Category Archives: ideas

“Woman-to-Woman-to…Huberman:” What journalism looks like from the inside 

May 6, 2024 By in Critics, Culture, ideas, Publishing Tags: , , Leave a comment

This is written by a woman (and friend of mine!) who wishes to remain anonymous. 

When the article about Andrew Huberman was published in March, I wasn’t surprised, because “Sarah” had contacted me months before, seeking answers from women she says didn’t know about her, though they were having sex with her then-partner, Andrew. 

On a Sunday night in February, I received a text from an unknown number—the texter introduced herself as “Sarah,” the woman Andrew shared his life with for the last five years. She shared deeply personal, deleterious, and unsubstantiated details about Andrew cheating on her with four to ten women, spreading rumors about her, and verbally abusing her. She assumed I was one of those hapless women, and she apologized for being the one to tell me. She was cloaking gossip in virtue, though she reassured me that she held no ill will against me and saw me as another victim. All of this happened before ending her opening message to me by asking me, “woman-to-woman,” to bring her comfort and closure by admitting that I was sleeping with Andrew. 

I felt a mix of shame, suspicion, confusion, hurt, degradation, empathy, and curiosity. Who was on the other end of this message? Could I trust her, or him, or them? Was this a trap? What sort of nightmare love triangle did Andrew drag me into? “Triangle” is probably not even the right geometric shape. I asked her how she found my contact information. It was hard not to feel solidarity with her, she was kind and spilling her guts about her heartbreak—yet, her approach was unapologetically intrusive and felt manipulative. 

Sarah said she found my name in Andrew’s journal one day and instinctively took a photo of the page and later googled me to find my number. When I asked why she’d assume I had an “affair” with Andrew after reading my name in his journal, she replied: “Because of him talking about a long-term relationship…with somebody beautiful. I looked at your picture and you seemed beautiful and private.” 

I admit some susceptibility to flattery, and yet it was as if Sarah thought I owed her answers regarding my relationship with Andrew. After I felt confident that this was the woman that Andrew had been seeing for the last few years, I told her that I’d not seen Andrew since before the pandemic. She rapid-fire texted: 

  • “So he cheated on me with you in the early part of our relationship?”
    • No, I’ve been in relationships. 
  • “Oh, he reached out, but you didn’t accept.”
    • No.
  • “Were you in a relationship with him? Or was it just more casual?”

I told Sarah I’d not been romantically involved with Andrew since before their relationship started in ~2018. 

She declared how relieved she felt and we discussed in limited detail our histories with Andrew. Sarah said nothing about going to the press and I said I wasn’t interested in any sort of PR takedown of him. It’s possible she wasn’t planning to at that moment, but I felt she had an agenda beyond closure. I thought she wanted revenge.

I told her I’d known Andrew for nearly 20 years and was aware that he had some struggles in his relationships—and don’t we all! Sarah said she was also aware of his past. Despite what she said earlier in her texts, Andrew had nothing but very positive things to say about her whenever I spoke to him. He told me all about their struggles with fertility and how much he loved their shared life with her children from a former marriage. While Andrew and I had dated off and on for many years, he did not reach out to me for anything romantic when they were together, indicating to me that he must be quite committed and in love with her. I expressed compassion and empathy for her and with any woman he’s not been truthful to, but I also expressed sympathy for Andrew because I know that, despite himself, he wants a life partner. The whole thing seemed sad to me. 

After Sarah realized I saw Andrew as more than what she and these other women experienced (he is more than that), she acknowledged Andrew was generous and kind with her in many ways throughout their relationship. She repeated to me that part of her healing process is knowing the full truth. I am sure she meant this, though I don’t know where she picked up this notion or how she knows it’s true. I think she should read Esther Perel’s books. The sense that she was seeking more than “healing” persisted. The truth came out when the article hit. 

I can’t decide what stood out to me more when I first read it: that Sarah cherry-picked whose contact info she provided to Kerry Howley, conveniently excluding me, or that a story which doesn’t amount to much more than a gossip column about an accomplished neuroscientist-turned-podcaster’s propensity for wandering made the front cover of New York Magazine. There’s no abuse of power, no exploitation, no inspirational story of female empowerment—there’s simply an opportunistic journalist writing an unflattering portrayal of Andrew Huberman as a narcissistic, philandering liar. Is someone’s admittedly salacious private life news? 

Howley might’ve squandered an opportunity to empower women who may have felt powerless in their relationships or perhaps open a dialogue about the complexity of human relationships gone awry. Something about how these women found themselves involved and, in some cases, in love with a man who seemed unreliable and even deceptive in his personal life while earning a public reputation as thoughtful, insightful, and charming. Instead of complexity, she chose simplicity. Howley didn’t explore the characters or backgrounds of the women in this story. Who are they? What were they seeking? Had she done more diligence of her own, Howley would’ve at least alluded to the background of one of them whose company was investigated for consumer fraud and sued by former employees for wage theft—clear instances of deception and abusing one’s power. The latter of the two was settled out of court and as they say, guilty people don’t settle (looking at you, Michael Jackson). 

Instead, Howley wrote about a series of anonymous women who say they thought they were in a monogamous relationship with a man, only to find out it was not monogamous at all. She highlighted how he repeated the same lines over and over again to these women. A lot of the language sounded familiar to me—oh wait, that’s because I’ve known Andew for years. I’m pretty certain my vernacular doesn’t reinvent itself every time I’m in a new relationship, and I’m pretty sure that’s true of most people. The article also includes a number of barely corroborated, seemingly petty things Andrew lied about to demonstrate his supposed lack of moral compass. One that stood out to me was that he lied about living in Piedmont, a wealthy enclave in the East Bay. Andrew’s home, while technically not part of the Piedmont zip code, was a literal stone’s throw away. The article felt like a jilted-lovers’ fantasy come true: an expose detailing every dark and mortifying secret about your cheating ex. 

Perhaps there just wasn’t a great story to tell and that’s why it merely reads as gossip. Were Howley and the New York Magazine editor also duped into sleeping with Andrew Huberman under the guise of monogamy and a great future together? Did they do it anyway, for the story?

Look, I get it. I have a pretty deep well of empathy for a woman scorned; I tell friends that I’ll provide transportation across international borders should they seek revenge and need to make a quick getaway. What I really want my friends to know when I make that joke is, if anyone ever betrays their trust, I’ll empathize with their feelings of anger and hurt and won’t judge them for acting out while they process it. 

I’ve been inspired by women who seek revenge on their exes, particularly when they empower themselves as women in the process. The difference between empowerment and disempowerment is important. One such example is the article that Justine Musk penned herself about her ex-husband, Elon Musk. Justine didn’t write this anonymously or use it as an opportunity to unearth gossip from all corners of Musk’s life (even though I think he deserved it then and deserves it even more now), weaving together a hit-piece without any substantive commentary on the complexities of life and relationships. Justine bravely laid bare her participation in the slow relinquishing of her own identity and career in support of her talented but painfully insecure partner, who turned around and dumped her anyway. The story inspires because it’s multifaceted, introspective, and offers insight into how someone might find themself in that exact same situation. And perhaps a roadmap to escape it.

The Sarah I communicated with in February sounded capable of writing something more cogent and inspiring. Something revealing, and introspective, while also untangling the complexities of getting involved with someone we can’t fully trust. I think Howley failed her by turning this article into the hack job that it is. I don’t know whether Sarah or these other women found closure or peace of mind by participating. I can’t help but feel like this article could serve as a lesson for Andrew and for them, but one that the author failed to articulate anywhere among its 10,000 words. What stories aren’t being told as this one is? What would someone with a broader, more humane vision of the world than Howley’s have done with the material? If we’re going to talk about lying, why don’t we talk about Sarah’s motives, and what she said when she approached women on Howley’s behalf? Why aren’t we looking into the relationship between Sarah and Howley? 

Much of the legacy media has turned into a hit-piece machine. It’s sad, but also common, and yet I still think many people don’t realize how the media sausage gets made. Once a journalist has a point of view, they often act like a prosecutor. We saw what the New York Times did to Astral Codex Ten writer Scott Alexander. Now we have this attack against Huberman. I don’t condone his dating habits, but I also don’t think this amounts to a public story. Ryan Holiday published Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator back in 2012. A dozen years later, it remains distressingly relevant. I want someone to investigate Howley and Sarah, and tell us how the article came together. That’s the story that’s most important to the public interest, because so many of the media’s sleazy operations are cloaked in secrecy. I can reveal just a little bit of that story: “journalism” can pretend to be a private story when it’s actually prep for a public social attack.

Many of us have unfortunate periods in our romantic histories, or pathologies we battle in our relationships today. But if you become famous, you become a target for the Howleys and New York Magazines of the world.

I don’t think there is a there there with this story. I think Sarah and Andrew did have real love and a real relationship, and she knows Andrew. She knows about his childhood, about his struggles to get where he is, about his deep desire for a loving family. Regardless of how much Howley attempted to undermine and trivialize it. I’ve had men betray me and I’ve fantasized about their personal or professional demise. But over time I’ve come to see them more fully. They are more than the hurt they caused me, and they were more to me than the hurt they caused me. Someone once told me that the only thing more emotionally damaging than feeling abandoned or betrayed by someone you trust, is abandoning our own sense of truth and morality. I believe that. But, if you’re my friend or a woman in need and your man has cheated on you, you know where to find me if you need a getaway car. 

A life-changing encounter with a man named Dan

June 29, 2023 By in Culture, Personal, ideas Tags: , , 7 Comments

This essay is by my brother, Sam.

In 2009, I had a life-changing encounter with a man named Dan; he was the top salesman at our company and left an indelible mark on my career. Dan was an impressive figure, standing at six feet four with a heroic build, fierce red hair, and striking green eyes. He possessed an air of confidence, always dressed impeccably, never seen with a loosened tie, even during late nights working on proposals. His crisp, white shirt occasionally had its sleeves rolled up, but he always exuded professionalism and ownership. People naturally gravitated towards him, stepping aside to listen to his words. Dan treated everyone with a warm smile and friendliness, be it the company president or the person serving us lunch at Subway. His positive attitude was unparalleled. Whenever asked how he was doing, his unwavering response was, “I have never been better”—and he genuinely meant it.

Then, one day, Dan received devastating news about one of his children, who passed away. He took some time off from work, but, upon his return, he walked into the building with his laptop in hand, his tie tightly knotted, and a radiant smile on his face. As we were close colleagues, I felt concerned and decided to visit his office that morning, closing the door behind me.

“How are you really doing?” I asked sincerely. “Is there anything I can do for you? I mean it, anything, just ask.”

With a grin, Dan replied, “You know, I’ve never been better,” tossing his empty Starbucks cup into a trash can across the room. I stood there in silence, processing his words.

“How?” I finally managed to ask. “How can you maintain such a positive outlook? How can you genuinely claim that you’ve never been better?”

Dan leaned in and spoke softly, capturing my full attention. “Listen carefully,” he began. “You don’t truly know anything about me or my life. You only think you do. Here’s something you must remember, and I won’t mention it again. Your attitude sucks. Frankly, I’m surprised they tolerate it here. Your attitude defines everything. It shapes your life. You think things are bad? Let me tell you, buddy, they could be a lot worse. A lot worse. You’re standing there, upset because a meeting didn’t go your way, dressed in your shirt and cheap tie. Well, go out and start digging sewers and tell me how much that meeting mattered today. And maybe, after digging sewers, you’ll get laid off and find yourself living in one, eating from a dumpster. You don’t know anything. So, listen up. When someone asks how you’re doing, there’s only one answer: ‘I’ve never been better.’ And you live your life as if it’s true because here’s the stone-cold truth — no matter how bad you think things are right now, they can always be worse. So, wake up and change your attitude. Right fucking now.”

With that, he leaned back in his chair, his smile returning as if nothing had happened. I stood there in stunned silence, my shirt drenched in sweat.

“I need more coffee,” Dan happily announced. “Care to join me? It’s on me. Sales always buys the damn coffee!”

We went to Starbucks in his new Mercedes, and while everything seemed unchanged for him, everything had changed for me. I realized I couldn’t fulfill Dan’s request within that job: so I mustered the courage to quit, eventually finding a position at another company. It was a terrifying move, as I had spent my entire professional career at the previous company.

As I was walking into the new office, the receptionist greeted me with a smile and asked how I was doing.

“I’ve never been better,” I replied, sporting a wide grin.

“Well, that’s a fantastic attitude,” she beamed. “You’ll fit right in here if you can maintain that!”

And so it went. I became the most cheerful and upbeat person in the company. Though I became the subject of jokes, I also became a beacon of hope for those feeling downtrodden. Unbeknownst to me, I’d joined a company on the verge of collapse, but, as things worsened, my attitude gained more attention. I rapidly climbed the ranks, despite lacking expertise in the company’s technology. Layoffs hit, one after another, but I survived each round despite being the most junior member. Perplexed, I asked my boss how this was possible.

“Well,” he explained, “During meetings to discuss layoffs, your name consistently comes up. You’re inexperienced and new to the company, making you the logical choice. However, each time, everyone decides you should stay. Your attitude is so positive that everyone wants you here. The president even said he’d prefer one average employee with a great attitude over five brilliant but gloomy experts. Attitude sells. So, you don’t have to worry. You’ll still be here long after I’m gone, until they turn off the lights, if you want to be.”

And so it unfolded. As things deteriorated, my promotions accelerated. Within 18 months, I became the senior member of the sales team. I became the face of the company’s improbable turnaround. And when things reached their breaking point (the turnaround effort was not enough), a friend offered me a job, and that very day, I walked out.

From my experience with Dan and the job after Dan, I developed a list of three priorities necessary for success in the workplace. Having spent considerable time in the business world, let me share these priorities:

  • Firstly, your boss. Your number one priority is to make your boss look good. This is not a joke.
  • Secondly, your company. Your top priority is to increase revenue. Following closely is improving profitability. These two priorities should guide your thoughts and actions.
  • Finally, yourself. Your primary priority is to maintain an unwaveringly positive attitude, self-confidence, and the appearance of success.

The third item is crucial for your career and life. No amount of education or expertise surpasses its significance in most circumstances. An employee with average skills and a positive attitude holds greater value than five brilliant but unpleasant individuals. As pilots say, “your attitude determines your altitude.” Maintaining a positive attitude at all costs ensures your success, as surely as day follows night. Failure is not an option.

Since then, I’ve strived to adhere to these priorities. Where I succeeded, they brought me great achievements. Where I faltered, they resulted in failure and misery. Attitude stands as the foremost determinant of success in life. You must consistently exhibit a positive attitude, no matter the circumstances. Because it’s true—no matter how dire things may seem, they can always be worse. Your attitude will dictate how you navigate through it all.

If I could impart one thing to anyone, regardless of their stage in life, it would be to always display a positive attitude. It holds immeasurable power in the universe.

Personal epistemology, free speech, and tech companies

November 10, 2020 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , 4 Comments

The NYT describes “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation, and in response Hacker News commenter throwaway13337 says, in part, “It’s not unchecked free speech. Instead, it’s unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.” There’s some truth to the idea that social media companies have evolved to seek engagement, rather than truth, but I think the social media companies are reflecting a deeper human tendency. I wrote back to throwaway13337: “Try teaching non-elite undergrads, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you’ll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it’s not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.”

From what I can tell, we evolved to form tribes, not to be “right:” Jonathan’s Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion deals with this topic well and at length, and I’ve not seen any substantial rebuttals of it. We don’t naturally take to tracking the question, “How do I know what I know?” Instead, we naturally seem to want to find “facts” or ideas that support our preexisting views. In the HN comment thread, someone asked for specific examples of poor undergrad epistemic hygiene, and while I’d prefer not to get super specific for reasons of privacy, I’ve had many conversations that take the following form: “How do you know article x is accurate?” “Google told me.” “How does Google work?” “I don’t know.” “What does it take to make a claim on the Internet.” “Um. A phone, I guess?” A lot of people—maybe most—will uncritically take as fact whatever happens to be served up by Google (it’s always Google and never Duck Duck Go or Bing), and most undergrads whose work I’ve read will, again uncritically, accept clickbait sites and similar as accurate. Part of the reason for this reasoning is that undergrads’s lives are minimally affected by being wrong or incomplete about some claim done in a short assignment that’s being imposed by some annoying professor toff standing between them and their degree.

The gap between elite information discourse and everyday information discourse, even among college students, who may be more sophisticated than their peer equivalents, is vast—so vast that I don’t think most journalists (who mostly talk to other journalists and to experts) and to other people who work with information, data, and ideas really truly understand it. We’re all living in bubbles. I don’t think I did, either, before I saw the epistemic hygiene most undergrads practice, or don’t practice. This is not a “kids these days” rant, either: many of them have never really been taught to ask themselves, “How do I know what I know?” Many have never really learned anything about the scientific method. It’s not happening much in most non-elite schools, so where are they going to get epistemic hygiene from?

The United States alone has 320 million people in it. Table DP02 in the Census at data.census.gov estimates that 20.3% of the population age 25 and older has a college bachelor’s degree, and 12.8% have a graduate or professional degree. Before someone objects, let me admit that a college degree is far from a perfect proxy for epistemic hygiene or general knowledge, and some high school dropouts perform much better at cognition, meta cognition, statistical reasoning, and so forth, than do some people with graduate degrees. With that said, though, a college degree is probably a decent approximation for baseline abstract reasoning skills and epistemic hygiene. Most people, though, don’t connect with or think in terms of aggregated data or abstract reasoning—one study, for example, finds that “Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts.” We’re tribe builders, not fact finders.

Almost anyone who wants a megaphone in the form of one of the many social media platforms available now has one. The number of people motivated by questions like “What is really true, and how do I discern what is really true? How do I enable myself to get countervailing data and information into my view, or worldview, or worldviews?” is not zero, again obviously, but it’s not a huge part of the population. And many very “smart” people in an IQ sense use their intelligence to build better rationalizations, rather than to seek truth (and I may be among the rationalizers: I’m not trying to exclude myself from that category).

Until relatively recently, almost everyone with a media megaphone had some kind of training or interest in epistemology, even they didn’t call it “epistemology.” Editors would ask, “How do you know that?” or “Who told you that?” or that sort of thing. Professors have systems that are supposed to encourage greater-than-average epistemic hygiene (these systems were not and are not perfect, and nothing I have written so far implies that they were or are).

Most people don’t care about the question, “How do you know what you know?” are fairly surprised if it’s asked, implicitly or explicitly. Some people are intrigued by it but most aren’t, and view questions about sources and knowledge to be a hindrance. This is less likely to be true of people who aspire to be researchers or work in other knowledge-related professions, but that describes only a small percentage of undergraduates, particularly at non-elite schools. And the “elite schools” thing drives a lot of the media discourse around education. One of the things I like about Professor X’s book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is how it functions as a corrective to that discourse.

For most people, floating a factually incorrect conspiracy theory online isn’t going to negatively affect their lives. If someone is a nurse and gives a patient a wrong medication or incorrect medication, that person is not going to be a nurse for long. If the nurse states or repeats a factually incorrect political or social idea online, particularly but not exclusively under a pseudonym, that nurse’s life likely won’t be affected. There’s no truth feedback loop. The same is true for someone working in, say, construction, or engineering, or many other fields. The person is free to state things that are factually incorrect, or incomplete, or misleading, and doing so isn’t going to have many negative consequences. Maybe it will have some positive consequences: one way to show that you’re really on team x is to state or repeat falsehoods that show you’re on team x, rather than on team “What is really true?”

I don’t want to get into daily political discourse, since that tends to raise defenses and elicit anger, but the last eight months have demonstrated many people’s problems with epistemology, and in a way that can have immediate, negative personal consequences—but not for everyone.

Pew Research data indicate that a quarter of US adults didn’t read a book in 2018; this is consistent with other data indicating that about half of US adults read zero or one books per year. Again, yes, there are surely many individuals who read other materials and have excellent epistemic hygiene, but this is a reasonable mass proxy, given the demands that reading makes on us.

Many people driving the (relatively) elite discourse don’t realize how many people are not only not like them, but wildly not like them, along numerous metrics. It may also be that we don’t know how to deal with gossip at scale. Interpersonal gossip is all about personal stories, while many problems at scale are best understood through data—but the number of people deeply interested in data and data’s veracity is small. And elite discourse has some of its own possible epistemic falsehoods, or at least uncertainties, embedded within it: some of the populist rhetoric against elites is rooted in truth.

A surprisingly large number of freshmen don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, or that novels are fiction. Not a majority, but I was surprised when I first encountered confusion around these points; I’m not any longer. I don’t think the majority of freshmen confuse fiction and nonfiction, or genres of nonfiction, but enough do for the confusion to be a noticeable pattern (modern distinctions between fiction and nonfiction only really arose, I think, during the Enlightenment and the rise of the novel in the 18th Century, although off the top of my head I don’t have a good citation for this historical point, apart perhaps from Ian Watt’s work on the novel). Maybe online systems like Twitter or Facebook allow average users to revert to an earlier mode of discourse in which the border between fiction and nonfiction is more porous, and the online systems have strong fictional components that some users don’t care to segregate.

We are all caught in our bubble, and the universe of people is almost unimaginably larger than the number of people in our bubble. If you got this far, you’re probably in a nerd bubble: usually, anything involving the word “epistemology” sends people to sleep or, alternately, scurrying for something like “You won’t believe what this celebrity wore/said/did” instead. Almost no one wants to consider epistemology; to do so as a hobby is rare. One person’s disinformation is another person’s teambuilding. If you think the preceding sentence is in favor of disinformation, by the way, it’s not.

Digital Minimalism — Cal Newport

February 28, 2019 By in Books, ideas, Nonfiction, Reviews 1 Comment

All of Cal Newport’s books could be titled, “How to Be an Effective Person.” Or, maybe, “How to Be an Effective Person In This Technological Epoch.” Digital Minimalism is, like Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, about why you should quit or drastically limit the digital distractions that have proliferated in much of modern life. To me, it seemed obviously necessary to do so a long time ago, so there’s a large component of preaching-to-the-choir in me reading and now recommending this book. I’m barely on Facebook or most other social networks, which seem anathema to doing anything substantive or important.

A story. A friend sent me an email about Newport’s article “Is email making professors stupid?” I told him that, even in grad school, I’d figured out the problems with email and checked it, typically, once per day—sometimes every other day. The other grad students were in awe of that (low?) rate. I was like, “How do you get any writing done otherwise?” I leave it as an exercise to the reader to square this circle. You may notice that some of my novels are out there and their novels are not.

In my experience, too, most profs actually like the distraction, the work-like feeling without having to do the hard part. In reality, it is not at all hard to open your email every other day and spent 90%+ of your time focused on your work. If you don’t do this, then, as Newport says, “The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.” And yet many of us, as measured by data, do just that. I buy many of Newport’s arguments while also being skeptical that we’ll see large-scale change. Yet we should seek individual change; many of the online systems are psychologically bad for us:

The techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier convincingly argues that the primacy of anger and outrage outline is, in some sense, an unavoidable feature of the medium: In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs that positive and constructive thoughts. For heavy Internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don’t even realize they’re paying to support their compulsive connectivity.

Is “the primacy of anger and outrage” really “an unavoidable feature?” I like to think not; I like to think that I try to avoid anger and outrage, making those tertiary features at best, and instead I try to focus on ideas and thinking. So I like to think that I’m avoiding those things.

Still, compulsive connectivity online may also be costing us offline, real-world connection. That’s a point in Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression, which you should also read.

The book describes how modern social media systems and apps exploit our desire for random or intermittent positive reinforcement. Because we don’t know what we’re going to get anytime we boot up Twitter or similar, we want to visit those sites more often. We lose perspective on what’s more important—finishing a vital long-term project or checking for whatever the news of the day might be, however trivial. Or seeing random thoughts from our friends. Newport doesn’t argue that we shouldn’t have friends or that social networking systems don’t have some value—he just points out that we can derive a huge amount of the value from a tiny amount of time (“minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them more more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make life good”). But our “drive for social approval” often encourages us to stay superficially connected, instead of deeply connected.

In the book, we also get visits to the Amish, suggestions we take a 30-day break from digital bullshit, and case studies from Newport’s readers. I don’t think “Solitude and Leadership” is cited, but it might as well have been.

Another version of this book might be, “opportunity costs matter.” If there’s anything missing, it’s a deeper exploration of why, if many digital social media tools are bad for us, we persist using them—and what our use may say about us. Perhaps revealed preferences show that most of us don’t give a damn about the intentional life. Probably we never have. Maybe we never will. Arguably, history is a long drive towards greater connectivity, and, if this trend is centuries, maybe millennia, old, we can expect it to continue. Many older religious figures worried deeply that technologies would take people away from their religious communities and from God, and those figures were actually right. Few of us, however, want to go back.

For a book about craft and living an intentional life, the paper quality of this book is oddly bad.

No one takes the next step

June 11, 2018 By in ideas, Politics Tags: , 2 Comments

Yesterday’s New York Times has an article, “Thanks for the painful reminder,” that starts, “Six months ago, our teenage son was killed in a car accident. I took a month off from work because I couldn’t get out of bed.” Almost everyone knows someone who was killed, almost killed, or seriously mangled in a car crash, yet no one is thinking or talking about how to reduce reliance on cars. In 2016 34,439 died in car crashes. None or few those parents and spouses start organizations dedicated to reducing car usage. Why not? School shootings keep inspiring survivors and their families to start organizations around guns, but the same doesn’t seem to happen with cars.

The author of the article doesn’t take the next step, either. It’s an omission that almost no one talks about, either. We’ve had the technologies to improve this situation for more than a century.

Postmodernisms: What does *that* mean?

April 30, 2018 By in Academia, Culture, ideas Tags: , 2 Comments

In response to What’s so dangerous about Jordan Peterson?, there have been a bunch of discussions about what “postmodernism” means (“He believes that the insistence on the use of gender-neutral pronouns is rooted in postmodernism, which he sees as thinly disguised Marxism.”) By now, postmodernism has become so vague and broad that it means almost anything—which is of course another way of saying “nothing”—so the plural is there in the title for a reason. In my view most people claiming the mantle of big broad labels like “Marxist,” “Christian,” “Socialist,” “Democrat,” etc. are trying to signal something about themselves and their identity much more than they’re trying to understand the nuances of what those positions might mean or what ideas / policies really underlie the labels, so for the most part when I see someone talking or writing about postmodern, I say, “Oh, that’s nice,” then move on to talking about something more interesting and immediate.

But if one is going to attempt to describe postmodernism, and how it relates to Marxism, I’d start by observing that old-school Marxists don’t believe much of the linguistic stuff that postmodernists sometimes say they believe—about how everything reduces to “language” or “discourse”—but I think that the number of people who are “Marxists” in the sense that Marx or Lenin would recognize is tiny, even in academia.

I think what’s actually happening is this: people have an underlying set of models or moral codes and then grab some labels to fit on top of those codes. So the labels fit, or try to fit, the underlying morality and beliefs. People in contemporary academia might be particularly drawn to a version of strident moralism in the form of “postmodernism” or “Marxism” because they don’t have much else—no religion, not much influence, no money, so what’s left? A moral superiority that gets wrapped up in words like “postmodernism.” So postmodernism isn’t so much a thing as a mode or a kind of moral signal, and that in turn is tied into the self-conception of people in academia.

You may be wondering why academia is being dragged into this. Stories about what “postmodernism” means are bound up in academia, where ideas about postmodernism still simmer. In humanities grad school, most grad students make no money, as previously mentioned, and don’t expect to get academic jobs when they’re done. Among those who do graduate, most won’t get jobs. Those who do, probably won’t get tenure. And even those who get tenure will often get it for writing a book that will sell two hundred copies to university libraries and then disappear without a trace. So… why are they doing what they do?

At the same time, humanities grad students and profs don’t even have God to console them, as many religious figures do. So some of the crazier stuff emanating from humanities grad students might be a misplaced need for God or purpose. I’ve never seen the situation discussed in those terms, but as I look at the behavior I saw in grad school and the stories emerging from humanities departments, I think that a central absence better explains many problems than most “logical” explanations. And then “postmodernism” is the label that gets applied to this suite of what amount to beliefs. And that, in turn, is what Jordan Peterson is talking about. If you are (wisely) not following trends in the academic humanities, Peterson’s tweet on the subject probably makes no sense.

Most of us need something to believe it—and the need to believe may be more potent in smarter or more intellectual people. In the absence of God, we very rarely get “nothing.” Instead, we get something else, but we should take care in what that “something” is. The sense of the sacred is still powerful within humanities departments, but what that sacred is has shifted, to their detriment and to the detriment of society as a whole.

(I wrote here about the term “deconstructionism,” which has a set of problems similar to “postmodernism,” so much of what I write there also applies here.)

Evaluating things along power lines, as many postmodernists and Marxists seek to do, isn’t always a bad idea, of course, but there are many other dimensions along which one can evaluate art, social situations, politics, etc. So the relentless focus on “power” becomes tedious and reductive after a while: one always knows what the speaker is likely to say, unless of course the speaker is seen as the powerful person and the thing being criticized can be seen as the obvious (e.g. it seems obvious that many tenured professors are in positions of relatively high power, especially compared to grad students; that’s part of what makes the Lindsay Shepherd story compelling).

This brand of post-modernism tends to infantilize groups or individuals (they’re all victims!) or lead to races to the bottom and the development of victimhood culture. But these pathologies are rarely acknowledged by their defenders.

Has postmodernism led to absurdities like the one at Evergreen State, which led to huge enrollment drops? Maybe. I’ve seen the argument and, on even days, buy it.

I read a good Tweet summarizing the basic problem:

When postmodern types say that truth-claims are rhetoric and that attempts to provide evidence are but moves in a power-game—believe them! They are trying to tell you that this is how they operate in discussions. They are confessing that they cannot imagine doing otherwise.

If everything is just “rhetoric” or “power” or “language,” there is no real way to judge anything. Along a related axis, see “Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem.” Essays like it seem to appear about once a year or so. That they seem to change so little is discouraging.

So what does postmodernism mean? Pretty much whatever you want it to mean, whether you love it for whatever reason or hate it for whatever reason. Which is part of the reason you’ll very rarely see it used on this site: it’s too unspecific to be useful, so I shade towards words with greater utility that haven’t been killed, or at least made somatic, through over-use. There’s a reason why most smart people eschew talking about postmodernism or deconstructionism or similar terms: they’re at a not-very-useful level of abstraction, unless one is primarily trying to signal tribal affiliation, and signaling tribal affiliation isn’t a very interesting level of or for discussion.

If you’ve read to the bottom of this, congratulations! I can’t imagine many people are terribly interested in this subject; it seems that most people read a bit about it, realize that many academics in the humanities are crazy, and go do something more useful. It’s hard to explain this stuff in plain language because it often doesn’t mean much of anything, and explaining why that’s so takes a lot.

“Bean freaks: On the hunt for an elusive legume”

April 19, 2018 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , Leave a comment

“Bean freaks: On the hunt for an elusive legume” is among the more charming and hilarious stories I’ve read recently and it’s highly recommended. There are many interesting moments in it, but this tangent caught my attention:

In his late teens, Sando lost weight and found his crowd, learned to improvise on the piano, and discovered, to his great surprise, that he’d become rather good-looking. “What we call a twink now,” he says. Although he never found a true, long-term partner, he married a friend of a friend in his late thirties and had two boys with her, now nineteen and sixteen. “I’d had every lesbian on the planet ask me for sperm,” he says. “But there was a side of me that said, ‘I can’t do this as a passive bystander.’ ” They raised the boys in adjacent houses for a few years, then divorced. “There’s a sitcom waiting to happen,” he says. But he tells the story flatly, without grievance or irony, as if giving a deposition. “The truth is that your sexual identity is just about the least interesting thing about you,” he says. “Do you play an instrument? That would be interesting.”

I think he’s right about the sitcom, and, while I said something like this in a previous post, I’ll say here that I think we’re going to see a lot more gay, bisexual, non-monogamous, etc. characters in movies, TV, and novels not because of a desire to represent those people, or whatever, though that desire may exist, but because of all the new and interesting plotlines and situations those orientations / interests / proclivities open up. Many writers are at their base pragmatists. They (or we) will use whatever material is available and, ideally, hasn’t been done before. As far as I know, a gay man marrying a lesbian and having two kids together, then raising them side-by-side, hasn’t been done and offers lots of material.

Speaking of laughter, this last sentence got me:

Still, admitting that you’re obsessed with beans is a little like saying you collect decorative plates. It marks your taste as untrustworthy. I’ve seen the reaction often enough in my family: the eye roll and stifled cough, the muttered aside as I show yet another guest the wonders of my well-lit and cleverly organized bean closet. As my daughter Evangeline put it one night, a bit melodramatically, when I served beans for the third time in a week, “Lord, why couldn’t it have been bacon or chocolate?”

If the bean club were still open, I’d subscribe. (This will make sense in the context of the article.)

Does politics have to be everywhere, all the time? On Jordan B. Peterson

March 22, 2018 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , 1 Comment

“The Intellectual We Deserve: Jordan Peterson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape” has been making the rounds for good reason: it’s an intellectually engaged, non-stupid takedown of Peterson. But while you should read it, you should also read it skeptically (or at least contextually). Take this:

A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.

I hate to engage in “whataboutism,” but if you’re going to boot intellectuals who write nonsense, at least half of humanities professors are out—and maybe more. People can have long (and literally endless) arguments about what “literary theory” is “actually saying” because most of its content is itself vacuous enough to be “a kind of Rorschach test.” Peterson is responding in part to that kind of intellectual environment. An uncharitable reading may find that he produces vacuous nonsense in part because that sells.

A more charitable reading, however, may find that in human affairs, apparent opposites may be true, depending on context. There are sometimes obvious points from everyday life: it’s good to be kind, unless kindness becomes a weakness. Or is it good to be hard, not kind, because the world is a tough place? Many aphorisms contradict other aphorisms because human life is messy and often paradoxical. So people giving “life advice,” or whatever one may call it, tend to suffer the same problems.

You may notice that religious texts are wildly popular but not internally consistent. There seems to be something in the human psyche that responds to attractive stories more than consistency and verifiability.

More:

[Peterson] is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision.

Makes sense to me. When much of academia has abrogated any effort to find meaning in the larger world or impart somewhat serious ideas about what it means to be and to exist in society, apart from particular political theories, we shouldn’t be surprised when someone eventually comes along and attracts followers from those adrift.

In other words, Robinson has a compelling theory about what makes Peterson popular, but he doesn’t have a compelling theory about how the humanities in academia might rejoin planet earth (thought he notes, correctly, that “the left and academia actually bear a decent share of blame [. . .] academics have been cloistered and unhelpful, and the left has failed to offer people a coherent political alternative”).

Too many academics on the left also see their mission as advocacy first and learner or impartial judge second. That creates a lot of unhappiness and alienation in classrooms and universities. We see problems with victimology that have only recently started being addressed. Peterson tells people not to be victims; identifying as a victim is often bad even for people who are genuine victims. There much more to be said about these issues, but they’ll have to be saved for some other essay—or browse around Heterodox Academy.

More:

Sociologist C. Wright Mills, in critically examining “grand theorists” in his field who used verbosity to cover for a lack of profundity, pointed out that people respond positively to this kind of writing because they see it as “a wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelligibility.” But, Mills said, such writers are “so rigidly confined to such high levels of abstraction that the ‘typologies’ they make up—and the work they do to make them up—seem more often an arid game of Concepts than an effort to define systematically—which is to say, in a clear and orderly way, the problems at hand, and to guide our efforts to solve them.”

Try reading Jung. He’s “a wondrous maze” and often unintelligible—and certainly not falsifiable. Yet people like and respond to him, and he’s inspired many artists, in part because he’s saying things that may be true—or may be true in some circumstances. Again, literary theorists do something similar. Michel Foucault is particularly guilty of nonsense (why people love his History of Sexuality, which contains little history and virtually no citations, is beyond me). In grad school a professor assigned Luce Irigaray’s book Sexes and Genealogies, a book that makes both Foucault and Peterson seem lucid and specific by comparison.

Until Robinson’s essay I’d not heard of C. Wright Mills, but I wish I’d heard of him back in grad school; in that atmosphere, where many dumb ideas feel so important because the stakes are so low, he would’ve been revelatory. He may help explain what’s wrong in many corners of what’s supposed to be the world of ideas.

Oddly, the Twitter account Real Peer Review has done much of the work aggregating the worst offenders in published humanities nonsense (a long time ago I started collecting examples of nonsense in peer review but gave up because there was so much of it and pointing out nonsense seemed to have no effect on the larger world).

the Peterson way is not just futile because it’s pointless, it’s futile because ultimately, you can’t escape politics. Our lives are conditioned by economic and political systems, like it or not [. . .]

It’s true, I suppose, in some sense, that you can’t escape politics, but must all of life be about politics, everywhere, all the time? I hope not. One hears that “the personal is the political,” which is both irritating and wrong. Sometimes the personal is just personal. Or political dimensions may be present but very small and unimportant, like relativity acting on objects moving at classical speeds. The politicizing of everyday life may be part of what drives searching people towards Peterson.

Sometimes people want to live outside the often-dreary shadow of politics, but, some aspects of social media make that harder. I’ve observed to friends that, the more I see of someone on Facebook, the less I tend to like them (maybe the same is true of others who know me via Facebook). Maybe social media also means that the things that could be easily ignored in a face-to-face context, or just not known, get highlighted in an unfortunate and extremely visible way. Social media seems to heighten our mimetic instincts in not-good ways.

We seem to want to sort ourselves into political teams more readily than we used to, and we seem more likely to cut off relationships due to slights or beliefs that wouldn’t have been visible to us previously. In some sense we can’t escape politics, but many if not most of us feel that political is not our most defining characteristic.

I’m happy to read Peterson as a symptom and a response, but the important question then becomes, “To what? Of what?” There are a lot of possible answers, some of which Robinson engages—which is great! But most of Peterson’s critics don’t seem to want to engage the question, let alone the answer.

The rest of us are back to the war of art. Which has to first of all be good, rather than agreeing with whatever today’s social pieties may be.

What would a better doctor education system look like?

March 2, 2018 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , Leave a comment

A reader of “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school,” asks, though not quite in this way, what a better doctor education system would look like. It’s surprising that it’s taken so long and so many readers for someone to ask, but before I answer, let me say that, while the question is important, I don’t expect to see improvement. That’s because current, credentialed doctors are highly invested in the system and want to keep barriers to entry high—which in turn helps keep salaries up. In addition, there are still many people trying to enter med school, so the supply of prospective applicants props the system up. Meanwhile, people who notice high wages in medicine but who also notice how crazy the med school system is can turn to PA or NP school as reasonable alternatives. With so little pressure on the system and so many stakeholders invested, why change?

That being said, the question is intellectually interesting if useless in practice, so let’s list some possibilities:

1. Roll med school into undergrad. Do two years of gen eds, then start med school. Even assuming med school needs to be four years (it probably doesn’t), that would slice two years of high-cost education off the total bill.

2. Allow med students, or for that matter anyone, to “challenge the test.” If you learn anatomy on your own and with Youtube, take the test and then you don’t have take three to six (expensive) weeks of mind-numbing lecture courses. Telling students, “You can spent $4,000 on courses or learn it yourself and then take a $150 test” will likely have… unusual outcomes, compared to what professors claim students need.

3. Align curriculums with what doctors actually do. Biochem is a great subject that few specialties actually use. Require those specialties to know biochem. Don’t mandate biochem for family docs, ER, etc.

4. Allow competition among residencies—that is, allow residents to switch on, say, a month-by-month basis, like a real job market.

There are probably others, but these are some of the lowest-hanging fruit. We’re also not likely to see many of these changes for the reason mentioned above—lots of people have a financial stake in the status quo—but also because so much of school is about signaling, not learning. The system works sub-optimally, but it also works “well enough.” Since the present system is good enough and the current medical cartel likes things as they are, it’s up to uncredentialed outsiders like me to observe possible changes that’ll never be implemented by insiders.

I wrote “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school” five years ago and in that time we’ve seen zero changes at the macro level. Some individuals have likely not screwed up their lives via med school, and some of them have left comments or sent me emails saying as much, and that’s great. But it’s not been sufficient to generate systems change.

“Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?”

January 31, 2018 By in ideas, Links Tags: , 1 Comment

“The good guy/bad guy myth: Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?” is one of the most interesting essays on narrative and fiction I’ve ever read, and while I, like most of you, am familiar with the tendency of good guys and bad guys in fiction, I wasn’t cognizant of the way pure good and pure evil as fundamental characterizations only really proliferated around 1700.

In other words, I didn’t notice the narrative water in which I swim. Yet now I can’t stop thinking about a lot of narrative in the terms described.

A while ago, I read most of Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and found it boring, perhaps in part because the characters didn’t seem to stand for anything beyond themselves, and they didn’t seem to want anything greater than themselves in any given moment. Yet for most of human civilization, that kind of story may have been more common than many modern stories.

Still, I wonder if we should be even more skeptical of good versus evil stories than I would’ve thought we should be prior to reading this essay.