask.”

There’s an analogy here to being given a spontaneous hug versus being given a hug upon request, or receiving a thoughtful gift from someone who paid attention to you versus receiving something off of your Amazon wishlist. There’s something nourishing about being seen and understood, such that your partner knows where your personal boundaries are, distinct from the generic accepted social boundaries, and is able to move around without first getting authorization in triplicate.

(Of course, if someone actually doesn’t have the requisite understanding, then maybe they don’t want to risk running into landmines in your psychology. But there’s a separately nourishing thing about, like … being treated as though you don’t have glass bones? The more people are visibly anxious about accidentally fucking up, the harder it is to relax into trust and intimacy. You can get caught in a hall of mirrors where their anxiety makes you less confident in them, which causes you to raise your shields, which causes them to notice that you’re tense, which causes them to feel more cautious, etc.)

But yeah—there’s something fundamentally distanced about a partner who opens up their arms and then visibly hesitates and asks “…do you want a hug?” It puts a ceiling on how-seen-you-can-feel, how-known-you-can-be. It’s way better than not getting a hug at all, and it’s way better than getting an unwanted hug (again, the point here is not “EVC bad”). But if you can do better, it’s worth it. If you do actually know your partner well enough to eschew the words, that very fact contains a rare and precious nutrient, and it’s worth graduating from EVC to that more intimate state.

(Also sometimes I simply do not know what I want next, and I want a partner to collaborate with me on exploring, rather than a partner who sort of quiet-quits and is like “well, I guess we’ll just sit here until you have orders for me.”)

4. The verbal channel can be actively destructive to other channels.

This is the one that I think is most likely to be confusing/hard to model to the EVC evangelists, because I think most of the people who get really big into EVC either:

• Are sufficiently verbally fluent that they can juggle both the verbal and non-verbal channels simultaneously without problem, or

• Don’t actually go into the non-verbal territory at all/stay firmly within the verbal realm (and thus may not have considered the non-verbal swath of the territory at all, and may undervalue it relative to other people).

But to use a simple analogy: a beautiful song is playing, and I am attempting to listen to it, and maybe sway along with it, and sink into it, and then, ninety seconds into it, someone (without pausing!) asks me to verbalize what I am thinking and feeling in response to the song, and where I hope the music will go next (while the song is still playing!).

Oof!

Oof.

The listening that I do, with a partner, is non-verbal in a way that takes up like 97% of my attention and available processing power; if someone boots the language channel back up, I have to drop/lose most of what was going on two seconds before they spoke. It pulls me out of one stream and into a different stream.

Separately, the experience that I’m having, when I’m being intimate with someone, is itself non-verbal. It’s often Bacchanalian or meditative or slightly-altered-state-y; I’m zero percent thinking in words myself. Indeed, getting away from words is part of the draw. It’s part of what makes it cool and different and interesting and fun and fulfilling.

(I spend so much time in the words, by default.)

When I’m in that kind of flow, forcing me back into words just kills whatever it was that was happening. It knocks over the house of cards, smashes the sandcastle. Sometimes I can start all over again, from scratch, but it’s slow and effortful, and if they throw words at me again I will often simply give up, and stay in the paler, faker, sadder, less-immediately-authentic mode for the rest of the time—like pronouncing every single word on the page “out loud” in my head, instead of sinking in to the act of reading.

5. A lot of things just take way more words to convey than they do not-words.

Verbal communication is clunky. It’s inefficient and lossy, cf. the picture being worth a thousand words.

The simple version of this is something like “if you are paying attention to your partner at all, you can usually tell whether they like or dislike the direction you moved in over the past three seconds.” Just feeling the way a partner’s muscle tension shifts in response to some change takes zero words; asking “Do you like that?” or “What do you think of that?” and then getting back a response takes infinity percent more words.

(For people who are like, “I can’t be sure my partner has consented unless they say so!” my primary answer is “skill issue.” I am aware that there’s a sort of ironic symmetry here, where people are like “well if you can’t just ask then that’s a skill issue, too.” The main thing I’m fighting for is both skill sets being considered valid and sufficient.)

Even complex things are not necessarily quicker in the verbal channel. “Move your fingers in such-and-such a way” is blunt and low-resolution relative to a gesture; “Describe to me the thing you want to have happen next” might take a thousand words.

Maybe that’s the only way! Maybe you Just Gotta. If my partner has a complex fantasy that involves a lot of moving parts that I can’t simply intuit, we probably need to talk it out, and that’s fine.

But again: the fact that explicit verbal communication is the right tool for some jobs doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for every job (or even most jobs). The two big tasks of:

• Figure out whether we’re both happy with the direction things are going, and

• Figure out what we’re going to do next

…just don’t always need to be spelled out, in explicit language.

V.

To reiterate: if navigating intimate encounters with explicit language works for you, that’s great, and I want you to keep doing it, and I want you to find partners who want to do it with you.

But I’d like the non-verbal stuff—

(Which was the only game in town for large swathes of our history and still is the main channel in lots of cultures and for lots of activities, e.g. dance.)

—to remain in the Overton window. I’d like for it not to be the case that social consensus concludes absolutely crazy things like “if you don’t get a verbal yes, that’s a no.”

(I’ve literally heard this and similar things said out loud, many times, including outside of the context of any specific workshop or event (where installing a local rule like that might be very handy and helpful), by people who were so self-assured as they said it that I think they genuinely never even considered the possibility that it might be false.)

Tech like that is good for strangers, and it’s good for increasing clarity and safety where people are confused or anxious.

But personally, I want to be actually intimate, with non-strangers, and I don’t like it when my intimates arms-length me with stranger-tech. I like the experience of already feeling sufficient safety and clarity that I don’t need to spend time ameliorating confusion and anxiety, and if I have to switch over into amelioration this means I’m going to be doing a different and less-nourishing thing.

Again: that’s still better than nothing.

But I think we can do better than “better than nothing,” and one of the ways to get there is to outgrow the crutch of insisting on putting everything into words. There’s a whole lot more to the map—EVC is just one swath of the overall territory, and people who are exploring the other sections are not, in fact, doing consent wrong.

They’re just speaking a different language.

It was entirely my fault. I was biking home from the Thallers’ house, as I had done probably close to a hundred times before. It was the equivalent of about 1.5 blocks, and involved crossing a single street with a 35mph speed limit.

I looked one way. I forgot to look the other.

(I caught my mistake about a half second after I started out into the intersection. I looked the other way—too late—and then looked down in some combination of defeat, acceptance, and here we go. I distinctly remember seeing my front tire wobble. It’s the last thing I remember.)

The car was speeding—my dad proved it by analyzing the skid marks, because the driver’s spouse tried to sue us for damages. If it had been going 35, or even 39, they would have stopped in time. They had to have been going more than that—a good bit more, given how far I got thrown.

But still. I’m the one who biked out in front of them.

I flew about thirty feet and landed on my head (no helmet) (cue the jokes about why I’m like this). My bike went further, and hit the windshield of a truck coming from the other direction. My mom was first on the scene, within about a minute, and says I wasn’t breathing; my dad says she was hallucinating but honestly she doesn’t seem the type (registered nurse, former Army intelligence officer, scoffs about how waterboarding isn’t that bad). She was squared-away enough to insist that they not take me to her hospital, five minutes away, but instead drive me forty minutes to UNC, which was a better facility.

The doctors were confused why I wasn’t edemic. It turned out that I had a single, tiny fracture, just over my ear, in exactly the place where they would have drilled a hole to let out the pressure. It’s the sort of thing that would fit right in to a set of religious beliefs, if I were so inclined.

But actually it doesn’t feel like I was saved by the angels (or whatever). It more feels like I had a 1-in-10 chance of making it through, and did.

(1-in-10 is a made-up number. But it feels about right.)

I’m not sure how long it was before my parents let me go out biking again. It wasn’t right away—I know this, in part, because we went to Washington D.C. late that spring, and it’s part of the family legendarium that we were approaching a crosswalk and I looked both ways, gauged the speed and distance of the oncoming cars, looked up at Mom and Dad, and confidently assured them that “we can make it.”

(We could have. They were nevertheless not amused. This was not the way they wanted me to be thinking about these situations.)

But it couldn’t have been that long. I met my best friend Drew in fourth grade and biked up into the neighborhood to play at his house and it felt unspecial and familiar (i.e. I’d already been biking around freely). That was at most eighteen months later.

I think a lot of people would argue that it was insane to let me out in the first place.

(I think they’re wrong.)

I think a lot of people would argue that it was more insane to keep letting me out, afterward.

(I think they’re wrong, too.)

I think I had a lucky result, given the mistake. I think the mistake itself was unlucky. It’s not the case that most mistakes, noticed and corrected within the space of a second, come with potentially lethal consequences. I think nine-out-of-ten Duncans that roll out into that intersection die, but I think a pretty small proportion of Duncans (1/500? Maybe fewer?) roll out into that intersection without looking properly in the first place. I don’t think the accident (or something like it) was so likely that my parents had a duty to anticipate it, and take extraordinary action to prevent it.

(By “extraordinary action,” I mean more than training me to look both ways, which they did, and going with me on the trip a hundred times first, which they did.)

The thing is, there’s a way to live your life that is circumscribed by fear, and that life is actually lesser, actually worse. I think that the version of Duncan who was forbidden to ride his bike to the Thallers’ house is meaningfully worse, in a number of possible ways.

They’re more afraid, anxious, timid.

They’re less capable.

They’re angrier, maybe, at the injustice of being chained.

(I don’t have a House and my House doesn’t have a motto, but if I did and it did it would be Nihil boni umquam ex catenis cuditur.)

Most importantly, they are lacking scores of vibrant, memorable, important-to-me experiences that were all downstream of the freedom of motion and the confidence to go where I pleased, at least some of the time.

(One of my friends was conspicuously not so free. I have a control group instance.)

I acknowledge that I would have other memories, in place of the ones I currently have; that I wouldn’t know the difference, from the inside.

But still. Compound interest. Multiplying 0.9 over and over again gives you something much less good than multiplying 1.1.

(Or, if we want to be generous, 1.01^100 vs. 1.1^100. 2.7 versus over 13,000.)

There are times when people try to do a sort of emotional hijack, to justify their own anxiety and authoritarianism. “Oh yeah?” they say (often with something close to a sneer). “If Cadence dies because of this policy, you’ll feel differently.”

And the thing is…

…I won’t.

(They don’t believe me, but that’s fine; it’s a mistake to care too much about their wrong beliefs.)

If I believe I have trained Cadence to competently handle a car intersection, and I am wrong, and she dies as a result, I will feel terribly, terribly sad. I will probably even feel guilty, a little bit, before I work through it.

But I really, actually expect that I will conclude that it was better to live a bright and vibrant life than a sad, fearful one in the shadows. I really, actually believe that it’s worse to impose a huge, massive, iterated cost across thousands and thousands of days than to accept the risk of some “foreseeable” “preventable” disasters.

Every disaster is foreseeable in retrospect. That’s not the standard we should be holding ourselves to. I know exactly what it would take to make sure that Cadence never, ever, ever gets hit by a car, for sure. And I refuse to do that to her.

(Two days ago she fell into the pool below, jumping across the gap where the water is falling. She did the jump successfully about six times, and then slipped and went in on the seventh. She can’t swim; I dove in after her; I had already taken my phone and wallet out of my pants when I saw her sizing it up the first time. Most parents wouldn’t have “let” her do the first half dozen. Even fewer would’ve “allowed” her to do more jumps, after, which I did. She fell in a second time, later, at a different spot on the edge of the pool, because she wasn’t afraid of it. In context, she was correct not to be afraid of it. It was fine. It was better than fine. She most likely won’t remember this experience, but she will remember future experiences that will be built upon the base formed by this one, and that base is superior to a base of excessive caution and constraint.)

I’d rather Cadence learn from experiences like that—and I don’t mean “learn not to do them,” I mean “learn how to handle them.” As strange as it sounds, I myself really would rather be dead, now, than denied my bike rides throughout second and third and fourth and fifth grade.

(If you go back in time and deny me them, it’s not entirely clear that the person you have thirty years later is still actually me, in the ways that matter. I hope it would still be me—the me that has maintained continuity of experience since at least the age of six. But I’m not actually sure that six-year-old Duncan has the mental fortitude to withstand half a decade or more of concernist propaganda. That’s a lot, to ask of a very small boy.)

Cadence will have her own February of 1995. I don’t know when, or where, or how loaded the dice will be. (I’ve had three or four of them, myself.)

It’s my job to prepare her well enough to come through it, and I take that job seriously. I’m supposed to teach her where the hazards are, and how to navigate them.

But it’s not my job to raise her to believe that you should never, ever, ever roll dice. If she grows up believing that, I will have failed her as a parent, as a person, and as a friend.

I wish more people thought about both sides of autonomy and sovereignty violations.

Our society spends a lot of time on avoiding “gotta,” by which I mean “you’re forced into a thing against your consent.” Child labor laws are anti-gotta. Rape prevention and sexual harassment prevention are anti-gotta. Minimum wage is not an especially effective intervention, but it is aimed at preventing people from “having to” work extremely shitty jobs for insufficient pay, and it achieves this at least a little.

Anti-gotta is great. I have no objection to it, in principle. The more that you have to do stuff, despite not wanting to and despite it being ego-dystonic, the worse and more stressful and not-worth-living your life becomes. A+, a mature society works very hard to reduce the gottas; gottas suck and their costs are large.

But this society—by which I mean America in the 2020’s—seems to me to massively underweight the cost of can’t.

For instance: there are thousands-if-not-more thirteen-year-olds who are desperately bored and suffocating in school, and would kill to have an opportunity to just go out into the world and cut their teeth.

(Which was something thirteen-year-olds were never barred from doing basically forever, in basically every society, up to and including this one as recently as five generations ago.)

But our society is so scared that thirteen-year-olds will be gotta’d into work that it’s decided to tell the ones for whom that would be good “nope, sry, you just can’t. We’re incapable of distinguishing healthy thirteen-year-old entrepreneurial spirit from unhealthy thirteen-year-old coercion and exploitation, so we’re putting a lid on the whole thing.”

The part that bothers me is that the “can’t” is often handwaved away as though it’s literally zero. “They can just wait five more years, what’s the big deal?” says an adult who would absolutely not tolerate having their sovereignty locked down for five years, are you fucking kidding me?

(Let alone the fact that for a thirteen-year-old, five years is a lot longer to wait than for a thirty-year-old.)

(“But I had to wait, and it was fine!” screams a person who isn’t prepared to face up to the fact that they themselves were screwed out of something, better to perpetuate the system forever because then you don’t have to watch others get a better deal than you yourself got,)

I pretty much buy “okay, we just don’t have the social technology to reliably tell apart the kids who would hugely benefit from being free to enter the world of Real Actual Work from the ones who would be coerced and exploited.” I don’t like it, but I can buy that it’s theoretically the right call, at the societal level.

What I don’t like, though, is:

• Not acknowledging that you are, in fact, coercing and exploiting some people, at a low level, so as to prevent a probably-worse coercion and exploitation at a more acutely disastrous level
  
  (“Wait, what do you mean, exploiting? Nobody’s exploiting eighth graders by preventing them from working!” Oh honey. O you sweet summer child. Taking a human being and treating them as your property and pet is exploitation.)
  

• Not actually letting the equation be an equation. Making one of the terms infinite, such that it justifies infinite excess in the preventive direction. What people support, in practice, but rarely say out loud, is something like “I’d rather lock down a million teenagers and deny them their agency entirely than risk even one teenager ending up in the salt mines.”
  
  (Except that actually, teenagers are ending up in the salt mines anyway; another part of why I rage at this whole dynamic is that it doesn’t even tend to protect all that many teenagers. It’s more “I’d rather lock down a million teenagers and deny them their agency than have to see and know about one in the salt mines,” which, man, fuck you.)

We prevent a lot of disabled people from ever having sex, on the grounds that they’re not able to protect themselves the way a non-disabled adult theoretically can; that it would be so bad for them to accidentally gotta that they are in the can’t bucket forever. This is deeply fucked up. It is deeply fucked up to deny a human being access to sex, forever, in the name of their own good, contra their own expressed preferences.

(The gotta’s that we’re trying to prevent are often acute, e.g. a sexual assault; the can’t’s that we impose upon people, prophylactically, are often an endless series of tiny cuts, the same soul-crushing “no” over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.)

We deny people access to all sorts of pharmacological substances, ranging from the recreational to the medically necessary, on the grounds that oh no, it would be bad enough if some people got addicted or took medical action that they regretted or which accidentally hurt them that this is worth barring everyone from making free choices.

(And then we never ever bother to check whether the math actually works out And then we do check and the math often clearly and unambiguously tells us that we’re doing it wrong and we ignore the math and keep doing the paternalistic fascist thing.)

We engage in all sorts of can’t’s, and some of those can’t’s are, in fact, reasonable, but we’re so unreasonable in general that you can’t actually tell, at a glance, whether a given can’t is justified or not, because [two essays explaining why].

And it’s, uh, bad.

The people who call themselves libertarians seem to me, as a class, to be spineless unprincipled self-centered hypocrites, but they’re not wrong about this one.

It’s bad. The fact that most people agree that it’s good doesn’t mean shit; slavery and the holocaust both had local consensus backing them.

When you’re considering throwing dust specks in the eyes of ten million people to prevent the torture and murder of one, check whether it’s actually just a dust speck, and whether you’ll actually prevent a murder, please. I’m down to suffer a dust speck now and then, to save a life—

(I’m down, for instance, with at least some of the restrictions we put on minors, in the name of preventing them from being sexually abused, though again I’ll point out that the interventions don’t seem to be working, actually, and I’d be a lot more in favor if they did; nothing that we’ve changed about how our society functions over the past thirty years has had a meaningful, unambiguous impact on the rates of child sexual assault; the last time it actually substantially fell was in the 1990’s when all crime fell.)

—but I’m actually not at all down to have one hand tied behind my back for five years when it doesn’t even save anyone.

(“We can’t track effectiveness of these interventions because that would demonstrate that these interventions are deeply ineffective and point in the direction of us giving up all this power we’ve accumulated over other people, and we don’t want to do that.”)

Fuck.

(deep breath)

To bring it back around to a digestible conclusion:

“Can’t” is just as valid, as a category-of-badness-worth-minimizing, as “gotta.” Track it. Notice it. Don’t handwave it away.

Thanks.

Okay, so, like: there are two types of people here.

Some people like soccer. They like kicking the ball around, they like practicing, they like playing, they just like it.

And some people like winning soccer trophies. They pay in the practice to get the thing, and if they fail to get the thing, they are not happy.

Some people enjoy the practice of parkour, others endure it to get to the result.

Some people like sex—all of it, the whole thing. And some people like orgasms.

These are different.

As is often the case, I feel like zooophagous kinda sorta … doesn’t realize that the other type of Pokémon exists?

(Or maybe they’re deliberately trying to delegitimize them by acting as if they cannot and do not exist, that’s a thing people do sometimes.)

But like. Clearly some people do bake because they love baking, and clearly some other people bake because that’s the only way to get the particular bespoke baked goods that they want to eat or gift or whatever.

You can have opinions about whether one or the other of these groups is more valid, more genuine, more deserving of respect.

But it’s sort of silly to trick yourself into thinking that only one of them exists at all. The process isn’t enjoyable for everyone. Some people find it actively aversive, in fact, and nevertheless want the end result. It should be no surprise that those people, specifically, are eager to find ways to shortcut the bits that they have hated all along, and been putting up with.

Rule of thumb: for every pursuit where you love every minute of it, there are some people out there holding their noses and counting down the seconds until the payoff.

Rule of thumb: for every pursuit where you’re holding your nose and counting down the seconds until the payoff, there are some people out there loving every minute of it.

Most humans on earth and in history share this trait with me.

If you were to give me a few hours with a competent teacher, I could probably get to the point where I can play the violin a little. But it would only technically be “playing.” It would only bear the barest resemblance to what people mean when they say “so-and-so plays the violin!”

I’d probably be one of these guys:

…since most people are. I have no reason to predict that I’d be unusually good or bad at it.

But here’s the thing about playing the violin. It’s sort of … logarithmically distributed?

By which I mean, if you rank everyone on Earth from one to eight billion, according to their skill at the violin, then being #4,000,000,000 does not mean that you’re half as good as the best violinist on the planet. Not even close.

Being at the bottom of the list is bad.

Being at the middle of the list is bad.

Being three-quarters of the way up the list is bad.

Being nine-tenths of the way up the list is bad.

Once you hit something like 95% of the way up the list, it’s like okay, maybe you’re starting to approach middle school orchestra levels of tolerable/worth listening to.

(Uh, asterisk: that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, for like joy and fun and fulfillment and because you’re allowed to do whatever you want! You’re not supposed to be good at the violin—or at least, I am not supposing it. Part of what I’m pointing at here is we’re almost all terrible; stop worrying about being terrible.)

Skill in the violin is clustered on the right side of the graph, such that you have to already be extremely unusual in order for your violin playing to be pleasant at all, and you have to be extremely extremely unusual in order for it to be notably good.

Here’s the unfortunate kicker: this is true of, like … a lot of things.

The things that brought it to mind and caused me to write this essay were the skills of:

• Explaining things

• Securing cheerful cooperation from children

(i.e. “teaching” and “parenting”)

But it’s true for a lot more than teaching and parenting. It’s true for writing. It’s true for reading. It’s true for nunchakus, and parkour, and driving, and cooking, and chess, and theoretical physics, and introspection, and graphic design.

Given skill X, the overwhelming majority of people are overwhelmingly bad at it. This is true even if you limit yourself only to people who’ve actually put time into the pursuit; among veteran teachers most teachers are awful, and among veteran parents most parents are deeply incompetent.

(Most parents and teachers, in my experience, are actively counterproductive in a literal majority of the actions they take; things would be better most of the time if instead of doing what they were doing, they did nothing at all.)

We muddle through anyway, but it’s important (according to me) to keep a few relevant implications in mind, as you move through the world:

• Experience doesn’t imply skill

• Common levels of skill are not necessarily good in any absolute sense

• The ceiling of competence on most skills is as-far-away-from-average as the ceiling of violin playing is from the average violin player.

It’s sort of uncomfortable to think about it and even more awkward to talk about it, but in fact the best teachers and parents and artists and conversationalists and middle managers and therapists and editors and Magic: the Gathering players are hundreds or sometimes even thousands of times better than the central member of their class.

(“What do you even mean by ‘hundreds or thousands of times better’ in a domain like teaching or parenting or therapy?” Well, these are sort of crude ways to think about it, but: could solve a problem within the domain in a hundredth or a thousandth of the time it would take a novice to solve the same problem equally well; or, if given a list of all possible problems within the domain, could successfully solve a hundred or a thousand times as many of them, to a given standard of competence; or, if put side by side with the novice in a hundred or a thousand situations, would do unambiguously better than the novice on literally all of them.)

For whatever reason, people get real tangled up about stuff like creativity or skill at lovemaking or whatever, and don’t like acknowledging that this extreme right-tail effect exists. People don’t (usually) feel threatened by “so-and-so is a thousand times better than me at the violin” the way they seem to feel threatened by “so-and-so is a thousand times better than me at being a good spouse.”

But unfortunately, the flinching-away doesn’t make it not true. It just makes it harder to think about, and talk about, and look at with curiosity, and improve. The anxiety and self-consciousness reinforce the status quo; insisting that you’re amazing at the violin, actually, and in fact it’s not even possible for someone to be that much better at the violin, how arrogant, how presumptuous, fuck them for even implying that your violin playing is kind of like listening to cats having sex in an alley—

(I mean, you shouldn’t actually tell someone their violin playing is like listening to cats having sex in an alley, most of the time. Most of the time, there are nicer and more constructive ways to offer the critical feedback, assuming that it’s appropriate to be giving critical feedback at all, cf. the part where the vast majority of people are fucking awful at providing feedback, which is a skill that includes knowing when to not do it.)

You’re probably not good at playing the violin, and neither is the next guy.

This is fine—

(It’s not a reason to not do it anyway! Find joy!)

—and it’s better to be able to take a deep breath and let that truth in than to wander the world wrongly believing that you’re surrounded by (and exuding) competence in all sorts of domains.

You’re probably not.

But the world keeps turning anyway, so maybe we don’t have to pretend quite so hard. Maybe we can accept the reality we’re already living.

Another version of this shows up when people with a mildly taboo orientation or fetish or hobby or personal trait hasten to differentiate themselves from those much worse people with their much more taboo orientations or fetishes or hobbies or personal traits.

(“I mean, haha, just kidding, it’s not like I’m a furry or anything. 😅😅😅”)

Instead of dismantling the machine that is victimizing both them and the other guy, they shove the other guy forward in order to put themselves further back in the line that leads to the gallows.

Another version: saying that they burned witches at Salem. There almost certainly were some people, among those murdered by the church, who were practitioners of what we would now call wicca or similar; people who “really” were “witches.”

But they weren’t witches in the way their murderers claimed. They weren’t the thing the bad guys wanted you to think, and when you refer to them as if they were, you’re letting the bad guys win.

Another place where this shows up: talking about whether certain groups are inferior, when it comes to their fundamental dignity and the rights that a civilized society should grant them.

Like, often nazis or misogynists or whatever will try to start demonstrating that [some group] is objectively inferior on [some axis], and often the opposition will come right back with NUH-UH, [group] IS EVERY BIT AS CAPABLE—

I think there’s a mistake, there, and I think that mistake is acting like that would matter, even if true. Playing into the frame of the bigot, letting them set the terms of the debate, implicitly conceding that the question of two different groups’ equality or inequality is the crux of the issue.

It isn’t.

Don’t cede the ground.

I happen to think that the claims of the racists and the misogynists are false in many cases; my sense is that even if the bell curves for different groups peak in slightly different places and have their tails in slightly different places, they basically cover the same ground and overwhelmingly overlap anyway, so whatever.

But even if it were demonstrably true that [group] was 15 IQ points inferior (or whatever), that wouldn’t change my sense of moral obligation toward them in the slightest! It wouldn’t change my beliefs about what kinds of treatment are fair or unfair!

I know for a fact that I have more raw intelligence than most humans. It’s as inarguable as being four feet tall makes you shorter than most humans. Even in nerd circles, I’m more-than-half-the-time in the upper quartile of whatever room I’m in, and guess what! Doesn’t matter! Practically every human outstrips me in some domain or other anyway! I can’t step to someone’s unique expertise, nor can I compete with them along domains orthogonal to intelligence (e.g. physical prowess), and even if I were hypothetically superior to some particular person along 10 out of 10 of the most important axes...

...EVEN THEN, I do not think that gives me the right to dictate the terms of their existence, cut them off from opportunity, or take a larger share of the social pie!

The whole point of civilization is moving away from a state of base natural anarchy, where your value is inextricably tied to your capability. The whole point of building a safe, stable, cooperative society is making it so that you don’t have to pull your whole weight every second of every day or else be abandoned to the wolves or enslaved by strongmen.

(“Wages are for people who can demonstrate the value of their labor within a single hour,” says my colleague. “I can’t do that, which is why I have to be on a salary.”)

The thing we're trying to build here is a world where the absolutely inferior—

(To the extent that’s even a category that exists; a lot depends on your point of view and what axes you consider relevant.)

The thing we're trying to build here is a world where even the absolutely inferior get to have the maximum achievable amount of sovereignty, and agency, and happiness, and health, and get to participate in society to the greatest possible degree permitted by their personal limitations and the technology we have available.

(Both literal technology and social/metaphorical tech.)

And IDGAF if you can “prove” some group’s “inferiority.” It means nothing to me. It changes nothing. It was never the key hinge of the conversation. Superiority is not the foundation of my sense of my fellow humans’ dignity.

(Not to mention that there is a huge difference between demonstrating some difference between groups at the statistical level and saying anything at all about an individual.)

I think it’s good to push back on bigots when they are spreading straightforward falsehoods. I’m not saying “don’t fire back with facts” in these conversations. If someone is arguing that [group] is inferior on some axis and you know that they’re not, actually, please do speak up!

But the fire with which people fire back seems to me to be ceding the field. It seems to be an implicit validation of the bigoted frame. Acting outraged at the mere possibility that some group might be measurably inferior to another, as if that would be morally relevant in any way whatsoever—

I dunno. I kind of fear that those defenders are closer to the bigots than I might wish. That they respond with such fervor because they do believe, on some gut level, that if groups are different, then the moral standards must necessarily also be different. They don’t want to conclude that the moral standards should be different, and so they object with desperation to any evidence that threatens to show actual differences between groups.

Which is just … bad. Don’t do it. Don’t endorse the enemy’s frame.

Recently, someone posted a funny gif on my Discord server, of a cat making what looks to human sensibilities like bedroom eyes, while flapping its tongue in a way that looks to humans like it’s lascivious.

And one of my server friends was sort of halfhearted and apologetic and said “yes, I know, it’s actually totally wholesome but it’s funny to imagine otherwise.”

And my objection, in the moment, was to the claim that the sexual interpretation was unwholesome.

The cat was obviously not doing a sexual thing, but the joke is not corrupt or dark or evil or harmful. The joke is funny. Sex is funny. Hastening to reassure that we know it’s not actually base and corrupt just reinforces the (wrong) background cultural narrative that sex itself is fundamentally unwholesome.

It’s not. That’s a psy-op. As is calling the murdered women (and men, and children) at Salem “witches.” As is feeling the need to insist that nuh-uh, there’s no such thing as a competence difference between races or sexes, because otherwise that would be bad.

Potential competence differences between groups don’t matter on a moral level. Or at least, let me-and-my-philosophy be an existence proof to you: they don’t HAVE to matter. You can build a society that doesn’t give a fuck if people are fundamentally inferior, and that does its best to be fair and moral toward them anyway.

That's the society you should be trying to build—if for no other reason than the fact that that’s going to be YOU one day, when you break a leg or have a stroke or just succumb to the vicissitudes of time. If for no other reason than the fact that that could be your kid, or the kid of someone you care about.

(There are other reasons, too, but that’s one that’s hopefully at least a little bit persuasive even to selfish egotists.)

Competence is not the measure of worth. Fundamental equality is not the justification for fair and moral treatment.

Build your ethics on firmer ground, please.