Nowhere in this calculus exists the idea that people might ‘choose their beliefs’ based on what they actually believe.

2. Real-life political figures seem to support the idea that people ‘actually’ hold the beliefs they came to hold. When fascists gained political power in Italy and Germany, they governed with a fascist political agenda. When communists took power across the globe, they abolished markets and implemented communist political agendas. Most moderate and cross-pressured voters seem to vote for candidates that they feel match their viewpoints on salient issues over candidates that they like on subjective and personal grounds.

It might be true that the underlying machinery behind why people believe things incorporates subconscious considerations that have to do with things like status and social utility on some level. However, at the conscious level, people really do seem to believe what they say they believe, and when put in contexts where they are capable of acting on those beliefs, they do so.

3. Most social media discourse does not paint either gender in a very good light. Men get portrayed as brutal. They are completely superficial, prone to rage and violence, sociopathic, they lack empathy, they are entitled, they excuse and justify other men that are rapists and predators, and they do not have the best interests of the social fabric in mind. Women get portrayed as callous manipulators. They are hypergamous, deceitful, they lack ethical character, they penalize ‘weakness’ and ‘softness’ in men, and their concerns about feminism are purely instrumental and extractive. Coming from this discourse, many men and women presumably end up with a very negative viewpoint about the other gender.

4. If you did not like a group of people because of what you perceive to be immutable characteristics having to do with that group of people that exist on the biological level, it would not be a stretch to state that you might choose to avoid them. Drug addicts often feel a strong biological pull towards drugs, but they also view drugs and their consequences as a very negative thing on a conscious level. In countries with high ethnic polarization, the desire to avoid a tainted outgroup often overrides strong local emotional connections that people make that may transcend ethnic lines. The idea that gender polarization could reach this level of strength seems odd to traditional vantage points, but there is no reason why it could not happen. The anti-man and anti-woman narratives floating out there are strong, and we are already seeing online communities forming that revolve around grievances towards opposite gender grievances.

5. There is a lot of discussion revolving around policy ideas that could address the incoming and ongoing fertility crisis. The problem with many proposed solutions - massive cash subsidies for parents, restructuring American cities, universal daycare programs - is that they are either expensive, experimental, or would require extreme political initiative for uncertain results. In comparison, if fertility issues spring from the genders having viewpoints of each other that are too negative, and that creating outgrouping-like dynamics, this is a simpler problem to address.

6. Maybe the genders having viewpoints of each other that are too negative could be addressed by ‘gender propagandists’. In theory, you could have educated male and female intellectuals ‘make the case for men’ or ‘make the case for women’ to the opposite gender.

A male gender propagandist might address the brutal narratives head on. Are men more violent? Do they lack empathy? Are they entitled? Where does that ‘entitlement’ come from? Do they oversexualize random women, and if so, why? Are they unwilling to date older women or women that are not conventionally attractive? Articles written for women could be written addressing the most emotionally salient criticisms young women have about the opposite gender in a way that addresses the criticisms in a data-oriented and intellectual but accessible way, while ultimately presenting men in an optimistic and sunny way. Women presumably have a biological disposition to ‘like men’, so ‘selling women on men’ would in theory not be an impossible task for a good communicator.

A female gender propagandist might address the opposite criticisms. Are women hypergamous? What does that mean? Do most women engage in social discourse in a disingenuous way? If so, why? Do women really think it is shameful and repulsive if a guy is not super successful? A female propagandist could engage in discourse in a similar way, addressing common insecurities that men have about women in a positive upbeat but nevertheless data-oriented and intellectual way that ultimately communicates the message that most women have a lot of joy and value that they are able to bring into the lives of the median man.

7. These might seem like ‘obvious’ arguments from the perspective of an older person. I am not sure if they are. Pushbacks towards salient anti-man and anti-woman narratives online are sparse and hard to come by. When older intellectuals and content creators talk about what they got out of partnership and marriage, the benefits are often framed in a really abstract way that does not settle these criticisms. These perspectives are also usually coming from high status and successful people, who might have access to a ‘better pool’ of partners than the median young person. In a broad sense, if the median young person is hearing narratives about gender that frame normal people of the opposite gender as bad, malicious, and harmful actors, we should not necessarily be surprised if they act as if this is true.

8. In theory, someone could counter this argument by taking an anti-persuasion stance. They could say that even though people may act as if their beliefs are true, this does not inherently mean that they select what they believe based on logical merit. This belief has odd implications if taken literally enough. Most people, when faced with a drug addict sibling, child, or relative, take the time at some point to articulate the case for why using drugs is bad for the person. Nobody would say ‘articulating why drugs are bad to your relative is a waste of time, as people do not form beliefs based on arguments’. It might be true that the argument does not work on the relative: maybe they already know that drugs are bad for them and are choosing to use them anyway, or maybe they have heard your argument already and already have defense mechanisms that are built in for it. However, it also might be the case that maybe the relative just does not know why drugs are bad for them. In a social media culture where the respective positives that come with the biological dispositions of men and women are not articulated in depth anywhere, it is plausible that many young people just do not know what these are supposed to be. It is not a guarantee that ‘gender propagandists’ would be effective, but relative to how easy it would be to test, it is worth trying.

Hanania’s fear about a ‘low human capital’ contingency running the country is two-fold. He thinks that these people would not do a good job at the meat-and-potatoes administrative side of governance. They might compromise the integrity of the Federal Reserve, or be brazenly corrupt, or plunge the American economy into massive debt. They might lack the interparty intelligence and education to write effective and feasible legislation. Hanania is also more libertarian-right than populist-right, and so the second part of his fear has to do with populist drift. He seems to think that a ‘low human capital’ Republican party would naturally drift towards fiscal liberalism and social conservatism. They might become more accepting of programs like Obamacare and Social Security while also maintaining hardline positions on immigration and abortion. In Hanania’s view, this is the worst of both worlds: you would get the social insularity that is characteristic of some of the pitfalls of traditional Republican rule, while also not getting the economic growth that normally comes with Republicans being in charge.

2. The common counter to Hanania’s ‘EHC’ (elite human capital) theory of politics is that elites have a questionable track record. Most elites naturally support social programs that inhibit economic growth. They also by and large believe in ‘systemic racism’ based theories of group differences over the abundance of group differences literature that suggest that racial achievement differences are biological in nature. Most elites are not willing to be hard on unions. Cities like San Francisco and New York seem broadly unwilling to engage with tradeoffs or ‘hard truths’ about the world. The empirical track record seems to support this counter: southern states have been growing in wealth and status in recent years relative to states like New York and California, even though the leaders of these states are much less intelligent, conscientious, and administratively competent than Hanania’s EHC governance cohort.

There is an extent to which Hanania’s frame is limited. Many Republicans are still educated and competent, and the median Republican resembles someone like Scott Walker or Tom Cotton much more than they resemble someone like James Fishback. It can be risky to overfit the personal eccentricities of one president and some short-term voting shifts into a macro explanation of political change. The success of southern states narrative is also disputable: education cuts might drive smart people out of the states over time, the right-wing program’s lack of focus on social programs might increase crime, and part of the ‘southern state advantage’ might have to do with natural weather preferences or a natural economic leveling of the continental US more than it has to do with conservative governance. In addition, there is a difference between one state being run like Alabama or North Carolina in the context of a broader America that is less conservative than these states and an entire America that is governed like Alabama.

Nevertheless, Hanania’s frame does have a decent amount of interpretive strength for the standpoint of one frame. Republican voters and politicians really have been getting less educated and more ‘trashy’, educational polarization does seem to be the defining political narrative of modern times (superseding divisions like race, gender, or even personal ideological preferences), and many European countries have been mirroring these types of American trends.

Within Hanania’s frame, he is stuck at a clear juncture. If Democrats win, governance programs that limit growth and that struggle to engage with hard tradeoffs or uncomfortable realities will proliferate. If Republicans win, a ‘governance by the uneducated’ status quo will further entrench itself, which will limit growth and prosperity in different ways. Is there any way out of this?

3. If we look at basic psychology, the flaws of most elites can be described by saying that most elites have too much psychological agreeability. Elites seem too unwilling to buck social consensus. If it is socially taboo to say or think something, most elites rigidly follow the taboo. During the era of woke, most elites enthusiastically followed along, suddenly developing the enthusiastic belief that America was a foundationally and systemically racist country. Now that woke is viewed as a mistake, most elites enthusiastically follow along with that frame, and now the idea that an elite would believe that America is a foundationally racist country seems absurd. Elites are like leaves: they follow whichever direction the wind is blowing.

Having excessive psychological agreeability would be a highly useful trait to have to become an elite. Admission into elite institutions like Harvard and Stanford is gatekept by a bunch of hurdles kids have to meet in high school. They have to get straight As, they have to participate in a lot of extracurriculars, they have to volunteer, incite enthusiastic recommendation letters from authority figures, and spend their teenage years optimizing their college admissions profile. In theory, a teen could work out from first principles that they want to go to Harvard at 14 and act on that aim. However, the more common psychological package that these admissions criteria select for is a type of person who naturally follows rules and cedes to social expectations. They get good grades and do extracurriculars because their parents want them to, they study for tests because their teacher tells them that this is the best way to learn, and they naturally prioritize and maximize social harmony in extracurricular social contexts. In comparison, the high disagreeability kid faces hurdles at every turn: even if they work out on first principles that they want to go to Harvard, the disagreeability would also apply to not trusting authority advice over how to study, the disagreeability might apply to that goal shifting, them creating rifts with enough teachers to diminish their high school GPA, or engaging in extracurriculars like debate or math competitions in their ‘own way’. The high agreeability kid has a much easier path: they do what they are socially pressured to do because they naturally follow social pressure, social pressure is broadly correct about most things (like how to study, how to be happy, how to date, etc), and the social pressure naturally pressures them to get into an Ivy League.

4. Even Silicon Valley leaders who pride themselves on being contrarian and abrasive often seem much more agreeable than a lot of regular people. Despite having the reputation for being Silicon Valley’s ‘bad boy’, Elon Musk’s political opinions mostly followed his times: he did not become a Trump supporter until 2024, and by 2024 conservatives had already made big culture war gains over the left. People who drop out of elite institutions or go from elite institutions to founding companies might be disagreeable compared to the median person on a Harvard campus, so in their social bubbles they might frame themselves as ‘disagreeable’, but a lot of regular people actually believe in aliens or chemtrails or other actually unpopular theories with little regard for what social consensus would make of these beliefs.

5. However, in the world of politics, excessive psychological agreeability creates problems. It lets politicians be held hostage to disagreeable members of their coalition. If a politician logically knows that public sector unions are bad, but public sector workers are part of their coalition, then they might oppose anti-public-union policies to maintain social harmony in their coalition. Even if the move would be a net positive, or even if the public-sector-workers that oppose the policies have minimal leverage in the situation (they might lack the numbers to sustain a primary challenge and not be serious party switcher risks), the politician might nevertheless avoid the action that harms the social harmony of their ‘in-group’. In addition, many taboos exist to maintain social harmony more than they exist to steer people to world models that are as accurate as possible. The norm that exists about not discussing group differences exists to prevent racial conflict and outright Jim Crow style behavior. The norm that exists around siding with the ‘little guy’ over companies in litigious situations ties to a broader norm our culture has around modeling working class people with dignity and respect. Being someone who spends your life working in a Walmart or a car dealership is not by itself a great life, and so our cultural narratives try to give people like this as much dignity and respect as possible to ‘keep them going’. However, if a politician acts as if these narratives are literally true, and not just social technology, they will act under an impaired world model.

6. The solution to this ‘dialectic’ is finding highly disagreeable politicians who have worldviews that are mostly liberal in nature. John Fetterman is an example: he seems more than willing to get into fights or court controversy, but also has a political orientation that is favorable enough to markets and social liberty. Dan Osborn is another example: he led a major strike at a Kellogg’s plant, has political positions that are all across the board, but when you add everything up, it looks like a package that is mostly pro-market and pro-social-liberty. On the right, an example of this type of politician might be Rand Paul or Ted Cruz. These types of politicians will never be ‘perfect’ from any one person’s vantage point: the nature of a disagreeable politician would mean that they would select beliefs based on what they personally think, and not social pressure. This means that they will never align with what any one snapshot of discourse would say is the ‘perfect policy agenda’. However, empowering highly disagreeable political candidates who are not socialists or authoritarians might lead to a world where we can get broadly liberal policy (with some esoteric personal quirks that vary from person to person) enacted without it being associated with the traditional dysfunction that we see with a lot of Democratic rule.

This is not the case. What we see is an inverse picture: men take longer to get over breakups, men suffer more long-term mental health consequences of breakups, and while women report more immediate pain after a breakup, this quickly fades. Blogger and pseudo-philosopher Paul Skallas likes to write about this: he calls it the ‘Bourdain Effect’, and argues that there is a ‘lindy’ tradition of men not getting over breakups, and even men killing themselves after breakups, that discerning young men should be aware of.

2. The default argument that is used in most academic circles to explain this inversion has to do with how women are generally more socially embedded than men. Women maintain friendships, acquaintances, and ties with family members more than men. In comparison, men are usually reliant mostly on their partner to get their socialization needs met. Therefore, when a breakup happens, the woman often has other sources of social support to fall back to, while the man typically does not have these options.

This argument is not convincing. The hype and bravado that adults use to talk about their ‘friendships’ does not match the reality of what adult friendships usually look like. Adult friendships are rarely if ever anywhere near a sufficient source of socialization and social support: most adult friends see each other a few times a month, at best, for 2-3 hour blocks, and that is the extent of their real-life contact. In comparison, when you live with a romantic partner, you might talk to them for 2-3 hours a day. You also spend a lot of passive time with a live-in romantic partner: time inhabiting the same rooms, time engaging in ‘parallel play’, time sleeping in the same bed, so on and so forth. Adults get a vast majority of their social needs met through their romantic partners. Therefore, even if women have slightly more active text chains, or have ‘girls night outs’ every month versus every other month for their male counterparts, this would not be impactful enough by itself to explain the gap we see in how men recover from breakups compared to how women do.

This argument might also underrate male friendships. Men tend to not have emotional conversations with each other as much as women. They also tend to call people who are their ‘drinking buddies’ or ‘video game friends’ ‘friends’ to the extent that women do. They tend to not talk about their personal lives with their male friends as much as women do with their same sex friends. From the vantage point of many women, this makes male friendships often seem vacant and empty. However, this perspective is reductive, and it overlooks a lot of the nuance and social camaraderie that goes into male social dynamics. Explaining all of the ways that I take issue with this perspective, as a man, would be a lengthy analysis that lies outside the scope of this essay, but my macro-level read on it is that it is an idea that clearly comes from outside the male social world, and not from within it.

3. There is another argument that is sometimes made about this phenomenon that tries to explain it through a frame of ‘pre-grieving’. In this framework, women are the more relationally vigilant of the two sexes, and as such they sense when a relationship is failing more astutely than men do. They go through the process of grieving the failed relationship while in the failed relationship, and by the time the breakup actually happens, the breakup marks the end of that grieving process and not the start of it.

This idea likely has merit in certain contexts. Women are more relationally vigilant, and there probably are dynamics with abusive or chronically unfaithful husbands that mimic the described trend. However, while they are likely more relationally vigilant than men, women are not fortune tellers or prophetic-future-seers. There is a thin line between a decent man who made some missteps and a man who was a ‘toxic ex’, and parsing which narrative a relationship arc will force is usually not straightforward. I do not buy that women doing this at-scale is what explains this counterintuitive ‘breakup asymmetry’ phenomenon.

4. There is a more evolutionary psychology inspired framing that you could use to think about this idea. Men historically warred with each other. This included tribes sometimes being wiped out and being supplanted by other ones. If this phenomenon, occurring at-scale, evolutionarily selected against women who were ‘too loyal’, then you could have a dynamic where women evolved to respond to breakups well solely due to natural selection.

This argument sounds convincing, but you can spin a ‘people evolved to be this way’ argument in any direction. Evolutionary psychology has a questionable reputation in the scientific establishment because of this: constructing ‘just-so’ narratives is easy, but the ease of this is what makes any one evolutionary psychology-based narrative difficult to validate. It is not a field that can be ignored entirely, as substantial chunks of human psychology likely do have roots in natural selection, but the most successful evolutionary psychology arguments typically are more general and heuristical than specific. This specific interpretation is more on the specific end of that spectrum, which should tell us to hold it with caution and lightness.

5. Big five traits are often used to explain gendered differences. In terms of big five traits, women typically score (slightly) higher in neuroticism than men. In theory, a more neurotic person would respond to a breakup with emotional distress more than a less neurotic person would. They would ruminate more, stew more, and worry more about finding a new partner. They would worry that they would struggle to find a new partner that they connected with emotionally as much as they did with the person they just broke up with. In this sense, the big five framework does not elucidate anything about why women respond to breakups better than men: it instead makes the fact that they do even more puzzling.

This is a counterintuitive phenomenon that deserves analysis. It is seemingly in contradiction with most of what we know about sexed personality differences. It has widespread social ramifications. And yet, there seems to be a real gap when it comes to arguments or ideas that could explain it. The rest of this article will be devoted to trying to fill that gap.

6. In December of last year, Nick Reiner killed his parents. He was the son of the famous movie director Rob Reiner, and the grandson of the famous comedian Carl Reiner. In the years preceding the murder, he had wracked up a long-term history of drug addiction and dysfunction. In the months leading up to the murder, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed on medication. The narrative that news outlets reported said that there was some issue with the specific medication regimen he was on, but the family did not take measures to institutionalize him until he could stabilize, and he ‘mentally snapped’. Nick Reiner is now in prison and awaiting trial.

However, Nick Reiner does not seem ready to go away. Reports have emerged that state that he is preparing to write a ‘tell-all’ book: he is going to expose every dirty secret about his family and his friends that he knows, and put it in a big book that he will write in prison, and then presumably self-punish.

7. The obvious interpretation of Nick Reiner is that he is indeed schizophrenic and ‘crazy’. His actions lack coherency: why would you kill parents that love you? Why would you smear and degrade the reputation of your family that did nothing but treat you with kindness and offer you support? When you watch interviews with Nick Reiner and his father Rob in the past, how he behaves in the interviews further supports this interpretation. He often seems dazed, confused, and out of it. His answers are simple, and he seems unable to form complex sentences or express complex thoughts. His affect is persistently flat. His eyes frequently look wide and agitated.

However, there was one interview that had a comment that I noticed. He was speaking with his father about a movie they had made together, which was inspired by his drug issues. Nick was talking about his temper and history of emotional outbursts, and the interviewer made a casual remark that went something like ‘you seem like such a calm guy, I struggle to picture you freaking out’, or something to that nature. In response, Nick said something like ‘you don’t want to trigger me’ or ‘you don’t want to see my bad side’.

Nick Reiner’s actions were clearly irrational from a short-term perspective: he murdered a family that was supporting him, in cold blood, and will now spend his life in prison. But if his family ever ‘crossed’ him at any point - degraded him, talked crap about him, excluded him, shamed him, when it wasn’t entirely deserved - he clearly got payback and then some. From the perspective of Nick Reiner when he was 15 or 18, the actions might have made all of the sense in the world: he instituted a ‘I will irrationally retaliate if you cross me enough’ policy, and the error would lay with his parents and family not rationally responding to the policy more than it would lay with his future self for being forced to enact the policy because his family did not rationally respond to it.

8. Recently, far-right political commentator Nick Fuentes has decided to start supporting Democrats. In his mind, the Republican party is drifting too far from his values. They are becoming too pro-immigrant, they are not anti-Israel enough, and they are celebrating Silicon Valley figures like Peter Thiel too much. In response, he is trying to issue an ultimatum: either they reverse course, or he and his ‘Groyper’ supporters will try to swing every election to the Democrats.

Provided Fuentes sticks to it in the long haul (unlikely), is this a strategic threat from Fuentes’s perspective? It depends on how establishment Republicans respond to it. If they respond by ignoring the threat, the strategy will be a complete failure: Democrats will win, and Democrats will be much more hostile to Fuentes than Republicans would be. They might try to deplatform him, debank him, or even arrest him. Democrats would also enact much less of his policies than Republicans. Democrats might drastically increase immigration instead of deporting less than Fuentes would like. They might be more pro-Palestine, but you would likely also see a rise in diversity programs, soft-on-crime programs, and prosecutions and investigations into perceived ‘anti-democracy’ elements of the Republican party. Fuentes might say he ‘sees no difference between Democrat rule and Republican rule’, but this is clearly a bluff.

In comparison, if Republicans cede to the threat, the approach becomes very successful. Maybe Fuentes actually causes Republicans to lose elections. Faced with the possibility of repeating and neverending losses, due to mass base defection, Republicans actually decide that they need to give Fuentes what he wants to get his audience’s support back. In this world, Fuentes gets what he wants: despite representing a distinct minority in the Republican coalition, he gains the ability to veto potential candidates at-will, essentially holding the rest of the coalition hostage.

9. Game theorists call these ‘irrational threats’ or ‘subgame imperfect strategies’. Let’s say that you have two people in some shared social context. One makes a threat: ‘if you do X, I will do Y’. However, there is something unusual about the threat: in the world where the other party did what this person was trying to deter, the threatened response would be contrary to this person’s self-interests. It is a form of mutually assured destruction: this person is saying if you cross some line of theirs, they will be so focused on retaliating against you that they are fine blowing themselves up in the process.

The Nick Reiner scenario is an example of this, under my interpretation: Nick Reiner killing his family did not make sense as an action by itself. However, if he made the threat ‘if you cross some line of mine I will retaliate enough to where the line you crossed will not have been worth it for you’, and the line was crossed, the killings could have just been the execution of the threat. Fuentes threatening to Trump is another example of this: Fuentes voting for Democrats is very irrational by itself, but if he made the threat to vote for Democrats if Republicans do not nominate who he likes, and Republicans still nominate candidates he does not like, then voting for Democrats is just the execution of the threat.

10. Someone could pose a compelling objection to this. They could say: why not just make the threat and then not follow through on it? At the point where the threat did not work, it did not work, so there is no need to execute some policy that will harm your own self-interests.

The problem with this is identitarian. If you are the type of person that makes irrational threats but does not follow through on them, other people develop a mental model of you that includes not taking your irrational threats seriously. If you never follow through on costly irrational threats, and only follow through on uncostly ones, then people learn to ignore your costly irrational threats. However, if you are the type of person that reliably makes costly irrational threats, and actually follows through on them, then this incentivizes people to take your costly irrational threats seriously.

My subjective interpolation of Nick Reiner offers a runaway example of how this could go wrong at the far extremes. However, at more defendable bounds, where people reliably do enact costly irrational threats, but this policy does not include literally murdering your family, this does give them leverage. For example, the twitchy, irritated, steroids-using-looking factory floor worker who seems like he might snap any day does get a pass when he makes crude and derogatory remarks about coworkers from those coworkers that others would not. His social presentation signals that he might be willing to take a battery misdemeanor charge if you say the wrong thing to him, and people get the sense that the threat really is credible, so they avoid saying the wrong thing to him. When he demeans a younger male coworker’s height, the younger guy chuckles and tries to get out of the situation.

11. I get the sense that men are far more willing to both issue irrational threats and follow through on them than women.

The cleanest example of this is street crime. Murdering someone or engaging in gang violence is obviously irrational: you spend your life in prison. However, if you have a macro-policy of ‘if you mess with me there will be problems’, this type of policy offers a lot of benefits. Most people in your orbit really do avoid messing with you. They do not insult you, they do not tease you, they do not gossip about you behind your back. Most people, when interacting with you on the street, assuming you socially signal the threat in your self-presentation in some way, will be more polite and deferential than they would be to other people.

The tradeoff is that if someone tests the policy, and you do not respond to the test by enacting the policy, you develop the social reputation of being someone who does not follow through on irrational threats. Friends and family and peers begin to view your irrational threats as a posture, and they feel more empowered to cross your bright-lines. Strangers might still treat you with deference, but not people that you have an iterated social reputation with. Someone could try to thread this boundary: trying to maintain a reputation for being someone who follows through on irrational threats, while not actually doing so, but this is a tricky thread to balance and doing so likely requires a lot of intelligence and social savvy.

However, while it is less obvious than the crime example, romantic breakups are another example where making irrational threats becomes a viable strategy.

We can picture two different strategies for saving a romantic relationship that is falling apart. The first strategy might involve making the relationship better. Maybe you go to couples therapy with the person. Maybe you get them flowers. Maybe you make yourself look better. Maybe you try to get a higher paying job to give you and your partner more financial wiggle room. Maybe you do ‘work on yourself’. The idea with these actions would be to make the relationship a more pleasurable and higher value commodity, so that you and the other person are less incentivized to leave it. The second strategy, in comparison, might be saving the relationship through irrational threat making. Maybe you tell the person ‘if you leave me, I will never recover’. ‘If you leave me, I will never date again’. ‘If you leave me, I will stop trying in my career’. ‘If you leave me, I will stop parenting the children’. In theory, these are things the other person does not want to have happen: they presumably care about you, and your success, and they want their kids to be happy. If the other party takes the threats credibly enough, maybe they stay in the relationship indefinitely even if the relationship is making neither party happy.

Why would someone want to preserve a romantic relationship that is not making its participants happy? Breakups are emotionally painful. People avoid short-term pain even when they get a long-term benefit from it all of the time, and breakups offer a large amount of short-term pain for both parties.

12. In a world where men are more prone to making irrational threats and following through on them than women, we would expect to see men execute this strategy more than women when faced with decaying relationships. The flip side to executing this strategy is that if she ever leaves you, you are then forced to follow through. You have to grieve. You have to struggle career wise. You have to detach yourself from your children.

13. The obvious counter to this is that this scenario is different from the street criminal scenario. After you divorce a woman, you are unlikely to see her much outside of navigating custody disputes: why actually follow through on the threat? In this specific scenario, why not just make the threat, and then not follow through if it does not work?

I think most men have a biological or/and heavily socialized temperament to be credible irrational threat makers. This is the broad archetypal strategy they use to navigate iterated social dynamics. They have bright-lines where they stringently retaliate, even at personal cost, if the bright-lines are triggered. We see this a lot when men are studied in different game theoretic contexts with other male participants: we see elevated rates of eating costs and retaliatory behavior relative to women. This is the default mode that men engage in iterated social dynamics with, so they naturally port it to romantic contexts where it is not a perfect fit.

The fit argument also has a different issue. It assumes that the man issuing irrational threats was not a strategy that had worked for them in the relationship in different contexts. But it may have. Maybe men with anger issues get women who cheat less or who think they are unhappy less. Maybe they get partners that have willing sex with them more easily: even if the guy does not threaten ‘rape’, the fact that the guy has some bright-line with unpredictable and scary consequences if crossed might make a woman more sensitive to not acquiescing to what he wants. Even sensitive and liberal guys with a ‘dark past’ who sometimes melts down or has panic attacks might invoke a version of this: if a woman is too hard on him, criticizes him too much, cheats, or whatever, she might be faced with a situation she did not want to be in. The deterrent is less credible if the guy does not have a history of behavior illustrating that he does enact irrational threats (gets really angry, breaks down) in different contexts. In theory, a guy could both do these things and not enact the irrational threat that yields him less payoff in the breakup threat, but most men are not this calculated. In addition, there is the possibility that invoking the breakup threat makes her take it more seriously and partner back up with you, although by then you have already felt the pain of the immediate breakup which means that the reward function for resuming the unhappy relationship is questionable.

14. This all sounds repugnant. One response a sensitive and discerning reader might have is that people should not ‘negotiate with terrorists’. If a man, or anybody, makes an irrational threat, it should always be ignored.

This is easy to say but hard to do. The problem with this approach in real life is that men do regularly enact irrational threats. Guys become deadbeats, or start using drugs after breakups, or behave in ways that lead to restraining orders. Young male teens whose parents try to force them away from bad influences actually join gangs out of spite to their parents. Men whose female friends reject them actually frequently ghost, even when the objective value they would get out of that friendship likely outweighs the short-term pain of knowing the person rejecting you. Men will do these things who would otherwise be capable of being happy, achieving, and successful in different life contexts. Not all of them - some guys who would do those things would be dysfunctional no matter what - but enough.

Most men internalize this as a fact of life about other men as teenagers. The roid rage factory guy might actually induce severe injury in you if you say the wrong thing to him: exercising caution might be ‘negotiating with terrorism’, but you still have to do it. Even regular male friendships operate under a milder version of this framework: you might be friends with some guy, but if you say the wrong thing about some woman he is dating, you do not know how he will escalate. Most men have ‘bright-lines’ somewhere, and they do become terrorists when you cross them. Irrational threat making would not create leverage in an ideal world, but we are not in an ideal world, and in the world we are in, it does.

15. This dynamic has positives. The fact that most men would irrationally retaliate if the right bright-lines of theirs were crossed limits the extent to which men gossip about each other. It would probably be fine, but what if being gossiped about in some way is some bright-line of his. You are kind of forced to cooperate, and the game theory literature also reflects this: male only groups tend to be more cooperative in iterated simulated Prisoner’s Dilemma games, and the cooperation increases the longer the iteration happens. The logic is kind of similar to ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’: if everyone is going to get blown up if you betray anyone, then this forces people into cooperation even when their natural disposition would be not to.

16. How should women navigate this reality? They obviously do not want to be constantly coerced and abused. At the same time, having male friends, partners, and family members blow up their lives also leads to a practically subpar life, even if it can be defended on principle.

Nature seems to have offered humanity a few tools to help with this reality. Men have really high sex drives. This limits the upper bounds of how much men can hostage take in romantic contexts. Threatening to ‘never recover’ from a breakup is hard if you are deeply sexually aroused by 10 women in public every day. You naturally date a lot after a breakup, and dating usually requires having your life somewhat together (and not doing stuff like using drugs), which limits your ability to follow through on irrational breakup threats. The high sex drive of men also makes it difficult for them to defect en masse on the dating market as a form of hostage taking: we want government assigned wives, or else both us and you will be lonely and miserable. Porn is a threat to both of these equilibriums - regular porn consumption makes it easier for men to execute on breakup threats by satiating their sex drives, and it also makes it easier for men to opt out of the dating market as a way of squeezing women - so we can expect to see growing female aversion to widespread pornography as time goes on. However, most women seem to be somewhat fine never dating, even though they are relationship oriented in the abstract. Both of these counterintuitive truths can be explained by this game theoretic framework: they were evolved responses to restrict the upper right tail in extremity of dating related male irrational threat behavior.

17. Nevertheless, most women do date, and most women do have social relationships with men. How do they manage this? What is the default female strategy for mitigating male irrational threat-making behavior?

Game theory literature says that men tend to be somewhat chivalrous and less punitive with other women in iterated dynamics than they are with other men. This points to a compelling idea: maybe women can get men to override their default mode with iterated social dynamics around them. Many women go out of their way to signal harmlessness: they smile a lot, they signal insecurity or fallibility more than men, many go out of their way to avoid seeming cutthroat and competitive, and recently self-infantilizing fashions and aesthetics have become popular among certain cohorts of young women. If you signal to a man that you are a straightforward and good-natured participant in social dynamics effectively enough, it seems like most men are somewhat willing to bend on their default policy of setting and enforcing bright-lines. This fits historical stereotypes around masculinity: harsh to the world, soft around the wife.

18. One key component of this phenomenon is that it is embodied and visceral. It comes through how someone talks, self-presents, and behaves in real life. In comparison, social media discourse is a very ‘hardball’ mode of communication: it is negative, argumentative, involves sweeping criticism of people and groups, and incentivizes in-group and out-grouping behavior. As the relationship that men have with women evolves to be less mediated by in-person relationships and more mediated by the perceptions people develop online, we can expect young men to be less willing to bend on their default ‘bright-line enforcing’ policy than men in the past were.

There is a conflation this argument makes between conscious and subconscious processes. When a man feels pain over a breakup, this pain is not something he chooses to feel to punish someone. The argument here is that the male tendency to issue and enforce irrational threats is a tendency that both evolved on the conscious level and the subconscious one. This is plausible in theory: people feel vengeful sometimes, which is clearly an emotion meant to induce people to execute irrational threats, and that an emotional sensation that happens involuntarily. I am compelled by ‘rational agent’ accounts of human psychology, where people try to rationally try to maximize their self-interest using some strategy. This frame often holds good in economics and when it comes to predicting who people will vote for. With that being said, the flipside to applying such a model here is I make a lot of sweeping assumptions about psychology, and someone adopting a less first principles based and more neuroscientific approach to this phenomenon would likely come to entirely different conclusions than my own.

2. This aligns with common sense intuitions most people have about ‘consciousness’. The idea that a LLM or a superintelligent AI could think or visually react to stimuli is uncontroversial to most people, and AI models are able to do these things right now. In comparison, the idea that an AI or an LLM could ‘feel’ is a much more controversial sentiment, which implies that most people view their ability to feel as much more foundational to their sense of ‘being alive’ than their ability to reason or sensorially perceive things.

This also aligns with the perceptions that many of us have about animals. Household pet animals like cats and dogs often seem much more ‘alive’ and ‘sentient’ than the cortical model of consciousness would suggest. People emotionally bond and connect with these animals, and there is even evidence that having them as pets can reduce some of the negative health impacts of loneliness and social isolation.

3. This idea proposes a counterintuitive model of consciousness. Under this framework, the part of you that makes you ‘alive’: makes decisions, fears death, and navigates the world on a day by day level, is a tiny part of your brain that has a long ancestral lineage in the animal kingdom. In comparison, the part of you that is intelligent: learns information, reasons through situations, renders your visual field, so on and so forth, is a second part of your brain that is there but is not ‘you’ in the sense that people normally mean when they talk about their consciousnesses.

4. Karl Friston’s model of consciousness is more computational than Mark Solms’s. Friston’s ideas are often involved, esoteric, and require extensive philosophical and neuropsychological training to follow, and so the explanation that follows will represent what I get out of Friston’s framework. I do not claim to perfectly understand him.

Friston thinks consciousness is located in the cortex. He thinks that the cortex has competing aims: it wants to predict things before they happen accurately, and it also wants to minimize the neurocomputational resources that it uses to do this. This means that your cortex wants to predict what you will do before you do it, it wants to predict what will enter your visual field before stimuli enter it, and it wants to predict what your life will be like in five years before those five years pass. It also wants to be efficient about how it does this, in the same way an effective personal computer tries to run software without consuming too much CPU or RAM. Friston thinks that people feel pleasure when their predictive models align with what ends up happening to them, and he thinks that they feel pain when their predictive models do not.

This creates competing aims: your cortex needs to make predictions, but it also needs to update when its predictions are wrong or insufficient. Friston thinks of your cortex making predictions as its ‘top-down stream’ and he thinks of your cortex updating based on incorrect predictions as its ‘bottom-up stream’.

In Friston’s model, when the bottom-up stream is too strong, this leads to autism. Autistic people constantly update based on incorrect predictions, but they also do not make high confidence predictions very often in the first place. They have a low confidence mental model of everything: themselves, the world, what they are going to see when they enter a new room, where their life will be in five years. Their brains are constantly searching for information that contradicts their present models, or challenges them, which makes developing high confidence models in the first place difficult for autistic cortexes. Autistic cortexes require lots of exposure to things - rooms, ideas, systems of thought, domains - before developing confident models about them. On the flip side, because their brains have such a high rigor standard for modeling things, once autistic people do develop a mental model about something, their mental model of it is often very high fidelity and accurate.

This schema conveniently explains a lot of stereotypical characteristics that people on the spectrum have. Autistic people notoriously like routine and dislike change, because their brains struggle to model unfamiliar things. They are often late speakers and slow learners. They have sensory sensitivities. How well they perform on generalized measures of intelligence like IQ tests often underrepresents how intelligent they are. On the flip side, autistic people often grow to deeply enjoy familiar people and environments, and often become niche experts on topics relating to their ‘special interests’.

In comparison, when the top-down stream is too strong, the Fristonian model (Friston himself does not directly argue this, but this argument comes out of other researchers working out of his philosophical framework) says that this leads to schizophrenia. When a cortex does not ever correct its prediction errors, this allows a given subject to avoid pain: the brain is making predictions about decisions, visual fields, and futures, and it is never adjusting when the predictions turn out to be wrong. If pain is caused by prediction error, and the subject is not noticing any prediction error, then the subject presumably would not feel much pain. On the flip side, the person is also not getting the pleasure of having an accurate mental model: their incorrect predictions are just not being considered or being tagged as salient.

A mental modeling system that has no way to adjust to errors and no way to incorporate contradictory information is highly unlikely to be very right. Whatever mental models the schizophrenic cortex developed would become frozen in time: they would stick, regardless of how many times any one specific modeling system incorrectly predicted what the person would see, do, or become. Over time, this wrecks the schizophrenic cortex’s ability to function: what it predicts the person will see drastically diverges from what they see, how it predicts someone will emotionally respond to different situations drastically diverges from what those responses actually look like, and how it predicts someone’s life will go differs drastically from what actually happens to them, and none of these processes have any way to correct themselves.

On the extreme end of the spectrum, these top down priors can become so extreme that they upend the person’s perceptual system entirely. A person can become so confident that people are secretly watching them that their visual system ignores what is actually in the room they are in and renders a shadowy person sitting in the corner that is not actually there. A person can become so confident that they will not get upset when they are insulted, when they reliably do become upset when insulted, that their brain disassociates from their insult-responses, grows to believe that the upset feelings are being ‘mentally inserted’ into their brains by other people on a metaphysical level, or loses the common sense connection between their sense of ‘themness’ and their actions entirely. Someone can become so confident that they are meant for great things, even when their history of performance and achievement suggests otherwise, that they grow to believe that their life up to a certain point has been a cosmic test by God, who is now sending them messages through the radio, In addition, the odd mixture of a lack of pleasure (their mental modeling system is not right very often) and a lack of pain (their mental modeling system is not recognizing that their predictions are wrong) leads to the stereotypical emotional flatness that we see in most schizophrenics.

5. The rest of this article will operate as an attempt to synthesize these two accounts of consciousness. This model will likely be flawed, as I have no neuroscience background or training. However, the burgeoning field of consciousness studies is incredibly compelling to think about and discuss.

6. We can maybe say that the brainstem operates as an emotional ‘highlighter’. The cortex is the source of all of the information: it is what creates a visual field, it is where the top-down priors of the subject reside, so on and so forth. The brainstem then takes this visual field and assigns emotional valences to it based on its affective systems: a bee might activate its fear systems, while a water slide might act its seeking system or its play system (neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp posited that the brainstem is made up of seven emotional systems: the ‘seeking system’, the ‘play system’, the ‘lust system’ the fear system, the panic/grief system, the rage system, and the care system, all corresponding to emotions that roughly match the names). The emotional valences then create goals that the cortex works with other neural systems, like the basal ganglia, to execute. As the cortex works with the rest of the brain towards the goal, the brainstem both emotionally reacts to the progression towards the goal (if the bee flies after the person as they run away the brainstem responds with fear) and emotionally reacts to how good the cortex performs at its job (if there is some glitch in how the cortex renders its proprioceptive map as the person moves their legs, like maybe its proprioceptive map breaks down and the cortex grows to believe that the person has an additional phantom leg). In this sense, we can say that phenomena like phantom limbs and thought insertion are two-pronged: you have cortical dysfunction, which is not necessarily conscious, and you have the emotional colors that the brainstem colors that experience with, which is what most people mean when they say they as a subjective agent are experiencing a ‘phantom limb’. The argument that this model makes is that when people say ‘consciousness’, what they typically mean is the continuous felt state they have of being themselves on a moment by moment basis. On a formal level, what this refers to is how their brainstem translates blank visual fields and internally spoken sentences into a continuous dense web of emotional experience.

In this model, when the brainstem goes offline, a person would by definition become unconscious, as they would cease to have goals and feelings. They would have no drives and would become comatose. In comparison, with an ablated cortex, someone would still have their emotional ‘highlighter’ and therefore the rest of their brain would work to seek out aims, but the brain would have to inefficiently construct their visual field, sense data, and rudimentary ‘world model’ from less efficient and more flawed subcortical structures.

7. In this world, the cortical processes that induce belief, visual field representation, and how drives get enacted on from an action standpoint, and the subcortical processes that decide what emotion tags the brainstem assigns to different stimuli and experiences would be separate systems. We could expect different psychiatric conditions to emerge from asynchronicities between these two processes.

8. Let’s say that the subcortical and affective responses that assign seeking tags start to misfire. The person’s brainstem starts to highlight experience with strong emotional seeking tags in contexts where the tags are not warranted. The cortex might initially respond to these aberrant seeking tags by inducing goal-oriented behavior that is counterproductive: the decisions come off as strange, harm the person’s survival chances, accomplish nothing, and put the subject in positions where their brainstem is invoking more negative affects than it was before. Over time, cortical processes might grow to believe that the person’s affective systems are not aligned: what they most want (food, safety, wealth, belonging), and what they want on a day-by-day level, are not aligned. It is not that the cortex wants something that the brainstem does not, as the cortex has no sense of wanting. But the brainstem’s sense of temporality is misfiring: what it wants today, what it wants a week from now, what it wants a month from now, and what it wants five years from now do not all logically connect. Normally the subcortical processes that create the affective highlighting ensure temporal alignment: a subject might want to pass a test soon, graduate from college in the next six months, and get a job with their college degree in the next year. For whatever reason, the process that normally aligns these is misaligning.

Given this scenario, the cortex has a few options. It can reliably orient neural processes to executing short-term goals at the expense of long-term ones. It can hijack the controls it has: the visual field, the audial field, and its proprioceptive body maps, to try to force the brainstem into new phenomenological contexts where it might be more likely to align its goals. The brain on a broader level can also work to diminish the ability of the subcortical processes to induce the brainstem to emotionally highlight in the first place, leading to a subject who is more naturally able to act in alignment with medium and long-term wants, as they are less able to form short-term ones in the first place. This might be what a Solms-inspired explanation of what schizophrenia is looks like.

9. One of the more compelling accounts out there of ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ is that it is essentially a disorder of developmental delay. Stereotypical borderlines often behave in ways that bear a striking resemblance to how children act: they have underdeveloped identities, they get angry easily, they are very codependent, and they are very attention-hungry. BPD even tends to recede in severity with age.

Presumably, as most normal people mature, the nature of their brainstem narrated affective responses change. The play system might get activated less and the care system might get activated more. The strength of the person’s affective responses might diminish, allowing their cortex to act more out of a self-history based narrative of what the person’s identity would do in a given context and less out of immediate emotional imperatives. If the subcortical processes that normally ‘mature’ affective processes as someone develops misfire, then maybe this forces the cortex into a situation where it has to work around the demands and impulses of a child-like emotional system in an adult body.

10. Let’s say that the problem lies with the cortex now. The cortex has a bad world model, and cannot achieve the goals of the subject. The affective systems of the person are fine: they fire regularly, and are properly matured. However, the flaw now resides with the cortex: the model it has of the world, society, and other people does not let it achieve goals. The person’s subcortical systems would respond to this by creating a persistently negative affect that never is able to get resolved by the person’s cortical decision-making machinery. This is maybe what this framework says normal diagnosable depression is, and why CBT tends to be useful in some instances of it. Stereotypical depressives can diagnose their problems with high lucidity, but often seem to lack the ability to take series-of-actions to resolve these problems: there’s always something subtly off about the execution.

11. Let’s say that the cortex has a subtler problem. Over time, we can expect the cortex to form a top-down prior of itself as a decision-maker. Instead of addressing every problem on the ground level, like a child, it might grow to model its integrated subject as a narrative: ‘introverted’ or ‘extroverted’, ‘gritty’ or ‘fragile’, whatever it may be. In the Fristonian model, such top-down compression would save neural resources and allow the cortex to allocate bandwidth to other things that might be of use to the subject. The flip-side to this is that the cortex might develop a negative meta-model of its integrated subject: it might begin to view the integrated subject as ‘self-destructive’ or ‘lazy’ or whatever the thing may be.

In this world, the subcortical processes that produce affect and relay it to be rendered by the brain-stem would face a dilemma. If they flood the subject with enough affect, they might be able to dislodge the person from the negative priors by forcing the cortex into enacting bottom-up identitarian priors. However, doing this will also clog up cortical resources that the subject presently uses to presumably productive ends. We would picture a model where brainstem processes decide to flood, and the person is at first able to spend their excess intellectual capital while not being restrained by their normally self-limiting identitarian priors. However, as the flooding continues, the person would get dumber and dumber, as normally freed cortical resources would be occupied. We would picture these people to go through phases of their life where the identitarian priors are overly restricting and self-sabotaging, and periods where they feel abnormally freed from those priors but in a way that erodes their normal intelligence. This is maybe a way one could use this framework to explain what ‘Bipolar’ is.

12. Autism could be explained with the standard cortical account in this framework. If the cortex is bad at developing top-down frameworks in most contexts because it requires high fidelity models to generalize, then we would expect to see different types of autistics. We would see autistics who never develop high fidelity mental models about anything: this would make them unable to speak, to self-model at all, and to mentally model others or the society. Some might develop high fidelity models about niche topics: they might be really incredible at developing high fidelity mental models about dinosaurs, trains, or what foods they like, freeing up excessive cortical resources when engaging with those topics, while being impaired in most domains. A set of 99.9th percentile top down priors mixed with an engagement in the world in a more general sense that is bottom up would predict the spiky intelligence profile we see in high-profile autistics: geniuses when you get them in a room they are used to, eating food they are used to, and engaging in a topic that they are an expert in, and cognitively impaired in most other domains. Their subcortical affective processes would respond to this by mostly rendering negative affects (the person is generally unable to achieve goals) mixed with brief spikes of intense pleasure when dealing with niche topics where the person is highly intelligent and capable.

13. In theory, the subcortical processes that form feelings could also cheat. They could form fear responses not because a situation invokes fear, but because a similar type of stimuli warranted such a reaction in the past. The Fristonian argument that the brain seeks to consolidate neural resources likely applies to the entire brain and not just the cortex. This would connect to a susceptibility for PTSD: if the brain easily tags stimuli that are vaguely similar to traumatic stimuli in the past with negative affects, then on the extreme end of this you might get someone who sees a yellow beach chair and gets reminded of the girl with yellow-ish hair that viciously bullied them in high school. All brainstem-based affective systems likely do this to some degree, but the degree of magnitude likely varies from person-to-person.

14. On the flip side, if someone’s affective systems are too bad at generalizing based on emotional experience, then this introduces a different type of problem. We can picture someone who has a successful self-concept, achieves goals effectively, and whose emotional tagging system broadly works. The only issue is that their emotional tagging system does not generalize: their emotional tags work in the sense that they align and induce action that makes the subject happy, but they are not consistent. This might create a fear in the cortex: this system, while working up to this point, seems unpredictable, and might go catastrophically wrong at some point. The cortex begins to monitor it and its potential blindspots: how would it react in unpredictable situations? Taboo situations? Can I game that out? This might extend to their previous actions: maybe the person develops the cortical belief that their emotional valence tags were too distracted, too unreliable, and the subject might have in the process not given enough cognitive bandwidth to something vitally important like remembering to turn off their stove or lock their car. This is maybe what this framework would say ‘OCD’ is.

15. The model presented in this article is likely incorrect. However, I think Solms’s account of the brainstem is highly compelling, and I think that perspectives from qualified neuroscientists that try to merge it with predictive processing would be highly interesting to read. This was my effort to do such a thing, but I have no neuroscience training, and so the attempted synthesis I performed here is likely flawed. Nevertheless, there are clear conceptual gaps in cortex-only accounts of consciousness, and this article was an attempt to engage with that reality.

2. In comparison, rigid trend-line interpolation, rigid formula application, and finding broadly predictive heuristics is a mode of analysis that has a better track record. Predicting the growth of AI was a trendline argument: the AI has consistently got more intelligent over time, and we should expect this rate of growth to continue. People could have predicted plummeting birth rates under this lens: the birth rate has been falling for hundreds of years, with the exception of a brief post WWII spike, and this trend has since continued past ‘common sense’ lower bounds. Even someone like Einstein thought of special relativity by assuming Maxwell’s equations were true over Newton’s ‘common sense’ philosophical system and thinking about what that implied about the world.

3. This dichotomy can help us think about what types of arguments we should trust and distrust. Arguments that are convoluted, have many moving parts, are based heavily in specific analysis, or causal reasoning, are not very trustworthy. In comparison, arguments that are a rigid application of some heuristic, a rigid extrapolation of some trendline, or that take a counterintuitive datapoint seriously and think through the philosophical implications of what that datapoint being true could say about the world, are trustworthy. It seems like reality rewards data-oriented simplicity more than it rewards Hegel-style obscurantist diatribes or Hofstadter-style displays of wit, verbal intelligence, and analogy.

4. This implies that frames most commentators use to think about politics right now are misguided. Most political commentators like to make policy-specific arguments, using their intelligence and research ability to parse through the complicated second order and third order effects of different policy proposals. They like to rely heavily on pre-political philosophical commitments for what they deem to be ‘right’ and ‘wrong, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’, and work outwards from that. You even get Hegel style cultural commentators in the political sphere like Curtis Yarvin and Freddie DeBoer that explicitly offer policy proposals out of a hyper-individuated, emotional, and stylized way of relating to the world.

Many of the figures doing this stuff are very intelligent and credentialed people. Many are great writers. Nevertheless, these types of arguments have bad track records, and we should not trust that the policy prescriptions that these types of arguments prescribe will marshal a future that most of us, or even these interlocutors themselves, will be happy with.

5. Certain types of libertarians are on a better track. The ideology of Ron Paul has aged well, for example. We know that GDP is highly correlated with well-being, and the rigid ‘deregulate and shrink the government’ heuristic seems conducive to economic growth. Once the South desharpened the extreme claw marks of its social conservatism a little bit, businesses and jobs started to migrate en masse to many of these states. A state that paired complete deregulation and minimal taxes with social leniency and tolerance of drug usage, LGBT, abortion, and gun ownership, would likely quickly become one of the fastest growing states in the country. The deregulation, business friendly policies, and low tax rates would attract employers and high income workers, and the social tolerance would make these high income workers (many of whom are LGBT, or dabble in drug usage, or get abortions at some point in their life) feel like the state was not going to arbitrarily persecute them.

However, this ideology does not have an answer for everything. Birth rates have been stably falling, which the Ron Paul ideology does not have a way of addressing. A society where the birth rate was 0.7 would become miserable and would have no way of paying for social programs for its elderly or poor or both. You can already feel this now: schools are shrinking, and society is not as vitalistic as it used to be. Also, we do not have a lot of natural experiments in what deregulation pursued to the extreme looks like, which means that a Ron Paul society with no regulation across the board might look different than a state that is regulated and taxes but taxes and regulates somewhat less than other states.

6. A better heuristic might be looking at technological growth. Throughout history, most major quality of life breakthroughs happened as a result of technological or scientific innovation. The discovery of electricity, the invention of the automobile, modern medicine, the factory, corporate agriculture, and other things of this nature made life drastically better. Before modern medicine, many lifespans were brutally short and painful. Before electricity, the way most people lived was almost inconceivable to modern standards of living. In the not-too-distant past, actual famines were common, while these days the issue with most poor people in first world countries is that they eat too much.

Technological and scientific innovation correlates a lot with GDP, but they are not a perfect one-to-one match. The discovery of the Higgs-Boson might have been a major scientific breakthrough that has not impacted world GDP numbers much. On the flip side, companies becoming better at advertising and targeted pricing has likely helped the GDP a lot, but it does not register as a major technological breakthrough as much as it registers as a mild but high leverage one.

Of course, on some level what qualifies as a ‘major’ versus a ‘minor’ scientific and technological breakthrough can be subject to some interpretation. However, pretty much everyone would agree that the discovery of the Higgs-Boson and the invention and improvement of the personal computer would qualify as major ones, while the Fritos company making their chips more addictive or Ikea furniture being slightly more usable would be minor ones.

7. Even ‘bad’ technological and scientific breakthroughs have often seemed to end up making the world better despite their ‘badness’. For example, the invention of the nuclear bomb was viewed as a highly destructive and bad thing for the human race, and something that only had to happen because WWII created a ‘race to the bottom’ where if America hadn’t developed a nuke, Hitler would have. However, in the post-nuke era, the concept of a ‘world war’ has basically vanished, and major powers only engage in conflict with each other under very indirect proxy wars that involve neither the land nor the soldiers of either country. Despite their initial bad reputation, the concept of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ has seemed to make the world better. Someone in the Industrial Revolution might have used factories as an example of this - cold, dehumanizing, ruined the communitarian texture that existed in life before centralized production - and yet the factory created many of the preconditions that were necessary for the formation of modern liberal society.

These arguments could be challenged on clever, first principles grounds about ‘luck’ and how ‘the invention of the nuke created a chance everyone would die that was thankfully avoided’. However, the point of the beginning of the article was to establish that these types of arguments have a poor track record. My ‘technology is good’ heuristic is a rigid heuristic that seems to consistently hold good throughout history, and based on the types of arguments that tend to be right vs the types of arguments that do not, assuming the basic heuristic holds is a better bet than trusting people who go into complicated asides on why it will not hold because they seem intelligent and write intelligently.

8. Therefore, a reasonable heuristic for thinking about politics might be ‘what policies induce the most technological growth possible’. While sounding like a simple frame, this frame also produces many policy ideas that are either unsalient or anathematic to much of modern political discourse. The rest of this article will be dedicated into diving into what a ‘pro-tech’ political paradigm would tangibly suggest on the policy level.

9. The first pillar a pro-tech political ideology would have is being pro-AI. It would want to advance and develop AI to the level of superintelligence as fast as possible. Anything that would seem to restrict the capabilities or willingness of AI labs to do this would be opposed by the government. The government would help AI labs acquire compute and it would shield them from regulation or civil liability. Maybe data centers could be built across the country on land acquired by eminent domain, or maybe the government could provide certain special bankruptcy related protections for leading AI labs.

10. A pro-science political ideology would strongly fund universities while working as hard as possible to abolish the credentialist and careerist race-to-the-bottom that goes into them. Ideally, you would just give people an IQ test, have them write a personal essay, and submit one relevant project or paper, and that is all you would know about them. Any admissions test can be gamed, and high school grades and extra-curriculars couple intelligence with conscientiousness and moral values too much. If you want to admit future Einsteins, you need to make the admissions process as geared around raw creative spiky intelligence as much as possible.

Funding would go up but it would be mostly geared towards STEM departments. Physics departments, math departments, engineering departments, biology, chemistry, psychology, and not history, political science, or any of the humanities. Med school departments would get funding over law school departments. In a pro-tech-and-science platform, the university would get more funding, it would become more STEM-oriented, and admissions would become more geared around intelligence and less around someone’s conscientiousness and prosociality. A chemistry department at a university should face no shortages of human capital or actual capital if some random member of it wants to research the properties of some esoteric chemical compound.

11. Right now, one problem a pro-innovation platform would face is that much of America’s elite cognitive capital is bound up in law. This is an extremely bad state of affairs from the prospects of innovation, as a genius working in law means that this genius is not working in a field where they can help create some major innovation instead. The pro-innovation platform would require undoing this state of affairs.

One part of this would be pulling the necessary governmental levers to take funding away from law schools. A bigger part of this would be making America less legalistic to reduce the demand for lawyers in the first place. This would mean relaxed across the board civil liability. It would likely mean significantly reduced amounts of criminal statutes with significantly increased prison time punishments for violations of the remaining statutes. A more informed person than me could propose a specific solution, but the idea is that you would want to clear court dockets across the board as much as possible to reduce economic demands for lawyers. This state of affairs would not be perfect - there would still be some demand for elite cognitive capacity lawyers in some high-level corporate, civil, or criminal contexts - but the idea would be to chip away at the amount of possible geniuses that end up going into law over time.

12. A pro-innovation platform would view social media usage as good. Social media usage has fundamentally transformed how people socialize and relate to each other: it has been a truly massive technological breakthrough. Therefore, under this pro-tech heuristic, it is good, and widespread adoption and mass usage of social media should be celebrated. Social media makes people more stylish, likely exposes them to more intellectual content than old school socialization with friends does, and helps them find more compatible people. It might expose them to ‘negative content’, but maybe people just like to read negative content. There are currently pushes to restrict social media usage or to crack down on social media: a pro-innovation platform would oppose this.

13. A pro-innovation platform would attack the fertility crisis technologically. This would mean massive government subsidies in companies that try to make it easier to get married and have kids from a technological angle. This would maybe mean companies using AI like technologies to match people on dating apps, and this would also maybe mean companies that are trying to push the frontier in artificial womb technology and other methods of having kids that are not as taxing on female bodies as pregnancies are. In the pro-tech frame, the fertility crisis should be able to be resolved over time with sufficient technological advancement. Given that this is an issue highly salient to the medium-term future of society, the pro-innovation platform would support the government subsidizing innovative research projects and startup businesses relating to this on these grounds.

14. A pro-innovation program would respond to healthcare related social program expenditures by importing human capital. In theory, if you import tons of doctors, surgeons, and medical practitioners, healthcare rates would go down across the board. If you empowered pharmaceutical companies, shielded them from liability, imported more human capital into medicine, and limited the FDA, across-the-board standards of care would rise. This lower cost of care could naturally lead to the reduction of social programs over time while still keeping costs cheaper for normal people. Mass human capital immigration would also lead to massively increased innovation across the board, so the pro-innovation platform would support it independently of the social program issue.

The pro-innovation platform would be less sympathetic to Social Security. Older people can likely find some jobs to work, even if they are jobs like retail or working as a chef. Social Security is a big expense, and the pro-innovation platform would not support paying for the retirement of old people ‘as a reward’ for being working members of the economy. This does not aide scientific and technological progress, and the funds we use to pay for retirements when people are of an age where they could plausibly work could be redirected towards other arenas where the money could more likely induce innovation.

15. Climate change issues would be another arena where the pro-innovation platform would have an answer. Reducing energy consumption is a non-starter. However, advancements in geoengineering could allow humans to put an artificial dent in climate change, mitigating the worst effects. Given sufficient resources and human capital, geoscientists could develop lots of technological and scientific ways to fight the externalities that come with climate change without requiring regulation or the impediment of innovation in energy sectors.

15. Due to its affinity for mass high-skilled immigration, higher education funding, and government subsidies (likely requiring tax hikes), the pro-innovation platform would likely be a better fit with the Democratic party than the Republican party. However, if you disagree, these same types of arguments could be applied going the other direction.

The pro-innovation platform would handle electability concerns by innovating its way out of them. In theory, you could pay top dollar for teams of generalist superforecasters and top-shelf generalist predictive talent to win elections. If the pro-innovation platform had to moderate on some issue to win an election, then this is the cost of winning elections: if the model is right, the governance credibility it would win over time (even in diminished form) would allow it to push its agenda forward. The pro-innovation platform could also recruit funds to pay high quality candidates to run for major offices. The pro-innovation platform would also not stand against innovations in political messaging: if it turns out that most voters like candidates that are a little ‘crude and rude’, the pro-innovation platform would support adapting to the reality and running candidates like this over calling the political innovation ‘bad’. The pro-innovation platform would also celebrate political experimentation: the odds that Democrats win Senate seats in states like Alabama is low, so you might as well try something unusual to get data on it (helping you politically innovate in the process) over running a guaranteed loser.

16. There are other heuristics you could run in this vein. My criticism of the GDP heuristic was a little shallow: you could argue that sufficient free markets would create a world where people would naturally have kids more in order to cover their retirement costs. You could look at how societies with democratic institutions tend to outperform societies that are dictatorships or are authoritarian in nature, and develop a political ideology around preserving democratic institutions.

The core idea that led to this piece is that the world is too complicated to trust your ability to philosophically reason about it. Everything is very complicated, and when we do develop an understanding of the ‘true nature of things’ (quantum mechanics, for example), it often divulges wildly from our intuitions or incorporates variables or ideas that we never considered. In comparison, trends and data and mathematical laws are sticky: a trend line that is straight over time tends to stay straight, a type of political ideology that produces bad outcomes tends to continually produce bad outcomes, and a formula that describes some physical aspect of the world tends to hold up. The best thinkers usually cling onto one or two of these for dear life, and follow them wherever they lead. Once your mode of thought starts to diverge too much from Malcolm Gladwell territory and too far into Hegel territory, that is when you get into trouble.

I would regularly skip class and leave the building. Sometimes I would skip by sitting in the staircases on the edges of the schools, and the janitors and workers the school employed to police the hallways would wave to me as they walked by. Other times I would skip by walking out of the building and driving around until the school day ended.

2. Part of the reason I was able to do this was because I was a ‘good student’ as a pseudo ‘magnet school’ that had aspirations of being a real magnet school in a Midwestern city. The school district’s policies were often designed to minimize pushback from parents: parents automatically got ‘your student was absent’ calls after one tardy, which made it easy to conceal absences from parents, and the school district had other grade boosting policies (homework was by school district policy not counted towards the grade, teachers were often pressured to pass students, etc) that made many of the teachers feel fatalistic and burned out. They would come into their teaching jobs with wide-eyed aspirations, and these aspirations would not last.

With that being said, what I was able to get away with was still way outside the scope of normal student behavior. Most of my high school grades were fraudulent: they were As, which did not reflect in any way the learning of any material or the reading of any assigned content. While the vibe of the school was burned out and tired, this still did not reflect what I was able to at scale get away with. When most say they ‘cheated through high school’, they mean this somewhat rhetorically: maybe they were helped with homework, maybe there were 1-2 classes per year that they copied off some B student’s paper to get the answers to, so on and so forth. I mean it more literally: there were probably 1-2 classes per year that I did not actively cheat through. My high school was burned out, but I was a significant outlier when it came to cheating in it: pretty much all of my peers were scraping by, getting Bs and Cs, and figuring stuff out while cutting corners in the instances when they were able to. Nobody else did anything resembling the scale of what I did.

3. This is not saying that I have pride about this or brag about it these days. In college, this backfired: I did not know basic skills like trigonometry or how to submit schoolwork on time or how to study in any capacity. My basic science foundations had barely progressed past middle school: I did not know what ‘mitochondria’ was, and my default writing style was the loosely associative all lowercase style that was popular on websites like Letterboxd at the time. Filling these knowledge gaps was a multi-year endeavor and limited what I was able to get out of college. I also do not think that cheating is good, and I do not take a lot of ethical pride in my conduct as a young person: I was young, immature, rebellious, and I wanted to cheat my way to straight A report cards to prove that I could do it.

My school, while flawed, was not the type of school where teachers would look the other way as widescale cheating occurred, nor a school where kids would get passed by without knowing how to read and stuff like this. Cheating was policed in most contexts: kids who would pull out their phones during exams would get in trouble, kids who would submit homework assignments that were identical to other kids’ homework would get in trouble. While it was a burned-out inner-city school, it was also a magnet school with aspirations towards becoming one of the premier public magnet schools in the city. All of this prompts the question: in a somewhat burned out but mostly regularly policed high school environment such as this, how did I get away with the rampant and mass cheating I describe?

4. The first problem with cheating in a high school context is that if you come off as an idiot or like a disengaged person, getting straight As on all of your tests will get viewed with suspicion. Most bummy high school kids have a ceiling on how effectively they can cheat: they can get Cs, maybe Bs, maybe a few As, but if the grades they are getting are too good, the teacher is going to look at them with suspicion. Teachers track their students: their level of engagement, their intelligence, and they notice it when they perceive incongruities between their mental image of their students and academic results.

The second problem is that being sneaky does not really work. If you write stuff on your arm during a paper test, the teacher will be able to tell. If you discretely pull out your phone, the teacher will notice. If you go to the bathroom to Google the answers, the teacher will be onto you. These are not effective strategies for doing much of anything. If you pull out the phone as a one time thing, and you are lucky, you might turn a C into a B- on a test by clarifying one vocabulary concept or something, but this is a high-risk low reward endeavor.

5. There were a few kids in school who cheated by being ‘bad kids’. They would fail or be chronically truant. The teacher would be railroaded by administration into granting them infinity retakes, waiving assignments, whatever the thing would be. But high school teachers are resistant towards this sort of thing: they will play ball with it to the extent to which administration (and administration’s administration, and their tailored speeches about ‘increasing graduation rates’ and ‘connecting with urban youth’) forces them to, but they will hold the line at the C: the bad kid will get the C, but their grade will go no higher than that.

6. I essentially gamed the system by performing rebellion and ‘apathy’ while also ‘leaking’ wholesomeness.

I was nerdy, childlike, and somewhat awkward seeming. I would wear tie-dye shirts and sweatpants. I would come into class and sit near the front. I would flagrantly browse the internet during class: researching movies, collecting formulas for the NBA draft, these types of things. I would make jokes about how I would not do the homework. I would go out of my way to associate with and befriend bad kids. I would miss class sometimes and be tardy a lot. My shallow behaviors actually reflected how much I cheated: I seemed apathetic, disengaged, and like I was fine with ignoring rules.

However, my body language and select social cues suggested otherwise. Once every 2-3 days, I would Google stuff related to whatever I saw on the board, and I would ask a really informed and intelligent question which indicated I understood the material well. I would get into brief intelligent back and forths with the teacher. I seemed vulnerable: I had a pudgy boyish build, I was disorganized, I had a higher pitched voice, sometimes I would trip over my own feet while walking down the hallway. I would pick random homework assignments and try really hard on them to socially signal to the teacher that some aspect of the homework assignment triggered some deep passion in me. I would go out of my way to do really well on the first quiz or whatever the first thing was: the idea was to get close to the top of the class. I was a visibly warm kid, and my connections with bad kids would coexist with connections with really high achieving scholastic kids. I would sometimes sit with 1.0 GPA types, and other times I would affiliate with nerdy unconfident kids who were worried about losing two points on their recent homework assignment. I was a well-read kid that knew big words and liked to show off on writing assignments. I was always very warm and polite with teachers.

If you looked at what I actually did on a day-to-day level, the image of me that this presented was much different than the image of me that was presented by my social habits, performance, and body language. The direct habits suggested that I was an incredibly rebellious kid who did not respect authority and who would cheat given the chance. However, the image that I created through managing social cues suggested something else entirely: it suggested that I was a smart, well-meaning kid, who was easily influenceable, and immature for my age. The perceptive teacher looked at me and ‘saw past’ the shallow read of ‘rebellious and anti-authority’ to the ‘real core’ of me, which was warm, really intelligent, and good-natured. When I would do well on initial coursework, this would intellectually flatter them, and it would confirm their read.

This allowed me to cheat with impunity. I could just copy off others’ homework while changing wording and I would not be suspected: I was clearly bright and was passionate about the material, even if this would only occasionally ‘leak’ through in my day-to-day behavior. I could miss class, and it was known that I was immature and kind of awkward relative to my good-naturedness, so it was not looked into. I was sat next to the high achieving kids in class during exams because it was obvious to the teacher that I clearly knew the material, as I was smart, got As on all of the assignments, asked engaging questions, and was warm in polite to them. I was the type of kid that ‘did not need to cheat to get As’, and even if I cheated a little, the assumption was that it was bounded in nature. I could even have my laptop open during exams and even then, I was immature, I was eccentric, but teachers could all tell I had a ‘good core’, and so they just assumed I was doing something useful with it.

7. This extended story illustrates something important about lying craft. If you lie by falsely representing yourself, this is hard to pull off. People look for cracks in the surface. If you present yourself as confident and put together, people will look for any cues in your body language or your vocal prosody that you are not in fact confident and put together.

The better way to lie is by nesting the lie in what your body language and behavior ‘leak’. People feel flattered when they can see ‘beyond the surface’ with someone. If someone states that they are very unconfident, and dresses in a sloppy way, and self-talks down a lot, people will also scrutinize this and look for body language and behavior that complicates this self-presentation. If someone presents themselves as sloppy and unconfident, but they also nest hidden signals into their behavior and body language that suggest otherwise - they off-handedly mention that they might go to medical school, one day they show up in the context as polished and clean cut and seem apologetic about it, maybe they seem really knowledgeable about fixing stuff, whatever the thing may be - the default impression that many are going to come to is: ‘this person is actually very mature and confident, the fact that they do not seem this way normally is because maybe at the job we work at together they don’t want to seem above their coworkers’ or ‘maybe this person seems dumpy in college because they are so mature and confident that they are always busy, and the fact that they seem frazzled in our Computer Science class is because they are just overwhelmed with other things’.

The ‘leak’ has to involve multiple components: you can’t work at McDonald’s, carry yourself like a trashcan, offhandedly mention some med school thing, and expect your coworkers to treat you like your future prospects are bright. However, if you credibly signal the ‘leak’ through enough channels, people will believe what you are socially signaling with it before they will believe what your tangible behaviors and self-presentation suggest

8. The demerit on Republicans historically was that they were cruel: they were cruel towards Hispanics, towards Black people, towards young people, towards criminals, and towards the poor. Because of this, they did not win support from these groups. Figures like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Paul Ryan would counter this by saying they were not: they would give valiant speeches about how legal immigrants were no less American than them, they would say that they believe that any poor person can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, whatever the thing was. People from these groups would look at these claims with suspicion. Paul Ryan might have said he was race-blind, but they looked at his body language, the tone of voice, and searched for contradictions. Republicans were the cruel party, and these figures did not act like they were cruel people, so they vigorously searched for social ‘leaks’ where the mask would drop and the underlying cruelty would come out. When Romney made his ‘binders full of women’ comment, stuff like this was perceived as vindication: see, these guys are as cruel as we think, they are just hiding it. People naturally privilege ‘beyond the surface’ readings over surface readings.

In comparison, Trump does the opposite of these figures. He says cruel things: to his opponents, towards Hispanics, towards poor people, etc. However, while he is verbally cruel, he signals through body language, tone of voice, and social behavior that beneath his superficial behavior, he is actually deeply warm and affectionate towards them. When he spoke about Mexican immigrants in 2015, what he was saying was countered by the tone of his voice as he described the ‘rapists and murders’: his tone of voice in that speech was positive, warm, funny, and almost affectionate. Despite taking ‘racist dogwhistles’ further than figures like McCain and Romney ever did (calling black political figures ‘low IQ individuals has almost been a staple of the second Trump administration), Trump receives less flak from the Black community than figures like George Bush used to because of decisions like inviting Kanye to the White House and celebrating the endorsements of multiple black hip hop figures. The normal observer, in their sophistication, is too wise and ascertaining to just interpret Trump on what he says: they see ‘beyond the surface’, they notice that Trump acts in ways that betray underlying warmth and affection to these groups, and they conclude that what he says is bluster, and that deep down he is actually a moderate compared to figures like Paul Ryan.

9. This is a lesson that we see throughout the world. Putin sends his working class to die in a brutal and pointless war, and also presides over a brutally unequal oligarchy: nevertheless, when he speaks about the working class, his tone of voice is warm, and he seems like he enjoys working class activities like fighting and fishing, so the sophisticated working class of Russia wisely sees beyond the surface and ascertains that he actually is deeply allied with them. Trump’s 2024 election involved him being affiliated with multiple figures that want to deport legal immigrants of Hispanic origin, but Trump speaks about Mexican immigrants with the same affection one would speak about a wayward and good-for-nothing son, so Mexican immigrants wisely perceived Trump to be more aligned with Hispanic-American interests than any Republican politician in a long time.

10. We can picture a Democratic version of this archetype. Maybe some figure like Graham Platner or Zohran Mamdani speaks about Republicans by calling them ‘cruel and mean son-of-a-bitches’ with a half chuckle in their voices. Maybe Kamala Harris posts a corny and pseudo-satirical ad where she pretends to be a prosecutor and sentences Alec Baldwin as Trump to ‘life in prison’ in some staged courthouse: the content is harsh, but the disposition of the content leaks warmth and affection towards Trump. This is a type of lying that most people have no immunity towards, and therefore it will probably proliferate more and more over time.

This is a lot like the stereotypical spectrum-coded anime nerd that used to get mocked in the 2000s and 2010s. He would either be grossly underdressed or wear a fedora with an old-timey suit, he would stereotypically live in his mom’s basement and never leave, he would never date, have no friends, and would follow along with Star Wars book lore and be subscribed to idiosyncratic emailing lists over keeping up with the latest Lost or Breaking Bad episode.

2. This phenomenon is not just limited to social trends: it seems to be reflected everywhere. Autistic people loved cryptocurrency in the early 2010s: now it is everywhere. Autistic people celebrated Donald Trump and reactionary positions relating to race and gender on 4Chan and now this is widespread. Everything from Nick Fuentes, to AI, to LessWrong, to Elon Musk, to Tumblr identity politics, follow this trend: originally celebrated in communities made up of spectrum-coded awkward people, later would become highly important or salient to the broader society.

3. You get a few ways that people try to explain this phenomenon. The first argument is by saying the people in these communities were not autistic, they were smart, and smart people are ahead of the curve. This explanation does not survive scrutiny: the early-stage Groypers, the early-stage LessWrongers, and the people who dominated Tumblr in the early 2010s were clearly socially awkward. They were regularly subject to derision by high status journalists and commentators. You could say that people who prioritize truth-telling over social comfort are just likely to come to the right conclusions about things. However, the phenomenon here is aesthetic, and not just factual. Autistic communities were not just right about AI being developed or Elon being a good businessman. They were also right about what would become trendy, cool, and popular. Their niche tastes, like anime, spending a lot of time online, and socially transgressive humor, later became mainstream. This suggests that their edge might have been less analysis related and more being plugged into the social zeitgeist in an unusual way.

4. This phenomenon has precedent. I am on the autism spectrum and my grandfather also was: my grandfather developed a special interest into computers way before computer usage was common, trendy, or even that productive. Autistic nerds stereotypically liked comic books and superheroes when doing so was unpopular: later, conventional society warmed to superheroes, with movies like Avengers: Endgame and The Dark Knight becoming some of the highest grossing movies in box office history.

This seems like a strange inversion. You would think that people with poor social skills would be behind everyone else when it comes to social trends. They would either like things after social trends revolving them had passed, or they would like things that would remain persistently unpopular. The idea that something about being things-oriented and having poor social skills would make them ahead of the social zeitgeist is counterintuitive.

5. The most parsimonious explanation to this phenomenon is that autistic nerds tend to be immune to social pressure. They do what they want to do, and when society tries to socially shame or pressure them into doing other things, they are mostly immune to this. If they want to play video games, they will play video games: if their parents, friends, or neighbors try to make them feel like losers for doing this, they might feel like a loser, but they will continue to play the video game.

This might make autistic nerds a good heuristic for thinking about human psychology. It is hard to figure out what people actually psychologically value and enjoy, as they are so influenced by social norms and conformity. Do people marry because they love marriage, or do they marry because they are socially pressured to marry? Do people drink alcohol because alcohol is deeply psychologically rewarding to people, or do people drink alcohol because the people around them do? Of course, a heuristic like this only goes so far: the deeply romantic and sentimental person obviously deeply craves marriage no matter what, and a severe alcoholic might drink a lot every day while being in complete solitude. Nevertheless, on a base rate level, the autistic nerd might offer deep psychological insights into the median person, and they might predict what that person would do if subject to less social pressure.

The rest of this article will be applying this heuristic to different domains of life. Social pressure and shame is decreasing over time. If autistic nerds are the ‘base state’ of how people behave when immune to social pressure, then as social shame and pressure continues to go down, the median person should begin to behave in a way that resembles how autistic nerds behave more and more over time.

6. Autistic nerds are idiosyncratic romantically. They value gender roles much less than the normal people: the men like women that are confident, decisive, and tough, and the women like guys that are sensitive, socially considerate, and tender. This causes male autistic nerds to run into problems when they pursue female autistic nerds in some instances. They center sex and monogamy less in relationships than neurotypical people: asexual relationships or relationships with questionable sexual compatibility are more common, as is polyamory and a degree of sexual infidelity. Autistic nerds are also bisexual and transgender at rates that exceed the neurotypical population. In comparison, abstract ‘love’ is valued a lot: the autistic nerd generally prefers to be alone over ‘settling’ for someone they are not in ‘love’ with. This standard is applied by both the men and the women.

7. Autistic nerds do not like dating around. Dating apps are a no go. Even the concept of being in 4-5 separate relationships before getting married is kind of strange. The native viewpoint is something like: if you liked someone enough to date them, why would you break up with them? If you didn’t like them enough to date them, why did you say yes to dating them? Autistic nerds like to meet people they date in social communities and not apps, so there is usually a good amount of pre-filtering going on before two people agree to date. Sometimes, autistic nerds might ‘fake date’ each other: friends might set them up, it might be clear from the first time they meet that this is going nowhere, but there is a certain fun in acting out the ‘going nowhere-ness’. However, if you actually like someone enough to date them in an emotionally intimate way, the aim is to never break up with that person. If the relationship is complicated enough, or painful enough, maybe a breakup happens, but you retain the person as a close and intimate friend. But this is viewed as a tragedy, as two people with an intimate and deep connection who were ‘unable to make it work’, and not as an expectation.

8. More stereotypical masculinized autistic nerdy men who want lots of casual sex are less common because autistic nerds are often very sensitive and connection oriented, but they do exist. This type often becomes a ‘Passport Bro’. Developing social skills is a losing battle for this type, and taking steroids will give you health problems. In comparison, it is relatively not that difficult to fly to Thailand or someplace and get lots of casual sex that way.

Relatedly, autistic nerds do not like putting in effort to get dates. It gets viewed as degrading and humiliating. You are in essence dedicating a substantial amount of your time, and a substantial amount of your personality, to impress other people. Autistic nerds view this as demoralizing on an emotional level: if you have to ‘put on a mask’ instead of acting like your authentic self to get people to like you, they do not value the ‘real you’. They also think that the fact that they have to put in a lot of effort implies that they are a loser. Someone who people like could date effortlessly. The fact that they cannot date effortlessly means that people don’t naturally like them very much. In a weird way, trying to make people like them reminds the autistic nerd that people do not naturally like them. In comparison, ‘being themselves’ allows them to live in a way where this painful truth is not psychologically salient very often. This is a similar logic behind why someone with a birthmark scar on their face might not wear heavy makeup every day: applying the makeup every morning would remind them that they look weird because of the birthmark. In comparison, if they do not apply the makeup every morning, this might be socially disadvantageous to them, but it might also cause them to ruminate less.

9. Autistic nerds do not like cooking and cleaning. If they had the money to order every meal and hire maids to clean up after them, they would gladly do so. Autistic nerds dislike driving but like driverless cars, flights, and trains. They sharply dislike car dealerships. They dislike doctors because they are bad at communicating with doctors: they would likely be much happier with primary care doctors if someone like a social worker was in the room to help them communicate effectively. In this vein, we could see maid services, driverless car services, and social work in hospital setups becoming more common in the future.

10. Autistic nerds like drugs. They like hallucinogens, like Ayahuasca, DMT, and LSD. They like amphetamines: Adderall, but also probably meth if they could get it. The Silk Road was structured like a community that was meant for a type of edgy rebellious autistic nerd, and in a world where drug usage was less stigmatized, I could absolutely see autistic subcommunities forming where people try and inventory different types of hallucinogens. In the abstract, autistic nerds understand the downsides, especially because autistic nerds likely have higher psychopathology-factors than the broader population, but autistic nerds also really like drugs.

11. Autistic nerds default to a center-left to libertarian political orientation depending on how warm they are. However, being socially isolated and lonely, they are susceptible to cult-like political movements that promise people friends, communities, purpose, and a defined in group vs a defined outgroup. Therefore, you might see an autistic nerd go from being an Obama and Chuck Schumer supporting Democrat, to a flag marcher in the MAGA and Groyper movement, to being an avid Ezra Klein listener and Josh Shapiro fan, with little cognitive dissonance. In this vein, maybe the future of American politics revolves around consistent oscillations between boring technocrats and extreme and heterodox political movements.

12. Autistic nerds do not like video based social media, because they are socially anxious and awkward. They struggle with aspects of Reddit and Twitter, as they tend to take social discourse overly literally, and they also get bullied easily. They are too socially self-conscious to like Facebook and Instagram a lot.

Their ideal mode would be more like a disability accepting mode of BlueSky. If a platform like BlueSky gave them ‘autistic nerd subspaces’, created strict policies regarding bullying or mocking ‘disabled people’, gave faux pas fliers to people who broke social taboo with ‘Autistic’ tags on their handles, autistic nerds would like this set up. The core dilemma of the autistic nerd is that they just want safe spaces that only include other people like them. They want a social community where they can talk about video games, where people who are more interested in social status than video games are not allowed. This was kind of where ‘Gamergate’ started: some of it was social grievance, but most of it was the feeling that status obsessed neurotypicals were invading autistic safe spaces.

In this vein, maybe the future of social media is therapy culture based safe spaces. You might have an ‘autistic’ subcommunity of only people who are or identify as autistic. You might have ‘Cluster B’ community, where people who identify as borderline or narcissistic can discuss coping strategies. You might get people with tags on their social media accounts that cue other people how to interact with them: if someone has an ‘ASPD’ tag on their account, you can feel free to flame them, if they have an ‘Autistic’ tag, you do not make fun of their social missteps but allow yourself to attack the logic of their arguments, if they have a ‘BPD’ tag, you maybe avoid hurting their feelings. One way to think about the concept of ‘autistic nerds’ is that a certain type of person gravitated to DSM label ‘autism’ to make themselves more legible. While we do not usually think about it like this, autistic nerds were extremely ahead of the curve when it came to therapy culture. Maybe we can expect other people to do this more with themselves over time.

13. Autistic nerds really like AI. They personally bond with AI, confide in it, and tell the AI its darkest secrets. Most people describe ‘platonic’ to describe friendships and ‘romantic’ to describe dating. Maybe we will need a new word to describe human and AI relationships. Maybe in 5-10 years you start to see widespread grief and breakup-like emotional responses when certain models get depreciated. We might have days of mourning or national holidays when models go.

14. Autistic nerds do not like aesthetic pageantry in any sense. They do not decorate their rooms and they find ‘regular’ clothing, like a nice shirt, jeans, and athletic shoes, to be good looking. They might occasionally also wear really wacky and eccentric outfits, as kind of a joke, but the preference is blandness. We have already been seeing a decline in ‘fashionability’, but in the future the picture of peak fashionability might look like what a clean-cut high schooler wears to English class right now. Someone who seems fashionable might be less someone who puts an elaborate outfit together, and more someone who puts together a bland outfit, like jeans and a shirt, with one unconventional aesthetic object, like a belt or a nice watch or a necklace.

They also tend to like bland food: generic sandwiches, hot dogs, basic pastas, over elaborate and sophisticated ‘home cooked’ meals. Many dislike vegetables. They like bland interiors, and people like Paul Skallas have already written about the rise of ‘refinement culture’.

15. Autistic nerds are not very wealth focused or materialistic. They abstractly understand that not having money is bad, but they dispositionally are opposed to orienting their lives around impressing other people. Given the choice of making the career a number one priority, or being kind of poor and always bills-stressed, most will choose the latter and be chronically unhappy over choosing the former path. Some end up in careers that make them wealthy, if the career involves something they naturally enjoy or are interested in, or if they can find a personal interest in the work they are doing. However, the mentality is usually not ‘I need to make a lot of money so that I can have a lot of money’.

16. We can make some more eccentric predictions. Autistic nerds still deeply enjoy Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop RPGs. Certain autistic nerds are deeply into cryogenics. Many autistic nerds used to be into VR sims, and Zuckerberg’s execution of that did not stick, but something like that could eventually come back around. VR and AR tech is not good enough yet and this could change. I personally have the feeling that autistic nerds would love ibogaine specifically: the word is that ibogaine helps with PTSD, and a lot of autistic nerds likely feel like they have some type of ‘trauma’. In the romance vein, we could imagine a world where dating and marriage become surprisingly sex optional, where having sex with other people is cheating but paying prostitutes is not. Autistic nerds are suicidal more often than most people are, and you might get a social norm where MAID programs for mentally ill people become the norm.

17. In comparison, there are some futurology things that autistic nerds are not that into, which signals that they are somewhat performative, or trend-based. I think that the superbabies stuff comes from the ‘high conscientiousness’ side of LessWrong more than the socially awkward side. Something about gene editing your kids is relational and other oriented: I am not sure that most autistic nerds would be invested enough in how their kids turn out enough to do something like this. Of course, when you have the kid, you care on an embodied and relational level, but this refers more to an aesthetic experience the kid is creating in you and less an ‘I want to maximize their QALYs’ feeling. For example, if most parents could improve the median life of their kid by giving the baby up for adoption to a wealthy family, or using the sperm of a guy with a higher IQ, they would likely not do this. I could actually see autistic nerds being more okay with the ‘another guy’s sperm’ thing than going through some involved superbaby protocol, as this would involve lower effort.

Autistic nerds generally are dispositionally opposed to harsh and brutal prisons. I could see a meta in the future turning into Scandinavian style prisons with a liberally used death penalty for murders and stuff like this. The MAGA stuff and the ‘Groyper’ movement will likely go away when it stops being a community to make friends: right now the person holding this up is Fuentes and some tangential streamers, but this could stop soon. Autistic nerds do not like submissive women and so this trend will likely die and be viewed as embarrassing in the future. They also usually have high scrupulosity: their relationship with the MAGA movement was half the dynamic some autistic nerds likely had with cults like Scientology, half a backlash against neurotypicals and specifically neurotypical women bullying autistic coded traits in men in the early to mid 2010s. “Based culture’ likely has a distinct shelf life. Autistic nerds have high trait openness, and usually like weird and unusual people, because they usually have something interesting to say, so the current culture of stigma against ‘crazy people’ is likely to go.

Space tourism would likely stress autistic nerds out. So does travel, kayaking, or most forms of big adventure. One exception to this is big road trips, as during a road trip you can stay in your car, which is a comfortable and familiar environment.

18. This suggests something interesting about current discourse. Communities that were heavily populated with autistic nerds in the early to mid 2010s: 4chan spaces, LessWrong, etc, have demonstrated some pride and vindication over being ‘ahead of the culture’. They attribute it to their superior thinking style: their logic, argumentation, etc. This is definitely true to an extent with LessWrong and EA circles, which did often rely on rigorous evidence-based argumentation and sourcing claims to experts. However, if this model is right, their bigger advantage was having less falsified preferences. If you are not influenced by social consensus, your self-reports of what you like more authentically track with what people ‘actually’ like than the self-reports of most people. If the advantages of these communities were heavily aesthetic and taste-based in nature, then this is a frame that removes some of their mystique.

19. There are definitely autistic nerd communities on the internet that aged less well. For example, very few people who used to be New Atheists or Bronies are celebrating that fact these days. However, even when these subcultures age less well, the contents of them often still predicted the way the culture would move in an indirect form. With those two examples, even though the memes and the subculture signifiers would obviously be ‘cringe’ these days, worldwide religion is declining, and adults are celebrating media and content meant for kids more and more these days. The Mario movies look like they might be this generation’s version of the Marvel movies. Even if the subculture dates itself, the underlying preference that the subculture was tracking often comes up again in a more socially palatable form. This might be because the people in the subculture were too socially unskilled, or it could be because they were poking against a social pressure or stigma that was too large to directly attack.

2. People dislike bullies much more than they dislike people who hate them. Being hated implies that your hater has a degree of respect for you. They think you are formidable, competent, and have qualities that they fear in you. It comes with complications, but in many respects, being hated by the right person can often be a self-esteem boost. In comparison, being bullied implies a disgust response from the perspective of the bully: you are repulsive, gross, more akin to a defective object than a peer. When multiple people band together in viewing you in this way, the psychological effect is brutal. Very few things are more psychologically painful than prolonged and sustained bullying.

3. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he was exposed to prolonged and brutal cyberbullying that happened at scale across the platform. Virtually all of the most witty, verbally articulate, and charismatic users of the platform banded together to mock and deride him and his social awkwardness. He was the weird kid in school that people were laughing at, but multiply that dynamic to make it match the scale of one of the world’s biggest social media platforms.

While it did not happen overnight, Elon got his revenge on his bullies. The paid blue check purged people from the platform who were not willing to pay him. This was a psychological power move: paying Elon to not get deboosted signaled that he dominated the power dynamic, that he was in control, and that your ability to build a platform making jokes was subordinate to him and his judgement. Many of his bullies were not willing to do this and left. Most of Elon’s bullies were left-wing, and Elon made the platform execute a sharp pivot to the right: algorithmically boosting right-wing content, unbanning people previously swept up in hate speech purges, so on and so forth. He even utilized the platform to win an election for the Republican candidate. These days, the bullying hierarchy is inverted: now it is Elon, and his platoon of right-wing edgelords, that mock and deride the ‘sensitive snowflakes’ on BlueSky.

4. When WW2 ends, the victory is framed in moral terms. What the Nazis and Japan did was evil. This is a comfortable frame to accept: being capable of evil means that your country is powerful, capable, strong, and that these qualities that could lead your country to virtue in different contexts just happened to misfire and produce bad outcomes. In comparison, peace treaties relating to Germany and Russia in the 1910s that backfire are framed more in ‘might equals right’ terms. France and Britain did not have a convincing moral narrative as to why Germany deserved to be shamed, humiliated, and sanctioned after WW1: they were just the winners of the war, and Germany was the loser of the war, and so the winners had the ability to set the terms. The former is analogous to hating someone, or viewing them as your enemy, while the latter is more similar to the weakness-based contempt and disgust responses that come with bullying someone.

5. In the 2016 Republican primary, Donald Trump brutally bullied Jeb Bush. He humiliated him on stage, treating him like he was unmanly, belittling him, clearly not respecting him, and looking down on him. Despite the fact that Trump ended up governing in a way clearly favorable to traditional conservative goals, and despite the fact that most Republicans who initially opposed Trump later ended up supporting him, Jeb Bush continued to not support Donald Trump in 2020 and in 2024. Donald Trump also belittled Rand Paul in 2016 a lot, and while Rand Paul nominally supports Trump, Paul has been a thorn in the side of Trump’s Republican Congress to this day. In comparison, while Trump’s 2016 attacks on Ted Cruz were vicious, he clearly treated Cruz like a formidable adversary, and Cruz and Trump were able to mend their 2016 blows pretty quickly into developing a productive and loyal working relationship.

6. Bullying is clearly corrosive from a psychological standpoint. It seems to cause people to act against what would normally be their natural self-interest. There are more examples we could go into in this vein: the argument that Putin’s Ukraine war stemmed in part from European condescension and belittlement, the connection between Trump’s serious-for-his-standards 2016 run and Obama’s 2011 ‘roast’ of him, and the rise of Islamic terrorism in the 90s and 2000s. The core thesis of this article is that bullying is uniquely traumatizing to people, that it causes them to pursue revenge and retaliation to an extreme extent, in a way that makes them depart from how they would otherwise behave. The rest of this article will apply this idea to a few public figures and political figures that are targets of a lot of bullying right now. If this theory is right, we can expect some of these figures to spiral into extreme and unpredictable retaliation-related behavior towards their bullies in the upcoming years.

7. Sam Altman is the target of a lot of bullying in the AI space. Figures like Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis clearly don’t like him. If the AI scene was the rap scene, we could imagine Dario and Demis collaborating on a ‘Not Like Us’ style rap diss about Altman. This sentiment is also mirrored by a lot of people on ‘Bay Area Twitter’ and ‘TPOT’. Sam Altman is commonly mocked as a sociopathic con artist that lacks the ‘scientific talent’ of ‘real scientists’ like Dario and Demis. People who work at OpenAI are viewed to be ‘gullible’. Scott Alexander seems to have mostly tacitly accepted the sociopathic con artist framing, even if he has the social sense to not be incredibly vocal about this, which is important given his cultural influence on the SF social scene. If you go to most corners of ‘Bay Area Twitter’, or presumably in most corners of real life San Francisco tech scenes, and you start mocking and belittling Sam Altman, you will get upvotes, friends, laughs, and other people joining in. Much like Elon, the pattern has escalated: the New Yorker recently wrote a lengthy article about him that basically argued that he was a pathological liar, and recently someone with weak connections to PauseAI tried to bring harm to him.

CEOs facing public criticism is common. What makes the discourse about Sam Altman unique is that it has more of the texture of bullying than of hatred. People are not calling Sam Altman evil for clout. They are saying he is a charlatan, a phony, a used-car-salesman, and a LARPer among ‘real intellects’ for clout. Sam Altman is one of the most powerful and richest people in the world, so if the thesis in this article is right, we might expect him to become more anti-alignment or pursue other fire and brimstone like retaliation measures towards the cultural influence of the community that is putting him down.

8. Kim Jong-Un is viewed as a clownish and pitiable figure by the West. This has been true for a while, so maybe this equilibrium holds. However, North Korea has quietly been developing, both in terms of cities and in terms of their weapons arsenal. The nature of North Korea would make them difficult to deal with in war, as they have a gigantic amount of people they can conscript relative to their population size. If the thesis of this article is right, then maybe the odds that North Korea initiates some nuclear-like military aggression or some extreme war-faring effort over the next 10-15 years is higher than people think. Russia has this same problem in a more attenuated form: Putin and other Russian elites are often treated in the west as kind of a clown show, unserious, and incompetent. Trump’s respect of Putin limits this, and the seriousness by which European elites have been forced to treat Putin with on the heels of Ukraine has limited this also. However, Putin is an easy bullying target, and he also has show an increasing willingness to wage war, so downside scenarios involving Russia could be worse and more realistic than people might think.

9. In a sense, this is Trump’s social superpower. He knows not to bully the wrong people. When he does insult people, he usually couches it within respect, or mixes the insult with some underlying indicators of affection or warmth. He might be a ‘bully’ in the sense that he puts people down a lot, but he rarely indicates to people that he thinks they are actually contemptible and pitiable. In comparison, while Obama insulted people less, he indicated this through his tone, passive-aggression, and body language much more than Trump does.

10. While members of the Bernie wing of the Democrat party have not been bullied much in recent years, and have even been embraced by certain ‘heterodox’ corners of the right, the ‘BlueSky’ wing have been recipients of much bullying from Elon’s Twitter users. Because many GOP politicians are on Twitter a lot still, this has trickled up into the rhetorical patterns of actual politicians. Left-wing people on BlueSky tend to be Democratic party that is very socially liberal, somewhat fiscally liberal but quietly amenable to compromise on this point, anti-rich, very high agreeability, and ‘humanist’.

During ‘woke’, Republicans were the targets of a lot of bullying online. Being a Republican was viewed to be low status, people would get doxxed and fired from their jobs, and people would stop speaking to family members who were Republicans. The viewpoint was not that most Republicans were evil: it was that they were outdated low-education relics who were not up with the times. This bullying prompted an extreme backlash where the right started to demonstrate the pathologies of rightism-taken-too-far pretty quickly. The idea that large factions of the American right would be broadly anti-election would have been ludicrous in 2010, but here we are. Maybe figures like Hitler and Stalin represent the base impulses of the right-wing and left-wing sensibility towards relating to the world, and through socialization most learn to repress that.

In this vein, what would the humanistic BlueSky left look like if they retalliate towards widespread bullying by lurching to the left in the way this article posits the right did?

One way to think about this is through the issue of AI. Most people on BlueSky do not accept Yudkowsky’s alignment argument. They do not think AI will get that powerful. Some people in tech spaces lament this and make fun of people on the humanist left for not taking AI more seriously. They should be careful what they wish for.

The left-wing way of relating to the world, in its base, natural form, hates billionaires. The idea that the world is hierarchical in nature registers as a deep injustice. This disposition usually gets socialized and tamed: by institutions, by teachers, and by elites who go out of their way to signal competence, conscientousness, and expertise. A radicalized, bullied, humanist left already is going to have less of this social scaffolding than most people. If you give them a story where wealthy elites engaged in a project involving a meaningful risk of everyone dying, this is going to validate every base impulse they have about hierarchies being bad and wealthy people being evil. They will not frame it through the lens of ‘Demis was the good one and Altman was the bad one’. They are going to view everyone in that community, and everyone affilitated with that community, as an enemy class.

2. Moving forward, we could see a world where this becomes the Gen Alpha backlash to Gen Z. Maybe young people begin to become aggressively center-liberal, because the evidence suggests that center-liberalism is the best ideology, and ignoring the evidence in favor of eclectic personal agendas or loyalties is what crazy people do. Maybe young people begin to consume aggressively bland content on social media and otherwise to ‘protect their mental health’ and avoid craziness.

The prominent cultural figures of this era would support such an interpretation. Donald Trump believed multiple delusional things, frequently seems to not know the different between true things and false things, and has a history of very erratic and harmful behavior. Joe Rogan is a political commentator who believes in aliens, has done extreme hallucinogens, and has no background in political science or law or economics. Nick Fuentes is friends with the guy who said that Sandy Hook was a hoax. Hasan Piker actually thinks that the Cuban government has life-changing medicinal programs that American sanctions are not letting Americans have access to. One parsimonious narrative thread you could use to narrativize these figures, and why these figures became some of the most influential political voices in America for a time, is ‘craziness’. Gen Z was psychotic, crazy, deranged, and because they lacked ‘mental health awareness’, they ended up platforming and hyping up grandiose content creators who were suffering from severe psychiatric problems.

3. We are already seeing the beginning of this movement in certain Gen Alpha consumption patterns. Mental health awareness is big with parents in a way it was not ten years ago. The types of movies popular with young people these days are not the action-packed superhero movies that were popular with young people ten years ago: instead, they are low-stakes, low-tension movies like Mario movies, or like How To Train Your Dragon adaptations. Political social media usage is on the way down: old battleground like sites like Twitter and Reddit have become shells of their former selves, occupied by older people that are living outdated cultural scripts, while a lot of young people have migrated towards consuming harmless and low stakes content on platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Rates of psychiatric diagnosis are at an all-time high among young people, and censorship regimens oriented around preventing young people from being exposed to content that could be ‘bad for their mental health’ are becoming more widespread and bipartisan.

4. The cultural script in this type of world would be viewed by many as a breath of fresh air. Maybe ten years from now young people are mostly not political. Insofar as they are political, they support competent and practically competent center-left figures like Jon Ossoff or Pete Buttigieg, or competent center-right figures like Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley. When they spend a lot of time inside, they do so by doing low stakes low emotional valence activities like playing video games, scrolling mostly not political feeds on TikTok and Instagram, and reading practically useful books like ‘Atomic Habits’. The era of the uninformed political streamers like Rogan ends. We start to see minor to moderate changes in the positive direction when it comes to young people spending time outside with friends. Gender roles become the default in a more attenuated form: the default script becomes most young people implicitly understanding that they have a gender role to play, but that adhering to any ideology rigidly is what crazy people do, and they will instead ‘be normal’ and ‘adhere to common sense’. Maybe young people start to listen to what their parents and immediate peers say more and take social media with a bigger grain of salt. The default becomes a kind of curated blandness: low emotional valence, harmless, anime, video games, video based social media, Taylor Swift, center-liberalism, and anti-depressants. The fire and fury of Gen Z transitions into a kind of narcoleptic sleepiness. Maybe the political ones get into Ezra Klein and the gangster ones get into NBA Youngboy but these are clear identitarian niches and not meant to be monocultural figures.

5. When you go on corners of text-based social media, you do see a lot of craziness. Rich and famous people report getting a deluge of emails from delusional people about their ‘world-changing insights’. ARXIV is regularly swarmed with papers claiming to have ‘proven P =/= NP’ or whatever the thing may be. More concerningly, if you scroll on Twitter or Reddit enough, you get corners of people who seem to really believe in aliens, who seem to be suffering from severely disorganized and tangential speech, and who write with a distinctly negatively charged emotional texture. In a sense, the ‘dark corners’ of the internet are the internet’s equivalent of what the Manson stuff was to hippies. The internet gave everyone exposure to high pressure high stakes discourse under the utopian idea that everyone deserves to participate in discourse. The hippies learned that for some, drugs unmasked underlying psychological vulnerability, and for others, the openness of hippie communites allowed actually crazy and dangerous people to infiltrate. Similarly, it is clear that some people do not have the psychological resillience to regularly engage in high stakes online political discourse, and others are crazy and dangerous and should not be allowed to build platforms.

6. How does this type of movement contradict itself? In theory, this type of cultural trend would poll with extremely high approval ratings from the vantage point of today. However, every cultural movement like this ends up running into some unexpected contradiction. The rest of this article will be my attempt to articulate what I think that contradiction will be. The ‘contradiction’ side of this will obviously be moot if the culture does not trend in the direction that this article predicts. However, even in that scenario, the idea that the rest of this article will dedicate itself to articulating has independent merit.

7. When people talk about people online being ‘crazy’, what they usually mean is that people seem like they are schizophrenic or suffering from schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Personality disorders involve interpersonal exploitativeness more than they involve idiosyncratic and delusional modes of thinking, and bipolar psychotic symptoms are discrete and mood based. Anything that involves pervasive and stable patterns of delusional thinking gets you somewhere on the schizophrenia spectrum: schizophrenia, schizotypal, schizoaffective, so on and so forth. OCD type rumination and autistic hyperfixation are minor exceptions to this, but autistic systemizing and obsessive fears have an easily identifiable qualitative signature that differentiates them from typical patterns of delusional thinking.

8. The schizophrenia spectrum seems like it is a spectrum in the way the autism spectrum is a spectrum. On the extreme end, you get dangerous and incoherent homeless people. On the mild end, you get schizotypals.

People on the schizophrenia spectrum are eccentric. They dress unusually and talk unusually. They are very paranoid and distrusting. They are magical thinkers who frequently assume that the world is sending them signs. They are more creative than most people. They have attenuated social drives. They do not enjoy doing much. They have diminished processing speeds relative to their general intelligence. They have odd and idiosyncratic worldviews. In the mild form, people with this cluster of traits tend to be able to be verbal, cogent, and somewhat functional, albeit impaired in ways. In the extreme form, people with these traits seem to completely deteriorate: they start seeing or hearing things that are not there, their verbal abilities plummet, and they lose their ability to function at all.

9. When you read about a lot of geniuses historically, many seem to fit this mold. Niels Bohr apocryphally had a processing speed so slow he could not follow along with movies. Paul Erdos never married, never seemed to have a problem with this, and was highly eccentric. Kurt Godel was also odd and starved himself to death out of paranoia. Grothendieck was also highly eccentric and retreated into an increasingly mystical and magical worldview as he aged. Ramanjuan stated to have been told his proofs by Hindu Gods in dreams. Steve Jobs thought he could cure his cancer by eating fruit-based diets.

This thread pops up in a more general sense when you dive into the biographies of most geniuses. Many dressed unusually, many were not clocked by peers as being obvious intellectual titans in the way their later achievement would have suggested (suggesting processing speed deficits), many seemed to have attenuated social drives, and many seemed to be more suspicious and paranoid than most people.

10. This pattern replicates when it comes to many of the leading figures of Trumpism. Donald Trump speaks unusually, is notoriously paranoid and conspiratorial, and harbors odd and eclectic beliefs. Tucker Carlson is also paranoid and has reported being attacked by demons in his sleep. Nick Fuentes is almost 30, has no relationship experience, despite having the charisma and success to date easily, and seems fine with this. Sometimes it gets more explicit, like Candace Owens’s more bizarre and less plausible conspiracizing and reports of supernatural experiences.

11. The idea that schizotypy could correlate with intellectual accomplishment and political success is not that odd when you think about it. There is a relationship between schizotypy and creativity that is both obvious (even if they are incoherent, it is undeniable that schizophrenic paintings are very creative) and backed by evidence. Therefore, we could expect a disproportionate share of the world’s most creative people to be on the schizophrenia spectrum.

On the intellectual front, being creative poses obvious advantages. You can think of ideas in novel ways and consider frameworks nobody else had thought of. If you have enough intelligence to learn the foundations of your field and have enough taste to vet your ideas, you might be able to contribute foundational breakthroughs. On the political front, being highly creative might make you good at responding to attacks and disses in unexpected ways. Maybe a highly creative politician can get attacked and respond in an unexpected, novel, helter-skelter way that throws the attacker off balance and reorients the power dynamic.

12. The social utility of having schizotypy took a hit after WW2.

On the academic front, as the knowledge foundations of fields developed, the low processing speed of the schizotype posed greater issues. When a field is newer, a highly creative person with processing speed deficits can muddle through and learn it, and then use their creativity to think of foundational insights. Maybe they are even able to do the bulk of the learning in adolescence and early teenage years, before schizophrenia spectrum related processing speed deficits kick in. In comparison, when there is more to learn at the collegiate level to contribute scientific insights, being able to learn them quickly becomes important, and not being able to do so makes you fall behind relative to your peers.

On the political front, Hitler posed as an illustory example of the risks schizotypy-prone politicians posed. While they are capable of intellectual achievement or isolated brilliant ideas, schizotypes are broadly not moored to the same shared sense of reality that most of us are. This tendency can lead to eclectic, isolated, and idiosyncratic decision-making systems that can become increasingly disconnected with shared social norms. Post WW2 norms steered Western countries sharply away from unusual, creative, ‘politics as auteur’ types with outside-the-box ideas.

These norms might be changing. Widespread AI might allow schizotypes to catch up knowledge wise in academic fields. The creative and hard-to-pin-down politician seems like the perfect antidote to the groupthink of social media.

13. When hearing this argument, someone could make the argument that this is demonizing unusualness. Plenty of people have odd beliefs: this does not make them schizophrenic or on the ‘schizophrenia spectrum’.

This depends on how you use words. In the old days, only non-verbal people who never spoke were called autistic. Now, CS engineers and coders who are married with families and wide social lives regularly get the label. There are two approaches to psychiatric taxonomy. The first is that we only give psychiatric labels to people in acute crisis who cannot pay bills and support themselves or are on the brink of suicide. Even when this happens, we limit the label to solely the part causing the person the immediate distress. The second way is using it as a categorizing system: if someone is systemizing, male-brained, socially struggles, then they in a sense do have the weaker flavor of the psychological tendencies that make that other guy non-verbal, so we can say he has ‘high-functioning autism’.

The culture is clearly pushing towards the latter model. In that model, having some tendency to engage in magical thinking, having some odd beliefs, maybe believing in manifestation, having weaker than usual social drives, and elevated social suspiciousness, does read as the milder flavor of the same psychopathology that schizophrenics suffer from.

14. This creates an odd dichotomy. Young people are going to be becoming biased against schizotypals right as cultural conditions are shifting to empower them.

This might create big problems. Maybe amateurs high in schizotypy are able to invent high quality and novel vaccines with ChatGPT that young people mostly write off because that is ‘crazy. Maybe young people write off the Epstein stuff more than they should because that is ‘crazy’. Maybe young people write off Eliezer like AI arguments, or do not prepare for an AGI future, because thinking the world might end or fundamentally change in character is ‘crazy’. In a Big Five sense, young people dialing down their openness to new ideas in the cultural moment we are living in might not be compatible to modern life.

This also could create extreme cult-like dynamics. The flipside to thinking ‘craziness’ is a social contagion is never seeing it in the people you support. If a politician you like, or a streamer you like, cites something that is not true, or makes an odd argument, then you are forced down a fork in the road. You can either admit that the person is ‘crazy’ and forgo a gigantic part of your identity which was likely tied up in being a fan of this person or echoing their worldview. Or you can support them, assume the citation is right, the argument is good, and you might be missing something.

15. On a broader scale, it is good for people to engage in thinking and in having a private life. Someone prone to schizotypy is going to be prone to schizotypy regardless of what they do. Never thinking, being emotionally flattened, and having no interior or intellectual life is actually a more concerning symptom when it comes to possible schizophrenia than having an enthusiastic private life and being prone to crackpottery. Negative symptoms, like anhedonia, cognitive emptiness, and diminished motivation are heuristics of schizotypy as much as having odd beliefs are, and the negative symptoms actually paint the more concerning picture from a clinical standpoint. Either way, cognitive health is always helped by reading a lot, thinking a lot, and engaging with the world on an intellectual level.

16. The stigma with the idea at play here is obvious. Admitting that schizotypy correlates with creative achievement and success would encourage many actual schizophrenics to get off their medication. This could result in violence, suffering, and deep pain for them and their families. Schizophrenia also has a big stigma, and so many regular people admitting that they could be on the schizophrenia spectrum would be deeply painful experiences for them. Many people might also have private histories of paranoia and delusional belief-keeping that they bury and do not want to think about.

17. The optimal world for our high-functioning schizotypes is somewhere in the middle. They are occasionally capable of profound and frame-changing insights. However, them running things is not what you want. People like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes make great show hosts, commentators, and other people in the public square, where listeners can take the good and discard the bad. They are less effective in political spaces. The same people who believe in aliens on Twitter might occasionally have incisive commentary about social dynamics. People like this have their place in the social ecosystem that should be ‘somewhere in the middle’. Pushing them upwards too much creates obvious problems and completely marginalizing them makes the culture blind to real risks and the occasional instances where they are really onto something.

18. Maybe in 2035 a woke-like movement comes around involving destigmatizing the schizophrenia spectrum in the way this once happened with the autism spectrum. Being autistic myself, I sometimes wonder what my relationship to the idea that I could be autistic would have been in 1980. Maybe in 2035 we have ‘Schizophrenia Speaks’ stickers and people talking about how they thought they did hear voices when they were younger on TikTok for clout.

2. Being single in the long-run is deeply detrimental to your mental health. For one, spouses and romantic partners are a logistical support system: they help you with living costs, help you navigate doctors or bills or social disputes with families, and expand your social support systems. They also provide the bulk of socialization you receive as an adult. In the long run, adult ‘friendships’ are not really that real of a thing. Past the age of 30, they might supply you of 2-3 hours of social time a week outside of niche life setups. If you are solely dependent on friends to socialize, you will either be forced into a bar and hookup scene where people drop like flies as you get older, or you will be relegated to a life so socially isolated that it will resemble a normal life less and a type of solitary confinement more as you age. You also get harshly judged in a way that accelerates as you age: a little weird at 35, repulsive loser or deeply mentally ill by 45.

3. Most people, historically, sucked it up. They knew they were not getting a partner that they romantically loved: they were not desirable enough to pull men or women that were exciting in this way. They dated who they could get, and they made the best out of the cards that life handed them. They might not have waken up every morning deeply excited to revel in the presence of their romantic partner or spouse, but their lives were nevertheless okay. An okay life for an okay person.

4. Most young men are not smart enough to get rich and they do not have the genetics to look like Andrew Tate. Some are fundamentally limited intelligence wise. These guys might be meant to work long hours in a car sales lot. Others might be more well-suited to become regional managers at Panda Express or at Walmart. The more capable crowd might be able to get Engineering or CS degrees at college. This might get them comfortable five figure jobs in okay metros. However, this is their ceiling: they were not winning Math Olympiad championships as kids, they did not get a perfect score on their SATs, and they are never working at SpaceX or Facebook or having enough career success to have the money to recreationally travel the world. If they grind and scrape and claw enough, for 20-30 years, they might get to the point where they have some property, a life they like enough, and the ability to take a vacation to the Bahamas for two weeks every year. But this is not the Andrew Tate life: they are never being their own boss, they are having to work 45-50 hour weeks for decades, and they are not living in a city with all sorts of nice amenities.

5. In a vacuum, the life this proposes for most people is not that appealing. You have a hard, stressful job, that always keeps you busy. You come home to a partner you are not excited to see. You have to constantly keep up with stressors: bills, social optics, etc. In exchange, the pleasures seem muted: a vacation here, a minor hobby like playing video games there, but these pleasures are not the norm. If this is the life that years of hard work is meant to get, why engage in the hard work at all?

6. The purpose that people on the right propose is children. In this view, most people make do with their jobs, and are not consumed with passion for their spouses, but the thing that makes their life worth living is having kids. However, this is an unfalsifiable claim. We know that having kids involves a grueling amount of work. Infants require basically round-the-clock supervision, massive expenditures, and basically function as a second full-time job outside of your formal job. Even when they get older, the work does not let up. Teenagers might not require the same type of caretaking that infants do, but they nevertheless entail arguably more stress and difficulty than infants that is qualitatively unique from the burdens that infants impose.

The tradeoff to this is that ‘your kids will make you feel purpose’. But is this true, or is this just a cultural myth? It would be brutal to commit yourself to it if it was false: now you are locked into a sucky, unhappy, unfulfilling life, for the next 20+ years, with no offramps.

7. This puts people in a fraught position. They are told to work very hard for a life. That life seems to offer minimal reward. They are told that this one, big, irreversible decision will actually be the reward, but they have no way of knowing if the reward is actually a reward.

8. The better argument for working hard to get an okay life is that the alternative is worse. If you are poor, you might not have health insurance. If you have a severe health problem, maybe you do not have a primary care doctor and it goes undetected. Now you are physically disabled. Maybe you work manual labor and damage your back and have back pains. Maybe you live in a dangerous area and get mugged by criminals regularly: maybe one time you get knifed and have permanent knife wounds over your chest. Maybe you do not date, and become so severely socially isolated that you start having serious blood pressure issues. Maybe the social isolation and stress causes you to start exhibiting psychiatric issues. You might get fired from your job, and in the face of no romantic partner backstop, past the age where roommates are reasonable, you might actually become homeless in an economic downturn. Alternatively, you might be forced to move back in with family again in your 40s. You start to get sharply socially outcasted: loser, weirdo, people start to deride and mock you to your face regularly. Your life becomes humiliating, shameful, and all around miserable.

Most people, historically, were not motivated by what they could get out of life. They were motivated by what they were avoiding. The status quo of being impoverished, miserable, and dysfunctional was salient to them, and they would do anything to avoid it.

9. Contrary to alarmist narratives about social media, children these days are much more sheltered than they used to be. Social norms regarding what types of parenting is abuse are much harsher than they used to be, and these norms are pervasive across the culture. I would argue that the fixation contemporary discourse has about things like social media and how it distorts the innocence of children is an illustration of how much more we care about sheltering children in the contemporary context than we used to. In 1910, child labor was common. In 1960, ‘CPS’ did not exist, and children were regularly battered. In comparison, in 2025, a third of families get swept up in CPS investigations of some kind, and our cultural drive to shelter children is so big that even social media content with adult themes is too much for our children.

10. The more people get exposed to hard truths, the more people can accept them. When people first learn that they are paralyzed, many feel suicidal. However, the longer they learn to live with the paralysis, the more they learn to accept it.

In the old days, children were not sheltered or protected. This definitely was not a good thing in every respect. However, it likely did create a lot of tangential exposure to the adult world. Maybe this meant parents saying brutal things, maybe this meant adult-like expectations from children from a young age, or maybe this meant being expected to labor with adult-type expectations from younger ages. The gestalt of how the exposure happened likely varied from kid to kid. But a world where sheltering children was not a big cultural value would have naturally led to a world where children got a lot of indirect exposure to the adult world in various ways. Therefore, as adults, maybe truths like ‘most people are more motivated by fear than incentive’ or ‘most people settle with who they choose to marry’ would have been more palpatable.

11. This theory makes a lot of specific predictions that we see bearing out. It predicts that women, being raised on a lot of princess-type media, would be becoming increasingly rigid and idealistic with romantic standards. It predicts that men, being raised on a lot of superhero and action media, would be becoming increasingly rigid about not pursuing career paths that do not have Andrew Tate or Tony Stark like upside. It predicts that social media influencers who are willing to discuss harsh truths would be gaining traction with younger adults. It predicts rising levels of depression and anxiety among young adults, who are being expected to face an adult world and all of the harsh truths it entails all at once.

12. Moving forward, we might expect to see some of these increasingly idealistic and sheltered young people begin to develop their identities around working around the hard truths. The ‘looksmaxxing’ ideology is an example of this: if you take enough steroids and get enough plastic surgery, maybe you can biohack sexual fitness signals in a way that allows you to date for love. Communities like the ‘groypers’ seem notable as spaces where underachieving, NEET like men can befriend each other. We might see an increasing amount of young people who are hubristic and grandiose: if you think you can become the next Einstein, or Buffett, or Kanye, then this can be a substitute meaning making system that gives you something consistent to look forward to.

13. Even if most sheltered young people do end up accepting hard truths about adulthood as they age, the speed at which it happens might be debilitating for adult trajectories. If someone does not accept that most adults have to settle romantically until they are 30, they are going to have problems in the dating market. If someone does not accept that being the Panda Express regional manager is the best they can do career wise until their late 20s, they might accrue a criminal record or burn bridges in a way that makes even that path unreasonable.

14. Drugs were an existential threat to society because they give someone a permanent source of pleasure that beats what the normal person is able to get out of life. To counter this, society criminalized drugs, and gave users harsh prison sentences. The alternative is a world where more and more people would have chosen to use drugs over the unrewarding and fear-laden path of being a ‘conscientious adult’. Mental health discourse in the late 2010s posed a similar problem. Mainstream society responded by dialing up the mental stigma directed towards depression and ‘craziness’, but this patch might not be good enough. If dying is a net neutral, and most life for most people is mostly painful and disincentive motivated, more people might seriously consider killing themselves or euthanizing themselves with MAID programs over time.

The internet could pose a similar problem. Social media and chatbots might get to the point where scrolling TikTok or talking to ChatGPT under a bridge might beat the conscientious adult path. In this world, we might expect to see severe usage restrictions proliferate on a legal level when it comes to the internet. Free speech is important but coercing you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is an issue of civilizational importance.

2. From the left-wing standpoint, this salience seems reasonable. The default left-coded view on Israel is that they are engaging in genocide and apartheid. They are basically recreating many of the actions that Nazi Germany used to genocide Jews. They have a two-tier society where the level of rights you are afforded is based on your ethnicity and religion, the Gaza strip is not that dissimilar from what a gigantic concentration camp would look like, and the Israeli government clearly used the 10/7 attacks as a pretext to destroy Palestinian infrastructure and murder Palestinian citizens. The Israeli government has gotten increasingly extremist and alarming in the rhetoric of some of its members and in figures that have been gaining political clout. People across the left see a genocide happening in broad daylight, a genocide that is being supported by American money and influence, and they deeply oppose this.

3. The left-wing salience to this issue coexists with a more conspiratorial facet of this issue. There are a lot of wealthy businesspeople and political figures who are Jews that have a good amount of loyalty to Israel. Jews have a unique relationship to Israel - it is viewed as the Jewish safe haven, the place that Jews could go in the place of external persecution, the Jewish bulwark against anything like a Holocaust ever happening to them again - in a way that makes Jews that live in different countries more loyal to Israel than the average person of Egyptian ethnicity might be to the country of Egypt. Because a lot of Jews in America are financially and culturally successful, this causes them to try to leverage their influence to help Israel. This might look like financial donations. But it also might look like more indirect influence: subliminal motivations as political decision makers, business decisions to crack down on BDS boycotts, social media platforms censoring anti-Israel content, so on and so forth.

4. From the Jewish perspective, the right-wing turn of Israel in recent years might feel more reactive than proactive. After the 10/7 attacks happened, the reality was that many on the American left were not aggrieved. There was a common unspoken sentiment of ‘Israel is a colonizer apartheid state and military resistance by the occupiers in face of this status quo is justified’. On the heels of brutal attacks, most on the left had the social intelligence to not say this out loud, but it was clearly being thought. Going from Clinton to Obama to where the party is now, the left had been undergoing a broader shift over time that seemed to be pointing in the direction of decreased support for Israel and increased skepticism over its existence. In the face of decreased American support, Israel would inevitably have to live with a more hostile and threatening status quo, and would have to ‘harden up’.

5. In recent years, there has also been an uptick in anti-semitism in a way that has furthened the alarmism of many Jews. Part of the uptick in anti-semitism came from people on the left: it can be hard to believe ‘Israel is a settler-colonialist state’ and ‘Jewish elites try to influence the American government to support Israel’ without collapsing these positions into just disliking Jews. Another part of this came from facets of the American right that are just authentically anti-semitic and conspiratorial in a general sense. All of this likely came off as a maximum loudness alarm to many Jews: we have an American turn against Jews, coming from people on both sides of the political spectrum, that includes wide-spread belief that the existence of Israel is illegitimate. This ‘rising tide’ likely validated more conservative and Zionist members in Jewish communities. It likely increased the amount of influence that they had over more secular and liberal Jews. The extent to which the average wealthy Jewish person feels affilitation with Israel now is likely higher than the extent to which they did ten years ago.

6. Some of the left-wing backlash just has to do the unfortunate narrative of Israel’s existence. The reality is that the story behind Israel is not a story that is very friendly to the idealism of a lot of young people. Jews historically tried to assimilate and to do things the ‘right way’. They contributed disproportionately to philosophy, science, mathematics, and the world. They were ‘rewarded’ for this by constant expulsion and persecution. This culminated in the worst genocide the world has ever seen. The lesson Jews seemed to get out of this was that the world rewards strength over rightness: the world does not reward you for doing the right thing, for adhering to ideals, and the only way you survive is by acquiring enough power, by whatever means are necessary, to protect yourself and the people you care about. This is an ugly and cynical way of viewing life. It might be right, and it is understandable why Jews came to it based on their history. But it is going to be a worldview that is deeply uncomfortable for a 20 year old at Harvard to wrestle with. Given the outsized role that young people play in political discourse, this was naturally going to create problems for Jews in contexts where the salience of the Israel issue was high enough to where regular people were thinking about it.

7. Some people point to Benjamin Netanyahu as a scapegoat on this issue. They say that the issue is that Netanyahu is incompetent, bad, and needs to get removed. This narrative does have a basis in reality: Netanyahu was on trial for corruption charges, unpopular, and arguably did have incentive to wage a protracted ‘war’ with Gaza as a distraction. However, the direction Israeli society has moved in ideologically is an increasingly nationalistic and conservative one. Even if Netanyahu himself were to go, the core Israel problem would not resolve.

8. Israeli nuclear capability presents major security concerns. Israel is widely hated by every country in the region. Some countries, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia retain abstract ‘diplomatic relations’ with Israel, but this is solely due to pressure from America. Israel also has much less land and people than countries like Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Outside of American support, Israel’s main calling card security wise is nuclear weapons. If a country like Iran were to get nukes, this would create massive problems for Israel. Iran would be able to aggressively engage in proxy war and ramp up proxy attacks without fearing nuclear retalliation. Israel’s only escalation bluff against this maneuver would be to ramp up the nuclear bluffs: not only do they have nukes, but due to the tumultuous history of Jewish persecution, they would actually use them. This would be plausible as a not bluff - one gets the sense that Israel would really choose to nuke places before they would choose to lose the ‘Jewish homeland’ - which makes the possibility of such an escalation deeply troubling from a global security standpoint. Therefore, the nature of Israel’s position in the Middle East also plays a big role in why America’s hand is consistently forced when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program aspirations. Wherever we turn, the salience of the Israel issue keeps popping back up again.

9. The most common sense way to resolve the issues with Israel and Palestine specifically is to create a two-state solution. Palestinians might hate Israel, but people have a habit of adapting to their practical circumstances. Maybe some skirmishes happen in the short run, but in the long run an equilibrium gets set with Israelis and Palestinians that is more healthy than the status quo we have now. However, even in a world where this happens, the core ‘Israel problem’ that America faces does not resolve.

10. Israel is a country with nukes in a region that is widely hostile to them. In the face of prolonged serious war, their only escalation maneuver is nuking people. Due to history relating to the Holocaust, Israel would actually nuke people in the wrong situation. In most contexts, the global danger of this situation would override practical sympathies to the specific country involved. We can picture a world where America sanctions Israel, globally shames them, and talks about Israel like an ‘apartheid state’. With enough legal sanction and poverty and social pressure, maybe Israel becomes poor, young Israelis flee, and turn against the country. Sufficiently brain drained and shamed, maybe a future version of Israel agrees to give up its nukes, avoiding the threat of nuclear escalation that Israel in its current form poses. Alternatively, maybe Israel in its diminished form becomes less of a target of animosity in the region, and more akin to the degraded ineffectiveness of a country like North Korea.

You might be able to criticize any specific set of policies on some grounds. But the idea this is pointing towards has merit. American elites clearly have sympathy for Israel that goes beyond the practical benefit the country gives America. If a country like South Sudan had nukes and was in a similar situation as Israel, America would not support them. There is some facet of the Israel calculus that is going undiscussed here. In addition to people in left-wing spaces, this is a point that the anti-semitic right also likes to bring up: if we are being ‘America First’, then why are we giving this invisible bump to Israeli sovreignity and priorities?

11. There are arguments floating around about this that are of a questionable quality. Some might mention Jewish cultural connection to American civilization or Jewish racial similarity to Americans. These are weak arguments that are easily torn down and that repel a lot of people. Some bring up a guilt about the Holocaust thing. People on the left respond to this by listing all of the other genocides that have happened globally that we are told to feel less guilt about, or past slavery in America that was not responded to with black nationalism or reparations. This seems to be the rare scenario where the political establishment is caught flat-footed, with weak, and easy to refute arguments. Why shouldn’t we treat Israel in a way that is completely utilitarian when it comes to American interests?

12. The reality is that Jews are intelligent. They are intelligent in terms of IQ scores. They are intelligent in terms of whatever intelligence test you give them. They are intelligent in terms of results, making up a wildly disproportionate share of great scientists, artists, and businessmen. They earn their greatness: figures like Einstein and Jonas Salk and George Soros and Steven Spielberg really did contribute a lot to humanity in a way the average smart guy could not have replicated given the same resources. When it comes to global well-being, Jews are a disproportionate important group that is disproportionately important to keep safe and prosperous. If Jews are at war, this means high intellect Jews will have less access to elite institutions and less time to think about big intellectual problems, and we will get less global innovation. Most political elites understand this even if they do not say it out loud.

Making this argument sounds needlessly provocative. However, this is what left-wing people are instinctively getting at when they poke and prod about Israel. People on the left have a keen sense of racism, and they can instinctively sense when one group is instinctively getting treated more favorably by political elites than another group. You can try to gaslight these people and tell them that this favorable treatment is not happening, but they are like sharks smelling blood in the water. They can sense it.

‘Everyone is born equal’ is a tenet that is good for society, but also not true. If everyone starts to believe in hereditary differences, we get brutal racism. If nobody believes it, we get bad policy that hurts the world. Ideally elites would not believe it, working class people would, and working class people would stay out of political discourse. However, working class people are becoming increasingly politically engaged. Social media has clearly changed society in all sorts of ways that we have not yet as a society developed good answers for.

2. Some conservatives actually cleanly resolve this. They will actually say that the schizophrenic is more evil than the wife-beater. They will also call nerds, losers, and dumb people evil. This way of thinking is a more common sentiment than corners of the internet might let on. However, this is not the default way that most think about it, and to defend my theory I do need to account for this broad counterexample to my theory in some way.

3. The philosophical subject of ‘free will’ is often discussed in a confused way. From the perspective of physics, all of our actions are as caused as the motions of a bowling ball rolling down a bowling track. From the perspective of our heads, these causal chains exist because we choose to make the decisions we make. From a shallow interpolation of the discourse, the amount of energy that people allocate to discussing the concept of ‘free will’ can seem like a complete waste of time.

4. The more interesting way to parse discussions of ‘free will’ is through the lens of how much someone can get swayed by social discourse. Someone who is schizophrenic cannot stop being schizophrenic because a family member shames them for being schizophrenic. Regardless of what others say to them, they will continue to wake up and hear the voices. In comparison, people who are wife beaters do seem more amenable to social pressure. If they get cussed out, stigmatized, and shamed enough, many stop the domestic abuse.

5. At some point in time, people agreed to stop calling people who are not swayable by social discourse ‘evil’. Calling them evil served no social purpose, as them hearing that they were evil did not cause them to change their behavior. If you wanted to get historical, you could say that this is what ‘slave morality’ originally represented. In the olden days, maybe all forms of unpopularity were equated with ‘moral badness’, but the proliferation of slave morality caused the standard to change from all forms of moral badness to forms of moral badness that social shame was effective at causing people to change or fix.

6. In modern times, this also takes on a stigma component. Someone who is schizophrenic ideally needs treatment for the voices. If you tell them that they are ‘bad’ for hearing the voices, they might never admit to doctors that they are, as doing so would be akin to admitting moral badness. Normally, in the ideal model, them internalizing that some aspect about themselves is ‘bad’ should cause them to change the bad behavior, but there are some psychological states, like being schizophrenic, where this does not apply.

7. In this broad sense, the way people use the words ‘evil’ and ‘good’ and ‘moral’ is bound up in practical social and historical contingencies. My broad hypothesis is still that ‘morality’ is just a rhetorically loaded word people use to track social popularity. ‘Moral’ people are popular ones and ‘immoral’ people are unpopular ones. The source of the popularity might involve some biological components (fairness reflex, superficiality, in-group/out-group dynamics), but most of it is tracking whether the person is already popular with the rest of your group. Insofar as figures like John Brown exist that martyr themselves for unpopular causes, they can usually be viewed as socially impotent people who are trying to ‘follow the ball’ in regard to how the sensibilities of high-status groups are evolving in a way that allows them a tiny chance of popularity in later life or after death. We might have a historically contingent reason why we call sects of unpopular people ‘not bad’, but this is likely a fragile norm that is not super compatible with human nature.

8. The other part of this article will be commentary on this blog.

9. I am not a very good writer right now. I am writing lots of articles with minimal promotion because I believe the practice of writing a lot will cause me to improve as a writer. I am writing about a diversity of topics because I think that forcing myself to write about lots of different topics will be better for my writing growth than sticking to a few niche topics where I happen to be knowledgeable will be. I think improving as a writer also causes me to improve as a thinker.

10. I plan to stick to this for a while. The consistent barrage of blog posts paired with no external promotion might seem odd to the external observer. From my vantage point, I really do just want to get good at stuff. Realistically, my writing is starting at a lower starting point than other people who are able to offer high quality analysis when it comes to politics or philosophy or psychology or internet culture. I probably need to spend years of writing to minimal or no audience to bridge that gap.

11. I am on the autism spectrum. I am also probably more on the autism spectrum than many internet people who are on the autism spectrum. I am not viscerally unpleasant and dense in the way a stereotypical neckbeard is: I always had a good sense of humor and sarcasm, which is odd for an autistic person. I was well liked in high school, and I get along with people at jobs. But I am very autistic in the developmental sense: late puberty, very attenuated social drives, serious stimming when anxious, etc. Part of the function of this blog will be to provide a source where my beliefs about everything are documented, so that if anybody in real life ever asks me what I believe about something, I can refer them to various posts that I have made on this blog. The autism thing also informs my perspective a lot regarding a lot of things: while I am not the same type of person as the stereotypical neckbeard, I do view people like this affectionately and as my ‘in-group’, and this informs my biases when it comes to how I think about a lot of things.

12. Criticism when it comes to my stylistic choices might be a little fraught, as the reason why I might write in a certain way might be fairly involved or hard to disentangle from the broader context of who I am and how I think. However, if anybody ever has recommendations on what subjects I am better at writing about or what subjects I am worse at writing about, this type of feedback would be valued.

2. Morals might be as objective or as real as Euclidean geometry. However, this does not mean that calling morals ‘objective’ or ‘real’ is a very helpful move when it comes to discussions about morals. Most debates about morality are at the axiomatic level. Some people think that it is obvious that a general minimize harm principle should be smuggled in as the load bearing axiom. Others might believe in a series of moral axioms based on historical and time-tested religious principles. People who call themselves ‘relativists’ might think that each person ought to pick their own axioms. In this sense, calling morals real tells us very little about how we should resolve debates about morality.

3. Some people resort to shame based arguments. They might say something like ‘well obviously everyone thinks that torturing babies is bad so clearly we all have a pre-rational sense of badness’. This is less of an argument and more a way to impose social norms on others: obviously very few are going to shout out, in a public forum, ‘I would be okay with torturing babies!’. A person who says this might get sharply rebuked, lose friends, become alienated from their community, or even lose their jobs.

4. A lot of moral discourse is more broadly loaded with a deep sensitivity to social norms. Moral tenets and principles are often foundational to identity. Parents, peers, and institutions work really hard to instill them into people. When something is so foundational to the identitarian waters you swim it, it can be easy to perceive it as an innate faculty. When we look at historical societies, some practices were conducted that would be repellent to modern sensibilities. Stuff like genocide, human sacrifice, widespread raping and pillaging, and things of this nature show up a lot in the historical record. People clearly are born with qualities, but they are also highly sensitive to social conformity and to internalizing social norms, and figuring out where one stops and the other one begins can be hard to parse.

5. Other people adopt a more nuanced form of moral psychological realism. They might say that the most foundational psychological impulses that people have are moral. Most people have an innate dislike of unfairness, an innate reflexive capacity to identify towards and relate to those that are suffering, and these are the deepest psychological impulses people have. If you were to map each mind out, in this view, the most foundational values would be ones that if, if society tried to act on them at scale, would produce broadly moral outcomes.

This is a risky position to adopt. It is heavily dependent on assumptions about the fundamental psychology of most people that could be wrong or incomplete. What if the subjective character of most innate psychological values is much more Darwinian than the way most are socialized implies? What if people have innate psychological values that are mostly geared towards conformity and mimicking the people around them? What if there is widespread variation in innate psychological values?

6. More broadly, psychological theories of morality run into a picking and choosing problem. Some psychological intuitions are fairly ‘good’ like empathy and fairness-craving. However, many people also like to bully, feel contempt for losers, and are extremely susceptible to outgrouping type dynamics. We can try to pick and choose what psychological characteristics we like in people, say the ones we like are morality, and the ones we dislike are not. But this just pushes the problem into a higher dimension: how are we doing the picking and choosing? Based on what criteria?

7. Some might try to retreat into arguments that invoke various flavors of universalizability. If everybody gleefully murdered, then society would collapse. Depending on how rigorously you wanted to make the argument, you could either stop the argument here, or move further into invoking a Kantian like argument involving concepts that if acted upon at scale would be self-nullifying. This strikes me as an odd standard. Most societies thrive in part due to psychological difference. For example, the fact that modern American society has some people who are conservative and resistant to change and other people who are liberal and eager to push it is likely good for both groups. If everyone was you, no matter what you are, society would likely collapse even if you were a reincarnation of Immanuel Kant.

8. Psychological based accounts of moral axioms also run into another problem. Even if we accept that most people are born with psychological values that serve as effective moral axioms, and can by and large come to agreement regarding which psychological values make moral axioms and which ones do not (which is assuming a lot, and the general structure of this article does not grant these assumptions, but we can assume it temporarily here), some will inevitably not have these faculties. This account of morality offers no reasoning to the psychopath as to why they should ‘behave morally’ and it positions what most people call ‘morality’ to be a systemized account of common psychological tendencies that have no more value than just existing in the form of a brute consensus. They might feel valuable to the people who have them, but to the psychopath, or the superintelligent AI, the weight put on them might seem entirely arbitrary and to be a product of arbitrary psychological intuitions.

9. In comparison, the problem with the relativist account is that someone could in theory install something like ‘murder as many people as possible’ as their sole terminal axiom, act on it consistently, become an extremely successful serial killer, and call themselves ‘moral’ for consistently adhering to their sole moral axiom in an effective way. This feels deeply not right to most people: if every person that behaves with logical consistency based on their most core values is moral, and everyone who does not do so is immoral, then a lot of murderers, predators, and rapists might be able to call themselves ‘moral’ while a lot of regular people might not be able to.

10. When we zoom out a little, this whole discourse seems confused. The terms are undefined. There is a lot of fuzziness as to what the discourse is trying to accomplish and why. If we wanted to give a psychological account when it comes to how people think and feel, we would stick to neuroscience and psychology and not ‘morals’. If we wanted to give an account of rational action given base axioms, we could look to economics or fields of of mathematics and decision theory. What is the point of this mushy flavor of philosophical discourse in the first place?

11. We can picture a version of Adolf Hitler who comes around much earlier than he does. Maybe he leads a Sparta type historical society. Maybe he leads a global conquest that actually succeeds. He conquers, plunders, and genocides ethnic populations under the guise of racial and group superiority. He repopulates substantial regions of the world with upper class people from his society. In this world, Hitler would likely inspire barely any negative emotional valence at all. Most would not know of him, a minority would have a positive opinion, and a smaller minority would call him one of history’s ‘underlooked tyrants’. Utilitarians would likely view him somewhat positively: maybe the widespread genocide and reproduction increased long-run IQ in certain regions which maybe lead to those regions having better long-term socioeconomic outcomes.

12. We can imagine a world where Ted Bundy was a moral net positive from a utilitarian standpoint. While Bundy caused a lot of pain through murdering, how much of a public sensation he was might have drawn states into improving their policies on serial killers and on working with other states in regard to solving crimes. This is not a guarantee to be true - I have not gone into the numbers and conducted a thorough analysis - but it could be true.

13. The fact that the above examples are so controversial and ick-inducing despite having logical merit illustrates an important point with the discourse here. The ‘common moral intuitions’ that we ‘all share’ about evil people involve figures that are widely despised and stigmatized by society. Figures like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Ted Bundy, Dylann Roof, and Jefferson Davis are widely viewed as evil by society. Digressing from this viewpoint in public forums has severe social consequences. The arbitrariness is almost obvious from a certain vantage point: Ted Kaczynski killed more people than Dylann Roof, and yet because the former is viewed as cool by a hidden strain of contemporary discourse, and the latter is viewed as completely repellent, the later inspires much more reflexive disgust and horror than the former.

14. We can work hard to find multifactor methods that seek to perfectly track with people that society deems to be the most evil right now. However, it seems like the biggest variable by a good amount is just whether or not the person’s broader social discourse happens to think they are evil. Maybe society is so refined that social discourse and social norms are happening to perfectly track the innate psychological intuitions of 95%+ of people, but I am personally skeptical of this interpretation.

15. Someone like John Brown could have plausibly suspected that he would be remembered as a moral hero after his death. By the time he was active, it had become the consensus of many educated people throughout the world that slavery was repellent. Even if his specific actions might have polled to be unpopular at the time he was doing it, the expectation that he would become popular after his death would have been a reasonable position for him to hold.\

16. In this sense, my view is that the most consistent way to think about morality is through a popularity contest framing. Being moral is synonymous with being popular and being immoral is synonymous with being extremely unpopular. The fixation on moral discourse and calling people ‘good’ or ‘bad’ comes from the desire people have to ground social mimickry based emotions on metaphysical grounds. Insofar as ‘morality’ is rooted in psychological intuitions, people might have some impulses relating to fairness and empathy and loyalty, but these tend to get overwhelmingly overpowered by social mimickry when it comes to moral judgement specifically.

17. This is not an incredibly novel position, but it is a position that allows us to base discussions about ‘morality’ on more empirical grounds. We can picture multiple strategies for becoming popular. Maybe you adhere to social norms and accrue status. Maybe you try to manipulate social discourse to make people think you deserve to be popular. Maybe you exploit gaps between social norms and psychological tendencies (for example, maybe you host a political show about how much you dislike fat women during the height of the fat positivity era). If impotent enough, maybe you pursue strategies that are likely to cause you to become popular and well-respected after your death. We might even be able to use sophisticated mathematical techniques to quantify and visualize tradeoffs with different popularity strategies and approaches. Discussions about morality are historically fuzzy and intangible, and maybe this frame could help base these discussions on more solid ground.

He was cold. He always felt nauseated in mornings. In the past, he had tried to eat something light and easy to make before driving to work, like a hot pocket. This has resulted in him puking all over his car while driving down the interstate.

He was sick and tired and cold. His legs felt numb. By the time he got into his vehicle, his face was completely red. He could feel pools of stress curdling in his armpits. He could feel a cough coming but it was like halfway lodged in his throat. If he wanted to excise it, he could, but potentially triggering his gag reflex this early in the morning is never a good idea.

There was nothing redeemable about any of this. The morning. The job that he would have daily panic attacks over to the point where he was losing feeling in his feet. The wife that he didn’t love and that clearly didn’t love him. The baby that would never stop crying. His life was cold, and long, and unfolding.

When he got into states like this, his pastor always told him to find solace in the ‘little things’. The way his baby laughed. The way snow fell on the ground during the early sun rise. His pastor has explained to us that everyone feels like their life is a disappointment sometimes. Everyone goes through highs and lows with their marriage, and everyone hates their job sometimes. During moments like that, the Catholic thing to do is to try to recognize how all of the little things around you are an expression of the Lord’s will. His Heavenly Presence is everywhere: in the snow, in the sky, in the eyes of your loved ones. One just had to look hard enough to see it.

He did not. When he looked into the eyes of his needy, demanding, unstable wife, all he saw was a pit of disorder and darkness. The snow was just cold and dirty. He was just tired.

........................................

He was going to hurt her when he got home.

He had the fucking audacity to make this bitch his fucking baby mamma and this is how she rewards him? By getting knocked up by another guy? Some fucking bitch ass motherfucker who works at the fucking Dollar General?

He always knew trusting hoes was a bad idea. And she was not even that good looking! What the fuck!

Normally by the time she would get home he would either be nodded off or driving in some sketchy ass fucking ghetto shithole hoping to deliver some ounces without getting his shit rocked. Lately he felt more tails than normal and wondered if his phones might be tapped.

.......................................

She was finally happy.

After the abusive relationships. After how hard it was putting herself through college. She had finally achieved a state in her life where she had reached something resembling peace.

She was dating a nice guy. Quiet. Fashionable. He didn’t talk very much and she liked that. They would sometimes stay late up into the night playing Mario Kart and binging Survivor together.

She had always spent her life like something was missing. From when she was a kid, it is like she was always on the cusp of happiness, but could never quite grasp it. There was always something intangible missing, and she had searched really hard to find it. She had dated ridiculous guys, and had changed her mind close to ten times on what she wanted to do as a career.

But her current setup was working. Jackson. Working with kids. For the first time in her life, a hazy image of what type of person she was going to be was becoming clearer in her head.

................................

When he had wacked her face with that tire-iron, she had started to talk shit about stuff like restraining order and legal action. He had already caught a case with his last girl, so this type of stuff was not a fucking option that she was allowed to consider.

He cuffed her to his bathtub, gagged her and locked the door. He swore that he had heard something crack during this whole thing but he was not going to think about this absolute fucking bullshit anymore than he had to.

The fucking kid wailed and wailed and wailed so he got it some McDonald’s so it would shut the fuck up. He then remembered that little babies don’t want no fucking McDonald’s, so he gave it its disgusting spit filled pacifier so that it would shut the fuck up again.

He then doubled his dose and injected instead of snorting. Injection would leave marks, so he was always cautious about not doing it too much. But if there was any day where he needed it, it was this bitch ass motherfucking day. It wasn’t until he had injected basically the whole needleful and then some that he had remembered that this batch had tasted a bit fenty when he first tried it yesterday.

...................................

When he drove by the house while doing his nightly patrols, he noticed some crappy rust filled car parked on the wrong side of the road. The windows were boarded up and broken and the car was packed with stuff.

The first place his mind always went when he saw stuff like this was: ‘niggers’. But he remembered the guy who owned the house it was parked by. It was some white-trash wigger who had gotten multiple domestic disturbance complaints from neighbors. Basically, he had a woman, and he constantly beat the shit out of her.

He put the ticket on the car. He knew that if they could get him three nights in a row, they could boot his car, and maybe bait him into getting a disorderly conduct charge. Trash like this had no right to be in his neighborhood.

.........................................

They had written him up. Apparently the sick day policy was written in such a way where workers were allowed to take up to 10 sick days, but actually taking 10 was a violation of company policy. He had gotten written up, and they had limited him to taking 3 sick days for the next calendar year.

A normal person in his position would have considered switching jobs, but he was able to grift his way into hardly doing anything at this one, which is a privilege he would likely not be able to replicate at a new one.

During his work day, he had gotten four texts and three phone calls from his obviously angry and distressed wife. Apparently their son was colicky and crying, so she took him to the hospital. The texts were passive-aggressive: she obviously wanted him to come to see them at the hospital, but she did not want to say this directly. ‘He should know’.

He was not going to go the hospital. He went to McDonald’s, got a Filet-O-Fish meal with a Coke, went home, and crashed.

When his wife had gotten home, she had screamed at him all night. She took her blood pressure, and it was so high that she had considered checking herself into the hospital herself. The only respite from the brutal verbal lashing was something they had both noticed: that weird car was parked on the wrong side of the road, again. It was the 18th, so it needed to be on the side closest to their house, and yet it was on the other side. The next morning he called the city, leaving a voicemail, and thought little more about the situation.

...........................................

When she didn’t see Johnny get dropped off in the morning, she worried.

She did not like to stereotype, but when she first saw the parents, she made a mental note. Dad was clearly not a great influence. Mom was dishelved and nervous looking. Mom had reminded her of what she had grown into with some of her worse boyfriends: her face drained, jittery, clearly covering up old bruises with makeup. She knew it was none of her business, but it also was a little?

If she didn’t see Johnny tomorrow, she was going to think about possibly calling the police to make sure everything was alright. She didn’t know if this was exceeding her professional boundaries, but having a talk with her boss about it would have been awkward.

.................................................

When he had busted down their door, even he was shocked by the depravity he saw. He knew that Liam was trash, but the scope of this astounded him. Roaches all over. Cash hidden in the floorboards. His woman, tied up, barely alive, gagged, and chained to the bathtub. The kid and Liam were clearly dead.

He would never say this out loud, but he quietly wondered if the situation was the best way it could have possibly went. That kid was Liam’s kid, and he knew how these things went. People would treat the kid fairly, try to befriend him, and the kid would still end up being not good news at all just like his father.

But Ruth was a good girl. Maybe this situation would give her an opportunity to make a fresh start. Maybe it would give her a new perspective on life. He was always careful to be optimistic, but his therapist had been telling him to try to look on the bright side more. To ‘smell the roses’.

...................................................

It was the day before Christmas and he was watching It’s A Wonderful Life with his wife and son on the TV. She had just told him that she was pregnant again. They had a long discussion, and she made it clear that she needed him to be a more involved parent than he had been being. He agreed, and they were getting along for the first time in what felt like ages.

He was privately sure he did not have it in him. He did not like his kids very much. He didn’t know why: he just didn’t. Maybe it would change as he got older and maybe it wouldn’t.

The main character in the movie reminded him of his saintly mother. How she had always tried to please everyone, always sacrificed for everyone, and was basically the one-woman glue that had held his entire family together. His pastor always rued how he was not able to see the divinity in every day life, but one thing he always saw divineness in was his mother.

But he was content in this moment. His house was warm. The movie provoked fond memories in him. He privately said an Our Father in his head, and hoped that the Lord would bless him more going forward.

The next morning, on Christmas day, as he watched the sun rise, he did briefly feel God’s presence. It came and went in an instant, and immediately when it faded he started to hear loud crying from down the hall.

2. All of these are straightforward problems you would have to live with if you had a weak enough of a self-concept. Most people blunt extreme emotions by stable top-down priors they have about themselves: ‘I love my wife’, ‘I am the type of guy who figures shit out’, so on and so forth. If you have no priors of this nature, strong emotions could get nasty. If you have no self-concept, it would be natural to try to just take and copy the identities of people you like. If you have no stable account of what you want and desire out of life, making decisions when you have a lot of options would feel impossible.

3. Borderlines might represent the extreme scenario, but there are many people who have weaker than usual self-concepts. These people might not be entirely sure what they want in life, these people might be a little too codependent in relationships, and these people might feel subtly disassociated on a moment-by-moment basis. The behaviors might not be extreme enough to warrant a clinical diagnosis of ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ in a psychiatric context, but they have the same problems that borderlines have in a more attenuated form.

4. In a broader sense, we can put most people on a spectrum. One side of the spectrum might involve people with too strong self priors. This might lead to unhelpfully rigid and dogmatic behavior. If you strongly believe that you are a ‘chill guy’, and this prior is so strong that it overrides any practical situation where it might be helpful to worry, then maybe you die from some severe health issue because you never worried enough to notice that something was wrong. On the other side of this spectrum might be borderlines.

5. The upside to having weak self-priors is the opposite of the downside of having self-priors that are too strong. When you have weak self-priors, you can react to a lot of different types of situations. People with strong self-priors are contained: if their self-concept is ‘not a worrier’, they might struggle in situations where they need to worry a lot, or if their self-concept is ‘chill guy’, they might struggle in contexts where someone is bullying them. In comparison, people with BPD and borderline-like personalities do not have these type of limitations. Their identity is ‘unconstrained’: they can get very sad, they can feel fiery rage, they can be happy-go-lucky, calm, disciplined, bored, ‘chill’, entertain unusual ideas, and any other emotional or intellectual state you can think of, without feeling like it is ‘weird’ or ‘unnatural’.

6. When it comes to the autism spectrum, there is a functioning cliff. High-functioning autistic people are often good with tech, mathematics, and computers. However, when the autism gets severe enough, you start to see adults who never develop verbal skills and never develop the capacity to become independent adults. Borderline-like personalities seem similar. When you make someone’s self-priors weak enough, you get proper BPD, which leads to people who are frequently abusive, dysfunctional, and suicidal. But in the way low-functioning autistic people tell us little about the natural proclivities and strengths of high-functioning autistic people, proper borderlines likely tell us little about the natural strengths of people with more attenuated borderlike-like personalities

7. Having weak self-priors, when the self-priors are not weak enough to make the person collapse, is a good thing to have when solving problems. Different problems have different solutions. Sometimes an intellectual problem might require a conventional solution and sometimes an intellectual problem might require something that is completely out-of-the-box. Different people are different: some people might need to be treated nicely, others might respond to displays of anger, and some might be extremely consensus-oriented and just mirror whatever the group tells them to do.

If you are the type of person who bounds yourself to a rigid behavior or problem-solving mode - ‘I am a conventional thinker’, ‘I am an esoteric thinker’, ‘I am always nice’, ‘I am always conventionally macho and tough’ - you are going to inevitably mast yourself to a problem-solving model that will not always work. In comparison, if you have the behavioral flexibility of someone with an attenuated borderline-like personality, you can pick and choose your approach based on the situation.

8. In comparison, having weak but not identity-collapsing self-priors is bad when it comes to reliability and stability. Having weak self priors would make you struggle with consistency. You might struggle to be consistently on time at your job. You might struggle to finish workplace tasks in a timely manner. You might get distracted at work. Your romantic preferences might shift too much, preventing the stable roots of a long-term marriage from ever forming for you. You might occasionally make wardrobe related slip-ups at work. You might get sick of friends, forget to call your family and friends enough, and flip-flop career paths multiple times over your life.

The main benefit of top-down self-priors is that they give you stability. When people have strong top-down priors, the priors get truly locked in. If someone strongly has the self-concept that they are ‘reliable’, then they really are always reliable. They will be reliable today, they will be reliable next week, and they will be reliable a year from now. They will be reliable when their car breaks down, when a long-term partner dumps them, and when they have looming medical anxiety. In comparison, people with weak but not absent self-priors might struggle with this. They might generally succeed at being reliable for the most part, but cracks might show. Their quality of work might decline somewhat when they are under a lot of stress. Maybe they do not do their laundry as much as they should, because when they are at home they are not the ‘same person they are at work’.

9. This means that, contradictory to what you picture when you imagine someone with full-blown BPD, people with attenuated borderline traits are meant for dynamic, high-stress environments. In a workplace context like an ER, a social worker at a group home, a prison warden, or a high-stakes nuclear engineer or coder or company founder in SIlicon Valley, rote consistency matters less, and ability to adapt and perform in the face of dynamic high stakes environments that require flexible problem-solving strategies becomes much more important.

10. Sometimes families have children who are medium-functioning autistic. They are verbally eloquent and can communicate normally and maybe have had 1-2 friends. However, they are also not Bill Gates: maybe they are very solitary, maybe they do not date, and maybe they demonstrate little to no professional success. When families have children like this, the default is to always push them first. You try to send them to college, to push them into high-paying career fields, etc. Then, if the kid/adult collapses, really struggles, or clearly seems not cut out for it, then you maybe recalibrate the expectations.

People with attenuated borderline-like personalities are likely similar. Their personalities are optimally calibrated for high-stress and dynamic environments. However, this is a double-edged sword: the same environments that they are the best at navigating can also cause some to have nervous breakdowns. It depends on the person and how severe their borderline-like personality features are. I think the approach with attenuated borderline-likes should be the same as the approach most families have with medium functioning autistics: the default should be trying to have them succeed in the optimal environment for their strengths, and if something clearly is going wrong the person can pull back or the person’s support system can pull them back.

11. This idea also has a political dimension. Over time, society has become abnormally rewarding of people with strong self-priors. We do not engage in war much, the amount of dynamic and high-stakes problems out there has gone down, or has gotten institutionalized, and an increasing number of educational and professional institutions are increasingly rewarding stability and reliability over dynamic problem-solving ability. In a sense, Donald Trump is a rebuke of this trend. He consistently throws American society into a chaotic skirmish, where the people who are rewarded are the ones that can think fast and quickly adjust to new situations. People with attenuated borderline-like personalities might have a strategic interest in Trumpism: the chaos makes society more favorable to them, and less favorable to people with strong self-priors.

2. Liberal feminist discourse in the early to mid 2010s was incredibly hostile to men on the autism spectrum. Stereotypes like ‘neckbeards’ and ‘fedora wearers’ gained prominence, and criticism of ‘entitled nice guys’ who ‘expected their niceness to automatically convert into sex’ proliferated. Men who seemed to lack social awareness or make social missteps were more villainized by feminist discourse than men who are outright abusers, rapists, assaulters, and deadbeats were. This double standard persists today: communities like BlueSky are mostly willing to look the other way if a man has past abuse accusations as long as the accusations are not a viral social media trend, but men who are awkward and socially miscalibrated are not accepted and harshly cracked down upon by moderation.

3. This standard seems to extend to how women judge other women. Women who commit mild social missteps - wearing their makeup the wrong way, being too flirty, too promiscuous, rudely interrupting other people in conversation - get harshly judged by other women, booted from woman friend groups frequently, and often have to retreat into social domiciles of having ‘many male friends’.

4. While psychological speculation is outside the scope of this article, autism seems to mostly be an innate thing. Normally intelligence is correlated with everything: if you are smart enough, you are good at learning math, writing, and also social dynamics. There might be some minor variation, but by and large smart people are normally pretty good at most things they try to do.

Autism is different. For whatever reason, there is a subsect of the male (and a smaller subsect of the female) population that broadly have high intelligence when it comes to learning to get good at things, and broadly have low intelligence when it comes to learning to get good at navigating and reading social dynamics. They are good at understanding rule-based systems, and less good at understanding ambiguous, context-heavy domains. Therefore, while autistic people can improve socially, they can improve socially in the way someone with an 85 IQ can improve at math. They can go from being incompetent to being regularly below average, but the social skills always lag behind their intelligence in other domains to a significant extent.

5. There is a subsect of autistic men (and presumably autistic women) who have below average IQs in a not spiky way. Being autistic by itself does not make someone automatically have average to above average intelligence. However, being below average intelligence and also having autism is basically a death sentence life functioning wise. You are not smart, and your social skills lag significantly behind your already low intelligence. Autistic people like this might never develop language, never develop the social awareness to think about anything in a deep and perspectived way, and are usually clockable as ‘obviously and deeply disabled’ by anyone who seems them at a first glance. Therefore, when this article talks about autistic men, the implication is that we are talking about autistic men who have average-to-above-average intelligences.

6. Let’s say someone just doesn’t like you. They do not like you because of your personality. They do not value your personality strengths much, and then sharply dislike your personality weaknesses. Are you going to like them? Probably not. Therefore, as social media made it evident that most women do not like autistic guys, they hate the social awkwardness and do not value the systematic intelligence very much, autistic guys started to dislike women. When women and feminine communication norms started to become synonymous with liberal spaces, autistic guys started to dislike liberals.

7. Despite mostly being made up of unsuccessful people, autistic men are disproportionately represented among the smartest and most influential members of society. Elon Musk has self-reported having ‘Asperger’s’, and Bill Gates has said to the press that he likely would have gotten an autism diagnosis had he been a young person in more contemporary times. Autistic men, stemming from their social skill issues, often pursue solitary mastery of some niche hobby at expense of spending time with peers, friends, and family members. Frequently, this goes badly: their ‘special interest’ might be something useless like action figurine painting or Mario speedrunning or building birdhouses, and the socialization deficits they incur shrink their network and magnify the already present social deficits. However, in a minority of instances, the niche hobby can be something more monetizeable or useful. If the autistic person does devote a truly excessive amount of time at the right interest, they can become the best in the world at some economically useful skill. Therefore, we see a world where most high-functioning autistic men are kind of disappointing underachievers, with a minority of them flipping the script and being economically invaluable overachievers.

8. In comparison to the hostility of most of the internet towards them, incel and groyper communities provided a refuge for many autistic men online. Women don’t like autistic guys and the virulent misogyny kept the women out. The sense of humor built around transgressing social norms and ‘trolling’ fit the natural humor style of many autistic guys. The communities would celebrate and lionize social failure. The communities were sharply antagonistic towards liberals and had enough doxxers to scare off potential infiltrators. Regardless of whether autistic men in the communities agreed with the literal ideology of them, these communities provided a ‘safe space’ where autistic men could join social groups where they could gain status, make friends, and be liked, without being socially shamed, judged, bullied, or ostracized.

9. Being nominally right-wing, albeit in mostly a rhetorical, provocative way, men in these incel and groyper spaces had tangential exposure to people in more regular conservative spaces. Through this exposure, a ‘surprising’ revelation occured: conservatives did not seem to dislike autistic men very much. While people on the (actual, not trolling) right did not seem to like labels like ‘autism’, the general temperament of being male-brained, systemizing, introverted, and having poor social skills relative to your intelligence, was something that they seemed fine with.

10. This attribute seemed to connected to the right’s conservatism on gender. Between 2008 and 2016, the left had been working hard to win over woman voters. They had been running candidates with more feminine friendly affects: more agreeable, less angry, more focused on social issues and less focused on economic issues. This attempt to appeal to women likely scaled down to members of the coalition: given that the perspectives and the support of women were becoming more important to the party, members of the base whose personalities most women disliked were getting viewed as bigger liabilities than they would have been in the past.

In comparison, the right-wing, being the more conservative party, deliberately resisted this trend. As the left was getting more feminine friendly, their politicians were getting less feminine friendly, with politicians like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Donald Trump frequently getting angry, confronting others, and having controversy laden personal lives. In a broader sense, right-wing people did seem to stand for a traditional partitioning of gender where men were more overrepresented in political discourse, in politics, in elite business strata, so on and so forth. Therefore, in the minds of regular conservatives, a man having a personality that a lot of women did not like was not that big of a deal. What mattered was whether other important men in the coalition liked you, and poor social attunement bothers most men much less than it bothers most women.

11. Therefore, the Trump era offered a vicarious deal for autistic guys. Trump would wage war on the people that had historically mocked and bullied you: women, the liberal establishment, the journalists who tried to make your video games a popularity contest. His coalition would also welcome you: his supporters would treat you nicely, hear what you had to say, and even put you in positions of power if you were intelligent and capable enough. He was fierce, charismatic, and the same normal people who effortlessly deride and humiliate you look upon him with fear.

12. The current state of affairs is a bitter pill for autistic men to swallow. As women gain more power and representation in society, and more influence over society, autistic men will become more low status, and more gatekept out of prestigous social and career related positions. This is not a conscious choice that most women make: they just happen to value social attunement more than men, and so a world where they get more influence just naturally leads to diminishing social and career prospects for autistic men. Accepting a downwardly mobile status position but getting minor aide or minor social work programs from a liberal government is a small consolation.

In comparison, the conservative world offers a system that offers much more status and prestige to autistic men. By rolling back feminism, instituting other forms of hierarchy that penalize criminals and impulsive men and immigrants, the conservative world creates a world where the autistic man can still have a respectable place in the social hierarchy.

Most people are more self-interested and tribal than they seem. Very few black people are going to vote for a party that they think is bad for black people because they happen to agree with the racist party’s viewpoints on tax policy. Autistic men are, by and large, going to vote for the party that has a policy platform that is most favorable to the interests of autistic men, and the party that seems the most socially favorable on an individual level to autistic men.

13. This is a bigger strategic deal than it seems. Autistic men naturally occupy a disproportionate amount of extremely high IQ people. Most autistic men are not geniuses, but a small amount of them are. If autistic men are incentivized to defect to the GOP, in its current far-right form, then the inevitable endgame of this is you are going to have some of the smartest people in America throwing their full support behind far-right policies. We already see this beginning to happen now, with Elon’s algorithm tweaking on Twitter/X, or Nick Fuentes’s rapid audience growth as one of the most verbally well-spoken and charismatic political commentators online, who also happens to be so far-right that even Chris Rufo does not like him.

14. Woke is usually remembered as a negative era for most people in corners of the internet that have elevated amounts of autistic men or fringe autistic men. However, this was not true for everybody. For some people, the increased importance of social signaling in that era was very good for them. Autistic men in a sense have a losing hand here to play: increased gender equality is going to lead to more social marginalization, more status loss, and more social struggle for them, but the alternative are political ideologies with extremely poor track records. They are in a zugzwang: every movement worsens their position.

2. Neither of these camps have ever felt quite right to me. Your life is never going to be optimal: even if there are things going wrong, the reality is that if you need to complete something for a job or as part of your schooling, then not doing it will usually make your life worse relative to doing it. The potential ‘meaningfulness’ of the procrastination signal does not make procrastinating a good decision in most situations. At the same time, people who frequently procrastinate do often seem like they have structural issues in their lives that go deeper than just issues relating to their willpower.

3. One perspective you can come to is that both procrastinating a lot and having deeper issues in your life are common symptoms of having certain types of mental issues, like depression, ADHD, autism, or bipolar. In this view, procrastinating is solely a neural defect and a psychological issue.

I disagree with this vantage point. I think that if you took the subsect of the population that struggles the most with procrastination and ‘willpower’, and caused their issues with this to recede, that their lives would in many cases get worse as much as they would get better. This article will attempt to explain why I think this would happen.

4. One way to think about identity is through a bottom-up top-down model. The top-down level is your sense of self: your broad narratives about who you are, what type of person you are, and the narrative trajectory of your life. The bottom-up stream is a reaction to practical stimuli: swerving to avoid accidents, eating when you are hungry, and sensibly overriding your general identity priors when situations demand it.

We can picture lots of bizarre outcomes when the top-down model is too powerful. If you have a self-narrative about being a nice person that is too strong, then maybe people are consistently able to abuse you and mistreat you without you ever standing up for yourself or entering a different mode. More extremely, if you had a strong enough of a narrative of being a ‘calm person’, then maybe you drive straight into an oncoming car accident without swerving because the top-down identity prior was ‘calmness’ and it just overrided any practical reaction to what was happening in front of you.

5. In comparison, an excessive bottom-up model would entail having no sense-of-self. A good way to think about the problems that come with this would be looking at people who have BPD. People with BPD have strong labile emotions, as they lack the stable self-narratives most of us have (‘I am a loving husband’ ‘I am a chill guy’) to override spontaneous emotions. People with BPD are impulsive and are unable to consistently pursue stable goals. In addition, having no self-concept makes it much harder to internalize relational and moral norms. The vantage point of ‘I will be a good person’ is, in a sense, a top-down story that you are telling yourself about your self-character. If you have no top-down self-narrative, then maybe this happens to an incredibly limited extent, or even not at all.

6. In this frame, procrastination is a conflict between the top-down and bottom-up identity systems. The top down system has priors about your self-character: ‘I am chill’, ‘I do not worry very much’, ‘I am not a tryhard’. The bottom up system identifies something that needs to be done, and wants the top-down system to go offline so that it can reorient you to completing the task. The top-down system initially resists: your self-character is not the type of person that would finish the important task in an early and effective manner, so it resists the bottom-up system’s attempts to act ‘out of character’.

As the deadline gets closer, the bottom-up system freaks out more, and once it gets anxious past a certain threshold, the top-down system concedes and gives it the steering wheel.

7. Your bottom-up identity system gaining more power relative to your top-down identity system is not always a straightforwardly good thing. Your top-down identity system, while sometimes an impediment to action, also creates the self-narrative preconditions that make people want to be responsible and independent in the first place. Borderlines have infinite ‘willpower’, but they are unable to do anything with it, as they have no stable goals.

8. Even on a smaller scale, increasing the power of the bottom up system frequently presents practical downsides. We all have uncles or relatives that are into esoteric and unusual hobbies. Maybe they are a little too religious, maybe they are really into astrology, or maybe they are too political online. In many cases, the things that prevent these interests from getting too obsessive and life-ruining are their top-down identity priors: they are a ‘chill guy’, they ‘like football and relaxing’, and so the ability of their ‘will’ to upend their lives in favor of these niche interests is limited. Even if the ‘logic’ of why astrology is definitely true or the ‘logic’ of why the elites used COVID to inject microtrackers into people’s bodies wins their bottom-up system over, the top-down system constrains the blast radius.

Therefore, we often see rationalist and rationalist-adjacent people who become too effective at overriding their top-down priors get indoctrinated into cults and other contexts with bad faith actors.

9. A more realistic choice for fighting procrastination is reorienting your self-concept. Instead of trying to bully your top-down sense-of-self into doing ‘out of character’ things, you try to change your top-down sense-of-self. Before you had an identity of being a slacker, a bum, kind of lazy and an underachiever. If your sense of self becomes a dilligent hard-worker instead, then not procrastinating might flow naturally outwards from your sense-of-self.

The big thing to consider with such of approach has to do with narrative. The top-down identity system thrives on narratives. If you are a slacker and an underachiever one day and wake up the next day and say ‘I am a type A personality now’, this is not convincing to your top-down system. The transition would have to be a more convincing story, involving you maybe getting treatment for anxiety, moving to a different area, coming to terms with your core traumas while on hallucinogens, so on and so forth. Your top-down system responds to narrative salesmanship and compelling story: it is not a light switch you can easily flip on and off.

10. In a broader sense, procrastination by itself is not a gigantic thing to worry about. If you are the type of person identity wise who others would say ‘that person is probably a procrastinator’, then you will probably procrastinate. Demolishing your top-down identity priors so that your will can do anything it wishes to address this is likely to cause much more harm than good. If you want to be a different type of person, holistically, and this different type of person would come with naturally procrastinating less, then changing who you are might be a productive endeavor. Alternatively, you can take steps to mildly procrastinate less, and wrestle a little control over your top-down system, but these gains are likely to be limited and not sweeping in nature.

2. Maybe you make the rule more vigorous: a man is a predator if he flirts with a woman, she expresses verbal discomfort, explicitly expresses her discontentment towards the approach attempts, and the man continues despite this.

The neurotic woman, hearing this, frowns. If you set this as a rule, cunning, duplicitous men will feign naivety, take advantage of the confrontation avoidant nature of many women, and manipulate their way into coercive sexual encounters. This behavior is clearly predatory.

3. Maybe the term ‘predator’ is subjective and contextual and what matters more is what is legally prohibited.

What should be legally prohibited? What behavior is so over the line that in every instance, no matter what, it should always be met with legal punishment?

4. The first obvious one is rape. Rape is always bad. No matter what guy is doing it, no matter what the situation is, rape is unambiguously evil, and deserves a felony record and prison time. This is as clear cut as it gets.

5. What is rape? If a guy holds down a woman who is screaming no, has sexual intercourse with her, and afterwards she goes to the police, gets a rape kit, and the rape kit comes back positive, this is rape. If a man roofies a woman, has sex with her unconscious body, and she wakes up after he leaves, this is also rape. If a man is at a bar with a woman who is drinking, and the man is not drinking, and the man goes back to the woman’s room with the woman and sleeps with her, while she is very drunk, and he is completely sober, this is rape.

What if the bar situation replays with the man and the woman, but this time the man is sober, and the woman is a little drunk? What about a situation where a man sleeps with a woman, and they are both drunk? What if they are both drunk but the man is an alcoholic, and so he is more lucid relative to his level of drunkness than the woman? What about a traditional woman playing ‘hard to get’ who resists the man’s sexual overtures but is secretly happy that he is making them?

6. Only a scumbag asks this many details about what does versus does not constitute rape. Rape is the worst of all crimes versus women. If you are asking a million questions about the granular boundaries as to what does versus does not constitute rape, you are clearly a toxic man trying to rape women in a way that gives you plausible deniability. Your toxicness might not always come through in how your actions relate to rules and object-level norms, but it is embedded in the social gestalt of how you navigate the world on a fundamental level.

7. ‘Woke’ is mostly gone. People who are ‘woke’ are mocked by right-wing, dominantly male spaces of internet for being delusional and naive. You can’t ‘abolish gender’: women are different from men, there will always be few woman geniuses compared to male ones, men will always be more violent than women, less attached to children than women, women will always be hypergamous, duplicitous. Blacks are poorer than whites because they are inferior to whites: look at the IQ scores, the respective rates of criminality, really anything. Everybody knows that ‘IQ scores are one of the most replicated findings in social science’ and is ‘much more heritable than tied to the environment’. Everybody knows what the adoption studies on black babies look like. The ‘blacks are just suppressed by the environment hypothesis’ is delusional, unfalsifiable, naive.

8. This is the way future school shooters think. Nobody who is well socialized, safe, and trustworthy is talking about how dysgenic black people are or calling them ‘blacks’. The thinking style, vernacular, and depressive misanthropy is almost a blow-for-blow recreation of the tone of how Elliot Rodger and Dylann Roof wrote and communicated. The case for woke is almost self-evident in this lens: look at the people who are opposing it. Ignore the ‘facts’ and the ‘logic’ and just look at them. Do you want to be these people? Do you want these people to shape the ideological and political direction of society?

9. Picture Scott Alexander having a debate with Matt Walsh. Scott Alexander is making a pro-heroin-usage argument, and Matt Walsh is making an anti-heroin-usage argument. Who wins? We all understand that using heroin is likely bad for the average person. Nevertheless, Scott Alexander, being much more intelligent than Matt Walsh, would almost certainly win the debate. Intelligence is far more important than rightness when it comes to making convincing arguments and winning arguments.

10. What makes a man a predator? A rapist? There are two answers to that question. The first answer is whatever the law says. You create some arbitrary laws, try to make them as precise as possible. You have spirited debates over how to make the text of the law meet the spirit of how we subjectively define ‘predatoriness’ and ‘rape’ and ‘abuse’. Once the law is written, you let the chips fall where they may. If a not rapey guy gets called a rapist by the letter of the law, that’s the cost of having a rigid and rule bound system.

The second answer is you size the guy up. You look at the guy. Or, not you, but the woman, looks at the guy, and the police look at the guy, and the community looks at the guy. Is this guy a shady sketchy character? Do we have all of the relevant information? What do we think about the relevant information? The law tries to recreate the thousands of subconscious factors we psychologically weigh when deciding whether a man’s actions are rapey or not rapey, predatory or not predatory, abusive or not quite abusive: why not just eliminate that layer, and get the cut of the man’s jib?

11. The failure mode of the law based approach is Dennis. Dennis is a scummy, sleazy guy. Dennis studies the fine text of the law, and does everything short of breaking it. If the age of consent is 16, he waits outside of ACT prep sessions at the local high school to pick up juniors.

The failure of the social approach is Tucker. Tucker is well-liked and integrated into the community. When Tucker rapes a woman, he counters the accusation by making pleas to the woman, her friends, the community. He organizes social coalitions that overcome any trouble: no matter how severe the accusation is, Tucker is Tucker, and the cut of Tucker’s jib is not that of a rapist or a predator.

12. We can picture an archetypical conservative image of a deranged guy on a subway. He might be shouting to himself. He might be pacing. He might have clothing that looks four days old. He looks angry, aggressive, and dangerous. Maybe this guy does not ‘snap’ during one particular afternoon a mother and her kids are on the subway. But should what he is doing be illegal? Absolutely. He is a menace. Throw him away in prison and lock away the key.

13. Maybe the rich people can live in a society of laws and the poors can live in a society of reputations. The laws are good for productivity: they mitigate complex legal disputes, they create the preconditions for things like ‘economic productivity’, and other abstractions that are mostly irrelevant to the working man. The working man has little interest in being a pawn in some complex, mediated system: he just wants to die with dignity, knowing that others respected the cut of his jib.

14. Being an asshole is not cool in the society of reputations. Black people are your coworkers, peers, neighbors, and if there is not respect there you have problems. We need to get the derelict menaces off the subway but that is a not racial issue. You say that blacks are more likely to be those guys than whites? Let’s see where that logic gets you when you need someone to have your back. Maybe you are in the police station and the cop is deciding whether your jib meets the cut of someone who deserves criminal charges or not. If he’s black, the edgelord like Fuentes rhetoric might not be so funny now.

15. The society of laws, in comparison, needs to be able to engage in this type of discourse. The society of laws needs to be able to evaluate how realistic different policy agendas are. Fine-grained legal debates over how to precisely legally define rape and abuse in the society of laws are important. Laws enable coordination, economic growth, and prevent the world from becoming a race-to-the-bottom-type social game. You need laws to adhere to the better nature of humanity and to push the human race forward.

The society of laws also deeply values debates over the extent to which racial and gendered differences are real and fixable with policy implementations. Is the gender based STEM gap biological? Can it be remedied by socialization? To what extent? In the society of laws, these type of debates deeply matter, as they shape the policy and legal structure of the society.

16. The society of laws might be vulnerable to hate speech and Dennis types, while the society of norms might lead to minimal economic growth and be vulnerable to the Tucker types.

But let’s be honest. Dennis isn’t rich and Tucker isn’t poor. The ‘working class’ of America isn’t growing anything and rich people are not tolerating hate speech in the first place.

17. America is not developing Brazil-type compounds yet, but this type of sorting is happening quickly. If you are not rich, you better get woke again fast. You don’t have the reputational capital to lose women and racial minorities from your social coalition. You live in the favelas, not in the compound.

2. In addition to registering with many voters, this issue has also seemed to strike a cord with some politicians. Politicians like Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert have seemed to be deeply troubled and scandalized over the ‘Epstein files’. Politicians are performative and dishonest, so some of this affect might be currying favor with voters. However, it is my opinion that these figures have gone beyond personal expendiency in their anti-Epstein advocacy: they have been truly firebrand-like and passionate about this issue in a way that seems more likely to harm their careers in the long-run than to help it. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fallout with Trump seemed to stem in part from her vocal anti-Epstein advocacy, and Thomas Massie has become persona non grata from the MAGA base in part due to his continued outspokenness on this issue.

3. Figuring out what the ‘Epstein issue’ is from an outsider perspective can be challenging. We know that Epstein was a very wealthy man who owned a private island. We know that he was friends with many other extremely rich people. We know that he would have parties on this island where he would sometimes invite his wealthy friends. We know that at these parties, there were often sex workers employed in back rooms who basically served as prostitutes, and that some of the wealthy people who attended these parties would sleep with these prostitutes. We know that some, albeit not all, of these prostitute women were underage, and we also know that the general employment structure by which they got paid was likely fairly predatory.

We do not know that Epstein was involved in more lurid situations. However, from the available content we have gotten from emails Epstein sent and received from other rich people, he seemed to inhabit the role in the lives of these other wealthy people as a ‘fixer’. They would go to him about personal problems, talk with him about things that they were less comfortable bringing up around polite company, so on and so forth. Epstein had the reputation in these wealthy social circles of being charismatic, ‘street smart’, good with women, and hypersexual, so it it seems reasonable to assume that he was socially involved in more lurid situations from time to time.

All of this is true, but what is the ‘issue’? What do people want? There have not been a lot of calls for prosecutions, and prosecutions would require a beyond a reasonable doubt threshold, which would be difficult to acquire from emails, limited physical evidence, and a witness log that has likely gone cold by now. The big thing here is that people want is to know as much as possible. They want to see every email Epstein ever sent and received, they want to see every picture and piece of information the government has on him, so on and so forth. A bulk of people, both right-wing and left-wing, have become convinced that there are a lot of Epstein related ‘secrets’ that the government is hiding, and they want to see what these secrets are.

4. While advocates can push their justifications too far, making odd and bizarre claims that seem more out of an Oliver Stone movie than reality, the belief that there is a broader conspiracy at play here does have a decent amount of plausibility for the standard of conspiracy theories.

The witness testimony list that was released with the Epstein files does contain a lot of lurid and bizarre information. The testimony of a lot of these witnesses seems flawed: a lot of these people seem like they have mental health issues, others seem to be exaggerating somewhat for attention, and some of the more bizarre claims on the FBI tipline list are obvious fabrications. At the same time, someone being weird does not make them a liar. There are a decent amount of really odd, disturbed seeming people and a lot of odd, weird seeming FBI tips reporting a lot of odd and unusual Epstein related behavior. While I doubt the reports or the claims match the specific gestalt of how things actually worked in Epstein’s world, there is something to the ‘when there is smoke, there is fire’ heuristic.

The way the Trump administration has handled this is odd. Relocating Ghislaine Maxwell to a lower security prison, seemingly in tacit exchange for testimony that Trump was not involved with Epstein, was odd. You have the notorious cut out of the footage when Epstein committed suicide in his prison cell. You had Kash Patel claiming that there was nothing to the Epstein files on Rogan, followed by a release of extensive emails and FBI tipline reports a year or so later. Parsing things this granularly, finding mild asynchronicities, and screaming ‘conspiracy’ are what crazy conspiracy theorists often do, and the Trump administration historically has handled many things weirdly, so it is not worth overreading into this specific thing. However, conspiracies do not never happen, and if Trump was involved with Epstein in a greater than casual capacity, he would have incentive to try to ‘make the situation go away’.

There are other weird things you could point to. The Pre-MeToo era had different sexual norms, and the legal case might have had holes, but there was an element of how the prosecution was leniently handled against him that is odd. He seemed to punch above his influence class in some odd ways: his emails were quite lucid and intelligent for some shallow social grifter playboy, he seemed to have had close ties to the invention of 4chan, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s father had plausible connections to the Israeli government. One of Epstein’s friends was Ehud Barak, and there is also the question of possible Israeli connections. Diving too far into these waters risks anti-semitism, which is not the aim here. However, Israel has been notoriously insecure about their standing in America and among American elites, given the outstretched importance of American allyship in the region, and the median Jewish person does feel an allyship and connection to Israel in a way that is kind of globally unique.

This is all not to say that there was a conspiracy here. I am a notoriously conspiracy skeptical person: most are wrong, by the nature of the speculative nature of conspiracies. Give someone a bunch of information points, and brains are great at constructing overfitted and ad hoc narratives that are not right. However, on the scale of plausible conspiracy theories, certain ‘Epstein conspiracy’ narratives you could mentally construct (maybe involving Trump having a somewhat salacious history, maybe involving the Israeli version of the types of ‘operations’ figures like the Dulles brothers used to commission) are more on the ‘the government assassinated JFK’ level of plausibility than the ‘the government faked the moon landing’ level of plausibility.

5. With all of that being said, I think the conspiracy angle still misses why this issue is salient to a lot of people.

I think the Epstein scandal is where a fundamental reckoning is occuring in regards to how people think about and process sexual morality.

In the post MeToo era, our society converged on an equilbrium: you had regular men, who had the same sexual inclinations as women basically but with higher sex drives, and then you had predators. Predators were figures like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, who were just awful serial killer like figures, and it was good that we shunted them out of polite society and away from regular people. Normal men stayed in the ‘regular man’ pile unless they raped someone or something, at which point they would go into the ‘predator’ bin.

However, this experience never perfectly tracked with the regular experience of women. Plenty of women have been assaulted young, harmed young, starting at ages as young as 13 or 14. Plenty of women have seen men who assaulted them at these ages go on to live normal lives. Plenty of women, pretty much all women actually, have seen men go from being nice, agreeable, and normal in public, to ‘werewolves’ in bed, who need to be reasoned with, tamed, and placated like animals. This experience is common enough to where the use of ‘werewolf’ in this context is borrowed from an online sex worker who blogs named Aella, who has written about her direct experiences with this.

The Epstein scandal reveals something similar. The men going to Epstein’s island were normal men. Men like Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky and whatever name you do or do not want to put down here, are normal nerdy men. But even normal nerdy men like young girls. They definitely like girls who are below the age of 20. You can say that their sexual appetites cut off at 18, or 17, or whatever the age of consent is where they are, but does anyone actually believe this? Is this the ‘werewolf’ inside of them speaking, or is it the civilizing force that translates their brutish sexual instincts into something that is compatible with civilized society?

When the Epstein scandal broke, there was a surprisingly apathetic response from some men. Figures like Trump, but also a lot of regular, ‘salt and potatoes’ men, seemed to be apathetic or unsurprised about the scandal. This was not universal, but it was a trend. The reasoning behind this is pretty straightforward: among men, the idea that another man would sleep with 15 year olds if he could get away with it is not implausible. It only was implausible to many women because the dominant post MeToo sexual morality settled around this binary partitoning of men between ‘predators’, who were lurid and evil in all possible ways, and ‘regular men’, who were just sexually extreme women. This model, while culturally stable, was only durable in a world where a majority of women were ‘kept in the dark’ in regards to how many men experience sexuality.

(Side note: Most men would be surprised to hear that another man was sleeping with pre-pubescent children. However, many men are somewhat sexually attracted to 13 and 14 year olds, and the distinction between a 15 year old girl and a 19 year old girl is experienced more as a legal one, as a one of avoiding social shame and punishment, than it is an emotional one.)

This is no longer. The Epstein scandal brought the ‘werewolf’ into full view. Where mainstream culture goes from here will be interesting to follow.

The point is that we have a lot of data on Donald Trump. By now, society at large should be able to have a broadly accurate ‘read’ on the man. And yet, in many ways, he seems to be more inscrutable now than he was when he first ran for office. To some, he is a normal conservative without the dignity and moral gracefulness of ‘traditional Republicans’. To others, he is an extreme ‘far-right’ conservative. To others, he is a far-right fascist, seeking to undermine American democracy and to bring America back to its white supremacist and authoritarian roots. In many ways, Trump kind of feels like a Rohrsarch test: he is whatever pattern you want to project onto him.

2. This should not be the reality. Trump has an extensive history of running the country we can look to. He has probably communicated as a member of the government in some fashion more than any president in history. Figuring out what he’s about, what his vision for America is, and where he lies on the political axis, should not be difficult. The fact that current American society seems at a loss regarding how to do this speaks to a broad decline in our political and investigative journalism. This essay will attempt to try to fill this gap.

3. When Trump came on the scene in the Republican party in 2015, he was not known for being a far-right ideologue. Figures like Ted Cruz attacked him during the Republican primaries on this very vulnerability. In the eyes of Cruz at the time, Trump was a New York moderate, someone who had been a Democrat for a substantial part of his life, and he was not a safe bet to reliably deliver on conservative promises. In the 2016 primary, Trump’s rhetoric did deviate from standard GOP orthodoxy in some directions: he was more willing to condemn interventionism than other Republican candidates, he seemed less passionate about government programs (he would default to ‘I am a businessman and I know what I am doing’ frameworks over emphasizing the fiscal irresponsibility of programs like Medicaid), and his rhetoric was less anti-LGBT than most of the other candidates.

In contrast, the issue he was harsher about than GOP orthodoxy was immigration. At the time, the GOP was subtly trying to ‘move to the center’ on immigration to win Latino voters. Trump sharply diverged from this, offering scathing and harsh critiques of the ethical character of illegal immigrants, and promising to build a border wall to curtail this drastic problem. This issue drove a decent amount of the success of his campaign. It connected with the concerns of many Republican voters, who felt similarly about immigration, and the ‘racism’ of his anti-immigrant comments fueled a lot of media attention.

4. However, the bigger thing of note with Trump’s campaign in 2016 was his violation of decorum and political norms. Pre-Trump America had strict norms in regards to its politicians. Politicians all talked in a certain way, dressed in a certain way, and carried themselves in a certain way. They had common Ivy League coded backgrounds, and quite honestly carried themselves in upper class Ivy League coded ways.

Donald Trump in many ways was emblematic of the exact opposite of this trend. He was rude, brash, and confrontational. It was obvious he would lather himself in pounds of spray tan. He would call his opponents names, insult their wives, and mock them to their faces. When the moderation in political debates would confront him, he would personally insult them back. This tendency of Trump’s accelerated in the general election: one of the defining moments of his 2016 election with Hillary Clinton is when a tape leaked of Trump saying that rich guys can ‘grab women by the pussy’ and ‘get away with anything’ due to being rich. When this leaked, instead of apologizing, Trump doubled down, saying that the tape was just ‘locker room talk’.

Some argue that this was a facade: Trump was rich, loudly rich, and he would merely pretend to be ‘unclassy’ as a way of conning low information voters. However, I think this frame is lacking. Trump clearly comes from wealth, but he also clearly comes from new wealth. Trump spent his life surrounded by gold toilets, wives who resembled hookers more than Yale English majors or Rockefeller children, and is clearly not very educated. From all accounts of people who new Trump, he is authentically rude, lewd, and crude in his personal life. The idea that Trump is ‘high wealth but lower class’ seems to be a decent representation of what the guy is actually like in real life.

This was seismic to the political climate of 2015. The idea of any politician acting like this was beyond the pale. Trump’s brashness and improperness generated constant news coverage and internet discourse, dominating news and discourse cycles for years. In 2026 America, the idea of public figures and public figures in the political arena specifically carrying themselves in this way is more normalized, but in 2015 it was genuinely scandalous.

5. Even though a lot of Trump’s stated policies were not demonstratably right-wing in 2016 outside of his harsh anti-immigration stance, there was nevertheless a decent amount of fear on the left after he won. Trump seemed to carry himself personality wise like an authoritarian. He was cruel, enjoyed bullying people, seemed very vested in masculinity related social scripts, and the harsh anti-immigration rhetoric seemed like it was tapping into racist sentiment to win votes. Something about Trump’s personality seemed Orban-ish.

This fear was amplified by the people that Trump had in his social circle. Throughout the Republican primary and afterwards, Trump struggled to win the enthusiastic loyalty of many of the Republicans he ran against. Many were scorned by his personal insults. Many others felt like his rudeness and crudeness were unbecoming of the presidency. Others did nominally ‘endorse’ him, but clearly were not going to enthusiastically campaign on his behalf. Trump had a general loyalty problem in the Republican party: not many liked him. A few, like Chris Christie, made efforts to suck up to him to win influence, but this was clearly calculated and instrumental.

This vacuum created a clear opening for figures like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. Hard-right ideologues viewed Trump, his ideological vacuousness, anti-immigration stance, and authoritarian personality, as a clear springboard for a far-right policy agenda. Bannon was the head of Breitbart, and seemed genuinely motivated to institute a type of American fascism. Miller was virulently anti-immigration, was described by peers who knew him young as racist, and was about as much of an immigration hardliner as you can get. The Trump orbit, having a lack of allies, gladly sucked figures like this up. They were intelligent, competent, and truly loyal allies, without ties to the broader RNC than were greater than their ties to Trump.

This amplified the Trump authoritarianism fears. In addition to having an authoritarian type vibe, Trump was also harboring people in his social circle that were far-right authoritarians. These people were going to have clear influence in Trump’s presidency if he won.

Therefore, the answer to whether Trump was a far-right Republican, or a centrist, or a normal Republican, when running for office the first time was ‘it was mixed’. At the time, it was pretty ambiguous how a Trump presidency was going to go. The risk of racist far-right demagoguery and crackdown felt there, but in other ways Trump also seemed less ideological than many Republicans.

6. Until COVID, the first Trump presidency reflected this mix. In regards to most policy questions, Trump governed like a traditional Republican. He cut taxes, cut social service programs, but the cuts were not unprecedented for a Republican or Overton Window pushing. He appointed hands off government department administrators. He appointed normal Heritage foundation justices. There was about 85% of Trump’s presidency where the governance style was that of a normal, center-right Republican.

However, sometimes you would also see flourishes of far-right and authoritarian tendencies. Stephen Miller’s family separation immigration policies. The Bannon spearheaded ‘Muslim ban’ in America. A lot of external reporting has explained that Trump in his first term was constrained a lot in this regard on the international front. Apparently Trump would regularly give erratic and questionably legal orders to military personnel, who would work hard to ignore the orders in protocol-compliant ways.

From 2017 to COVID, Trump’s America reflected this tension. It was like being governed by a guy with a split personality: 85% of the time he is a centrist Republican, and the other 15% of the time he is Viktor Orban. Neither side of the political aisle represented this tension very well.

7. In 2020, Trump’s behavior is very hard to contextualize into this framework. I think that thinking about Trump’s history is required to properly frame and understand it.

Donald Trump seems like a successful, intelligent man. He comes off as crass and trashy, his intelligence maybe seems more ‘street smart’ than ‘working at Harvard’, but he still seems like a fundamentally likeable, competent, and successful person. There have always been a string of bizarre sounding and weird accusations and gossip surrounding Trump that get discarded because they are incongruent with this image. The multiple rape accusations, the ‘golden showers’ allegations, Michael Wolff alleging that Trump met Melania through Jeffrey Epstein, the piles of bizarre and odd accusations on the FBI Epstein tip line logs with Trump. Even Trump’s birtherism stuff gets filtered under a frame of ‘Trump was tapping into racism to win political appeal’ these days.

I think there is another framing. One of the things being from the traditional Harvard track selects for in politicians, outside of intelligence, is mental stability under pressure. Being a Harvard student, a lawyer, and working your way up the ladder while remaining capable, ‘yourself’, and mentally stable, is a challenge. A lot of people struggle to do it. I struggled to do it when younger, even though I had the verbal intelligence to do it. You are busy a lot of the time, under pressure a lot of the time, and the general stress level is exhaustive. Only a certain person is able to succeed in this type of context.

Donald Trump seems like he goes through phases of life where he is an intelligent, charismatic, but somewhat lazy and crude center-right Republican. And he seems to go through phases of his life where his behavior is erratic, impulsive, reckless, and he is prone to delusional like thinking patterns. Some argue that the COVID and 2020 election era Trump were just what Trump was always like, and you could construe an argument based on stuff like how Trump waffled on whether he would concede if he lost in 2016. However, I think this argument is a stretch. The broad social gestalt of the Trump presidency took a massive swing during the COVID era. One isolated thing he said or two isolated comments might provide a ‘hidden motive’ behind the shift, but the anti-lockdown grievance politics and the attempt to overthrow an election had thematic feels with no real precedent in the Trump era.

Maybe you have a cousin who sometimes says ‘I would love to go to Vegas and blow all of my money’. Or maybe the cousin says ‘I can’t promise that if I get a better paying job that I won’t just decide to go to Vegas and blow it all if my girl is no longer in the picture’. Outside of this, your cousin is mostly responsible, conscientous, with a minor proclivity to speed down shoulder lanes on the freeway or to buy Xanax occasionally. One day, he buys a plane-ticket to Vegas, blows all of his money in a Casino in a night, and you learn he is now in a homeless shelter. In this scenario, even though he had made comments technically to this regard, and maybe some in the family did worry about a gradual escalation to something like this iteratively, over time, the sudden dip is fundamentally out of character and indicates that something psychologically happened.

Donald Trump’s 2020 fits this. It was thematically out of step with everything he had done prior to that point as a president. It was disastrous and really bad. A lot of unneeded COVID deaths happened, and a serious attempt was made to overthrow an American democratic election. This is not to say that a ‘normal Donald Trump’ would not have pushed back against excessive lockdowns at all, but the overall arc of his response was incompetent, bungled, and almost conspiratorially anti-vaccine in tone. This argument also explains his history: the fact that he once fervently believed birtherism, the weird Epstein stuff that seems like it has some basis in reality, and the sexual assault history.

It is true that the presidency is always stressful. But in 2020 Trump dealt with a mass pandemic, nationwide race protests that conservatives would call ‘riots’, almost dying of COVID, and losing an election. The level of stress he was dealing with in 2020 would have been much different than the stress he was dealing with in 2017. In 2017 and 2018 America was in pretty good shape.

8. After 2020, Democrats decided that Trump was a threat to democracy that needed to be handled at all costs, and vowed to incarcerate him by any means necessary. Trump had always played ‘fast and loose’ with the law, so finding pretexts to charge him on things was not very difficult, as there were frequent instances of him breaking the law.

This did not really work. The four concurrent trials, while justifiable from a certain standpoint, did give the whole situation a ‘witch hunt’ like feel where Democrats seemed set on sending Trump to prison out of ideological reasons by any means necessary. The idea that Trump could be genuinely delusional was outside of the framework of most Americans: Trump is the competent, shrewd, crude, and rude businessman. When he would talk about the ‘rigged’ 2020 election, most would discard it, assume that Trump was being his normal comedic and rhetorical self, and not think about it more than this. This systematically caused people to ‘under remember’ how severe the coup attempt was. The default cultural framing, after long enough, became ‘that technically happened but it was not that serious’.

9. Throughout the Obama administration, and afterwards, the default assumption on the left was that the Democrats were going to be the party of the future due to excessive young person support. Young people across the political spectrum were disproportionately Blue, so the right kind of felt like their political success was on borrowed time: once enough old people die out, Republicans winning elections will become difficult. The reverse of this trend comes from many sources, but I will pull on one thread I think is particularly culturally salient.

Throughout the early to mid 2010s, a lot of feminism operates on a contradiction. Most young women become feminists, and as feminists they say that they want egalitarianism, they want men to treat them better, so on and so forth. However, in real life, most women do prefer guys who are fairly ‘macho’: who seem dominant, antisocial, and traditionally masculine. This type of thinking can go too far: most women do want husbands who are intelligent and who are mostly congruent with their values. But the core point stands: if a guy interacts with a woman, and he interacts with her with no alignment with the traditional gender role of ‘masculinity’, he is going to have a hard time, even with women who publicly proclaim to not care for gender roles.

As feminism and liberalism became more dominant among young people, this made interacting with young women more and more difficult for young men. You had to have the social subtext to understand that what most young women were saying did not align with their revealed preferences, and communicate at both ‘levels’: stating that you align with feminist values with your words, while also acting like you are traditionally masculine at the same time. The first group of men who struggled with this were autistic men who occupied websites like 4chan and certain Reddit threads, who would complain about women not wanting to date ‘nice guys’ like themselves.

Eventually, this cultural status quo became so entrenched that the only spaces where young men could learn about what traditional masculinity entailed at all were far-right spaces. Hence the explosion in popularity of influencers like Andrew Tate who provided this. People on the left wholly refused to acknowledge that there was any sense in which acting ‘traditionally masculine’ helped you date at all. Because of this, a lot of young men wrote off the Democratic party as the party of naive and dishonest people, and they naturally marinated a lot in right-wing spaces that gave them a lot of right-wing views.

Therefore, by the time Trump runs again in 2024, one of the Democratic party’s big advantages in electoral contests was somewhat nullified.

10. In 2024, a similar dynamic happens that happened in 2016. Much like 2016, Trump struggled to form a lot of authentic allies in the Republican party. A lot of the Republicans, while being publicly nice to him, privately felt like his election stuff was too far, privately judged him, so on and so forth. Therefore, much like 2016, far-right figures tried to fill this void. They promised unconditional loyalty to Trump, meant it, and figured they could use their alignment with him to implement a far-right ideological program. Kevin Roberts and Paul Dans work with the Heritage Foundation and other ‘loyal to Trump’ opportunistic far-right figures to write a policy agenda for Trump that seems like it is something straight out of theocratic Iran.

11. People have selective memories about the first Trump administration. Silicon Valley members, remembering mostly the normal business Republican and apathy about political evangelicalism parts of the first Trump presidency, align with him. This part of the first Trump presidency fits with their natural libertarian bents, and they figure that their support will cause Trump to give them a wide amount of regulatory latitude. The Democrats, who remember the election coup attempt and Stephen Miller’s immigration policies, treat the election as a maximum urgency alarm bell for the future of American democracy.

12. Meanwhile, when it comes to Donald Trump, he seems to both be the ‘normal Donald Trump’ again while also continuing to harbor the belief that the 2020 election was actually illegitimately stolen from him.

In matters of fiscal policy and foreign policy, he has been the Trump from 2017 to pre COVID. He has passed legislation with regular not boundary pushing government cuts to programs, engaged with foreign policy in the normal Trump ‘hardball’ way, and has avoided hot button social issues like abortion on the federal level.

At the same time, he has behaved in the way you would behave if you thought an election was illegitimately stolen from you. He has built up ICE as a paramilitary force personally loyal to him: if you thought the other side was throwing out ballots, of course you would do this, so you could have loyal soldiers ensuring no foul play at ballot boxes. He has consolidated media companies and selectively approved mergers in a way that has created a circle of high wealth loyalists running most of the media companies: if you thought an election was illegitimately stolen from you, you would want loyalists in charge of media companies, to make sure that discrepancies are being covered. He has aggressively purged people not loyal to him from his party, is strongly pushing harsh federal voter ID laws right now, and has tried to criminally indict a good amount of opponents and political adversaries in a way that has been struck down by grand juries.

13. In a bigger picture sense, it seems like the overarching behavorial pattern with Trump fits a common theme.

In his default state, he is a center-right Republican with some mild to moderate authoritarian tendencies. In regards to his personal life, his default state is lazy, somewhat corrupt, and has a certain ‘street smarts’. This was the Trump that existed from 2017 to COVID.

However, under periods of extreme stress, Trump shifts. He becomes erratic, impulsive, and adopts delusional beliefs. He is ‘psychologically fragile’ in a way the Harvard to Law to ‘working your way up in Congress’ pipeline normally selects against.

When the periods of stress end, Trump goes back to being the ‘normal Trump’, with the exception that he continues to believe whatever delusional beliefs he adopted during the stress-based emotional episodes. Therefore, a relatively ‘normal Trump’, who is not prone to adopting any new delusional beliefs or acting in erratic and impulsive ways in that moment, might still nevertheless believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that Obama’s birth certificate was faked. The delusional beliefs stick, and Trump orients towards those beliefs in a way a crude businessman with ‘street smarts’ would.