It’s just too fast. I can do it in argument: I can argue passionately for a position, hear a devastating counter-argument and not double-down. I can let go of all my identification with the thing I was arguing for a second ago, shrug and go “Yea, I guess you’re right.” I can do it so fast I often leave my interlocutors disoriented, grasping at straws.

But, actions? They just go by too fast: having all eyes on me, feeling I will lose face if I dis-identify from the action I was just engaged in… It all just moves too fast. So I can’t.

I used to think relationships were much more final. That the past determined the future. That there was an end-scene or end-credits where the score gets tallied. But now… I don’t think that anymore? Things are much more… strange: retrocausal, pliable, flexible. Like, sure, the facts won’t change. But your interpretation very well might: it’s perfectly plausible that you can have a nasty disagreement with someone and then, after that, have a heart-to-heart that brings you closer than you were before the disagreement. That brings you close enough that you’re bound to think, and feel, something like “That sucked. But… I’m kinda glad it happened because it got us here, y’know?”

The future changes (the interpretation of) the past.

I now realize that LessWrong and its discussions on rational decision-making were a very impressive external artifact perfectly fitted for my neurosis-shaped hole.

it’s perfectly plausible that you can have a nasty disagreement with someone and then, after that, have a heart-to-heart that brings you closer than you were before the disagreement. That brings you close enough that you’re bound to think, and feel, something like “That sucked. But… I’m kinda glad it happened because it got us here, y’know?”

I used to think relationships were much more final. That the past determined the future. That there was an end-scene or end-credits where the score gets tallied. But now… I don’t think that anymore?

The focus was on a cause of great shame: that one time I repeatedly punched my younger brother in the stomach because of what he said about a girl I was dating at the time.

(Extra bonus shame points for the fact that I was told he had said those things. I didn’t even hear it myself. Looking back, it’s perfectly plausible that I was manipulated: many people over the years — usually girls — tried to turn me and my brother against one another.)

Anyway, I punched him in the stomach, over and over, and I perfectly remember, first-person POV, his eyes watering from the first punch. I also perfectly remember having a “moment of conscience” in response: a ‘Wait. Hold up. What the fuck am I doing?’ I remember being overcome with shame, I remember being terrified of losing face (to whom??) and choosing to smother the voice of my own conscience and keep punching, keep insisting on the action that I already knew was wrong.

That is the great shame. Not the fact that I did it: I was 15, I was a stupid kid. But I wasn’t that stupid. The “voice of conscience” did come, the cricket did materialize on my shoulder. I just chose to ignore it.

For years I’ve been obsessed with theories of decision-making. At least since, 15 years ago, I read LessWrong and moved to Vienna to study them. I was really into them, intellectually, really into the topic of how to maximize utility and how to make the best choices.

I now realize that LessWrong and its discussions on rational decision-making were a very impressive external artifact perfectly fitted for my neurosis-shaped hole.

Ever since the episode above it became extremely, insanely, life-and-death important to not make the wrong choice. To not smother, once again, the voice of my own conscience.

So I agonized and agonized over every decision. I formatted any incoming conflict or trade-off as a Decision to be agonized over. And LessWrong, with its theories, promised me deliverance from this Hell of my own making.

And it really was Hell: I suffered eons more than whatever physical pain I caused my little brother. But that was a small cost to ensure I wouldn’t make the wrong choice again, the wrong decision, that I wouldn’t once again smother what I knew was best. I had to make all choices perfect.

It doesn’t work.

It’s just too fast. I can do it in argument: I can argue passionately for a position, hear a devastating counter-argument and not double-down. I can let go of all my identification with the thing I was arguing for a second ago, shrug and go “Yea, I guess you’re right.” I can do it so fast I often leave my interlocutors disoriented, grasping at straws.

But, actions? They just go by too fast: having all eyes on me, feeling I will lose face if I dis-identify from the action I was just engaged in… It all just moves too fast. So I can’t.

One of the things I love most about language is how it’s retrocausal. How the future can change the past. Here’s an example: “I love jars. Some of them, anyways. Or at least I used to.” Right? Each further sentence alters the meaning of the preceding one. I now think relationships are like language.

I used to think relationships were much more final. That the past determined the future. That there was an end-scene or end-credits where the score gets tallied. But now… I don’t think that anymore? Things are much more… strange: retrocausal, pliable, flexible. Like, sure, the facts won’t change. But your interpretation very well might: it’s perfectly plausible that you can have a nasty disagreement with someone and then, after that, have a heart-to-heart that brings you closer than you were before the disagreement. That brings you close enough that you’re bound to think, and feel, something like “That sucked. But… I’m kinda glad it happened because it got us here, y’know?”

The future changes (the interpretation of) the past.

Which makes relationships like language. I can’t change the past. But I can still apologize to my brother.

Last week I came across the following tweet:

“Sweet”, thought I. “Pre-vetted essays.” I opened the first one and started reading. My spidey sense started tingling. — “Oh.” —  A bad feeling growled in the pit of my stomach. — “Oh no.” “Is this AI slop!?”

I fired up Pangram and, well, you guessed it. It was. What you might’ve’nt guessed is that it was 100% slop.

I felt outraged, violated, angry, deceived, taken advantage of, exploited, fooled, made a fool of, tricked, hurt, violated (again)…

I ran the other ones through Pangram before even reading a word. Slop. Slop. I felt like puking. Not slop. Thank God.

And so I ran to the only recourse I felt I had: I tweeted about it.

Doubt

Still recovering, my DMs icon highlighted. A new message. I opened it. “Please distract me.”

I’d been having an ongoing conversation with someone who DMed me slop asking for my opinion on it. The tricky thing was that the content itself, the original ideas in it, was pretty rad. But the formulaic structure made me bounce off.

So I told them as much “I like the ideas but… was this AI-generated?” “Well, I wrote it or, rather, dictated it myself. I had AI edit it.” “Cool, cool… I think these ideas are good enough to merit writing them in your own words.” I was trying to be diplomatic.

They did. They rewrote them in their own words. That’s what this DM was. I read through and… it was worse? Or, at least, harder to make sense of? I realized that slop is a “known formula” — not unlike scholastic disputations or socratic dialogues — and that that makes parsing its core claims easier, even if it’s grating to read. Hmm.

Dialogue

I was still trying to re-orient myself after this realization when a second message hit my inbox. This time by the author of one of the pieces I had just denounced.

Now, my backstory with this person is somewhat tense: we used to be mutuals, at some point she wrote about how her boyfriend can’t feed himself and only eats frozen meals and I tweeted out “bitch cook him a meal” because the thought came to me and it’s the only way I have to discharge myself from such thoughts. Some idiot tagged her and she unfollowed.

(Something I should say here is that I have a bit of a different relationship to Twitter than most people. For me the content is primary. It’s never really about anyone, at most inspired by them. People tend to have a much more personal and social relation to it than I do. It’s hurtful, perhaps, but to me accounts on Twitter are just that: accounts. I might love you irl and not follow you. This often hurts people as they feel it’s a personal judgement. It’s not. You are great. It’s your content that sucks.)

But she’s good, as a writer, her writing’s good. So much so that I recommended Chris Lakin hire her back when I was working with him. She has skills I don’t. That I had endorsed her only made the betrayal sting more when I ran the rest of her Twitter feed through Pangram and everything came out as AI, or mixed at best. Even worse: I saw she was offering writing coaching services. “Really? This is my competition?” I went from feeling bad for having inadvertently offended her to feeling devalued and outraged, swindled by a fraudster.

Suffice to say, when she reached out I was pissed. But I tried to be max polite, max diplomatic, trying to flex these new skills.

Her take, as summarized by me, was the following: “Pangram is meaningfully misfiring in my case. People care about knowing whether something is AI-assisted because it serves as a proxy of effort and, thus, as a proxy of whether they should invest the time to read it. But the way I’m using AI costs me more time than if I didn’t. I generate variations and wrestle with every single sentence and every single word. There’s all sorts of associations with using AI that actually don’t apply to my case (even if they may apply to most). That’s why I don’t want to litigate this publicly but I’m happy to dialogue over DMs. In my mind, I see this as having an editor, which I would if I could, but I can’t afford. I’m actively discussing this with Max [the founder of Pangram].”12

Which is like… you know, not immediately preposterous on its face?

This is very new technology. We are still collectively negotiating norms around it. (This essay being intended as part of that very negotiation). I, selfishly, would love those norms to include a jubilee: I’m not free of sin either, I wrote a book draft just as I realized ChatGPT’s potential and you can guess what happened as a consequence. It was very hard not to use it, especially towards the end as things got tougher and I was more tired. (Don’t try to write a book in 3 months.) There were no norms back then and I didn’t have any experience to keep me from using it. Unfortunate.

I told myself I’d reedit the whole thing, that it was just a draft. Of course I never did. After 8 months I capitulated and published it anyway. But I did call it a draft and highlighted that it had been AI-assisted right there on the sales page.

And I told her as much: “I wouldn’t feel duped if AI use had been disclosed.” To which she responded that it imports the wrong associations. People equate AI with slop and will be reflexively repelled without even giving her a chance to explain.3

Pondering

Let’s take a step back.

I’ve used Midjourney a lot. I had periods where I generated over 1000 images per month.

I love Midjourney. It has enabled me to witness endless alien aesthetics and to fulfill a life-long goal of “drawing” my dreams. I don’t think I could’ve done either on my own.

And not for lack of trying: as a kid I drew comic fan fiction, of Pokemon, of Calvin & Hobbes. As an adult, I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and did all the exercises; I got oil and canvas, I painted 10 or 20 paintings. But there’s too much I want to witness and not enough time in a human life to learn all the skills I’d need to learn to personally make it. Not without AI.

These are all AI-generated. But they’re not slop. Not to me, anyways.

And it’s like, sure, AI can make slop, Most AI-generated art is slop. But is that an indictment of AI? Isn’t most human-generated art slop too? Excuse me -- “kitsch”?

Human-generated art used to be skill-gated, so most people never made any. But AI-generated art isn’t, so many more do. (Like me with Midjourney!) Unfortunately, most people lack not just skill, but also taste. Or, since that word has become so overburdened, most lack aesthetic judgment.

AI has made it so much cheaper to create that there’s a selection effect where most of the slop you see will be AI-slop, even if the determining factor in it being slop is not that it uses AI. AI just makes it easier to make more of everything and most of everything that gets made is crap.

But some people do have taste even if they don’t have skill and AI unbinds their taste from their (lack of) technical skill.

I’m not even sure if you could make the above without AI. Perhaps you could. I certainly couldn’t.

All this to say I’m actually super down with AI art. Any art. In fact, I’ve believed for the longest time that the only reason artists are against AI is either ignorant ludditism, rent-seeking, or both.

Sacredness

Going back to the DM exchange, a surprising moment of recognition came when she confessed she’d be repulsed (my words) by someone using AI to write poetry because poetry is a “purely creative act”4. And it was like, AH-HA! So you DO have some sacredness around writing!

That’s what strikes me about me debate around AI-assisted writing. Ultimately it looks to me as a failure of inter-faith dialogue. Different people hold different things as being sacred and, to spin a famous sentence, it’s not that everyone wants to commoditize their complement, as much as each person wants to desacralize everyone else’s sacredness.

Or, as the saying (doesn’t) go: “One man’s sacred object is another woman’s primitive taboo.”

Perspective-taking

From the inside I’m upholding the sacredness of human writing against an onslaught of AI slop while anti-AI artists are merely rent-seeking luddites.

But, how do I know they don’t feel exactly the same way about me? I can totally imagine an artist who’s me but in reverse: who treats creating art terminally, and who is thus totally unwilling to hand it over to a machine, and who treats writing instrumentally — “Writing? That’s for curators.” — and is thus thrilled at not having to do it manually anymore.

Hell, I know people like that. I’ve had people, close people, ask me to review articles they intend to publish in newspapers that were wholly AI-generated. It led me to temptations of murder-suicide. “Don’t you know what writing can do for you!? This is such disrespect to your readers!” But, to them, publishing articles is merely instrumental to raising their prestige.

Distinctions

The point I’m making is this: each side drops distinctions that the other side finds crucial.

Human vs AI.

AI-generated vs AI-assisted.

Slop vs not.

Any AI use is seen as making something entirely AI-made, and what's AI-made is treated as slop (is what I think my DMs interlocutor would say). But, in fact, AI-assisted and AI-made are not the same. And AI-assisted and slop aren’t the same either.

But they don’t even feel comfortable making this argument publicly because of the (deserved or not) stigma.

Which, again, fair enough.5

Judgement(al)

If you go back to the original call-out tweet I wrote you’ll see that I said the articles were X% slop.

It’s not obvious to me anymore that any and all AI writing is necessarily slop. It was already obvious to me that AI generated content doesn’t have to be slop in creative domains that aren’t sacred to me — art, video, music — and, by analogy, I can imagine it not being obvious in the one creative domain that is.

If anything, it seems like I might be making my way over to the majority view: the articles in the original tweet all did very well. Of the biggest Substack publications, 7 out of 31 use AI-assisted writing.

Perhaps they do it because it’s what people are into?6 The person who I asked to rewrite their ideas in their own words did worse than with AI. Slop and AI-assisted are not the same, this I already knew. Maybe there’s a distinction too between AI-assisted and AI-generated. I certainly need to fiddle with Midjourney prompts to get what I want from it, even if I’m not the one, ultimately, “making” it.

A way to cut this whole debate short would be for people to open up about their writing process. To share their logs along with their writing. In fact that’s just what Max [the founder of Pangram] asked of the author who reached out to me over DMs. She declined.

5

It took only moments from my denouncement for people to use it as a way to criticize the person who originally shared the essays.

Substack itself, when you ask it to show you less of a type of note, gives you this option that puts “slop” on equal footing with not interesting / clickbait / spam / shilling / political / rude.

So, society is a bunch of deals and deals require mutual trust, which entails being safe or, at the very least the ability to perform being safe. The way you perform being safe is by being a normal person: can you perform the basic social rituals? “Good, how are you?” “Watch the game last night?” Etc. Each serves as a hoop you have to jump through until you eventually get categorized as “normal”, until you eventually get categorized as safe.

A “weirdo” is someone who — by disposition or cultivation — cannot perform the basic social rituals.

That’s bad.

Normies live and die by their basic social rituals. (They ought to be called “normers”, really: those who enforce norms.) And that’s GOOD! These little rituals are just the tip of the iceberg that are our shared norms and our shared norms are GOOD! They’re the cause and consequence of self-domestication, of selecting for cooperativeness, and societies that can enforce them not only trade more but also cooperate more and scale better, eventually outcompeting those that cannot.

And that’s why normies distrust weirdos: if you cannot perform the nearly costless basic social rituals… how can I trust you to perform the important, costly ones?

As a weirdo this can feel unfair to be on the receiving end of, but it’s not unreasonable.

Destruction is easier than construction (all that’s necessary for society to crumble is for normie men to do nothing) which means that once someone is stepping outside tested-and-true (i.e. normal i.e. normie i.e. normed i.e. selected-for) behavior the odds are higher than not that their behavior is going to be a net negative. There’s no time to do deep dives on everyone and as a cheap-and-dirty heuristic it works.

Where normies’ “If you’re a weirdo, you’re bad” heuristic fails — and, again, it mostly works: for each “good weirdo” there’s a prison-size population of bad ones — where it fails is that, once in a blue moon, a weirdo actually is that guy: he doesn’t follow the norms, yes. Because he makes up new better ones.

But that’s the exception, not the rule. And thus, generally, normies are right to mistrust weirdos.

Gf and I moved to Porto, in the North of Portugal. One night we went for a walk downtown and, coming back by metro, we exit into this park. A park I rant against each time we go by, about how if you want to have public places then strong law and order is non-negotiable: the alternative being rapid decay as less bad people get iteratively expelled by progressively worse people.

We exit the metro to turn around the bushes that encircle the whole garden, facing the sidewalk, and are greeted by this Indian man — and I mention this detail because our former PM, now President of the European Council, did an 8-years open borders policy that increased our population by 20%, many being Indians, nearly all unvetted — with his dick in hand, peeing onto the street. Mind you, it’s 8PM.

She noticed it, I lost it. “ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY!?” He threw up a 👍 in response while looking me straight in the eye: my cortisol spiked, his did not.

I’m no stranger to physical confrontation. The first month gf and I were together she saw me yank a drunkard from a cab after he overtook us to it, outside a club. Scared, defenseless eyes.

Another time, she saw me yell at a man that nearly hit her because he was texting on his phone. “DON’T YOU HAVE EYES!?” He turned: “Yes… two.” “THEN USE THEM!!”

She witnessed the moment where everything gets heightened. You can physically feel the boundary — Does he dare to take a step forward? Both him and I knew that, if he did, a fist fight was inevitable.

Both of those moments spiked my cortisol bigly: neck veins popping, canines showing, heat through my body. This time… not as much?

Sure, tweets of Zoomer Black Sun edits flashed through my mind. But I just… walked away?

“He has two friends, they didn’t realize what happened, there’s all these cobblestones right here, they’re probably carrying knives, I can call the police —” and then it just dropped. I just didn’t have it in me to keep going.

This might be surprising — given the above two tales — but it recently become a theme.

In traffic, for example, my cortisol would spike as well. Reckless Driving would Happen and I’d keep Replaying it in my mind, feeding the fires of my outrage\. “How dare he!” and so on.

Kinda like this

But, since meditating a bunch, I’ve lost it. I’ve lost the ability to do it.

It’s weird to say but, as it turns out, being angry is a skill:you gotta continuously add coals to the fire to keep it going. Meditation makes you lose that ability to mentally feed the fires. Fast. (I think they call these the three poisons.)

To be clear: my cortisol still spikes. It spiked with dick-in-hand guy, and it kept spiking through the night whenever I recalled his “👍” and his stupid Bollywoodesque glasses. But, outside of those rare spikes, my mood was pretty swell.

I still had, of course, all sorts of meta-thoughts about that: “I did nothing — does that make me a cuck?” Memes of an Indian Chad throwing up a “👍” and a Virgin Cortisol Spiker flashed through my mind.

But the truth is I was certainly far, far from his mind while he would still be on mine if I kept seething at home. So I just… didn’t.

I just dropped it. Or “it dropped itself”.

Perhaps becoming a better person entails being a worse man.

The day after

“Perhaps becoming a better person entails being a worse man.” — that’s how I originally ended this essay yesterday. Very congratulatory. But, looking back, maybe that’s not what happened?

I thought I had become a worse man as I “didn’t defend my woman.” Except I did: I set a boundary and moved her away to safety. In both of the earlier episodes me getting into confrontations probably only made things more dangerous for her, not less. Maybe I’ve become a better man, after all.

At the same time… despite the active anger not being present I can feel something turning inside me, something cold, calculating… rational.

Getting into a confrontation in the “heat of the moment” is understandable. “You were not yourself.” A different thing is planning, planning and plotting. That entails endorsed intentionality across time.

This event strengthened something in me. Something that wants to plan and plot and carefully execute to make sure this doesn’t happen again — to her or any woman — and that these people get the hell out of my country.

That feels that much more deliberate, more owned, more evil.

Perhaps the truth is the opposite of what I previously concluded: perhaps I’ve become a better man and a worse person.

Maybe.

It’s hard to tell.

Buddhism claims that you’ve been confused all your life. The mind is of one nature which you’ve never once experienced. The reason you’ve never experienced it is because you have all of these THOUGHTS muddying your vision. How can you see into the bottom of the lake if the waters are dirty and tumultuous? You need to let the waters calm down so that the dirt can fall and you can get a glimpse of what’s really at the bottom, for the first time ever. And, they’ll say, the way to do that is to sit in meditation for hours and hours and hours.

Alternatively, you can teleport.

To use another metaphor: it’s as if you’re mining for a diamond. You can mine, mine, mine and mine…

…or you can teleport to it.

“Direct Pointing” is the traditional name given to teleporting. Someone who is experientially familiar with the nature of mind can just “send you there”. And, traditionally, it comes in two kinds: direct pointing by extraordinary means, which is when a teacher takes a student there, apocryphally by doing as little as tapping them on the forehead — pretty extra, eh? — and direct pointing by ordinary means: when a student is taken there through an instruction that bypasses the conceptual mind.

As you might or might not know, I’ve been meditating for at least 14 years (memory is getting fuzzy). I got real serious about it in 2023. In that search, that journey, I at some point found direct pointers.

The rest of the post is me sharing the ones that worked best for me since.

There Is No Problem to Solve | Shift Into Open-hearted Awareness

This is the first direct pointer I ever came across, before I even knew the term for it. I was just sitting on the couch, accursed by thoughts as was usual back then, listening to Youtube in the background. He built up to the question he asks at the end (Do NOT skip to it. You need the whole buildup for it to MAYBE, POSSIBLY work.) Then he asked it and it was like… Like until then I had been underwater and now, for the first time, I was not.

Basically making this transition:

From looking through thought to looking — for the first time ever! — beyond thought.

Everything suddenly dropped and it was like I could take a breath for the first time.

Or, in my boutique very unique and very cool style:

(Yes I’m mixing metaphors and visual languages — the diamond of the mind was down before and now it’s up — but get off my back: that’s just what being a shape rotator is like.)

I fell in love with Loch Kelly and immediately bought his two books. I bought them over and over, in fact.

Each book is a collection of direct pointers. You never know whom each will work for so you gotta throw lots of them. I read both as I let Awareness bathe over me.

(Sorta literally too: I read them in the bath.)

I’m not exactly sure when or how I found this one but I was struck by how such simple instructions could work.

Demonstration of how easy it is to stop thinking

Watching it you may realise that yes, it’s true: by default there is non-stop mental chatter, mental elaboration, mental blabla. And that there can also be gaps in this chatter and that you can look through those gaps to find the mind.

Looking through these gaps you can glimpse — maybe for the first time — the restful nature of mind, away from, and beyond, the continuous discourse that habitually conceals it.

Not all instructions come from modern teachers’ Youtube videos. Some are old. Old old. For example, Tilopa’s six words from somewhere between 988 and 1069:

Translated by Ken McLeod

‘Six words’ because in Tibetan they’re only six words. (Maybe it works like German? Idk.) Tilopa’s intent here — I believe — was to short-circuit all habitual mind tendencies: don’t go to the past, don’t go to the future, don’t go up to thought, don’t go down to examination, let go of controlling experience. Your reaction to that might be ‘What? Then there’s nothing to do!’ Yes! Precisely.

As you get into meditation weird stuff starts happening. It’s sorta par for the course, don’t sweat it.

One such weird thing that happened was how I found the next pointer. It was on a pdf on my computer but I had no idea how it got there, no recollection of ever buying it.

I randomly opened a page and found the following instructions:

And, it continues, “by doing so nonconceptual rigpa will arise.”

It worked. I “went there”, nearly instantaneously, right after reading the instructions. It just cut through the sea of conceptual elaboration. (Confused by all these mixed metaphors? Good. See through them! What are they pointing at?)

The most recent direct pointer was even weirder… I’m even shy to admit, but hopefully I’ve built enough credit as a very normal and very well-adjusted person by now to pull it off. Ok, here goes nothing: this one came to me in a dream.

This dream followed a day during which I got no pulls, not one, to do anything. That night, in my dream, a figure I just knew was wise appeared. Only to say “Stay in the space of not-knowing.”

And so I did.

TV is nice. You get to lay back and… turn off. Not so with Twitter — my other drug of choice. On Twitter you gotta make all these micro-decisions: do I scroll past or quote-tweet dunk or take it to the comments or… It’s nice to just sit back, relax, and let your brain soak.

Having said that, yes, TV is indeed a “base” activity that’s beneath an intellectual such as myself.

Thankfully, my intellectualism is of the online kind. There’s a great tradition of online intellectuals countersignaling by analyzing what our irl brethren won’t touch: Alex Danco’s The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class, Eric Weinstein’s Kayfabe, TLP’s The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam, and, of course, Venkatesh Rao’s The Office according to “The Office”.

Today it is our turn to ruin that great tradition.

So, WWE Unreal.

I discovered the show scrolling through the shows Netflix. (As one does.)

It started auto-playing (as they do) and got inundated by a wave of nostalgia. Some odd 20 years ago WWE absolutely took over Portugal. It showed on our dedicated teen channel and pretty soon every school was having to issue guidelines telling kids to stop driving one another through tables.

I had also been recently reminded of it because a WWE scene — John Cena ‘turning heel’ — went so viral that it crossed my timeline, where I had never once seen wrestling before.

All this to say: their media blitz worked. Gf — who had never watched WWE before — and I put on the first episode of WWE Unreal and got on to it.

WWE Unreal is a television series that promises to give you a behind-the-scenes into how WWE is produced.

20 years ago, when I was a kid watching WWE in Portugal, the burning question on my mind was ‘Is it real?’

Reading Eric Weinstein’s essay on Kayfabe above put the final nail in the casket I had been carrying around half-open ever since.

But, 20 years later, Wrestling has moved so much past that.

WWE Unreal gives us a look behind the curtains into how WWE is produced. Going into season 1 I was maybe even more fascinated than I was watching WWE as a kid because I could relate to it differently.

Performers — that’s what they call “wrestlers “ now — have “eras” with corresponding “stage names”, which reminded me of the experience of being pseudonymous online.

These performers — just like pseudoanons — had trouble distinguishing exactly where the boundary was between real and fake, between fiction and non-fiction. Adding to their confusion a bunch of them use as their stage name their irl name — which they always refer to as their “government name”.

At some point a performer says “I needed to stand up for myself, not as Naomi [performer name] but as Trinity [government name].” She “turns heel” which is wrestling jargon for “becomes a bad guy.” Her husband — Jey Uso — being filmed in their home comments that ever since she — Trinity, the irl person — “looks different, talks different.”

Just like Trinity and Jey Uso many performers are married, which often becomes part of their character storylines. Which brings us to how the show gets written. There’s a creative team, headed by a former superstar, with the performers all giving inputs. “Naomi” turning heel was motivated by Trinity being frustrated about her position in the woman wrestler’s roster irl.

Two other female performers get into a — scripted — tiff onstage and one calls out the fact that the other has been divorced 3 times — unscripted. She cries backstage.

Performers also make decisions in real time based on how much they can hear the public emote, which also gets roped into the writing of the show. A real-time dialectic with the audience.

A visceral example: at some point the company fires (for real [it’s amazing how many of these clarifications I have to add to the text]) beloved performer ‘R-Truth’. The audience backlash is so large that chants of ‘We want Truth’ drown out anything said in the ring. In response both that decision gets rolled into the story, as does the re-signing of his contract. And all of that gets rolled into Unreal WWE.

And that’s the other thing I realized watching the show: everything gets rolled into the story.

Everything is narrative fodder.

The performer’s stage names, their government names, their marriages, their firings, their injuries, the audience’s chants, the announcers, the refs — all of it gets folded in.

Realizing this a question starts burning in my mind: what exactly am I watching?

It took me getting to the end of season 2 to get some clarity.

In season two Paul Heyman — executive, promoter, commentator and manager who on-screen plays… himself — starts making appearances.

He’s old school. He’s all about that old school kayfabe, “Weinsteinian” kayfabe — honest kayfabe, played straight.

He doesn’t like the show he’s now on — Unreal WWE. He says as much himself. He goes as far as saying that, in his time, secrecy was a “matter of life and death”.

But, he continues, iPhones made that difficult — all it takes is one pic going viral to blow up a story you might’ve planned out months in advance.

The future is now, old man, I can imagine Paul Levalesque replying.

Paul Levalesque is the other talking head in the documentary. This is what he looked like back when he went by ‘Triple H’:

Triple H, now ‘Paul Levalesque’ — business executive, promoter, retired wrestler, chief content officer, head of creative and executive producer at WWE — sees things differently.

His take is that the fact that everyone has a camera isn’t a threat, but an opportunity.

In one storyline they have a performer attack another outside — not just the ring but the arena (!) — to “show the beef is real”. They deliberately don’t film it — that would telegraph that it’s scripted. Fans all have cameras in their pockets and they’re relying on them to do work for them. The attack goes viral on social media.

Levalesque understands that the audience got too genre savvy for old-school kayfabe to work. The internet has made keeping secrets hard. Old insider industry terms — like ‘babyface’ and ‘heel’ — are now familiar to everyone in the audience.

And performers take that for granted: John Cena, after the viral moment where he ‘turned heel’ literally tells the audience he’ll be himself — meaning not himself: meaning returning to the babyface he had always played — once more at the next Wrestlemania.

(So buy your tickets now!)

The grand finale of Season 2 is performer Seth Rollins faking a knee injury. And, again, WWE’s use of their fans’ unpaid labor to their advantage: he uses crutches everywhere because he knows he’ll get filmed feeding viral social media “Is it real?” discourse.

The animating question of Wrestling used to be ‘Is it real? Is it fake?’ A question that admits only a binary yes/no response.

‘Just exactly what is fake?’ explodes the possibilities for viral discourse once more and, with it, the possibilities for ticket and pay-per-view sales.

The audience got savvy. They know the insider terms. They know wrestling is fake. The old question is moot.

But the audience has been promoted: they’re now part of the show. Their cameras film what WWE won’t. Their chants rewrite the script. Their discourse is the show.

So Levesque revives the old question by moving it up a floor:

What is WWE Unreal?

Then I became less young.

With this movement, from young to less young — I refuse to say “old” — many changes come. White hairs, white pubes — just wait — and, worse: realizing you were been wrong.

I was at JessCamp the past week — the yearly European TPOT camp — and had a familiar interaction: a Frenchman on MDMA approached me. I had been approached by a Frenchman 2 Jesscamps ago and he had become one of my close friends after he, also on MDMA, gave me a cold read that he thought I was “lonely”. So I was happy to entertain.

Frenchman 2 turned to me — just yesterday — and said “You trigger me.”

Oh, God, here we go again.

Some color: I knew of this Frenchman from last year’s JessCamp. After the initial welcoming announcements on the first day he had asked to speak only to say that if anyone was having a difficult experience he would be happy to hold space for them and all this nice hippie stuff. So he was in my good books. He had political credit with me. So I went for it.

“Say more?”

I’m summarizing a long conversation but the thrust of it, if I understood it correctly, was just how seemingly happy-go-lucky and careless I was — horrible traits, I know — given that we had the same background reading.

He had come up in LessWrong, in EA, he knew that the world was not just on fire but a fireball moving at lightspeed towards the abyss that is superintelligence. And so did I. So why wasn’t I freaking the fuck out!?

(Hearing him I couldn’t help but imagine two missionaries having much the same discussion some odd 500 years ago: “My brother in Christ, you know the natives haven’t heard the Good Word and that thus their souls are destined for an eternity in Hellfire. Does this concern you not!?”)

Again: political capital. I played ball and gave him my backstory: the way that I had had social difficulties growing up and the way I was captured by the Animal Pak/gymbro ideology at 15 as a way to solve it.

If only my legs were that big I’d never hurt again…

I told him how hardcore I was about it: training up to twice a day 7 days a week. I told him how I worked out so much I gave myself a Deep Vein Thrombosis which was the worst thing possible. Not because I could’ve died, mind you — I was fully willing to die if only I could deadlift 300 kgs once — but because I couldn’t train. Not for the next 6 months.

I told him that broke my self-image: I was a guy who trained. I told him how it made me depressed. How I wrote a book of sad short stories to cope. How I reasoned, very rationally for a 21-years old — my age when the thrombosis happened — that I was a guy who trained and that if I couldn’t train the body then, goddamn it, I’d train the mind.

I told him that’s how I got into the Model Thinking course on Coursera and how I woke up early to do it before Uni. And I told him how, from there, I found LessWrong.

I told him how I got really into LessWrong. So much so that I moved to Vienna to study Cognitive Sciences for my masters and how I did my “Masterarbeit” in formal theories of Decision-Making.

I told him that, in Vienna, I met this person who was traveling around Europe to meet LW meetup organizers and how she invited me to the very first EA Summit, at Leverage, in San Francisco, all the way back in 2013.

I told him how the Summit blew my mind: Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, American abundance (I must’ve eaten 1000 French toasts over those 5 days), a bunch of people in their 20s and 30s being paid to research “whatever they wanted.”

I told him how, in the LessWrong days, I had bought into the “raising the sanity waterline” hook, line and sinker. And how from that point moving to America to work on making it happen was but a small step.

I told him all the ways that move turned out to be a bad decision: how the organization exploded 2 years after I moved, how I got so broken that after I came back I couldn’t sleep for three nights straight and how, during those 3 sleepless days, I saw hellish imagery every time I closed my eyes.

I told him how I got so broken I was tormented by endless thoughts, how I filled notebooks and notebooks with them, how at some point I started posting them online and that that is how, 6 years after the incident, I still average 50 tweets per day.

I told him putting myself back together wasn’t fun, that I regretted looking at hell directly, and how some things are best seen from an angle.

I further told him that I thought his intention to look at hell straight on was very laudable, very honorable. But that I thought it wasn’t strategic. That maybe it makes sense from the perspective of the leaders of these movements. That maybe, from their perspective, breaking 999 people on the way to find the 1 that can make a difference is positive Expected Value. You gotta break a eggs to make an omelet and all that. But I’ve been an egg — not fun.

One of the few good things that came from that hellish period was that I had access to an early copy of The Mind Illuminated and got really into it. And, from there, really into meditation. I told him how my experience just straightforwardly matched what the Buddhists claimed: how the mind just is an “object” that can go through one-way state-transitions. That I understood the impetus to try to make your mind match the state of the world. That, again, I thought it was very honorable. But that I had seen — and knew from experience — how that just breaks your mind. How you need to approach that honorable goal cautiously. From an angle.

How those “one-way state-transitions” (I’m referring here to the four stages of Buddhist awakening) change the quality of your mind such that you can face hell. “Suffer less, notice it more,” as meditation teacher Shinzen Young says. Those two go hand-in-hand: if you’re burned out you can’t notice — and can’t act — on any suffering.

How I too still held the intention to make my mind reflect the world but that I had punted it to the far, far, future; how I thought going after it too early had been a mistake; how I genuinely believe, in my heart-of-hearts, that focusing on this vibe, on transforming your mind into this vibe is the best way — nay, the only way — to eventually be able confront the hellish aspects of reality.

And, as I write this, it is not lost on me how this vibe is the polar opposite of the one other image my younger self was aiming at…

I further told him that all this was old wisdom, how Stephen Covey in his 1989’s — I’m old-old — 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a sort of predecessor to modern self-help slop, had already talked about the circle of concern vs the circle of influence and how focusing on what you can change grows your power to change things over time and on how focusing on things you can’t change whether or not they’re true diminishes it over time.

He, like Buddhists, understood reflexivity: he understood that the mind is not a spotless mirror — certainly not at the start — and that what you focus on changes it and that you need to change it in a certain order — and thus focus on things in a certain order — if you want it to become like a spotless mirror.

Turns out the reason you’re supposed to put your own oxygen mask first is that, if you do, then there’s at least one person has got their oxygen mask on. If, instead, you go and try to help others you might fail on the way making it so that no one has a mask on. Stuff you learn as you get older type shit.

He was grateful for my engagement, but it wasn’t clear I convinced him. Oh well.

In “Lemmings” a bunch of Lemmings (get it?) spawn on a map, and the goal is to get them home to that little portal thingy at the top.

This is how they spawned.

Well, what about it? Easy enough, right? Just let ’em rip?

You’d think so. But here’s where they’d end up:

You see, Lemmings aren’t too smart. They’ll just walk up in a straight line from where they spawned.

This would have maybe 2 Lemmings home and the rest… jumping off a cliff. 💀

And that’s why mentorship makes a difference.

Heuristics & Trade-offs

I can hear you shout from your seat at the screen “You idiots! Just go left/right!” Yea, I feel the same way about my mentees sometimes. They can’t really hear you, y’know?

But let’s spawn some mentor Lemming characters who say just that.

And let’s place them square down the middle…

Cool. What happens then?

Oh. Oh no.

What if we try the other lil’ guy?

God damn it.

As it turns out both “Go Left” and “Go Right” are still absolutely wrong. Neither saves all the Lemmings. But they’re also both directionally correct: each of them is an improvement on the default outcome we first got! Now only half the Lemmings jump off the cliff. Whew.

Both “Go Left” and “Go Right” make for an improvement for the population as a whole. However, we still trading-off between subsets of the population: “Go Left” saves the rightmost end at the expense of the leftmost end, and vice-versa.

At this moment, being a heckin’ good person, you might be wondering: can’t we just get exclusively smiley faces? Can’t we just use a sign that saves everyone?

Ah.

Mass Comms & Noble Lies

Let’s try that. Let’s introduce a new mentor Lemming , this time with a more precise sign:

What happens then?

God damn it.

Turns out ain’t no Lemming got time to read all that.

Which gives us an insight into mass communications: communicative precision is often at odds with memetic success (!)

“Go Right!” “Go Left!” worked not because they were right but because they were simple. Expressing the message in the strongest possible terms increased its memetic fitness. Even though that fitness is at odds with factual accuracy! (As the sub-set of Lemmings who ended up on the cliff again know only all too well.)

Ok, but perhaps the message was just too long and they just didn’t have enough time to parse? Perhaps we could get a better outcome with a message that’s still individualized but not as long?

Sure, let’s try that.

FUUUUUUU—

“Think” sounds good. Doesn’t scale. Most Lemmings aren’t too bright. And even those who are lead busy lives with many things competing for their attention. Asking every single lemming to think for themselves is incredibly costly to the Lemming population as whole.

Spreading the ‘Good Word’ of Turn Left(/Right) scaled much better.

And, speaking of the ‘Good Word’.

Earlier I said that expressing a message in the strongest possible terms increased its memetic fitness.

You can imagine rebellious Lemmings who do want to think for themselves. And you can imagine that leading them further astray. But, in fact, given that Lemmings aren’t too bright and that portal thingy is as narrow as the eye of a needle, your expectation should be that for most Lemmings thinking for themselves is a mistake. That it will lead to worse outcomes than not doing so.

So you’d want to make your original message even stronger, even more absolute to make sure it got those stray Lemmings too. Perhaps by invoking an extra-lemming entity.

This message would, in expectation, lead to better results for the Lemming population.

Despite not being true.

Holy Wars & Flame Wars

“Lemmings” is just a game. Don’t cry too much after the deceased Lemmings. They respawn after they die. But no one said it was a Christian game. Perhaps Lemmings remember their past lives (deaths).

If so, you can imagine that the set of Lemmings who spawned on the left-side of the screen and who followed the ‘God commands Right’ commandment would be pretty gung-ho about it. And the same for Lemmings who spawned on the right-side of the screen and who followed the ‘God commands Left’ commandment. Literally saved their lives.

Now, notably, not even Lemming God can command two opposite directions at once. Which leads Right Lemmings to think Left Lemmings are wrong or immoral or confused or fallen, and vice-versa.

Which leads them to engage with one another. A lot. And that engagement leads each of their respective takes spreads.

That is, the “technically correct” take above doesn’t spread at all. No one even engages with it.

The takes that spread the most are the ones that perfectly scissor the population into a sub-set for which they’re life saving and another for which their deadly.

In the distant past these two halves of the Lemming population would go to war with one another. Now, with modern virtual technology, they just get into online flamewars.

Both types of war occur when a heuristic is universalized beyond its local validity—an overreach that was necessary fo it to spread in the first place.

Fascinated by how wrong it is.

The logic of the image is the following: if you can’t picture a pig in a children’s book doing it, then the job is fake. Frontier AI Researchers? Fake. Central Bankers? Fake. Venture Capitalists? Fake. Strategy Consultants? You see where this is going.

But the “can I picture it test” expresses only a fact about you, not about the world. You were once like a little baby who couldn’t picture anything. Doesn’t mean the whole world was fake back then. Watch this:

I’d be hard-pressed to picture a clothes-wearing pig doing any of these. But that’s not because they’re fake jobs. It’s because they’re highly specialized and highly-leveraged.

At least, that’s what I thought. And then FTX happened.

Turns out some people do exploit obscurity for grift. And it thus makes sense to be wary of opaque power.

That’s what the Piggy meme is really about. It’s not about jobs, it’s about trust given opacity. You can’t understand what someone else does. Do you take that as evidence of hidden value, or as evidence of fraud?

Introducing: my favorite thinking tool

That’s a real question, and one with two bad answers.

One bad answer is Piggy’s: everything I don’t understand is fake. Wrong — see above.

Another bad answer is mine, pre-FTX: everything I don’t understand is real. Also wrong — see… FTX. (Pain.)

So we have two opposite failure modes. For the visual learners:

The columns represent what you believe; the rows represent what’s true. Two ways to be right, and two ways of being wrong.

It shows you the benefit of being a believer — you believe true things — and of being a disbeliever — you don’t get scammed by fake things.

But it also shows you the costs of each: if you’re a skeptic, you won’t get scammed, yes, but you will miss out on some alpha. If you’re a plan truster, you’ll believe things that are true… and also get taken for a ride every once in a while.

Because of reasons you cannot reduce both errors to zero. Briefly: evidence is noisy and not cleanly separable, so you’ll always make some error. Either dismissing real things as fake or being fooled into believing fake things are real.

You only get to choose which error you make. Ultimately, where you set the dial is a matter of personal judgement.

However.

We live in a society

Personal judgment can help set the dial. But using it to assess society at large? Sounds good, doesn’t work. Personal judgment doesn’t scale like that.

Nonetheless, the underlying problem of having to trust people you can’t be sure whether to trust (also known as principal-agent problem) is still painfully real. (I should know.)

So, as a society, we created heuristics that to solve this problem that do scale.

These heuristics are in the form of social roles that license trust. “Doctors” and “Judges”. Lab coats and wigs. They give you something to hold on to in a system that is mostly illegible. They tell you: this person has been vouched for by some process. You can’t really evaluate the process either but, hey, at least there’s a process.

And it mostly worked! By trusting the label you outsource the judgement problem to whoever issued it. You don’t personally need to check whether your surgeon is competent: you trust that the medical board already did that for you. It’s turtles all the way down bottoming out in an institution you can’t evaluate but assume is functional.

Until you don’t.

Wigs off

I said “We live in a society.” Facts. We also live in a democracy. Facts facts. In democracy we keep getting asked to collectively decide things we cannot possibly assess: “Should we raise rates? Should we approve this drug? Should we bail out the banks?” Bruh.

We got no idea. So we trust. Parties, politicians, experts, the news, influencers. Democracy runs on the same trust-licensing infrastructure.

Which means it’s equally vulnerable.

When trust-shortcuts break — for whatever reason — the very roles that used to license trust become sinks for popular anger: political entrepreneurs can score cheap points by villainizing little-understood but well-known roles. “Experts”, “bankers”, “the elites”, “journos”, “the rich” — whoever is legible in a system that is otherwise illegible becomes a target. Because of course they do: there’s nothing else to aim at.

We call this failure mode “Populism.”

Yes, and…

It’s easy to dismiss populism as being a moral failing, or stupid. So easy, in fact, that I opened this essay by doing just that.

But populism is also a rational response to a system where ordinary people can’t evaluate expertise and can’t trust the institutions that certify it anymore either.

Asking people to “trust the experts” after the Covid clusterfuck, the various recent scientific scandals, and the sad spectacle of institutions outdoing one another burning through accumulated trust makes it no longer be heard as a reasonable request.

Instead, it’s heard as “Make the mistake that benefits us.”

Conclusion

Piggy’s error is misallocating disbelief. Wiggy’s error is misallocating trust.

As far as Piggy is concerned, every wig is a mere costume. Wiggy, in turn, sees every pig as… well, a pig.

Both see the other’s failure mode. Neither admits to their own. “Distrust your lying eyes” doesn’t work. But nor does “burn it all down”.

Wiggy would rather make the mistake of tolerating some rot than lose what took centuries to build. Piggy would rather mistakenly burn too much and stay warm than freeze under a regime of wigged scams.

Piggy wins when people collectively decide false trust is more dangerous than false disbelief and set the dial correspondingly.

And that’s the Pig-or-Wig Theory of Populism.

Memento is a great movie in which Guy Pearce portrays a super hot (no homo) guy whose episodic memory resets every 5-minutes. He gets around this using tattoos and Polaroids as external memory. The movie culminates with the reveal that he has been editing his own memories misleading himself and, thus, us, who had been trusting his narration.

Last month I tried, and failed, to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It’s a very demanding novel. You need all your soul to read it.

But it had me thinking about time, and memory.

A few days ago I was walking down the street with gf and telling her about this “Somatic Experiencing” therapy I’ve been doing. The idea behind it is to “complete the action that was left unfinished”. And they mean it quite literally: if, in a previous situation, you felt like hitting the bricks but didn’t then the therapist will have you literally walk away from their office or whatever.

I’m no stranger to therapy. And I’m no stranger to somatic therapies either . I even prefer these “man-therapies.” No talky, just action.

But, as I told gf, I’m not sure about Somatic Experiencing. It works too well.

I say this because at least two Somatic Experiencing sessions have literally edited my memories.

The first one with the “hit the bricks” situation above. A past situation where I wish I had bolted, but didn’t. The therapist had me physically walk away from her office. And now — it’s even weird to write about it — despite knowing that I didn’t do that, in the original situation that bothered me, I feel like I did. My felt memory is that I did (!)

The second one relates to a memory from when I was 13 or so and was accused by an odious teacher of destroying a bunch of metallic structures at school, where kids left their lunchboxes. She said she saw me doing it. I didn’t do it. Ever since that accusation I’ve been carrying around murderous rage.

In our Somatic Experiencing session my therapist (a woman!) had me vividly imagining what I wished I had done then: beating the teacher up, smashing her skull against the wall, grabbing her by the feet and swinging her lifeless body agains the floor in that exaggerated children’s cartoon way.

Shockingly, this murderous imaginal act was healing: my rage subsided, I felt peaceful, and even started to consider alternative and more charitable scenarios: “Perhaps she just mistook me for someone else…”

But, again, when I recall the episode of the false accusation, the ending I recall is the gory one and a floating correction. (“That didn’t really happen.”)

That’s not how most my memories are. They’re not split into two! The emotional felt memory just is what happened and there’s no need for separate_, factual, meta-commentary.

If I didn’t know any better I might be OK with this. “That’s just what healing is!” Not in my experience it’s not.

Around the same time these two “memory edits” happened I also made progress on two other issues that had been bothering me for the longest time. And I did so without any memory editing.

One of them is also from back when I was young. Like, young young. Basically, I was stuck in a situation where every option got me punished, so I took a compromise between the options and still got punished. I carried that for decades — “If only I had known that the Right Choice…”

(Ever since, I’ve found myself — made myself? — stuck between options: between women, between courses, between life-paths. I got into LessWrong and formal decision theory very young, even doing my master’s in it…)

The first time I talked to a therapist about this was in 2012, in Ljubljana. Since then I’ve talked to many other people, other therapists, written about it, cried about it, felt it through. Didn’t budge.

What it took was growth “elsewhere.” At some point, recently, I returned to it and managed, for the first time, to eke out of my childhood POV and to see the whole situation “from the outside,” as it were. And from that external POV it was obvious: There was no ‘Right Choice.’ Every choice was wrong. It was just not about me: I was just collateral damage in someone else’s story.

Not “things were bad and it’s on you because you didn’t know what the right choice was.” Just, “things were just bad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

This is what development is like in my experience: not “things are strictly better” within the parameters of the old model but new dimensions revealing themselves that weren’t there before. Things becoming simultaneously better and worse. It was not your fault :D and also the universe doesn’t revolve around you :ᗡ Your 2D model becoming 3D.

The memory of that episode of being stuck is still with me. I still know exactly what transpired. I just interpret it differently now. And that made the emotional charge go. The memory stayed the same, but the charge disappeared, no editing required.

And I got there by growing elsewhere, by maturing my POV until I could look back and see the episode clearly. And then it didn’t overwhelm me anymore.

The second memory is is about Vienna and Ljubljana — where I did my Masters — and about which I’ve been obsessively reminiscing ever since I left.

That reminiscing has caused me both anguish — the present always failing to live up to the past — and shame — in the back of my mind, wondering: “Am I one of those guys?” “Did I peak in high school Uni?”

This particular rumination has been going on for over 10 years. (The Masters itself was two years long.)

Anyways, the other day I was writing an essay. As soon as I finished it, on the couch — while gf was either in the room or showering, but not close — as I was preparing to close the laptop I was entirely overcome with emotion. I didn’t know why or what I was doing exactly but I typed docs.new to boot up a new google doc (now you know), and started writing about my departed grandmother.

A thing you must know about me is that I’m not brave and so I write about everything except the most important things. Like my Grandma. My Grandma was — is — the love of my life. once described agápē as “the love that bestows personhood” and, reading that, I could think only of her. She overflowed with love for me, her body hardly able to contain it, and I felt it. Which shocked me as I was the first child of her tenth.

Actually, now that I recall, my earliest memory is of gazing into her eyes — as she was teaching me to color like she had taught me to pray — and witnessing them looking back at me, two beaming rays of love. I think that’s the moment my conscience “woke up.”

This to say I deeply loved — love — Grandma. It was very difficult for me when she died and the closest person to me departed. For weeks I had night terrors where I would wake up screaming.

Fourteen years later for some reason which transcends me I booted up that document. I wrote down my feelings about her. I sobbed and sobbed as I did. Writing had never been that violent before. But it was very healing too. I grieved for the first time.

The day after — and this is why I’m bringing this up now — the memories of Vienna and Ljubljana had much less… punch? Much less charge?

Grandma died right before I went to Vienna and I remember my night terrors were in part about the tremendous anguish I felt having learned everyone I loved would die.

Last year, I heard Daniel Ingram say on a podcast that the death of a closed one can trigger a spiritual stage called Arising and Passing Away. “Spiritual Puberty,” he called it.

His website has some graphs illustrating the development of the Spiritual Path. Note how Pleasure, Powers, and Energetic Phenomena all peak right around the Arising and Passing Away.

(Technically you cycle through all of them forever, but perhaps you never forget your first?)

Those charts — which I found after the podcast — described exactly what my experience in Vienna and Ljubljana had been like, all those years before.

The whole world reforming itself to accommodate my needs: teachers tripping over themselves to give me the best grades in response to me emailing I wasn’t attending class because I was still drunk from the night out; girls telling mutual friends to tell me not to say anything and just kiss them once I saw them; jumping in and out of moving cars unscathed, for no reason; in Venice, on the way to Ljubljana, accidentally collecting followers, ending the first day in Campo Santa Margarita with 20 strangers sitting in a circle. I had no need for sleep; I’d get anywhere and was invited everywhere. I even purposefully made my life harder, throwing myself challenges, as I called them, because I was so damn curious about how I’d wiggle out of them. And I did. Each time. To this day people who met me then say they had never seen a human being that free.

It was like I walked on water.

But, back to the main story line: that’s how I think my grandma’s passing connects to Vienna and Ljubljana. I had been trying to deal with that particular obsession, without any luck, for decades. It took spontaneous writing (and feeling into… and crying about…) something seemingly unrelated for the memory of that time to budge, to lose its punch, to yield the grip it had over me, after all these years, reaching back from the past.

This second episode didn’t change my memories either. It just made them lose their color, their vividness. Vienna and Ljubljana are now grayscale. My memories of them are not anymore weirdly superimposed atop the present.

So, here are two instances of undoing the emotional color or aliveness of a memory and of placing it back in the past — where it’s from and where it belongs — without editing it.

Or, here’s a third one, on that very same walk with gf — yes, she’s a saint — I remembered my mother telling me as kid to NEVER cross an intersection in a diagonal. (Gf and I just had.) To NEVER, EVER do it. And I remember this irking me profoundly “What do you mean, ‘never’? What if there’s a kitty falling from a building and the only way to get there on time is” yada yada yada.

But, since then, I’ve grown. I’ve seen this clip by David Mitchell: “As a child, I was scared of the sun.” I’ve listened to Dom Cummings talk about how public comms can’t possibly have any subtlety. And I’ve reasoned about it too and it’s like, yes, most people will discount any message they hear, so if you want to reach the largest possible number of people then you need to communicate your message in the strongest possible terms.

‘Be reasonable’ or ‘Use your judgement’ are very bad comms strategies. You want to give people a hard and fast rule that they can easily memorize for when they need guidance. Especially if their judgment can’t be trusted. Like that of a child.

Knowing this, and automatically juxtaposing this current understanding with the old memory as it arose, my childhood irkness that arose just… dissolved? Mother did nothing wrong, she was doing the locally correct thing, I did nothing wrong either, I just didn’t know all this, I couldn’t have. There was no big catharsis just… nothing.

So, out of 5 memories that recently moved, the 2 edited ones still hold charge, just in the opposite, victorious, direction (which didn’t really happen) and the 3 others “dissolved.” Either through complexifying my views or through — seemingly unrelated at the time — grieving.

I’ve been meaning to write this essay for days but keep losing the moment. But, I just saw this screenshot on the timeline and was reminded of it.

“Memory reconsolidation” is the fancy name for memory editing.

And I’m afraid it might be robbing us of hard won insight.

Editing my memories brought me relief, yes. But it also brought with it this weird mental inelegance. And it taught me nothing.

For the other memories dispelling the charge entailed understanding things I didn’t understand before, or at least connecting new understandings to old memories.

Now, in fairness, grieving my grandmother was completing a movement. But of something that had already started. Not wish-fulfilling something that had not.

Maybe growth always hurts. Maybe living just entails facing things that are too hard to process at our current level of development and maybe the way to dissipate their charge is not making them smaller by editing them so that our memory is of not having been overwhelmed by them but, rather, by growing sufficiently large that they — in their fullness and in their truth — take up only a small part of us.

At 1.5 million words In Search of Lost Time is the longest novel ever written. I only made it halfway through the first volume of seven, so I don’t really know where Proust is going with it. But I can already tell he didn’t edit his memories down. He made his soul large enough to be able to hold all of them.

This question — of the okayness or lack thereof of editing your own memories — is something I’m trying to work out for myself in writing this. But, as I write, I’m also dimly aware that it might double as a killer public essay.

It just needs a little editing down.

When you’re young you don’t make too many distinctions. You yourself are very indistinct: a wholly undifferentiated mass. (Perhaps that is why it’s so easy to connect with others then: not too much friction involved in putting wholly undifferentiated masses together.)

As you grow older you start making distinctions.

2.

Yesterday I wrote about how Rachel told me I wasn’t “playing the game” meaning the seduction or pick-up game. That is but one of many language games you can play. (Thank God.)

3.

We all agree that the same sound can mean different things across different languages. ‘Mee’ means “me” in English and rice (“mǐ”) in Chinese. (Trust me, bro.) We’re ok with one sound having different meanings across languages.

Are we ok with the same sounds having different meanings within the same language?

4.

“It’s cold in here.”

Weather report. Indirect request to close the window. Passive-aggressive jab at the host. A come-on.

Different meanings, depending on the context.

5.

I’ve been watching ‘Owning Manhattan’ — a show about real-estate brokers taking over NYC. (No kidding about the reality tv obsession.) I notice the way that people on the show relate to one another, the way they talk — better: the way they use language. I spent last November in Berkeley, at Lighthaven — the rationalist headquarters. I remember how people used language there. I imagine these two communities colliding. I imagine bodies spontaneously combusting.

6.

The way I see it is that the rationalists and the NYC real-estate brokers are playing different language games. They all use the same “raw material” — the English language — but they play different games with it, with different rules and different value hierarchies. In the rationalist language game the ultimate value is to Speak The Truth, even if that may entail ruffling a few feathers. In the NYC real-estate brokers’ game, maintaining relationships and managing egos is crucial. Different sacrednesses.

It’s hard to speak across sacrednesses.

7.

I see these two language games as constituting different “deformations” of the map such that the exact same sentence, the exact same utterance, will land pretty differently, depending on in which context — depending on in which community — it is said.

8.

I have failed at making this distinction in the past. When I first came to America over a decade ago for the inaugural EA summit I was smitten, and instantly decided I wanted to move there. I was mid-way through my studies at the time and spent part of the summit making a decision-tree justifying my decision to quit them so I could move to America sooner rather than later. Every rationalist around me commended me on it. I sent it to my dad, proud. He made fun of me.

I spent the past 3 days at a 40th birthday party. I’m telling you this so you know that I’m both Very Cool and Very Social. Most of the people at the function I hadn’t met before but, being Very Social, I took the opportunity to chat to all of them. I soon found that early get-to-know you conversations route through the same familiar landscape: How do you know the birthday boy? Where are you usually based? What is it that you do?

It’s a landscape I increasingly enjoyed traversing. Each time I did I got better at it: better timing, better setups, better twists, better punchlines. Heeeeell, I was feeling myself.

Oh, I should say: this was a nearly exclusively international crowd, so basically all the conversations were happening in English.

And, as I was saying, I was feeling myself.

At least until I met the other Portuguese guy at the function. I was running through the lines I had been workshopping and, hearing myself saying them out loud, in Portuguese, and seeing his face increasingly contorting into a grimace like the ones below, it hit me.

Oh. Oh no.

I can’t speak Portuguese.

2.

The morning after — did I say it was a 3-day affair? Très chic — I’m in town with gf, looking for a bite. We get it, and come back to see a car parked in the second row, blocking ours. I’m already fuming as I go around it to check if they at least had the courtesy to leave their cell number on a piece of paper in the tablier. They did not. I enter the car and honk angrily, most of all angry that I’ve been forced into a position where the only way to make myself less inconvenienced entails inconveniencing everyone else.

A short, fat old man comes huffing and puffing from some nearby pastry shop, with a goofy smile on his face, and hits me with a ‘Sorry about that’ to which I retort ‘If you’re sorry don’t do it.’ He is appalled. How dare I. I double-down: ‘Either you think you did nothing wrong, in which case don’t apologize, or you think what you did was wrong, in which case don’t do it.’ This aggravates him further. But I feel little empathy: Portuguese people love to ambiently inconvenience others and then try to pull a ‘I’m just a smol bean OwO 👉👈’ to have their selfishness validated. Well, not today, old man.

He got increasingly angry — fat old people get so red when they get angry — and as he drove away he shouted ‘Vai para o raio que te parta.’

Gf isn’t Portuguese, but she’s learning, so she asked me what it meant. “Literally: ‘make your way to a lightning bolt that will split you’”. She was horrified. “That’s so rude…” and I had to explain to her “No, not really. It’s something that only old people say, and it’s kinda tame, really. In context.”

Context.

3.

Since these events I’ve been thinking about the way I speak Portuguese and why it is that in English I am successful at conveying what I want to convey, but in Portuguese I’m not. I mean, I literally am Portuguese. Wtf gives?

Here’s what I think the fuck gives: I’ve consumed a lot of English media. Like, a lot. I’ve also made a lot: 3 million words just on Twitter. I’ve seen endless reality TV shows: Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore [sic.], Love is Blind, Million Dollar Listing, you name it. Most of my convos have been in English ever since I first moved abroad over a decade ago. I spent time working in the US. All of these have given me a gestalt of how each word relates to all other words. In English.

Like, I know how in NYC it’s totally appropriate to cuss someone out while it isn’t in SF and also that it is a dying tradition in part because of… “transplants” from SF. As they would say.

There’s all of this context, all this… linguistic pragmatics about how utterances are interpreted beyond the strict, literalist dictionary meaning that I think you only learn from practice.

Practice which, in Portuguese, I lack. Making my utterances ever so slightly off. And normies clock this at instant speed.

My mental model for it is something like the above. I have a “target” for what I mean to convey and, in English, I kinda understand enough context to know how all words generally relate to one another and how that “deforms” the map, making it so that you can’t aim for where you literally want to land. If you do you’ll be ever so slightly off and… have a bad time.

(I legit wonder if this is what is going on with (at least some) people “on the spectrum”: I wonder it’s just literally just lack of practice meaning they don’t know how to convey what they mean to convey. Like cussing someone out in SF.)

4.

“Hmmmmm, models… Juicy,” I can hear you say. Here’s another one:

Back in the day an (also international) ex was very surprised the first time she witnessed a friend of mine speak Portuguese. His English isn’t the best and, because of that, she thought, up to that point, even though she had never told me before then, that he was retarded.

I think this is an easy mistake to make: we reflexively think that people have “content” inside them that reflects “their soul” or “who they are” and that language is a mere “funnel” through which that content flows and gets expressed. So, insofar as the message we’re receiving is not great, it must be because the content itself is faulty.

It’s easy to believe this as Language — like any other good tool — becomes ethereal while we use it. Vapor. And it has to. Or we’d always be hitting our heads against it.

But then again, if I’m right (I think I’m right) this view is wrong and Language is… its own thing? LLMs provide a reductio of the former view: they have no content (no soul) and yet they can produce great languaging.

Language just is a separate thing. It’s its own thing. No soul required.

But language being its own thing implies that mastering it is its own art. Imagine the world’s most interesting man. But he’s mute. Yea.

Now, I am interesting, if I may say so myself. And I’m not mute. But I might as well be. At least in Portuguese.

5.

I remember the first girl I was into. Really into, iykwim. An English girl, Rachel Hamilton. She rebuffed me, via text, for not pursuing her appropriately: I wasn’t ‘playing the game’.

I was 16. The only game that mattered to me at the time was the game of seduction. And I was failing.

But I’ve learned it since. And, with it, all the other English language games.

Rachel won.

And now I can’t speak Portuguese.

Building an artifact about the adversarial use of language: how public language gets shaped by political struggle, and what that does to the shared maps we use to think with.

The Problem section is fully built. It’s not a linear essay, it’s a wiki, and it’s meant to be explored. But if you hover ov…

Read more

My sister.

Kafkatrapped, to be precise.

Backstory

It’s Summer, 2025. I’m trying to give my sister feedback on something—critique her, really—only to be met with a “It’s a one-off, don’t generalize.” Fair enough, thought I. So I started collecting instances of the behavior I wanted to address.

Six months later, on Christmas, I approached her, and proudly unloaded the stack of instances I had collected on her. Surely she would have to yield to my criticism now.

“Why are you so obsessed?”

Oh.

Kafkatraps, Double-binds, Fright-without-solution, and Insanity

“Kafkatraps” refer to Franz Kafka’s horror bureaucracy novels where an accused person’s denial of guilt is used as further evidence of their guilt.

They’re an instance of what Gregory Bateson called “double-binds”: impossible dilemmas with no winning solution. “Would you rather be hit on the left, or the right?” Classic bully stuff.

He thought double-binds were responsible for schizophrenia.

That hypothesis didn’t really pan out. But they do generate insanity. In children.

When a child’s caregiver is both the safe haven and the source of alarm, you get what’s called “Fright-without-solution”—no way to win. The system can’t organize a coherent strategy and so it keeps cycling between mutually incoherent ones endlessly. Presto! You have created insanity in the form of “disorganized attachment”.

Now, why in Freud’s name am I throwing all these names and literature at you?

Above I said there is no way to win in situations like this. And there isn’t. But there is a way to stop losing.

By naming what’s happening.

Protecting yourself from Insanity

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re a high-decoupler. You take what people say literally, not just seriously. You try to make sense of it. Overt contradictions bother you. And that’s precisely what keeps landing you in this situation.

A low-decoupling misogynist would hear the two contradictory things my sister said, go “Women,” and not give it a second thought.

Alas, we not like them. So we have to get out from under them.

How?

It’s 2025: by naming what’s happening turning it into a meme.

Alchemy

Back to Christmas.

I’m licking my wounds from the Kafkatrap that just ensnared me. I took to Twitter to self-regulate, as one does, especially around Christmas. And, out of nowhere, mid-doomscrolling, I saw it:

It was perfect. I just had to use it. So I screenshotted it and fed it to ChatGPT.

I immediately posted the result which went on to get a third of a million views.

That was a month and a half ago.

Just yesterday, I saw someone I don’t know deploy it on a different platform with relatively high numbers too.

Success.

Or so I thought.

Herstory

Everything written above is true. According to me. The guy who wrote it. And, as I did, I started to notice how my writing might’ve led you to certain conclusions. Mine. History is written by… losers, apparently.

So let me make a veritably TITANIC effort to get both our heads out my ass and try to see things from my sister’s perspective. From her point-of-view. What was going on with her?

Nothing too bad, I don’t think. She was just being defensive and impervious to feedback. No. Not even. She was being impervious to my feedback.

Maybe she doesn’t respect me enough to listen to it. Perhaps even fairly! Perhaps I don’t have the requisite ethos to be taken seriously. Again, maybe fairly.

It’s not like I am particularly consistent: I know my smartness dwarfs my wisdom allowing me to rationalize just about anything. From the outside it must seem like I zig-zag between a position and its opposite every other weekend.

Hell, it often feels like that from the inside .

All great reasons to not take me seriously.

That’s her perspective, I think: I zig-zag too much, I can justify anything and thus any one argument I make means very little. She doesn’t trust me enough to allow herself to be altered by my feedback and, therefore, reached for whatever tools she had to defend herself from it.

(“D-did you just mansplain your sister’s perspective in a section called ‘Herstory’?” Chad_yes)

Those tools were good not because they were consistent, but because they got the job done: I backed off and went elsewhere to self-regulate.

But, from my point of view, they felt like being on the receiving end of insanity. Which is why I made the meme.

Now, the meme did get me out from under it, to be clear. Other people found it useful, and I stand by it.

But making it only enabled me to share my perspective on what was being done to me.

A harder move is to catch myself mid-story, to realize I am the hero in every story I tell, and that maybe the person whose logical inconsistency I’m critiquing is just someone who learned I’m not safe to agree with.

Perhaps you can relate.

But it’s rough. If you can put up with that and want a longer, more structured, version of the ideas I share on this Substack, you can check out “Alignment Gone Strange” here:

https://rivalvoices.gumroad.com/l/ags.

Imagine we restarted society 100 times.

What would happen? Would it develop in a completely different way each time, or would we see patterns in the way it develops?

Thankfully we don’t need to actually restart society 100 times to answer this question. We’ve already ran the experiment. In fact, we’ve been running it for the past 10,000 years.

2.

For the past 10,000 years different societies have independently arose and developed across the globe.

And there were patterns.

We saw the same things arising. Over and over. You got, for example, Knights and Samurais and Legionnaires and Hoplites and Janissaries and Conquistadores and Chevaliers and Warlords and …

But those are not the same thing!—I hear you protest.—It says so right there in their different names!

Ah.

3.

The Radical Idea of Functionalism is to understand things primarily through their function rather than their names.

Knights, Samurais and Legionnaires are all different names, yes. For the very same eye-gouging business.

Which is itself kinda weird. Why would these different names arise in all of these different societies for what is, at its heart, the same function?

4.

Perhaps it’s because that function is necessary for the continued existence of those very societies. But, even if it were, how would we know?

One way we could know would be by doing away with it.

Let’s say that we abolish, for example, the police. What happens next?

5.

Thankfully, we don’t have to run that experiment either. We already know what happens: the policing function immediately reasserts itself, albeit with a different name.

That is, we don’t just see functions independently emerging across different societies. We also see them reappearing in the same society, across time.

But abolishment is not the only way an institution can stop fulfilling its function. It can also decay, or get corrupted, or be captured. And that’s just what we’re living through.

6.

Take Science. The motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in Verba—“take no one’s word for it.” The function of Science is to provide truth that is verifiable through independent verification. Yet, the contemporary institution that bears its name admonishes us to "Trust the Science." and “Believe Science.” The Name lost the connection to the Function.

Or consider Journalism. Society needs a way to relay information. Journalists, unfortunately, realized that once people look to you as the source of what is the case you can exploit that by telling them what you wish were the case instead. They’ll act in accordance with it and, in doing so, bring it about.

Sadly, they couldn’t resist.

In Journalism too the name forsook its function. “Journalist” no longer dereferences to “people who inform the public.” But the function of informing the public stays necessary, so it reemerged with you now getting your news from X and Telegram and Youtube.

People slowly realize what happened, and public language catches up to it. News became “Legacy/Mainstream Media.” Journalists became “Journos.”

7.

Nothing here is new. Confucius first diagnosed the Name–Function divergence problem 2,500 years ago.

His fix was the ‘Rectification of Names’—changing language so names match functions. But rectification is hard. Once a name acquires legitimacy, abandoning the function while keeping the name becomes profitable, making resistance guaranteed.

Until that resistance is overcome and public language wises up, Functionalism is the way to see past names. Look at functions instead. Names catch up eventually.

So… what gives? And how in the world did it get to this?

Society being predatorial isn’t exactly new. If anything, it is in keeping with historical trends. Just look at the Aztecs and their human sacrifices, a mere 500 years ago. The difference is that the Aztecs, like other historical societies, were openly predatorial while our society is covertly so.

That’s because the current style of predation only works insofar as it doesn’t reach common knowledge.

Take advice.

A short history of Bad Advice

Bad advice has always been legion.

Not that it intentional—just a side-effect of making society work. Polite lies and other social niceties allow people to save face, avoiding escalating spirals of violence. In addition, needing good advice to spread as widely as possible entailed exaggerating it. Together, those meant that the advice spread was particularly bad advice for those of a literalist bent, true. But not by design.

All in all it was a no-harm-no-foul situation: literalists are a minority and were only metaphorically sacrificed for the greater good. The whole thing even ended up making great fodder for comedy, as with David Mitchell below telling how he believed, until late in his adulthood, that he would literally go blind should he ever so much as glance at the sun.

Things like these were just an unfortunate consequence of what’s necessary for society to work.

Now, however, bad advice is spread on purpose. How come?

Mass Society

Among other things, what changed in the past 500 years is that we shifted into mass society, upending the previous logic of social organization. Before mass society, what you thought really didn’t matter—just till the land, serf. Now it really does.

Well, not you, personally. What people like you believe really matters, because mass society is all about strength in numbers: whatever is generally believed is what determines how people vote, with their ballots and their wallets. Thus, the path to power and riches is now controlling which stories spread.

This creates an incentive to generate stories, or “narratives” that benefit whoever is spreading them.

This is, in so many words, what happened. But I’m underselling how bad it actually is.

Living in a narrative wasteland

The biggest impediment to believing any one particular story is knowing things.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this: you see a fantasy movie starring some mythological creature and fail to perform the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy. “How in God’s name would that anatomy ever work…” This is what knowing things does: it makes some things impossible to believe. The more you know, the more invariants in your world model, the harder it is to believe any one random thing.

Perhaps you already see where this is going. The consequence is that the easiest people to sway with stories are those who know nothing. Which means every bad advice peddler has a vested interest in keeping you from knowing things, for that would work directly against their goals. Only the ignorant who can be pumped.

And who’s more ignorant than young people? They lack the life experience necessary to knowing things, making them great targets for this type of pumping. Just notice how many social movements focus primarily on the youth.

My heart breaks for them—genuinely—for I too was young and pumped and dumped once. Please don’t believe the lies. You will be sold a story that you have nothing to offer. It’s not true. You may not have experience but you have exactly what vampires want: YOUTH and ENERGY. This is why they want you to believe you don’t have anything to offer: because that makes it far easier for them to be near it, by being near you.

It’s rough.

Fighting back

There’s a bunch of things you can try to do to fight back. I personally have dabbled in all of them.

One is to become proportionally paranoid and constantly keep in mind the Roman idiom—Cui Bono—who benefits?

Although… it feels bad to assume you’re constantly under attack and that you need to double-check everything and triple-check everything else. It’s lonely. I think that is why the memes below have spread, by the way. Signposts saying “It is a narative wasteland, but you are not alone”.

Another option is to try to derive everything from first principles. I don’t recommend it. Neither of us is René Descartes.

A third option is to locate and join “sensemaking communities”, like LessWrong or TPOT. While the arising of these decentralised sensemaking communities is itself a testament to the fact that we don’t trust our priest class anymore, you gotta be lucky to avoid the wrong sensemaking communities, like incels or PUAs or lookmaxxers or what have you.

A fourth option is to seek advice exclusively from those who can’t possibly benefit from giving you bad advice—the long dead. Reading Seneca’s Epistles never harmed anyone.

And I guess all of the above are instances of the fifth one: to try your damn hardest to know things. That’s the only way to reliably keep people from pumping you.

And that goes double for community defense. The only way to be defended, as a community, is to know things. The whole dynamic of covert predation survives only insofar as a community doesn’t know things, specifically, insofar as the community doesn’t know about it.

Which is why I wrote this piece.

Take driving. The only reason that driving somewhere is possible is because driving everywhere is impossible. You can’t just drive home in a straight line. If you could, we wouldn’t have everyone getting home; we’d just have crashes instead.

Makes sense? People—plural—get places because you—singular—can’t drive the way you want. You must drive on the right. Or, properly, “DON’T drive on the left”.

The reason this gets you home is because this constraint isn’t the usual, boring, constraint—”Don’t have that fifth slice of cake”. No. This constraint is different. It’s an enabling constraint.

Enabling constraints are different, magical, paradoxical even: we associate constraints with the loss of options, but enabling constraints work the opposite way: they enable new options.

What am I doing—we’re here to talk about cars. VROOM VROOM—Sorry. I just needed to buy time while I got Claude output the second animation:

As you can see the machine validates me. No constraints=gridlock=less options. Constraints=everyone gets home in time for supper. QED.

But—I remember now—we’re not even here to talk about cars are we? (vroom, vroom?…) We’re here to talk culture. Well, all culture is like this. The only reason you even have the option of being in traffic is because of the State holds the monopoly on violence. If that enabling constraint weren’t in place… Well, let’s just say you’d have bigger problems than reaching home late for supper.

Anyways, enough about driving and cars, it’s time to change gears. (Sorry.)

Enabling constraints are what Chesterton was thinking of when he wrote the parable of the fence, even thought he didn’t have the words at the time.

Upon seeing a fence our first instinct is to remove it, for we take it to be a mere constraint of the boring kind. But this is only because we haven’t trained our vision: we look with our eyes (no fence!! more options!!) when we should be seeing with our minds—seeing all the negative outcomes that the red light, pardon, the fence is avoiding.

Chesterton wants us to go further and respect the people who put up the fence and not just assume that they did it because of ✨ s u p e r s t i t i o n ✨ even if—especially if—that’s why they did it: why something works and the story people tell themselves about why it works are two wholly independent things. Failure to see this is just another failure of the imagination.

It’s tremendously easier to know that something works than to know why it works. Do you know how the Doge of Venice was chosen, back in the 1300s?

“First, 30 members of the Great Council of Venice were selected by lot (random draw); these 30 were reduced by lot to 9, who then chose 40 electors; the 40 were reduced by lot to 12, who chose 25; those 25 were reduced by lot to 9 again, who selected 45; the 45 were reduced by lot to 11, and those 11 finally chose a panel of 41 electors, who then voted to elect the Doge, with the winner required to secure a substantial supermajority, typically at least 25 votes.”

This is superstitious bonkers and, also, it worked. Modern impossibility results in social choice theory show just how hard it is to find a voting system that satisfies a set of very reasonable criteria (Spoiler alert: it’s impossible.) As it turns out the “bonkers” method above has a bunch of really nice properties you’d want fulfilled. But it took ~700 years for us to even have the tools to say why it did.

The point is this: taboos work. We don’t have to know why they work to know that they work. We just know they do for, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be with us now.

Everything in culture can low-key be understood in this light: as taboos that survived.

Just think of the various parts of our culture:

• Etiquette?

• Traffic rules?

• Professional norms?

• Language rules?

• Moral codes?

• LAWS?

All taboos. All enabling constraints. And what are they enabling? Cooperation.

Traffic rules allow cars (sorry, can’t help myself) on the road to cooperate. Etiquette allow civilized people to cooperate. And so on. And that is why those constraints are still with us.

It goes like this: societies produce taboos that constrain behavior. Some of those taboos function as enabling constraints that scale cooperation. Societies that can cooperate at scale outcompete the other and spread and, with them, their taboos, while the other ones become the Sea Peoples or whatever—creatures for archeologists.

More succintly: all culture is the outcome of an evolutionary selection process for taboos that enable cooperation—societies that find them outcompete the ones that don’t.

Told you I could do it.

🏎️ Rival, OUT!

It was a lazy August morning when the 12-year-old dropped the bomb.

Or, rather, when she got her mom to drop it for her. The “bomb” was in the form of a Twitter poll and if you think “bomb” is hyperbolic that tells me only that you survived the blast radius of the discourse that ensued.

Looking at it with the benefit of hindsight you might be thinking, What’s the big deal? Blue won, no one died. Everyone was saved. Sounds like a nothingburger. But the worst part of a bomb is often the fallout. What made this poll so important was what happened after.

As a shell-shocked survivor it would be too painful to go into detail. But I can bear to give you a gloss:

After Blue’s victory, ensuing discourse was about how choosing Blue had been profoundly irrational. A stain on our collective epistemics. Choosing Blue, you might die, while choosing Red you were guaranteed not to, making Red the “dominant strategy”—a game-theoretic term that was thrown around at the time, meaning a choice that always yields the best results for you, independently of what others do.

The Rationality of Red.

This game-theoretic line of reasoning was found to be persuasive. So much so that, in follow-up polls, the percentage of Red grew and grew. It grew so much, in fact, that it even crossed 50%, leading to Blue deaths.

(Look at the original poll tweet again if that’s confusing.)

Now, I want to restate the above to hopefully make clear why this poll was so important. In the first poll, prior to discourse, everyone was saved. In the polls after discourse, not everyone was.

Again, tighter. First poll. Everyone lives. Game theoretic discourse about what the rational choice is. Blues die. Spreading rational reasoning led to worse results.

That makes no sense.

Not unless you’re reflexivity-pilled.

2.

Here’s how Red-pickers see the game:

There’s a game. I see it, you see it. It’s right there in the original poll question. We have common knowledge of what is the dominant option which is always good to choose, no matter what anyone else does. So that’s obviously the correct answer. Simple as.

How Red-pickers see the game.

Simple, yes. But not reflexivity-pilled.

If you’re reflexivity-pilled you’ll realize that the above is a mere fabrication. You’ll realize that “Games”—in the game theoretical sense of formal models of strategic interaction—are just that: models in agents’ heads. A reification. There are no “games”. There’s only agents’ beliefs about what games they’re in. Which also means, of course, that you have no idea what game other agents believe they’re in.

What’s actually going on from Player’s A perspective.

(You might think I’m an unparalleled genius for coming up with this insight. Thanks. So did I. I’ll enjoy that delusion just a bit longer.)

For now, back to Player B. Maybe they’re slow, or made a mistake, or for any myriad of reasons see the game in a way that led them to the “irrational” choice: Blue. Maybe they care about no one dying. Who knows—and that’s the point.

How Player B might see the game.

They might pick Blue which means that the only way they get to live is… if you pick Blue as well. Or maybe they know Red is the dominant option but they don’t know that you know which means that, by the same logic, they have to pick Blue. But if that’s the case then… You see where this goes.

Now, this chain of reasoning matters if and only if you care that Player B lives too. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re out only to save your own ass. Like Koro.

3.

This essay is not about anyone in particular so, for the sake of anonymity, I’ll call the person I’m thinking of… hmm… “Koro”.

Koro was one of the main people pushing the discourse towards the rationality of Red.

Have you noticed how, in movies, heroes are always (1) a team, and (2) irrational as hell? In the poll everyone acted the way heroes do in movies: as an irrational clique. That’s how Koro saw it.

His hubris was in not realizing that his “rational” lens was just that: a lens. A way of seeing. NOT “how things really are” and much less “the obviously correct answer”. He put tinted lenses on so long ago he forgot he ever did and what the world looked like before. “You idiots, can’t you see the world is Red!?” His world certainly is, but he forgets that’s something he had to learn to see.

Koro’s red-tinted lenses are why the results of the original poll—the one where everyone survived—made him deeply uncomfortable. He said as much himself. Deeply uncomfortable at Blue team’s “irrationality”. To fix it, Koro launched a persuasive campaign to convince people to choose Red instead. And, as I said, more people voted Red than not in subsequent polls. His campaign worked. But Blues died.

And, to be clear, his conception of rationality isn’t wrong. Red is the dominant strategy—if payoffs are fixed, beliefs are independent, and no one conditions on anyone else’s reasoning.

But in human systems—in reflexive systems—those conditions fail. And that’s when pushing for Red stopped being “rational”, and started becoming corrosive.

In a reflexive system, “Red is rational” isn’t just a neutral description—it’s an intervention. In a reflexive system, the moment you broadcast a supposedly normative model of rationality, you’re no longer neutrally analyzing; you’re playing.

Koro believed our Blue heroes were living in a deluded story, failing to realize that he too is in a story—a hyper-rational mythos of how agents “should” behave which punishes deviation as “irrational.” The difference being that his led to worse outcomes.

4.

So that is what Koro failed to realize. But what have we realized?

Hopefully we’ve realized that the narrative we believe about what is going on changes how we model things, which changes how we act, which changes what happens.

This is what heroes intuit, even if they can’t say it: in reflexive systems there is no pre-determined correct choice because players don’t sit somewhere outside the game. They’re an intrinsic part of it. And it is through their present choices that they make a past option retroactively right.

Villains’ “rationality” is myopic because it fails to take this into account. It fails to take into account that they’re creating the conditions they mistakenly see themselves as rationally responding to.

Or, said differently, villains are merely rational while superheroes are, appropriately, superrational. That’s why villains “low-key make sense”. Heroes act in a way that is, from the outside, indistinguishable from the way that people who don’t understand that Red is the dominant option act. But they do so to save them.

Failures of theory-of-mind would explain ignoring this heterogeneity and hinging your choices on “if everyone would just”. “If everyone would just pick Red.” Yea, good luck with that. Different people will choose different options for all sorts of crazy reasons you can’t even imagine and you need to account for that in your choices to save the irrational from themselves. Even when they act against their best interests. Especially when they act against their best interests.

The other reason not to do so would be not caring about others’ outcomes. Now that would be villainous.

5.

And, sadly, with that, we reach the end when I can nurse the delusion of my originality no longer. Thank you for this time, it was good while it lasted.

Early on I said that it was thrown around that Red was the “dominant choice”. Hopefully I’ve demonstrated why that wasn’t the case: it would have been the dominant case if a bunch of conditions obtained that didn’t, because we were within a reflexive system.

One conclusion you could come away with is “Game Theory Bad”. I want to dispel that right now.

The problem wasn’t “game theory” as much as it was too little game theory or “pop” game theory. The misapplication of game theory is why Red got the worst outcomes. People did better when they knew none of it than when they knew a bit.

As the saying doesn’t go: a little knowledge is an infohazard.

But that is why we should listen instead to people who have a lot of it. My “original brilliant thought” just recapitulates something figured out by a Russian researcher born more than half a century before me. He even did a series of lectures on it called … drumroll… “Lectures on Reflexive Game Theory”. No comment.

But it’s not just the Russians. When I said above that “superheroes are, appropriately, superrational” I wasn’t just being cringe: I was referencing a game-theoretic term first coined by the American Doug Hofstadter in 1983. Oh, and Germans, too, can’t help but have derived this all the way back in 1785.

My lack of originality pains me, but I was born too late to fix it. So what remains for me to try to make my place in history? Only to spread the ideas of those that came before me. Which is, of course, what this essay is really about.

In true reflexive fashion, this essay is both description and a self-aware intervention—a deliberate attempt meant to undo the damage caused by mistaking a local heuristic for Universal Rationality.

And, if it works, it’ll make itself obsolete. Wait. But then there goes my place in history—

Addendum May 2026

I wrote this essay 5 months ago. The idea was that different people model the “game” differently and that you have to account for that in your calculations. Recently there was another round of discourse about it, kicked off by Tim Urban. What was different about this round is that, this time, LLMs made it trivial for people to show just that, through the memes they made about it:

Excuse me as I take a short victory lap…