One of my pet projects that I probably won’t manage to finish before Silicon Valley kills us all is a little book that teaches a bunch of concepts from the made-up culture of the made-up land of Agor (the home culture of Duncan and the other Homo Sabiens).

The idea is that, just as Japanese has the single word “komorebi” for a thing that takes a sentence to explain in English, so too does Agori have single terms for many conceptual gaps in our own cultural lexicon.

One such gap: English does not quite have a word for “ah, you’re actually intervening on your anxiety, but you’re doing so via taking external actions; you think that you are e.g. making a situation safer, but you’re empirically not; instead, you are imposing costs on other people to satisfy your own need to feel like something is being done while making nothing materially better.”

Another gap: English does not really have a word for creeping concernism, i.e. the constant falling-back in the face of concerns that something might go wrong or someone might object, leaving more and more of the territory effectively off-limits disproportionate to the actual risk.

Yet another gap, closely related: although some niche communities have the jargon “evaporative cooling,” English-speakers in general do not have a word for the dynamic which goes:

• A thing becomes somewhat stigmatized, perhaps downstream of a very public and visible event

• In response, those individuals who are either most responsible or most sensitive to other people raising a critical eyebrow stop doing the thing

• As a result, the population of individuals still doing the thing actually becomes somewhat worse/the thing is now done by people who are relatively more reckless or anti-consensus

• More negative events occur; they’re worse or more frequent now that the most conscientious individuals are gone

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 9-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 8-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 7-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

• As a result, the stigma intensifies, and the people who were 6-out-of-10 responsible or sensitive also stop doing it

…you get the idea.

II.

There has been no unambiguous, clear, incontrovertible drop in rates of child abuse, child abductions, and child molestation in America since the 1990’s, when all crime took a notable drop.

I’m going to repeat that, because it’s important: there has been no unambiguous, clear, incontrovertible drop in rates of child abuse, child abductions, or child molestation in the past three decades.

(Child murder has fallen, but in line with all murders, with modest increases since a low point around 2013.)

There are some studies that find that things are a little better here and there, and there are other studies that find that things are a little worse, actually. There are some studies that seem to show increasing rates of bad shit, and others that hint at maybe the increasing rates being merely an artifact of better detection and increased reporting.

It’s a wash, epistemically speaking. There might have been some modest improvements. There might possibly be fewer children being raped and molested and neglected and beaten and kidnapped and emotionally abused. But no one who is honest and reasonable and careful with their words and responsible about grounding their beliefs in reliable data can look you in the eye and say “the world has obviously become meaningfully safer for kids over the past three decades.”

(They already couldn’t say that before you factored in the rise of firearm-related deaths; these days guns kill more people under the age of 20 than cars, and while the 18- and 19-year-olds are overrepresented in that statistic, even if you remove them, firearms (including homicides, suicides, and accidents) are still straightforwardly top three.)

I’ll say it one more time: there has been no unambiguous, clear, incontrovertible drop in rates of child abuse, child abductions, or child molestation in the past three decades. At best, one can make a tenuous case for partial improvements in limited domains.

III.

Fourteen-year-olds today have less freedom of movement than five-year-olds when I was growing up.

(This and other claims in this section based on a recent and extensive survey of over 23,000 American parents of over 40,000 children, including over 2,000 teens.)

Half of the high school freshmen captured by the study are not allowed to go beyond the street they live on without adult supervision (55% of the 14-year-olds, and 46% of the 15-year-olds, leaving us at 50.5% overall). 62% of the 17-year-olds are not allowed to leave their neighborhood unchaperoned.

The study anticipates a possible objection:

The safety of communities certainly influences household norms around childhood mobility and unsupervised play. On the other hand, due to the size of our sample, covering 24,000 parents and 40,000 profiles of children, the overall patterns we see cannot be explained by such factors alone. Indeed, as we show, at least one kind of neighborhood factor that we checked—walkability—has no impact on what children are allowed to do and where they are allowed to go.

The study also points out that:

…despite the documented developmental benefits of play, independence, and mobility for children, we find that most American parents believe that children today are under-supervised. In fact, 62% of all parents in our sample said that 8 to 12-year-old children should receive more supervision than they currently do. We find no meaningful differences on this issue between religious and secular—nor between conservative and liberal—parents. All of these groups want more childhood supervision.

This is also true for parents of different levels of educational attainment. We find a majority of groups, from those without a high school diploma to those with a graduate degree, who also believe that kids are under-supervised.

…though it acknowledges that, while the parents with a graduate degree still overall think 8-to-12s should be more supervised than they presently are, they’re ten percentage points less likely to think so than less educated/privileged parents.

IV.

Another of my pet projects is a curriculum on “defense against the Dark Arts,” in which I am building a taxonomy of social manipulation (I recently presented a first draft of the taxonomy at a talk in San Francisco as a birthday present to myself).

By loose analogy to martial arts: different martial arts have all sorts of different unique properties, but you could model every martial art as being made up of kicks, punches, knee/elbow/palm/forearm strikes, chokes/holds/locks, and sweeps or throws, with a little bit of leftover miscellany for things that don’t fit cleanly into any of those conceptual buckets. Similarly, it’s possible to conceptualize and categorize social manipulation as being mostly made up of a small number of describable dynamics.

One such dynamic, analogous to “punches,” is “creating costs that you do not yourself pay.” When people are socially licensed to create costs that they do not themselves pay, this inevitably results in bad things. Some people directly abuse the dynamic; others do so by accident; still others because it simply becomes normalized and it doesn’t even occur to them not to.

(Few people who owned slaves didn’t order those slaves around, even if they were extra nice about it.)

And the parents (and teachers, and coaches, and day care workers, and the eyebrow-raisers who pressure them, and the child protective services apparatus that looms threateningly over them all), are stealing something deeply and irreplaceably precious from the children, to those children’s enduring detriment.

And while it’s not the case that the adults are paying no cost—

(In many ways, the adults are making their own lives worse, too, by allowing an impossibly large burden of supervision and care to settle on their shoulders.)

—the main cost is one whose pain they do not feel and whose downstream effects they did not themselves experience and do not viscerally understand. The screws are tightening, generation by generation, and parents are consistently and repeatedly denying their children the freedoms that they themselves experienced. My parents gave me less freedom than they got, and other parents in my generation are giving their kids less freedom than we got.

The relevant word is “atrophy,” with an extra-bleak dash of Kafka-esque injustice, that the atrophied and incompetent state of kids and teens is then recycled into post-hoc justification for even further restriction, because of how patently unready they are to handle themselves unsupervised.

V.

I am tired.

I am tired in a way that I believe is probably a pale shadow of the exhaustion felt by e.g. women of color, as they navigate a world that is structurally hostile toward them.

I understand that the vast, vast, vast majority of people are not setting out to harm the children.

I understand that the vast, vast, vast majority of people are well-intentioned, and often lack the capacity to even think such questions through for themselves, as opposed to simply having to take their cue from their neighbors.

(And even those who do have the breathing room to think it through do not necessarily have the privilege required to actually do better. Many slave owners didn’t realistically have the option of opting out of the slave culture, even if they wanted to.)

I know, I know, I know that most people are just … beleaguered, and bewildered, and doing the best that they can, and are not in fact reasonable targets for my fire and fury, here. I know that many of them are anxious, and they are trying to keep their kids in close proximity so that they do not fret and worry.

But I am so tired of politely pretending that they are not harming their kids. I’m so tired of validating their good intentions, and their limited resources, as they chain and confine their children, robbing them of their privacy, robbing them of their autonomy, inflicting upon them amounts of confinement that only barely fall short of the confinement we impose upon actual criminals, allegedly justified by an increase in safety that is not real.

Sometimes, I want to just grab them by the lapels, and scream that I do not care that they are anxious and worried or that everyone else is doing it, that is not sufficient justification for crippling and infantilizing the children whose well-being they are supposed to put first, it’s your fucking job to actually check whether these hideous restrictions are doing anything at all, you should notice that they are not actually paying for themselves, you are making the world worse for your children and you’re not even getting anything good out of it.

(I don’t actually do this, because it will not work.)

(I don’t always manage to distinguish between actions whose sole effect is to make me feel better, and actions that actually improve the problem, but I do at least try.)

But I am tired.

I am tired of the bad guys calling themselves the good guys, and walking around patting one another on the back for what good parents they are, when they are not.

In a more just world, they would at least have to admit that they are jailers, even if nothing else was materially different.

And in an actually adequate world, they’d let their fucking kids have lives outside of their fascist panopticon. Life should not begin with an eighteen-year prison sentence, and parents should not be their children’s first abusers. Adulthood should not start with stumbling, blind and atrophied, into a world in which you have not ever been permitted to flex your muscles and try your hand.

We know that this is bad.

So please stop.

In 2010, Google tried to estimate how many books there are in the world (i.e. unique strings of words and pictures, not individual physical objects), and came up with an estimate of 130 million.

UNESCO estimates that, these days, about 2.2 million new books are published every year; round up to 3 million to account for unpublished books and that’s another 3mil*16y = 50 million…

(We’re doing the kind of math where you do not pay attention to the distinction between 48 and 50.)

…which puts us at 180 million, which is 200 million according to the norms of Fermi estimates.

(I don’t mind rounding up twice in a row; there are probably actually a bunch more unpublished books than published ones, but there’s also a quality gradient and pretty quickly I start quibbling with people over whether the doc they have buried in their tabs is complete enough and good enough to count as an actual book, so.)

(But okay, fine, there’s also a lot of internet fiction that should count as books, Worm and HPMOR and r!Animorphs and Falls Chance Ranch are all books, let’s do one more bump up to 300 million, of which we’re saying half are something other than formally published. 1:1 published versus unpublished-but-good-enough-to-count seems reasonable to me, and if anything an undercount of the unpublished stuff.)

Let’s assume everyone who completes a book makes only one (1) book.

(This is false; Ryoki Inoue holds the Guinness World Record for most published books at ~1000 distinct books. But the modal author probably completes one book, and the second largest category is probably People Who Wrote Two (2) Books.)

(Also remember that we’re self-aware-ly undercounting unpublished books; those errors should at least partially cancel out; this is part of how this kind of estimation works.)

Let’s assume that 100% of books were written in the past 200 years.

(Hopefully also clearly false, but this is going to help us simplify the rate of authorship.)

(If you take something like 100,000 years of anatomically modern humans capable of symbolic communication, but only maybe 5,000 years of writing, and only ~400 years between the invention of the printing press and our 1826 cutoff for “modernity” and a pretty low literacy rate per capita, then the ancient contribution to the total inventory of all books is probably in the vicinity of ten million, which is more of a splash in the bucket than a drop, but still.)

Nearly 1/3 of all of the 100 billion humans who ever lived were born since 1826, so that gives us (rounded to the nearest first digit) 30 billion people.

That means “I wrote a book,” on this extremely rough estimate, is true of 1% of people (300 million books divided by 30 billion people), which I find amusing because it’s the base rate of base rates:

If we’re underestimating books, the number goes up; if we’re underestimating how many authors write multiple books, the number goes down (because the total is being divided up among fewer people).

II.

Okay. Who kills people?

Initial brainstorm: soldiers, murderers, automobile drivers, medical malpractice. Probably medical malpractice is a rounding error.

The Global Study on Homicide claims that 5.8 people per 100,000 are killed with homicidal intent per year, worldwide. (This number is 2.2 per 100K in Europe and 15 per 100K in the Americas, etc.)

That’s a rate number rather than an absolute number, so I feel slightly more comfortable extending it backward through time; if anything, murder is probably becoming less common as more of the world gets locked in to the-kinds-of-societies-that-can-coexist-in-large-numbers-at-all.

For the ~30 billion people born since 1826, the average lifespan is closer to 30 years than 20 or 40 or higher (since high infant and child mortality in the 19th century pulls the average down fairly hard). That means there have been roughly 9*10¹¹ person-years since 1826; let’s call it 10¹² for simplicity.

Applying the homicide rate to that total gives us 60 million murderers. (I am ignoring murderers with multiple victims the same way I’m ignoring authors with multiple manuscripts and again hoping that those errors will cancel one another out.)

In America, there are roughly 20,000 murders and roughly 600,000 missing persons reports per year. However, 90% of missing person reports are resolved quickly, with the person being found alive. So there are roughly three missing people for every known murder victim; let’s assume that probably about one of those three is killed (as opposed to dying by accident or just … starting a new life) and use that to turn our 60 million murderers throughout history into 100 million.

(This is fun. We’re having fun.)

What about deaths from war? Some quick Googling:

Major 19th-century wars and massacres (Napoleonic era, American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, colonial wars, et cetera): 30-50 million, with a lot of the uncertainty coming from how many people actually died in the Taiping Rebellion.

World War I (incl. the Armenian genocide): 15-25 million.

World War II (incl. the Holocaust and Stalin’s madness): 60-85 million.

Post-WWII wars, civil wars, and other organized violence (Korea, Vietnam, Iran-Iraq, Congo, Rwanda): 30-80 million (ugh, wide range).

21st-century military conflicts (so far): 5-15 million.

Additional genocides, purges, massacres, and pogroms likely to have been left out of the estimates above: maybe another 20-80 million.

This leaves us with a floor of 160 million, and a ceiling of 335 million, which I’m going to call 250 million. 250 million victims of organized violence in the past 200 years.

(We should’ve done this before murderers, obviously.)

A single bomb kills a lot of people. Massacres generally involve a small number of perpetrators with big guns. I’m going to imagine that there are plenty of soldiers who kill 0-1 other people during their participation in war, and plenty of individuals who are responsible for 100-1000 deaths. I don’t really know how to reason about this defensibly, but it feels wrong to lay the deaths of the 150,000 people at Hiroshima at the feet of the 12 crew members of the Enola Gay when there were another 500,000-or-so people involved in the Manhattan Project.

I’m going to hazard that 250 million victims means at least a couple million killers (it would be wild to imagine that the average soldier who kills at all is responsible for 100 deaths). And I’m going to hazard that it can’t possibly imply as many as 100 million killers, i.e. the average soldier who kills at all (including things like sub-Saharan paramilitary slaughter and WWI artillerymen) only takes out 2.5 other humans.

2 million on the low end, 100 million on the high end; call it 50 million because I’m a coward (but keep the uncertainty in mind).

So that’s another 50 million killers added onto our existing 100 million non-broad-conflict killers.

(Huh. Those are closer than I thought they would be; I expected more state violence; maybe doing lone murderers first wasn’t that ridiculous after all.)

Should we leave out automobile accidents and medical malpractice? Maybe those don’t really fit as “killing” … no, wait, someone who killed someone in a car accident or the operating room would definitely say “I killed someone once” in their therapy sessions. And we’re not really estimating homicidal intent; lots of soldiers don’t have any innate desire to be killing people.

Okay. Worldwide traffic deaths: currently a bit over a million per year. Cars: around for about a century. Rate of car adoption: rising over that century. Call it 50 million automobile deaths.

What percentage of those would have a person clearly identifiable as the morally responsible party (who also themselves walks away)? I’m going to guess somewhere between 10% and a third; it doesn’t seem to me like half of all traffic deaths were down to some specific person’s specific fuckup in a way that would deserve the phrase “I killed someone once.”

So that’s another (I’m going to say) 15 million killers. We’ve gone from 150M to 165M.

For medical malpractice and other accidents (industrial, hunting, sports), I went to the LLMs and they figured that, over the past 200 years, you might reasonably find 5-10 million clinicians who could say they’d accidentally killed someone, and 5-10 million crane operators etc., and 5-10 million other accidents that were someone’s fault (which would include stuff like unjustified police shootings, of which there are certainly Too Many but not that many relative to all these other categories).

So our 165M is now up to 180-200M, and if we bring back in the uncertainty we had about soldiers we’re looking at somewhere between 150 and 250 million killers, over the past 200 years.

Compare that to our estimated 300 million authors, and killing seems somewhere between half as common and roughly-as-common as book-writing. Extending back into the past beyond 1826, when book-writing becomes rarer and killing becomes more common, and the two numbers are surprisingly close.

(Or unsurprisingly, since again it’s amusingly just the base rate of base rates. The estimates have enough wiggle that I could see the real answer turning out to be as much as 3:1 or 1:3, but in Fermi estimation those just mean “basically the same size.”)

These days, writing a book at all seems probably slightly more common than killing someone. But writing a children’s book specifically, or writing a novel specifically, or any other meaningful subset is probably weirder than having killed someone.

In similar fashion, intentional/culpable killings (murders and some soldiers) and unintentional/accidental killings (some soldiers and everything else) were roughly equal, so doing either of those is probably weirder than being an author at all.

Anyway, I finished my novel a couple months ago.

(Where you reward some behavior sporadically rather than literally every time.)

—produces a stronger training effect than consistent reinforcement.

This is at least in part because consistent reinforcement sets up an absolute pattern, and it doesn’t take much for your brain to conclude that an absolute pattern has been broken.

A → B.
A → B.
A → B. (ah, cool, I get it, A always results in B!)
A → B.
A → B.
A → B.
A → B. (hell yeah, this is great)
A → B.
A → B.
A → ＿. (wait, what!?)
A → ＿. (okay, I guess the good times are over.)

Whereas if A sometimes results in B, but it’s not clear exactly how, or how often, or which times will be which, there’s a much stronger impulse to keep trying A, in part because you can’t quite be sure that the A → B pattern has actually been broken. Maybe you were wrong about it happening three times in ten; maybe it only happens one time in ten and you just had a lucky streak. Or maybe this is just an unlucky streak…

Absolute patterns are fragile. Flexible, intermittent patterns are robust.

Correspondingly:

If your team has never lost a game, the first defeat is much more of a shock, and leaves you much more shaken, than if you’ve had a mix of wins and losses. Much more shaken than you “should” be, epistemically speaking, if you still have a 99% win rate.

Correspondingly:

If your friendship or relationship has never had a downturn or a rough moment, then the first big fight is actually much more frightening than if you’ve seen things go south and come back north more than once. The absolute pattern of goodness, being broken for the first time, is scary. Having already had the experience of recovery before, it’s easier to imagine recovering this time.

Correspondingly:

If you’ve never been outside of your comfort zone, the first time that circumstances force you into uncomfortable territory, you’re much more likely to be deeply shook. The pattern of “things are comfortable for me” (or “I’m generally good at the things that I try”) is suddenly broken, and it’s not clear whether it’s going to be like this forever and the good times are simply over.

Evidence of downturns swinging back the other way is what provides feelings of safety and security and unpanic. Not just knowing the phrase “this too shall pass” but knowing it in your bones.

To head off a possible misunderstanding: the advice here is not “shoot yourself with small bullets to build up resistance to fullsize bullets.” I don’t think you should go out and mess with things that are good, preemptively, in order to prepare for later downturns. That seems crazy to me.

Rather, the point is “understanding this fact about human psychology will help you contextualize your own feelings when something like a sudden anxiety crops up.”

Something that’s only always been completely good suddenly being bad is kinda alarming! But you usually don’t actually know that the good thing is broken forever and can’t ever be fixed.

If you can recognize that you’re Big Panicked in part because you don’t know if this thing will ever turn good again, knowing the source of (at least part of) the panic can help. It helps you take the feelings more as object, and turn your attention to questions like “okay, how would I actually know if it is likely to turn good again?” or “okay, what will I do if it doesn’t?” rather than just being stuck in bewilderment and Oh No.

You can in fact keep the ice cube an ice cube, if you do something like “blast it constantly with very cold air.”

You can also keep the ice cube an ice cube if it is entirely surrounded by ice cubes.

Any culture that differs from the culture around it will require a constant input of some kind of something, in order to keep its uniqueness from slowly melting/eroding/fading. You have to put in energy, to maintain the unusually high local concentration of X, Y, and Z, and the unusually low local concentration of A, B, and C.

Most critically, you have to do something at the boundary. It’s at the boundaries of the culture, both literally and metaphorically, that things shift. That’s where heat transfers, and melting occurs; deep within the center of the culture, individuals are surrounded by just … more of the culture, and it’s self-sustaining; there’s no place for heat to transfer because there’s no temperature gradient.

(This is another explanation, besides “the narcissism of small differences,” for why people are more prickly and defensive and fixated on the differences between themselves and their very similar neighbors, than on the larger and more obvious differences between themselves and very distant peoples. It’s the people right next to you who are more likely to frogboil you into something other than what you currently are, just as you are more likely to frogboil them. What starts out as warm water and ice cubes eventually just becomes cool water, which is neither of those things. Cool water may be good in its own way! But it lacks the virtues of either warm water or ice cubes. More here.)

To be clear: sometimes it’s good for cultures to erode. Sometimes cultures are kinda bad, actually! I wouldn’t mind seeing the “ice cube” of insular hyperreligious communities that are horrifically misogynistic “melting” around the edges, just because their neighbors are not horrifically misogynistic.

(Although indeed the neighbors are likely to become more misogynistic at similar rates.)

But if you do have a good thing going—something that’s different and unusual and unlike what’s going on around the corner—you are going to have to do work to keep it different.

(Boundaries/fences/gateways also help, as do transitional grayspaces.)

I think a lot of people sort of … acknowledge/understand this in the abstract, but when it comes to actually doing the work—

(Which often includes uncomfortable things like “judging people” or “excluding people.”)

—they flinch. They hesitate. They waver.

And then the temperature goes up a little, and the ice melts, but only a little, and it doesn’t seem like anything bad happened, actually, the ice cube still looks like an ice cube…

But phase changes can be pretty rapid, and once something unique is lost, it is often impossible to recover. (Link goes to another short essay you should maybe read, about a concept called the “trust thermocline”.) It’s a whole lot easier to keep an ice cube an ice cube than it is to refreeze the water once it’s melted and merged with all the surrounding liquid.

Maintaining an environmental enclave that is meaningfully different from the rest of the environment around it takes work. If you look around at your different little subculture and you don’t see that work happening…

Well. The clock is ticking.

(A corollary of sorts: some actual person or persons have got to do the work; if you look around and you don’t see the-work-of-maintaining-the-delta being rewarded, appreciated, and incentivized, the obvious thing is going to happen.)

If you plan to use this as a reference, you will want to save it as a file on your phone, because once you get there you will not have internet.

Maps will indeed correctly take you to the parking lot:

The nude beach is an easyish 20-45 minute hike (depending on how fast you walk). It doesn’t require hands-and-feet at any point but it does have some steep stairs. The jump is another 20-45 minutes beyond that, and the trail is much narrower and wilder and does require some hands-and-feet, but is still overall definitely a Real Trail; you’re not cutting through the jungle or anything like that.

In the image above, the nude beach is the red tree icon and the jump is the gray pin in the upper right corner; Google maps tells me it’s approx 39°18’22.5”N+121°04’34.5”W.

It’s got multiple heights; during normal “jump season” (circa June 15 to November 1) the highest one is about five meters over the water, with lower takeoff spots at 4m, 2.5m, and 1m.

The highest jump looks like this, and you are indeed advised to jump in that direction rather than to the left as you might think. The water straight ahead from the feet below is deep and safe; the water to the left is probably safe but the rocks are only maybe 2.5, 3m down.

These are the takeoff spots:

Here’s somebody jumping off the second highest:

From all of the jumps, aim toward the dark stripes:

To get out, you just swim slightly downriver and take your pick of a bunch of places to clamber back out on the right. Just down from the jump is a wide, placid, shallow area, so unless you’re there in the wrong season there’s no danger of e.g. accidentally slipping into a rapid.

(If you look and you feel like there might be danger of accidentally slipping into a rapid, you are there in the wrong season.)

Phase I: Getting to the beach

From the parking lot, cross the wide concrete bridge and then take this trail up and to the right:

Honestly, the trail from the parking lot to the beach is mostly unambiguous. The main thing to watch out for is that there are lots of smaller trails that branch off downhill and to the right, to take you to the water in various places. You mostly want to keep staying on what looks like the main trail/major artery and not turning off early.

A few landmarks along the way:

You’ll see this view when you’re somewhere between one third and two thirds of the way to the beach (which is just out of view another 50m upriver):

There’s one spot pretty far along where you don’t want to take the left trail, but it’s pretty easy to figure out that you’re supposed to go right because the sign for the beach is another 10 or 20m down the right hand fork:

Post-sign, you’ve actually still got 2-5min of hiking; there are a bunch of small turnoffs to the right that lead to small enclaves downstream of the beach proper. Here, for instance, go forward/left up between those two boulders rather than branching off to the right:

But eventually, you will reach The Beach in all its glory.

(Uh. That’s not the beach. It’s next to it, though.)

(All of my pictures of the actual beach are full of naked people, sry.)

Phase II: Getting to the jump

Okay, so, you’re actually going to want to double back a bit; I usually drop my clothes and other stuff at the beach and then walk 1-2min back to the fork that is the easiest way up to the jump.

The best way to describe the particular fork is “it’s the place where you turned sharp right and went down between a bunch of small boulders, to get to the nude beach.” Instead of taking that fork (which was to the right when you were coming in) you will go uphill to the left. James points the way:

The trail zigs to the left and then almost immediately (like, within 10m) there’s a fork back to the right:

Pretty soon (within 30m) there’s another fork, and you want to go left/uphill/sunny:

You’ll know you’re on the right track if you very quickly come upon a wide flat steep sandy rise with erosion canyons; be reassured:

The clamber kinda sucks but it’s only a minute or so; once you hit these roots you’re (relatively) done with the huffing and puffing:

As with the trail to the beach, the main thing you have to do is resist the siren song of little forks off to the right. Many of them don’t even go down to the water, above the beach; some of them just dead-end at a cliff. Stay to the main trail, to the left:

Another reassuring landmark. You are on the right track!

This is the “fool’s fork”—at this point, you may be able to peer down and recognize the jump, and you’ll think “surely this is the one that will get us down there,” but nope. Stay the course:

The trail sort of seems to peter out into the jungle after a few more minutes, with wide slab rocks. Don’t worry, it picks up on the far side:

Here’s a video of the rest of the path to the jump, although I’ll also carry on with the photos.

This section is steep-ish and kinda slippery, and leads down to a tumble of rocks:

Turn slightly right when you reach the rocks, and go down this waist-high drop:

Then bear left, down and down. Don’t go over the cliff! Bear left yet again, and you’ll see the trail:

There’s a helpful rope that you don’t really need, but lots of people find it provides peace of mind:

You’ll go past a “wishbone tree” (sry, didn’t snap a pic) and then the trail forks. The path to the left is actually a faster and (in some ways) easier way down, but it involves taking a ~2m drop from rock to rock right on the edge of a drop, so I think of that as the “advanced” path. The ordinary path is more scenic anyway:

Follow along the flat, smooth stones with the river to your left (yes, you’re doubling back, but only for maybe 30m):

You’re going to go to that tree and loop around it, past and then left and then down:

After passing the tree and turning back:

You’re now clambering down some pretty steep and smooth rocks. There’s a helpful wire cable that sucks if you care about Textures™ but you can also use the holds on the rocks themselves. At this point, your goal is basically “get down near the water without slipping into the water,” although I guess nothing terrible would happen if you did slide in:

James, demonstrating the non-wire technique:

Use the cracks in the rock for grip. Follow them like trails, down and then to the left, back upriver:

Behold: a jump! You made it.

I highly recommend a swim/clamber back downriver to the nude beach, rather than reversing the climb (this is why I leave my clothes and stuff at the beach). But you can just … go back the way you came, if you gotta.

Abrupt conclusion because this isn’t actually an essay. Stay safe, have fun.

In my long, meandering essay Truth or Dare, I talked about a person (pseudonymized as Mitchell) who had developed a strongly negative opinion of me, which consistently colored his interpretations of my behavior. Because Mitchell knew that I was a dick, he knew that when I said X or Y or Z, I must be doing it manipulatively, or disingenuously, or with some sort of ulterior motive.

The problem was, it was projection all the way down. When I tried to find the original source of his belief that I was a dick, all I could dig up was a long history of [ambiguous interactions interpreted uncharitably], with the justification for any given interpretation being all the other interpretations. Mitchell knew that I must have been secretly being a dick in June because back in April he confirmation-biased that I was being secretly a dick because back in February he confirmation-biased that I was being a dick because last November he confirmation-biased that I was being a dick because the summer before he confirmation-biased that I was being a dick because…

(You get the picture.)

There’s something about this pattern that reminds me of trying to argue with a certain type of religious person. There’s something like a self-reinforcing network of beliefs—I start out by (say) getting them to acknowledge that the actual personal history of their individual faith strongly implies that if they’d been born in Saudi Arabia, they would be a devout Muslim, and not a Christian at all.

And they nod, and there’s a flicker of unease, and I try to build upon that flicker of unease by (say) moving on to talk about the Council of Nicaea, or the patently cobbled-together nature of Judeo-Christian mythology, or perhaps the concept of falsifiability, or the overwhelming evidence in favor of things like evolution and the age of the earth being four and a half billion years and the absolute lack of any pattern that would indicate the viability of prayer or superior health or wealth or morality among the faithful…

…but it’s not like there are a dozen pillars holding up their faith, and if I show them that each of those pillars is false one by one, then voilà, mission accomplished.

Instead, what happens is, I show them that one pillar is fake and crumbling, and maybe they even acknowledge that that pillar is fake and crumbling, and I move on to two or three other pillars, but when I turn back, the first one has already repaired itself. The argument doesn’t properly accumulate. Yeah, sure, I showed that the actual reason they believe in Christianity is just that their parents and community told them to, and if they’d grown up in Saudi Arabia they’d believe in Islam instead, but whatever, they still have the correct faith anyway, I guess they lucked out or something, because [a bunch of other reasons that are also overturnable, but if I don’t somehow overturn them literally all at once then they just keep resurrecting one another as soon as my back is turned].

I run into something like this pattern a lot, and when I do, what I feel is hopeless.

It’s not that it literally cannot be broken. It’s that doing so requires something close to the literal maximum effort I am capable of producing, sustained across a large period of time, and even then the odds of success feel like a coin toss.

In part, it’s a coin toss because the truth of the matter at hand is not even the most relevant factor, most of the time. If I actually sat down with Mitchell, to be like “look, I think you straight-up misjudged me, like, fourteen times in a row, and I’d like to exhaustively demonstrate to you how every single one of those times I was actually behaving nobly, I think I can do it, I have the actual evidence,” I’d pretty quickly run into one of those lovely little Kafkatraps:

Just as the Christian isn’t actually there to be deconverted, but is instead listening with an air of (extremely finite) patient tolerance, so too is Mitchell not actually interested in finding out that he’s wrong.

He doesn’t even have to be malevolent, or intellectually dishonest. He’s just … already sure. He has like fourteen separate instances that all point in the same direction, after all! What’s even the point in entertaining a hypothesis as wildly unlikely as the one that I’m proffering?

Even if I get Mitchell to consider something like three different run-ins in a row, and demonstrate that all three of them were the sort of thing where I don’t deserve any sort of blame or censure, this doesn’t fix anything. It often makes it worse, actually—

“Okay, sure, those times you weren’t being a dick, but that just makes me even more confident that you were being a dick the other times, because otherwise where did this very strong feeling that you’re a dick come from?”

The reason this whole structure is on my mind now, and I’m unable to sleep at three in the goddamn morning (or whatever time it is, I’m too scared to look), is that I’m currently feeling hopeless. I am currently trapped under the net of a bullshit, false narrative that is (as far as I can tell) not even the slightest bit interested in discovering that it’s false.

And—as with Christianity, as with Mitchell—the problem is not that I can’t exhaustively demonstrate that this is, in fact, false.

(I can.)

(It’s just plain false.)

(To those of you who are shocked that I would say something so ridiculously, patently absurd when Jesus is obviously the son of God; everybody knows that: it’s really, actually false, in an insanely Kafkaesque fashion; when people actually produce lists of times when I have allegedly “turned on” various people—

(Which they usually do not bother to do in the first place, because it’s so self-evidently true that they don’t need to justify it, any more than most Christians feel the need to actually provide any reason for believing in Christianity.)

—usually like a full third of the list is people that I spent literal years giving chance after chance after chance after chance, long after the-type-of-person-who’s-accusing me-of-turning-on-people would themselves have cut their losses and burned the bridge behind them. And as for the other two-thirds—man, don’t even bother, they’re not interested in your “story.” 🙄)

The exhaustion, in situations like these, comes from the fact that I don’t just have to win this fight.

It wouldn’t even be enough if I won all of the dozens of fights, because of the cyclical self-repair thing. I could have the receipts on literally 100% of them and the miasma would still stick to me.

The problem is that, in order to even get to a place where I’m allowed to start presenting evidence on the dozens of fights (and have it taken seriously), I first have to win a meta fight to move the other person to a position of like maybe being willing to consider that the entire edifice is deeply unfair and based on illusions and projections and confirmation bias and monkeys uncritically reinforcing one another’s made-up stories.

Which is a hard thing to do, in the face of the confidence and dismissiveness of a person who’s got dozens of examples lined up, in their conception of things. You can get a devout Christian to listen politely, but it’s not easy to get them to actually listen, with a genuinely open mind—to think through the question afresh, be willing to reassess an entire self-reinforcing memeplex, to unwind dozens or hundreds of instances of rehearsing the gestalt and be suspicious of the well-worn grooves of their own established narrative. It’s like asking someone to seriously consider that the sky is green.

(Or more aptly, to seriously consider that maybe those two colors that they are absolutely certain are the same are in fact different, which is much harder to convince someone to do when they’re surrounded by people who all share the same color-blindness, and are constantly reassuring each other back and forth that nope, those are definitely the same shade, don’t fall prey to the seductive whispers of atheists and satanists, the more convincing they sound the more you know they’re trying to pull one over on you, actually…)

If I do somehow muster (in spite of my despair) and succeed at effortfully extracting some sort of tentative, begrudging admission of the mere possibility, drawing heavily on whatever warmth and goodwill might exist between me and the other person, and whatever respect they might have for my morals and my intellect—

(Which is often not much, given that these situations usually involve being in the doghouse to begin with.)

—I will still have only just begun. I will have run a half-marathon just to get to the starting line—the place where the fair fight even can happen, in principle.

And it’s in that arena that I’ll subsequently have to do something like make a hundred correct moves all in a row, without any mistakes, because if I phrase something clumsily or accidentally overstate something or get some checkable claim slightly off, then boom: the default skepticism and the original viewpoint are just waiting to landslide their way back in, see, I knew it, he was full of shit, my dozens of examples weren’t all downstream of a single magnetic field of bias pulling all the data suspiciously in line—

(Three seconds in to explaining how the very first example isn’t what it looks like, and my interlocutor shoots back with “but you see how it is” because they did not, in fact, actually sustainably shift their brain into a state of genuine dispassionate neutrality; they claimed that they had and probably believed that they had but in fact their actions are indistinguishable from the actions of someone who is looking for me to be wrong, trying to poke holes in what I’m saying, believes they already know the answer and is suspicious of what seems to them like any attempt to move away from that answer.)

—and it’s just, like.

Yeah.

Go ahead and give up, buddy. You’re not going to win this one; the truth of the matter was never the crux; you already lost in the social and emotional realms and those are the realms where people decide to lynch you.

(There’s nothing quite so demoralizing as knowing that you are in the right (and could even prove it) and that you are going to lose anyway. That there simply is no viable path, in practice, to deconverting the Christian, even though their god does not, in fact, exist.)

Hopeless.

Absolutely nothing in this essay is contra consent. It is, however, contra the conflation of [explicit verbal consent] with [consent]. A lot of people, in my experience, act like the diagram looks like this:

…when it seems pretty clear to me that it’s actually more like this:

There are some situations where EVC is 100% the appropriate (or even necessary) tool.
There are some situations where EVC is one of multiple valid options.
And there are some situations where EVC is actively corrosive and bad.

It’s not a panacea.

I.

Defining terms:

By explicit verbal consent, I mostly mean the following two things:

• Asking, in words, before escalating some sort of interaction (usually but not exclusively physical or sexual ones), and holding off on that escalation until receiving words that are or are equivalent to “yes.” (And on the flip side: insisting that “no” also be clear and verbal and explicit, too.)

• “Negotiating” “scenes,” i.e. planning out encounters in detail, in advance, or at least setting clear themes and drawing a bunch of concrete boundaries (yes to X, Y, and Z; no to A, B, and C; M and N are on the table but may or may not happen).

I feel pretty pendulums about it.

“Feeling pendulums” means:

I agree that things were worse, before. The popularization of the social technology of explicit verbal consent, over the past few decades, has put an end to a lot of boundary violations, and has given a lot of people much better tools for expressing their needs and communicating with their partners. That’s great!

But I run into a lot of people who seem to think … “We did it!!” (or something). Who lean on explicit verbal consent for approximately everything, and act in ways that imply a belief that doing so has no costs and no downsides.

Maybe it doesn’t, for them! But other kinds of people exist.

This brave new world is clearly less bad than the previous, but it’s not ideal. I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the things the verbal-type Pokémon are missing, and in some cases trampling over.

II.

First, though:

Guess culture is the term for an implicit mode of operation in which people are sensitive to the likely impacts of the things they say and do, and adjust what they’re doing, preemptively, taking those impacts into account.

If your parents ever scolded you for asking whether a friend could sleep over in front of that friend, that was a guess culture moment. Asking while the friend is looking on eagerly creates pressure on the parent to say “yes,” even if it’s not in fact a good idea or they don’t want to do it. The parent is sort of backed into a corner: they either grant permission, or they look like an ogre in front of your friend.

Guess culture says “you know that’s going to happen; the impact of putting your parent on the spot is predictable. Therefore a) don’t do it, and b) if you do do it, we’re going to act as though you basically created that pressure on purpose.” In guess culture, you don’t ask questions to resolve uncertainty—direct asks are reserved for when you’re already super confident that you know the answer.

Ask culture, in contrast, is explicit. Ask culture argues something like “look, I can’t actually predict how any given statement or action is going to impact you; I can maybe get kinda close but honestly different people are different, everyone has their own microculture and different people attach different connotations to things and people have wildly varying expectations and norms and I’m not a mind-reader, can I please just ask?”

Guess culture: don’t ask your friend whether you can crash on their couch for the weekend, because they might feel obligated to say yes; instead slap your thighs and say “well, it’s getting late; I’d better start figuring out hotels.” If they want you to sleep over, they’ll speak up.

Ask culture: “Yo, can I crash on your couch?”

Relevance to EVC:

Guess culture is largely for intra-cultural communication, i.e. communication between people who have a large shared base of norms and intuitions.

And ask culture is largely for inter-cultural communication, i.e. communication between people whose cultures are different enough that you can’t rely on both parties understanding the same “A implies B.”

EVC is an inter-cultural tool, just like ask culture. It is, fundamentally, based in the assumption that we can’t make assumptions. It’s a tool for people who are wary and cautious and uncertain, and using language to reduce uncertainty, and bridge cultural gaps.

From over here in my armchair, I see three big forces at work, in the rise of the popularity of EVC over the past few decades:

• Internet culture causes people to collide with far more people who are far more different from them on a regular basis; no longer are you primarily interacting with people in a 20-mile radius of the place where you physically live. People have boned up on explicit culture in general because most of us are spending way more time in the company of strangers than in the past.

• The destigmatization of therapy has caused lots more people to take advantage of it in the past 2-3 decades than in the 2-3 decades before that. And therapy is absolutely chock-full of explication. Millions of people have been practicing explaining themselves—to their therapists, to themselves, to their romantic partners—and the terminology and technology of making things explicit has leaked into the water supply in a big way.

• In the realm of sex and intimacy specifically, kink/BDSM culture has spent the past few decades refining and exporting all sorts of technology for unlocking vulnerable, intimate interactions between total strangers. Thousands upon thousands of people have showed up at events where they knew next to nobody and been taught explicit frameworks for forming connections and making proposals and negotiating boundaries and moving (relatively speaking) very quickly to activities that would otherwise require a lot of built-up trust.

It’s that last one that I want to start with (although all three of the above share a similar underlying structure). I think that part of what’s going on with EVC is something like the metastasis of norms put in place to facilitate, er, “speed dating.” Kink event norms are like diplomatic norms—they’re a set of clunky, machine-like buttons that everyone knows how to press, so that people don’t accidentally try using their own cultural levers on one another.

You get people to agree, explicitly, on the meta level, to things like “no escalation without negotiation” and “consent can be withdrawn at any time” and “you and your partners owe one another specific experiences, in line with what was agreed-upon; neither of you has promised one another a good experience, because who knows how it will actually land?”

All of these agreements allow total strangers to become physically intimate at all without things going immediately sideways. This is great! It’s great to have tech for zeroing in on the details of a specific scene, and how it will start and end, and what things are on and off the table, so that there’s minimal misunderstanding and people’s actions are reasonably predictable.

But this is also different from something like—

(sorry)
(I know the way I’m phrasing this is value-laden)
(sorry)
(but seriously though)

—true intimacy. Actual attunement. Seeing and knowing one another, having that shared base of norms and assumptions.

At an event full of strangers, if your options are “welp, can’t understand these randos well enough to connect” or “oh, we can both push the big blunt buttons and get like an 80/20 of the real thing!” then obviously the latter option is way, way, way, way better!

But in other contexts, the big blunt buttons get in the way. They’re like—

(sorry, somewhat clumsy metaphor)

—they’re like a monoculture, a single species, like Bermuda lawn grass. They’re better than dirt, but they’re not as good as a thriving wildflower garden.

Processes which allow you to go from [zero intimacy] to [any intimacy at all] in the space of minutes or hours are often corrosive to the deeper, fuller sort of awareness and attunement, if it already exists. It’s good that you can ask a barista for the price of a coffee, and they’ll tell you, and then you can hand over some money and be given a receipt and receive your coffee, but it would be bad to deploy that technology with your friends, in your kitchen.

And through some weird slippage of monkey brains—

(Especially in subcultures that have A Lot Of People who’ve been through the BDSM training camps, or spent a bunch of time steeped in therapy culture, or just generally had to navigate a bunch of interactions with strangers on the internet.)

—the specific, heavy, overengineered technology of Big Events Full Of Wary People gets enshrined as The Right Way To Do Things, Period, and people start porting that tech into domains that are supposed to be running on a different language.

It’s, uh. Bad.

III.

Just a brief point: the dynamic of “X is worse than Y but it’s far better than nothing” is, I think, a part of why so many people have felt deep relief at being handed the tools of EVC. I feel like I see a lot of people who were lost in a fog of confusion and anxiety, and couldn’t get a grip on intimate interactions, and were stressed and afraid and under-nourished as a result…

…and then someone taught them the tools of ask culture/EVC and it was like opening a door and letting in light for the first time in years.

This is wonderful. Like, the point of this post is not to shit on EVC in general; as noted in the second diagram I think it’s a big chunk of the overall picture of consensual intimacy. And I know people who are like, “I am finally able to have conversations I could never have before, and those conversations are unlocking lovely experiences I could never have before, and being able to just ask my partners how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking and what they want (and communicate the same, about how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking and what I want) is a huge gamechanger. Before, I had so much uncertainty about what might happen to me, and whether my boundaries would be respected, that my only real option was abstinence. Now I can actually play.”

Valid. Valid valid valid.

And there are some people for whom the claims I made above (about verbal stuff being limiting or corrosive) aren’t personally true! There are some people who don’t take any damage, or experience any confinement, from passing everything through the verbal channel. And this is also rad and valid. I wouldn’t undo all of the cool invention and popularization that’s happened over the past few decades, because every new tool in the toolkit is useful to someone.

But—

IV.

Some things that the more zealous EVC evangelists seem not to notice, or to dismiss as irrelevant:

1. If you make participation in an activity conditional on verbal fluency, you are necessarily excluding from that activity everyone who isn’t verbally fluent.

This includes autistic people. This includes disabled people. This includes people who speak a different language. This includes people with certain kinds of social anxiety. This includes people of a lower IQ. This includes younger people. This includes people under the influence. This includes people who are scared or anxious or nervous.

I think it’s fine to set up environments where you say “sorry, you must be at least this verbally competent to ride.” The people putting on an event matter, too; doms and tops and dance leads matter; if the driver of an experience is only comfortable if they can get a certain level of explicit verbal clarity from the other party, that’s valid.

But it is in fact emphatically not the case that things like dance or sex or BDSM are (or should be) fundamentally gated on verbal fluency. They aren’t primarily verbal activities! It’s not like saying “sorry, you have to be articulate to participate in the rap battle.” It’s like saying “sorry, you have to be articulate to play in the soccer game.”

(Which is fucked up, and unfair.)

There are in fact other, equally valid routes to building trust and intimacy, and affirming enthusiastic consent, and ensuring that boundaries are respected. The verbal channel is a legitimate channel; acting as if it is the only legitimate channel is misguided and even a little bit cruel.

2. If you spell out all of the details of an adventure, you are no longer having an adventure.

“Okay, but which trails are we going down, exactly? And what will we see on those trails? And what animals will we encounter—will there be bugs? Snakes? How wet are we going to get? What time will we be back? What views are we going to see, and how am I going to feel about them?”

^ This is anxiety. A sort of fretting Neville nervousness. And again—it’s valid! I think that people who want to know every detail of the hike, in advance, so they can prepare, are valid. They deserve to be able to have hikes that work for them, with friends who want to share that sort of experience.

But again—the objection here isn’t to EVC being in the toolkit. It’s to EVC becoming the obligatory default. There are negotiations that kill every last scrap of mystery and excitement and uncertainty in an interaction, and for some of us (and for some interactions), those things matter.

3. Sometimes you don’t want to drive.

Related to 2, I’ve had experiences where someone was willing to top or dom me, but only if I could specify exactly what I wanted to have happen to me, and that’s … sorry, I guess we’re not actually compatible, you can’t give me what I want, it’s mutually exclusive with what you need.

“Just ask for what you want to have happen to you!”

“What I want to have happen to me is not having to ask.”

There’s an analogy here to being given a spontaneous hug versus being given a hug upon request, or receiving a thoughtful gift from someone who paid attention to you versus receiving something off of your Amazon wishlist. There’s something nourishing about being seen and understood, such that your partner knows where your personal boundaries are, distinct from the generic accepted social boundaries, and is able to move around without first getting authorization in triplicate.

(Of course, if someone actually doesn’t have the requisite understanding, then maybe they don’t want to risk running into landmines in your psychology. But there’s a separately nourishing thing about, like … being treated as though you don’t have glass bones? The more people are visibly anxious about accidentally fucking up, the harder it is to relax into trust and intimacy. You can get caught in a hall of mirrors where their anxiety makes you less confident in them, which causes you to raise your shields, which causes them to notice that you’re tense, which causes them to feel more cautious, etc.)

But yeah—there’s something fundamentally distanced about a partner who opens up their arms and then visibly hesitates and asks “…do you want a hug?” It puts a ceiling on how-seen-you-can-feel, how-known-you-can-be. It’s way better than not getting a hug at all, and it’s way better than getting an unwanted hug (again, the point here is not “EVC bad”). But if you can do better, it’s worth it. If you do actually know your partner well enough to eschew the words, that very fact contains a rare and precious nutrient, and it’s worth graduating from EVC to that more intimate state.

(Also sometimes I simply do not know what I want next, and I want a partner to collaborate with me on exploring, rather than a partner who sort of quiet-quits and is like “well, I guess we’ll just sit here until you have orders for me.”)

4. The verbal channel can be actively destructive to other channels.

This is the one that I think is most likely to be confusing/hard to model to the EVC evangelists, because I think most of the people who get really big into EVC either:

• Are sufficiently verbally fluent that they can juggle both the verbal and non-verbal channels simultaneously without problem, or

• Don’t actually go into the non-verbal territory at all/stay firmly within the verbal realm (and thus may not have considered the non-verbal swath of the territory at all, and may undervalue it relative to other people).

But to use a simple analogy: a beautiful song is playing, and I am attempting to listen to it, and maybe sway along with it, and sink into it, and then, ninety seconds into it, someone (without pausing!) asks me to verbalize what I am thinking and feeling in response to the song, and where I hope the music will go next (while the song is still playing!).

Oof!

Oof.

The listening that I do, with a partner, is non-verbal in a way that takes up like 97% of my attention and available processing power; if someone boots the language channel back up, I have to drop/lose most of what was going on two seconds before they spoke. It pulls me out of one stream and into a different stream.

Separately, the experience that I’m having, when I’m being intimate with someone, is itself non-verbal. It’s often Bacchanalian or meditative or slightly-altered-state-y; I’m zero percent thinking in words myself. Indeed, getting away from words is part of the draw. It’s part of what makes it cool and different and interesting and fun and fulfilling.

(I spend so much time in the words, by default.)

When I’m in that kind of flow, forcing me back into words just kills whatever it was that was happening. It knocks over the house of cards, smashes the sandcastle. Sometimes I can start all over again, from scratch, but it’s slow and effortful, and if they throw words at me again I will often simply give up, and stay in the paler, faker, sadder, less-immediately-authentic mode for the rest of the time—like pronouncing every single word on the page “out loud” in my head, instead of sinking in to the act of reading.

5. A lot of things just take way more words to convey than they do not-words.

Verbal communication is clunky. It’s inefficient and lossy, cf. the picture being worth a thousand words.

The simple version of this is something like “if you are paying attention to your partner at all, you can usually tell whether they like or dislike the direction you moved in over the past three seconds.” Just feeling the way a partner’s muscle tension shifts in response to some change takes zero words; asking “Do you like that?” or “What do you think of that?” and then getting back a response takes infinity percent more words.

(For people who are like, “I can’t be sure my partner has consented unless they say so!” my primary answer is “skill issue.” I am aware that there’s a sort of ironic symmetry here, where people are like “well if you can’t just ask then that’s a skill issue, too.” The main thing I’m fighting for is both skill sets being considered valid and sufficient.)

Even complex things are not necessarily quicker in the verbal channel. “Move your fingers in such-and-such a way” is blunt and low-resolution relative to a gesture; “Describe to me the thing you want to have happen next” might take a thousand words.

Maybe that’s the only way! Maybe you Just Gotta. If my partner has a complex fantasy that involves a lot of moving parts that I can’t simply intuit, we probably need to talk it out, and that’s fine.

But again: the fact that explicit verbal communication is the right tool for some jobs doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for every job (or even most jobs). The two big tasks of:

• Figure out whether we’re both happy with the direction things are going, and

• Figure out what we’re going to do next

…just don’t always need to be spelled out, in explicit language.

V.

To reiterate: if navigating intimate encounters with explicit language works for you, that’s great, and I want you to keep doing it, and I want you to find partners who want to do it with you.

But I’d like the non-verbal stuff—

(Which was the only game in town for large swathes of our history and still is the main channel in lots of cultures and for lots of activities, e.g. dance.)

—to remain in the Overton window. I’d like for it not to be the case that social consensus concludes absolutely crazy things like “if you don’t get a verbal yes, that’s a no.”

(I’ve literally heard this and similar things said out loud, many times, including outside of the context of any specific workshop or event (where installing a local rule like that might be very handy and helpful), by people who were so self-assured as they said it that I think they genuinely never even considered the possibility that it might be false.)

Tech like that is good for strangers, and it’s good for increasing clarity and safety where people are confused or anxious.

But personally, I want to be actually intimate, with non-strangers, and I don’t like it when my intimates arms-length me with stranger-tech. I like the experience of already feeling sufficient safety and clarity that I don’t need to spend time ameliorating confusion and anxiety, and if I have to switch over into amelioration this means I’m going to be doing a different and less-nourishing thing.

Again: that’s still better than nothing.

But I think we can do better than “better than nothing,” and one of the ways to get there is to outgrow the crutch of insisting on putting everything into words. There’s a whole lot more to the map—EVC is just one swath of the overall territory, and people who are exploring the other sections are not, in fact, doing consent wrong.

They’re just speaking a different language.

It was entirely my fault. I was biking home from the Thallers’ house, as I had done probably close to a hundred times before. It was the equivalent of about 1.5 blocks, and involved crossing a single street with a 35mph speed limit.

I looked one way. I forgot to look the other.

(I caught my mistake about a half second after I started out into the intersection. I looked the other way—too late—and then looked down in some combination of defeat, acceptance, and here we go. I distinctly remember seeing my front tire wobble. It’s the last thing I remember.)

The car was speeding—my dad proved it by analyzing the skid marks, because the driver’s spouse tried to sue us for damages. If it had been going 35, or even 39, they would have stopped in time. They had to have been going more than that—a good bit more, given how far I got thrown.

But still. I’m the one who biked out in front of them.

I flew about thirty feet and landed on my head (no helmet) (cue the jokes about why I’m like this). My bike went further, and hit the windshield of a truck coming from the other direction. My mom was first on the scene, within about a minute, and says I wasn’t breathing; my dad says she was hallucinating but honestly she doesn’t seem the type (registered nurse, former Army intelligence officer, scoffs about how waterboarding isn’t that bad). She was squared-away enough to insist that they not take me to her hospital, five minutes away, but instead drive me forty minutes to UNC, which was a better facility.

The doctors were confused why I wasn’t edemic. It turned out that I had a single, tiny fracture, just over my ear, in exactly the place where they would have drilled a hole to let out the pressure. It’s the sort of thing that would fit right in to a set of religious beliefs, if I were so inclined.

But actually it doesn’t feel like I was saved by the angels (or whatever). It more feels like I had a 1-in-10 chance of making it through, and did.

(1-in-10 is a made-up number. But it feels about right.)

I’m not sure how long it was before my parents let me go out biking again. It wasn’t right away—I know this, in part, because we went to Washington D.C. late that spring, and it’s part of the family legendarium that we were approaching a crosswalk and I looked both ways, gauged the speed and distance of the oncoming cars, looked up at Mom and Dad, and confidently assured them that “we can make it.”

(We could have. They were nevertheless not amused. This was not the way they wanted me to be thinking about these situations.)

But it couldn’t have been that long. I met my best friend Drew in fourth grade and biked up into the neighborhood to play at his house and it felt unspecial and familiar (i.e. I’d already been biking around freely). That was at most eighteen months later.

I think a lot of people would argue that it was insane to let me out in the first place.

(I think they’re wrong.)

I think a lot of people would argue that it was more insane to keep letting me out, afterward.

(I think they’re wrong, too.)

I think I had a lucky result, given the mistake. I think the mistake itself was unlucky. It’s not the case that most mistakes, noticed and corrected within the space of a second, come with potentially lethal consequences. I think nine-out-of-ten Duncans that roll out into that intersection die, but I think a pretty small proportion of Duncans (1/500? Maybe fewer?) roll out into that intersection without looking properly in the first place. I don’t think the accident (or something like it) was so likely that my parents had a duty to anticipate it, and take extraordinary action to prevent it.

(By “extraordinary action,” I mean more than training me to look both ways, which they did, and going with me on the trip a hundred times first, which they did.)

The thing is, there’s a way to live your life that is circumscribed by fear, and that life is actually lesser, actually worse. I think that the version of Duncan who was forbidden to ride his bike to the Thallers’ house is meaningfully worse, in a number of possible ways.

They’re more afraid, anxious, timid.

They’re less capable.

They’re angrier, maybe, at the injustice of being chained.

(I don’t have a House and my House doesn’t have a motto, but if I did and it did it would be Nihil boni umquam ex catenis cuditur.)

Most importantly, they are lacking scores of vibrant, memorable, important-to-me experiences that were all downstream of the freedom of motion and the confidence to go where I pleased, at least some of the time.

(One of my friends was conspicuously not so free. I have a control group instance.)

I acknowledge that I would have other memories, in place of the ones I currently have; that I wouldn’t know the difference, from the inside.

But still. Compound interest. Multiplying 0.9 over and over again gives you something much less good than multiplying 1.1.

(Or, if we want to be generous, 1.01^100 vs. 1.1^100. 2.7 versus over 13,000.)

There are times when people try to do a sort of emotional hijack, to justify their own anxiety and authoritarianism. “Oh yeah?” they say (often with something close to a sneer). “If Cadence dies because of this policy, you’ll feel differently.”

And the thing is…

…I won’t.

(They don’t believe me, but that’s fine; it’s a mistake to care too much about their wrong beliefs.)

If I believe I have trained Cadence to competently handle a car intersection, and I am wrong, and she dies as a result, I will feel terribly, terribly sad. I will probably even feel guilty, a little bit, before I work through it.

But I really, actually expect that I will conclude that it was better to live a bright and vibrant life than a sad, fearful one in the shadows. I really, actually believe that it’s worse to impose a huge, massive, iterated cost across thousands and thousands of days than to accept the risk of some “foreseeable” “preventable” disasters.

Every disaster is foreseeable in retrospect. That’s not the standard we should be holding ourselves to. I know exactly what it would take to make sure that Cadence never, ever, ever gets hit by a car, for sure. And I refuse to do that to her.

(Two days ago she fell into the pool below, jumping across the gap where the water is falling. She did the jump successfully about six times, and then slipped and went in on the seventh. She can’t swim; I dove in after her; I had already taken my phone and wallet out of my pants when I saw her sizing it up the first time. Most parents wouldn’t have “let” her do the first half dozen. Even fewer would’ve “allowed” her to do more jumps, after, which I did. She fell in a second time, later, at a different spot on the edge of the pool, because she wasn’t afraid of it. In context, she was correct not to be afraid of it. It was fine. It was better than fine. She most likely won’t remember this experience, but she will remember future experiences that will be built upon the base formed by this one, and that base is superior to a base of excessive caution and constraint.)

I’d rather Cadence learn from experiences like that—and I don’t mean “learn not to do them,” I mean “learn how to handle them.” As strange as it sounds, I myself really would rather be dead, now, than denied my bike rides throughout second and third and fourth and fifth grade.

(If you go back in time and deny me them, it’s not entirely clear that the person you have thirty years later is still actually me, in the ways that matter. I hope it would still be me—the me that has maintained continuity of experience since at least the age of six. But I’m not actually sure that six-year-old Duncan has the mental fortitude to withstand half a decade or more of concernist propaganda. That’s a lot, to ask of a very small boy.)

Cadence will have her own February of 1995. I don’t know when, or where, or how loaded the dice will be. (I’ve had three or four of them, myself.)

It’s my job to prepare her well enough to come through it, and I take that job seriously. I’m supposed to teach her where the hazards are, and how to navigate them.

But it’s not my job to raise her to believe that you should never, ever, ever roll dice. If she grows up believing that, I will have failed her as a parent, as a person, and as a friend.

I wish more people thought about both sides of autonomy and sovereignty violations.

Our society spends a lot of time on avoiding “gotta,” by which I mean “you’re forced into a thing against your consent.” Child labor laws are anti-gotta. Rape prevention and sexual harassment prevention are anti-gotta. Minimum wage is not an especially effective intervention, but it is aimed at preventing people from “having to” work extremely shitty jobs for insufficient pay, and it achieves this at least a little.

Anti-gotta is great. I have no objection to it, in principle. The more that you have to do stuff, despite not wanting to and despite it being ego-dystonic, the worse and more stressful and not-worth-living your life becomes. A+, a mature society works very hard to reduce the gottas; gottas suck and their costs are large.

But this society—by which I mean America in the 2020’s—seems to me to massively underweight the cost of can’t.

For instance: there are thousands-if-not-more thirteen-year-olds who are desperately bored and suffocating in school, and would kill to have an opportunity to just go out into the world and cut their teeth.

(Which was something thirteen-year-olds were never barred from doing basically forever, in basically every society, up to and including this one as recently as five generations ago.)

But our society is so scared that thirteen-year-olds will be gotta’d into work that it’s decided to tell the ones for whom that would be good “nope, sry, you just can’t. We’re incapable of distinguishing healthy thirteen-year-old entrepreneurial spirit from unhealthy thirteen-year-old coercion and exploitation, so we’re putting a lid on the whole thing.”

The part that bothers me is that the “can’t” is often handwaved away as though it’s literally zero. “They can just wait five more years, what’s the big deal?” says an adult who would absolutely not tolerate having their sovereignty locked down for five years, are you fucking kidding me?

(Let alone the fact that for a thirteen-year-old, five years is a lot longer to wait than for a thirty-year-old.)

(“But I had to wait, and it was fine!” screams a person who isn’t prepared to face up to the fact that they themselves were screwed out of something, better to perpetuate the system forever because then you don’t have to watch others get a better deal than you yourself got,)

I pretty much buy “okay, we just don’t have the social technology to reliably tell apart the kids who would hugely benefit from being free to enter the world of Real Actual Work from the ones who would be coerced and exploited.” I don’t like it, but I can buy that it’s theoretically the right call, at the societal level.

What I don’t like, though, is:

• Not acknowledging that you are, in fact, coercing and exploiting some people, at a low level, so as to prevent a probably-worse coercion and exploitation at a more acutely disastrous level
  
  (“Wait, what do you mean, exploiting? Nobody’s exploiting eighth graders by preventing them from working!” Oh honey. O you sweet summer child. Taking a human being and treating them as your property and pet is exploitation.)
  

• Not actually letting the equation be an equation. Making one of the terms infinite, such that it justifies infinite excess in the preventive direction. What people support, in practice, but rarely say out loud, is something like “I’d rather lock down a million teenagers and deny them their agency entirely than risk even one teenager ending up in the salt mines.”
  
  (Except that actually, teenagers are ending up in the salt mines anyway; another part of why I rage at this whole dynamic is that it doesn’t even tend to protect all that many teenagers. It’s more “I’d rather lock down a million teenagers and deny them their agency than have to see and know about one in the salt mines,” which, man, fuck you.)

We prevent a lot of disabled people from ever having sex, on the grounds that they’re not able to protect themselves the way a non-disabled adult theoretically can; that it would be so bad for them to accidentally gotta that they are in the can’t bucket forever. This is deeply fucked up. It is deeply fucked up to deny a human being access to sex, forever, in the name of their own good, contra their own expressed preferences.

(The gotta’s that we’re trying to prevent are often acute, e.g. a sexual assault; the can’t’s that we impose upon people, prophylactically, are often an endless series of tiny cuts, the same soul-crushing “no” over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.)

We deny people access to all sorts of pharmacological substances, ranging from the recreational to the medically necessary, on the grounds that oh no, it would be bad enough if some people got addicted or took medical action that they regretted or which accidentally hurt them that this is worth barring everyone from making free choices.

(And then we never ever bother to check whether the math actually works out And then we do check and the math often clearly and unambiguously tells us that we’re doing it wrong and we ignore the math and keep doing the paternalistic fascist thing.)

We engage in all sorts of can’t’s, and some of those can’t’s are, in fact, reasonable, but we’re so unreasonable in general that you can’t actually tell, at a glance, whether a given can’t is justified or not, because [two essays explaining why].

And it’s, uh, bad.

The people who call themselves libertarians seem to me, as a class, to be spineless unprincipled self-centered hypocrites, but they’re not wrong about this one.

It’s bad. The fact that most people agree that it’s good doesn’t mean shit; slavery and the holocaust both had local consensus backing them.

When you’re considering throwing dust specks in the eyes of ten million people to prevent the torture and murder of one, check whether it’s actually just a dust speck, and whether you’ll actually prevent a murder, please. I’m down to suffer a dust speck now and then, to save a life—

(I’m down, for instance, with at least some of the restrictions we put on minors, in the name of preventing them from being sexually abused, though again I’ll point out that the interventions don’t seem to be working, actually, and I’d be a lot more in favor if they did; nothing that we’ve changed about how our society functions over the past thirty years has had a meaningful, unambiguous impact on the rates of child sexual assault; the last time it actually substantially fell was in the 1990’s when all crime fell.)

—but I’m actually not at all down to have one hand tied behind my back for five years when it doesn’t even save anyone.

(“We can’t track effectiveness of these interventions because that would demonstrate that these interventions are deeply ineffective and point in the direction of us giving up all this power we’ve accumulated over other people, and we don’t want to do that.”)

Fuck.

(deep breath)

To bring it back around to a digestible conclusion:

“Can’t” is just as valid, as a category-of-badness-worth-minimizing, as “gotta.” Track it. Notice it. Don’t handwave it away.

Thanks.

Okay, so, like: there are two types of people here.

Some people like soccer. They like kicking the ball around, they like practicing, they like playing, they just like it.

And some people like winning soccer trophies. They pay in the practice to get the thing, and if they fail to get the thing, they are not happy.

Some people enjoy the practice of parkour, others endure it to get to the result.

Some people like sex—all of it, the whole thing. And some people like orgasms.

These are different.

As is often the case, I feel like zooophagous kinda sorta … doesn’t realize that the other type of Pokémon exists?

(Or maybe they’re deliberately trying to delegitimize them by acting as if they cannot and do not exist, that’s a thing people do sometimes.)

But like. Clearly some people do bake because they love baking, and clearly some other people bake because that’s the only way to get the particular bespoke baked goods that they want to eat or gift or whatever.

You can have opinions about whether one or the other of these groups is more valid, more genuine, more deserving of respect.

But it’s sort of silly to trick yourself into thinking that only one of them exists at all. The process isn’t enjoyable for everyone. Some people find it actively aversive, in fact, and nevertheless want the end result. It should be no surprise that those people, specifically, are eager to find ways to shortcut the bits that they have hated all along, and been putting up with.

Rule of thumb: for every pursuit where you love every minute of it, there are some people out there holding their noses and counting down the seconds until the payoff.

Rule of thumb: for every pursuit where you’re holding your nose and counting down the seconds until the payoff, there are some people out there loving every minute of it.

Most humans on earth and in history share this trait with me.

If you were to give me a few hours with a competent teacher, I could probably get to the point where I can play the violin a little. But it would only technically be “playing.” It would only bear the barest resemblance to what people mean when they say “so-and-so plays the violin!”

I’d probably be one of these guys:

…since most people are. I have no reason to predict that I’d be unusually good or bad at it.

But here’s the thing about playing the violin. It’s sort of … logarithmically distributed?

By which I mean, if you rank everyone on Earth from one to eight billion, according to their skill at the violin, then being #4,000,000,000 does not mean that you’re half as good as the best violinist on the planet. Not even close.

Being at the bottom of the list is bad.

Being at the middle of the list is bad.

Being three-quarters of the way up the list is bad.

Being nine-tenths of the way up the list is bad.

Once you hit something like 95% of the way up the list, it’s like okay, maybe you’re starting to approach middle school orchestra levels of tolerable/worth listening to.

(Uh, asterisk: that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, for like joy and fun and fulfillment and because you’re allowed to do whatever you want! You’re not supposed to be good at the violin—or at least, I am not supposing it. Part of what I’m pointing at here is we’re almost all terrible; stop worrying about being terrible.)

Skill in the violin is clustered on the right side of the graph, such that you have to already be extremely unusual in order for your violin playing to be pleasant at all, and you have to be extremely extremely unusual in order for it to be notably good.

Here’s the unfortunate kicker: this is true of, like … a lot of things.

The things that brought it to mind and caused me to write this essay were the skills of:

• Explaining things

• Securing cheerful cooperation from children

(i.e. “teaching” and “parenting”)

But it’s true for a lot more than teaching and parenting. It’s true for writing. It’s true for reading. It’s true for nunchakus, and parkour, and driving, and cooking, and chess, and theoretical physics, and introspection, and graphic design.

Given skill X, the overwhelming majority of people are overwhelmingly bad at it. This is true even if you limit yourself only to people who’ve actually put time into the pursuit; among veteran teachers most teachers are awful, and among veteran parents most parents are deeply incompetent.

(Most parents and teachers, in my experience, are actively counterproductive in a literal majority of the actions they take; things would be better most of the time if instead of doing what they were doing, they did nothing at all.)

We muddle through anyway, but it’s important (according to me) to keep a few relevant implications in mind, as you move through the world:

• Experience doesn’t imply skill

• Common levels of skill are not necessarily good in any absolute sense

• The ceiling of competence on most skills is as-far-away-from-average as the ceiling of violin playing is from the average violin player.

It’s sort of uncomfortable to think about it and even more awkward to talk about it, but in fact the best teachers and parents and artists and conversationalists and middle managers and therapists and editors and Magic: the Gathering players are hundreds or sometimes even thousands of times better than the central member of their class.

(“What do you even mean by ‘hundreds or thousands of times better’ in a domain like teaching or parenting or therapy?” Well, these are sort of crude ways to think about it, but: could solve a problem within the domain in a hundredth or a thousandth of the time it would take a novice to solve the same problem equally well; or, if given a list of all possible problems within the domain, could successfully solve a hundred or a thousand times as many of them, to a given standard of competence; or, if put side by side with the novice in a hundred or a thousand situations, would do unambiguously better than the novice on literally all of them.)

For whatever reason, people get real tangled up about stuff like creativity or skill at lovemaking or whatever, and don’t like acknowledging that this extreme right-tail effect exists. People don’t (usually) feel threatened by “so-and-so is a thousand times better than me at the violin” the way they seem to feel threatened by “so-and-so is a thousand times better than me at being a good spouse.”

But unfortunately, the flinching-away doesn’t make it not true. It just makes it harder to think about, and talk about, and look at with curiosity, and improve. The anxiety and self-consciousness reinforce the status quo; insisting that you’re amazing at the violin, actually, and in fact it’s not even possible for someone to be that much better at the violin, how arrogant, how presumptuous, fuck them for even implying that your violin playing is kind of like listening to cats having sex in an alley—

(I mean, you shouldn’t actually tell someone their violin playing is like listening to cats having sex in an alley, most of the time. Most of the time, there are nicer and more constructive ways to offer the critical feedback, assuming that it’s appropriate to be giving critical feedback at all, cf. the part where the vast majority of people are fucking awful at providing feedback, which is a skill that includes knowing when to not do it.)

You’re probably not good at playing the violin, and neither is the next guy.

This is fine—

(It’s not a reason to not do it anyway! Find joy!)

—and it’s better to be able to take a deep breath and let that truth in than to wander the world wrongly believing that you’re surrounded by (and exuding) competence in all sorts of domains.

You’re probably not.

But the world keeps turning anyway, so maybe we don’t have to pretend quite so hard. Maybe we can accept the reality we’re already living.

Another version of this shows up when people with a mildly taboo orientation or fetish or hobby or personal trait hasten to differentiate themselves from those much worse people with their much more taboo orientations or fetishes or hobbies or personal traits.

(“I mean, haha, just kidding, it’s not like I’m a furry or anything. 😅😅😅”)

Instead of dismantling the machine that is victimizing both them and the other guy, they shove the other guy forward in order to put themselves further back in the line that leads to the gallows.

Another version: saying that they burned witches at Salem. There almost certainly were some people, among those murdered by the church, who were practitioners of what we would now call wicca or similar; people who “really” were “witches.”

But they weren’t witches in the way their murderers claimed. They weren’t the thing the bad guys wanted you to think, and when you refer to them as if they were, you’re letting the bad guys win.

Another place where this shows up: talking about whether certain groups are inferior, when it comes to their fundamental dignity and the rights that a civilized society should grant them.

Like, often nazis or misogynists or whatever will try to start demonstrating that [some group] is objectively inferior on [some axis], and often the opposition will come right back with NUH-UH, [group] IS EVERY BIT AS CAPABLE—

I think there’s a mistake, there, and I think that mistake is acting like that would matter, even if true. Playing into the frame of the bigot, letting them set the terms of the debate, implicitly conceding that the question of two different groups’ equality or inequality is the crux of the issue.

It isn’t.

Don’t cede the ground.

I happen to think that the claims of the racists and the misogynists are false in many cases; my sense is that even if the bell curves for different groups peak in slightly different places and have their tails in slightly different places, they basically cover the same ground and overwhelmingly overlap anyway, so whatever.

But even if it were demonstrably true that [group] was 15 IQ points inferior (or whatever), that wouldn’t change my sense of moral obligation toward them in the slightest! It wouldn’t change my beliefs about what kinds of treatment are fair or unfair!

I know for a fact that I have more raw intelligence than most humans. It’s as inarguable as being four feet tall makes you shorter than most humans. Even in nerd circles, I’m more-than-half-the-time in the upper quartile of whatever room I’m in, and guess what! Doesn’t matter! Practically every human outstrips me in some domain or other anyway! I can’t step to someone’s unique expertise, nor can I compete with them along domains orthogonal to intelligence (e.g. physical prowess), and even if I were hypothetically superior to some particular person along 10 out of 10 of the most important axes...

...EVEN THEN, I do not think that gives me the right to dictate the terms of their existence, cut them off from opportunity, or take a larger share of the social pie!

The whole point of civilization is moving away from a state of base natural anarchy, where your value is inextricably tied to your capability. The whole point of building a safe, stable, cooperative society is making it so that you don’t have to pull your whole weight every second of every day or else be abandoned to the wolves or enslaved by strongmen.

(“Wages are for people who can demonstrate the value of their labor within a single hour,” says my colleague. “I can’t do that, which is why I have to be on a salary.”)

The thing we're trying to build here is a world where the absolutely inferior—

(To the extent that’s even a category that exists; a lot depends on your point of view and what axes you consider relevant.)

The thing we're trying to build here is a world where even the absolutely inferior get to have the maximum achievable amount of sovereignty, and agency, and happiness, and health, and get to participate in society to the greatest possible degree permitted by their personal limitations and the technology we have available.

(Both literal technology and social/metaphorical tech.)

And IDGAF if you can “prove” some group’s “inferiority.” It means nothing to me. It changes nothing. It was never the key hinge of the conversation. Superiority is not the foundation of my sense of my fellow humans’ dignity.

(Not to mention that there is a huge difference between demonstrating some difference between groups at the statistical level and saying anything at all about an individual.)

I think it’s good to push back on bigots when they are spreading straightforward falsehoods. I’m not saying “don’t fire back with facts” in these conversations. If someone is arguing that [group] is inferior on some axis and you know that they’re not, actually, please do speak up!

But the fire with which people fire back seems to me to be ceding the field. It seems to be an implicit validation of the bigoted frame. Acting outraged at the mere possibility that some group might be measurably inferior to another, as if that would be morally relevant in any way whatsoever—

I dunno. I kind of fear that those defenders are closer to the bigots than I might wish. That they respond with such fervor because they do believe, on some gut level, that if groups are different, then the moral standards must necessarily also be different. They don’t want to conclude that the moral standards should be different, and so they object with desperation to any evidence that threatens to show actual differences between groups.

Which is just … bad. Don’t do it. Don’t endorse the enemy’s frame.

Recently, someone posted a funny gif on my Discord server, of a cat making what looks to human sensibilities like bedroom eyes, while flapping its tongue in a way that looks to humans like it’s lascivious.

And one of my server friends was sort of halfhearted and apologetic and said “yes, I know, it’s actually totally wholesome but it’s funny to imagine otherwise.”

And my objection, in the moment, was to the claim that the sexual interpretation was unwholesome.

The cat was obviously not doing a sexual thing, but the joke is not corrupt or dark or evil or harmful. The joke is funny. Sex is funny. Hastening to reassure that we know it’s not actually base and corrupt just reinforces the (wrong) background cultural narrative that sex itself is fundamentally unwholesome.

It’s not. That’s a psy-op. As is calling the murdered women (and men, and children) at Salem “witches.” As is feeling the need to insist that nuh-uh, there’s no such thing as a competence difference between races or sexes, because otherwise that would be bad.

Potential competence differences between groups don’t matter on a moral level. Or at least, let me-and-my-philosophy be an existence proof to you: they don’t HAVE to matter. You can build a society that doesn’t give a fuck if people are fundamentally inferior, and that does its best to be fair and moral toward them anyway.

That's the society you should be trying to build—if for no other reason than the fact that that’s going to be YOU one day, when you break a leg or have a stroke or just succumb to the vicissitudes of time. If for no other reason than the fact that that could be your kid, or the kid of someone you care about.

(There are other reasons, too, but that’s one that’s hopefully at least a little bit persuasive even to selfish egotists.)

Competence is not the measure of worth. Fundamental equality is not the justification for fair and moral treatment.

Build your ethics on firmer ground, please.

• You call someone out for a transgression that is, in fact, a transgression—something where they are in fact cringe, have in fact lost some points.

• You do so in a context and in a manner where it’s clear that this doesn’t matter, overall—that they are safe, and still “in.” That the loss is small and absorbable and forgettable.

That’s it.

If you (metaphorically or literally) fart while everyone is eating, and nobody mentions it, this can be a certain kind of anxiety-inducing. It’s not clear whether the faux pas was noticed, and by whom; it’s not clear whether it’s being left unmentioned because it’s a really big deal, actually; it’s not clear whether maybe people are going to talk about it later, behind your back, or whether the loss of status is so great that actually this is the last time you’ll be invited, or whether they think that you are so fragile and thin-skinned that they don’t dare to just … acknowledge plain reality.

But if you fart, and everybody groans and calls you the Field-Marshal of Flatulence, and there’s good-natured laughter, and then the conversation moves on to the next target…

What’s happened is that a cap has been put, on how bad it could possibly be. That the group feels safe acknowledging plain reality. They feel like it’s fine. They’re showing, viscerally, that it’s fine. They’re defusing the potential of social land mines by loudly stomping around, laughing and unafraid. They’re not so concerned over the loss of a few points that they’re making A Big Deal Out Of It.

This can go south, in a number of ways. It’s not always easy to distinguish loving banter from contempt; they sort of necessarily use the same words and the same channels.

And if you yourself are not secure in your position within the group—if you’re either genuinely afraid that you don’t have very many points, or if you just kind of happen to be eternally socially anxious, such that you feel threatened by the pointing-out—this can cause you to react loudly to the attempted gentle slug-on-the-shoulder, in a way that demonstrates back to the group that it’s not safe to josh you, actually, and that whole thing can start a spiral away from a starting point that was actually safe (if only you’d known).

But overall, friendships that have had a few fights and then recovered feel more secure than friendships that have only ever been Good Vibes Only. People who’ve made a couple of mistakes and come out of it fine are less terrified of misstepping than people who’ve never gotten anything wrong, in a given context, and don’t know what will happen if they do. One feels less scared of small downturns in the market if one has been investing for a while, and seen the squiggles go up and down, and trusts that they mostly go up in the end.

Banter is your friends’ expression of the sentiment “We see you. We actually see you. We see your flaws, your foibles. We accept you, warts and all. We’re not going to only conspicuously be accepting of your carefully curated best face.”

(I once felt an epsilon of sexual attraction to a car, which was deeply embarrassing, and it felt less embarrassing when they teased me about it than if they’d all started tiptoeing around it. Less fraught. Less of a big deal.)

Banter is your friends telling you “look, yeah, you lost some points, but whatever, you had 9567 and now you have 9548, big deal, nobody cares.”

And that’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than “Whoa, whoa, whoa—you just lost 19 points!? Jesus, you’d better get your shit together, you can’t afford to do that very many times.”

(Although I’ll note that that exact sentence could be great banter, in fact, if said in a way that clearly indicates that it’s tongue-in-cheek.)

And it’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than [embarrassing moment] → [radio silence]. Radio silence could mean anything.

Banter may not feel that way to you. And you may know people for whom banter doesn’t really work. (I know several, myself, including my spouse.)

But this is a big chunk of what it is, for a big chunk of the population. This is the core of it.

Now you know.

(Idiot. =P)

…and there’s a sort of analogous dynamic in making connections.

The fact that “barbie” in “throw another shrimp on the barbie” means “barbecue” is stunningly obvious in retrospect, such that it wouldn’t even require comment, except that it’s worth pointing out that, like, 0.217 seconds of actual attentive conscious mental processing was required for me to make the connection.

I could’ve made said connection at any time in my life, but I happen to have only made it on February 16th, 2025 (I know because I posted about it at the time).

Something like this happens roughly a couple of times a week. Some very very simple thing becomes clear, in microrevelation.

It’s important to consider how many such obviousnesses your brain has not connected the dots on (because there are simply billions of them, and you do not have all that many billions of seconds in your life; even if you spent every waking moment engaged in the act of revelation you wouldn’t catch ‘em all).

It’s also important to recognize that there are many such simple, single intuitive leaps that no one on Earth has found the time for.

It’s also important to note that there are simple, single intuitive leaps that are themselves downstream of other leaps, i.e. you get A+B=C and separately X+Y=Z and only once both of those have occurred do you even have the opportunity to connect C to Z and get ?

And somewhere way, way down the line, it’s as-obvious-as-barbie-meaning-barbecue that Ƃ+ƕ=Ƣ, but even someone in possession of Ƃ and ƕ

(as the result of making many, many mental connections)

might still just ... not ever happen to put those two thoughts together in the right way, out of all the other nigh-infinite puzzle pieces they’re holding onto.

• As part of my birthday celebrations, I’m giving a series of short talks on Defense Against the Dark Arts at Mox in San Francisco on Saturday, April 18th. There’ll also be dark chocolate. You should come if you can! Duncan-talks are always highly rated and are a rare treat these days.

• A few weeks ago, I finished the first draft of my novel, which I have been working on since 2008 (!). I’ve almost finished a second pass-through, and am looking for editors in hopes of eventually publishing. It’s upmarket/literary fiction, non-speculative, with a twelve-year-old protagonist (but it’s not YA); please ping me if you are a freelance editor who might be interested, or if you know one.

• Reminder that DunConII has been scheduled, for Halloween weekend, and that the first one was rad and the second one will be radder and you should consider whether you maybe want to set aside money for a trip to Berkeley in the fall.

Now, back to the show!

I.

Every now and then, I’ll see a screenshot of a tweet or a Facebook or Tumblr post where someone is saying, with great confidence, that no, they’re not gay/bi/whatever, they just struggle with impure thoughts about the “wrong” gender the same way that everyone does.

(I mean, if this wasn’t a nigh-universal experience, there wouldn’t be so much content about resisting the temptation, right? So many sermons warning of the dire consequences of indulgence?)

At its core, this is just the typical mind fallacy—the knee-jerk assumption that one’s own experience is normal, and common, and representative. But there are some interesting things that happen downstream of leaping to this particular sort of conclusion.

II.

Picture Anna, who struggles privately with violent thoughts and impulses, and who has never ever acted on them, but has had to put forth real effort over the years—especially in a couple of critical incidents where she almost lost control.

Anna looks at herself, from the outside, and correctly notes that her violent proclivities are invisible. She is hiding the struggle—as she is supposed to, as all good people do. Anna’s culture is full of messaging about this—that you should turn the other cheek, that you should be careful about drinking because it lowers your inhibitions (and your inhibitions are important), etc. etc.

It’s quite reasonable for Anna to assume that basically everybody deals with feelings similar to her own. After all, their observable behavior looks just like hers! The model is a good fit for reality—everybody has violent feelings, most people do a good job of containing and suppressing them, some small fraction of people have insufficient self-control and become criminals or domestic abusers or bullies or what-have-you.

Reasonable.

Now picture Bryce.

Bryce has zero such struggles, and zero such impulses. Bryce has approximately never been tempted to haul off and punch a coworker in the mouth. She has flares of temper, sure, but she’s never even considered being afraid of “but what if I lose control, though?” because it’s just never come even remotely close to happening.

It’s pretty reasonable for Bryce to assume that basically everybody has the same experience, too. Bryce—who doesn’t ever get into fights—looks out at the world, and sees most other people also never getting into fights, and naturally assumes that most people simply don’t feel like getting into fights. There’s some small percentage of the population—maybe like 5%?—that has the “violent tendencies” property, and those people become criminals or domestic abusers or whatever, but they’re rare and weird and most people are pleasant and normal.

Both Bryce and Anna have the same observation: a world in which most people are non-violent, most of the time.

But Anna (extrapolating from her own experience) concludes that this is the result of willpower or self-control, gating back some sea of negative impulses that are constantly threatening to burst forth.

And Bryce (extrapolating from her experience) thinks that willpower and self-control are approximately irrelevant for most people, and that the crux of the matter is whether you even have awful, horrible impulses that most people do not.

(And so self-control does matter, but only for that narrow subset of people who Have A Weird Problem, and not so much for the average Joe.)

Now imagine the following exchange:

Anna: [tells a story about getting dangerously angry with a coworker the day before, and how she had to leave the room to go recover her composure]

Bryce: [laughs sympathetically, chiming in with a sort of “oh, yeah, me, too” example from her own experience, not realizing that what Anna means by “dangerously angry” is something very very different and far outside of Bryce’s experience]

Anna: [is becoming sort of alarmed, because Bryce isn’t signaling the appropriate level of seriousness or wariness, and seems real casual and blasé about the whole thing in a way that feels like watching a toddler playing with razor blades]

Bryce: “What? Come on, relax—I’m just saying, look, it’s fine, we all get mad at work sometimes. It’s no big deal!”

Anna: [for whom it is a big deal, is not reassured, and begins to probe Bryce on her anger management strategies and other coping skills, hoping to find evidence that Bryce isn’t as careless and reckless as she sounds, because that would be bad]

Bryce: “What do you mean, ‘how do I cope’? I mostly…don’t? It’s not like I’m, you know, holding back murderous rage or whatever, any more than you are.”

(Because who does that? Not normal people like us.)

Anna: [who is, in fact, constantly holding back murderous rage, is now much more alarmed, because not only is Bryce being frighteningly nonchalant about all of this, now she’s lying, pretending to some monk-like inner peace that is, frankly, unbelievable.]

(Anna doesn’t usually talk about her inner struggles with anger, because she’s gotten the message that this isn’t polite conversation. But she wouldn’t pretend not to have them—that would be a transparent and obvious lie and she would not expect to be believed.)

Given Anna’s priors, the most charitable possible interpretation left to her is that Bryce is so blind to her own anger that she hasn’t even bothered to put in any checks or preventive systems, and is clearly at risk of just…blowing up, as soon as someone hits the right trigger.

Anna was looking for reassurance that Bryce was taking the situation seriously (as Anna is; as she assumes all reasonable people do).

Bryce was looking to communicate that she’s not one of those rare people who needs to take this seriously. She’s normal, just like Anna.

And since they’re talking past each other and don’t really know it, they’re likely to get increasingly confused and increasingly alarmed and the interaction is at high risk of going south in a hurry.

III.

Returning to the image at the top of the essay:

Getting boxed out is what happens when:

1. Your lived experience is such that the other party in the conversation does not even consider it, by default, and may have a hard time imagining or believing it even if prompted. (This can be because you are weird or because they are.)

2. You (unaware that you are incomprehensibly alien to them) attempt to make reference to your shared, mutual experience, and this very attempt makes things worse. You think that you’re inside the same box, but you are not, and so your signals of kinship and mutual understanding catastrophically backfire.

A few other examples, to help triangulate:

Eyewitness testimony.
I have unusually good memory—I don’t recall everything (not by a long shot) but when I am confident that I remember something, I have a very, very high hit rate. When I e.g. make strong claims about the exact wording of an email conversation from more than ten years ago, I am proven right way more than nine out of ten times, when we actually go check.

(My friend Nate once claimed that the incantation “Arresto Momentum!” was present in the original text of one of the seven Harry Potter books, and I instantly and confidently counterclaimed that nope, it definitely for sure is not, which indeed it is not (though I think it may appear in the movies).)

But! The “box” in this case is something like “eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.”

This is a fairly commonly known and cited fact—the middle of the bell curve of accurate recall is not great. People whose eyewitness testimony is reliable are weird. They’re outside the box.

But it took me a long time to realize that I was weird. When I was younger, I would often expect my memories to be trusted—

(Because I thought everybody had functional, reliable recall.)

—and when people would (bafflingly) not trust me, I would sometimes try to persuade them by reminding them that their memories were reliable, right? Why shouldn’t they trust my recall as much as they trusted their own?

(The irony was that they did trust my recall as much as they trusted their own, which was “not much.”)

“Everybody knows” that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. It’s such a pervasive factoid that if you claim that your eyewitness testimony should be trusted—

(Without first signaling your awareness of the factoid, and presenting up-front evidence of your own unusualness)

—people will take that very claim as evidence of your naïveté, and trust you less. “smdh, this guy doesn’t even know that he should be suspicious of his own recollections.”

You got boxed out.

Caring about X
I once had a rather frustrating interaction with a colleague, in which they theorized that I was doing Bad Thing X, and I replied that no, actually, I cared rather a lot about Bad Thing X, and put forth a great deal of attention and effort in the domain of X to make sure that I avoided doing the Bad Thing,

to which my colleague scoffed that yeah, okay, now I’m even more confident that you’re doing Bad Thing X, and are blind to it, because it’s like psychologically important to you to not-notice yourself failing on this axis.

The “box,” in this case, was something like “people’s minds generally find it easier to set up flinches and blindspots around things which threaten their identity or self-esteem, than to actually take in potentially devastating data. Someone claiming they really care about X is a red flag that their thinking around X is probably distorted.”

This is a pretty reasonable box, actually. I think that’s generally true of people—at least to the point that it’s a justifiable and non-offensive hypothesis to hold, just like “hey, maybe your recollection of events isn’t accurate” is a decent prior.

But some people are outside the box. Some people are actually weird. What made the interaction with my colleague frustrating was that they sort of stopped at “Duncan’s claim to care about this is evidence that he’s worse at it than average, because he’s not signaling awareness of this universal flaw that we definitely all have, where the things we care about sneak into our blindspots.”

They didn’t give me a chance to prove myself, and I wasn’t prepared to, with evidence.

I forgot that I was weird, for a second.

Inscrutable Souls
I was having a conversation with two of my romantic partners, both of whom regularly have difficulty pinning down what it is they’re feeling, or precisely what they want.

i wanna posit that knowing ones soul is super-duper-difficult, and a lot of times the things coming from it are blurry or vague or nebulous or only have an incomplete sensation of it,

said one of them.

This is a box! Many, many people are in the “my soul is somewhat opaque, even to me, and I have a hard time getting answers out of it” box.

It’s a good thing my partner said it out loud, because my own internal experience is very, very different. Absent their reminder about this box, I very easily might have ended up making several bold and specific claims about what my own soul is/wants, and maybe even being blasé à la Bryce—“You know, I just, like, checked. In the normal way. I asked my soul, and it answered, just like how you do.”

Which would’ve been me boxing myself out! They would’ve looked at me in confusion, suspicion, and bafflement, and been unsure why I was making up such ridiculous stuff, when everybody knows souls don’t work like that.

(Bonus: just as Anna and Bryce had very different explanations for their shared observations of nonviolence, I too often emit sounds that sound like my soul is opaque! My partners would’ve been pretty justified in thinking that I was like them, because I have other hesitations and hangups that sometimes make it hard for me to say, out loud, what my soul is telling me very clearly inside my own head. From the outside, I hem and haw just like people who actually don’t know, and so it’s entirely reasonable for people who don’t know to assume that I have an introspective struggle identical to their own.)

IV.

The thing that makes getting boxed out so insidious is that it’s self-sealing.

The weirder your experience is (or at least, the more different it is, from the experience of the person you’re talking to), the more your attempts to communicate it can come off as naïveté. If you (as I often instinctively do) try reaching for the common ground, that very reach can be read as confirmation that you’re blind, confused, don’t know what you’re talking about, etc.

(As opposed to being taken as evidence that oh, right, we might be different sorts of people.)

Unfortunately, the only exits I’ve found are pretty heavy/ungainly. I basically just have to front-load my awareness of the box—signaling, explicitly and early, that I understand what the overall reality looks like, and how I or the other person might be unusual…

…which is not a thing I can do when I don’t know about the box, in advance! I can understand the typical mind fallacy in a general sense, and know not to rely on my own experiences generalizing, but I don’t know which ones are weird until I find out.

Add to that the fact that sometimes I am the normal one, and it’s the other person who’s weird-and-doesn’t-know it, and … yeah. It’s a pickle.

Fortunately, just knowing about the overall pattern:

(Get misunderstood → reach for commonality → get misunderstood worse as a result)

…goes a long way, all by itself. It doesn’t stop me from getting boxed out, or accidentally boxing out somebody else, but at least it lets me recognize what happened, after the fact, which gives me a bit of a roadmap for recovery.

Hope it helps you, too!

We’re used to Econ 101 textbooks talking about supply and demand that show smooth increases in price leading to smooth increases in revenue, until the price gets too high and customers start dropping off. Curves that look like this:

…except (said my engineer friend, convincingly and with the weight of years of frustration audible in their voice) it doesn’t actually work like that at all, in practice.

In practice (they said), what you get looks more like this:

…and that’s if you have perfect information. There are just too many other forces at play, for any of the interesting and valuable questions; things never really vary on a single variable; it’s always a messy multidimensional space and when you collapse it down to two dimensions what you get is incomprehensible chaos.

(Indeed, even this curve is simpler than many real-life performance curves, which can e.g. have multiple real peaks where this one is basically normal.)

And we don’t usually have perfect information. We can’t usually sample all that many points. We skip around on the graph more-or-less at random, most of the time, which means that the above reality might look to us like this:

…which certainly does not encourage one to aim for the actual (unknown) sweet spot.

(To be clear, all of those blue dots do, in fact, lie on the messy curve above.)

Or maybe after trying a few things, the situation looks to us like this:

…which kinda does locate the sweet spot, but in a confusing and uncertain sort of way where if you try sliding just a little bit away from the highest blue dot you might end up at this orange dot:

“Okay, well, that’s fine, just … don’t quit experimenting, at that point” is easy advice, but when what you’re struggling with is something like persistent health or energy problems, or the quality of your relationship with your significant other, or some other fraught, expensive, high-stakes endeavor, it’s not always easy to “just keep going,” and that’s before you factor in the possibility that the curve itself is changing—

(e.g. as you age, or as your relationship matures and shifts)

—and you can’t necessarily even go back.

The tyranny of Ravenclaw/Magic: the Gathering blue is something like the obligation to just keep looking, just keep investigating, the true best answer is out there, actually, you really can find it, if you give up before you find it you’re some kind of lazy or dumb or not really trying.

But the reality of the situation is (as Hufflepuff/Magic: the Gathering green would have it) often actually “this search is exhausting and you would have to go far, far beyond the limits of your endurance to find the one true best answer to even just one question, and that best answer may not even be all that much better than the answers you’ve already found.”

I sort of already knew green-ish exhortations like “be gentle with yourself,” and had heard sazen like “reality is messy” and “there’s always more to the story” and “life isn’t simple” and so on and so forth.

But (for me, at least) none of it made it sink in as well as my engineer friend’s hard-earned scoff, at the idea that we could just try adding a little more and see what happens. A weight of responsibility lifted off of my shoulders, that day—a weight that my entire education had intentionally placed there. I’d spent my life being told, not just that I could figure it out (if I tried hard enough), but furthermore that I had to, and that throwing up my hands in confusion and defeat was a sign of weakness and inadequacy.

It can be.

But god damn, sometimes shit is just really really complicated.

Knowing that made it a whole lot easier, emotionally, to settle for being pretty high up atop a pretty high hill, even if in principle there might be much much higher hills out there.

There are worse places to end up, too.

In Japanese, there’s a word:

がんばって

…usually transliterated as “ganbatte,” which means something like “do your best,” “hang in there,” “have courage,” “keep going.” It doesn’t just mean try hard—it’s an exhortation that carries a tone closer to I know this is tough, but I believe in you. Don’t give up—what you’re doing matters. It implies perseverance despite difficulty, emotional support, a shared recognition that something is hard.

(It’s the sort of thing one wouldn’t say if someone is already clearly doing their best, or if the listener is overwhelmed or grieving—people generally don’t use it when it might leave an impression like you ought to be stronger than you are, right now. It’s meant to encourage people up to the limits of their endurance, not shame them for those limits.)

In Agori, there is a word:

…pronounced something like “en-dawn-you,” which you don’t actually have to remember because what matters is the mindset, not the word attached to it.

Endonyu means something like “choose to be okay.” Except—like ganbatte—there’s nuance to it.

It doesn’t mean “pretend you’re okay, when you’re not.”

It doesn’t mean “if you’re not okay, you must not have been trying.”

Rather, it means something like…

“Look, if you’re genuinely not sure whether you’re okay or not, and (as you look at what’s happening to you and introspect on your internal state) there seem to be multiple viable ways that you could crystallize and categorize your experience, you should in fact choose from among all of those possible ways-to-be the one that is the best, the happiest, the most-okay.”

Not “lie to yourself.” Not “force it.” But “it actually matters, if choosing among competing, roughly-equally-valid frames, which of those frames are good for you.” Which of them will have positive downstream effects, and nudge you in a healthy direction, versus which of them will push you toward neurosis, trauma, and the accumulation of stress.

II.

“Dr. Pilkington made you keep a journal, right?”

“Gratitude journal, yeah. It’s not like anything changes based on whether I’m staring straight at the parts of my life that suck or the parts of my life that don’t suck. But like my experience changes. He was like, look, all things being equal, nothing you can do about it, would you rather be happy or sad, and I was like, sad, because I can’t have the thing and that’s real, and he was like, listen, motherfucker, does being sad help anything—”

“He called you motherfucker?”

“I’m summarizing. But he just kept pointing out, over and over again, like, ah, so, you made yourself sad just then, did it help, and spoiler alert—”

“It didn’t.”

“Nope.”

I feel very silly, writing this post, because it feels a little bit like saying “the sky is often blue” or “perhaps you should prefer good things to bad things?”

But at the same time, I encounter so many people who seem to have gone their entire lives without ever hearing “endonyu.” People for whom the idea that “oh, right, I have some limited capacity for choice, here, and also the choices I make matter” has never occurred to them.

I see people make what-looks-to-me-like-a-mistake-here most particularly when they’re in the process of reassessing or recategorizing things. Either:

• Looking at past experiences, and recognizing (for example) that they were abused or manipulated or cheated or groomed

• Looking at their present circumstances, and swapping out one narrative for another (e.g. going from “this is a high-demand but overall healthy workplace” to “oh, wow, I think I’m being taken advantage of, actually.”)

A major part of people’s response to this sort of recategorization seems to be deciding whether or not to identify as a victim. Whether to “put their trauma in their bio,” so to speak, and make the-awful-thing-that-happened-to-them a crucial part of how they think of themselves. It’s the difference between “I was bullied, in middle school,” and “I am a survivor of bullying,” present-tense.

This difference is actually pretty darn important, in my experience.

To be clear: sometimes people are wounded, or are suffering, in ways that they are unable to fully see, and it takes them a while to notice and acknowledge and come to grips with a bunch of stuff they were suppressing or denying. Sometimes, people start unpacking things, and what they find is pain, and the pain was already there, all along, and it was already influencing them and coloring their decisions and experiences.

Recognizing that (when it’s true) seems straightforwardly good, even if the recognition comes with a local downturn in quality of life as you abandon your preexisting methods and coping strategies and have to build new ones. Resetting a bone (metaphorically speaking) can hurt, but it puts you on the path to long-term healing.

Other times, though, people are completely fine, actually, and then they find out that something bad happened to them in the past, or they find out that their present circumstances are objectionable, and their response is to become injured.

This seems bad, to me.

It seems to me that if I were to wake up tomorrow and suddenly recover suppressed memories of a childhood sexual assault, it would be better if my reaction were:

“Huh! Wild. I was assaulted and yet everything pretty much turned out okay. Lucky me, I guess.”

…than if I were instead to go oh no, I wonder what this means, I wonder what this explains about me, I wonder what’s wrong with me downstream of the horrible thing that happened, and then go looking for evidence of bruising and scarring.

(Similarly, it seems bad to me to go “ohhhhhhhh, I get it, what’s wrong with me is that I have rejection-sensitive dysphoria; I am an RSD-type Pokémon,” as opposed to “oh neat there’s a word for a cluster of experiences and I have a lot of experiences in that cluster; things that helped other people in the cluster will likely help me, too.”)

The human capacity for self-injury is quite real, in my experience. If you go looking for evidence that you are messed up, fully expecting to find it, fully expecting it to turn out to be serious, you will almost certainly find something that you can conceptualize as damage, and you can subsequently actually hurt yourself with your thoughts. People can think their way into depression, anxiety, paranoia, alienation, all sorts of neuroses and phobias…

…and then those twisted beliefs can have substantial negative impacts on their relationships and their outlook and their productivity and their mood, not to mention their actual physiology—

(textbook here)

—and then lo and behold, they’ve set up a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which they expect to have problems (because look, they do have problems!) and so they keep having problems, and the whole thing just keeps on getting worse.

(This is one reason why some people are resistant to diagnosis, digging in their heels about it even when they “clearly” “have” RSD or OCD or autism or bipolar or whatever. Reifying “you simply are shaped in the bad way, actually,” can itself be harmful—sometimes more harmful than the gains from increased clarity and new tools.)

III.

At this point, there’s a chorus of voices in my head saying things like

“Sounds like you’re encouraging people to repress stuff”

and

“Seems like this sort of thing inevitably results in delegitimization and victim blaming”

and similar, and this is where I sort of throw up my hands and go “look, most of the time when people say ganbatte they aren’t saying a stupid thing, actually.”

I think there is a valid complaint along the lines of “it’s already pretty hard to get people to notice when they’re messed up internally, especially in ways that are embarrassing or vulnerable or for which they might receive some kind of status debuff, so don’t add the additional complication of saying ‘but also some cool people aren’t fucked up, are you cool or are you not?’”

But also, like.

Just don’t do that?

Just don’t make it a “cool vs. uncool?” thing. You can in fact have a culture that doesn’t do that; the shitty thing is not inevitable. In Agor, we’re aware that some people have peanut allergies and some people do not, and this is not anyone’s fault and it’s largely orthogonal to your overall coolness as a person.

(Like, it is a cost/a point off your total, but it’s usually actually just a point and people’s totals are often in the thousands; it would be much worse to be the sort of person who looks down on people for their peanut allergies.)

The solution to “some people might get twisted up if they realize they were hurt worse than others who experienced the same harm” isn’t “force everyone to pretend to be damaged.” It’s “decouple the outcome of traumatic experience from people’s overall sense of self-worth.”

If you happen to have been derailed or destabilized by something derailing or destabilizing, this … isn’t to your detriment?

In Agor, we want people to be able to be unusually okay, and this doesn’t threaten the people who are understandably not okay. A doctor in the trenches isn’t mad at people who are shot and bleeding, but is relieved if a couple of them are like “hey, I’m just going to patch up my own arm while you deal with the more seriously injured, okay?”

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, in other words, and when it comes to “well, but what about people who are just faking it for attention and care, huh??” our response is:

“Uh. It, um. Seems valid to need more attention and care?? Like, maybe they’re lying about what specifically is wrong with them but it’s not like nothing’s wrong with them, geez, they’re still expressing a desperate need. We’re gonna try to help them, as best we can. If we find out they’re lying in a way that bumps them down the priority list, we’ll just bump them down the priority list, and if they’re too costly to help, we maybe can’t help them, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t deserve help in a fundamental sense.”

Sort of analogously: over here in this culture, people tend to have a very hard time legitimizing and validating anything that doesn’t already come with broad social consensus and a word attached. Both [genocide] and [sexual harassment] went unrecognized and unsympathized-with until people undertook deliberate and strategic campaigns to create and popularize the terminology.

So sure—in this culture, if there’s already only partial/precarious legitimization of the idea that (say) having been raped as a child might actually fuck you up really badly, actually,

then yes, pointing out that it’s also possible to have not been harmed by it, or to have completely recovered and now be completely okay, could be seen as an attack. This society seems curiously incapable of comprehending stuff like “I dunno, man, people are different and different things hit people in different ways.”

But in my culture, we, uh. Don’t get that one wrong?

We don’t get that one wrong. In my culture, we don’t have bosses who say “if you call in sick on Monday then you’d damn well better call in sick on Tuesday, too,” because we just actually understand that it’s possible to be too sick for work on one day and recovered the next. We teach people not to make that mistake in elementary school, and we laugh at them if they make it in adulthood.

(Gently, and with compassion, because we all make sillybrain mistakes from time to time. But we don’t validate their confusion.)

IV.

Okay, okay, but what does it mean, to recommend endonyu to someone? What are you actually saying they should do, in their brains, when you say “Choose to be okay”?

One version of it is “choose the narrative that ennobles and empowers you the most.” Identify which aspects of the situation are under your control, and take control of them; chalk up the ones that are not under your control, and release any lingering guilt or shame or obligation around them.

(And notice that I genuinely can’t actually tell whether this is under my control or not! is itself something that is at least partially under your control—you can e.g. try letting it go, or try controlling it, and find out what happens.)

If you’re finding that a lot of your problems come from having your expectations repeatedly violated, form different expectations, or build up your capacity to notice expectation-formation in the moment, and start doing less of it.

(These things are not always easy in practice but the targets, at least, are often pretty clear.)

Another version of endonyu is something like:

Imagine that you were to “wake up” into your present experience, minus all memories of The Thing That Happened To You. If you were just here, now, today—are you suffering? Is anything wrong outside of the stories that your brain is telling itself?

Sometimes the answer is yes! Sometimes there are things that are wrong. If you’re in chronic pain, getting briefly amnesia’d isn’t going to make the chronic pain suddenly disappear. If you’re the victim of systematic injustice, forgetting about its shape is just going to result in you bumping face-first into the next post.

But it pays to notice when the damage is coming from inside the house. Some of that damage is valid/correct to self-inflict, but some of it you can simply stop inflicting.

A third version is something like “what if instead of getting sad, I get mad?”

(Not necessarily sad → mad specifically, just any productive reframe that is better for you and is still compatible with the situation overall.)

What if, instead of focusing intently on the part of my life that sucks, I try to shift my attention to the other parts?

What if, instead of just staying in this context that is painful or unpleasant, I change contexts?

What if I use my experience as a foundation to enact positive change in the world, instead of lamenting how bad things used to be, or still are?

…etc. The idea being, step back and look at the story you are self-authoring, and ask yourself if there are any better stories that are available to you, from the starting point of “today.” If you find yourself confined to a wheelchair, you can remain oriented toward all of the things you can no longer do, or you can reorient, and either figure out how to do BMX jumps anyway, or you can switch to some other fulfilling pursuit that doesn’t involve legs.

“But I don’t want to flinch away from the fact that my legs don’t work anymore. That’s a real tragedy that actually befell me!”

“Not wrong. But is ruminating on it making anything better?”

“That’s not—I’m not ruminating, I’m just saying, I had an actual dream, here, and I can’t achieve that dream anymore, and my sadness is valid.”

“It is. One hundred percent. And it’s completely fine to live in that sadness for a while, and properly grieve and mourn. But it sounds like you’re starting to get tired of that sadness, and are ready to do something else? Like, you’re sounding to me as though you are sad about being sad, which seems important. Am I mishearing you?”

There are a lot of things that are attractive about the narrative “I’m a broken healthy person,” as opposed to “I’m maximizing my potential as a disabled person.” People give you sympathy. You have excuses for things, and don’t have to feel bad about passing up certain opportunities or obligations. You get to stay in touch with a world and a lifestyle that you were familiar with, and don’t want to abandon in favor of the unknown.

But also: sometimes you’re just not actually in that world anymore, and trying to stay there is doing nothing but hurting you, and you’d be better off redrawing the boundaries of your identity.

(I’ve drifted away from the “sometimes people are actually just fine” point, but endonyu is for both kinds of people. It’s about leaning away from versions of your story that hurt you worse than you need to be hurt, regardless of whether the magnitude of your actual hurt is zero or small or very, very large. It’s about choosing to be the most okay that you can be, under the circumstances.)

V. On trusting people, and not being a dick

Part of why ganbatte doesn’t go as-wrong, in practice, as Americans might think, is that there’s somewhat more of a culture of trust and collaboration and cooperation, in Japan. In at least some ways, the encouragement is more likely to land as actual encouragement, from an actual comrade, and less like someone with no skin in the game telling you to suck it up before abandoning you to deal with it all by yourself.

(Something something, universal healthcare.)

Similarly, Agor has more of a culture of trust, and mutual respect, and reluctance-to-theorize-about-the-internals-of-other-people’s-experiences-and-possible-inadequacies-of-their-character-thereof, and this means that endonyu is more likely to land as a gentle reminder to reconnect with one’s own values (and consider reassessing one’s knee-jerk responses to the situation) and less like a judgment or a criticism.

It’s easier to suggest to someone that they try making a shift that will leave them feeling more-okay, if the cultural background is such that it lands as an actual suggestion, and not as … I dunno, mansplaining?

Hence, in Agor, there’s another phrase that is a standard response to endonyu, and it translates to (basically) “I’ve tried five times.”

Cameron: [lament]

Dallas: “…endonyu, maybe?”

Cameron: “I’ve tried five times.”

Dallas: “Ah, dang, that sucks.”

End of interaction! Dallas saw a thing that looked like it might be Cameron foolishly choosing to be not-okay. But when Cameron explained that, nope, I’ve endonyu’d a bunch already, actually, and none of it solved the problem, Dallas accepted that, socially/conversationally.

This is an absolutely critical part of the handshake. Dallas can in fact continue to harbor doubts, but there’s a way in which the burden of proof—

(Both that Cameron is doing something wrong, period, and also that Cameron should grant Dallas more time/attention/energy in conversation about this topic.)

—has now fallen on Dallas. It could in fact be the case that Cameron is self-deceiving, or making some obvious mistake, but if Dallas wants to make that case, it’s up to them to find out more about the five things Cameron has already tried in a way that isn’t costly for Cameron, and to demonstrate up-front that they understand Cameron’s situation well enough to intelligently opine.

(As opposed to mansplaining from a position of ignorance.)

And all of this is taken for granted, in the land of Agor. It’s part of what makes endonyu work, as a social move. When you actually just forgot, or haven’t bothered to check, it’s useful to be reminded! When you’ve checked a whole bunch, actually, it’s useful to have the reminder end quickly, and not turn into an interrogation in which you have to effortfully demonstrate the validity of your continued suffering.

VI.

I notice, on reread, that most of the above is geared toward something like “heading off possible objections at the pass.”

That’s because there seems to me to be multiple weird backpressures against “making decisions about how to orient toward things based upon which orientations are net helpful for you.”

I do think that some people have a tendency to prioritize what’s helpful for them over things they shouldn’t, such as [the truth] or [the wellbeing of others]. I don’t generally endorse lying to yourself, or shoving other people under to save yourself from drowning. I don’t think “think about this in the way that’s best for you” should be the absolute top priority.

But I do think that it’s worth pausing to ask something like:

“If I were giving advice to a poor struggling sixth grader who’s dealing with a situation a lot like mine, how would I want them to conceptualize the whole situation? Where would I want them to put things like blame and shame? Which parts would I want them to own, versus disown? How would I want them to think of themselves in relation to all of this, and why do I think that’s the right way to think about it?”

There’s a difference between having been victimized, and being a victim, in an ongoing sense. There are hurts we can lean into and make worse, and it’s almost always better to lean in the other direction instead.

(Better in the sense that it leaves you better off, and usually doesn’t actually make you any less effective at addressing the concrete, changeable aspects of the situation.)

When all else is equal—when there really are multiple equally valid ways that you could orient toward a situation—I think that it’s worth prioritizing the ones that leave you the best chance at feeling whole, and happy, and healthy.

And I’m surprised how rarely people seem to do that.

Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation—especially if things are heated or tense or confusing—they’ll pause, and they’ll say something like:

“I’m sorry, but—look. In my culture…”

…and then they’ll go on to explain something that one might easily mistake for a rule, or a request, or the enforcement of a social norm, but which is actually (as far as I can tell) just a statement about the version of the world they carry around inside their head.

Because none of us quite have the same culture, after all. We all differ in different ways from the Basic Package—even those of us who’ve lived in the same towns, gone to the same schools, worked in the same industries, played the same sports, read the same books, watched the same shows—we’ve all got our own unique little takes, built up out of the odd quirks of our parents, tiny traumas and formative experiences, countless accumulated musings about how Things Could Be So Much Better If Everyone Would Just _________!

And so Your Culture, though it might match mine at a thousand different points, will also be noticeably different at a thousand others. You and I would found different churches, write different constitutions, build different schools and startups—

—and we would recognize different things as trespasses or offenses, and react to those trespasses and offenses in different ways.

“They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also remember. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.”

“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”

“If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.”

There’s a particular school of therapy called Internal Family Systems, which was founded on the basic insight that a lot of the stuff we’d come up with for mediating conflicts between family members could also be used for handling disagreements within oneself. Identify conflicting impulses, goals, and restraints, loosely anthropomorphize them as child-figures or parent-figures or spouse-figures or sibling-figures, and treat them with the same sort of respect you’d offer real quarreling humans, and voilà—suddenly a bunch of interpersonal tools and skills can be used to make personal therapeutic progress.

In a similar fashion, my colleague has been doing something like adapting the tools of international diplomacy for use in difficult conversations between family and friends and coworkers. Not by demanding that everyone follow their rules, and not by asserting any one culture’s superiority over another, but simply by acknowledging the fact that their culture meaningfully differs from everyone else’s. By taking that fact seriously, the same way that diplomats do, and putting forth conscious effort to work sensibly around it.

I don’t claim to know what’s going on in my colleague’s head, but from the outside, the process I see looks something like this:

• Someone will make a move that’s generally known to be okay in the broader context culture, but which would be recognized as mildly offensive or blasphemous if everyone were on the exact same cultural page as my colleague (like offering a handshake to a business partner from Thailand).

• They’ll pause, and do their best to make that aspect of their culture transparent and accessible and comprehensible—“in my culture, if someone is in the middle of a thought the way I just was, and somebody else interrupts in the fashion that just happened, this is generally interpreted to mean X, Y, and Z about what was going on in both our heads and what our relative positions are and so forth, and it has such-and-such ripples through the social fabric of the conversation, and as a side note I get the sense that you expect me to be able to just pick back up in the middle of the sentence but actually this isn’t a reasonable expectation because in my culture thoughts don’t quite work like that.” The emphasis is always on clarifying the sort of Rube Goldberg causal structure of the culture—if you push button A, you’ll get effect B, and if you want effect C, you should push button D, and here’s why those specific if-then relationships make sense in context.

• If necessary, they’ll ask for clarification about the other person’s culture. If, say, it wasn’t entirely clear how the other person might have thought their actions were good and correct, or if there’s any lingering resentment about the trespass that might be cleared up by a richer understanding of where the other person was coming from.

• Occasionally, there’ll be a negotiation about which norms should be adopted in the larger context—whether side A’s norms, or side B’s norms, or a specific compromise between the two, or a set of triggers for distinguishing when to do A versus when to do B. More often, though, it’s simply left up to everyone to do what makes sense, given both the knowledge that things-will-sometimes-land-this-way and the knowledge that this doesn’t compel anyone to change their behavior in any particular way.

(It happens to be a part of this particular conversational culture that sharing something about yourself is distinct from making a request of others; i.e. you can say “X results in me being sad” without implying “if you continue to do X, you’re bad/will be interpreted as intentionally trying to harm me.”)

I find this beautiful. Beautiful enough that it is now one of the foremost elements of my culture—that in my culture, this is a move people can make, and which I myself will make unilaterally. Not only does it allow me to reduce the number of unnecessary spats and misunderstandings to the theoretical minimum—

(i.e. fewer and fewer trespasses happen “for no reason”; I and my conversational partners asymptotically approach a state in which all the disagreements are real disagreements, and not just translation confusions over what was intended by a given hand gesture or conversational move)

—but it also gives me a glimpse into each person’s vision of utopia. The tiny flaws that each person sees in the larger culture around them, the tiny little fixes and wishes that they’ve built up in themselves over the years—when I’m embedded within a subculture that does this kind of cooperative conversational anthropology on the regular, it feels like I’m constantly expanding my sense of what-better-worlds-are-possible.

And there’s something particularly attractive (to me) about the frame of “this is already true in my culture.” It’s sort of like the NVC shift of expressing emotions and impacts rather than claims about other people’s intentions—even if you’re the only person with your particular culture, you are an example of it working, and so it’s less about arguing over the shared normspace and more about just laying out options and alternatives. “This is how it works for the people of Duncanland” is simultaneously more true and less confrontational than “but we all know we should X” or “obviously things would be better if Y” or “I can’t believe you would Z!”

(I think this applies all over the place. It’s often easy for requests of a cultural nature to either slide toward, or be interpreted as, something like “change your behavior to match my cultural expectations, or be seen as a bad person.” And naturally, even the perception that that’s what’s happening is enough to make some people dig in their heels—from that perspective, someone’s trying to move the overall culture to a new setpoint, and also preemptively allocating the costs of that shift. That’s the sort of thing that will reliably produce resistance in some fraction of humans, no matter the nature or magnitude of the request.

Whereas a statement like, “Oh, in my culture we do X, and we find this low-cost and mundane” highlights an opportunity for greater cooperativeness, but falls short of being a demand. The frame creates a boundary right from the start—this is my culture, not everyone’s culture, and therefore conformity is … contingent on relationship, or something? Like, you’ll certainly need to up your game in this area if you want to do a lot of business with me, but to the extent that our interactions are confined to the broader context culture, and to the extent that the norms I’m personally comfortable with are not actually universal in that culture, it’s more a matter of politeness/friendliness/extra credit. There’s a strong implication that your nonconformity, as long as it’s not clearly antagonistic, will be taken in good faith, just as someone from Greece will likely forgive you if you happen to forget that a thumbs-up is a rude gesture in their home culture. And surprise surprise, that gentler version is often more successful at getting people to willingly and cheerfully put forth effort than a version that is perceived as being tinged with demand or threat or judgment.)

And sure, it’s true that none of us actually have perfect introspection, and that maybe we think of things as being part of our personal culture that aren’t in practice, or we mislabel and misdescribe them, and maybe there are things that kind-of-work for us as individuals that would actually be disastrous if they were installed for everyone, and so on and so on. Perhaps simply declaring “in my culture, X is true” is overconfident or misleading.

But it seems much less overconfident than declaring “X is true for everyone,” or “X should be true for everyone,” and so it feels to me like a step in the right direction, even if it glosses over some important uncertainty/humility.

I want to zoom in for a moment and give some examples of the sorts of things that might fill in the blank after the words “in my culture.”

• What interactions between different classes of people are or are not okay (e.g. whether a high-school teacher can or can’t give their students permission to refer to them by their first name).

• What certain actions are widely interpreted to mean (e.g. “everybody knows” that if you plead the fifth, it’s because you’re guilty).

• What obligations you have when discussing controversial topics (e.g. whether you have a responsibility to include historical context, or a responsibility to remain dispassionate and logical).

• What sorts of idiosyncrasies are defections (e.g. whether it’s okay to go to a party and be the only one who remains sober).

• The “rules of engagement” for various levels of disagreement or antagonism (e.g. whether it’s justified to engage in otherwise-disallowed behavior if it’s in response to someone else doing it first).

• The order and ranking of swear words and epithets; which curses are mild and which are unspeakable and unforgivable.

• What things are sacred and what things may be mocked.

• Whether or not birthdays and anniversaries are special.

• When and how to decide between focusing on people’s feelings and interpretations in a way that doesn’t particularly care about the truth of the matter (which is often useful for healing and processing) versus focusing on cause and effect and objectively verifiable truth (which is often useful for a lot of other things).

• What it’s okay for an employer to ask of its employees, and whether or not society should put limits on what adults can freely agree to (e.g. questions about mandated minimum wage).

• Which side of an argument or disagreement is the default, and which bears the burden of proof, and how that decision is made, and whether it’s made implicitly or explicitly.

• Whether or not cargo shorts are a valid thing to wear, and whether or not the question “are cargo shorts a valid thing to wear?” is a valid one to pose.

The above list was generated mostly by me trying to recall examples of times I’ve found myself in disagreement with other white, college-educated, non-religious, American-raised, upper-middle-class males, to show that even people who look extremely similar to me on paper can still have meaningfully different cultures. And of course, that list could easily have been hundreds or thousands of entries long.

One important thing to note is that even the smallest and most trivial entries (like the cargo shorts thing) are more than enough to send destabilizing waves rippling through the social fabric—to turn a good evening into a bad one, for instance, or to spark long-lasting antipathy between people who were otherwise getting along just fine. The TV show Seinfeld got endless mileage out of just this sort of cultural mismatch, and it was resonant and successful in part because that sort of thing happens all the time. It’s sort of tragic, and it would be nice if we could do better, but as things currently stand it’s a part of our social reality.

This is part of why the diplomatic approach gives me cautious hope. It seems like a hammer in a world full of nails—the sort of thing that might actually make a difference, both in the moment and in the aggregate.

In that spirit, I’d like to take the remainder of this essay to outline a dozen or so of the more important and idiosyncratic customs that are native to my culture. It may be that none of them seem interesting to you, or worth the effort, but it may be that some of them are small gifts you’ll feel like giving me, on the level of learning to say “thank you” in someone’s native tongue, and it may be that some of them are worth taking home and tossing into your own cultural stew.

One last thought, though, before diving in to my own norms and traditions: there’s a difference between

Noticing that there are many different cultures, and wanting to find or build a context culture that allows them to communicate and cooperate to the extent that there is mutual desire to do so

and

Treating all cultures as fundamentally equally good or valid.

I don’t want to take a firm stance on the latter question in this particular essay. I certainly have opinions, but those opinions have enough doubt and fog and uncertainty that they’re not worth promoting. I simply want it noticed that you can advocate for the former (for practical reasons) without advocating for the latter (which seems like more of a moral or ethical question). Even when the US and the USSR were at each other’s throats over a conflict of cultures, they still were able to recognize the instrumental value of having a red phone, and that seems to me like it was the right move.

In my culture, everybody simply takes for granted the existence of a larger context culture that exists to foster communication, cooperation, conversation, compromise, and so on and so forth. It’s understood that this context culture emerged over the course of long, hard millennia of trial and error, with lots of death and suffering and war and outrage along the way, and that, while it’s far from perfect, it’s absolutely critical to the safety and success that those of us currently living in the developed, modern world rely upon and enjoy.

(For instance, the founding fathers of America were certainly aware of the flaws in the concept of religious freedom, but they rightly recognized that those flaws were vastly less terrible than the history of war and persecution and oppression that came from attempts to constrain how people worship.)

It’s understood that attempts to change this context culture are fraught with risk, and that sometimes even shining too bright of a light on its faults and failings can be a mistake. This is because, in any given room of 100 people, at least some will misunderstand a claim of “some part of this is bad” to mean “this whole thing is bad.” And of those, some will go on to virtuously attempt to tear down the whole thing, not realizing that they’re digging away at the foundation that lets us have any sort of civilization at all.

(To continue the religious freedom example, it’s often not clear to a young idealist why even saying the sentence “hey, is religious freedom actually the right way to go?” out loud in a public forum might be treated as a risky or dangerous act, especially given other cornerstones of our context culture like the enshrined freedom of personal expression. But in fact the sort of unofficial social pressure that is often brought to bear to discourage such expressions is an important part of the context culture’s immune system. Turns out that such sentences are often a prelude to atrocity, and even when they aren’t, it turns out that it’s reasonable for people to experience a kind of background elevated stress in response to hearing them, and even when it’s not reasonable, turns out some people will anyway, with corresponding downstream effects, and that wishing this weren’t the case or talking about how it shouldn’t be the case doesn’t actually fix it, and that much of the time we’d rather keep on quietly and imperfectly cooperating than engage with or tolerate a literally endless series of erosive complaints and suggestions.)

Thus, it’s known and acknowledged (in my culture) that all of the expressions below are things which may not be possible in the broader context culture. They are things which may be negotiated away in the service of building a world that accommodates more people. They are things which may occasionally be sacrificed, for the sake of collaboration across cultural lines. They are things which it is easy to find oneself arguing for with language that implies that disagreement is tantamount to defection—that one is either with you, and on the side of goodness and rightness, or on the other side—and in my culture we take the stance that letting oneself get away with that kind of slippery narrativemancy is a meaningful transgression against the larger context culture that lets us all live side by side in relative peace.

And so, to the extent that we want to continue cooperating with people of other cultures (i.e. to the extent that there is a diplomatic summit going on that you want to be a part of and are willing to make tradeoffs to stay a part of), people in my culture acknowledge that it is important to be careful, and to be charitable, and to prepare for one’s care and charity to be insufficient, and to be wary of poking holes in the social fabric, and to be ready to repair those holes that will inevitably accidentally be poked, and to—when writing an essay such as this one—take pains to draw a bright and solid line between “this is how it is in my home culture” and “this is a bid that the overall context culture shift in my direction,” and to not immediately dismiss a claim that we did not draw that line brightly and solidly enough.

Another way to put this is that, in my culture, if you want to engage in an act of civil disobedience in order to change the culture around you, it’s important that you at least stick around and let them arrest you and put you in jail. Otherwise (so say my cultural norms) you won’t be interpreted as trying to cooperatively influence that context culture, but rather as trying to outright undermine it and replace it with your own.

(Which is sometimes justified, to be clear. Sometimes you are trying to break the context culture, because the context culture is rounding up and murdering Jews and you symbolically going to jail won’t actually accomplish anything. The point is not that you should always cooperate with the context culture, but that you can’t have your cake and eat it too—you can either cooperate with it or break from it, and you should pick.)

(It’s worth noting that these points are so obvious in my culture that the first draft of this essay excluded them entirely, and my friends had to remind me to make them explicit. I just took it for granted that the rest of the post would be interpreted in that light, which is not at all obvious to people in cultures even only just a little bit different from mine.)

In my culture, with the exception of certain subsets of neuroatypicals or disabled persons, it is assumed that the vast majority of people over the age of (say) eight or nine are straightforwardly acting in accordance with their will.

This is not to say that people don’t make mistakes. It’s not ignoring the fact that people often have their options constrained by circumstance. It’s not meant to legitimize or trivialize things like oppression and coercion and abuse.

But in general, for most people, most of the time, the assumption is that you are doing things mostly on purpose, and that the sum of your inner values is revealed through your visible actions—that you are pretty much always choosing your most-preferred option from the options available. In my culture, there isn’t really any such thing as akrasia, or a persistent inability to act in line with your values. It’s understood that people often have aspirational values—things which they genuinely wish they could express in their actions even though they currently kind of don’t—but in general if you’re not acting in line with those, it’s assumed that it’s because you have some other (possibly hidden) wants that are getting in the way.

Thus, in my culture, it’s considered reasonable and standard for people to model you and react to you as if you generally want and endorse the things you generally do. Your revealed preferences are taken to be a reflection of your net values in all but a few special cases. Hence, apologies are treated as falling somewhere between predictions and promises—if you are genuinely sorry, then in my culture you will demonstrate it through future action that meaningfully differs from past action. And if your future actions continue to resemble the past, people in my culture will conclude both that you weren’t actually sorry and also perhaps that your word can’t really be trusted in general.

(Another way to say this is that, in my culture, you get to decide what’s true inside your head, but other people are justified and supported in making predictions and taking actions based on what you do in the world. If you have a mood disorder that makes you judgmental and suspicious and unpredictably mean twenty percent of the time, you’re welcome to say “that’s not really me,” but other people are not mistreating you or morally bankrupt if they decide not to take the risk and end up avoiding you altogether—if, in essence, they behave toward you as if that really is part of your character.)

In my culture, it’s understood that emotions can be right or wrong—or, to use less charged language, they can be appropriate responses to a situation, or they can be inappropriate responses. In the latter case, it is absolutely still a sacred right to have the emotion (no one in my culture can tell you that you should feel a different way than you feel), but what you do with that emotion is constrained by social norms.

This means that if Alex does something, and Bailey becomes angry, and furthermore if both Alex and Bailey want to avoid such situations in the future, the fix could be on either side. It’s neither obviously on Alex to stop doing the thing, nor obviously on Bailey to leash their anger. Instead, the question at hand becomes something like “what actually happened? What are the relevant contextual details? How reasonable is it for Bailey to feel a sense of trespass at Alex’s actions? Was a commonly-acknowledged boundary violated? What about a rarely-acknowledged-but-previously-communicated-and-agreed-upon one? Sometimes people jump to conclusions, or make wrong guesses at motives, or get angry at a made-up caricature of the other person—is that happening in this case, or is Bailey’s anger a straightforward response to Alex’s observable actions?”

This may sound trivial or obvious, but it’s important to note that what this means, in practice, is that sometimes I will feel wronged, and I will act in what feels like defense of myself or of important principles, and afterward I will have to apologize (and possibly accept punishment), because it will be deemed that my sense-of-being-wronged and my subsequent actions were not, in fact, an appropriate or justified reaction to the situation. In my culture, when we find ourselves on the wrong side of judgment in this way, we often suck it up and make public peace even if we still hold resentment or uncertainty on the inside. Because otherwise—if your peers can’t ask for surface-level amends unless and until you’ve made a deep, internal update—you could simply get away with anything by sort of … weaponizedly never-noticing-you-were-wrong?

To put it another way, in my culture, sometimes one’s personal satisfaction must come second to a sort of public dance which maintains the norms and standards of the group as a whole, and those norms and standards are seen as sensible and necessary and worthy of occasional personal sacrifice.

In my culture, there are limits to the judgments you can hold about a person, and the predictions you can make about them, and those limits are derived from the complete set of your previous experiences of that person, leaving out nothing.

Another way to say this is that, in my culture, vague suspicions and unfounded intuitions are allowed only insofar as they are openly flagged as such, and in general will not carry much weight when they’re in conflict with a consistent, coherent, observable record.

(Although if a vague suspicion or unfounded intuition is born out, then the person who registered it will have earned a solid point in favor of being good at making accurate predictions that run counter to existing data.)

This also means that updates about a person must be gradual and Bayesian, and that in general people are expected to seek the smallest possible update. If a seemingly loyal colleague has seemingly betrayed you, you are obligated in my culture to be confused and curious and look for alternate explanations, rather than leaping straight to a new story which contradicts all of your prior evidence. If you learn an unpleasant secret about someone (e.g. that they privately abuse heroin), your update is confined to the domain of that secret, and can’t be used to invalidate or dismiss their record of e.g. completing work projects on time or being kind to animals and the elderly.

(You might easily still be justified in firing them, if they are your employee, or ceasing to associate with them, if they are your friend. For instance, the new data might actually be relevant to your estimate of entangled qualities like their integrity or conscientiousness or decisionmaking or trustworthiness. But in general, even if the new data is damning, people in my culture make a conscious effort to compensate for the human impulse to round everything off to a single answer. Sometimes people aren’t simple or straightforward, and in my culture you can object to the costs associated with one trait without unjustly and inaccurately lowering your evaluation of the rest.)

Symmetrically, in my culture, there are limits to the kinds of claims you can make about yourself. If someone does not believe that you have Trait X, and you believe that you do, you’re not allowed to just declare that you do, and expect them to update. Instead, the most you can do is say something like “Look, of course you’re going to hold this with some skepticism, I endorse that—not that you needed me to endorse it, it’s not like you need my permission—but I claim I have Trait X, and I’d like you to accept that as a hypothesis, and give me a chance to prove it. Like, I’m requesting that you keep your radar open and be receptive to evidence on this question.”

In my culture, unless you’ve made a specific commitment to the contrary, you can end any conversation at any time.

There are ways to do this which might be blunt or rude or cruel, and people might dock you social points for your bluntness or rudeness or cruelty.

But they will not dock you points for the leaving itself. In my culture, you do not owe anyone your attention, your ear, or your thoughts. If you and I were romantically engaged, and we broke up, and I am desperate for closure, that is my problem, not yours. If you want to provide me the opportunity to talk further, that’s great, but I have no right to demand it, and if I’m being pushy, other people will step in to remind you that you’re morally justified in simply cutting me off.

In my culture, if I cover the check and you agree to PayPal me your share, it is not up to me to remind you.

In my culture, if I lend you a book, I should not have to ask for it back.

In my culture, if you break something that I own, it goes without saying that you will take the initiative to replace it, or reimburse me, or make it up to me in some other fashion.

In my culture, failing to fulfill an obligation until someone else reminds you to do so is itself viewed as a transgression. It’s seen as imposing an additional cost upon your creditor, and onlookers will tend to notice that, and remember. There’s an instrumental argument for people to remind you anyway (since otherwise they might never get what you owe them), but in that case, it’s understood that you’ve lost an additional point, and have to either accept that fact or make up for it with some kind of concrete action.

In my culture, if you’re going to a Cirque du Soleil show, and one of your friends is a gymnast, it is viewed as slightly rude to fail to think of inviting them. Ditto if you’re planning a night of Magic: the Gathering and one of your friends is always lamenting a lack of people to play with.

You don’t have to actually invite them, if there’s reason not to. For instance, if you simply wouldn’t enjoy their company, or if they’re incompatible with someone else who’s already going. But it’s expected that you will pause to ask yourself the question. That you will notice the opportunity to include them, especially if their interest is sufficiently well-known that they might reasonably expect their name to come to mind. To fail to do so twice in a row will undoubtedly be taken as a signal that you dislike them or don’t particularly care for them or are willing to prioritize other things above their preferences in this domain, and they will update their expectations with regards to you accordingly.

(There’s an interpretation of this which sounds vaguely threatening, à la “invite me or else.” But in my culture it’s actually much gentler and more stoic than that—it’s more like “invite me, or I’ll update toward believing that you’re not the kind of person who will remember to invite me.” That doesn’t have a strong moral shading of any kind, in my culture—it’s just using the past to make predictions about the future.)

In my culture, it is seen as trivially obvious that if a friend has to ask you whether or not you want a hug, the friendship is weak enough that the hug will probably not be particularly nourishing in the first place (since it comes with a reminder of distance and insecurity).

This is not to say that all hugs are always welcome—it’s a bad idea to simply hug people willy-nilly, or to offer hugs as a way to cargo-cult your way into a closer relationship. If you’re not sure, you ask anyway and pay the distance cost, or you just don’t hug at all.

Rather, the thing you aim for is to grow your friendship to the point where your friend knows you well enough, and feels secure enough in their relationship with you, that they can tell when you need a hug, and aren’t the slightest bit anxious that it’ll be taken badly if they happen to be wrong.

In my culture, birthdays matter, and celebrating birthdays matters, and remembering to celebrate birthdays matters, and actually knowing what kind of celebration will be warm and wanted is more important and more highly valued than the mere desire to do so.

(Another way to say this is that, in my culture, the thought does count, but other things count more.)

In my culture, we play punch bug.

In my culture, if I’m trying to help you, it’s important both that it’s not about me and that it doesn’t seem, on the surface, that it’s about me.

(Note the “if.” Sometimes, the situation can be more complex, and my primary goal is not simply to help you, but to investigate a situation, or to protect myself along with you, or to preserve community norms and standards, etc.)

But if I’m actually in it for your benefit, as opposed to because your feeling bad makes me feel bad and what I really want is to stop feeling bad myself—

If that is the case, then it’s important to avoid setting up a dynamic whereby you, who are already struggling and low on resources, feel pressure to reassure me. I don’t want to make it seem like my own failure to help will mean that I will not be okay, such that you have to put on a mask and pretend to have been helped, regardless of whether or not you really have. In my culture, we recognize that this is the opposite of helping—it’s adding yet another item onto the pile of stuff you have to deal with.

(Which is not to say that I’m not allowed to feel distress, and possibly take actions in accordance with that distress, when someone else is sending up distressing signals. If you express extreme depression and suicidal impulses to me, for instance, of course I’m going to have an emotional reaction.)

But absent any of those other considerations—if it’s just you and me in a room and my goal is to help—if I want to have any chance of actually helping you, it’s understood in my culture that it has to be clear that my own ego is not relevantly in the mix. It has to be clear that I’m okay with you being sad/mad/stressed. It has to be clear that I’m there to offer you tools and support to get at the root cause, not to punish you for your symptoms, and furthermore that if you don’t want my tools and support, or don’t find them helpful in the end, that’s okay too.

In my culture, we distinguish between what a situation looks like and what it actually is.

When we can’t tell the difference, we intentionally form two reactions—one appropriate for each possibility—and we take only provisional and reversible actions (or actions that are good in both branches of possibility) until we have some hint as to what’s actually true.

(To make this more concrete: in my culture, there simply isn’t anything like the Duke lacrosse scandal. That sort of unjustified public excoriation just doesn’t happen.)

In my culture, we believe that a peace treaty is not a suicide pact.

Civilization works (at least in part) by mutual agreement to set aside options. As the Freud quote goes, “the first person to hurl an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” We learn in kindergarten not to hit each other as a method of expressing disagreement—we mutually sacrifice that option, trading the ability to hit at will for the safety of not having to be constantly on alert against being hit.

But in my culture, there’s a distinction between “I agree to follow these rules with everyone I interact with” and “I agree to follow these rules with everyone who also agrees with them.”

This can be tricky when it comes to balancing my culture with the needs of the broader context culture that allows us all to coexist. If Lord Duellington comes from a culture where people get into duels over perceived insults, it needs to be really crystal clear to everyone else at the diplomatic summit that Lord Duellington really understands that this aspect of his culture is not shared, and that there is zero chance that Lord Duellington will propose a duel, regardless of how insulted he perceives himself to be.

Even the mere perception of Lord Duellington as a loose cannon who cannot distinguish between [his own local culture] and [what’s agreed-upon by everyone present] is costly, regardless of whether or not it’s true, because it results in a dynamic where other people at the summit feel like they have to spend lots of energy and attention tracking and maintaining their personal physical safety, rather than being able to rely on the social contract. Thus, it’s important that Lord Duellington not even mutter under his breath that back home, we have a way of dealing with people like you, and it’s entirely reasonable for people to disinvite Lord Duellington from future summits if he does.

(Although it’s also reasonable in my culture for Lord Duellington to object that his track record indicates that he would never actually do such a thing, and that it’s not fair for people to see him as a risk, as noted above. But it can both be true that he’s not actually a direct risk, and also be true that his presence nevertheless puts too much stress on the social fabric to be worth it, and even Lord Duellington will admit that this is possible.)

This is why, for instance, I no longer use my car’s horn as a tool for reacting to perceived defections in traffic. In my home culture, certain traffic violations effectively equate to opting out of the treaty whereby people don’t honk at each other.

In the Bay Area context culture, though, that’s a sort of violence that isn’t justified even by overt defection, as far as I can tell. People will socially punish it even if they agree that the honker was wronged, because use of the horn for that purpose is seen as corrosive in other ways.

(For instance, it hurts nearby people as well, and reduces the effectiveness of the horn as an exclusively emergency signal, and grabs people in a sort of deep, visceral, monkey-brain kind of way that is almost guaranteed to escalate the situation rather than resolving it.)

And it seems correct to conform to the context culture in this way, and for others to expect you to conform, regardless of your home culture. A clause that releases you from the social contract in your home culture does not have the power to release you from the social contract at a diplomatic summit. The whole point of a diplomatic summit is that people are setting aside their native standards for what constitutes transgression, and agreeing to a cooperative compromise culture. If a person isn’t willing to make that sacrifice, then the diplomatic summit can’t afford to have them around, no matter what value is lost in the process of excluding them.

But in my home culture, if Cameron is behaving toward Dallas in ways that are proscribed by social norms, and Dallas has tried a couple of times to get Cameron to stop, and has actually made efforts to bridge the gap, and has taken actions which reasonably rule out the possibility that Cameron was just making a one-time mistake out of frustration or misunderstanding or whatever—

In my home culture, if Dallas retaliates in kind, no one will assign Dallas the sort of blame they would otherwise receive for taking a forbidden action.

And if Elliott steps in to protect Dallas from Cameron, and uses Cameron’s tactics against them, no one will look sideways at Elliott, either.

In my culture, there’s a fundamental difference between people who are trying to play by the rules, and people who are unmistakably willing to violate them. The former category gets a lot of protection, and the latter gets meaningfully less, especially when it comes to open antagonism. In my culture, we try to be really damn sure that it’s actually fire, and not just smoke, but we are indeed willing to fight fire with fire, and we don’t dock one another points for doing so.

I sometimes wish that other specific subcultures had more in common with my home culture in this way, but I think that it’s correct that the broader context culture does not, because the whole thing rests on the idea that there can be clear common knowledge about what constitutes a transgression and what doesn’t, and that everyone can see what’s justified and what isn’t, and that seems to me to be an impossibly naive expectation when we’re talking about a diplomatic summit with representatives from thousands of individual cultures.

This is not at all a complete list. On reflection, it’s probably not even the most important differences between my culture and the general culture—just some of the more important ones, the ones which floated to the top over the two weeks I spent tinkering with this essay. No doubt I’ll discover more after hitting ‘publish.’

But it’s okay that this is incomplete, because me sharing my culture is only half of the process. The other half is you sharing yours, and so this feels like as good a place as any to pause and listen, in case you feel like talking.

(If enough people respond in commentary here or elsewhere I may write a followup someday on other people’s specific cultures.)

“If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”

First off: most people? Yes. Like, either the bridge is actually safe, and the evidence of my friends all jumping off first means it’s fine for me, too…

…or everyone is killing themselves and it’s not actually all that crazy to not want to be the last lonely person left out of your entire social circle.

But backing away from the literal interpretation and toward the metaphor, where this is about making unwise choices just because other people are also being unwise:

The real problem is, it’s almost never jumping off of a bridge, singular. Lots of people fantasize about Taking One Big Meaningful Stand and can at least conceive of saying “no” in the bridge situation. In practice, though, it’s usually a million microbridges in a row, each of which gives you a choice between:

• Going with the flow and being one of the guys

• Coming across as a weird uncool stickler who’s ruining the vibe and making a big deal out of nothing

Often people do say no to the microbridge half a dozen times in a row, and the result is that they start getting a bunch of weird looks and sighs and eye rolls and “here he goes again” energy and it feels like pressure and it feels like their status is suddenly precarious and they start to microflinch away from the idea of the next “no” because they’re being micropunished for every microtransgression and their subconscious very quickly (and usually wordlessly) updates to “okay, well, let’s never do THAT again.”

This has the unfortunate side effect of giving people a dangerzone feel around someone else doing the same thing! If you’ve been microslapped half a dozen times for turning down half a dozen microbridges, then when you see your dear friend doing the same thing you often get a subconscious “oh no” and a desire to steer them away from making the same “mistake” that you made and suffered from. Like the apocryphal monkey ladder experiment, which did not involve a ladder or bananas but did involve one monkey being sensitized to danger, and then dragging the other unwitting monkey away from that danger. Someone who tried to buck the system and got lightly singed for it often becomes an enforcer of the system, by way of wanting to protect others, which is incredibly funny in an extremely tragic way.

(vaguely related: No Arrogance Like That Of The Recently Humbled)

But anyway, it seems to me that there’s something like a knife’s edge, or a tipping point, re: saying no to the microbridge half a dozen times (or twenty times, or fifty times).

There’s something like antibiotic resistance, if you don’t do quite enough of it, and there’s something like immunity, if you do.

Microdose cringe enough to get the weird looks and the status punishments and then stop, and the lesson you learn is “ah shit, don’t do that, that gets you kicked out of the tribe, or at least booted to the bottom of the pecking order.” You become the sort of person who instinctively flinches away from cringe, and adds pressure in the direction of local conformity.

Microdose cringe enough, and a different thing happens. Some combination of “you implicitly signal to the group that the normal rules don’t apply to you, and they stop trying to enforce those rules on you”—

(à la Donald Trump, or that kid in your high school who was always tardy but never actually got detention for it b/c the teachers just expected it)

—and “you in fact get booted from the social circle you were ill-suited for, but you find a new one where The Thing You’re Doing is itself high-status.” You leave the bridge-jumper ecosystem and enter the non-bridge-jumper ecosystem, accumulating non-bridge-jumpers around you like moths to a flame.

This, uh, doesn’t always work. There are a lot of ways to break, in the in between spaces. You can sometimes trigger the ire of a whole crowd of monkeys, and they can come to destroy you. You can sometimes be too isolated or too far from any other non-bridge-jumpers to ever find or build a new community. Other, uh, other bad stuff can happen, too.

But if I’m looking at somebody early in life, with a buffer of resources and support to spare, I want to encourage that person to practice saying no to microbridges, even given that this will, in fact, cost them pretty hard.

(I tell them upfront that it will cost them pretty hard. The claim is that it’s the right cost to pay in the long run—that it will stop them from ending up with the wrong crowd and being frogboiled and brainwashed into jumping off bridges they know they don’t want to jump off of.)

Abrupt conclusion; I will likely revisit this point in my hopefully-upcoming essay on how It’s Really All Tiny Things; The Tiny Things Matter So Much, Guys (cf. compound interest, cognitive behavioral therapy, Truth or Dare.)

People retell the tale as if the sphex wasps were all caught on a mindless loop, never ever breaking their habitual if-then patterns. In the actual original text, the author notes on the very next page that some wasps broke the loop after as few as three or four repetitions, others took twenty or thirty repetitions, and still others seemed prepared to loop forever (and the author eventually gave up).

This is cool! This shows that habits are sticky and enduring, but not invincible. Which makes the claim “hey, you’re probably being run by your habits” MORE convincing to a skeptic. A skeptic, upon hearing the absolute claim, will have an easy time rejecting it outright; the more moderate claim is both more believable and ultimately more useful.

Anyways, today’s investigation: the “monkeys on a ladder” experiment.

It wasn’t a group of five monkeys, it wasn’t a ladder, and it wasn’t bananas. It was a single monkey blasted with air when it approached an object, and then later returned to the same environment with another monkey.

(They repeated this experiment multiple times, with three pairs of male monkeys and three pairs of female monkeys.)

And: fascinating! The male monkeys who’d been air-blasted dragged their unwitting partners back or otherwise actively discouraged them or tried to distract them by sexually presenting.

The female monkeys who’d been air-blasted avoided the object, but did nothing to prevent their unwitting partners from approaching the object, and eventually “deprogrammed” from believing it to be dangerous after observing those partners interacting with the object with no negative consequences.

This is a way cooler result!

A few others:

Stockholm Syndrome, as a concept, was largely a psy-op; the police were actually being pretty reckless with the risks they were imposing on the hostages’ lives—

(e.g. antagonizing the already not-very-stable hostage takers)

—and the hostages were not motivated by affinity for the hostage takers so much as a sober (and accurate) assessment that the authorities were not, in fact, prioritizing their safety. Nils Bejerot, who coined the term, never even spoke directly with the hostages.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is smaller than pop-psych pieces would have you believe, and is notably lopsided—the effect of “incompetents overestimate themselves” is way larger than the (usually equally emphasized) “and experts underestimate themselves.” Experts do underestimate themselves, but only by a modest (ha) amount.

It’s not true that “the frontal lobe isn’t fully developed until age 25.” If you follow the game of telephone back far enough, you discover that the original studies just ... didn’t include anyone over the age of 25, and the frontal lobe was still developing, so the authors concluded “development must stop later,” and the message got garbled (much to the detriment of millions of young people who had this used as propaganda against them).

Feel free to add more in comments below.