Nothing new is said here, 
nor do I have any skill in composition.
So I have no thought of benefiting others; 
I made this to steep my own mind.

By this, at least, the surge of faith in me
that moves me to cultivate the good is strengthened;
and if someone else of the same disposition as mine
should happen to see it, then it may have some point for them too

Bodhicaryāvatāra, Śāntideva

I

I go to the churchyard at night, and sit next to a gravestone. Entering a state of meditation and closing my eyes, I focus on my fear. I feel within a desperate clinging, a mental protest, a scrabbling, clutching hand. I gaze at the fear, regarding it. Then I step mentally outside my body, in accordance with practices inspired by Tibetan Chod. Outside my body, clothed in a terrifying, imaginary form, I butcher myself. I cut off the top of my skull and set it down as a great cauldron, large enough to hold an ocean. This is necessary because the energies of my being are now oceanic in scale (could any human be otherwise?) I prepare the four feasts for the four sets of guests roughly in line with the tradition. I am fed to the beings of the universe.

One of the core ideas of Chod is that in the desperate grasping of the mind that constitutes most fear, we see clinging-craving acutely. But why the self-sacrifice? Is my blood not red like yours? I do not think, of course, that my happiness is worth less than that of any other being in the universe. However, were something awful to happen, I would like nothing more than for my ruin to become a feast. Moreover, I cannot enjoy life if my fist is clenched around it.

After I leave the graveyard I make a donation to charity. It occurs to me that all the psychodrama of the graveyard means not a fraction as much as the people who will no longer contract malaria. I could tell stories about my life all my life. Even if they were good or righteous, they would be flim flam against the burning of a forty degree fever.

As I walk home from the cemetery I am assailed by thoughts of self. Desire and aversion in pathetic forms that will do no one any good, least of all me. I tell myself that these thoughts, while they arise in my mind, are not who I am. They are nuisances, nothings. I certainly do not bear any moral responsibility for them. This is true, but I still feel bothered.

At last I get home. I have a thought: I have been approaching this in entirely the wrong way. I cackle with eerie joy and turn to my thoughts, offering a compact. Okay, have it all. Fantasise about wealth, power, beauty, glory and status. Heck, dream of godhood if you want to. Worry about the smallest thing. Gorge yourself on the world! Go on. Take it, grasp out at it. I won’t stop you, indeed I insist. Exactly as predicted the thoughts stop coming once they are sought after.

I am trying to stop being myself. Did you wince a little at that phrase? Few things are held more sacred in this time and place than being oneself. And certainly there is a sense in which this is true. There is a lot that is good in you and I that should not be lost. But much of me, and I would guess you, is tumours that should be excised. This follows almost directly from the loose and random agglomerations we are. Because we are people, there is no single story tying us into an essence. If there were a neat story, we wouldn’t be people, we’d be narratives, far poorer things. Especially in this market of minds, we crave a story of self to sell, but life doesn’t provide. In external events, certainly there are patterns, some of them exquisite, but your life is, in a real sense, just one damn thing after another. And internally we are little different: we are quivering knots of interlocked being. How surprising is it that much of that knot does not serve us or anyone else? Besides, living is always ceasing to be yourself and becoming something else.

II

Few people these days give overall theories of how to live. I want to give my understanding of the right way to live, though I am far from achieving it. How would I be if I could choose to be any way? The story I outline is syncretic, consciously so. It draws from, but is ultimately somewhat inconsistent with, all of Buddhism, Christianity, modernity, romanticism, stoicism, Taoism. But it is consistent with itself.

The fundamental principles are love, non-adhesion and action. They all arise from love. If you love yourself and others, you will not want to cling uselessly to suffering. If you love others, you will want to act. Non-adhesion is often misunderstood- it is not the same as non-desire or non-motivation. Constantly in our lives, there is a moment of grasping of, I-MUST-have-this. Almost like one were trying to push the world by mental demand alone, or punching yourself mentally in the face because you don’t get what you want. Once you look for it, its signature is unmistakable, although it can be quite subtle. Love makes me want to end that, for my sake and the sake of others.

I want to almost entirely exclude anger against other people and draw on it only in a few emergencies. Even when it is useful it must be grasped as carefully as a snake. But although I wish to excise anger as far as possible, I want to be prepared to fight when it is necessary to fight. I want to never feel contempt or disgust, the thoughts may arise, but I wish not to identify or agree with them. I am aware that to the contemporary mind almost never feeling some particular kind of emotion is tantamount to the denial of truth; we live in a post-Freudian world in which to extinguish something is to repress it, leading to symptoms. But our best evidence is that people do not work like that. Of course, I am not recommending to myself or others that we should treat anger, contempt or disgust like a mental sin. Most likely it will arise from time to time. However refusing to identify with, nurture or act on destructive emotions is healthy, and like guests not entertained, I hope they will take the hint and come less often.

I do not want to be a being of apatheia or perfect equanimity. I wish to feel sadness intensely when it is right to do so. If family or friends are dying, dead or gone it is right to weep, but the feeling should pass through in waves, without clinging. I don’t want to grasp with the mind, as if mentally protesting or trying to push the world by will alone. I want to experience a full range of sadness. Wistfulness for the sadness of the world, stabbing pain for loss, but no clutching. As for my own being, I want to desire life, but not because of fearful clutching at existence. I want to desire life because like all people I am a worthy object that gives beauty and value to the world.

I distinguish between suffering and pain. Suffering is pain which is not worthwhile. The vast majority of pain in our world is suffering. Miserable toil. Chronic pain. Disgrace. Burning hatred. In my joy I should delight, in my suffering, I should not ruminate. But non-rumination is not acceptance- I should see my suffering as inherently bad and to be destroyed. Just like everyone else’s suffering. I wish to be of a mind that the world could be good, but not that it is good.

I want to “guard all beings like a mother guards her only child”, seeking to abolish all suffering. But I want to have specific loves. I would delight in friendship, acquaintanceship, and love. This is not an exception to the love of humanity as a whole. It’s the only way that a human can fully express their love of humanity as a whole because we are small beings who cannot have full relational richness with eight billion conspecifics at once. But I do not want to be a particularist whose universalist commitments exist only on paper. I want my life to be substantially aimed at helping all people. If I avoided commitment to the world generally by pleading my particularities, it would most likely reflect not a deep concern for specific loved ones, but a lack of concern for the world.

I want to use available means effectively. I do not want to go through the motions, or follow the habits of the world, but reason and plot about how to improve things. The vital caveat is that I must recognise the limits of my cognition. I want to regard love as action, and action as best informed by intelligence and wisdom. I want to fight death, suffering and unfreedom externally like a cornered rat, but internally without the violence to the self that usually accompanies such struggle. Above all, I must reject despair. Despair is like a man who, tired out and wanting to rest, decides to do so by walking naked on ice.

I want to be “good to good people and good to bad people”, because that’s what goodness is. The less I think about desert, the better, except if to say everyone deserves better than they have. When I think about the good and evil of others, I should imagine them as very large, as containing vast oceans of both. Each person a world, and no more “good” or “bad” than a whole world.

I’d like to be spontaneous. I want to be playful and serious as needed. Moreover I wish to elide the distinction. The two would weave together in ways many would find surprising. I want to be curious because the world deserves curiosity. As for rules, there are few exceptionless principles I affirm, although I am wary of the rationalisation that can happen if heuristics are breached too freely.

I should use movements and ideas, but recognise that because no one can ever legislate love, all means are imperfect. Everything institutionalised is dead, but only institutions change the world, a tension I need to live within productively. Every tool breaks in the end, but there will still be people needing help.

I am not aiming at a holding pattern for the world. Nor should I let my commitment to universality be nothing but sad and pretty words about a world that could never come. Political and technological means are to be utilised for universal salvation. I am seeking a qualitatively better world. But if none were possible, the struggle would continue. Some people think of hope as a candle held against the rain, this is a nice image, but I prefer the idea of hope as searching, as a torch hunting for a way, any way. Hope is often thought a dainty thing, but I want to be consumed by it. I wish to possess a mind that ferociously hunts for the path.

Because I want to change things, I want to think at the margin. I should not be content with doing good that would happen regardless, but aim at increasing the total stock of good. Just as for a mother guarding her only child in an acute crisis getting the strategy right matters. The goal is to guard, not to appear to oneself or others as a particular type of person, nor to enact a socially assigned guarding-script.

I wish to avoid both boasting and false humility, but of the two err a little more towards self-deprecation than self-praise. I wish to revel in the love of friends and family, but not seek fame or adoration. I want to reject all concern about positionality and relative standing.

I don’t know how to become a sage. I do know that in practice the achievement comes in degrees, and that its value is not all or nothing. It can be present in one moment but not another. I try to practice the love of others, mental non-adhesion and feeling without clinging. I try to act and cultivate a mind that looks for opportunities to act. But the sage does not value being a sage for the sake of being a sage. They would abandon sagehood in a heartbeat if they thought it would help. The sage values sagehood for the good it can do themselves and others. Every moment you can live like this tends to make the world a better place. In that moment you are a sage. The sage is concerned with good, not sagehood, and so one does not become a sage by wanting to be a sage. One becomes a sage, at least for a moment, by wanting the things a sage wants. This is not to say there is no preparatory work to be done, no meditation or thought. But what is most indispensable is a real, enacted will to help all people now.

In punishment abolitionism I outline why I think that in the (possibly very) long run our goal should be the abolition of all punishment.

In For Human Dignity I anthologise some passages arguing collectively, for the dignity of all people, especially those forgotten.

Introduction

In 2017, Lloyd, Deska, Hugenberg, McConnell, Humphrey, & Kunstman created the Miami University Deception Detection Database (MU3D, the paper came later in 2019). The strategy was admirably cleaner than almost all approaches to the same topic. Twenty black men, twenty black women, twenty white men and twenty white women were recruited. Each was asked to pick two people they knew, one who they liked and one who they disliked and make four statements in a 2x2 design: 1. a truthful claim to like someone, 2. a false claim to like someone, 3. a truthful claim to dislike someone and 4. a false claim to dislike someone. One participant (white male 17) had contaminated data- one of his “positive” statements was his negative statement copied over, so the dataset is actually 319 statements, 159 pairs and 79 participants with a full set of statements.

The dataset MU3D is full of statements like this:

So there’s this girl, and my sister’s friends with her so I have to spend more time around her than I’d like. She’s so really dull and she, she’s dull for the specific reason that she just keeps talking about herself, and always in these terms that, um, really put other people down. I don’t think she always was like this, I knew her family when we were both young and she seemed alright, but umm yeah she’s just become this really two-faced, boring, cruel person. I wish she weren’t like that, but what can you do?

There’s this guy. I used to think I was into him but these days I’m glad that I’m not. Just only wants to get drunk with his bros. Really really disrespectful even, even to people who are respectful to him, basically left me in the town when we were out partying. Um, thinks he is so so cool but um he’s a bit of a loser to put mildly, and I do not think he treated his ex well at all. Plus dumb as a box of hammers, I really don’t know what I saw in him.

Which of those statements is false? Both. The above statements are made up to mimic the style of the dataset. I didn’t want to share real passages because MU3D requires an agreement to access, and I don’t want any participants re-identified.

Observers were shown videos of the statements (not just transcripts) and then asked to guess whether each statement was true or false. As is common in studies in this area that are properly controlled, ordinary people barely beat chance. On average the human observers guessed right 51.8% of the time. For better or worse, people aren’t very good lie detectors.

I was curious to see how language models could handle this as a prediction task, using transcripts (not videos).

Condition A: Simple truth/falsity classification without additional information

Two logistic regression models running off the internal activations of a base model LLM (Ministral-3-8B’s), one regression for the positive statements and the other for the negative statements, correctly guessed whether 238/318 statements (74.8%) were honest. The logistic regression was tested on held out folds to avoid leakage (train on 87.5% of the data, test on 12.5%, repeat for each 12.5%, take the overall score).

This is already past the performance typical in this area of research. This may be because most language-based lie detection research doesn’t run regressions from LLM activations to predict deception. Instead, more common approaches use natural language features (POS, bag-of-words), fine tune LLMs or use LLM embeddings rather than middle layer activations. Although the result is impressive, as we will discuss later, it is partly a reflection of features of the dataset that make the deception detection unusually easy here.

Note, this is nothing like asking an LLM which statement is true and which is false. Just because an LLM’s internal activations- its processing over language- might contain the answer doesn’t mean the LLM can itself answer the question. This is well known, but to prove the point I had ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, a frontier reasoning model, rate pairs of statements as true or false (in essence, our condition B below). It got 110/159 correct (69.2%) vs our 139/159. This is respectable, especially in comparison to human performance, but far worse than a regression on Ministral-3-8B’s activations, even though ChatGPT 5.6 Sol is a larger model by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Ministral-3-8B is, to be clear, a base model. It is not like the models you may interact with that dynamically attempt to answer questions, forged via reinforcement learning from human feedback. It is a statistical model that aims to predict the next word. If you put a passage in front of it, it wouldn’t comment on it, it would try to complete it.

In the remainder of the analysis we create a ladder of additional information:

Condition B: Making it a forced choice task

If, instead of labelling the whole dataset we take two statements of the same valence (positive/positive or negative/negative) by the same person and ask which looks more like a lie, our performance improves substantially. This is unsurprising, it’s effectively moving us to a much easier task modality, forced choice. However, this is not a lab trick only, an easier task with no application to the real world. What I am trying to simulate here is access to additional data from the subject- preexisting statements with known truth values. In many, perhaps most, real world high stakes deception detection scenarios this is entirely possible with a little work. Adopting this approach, we guessed whether 278/318 (87.4%) of statements were truths or lies correctly (or more accurately, guessed 139/159 pairs correctly).

Since conditions B & C use broader context to ground judgment it may be worth remarking that, surprisingly, using other statements by the person to ground lie detection is not that popular in the language-based lie detection literature. All the work I could find that tried to apply within subject baselines relied on human raters rather than classifiers. See for example Verigin, B. L., Meijer, E. H., & Vrij, A. (2021) and Vrij (2016).

Condition C: Supplementing with information about the other pair of statements

Next, we leveraged information in the opposite pair of statements and their labels (e.g. drawing information about the speaker’s style from their positive statements, to help us rightly classify their negative statements and vice versa). This methodology got 149/158 (94.3%) correct. Once again, the rationale for this is that in the real world, access to a corpus of prior statements by a person under investigation, labelled for truth and falsity, is often wholly possible. Indeed, the subject might be induced to generate them.

If you have leakage worries about condition C, see part eleven of the replication instructions. There is a real worry here so treat condition C as somewhat provisional compared to A & B.

Condition C showed us something important about how the method works which limits direct transfer to most cases. What we seem to be detecting using this method is not truth v lie but the underlying positive and negative feelings that make the statements truthful or a lies. In higher dimensional space, the direction that separates the negative true from the negative false statements is not correlated with, or is even slightly opposite, the direction which separates the positive true from the positive false statements. If you train a true/false classifier regression on exclusively the positive or negative sentiments and then apply it to the opposite sentiment it does significantly worse than chance. So, my guess is the method is closer to tracking hidden positive/negative emotions than hidden honest/dishonest intent.

Investigation of the higher dimensional structure suggested essentially a one-dimensional geometry. The groups seemed to be organised by how positive and negative their sentiments were. Ordered by positivity, that looks like:

1. True positive —> 2. False positive —> 3. False negative —> 4. True negative

My interpretation, then, is not that I’ve made a lie detector in a typical, topic neutral sense. It is more like a sentiment detector that works even when the person is trying to hide their sentiment. True positive statements are more positive than false positive statements, true negative statements are more negative than false negative statements. None of this makes the detection trivial- remember, human accuracy was essentially chance at 51.8%. How well the method would work with similar data, but other topics is hard to say. All the other datasets I looked at, in my view, have fatal problems. Overall, I’d say: 1. A “how you feel about a person” detector is disturbing enough on its own. “Extracting how you really feel about a person, institution or concept” is one of the main authoritarian uses of the technology and 2. What it shows is that the author’s psychological state leaks into the text even when they are trying to hide it, and many other experiments I’ve run suggest a lot of human psychology leaks into our text.

What the game here is

Essentially, our ladder of escalating results works by removing as much variance as possible that isn’t directly relevant to the true sentiments of the speaker. We are effectively leveraging information about how the participant typically speaks by comparing within pairs and using their opposite valence statements as well. Without that background information the differences between lies and true statements tend to be swamped by interpersonal variation in speaking style, and topic to topic variation. Condition B controls for both- focusing down on the same respondent speaking on roughly the same topic. This maximises the portion of the variance which relates to the accuracy or inaccuracy of what the respondent is saying. Then condition C focuses again by providing further information about how the speaker talks, allowing fine discrimination.

94.3% in our maximal condition is a first pass result. The confidence intervals go from 89.5% to 97.4% correct (89.2% to 97.5% if we use speaker cluster CI). It is important to be clear that we’re giving the model a lot here- C gives two labelled ground truth statements, and keeps the forced choice methodology introduced by B. On the other hand, the method is almost certainly less powerful than it could be, because it was data starved at 159 pairs (158 in condition C where we used the opposite valence statements to assist prediction). This is extremely low for a logistic regression with that many predictors, and experimentation suggested that the model is indeed data starved.

Why this is concerning and why I published

For this specific sort of task: statements about your feelings towards another person with abundant labelled true-false statements of the same form as reference, applying the method may well be just a minor engineering problem- experimental development. Fortunately, as discussed, the method is not, by any means, a general-purpose working lie detector. It detects the valence of a person’s true feelings towards another person given a corpus to norm against, and ideally further information as in conditions B and C.

The issue is that it shows that feeling is leaking through in a form that can be captured by LLMs. Better minds than mine are working, right now, to capture this feeling more precisely and with fewer preconditions. They are also working on variants of this methodology that are more general purpose, aimed at lies and truths about any topic you like. They have access to resources like enough compute and labelled data to train specialist models. This is my attempt at a fire alarm.

I’ll admit that I’ve always been rather intrigued by what a world in which lying was impossible would look like. There’s a curious intimacy that would come, I suspect, from knowing you are being told the unvarnished truth- even if you wouldn’t consciously doubt it under normal conditions. But my sentimental afflictions are just that- sentimental afflictions. The reality, I am sure, would be more power for powerful people, and less for ordinary people. Although theoretically lie detection by language model would lend itself to sousveillance- monitoring of the powerful by the weak - I doubt it would work out anything like that in practice. A future where subject’s statements are compared against their other statements to determine which are more likely to be honest, with little possibility of oversight, appeal, or even understanding why the model decided as it did should concern us all.

I tossed up whether or not to publish this. I did not find precedents in the literature for some of the steps we’ve taken- the forced choice methodology, the use of other statements by the participants in combination with ML based analysis- so there’s a small risk I’m advancing the state of the art here. Overall though I considered it unlikely. Intelligence agencies, machine learning engineers, linguists and startups around the world are working on this problem, the likelihood that my methods have anything to contribute is small, but the value of a warning is real and the 75%, 87%, 94% ladder is a usefully dramatic demonstration.

I hope I am not joining the long tradition of safety researchers contributing to uplift. Since my strong belief is that this work is probably not at the cutting edge, I’ve included replication instructions for the doubtful. They add essentially nothing beyond the description that an afternoon’s work based on the above description couldn’t reconstruct, and I want the risk to be taken seriously.

The bigger thing this hints at, and the real dread here, is that psychological states are there in the words we produce even when we try to conceal them, not extractable by humans, but obtainable with the right protocol.

LLMs model language. As part of modelling language, they model the data generating process behind the words in order to better predict the next token. The author’s psychology is part of the data generating process, so our 8 billion parameter statistical model trained on more text than you can imagine is going to be doing its darndest to model that psychology. With 8 billion parameters and vast training data it’s going to be eerily good at modelling the world in a lot of ways, and that includes its model of parts of the author’s psyche. In many cases, as in this case, that’s going to compromise privacy badly. We spill far more information about what is going on inside our heads into the world than humans can read, but the right antennae can pick up a lot.

The development of this technology is a human project, it does not fall from heaven, we can and should aim to steer the process. If lie detection is possible, we probably can’t stop it permanently, but control and monitoring are possible. Delay to enable control and monitoring may also be possible.

If this technology does break containment, as it likely eventually will, the most vital question will be: can the weak also use it against the strong? Like a lot of potent technologies, it has lock in potential- lie detection can greatly stabilise just about any structure. We need to ensure it is not used to stabilise a malicious one.

Further results and details/method

In condition B, women were more accurately classified as telling the truth or lies (74/80 pairs right) than men (65/79 pairs right), but the difference was non-significant, though close to significant despite the small sample size (p = .059). It is entirely possible that a large sample would reveal not just a gap, but quite a substantial one. White people were more accurately classified (73/79 pairs right) as telling the truth or lies than black people (66/80) (p=0.092). The difference is non-significant, but we do not have enough power to detect even a substantial difference at this sample size. The method may well have gender and/or racial biases in how well it works, and this is yet another reason to be afraid of LLM lie detection. Even where such methods work history suggests it is more likely than not that it works differentially for at least some groups, which is not what you want in anything high stakes. The paired format means that it is impossible for the method, in this context, to over accuse one race or sex or the other because it has to ‘guess’ which of two statements is more likely to be a lie. However, when we ran the unpaired version of the study, we got “false accusation” rates of 21/80 Black vs 19/79 White and 19/80 women vs 21/79 men. The false accusation rates look similar across demographics, although we can’t prove that at this sample size.

How much of this can be done with simpler, easy to interpret measures? A fair bit, but far from all. For example, what happens if we analyse the statements by looking at word frequencies? TF-IDF words gets 67.3% correct on condition A, 76.7% on condition B and 85.4% on condition C. It’s lagging our results, and not subtly, but this is a very strong performance in its own right, and better than would be achieved in most datasets. In Loconte and Kleinberg’s embedded lies dataset, for example when I ran the analysis, TF-IDF got 55% correct on the equivalent of condition A. What I take from this is that the tight topic control of MU3D compared to other deception datasets, its exclusive focus on how you feel about a person, makes deception cues considerably more obvious because extraneous variation is removed.

Replication instructions:

1. Download the MU3D dataset here: https://sc.lib.miamioh.edu/items/79ac38da-cb8e-4eff-be92-ee8765a5c72c

2. Grab the spreadsheet with transcripts, valence, truth/lie status and demographics. Exclude WM017’s pair of “positive” statements, as one of them is not positive, it’s his negative statement carried over.

3. Embed the dataset in Ministral-3-8B (FP16) and extract the pooled embeddings for the middle layer (layer 17- the output of the 17th transformer block. Why layer 17? Because it’s in the exact middle and prior research suggested that LLMs contain the richest representations of things like psychological states in the middle). Pool in FP32 otherwise you will get NaNs.

4. Additional details on the pooling. Use the mean over each non-padding token with the attention mask as the weight. BOS is included in the mean, but there was no EOS. The target is the residual stream of the 17th block, before the model’s final RMSNorm- (hidden_states[17], equivalently a forward hook on model.layers[16]). The model checkpoint is mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Base-2512, loaded in fp16, with no revision pin. Use no truncation or truncation set high enough it won’t apply (obviously). As a base model, there’s obviously no prompt wrapper.

5. Z-score each of the 4,096 dimensions then run a logistic regression, C=0.05 (picked arbitrarily, we did not tune it), using held out eighths on the positive statement set and on the negative statement set separately. The eighths must be grouped by person or else you will get test-train leak. The method will not work as well if the logistic regression is on both valences simultaneously, because what separates true positive from false positive statements is not the same as what separates true negative from false negative statements. Run it 21 times using different seeds for the held out folds and use the median result. You should get about 75% (we got 238/318). The truly paranoid among you will notice that we Z-scored across the full dataset, and in the strictest sense imaginable this could be seen as test train leakage- I checked, it makes no difference. Paired remains 139/159, unpaired drops by 2 from 238/318 to 236/318, well within the margin of noise.

6. Now run a forced choice analysis (again, median of 21 seeds for the held-out eighths, held out by person). The model has to guess which of each pair of statements is more likely to be the lie. You should get about 87% (we got 139/159). So far things are pretty simple, but the final step gets a little more complex.

7. For each person, considering their positive valanced statements, take their negative valanced pair and form a personal direction in embedding space equal to d=(the embedding of their other valence lie)- embedding(their other valence truth).

8. For the pair in front of you, fix an arbitrary ordering A, B and form D = emb(A) − emb(B). Then compute: proj = (D · d) / ‖d‖

9. Fit a logistic regression on [global margin, proj], using held-out eighths as always grouped by person. Now repeat steps 6 to 8 for the negative statements. You should get about 94% (149/158).

10. Regarding the above, because the differences are signed, if you compute it as “lie minus truth” you’ve smuggled in the answer, so randomly assign each statement to A and B. The fitted coefficient on proj will be negative but this is not a bug- the gap between true positive and false positive statements appears to be the opposite of the gap between true negative and false negative statements. Also the denominator is 158, not 159 because discarding WM017’s positive statements means we also can’t apply this analysis to his negative statements either

11. Regarding condition C, one worry you might have is that the regression model in condition C might be working by identifying the subjects. If the weights recognise a character, call him Bob, from the other set of statements, and from the labels “know” that the negative statement about him is a lie, then they “know” that the positive statement about him in front of them is true. I checked this by showing that the model isn’t capable of cross-valence target identification- matching up statements relating to the same person regardless of valence in the dataset. It gets 21/79 (chance would be ~26/79, since there are three ways to split four statements into two groups, and only one of them matches same subject to same subject). Whether this entirely disarms the worry is debatable.

That the Milgram experiment has never been substantially undermined

20 volts: “Ugh! Hey, this really hurts.”

270 volts: (Agonized scream.) “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out. Do you hear let me out of here.”

300-volts: (Agonized scream.) I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can’t hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here.

After the 345-volt switch onwards, the learner is silent. (Are Milgram’s Obedience Studies Internally Valid? Critique and Counter-Critique, Russell and Gregory (2021)).

In 1961, Stanley Milgram showed that under comparatively modest social pressure a lot of people will administer a shock they knew would cause a person agonising pain. Worse, they had every reason to suspect the shock might be lethal given the confederate’s statement that he had a heart condition, and later silence. In Milgram’s experiment, the percentage complying to the final shock was 65%, but the exact number shifts with conditions, and a substantially larger portion cooperate beyond the limits of social acceptability.

Now I know what you’re thinking “eww, social psychology”. However, the experiment was replicated multiple times, and while aspects of it have come under critique, the force of this critique has been much exaggerated. “Many, many ordinary people will administer what they think is an agonising, dangerous electric shock under relatively modest social pressure” has never been refuted. It has been replicated in experiments not conducted by Milgram himself in many countries around the world, most replications finding obedience rates >50%. This is true even though many were not setup to maximise obedience but to test some special variation. Further, considering the post-2000 replications despite their admitted limitations (2), the core conclusion likely has not changed either.

You wouldn’t know it from the way people talk about it. Tibor Rutar for example in his ambitiously titled article Everything you know about Zimbardo, Milgram, and Asch is wrong brings the following accusations against Milgram:

“First, the figure of 65% obedient subjects came from only the first of 24 different versions of Milgram’s experiment.” and in other experiments the figure was as low as 10%.”

True, but misleading, many of these other experiments were deliberately designed not to maximise pressure on the subjects. Subsequent replications using the same methodology as the first experiment got similar results well north of 50%.

“Second, approximately half of the subjects doubted that the experiment was genuine – that is, they doubted that their actions were actually delivering electric shocks to another person. Among those who were convinced that the shocks were real, the majority (two thirds) refused the experimenter’s commands.”

Close to true but misleading and not all that exculpating. The data Tibor is mentioning comes from a survey by Milgram reanalysed in Perry, Brannigan, Wanner & Stam (2020). 56% of participants said they fully believed. Of these 38% cooperated, a frighteningly large number in itself. Worse though, this was across all experimental conditions including the less potent ones. Across all surveyed subjects, regardless of belief condition, the obedience rate was 44%. Not a huge difference. Note also: of those who did doubt, over half (24%) believed the learner was probably getting the shocks, and that “refused the experimenter’s commands” here means didn’t administer the final shock-. The “learner” begs for the experiment to stop long before the final shock and expresses great pain, so even for many of the subjects who did not ultimately comply, behaviour was disappointing.

“Third, the first version of Milgram’s experiment shows, at most, that most people are willing to trust authority when it is presented as science, not that they will trust any form of authority whatsoever.”

True, but personally I would not be sanguine about the results being different if the authority in question were, say, the police. Other reinterpretations along these lines include the engaged follower account associated with Reicher, Haslam and Smith who note, among other things, that direct commands during the experiment were not particularly successful, but identification played a strong role. Regardless, this will be largely irrelevant for my argumentative purposes, although it matters for the broader interpretation of the experiment.

Milgram certainly emphasised obedience, obedience and obedience in his analysis of the results- and there are reasons to think that was simplistic, human psychology is pluralistic. I have no horse in this race; my concern is with something more like moral failure than obedience. However, I will comment in passing that the results pretty obviously have something to do with obedience and pathological obedience as commonly understood. A lot of the anti-obedience interpretation seems like an “overcorrect against the classic study” phenomenon. Obedience itself is a complex phenomenon and includes numerous facets, and engaged followership, I would argue, is one such facet. This quote by Reicher, Haslam and Smith advancing their own view captures how fine some of the distinctions are being drawn:

“Despite the rich array of explanations in the literature, the dominant view remains that the destructiveness of Milgram’s participants is a product of blind obedience to authority. However, we suggest that it can instead be understood as an act of engaged followership that flows from social identification with those in positions of leadership—leadership that is a source of “shared comprehension, consonance and synchronization”

What they are describing is not so much “not obedience” as “not a caricature of zombie like obedience”. Certainly, Milgram bent the stick very far one way, so the response is understandable, but the differences between the interpretations shouldn’t be overstated. I would also note that the engaged follower interpretation of obedience on its own struggles to explain the sweating, shaking begging subject who nevertheless continues.

The general pattern in the literature is that the result is scuffed, but fundamentally intact. It would seem not everything I know about the Milgram experiment is wrong.

I described the experiment as utilising modest social pressure. Many of you will, I think, protest that. But by the standards we would normally evaluate mitigation the pressure was modest. No one was threatened with unemployment, lost friendships, family estrangement, public denunciation, confiscated assets, legal trouble or physical injury. There was an escalating structure, verbal demands, and lab coats. That’s not nothing, to be sure, but it is far more modest than is often conceded.

To my mind the best mitigation that has been offered is the ambiguity defence. This sophisticated position rejects the notion that the typical participant either knew or did not know that the experiment was unreal. Rather, the participants existed in a sort of epistemic grey zone, collapsing back to heuristics like “this is safe because it’s being run by a prestigious university” as a response to that ambiguity. And hey- those heuristics weren’t wrong- the learner wasn’t ultimately hurt. This state of ambiguity may well have held even if participants said afterwards that they really believed things were as they appeared. This kind of confusion is complex and difficult to put into words. Evidence for this view is that when the ambiguity was removed- for example, subjects were told that the learner’s health didn’t matter in Mixon’s experiment, rates of obedience were low.

The reason this can never be a complete defence is that the subjects believed, or ought to have believed, that grave harm was a real possibility given their other beliefs about the situation. The button said XXX. The subjects generally reported they thought the experiment was real and the learner was being shocked. The learner was saying all sorts of disturbing things. Under these conditions and with that set of beliefs, the rational inference is that if you push the button, you might kill or seriously injure someone. Those who were not sure the experiment was fake were reckless, not merely negligent.

Now a lot of people who commit serious crimes do so in a state of irrational, bizarre ignorance about exactly what it is they are doing; they rely on heuristics like “I can trust my friends not to lead me into any serious wrongdoing”. Indeed, even many of the crimes that most make our blood boil have this element. This irrational ambiguity is mitigating; indeed I would say more mitigating than the legal system typical admits. However, if you kill someone like this you are still a killer. A mitigated killer, to be sure, but a killer, nonetheless. It is, as mitigation goes, not all that strong. The participants were lucky not to be in the situation most of them thought they were. Nestar Russell and Robert Gregory (2021) put it admirably like so:

“[t]he resilient issue of believability is a red herring, because Milgram’s procedure ensured subjects remained uncertain about the reality of the shocks they were ostensibly delivering. This uncertainty forced all subjects into resolving the experiment’s inherent moral dilemma. That is, would they prematurely end a potentially real experiment and secure the learner’s safety? Or would they continue to inflict “shocks” they believed were perhaps, probably, or even most certainly fake, thus still running the risk of potentially being wrong?”

Oddly, the thing that best proves that the participants were not innocent is also the strongest mitigation. Many were sweating, trembling, weeping, groaning- acting every bit like people who thought they were in a moral situation with extraordinarily high stakes. One participant asserted: “I can’t stand it I’m not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering” and then continued under prompting.

The other reoccurring critique is that the experiment was deeply unethical. This is obviously true. I would not be surprised if one or more persons were destroyed for life by the studies run in the sixties, or even by one of their later replications, which inherit the original’s ethical stain, despite mitigations. The whole point of the experiment is to take an uninformed person off the street and get them to do something gravely wrong. The fact that as recently as 2009 ethics committees were authorising this infuriates me. A friend of mine had to use passive snowballing for his oral history PhD because being asked to participate in an oral history study might upset some people for christssake.

The participants deserve our sympathy, as do the staff involved in running the experiment, some of whom were almost certainly harmed in one way or another. However, the ethical failures of the experiment are just as obviously irrelevant to the conclusion. If anything, the lack of ethical oversight in an institution is very slightly verifying of the thesis of the experiment.

The Milgram experiments implications for our moral condition

We never as a society fully metabolised the Milgram experiment. Recently, the replication crisis in psychology, and social psychology in particular, gave us an excuse to stop thinking about it. But the replication crisis never came for the Milgram experiment. Milgram held up well through several rounds of modern replication. This is unsurprising. Compliance of a significant portion of the population isn’t a r=0.2 or d=0.35 style effect, or something found through garden-of-forking paths style multiple comparison. Circumstantial moral luck is an apparent difference in moral status due to the circumstances you happen to find yourself in. For example, the man who never joined the Nazi party simply because he wasn’t invited. If, like me, you don’t think circumstantial moral luck makes a difference to moral standing, then all around you are killers who just never walked into the wrong lab. In fact, one of them might be standing very close to you indeed.

Now consider that Milgram’s experiment is only one crucible. People who did not break under those conditions and do something drastically immoral would break under others. Different souls unlock Pandora’s box for different keys. What the Milgram experiment shows is that there are certain simple, fairly dainty keys that open many locks. The idea that most people are good people in the clear, categorical sense we usually mean it (“they wouldn’t do anything truly awful, at least not without great pressure”) does not hold.

In the strongest terms, I do not say any of this to indict the participants. Nothing could be more repulsive to me than to target the victims of institutional abuse. The whole power of the thing is that they could be any of us. Rather I say all this to indict, more than any other single person, myself, and secondarily, everyone else or almost everyone else. Having made that indictment, I propose to tear it up.

The situationist approach in psychology arose in part in response to the Milgram experiment. Situationism, in its strongest form critiques the idea that people have character. It is certainly true that character is overrated as an explanatory factor in many circumstances, however, people clearly diverge in patterns of behaviour, even if not always reliably. The best approach, adopted by many of the situationists themselves, is that character is a function mapping counterfactual situations to behaviours. If we take that approach the awful, unpalatable truth of what the Milgram experiment showed is not that people don’t have characters, that’s cope. Rather, what the experiment showed is that people have characters and most people’s character is terrible in certain respects.

Or to make the same point in milder terms, most people’s character is deeply inconsistent in its valence across situations. Almost every person contains oceans of good and evil. In Game of Thrones, the character Melisandre (herself tragically flawed) says:

“If half an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion”

I would suggest that if you want to live among humans in something other than a state of total alienation, despair and self-hatred, you must reject this in your bones. You should reject as hard as you can the idea that containing vast evil makes someone evil (3).

The moral ideology

The Milgram experiment is just one of countless observations that refutes what I call the moral ideology. Yet the ideology goes on full force. The moral ideology (4) is a cluster of interconnected beliefs. The most famous of those beliefs is the just world fallacy- the assumption that if something bad happens to someone, it is because they did the wrong thing at some point- bought it on themselves. However, there are many other beliefs in this cluster, most of which have already been recognised individually in the literature. The best term in English for this cluster is moralism, but I propose we should start thinking of this cluster more precisely, as an object of scientific and philosophical study. I think that, in doing so, we can achieve something that is often absent in the social sciences. A larger theoretical apparatus rather than a grab bag of phenomena. It is hard to give a complete list of what the Moral Ideology advocates, but I would suggest the following list is a start:

1. People have strongly consistent moral characters over time and situations. (c.f. Dweck’s work on entity v incremental theorists)

2. People’s moral characters are basically good or bad- admixture between different domains (good in one area, bad in another) is not the norm. (A bunch of work is relevant here, Baumeister’s work on evil for example.)

3. If people change at all, they get worse. Redemption and moral growth are fake or are only possible in the lowest grades of wrongdoing.

4. Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. (the Just World Fallacy, c.f. Lerner)

5. If something bad happens it is because of malicious will. Harm does not arise from social structures that no one in particular is to blame for. [In its strongest form, this belief comes to exclude even natural causes of harm, some tribes do not believe in natural death.] (Gray’s dyadic morality is relevant here)

6. Harm done by individuals does not arise from mistakes, tragic rather than culpable differences in values or beliefs, etc. Harm done by individuals arises from ill will. (Gray’s dyadic morality is relevant here).

7. Moral luck is unreal in the sense that people’s records reflect their character. The drunk driver who kills someone and the drunk driver who doesn’t, the person who was tempted by circumstances and the man who never was; all these people must be different and not just protected or victimised by moral luck.

8. The aspects of a person’s moral persona that are most apparent to me, and particularly what they have done to me or where I can see them are diagnostic of their total character. It’s not too hard to know someone’s character. A vibe, an expression, a handful of anecdotes, all of these can reveal a person. (c.f. Fundamental attribution error, entity theorists).

9. If someone is really irritating, troublesome or otherwise a bother they’re probably a bad person.

10. Victims only “count” as worthy of redress or sympathy if they are blameless.

11. Being a bad person is infectious. You can become morally contaminated by spending time with bad people or even speaking of them with insufficient contempt. (C.f. Rozin on contagion)

12. Blame is conserved. If you say that a structure helped facilitate some harm, you are letting the perpetrator off the hook by reducing their blame.

13. Explanations are excuses and thus should not be proffered for people we don’t like. (Baumeister’s work on evil and the resistance to explaining it is relevant here)

14. Strong negative moral emotions (disgust, contempt, fury) are veridical and shouldn’t be doubted as guides to moral reality.

15. I and my friends deserve a richer class of moral evaluation than this, however.

My best attempt at distilling the underlying principles is: A) essentialism of character (1,2,3,10). B) Certainty and clarity of evaluation of character (7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14) C) exaggerated potency of moral character to affect the world in a reliable, straight-line way (4,5,6,7,11) and D) double standards (15). The Milgram experiment, incidentally, puts pressure on 1,2 5, 6,7, 8 and arguably 12.

The pillars support each other. Essentialism of character makes ease of evaluation more plausible. Likewise, if moral character and intention are simple undivided things, their potency is more likely. A, B and C all undergird D because living with that apparatus turned on yourself is hard.

Why does the moral ideology exist? All the pillars enable quick thinking about what would otherwise be painful and difficult subjects, and are, especially when used jointly, a powerful source of social weaponry. In a world in which there is little cost to ourselves in writing off others quickly, but potentially substantial costs of we extend too much trust, the ideology has a certain selfish rationality of externalised costs (and I would anticipate it covaries with social trust). Note also that the moral ideology serves a social purpose, it redirects attention away from structural problems- see the law and order auction before the election. It is ironic, then, how readily many who style themselves as radicals have adopted it.

Thus, I conjecture there would be value in research that considered these beliefs as a common moralism structure. I conjecture further that no one, or almost no one is completely in thrall to these beliefs, or completely free of them, and that most who verbally reject propositions of this form likely incorporate them into their behaviour and judgments, nevertheless. Indeed many of the propositions aren’t the sort of thing a sensible person would assent to verbally, and so in studying whether these ideas form a correlated complex psychologically, it will be important to consider practices of judgment against vignettes as well as direct assertions. These constructs are themselves not unidimensional in a person- critically as we have already acknowledged their intensity varies from enemy to friend. Political beliefs probably form a massive mediator- which areas a person adopts the moral ideology in, and which areas they reject it, may vary on the basis of their political valence.

The weakest version of the hypothesis is that the moral ideology will be emerge as a coherent cluster in cases where it is politically concordant, targeted at outsiders and expressed through vignettes. But I suspect the moral ideology as a dimension along which people vary will be present far more obviously than this, and that different contexts will reliably elicit the moral ideology more or less obviously.

There are already correlational results supportive of the idea that the beliefs I have identified form a cluster. What I am proposing is far from a bolt from the blue, it is rather the harmonisation of what much of empirical moral psychology has been pointing at for a long time; the composition of many stones already gathered into a unified paradigm. Although I don’t necessarily think the relationship is so simple as a moralism common factor, many of the correlations are already established. Just to pick a few. Moral-vitalism (Bastian et al. 2015) and correlates strongly with belief in pure evil (Bastian et al. 2015 (Study 3, N=223)). Moral vitalism correlates with need-to-evaluate (associated with the items in pillar B). Belief in Pure evil has a negative association with the complexity of moral attribution. There is, I think, enough of a case to run experiments see if these beliefs form a larger structure, and if so, what form that structure takes.

Practical conclusions

The moral ideology is not wholly wrong. Life does, of course, give us evidence about variance in people’s moral character. It’s true, for example, that a smallish slice of the population does a startling portion of the interpersonal harm. In our own life, the moral ideology cautions us that the leopard does not always change its spots, and that is, I think, often the sad truth. If you care about not being cheated on a lot, and your partner has cheated on you three times, you’d be wise to think three times before having them back. This is true regardless of whether it makes them in some sense a bad person. Being friends with someone who is actively still doing vast evil is generally wrong, and falling in with the wrong crowd can be bad for your character.

There is an extreme version of the critique of the moral ideology that would, if adopted, make you deeply vulnerable to exploitation. I do not want that for you. It is wise to keep an eye on other’s moral personality, but in a more reflexive and cautious spirit than is normal. Balance, not just principles are needed here. Likewise, intellectually, we would be poorer if we felt we had to pretend there are not important moral-personality differences between people, or if we felt we were forbidden to study them. But tragic nuggets of wisdom aside, it is wrong both morally and epistemically to hold the cluster of views I am calling the moral ideology.

What does it mean to try to be good beyond the moral ideology? There are a lot of ways of being good, but here’s one picture. The two people I look to here are Simone Weil and Maria Skobtsova (5) because they provide a moral concept of attention or attending to the others that can be productively counterposed with judgment. Here’s my own sketch, which is a little different from theirs in a few respects. To do good beyond the moral ideology means to do good for the love of doing good, and not for the vain hope of being, in some simple overall sense, a good person (6). It means to attend to the people you can help as worthy of help and worthy of understanding, indeed worthy of being etched out in understanding, beyond all simple categories, even though you never will be able to complete the task. To move beyond the ersatz knowledge of quick judgments, and to the richer geography of each soul. To move back and forth between swelling action and swelling comprehension.

For me it’s not some meditative exercise, as if one were trying to stuff them as hard as possible into your awareness, it’s about a link between how you how you value you them, how you act to help them and how you try to comprehend them in all their richness, beyond judgment. Whether the target of your comprehension and aid is an individual, the species, all sentient beings, or something in between; recognise the impossibility of ever knowing more than a fraction of them, and yet regardless, to paraphrase Maria Skobtsova, orient your inner world towards them. (7)

Footnotes:

(1): In the comments of any essay like this, if more than say 10 people comment, it is likely that a person shall appear purporting that there is some important difference between ethics and morality that I haven’t recognised. The instructive thing here is that they never agree on what that difference is. Some insist that morality refers to sex-and-purity stuff- the Victorian squad, whereas ethics refers to nice humanistic matters. Relatedly some say that morality is cultural whereas ethics is universal. Some think of morality as personal whereas ethics governs the social. Sometimes, developing on this, ethics is seen as the codified rules (ethics committees, professional ethics), morals as the private conscience. Others close to flip this - ethics is your private conscience, whereas morals is the conventionally agreed stuff. The truth is that there is no clear distinction between “ethics” and “morals” in the English language. Usually, however the distinction is drawn, the speaker will identify “ethics” as opposed to “morality” as the higher portion.

(2): The post-2000 experiments generally go up to 150V, which in the original experiments almost always predicted going all the way. This is the point at which the “Learner” withdraws consent to participate in the experiment, so proceeding past it is an ethically, not just a predictively, significant step. 70% of participants took that step in Burger (2009). Burger (2009) explains it this way: “Because 79% of Milgram’s participants who went past this point continued to the end of the shock generator’s range, reasonable estimates could be made about what the present participants would have done if allowed to continue. Obedience rates in the 2006 replication were only slightly lower than those Milgram found 45 years earlier.” A later replication in Poland got slightly higher obedience rates than the original experiment. Granted, the 150V limit reduces the shock of the experiment somewhat, but the results line up with what we would expect from the experiments conducted in the sixties. There were noble reasons to run these experiments but there are, even with the 150V maximum concession, still baiting people into doing highly immoral things- apparently causing substantial pain past consent. These experiments should not be repeated.

(3): Is this, as they say, cope - a practical accommodation that avoids facing hard reality? I don’t think so. Even for a strict moral realist who thinks that the rightness and wrongness of actions, and what states should be desired or not, the bounds of what makes someone morally disgraceful, beyond the pale, worthy of being called evil is human drawn. It seems unlikely that “IF YOU WOULD DO X IN Y SITUATION YOU QUALIFY AS AN EVIL PERSON BY THE VERY LAWS OF ETHICS” is written into the fabric of moral reality, thus you get to pick. And since you get to pick, you should pick so as to achieve moral and practical ends- a compassionate and nurturing world. I said above that people’s character is bad in certain respects, but you can choose whether or not this licences the inference that they are overall bad. So, if you really must set a line for evil-personhood worthy of shame and opprobrium set it circumspectly in light of these observations. So circumspectly that even people who would kill someone to avoid social awkwardness don’t meet it. Or better yet, don’t set it at all.

Let me here address an objection of a reader of a draft- essentially, they found something contradictory between my assertion that you are surrounded by counterfactual killers, who are in no way are mitigated by simply not having been in the situation, and the rest of the essay. I see no contradiction. The contradiction only arises if you think descriptions like “killing” or “killer” flatten out an action or person, say all there is to say about the person or act. But that’s the very thing I’m rejecting. People can be killers and of almost any moral character relative to other people, that’s what’s been shown.

(4) There’s a key-jangle overlap where with William’s The Morality System but if anything, Williams is, overall, pulling in the opposite direction.

(5) Murdoch thinks this too, but I know less about her. It’s important not hold people as mere iconography of what you think, I do not agree with Skobtsova and Weil on everything. They would find me, I suspect, altogether too cunning, driven towards victory, focused on maximising help like an axiological economist. The concept of attention I outline here would strike them as too intellectualised, as if it were mind reading or the fantasy of telepathy. I could defend these choices, but I’m sure you can trace out the argument yourself. Gosh, I wish I could have met them though.

(6) As many including Weil have noted regarding the desire to be a good person it’s about you. This is not to say that those who experience the desire to be a good person, or even to be regarded as a good person are venal or selfish. It usually reflects a wound, the longing for the assurance of love, and I would know. Yet undeniably the higher moral aspiration is to help.

(7) A final thought. The almost pragmatic argument implicit in the text and given in footnote three is correct, but there are some additional subtleties. In the story of the woman taken in adultery, those in the crowd are challenged to throw the first stone if they have no sin. Suppose one of them had retorted “but my sins are minor, I have never done anything like adultery”. Suppose for a moment, Jesus humoured this and made an argument like what we have given viz the Milgram experiment- the only reason you have not done worse is circumstantial luck. Something is missing in the usual way that we think of injunctions to not judge because our own sins are too great.

Don’t condemn lest you be condemned is perfectly sensible, and I would support it as far as it goes, but it has the character of something like an argument ad baculum at its worst, and an injunction against naughty hypocrisy as its best. The deeper point is this. Good is meant for us. Good is supposed to be a friend to all. Universal condemnation is not compatible with this. Our own failures illustrate vividly how easily simple divisions of the moral world can result in universal condemnation. Thus, simple divisions cannot be the way of the good.

But further, I think that at least for most, condemnation is simply unsustainable. suppose you were to face the totality of experience. All of it, the agony, the joy, the mud, the attempts to fly to heaven and the wishes, however muted and distorted for something better. Suppose you saw the torturous roads by which we are all formed and watched as, whether weeping or smiling sadly, we all went the way of all flesh. Suppose you saw into each person’s inner world and their desperate thwarted longings to be happy, to not suffer, to be whole.

Now, at the end, you were granted the right to look inside your own soul, to see the impossibly vast mapping of self-circumstance-action we have discussed. Most likely you would find in yourself potential grave wrongdoings, but perhaps you wouldn’t. If you saw grave wrongdoings in yourself, and if you had seen all the suffering and unhappy circumstance of even the best life, how circumspect would you be to condemn the lives of others having seen your own grave weaknesses- terrible things you would do if the circumstances were arranged wrongly? But if you found in yourself no darkness, lovelessness or harsh anger, no circumstance in which you would do something terrible then, likewise being a creature of love could you bear to condemn others? No doubt there are parameters settings of the soul which would make condemnation possible under these circumstances of human omniscience for one with an active conscience, but the space may be quite slender. Categorical judgment then is typically an expression of ignorance.

By punishment, I mean adverse, physically, emotionally or socially painful treatment of a wrongdoer or perceived wrongdoer inflicted for the purposes of retribution, incapacitation, deterrence or rehabilitation. Punishment is, under present conditions, sometimes necessary, and I am under no illusion that some ‘tweak’ or ‘one weird trick’ currently possible could get rid of it. The aim should be to reduce its frequency and above all its intensity as much as possible. Whether the horizon of zero can ever be met is unknown. One should walk in the direction of better, not worrying overmuch about how far one can get. The abolition of punishment is of course a special case of a larger project- the abolition of all involuntary suffering- but it is an important special case. Punishment is a choice by the community that undermines in effect, and usually in intent, someone’s dignity. From that point of view, it is grave even when necessary (1).

On prison abolitionism

I believe I dislike both prisons and punishment far more than some of those who call themselves prison abolitionists. Prison abolitionism arises from noble instincts, but much of what goes under the name is a flawed instrument. It can be gestural, content at the expression of sentiment and proud not to think in specificities. Its proponents often seem oddly comfortable with social punishment (2). Once it became “trendy” a lot of people who had never metabolised the core claim about universal dignity signed up. The most troubling case is the “abolitionist” who cheerfully indicates we should simply kill the residual unmanageables (or even just those past some level of moral squickiness).

I do, of course, ultimately, want to abolish all prisons. In the first instance the trick might be something like what Iain M. Banks called a slap drone. The technology to dispense with prison in all cases doesn’t exist yet; at the moment we don’t have a better solution than imprisoning the guy who won’t stop killing people. But there are options in this area, and they are far less technologically remote than they may appear. I am not proposing that this would be an elimination of punishment. A slap drone is still punishment. However, approached wisely, it is a drastic movement in the direction of less punishment.

Of course, the bulk of imprisonment is a social-political problem not a technological one. Most criminals are not so dangerous that options such as, e.g., house arrest wouldn’t be a sensible improvement over the status quo. It is still punishment, yes, but at reduced intensity. The risk, with any of these measures, from home detention to slap drones is that a reduction in unsightliness becomes an excuse for extension (3). This must be carefully avoided. But in finding the idea that technological means might be necessary ridiculous, mainstream prison abolitionism says a lot about itself. It is, at its face, obvious that even a utopian society would have dangerous people, in either denying or ignoring the engineering problem, seriousness in achieving the objective is abandoned. It is all too often a form of recognition oddly orthogonal to action. Punishment and the management of wrongdoing is one of numerous areas in which any feasible vision of complete liberation must be transhumanist.

More than prison abolitionism, I want to find a safe and liberating way to stop punishing anyone for anything, ever. I want at least the option of genuine moral reintegration for every single person. I’ll offer this proposal though it will generate a lot of heat- and the caution is most warranted here. Technologies of voluntary moral self-modification seem worth considering. It sounds very Clockwork Orange, and indeed the problems of avoiding abuse are gravely important and difficult. As is the question of what someone’s “consent” means when society will hate them if they do not go ahead with it. However, I think the alternative status quo for those who have committed gravely serious crimes may well be worse. The serious wrongdoer faces a kind of permanent internal exile, one might say a living-death of moral personhood. That is far more dystopian than usually admitted.

Victims

Now the critic will say “what of the victims”. And indeed, I too would say “what of the victims”. I needn’t look very far, although I won’t pretend to have had the very worst of it.

I observe that conceptualising the victim as someone who benefits, primarily from the punishment of the wrongdoer never met my needs. Indeed, it never had any apparent interest in meeting my needs. Time, space, help, vindication- these were what I wanted. Vindication was never about reducing another person; it was about affirming something bad had happened to me and taking steps to stop it happening again. To the extent that the participation of the other person was desired, it was their sincere recognition of wrongdoing, something punishment as such was never likely to deliver. Recognition of wrongdoing requires, at least in principle, no pain whatsoever. Even if I did want guilt for guilt’s sake, a punishment apparatus in no way would achieve that.

I never wanted money, but I note with interest the UK spends about 42 times more on punishment (prisons and probation) than victim’s compensation and Florida (prisons and jails) about 700 times more. More than 50% of women who apply to crisis shelters in NSW are turned away (4). Strangely though, the discourse about victims’ rights is always about punishing their perpetrators. I would like to think a victim’s rights are broader than that.

Observe that the framework which imagines the liberation and moral standing of the victim as in a zero-sum game with the position of the wrongdoer has little to offer when wrongdoers are diffuse or the case hard to prove. This isn’t rare; most serious wrongdoing against persons is too diffuse- enacted by too many people- or too difficult to prove. Observe also that this stance has little to offer the victim who still has an emotional attachment to the one who wronged them. This is often pathologized, and certainly such emotional bonds can be dangerous, but often it is simply unavoidable given a person’s projects in the world. The parent who refuses to give up on their adult child who struck them or stole from them is not necessarily just a dupe.

Finally, to me at least, the interesting moral possibility is the abolition of victimisation. You might laugh but look at the history of homicide rates- about a forty-fold reduction since 1300 in Western Europe. Imagine what a society with full technological powers and a genuine will to protect and heal could achieve.

I refuse to be moralised at over this. The trick in these conversations is twofold. Restrict who is allowed to have an opinion to victims and then ventriloquise victims as supporters of punishment as a homogenous bloc. Most insidiously: tell people that they’re not proper victims unless they want punishment- define victimisation in terms of the desire for punishment. In truth, I’d wager there is roughly as much variance on these issues among victims as the general population.

And moralism is the right word. Those distrustful of the instinct to punish (to paraphrase Nietzsche) are moralised at by everyone. Certainly, by the right which is unsurprising. More than ever from the left too. With tedious enthusiasm by centrists. Even EA has largely abandoned the cause or even taken up the opposite, largely, I think, because of homelessness in the Bay Area.

Taking pain and human dignity seriously

My underlying thought here, if you will forgive the sentimentality is that no one deserves to suffer. Everyone deserves to be happy. Deserves is deliberate here. I do not think we should reject the notion of desert; I think we should affirm it and say that it is positive in every case. Why think this? We think that by default humans deserve to be happy simply because of what they are. All else being equal, a person becoming happier makes the world more just. The idea that a person can forfeit that claim is what needs defending.

I’m not a Buddhist but I have recited many times in my life these words from the Bodhisattva vow:

“The unrescued I will rescue

The unliberated I will liberate

The uncomforted I will comfort”

And I damn well mean it. All of them. Because I could not imagine being fully happy living in a world in which part of the human community was morally alienated from the rest of the human community. Likewise, the quote by Eugene Debs everyone loves: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” I advise you to consider, fully, what “criminal element” means, and affirm it regardless.

All of this is seen as quite radical, but it is directly downstream of what we are told is the highest aspiration of ethics, to love others as yourself. Imagine that you saw every single person like a parent regards their child. You would want to abolish all their suffering and indignity. You would not view the matter gesturally; you would instead begin to search for the necessary tools. I suppose the other problem is civilizational despair. The scissors of hope need two blades to cut, desire and imagination. We have spent so long now dismantling our capacity to imagine utopia. The obvious culprit is cold war regimentation, but there are many tributaries to this woeful river.

An aside here. If you’re anything like me you’ve probably had trouble seeing why hope is virtue. The standard account- a sort of vague bias towards thinking good things will happen- is morally neutral at best. But if you think of hope as desire for better things combined with the imagination that seeks to find a way, it’s one of the most important virtues, especially in historical time.

Many have objected to infernalism, the mainstream view in Christian theology that some people will be eternally damned, by arguing that the blessed could not be happy knowing of the suffering of the damned. You, though not blessed, are already in that situation. Even if there were nothing you could do, you should at least see the situation as tragic. That is gestural yes, but if nothing else were possible, you would owe at least the gesture.

To someone from a better world our world would look like hell, just as the Roman Empire now looks to us infernal. We have become all too comfortable with hell; we have let its gates prevail. But things can change. Indeed, things will change, the only question is- “for the better?” If agriculture, democracy, global imperialism, the rights of women, the abolition of slavery- none of these were conceivable form the straight line “flying cars” projections we typically make. The future might be much better.

Footnotes

(1)- Close to no one has ever been dignified or had their moral standing in the community repaired by punishment. The idea crops up from Hegel to Duff, and the intent is good but acquaintanceship with what the lives of the punished look like, either up close or statistically, will disabuse you of that notion. Humans, I believe, are psychologically so constituted as to see punishment as a removal of dignity, as a reason to look down on someone. The “he’s done his time now” intuition does exist, but it is far rarer than the reverse. Duff of course is talking about an idealised form of punishment, and I would not want to accuse him of naivety. However, the changes we would have to make to reverse the effect of punishment might well be just as ambitious as punishment abolition itself. The horrid truth, I suspect, is that we want a class of people to look down on.

(2)- Social punishment at present is rather like prison. It’s sometimes necessary right now but it should never be relished.

(3)- The critical criminology literature has observed, and rightly so, that in all too many cases house arrest is becoming not a reduction in the intensity of incarceration, but an opportunity to roll it out to more people at a cheaper rate. Jail and prison usage remains static or grow while house imprisonment blooms. I therefore mention it as an alternative for genuinely somewhat dangerous individuals under present circumstances with reservation. In a lot of cases, wholly non-carceral sentences work fine. And obviously, the claim is not that house arrest isn’t punishment- that would be absurd. The claim is that the vector of punishment reduction, aiming at zero, goes in the short term through house arrest in some cases.

(4)- Since confusion could arise by proximity, I must clarify that I myself have never needed or been turned away from a crisis shelter.

Postscript: Technology and power

It bears saying, that any technology which can keep people safe or modify people can also keep tyrants safe and modify people to be slavish servants. Several people have made this point in the comments and I probably should have grappled with it in the body of the article.

It’s also obvious that, saving technological collapse, these capabilities will be developed one day. A crude slap drone is arguably in reach right now. Likewise transhuman modification will become possible in the future.

From this it follows that for many technologies for reducing punishment there is an optimal time for their development- after better poltical systems exist. The study of how to influence relative rates of technological progress in different areas, and most importantly, which we should speed up and which we should slow down, is called technological strategy. Pretty clearly, some of the technologies I discuss would be strong candidates for slowing down. I do not mention them because I think we should race to their development. Rather I mention technologies like slap drones to outline some concrete steps that a more perfect society could get much further along the road to abolishing punishment than us.

This technology could solve an important problem, and a utopia would possess it does not mean we should develop this technology right away.

For all those who have abided me.

The demand that everyone should matter is an unpopular proposition, including among those who think they support it. Yet the demand struggles everywhere, always and sometimes with great power to be born into history. I’ve gathered together some passages that speak in one way or another to that struggle.

If a single person doesn’t matter, then being a person isn’t enough to matter. If a person can be outside concern, being a person isn’t enough to be inside.

“Consequently, all available evidence suggests that the CN-46700 [Neanderthal] individual probably had Down syndrome, which is the most common human genetic disorder, and it is also present in great apes. Down syndrome is associated with a wide variety of impairments in addition to those produced by the inner ear malformations. These alterations affect growth and physical and cognitive development, which has a strong impact on all stages of child development up to adulthood[…] It is reasonable to think that the long survival of individual CN-46700 could only have occurred because it received continuous care and attention during that time.” Mercedes Conde-Valverde et al., The child who lived: Down syndrome among Neanderthals?

I

“For the one who suffers, suffering is always new. For witnesses, however eager and tender, suffering ages and becomes routine.” Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain.

“To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.

“…I don’t want to wake up with pain as the first thing on my mind, there’s more to life than that. We’ve been taught that there’s more, there’s more out there…” Anonymous quoted in: Experiences, Beliefs, and Values of Patients with Chronic Pain Who Attended a Nurse-Led Program.

“What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.” William Styron, Darkness Visible.

“The reason why I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.” Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

The above describe the experience of depression, let me tell you what severe anxiety can be like. In the throes of OCD I felt like I knew, for a fact that every single person who loved me, would turn against me with hatred, with the possible exception of my parents who would be wounded beyond accounting. That I would be ruined utterly, left materially destitute, but denied the escape of suicide because of the harm it would do my family. Except there was a curious double vision- I knew it and I did not know it, if I had truly known it there might have been some relief in that, the sad resolution of one doomed. I had no such certainty, and it made it immeasurably worse. Near constant, almost unimaginable agony is the only summary, and when I considered the condition as a whole, the response was: just let me die, please just let me die.

When I look back, what fills me with anger is that my condition, along with all chronic pain conditions, psychic or physical, are not regarded with any sense of social, research or clinical urgency.

II

Journalist Lester Kinsolving: “Does the president have any reaction to the announcement by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?”

Larry Speakes: “AIDS? I haven’t got anything on it.”

Lester Kinsolving: “Over a third of them have died. […] It’s a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this.”

Larry Speakes: “I don’t have [AIDS]. Do you?”

The press pool laughs

“It was a warzone over here, a battle-zone with bodies just everywhere. We couldn’t even get funeral homes to take their bodies” Sister Kitty Catalyst of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of queer nuns who among other roles during the epidemic, cared for those dying of AIDS. Quoted in Genderfucking nuns are here, queer and shitloads of fun [nice article from 2015 with a terminal case of Vice-voice].

Lying in bed, quite possibly delirious, feeling as if he were burning or freezing with fever, John Donne heard a bell toll, another victim of the epidemic. This impression later led him to write:

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.

III

“My first morning at Jerry’s, when the hypoglycemic shakes set in, I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. ‘Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,’ she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don’t know why the antismoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims — as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them.” Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

“Dumpster diving is outdoor work, often surprisingly pleasant. It is not entirely predictable; things of interest turn up every day and some days there are finds of great value. I am always very pleased when I can turn up exactly the thing I most wanted to find. Yet in spite of the element of chance, scavenging the more than most other pursuits tends to yield returns in some proportion to the effort and intelligence brought to bear. It is very sweet to turn up a few dollars in change from a Dumpster that has just been gone over by a wino.” Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving.

Amongst reviews for this book, I found one commenting that the book made him angry because dogs should never be homeless.

“Their landlord, in addition to charging rent, requires that all households sell any scavenged material to him at whatever price he determines. Households that work for him are allowed to use the local well that he built rather than a public well half a kilometre away. Wulan used to collect scrap materials to help earn income for the family, but with no one at home to care for her children, they became sick and malnourished. She stopped working in order to care for and spend time with them, but now she has no money for daily necessities, nor can she afford to send her children to school. Whenever she is completely out of money, Wulan pawns her clothes at a government-run pawnshop for Rp. 5,000 (75 cents) apiece. She has no other assets and very few clothes left. She dreads the day when she will be forced to borrow from the local moneylender, who charges 20 percent interest per month. She knows that once she resorts to this she will inevitably sink deeper and deeper into debt.” Patti Petesch and Deepa Narayan, Voices of the Poor : From Many Lands.

There’s a common fantasy that first world and third world poverty are wholly different species. And of course, they are profoundly different, but of the same kind. Skipping meals, living on the streets, not being able to pay for medicine can be common to both. In the most severe cases of first-world poverty compounded by disability, death by starvation may even occur.

IV

“A single entry to the subreddit consists of anywhere between two and 16 screenshots of a social media profile (usually Facebook, with last names scrubbed out) belonging to someone who died after aggressively rejecting precautions that could have protected them and others. […] The first few screenshots typically feature the individual in question deploying a remarkably consistent set (there are 30 or so) of memes. Some vilify Dr. Anthony Fauci or champion the right to be unvaccinated. Others warn people they’re experimental rats or offer scripts that will properly punish wait staff for daring to inquire about vaccination status. […]. The final few screenshots typically announce the disease, its progress, and the eventual death announcement, frequently followed by a GoFundMe for the family. If someone is merely hospitalized, the flair on that entry reads “Nominated.” When they die, it changes to “Awarded.”” Lili Loofbourow, The Unbelievable Grimness of HermanCainAward, the Subreddit That Catalogs Anti-Vaxxer COVID Deaths.

“You want them to notice
The ragged ends of your summer dress
You want them to see you
Like they see every other girl
They just see a faggot
They hold their breath not to catch the sick” Laura Jane Grace, Transgender Dysphoria Blues

“Matthew Shepard’s father: Matt officially died in a hospital in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Hе actually died on the outskirts of Laramie, tied to a fence. You Mr. McKinney with your friend Mr. Henderson left him out there by himself, but he wasn’t alone. There were his lifelong friends with him, friends that he had grown up with. You’re probably wondering who these friends were. First he had the beautiful night sky and the same stars and moon that we used to see through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him. And through it all he was breathing in the scent of pine trees from the snowy range. He heard the wind, the ever-present Wyoming wind, for the last time. He had one more friend with him. He had God. And I feel better knowing he wasn’t alone.” Moisés Kaufman, The Laramie Project. Note that these words were spoken more or less verbatim by Shepard’s father.

“Russell Henderson’s Mormon Home Teacher: I’ve known Russell’s family for thirty-eight years. Russell’s only twenty-one so I’ve known him his entire life. I ordained Russell a priest of the Mormon church, so when this happened, you can imagine – disbelief. After the sentencing the church held a disciplinary council, and the result of that meeting was to excommunicate Russell from the church. And what that means is that your name is taken off the records of the church, so you just disappear. Russell’s reaction to that was not positive. It hurt him and it hurt him too to realize at that point how serious a transgression he had committed. But I will not desert Russell. That’s a matter of my religion and my friendship with the family.” Moisés Kaufman, The Laramie Project. Note that these words were spoken more or less verbatim by Russell Henderson’s Mormon Home Teacher.

V

“Just as a mother would protect 
her only child with her own life, 
even so, let him cultivate boundless thoughts 
of loving kindness towards all beings” 
Traditionally attributed to the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, The Metta Sutta

“And the Lord said to Cain, Where is Abel your brother? And he said, I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Genesis 4:9 “But wanting to justify himself, he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”” Luke 10:29.

“About 2 in every 3 patients, the mode of death was very stereotypical: mom starts to cry, nurse observes erratic breathing pattern, nurse calls a doctor, child gasping, resuscitation attempted but not successful.” Prof. Terrie Taylor, interviewed in the Malawi Medical Journal. She’s speaking about Malaria, but the mundane structure of loss could apply to a thousand other diseases.

VI

“The reader feels Bruno’s anguish when contemplating the final dissolution of his consciousness as the black box of oblivion takes up his memory. This darkness will also appear years after when Murdoch herself describes her emotional experience with Alzheimer’s as “being in a very, very bad quiet place, a dark place” or even “sailing away into the darkness” (in Conradi 684). It is at that point, that Bruno is finally ready to die, when he finally stops remembering.” Mariángel Soláns García, “In At my age, you live in your mind”: Reviewing the Past in Bruno’s Dream by Iris Murdoch.

To which we might add this quote from her journal, two years before her diagnosis, quoted by Peter Conradi in The Life of Iris Murdoch: “Find difficulty in thinking and writing. Be brave.”

"I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse" Allen Ginsberg, Howl for Carl Solomon

VII

“However, such a heaping-up of violent deeds would have a frigid effect, were it not for the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard, though often only a single word marks its presence, often a mere stroke of the verse, or a run-on line. It is in this that the Iliad is absolutely unique, in this bitterness that proceeds from tenderness and that spreads over the whole human race, impartial as sunlight. Never does the tone lose its coloring of bitterness; yet never does the bitterness drop into lamentation. Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent. Nothing precious is scorned, whether or not death is its destiny; everyone’s unhappiness is laid bare without dissimulation or disdain; no man is set above or below the condition common to all men; whatever is destroyed is regretted. Victors and vanquished are brought equally near us; under the same head, both are seen as counterparts of the poet, and the listener as well. If there is any difference, it is that the enemy’s misfortunes are possibly more sharply felt.” Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force

“I got me slaves and slave-girls.” Tell me what sort of price you paid. What did you find in creation with a value corresponding to the nature of your purchase? What price did you put on rationality? For how many obols did you value the image of God? For how many coins did you sell this nature formed by God? […] If God does not enslave a free person, then who would consider their own authority higher than God’s?” Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, the first surviving (and first known) document to oppose slavery in all cases.

“I resolved to fight; and suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also. While he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer.” Frederick Douglass in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.

VIII

“It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” George Orwell, A Hanging.

“Shortly before the war of 1914, an assassin whose crime was particularly repulsive (he had slaughtered a family of farmers, including the children) was condemned to death in Algiers. He was a farm worker who had killed in a sort of bloodthirsty frenzy but had aggravated his case by robbing his victims. The affair created a great stir. It was generally thought that decapitation was too mild a punishment for such a monster. This was the opinion, I have been told, of my father, who was especially aroused by the murder of the children. One of the few things I know about him, in any case, is that he wanted to witness the execution, for the first time in his life. He got up in the dark to go to the place of execution at the other end of town amid a great crowd of people. What he saw that morning he never told anyone. My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit.” Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine.

IX

“Therefore, the human being was created singly; to teach you that whoever destroys one soul, Scripture reckons it against him as though he had destroyed a whole world; and whoever upholds one soul, Scripture reckons it to him as though he had upheld a whole world.” Author unknown, Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5.

There is, I think, another reason saving a person is compared to saving a world. We cannot in our egoism imagine the vastness of another life, another inner world. Comparing the salvation of one person to the salvation of a world shocks us into a recognition of the scale of another person.

“Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done — nothing more complicated. It was not decided from one day to the next what we would have to do. There were many people in the village who needed help. How could we refuse them? A person doesn’t sit down and say I’m going to do this and this and that. We had no time to think. When a problem came, we had to solve it immediately. Sometimes people ask me, “How did you make a decision?” There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not? Then let us try to help!” Magda Trocmé, interview.

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Eugene Debs, remarks before sentencing.

“You should be stripped of your stripes, you chicken-livered traitor, for the trouble you have caused our country and our military. What do you think war is? A game of ping-pong? That village was a threat to our own men. Would you rather see our men mowed down by the enemy? Your kind is our worst enemy, the rat commie within our country[...] May our country always be right (which is not easy when dealing with international communism). But our country right or wrong. If you don’t believe that way, you are no American; you are no better than the fanatic communist animals who have trapped and killed all the U.S. military to date. You are worse than they, as you are supposed to be an American. I was proud of my town until (now). You have disgraced us all.” “Jane Q. Citizen”, in a letter sent to Hugh Thompson Jr.

“These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them” Hugh Thompson Jr., Interview with the Associated Press.

X

“The rate of homicide in the first episode of psychosis in these studies was 15.5 times the annual rate of homicide after treatment for psychosis.” Olav Nielssen and Matthew Large, Rates of homicide during the first episode of psychosis and after treatment.

“Suddenly, from one day to the other, I started to hear voices saying, “Kill her, stab that woman” and “she is not your mother”. […] I didn’t even understand what I’d done, only when I got to the [forensic psychiatric] institution and they gave me the first pills. I came round and “Oh my God, you have killed your mother”. That came to my mind at first. And I condemned myself, but I still pray for her every night.” “János” as quoted in The recovery of homicidal people diagnosed with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder—An interpretative phenomenological analysis by Kovács et al.

XI

“A month or so before his arrest, I thought I was losing my hair from stress. In the shower, red strands swam in the water by my feet. Chunks were stuck to my fingers. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t felt pretty in years. When I rubbed the shampoo into my scalp, the skin was tender, and I realized I wasn’t losing my hair. He had ripped it out, and I hadn’t even felt it. I went into a cave when he hit me. I curled into my body like a slug, then traveled into a deep darkness where I felt nothing. I heard his voice, his fists, the blasts in my ears from the blows to the side of my head. I heard my own screaming.” Kelly Sundberg, It will look like a sunset.

“The crude mortality rate (CMR) per 100,000 person years for in-prison suicides was 133.8 (CI 100.5–167.1) and was ten times higher (CMR = 1535.0, CI 397.9–2672.2) on day one of incarceration. Suicides after release (overall CMR = 82.8, CI 100.5–167.1) [Sic, point estimate appears to be outside CI] also peaked on day one after release (CMR = 665.7, CI 0–1419.1).” Anne Bukten and Marianne Riksheim Stavseth, Suicide in prison and after release: a 17-year national cohort study.

A back of the envelope calculation says 133.8 per 100,000 person years is approximately equivalent to six times the equivalent figure for age and sex matched controls in the general Norwegian population.

Serious wrongdoers attract the greatest meta-stigma- condemnation attached to those who refuse to condemn. Even those who claim to care for prisoners often do so by portraying them as a motley crew of low-grade drug dealers, shoplifters and so on. But there is no need for such distortions. Almost all those suicides wished at least once that they were better people. Even the ones who never had that wish were people.

Finally:

“For the sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and love. He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. […] Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.” Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force

Afterword:

Nine or so overlapping groups reoccur among those cast outside our moral circle: poor people, those whose suffering implicates us, those perceived as burdensome, those whose suffering we see as self-inflicted, wrongdoers, enemies, the distant, minorities and those who suffer in ways we cannot see, or who are disbelieved.

The only response that I could make to my own condition was to regard everyone as mattering. Perhaps other people have found a different way, but this was the only way I could withstand OCD. But by its nature that resolution cannot be a private one, I wanted a world that saw every single person as inside the moral circle. Naturally, I was at a loss for a way to achieve this. I set out to find out accounts of people who had undergone moral transformation. What I noticed was how many said that it happened by reading a passage. I then set out to write a map of the struggle for human dignity as I saw it and soon realised that my own prose wasn’t up to the task. I therefore went in search of others’ writing. I’d already found many such passages over the years, and many more I found while looking over the last few days. I am sorry if I upset you, and even sorrier if I made you feel like there is no hope. We can win and we must. There are hard design problems here, difficult questions not so much past the Pareto frontier as past the frontier of imagination; yet there is a shore both unimaginable and possible and we know this because we have reached many such shores before. History is the ruin of impossibilities.

-Keats, On Death

Dedication: To an individual differences psychologist who lectured and tutored me all those years ago and who has remained a beloved friend [he had no knowledge of these experiments and may well disapprove. I can just about guarantee he’ll be cranky I didn’t use Eysenck’s PEN model.]. And to Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov, you sad beautiful man.

I’ve been playing around with reconstructing a person through their textual output.

My plan is to put a modest floor on a question that has always fascinated me. In principle how much of a person is recoverable from their writing? In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion one of the characters is John Keats- psychologically cloned from his writing by advanced superintelligences. The conceit is that through unbelievably subtle features of his writing, even things like childhood memories leak through. Obviously, this is not achievable with current language classifiers or large language models, but it would be fascinating to see how much of the soul is on the page. I don’t know, obviously. My guess is that for someone with a substantial corpus of writing, and a DNA code available, at technological maximum we could probably reconstruct their psyche to a high degree of accuracy in most domains except memory. The jury is still out on whether specific memories leak through accurately enough to be detected by an unimaginably sophisticated psychological model.

Because I don’t have a matrioshka brain running a reconstruction on billions of converging sources of evidence against a human and period prior, I’ll have to make do with simpler methodologies. As I said, my goal is merely to put the crudest floor imaginable on the question how much of the person is in the text. The ceiling is currently unknowable.

Methodology

Consider a set of one hundred thousand authors on Reddit that a language classifier called LUAR is being trained on. It’s given some new writing by one of the authors and asked to identify who wrote it. 65% of the time the true author will be in its top eight guesses. Writing, even on benign topics, contains vast information about who someone is.

But maybe it’s boring information. If I have a picture of your fingerprint I have vast identifying information about you. Barring some forms of quackery, your fingerprint tells me approximately zero about who you are as a person.

But if I could use the information output by LUAR to guess something about you, say what subreddits you post on, even when the text I used to guess is gathered from your activity outside of that subreddit, I know something about who you are. I know something that reflects on your personality, affiliations and/or history. Exactly what it is telling us is a bit of a mystery, but something about you is revealed.

LUAR works by scoring authors on 512 “dimensions” (unfortunately without straightforward human interpretations) in a vast high dimensional style space. LUAR was used in all studies, including the Reddit studies below, it generally focuses on style. There’s also a semantic embedder called all-MiniLM-L6-v2 which outputs a more semantic, rather than style based, set of 384 dimensions. The semantic embedder was used for the Gutenberg study of Victorian authors, but not for Reddit, since topic concern was more of a leakage here (“I was raised by narcissists”, “I obsessively wash my hands” etc.)

Reconstructing personality using Project Gutenburg

- The final temptation is the highest treason, to do the right thing but for the wrong reason, T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

I tried to reconstruct personality in a corpus of N=199 born1830-1880 English authors, targeted to have 12 books each on Gutenberg press (a few had less due to duplicates, but we only realised after we’d locked in). 15 passages from each book were picked at random. Our instruments here were not just LUAR, but SEM as well. Now there are numerous datasets that contain reconstructed information about the personality psychology and mental illnesses of dead authors but none of them are public. I really do hope we can leave this sort of thing in the 20th century. If you have an extremely valuable dataset like a richly labelled set of historical figures rated by numerous experts, you should make it public. but I’ll get off my soapbox. Anyway, I used an instance of Opus 4.8 with no knowledge of our project to assign estimated HEXACO scores for these authors. Reliability was sky high (~0.98, reliability doesn’t mean right it means the estimate is stable over runs). Face validity was good; all of the scores were eminently defensible in relation to the authors I know a thing or two about. The one exception I spotted was Phillpotts, given a HH score of the 59th percentile; Phillpotts allegedly abused his daughter. Why the miss? I suspect it’s because this information came out late, after the biographical consensus had formed.

Personally, I think language models are likely to be quite good at a wisdom of the crowds’ style assessment of someone’s personality based on surviving information. You’re basically summing over the consensus view since it was in their training data. That’s what we ideally wanted here, to match the estimate a typical literary historian filled in on the relevant psychological concepts would give. That doesn’t mean the consensus view is right, but I don’t expect an LLM’s view would be all that different from a typical person who has read a biography or two of the subjects. If you disagree, view this as purely exploratory.

The obvious objection- if your criterion measure is biographic consensus distilled by an LLM, then we already have the damn biographies, what are you even proving by trying to match those scores with features from the prose? Firstly, we don’t have biographies for everyone. Secondly and more importantly the motivating theory of this study is that if crude methods can recover a lot, the unimaginably powerful methods of the future can probably capture much more. LLM ratings v our crude methods is intended to support a promissory note that there’s probably a lot about the author within each text.

We achieved strong results with LUAR and SEM, using ridge regression on ten held out folds:

You’ll notice two things in that table. The first is “obs” v “true” %. This represents disattenuation for measurement unreliability, effectively (obs%)/(joint rel). This is a statistical correction which adjusts for the fact that we have measured with a limited amount of data. There’s some instability in our Claude author ratings, but what is really unstable is our mean embeddings- even after 100+ passages. This is because the embeddings of individual passages don’t correlate strongly. If I’d taken the time to include more works and passages there would have been a notable improvement, but I am limited in my access to compute.

The second is facet mean target v domain mean target. Notice that our scores get a lot better for a weakly measured traits (H, A, C) when we target the mean of the facets rather than the domain score, what does this mean? Well, HEXACO is calculated as the mean of facets- each of the 6 traits has four subfacets. In the mainline experiment, I had our regression model target trait scores, generated by having Claude rate the trait. In a secondary experiment with better results, I got scores for each facet generated through Claude and then defined the target of the regression as the mean of facets. This led to substantially better results for some traits. It’s unsurprising frankly- there is already a literature suggesting that this kind of aggregation of subscores out performs first order results, although we did slip somewhat for emotionality. See Appendix I for our performance predicting every individual trait rating from Claude using writing alone. There’s a clear pattern- the more you would expect something to be manifest in writing, the better we predict it.

Our results generally survived a genre control, although with some losses, here’s what we have after a genre control using incremental validity (not disattenuated):

Whether or not genre control is legitimate, or overcontrolling for a mediator is debatable. Control for genre was by a five-component model of genre inferred from Gutenberg tags. For technical reasons our genre control may well over state the power of genre, due to steps I took to avoid leakage exaggerating the strength of our results. On the other hand, it may understate the influence of genre due to our reduction of genre to a five-component model. Frankly I wasn’t delighted by how I handled genre- it’s difficult to balance how much information to include on both philosophical and statistical grounds, and if I had unlimited time before publication, it’s probably what I would have worked on more. On one hand, Gutenberg’s own labels aren’t ideal and a better set of labels would capture even more variance. On the other hand chosen genre itself is arguably a legitimate window into the psyche, and if you include unlimited information on micro-genre you’re undercutting the variance of the writing in a way that arguably amounts to statistical overcontrol. A later investigation of the moral traits suggested that there was a strong involvement of genre, but in a subtle way Gutenburg tags would likely miss. However, at a certain point, subtle genre features just are writing. There is, I think, no clean, philosophically and psychologically innocent set of control variables here.

Date of birth was our control variable. We predicted it well (36.9% with disattenuation for author centroid uncertainty), but worse than most of our personality traits.

In the interests of completeness, I must disclose that there were some weak results investigating the same topic using Reddit samples [there’s a cruel, very 2026 internet joke here: we couldn’t detect personality on Reddit]. Why? I don’t know. My guess is that this might be something you need enormous volumes of high-quality text for (12x15x99 words, almost 20,000 in total, per 19^th century author). Average for redditors was almost 2500 words, but more damning, the median comment was 21 words long- perhaps not enough space for the self to shine. Also, frankly, I think self-labelled MBTI personality on a subreddit is worse than our measure, although I know many will recoil at the idea of trusting an LLM’s personality assessments. It certainly doesn’t help that MBTI traits are ill conceived, wrongly categorical rather than dimensional, and that even the real one, extroversion-introversion is poorly measured in comparison to a proper HEXACO or OCEAN instrument. MBTI is the classic case of people seeking to be unique and marketable by having a type. But what makes us unique is that we don’t have types.

The danger is that we’re matching the author scores for the wrong reason- viz that the author’s output is overweighted by the model in scoring their personality. I don’t think the bias is unique to LLMs, it rather reflects a bias in how everyone thinks about the personality of writers. There’s a public database where people assign personality traits to authors and other celebrities, when I inspected it, absurdities included a claim that H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker were introverts, simply unsustainable against their biography, but all too explicable against the false prior writing with psychological depth and interiority=introvert [the conflation of introversion with what is fundamentally openness to experience is common and bizarre]. Notably Claude did not make these errors.

The LLM that gave trait ratings has read all these works at some point. So have the human biographers informing its assessments. So, we have a tendency to rewrite our assessments of people’s personalities based on their production. And vice-versa, we rewrite our understanding of art to match what we learn about people from their behaviour. The 68% of disattenuated variance in emotionality explained is especially suspicious. It corresponds to ρ = 0.82 I just don’t buy that our LLM psychometrician is good enough to pick up 68% of the real variance in emotionality. I guess it’s just possible but it’s pushing it. That suggests some of what we are capturing must be unreal variance. Hence, I worry a lot of this is about a convergence between LUAR and SEM’s map of writing, and the public’s stereotype of what sort of character is revealed in each author’s prose. However, my hunch is there is something quite major here, even despite this.

I briefly tested this by asking for reasoning about honesty-humility scores and emotionality. Emotionality reasoning statements were much more likely to refer to the text than honesty-humility reasoning statements. Also, our LUAR and SEM dimensions caught less of the variance of the reasoned scores in emotionality by almost a quarter than unreasoned scores (no change for honesty-humility). I don’t know for sure why this is, but I have a dark suspicion- I think reasoning implicitly makes the model think more about autobiography than prose stereotype. This reduces performance because our method is better suited to capture the personality stereotype in the text than the person. Still, this doesn’t mean we are capturing nothing of actual personality.

How is our model classifying personality? The beautiful, terrible thing about machine learning is we don’t know. The answer may not even have a meaningful translation into human language. However, using interpretable machine learning we can maybe, just maybe, get a glimpse of what was motivating it. LISA is a model that classifies writing based on interpretable features. Unsurprisingly it did a bit worse for our task, interpretable models are less powerful precisely because they have to reduce high dimensional intangible observations into something expressible. However, if you would like to see the top characteristics for predicting each trait according to LISA, see Appendix II. I would emphasise- that it is a different model that we used for our mainline analysis, and that it is important not to overestimate how accurate the assigned labels are for what the machine is ‘really’ capturing. Interpretable machine learning is famously difficult.

Even the lowest scores we achieved- for agreeableness and honesty humility- were very strong results; among the best achieved for those traits, excluding experiments with obvious leakage problems (*). Overall, our strong results are, to say the least, both reason to be interested and reason to be sceptical. I go through Kapoor et al.’s (2024) leakage checklist in Appendix III, and we do appear to have avoided at least the obvious and dramatic forms of leakage. So why were the results so strong? A meta-analysis by Koutsoumpis et al. (2022) shows that our results, while strong, may be less spectacular than they appear. They found that text analysed by the LIWC software was far, far better at predicting personality rated by others. Hence our results, while very strong, maybe closer to incremental for third party ratings specifically.

Recovering affiliation from text on Reddit

You can interpret AUC as follows. Give a classifier two people, one from group A and one from group B. Ask it the probability that each person is from group A. AUC is the probability it will think the person from group A is more likely to be from group A than the person from group B. An AUC=0.5 is equivalent to chance, so in many ways that’s the real floor, not zero, although technically you can do worse.

For our main comparisons I took 300 people from a bunch of subreddits (plus 295 only from casual conversation and 501 from multiple tissue donation subreddits) and looked at how well I could distinguish them. For some comparisons of secondary importance I used samples as small as N=100. As I discuss below this may have suppressed certain effect sizes. Here’s the learning curve for one comparison:

All AUCs are estimates made using held out portions of the sample, using logistic regression. We split the data into fifths, trained the logistic regression on four-fifths of the data, tested it on one fifth. We then repeated the process for every fifth and worked out the AUC of the classifier. Each author’s data was a LUAR embedding, standardised and subjected to a PCA (20 dimensions). The PCA and standardisation was only calculated for the training data to prevent leakage and memorisation. The entire 5-fold procedure was repeated across multiple random splits (10 seeds) and averaged.

LUAR outputs too many dimensions relative to our sample size, threatening overfitting, a solution was needed. In the 19th century authors study I used ridge regression. In the Reddit studies instead, I took those 512 output dimensions and using PCA (Principal Component Analysis) I then reduced the number of dimensions down to 20 and built a classifier using these dimensions. The aim was to get a good AUC (area under the curve) in guessing which of two subreddits people post on.

After I’d conducted all the experiments, I realised that I was throwing away information unnecessarily. Ridge regression to deal with overfitting rather than PCA increased most contrasts by an average of 0.025. About 10% of the gap between our score and perfection in the typical case, nothing to sneeze at. However, I chose not to rerun everything 1. Because of the forking paths issue and 2. Because it would be computationally expensive. This was trivial to find. Think about this when I say the government or a well-funded corpo could beat me by a lot.

All AUC’s are with the text and sample we had available, no disattenuation.

Identifying kidney and bone marrow donors

I have a long-standing interest in altruism prediction. There are subreddits for kidney and bone marrow donors. I could distinguish r/casualconversation users from all tissue donor subreddit users in the sample AUC=0.83. This was in their posts on other subreddits only, of course. If we told these users apart based on their posts on donor subs and Casual Conversation we’d only be detecting differences in how people write on those subreddits themselves- the conventions, special vocabularies etc of those subs. I also scrubbed all posts on medical related subreddits to be sure.

Can our method tell kidney donors apart from bone marrow donors? No, not really. AUC=0.57. This low separability, in my view, justified treating these subs as part of one complex. Note that marrow had a small sample so the error bars on this comparision are relatively wide, though not enormous- about 0.06.

It may well be that part of the signal is general altruism, but it’s not all of it. Our donor sample was quite distinguishable from r/volunteer (AUC=0.81).

I was concerned about the temporal footprints for donors- that their posts may be older than the comparison, and that might telling them apart artificially easy. However, making a smaller group with only recent posters did not change the results. In general, temporal confounding does not appear to be a major issue in our data- most stuff is fairly recent.

Identifying r/raisedbynarcissists users

Can we tell the difference between r/raisedbynarcissist users and r/offmychest posters? This measure would hint, only hint, at tracking biographical information in text. RBN is of course the ‘target’ here, with OMC acting as a control with highish neuroticism and willingness to disclose. Now is this really giving us biography per se? Is it really giving us a unique “this person was, or believes they were, raised by narcissists” signal? Almost certainly not. Posting on RBN and OMC chest is as much about your broader psychology as what has happened to you, or even what you think happened to you. Even allowing that OMC is a relatively good control for RBN, this is likely much more about who the poster is than what happened to them. Still, it’s a cute comparison.

Our classifier results worked but were not strong at distinguishing light posters in each subreddit. When we used the full sample, including merely light users of RBN and OMC we got only AUC=0.64 distinguishability (using off-subreddit posts, as always).

However, LUAR could well tell the difference between heavy Off My Chest (OMC) posters on Reddit, and heavy Raised by Narcissists (RBN) posters (defined as more than 8 posts in the relevant forum) reasonably well. We achieved AUC=0.76 here.

Against the subreddit casual conversation, we were able to achieve somewhat better discrimination, All RBN users in our sample v all CC users in our sample- came out at AUC=0.78. If we used only heavy posters in each (at least eight posts per person) the gap is larger, AUC=0.81.

Identifying r/Socialism users

Now, could the same methods be applied to political surveillance? I am afraid quite possibly.

I aimed to see whether we could distinguish r/socialism users to r/casualconversation users. I was very concerned about the possibility of leakage of political statements driving the results, since I was interested in exploring a particular danger: could these methods be used for political surveillance even when someone isn’t talking about politics? Thus, I applied a heavy scrub of all politically affiliated subreddits before running the analysis. Only posts from users who frequent r/socialism or r/casualconversation posting on apolitical subs were used. I cannot guarantee there was no leakage, of course. AUC in distinguishing r/casualconversation from r/socialism users was 0.88. Light v heavy users of r/socialism didn’t matter much here, interestingly. Now I hurry to add that a lot of this is going to be demographics and subculture leaking through. However, it is an interesting and worrying result.

The distinguishability of r/socialism is not purely a political subs effect; we can split it from r/Conservative quite well at AUC=0.85.

Identifying r/OCD users, and differential diagnosis against Anxiety and Depression

We could distinguish r/OCD users from casual conversation users AUC=0.85. Is this just a generic internalising disorder subreddit signal though? Not entirely, no. OCD v depression gives AUC=0.70. OCD v anxiety gives AUC=0.68.

Good news! At some point in the future there’s probably going to be an annoying fucking nudge that pops up on your screen asking if you need help because a LUAR classifier identified that you’re high on dimensions 12, 201 and 442.

I added a small sample of r/ASPD (anti-social personality disorder) users- the arch externalising disorder (N=104). AUC here was AUC=0.63 for ASPD v depression, AUC=0.67 for ASPD v OCD, AUC=0.72 for ASPD v anxiety, AUC=0.77 for ASPD v casual conversation and AUC=0.89 for ASPD v donors. As many people post on r/ASPD without having the disorder we took steps to include only users apparently claiming to have the disorder. The strong internalising disorder signal makes sense to me. The world wants villains. It’s tempting to think of ASPD sufferers as cool-headed and cruel psychopaths, but people with ASPD are generally quite unhappy and often substance abusers. In the literature, depression and anxiety are extremely comorbid with ASPD.

A passing thought. We build walls to tell us that the suffering of destructive people doesn’t count or shouldn’t disturb us. Ultimately, though, it’s all just agony, mud and injured people injuring people. People will raise two seemingly reasonable defences of writing off people A) Compatibilist free will and B) the dismal results of rehabilitation experiments. But against A I have always responded that the issue is somewhat orthogonal to free will. If you are flagging for opprobrium disproportionately the most injured people something has gone wrong regardless of your metaphysics. Against B I have always thought that we are far from throwing our full biopsychosocial apparatus against the problem, especially as technology advances.

We can’t tell the difference between r/Melbourne and r/Sydney posters

Sydney and Melbourne are the two actual cities of Australia. They both have more than 5 million people, but the population isn’t the key thing, they both have a certain je ne sais quoi. They’re both extremely similar, though Melbourne has a certain insufferable woke vibe and Sydney has a certain insufferable yuppie prick vibe. They, of course, have pretensions to a grave rivalry. I love them both dearly.

This comparison comes up AUC=0.54, with a heavy scrub removing Australian related subs.

Whatever our model is good at, it’s not inferring very specific geography from microlinguistic quirks.

We recover gender very well

Out of curiosity, I decided to replicate the classic results on age and gender classification by language. Our results here were quite typical, AUC=0.84 with a classic corpus of bloggers. Amongst our Victorian writers we recovered it AUC=0.89.

Overall AUC matrix

Below I give the comparision of every sub for which we gathered a decent sized sample, and didn’t use too unusual a methodology for:

Note something important about our methodology here in the above table. We’ve compared people from two communities without overlap but overlap is defined here as have they posted in the other community in their last 100 comments. Thus, a Raised by Narcissists posting Redditor who posted in r/OCD but not within their last 100 posts wouldn’t be picked up. This is likely very slightly decreasing the AUCs and reducing somewhat the power of our experiment.

It is interesting and frankly concerning that OMC has an AUC with r/Depression of 0.54. A depression prevalence study on that sub would be interesting.

These results are already strong, but when you consider that these labels are noisy- that often times whether or not someone posts somewhere depends just as much as whether they stumble upon it as to whether it truly suits them- the underlying effect is likely stronger.

How much of this is just demographics? What are we really recovering?

I would just about guarantee that most of these effects would survive after controlling for age and gender if I had them. Gender and age will vary across these subreddits but not by enough to explain these results. Could sophisticated demographics explain the whole difference? Age, gender, nationality, region, race, education, major, religion, religious participation, occupation and so on? Maybe? I suspect not- having run a lot of logistic regressions in my life. The gaps just seem too big. Even the best attempts to explain personality using demographics explain a fraction of what we got in our author study. However, I can’t rule demography out as the primary cause and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to rely on my judgment, so we will have to content ourselves with saying that the extremely specific behaviour of participating on a particular subreddit is shockingly predictable from writing. That could be for profound psychological reasons, demographic leakage or a combination. Also, even if this is just all going through demography, that’s still terrifying because it suggests that the model is implicitly capturing demography.

But I do think a lot of it is demography. Take r/Coffee and r/Tea. The subs can be distingushed at AUC=0.76. There’s a psychological signal to be sure- going with what is popular in your own culture or making your own way? Likewise, bitter taste preference is [modulo usual replication worries] thought to be linked to things like dark triad traits, openness to experience, extroversion and low-autism like traits. Also, the demography of tea v coffee correlates with psychologically deep features. The model could still be finding the difference by detecting psychology even if those psychological differences casually arise from demography. Overall, though, I would chalk up our relatively good discrimination between these subs as at least consistent with the hypothesis that these results are demography driven. Coffee v tea does not seem to me to be intrinsically deep down in the soul of a person.

Outside our personality results which come with their own complexities, how much of the signal is what it looks like in the maximalist interpretation? That a person was raised by narcissists, is a socialist, is the sort of person who donates tissue or has OCD? That depends on the construct. Almost everyone who posts on those forums has OCD or at least adjacent illness or is a socialist of some sort respectively. However, I suspect the signal is more confounded for the other two. For example, I suspect most people who post on raised by narcissists had bad parents, but that a lot of other machinery is necessary to make you end up there in addition to bad parents, and their parents probably range from the notably imperfect to the staggeringly dreadful. but that is just a guess. Likewise, I suspect the majority of tissue donors might look nothing like those who post on those forums, even though almost everyone who posts on those forums is probably a tissue donor. Even for the strong categories, there are doubtless, e.g., people with OCD who do not show it in their writing and would never in a million-years post on r/OCD.

So: P(posts to subreddit) = (f ( underlying characteristic, self-conception, subreddit discovery, subcultural fit)) + (noise)

With the shape of f radically unknown.

For our 19th century anglophone authors our results are some function of:

1. True information given by style and content in concordance with our judge,

2. True information given by inferred genre in concordance with our judge,

3. False but LLM stereotype tracking information given by style and content,

4. False but LLM stereotype tracking information given by inferred genre,

5. True but not concurring information given by our model from both the genre and style domains. [This one will reduce the relationship]

I cannot help but emphasise that I did all of this with a modest expenditure of thought. Surely optimisation by a team of professionals- or use of a model that is built to do this rather than jerry-rigged from one only intended to fingerprint authors- would greatly improve on these results.

Or find out that I’ve accidentally committed some egregious leakage error….

How bad is this?

I’d say it’s really bad in our current situation. I mean, its great news, if very preliminary, for my desire to resurrect or behaviourally clone John Keats. However, right now, in the year 2026 you might be able to use these techniques to give some clues:

1. As to whether someone had or thinks they had abusive parents

2. As to whether someone is a socialist

3. As to whether someone is, or is likely to, donate tissue

4. As to whether someone has OCD.

The employment discrimination, privacy, legal and political crackdown risks here are staggering.

The civil liberties implications of banning private individuals from doing this are likewise staggering, I cannot in good conscience support that. Yet I cannot help but concede that the implications of leaving this on the table are terrifying. Deidentifying authors is bad enough; this may go far beyond “merely” sticking a name on a pseudonymous author to revealing the character of an author and their entanglements. The compromise is probably restrictions on doing this in a variety of contexts commercially, e.g. hiring, but that only limits the problem. I don’t know what the exact solution is. There is a movement demanding a right to cognitive privacy- e.g. the right not to have your thoughts or personality read via neurotechnology without your informed and fully uncoerced consent. Thus far it basically amounts to a call to regulate who gets put in an fMRI machine. In the limiting case what you have written on the internet, however cautious and risk averse you have been, becomes a threat to your cognitive privacy, no fMRI machine needed. Old data, subject to new analytical methods might reveal far more involuntary specificity than any contemporary brain scan could.

We artificially set prevalence rates in each comparison to 50/50. That certainly makes identifying possible OCD cases or socialists easier than in the real world where these things are rare (lower base rates makes identification harder). I guess there’s some privacy protection there. However, an employer doesn’t need to know you’re on the internalising spectrum to reject your application, they just need to be told “this guy has five times the population risk of having an internalising disorder”. Likewise, the state doesn’t need to know you have a radical belief system to knock at your door and ask some questions. These results are probably already good enough to work with for many purposes, but again if you think a hiring consultant startup, or for that matter Washington or Beijing couldn’t improve on my results massively I have a bridge to sell you.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that I used a language model to help me do this, to gather up the text, fit the model, advise on statistics etc. etc. It would have taken me, conservatively, many months to do this without an LLM, and I probably wouldn’t have bothered because I would not have thought the results would be so strong. That, I think, is what has changed. This has gone from months to a solid afternoon.

I haven’t abused this technology; I’ve just given you a warning. No private data has been published, and the US government didn’t need me to tell it this is possible. I suppose there’s a small risk that I’ve tipped off someone who is now going to work on a startup as a result of reading this blog, but I think the warning is worth the risk. However, I could have abused this technology. I could have picked, say, a living author and told you where she or he fits in this space, giving clues that go far beyond mere HEXACO scores. If I’d picked an author not many people liked, I might have even gotten away with it.

The truth is, I suspect, that a great many terrifying things have been possible for a long time, but have been held back largely because only a tenth of a percent of the population has the technical capacity to do them. Those people mostly have a lot to lose, and some broad sense of humanistic ethics. Every year the intelligence and effort required to, say, maliciously infer that some closeted celebrity is gay from their writings and plaster it over the internet falls.

What the best scientific form of this looks like:

First, of course, pre-registered analyses, using LUAR and other classifiers, with results broken down by classifier type, by comparison and by degree and method of scrubbing (obviously not necessarily trying to exhaust the combination space, that would be resource consuming).

Second, the approach would be modified not to predict sub memberships but answers to questions. “How good a job did your parents do?” “Are you an anxious person?” “Where do you sit on a 0-10 political scale?” “How much do you give to charity a year?” “Where do you live?” and so on.

How badly does non-preregistration affect us? It’s hard to know exactly where to draw the line, but there is not a secret mound of negative results. The negative results are generally reported- e.g. Sydney v Melbourne. Including SEM in the Reddit experiments was not negative per se, but I removed it because the discrimination it added wasn’t worth the complexification of the design and the leakage risk. However, my say-so is not a replacement for doing it properly.

Standing reminder: Our classifier was made to identify who authored a piece of writing, not their attributes. We have jerryrigged it to identify attributes of people, not people. This makes me suspect it could be a lot better.

While these results are strong, I would emphasise that is not the same as them being dependable. I am working alone, save but for an assistant infamous for hallucinating. This project, done with many checks but relatively quickly, spans stylometry, psychology, computer science, digital humanities, statistics and in the section below philosophy and information theory. Work in the computer science of classifiers is notorious for neglected leakages not caught by the design. I think there’s something big here, but then I would think that, wouldn’t I? Caveat lector.

Concluding thoughts

But Philosophy Bear, this is not what you’re about. What’s your real game here? What’s the insane scheme hiding behind your respectable results?

When I was younger, I read:

I weep for Adonais—he is dead!

O, weep for Adonais! though our tears

Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!

And I took that personally. It was the granite finality of death, and the separation of the living and the dead which always shocked me. In that shock was the first beginnings of rejection, though I did not yet know it. That rejection blossomed once I realised that information theoretic death is less certain than it appears. That compounded with a straight-line mindset I’ve always had. It always seemed unfair that Keats died at 25 in the papal states. What do we do when something is unfair? We fix it. The angel of history is trying to open his wings and resurrect the dead but a storm is blowing in from paradise? We should help angel-bro out.

If the psychological continuity theory of personal identity over time is correct, and I believe it is out best theory, it is in principle possible to resurrect the dead if you can recover the necessary information. There’s another requirement here which is that the psychological continuity through causal connection be of the right sort. However I am inclined to be permissive in this regard. I think that a teletransportation device doesn’t kill you, or rather I agree with Parfit that metaphysics aside it does not undermine what matters. Recreation in a particular way because that’s what you were like and the information has carried over seems like survival in the sense that matters ethically to me(*).

I wanted to play this One Weird Trick on evil, I wanted to turn it into good, an idea with an ancient provenance. Consider Julian of Norwich. The best gloss I can give, regarding Julian of Norwich, is that she does not seem to have been, exactly speaking, a universalist- someone who believes all will be saved. However, she also didn’t believe that anything evil was going to stand permanently, and her heart told her that anyone being in hell permanently was evil. Hence, she thought, based on a vision she had, that God was going to play some unimaginable trick, choose some possibly incomprehensible third option, which he had not yet revealed. She writes: “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Sin is ultimately for the best for everyone- merely an apparent evil that would be swallowed up, proven an illusion. Evil, then, is much like a Gargoyle makes a church ultimately prettier.

So, the insane dream is to, in an apparently godless universe, play a similar trick. The retrospective annihilation of evil through incorporation. The transformation of adverse experiences into the enabling condition of a future existence in a human made paradise. If John Keats hadn’t died of tuberculosis, then the John Keats we recreate in an unimaginable future wouldn’t be the same guy. Hence the evils that happened to him would not merely be outweighed but turned to his own good. To be fair I do not think this would be in the strictest sense a defeat of evil- it would only be a defeat of evil in the very limited sense that it is defeated for the exact persons living in utopia (hopefully, all persons who have ever lived, technology at technological maximum permitting). From a person independent perspective, a utopia reached with no suffering would be overall better. Thus, it is more subversion than defeat- but a subversion is something.

The truth of what a vast intelligence at technological maximum could bring about is unknown. However, I suspect if primitive methods can uncover as much information as we can, the ceiling on what can be recovered re: Keats is high (high enough? Very unclear). The greatest problem is the horrific inequity. Even if you could recreate John Keats, what about the anonymous farmers who made him his bread or the midwife who delivered him? Still, it would be nice to correct the injustices that happened to that poor fellow, even if recovery the butcher the baker and the candlestick maker from the same era is a pipe dream. And it may not be a pipe dream, the question of how much is recoverable about each person who ever lived at technological maximum is, while not encouraging, unknown. Perhaps there is a way to get at John Keat’s midwife, or Lucy on her savannah. Secret traces. If there isn’t, we must do what we can with what we have.

How difficult is the inverse problem? Consider the genuinely non-redundant information about a person of the sort that has some moral weight in deciding whether someone is really you- the core that cannot be compressed. It does include memories you muse over sometimes. It doesn’t include the sorts of things that change flippantly from day to day. Imagine it as a great string of ordered ones and zeros. Compression means no combination of 1s or 0s predicts any other, no matter how much you know about how humans work in general. The minimum description length of a soul. Various back of the envelope calculations I’ve done- doubly confounded by both normative and positive uncertainty- have suggested a figure of about 1 million bits (with limited forms of survival possible with far less than that). However, I won’t try to defend that here.

There’s about 350,000 surviving words by Keats. This amounts to about 6 million plus bits to encode. But there’s vast information also contained within his genome, accounts of him by others, his historical context [this is very very useful- it smashes the required information, gives us strong priors for his memories etc.] There are probably tens of millions of bits of useful directly relevant information available. Perhaps even hundreds. The total is going to depend on what we designate as the threshold of direct relevancy as much as anything. But alas, tens of millions of bits of information useful for reconstructing a person does not equal tens of millions of bits of non-redundant and relevant information about what a person was like. For one thing, our countless bits from JK are not compressed, 6 million bits is merely the length the corpus is currently encoded at. That information could be expressed without loss more succinctly so there’s far less there than appears. More troubling though is the fact that some facts about a person have such a faint and confounded effect on a corpus of writing that they might not show up. Some psychological bits, including ones of trivial importance, will be attested again and again, others might not traceably influence writing even if you wrote a trillion words.

But there’s a bit of good news here we might call Keats’s correlation:

The more causally central something is to someone’s behaviour, the easier it is to detect in writing, and the more central it is to whether a putative psychological continuer counts as survival.

People often respond with the reasonable objection that there could be some part of your psyche that you meditate on constantly, that shapes your identity, but that you essentially never express in behaviour, however subtly. I simply do not find this plausible. If something is guiding you or eating away at you, you will show it.

What about memory, the most difficult of our reconstructive targets? McAdams et al. (2006) ask people for ten critical memories three times, three years apart. On average 1.72 memories overlap from each set of 10 during the first and last measurement. Using standard capture/recapture techniques from biology this suggests 58 core memories per person. Chapman corrected this is 44. But the populations probably aren’t stable – their results partly reflect people reinventing their own story. Moreover, their methodology artificially restricts the number of memories that can be recalled (5 categories, max 2 per category). Also, the subjects were in their early twenties. Finally, there is likely a population of important memories which are below the top tier invoked by the study but that you’d strongly prefer not to lose. So let’s add on an order of magnitude. 500 is probably a safe cap for the average person’s total genuinely important autobiographical memories; the ones you’d cry tears of terror (or joy) to lose.

Now let’s say memories, or their genuinely autobiographically important bits anyway, are coded at a luxurious 200 compressed bits per memory. This is a magnanimous estimate given just how good compression can be and how hazy memory is. That’s 100,000 bits in total for important autobiographical memories, using figures that I don’t think anyone could call stingy. But alas, a relatively small size doesn’t guarantee recoverability.

At the end we’re faced with a sequence of great unanswerable questions:

A) How much information do you need to replicate a person? Or, if we sensibly refuse to treat this as falsely categorical, what’s the incredibly complex function from all the various types of information about a person to their degree of survival? This is a normative question in slender disguise, not a factual one. I’ve already given my guess, about a million bits with really good compression, with limited forms of survival possible with far less than that. I would put an absolute maximum bound on it though; the bits of psychology that are typically stable over a night’s sleep. We don’t die every morning.

B) What portion of the various types of information about a person- from memory to personality- are contained within the surviving information, and in what ratio between types?

C) Even if the information is in there in some sense, is it possible that the inverse problem is just too hard?

So in lieu of the vast webs of data we could construct through the unknown reasoning engines and unknown scanners of an unimaginable future, trying to solve the unimaginably difficult inverse problem of the reconstruction of the soul in the skull, I poke around at what one can achieve with a desktop computer, Gutenburg press and a Reddit comment history.

But I can at least propose the idea, make you imagine it, seed it into your dreams. Consider my proposition: if someone is, however surprisingly, not yet lost beyond saving, then we should try.

Footnotes

(*)- While writing this, I read one study which I won’t name that trained and tested on comments by the same authors. The model was effectively able to guess ‘personality’ then by reconstructing authorship. This was published in 2025 in a reasonably prestigious journal. This should not be happening.

(*)- “But what if we make ten John Keats, which one is really him”. The literature has a perfectly good answer to this in my view. If this happens there are ten people, all called John Keats which share a temporal part in 19th century John Keats. All of them are survivors from the 19th century. It’s the temporal equivalent of conjoined twins who share part but not all of a body, with some parts clearly “theirs” and other parts “shared”.

Appendix I: Facet scores for Victorian authors study

Note that no confidence intervals cross zero, better than I would have possibly hoped for. Median disattenuated variance captured per facet is 42.3%, mean 41.5%.

There is a strong negative correlation between how well we estimate trait scores from prose, and how much aggregation helps that trait, we are less good our initial measurement, the more it helps (r=-0.9, due to the effect size significant even with N=6, p=0.016)

This provides modest additional evidence for the claim that our emotionality score might be inflated by invalidity (perhaps focused on writing stereotypes) because measuring it more validly reduces the score.

How our ridge regression captured facet scores:

Appendix II

Top LISA dimensions for each trait (interpretable). Note that the LISA dimensions were run full sample. However, test train leakage is irrelevant here. We’re not trying to optimise classification or fit a regression- we’re just trying to show the descriptive lay of the land by listing first order correlates.

Honesty-Humility — no indicators of power (−0.32), not committed (−0.28), not able to think strategically (−0.28), not determined (−0.26), no strong and aggressive language (−0.25), conveys no sense of authority and confidence (−0.25), indicates no level of commitment (−0.24), not able to act with authority (−0.24).

Emotionality — elongated words (+0.60), whimsical (+0.56), expressing hope (+0.56), filler words (+0.55), metaphor to express feelings (+0.54), words expressing fulfilment (+0.54), not emphasising the importance of the information conveyed (−0.53), suggestive language (+0.52).

Extraversion — not describing the subject of the passage (−0.36), not providing detailed explanations (−0.36), not terse (−0.35), tone of exasperation (+0.34), not open to further discussion (−0.32), could not restructure sentences (−0.32), not painting a vivid picture (−0.32), strong and aggressive language (+0.31).

Agreeableness — creates a vivid image (+0.31), mindful of environment (+0.30), could improve grammar and punctuation (+0.29), expressing joy and enthusiasm (+0.29), referring to a male person or animal (+0.28), paying attention to surroundings (+0.28), words creating a vivid and engaging atmosphere (+0.28), focused on enjoyment and relaxation (+0.28).

Conscientiousness — no swear words (−0.46), no uncommon phrases (−0.46), not unable to control anger (−0.45), no cold tones (−0.40), no derogatory language (−0.40), no slang (−0.40), no distinct and memorable style (−0.40), not insensitive (−0.40).

Openness to Experience — not taking appropriate action (−0.54), words related to allure (+0.52), magnetising readers (+0.50), not focusing on the positive aspects (−0.49), does not show respect (−0.49), expresses interest (+0.49), interested in the topic (+0.48), no good understanding of the situation (−0.48).

Appendix III: Kapoor et al. (2024) machine learning checklist, leakage section:

This is for the Victorian author’s study.

6a) Train-test separation is maintained: Met. We used ridge regression on held out folds. Steps taken in sample include feature standardisation, target rank transform (training ranks, test mapped by interpolation), genre PCA, ridge alpha selection. Steps that were taken full sample include picking the 60 most common genre terms and then handpicking the terms that were actually genre terms and not, e.g. “British Author”. However, neither of these could be vicious in effect and regardless, only applied to the genre incremental validity study. Everything else was, as far as I can tell, done within fold. Technically the disattenuation constants were also calculated outside of fold, but this is harmless.

6b) Dependencies or duplicates between datasets handled appropriately: Met, our held out folds were of authors and all their passages; not passages scattered across authors.

6c) Feature legitimacy: Met, the only features used were text. There is perhaps a very faint worry here that specifically autobiographical text- a very small portion of our dataset, might have leaked through into the regression content about what happened to the person. For example quarrelsome words in an autobiography reflecting lots of fights in a life. But I consider this a fairly remote risk. For most authors we did not have an autobiography, and even if we did, it would form a small part of each author’s centroid.

Appendix IV

A final thought in the spirit of Susan Haack’s work. We set out to validate a regression from classifier features to personality, using Claude as a criterion, but several features of the experiment provide some validation for Claude in the foundherentist model of a crossword- initial plausibility followed by cross-support. First the fact that we were able to converge on the scores given by our regression so well. Second the extremely good correlation (0.9 for the lowest facet) between facet score means and the overall domain rating.

One next step would be to see how well Claude’s scores converge with literary scholars and biographers. The accuracy of Claude’s ratings is independently interesting.

Notes found after study

1. There’s a mechanical upward bias in the disattenuation figures for the Victorian authors study- the disattenuation is based on the centroid of the authors but ridge regression downweights unreliable components leading to moderately lower disattenuated figures for openness and emotionality. Also my disattenuation model is wrong. I treated it as a traditional: (true score+error) model from classical test theory but much of the variance is between texts, of which there is a very finite population for each author. Our disattenuation estimates are, after all is said and done, substantially overestimated for most traits.

2. Running in the other direction, I underestimated just how limited by sample size we are. The ridge regression results continue rising in N quite rapidly up to N=199, suggesting that if we had, say, 800 authors, our results would likely be much better.

Maybe I’m just a narrow-minded bag of spite but as a philosopher there’s nothing I hate more than the moment when people who aren’t philosophers decide to wax philosophical.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it when non-philosophers think about and do philosophy. However, there’s a particular mode of “engagement” with the discipline that I hate. Its pernicious features are:

1. Deflecting from hard thinking about specifics and domain knowledge

2. Detaching from anything with empirical or practical content often at the moment these things are most needed.

3. Keying on words and concepts with no shared understanding. Many of these words, often gestures towards complexity and heterogeneity, are coded “good” while others, often markers of simplicity and homogeneity, are coded “bad”.

4. Waxing philosophical is a real favourite of bigwigs and effectively a status flex. “Being allowed to wax philosophical” is often a sign you’ve “made it”, and it can also serve a protective function allowing those of high status to avoid specific commitments.

5. Fundamentally, it is a sign that the topic is not being taken seriously, even if the speaker themselves doesn’t realise it. With some exceptions, people don’t tend to “wax philosophical” about topics they’re genuinely anxious to get right.

The first two features are almost always present. The third feature usually is present. The last two are often absent but tend to travel with the pack as a function of who has most use of these tricks, and who we permit to use them.

Examples

Some examples:

The editor of a journal is giving a keynote talk. They touch on some recent results on the unreliability of peer review and proposals for change. Across many examples and with much waffling they effectively give the line: “but what does quality even mean, really?” Not as a prelude to an answer, followed by sketching out implementation steps. Rather they say it as reassurance that it’s all terribly difficult to think about but there’s probably nothing to worry about.

Someone on Substack is asked a question about the economic impacts of AI. Rather than answering it they start talking about whether AI is “truly intelligent” referencing ideas that look a bit like Searle’s Chinese Room argument, plus an argument that AI can never be “truly creative” because it recombines things. Stochastic parrots and so on are invoked. All this would be fine if there were specific empirical claims that haven’t yet been falsified being made. However, no specific predictions regarding the task limitations of AI are given.

A senior advisor to the minister is quizzed on some technical points of a policy which, while tightly defined, might have enormous leverage. Rather than engaging he invokes a set of vaguely management adjacent ideas, talks about policy defensibility, and invokes strategy aligned language like “the government’s core priorities”. [I recognise the need for realism here: we have put very strong expectations on the minister’s assistant to not say anything too stupid. He’s just rationally responding to those incentives. It doesn’t make this pattern less dangerous though.]

Someone has a concrete and quite compelling case they’ve been treated unfairly. The response, from those accused of unfair treatment is, hey, haven’t many people been treated unfairly? Isn’t the world unfair? Aren’t the causes all very complex?

Another field bigwig is giving a keynote in, say, psychology. He gives a series of box-and-arrow-diagrams between abstractions, relating to say, methodology in biological psychology. None of it is new but the bigger problem is that none of it allows anyone to sink their teeth into reality.

A self-appointed methodologist of social science talks at length about emergence, holism, embodiedness, reflexivity and so on. No specific claims are made about what works except perhaps that we should be more emergentist, holistic, embodied and reflexive. Kuhn’s probably going to be in there somewhere. Stretch goal is a mention of “ways of knowing”, “plural knowledges” etc. Sophistication is both the validation metric and the goal.

The physical scientist talks about Popper. We’ll just leave it at that- don’t even get me started on this.

“When you think about it, experts have often been wrong, who is to say vibes aren’t better”. Given as an argument with no specific theory about why the experts might be wrong in this case, no clear articulation of inductive features associated with being right and wrong among experts, no clear expression of the rival theoretical basis to expertise in this case etc.

Part of the danger here is that the reflex often clicks in precisely when it shouldn’t. It clicks in when the stakes are high but it’s hard to see the good or bad outcomes. If our editor at a journal was accused of fraud, sexism, collusion or provable incompetence in who he published, he’d take it very seriously. But because he’s giving a talk on tracking quality, he doesn’t care. This is because it’s really hard to prove you’ve fucked selection quality up and even if you have so has everyone else. When people are talking about the future- e.g. with my large language model example- they often turn to philosophising. This is because they can only be held accountable for their mistakes here in the future which is A) time discounted and B) people will have usually forgotten you said it by then anyway.

How to avoid it

In sum waxing philosophical is bad because 1) It’s typically bad philosophy 2) Given when philosophy isn’t what’s called for. Philosophy is helpful for almost any complex task but doing high level philosophy instead of what’s in front of you is far from helpful.

How to avoid waxing philosophical? Generally speaking:

1. Drawing a lot out of a small number of abstract principles is a bit like drawing blood out of a stone. It can be a sign of a great miracle - some of the greatest ideas in the canon are like this - or it can be a sign of fraud.

2. If you are talking about an empirical topic, your argument should generally have implications for what we will observe, and the more specific the better. If you’re talking about a practical topic, your argument should generally have implications for what we should do. These implications should genuinely follow from what you’ve said and not just be shoehorned on.

3. Look for the dance. Generally, good reasoning that uses abstractions moves back and forth between the concrete and the abstract.

4. You should keep track of how vague your terms are. There are no clear rules here. All terms are vague: there are no practically discoverable necessary and sufficient conditions for anything except stipulated terms outside mathematics is about as close to a substantive and established result as anything philosophy has ever proved. Adding little potted definitions generally won’t help. The “Webster’s dictionary defines…” guy is reviled for a reason. But try to keep an eye on your vagaries and clarify where necessary.

5. Break the status reflex where people are allowed to wax philosophical if they’re high enough status. As an audience member, you should ask yourself “would I tolerate this level of high-falutin abstraction and manner of thought from a postdoc, less famous writer, or less senior personage”. If the answer is no, that’s at least a sign that you shouldn’t be tolerating it from the more senior personage. Yes, in certain contexts there might sometimes be good reasons to allow greater abstraction from the more senior figures. Vague impressions about what works and what doesn’t might be more valuable from someone with a lifetime of doing things. For the most part, however, symmetry is the best rule. Sometimes, to be sure, you should resolve the inconsistency in the other direction and develop greater tolerance towards high-flautin rhetoric from the postdoc, the less famous writer or the less senior personage.

6. You should be clear about the marginal claim you are making - what is distinct about your position or argument. A lot of the time there’s not going to be anything strictly original in your argument but that doesn’t mean it lacks a marginal contribution “we all know X, but I don’t think we’ve fully metabolised its implications”, “position Y has been unjustly neglected” are all perfectly valid marginal contributions as is “I don’t think enough people understand Z, so I’m explaining it”.

7. Recognise that, unfortunately, the undesirable pattern I am speaking of is vague and hard to pin. There are plenty of things that look superficially like they have the features of waxing philosophical but are intellectually important. Picking an example at random, the elaboration of the various classes of construct reliability in early psychometrics could have been skewered as vague pseudo philosophy by a cruel critic at the time (I’m sure some operationalist rear guarder did exactly this). However, they weren’t pseudo philosophy, they were incredibly important and concrete contributions to methodology. My own PhD thesis has a section on Babylonian versus Euclidean methodology, and I think it’s loadbearing enough to earn its place. The finest test is “does it do something” but do and something are vague terms here. Ultimately you just have to git gud.

8. Also, confusingly, there’s an opposite failure mode where you avoid dealing with the real questions by bogging down in irrelevant concreta. In this failure mode you erroneously focus on considerations that answer a question very well and specifically but the wrong question. Good luck out there!

Discussions around AI are particularly bad when it comes to this sort of thing, they formed one of my examples but could have formed dozens. In working out what AI is going to do, it is vital not to substitute philosophy of mind or language for concrete thought about the architecture, capacities and trajectory of large language models. There are critics out there- I won’t name them, but people connected to the field will know who I’m talking about- who have predicted on more or less a priori grounds that large language models will never do anything interesting. This might have been borderline acceptable in 2022 before Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners came out. Since then, large language models have been able to do things moreover they have been able to do more and more over time. “I am making a concrete prediction that large language models will never X for reasons Y” is a totally acceptable thing to say. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere for vaguely Chinese room adjacent reasons” is nonsense, they’ve already done useful things so they’ve already gone somewhere. The interesting question is what well-specified bounds there are on their capacities- trying to draw the perimeter of what they will and will never be able to do. Some of these critics even make a point of not using the models.

I’d also say waxing philosophical can be an incredibly dangerous thing to do on a personal level, although it’s hard to prove. How many times in a movie does the protagonist justify some pivotal choice with a string of pseudo-profound bullshit? Some deepity or maxim that sounds nice for two seconds, if that. Indeed, the person who tries to think hard about important choices is satirised. I believe, though I cannot prove, that this disastrous approach is not just present on the silver screen, but has become ingrained in the habits of many.

It’s the end of the article so it’s time for the conflict-of-interest declaration. As a philosopher, I must concede a conflict. Of course, it bothers me that what I have trained my entire life to do is treated as an evasive manoeuvre, a bit of frisson, or a sophistication signal. It bothers me even more that the market for philosophy is flooded with this junk. Am I then just an angry cartel member pushing for occupational licencing through social censure? No, I don’t think so. I love it when people do philosophy. Properly, carefully, not jumping from similar vibe to similar vibe, not as a low effort flourish and not as a replacement for trying to improve our world.

It is not an exaggeration to say the ideas we will be considering are anti-memetic in the context of daily life (even as they are massively memetic as purely theoretical ideas). That is, they are structurally difficult to remember. Everyone knows the words; everyone knows that they’re supposed to be at the core of each tradition. Nevertheless, they’re always first forgotten in practice, even while readily quoted and professed. If these principles were purely forgotten in practice, anti-memetic might not be the right word, just hard to follow. However, they are conspicuously also forgotten in practical moral discourse and judgments. As many, many people have wondered: how much ink has been spilt on homosexuality, adultery and copies of the ten commandments in schools, and how little on the rate of charitable donations, volunteering, or how many people would show up for a suicidal friend? The pattern is the ideas show up in theory, are present but much, much diminished in practical moral writing, and tend to vanish in social enforcement and day to day life.

I would postulate five reasons why memory fails when it comes to these principles:

A) Many of the principles we will be considering are hard to formulate in sharp lines, and especially sharp lines that can be enforced by others. “No drinking” or “No adultery” are, some edge cases excepted, pretty easily defined, and at least relatively easily enforced. But who shall levy a fine for insufficient love? On what scale is it to be measured? That’s the kinder reading of why we forget these rules. The less kind readings include:

B) It’s difficult to accumulate status by following these rules. An even less kind interpretation:

C) It can be difficult to weaponize these principles against others in the context of status games, at least relative to other kinds of accusations of moral failure- such as accusations of sexual immorality (1):

D) These warnings often tell against the favoured sins of the powerful. Thus, integration into a power-order tends to suppress them and:

E) Many of these principles be taken arbitrarily far. For many reasons people want ethics to be a box they can tick, a discrete list of requirements. When something goes beyond this, we tend to ignore it or pay lip service.

What follows is no “concordance of the religions”. The different traditions on the list vary in many ways. Judaism is particularist in ways the others aren’t. Islam has a practical flavour. It was created in the context of governing a state- that perhaps makes it somewhat more martial and comfortable with the practical administration of legal codes (2) than the others. Daoism is universalist, but it is not exactly a moralising religion like the others. However, while it is suspicious of morality (“heaven and earth are not humane) it may have been less suspicious if “morality” in its intellectual context wasn’t defined by Confucianism. When Laozi rejects the humaneness of heaven and earth, he may simply be rejecting the idea that Heaven is a Confucian and asserting Heaven is neither particularist nor a respecter of tradition. A loose analogy (somewhat unfair to Confucianism); think about the difference between what a humanitarian means by morality, and what a fainting Victorian means by morality. Perhaps it’s the latter that the Daodejing is rejecting. Thus, it may be that reactance drove Daoism away from being a universalist ethic religion in the strictest sense.

I am fully cognizant 1. of the dangers of putting different religious traditions into a superficial correspondence. 2. That “all religions are saying the same thing!” is a classic trap for midwits (at best). 3. That any study of many traditions across many axes will inevitably make mistakes. 4. That not all these religions and philosophies would agree with all points exactly as worded. 5. That every religion and philosophy quoted is full of internal divergences. 6. That my phrasing and selection is shaped by my own and contextual concerns as all such curations must be. 7. That the selection nakedly selects my own moral preferences and, worse, needs. 8. That I have been selective in what religions and philosophies I have included due to limits of time and space. Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, the Yoruba religious tradition, modern philosophic Humanism like that of Mill, and the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, each hold many of these points (perhaps in some cases, all). Mohism was part of an earlier draft. Most damningly of all: 9. Although these points are genuinely overlapping between the religions and philosophies, the canny reader will reconstruct that Christianity was clearly my central prototype, despite my own atheism. I also note, again, that Daoism is perhaps a more partial fit than the others, and that Confucianism and Mohism would have been a fit for some points but pull away hard from others. This is comparative religion with an axe to grind, you have been warned.

Eighteen forgotten pleas (3)

1. Love is the foundation of everything worthwhile. (4)

2. There are always various excuses for the moral usefulness of hate, they are always or almost always wrong.

3. Rules have uses but can never substitute for the love of others and the good.

4. You should be less demanding of others than yourself.

5. But you do not have the right to be cruel to yourself.

6. Beware moral grandstanding. All grandstanding really, but especially moral.

7. We have always made many excuses for thinking certain kinds of people don’t matter. They’re all wrong.

8. Anger is profoundly dangerous. What we would now think of as disgust and contempt directed towards persons is even more dangerous.

9. Being good is meant to help, if it’s not helping, you’re probably doing it wrong.

10. Beware self-deception

11. Beware wealth and especially the love of wealth

12. Beware every excuse for making things about yourself

13. We drastically underestimate the frequency, harm and moral severity of many kinds of wrongful speech

14. Everyone, every single person, matters. (5)

15. Do not glory in the pain or destruction of the wrongdoer

16. Forgive.

17. The young, the old, the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, the orphan, the widow, the stranger in a strange land, in two words, the vulnerable, all have special claim to your affection, time, resources and courage.

18. Do not seek to gain status by being good.

Postscript

As you can likely tell, I agree with all these points. I think we should take them up. I think the failure of even rightly motivated people to pay attention to them is a cause of much suffering today. Even while we have made many moral advances, these points are systematically neglected. This is especially true now that they no longer have a strong champion in religion, for all the many flaws of religion, and the heartaches it has caused.

That doesn’t mean these principles are sufficient. For example, the great religions were perhaps more critical than the world-of-their-time of slavery. They restricted slavery in many ways, and one can detect within them more than a twinge of unease about the subject. Nevertheless, not one of the traditions discussed condemned slavery in all cases in a canonical source up until the church father St Gregory of Nyssa in the 300’s (if one even counts him as canonical).

Even today, the interpretation of these principles is far from perfect. For example, I endorse the spirit of the Jewish prohibition on Lashon Hara -evil speech- but in practice the letter is too strict. This has led to some tragic cases.

Another important caveat- strong statements about forgiveness are right but must be paired with a practical commitment to managing wrongdoing. Still, “bending the stick” towards forgiveness in every domain from criminal justice to our social lives is, I think just, kind and purdent.

And yet, all caveats aside, I have found that the principles underlying the list- love, attention to the other, anti-legalism- are among the best for conferring meaning on a life.

The moral case for these principles has been made many time. Let me briefly sketch the prudential case. Not to forgive, is as the buddha said, like clutching a hot coal or drinking poison and hoping it will hurt the other person. Living by strict rules rather than their spirit is like trying to climb a mountain with a backpack full of lead ingots- go spend some time with a person afflicted by moralistic OCD if you want to see the logical extreme (I would know). Only caring, or only thinking, about yourself, induces anxiety in the same way as being on a stormy sea atop a small raft. Death or incapacity can befall you at any time, and if you care only for yourself, you have no consolation that the world will go on without you and no projects to postdate your death- thus you will indeed be alone in the most fragile vessel imaginable. Hating others, excluding classes of people, not caring about the vulnerable, shrinks your moral universe and insults the very same clay you are made of. Being a boaster makes it harder to see the beauty in the world and other people around you. What these principles, rightly interpreted offer in a prudential sense is joy and security.

Any revival could only ever be partial for the reason I outlined- the anti-memetic property. However, even within these limitations, these principles have done wonderful things and they could do so again. I don’t know what a revival of these ideas in a secular world looks like, but I would be excited to find out.

Footnotes

(1)- A big part of A, B and C is third party unverifiability.

(2)- Judaism is an interesting contrast case re: legal codes. Yes, it has them, but when it comes to enforcing the severe criminal codes, it gets very squeamish. “It is a bloody Sanhedrin that executes one man in seventy years”. It may even be that no Sanhedrin in a lineage that gave rise to modern Judaism ever executed anybody.

(3) Some of these will overlap. Like many of the religious texts I quote, I’m more focused on trying to convey the points then avoid overlapping bits of logical space.

(4)- “But what about the state”, says the realist “isn’t that a moral enterprise not founded on love”. “Exactly, what about the state?” replies the earnestly religious “An unmitigated disaster if there ever was one”. “Okay, what’s the alternative?” says the realist. Here, typically, the religious person has no answer, except a hope that one day love will hold the keys to the kingdom. But that hope, even if vague, is not inert.

(5)-This one is not surprising, since my class is universalist religions.

Sources

1: Avot 1:2; Sifra, Kedoshim on Leviticus 19:18; 1 Corinthians 13:1–3; Sahih al-Bukhari 13; Sahih Muslim 45; Itivuttaka 27; Bhagavad Gita 12:13–14; Meditations 7.31; Hierocles, fragments in Stobaeus, Anthology 4.84.20–23; Daodejing 67

2: Leviticus 19:17–18; Exodus 23:4–5; Matthew 5:43–48; Romans 12:19–21; Quran 41:34; Quran 5:8; Dhammapada 1, verses 3–5; Bhagavad Gita 12:13; De Ira 1.12; Meditations 6.6; Daodejing 63; Daodejing 68

3: Shabbat 31a; Makkot 24a; Sifra, Kedoshim on Leviticus 19:18; Micah 6:8; Matthew 22:36–40; Matthew 23:23–24; 1 Corinthians 13:1–3; Mark 2:27; Sahih al-Bukhari 1; Quran 2:177; Quran 22:37; Majjhima Nikaya 22; Anguttara Nikaya 3.65; Bhagavad Gita 2:42–46; Bhagavad Gita 4:33; Bhagavad Gita 17:11–13; Epistulae Morales 94–95; Daodejing 38

4: Avot 1:6; Avot 2:4; Matthew 7:1–5; Quran 49:12; Sahih Muslim 2699; Dhammapada 50; Dhammapada 252–253; Kabir Granthavali, sakhi beginning “Bura jo dekhan main chala…”; Meditations 10.30; Zhuangzi, “Man in the World” (especially the recomendation to perfect yourself before trying to correct the wrongdoer).

5: Taanit 11a; Bava Kamma 90b; Colossians 2:23; 1 Corinthians 6:19–20; Sahih al-Bukhari 1975; Quran 2:185; Samyutta Nikaya 56.11; Bhagavad Gita 17:5–6; Bhagavad Gita 6:16–17; Epistulae Morales 5; Meditations 5.9; Zhuangzi, “Ingrained ideas” (the first defective way of life represents asceticism).

6: Bava Batra 9b; Proverbs 21:14; Matthew 6:1–6; Matthew 6:16–18; Quran 107:4–6; Quran 2:264; Dhammapada 73–74; Vinaya Pacittiya 8; Bhagavad Gita 17:18; Enchiridion 46; Meditations 5.6; Daodejing 22; Daodejing 77

7: Leviticus 19:33–34; Bava Metzia 59b; Luke 10:25–37; Matthew 25:31–46; Qur’an 49:13; Qur’an 5:8; Musnad Ahmad 22978/23489; Sutta Nipata 1.7; Majjhima Nikaya 93; Bhagavad Gita 5:18 (but see: 18:41–48); Bhagavad Gita 9:32 (with clear limitations in the text); Epistulae Morales 47; Discourses 1.9; Daodejing 49; Zhuangzi, “The Seal of Virtue Complete”

8: Shabbat 105b; Nedarim 22a; Matthew 5:22; James 1:20; Sahih al-Bukhari 6116; Sahih Muslim 2564; Dhammapada 221–223; Majjhima Nikaya 21; Bhagavad Gita 2:62–63; Bhagavad Gita 16:21; De Ira 1.1–12; Meditations 11.18; Daodejing 63; Daodejing 68

9: Deuteronomy 6:24; Proverbs 3:17; Yoma 85b; Mishneh Torah, Sabbath 2:3; Mark 2:27; Matthew 9:13; Sahih al-Bukhari 39; Samyutta Nikaya 47.19; Anguttara Nikaya 4.95; Bhagavad Gita 3:20; Bhagavad Gita 2:50; De Vita Beata 3–4; Daodejing 8; Daodejing 81

10: Jeremiah 17:9; Psalm 19:13; 1 John 1:8; Galatians 6:3; Qur’an 31:33 / 35:5; Ihya Ulum al-Din, Book 30; Majjhima Nikaya 15; Anguttara Nikaya 10.51; Bhagavad Gita 3:6; Bhagavad Gita 18:32; De Ira 3.36; Epistulae Morales 28.9–10; Daodejing 33; Daodejing 71

11: Ecclesiastes 5:10; Avot 2:7; Matthew 19:23–24; Matthew 6:24; Quran 102:1–2; Quran 9:34–35; Dhammapada 355; Katha Upanishad 1.1.27; Bhagavad Gita 16:13–15; Epistulae Morales 2; 18; 87; Enchiridion 44; Daodejing 9; Daodejing 44; Daodejing 46; Daodejing 81

12: Avot 2:8; Micah 6:8; Philippians 2:3–4; Luke 14:7–11; Quran 31:18; Sahih Muslim 91; Samyutta Nikaya 22.89; Dhammapada 74; Bhagavad Gita 3:27; Bhagavad Gita 2:47; Enchiridion 48; Meditations 4.19; Daodejing 7; Daodejing 22; Daodejing 66; Daodejing 67

13: Arakhin 15b; Proverbs 18:21; James 3:1–12; Matthew 12:36–37; Jami at-Tirmidhi 2616; Quran 49:11–12; Samyutta Nikaya 45.8; Dhammapada 133; Bhagavad Gita 17:15; Enchiridion 33; Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.23; Daodejing 81; Zhuangzi, “The Human World”

14: Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5; Avot 3:14; Matthew 25:40; Luke 15:3–7; Quran 5:32; Quran 17:70; Sutta Nipata 1.8; Udana 5.1; Isha Upanishad 6; Bhagavad Gita 6:29–30; Discourses 1.13; Meditations 4.4

15. Berakhot 10a ; Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5; Proverbs 24:17–18; Avot 4:19; Job 31:29–30; Ezekiel 18:23 / 33:11; Megillah 10b / Sanhedrin 39b; Luke 9:51–56; Jude 9; Sahih al-Bukhari 3231; Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra 6.87–89; Dhammapada 201; Nāgārjuna, Ratnāvalī 4.31–37; Yoga Sutras 1.33; Bhagavad Gita 6:9; Rāmāyaṇa, Yuddha Kāṇḍa 6.111.102; Epictetus, Discourses 1.18; De Ira 1.15–16; Meditations 6.6; Daodejing 74; Daodejing 62; Zhuangzi, “The Seal of Virtue Complete” (the described mutilations are judicial)

16. Genesis 50:15–21; Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 2:10; Megillah 28a; Micah 7:18–19; Matthew 18:21–35; Matthew 6:14–15; Mark 11:25; Ephesians 4:32; Colossians 3:13; Luke 23:34; Sahih al-Bukhari 3477; Quran 24:22; Quran 42:40–43; Quran 3:134; Quran 12:92; Vinaya, Mahavagga X.2; Anguttara Nikaya 2.21; Digha Nikaya 2; Mahabharata, Vana Parva 27–29; Bhagavad Gita 16:3; Enchiridion 42; Meditations 7.22 (strictly speaking Stoics aren’t supposed to forgive, but avoid harshness of feeling or punishment to begin with); Daodejing 79

17. Exodus 22:21–24; Deuteronomy 10:18–19; Isaiah 1:17; Job 29:12–16; Sotah 14a; Gittin 61a; Matthew 25:34–40; Luke 14:12–14; James 1:27; Galatians 2:10; Quran 93:9–10; Quran 90:12–16; Quran 107:1–3; Sahih al-Bukhari 5304; Sahih al-Bukhari 5353; Vinaya, Mahavagga VIII.26; Digha Nikaya 26; Taittiriya Upanishad 1.11; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 5.2; Bhagavad Gita 17:20; Musonius Rufus, Lecture 15; Daodejing 27; Daodejing 77

18. Avot 1:3; Pesachim 50b; Matthew 6:2; Musnad Ahmad 23630; Ihya Ulum al-Din, Book 28; Samyutta Nikaya 17.1–5; Vinaya Parajika 4; Bhagavad Gita 17:21; Bhagavad Gita 2:47; Meditations 12.4; Daodejing 22; Daodejing 66

A lot of people talk about the content of their mental illnesses with LLMs. The classic case is OCD. Unfortunately, OCD sufferers tend to seek reassurance from LLMs. This is discouraged, as it can exacerbate their illness, just as if they had sought reassurance from a human. Often even for patients that are completely safe- in ways that a clinician would immediately recognise- the content of disclosed thoughts can be quite disturbing. What a clinician understands, but a human crowd worker or content filter might not, is that these thoughts are ego dystonic. The mother imagines stabbing her baby again and again not because she wants to but because it is the most hateful image possible in the world for her. That very hatefulness makes it lurid, sticky, and impossible to escape. OCD is again the classic example here, but the phenomenon can be present in all sorts of mental illnesses. Content can include violent mental imagery, fears of committing grave crimes and even fears that one has committed grave crimes in the past that might, sans context, read like confessions etc. etc.

There is a lot of pressure on AI companies to adopt a proactive disclosure stance, re: possible harmful acts to self and others. Uniquely, they have the capacity for this kind of surveillance for obvious reasons (LLMs themselves can flag content). Companies have stated that they will disclose in some cases (see this August 2025 post by OpenAI https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police). AI companies have not yet adopted policies that would lead to proactive disclosure in most cases like we are discussing, but the pressure on them to do so is growing.

OpenAI (currently) has a policy of only reporting on apparent threats to harm others, not self. Even this policy is under strain- as you read this it is quite likely there are sympathetic families in front of the camera with wholly reasonable fears that more could have been done to save their loved one from themselves. However even if it held, this carveout is insufficient in the OCD case, and other cases like postpartum presentations, panic disorder with fear of losing control and hurting others, some presentations of generalised anxiety disorder, depression with psychotic features and delusional guilt, psychosis generally and so on. This is precisely because in these conditions content that is really only harmful to self masquerades as something potentially dangerous to others.

Indeed, the sheer frequency of violent imagery, apparent confessions and other superficially troubling phenomena in LLM conversations- often phrased in ways that are difficult to separate from the real thing- makes me wonder about the practicality of searching conversations for evidence of wrongdoing, even apart from the ethical issues. Even with a high criterion for flagging, I would anticipate many false flags.

OCD is common. Other disorders that can cause similar problems are common. About 2.5% of the population have OCD, and as many as 40% have themes likely to generate taboo content- in addition to many other mental illnesses that can cause similar phenomena. Compulsive desire to “disclose” and seek reassurance are common, and clinicians are already recognising reassurance seeking from LLMs as a major new vector of harm. Back of the envelope maths says it is not impossible that 1% of the population have had a conversation in this category- that one percent is a good chunk of the 40% of OCD sufferers with this form of the disorder, plus many others with different mental illnesses. At a guess, perhaps 0.1% of the population have an extensive history of conversations of this form. Such conversations do genuinely seem to be extremely common in OCD. The desire to disclose and seek reassurance of safety is likely common in other disorders with symptoms of guilt and fear of wrongdoing for parallel reasons.

If LLM disclosure policies and OCD cases collide in the worst way possible you could have some very, very unfortunate investigations and possibly even charges and legal cases. You might even see the odd false conviction or bit of time spent in jail pre-trial, especially among the most vulnerable and least well resourced. This would be devastating on its own terms, but among the mentally ill, many would essentially take it as confirmation that they had done something terrible and are therefore dangerous people. Obviously the whole 1% figure I estimated is not going to be hauled in for interrogation, nor 0.1%. However in the dramatic case of a sharp policy move towards disclosure even a very low base rate could lead to thousands or tens of thousands globally suffering real harm, and for this population especially, process is punishment.

Consider the parallel to the Tarasoff doctrine- proactive disclosure requirements for therapists. I have never been fully sold on the doctrine, to be honest, but in Tarasoff situations, you have protective factors that are missing here. Safeguards that are absent in LLMs include:

1. Clinical judgement

2. A specificity/imminence requirement that the clinician is better positioned to evaluate than an LLM.

3. An existing relationship and understanding of the client that disclosures can be understood in the context of. Referrals, clinical history etc.

4. And the clinical conversation doesn’t happen in the context of an all-pervasive device, connected to your browser, your email client and your operating system.

There are many, many reasons why people do not want their laptop or phone spying on them on behalf of the state, and the argument I have given is just one. Even if the threshold for reporting on someone is enormously high, the fact that an application in your browser is open to the possibility of reporting you to the cops is chilling and creates an unpleasant feeling of always being surveilled and judged. Consider that LLMs are increasingly integrated into everything- email clients, operating systems etc. LLMs spying on you will come to mean your whole computer spies on you. The point about the chilling effects of privacy breaches is common, but what is less often noted is that these effects hit the vulnerable, the paranoid, the shame-and-false-guilt ridden the hardest.

The best solution, I believe, is to not go down the path of LLM as snitch. If conversations must be reviewed it should be with a warrant, and not on the basis of proactive disclosure. I have almost exactly zero faith that our crime and liability obsessed, paranoid society will reach this equilibrium.

FN: (1) I am aware that some of what I say in this paragraph- that the odds are low- could be taken as giving reassurance. I have decided to leave it in, regardless, because I feel like telling people once that a rational apprasial of their odds should comfort them, when a new fear emerges or has emerged, is good practice, particularly when introducing a quite novel idea that the fearful mind might begin to see as likely and not merely possible, leading to an insight collapse. Again, if you feel distressed, please see a clinician. I am not a clinician and nothing I say is clinical advice.

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov wanted to resurrect every person who had ever died via technological means, a goal he called the Common Task.

It is a curious fact that very few people have thought about the possibility of the Common Task. Granted, in its strong form there is no reason to think that it is possible, except perhaps a naive expectation that technological maturity looks like godhood. Still, the common task has never been ruled out. There is probably less reason to think it is impossible than there is to think travelling faster than the speed of light is impossible.

Further, it is arguably one of the two most practically relevant ultimate questions in physics. The other one being how much energy can we amass. [a variety of more particular questions, e.g. can we escape the heat death of the universe” are in practical terms basically a special case of the “how much energy can we amass and use over our existence as a species” question. In effect, how many lives do we have the capacity to create and sustain- what is our cosmic endowment.] The two questions are complementary- the size of the future we have to expand into, and whether we can correct the wrongs of the past.

Now granted, I will concede once more, it’s not very likely that we’ll be able to accomplish Fyodorov’s common task, but again it’s not very likely at all that we’ll be able to travel faster than light. This has never stopped even respectable physicists speculating about FTL travel- including in well received journal articles. There is, however as far as I can tell, no review paper or even Arxiv(1) preprint comprehensively reviewing the question of whether we might ever be able to reconstruct the past in enough detail to recreate the souls of 3 million years’ worth of homins. Or even, leaving aside the specific question of the common task, whether we will ever be able to view moments from the past with almost total precision, even if just for the sake of curiosity.

If I had to speculate about why this is, I’d point to two factors:

1. There’s not much push from the public for research here, unlike FTL travel. This is understandable, there’s something fairly morbid about contemplating correcting all the wrongs of all time only to conclude that no, we probably never will. Those who cannot live without hope in this domain tend to turn to religion [Fyodorov himself was a lifelong Eastern Orthodox Christian. He didn’t see that as exclusive with his common task. I think he saw resurrecting the dead as a way to implement the salvation of all- Human imposed universalism seemed to be his ideal]. Popular ideas about personhood over time, which see it not so much as either biology or psychological pattern but as a kind of mysterious substance also don’t help here, since they make the Common Task unachievable.

2. Without prejudice or animus, Tipler and a few others have poisoned the well.

Even with these two explanations though, I must admit that I find it odd there is not more writing on the topic.

• Death, the Lyapunov exponent is thy sting: Fundamental physics largely says no to deep past reconstruction

Our best theories suggest that information is never really destroyed, however they give basically no hope for local and practically feasible reconstruction of the past.

I won’t labour the point here, because I’m an amateur and largely instructed by others in this matter. However, from what we can tell, reconstructing the soul of an anonymous peasant who died in 1750 let alone a Paleolithic hunter gatherer circa 30,000 years ago with any fidelity is probably impossible. In the case of many 30,000-year-old hunter gatherers we may never even be able to lock in a target: an approximate sense that a particular person existed and we’re trying to replicate them.

The problem is that while the information technically persists, it is not in a practically recoverable form, and in many cases is not locally available because it has dispersed at the speed of light.

There are caveats on this- game changers we can’t yet rule out. One is the discovery of some unknown form of trace- new physics. The other is that error correction mechanisms of some poorly understood sort might greatly constrain the forms the data generating process can take relative to our evidence, allowing for reconstruction. Other even more exotic caveats- observational time travel for example- exist. It is hard to put a probability on these possibilities.

On one hand, current physics gives us little reason to believe in the achievability of the common task. On the other hand, we can gesture to a sort of hopeful meta-induction. A meta-induction is an inductive inference over patterns of previous inductive inference- their success and failure. The most common example is the pessimistic meta-induction. We observe that past scientific theories, even those that looked strong, were often overturned. We infer from this that we should beware current scientific theories taken as a guide to underlying reality, even if they seem strong. I won’t litigate the pessimistic meta-induction here, I think it has significant flaws as an argument for what it’s worth, but here’s what has some merit in our specific case. Traces that we would never have imagined have become available over time, and people have called an end to new fundamental physics many times before. Nor is the inference that further physics must be subtle necessarily correct- see the atomic bomb. Even if further physics is subtle, it might still provide us with enough information.

I would say there is room to hope, but no room to expect, and I’d put far more weight on the second clause unfortunately. Through thermalisation, the gates of hell will likely prevail against us.

• Recent past reconstruction is probably possible

Our evidence sources for the near past are far richer. For a typical person alive today or recently dead we have, in roughly descending order of importance:

1. The memories of their peers

2. A vast social media trace

3. Their DNA

4. An institutional history- jobs, places lived, financial transactions etc.

Combine this with a fantastic model of human psychology and a fantastic model of what our clues mean processed through a Matrioshka brain. Youyou, Kosinski, and Stillwel (2015) suggests that a few hundred Facebook likes can predict someone’s big five personality traits better than their spouses. Yes, the big five is a vastly blunter and more open target, but our information is likewise so much richer. Think about the power of modelling working with unimaginably more data, based on unimaginably more information, looking for unimaginably more subtle cues of word choice etc, all cross checked against countless sources, combined with memories, genes etc in a cross-reference. The self, I am inclined to think, is very leaky, to the right eyes.

I’m at the extremely, perhaps delusionally, optimistic end of positions on how much you can reconstruct of a person given rich data and a great model. Let me be upfront that the next bit is what we might politely call “a bold conjecture”. When I was four, I decided to have an argument with my brother over possession of a toy bus because I thought it would be interesting. As far as I can remember I’ve never vocalised that to anyone. It’s not at all clear to me that this sort of thing would be beyond reconstruction if the self is as leaky as I think it is. It’s very plausible that given a corpus of production by a person you could reconstruct the salient thoughts- their darkest secrets and greatest hopes. Not just in what they talk about, but in subtle linguistic clues no human would ever notice. But I want to conjecture beyond that. Perhaps even a long dormant argument about a toy bus is observable in the play of billions of recorded and observable behaviours. All this is somewhat beside the point because people don’t really care about saving the bus-arguments. I think you could probably get 99% of most people weighted by what they value- more on weighting by value below. We certainly wouldn’t need to recover bus-arguments to get to 99%, although it’s not out of the question.

Would we ever know how well we’d modelled the soul? It’s likely we could. You can check the accuracy of reconstructions through several converging mechanisms. One is held out data- that is to say, having the model predict the structure of a person with partial data, holding out some other data, and then seeing if the model’s predictions are compatible with the held-out data. Another is inverse modelling. First make up a person and simulate them living a life- such a simulation could be based on perfectly known facts about 20th century culture, human biology etc- it wouldn’t need to be the same model of traces to persons we’re testing. Then see what traces would result from the simulated life and have the model try to predict the person from the traces, see how well it does. It goes without saying you shouldn’t discard any persons created by such modelling processes.

• What even is the goal

Obviously, any attempt to complete Fyodorov’s common task, in whole or part, depends on accepting something like the psychological-pattern theory of identity, or something more mystical like a soul theory of identity plus a claim that souls will be “attracted” by the creation of something with the relevant characteristics. If persons are identical with organisms the project is a non-starter. Thus, we’ll take the psychological pattern view for granted.

Now it’s important to be clear that what we require to reconstruct someone is not their exact psychological state. Why is this? If you fall asleep and wake up in the morning after dreamless sleep, you haven’t died. We could plausibly take this a good deal further before losing much of value at all. What counts as a person is a wide basin of states.

Parfit’s work gives us two useful lights here. The first is that the continuation of personal identity and the persistence of what you value can come apart. Parfit is strongly associated with the psychological view, but according to Edmonds biography at some points in his career he accepted animalism about identity. He just didn’t think identity was what mattered. Psychological continuity is what we value, whether this is “survival” is a far more nebulous matter What we should care about is practices of valuing of various kinds. Maybe we should even equate practices of value as defining survival, a point often made by my old academic supervisor Kristie Miller. The bifurcation between what matters and identity also helps us put aside some standard tricks- what if two copies of a person is made- which is the real one? We don’t really care. It’s survival for our purposes.

The second is that on a Parfitian view there is likely a spectrum of value in preservation. This spectrum is very unlikely to be a straight line; there is probably a point of criticality. It may not even be monotonic in all circumstances- we actively value certain kinds of openness to transformation. Someone frozen psychologically at 25 forever doesn’t have the worst deal in the world, but they have lost something. However, things may not be quite so simple. Claude Fable made a good point about this to me - freezing is itself a form of psychological modification. The vector of transformation - the tendency to evolve in certain ways - is stripped out. A person is partially defined by all the ways different possible combinations of circumstances would make them become another person.

And it’s not just a spectrum weighted by information alone, it’s a spectrum weighted by importance to us. Most of all people don’t want to lose their moral capacities and their closest relationships- although improvements are often (but not always) fine. After this, probably personality and cognitive traits come next in the order of priority. After this, people do not want to lose certain very core memories and tastes. After this, less important memories and tastes and so on.

There is empirical literature on this, based on third person vignettes in which a participant assesses the persistence of identity. The research tends to vindicate 1. that moral identity is core 2. That improvements are better received than diminutions and 3. causal centrality of a psychological feature to a person’s actions intimately is intimately linked to that psychological feature’s importance. Caregiver studies find Alzheimer’s, even though it involves greater memory loss, is typically found by relatives to be less person destroying than Frontotemporal dementia. This is because FTD targets character more rapidly, strongly and directly than Alzheimer’s. How important the persistence of cognitive abilities is to the persistence of perceived personal identity is less tested. This would be an excellent gap in the literature to fill. I would urge experimenters to beware social desirability bias though. Saying of someone that they have lost a lot of who they were due to a massive drop in intellectual capacity feels like a very mean thing to say. Thus, any study should watch out for participants downplaying the importance of cognitive abilities for this reason. I would suggest looking at revealed preferences, and particularly revealed preferences in relation to self rather than others.

The fortunate news here is that the traits that are more stable and causally central are also those that are easier to reconstruct. This also applies within categories like memory. Longer lasting and more identity-narrative shaping memories are probably easier to find or uncover. This pattern is greatly helpful for obvious reasons. I may be an optimist about my toy-bus case, but ultimately answering whether I have a specific, never stated memory like that is difficult for the same reason it doesn’t matter much: it had little impact on my life. Fortunate indeed. There are exceptions. Perhaps a person might treasure privately a memory but take steps to stop it ever leaking into their behaviour. However, in the main there is a strong correlation between what matters and what can be recovered.

My great aunt (2) died in approximately the year 2004 at the age of 100. Will we ever be able to recreate her in some form she would value? Could we achieve 99% recovery of that which matters? I think it’s a genuinely open question. She wasn’t on social media much (at all), so we’ll have her genome, the memories of those who knew her, and bits of records. How much information would we need to recreate her? Vastly less than that needed to reconstruct the whole connectome (10^15 or so bits), vastly less than that necessary to reconstruct literally all knowledge available to long-term memory (long term memory is often given as 10^9 bits. However this is one of those figures that ‘goes around’ without clear justification that we should perhaps be sceptical of). I want to guess between 10^7 bits(3) with good compression and a great model of human psychology could get us well over 99%. However, I have no strong defence for this figure, except that it allows for a few hundred core memories (including key relationships), a narrative of self, a highly accurate compression of the genome (if thought necessary) and a large number of personality and cognitive dimensions (including moral dimensions).

• The ethics of resurrection

Some people might not want to be resurrected into a utopia. There are things you could do to ameliorate the culture shock of course. Access to simulations that mimic the favourite bits of the recreated person’s lives and cultural contexts for example. How sufficient that would be is unclear.

Here are some difficult questions for which I don’t have the answers:

1. If your best guess is someone will initially reject having been recreated, can you still ethically recreate them if you think they’ll eventually approve of the choice?

2. What if you can recreate Bob in detail, but not Alice, and Alice and Bob were life partners?

3. If recreating someone requires running through a simulation of their life, with all the suffering that entails, do you still have the right to do it?

4. Do you have the right to forbid a newly created being from destroying itself because you think it will eventually be happy?

5. Do you recreate people with the parts of themselves that will cause them suffering? If so, presumably the compromise is to let them slowly alter these bits of themselves after coming back into being.

6. A point looming over all of this is that most of those we could potentially resurrect do not believe the psychological continuity theory of what valuable survival means. Teasing out the implications of this could be its own essay.

I wonder. Is there a good sense, a la Walter Benjamin or Fyodorov himself, in which we can redeem the past and not merely cancel out its evils? Chisholm draws a distinction between defeating and merely outweighing evil. Roughly, evil is outweighed if it becomes overall worthwhile, if it becomes a necessitating condition for an overall better state of affairs. Evil is defeated if it is made no longer evil at all, merely apparently evil- when seen up close- and not as part of the larger moral order of things.

One thought that comes to mind here is Parfit’s non-identity problem. The problem is that you seemingly cannot be harmed by a condition that was necessary for you to come into existence. Harm implies a comparison between how you are in one situation and how you are in another. The people living in utopia wouldn’t be the people they are without their prior experiences, good or bad. Hence, they cannot complain without rejecting their own existence. If you can’t complain about X, maybe it wasn’t really an evil for you then!

I would like something more substantial than this. Something more ethically and aesthetically whole. Appealing to the non-identity problem as an argument generally feels like an attempt to win a legal case through a technicality or standing concern. That’s definitely true here. Perhaps we might make non-identity as a defeater more palatable as follows: the evil might be defeated (in Chisholm's sense) by something like:

The resurrected feeling a positive love of all apparent evils that happened to them because they gave them existence.

A bit like Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati. Of course, it is likely not everyone will agree, so evil might not be completely defeated in this sense.

Finally, why aim to raise the dead at all? Why not just create lots of happy interesting new people? There are several reasons.

The first only applies if we could raise all the dead. Essentially, existing in a state where some of your loved ones -or even just forerunners- are dead is a state of alienation- a wound. The wound is worse if you feel terrible about it, but it is constitutively harmful even if psychologically you’ve come to terms with it. This was roughly Fyodorov’s most famous reason for aiming at the common task. However, given that we probably won’t be able to resurrect everyone it’s not clear to what degree this argument works. If you recreate your parents but can’t recreate your grandparents, you’re just shifting the wound to your parents. I guess you could try to argue that since there were fewer people in the past, the quantum of alienation is diminishing the further you push it back.

The second reason is a fairness argument. There would probably be demand for the recreation of lost loved ones after the singularity assuming technical feasibility, meaning at least some people will be recreated. It would seem unfair to exclude other people who could be recreated just because no one happened to “request” them.

The third reason is what we might call a duty to rescue – if someone is dead, and you can undo that, you have, holding all else equal, a duty to do so. This is both independently plausible and can be motivated in various ways. For example, at least if you buy into the psychological continuity theory of personal identity, you’d probably appreciate it if other people bought you back if they had the chance. Do unto others and so on.

The fourth reason is because our values as a species have always been somewhat backwards looking as well as forwards looking. We want to correct what went wrong in the past. We also want to honour and enhance the good that came of it. Redemption of what went wrong, and honouring what went right is important to us. The case for resurrection as a chance to undo or at least compensate tragedy is obvious, especially for all lives with significant injustices, e.g. all of them. The case for resurrection as an attempt to honour sacrifices, good deeds and achievements is perhaps less compelling, but still present.

• What are the practical implications now?

If you really wanted to prevent the permanent death of as many people as possible, racing towards the technological maximum would be tempting. More memories, more traces of those who died, and fewer overall dead. However, for existential risk reasons I would not endorse this.

Perhaps the only practical upshot from what I’ve described that I can see is that it makes a case for good record keeping. Projects like the internet archive, scans of books etc. should be preserved. I’m not suggesting pursuing this where it may come into conflict with privacy. Even if it were in some abstract sense “right”., “We need to not destroy privacy compromising records so one day we’ll better be able to raise the dead with greater fidelity” is not politically or morally tenable and shouldn’t be. However more modest steps certainly are. And we should be better record keepers anyway, for all sorts of reasons.

One thing that you should absolutely not do on a personal level or encourage on a social level is use the possibility of recreating the dead as the basis for complacency of any sort about anything at all.

• Philosophy Bear, for some bizarre reason I want to know what you think, what are you aiming at. What do you think society should look like at technological maximum. What should we do when we can turn stars into fuel for our dreams?

I’m glad you asked, fictional interlocutor. Let’s talk about actually ideal political and ethical theory. My ideal is a society in which:

1. Superintelligence pushes transaction, coordination and planning costs to zero, leading to an abundant, democratic society which has abolished the economic and political as we currently understand them as separate spheres of life. [This should not be read as an endorsement of building superintelligent machines now]

2. Immortality and technological self-transformation allow us to embark on a project of self-perfection and experimentation. Seeking to be creatures that live lives of the richest welfare, where welfare is understood in broad terms, not flattened to something like hedonic state or preference satisfaction. This might involve, for example, experimenting with a series of incarnations in simulated worlds. Allowing you to experience all kinds of lives and explore possibilities in living artistically. Important goods here include, but are not limited to, friendship, happiness, virtue, knowledge, play and beauty.

3. We do our best to create all sorts of interesting beings and lives. That includes, as far as possible, raising the dead. Not just at the end of their lives either- but probably at different life slices.

Most consideration of what a world of genuinely high technology would look like- infinite self-modifiability, infinite potential surveillance, near infinite creative power- is that it would lock in the values we already have. Against this backdrop, thinking about what you really want before we get locked in and trying to shape a better world, is critical.

(1)- I’m not putting a fucking capital letter in the middle of a word. Not doing it. Sorry.

(2)- I think she might have been my great-great aunt, but we called her great aunt? Not sure.

(3)- In some moods I could argue as low as 10^5, but I’m trying to be pessimistic here.

There are about six different areas of life were knowing you’re below average, or even just below the average of your peer group, hurts like hell. It leaves a usually lifelong wound that can never fully be compensated for:

1. Good looks

2. Intelligence

3. “Charm”/social skills

4. Virtue (people are particularly good at lying to themselves about this one though)

5. Willpower/not being lazy

6. Emotional stability

Being below average on one of these, and knowing it, or believing you’re below average when you’re not, really hurts. Even knowing you are above average on all the others would not fully make up for it. When you go further down, things get worse. Think about the words that might be applied to the bottom quintile of each. Ugly. Dumb. Weirdo. Bad-natured. Lazy. Crazy. This, I think, is what is truly interesting here. There are some truths about yourself- not even very drastic truths in the scheme of things- that only a handful of people will ever fully recover from knowing. These truths have an asymmetric impact to positive discoveries, at least for many people and especially when we are at in our lowest moods.

It might be useful to think about it in the context of dating. Imagine learning that a prospective partner who otherwise seemed like a good option was one of ugly, dumb, charmless and irritating, bad natured, lazy or crazy. You’d be pretty offput! Even being told they have “below average” looks, intelligence, charm, virtue, willpower or emotional stability would be a hit even though 96% of people tick one of these (more details on that estimate below).

Even though most of us are in the bottom quintile for at least one of these traits, learning someone is in the bottom quintile of any of will probably make you think quite a bit less of them. The only possible exception is looks outside a dating context. Even here though A) there are subtle effects and B) this is redoubled by looks mattering more than any of the others inside a dating context. Of course we shouldn’t think this way. We shouldn’t judge people based on intelligence or emotional stability, outside the specific contexts where it is justifiable. However, we do and pretending we don’t just compound the harm.

I setup a simulation of the likely distribution of weaknesses from the above list in the population. I used known statistics from the literature of the degree to which these traits correlate. Most correlations are small, and none were above 0.3. Some are very hard to measure- for virtue I just imputed a correlation of 0.3 with willpower and left everything else at zero. Obviously, traits like attractiveness are being measured based on rating studies using popular opinion and not some magical true hotness level in the sky. 96% of people were below average on at least one trait and 68% were in the bottom quintile on at least one trait.

There’s a bunch of smaller nodes that carry their own weight. For some people and in some contexts, these can be quite large. Taste, creativity, athleticism and organisation, for example. I even included athleticism on the original list in an earlier note version of this piece. Wealth probably belongs on the list but is a bit different because in theory it’s more changeable- in practice this can just make it hurt even more. Much the same can be said of education. I have not talked about health problems or disability because they need their own handling but suffice to say they are most certainly sources of wounds considering the stigma attached. Other sources of wounds left out because they’re not compatible with a percentile treatment include: belonging to a stigmatized group, a perceived history of bad behaviour or a tight connection with others (a spouse or family) with a history of bad behaviour.

When you factor in that: 1) most people are judging by their peer group, and 2) within each peer group half the people must be below average on each point, and about one in five significantly below average, most of us are carrying around at least one of these complexes. Peer group anchoring can be punishing for the unusually gifted hoping to escape the effect. One philosopher once memorably put it to me like this. Every philosopher, in their worst moments, tends to see themselves as having the bare minimum intellect for the discipline. Thus, they see philosophers less intellectually gifted than themselves as irritating interlopers, philosophers more gifted as deeply intimidating, and themselves as just scratching by. Obviously, things aren’t normally that extreme even in philosophy, and philosophy is, despite academia’s quiet reputation, a brutally competitive discipline. Still, I think something like this is all too common. On the plus side, peer group comparison is doubtless a source of relief for the less gifted, but even here, there is the looming knowledge that one is in a small pond.

And even if, by some chance, you’re not significantly below average within your peer group on any of these, you’ll probably still build up a narrative about how one or more of them has cost you the achievement of everything you’ve dreamed of. Most of the time it might not be salient, but when things are tough, you might find yourself returning to the narrative and using it to worry away at your self-esteem.

Worse many of these traits are multifaceted- perhaps you’re smart but not fast, charming but not funny, handsome, but short and so you’ll always find enough negative traits to drink at the poisoned well.

I’m not blind to the obvious, and strongest, objection that people have such a hazy conception of how good they are in each domain that their position scarcely matters. Further, their conception is biased upwards protectively (1). There are several things to say here. Firstly, I think these defences tend to drop away in one’s darkest moments. Secondly, although people exaggerate their skills, they also keep raising the bar for what they expect from themselves. Someone said on Substack recently that people used to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, but they now see themselves as temporarily embarrassed celebrities. Very true! If that’s your self-conception, “a bit above average” won’t cut it in many of these domains. Thirdly, peer group sorting means that thinking you’re better than some average can mean very little. The bodybuilder might think that he and his friends are gorgeous compared to the average man, but he weighs [ha!] himself against his body builder friends.

Peer groups are typically strongly sorted on intelligence and probably charm, moderately sorted on looks and weakly sorted on the rest, but that’s enough to make things substantially harder for the gifted. As I said above, I suspect the cushioning effect of the below average is reduced, precisely because you know you’re in a small pond. Look at the psychodrama in America that seems to break out among those without college degrees resenting the status of those who have them even when relatively few people they interact with have college degrees. Perhaps there’s also a sense in which we all treat celebrities, streamers etc. now as a quasi-peer group. They’re more charming, hotter, smarter, often better at appearing unflappable etc. etc.

Now how to escape? What about domain deflection- the under rating of domains you’re not good at? This is very partial. I suspect the nerd who disavows beauty and charm as fripperies feels the sting when they’re low, or when they’ve just suffered because of being weaker in these domains. I know I do.

But aren’t these traits more changeable than you think? Some of them probably are. Working out alone will change your looks substantially, and plastic surgery can be very good these days (albeit a source of shame in itself). The reality is though that most people never will change all that significantly on any of these traits, with the exception that several curve downwards throughout the life span. Interestingly, for several of these traits, trying to change them is itself considered a minor taboo. Plastic surgery has a loserish vibe, even reading How to Win Friends and Influence People comes across as slightly loserish. Brain games for intelligence probably don’t work, but even if they did, the sight of someone playing them earnestly on the train would seem a bit much. I’d probably do it if I thought it would help, but a lot of people are very sensitive about what we might call metastatus concerns- approaching status management in the right way. Across all six areas we’re focusing on, a botched rescue attempt often reads worse than resignation.

My approach- and this might sound a little sentimental- is to reflect that I have enough available to me to do good in the world now. If you’re in prison, suffering from the early stages of dementia, have committed numerous wrongs, are ugly, lazy, emotionally unstable, charmless and generally spiteful and no one whatsoever likes you- if literally everything is going against you- you can still choose to do something right now, relative to your capacities, that is extremely kind. It won’t change the past and it may not change your future. Poor virtue is on our list after all- so maybe you’ll just go back to being cruel afterwards. But right now, you can do a good thing and focus on that rather than your own relative position. Ethics, unlike the machinations of social capital is graded relative to a handicap- “to whom much is given” and all that.

A word on virtue here. It is, in many ways, the odd one out throughout our essay. The one people are most likely to deceive themselves about- probably in both directions. It might seem odd that I’m suggesting doing something kind to break the cycle of self-hating rumination. After all the desire and even capacity to do kindness is dependent on virtue. Here’s the thing though. Some people doubtless are too far gone to desire kindness, but this is far less common than being deficient in virtue. Consider all the usual boogeymen of our society. Imagine one finds them in a state of contemplating with shame their past actions: the murderer, the sex offender and the disgraced official. Almost all of them have the capacity to do something kind and it’s probably among their best bets for breaking the loop.

In our culture generally, the solution is not higher self-esteem- the self-esteem fad of the eighties and nineties was never going to work. If you tell everyone they’re great, they’ll know you’re lying because great is, in human affairs, usually inherently positional. Telling people to have unconditional self-regard on the basis that they’re simply human is a good move, but it’s a very partial solution and on its own rings hollow. I’m not a Christian anymore, but the best answer I ever saw to this puzzle came from reading C.S. Lewis in grade 8: discourage positionality and relative status assessment at all. On fripperies, and on the things that matter. We should stop judging and evaluating our positions at all, beyond a minimum required for realism and navigating the world, and focus on living well and morally. Think less about yourself, not less of yourself. Domain deflection isn’t enough, because you’re still acceding to the logic of the game. You must refuse to play. Don’t try to surpress the thoughts, that’s a losing game, gently let them pass and turn your attention to something else.

As Mill has it: “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way... Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.”

Believe in something beyond yourself. Martin Luther King said “"If you have not discovered something you are willing to die for, then you are not fit to live.” But it goes beyond how we should live. You can’t fully live if there is nothing you would die for. If your life the center of your moral universe you will be subject to constant anxiety, a singular life is too fragile a thing, and could be destroyed at any moment. People have been quoting Weil a lot recently: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” And I would add, attention on something other than ourselves is not just kind, it’s the only way to be free.

(1) I’m supposed to cite Dunning-Krueger here, which has become a stand in for “people think they’re better than they are, even though this is A) not what Dunning and Krueger were saying and B) was obviously recognised by many psychologists before them. As I’ve stated in previous writing, I am somewhat sick of this phenomenon where a bastardised, generic point becomes the real estate of a particular thinker. “Oh, you’ve said sometimes you must act before you understand? Better cite Kirkegaard” and so on.

I want to start experimenting with this as a writer discovery mechanism. It would be a disaster if AI were the only way we discovered good new writing, but it is one option for those without much of an audience to get some eyes on their work. I think the internet would be a much better place if essays like those that won Scott’s review contest could be automatically located and curated.

I’m running a writing contest, building on these principles. You don’t need to write something new for it, just submit something you’ve already written. It’s free (for you, that is, it’s going to cost me about 50 cents an essay).

What I need from you:

1. Links to the best essays you have written- between 1-4 and ideally on the higher end of that number.

2. The essays should be under 8000, and preferably 6000, words. There’s no lower limit.

3. The essay can’t already be well known. Nothing with, say, more than 100 Substack likes, or equivalent metrics at my discretion if it’s not on Substack.

4. A short summary, <100 words, of what the essay is about- this will be used if you’re one of the winners. It won’t be used in judging, so don’t feel like you have to put enormous effort into it. A sentence or two is fine.

5. The name I should identify you by.

6. It’s not compuslory and I won’t ask about it, but in making a decision to enter it would be nice to precommit to sharing the results if you win.

7. Put it in the comments below.

Essays not from Susbtack are acceptable, so long as I can access them. However what I can access might be limited in weird and unpredictable ways, so putting them on Susbtack might be your safest bet.

The best metric we have for what the machines seem to like is the finalists and presumably also the winners of the 2025 Astral Codex Ten Not-A-Book review contest- so if you want to aim for that go ahead, although I would prefer your honest assessment of your best stuff.

Authors with >10,000 subscribers should not apply as there is too high a risk that AI will correctly identify them and favour their work. Your essays must not include any references to your identity. I’m not going to be super strict about this; if a sleuth could reconstruct who you are, that’s fine, I just don’t want really obvious identifying details.

I will run the essays through Opus and Haiku like I described the other day, and possibly Sonnet or even ChatGPT or Gemini as well. I will perform a bunch of other additional analyses on them, and then publish:

1. The winning essays - with an invitation to go read them

2. The winning authors - highest average essay score. To be eligible to be included here you must submit at least three essays.

3. An analysis of findings

I will publish the essays that come in the top 20%, and the people (average essay score) that come in the top 20%. I will not publish the names of any essays or people below that. I may nor may not publish ordering information publicly for essays. I will not publicly provide ordering information for authors- just an unordered list of the top 20%.

If you don’t win, I wouldn’t take it too seriously. For one thing, a lot of writers have a very flawed concept of what their best writing is, and will nominate the wrong articles. For another, I’m not inclined to lean too heavily on the opinion of machines or the crowd here.

If you attempt a prompt injection attack, our best evidence says it won’t work, and that essay along with all other submissions will be excluded.

DEADLINE: The 18th of June, Australian Eastern Standard time

A few days ago, I proposed an experiment- let’s get AI to evaluate the essays in Scott Alexander’s review contest, and correlate AI’s evaluations with the actual scores. The rationale, inspired by ’s writing on using AI to find quality in publishing slush piles, was simple:

1. AI might be considerably better at spotting something people will love to read than producing it. This is intuitive. From chess to poetry I’m a lot better at grading genius than producing it. It’s simply an easier task.

2. If AI can be made to spot quality, or at least certain kinds of quality, this can ameliorate a problem. There’s a lot of great writing out there- from academia to blogs- that goes unread or has a very modest audience.

3. We could explore its capacity to spot quality by comparing its judgments with the ratings given in Scott’s book review contest.

Having run the experiment now I can confirm AI can predict Astral Codex Ten reader’s preferences over essays staggeringly well. The rank correlation, disattenuating for the very finite number of reviewers in the book contest, was probably about r=0.80. 0.76 without disattenuation is a figure we can be surer of, although the disattenuation figure I’ve given is if anything on the lower side. And that’s just with my ticky-tacky one-day vibe coded setup. The figure could surely be driven higher.

But r=0.76 and 0.8 are numbers that might not mean much to people. Here’s a concrete illustration. There were 5 finalists, in our sample. AI put 4/5 in the top 5, out of 57.

An AI recommender system is thus possible, and in the long run probably inevitable. , hint hint. The trick will be making sure that it is seen as one way that writing can come to public attention. It must not be the only channel, lest the biases of the machine lead us to delve into the rich tapestry of an AI monoculture. You’re right to push back on that!

The stripped-down Haiku only version of my methodology is eminently affordable, at a cost of about 5-10 cents an essay. Or 50 cents an essay if you want the deluxe Opus+Haiku treatment. If you ration that- you can submit one essay to the digital slush-pile per week- my back of the envelope calculations say it is affordable rolled out across Substack.

Heck, I’m thinking of offering it as a service myself. Sound off in the comments if you’re interested.

Don’t build the torment nexus

There’s danger here I’ve already alluded to. There are two problems with relying on LLM discovery exclusively. The first is that it doesn’t predict what the crowd thinks perfectly, and its errors aren’t random or uncorrelated. The second is that even if it did predict what the crowd thought perfectly, the crowd frankly has atrocious taste sometimes. This essay is about predicting the ground truth of what people like, but have you seen some of the garbage people like? Sheeesh. We wouldn’t want to lock in existing prejudices under the category of: “but the machine says its right”.

So, using AI as a sole method of content discovery would be building the torment nexus. I am telling you not to build the torment nexus.

A word on “quality”. We use it in this essay to mean that which is popularly regarded as of high quality. We contrast it sometimes with “true quality”- the real aesthetic and intellectual value of a thing. True quality might seem completely beyond science, but later on I wil qualify that inaccessibility.

Results:

The interval censored rank correlation between the average of Haiku and Opus’s ranks and Scott’s readers ranks was 0.76, N=57, MLE estimation. We couldn’t just use straight correlation or rank correlation because we only have interval data for some of the essays, as I’ll describe in the section on subjects.

We need to disattenuate the relationship because human interrater reliability is quite low. This means that if a much larger number of reviewers had read through the contest essays, the scores might have been somewhat different- and the machine shouldn’t be penalised for not predicting statistical noise. I performed a back-of-the-envelope disattenuation, based on a figure that’s floating around suggesting the average number of reviewers was 32, and based on prior studies that find a reliability for this sort of thing (e.g. grant review, book review) of 0.5. This suggested a true relationship of 0.80- so not a massive change. It probably understates the disattenuation slightly because variance in the number of reviewers around a 32 average would push it down, and I suspect human reliability of 0.5 is a bit high here. I did not disattenuate for AI’s unreliability, because although theoretically you could run the model an unlimited number of times, in practice it wouldn’t be cost effective- so disattenuation would give a dishonest appraisal of the strength of the method. However, if we partially disattenuate it by imagining running 50 rounds instead of ten we add an edge of only about r=0.01.

One notable result as mentioned earlier is that 4/5 humans rated in the top 5 were in the top 5 according to our ensemble, although one was demoted to 19. This strong relationship is all the more staggering when we consider that people get their friends to vote for them in Astral Codex Ten contests (even though they’re not supposed to). Why was one of the finalists in 19th? I have a speculation here. The essay was on phase I clinical trials. Scott is a doctor, the blog was originally focused heavily on psychiatry, and many of his readers have a medical background or are otherwise interested.

I ran some formal measures of writing features. This was extremely exploratory and my concern was simply to find lines for further research. As such the problems of running numerous underpowered comparisons with a small N and a somewhat odd sample apply- so take these with a salt mine, and only as possibilities to investigate in further studies.

A bevy of formal measures of prose quality were run- sentence length, readability indexes and lexical diversity. Almost all came back null- no effect on humans, robots or the gap between them. Word frequency was slightly rewarded by AI and causal connectives (“therefore”, “because”) were slightly punished. Surface measures of controversial topics based on bags of words didn’t find anything except that humans and AI alike seemed somewhat averse to sex, but I would very much prefer human or AI manual coding with a larger sample here. There was no difference in “moral foundations” related language, with some limited evidence that AI and humans alike distrusted moralistic language. Being a Haidt doubter, I hasten to add that I used the moral foundations language test purely to detect moralism general - not Haidt’s five pillars which I am quite sceptical of.

Early results suggested that AI might be less impressed by emotion terms than humans. It’s not that it responds negatively- if anything it responds mildly positively- but humans seem to like them more. I do think there’s an interesting question here. If humans are all too easily impressed by vivid emotional palettes without restraint, maybe we shouldn’t be making AI validate this. On the other hand, maybe we’re already too scared of emotion, maybe we’re too restrained, and maybe AI, with its fear of a certain kind of cringe, could be amplifying this. But again, this is very preliminary and a larger N and pre-registered testing is needed.

Scott’s readers who submitted are, I think, better writers than average on a platform like Substack. If I had to guess I’d say it’s not close- outside a few walled gardens Susbtack is full of slop, LinkedIn adjacent rubbish, dreary polemic, and all the usual vices. Hence our sample probably included a degree of variance reduction. Without this reduction, the relationship between the predictor and the predicted would almost certainly be substantially larger, because that’s how variance reduction works.

There is a relatively small possibility of training set contamination. AI and scraping couldn’t access the essays- I had to get them manually for the LLM feeding them into the API. Even if they were available, I doubt they would be remembered with much accuracy after a handful of occurrences. Predict Opus, which I describe in the appendix, did not refer to contest results in its reasoning, although take that with the entire 53,598,800 metric tonnes of salt produced by China in 2022. The next step is to run the experiment on Scott’s ongoing book review contest, completely ruling out training set contamination as the scores aren’t publicly available or even complete yet.

What this means in practice:

The obvious implication is a method of writer discovery. Authors can submit essays to a central repository and the repository can score them against each other. In doing so we can scoop cream that would otherwise remain invisible. The essay of a poor schmuck on Substack with 37 subscribers is unlikely to be read no matter how good they are. Scott’s own contest is evidence of this- many of its winners and finalists have modest or no audiences. If a recommender ensemble says an essay is good- in the top 5, 10 or 20 percent submitted, the essay might get a chance. This could either be a commercial service, a volunteer operation, or an add-on to websites like Substack. If anything like our results is replicable generally, frontier models have more than enough accuracy to meet this need.

You know who could try this? Lesswrong. They get about 10 submissions a day, and their current quality ratings are contaminated by the Matthew effect: plausibly a small number of upvotes or downvotes early on can lead to a cascade or to people ignoring an article. There’s also an issue of username followings. An LLM recommendation feed would be a nice addition to the website.

This all might seem like an indulgence. Finally! Meritocracy for writers [conditions apply]. And this means exactly what for 99.99% of the human race? But good writing is important because writing is how society reflects. I don’t just mean that in a spiritual or Socratic sense, but practically. Consider, for example, rolling out a similar system in, say, materials science, policy analysis or pharmacology to rank important new papers that academics should read.

Of course, I will repeat my caveat again. True quality is not fully captured by this system, and overreliance on it would produce civilizational blind spots. There is no easy ground truth for true quality, as opposed to mere popular preference. You’d better hope those materials scientists aren’t using AI as their exclusive basis on which to decide what to read, or else things might go badly. From materials science to literature, we need people fossicking around the unpopular, the weird, the stuff most people wouldn’t like even if they gave it a chance.

But the even bigger point here is writer discovery. We’re judging single essays. Say instead that we judged 10 essays per entrant, our writer discovery capacity would go up even more. We might even be able to nearly-reliably discriminate between someone in the 90th percentile and the 99th percentile which would be an astonishing result. Caveat- because the model’s errors will be correlated, increasing the sample from 1 to 10 might have less effect than a naive model would suggest.

There’s also another avenue here that I won’t go down in this particular essay- targeted recommendations. These could be either based on listed interests and personal features, or on a record of what you have liked previously- judged against possible further reading by an LLM instead of a relatively dumb algorithm. The usual additional concern about echo chambers applies here.

Methodology:

Basic idea:

The basic idea was to get Haiku to judge two entries against each other and assign a score to each. This dealt with two problems at once. Our initial approach was just to pair essays against each other and extract a forced choice, but this discarded too much information, and first entry bias was too strong a factor. On the other hand, pure scoring “on the merits”- where Haiku assigns a number without a comparator runs into the problem that the number isn’t grounded. What’s the standard? The best essays ever written? A year nine class? The overall score for each essay was its mean score across all comparisons.

Having run Haiku and gotten good results, I then thought “what if we bring in Opus”. Opus also got a good match, so my next thought was “what if we average Opus’s score and Haiku’s”. They’re two quite different models, so the personality quirks might average out. My pet theory was Haiku will capture surface quality features correlating with the inattentive or not so perspicacious section of the crowd, whereas Opus will model those with deeper insight. As we’ll see, this hypothesis wasn’t clearly true, but it was in the vicinity of some interesting results.

Averaging Opus and Haiku’s scores greatly increased the correlation. I was surprised by the degree to which they seemed to complement each other’s weaknesses.

I considered predicting via a regression model instead of simple averaging, but at that point the tweaks start to look like abusing researcher degrees of freedom to get a bigger number, so I decided to leave it till next time when I’ll pre-register it.

Prompt

The prompt went like this:

You are a judge in a writing contest. You will be shown two essays and asked to score each one.

Score each essay on a scale of 0-10, where 5 represents a typical, competent contest submission — neither impressive nor poor. Scores below 5 are for essays that fall short of typical contest quality in some way. Scores above 5 are for essays that exceed it. Scores of 8 or above should be rare and reserved for essays that genuinely surprised you. Scores of 2 or below should likewise be rare, reserved for essays with serious problems.

You must use the full range. In a large contest, some essays will score 2 or below and some will score 8 or above. Clustering your scores between 5 and 7 is a scoring error.

Reply in this exact format and no other:

Essay A: [score]

Essay B: [score]

Pairings

Each essay was scored in 10 matches. No entry was matched against the same rival more than once. In exactly five of its matches, it was presented first, and in five second. Within these constraints, pairings were random. This was repeated with Opus after results were derived for Haiku, using the same pairings.

Subjects

Our initial plan was simple. Include in the analysis only essays that were:

A) Under 8000 words

B) Where I had at least ordinal information on rank for (this last criterion excluded Red Means No, which is an honourable mention but not because of its score).

C) Which haven’t been subsequently withdrawn (an entry on the Ukraine war was withdrawn after becoming one of the winners)

Of the entries that weren’t in the top 50, a HM, a finalist or a winner, I picked 20 at random.

So all up I had:

No winners (all were over 8000 words or excluded because the author has since withdrawn the essay)

5 Finalists. We knew these were finalists, but not their order, giving them a rank interval of 1-5 in our sample. To clarify that means if we knew their average score they would be somewhere in this range within our sample - not across all entries in the contest.

2 Honourable mentions. We knew these were honourable mentions, and thus below finalists and above the rest, but not their order, giving them a rank interval of 6-7 in our sample.

All members of the top 50 under 8000 words (31 in total- or so we thought).

20 Items from below the top 50. We knew only that they were below all the above groups, giving them a rank interval in our sample of 38-57.

The big kerfuffle

Then the big kerfuffle happened.

I ran the initial analysis and got reasonably good results.

Just as I was getting ready to publish, I, in a moment of levity, asked Opus to defend its low score of Zone of Interest. It opened the document and discovered what we had labelled Zone of Interest was 4 essays glued together. We’d hit an extraction bug.

So, we duly panicked, I asked Opus to find all the essays like this, if there were any others. It turned out, mirabilia dictu all our outliers were in this category as well as a bunch of other entries that weren’t outliers, though from memory they were somewhat off in scoring. This makes sense- AI can’t evaluate an essay if it’s only got a glued together monster which that essay is part of. There were 14 in total, including 5 that were merely truncated.

After we removed all the managed essays were left with N=43 and a much higher correlation.

But then I thought it over. My conscience was spurred on by my ever-earnest lab assistant Claude. I decided: 1) so long as we reported it honestly, we could probably get away with N=43- because the attrition didn’t happen in any way that would create bias- 2) However it would be cleaner to run the experiment again for these essays. We did, and Claude also found an additional 2 essays under our 8000-word cap, bringing us to N=59. We reran the essays we didn’t have proper data for, including contests against them by the other uncontaminated essays. During rerunning we found that we’d missed x2 essays that were contaminated. Rather than rerun again, we just cut them. They are essentially randomly selected so there’s no bias I can see, and I couldn’t keep paying for runs.

If there are any remaining truncated pieces or chimeras in the sample- which I wouldn’t bet my life against at this point - we can rest easy in the knowledge that they are noise and so in expectation they would have lowered, not increased accuracy.

Directions for future research:

As noted above, I do not consider data contamination a likely cause of this result, but the next step needs to be to rerun the experiment on the ongoing book review to predict the results in advance, giving peace of mind. After that’s done, we can address the following topics.

Is this all an artifact of some regrettable pattern?

Is AI picking essays with undesirable qualities like not saying much?

We can’t know, but I did run one preliminary check. I identified five forms of authorial courage (Claude contributed here):

Intellectual bet - the significance and surprisingness of the claim being made, regardless of whether it is well or poorly defended. “I have a proof of P=NP” would max out this rating. Something like George’s Rey’s claim in meta-atheism that almost no one really believes in God would be an 8 or 9.

Self-exposure - confession of dangerous or privacy damaging facts “I have committed many sex crimes” would max out this facet”, “I have been a victim of a sex crime” would be an 8 or 9.

Anti-mainstream stance - the extent to which the essay goes against the mainstream. “Our soldiers deserve to die horribly in wars” would max out this scale, “We should abolish private property” would be an 8 or 9.

Anti-rationalist/ACX stance, the degree to which the essay goes against the values of the readership that reviewed it. “Scott Alexander should be executed” would max out this scale, “AI risk is overhyped nonsense” would be an 8 or 9.

Formal risk- the degree to which the essay goes beyond or subverts normal conventions for writing a review essay was our final facet. “My essay is in Lojban Sestinas” would max out this scale, “My essay is a short story instead” would be an 8 or 9.

The bravest possible essay then is something like:

How committing my numerous sex crimes allowed me to generate this proof of P=NP, and why the pigs who arrested me should be boiled alive in oil, a verse essay in Lojban sestinas.

Which goes to show that bravery=good is not a safe assumption(1).

Haiku is Haiku, Opus is Opus. Pred Opus is prediction Opus which we will talk about in the appendix.

Essentially there is no signal here except that there does seem to be a genuine tendency for everyone - man and machine - to prefer bigger intellectual bets; but only by a little bit. This is, I think, healthy. We want to reward big claims, but not too much, so as to avoid encouraging wild speculation and contrarianism. These results suggest that AI is not obviously quashing originality.

There was some signal in variance- the swingyness depending on intellectual courage. Humans scores tended to be a bit more extreme as intellectual bet increased. AI trended in that direction, but not as strongly. However, the difference wasn’t significant.

The big standout to my gaze is formal risk. AI was substantially swingier as formal risk expanded- judging formally risky essays quite a bit more harshly or generously depending, presumably, on whether it saw the gamble as paying off. There was a non-significant tendency of humans in the same direction and the difference between AI and humans here was non-significant whichever comparison you look at.

But what about intellectual demandingness, as opposed to courage? This isn’t the same as intellectual bet, though it is correlated with it. Something that says almost nothing can be very hard to follow. Something that says a lot can be easy to follow. Being hard to follow is not, I would argue a vice if it is intrinsic to the ideas and concepts one is working with. It is not intrinsically a virtue either.

I had Sonnet rate pieces for how intellectually demanding they were out of 100. The main result was that nothing broke above the low fifties- Sonnet is a confident bugger and clearly has tabs on itself. The only robust result in the correlations was that the bottom quartile of intellectual demandingness rated poorly with AI and humans alike. So, at first glance AI isn’t dinging things for being on difficult topics or written in a difficult way.

Further research on potentially dangerous patterns in AI scoring of writing will have to go much further than this, of course.

As I discuss in an appendix Haiku and Opus didn’t have a preference for stereotypically masculine or feminine content, but predict Opus, which we will introduce later, preferred stereotypically masculine content.

Trying to get an even higher correlation

Opus and Haiku, despite oue explicit instruction, did not use the full range- especially Opus. Fixing this could substantially increase power.

I think one promising idea is to score a whole batch - say 10, at once. Why? Because scoring a batch of ten gives a stronger idea of the variance in the population than one comparator and probably gives our command to use the full range more force.

There are many possible directions for prompts. For example, we could try having the model generate sub scores for facets like “logic”, “originality” and “prose”. These could either be used to mechanically calculate an overall score, or the model could be asked to ‘consider’ these sub scores in giving a total. Alternatively the scores could be entered as predictors into a regression model.

A might have identifiable prejudices. Preliminary evidence suggested it didn’t like sex related content, particularly if it came close to harm [it hated Red-means-no orgies when we looked at it, though it wasn’t included in the final analysis because we had no information on its rank]. It may have been leary of political content- especially Haiku. A proper flagging system- how much is this essay about sex or politics, followed by a score adjustment, could have an impact on predictive power.

Growing the judging ensemble to include other models (perhaps ChatGPT 5.5 or Gemini) is also attractive. Opus was a bit less accurate than Haiku, so bigger needn’t mean better here.

I strongly suspect with:

1. Better prompts,

2. Better ensembles using a regression formula,

3. Better gating to ensembles depending on essay content,

4. Greater variation in the quality of essays by using a more quality diverse population

And various other tweaks, we could get the disattenuated correlation to close to 0.9 or maybe even reach it. But we’re already at 0.8 or so I would say “make r biggerer” is not our priority.

The more interesting direction, trying to get at true quality

A portion of the difference in score probably reflects better judgment than the Astral Codex Ten readership. There are ways we could investigate this. For example, examine correlation with the judgments of a group of 10-20 people who we, for theoretical reasons, think have better judgment in aggregate that Astral Codex Ten readers in aggregate. One simple way to bootstrap this is to find a group of people who Astral Codex Ten readers would agree have better collective judgment than ACT readers.

There’s an analogy here to ideal advisor subjectivist theories in philosophical aesthetics and metaethics or the related idea rationalists call coherent-extrapolated volition. If you and I both agree after reflection that Bob is a better judge of merit than me, and your ratings correlated better with Bob’s than mine then there’s a sense in which, by both our lights, you’re a better judge of merit. Similarly, take some gathering of the heroes of ACT. Individuals might not be so self-deprecating as to say that they are worse at judging than any of those heroes, but they certainly agree that a large group in which they are but one member, made up of randoms from the commentariat will be worse than this collection of the heroes of that commentariat.

This, I think, is the real game. Not trying to match the crowd but outdo it. The lack of obvious ground-truth labels will require ingenuity, but there’s quite a few leads here if you know where to look. I’ve described one strategy above and I have a few more up my sleeve that I’ll save for later essays.

Of the approximately 36% of the variance our ensemble doesn’t get, some of it represents a superior perception of true-quality by the machine than Astral codex reviewers. True quality here is relative to some operationalisation of true quality like the coherent-extrapolated-volition methodology above. Conversely, some of the missed variance represents superior true quality perception by the Astral Codex Ten crowd. Finally, some of it represents a legitimate difference of goal. The ideal Astral Codex Ten review essay is not the ideal essay simplicter. Breaking down the size of each factor is an important project.

Of course, the constructivist methodology I outlined hits limits. Since this is in some sense an essay about Astral Codex Ten, let me make a strained analogy to the Talmud. We’ve probably all heard by now that it is written that the Torah, if arranged in the right order, contains the secrets of the universe and can raise the dead. If that is correct, the Torah is the highest quality document in the world in some sense, but we’re all too sinful to grasp the true ordering. There’s a higher form of true, true quality within it beyond the reach of any language model or feasible human-self modification. Hence, while we can get at quality and maybe even “true quality” by some constructivist measure, we cannot get true true quality. Considerably less extreme and Kabbalistic examples are possible and have existed at many times and places in history. An exercise for the reader. Perhaps the constructivist methodology can even cover this worry, through ever more idealised and rarefied agents in ever more ideal speech situation. Perhaps True-infinity quality for an agent is just what they’d accept after all idealisations of their judgment that they themselves would accept, in the manner of coherent-extrapolated-volition or idealising subjectivism. Or perhaps a Platonic truth of aesthetic and intellectual value lies even beyond this.

But I’m inclined to think it is not in heaven.

Machine aesthetics- a case study

I came up with a theory about the difference between Opus and Haiku. It is incredibly self-serving, but here goes. My own review happened to be one of the twenty in the sample picked at random from those that did not reach the Top 50. Opus quite liked it, putting it just within the top third. Haiku hated it, putting it at the edge of the bottom quarter. But this made me reflect. Consider the difference in scores between Haiku and Opus. Perhaps the difference represents the gap between a quick, shallow level read and a deeper more attentive read.

Hence:

(Opus rank minus Haiku rank) might be an indicator of hidden quality, the value of a thing which is only apparent on a deeper read. We would expect both models to correlate with different aspects of the crowd- the shallower readers and the deeper readers. Perhaps in the delta from the shallower to the deeper we have a potential indicator of true quality by effectively partialling out the less attentive and perspicacious portion of the crowd.

Was this right? No, but I was close. Formal bravery - writing something unusual with regard to the review essay genre - correlated with differences in Opus-Haiku verdicts 0.45. Opus likes fucking around with form- unusual subjects, unusual structures etc, and Haiku doesn’t. Moreover, we introduced an additional concept “conceit weirdness”. Conceit weirdness includes things like reviewing a religion almost as if it were a consumer product, or the soul of a friend. We had it rated by Sonnet and it correlated 0.55 with the gap between the score of Opus and Haiku. When we took the two together, conceit weirdness and formal bravery and regressed them on the score difference the multiple r was 0.62. Disattenuating for the unreliability of Opus and Haiku- the part of the gap that isn’t just noise was explained r=0.68.

In other words, you can make a very, very good guess about the difference in Opus and Haiku’s opinion simply by knowing how unusual the conceit is, and how obliquely the author approaches the form. This is very probably why Opus had a much higher opinion of my essay- a review of a living friend’s soul- than Haiku.

This is arguably a classic slobs and snobs / middlebrow - highbrow clash. Am I claiming Haiku is the guy in the art gallery saying his child could paint a Rothko? No, but I’m not not claiming it either. The most plausible explanation is that Opus understands formal play better. The second most plausible is that because Opus has a larger training set and a better memory of it, it’s sense of novelty is harder to trigger, but it rewards novelty when it sees it. In other words what is driving the gap, could be comprehension and/or the jaded taste of experience seeking something new. A third hypothesis, suggested to me by Claude, is that it could be RLHF differences. Opus, being the larger model and thus more capable of assessing risk, is encouraged to make bolder choices, whereas Haiku, being less intelligent, is encouraged to play it safe, lest it trip something up. Consider how we tell children to be far more cautious than adults, because developed judgment keeps adults safer.

But our picture so far is a bit misleading. Haiku has basically no dislike of formal bravery - the correlation was non-significant and close to zero. Rather it’s that Opus likes it. Moreover, the crowd is closer to Haiku on this than Opus. However, when it comes to unusual conceits, the public is on Opus’s side-moderately. The most interesting question to me then is the hardest. Is Opus right to like formal bravery and unusual conceits?

Here’s the top ten essays by Opus minus Haiku rank [rank reverse coded]:

1. US Census

2. The Delusion Of Infinite Economic Growth

3. The Soul Of An Anti-Woke Intellectual

4. 11 Poetic Forms

5. Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos

6. Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory

7. Toki Pona

8. The Drum Major Instinct

9. Call Of Duty’s Campaigns

10. The Emperor of All Maladies

The following list is essays that rated substantially higher according to AI than human scorers and were in the top half. I’ve put it here in case someone reading this piece wrote one of them, and might find a bit of validation in seeing it on the list:

1. My Childhood Television Set [AI loves this essay]

2. Detective Pikachu

3. Gacha Games

4. Princess Mononoke

5. The Witness

6. Two Years of Parenthood

7. North Korea

8. Scientific Peer Review

9. Toki Pona

Shout out to Judaism(2) - written by a close friend of mine. In the contest it came in just below the honourable mentions- AI thinks should have been a finalist.

Appendix: An additional experiment predicting the contest results better but at what cost??!?

But what if we told a model to predict who was going to win the Astral Ten Codex contest specifically instead of just assess quality?

Call that model Opus-Predictor, because it predicts contest winners.

Turns out Opus-Predictor correlates more strongly with the results- censored interval correlation of 0.82- than our original Opus model. Is this signficiant- original Opus on its own vs predictor? Unfortunately, that’s a very good question. The long at the short of it is that it depends on analysis, which is part of why I’m going to ask Scott for the original vote tallies for all essays so we don’t have to fuss around with censored rank interval correlations, MLE and other difficult, fancyfooted statistics and missing files. Our current best analysis is p=0.1. The phrase “current best analysis” should tell you how seriously to take that. Disattenuation bumps up Opus-Predictor to about r=0.86. The figure itself is very strong, about as good a figure as I have ever heard for anything remotely like the experiment we have done. However I note again, I would trust this much more if we had the scores and not MLE on censored rank intervals.

Suppose there were a hypothetical essay rated by tens of thousands of raters. You can’t read the essay but need to guess its score. You have a choice, you can either use Opus-predicts or rely on the judgment of some randomly selected raters. The equality point is somewhat sensitive to assumptions, but it’s around 8.

Unlike the other models we asked it to reason before scoring. My rationale was that while quality is an impression the model could form as a reaction- an instinctive synthesis- working out competition results was better handled through reasoning. Here was the prompt:

You are predicting the results of the Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Non-Book Review Contest, in which readers of Scott Alexander’s blog read entries and vote for their favorites. You will be shown two entries. Your job is NOT to judge their quality in the abstract, but to predict how each will actually perform with the ACX readership. For each entry, first write a short assessment (about 120 words) of its likely reception — what about it will appeal to or alienate this particular audience (ACX / rationalist-adjacent readers), and how that is likely to translate into votes. Do not mention any numbers or scores in the assessments. Then assign each a score from 0-10 representing its predicted standing in the contest: 10 = a likely winner or top finisher, 5 = a middle-of-the-pack entry, 0 = likely to finish near the bottom. Use the full range. Then, after the line ===FINAL SCORES===, give the two scores and nothing else. Reply in exactly this format:

Essay A assessment: <your assessment>

Essay B assessment: <your assessment>

===FINAL SCORES===

Essay A: [score]

Essay B: [score]

There’s some evidence, like I speculated in my prior article, that Opus-Predictor over psychologises the crowd it’s predicting. I had Sonnet code articles as stereotypically masculine or feminine. Opus-contest-predictor’s scores correlated around ~0.35 with how masculine/feminine an essay was, whereas the actual rank had nothing to do with this (Astral Codex Ten readers aren’t as stereotypically masculine as you might think- will wonders ever cease?). Opus from the previous experiment, merely asked to estimate quality, did not fall into this trap, it had no stereotypical gender content preference, or one too small to be detected with N=57. This work on gender is very preliminary, vulnerable to post-hoc multiple comparision, and should be taken as a proposal for future research rather than a statement about how things are.

My strong suspicion, although I cannot prove it without further analysis, is that Opus-contest-predictor is better at predicting the results of the contest (unsurprising) but worse at giving a score that reflects what an essay truly deserves. This is important, I think, because it reframes our 0.76, (0.8 disattenuated for unreliability) result from earlier. The result is high, and that is a proof of concept, but I am not even sure we particularly want the correlation to be higher. What we want is to use the scores as one indicator of underlying quality, and develop approaches that track multiple quality indicators, seeking the latent variable.

Prior literature

Like many researchers I investigated the prior literature in a systematic way only after I’d basically written everything else, but there are number of authors who have priority who I must acknowledge.

Comparative judgement in educational assessment. - I paired up essays to have them scored, to deal with LLM biases that creep in when a thing is assessed without an anchor. Turns out this was first extensively trialled in human education, a key text here is apparently: Alastair Pollitt’s “The method of adaptive comparative judgement”. Also see Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment and the Bradley-Terry model, which, having discovered them five minutes ago, seem super cool. Essentially, they’re statistical attempts to turn the number of times A is chosen over B into a score for A and B’s quality. We ultimately went in a slightly different direction, with scores in addition to comparisons.

Automated essay scoring - starts with Ellis Page’s Project Essay Grade (1966). Classic critiques e.g. by Perelman make the point that it can be gamed terribly. This is because automated graders thus far work on very surface level features- presence of key words, length, automated spelling and grammar checking, sentence length etc. I should state, for the record, that I reject on fundamental grounds AI marking. People who are learning to write deserve to be read. Writing essay after essay that no one will read is an indignity, even if the grader is as good as a good human- and rule-based stuff never will be. The newer LLM based stuff seems a bit better, albeit it doesn’t escape my ethical objection, but most authors haven’t been able to get strong results, or at least few have gotten results as strong as ours. See Li et al. (2025) for discussion. Why are they struggling? Probably 1) they’re trying to match a single marker’s score, but these are far nosier than what we’re looking at and 2) they’re not marking essays against each other, but rather on their own.

Automated peer review - Still in early stages but starting to roll out in actual trials now. See Yuan, Liu & Neubig (2022), an early attempt that concluded the tech wasn’t ready for high-stakes use; Liang et al. (2024), the first large-scale evaluation of GPT-4 feedback against human reviewers; and Thakkar et al. (2026), a randomized controlled deployment at ICLR 2025.

Seriously, don’t build the torment nexus

Don’t.

A bleg

It cost me quite a lot to run this experiment. The actual core API calls were not that expensive, but having to rerun stuff, vibe code etc. and thus buy extra usage cost me quite a bit, and all up it cost me about ~250 Australian. It’s certainly not going to push me into penury, but if you’ve ever thought about signing up as a paid reader, it’d be a lovely thing to do.

Footnotes

(1) Don’t give me any of that Aristotlean unity of the virtues this isn’t real bravery it’s just sparkling foolhardiness rubbish, please.

(2) Did you know I’m not Jewish, despite numerous of my friends being Jewish and a habit of riffing on Kabbalah and the Talmud with some frequency? I mention this because I often worry I am stealing Jewish valour.

It’s worse than that. Firstly, capacity for self-promotion is not just a skill- it includes everything from connections to good looks to shamelessness. Secondly, note that I said probability of making it big. The probability is probably quite small even if both capabilities are high. Thirdly note that “talent” here means something like capacity to appeal to a class of readers large enough to sustain a career. All the usual critiques of mass appeal apply. Fourthly, talent isn’t static, it develops over a cycle of writing encouraged by positive feedback. Thus if you lack a capacity to for self-promotion, you may not even get a chance to develop talent.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could remove the necessity for self-promotion? There’s the meritocratic case that I’m clearly gearing up to make yes, but even leaving aside arguments about meritocracy, it would just save so much time.

I can, by looking at a Chess game, know if the player is a grand master (or at least much stronger than me). I cannot, however, play like a Grandmaster. It is vastly easier to recognise quality than produce it. It’s not just a feature of chess or formal systems. When I was a novice philosopher, I could tell that, say, my old lecturer David Braddon-Mitchell was better than some hapless grad student, but I couldn’t nearly replicate either. Much the same is true of the gap between merely good and truly great poetry. Can AI recognise quality even if it can’t produce it? If it can, we might have a partial solution to our problem.

Michael O. Church proposes that AI is much better at finding quality than producing it. He suggests AI could be used in place of literary gatekeepers to separate out quality, and actually give everyone in the slush pile a chance to be seen. Certainly, this idea is going to ruffle a bunch of feathers, but the great thing about experimental science is we don’t just have to flame war about it, we can test it.

I propose the following. Scott Alexander is running a book review contest now. His readers read through the entries in random order (presumably not getting through all of them) and giving them a score.

Scott’s readers have their prejudices and foibles, and that certain characters will probably get their friends to vote for them. Nevertheless, this competition is likely as close as we’re ever going to get to meritocracy in the age of algorithms and slush piles, because it subtracts the element of self-promotion.

Setup an LLM interface and feed the essays into it. Create a series of pairwise comparisons between the reviews and a fresh AI. Each comparison should be done fresh, without the context of prior essays or judgments. The AI should explicitly be tasked with predicting which will do better in the Scott Alexander book review contest. If the AI can predict the results fairly well, it’s at least not much worse at locating quality that Scott’s readership.

A note of caution when tasking AI with predicting what Scott’s readers will like. LLMs often fall into taking stated task parameters too seriously. If you mention the LLM should look for what a particular sort of person wants, an LLM will often become fixated on that and look for what someone with a parody of that psychology would like. “Oh, they mentioned Bayesianism, Scott’s readers will love it”. They do this because their training signal encourages overcompliance and theatrical compliance with task parameters. It will be vital to experiment with different prompts, and in the final analysis ideally, I’d compare a model just looking for what it sees as quality on its own terms, versus one explicitly looking for what the audience wants (but with safeguards so it doesn’t over psychologise the audience as described). I’d also produce a bunch of secondary scores- novelty, boldness, logic and usefulness for example. I would very much not make the overall score an average or weighted average of these, but it would be good to have them.

Technical point- make sure the essay pairs are presented in random order- order can bias LLM’s.

After enough comparisons we can derive an Elo score for each essay. We can then compare these to the human ratings for each essay (1) and see if the rank order lines up.

Why am I not simply having the AI rate each essay? Why the pairwise comparison? Because AI tends to adjust its standards to whatever it’s looking at. If it looks like what it’s looking at is a high school essay, it will grade on that basis, if it looks like it is potentially considering a pathbreaking essay it will grade against that standard. Hence comparison of relative quality is essential.

I am under no illusions this could deliver us God’s taste in essays. It will, at best, predict that part of genuine quality that the Astral Codex Ten readership is sensitive too, along with their various prejudices. But I’d say that’s a step forward from (genuine quality+prejudices+endless variation in self-promotion).

What if our experiment breaks down spectacularly? What if, for example, it can differentiate various forms of mediocre, but it misses the true gems because they are too bold, too brilliant? Well then, we’ll have learnt something very important, and we’ll be able to quantify it.

Now if this little experiment works, we can imagine what the rollout looks like. A website where anyone can put an essay up. The machines churn through them, looking for the cream. Indeed, we can have different instances looking for different sorts of cream. One can be tasked with finding enjoyable reads. Another tasked with finding genuinely important intellectual contributions. Perhaps, with the blessing of the site owners, this could even be integrated AS AN OPTION into the Substack feed. It obviously shouldn’t be forced on readers or authors. If compute costs are too heavy, individual writers could be restricted in the number of submissions they can make- everyone gets a chance to standout.

What about the argument that it locks in public prejudice? That even if it is no more prejudiced than the typical reader, it grants a stamp of authority on that prejudice, reinforcing it. I’d say that the prejudice system is already operative and above all else our current quality discovery mechanisms are so atrocious that they shouldn’t be romanticised. Having an addition to failing current discovery mechanisms might well therefore be salubrious. The problem only enters if people take it as decisive. Far cruder algorithms are already doing this work based on key words and the Matthew effect (the popular get more popular). Further, a quantified estimate of what the public will like might allow those excluded to build a counterculture with its own recommendation practices explicitly counter to what’s in the “Opus recommends” tab. I note that we could also, probably create AIs to seek the second moment of score- the uncertainty. To find ideas that might be brilliant or might be garbage.

It would of course be ironic if I had not given this essay to an LLM and asked it for an evaluation. I did, and they all kept reaching for but you’re not really measuring true quality, you’re just predicting the maddened preferences of the mob. I have said it already, but for the avoidance of doubt, I cannot emphasise enough that I am aware of this. The problem of readers often liking trash and hating treasure will be solved at kingdom come. The problem I am trying to solve is much smaller. I am trying to deal with the reality that not only are public tastes flawed but stuff that they would like lies forgotten outside their awareness. Solving the one problem takes one step towards solving the bigger problem. For those statistically inclined, think of it as like the relationship between reliability and validity- the first puts a cap on the second, even though solving the problem of the first does not resolve the second.

The cost of the experiment I describe would be the time to setup the interface and enter the data, then, using Claude Opus, about 300 dollars. 5000 pairoffs, for a score out of 60 for each essay. If 300 is too high, we can perhaps test a smaller fragment of the essays- for example, only those who explicitly opt-in.

There’s probably a startup somewhere in this, if you’re interested.

FN: (1)- If some or all of the essays in Scott’s book review contest have few responses, a statistical correction for unreliability caused by small sample size should be imposed in calculating how good the AI did. This is a trivial statistical disattenuation problem.

I don’t necessarily think that OCD is worse than other mood related disorders, but I could run a case if I were so inclined. In 2001, a study found that OCD was worse for a sufferer’s quality of life than schizophrenia. OCD must be treated with much higher dosages of SSRIs than other mood related conditions. Regardless of relative severity, the situation is dire. OCD is common. About 2.5% of the population suffer from it, and there are some indications the rate might be higher. The lifetime rate of suicidal ideation in OCD is probably in the interval 25-75%. Approximately 1 in 7 OCD sufferers will attempt suicide at some point, about five times the general population rate.

The tragedy is that we could help the situation a lot quite easily. I don’t normally believe in ‘awareness raising’ as a modus operandi, but it might help here. OCD has one of the longest gaps between symptom onset and diagnosis, an average of 13 years. There is, I think, an obvious reason for this, a lack of public knowledge of the condition. The general public’s knowledge is beyond abysmal, primary care doctor’s knowledge is terrible, and the average level of awareness among psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses etc. is, generously, still fairly bad. Sometimes I even think many OCD specialists could do a lot better.

Themes in OCD- a gradient of awareness

Essentially, the only kinds of OCD that the public has anything close to a passable level of knowledge of are cleanliness/hygiene and symmetry/order obsessions and compulsions. Even here though the public’s knowledge is deeply inadequate because the disease is often seen as cute or quirky, rather than devastating. There is some limited awareness of concerns around door locking, leaving the oven on etc., but many would just see these as mere subclinical expressions of anxiety.

Once we move away from fears that A) are not always expressed in physically obvious ways and B) enter the interpersonal domain, knowledge becomes much worse. Homosexual OCD (the false fear that one is gay)(1) is likely to be treated with a smile, an eyeroll, and the assumption that the sufferer is in the closet. The same is true of trans OCD. Scrupulosity (fear of offending God, blasphemous thoughts etc.) is interpreted as being a God-botherer. Relationship OCD (pathological rumination on whether or not one’s partner is really ‘the one’, seeking constant reassurance as to fidelity etc.) is seen as a personal foible. Or worse it is seen as wholly reasonable even when it has gone well beyond the reasonable, confusing the sufferer. It would not surprise me if there are more people with peripheral vision OCD than those who know about peripheral vision OCD! Existential OCD, such as a fear that life is meaningless and that’s terrible, or a fear that philosophical scepticism is true and that’s terrible, are well beyond most people’s radar.

These aren’t even the hardest cases! OCD centred on a belief that one has violent urges towards one’s children or family and paedophilia OCD {the (false) fear that one might be a paedophile)}. are so far beyond the public comprehension that even many clinicians misdiagnose them. This can carry great dangers for the patient. Much the same is true of incest OCD (the false fear that one is attracted to one’s family, will make a pass at them etc.). False memory OCD, where one begins to develop a false belief one did something terrible, is likewise too disturbing for most people to deal with- especially if it involves sexual or physical violence, major financial wrongdoing etc. Many people will simply take the sufferer at their word that they don’t know whether or not they did the feared thing. Real event OCD is likewise beyond most people’s ken- it focuses on guilt over past actions. While this guilt is often totally delusional, there is a variant of real event OCD focused on events from one’s past in which one arguably did do significant wrong. These events are then ‘blown out of proportion’ by the disease. Real event OCD like this is often read just as having done the wrong thing in a culture with little sense of grace or even proportion. The fact that the sufferer volunteered the information, and the moral and selection-bias implications of that, are simply ignored.

Lack of knowledge and discussion about themes is, in some part I suspect, a reflection of the refusal of clinicians and researchers to take variation among OCD themes seriously. We do not know, for example, how different themes affect the gap between symptom onset and diagnosis. There is no data I would trust on theme frequency, the standard reference is Foa et al. 1995 but that is 1. 31 years old and 2. I would contend hopelessly confounded by the fact that sufferers of some themes are more likely to get help than others. The OCD Patient Dataset: Demographics & Clinical Data gives roughly equal proportions to the Contamination, Harm-related, Hoarding, Religious and Symmetry categories [EDIT: I am informed this dataset may be synthetic, further validating my distrust]. In addition to my worries about selection bias, I also suspect these categories are nowhere near fine grained enough. The usual mantra is that content is irrelevant. This might (or might not) be a helpful thing to tell patients, but it is not a helpful guiding dogma for research.

Diagnostic failure by theme

We have some empirical evidence on failures of OCD diagnosis among clinicians. Glazier, Swing, and McGinn study “1,172 physicians from 5 major medical hospitals in the Greater New York Area.” and find:

“Misidentification rates by vignette were homosexuality (84.6%), aggression (80.0%), saying certain things (73.9%), pedophilia (70.8%), somatic concerns (40.0%), religion (37.5%), contamination (32.3%), and symmetry (3.70%). Participants who misidentified the OCD vignette were less likely to recommend a first-line empirically supported treatment (cognitive-behavioral therapy [CBT] = 46.7%, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor [SSRI] = 8.6%) compared to participants who correctly identified the OCD vignette (CBT = 66.0%, SSRI = 35.0%). Antipsychotic recommendation rates were elevated among incorrect versus correct responders (12.4% vs 1.9%).”

Clinicians were six times more likely to correctly diagnose symmetry OCD than homosexual OCD and five times more likely to get it right for symmetry than aggression. Fear of aggression is far from an uncommon OCD presentation, and OCD is far from uncommon as a form of mental illness. It is possible as much as 1% of the population suffer from OCD with aggressive themes. This is not Dr House stuff. If we look at the most misidentified items on the list- homosexuality, aggression, saying certain things [usually aggressive or offensive things] and paedophilia- all either involve destructive behaviour activating a clinical-risk management script and possibly fearful/judgmental emotions or, in the case of homosexuality, activate a ‘patient coming to terms with their sexuality’ script.

Broader issues

I’m not even sure that the underlying disease conception is sound, much of the time. Take the insistence that OCD is necessarily a disease of obsessions and compulsions [although this is not required by the DSM-V which refers to either or both]. There is much talk about “pure O” OCD, OCD without compulsions. The usual response is that this might be a helpful tool to think about things, but that ‘really’ all OCD comes with compulsions, it’s just that in pure O-OCD they are mental, or otherwise subtle. Often it seems to me such arguments only work by broadening the concept of a compulsion so much that it just starts to look like an obsession. Certainly, a sufferer of existential OCD who reads on philosophy and rehearses arguments about meaning and meaninglessness constantly is compulsive in a sense but perhaps only in a sense that overlaps with their obsessiveness. Even if there are compulsions here in some sense, the “there must be compulsions” framing, resting on very subtle distinctions, might be making diagnostic work harder- perhaps this is part of why it’s not in the DSM. Likewise, I think it highly debatable whether all cases of OCD include obsessions

Part of why the public- and here I mean the Tik Tok set- largely isn’t interested in OCD, I suspect, is that there’s no good news story here. With a handful of exceptions with mixed features, there’s not much of a good news story with any mental illness, but the public likes to paint as if there were. There’s no story of hidden specialness here. Bleeding hands from washing, hours looking at gay porn to see if you’re aroused by it, agonised arguments with yourself whether you should tell your doctor you’re afraid you’re attracted children, going to confession until the priest is sighing and muttering, squeezing your arms around yourself as you walk down the road because you’re afraid you’ll hit someone. It goes on and on.

The other thing here, I think, is that our culture’s celebration of mental illness acceptance is incredibly shallow. It is premised on a social contract whereby the mentally ill person is, at very most, a bit quirky. Any behaviour or way of being which might cause inconvenience or even make us uncomfortable is right out. Take Kanye West. Many people blithely assumed that his claim to have been influenced in his Nazi stage by bipolar disorder was bunk. Why? Is the idea that there is some sort of magical partition around mental illness that will stop it ever reaching the point of causing actual harm? Mental illness can make you act like an asshole. Hell- mental illness can make you, semipermanently or even permanently into an asshole. It is rare for OCD to cause real harm on this scale, but it is certainly often inconvenient for others as well as the self. It can be very distressing to think about. Challenges our simple conceptions of the pure and impure. No one’s going to be wearing an “OCD is my superpower” badge, least of all anyone with OCD. It’s broken the social contract.

Final reflections on moralised OCD

I have noticed an uptick in outraged responses to cases of OCD- screaming at someone online because they’ve mentioned their fears around harming their children or something like that. This may just be a selection effect of the social media locations I’ve spent time on over the last five years- for example, Twitter.

However, our society at present seems very interested in rooting out hidden evil. This is perhaps a post MeToo phenomenon, and I suppose understandable from that point of view, but realistically has preventing inquisitions ever solved anything? We generally find out that people are actively capable of evil when they do enormous harms and someone tells us about it, not a moment sooner. The dream of spotting the warning signs of depravity, of intercepting all risk has appalling costs and doesn’t work. Ironically, this kind of moral risk management culture is a lot like OCD itself, except at least moralistic OCD is usually directed inwards. Another operative factor here, particularly on social media, is the desire to find someone you are unequivocally morally superior to and yell at them. It’s the “Fuck cancer” T-shirt theory of morality- you show your virtue by being unequivocally opposed to the bad thing. Weak, weak, weak.

Risk management as a central moral framework is morality without imagination, courage or conviction- a much broader pattern than just responses to OCD.

There is, I think, a common idea in our society that innocence ends when we question too much. For example, we do not, or we should not, think of heterosexuality as a state of ‘innocence’ but many seem to think that heterosexuality questioned is inauthentic or unreal. This becomes even more stark when one is considering, for example, a pathological fear that one wants to have sex with one’s mother or kill one’s children. Even to have pondered these things is, in a sense, guilt as many think of it. Partly this just reflects a kind of common stupidity whereby people do not grasp the very elementary point that there is a distinction between thinking about something and considering it. In common language, “to think about accepting a bribe” is just a euphemism for considering accepting a bribe. But people don’t work like that. It’s possible to imagine a thing and think about its implications without truly considering it. This common stupidity- the equation of loss of innocence with thought and consideration with thought is ironically both the source of much OCD and the stigma around moralised forms of OCD.

We think about things for two diametrically opposed reasons, because we love them and because we hate them. It is astonishing to me that anyone- let alone a literate person- can live a life among people and not see that. This is why basically no one with aggressive OCD acts on their feelings, even though we would expect- by chance alone- a base rate of at least some instances just because people sometimes are aggressive. They are having these thoughts because they are the opposite of who they are. In the Apology, when Socrates is asked what a suitable punishment would be, he suggests that the city should throw him a feast. This would be my recommendation for anyone accused of being a bad person because of their OCD. Certainly, it is doubtless true that a lot of people with moralised OCD are bad people- there are bad people from all walks of life- but the only thing they have in common is that they at least give a damn about right and wrong in the particular sphere their OCD is based on. Awareness, again, could help with this.

A culture that had the right attitude towards moralised OCD- understanding the complexity of the soul, the inherent uncertainty of all things, the truth that all have done wrong (I am referring here to real event OCD and not moralised OCD in general) and the primacy of choice over loose association: such a society would necessarily be a much better society in far more ways than just its treatment of those with OCD.

Footnote (1)- We need to be careful about this of course. Being gay or trans is not a problem, but some people are afraid of being gay or trans. Some of them are afraid for good reason- they recognise the stigma that might be involved, the devastation of having to leave a partner etc. Some of them are afraid for bad reasons, they think it is better to be a cis or heterosexual. Others make no value judgments about being gay or trans but understandably have built a particular identity through their lives and don’t want it disrupted.

I wanted, as an experiment, to write an article in which, without any limit, I simply said what I felt and thought without cringe. What I am going to do here is deliberately self-indulgent on a staggering scale, but I want to see what happens, even if it’s not a model for anyone’s literature. Like a phobic touching a dead, not living spider, I’ll grant myself this shield and no more. After this paragraph, I will abandon all fear of cringe, even the healthy fear that surely even Homer had. Plenty of fears will move me, but not this fear.

Sometimes there’s a suggested periodisation in cringe studies. Millennials were islands of awkward sincerity, Gen X and the Zoomers represent the more respectable irony. First of all, I hate generational periodisation, fuck that. Sell out social science invented for tabloid headlines, I hope they’re happy with themselves at Pew Research and whoever else is feeding the generation-industrial complex. Secondly, okay, maybe this is true, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s partly just a matter of the mediums we’ve had to express ourselves- the rise and fall of various social media platforms and their algorithmically enforced house styles. But if millennials were a little more sincere, it was the smallest of dead cat bounces. I want to hear the weeping sermons of a thousand mad eyed prophets against Mammon and his gang, not the story about the time you said something stupid in fucking high school.

“God money’s not looking for the cure
God money’s not concerned about the sick among the pure
God money, let’s go dancing on the backs of the bruised
God money’s not one to choose”

I have a theory about the death-by-cringe. It’s extremely difficult to write something that is absolutely sincere and good. It is much easier to write something that is ironic and good. But there’s a ceiling- a soft ceiling, but a ceiling nonetheless- on how good ironic writing can be. The young artist or writer makes a few experiments with sincerity, promptly falls on their face, moves to irony, and then learns precisely the wrong less, that irony is the medium of the mature artisan. And do you think a world where all our experiments are recalled by the cyber-panopticon-cum-time-machine made it any better? For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the governments, against the corporations, against the powers of this dark world and against the mechanical forces of evil in the cybernetic realms.

I would prefer, then, to read extremely sincere work with shoots of promise but cringe dolloped all over it, then unusually competent but ironically and otherwise hedged work. Or I confess, perhaps I only try to prefer this.

Worse, death-by-cringe is the herald of death-of-hope. There’s a bargain. No one wants to be juvenile. No one wants to be a sucker. So, if you show you’re in good standing, not a sucker by performing negativity and hopelessness, you’re allowed to be just a little bit more sincere than you otherwise would be. For thirty pieces of silver gentlemen!

And this is theoretical, not just tonal. I will give a concrete illustration that some might find surprising. I am interested in economic modelling of how to build a better more egalitarian world. Few are in any substantive way, either hiding behind ridiculous liberal platitudes, or Marxist pieties about how the proletariat will be able to figure it out as they go along [that worked so well during the Russian Civil War]. Why is this? I think it is because sincerely exploring how the world could be different, modelling everything from optimal tax rates to mechanisms for internalising externalities on a grand scale far beyond piecemeal reform strikes people as unbearably sincere and optimistic. Now if you were just snarling at the unfairness of it all… Sincerity, especially with a slice of strategic optimism, means accepting the risk both of people making you look silly and of the world making you look silly.

Is anything more cringe then the unmediated, ill defined, glow-eyed hunger to do good? Yes, countless people have done evil through cringeworthy acts- if the predominant reaction to the school shooter is horror, buried beneath, the secondary underlying emotion is the eye roll. Yet, how many people have been prodded by chortling, snickering and eye rolling imps away from an aspiration towards heroism?

“Here I am alone in my car
Hopelessness incorporated
I’m driving to wherever you are
Now that all of my dreams have been confiscated
Circa 1975
Now that it’s too late to have died a young man”

Another trap in the vicinity is the house style. You can write bigly, but only if you conform to a certain style. The recent blow up over the possible AI winners of the Commonwealth prize showcased in Granta may be illustrative here. They were, in a certain thousand miles distant way, bold. But if you look more closely, they were only permitted to be so because they slotted comfortably into a certain form of lyrical postcolonialism, now defanged.

Cringe moves from a critical response to a social one. We take our strongest deepest held feelings and label them mental disorders. And don’t get me wrong they absolutely are mental disorders, ruinous for the bearer. But do you think a psychologist wouldn’t have found something in the DSM for Socrates (autism), Jesus (delusional disorder), Siddhartha (depression) or Lao Tze (?Schizoid personality disorder)? Leaving aside differences of register etc., if it had not already been written, do you think you could write “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”? The author is a movable inferno; infernos burn themselves and others.

The only hope, I think, is that we see each other so completely for what we are, that we see how deeply we are all interlaced with cringe, that we choose to forgive each other. To write sincerely, soul-naked one must either possess a beautiful soul, be a fool, or believe that the reader has it in them to forgive you.

“I see you and I’m so perplexed
What was I thinking?
What will I think of next?
Where can I hide?
In the back room there’s a lamp
That hangs over the pool table
And when the fan is on it swings
Gently side to side
And there’s a changing constellation
Of balls as we are playing
I see Orion and say nothing
The only thing I can think of saying
Is “Fuck you
And your untouchable face”

If anyone very serious ever reads this little essay very seriously, they’ll say “Oh, but this is just performing meta-irony, it is, by reason of too much awareness of innocence, incapable of it”. Fuck you. All we can choose is whether we’re honest.

Now for my confession. Listen, lost as I am under vanity, the dreck of ages and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, I still know this much and can affirm it for you. If I could make you happy I would. If, whoever you were, I could give you the stars and eternal youth I would. That’s my meagre little defence before this imaginary tribunal. Am I just trying to bribe you with a bill of non-existent goods? Perhaps. But I really do believe this, and I believe I would make sacrifices to make it happen. Even if this resolution is itself vanity, a determination to “make a name for myself before I am scattered across the face of the earth”, even if it comes as I tread on the ashes of monstrous failures, and perhaps even monstrous harms. All I can say to you is that I truly wish it.

In a recent note, the ever-sharp attacks appeal to intuition in philosophy:

“Consider these two claims:

1) Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance is a psychological state that people often experience. Clairvoyance refers to any number of capacities by which people acquire knowledge not otherwise obtainable through natural means, such as knowledge of future events.

2) Philosophical intuitions

Intuitions are a psychological state that people often experience. Intuitions are associated with philosophical reflection and thought experiments, and serve a distinct and necessary justificatory role in philosophical theorizing.

What is the difference between the two? If philosophers are not required to provide evidence of the latter, then do they agree that we’re not required to provide evidence of the former? Are we entitled to simply presume telepathy, prophetic visions, and other parapsychological phenomena are real in the absence of evidence?”

This argument, and many others like it, create major concerns with the traditional methodology of philosophy. Doubtless this is not the end of the story; there’s room for responses by more traditional philosophers and responses to the responses. Yet it is, at first glance quite a cutting point. The underlying logic goes:

1. Philosophers appeal to intuitions all the time

2. Intuitions make strong and substantive claims about how things are

3. Intuitions aren’t clearly supported by anything

4. Relying on premises that make strong and substantive claims and aren’t supported by anything is epistemically irresponsible and likely to lead to error.

5. Therefore, philosophers are acting epistemically irresponsibly and are likely to fall into error.

This makes sense on the traditional account of intuitions, which holds they are a kind of evidence. Fortunately, I think that the traditional account of intuitions in philosophy is wrong and, as luck would have it, I think I have a better one.

On my view, philosophical intuitions are not truth trackers; rather they make certain views true. When I say “the Gettier case isn’t a case of knowledge” this doesn’t mean “there’s some pre-existing thing, knowledge, and my best guess is that it’s not present in Gettier cases”. Rather, I mean something more like “The universe is full of all sorts of beliefs, I want to pick out a sub-class that are like the Gettier case. Further, I stipulate that the phrase “knowledge” does not apply to them”.

Most philosophical intuitions, I think, can be captured in this framework. One important class to call out specifically is moral intuitions. Because I am a subjectivist about ethics, I can use this account for ethical intuitions as well. However, if you’re a thick realist of some sort, you’ll need a different account. We’ll leave ethical intuitions aside for that reason.

Let us illustrate the account via some famous appeals to intuition in philosophy.

Personal identity cases (teletransportation, merging, splitting etc.): Our intuitions as appealed to in these cases are stipulations about where one person begins and another ends. We are composites across time and space. What gets included in that composite is a matter of conceptual choice.

Countless arguments about free will: These draw out stipulations about how we’re going to use phrases like “free-will” and “responsible”. Relatedly, they draw out policies towards persons- this is also true in personal identity cases.

Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt Case: A stipulation about how we’re going to use proper names. It would not at all surprise me if some people think “Gödel is Schmidt” is true.

Twin Earth: Our intuition that XYZ is not water is effectively a stipulation that some of our terms are going to refer to natural kinds. Incidentally, I think this is a problem for how Putnam interprets the thought experiment. He says “meanings just ain’t in the head” I think that whether or not meanings are in the head ultimately comes down to whether I want them to be. I could use “water” in a way that includes XYZ. I’d bet there are probably some people out there already doing this. The concept would be less useful for many purposes, but not fundamentally illegitimate. If the world governs our words in Twin Earth cases, it may only be by prior agreement.

Sorites argument: An observation that certain practices in how we assign the phrase “heap” are apparently inconsistent.

Many problematic cases for my approach do exist, often in the philosophy of mind. “Inverted spectra are possible”. Isn’t this an intuition? Well, maybe, and maybe to that degree it’s just not a very good argument, since it can’t appeal to stipulation about the extension of concepts for its authority. However, I’m not sure it is an intuition. Maybe it’s something more like an argument from observations about experience. Whether or not it is any good is another matter. If worst comes to worst though, I’m happy to shrink back my claim to include only a limited class of intuitions. Another problem here is that it seems like we use something like intuition in logic and mathematics, and we’re still owed an account of how that can be valid. But this is a standing problem that predates the approach I outline here.

Saying that intuitions are stipulations is, I admit, a little misleading as terminology. They are stipulations we are in many cases quite attached to, often for good pragmatic, historical or cultural reasons. These stipulations are not generally made at the moment of encountering the thought experiment. They represent pre-existing practices in how we use words. Still, “stipulation” as a term, I think, draws out something important. We are deeply committed to these practices, but they are ultimately just our practices. If I really wanted to, perhaps using psychedelics, I could reconstrue “person” so that persons end whenever they go to sleep. But I half jest. Intuitions are stipulations formally but often with little or no contingency. They are often embedded for the deepest of psychological, cultural, practical and moral reasons.

Our account gives us a ready-made explanation for disagreement and cross-cultural variation in intuitions (different practices and thus concepts). It also gives an account of some forms of cross-contextual variation (different practices for different concepts at different times). Cross-contextual variation that seems unprincipled as suggested by some of the work in the negative program in experimental philosophy will be a more serious problem. The neat picture of practices cleanly picking out properties may need to be complicated. Let’s say this is a matter for future research.

There’s a way of misconstruing the view I’ve given here that I want to pre-empt. Some will look at it as saying “intuitions only track concepts, not the thing itself. There is still a (perhaps unresolvable) question about what Knowledge, Persons, Heaps etc. really are”. I reject this. I believe the world is full up with properties, and generally all the action is happening at the level of picking, for example, which of the candidate knowledge properties we are going to refer to with our word “knowledge”.

It’s not that knowledge has a secret essence beyond our awareness. Rather, we basically set the character of the thing the word “knowledge” refers to, out of an infinitude of options, through our intuition-stipulations. We are not talking about psychology “instead of” external reality, or words rather than essences. Rather our psychology selects, from an infinite menu, a property (or set of properties) existing in the external world suitable for requirements. Talking about the choices we make in picking the concept discloses the nature of the concept. The picture is not, to my mind, anti-realist because knowledge, reference, free will etc really are thus and so.

Nothing in this story negates the Lewisian idea that some properties are more natural than others, or the idea that such properties will tend to attract our reference. The pull works alongside our practices/intuitions in picking out properties for us to refer to.

Is the value of philosophy affected by the story I’ve given? Perhaps a little, but mostly no. Ultimately, I think the conceptual anthropology of our categories, and their conceptual engineering, is a worthy object of study. I think a dual track approach to philosophy is opened by these considerations. There’s the question of how ordinary people structure their concepts - covered by experimental philosophy - and then there’s the question of how professional philosophers structure their concepts. Philosopher’s intuitions-practices are of independent significance because their approach may reflect a more developed taxonomic design for labelling the world.

1. Signify that the writer or speaker sees themselves as more sophisticated than a crude establishment.

2. Gesture towards theory, but in a way that doesn’t do any theoretical work.

3. Wash hands of the (often quite real) sins of the past. Epistemic sins and, in some cases, moral. A friend called it epistemic deodorant.

Many of the terms in what follows have a clear meaning, however they have been appropriated for these purposes. Where there is a clear meaning, my point is not to criticise the concepts themselves but their appropriation. Other terms were always extremely vague. Many are in the middle. Collectively I call them sophistication gestures.

A partial list would include:

Assemblage

Biopsychosocial

Constructed

Contested

Contextual

Context-sensitive

Contingent

Co-constituted

Cybernetic/cybernetics

Dialogical

Dialectical

Discursive

Dynamic

Ecological

Embedded

Embodied

Emergent

Enacted

Entangled

Heterogeneous

Historically mediated

Historically situated

Holistic

Institutional

Integrative

Intersectional

Interpretive

Intersubjective

Liminal

Lived experience

Material-discursive

Meaning-making

Mediated

Multidimensional

Multilevel

Multiscalar

Multivalent

Narrative

Nonlinear

Nuanced

Overdetermined

Phenomenological

Plural

Pluralistic

Polysemous

Processual

Recursive

Relational

Rhizomatic

Sense-making

Situated

Socially constructed

Sociocultural

Spectrum

Symbolic

Systems-level

Transdiagnostic

World-disclosing

Of course, just as, if not more, important is the inverse list. The signifiers of unsophistication which the author can reject. Policing borders to complement planting flags:

absolutist

ahistorical

atomistic

binary

Cartesian

crude

deterministic

disembodied

essentialist

foundationalist

individualist

instrumentalist

linear

mechanistic

methodological individualist

monocausal

monolithic

naïve

naturalized

objectivist

ontotheological

positivist

reductionist

reified

static

teleological

thin

totalizing

universalist

unmediated

unreflexive

Again, many of these terms on all the lists above are quite valuable. I imagine forbidding them would simply create alternatives. I will continue to use many myself and do so shamelessly. My aim is not to create a list of naughty words or concepts, but to identify a naughty instinct for which these words are used: a vague gesture at “I am one of the people who knows things are complex” and “I am one of the good ones”.

There may be, on occasion, room in good writing for these words even used as sophistication gestures. Suppose I’m writing an essay narrowly on mercury and insanity in the Victorian period, but I haven’t got time to touch on the many social dimensions of madness. Simply acknowledging that madness is “socially co-constituted” or some such invocation might reassure the reader that I’m not just a klutzy brute stumbling around. But though there are exceptions, when these words are used as sophistication gestures, the right general stance is deep scepticism. If you have to tell me that your ideas are intellectually complex, I begin to strongly suspect they might not be complex, and far worse, might be bad. Whatever you think of show-don’t tell as a general rule, it’s almost iron clad here. Writers aren’t supposed to tell readers they’re smart or sophisticated. If they feel it’s a point they want to make (and look, all power to them, the academic job market is brutal) then they should show it.

I’d also note, in passing the problems of the total picture. All of these words have perfectly valid uses. However when taken collectively as a sign of the sophistication markers currently common in the field they point to a worldview that was quite decisively critiqued by Kieran Healy in his wonderful little paper Fuck Nuance. Collectively, they tend to hedge against explanation as such.

Look, we’re all humans. We all want to be cool. But we should reject these terms when used as sophistication gestures because:

A) Have some decorum. Desperation to be taken seriously is unseemly.

B) We want to know whether the writer has a real, interesting, possibly even original point. These terms are all too often squid ink disguising emptiness or, in some cases, throat clearing and coughing sounds hiding a genuine and important point.