Scrupulosity Sequence #2: Self-Experimentation and the Replication Crisis

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ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity sequence

In a perfect world, if someone had a psychological problem, I’d be able to tell them all about the rich peer-reviewed psychological literature that has to do with specifically their problem, all of which has effect sizes of a billion and definitely and certainly applies to everyone.

Unfortunately, we live in this world.

For the past decade or so, the social sciences (particularly psychology) and medicine have been going through the replication crisis. Basically, when you repeat social scientific and medical experiments, many of the effects that existed the first time you did the experiment disappear. Some projects suggest that fewer than half of psychological studies show a reproducible effect.

Why is this a problem? Imagine if, when we repeated the experiment of dropping a feather and a bowling ball in a vacuum chamber, sometimes they fell at the same rate, but sometimes the feather fell faster, sometimes the bowling ball fell faster, and sometimes the bowling ball fell up and hit the experimenter in the face. It would be pretty clear that we don’t know anything about how gravity works, and all the physics that built on the idea that feathers and bowling balls fall at the same rate in a vacuum chamber was totally wrong.

It would also bring up the question of how nobody noticed that sometimes bowling balls fall up before. The answer for psychology is that many psychologists use questionable research practices: one survey suggests that more than half of psychologists have. Many psychologists check whether the data shows an effect; if it is, they publish, and if it isn’t, they recruit fifty more participants to see if it will show an effect. Other psychologists will write a paper that includes multiple studies and only report studies that showed an effect, even though they conducted other studies that showed no effect. Still other psychologists will decide whether or not to leave out outliers depending on which way shows an effect as existing. There are lots of other questionable research practices, many of which require more statistics to explain, but I hope that gives a sense of what people are doing.

The other problem is that humans behave much more inconsistently than bowling balls do. You’d expect that if you drop a bowling ball in a vacuum chamber, it’ll be exactly the same as every other bowling ball in every other vacuum chamber around the globe. You only need to drop one bowling ball in a vacuum chamber to find out how bowling balls in vacuum chambers work all around the globe. But if you do a study with a hundred and fifty people, you might have happened to find a hundred and fifty really weird people. Even if the effect is real within your sample, it might not apply to any other group of a hundred and fifty people, because people are weird.

It is hard to overstate the implications of the replication crisis. I would go so far as to say that you should not read quantitative psychological research, because it will make you actively stupider and have more inaccurate beliefs. You should view quantitative social scientific research more generally with grave suspicion. (Qualitative social science research wasn’t ever really supposed to replicate in the first place; ethnographies are still likely to provide an accurate insight into what it’s like to be a person very different from you, although you might be well-advised to skip the chapter about the generalizable implications.)

Now, you might think we’re in a complete state of epistemic helplessness, unable to know what facts about people are true and what facts are false. But that’s not true.

People are actually very good at figuring out whether psychological results are true or false. I’d cite the research on this but I just finished explaining why that’s bad, so instead I’ll direct you to 80,000 Hours’s psychology replication quiz. If you don’t get better than half, I will write you a drabble on the subject of your choice.

Consider priming, one of the results that has most completely and utterly failed to replicate. It turns out that doing a bunch of anagrams of words related to old people does not actually make you walk slower, imagining doing something morally wrong does not make you want to buy cleaning products, and reading the word ‘stupid’ does not make you assume people you’re talking to are less intelligent. Ask yourself: have I ever in my life experienced reading a bunch of words related to old people and then walking more slowly? Have you ever been like “sorry I’m so slow walking, I was helping out at the nursing home this morning”? No?

Most people spend much of their time thinking about other people. The human brain is in many ways optimizing for understanding other people. (Compare the abilities of your laptop computer and a five-year-old child with regards to comforting you when you’re sad, then compare their abilities with regards to quantum physics.) We are, ourselves, people. We have natural expertise and tons of information about the subject. We can outperform science.

A lot of people think of knowledge as coming from science, and science as coming from people in white labcoats doing complicated things with numbers and publishing peer-reviewed journal articles. But science is just a particular kind of empiricism. Empiricism means going out into the world, looking at things, coming up with an idea about how they might work, trying it out, and seeing if you’re right. You do empiricism all the time– when you try a new recipe, when you see if a good night’s sleep will make you feel better, when you check whether this movie reviewer has any clue what she’s talking about.

And you can do empiricism about your own psychological problems.

There are a bunch of meta-analyses that suggest that SSRIs, in general, are just barely better than placebo. There are also a lot of people who take an antidepressant, go off their antidepressant, get depressed, get back on their antidepressant, stop being depressed, go off their antidepressant, get depressed, get back on their antidepressant, stop being depressed, go off their antidepressant, etc. If you are in that group of people, what should you expect to happen if you go off your antidepressant?

You should expect to be depressed.

In a certain sense, this is totally ignoring science– you’re looking at that peer-reviewed meta-analysis with a bunch of complicated statistics and a sample size larger than one and going “…nah.” In another sense, this is doing science of the sort that is most closely connected to the question. The thing you care about is what will happen if you go off your antidepressant, you have empirically investigated it, and the answer is that you’re depressed.

At this point I should take a moment to discuss the placebo effect. Unfortunately, many people use the phrase “placebo effect” in a sloppy way. In a broad sense, the placebo effect refers to the ways a disease or condition changes if you take a sugar pill instead of a pill with an active ingredient, or talk to a kind intelligent person with no therapeutic training instead of a therapist, or whatever. In a narrow sense, the placebo effect refers to a particular source of these effects: the mind-body effect where if you do something at all to help the condition then you feel better. (More precisely, the former is called the “placebo response” and the latter is called the “placebo effect.”)

Actually, there are lots of causes of the placebo response. For example, a lot of conditions like depression fluctuate: you feel worse for a time, then you feel better, then you feel worse, then you feel better again. People tend to seek out treatment when they feel really bad and stop treatment when they feel better, so it looks like the treatment works, but it’s actually just the natural course of the disease. Similarly, some diseases are time-limited: whether or not you drink orange juice, your cold is going to take about a week to get better. Another example is that some people feel bad that people have put all this effort into giving them medicine and then they don’t feel better, so they rate themselves as feeling better even though they really don’t.

Ideally, you would do a placebo-controlled study on yourself. The process is fairly simple for medications you expect to work within one day, and I think more people should consider doing it. However, there are lots of situations where placebo-controlled studies don’t work at all: it is very difficult to do, say, placebo self-therapy or placebo exercise, and many medications such as SSRIs have to be taken for weeks to work properly.

A more promising strategy is to think about whether your experiences are consistent with the response being a placebo response. For example, if you’ve been depressed for years, you can rule out “it was just the sort of thing that would get better in a week anyway” as an explanation. If you typically miss your antidepressant because of a snafu with the pharmacy, that suggests your post-antidepressant depression is a real effect; if you typically miss your antidepressant because you’re too sad to take it, that suggests it may be a placebo response. If you’ve tried six antidepressants and only the seventh worked (despite them all being similar-looking little pills with similar side effects), it’s unlikely to be a placebo response, since there’s no reason to believe pill #7 would have a placebo response the others didn’t.

How do you choose things to experiment with? I offer the following guidelines:

• Good safety profile; few to no side effects. SSRIs are widely used and if they caused sudden horrible death we would probably know. It is difficult to imagine pomodoros or Facebook blockers having health effects one way or the other. Exercise actually makes you live longer. Conversely, taking random research chemicals off Longecity has all kinds of possible horrible side effects, and antipsychotics are routinely rated as “the only thing worse than psychosis” or “actually, no, I think I would rather be psychotic”.
• Easy to figure out if it works. If an intervention promises to help you get more work done or be less anxious, it is easy to figure out whether your to-do list has fewer items on it or you’re able to talk to strangers instead of hiding in the corner out of fright. If an intervention promises to help you reach enlightenment, this is harder to determine.
• Easy to do. Installing Facebook-blocking software or using a pomodoro tracker is very easy; anyone can do it in about one minute. Exercise, dietary changes, meditating for an hour a day, and so on are very difficult.
• Quick to test. It takes one afternoon to check whether pomodoros work for you: if you didn’t get more work done that afternoon, it probably didn’t. It can take months or years of work to find out whether meditation works for you. The former is a better thing to experiment with.
• Explanation makes sense. Ask the person why it works. If the explanation is something like “when you do something you’re scared of and it isn’t a disaster you’re likely to be less scared,” then the thing is more likely to really work. If the explanation involves unscrambling anagrams about old people making you walk slower, then maybe don’t try that one.
• Good reviews. If it worked for someone else, maybe it’s worth trying. You can ask your friends, but it’s also worth mining historical figures for ideas (maybe Marcus Aurelius has some good tips) or, sigh, reading the psychological literature.

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Solstice Picture Books: A Review

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ozy blog post, solstice

Ideally, Secular Solstice would be a holiday for families– one that teaches children humanist values. Unfortunately, it is at present celebrated by only a few hundred people, so we do not have picture books that explain Solstice-related concepts in an accessible fashion. We must appropriate picture books that were not written as Solstice books but which happen to address Solstice-related themes. I will review several here.

Many solstice themes appear to be entirely absent from picture books. For perhaps obvious reasons, few picture books appear to address existential risk, the fact that the universe doesn’t care, stoicism, or perseverence in the face of a harsh world. While many picture books do address the subject of death, few do it in a way anti-deathist atheists would find remotely satisfying. My selections also include a puzzling absence of books about trying to be good, building things together, or hope for the future, perhaps because I was mostly looking at humanist/atheist picture books and these topics are discussed more generally. I am interested in suggestions from readers for picture books that address each of these themes.

Older Than The Stars: A brief history of the universe. Excellent use of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and alliteration make this book a delight to read out loud. The main text is relatively light on science, although it does touch on the Big Bang and how all atoms formed in stars; however, each page contains science facts for the older reader which are, as far as I know, accurate.

Solstice themes addressed: humans are built of meat and stardust; existence is neat.

Grandmother Fish: A Child’s First Book of Evolution: A lovely, reasonably scientifically accurate book about evolution. The book explains that we are descended from various kinds of animal, who evolved various abilities, and related to all different kinds of animals. The book is interactive, prompting the reader to wiggle and chomp just like Grandmother Fish. I worry somewhat that it promotes a teleological view of evolution: it talks about how Grandmother Reptile evolved the ability to breathe air, but does not mention that Grandmother Reptile also lost certain abilities that Grandmother Fish had. However, that’s a fairly minor flaw in an otherwise wonderful book.

Solstice themes addressed: humans are built of meat and stardust; existence is neat.

If…: A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking At Big Ideas and Numbers: Each page offers a concrete visualization of a big, complicated number: what if the Milky Way galaxy were the size of a dinner plate? what if all the wealth in the world were a hundred coins? what if the events of the past 3000 years were condensed into a single month? As such, this book does not address many Solstice themes. However, it can be a jumping-off point for a lot of Solstice-y discussions. Families who prioritize global poverty may find its visualizations of wealth inequality a way to spark a discussion about why the family donates the way they do. The section about history may prompt conversations about past human achievements and what we might do in the future.

Solstice themes addressed: existence is neat; building things together; tangentially, trying to be good and hope for the future.

If The World Were A Village: A Book About The World’s People: Similar to If…, and written by the same authors, If The World Were A Village focuses on a single concrete visualization of a big, complicated number: what if the entire world were a village of a hundred people? How many people would be Christian? What languages would they speak? How much money would each person have? How many people would have a computer? The book is intended to build “world-mindedness,” a sense of the diversity of the world and caring about people in other countries; this seems like a good rationalist/effective altruist virtue, but perhaps not a Solstice-y one. If read around the time of Solstice, then this book mostly seems useful as a jumping-off point for discussion, particularly among families who prioritize global poverty. It brings up questions about why some countries have more food than others; the parent might also bring up that a few hundred years ago all countries were more similar to the global poor than to the global rich. The book was published in 2011, so many statistics may be out of date; figuring out how to update the statistics might be a good project for a homeschool.

Solstice themes addressed: tangentially, building things together, trying to be good and hope for the future.

I Wonder: This is an adorable book and I definitely recommend getting it. Eva takes a walk with her mother and asks many questions, from why the moon stays close to us to where butterflies come from. She learns the answer to some of her questions, but also learns that there are a lot of questions even grownups don’t know the answer to. I think this is a good book that models curiosity about the unknown, but I’m not sure that it’s very Solstice-y. Not every rationalist virtue needs to be crammed into a single holiday. This might be one to keep on the shelves year-round.

Solstice themes addressed: existence is neat? building things together? trying to be good?

Annabelle & Aiden Presents: Oh The Things We Believed: Very much disrecommended. The book itself is flimsy and feels cheap. The author is attempting to write verse, but does not seem to at all understand the concept of scansion, and the rhymes are very forced. The story is all over the place. I am baffled by the author’s choice to have a bunch of magic things happen in a book the moral of which is that magic doesn’t happen. The cloud isn’t magic, but what about the talking fucking stegosaurus? Maybe that might be magic? Worst of all, the book contains several factual inaccuracies, such as that people used to believe the earth was on the back of infinite turtles. As far as I am aware, no culture believed this. Do not buy this book for your child; I would also probably avoid the rest of the Annabelle & Aiden series.

Solstice themes addressed: we can build things together; perseverance in the face of a harsh world.

Scrupulosity Sequence #1: Don’t Listen To Me

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neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality, scrupulosity

[Related to: Beware of Other-Optimizing; Generalizing From One Example; What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?]

This post does not contain new material; everything I say in this post is said in the above-linked posts. But it’s important, and particularly important at the beginning of a sequence that gives advice, so I’m going to say it anyway. Bear with me, people who have been around here for a while.

Everyone is different. This is a platitude. You hear it in elementary school classrooms and workplace presentations about diversity, and for that reason it can be hard to understand how important it is.

Everyone is different. There are lots and lots of ways in which everyone can be different. Some people are extroverts; some people are introverts. Some people worry constantly; other people shrug off a cancer diagnosis. Some people can get along with anyone; other people refuse to give anyone a second chance because they already know they dislike the person so why would they give that person another opportunity to be disappointing? Some people have studyblrs full of beautiful photographs of their neatly color-coded notes for all twelve of the college classes they’re taking; some people made a studyblr, got distracted by discourse and memes, and haven’t posted anything to it except a list of the fancy pens they fully intended to buy from Amazon. Some people love beautiful things and museums and daydreaming and poetry; other people… actually I have no idea what low-openness-to-experience people do all day, sorry guys.

We have barely begun to map out the number of ways that people can be different.

What this means is that the advice that works for one person often utterly fails for another person.

We see this in all areas of human endeavor. One person writes in the morning; another in the evening; another gets a hotel room and churns out a novel in a single feverish week. One person finds that running lets them be alone with their thoughts; another likes how yoga connects them to their body; a third finds the social aspect of sports very motivating. One baby thrives with cosleeping, while another needs to cry-it-out, and a third does well with no-cry sleep training.

A further complication is that we don’t have words for all the ways that people can be different. Sometimes scientists have the word but laypeople don’t: many people who have no sense of smell have never heard the word “anosmia.” Other very real distinctions are ones no one has learned to make yet. (There has been little study about what factors cause a person to prefer writing in hotel rooms.) If we don’t know how people differ, then we can’t have any sense about for whom the advice works.

Depression is a condition about which there has been a good deal of research. There are accepted evidence-based therapies (CBT) and medications (SSRIs, MAOIs, tricyclics). But you’ll find formerly depressed people swearing by mindfulness, CBT, DBT, behavioral activation, SSRIs, antipsychotics, MDMA, LSD, nootropics, exercise, yoga, vitamins, finding a partner, breaking up with a partner, cuddling a pet, walking outside in nature, acupuncture, green smoothies, and lighting herbs on fire near your toes. All of these treatments likely alleviate depression for some people. (…Maybe not lighting herbs on fire near your toes.) All of these treatments will likely fail to treat depression for other people. And for none of them do we have a good sense of what populations they are likely to work for. All you can do is keep trying things which seem likely to work and have an acceptable risk profile until you aren’t depressed anymore, and try to avoid the “my depression was caused by a vitamin deficiency, therefore SSRIs are a LIE and everyone should take Vitamin D” assholery.

There has been almost no research into scrupulosity and dysregulated guilt and shame, and there are no best practices which I am aware of. Therefore, when I write about my scrupulosity, it is merely one person’s description of what worked for me. It is as credible as one depressed person saying “I became less depressed when I started taking regular walks in nature.” Certainly a useful anecdote; perhaps helpful to some depressed people trying to narrow down the enormous list of things they could theoretically do about depression; absolutely not a universal cure.

Although I hope this is not the case, it is possible my recovery was entirely due to the beneficial effects of time, that I am attributing causality where there is none and this series is the equivalent of the depressed person writing that lighting herbs on fire near their toes cured their depression. That is always a possibility when a person is describing what worked for them.

I believe that what I write will be useful for some people; I believe it will be useless for others, and perhaps harmful. But if the things that work for me don’t work for you, that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s how brains work. People are different. Test everything yourself, and if something doesn’t work, toss it away without a further thought.

Defeating Scrupulosity

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

Six years ago, I suffered from crippling scrupulosity issues. Today, I don’t.

My symptoms were as I discussed in my old post Generalized Shame Disorder, which was based substantially on my own experiences:

Let’s be clear about how I’m using the word “shame” here. Shame is not the same thing as guilt, although many people with generalized shame disorder self-identify as having guilt issues. Guilt is a response to doing something wrong; while sometimes people feel guilty too much or guilty about the wrong things, in general, guilt is useful and healthy. Shame, however, is about fundamentally being a bad person. Guilt is “I made a mistake”; shame is “I am a mistake”. Guilt often motivates people to make amends and change their behavior; shame often doesn’t, because fixing a specific defect is much less daunting than fixing an entire defective self…

Commonly, generalized shame disorder seems to be associated with literal self-destructive impulses. Conventionally, the term “self-destructive” means doing things that have far more negative consequences than positive consequences, such as substance abuse; however, people with generalized shame disorder seem to literally want to destroy themselves. This manifests in a lot of different ways. Suicidal ideation is obvious. Some might have an eating disorder in the hopes that they can waste away until they stop existing. Some people may go to a psychiatrist in the hopes of getting medication that will cause them to be a completely different person. Some people make life choices that make them miserable because the complete opposite of themselves is the only good kind of person to be. I am sure there are others; we are nothing if not inventive.

Regardless of the preferred form of self-destruction (and most people with generalized shame disorder have more than one), the root thought is the same. In fact, if there’s anything besides “lots of shame” that defines this condition for me, it’s that: the urge, in some literal or metaphorical sense, to stop being you. It is very common for people to feel guilt about the fact that they can’t force themselves to be someone else or that they don’t want to.

I am not entirely recovered from scrupulosity. In fact, the evening before writing this post I experienced a minor relapse; I treated it promptly and was entirely recovered within a few hours. I have one relapse every three to six months, none of which last longer than a few hours. This is a level of pain I can live with.

Perhaps the greatest sign of how things have changed is that I’ve forgotten how much my shame and scrupulosity used to shape my entire life. Recently I had a conversation with a person who used to know me quite well, but who has been a distant acquaintance for the past few years. I made an off-hand comment about my self-acceptance and then they said “weren’t you the person who used to spend hours crying every day about how worthless you are?” and I suddenly realized that I don’t do that anymore.

So I am writing a sequence to explain how I recovered. I primarily intend this sequence to be helpful to those struggling with scrupulosity, excessive shame, and similar issues. However, I expect that many of the posts will be of interest to people who do not have similar issues; after all, the original Sequences were about what Eliezer discovered while trying to figure out how to create a friendly AI, and are of interest to many people who were not involved in creating a friendly AI at all. This is the index post and will be updated with links to later posts as they come out.

On Laziness

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I have "respond to the rest of the values difference stuff" on my to do list but that is THREE posts and this is ONE post so it happens faster, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality

When I was a teenager, I was lazy.

When I was at home during the summer, I didn’t do my chores; instead, I read books all day. My parents were deeply frustrated. They tried everything they could think of to deal with my laziness. They explained in great detail that I needed to contribute to the household. They yelled at me. They punished me for not doing chores. They rewarded me for doing chores.

Eventually, my mom happened to write down the chores she wanted me to do on a list. When she came home that night all the chores were done.

Turns out I can’t process auditory information very well.

Whoops.

—

I once had a partner who was lazy. I told him “it’s only fair that we both contribute fifty percent to the household,” and he agreed, and we decided that he would sweep the floor when it was dirty. However, the floor just got dirtier and dirtier. Even when I nagged him to sweep the floor, he’d say “it looks clean enough to me” or– even more frustrating– he’d sweep half the floor and leave the other equally dirty half undone.

Goddamn male-privileged assholes who expect other people to do all the chores while they laze around in their underwear and play video games, this is the 21st century, we believe in equality!

One day I took him and pointed to a pile of dirt and said “do you see this dirt?” He responded with “holy shit! Our floor is extremely dirty!” and immediately got a broom and swept it.

It turns out that while I am constantly low-level stressed by mess, my partner literally just did not see it unless it was explicitly pointed out to him.

Whoops.

—

For most of my life, I’ve been lazy.

I’ve flunked classes and lost jobs and let dishes pile up in the sink until they make towers. My resume has so many holes it looks like it’s made out of Swiss cheese. When I was in college, I was so lazy I flunked a class it was supposed to be literally impossible to flunk, and the only reason I didn’t have to repeat the year was that my adviser pulled strings to get me to graduate because she didn’t want to deal with me anymore. I spent a lot of time hating myself about how lazy I was. My inner monologue usually resembled the following comic:

[Source: Allie Brosh’s book Hyperbole and a Half.]

I talked a good game about knowing I had depression, but secretly I was pretty suspicious that this was all a coverup for my innate lack of moral fiber.

Then I took Zoloft.

Magically, the pill caused my moral fiber to grow in.

Whoops.

—

Last week, I was lazy.

I had been lazy for more than a month. I was too lazy to take my infant son to the library, or to play with him, or to sing to him, or to do anything other than the bare minimum to keep him alive and not crying. I was too lazy to write. I was too lazy to read books. I was certainly too lazy to do work for my job. I spent all my time thinking about how much I wanted to sleep, which was pretty much the laziest thing I could imagine. I spent a lot of time breaking into tears about how miserable being so lazy made me and how I wished I could just willpower myself into wanting to do more things.

Then, I extremely lazily took a nap for three hours last weekend, instead of doing work that I absolutely needed to do because there was a deadline and I had procrastinated on it. I think we can all agree that was the absolute laziest thing I have done in this entire anecdote so far.

I woke up, wrapped up the thing I needed to do in a couple hours, and have been astonishingly productive for the past few days, a fact that is no doubt related to the fact that since then I’ve been making sure to stay in bed for at least eleven hours a day.

It turns out that what I was calling “laziness” was, in fact, chronic sleep deprivation.

Whoops.

—

Scott Alexander recently wrote a post called The Whole City is Center, which has a very extended bit about laziness in it:

Simplicio: I think we’re treating the word “laziness” differently. I’m thinking of “lazy” as a way to communicate a true fact about the world. You agree that the true fact should be communicated by some word, but you’re interpreting “lazy” to mean some sort of awful concept like “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer”. Are you sure this isn’t kind of dumb? Given that we need a word for the first thing, and everyone currently uses “lazy” for it, and we don’t need a word for the second thing because it’s awful, and most people would deny that “lazy” means that, why don’t we just use “lazy” for the very useful purpose it’s served thus far?

Here is my thought. I agree that “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” is a terrible concept. “Lazy” is how I personally express that concept (well, actually my concept replaces the “and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” with “and so we should be resentful about them forever,” but close enough). That is why I am trying to avoid using the word “lazy”.

Look, if you personally use the word “lazy,” and it doesn’t come along with the connotation of “this person is bad and horrible and I should spend lots of time and energy feeling resentful and bitter about how bad and horrible they are,” and it doesn’t impair your ability to think thoughts like “maybe the reason that I, the person who does all of the nighttime parenting for a six-month-old, can’t do anything and keep fantasizing about sleep is because I am sleep-deprived,” then please keep using the word “lazy.” I encourage you to do so. My one caution is that you should take care about calling other people “lazy” unless you’re really certain that they won’t interpret you as meaning the “bad and horrible” meaning, because it is good to make sure that when you insult people it is deliberate.

Maybe you’re able to voluntarily shift the definitions of words that you use as soon as someone points out to you that the word definition is kind of stupid, no matter how many emotions you have wrapped up in the definition of the word you were originally using. That’s a useful skill. Unfortunately, like many useful skills, such as obstetrics or car repair or leaving the house promptly, I don’t have it. My brain just keeps using the word definition it’s always had.

I fully admit that I am a deeply unreasonable person in this way as in many other ways. However, I observe that when I don’t use the word “lazy,” I am more likely to notice the actual causes of someone avoiding responsibilities, and I am less likely to spend lots of emotional energy seething about how they or I are/am a bad horrible person who deserves to be hated forever. No doubt this is an unreasonable coping mechanism. As an unreasonable person, I often use unreasonable coping mechanisms. But you reasonable people, with your reasonable-person privilege, should not go around saying I shouldn’t use my coping mechanism which I was using just because reasonable people don’t need it.

Now, it might be that I’m totally unique in my unreasonableness here (or perhaps that it’s genetic, because my parents share it). However, I think a similar unreasonableness is actually quite common. Exhibit A: people keep writing blog posts about it.

Scott Alexander later writes:

Simplicio: If you’re right, I worry you’re going up against the euphemism treadmill. If we invent another word to communicate the true fact, like “work-rarely-doer”, then anyone who believes that people who play video games instead of working deserve to suffer will quickly conclude that work-rarely-doers deserve to suffer.

Sophisticus: Then let’s not invent something like “work-rarely-doer”. Let’s just say things like “You shouldn’t have Larry as a dog-sitter, because due to some social or psychological issue he usually plays video games instead of doing difficult tasks.”

Simplicio: I think people are naturally going to try to compress that concept. You can try to stop them, but I think you’ll fail. And I think insofar as you can communicate the concept at all, people are going to think less of Larry because of it. It’s possible you can slightly decrease the degree to which people think less of Larry, but only by slightly decreasing their ability to communicate useful information.

This is true. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis doesn’t really work. I can prevent myself from using the concept “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad” by not letting myself use the word “lazy” and– if I observe the concept attaching itself to another word– adding that word to the blacklist too. I can’t prevent everyone else from using that concept by blacklisting the word: anyone who doubts it should see the snarl some people can put on the word “transgender.” Nevertheless, I have two objections to Scott’s argument.

First, most people do not have a particularly sophisticated ontology of language, so when they say “laziness doesn’t exist” they mean “the concept we unreasonable people use the word ‘laziness’ to describe doesn’t exist”. Scott Alexander actually agrees with their point.

Second, even if it wouldn’t work that well if everyone adopted it, if I personally adopt it, then I am less likely to be chronically sleep deprived for several weeks because I think taking a nap would be Extremely Lazy and that if I am going to be lazy I should at least have the grace to be conscious so I can hate myself about it. This is a win. Since I am not a Kantian, I do not have to go “hmm, well, this works for me, but if I check it against the categorical imperative it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, guess I’m going to have to be sleep-deprived until I have a failure of willpower and take a nap anyway.”

Scott Alexander has talked a lot about the typical mind fallacy and how it’s a mistake to assume that everyone is the same as we are. Unfortunately, awareness of a fallacy doesn’t necessarily stop you from falling victim to it. (As I know very well, because as I said above I am a deeply unreasonable person.) Scott is a very reasonable person, with reasonable coping mechanisms; he should not in this way generalize to those of us who behave in stupid and counterproductive ways constantly and are desperately trying to figure out how not to.

Models: A Summary

Tags

ozy blog post, PRECIOUS sexual energy

Models is the single best book I’ve read about finding a romantic-sexual partner. Although intended for straight men, the vast majority of the advice is useful for people of all genders and sexual orientations. Many people I know have difficulty finding romantic-sexual partners, and it often causes them a lot of pain.

If this summary intrigues you, I urge you to buy the book. I cannot summarize an entire book in three thousand words; there’s a lot of advice and examples I can’t include, and then you will get Mark Manson’s version which isn’t filtered through my opinions. If you can’t afford the book, I hope you will find this summary helpful anyway.

Alpha Males Are Everywhere

For the purposes of this subsection, I will define “alpha male” as a straight man who, if he so chooses, could go out on an ordinary Friday night and, about half the time, find a stranger they find attractive to have a one-night stand with. (Sorry for the terminology, feminist readers, but I’m trying to talk to the anti-feminists here; if this is teeth-grindingly awful, skip ahead to ‘summary’.) I don’t mean that they necessarily go out and have a one-night stand every night: some people don’t want to. There are some men who are saving themselves for marriage but, if they decided to stop having this goal, could easily have a one-night stand this weekend. Alpha maledom, as I’m defining it, is a fairly high level of attractiveness for a man. Nevertheless, it’s not wildly unachievable: it’s not Keith-Richards-level attractiveness, it’s hottest-guy-in-the-room attractiveness. In my adventures as a promiscuous person, I have had the opportunity to observe many men in this category.

Here’s the thing.

I know broke alpha males. I know alpha males who are financially supported by their girlfriends. I know fat alpha males. I know bald alpha males. I know short alpha males. I know ugly alpha males. I know alpha males with small dicks. I know alpha males who are programmers. I know alpha males who love D&D, Star Trek, and World of Warcraft. I know feminine alpha males. I know sexually submissive alpha males. I know alpha males who rock a dress. I know alpha males who cry at every single Pixar movie, all of which they have seen, because Pixar movies are their favorite. Extroversion definitely helps, but I know some introverted alpha males and even some socially anxious ones.

Alpha males are an incredibly diverse bunch of people. Many, perhaps most, of them are people you would never expect to be as attractive as they are.

It’s harder to come up with as clear a definition of attractiveness for straight women and queer people. Straight men as a group tend to want casual sex more than straight women as a group (even from a sex-differences-don’t-exist feminist perspective this makes sense– women are more likely than men to be slut-shamed and less likely than men to have orgasms during casual sex). So “ability to get casual sex” is a useful metric for straight men and less useful for everyone else.

But I am pretty damn sure the same thing is true for straight women and queer people. The ones who have the highest level of sexual success do not necessarily look like what you’re imagining when you think “really hot straight woman” or “really hot gay man” or “really hot lesbian”.

Now, I’m not saying anyone can be an alpha. Many people are going to have a hard time being alphas: if nothing else, if you can’t talk to attractive people, you are never going to be able to date them. But what I am saying is that that narrative you tell yourself where you’re short and therefore you’ll never find love, or you’re a nerd and therefore you’ll never find love, or whatever– maybe you should be open to the possibility that that’s not true. Because a surprising amount of the time, other people with that trait have more dates than they know what to do with.

Summary

The two rules:

• Be vulnerable.
• Don’t be needy.

The three fundamentals:

• Having an attractive lifestyle.
• Knowing how to flirt.
• ACTUALLY ASKING PEOPLE OUT.

If you can’t get a date, you have a problem with at least one of the three fundamentals. Possibly two. A few people are in bad enough straights that they have trouble with all three. And surprisingly often, your problem with the three fundamentals is rooted in a problem with one of the two rules.

This can be overwhelming: there’s a lot of specific advice. I’d suggest working on your vulnerability and non-neediness first, while picking one or two pieces of advice from your weakest fundamental. For example, if you have trouble flirting, you might concentrate on touching people you’re flirting with on the arm when you tell them a joke. That will be incredibly awkward the first time you do it, because you’re not used to it. Keep trying. It will get easier.

Also, you don’t have to be perfect! You don’t have to be a god of non-neediness and vulnerability to get a date: the vast majority of people who date or get married are needy sometimes and are ashamed of some things. You can become very sexually successful even if your clothes don’t fit, or you don’t have a sense of humor, or your opinions are bland and boring. If you’re unsatisfied, then work on your fundamentals; if you’re satisfied with your romantic life, enjoy your poorly fitting clothes and bland opinions to your heart’s content.

The Two Rules

Neediness is when you care about other people’s perceptions of you more than you care about your perception of you. Your actions are primarily motivated by gaining approval from others. Non-neediness is when you care about your perception of you more than other people’s perception of you. Your actions are primarily motivated by your own desires and goals.

Specifically, you must care less about a romantic partner’s approval of you than you do about your own approval of you. You can care about whether a romantic partner approves of you– most people do! — but you have to care more about your own opinion of yourself. If your romantic partner is like “I will only love you if you kick that puppy,” you have to be the sort of person who can say “uh, fuck off.”

Non-neediness doesn’t mean that you’re a dick! You can compliment people, or give them thoughtful gifts, or remember their birthdays, or let them crash on your couch for six months, and be non-needy. If you’re letting someone crash on your couch for six months because they’re cool and you like spending time with them, non-needy. If you are seething with resentment but don’t dare to say anything because what if that makes them unhappy with you, needy.

You can be non-needy and be an effective altruist or a white anti-racist or a male feminist, as long as you’re that because of your own values and desires. “Maybe if I give lots of money to charity people will like me and I won’t be evil”: needy. “I think it’s wrong that I have so much and other people have so little”: non-needy. “I am not going to buy you a diamond necklace for Valentine’s Day, no matter how much you feel you deserve it, because I’m donating the money to the Humane League”: epic-level non-needy.

Which brings us to the idea of polarization. At its core, polarization means this: if a person turns you down, they’re doing you a favor.

Most of the time, we think about romantic and sexual success as decreasing the number of rejections you get. In reality, romantic and sexual success means trying to get rejected as quickly as possible.

Nearly always, the reason a person has for not wanting to date you is also a reason you don’t want to date them. Someone rejected you for not wanting kids? Imagine five years from now when they’ve worn you down and you have to wake up six times a night to feed a child you never wanted. Someone rejected you for being bald? Imagine having sex with them while they try to hide that they aren’t attracted to you and it doesn’t work and you feel awful about yourself. Someone rejected you for being boring? Imagine all the bitter fights you’ve prevented about how you NEVER take them out anymore and it’s like you don’t EVEN CARE ABOUT THEM AT ALL.

It’s true that sometimes people reject you for stupid reasons. I have seen a list floating around the Internet where the author offers the opinion that you should always reject someone who sleeps on a mattress on the floor. That’s a pretty dumb reason to turn someone down, but think about it this way: now you don’t have to date someone who would turn you down based on whether you own a bedframe. What a fucking asshole. Good thing they rejected you.

Many people try to get dates by being as boring and neutral as possible, hiding anything weird about themselves, in the hopes it prevents rejection. This is literally the opposite of what you should do. Wave your freak flag high! Be open about your bald, kid-hating, boring ways, and then you will only date people who loathe kids, enjoy counting their silverware, and have a thing for Picard.

And that brings us to vulnerability. Vulnerability is the willingness to stick your neck out, even if people might think you’re stupid or weird or make fun of you about it. It’s making jokes that might not be funny, sharing fears that might make people think you’re a coward, trying things that you might suck at, telling someone you like them when you might be rejected. Vulnerability is saying: “this is who I am and I am not going to be anyone else.”

There is a deep connection between vulnerability and non-neediness. If you care about what other people think about you more than what you think about you, then there are lots of aspects of yourself you’re ashamed of or embarrassed about. If you care most of all about your own self-respect, then you’re willing to be more open.

The thing about the attractive guy who cries at Pixar movies is that, when the subject of Pixar comes up, he says “I think Pixar movies are some of the greatest movies of the twenty-first century. People don’t give them as much credit as they should because they’re children’s movies. I challenge any person with a soul not to cry at the first twenty minutes of Up.” If you love Pixar with all your heart and soul, and when the subject comes up you go “uh um they’re children’s movies I mean um I have occasionally watched one I guess but it’s not like I REALLY like them or anything,” that is not attractive.

Be willing to admit to your embarrassing moments, your flaws, your mental health issues, your weaknesses, your mistakes, and your habit of drinking milk out of the carton. This is attractive.

Fundamental One: Lifestyle

The basic rule of lifestyle is that like attracts like. You attract what you are.

If you’re goth, you attract goths. If you’re a nerd, you attract nerds. If you’re Christian, you attract Christians. If you’re an educated professional who likes fine wine and travel, you attract educated professionals who like fine wine and travel.

Here are some problems people have with lifestyle:

Looking in the wrong place for partners. If you’re quiet and love thoughtful conversation and fantasy novels, you’re not going to be very successful at a bar. However, you might do very well at a book club. A quick heuristic is to think about where you would look for friends (and then filter that for places that also have a lot of people of the appropriate gender and sexual orientation– straight men, book clubs are better than Magic tournaments; straight women, the other way around).

Pretending to be something you’re not. If you’re quiet and love thoughtful conversation and fantasy novels,  but are pretending to be loud and enjoy sportsball and crushing beer cans on your head, you are only going to attract loud people who like sportsball and crushing beer cans on their head. This is not the recipe for a long and happy relationship.

Attracting the wrong people. If one person you date is a narcissistic manipulative asshole, or hates sex (if you’re allosexual), or runs up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt you have to bail them out from, shit happens. If every person you date is a narcissistic manipulative asshole, or hates sex (if you’re allosexual), or runs up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt you have to bail them out from, then you are doing something that attracts those people. Consider:

• Are you, yourself, the kind of person you keep attracting (e.g. a narcissistic manipulative asshole)?
• Are you the complement of the person you keep attracting (e.g. someone who can’t set boundaries)?
• Do you believe everyone, or all people of your preferred gender, are like the kind of person you keep attracting (e.g. you think all men are narcissistic manipulative assholes)?

Now, most of this advice is pretty vague. Here is some more specific advice. However, every piece of advice must be tested against the “like attracts like” rule and the non-neediness rule. If a piece of advice makes you less like your best self, or it attracts people that you don’t want to date or have sex with, ignore it.

Some traits are physically attractive, like a symmetrical face. Some traits are psychologically attractive, like charm and talent. In general, men tend to care more about physical attractiveness and women tend to care more about psychological attractiveness. (This is a generalization, there are lots of exceptions, and regardless it’s like 60% one and 40% the other for most people anyway.) If you are a straight man, you probably are falling victim to the typical mind fallacy and care too much about being physically attractive and not enough about being psychologically attractive. If you are a straight woman, it is possible that that’s the problem, but it’s also possible that the media has taught you that men care 95% about physical attractiveness and you should work on being charming instead.

Here is some general physical-attractiveness advice:

• Pay attention to basic hygiene, including showering, deodorant, brushing and flossing your teeth, haircuts, and clean clothes without holes.
• Wear clothes that fit you. Consult howclothesshouldfit.com. Dresses (which are not covered on the site) should skim the body without squeezing it; you should be able to see the shape of your body and it should not ride up when you walk.
• Wear colors that match. I am actually generally confused about this one myself and rely on blunt friends and/or take the attractiveness hit.
• Wear clothes that match your personality and signal the things you want to signal. You can look at what celebrities you want to be like wear (Mark Zuckerberg counts).
• Exercise. EXERCISE. EXERCISE! EXERCISE!!!!!!
• While the most important kind of exercise is the kind you actually do, lifting weights improves the attractiveness of everyone, male and female. (No, women, you will not get “too bulky” unless you repeatedly trip and inject yourself with steroids.)
• Limit soda, candy, fast food, and desserts; eat fruits and vegetables.

Here is advice for people who want to present in a masculine way. This is mostly straight men and queer people, but straight women who feel drawn to masculinity should consider it too. It’s great polarization and you will never have to shave your armpits again. People who wish to be feminine, sorry, both I and Mark Manson are totally unqualified to provide you advice.

• Move your shoulders back until the seam on your shirt that extends from neck to sleeve is straight.
• Raise your chin to a 90 degree angle; make the back of your neck as straight as possible.
• Your feet should be shoulder-length apart and either straight ahead or at a slight outward angle.
• Swing your shoulders and your arms a little as you walk. (Not too exaggerated; just a little swagger.)
• Speak from your chest voice. If your voice sounds different when you hold your nose closed, you’re speaking from head voice.
• Speak slowly yet loudly (without screaming).

Most psychological attractiveness will be covered under “Flirting.” However, relevant for lifestyle is whether you are a super-boring person. If you spend all your time working and watching the same sports and sitcoms everyone else does, you are probably boring. If you go skydiving, write poetry, or climb mountains, if you are Internet famous, or if you have ever eaten a spider, you are probably interesting. The easy way to become interesting is to try more things with an open mind. If it exists, it exists because someone finds some value in it; try to find the value and then decide whether you like it.

Fundamental Two: Flirting

Flirting is all about subtext. Two people can say the exact same thing and one is successful flirting and one is failed flirting, because the subtext is different. If you compliment someone because you’re needy and want to validate yourself with their affection, that is very different from complimenting them because you appreciate them. Subtext is also the difference between teasing and insults, sharing and bragging, and so on.

So what subtext do you want to establish while flirting? First, of course, you need to be non-needy and vulnerable. Second, you want to create sexual tension, which means creating uncertainty (that’s the tension bit) about whether you’ll have a sexual or romantic relationship (that’s the sexual bit). A really obvious example of this is playing hard-to-get.

But you can also create sexual tension by stating your intentions boldly, such as by complimenting someone on their appearance. The uncertainty comes from what will happen next and what you’ll say or do.

(NOTE: if you are flirting with a shy nerd, they’ll come up with the uncertainty all by themselves, you don’t have to make any.)

How to Flirt:

• Do not startle or scare someone when approaching them, such as by approaching them from behind, screaming, grabbing them, or saying something offensive.
• The best three pickup lines are “hi, I’m X”, “hey, this is kind of random, but I wanted to meet you,” and “hi, I thought you were cute and wanted to meet you.”
• Smile.
• Whenever possible, be brief. Don’t use ten words when you can use four.
• Instead of asking people questions about themselves, make mild predictions. For example, instead of saying “where are you from?”, say “you look like a California girl.”
• If the conversation stalls, just say whatever you happen to be thinking, no matter how random it is.
• Teach yourself to notice jumping-off points in other people’s statements. For example, if someone says “I go to Harvard now, but I want to move out west because the weather is too cold,” you can talk about Harvard, the west, or the weather.
• Learn to tell stories with a setup, a conflict, and a resolution.
• Open up about yourself. Talk about your passions, your ambitions, the best and worst things that have ever happened to you, your childhood. That will get them to open up about themself, which leads to an emotional connection.
• Make jokes. Here are some kinds of jokes:
  • Misdirection– saying something that makes your listener think you’re going to make one point, but actually making a different one (“you know that look women get when they want sex? Me neither.”)
  • Exaggeration– blowing things out of proportion in an interesting way (“I’ve seen more appetizing things in the bottom of an airport urinal”).
  • Teasing– humorous, derogatory comments with a good intention (to a person sitting by themself looking bored: “who put you in time-out?”)
  • Puns– playing on words (“surely you can’t be serious!” “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley”)
  • Roleplaying– pretending to be something you’re not (if a person you’re flirting with says something you dislike: “that’s it, we’re getting divorced. You can keep the kids, I’m moving to Italy.”)
• Only ask someone for their phone number if they seem genuinely interested in you and if you want to hang out with them again. Don’t make up a line or a reason, just ask for it.

How To Date:

• If a person likes you, they will make it easy for you to date them. If Chris Hemsworth or Scarlett Johanssen asked them out, do you think they could rebook those weekend plans? Then if they’re not doing it for you, they aren’t that interested.
• Have dates at night, but early enough that you can spend three or four hours together if it’s going well. (Lunchtime and afternoon dates often come off as platonic.)
• NO MOVIE DATES. (Exceptions: Rocky Horror Picture Show, midnight releases you’re both looking forward to.)
• Dinner dates are okay but you can usually do better.
• Good dates: comedy club, dance class, walk in a park or plaza, concerts, bars, nightclubs, museums, looking at books together…
• Netflix-and-chill might come off as boring, but is also cheap and can result in sex really fast. Your call.
• Whenever possible, try to include multiple activities on a date. For example, you might meet for coffee, get ice cream, go swinging at the empty playground, and then go to a bookstore.
• If you planned the date, then lead the date. Say confidently what you’ll do next (“there’s this great exhibit at the Exploratorium”).
• Have deeper and more personal conversations, without becoming a job interview.
• TOUCH. YOUR. PARTNER.
  • I mean it. If someone says “stop”, obviously, you stop, and in sex-positive contexts you should feel free to ask first if you’re uncertain, but YOU MUST TOUCH PEOPLE YOU ARE ON DATES WITH.
  • Start by gently touching them on the arm or shoulder for emphasis (for example, at the punchline of a joke). Wait for them to touch you back.
  • If they do, you can move to more intimate touch, like putting your hand on their back or around their shoulders. Notice if they pull away; if they do, it’s probably not welcome.
  • In sex-positive contexts, if you think the person you’re with wants to kiss you, a simple “can I kiss you?” is appropriate; if you’re good at reading body language, you can just go for it.

Signals of interest

• Pre-approach: smiling; non-accidental eye contact; proximity; the person initiating a conversation with you.
• In conversation: smiling and laughing a lot; playing with their hair (usually women, femininely presenting people, and shy people); making lots of eye contact; makes excuses to spend more time with you; touches you; ditches their friends for you; comes up with some pretext to be alone with you.

Fundamental Three: ACTUALLY ASKING PEOPLE OUT

Lots of people are anxious about talking to attractive people, asking people out, the first kiss, and sex. They come up with various rationalizations:

• “Oh, she’s stupid.”
• “Men are shallow and only care about looks.”
• “I don’t really care about getting a girlfriend.”
• “I’ll ask him out tomorrow.”
• “I don’t know if I’m really bisexual, so I shouldn’t ask that cute guy out.”
• “If I ask her out I might sexually harass her.”
• “I need to learn more about how to flirt first.”

The way you learn to overcome your anxiety is a process of gradual exposure. For example, let’s say you’re scared to talk to women. You might start by going up to three women once a day and asking what the time is. When that isn’t scary, try asking them what the time is and how their day is going. Continue until you can walk up to a strange woman and say that she’s cute and you wanted to meet her. It may help to tell a friend that this is your goal.

Lots of men I know are scared of asking women out because they’re afraid of sexually harassing them, so it’s time for a pep talk.

First, there is no such thing as a romantically or sexually successful person who has never ever creeped anyone out. Give yourself permission to be creepy. I am not saying that you should go around trying to creep people out; of course, if you know something is going to scare someone, you shouldn’t do it; it is best that one avoid becoming Harvey Weinstein. But miscommunications, awkwardness, and misunderstandings happen. Sometimes people make mistakes. You are not going to become Harvey Weinstein by accident. Most people have interacted with someone who has creeped them out at some point, and it does not exactly cause lifelong damage. And while there can be some negative consequences, particularly of creeping people out at work, if you ask out a random stranger at a bookstore or something and they’re creeped out, you know what will happen? Absolutely nothing. The feminist police will not come lock you up for creepiness in the third degree.

Some quick tips to avoid being creepy:

• Like I said above in the “flirting” section, don’t begin a conversation by approaching people from behind, screaming, grabbing them, saying something offensive, or otherwise behaving in a way that would make a normal bystander go “hey, what the fuck?”
• If you’re doing something that violates a social norm, such as telling a strange woman that she’s beautiful, begin with “excuse me, I know this is random,” “I don’t usually do this,” or “I’ve never done this before.”
• Don’t be sexual to strangers (e.g. “you have nice tits”) unless the context is one in which it is appropriate. (If you’re in a context like that, you’ll know.)
• Try to match up your intentions with your actions. If your body language says “I want to fuck you” but your words say “let us have a purely platonic conversation about the weather,” you’re more likely to come off as creepy.
• Be, yes, non-needy and vulnerable. You’re much more likely to come off as creepy if your subtext says “PLEASE LOVE ME.”

 

A Modest Proposal Concerning Clinical Research Samples

Tags

no one listen to me about anything, ozy blog post, science side of tumblr

[I have literally no qualifications to have an opinion on this and everyone should take it with many grains of salt.]

If I ran the world, there are two things I would do to make research on human beings more representative and have higher sample sizes.

First, there are lots of cases where there are multiple treatments for a particular condition, but there isn’t any really solid evidence about which one is the best. (Autism treatment, of course, is an example close to my heart, as is antidepressants.) Right now, people are prescribed a variety of treatments, but the data is pretty much useless, because maybe doctors who have rich patients favor Treatment X and doctors who have poor patients favor Treatment Y and then it’s no surprise that people who get Treatment X fare better.

Instead, we should use this as an opportunity to run a randomized controlled trial! If you’re depressed, your doctor should press a button and get a random SSRI to prescribe you. There would be no extra burden on the patient, because you could use the information about effectiveness and side effects that should be in the patient’s medical records anyway. Result: enormous sample sizes with plenty of real-world validity.

Research should of course be consensual, so the patient can opt out and rely on their doctor’s clinical judgment. I think this should require signing a consent form that says “I UNDERSTAND that there is no clear evidence that one treatment is better than another. I UNDERSTAND that my doctor’s clinical judgment may be influenced by many factors, including but not limited to advertising from pharmaceutical companies.”

This would be easiest, of course, to do in a country that, unlike the US, has a national health system. But I think it would be possible in the US as well.

Second, we would recognize that participating in human-subject research is a necessary part of contributing to society, the same way that jury duty is; everyone has to participate in creating science that benefits everyone. Researchers with an academic affiliation, or who are sponsored by a researcher with an academic affiliation, have the right to pull a random sample of people from the voters’ or drivers’ rolls. If they wanted to research a subpopulation of people, they could send out questionnaires (with an online option, because we are in the 21st century here); only the people who are eligible for the study need show up at the study site.

People would have a right to refuse to participate in any studies with an actual risk, such as drug trials, weight loss studies, or studies which involve sensitive issues like violence or stigmatized traits. However, certain studies would be certified by the institutional review board as minimal risk: for example, spending an hour talking with an interviewer about household chore division or filling out a new personality instrument or having your blood pressure taken before and after you watch a video about puppies. IRBs are currently absurdly strict about ethics, so I expect they will not certify anything as minimal risk unless it is actually minimal.

Once again, the result is studies with large, random sample sizes and a complete end to psychology actually being the discipline of Introduction to Psych Student Studies.

Hogwarts House Primaries

Tags

ozy blog post, sortinghatchats, utilitarianism it works bitches

[Edited after publication for clarity.]

I used to get into a lot of really frustrating arguments about normative ethics where the person I was talking to and I were just talking past each other. When I found the Sorting Hat Chats system for classifying personality types, I originally just thought of it as being another elaborate fiction-based classification system, which is another one of my guilty pleasures. Sorting Hat Chats is divided into primary and secondary houses. While the secondary houses are just a new gloss on the standard Hogwarts houses, the primary houses are an inexplicably good system for classifying people’s opinions about normative ethics and scrupulosity. Now, instead of going “okay but that thing is wrong, why are you still arguing about it,” I go “ah, Ravenclaw primary” and move on. So I thought I would write up my understanding of the system somewhere more permanent than Tumblr.

(Note: Sorting Hat Chats house primaries only vaguely resemble the Hogwarts houses they are named after, and it is best to put aside your preconceptions about the houses when considering this system. Similarly, no knowledge of Harry Potter is required to understand the system. While this is my personal understanding of the system, I do not claim to know what the creators of the Sorting Hat Chats system intended and may very well be misunderstanding their original intent. I think it is fairly unlikely that this system covers literally all possible orientations towards normative ethics, but as-is it is useful enough that I think it’s worth sharing.)

Ravenclaw Primary. There is an infallible single-question test for identifying Ravenclaw primaries: “is normative ethics boring and/or completely disconnected from any actual moral reasoning you do in your everyday life?” If your answer is “yes”, you are not a Ravenclaw primary. If your answer is “no”, welcome to Team Ravenclaw.

Ravenclaw primaries believe that you should figure out what the right thing to do is through logic and reason. They often have a particular fondness for moral philosophy and ethical thought experiments. Ravenclaw primaries are particularly likely to identify as utilitarians, Kantians, and virtue ethicists. Other sorts of primaries only rarely identify as these categories unless they have to regularly talk to Ravenclaw primaries. For some reason, Ravenclaw primaries have a particular attraction to Catholicism and Judaism; I suspect I would know a lot of Ravenclaw primary Muslims if I knew more Muslims.

Please note that “Ravenclaw primary” is not the same thing as “moral realist.” Many Ravenclaw primaries are not moral realists, although they have a distinct tendency to fall into the “error theorist in metaethics class, utilitarian in normative ethics class” bucket. A Ravenclaw moral non-realist can be recognized by (a) the fact that they really really care about the difference between error theory and noncognitivism and (b) their insistence on trying to come up with some ethical system from first principles anyway.

It is commonly assumed that all effective altruists are Ravenclaw primaries. This is not actually true, although we do have a lot of them.

Gryffindor Primary. Like Ravenclaw primaries, Gryffindor primaries care about principles. Unlike Ravenclaw primaries, Gryffindor primaries tend to follow their hearts and their intuitive sense of what goodness is; they don’t view moral intuitions as raw material for a systematized moral system, but as justifications in themselves.

It is common for Gryffindor primaries to pursue certain values, such as justice or kindness or freedom or the flourishing of others or their family or their own happiness. It is also common for Gryffindor primaries to feel a strong intuitive sense that one should follow certain rules, such as letting everyone speak freely or avoiding blasphemy or being loyal to your friends.

Gryffindor primaries are perfectly capable of systematizing; a Gryffindor primary who intuitively values the greatest good for the greatest number will probably use a lot of numbers to figure out what the greatest good for the greatest number is. However, when it comes right down to it, when asked to justify their beliefs, a Gryffindor primary will go “because it’s WRONG”. When pressed, they will say “because it JUST IS. It’s OBVIOUS.” Occasionally they will engage in circular reasoning like “you should pursue beautiful things because they are beautiful!”

Not all Gryffindor primaries have an ethical system that involves caring about people. Oscar Wilde and Patti Smith are both excellent examples of Gryffindor primaries who are devoted to beauty and art.

I am a Gryffindor primary.

Hufflepuff Primary. Unlike Ravenclaws and Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs care about people. They believe in the inherent worth and dignity of individuals, and want to engage in moral behavior because they have empathy for others. (A Ravenclaw, on the other hand, would start wondering how you could measure worth and dignity, and a Gryffindor might decide they’re pursuing the principle of INHERENT WORTH AND DIGNITY FOR ALL HUMANKIND! without ever really caring about individual humans.)

Hufflepuffs are perhaps best modeled with the idea of circles of concern. Some Hufflepuffs have very small circles: perhaps they care about their family, or their friends, or themselves, or anyone who happens to be personally suffering in front of them at this moment. Some have larger circles: they care about a community, or people who have suffered the same thing they have suffered, or people who also practice their religion, or their country. Some Hufflepuff primaries’ circles embrace all of humankind, or all sentient beings, or ecosystems.

It is common for Hufflepuff primaries to have multiple circles and to care more about people in the inner circles than people in the outer circles. A Hufflepuff primary of my acquaintance occasionally comments that they care equally about their spouse and the entire continent of Africa.

In my experience, effective altruist Hufflepuff primaries often have a formative experience that causes them to have empathy with animals or people in the developing world: for example, they may have visited a developing country, gone to a museum exhibit that included an exhibit of rice equivalent to how much a person in the developing world eats in a day, or viewed a Mercy for Animals factory farm video.

Slytherin primary. Of the house primaries, Slytherins are the most likely to be parsed as amoral. The Slytherin primary cares about individuals: they almost always care about themselves; they may also care about their friends, partners, coworkers, or family. (Interestingly, some Slytherin primaries generalize this and agree that everyone else should care about their families too, sometimes promoting this principle at some cost to themselves; my father, a Slytherin primary, threatened to quit his job if one of his employees was fired for missing work because his child was in the hospital.)

A rough guideline for distinguishing Slytherin primaries from Hufflepuff primaries is that Hufflepuff primaries naturally care about groups (“my family”) while Slytherin primaries naturally care about individuals (“my dad, my mom, my sister, my husband, my child”). Hufflepuff primaries also tend to be more other-centered (“I care about you because you’re suffering”), while Slytherin primaries tend to be more self-centered (“I care about you because you are one of the six people I have chosen to care about”).

Most Slytherin primaries are not particularly altruistic. They sometimes engage in activism or charity donation if it’s in their own interest or the interest of the individuals they care about: for example, a trans Slytherin primary may advocate for trans rights; a Slytherin primary whose partner died of cancer may raise money to fight cancer. A small number of Slytherin primaries may take up altruism for reasons expressed eloquently in the following quote from Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men:

All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!

It can sometimes be hard to determine someone’s primary. A Ravenclaw primary may behave similarly to a Hufflepuff primary if they’ve been reasoned into it; a Gryffindor primary who believes in the principle of helping people close to you may be difficult to tell apart from a Slytherin. But in my experience, if you question why someone believes what they believe thoroughly, you can almost always classify them into a house primary.

Why is this useful? First, you will avoid frustrating arguments because you are aware that other primaries differ from you. Slytherin primaries can recognize that altruism is psychologically important to other people and, while they don’t have to understand it, they do have to accept it. Ravenclaw primaries can avoid patiently repeating thought-experiment-based arguments to people who respond with “huh, that’s confusing” and then keep doing what they were going to do anyway. Gryffindor primaries can stop having arguments that end in “YOU SHOULDN’T DO WRONG THINGS BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG, WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND.” Hufflepuff primaries will stop explaining that, you see, these people are people and they suffer and you should have empathy for them.

It can also help you strategize about how to convince someone to adopt your values. In my experience, philosophical arguments tend to only move Ravenclaw primaries. Gryffindor primaries respond best to Secular-Solstice-style attempts to make doing the right thing seem grand and beautiful. Hufflepuff primaries respond best to things that trigger empathy, such as Give Directly Live. Slytherin primaries… look, if you can appeal to their self-interest, do, but most of the time you’d be better off locating a Ravenclaw and leaving the Slytherin to do their own thing.

I also think the primaries have very different kinds of scrupulosity, and tactics that work to address one primary’s scrupulosity issues are incoherent or useless with another primary. Sorting Hat Chats calls scrupulosity issues a “burned primary.” I’ve noticed miscommunication particularly with Gryffindor and Ravenclaw primaries, perhaps because they’re the only ones I’ve seen burning around me.

Burned Ravenclaws lose faith in their ability to find the truth at all. They may be troubled by moral nihilism, the inability to understand everything that’s going on in the world, or the fact that any action has many unknowable consequences and you’ll never be able to know for sure if you did the consequentially right thing. I’d add that Ravenclaws often have guilt issues if they adopt a moral system they can’t live up to; that’s relatively treatable through persuading the Ravenclaw to adopt a more livable system.

Burned Gryffindors are no longer able to trust their own internal compass to point them to what’s right. The burned Gryffindor sometimes develops a coping mechanism, such as relying on a person or a system to tell them what’s right; this can allow them to function, but often makes them feel depressed and soulless, and does not fail gracefully if the person or system abuses their power. Some worry that every moral claim anyone makes is actually correct and spend hours worrying that perhaps they’re doing great evil by watching a movie that at least one person on the Internet disapproves of. In my experience as a recovering burned Gryffindor, the solution is not to try to come up with less demanding rules or force yourself to stop listening to random people’s moral claims by force of will; instead, it is to get in touch with your own felt sense of morality, whatever that is, and fiercely defend your ability to make moral decisions for no other reason except that it is right.

I have not personally encountered a burned Hufflepuff or Slytherin. (The Slytherins do need to cut it out with the “have you considered becoming a Slytherin?” approach to scrupulosity issues though.) According to Sorting Hat Chats, a burned Slytherin feels it is too dangerous to have loved ones or value anyone but themselves, while a burned Hufflepuff aches to be allowed to have a community and care about more people but for whatever reason feels this is not possible. I’m interested in burned and formerly burned Slytherin/Hufflepuff opinions on how correct that is, as well as burned and formerly burned Ravenclaws and Gryffindors who want to add new experiences to my analysis.

Entitlement, Covert Contracts, Social Libertarianism, and Related Concepts

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

One of my most unpopular opinions is that “entitlement” is actually a useful concept.

It makes sense that people have a knee-jerk negative reaction to it. “Entitled” is one of those words (like “patriarchy” and “rational”) that it is useful to have in your mental toolkit but if you ever find yourself using it you need to rephrase your argument. More on this later; it ought to show up later in the essay but I wanted to put in “I know that there are good reasons for you to hate the word ‘entitled'” in the forlorn hope that this would keep people from writing angry comments before they read the post.

I think that entitlement is a useful concept when thinking about the interplay between these three concepts:

1. Basic rights and expectations for any relationship.
2. Boundaries and needs you have in some specific relationship.
3. Needs that are completely unreasonable.

There is a very common model of social interaction which you might call “social libertarianism,” beloved by poly people, sex-positive people, and assholes who don’t want to get called on being assholes. Under social libertarianism, people have sets of needs and boundaries, and the goal of social interaction is to find someone who can fulfill your needs and whose needs you can fulfill, without violating either side’s boundaries. The only misdeed is to deliberately violate another person’s stated boundaries. No set of needs or boundaries are right or wrong, but some may be incompatible with other people’s. If you enjoy screaming curse words at other people, then all you have to do is find someone else who likes having curse words screamed at them, and the problem is solved.

Social libertarianism often comes from a good impulse. Many people generalize from “I would be unhappy in this sort of relationship” to “everyone who is in this sort of relationship is unhappy and being exploited and a victim of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here.” Social libertarianism has built into it the idea that people are different from each other, an insight which is all too often forgotten. If you’re the sort of person whose perfectly happy relationships get accused of being unhappy and exploitative and only existing because of Insert Cultural Boogeyman Here, there’s a natural tendency to embrace social libertarianism.

But I don’t think social libertarianism works as a model, because it is in fact actually possible to be an asshole.

For example, if I were friends with someone and they decided to tell me my hair was ugly, my blog is stupid, I would never fulfill any of my dreams, and all my friends secretly hate me, I would not say “I see I have not set the boundary with you that you don’t get to insult me at all my most vulnerable points; my mistake, in the future please don’t do that.” I would say “never darken my doorstep again.” This is because it is actually wrong to insult your friends. I don’t have to set the explicit “don’t insult me” boundary; it is understood. Similarly, I might specify that a car I’m selling is red, but I wouldn’t specify that it has wheels. All cars are supposed to have wheels. It’s a basic expectation.

There are actually quite a lot of these in relationships. “Don’t share people’s private information without their consent.” “Don’t forbid someone from being friends with someone else just because you don’t like them.” “Don’t tell people they are bad people for having a feeling.” Spend a few hours reading any advice column or relationship advice book and you will discover hundreds of basic rights you never knew you were respecting. (Years later, I remain boggled at More than Two spending at least a page patiently explaining why it is wrong to veto a partner’s relationship because it makes them too happy and that makes you jealous.)

I realize the concept of “unspoken rules that are wrong to break” is going to give some of my more socially phobic readers hives. To which I say, as reassurance: this is literally all stuff you learned in kindergarten, it’s “play fair” and “don’t hit people” and “be nice.” Most people get through life fine without ever being confused about this stuff. Some people are actually ignorant, particularly autistic people and people who grew up in abusive or fucked-up homes: I myself was confused until relatively recently about why I shouldn’t share other people’s private information. But if you are, most people will forgive you if you apologize, explain yourself, and don’t do it again. There’s a difference between a mistake and malice, and “don’t treat people’s mistakes like they’re deliberate attempts to hurt you” is one of the basic expectations for any relationship.

On the other end, sometimes people have expectations that are, in fact, completely unreasonable. For example, if I don’t watch myself, I tend to expect that if I just do everything right then everyone in the whole entire world will like me. So I feel a lot of social phobia: if someone dislikes me, it means I have done something wrong, and I need to self-flagellate about my wrongness and carefully search all of my actions until I determine what horribly wrong thing I have done.

I do think, in a sense, my social phobia is a form of entitlement. (Not everyone’s social phobia is entitlement, of course. Probably most people’s isn’t. But mine is.) You can tell, because sometimes I get fed up with the whole self-flagellating/navel-gazing business and instead start being unreasonably angry. “How dare you dislike me!” I think. “I am a good person and I deserve universal adoration! I should come up with the most cutting insult possible so that you will regret your decision to have any negative opinions about me whatsoever.”

Like most entitled thoughts, this line of thought is a reasonable thing to want. Being disliked feels bad; that’s why we have a bunch of social rules about not explicitly saying when you don’t dislike someone. It’s natural to want to avoid ever having to experience this unpleasant thing. The problem is when a natural desire turns to an expectation that the world should be this way.

Also like most entitled thoughts, when you actually explain it it is balls crazy. Like, pretty much the only way it would be justified to think this is how people work is if you lived on a desert island for your entire life and learned about people solely through your copy of the Sims 2. Everyone has flaws, which means that everyone is going to be disliked for their flaws by someone. Sometimes people dislike each other for silly reasons: some people are going to dislike me no matter what I do because my writing style grates on them, or I remind them of their horrible ex, or they think my name is pretentious. Even if I were absolutely perfect in every way and somehow managed to talk everyone out of disliking me for silly reasons, horrible people exist. I’m not going to get Homophobe McNazi to like me, which is okay, because Homophobe McNazi’s approval would fill me with shame.

One very common form of entitled thoughts is “covert contracts,” a concept which I learned from the Red Pill and intend to rescue from the horrible misogynists who currently own it. A covert contract is when you make up a deal inside your head where if you do something, then in return someone else will do what you want, and then never tell the other person that this is the deal.

Examples of covert contracts: “if I never disagree with you then you will like me.” (This one I am annoyingly prone to.) “If I do the dishes then my housemate will sweep the floors.” “If I refer you to my company, then you’ll do really well on the interview and impress my boss with your good judgment.” “If I spend lots of time trying to solve your personal problems, then you will be my friend.”

The problems of covert contracts are many:

• The other person might not even want the thing you’re giving them. (Maybe your housemate doesn’t care about the dishes. Maybe your attempts to solve other people’s problems are actually busybody meddling.)
• The other person has literally no idea that this contract exists, and therefore will only fulfill it by coincidence or telepathy.
• You didn’t give the other person a chance to say “no” and they might not want to take this deal. (Maybe they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to do well on the interview. Maybe your housemate really fucking hates sweeping.)
• The other person thought they were getting a favor for free and is going to be really annoyed at you when they discover that you in fact made a deal with them under false pretenses of doing a favor.
• Sometimes the contracts are just balls crazy. (If someone likes you on the condition that you never disagree with them, you don’t want to be their friend.)

The solution here is twofold:

1. Do nice things when you want to do nice things for their own sake, not because you expect to get something out of it.
2. If you want to make some sort of exchange (dishes for sweeping, referral for good interview performance, therapy for friendship), tell people about it ahead of time and give them the chance to say no.

(In Guess Culture, exchanges are often not explicitly discussed, but instead negotiated some other way. I am not Guess Culture enough to give advice about how to negotiate this, but I would suggest that your implicit contracts should definitely avoid the pitfalls outlined above.)

So hopefully at this point you can see why I think “entitlement” is a useful concept which identifies a specific class of distorted thoughts that cause harm to oneself and others. Why, then, is the term “entitlement” so universally despised, at least by the non-asshole population?

Two reasons. First, some people say that people are “entitled” when the thing they are is “sad that they can’t have a desirable thing.” It is true that it’s very unreasonable to expect someone to date you even if they don’t want to, but you still get to be sad that they don’t want to date you! It is okay to be sad about the way the world is! This is an awful misuse of the term and people who do it should be hung up by their thumbs.

Second, and more perniciously, it is used to cover up arguments about which of the three categories– basic expectations, expectations that can be negotiated, and completely unreasonable expectations– something is in.

Recently I was watching an old John Oliver clip about the NCAA’s refusal to pay its players. An NCAA spokesperson characterized the student-athletes protesting not being paid as “entitled athletes”. You notice he didn’t say what the student-athletes felt they were entitled to, because saying that would immediately reveal that his position was bullshit. Student-athletes think they should get paid because they are destroying their bodies to earn other people millions of dollars. No fucking shit they’re entitled to it. This is one of those “basic expectation” things. If someone is profiting off your labor, then you are entitled to a cut of it, and you are certainly entitled to not have all of your possible employers form a cartel for the specific purpose of ensuring you don’t get paid.

But if he just says “entitled athletes,” then everyone is like “ah, yes, entitled athletes, hooking up with cheerleaders without condoms and getting drunk and vandalizing buildings” and they fail to notice the bit where the student-athletes’ complaint is actually totally reasonable.

This happens all the time.

So I would suggest never using the word “entitled” without following it with the word “to”. Very very few people think they are entitled to literally everything they want. “Entitled” by itself should sound to you as strange as saying “in love” by itself: in love with whom? Entitled to what? And given people’s perfectly reasonable objections to the term, even if you personally use it in your thinking, it might be best just to never use the word at all, instead replacing it with something like “so-and-so has a distorted thought that they deserve Thing.”

Keep Your Identity Large

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

In his famous essay Keep Your Identity Small, Paul Graham argues that the reason arguments about religion, politics, and programming languages get so heated is that they’re parts of a person’s identity. It isn’t just about the merits of this or that policy or this or that programming language, it’s about who you are as a person. Therefore, he suggests, to be less stupid, avoid identifying as anything: be “a person who uses Lisp sometimes” rather than “a Lisp programmer.”

I disagree.

The problem is that, as Sarah Constantin writes:

Dasein [identity] is what you do when you assert what it means to be human, what it means to be you, what it means to be a member of your community.  Dasein is self-definition.  And, in particular, self-definition with respect to a social context. Where do I fit in society? Who is my tribe? Who am I relative to other people? What’s my type?

These are really basic psychological needs for a lot of people. As Sarah writes later, identity is about self-expression, self-definition, self-assertion. Of course, not everyone shares these needs: not everyone needs to know who they are and where they fit into the social fabric. There are a lot of different kinds of minds. But having a self-model, a sense of yourself, is a legitimate need for many people.

Of course, if you have that need, and you try to eliminate your sense of identity, your brain isn’t just going to let you go about not having a basic psychological need filled. Probably you’re going to have an identity anyway, you’re just not going to be consciously aware that you have it. And that means you can’t take any steps to compensate for the ways your identity might be biasing you. You can’t take a step back and say “hey, I know I get emotional about programming languages because I identify as a Lisp programmer, so I should take a step back and deliberately notice the good parts of this other heathen programming language.” Instead, you just say “Lisp is the best language for all purposes! You should believe me because I don’t have an identity as a Lisp programmer so I’m objective!”

It is always dangerous to have a self-image as being objective, because all too often one acquires the self-image before one acquires the objectivity.

Of course, the criticisms Graham says still apply: if people’s identities are getting wrapped up in an argument, it’s really hard to have the argument in a remotely civil and enlightening way. So how do we minimize the harm of having an identity while still getting the benefits?

Identify as things that aren’t based on empirical claims. If you identify as a libertarian, then you’re signing on to a bunch of empirical claims, like “the minimum wage is bad for poor people” and “environmental regulations cause more harm than good” and “police officers abuse people’s civil liberties.” If it turns out that actually police officers are totally nice to black people everywhere, this might be a threat to your identity as a libertarian, and then you’re going to have flamewars about the subject.

Compare this to an identity as a baker. I am really having a hard time thinking of empirical claims related to being a baker. “Bread is yummy”? “It is a good use of one’s time to knead things”? “Being paleo is maybe a bad idea and maybe a reason for creativity in the use of gluten-free flours”? But “baker” serves all the same purposes of self-definition (you are a person who can make really delicious cakes) and understanding oneself within a social context (you are a person who feeds people such as Ozy delicious cake). A baker self-identity is free epistemically.

Identify as things you want to preserve. Many effective altruists are concerned about values drift. They start out valuing altruism, become an investment banker so they can donate more money, and wind up valuing $300 sushi dinners and designer ties. Fortunately, identity tends to keep things fixed. That’s awful for facts– you want to be convinced by new evidence– but great for values– you want to keep your own values and not other people’s. Therefore, it can be useful to identify as an altruist, or an artist, or a family man, or an ambitious person, or a hedonist, or some other value you wish to preserve.

There’s a failure mode here. It’s very easy to have an identity as a good person, and then when people threaten your identity as a good person you lash out at them in the same way that Lisp programmers lash out when people suggest Lisp isn’t the best programming language. This can lead to results even more disastrous than bad arguments about politics. So if you’re going to identify as a good person, it’s really really important that your definition of “good person” isn’t “a person who always does the right thing” but “a person who notices their mistakes and tries to fix them.” A similar concern applies to artists, family men, and so on: it’s important to make sure that your definition of artist is not “a person who makes great art” but “a person who values their art and puts a lot of effort into it.”

Keep your identity large. Don’t just identify as a Lisp programmer. Identify as a poet, a mother, a Communist, a Jew, a weightlifter, an altruist, and a Lisp programmer.

If the only identity you have is Lisp programmer, then it’s terrifying to think about not being a Lisp programmer. How will you know who you are? How can you relate to other people? On the other hand, if you have a lot of identities, you have something to fall back on. Even if you have to switch programming languages, your children still exist, you can still benchpress twice your body weight, you still light Shabbat candles, and you still spend an absurd amount of time explaining that your preferred economic system wouldn’t have any gulags at all not even a little bit and capitalism has killed more people than socialism anyway. Your sense of self in a social context remains secure. You can admit the flaws in Lisp or that prices are an elegant means of solving coordination problems, without threatening who you are as a person– because who you are as a person isn’t grounded in just one thing.