On "Being Out of Touch"

I want to start here with this very specific thought: There's an informal fallacy called 'ad hominem' and it has a very obvious example to explain the fallacy. The fallacy literally translates as 'to the man' so rather than attacking the argument you attack the person making the argument and the example is almost always Benito Mussolini wanting the trains to run on time. So just because a fascist dictator says it, doesn't mean train punctuality is wrong.

While that may in some part inform you as to what the ad-hominem fallacy is, what I am specifically thinking about is a kind of meta-fallacy, or cognitive distortion that arises when there is a 'too-obvious' example people always go to. I feel what happens is that if we repeatedly use the same example to demonstrate the principle, it leads to people understanding only the example and not the principle.

Which brings me to 'being out of touch' a principle whose example is almost always overwhelmingly old people who don't realize that's not what the kids are saying anymore. A handy example might be myself, using a blog to put down thoughts when 'nobody blogs anymore' it's literally behind wordpress, tumblr, twitter, instagram, snapchat, instagram stories and tik tok. The go-to example for describing what it is to be out of touch is generally the rapidly changing youth culture. As beautifully demonstrated in this clip from 21-Jump Street:


Media in general is obsessed with youth, for various reasons, but I would stress not understanding 'youth culture' is but one of the ways to be out of touch. But young people can be badly out of touch, and people of all ages can be out of touch with really significant things.

So as an example of 'youth culture' being out of touch, I was thinking of late 80's film 'The Lost Boys' where the protagonist Michael meets the love interest Star. Michael when he learns Star's name says something like 'you're folks too huh?' and Star replies 'what?' and Michael says 'ex hippies. I came this close to being called Moonchild.'

Though I am too young to have been sexually active in the 80s, this clip spoke to my experience growing up on the other side of the pacific ocean. There are certainly trends in kids names, such that the majority of kids I grew up with had 'conventional' names even though you can see changes across generations, a lot less Dougs and Russells, more Lukes and Todds etc. But we occasionally came across kids almost exclusively girls called 'Crystal' 'Sky' 'Cloud' 'Rainbow' and we actually knew, like Michael that this was a legacy issue of when elder boomers were in small numbers part of an out-of-touch youth movement: hippies.

I find this a good example for two reasons:

1.) History can also skew our perception by fixating on a youth culture. Especially when we learn history via themed parties. Hardly anyone 15-25 during the summer of love, was actually a hippie. They probably bought Beatles LPs. Maybe grew a moustache or went bra-less. But picture your kid coming to you and asking to see photos of your Goth phase, or Ska phase, or Emo phase. Odds are you'll tell them 'I wasn't a fucking Emo.'
My parents speak condescendingly of people they knew that really got into astrology, or the idea they could levitate buildings with their mind, they knew of hippies, maybe appropriated some muted form of the fashion, but they weren't.

2.) The legacy of fashionable names as product of a subculture gives us reliable data to demonstrate that if you were a hippy in the late 60's early 70's you were actually out of touch not in touch, with the culture. A Star among the Sarahs, Jessicas, Kates, Melissas, Lisas, Tracys, Emilys, Jos, Claires, Lucys and Brooks sticks out. Even children can recognize that one of these names was not like the others. Kids I grew up with appeared to intuit that a 'name' doesn't literally describe it's meaning.
That example speaks to me, but there's others like 'Madison' becoming popular after Darryl Hannah's performance in Splash (this has actually had staying power, probably because in 1984 being 'in touch' didn't mandate seeing Splash) and more recently Khaleesi, who if genders still exist in 15 years will be meeting boys that explain 'they were this close to being called Tyrion.'

It's really tempting to get judgemental, the fact is that once you remove the scales from your eyes and see that their are more dimensions by which to be in touch than what the most visible minority of the cohort of people currently aged 16-25 are consuming in terms of culture; statistically you are almost certainly out of touch, because everybody is on most dimensions.

The danger is possessing the conceit that you are in touch. (I can only hope that the people at the center of any given youth scene have some kind of imposter syndrome, where they worry they have not yet discovered the authenticity necessary to find the real center of the scene.) A distinct outsider advantage is to be painfully aware your thumb is off the pulse of the majority.

My home city, has been among the world's regions to emerge from pandemic lock downs only to have cases spike and head back into lock downs. The press briefings from the Premier have provided many examples of being out of touch in other dimensions.

One of the first speculations offered as to why it was spreading so rapidly through the community for this second wave, was that it had gotten into a specific demographic that had large family gatherings. Here we can see that owing to demographics - specifically a declining birth rate, we had a majority of people completely out of touch with the reality of what it is like to have 6 aunts and 4 uncles, 32 cousins, and 3-5 siblings with possibly a few nephews and nieces in the mix, not to start estimating second cousins. The majority of households in the city are completely out of touch with the notion of seriously believing in God, going to church or mosque regularly and of course having large family gatherings.

But unfortunately, it's from this community it appears, allegedly to be where a company paying $18 an hour and no training to security guards for a quarantine hotel are drawn from.

Now two weeks into our second wave, we are seeing daily deaths climb up into double digits, and daily new cases approaching 1,000. In the first wave, Australia nationally accumulated less than 10,000 cases.

Bringing us to the latest (as of writing) speculation, that it has got into Aged care on account of insecure employment. the speculation, roughly is that it turns out the people that provide the 'care' in 'Aged care' are paid very little and underemployed in terms of hours, and have for some time been working at multiple facilities, meaning one staff member can spread Covid to three facilities.

Our state government are a party whose roots are in Industrial Action, a Workers Party, and this party is out of touch with the realities of people who have nothing to trade on but their labor. Most in my circle are directing their ire at the one person they saw in a hundred that wasn't complying with the mask order.

Lest I get bogged down in the wholly separate issue of the general inability to interpret data among the populace. The real spotlight of our second wave regarding being out of touch, is that it washes out the phenomena of blind spots - in terms of transmission risks - that most people, including our government didn't see because - we are more often than not - out of touch.

It's hard for me to pull out examples of when I'm out of touch, because the nature of being out of touch is that you don't know something, and it's hard to know what you don't know.

I would guess that I am largely out of touch with the subjective experience of being a woman. There's a possibly completely different way to experience my surroundings if I could just pass as female. I'm certainly out of touch with the plight of the Kurdish people in Turkey, I don't really know shit about that. I'm out of touch with living under a totalitarian regime. I am out of touch with the experience of being a baby-boomer.

There's another stark illustration. Australia like much of the anglosphere, the former colonies of the Commonwealth, has been having regular Black Lives Matter protests since the murder of George Floyd by police officers kicked them off. This is just my speculation, and it's not to the issue of police violence, police racism, police corruption, state sanctioned murder etc. but just as an example of being out of touch, it is much easier for our population to identify with the cause of BLM, even require it to signal that we should address our own domestic inequality and injustices regarding the indigenous populations, than it is for us to identify with the plight of the citizens of Hong Kong.

It may be owing to our Governments are being far more proactive with the Hong Kong situation, the US, UK, Australia and Canada making up a non-exhaustive list of nations actually critical of the Chinese Governments actions, offering aid to the citizens of HK and taking criticism for it. But the facts are really disparate and we can see the public's inability to grasp those differences. There is explicit documented legislation in one case outlawing things like criticizing the Chinese government and advocating for independence, in the other case we have documented examples of police incompetence and illegal activity, we have data on lenient sentences and documented 'blu-flu' style strike action to stifle reforms, and of course tweets from POTUS.

I would just suggest in the Australian bubble, we see an example of what it is like to be in-touch with the Borough of Brooklyn, the City of Austin, the state of California and completely out of touch with South East and Central Asia.

A conceit might be understanding 'the Green New Deal' and 'Defund the Police' and 'Extinction Rebellion' qualify us as in-touch. But relative to the people these often laudable causes need to actually sell, these slogans often demonstrate how out-of-touch their propagators are. 'Defund the Police' is certainly what you would call a police reform proposal if you wanted to turn off the public from supporting police reform. Referring to an Economic Stimulus package by a name that evokes an almost century old expansion of the government sector is almost certainly what you would title that package if you wanted the incumbent party, and even the most centrist aspects of your own party to have absolutely no chance of selling it to their constituents.

I like AOC, when she won that primary that launched her from nobody to upstart, I felt great hope in that she had exploited conceits and bad assumptions about who votes in a New York Democratic primary - she'd displaced the incumbent by going out and finding her own voter base realizing the opportunity their that her seniors were out of touch with. I think she has the capacity to raise the bar of recent US Presidents. I also think her behavior, and that of 'the squad' betrays that she is badly out of touch. Perhaps leading to her being parodied for grandstanding in the Netflix Series 'Space Force'.

I think AOC is out of touch with a large chunk of America, and much of her fan base is also. They will be dismissive when AOC takes the Oval Office and protests populated by red faced, overweight sweaty people wearing all-over-print XXL t-shirts of the American flag with fanny packs strapped under their gut segmenting it from their jean-shorts and white sneakers take to the streets with placards declaring 'Not Our President' and it will be assumed they are racist. Street interviews by journalists might even find soundbites of participants calling for her to go back to Cuba or Mexico or wherever.

That'll be a shame, because I genuinely believe based on the Green New Deal, that an AOC administration would probably address the issues for which those people will be marching. Namely job security and the issues that follow like health care, opioid addiction and crime. The means may wind up justifying the ends, but there's a nasty history of blow-back or 'no good dead goes unpunished.' This is highly speculative but I'd encourage you to speculate.

As John Stuart Mill put it: "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."

A colleague was relaying to me some video he watched of someone asking people at a Climate march really bush-league questions about climate change, that they couldn't answer. I couldn't track down a likely candidate for the source material cited - plugging 'protester can't answer question' into a youtube search invites a dumpster fire of both out of touch political extremes.

Our mutual interest however was over the implications for the change our organization was trying to enact, and it was cited as an example of how often the public doesn't even understand what it is supporting. This doesn't surprise me, in any domain.

Tune in to pretty much any episode of the Athiest Experience to hear somebody call Matt Dillahunty to discuss their proof for God, and within 5 minutes it becomes clear that not only do they not understand Physics, Geology, the Hot Big Bang theory, Carbon and Radiometric Dating, Abiogenesis or the Theory of Evolution, they very often haven't read the bible so far as Exodus, or finished Genesis.

It is all too easy, to think you are in touch, ignoring all the various ways you are out of touch, but also to add insult to injury, be out of touch with the very thing you think makes you in touch.

Two Years into Processing a Suicide

It has been over two years, and there's days often strung together, maybe even weeks when I don't think about James. Both the fact of his death and the fact of my continued existence in a world without him are accepted, as a general rule I'm as functional now as I ever was.

Maybe there's something seasonal that prompted me to write about this now. Maybe some news story unconsciously prompted me. Maybe it's that my lady is away visiting for a weekend and it's the first stretch in awhile I've been alone with my thoughts.

I want this post to be valuable for anyone that has, may or ever does find themselves having to process a suicide. Part of what makes me feel this is worthwhile, is that suicide is under-discussed, and the internet is now riddled with people who foster an impression that people won't commit suicide if they just never have to read about it.

That internet subculture is one I can't sign onto however, and I will flag that I write this from the perspective of my interpretation of stoic sentiments put into practice, that and my lay understanding of more robustly studied psychology. Namely, that avoidance is a terrible way to deal with things, and the space to aspire to occupy is one where you can look at things, and allow yourself to experience just how bad, bad actually is, that it doesn't grow and expand in your mind.

I've doubled back to the beginning of this post after writing it mostly free-form, unstructured off the top of my head. I really want to contextualize this post however. I want to write and share my experience because processing James' suicide is difficult and ongoing, I recognize that I've had (even prior to the Pandemic) plenty of time and space to do the work of processing it.

Where I'm at after two years is a subjective experience akin to having a cracked but functional smart phone screen. There's a fracture there that if I fixate on it, feelings follow. If I don't pretty much everything works as it did before.

For more context, I'd benchmark it to another loss that I'm almost 6 years into. Where I initiated an altercation by acting like a douche to my then best friend leading rapidly, and ultimately to my ostracism. Where James' suicide meant he lost everyone and everyone lost him, ostracism is way more personal, I am dead to them and nobody else, it also puts our mutual and their exclusive friends in a position of implicit endorsement as I and I alone disappear from the roster. Such is the fate of a social cuckoo.

It's also way more ambiguous because the ostracism could be ended whenever she so chooses. Death is unambiguous (though I might slip into denial for brief moments) but my ostracism began with an impression that she just needed a few weeks to cool off. It upsets me to think I might tell the past version of myself that was three months into the ostracism to prepare mentally for 6 years and counting.

A loved one committing suicide is an experience worse than I believe anyone can prepare for (pleading ignorance on the subjective experience of being Japanese, or in a Jihadist movement). There's no coming back from suicide, no getting back to the before times, but there's a solidarity, a shared sympathy among everyone who has lost the person to suicide. Ostracism (and ghosting) is inhumanely cruel and whether experienced or not, that cruelty is renewed on a daily basis, it has been my experience that to accept ostracism I have to pretend they are dead; assume it never ends.

I'd also contextualize it through a comparison of suicide and homicide, homicide distinguishes killer and killed, suicide drops that distinction, they are one and the same.

Not only is there the conflicting feelings of loss at losing James, but some anger and regret that James killed James and I really loved James and James killed him and took him away from me. These feelings can chase each other around like a dog after its tail, just more persistently than any dog I've ever met.

So yeah, it fucked me up. And suicide is around, far more prevalent than murder, I would guesstimate that if I add a degree of separation in my 36 years I've been one degree away from at least 20 suicides. Two degrees of separation and it would be inestimable. I know people that have lost multiple people to suicide.

It fucked me up but two years on what I can do now is contemplate aspects of his death that will reliably induce negative emotions: sadness, guilt, shame. There's a metaphorical scab I can pick at that kicks off a very real, physiological spiral that I can now, and probably for the last year and a half, arrest at will. If I could put it into words, I can point exactly to where in my body I feel James' death, my best attempt would be I feel it exactly where you'd insert a misericorde to administer a coup de grace (like that helps).

The thing about this is not that I use it to cry so the police officer will let me off with a warning or anything, it is more so that certain emotional states are hard to sit with in my experience. Shame particularly is one that I will reflexively do almost anything not to feel. It is useful to have a reliable shame spiral I can induce and sit with and explore, like forcing to opposing magnets together. So I don't make those reflexive avoidant decisions I tend towards at the first hint of shame.

The wound is deep, and I consider myself in relation to James, one of the luckiest of the bereft. In that sense, I may be one of the most useless to consult if you find yourself in the midst of the horror of having to process a loved one's suicide.

I'd experienced grief. The first time I ever sat down with a qualified clinical psychologist I was informed I was going through a grieving process and that grief as a psychological construct applies to broader applications than just the death of someone you are attached to. I rapidly got studied up on grief while having the benefit of experiencing its effects in real time as a study material.

Over the course of a decade, I came to appreciate grief, and the defense mechanisms of the brain that, if working well, allow us to process only as much reality as we can handle. Understanding is a font of self-compassion as well as self-advocacy to not make really bad decisions, for example: when grieving the end of a relationship, self-medicating through common drugs like alcohol or going on the rebound I can soberly appraise as bad remedies for grief, about as bad as they are common pieces of advice offered by peers.

I would also say, that an honest conversation about grief would produce findings like the death of an animal companion being much harder than the death of a parent/grandparent (depending on the context, namely age). The departure of a colleague from a work environment can have as much impact on functioning and mental health as the end of a relationship outside of work etc. However, naive intuitions create a disparity between attitudes towards types of grief vs the actual impact on the bereft.

When James killed himself, that really broke my brain. It just sent a fracture through my map of reality, and processing it feels more like a strange loop that goes nowhere. It is to some degree 2 years on, still indigestible.

I am a determinist, and importantly not a fatalist. This means I believe things happen they only way they could have happened, not that my own choices and actions don't matter. Part of the 'fracture' I try to describe is hopping around the timeline trying to relate myself as I am now to what happened around the axis of James' death.

In 2001 I graduated from high-school, and my school had a bunch of traditions I'd be curious to know if they were still allowed to persist... there was a traditional day where men and women swap uniforms that I imagine is now banned. There's muck-up day that had already been pretty much fully neutered by the time I got to it, and I can no longer recall where in the timeline you got your school shirt signed by your peers but I'd assume by now that's banned because of all the penises that get drawn ejaculating onto your collar and coming out your armpits and butt crack and up your sleeves.

One tradition though at my school that I hope survives, but was under threat due to growing enrollment already in my day; was that on muck-up day, the year 12's got cleaned up and the whole school bused down to a big church and every single year 12 student gets to say a few words with a nominal 30 second time limit nobody makes you stick to.

In my speech I read out a list of my advice that was mostly comical. I recall one piece of advice that was perhaps too sophisticated for a bunch of Ballarat rubes was: 'between now and the day you die tell everyone how you really feel about them.' ...see the joke is that that deadline is actually really useless so while it sounds like good advice on a superficial level, in fact it's really bad advice... look after 19 years I'm tired of explaining to you slack-jawed mouth-breathers how humor works. Go back to your puns.

Anyway, in like 2012 I had my first exhibition and holding a marketing degree my strategy to generate a big turnout and impress the girl I liked at the time was to actually write every single one of my guests personally with a personalized invite sent DM to their inbox. It was here I began actually following my valedictory advice, and it was the first of 9 exhibitions I did this for, and so I, out of sheer habit wrote James and told him honestly and openly and sincerely what he meant to me and how much I loved him.

This is where I become a bad source of advice on how to process grief in the first two years, because I was doing things that made it easier 6 years in advance. It was a task that I did some 250 times for 9 exhibitions, and the content generally did reflect how I felt about people. People close to me generally received sincere and vulnerable heartfelt invitations reflecting on precisely what they mean to me. Distant acquaintances also received something humorous and personal to indicate that I noticed their existence and want them to be happy.

It would take me 4 weeks full-time invite writing, and was a costly exercise in terms of emotional energy. The human brain is not designed to make 250 social connections in a period of 4 weeks however, it paid for itself in doubt and anxiety spared when James took his own life.

I was also just really plain fortunate.

James would call me when he was in a bad place. I certainly wasn't the only one, nor was I close to the most frequent one. But I was one of the lucky ones. James was in a really bad place summer of 2017-18 (we're southern hemisphere) I spent Christmas logging into messenger to check how many minutes since he'd last been active because at that time from catching up with him I honestly didn't think he'd make it through that gauntlet.

I saw him 2-3 times over that summer, in the flesh, and we had good deep talks about his mind, his situation, and given the gravity of it all, I took the opportunity to tell him how I felt. I learned about him too. I saw for the first time, his insecurity, as he held up his phone to show me photos of his new girlfriend and have me confirm that she was indeed hot as mustard. It was the first time I contemplated that James might be trying as hard to impress me as I tried all my life to impress him.

(One of the things that makes this a grieving process that just keeps giving is that James and I both shared at least one aspect in common: being disgusting pigs, and in his absence and the world I now live in; I feel like I'm the last disgusting pig left alive. Luckily I found a lady who is into disgusting pigs. 'Las puercacitas aman los puercos')

So there's another bit of non-advice/useless advice that helps process a suicide. Be someone they call when they are in a bad place. There is something to act on there, which is how you treat people you care about such that they do call on you.

People with avoidant-attachment styles, and personality disorders like generalized anxiety, narcissism or borderline are going to be at a disadvantage here. But what makes the unbearable slightly easier to bear, is knowing that they knew they could call you, because they did, several times, over the course of their troubled years. It is worth noting because it is reassuring that when they decided not to call you, they decided not to call you (or anyone), it's not that they didn't know they could.

When there are multiple bereft people, I am a fan of the support-in-dump-out rule or 'Ring theory'. It's one of those things that intuition suggests should be obvious and evidence says isn't. James' death happened about a month before Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered by a stranger and her body was left in a public park, on an oval where me and one of my former partners first hooked up, heading in the opposite direction 15 years earlier. I mention this just because again, concepts like 'Ring theory' were salient for me while these tragedies were happening and Eurydice's death not in particular, but in totality, dominated all public and private discourse in the country for a month.

It was also coincidental that one of my friends, was a colleague and friend of Eurydice caught in the nightmare of a private and public grieving process. He had been at my exhibition opening just a few days after news of James death, and we were able to compare some shared experiences when checking in on him.

The first thing I had noticed from James' memorial service was that... and I don't know quite how to articulate this accurately, but my nearest approximation was that the difficulty of grieving (having a hard time of it and requiring support) was not so much a function of closeness to the deceased (in terms of intimacy), but actually how much of their own personal shit the incident brought up. I saw it in person among James' friends, (mostly strangers to me, owing to the fact that James' and I had virtually no overlapping social circles) and quite visibly on social media, in the reactions to Eurydice's death.

I want to stress here that to my nearest guesstimate, this behavior where a second-cousins'-former-paper-boy's-next-door-neighbor needs to cry on the mother of the deceased's shoulder crying 'it's all too much for me.' isn't in my opinion a process of 'making it all about them'. I think but cannot prove, that the reaction is literally about them. The circumstances break a mental defense mechanism and they enter an activated state. Such that you can have a parent living the waking death that is losing a son or daughter in a position where the worst thing that could possibly happen has happened, but somebody whose life or relationship or career is falling apart, or living in a world where they feel no control finds the fact of suicide or murder or any other tragedy far more terrifying because they identify with the deceased, not the bereft.

That charitably, is where I think the general insensitivity or seeming narcissism comes from when a stranger to the deceased 'dumps-in', and leaches support from the people who intuitively need the most support. I feel generally the Ring theory is good advice, but when it is broken in my experience that break is happening for a reason, and the reason isn't malice or insensitivity. (Though, like elephants, some people are just jerks.)

I was also nicely partitioned in terms of my rings, able to support James' family and closer friends while having my own social circle unambiguously to myself. My family also get it, though while James was my best friend between ages of... 4 and I dunno 6 (James has been part of my life for so long that I literally cannot recall meeting him, there is no first impression) my sister is literally best friends with his sister, but she seems to take the lead of James was my friend so it's usually her checking in with me on anniversaries.

But there is actual actionable advice I can offer here, based on my experience and that is: deal with your own shit. Again, in my case I first went to psychotherapy in what must have been 2005 or something, and then again probably beginning around 2013 where I had regular sessions on the Mental Health Care Plan for 2 or 3 years. This is something I can recommend not just on the off chance (6-17? in 100,000) that someone you know and care about takes their own life, but for the benefit of virtually every decision you make and every event that takes place in your adult life.

Getting to know your own unconscious and shifting it into your conscious awareness is advocating for yourself and giving you more agency in your life. You should be able to render your more perplexing behavior into a coherent and intelligible narrative, and ideally recognize when contemporary events dredge up your implicit memories and change your affect and effect your behavior and decisions.

It's something in a wealthy country like Australia every adult can do for themselves and aid their careers and relationships and health. It also helped me talk to James. A common intuition is that with enough love we can heal anything. In my experiencing showing is better than telling. Be the change you want to see in your friend. Physician heal thyself.

Bringing me to a biopsychosocial consideration. I'm sure there is no one portrait of the person who commits suicide, there's just going to be a bunch of risk factors. There will be people that commit suicide that exhibit almost no risk factors, and there will be people who attempt/commit suicide that have numerous risk factors.

James at least to me exhibited no shame about his opiate problems, we had open and honest discussions about it, his experiences, when and how he got hooked, what the addiction is like, how it destroys your life, how hard recovery is, how the people you buy from are not your friends and you'd never want them as friends...

I am highly influenced by Canadian M.D. and author Gabor Mate who was the first that narrated biopsychosocial model to me, and as a result I tend to think of addictive behaviors as self-medicating practices.

One of the helpful aspects of thinking about addiction in this way is to imagine that if you were to be admitted to an oncology ward, and then tried to socialize with the other patients, making friends. What we'd notice is that you having cancer was predictive of your new friends having cancer, because you met your friends where people with cancer go.

Similarly, if you moved to a new town and bought a place in the new housing development, you'd probably discover your community was made up of the kind of people that move to that town and buy a place in the new housing development.

When James and I lived around the corner from one another, I scored an invite to a party at one point. I was sitting in one of his housemates' shed/room and they began cutting up the old metcard public transport tickets to use as filters in a joint. I declined to get in on the action citing that I had schizophrenia in my family tree, I was still too young to risk triggering some form of psychosis so I didn't touch the stuff. I remember 3 or 4 guys, (James wasn't in that room) looking around at each other and listing off their diagnoses for bipolar and psychosis etc.

Gabor Mate is good at articulating that who our friends are isn't an accident. There is a filtration process, a natural selection such that if you had a bunch of risk factors for suicide, then come your funeral there are probably going to be a fair few mourners that are also in possession of those self-same risk factors.

I really want to emphasize though, that I don't say this to be judgemental. The judgement form is typically in the narrative of 'S/He fell in with the wrong crowd.' like some evil people made someone bad. I suspect in most cases people fall in with a crowd because they are part of that crowd. They find their crowd, at least their crowd of least resistance.

One of the nicest things said to me at James' wake was by one of his old housemates and as biopsychosocial would predict, like James is one of the most interesting people I'd ever met. He said 'I think James should have spent more time with you.' We were both 'quitters' as in, the last time we had talked at a party we both had quit pretty much everything we were addicted to, that's biopsychosocial again. This friend lived with James and tried heroin with him, on one occasion, resulting in no habit, because heroin and alcohol solve different problems.

So I disagreed with him, I said something like 'I would never have been allowed into that room where James was doing heroin, you say that and it means a lot that if he spent more time with me he maybe couldn't have done drugs. That's why he couldn't have spent more time with me. I'm really grateful he had friends like you that could be with him when he did.'

One doesn't wind up on heroin because they love sin and hate life and are bad and/or stupid and then it destroys them. When James sent me a text to inform me he was using h, my first thought was of Dylan Moran's 'I have limited sympathy for heroin addicts, because you'd think they would have heard something bad about it by now.' in hindsight what I appreciate about that bit is that of course everyone's heard about the drawbacks of heroin, when you graduate to heroin there's going to be really compelling emotional pain behind it.

I was lucky because I sat in James' kitchen with him and we talked about what heroin did for him. I had taken the time to understand heroin such that when I anthropomorphized a substance into an agent, I recognized that heroin was also a friend James could call upon when he was in a bad place. Not the most helpful friend, nor the cheapest, but it probably kept him alive for a few good years even as it made his sober/withdrawn life harder, put a strain on all his relationships etc.

Heroin is a solution, it just isn't a good solution. A Pyrrhic victory over loss and longing. Most of my friends know that roughly 6 years ago I binge quit a bunch of stuff - KFC, McDonalds, Alcohol, Caffeine, Pornography and Confectionary/Soft-Drinks/Desserts (which I usually shorten to 'sugar' but people will annoyingly point out the turkish bread I was eating had sugar in it, also annoyingly women I met at parties would try to tell me recipes for great sugar free desserts, also annoyingly people would see me eating a chicken parma and fries for lunch and ask me 'what happened to eating healthily?') I have backslid on all the things I quit except for KFC. In some cases just once (McDonalds, in the Zurich Airport when my flight was delayed for more than three hours and I was given a voucher good for nowhere but McDonalds) and other cases many times (Pornography).

The last time I saw James alive, I shared my conclusion from my experiments with quitting my own addictive behaviors, and that was: 'Who the fuck am I to judge you?' I recommend experimenting with quitting your own addictive behaviors, the benefits are myriad, as are the insights. But nothing gave me any real comprehension as to what it is like to be addicted to something like heroin.

What is really insightful though, is how counter-intuitive it is to appreciate the reality of being addicted to something as serious as heroin. The intuition is that when you are selling your last possessions on ebay, or putting them into pawn, or stealing from people who trust you to then go meet a dealer, in a sketchy part of town all to just not feel physically ill for another day, the situation is so obviously bad that you must be irrational not to quit, not to appreciate how serious it is, how high the stakes are, and to do everything in your power to turn it around.

This in a society where people ask for donations to go without drinking for a month ('Dry July') and from people that don't notice how difficult it is for them to walk past their cafe round the corner and not buy a latte. People who tote keep cups around with them, because they are so addicted to coffee that when they learned about the environmental devastation wrought by so many disposable coffee cups instead of buying less coffee they changed their lifestyle from wallet, keys, phone to wallet, keys, phone, keep cups.

So when I thankfully, luckily got to confess to James on the last opportunity I had to: 'Who the fuck am I to judge you?' it was an acknowledgement that too often in the context of drugs and addiction, people who have never even completed the 3km walk yelling at people running the Hawaiin Iron Man to hurry the fuck up, and not dare quit or stop for a breather. I understand the frustration and the drain and the pain of loving someone with a substance abuse disorder, but in my experience the most helpful thing was and remains to try and understand not what you are going through, but what they are going through as best you can.

Again, I don't have much useful advice having only one direct experience of losing someone to suicide. There are other risk factors, and there's suicides I'm sure that are exceptionally painful because there was nothing to foreshadow them.

What appears obvious and intuitive based on my experience is a recommendation to empathize, however, 'empathy' is one of my personal bugbears; so my advice would be to make sure you employ cognitive-empathy because most people (including unfortunately, Brene Brown) when they say 'empathy' they actually mean 'sympathy'/projecting (or empathizing with the people you most sympathize with to the exclusion of all others).

So to be clear, this doesn't mean mouthing a platitude like 'I feel your pain' or 'I'm going to sit in this dark hole with you.' but rather it means learning some psychology theory, reading as broadly and deeply as you can about a diagnosis or personality disorder and trying to use your imagination to recreate some muted or analogous version of their subjective experience. It's fucking hard and it takes work, saying 'I feel your pain' doesn't.

I was blindsided by James' suicide and protected by shock, as well as having dug myself into trouble through over-promising my 10th exhibition and was already up to 10 hour days when I got the news. I buried myself in 14 hour days, kept insane by Red Letter Media's 'Best of the Worst' videos on Youtube and the audiobook 'Toast on Toast' based on the BBC comedy 'Toast of London'. Sane would have impeded my ability to function. I could be sane later.

I remember these materials because in those hard to endure days of my life, where the moment I stopped moving tears welled, and when I went to bed at 1am I spent 2 hours crying and 3 hours sleeping, the earliest indication that I was going to survive James' death and one day 'be okay' again was when Toast on Toast made a joke about some colleague in the London theater scene committing suicide and all his peers welcoming it as the only respectable thing to do, I laughed. It actually cracked me up, on its own merits, and I knew I was going to be okay. I can still listen to 'Hold your head up high and blow your brains out' by the Bloodhound Gang and appreciate it for exactly what it is - helped somewhat because I'm pretty sure James' ripped me my first mp3's of One Fierce Beer Coaster.

This too is advice that might actually be useful for processing a suicide or any other traumatic event. I can appreciate that 'Hold Your Head Up High and Blow Your Brains Out' is not the song to sing at James' memorial service hoping to get a cheeky laugh and a wink from his parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. But you as an individual, the aim, the end goal, of grief is to accept the new reality, orient to it and function again. This means if your father was trampled by a stampede of Wildebeest your goal Simba; is not to subsist on grubs for fear of recalling that day, but to learn to eat Wildebeest again.

The human mind is robust and it has seemingly hard wired methods for meting out the grieving process. Shock, Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Acceptance, Sadness etc. You can bounce around in those first four for a long time, but you don't need to help them. Please trust me when I say, if your unconscious feels you need to go into denial to get through a quiet Sunday, it doesn't need your permission or support to do so. I invite you to trust the process without feeding it by avoiding anything that might activate anger, or sadness, or acceptance.

For me, those protection mechanisms were more about finding times and places where I could process James' suicide without having to make strangers uncomfortable. In the first fortnight it's not perfect, you know, people can hear you crying in a bathroom, customer service representatives will notice the puffy eyes and running nose. Air travel is hard to keep it together because for some reason that's when my body feels like it has the most privacy ever, and I've had some great grieving sessions on long haul flights.

But again, this is where I veer into unhelpful territory. When James died I was not only in a position to, but planning to leave the country and flee to Mexico. Part of why I was blindsided was because I'd already put my trip off by 6 months, and... well this is hard and this is why grieving a suicide in my limited experience is such a fractal mess.

The fact was, I had thought that James was just going to die. Christmas-New Years 2017. He was skeletal thin, he couldn't hold his composure in front of me, he really broke down in front of me and he wouldn't let me hug him. He kicked me out of his house, with a bare faced lie, wounding me like no other by implying that he could be embarrassed or ashamed in front of me. Like he could tarnish somehow, anyhow my love for him.

In that afternoon of utter helplessness, where I went on my own little remote suicide watch checking his 'last active x minutes ago' on messenger, he had mentioned to me what I took to be a piece of chickenshit that he had contacted the girl-he-hadn't-not-thought-about-for-a-single-day-of-the-past-ten-years. I was there when that happened and felt it to just be hot air, bravado from a desperate and dying man.

I caught up with him a week later, and they were dating. That's when he showed me her photo seeking my validation that she was indeed hot. Her presence in his life, allowed me to relax a little from the impotent nightmare of watching someone you love drown, and you can sit with them and shake their hand and hug them in greeting, but you can't pull them out of the water.

Before it became clear that James' in the 11th hour way he and not many other men can pull off, had actually successfully initiated a romantic relationship, while I was preoccupied with completely overhauling my prior conception of what 'At-Risk' was. That relationship took James from death's door, to the last time I saw him alive, and beyond.

The last time I saw James, I dropped round to his old house to meet him in the afternoon on my way to an exhibition opening in Brunswick. I think I'll keep those precious memories to myself, though I know from his lady that James didn't. We parted ways that evening as I dropped into a second opening before I headed to a gig. I said I wanted to meet his lady and he said he'd bring her to my exhibition.

I had my own lady to hit on and I struggle enough as is, without having a man ladies clumsily hit on even when destitute and using, shadowing me. I went to see Theme-Team at the B-East and after it was clear the lady wasn't going to dance with the one who brought her, I went to dance with the ones who were dancing (this is also sound advice I'm confident) and I was ecstatic because for the first time in months I had hope, I believed my precious James was going to live, I stopped bracing for his death, we chatted a few more times on messenger, he was coming to my exhibition.

Then he killed himself.

So I was one of the lucky ones, and it never slips my mind. Though I was blindsided; I met James' friends that were completely blindsided by his death. I've met the guys that were his best friend for longer than I ever was, in years more formative, that had no idea how bad James got, how fragile his situation. Experiencing the heartbreak that for whatever reason-that-died-with-James, they didn't get the call. I know the friends and family that were much closer to James, that didn't have months of wondering when the call was coming that he was dead, but lived in that state of entrapment for years, that were asked far more and did far more to keep him alive for all of us.

I don't know what circuit fired in James' brain that made him think of me on the occasions that he did. He gave me the call and I came, and he actually vetted me as a potential spy (I am a notorious snitch, but I snitch on my snitch nature usually within the first three conversations I have with anyone. I should get a shirt printed. In this case reason prevailed that it was an incredibly long con for me to wait like a year for him to invite me around so I could spy on him) I was checking in through the roughest times, but his girlfriend did all the heavy lifting, and she gave me that treasured day, and treasured hope. I only met her at James' memorial service, now we're friends and I plan for us to remain friends for longer than James and I were.

But it's a big difference, it may be too specific to be helpful, and certainly no healthy relationship can have someone's life depending on it - that's more of a hostage situation, and to James credit and condemnation, I am left with the impression he didn't let on to his partner how fragile and precarious things were for him. That's a real double bind. I understand the anger at the omission/deception but compared to my friends that have been in that hostage situation and knew it, and the stats are that it skews heavily to men that both commit suicide after the breakdown of a relationship and much more heinously threaten their partners with their suicide as the natural consequence of them leaving and I'd favor the anger from grief over the living in fear, particularly if you are genuinely trying to achieve a healthy relationship.

I think about that though, in the fragmented way I try to piece together the chain of causation that lead to my dear friend's demise, that there was 6 months of my friend's life probably riding on her replying to his message or not. I didn't appreciate it as it happened in front of me, but I certainly appreciate it now.

He spoke to her apparently about the future, about the long term. His apartment suggested that was the plan, if you knew you were committing suicide tomorrow you unpacking boxes seems a waste of time. Another thing that's useless in hindsight, but may come up again is that if you have an opportunity to see where it happened, do so. Through sheer dumb luck by the time I was free and clear of my exhibition and could go see James' family I happened to catch up when his sister was going to his apartment to look for mementos for the funeral.

I got to walk in and out of the last room he ever entered alive, and see where it all went down. I would have seen the body too if I could, this is confronting how bad bad is. In my head I was terrified of the thought of him dying alone in some dank crack den. His apartment was nice, with nice views. What happened there wasn't pleasant, but it happened. There's no bliss in the ignorance of what the reality of his suicide was like, for me at least there was a lot more fear.

This is a piece of advice that I think can help, both process and prepare for suffering in your own life. It is a cliche to the point of platitude for people to say things in grieving like 'It really gives you perspective.' Most people shelve that gift, at least in most ordinary cases of grief like Grandma or the Parrot dying, before they know it they are furious over the trivial, like discovering the restaurant is cash only. If something gives you perspective, accept that gift, make it that good gift that you use as often as possible.

At James' wake a friend of James spilled her drink all over me. She was really embarassed but I'm proud that I responded 'don't worry, it's not the worst thing that's happened to me this week.' You see this perspective as the foundation for Netflix series Afterlife.

There's two outcomes guaranteed as of writing. The first is that someday you will die and lose everyone and everything you care about in it, at least the only life you know for certain to exist. The second outcome is that you live long enough to see everyone you know and care about now die; and then you die.

I make efforts to not lose that perspective, I hadn't lost it when James died. That perspective can do so much heavy lifting if you let it. I have had long distance relationships where it was clear to me that I could appreciate the fact that we could communicate and call daily, thanks to technology and social media, and have a relationship and it was good. And my partner couldn't.

The dissonance was too strong, even when by our 30's we are all likely to have lost someone where we would give just about anything to just be able to text them, or get a letter from them once a year etc. What we wouldn't pay for a couple more hours with that someone if we only knew.

Remember that friend that ostracized me? 6 years on it would make my fucken day to get a txt or one line email from her.

While those people are lost to us, we are often sitting on those very things with others that we will in hindsight give anything to have again. On my novia's recommendation I just binged the US office series, and in the finale Andy ruminates about how when he was in the office he missed his Cornell buddies and now he's at Cornell he misses all his office buddies, and wishes someone would let you know when you are living in the good old days.

In James' case, that thing I'd give anything to have again, I actually had. In adulthood I knew I had it when I was having it. (It helps that he miraculously survived jumping off the Westgate Bridge that time). I didn't get ripped off. Some of the people that loved him most, did. Some of the people that loved him most lost him much earlier than I did. Some of the people who loved him most lost the best aspects of his personality long before the others.

Maintaining perspective has helped my processing the loss a lot. My friend Harvard is a wedding photographer and once he posted on his blog a shoot he did and quoted one of the couples speeches something like 'Once I knew we'd have the rest of our lives together, I knew it would never be enough' Everything ends that we know of (excluding Newton's first law of conservation or whatever) energy might be eternal, granted. All there is are experiences you have, and don't. You don't get to keep anything, just have things for a while.

I was also fortunate to go on sabbatical for a year, slightly over a year, to Mexico. (It is, however generally bad advice to make dramatic life decisions while grieving, it is a good rule to put a moratorium on moving house or changing jobs or any other major life changes for a year when grieving.) I just happened to be in a situation where the decision was made, then James died, then I left. I did feel however like I was abandoning a community that was brought together in one of the few positives of his death. I was getting a lot by piecing together a narrative through sitting and talking with everyone I could that had also lost James.

His godmother and I had incredibly helpful and incredibly snotty conversations that spanned like 10 hours and included going to a restaurant to have an incredibly snotty dinner.

I knew I needed to see my ex-girlfriend who lived in Japan in the wake of James death. That's kind of a 'if you lose your wallet, you run to your safe' kind of response. I needed to check that she was safe and well and happy, I did other paranoid ring-arounds for other precious friends too, but Miki was a big one, to the point that I managed to mention her in my eulogy for James and not his girlfriend who was actually there and I will feel bad about that until the day I die.

But I would say, that going away to Mexico on sabbatical, was a luxury from the perspective of processing James' suicide. It gave me the luxury of time and space to just really lean into it. I have actually almost written a book full of letters to James, in an attempt to make sense of his death and my remaining life.

This is something I would wish for everyone, in some kind of social safety net. To just sequester the bereaved so they don't have any other stress or task in their life but to grieve and process. I realize many of James' loved ones didn't get this. They had rent to pay, kids to feed and clothe, dogs to walk, problems of their own, other loved ones to bury. All I can say in deference to economic realities, is to consider the long game, the returns from leaning in and processing just how much a suicide fucks you up, because it fucks me up, and making what sense of it you can, pays dividends down the road.

I want to broaden this up, and get less personal. I have many friends that are social workers, these people are on the front lines of suicide prevention. Many of my friends who are social workers, burn out. They are used up and burn out. This results in transfers to less intense roles, clinics, organizations, departments etc. but in other cases it results in the grim confession that they just can't do social work anymore. They get used up like light bulbs.

This leads to me playing out a thought experiment of 'design the perfect social work system' and through lack of imagination it follows a pretty mechanical process.

It's a very complex problem, and I want to cut to the crux of my thought experiment while resisting the temptation to demonstrate how much detail and nuance I've considered. As I idealize a social work system, I throw more bodies at it, not just to reduce workload, but also in a tiered structural way where supporters are supported and those supporting the supporters are in turn supported.

This runs into Ye-Olde-Cursed-Chain-Letter problem, where if everybody actually forwarded it to the required 50 people necessary for your crush to ask you out, the world would run out of new people to receive the chain-mail on something like the 6th day. In much the same way, as I throw bodies at social work instead of a vast pyramid hierarchy, it quickly begins to just look like a functional community where people look out for each other.

In my letters I wrote to James, mostly while in Mexico, often sitting at a Burger King table, one of them contained the thought:

If ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ then by symmetry it takes but one break in that chain to neglect one, to kill one. I intuitively reject this. I feel in some way it takes the whole village to kill a child, for a little love goes a long way. You know the answer to this, I can only suspect.

But this is something I think about, and again and perhaps useless advice for processing a suicide. I need to stick to a broader point here, and that is that the great project of the economy is in contemporary times an obstacle to community. Catching up with one of James' best friends after the 2nd anniversary of his death I shared with him my view that because of how economy was set up, much of James' support network were unable to offer him shelter. Would this have been the case in the 70's when blue collar workers had job security and could afford to buy homes on their wages?

Of course, it isn't that simple, there's some data to suggest that if housing were more affordable birth rates would be higher, meaning instead of being avocado toast eating renters they'd be mothers and fathers of 2.3 children and it may be a hard thing to take away the rumpus room and make it a guest house for a friend in need.

The real clincher is time poverty, if people pay 30-60% of their take home pay on being not homeless, and the balance on a combination of food for sustenance and self-medication of the stress arising from their work, circumstances are fragile for re-allocating time to someone who has slipped to the outskirts of society.

There are two takeaways I find consoling and that I hope are consoling since no individual is in a position to change the economic system unilaterally. The first is that keeping someone alive through human connection just cannot feasibly fall on any one person. It takes a village to marshal those resources and build redundancy. The other is to acknowledge that we are with our feet to the fire, nobody feels secure and feelings are powerful.

When James chose finality over a future, I was preoccupied preparing for a better one. I was bogged down in art, oblivious to the condition of James and completely self absorbed. I was looking forward to seeing James at my opening however, and meeting his partner. James is a big part of my audience, all my life, as I was his. The economy drives us towards optimization, that's where growth comes from when you run out of frontiers. It's running lean, removing the buffers, cutting costs, and that's been going on for a while.

Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself, doubly so when you can forgive yourself for being preoccupied with something, anything else when someone you love checks out.

James' memorial was populated by so many friends struggling with the rawness of self-recrimination, there's a chance in some cases I was projecting my own anguish but enough cases told me so in as many words. 'Had I known' 'Had I known' 'Had I known' the nature of my own self-recrimination however was such that I didn't hold any of these different people accountable, just myself; and I suspect that's what everyone else is doing. The outcome had a different context occupying each skull. Some of those people might be thinking of the intervention they could have made a few days ago, a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago. Whatever their window of opportunity where they think they could have done something differently.

And James was his own agent. He made a decision, many of them. Again, all of us doubled-over with self-recrimination had been intervening our whole relationships with James. An essential quality of friendship has to be someone who is an argument for living.

I endeavor to try and foster community. I'm not very good at it. Not a natural. I am a natural loner and I suspect it shows. I can bring people together, but community rarely takes root. What you can do is vote for community. Look at the outcomes of the great economic project, and vote accordingly, not just in elections but in the market.

I would be pointing to the disparity between the movie going experience of Cinema Paradiso vs Netflix and Chill. Get interested in your back yard, fight the current sweeping you to the cultural nexuses, no you don't have to embrace cringe inducing Australiana or whatever, just the people who are around.

James enjoyed talking about shitty pop-culture, so I hope he'd appreciate this analogy. For those who are left behind, suicide is like the cut to end-credits in Inception, where the top is spinning and it's ambiguous as to whether whatshisface is stuck in a dream or made it back to reality. This ambiguity prompts speculation "which was it? Is he still in the dream or is it real?" It might send you straight to the internet to see if someone can give you a definitive answer. A bit more dated, but I remember seeing Donnie Darko and as soon as the houselights came on I saw couples in the audience turn and try to explain what happened.

My direct experience of having a suicide effect me personally, is that it is like that - a state of ambiguity that sends the wheels of the mind spinning, trying to figure it out. The trick with those movies is that there is no answer there. The director left it unanswered. Even if JK stands up and says 'Dumbledore is gay' or Ridley Scott says 'Deckard is a replicant' the fact is, the information necessary to arrive at that conclusion isn't in the body of the work (barring any of the spin-off's JK has written to make Dumbledore's homosexuality canonical.) the question of why comes with a 'I don't know'.

To my knowledge, James didn't leave a note. Didn't send a text, I'd be curious in cases where there is a note, whether that note is ever satisfactory in answering the 'why?' given how much I struggle to put in a blogpost, and given how much there is that I suspect I don't know about myself, I doubt a note ever really answers the question, and there's many questions.

I have asked so many questions, come up with so many answers and there's just nothing to check it against. I find the exercise's only value is in its application to the living, specifically myself. How can I use this speculation to better myself?

I have my own regrets, those are easy to spot, for one I never asked James to speak at one of my exhibitions. Conversely though; I notice a bunch of not-regrets. That's the negative space in the picture I feel grief has us overlook. That catalogue expands though, and the regrets recede when I discover someone else had them, like when I learn another friend took a road trip with him, and his girlfriend got the emails where he poured his heart out. There's the people that skated with him, the people that played in a band with him. And again, there's the friends that did drugs with him. I wasn't going to, so I'm glad some of them were there, and I'm glad he was there to prevent the occasional overdose.

I don't know. That's the conclusion. That's okay. That's the silver lining. It's ugly, it happened. The only way to spare my grief is to deprive myself of his love. I wouldn't take that deal. You can take that deal and shove it so far up your arse I can pull it out of your mouth and offer you seconds.

It broke me; but for me at least, I can be happy enough broken.

"Progressive" is a Misnomer

I don't like as a term 'SJW' or 'Social Justice Warrior' because it feels too damn condescending. There's an intuitive part of me that doesn't like 'Woke' either where I can't accept that people would ever use it unironically and thus it also feels too condescending for dialogue. At the same time, these handles are descriptive, they have currency because they do a pretty good job of achieving communication between two parties where we know roughly who or what we are talking about in terms of a subscription to a loose cluster of policy positions and ideology.

My preferred term was 'progressive' because it seemed the least pejorative and thus had the best chance of conveying accurately that I take the positions seriously, and have not predetermined to dismiss all arguments from those positions out of hand. I liked using 'progressive' to enable me to be treated as an honest interlocutor. 

However, if I was to scrap my preconceptions and use my intuition to build the profile of a 'progressive' movement looking just at what the word itself 'progress' means and consideration of it's etymology of 'pro' + 'gradi' both from Latin meaning 'forward' and 'to walk'.

What I would infer is that it would be an ideology of continuous improvement, fighting the good fight for a series of reforms. An inherently patient movement, and an inherently data driven movement for good reasons.

movement to an improved or more developed state, or to a forward position

Reason #1: 'an improved or more developed state' is undefined, subjective. There is unlikely to be a consensus on what constitutes progress. It subsequently requires both humility and integrity to figure out what is likely to be generally regarded as progress.
GDP growth for example, might be considered progress. But probably not in and of itself, even though at base there's a fairly naive assumption unsupported by data that more consumption = more utility (the Economist conception of happiness). However, it may somewhat correlate to other indices like Human Development Indexes where it can be demonstrated that GDP growth predicts other positive developments.
The humility part involves avoiding the temptation to project a personal subjective notion of progress out onto the broad population. The integrity part is any progressive movement needs to resist special interest groups leaning on the process of interrogating the data, whether that's a multi-national energy lobbyist arguing that burning up fossil fuels delivers growth, or an activist addressing a minority issue arguing that the top priorities are sweeping reforms to make public infrastructure accessible to an additional 0.1% of the population.
A progressive movement conceived with no further guidance than the meaning of the word, suggests almost a 'low-hanging fruit' movement where its efforts are concentrated in rigorously* defining progress and rigorously* identifying the easiest/best opportunities to progress.

Reason #2: From 'gradi' Latin for 'to step' same root, different conjugation as 'gradu' Latin for 'step' as in 'gradual' as in not sprint, not run, not now, not arrive. Progress implies a continuous process, an ongoing process and it is in this aspect that I probably find the modern usage of 'progressive' a misnomer ruining it as my favorite term of reference.
Take for example the Gender pay gap, or wage gap. There's many ways in which discussion of this issue is a dumpster fire, and rather than digress into a whole nuther post its simple. Progress requires at least two points in time to be assessed, much like regress. So again, sticking to the exercise of a hypothetical 'progressive' movement where the name reflects approach, methodology, ideology, policy etc. If a rigorous methodology identified a pay gap right now in 2020 between Female CEOs and Male CEOs in the same industry adjusted for market capitalization of firm where female CEOs were paid 70c for every dollar their male counterparts had, this progressive movement would be obliged to compare this to a relevant point in time, or time series trend.
Such that if in 2010 by the same methodology women received 55c for every dollar their male counterparts received the progressive conclusion would be that 'the program' (whatever it is) is working and project that specific pay gap to close to parity by 2040, and if parity is the goal reform may actually be necessary to prevent further gender specific wage growth, such that you don't regress to a pay gap in 2050 where men are paid 85c for every dollar their female counterparts earn.
I do just want to try and preemptively address that the nature of the pay gap changes depending on the methodology employed which has to go back to Reason #1.

The progressives we have, as in what I think I'm talking about and what I assume you understand I mean bare little resemblance to the hypothetical movement the name suggests. 'Progressive' general describes a person sympathetic with the radical left. Sympathy with revolutionary notions, and activism and slogans like 'not one more' 'enough is enough' 'ya basta!' 'defund the police' 'tear it all down' 'smash the patriarchy' 'occupy wall street' etc. tend to demand what problems they identify are resolved ASAP.
What I particularly notice is the expectations as to how rapidly knowledge* should disseminate through the population, how quickly attitudes should shift what matters are settled and what conversations are over.
Furthermore, a big characteristic is in my perception how many definitive answers 'progressives' believe themselves to be in possession of. Such that I am left with the distinct impression that numerous people believe that had they only the power to legislate they could just solve many of the worlds problems tomorrow.
There is no trial-and-error just error, in other words, they know the errors and only impotency stands in the way of the broader community's salvation.

The most telling thing though, is the denial of progress. In discussion of the higher rates that LGB individuals are victims of violent crime, suffer more episodes of poor mental health issues, higher homelessness, higher substance abuse rates etc. the 'progress' is literally left out, in favor of catastrophizing the extant problems. I do not wish to minimize the current problems the behavior though is not descriptive of progress. Conservative apologia offer the rhetorical question 'would you rather be LGB 10 years ago?'

I believe Director John Waters to be in a tiny minority of homosexual men that miss the good-old-days where homosexuality was illegal because it was more fun. What I observe among progressives is increasing dissatisfaction that correlates positively with progress.

Now, cognitive dissonance must be at play, because if we regressed to a point where there was increased conversion therapy, increased 'unsolved' murders of queer people, a greater pay gap, more police shootings, less accessable venues for the disabled, more teen pregnancies, lower education levels, less diversity in media, less representation in public offices etc. confusing correlation for causation would suggest progressives would be more satisfied, which I do not believe to be the case.

I suspect it is more the narcissism of small differences at play, where a society such that women earn 20c to every dollar a man earns, and same-sex attraction is diagnosed as a psychological delusion to be treated with electro-shock therapy, and trans-kids are honor killed by their parents are societies where these problems are manifesting as established norms, hard to question.

It suggests though, psychologically that large disparities are easier to suffer in silence than small disparities that become unbearable.

There is also on a related but perhaps in a second-cousin sense the strange geographical distribution of progressive values and activism, being that it tends to manifest most strongly in the most progressive places and institutions on Earth.

Germaine Greer, Aziz Ansari, Natalie Wynn, Lena Dunham and JK Rowling have more to fear from progressives than David Duke, Donald Trump, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray. From my perspective in much the same way as Islamic Fundamentalism is a far bigger problem for Muslims living in a Muslim nation than non-Muslims living in Europe, the US or the Commonwealth.

This too renders the contemporary use of the word 'progressive' a misnomer, as progressive politics tend to not be advancing through attrition of the moderates and right wing, building an ever growing and more reliable consensus but rather appear to prefer a debilitating purge of sympathizers, a kind of Pyrrhic attrition.

For example Antifa (whom many progressives are sympathetic with) are most active and have the oldest chapter in Portland. In this manner they remind me of contender for Australia's worst export Ken Ham who fearing the decline of the one true faith of Christianity left Australia (where 30.1% of the 2016 population identify as non-religious and only 7.5% of the population attend Church on a weekly basis) to fight on the front lines in the most secular post-Christian place on Earth: Kentucky. (76% Christian, mostly Evangelical Protestant with 39% weekly attendance at Church Services).

Just as Christian Evangelists have a propensity to claim persecution in locales where they are historically and contemporaneously privileged, my experience is progressives demand progress most vocally in the most progressive and tolerant places and institutions available. Part of this phenomena is going to be self explanatory - a place needs to be diverse enough first to permit voices and platforms to those who would complain about unfair treatment. I cannot exclude however a narcissism of small differences, or the coincidence of bravado with where we are most safe.

It suggests to me a very human propensity to seek out soft targets, and also biases towards recency, availability etc. like the oft cited kidnappings have gone down, but coverage of kidnappings have gone up, biases that progressives if anyone by name, should be across. To me the word 'Progressive' conjures up a very calm persona if I exclude the people I stereotype as progressive which is a very anxious-dramatic persona.

Behaviorally, a better descriptor than 'Progressives' would be 'Utopians', or perhaps 'Utopianists' which for me specifically draws on the idea that problems can be solved - end states achieved. A Utopia is a state where both progress and regress are impossible, antithetical to a state of Utopia. This describes a post-progress world.

Progressive describes a person who appreciates, almost stoically that things could be worse, because they were worse looking backwards, and simultaneously asks 'what's next?' without tearing out their own hair and gnashing their teeth and wailing 'why aren't we there yet?' in favor of planting seeds and watching them grow.

I would ordinarily be inclined to end here with an admission that I understand why Progressives would not want to adopt the name Utopianist, for roughly the same reason someone Pro-Choice would not want to call themselves 'Fetus Terminators' or someone Pro-Life would not want to call themselves 'Incest, Rape and Absentee Paternal Rights Activists' or 'Capital Punishment for Obstetricians' is that you quickly dissolve your credibility with a bad if descriptive name.

I was going to end it there, then I happened to watch the first 4 minutes and 32 seconds of this video on 'Defining the Defund the Police' slogan, and given that it didn't open with an admission that if you wanted to reform the police by reallocating their budget to alternative first responders like social workers and paramedics, particularly focusing on the budget allocated to purchasing ex-military equipment and you chose the slogan/rallying cry of 'Reform First Responders' and somewhere between Fox News and the White House the right-wing mouthpieces inevitably seized upon the proposed budget cuts to police and started labeling it 'Defund the Police' in order to undermine the necessary reforms and turn public opinion against the BLM protests except the right didn't have to because the left spared them the effort by choosing the worst conceivable slogan they possibly could have and scoring a massive own goal in rallying public opinion against them; then yeah, rather than having to abandon the misnomer 'Progressive' for SJWs (a misnomer + reads as a pejorative) or 'Woke crowd' then yeah, maybe progressives could start loudly and proudly calling themselves Utopianists, or maybe Movementarians, everyone can enjoy that.

*rigor refers to sound epistemology there are multiple forms of epistemology, of varying soundness.

On Eric Weinstein

If you aren't familiar with Eric Weinstein, this isn't the post for you. May I recommend the rest of the internet?

I would also flag this is most definitely a 'Narcissism of Small differences' post, which isn't to assert the narcissistic claim that I am close to the subject in terms of knowledge, horsepower or mental agility. Just to say that while I am venting my frustrations with someone whose content on balance I enjoy, it would be a mistake to think I am in any way sympathetic to ideologies most motivated to be critical of Eric.

In fact I highly recommend his podcast series 'The Portal' and anywhere else he appears as a guest. Eric interviews subjects that push back, and have the horsepower to push back occasionally to the extent of making him look foolish, which is an achievement because I wouldn't describe Eric as a fool. His guests are also eclectic, so he's one of those interesting people that has curated an interview series with interesting people that are rarely if ever on a promotional tour for the book they've just released.

It's just when the pandemic hit, and I got this visceral feeling that I was witnessing Eric have a kind of public meltdown. Simultaneously, I possibly project onto him that he is getting dangerously close to a lethal level of confidence and self belief, a state of mind where I myself am at my worst. I may simply be witnessing someone go through the liberating experience of unburdening oneself of long held fears, or I may be witnessing someone who has built up an audience of yes-men and now has a diminished capacity to sense their own performance, as dare I say it, they slip into the grips of their own organic DISC or GIN, see below. At any rate, I want to shit it out in my little corner of the internet.

Dunning-Kruger Appeal

I've promoted this to my most resonant gripe. I was fortunate to have an older brother walk in to our living room sometime in the late 90's early 00's and watch about 40 seconds of Pacey talking onscreen in the drama 'Dawson's Creek' to which he replied 'what's worrying about this is that people will watch it and think they are getting smarter.'

This is my synthesis of an argument Eric has presented, and shouldn't be confused for a necessarily accurate representation of Eric's actual argument. But it's something like he hypothesizes that people are tired of, or suffer from having science communicators dumb concepts down for them. Some kind of resistance training where the onus is put on the audience to go and research anything they don't understand. Much as Michael Shermer and Michael Iain-Black's podcast 'Topics' has the guideline of covering '80%' of any topic and the audience is to fill in the remaining 20%, whilst simultaneously instructed to 'take it easy.'

A potential jump-the-shark moment for me in the Portal, was when Eric said to a guest in response to the guest trying to explain some concept they had mentioned 'don't worry about the audience, they'll go look it up, I may not have the biggest audience in the world but I have the best audience.' or something to this effect. I'm paraphrasing, and unfortunately can't recall which specific episode he made this remark or event he guest he said it to... maybe Roger Penrose but I'm not going to sit through that again.

So if you care about Eric Weinstein, or have been a member of his audience you may want to go look up the Dunning-Kruger effect if you haven't heard of it. Eric's statement made me cringe, and project my shit onto him and his platform with a 'why would you do that?'

Case in point, on April 1st... uh... America time, 2020. Eric posted on his youtube channel his presentation to theoretical physicists his theory of Geometric Unity, including a preamble by Eric, then the actual lecture and then roughly 35 minutes of ppt slides in explanatory notes, as Eric I think introduces the footage with an apology for his handwriting quality.

It was solely because of the aforementioned statement about having the 'best audience' that I did something I never do and that is go 'below the line' and read video comments. I have to be in a state of morbid fascination to ever read youtube comments, but here I was rather testing the assertion of 'best audience' by looking for evidence that a largely lay audience presented with this material where interpreting, understanding and dissecting the contents.

A single piece of positive evidence would suffice to substantiate claims made by Eric whereas the null hypothesis can't really be concluded - an absence of evidence is not sufficient to conclude evidence of absence. Maybe that discussion takes place elsewhere, on another forum like a reddit thread or some kind of wiki.

Whereas I feel the comments on the video provide many data points to build circumstantial evidence that we are seeing more of a Dawson's Creek type fanbase. People perhaps prone to interpreting the experience of watching something impenetrable to them, as proof positive that they are the kind of 'smart' person that watches stuff they don't even understand because they are that kind of curious intellectual.

The lecture is entirely impenetrable to me. This is why I pick it out to substantiate my gripe, if Eric's hypothesis about dumbing down language to the detriment of the audience is true - I would guess his show would diminish rather than exacerbate the Dunning-Kruger effect. People would watch it and feel dumber for watching it, rather than smarter. So someone like me that stopped any instruction in Physics at the end of high-school if in the grips of Dunning-Kruger would possibly assume there wasn't much to know about theoretical physics; you know, I'm someone that if you asked me 'what's Newton's 3rd Law?' would respond 'I know I've been taught that, and I have access to Google.'

I should at this level of comprehension of the subject of physics feel pretty confident that I can duke it out with the best. Like some kind of Simon Cowell 'So you think you can break the Einsteinian Speed Limit' audition show. I don't. I don't think I could pass the exam I passed in my final year of highschool. It's possible I've forgotten more than I ever knew of physics. Then I listen to Eric talk about Geometric Unity and am humbled by it, realizing there's so much more I didn't even realize I didn't know - my overconfidence should diminish.

For one thing, I didn't have that confidence to begin with. Another thing is, that I don't know what I'm looking at with Eric's lecture. I am simply not in a position to do even a J Peterman evaluation:



I don't have the competence, to tell whether Eric even presents anything coherent or incoherent. I have to defer to an appeal to authority, and the authority I would disallow myself an appeal to is Eric Weinstein. There's a number of reasons I'd proffer for this.

That Eric sat on this theory for as long as he claims means I can't exclude the narrative that he has done so because he suspects it may be rejected on its merits - like a guy that procrastinates about asking a girl to the prom because he suspects she might reject him, the moment he asks the fantasy collapses - what Dan Gilbert in his book 'Stumbling on Happiness' explores as anticipatory pleasure - the more one looks forward to an uncertain event, the less likely one is to act on it, or thereabouts.

I can't exclude the possibility, that there just isn't a there there. To exclude it, I would have evidence that Weinstein's outsider idea had some traction in displacing the status quo. I don't really know what his theory even is, my closest attempt to understand it by analogy is something like:

We've assumed that a human cannot break the 8 second mark for the 100m sprint because they have to apply force to the ground to propel them forward with equal and opposite force, but what if we assumed the ground could also propel itself forward?

Some kind of re-framing theory like that, where you re-examine an assumption that something is constant, and then changing that as a variable can demonstrate mathematically a reconciliation with everything else working. Some kind of De Bono lateral thinking approach, that the academic establishment hasn't been doing. If someone were to pose such a theory to me on a subject I do actually understand I could probably make one of two evaluations: 'woah that opens up a lot more interesting possibilities.' or in the possibly apocryphal words of Abraham Lincoln 'calling a tail a leg don't make it so.'

The other thing I can't exclude is, that even if Eric's unified theory is correct - its lack of traction may owe to his own inability to communicate and sell it to that critical mass level where the right people look at it. Write ups in the Guardian dating back to 2013 when he first presented this talk report complaints that Eric gave people no paper, or pre-print draft to review, some of the sighted sources mention that he provides no testable hypothesis in his theory just elegant coherent mathematics.

The entire history of Q&A sessions at the end of a keynote speech, at events at the 92Y in New York or Google Talks, IQsquared debates, Convention Panels and book tours all provide evidence of a particular manifestation of the Dunning Kruger effect, which is people consuming some material and equating that with an estimation of their ability to produce such material. You can virtually rely on someone getting up and being completely unable to articulate their question, trying to pack their life story and/or their thesis into the background of their question. You can rely on some anonymous person in the audience trying to speak to the keynote speaker as though they are equals. One doesn't even have to rise to the level of a Ta Nahesi Coates or Steven Pinker. You can see it with Clerks director Kevin Smith in his 'Evening with Kevin Smith' releases. People confuse their ability to consume content with their ability to produce content.

Recently on an Episode of the Portal, Eric Weinstein interviewed the founder of Project Veritas, James O'Keefe where I feel it is not hyperbolic to say that Eric keeps hounding James that he doesn't demonstrate enough agonizing over the destruction of people's reputations/lives. In the same way, I would be greatly reassured if Eric publicly demonstrated more agonizing over exacerbating the Dunning-Kruger effect in his audience, that as my brother put it so long ago 'the worrying thing is that people will watch this and think they are getting smarter.' My life experience predicts that a majority of people would agree with the statement 'Reading books makes me smarter.'

Worrying enough is that he coined the term 'Intellectual Dark Web' which is if nothing else, labeling yourself an 'intellectual' a red flag. The 'IDW' furthermore has now had some time since its minting to gain or lose traction, and in my opinion has lost traction. Perhaps analogous to Dawkins' suggestion that Athiests refer to themselves as 'brights'. I'm guessing that it moreso is owing to informality of membership and that many of its associated personalities like Murray, Harris and Peterson are larger personal brands where both the IDW and Eric stand to gain more than they receive by adopting it.

Again though, I can't exclude that nobody has really rallied to the IDW banner because like 'Brights' or 'iSnack 2.0', it is simply a branding disaster. My current go-to Youtuber Dr Todd Grande who despite his name is refreshingly lacking in any grandiosity, production values or pageantry does a good summary of Mensa & Narcissism that I suspect might have a lot to do with why IDW hasn't crystalized into something more cohesive. It's not very intelligent to advertise yourself as intelligent, as most people find this off putting.

Eric's behavior, specifically his affection for 'the greatest audience in the world' or whatever makes me worry that the Portal as a product, and perhaps Eric Weinstein as a public intellectual is more in line with Lumosity - a product that actually targets dumb people with the promise of feeling smarter, while failing to demonstrate the claims. This is a confronting thought to entertain as I would be one of these dumb people consuming the illusion that I have special insight or am smarter than the average Bear. One might also recall the athlete hologram power balance bracelets, that were eventually outdone by my barely noteworthy Alma Mata: RMIT University, who were the first that  bothered to investigate whether these placebos did improve performance as they claimed.

Eric's content he has released over the course of this pandemic though, has had the result of me actually looking to his wikipedia page, and its attached talk page and it is sobering to be reminded that despite the impression Eric makes through his polymathic articulate intellectualism and the circles he moves in - he actually is and remains barely noteworthy, by Wikipedia standards. This could be a bias built into wikipedia that I disagree with. For example, when some speaker starts tickling my bullshit detector I like to check their wikipedia page, because of the tranparancy of the talk page, like if you believe it biased one way or another you can go to the talk page and often see that bias fought out.

(historically, I had a friend that at one point sent me videos to check out Nassim Haramein and rather than picking apart yet another video and debunking it, I just looked him up on wikipedia a page now deleted, apparantly for notability, but recently I used it for Chris Martinson, and for Randall Carlson and he doesn't have a page. Whether pseudoscientists and hacks are noteworthy or not, it's actually good to have a page where this is briefly explored and maybe even fans can learn skepticism by having their edits deleted.)

Eric could be an intellectual's intellectual, or he could be just remarkably successful at infiltrating scenes and coasting. I raise this because Eric may in part be in the grips of Dunning-Kruger himself, I recall him commenting on his brother Brett's speaking event with Richard Dawkins, and how Dawkins had experienced a decline from ground breaking maverick in the 70s to somewhat of a curmudgeon in the present day. I wonder whether Eric (and Brett) can extrapolate out that if it proves to be the case that they are the new generation of public intellectuals of the moment, they too are on a trajectory that will have them like Dawkins and maybe Chomsky in a position where they are the ones closed to criticisms and revisions of their pet theories by the next generation.

I also notice that Eric does not yet have an achievement to his name anywhere near that of Dawkins' Selfish-Gene, coining the concept of 'meme' or even a pedestrian best seller like the God Delusion that in my opinion did the service of repackaging and expanding Bertrand Russell's arguments from 'Why I Am Not a Christian' for a new generation.

And oh god... every time I go to look something up to check myself, it just gets worse. Now I can picture Nassim Haramein or Randall Carlson sitting on their own podcasts presenting mathematical art pieces they find compelling like Eric's klein bottles and other math knick knacks, before talking about the black hole at the center of every atom/the catastrophic event that explains the loss of Atlantis... This isn't where I set out to go with Dunning Kruger appeal, but I just fear I'm looking at the teeth now of my own Dunning-Kruger trap.

Conspiracy Bating

It was really his podcast episode 'The Construct' I forget which number; where I reached peak irk. But it makes me reflect on his first appearance on Sam Harris' podcast, where Eric steel-mans conspiracy theories at some point. Then in that context it felt like an interesting point, but more for the steel-manning than the legitimizing of the psychological phenomena of conspiracy-theories.

By his publication of the podcast about the death and possible life of Jeffrey Epstein, the point that a conspiracy theory was theoretically possible had been repeated enough to stop being interesting and start being annoying.

What is a 'conspiracy theory'? I suspect part of the problem is that it's an undefined term. The etymology of conspiracy is evidently, something banal such that the words are not descriptive of the behavior we refer to when taken literally.

What I'm saying is, in the legal sense 'conspiracy' can be thrown into a bunch of charges. Such that 'conspiracy to commit murder' describes what happens when an exotic dancer and her pimp conspire to murder a 'John' after having him take out life insurance, naming the dancer as beneficiary. But the cops solve the murder in a few hours, because they made their conspiracy in a quiet dive bar where the staff could all hear them conspiring.

If this were the accepted definition of 'conspiracy theory' whenever 2 or more people discuss something that they then do, then legal tomes would prove that conspiracy theories are proved true all the time in criminal trials.

But if you are at a party and someone says 'I'm really into conspiracy theories!' I feel most people will guess in the league of moon-landing-faked/royals-killed-diana/9-11-inside-job/earth-is-flat territory of conversation.

Wikipedia gives a pretty thorough definition on its page:

A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation,[2][3] when other explanations are more probable.[4] The term has a pejorative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence.[5] Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth,[5][6] whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved or disproved.[7][8]

The bold type is my emphasis, because I'd probably if pressed to define or characterize a 'conspiracy theory' I would say something in line with 'explanations that add unnecessary complexity, like them breakfast machines.' this is reflected in the 'more probable' wording in the wikipedia definition, by my interpretation. A straight mathematical calculation, did somebody flick the light switch with their finger leaving a fingerprint, or did the person use a koala to flick the light switch leaving a human-like fingerprint? One probability has to factor in the extra detail of having a koala on hand, the other doesn't.

Conspiracy theories are often worse than this, because the theory has to include explanations as to why there is no evidence of a koala being present at the scene also.

But keep in mind, there's this banal, legal definition of 'conspiracy' that means two or more persons premeditating an act that we generally aren't referring to when discussing 'conspiracy theories' and the more grandiose sense of 'conspiracy theory' that can go right off the deep end of credulity, which we are more often discussing.

Keeping those two poles in mind, Eric's podcast 'the Construct' begins with him building a category of 'responsible conspiracy theories' so 'conspiracy theory' with the qualifier of 'responsible' and then reading through a long list of known 'conspiracies'. Also referred to by Eric as 'dirty tricks' that were a product of some review sometime in the 60's or 70's of tactics and strategies US intelligent services had employed against US citizens.

I do not wish to come across as dismissive of the data set Eric provides, I simply cannot recall the details, and found the episode too irksome to revisit. It's up there on youtube to investigate yourself.

My synthesis though, is that the list of 'dirty tricks' that Eric cites as in the realm of "proven conspiracies", are fully plausible, because they are tactics proven to work by any group of mean girls in any high school, in any culture, in any time period, in known history of teenage high school girls. Reputation destruction, spreading false rumors, gaslighting, deplatforming, peer pressure etc.

I can't recall but it possibly includes precedents for the US government creating or employing spies to infiltrate organizations like Unions or Communist Parties. Much as the police create fake prostitutes to infiltrate illegal prostitution rings. British comedian and director Chris Morris' second movie 'The Day Shall Come' was based on more contemporary phenomena of American Intelligence agencies recruiting terrorists in order to arrest them in some form of legal entrapment.

If there were such a thing as a 'responsible conspiracy theory' or 'responsible conspiracy theorizing' it would I suspect probably involve assuming the burden of proof, specifying conditions under which the theory can be falsified and a presumption of innocence. This isn't where Eric goes though, he really alludes to but doesn't specify some qualifier of plausibility...

This is all preamble to the main content of the episode, that Eric believes Epstein was 'a construct' which is a fancy, sexy way to say an actor hired to pretend to be a real person, whose employers had made the fatal mistake of miscasting a pedophile actor into that role bringing the whole operation undone, and was then murdered to conceal the truth of his existence, his murder being made to look like a suicide.

To Eric's credit there are a lot of disclaimers. But the preamble diminishes the disclaimers somewhat. It just happened to remind me of an athiest youtuber's video I had seen perhaps that same day, where a similar preamble was offered by an apologist.

The synthesis of that video, is trying to confuse claim + evidence, with just a claim. By introducing categories of 'reasonable claims' vs 'unreasonable claims'. The apologist even gives examples of an 'unreasonable claim' accompanied with testimony that the claim is made up, and the 'reasonable claim' example with testimony that the claimant witnessed the event first hand.

All in the service of equivocating 'hey we've all heard claims that kids trip over and hurt their knee, and we've witnessed this happening too.' with 'we've all heard Jesus died and was resurrected, the one time this happened in history and what makes him so uniquely special...'

Something rhymed - in the attempt to bolster speculation with a preamble - between the two videos. 'reasonable claims' vs 'responsible conspiracy theorizing'. An attempt to predispose me to consider a story as closer to known documented historical events than a tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory.

Which is where Eric's ability to articulate arguments very well becomes a 'with great power comes great responsibility' conundrum; specifically the responsibility to not use that ability to bolster not only a spurious personal interpretation of events (disclaimed to have no special insight) but the legitimacy of positing conspiracy theories in the first place.

Somewhere in his interview with Tyler Cowen, the guest pushes back on this conspiracy theory indulgence of Eric. Imploring him to look at the abysmal historical track record of conspiracy theories proving true. Often, (and this is my impression not Tyler's), conspiracy theories become religious claims in so far as they are unfalsifiable, (going back to that wikipedia definition), all evidence that refutes the conspiracy theory becomes proof of the cover up.

Eric in his 'the construct' episode, offers his testimony of his one meeting with Jeffrey Epstein. When I imagine Eric sitting in a court room, offering his testimony, I can imagine the defense attorney yelling 'objection: speculation' 'objection: speculation' and having it sustained again and again. Eric appears to be trying to build a case for Epstein being a construct which I believe based on Eric's testimony is Eric's impression of Epstein. But drawing from the Youtube Athiest communities playbook again it's a 0 + 0 doesn't equal 1, but maybe 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 does equal 1, style fallacy, which is a hefty accusation to hurl at a mathematician like Eric.

The episode could have been much shorter if it stuck to a reasonable complaint that the media abandoned this story much too fast. If it was a call for dispassionate, investigative journalism to resolve the uncertainty to public satisfaction and nothing more (notably the media can't do investigative journalism to the satisfaction of conspiracy theorists, as they are unsatisfiable).

I would actually really like to see a Dr. Todd Grande summary of the Epstein case, as he would responsibly speculate. But also because Todd often speculates on numerous highly publicized criminal trials and is subsequently to more accurately see law enforcement breaking from procedure in compromising ways as the norm it seems to be, rather than suspiciously exceptional.

But the episode ends weirdly with Eric imploring someone that we not be too hasty to seek retribution if Epstein turns out to be an intelligence asset of the state of Israel or something. Watch it for yourself, there are certainly, big unknowns surrounding Epstein's life and death. Is this speculation responsible though?

Responsible conspiracy theories I would reiterate, are actually just investigations, with appropriate burdens of proof and presumptions of innocence/incompetence. What makes conspiracy theories fundamentally irresponsible is that they can never find anyone innocent. Conspiracy theories shift a burden of proof upon skeptics to prove a negative, that some nefarious plot didn't take place. 'Prove a black-ops assassin wasn't there!'

I understand and hold to the principle in the more ordinary legal world of a presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt/balance of probabilities (depending on severity of charge). This answers the question of 'what do we want to get wrong more frequently? jailing innocent people, or letting guilty people walk?' Our legal system (humbly realizing that perfect justice is beyond our grasp) opts to try and jail less innocent people. If there's one mistake it makes, it is heavy handed in finding people not guilty, because the social cost of the opposite has been decided to be too damn high. This obliges me as a citizen to have a point where I have to hand it to some people that they got away with murder or other crimes because the forensic tech lags behind.

The cost of conspiracy theories is the time and attention spent spinning wheels in the mud of a case you can't prove is even a case to begin with. That due to the compelling nature of the narratives will have people talk about convoluted assassination plots instead of how change in GNP is a provably terrible scorecard for human well being and government performance. That climate change is a massive existential threat to humanity, and ordinary human psychology ignores it, simply because we'd rather chase shadows than deal with a real problem right in front of us.

Having read all that, I should disclose in closing, why it may just be my personal prejudice that finds Eric's championing of conspiracy theories so irksome.

I have had the personal experience of being involved in a Non Government Organization (ngo) where they weren't doing well. Membership and revenue was stagnating, they only had one full time staff member who actually implemented outreach projects, and awareness of their brand and mission was close to zero. I got a very quick impression that the organization was unsuccessful owing to it being incompetent and antiquated in communicating their message. They alienated every person who walked through their doors. The internal diagnosis? - a vast conspiracy so scared of their message that they were invisibly thwarting their every attempt from behind the scenes. Their evidence? their lack of success.

It was in the worst cases, worse than the picture I've painted here. But I was painting this picture for a friend of mine that consults with a lot of different ngos and apparently my experience is not that uncommon. Many organizations fall back to this ego defense where it is simply easier to imagine you are so important that terminators are sent back from the future to thwart your success than to contemplate that you are simply not very good at what you are doing.

Eric's increasingly building a case for me that he is somebody that posits the extraordinary lacking even ordinary evidence, in favor of entertaining the ordinary for which evidence abounds. He is veering more towards a Slavoj Zizeck - a generator of interesting ideas and provoker of interesting thoughts, but ultimately of little substance.

Combine these apologia for the practice of conspiracy theorizing, and the appeals to the audience's Dunning-Kruger effect and for me it dangerously doubles down on being a product designed to feed the audience's illusions of superiority, or possibly delusions of superiority.

Neologisms

A neologism is a 'newly coined word or expression' semi-recent examples might include 'selfie' 'unfriend' 'iso-hair'.

What about what I'm calling the Social Traffic Obstruction Protocol or 'the STOP'? a concerted effort to impose a cost upon me as an employee whereby coordinated efforts create inefficiencies in the transport grid, greatly expanding the time taken for me to cover the distance between my home and place of work. Where I can only avoid the reputation cost of arriving late to work through a sacrifice of my personal time to negotiate with the STOP.

Yeah, well I guess someone could call it 'congestion'. A very boring and un-sexy pre-existing word that more accurately describes what happens when everyone tends to commute during the same peak time periods because businesses operate the same standard opening hours of 9~5 as a hangover from a bygone era when if the bank closed its doors and the post office closed their doors there was little point to keeping your office open.

I'm not really enamored of my neologism 'The STOP' it is posited to compare it with Eric's neologism he calls 'The DISC' or the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. For me, the 'D' in that acronym is what sticks in my craw, because I suspect the justification for 'distributed' is so you wind up with a word, which you don't with 'the ISC' and it's possible that there's a technical justification for 'Complex' instead of 'Paradigm' or 'Instinct' but I suspect 'Complex' is chosen for the same reason I chose 'Protocol' for 'the STOP'.

'Clever' acronyms do certainly make me suspicious, they make me groan in fact, with real disdain, as puns do. So it might just be I'm projecting my shit onto Eric who has a fondness for them. My more sober objection is just as a choice to use 'congestion' instead of 'The Stop' might rob me a lot of sexiness in thinking I'm describing a complicated, personal and esoteric phenomena. I would offer as an alternative to coining a new term like 'the DISC' as 'inertia'. Which robs the sexy sounding 'the DISC' of an ability to distance itself from describing a very ordinary, very mundane aspect of human psychology, and robs Eric of a pretense of special insight.

The new term Eric appears enamored of (he has incorporated 'the DISC' into two podcast episode titles, and appears to have his guests accepting it as having unique descriptive value) is but one of many - he also increasingly throws out 'GIN' or 'Gated Institutional Narrative' instead of off the shelf terms like 'sunk cost' or 'reputation' or 'self interest' again, all very ordinary human psychology, not the diabolical agenda of powerful institutions, and not a special insight on Eric's part.

Similarly, Eric has started to abbreviate a discrediting process as 'Fear Uncertainty Doubt' as 'FUD' which I regard as a bit of a dick move. It's similar to the meme of if you start to doubt the existence of God, that means the devil is infiltrating your mind. FUD appears to pre-emptively strike at feelings that Eric may not actually have figured out what he claims to have figured out, not that his enemies are nefariously trying to bring him down through reputation destruction.

It poisons the well. If Eric was to release a podcast tomorrow saying 'The Earth is Flat' (just to pick something I'm reasonably confident he won't do) and I say:

okay I know the Earth isn't flat because I live in fucking Australia, I have seen the top of a ship appear on the horizon before its hull does and literally nobody benefits from suppressing the truth about the shape of the Earth. I'm fairly confident he's wrong about the Earth being flat... does that mean his other theories are... OH NO this is FUD just like he warned me! I couldn't be experiencing fear, uncertainty or doubt as the natural result of his own conduct, it must be 'them' turning me against him. This proves 'the DISC' and 'the GIN'.

You could save a lot of neologisms, and a lot of time by promoting the more generally applicable principles of skepticism. If I read criticisms, like this one I'm writing about Eric Weinstein, I can just evaluate the criticisms on their own merits, engage with the material. I don't need FUD as a framework to evaluate whether something is a hit-piece or legitimate criticism.

By the report of Steven Pinker, fellow linguist Noam Chomsky isn't just dismissive but actively hostile toward some alternative theory of linguistics or neuroscience he isn't on board with. It's probably some very common, very ordinary piece of human psychology even Chomsky falls prey to like confirmation bias. I suspect whatever Eric calls the GIN and the DISC is an emergent property of this same psychology in institutions, just like rush hour congestion is an emergent property of enough people sharing the same work hours and infrastructure. Rush hour congestion doesn't require a nefarious puppet master, or coalition of any kind, it simply requires a lack of imagination on behalf of the participants.

People not from the United States are well positioned to observe one Gated Institutional Narrative in the form of trying to convince US citizens they are not objectively from the greatest country in the world, and probably have first hand experience that this endeavor is a lost cause. Creating this narrative is a very simple and efficient process, assert the claim with no substantiation and safely count on almost nobody bothering to verify the claim for themselves.

When immigration at LAX repeatedly forced me to explain the concept of Mexico to them as I transited through, I didn't believe that this was the product of a vast conspiracy to enforce the narrative that nobody could possibly want to live in Mexico and must be trying to enter the US for some devious subterfuge. I just put it down to ignorance.

If 'the DISC' exists, it is an incredibly efficient machine that requires no fuel, no maintenance, no user manual. It just works. I would posit that if some environmentalist patented a sustainable greenhouse-emission free jet fuel and took on a billion dollar loan to supply the aviation industry, only to discover that another environmentalist later that week invented solar powered stable wormhole technology rendering all fuel based transport obsolete, that first environmentalist would get all Thomas Edison on the latter's arse, running PR campaigns to scare the public away from their superior solution and preserve their investment.

There's probably not much Hannah Gadsby and I agree on, but when she does profess not to think women are better than men in her special Nanette (or could be a later appearance it's been a while), I hope she's veering towards the Michelle Wolfe camp who argues (perhaps facetiously) that women should be celebrating Elizabeth Holmes' contribution to gender equality, and that female heads of state aren't just the Jacinda Arderns but also the Margaret Thatchers.

I hope Eric can see the opportunity he has to observe the ordinary way in which his own podcast is subject to generating its own GIN, its own DISC, its own FUD. The portals' GIN is 'the DISC' and others. He's not doing pirate radio, he's a Youtuber. Possibly anti-fragile in that his own bad press only serves to raise his profile and give him a voice, much like Jordan Peterson's adversaries made him a star and a best selling author.

Excellent case in point that I just learned while writing this point, Andrew Yang credits his appearance with Sam Harris and his appearance on Joe Rogan with his viability as a candidate. Yang appeared on the Portal as well, but Eric claims that Andrew Yang was left off CNN and MSNBC graphics as a function of 'the DISC' while disregarding the ability of his personal friends to essentially create a Presidential Candidate. Eric claims to be an outsider, doing 'pirate radio' such that his descriptions of the world seem to be more of an attempt to reconcile his impotence in reshaping the world to fit his conclusions with his actually quite significant influence. If you can call Joe Rogan and Sam Harris on the phone, you are a fledgling kingmaker.

Like JP though, Eric is much better at bringing himself down than his detractors. The neologisms mainly bother me because I believe them to be redundant, his insistence on using them rubs me as a conceit, or oversight. They also fold neatly into the conspiratorial thinking, and with increasing fear, uncertainty and doubt, I begin to think Eric gravitates toward intelligent design positions, which in turn makes me notice that he doesn't criticize the progressive/SJWs/Post-modernists whatever because they essentially advocate an intelligent design position, but as an intelligent design position.

I don't have the brainpower or inclination to substantiate this suspicion.

Instead I compare Eric, and even his more self-moderated brother Brett's podcast output to similar but adjacent bodies like BloggingheadsTV with its excellent channels 'The Glenn Show' and 'Feminine Chaos' and how they manage to often tackle the same subjects I do care about with none of the baggage the Weinsteins bring.  Or compare the IDW to Heterodox Academy. Or detractors of the status quo that operate within gated institutions, like professor Mark Blyth of Brown University, Noam Chomsky of MIT, Richard Thaler of Chicago University (and Nobel Laureate), Politician Yanis Varoufakis of Sydney University, Cambridge etc.

There are plenty of people that seemingly falsify 'the DISC' or 'GIN' and I find Mark Blyth's explanations as to why we suddenly all know the name of Central Bankers both simpler and more compelling than Eric's neologisms.

Again, I find myself finding Eric's the Portal being a confusing mix of great guests and an imploding host. I find myself drawn to drawing the distasteful comparison of Eric to Australia's worst export - Ken Hamm, where his neologisms are coined in characterization with the sense of superior insight conspiracy theorists claim, and also the persecution narrative so beloved by Ken Hamm.

Eric is quick to jump on evidence that seemingly corroborates his status as a persecuted outsider, and appears to ignore evidence that he is actually a privileged insider. Tyler Cowen again offered Eric push back on this point as well by suggesting that he is now one of the mainstream voices.

Where Eric thankfully does not resemble national disgrace Ken Hamm, is that the portal doesn't have the same two recurring guests employed to agree with him and block anyone who questions him. Perhaps a better analogy is that Eric likes to think of himself as NOFX, when in practice he's probably The Offspring and could even be Blink182.

Chauvinism

I don't mean chauvinism in the more common usage of 'male chauvinist pig' but I probably can thank that usage for watering down the word, because its strict definition is apparently "exaggerated or aggressive patriotism" a charge for which I'm fairly confident there's not enough evidence to convict or even bring charges. But I'm talking about something more in this vein, than the gendered sense of chauvinism.

Eric has one trick for generating interesting ideas that he possibly learned or adapted from his friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb, coiner of the term 'anti-fragile' that unlike the previously examined neologism/forced clever acronyms is not a loaded redundant term.

Eric looks at a concept and imagines the opposite: virtue signalling generates vice signalling (useful concept) leadership generates followership (useful concept) inclusion officers generate exclusion officers (possibly useful if you can find a non zero-sum context for inclusion officers).

And so the 'chauvinism' I'm talking about is a very personal pet-peeve I'm almost certainly projecting psychologically and yet, it's a behavior I find off putting.

If we are familiar with the concept of 'othering'... actually that's a big assumption. Wikipedia has this: "The term Othering describes the reductive action of labelling and defining a person as a subaltern native" and more, to describe othering.
My experience of it being employed is: essentially foisting some burdensome out-group identity on a person. Eg. here's Mike, Mike think's of himself as a skater and when he shows up to his natural habitat - the skate park - the other skaters in various ways keep pointing out that Mike is aboriginal overshadowing his identity as a skater, Mike has been 'othered'.

So take 'othering' and generate 'samening' where this shows up as: essentially foisting some burdensome in-group identity on a person. Where both 'othering' and 'samening' are both aggressive acts - the aggression being respectively 'you're not one of us' and 'you are one of us.'

Somewhat in some pseudo mathematical sense, othering and samening are the same act. Discrimination 101 you can't create an in-group without de facto creating an out-group and vice versa. The one implies the other. There may be an emotional difference for Mike on the one hand to turn up to the skate ramp and be told by white kids that he's aboriginal; and on the other to turn up to the skate ramp and be told by aboriginal kids that he's aboriginal so maybe that amounts to a functional difference. But if we substitute Mike for me, that difference is illusory, I turn up to the skate park and the white boys say 'hey you're alright you're one of us' we can immediately see the problem because we are probably imagining Mike standing next to me.

I say discrimination 101 because if Mike and I did turn up to the park as friends, discrimination against Mike is discrimination against me also. It might be harder for Mike, but there's the not to be neglected imposition on my freedom to associate and befriend whoever I choose.

I'll just disclaim two personal experiences that might prejudice me against the behavior of Eric's that irk me, before describing that behavior. The first was that in my teens and twenties when people still watched Television on a television, I used to get angry in the lead-up to Australia day as the ethnic majority tried once again to force a positive national identity upon itself. One year following the usual attempts to define ourselves as about 'mateship' and 'a fair go' I got to ask a panelist at some event of a refugee background how she felt about this insistence that Australians were somehow especially representative of fairness, justice, friendship, hospitality etc. I really enjoyed her assertion that there is nothing Australian about basic human decency, hospitality etc. that all people's of the world do this.

Obviously, culture exists. It can be demonstrated, but as the joke goes 'what's the difference between Australia and Yogurt?'

Second prejudicial experience was when I had a crush on this girl, that for anonymity's sake we'll say had a Finnish ancestor. In our social circle, there was another girl who had Finnish parents, and she would interject in my attempts to converse with the girl and do my Garry Groundwork with these 'oh my god, I have to tell you about what my Finnish parents did last night, so Finnish you are going to die!'

Because I was having precious attention diverted, I couldn't help but notice this 'samening' behavior that completely overlooked all the components of my crush's non-Finnish makeup in order to assert her Finnish identity. The other thing I notice is that this samening was not a two-way street, the motivation was coming from the Finnish girl to claim my friend as her compatriot. I cannot read minds, it just struck me as insecure behavior, something like the spotlight effect where she was incredibly self-conscious of being from Finland, and failing to notice that nobody cared. Now maybe I'm more agitated because she was competing with me for attention from a third party, but I feel I recognize a real phenomena there of steamrolling someone's broader identity to assert some trivial aspect of it as common ground.

And so, I find myself particularly sensitive to noticing every time Eric points out to a guest 'but come on you're an Armenian-Jew...' or 'you Russian-Jews are...' and it may be these instances I recall are the only two-instances of samening that I can assert. And again being charitable that Eric means these to be positive affirmations of character. But they are what serve to stimulate the visceral response that I find off-putting. It may be a subtext I put in that just isn't there, but it's invoking an appeal to mutual Soviet-bloc-Jewishness to explain some positive character attribute. Two instances might be insufficient data sample to extrapolate a pattern, but the other data points would be that Eric is yet to assert that not being some variety of former soviet bloc Jew might contribute to a particular genius or positive character trait.

...It's possible that my own confirmation bias is at play, Eric has introduced Garry Kasparov in Russian, doesn't assert a Jewish identity on Sam Harris, and doesn't to my recollection hit Rabbi David Wolpe with any assertions that his being a (?) Polish-Jew contributed to anything in particular. It may simply be too obvious that Kai Lenny's Hawaiin identity contributes to his surfing genius. I may be overlooking when Eric asserts his Gen-X identity with a guest like Brett Easton Ellis.

I may simply be making a case for my own latent anti-semitism, where people can get out their tiny violins as I cry over being left out of the Jewish-genius club because now a white straight man know how it feels. I do love however this mind bending quote from Chomsky "“Everyone's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's really an easy way: Stop participating in it.” which I interpret, perhaps incorrectly that 'our' predictable reactions (and knowing Chomsky probably pre-actions too) perpetuate the phenomena.

I suspect there's a principle in their that has broader applications - the inclusion/exclusion, othering/samening continuum where a predictable response of oppression is solidarity, solidarity creates in-groups that can then be targeted or used to justify further oppression. Possibly the best course of action is to assert one's identity as an individual, like John Hurt's depiction of John 'The Elephant Man' Merrick "I am not an animal." much as when complaining it is best to own the complaint rather than de-individuate.

Again, I might be seeing things that aren't there, but the very engrossing episode of the Portal with Prof. Agnes Callard opens with a kind of coded discussion of status and the need to acknowledge status in order to move on that I suspect has the covert subject of Eric at it's core - Agnes sensing his ego needs to be appeased. I suspect also that she identifies part of that as Eric's fragility regarding the Jewish axis of his identity to keep throwing Greek intellectual traditions at him, perhaps covertly deny his agitations for the Jewish intellectual tradition as pushback for his attempts to samening her. More likely this is my psychological projection, as this is what I tend to do when people attempt to samening me (and I tend to lean in hard when being othered). I would not rate my abilities to read Agnes' mind because Agnes is the kind of person I'd stand next to when trying to pass myself off as intellectually disabled.

Narcissism of Small Differences

The irony/hypocrisy of writing a narcissism of small differences post, is to say one of the things I'm finding increasingly off-putting is the narcissism of small differences that Eric exhibits. If you aren't familiar with this concept, a simple example might be that you sit down to dinner with two friends that have previously not met eachother. You are an omnivore, one friend is a vegetarian and your other friend is a vegan. As you order your meals, you notice that your vegan friend gives your vegetarian friend a much harder time for not being vegan than you do for not even being vegetarian.

So to keep it specific, Eric Weinstein in the banal Eric is heavily critical of the US Democratic Party. He is a fan of certain candidates as per the appearance of Andrew Yang on the Portal, but he like many is no fan of the Clinton dynasty, early in the pandemic he appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast and called for Nancy Pelosi to resign over some behavior like encouraging New Yorkers to go eat in China Town or something. The Narcissism of Small Differences I'm asserting here, is that he is disproportionately angry at democrats like Pelosi, compared to how angry he is at the Trump administration or Mitch McConnell etc. This in itself is a very understandable psychology of 'I expect better from you though!'

It's compounded by Eric's propensity to praise Trump, a pattern of behavior whether he is pushing back on Sam Harris' 'Evil Chauncey Gardiner' analysis or enamored by "Kayfabe" posits some 'genius' as explanation for Trump as president.

My prejudice/personal bias again, is that we've been through this with the George W Bush 'secret genius/it's all an act' hypothesis. I view this as an argument from incredulity, where much like a conspiracy theory people fail to imagine a world in which a moron could win highest office, thus they must be playing some kind of 'three dimensional chess.' History, and all behavioral evidence corroborates that George W Bush was exactly as dumb as he appeared. The hypothesis that Trump is a secret genius is even weaker.

The frustrating thing is that Eric himself has demonstrated a useful analogy, (in an interview I sadly couldn't find to link to) where he described how a mindless parasite can hack the intelligence of another organism. I would put it thus, an architect is intelligent and they use that intelligence to design a house with a timber frame. Then termites eat that timber frame and ultimately bring the house down. Is it right to conclude that the termites are therefore 'geniuses' or that eating timber and reproducing is a kind of 'genius' for their ability to confound the designs of an architect?

This is where the costs of narcissism of small differences become apparent, I compare Eric's calls to a vague unspecified 'mutiny' in his post pandemic appearance on the Joe Rogan show to Michael Lewis' thesis from 'The 5th Risk.' To attempt to steel-man Eric's calls to mutiny, I would say that there are indeed problems with a 'vote for the lesser evil' worldview. World leaders don't just have their finger on a nuclear button where we need to pick someone who won't push it, but they have another hand on a faucet of greenhouse gasses where we need them to be turning it off before the timer is up. Which is to say, leaders are needed that have positive proof of attributes being present, not just less defects than the other guy.

But Michael Lewis points out that the Trump administration hasn't filled many government positions, and the government actually does a bunch of important stuff. I don't think 'the 5th risk' is a great book title in so far as being self explanatory. Lewis' explained it on the Al Franken podcast appearance as 'there's always 3 or 4 things you're worried about, and it's the 5th thing you don't worry about that gets you.' We know that a party controlled Golden Retriever would do a better job than Trump because they will at the very least appoint a bunch of experts to look after the nuclear arsenal, predict cyclones, ensure food security etc.

Lewis' and Harris' seem to recognize the low hanging fruit of civilization being in peril with a buffoon like Trump having the keys to the oval office. Eric appears to admire trumps ability to put himself in a position to destroy civilization, while feeling that Pelosi's head should be on a stake for saying something that granted, may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers, but is comparible to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's advice to Australian's that they could enjoy a meal at a Chinese restaurant roughly a week before we started locking down.

In this manner, he strikes me as having a similar mindset to intersectional progressives, fixated on a civil war and inflating the threat of unpopular enemies while ignoring the encroaching obvious enemy.

Dumb Ideas

This is probably a good time to take stock of comedian George Carlin's observation that everybody on the road who drives faster than us is a maniac, and everyone who drives slower than us doesn't know what they are doing. Which is to say we all have some internal equilibrium where we look at people with a view held stronger than our own and think them some insane fundamentalist, and then look at anyone with a view held weaker than our own and think them some naive idiot.

So the question of whether an idea is dumb or not, can break down to one of personal preference and I want to acknowledge that up front. Here's a link to YANSS podcast on the psychological phenomena 'naive realism' from which I took wholesale the George Carlin bit. I don't know if this psychological phenomena has yet survived the replication crisis.

That out of the way, I want to look at just two 'dumb ideas' Eric has touted. The first is leaving the planet.

Again to allude to the spectrum of reasonableness, there are going to be scientists working on real logistical solutions to establishing a moon colony, a mars colony, a titan colony etc. theoretical physicists trying to find a way to exceed the Einsteinian speed limit, an ongoing arms race to militarize space, another one to capitalize space etc. Then there's all the way down to very unrealistic proposals by cult leaders that Jesus is a righteous alien dude.

Eric appears to be in the camp of theoretical physicist trying to break the Einsteinian speed limit. The science and mathematics there is impenetrable to me, so it could be dumber or wiser than I am capable of ever discerning. The dumb idea is the rational he's outlined on Joe Rogan the 'We have become as God's but for the Wisdom.' meme. Eric believes it's time to leave the planet and explore the cosmos because we are unfit custodians of Earth.

Here, my mind at least draws a parallel between a 'Humans can't live sustainably/responsibly, we need more planets' argument and a 'Humans can't live sustainably/responsibly, we need less humans' argument - which I refer to in my head as the 'population' argument of environmentalism, and may technically be known as the Malthusian Trap. This 'we need to reduce the population' argument appears to be the conclusion of the Earth Day premier, Michael Moore produced 'Planet of the Humans' but is popular in environmental crowds.

The significance of this parallel I will annoyingly try to explain with a third analogy - sprinkling salt on a bird's tail. I can't source this folklore with my Google-fu, and I don't know how widespread it is, but I find it useful. It's apparently an annoying thing the elderly said to credulous children 'how do you catch a robin/swallow/sparrow/pigeon/crow/hummingbird?' 'Simple you just sprinkle some salt on its tail feathers.' The point being however, that the solution requires a bigger problem to be solved than the original solution. If you can sprinkle salt on the tailfeathers of a bird, you have far exceeded the conditions required to catch it.

With 'we need to reduce the world's population because humans can't live sustainably.' you are asking people who can't give up asparagus for 3 months of the year to give up their children. Furthermore, the best path to a declining birthrate appears to be increased consumption. This of course is not an argument Eric has to defend, he has another solution, crack the speed of light and spread out into the universe.

That in itself isn't so stupid. As per #27 of the Portal - Avoiding the Apocalypse Daniel Schmactenburger points out that for much of human history we've had recourse to migrating to a new area. Once you've covered the globe, you need more globes. However, it's that Eric uses this, I would argue, transparently stupid rationalization of 'We have become as Gods but for the wisdom' where it may be the influence of the online Athiest community rubbing off on me, but any examination of the 'wisdom' of the Gods indicates that humanity exceeded the wisdom of the Gods long before splitting the atom. There is little evidence in the scripture to substantiate the gods are wise at all.

But I am inclined to recall Gary Larson's bozone layer a layer of tightly packed clowns orbiting the Earth that protects the rest of the universe from our effects. I am also reminded of Carl Sagan's "If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes." all of which is to say, that anyone who believes humans are as yet unfit custodians of our own planet, shouldn't be arguing that we need more planets.

In the context of the current pandemic, it would be like arguing 'Wuhan's hospital system is on the brink of collapse, we need more international flights out of Wuhan, let's export this thing to the world.' It's kind of I guess, the reverse of sprinkling salt on a robin's tail though fixing our economic models may prove much easier than building a warp drive. It's that if we can't all get along on one planet, why expect us to learn to get along on two planets.

It isn't the dumbest thing of course. Maybe it is the case that with two planets we can at least buy human civilization some time to sort its shit out. But sooner or later learning to survive our own intelligence has to become the central project. I believe that project is what is referred to as 'Game B' and is one Eric has engaged in with his guest Daniel and possibly his own brother Brett and found uncompelling. However, again, with the influence of the Athiest community, there are plenty of smart people aware of the mechanism of evolution via natural selection that prove time and time again to be incapable of engaging with it. When Daniel pushes back 'your solution requires a Warp drive' there's no equal and opposite retort from Eric. I'd be inclined to suggest his solution is not a solution at all. At best it is a stop gap, at worst I imagine there could be some game theory where you are more likely to lose something if you believe you have a spare/or second chance. (I've always wondered this about the AFL's preliminary final vs Elimination final performances)

Eric's brother Brett has at least once expressed some frustration on his Darkhorse podcast that his own brother is in this camp of 'more planets' rather than 'figure out stewardship of the only one we know we have.'

The second dumb idea, is hopefully one that needs less explanation, that is 'Joe Rogan for President' it's just impenetrable to me. Joe Rogan has a big show in terms of viewership, and I suspect some aspect of Chauvinism might be rolled into that. The most defensible argument for Joe Rogan to make a run for the oval office, is not one of suitability but electability in the specific context of an incumbent Donald Trump and the unbelievably low bar he sets for improvement.

To even make this argument, you'd have to exclude how many of Joe Rogan's views and hits come from people with absolutely zero ability to vote in a US election. One might also want to compare the value of Joe Rogan's endorsement vs Barack Obama's endorsement. It might be hard to isolate the impact, but probably can be estimated. It's also hard to gauge how popular Joe Rogan would be given an actual alternative, like if people could choose to have Rogan interview his guests, or Howard Stern or Ricky Gervais, or Conan O'brian etc. We could conceivably conduct a poll on who you'd rather helm the Joe Rogan experience. It would be imperfect, I mean Conan for example would probably precipitate a sharp decline in guests that bow hunt and spear fish, and an increase in guests that have read every piece of correspondence of Grover Cleveland and a skew towards the incestuous SNL family tree of comedians.

We are going to get a test, which is whether Rogan proves risk averse with his Spotify exclusivity deal. Taking a certain $100M payday while tanking his podcasts' reach. I don't know enough about the economics. Presumably Rogan is concerned about losing a share of his audience when working out the deal, what will be tested there is his and his teams ability to forecast.

As for suitability on this idea, it's probably easier to even see Trump as a capable President when you have the proximate access of a Steve Bannon, assuming you'll have the Presidents ear and exert influence over policy which with the courage of your convictions, you shouldn't fear. It doesn't take long though for me to find plenty of reasons not to vote for Joe Rogan. Whatever secret sauce has driven the success of his podcast, you just need to watch how hard he questions and cross-examines his guest Adam Conover in #1282 whom I don't agree with, citing really bland versions of progressive assertions and then go to #1284 and watch how little push back he gives guest Graham Hancock, a man whose book 'Fingerprints of the Gods' were the inspiration for blockbuster movie 2012. If Eric bates conspiracy theorists, Joe pours gasoline on that fire for a living.

If Eric has acquitted himself poorly in the advent of the pandemic, Joe Rogan has proved a real time study as a documented fool in the pandemic, and this is who Eric feels needs to give up his charmed life to run for president for the good of the country. Rogan is someone credulous to characters like Hancock and remains incredulous to characters like Bill Gates in the middle of a pandemic. (I suspect also that Sam Harris in his early NY outbreak podcasts refers to his tendency to go through back-channels to try and correct his covid-19 skeptic friends, that he is likely referring to Joe Rogan as one of these friends given how much Rogan was downplaying the pandemic).

I just feel this is a dumb idea, akin to the Oprah 2020 idea. That the only thing that can kill a celebrity is a celebrity. Now I don't think the Democratic Party has proved great at devising a solution to the Trump problem. But that's like making a valid defense of the futility of breaking a siege through continued diplomacy, and then presenting as an alternative clicking the heels of ruby red slippers and repeating there is no place like home.

A Man Shall be Judged by the Company he Avoids

Which I take from Gordon Livingston's 'How to Love' chapter title. I originally wanted to comment on something purely visceral for me, which is the whole Rogan-Ferris-Willinck type podcast scene that seems to suck in intellectual men because they can't get past the dream of tight abs. A place where PhD's in mathematics and nueroscience intersect their love of UFC/MMA with the common man. The phenomena of more accomplished men to become George Costanza in the presence of a Mimbo.

Ostensibly there's nothing wrong with this. LA as near as I can discern is somewhat a culture of blowing smoke up others arses.

Something that I actually credit Gladwell and Lewis with for example is that they are far more interested in discussing sports with their guests than the subject of their books, and many many an intellectual proves themselves vapid and vacuous by parochially confessing they are a snob to sport.

It's just that writing out the section on Conspiracy bating, and where I have bothered to go and check my source or do even arbitrary research, keeps painting this picture that Eric Weinstein may just plain be a conspiracy theorist, albeit an atypically articulate and coherent one.

That's where I notice in the network constellation around Eric, there's a convenient absence of people whose existence appear to contradict the existence of the DISC, the GIN etc. People who could take him to task, like a Mark Blyth or a Robert Sapolsky, maybe even a Yanis Varoufakis, perhaps even a Dr Todd Grande. It may be that such figures have been approached and just wouldn't dignify the Portal, sadly reinforcing the notion of what Eric calls the DISC.

Eric knows by one degree of separation Mark Blyth (Via Nassim Nicholas Taleb) and by one degree of separation Matt Dillahunty (Via Sam Harris)

So I guess I'd just pick one example and look at Eric in relation to Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Unquestionably, Harris and Peterson have a constructively adversarial relationship. They disagree, but do the good work of modelling a civilized and constructive conversation (eventually) in what is probably a zero-sum game.

Their sparring matches, particularly the first one where Harris and Peterson got bogged down in a point that Harris couldn't let go was where Eric scored a coup and got himself on Harris' podcast offering to constructively critique the exchange between Harris and Peterson.

Exchanges between Harris and Peterson did seem to improve subsequent to Eric's intervention. Eric's diagnosis was something like Harris has a paradigm of 'truth' and Peterson has the paradigm of 'meaning' and something Eric has expounded on more than one occassion is his five factor model of something like truth, meaning, grace, beauty... and something else.

It may be a good exercise in cognitive empathy to understand 'oh I really care about truth but this person doesn't they care about meaning...' but I would say on my intuitions that if you posit having 5 true norths, you should have to defend why they don't collapse into a single one - namely truth.

As in, what is more beautiful than truth? what is more graceful than truth? etc.

I basically feel, that Eric exhibits a preference for people that will permit him alternative epistemologies to believe what he wants. Jordan Peterson is guilty of everything the non-radical left accuse him of. The non-radical left tend to accuse him of being a sophist, a christian apologist etc. So Peterson and the Progressives lock horns because they disagree fundamentally on ideology, and to Peterson's credit he appears a competent and credible clinical psychologist, everything he has put out in this lane is generally sound, and yes! even Todd Grande has a good video on JP.

But I think the exchanges between Peterson and SJW's and why they appear characterised by simmering rage may in my opinion be a narcissism of small differences one, where their ideologies are directly opposed but they share a methodology.

Not in psychometrics, or clinical psychology, but in literary criticism. Watch any of Peterson's Bible lecture series and then watch Harris' take on sophistry/mystical interpretation. And I don't know how true this is, but have my suspicion that Peterson (and maybe Ben Shapiro, though I only catch him on the periphery of panels populated by people I actually find interesting) started the newish annoying trend of apologists claiming the achievements of the West as owing to Judeo-Christian values, completely ignoring the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians etc.

Without waxing on about Peterson endlessly, it's that on the subject of say Cancel culture or Identity politics Harris, Peterson, the Weinsteins etc. align ideologically in terms of thinking them in the majority share, a load of shite. But Harris and Peterson lock horns over differences in methodology. Hence Harris can share a stage with Peterson and it's largely adversarial, sometimes constructive and Harris has to push back against Jesus smuggling, by not permitting Peterson's non-epistemology. Harris can also share a stage with Matt Dillahunty, best known as host of 'The Athiest Experience' and this is not his first appearance in this post.

I think Eric can share a stage with JP, but I increasingly suspect he would avoid the company of somebody like Matt Dillahunty, because Matt Dillahunty if nothing else, keeps speakers honest. It's hard to assert this, given Eric's willingness to sit down with someone like Prof. Agnes, or Daniel Schmactenburger or Tyler Cowen. I just suspect as where those guests joust, Dillahunty (who reportedly has problems with some of Harris' positions) is likely to tear in and force Eric to justify his sympathy for the 'mytho-poetic' or the metaphor of moving through rooms in a house he used to illustrate to Sam Harris' his various modes of thought in that first podcast.

I guess my hypothesis, subject to testing is that Eric will avoid the company of anyone who might detect and diagnose cognitive dissonance on his part. Anyone that could competently prevent Eric from believing what he is comfortable believing, or motivated to believe. To a lesser extent I believe he might successfully avoid guests that are averse to using insider terms of art or jargon, and hence not tolerate what has become the jargon of the portal - DISCs and GINs and EGOs. I suspect he'll never talk to a Mark Blyth who might suggest you can just throw out guage theory as it's unnecessary to understanding economics, and who has demonstrated much more powerful predictive power than Eric as near as I am in a position to assess.

Tentative Conclusion

It has been good to think on these very visceral things I felt, and explore them through writing. What I suspect is happening is again a piece of ordinary human psychology. To borrow an analogy from Dan Ariely, as you increase the resolution on a photograph the subject becomes less attractive. You start to see the acne, the freckles, the blackheads, the veins. Details that are lost from a distance.

With someone like Jordan Peterson this process is relatively short*, you watch his lectures on the Big 5 personality traits and are like 'fascinating and informative' then switch over to maps of meaning or his bible series and start tugging at your collar nervously. Which is probably unfair, Peterson's sophistry is interesting and safe provided you allow the possibility that it's all irrational.

*(Not so short if you basically do the same thing as Peterson and draw from the never constructed panopticon prison that psychology is a Eurocentric construct)

Eric Weinstein is a bit more mysterious, because he speaks a lot of maths and theoretical physics seemingly coherently but it is much less penetrable than the assertions of Peterson. One has to defer, and often there's nobody else in the room to defer to. Eric doesn't speak much to Harris about Gauge theory, Geometric Unity and Klein Bottles. I have to go 'Roger Penrose seems to think he's okay.'

It's just these little alarm bells that go off, with the conspiracy theories, the neologisms, the chauvinism, the dumb/questionable ideas, and the admittedly availability-biased choice of company.

I cannot emphasize enough that nobody has fed my fear, uncertainty and doubt more than Eric's own conduct and behaviors, particularly post pandemic outbreak where the resolution improved like Eric had an embedded growth obligation to reveal more of himself.

In late January, the Australia day weekend I was visiting my friends in Geelong, one of which at least consumes the Portal like me. He shared his gripe that Eric 'thinks he's pretty good' or something, the self-congratulatory elitism he was picking up, which I hadn't noticed. Once it was pointed out though, I couldn't not notice, and the rest sort of unravelled.

I'm surprised, that after having done this, I'm inclined to feel more that Eric is someone that could be fairly described as a conspiracy theorist and would actually have a hard time debunking that as mud-slinging, albeit he's as close to borderline not one as you can probably get. He seems quite callous though in permitting his fans to think conspiracy theorizing is okay.

I've also noticed, how much of Eric's position just washes over me, without me realizing that he has just said a bunch of stuff unintelligible to me. He's presented that argument that people don't need and perhaps suffer by having everything dumbed down for them, but I tend not to compare and contrast this with thinkers like Chomsky, Blyth, Harris, De Botton and Varoufakis who seem to have arrived at the opposite conclusion and in many cases test for content via intelligibility to say, a child. My marketing degree would also disagree, this sink-or-swim philosophy just strikes me as a terrible approach to communication, but I'm agnostic as to whether an authority in marketing might point out circumstances in which alienating speech becomes a lure like hard-to-get tactics in courtship.

I have to imagine Eric listening to Judith Butler making the argument that there's no need to abandon rarefied academic speak for the benefit of an audience, and wonder if he'd agree that audiences stand to benefit by assuming the cost of deciphering speech in order to grow or, alternate hypothesis retreat into a safe bubble of self-selected sympathetic people who can dismiss criticism from outsiders. From memory Eric kind of out and out said he was willing to cull his own audience to the ones willing to do the homework, which sounds too much like a desire for 'true believers only' for my comfort.

I don't know myself, I'm agnostic. I'm just willing to start betting, based on confidence in a state of uncertainty.

I would love to see Dr. Grande's take, and I'm tempted to call the Athiest Experience and try and get Matt's take, but I imagine it would be 'Eric's not here, tell us what you believe and why' I suspect the big avenue to explore is ordinary human psychology, and the perils of dismissing its explanatory power.