Protect Your Slack, Delay Moloch: Why You SHOULD Defend Yourself With Artificial Rents

Inspired by Behold the Pale Child at Secretorum: "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards Bakkalon." (or Moloch. Moloch, at the bottom of the Darwinian/economic/political gravity well!)

The point of life is to be happy. How to go about this is mostly biologically determined. Yes, it's good to make others happy if you can, and to have making others happy make you happy as an incentive; for most of us, as social animals, this is also biologically determined. This position is that of a modern-day Epicurus, enhanced with and connected to facts about the natural world and our place in it. Not very controversial, you might think.

But I suspect that many people in the rationalist blogosphere will find it incredibly selfish to think first and foremost of oneself and ones own happiness, instead of the utilatarian (more specifically, Parfitian) long and wide view of everyone's happiness. (This more "selfish" position is not necessarily just individual hedonism, but rather would include having birthday parties for your kids instead of donating that money to dig a well in the developing world.[1]) In a curiously Calvinist-adjacent take, the implied position of the EA world (and tech capitalists telling young people their identify comes from working unhealthy hours and sacrificing the rest of their lives) is that you should de-emphasize your own happiness here and now since it's such a small drop in the ocean of possible conscious experience throughout time.

And yet if people are biologically limited by the link between their happiness and the amount of work they can do - and the kind they can do - and for whom they do it - and they are - what you're asking is many people to sacrifice their own happiness for an uncertain outcome, for an uncertain philosophical position.

The position of working 110% all-out all the time is not just something from the world of Effective Altruism (EA), etc. In a recent post on the Slatestarcodex (SSC) subreddit, in a discussion about the Musk-like approach to constantly fastforwarding everything and having work be eternal crunchtime - a commenter stated that once in a great while, such a push was okay, but it's not sustainable. I would go one step further: I want to enjoy my life, working hard diminishes that, focusing on any one thing to the exclusion of most others diminishes that, and you should avoid crunchtime and working hard wherever possible. (That is, I value slack - see Church of the Subgenius - and I will defend that slack if necessary, even if I have to do it surreptitiously.) Wanting to enjoy your life, and do more things you directly enjoy more often, and fewer instrumental things, is not something to be ashamed of. That's why I'm posting it online and telling you it's good to feel the same way.[2]

It's true that if everyone thought this way, then life-saving and -improving technologies would progress much more slowly. But herein I'm taking the (apparently very hard to grasp position) that I neither want to work that hard, nor do I want to get in the way of people who do want to work hard. I say in all seriousness: good for them, I'm glad we have people built this way![3] But don't feel bad if you're not one of them, and you're almost certainly not. I'm definitely not, and I feel great about it! I've even turned down promotions for this reason. Again, not controversial, I wouldn't think. But it feels very much like an emperor's new clothes position to take.

The opposite of slack is hypercompetition, which I don't have to further describe to anyone living in the developed world in the 21st century, and I would argue a big part of Moloch is hypercompetitiveness (Moloch in the sense of Scott Alexander's synechdoche for a self-perpetuating system with serious and unintentional consequences that benefit nobody.) There is only so much work you can do; you need some slack, and though our modern Molochian culture has trained us to hide our slack-seeking from ourselves, we do it, or we burn out. And part of the outrage at people finding ways to guard slack is a result of hiding our desire for slack from ourselves (read: reaction formation and the predictable reaction to seeing others fulfill their fantasy) when a source of slack protection is noticed. (See: "tears of rent-seekers" regarding taxis, academia, government, or any other area where people have goodness forbid given themselves some extra slack to help them enjoy their lives.)

Other strategies: shrouding - which normally means companies trying to avoid competing on price by making their pricing opaque, but works in the labor market too when workers cooperate to obscure measurement of output - outlawing payment for piece work was a major victory. Another: avoidance of direct market exposure, or any situation where your livelihood rests on your having to react in real time to developments - usually the more layers within an organization away from a customer interaction surface or competition with other organizations, the quieter your life is. (Must be balanced against the risk of paroxysmal collapses; the cycle-time of this class of org is relevant to your choices here (nations = centuries, companies = years or decades if already long-established.)

Some concrete examples are in order, of how you can and should protect slack and benefit your life by erecting artificial rent structures.


SITUATION 1 You're the leader of Organization A. You believe in what the organization is doing, genuinely care about the people there and want them to have good lives, and as a result you "leave some money on the table" by not expecting them to work that hard or otherwise sacrifice their well-being to the organization, as long as they keep the wheels turning.

Then Organization X comes along (for the Parfit-style calculators out there, let's say it has the same number of people), which does NOT care about its people this way, and they are constantly sacrificing themselves, or at least on a sort of psychological Malthusian frontier (of stress rather than starvation.) This might well be an Elon Musk company. Organization X eats Organization A's lunch, and Organization A is destroyed or absorbed, along with the lifestyle of the people in it.


SITUATION 2 Same as above, but you're the leader of Organization B. You know it is likely that if you do NOT drive your people to self-sacrifice, then a Muskite will drive theirs in such a way, and then they'll come for you. So for your organization to continue existing, you have to work them to the point of self-sacrifice. You do this, and keep existing, but the people who work at your organization are now miserable.


SITUATION 3 You're the leader of Organization A, same as Situation 1. Except you have a plan. You want your employees to have a good life but you know that the Muskite misery engines out there like Organization X will come get you. So you make a couple calls to a governor or legislator, take them golfing and make some arrangements, etc. Organization X now finds you have an administrative or legal moat - an artificial rent protector - for example, to do what your org does they have to be in a certain consotrium and no one will let the Muskite org join, or Organization X can't operate in a certain business in a certain territory, unless the workers within Org X get lots of protections. You know this can't work forever, but it will work for a while, and benefit the people you care most about. Organization X loses its advantage in being willing to essentially trade personal slack for victory. People on SSC read about this, and cry their eyes out talking about Rents, and how you're immoral for depriving the rest of the world of the fruits of your labors (invisible tragedies, etc.)


I used to join in with the "ha ha, rentiers dying, suck it taxi drivers" until I realized that within a few years, AI will be able to do all of our jobs, and the value of labor will race to zero. Of the strategies I've mentioned, only legal artificial rent structures have any chance of lasting for any length of time. So I'm unashamed to admit I would rather work for Organization A in Situation 3, and unless you're the 1% of the 1% in productivity, you would too. (I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you think you are a 10x 1% of 1% superstar, you are much more likely to be delusional than an actual superstar, and the angrier that statement made you, the more likely you're delusional.) Of course, sometimes the rents come "honestly" from an innovation - but then again, even patent protection is an artifical rent, since it's not just the innovation itself. Mostly rents come "artificially" from barriers like the ones I've described. Taxi medallions, medical licenses, etc. although in most cases there's usually at least some non-bullshit reason for the certification, or guild membership, whatever it is (e.g. it's a quality signal.)

Note that I've written these thought experiments with you in the position of the leader. But you're almost certainly not. If, in a true Rawlsian approach - if you fell out of the sky at random into these thought experiments - you'd probably be a rank-and-file employee. In that spirit:


SITUATION 4 You're an employee (not the leader) of Organization A. You believe in what you do and what the organization stands for. Your leader seems to genuinely want everyone to have good lives and doesn't work anyone too hard. As you smirk and murmur to your colleagues at pool parties, this is because the leader is friends with the governor, and got a law passed artificially protecting you from competition, which is why you have a good income without working too hard.

Then the leader dies or steps down, and a new CEO takes over - one who reads SSC and Marginal Revolution. "Enough with this laziness! Company X has their own lobbyists, and we can't wait for them to get the law repealed and be caught off-guard. 80 hour weeks! No vacation or weekends if you want to be considered serious around here! Constant aggressive deadlines! Do it 10x faster! We're depriving the rest of the world and future generations of the fruits of our labor, how selfish that is, think of all the hidden tradegies! Don't like it? Emigrate/quit and go to our competitor, who will probably have to do the same thing to keep up anyway." Would you say "Yes! Finally, our new leader is high-agency, and this is the moral thing to do instead of collecting rents"? Yeah, sure you would.[4] If you do, you burn out, ruining your health and family life, plus you have no more time to read SSC.


Certainly it's a difficult balance to find, and often you're just surfing a temporary inefficiency wave until that wave breaks and you're back in the same Molochian world as everyone else - but you should try to find it and ride it as long as you can. In the long run, we're all dead anyway. If you can have 5 or 10 more years of slack instead of zero more years, you are not being immoral to take it, and (for the Parfitians in the back) you can't be sure that the only thing you'd do by missing out on the slack is making yourself miserable with no other impact, thus doing the immoral thing of increasing the suffering of the universe on net.


[1] I've noticed that the tech world in general and EA especially is a haven for those who in the abstract, are horrified at the existence of slack (or at least that's the non-revealed preference.) In general consequentialists tend to neglect deontology - the role of duties in what decisions are moral. Consequentialists tend to look for abstract principles for actions to adhere to, but actions are not disembodied principles, they occur in time, and space, and social space - that is, in the context of whatever history and relationships, if any, you have with the people affected. Deontology clears up a lot of the confusion about what to actually do and when to do it, and who to do it with/for. I've also noticed conscientious younger people tend to be consequentialists, and older people season their outlook with more deontology as they age.

[2]Maybe this whole essay is just my own psychotherapy, justifying the following to myself: as a physician, every time I go home at the end of the day or take a day off, I am depriving people of potentially life-saving treatment. Some physicians, more in previous decades than today, kept this in mind and worked ridiculous hours; many modern healthcare organizations are more than happy to take advantage of this mentality of self-sacrifice to make another cent, and then when you start making mistakes because you burn out, they kick you to the curb. Not unique to medicine of course, but I'm very comfortable protecting my time so I can have slack and enjoy my life, and what's more, I limit my responsibilities to my established patients, and not some abstraction of "possible humans in the universe". If you're a naive consequentialist (who doesn't understand deontology or respect the limits set by biology) you've probably dismissed me as Jeffrey Dahmer by this point.

[3]To beat a dead horse: this is not an anti-hard-work screed. If you like to work hard, focus on one thing and one thing only, you find it rewarding, great! Part of civilization's success is that we've set up a system that rewards you, and where the rest of us also by diffusion get the benefit of the wealth and technologies you create. But if your choices start taking away my slack - I'll ask my guild to take our Congressman golfing, after which an artificial moat may mysteriously appear. For a relevant culture-wide take on the same: I once read an account of an American traveler in Japan who said it's great to be a foreigner in Japan - because it's a safe, clean, beautiful, quiet place, due to the crushing social obligations of Japanese culture that keep it this way, and as a foreigner you can free ride on this. But you obviously shouldn't do anything to make it harder to keep the country that way!

[4] SSC surveys have consistently shown that oldest siblings are more likely to be readers. Though it's a stretch, it does make me wonder if an oldest-sibling-rich group concerned about these topics might tend to lack a healthy level of resource anxiety (no older siblings to finish all the dessert before you, hog the TV or soccer ball, etc.) This would lead them to always assume that protecting slack can only be about stupidity or laziness - "Aw, we ALWAYS have to stay on the little kid playground because of them!"

On the Good of Young Men Having Their Asses Kicked

I recently visited a martial arts school for kids, and was immediately impressed by - something. It took me a minute to put my finger on what I liked about the place. It was that they were serious, and firm. The instructors wanted these kids to get better, and they didn't need to crack a joke every minute to diffuse tension, or even be especially kind about criticizing someone's technique. And the kids responded well to it, and were focused, and improving. I found myself wishing to see more of this approach, and then wondering why.

Young men having their asses kicked by superiors genuinely interested in the improvement of those young men, is an individual and social good. I express my concern and record my defense herein because I think many young men today should have their asses kicked more. If you're a young man reading this, know that I was once a young man; also, that I should definitely have had my ass kicked more. Below I define ass-kicking, and explain why I believe this.

By "ass kicking" I don't mean physically, and I also don't mean pointless abuse. What I do mean is this - in second person to help you imagine and identify with it:

1. there is a person with higher status than you
   
   
2. they are training you and/or managing you, and they provide intense, frequent negative verbal feedback and potential consequences for underperformance...
   
   
3. for reasons in your best interest (this is critical)
   
   
4. who you won't avoid - because you recognize that tolerating their very negative feedback will help you improve as a person, at specific skills, and achieve your goals.

Expanding on each item above:

1. "Higher status" means the person has objective, measurable achievements that place them unambiguously above you - money, artistic production, athletics, climbing some ladder - that you are also in. If you're trying to be a better electrician, you don't care if an investment banker or mountain climber gives you critical feedback.
   
   
2. This intense, frequent, negative feedback is unpleasant for many reasons, among them that it concerns something you care very much about - some ability or position that you have chosen as part of your identity. The unfortunate paradox is that meaningful negative feedback hurts, and it has to hurt at least a little, if you actually care about the thing you're getting feedback about.
   
   
3. The person is actually trying to help you improve, often to very high standards - this is why it's not abuse - but their concern in helping you improve takes precedence over hurt feelings. Hurt feelings take time and attention to avoid, so by virtue of your superior not having to consider them, you improve faster. What's more, during ass-kicking, the atmosphere is serious. There is no tension release mechanism other than improving your performance. (As an aside, the ass-kickee often attempts humor is in these situations, to his detriment.)
   
   
4. You choose not to avoid the unpleasantness because you know this experience is in your own best interest, and therefore despite its unpleasantness, you choose to carry on; or you're in a setting you can't leave (e.g. the military) but fortunately your superior is trying to improve you rather than just abuse you.
   
   

Some examples of institutionalized ass-kicking are sports coaching, medical school, the apprenticeship process in certain high-performing high-status industries (e.g. high finance), and military training. (For a first-person account of a military boot camp, and interestingly, a distinction between cult abuse and military indoctrination, go here.) Near-universally, people who've been through an ass-kicking program express gratitude for the experience (after it's over) and recognize both the skills and personal transformation it imparted, but are quick to say they wouldn't want to do it again, possibly along with humorous stories of the most difficult superiors who kicked their ass particularly thoroughly.


Why is ass-kicking a good thing? And why am I focusing on young men?

Why am I specifiying young men? Let's broadly define "young" as 13-30. After this developmental window, it is very difficult to change identity and personality in the way that ass-kicking does, and in particular to obtain the benefits such experiences can produce. And I find that it's usually men who have a personality structure and defenses that most benefit from such experiences. A young man's psychological defenses involve a good deal of narcissism about how tough, strong, and awesome he is. When encountering situations suggesting otherwise, he rationalizes, avoids, or attacks. If anyone tells him he's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, he denigrates and/or retaliates and/or disengages. But when it's his superior (his supervisor in a job he wants to advance in) or drill sergeant doing it and he can't rationalize avoid or attack, he has three choices: a) fail b) be miserable because he can never understand that they're not just abusing him personally or c) he "gets it" and grows up and improves, not just in specific skills but in overall character.

It is my suspicion that, not only is ass-kicking happening less often, but also that option c) is being delayed in men's lives and more often happening during romantic relationships; and romantic partners are not enjoying the expansion of their near-parentified duties. Of course it's not only men who can ever benefit from ass-kicking, and certainly not all men will benefit from ass-kicking based on their constitution, but in my empirical observation, in general young men benefit most from ass-kicking.

Why is ass-kicking good? Beyond (obviously) the specific skills and professional identities that are being quickly learned and grown, the general benefits come down to three factors.

• A. We learn to control our negative emotional reactions and decouple them from the person providing the feedback. This is necessary unless you plan to go through life always killing the messenger (which some men certainly try to do.)
  
  
• B. We learn to recognize our flaws and shortcomings and tolerate the distress arising from them, and to turn that energy into something positive by working on them instead of being angry about them, denying them, or avoiding them. We also learn that our position in a hierarchy is not the entirety of our worth and identity. (Note, both B and A are really both forms of "tolerating the distress of being at the wrong end of a hierachical disparity." This both makes young men better able to work in groups, and produces empathy which they might otherwise lack, when they are later at the top of such an imbalance, not to mention improving reality-based confidence.)
  
  
• C. Not only do we decouple our emotional reactions to the person and the message, we learn to respect the person and recognize that they are helping us, even if it wasn't fun at the time.

A, B, and C correspond basically to "I have a long way to go to be a badass, it's okay that I have a long way to go but it's up to me to improve and I can improve, and while it's not fun now, I recognize that my superior did me a favor and that they're in the position where they are for a reason so I will respect and defend them to others." It adds up to the cliche character-building as well as dealing with adversity, being able to function in authority structures and understanding the basis for legitimate authority, i.e. that authority is not synonymous with force. In terms of Kegan and Chapman's hierarchy, ass-kicking is a maturing process that helps young men graduate from level 3 into level 4, and failure to do so has predictable consequences for broader society (see last paragraph.)

To be clear, nothing herein should be taken as justifying abuse. In fact, I think outlining the characteristics of ass-kicking helps us draw a distinction between ass-kicking and mere abuse. And even when an ass-kicking superior intends the ass-kicking constructively to improve the ass-kickee, if the ass-kickee can't tolerate it, they should be able to quit (withdraw consent.) Abuse is non-consensual, and is about pleasing a sadistic abuser, rather than (in the long run) helping the recipient. And even those of us nodding along with this essay and agreeing that ass-kicking is a good thing and was a good thing for us specifically, are usually still able to look back and distinguish between a hardass who you maybe even hated at that time but for whom in retrospect you feel gratitude and respect - versus a bully with an anger problem. (Of course abusers try to trick us sometimes by pretending to be ass-kickers.) Many readers will by this point be thinking of Sergeant Hartmann from Full Metal Jacket (note these links are NSFW and contains slurs) - he is hard but he is fair, directly states you will not like him, but he is trying to help his recruits and he tells them so. He is clearly pleased when they improve. He is an ass-kicker. In contract, Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is just an abusive bully, and the ages of some of the men in the meeting suggest they are beyond the useful ass-kicking window anyway. He explicitly tells them he doesn't care about them, and just wants numbers for the company, figure out on your own how to do it or hit the bricks pal. Without Good Result A above, young men are more likely to keep thinking everyone who tells them something they don't want to hear is just another Alec Baldwin humiliating them.


Why did I write this?

It's my impression that opportunities for ass-kicking have decreased over the past half-century or so, at least in my country, the U.S. Why? I suspect it's a combination of our decreasing intolerance of direct-speaking authority figures, and constant consumer messaging: that you are special, you are the best, you should never be uncomfortable, don't listen to people who make you feel that way. Those two reasons may or may not in fact be the same thing. (I intentionally use "impression" and "suspect" not as weasel words but as clear signals of how you might weight these claims.) Therefore, as young men's opportunities for ass-kicking decrease, I predict America will face a worsening epidemic of narcissistic, oversensitive, immature, and adversity-intolerant men, who blame everyone else for e.g. why they couldn't finish college or hold down a job, and who can't tell the difference between bullies and legitimate authority. I leave it to the reader to decide if this trend is already visible.

Fiction Is Dreaming In Print

There are mathematical techniques intended to counter over-fitting in data. Imagine a stockmarket analysis program. If it's trained on a year of data when, that year on June 23, all tech stocks dropped, it might start to recommend selling (or shorting) all its tech stocks just prior to June 23 every year. Obviously this isn't smart; the program has overfitted. What you might do is take the training data and slice it up and restack it in some new way - different sectors, different months - and the program might start finding more meaningful relationships.

This is analogous to dreaming, and has been rediscovered (or re-engineered, if you prefer) in other settings for some years now. We still don't really know why we sleep, let alone why we dream. But if we assume that brains are doing the same thing - avoiding overfitting - the explanation makes sense, and is consistent with the characteristics of dreams. Suddenly you're at the beach you used to go to every summer as a kid, but then in your school; your deceased grandmother is there, at the same time as your asshole coworker from the last company, and then you're driving down a steep mountain road with no brakes. Obviously they never met, and they especially didn't meet in some bizarre hybrid beach-school-mountain place. By mixing them, you're trying to avoid overfitting. In contrast, if you have PTSD, you do dream literally the same concrete traumatic experience over and over - and your waking behavior is overfitted - you avoid trucks under overpasses, or that one street corner, or movies about fire, based on whatever experience you had that you can't "digest", integrate with the rest of your life's experience, and move past.

Returning to computers, Andrej Karpathy on Twitter says "...in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM's hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful." Similarly, the data stored and sliced and diced in our dreams influences how we perceive the world. It provides the top-down filter for the bottom-up sense data pouring in.[1] Without this, we veer off into hallucinations and delusions within days.[2]

But sometimes we humans' dreams intrude into our waking hours, drawing attention to themselves in full form, like stars briefly visible in the daytime if you know where to look[3], or if you like, a laundry dryer opened mid-cycle to let a sock or a shirt fly out. In the shower, you start laughing when a joke you heard in eighth grade pops out of nowhere. While driving to work somehow you're suddenly thinking of your recently deceased cat, and you're sad.

It seems to me that fiction is a more elaborated version of this, committed to a less ephemeral form, one that produces fossils of our overfitting-avoidance. Something has to explain the reason that we write stories that never actually happened, that we know no one will ever think actually happened, and that we (mostly) never even show to anyone else. (Out of all the short stories ever completed in history, what percentage of them was even intended for publication, let alone did the author think had a real chance of being read by someone else?) So why do we bother? Why are we so compelled? We're avoiding overfitting the things that are important to us. We write character-driven stories examining the psychology of people similar to those we know, or we write alternate history what-ifs about events that we find interesting - all of which we are trying to understand better and connect to our other experience, as we turn it over, and slice and dice it and rub it up against our other experiences.. Even the writing process itself is consistent with this - the ideas somehow just appear automatically, along with some scenes and images and events, that the writer has to organize (often laboriously, decidedly non-automatically) into a coherent narrative.


[1] In psychosis, the top-down part of the process dominates and you're lost in a waking dream of hallucinations and delusions. Autism is sometimes thought of as a diametric opposite to psychosis, when the bottom-up sense data dominates and unfiltered and the overwhelming cacophony of sounds, lights, or textures become intolerable.

[2] Waters F, Chiu Vivian, Atkinson A, Blom JD. Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis With Increasing Time Awake. Front Psychiatry. 2018; 9: 303.

[3] When Venus is on the same side of the Sun as Earth, you can actually see it with the naked eye during the day. When I first located it in a blue daytime sky, I found this almost disorienting.

Denialisms Are About Moral Authority, Not Truth

Sovereign citizens (hereafter sovcits) stick out among the various species of denialists.  Other denialisms are at least about matters of fact - even if the denialists demonstrate poor critical thinking, at least their core assertion is a truth claim.  The Earth is round, or it is flat.  Vaccines cause autism, or they do not.  9/11 was an inside job, or it was not. 

But sovcits extend their beliefs into having a kind of power of their own; that their legal pronouncements have some kind of magic power to them. When surfing Youtube for "sovereign citizen" you won't have to look long for Youtube videos of the form:

1. Sovcit gets pulled over, stopped, or otherwise detained by police.
   
   
2. Sovcit recites their legal incantation.
   
   
3. Sovcit, quite amazingly, somehow manages to be shocked when the police break their window, tase them, arrest them, etc. (Here is a perfect example, but don't watch it unless you are ready to see police violence.)

Creationists and Flat Earthers mostly agree with the same basic observations of the world, and they mostly don't make different decisions about how to live in the world based on their claims. I've never seen a creationist argue against the existence of island gigantism or dwarfism, or a flat Earther against the existence of the horizon - they just have a different explanation.

You might make the argument that as a denialism, the "theories" of sovereign citizens have domain-specific characteristics. After all, law requires a belief in its legitimacy to work, and they just claim legitimacy for a different set of rules, rules which affect our behavior on a daily basis. But this still doesn't really address the way in which sovcits seem different from the rest. Imagine that an evil neuroscientist plants in your head the belief that vaccines cause autism. Once under the spell of that denialism, you can predict that you would act the same way as other anti-vaxxers, avoiding immunizations, attending anti-vaccine protests, etc. But the thought experiment doesn't work for sovcits. The evil neuroscientist puts the belief in your head that the current American government is illegitimate. You STILL wouldn't think that you could Jedi-mind-trick your way out of a traffic stop, even though you would be frustrated by living under the thumb of the current regime. In fact we don't need an evil neuroscientist to demonstrate this - assuming you believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegitimate, then you consider the political authority of the Russian government in the occupied territories to be similarly illegitimate. If you found yourself in Ukraine, would you go walking across an open field into the occupied territories loudly reciting "The U.N. says this is an illegal war and you can't be here" and then adding with surprise "Hey, you shot me!" No, because you recognize the physical reality even if you disagree as to who the legitimate authority is. But that's exactly what these sovereign citizens are doing.

And there, exactly, we see what DOES unite all these denialisms. In all of them, including the sovereign citizens, the core aspect is a disagreement as to the true source of moral authority. The different truth claims are a symptom of that underlying disagreement, and only in the sovereign citizens is the root cause so exposed.

A lot of other seemingly unrelated aspects of denialism start to snap into place now. Creationists believe the source of authority on the story of our origin is the Bible (or Quran), and by undermining religious cosmogony, ultimately we undermine religious morality (hence why creationists are overwhelmingly religious, hence their bizarre non sequiturs that teaching evolution leads to drug culture and promiscuity.) And I'm not sure who the moon landing people or 9/11 truthers think is a good moral authority, but I'm damn sure they do NOT think it's the United States government. And if you think the people telling you to wear a mask and get vaccinated are the same immoral elites making your favorite President look bad by calling attention to the pandemic, then no mask and no vaccines for me! Some people have a psychological makeup that is so polarized toward respect for authority that not only does it dominate truth, it becomes conflated with it. Sovereign citizens think that objective truth equals objective and irresistible authority, which is why they're inevitably shocked when physical reality disagrees with their perceived moral authority.

We neglect and misunderstand the complicated and ancient relationship between truth and authority at our peril.

Professional Sports: Salary Distributions and Relationship to Team Size and League Revenues

Some casual fans of pro sports are actually much more interested in the business and psychology of the leagues than the action on the field. IF that's you, read on! I started wondering 1) what is the minimum you could make in each sport? What was the relationship between size of team in each sport, player salaries, and profitability? and 2) that if any of the figures in my table are glaringly wrong, please comment below and I will correct it (and my written conclusions if they're affected.)

Leag	Max/min	avg/med	rev, $B	sal/rev	rev/plyr	rev/pl / avg sal
NFL	76	1.28	18.0	0.10	10,613,208	9.68
MLB	56	2.92	9.56	0.40	10,988,506	2.51
NHL	21	1.04	5.2	0.42	7,065,217	2.36
NBA	44	1.97	10.0	0.34	22,222,222	2.96

Observations:

1. The smaller the team roster size, the better players get compensated (both in terms of minimum income, median, and average.) That is to say: if you're a player, the NBA is the best place to be.
   
   
2. To get an idea of the salary spreads in each sport, we can look at the max:min ratio. (Minimum salaries in each case are determined by the players union contract with the league.) A catchier name for this would beis the "J.P. Morgan index"*, is highest in football, then baseball and not far behind basketball, with the NHL the lowest.
   
   To get a Gini index (to see income inequality within the league) we'd need all the individual salary data. While that may be available, and I welcome you to find it and crunch the numbers yourself, for my level of curiosity a quick-and-dirty index of average salary divided by median will work. Despite the NFL having some outgroup super-earners giving it the highest J.P. Morgan index, baseball is the most unequal (suggesting the most high-earning outliers) at almost 3, followed by the NBA, NFL, and NHL. In the NHL the average and median are almost the same, and the top earner is an outlier among all the leagues at only $16M. (The J.P. Morgan index is also the lowest there.)
   
   As an additional thought, I wonder how closely real output (measured in goals, sacks, strike-outs etc.) correlates with pay - and does this explain why the NHL is so much more egalitarian in pay than the MLB or NFL? (Again there could be contract or business-specific reasons that I'm not aware of, rather than the nature of the sport.) It also raises the question of whether relative status has more of an effect in some sports, i.e. are there more positional effects in hockey?
   
   To explain this concretely: if you look at say, a brick-making factory, there will be people who are faster at making bricks, and people who are slower. If they're salaried, then you would expect rationally that someone who makes twice as many bricks as the median would get paid twice as much, and similarly someone who makes half as many bricks would get paid half as much.
   
   But that's not what we see - the curve is sigmoidal, flattening out at both ends, with the most productive people not making as much per unit as the people in the middle of the distribution, and the slowpokes getting more per unit. How does this make sense? The theory (as described by Robert Frank in Choosing the Right Pond) is that part of the compensation the fast workers are getting is status - they can strut around the factory with everyone knowing they're the best - and similarly to keep the humiliated slowpokes coming back day after day, you have to give them a premium to pay for the humiliation they suffer. So does a quarterback who throws for twice as many yards or scores twice as many touchdowns get twice as much? It's easy to tell just-so stories in other directions before we look at the data - yes, obviously status is a massive part of sports played for an audience, so the effect would be greater - or, people want to play sports professionally and the status of being a professional athlete more than offsets the humiliation of being the worst quarterback, paid commensurate with miserable stats. But again, I would need data at individual salary levels and have to compare stats (which differ for different positions), so if that's interesting enough to you to gather and crunch the numbers, I invite you to do it and post a link in the comments.
   
   
3. I was also curious about whether player salary or team payroll made a difference, and fortunately other people have been too and already crunched the numbers. Keep in mind that what matters to a franchise's owners is how much money they make, and winning or losing is just a means to that end (if it actually matters to the fan's expenditures at all - and the more loyal the fans, the less it matters - see more here.) But it turns out that baseball has the highest gap between payrolls, and it also makes the biggest difference to team performance; the NFL has the least gap, and it makes the least difference. According this article, the low-payroll teams actually made it to the Final Four more often than the high-payroll teams. (More data on MLB payroll-performance relationship here; yes payroll does help you win in MLB.
   
   
4. The most important thing is how much does each player produce? As someone involved in a league or franchise from a business standpoint, you might think of your sport this way: players are machines that produce revenue. In this analysis, using the average salary and number of players per league, as well as the overall revenue, we can see how much of the revenue is taken by salaries, and how efficient each league's players are at producing profit. Interestingly, here the NFL is in a league of its own. Its salaries are only about 10% of its revenue, compared to the other three which range 34-42%, and players in the NFL produce a share of the revenue 9.7 times their salaries, as opposed to the other three, who range from 2.36 to 2.96 times their salaries. Why is this? Does the NFL have better merchandising? More expensive tickets? Or it's just an inherently better TV sport so there's a bigger audience?
   
   (College football is obviously ideal in this regard. The individual player's share of revenue generated-to-salary ratio is nearly infinite. We might all be forgiven for dismissing the overwrought pleas not to pollute the moral purity of the sport by paying the players coming from the administrators of these programs, or the business office of the learning institutions that for some reason host them. It will be interesting to see, with college football consolidating essentially into two superleagues, how they'll keep the rankings and championships opaque in order to continue maximizing the number of bowls and profits therefrom.)

*Wasn't it J.P. Morgan who said the CEO should not make more than a certain multiple of what the lowest paid employee makes? I couldn't find the quote so if I'm misattributing it please correct me in the comments.

Lists of "Bizarre Beliefs" Reveal Difference Between True Belief, and Tribal Team Cheers

tl;dr Many truth claims - beliefs - are actually just tribal team cheers, or emotional signals, with the propositional verbal content merely superficial. We can get confused and react to these as if they are truth claims, especially because they people saying these things insist that they are. We need a name to distinguish them from real propositions - let's call them dolphin beliefs, because of their superficial similarity to true, propositional "fish" beliefs.


You should read Aaron Bergman's review of Fantasyland, a book about American's relationship with conspiracy and magical thinking, today and over the decades. He cites surveys which show, for example, that one in nine Americans believe they have seen the devil driven out of someone. Others he cites are about Obama being born in Kenya, vaccines causing autism, and ghosts. Recognizing that no one is immune to irrational beliefs, Bergman identifies what he thinks are his most "fringe" beliefs. And here I also engage in this exercise, not because I think you're particularly concerned with my fringe beliefs, but because it's interesting to see the differences in his and my list, vs the kinds of things discussed in a book about American conspiracy thinking.*

A few of my own bizarre beliefs:

• Panpsychism - consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe itself.
• There are living cells on Venus which explain the unknown absorbers and presence of phosphine. (See below for an update to this as of 2025.)
• As we explore the solar system, we will find evidence of von Neumann probes on asteroids.
• There will be nuclear weapons used in war in the lifetimes of many readers, and we don't talk about this nearly enough.

There are two characeristics to note about these fringe beliefs - one of which Bergman and I share with the conspiracy-believers cited in the book, and one which I think we do not.

1. We are not good at knowing what will seem strange to others.
   
   
2. These beliefs are not central to identity.

I think if you asked the devil-drivers to name their fringe beliefs, they would (in keeping with #1 above) not necessarily realize that devil-driving is seen by many others as a strange, fringe belief. Similarly, when voluntarily producing a list like this, I probably haven't been able to identify the beliefs I hold that would most shock most readers. This occurs because we're all embedded in communities. Devil-drivers know a lot of other devil-drivers; the belief doesn't seem strange in that context.

As for #2 - I can't speak for Bergman but I know that, if I encounter a strong argument against panpsychism, or data from a probe in the Venus clouds showing a completely mundane abiotic process that produces phosphine, not only would I probably change my mind - I would not become hostile and defensive, as if I were being personally attacked. Resistant, disappointed, a bit embarrassed to have been wrong in public - sure. But not angry. Whereas I think if you were to engage a devil driver and explain why their belief may be wrong, I predict they would become hostile and defensive, as if they were being personally attacked. Same for antivaxxers and birthers.

This underlines the core difference in two types of beliefs. There are actual hypotheses - what a belief ideally always is, able to be updated by new information – and then there are the tribal team cheers of religion, politics, or conspiracy communities.

If we think of beliefs as a good materialist should, we think about what is actually going on in the nervous systems, and how the behavior of the organism differs systematically in a way that can be categorized or at least placed on a spectrum. Notice that it's not merely isolated "trapped priors" we're dealing with here - antivaxxers and devil drivers don't just calmly reject arguments and information and continue to believe what they already believed. There is community, identity, and emotion involved.

I therefore think we should consider whether the "beliefs" of devil-drivers and antivaxxers are truth claims at all, or something else.** At the very least we should consider whether their utility is more as tribal team cheers than as truth claims.

The implication here is that the superficial content of the belief is not the only determinant of whether it is a functional, updateable belief (a hypothesis) or a tribal team cheer. For example: say I learn that there is going to be a meeting of a local club to discuss the phosphine and unknown absorbers in the Venusian atmosphere. Excited to talk about it with like-minded people, I attend. At the meeting I find people talking about how they just know in their hearts there is life on Venus, that NASA is trying to hide the evidence, and that they don't care what additional evidence the probes might find. In fact when I suggest we send more probes they are actively hostile!*** Whereas the club members and I would both say "There is life in the Venusian atmosphere", I have a hypothesis, they have a tribal team cheer, though the superficially the content of the claim is the same. (The hypothesis IS just the content of the claim; the tribal team cheer is a cake of social behaviors with the words of the truth claim as icing.)

(Added later: as of 2025 I have updated my belief and accepted that the unknown absorbers are not life. Not only was that phosphine paper a product of bad spectrometry that failed multiple attempts at replication, there are at least two papers - Jiang et al 2024, and Egan et al 2025 - that have advanced good candidate abiotic explanations for what the absorbers could be. Needless to say I am now a pariah in the Venusian life community, who say I was never actually a true believer, etc.)

In fact, focusing on the process of belief, rather than the content of the belief itself, is what we do in psychiatry. If someone is convinced his wife is cheating on him with absolutely zero evidence, even if she confides "actually I did have a drunken one-night stand ten years ago but he doesn't know about it" - that's still a jealous delusion. He doesn't have a good reason to believe it. The Venus club's stated belief is a community and identity device, not a cognitive tool for explaining the world. Hence bizarre statements, in the rare occasion when they are discussing it with people from outside their community, like "I just feel that it's true", "this is offensive", and "this is a personal attack."

Because it's easy to be confused by tribal team cheers which do indeed look like truth claims, especially when the tribal team cheer-ers are loathe to admit that it's not really a truth claim, it's worth identifying the tribal cheers as something different from hypotheses.

You're probably familiar with the idea of a shibboleth. For me, the belief in Venusian life is a hypothesis; for the club, it's a shibboleth - or at least, much more of a shibboleth than a hypothesis. The more of these characteristics it has, the more likely a belief is a shibboleth than a hypothesis:

• Avoidance of any testing
• Anger at questions, as if somehow being personally attacked
• Formation of identity around the belief
• Reason for belief is emotional
• Association with community around the belief

Devil-driving, birtherism, and antivaxxer-ism are shibboleths. Panpsychism is a hypothesis. In the future of epistemology, people may be amused but charitable that we did not make this distinction, just as we think of people five centuries ago who didn’t understand that dolphins are not fish. For that reason instead of calling these types of beliefs shibboleths and hypotheses, let's call them dolphins and fish respecitvely, to emphasize their superficial similarity, and because many dolphin beliefs are actually not in-group team cheers, they're just used by individuals to send emotional signals.


*It's worth pointing out that the types of beliefs we articulate, when asked what our most surprising beliefs are, are generally about the external world, not internal beliefs like "I'm unlovable" or "I can't accomplish important things" - even if we're frequently aware of such beliefs, we guard them closely. I think this is more likely out of fear of the impact on others' opinions of us, rather than a shrewd calculation about what people want to hear about.

**At one point there was a debate in psychiatry as to whether delusions are really beliefs. My argument is that they are indeed something neurologically and behaviorally different, though this is an academic or semantic distinction at this point.

***Compare to eg creationists, who often spend much more time talking about how their enemies are suppressing them than providing actual arguments and data, making predictions or trying to do something pragmatic and useful with their "theory". Where are the creationist biomedical companies?

Is Discounting the Future Due to a Defect in Impulse Control, Or a Rational Adaptation?

Many people are familiar with the Mischel marshmallow experiment. Kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes.* The concept of varying ability to delay gratification is quite critical to discussions of public policy, since clearly we do not all have identical agency in every situation, by reason of variation of our nervous systems.

The received wisdom in the informed public is that not delaying gratification - that is, discounting the future - is a negative, a deficit in impulse control. The experiment has been run in multiple settings with the discount rate quantified: do you accept a ten dollar payment at the conclusion of your participation, or $11 a month later? (If you take the $10 right now, your future discounting rate is 10% per month.) It's been pointed out repeatedly since then that there are many other plausibly influential factors, including the predictability of the environment. Run this study in Singapore, and you can count on the experimenter being in their office when you go back. In Somalia, after a month, who knows if the building will be there anymore? Whether it's war or just low trust that makes it less likely you'll actually get your payoff, the direction of the impact on your discount rate is going to be the same.

Celeste Kidd created a model of this in children, and sure enough, kids who were disappointed by not receiving a promised reward, later on discounted the future significantly more. This relates to future discount rates in politically unstable parts of the world, as well as in children raised by inconsistent parents. It's a vicious cycle, because increasing your discounting is actual the rational choice.

I would have expected this result to be much better known, so I'm doing my small part in making that happen.

Kidd C, Palmeri H, Aslin RN. Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition. Volume 126, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 109-114.


*It's worth pointing out that, so far as I know, there's no research showing that low future discounting increases happiness - in fact, there's research strongly suggesting that the curve is U-shaped, and beyond a certain point, good impulse control makes us less happy! Isn't that why we care? Essentially longitudinal studies here and here; writeup of both in Washington Post. Of course, your country is affected by the level of impulse control of your countrymen, so the ideal situation might be to be a person with low impulse control in a country of people with high impulse control, a classic free-rider problem.

Classifying Humans Is Not Inherently Bad. In Fact It's Often Good.

When I was a psychiatry resident one of my supervisors told me her classification scheme for her fellow psychiatrists: there are fuzzies, and there are techies. Fuzzies are more the stereotype you might hold of people in the mental health field - people who are innate nurturers and speak in a soothing voice, and enjoy a holistic instinctual approach to helping people. They might have ethnic vases in their office. In contrast, techies are psychiatrists who like to think about neurotransmitters and circuits and diagnostic classifications, and use explicit reasoning processes about those to help patients. They read science fiction and dress like engineers.

I think there is indeed a spectrum of this sort, and I think it exists not just in humans, but in the world at large. And I see an increasing moral disgust on the part of fuzzies against techies.

Classifying humans is not bad. Humans are fascinating. Why wouldn't you pay attention to the endless ways in which they vary? (Have I given myself away as a techie yet?) But to fuzzies, an urge to assign humans to abstract categories of any sort can seem bad - creepy, even - a gateway to dehumanizing and harming them. "You should just care about about people!", they say. "Why is that so hard?"

These two urges - to care and to classify - are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are mutually reinforcing to the important outcome, namely, people getting better. They should both be present in any healthy cognitively diverse group of humans. They're just not usually present to the same degree within each individual brain.

There are a lot of us who want to help people, but don't have that innate nurturing instinct. So we make an end run around that, and we think in explicit categories: person #1 has trait A, and might benefit from X (and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about psychiatric treatment, public policy, or understanding why someone is feeling a certain emotion right now.) To a nurturer, this might sound abhorrent. But if it helps, does it matter what cognitive process we use to accomplish it?

Because we humans do vary in this dimension, this ironically means we vary in our ability to understand people at the other end of the spectrum. To us techies, when we encounter fuzzies' offense, it's surprising and baffling. "No no no, you've got it all wrong. I like this person! I find her interesting! She is the first native speaker of a Nilotic language I've met and that makes her cognitively unique among people I know and capable of contributing uniquely!" From many fuzzies' perspectives, this kind of classification seems almost "racism-adjacent" - indeed, a stone's throw from phrenology.

A fair criticism of techies is that classification can be wrong, and can be used for bad purposes, e.g. phrenology (a dead horse which has been dead for a long time but which people love to bring up - until someone can find us a living phrenologist, let's all retire this cliche.) And yes, it is possible that thinking of people only in terms of their abstract traits and membership in various groups can dehumanize them, if it is done with no real interest in the individual, by reducing their identity to membership in collectives.* It can feel intrusive and "script"-reinforcing. On the other hand, a defense of techies is that their interest is a genuine interest in humans, their makeup is generally such that this is the most natural way of relating, and this is all an effort to connect and understand other people. The very abstractness of these categories means that they are universal - to a techie, the fact we can all be classified in along the same dimensions actually feels quite equalizing!

An also-fair criticism of fuzzies is that often, the self-image and need to signal tribal identity with certain kinds of statements overwhelms consideration of others' actual needs. ("Did you actually measure the outcome of your caring act?") And nurturing does not always help. Some people, for example, are indifferent to (or even enjoy) the suffering of others (i.e., antisocial personality disorder) and no amount of nurturing will change that; thus, the blind eye often turned to this population in mental health care, because the cognitive dissonance their existence causes to nurturers is extreme. It should also be pointed out that the neurochemical basis of nurturers' behavior, oxytocin, is not a love hormone so much as an ingroup hormone. All that nurturing ultimately requires an outgroup, and many a techie can tell stories of deliberate censure and exclusion by fuzzies for some poorly understood offense. A defense of fuzzies is that they are more genuinely motivated by the positive affect of the recipients of their caring attention, and therefore, probably better at taking care of people in the short-run.


*Speaking as a techie: intersectionality seems quite deliberately dehumanizing, in that it explicitly argues the most important thing about each of us is the various racial and gender groups we're part of - and since our membership in these groups is involuntary, this strips identity of any aspect of agency.

Physical Topography (of the American West) Associated with Human Personality

You can find the paper here. I have only read the abstract since there's a paywall. Questions: how does this correlate with the settlement patterns discussed in Albion's Seed, in this genetic analysis, or the Bad Stripe? (The Bad Stripe roughly correlates with Greater Appalachia in the former article, or the Border Reavers in Albion's Seed.)

Götz, F.M., Stieger, S., Gosling, S.D. et al. Physical topography is associated with human personality. Nat Hum Behav (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0930-x

"What Do We Want?" "Not That" "When Do We Want It" "Now"

An as-ever prescient Orwell, on modern protest movements both left and right:

"[Nationalism] can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty."

- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

Addiction Has Three Types: To Pleasure, Flow, or Meaning

Positive psychology research models happiness as reducing to three components: pleasure (chocolate, sunsets and orgasm), flow (losing yourself in an activity; "action meditation") and meaning - feelings of value and connection and identity within a community. My fellow Americans and I have a tendency to reduce the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is important, but it's not the whole game, and modern consumer society may have specialized in that component and lost the other two.

We commonly think of addiction as a problem of pleasure and pain: pleasure when you consume the addictive substance (or perform the addictive activity), and suffering when you do not, after you're hooked. It's not hard to see how it's not just meth, but sex or food, that could be the subject of addictive behavior. Humans have continued to get better at creating goods and services that cause repetitive behavior in their targets - think brand loyalty, processed drugs (think coca leaves to cocaine; increasing the sugar in everything.) We have probably become better at identifying avoiding these addictive goods and services. Still, I'd bet good money that over time, they're becoming more addictive faster than we're getting better at resisting them.

Through the lens of positive psychology, this starts to look too narrow. It's not just the pleasure component of happiness that has been exploited. Addiction to flow and meaning exist too.

Probably the best example of addiction to flow is video games. They are designed for this purpose, and there is evidence that they are damaging the productivity of young people, particularly young males.

Then there is community addiction. The most harmless form is what Facebook exploits to get you to keep checking whether your friends have liked your post. The more concerning form is that of religious cults, or small ingroup-vs-outgroup communities (often based on unearned, non-opt-outable qualities like race or religion.) This is actually the one that has the most potential for harm. Postwar Japan and late 60s America both featured a shock to the automatic meaning-generating aspect of national community. This is happening in a second wave in the West. It pains me as a staunch atheist to say this, but it's becoming clearer that the disappearance of religion as a community-builder has not been a boon for everyone. If you're also an atheist and that sentence made you squirm, then here's a thought: a substantial part, maybe even the majority, of young American males who support Donald Trump are not religious.

I have enough confidence that these three types are legitimate subtypes that I think it would be appropriate to have them DSM as specifiers. Indeed, the discussion over video game addiction has been ongoing for some time.

For the Rationalist Community: More on Why Choice of College Doesn't Matter That Much

After I wrote the last post (telling people college choice doesn't actually matter much in terms of happiness in life) it struck me how directly opposed it was to the message that's been growing over the last few years in the rationality community, much of which overlaps with people interested in existential risk (x-risk) and effective altruism. Since Scott Alexander is kind enough to put me on the blogroll at Slatestarcodex, I occasionally get readers from there. Some of them are in high school and are deciding what to do with their lives; some are parents, helping their kids decide.

(An interesting take on perils to be avoided in college culture from Dan Wang)

A good starting point is this SSC post, which notes: "In general, [Dale & Krueger 2011] find no advantage from attending more selective colleges. Although Harvard students earn much more than University of Podunk students, this is entirely explained by Harvard only accepting the highest-ability people. Conditional on a given level of ability, people do not earn more money by going to more selective colleges...Overall, unless people come from a disadvantaged background, there’s surprisingly little evidence that going to a good college as an undergraduate is helpful in the long term – except possibly for a few positions like President or Supreme Court justice." No argument that many colleges are getting harder to get into; but clearly, it doesn't matter as much as you might think.

And that's the point I'd like to expand on. There are two messages that we're getting these days from the ambient culture about college decisions:

• If you don't get into the college of your choice, your life is ruined, that's your one chance, you're now a loser and you won't be able to get a good job (society's current message)
• In order to work on anything meaningful, it has to be something involving AI, x-risk, or EA/rationality-adjacent topics. (this community's implied message)

It turns out that neither of these have much to do with meaning or personal happiness.[1]

I worry that earnest young rationalists, who are already anxious enough when they recognize the pervasive irrationality in society, will have their anxiety exacerbated by these discussions and the extra fuel they add to the (unnecessary) college admissions madness I'm arguing against here. There is also something to be said here against the tendency of people in the rationalist community to define themselves based on intelligence. Intelligence is only a proxy indicator for actual accomplishment. (No one was ever recruited onto a basketball team for being 6'10". They're recruited because they can play good basketball. Yes, height is correlated with that, but it's still only a proxy.) And you have to keep in mind, getting into college isn't the accomplishment.

There are certainly choices you can make that will damage your happiness in life. These do not have to do with which college you go to. They are things like abusing substances, driving unsafely, harming the people you care about or allowing them to harm you. I should clarify that this is not an argument that college is pointless, that you shouldn't try to get in, or that choice of program is 100% entirely irrelevant to your life. I think you should try to get into the best school you can, that's best-suited to what you want to do. What you should take away from this is that there's no point killing yourself to do it, and don't worry too much, because if you don't get in to your top choice(s), you'll be fine anyway.

The overall message is that wherever you go to college, it will not significantly harm or help your chance at a good life.

College admissions madness – noticeably worse in the 30ish years since I applied to undergrad – is mostly motivated by status considerations. Yes, status helps you do other things, much like developing a chess piece's position, and I've wondered myself about how much time to spend looking impressive vs actually "doing things." I don't have an answer for that, other than for me personally, the answer is clearly not "indefinitely increase status throughout life." I tried it. It makes me miserable and is unsustainable, and defeats the purpose of being able to use the status to "do things." Some problems are 1) that we can never know when your quest for status is actually just motivated by the immediately positive feedback you get right now from someone recognizing your status (rather than it being a vehicle to accomplish other things) and 2) that status is an ordinal good – it's about ranking, not absolute value. Moreover, it's necessarily zero sum. If you rise one spot in a status competition, someone else drops one spot. Smart people – emotionally and intellectually smart people – stay out of zero-sum games, including status competitions. One major drawback of the internet is that suddenly we're all aware of the same status hierarchies and aware of how the other half live, and we are drawn into the game, instead of appreciating that in absolute terms we mostly have good lives, and will have the same life regardless of where we rank in status competitions, including "where was your undergrad institution ranked?"

It's tragic that, so far as we know, this is the one place and time in the universe where such a thing as happiness can exist, and the most evolved beings on this planet who live in wealthy free nations with material lives our ancestors could only dream about, are squandering our happiness to worry about whether their neighbor might think they're better.

So here are some follow-up questions and objections that I imagine might be voiced by a young person connected to the rationality community, puzzled by what they're reading here, against the backdrop of other messages they've been getting.


"I want to work on the most important problems, especially x-risk problems. I can't do that unless I get into these institutions."

It is very unlikely that getting into a certain university is 100% gating to whether you can do anything that contributes in a certain area. (Worth asking here: are you working on nuclear x-risk? Why not? Even the risk vs probability graph here shows nuclear war having an expected value worse than rogue AI on the 200 year horizon; I don't think the probability of nuclear war drops as much with shorter time periods as rogue AI drops. Seriously. Work on nuclear weapons reduction, that has a much clearer payoff.) If you don't end up in a position to do anything related, you'll still have a good life. And to that someone might say, "So you're admitting you're just interested in having a good time, and you're not stressing too much about working on x-risk or any other cause? How incredibly selfish!" This is the paradox. If you want to work on x-risk, and you apply and can't get in to your preferred programs – guess what? It's probably because people better than you at those skills got the spots you were applying for. And they're going to do a better job working on those problems than you would have, so the work gets done anyway. So there's the paradox – unless you're saying what matters is you and your little ego getting into that spot, rather than progress being made, you shouldn't be upset about that.[2] It's fine, and you'll still have the same quality of life you would otherwise have.

If you're objecting to my statement that the admissions process is fair and accurate, and you're saying "the applicants who beat me out won't necessarily be better than me – they're just people who hire better essay writers, or whose richer family gave more money to the university, or who are better looking, or [endless list of unfair gamey things that have nothing to do with success in the chosen field of endeavor.]" And you are quite possibly correct! So this doesn't reflect on who you are, you have no control over it, and you'll still have a good life!


"But I can't do [exact career] unless I get into [chosen institution.]"

Rarely are career tracks so black and white. Yes, it might be harder to go from A to B (become a professor, get funded by a VC, etc) if you don't start out at a top institution, but rarely is it a go/no-go situation. But even that difference in access is not really about the education, and is more about networking and access. You can do that with internships, visiting your friend who did get in and making contacts, or doing projects with contacts you make online. If you're hoping you can just rely on the credential you get from institution X and are not doing anything related to that career before you get there, outside of the institution...then maybe it's just the status of the institution you want, and not what it can actually do for you in terms of making you better at that field of endeavor? (See more on this below in the "But I won't be able to learn..." section.)

In fact there are very few one-hour periods in your life that strongly determine the rest of your life – life is mostly the accumulation of small decisions made multiple times a day. The discrete future-determining events tend to be either not programmed (e.g. random introduction at a social event) or have nothing to do with your career (asking someone on impulse for their phone number, and later you start a family with them.) You might object that there was an admissions test you didn't do well on, but guess what - your ability at that test was determined well before you sat down, in fact mostly before you were born.[4] And even then, a bad score because you were sick doesn't destroy the rest of your life the way, say, mistreating a family member might.

An anecdote, with thrills and spills: a med student that I once supervised as a resident got back her Step 1 score while I was working with her. For non-medical people, this is the single most important test score that determines how competitive you are as a residency applicant – both in terms of the programs you might go to, or even the specialty you might get into (some specialties are harder to get into than others.) She remains the best med student I ever worked with – but when she got back her score it was quite disappointing to her. "I feel like my future just closed off! I can't get into [competitive specialty.]" And with her score, she was probably right (a spill.) So I asked her to go for a walk with me and I told her I thought she would have wasted her talent on [competitive specialty] and that she'd be a talented psychiatrist (which is not as hard to get into, though this is changing – fashions in medicine are funny things.) Fast forward, she is now in her psychiatry residency (thrill), and got into [extremely competitive program.] I told her to stay at our program, partly out of selfishness at wanting to retain her and work with her (which I freely admitted) but I also thought she would be happier. I haven't spoken to her recently but I've heard that she hasn't enjoyed her training experience so far, for deeply unpleasant reasons that have to do with the culture of the place but not the rigor or work hours (a spill.)


"If I want to be a professor at a major university, or a physician, or a lawyer, there are big differences in my chances based on what college I'm applying from. There are real hoops and gatekeepers."

First, see "But I can't do exact career" above. Also, the same thing applies as with X-risk above: if you're really in it for patient care, or justice, etc. and you didn't get in, then someone else better than you got your spot. Fine! Your patients or clients will still be taken care of, and you'll still be happy as not a doctor or lawyer. (In fact, likely happier. The burn-out statistics for these professions are abysmal. And sometime read up on the lives of people who had physics units, or other equally Important Things, named after them. Maybe you're more selfless than most people – actually probably not – and most people would rather have a good life than a unit.)[5] Regarding getting a PhD and getting a full-time tenured faculty position, in a place you might actually want to live for its own sake – you're entering a lottery similar to that jock you scoffed at in high school, who said he was going to play pro sports.

Also, if you can't get into a good institution, maybe you're not cut out to be a doctor or lawyer. That's fine, and in fact I'm happy for you that you didn't get stuck in those careers, where unless you're suited for them you would be abjectly miserable. (See below, "There's a clear hierarchy...") Even within medicine, I meet psychiatrists who hate being psychiatrists, surgeons who hate doing surgery, etc. – and they have bad lives. We live in a technologically advanced wealthy country. There are many, many, many things to do with your life that will be fulfilling, make money, and give you a chance to create value for others. I once overheard a middle-aged mountain guide on Mt. Shasta once talking with the people in his climbing party, and it turned out he had applied to med school and then withdrawn his application. He was having a blast on the mountain that day and showed no sign of regretting his life choices.


"I see a lot of information online about how VCs and top companies only recruit young people from elite universities. And various people who talk a lot online about start-ups and technology companies say that unless you're working in technology, you're not doing anything important."

If CNN ran stories all the time that said, really the only significant thing in your life is to become a TV journalist, and it's incredibly competitive and you should start thinking NOW about where to attend so you can get hired...I hope you would laugh at the obvious self-servingness of it. So when you read online about how tech is the only thing that matters – how is that different?

It's worth pointing out that VC partners like young founders, despite data showing that older founders are more likely to be successful. That is self-evidently because they can control the founders more easily, and make them work harder – no families, no expectations of a healthy life-balance. (That little twinge you just felt that you must be a loser if you want time with your family and a balanced life? That means that "the 1%" have already done their job on you.) In the same way, consulting firms are not interested in older applicants, because they can't mold them and get them to work stupidly long hours – a fully formed personality and set of values is not useful when you want to control someone. So don't be so eager to put yourself in this position.


"There's a clear hierarchy in life. Don't kid yourself. This is all just wishful thinking."

There are certainly status hierarchies. If you haven't bought into their lack of innate value by now, you should stop reading. But it's true, we're human, and they affect us – which is why the healthiest societies are ones with multiple overlapping status hierarchies, and the healthiest people are members of multiple status hierarchies. First, there's not just one dimension with "MD/PhD at UCSF" (in my world) at the top, and everyone else below that. Whatever is at the top of the hierarchies you spend your time worrying about, rest assured that the majority of human beings don't care about it. It can be easy to forget that other status hierarchies exist when you're inside one, but if you can, avoid taking them seriously, and stop worrying about who's above and below you.[3] (If there is a secret to a happy life, it's the ability to do this. I'm still working on it myself but when I can do it, it feels great.)

Second, to the extent that you're willing to subject yourself to a status hierarchy because there are good people participating in it who you respect and whose opinion you admire – make sure it's one that fits you. People differ tremendously in their innate talents and temperaments. You might not be cut out for a STEM field. You might not even be college material. There are many many many things to do in life that are fun, create value for others, and can make you a decent living, that don't require a bachelor's degree (ie trades.) Don't rob yourself of a career you'd be great at because classmates look down their noses at your choice. There are many many many people stuck in postdocs or at big law firms wondering why they chose this path. Ask yourself seriously how much you're collecting status coupons (degrees from prestigious institutions) to reassure yourself that random strangers who don't matter to your life or goals will think you're impressive, versus how much those status coupons are actually getting you toward your goals. If you don't know what those goals are, figure them out.


"But if I don't get into a good STEM program, I won't get a job."

Most jobs that require a bachelor's degree, still do not specifically require STEM degrees. With the exception of programmers, we produce way too many STEM graduates, particularly ones who want to go beyond undergrad. (See "If I want to be a professor" above.) You can learn programming from any institution and you'll be in demand. You can also learn programming on your own (see "But I won't learn" below.) If you say you want to be a programmer but your reason for not spending more time learning it is that you didn't get into XYZ University...chances are, your self-starting passion would not have been kindled there either.


"But unless I get into XYZ University, I won't be able to learn [field.]"

Don't MIT and Harvard literally have all their courses online? Why aren't you already taking them? If you need a professor to threaten you with bad grades to make you learn the material, you are not a talented and self-driven achiever in that field, and going to such a program will give you a piece of paper that impresses people and maybe gets you paid a little more, but will not turn you into a talented and self-driven achiever.


"Fine, but that 10% income premium does make a difference over time. If I don't get into an elite school, I can't join the 1%."

First: if you're thinking your salary is going to be what gets you into the 1%, then you're woefully middle class and don't understand the 1% at all. Being rich is about capital, not salary. I'm a physician, but I still rely on my salary. I'm not elite. I have to go to work on Monday or I can't pay my mortgage. So your university experience is very unlikely to get you into the 1%. Second, above about US$70,000 (maybe a little more adjusted for today's dollars and your local cost of living) the happiness curve plateaus. One caveat – if you're the first generation in your family to go to college, or you come from an underrepresented minority or immigrant population, college does give a bigger benefit to your future prospects than others, and the better the college, the more disproportionately bigger the increase.


"Sure, it's easy for you to say 'don't worry about getting in, status doesn't matter.' You got into med school and you're now established in your career."

Oddly enough, the thing that I think has most made me relax about my career is having a family. It really does put things in perspective. So it's not really "I did it, so it can't be hard", it's more "I realized my career is actually not as important as I used to think it was." And the reality is that a job is a job (see "Fine, but that 10% income premium" above.)


"Status does matter. I can't help noticing how people regard me. So I'll be scared and depressed if I follow your advice, and I'm still going to try to get into the best school possible."

First, you should try to get into the best school possible, but you shouldn't kill yourself trying, and you shouldn't feel bad if it doesn't work out. But if you feel controlled by your own need for status recognition – this actually IS something you have some control over (try CBT!) Second, there are two sides to the coin. What if you go to Harvard, and don't do much with your life? Many Harvard grads have regular jobs, and are constantly feeling pressured from other Harvard grads, their coworkers, families, etc. when someone says "So you went to Harvard, and now you're doing...this?" (i.e., the same job with same office that someone who went to State U is doing.) I have known Harvard grads who feel this, and it's unpleasant. They have the same life that a State U grad has - which is fine - but also the feeling that they've disappointed people - which is not fine.

An anecdote: an acquaintance from my undergrad (a decent but not awesome public university) was interviewing for a prestigious international scholarship. When they asked him what he would do if he didn't get it, he said, "Oh I'll be fine, I already got [other, less prestigious international scholarship.]" (Which he had.) He soon realized this was the wrong move, and needless to say did not get the scholarship he was interviewing for. Guess what? He has had and continues to have an amazing career, so much so that I'm changing details and not naming him because you might be able to figure out who I'm talking about based on his presence online. And, it's very difficult to see how he would be happier OR more successful if he had gotten the "better" scholarship. It is also difficult to believe that he would not have had a fulfilling career even if he did not get any prestigious scholarships (and again, note that successful is not the same as happy!) And looking at top scholarships - Rhodes Scholars are smart people, but they don't change the world. The people who get into top scholarships and programs are the people who are best suited for getting into top scholarships and programs - not necessarily doing the things that those programs are ostensibly training people for.


"I was reading your other post, and I read where you say you looked for data on happiness outcomes from attending universities of varying quality – and there's little to no data on this? This is even worse than I thought! How am I supposed to make a decision! I'm flying blind in my quest to have a good life!"

No you're not. What data we do have suggests your quest for happiness is minimally impacted by where you go to university.


"This is so selfish. If everybody thought like this (maximizing personal happiness) then progress would grind to a halt, the AIs will get us, etc."

But guess what! Not everyone thinks like this. But, if you're willing to sacrifice your personal happiness, I truly do appreciate your decision. I just want you to realize that's what you're getting into. Working 20 hour days will not make you happy, even if you get into the school/company/etc. of your dreams.


"Look, I know I will be happy if I get into [college program of my choice.] You can't explain that away by saying my life will be fine either way."

Yes, you will have a bump up in your mood if during application season you get a thick envelope and some bad days if you get a thin one. But happiness set point is a real thing. You will have good and bad days at either university, or job, or in your life, regardless. In fact, very close to the same number and intensity of good and bad days. Just like people who win the lottery or become paraplegic return to their own set points in mere months. If the devil appeared and said he was either taking away your ability to walk, or making you not get into your top choice for college, which would you pick? (And guess what – you would be okay either way.)


ADDENDUM: The Community College Strategy

People often attend community college with the goal of transferring to a four-year college, and ultimately, getting the same degree everyone else does. Community colleges accept all comers, and if the stressful part of this process is getting accepted to a four-year college, then isn’t this a very obvious back door? Yet I don’t hear many people discussing it. On one hand, I wonder if people avoid this seemingly very workable strategy due to the (stupid) status stigma of starting at a community college; on the other, I don’t know the numbers and maybe it is actually quite hard to transfer to a decent four-year college from a community college even for motivated people. There’s also the consideration of missing out on networking opportunities – some colleges are very cliquish, and landing there junior year when all the relationships are already established might be a very lonely experience, and you miss out on the friendships and career connections that are an important part of your career.

Bottom line, if you want to attend a good public university in a state, and you can't get in straight from high school, then if you're actually motivated and you attend a community college in that state, that's a realistic shot at getting in as a transfer student.

However it was hard to find statistics along the lines of "x % of people entering community colleges stating that they wanted to transfer to a selective four-year institution were able to do it." What I did find are some stats for specific universities (decent list here.) At UCLA, 30% of its undergrads are in-state community college transfers. Top public universities do take lots of community college students. (Interestingly, community college transfers outperform the direct-from-high-school students at top universities, but private schools don't take many - indeed, Princeton only recently started taking them at all again. Why might that be? One theory that explains observations is that Princeton isn't looking for performance throughout its student body, it's looking for alumni contributions that give them some mediocre legacy students, along with a "certain type" of applicant. Again, if you're the applicant, that's not about you or any choices you've made.)

You might also know that community colleges have an abysmal rate of its students ultimately graduating with a four year degree, so how does that match the higher success rate of community college students once they get to a four year campus? Because it's not the community college or four year college "making" the student - the community college students that succeeds at UCLA might not succeed first time around in the initial admission but they get to the same place, because of their innate properties. And if you go to community college and don't graduate - higher ed isn't for you, and that's fine too. Also worth noting - once you're at a UCLA, more selective private schools are within reach for graduate education. (But again - why? Ask yourself very seriously.)


FOOTNOTES

[1] If you're worried about a meaningless life: don't be. This is literally the thing that you have the most control over. As well, happiness is composed of three components, pleasure, meaning, and flow. With respect to these things, humans discount the future in two different ways. We value pleasure over meaning too much in the short term; that's easy to understand. But we also value meaning over pleasure too much in the long term. If you go years sacrificing food, fun, and friends to work like a dog at your meaningful job, you will likely burn out, and you may not get as much meaning from your career as you thought when you considered it for sixty seconds while you were 17.

[2] I am a physician, and did not get into the (highly competitive) top-ranked residency programs I ranked first. This was devastating at the time, especially because I realized some decidedly non-clinical-skill-reflecting poor choices likely played a part (i.e., it didn't occur to me to go over my application with my own med school, which includes getting a professional photo done, and I sent out my application with a headshot that made me look like a serial killer.) I complained to a friend that the people who did get those spots were just status-seekers who played the game better than me, to which she replied, "How is that not what's motivating you? And are you admitting that how well you play the admissions game is the important thing about your life?" Once I realized that I had become a physician to (news flash!) help patients, and that I would still be able to do this just the same, I got over myself. And the program I went through ended up giving me opportunities I never would have had at the other ones. Now, if I had gotten into the more competitive ones, would I not be writing a blog post about how that program ended up being the best one? Probably. Because it doesn’t matter to my overall happiness.

[3] People with narcissistic personality disorder have very little empathy or interest in others beyond using those others as a constant source of attention and flattery, so that the narcissist can convince himself he’s not garbage. Narcissists have very little self-value other than knowing where they are in status hierarchies, and very little knowledge of other people beyond categorizing them as higher or lower status. And narcissists as a rule are miserable.

[4] While on my surgery rotation, I met with the director of the clerkship, a trauma surgeon. He asked what specialty I wanted to go into. At the time I already knew it would either be psychiatry or neurology. But I was on my neurosurgery rotation at the time. In reality, for multiple reasons, there was never any danger of my becoming a surgeon. But the game I had been told to play was to include my current rotation in my list of interests in the hopes of avoiding offending the attendings and getting a better grade. So I did that – and the trauma surgeon looked contemplative and said, "I'm going to be honest with you. I don’t see you as a neurosurgeon." Of course he had seen through me and was exactly correct. There was a second of fear ("Oh no, he’s going to fail me") and then a feeling of immense relief – a physical sensation of weight lifting from my shoulders. That’s when I realized that my not being a neurosurgeon had been determined many years before that moment.

[5] Neurosurgery sounds cool but the training is especially grueling, even by doctors' standards. When I was a med student, I was in a seminar where a doc was going around the room asking what specialty people wanted to go into. One guy said neurosurgery, and the doc held out his hands as if weighing options and said "Yeah...(one hand) neurosurgery...(other hand) happy life...(one hand) neurosurgery...(other hand) happy life..." As it happens, I love what I do, psychiatry, which has a much more humane schedule than neurosurgery. I can't imagine why everyone doesn't do it, other than they don't think about what it would be like at age 50 to have a neurosurgeon's schedule.