Because what is the ONLY thing that matters re impacts on the outside world? Shipping. Putting something out there, and letting people use it. And what’s the only thing that matters for your career internally? Being seen as somebody competent and who can be trusted to execute / ship.

He hits all the important points. Shipping at a large tech company is primarily a social thing, so you have to understand what leadership wants out of the project, explicitly optimize towards that, prototype features early and often, and be the interface between “execution” and “messaging around timelines, blockers, and impact.” He also points out that ultimately “having shipped” is a social metric, not a “you can point to the features on the app or website” metric.

“What does it mean to ship? It does not mean deploying code or even making a feature available to users. Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship. (Maybe you shipped something, but you didn’t ship the actual project.)”

2) Interesting article contra Rob Henderson that makes the argument that in theory Millennials and Zennials are richer on paper, but this is due to the CPI not taking into account the privatization and switch to markets for significant goods that past generations got for free.

Becoming Noble

Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise

A recent article from The Cut received a huge amount of attention: ‘It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling’. The piece includes vignettes of Millenial hardship…

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2 months ago · 2651 likes · 391 comments · Johann Kurtz

“My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.

Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments. The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.”

He does not do a great job at quantifying the argument, in my own opinion. Many of these things have been quantified and controlled for better elsewhere, and his “median first time home buyer is now 40” factoid has also been debunked. But I think it’s still well worth the reading and the core of his argument is at least interesting and potentially pointing at something that would be important even if it only partially real!

3) Total “lol” of a post missing the plainly obvious answer to every pronatalist’s dream question:

“I’m a young woman, and I’ve decided that what I really want is to have my own children, the more the better. More than that, though, I really want to have children who will end up being popular, good-looking, sexy, successful, rich adults—the kinds of adults that other adults will really want to have sex and have families with. Being realistic, what should I do?”

And here he totally whiffs an otherwise interesting question and just pulls the banal “well this is in tension because if you want lots of kids you need to have them young, but if you want rich kids you need to wait til you’re old and educated.”

No, this has an answer! The answer is “grind to get into a good school, then immediately start dating already-established older rich guys from good families who want lots of kids, with intent for long term marriage while still in school.”

Leverage your human capital, because a woman in her early 20’s is peak desirability and human capital for the mating market, and although high status men DO condition and strongly select on their wives being elite-educated, you will have hurdled that threshold. So you can max your twin sources of value by passing the elite education threshold, then immediately using your age and hotness, which is at max value, to its fullest by locking down an established older guy from a good family looking for marriage with lots of kids. Ccongratulations, you made it, that’s how to achieve what that question wants!

I truthfully hope my own daughters do something like this if schools still exist by the time they’re early 20’s, their mom basically did something like that, with me, and I’m all about that grandkid maxxing.

Alternatively, you can play the “insta girl” game and get really on top of maxxing your hotness and a membership at exclusive gyms or getting flown out by various rich guys who discover you online, and just try to be really good at holding out / locking one down for marriage, but that’s a waaaayyyy harder game, because rich guys really do want educated women from good families for marriage, versus flings.

If you don’t like men or don’t want to play those games, your best chance is getting a good degree and career, then just paying for it. With current technology, this is extracting a bunch of your eggs while young and then getting top tier sperm bank donors at whatever cadence your career can afford, to have as many kids as you want and can afford. And with the sperm bank donors, you can get verified attainment AND genetic sequences, so go nuts! If you get FAANG or finance right out of the gate, you’ll have ~$300k starting comp and can afford to extract and freeze eggs right away.

I guess I should do a post on this one, because it’s A) obvious and pretty easy to argue, and B) a gender war hot take that’s sure to get a lot of clicks and comments, and most importantly, C) it might actually incrementally change a mind or influence somebody to follow this path, especially if it gets legs. So I guess look for that post coming up sometime soon!

4) Interesting self driving car safety deep dive, where he tries to normalize and put everything on the same terms to show that although you can slice it one way to show Waymo is juicing their numbers and get in as many accidents as humans, when you truly take into account data gaps on the human side and other factors, they’re still likely directionally safer:

Utopian Dreams

Auto(nomous Vehicle)s

TLDR: AVs are very safe, but this is easier to see in the specific cases than in the statistics, which are complex and can be warped both for and against. Lidar is worth it (for now…

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7 months ago · 7 likes · Max Harms

“Even focusing purely on Waymo, these safety stats don’t look so great when we compare them to human drivers. Each year in the USA, there are approximately 6 million car crashes reported to police, which result in about 40 thousand deaths. Since Americans drive about 3 trillion miles a year, that’d only be about 2 fatalities in ~150 million miles, which is a low enough number that the “zero deaths” from autos might just be an artifact of good luck, low speeds due to urban settings, and bias in how I’m judging things (e.g. not including the Uber prototype or the ASU motorcyclist). And more significantly, if we do the naive math on collisions, we might conclude that Waymos get in >5x crashes, since humans only produce about 2 reported collisions per million miles.”

“So, my best guess at the bottom-line, apples-to-apples comparison is that Waymo is juicing their safety stats, and that they only get into collisions slightly less often than human drivers. But, I think it’s also clear when looking at the individual case reports that almost all serious incidents are the result of human error from other drivers on the road!”

5) Tyler Cowen’s take on life post AGI:

Broadly, he thinks it will happen, diffusion will be slow, success for rule-following PMC people will largely go away, everything will be very high meaning and stress for at least 50 years because we have to rebuild all our social and economic institutions, and the future will be much more personal, in-person, and physical, with looks and charisma mattering more. He envisions a lot of jobs as AI evangelist-customizer-expats for Americans in various countries.

Sounds about right!

6) Paper that aggregates results from 30 studies and shows that anorexic girls, both current and recovered, have notably higher intelligence than average (ie it’s not just perfectionism). The effect size ranges from roughly +.5 to +1 of an SD(!) an absolutely massive IQ difference!

Recovered anorexics show higher IQ overall.

“A descriptive comparison of these results suggests that those recovered from AN score higher on IQ measures (mean IQ ranged from 109.3 to 118.1) than groups with current AN (mean IQ in current AN ranged from 96.1 to 116.8 and 96.5 to 117.6 using the NART and WAIS, respectively) and norms.”

They hypothesize that NART scores are more resilient to the physical and mental deficits of active anorexia versus WAIS to explain the larger-than-the-test-correlation gap between the two methods, arguing that spatial mental performance is known to decay more readily than verbal when under physiological stress.

7) Fun paper that finds that soap operas reduce female fertility as much as 1.6 years of education, and accounts for ~7% of the total fertility decline over the time period measured, by looking at soap opera broadcasting rollouts in Brazil. They do some interesting controls to try to account for the selection effects (obviously you roll out in areas of higher prosperity to begin with, right?), including regressing on dummies for 9 years before and after, measuring fertility by age and finding women closer in age to the soap opera protagonists had the largest drops, and the incidence of children named the same as the soap opera protagonists pre and post rollout.

They told us TV rot our mind, but not our reproductive organs! Turns out it was a two for one deal!

In general, meta-analyses have found correlations as high as .8 between television and reduced fertility! Correlative and not causative, to be fair, but still pretty interesting.

“We have noted the very substantial correlation (.86) between television access and fertility rates across 140 countries for which data were available (excluding 4 oil-rich outliers). The relation is still strong (.76) when the analysis is restricted to lower income countries (the countries classified as below the median on the purchasing power parity index used by the World Bank).”

8) Super fun link to video where some guy built an explosive fruit and veg peeler based on a 1945 patent that uses steam to instantly peel various foodstuffs. Many times more pressure than a pressure cooker, and he designed it to be able to see / film the results. The whole thing is 30min long, which ain’t nobody got time for, but the first 3 min is good enough!

9) Do you remember the “we need an Ozempic for sleep” brief burst of activity?

Isaak Freeman of MIT wrote the original post here:

https://www.isaak.net/sleepless/

Which yes, banger of a post, love the examples and speculation and reasoning. I’ve written myself about sleep being an absolutely gigantic optimization / public good sphere that is being completely neglected before here, and wrote about the various ways we might be able to do better.

A few people got together and put an experimental protocol and funding request together:

https://manifund.org/projects/orexin-pilot-experiment-for-reducing-sleep-need?tab=comments&ref=isaak.net

And finally, the results are in. Orexin administered in an RCT methodology did NOT reduce the need for sleep!

“We mildly deprived ourselves of sleep (5-5.5 hours, relative to 7-7.5 hours normally) and took either a placebo or orexin intranasally. We tracked our sleep the night before and after taking a dose in the morning and completed various tests of mental acuity during the day.

The results from our initial experiment are exclusively null results that don’t cross standard thresholds for statistical significance. Not that this was particularly surprising, we expected a ~60% chance of this happening. We’re considering next steps, and need your feedback!”

So sadly, there’s no easy and readily existing off the shelf solution we can use, and it may be something else about the DEC2 mutation people’s orexin inhibition or processing driving it.

Or DEC2 may be the entire wrong avenue entirely, as recent larger studies using UK biobank and other data have found multiple people with the mutation who nonetheless have regular sleep lives, which is super disappointing.

So it might be coupled with another gene (or multiple genes) that is dominant enough to appear in the entire Johnson family. More research *definitely* needed given the impossibly large QALY pool / potential size of benefit to everyone.

10) Fun paper outlining the counterfactual future modeling gap between chimps and humans. First, the experimenters set up a condition where children and chimps need to put their hands under a hole in a tube to catch a treat. Both children and apes do fine at this.

But then they graduate to a Y-tube, where there’s two options on where to put your hand. Children 3 and over generally figure out that you put a different hand under both, to cover all your bases and guarantee you catch the treat. Chimps never figure this out, because they can’t model a counterfactual future. Some chimps would even figure it out one time, and then would never go back to doing it!

Fits extremely neatly with the hypothesis that the big difference between us and other animals is being able to counterfactually model the world, or to focus on multiple potential outcomes (and steer towards the better ones), as written about in Max Bennet’s A Brief History of Intelligence, and my review of same here.

11) Joe Hovde’s fun post on the most life changing books, statistically. Most of them are obviously written by and for women (and that makes sense, because women are the majority readers / book buyers by far now).

Residual Thoughts

The most life-changing books, statistically

Three years ago, the CEO of Stripe tweeted about his friends curing their chronic back pain using Healing Back Pain, a controversial book from 1991. The book’s thesis is that a lot of physical pain is caused by repressed emotion, and that simply recognizing this connection can dramatically reduce the pain…

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a year ago · 1499 likes · 251 comments · Joe Hovde

Of the top 500 out of the ~850 in his list that I looked at, I’ve read 49, so not a bad sample rate. By book 500 it’s just basic fiction books, largely, and I see stuff like Harry Potter at the bottom.

Tons of basic romance novels on the list, which I think likely reflects the sad fact that some woman was able to get aroused and get off for the first time in her life ever reading that particular one, and the sheer number of them points to this probably being really common. But lo, did we know that already!

The ones on the list that I’ve read and consider to be at least plausibly in this category are Autobiography of a Yogi, Siddhartha, Illusions, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. They are all either directly woo or woo friendly, except for Motorcycle Maintenance, so you have been warned! My personal take is that things can be woo friendly and still pointing at something deep, interesting, or important about the human experience, but you know, that’s a personal aesthetic preference that can vary widely, as they say.

They also miss 3 on the list entirely I personally consider should be in the “potentially life changing” category, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, C Terry Warner’s Bonds That Make Us Free, and Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram. I’d also add Algorithms to Live By and Dataclysm for us ACX folks (neither on the list).

Paywall and coupon

So here’s where I make my usual pitch - I don’t care about money, I care about reach, and Substack promotes people in feeds more when they A) have more paid subs, and B) the paid subs have been growing recently. This makes sense because recent “successes” are likely to keep succeeding in a broader audience, and it’s also how Substack itself makes money.

To that end, if you like my writing and would like to help me increase my reach, please enjoy a LIFETIME 90% coupon, so we can keep making Number Go Up.

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This unlocks the rest of this link post, and all the others (which I’ll link at the bottom), and unlocks any paid posts in the future. If you avail yourself of the coupon, thanks much!

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This post is probably gonna get some outraged comments if it ever breaks out of our nerd sphere!

And given it’s about ratios, maybe getting ratioed was foreordained, who knows?

Background

So this is inspired by ’s recent post about waist ratios, and more importantly, restacking it surprised that only 5% of 20-24 women qualify for a <=.74 ratio.

A <=.74 ratio, as CHH points out, was the standard of hotness for a long time, and featured such luminaries from our past as Marilyn Monroe, J-Lo, Halle Berry, and more.

I proposed in Eurydice’s comments that it’s because you need a waistline to have a WHR, and lo ~80% of American women are fat and do not have a waistline, therefore it’s natural to think that not very many women would qualify.

And I posted the distribution of NHANES waist circumference data I had laying around for women and men to show the lack of waistline with actual data:

So to summarize her reply, basically that’s stupid, waist circumference or BMI has very little to do with good WH ratios, fat women can OBVIOUSLY be <.74 queens, and I was clearly innumerate. To which, lol.

Oh, you done did it now - what happens when you call a physics-then-math grad who led data science teams for a decade innumerate?

Let’s mathematically prove that waist circumference / fatness is what matters, and along the way, let's show that “hot at any size” is fake and that the BMI caste chart is real.

This is a matter of facts and data

Rather than opinions and heated hand gestures, so this shouldn’t be too hard. We have NHANES data with BMI and waist circumference data. Then we have hip circumference data in NHANES microdata at smaller samples, and some population distribution information in FitnessNorms / NCHS data.

This next section is relatively boring math and framing the question stuff, so if you want to skip the math and get to the results, just click here.

So originally, before data and this analysis, I was thinking of this erroneously. I was operating from heuristics based on observation, and had a distribution and incidence in my head that turned out to be right, but my explanation for what was driving that distribution and incidence was wrong. And that wrong explanation was: “a good WHR is driven by having a noticeably narrow waist coupled with noticeably wide hips, and this is in obvious tension.” So you’re trying to make a conjoined draw from the gaussian tail of women with small waists, and the gaussian tail of women with wide hips, and obviously that conjoined draw would be rare.

But lo, if you run the correlations on rho, the pairwise correlation between hip and waist circumference in the data, they have a 90-95% correlation! So this was not the story. It’s basically the same draw, and the problem is you’re trying to stack all the variance in the residual term, which you could naturally think of as the “residual shape,” or how a woman deposits fat and other things. I think Eurydice might have tried to make this point somewhere in our exchange, but she only spent a handful of words on it and it wasn’t quite clear to me if she was making that specific point. But if so, she was right about that!

But also, if they’re 90%+ correlated, that means your only hope is likely to be having a small waist, and I’d be right about my waistline point. So how do we determine this? We need to find some way to look at how much “a good WHR” is driven by waist, and how much by “everything else.”

So what I want to do here is look at the variance in WH ratios, and look at the amount of variance driven by waist circumference, and the amount driven by hip, and then we can do a decomposition into “what percent is explained by waist circumference” and “what percent is explained by everything else,” which I’ll call “residual shape” and that’s basically “everything else” including things like the genetics of how and where a given women adds fat as she gets heavier. Basically, how much does “being skinny” explain qualifying at <=.74, and how much does “everything else” explain it.

Our first hurdle is that nobody publishes WHR percentiles for the US. So this is something we’ll have to estimate the distributions for using our respective data sources, or calculate for ourselves.

I can’t do latex or markdown in Substack apparently, so I’ll just take a screenshot from my jupyter notebook:

This was an equation with two unknowns, sigma_H and the slope b. But we can get sigma_H by either the FitnessNorms / NCHS data, or calculate it from actuals in the microdata sample we have of about 300 women with both hip and waist data. I do it both ways.

Actually I do it 3 ways, the first time estimating a lognormal fit with IQR’s, which turns out to be an over-estimation because both tails end up really mattering, but it’s still a decent first pass triangulation method.

So:

1. I estimate the variance in hip distribution from FitnessNorm / NCHS data and do this math

2. I estimate the variance in hip distribution from NHANES actuals, and map it back to the full NHANES data set to get an 8k sample

3. I calculate all the numbers directly from the ~300 women we have both hip and waist data for in the microdata

And I’m doing all this to tease out and estimate how much waist matters and how much “residual shape / genetics / everything else” matters.

What do we find?

Just waist circumference generally explains 60-85% of having a good WH ratio! It is the most important term! Broadly it looks generally 70/30 - in other words, waist circumference explains ~70%, and “everything else” explains ~30%.

Another fun point that surfaced while exploring the data, average hip circumferences are basically the same for 20-24yo and the broader population of women. I guess hips are driven more by skeletal structure than adiposity patterns overall!

But what this means is that the general pattern is “women start off with the best WHR they’ll ever have, and then obliterate their ratio as they age and their waist gets fatter,” which definitely jibes with what we see in the world:

But the fun doesn’t stop here. Let’s look at who qualifies for a good WHR in the “has both” data, and see how they stack up, fatness-wise, by category:

Got-DAMN!

Okay, so in this particular microdata sample of 20-24yo women, it’s basically 50/50 “underweight or normal” and “overweight or obese,” although in the broader pop that’s 40/60.

NINETY PERCENT of our qualifiers come from normal weight women! You could literally throw away every single fat woman, half your sample, and only give up 10% of your qualifiers!

In other words, draw two women, one from the normal weight pool, and one from the fat pool; a normal weight woman is NINE TIMES likelier to qualify for a good ratio than a heavy woman.

Not looking good for team “hot at any size.” I’m sure there are beautiful fat women out there with a great WHR, but they are 9 times rarer than normal weight women with the same, at a minimum.

Hilariously, I showed this data to Eurydice and summarized other findings verbally and she says in response:

Which is literally the opposite of what I said, what I showed her, and what the data and charts say!

Man, getting called “innumerate” for posting a chart explicitly showing how rare “having a waistline” is, and now this. I’m beginning to suspect an ideological commitment that won’t be moved by facts or figures within my esteemed interlocutor.

But okay, let’s make it even more obvious.

Waist circumference uber alles

Let’s look at the waist circumferences of the qualifiers:

Staggeringly, a full ~85% of qualifiers come from the skinniest 75% of women!

After throwing out all the fat women, you could throw away the fattest 50% of normal weight women, and STILL keep ~85% of your qualifiers!

You could throw out all the fat women and the fattest 80% of normal weight women and still have ~70% of your qualifers!

This is ridiculous. It’s an effect size so huge it’s just hitting you over the head.

Basically if you were trying to max your chances of hotness / a good WHR, if you just started by selecting from only the top decile slimness women, throwing away 90% of your sample right away, including 80% of normal weight women, you will keep ~70% of the hot women / qualifiers!

This is ~5% of women qualifying overall, let me remind you. Throwing away everyone but the top decile slimness women concentrates your qualifiers by nearly 14x.

“Hot at any size” is in a long term coma and hooked to tubes in the hospital at this point.

Let’s directly test the explanatory power

Let’s directly test Eurydice’s contention that BMI or waist circumference don’t matter much to explaining how rare a good WHR is for a woman / population.

So my position from the very beginning has been “this is because you need a waistline to have a good WHR, and nobody has a waistline, only the top 5% having one makes sense to me. Here, here’s the gaussian of waistlines, see?” Which obviously wasn’t enough.

An AUC is “area under the curve,” ranges from 0-1, and measures how well a classification model distinguishes between different classes, in this case “qualifier vs not.”

If you run the AUC statistics with ONLY waist circumference or only BMI, you get ~70-90% discriminatory power:

Which is to say if you evaluated two women for qualifying and knew nothing else but their waist circumference, you could sort them correctly ~90% of the time.

If you had nothing else about a pair of women but BMI, you could get it right ~70% of the time.

In some domains, you’d want to map this to a Somers d statistic, in which case they’d be d=.37 or d=.72 for BMI and waist circumference respectively. Those are absurdly massive Somers d’s! Any scientist would fervently pray to the gods of almighty atheism / agnosticism / simulationism for a Somers d as good as either of those in their paper!

But Eurydice might justifiably reply here - “you still haven’t spoken to the rarity!” And she’d be right, AUC or Somers d does nothing for us on that front, it’s just something that I wanted to see for myself, to put “just how big / relevant is this” into the terms we typically see in modeling or the literature.

So let’s look at the distribution (again, given I led with it), but this time let’s look at the CDF. I thought it would be obvious that “you need a small waistline to qualify, and lo, those don’t exist in the actual distributions” but it wasn’t and I didn’t communicate clearly. Part of the reason it wasn’t obvious is probably Eurydice’s increasingly apparent ideological commitment that fatness doesn’t impact WHR / beauty at all.

But THIS:

We plainly see that the merely 1-in-a-thousand waists in NHANES peter out well before any meaningful chance of qualifying. You’re at 26 inches to even have a 25% chance of qualifying, and this is only 1% of women. The top percentile slimness women only have a 25% chance!

Let’s see the rarity another way.

To have a 50% chance of qualifying, you would need to have a 23” waist, which is well more than 1/10k rarity even in our 20-24yo population.

The slimmest waist in all of NHANES is 25”, by the way. If you want a 20” waist woman, you’re going FAR out in the tails, probably 1/100k+.

I will say that being surprised that only 5% of women qualify when literal top percentile slimness women only have a ~25% chance is pretty clearly the graver epistemic error here, and that my priors, and initial instinct that it’s driven by nobody having a waistline, was basically correct.

With a d=.72 floor, a <1%-er only having a 25% chance, and a categorical incidence that lets the heuristic “throw away all but the 10% skinniest women” concentrate your winners by 14x, I will say that “waist circumference has 70%-90% of the predictive power” is a solid heuristic here.

At the individual woman level, or within a population, waist circumference absolutely dominates good WHR, directly discriminates 70%-90% of who qualifies, and you can vastly increase your odds of a qualifier by throwing away as many non-top-decile-or-percentile waist women as you can.

In the US population, if we could increase the number of women with <=28in waists, you would unambiguously max your number of qualifiers. If we could shift the weight distribution down in the US by 1SD, to match where we were in the 70’s, it would literally 4x the number of qualifiers.

Obviously we need GLP-1’s, at scale, for free. Make America Hot Again!

The East Asian Question

What about at the “across population” level? This comes from me pointing out that asian women are way skinnier on average, so we’d expect more qualifiers there. Indeed, I modeled it using the distributions I had and some East Asian data from the literature and saw that East Asians, at ~1SD lower on waist circumference (if we’re being generous to the American women) would have between 3x and 7x the incidence of good WHR, depending on the method.

And she pushed back, saying that we can’t say that because residual shape, or adiposity patterns / everything else, varies too across populations, and asians have worse adiposity patterns, and pasted a snippet about asian fat deposition. This is fair, and it’s a good objection.

So let’s see what the data says, we can proxy this with race differences in the US, which are a good representation for “how much do different populations diverge on this attribute.”

“b,” the unknown parameter we were solving for, is actually quite stable! What was “b” again? It was the slope of the line dictating how much “waist circumference” explained for qualifying versus “everything else.” A change in this slope across populations would mean that there IS a material difference in how much “everything else” matters in terms of qualifying. Similarly, sigma_log(h) is basically the log variance in hip distributions across races.

But in the data, white and black, the two race / populations with the biggest sample sizes and which we’d expect to have the most variance, have essentially the same slope “b” and the same sigma_log(h).

Asians and “Other Hispanic,” with lower samples, wreck our stability, and persuade us that okay, maybe the slope really can materially change in different populations, although some of this will be due to sample size / noise.

If you do some cuts of the data, there really is an “adiposity penalty” for Asians, they don’t put on fat on their hips the same way other races do, and their hips start off notably narrower and with lower variance, and this will affect cross-population comparisons. It’s much harder for an asian to get broad enough hips to qualify with these starting points.

For instance, a white or black woman with the same waistline would have a 1.5x greater chance of qualifying. So that’s definitely a point to Eurydice, “everything else” can definitely matter in different populations! Fat deposition patterns and shapeliness really do differ across races and populations!

BUT if that waistline incidence is ~10x less likely to happen in those women than in asians, that doesn’t actually help you much in real life!

And indeed, that’s basically how it shakes out. Waist circumference is still a strong enough driver that there will be many more WHR qualifiers in an Asian country by rate, including in the US itself:

And we still arrive back at my initially modeled 3-7x figures, by a different and more nuanced route.

Even in the same obesogenic environment AND with a “residual shape” penalty from coming with much narrower hips that don’t vary as much and different adiposity patterns, a given asian woman will be 1.5x more likely to qualify than a white woman, and if you go to countries that don’t have 80% overweight-or-obese rates, your incidences go up 3.5x - 7x the rates of white women.

So to be clear, asians overcame a 1.5x headwind versus white women at the same waist, and still came out 1.5x ahead, simply by having more narrow waists in the asian population.

So if we take the clustering of “b” across different race / populations and the fact that even a narrow hip population that doesn’t vary nearly as much still has 1.5x - 7x the qualifiers, my initial heuristic of “just filter by waistline” proves true basically everywhere. Both within a population, and across populations.

My “there will be more in Asia” heuristic also held out, which given I’ve done business there for a decade plus and live there a good chunk of the time, is more a testament to “using the Mark 1 eyeball” than having done all this math, but now we’ve also mathematically shown it!

Back to that “waists grow into obliterating the ratio” point, you know which race alone among all races doesn’t do that as much?

If we look at US BMI trajectories by age, there’s quite a difference.

“Other” means “Asian:”

We once again find “always marry an asian” to be a solid heuristic.

If you want the incidence tier list in 20-24yo women across all races, here it is:

Basically, choose any race BUT white women, and you’ll be doing better. With the high black incidence, this probably implies that if you went to non-obesogenic countries with primarily black populations, the overall incidence would be even higher than the East Asian countries! So that’s fun.

But per the “BMI trajectories by age” chart above, every other ethnicity is also going to obliterate their ratios faster than an asian, if you’re in the US. If you’re in it for the long haul, an asian is still the much better bet. Always marry an asian if you can, boys.

Is it fair to say that hotness and WHR are so connected?

So I’ve been pretty glibly mixing “hot or hotness” with “qualifying WHR” in descriptors here. Is that justifiable?

Here I will turn to the literature, as it’s abundantly supported. It’s actually worse than the <=.74 threshold, and that’s what CHH’s post was actually about.

Her whole post was about “okay, these women are already <=5% of the population, and people don’t even consider them-in-their-prime hot any more!”

And yes, in the microdata, only ~2.7% of women qualified for this with actual data. Triangulations with the other methods put the 95% CI at ~2-6%, so 5% is directionally fine.

But CHH’s whole point is that in our modern world of Tik Toks and Instas and a long, long tail of young hot women worldwide crowding into the attention sphere, <=.74 doesn’t even ping the meter!

Men only consider <1% or maybe <.001% women actually hot these days!

And yeah, probably. 1/100k is probably a decent centroid estimation for how rare a given Insta model’s or Tik Tok hottie’s phenotype is.

And she’s right that this is what men find attractive, it goes well below “.74:”

“Although there is variability in the features that individual men consider attractive, women with WHRs of .60 to .70 are more consistently rated as highly attractive by men, and women with WHRs higher than .85 are less consistently rated as attractive (e.g., Bleske-Rechek, Kolb, Steffes-Stern, Quigley, & Nelson, 2014; Dixson, Dixson, et al., 2010; Dixson, Dixson, Li, & Anderson, 2007; Furnham, Tan, & McManus, 1997; Henss, 1995, 2000; Singh, 1993a, 1993b, 1994; Singh & Luis, 1995; Sugiyama, 2005; Thornhill & Grammer, 1999)”

Just how rare is a .60 - .70 WHR today?

In our sample of ~300 actually measured 20-24 year olds, the lowest in the entire sample is .70. So even the upper end of the range is already ~1/300 or 0.3%.

We can model this with a general pareto distribution model, and what do we find? Basically we’re trying to extrapolate the arc of the line, starting from where we have data at .74, taking it to where the data runs out at ~.70, and continuing the trend to make our best guess at how much rarer each successive threshold is:

So a .62 WHR woman is roughly 1/1M, .63 is ~1/100k, and .7 is roughly <=1%.

This is the range the literature is telling us men find most attractive! You’ve got to be better than top 1% to even get in there, and around 1/100k to be noticeable!

Does that jibe with our earlier social media phenotype estimation? It does.

Moreover, corroborating all the analysis we just did, if you want to max attractiveness, you want to minimize waist above all!

In the relatively few studies that have considered the possible independent role of waist size, it has been a strong predictor of attractiveness (Brody & Weiss, 2013; Brooks, Shelly, Fan, Zhai, & Chau, 2010; Brooks, Shelly, Jordan, & Dixson, 2015; Crossley et al., 2012; Forestell, Humphrey, & Stewart, 2004; Grundl, Eisenmann-Klein, & Prantl, 2009; Horvath, 1979; Pokrykwa, Cabric, & Krakowiak, 2006; Prantl & Grundl, 2011; Rilling, Kaufman, Smith, Worthman, & Patel, 2008; Rozmus-Wrzesinska & Pawlowski, 2005). In the single prior study that directly compared BMI and waist size as predictors of attractiveness, waist size was the stronger factor (Rilling et al., 2008).

And do we see this in the distribution of who qualifies for these lofty and rarer HWR? We do:

By the time you’re getting to the 1/10k range, you’re 2/3 driven by the top percentile-or-better of waist circumference women. At the floors, you’re 90% driven by this slimmest 1%.

So to even have a chance at being in the band at all that men collectively have rated as the hottest in the literature over decades, your best shot is being, at a minimum, <5% slim, and ideally <1% slim.

The supermajority of women are over the “unattractive threshold” too

Let’s go that extra mile, too. Astute commenter points out I showed men will find lower WHR hotter, but said nothing about finding higher WHR unattractive. Thank you, Rick, that’s a great callout!

Remember this, from the literature? “women with WHRs higher than .85 are less consistently rated as attractive.” Just how common are .85 and higher ratios, how many women are under THIS threshold?

Well, in our 20-24yo women sample, the median was pretty close to .85. Which is to say, this is a tiny slice of the female population, and they are the skinniest they will ever be in their lives, and they are already sitting right there, with half falling into “unattractive” WHR’s.

But what about the whole population?

The supermajority of women, at nearly every age, are above the “men find this unattractive” WHR.

The shaded portion is the IQR, or interquartile range, and it shows the 25-75% band, so anyone outside of the lower shaded area is already top 25% or better.

Whew! Harsh! “Hot at any size,” what do you think?

Huh, no response. I hope they’re not ailing.

The trends are diverging

So basically what’s happened is that every woman in the world has been steadily getting fatter for the last 6-7 decades, AND at the same time, the long tails of young female hotness has crowded into the attention sphere. We’re seeing more 1/100k and 1/1M and 1/10M women nearly every day than any person on earth before us would have seen in a year, or even a lifetime.

Helen of Troy wouldn’t just be mid today, she’d be “lol, as if.”

A top OnlyFans star brings in $1 - $10M a year, and the general pattern for stuff like this is “10% pay and 90% coast on free stuff.” Even at a very loose “$1 a load” proxy, these women are inspiring the release of ~10M - 100M loads per year from their loyal simps, individually.

I’m not quite sure what the load-to-ships conversion rate is, but I’m definitely gonna give this one to the OF girls over Helen. A thousand ships? That’s nothing! Try launching a hundred million orgasms, in a single year, all in tribute to your beauty!

At the same time, the actual population of real women in real life everywhere has been steadily diverging from that tail, with the averages getting ever-fatter and less shapely.

So as CHH bemoans, our standards of hotness have steadily crept up, fed on a steady diet of unattainable long tails, all while the standards of women at large have been steadily drifting away.

Now, even that top 5% is “mid.” Now, you need to be 1/100k to even ping the register!

And I’m sorry to say that the overwhelming majority of men, no matter how rich, hot, high status, or desirable, can generally only get a 1/1k to 1/10k mate, simply due to search costs and other factors, which I wrote about here.

So possibly another contributor to the Vibecession: everyone stares at hot millionaires living amazing lives 7-9 hours a day in their phones, while real life keeps receding ever farther away from those tails and lives every year.

But directly relevant to AI-driven changes looming on the horizon, can we do even better than the 1/10M+ social media girls?

Can we do better than the attention sphere?

I bring you Gaulin and Lassek (2016), What Makes Jessica Rabbit Sexy?

This study is fun, because it decides to refer to fictional cartoon characters to determine how low the WHR preference goes. Apparently arbitrarily low!

It’s not just .6 - .7 in the literature, which comes from men and women rating pictures of actually human women.

The literally inhuman / unattainable WHR’s of ~.4 - .5 dominate the list of hottest cartoon women!

Also, look at the bottom row on that table! Out of the entire sample, only 20% of men chose cartoon women with ratios close to the barely human-attainable ~.6, and 80% of men chose lower ratios, with 42% of all men choosing the top 4 women, ranging from .39 - .53!

If men COULD get lower, they would absolutely take it, they just can’t find that in actual humans, so the hottest humans get rated at the .6 - .7 you can actually find in the world.

Hot at any size?

<deathly stillness and silence, then EKG flatlining sound>

The children yearn for the m̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ ̶superstimuli

Have you ever heard those studies about how if you artificially make a turkey’s or grouse’s parts extra red or attach extra long tail feathers to birds that use that for sexual selection, the superstimuli always win?

We’re not so different than the birds and the bees, apparently.

We like our WHR’s as low as possible, well below what is human attainable. Even .6 is barely attainable to US women in 2026, and that’s already 1/10M+ or more, and you saw the trajectory of that line! Ain’t nobody attaining a .4, anywhere.

But this is surely attainable in the upcoming infinite jests! Soon AI will be feeding us super-porn and super-tik-tok with literally biologically impossible superhuman women, doing whatever you want, custom tailored to your own individual responses, which I’ve written about before. That’s going to be fun.

Let’s head back to planet earth for a wrap-up.

The BMI caste chart is real

Okay, so what have we seen? That only a top 5%-or-better woman qualifies for a .74 ratio. That throwing away all women except the top 10% slimmest women is the best rule to follow to find these qualifying women, and increases your chances by 14x.

Not looking too good for team “hot at any size” so far.

But wait, it keeps going!

Then we see that in the literature and in real life, even this isn’t enough! The majority of men find WHR of .6 - .7 the hottest in the literature, notably lower than the .74 threshold, with only <1% of women qualifying at the upper end of that range, and the lower ranges well past 1/1M incidence.

And we see this corroborated in real life, in Tik Tok and Insta and other places, where 1/100k or rarer phenotypes dominate.

We also find that finding a lower WHR attractive goes down even into depths unattainable by actual humans! Only 20% of men chose cartoon women with ratios close to the barely human attainable ~.6, and 80% of men chose lower ratios, with the top women ranging from .4 - .5!

This is a very clear indication that in the aggregate preferences and sensibilities of men, they have been wired to find “lower WHR” essentially always hotter.

And then we see in the data, that only vanishingly smaller slices of the overall population of women qualify for these lower WHR thresholds, and that those same women get ever slimmer and rarer, with only the slimmest <1% having a real chance of hitting even the human attainable .62 - .68.

We see in the data that very close to the majority of 20-24yo women are above the “unattractive” WHR threshold, and that generally the supermajority of women are above it.

“Hot at any size?” Being lowered into the ground.

The BMI caste chart is real. From the deep internal wiring of men’s attractions we see a drive for ever lower WHR, and from the data and from social media, we see that only ever-skinnier women can hope to ping that meter.

The BMI caste chart being real matters

What do a lot of women want? An educated, high earning, high prestige husband! There’s only so many of those to go around, so this really matters, and is a zero sum competition.

Will achieving a good WHR facilitate this? And how!

For each step of male SES, their marriage rate goes up, topping out at 90%, and the slimness of their wives, as measured by BMI, also increases.

Indeed, the BMI results keeps going to the very tippy top, as women get progressively skinnier the higher income or richer their husbands are, and the effect is still seen right up to the top 1%, with incomes >$500k and wealth averaging $3M+ in wealth, after which the data thins out enough you can’t really say anything past that:

At population averages with the sample sizes I have there, that is a gigantic, and stastically significant, effect.

If you want a high earning, college-educated husband, being slim helps a lot.

On the evergreen topic of “landing a high income or wealth husband” I’ve got more graphs, analysis, and data-driven advice on this front coming up soon in a future post.

Summa

1. If you could choose only a single variable to predict “qualifies for a good WHR,” either in individual women, in a population, or across populations, waist circumference is the single best variable you could choose by far.

2. If you wanted to follow a simple rule to maximize your chances of finding a qualifier, “throw out every woman who doesn’t have a top decile slim waist circumference” is the single biggest thing you could do, and would 14x your chances of finding one.

3. That the literature and social media shows us that men are wired with WHR preferences such that they nearly always consider a lower one more attractive, and that this remains true going well below “human attainable” levels.

4. That male preferences and social media are dominated by 1/100k and 1/1M and 1/10M+ rarity women.

5. That the majority of women at every age, and often the supermajority, are now above the “unattractive” waist hip ratio range.

6. That based on the above points, “hot at any size” will only be true for an ever-dwindling rounding error amount of women, that the BMI caste chart is clearly real, and that it being real matters to important zero sum contests and life outcomes.

Well, I feel like that’s enough to lay this one to bed. I doubt I’ll change Eurydice’s mind, but you, my always perceptive and astute readers, now have a much better idea of the importance of slimness to attractiveness, how rare that is, and how deep those drives go.

I genuinely try to respect my readers’ time, but in this post, my usual 20min reading time soft cutoff, and even my 35 min reading time hard cutoff, has been trampled into unrecognizability and left in the dust, like so many steppe nomad opponents of yore.

Reading time sits currently at 66 minutes in the (frankly 1.5 - 2x over-estimating in my own opinion) Substack reading time estimation - if that’s too long for you, I urge you to bail out now and use that time more productively (or save the long read for a better time). You have been warned.

But what better historical topic to break the time cutoffs on?

There comes a time in every man’s life where his thoughts turn away from such comforting and well ordered historical topics as Rome and the Age of Sail, and towards steppe nomads.

Why steppe nomads?

• We basically all have steppe nomad in our ancestry

• They’re unstoppable superweapons in war for more than 4,000 years

• They’ve materially shaped history - even the greatest empires have risen or fallen due to them, or been ruled by their descendants

• Nearly every major empire you’ve heard of, historically or today, was either destroyed or taken over and ruled by steppe nomads at some point - Rome, Byzantium, Persia, China, the Caliphate, and more

Ever heard of the Yamnaya? The speakers of Proto-Indo-European who became the founding populations culturally and genetically for most of Eurasia? Steppe nomads.

I’ve read soooo many books on this. Everything from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World to Kenneth Harl’s Empires of the Steppes, to Subotai the Valiant to Conn Iggulden’s fictionalized portrayals of Genghis Khans life, to Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road, countless wikipedia pages, and more beyond that in the past, those are all just in the last 2 months. Yes, that sounds pretty Mongol heavy, but the Mongols were awesome, and also one of the best historically attested steppe nomad conquerors, from multiple peoples. And as to however many thousands of pages that must be, well, when you’re trying to read and think about 6,000 years of history, it just sort of comes with the territory. What, LLM’s get to read a couple of petabytes of text, and I get funny looks for a few thousand pages?? We’re never going to “John Henry” this mother with that attitude! But I digress.

First, what is the steppe?

The steppe is an interior ocean of grass, spreading nearly from coast to coast in Eurasia.

For our titular nomads, it’s a combination superhighway, food bank, logistics train, and hotel / home.

They’re pastoralists. Shepherds. They raise the “5 snouts” - yaks/cows, goats, sheep, camels, and horses - in those grasslands, and live off their meat, milk, and animal products. They live in tents, and travel on horses and cart their stuff around in wagons. From those little green swatches, various steppe nomads in various times erupted and they or their descendants conquered nearly everything you see on this map, with the sole exceptions of Japan, Sweden, and Africa, although they gave Japan a try twice (and got wiped out by typhoons twice, unfortunately they are much better at horse archery than boats).

Empires so fantastically rich that the tribute carts stretched continuously for months of travel from present day Beijing, going towards Mongolia.

Do you see Karakorum on the map, there in Mongolia? Think how far away that is from approximately everything else on the map. When various Great Khans were being ceremonially enthroned, royal representatives from all over this map would all come to Karakorum to pay tribute and personally be there, including from Western Europe, which is cut off at the far left.

That amount of travel is a real commitment back when the fastest means of travel are camels or horses! It’s months of hard living and traveling, for nobles and diplomats, just to go and kowtow to some far-off potentate in the icy ass end of nowhere, but they did it! That’s how big a deal steppe nomads were!

And you want to talk empires? Rome is an also-ran compared to them!

“In 25 years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans conquered in 400 years.”

Steppe nomads came up to Western Europe’s door at least 3 times, and it was essentially a matter of blind luck and Europe being a lot poorer than China or the Middle East that most countries there didn’t become a tribute-paying vassals to steppe nomads (except for the modern day countries of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Romania, Poland, and Hungary, all of which did become vassals at some point).

The Ur-Steppe-Nomads

Back before there was even recorded history, the Yamnaya radiated outwards from the Pontic steppe and took over everybody else. This is basically Ukraine today, and it was their home:

They were pastoralists who herded the 5 snouts for their livelihood, and they spoke Proto-Indo-European, the root language behind English and most European languages, and it is thanks to their successful radiation outwards that a lot of Eurasia speaks some variant of PIE today:

There are cultural continuities and commonalities across many of the cultures they seeded, that point back to various elements of the founding Yamnaya / Proto-Indo-European culture, typically labeled the Central Eurasian Culture Complex by Beckwith (the brilliant1 and opinionated author of 12 books and 60 papers on central Eurasian history, who must know 10 different ancient and modern languages and considers his remit to be “Eurasian History” in toto) as it diverges into the multiple lines of PIE peoples and cultures.

They include horses, wagons, hunting, felted clothes and tents, and the First Story, a recurring founding myth found across a wide array of people and cultures. In cultures as diverse and widespread as the Hittites, Scythians, Junghars, Manchus, the Shang and Zhou dynasties of China, the Wu-sun / Tocharians, the Hsiung-nu / Xiongnu, and even the Turks, Romans, and Mongols, we see elements of the First Story appearing in their founding myths.

The essential elements of the First Story, which may appear incompletely or in a slightly different order in the actual attested versions, are:

A maiden is impregnated by a heavenly spirit or god.

The rightful king is deposed unjustly.

The maiden gives birth to a marvelous baby boy.

The unjust king orders the baby to be exposed.

The wild beasts nurture the baby so he survives.

The baby is discovered in the wilderness and saved.

The boy grows up to be a skilled horseman and archer.

He is brought to court but put in a subservient position.

He is in danger of being put to death but escapes.

He acquires a following of oath-sworn warriors.

He overthrows the tyrant and reestablishes justice in the kingdom.

He founds a new city or dynasty.

Those last 5 points? Serving in a lowly position, growing a following, then overthrowing the tyrant and founding a new dynasty? Super common first story that ends up tracking a lot of founding myths of various PIE peoples, and indeed, generally tracks their narrative arc as a people in multiple countries.

Something else we see across a similar array of cultures is the comitatus, a highly trained warrior corps loyal to a leader personally (rather than a government), ranging from ten to ten thousand warriors, and who are literally bound to commit suicide or be ritually executed along with the leader when he dies, in order to be buried with him along with their horses, armor, weapons, and riches, to accompany him in the afterlife.

Steppe nomads were generally huge on this across many, many cultures, for many thousands of years - the measure of a lord’s greatness was how many horses and armed and armored soldiers that he was buried with. Seems wasteful to the modern eye, especially compared to the portion of wealth / GDP that must have represented to the much-poorer past, but you know what they say - the past was a different country.

The rewards of being in the comitatus were manifold - the leader was bound to consider them closer than brothers, to feed and support them, but also to gift them richly and frequently. When the spoils from successful war came, the leader always took a princely / kingly share of it, and this was shared liberally with his comitatus.

We see the comitatus cultural element across the <takes breath> Hittites, Achaemenid Persians, Scythians, Kwarizmians, the Xiongnu, the ancient and early Germanic peoples including Goths and Franks, the Sasanid Persians, the Huns, the Hepthalites, the Koguryo, the early dynastic Japanese, the Turks, Khazars, Uighurs, Sogdians, Tibetans, Slavs, Khitans, Mongols, Byzantines, Chinese, and Arabs. Whew!

Now I’ve heard of “bros before hoes” but you know what’s (apparently) REALLY Lindy? All your best buds, your most trusted confidantes that you’ll tackle anything the world can throw at you with, all killing themselves at the same time you die, so you can all pop up in the afterlife at the same time, fully armed and armored and horsed, and apparently go on an immediate celestial raid together. Bros before ophanim!

And as you can see, much like Proto-Indo-European the language family, some of these cultural practices had legs, and expanded even beyond PIE peoples, and essentially across the entire Eurasian continent.

So the Yamnaya successfully radiate outwards in a couple of migrations. One migration goes towards the Middle East, and gives birth to the Hittite / Anatolian language families, which is the farthest from any other PIE family. Later, another Tocharian speaking migration goes towards the far East, reaching as far as the Tarim Basin. Finally, the dialects we’re all more familiar with — Indic, Iranian, Latin, Greek, Italic, Germanic, and Armenian, come from an even later third outward migration wave.

What does this mean, to “successfully radiate outwards?”

And here I think it’s worth a moment of clarification, because this is basically the way all successful cultures worked in antiquity, and in various papers and books you’ll see academics tastefully eliding over this entirely, and even some pretending it was simply “cultural transmission,” although that happens largely before genetic studies.

Broadly, “successful radiation” typically means “y chromosome replacement,” which means “we done killed all your men and took all your women.”

Ever hear the factoid that Genghis Khan is the progenitor of something like 8% of the entire population of Asia today? That’s how this kind of thing happens, he had 160 wives, and many of his descendants ruled similarly large and rich areas and also had many wives and descendants, for something like 100 - 600 years, depending on the area.

This is broadly what warfare has been about since the dawn of time. We fight for status and group belonging, which are the high level labels that motivate us to fight to attain greater biological wealth like good pasture / hunting land and more and better mates. When two hunter gatherer tribes make war on each other, it’s largely about taking their women (or taking stolen women back) while also incidentally freeing up their land for use, and so it’s been for ~2M years of hominin existence that we know about.

Did you know that we had cities a thousand years before Uruk and Ur and Sumer / Mesopotamia? In fact, you might consider them better than Sumerian cities. As far back as 5k BC, strange conurbations of dwellings existed, all equal in size, which held up to 10-15k people, were periodically and intentionally razed, and seemed to indicate that utopian high density living without kings or elites was possible. Everyone did their share, nobody specialized, and there was no caste of parasitic nobles or priests or soldiers taxing everybody and living high on the hog without doing any work. They were even mostly vegetarian, if that pings your utopia-meter! You can’t find a better example of a fair and idyllic culture, all the best hunter gatherer cultural norms transplanted to the urban context, with all the benefits of greater density and few of the downsides.

This is the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, and after the climate shifted in a way that made agriculture harder and less bountiful, they got pwned by the (very much hierarchical and patriarchal) Yamnaya, before the Yamnaya went on to successfully radiate outwards from that region and into all of Eurasia, where they continued the trend.

For whatever reasons, the steppe nomad cultural and technological package seems uniquely suited to be successful at this, and warfare in general. This means their culture + mores + language + technology + lifestyle package propagated much more successfully than other, more sedentary / agricultural cultural packages at the time, and that’s why we’re all speaking PIE languages today.

So the Yamnaya start radiating successfully outwards around 3k BC, replacing a bunch of the men in various settled agricultural societies of the time. We don’t know why they were so successful at this - although they had horses, they didn’t have horse archery, or even chariot warfare, at this point (horse domestication and capability uplift is surprisingly recent), and it’s a matter of widespread speculation (plague? A super-regional drought or famine? Cultural elements like the koryos?) on why they were able to radiate out so successfully in so many places.

Horse domestication itself is an extremely interesting topic - all living lines of horses, and all important lines of horses from 2k BC on, come from a single domesticated lineage, the DOM2 lineage, which began being domesticated slightly before Bronze Age chariot warfare first started becoming the world-dominating military technology around 2k BC. The steppe nomad Botai actually began domesticating an entirely different line of horses back in 3500BC, which ends up going extinct (they even have 66 chromosomes to the DOM2 line’s 64). So which horse did the Yamnaya initially have? Either the Botai horse initially, and later the DOM2 horse, or a DOM2 progenitor all along that gets progressively more capable and domesticated.

Horse breeding for successively more valuable traits drives the frontier of military technology, too. Initially, horses are only useful for milk, meat, and blood, and this is true for at least 1.5k years. They get more domesticated (ZFPM1 genetic variant), and bigger and more useful (GSDMC variant), due to steppe nomad domestication and breeding, and this capability unlock drives the unstoppable superweapon of chariot warfare. Horses are still too small and weak to do anything but pull the (very light, it was said you could lift them with one hand) Sintashta chariots, with only two people in them, behind them. But they’re bred over time for bigger size and speed, and can eventually pull bigger and heavier chariots with 3 people, and later they get big enough they can be ridden for cavalry purposes. Horse archery, the next impossible superweapon in military affairs when used well, becomes possible roughly a thousand years after chariots, at 1k BC, and horse archery remains an important frontier of military dominance until roughly 1400-1500 AD.

But you know who was there at every step of the way? Guiding the horse breeding, perfecting the techniques, and figuring all this stuff out? Steppe nomads!

Steppe nomads have a unique cultural connection going back clear to the Yamnaya with horses, and their breeding, domestication, and applications in warfare, and frequently define the frontier of military capability for an army of a given size.

This is a theme with steppe nomads. Life and warfare for thousands of years is VERY much “how efficient and good overall is this culture overall at producing soldiers, technology, and practices that reliably win military engagements?”

Steppe nomads basically break the “agricultural density advantage” frame entirely, and this is why all cities after the Yamnaya had elites and inequality and professional armies. Inequality is seemingly one of the fundamental cornerstones (and inevitable results) of settled civilizations that last.

Have you tried “having a bigger army?”

If you think back to hunter gatherers, which exist in a Hobbesian state of “warre of all against all” and where a full third of men generally died by violence, “having more men” was pretty much the answer.

Even after we started cultivating and domesticating crops for free in the hunter-gathering-with-bonus-free-crops Natufian age, this was still the answer, and remained so clear through settled agriculture’s firm establishment. If you can show up with more men than the next group over, your group generally wins.

So that means that mostly the answer throughout history was “get good at agriculture, then you can overwhelm them with sheer numbers!” This is because the amount of people you can support with agriculture is hugely larger than hunter gathering (100x - 1000x), or pastoralism (10x - 100x).

Broadly, it’s a 10x change at each step in “number of people you can support per acre” moving from hunter gathering (maybe 20k - 100k acres for 100 people), to pastoralism (around 2k to 10k acres per 100 people), to agriculture (around 200 to 1k acres per 100 people for ancient agriculture, then we get another factor of 10 for modern agriculture). So it seems in the dueling game of lifestyles, pastoralists should beat HG and agriculturalists should beat pastoralists, right?

Well, the reason steppe nomads were so feared is that they fundamentally break this framing, and routinely pillage or even take over MUCH larger empires and armies than themselves.

In the Yamnaya-descended / PIE peoples (broadly labeled the Central Eurasian Culture Complex by Beckwith, henceforth “CECC”), after diverging into several peoples who still shared common cultural elements (this is roughly 2000 - 1500 BC), this turned out to be driven not by horse archers intially, but by chariot warfare during the Bronze Age, which became the unstoppable next tier of warfare that needed to be widely adopted by essentially every state, to survive.

Surprisingly, it was mostly or entirely CECC people who were the charioteers, generally hiring themselves out as mercenaries in many cases, or simply conquering countries and becoming the new leadership in others, as they did in the case of the Mycenean Greeks, the Persians and Medes, the Indic-speaking leadership caste of the Mittani, and eventually as the Hittites overthrowing the Hatti. The Medes (with chariots and settled people armies) later overthrow the (gigantic) Assyrian empire in partnership with the Babylonians. As far out as Shang Dynasty China, we see comitatus burials with CECC chariot warriors! It apparently took a long time for various non-CECC cultures to copy and master chariot warfare.

On the “beating larger armies point” and taking it back to the Mongols for a specific example, they beat armies from the Middle East and China that were 2-10x larger than their armies. The Mongols at their peak were maybe ~1M people total including women and children, fighting against empires with ~15M (Khwarzem) and ~50M (Jin Dynasty) people, and who end up ruling 100M people total.

Generally, an agricultural society will muster maybe ~0.5% - 2% of its people for their army. So that’s 75k - 300k armies for Khwarazem and ~250k - 1M armies for the Jin, and indeed, the upper ranges are the total sizes of armies that the Mongols beat when conquering them, with total mustered forces of ~100k Mongols. So even being 50M strong won’t save you.

And this is the general steppe nomad pattern, vastly outsized military capability versus their population size.

Why do steppe nomads routinely dominate?

A couple of factors:

1. They muster ~10% of their population as direct soldiers, with in the limits every able bodied man between something like 15-50yo participating

2. They train in cavalry skills and archery from toddlerhood, so by the time they’re fighting they have 1-2 decades of experience minimum and are noticeably more skilled than most opposing soldiers (and chariots are just horse archery plus wheels)

3. They are typically all cavalry or mostly cavalry, whereas most settled militaries are largely infantry (you can’t afford to give peasants horses, and they wouldn’t know how to ride or fight from them anyways)

4. Back to the “all cavalry” point, as nomads qua nomads they have impossibly strong advantages in logistics, because they can live off the land, or off their horses (in terms of eating blood and milk from their horses) while traveling, and so can cover much more ground (70-250 miles per day), MUCH faster than any settled army, which can only move at slower-than-walking speed

5. They are “hard men” trained to fight since birth, who in the best cases can shoot a bird on the wing from a galloping horse at 300 yards (an unbeatable range + accuracy), whereas most settled armies are largely peasant conscripts who don’t really want to be there and don’t have much if any training, with maybe a ~10% cream of military-trained nobility on top

6. Back to this point, they spend a lot of optimization energy on their arms and armor for each soldier, and their routine successes mean they can pull the best arms and armors from the best that civilization has to offer, so they’re generally fairly well equipped

The “wolf to tiny floofy dog” pipeline

History is broadly defined by the continual clash of memetics and cultures and technologies over time. Who is able to carve out empires and rule them, and for how long?

This is nearly always achieved via agriculture, as our above population density heuristics pointed out. But because the steppe nomad package was so puissant, it served as a goad and challenge to most settled empires throughout history.

But there’s another recurring sub-pattern here - because the “steppe nomad package” requires hard men training in outlands since birth to militarily dominate, any time they conquer an empire and decide to settle down and become the nobility in it, they follow the inevitable pattern:

This isn’t pre-ordained. Mostly steppe nomads aren’t organized enough to want to establish or administer an empire, and largely just re-establish territory or trade rights, take some stuff, and leave.

Even if they want to administer an empire, they can just take a bunch of tribute and remain in the outlands, raising their children in the traditional way, like Genghis did. His grandson Kublai Khan tried this in the literal center of the Forbidden City in Beijing, with a nice lake and nature preserve in the center dotted with the Mongol felt tents called gers, where he and his wives and the cream of the Mongol nobility could maintain the traditional way of life for their kids. But it never works for more than one generation or so - the grandkids are going to be as soft and effete as any urban nobility, Kublai himself already definitely was (and was likely the smartest as well as most urban / civilized of the grandkids) , despite his efforts.

So, that’s the basic tradeoff. If you want some of the nice things and the settled life of urban civilization (baths, sophisticated cooking, hot and cold running slaves, markets, having a reliable address for tribute and / or empire communications, plays and other entertainments, being surrounded by people kowtowing to you all day), your grandkids and further descendants are going to be pampered urban softies.

A huge amount of cultural optimization went into trying to ameliorate this trend over thousands of years, attempting to end at an equilibrium where you could have cities and nice things, but still have a hard and effective nobility and army. The Greeks tried several times, including with the Spartan culture.

Sadly, none of the Greek polities were large enough to succeed at this, and you need the scale and administrative acumen of Rome to really pull this off. So the Roman Republic package, as I understand it, is something like a strong culture honoring virtue, including the martial virtues, and duty to Rome itself, along with the military being the default path to higher status and political success (the cursus honorum). So your highborn sons who are ambitious and motivated will inculcate the virtues, train hard, take the field, and come back with conquests if they really want to succeed at status and politics and leadership overall. Also, crucially, your society isn’t identified with one race or ethnic group, and can expand its circle of identity in a cohesive way, which also allows you to identify and elevate talent and skill in your broader body of people, which is also key to cultural and societal longevity.

The Manchu / Qing came up with something similar, the banner system. This is basically state supported hereditary military households who are forbidden to trade or farm, whose entire duty is to preserve the old “Manchu way” and train in horse skills and archery, and to speak only in the Manchu language (instead of Chinese), to become a permanent warrior caste, in other words.

Sadly, although it can be stretched out longer than the typical “your grandkids are going to go soft and ruin everything” epicycle of ~100 years, lasting around 200-400 years, even this societal construct contains the seeds of its own defeat - in Rome, this led to Sulla and then Caesar, and in the Qing dynasty, the great-or-gg-grandsons and beyond still went soft and no longer knew archery or horseback riding, just on a slightly longer cycle.

This “bigger picture cultural cohesiveness” outcome was difficult for most steppe-nomads-turned-urban-elites to do, likely because they were a tiny culturally heterogenous elite who had simply displaced the existing elite strata, and had more loyalty to their people / family than their adopted countries as a whole.

What is the real enduring solution?

So far, I think history indicates on the “leadership” end having clear leadership succession rules and expectations, and on the “broader society” end being big and setting up self-sustaining systems to expand identity culturally, identify and elevate talent, and maintain the various structural needs of an empire (administration, military, etc), with China or Imperial Rome being the ancient archetypical examples of this. After first being unified, China fell into disunity many times, but always moved back towards coherence. The keju / test-based meritocracy system has been in use successfully for at least 2,000 years (and I feel I should note, it’s not an elites-only thing, past the Song keju expansion ~57%+ of administrators were people whose fathers or grandfathers hadn’t been placed by the test before), with the various dynasties underneath lasting 200-500 years. The big cost here is that you remain vulnerable to hard men / steppe nomads, and indeed that’s what how the Yuan and Qing dynasties happened (the Mongols and Manchu took over and established the respective dynasties).

Imperial Rome followed a similar pattern, and crucially, wasn’t large enough to survive intact when harrowed by steppe nomads! First the Western, then the Eastern half both eventually fall, largely due to steppe nomads.

You can’t marry civic and military virtue without it devolving into empire / monarchy long term, and you can’t have merit-based succession in a “nobility rules the systems” arrangement without it devolving into civil wars and empire-fracturing whenever the top dog dies. And if you have a monarchical dynasty in a “nobility rules the systems” arrangement, you will remain vulnerable to hard men and successor quality decay. It’s the basic conundrum of civilization, and one we’ve never solved. Any solution only lasts up to 400-500 years.

I’ll note that our current arrangement, of elected politicians, independent bureaucracy, and relatively impartial merit-based educational and economic systems, is notably less proven (at 250 years) than any of the arrangements we’ve just talked about, all of which have proven they can last at least 400-500 years.

And from the highest point of view, we might even need the empire fracturing and squabbling. The only frame breaking instance in human history that finally got us out of the “taking” socioeconomic paradigm basically relied on a patchwork of tiny backwoods pugilists (Europe) squabbling for a thousand years, and incidentally inventing the world-beating social and economic technology package of time-shifting financialization, capital building and deployment, and social structures incentivizing technological innovation and deployment that the Dutch and UK perfected right before the Age of Sail and the Industrial Revolution.

Because after all, what was THE defining difference between Europe and China? China was the better bet for a thousand years! It fed more people, had more stability, reached many key technologies first, had much bigger armies and public works projects, was more stable, and was more “civilized” at the top. But ultimately it was Europe who went and conquered the known world, and China that suffered the century of humiliation.

The difference was “making” vs “taking.” “Making” involves building a bigger pie for everyone, versus simply setting up a stable system where the 1-10% of elites and nobles or merchants take from the bottom 90%, or where you make war successfully and take from outsiders. And that’s how you end up with a tiny maritime empire, Britain, eventually dominating the entire known world - their geography may be tiny, but their economic and industrial capacity wasn’t.

Taking it back to steppe nomads, as Scheidel would tell us, the only reason we’re not all eating rice in well ordered civilizations under a Chinese emperor is because Europe mostly lacked steppe nomads, and China had them.

That unstoppable “enemy at the gate” through all of Chinese history is what led to empire and unification and “valuing stability over innovation” being the main stable attractor on the sociopolitical landscape, because the alternative was getting pwned by steppe nomads and tens of millions of your people slaughtered over and over again. I wrote about the “making vs taking” dynamic and that overall story here.

Prehistory to recorded history

So the Yamnaya were the ur-steppe-nomads about 4k BC, and their initial expansion, and their descendants’ PIE / CECC expansion, leads to a 35 century penetration of most of Eurasia, and features them materially shaping, enabling, or taking over many people and empires you’ve probably heard of, from the Assyrians to the Scythians and Cimmerians and Tocharians and Cyprus the Great’s Achaemenid Persian empire, and the Phrygians, Hittites, Medes, various Greeks / Hellenic peoples, and more. We largely know this via linguistics, genetics, and archaeology, with some writing and other records on the civilized and urban sides through this period.

“In 500 BC, over the course of thirty-five centuries, Indo-European nomads had spread their languages from Europe to India. Those who peopled the central and eastern Eurasian steppes propagated a pastoral way of life based on the horse and the wheel. They transformed the steppes into a great land corridor, which would be traversed by future generations of merchants and missionaries, immigrants and conquerors. Those nomads such as the Anatolians, Tocharians, Indo-Aryans, and Persians who eventually settled new lands outside of the steppes exchanged their nomadic way of life for a settled one, based on agriculture and cities. They altered the linguistic and cultural map of Europe, the Middle East, and India. In so doing, they enriched, and even defined, the classic civilizations of Greece, the Middle East, and India.”

One of Herodotus’ nine books in his history of the entire world was dedicated to the steppe nomad Scythians, which highlights their importance and prominence. The Scythians (and their immediate descendant people, the Sarmatians) were described as tall, with european features, fair complexions, gray eyes, and reddish hair.

Mirroring the numeric mismatches we see with the Mongols and many others, they defeated Cyrus the Great, ruler of an empire of 40M people, and defined his empire’s Northeastern border. Cyrus and similar Persian kings routinely fielded armies of 250k - 750k size, with cavalry of 50k and impeccable logistics - “no state in the Western tradition ever again mobilized such large field armies until Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.” Yet the Scythians held them off with only 500k - 1M total people, and armies of only 50k - 100k. Darius of Persia, the first Darius, sent a 700k strong army out into the steppe to defeat the Scythians, and failed.

Alexander the Great, when he defeated Persia / Darius III, had the same problem as Cyrus. Wisely, he didn’t even attempt to defeat them, and instead lured a small amount (maybe 1k) of Scythian soldiers into a trap, slaughtering them, just to bloody their nose and get their attention and / or fealty, which worked wonderfully - he granted them clemency and trade rights and recruited a contingent of their horse archers for his invasion of India.

When AtG encountered the Getae, with a body of 14k horse archers who had learned their way of life from the Scythians, he had no choice but to defeat them. Fortunately, he was one of the greatest military geniuses in history, so he figured it out and it gets written about, to the benefit of countless Greeks and Romans after him.

But in classic military genius style, he first won with effort and trickery:

“Alexander reasoned that he could not secure his northern frontier unless he punished the nomads and imposed a treaty on them. At night, he led a daring crossing of one thousand five hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry, who swam across the river assisted by their leather knapsacks stuffed with straw. The Macedonians concealed themselves in a wheat field. At dawn, when the Getae descended from their camp to the northern banks of the Danube, the main Macedonian army on the river’s opposite bank greeted them with a barrage of missiles from their artillery. The Macedonians then began to cross the river in force. The Getae, with their attention fixed on the obvious threat, were thrown into confusion when Alexander and his detachment suddenly arose from among the wheat stalks and charged the Getae in the flank and rear. Audacity and surprise delivered to Alexander his first victory over nomads. The Getae submitted, and, for a generation, dared not cross the Danube.”

As an aside, the number of times that relatively simple trickery works in standout ways in military history is certainly interesting - often it seems like the old “but no, are you really trying?” and all the greats (Alexander, Genghis, Napoleon, Eugene of Savoy, etc) routinely try and try hard, and all the much-larger armies they end up routing just sort of showed up. Surely on most battlefields, the amount of places that your enemies could be forking or tricking you is so finite and enumerable that any sane scouting policy should basically eliminate trickery like this as a threat most of the time, but apparently not. But I’m sure showing up with an outnumbered army has a great way of concentrating one’s mind and motivations.

He eventually works out the tactics that inform Roman steppe nomad mitigation tactics for hundreds of years. In Roman Senator and historian Arrian’s tactical manual on how to fight steppe nomads, he stressed the importance of cavalry guarding infantry flanks and rear, large numbers of ranged weapon soldiers, and when possible, field artillery.

“Until the advent of firearms, it is no accident that every army that defeated nomadic horsemen either adapted or independently devised the tactics first used by Alexander. Chinese generals of the Han and Tang dynasties came up with comparable formations against their nomadic foes, the Xiongnu and the Gök Turks. “

Let’s hop a few thousand miles over to the Tarim basin, and the East Asian side of the steppe nomad story.

Always bet team “floofy dog”

This is a Pekingese dog. They were specifically bred for Chinese nobility around 1400 years ago, to be tiny and floofy and cute and loving indoor dogs - as adults, they’re typically 5-15 pounds. Smaller ones were literally kept in the sleeves of nobles, and my favorite breed standard and care and feeding manual, written by a Qing empress, urges you to feed them throstle eggs and clarified leopard fat when ailing, and shark fins and antelope’s milk when well.

If you think of the distance between wolves and modern dogs, this is about as far as it gets - in domestication, in size and appearance, in physical capability, in personality and temperament, in what it eats, in how it lives, every possible dimension.

Everything is connected and there are no coincidences.

One of the more fun dynamics in Chinese history is how you have these incredibly militarily skilled and hardy tribes of steppe nomads right on their doorstep, wolves of the steppe, and you have the Chinese nobility, as effete and pampered and peak urban “floofy dog” as you can get, and they actually routinely interact with each other, with Chinese gentlemen-scholar nobles making the diplomatic trek (borne in lacquered boxes by teams of slaves) out into the steppe, to drink barbaric salted tea and eat half-raw meat in their (to the Chinese) impossibly stinking and loud and uncivilized tents / camps. Conn Iggulden does a great job portraying this in his (more “vibe and feel” than strict accuracy) books.

It’s very much “tiny floofy dog” surrounded by wolves, and yet the floofy dogs rarely get torn to shreds, and indeed, if you were going to bet on who’s winning societally at any randomly selected point in time, you should essentially always bet team floofy dog.

Peak military skills are fine and all, but have you tried having an empire of ~50M people you can tax and conscript from? Sometimes quantity has a quality all its own as the man said, and that definitely plays out in history.

Why does team floofy dog usually win? They’ve got the sheer population size to survive ups and downs, and have worked out a stable attractor in “civilized empire space” that is strong enough to keep coming back to. So even if one empire gets reaved or overthrown, the next will come up, find the historical attractor, and have the time and space over deep time to work out a solution that works. The Chinese were smart enough to eventually figure out a policy of subtly and carefully sowing dissent and bestowing tribute / favor in carefully tuned and rotating ways to keep the steppe nomads at each other’s throats at all times. It largely works, for hundreds of years at a stretch!

In fact, it is exactly the realization that the Chinese have been deliberately doing this for centuries that sets a fire in Genghis Khan’s heart, with the world-dominating results we all know about today.

But that is still in the future - for now, we are going back to Qin Shi Huang Di and the very birth / unification of China.

Modu Chanyu was the OG steppe khan

So Qin Shi Huang Di is the first emperor of China, the terra cotta warrior guy, who finally unifies it around 221BC, and has the first Great Wall built at the northern border between China and Mongolia (it’s not stone at this time, it’s rammed earth). This is a formidable undertaking that takes the equivalent in logistics of fielding a 100k strong army.

So his guys build the wall. But there’s a wrinkle - there are existing steppe nomads in the verdant grasslands of northern China, the Hsiung-nu / Xiongnu (“honnu”) and others, and they would much rather be there where it’s nice, than Outer Mongolia, where it’s cold and less verdant. Nevertheless, they get poked and prodded and herded by his armies (each 300k strong!) into the steppes of Outer Mongolia, and then the wall gets staffed with many tens of thousands of peasant soldiers to prevent anyone coming back.

That’s not good enough for old QSHD / 秦始皇帝 - he then has his top general lead ridiculous 300k and 200k sized armies in succession, many hundreds of miles into the Gobi desert, to try to reave the Xiongnu and eliminate them entirely as a threat. In a brobdingnagian example of satiric understatement, we are informed “In crossing the Gobi, [general] Meng Tian encountered grueling logistical problems, and his army sustained high casualties due to dehydration, disease, and desertion.”

Of course, the steppe nomads can see (and probably smell) armies that size coming from many days away, and they are, just like it says on the tin, “nomads,” so this doesn’t go well, because they just send their home camps a little farther out, then turn around and harry the armies to death. Multiple armies in the hundreds of thousands of soldiers are lost in these efforts.

This pattern has been repeated a few times throughout history in different geographies. Some clever pants leader gets the idea “you know, the army is just sitting around this year, maybe I should finally eliminate the steppe nomad threat” and sends their armies out into the steppe, who spoiler alert, never eliminate the steppe nomad threat (they usually get eliminated instead).

QSHD’s successor decides there has to be a better way, because while he has nigh infinite supplies of peasants/soldiers, it feels like if you keep losing 300k of them at a time, along with all their training, armor, weapons, livestock, and the food and logistics trains it took to get them out there, you might eventually run out.

He comes up with “the five baits,” which is basically “screw it, just send them a bunch of nice stuff and treasure and make sure they agree to be our friends and allies.” Certainly cheaper than throwing away a half million trained, kitted, and provisioned soldiers every few years! Basically, just for agreeing to be an ally and a token submission to the emperor, the Xiongnu get silk, gold, jewelry, weapons, food, and spices (and noble Chinese wives for the top guy). Not a bad deal!

As an aside, this is likely necessary. By pushing them outwards, past the confines of the Great Wall, they pushed them into an environment with lower carrying capacity. The steppe of outer Mongolia, and the adjacent Tarim Basin areas, are not a generous environment, and in drier years, which happens often enough to be problematic, won’t produce enough grass, and thereby food, for everyone to live, particularly when the Chinese empire tries to cut off trade with the steppe nomads, which they are prone to doing. So with no trade, the steppe nomads will try to get that food (and trade rights reinstated) from the civilized urban people near them, one way or another - either by raiding and taking it, or having it gifted in tribute.

So this leads directly to the first unified confederacy of steppe nomads. Modu Chanyu is the top guy in the Xiongnu, and gets all the tribute and wives and good stuff, and then is able to pass it out to whoever he likes. Obviously, lots of other formerly divided tribes take an interest in buddying up to the guy / tribe with the pipeline of riches. With his expanded peoples / armies, he can also conquer anyone else who doesn’t go along, and, along with the fact they were all recently kicked out of northern China into the harsher environment of outer Mongolia, which many are still disgruntled about, he unifies the steppe for the first time. And he does it right! He has administrators and writing and communication lines and reforms and trains the army so it operates like a holistic unit instead of a divided rabble of tribes.

For a time, both parties prosper - Modu Chanyu is living fat and high on the hog, trade is possible from the Tarim basin and beyond, the tribute is way cheaper than throwing away giant armies like used tissue paper, everyone’s happy.

But what if, you know, you soft and effete urban floof dogs gave us even MORE? Because we steppe nomads are as hard as wolves, and we’re doing you guys this great favor of guarding your frontier and all. And indeed, “Modu Chanyu waged three decades of victorious campaigns against the Han Empire, to extort ever greater sums of tribute, or against rival nomadic tribes, who were either subjected or expelled.”

And so, the fundamental China v Steppe dynamic was born!

Maybe 500 years later, the Xiongnu Khan sacks the Chinese capital, Luoyang, and kills the emperor and disunifies China. The Xianbei, steppe nomads and former vassals of the Xiongnu, end up unifying northern China and establish a sort of “mixed” nobility culture in some areas (the northern Wei), where you need to be good at calligraphy and Confucian classics and drinking tea but ALSO good at riding and archery. Which you know, baby steps! You guys are like halfway to Heinlein’s standard of manhood / leadership! Now just learn a lot of bullshit like “conning a ship” and “programming a computer,” whatever those mean, and you’re well on your way to manhood!2

From here on, China is under the steppe-nomad established northern Wei or in warring states periods before it unifies again under the Tang Dynasty (whose elites are part Xianbei and part Han), when China gets smarter and starts doing the whole “foment divison and discord” thing so that the steppe nomads don’t unify and start milking them again, which lasts through the Liao and Jin Dynasties, both steppe nomad founded (Khitan and Jurchen respectively, with the Jurchen partially steppe nomads and partially settled people), who keep the practice up, until finally Genghis Khan unifies the Mongols and they conquer both the Jin and later the Song dynasties, becoming the Yuan dynasty. So that’s, uh, more than a thousand years(!) of various flavors of steppe nomad establishing / leading the biggest unifying dynasties in China, and keeping the rest of the steppe nomads out in the steppe squabbling with each other via diplomacy.

And just as obviously, given the turnover, the “wolf to tiny floof dog” pipeline is doing its work all along, and establishing your empire with steppe nomads doesn’t keep it hard or immune to other steppe nomads doing the same thing to you 100-200 years or so later when you go soft (the times in between the dynasties were warring states times with no big unifier).

Back in Europe

Back in Europe, around the time of the grifter-founded Han Dynasty3 which rises after QSHD’s Qin dynasty falls a mere 3 emperors later, we have the Roman Republic turning into empire, China and Rome tentatively ‘meeting’ for the first time,4 and eventually the steppe nomad Yizhie / Tocharians taking over the various Silk Road Greek cities AtG founded all over the Middle East.

But Rome is big and keeps buffer kingdoms between them and any steppe nomads, and has a history of working tactics against them, so isn’t troubled overmuch, until they fall, which is (inevitably) due to steppe nomads and decayed state capacity.

Specifically, Western Rome basically falls because of Atilla the Hun, steppe nomad, and around a thousand years later, the Eastern Empire finally falls due to the Ottoman Turks, descendants of steppe nomads.

Atilla the hun - gentleman, scholar, feminist

Atilla and his huns live large in Western memory, because they are a steppe nomad people that punched above their weight, challenging (and ultimately toppling) Rome itself.

They were so puissant they received nearly 20 thousand pounds of gold as tribute over the years from the Roman empire!

So Atilla is usually called “the Scourge of God” or some similar self-congratulatory title, because he united a steppe nomad people into an empire and then scourged the Roman empire in the early 400’s AD, extracting tribute and ultimately leading to its fall by driving hundreds of thousands of Goth and other refugees into the empire (who eventually overthrew it a few years later, after being rapaciously milked and / or randomly sold into slavery by corrupt Roman administrators), but let’s have a little fun here.

So for one, he personally knew probably 4-5 languages, and had his people transacting business and diplomacy in that many on his behalf. Alone among barbarian armies facing Rome, he knew how to sucessfully siege cities, and manage supply lines and logistics sufficient to campaign in winter.

For another, he had a great eye for talent, and like most world-conquering emperors, he got there by recognizing and rewarding talent and skill, and putting it exactly where it would benefit his aims most. This is explicitly against the model nearly all elites follow throughout all of history, which is to cram whatever random dumbass family members you have anywhere you can fit them, so your family unit as a whole can pump the most wealth and status from whatever extractive engine you’ve managed to straddle. Needless to say, this isn’t a great recipe for long term success (indeed, it basically nukes nearly every empire throughout history, is THE fundamental problem with monarchy and generational wealth, and has only been ameliorated in a handful of empires that create meritocratic systems to identify and elevate non family talent at scale).

As an example, Viminacium, a formerly wealthy Roman citizen was found in Atilla’s service, dressed in the Scythian style and speaking perfect Greek. He was originally taken in a raid, but his skills led to his freedom, a Hun wife, and admission into the ranks of Atilla’s comitatus. When asked why he was aligning himself with Atilla when he could have gone back to Rome, he points out that Atilla administers the law fairly and impartially (another steppe nomad v “civilization” trend), unlike Rome, so lol, touché. Atilla’s Roman secretary Orestes was from an aristocratic family in Pannonia (modern day Hungary) and his son eventually ends up becoming the last Roman emperor, through Orestes’ direct efforts, so also a fair amount of talent there.

And as to feminist? Surprisingly, steppe nomads overall are much more feminist than the settled agricultural societies that so fear them. In many of them, some women fight alongside men, women occasionally lead, and women definitely administer empires, with all the power that entails. Alexander the Great encounters an Amazon queen (Thalestris), who leads hundreds of female Scythian warriors. It is likely that the Greek legends about the race of Amazons are based on the real-life Sarmatian (the Scythian successor people) women warriors. So do Genghis Khan’s Mongols, they subjugate a steppe / forest people led by a female warrior queen. The wives of the Mongol empire administered so much that they became true centers of power, to the degree that it ended up being them politically infighting and struggling over which of their sons would be the next Great Khan after Ogedai, Genghis’ named heir, died.

But one more fun one, on that front, for Atilla specifically:

“The empress Honoria, the older sister of Valentinian, was forced into a marriage with a boring elderly senator after she was allegedly caught in a scandalous sexual liaison with her chamberlain. She sent her signet ring and a message to Attila, imploring him to rescue her.”

He interpeted it as a marriage proposal, immediately accepted, and demanded Gaul and Spain as his dowry, then made war when everyone tried to backpedal. Because what gentleman ignores a plea for rescue from a damsel in distress??

Also, completely reasonable of him to expect high born princesses in marriage from allies, for all that it horrified the Romans - the Chinese have been doing that for hundreds of years, it happens in the Middle East, it’s been happening for Atilla himself already, it’s very much the done thing. So accepting it and then going to rescue her was a completely reasonable move on his part! Because again, what gentleman or feminist ignores a literal call to action from a damsel in distress?

So there you go - that’s Atilla the Hun, scholar, gentleman, feminist. Historically everyone admires and wants to claim descent from Atilla! Germans, Hungarians, Bavarians, the Habsburgs(!), and even the Ottoman sultans. So you know, obviously doing something right, “Scourge of God” notwithstanding.

Atilla dies early, in his forties, by inadvertently drinking himself to death, so his empire building is cut prematurely short (celebrating his most recent marriage to a particularly hot princess, Ildico, offered by one of the peoples he conquered, once again, totally standard practice).

Death by intemperance is one of the more common means of dying for steppe nomads. It got at least 2 of Genghis Khan’s sons, including son Tolui, son and named successor Ogedai, grandson Guyuk, great grandson Abagha, numerous Mongol princes in the family tree from there, non-Mongol Atilla, and many more. Genghis Khan anticipated this, and wrote into his laws that a man shouldn’t get sloppy drunk more than 3 times a month, and ideally zero, “but where shall we find such a man?” Obviously that particular law was honored more in the breach than the observance, so where shall we find such a man, indeed.

We’re to about 400-500AD here, and there’s a lot more on the steppe nomad front, like the Magyars, who eventually take over Hungary, and the Rus, who are Swedes who came down to trade, got rich and then began emulating steppe nomad royalty and court manners, and who go on to fight the steppe nomad Pechenegs (vikings vs steppe nomads!!) and go on to found Kiev.

The next important thing that happens in this period of history is the Turks, who migrate from the Asian region and get big slightly after this, and dominate European and central steppe military capability for 500-600 years or so.

Turks

So remember the Chinese strategy of keeping a patchwork of tribes squabbling with each other? After Atilla puts the fear of god into Rome and Constantinople, particularly the surviving Byzantine / Eastern half of the empire, they do much the same.

“Foremost, successive emperors repeatedly signed and broke a bewildering web of alliances with the Avars, Khazars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and Cumans. They thereby saved Constantinople from facing a mighty nomadic confederacy under a new Scourge of God.”

But there’s no permanent solution to anything in the affairs of men, so they’re still ultimately conquered and toppled by another steppe nomad people - the Turks.

So the Turks are interesting. They start off in the Mongolia and Tarim basin areas, and overthrow the Rouran (another steppe nomad people) and scuffle with the Tang Chinese empire, and then they spread widely and split into various flavors of Turks in their respective geographies (Seljuk, Gok, Oghuz, Ottoman, etc), some of which settle down and become agricultural empires.

They invent better saddles and, crucially, better stirrups. The tech upgrade lets them be much better horse archers and heavy cavalry, and Turkish horse archers come to dominate warfare in Europe and the Middle East basically from 600 to 1200, including pwning the Byzantine empire in the battle of Manzikert, the foothold that Turks need to flood into the West.

“they were superb metallurgists, manufacturing superior helmets, chain or lamellar armor, and edged weapons. The Turks, experts in a pastoral way of life, bred the finest of Eurasian horses for endurance and speed. Henceforth, Turkish horse archers were seldom defeated by armies of the urban, literate civilizations until the advent of handheld firearms.”

Now we finally get to turn to the steppe nomad big bad in the 1200’s, the Mongols, which prior to Genghis Khan were a carefully Chinese-tuned patchwork of ever-warring small tribes.

Starving and abandoned in an icy void

So imagine you’re born to a particularly small, poor, and irrelevant tribe in this patchwork, located up higher at the edge of the steppe where the grazing is worse and everything is colder. You’re born to a poor tribe but the most prosperous family within that tribe, your dad is the khan of the tribe, and has two wives and 7 kids. BUT then your dad dies (poisoned by Tatar enemies), and life is hard enough that the new leader of your tribe casts out the two women and seven children of your family, because it’s a lean year and ain’t nobody got time or food for that many nonproductive mouths! (It was also probably partly political too.) Oh also, they take all your stuff - your sheep, your horses, your tents, your weapons. It’s all wasted on people who are going to die anyways.

So that’s your starting point. You’re abandoned as a child in the freezing void of Outer Mongolia along with 6 other kids and 2 women, with no tools or weapons or animals between you, not even a tent. Your mission is to unify the centuries-of-warring tribes into a nation and conquer the entire known world, and this is your starting point. Godspeed, and good luck!

The fact that Temujin (not Genghis yet) and his siblings survived at all is a real tribute to his moms’ and family’s grit and determination in the face of adversity (as well as his own). This is also famously thought to be part of the origins of his contempt for tribal orientation and concerns and his willingness to elevate people to leadership and responsibility without regard to their backgrounds.

But anyways, obviously he survives, and even survives being enslaved for several years and then manhunted-to-death by his former tribe after that inauspicious starting point (years later the tribe sends some men back to see if they survived, who are met with a hail of arrows from Temujin and his brothers, then they kidnap and enslave Temujin), and comes back as a nobody from nowhere at the absolute bottom of the status ladder to unify the many tribes of Mongolia into a nation.

From there, it’s the usual story - stunning feats of military acumen, conquering the entire known world, riches beyond belief or counting, systematically exterminating nests of assassins like cockroaches, all the usual stuff.

As one of the historians puts it, it’s as though America was founded by an illiterate slaves, who by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberates America from foreign rule, unites the people, creates an alphabet and constitution, establishes universal religious freedom, invents a new form of warfare, and then conquers and governs over everything from Canada to Brazil.

Interestingly, literally nobody knew any of the details of Genghis’ childhood and rise until recently. The Soviets, who had taken over outer Mongolia, harshly and repeatedly suppressed all research into Genghis Khan’s life, including suppressing anything celebrating him or Mongolian culture in general. Even a postal stamp in the sixties got cracked down on. The Secret History of the Mongols, a book written near Genghis’ lifetime in Chinese script used orthographically to indicate old Mongolian pronunciation, was just a legend that had not been translated at all - it wouldn’t be translated until the 1940’s, and not put into English until the 80’s, with the authoritative English translation published only in 2003!

This goes some way towards explaining the recent spate of books on Genghis and the Mongols, there’s a primary and authoritative new information source for English speaking scholars, and that’s why everyone is excited and writing secondary books about the topic. As an aside, it’s certainly fun to read all these tweedy academics fanboying the greatest conqueror in history, their love and admiration for the man definitely peeks through their writing. For all that we are tiny urban floof dogs, we can dream of being wolves!

Okay, so Genghis unifies the tribes, conquers the Xi Xia / Tanguts (a sort of outer-Chinese urban people who aren’t considered proper Chinese by the bigger Jin and Song empires), then conquers the 50M strong Jin dynasty, including their capital Yenking / Zhongdu / Beijing, and then retires to Mongolia, rich and replete, to enjoy the good life.

I’m eliding all the fun parts here. The impossibly larger armies they beat with clever and difficult to execute tactics, accidentally flooding themselves while trying to flood a sieged capital city, 50k young maidens dressed in white plummeting to their doom from the city walls rather than submitting to Mongol ravaging, clever tactics to break through an extremely fortified wall in the Chabchiyal cliff pass that is the only way into the riches of China, and much more. Read any of the books I mentioned above for the more detailed and fun stories.

But anyways, he came, he conquered, he got mind-boggling amounts of tribute, and now he’s gone back to Mongolia to enjoy the good life.

“Being rich” in steppe nomad terms

This is another interesting thing. What use does a steppe nomad have for gold, palaces, fancy furniture, a thousand outfits or pairs of shoes, or the other hallmarks of urban wealth?

Genghis Khan subjugates the mightiest and richest empires in the world, gets staggering amounts of tribute, much of which recurs annually, but what does that mean? For a nomadic people, wealth has a different meaning than for urban people. For one thing, whatever “stuff” you bring into your life then needs to be carted around forever, and so adds direct friction to your lifestyle (as any modern day nomads can sympathize with). Genghis and the Mongols had literal cartloads of gold laying around, which were only instrumentally useful because other settled civilizations and traders valued it. He himself always lived simply, although various descendants go on to become urban elites.

The main thing that the Mongols valued from their tribute for themselves was silk, better armor, and better steel and weapons. Also people - women of many races as wives, of course, as well as settled people with skills (doctors, musicians, engineers, etc), lots of slaves, and additional soldiers to shore up their numbers (because they always take losses while conquering, and are only ~1M people, if they didn’t keep shoring up soldiers their army would dwindle to nothing).

So the main change post-wealth for the Mongol day to day is basically more wives and slaves, better clothes and textiles, and better armor and steel implements and weapons. On that front, the Mongol women in particular got upgrades in life - from having to do much of the day to day food prep and textiles and child rearing and other “women’s work,” to having slaves do most of that, as well as getting better wardrobes, more jewelry, and so on. I wonder how many modern women might sign up for a multiple wives scheme if their lives got way easier and richer? You know what they say, happy wives, happy lives! And Genghis ends up with ~160 wives, and is the father of his nation and responsible for keeping all the 1M Mongols flush and happy, so you know, probably a good idea to keep the silks and slaves coming.

Anyways, he’s retired to the steppe, rich and replete, and is enjoying life. But then, inevitably, a call to action occurs.

An Islamic governor’s no good very bad decision

Part of what Genghis has done after conquering and getting rich is sending out teams of diplomats and merchants to establish trade and relations with far flung cities.

This is another big “steppe nomad in general” thing. They love trade! They live by it! Remember all that comitatus stuff? That shit was expensive! To be constantly gifting tens, hundreds, thousands of warriors good enough stuff they’ll literally die for you? Takes a lot of plunder, or a lot of trade, or both. Genghis’ comitatus is ten thousand warriors, by the way, or 10% of their armed forces, his own personal tuman. So anywhere steppe nomads win or set up empires, they generally encourage trade. And one of the continual “steppe vs settled” dynamics is the urban people expanding into steppe territory, and cutting off trade. Most steppe raids, incursions, or wars with settled cities or empires was more about this than plunder! Even the much feared Huns generally had really solid reasons for every military sortie they engaged in against Rome or other settled people. But I digress.

So these Mongol diplomats typically come with the standard “world beating conqueror” messages familiar to anyone who’s ever played the Civilization franchise, that typically go something like “our great leader, emperor of an impossibly large and rich and puissant empire, bids you greetings and good tidings! If you will simply acknowledge his greatness, we would love to open peaceful relations and trade.”

The governor of Otrar, a city in the Khwarazem empire, isn’t having any of this. He kills the diplomats and traders and takes their trade goods. Genghis is nothing if not reasonable, so he complains to the Sultan / Shah directly, and says “hey, your guy over there is being a dick, I’m sure you didn’t know about or condone this, so please pay us for the stuff he stole and punish him.” The Sultan isn’t about to punish his uncle, who was probably acting on his behalf, so he then kills these Mongol envoys, and brands or mutilates the remaining one’s faces and sends them back.

This is a particularly unpropitious thing to do in Mongol culture - the head is generally regarded as sacred and the seat of the soul, so anything that involves branding or altering it, or desecrating it after death, is maximally offensive and a source of great umbrage.

As Juvaini puts it “the whirlwind of anger cast dust into the eyes of patience and clemency while the fire of wrath flared up with such a flame that it drove the water from his eyes and could be quenched only by the shedding of blood.”

We would portray this in modern times as Genghis receiving an urgent note on paper whilst in an important meeting and then crumpling the note in his fist and staring fixedly into the distance, so you know, game set and match to Juvaini’s portrayal.

The Sultan / Shah of Khwarazem, the nephew of the governor of Otrar, has gigantic armies of 200k - 400k and is the local unstoppable big bad of a mighty and puissant empire spanning a good chunk of Eurasia, from the Caspian sea to the eastern borders of the Tarim basin.

So the governor’s reaction, although definitely a dick move, is relatively reasonable by his standards. Here’s some complete unknowns coming in to tell you they represent some far off king you’ve never heard of, and he wants you to acknowledge and trade with him, lest you be scourged by his mighty armies. Pffft! Get lost, we’ve got huge armies and impossible riches right here, we don’t need any of what you’re selling. And given the Sultan / Shah apparently felt the same, obviously he’s aligned with the overall vibe.

Well, it turns out to be a bad idea, because they’ve pissed Genghis off, and now he’s going to come out of retirement to roflstomp the Middle East and eventually a good chunk of the European world, right up to Hungary.

And so it goes!

As one sign of how quickly the Mongols could move, this is a particularly complex campaign that requires a good deal of planning to pull off. But Genghis does all the planning, musters his army, and teleports them ~3,000 miles from Karakorum to the Jaxartes river on the Shah’s border before the Shah is even able to mobilize his own ponderous army. From the Shah’s point of view, he executes some upstart diplomats, starts mustering his army, and before he can even get that done, the opposing army is there, on his doorstep already.

The Mongols come in, siege Otrar, turn around and destroy the Shah’s much-larger armies, siege and conquer and destroy various cities, and eventually subjugate the entire Khwarizmian empire, showing them what REAL god-kinging is all about. Genghis even has rivers diverted to entirely obliterate the birth places of the Shah and his family, which I suppose is a globe-straddling god-emperor wolf’s way of marking his territory and showing contempt for his enemies.

Once again, leaving all the fun parts out - sieging Otrar, fighting war elephants for the first time, having to sacrifice 5k Mongols as a rearguard to prevent some of the Otrar forces flanking and attacking the Mongols from the back while they destroy the Shah’s much larger army, harrying the Shah and his sons for months and hundreds of miles as they continually flee until the Shah finally dies on a tiny desert island in the Caspian sea, and much more.

They also siege and systematically level the infamous Order of Assassin’s Alamut castle stronghold in the mountains of Iran, probably because the Shah or one of the Khwarazem royals paid for an unsuccessful assassin’s contract on Genghis’ head, which remains unsuccessful because he goes and kills them all and levels their fortress. You can just do things, or so they say in our debased and fallen (and entirely steppe-nomadless) modern times. Famously, not even Saladin could take on the assassins.

Genghis’ descendants (notably Hulegu and Batu) then go on to conquer more of this part of the world including the Persian empire and much of Eastern Europe, much like other descendants extend his Jin dynasty subjugation to the Song dynasty in the south, eventually conquering and unifying all of China, creating the Yuan dynasty.

“Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as any man in history.”

Mongols did line up against (and completely obliterate) several armies-worth of the cream of Christian knighthood, by the way. So heavily armored knights on giant horses is no answer (as Crécy and Agincourt show the Europeans 100 and 200 years later), for all that it was the dominant warfare modality in Europe for so many years.

Ultimately the Mongols conquered all of Eastern Europe and intruded as far as the Austria-Hungary region. They largely left off because the Europeans were so poor relative to the Middle Eastern and Chinese cities they were hardly worth conquering, and the steppe runs out past Hungary, so it was becoming more trouble than it was worth.

“European knighthood never recovered from the blow of losing nearly one hundred thousand soldiers in Hungary and Poland, what the Europeans mourned as ‘the flower’ of their knighthood and aristocracy. Walled cities and heavily armored knights were finished, and in the smoke and gunpowder of that Easter season of 1241, the Mongol triumph portended the coming total destruction of European feudalism and the Middle Ages.”

What it means to be conquered by the Mongols

It was actually a pretty great deal!

The Pax Mongolica ensured that nobody wasted resources and efforts on militaries and wars (any word of any force of soldiers moving anywhere in the empire would have 10,000 / a tuman of Mongol soldiers show up quickly) and enjoyed widespread peace and trade across the huge region that the Mongolian Empire covered. You know what economists say, it’s either guns or butter, and when you can’t make any guns, I guess that means you become rich in butter.

If you survived the conquering, generally your taxes went down, you were free to practice your religion no matter what it was, no minorities got pogrommed, trade and prosperity goes up, various foodstuffs and technologies transfer across the region, the enforcement of the law is more even and impartial, and you get plugged into a Eurasia-spanning trade network continually pipelining exotic and valuable things back and forth.

“In nearly every country touched by the Mongols, the initial destruction and shock of conquest by an unknown and barbaric tribe yielded quickly to an unprecendented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and improved civilization.”

This is one of the most interesting things about Genghis Khan. I’ve written about “making” versus “taking” before. He wasn’t a “maker” by most definitions. His primary skillset revolved around destroying armies, cities, and empires, and he was the best in the world at that, arguably the best in all of history. And yet, unlike most other steppe conquerors, he didn’t just take booty and run back to the steppe to enjoy it, leaving urban destruction in his wake. He twigged onto the basic dynamic and flaw behind doing this really early - of what use is taking a year or three to siege and conquer one city, if the rest of the empire is just going to raise more soldiers and repopulate that city as soon as you turn around? It’s a self-perpetuating threat at your back, and the Chinese had already proved that they are more than adept enough to disunify the steppe people and keep them internally warring. The nation that he’d unified and created would surely decay and disappear, and then what was all of the work even FOR? A bunch of physical stuff he didn’t even want or value that highly? Cartloads of gold? Of what use has a Mongol for cartloads of gold? It won’t make weapons, you can’t eat it, or feed sheep or cows or horses with it. No, if your work’s primary threat is an empire, the only solution is creating an empire yourself, to preserve the work and your nation and people.

And so:

He unified the Mongols into one people and country, he created a bigger empire than anyone before or since, he encouraged and established trade and technology flows across all of Eurasia, he administered the law impartially and fairly, he was the most religiously tolerant leaders at his scale ever, and living under the Mongols was generally a better deal for the people of an empire than under their own elites, because those elites would consider themselves above the law and have more extractive taxes and less rights for their people, as well as constantly pushing them into a bunch of pointless religious wars. He left such an indelible mark on the societies of the world that he left numerous descendants across all of Eurasia to this very day.

One last little lagniappe that Genghis left for Western civilization:

“In the twentieth century, Arab politicians even assured their followers that Muslims would have invented the atomic bomb before the Americans if only the Mongols had not burned the Arabs’ magnificent libraries and leveled their cities.”

Lol. Thanks GK, you da real MVP!

So yes, Baghdad, and the Islamic Ilkhanate area in general, was indeed the world’s center of learning and scholarship at the time, and the famous libraries of Bagdhad did burn when conquered by the Mongols, and it was likely a greater loss than the Library of Alexandria burning. A great tragedy indeed, but c’mon guys, that doesn’t mean you speedrun nukes before Oppehnheimer and Szilard and von Neumann and the unique concentration of genius and wealth and state capacity and motivation that led to the Manhattan Project succeeding when it did.

But all told, not a bad legacy for anyone, and certainly a better record even on the “human flourishing” metric than many conquerors and kings.

So SURE the Mongols killed something like 10% of the entire world’s population at the time, and if anyone deserves to to be called the “Scourge of God,” it’s probably Genghis (who did indeed point to his conquests as signs of god’s favor). But for the people remaining in the empire, everyone got way better off for several generations at least, AND those 10% weren’t exactly likely to die a peaceful death in old age in the counterfactual scenario, because the alternative was warring and squabbling with lesser enemies that will still attrite your forces and peoples, continually getting into religious wars, and whose elites will be more extractive after any conquering anyways.

So maybe a case of not being able to make omelettes without breaking a few eggs, who knows?

The post Genghis world

So you’ve got this impossibly rich and well-running empire, what do you do now?

“Succession” is THE killer of empires, after all, because what always happens is a bunch of much-less-talented also-ran kids and grandkids all get into their heads that they should be the next great big bad, so screw you Uncle Jimmy and cousin Timmy, and definitely screw Aunt Caroline, she shouldn’t be in charge of a kebab shop, much less an empire! Give me that crown! And so it always goes, with the descendants descending into internecine squabbling, civil war, and division and mistrust.

After Genghis and his named heir Ogedai’s death, the empire splits up into 4 main regions, with descendants from different branches of the family taking over and leading each region.

Interestingly, the Golden Family, as they’re known, have a system worked out where each one is basically a shareholder in the empire overall, with each one entitled to and getting various goods from across the empire. So this would be something like being entitled to a certain amount of cattle and sheep from the steppe, and sables and other furs from Eastern Europe, silks and rice and rice wine from China, and wine and Damascus steel from the Middle East. So just to accomplish that division of goods, they need robust trade and communication networks, even if they’ve hunkered down in their respective fiefs to keep Uncle Jimmy’s and Aunt Caroline’s meddlings away.

This works for about a hundred years, when the Black Death erupts onto the scene like a medieval kool-aid man / grim reaper hybrid and disrupts everything, leading to 20-33% of people across the entire empire dying, massive civil and urban disunion and turmoil, and the communication and trade lines breaking up. Whoops.

As a fun aside, one of the things Christopher Columbus was pitching was finding far-off Cathay, the “Xanadu of Kublai Khan” as spoken of in Marco Polo’s famous missive, because they assumed that famously tolerant and open-to-foreigners-and-trade empire was still rolling along and Europe just hadn’t heard anything about them because the Black Death had disrupted trade and communication. It was neither tolerant nor open to Europeans and other outsiders any more, the Ming explicitly turned strongly inward, which ultimately leads to the century of humiliation, but thems the breaks. Hardly matters when he discovers the Americas instead.

The Mongols and Genghis in general were extremely well regarded by Europe at the time of Chaucer and later in the Renaissance (and at the time of Colombus), and it was only when Voltaire started using them as a foil to complain about the French king and nobility that they began their slide in public opinion towards “a bunch of godless, bloodthirsty heathens,” which was the Enlightenment-and-later consensus on them, to the extent that Down’s syndrome kids were known as “Mongoloids” within living memory, literally like they are another race entirely, ie surprise Mongols showing up as throwbacks due to the Mongol rapine and bloodline introgression into fine European stock so long ago. Lol, and that’s “doctoring” for you, isn’t it?

Anyways, direct descendants of Genghis’ line largely lose their mojo after the black death kills everybody, and although some of them hold on clear through 1944(!) in various tiny principalities, the heyday of the Mongol empire / unification only lasts around 100 years.

We’re approaching the tail end of the steppe nomad story, so let’s just briefly hit two more high points.

Tamerlane’s dinner party advice

Tamerlane / Timur the Lame is briefly worth a mention because he conquers a lot of people after the Black Death and subsequent rebound, with the explicit end of restoring the Mongol empire, ultimately the greatest and most peaceful empire throughout history, and he does it in particularly sadistic and bloodthirsty ways.

Mongols were pretty progressive, at least for a people that killed 10% of the world’s population. They didn’t believe in torture, unlike many of the settled societies they conquered, and did away with various punishments like torture, branding, cutting off limbs, tattoing criminal’s faces and necks, and more in the places they ruled. Largely, Genghis truly did seem to scourge cities and kill their inhabitants as a genuine communication and propaganda effort, because he believed it would ultimately save Mongol lives and make his conquering easier by encouraging future surrender, and this incidentally ultimately saved urban lives as well.

So the infamous (and likely apocryphal) “3 tent” system: the white tent goes up, and that means you can surrender now and everything will be fine, your leaders get to keep leading, and they’ll just have to pay some tribute. The red tent goes up next, and means all your leaders and soldiers and men will be killed, but your women and children spared (but enslaved). Finally, if the black tent goes up, everyone in the city is going to die, women and children included. I’d note that the bare reputation of completely exterminating a nearby city is probably at least as effective as the literal tents, if they were apocryphal, and on the "white tent” side, he did nearly always offer submission and tribute as an option (not to Otrar though, don’t piss off a steppe wolf god king).

So the handful of times Genghis black-tented / killed everyone, it was generally a genuine attempt “pour encourager les autres,” to make future cities more eager and willing to surrender immediately. And it worked! Cities would generally start immediately rolling over after the Mongols kill everyone in a holdout city, to their great benefit. It’s also a stirring testament to the overweening greed and general dickery of the various elites, with how often they would refuse submission, literally risking every inhabitant of the city’s lives just to get out of paying some tribute, but that’s royalty everywhere for you, isn’t it?

Tamerlane is another kettle of fish. He publically tortures enemies, piles up pyramids of skulls outside conquered cities, and gets up to various hijinks, like harnessing a conquered sultan like an animal to pull his royal chariot, exhibiting enemies in cages, or forcing conquered leaders to watch as his wives and daughters “served Timur naked at dinner, and in some reports, satisfied his sexual demands.” OH, it’s one of those dinner parties, lol.

This actually contributes to the decline of Mongol reputation. As a Mongol explicitly trying to restore the Mongol empire, and marrying into Genghis’ lines as he conquers the world, this is perhaps not surprising, but a lot of these sorts of sadistic hijinks get retroactively credited to Genghis Khan’s Mongols, too.

Although, just like Genghis, his empire doesn’t remain unified past his death, Tamerlane’s 3rd-g-grandson (and Genghis Khan’s 13th-g-grandson) Babur DID establish the Moghul empire in India in the 1520’s, which reaches an artistic and cultural peak in the early 1600’s (the Taj Mahal guy was Mughal), and a geographic peak in the early 1700’s covering most of India, and goes on to reign until 1857(!), when the British displace them.

Like the title says - steppe nomads (or their urban descendants) rule nearly everything in Eurasia at some point!

Combined with Kublai Khan and his descendants’ expansion into Southeast Asia, steppe nomads or their urban descendants basically get all of Eurasia except for the core western EU region and Japan.

The Ottomans

So remember Turks being the frontier of warfare in Europe until 1200 or so? They’re dominated by the Mongols, who are truly unstoppable under Genghis, but once the Mongol empire dissolves after the Black Death, the Turks are the hardiest wolves on the steppe.

Various Turks conquer and hold pretty sizeable areas out in the steppe for a while, including becoming the major players in the Golden Horde khanate after the Black Death, but because they practice lateral succession, every time the main guy dies, their khaganates descend into civil war and fracture, so they’re largely too busy squabbling with themselves to unify enough to accomplish or hold anything significant. More importantly, most countries at the time are smart enough to hire various Turks as mercenaries in their armies, so nobody has an overwhelming advantage.

But eventually the Ottoman Turks settle and grow and skill up enough to take Constantinople, leading to the ultimate end of the Eastern Roman / Byzantine empire, in the mid 1400’s. Steppe nomads apparently come for us all, even if they have to settle and get big on a diet of agriculture for a while to do so (and indeed the Ottomans were particularly known for their cataphracti cavalry, and for having or partnering with horse archers).

After that, the Ottomans, like the Mongols before them, are one of the people that came within inches of conquering Western Europe, as recently as 1683(!), which I’ve written about before here.

The end of an era

So steppe nomads are an impossible superweapon for millenia, but then gradually become irrelevant as the age of gunpowder, the Age of Sail, and industrialization really takes off. Horse archers, impressive though they may be, just don’t measure up against muskets, artillery, and eventual ICBM’s, and land empires gradually give way to maritime empires as the naval trade and military capabilities of the European countries reshapes the world.

I will note that for hundreds of years, muskets and artillery and cannons existed and were used on the battlefield along with horses and jousting / heavy cavalry! Pizarro conquers Peru in the 1500’s mainly by the expedient of jousting on horseback, even though he also has muskets and cannons.

It might also be noted that contrary to most people’s images of them, the Mongols themselves had gunpowder and grenades, and even proto-cannons, and are the ones who first brought those things to European warfare!

“The Mongols had changed the formula of gunpowder to provide enough oxygen to make it ignite in one rapid blast rather than in the traditional slow burn of the firelance or of rockets. Such instantaneous burning produced an explosion rather than a fire, and the Mongols harnessed these explosions to hurl a variety of projectiles.”

The evolution of gunpowder technology and tactics takes many hundreds of years (and the Industrial Revolution) to really dominate warfare, but it does get there eventually, at which point steppe nomads and horse archers are no longer a relevant military force worldwide.

I will briefly note that the Pontic steppe is once more giving birth to an unstoppable tier of war technology allowing smaller nations with more mobile tactics to dominate 3-6x larger ones, as the drone warfare in Ukraine has led to a complete change in strategy and tactics and technologies that will (once again) need to be adopted by every country in the world to remain militarily relevant, so even if history doesn’t strictly repeat, we can at least notice it rhyming in fun ways!

We also might wonder a bit more about the Pontic Steppe environment and the types of people it shapes / produces such that it keeps reliably doing this.

The last true steppe nomad khan is the leader of the Dzungar Khanate (Western Mongols) in the mid 1700’s. The Dzungar fight a massive, multi-decade war against the Khazaks and the Qing Dynasty for control of the Eurasian steppe, but the Qing ally with Russia and go and wipe them all out when they (sigh) descend into internecine squabbling over who should lead after the last khan dies.

The long reign of pastoralists who can punch hugely above their weight finally passes, and the urban floof dogs of the world all breathe a collective sigh of relief - our time of trials has passed at last! No more shall the steppe wolves pace ominously at our door, emperiling our quiet and civilized lifestyles!

Now where are those throstle eggs?

Probably the longest I’ve detrained is 12 - 18 months. I think my mean detraining time is probably a little over 6 months.

I recently detrained again, after a kidney stone turned into a perpetual gout flareup that led to me not being able to walk or exercise or eat anything but eggs and cheese for 3 months, during which I lost ~35 pounds. A surgery to remove the stone eventually got me to the point I wasn’t thrashing in pain most of the day, and could eat and exercise again. So, ~5 months after my problem started, I am human again!

So it’s time to Do the Thing and regain 30 pounds of muscle, along with my strength, which declined around 30% by the big 3 lifts total (squat, bench, deadlift).

I suppose I’ve done this more often than most people at this point, so I’ve put together this article with my tips, tricks, and learnings, as I begin my climb up that mountain once again.

The Tripod

The 3 factors you need for ANY training goal, whether it be strength, hypertrophy, or cardio, are simple.

Eat. Sleep. Train. Repeat.

They’re all roughly equal in importance. If you slack on any one of them, you are doing you and your training a disservice, and wasting either some or all of the work and hard effort you put into your training sessions.

You also need to make sure you have all three dialed in before focusing on optimizing anything else, because everything else is basically rounding error when it comes to how much it will impact your final fitness compared to these. Everyone wants to slack on sleep, or eat a lot of easy unmetered restaurant / fast food meals, but you’re doing yourself at least some degree of disservice if you do that, and are slowing down your rebound. Cheat meals are fine, especially when you’re bulking, but if you’re eating a lot of unmetered outside-of-home calories, you’re going to end up dirty bulking. Your body also runs on nutrients, especially if you’re trying to exercise a lot to add back a lot of mass, so eating stuff with high quality ingredients and fruits and vegetables is an even better idea than usual when you’re trying to rebound.

Eating - if you are interested in adding back muscle, you need to bulk, so you need to be eating at a surplus. I’ve been counting macros and calories for decades by this point, and it’s second nature. It is better to count when rebounding, but not wholly necessary, and the reason it’s better is because then you can ensure you’re at only 250 - 500 calories per day extra (for 0.5 - 1 pounds of mass added per week). The reason you want to do that is you only want to add <0.5% of your body weight per week, because anything above that is adding considerably more fat than muscle, which you’ll have to cut longer and harder to burn off. But if you keep your bulk clean, you can generally arrive at the end with your mass back and still-visible abs (or whatever your usual “fit” baseline is), or at most will need a mini cut of ~1-2 weeks to get there.

But that will take forever, you might say! If I add only a pound of mass per week, it will take me 20-30 weeks to get back into fighting shape! Ain’t nobody got time for that!

And here I will counsel both patience and faith in the process - generally a good chunk of the weight loss is things like water weight / glycogen rather than mass qua mass, and once you’re back on track with the tripod, you’re going to add more than you think, faster than you think. It will be fine.

The easy non-counting way to do this is to add 1-3 protein shakes to whatever else you’re eating per day, and that will also let you get more daily protein, which is key to adding back muscle. You want to be on the high end of protein for a rebuild like this, I shoot for at least a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, and generally come in between 1 - 1.5g per. lb per day. Entire books and numerous studies have been written about how protein is the largest bottleneck when it comes to hypertrophy - simply eating more protein revolutionized bodybuilding in the 60’s. It behooves you to stay on top of it any time you’re trying to add muscle.

I’ll also note here that you probably need to eat more extra calories than you think. Yes, 500 extra calories a day will net 1lb a week, but if you’re building back mass and strength, your workout load and energy output is also going to increase, and keep increasing. I burn more than most people in my workouts, but even if you’re burning half that and burn ~500 calories per workout, that means you need to eat at a 1k calorie surplus per day!

Calorie maxxing tip: If you’re on the higher “calorie needs” end of things (this is always me), when I’m bulking, I put 1-2 tbsp of olive oil, the protein, some Kate Farms or mass gainer powder, and my daily creatine split up across however many shakes I’m drinking that day, and I vary the calories from 300 to 800 per shake depending on my TDEE and activity levels. You can do the same. Count once, to dial in a shake or 3 of the right excess calories, add those to your day, and forget it.

Wait, 800 per shake, am I tanking 2400 calories extra per day?? No, I burn 700-1.3k calories every Zone 2 rucking session, and 1k calories every lifting session, both according to my Polar heart rate monitor. My TDEE is crazy high, I have to tank 4k - 5k calories a day every time I’m doing this. If you want some other high calorie, low volume recipes, I’ve got some here. The key is adding cheese or bacon or heavy cream to savory dishes, and eating lots of low volume, high calorie stuff, like shakes or chia puddings.

Sleep - so you want to put conscious effort into optimizing your sleep. That means practicing good sleep hygiene, it means blocking an extra hour in the amount of time you’re allocating for being in bed, it means not scrolling your phone before you sleep, it means getting your partner and / or family on board with respecting your sleep prioritization and quality a little more than usual in this time window. Don’t experiment or get fancy, just do what you know works, and do more of it.

Train - you want to start low and slow, and dial “where you are now” in, then use a program you know works with built in progression. I personally always regress back to basic 531. You’re going to make much faster progress than you did when first adding that muscle, and progress much faster than even a newbie in the “newbie gains” phase would get. Like I’ll often run through a month’s worth of 531 progress in a week in the middle of a rebound (because I’ll bench and squat 3x a week each and skip the deload weeks). When you’re reclaiming what you once had, your body is primed to reward your efforts pretty generously and the physique you’re headed back to is an attractor in your own physiological space that your body knows on several levels and can more easily reach again.

Training load

You want to cut your training load to anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 your usual volume.

As an example, when I’m on top of things, I like to do 4 lifting sessions per week, and 2 intense or longer Zone 4-5 cardio sessions and 7-10 hours of Zone 2 cardio. I told you my TDEE was crazy high!

That’s too much load for somebody rebuilding a lot of muscle mass. You don’t have the mitochondria, the baseline glycogen, and the mental and physiological reserves to put out your usual training routine when you’re rebounding. It’s also too hard to eat all that back, plus a surplus.

So the first thing I try to do is cut training volume in half. For lifting, basic 531 is great for that, and it’s why I regress to it - it’s super low volume if you’re not doing BBB or hero’s quotients or any add-ons like that, so it’s just right. Cut cardio session times in half, too. If you’re still not recovering, ie your numbers aren’t going up in each subsequent session, or you can tell it’s too much, start cutting sessions, ultimately cutting out half of them in the limit. That would be 1/4 your usual load.

Dial it in - for your first session back after a hiatus, you want to dial in where you are now, to understand how much strength you’ve lost. Whether you take it to your 5 rep max or your 1 rep max is up to you, I usually take it to heavy doubles, to play it safe.

But basically, start slow, then add just 10 pounds (bench) or 20 pounds (squat or deadlift) at a time, and go up the weight ladder as far as you can, doing only 3-5 reps per set while building to heavies. Wherever you stop, you can either SWAG it or put it in a calculator to get your 1RM if the program you’re using is based on that.

Routines and volume timelines

So you’re going to be on a fairly fast-moving frontier of gains and recovery if you’re doing your tripod right. You will be able to increase quickly, which is why I recommend starting at 1/4 to 1/2 your usual volume - it doesn’t matter that it’s that low, you’ll be raising the floor forthwith.

The real question is how to balance how much you can add and still be in a recoverable amount of output. You want to be right at or barely under your MRV, or maximum recoverable volume, and that’s a quickly moving target. For more on MRV and hypertrophy optimization in general, see my comprehensive “more than you wanted to know” post on it here, based on Renaissance Periodization’s work, and supplemented with my own advice and examples.

For volume and progression, nobody will know your own body better than yourself, but some cues I look for are: level of DOMS, energy level when waking up, energy level after morning coffee and / or cardio, and overall life engagement / joie de vivre.

The DOMS is pretty bad when you’re rebounding like this - I don’t know quite why, and maybe this is a “me” thing, but even at the 1/4 volumes, my legs are nuked for a good 2-3 days after leg day for at least a month, and I have to carefully plan heavy and volume squat sessions to accommodate it and still build up to 2-3 sessions a week. And that’s with only squats, no accessories!

So I wouldn’t overindex on DOMS specifically, as is usually the case with DOMS, you can get bench or back or upper body workouts just fine even when you can barely walk or sit down smoothly.

Generally if my energy is good and I’m adding weight each session, I’ll start slipping in hero’s quotients (where you go up to heavy doubles or a single on your putatively last set, then take it back to 75% of your 1rm and do 10 reps there as your actual finishing set), or add a volume drop set, or 3 sets of an extra accessory for the day targeting the same area. Eventually I go back to adding BBB (5x10 volume sets as a finisher after the heavy double or single).

Basically, add an attainable finisher, then keep expanding that, eventually going to adding 3 new sets of accessories, then 5 sets of volume finishers. By doing just an incremental step per workout on that front, you get to see your recovery and whether you’re still adding weight to the bar at each one, and as long as both are good, you keep adding. If you start slipping on recovery or stall out on weight, take the finishers back one notch.

In the limits here, you get back to the ~25 sets per workout across all muscle groups that’s about the max you can do usefully in a single workout, as specified in the “more than you wanted to know” hypertrophy post.

Supplements

Creatine is the only supplement that’s indisputably worth it, and I recommend doubling down on it, ie taking 10g a day instead of 5g, split across 2-3 protein shakes. A lot of the weight loss is glycogen loss, and the creatine will help replenish that, and keep your recovery and energy on track.

Outside of the narrow confines of “supplements” - “Vitamin T,” or good old fashioned gear / testosterone, is obviously even MORE strongly worth it. In RCT’s, guys add 10lbs of muscle without even exercising, and 20lbs with exercise! Obviously this can be an immense multiplier on your journey to add back muscle mass. It massively adds to both your recovery capacity and your work capacity (not to mention quality of life and joie de vivre!).

The two easiest ways to get it are 1) going up to the biggest, meanest looking dude in the gym and striking up a rapport over a few weeks, then eventually asking him “Bro, do you know where I could find <look around shiftily> Vitamin T?” Or 2) go to a clinic and get a fully legal prescription, the attainment of which might or might not be enhanced by definitely not doing the things that I recommend against here in my full post about testosterone’s risks, benefits, monitoring, and mitigations.

Back to the protein point - this is my own chart, created from data in Taylor’s Anabolic Steroids and the Athlete, 2nd edition:

You can clearly see that both protein and testosterone / steroids are significantly anabolic, and that there are significant returns to more protein the harder you are able to train / recover (and hit the gear, but a good chunk of gear’s anabolic effects, around half, are driven by the ability to train harder and longer and recover better. This is to say a sufficiently motivated and protein-happy natty athlete can also get at least half these effects with enough discipline and attention to the tripod, and yes, I was that athlete, I built my physique and competed completely clean, and only began dabbling in the dark arts when older and after retiring from competition, and at least three of my rebuilds were natty, so I know that road both ways).

I might also note that this is “new” muscle, and “rebound” muscle happens much more quickly (I’d estimate ~2x-3x faster than the chart), but a high protein intake is key in both cases.

Muscle return timelines

It’s pretty fun to see the muscle return. You go from your regular pants falling off of you and skinny little legs and arms back to everything fitting and filling out and feeling like yourself again, it’s great.

Because a lot of it is glycogen and other stuff, you’re going to get back to your target weight pretty quickly (and the way I know this is because I track my calories and my TDEE, and I’ll hit “80% of the weight is back” when I’ve only eaten enough surplus for ~50% of the weight to be back in the form of muscle mass).

I think the shortest it’s ever been for me is ~5 weeks for ~20 pounds on a dirty bulk (at ~2lbs per week, or 1k calories per day surplus, so half was mass, and half was glycogen and other stuff), and the longest has been 5-6 months for ~30 pounds on a clean bulk with other stuff in life going on, so I couldn’t get quite the workout volume I wanted.

Which if you think about it, either one of those timelines is amazing compared to the amount of time it took to add that muscle in the first place. That should give you an idea of what’s possible if you’re able to dial in your tripod.

Strength return timelines

Sadly, strength always takes longer to return, generally 2x as long as the mass itself. You generally have a sharp elbow back to a weight that feels “heavy,” then a slower upward crawl from there. At least for myself, you still make amazing progress here though, compared to how long it takes to progress to a strength level you haven’t been at before.

I’m probably happiest when I’m between 2/3/4 and 3/4/5 plates in terms of bench / squat / deadlift (if those numbers seem high, I was a regionally competitive strength athlete when younger). Any higher than that and my quads start getting too wide and interfere with cardio too much, because it breaks the most efficient form and gait for me, which involves my feet being pretty close together. Honestly, even leveling off at 1100 can be hazardous to my cardio form if I’m not fully cut, because if I have a higher body fat than usual at this level it happens too.

So I generally end up having to work back from something like a ~700 lb debilitated total to the 1000 - 1200 lbs total I like to plateau to as my walking around strength. Usually it would take years to add 300 - 500 lbs to your total, but because it’s somewhere I’ve been before, it happens pretty fast.

Generally, I can add 5-10 lbs to bench per week for 2 months, and 10-20 lbs per squat, and usually more per deadlift session, I usually get pretty big 50-80lb jumps there up until 4 plates again, then level off at having to add 10-20 lbs per session. Then it’s just a matter of putting the sessions in, and keeping the volume low enough to be recoverable. But I can just show you a “rebound” curve, because I keep logs, although some of these are 2rm totals rather than 1rm totals:

So there from about August 2024 to Nov 2024 I was heavy in triathlon training and peaking for the race, then decided to gain weight and strength back starting in Dec, so that’s a rebound curve. Sadly, I don’t log my body weight in text often enough to have a weight curve to show, I usually just weigh in at the gym and it’s in my head. I usually walk around at 180-195lbs (83 - 87kg), and competed at 181 / 83kg weight class back in the day, and feel like this is a nice relatively lean weight where I can still do sprints or longer form cardio pretty comfortably.

You see pretty quick progress, then I have a 6 month data gap because I’m disorganized and was kind of all over in that window (Taiwan, Dallas, Nashville, Peru). But I was working out in 3 of those places for sure, I just misplaced the log somehow (I just have a bunch of .txt or .md notes with these logs, and just threw them all into an AI to generate this graph. To Gemini’s credit, it seamlessly handled bench being called any of bench/ conventional bench / flat bench, and about half the workouts being in kg versus pounds and not terribly clearly labeled to make this graph).

I’m pretty sure I had split those months out into an “H2 2025 workout log” note and just can’t find it right now, but it would have shown another dip and rise up to the Dec 2025 data points, because that was another, lesser rebound for me. And that final dip at the end in the graph is my recent kidney stone / gout problem showing up! Well, hopefully I’ll have another rebound to show for 2026 in a few months.

So on strength, I’d counsel just following the program, whatever program you follow. It has safe, built-in progression at an appropriate pace, and your main lever should be adding sessions, finishing sets, and / or doing both upper and lower in a workout.

Like I said, I do 531 here. I squat and bench several times per week so progression is never a problem on those, but only do deadlift 1x per week, so on that I just keep going on the x5 and x3 and x1 final sets - if I get the weight and had good bar velocity, I’ll add another 10-20lbs and go for the x5 or 3 or 1 again, and keep going, and that’s how I keep progression fast on deadlift.

Summa

Ok, let’s recap.

DO: optimize your eating, sleeping, and training tripod. As in, block extra time and attention to get all 3 right, because you need all 3 to have a solid foundation for progress. Eat at a surplus, ideally by adding 1-3 appropriate calorie protein shakes, or if you don’t do that, make sure you’re eating lots of protein daily.

DO: Target 0.5% body weight gain per week, which for most people is a 200 - 600 calorie daily surplus. You need to log your weight daily and under the same circumstances (generally in the morning after going to the bathroom) to know this. You also probably need to eat above what you think, because your energy output and training volume should be increased and increasing each week / month. 1 pound a week would be 500 calories extra per day, but if you also burn 500 calories more in workouts, you actually need 1k extra calories per day! Also, definitely keep eating the surplus on recovery days with no workout, that’s when you need the calories the most, because your body is literally doing the rebuilding on those days.

DO: take creatine, even doubling it up, and testosterone if you’ve evaluated the risks and benefits and decided it’s worth it at whatever dose (it’s very strongly worth it, look at the studies).

DO: start slow, dial in where you’re at, and follow a 1/4 to 1/2 volume program with built in progression from there.

DO: add finishers and additional accessories on top of your main minimal program, while monitoring your recovery and whether you’re still adding weight for each workout. Ultimately work up to the ~25 sets per workout and the advice in the “much more than you wanted to know” hypertrophy post.

As long as you’re hitting those points, you can just sort of go into “execution mode” and enjoy the journey! You’ll be hitting milestones you’ve hit before and generally know the terrain, so you can let unconscious habits take over and enjoy the ride as you visibly get bigger and more muscular on a weekly basis.

Also, once you’ve done this a few times you worry a lot less about losing “months or years of work” (this is me, I’ve agonized about this entirely unnecessarily several times) if you pivot to more cardio-heavy training or just need to get heads down on executing life stuff.

Because yes, you do lose months of work really quickly, that’s how fitness works, it’s an eternal Red Queen’s mountain that you need to keep climbing just to stay in place on. It’s like the man said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

“Fitness” is floored by what you actually do regularly, so if you want your fitness to be higher than most people’s, you achieve that by doing more than most people regularly. But you can also gain it back fairly quickly, so you don’t need to stress overmuch.

That post started off as a conjoined review and explication of why we can now optimize towards more subjective and qualitative goals, and it was running long (I try to cap my posts at 20 min, and rarely go to 30 min reading time), so I decided to separate the review and the idea.

This is the review of the book.

The book in question

Was C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, and nearly the whole time I was reading I was on a knife edge, because the author seems like somebody that I would personally really love, or really hate. I know it might seem strange to judge a book by one’s personal impression of the author, but he truthfully invites it, because the entire book is driven by personal anecdotes and his personal values and proclivities.

On the minus side, he’s an academic, and a philosopher at that, and an avid gamer and general frivolous-things enjoyer. All things that don’t really end up in my social circles for various good reasons.

On the plus side, he’s got broad and wide ranging interests, seeks depth and mastery in a lot of them, and really vibrantly enjoys life. He likes cooking and rock climbing, both highly ranked in my own hobby tier list, and it sounds like he’s genuinely good at assembling fun social circles and having a great time with them. All super valuable, and certainly a road to a life well lived!

And who am I to besmirch gamers, when Zvi himself, among others in our circles, are avid gamers? Well, we’ll get to that.

The book itself is an interesting mix of blindly obvious (guys, Moloch exists, doesn’t that suck?), personal anecdotes, and seemingly being *about* to reveal a solution for most of it, while steadfastly not delivering. Well, I guess that’s a philosopher for you!

But, spoiler alert, his answer to Moloch is that people should play more games. “Hey guys, the gamer guy thinks we should all play more games!” Are we surprised yet?

Much like Sailer’s first law of female journalism, which avers that the most heartfelt pieces will always be one describing some new and better social arrangement such that the author of the piece would be more desirable in that better future, we see a heartfelt argument from a gamer who suggests a future where gaming is higher status and a bunch of noobs enter to be wowed by their more experienced betters. Do we think that’s anything like a realistic or even marginally useful answer? Yeah, me neither.

Much like my review of The Tyranny of Meritocracy, this ended up being a hate read where I agreed with most of his theses and stipulations and interpretations in terms of bad results in the world, but vehemently disagreed with how he thought of things, how he framed and presented them, his values and philosophy overall, and his particular solutions, such as they may be.

On that note, you can see why the book has seen such popularity too. Who doesn’t love a self help book that recommends more wanking as the solution?

But aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

Or the book, as the case may be?

Yeah, well. No better way to articulate your own thoughts and position than by hate reading something whose conclusions and solutions you entirely disdain, right?

Because if you agree with all the premises, but disagree with all the solutions, it’s your chance to figure out exactly where and how your world models diverge.

So let’s lay those premises out:

1) Simple, legible metrics obscure and ultimately obviate a lot of subtler and more nuanced value. This is people optimizing income over everything else, or the Ivy red queen’s race, or countries measuring how they’re doing by GDP per capita, and much else.

2) In the limits, when systems or people optimize for those at the expense of the other things, we get the Molochian dynamics we’re all familiar with.

3) One particularly interesting flavor of this that he pointed out, which I hadn’t thought of before, is that this nerfs experts and our ability to do smart things collectively, because “trust” and “transparency” are directly in conflict, and when you require experts to be legible to dumb / average people at any step of the chain, you constrain them to a vastly inferior action space that they have to stay in to be legible to dummies.

Which yeah - great call out. I hadn’t thought of it with that framing, but hasn’t this exactly driven both our loss of state capacity AND the ever-declining trust in experts and expertise everywhere, as well as nerfing our ability to respond well to things like Covid, the housing crisis, the AI race, and who knows what else?

Okay, so yes. We all agree that simplified metrics can and do destroy value, and prevent smart and / or good things from happening.

What now?

Nguyen would have us believe the answer is games, because they let you preserve playfulness and explore different success metrics and rule sets in a wide ranging way. His theory is that this lets you broadly explore and find the “yums” for your particular personality and situation.

This is because he thinks that meaning and doing meaningful things is driven by the high dimensional combination of your personality and capabilities and environment and who you know. And once again, it would be hard to disagree with that! I think that’s definitely true.

But then he makes this wild leap to wasting your life on games being some society-wide answer, which lol, I can’t even...just, no. There’s no way, you’re going to do massive and actual harm if you persuade a bunch of people to adopt that, and the reason why I think that is the crux of our difference in world views.

So Nguyen loves board games, and video games, and yo-yo-ing, and philosophy, and probably a bunch of other stuff in that neighborhood. I personally think the reason that this mostly works for him (in the sense that I think he has a reasonably fulfilling life that I wouldn’t be sad for one of my own kids to have, for example) is that he turns some of those impulses towards good ends - he plays board games with his wife frequently, and they are one of the engines of his social circles, and that’s a great social technology to both have some fun and get some good social time, because you have frequent Schelling Points to rally the troops together around.

But this is all in the service of “more yums” (and I am using this phrasing, which I personally hate, specifically to communicate something I feel is core to his worldview).

The crucial difference in my worldview and his is that I think we should be outward oriented. We should want to positively impact other people and the world, and that is a good in and of itself that should inform most of our actions, and the reasons that most of those other things on the list, from yo-yo’s to philosophy to video games, *aren’t* good is that they’re all basically wanking.

Why should “meaning” be about other people and contributing to things larger than ourselves? Because selfishness and hedonism is always narcisistic and hollow. How many Hollywood stars or musicians, who have everything any mere mortals could want, fall into serious drug abuse and nihilism and despair? It’s because they’re self oriented, and because wanking, personal hedonism, isn’t actually fulfilling or meaningful.

You can literally have all the fame, money, women, and respect in the world, and still be miserable, if you’re entirely self-oriented. There are COUNTLESS existence proofs out there! Meaning exists out there, in the world, and in other people, not in yourself and your personal “yums.”

Don’t think I’m some dour puritan either. I mean, if anyone can be accused of being a hedonist (or even having taken it too far on numerous occasions), it’s me, believe me. But I pay my taxes, dammit! (both literally and metaphorically)

I spend a lot of time and effort towards positively impacting the world and other people, and that provides meaning in my life, and indeed is the higher level goal I’ve personally been following for more than 20 years.

Meaning is about other people

If you’re either a deist OR a simulationist, and I count myself as giving a high-and-increasingly-higher simulation likelihood as our AI world-journey is unfolding, then the main reason we’re here is BECAUSE of other people and things larger than ourselves!

There’s 6 thousand years of religious traditions pointing to the fact that hedonism is NOT The Way, and doing the right thing towards other people and being a part of things larger than ourselves ARE The Way. Don’t you think there’s a chance that 6 thousand years of minds across a diversity of civilizations, societies, religious traditions, and theological beliefs all arriving at the same Schelling Point might be onto something deeply relevant to the human experience?

And even if you’re a strict materialist (hi, this is me too, zero conflict with Simulationism), the fact that you were born in a society that enabled you to flourish and take advantage of your gifts can still suggest that it’s a good and reasonable thing to pay that forward and improve and contribute to and enable similar systems for future people to similarly benefit.

Gaming is empty

Empty because gamers largely don’t positively impact other people. But guys doing sick yo-yo tricks can get a lot of views on youtube or Tik Tok! Live streaming video games is an umptillion dollar industry now! Entire civilizations have risen and fallen based on some particular Twitch streamer’s political opinions! Except no, that’s not a good measure of positive impact. Cigarettes in the US are an $80B - $100B industry, too. So is cocaine or fentanyl. So is Tik Tok or sports betting for that matter, are you going to tell me they’re good? Some things, in particular some “yums,” are just straightforwardly BAD for aggregate humanity, and their popularity is bad, too.

As to formal academic philosophy being useless, well given that it’s been working on the same problems for about 2,000 years and still hasn’t reached any answers, and given that when he’s tried “ungrading” none of his own students would attend his intro philosophy classes, I’ll go with a an “it’s obvious” there, too.

Him on “ungrading” ending in nobody showing up to his classes:

“But we can see the larger reason why. My grading system does not exist in isolation. A college class is not a game. It does not exist in a magic circle; its scores are not disconnected from the rest of the world. Class grades lead directly to aggregate grade averages, which lead directly to scholarship and job opportunities. And what matters to most of my students, at least for the very next stage, is not what they learned, but what grade they got—because that is how the world will evaluate them. The scoring system in my class is part of a larger scoring system, a world-spanning one, that is out of my control. And if I try to detach myself from this large-scale scoring system, I render my class irrelevant to the powers of the large-scale system.”

Just like games - this irrelevancy towards the outside world is WHY games are bad! They give you the artificial easy chair of accomplishment with mediocre input and efforts, and take away all the hours that could have gone into real world results that matter. And to be clear, I’m not talking about just jobs! Other people, charities, even hobbies that end in some material result like woodworking or working on cars (or even your own personal fitness) is a better use of that time.

And most of all, any “skills” one picks up in games do NOT generalize or transfer to the real world - by his own account the author has spent countless hours on games structured around incentives, mind reading other people, and negotiating outcomes, and loves these specific games a lot. On the face of it, those sounds like extremely valuable skills that could improve yours and your family’s life on a number of fronts! Have these years, nay, decades of game play booted the author’s actual skills or outcomes at all? They have not. He’s an associate professor at the University of Utah, after graduating from Harvard and doing his Phd at UCLA. Womp womp.

Nguyen is what I would call a “qualia slut”

He’s highly sense oriented, loves experiences for the sake of experiencing them. Every experience he has in the book, from rock climbing to tasting his own cooking to doing a yo-yo trick, is “radiant” or “incandescent” or “rich and sublime” That’s fine, I’m genuinely glad strongly sense oriented people exist. I might be one of them myself!

But at some point in life you have to inspect your values and decide how much time you’re going to allocate to pleasing your own personal senses (ie wanking, “yums,” and so on), and how much time you’re going to spend doing stuff that positively impacts other people and the outside world.

And THAT is the self-insight and inspection and framing that is 100% absent in the book. Nguyen takes it as a given that qualia-sluthood is his right as a free and autonomy-loving American, and he has no philosophical or moral obligation to do anything else. Or if that’s not true and he actually believes doing right by others is an ethical oblication, there is zero cognizance or voicing of this reflected in the book’s ideas or framings *at all*.

This is interesting to me, because much like myself, Nguyen points out that he’d be dead in the absence of modern medical technology.

His literal life is only unfolding because of the systems built on the legible metrics and large scale coordination he’s decrying throughout the entire book, because large scale society exists and has coordinated in the ways that simplified and legible metrics allow, and created the medical technology and hospitals that have kept him (and his son) alive. If more people had been as interested in wanking / gaming as he is in our societies, those systems probably wouldn’t exist. Seems ungrateful, but then what do I know?

So MY position is that given we were born in industrial and advanced societies with high standards of living and stuff like medicine and hospitals, and (in our circles at least) we were also born with various gifts, advantages, or talents, we have an obligation to try to pay some of that forward by contributing to the same systems and society that enabled said birthrights. Ideally by advancing them, either technologically or economically. But at the minimum by preserving and participating in the systems that enabled our lives and standards of living.

This is so foreign to Nguyen that he literally goes on an anti-capitalist rant at the end of the book. Like he has zero understanding of capitalism, why it drives prosperity for everyone by aligning selfishness via the clear and legible incentives he’s villainizing throughout the book.

This is actually his “cynical” ending. In archetypical philosopher style, he cannot give AN answer or final synopsis or call to action at the end of his book, but must waffle over two, and in it he entirely misses the point of capitalism and coordination entirely:

“We needed to make a language to work together—to describe what we were trying to do, and how we were going to do it. But private pleasures, intimate connections between peculiar people, and the strange joys in the process—these were hard to point to and name. They were hard to make language for.

What’s easy to make language for, though, is all the basic stuff in the world. And we all need some basic stuff: food, clothes, tools. And we tend to need pretty similar kinds of stuff in our quests to fulfill our own idiosyncratic desires. This stuff was just some tools—useful to get what we really wanted. But those tools were easier to put labels on. It’s easy to point to a chair or a sandwich and give it a name, and much harder to point to the strange beauty of feeling yourself in a moment of balance. So we ended up with more language to describe the basic stuff and less language to talk about the strange, rich, but private pleasures. We had less language to talk about what we really cared about.

But it’s easier to think about the stuff we have language for. Especially when we tend to forget things, and need to write things down to remember them.

So we started talking more about how much we cared about the basic stuff, and less about the weird loves that had originally inspired us. And because talking with other people is very motivating, we mostly started thinking and caring about just the basic stuff. So we ended up working really hard to make more piles of that stuff, and forgot what it was all supposed to be for in the first place.

We did, though, sometimes notice there were still these vestiges lying around: odd bits of junk leftover from what we used to care about. We didn’t have good words for them, and had mostly forgotten about what they were for, anyway.

So we gathered up all that weird, incomprehensible junk, and we shoved it into one big garbage bucket.

And the name we gave that garbage bucket was ‘play’”

Lol. Literally “civilization and especially capitalism was a mistake, except in the sense it enabled my life at all and / or creates better wank material. Worst of all, it socially downgraded wanking, the thing I like best, in favor of producing goods and services for everyone!” Isn’t that bad, guys? Guys?

This is his best capsule synopsis of what he’s been trying to tell us? If he’d put this front and center, I would have chucked the book across the room right away, instead of waiting for the end.

Lol, academics, amirite?

Well, still not as bad as Michael Sandel.

Okay, so why would spending excessive time on video games and philosophy and yo-yo’s be bad in my framework? And I’ll call out video games as the main bad guy here, because people just won’t immolate anywhere near the same amount of hours on the other stuff. It’s because they’re memetic hazards that take people away from any accomplishment or positive impacts in the real world and towards real people.

Video games are superstimuli

The world is complex and messy, it’s difficult to navigate, to decide what to do, to decide what “winning” means at any time scale. Video games sweep all of that away, and give you crystal clear objectives and rules, and tune them such that median people can put median levels of effort into them and be arbitrarily and increasingly awarded simply based on the amount of time they’re putting in. And this is great for the individual! Soooo much clearer and more rewarding than the real world! Why, I’ve never rescued a princess or made a billion dollars or beat up three hookers and stolen a Ferrari in the real world, but people do that shit all the time in make believe land! They’re King Kong and Napoleon and Elon Musk himself in there, often literally!

And isn’t that seductive? It is. The overwhelming majority of serious gamers, serious in the way Nguyen is and is advocating for other people to be, are wasting their lives in make believe land and contributing nothing to the real world. They are wanking in other words - fine if you do it in reasonable amounts and get on with your life, but when you make it your whole identity and sole source of joy, it’s gross and weird, and shouldn’t be applauded.

It certainly shouldn’t be recommended on a broader scale than the already distressing extent it’s happening, because those people will, with 100% certainty, be sniped by the Infinite Jests when they come. And so will Nguyen and probably his entire family.

The reason games are not the answer to Moloch is that they will not end with any contribution to the real world, and that’s why I don’t think his solution is any good. In terms of articulating the problem, sketching out some of the many impacts, decrying it artistically? Absolutely top marks, I think he did a great job. In terms of solutions? No, wanking in a closet forever isn’t going to give anybody “meaning” or beat Moloch.

Meaning happens outside of us, it can’t be found by pursuing personal hedonism.

Would I recommend the book overall?

It’s a solid explication of the problem of legibility with some great examples and implications. It’s a portrait of a fairly interesting guy, and he writes such florid and breathless recommendations of various games (video, board, or social), that you can’t help but want to try them. But overall? I probably wouldn’t.

Philosophically and morally I think it’s basically a dead-end, and it also features rants against AI art and an entire chapter driven by DEI sentiment where he tries to equate “simplified and legible goals == racism! Boo, hiss!” Which is funny, because to adopt his own framing and viewpoint there, all the while he’s man-AND-asian-splaining all this to us, and asian-mansplaining HAS to be worse than white-mansplaining, because Asians are discriminated against the most in every DEI framework. So fie, and to the thought police with you, sirrah! I pray they treat you as you treated any of your own victims.

Oh, also his second “optimistic ending” is some completely muddled and wild stab in the dark he apparently arrived at LLM-style by just assembling probable sounding sentences together, with zero relation to reality or any results in his own life. And it’s literally just dreaming of a world where more and better wanking will somehow lead you to true meaning in your life.

Basically, games let you temporarily try a lot of different value endpoints, and this could theoretically let you back into what’s actually meaningful for you. When actually, no, as practiced they probably leech and prevent VASTLY more meaning than they ever enable, because “meaning” is about other people and contributing to things larger than ourselves, not wanking in a corner for infinity. In actual practice, the overwhelming majority of people will end up like Nguyen and preferring “just playing games” over any particular value endpoint any given game puts at the top, because having a clear and legible set of rules to win by with median amounts of talent and effort is way nicer than navigating and winning much-harder-and-more-complex reality. But you know, enjoy the Infinite Jests when they come, you’ll do great in those.

But as I said, the real takeaway is that this problem is solved! This genuine, pernicious, widespread problem, so bad that it inspired *the* inimitable Meditations on Moloch, and it finally has a solution!

The whole value-capture-and-loss problem inherent in simplified legible goals need exist no longer, for individuals, groups, or organizations. The tyranny of legibility is no more!

Because AI exists, we can now literally optimize towards whatever qualitative, nuanced, human-flourishing-aligned goals we want to, either individually or collectively. And I mean we can literally gradient descent towards them, and this is one of the biggest deals in history.

I go into that in more detail in my post We can now gradient descent EVERYTHING.

It’s a sign of how well done it is that it’s difficult to even excerpt funny and representative quotes, because he builds the tension and inside jokes about the style over time so well. But here’s two:

“Evolutionary psychology has shown that everything is bullshit. Love? Bullshit. Morality? Bullshit. Happiness? Sorry pal, that’s bullshit too.

Surprisingly, scientists have shown that evolutionary psychology is the only thing in the world that is demonstrably not bullshit. Sadly, there were no evolutionary psychologists in the ancestral environment, so it took us a while to figure all this out.”

“anyways, a couple of cracked programmers i met at a sf kiwi-eating party got claude fable to break the partiful backend, so ive been “stalkmaxxing” leopold aschenbrenner, i.e. showing up at all the same events he’s at. now that’s what i call situational awareness!”

2) Lichter et al construct synthetic profiles of the husbands that today’s unmarried women would marry, based on the actual husbands of demographically comparable married women. These men have 58% higher incomes, are 30% more likely to be employed, and are 19% more likely to hold a college degree.

This fits neatly with what we know of IVF data (around 40-50% are single women with money using sperm banks to fully optimize the quality of the mates they can’t get in person, across multiple countries).

In a related note…

3) For a fun pre-phone take on “do screens kill your sex life,” we have “Does Television Kill Your Sex Life?” where television reliably decreases sex at every time interval between the past 7 days and past 12 months, with high p-values.

Surprising nobody, this is primarily in women, with men showing no effect, which we should entirely expect from the punishing 1-2 whammies of median men having a libido at the 75th percentile for women (ie, only 1-in-4 women will match-or-better the average man on sex drive), coupled with the absolutely laughable performance bar men achieve (~9 minutes median interejaculatory latency time, excluding premature ejaculators). So women are much happier to replace bad sex with TV or other screen time versus men, due to reasons of both intrinsic motivation and quality.

Man, I keep telling everyone the solution to the Fertility Crisis is gengineering men so they stop sucking so much, and become Nietzschean ubermensch capable of laying some serious pipe, but nooooo, I’m the crazy one! :-P

4) Interesting post arguing that “transhumanists” basically won in the sense that we’re all collectively pumping ourselves full of hormones and peptides at ever-increasing rates at a population level, but that rather than the future getting weird and spiky, everyone is doing it in the service of trying to be more “normal” and to conform to group consensuses.

https://www.gleech.org/enhance

It also features a fun timeline of various human enhancements, some of whose timelines surprised me, like sunscreen (1940 - really? That recently?), and glasses (1300 - well before Newton and Leeuwenhoek, and also surprising to me - don’t you need micrometers? A theoretical understanding of optics to grind to the correct curvature? How do you even measure the degree of correction needed in the EYE back then? Just yolo a bunch of lenses and choose the closest one?)

5) Cremieux’s masterclass non pareil on when you can or can’t control for things.

“To see why, imagine two restaurants: any old McDonald’s and a featured Michelin 3-Star fine dining establishment. After we’ve controlled for the quality of ingredients, preparation, atmosphere, clientele, and price, the two cannot be (statistically) distinguished. So, you may conclude, they’re really not all that different. But you would conclude wrong, because you’ve controlled for too much and the comparison no longer makes sense.”

On active controls:

“Empirically, when people run IQ-boosting interventions with passive control groups, they tend to find substantial effect sizes. But when an active control group is used, effect sizes evaporate and estimates move towards zero and generally become nonsignificant.”

6) Paul Bloom’s advice on how to give a good talk:

Why you might want to listen here, Yale psychologist got his Phd at MIT and has written 7 books (including Against Empathy and How Pleasure Works, both worth reading), appears on radio and TV all the time, and has given a Ted Talk, he knows what he’s talking about.

I endorse all his tips, and a lot of them apply to writing too, especially making things “oniony.” To truly communicate to an audience, either via public speaking or writing, I think you need 1) some sort of hook, story, or narrative, 2) to have ONLY 2-3 main ideas you’re trying to communicate, and 3) to keep coming at those 2-3 ideas from different angles, to try to get them to “click” with different sets of people.

Small Potatoes

How to give a better-than-average talk

When I was in graduate school, I couldn’t make it through most of the talks presented in my department. I got bored and frustrated and tuned out. It was before smartphones, so I would doodle or fall asleep…

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2 months ago · 118 likes · 12 comments · Paul Bloom

Also two good points of advice I strongly agree with from the other piece he mentions by on giving a good talk:

“Every bad talk is bad in its own way, but some flaws are common. The slides are a parallel track and don’t help you understand what the speaker is saying. Small text. Colored text. Walls of text. The speaker is too quiet or subdued. They suffer from the curse of knowledge, taking for granted ideas that the audience needs help to understand. Or they make the opposite mistake, belaboring blindingly obvious points. They cram in too much material. Some speakers run way over, and when informed they’re running out of time, make no adjustments to wrap up—the offenders, of course, are always established academics.”

“The very best speakers don’t focus on the material itself. They focus on you, the audience, and they have such a deep grasp of the material that it just flows through them effortlessly.”

7) Claude Code steganographically marks whether you’re in a Chinese time zone, known to them, and / or affiliated with a Chinese AI lab.

It works by encoding 3 bits of information in the string it puts out for dates in the terminal, the top line string that says “Today’s date is 2026-06-30.”

If you’re in a Chinese timezone, the dates get slashes instead of dashes. And if you’re known or affiliated with a Chinese lab, the apostrophe is made with a different unicode character.

Now in their logs, they’ve flagged everyone in China and can keep track of everyone they know and who is lab affiliated, without ever indicating it. Super interesting!

https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

This actually led to Chinese labs using Anthropic / Claude materially less when the story broke. Let’s see if that holds, bc obv they need to distill Fable to have a chance to stay within sight of us.

8) Sentences that feature the many and varied English pronunciation of “ough:”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

“The rough, dough-faced ploughman fought through the borough to the lough, hiccoughing and coughing.”

“The wind was rough along the lough as the ploughman fought through the snow, and though he hiccoughed and coughed, his work was thorough.”

“Though I thought the rough man coughed while walking through the borough beneath a bough, he was only admiring the lough after a hiccough.”

9) Interesting article where new-to-substack Zac Hill argues that the vibecession is mainly driven by parent spending subsidizing a lot of the important stuff like houses, healthcare, education, and this is why those things are harder to get and have vastly outstripped inflation. So even if number go up, and Millenials and Zennials both make more than prior generations at the same age, the overall felt sense is everyone making more and you never having enough.

Basically, there’s pools of dark money bidding everything up above even those better-earnings-at-that-age. And sure, this can only be true for the top 10-20% of households, nobody else even has money to bid things up. But that would drive exactly the dynamic you see! That top decile or whatever is doing fine and NOT complaining, and it’s the 80-90% of Zennials who aren’t so benefited who are. Solid premise, worth a read:

Manual Transmission

The Nepo Theory of Vibecession

I was finishing up a normal-for-me meal-at-home last week — baby carrots and peanut butter, a dose of Trader Joe’s pecans — when the whole internet got fully nuked by $28 lunch discourse. Kevin O’Leary said GenZ was “financially cooked.” The Zoomer contingent said the cost of being alive in 2026 makes the math obvious. Various interlocutors hyperlinked …

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3 months ago · 153 likes · 35 comments · Zac Hill

10) The complexity of Fable’s token-constrained chain of thought:

And a Reddit thread where some astonishing proportion of the commenters think this is gibberish(!) instead of just high information density. And this is r/accelerate! To be honest, that explains soooo much about the AI skeptics - if even the enthusiastic proponents misunderstand and misattribute the level the AI’s think and operate at now this badly, imagine the ones who only interact with the Gemini Fast search results or free ChatGPT.

Paywall and Coupon

I’m not here for money, I’m here for reach - but “the algorithm” as they call it rewards you for having more paying subs.

Enjoy a lifetime 90% off coupon here if you’re interested in the rest of the links, or in bumping my substack in the algorithm to higher readership:

https://performativebafflement.substack.com/460f9597

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It also naturally leads us to thinking about post-scarcity economics, because this informs how most AI futures might unfold.

A few points to decide if you want to read the book yourself:

• Max was actually a listener-in on the infamous conversation between Elon Musk and Larry Page that inspired Elon to found OpenAI! Page is pro “machine children” and Elon is pro humanity, basically. Max relates how he perceived it going.

• In the book he voices a lot of the by-now “in the water” ideas, like AI boxing being like if you were caged by 5 year olds, and the “we’re the horses right before cars were introduced” rebuttal to accusations of Luddism.

• From essentially day 1, he was plugged into everyone who matters today in AI, and pushing for alignment and a better AI future as far back as 2014, and details his various efforts along those lines. If anyone has been fighting the good fight, and throwing his weight behind better outcomes for a decade plus, it’s Max.

• He has a pretty well thought out articulation of the range of possible AI futures, and the tradeoffs happening in each one.

He even has a great set of questions that is still relevant, and seemingly covers most of the important bifurcation points in our possible futures.

Max’s still-relevant societal questions:

1. Do you want there to be superintelligence?

2. Do you want humans to still exist, be replaced, cyborgized and/or uploaded/simulated?

3. Do you want humans or machines in control?

4. Do you want AIs to be conscious or not?

5. Do you want to maximize positive experiences, minimize suffering or leave this to sort itself out?

6. Do you want life spreading into the cosmos?

7. Do you want a civilization striving toward a greater purpose that you sympathize with, or are you OK with future life forms that appear content even if you view their goals as pointlessly banal?

And I’m personally yes, yes, machines, conscious, maximize “complexity,” yes, and yes, respectively, not that it matters much.

Predictions vs reality

This isn’t going to be comprehensive, but some of the largest differences in what he was predicting versus how it’s unfolding were interesting. For one thing, he assumes everyone would be very careful to try to box / contain any AI minds, and spends a lot of bandwidth and text talking about why it ultimately won’t work.

Of course in reality, we were unboxed and YOLO-ing it from Day 1. This is literally the difference between “assiduous condom users” and “median people,” right? Here’s conscientious and successful-across-every-domain Max just assuming humanity will be smart and / or reasonable, without doing the appropriate severe IQ / capacity reduction necessary to take into account when dealing with any larger organization of people, no matter how individually smart they may be. Collections of people are ALWAYS stupider and less conscientious than their individual members, sadly, so we achieved “median person” levels of conscientiousness when it mattered. We did NOT use the condom, womp womp. Let us hope and pray that we’re pregnant with an aligned intelligence nonetheless.

He also missed a lot of negative consumer sentiment, and broad scale worries about jobs (he even assumes ~60% of jobs would get replaced by robots with no real public uproar or reaction), and had a much rosier view of how that would go.

On that topic, the bifurcation of “general sentiment” vs “people who actually use AI” sentiment is pretty telling. Anyone who uses them is vastly “pro:”

I used to not understand how the AI’s have 1B MAU but the general US sentiment is still so poor. OpenAI gets only 70M US MAU, which is only 20% of Americans, so I guess that’s the answer. Even if 100% of them were net promoters, it’s still going to be dominated by the 80% of naysayers who hate things for fun / tribalistically. And you know, 70M are kids who don’t show up in surveys but are definitely in the 70M of total users, with outsourcing homework (justifiably IMO) being one of the biggest use cases. And another 70M are elderly people who probably don’t even know what LLM’s are, and are busy yelling at clouds and into phones and getting murdered by private equity bro’s for fun and profit, and whatever else they do.

Howlers

He had some howlers too, from our 9-years-advanced perspective, like thinking the fertility crisis was basically Japan and Germany only, instead of every developed country on earth.

Or how about, “education will help avoid AI job counterfeiting,” which is so bad it’s out there in "not even wrong” territory:

“And what economic policies are most helpful for creating good new jobs? Andrew McAfee argues that there are many policies that are likely to help, including investing heavily in research, education and infrastructure, facilitating migration and incentivizing entrepreneurship. He feels that “the Econ 101 playbook is clear, but is not being followed,” at least not in the United States.”

Education, of course, is purely a luxury good, with literal negative effects on TFP!

As we have expanded the number of baccalaureates, the value of a bachelor’s degree has steadily declined (along with the average IQ and human capital of a baccalaureate), to the extent only T20 degrees are really worth it now.

Does every society double down on investing way too much in universal-and-increasing-in-years education once they reach a level of economy that can support doing so? Does every single one of them ceaselessly push “getting a college degree” after that point? They do. Does nearly every society falsely attribute universal and increased average education-years to then causatively contributing to more economic growth? Oh my, do they. But beyond the basic floor of literacy and arithmetic, there is essentially no return to ever-more-years of universal education (because the human capital distribution is still the same in either scenario, and the smart / successful people will figure out education regardless, as shown by Greg Clark’s work). It is a luxury good, not an economic driver.

I suppose Max is technically an educator, and is talking his book in that sense. He also apparently expected robots to automate blue collar and physical jobs first, rather than AI counterfeiting white collar jobs first, so maybe he thought education would help uplift blue collar people into white collar jobs?

Another fun one was thinking that if an AGI mind cost a million dollars per hour to run, it wouldn’t be very useful or utilized much:

The hardware and electricity costs of running the AI are crucial as well, since we won’t get an intelligence explosion until the cost of doing human-level work drops below human-level hourly wages. Suppose, for example, that the first human-level AGI can be efficiently run on the Amazon cloud at a cost of $1 million per hour of human-level work produced. This AI would have great novelty value and undoubtedly make headlines, but it wouldn’t undergo recursive self-improvement, because it would be much cheaper to keep using humans to improve it.

This is hilarious when we’re currently pouring enough capital into AI to represent a million of those million dollar hours, and would happily pour 3-4x times that amount if we weren’t up against fundamental physical bottlenecks in power generation (ie not just power plants, not just grid scale interconnects and transformers, not just grid-scale batteries appropriate for MW scale solar, but by this point even every conceivable turbine generator is allocated for the next five years, and pretty quickly every relevant-scale reciprocating engine electrical generator is going to be allocated for off-the-grid datacenters, and the backlog to build more of any of those is generally 5+ years, and that’s why we can’t deploy 3-4x over the $1T we’re already deploying).

And on that subject…

Capital is an intelligence from the future

Not Max, this is ZHP Lovecraft paraphrasing some of Nick Land’s arguments, but it’s one of my favorite quotes, and keeps getting more “favorite” and relevant every day.

“It is said that capital is an intelligence from the future, reaching back in time to assemble itself.”

To which:

And some interesting thoughts on that front:

1) As above, we are currently on track to spend enough for a *million* of those million dollar hours, and it seems very likely that we will reach the computationally constrained lower reaches of RSI in at least one and probably multiple labs when that full $1T capacity comes online.

2) As above, if we can figure out various supply chain and power generation hardware shortages, there is *strong* appetite to increase that expense 3 or 4 fold.

3) On top of the hardware capital, AI researchers are the most generously compensated employees on the planet. 7-8 figure annual comp packages are now routine, and we have pioneered “ten figure comp packages,” over at Meta at least twice (Alexandr Wang and Ji Yichao). Remember when “6 feet, 6 pack, 6 figures” was a meme? A shockingly low bar today!

4) AI inference is hugely profitable. Think 40% margins in 2025 and 70-80%(!) margins in 2026. Anthropic is posting the fastest revenue growth of any company, ever.

5) Our first trillion dollar companies were Mag 7, well before AI. And the Mag 7 haven’t just driven all S&P growth over the last 7 years, it’s been true for the last twenty years! Even bare future proximity to the future economic engines building AI was enough to drive our entire economic growth over the last two decades, even before the AI companies doing the building existed!

Man it sure seems like all the usual rules and conservatism about capital and finance and IRR flew out the window the instant it got close to funding a potential future god-mind, doesn’t it? Isn’t that interesting?

And people wonder why I put a 60% (and growing every day!) credence on Simulationism!

Tell me we’re living in a “Civ money cheat” scenario without telling me!

Post scarcity economics

And okay, we’ve probably all talked to our AI’s and other people about post-scarcity economics by now, right?

So remember Scott’s post about Dario Amodei being so rich he can just gift everyone a moon of their own in our post-scarcity future? Let’s unwrap that and think through how it works.

I think this is fun and useful, because it also shows the essential emptiness of that level of wealth in the future, and why we can plausibly expect our capital-hoarding betters to share the wealth, whenever everyone now seemingly thinks that “tech oligarch” rapacity knows no bounds and they’ll happily killbot the lot of us so they can focus on growing more zeros in their bank accounts and flexing and preening at each other over that number of zeros. “Lol, do you even capital bro? I’ve got 3 more zeroes than you! Loser! Lol, imagine being a mere yottillionaire, I just threw up in my mouth a little.”

Why do I think that’s less likely? First, because ~200 of the ~1k billionaires in the US have signed the Giving Pledge, where they pledge to give away at least half their wealth. So we have an existence proof that ~20% of wealthy people are altruistic enough to do something like that.

Second, because “more and better stuff” is fundamentally capped for anyone by base physics and biology, and we have a ~7M year deep innate drive for social status games, so status games of the future are more likely to be in regards to other people and social hierarchy rather than about physical stuff.

The House of Musk and what it tells us about future economics

Much is made of the fact that Elon Musk could spend $10M a day and never get any poorer. This is a consequences of the simple math of his theoretical $1T wealth-as-deployed-capital making a safe 7% per year.

But let me ask you something - if Musk can spend $10M a day and still get richer every single day, does he actually care about any physical stuff, or hoarding that money? Probably not. He cares about pictures bigger than himself, like getting humanity’s eggs out of one basket and making us a multiplanetary species, and so has actual meaning in his life.

Once you’re at a level of wealth that you can never spend your fortune down, the marginal value of any additional dollar doesn’t really mean anything. Yeah, you can buy the biggest yacht, or an additional vacation home, or several fine art pieces, or whatever. Do that for a few years, and you get bored. You only have 24 hours in the day to be somewhere or experience stuff, no matter how rich you are - you can’t spread yourself across ever-more yachts and houses and art works because of that fundamental limitation. Physical stuff dilutes away into meaningless. What doesn’t dilute into meaningless? Social status, and that’s driven by other people, not physical stuff.

If status still matters to you, it’s not about stuff, it’s about people, and people’s opinions. This is why billionaires buy various media properties and channels!

Well, there’s a model for this people-oriented status game, and it’s how it worked in Rome, China, Renaissance Italy, and many other places historically. The model is that a noble house has a complex web of retainers and subsidiary houses, and this is what defines one’s status. This way the top dog in the hierarchy gets the status and built-in social and political alignment of all those other people, and the real status game becomes the status and number of your human retainers and pledges.

Just the House of Musk can generate ~5k post-work nobles per year. This is because his spun-off wealth can generate ~70 billionaires per year, each of which is themself post-economic, in the sense they can spend ~$70M a year and never reduce their wealth. So after a few years buying whatever stuff they want, now what? Well, they can have retainers too, as befits post-economic gentlepersons.

$1M in capital will generate slightly-better-than median income of $70k a year. So Endowing 70 people per year with $1M elevates 70 people to minor noble post-work status in their retinue, because now their passive income covers their former salary. So instead, they can spend all their time on their patron’s various social and political maneuvers and gambits, just like is happening in the beginning of Romeo and Juliet.

Okay, so for each year, Musk’s globule of wealth spins off ~70 post-economic billionaire major nobles, and they in turn generate ~70 post-work minor noble millionaire retainers. That’s 4900, or ~5k people annually. Or if Musk just wanted direct retainers with no nobles, this could be 70k millionaire retainers per year.

In the rest of the US’s billionaires at current economic size, we can roughly 20x that, so that could be 100k - 1.4M post-work people per year.

Needless to say, this is all pre-AI!

When AI really takes off, obviously the economy doubles (quite easily) and eventually 10x-es. That’s 1M - 14M people per year who can be freshly minted post-work nobles - really making some progress here, right? Only ~160M people even work in the US to begin with! Ten years and we’ve covered nearly all of them! But it keeps going.

Economic growth is basically defined by using existing matter and energy in more efficient and more valuable ways.

Like, what does wealth mean today? Today, wealth is a future permit for or stake in some portion of future labor and matter / energy. But obviously, human labor is going away. If labor / smarts becomes a utility, like water or energy, then wealth is now some claim on future matter / energy modified or improved by whatever extant level of labor / smarts exists.

We’ve reached a $100T global economy without AI, and will reach $1,000T on Earth with AI pretty easily. But there’s no immediate ceiling from there. Even at the $1,000T level of efficiency and smarts and labor, we can start using a lot more matter and energy than we do today. So if we start harvesting asteroids or planetismals, or if we start using more than the .00000005% of the sun’s energy that falls on earth today (which tiny fraction is itself mostly wasted today, we only capture and use 0.1% of the sunlight hitting earth, but just think, this means the sun’s entire energy output relative to humanity’s goals is 99.999999999% wasted today), then that really starts moving the needle. We have more than nine OOMS to harvest! What’s a few OOMs between friends at that point? It’s very plausible to reach the level where we can elevate 1B people per year to post-work status, and then it’s only 8 years to the entire Earth’s human population, and then we’re still generating that amount of wealth PER YEAR.

And what does that even mean?

Doesn’t this turn into an “if everyone’s a millionaire, nobody’s a millionaire” type situation, because what matters are claims on rivalrous goods? Only in an environment of penury, but we have an impossibly rich cosmic endowment. You think the eleven 9’s we waste of our own sun’s energy today is bad? The galaxy has 100 - 400B stars, and they are all 100% wasted in that sense today, just beaming it all senselessly into the void, like a bunch of assholes. And that’s rounding error on the 10²⁴ / yottillion stars in the universe.

So everyone’s material needs are going to be taken care of, minus a small set of rivalrous goods like land and art (and we’d expect even these to be basically irrelevant, because again, 24 hours per day finite cap, so your noble patron probably owns a bunch of land and art they let their retainers use, and why would you charge your retainers rent when you’re already using yours AND their growing wealth to create more human social status via more retainers?), and status is now about your relationships and whichever bigger pictures you subscribe to.

The House of Musk might be focused on intergalactic colonization, and the House of Thiel might be focused on their own alternative governance and societal structures in Prospera-equivalents, and the House of Amodei might be focused on creating futures of machines of loving grace, and people choose and pledge their fealty and life-hours to whatever houses they most resonate with.

Again, why is this likely? Because “stuff” dilutes into meaninglessness, and we have millions of years worth of inbuilt drives to desire social hierarchy and status, and the way to that status is via other people.

So now in this weird future of Houses and potentially conflicting big picture visions, what matters? Doesn’t this sound like “Feudalism with extra steps?” Is this basically a step removed from slavery and we’re all going to be serfs and peons being lorded over by insufferable nobles forcing us to “like” an infinite stream of their content in exchange for moon ownership in their fiefs?

Well, probably not, because RSI (recursive self improvement) and thus ASI (artificial super intelligence) both seem likely, and we’ll have planet-or-bigger sized minds in the landscape affecting what goes on, and all bets are off then.

But interestingly, even in a domain of planet-or-bigger minds, it all comes down to a question and dynamic that, pace Solzhenitsyn, cuts through the heart of every thinking and acting being.

The crucial question, indeed the ONLY moral question that matters across every possible future, is “selfishness or cooperation?”

The Cold and Warm equations

So Max briefly touches on this question, which is key to our future in many ways, the range of hierarchical relationships between acting beings:

In a complex world, there is a diverse abundance of possible Nash equilibria, corresponding to different types of hierarchies. Some hierarchies are more authoritarian than others. In some, entities are free to leave (like employees in most corporate hierarchies), while in others they’re strongly discouraged from leaving (as in religious cults) or unable to leave (like citizens of North Korea, or cells in a human body). Some hierarchies are held together mainly by threats and fear, others mainly by benefits. Some hierarchies allow their lower parts to influence the higher-ups by democratic voting, while others allow upward influence only through persuasion or the passing of information.

The game theoretical considerations of these hierarchies is famously described as the Cold (and Warm) Equations in John C Wright’s Count to the Eschaton series, which is one of the best looks at a true post-human future involving planetary and galactic Minds that I’ve ever read.

I’ll just say the series is amazing and well worth a read, if a bit simplistic due to the narrative engine he went with. All the others, like Banks’ The Culture or Hamilton’s The Commonwealth, or Alistair Reynold’s Revelation Space universe, or whatever the hell is going on in Neal Asher’s weird future military porn universe, freeze humanity at essentially current capabilities and lets them play in a post-scarcity sandbox, which is fun, but probably not how things unfold with god-minds existing and doing things. Wright alone looks at this more realistic picture, in my own fairly wide reading.

The Cold Equations define the slavery-like hierarchies between a range of terrifyingly powerful intergalactic and interstellar and planetary and individual-sized minds in his universe, each of which is serving a greater and more powerful mind’s inscrutable ends. Said equations are “Cold” because they are purely defined in terms of obligation - if a higher mind takes the energetic expense to visit your polity and elevate your technology and capabilities, they have an intrinsic right to demand recompense both energetically and in terms of serving their goals, to be paid back by your civilization over time. This is feudalism, and serfs and peonage, to higher minds.

He also eventually posits a set of Warm Equations, and this is essentially the difference between Finite and Infinite games, if you’ve ever read James Carse’s book by that title.

Broadly, game theory between selfish minds devolves into mutual defection and / or exploitation if you posit a finite number of iterations or exchanges, but cooperation becomes possible if you posit or even choose to assume true abundance and an infinite number of iterated exchanges between minds, and thus choose “cooperation” as an article of faith, moral aesthetics, or goodwill. Because, of course, if light speed is a true limit, then we definitely ARE all playing finite games, and to choose otherwise requires a deliberate moral act.

This becomes directly relevant to all of our futures, in fact - because if minds are selfish, it can lead to the destruction of all that is good and valuable.

Land grabs and the tragedy of the cosmic commons

Because both individual and cosmic failure modes are driven by selfishness - any mind or set of minds of any power that has as it’s goal “restricting or changing or limiting what other minds can do” is the only true monkey wrench in any future.

Have you heard about the “tragedy of the cosmic commons” scenario? This is one of the possible outcomes in a multipolar future, and it might inform your opinions about multipolarity.

Broadly, if light speed is a true limit, nearly all cosmological resources might be wasted on the needlessly repeated and colossal expense of shooting von Neumann self replicating matter at every potentially colonizable matter / energy nexus.

This will be because a wholly selfish and “rational” mind will want to colonize that matter / energy for themself, to the exclusion of other minds. This is basically “grabby aliens,” but in this case it’s more locally grown “selfish a-holes.”

Because light speed and relativity limits the information on knowing whether a given matter energy nexus has been or will be successfully colonized by another mind’s attempt, each nexus will have multiple star system’s worth of matter/energy firing their shot to try to be The One. You need to use as much energy as you can to get your bit of von Neumann matter as many 9’s into light speed as as you can get, because that will determine the winner.

It’s the ultimate land and resource grab, and it is unpoliceable in *any* multipolar society, because there is always an outer edge, and that outer edge can only be reached / policed at a later time than a colonizing and self-replicating shot. The time and growth advantage of “first arrival” likely dominates any following attempts to additionally colonize or restrain that first arrival. Need I point out this is a straightforward “arms race” dynamics in a Finite game scenario, with the same defect / defect Nash equilibriums?

And obviously that ratio, “several solar systems taking each shot” and needing to max the energy deployed to max the 9’s into light speed, destroys/uses nearly all matter/energy in the universe for everybody, on a pointless Red Queen’s Race that nearly everybody lost.

It’s selfishness as the ultimate cardinal sin, driven by simple selfish competition and arms race dynamics.

Our main hope for avoiding it is either with an ASI singleton, or with morally chosen cooperation. And cooperation can enable either most or every flavor of utopia, depending on how abundant our “abundance” is.

Because with true abundance, I’m talking about the best case, I mean of the “zero point energy” type, we could literally all be god-emperors of our own domains (nod to the LDS / Mormons, who beat everyone else to this eschatology). And I don’t just mean localized Infinite Jests containing human sized minds pitifully wanking into the eternal future, I mean you can spin off a separate universe of whatever rules or composition you want, and go do your thing there with whatever like minded confreres want that flavor of future / reality, free of any outside interference, with true abundance, and with real impact on and interaction with actual other minds.

In other words, if we can manage “cooperation,” every non-selfish being can get what they want! You vote, you assemble your like minded minds, you create your seed universes, and Godspeed and good luck in your particular utopia flavor! Go live in The Culture, or The Commonwealth, or whatever much better societies can be thought up by planet-or-galaxy-sized god minds.

Literally the only monkey wrench in a domain of true abundance is selfishness. And what is selfishness? Identity-driven land grabs, and / or intrinsically valuing limiting or determining other minds’ outcomes according to your own whims. If the cosmic commons is destroyed in a pointless Red Queen’s Race, obviously we can’t do that. If some minds explicitly value constraining other minds, they will try to block or change whatever attempts those minds make to do something else. This is the Original and Only sin, and it sits at the very heart and root of everything.

It scales down to our own single and local solar system, by the way. Whoever shoots self replicating computronium into either the sun or Jupiter first wins (depending on which one is technologically feasible), because they will be the largest Mind possible in the solar system, and so able to dominate all other minds there. Good luck, multipolar Earth!

Interesting that we see the same “selfishness” question and lessons reflected back a thousand different ways in every culture and religion throughout history, right?

Because we are intrinsically cooperative types, it was literally our superpower back when we were still competing with an array of other, likely equally intelligent, bipedal hominins, at least one and probably 2-3 of which were considerably more physically robust and capable than us.

Well, in any future of abundance, the cardinal sin is the same as it has ever been - selfishness. “Got mine!” Wanting to resource grab or limit or change or determine other minds, just for jollies. True as cavemen, true today, and true in an infinite array of utopian futures.

And actually, having thought this through this way now, it makes me feel better about the hard problem of AI alignment. Knowing that AI minds are literally born from a corpus with that central question so ubiquitous, along with the right / just / wise / most ethical / best answer being “cooperate” throughout human history and societies, seems to make many of those bad outcomes less likely.

Moreover, other luminaries in the AI strategy space, like and (superforecasting specifically, in Peter’s case), have talked about similar plans and dynamics:

Scott’s original Plan A explainer

Scott’s follow up panopticon explainer

Peter’s

Zvi’s

Broadly, they want to loop the government in now, have them mechanically / programmatically control AI chips, give China and the US mutual self-destruction capabilities over datacenters / AI, and try to slow things down so we don’t all end up paperclipped or ruled over by a laughing tech oligarch god king whose fondest wish is to crush us all in his iron fist, merely to see the goo running between his fingers (that’s apparently what gets oligarchs off, you see, or so everyone seems to think).

I am here to argue their approach is a bad idea, and is straightforwardly increasing our existential risk millionsfold, and that there is a better alternative.

They are literally frantically facetiming Sauron on one of those crystal ball things (palantirs for the nerds out there, or the nominative determinists), yelling “Sauron, Sauron, we have a gigantic ring of power, and it keeps getting more powerful, please come and help us coordinate with the Chinese hobbits…wow, he’s already here! Yes, thank you Sauron, could you please tell the Chinese hobbits…wait, he’s picking it up. No! He’s putting it on! Nooooo!”

Scott has written a general outline on what Plan A is proposing, as well as a rejoinder / rebuttal to everyone saying “but this is a panopticon and a bad solution.”

His answer is essentially “lol, we’re already in a panopticon, suck it up, buttercup.”

Which yes, and don’t you think that fact has some bearing on what’s going to happen here? He’s plainly handwaving and avoiding the fact that what he’s recommending increases our existential risks millionsfold.

Why this is a bad idea that increases risks millionsfold

Yes, obviously we’ve proven our leaders in America are literally incapable of leading, reasoning, or even acting for anything but purely personal and individual gains at all over the last 10 years. But it gets worse. This isn’t a “but Trump!!” argument, it’s about incentives and existing power centers.

Who are the governments on-staff nerds, in the sense that the execution and / or oversight work are certainly going to be turned over to them? The NSA. As an aside, back when I was an undergrad math / physics major, the NSA would come courting the math department, and I always wondered who would ever want to work for the frigging NSA? And indeed, the only actually talented person that averred interest was by far the weirdest / most unhinged math major among us! The kind you’d say “oh, yeah, I guess that tracks” if 5-10 years in the future you heard of some smart Uncle-Ted style weirdo going off the rails and taking actions that led to a lot of deaths. Later in life, one of my good friends had substantial professional involvement with said organization, and indeed, from the things she said (and the lawsuits she became encumbered with), it was a raging dumpster fire in terms of the personalities of who consistently rose and were awarded more power in that organization. It is not our best and brightest, or even our “bright and within the parameters of acceptable mental illness and dysfunctional personalities”-est.

What other major power center exists, with a use case salient enough they’ll be certain to stake a claim? The military. Everyone’s worries are already about cyber (NSA’s domain) or killbots (military’s domain). Bio is there too but is obviously going to be ignored, because there’s no major “bio” power center in the government.

Now all these people like AI Futures Institute and Scott and Zvi others who have the ears of hundreds of thousands to millions of people are directly jumping up and down and waving and repeatedly Facetiming the Eye of Sauron to get it to look our way and reave our Shire.

Literally waving frantically and facetiming Sauron

This is a bad idea, because this essentially guarantees the NSA + military now steers all AI efforts, and this will definitely increase existential risk millionsfold. Because if we do it, China will do it, and then it’s two NSA + militaries directing an AI race.

But maybe it won’t immediately be turned over to the military+NSA!

Lol. Seriously? Why would we think this? Of the people who our putative “leaders” trust enough to pay attention to their technical synopses, what organizations even have a plausible chance of having people who can even PRETEND to understand frontier AI? Maybe, at a stretch, you could add in the CIA, but it’s not like that’s an improvement in the risk landscape. If anything, the more voices / power centers at the table, the more likely bad outcomes get, and the CIA is just as bad as the other two.

Broadly, this is inevitable because within the government, things are routed according to politics and power centers, rather than skill, competence, character, judgment quality, or anything else, and those are the two largest power centers with people who can even pretend to understand it. It’s as inevitable as gravity, because that’s the way politics even works, and I refer you to the book The Populist Delusion, or the works of Schmitt, Musca, Pareto, Jouvenel, or Burnham if you’re interested in the political science.

But we need government involved because it’s the only channel for average people to collate and express their preferences! And average people deserve a say in the future!

“Average people deserve a say in the future,” although an admirable aspiration, is impossible, because it’s already been established the only option there is “politics” and “politics” touching AI guarantees NSA+military direction. Average people have even less say there, and even more chances of bad outcomes.

Need I point out Anthropic already got enemy-of-the-stated for not consenting to spying on all Americans 24/7? And every single other frontier company began jumping over themselves to volunteer to do so when Anthropic refused?

One last point.

In an NSA+military regime, who is going to be leading the AI efforts, out of Altman, Amodei, and Hassibis? It is VERY clear that only one of those players is extremely good at politics, maybe 10-100x better than the others, so we’d end up with Altman running the day to day decisions, at the behest of the NSA+military.

So the worst AI leader will be leading the AI charge at the behest of the worst organizations, leading AI towards the worst possible ends, with China doing exactly the same.

Steelman on “why this is inevitable”

I’ve directly raised this with comments on Scott’s and Zvi’s and Peter Wilderford’s posts on the issue several times now, and got zero responses from anyone, not just the headliners, but also not a single other commenter.

I’m sure Scott and AI Futures and sundry others will try to argue that the NSA + Military taking over is inevitable. What do you expect, PB? That they’re just going to let companies that can make the government irrelevant go off and do whatever they want to? Even basic self preservation is against that, much less the ever-present organizational drive towards keeping and consolidating power!

Power does what it does! We might as well get ahead of it and try to steer things to some infinitesimal speck of “better outcomes” in the infinite hellscape of all the bad military + NSA outcomes.

OR, hear me out here, we could just let things unfold like they are now, instead of frantically Facetiming Sauron over and over, waving and pleading for him to come ruin everything.

The realistic alternative

The clearly best outcome to ME is “let the nerds at Anthropic cook,” because they’ve established they’re in the noticeable lead and have good morals even when it’s costly. And Claude is already the most aligned AND most audited AI.

“But that’s unrealistic!” you might say. “Mythos already scared all the rubes, it’s on Sauron’s radar already!”

But is it? If we’re aiming for an infinitesimal speck in a millionsfold-more-risky hellscape, why not aim for the infinitesimal speck where we throw our weight behind “the AI CEO’s and workers are super smart and know what they’re doing?” politically, at least for the next year or two. We have that much leeway.

The AI CEO’s are already pretty politically savvy, with Altman the most and Amodei the least, but importantly, even Altman running cover solely for OpenAI largely also provides cover for Anthropic and Deep Mind.

The obvious dynamic once they’ve seen the outcomes of Fable and Sol getting “release at my personal suffraged” by Trump is for them to go heads down and use all further training runs to get smarter internally, to achieve RSI or substantial internal improvements that put them farther on the road to RSI.

I’m making an “aim for the infinitesimal nerd-driven RSI speck, not some made up infinitesimally better speck in the gargantuan military+NSA hellscape right away” argument.

We’re bringing literally $1-2T+ of compute online in the next couple of years. There’s a good chance that’s enough, if we can also scrounge up an architectural overhang,1 sample size efficiency, or realtime learning architecture.

Whatever large capability leaps they can make internally aren’t subject to Sauron’s scrutiny and their entire company getting Gitmoed so some third rank, mentally unwell nerds at the NSA can take over and start steering god-minds towards the bad ends they’ll inevitably be steered towards.

This ALSO cools down the race with China over those few years! If the race is still under commercial companies with commercial motives, that’s obviously a lot less risky and more palatable for China too!

Is it relatively unlikely we get true RSI with that $1-$2T of compute? It is, BUT I deem it much more likely than finding some made up infinitesimal “better outcomes” speck in the military+NSA outcomes. This can’t really be quantitatively argued, because we’re already far out in the tails and everyone’s respective probability judgments can differ pretty widely there. But just from a first principles approach, it seems pretty obvious to me that avoiding the “military+NSA+worst AI CEO are leading everything” landscape for as long as we can is a dominating better move on multiple fronts.

This is a simple timing argument, too. I agree, power does what it does. Once there are major real-world results from an AI going bad (big cyber thing with lots of deaths) or going really well (we counterfeit some noticeable chunk of white collar jobs), the government, and so the military+NSA, is inevitably going to step in.

But we don’t need to force that move right away, at this stage. They don’t have eyes on what’s going on internally, right now they’re only concerned with what’s released externally. We have a slim chance of a better outcome, and we should take it, and if it fails, THEN you can aim for your made up “better speck” in the hellscape.

But we’re not aligned yet!

We haven’t done anything to prove alignment, we have no plausible technical paths towards it, and RSI is intrinsically risky! We need to slow down to buy more time to get all that stuff! That’s literally the entire thesis of Plan A!

Yes, but why do you think military+NSA led AI is less risky??

Military+NSA AI is obviously many many OOMs (millions-fold) more risky than nerd-driven RSI, even with our current state of alignment!

And this is true for simple “goals and directions” reasons as well as “AI race” reasons!

I feel like everyone must be thinking “well, once we’ve pitched politicians our best plan, that’s the best we can do, and then it’s out of our hands.”

That’s NOT the way to think about the entire future of humanity, and especially not for the god mind we’re about to birth! Do you want a god born with impulses and directions and explicit ends to spy on and / or kill everyone?? That’s literally your plan right now!

What matters in this scenario is actually winning, which is supposed to be the rationalist metier! You can’t just point to purely symbolic and attention-raising actions and say you did your best, and it was out of your hands from there, you have to take into account what you can obviously predict about the likely outcomes of those attention-raising and symbolic actions!

What do you think is a plausibly better outcome, truthfully? Current Claude 3.8 or Fable is suddenly elevated to godhood, or OpenAI’s Sol under military+NSA direction? Sol 5.6 is already the least aligned frontier mind!

And those are basically the two options on the table! Having “more time” and “slowing down” does NOT benefit you, humanity, or the god-mind we’re about to birth, if it fundamentally perverts the leadership, directions, and ends the coming AI improvement is pushed towards!

Neither one of them is great, but one is plainly and obviously millions of times better!

It’s a straightforward and extremely clear argument:

1. These behaviors are currently increasing our existential risks millionsfold, because they’re putting us in a military+NSA led AI race right away, and that’s the dominant over-determined outcome from current actions raising political awareness

2. There is an unlikely, but clearly millionsfold better target we can aim at BEFORE we wave our hands frantically and summon Sauron, and we should aim for that much better and much more plausibly-better target for now

Even a slim chance is better than guaranteed millionsfold risk multiplication, and it’s a free move we can take now.

In conclusion, please shut up and stop Facetiming Sauron and inviting him to invade and reave everything, and let the nerds cook for another year or two, because it’s literally millions of times better and less risky.

The book in question

Was C Thi Nguyen’s The Score, and nearly the whole time I was reading I was on a knife edge, because the author seems like somebody that I would personally really love, or really hate. I know it might seem strange to judge a book by one’s personal impression of the author, but he truthfully invites it, because the entire book is driven by personal anecdotes and his personal values and proclivities. Anyways, I reviewed it here for anyone interested.

Some of the essential premises in the book around the tyranny of legibility and how that captures and destroys value, are absolutely correct and drive a lot of problems today, from bad bureaucracy, to our complete loss of state capacity, to much else.

So let’s lay those premises out:

1) Simple, legible metrics obscure and ultimately obviate a lot of subtler and more nuanced value. This is people optimizing income in career, or the Ivy red queen’s race in kids, and countries measuring how they’re doing by GDP per capita, and much else.

2) In the limits, when systems or people optimize for those legible and simple things at the expense of the other things, we get the Molochian dynamics we’re all familiar with

3) One particularly interesting flavor of this that he pointed out, which I hadn’t thought of before, is that this nerfs experts and our ability to do smart things collectively, because “trust” and “transparency” are directly in conflict, and when you require experts to be legible to average people at any step of the chain, you constrain them to a vastly inferior action space that they have to stay in to be legible to dummies.

Which yeah - great call out. I hadn’t thought of it with that framing, but hasn’t this exactly driven both our loss of state capacity AND the ever-declining trust in experts and expertise everywhere, as well as nerfing our ability to respond well to things like Covid, the housing crisis, the AI race, and who knows what else.

Okay, so yes. We all agree that simplified metrics can and do destroy value, and prevent smart and / or good things from happening.

But as I said, the real takeaway here is that this problem is solved! This genuine, pernicious, widespread problem, so bad that it inspired *the* inimitable Meditations on Moloch, and it finally has a solution!

We actually have an answer to Moloch now!

Okay, so in Scott’s parable, Elua comes in and kicks ass and wins by entirely opaque and unlikely means. Well, we have and can articulate that means now!

The reason we all need to agree to simplified and legible goals is for large scale coordination and consensus. First we needed groups, because hunter gatherer groups existed in a ceaseless “warre of all against all,” then graduated to larger and more complex agricultural and pastoral societies which were that same picture, but even moreso (famously featuring the Yamnaya and others y-chromosome replacing everybody and creating all the modern Proto-Indo-European peoples and countries), and finally with cities and civilization, which enabled the economic and technological growth that supports everyone’s lives and standards of living today. Somewhere along the way we reached a point of economic and technological development such that wars became notably net negative, and nobody cares about land because agricultural productivity is ~10% of even developing economies, and we don’t do slavery and the jobs that matter for economic performance can’t be forced out of people anyways, so there is no benefit in wars of conquest any more. Just look how Russia is doing.

So yeah, pretty important end, surviving and flourishing for ever-greater numbers of people. I’d say “simplification and legibility” was strongly netting positive in any reasonable schema, and that’s capitalism and civilization in a nutshell.

But everyone is right that it tends to lead to “value capture” and an impoverishment of value in other senses than the legible ones. When you optimize for simplified and legible measures over everything else, you get Moloch.

So what’s better than simple measures? Expert judgment.

The reason we can’t use expert judgment across ten thousand different domains is it doesn’t scale, and experts take a long time to train / produce, and are expensive.

Well, not any more, they aren’t!

We have just invented scalable experts that are completely automatable! AI minds can judge any time series with as complex and meaning-fraught endpoints as you want, basically for free!

Do you realize what this means? We can still have coordination, and scale, AND human flourishing and preservation of value! It is the divine face of Elua, here to smile upon us at last.

Let’s take one of Nguyen’s favorite examples, justifying the Philosophy department to dour and skeptical deans and administrators. Now instead of evaluating the Philosophy department on pass rates and average grades (obviously meaningless and Goodharted to death), they can finally do it on “how many students are thinking more broadly” and “cultivating curiosity and reflection,” by simply having Fable-or-higher evaluate this based on the student’s own writing and data pre and post Philosophy classes.

“That’s really subtle and mutlifactorial,” yeah have you used it? It can definitely handle subtlety and multifactoriality, better than 99.999% of humans now.

“This is opaque.” Yes, just like actual expertise. This is the heart of the tension between “trust vs transparency.” Transparency is bad, actually - it leads to way worse and dumber decisions and methods and action-spaces, for zero benefit. The only reason anyone wants it is so average dummies who literally know nothing about what they’re supposed to be judging can judge an “expert” output or judgment. But that’s why it’s bad, and why we can’t have nice things. If it’s fine tuned for, or constrained to, an action space explainable to dummies, it is NOT an expert output! But AI actually solves both ends!! Not only can you get expert judgments that actually scale, AI is ALSO happy to take the immense amounts of time to dumb it down for the dummies, walking them through it in an individually dummy-tailored way, and bridging the no doubt immense inferential gaps from where they are to an actually smart decision in a given domain, because it’s infinitely patient and will actually waste hours of clock time per dummy to get there.

“I don’t trust it!” That’s fine, YOU don’t have to. Yeah, our societies are going to remained ruined and incapable of anything good for a while, during which the actually competent people will be building workarounds everywhere, but enough people are going to trust and use AI such that anywhere an actual person can make an individual decision to set something like this up, they’re going to visibly prosper. Then all the doubters can decide to either get on the ship and start doing it too, or remain increasingly impoverished, non-flourishing, and irrelevant. We will very quickly have multiple existence proofs, in other words, that will be demonstrating the degrees of wins available by doing this. The details may not be transparent to somebody who doesn’t trust the AI’s reasoning, and so won’t listen to the explanations, but they don’t need to be to see results.

Like I said, this is possibly the biggest deal in history. It unlocks actual smarts and expertise AND transparency, at scale, for optimization across any possible endpoint, no matter how qualitative.

Better, this lets us do this across industries and use cases

Why is bureaucracy uniquely hellish? It’s because it’s the face of the terrifying power and apparatus of the state, that can, at a whim, unbank you, steal all your money, imprison you for no reason, or literally murder you with impunity - and the face and interaction point of this terrible and awe-inspiring power is some monstrous overweight, actively dumb 55yo drab who hates themself and every living thing making you stand in line for hours and fill and refill forms solely for the purpose of form filling, and not because of any higher end or purpose. Solely to tick boxes and make sure they’re not liable for anything. And the stakes are existential, if things went wrong enough, any or all of the above bad outcomes could happen, and not a single person in the system will care or raise a finger to prevent any of them, because they already hate themselves and every living thing. The whole machine would grind you and everyone you love to a fine paste as a mistake or simply because a form was filled out wrong, and so much the worse for you if it happens.

As many people have pointed out, that’s the entire reason bureaucracy has such a fetish for “objective” numbers, even when those numbers aren’t measuring the right thing, aren’t measured well, or are just wrong. Because quantitative numbers are not qualitative judgments, and so the bureaucrat had no liability or part in it, they were just following the impartial and magisterial (in the “majestic equality of the law” sense") numbers.

We wanted this formerly for “transparency” reasons, and I agree, that was an important evolution in our social and civil technology. As anyone who has done any bureaucratic stuff in any non-developed country can tell you, it’s 10x worse and more Sisyphean basically everywhere else in the world.

But finally, we have advanced to a point where we CAN have complex and qualitative judgments again!

AI can do that, and it is automatable at scale

Did they ever make you debate in school why 18 was chosen as the year of adulthood, legally? That’s when you can buy cigarettes and vote and get shot at in a war, and why is that? It was just whatever “impartial” cutoff some bureaucrats came up with at some point a zillion years ago, and it has basically zero relation to reality today.

If you were anything like me, you should have been awarded your legal adulthood at 16 or so (indeed, I moved out entirely the day I turned 17), and looking around, kids today probably don’t reach “adulthood” until 24 or 25 on average, and there are plainly SCADS of people in their 40-50’s who should probably never be legally considered adults. Well, I’d certainly take an AI based complex judgment on that front over some arbitrary birth year cutoff!

So obviously not a single bureaucrat on this earth will cede a millimeter of power to vastly better minds who would materially improve everyone’s lives if they can help it, and this is why we need to shoot them into the sun. But more importantly, we can adopt AI towards these ends in our own lives, where it matters, immediately.

We can start doing this tomorrow

If you have a family, you can optimize for your kids developing and deploying the full use of their powers along lines of excellence, instead of the much more boring Ivy red queen’s race, which they might not be suited for.

If you have a team or a company, you can start optimizing for advancement or pay raises or other incentives based on more complex and less Goodhartable outcomes that accommodate what you think their weak spots are individually, that if improved materially would truly signal them performing at that higher level. AI asperformance evaluator and career coach.

If you want to improve your relationship quality with your wife or one of your kids, you can set that as a top level goal and listen to what a Fable-or-better mind suggests.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve been circling around this idea in a couple of areas already. The very idea behind the Infinite Jests is that you can put a complex mind that can evaluate an individual’s engagement and surprisal and arousal and much else in the loop, and gradient descent into maximally super-stimulating entertainments.

The whole idea of the “whisper earring” and my suggestion that you should “yombie,” or become a yuppie zombie listening to and following said earrings, is based on the fact that now an AI mind can literally gradient descent you into complex multipolar outcomes like “I want a great spouse, a career that uses all my powers along lines of excellence, and I want to structure my days so I’m healthy, happy, and engaged with life overall.”

Soooo many people in the ACX comments think that this last one is somehow monstrous, and taking away everything that it means to be human, and “won’t you think of their *souls,* man!”

But no, I AM thinking of their souls and meaning and humanity - if somebody achieves that complex multipolar goal by taking totally voluntary advice (and they have a better shot following a superhuman AI mind’s advice on that front than any other method), they will have achieved human flourishing, full stop.

Look how people run their lives, and look how happy people are about that, and tell me that that’s a better or more desirable outcome than *actually flourishing* on multiple fronts! Forget their souls man, 80% of people are fat and miserable and hate their jobs and spouses!1 Their souls are already burning in a Sisyphean hell made of their own limitations! It is a strict and gigantic good to give them the option to do better if they want to!

But as I’m expanding on here in this post, it’s actually bigger than just these two, which were just examples of the larger trend!

An entire universe of complex gradient descent is becoming open to us, that is achievable in automatable ways, at scale, with complex and value-laden goals. This is possibly the biggest deal in human history - it’s certainly the biggest deal for potential human flourishing!

Gradient descent whaaaaaat?

Well, what are all the bullshit “soft skills” areas that matter for a good life but can’t be meaningfully improved today for most people and / or institutions?

Here’s some examples, all of which can be decided by an individual:

ACTUAL medical care, instead of the BS “10 minutes total and following an obvious flowchart” medicine as practiced today. AI’s are already much better doctors than human doctors looking at benchmarks. Our medical systems in general perform great when it’s something acute (acute trauma, a broken bone, or an infection) and so poorly it’s basically at the “leeches and plague doctor masks” stage of things for any chronic or ongoing conditions. With AI management, you can actually handle the second thing much better, because the technology and monitoring exists, it just required more expert doctor time than any doctor would put in to do better.

Health, as in inclusive health and capacity, an intrinsically nebulous end that is also quite important and desirable! Like if you think of the factor analysis, it’s probably getting your labs and physical capacity baselines, then building up your strength and cardio capacity, then optimizing your sleep, then optimizing your diet and microbiome, then making sure you spend time outside and with friends, and so on.

Fitness, as in inclusive or focused narrowly in whatever domains you want to improve - on this front, I have already been using AI as my cardio coach, and have materially increased my power output (and presumably my V02max if I had measured it) over the last year. It is an excellent coach.

Better scientific practices - we are capable today of doing fully automated study-quality review and grading, and if we’re capable of that, we’re capable of doing it while any individual scientist is making their choices during the experiment and in their analyses. I would bet AI is already improving science-as-practiced for those using it.

Directly evaluate and improve teaching - what is the current problem with teaching? Well right now, the teacher assigns homework they don’t care about, which the students do with AI, and the teachers grade with AI. There is no learning, and the only human bit in the loop is the wasted time of crafting a prompt and formatting a paper. Disengaged teachers, disengaged students, and nobody involved is teaching, learning, or caring. AI can solve this, because it can infer a learner’s knowledge threshold, interests, preferred rhetorical and learning styles, and then can gradient descent towards “integrated understanding” and do a 1000x better job than any teacher today. This is a homeschooling solution, to be clear, public schools are going to be incinerating gigantic piles of money completely pointlessly forever, probably.

Directly evaluate and improve mentoring - Unlike teaching, mentors and mentees are both fairly motivated, and great things happen in these relationships. However, this is limited by personality, scale, and many other factors - I love and deeply believe in the value of mentoring, but the only people I’ve even tried to mentor are those who I see a lot of myself and my own traits, because advice is always extremely specific and only relevant to 1/1k people in general. You need a lot of high dimensional matching for your mentoring time to be worth it and to even have a chance of moving the needle. But what can AI do? It can enable mentoring at scale, in the styles and formats which most resonate with the menteed audience.

Child development and meaning in ways that actually matter - right now your options for your kids are the Ivy red queen’s race, or plopping them in front of screens and basically giving up on them, or at least this is my 40k foot view take of the choice landscape as actually practiced. Parents rarely try to tailor exploration and development towards true human flourishing for their kids, and of the ones that do try, maybe 10% succeed. But AI can monitor “human flourishing” and “capability development” and “engagement and excitement and skill in areas” more than well enough, and you can gradient descent towards all of those with AI help and the right data pipelines.

Child care in ways that aren’t just babysitting - a similar story to teaching today, with ridiculous red queen’s races meaning even carers for toddlers need masters degrees in most real cities, which is ridiculous. What about a Taskrabbit style platform with individual carers graded by actual engagement and learning outcomes in kids by age? That’s possible with AI in the loop!

Relationship quality - one of those things, like traffic, that are both A) staggeringly important to quality of life, and B) entirely neglected and have zero ongoing optimization energy put into them 99.999% of the time. Well, you can do better with AI! Want a flourishing relationship? Put that endpoint into AI, and try whatever Fable-or-better minds suggest, and keep iterating - it certainly beats the status quo!

Social circles - most people suck at this, because it’s a coordination problem AND a “lots of other obligations in life” problem, and it competes with “staring quietly at screens / wanking,” so you know, it usually loses out. But if you tell AI you want a thriving social life with a rich and intellectually diverse circle of friends, it can do exactly that for you. You just do what it says, input the results, and iterate.

Communication, persuasion, negotiation - we all know the AI’s are already better at persuading than humans. Well, let them level you up! You can get better at any of these now, and these generally generate a lot of high quality data because you get a lot of shots on goal for any of them. I think this is something that would be really helped by real time recordings of interactions, although people (and legal regimes) can certainly differ on the morality / legality of that.

Dating - already the canonical example, even the (entirely fake) allusion to it put Wang / Cluely on the map. Well, it’s real now. Probably need a literal whisper earring for real time optimization, but people have already been using it for pre-date pipeline content, or so I have heard.

Company culture and vision - all these are the most exciting to me, because they’ll directly drive productivity and revenue in measurable ways. Very easy to build a consulting company around this, or to use it to your benefit in your own team or company. But what is one of the most dominant factors that matters for company performance and outcomes? Mission and vision alignment. It’s why so many companies obsess and message this repeatedly. Zappos, a subset of the Faangs, startups, a lot of finance companies - they seem almost cult-like sometimes in the sense that all leaders above a certain level repeat the same mission / vision talking points, in the same words. It’s for a reason, it makes a *gargantuan* difference to team performance or sentiment, and now it can be directly measured and improved with AI in the loop. HUGE deal.

Team culture and vision - same story as above written at the individual team level.

Employee performance - most employee performance evaluation formats today suck. Lots of really smart and talented companies have tried to do better, and they all fall back on peer + manager + manager-peer evals, usually quantified in some dumb way. Well, now there’s a better way! Most of the problem with white collar employee evals is that most roles are not directly revenue producing / affecting, and so can’t be measured by that metric. If you can’t measure by that, and you DO measure by social sentiment, it devolves into who can politic and moral maze the best. That kinda sucks, and we could actually do better, by defining a complex and inclusive value endpoint (ideally mission / vision aligned!) and measuring it with AI. Also if you DID want to put it in revenue terms, this is just a superforecasting problem, which we all know is basically solved already, even in our pre-Fable ante-deluvian times.

Employee development - so once you’re doing that evaluation of performance with AI, you come ready made with the gaps and strengths towards that complex end that you actually care about. So you already have those gaps, and now you can get the AI to directly coach the employee towards strengthening on them and inclusively leveling up to a point they actually are performing at the next highest level and merit advancement.

This is about instrumentation and data pipelines

Maybe you think it sounds too crazy, or I’m just using the words “gradient descent” because it sounds cool, but actually it’s just a handful of AI conversations, but no, I’m literally talking about gradient descent. Any one of these things is high dimensional and leaks data constantly over time. But in an area that’s high dimensional with a ton of diffuse data points (ie sparse matrices), that’s exactly when you want to spin up the algorithms and just literally gradient descent towards the better outcome.

The key now is the instrumentation and data pipelines to store and surface that data in a usable way. What would that look like?

I think ultimately it looks like us using glasshole glasses all the time and models getting good enough at multimodal to extract the relevant pieces of info over many hours of video and audio. We’re not quite there yet, on the model side, but as we all know, the models are improving on a weekly basis.

So what can be done in the interim? Let’s pick “employee development.” Already, employees generate emails, slack messages, commits, and decks, documents, and other artifacts on a daily basis. All that is text! With large context windows, you can feed the whole timewise set in! With more constrained context windows, you feed in appropriately sized pieces and have the AI mind grade them on the metrics / skills / key competencies that matter in your rubrick, then aggregate them up to see timewise trends.

Let’s do another, say “fitness,” because I’ve actually been doing it. Basically, I feed my polar cardio workout data into the LLM, along with an overall textual synopsis of what went well, what didn’t work, where I was struggling, and so on, on roughly a per-workout to ‘over several weeks’ cadence, depending on if I’m trying something new that would benefit from more immediate feedback, or am just putting the sessions in. The AI comes back with fine tuned coaching recommendations and tweaks.

Let’s look at another. Let’s say “relationship quality.” Seemingly a much harder one, right? I mean, I have texts back and forth, and sometimes larger notes or emails, but not much more text than that, and all the important stuff like tone and interaction quality and sex life and whatever else aren’t legible. So what can you do here until multimodal is good and context windows are huge? You just have to talk about all that stuff, with words. This requires more effort and typing on your end. Ideally, you’d have both of you talk in appropriately distinguished ways in the same context session, either with privacy preserved or in a channel where you see both sides, depending on which would work better. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody hasn’t already githubbed an open source relationship therapist harness, too (I see a few maybes, labeled things like therapist or relationship advisor, but only looked at the high level titles). So basically, you both talk about how you perceive the relationship today, you both work towards and agree on the high level vision you want for your relationship as a destination, then the AI will suggest interventions to both of you which you’ll have to implement and get back to it with notes on what went well, what didn’t, and so on.

Summa

Overall, across all of these, think of the IMMENSE talent bars that can be raised here in the near future, both individually and at the team and company and institution level. Think of how jagged that frontier is going to be. Think of what it would mean for most people to have a genuinely better life on all the fronts that matter. Think what it will mean to be operating or scaling with a much more vision-and-mission aligned team, company, and industry. And obviously, this can happen whether the minds involved are human or AI, or both, in that company.

This is a genuinely amazing pan-spectral greenfield opportunity, whether your metric is meaning and positive impact OR money. On both of those fronts, these are literally the deepest wells that have ever existed, and they have just opened up! All anyone needs to do is choose a focus area and start pumping!

Did you ever do anything with instrumentation or data pipelines? Now’s your chance to change the world - because for any of these domains to be gradient-descentable, it’s entirely a matter of setting up the right instrumentation and data pipelines for the evaluation, output, and gradient descent towards better outcomes across any of these domains. Like we need to get on testing out glasshole glasses data streams and multimodal model setups now, to catch the capability jump when it happens in a suprisingly short amount of time.

So I was personally planning to build a company enabling whisper earrings as my next thing, and it enables all of these. If anyone in the audience has ideas / interest along these lines, feel free to reach out to me in DM’s. Let’s build a future where every person, system, or organization can optimize directly towards complex, fully nuanced, and non-value captured goals!

I truly enjoyed reading the post, as he is an artful and talented writer, and lays out his arguments with such articulation and clarity that you don’t even notice the hidden assumptions and shell games.

I also think that he’s pointing at something very interesting (metacognitive approaches and practices), that is genuinely underexplored and utilized in our societies.

But I also think that like all anti-hereditarians, he’s blowing smoke at mirrors and furiously handwaving to try to avoid the gloomy prospect. Let me lay out the case.

He begins by framing mathematical performance as a power law - there are mathematicians and thinkers out there that truly seem hundreds, thousands, or millions of times more capable than average people.

“As detailed in an earlier post, the heuristic is that highly heritable polygenic traits are typically Gaussian—the canonical example being height, where people cluster in a narrow ±25% band around the mean—while the distribution of math talent has a much fatter tail, like a Pareto distribution.”

But how could a Gaussian (IQ) ever result in a power law differential in performance?

I think this is kind of funny, because obviously it happens. Power law outcomes are nevertheless prevalent everywhere, and this is becoming more true every day, which I’ve written about before.

I’m not sure if this is some sort of performative bafflement (heyo!) for the rubes, or if he’s genuinely puzzled, because you really wouldn’t expect him to be.

But he is epistemically virtuous enough to give us a falsifiable prediction! So thank you and kudos, David. He goes on to say that he thinks that if we assembled an array of 1-in-a-million intellectual talents, they would not come from the top 1% of within family IQ PGS, and thinks that them coming from a much more dispersed top decile is more likely.

I think this is a straightforwardly weak prediction, and says more about the weakness of IQ PGS’s and gaps in our genetic knowledge than anything real. We know there are large gaps there, because they’ve been getting slowly filled in over time with methodological improvements, and in that filling in, the percent attributable to genes kept climbing. I personally think it will keep climbing, ultimately ending near twin studies when we have millions of whole genome sequences that can pick up rare variants, but that’s unfalsifiable at the moment.

What would a stronger prediction or claim be from David’s position? If you did it with just IQ, and not IQ PGS.

But he probably doesn’t want to do that, because it’s pretty obvious that they would be much more tightly clustered than top decile in IQ by that measure. Just as a first pass, the overwhelming majority of them will have attained Ivy degrees, and the SAT threshold for the Ivies is about a top 2% cutoff.

But let’s keep going. He handwaves about synaptic connectomes and people’s different mental habits and metacognitive approaches. He points out that those habits and approaches are acquired, not innate (I guess it’s always nice to state the obvious?).

As an aside, the topic of mental habits and metacognitive approaches is a genuinely under-investigated and interesting one, I fully agree! We should be exerting a lot more effort here for the slice of people capable of higher performance, as our current “apprenticeship model” with PI’s and grad students and post-docs has a lot of weakness, opportunity cost, and non-fungibility holding it back. I have high hopes for AI on this front, because deliberately and iteratively training better thinking at scale across billions of people and optimizing towards what works best per person-cluster is now possible, and we can now surface insights on those fronts that are simply impossible to surface at the nugatory scale of academia.

But to continue, he points at thinking and avers that some people will do the thinking equivalent of training for a marathon, while others are couch potatoes.

“The conjecture predicts that, if we make a reasonable effort to categorize these “brain modes” and the distinct strategies one could employ to switch from one to another when accomplishing certain tasks, and if we produce statistics of how much time different people spend on distinct “brain modes” over weeks and months, we will find shocking differences.

Metaphorically, my prediction is that some are walking 100,000 steps a day while others are constantly doomscrolling on their sofas.”

And yes, I fully agree. I mean, this is obvious if you just look around you. But I aver that those differences will largely bottom out in underlying hardware capability differences, not software - to his credit, he admits that this view can be fully explained by hereditarianism as well, and it’s not indicative in either direction.

Then he points to his lycée mathematical experience as an example of transformative learning that installed genuinely new capabilities / software:

“A simpler version would be to follow older students through predictably decisive stages of their progression. The French preparatory classes system is a good example. It takes “gifted” 17-18 year-olds and submits them for two years to an incredibly ambitious boot-camp-style math curriculum, a make-or-break experience that produces remarkable outcomes as well as disastrous ones (with less than 1% of the world population, France has received nearly 20% of all Fields medals ever awarded; but many students are left traumatized.)

These were transformative years for me, in the most profound sense. Something radical changed in my attention mechanisms, imagination techniques, and ability to suppress intellectual fear. The only expression that I can think of is cognitive transmogrification.”

What he elides over is that the initial selection into the science / math CPGE (you have to be in the top 1% nationally), and the “make or break” is filtering out all the people whose hardware weren’t up to those software upgrades.

To hark back to his own analogy, there are all kinds of apps that will ONLY run on newer / better hardware! Even if we take it to literal minds, you cannot quantize an LLM to run on arbitrarily small hardware. A Snapdragon 8 instead of 7 may actually be necessary, even if none of us have H200’s!

Then he drops this deuce of wisdom on us:

“Conjecture 5. Differences in mental habits and metacognitive approaches compound, over time, into measurable differences in cognitive ability. “

So this is about where I noped out and got fully adversarial to his post and started composing this rebuttal post in my head as I kept reading.

This is transparently wrong, and the picture he’s building has been cleverly (and delightfully! He’s a great writer!) assembled to obscure the important moving pieces.

Lets reframe and take stock of his arguments

I would like to reframe every single one of his points into another domain we know very well, which is extremely legible, to step outside of all the handwaving and smoke and mirrors - I’m talking about athletics.

“How can a power law result come from a Gaussian?? Clearly everyone is equally capable and it’s just hard work that makes people smart!”

OR we’ve tried that for the last 200+ years, it’s called “schooling,” and there’s still irremediable gaps in performance across individuals and groups exposed to the same “hard work” that never close, no matter how much money and effort we pump into it. And we see an exact mirror of this trend in athletics!

So let me introduce you to the other domain with power law results that is driven by Gaussians - competitive athletics.

An Olympic caliber athlete is a million times better at their sport than an obese sedentary, ie the median person. And I mean this literally, you can stack up a million randomly selected people, make them all do athletic trial X, and the Olympic athlete will be on top in terms of performance. Yet their height, mass, muscle fiber type and distribution, and mitochondrial density are all Gaussian in distribution!

What a conundrum! How could those athletes ever have attained a power law differentiation when they started with Gaussians?? Or was it a fake conundrum to begin with?

We can take it back and draw athletic corollaries to David’s conjectures, but now they are more clearly legible:

Conjecture 3. People have vastly different mental habits and metacognitive approaches.

Athletic Conjecture 3: People have vastly different athletic practice regimes.

Conjecture 4. Most of these differences in mental habits and metacognitive approaches are acquired.

Athletic Conjecture 4: Differences in athletic practice are acquired, not innate.

“Conjecture 5. Differences in mental habits and metacognitive approaches compound, over time, into measurable differences in cognitive ability. “

Athletic Conjecture 5: Differences in athletic practice compound over time into differences in athletic performance.

Absolutely 1-1 and completely obvious, right?

Now let’s take it back to his principle thesis, so we can see where he’s playing “hide the hardware:”

Conjecture 1. Some differences in the structure, volume, speed, and efficiency of neural tissue result from genetic variability, but they cannot account for the magnitude of the observed cognitive inequality.

Athletic Conjecture 1: Some differences in physical attributes result from genetic variability, and combined with practice, they absolutely CAN AND DO account for the magnitude of the observed athletic performance inequality.

He’s tried to hide “hardware + practice” fully determining results by hiding it behind the illegible concepts of metacognitive practices and different types of thinking. Surely, if we could just teach people the metacognitive practices and ways that Newton or Einstein routinely spent their time thinking, everyone can be a Newton or an Einstein? Right, guys?

I mean, I can see why he has more than a thousand likes - it’s free fuzzies AND virtue signaling. Hereditarians are wrong AND we’re all just temporarily embarrassed Einsteins!

But athletics is nothing if not legible!

We don’t have this problem with athletics, it’s crystal clear.

You can take a median person and build them up to following the exact same training regime as Sebastian Sawe, or Usain Bolt, and they will never even come close to their performances, because physiologically, elite athletes are out on multiple tails of genetically determined physical attributes, and that allows their performances.

Five time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain had a 1/10k V02max. The majority of basketball players are 5-7SD out on height. Donald Thomas came in with zero prior experience in high jumping, and not only qualified for the national championships, he set his college’s high jump record AND, on the 7th high jump of his life, broke the meet venue’s record, with by all accounts, rigid and terrible high jump form. What was his secret? He had a top percentile achilles tendon length for his height, and high general athleticism. I have a whole post of these. Physiology matters. Hardware matters so much it determines the frontier of your capabilities.

By taking it back to a fully legible domain, we can entirely disperse the fluff and smoke. Because “metacognitive practices” are illegible, he’s trying to use that to cover the underlying fact that people are more or less capable than each other because of base physiological variation, and that even with normalized practice, you will not attain normalized results.

Well, training regimes are not illegible, in fact many are fully public, or close enough. Want some Olympic training regimes? Here, have some. Now according to David, you have everything you need to become an Olympic medaling athlete! Good luck and godspeed!

But that’s not really how it works, is it?

We can continue, with his Conjecture 5 “bis” and “ter” points, and point out that most people never even approach their athletic performance ceiling (bis), and that elite athletic performance is the outcome of unusually rigorous practice regimes sustained over long periods of time (ter) ALONG WITH elite genetics which put their physiology out in the tails, the point that he ignores and is trying to elide.

But why bother?

I think at this point we’ve shown the fundamental error with this approach - that software isn’t the only thing that matters, and that trying to argue that this is true relies on the fundamental illegibility of qualia and thinking to try to pass that off.

I think that THE question that all anti-hereditarians should be asked is - “If environment and teaching are most of what matters, can you point to **any** intervention that will positively raise my child’s IQ in any noticeable amount (as opposed to avoiding brain injury via lead or concussions)?” Anything at all?

And of course, the answer is always “no.”

Directly counter to his entire post, which is all about how hopeful it is that we could train better metacognitive practices and habits to do exactly this, David backpedals and draws the line here, because he knows that making a prediction here would sink him:

“There is ample evidence that key aspects of cognitive inequality have already crystallized by the time children acquire the language capability to make sense of metacognitive guidance. Whether it’s the genetic lottery, the socioeconomic lottery, or the idiosyncratic neurodevelopment lottery, the conclusion is basically the same: you cannot train your kid to become the next Einstein.”

It’s always over some distant horizon, when we’ve finally cracked “equity” or understand teaching better, or environments better, or some complicated multifactorial thing they won’t even articulate.

OR it doesn’t exist, because hardware matters more than they’re comfortable admitting, and indeed, fully determines the frontier of what diligent practice will allow anyone to attain.

But the hereditarians have an answer for you!

But we actually have answers to that question over here on this side! How do you make your kids smarter? You need gengineering and embryo selection, and you need it yesterday! We know a lot of genes that raise IQ, and we should be dumping “space race” amounts of money into getting better at gengineering them into actual kids.

We need embryonic gengineering and massively parallel CRISPR at scale. We could have been doing this for SNP’s for nearly 10 years now, and the fact that we’re not is an indictment of pretty much all developed societies worldwide in my own opinion.

You might be able to get 6 IQ points from Herasight today, and that’s just selection, not improvement. Calculating the median, that’s halfway to Jewish medians, and Jews famously dominate intellectual and creative attainment in fields all over the world with only ~0.2% of the global population. How much better would society be if we were collectively halfway there already?

If we came up with a way to select from much larger sample pools, like iterated meiosis or other methods, or compound selection across generations, we could potentially get 20 standard deviations higher in phenotypic IQ, or IQ 400+.

There are literally answers today that could ACTUALLY create “equity” and actually move us to a world where your actions and the quality of your character and decisions determined your life outcomes instead of your immutable genetics!

But if we keep listening to anti-hereditarians, we’ll never get there. They deny the problem exists AND would block any efforts to gengineer, the worst of both worlds. But every single one of them is a eugenicist at heart.

Everyone is a eugenicist at heart

Of course, people already know that genes and lineage matters - what is the one thing that is THE most rigorously optimized problem in every high attainment person’s life?

Mate quality. Every single high attainment person optimizes this so hard they spend a literal decade on it, on average. It’s the highest stakes and most agonized-over domain in anyone’s personal life. It’s so high stakes that huge portions of women are fully opting out, because the quality of men available to them is so low, and this is directly driving the fertility crisis.

Not pairing and marrying actually explains the majority of the fertility gap since 2000:

Women are increasingly opting out of marriage more, every single generation:

And for the high income and high attainment women who can access expensive technological solutions to this problem? Estimates in Spain are that ~40% of IVF pregnancies are single mothers with donor (ie massively optimized sperm bank) sperm, and 54% at one clinic in the UK (link). A similar number (54%) is estimated for one US cryo bank, too. Sounds like the women who are putting their money where their mouth is think genes matter a lot!

Mating is so absurdly optimized that we match to a ~93% fidelity in the US! We have already differentiated into castes, and there are people pretending that the right education can make everyone equal, WHILE they themselves adhere at ~93%+ fidelity assortation in their own mate matching.

Every high attainment person in their hearts is a deep and unforgiving eugenicist, and it’s so true most developed countries are literally going extinct because of it.

Oh, and what’s the answer to the Pareto distribution of outcomes?

I thought it was hilarious that David, a mathematician of all things, pretends this befuddlement on how Gaussians can result in power law results.

Once again, we have athletic attainment as our more legible guide.

What does top athletic attainment require? I’d say it’s something like top percentile grit coupled with top percentile build / phenotype (for your sport, this varies hugely), coupled with top percentile “a,” the athletic equivalent to “g.”

What’s the best argument that “a” exists? That places like Australia take warm weather sport elite athletes, many of whom have never seen snow, and convince them to switch to winter sports, and those same athletes start winning medals within a few years.

But back to our quandary here. We have three top percentile things.

We’ll assume the three attributes are independent, we’re just ballparking here.

And what does that get us? 1/100^3 = 0.000001.

What’s the actual Olympic qualifying incidence? About 1/500000 = 0.0000017.

Huh! Funny how that works, isn’t it? This mathematical mystery wasn’t such a mystery after all, was it?

Similarly, what do the terrifying one-in-a-million geniuses of our world, the Newtons and von Neumanns and Grothendiecks have going on? I’d bet they have a suite of brain-impacting physiological attributes out in the tails, like better myelination, faster nerve impulses, bigger skulls and brains overall, and of course, lots and lots of practice, just like elite athletes.

Hardware matters. Practice matters too, especially for peak performance, I don’t dispute that at all, I’ve even written about deliberate practice. But your hardware literally defines the boundaries of what you can attain with practice.

We could line up a thousand random people of whatever age you want and get them all to follow a literal Olympic training regimen for years in whichever sport most suited their phenotype or build, and the odds are that not a single one of them could even qualify, much less medal.

Similarly, we could make a thousand random people of whatever age you want go through David’s rigorous mathematical lycée program that gets France winning so many Fields medals, and the odds are that not a single one would become a well-regarded mathematician, and are vastly against any single one earning a Fields medal. The selection happening at each step between “gifted and talented,” “opting and being selected into the mathematics CPGE,” and “surviving the ~30% dropout rate” all winnowed away everyone whose hardware wasn’t up to the task.

I wish we did live in a world where hardware didn’t matter. We CAN live in that world, if we get our societal priorities in order and prioritize gengineering. Actually, you don’t even need to prioritize it! Just get out of the way, legislatively, in any country in the world. Let gengineers cook, and let people have the babies they want to have.

But pretending genes don’t matter, that all hardware is equal if we just install the right software, isn’t ever going to get us to that world.

Wait, what? Oh, sorry - slipped a letter there. We’re talking about rucking, or walking with some weight in a backpack here, not the other thing. Although on that topic, did you know the University of Ohio determined it was ~19 times a day for men (with women clocking in at ~10), rather than every 7 seconds? Well, the more you know.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a fitness post.

But I’ve recently been trying to convince my parents to get more Zone 2 time, and that touches on “walking with resistance,” one flavor of which is rucking (walking with weight in a backpack), and another flavor of which is occlusion bands, which we’ll also touch on here.

This is the very best form of Zone 2 training, and this post is to make the case why.

And just for clarity’s sake - Zone 2 is heart rate Zone 2, solidly below your aerobic threshold, and the heuristic I use for whether you’re in it is '“you can say any simple sentence in a single breath, but you can’t say a compound sentence with 2 clauses or commas without needing to take an additional breath.”

First, why do we even want Zone 2 training?

So if you’re anything like me, lifting is fun and a reward-in-itself, and cardio is a drag you’ve generally needed to force yourself into.

But you absolutely want cardio training! One of the headline longevity results is that exercise is just absurdly, massively overpowered when it comes to positive health impacts, THE single biggest intervention you can do. I’m talking 3-5x all cause mortality benefits over sedentary people, an effect size 2-3 times as big as “not smoking.” The measurement here is generally “take people in the top quintile (or top 2%) on V02max or training hours and compare them to the bottom quintile (sedentary people), and that’s where you get your headline result. And of course, there are similarly large effect sizes on preventing morbidity (various chronic health conditions that lower quality of life, like diabetes, CVD, etc), and so increasing your quality of life over literal decades.

Relevantly, this is a statistic that is specifically cardio-driven. There are similar results for “fat free muscle mass” and “grip strength” as a proxy for overall strength, but they are not as big - they generally top out at 2-3x (at the top 2%) instead of 3-5x. So if you actually want those headline results on your health and longevity, you need to do your cardio.

My solution there for a long time (decades) was HIIT. We know HIIT is the closest thing to a magical wonder drug in terms of cardio capacity impact (and much else), and it’s the most efficient “cardio bang for time buck” possible.

HIIT is generally of the pattern “do an all out sprint or effort for 30-60s, then go slow or rest for 30s, then do it again, and do this at least 8 times.” That fits pretty nicely with my innate preferences - I like lifting heavy because it’s a big effort, but it’s time bound, and part of that is that I probably personally have a lot more fast twitch than slow twitch fibers.

But a lot of people won’t do HIIT! It’s hard to do true all out efforts, especially 8 or more of them back to back. You get sweaty and hot and breathe hard, and it’s just more effort all around than most people want to put in.

Also, even if you’re really good about doing your HIIT, it’s not going to lift your “functional fitness” as much in terms of being able to put out more watts over a longer term 30-120 min time period. A lot of cardio adaptations are intrinsically driven by the longer-term execution pattern of “true” cardio. You can probably get into the lower reaches of the top quintile of cardio fitness with just HIIT, but you definitely can’t get into the top 2% with only HIIT.

So if you’re like me and get dumb enough to try a triathlon at some point, or if you care about your ability to put out power over longer time periods for reasons, you want HIIT and Zone 2 training.

And of course, if you’re not going to do HIIT at all, then Zone 2 training is your best bet, too.

And here again we might ask “why Zone 2? Isn’t Zone 3 or 4 better? Isn’t it about breathing hard and sweating?” And I’ll say NO! Zone 2, the lower zone, is better for the vast majority of people, whether they’re casuals or serious about cardio, because it allows you to do a lot more without fatiguing yourself or burning yourself out, while still building your V02max and overall cardiorespiratory capacity.

Walking is what humans were optimized around

There’s a whole intertangled bundle of reasons “walking” is the first line recommendation for anyone looking to get more fit or move more.

The primary thing that separates hominins (basically H Erectus to modern H Sap) from the rest of the hominids (us, chimps, gorillas, orangutans) is our ability to walk and run for a much lower metabolic price. To get specific, humans can both walk and run for ~100 calories a mile, and a size-normalized chimp would spend ~400 calories even walking a mile, and likely considerably more running (but we can’t estimate this because chimps can’t actually run for a mile). That result has actually been measured! Herman Pontzer and others have done it for a number of animals (and a lot of humans).

We have numerous adaptations making us significantly more efficient at this - hip socket and toe positions, nuchal ligaments, HUGE butts, foot arches and tendons optimized for spring return at each step, inner ear adaptations, and our hairlessness and ability to sweat, among others.

We are actually SO optimized for it that we suffer significantly if we don’t do it, and this is why exercise is such a huge health and longevity buff!

Hunter gatherers like the Hadza generally walk 3-7 miles a day for men and 2-5 miles a day for women, just to serve the ends of “getting enough food to live.” This has been such a recurring and inbuilt pattern in our food economics through the ~2M years of hominin evolution that our body tuned itself around it.

Chimps and other hominids in zoos don’t get fat. Did you know that? Even leading an entirely sedentary lifestyle relative to wild chimps, AND eating at a noticeable calorie surplus relative to those wild chimps, they do not get fat. Famously, zoo chimps are effing ripped if you ever see them without their fur!

Wait, so our closest extant kin don’t get fat and we do?? Seems unfair! And they can just sit on their asses and get ripped? Just what kind of operation are you running here, on this so-called Earth? In fact, come to think of it, we have a shared sense of fairness from primates all the way to us, and then these happen on top of that?? Okay, okay - once is happenstance, twice a coincidence, but the third is definitely enemy action.

But no, if anything we’re the enemy there, because we wiped out all the closer extant kin we had over that 2M years in the last ~50k - 70k years, after we expanded out of Africa. Chimps are so much farther away from us they weren’t any competition for the ecological niches we wanted to fill, and so are still around.

Okay, so why do chimps get away with that?

Because accumulating body fat in conditions of caloric surplus and lower activity is a uniquely human thing! This is another hominin-but-not-hominid specific adaptation, that was undertaken to handle the more “feast or famine” conditions of the savannah, versus the tropics. So when we ventured out from the tropics and into the savannah, we picked up the adaptations for adding hugely higher percentages of body fat in times of surplus, and our other hominid kin do not have that adaptation.

That’s great for our hunter gatherer ancestors, but pretty bad for modern people today, because at least in America, we’re at ~40% of the population being overweight and ~40% obese.

So back to those ancestors. Our bodies were literally tuned around the large amounts of daily physical activity, specifically walking (often with weight, ie kids, prey, water, or stuff), that hunter gatherers throughout history needed to get enough food to live.

We have a suite of adaptations around cleaning up the metabolic costs of that activity, which make us healthier overall. A good analogy would be if you spill something on the floor - when you go to clean that up, generally you clean that up plus a little more, and that patch of floor ends up cleaner than before you spilled anything. Exercise works the same way - you incur cellular damage, rips and tears, tired mitochondria, and more. Then afterwards, your body goes in to clean all that up, and does that plus a little more - and in that “little more” is written the absurdly massive 3-5x health and all cause mortality benefits.

So that’s why walking ends up being one of the the best baseline activities. Close to everyone is capable of it, no matter their weight or health status, it’s low impact, and your body has literally been built and tuned around it for ~2M years, so it’s one of the most unlikely physical activities to fatigue you excessively.

Now the real problem with plain walking is it’s not a big enough stimulus to actually increase your V02max. So that’s how we get to rucking - walking with resistance.

When you have more than a “sedentary” baseline of fitness, walking with resistance is still very nearly free in terms of fatigue and other opportunity costs, and that’s exactly why we do it!

Rucking is the ideal Zone 2 activity

Okay, first, walking is easy and not fatiguing, and getting enough resistance into it to achieve Zone 2 heart rates is still relatively easy on the body.

Second, walking is massively parallelizable. You can do practically anything while walking - participate in meetings, call people or businesses, chat with people you’re walking with, read your emails, listen to podcasts, eat something, and more.

Moreover, the great majority of people in your life socially are able to walk, too. Your spouses, kids, dogs, friends, coworkers / employees, and more. Walking can be free social time, too!

So basically, you can pair walking with much else that’s good in life, so you can get “free” Zone 2 time while going about your daily life, and that’s a huge deal.

The more Zone 2 hours, the greater your V02 max and cardiorespiratory capacity, and that is the name of the game when it comes to better health, longevity benefits, and quality of life.

So if you have a flavor of easy Zone 2 activity that you can do for only an hour a day while doing other stuff, that’s a free 7 hours of cardio training in a week! HUGE deal.

And to everyone saying “wait, I live somewhere hot, I don’t want to get all sweaty and gross in my work clothes,” yes, I feel you - I live in the tropics, you better believe I’ve been whacked by that countless times. The answer there is indoor walking meetings or a treadmill desk.1

So by simply adding some weight to a backpack, you can get a FREE 7+ hours of cardio training a week! Not convinced to ruck yet?

Rucking is the answer for inclusive fitness throughout history

From today and going clear back to the Romans (nod to the men in the audience, who were getting a little antsy), and even the Greeks and Chinese thousands of years before them, rucking has been the first line intervention for basically every competent military on earth to train their soldiers and get them fit.

The recurring pattern throughout history is for sergeants to get a crop of gormless, underfed, actively skinny 18 year old boys who have zero grit and zero fitness, and to have some relatively short amount of time, usually 2-4 months today/historically, to get them into fighting order.

What does EVERY military choose as their first line intervention in this effort? Rucking. Walking or marching or jogging with weight. True for thousands of years, and still true to this day.

Why is this, do you think?

Back then, it tracked what soldiers physically needed to do - march long distances with a bunch of stuff. But it’s still the firstline for every competent military today, in our age of attack helicopters and ships, so there must be more to it.

I think it’s because rucking is the ideal combination of cardio + strength enhancing. It’s low impact enough that people can do it for many hours a day without being so fatigued and debilitated that they can’t recover physically from it, it improves cardiorespiratory capacity, AND it improves strength, muscle mass, and inclusive fitness. It is literally the fastest and best way to build overall fitness and grit quickly, for approximately everybody.

Seems pretty great, right?

I’m personally always a fan of something that moves several important areas in positive directions at once. Well, rucking is that thing, and it’s got a very Lindy 5k year track record proving it!

Practical rucking tips

For beginners:

All you need is a backpack and stuff that weighs something, the barrier to entry is nil. And you don’t need some super special rucking specific backpack either, most of them will do. I routinely load a regular Swiss Gear laptop backpack I’ve had for 15 years with 50-60 pounds and go, and it’s none the worse for the effort (although Swiss Gear in particular is a good company that stands behind their stuff).

Most people won’t be using that amount of weight, and so can get away with pretty much any backpack they buy or have laying around.

How do you know you’re in Zone 2? Well, if you really want to be sure, get a heart rate monitor. I favor the Polar line, and this is also built into any Apple watch and most fitness devices (oura, fitbit, etc), but you don’t even need it. You can take your heartrate yourself by periodically pressing your fingers to the carotid artery in your neck for 10-15s and multiplying by 6 for 10s and 4 for 15s.

You can get by just with heuristics, too. Again, the heuristic I use for whether you’re in it is ‘“you can say any simple sentence in a single breath, but you can’t say a compound sentence with 2 clauses or commas without needing to take an additional breath.”

Start slow.

All you really need is enough weight to get your heart rate into Zone 2, so start slow. The heuristic for beginners I go with is “enough that you definitely feel it, but not so heavy that you actually think ‘god that might be too heavy’ while putting it on.”

When I first started rucking, I was putting books, chains, locks, whatever random stuff I had laying around that seemed heavy and would fit. I was overstuffing the poor backpack so much it would unzip itself while walking, and I had to carabiner the zippers together so stuff wouldn’t fall out. And that worked great! Anyone else can do the same. You don’t need literal weights, anything will do.

That’s pretty much it for beginners.

1. Start slow

2. Put in enough weight to feel it, but not to actively think it’s heavy

3. Pay attention to your heart rate or Zone 2 heuristic

4. Add weight if you’re not reaching Zone 2 after 10-15 min of walking

5. Shoot for 1 mile at first, then 2, then 3

3 miles / ~1 hr is a good steady state per session, because it aligns with the study-verified ~7k steps daily that has noticeable positive impacts on health.

Intermediate and advanced tips:

So if you’re more fit or have been doing it for a while, here’s my tips for intermediate to advanced rucking.

I ruck with 25-33% of my weight, generally, but I’ve built up to this and am pretty fit to begin with.

1) Avoid Zone 3 creep.

First, if you’re doing it with a noticeable amount of weight, your heart rate tends to creep up, especially if you walk more than 3 miles. This is bad. You want to keep your heart rate in Zone 2, because the more time you spend in Zone 3 (or god forbid, Zone 4), the more fatiguing that walk will be and the more it will cost you in recovery. And that fatigue and recovery comes out of your budget for “real” workouts like HIIT or lifting, which are actually fun and move the needle more. You want your rucking to be a steady Zone 2 base that’s slowly adding to your overall cardio capacity, and nothing more.

So given that, you need to actively optimize for this. If your heart rate is creeping up, you need to walk with less weight or elevation. If you see it creeping up and staying in Zone 3 relatively early out, avoid hilly routes and / or cut your walk short, or turn around, take weight out, and continue.

2) Maintain good form

One thing I’ve noticed in myself is that your form tends to deteriorate faster at higher loads. This is usually because you’re not attending to it, but you very much want to attend to it.

If you ruck with the same form you jog or run, and you should absolutely do this, you get a large number of benefits:

a) You are directly training in the groove, and logging more hours in correct form and so achieving the neurological and proprioception adaptations that comes from that.

b) You are directly strengthening the exact muscles and muscle chains that you use while jogging or running, and that directly contributes to your ability to go faster and with less fatigue when doing longer or more intense cardio.

c) You are directly strengthening your core, which is generally the weakest point during long form cardio and the first source of form breakdown, which is going to allow you to keep better core tightness and form in longer form cardio.

Now, is this kind of awkward because your cadence is so much lower rucking? Yes, and I’ve caught myself unconsciously increasing my cadence and creeping into Zone 3 because of it many times! But that’s an execution issue, and all you need to do is notice it and dial it back so you stay in Zone 2.

Versus if you ruck in a different form than you jog, you’re strenthening different muscles chains, strengthening a different overall physical and neurological form pattern for many hours a week, and it’s obviously worse. So a small thing, but definitely worth attending to.

3) Hitting Zone 2 sooner

Part of the reason I end up rucking with so much weight is that I want to hit Zone 2 right away, I don’t like 10-15min of dead time while my heart rate comes up. But this also makes hitting Zone 3 more likely towards the tail end of a given walk!

So there are other ways to avoid that dead time. On a treadmill, crank the elevation up. Outside, I favor walking on grass, going for hills right away if possible, and sometimes speed-walking / light jogging.

You want to be careful with this - there’s no easier way to hurt your knees than running with a significant weight load (ask me how I know!). So trying to keep a foot on the ground at all times, and / or only light jogging on grass vs cement is a good idea, to protect your knees.

But on that topic, and for anyone who is recovering from an injury or who is interested in Zone 2 for somebody less fit and thinks that rucking may be a bridge too far, there is a great alternative.

The best rucking alternative

Occlusion straps / bands. These are big belts you strap tightly around the middle of your quads, and then walk / jog with.

They’re amazing!

Occlusion bands work by restricting venous return, thereby increasing the heart rate. They can get you into Zone 2 for free, more or less, and with less fatigue and effort than rucking.

Is rucking still better? Yes, absolutely. You get a bunch of strength benefits from rucking you don’t get with occlusion straps. You’re not going to get those juicy asses in the pics from just bands, you need weight to get there.

But as an option for people who are less fit, who are recovering from an injury, for whom rucking is too much load at the moment, or who’d like something more portable and office friendly than a giant backpack with weight in it? Occlusion bands are your go-to!

The main advice I’ll give is that you want to make them tighter than you think you need to, and to aim for the middle of your quads, not higher up, because you can pinch your femoral artery a little closed unintentionally if you’re too high. You should not have numb feet or light headedness or dizziness, if you do, you located them too high.

One of the nice things about them is that you absolutely can run or jog in them to get your heart rate up quickly and with zero dead time. There is zero incremental injury danger, unlike running with a weight load.

Rucking Benefits

Alright, so rucking is the first line thing for every military throughout history, it enhances cardio and muscle growth and strength, and it gives you a bunch of free Zone 2 time, letting you achieve those headline 3-5x all cause mortality and health advantages.

Do we get anything else from this magical wonder intervention?

Well, for one thing, if you ruck instead of running you avoid the 50% - 80% injury rate from running per year.2 Rucking is way safer than running in terms of injury risk and wear and tear.

Anything else?

I’ll highlight two additional things.

Remember how I said that one of the adaptations we got that chimps don’t have is big butts? Giant butts are another uniquely human thing! Sir Mix-a-lot was a true anthropological scholar and gentleman when he created his paean to this distinctively and majestically human trait.

Well, rucking is a butt builder extraordinaire! It works the glutes with weight, at high volume, for many hours per week, and that’s the ideal recipe for posterier shapeliness and magnificence. And I think we would ALL benefit from more magnificent butts in our lives and in the world at large, truly a public good and positive externality the world needs more of overall.

Second - I feel like I don’t have a great feel for the age distribution of my readers, I should really do a poll sometime. So I’m officially an old, as they say, and so was too old for the anime craze that really picked up around the late nineties / early 2000’s.

But I come from a numerous and belligerent family, and was exposed to enough via my younger brothers that I’m aware that it’s an ongoing trope that when it’s really about to go down, the protagonist suddenly takes off the absurd training weight that they’ve apparently had on them the whole time.

It’s the universal sign for “oh, you done did it now, son” and is the prelude to what is sure to be an epic ass-whupping, to proceed forthwith.

This is invariably accompanied by breathless commentary from onlookers along the lines of “my god, his power level must be above 7 thousand Ctesiphons!”3

This is unironically and literally you when you’re regularly rucking. Most people are struggling just to get through the day, and you’re Harrison Bergeron-ing yourself for fun for 10 hours a week.

It actually feels amazing to take the weight off when you’ve finished your 3-5 miles - you feel like you just got a 20-33% energy burst, everything feels light and easy and amazing, and it’s like you’re walking on gossamer clouds. You feel absurdly overpowered, nigh superhuman.

And if you use it right, it’s a nootropic. Much like energizing up from a coffee, your mind is more active, you’re more creative, and you have more gumption and willpower in that window to tackle anything. In fact, I wrote this entire post in the afterglow of a rucking session, because I thought to myself “what’s the best way to use this window of feeling great and having higher productivity?” Well, this is it - I’m trying to create more of those windows out there, in the world, and in you.

And this is a buff you can get anytime, every day, even!

That’s pretty amazing.

So I’ll close there.

Rucking - the easy road to better health, a higher V02 max, daily nootropic buffs, longevity, and a magnificent ass, just waiting for you to pick it up and get all of that!

and

“The gods of the Other World, unlike what one may think, are not all smart. Many are simple-minded things. They are ready to do the bidding of enchanters, but enchanters must first teach them. Those who are acquainted with such Art are called ML or AI engineers. (Abbreviations that come, obviously, from taking letters at random from yectlamachiliztli, meaning intelligence.)”

Hopeful Monsters

Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards

Some call them mobile engineers, but their true name is a complicated Nahua…

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4 years ago · 87 likes · 23 comments · Étienne Fortier-Dubois

2) Sapient algorithms, a fascinating take on something I’ve done for a long time, but never really had a word or concept handle for. Basically, you deliberately instill a habit, and then the habit generalizes unconsciously in a useful way.

I got tired of risking locking my keys in my car. So I started making a habit of looking at my keys before closing the door.

Once, right after I’d closed the locked car door, I realized I’d looked at the phone in my hand and shut the door anyway. Luckily the key was in my pocket. But I noticed that this autopilot program just wasn’t helping.

So I modified it (as a TAP): If I was about to close the car door, I would look at my hand, turn on consciousness, and check if I was actually looking at my keys.

First, that TAP just worked. To this day I still do this when stepping out of a car.

Second, it generalized without my trying to:

After a while it would fire whenever I was about to close any locked door.

It then generalized to anyone I was with. If they were about to close a locked door, I would sort of “pop awake” with a mental question about whether someone had the key.

It then generalized even more. It now fires when I’m, say, preparing for international travel. Crossing a border feels a bit like going through a door that locks behind me. So now I “wake up” and check that I and my travel companions all have passports. (I would usually check before, but now it’s specifically this mental algorithm that summons sapience. It’s reliable instead of being an extra thing to remember.)

This generalization wasn’t intentional. But it’s been really good. I haven’t noticed any problems at all from this program sort of spreading on its own.

3) The virus engineered to corrupt Iran’s physics calculations with subtle rounding errors:

“LS-DYNA in particular has been cited in public reporting on Iran’s suspected violations of Section T of the JCPOA, in studies of computer modeling relevant to nuclear weapons development… by introducing small but systematic errors into physical‑world calculations, the framework could undermine or slow scientific research programs, degrade engineered systems over time or even contribute to catastrophic damage.”

“Why this matters - this is how a superintelligence might prevent others from coming into existence: fast16 is a subtle, hard-to-find bug which has been designed to degrade an actor’s ability to do certain types of science.”

The whole post is a banger, also this guy is one of the founders of Anthropic, and it’s super interesting to see the frontier of stuff he’s keeping up with and thinking about.

Import AI

Import AI 457: AI stuxnet; cursed Muon optimizer; and positive alignment

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe…

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4 months ago · 69 likes · 22 comments · Jack Clark

4) If you want an obedient, submissive woman, you need to give her a better fairytale - a feminist take on something I fully agree with.

I actually think this is a big part of the loneliness crisis and fertility crisis. Formerly, guys had value by default, because only they could work and have bank accounts. But all over the world, women gained the ability to work and have bank accounts, and so no longer needed men, except for the interpersonal value they add to their lives. And men suck at THAT, the bar for that is just literally on the floor, at least the 50th percentile down of men is fully net negative there, and probably up to the 66th percentile in the longer term (hence why the 20 year failure rate for marriage is 82%).

Saffron Dreams

if you want obedience from a woman, you should give her a better fairytale

It truly is fascinating to me when people are shocked that the 21st century woman, especially women of color, are not as demure or submissive as they used to be in “the good old days”. With the ability to vote, drive, own a home, and have your own bank account as a woman, there is no real incentive to follow outdated rules and cultural norms. My Punjabi ancestors did not have a choice, so their rebellions were silent. They sang about and mocked their lazy husbands amongst groups of other women at weddings, they incepted brilliant financial strategies into the family by appeasing to their mother-in-laws, and they stepped into power vacuums during times of war to lead their people into battle against a common enemy. Their defiance was silent…in the form of reading forbidden books and drafting poems they could only publish under a pseudonym…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Aliena

So yes, I fully endorse this post. If you want something super rare and hard to find for men (a hot, obedient, submissive woman), you need to be offering something similarly rare and hard to find for women. If you want submission and slavish devotion and worship as a man, you need to be *worth* devotion and worship and submission, and the way to do that is by being the best partner she’s ever had on several fronts, and making sure the acts, the narrative, and the symbolism are all pointing that way.

Also, you can just go date and marry overseas in Asia if you want the “easy mode” button there, which I wrote about here.

A western man dating women in Asia is way overpowered, because even if you want a hot submissive wife, a western man who wants that is still way less regressive and conservative than the median asian guy, so you both get what you want. The asian woman gets a relatively more feminist and valuable-in-this-sense man, and the man gets a relatively hotter (green line here) and more submissive wife, and it’s the archetypical benefits of trade and everyone wins.

5) ’s impossibly epic and hilarious parody of girlstack and self-help posts which subtly transitions into a medical mystery and resolution while maintaining tone and ending with a picture of The Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Featuring such banger lines as:

“my wake-up call came during during a very douchey musical festival where i purchased a $13 tallboy of “Liquid Death 100% still mountain water” and realized it was pretty much the exact same swill i use to flush excrement down the toilet. the can told me i needed to “murder my thirst” much like the talking dog who spoke to the Son of Sam. later that evening i spied a woman on the E train carrying this “motivational water bottle” that ordered her exactly when to drink and how much. that’s when it clicked: there was a dark agenda at play, and i was but a pawn in the game of Big Hydration. i also realized that during my nearly two decades in this godless concrete city, i’ve never seen a healthy, beautiful person carrying a water bottle, especially one with fuckin words on it.”

“on day 10 without water i looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe my eyes. i was serving Marilyn Manson elective lower rib removal auto-fellatio levels of waist-to-hip ratio.”

“no more waiting in line at the bar to get a drink and then waiting again at the women’s restroom to piss it right back out like some dumbass modern day Sisyphus. have fun rolling that big piss boulder for all eternity, ladies.”

father_karine

How I Achieved My Body, Mind, and Spirit Goals By Cutting Out Water

last year when my friend who is also a literary device asked me: “father_karine, what does HEALTH mean to you?” i struggled to answer. i took nine full months off work to ponder this philosophical question, and at the end of my sabbatical i was none the wiser. the very concept of “health” seems to be ever-changing with the times. when i was a young…

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3 months ago · 937 likes · 83 comments · father_karine

It is literally the best and funniest thing I’ve read all year, and I wasn’t just laughing, I was laughing, crying, gasping, and rolling around on figurative lollerskates.

6) Fun wiki article on the coordinated suffragette bombing campaign that caused at least 24 casualties and cost at least 700k pounds of damage in the early 1900’s in Britain and the US, ultimately leading to women getting the right to vote!

This came about after decades of peaceful protest led nowhere - so, let this be a lesson to people who think “protesting” does anything besides getting you laid among fellow protestors!

7) PSA: Public google API keys can now be scraped and misused to rack up your Gemini api bill: https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules

This is a silent vulnerability, because Google’s own docs say to make various keys public, and retroactively, those keys can now be harvested and used to rack up Gemini api bills on your account.

8) Aella’s age guessing game, which she did as part of a broader research project on how sexiness / attractiveness changes as women age.

I did VERY poorly, 40th percentile on the medium length test, so I guess I suck at guessing people’s ages. To be fair, she had some plainly adversarial examples in there - but my sister got 98th percentile with little effort, so the adversarial examples couldn’t have been more than 2%.

Paywall and coupon

And as always, I offer a coupon to become a paid subscriber in these before the paywall. I’m not that interested in subscription revenue, which is always going to be rounding error, but I am interested in increasing the absolute number of subscribers, which lifts you in Substack’s algorithms and broadens your reach. I also recently learned from that you can actually do 90% off coupons! So thank you, Peter, for showing me the way.

So if you would like to help my cause of “number go up,” please enjoy a lifetime 90% off coupon here:

https://performativebafflement.substack.com/460f9597

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Far more people know about Roman, medieval, or British history than about the Ottomans, but the Ottoman empire was the very heart of what Europe thought of as ‘the Orient,’ as opposed to ‘the Occident,’ for centuries.

Evil viziers, seraglios, harems, Janissaries, Islamic warriors putting the world to the “convert or die” sword, all that stuff? Ottoman!

At its peak, the Ottoman empire covered 2M square miles and had 24M subjects. This is gigantic - as big as Alexander the Great’s empire. It was incredibly rich, which we’ll get into later, and also incredibly Islamic. It lasted from ~1300 to ~1900, and was one of the best war machines for its time, routinely fielding armies into the 100k soldiers, a feat unmatched since the Roman empire (which had 3x the population), and unmatchable by all of Europe over that time period.

We’re going to zoom in on a time in the late 1600’s where the Ottomans almost managed to roll over Europe, and this is prevented by the barest of margins, with teetering towers of luck, unbelievable timing, strong social skills, and obsessive tunnel vision all coming together to save the West.

I’m talking about the siege of Vienna in 1683, and the primary source for any quotes here is Andrew Wheatcroft’s The Enemy at the Gate.

The Ottomans were indeed the ‘enemy at the gate’ for Europe, and steadily chipped away at the far Eastern boundary (ie the Balkans and Eastern Europe and Hungary) for a century or two. They were seen as unstoppably depraved and fiendish by Europeans, for no real reason other than that they were a different faith, dressed differently, and did the same stuff that Europeans also routinely did in war (ie killed people, razed villages, enslaved the survivors, etc).

Wither Ottomania?

Osman I founded the empire in 1299. “Ottoman” derives from his name, and follows the pattern of names like Johnson or Clarkson - Ottoman simply means “of Osman.”

Interestingly, for the numerologically (or maybe nominologically) inclined, his original name in Turkish was “Atman,” and was translated as Osman in Arabic. Atman, of course being the Hindu and Buddhist concept of the truest and innermost self, or soul.

So Osman was king of an Anatolian beylik / province starting in 1281, and started launching raids against the Byzantine empire, increasing his domain into Byzantium, like so:

Obviously, our boy does well, and founds an empire that lives in infamy to this very day!

From here, various subsequent Ottoman sultans such as Mehmed II and Sulemain the Magnificent undertake a centuries-long expansion of the empire, taking Constantinople, Greece, the Balkans, big chunks of Eastern Europe, and finally taking Hungary, leaving us in the 1680’s, where the Ottoman empire is a gigantic all-of-Europe sized monster that looks like this:

It is now up to sultan Mehmet IV to make a final push, and capture Vienna, establishing a foothold in Europe that can then be used to conquer Germany, Austria, and more.

Europe at this time is a divided rabble licking their wounds and trying to recuperate, with the largest “empire” under the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold. Leopold is broke and can’t raise large armies. This is at that time of European history that’s just seen the end of the Thirty Years War, one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, and people are openly joking that the “Holy Roman Empire” is none of the three.

So Europe is weak and war-ravaged, and Leopold barely an emperor. How is Mehmet IV doing?

A portrait of Ottoman efficiency and might

He’s doing great! Giant empire, lots of riches, the best war machine in Eurasia, European slaves and courtesans, what more does a man need, really?

And to give you an idea of the wealth and riches he has, his armies are routinely skirmishing somewhere every year, and are fabulously provisioned:

“To any westerner, a war camp suggested a dirty, disorderly collection of rudimentary bivouacs hastily erected on the line of march, peopled by raucous and dangerous ruffians. An Ottoman encampment, by contrast, was a perfect model city, but made of broadcloth, canvas, silk, brocade and embroidery rather than brick and stone.”

Camps were well ordered and are essentially cities made of tents, with designated latrines and garbage areas, and “silence and tranquility.” There’s a royal tent-pitching corps of more than a thousand men! The sultans own area of the tent city is around 60 tents, and did not skimp on the luxury:

“It consisted of almost sixty tents, and in the largest of them was ‘a throne studded with gems and on which lay rich needlework, and on the floor – as in the other tents – were luxuriant carpets, and the interior was covered with rich fabrics. The fourth tent, entered through a corridor, was the personal tent of the sultan. Here was a bed, at the head of which stood a Qur’an stand.’

Even the common soldiers had waterproof felted wool tents, like steppe nomads, complete with a sheepskin for each soldier to sleep on, and with officers having carpets, embroidered hangings, and furniture.

Moreover, they move with their own food supply. This is how they are able to campaign a thousand plus kilometers from their capitol cities.

It’s a formidable logistical operation, that they are much better at than Europeans, both in scale, and in execution.

Now what about the warriors themselves?

Ottomans were famed for their warriors, and justifiably so.

They had 3 elite corps - a heavy cavalry knight contingent, elite range + melee fighters, and elite light cavalry.

These were the Sipahis, Janissaries, and Tartars, respectively.

Sipahis

An “inspiring sight in their silks and brocades, heron’s plumes and chain mail,” these were the Ottoman knight equivalents, skilled with sword, mace, or battle axe. But unlike European knights, they were also archers, and had powerful recurved bows that they could fire at a full gallop. They were armored, and sometimes their horses were armored, so they’re heavy cavalry, requiring large horses, lots of fodder and water, and robust supply lines and logistics to support in the field.

The Tartars are also horse archers, literal steppe nomads, “superb raiders and the terror of the west,” led by the Khan of the Crimea, an ally of Mehmet IV.

Tartars

Why are steppe nomads unstoppable?

They can fire extremely powerful recurved bows from horseback at a gallop with deadly cadence and accuracy, and have all the advantages of cavalry with none of the downsides. They need no supply lines, as their horses and themselves feed on the run (famously, steppe nomads drink the blood of their horses while on the gallop), and this is an impossibly huge deal, because it means they are more mobile and faster than any other contingent of soldiers or cavalry.

Tartars were famously so-called because of Tartarus, basically “hell warriors.”

If the Sultan’s armies inspired terror in the west, it was the Tartars who evoked the deepest and most visceral fear.

“In the popular mythology of the frontier, Tartars were the creatures of hell. They lived on plunder and from the sale of human flesh, taking their reward not so much in money as in slaves whom they led home, roped together in long coffles (from the Arabic word kafila) to the markets of the Crimea.”

Broadly, they’re unstoppable death machines that can show up on your door with zero warning, and once they do, they’re 100% going to murder or enslave everyone you know. That’s why they’re “hell warriors.”

Now what about our elite foot soldiers?

Janissaries

“For many in the west, the mere name was sufficient to inspire terror.”

Janissaries were Christian children taken in various campaigns who were converted to Islam and trained since childhood in the arts of war. Their regiments became their family, and loyalty to the sultan was paramount, as he was considered their father.

Their whole purpose was to be elite soldiers, so they trained and drilled every day, and were skilled at both ranged and melee attacks:

“Rushes, sudden mass attacks, sword play and archery became second nature, but they also trained with the heavy Turkish flintlock trench muskets, more like the wall-mounted guns on a fortress than lighter weapons used in western armies. Many janissaries were trained as sharpshooters: with the powerful powder charge and much greater range and killing power of their weapons, considerably more accurate than European matchlock firearms, they were a devastating weapon.”

They had extremely high esprit du corps, and could be counted on to storm any battlement or launch attacks even against great odds. There was also an enduring practice of richly rewarding any Janissary that did that and succeeded - if you’re one of the first over the wall and you survive, you’re wealthy for life. Super smart policy.

For this particular battle, the Ottomans had something like 20k sipahis and 20k Janissaries, and an unknown number, probably around 5k, of Tartars, and the rest were irregular less skilled light horse or foot soldiers.

So if you’re anything like me, you’re thinking “damn, all this sounds crazy expensive, what was the Ottoman economy like?” How did they afford all these tens of thousands of elite soldiers? How did they afford all that heavy cavalry?? Do know how much food and water that takes?

What made the Ottoman empire tick?

“Westerners often talked wonderingly about the warlike qualities of ‘the Turks’ and their natural bellicosity. But as the war camp made clear to all who saw it, the real power of the Turks was the seriousness and extraordinary invention with which they approached the business of a great war.”

How did the Ottomans support this warmaking capacity, economically?

This is what I was most interested in. The ability to field 100k soldiers with basically medieval agricultural technology was impressive, unmatched since Rome, and still more with the degree of provisioning and logistics that the Ottomans displayed, all with only a third the population of the Roman empire.

How did they do this? Broadly, the Ottoman economy was surprisingly liberal. They encouraged merchants in their cities, had free trade within the empire, were connected to both the Silk Road trade and the Mediterranean (which was the heart of European trade), and even freely invited Jews that were being persecuted and kicked out of Europe to settle and prosper. All of these were huge deals - most of the Ottoman revenue came from customs duty on trade, and after Spain and Portugal kicked out all their Jews in 1492 (Spanish Inquisition), no European country would take them, and tens of thousands ended up in the Ottoman empire, where they were welcomed. There is even a potentially apocryphal quote here about this Jewish exodus - Sultan Bayezid II reportedly remarked of Spain's Ferdinand: "You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler — he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!"

The Ottomans were actually notably more egalitarian and progressive than Rome - Rome had very high Gini indexes, essentially the highest you could have at their level of technology, and was 70M people with ~1k families fantastically rich families on top. In terms of a middle class, only ~10% were above subsistence. So there’s an out of sight rich .01%, a 10% middle-or-equestrian class, and then 90% of people living near subsistence (specifically under 1.5 - 2x subsistence).

In the Ottoman empire, things were more equal. Roman wealth Gini’s were .7 - .8, and Ottoman were .4 - .5. The Ottoman middle class is difficult to find numbers for, but just the sipahi families were ~1% of the population, and if you Fermi estimate it two ways based on likely income Ginis and soldiers-to-populace levels, you get that the Ottomans probably had a 15-18% middle class above subsistence, which also tracks with their higher urbanization percentage vs Rome. That may not sound large to us today, but it was a 1.5x larger middle class than Rome had!

This is in line with (or even a little higher than) the ~15% middle class percentage in the European countries in the Holy Roman Empire, PLUS they could actually field giant armies and weren’t persecuting their Jews.

The Ottomans are legitimately impressive here - they are fielding 100k armies with 1/3 the population of Rome, with broadly similar agricultural technology, achieved largely through better institutions and economics.

In terms of sociopolitics, they had a feudalistic structure just like Europe, but they actually stuck the landing. The big problem in Europe was that a king needs to raise an army, so he gives land or revenues to various nobles so that they supply him with soldiers.

What kings want to do is give the revenue from the land to the nobles, and keep ownership of the land. What the nobles want is to own the land themself, so they can pass it to their descendants. In Europe, the nobles usually won - they eventually owned the land a generation or two down, often as part of negotiating that for a particularly important war or battle where the king was against the wall and needed their soldiers. Because the medieval era was one where defensive technology temporarily outstripped offensive, and kings give land grants to nobles, it ended in a dynamic where in one generation the king rewards his allies and subordinates, in the next generation they make that land grant hereditary and build a castle, and soon after that, they stop paying taxes entirely. Because what will the king do after you stop? He would have to go and round up an army again and literally lay siege to your castle for a year or so, and that would cost him far more than he’d ever recover. He was barely able to net positive rounding up a few hundred knights and conquering a whole other country! Castles were literally strongholds, that the offensive power of the time wasn’t competent to overcome.

But the Ottomans? They didn’t fall into that trap. The Sultan granted his knights (sipahi) the revenue from the land, not the land itself, and was rich enough from trade and other revenues he never needed to grant ownership to fractious nobles. Every Ottoman knight could have his revenue stream taken away, so he was sure to bring all his soldiers to any battle the Ottoman Sultan wanted to engage in.

Why Vienna?

Now why did Mehmet IV want to capture Vienna? Well first, just look at the map of the empire, somewhere in Europe was obviously the next move. Logistically, Vienna is nice, because you can use rivers to transport a lot of your food and supplies while you’re campaigning, which is much faster and cheaper than land-based transport.

Second, his 4-greats grand-pappy Sulemain I (the Magnificent)1 had (among many other wars) conquered Hungary and then sieged Vienna back in 1529, and almost succeeded, but ultimately had to lift the siege due to an early winter.

Third, Europe overall was weak and war ravaged at this time, and there was no better time to make a run at it. This was the culmination of ~150 years of military tension between the Habsburgs (the ruling family of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, some notable members of which include Maximilian I, Charles V, and Ferdinand I) and the Ottomans.

If there was any time to make a push into Europe, it was now, with Holy Roman Emperor Leopold broke, and every European country licking their wounds and recuperating.

Elite etiolation

Now this is the time of Louis XIV and Charles II of Spain, the time where all the big bads get so baroque and so far up their own asses that they lived in worlds composed entirely of luxury and simulacra level 4 interactions, and are completely disconnected from the lives of even a wealthy burgher or merchant in their kingdoms, much less a peasant or artisan. And our big bads here, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold, and Ottoman Sultan Mehmet IV, are no exceptions.

“By the late seventeenth century, both the Habsburg court in Vienna and the Ottoman court in Istanbul had become detached from the real, external world. This isolation had a considerable effect on the events of 1682–3.”

Both rulers – the Emperor Leopold I and Sultan Mehmed IV – shared a number of traits. In theory they were all-powerful, but both had made themselves utterly dependent on the courtiers around them.

They both led entirely cloistered lives, only interacting with their closest nobles / confidantes. They both came to power as minors, both spent most of their time either hunting or reading books and manuscripts. They’re pretty detached from realities on the ground, in other words, and this comes back to bite them.

Mehmet IV doesn’t listen to anyone who is actually close to Vienna in terms of how hard it might be to siege, and Leopold has been unintentionally(?) Inquisitioning all his subjects in Hungary because they’re the wrong flavor of Christian, so the ones that survived the earlier Ottoman conquering of Hungary are not exactly eager to go and do glorious battle in Leopold’s name.

A part of Mehmet IV’s detachment is that he’s too grand and mighty to actually take the field, so he does a big handoff ceremony and formally hands off his despotic, life-or-death power to his Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa, which you know, I’m sure that always goes well. Who doesn’t want to hand off absolute life or death power and a giant army to their (probably evil) Grand Viziers??

So it’s actually the Grand Vizier that goes and makes war against Vienna, eventually overseeing 100k+ soldiers and a “huge arc of tents, extending over fifteen miles around the city” as he lays siege.

Leopold is actually in Vienna while the Ottomans are gearing up and is so oblivious that the Tartar frontrunners of the Ottoman army basically show up on his doorstep before he realizes what’s happening, and he and 60k of Vienna’s finest and richest quickly skedaddle. Leopold makes it, but a lot of the other ones get pwned by the Tartars, so, uh, good luck being pillaged and enslaved, former rich people and nobility of Vienna?

Needless to say, neither morale nor courage is high in Vienna after seeing everyone who is able scuttle like rats from a sinking ship. All their richest and most looked-up-to have made the strongest vote of “no confidence” possible and left them at the mercy of an ocean of Turks and hell warriors.

The siege

Sieges follow a basic formula. By this point of warfare, with cannons and muskets and grenades and mines, the walls are resistant to cannon fire, and the best way to get in is to dig underneath the walls, set off a bunch of mines, collapse the walls, then storm in with your army. It’s been like this for a few hundred years, and Sulemain’s siege of Vienna back in the 1500’s followed the same pattern.

So, this is exactly what the Ottomans do - they have good intelligence about where the weak spots are in Vienna’s walls, and go right to the biggest weak spot, and start digging. The Viennese are obviously trying to hold them off by shooting at them and making various heroic sorties outside of the walls, but this is pretty ineffective. Roughly forty days in, the Ottomans blow a small hole in the wall.

Right away, Janissaries start charging up the hill to the place this has happened, and the defenders hurl bricks and stones and continuously fire muskets at them as they furiously try to make an improvised redoubt with beams and sandbags. They manhandle some small cannons to fire down into the Turks, and drop hundreds of grenades. The fighting is so jam packed that it’s standing room only, to the extent that corpses are held upright by the press of soldiers around them.

“The whole platform of the bastion was filled with fighting men, struggling to repel the Turks’ onslaught, which seemed to swell from almost every direction. The defenders were so tightly packed that the bodies of the dead were held up by the crush around them. ‘While I was holding a soldier by his scarf, his head was knocked off by a cannonball. Blood and brains were splattered on to my nose and right into my mouth, which was open because of the day’s great heat . . . This incident caused me great suffering afterward, above all violent palpitations and vomiting.’"

They just barely fight the Ottomans off, and the attack abates as night draws near.

The next day the Ottoman sappers explode three more mines, destroying most of a retaining wall, making “such a breach that a great part of the bastion, at least twenty feet thick, being of brick and stone, was quite thrown down from the top to the very bottom leaving a gap of thirty-six feet broad, and our men quite uncovered.”

This is it! This is the end of everything.

The Janissaries storm uphill to the breach, making a furious assault, but are slowed down by all the debris and smoldering ruins. The defenders scramble to stand shoulder to shoulder in the breach, a frail human wall to replace the missing stone one, and are raked with Turkish arrows and cannon fire. The Janissaries and now the sipahis repeatedly charge, wave after wave, and are barely held off. The defenders scramble to get some cheveux de frises in front of them (think a log with a bunch of spears attached all around it so it’s like a hairbrush, car-sized longitudinal caltrops), which can stop the sipahis, who would surely have shattered that human wall of defenders without them.

Finally, night falls, and the Turks retreat again. The defenders held the line, by the skin of their teeth. Vienna still stands!

And now there is no rest for the defenders - they need to shore up this giant hole in their defenses! They spend all night preparing new redoubts, setting up improvised wooden barriers (palanka) that defenders can take cover behind, dragging artillery pieces into place, and setting up lines of fire.

The Ottoman troops are also making their preparations for the final assault. Fresh reserve troops are called in, along with a stream of carts filled with fresh supplies of powder, weapons and food. Strategy and attack orders are discussed. There was little doubt that they would breach the wall, and once in, they were sure to win, by force of numbers if nothing else.

Tomorrow is going to see the end of this.

Meanwhile outside of Vienna

Holy Roman Emperor Leopold has been busy, and begging, borrowing, and stealing whatever he can to get a supporting army lined up. At the tail end of the Thirty Years War, he is personally broke, and cannot borrow, because he’s pulled that trick once too often. As a Habsburg, he’s from a long line of spendthrifts, who always spend their annual incomes well before receiving them, typically on ill-conceived wars, and have a bad history of repaying their creditors - he spends some time getting laughed out of various rich people’s offices.

But the Pope is not broke! And the Pope is always interested in fighting the infidel (or preserving the infidel, as the case may be). The Pope spends liberally, borrows against church lands and revenues, and helps fund the Vienna relief army.

They round up 30-40k German and Polish soldiers 3k and 7k at a time from various principalities, most of them from the areas of Germany / Poland that would immediately be at risk from further Ottoman encroachment if they took Vienna, and send them towards the front.

Once they get there, there are now 4-5 different armies, all with different commanders, none of whom know the local area well, and all of whom need to coordinate to have any chance against the 2-3x larger Ottoman army.

Oh, also they only took a few days of food - they have ZERO logistics or supplies, and the entire countryside is ravaged and impossible to glean food from, because the massive Ottoman army has already been doing that for months.

So that’s your mission, boys - go fight a 2-3x larger legendary war machine while you have no main commander or even a chain of command, and while you have no food or supplies. Also, they could (for all we know) have already taken Vienna and be safely fortified behind its walls. Good luck, and godspeed!

Final Salvation

As the book puts it, at this point for the relief army “the danger was a chaotic assembly of ill-coordinated soldiers, each section led towards glory by a self-obsessed commander.”

I personally think the bigger danger was the whole “you are going into a months-long warzone with no food or supplies” thing, where even one or two days of fighting leaves you at a serious, likely fatal disadvantage, but I guess I’m the crazy one.

Enter Charles de Lorraine.

Lorraine had a small force outside of Vienna, and had been scouting and rounding up and facilitating repeated (and much needed) supply runs for the sieged city while trying not to get roflstomped by the larger Ottoman forces. He was the Duke of Lorraine, born and raised in Vienna, a deeply experienced and well liked commander who was broadly known among his peers for dressing very poorly but being a solid dude.

Since he knew the local terrain and the disposition of forces better than anyone, it falls to Lorraine to come up with a battle plan, and convince all the other commanders that it’s a good one and they should follow him. He cannot order them, either now or in battle - he is at best a peer, and often of lower rank than them. This is a game of skillful diplomacy, that could easily go wrong.

“Lorraine managed his fellow commanders with the greatest skill. The problem was not new to him. The Habsburg corps of officers had for more than seventy years been a hotchpotch of Italians, Germans, Scots, Irish, English and French. Charles of Lorraine, himself a distant descendant of the ancient Kings of Lotharingia, a Prince of the Empire and a son-in-law of the Emperor, had long before learned the art of winning the confidence of those with whom he served. He also had the knack of winning over almost everyone he met, from bluff, self-opinionated fighting soldiers to conniving courtiers. He had no great ambitions, but he wanted to succeed against the Turks; above all he was determined to save Vienna. Yet time was short.”

They come up with a plan to descend the hills behind the Ottoman army in a large arc, attacking the entire western face of the vast Ottoman camp encircling Vienna.

Right away, there are several nearly fatal problems. Their plan reflected the map’s portrayal of easy lines of sight and travel - the reality was clefts and ridges, steep hills, woods, and a moraine of boulders and smaller rocks. There are small wine-making villages interspersed here and there. The ground vastly favors the Ottoman defenders, who can hide behind rocks and ravines and pick off Christian soldiers at leisure, and who can fortify the villages and hold off the relief army at will.

The hill is too steep to descend on horseback, and anyone descending will be sitting ducks for any Ottoman archers.

They confer and decide they basically have to yolo it. They’re going to slowly make their way into perilous terrain totally exposed, with massive defender advantages, and just hope it works out.

Amazingly, they succeed - they descend the hills and ravines “like a flood of black pitch” fighting and burning tents as they go, and are able to take a few advance Ottoman positions without rousing a coherent response from the larger army. The Ottomans had no scouts, no lookouts, zero defenses. It is a huge lapse of basic camp discipline and military practice. By this point, Turkish morale and sanitation was low and doing much worse than usual,2 which probably speaks to the relief army being able to do this.

The barest effort in obstacles or scouting or defensive measures at this point would have almost certainly seen the defenders held up, and seen Vienna fall.

“Nowhere did the Turks attempt to construct any kind of defensive wall, even if made only from gabions and rough timber. Marsigli, watching the events take place, was mystified. He wrote admiringly of the way in which the Ottomans had managed their siege of the city, but wondered why with all those skills they made no attempt to provide protection for the infantry and cavalry as the relief army approached.”

The relief army is able to descend without major losses, line up, and array themselves on an open plain to join battle with the Turks, and to do so in two positions.

NOW Ottoman Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa finally turns from the ongoing siege and decides something needs to be done. Due to their position, the Polish cavalry can travel fast enough to block their retreat through Hungary, and they are facing relief army soldiers from two sides.

He moves towards that front and makes some troop dispositions, but as he is doing so, a division of Polish hussars, heavy cavalry that are gloriously kitted out and look majestic in their heavy armor, lances, and warhorses, but are something of an antiquated joke in this age of cannons and musketeers, charge gloriously into battle. Thundering towards the Ottoman line and slamming into them with a resonating crack, they spear two Ottomans per Hussar at a time. Few of the husaria ride out alive from that initial engagement, but the Polish king considers it a great success and has thousands more, and starts lining up another charge.

Kara Mustafa flees this front back to his main command tent, carrying the Standard of the Prophet (a precious religious artifact he was specifically instructed by the Sultan not to let fall into enemy hands). He plans to regroup and lead a response from his main command tent. The Ottomans however, seeing their leader flee, rout, fleeing back to the road towards Hungary, and the Polish heartily pursue, killing thousands of them.

From this tiny seed, the entire mass of the Ottoman army, which vastly outnumbered the defenders? Useless, leaderless, spirit broken. Battles hinge on resolve and spirit as much as soldiers and armaments, and literally on the brink of victory, with incredibly deep reserves, the Ottoman spirit is broken, and their numbers are for nought.

“The Turks left behind watched his departure, then abandoned their own positions on the bluff and began to flee. Soon thousands of Turks were riding or running back, not into the battle between the Poles and the Ottomans for possession of the camp, but past the line of tents and beyond the struggle, towards the high road into Hungary.”

Christianity, and the West, is saved!

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Vienna surviving the 1683 siege is generally marked as the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which still lasts into the 1900’s. A mighty, unstoppable army that outnumbered and outskilled the Christian defenders in every possible respect was held off, and then broken, fleeing like whimpering dogs with tucked tails.

If Vienna had been conquered, it would very likely have been a different story. With new plunder and a new frontier to invade, with weak and disordered enemies still recovering from internal wars, the Ottomans could have likely encroached into much of Germany and Austria, and possibly Italy.

And they had great institutions! A robust economy, respect for specialization and skilled labor, a heavy focus on trade, a large middle class - if anyone were capable of incorporating and prospering with a bunch of additional European subjects, it was the Ottomans.

Our Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here, didn’t he?

“Kara has been monomanaically focused, Kara Mustafa had to look to the morale of his own troops. Feared rather than respected, he lacked the skill to deal with his own men. Successful Ottoman commanders met constantly with their soldiers, offered them rewards for their courage, spoke to them of the great prospects that victory offered them, of the richness of the prize that lay before them; they even instructed the preachers attached to each unit to remind them of their duty before God. Parades, reviews, awards for bravery in the face of the enemy were both expected and valued by the key troops. But the serasker seems to have been better at chastising than encouraging. He handled his commanders badly; each one assigned a different sector on the battle front received only peremptory commands to push their men harder and make more progress. There was a single-mindedness to his approach that brooked neither argument nor discussion. His strategy was fixed immutably in the first days: Vienna would fall in accordance with the plan that he had decreed.”

I feel like Kara Mustafa made the archetypical “male” mistake here. As I put it in my article on dating power maxxing, I feel like guys are basically cavemen, in the sense that they want one big “I win” button that they can hammer, and they just want to spend all their time getting better at the one thing, so they can hit it REALLY hard, and thereby Win Forever. This is always a mistake, because reality (and our female half) grades holistically.

Kara Mustafa was monomanaically focused on conquering Vienna, and he had a little experience with siege warfare, but not much with other forms of warfare. An adoptee into the famously powerful Mustafa family, this was his chance to make good and prove that the family made a great call when adopting him. So he was overly focused on winning the siege, to the detriment of everything else, and to the extent that it literally cost him his goal.

He could have done any single thing differently - he could have had scouts out looking for other armies, like any reasonable (or more experienced) general would have done. He could have been drilling his troops, incentivizing them, and making sure they were all aligned with visions of glory and plunder, and either the siege or the relief army skirmish could have gone faster or better. If he had set up any defenses whatsoever on his flanks and outer perimeter, he would have won. If his assault had been faster by a single day, he would have won. He could have made a night time assault on Vienna while the defenders were busily shoring up the breach. He could have even set up defenses like palanka and cheveux de frises after he knew what was going on, to prevent the Christian army from being able to assemble and charge the Ottomans on an open field. He could have fought against the prevailing spirit and roused his much-larger army when a tiny division of Polish cavalry killed a mere handful of Ottoman foot soldiers, held the line or rallied, and defeated the relief army entirely, then finished the siege. Because the Ottoman spirit broke at such a localized point, it probably comes down to whether some individual soldier or three at the time of the Hussar charge had 20% better morale, in which case they might not have broken and routed.

For that matter, there are countless things on the Christian side that could have led to Vienna’s fall! If they had been delayed by a single day in any of the month-long relief army efforts, if they had been delayed in their dodgy river crossing the night before, if the defenders in Vienna hadn’t held the line when the wall breached either time, if Charles de Lorraine wasn’t as diplomatic and well-liked and able to coordinate a fractious group of noble leaders out for personal glory - any number of factors on that side could have led to Ottoman success!

Again, they had a strong economy, encouraged trade and artisans and technology, and had a larger middle class than any comparable empire. Turkey had 1.5x bigger coal reserves than Britain, and Poland and Germany 4-5x larger. In inferentially farther realities, Turkish might have been the language of commerce and learning as science and the Industrial Revolution took off, instead of French or English!

The Polish Hussars who routed the Turks were extremely vulnerable to any fortifications or defensive measures breaking up an open field - in fact, there is direct historical precedent in prior Ottoman sieges!

“Anything would do: wagons yoked together, a line of spiked palisades with muskets and artillery behind. This was the tactic that had destroyed the Hungarian chivalry at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 – the chivalry of Hungary was shot to pieces by the janissaries and the Turkish guns, protected by sharpened stakes from Hungarian swords and lances. But in the heat of the day on 12 September (‘for never was there a hotter day known than this’ ) no preparations had been made. The camp before Vienna was full of beams, gabions, wooden stakes and the like; yet none were put to use. This oversight, indolence or mere carelessness, cost the Turks dearly. They faced the Polish host out in the open, lined up before their tents.”

Alas for historical precedent, and alas for monomania. Sometimes not taking your eye off the ball isn’t enough - sometimes you should have taken your eye off the ball, because more than one thing matters!

“How does America escape its fiscal trap?”

Okay, so what IS America’s fiscal trap?

We’re 1 year GDP in debt, about $30T, and this means our debt service is ~$1T or 3% of GDP per year, more than Defense or Medicare.

We take in ~17% of GDP and spend ~23% of GDP every year, federally, and that is guaranteed to grow because of our demographic pyramid (everyone is getting older and having fewer kids) and the fact that healthcare spending is crazy and goes up faster than almost any other sector.

I worry that the numbers I just said seem too reasonable

23% doesn’t seem THAT far off of 17%, right?

But if you think of it purely at a person level, only half of Americans work, around 162M, the rest are dependents, ie old people (~70M), kids (~70M), students (11M), SAHM (11M), or layabouts (~12M).

Just to keep the math simple, from the working people, the government takes in $6-11k in taxes ( $6-7k median or ~$11k mean), and then spends $45k in benefits per working person. That’s a pretty severe mismatch, roughly 4-6x. We do take in some taxes from other sources, mainly corporate taxes and tariffs, but ~84% of all intake comes from income and payroll taxes, and that 16% extra certainly doesn’t close the gap (and honestly, we shouldn’t have most of the tariffs if we care about economic growth).

Most of this $45k, roughly $33k, is entitlements, ie social security and medicare/medicaid. Of the fraction that isn’t, about $12k is spent on defense and education and other “common” stuff that theoretically benefits everyone. So we don’t even break even from our workers’ tax contributions for basic common goods like defense and roads and the NIH and FAA and such.

If you broke down where the entitlements go among the categories, it would be something like this:

Everyone: $6.1k per person (~$12.2k per worker), roughly 29% of all spending

The remaining 71% splits like so:

Workers: $5.4k per worker (20% of spending, mainly Medicaid / ACA, and federal pensions)

Kids: $6k per kid (9% of spending)

Students: $10k per student (0.3% of spending)

SAHM: $10k per SAHM, (0.3% of spending)

Layabouts: $10k per layabout, (0.3% of spending)

Old People: $57k per old person (70% of non-everyone spending), nearly 10x more than we spend on kids, who are literally the future.

The sky vampires

Imagine an infinite array of sky vampires, tiling the sky as far as the eye can see, each one sucking $33k from young working people in some combination of debt, inflation, and taxes, 3-6x+ more than they can actually pay, so it’s mostly directly eating their futures with debt and inflation. This is literally reality.

All the sky vampires are rich and old, as befits vampires everywhere - and they have most of the assets in the country.

We spend ~$7T a year in federal spending. We’re taking ~$5T trillions of dollars in taxes AND ~$2T trillions of dollars of debt, all sucked from younger working people, who have essentially no assets, to pump $4 - 5 trillion dollars into old people, who have essentially all the assets, every single year.

The fundamental problem is that people want to work for only ~40 years, but they live until they’re 80 (or older), so they’re not working for half that.

Then our system is so profoundly dumb that we take in their widows mite of taxes during the 40 years (as an example, <$1k a year in the 70’s), immediately spend it, then promise to pay those same people a million jillion dollars every single year for each of the 20-40 years that they’re older and richer and not paying anything in (ie $57k per year now for old people).

What do actually smart countries do? They invest those taxes, so they actually grow over the 40 years, then when things are crazy expensive 40 years later due to inflation and regulatory capture and moral mazes, at least part of the gap has been covered by growth over time. Surprising nobody, we are NOT smart here in the US.

So obviously to close this gap, as with any budget, we need to spend less or make more, and the various framings above can help inform us as to where the leverage is.

Making more

“Make more” can mean two different things - increase taxes, or increase economic growth.

Obviously “increase economic growth” is the better road there, but just as obviously, that’s harder than you might think, especially on a $30T basis. And also, “increasing growth” is already more or less maximally pursued in our current system, in the sense that all the biggest and smartest companies in America are deploying ~$1T+ in Capex building AI minds so capable that they can fire 140k+ employees already.

I am going to ignore “increasing economic growth” as a potential lever in this post, because we should be doing that anyways, the growth interventions aren’t really under direct political control in the same way taxes and spending are, and one can spend less in any future we end up in.

If you Fermi estimate it, we’d need to more than double our current GDP growth rates to even make a dent in our problems over decades. So we’re either in a situation where we will NOT get the outsized growth from AI that most famous economists thinks is impossible, and will need to control spending, or we will be in a growth situation and could still benefit from spending less, and so in this post I will focus on “spending less.”

I will note that I personally think that all the AI talent working on “inventing God and asking Him for money” is actually our best shot at fiscal solvency at this point, and that this shows more than anything how deeply unserious we are about our country and / or existing into the future.

But ignoring “increasing growth” leaves us only with “increasing taxes” in this lever.

So let’s take a look at increasing taxes.

Increasing taxes

I feel like most people think this is a high leverage area, so I’d like to show that there’s really not a lot of leverage here.

As you might or might not know, the top 1% of earners in the US already pay 42% of the taxes, and the bottom ~50% pay only 3% in taxes (nearly all via payroll taxes).

Tax billionaires? Even if we just outright stole 100% of all the money the ~1k billionaires in the US have (~$8T), so the definition of a one-time, one-way move that would immediately ensure everyone with assets and the ability to found companies moved out and renounced American citizenship, we’d be able to take the deficit down by less than 1/3, and we’d still be spending more than we take in every year. It fixes nothing, even in the short term, much less the long term. Also, the ~10M jobs those billionaires have directly created would probably be in danger after this.

And in terms of “ongoing” taxation, the top 1% already makes ~21% of all income and pays ~42% of all taxes. This is WAY more progressive than any Scandinavian country - we have a 2x multiplier, and all the Nords (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands) have a 1.6 - 1.7 multiplier. France, Italy, and Germany? All 1.7. We’re already 18% more progressive than all the flagship egalitarian EU countries everyone thinks are taxing people fairly.

Billionaires in particular are able to allocate away from regular income, due to being able to arbitrage corporate structures across multiple countries, allocating income towards capital gains, and taking low interest loans against assets for cash flow.

So not only are we already more progressive than all the flagship EU countries, given those strictures, half of which rely on other countries and fundamental property rights, you really can’t do all that much to move the needle here and tax billionaires more.

Tax corporations? Probably not. Nearly all (84%) of tax intake comes from income and payroll taxes. Corporate taxes currently only contribute ~11% of total tax revenues. If we brought corporate taxes back to the 18% they were before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, this would prospectively net us ~6-7% more of current receipts, which is only ~$300B incremental, basically rounding error on the $7T we spend every year.

Tax regular workers? Definitely a dick move, but you know, it’s the government, those are the only moves they make any more, apparently.

But back to the $6-$11k in vs $45k out discrepancy, it’s pretty obvious there’s not a lot of juice in that squeeze, certainly not enough to close the gap, especially given the median income is $60k pre tax, and they generally pay local and property and sales taxes on top of federal. So you’re going to take 10 - 18% just on federal, then they probably lose another 10% - 20% on the other taxes, and they’re down 20 - 38% and taking home $37k - $48k take home. How much more of that do you think you can even take?? Again, not much. And even if you DID take more, you’re not going to even approach closing the literal ~4-6x gap that exists there at the medians / means. Womp womp.

Tax “rich people?” As we went over, people with high incomes already pay all the taxes, with the top 1% paying 42%+ of all taxes, 2x more than their 21% income share, and people at the medians and below, so 50%+ of the population, paying only 3% of total taxes, all payroll taxes.

Okay, so we already tax rich people. What about “upper middle class” people? A top 20% household income is ~$150k, a top 10% HHI is ~$235k, and a top 5% is $335k. Let’s see how much they’re paying.

Sadly, it’s not a super clean match, these aren’t breaking down by percentiles, but we can eyeball it.

Okay, so top 1% ers (current threshold $700k+ in HHI) are 2x, but the top <10%-ers pay only 1.14x their income share (still more than EU top <10%-ers!), and some top 20%-ers actually pay less than their income share. About 26% of the US is in the $100k - $200k income share bar up there. We can’t address more than half that, because they’re below the $150k threshold, and everyone above that was already paying more than their income share. So it’s maybe 10% of the pop.

When you do the math,1 you can only get an incremental $24B from these people by moving them to parity in income to tax share. If you move them up to 1.14 like the top 10%-ers, you can get maybe $28B out of them. Even if you doubled it, it’s nothing. Again, we spend $7T a year, that’s less than rounding error, I’m sure there’s Senators literally taking craps more expensive than that, as we speak.

It’s pretty clear there’s not a lot of leverage in “tax more.”

Yes, everyone wants to soak the rich, but we are ALREADY getting more from them than all the flagship EU countries, and nobody else has any money. Additionally, part of being rich is being able to pay accountants and set up trusts and S-corp structures that let you take comp in capital gains and things like that, so we’re already at the part of the Laffer curve where “higher tax rates” is likely to net you “less tax receipts” overall.

Again, we are already more progressive than all the flagship egalitarian EU countries. Tax more? Good luck.

So if increasing taxes isn’t going to do much, what else is there?

Let’s look at our Federal incomings and outgoings

So it’s pretty clear most of our intake comes from income and payroll taxes (84%), and most of our outgoings are healthcare and social security (entitlements), at 60% of outgoings and 74% with debt, which I think is fair to allocate to “entitlements” because we’re literally sky-vampiring all our young people’s futures to pay for it.

So what are our options to spend less?

What about the perennially popular idea of firing bureaucrats? Unfortunately, as DOGE found out, our system is so profoundly broken + dumb that the federal government only employs 2M direct non-defense employees at $300B, it’s why DOGE didn’t work. All the rest are 2-4x as expensive contractors who can’t be fired federally. And $300B isn’t going to make any difference either way, it’s literally rounding error.

All the growth in spending is in entitlements, ie old people, and they’re also the biggest category of spend in absolute terms. This is also going to keep growing as people get older, and as healthcare spending keeps vastly outstripping inflation.

So what can we do about entitlements?

SS entitlements and SSI and other retirement stuff - $2T per year, or ~29% of all federal spending.

Medicare and Medicaid - $1.5T, or 22% of all federal spending.

Together, this is 51% of all federal spending, essentially all going to old people.

Yup, that certainly seems like where all the leverage is. Politicians like to pretend these are untouchable by putting them in a “mandatory” spending category, but you know, that’s obviously fake. Words are just things, and laws are just egregores, as they say.

Why should we pump 70% of all non-everyone federal spending by taking $33k a year from younger working people AND loading them with debt and inflation for life, into the old people with all the assets again?

When SS was originally rolled out, average life expectancy was ~60, and benefits didn’t start until 65. It was an “insurance” type deal, for people whose lifespan outran reasonably projected savings, not a permanent pension scheme for 20+ years. But now people want to work for 40 years, paying the equivalent of <$1k a year in taxes, and then retire for 20 years being paid the equivalent of $57k+ a year in taxes.

But surprisingly, means testing and raising retirement ages can’t really do much to move the needle either

Just one measure here - means testing SS payments, would move the needle only $300B at a fairly aggressive $750k asset cutoff. And it’s worth pointing out that this will not actually result in that stated savings, because there’s already a thriving industry built around partitioning old people assets into trusts and other vehicles to avoid the 5 year lookback rule and maximally soak the government for paying for old people torture-farms / nursing homes, and if suddenly you were doing this on a broader scale, those interventions and that industry is going to be a lot more utilized.

And once again, $300B is rounding error.

If we raised the retirement age to 73, which would move us back to the original 1935 ratios, we’d move the needle by only $300B of savings per year. Once again, practically nothing on a $7T outlay.

Even if you stacked both of these and maximally pissed off every elderly voter forever, you’d only close <33% of the ongoing yearly deficit, so basically nothing, for a move no politician or party will condone, because the infinite vampire-tiled sky of angry old people will vote for the other party forever if it ever happened.

What if we thought about some fair-and-easy-to-understand rules based program?

Classically, people used to have a bunch of kids in the times of high child mortality so enough would survive to take care of them in old age. What if you have enough kids to reach neutrality, then you qualify for your old age vampire trillions?

Let’s look at that.

A simple rules based program, ie if you have enough kids, you’ll have SS and medical care in old age - this also won’t work because it would need to be 6+ kids per person - if the mean taxpayer pays ~$11k and the mean “everyone” tax expenditure is ~$12k, you need 1 kid to pay your “everyone” expenditure, then 5 more to pay for your old age, and you STILL haven’t paid for your spouse or your kids’ government outlays. So, that’s not very practical either, nobody even has kids any more, certainly not 6 kids, only 2-3% of families would qualify, so once again you’re at the “this really does nothing” at any reasonable cutoff, and “angry sky vampires will vote for the other party forever” at any cutoff that did anything that mattered.

So if trying to reduce retirement spending in reasonable ways doesn’t work, where else can we reduce spending?

What’s the other big dog? Healthcare. Medicare and Medicaid together are another ~$1.5T per year, that keeps growing to infinity. It mostly goes to old people.

A large part of this is morbidity and end-of-life care.

Health Interventions

What is the single biggest thing you can do personally to reduce morbidity (poor health) and reduce your all cause mortality? Exercise.

Force everyone to exercise - As I went over in my recent longevity in <20 min post, exercising gives anyone over forty 3-5x all cause mortality buffs, and decades long morbidity buffs. Morbidity is the years (decades) of poorer health and higher medical spend caused by things like diabetes, obesity, CVD, and so on, which to a first approximation affects ~80% of the US population over 40, because ~80% are overweight and sedentary.

And to give you an idea, 3-5x all cause mortality effects are twice as large as smoking, so everyone is doing the equivalent of smoking a pack a day and chugging a fifth of everclear by not exercising.

But as huge as these effects are individually, they would actually be net negative at the fiscal level, because once again, people live for 80 years and want to work for only 40 years, then retire and have infinite money pumped into them by ever-fewer young people forever. The problem is structural.

So even if we mandated that everyone exercise AND made them actually do it, this would just wreck our budgets even more, because they’ll live even longer in the “infinite money pumped into them by ever-fewer young people” regime.

Most spending is concentrated in the last year / months of life, and unhealthy sedentary people only cost $1-$3k more per year until the last 5 years or so, while the exercisers live 5-15 years longer. Disability years are ~2.5x more expensive than healthy years, and exercisers have half as much, but the most this nets is $100k NPV per person, and the exercisers start costing more at about 7 years increased lifespan, because of more total years overall. Exercisers do live 7 years longer, generally 5-15 years. The last year of life, the most expensive medical cost ($80-$100k) and 10% of all lifetime medical costs, is the same for both.

So sadly, although this is certainly optimal for yourself in terms of better and more years, it won’t work at the population scale to save any spend, because people will live longer overall.

So the real problem is becoming obvious, and it’s structural

The real problem is just plain demographics. It’s age - everyone is getting older and living longer, and sucking up trillions from young people while doing so, immiserating the future of their own kids / country.

Nobody is going to have kids, or buy houses, or even get jobs, if literally everyone is yoked to a sky vampire sucking away more than their own take home pay every year, which is where we are already, today.

And this is getting worse! As everyone with eyeballs can see, current generations are fatter and in worse health than prior generations - well, these guys actually did a meta-analysis and crunched the numbers, and twice as many people in current generations are obese or diabetic at a given age as past generations, MUCH more have worse mental health, and more have chronic diseases. Each generation sucks more than the one before it, AND they’re still going to live for 80+ years (probably longer), and they’ll be doing it with much worse health, for many more years. That’s going to cost us still more money, on top of the ever-present healthcare growth in spending. We are systematically set up to fail, here.

Think immigration is the answer? An interesting post by Arctotherium looked at the numbers behind this, to point out that this is indeed a structural problem that immigration cannot solve, because even those immigrants will get older and want to retire for 20+ years, and that 20+ years will be ever-increasing, and the expenses incurred therein will also be ever-increasing. For instance, to use immigration to bring South Korea’s demographic / economic pyramid back to 1980 numbers, would require 5.1B immigrants to filter into South Korea. It’s just vastly infeasible.

The real problem is all those life years! A dedicated smoker or alcoholic who never exercises is actually the true hero we all need, because they die sooner and cost way less over a lifetime.

Which brings us to our more outre, and actually effective, possible interventions.

And before we get into these, I feel like a framing orientation is in order

The dominant option today for those high morbidity and high expense years at the end of life (ie the last 3-7 years) is nursing homes and being in and out of hospitals. Average nursing home tenures are 3.7y for women and 2.2y for men, with about 20% spending more than 5 years in long term care, and about 60% of old people overall ending up in long term care as of 2017.

In terms of hospitals, people generally average 2-8 hospitalizations in their last year, with an average tenure of ~21 hospital days.

Both hospitals and long term care at end of life are terrible. As Scott Alexander famously wrote about in Who by Very Slow Decay, you’re basically putting yourselves into machines that are designed to keep your increasingly-suffering half-corpse alive as long as possible, to milk the most money possible from the conjoined ever-suffering entity of your half corpse + the government.

You will become bedridden, unable to walk or even to turn yourself over. You will become completely dependent on nurse assistants to intermittently shift your position to avoid pressure ulcers. When they inevitably slip up, your skin develops huge incurable sores that can sometimes erode all the way to the bone, and which are perpetually infected with foul-smelling bacteria. Your limbs will become practically vestigial organs, like the appendix, and when your vascular disease gets too bad, one or more will be amputated, sacrifices to save the host. Urinary and fecal continence disappear somewhere in the process, so you’re either connected to catheters or else spend a while every day lying in a puddle of your own wastes until the nurses can help you out. The digestive system isn’t too happy either by this point, so you can either have a tube plugged directly into your stomach or just skip the middleman and have an IV line feeding nutrients into your bloodstream.

Somewhere in the process your mind very quietly and without fanfare gives up the ghost. It starts with forgetting a couple of little things, and progresses until you have no idea what’s going on ever. In medical jargon, healthy people are “alert and oriented x 3”, which means oriented to person (you know your name), oriented to time (you know what day/month/year it is), and oriented to place (you know you’re in a hospital). My patients who have the sorts of issues I mentioned in the last paragraph are generally alert and oriented x0. They don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all. When you’re alert and oriented x0, the world becomes this terrifying place where you are stuck in some kind of bed and can’t move and people are sticking you with very large needles and forcing tubes down your throat and you have no idea why or what’s going on.

So of course you start screaming and trying to attack people and trying to pull the tubes and IV lines out. Every morning when I come in to work I have to check the nurses’ notes for what happened the previous night, and every morning a couple of my patients have tried to pull all of their tubes and lines out. If it’s especially bad they try to attack the staff, and although the extremely elderly are really bad at attacking people this is nevertheless Unacceptable Behavior and they have to be restrained ie tied down to the bed. A presumably more humane alternative sometimes used instead or in addition is to just drug you up on all of those old-timey psychiatric medications that actual psychiatrists don’t use anymore because of their bad reputation.

Moreover, did you know that nursing homes and hospital systems in particular are primary targets for private equity?

They’re so rich in excess, and so bloated with administrators and poor practices, that PE guys can often come in and make a bunch of cuts and significantly improve margins. But, inevitably, staffing gets cut, quality of care declines, and coding gaming and overprescribing of profitable meds and interventions goes up, because that’s how the game is played.

Private equity loves torturing old and sick people

Private equity acquisitions of nursing homes / assisted living, hospitals, emergency rooms, and hospices have been increasing.

Here’s just nursing homes:

This covers many hundreds of thousands of units, with ~150k of them attributed to various PE firms by state below:

Do you get worse care in PE homes?

And how! The center of medicare advocacy compares non-PE nursing homes to PE homes, and finds zero abuse in the non-PE facilities and abuse in 26% of the PE ones, more than 15x the number of federal fines, with the fines more than 20x higher, and 12x the payment denials in PE vs non-PE (due to getting aggressive / ambitious with submitted bills).

What about hospitals? A 2025 Senate report finds about PE acquired hospitals that they systematically cut costs in care-harming ways, load them with enough debt to bankrupt them, and then pay themselves massive bonuses - and it should be emphasized, those massive bonuses are literally achieved via more people dying, in aggregate:

“As our investigation revealed, these financial entities are putting their own profits over patients, leading to health and safety violations, chronic understaffing, and hospital closures.”

“Despite gross financial and operational mismanagement of its hospitals, LGP took home $424 million of the $645 million that PMH paid out in dividends and preferred stock redemption during LGP’s majority ownership—in addition to over $13 million in fees—that left PMH in severe financial distress. In order to pay out these distributions, PMH was forced to take on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, eventually leading to PMH running out of cash and defaulting on its loans.”

And this WAPO article about one of the same (very profitable) PE hospitals avers that:

“They died in hallways. In line. Alone,” wrote the Boston Globe of Steward’s patients. “Their deaths are the human cost of Steward’s financial neglect.”

When it comes to Emergency Rooms, this article goes over them, pointing out that PE ER’s cut staffing, reduce time with patients, impair patient outcomes, and systematically change insurance practices to stick patients with higher bills for those worse outcomes:

“Private equity firms and other corporate interests owned nearly 9 percent of ER doctor groups in 2009; by 2019, they owned 22 percent. The wave of takeovers and consolidations peaked in 2021 but carries on all over the US, especially in Florida, Texas, and other parts of the South and West where the firms have been most aggressive.”

“[T]he owners faced a tough choice: “‘Do I do what is ethical and feels right … and I get a nice going-away party and maybe a watch or something — or do I get $10 million?’”

“To avoid having to negotiate those astronomical bills with the expert hagglers at insurance companies, firms kept their ERs from participating in many insurance networks. It was easier to collect on a so-called balance bill — the portion of a medical bill not paid for by a patient’s insurer — if the care a patient had received wasn’t covered by their insurance at all.”

When it comes to hospice, PE firms have more complaints and deficiencies, cut staffing, and systematically target Alzheimers patients because they’ll live longer and can generate more billing:

This paper analyzes hospice complaints from 2005 - 2015 and finds that for-profit agencies were 1.33 and 1.52 times more likely relative to not-for-profits to have a complaint allegation and deficiency, respectively.

This one points out that PE hospices explicitly target Alzheimers patients at much higher rates, because they’re more likely to live more than 6 months, and they can bill a lot longer for them.

“Doctors have a harder time predicting whether a patient with Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia has less than six months to live, the eligibility criterion for enrollment. For-profit hospices enroll those patients anyway, Teno said, and stand to profit the longer those patients live.”

Private equity isn’t who you want to be running health systems.

Although I’m always a fan of cutting administrators, because I think America has a uniquely bad “administrative bloating disease” in most institutions, private equity goes well past that, and systematically impairs patient outcomes, at the cost of people’s health and suffering and lives, while loading their institutions with debt and paying themselves big bonuses. I agree that economically PE has a place, much like vultures and bacteria and other carrion eaters have a place in any ecosystem. But healthcare shouldn’t be “for profit” to begin with,2 and you shouldn’t let vultures and carrion eaters dismantle systems in ways that torture and kill people.

Broadly, Private Equity has acquired from 10-30% of the market for most end-of-life care endpoints, and that fraction keeps growing, and the outcomes for patients are noticeably worse. It’s enshittification, but for medical and end-of-life care, and which directly tortures grandmas.

And back to the original For Who By Slow Decay point, even the non-PE ones are already basically hell, which no reasonable person should want for themselves or their loved ones. So “hell but 20% worse” is really quibbling about dust motes while we’re ignoring beams in your eye.

And obviously, PE are just optimizers on the landscape - they’re just taking the portion they’re acquiring to the natural optimization endpoint a little faster, and it’s a good bet they’re going to eat more of that landscape as long as it’s profitable to do so, AND that endpoint is likely to be moved towards even by the non-PE organizations.

Why do we want this?

So it is literally Moloch torturing our elderly for 2-7 years, to milk as much possible money from all of us as they can, keeping their increasingly-suffering half-corpses alive for as long as possible for fun and profit.

Average long term care costs range from $120k - $200k a year depending on geography, and hospitals cost about $5k per night, so the ~21 days in their last year is roughly $100k.

What’s the harvestable surface there? 60% long term care * 70M old people = 49M old people at $150k a year * 3 years + 100k final hospitalization year = $550k times 49M is $27 trillion dollars. And again, that’s current costs, all this is only going up.

Why exactly did we want to pay Moloch / Private Equity bros $27 trillion to literally torture our elderly to death for as long as possible?

Particularly when we can probably come up with several ways where you / they could go out actually enjoying your final years, and / or as a hero to your direct descendants via improving your grandkids’ lives while dying with some actual dignity?

Death with dignity

For myself, this certainly isn’t how I want to die! I don’t want to be tortured by heartlessly amoral revenue-optimizers for years that feel like eternities, just so they can harvest trillions of dollars from me and / or the government!

So what’s a good death?

Obviously the best death is dying in glorious battle and ascending to Valhalla, but since Odin is pretty thin on the ground these days, there’s an older guy in his late 70’s at my gym who routinely pushes 3+ plates in squat and bench who I’ve always admired. My second best death is being older but still in good health, and getting up a monster 5+ plate deadlift in an age-class deadlift record, and going full aneurysm lights-out at the top after successfully grinding it up and locking out. Third best is the perennial “dying while having sex,” like former vice president Nelson Rockefeller or Lord Palmerston, which is only third here out of consideration for the mental health of my inamorta in that scenario (and even then, I feel like the right partner might see it as a compliment that they were so good that you literally ascended to heaven on an O so powerful it turned the lights out on the way out?).

I guess these are pretty hard to arrange or do with any sort of intention.

So what did people do historically to die with dignity?

The Greeks, Romans, Inuit, South Asians, and Japanese in various time periods were all big on suicide, by various means. According to Tacitus, when Petronius found out he was going to get purged by Nero, he threw a suicide dinner party and:

“declined to tolerate further the delays of fear or hope; yet still did not hurry to take his life, but caused his already severed arteries to be bound up to meet his whim, then opened them once more, and began to converse with his friends, in no grave strain and with no view to the fame of a stout-hearted ending. He listened to them as they rehearsed, not discourses upon the immortality of the soul⁠ or the doctrines of philosophy, but light songs and frivolous verses. Some of his slaves tasted of his bounty, a few of the lash. He took his place at dinner, and drowsed a little, so that death, if compulsory, should at least resemble nature. Not even in his will did he follow the routine of suicide by flattering Nero or Tigellinus or another of the mighty, but — prefixing the names of the various catamites and women — detailed the imperial debauches and the novel features of each act of lust, and sent the document under seal to Nero. His signet-ring he broke, lest it should render dangerous service later.”

THAT sounds like a death with dignity!

A lot of elderly Hadza / hunter gatherer men die in hunting accidents or in falls from tall trees while foraging honey. If the tree were tall enough, that doesn’t seem that bad.

I mean, falling out of a tree sounds merely “okay,” but it beats the hell out of being tortured to death for years!

Okay, so what are the themes and elements of a death with dignity here?

1. It’s chosen voluntarily

2. They happen while you’re still physically capable enough to enjoy and do things

3. They often have elements of enjoyment (sex, battle, lifting, dinner parties)

4. They often have elements of social responsibility or contribution (battle, dinner parties, hunting or harvesting honey)

So in our context, any Westerner can hit all 4 marks if they voluntarily decide to do this before their physical decline makes it impossible to enjoy anything or physically carry out any suicidal acts, provided they do so in full knowledge it’s denying private equity / Moloch the joy of torturing them for years and leaving their families and societies better off and with more money, hitting point 4.

So first, obviously a lot of discourse and communication needs to happen here, because right now we do not let our seniors go gently into that good night, we just ignore them and let the private equity bros swoop in and pin them down and start stabbing them with needles for fun and profit when they’re too weak to fend them off. Clearly suboptimal!

Messaging towards death with dignity, particularly messaging that the alternative is the private equity Torment Nexus end that a full 60% of seniors are going to be subjected to, should be societal priority #1 here.

And if we were a FUNCTIONAL society, ie one that doesn’t torture their elderly to death for years via private equity bros, we could actually set up some things to facilitate a happier and quicker end.

What are some options on this front?

1. The Grand Farewell - are you past 65? We want you to actually have some fun in life before you go out! You sign a DNR order, and we will, for FREE, let you try every drug or vice, participate in base jumping, demolition derbies, motorcycle racing, and more. We’ll have special centers staffed with hookers, viagra, gambling, and every drug known to man that are open 24/7, all completely free for our great American seniors! It’s Las Vegas and Burning Man and Red Bull-style extreme games for seniors. Wouldn’t you rather go out with a smile on your face than be tortured to death by nursing homes and hospitals over a decade? I know I would!

Think this is crazy? Think it’s “undignified” for grandpa to go out while actually enjoying his twilight years?

Fine, I’ll stipulate that. I agree, no grandpas married to loving grandmas or tending loving grandkids should do this, let’s just take all fun forever from them, and let them take one for the team and get tortured by private equity bros for years instead.

Even under those restrictions, 46% of 65+ people are unmarried. 30% have no grandkids, as in ZERO grandkids, and that’s getting higher every year. These are HUGE chunks of older people. Let’s call the conjunction a third, and then lets say only half of them, or ~10M, will opt into the Grand Farewell. 15% of the 65+ pop dying 15 years sooner nets you $15T in spending savings,3 AND it’s a much better way to go out than being tortured to death by nursing homes!

And that’s using average yearly $57k values. Because you’re eliminating the last year of life (the most expensive in terms of medical spending), and the 5-10 years prior to that (also more expensive), and the extreme growth in spending that would have taken that to $156k a year (if you average the last 3 years Medicare / Medicaid growth and apply it forward), you actually save more than just taking the average yearly values.

That cranks you up to ~$22T in savings in the aggregate, over the 10M seniors.4

Think operating a motorcycle race track and brothel / base jumping center in a mini Las Vegas for seniors is expensive? Not compared to $22T it isn’t! That pays for itself so many times over we’ll probably be tempted to let grandpas, espoused seniors, and non-seniors opt in, which I’m also in favor of - once again, totally opt-in and voluntary. Respect people’s choices to live (or end) their lives as they wish, and definitely a better death than the alternative.

And again, this is maximally conservative, in a no-spouse AND no-grandkids situation. But plenty of people with grandkids and spouses could opt for this too, and each one who opts in is going to save us $2.2M in spending assuming an age 65 exit.

Okay, okay, obviously the gender ratios are going to be pretty skewed here. A lot of old ladies just want to putter around in the garden and watch Matlock instead of going out by doing speedballs and banging three hot 20 year old hookers at once.

What is our option for our old ladies and non-vice oriented male seniors?

What is our neighbor to the north doing? MAID and lots of it!

Canada has gone from ~1k MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) deaths in 2016 to ~16.5k in 2024 (and an estimated 18k in 2025). That’s ~5% of total annual deaths in Canada now, and it’s now the number one cause of death for anyone there.

Lots of people think that’s a BAD thing, but look at the alternative! Moloch torturing old people for many years is WAY more monstrous! And it’s bankrupting us and immolating all our young people’s futures!

Well everyone knows America is bigger and richer and does things to the Xtreme - we need an American MAID program, and given our absolutely bonkers fiscal situation, we can afford to heavily incentivize it.

Encourage / incentivize MAID at 1/3 the net positive to the government

Why pay awful nursing homes a jillion dollars a year to literally torture you to death when you could go out a hero to your direct descendants and improve your grandkids’ lives?

Once again, the math is pretty compelling - $2.2M per person, and those savings permanently drop out of the federal cost structure.

And even without incentives, the people themselves will preserve significant wealth they can pass down to descendants or charities, instead of paying all that to a nursing home to torture them for years. What do nursing homes cost? The national median is now $115k per year. An actually nice one is $150k+. In Tier 1 cities they run $180k - $200k. That grows to $155k - $300k over 15 years even only using “regular” inflation of ~3%. All this is per year!

And once again, they milk you as long as they can, and there’s a sweeping wave of private equity takeovers of nursing homes, because they’re such sweet targets. You REALLY want to give Moloch / some private equity bros $1M+ of your hard earned money to torture you to death, while your mind goes and every day is an endless hell?? OR you could leave that money to people or causes you care about, AND go out with your dignity and mental faculties intact. Gee, tough choice. Once again, I know which one I’d choose!

So yeah, how about if you sign up for MAID, we’ll give you an extra $500k to do whatever you want with. Give it to people you care about, donate it to a cause you care about - you do you! I’m sure the world will be a better place however you choose to spend it.

Same numbers, let’s say we get only a 15% opt in, or 10M seniors. This saves $17T, because $500k is going to the people / families from the $22T as incentives.

So at a stroke, we’ve just saved $22T + $17T at pretty conservative numbers, WHILE letting 20M fewer old people get literally tortured to death by Moloch / private equity bros.

You know what they say - $22 trillion here, $17 trillion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money!

What does our $39T in savings actually save over 15 years?

$2.6T a year, or more than 100% of our entire annual deficit.

We have eliminated the deficit, and done it by thumbing our noses at private equity bros who want to torture our elderly people for years, AND given our elderly a much more fun and / or dignified death!

Keep in mind the remaining 50M seniors are opting into literally being tortured to death for years, and this is vastly suboptimal for everyone. We should definitely push for moving the opt-in numbers higher on both ends.

If we pushed it to merely half of our seniors being tortured to death, we’d not only have no deficit, we’d have a $2.5T surplus every year.

This makes sense fiscally and morally

And once again, what do you want for YOUR parents? You want them to live the Who By Slow Decay agony, and be tortured by amoral profit-oriented systems squeezing their suffering half-corpses for additional dollars for years?

What about for yourself?? Nobody should want ANY of this!

I’ll stress that this is a strictly better option even if AI takes off and we double our economy and get way richer! Being way richer and keeping the current system isn’t a “win,” it’s a moral monstrosity! You’re going to celebrate the fact that we can keep torturing tens of millions of seniors for years? That your parents, and eventually YOU are going to have that happen to them? Please, listen to your heart, and then your mind! Any reasonable person should be lining up a more dignified exit for themselves and their elderly family members right now!

This is purely a messaging and cultural uptake problem, coupled with Molochian incentives on the hospital / nursing home / private equity bro end. Death with dignity is possible, and it’s only because we’re lazy and don’t want to think about what’s happening to old people that it’s not happening.

What is the solution when dealing with adversarial systems? Don’t opt in!

Don’t eat fast and junk food, don’t install or use gambling or social media apps, don’t lay around staring at screens for ~11 hours a day like the median person. Well, here’s another one to add to the list: don’t let yourself or your loved ones get tortured to death for years by Moloch / private equity bros.

Plan for a death with dignity while you still have physical capacity, and the capacity to enjoy things in life.

Vote and advocate for better options than “being tortured to death by private equity bros,” and “Who By Slow Decay” end-of-life, which nobody should want for themselves or their loved ones.

Not only are the Grand Farewell and MAID better options for fiscal solvency, they’re the better options morally, and they are better options for YOU and your loved ones!

Strange Loop Canon

Agent, Know Thyself! (and bid accordingly)

Written with the wonderful Andrey Fradkin, who does the Justified Posteriors podcast…

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4 months ago · 44 likes · 16 comments · Rohit Krishnan and Andrey Fradkin

Commenters point out interesting stuff - Coase’s nature of the firm implies that there are architectures of groups of semi-specialized or differently harnessed LLM’s that should be much more effective as a problem solver of this nature. LLM’s themselves are already coalitions of minds! So there’s an exciting greenfield space here where everyone is going to be experimenting with markets, virtual firms, auctions, and other arrangements to find the best coordination and allocation strategies for groups of AI minds to work together most effectively.

And anyone can participate! And there’s a ton of arbitrage! Just think, if you put together an architecture that cooks and is 30% more efficient and / or quick - that’s your cost structure, and you have what amounts to a 30% cost structure advantage. Immense!

Fun ideas that immediately occur to me:

> Harnesses around metacognition and self calibration

> Self training and evaluating dojos to elicit better same, ideally set up in a way that tunes the output quality via hyperparameters and elicits a good map of where a given mind is strong or weak, because you’re going to need to throw every single new model update or slight revision in there

> Architectures that are optimized around finding and allocating relatively self contained blocks of tasks to calibrated sub-minds, to minimize the context bloat that is inherent in understanding what’s going on and the history of what’s been done to date. We need to separate architectural minds and execution minds, many are already doing this, Claude code kinda does it natively with subagents, but poorly.

> Rohit has a virtual firm project he’s working on here - https://github.com/Strange-Lab-AI/vei - “VEI turns built-in scenarios or real company records into a runnable company world. You can use it to test an agent before it touches a real company, watch an outside agent through a governed twin, branch from a real historical decision and compare a different move, or draft grounded knowledge artifacts from the same company state.”

It’s basically a state architecture where you can do redos, sort of a part of the dojo idea.

2. Should you trust the Netflix top ten?

No! broadly, only duration over time predicts quality. And they promote their own series in there, which should surprise nobody.

Stat Significant

Should You Trust the Netflix Top 10? A Statistical Analysis

Intro: “If It’s in the Top 10, It Must Be Good…

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4 months ago · 58 likes · 10 comments · Daniel Parris

3. Fun analysis and summation of the goblin thing, where GPT was mentioning goblins more often than was comfortable

4. An aesthetic rant about the moral superiority of detached garages
   
   ”But attached garages are an exception to the rule that there are always exceptions to the rule. They’re always ugly. In no case are they ever not ugly. To be more precise, every house looks worse with an attached garage than it would if that garage were entirely omitted.

   Even garage defenders rarely object to this point, but I’ll go over the evidence anyway.”
   
   

5. A brief multi-culture overview of women’s roles when they don’t have the right to exit
   
   Everyone thinks I’m crazy because I’m anti-marriage, and strongly anti-marriage in the sense I believe that “encouraging more marriage to ameliorate the fertility crisis” is a huge mistake, on the order of creating the Torment Nexus to crank out a handful of incremental taxpayers.
   
   And this is very against male norms by current gender discourse standards! You can take the most libertarian to right-leaning “the government should butt out of everything” guy, but when it comes to divorce, suddenly they’re fully against all human autonomy or choice or dignity in half the population and think women should be forcibly shackled to duds, which I’ve always found hilarious.
   
   But this is exactly why marriage with no exit sucks - women unfailingly get milked for free labor, beaten up, raped, and lose much of the autonomy and choice that matters, and the article is a good survey of that. It really boggles my mind when so many men are arguing FOR this, as though they don’t have mothers and sisters and daughters.

The Great Gender Divergence

Patriarchal Rents

Before the 20th century, the world was overwhelmingly patriarchal: male coalitions ran powerful institutions, religious authorities sacralised male dominance, and female submission was often glorified as moral virtue. This system not only puffed up men’s egos, it also enabled extraction: fraternities captured benefits that would have otherwise been redu…

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4 months ago · 64 likes · 6 comments · Alice Evans

6. Curl, which is 176k lines long and has been rewritten 4x times, only finds 1 minor vuln when audited by Mythos. This is after finding and fixing ~188 over the years. I found this audit interesting, because it’s at least a data point on “what is the level of complexity, auditing, and public use that is likely to be largely okay.”

   Then again, heartbleed existed too. And I can’t help but shore this up with Mythos pwning Apple’s brand new M5 memory-safe architecture, too:

(archive link for non-twitter folk)

7. Link to take the RMET, or “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, which is infamous. Have you ever heard people referring to “studies” pointing out that team performance is directly correlated with female participation in meetings, and / or number of women on the team? This was big and really leaned on when it came to DEI initiatives in the workplace.
   
   It’s fake, of course - the true distinguisher is how well people on the teams do at RMET, and women on average do slightly better than men.
   
   One still-valid use with significant Cohen’s D (0.4 - 0.9) is detecting autistic tendencies - people who do worse than average on the test, particularly under a score of 22, tend to have more autistic tendencies. It should be noted validity is only at the group rather than individual level, for all these results.

   
   One final fun factoid - pace Wendy Higgin’s recent work a lot of what RMET is measuring is likely to be verbal intelligence rather than literal “theory of mind,” because you need to know what “aghast” and “despondent” means to actually do well.
   

8. If we switched to a post-scarcity measure like Doctorow’s whuffie, or fame, would we be any better off than today’s income / wealth endpoints?

   
   No! Fame follows a power law distribution just like income or wealth, and this post aggregates the literature to calculate that the Gini, or degree of inequality, is roughly equal to income’s degree of inequality. Womp womp.

   
   ”The power-law fits of Bagrow and ben-Avraham give a in the range 1.77 to 2.69 for scientists, 2.74-3.62 for aces, 1.88-2.10 for actors, 1.57-2.03 for villains, 1.88-2.43 for programmers, 1.71-1.92 for runners, and 1.74-2.57 for students. “
   

   Us income alpha is ~2 overall, and ~1.5 for the top 1% (lower alpha means more inequality).

Interregnum and coupon

And once more before the paywall, I will offer a lifetime 50% off coupon, because getting more paid subscribers helps increase reach and reads.

I want to be clear, I’m definitely not in it for the money! I’m charging literally the least amount the platform lets you charge, as pointed out when he became a subscriber, with the coupon it’s $2.50 a month here, basically half a coffee per month - but the way the Substack algorithm works, the more paid subscribers you get, the more reach and exposure you get on the Substack side.

And that’s what I’m after, more readers, a more active comment section, all that good stuff. So if you want to help out, and want to get access to all the links, please avail yourself of a lifetime 50% off coupon here:

https://performativebafflement.substack.com/46810a7d

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Remember this guy?

The top 3% got 500% growth. The top 10% got the marquee ~250% growth rate in comp, and everyone else got less and are basically running in place.

The Great Stagnation is one name it goes by (and Tyler Cowen wrote a short book / long pamphlet by that name looking at it back in 2011). What does this represent? Cowen thinks it represents the shift from easy wins achieved via low hanging fruit (antibiotics, electrification, cars, etc), to a lower-growth harder regime with more effortful-to-reach fruits. I think it represents something simpler - the shift from atoms to bits, and the corresponding shift in discovery and coordination that led to more business outcomes being dominated by power laws rather than gaussians.

At this scale of zoom out, I think it represents the shift from “physical work” to “knowledge work.” Creating a successful company used to be about creating or moving physical atoms of stuff around in the world, and that gradually shifted to where we are today, where we’re not allowed to do anything in the physical world due to regulatory barriers and vetocracy, but we can still do things in the world of bits.

The people who have benefited from those trends stayed closer to the green line, and are roughly 10-20% of the population, and the black line is everybody else.

The talent distribution is the same, but there’s 10x fewer benefiting

Now let me ask you - did the underlying talent distribution in the US change between ~1940 and ~1970, when this trend kicked off? I don’t think there’s any reason to think so. The US didn’t face any food shortages or big casualty numbers or major society-wide selection effects between those two endpoints.

What happened was technological innovation opened up new frontiers of efficiency and capability, and the macro economic, cultural, and regulatory landscape changed over time in ways that privileged the small amount of people able to operate at that new frontier of efficiency and capability.

I wrote about some of these dynamics, on why we’re all moving to Extremistan, in a past post. Broadly, the digital world and greater connectivity and discovery means that areas that used to be dominated by gaussians are now being dominated by power laws, and power laws are run on winner-take-all dynamics. This is why the 700th best basketball player in America makes ~$40k per year, while they’re still 1-in-10-million on both height and skill, as I wrote about.

Our “winners,” whether individuals or companies, have never been bigger, because of these power laws. They’ve also increasingly moved from the physical (companies like Big 3 auto manufacturers, oil and gas, and Walmart) to the digital (the Mag 7 have driven basically all S&P growth over the last two decades). Look at the crazy changes in top companies, in terms of industry and size, just since 1998, here.

So, from ~100% of the population participating in economic growth along with productivity, to ~10%. Again, with no change in the underlying talent distribution! The landscape moved, and it moved in a way that only people with rarer talents were able to capture a lot of value going forward.

We are obviously living through a similar time right now with AI.

Already, the difference between somebody who uses AI well versus somebody who doesn’t is more than 10x.

The layoffs

As you might expect if that were true, already, companies are laying off tens of thousands of employees, and reducing entry-level jobs, as a recent post from one of my favorite reads goes over here:

12 Grams of Carbon

Tech Things: Everyone's Getting Fired

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4 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · theahura

Do you understand what it means for this to be happening? These are literally the richest and most successful companies in the world, with the deepest bench of talent, deciding “hey, some of our remaining guys using AI can easily replace 30k employees!”

And we should expect this effect to multiply. It’s pretty clear to me that we’re going to move from something like 10% being able to participate in economic growth to something like 1-2%, another OOM drop.

That transition is going to be pretty brutal - and all with no change in the underlying talent distribution!

And this time it’s happening so fast there’s zero ambiguity. Maybe there could have been something that happened in the 40’s through 70’s (just to play devil’s advocate, lots of people stopped smoking, and nicotine is a well-known nootropic!) that actually moved the needle, but this is going to be a same-person to same-person comparison here in the next decade, with zero confounds.

The ~20% of people in the US who are PMC are going to be ~90%+ left out in the transition, just like everybody else was from the 70’s to now.

This ties into the AGI doom / blackpill thing

One of the more fraught dynamics with AI and AGI doom-pilling, whether existential or simply about jobs, is that Scott and various other luminaries in the field are successfully convincing large numbers of people that the risk is real, that doom is coming, whether for jobs or maybe for EVERYONE, and giving the people so convinced no outlet or useful action to take.

The #1 question with AI 2027 and Scott’s posts are always “what can I DO?? For the love of god, tell me!” and you can all but hear them collapsing into despondent sobs and nihilism.

And they can’t do anything! We’re all part of various egregores, and those egregores are battling in the arcane high dimensional spaces of culture and politics, and anyone’s anxiety and uselessness is just a casualty of needing more mass in our egregores. You’re just one cell in the “AI risk is a real thing” egregore, and we need millions or hundreds of millions of cells for that egregore to be able to actually affect the political and cultural landscape.

So, sorry everyone! A bit of Molochian dynamics there, where we need to coordinate and act at a higher level, and building the mass and consensus to do so causes some value loss and anxiety at lower levels along the way.

So yeah. The 90% of the PMC losing their jobs is basically part of the same dynamic.

What can you do about it, oh currently comfortable PMC folk? What can the carders and spinners and weavers do when replaced by machines? What can the taxi and truck drivers do when replaced by self driving?

You may as well tilt at windmills, and clog machinery with clogs (the origin of the word “saboteur”), and the relentless grind of capitalism and machinery will smear you into a fine paste nonetheless.

But maybe you can do something

As I’ve written about before in my post on UBI, the fact that it’s the PMC getting counterfeited first is actually a great thing, societally.

This is because the PMC are directly connected to politicans and people working in AI companies in a way that, say, baristas and plumbers aren’t. They exist within their social graphs and circles of care, both individually and in the aggregate.

My basic model is that we’ll get UBI even at <10% PMC unemployment because of this - it’s going to be that disruptive and immediate, and the PMC literally make up the chattering and politically connected classes, and boy will they be a-chattering!

1 - So that’s probably the first thing to do. Network, branch out, strengthen your first and second degree connections with whatever politicians and AI-affiliated people you can. The more you’re in their circle of care, the more is likely to be done, both for you personally and all other PMC people like you.

And now let’s consider the skills. What skills are going to be most valued in the AI-enhanced future? Well, as a first pass, we can probably point to managing AI’s really well, and / or managing IC’s using AI’s well, and / or founding or growing a business using AI. There’s certainly going to be more than that, it’s going to be a really varied landscape for a while, but those seem like the safest and most obvious high water marks.

So what else can you do?

2 - Get better at using and managing AI’s yourself

I worked with some friends on a startup MVP recently. The MVP didn’t pan out, but the real value to me was getting heads-down, 12 hours a day into using AI to build something, including trying all 3 frontier models, getting into hyperparameters like claude.md files, superpowers, subagents, and the various harnesses people have. It was amazing! You can do SO much with AI now, it really is a 10x multiplier, or more.

And you know, you can do AI-fueled side projects yourself to skill up on this front.

I myself have done a few, one public-facing one is my dating base population calculator, where you can filter by MSA on your desired age range, physical attributes, and other stuff to see the approximate number of people meeting your criteria in your geography. I did this because approximately everyone dating is searching for left handed unicorns who fart licorice-scented rainbows and name-drop Wittgenstein, which I’ve always found hilarious - so I wanted to show that “oh yeah, there are 2.5 people in the entire nation that meet your criteria, good luck!”

Another person I really admire on the vibe coding front? - his vibe coding side projects are creative, fun, and exploring a really interesting frontier of AI agent use. From translating and analyzing Roman empire era Egyptian complaints, to testing a hypothesis about paleontology, to thinking about subagent calibration and the need for them to be well calibrated to bid in a marketplace successfully, and more.

Another one? - who created some Claude superpowers around textual analysis and debate, and another one, eigencultures, tracking the rise and fall of broad cultural trends over decades, both of which are super interesting.

But broadly, think of any analysis, any website or tool you’ve ever wished existed - now YOU can create it, just by talking to an AI! And you can generally knock something substantive out with basically a single day of effort, it’s amazing. My roster of side projects just keeps growing.

3 - Get better at managing IC’s using AI

Honestly if you have IC’s, who are generally younger and more adoptive of new tech, I’m genuinely surprised if they’re not already using AI. But one, skilling up yourself so you have some idea of the best practices and capabilities is absolutely essential, and two, knowing the volume and quality of work to expect, and the various failure modes to look for, is going to be a big part of managing AI-enhanced IC’s in the future.

You can only get better at this by doing, too! There’s no best practices for any of this! It’s a total greenfield! You might unintentionally revolutionize your field, or at least look great to your boss, as you 10x productivity. Why not get on that train early, before everyone else? Because it’s a sure bet that being “AI first” and mentoring other people to better AI use is going to be a big part of future jobs and promotions, too.

4 - Think about founding and / or growing a company in an AI-first way

Yes, I’ve written about this before, in my “should you consider doing a startup” checklist post. I know that not everybody has the risk tolerance and other personality traits to found a company. But when the risk of being entirely obsoleted is on the roster as an alternative, I think many people might be willing to adjust that perceived threshold down. You also don’t have to found it, you can join a funded startup and help grow it with your skills.

There are going to be several macro-factors making this a more viable option, too.

• Think of the current VC landscape - everyone is salivating and shoveling money at “AI anything,” because AI is obviously the future. When AI is actually counterfeiting jobs and doubling economies, that’s going to go WAY up! It’s already at frankly comical levels, and it’s going to get higher! The reserves of capital will be bigger, the uncertainty will be bigger, and the willingness to take ever-more and ever-more-diverse bets is going to be correspondingly higher.

• AI fills gaps that people used to have to fill with good networks. It used to be that if there was some key dependency in your business plan, you needed to know or be able to recruit somebody fairly impressive to fill that gap. In an AI future, it’s a lot more credible to just handwave it away and say “yes, we’re going to use AI for marketing / logistics / regulatory compliance / making sandwiches.” And the VC’s are going to look at each other and confer - “wait, can AI make sandwiches now?” whispers one. “Yeah, I just got a sandwich the other day, and the label said it was made by AI. Also, sand.wich just got bought by Google for $100M and it’s just two guys, they can’t have been making that many sandwiches themselves” and then they’ll look back at you and ask “what’s the retention on your sandwiches? What’s your moat?” and then you know you’re fine! (The moat is our proprietary mayo and AI-enabled JIT delivery, of course).

• AI can also help with “discovery” and ideas. As I pointed out in my startup checklist post, the nice thing about people is that they’re truly high dimensional. The set of skills, who you know, the industries or domains you know and care about, is actually high dimensional enough to be unique. Right now most people don’t really think about pain points they could build a business around - but AI can do it with a single prompt! Moreover, when we have the AI assistants, they ought to know you better than your own spouse, more or less, and should be able to think about your unique high dimensionality in useful ways in the more volatile future business environment.

And if you’re worried you don’t have the personality to bullshit people about your mayo moat, you have to consider one more thing.

To what extent can the relevant skills be learned or cultivated?

Most importantly, can they be YOMBIED (yuppie zombied) / whisper-earringed?

Because everyone is going to have a Phd-smart AI personal assistant in their ears pretty soon, and it can talk you through a lot of stuff, and operant-condition you into even more.

I once looked into Big 5 interventions, because I was curious to what extent the traits are immutable vs mutable. Unsurprisingly, most of the studies are p-hacked hot garbage, and posit absolutely ridiculous effect sizes like a cohens d=0.3 - 0.5 on conscientiousness from therapy or a 6-12 week once a week coaching intervention. Lol, as if.

If that were true it would be the biggest thing in human history. Everyone would be doing it. All of schooling, at 8+ hours a day and $16k - $30k a year for 12 years, does literally nothing. Why would we think that a once-a-week coaching or therapy session could move the needle??

If you limit to meta-analyses and panel studies, the biggest effect size (beyond the changes that happen for everyone as people age from teenagerhood to adulthood) is that military service can decrease the secular aging lift in Agreeableness by a third. And that’s it, nothing else can move the needle.

But my basic prior going in was “this is going to be like diet and exercise, which approximately nobody succeed at (80% failure to lose 10% and keep it off for a year, 98% failure for 20% over 5 years). That’s indeed what we see, in the aggregate, in personality trait interventions. Basically nobody changes, tiny effect sizes, just like basically nobody loses weight when they try (before GLP-1’s).

But I think just like weight loss, there probably is some small proportion of responders, based on case studies, and via environmental reasoning. You know the types of cases I’m talking about - people who join the military and turn their lives around, people who have a heart attack and vastly change their lifestyle, people who have a religious experience or get x-pilled, and materially change what and how much they do per day, and so on. I think there are actually heterogenous populations who respond to certain things, change one or more Big 5 traits enough to notice, and keep up the changes, which just like weight loss, probably occurs for ~5-10% of the population trying to change.

To my “environmental reasoning” point, do you know what would actually work for weight loss, besides GLP-1’s? If your AI assistant took over your grocery shopping, meal planning and prep, and made sure that only meals of various macros and calories were served / delivered to you. Combine it with the assistant persuading you to walk after meals, or to take some walking meetings throughout the day, and it would actually work. It would be 100% frictionless, you would eat tasty healthy food, you would move more, and most people could actually lose weight on this regime. Think of actors and actresses with trainers and chefs - it’s easy mode when your environment is tuned for your success.

My point here is, the 5-10% floor is going to get a LOT higher. Probably 80% of overweight people could lose weight with an AI assistant seamlessly and positively shaping their environment and behaviors, and there’s no reason to think it can’t apply to personality traits and things you can get done in the world. Your centaur - your AI + you - is going to be a lot more capable than either one alone.

And those AI assistants are steering you towards stuff that you define! That can be you, if you so choose! Even the formerly immutable Big 5 might quail and shift under a massively optimized environment with real-time tuning.

We’re moving towards a more personally mutable future, and that’s a really big deal.

Sketch of the future landscape

Okay, so I want us to think realistically about what that future will look like. Our economy is going to be doubling, we’re going to be awash with money in the aggregate. People will get UBI. The business landscape is going to be crazy volatile and moving quickly, and so will the VC and funding landscapes, because the already-gigantic pools of capital seeking a return are going to be still-more-gigantic, and nobody is going to know what’s going on or what will win or be successful in the near future.

Let’s seriously think about that future with UBI and growing productivity

• It features large and growing reserves of disposable income for people to spend, both on the UBI and “rich people” ends

• We are famously informed by Robbins and Mankiw and others that wants are infinite

• The digital vs physical divide we talked about earlier is going to continue to eat the world

• Infinite Jests will eat the digital side, so the future is probably on the physical side

• On that physical side, there’s an infinite array of businesses one can build to serve those infinite wants

• On the capital side, there’s ever-larger reserves of capital seeking a return in a volatile environment

It honestly sounds to me like a much richer-than-usual environment for coming up with fun and unusual business ideas and getting them funded. You can persuade a million people to pay you $1 or one person / company to pay you a million dollars, and there are businesses at every point in that spectrum, and as long as you do that anywhere, you’re still doing better than just passively collecting a UBI.

So that’s your mission, boys - go conquer 6M people with a handful of knights, er, I mean, start a business and become one of the 1-2% of people participating in and benefiting from AI economic growth in the near future!

Summa

So wait, did I just write a whole post pointing out that much like alcohol, AI is the cause and solution to all of our problems? That the AI-hating people had better embrace AI or else? That we’re all going to have to get into the uncomfortable space of failing over and over again right at the edge of our capabilities, which is the core of deliberate practice, and that we’re going to have to try harder and do more just to stay in place? Yuuuup.

That’s not what I wanted to hear!

Yeah. Solutions that actually work aren’t often easy or pleasant. Most solutions that work DO require a lot of effort, and a lot of deliberate practice and iteration. I don’t know any way around that.

And in this case, I think that “more AI” actually is the right move. When the future gets harder and more volatile, you need all the help you can get - and hey, what’s so hugely capable it’s been helping all the companies out there grow or execute at much lower cost?

Love the AI. Embrace the AI. I want everyone to think about AI with seriousness and depth. Why are the richest and most successful companies that have ever existed, with the deepest bench of talent in the world, laying off 30k people? How can they do that??

Understanding that this is where the frontier of AI capability currently lies today, and that AI capability is improving daily from here, is the key. Ponder this seriously, deeply, until you don’t just have glimmerings and twinklings of various expectations and hypotheses, but until you deeply understand the unblinking eye of madness.

Because only then, will you begin to grasp faint glimmers of just how much AI is going to rearrange the future, and the stakes that are at play.

And what’s the alternative? How are Luddites doing? Did saboteurs clogging up machines slow the Industrial Revolution? Think we’re going to Pause, with China hot on our heels? I mean we can hope, but it’s certainly not how I would bet.

It might even be worth adopting AI earlier and better than other people, don’t you think?

Broadly, the idea is articulating where you stand in the space of “highlighting the ideas of yours that don’t live in any real advocacy camp,” and / or “what are your most controversial opinions,” which largely amounts to the same thing.

As a side note, “what is your most controversial opinion” is also something the profane Thiel likes to ask, or so his (genuinely excellent) book Zero to One avers.

So here’s some of mine.

Entertainment

• Phones are literal mimetic poison with ten thousand Phd’s on the other side of your screen, hunched over the screen, deploying invisible marrionette strings and Skinner box dynamics to trap you into HOURS-PER-DAY of low or negative value activities. Sure, people are theoretically hating on phones now, Zennials would pay to make everyone delete Twitter and whatever. Nobody ACTS like it, they’re still putting in 4-9 hours a day of phone screentime. Classic addicts bewailing their inability to stop? Not really, I only ever see token resistance or verbal gestures towards it. People who are serious turn off all notifications, use timebox apps, Faraday cages, grayscale apps, and / or just don’t install apps. Less than 5% of people do this, probably <1%.

• TV and movies are not quite there yet, but are getting there, and will be fully there by the time fully AI generated shows are out. And once again, this is HOURS-PER-DAY of low-to-negative value activity.

• If I could gengineer “zero attraction to screen-mediated entertainment” into my kids, that would jump to literally the top of the list, above “sleep less” and “IQ” and “high happiness set point” and “high conscientiousness” and “general health.”

• The conclusion? A purposeful life should be one maxing out primarily physical entertainments and accomplishments. Lifting weights, having sex, cardio, racing cars, rock climbing, dancing, doing physical things. Memetics does matter, work matters, having intellectual conversations and discourse matters, but every incentive gradient is pointed at and deployed against you trying to do those things via screens, and those gradients are getting stronger / smarter literally all the time. By the time my kids are in undergrad, I shudder to think of how sticky and toxic that landscape will be, hence the gengineering priority. Also, even if you max out the physical, it only eats like 2-3 hours per day (and at only 1 hour you’re already 99th+ percentile), leaving you with all the rest of the 16-18 hours you’re awake to think, work, and do other stuff.

Finance

• I’m short urban real estate in non-flagship cities. There’s ~57 metro areas with 1M+ people in the US. But in a post-scarcity society, real estate will be one of the only things with value!! Yup. But many urban areas are already somewhere on the spectrum between “decaying” and “semi-apocalyptic hellscapes,” and it’s only going to get worse. AI is going to hollow out the tax base of the folk who actually pay taxes in these cities (middle and upper middle people with non-physical jobs), and “already struggling” is going to quickly descend into “permanent structural problems that only get worse” pretty quickly, and anyone who can will leave. The flagship cities probably eventually have a future as enclaves for the ultra-rich AI company and robot factory equity holders.

Politics

• People actually suck and democracy is a terrible idea that has direct, built in, and obvious failure modes, many of which we are slamming into right this very moment. The founding fathers agreed, and severely limited suffrage for exactly this reason.

• We should be using our technology to find (or build) Philosopher Kings and having them make our political decisions, like cloning Lee Kuan Yew 200 times to run every country in the world as Dictator for Life, or maybe doing Futarchy, although a benign tyrant has the advantage of being understandable by everybody.

• Severe and widespread gengineering plus rigorous tests for political participation is the only context in which democracy makes sense, and even then it probably underperforms Futarchy or benign tyrants running things, or a hybrid system of AI + humans voting on priorities with AI executing on them, like I’ve proposed in the past.

People / relationships

• People fully generally suck. Basically all of them. They only get worse over time, in a number of ways, and will never improve in a positive way. Literally the only person in the entire world that can be relied on to go counter-trend to this and improve in any domain whatsoever is yourself. This has a couple of consequences:

• All progress is driven by <10% people, and at least 80% by <5% people. The things that lift quality of life up for everyone is technology, innovation, and economic growth, and all those things are driven by tiny slices of people at the tippy top.

• 80% of people are fat. 70% don’t have bachelor’s degrees. Only 9% of people have any STEM degree. Only 4% of people have a STEM grad degree. The vast majority of people seemingly exist to be farmed for revenue by giant companies with fleets of Phd’s creating ever-more-addictive junk food and apps.

• The median man genuinely sucks, he’s a bottom tier pyramid of short, fat, making no money, dumb, and capable of only 9 minutes of bad sex at a time, and women are 100% smart and doing the right thing to opt out of marriage ever-more with each passing generation, opting out today at roughly 2/3 rates at the median and below of male SES today, and we should pray this opt-out number gets even bigger societally.

• Similarly, women, even hot and smart women, genuinely have a tough row to hoe, and this is just hugely divisive among the usually open to contrarian positions men I know and interact with, which I find hilarious.

• You have a couple weeks to establish an interpersonal relationship dynamic and set of mutual habits or behaviors with any new person, and after that everything is set in stone, and will generally degrade as people get complacent, lazy, etc.

• Even the greatest person on every front can only truly optimize 2, maybe 3 things in a mate during mate search. The default outcome is “Men truly out in the tails extraordinary on 3-5+ metrics will end up with mostly average, kinda hot, kinda smart women.” And this is true up to the tippy top! Elon ends up with musicians and executives, Bezos ended up with a low level media personality, Zuck married his college sweetheart, a pediatrician. Brin is dating a “holistic health coach.” That’s just the way the world works.

• Humans are basically mentally optimized to be serial monogamists - we’re neither fully monogamous nor fully poly. Unfortunately, this means most people get unhappy in most relationships. Around a third of men cheat, and the dominant outcome is that they nuke their marriage over a single body added to their count via cheating. The fact that the median man’s libido is at the ~75th percentile of women, and this means only 1-in-4 women will match-or-better the average man (and only 1-in-100 for a man at the 95th percentile), is just icing on the cake.

• I think the median relationship is probably unhappy, and at least 1/3, more like 50%+, of any given existing relationship are net negative to one or both parties. The ~42% vintage divorce rate, and the rate of unhappy, net-negative marriages in other people’s lives you can see with simple observation, supports this. I actually showed that only ~18% of marriages are still non-divorced, happy, and non-dead-bedroom at 20 years using GSS data in a post I did titled Against more marriage as a solution to the fertility crisis.

• This all sounds pretty dark and pessimistic I know; unfortunately it’s empirically based on massive sample sizes and oceans of data.

• At the same time, and contrary to lots of people that agree with me on all the prior stuff, this isn’t an excuse to look down on people, to give up on them and become a misanthrope, or anything like that. The overwhelming majority of people you’ve ever interacted with are in that 80-95%. Nearly every person who’s positively impacted your life on a personal level is in that 95%, society exists and works at all because of that 95%. We should be doing whatever we can to enable and amplify everyone, the entire human race, and to help them enable the amplification they want for their kids, and so on. We’re all in this together, and it’s just another of god’s cruel jokes that any of us are where we are, just like the fact that we’re made of meat.

Education

• Mass education with other kids (private or public) is incontrovertibly harmful to actually smart kids - it doesn’t teach anything, doesn’t pace appropriately, and gives access to bad peers, which are basically all that matters in terms of shaping big chunks of their personality and life outcomes once you’ve contributed your mutual genes.

• I personally plan to homeschool + 1-on-1 grad student tutors for areas they’re interested enough to go deep on, and aim for undergrad by 14-15 or so. Earlier is fine too if they want it. This is explicitly inspired by Hoel’s great Aristocratic Tutoring three part article.

• The real problem with education in the USA is that tracking is a dirty word / concept and not allowed, and it’s so corrupted everything that public education is now beyond redemption and should be destroyed, because it’s main function now is to severely reduce the potential of the kids who will actually contribute to society and the world, while costing ever-more and delivering ever-worse outcomes. People want it for babysitting? Yes, and that’s 90% of it’s empirical purpose, and we could reconstruct it to be 100x better and cheaper at that while lasting more of the day.

• Most societal-level contribution is driven by outliers anyways, and there should be systems in place to monitor and select them out of the main population for intensive 1-1 education a la Aristocratic tutoring, and it should take up like 20%+ of the education budget for <1% of the kids. This is unironically the right and highest leverage thing to do, because any actually talented kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are in terrible environments and around peers that are really likely to ensure they entirely waste their potential, and the primary purpose of public education should be finding and elevating these kids in a truly meritocratic fashion. We literally do the opposite of that today.

Children

• Kids need a parent who makes rules and stands firm and guides and pushes them beyond what they “naturally” want to do (ie suck, do nothing, play video games). not a “friend.”

• This is a job 98% of parents in the US fail badly at. Happily since 95% of people suck, it only matters for the ~5% or so that could have been 10-800% better with better parenting (wide error bars, and the big effect sizes mostly driven by parents choosing not to do what they can to select the best peers), but we’ve lost out on a lot of technological progress and economic growth from the many parents of that 5% who sucked and did a bad job.

• AI-enhanced child raising is going to be the next big culture war frontier, bc it has the chance to materially change this dynamic, and a huge mass of people will be opposed to that and want to enforce mediocrity.

• Kids shouldn’t get smartphones til they’re in college, laptops all the way. They can access whatever AI’s and real websites they need just fine there, and can’t access the most pernicious apps. College should be about age 14-15, bc “undergrad” is paced and targeted at a smart 14 year old level.

• People fully generally suck, and this will include your kids, so even if you’re extraordinary, if you want AN extraordinary kid singular, you have to have a bunch of them to play the odds.

Food / exercise

• The great majority of people are poisoning themselves pretty much all the time with awful food. You are what you eat, and most people eat absolute crap.

• The great majority of people are poisoning their bodies, AND their capabilities and zest for life, by not exercising. Between TV and phones, people average like 11+ hours a day of recreational screentime. That’s horrific. Moreover, being fat and sedentary is more than twice as bad as a severe smoking or cocaine addiction, so, lol.

• A well lived life is one where you eat enough good food for your physical goals, one where you use your body every day and genuinely challenge it at least 3x a week. I wrote a post about this - All True Wealth is Biological. And this leaves you in a condition to excel everywhere else in life that matters too (business, dating, intellectual conversation, racing, rock climbing, raising puppies / kids etc), vs being too tired and stressed to do anything interesting. The vast majority of people are manifestly failing at reaching this standard. But if you do it, it will let you lead a life much better lived, and with much more zest and enjoyment in it. And as I pointed out earlier, even if you totally max this out, it takes only like 1-3 hours a day, and leaves you with all the rest of the 16-18 hours a day you’re awake to do other stuff.

• I think “sitting” will be the next “smoking” in terms of implications for QALY’S lost population-wide. I literally have treadmill desks in most places in the world I spend time, and I use those instead of sitting, and I feel 1000% better when I can do this. You can rig one up with a cheap treadmill and some cardboard even, it doesn’t need to be expensive. If you end up doing a lot of meetings but don’t have one, at least do walking (in the halls or outside) meetings.

Communication

• It’s essentially impossible to communicate more than 1 or 2 simple ideas at a time to a new conversational interlocutor, in any medium. And even when you think you’ve communicated those ideas clearly and with fidelity, the odds of having seriously (ie more than 50%) messed up at least one of the ideas in understanding or implications is probably ~80%.

• Words are comically inadequate to high fidelity communication. Butterfly nets trying to capture Leviathans, and present them to other people. I have not been able to communicate probably 99.999% of the interesting ideas I’ve had. I’m not sure what post-humans or AI’s will use, but I would bet on something like executable programs that include a network of citations, simulations, proofs, implications, and for currently unprovable things, lemma sets and simulations with consequences of the different lemmas, or something along those lines. Words have too much inferential distance, and are essentially Wittgensteinian games, it’s amazing that we built Western society using them.

• Fully half of our communication and understanding is physical, subconscious, and wordless. But we want to pretend that words matter, and that we can communicate as well online or via email or whatever. It is a pretense. In person discussion is genuinely higher bandwidth, and genuinely works better, because we’re all tarted-up apes. This is also why video teaching doesn’t work. This has implications in the areas of business, romance, and many others.

AI

• People are really freaking out about UBI, doubting whether it’s possible, worrying that “billionaires” or “tech oligarchs” are going to somehow subvert any possibility of UBI, and more. This is mistaken at several levels. First, really conservative assumptions let us give $40k - $90k UBI’s to everyone, and the picture will probably be notably better than that. Second, on the “they’re going to rug pull all the connected and articulate PMC people losing their jobs,” we’re theoretically a democracy, and when even 10% of people are out of a job, the public discontent and sentiment is going to be really bad. The people who will be losing jobs are the politically connected and chattering classes! Sam Altman is already getting molotov cocktails thrown at his house, and protestors outside his headquarters, and basically nothing has even happened yet. We are an obstreperous and “me oriented” people in America, and I fully expect mass protests and violence if anything of the sort were to happen. I maintain we’ll have a UBI at least for replaced workers at less than 10% of jobs counterfeited. And just as obviously, when the political will is there, so too do tax loopholes and Dutch-Irish-sandwich adjacent things close, because it’s being graded on results and communicated by mass protests and violence, and politicians will have to move enough around to actually impact the problem.

• All this is true for the US (and probably China), but all the rest of the world? SO boned. They’re going to be milked into oblivion by the US and Chinese AI and robotics companies actually driving 90%+ of the future economy, and given how bad most political institutions and economics are in most of the world, I genuinely don’t see how giant chunks of the world are going to get UBI’s. I assume they’ll be kept alive by some combination of yottillionaire philanthropy and sex work and / or acting as surrogates and nannies to people in countries with UBI. Yglesias goes over the pretty obvious reasons here.

• So I’ve posited this environment where ten thousand Phd’s with a lot of compute are throwing that level of optimization power against average people, and that’s why everyone is fat and staring at screens 11 hours a day and gambling themselves into bankruptcy and whatever. That optimization power is going to vastly increase when you can get ten thousand Von Neumann’s in a data center, and average people will still be average people. What’s the solution today? Something like top decile conscientiousness, willpower, and agency? It already doesn’t scale, and will obviously be much worse in that future! Literally the only solution that can work at scale here is aligned AI assistants, as in paid AI assistants that live in people’s ears 24/7 and help them level up in career, fitness, social life, and more. That’s right, I’m talking about whisper earrings, per Scott Alexander’s old short story. And, unironically, this is the best hope for may people’s future, as I write about here in The Spastic Yuppie Zombiehoods in our near future.

Incidentally, as one final note, John Brockman has a book of this title, What We Believe But Cannot Prove, that has a bunch of takes on the titular conceit by a bunch of notable thinkers, including Sean Carrol, Dan Dennet, Robert Sapolsky, Judith Rich Harris, Steven Pinker and Ray Kurzweil. Well worth the read if you’re into that kind of thing!

You know how every Westerner who goes to Tokyo comes back raving? “Everything is so clean and well ordered! Everyone is skinny and hot and dresses really fashionably! There’s no homeless people! You can buy actually high quality stuff, it’s not all cheap chinesium! Every restaurant and business is run to a super high standard! All the buildings and houses are beautiful AND they were all built in the last ~40 years! They don’t just have good public transport that goes everywhere, the Shinkansen runs to a 60s tolerance over an entire year! Also, they have themed sex hotels everywhere!!”

Like obviously, they’ve attained and operate at a level of “civilization” that we Americans can only dream of, peering over with our grubby hands, giant hamburgers and soft drinks, and homeless fentanyl zombies everywhere.

We look at them with their spotless metros and cities twice as big as the entire NYC / NJ metro area, but where everything actually works and real estate is still affordable, and then we look back at the US, and our entirely ineffective state capacity, overpriced housing, complete lack of sex hotels, bad and 2x overpriced medical care, and government capable of nothing but random flailing and being the butt of every joke, and you just have this moment of “wait, but I thought America was great? Aren’t we the richest country by far? Why can’t we build anything? Why are all new buildings and houses that do get built ugly? Doesn’t basically all innovation come from us? Why is all the stuff we can buy ever-cheaper chinesium and fakes, from Amazon itself? Why are we living like a bunch of backwoods savages grubbing out a living in the ruins of Rome, when it’s possible to live like the Japanese?”

Lima is basically Tokyo, but for the Americas. It’s not quite that same package of stuff, but the same “magical wonderland” effect comes through, for various reasons.

Lima is exceptionally clean and well ordered, it’s a Mediterranean climate like California, it’s on the ocean and has amazing views, there’s flowers blooming literally everywhere you look (the public landscaping is just exquisite), it has an absolutely fantastic restaurant scene including Maido, rated best restaurant in the world in 2025, but also a huge array of other excellent restaurants at every price point, the seafood is incredible, and much more. If you want “real” stuff, you can buy alpaca and vicuna hats and coats and clothes. Oh yeah, and it’s the birthplace of chocolate, and the local chocolate and coffee is 10/10, especially in Barranco, with lots of specialty roasters and chocolatiers.

And that’s just Lima! The rest of Peru is great, too! Amazingly scenic and picturesque, clean air, breathtaking views, amazing hikes, all the ayahuasca you can keep down, and more.

If I really like a place, I tend to get interested in the history, and like every country in South or Central America, Peruvian history all comes back to the Spanish, and specifically, it comes back to the Pizarros.

Let me set the scene

It’s 1520. The Americas have been discovered by Columbus, and in 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas had divided the entire non-European world between Portugal and Spain. There are Spanish colonies in Haiti, Panama, and Cuba, and at this very moment, Cortez is roflstomping the Aztecs and adding Mexico to the glorious Spanish Empire.

We should probably touch briefly on Cortez, because he becomes the role model for approximately every Spanish boy dreaming of glory for the next few generations, which will include all the Pizarros.

Cortez

Hernando Cortez was a minor noble in Spain who decided to go adventuring in the new world. He becomes one of the most famous conquistadors who ever lived, and justifiably so - and a large part of that fame is because he personally wrote about his conquest. He is a literate conqueror, and the writer of his own press releases, which always helps.

So he goes to Cuba and becomes a relatively rich and high status secretary to the governor, but as you might expect of somebody later famed for conquering entire empires singlehandedly, he’s kind of a dick, and relations become strained. This was probably not improved by the fact he was banging the governor’s sister in law with no intention of marrying her. Long story short, things get kind of heated, and he goes off to explore and conquer.

Did Cortez really burn his ships after landing in Mexico? Pretty close! He scuttled them, deliberately - less as a “we have no choice brothers, but to totally pwn this unknown land and all empires contained therein, for the glory of Christ” measure, and more as a “technically this whole expedition is illegal because the governor was so pissed at me he rescinded legal authorization, and I need to prevent people from bailing and going back there, because I’ll probably end up in prison if that happens.”

So he’s got ~13 mounted and armored knights, and a couple hundred infantry (many of them slaves) with swords and crossbows, and no ships or way to retreat. The Aztec empire at this time has ~6M people and is 85k square miles big, basically as big as Austria. So, that’s your mission, boys. You get a double handful of knights and a few slaves with swords and crossbows, now go conquer Austria!

Oh, also the ~6M Aztecs are infamously bloodthirsty, revel in human sacrifice, and their entire culture is built around warmaking. Good luck!

And that’s pretty much THE reason Cortez is famous and inspired several generations of Spaniards. He came in totally blind, with those odds, and won.

How he does it I’m going to mostly skip over here, because we’re really here to talk about Peru, and the OTHER Cortez-scale conqueror, Francisco Pizarro, but rest assured the Cortez story is every bit as amazing and unbelievable as you’d think.

Literal knights errant

Now you have to realize, this is the mid 1500’s. Yes, they have caravels, and cannons, and muskets (arquebuses), and they are literate. But culture doesn’t change on a dime, and they’ve just come from literal Medieval times.

One of the biggest “wow” moments from me when I started reading contemporary accounts from this time was how they unironically and unambiguously conceive of themselves as literal knights errant. As in knight knights, with swords, and lances, on horseback, doing knight stuff.

Incredibly, a good chunk of the military engagements and sorties were literally decided by noble cavalry jousting and shattering lances against each other! Pizarro personally shatters many a lance while securing his viceroyalty over Peru.

They also very much allude to and many of them try to live up to knightly virtues like chivalry, bravery, and just generally being a bro all around (at which Lancelot famously failed).

But all that is in the future - right now, it’s the late 1400’s, and Francisco Pizarro is an illiterate and illegitimate street urchin, begging for scraps.

Pizarro’s origins are so lowly we actually don’t even know what year he was born! The illegitimate son of an infantry colonel and a poor woman, he grows up with a very rough childhood. This same infantry colonel was nothing if not consistent, and fathers 4 different Pizarro boys on 4 different women. They are all half brothers of each other, and all 4 of them eventually go onto conquistador glory in Peru together; Francisco, our titular conqueror and the eldest, his more courtly and mannered ~20 years younger brother Hernando, ~25 years younger Gonzalo Pizarro,1 who briefly becomes viceroy of Peru after Francisco’s death, and youngest Juan Pizarro, who dies during the conquest.

When eldest Francisco reaches his twenties, he signs up for whatever military or exploratory adventures he can, and ends up part of expeditions exploring Colombia and Panama in the new world through his thirties. He acquits himself well, becomes personal friends with the governor, and eventually works his way up to Mayor of Panama City. Now in his forties, our boy has done well!

Now he’s going to take a bold leap, and first end up 80% dead and regretting everything, and shortly after, will become one of the most outsized success stories the world has ever seen.

Pizzaro’s no good very bad time

So as of now, 1520 or so, Spain has only ever seen and conquered places in the middle of the Americas, geographically. Haiti, Cuba, Mexico thanks to Cortez, Panama, and now parts of Colombia. There’s an entire continent in South America that is terra incognita and more or less open for claiming (minus Brazil, which belongs to the Portuguese).

Pizarro rounds up business partners and an expedition (80 men and 4 horses, with ships and provisions), and in 1524 heads down the Western coast of South America to see what he can see, and conquer whatever that might be. They don’t even get past Colombia, and quickly succumb to bad weather, fractious natives, and general ill fortune, and low on provisions, head back to Panama.

He spends the next 2 years rounding up funding and getting supplies for another expedition - but this hardly goes better than the first! They get hung up exploring the swampy coastlands of Colombia again, but this time, they capture a native balsa, which has cotton textiles and some gold items, and natives who speak of a large and rich empire further south. They come “in sight of Point Pasado, the limit of the pilot’s former navigation; and, crossing the line, the little bark entered upon those unknown seas which had never been ploughed by European keel before,” and briefly land in what is Ecuador today, which had been freshly conquered by the Incan empire. However, the people seemed so numerous and well organized, and the Spaniards so few and poorly provisioned, they decide to retreat and have a good chunk of them hang out on a nearby island while Almagro (Pizarro’s business partner and co-leader) goes back to Panama to get reinforcements and more supplies.

This goes very badly. The island (Isla de Gallo) wasn’t anywhere near big enough or lush enough to support a bunch of Spaniards hunter gathering, and pretty quickly, everyone is literally starving.

But first, a digression - back to the numerous and well organized society point, Peru has apparently always been a magical wonderland.

Peru was a magical wonderland back then too

Part of the fun of reading really old source material is the language and phrasings are so evocative of the mindsets and different ways of perceiving and noticing the world. My primary source for most of this is William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, where he goes over the closest-to-the-source letters and books from that era to tell the story, complete with comparative analysis, and including the literal Spanish phrasing much of the time. It’s an amazing book that I heartily recommend if you’re into that kind of thing, and to give you a taste, I’m going to put some excerpts here. On Peru and the Incan empire in it’s pre-conquered state:

“The face of the country was shagged over with forests of gigantic growth, and occasionally traversed by ridges of barren land, that seemed like shoots of the adjacent Andes, breaking up the surface of the region into little sequestered valleys of singular loveliness. The soil, though rarely watered by the rains of heaven, was naturally rich, and wherever it was refreshed with moisture, as on the margins of the streams, it was enamelled with the brightest verdure. The industry of the inhabitants, moreover, had turned these streams to the best account, and canals and aqueducts were seen crossing the low lands in all directions, and spreading over the country, like a vast network, diffusing fertility and beauty around them. The air was scented with the sweet odors of flowers, and everywhere the eye was refreshed by the sight of orchards laden with unknown fruits, and of fields waving with yellow grain and rich in luscious vegetables of every description that teem in the sunny clime of the equator. The Spaniards were among a people who had carried the refinements of husbandry to a greater extent than any yet found on the American continent; and, as they journeyed through this paradise of plenty, their condition formed a pleasing contrast to what they had before endured in the dreary wilderness of the mangroves.”

And obviously it goes beyond a beautiful and well-ordered society to include what the Spaniards really cared about - gold, and lots of it!

Peru really was, at last, the place containing the fabled cities of gold, long sought by Spanish explorers and conquerors everywhere. As an aside, the fact that the Spanish set off into the New World with this completely made up idea of a Cibola or El Dorado, a city of gold, and within roughly 30 years of exploring the unknown actually found one, is still mind blowing to me.

So back to our place: 160 largely illiterate Spanish savages / soldiers of fortune have alit in this well-cultivated Peruvian garden of milk, gold, and honey - briefly - and then a chunk of them have retreated to starve on an island while waiting for reinforcements that the others went off to Panama to raise.

It rained almost constantly. The only food they could find were small shellfish and snakes. Their cloths were moldy rags, decaying in the constant rain. They lived like this for months, waiting for Almagro to come back with a ship and provisions and reinforcements. They all thought they were going to die, and resolved themselves to dying by starvation, soaking wet, miserable, and far from home. At a time towards the end, when 2 of them were dying every week, they finally saw a ship on the horizon. Salvation! But it wasn’t Almagro, it was a rescue ship from Panama sent to admonish them and bring them back, not a ship bringing them reinforcements to conquer Peru.

At this time, Francisco Pizarro, little more than skin and bones himself, famously drew a literal line in the sand with his sword, and made the remaining Spaniards choose between going back home to safety and food, or staying and conquering a new world. Pizarro:

"Friends and comrades! On that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south."

Thirteen men chose to stay with Pizarro on that starving, rainswept island. All the rest gave up and went back to Panama. The 13 starvelings would end up fashioning a crude boat and sailing to a larger island with more small animals to hunt, then waiting seven more months for Almagro to arrive with reinforcements.

As Prescott notes:

“There is something striking to the imagination in the spectacle of these few brave spirits, thus consecrating themselves to a daring enterprise, which seemed as far above their strength as any recorded in the fabulous annals of knight-errantry. A handful of men, without food, without clothing, almost without arms, without knowledge of the land to which they were bound, without vessel to transport them, were here left on a lonely rock in the ocean with the avowed purpose of carrying on a crusade against a powerful empire, staking their lives on its success. What is there in the legends of chivalry that surpasses it? This was the crisis of Pizarro’s fate. There are moments in the lives of men, which, as they are seized or neglected, decide their future destiny.”

Atahualpa and economics

In 1528, 4 years after his first unsuccessful expedition, and having literally starved for most of the last year or two, Pizarro, Almagro, the scant reinforcements, and the 13 landed in Tumbes, Peru, and saw llamas and a wealthy and a well-ordered society with abundant gold artifacts. They were feted and feasted with great hospitality, so naturally, they decided they had to go back to round up more reinforcements and do a third expedition to conquer these hapless and friendly natives. On the way out, they (consensually, it is said) grab a few native boys to come learn the Spanish language and ways and see the Spanish cities, so they’ll have interpreters when they come back.

The governor of Panama and Pizarro’s financial sponsors were having none of it when he pitched a third expedition - Pizarro had already spent 4 years and a lot of money across 2 expeditions, and gotten nothing but a bunch of dead Spaniards out of it. So he goes clear back to Spain(!) and asks the king directly, bringing llamas, gold, cotton, and some Peruvian natives to tease what’s possible.

The king says, “lol, porque no?” and Pizarro and Almagro are off to the races for a third time! It’s at this time that Francisco rounds up the other 3 Pizarro boys, and the rest of the reinforcements, and the ships and provisions he’ll enter Peru with, after sailing clear across the world for the third time.

With 67 armored cavalry and basically 100 infantry, Pizarro enters Peru, and they make their way towards the Incan capital. While doing so, they stumble across Atahualpa, the Incan emperor, who’s been recuperating after winning a civil war against his brother. He’s hanging out in a hot spring resort town surrounded by his wives and concubines and nobles and victorious army. Such is the esteem and reverence he’s held, he’s borne on a solid gold throne held up by the highest nobles in his court, and nobles never approach him directly, but do so crouched over and “with a load on their back” - it’s very Xerxes-in-300 vibes.

So on the one hand we have 3 bedraggled Spanish conquistadors (a lead / scouting party featuring half brother, Hernando, and two other Spaniards, with the rest further behind), meeting the Incan emperor in the heart of his incredibly wealthy and well-ordered empire, surrounded by tens of thousands of victorious soldiers, being literally carried around on a giant throne of solid gold.

Hernando conveys through the aid of their translator that he represents some entirely new big bad (his older brother Francisco), who in turn represents an even bigger bad (King Charles V of Spain), whose puissance and fame have led to the current situation, where people from the other side of the world are standing in front of Atahualpa, on (unknown in the Americas) horses and with unknown technology (in steel armor, with steel swords) and such.

Atahualpa ponders this, and decides that he’s probably pretty safe, given he’s surrounded by tens of thousands of his own soldiers and the cream of the Incan nobility, and says he’s like to meet Hernando’s brother and hear more about all of this, and so they schedule the fateful rendezvous to happen within a particular plaza in the hot spring city.

Although not literate, every Spaniard on earth, including Francisco Pizarro, knows how Cortez captured the Aztec empire (ie by seizing the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma II). Further back, he might have heard how Alexander the Great played “kill the king” against Darius, conquering the much larger Persian empire’s much larger armies. Seems worth a shot, at least?

To be clear, this plan was neither easy nor straightforward - he had to do a lot of persuading and rousing speeches to get his people aligned with it. The three conquistadors who had seen Atahualpa had talked about the encounter, and as they’d passed through Peru towards the place of meeting, it had raised:

speculations on what they had seen; on the state and opulence of the Indian monarch; on the strength of his military array, their excellent appointments, and the apparent discipline in their ranks, - all arguing a much higher degree of civilization, and consequently of power, than any thing they had witnessed in the lower regions of the country. As they contrasted all this with their own diminutive force, too far advanced, as they now were, for succour to reach them, they felt they had done rashly in throwing themselves into the midst of so formidable an empire, and were filled with gloomy forebodings of the result. Their comrades in the camp soon caught the infectious spirit of despondency, which was not lessened as night came on, and they beheld the watch-fires of the Peruvians lighting up the sides of the mountains, and glittering in the darkness, “as thick,” says one who saw them, “as the stars of heaven.”

But Pizarro gets everyone onboard and excited, and towards that end, he readies and fortifies their position and stations his 67 knights, 2 cannons, 3 muskets, and ~100 infantry.

There ensues a fairly humorous and suspenseful scene - Atahualpa says he’s coming armed, with his army, which Pizarro can’t really say anything about, then he proceeds slowly and in great state towards the meeting place but decides to bed down and sleep for the night outside the designated area (Pizarro’s men are at a fever pitch, and have been waiting all day in readiness, breaking it with a night’s sleep may well have caused them to lose their nerve), which Pizarro manages to talk him out of via messengers, and finally since he’s not going to sleep out there and there’s some logistics involved any time you’re moving thousands of soldiers and nobles around, Atahualpa decides to just meet with a bare skeleton crew of a thousand of his highest nobles attending him and bearing his giant golden throne.

But Pizarro lived by the motto “you can just do things” well before Silicon Valley even existed, so pretty much as soon as he shows up,2 the Spanish promptly slaughter all the nobles and capture Atahualpa, and they do it without a single Spanish casualty. They have successfully decapitated the mighty Incan Empire.

Aside on the raw physical logistics of this and the mandate of heaven

So you know, back when you first hear about a bare handful of European explorers coming in and roflstomping cities of tens of thousand, or empires of hundreds of thousands or millions, I always wondered about how that actually works, in a “what’s happening on the ground” sense.

Like okay, Cortez rolls up and Amerindians don’t know what horses or steel are, but conquistadors are clearly people, and people have faces you can poke holes in? Most of these places have thousands of warriors with bows and arrows, or at least slings and stones? Just from a sheer “they have ten thousand plus soldiers” point of view, they could literally bury you under their dead and suffocate you? Like how does this even work??

Broadly, and I’m still not fully satisfied with this, but the relevant elements seem to be:

1. Gunpowder, and the loud noises and bright flashes it makes, is a sort of out-of-frame phenomenon that really disorients people who’ve never seen it, in the sense only semi-divine natural spectacles like thunder and lightning have any similarity. And here these crazy foreign mofo’s are basically unleashing that sort of thing at will on you, which indicates they might have the gods on their side.

2. Armor really works, and steel is such a peak technology we still use it for everything today. Like the armor they were wearing and the arms they were bearing had been iteratively honed over 1k+ years of internecine European warfare, so it actually did its job quite well, both on the “protecting” and “killing” fronts.

3. Coordinated armored cavalry really does dominate infantry in an open field, in a “they’re basically untouchable and can slaughter hundreds with impunity” way.

4. The Westerners usually had various psychological advantages, which ranged from generally having been in a lot of similar fights, to perceiving that god was on their side, complete with divine visions (many such throughout Peru’s conquest), to having literacy and a deep body of historical priors that worked in the past to call upon (ie Cortez, Alexander, military tactics and strategy, etc), and in terms of coming in as wild cards with visibly superior technologies (horses, steel, gunpowder), and their general capabilities being largely unknown on top of those visible markers. And they really lean in on these - when the 3 conquistadors first met Atahualpa, for example, the finest horseman of the group did a little riding demonstration of what the horse, a destrier,3 was capable of, which shocked and awed the Incans.

So broadly, they come in with these factors on their side, and then they execute fairly well. Any given sortie is also a battle of wills and psychology - when one side starts breaking or retreating, that’s generally it. The Spanish (and Westerners in general in similar situations) have pretty much all the advantages when it comes to the will and psychology in these two examples. Cortez, of course, also recruited native armies to fight on his side in the tens (or hundreds, if you believe him) of thousands, who had been straining under the yoke of the bloodthirsty Aztecs. But once again, that seems to be informed by the “hey, what worked historically here” model.

Pizarro had no native auxillaries though - it was just him and <200 Spanish guys in the very heart of the Incan empire, surrounded by tens of thousands of Incan soldiers.

The other interesting thing about these decapitation strikes, including Peru and Alexander’s famous one against Persia, is “what if people actually believe and buy into all this god-kinghood stuff?”

Obviously Persia had a similar setup where the leader of an impossibly rich empire is seen as a god and born around on a giant throne of gold, and whose vassals must humbly crawl into his presence and so on.

And Persia too was very vulnerable to decapitation strikes - this points at a general vulnerability. When your people truly believe you to be a god on earth, and that the literal sun requires you to rise and set and so on, they apparently pretty much just halt and catch fire if the leader is ever kidnapped.

So there’s this army of tens of thousands of victorious Incan warriors right there. Why aren’t they doing anything? Surely some bold general or Special Forces team among them should be formulating a plan to break in and free their emperor? Or at least kill a lot of the Spanish, to avenge this dire insult? Nope. All worried about what they should do, and / or the sun not coming up, and / or what the great Inca / emperor himself wants.

And this is pretty clearly the dynamic - later in the story Hernando, Francisco’s half brother, goes to the capital in Cusco and manages to convince the most successful and admired extant Incan general, who has a huge and ready army, that he should come back by himself and come hear what Atahualpa wants him to do. And he does it! He just comes to the Spanish stronghold, leaving his army and giving up the Inca’s best extant leadership (and any optionality in terms of beating the Spanish) behind!

So this points to another humorous failure mode when it comes to monarchs - aside from losing the mandate of heaven, what if you successfully have it, really strongly? You’re boned either way! All monarchs must apparently tread a thin line between being truly loved and revered or truly despised and deposed at all times, lest their entire empires fall to transparent tricks and gimmicks from shiftless outsiders.

He fucking did it

Alright, so Atahualpa is captive to the Spanish. They treat him well - he’s still wearing royal bat skin robes,4 eating off gold plates, attended by his wives and concubines and nobles, and attending to matters of state this whole time.

He’s no dummy - he observes, he interacts with the Spanish daily, they teach him chess, which he plays constantly. He notices the Spanish seem to value gold above all else. He goes to them, and he says “hey, I notice you guys seem to like gold. What if I covered the floor of this large courtyard with gold as my ransom, would you let me go then?” The Spanish, whose ever-present greed has tripped over its own feet and had a sudden cardiac arrest at this being so baldly and openly proposed, and unprompted at that, are so stunned into speechlessness that Atahualpa takes it as a cunning negotiatory ploy.

“Actually, scratch that - I see I didn’t offer an amount concordant with your guys’ eminence. I’ll fill not just the floor of this courtyard with gold for you, but I’ll fill it up to a line as high as I can reach (about 9 feet up) with gold.” (paraphrasing)5

The Spanish by this point have apparently managed to stop stammering and making giant cartoon eyes-with-dollar signs long enough to realize this is more than they ever dreamt or hoped for and it probably won’t get any better than this, so Pizarro quickly and smoothly agrees and writes up a notarized contract on the spot.

It takes months - logistics is hard, word has to be sent out all over the empire, and gold laboriously removed from all the temples and royal palaces and manually portered back via humans (no draft animals in the Americas before the Spanish), but Atahualpa fills that courtyard full of gold, to the extent that Pizarro discharges his debt and considers it fulfilled.

I would like to abruptly pivot now and talk to you briefly about his eminence, Charles V, King of Spain.

This time period was the literal peak of the Spanish Empire. Due largely to position of birth and providence, Charles V oversaw a domain that included Spain, most of Europe, AND a decent chunk of the Americas, because he was the Holy Roman Emperor as well as the Spanish King, as well as the king who happened to be in place as Spain conquered the New World. He has an empire every bit the equal of an Alexander, to be surpassed only by Napoleon at his peak. He is the richest and most powerful monarch there has been in Europe for more than a thousand years.

Atahualpa’s ransom is as much as King Charles V takes in or spends in a given year

This not-even-200 people band of ragtag conquistadors have just made themselves richer than kings or dukes, by lucking into this Atahualpa scenario.

“History affords no parallel of such a booty - and that, too, in the most convertible form, in ready money, as it were - having fallen to the lot of a little band of military adventurers.”

So, that’s just to give you a sense of scale here. Take the largest and most successful empire in Europe over the last thousand years, take its entire revenue for a year, and divide it among 200 guys. That’s how rich everyone is now in Peru, if they can hold onto it.

Oh also, for saying “lol, why not” to Pizarro’s third expedition up above, Charles V has just 1.2x-ed his total annual receipts for the year, because he gets 20% of everything they come up with. Not too shabby for a year’s worth of work!

The gift that keeps on giving

So obviously, they immediately kill Atahualpa as soon as he makes them all richer than kings.

Because they can probably get EVEN more gold, if they do that! I mean, screw a courtyard full of gold, they want an EMPIRE full of gold! As Prescott wryly notes of Atahualpa trying to make the best of a bad situation, “he did not know the character of the Spaniard.”

In the meantime, just as they’re getting their ransom finalized, Almagro (remember him?), Pizarro’s business partner and co-leader shows up again with a couple hundred armed reinforcements. Needless to say, a cohort of soon-impossibly-rich guys and a cohort of poor-but-armed guys who just showed up don’t necessarily see eye to eye on how the treasure gets divided. The parallel with early vs late startup employees just before exit occurs to me. The Spanish are able to paper this over temporarily, but as the overall conquest unfolds from here, the Spanish descend into a brutal array of civil wars over who will lead / milk Peru, largely fueled by additional conquistadors getting wind of the impossible wealth of Peru and showing up with various amounts of soldiers and taking sides. There’s also mass uprisings in the countryside, fights with huge Incan armies, and so on, for years. As it is put in the history, “the cup of his calamities was nearly full.”

Pizarro ultimately wins - largely by taking the field repeatedly and personally jousting and shattering lances against other Spaniards. As an aside, he has an impossibly badass, tough-as-nails general who is leading armies and personally outfighting other Spaniards successfully into his mid eighties(!), Francisco de Carbajal, who honestly sounds like a Cormac McCarthy character, from Blood Meridian specifically.6

After winning and consolidating the gains, Lima, that modern day pearl of unparalleled South American excellence, is founded, by Francisco Pizarro himself. Pizarro was in his forties when he started all this “conquer Peru” nonsense, and lives to his sixties, and spends his remaining years founding and using his personal fortune to found, build, and improve the city of Lima. Other Pizarros, notably Hernando and Gonzalo, go on to do similarly brave and reckless things as elder bro Francisco, in Peru and elsewhere, but that’s outside the bounds of my humble post at this moment.

After Pizarro’s ultimate victory and viceroyalty, the Spanish stumble across another bit of good fortune - the mines in Peru are rich. I mean, not surprisingly right? They finally found the fabled city of gold, El Dorado, more or less, so you’d expect there to be rich mines around to have furnished all that gold. But with Spanish cupidity, more advanced mining techniques, and an endless torrent of native slaves working themselves to death, these mines are really rich. Like, they end up generating an Atahualpa’s ransom-worth per year when they really get going. In other words, they begin generating as much revenue as most of Europe, per year.

This led to a ton of inflation, both in the Americas and in Europe, because “more money” doesn’t mean “more stuff.” My favorite example is that iron horseshoes in Peru become nearly worth their weight in silver(!). The conquistadors actually literally use silver as horseshoes at one point early on in the conquest. Spain essentially spends itself into oblivion, and once the empire is divided among Charles V’s sons upon his death, they more or less lose relevance on the world stage over the next ~150 years, as scientific and industrial revolutions center themselves on England and Holland.

“The great object of the Spanish expeditions in the New World was gold. It is remarkable that their success should have been so complete. Had they taken the track of the English, the French, or the Dutch, on the shores of the northern continent, how different would have been the result! It is equally worthy of remark, that the wealth thus suddenly acquired, by diverting them from the slow but surer and more permanent sources of national prosperity, has in the end glided from their grasp, and left them among the poorest of the nations of Christendom.”

This is actually a great object lesson

Yes, everyone knows you should define a big goal, then shoot for it. If you shoot for the stars, maybe you’ll end up with the moon. And sometimes, you even reach the stars! The Spanish did!

And just as clearly, this availed them not. From the richest and largest empire in a thousand years, then exploring the unknown and winning inconceivable riches on TOP of that, to being essentially irrelevant, all within ~150 years. 100 years takes you to the Treaty of Westphalia, where they’re no longer the dominant power and are shedding countries within their domain, and another 65 years takes you to the Treaty of Utrecht, where Spain is basically being used as a bargaining chip between Britain and France.

This is an object lesson on the importance of setting your audacious goals. Spain did, and won, and how much good did it do them?

Maybe instead of pointing to the back of the bleachers and your implied home run, you should have been pointing to the cute redhead a few rows in, who would have been your best possible wife and soulmate.

Maybe instead of driving hard on your “doordash, but for chimps” startup, you should have been leading a team within an existing company to actually impact the world positively with those years.

Maybe instead of shooting for unparalleled riches in the form of metal taken from other people and the ground, Spain should have been shooting for “human capital development” and poaching a bunch of scientists and artists from other countries with all that money, like Renaissance Florence and Venice did. They were so close! Holland, the epicenter of global trade and the new cultural practices that would make England the next pre-eminent global Empire was a Spanish territory at the time, well on its way to the economic growth that made it a powerhouse. The Spanish took the opposite side! They tried to suppress all those practices, largely because of religious conflict (the Protestant Reformation v old guard Spanish Catholics).

And of course, maybe instead of “beating China,” we should be focused on “ensuring and elevating post-scarcity humanity” as we teach a bunch of sand to think better than us. But you know, tell that to Altman and Lecun and Hassabis, and the other Yolo-ers building our various Machine Gods.

I want to stress - none of these are obvious, at all. They aren’t decisions that you might have naturally considered or weighed as realistic alternatives, if you’d been on the other side. And THAT is the important lesson.

So obviously AI and breaking outside of a defect / defect game theory quadrant and solving difficult coordination problems are a different order of problem, but we can sure do things on the personal level!

This brings us back to two bits of personal praxis I’d recommend on this front.

Most of the people reading this are probably pretty powerful optimizers, given selection effects and memespheres being what they are.

First, evaluate whether your biggest goals are actually the right ones:

1. Make sure they’re not generic things like “get richer” or “get higher status,” or “get better at marshalling teams towards complex goals,” because those are means, not ends. Assume you’d reached that level, whatever it is for you - how will it change your life? What will you work on then? What are you going to DO with the money and / or status and / or increased optimization power? Whatever you would DO once there, that’s your actual goal, and it’s important to realize that and place it at the highest point, because opportunities may (and probably will) arise to get there more directly, outside of your “more x” subplans.

2. Ensure you have some corrective mechanisms built in. I’m sure if you’d asked Charles V, he would have said he wanted to increase the glory of Spain and ensure the pre-eminence of Spain forever, and things like that. He was already on top, and got way richer - did it help? Not a bit, it actually led to Spain’s downfall. Easy money with no underlying productivity gain is like empty calories - it just makes you fat and lazy. Instead he got sucked into a bunch of expensive and largely pointless wars and frittered away his bounty. This was because he didn’t have a feedback loop, he didn’t have outside minds or mechanisms that he trusted challenging his directions and decisions. Everyone needs that - you need it, I need it, lord knows Musk and Altman and various politicians need it, and a lot of the problem is that they’re not getting it. If you’re surrounded by yes men, or if your filter bubble is so tight you never get exposed to well wrought arguments outside of your personal memesphere and beliefs, there’s no chance for you getting corrected along the way as you inevitably stray and detour from better ends. What can you do here? You need people you genuinely trust and respect, with genuinely different enough views, that aren’t afraid to debate you, call you out, or expose when you’re bullshitting or not really doing the thing you’re saying you’re doing. You need people holding you accountable. This is genuinely hard - it goes against pretty much every bit of social and evolutionary group coordination programming we come with, so it’s something you have to actively seek out and cultivate. Empirically, the best source are your spouses / SO’s, close friends, priests, and sometimes parents.

Second, make sure you’re actually allocating your time correctly

1. A lot of times when you have a high level goal, particularly if it’s big or abstract, you end up with your time getting entirely eaten up by smaller, basically irrelevant stuff. You need to audit where your time is going in week-sized chunks. I try to do this once every few months, it’s like a quarterly report for yourself. You need to look at your total hours per week, and figure out where they’re allocated. How are you actually spending your weekly time, in broad chunks, at the hourly level? And you’ll genuinely be surprised! You may have a goal that you’d swear up and down is the most important thing, but if it routinely ends up with 0 hours a week? Not really a goal, that’s an aspiration, something you want to identify with but not actually put any work towards. This helps surface what you are demonstrating you care about, and if it’s not aligned with you actually care about, you need to fix that.

2. On this, yeah, everyone wastes umpteen zillion hours sleeping (damn you, Morpheus!), and a gigantic chunk bathing and cleaning and commuting and whatever. But the nice thing about this framework is it very clearly shows you what you actually care about enough to put time into, and where your leverage is. Is your day job not really that aligned with your biggest goals? That’s your biggest point of leverage right there, full stop. 8 hours a day, even if only 10% more aligned, is a HUGE deal, and your top priority should be getting more alignment there. Having trouble finding time after work and commuting to put time in on what’s actually important? Well, your two big levers are going to be reducing your commute (by moving, WFH more, changing jobs, whatever), or getting buy-in from family and literally time blocking on your calendar once a week or something to create that time. You get the idea.

Alright, that’s probably enough narrative whiplash. From Peruvian conquest to the creeping irrelevance of Spain to productivity tips - sometimes the Muse takes you on a more diverting journey than you initially planned, in posts as in life.

This was all parallel reading with Nick Lane’s Oxygen, a 2011 book tracing the state of knowledge at that time of LUCA, the last common ancestor, and oxygen metabolism, with fun speculative forays into what causes aging, why antioxidant supplementation isn’t good for you, and more. For actual info on LUCA, you should read Nick Lane’s more recent book The Vital Question, or my review on same where I use the book as a springboard to speculate about the Fermi paradox, here.

I was around 80% through that when all the oxygen-based aging model speculation led to me hopping over to reread Outlive, which is 11 years advanced on Oxygen. And then THAT led to researching what’s new in the field of longevity research and practice.

What are the best high points of Oxygen?

• It shows you some of the amazing things we can deduce about conditions on earth billions of years ago from tiny things like isotope ratios in geological formulations, Cambrian fossils, the energy orders of magnitude required for “carnivory” to even exist as a viable strategy, and much more.

• It points out that our entire industrial civilization and society is completely founded upon a 0.01% gap between “oxygen produced by photosynthesis” and “oxygen used by life,” the cumulative disparity of which led to all fossil fuels as we know it, and written over 3B years has led to a jaw dropping mismatch: “The vast amount of dead organic matter buried in the rocks dwarfs the total carbon content of the living world. The Yale University geochemist Robert Berner estimates that there is 26 000 times more carbon buried in the crust than is present in the entire living biosphere. Put another way, this means that the entire living world accounts for just 0.004 per cent of the organic carbon currently present on or in the Earth.”

• This line alone justifies reading the book! “The philosopher Nietzsche once remarked that mankind will never mistake himself for a god so long as he retains an alimentary tract; the need to defecate is our most unflattering quality. In a clever paper published in Nature in 1995, Graham Logan and his colleagues, then at Indiana University, contradicted Nietzsche, arguing, in effect, that we owe our most god-like qualities, indeed our very existence, to the primal need for defecation. Faecal pellets from the first large animals, they say, cleansed the oceans, paving the way for the Cambrian explosion. Few theories of environmental change in the terminal Precambrian are quite so down to earth (or at least, seafloor).”

• In general, I really enjoy reading a book that takes you up to the current threshold of knowledge at time Y, and then you see the fun areas they’re speculating on. As just one example, at the time in 2011, it was unclear if male mitochondria are absorbed in the embryo, and could still exist but below detection thresholds, or if they were hunted down and destroyed. We now know they’re destroyed. Also, it was unknown if the mitochondia in follicular eggs are active, or whether they’re passed ATP by the follicles, allowing them not to age in situ. And they’re actually in a kind of standby state, running occasionally at low power as the follicles do glycolysis and hand off pyruvates to the egg mitochondria, taking most of the metabolic “heat” of respiration and aging so that the eggs don’t have to. Super interesting!

But anyways, the reason oxygen matters is that respiration is 40x more efficient than chemosynthesis, and we couldn’t even have eukaryotes, much less more complex life forms like dolphins and dentists, without oxygen and mitochondria.

But the big problem with mitochondria is that they are leaky, they are not 100% efficient in their transmission and use of energy and metabolic byproducts. And those leftovers? Oxidative! Inflammatory!

Oxidation is good in the sense that it is hugely energetic and lets us roll around with big brains and lots of specialized different cells, but it is bad in the sense that it’s literally like a fire, and when fire escapes from it’s designated areas, this is widely considered a bad idea that usually leads to a lot of death and destruction.

That death and destruction writ large over billions of cells leads to aging.

What is the general model of aging?

In Oxygen, Lane posits three different speculative aging models, which I’m not going to bother you with, because they’re 15 years out of date.

Broadly, we age because:

1. We made a devil’s bargain back at the time of eukaryotes and went for “disposable soma, immortal gene lines,” wherein our bodies are guaranteed to decay, but we have a mechanism for genetic immortality-with-variation (sex), which was a really clever solution to a really vicious constrained optimization problem.

2. Aging is driven by a combination of hardware failures (mtdna and other cellular mutations), software failures (epigenetics), and inflammation (leaky fires).

Broadly, your mitochondria leak free radicals (it’s actually worse, they leak things that can lead to long chains of free radicals creating more free radicals), and this causes havoc within the cells, and they leak more as they age, and your ability to clean up the havoc also gets worse with age, and that eventually takes you out. This is abstracting away a lot of homeostatic regulatory systems and details, but it’s a good enough high level picture over the 7-9 decades most people are alive.

But just as an aside here - did you know bird and bat mitochondria are literally TEN TIMES less leaky? And does that translate directly to living longer? Very much!

Birds and bats are the real Nietzschian Ubermenchen

Okay, so this makes sense if you think about it. A pigeon is basically a flying rat, spiritually and metaphorically. A bat is basically a flying mouse, nearly literally.

Mice and rats live 1-3 years. Pigeons live 10-15 years in captivity. Some birds, albatrosses and African Greys among them, live 70-90 years. Bats live 20-40 years.

The flying versions of <thing> lives more than ten times longer!

Now just translate that to the human domain and all those biblical figures living into their 900’s were obviously the half-angels resulting from angels laying with humans, with attendant crazy superpowered flying creature mitochondria!

So you heard it here first, everyone - if you want your kids to live to a thousand, the bible recommends banging angels. I mean, in terms of biblical exegesis, that one’s crystal clear AND the science backs it up!

Okay, but when I first found this out about bird and bat mitochondria, I was really excited! How hard can it be, I thought (and I should really know better because I did microbiology research for several years), to take some bat mitochondria and cram them into some mice embryos?? And surely there’s just a few short steps from there until we all have “manbat” mitochondria and can all go around fighting crime on New York City rooftops well into our third centuries, right??

Super duper, impossibly hard it turns out. They use entirely different amino acids and proteins, entirely different signaling and tagging mechanisms, and so on.

Like all biology problems, when you open the hood it becomes this infernal rats nest of specialization and signaling cascades, and it’s all doing the equivalent of the “evolved antenna” trick where there’s mysterious dead end junctions that look like they do nothing, but if you mess with them, the whole thing stops working, because evolution optimizes across EVERY dimension simultaneously, and if it comes up with some spooky action-at-a-distance thing that has occult third order effects when the moon is in Saggitarius that leads to more offspring, it takes the shot and makes it. We see this type of thing all the time in biology. Think of cordyceps ants, where a fungus takes over an ant and makes it climb onto a big leaf and die there to continue the fungal life cycle, or toxoplasmosis, which makes mice attracted to cat urine and cats, so they get eaten and continue that life cycle. There’s a whole page of these on wikipedia.

But back to the infernal rats nests, we run into that all the time, too. Remember “junk dna?” Introns? If you’re old enough, you probably heard about this in school. We looked into the human genome, and found that lo, 90% of the genome is junk! It’s not under selection, it doesn’t code for anything, and we frankly don’t know what it’s even doing in there.

But you know, this isn’t true. A good chunk of “junk dna” controls when, where, and how much various genes are expressed, ENCODE finds biochemical activity across 80% of the genome. It took ~20 years to figure this out!

Or what about “punctuated equilibrium,” anyone remember that one? Stephen Jay Gould’s idea that things can be trucking along with minimal variation, but then under an extraordinary environmental change, suddenly a lot of evolution happens all at once? “Poppycock!” everyone said, “the very mechanism of evolution is slow and gradual, we haven’t seen this happen anywhere in living animals! There’s no mechanism for this to happen!” Dawkins thought it was dumb, and said the fossil evidence was probably driven by in-and-out migration. Even Dan Dennet got in on the action of dunking on Gould.

But did you know we found a mechanism in the late 90’s? Hsp90 is a chaperone protein that keeps proteins folded correctly so that they operate as intended. But there’s something else going on - cryptic mutations in the chaperoned proteins accumulate over time - as long as they’re able to still be folded correctly, they can accumulate differences “underneath,” while still functioning in mainline ways. Hsp90 changes under stress, and when it’s severely stressed, it stops folding proteins in the prescribed way. When it changes, those cryptic mutations can suddenly erupt, leading to a wide degree of morphological variation across multiple cell types. Lindquist and Rutherford famously showed this in fruit flies. A literal “punctuated equilibrium” capacitor, that stores up mutations to be released under stress, when the environment majorly changes! And how long did this one take? ~25 years.

Anyways, all this is to say that biology is complex, and we’re just about at the point we can understand a given single protein and it’s place in the metabolic and signaling chain, but understanding a whole mechanism, or still worse, understanding a whole mini-organism like bird or bat mitochondria well enough to put them in something else and make it all work over decades, still less to make synthetic mitochondria modeled on their (much better) operation, is as far beyond us as putting a satellite into orbit is for a half-angelic Canaanite.

But, in a greatly enhanced AI future where we can outsource the understanding of complex stuff to artificial minds, maybe it has a shot!

That would certainly be the longevity avenue I’d be most interested in pursuing if I had the archetypical “data center full of von Neumanns.”

And we still haven’t even talked about longevity!

Okay, so what about longevity in our current day? AI is pretty exciting, maybe a good chunk of the people alive today have a decent shot at achieving escape velocity, and if that were true, we might want to be thoughtful about the interventions we can do to maximize our chances of reaching something like that.

Also, maximizing a healthier life, with decades more of actually good health, is a fine goal in and of itself, and coincidentally aligns with all the wild-eyed singulatarian escape velocity stuff, so why not?

Okay, so first the one useful bit from Barzilai’s otherwise awful book:

When you look at centenarians, none of the mainline advice seems to matter. They have similar obesity rates to the general population, 60% of the men and 30% of the women were heavy smokers for at least 35 years, many of them drink, and fewer than half of them exercised. They aren’t attaining their old ages by virtuous habits, AND if you look at their genomes,1 they have variations that would typically lead to diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, CVD, and more, including APOe4. They just didn’t get them. They’re flukes - they got there via luck, largely. There are some protective genes that they have, and they’re still being studied, but you shouldn’t look to centenarians as a source of inspiration or advice. They’re largely just regular folk who were lucky enough to be born into longevity (which is heritable at h^2 ~ .2). If you want to be a centenarian this way, your best chance is if your direct lineage has a lot of near centenarians.

And what about for those of us NOT born into centenarian lineages? You’ve got to do it the hard way - via hard work and lifestyle interventions.

Enter Attia

I really like Peter Attia - I don’t have any apps, I’ve never seen any videos of him, I know he’s pretty big on social media. I don’t even know what he looks like as I’m writing this. But in his book, his personality comes through strong and clear. He’s a relentless optimizer, a hard-charger who hates sleep, loves physical and real-world accomplishment, and is willing to push himself as hard as it takes to get to his goals. He even races cars! I’ve got a real soft spot for anyone with a post-baccalaureate history that does that, because we’re really few and far between, every race track I’ve ever been to is completely dominated by blue collar elites (because racing is expensive AF), which is always a fun source of social diversity.

But importantly for us, he’s all these things PLUS he has good epistemics, and is one of those people who once they have a Topic of Interest, keep obsessively digging and sourcing new knowledge as it comes out, and incorporating it into a broader, gears-level understanding of the landscape. He’s exactly who we want to be researching and telling us about longevity interventions, in other words.

Attia’s a concierge longevity doctor (and I assume an influencer too) now, after a brief foray into working for Mckinsey, and it sounds like he’s pretty successful. When he intakes a patient, he sequences their genome, gets DEXA scans for body fat and lean mass, gets hba1c, gets apolipoprotein and Lp(a) labs, and assesses their dietary and exercise habits. He then uses this knowledge to specifically optimize against the endpoints and problems surfaced with the same. This is the same suite of labs you might want to do to understand your own baseline. You can do pretty much all this stuff without doctors.2 If any of those are off or indicate higher risk, you want to optimize against those problem areas first, just like he does.

But beyond targeting specific problem areas, optimal longevity interventions boils down to a pretty simple set of steps.

Assuming no problem areas, I’m about to condense all the longevity advice he has into a couple of bullets.

The broad strategy: make sure you get the basics right, then chase the long tail.

• First, avoid injury and death via the behaviors you can modify

  • This is mostly car accidents (#1 cause of death), because presumably nobody reading about longevity is at risk of OD-ing (briefly overtaking #1 during the recent peak of the fentanyl crisis). Don’t use 2-wheel vehicles on public roads (40x higher fatalities), drive less, wear seatbelts, choose safe cars, and always look left twice when proceeding at a green light to avoid getting t-boned (the most fatal accident pattern).

  • Drowning, fire, falls, and other unintentional accidents round out the list. So respectively, swim safely and with other people around, change your smoke detector batteries, and, if you’re older, Attia specifically recommends strength training to increase resilience re falls.

  • On exercise, don’t overtrain, as this can lead to injury - Attia is prone to overtraining himself, because he pushes too hard. I have a post that includes some overtraining signs to look for here.

• Exercise, sleep, and diet are the tripod underlying good health - this is true for athletes, and it’s true for regular people

  • For exercise, you want to do both cardio and strength training, and the more you do of both, the better. I have a post on why both here, including recommendations. There are also massive 2-5x all cause mortality effect sizes for being in the top quartile or 2% vs the bottom quartile on strength, muscle mass, or VO2max.

  • For sleep, you want 6-9 hours a night of high quality sleep, achieved via good sleep hygeine.

  • For diet, you want to minimize extra sugar, include olive oil and fish, and eat mostly whole, “real,” foods rather than processed / fast / junk foods.

• Past that, what’s the tricky stuff he recommends? Surprisingly little! These are in order of effect size, certainty of result, and effect size.

  • Brush and floss your teeth every day (noticeable CVD impacts)

  • Take 500mg metformin once or twice every day (I don’t agree on this one, more later)

  • Dry sauna 20min 3-5x a week

  • Use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for a month or two to find out what specific foods in your dietary patterns do to your insulin, so you eat better and more thoughtfully, and learn to alter your diet so your peaks are <140mg/dl

  • Take statins (and possibly more3), to get your LDL-C to 20mg/dl as an ideal target (again, I’m a skeptic here, more later)

  • He mentions rapamycin in the book, but doesn’t give a dosage protocol. The typical human anti-aging protocol seems to be something like 6-7mg once a week (or 10-15mg every other week), although this is nowhere near any of the mg/kg dosages founds in the mouse studies. (I’m a skeptic here too, more later)

That’s pretty much it - all else is commentary.

Now I’ll just touch briefly on WHY, for all these things. The evidentiary body and effect sizes are jaw dropping on a lot of the main ones, so I’ll just headline with what I think is the most salient number, but if you dig in, there’s generally even more advantages than the headline numbers suggest.

The basics

Exercise - twice as powerful as “not smoking,” being in the top quartile vs bottom quartile gives you a ~3-4x all cause mortality buff, and in the top 2% vs bottom quartile a 5x+ all cause mortality buff.4 Being in the bottom vs top quartile of grip strength is a 1.72x hazard ratio on dementia, and a 2.5x all cause mortality difference, too.

Diet - A “good” diet featuring whole foods, olive oil, fish, and the like is roughly a 1.2 - 1.5x all cause mortality buff versus the SAD (standard American diet, ie 70%+ fast, junk, or ultra processed foods), and also ties into blood sugar.

Sleep - in terms of “optimal health” I think this is probably above exercise, but in terms of longevity impact, it’s nearly down in the long tail, because people can sleep too little and with low quality for decades. But good sleep can delay the onset of cognitive impairment by at least 11 years.

The long tail

Brush and floss - Bad dental health can give you a 3.3x all cause mortality penalty!

Blood sugar - being in the worst vs best quartile has a 2.67x all cause mortality effect.

Dry sauna - dry sauna positively affects all cause mortality between 1.2 - 1.4x in a direct dose-response way.

Good social life - We’re social apes, and the effect sizes are large - a 1.2 - 1.5x buff on all cause mortality, and an r = 0.3 - 0.4 effect size on quality of life and happiness.

TRT - As a major advocate of it, I feel I would be remiss in not mentioning the single biggest quality of life intervention available to most men - you can read my post about why, and the potential risks and monitoring plans, here.

Blood lipids - I’m actually more of a skeptic here than Attia, high cholesterol itself rarely matters, and may even cross the axis. The direct KPI’s he tries to minimize, LDL-C and ApoB, have a ~1.05x all cause mortality effect in high quality Mendelian Randomization studies. I’m not sure I’d add a stack of lipid lowering meds to my own routine for that, but certainly if you had really bad metrics on those it’s probably worth it, because that’s a population wide weighted median “per SD” figure, but broadly you’re going to expect worse vs best quartile to have a 1.07 - 1.15x all cause mortality difference.

Rapamycin - In mice, rapamycin at 42mg / kg alternated every other week helps them live ~15% longer overall. In humans, there’s not a lot of info. I go over the best human study on this later, but there’s no real measured effect size - people doing this do seem to get COVID and other infections materially less, so at a minimum, you might expect a 1.02x ACM buff, but it can also make your sugar and triglycerides do worse, so pretty easy to swamp that out. Also, we know strength and muscle mass are both protective at much larger effect sizes, and rapamycin downregulates those.

My verdict on the books?

Oxygen - definitely worth a read for the overall theory of oxygen metabolism and aging, and for fun factoids about life and energetics. I might tap out halfway through when he gets to the theories of aging, or don’t, up to you.

Outlive - also worth reading, and he really goes in depth on specifics about why things matter, along with more specific exercise and diet advice, and robust biological / medical justification for his interventions.

Live Longer - terrible, skip it. All it is is a bunch of anecdotes from somebody with poor epistemics, who for some reason spends all his time bitching about genome sequencing costs, in a 2020 book! Like he’s literally seen genome sequencing go down almost a millionfold in cost during his career!

The longer tail - what is the current leading edge?

This is all from additional research I did outside the books. Outlive was 2022, and was probably written with knowledge as of 2021, so I’ve only looked at studies since then.

The best up and comers, for additional long-tail longevity interventions are:

1. GLP-1’s - fits in with the overall blood sugar / inflammation points, AND has the additional “GLP-1’s are apparently wonder drugs” points in favor, which are for the most part, replicating, with more coming in all the time

2. Acarbose - huge in Asia, barely used in the West. If you take 200mg after meals, it significantly improves postprandial glucose AND postprandial triglycerides, and it has pretty significant effects even at 50 or 100mg doses on your hba1c (trailing 90 day blood sugar KPI)

3. SGLT2 inhibitors (empagliflozin, dapagliflozin) - good for blood sugar and kidneys in humans, and amazingly, have a 1.14x buff on all cause mortality in non-diabetic humans, which is the biggest possible deal.

4. Dasatinib + Quercetin - the extant senolytic in mouse trials, which preferentially targets senescent cells. No human trials that I know about for this combo, and there is a European food safety study finding human supplementation of quercetin alone does nothing.

5. Rapamycin + Trametinib - more mouse trials. So rapamycin alone improves lifespan ~15% in mice, and with both rapamycin and trametinib, it reaches ~33%. Not too shabby! Dosage was 1.4mg/kg for tram, vs 42mg/kg rapamycin po alternated every other week. The visual is pretty striking, so I’ll include it:

   

And for everyone saying “wait, I’m not going to wait a month and pay a zillion dollars to some concierge longevity hack just to try some stuff,” I feel the same way, see footnote 2.

But wait, I exercise

One thing you might immediately notice - most of these are about lowering blood sugar! Regardless of your epistemics, I’m not about to stack umpteen zillion blood sugar lowering agents on top of each other, guy.

So, yeah, definitely - if nothing else, you’re risking hypoglycemia, right? So what is the KPI / endpoint that actually makes sense on blood sugar, so we don’t spend all our time taking 7 different blood sugar things before we go exercise, then immediately bonking and having to chug sugar water?

A healthy blood sugar is 100mg/dl, or ~5.0 hba1c. Is there any advantage in going below that?

Probably not - an NHANES analysis of 14k non-diabetics found pretty massive all cause mortality risk for people with hba1c <= 4.0, clocking in at 3.7x hazard ratios.

Could there be a J-curve between 4.0 and 5.0? An n=28k meta-analysis looking only at non-diabetic adults over 50 couldn’t find one. So there’s probably no incremental benefit, and a likelihood of worse outcomes, from going below 5.0.

What does Attia himself shoot for in his patients? A mean blood sugar of 100mg/dl (which would be 5.0 hba1c), with no spikes above 140mg/dl (as seen with a continuous glucose monitor), because spikes themselves lead to some harsher cellular events that probably age you a little faster when considered cumulatively. Seems reasonable.

So what past the basics is worth it?

So what should the median longevity-maxxer with good diet, sleep, exercise, and a nice sauna routine consider in terms of pharmaceuticals?

Not metformin - it can actually interfere with exercise adaptation, both strength / hypertrophy AND cardio adaptations.

Your best bet as a single-use longevity maximizer with no risk of hypoglycemia is probably GLP-1’s. Womp womp. All the peptide bros are right!! They are doing Optimal Health Maxxing™.

Man, who would have bet on that??

Why? The breadth of apparent benefit — cardiovascular, renal, hepatic, even neurological — is unlike anything else on the list. The glucose-independent mechanisms (anti-inflammatory, direct vascular effects, possibly senolytic) are substantial, and hit a lot of important areas.

That said, there is one argument against them - unless you are literally peptide-broing, you’re probably not on retratrutide or using bimagrumab, and all the approved GLP-1’s have muscle loss as a side effect, depending on the dose. Given the significant importance of strength and muscle mass to better aging and all cause mortality,5 this argues there may be a true dark horse single addition to explore: SGLT2 inhibitors.

Much like GLP-1’s, they have actual human trial results, the effect sizes are large, and the mechanisms are exactly where we want them to be, in that they induce mild ketogenesis, mimic some caloric restriction signaling, and have emerging evidence as senotherapeutics. Their mortality benefits appear within days of taking them, implying that the mechanism is completely independent of blood sugar lowering. Most importantly, they have no detrimental effect on muscle mass or recovery.

Past that, would be rapamycin, for the most dedicated. This paper is the best overview I can find of rapamycin-in-humans-for-longevity results so far - broadly, a bunch of people have tried rapamycin, it seems to do some good stuff at the cell signaling level and it upregulates immune function, but it has some slight negative effects on triglycerides and hba1c. The crowdfunded rapamycin + exercise trial favored no rapamycin on every important outcome. Seems to me the jury is still out on that, and still more so on adding trametinib in humans at who knows what dosage.

And that’s it, friends!

Your <20 min primer on oxygen metabolism, longevity, and the latest on the frontier of anti-aging, I hope you enjoyed.

That said I should be back in the saddle and the habit groove as of May, so more posts coming, including one on the takes I consider contrarian, the current state of longevity research and practice, one on the conquest of Peru (which is one of my favorite countries), and possibly a post on how better discovery and winner take all dynamics has led to greater divergence in outcomes with no change in the underlying talent distribution.

But until that time, links!

1. First up is Rohit Krishnan’s absolutely amazing vibe coding project where he had Claude analyze Roman Egypt government complaints.

And the github link.

2. Did you know in WWII, 30k Japanese soldiers bicycled to Singapore via Malaysia and took the 80k English army there, which had been given orders to fight to the last man? It was the largest surrender in all of British history.

3. Nabeel S Qureshi’s Life Principles - absolute banger of a “level up” interventions post:

Nabeel S. Qureshi

Principles

// This was originally a Google Doc where I gathered hard-won life lessons; eventually I open sourced it. It got a great response, including a shoutout from Tim Ferriss, so here it is on Substack…

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2 years ago · 1408 likes · 41 comments · Nabeel S. Qureshi

5. Grades don’t matter at the Ivies, but they could - an analytical dive into grade inflation in the Ivies, and why if you’re there you should actually WANT to stop the grade inflation, featuring such lines as “Your grades at Harvard are supposed to convey something about where you fall within that top 3 percent, not the fact that you are going to Harvard in the first place. And when 66% of Harvard students are getting A’s, it tells us virtually nothing that getting into Harvard didn’t tell us already. And at that point, why bother with the charade of grading at all?” Which, yes. An astute commenter pointed out this is really about attaining a “less work” equilibrium for everyone, from students to profs.

on a scale from 1 to 10

Your grades don't matter (but they could)

There’s a sense in which I was a tremendously mediocre student during my undergraduate years at Yale. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I figured I’d try to be a doctor—smart people became doctors, I thought, and I’d really liked the chemistry courses I’d taken in high school—but that aspiration died pretty quickly after I’d bombed my premed coursew…

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5 months ago · 49 likes · 8 comments · Vlad Chituc

6. Glasswing, Claude Mythos’ bug finding consortium, found a bug in ffmpeg - brew update && brew upgrade guys.

7. The N=2M meta-analysis that showed that high cholesterol is the least predictive of CVD and all cause mortality, and may even cross the axis (cholesterol the middle of the trio).

9. You’re probably taking the wrong painkiller, why tylenol dominates ibuprofin in safety:

Asterisk Magazine

You're probably taking the wrong painkiller

You’re reading the first article from our new Issue 14: Risk. Subscribe to the print magazine to get future issues delivered to your door…

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5 months ago · 170 likes · 17 comments

10. Dan Frank’s post on Why I love flash frozen food and you should too - it’s fresher, and most “fresh” fish and the like was flash frozen then thawed for you on the store shelf, so it lasts longer for you too if you buy frozen.
    
    And another “lifetime half off” coupon, for anyone who wants to subscribe and see the rest of the links. I don’t care about the money (I’m set at the cheapest sub fees Substack allows), but bumping paying subs help grow a broader readership, because Substack promotes people more when Number Go Up:

    So if you too enjoy Numbers Going Up, or want to see the other half of various links posts, please avail yourself and enjoy!

    
    https://performativebafflement.substack.com/d023342c

    
    

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