IIXI.

Traditionally, the extent to which a trait is genetic is assessed using the heritability statistic, which denotes the extent to which variation in a trait is caused by genes. This is estimated using pairs of twins or family members of different relatedness.

If members of a household are all similar to each other, regardless of their genetic similarity, then it will be concluded that the trait is strongly downstream of a shared environment; if people in the same household don’t tend to share a trait, it is concluded that it’s downstream of the unshard environment; and if similarity in a trait tracks genetic similarity, it’s concluded to be highly heritable. Most traits are caused by all three of these factors.

Proxies for athletic ability tend to be highly heritable: 85% for height, 80-90%1 for reaction time, 55% for BMI, 60-80% for bone density, 50-70% for VO2% max, and 50-70% for measures of strength:

Twin studies are not exactly the most uncontroversial scientific method. I think they, and family/adoptee studies like them, are generally defensible. These estimates of heritability vary little, if at all, between countries. It doesn’t when it comes to height2 or education, though the heritability of BMI does have a little international variation.

Athletic improvement is a multi-stage process. First, people have to be motivated to get better in the first place. Independent of motivation, some people train in more efficient and functional ways, take different drugs, and have different diets. Finally, people’s bodies respond to training and diet in different ways.

When focuing on the genetics of athletic ability, people seem to hyperfocus on the last stage — the differences in bodily responses to training — and ignore everything that comes before it. The problem here is that everything is heritable — a finding so uncontroversial, it’s been called the first law of behavioural genetics. The heritability of people’s persistent interests is about 66%, and the heritability of dietary habits is about 30%.

In the field of intelligence enhancement, an argument called ‘Algernon’s argument’ — that if there was an easy way to optimise intelligence, nature would have already found it. This logic fails incredibly badly for athletics. Steroids are even more effective than resistance training for building muscle; 50% of olympic athletes admit to being on performance enhancing drugs, despite their illegality. Even legal supplements like protein, creatine, beta-alanine, and caffeine have small to moderate effects on performance. Eating protein and supplementing creatine have basically zero undesirable side effects; the case of caffeine is more debatable.

III.

So, let me be clear. The idea that racial groups that evolved separately for 50,000 years have completely identical genetic predispositions to physical abilities is insane.

The idea that the causes of racial or international differences in sports performance are strongly downstream of environmental or cultural factors is not, though.

Empirically, international differences in grip are massive. The difference in strength between Polish or Swedish men (45kg) and Pakistani men (~22kg) is 23kg, equivalent to 2.6 standard deviations. That’s comparable to 6.5 inches in height, $200,000 in salary, or 39 IQ points.

Now, if we look at the grip strength of South Asian men who live in Britain — not just ones who were born there, but who just live there, the picture is very different. Their grip strength is only 6kg lower than that of British whites:

Because of differences in sample composition, it’s difficult to make exact comparisons between South Asians in Britain and those in South Asia. After making a few assumptions3, I estimated the between-group heritability of grip strength between Northern Europeans and South Asians — in their respective countries — to be 16-28%. Much lower than the heritability of strength at the individual level, which is closer to 60%

As much of a meme ‘variance within vs between’ has become in behavioural genetics because of one specific and infamous example, the idea still applies in the wild.

A little known fact — Chinese youth are now as tall as their American counterparts:

XAXA.

Differences in athletic performance between countries and races has attracted quite a bit of popular and academic attention. Genetics are a hazy explanation for these differences. Sometimes accurate, other times nonsensical.

Those advocating for the hereditarian explanation cite radical overrepresentation of East African runners in endurance competition, or that of West African runners in spriting. Similarly, one could bring up examples that support evironmentally-downstream views: despite the fact that only 11% of the Moroccan diaspora lives outside of Morocco, 73% of the country’s world cup team was born abroad.

The case of Kenyan endurance runners is interesting — it’s clear there are some genetic advantages at play: evolved respiratorial efficiency due to living at high altitude, and an ectomorphoic build that is more suited to running: better at dissipating heat, lighter on the knees.

There is also a cultural factor: there is a tradition where Kenyan schoolchildren run to school, and are incentivised to compete in athletic events. Still, those traditions and environmental factors wouldn’t exist without the genetic advantages; genetically gifted Kenyans are probably more likely to take advantage of them.

Powerlifting, on the other hand, favours more mesomorphic physiques, which are more common in Europe. Predictably, weightlifting is dominated by whites; Korean bodybuilders, believe it or not, are pretty good too. On a per capita basis, Eastern Europeans and people from the Caucasus fare the best.

Kenyans in endurance running remind me of the phenomenon of Koreans in League of Legends (LoL), the most popular esport — meaning competitive video game. Of the top 50 pro players with highest tournament winnings, 56% were born in Korea, 28% were born in China, 14% were born in Europe, and 1 was born in Taiwan. Even ignoring their overrepresentation relative to the global population, South Koreans only constitute 3% of the entire East Asian population; there are as many East Asians living abroad as there are living in South Korea.

European and American LoL teams frequently import Korean players because they’re much better. There is no scramble for racially Asian players who grew up in the West.

In Dota 2, Koreans make up a total of 0% of the top 50 highest paid players ever. Not because they lack a Dota 2 gene, but because the game isn’t popular there. In physical sports, it’s often difficult to separate a region’s cultural preference for a sport and their talent for it. In gaming, it is possible to separate the two, and it’s easy to see that the preferences have a massive impact on national overrepresentation.

Koreans were incredibly dominant in the early days of Starcraft — as in, maybe only 2-5 of the top 50 players in that time were non-Koreans. They fell off after other games became more popular and Western players started getting better; now Korean and non-Korean players are roughly at parity with each other.

Unsurprisingly, hereditarian explanations for differences in ability between nations are unpopular in the esports scene, even among professional players and staff.

Explanations for Korean dominance in esports vary. So far, I’ve seen the following theories: Koreans are better at handling criticism from other players or coaches; Koreans are able to practice against better players — particularly, this is an explanation for why the gap is so large, not why it appeared in the first place; IQ; better internet and lower ping in Korea; and cultural factors surrounding competition and the serious nature of gaming in Korea.

The difference in practice environment seems like a believable explanation as to why the gap is so large — one of the best Western Starcraft players, Naniwa, would say that, when he travelled to Korea, he would fair poorly against even B-tier Korean players. After a few weeks, he would rapidly improve, and become competitive with the top Korean players.

There’s definitely something to the IQ story, but it is a bad explanation for Korean dominance in particular. South Korea is a coutnry with a national IQ of 103, and is better than America, Europe, and China, which all have national IQs in the 95-100 range, and vastly larger populations. So much larger that not even the tail-effect argument makes any sense, mathematically. Ethnically, most of the players on Western teams are either white or asian; there’s a surprisingly large number of Turkish and Arabic players too.

Then we have the overrepresentation of black athletes in the NFL and NBA.

Statistically, 70% of NBA players were black in 2023; in 2019, 59% of the NFL was.

If we look at the general population, black people are more athletic than whites: 1kg higher in grip strength and higher bone density. To actually test whether that causes their overrepresentation in sports would require a precise estimation of race differences in athletic ability for that particular sport in a large, nationally representative sample — which doesn’t exist, to my knowledge. And then we still have the issue that, even if we have that measurement, there’s no guarantee that the difference is due to genes.

If we assume that the overrepresentation is due to group differences in athletic ability relevant to the sport — which I don’t believe, we can calculate the athletic advantage black people have over the rest of the American population.

14,000 professional athletes are employed in the USA, and there are 90 million Americans between the ages of 20 and 40 — that’s z = 3.544. It’s a little difficult to make a z-score here, because there is selection for the particular sport too. Given black people are 13% of the US population, the advantage in athletic ability in basketball would have to be d = 0.73; for football, it would have to be d = 0.545.

Those aren’t trivial differences, by any means. Black people are the same height as whites, and are not much stronger than them — their grip strength is only 1kg (d = 0.22) higher. Their specific build — tall and lean — is definitely more suited to basketball; in football, it would depend on the position.

Discussions over what the null hypothesis should be, what qualifies as evidence, and what qualifies as good evidence — frankly — don’t interest me. It’s a boring debate.

XIII.

People have noted that ethnicities genetically adapt to their environment: Tibetans have a gene that make them better at tolerating environments that lack oxygen; the Bajau people have enlarged spleens that allow them to tolerate long periods of diving.

Genes have been identified with non-negligible effects on performance in sports, such as the ACTN3 gene, where the RR and RX polymorphisms correlate with better performance in sports that require sprinting or power; the XX polymorphism correlates with better performance in endurance. Only 1-3% of black people have the XX genotype, 18% of whites do, and 25% of asians do.

After screening 476 initial registrations, 25 studies were included in the final analysis (13 different countries; 14,541 participants). In power athletes, the RX genotype was predominant over the two other genotypes: RR versus RX (OR 0.70; 95% CI 0.57–0.85, p = 0.0005), RR versus XX (OR 4.26; 95% CI 3.19–5.69, p < 0.00001), RX versus XX (OR 6.58; 95% CI 5.66–7.67, p < 0.00001). The R allele was higher than the X allele (OR 2.87; 95% CI 2.35–3.50, p < 0.00001) in power athletes. Additionally, the frequency of the RR genotype was higher in power athletes than in non-athletes (OR 1.48; 95% CI 1.25–1.75, p < 0.00001). The RX genotype was similar in both groups (OR 0.84; 95% CI 0.71–1.00, p = 0.06). The XX genotype was lower in power athletes than in controls (OR 0.73; 95% CI 0.64–0.84, p < 0.00001). Furthermore, the R allele frequency was higher in power athletes than in controls (OR 1.28; 95% CI 1.19–1.38, p < 0.00001). Conversely, a higher frequency of X allele was observed in the control group compared to power athletes (OR 0.78; 95% CI 0.73–0.84, p < 0.00001). On the other hand, the frequency of the RR genotype was higher in power athletes than in endurance athletes (OR 1.27; 95% CI 1.09–1.49, p = 0.003). The frequency of the RX genotype was similar in both groups (OR 1.07; 95% CI 0.93–1.24, p = 0.36). In contrast, the frequency of the XX genotype was lower in power athletes than in endurance athletes (OR 0.63; 95% CI 0.52–0.76, p < 0.00001). In addition, the R allele was higher in power athletes than in endurance athletes (OR 1.32; 95% CI 1.11–1.57, p = 0.002). However, the X allele was higher in endurance athletes compared to power athletes (OR 0.76; 95% CI 0.64–0.90, p = 0.002). Finally, the genotypic and allelic frequency of ACTN3 genes were similar in male and female power athletes.

An ACTN3-downstream theory would predict black people to be poor endurance runners and asians to be good ones. In practice, this isn’t true because black people have ectomorphic physiques which are better suited to running.

Black people also have fewer repeats of the CAG polymorphism on the androgen receptor gene than whites, which has been hypothesised to cause higher androgen sensitivity.

There are locker room theories about national/ethnic differences in sport performance being downstream from willingness/ability to use steroids and their physiological response to them. Empirically, hispanic and black teenagers are about equally likely to claim they use anabolic steroids… if they are straight.

I assume the elevated rates of steroid use in sexual minorities are due to normal teenagers lying about their behaviour for fun.

If we’re talking about differences in the USA, then rates anabolic steroid use do not explain race differences in athletic performance, but perhaps their response to them at the top level could. It’s not inconceivable, however, that access to more and better performance enhancing drugs in the Soviet Union contributed to their success in weightlifting.

Contrary to popular belief, race differences in total testosterone are minimal, if they exist at all:

This evidence only refutes the insane version of the theory, which is that genes play zero role in race differences in athletic ability. Not the empirically supported one — that environmental factors play a large role in international differences in athletic ability, or that there are race differences in sports selection that are caused by cultural factors.

It’s notable that sports dominated by black people tend to be those that require less equipment and money: running, basketball, and football; the only exception is weightlifting, where white performance is higher due to differences in physical morphology. The racial demographics of boxing in the USA shifted over time: it was first dominanted by Jews — no joke — in the early 1900s, then Irish and Italian, and now black and hispanic. This tracks poverty more than any real biological difference.

In fact, Jews entered the ranks of American boxing in large numbers and by 1928, were the dominant nationality in professional prizefighting, fol¬ lowed by the Italians and the Irish. Ten years later, Jews sank to third place, preceded by the Italians and the Irish. When World War II ended and the G.I. Bill of Rights and other avenues of advancement became available, boxing was no longer attractive to the Jews as participants. By 1950, there were virtually no Jewish boxers, and their number has been minuscule ever since. A similar decline occurred among Jewish trainers, but Jewish managers, promoters, and matchmakers continue to maintain a presence.

The traits that cause differences in performance like height or bone density are polygenic. As such, the same will be true for genes that cause differences in performance in sports.

Normally, when talking about the subject of race and athletics, people attack the idea of racial categories, and how well they map on to genetic differences. It is true, for example, that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than outside of it. The fact of the matter is that people dislike racial categorisation because they find it uncomfortable for social and emotional reasons, not because of any scientific or statistical beliefs. If accuracy was the only objection, then they would call for more genetically-informed racial terminology, and they… don’t.

If we want to complain about broad and cloudy concepts, the obvious culprit here is the idea of ‘athletic ability’, not race. Sometimes, the traits that make you good at one sport are antagonistic to what makes people good at others; some muscle fibers are optimised for strength, others are optimised for endurance.

People with hypermobile joints are much more suited for dancing than long distance running; bone density prevents injuries, but makes swimming more difficult; muscle fibers are optimised for strength or endurance; lanky people are better at running; stocky people are better at weightlifting. Professional athletics is looking for a microniche where your body performs 0.2% better than other athletes.

XIY.

To summarise, I think the most clear genetically caused group-level advantages are differences in frame type: the tall and narrow frame of Africans make them better runners, while the compact frame of Europeans make them better powerlifters.

The causes of their relative representation rates in complex sports: tennis, soccer, combat sports, basketball, and football — is more debatable. This is where, I think, cultural selection becomes a much better explanation. The endurance and reaction time of whites might be an advantage in tennis, but so would the speed and power of a black person. The fact that great tennis players tend to be white is probably because most people who play tennis are, well, white.

I.

Regarding my father’s inability to build muscle; Jews and American Indians aren’t exactly the most stereotypically athletic ethnic groups. If we look at statistics on differences in grip strength between races, Hispanics only trail whites by 4lb — 0.37 standard deviations. So my dad rolled the wrong genes at an individual level.

Otherwise, my dad is athletically gifted and active. I haven’t beat him in tennis a single time, and he often plays with people 10-30 years younger than him. He is 55.

The only edge I have on him, controlling for age, is hypertrophy and reaction time. The advantage doesn’t map on to a difference in the ACTN3 gene; we both have the endurance variation.

I have my own athletic limitations: AMPD1 deficiency and joint hypermobility. I checked my dad’s genome, and he carries an allele for the former disorder — which is recessive. He complains that his joints are too stiff, not too flexible.

Funnily enough, AMPD1 deficiency is 3x more common in white gentiles than Jews, and even rarer in American Indians.

The common thread in our athletic strengths and weaknesses is not race, or even genes for that matter. There isn’t even one.

1

Increases after correcting for the unreliability of reaction time:

set.seed(1)

n_black <- round(38929319 / 10)
n_white <- round(223553265 / 10)

black <- rnorm(n_black, mean = 0.54, sd = 1)
white <- rnorm(n_white, mean = 0, sd = 1)

both <- data.frame(
  race = c(rep("Black", n_black),
           rep("White", n_white)),
  performance = c(black, white))


##dawdaw
#awdawd
#awda##

nfl <- both %>% filter(performance > 3.51)

nfl %>% group_by(race) %>% summarise(n = n())

5828/10855

####################

n_black <- round(38929319 / 10)
n_white <- round(223553265 / 10)

black <- rnorm(n_black, mean = 0.73, sd = 1)
white <- rnorm(n_white, mean = 0, sd = 1)

both <- data.frame(
  race = c(rep("Black", n_black),
           rep("White", n_white)),
  performance = c(black, white))


##dawdaw
#awdawd
#awda##

nba <- both %>% filter(performance > 3.51)

nba %>% group_by(race) %>% summarise(n = n())

10671/15623

BPC-157 probably works as a healing agent, but it might cause anhedonia and cancer. Whether it should be taken depends on the situation at hand. In terms of what parts of the body the drug acts on, perhaps the better question to ask which ones it does not heal — there are studies that find positive effects on joint, muscle, and even gut recovery.

Low doses (0.1-123mcg/day) are likely sufficient for humans; the conventional doses (200-1000mcg per day) that are recommended online are much higher than the ones used in animals, controlling for body weight. Multi-day dosing could potentially increase the drug’s potency.

About 20% of people on reddit who took BPC-157 report anhedonia — the inability to feel pleasure or pain — as a side effect. It’s possible that BPC-157 interacts with catecholaminergics (SSRIs/NDRIs/etc), and counteracts their effects, potentially inducing anhedonia or withdrawal. I took it while on adderall, and that might have factored into the anhedonia I got from it. I quit, and it went away. Most people report the side effect being temporary; a few say it was permanent.

The science

BPC-157 is a peptide that acts as a broad-spectrum healing agent. It can be taken orally or injected into the body; it’s considered to effectively repair ligaments, muscles, bones, skin, the gut, and much more. We don’t know how BPC-157 works. Most of the theories (e.g. VEGF activation, NO-1 modulation), involve the compound activating receptors that lead to the the body spending more resources on healing itself. We don’t know if the body even makes BPC-157; the peptide itself is derived from a protein found in gastric juice — which doesn’t leave the digestive system.

Human studies on the compound itself are bad, typically containing no control group or an extremely small number of subjects. Dosages, drug interactions, effect sizes, and side effects have not been documented. Typically the recommendation online is to take 200-1000mcg of BPC-157 daily, cycled for 4-8 weeks, then 2-4 weeks off. Quite a large dose compared to what the animal literature uses.

There’s several justifications that one could make for that dose. If there is a dose-response relationship between the peptide and its effect, then it would be ideal to take a higher dose. It’s possible the pharmacokinetics of the drug differ significantly between humans and animals, making it so humans require larger doses for comparable effects.

These are not bad ideas; the recommended doses are still absurdly high.

Let me pull up a few rat studies. In this one, doses as low as 10ng/kg — 0.7 mcg in humans — are as effective as doses of 10 mcg/kg. That’s a 1000x difference.

The context here is that they disconnected the muscle and bone in the quadriceps of some rats. Apparently, an injury that does not heal on its own in their species; adding BPC-157 to their water reattached the muscle to the bone.

A different study on healing severed achilles tendons in rats found something similar, though the rats in the control group also healed eventually. It sped up the healing process by about 10-20%, in all doses except for 10 pg/kg, which was completely ineffective.

BPC-157 research is infamously concentrated in a Croatian research group led by Sikiric, the developer of the drug. A boring criticism; there are also studies conducted by people outside that circle that also find positive results.

A Korean study administered some rats a single injection of saline, BPC-157, or morphine. 60 minutes later, they either injected them with formalin (toxin) or made a small cut to their hind paws — a 2x3 study design. They sowed up the incisions and treated with anti-biotics. They then monitored their responses to pain over the next seven days.

Rats treated with BPC-157 had more blunted responses to pain, indicating either a better recovery or an anesthetic effect. Rats treated with morphine fared better after it was administered, then worsened, probably because of withdrawal.

In the formalin test, rats treated with BPC-157 flinched less than those administered with saline 10 minutes after the formalin was injected; but not 10-60 minutes later (in phase 2).

There existence of a dose-response effect here looks quite ambiguous, despite the statements of the authors. It also might be the case that the dose-response effect differs between effects — the anesthetic and therapeutic ones — assuming they exist in the first place. The doses of BPC-157 used here are also quite high, above when you would even expect the dose-response effect to appear.

It’s pretty clear BPC-157 works in animals, it would be overkill to go through more studies. There is still the question of human extrapolation, whether doses in rats generalise to people.

Typically, humans are given lower doses of drugs than rats are, due to their lower relative surface area and slower metabolism. The FDA’s heuristic is that, for coverting rat/mouse drug doses to humans, the amount must be 6.2-12.5x lower controlling for body weight. This is not necessarily the case for BPC-157, but there is no particular reason to think that it does not.

In rats, the bioavailability of BPC-157 is 14-19%; within beagle dogs it’s 45-51%. Rats are more genetically similar to humans than dogs; regression-to-the-mean logic implies it’s likely that the human bioavailability is higher than the rat one. Unless BPC-157’s effects within humans differ significantly from those observed in rats and mice, it’s possible that doses as small as 0.1 mcg1 are effective in humans.

Which is insane, and likely wrong, but keep in mind that BPC-157 is a compound that activates receptors. It’s unlikely it does the dirty work of repairing the body itself.

My intuition is that the rate limiting factor in the efficacy of BPC-157 is the volume of injected liquid, not dosage. At the 0.01-0.05ml range, it becomes more difficult to reliably control the volume due to various factors: dead space in the syringe, the precision of human muscles, and slanting (e.g. one part of the liquid being on the 4 unit bar, and the other part being on the 2 unit bar).

Most BPC-157 vials have a volume of 3ml and 5-10mg of peptide powder. This means that, realistically speaking, the smallest consistently injectable dose of BPC-157 is somewhere between 30-100mcg depending on the vial and syringe. Unless the solution is deliberately diluted by removing reconstituted peptide and replacing it with BAC water.

Ignoring the constraints of injecting, I’m not really sure what the optimal dose is. If we assume a worst case scenario: the human bioavailability is 10x lower than in rats, the surface area conversion factor doesn’t apply, and maybe humans even have some unique quality that makes the drug 10x less effective — that gives us a worst-case dosage of 62-123mcg2. Still much lower than what people tend to use.

My intuition regarding the dose-response effect is that injecting more is not better. Even when people have severe and urgent injuries like gunshot wounds, there is little the body can do to speed up the recovery process. Even with all the drugs, energy, and water in the world. Releasing more healing signalling molecules should theoretically redirect more resources towards the injury, but the thing is that it seems the signalling can only do so much. Gunshot wounds take at least several weeks to heal, even with state of the art medical care and optimal health.

There is also the question of dosage frequency. People typically recommend daily doses + cycling the drug. I don’t think this is necessarily ineffective, but the drug clears from the body pretty quickly; the half life is lower than 30 minutes… in rats and dogs. People who want stronger effects might find better results from dosing 3 times a day rather than 3x as much at once.

Cancer

BPC-157 is a generally well-tolerated drug. Humans taking it report few side effects, and neither do studies on animals. A lethal dose has not been established.

One of the major concerns with the drug is that it causes cancer. BPC-157 is an angiogenic drug, which means that it contributes to the formation of new blood vessels. Theoretically, these could latch on to new tumours and contribute to their growth — causing cancer.

Some anti-cancer drugs, like Axitinib, treat cancer by doing the exact opposite of what these peptides do: inhibit angiogenesis through the VEGFR pathway (however that works). Many other cancer treatments are angiogenic inhibitors, for that matter.

Things that have been proven to cause cancer in humans are almost always shown to be carcinogens in animals. So much, that some scientists think that all human carcinogens also cause cancer in animals. I’ve heard some say that arsenic causes cancer in humans but not animals, but that’s it. That said, there is no evidence (not saying bad evidence!) BPC-157 causes cancer in animals. It’s all theoretical.

No evidence does not mean an absence of effect here; testing for carcinogenic effects properly requires a specialised methodology due to the fact most animals have shorter lifespans. In some cases, animals (e.g. mice) genetically altered to have cancer mutations or the implantation of tumours into animals to see if the cancer grows.

Some people have claimed that BPC-157 is an anti-cancer drug. That’s not necessarily false, but there is no good empirical evidence to support that claim:

The comment by Sikiric et al. cites “anti-tumor potential” yet offers no published in vivo tumor-growth or metastasis studies. A single melanoma cell-line experiment from 2004 [8] (unreplicated) is insufficient to support anticancer claims, while pro-angiogenic signaling remains a plausible tumor-promoting hazard. To date, no published in vivo data demonstrate that BPC 157 inhibits tumor progression, reduces tumor volume, or suppresses metastasis.

In line with this, in the comment, the authors claim that oncologic risks are “entirely excluded,” yet they fail to cite a single in vivo study involving solid tumors. Paradoxically, their own previous work demonstrates BPC 157 activates angiogenic signaling—precisely the kind of mechanism known in oncology to potentially support tumor growth. The study by Kang et al. [9], which was cited by the group of Sikirc et al. as a solid confirmation of in vivo anti-tumor activity mediated by BPC peptide, primarily focused on alleviating symptoms of cachexia and inflammation in tumor-bearing animals, rather than inhibiting tumor growth or destroying cancer cells. Therefore, such studies cannot be interpreted as the evidence of BPC 157’s antitumor activity but rather as a potential supportive effect on the overall condition of the diseased organism.

I’d say it’s likely BPC-157 causes cancer; we don’t have the proof it does yet.

Anhedonia

Imagine if there was a drug that turned you into the king of the world, but removed your ability to feel anything. Would you take it? I assume not.

The argument about BPC-157 potentially causing cancer dominates scientific discourse, but people who actually take the drug seem to be complaining more about anhedonia. Particularly, when they take it with certain medications; the common link I see between them is that they are catecholaminergics: adderall, SSRIs, and whatnot.

The “experts” claim that there is “no evidence” that BPC-157 causes anhedonia. Of course there is no scientific evidence it does. Where are the human studies?

I took BPC-157 for about a week, in the form of KLOW: a combination of GHK-cu, BPC-157, TB-500, and KPV. Took it because of struggles with chronic knee pain + a subluxated shoulder. Tried various doses out of curiosity — 66mcg, 132mcg, and 625 mcg (intramuscular, into deltoid). Didn’t notice any differences in effects.

Felt great on it, regardless of the dose. Nasal passage was clearer, pain/fatigue improved, and it was just easier to move my body. The shoulder seemed to start recovering faster, but it’s hard to tell because of the way recovery works.

Unfortunately, I felt anhedonic. I quit. I recovered within a week.

I was also taking adderall at the same time. I quit that too, as a precaution.

Many such cases. Somebody asked about said side effect on reddit, and people commented on whether they got it. 17 said yes, 58 said no; 9 were complicated cases.

That means 20% of people in the thread who took BPC-157 reported anhedonia. A large number; you’d struggle to find a figure that high, even for something like SSRIs.

Apparently for some people, the anhedonia is permanent (!). One of the worst side effects you could get from any drug. Even worse than getting cancer — at least you can still enjoy life.

Generally, I’m pretty skeptical of cases like these. It could be an attribution error, where the permanent side effect was caused by something else. It could be psychosomatic: people getting in their own heads about whether they are experiencing something so much that they actually experience it. That doesn’t mean the drug didn’t cause anhedonia; it just did it through a different causal pathway.

Here’s the problem. Now you know you could get anhedonia from taking BPC-157. So if you take it, you will monitor your body to check if it happens to you. The problem is that a lot of things that are enjoyable are that way because you aren’t checking yourself. You become absorbed. Asking yourself whether you like a video game pulls you out of the trance, and makes the magic disappear. But if you don’t check yourself, you could be wrecking yourself. Quite the catch 22.

When I was on BPC-157, sometimes I would just stare at a computer screen, wanting to care about something, but I couldn’t. I was worried about whether I permanently damaged, and didn’t even feel any dread about what I did. I just felt empty.

I checked out some of the animal studies on how BPC-157 interacts with amphetamines and hedonic responses. It seems that BPC-157 counteracts some of the effects of amphetamines on rats, including repetitive behaviour; it also seems to heal disruptions in behaviour caused by chronic amphetamine use.

So maybe the anhedonia wasn’t caused by BPC-157 itself, but by nullifying the effects of adderall, which then sent me into withdrawal — which caused the anhedonia.

I am not here to give medical advice — I do not have a medical license — but if you also have chronic pain caused by joint hypermobility, it’s unlikely that BPC-157 or anything in KLOW will fix it. It may do so temporarily, but it would be unwise to take a drug that may cause cancer for your whole life, even if it is cycled.

The legal question

I think BPC-157, and all peptides like it, should be legalised anyway. No matter how dangerous. Logic is simple: before legalisation, main and side effects can’t be proven the same way. If it’s legalised, and it’s dangerous, the danger will show up in the data. Then we can make them illegal. That is the meaning of accelerationism.

What was initially an inside joke at school took a turn for the worst. Around the age of 15, I started weightlifting, and ended up injuring my elbows and knees. To the point that it hurt to walk, so I limped instead. I even used crutches a few times.

I wasn’t sure what was the problem. Maybe I was lifting too often, or with poor form… which was probably true.

The exact chain of events is blurry, but at some point, I started to connect the dots between flexible joints and joint pain. It’s a common complaint of patients with hypermobile joint disorders — flexible joints tend to overextend and get injured, and are less capable of sustaining weight.

So my mother drove me to the hospital to see a doctor. I told him that my joints were in pain, and that I thought it was connected to the flexibility of my own joints. He was pretty convinced of the flexibility after a demonstration. The doctor, unfortunately, said there was nothing he could about the pain, that there was no cure for my condition.

I stopped listening after he said that. Later, my mom told me that he thought I did have some kind of hypermobility disorder. I haven’t bothered seeing a doctor about the issue since.

II.

Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) refers to 13 different connective tissue disorders, unified by joint hypermobility and strechy skin. Lesser-known complications incude cardiovascular failure, joint pain, and scoliosis. Some people with the disorder do not have the characteristic strechy skin. Treatments are limited in variety and efficacy — typically losing weight and strength training are encuraged; sometimes opioids are prescribed for pain, but doctors are generally wary of doing that. The disorder itself is genetic and incurable.

It also turns out that Ehlers Danlos syndrome is correlated with a variety of symptoms and medical conditions: narcolepsy, POTS, ADHD, autism, LGBT identification, MCAS, allergies, IBS, and dysautonomia. That covers, well, everything in the body — the brain, sex, cardiovascular system, gastrointestinal system, immune system, and nervous system.

Some of the effect sizes are large: 42.5% of EDS patients have a psychiatric diagnosis — the condition is most strongly associated with autism (7.4x) of all mental disorders. Transgenders are 132x (?) more likely to have a hypermobile joint disorder. Which replicates too — a different study found 17% of teenagers with EDS are trans.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe some of these associations are real. I have some of these comorbidities1, and so do my siblings. They also have flexible joints, but not to the same extreme. You could say they regressed to the mean.

It would also be surprising if mutations affecting collagen, the most common protein in the body, were specific to just joints and skin. It’s also found in the brain, gut, teeth, cornea, and spine. Name a random body part: it’s more likely than not that collagen is there.

There is a theory the correlations might be specific to clinical samples due to selection, but it’s hard to test that theory, since EDS is such a rare disorder. This has caused people to say there is “no evidence” EDS is associated with these conditions.

Bad evidence is bad, but it is still evidence.

Related: The Phrase “No Evidence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication

The critics of the comorbidity literature are essentially arguing that the symptoms of connective tissue disorders are limited to the skin and joints, even though there is connective tissue everywhere in the body. Which is a ridiculous null hypothesis. It’s not even a good alternative hypothesis.

III.

On reddit, people with hypermobility disorders report being ignored, belittled, or rejected by their doctors for seeking care. The r/ehlersdanlos subreddit even has posts that advise people on how to work with doctors to get medical testing:

70% of people diagnosed with a joint hypermobility disorder are women; about 95% (?) of the people seeking care for it are female. It’s an autosomically-caused disorder, so the true ratio is 50/50, but sex differences in musculature and the formation of connective tissue lead to the disorder having an exaggerated expression in women.

There’s another variable at play. I assume a lot of the other men with joint hypermobility did what I did: went to the hospital, got told the condition isn’t curable, and left. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to seek diagnoses and care for medical conditions in general.

The male strategy is definitely more culturally valorised. Is it better? Not really. Sometimes, not seeking medical care for uncertain or benign symptoms works: the symptom either doesn’t matter or it goes away on its own. Other times, it leads to late diagnoses or symptoms not getting proper treatment.

Ehlers Danlos Syndrome has acquired a reputation for being an “instagrammable illness”, one that people fake or aesthetise for attention. This has been invoked as an explanation for why hypermobile joint disorders have so many comorbidities.

The diagnostic environment for people with EDS is already complicated. Then you add in the instagrammable ilness stigma, which makes doctors suspicious of people seeking care for the condition, maybe for good reason.

These debates about the social dynamics of EDS bore me. Muddled by Judeochristian2 morals and idiots on the internet. Let’s pull out the economics.

A patient has physiological problems — pain or fatigue — perhaps caused by joint hypermobility. Incentives pull them away from the medical system because it does not reliably diagnose the condition or provide options for treatment. So people pivot to the internet to get what doctors normally give them: validation, information, and suggestions for treatment.

But it’s still the internet: full of hypochondriacs, grifters, false information, questionable anecdotes, and people who just want attention. That then affects the reputation of the disorder, which makes its diagnosis more difficult.

The fact that EDS is incurable, rare, and illegible enables people to fake it. So they do. Not much more depth to it than that.

In other words, Ehlers Danlos syndrome being a meme is downstream of economic incentives and the biological constraints of the disorder. Not random social trends, or evil people in a room full of smoke.

IV.

Oh, and I forgot to say. Ehlers Danlos Syndrome is a made up disorder.

Worse, it’s not even good at being a made up disorder.

It’s more analogous to ‘intellectual disability’, than something concrete like Down’s syndrome — except that it affects connective tissue and not the brain.

There is no consistency in what is and is not ‘Ehlers Danlos Syndrome’. If it was mutations in collagenous genes, then Alport syndrome would qualify. It’s not hypermobility: there are genetic disorders associated with hypermobility that do not form part of the EDS umbrella (e.g. Marfan syndrome). There are even types of EDS, like Musculocontractural EDS (mcEDS), that are associated with stiffer joints.

Maybe Ehlers Danlos syndrome is supposed to be an umbrella term for joint hypermobility disorders with specific causes that generalise past skin and joints — like brittle cornea syndrome. Using the intelligence analogy — joint hypermobility is analogous to having a low IQ, independent of whether there is a specific cause, like brain trauma or a chromosome deletion. Ehlers Danlos is more like Down Syndrome: not only do people with Down’s have a low IQ, but there is a specific cause (trisomy) and accompanying comorbidities, like obesity or a short neck.

This would make sense… if there wasn’t another vague diagnostic label under the EDS umbrella — hEDS. A joint hypermobility disorder with an unknown cause. Translated into English, it means “there’s something wrong with your connective tissue and we have no idea what it is”. And that still ignores the many disorders that feature joint hypermobility that are not categorised as subtypes of Ehlers Danlos syndrome.

A different way to see it: there are 28 different types of collagen. Coded by 44 genes and 2 pseudogenes. In total3, those genes add up to about 6,567,598 base pairs. Assuming ~95% of mutations are benign, that gives us 300,000 potentially causal variants — most of these will not vary in the general population, and if they do, only a few will have large effects. And then you have all of the genes that affect connective tissue that have nothing to do with collagen.

If so many genetic mutations and variants could affect the expression of connective tissue, the reasoning behind grouping a bunch of disorders under one label starts to look a little unreasonable.

‘Syndromic intellectual disability’ is a useful label, because it gestures at a problem (low IQ) and the suspicion of a single cause, without having to identify one. ‘Ehlers Danlos syndrome’ is not, because it is pretending to identify a specific cause without actually doing it. And everybody loses their minds: patients, doctors, medical researchers, and people on reddit.

V.

The beighton score is the IQ test of joint hypermobility. It involves testing whether the thumbs, elbows, knees, and spine can bend past a certain point, and adding up the nine tests into one score.

An OK idea which… somehow turned into the gold standard hypermobility test.

The biggest problem is that the expression of even a single type of Ehlers Danlos syndrome varies significantly. Among people with genetically confirmed cEDS, which supposedly causes generalised joint hypermobility, only 59% pass the beighton test:

They also reported the frequency of comorbidities. Based on a visual glance, they seem high, but not as high as the percentages in the comorbidity studies.

What’s the problem?

Circling back to the intelligence analogy, there is a consensus that an IQ test alone is awful at diagnosing intellectual disability. Not just among the people who are labelled as experts, but among the IQ-realist crowd as well.

Why? Well, it simply doesn’t work.

Let’s use 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (DiGeorge syndrome) as an example. In accordance with its name, it involves a deletion in part of the 22nd chromosome, which causes intellectual disability and some other comorbidites. These individuals score about 2 standard deviations below the average person on an IQ test.

The myth on the internet is that an IQ score of below 70 equals mental disability. If 70 was the cutoff, only half of the people who have the mutation would get diagnosed, and about 2% of the general population would be shoved into the same category; most of who do not have any specific problem, besides scoring poorly on a test.

Now, we circle back to Ehlers Danlos syndrome (this will happen many times). The reliability of the beighton test is mediocre — a meta-analysis of 24 studies found a mean inter-rater reliability of 0.75 — the authors of the publication thought that implied the beighton scale was a “highly reliable clinical tool”. An offensively incorrect interpretation4, which can be ignored for now.

When we are diagnosing people with Ehlers Danlos syndrome or another hypermobility disorder, we are dealing with outliers. Typically, outliers regress to the mean in a disproportionate way — this is called the winner’s curse in statistics.

This phenomenon makes it difficult to identify gifted students with IQ tests.

When using composite ITBS scores, which have a reliability of 0.98 (??): 50% of students who were labelled as gifted in 3rd grade would not have qualified as such, had they been tested in the 8th grade instead.

Part of this is that people have different developmental curves for intelligence, but it also has to do with the way cutoffs work. A test with a reliability of 0.9 will still misclassify 50% of the people who scored in the top 1%.

Doctors using beighton scores to diagnose Ehlers Danlos Syndrome are doing something far more ineffective: using a tool with a inter-rater (aka maximum) reliability of 0.75, to diagnose a disorder with a rarity of 1/5000.

My argument here isn’t that a lot of people are incorrectly diagnosed with hypermobility disorders by fluking the beighton, though I’m sure that happens. It’s that many people, particularly with forms of EDS that do not cause generalized hypermobility, are being screwed over by a simplistic and mediocre test.

In some cases, these missed diagnoses can make the difference between life and death. Vascular EDS in particular can lead to random arterial ruptures, which can be fatal; the life expectancy of people with the condition is about 50 years.

VI.

Medicine and psychiatry both have a problem where they want to merge classificatory and diagnostic labels. ‘EDS’ is a classification. ‘A mutation in the COL5A1 gene causing strechy skin and hypermobile joints’ is a diagnosis.

This also generalises to other debates in science — is chronic fatigue real? As a symptom, sure. As a disorder — chronic fatigue syndrome? The wrong question. If we can identify a causal pathway by which people have persistent fatigue, then why don’t we call that its own thing?

Then we have psychiatry. Is ADHD real? Or is it another way of reframing low conscientiousness/intelligence/energy/executive function, a personality type, or disliking rejection, spreadsheets, and school? Arguing ADHD is one of these things is kind of like answering the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with a colour. “I want to be red when I grow up” — “ADHD is executive dysfunction”.

ADHD is a classification used to identify problems that can be solved with stimulants.

There is an uncontested assumption in the EDS discourse that I have not seen other people highlight — whether knowing you have the disorder matters. Does knowing you have an uncurable, rare disorder actually help you? Making you feel special doesn’t count.

My vote is yes.

Let’s say God swoops down from the heavens to tell me my recurring joint pain is not caused by hypermobility.

Well, my joints are still in pain. What causes that then?

Maybe the pain is psychosomatic. Does knowing that matter? To me, it does.

What if the pain is caused by a different disorder, like rheumatoid arthritis? Well, that can actually be treated.

VII.

To have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome is to have a body that does not work, because of a disorder that does not exist. You can try going to a doctor — most of them will not know about the disorder. If they do, they might just assume you are malignering (aka a munchausen) from the get go. And if they do trust you, they are likely to use inadequate diagnostic methods like the Beighton score. And then, even with a diagnosis, there is little the doctor can do to help you, even if they care. Internet communities can give some useful information… but it’s still the internet. The truth of whether you have this nonexistent disorder will still matter to you, even if nobody understands why.

And that’s if you are lucky enough to live a developed country.

1

• Narcolepsy: probably. I have the sleepiness, hypnohallucinations, and disordered sleep. The condition accelerated around the ages of 16-20. Some symptoms, like sleepwalking and randomly falling into deep sleep, were there since I was young.

• ADHD: subclinical. Older sister, younger sister, mom, and all three of her siblings have it. Yes, all four.

• Autism: subclinical. The only psychiatrist I ever went to thought I had aspergers, but my mom pushed back against the diagnosis; it would have prevented me from going to private school (didn’t grow up in the US).

• Depression, anxiety, headaches: fortunately not.

• Allergies: cats, dogs, and probably pollen. Went into anaphylactic shock after chewing on a Brazil nut… it was so disgusting I spit it out and washed out my mouth. Some nuts really are too bitter to swallow. Dad (not hypermobile) and older sister also have problems with allergies. Thankfully, H1-blockers are highly effective and OTC.

• POTS: maybe. Ever since I was a child, I would occasionally see stars whenever I stood up. I thought that was normal, but it indicates a drop in blood pressure. My blood pressure off stimulants (~95/55) is very low. I’ve randomly fainted twice already. Sister was diagnosed with the condition; brother also faints a lot, but I don’t think he’s talked to a doctor about it.

• Tinnitus: when I was a child, I thought it was normal to hear buzzing in quiet environments. Apparently that’s, well, tinnitus. Not bothersome or particularly elevated though.

• Temporomandibular Joint Disorder: if I open my jaw far enough I hear some popping sounds. Not bothersome or notable. It’s also common in Latin Americans.

• Subluxations: they come and go. Just had a shoulder sublixation like three weeks ago.

• Wrist pain: used to have issues with it. I honestly think it was psychosomatic. My joint hypermobility is nonexistent in smaller joints; other people have reported similar experiences with gaming causing psychosomatic joint pain. Specifically, Mikyx (LoL player) reported having problems with wrist pain, which improved after reading a book about… back pain. From what I read, it identified the autonomic nervous system as being implicated in chronic pain. Don’t know if that’s actually true. My impression is that the author is saying “psychosomatic conditions cause chronic pain” in a scientific and emotionally acceptable way.

• IBS: used to have it. Changed diet. Went away. Don’t even remember what I changed, but I’m glad it’s gone. Maybe I shouldn’t ask too many questions…

• I noticed my right ring finger was deformed when I was 16 years old, and thought it was from playing video games or excessive computer use. Apparently, it’s called a swan neck deformity, a side effect observed in hypermobility disorders. Not sure if that is the actual cause though, since my small joints aren’t hypermobile.

The effect of paternal age on offspring attractiveness has recently been investigated. Negative effects are predicted as paternal age is a strong proxy for the numbers of common de novo mutations found in the genomes of offspring. As an indicator of underlying genetic quality or fitness, offspring attractiveness should decrease as paternal age increases, evidencing the fitness-reducing effects of these mutations. Thus far results are mixed, with one study finding the predicted effect, and a second smaller study finding the opposite. Here the effect is investigated using two large and representative datasets (Add Health and NCDS), both of which contain data on physical attractiveness and paternal age. The effect is present in both datasets, even after controlling for maternal age at subject’s birth, age of offspring, sex, race, parental and offspring (in the case of Add Health) socio-economic characteristics, parental age at first marriage (in the case of Add Health) and birth order. The apparent robustness of the effect to different operationalizations of attractiveness suggests high generalizability, however the results must be interpreted with caution, as controls for parental levels of attractiveness were indirect only in the present study.

The p-values check out:

Intuitively, the idea makes sense: older parents will have more genetic mutations, which will cause them to be less attractive to their peers.

The problem is that this could be confounding: that attractive parents have children at earlier ages. It’s an issue the authors were aware of, and tried to control for indirectly.

To test the extent to which confounding played a role, I checked the raw data of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which had the yearbook photos of the participants rated by 12 different researchers on the basis of their physical attractiveness. It turns out that attractive people have kids at an earlier age. The magnitude of the correlation matches the one between parental age and child attractiveness, just in the opposite direction. And it’s not like the original correlation was strong to begin with.

It holds for both men and women:

The idea that older parents have more mutations, and that those genetic alterations have negative effects on the appearance of their children is not unreasonable. What is disputed is the extent to which that correlation is causally mediated.

Chater’s thesis is that the mind is flat — superficial, simple, and unpropositional.

We think we have unconscious beliefs, personality traits, or desires that inform our thoughts and actions. The author argues those things do not exist, and that our actions and thoughts are made up based on what we have experienced before. That we believe what we do because we chose to believe it at some point in the past.

In his own words:

We have all been victims of a hoax, perpetrated on us by our own brains. Our brains are spectacular engines of improvisation that can, in the moment, generate a colour, an object, a memory, a belief or a preference, spin a story, or reel off a justification. And it is such a compelling storyteller that we are fooled into thinking that it is not inventing our thoughts ‘in the moment’ at all, but fishing them from some deep inner sea of pre-formed colours, objects, memories, beliefs or preferences, of which our conscious thoughts are merely the shimmering surface. But our mental depths are a confabulation – a fiction created in the moment by our own brain. There are no pre-formed beliefs, desires, preferences, attitudes, even memories, hidden in the deep recesses of the mind; indeed, the mind has no deep recesses in which anything can hide. The mind is flat: the surface is all there is.

What he is really arguing in the book is something more complex: that the propositionality of the mind is specific to what is conscious. Everything else is a mish-mash of neural networks that do not adhere to strict logic, and change from moment to moment.

Specifically, propositional statements like “I hate my father” and “I am allergic to apples” may arise in the brain’s conscious experience, but not correspond to the brain’s structure. There is no set of neurons that encode axioms like “I hate my father”. What ultimately decides how you react to your father is dependent on the neurons and environment, not the conscious belief.

Beyond the rhetoric, Chater does make some genuine mistakes after he lays out his premises.

Chater believes all perception is inference. That is to say, perception constructs an interpretation of reality based on sensory inputs — it’s not the inputs themselves. He loves mental illusions, and likes using them to demonstrate this.

My favourite examples are impossible shapes: things which your mind can perceive, but are not logically possible according to the rules of this universe:

Here, we aren’t just seeing a bunch of black and white dots on a paper. It feels like we are actively constructing an interpretation of the image — a shape that feels coherent, even if it is not.

Another optical illusion that helps show perception is inference: the Bs are easier to see in the second image because the grey bars fill in the conceptual blank for us. Despite the fact the amount of optical information we receive is equivalent in both images.

Where this relates to his thesis, is that what you experience is not raw data: but an interpreted and processed version of it. Conscious perception is the output of the mental process — not the inputs or the process itself.

Chater then leads these illusions to another point — that perception can only focus on one object at a time. We think that we can perceive a whole image at a time, but only a clear subsection of it is seen at a time:

This can be experienced more directly in the following optical illusion. Darting one’s eyes throughout the grid causes the black dots to appear and disappear dpeending on where focus is placed:

This has been tested more rigorously with studies using computer vision. This involves a camera which tracks where people’s eyes are focusing at a given point. Some researchers then tried testing the limits of human vision by having a text that was written entirely in gibberish except for the fragment of the text the eyes were gazing at.

This is done by having the displayed text change depending on where the computer predicted the subject was looking — this is achievable with fast refresh rates and low latency. According to Chater, their study found that people don’t notice anything is amiss as long as the distance between the center of focus and the right side of the text window is 12-15 characters.

Big if true. I checked his source, and Chater is taking the study’s conclusions too far here. The authors were wrong too, to be fair. For reference, this is the abstract:

A computer-based eye-movement controlled display system was developed for the study of perceptual processes in reading. A study was conducted to identify the region from which skilled readers pick up various types of visual information during a fixation while reading. This study involved making display changes, based on eye position, in the text pattern as the subject was in the act of reading from it, and then examining the effects these changes produced on eye behavior. The results indicated that the subjects acquired word-length pattern information at least 12 to 15 character positions to the right of the fixation point. and that this information primarily influenced saccade lengths. Specific letter- and word-shape information were acquired no further than 10 character positions to the right of the fixation point.

Early psychologists noted that people could pick out words in their peripheral vision 2-3 lines above or below where they fixated their gaze. This study was trying to evaluate how wide vision was in an experimental environment where people are actively reading.

It did this by testing whether the participants — six high school boys — were really using their peripheral vision using computer vision. They used six different types of dummy text depending on their content and spacing, and also manipulated the window lengths from 13 to 100 characters.

They then assessed how easily they read based on what the computers inferred from their vision: how long they looked at characters, and how far their eyes jumped from character to character to continue reading. Empirically, there was no statistically significant difference in objective reading skill past a window span of 25 — which is where Chater got the figure ‘12-15 characters’ (25/2 = 12.5 =~ 12-15).

The obvious problem here is the lack of power: they had six participants. If one charts the relationship between window size and the length of people’s eye movements, one can infer at what point people stop using their peripheral vision to read. Visually, to me, it seems possible that there is a window size effect until 40 characters (remember to divide by 2).

Given there is intraindividual variability in visual span, it’s likely the average is lower, but the maximum is higher.

The same logic can be applied to how long it simply took them to read — we still get the same number: 40 characters. That correponds to 10 degrees of human vision on both sides, according to page 3 of the study. And that’s the amount of vision people use to read, not necessarily what people use to see. Though that does seem to be the case, coincidentally.

Looking back at the book, 10 degrees seems to be around where human vision starts turning into garbage; right before the pupil’s blind spot.

Chater then brings us to a different theory: the brain transforms inputs into outputs; we only see the outputs, not the inputs or the process involved. Our perception is not the raw data, but an interpolation and interpretation of it based on our cognition. Thoughts and physiological reactions can be observed, but what caused those things to occur cannot.

He makes some first-principles arguments for this being the case. If our brain is a network of billions of neurons, and we are only conscious of one thing at a time, then it must be unconscious of everything else. To him, what looks like multitasking — chewing gum and walking at the same time — is the brain carrying out automatic processes that do not require cognitive resources.

If we are conscious of one thing at a time, and the brain is a network of 100 billion neurons communicating by streams of electrochemical pulses, we must necessarily be unconscious of almost everything our brain does. This should not surprise us. As we have seen, we are only ever conscious of the results of our brain’s attempts to make sense of the world – or rather, to make sense of some small part of it. Yet these results arise from a hugely complex cooperative computation, the cycle of thought, involving a substantial fraction of those 100 billion neurons and drawing on vast amounts of information from our senses and our memories.

That does not mean the brain is oblivious to everything it is not attending to. Through peripheral vision, the brain can detect unexpected motion and pay attention to them when appropriate. Keeping these processes maintained does not require the brain’s global attention; it helps direct it.

He also notes that multitasking is impossible at the cellular level because neural transmissions would become jangled and confused:

“But it is hard to see how a vast population of interconnected neurons can coordinate on more than one thing at a time, without suffering terrible confusion and interference. Each time a neuron fires, it sends an electrical pulse to all the other neurons it is linked to (typically up to 1,000). This is a good mechanism for helping neurons cooperate, as long as they are all working on different aspects of the same problem (e.g. building up different parts of a possible meaningful organization of a face, word, pattern or object). Then, by linking together, cross-checking, correcting and validating different parts of an organization (the parts of a face, the letters making up a word), it is possible gradually to build up a unified whole. But if interconnected neurons are working on entirely different problems, then the signals they pass between them will be hopelessly at crosspurposes – and neither task will be completed successfully: each neuron has no idea which of the signals it receives are relevant to the problem it is working on, and which are just irrelevant junk. So we have a general principle. If the brain solves problems through the cooperation computation of vast networks of individually sluggish neurons, then any specific network of neurons can work on just one solution to one problem at a time.”

Personally, I buy it. I’ve played thousands of hours of League of Legends, and people definitely cannot look at two things at a time — they can’t look at both the minimap and the lane.

The theory is literally false, in the sense that the brain can engage in multiple processes at a time, figuratively true in the sense that one process must dominate at all times.

Some of Chater’s thoughts on emotions are interesting. He thinks that emotional states are something that are inferred based on context, not felt. For example, our interpretations of what a man feels depends on what we see in his surroundings:

This politician looks angry alone, but elated with others:

The author1 extrapolates from there to argue that our own interpretations of our emotional states are confounded by the context. This is the most boring part of the book, so I’ll skip2 over it. In my opinion, emotions aren’t real in some strict sense, but that doesn’t have to do with the structure of the mind. The emotions are the map, physiology is the territory; the fact that emotions don’t exist is besides the point. They are descriptive labels.

Now we get to one of Chater’s biggest theories: the brain is always improvising.

My objection: if everything is improvising, then nothing is. Improvising, as a term, only makes sense when it can explain some human behaviour but not all of it.

Let’s say I want to kiss my older sister on the forehead. I drive over to her house and then do it. Chater will have you think that, because there isn’t a book in my brain commanding me to kiss her, that I improvised that action. That’s nonsensical. If she pulled a gun on me and told me to leave, I probably wouldn’t kiss her. Otherwise, it’s a pretty fixed event. Literally true, figuratively wrong.

Now, what if I just slid over to her house, had no pre-existing plan to kiss her on the forehead, and did it anyway. I’ll grant that is an improvisation, but when you strech the definition of that word to include literally everything you do, it loses its meaning. A theory of everything explains nothing. The word is used for rhetorical purposes in the book, to argue that humans are shallow.

If everything is improvising, then reading directly from a script must be too.

In a physical sense, it is impossible for the brain to be living anywhere but the moment. We only think it does not because we can remember the past, and weigh future outcomes as well as past experiences into our decisions.

The frame of improvising misleads us into thinking we are evanescent and can do anything, ignoring how much human phenotypes are stable and genetic: the 75% heritability of intelligence and personality traits, the consistency of our food preferences. Variety often hides consistency — one day I read the g-factor, then I read Metamorphosis, and then Fate/Stay Night. All different materials, but read.

Chater acknowledges the consistency of human behaviour, using the metaphor of water channels. Our thoughts are water, and they flow through the channels that already exist, and then the water flowing through the channels cuts through them:

Thoughts are like water droplets finding their way from high ground to the sea, following the channels in the landscape, whether gullies, streams or river valleys. And, in its passing, each droplet cut those channels just a little more deeply. The landscape, then, is partly a history of past water flow, as well as a guide for how water will flow in the future. In the same way, our mental life follows channels carved by our previous thoughts, and traces of our present thoughts and actions will shape how we think and act in the future.

Which is rather odd: this metaphor illustrates depth, not shallowness. It would be shallow if the landscape before the water arrived was flat, but it clearly is not. In this metaphor, it is genes that affect the distribution of the density of dirt across the mind’s landscape, the landscape’s shape, and the rate at which channels atrophy when no water runs through them.

Chater then builds on his theory that brains constantly improvise. More accurately, that humans are dispositional and cannot live anywhere but the present. But basically, he then concludes that explanations are unreliable, made up in the moment, and unreflective of mental depth.

I once read a philosopher argue that people had really shallow understandings of how the world around them worked. That they couldn’t even explain how a simple zipper did. Which is the most worthless thing I’ve seen written. You don’t need to know how zippers work, you just need to know that they close when you tug up, open when you tug down.

Chater appears to form part of this tradition.

“Whether explaining how a fridge works, how to steer a bicycle, or the origin of the tides, we have a feeling of understanding which seems wildly out of balance with the mangled and self-contradictory ex­planations we actually come up with.”

When we are asked for an explanation of something, the answer will necessarily be incomplete. If I am asked why I love my parents, I can say “many reasons” or “I don’t know”. These are true answers, but not meaningful ones. The inaccurate, abritrary nature of explanations is only a bug if you expect them to be something else.

The author cites Gazzaniga’s research3 to argue that human explanations are ad-hoc and nonsensical. This involved studying split-brain patients, who had the connections between their left and right brain severed as a treatment for epilepsy. This somehow didn’t have noticable effects on their cognition or lifestyle.

The left side of the brain controls and receives stimuli from the right side of the body, and vice versa. So my man Gazzaniga decided to see what happened when the left side of the brain was forced to explain the unexplainable: behaviour that originated from stimuli it received from the left side of the body — which is connected to the right side of the brain. It turns out that, when that happened, the split-brain participants would just make up the explanations for their unexplainable behaviour.

Consider a particularly striking study by one of the pioneers of split brain research, the psychologist and neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. He simultaneously showed a split-brain patient, P.S., different pictures on the left and right halves of the visual field.2 The left-hand picture was a snowy scene; the brain’s cross-over wiring pipes this information through to the visual cortex of the right hemisphere. The right-hand picture was a chicken’s foot, which is sent to the corresponding area in the left hemisphere. Like most of us, P.S.’s language-processing abilities are strongly concentrated in the left hemisphere; the right hemisphere, in isolation, has minimal linguistic abilities. P.S.’s left hemisphere was able to report what it could see – and fluently describe the chicken claw, but P.S. was unable to say anything about the snowy scene that the right hemisphere could see.

What this research is showing us is that the quality of our explanations deteriorates when we are forced to explain what we can’t. This doesn’t necessarily hold for anything besides that. My inuition is that the explanations we make for why we make large decisions influenced by multiple variables (e.g. relationship breakups, career changes) are incomplete. Otherwise, I think they can work. “Running an errand” is a good explanation for being in a car.

Chater builds from that faulty premise to argue that those arbitrary explanations we make up in the moment create our long-term preferences and behaviour. To make this claim, he cites what he calls “choice arbitrage studies”. These involve asking people to choose between two objects. Once they make their selection, they are intentionally presented with what they did not choose, and asked to explain why they chose it.

One example involves getting people to choose which woman they are more attracted to, and then are asked to explain why they prefer the other. In this experiment, many of the participants then began to explain why they made that choice, citing reasons like their hair colour, earrings, or face shape.

I have no reason to think the study did not happen as he describes it; where I differ is interpretation. In that image, the proctor is presenting two women who share a lot in common: race, hair colour, and apparent age. People would probably notice the trick if that was not the case, and they would be more likely to make a choice based on stronger preferences.

It also might be the case that the subject chose one at random, so they didn’t notice the trick. Or maybe they thought something was wrong when the proctor falsified their choice, but felt constrained by the structured environment, and had no incentive to introduce social friction by asking if the proctor was mistaken. Or maybe they felt something was wrong, but thought it was unlikely that the proctor would trick them or make a mistake.

Chater also presented a more interesting study to argue this was the case: they had Americans fill out a form about their political beliefs before the 2008 election. On half of the forms, there was an American flag in the corner. Those who had the flag on the form were more likely to agree with right wing political attitudes.

When they tracked the participants’ votes in the presidential election, they found that people who had the flag in the form were more likely to vote for the Republican party.

Chater then argues that is evidence of his hypothesis, that our in-the-moment choices are arbitrary and possible to manipulate. And that would be true… if that flag priming study actually replicated.

It did not.

So maybe it is possible to trick subjects with these cute experiments, but the explanations those people made didn’t actually track to the creation of new preferences or identities. So much for Chater’s thesis, then — the mind is not flat.

That’s the end of the argument, logically.

Not the book, though. Chater then argues the unconscious exists the way psychoanalysts or common folk think it does. By unconscious, he means a part of the mind that has beliefs, desires, thoughts, and identities that is hidden from our conscious experience.

I think this is necessarily true if you conclude that the propositional character of our conscious experience does not apply to raw sensory data or our unseen cognitive processes. I don’t know if that’s Chater’s argument (I don’t understand it), but it’s fair if that is the case.

Concretely: we have a mental surface: thoughts, actions, sensory perceptions, and feelings which can be consciously observed. Then, we supposedly have some sort of unconscious mind underneath that surface: motives, thoughts, feelings, and identities that we do not know, but affect our consciousness.

Chater astutely notices this analogy tricks us into thinking what is conscious is like what is not. That the ice above the water is the same as the ice beneath it. That the consistent and clean thoughts we see on the surface generalise to what is underneath.

But the vision of the iceberg, with its vast dark mass hidden below the water, hides an important but entirely flawed assumption. In an iceberg, the material that is above and below the waterline is precisely the same – ice is ice, whether deep beneath the waves or sparkling in the sunlight. And, for this reason, it seems only natural that what is hidden can be made visible and what is visible can be made hidden – it is still the same ice whether we lift it from the waters or plunge it into the depths. The metaphor suggests that the very same thought could be either conscious or unconscious – and could jump between the two states. Accordingly, a thought that was previously unconscious might be brought into the light of consciousness (whether through casual introspection, intense soul-searching or years of psychoanalysis).

In that regard, I don’t think Chater was radical enough. You might think you have a conscious drive to “satiate thirst”, but you have only inferred it based on patterns of behaviour and physiological signals. You can’t see a neuron or set of neurons in your brain that activate when you need water.

Every single drive, fear, and desire you have is unconscious. Nothing is being repressed, just ignored or unrecognised. The only way you can learn anything about yourself appears to be… introspection.

Chater does not like introspection as a word or concept. He never says this so nakedly, but its clear from his writing. A problem I see is that intropsection isn’t really one thing. One kind — noticing emotions — is plainly useful. Causal accounts of why these emotions occur: environmental factors or one’s personality — are useful for self-interpretation, but often wrong.

People are almost always unwilling to admit to being wrong, especially if it’s about something as personal as the self. People are often highly overconfident in their interpretations of themselves, and are unwilling to revise them.

Much error can come from taking your thoughts too seriously; even the eminent and talented philosopher Bertrand Russell did — he went on a bike ride and somehow realised that he no longer loved his wife Alys. What followed was an unhappy marriage that eventually broke apart.

The philosopher, logician and political activist Bertrand Russell writes memorably of a moment of apparent emotional insight in the autumn of 1901: ‘I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys. I had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening. The problem presented by this discovery was very grave.’

For Russell, this thought was no mere creation of the moment (perhaps a product of a frustrating morning’s work, or the aftermath of argument); instead, he interpreted it as an indisputable revelation, breaking through from a hidden subterranean emotional world. This proved to be a disastrous interpretation, at least for their relationship, which foundered rapidly, though not leading to divorce until twenty years later. Of course, the marriage might have failed in any case, but once Russell had received, as he saw it, a damning and final verdict from the ‘inner oracle’, he became utterly convinced that the relationship was dead. And with that belief firmly established in his mind, there was probably little hope.

Russell, here, is assuming the mind works in syllogisms: I either love or don’t love my wife. It doesn’t. You have a dispositional attitude towards your wife, and could feel anything towards her in the moment. During that bike ride, he might just be in a bad mood, and a thought just sprung into his head. It didn’t need to be taken seriously.

Chater’s ultimate argument is that a unified, stable self does not exist. That feels like the biggest clam he makes in the book, the most derivative of his premises, but it’s also the most reasonable conclusion to make. Great philosophers like Hume, Nietzsche, or Buddha noticed the same thing. In a way, Chater is still right — the mind has no propositional and unchangeable depth.

Where I would push back is that this model of the human brain, in a weird way, opens itself to more depth that the alternatives. The incoherence and evanescence of mental depths is not evidence of its absence, or of it not being worth wondering about. People do have genetically-determined personality traits which will reliably affect how they act and feel. They have beliefs… held loosely or in contradiction with others.

So

The mind is a woman and she has B-cups.

I read the entire book, some sections of it twice. If you can get me to do that, you are entitled to at least a 6/10. I give the book a 9, and it's earned a place on my sidebar. The book is great at taking bad ideas and tearing them down — Freudian nonsense, identitarian self-modelling, multitasking, and whatnot. The model he replaces it with is good, but incomplete and sometimes plainly wrong.

The most useful information in the book:

1. Perception is inference.

2. The mind can only focus on one thing at a time.

3. Only the outputs of the brain can be observed.

4. Self-explanations are necessary, but shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

5. Minds are dispositional, not propositional.

6. There is no stable, coherent self.

7. The unconscious has no desires, beliefs, or deep hidden self.

Chater unredpilled me on self-deception. People don't need to trick themselves because there is nothing to trick. The paradigm of self-deception assumes there is a way people can find the answers that explain their own behaviour — that must be overidden. It doesn't exist.

What happens is that, when people are asked about their behaviour in a socially sensitive context, they default to defensive and benign answers. The answers aren’t lies because they often do not know the answer, unless their behaviour was planned or highly deliberate. The anwers they provide aren’t necessarily wrong, they just happen to be what people are incentivised to share. The Elephant in the Brain is the fact we think we are righteous individuals in the first place.

Many other schools of philosophy do not survive the scrutiny of flatism. Psychoanalysis is the most obvious one. Rational econometric models of human behaviour fall out of favour, as brains are not propositional. Modern beliefs about a true self or even nonexistent one look flimsier.

The worst conclusion you could make based on this book is that, because you don’t have mental depth, that you can become anything. That if you keep working hard at math or being a good person, that you can become those things. That if you keep eating potatoes and convincing yourself you like them, you will. It’s the kind of logic your parents used to get you to participate in extracurriculars you didn’t care about.

Genes are real. Persistent environmental effects are real. Free will is fake. Case closed.

In second place would sit the idea that, because our explanations can be faulty and selective, that they must always be. Not exactly. Somebody asked to explain why they are in a bed at night could say they desire to sleep; it wouldn’t be wrong. The problem lies with wanting explanations to do things they cannot.

Beyond that, there is a scientific consensus that they cause dementia in the long term.

It’s incorrect.

This is one of the biggest academic blind spots I’ve seen in my life. Anti-cholinergics are not a well-known drug class, but they are taken by about 25% of the general population; more common than anti-depressants.

These drugs are thought to cause dementia for multiple reasons. One of them is that some anti-cholinergics block1 the M1 receptor, which can then cause the brain to produce less α-secretase and more α/β peptide; α/β peptide accumulates into amyloid plaques, which cause cognitive decline. Essentially:

Drug → M1 receptor block→ more α/β peptide →amyloid plaques → cognitive decline (specifically Alzheimer’s)

The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s has attracted some doubt. One of the researchers who published papers that influenced the theory was found to have committed tons of fraud; some of the papers were retracted. Prior to this finding, there were people who were skeptical of the theory, noting that many of the drugs based on it failed FDA trials, while the others that were approved were not related to it.

The presence of amyloid plaque is still a pretty strong predictor of the disease. There is almost no overlap in the amount of plaque in Alzheimer’s patients and similarly aged controls who have no dementia. At least, in some parts of the brain:

It seems that the plaques themselves don’t cause cognitive decline, it’s the tau tangles. One study reports baseline amyloid plaque levels had no statistically significant association with declines in future test scores, but tau tangles did:

The statistical reasoning here is faulty. Within people who had elevated amyloid plaque levels (A/β+), the association between plaque and cognitive decline was not statistically significant, but it was in the expected direction. They claimed to correct the association between tau tangle baseline levels and cognitive decline for plaque levels in their regression model, but it doesn’t look to me like they did.

It seems that, at the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease, α/β plaques are more present than tau tangles, and both predict the future levels of tau tangles. Once the disease gets going, plaque becomes less relevant and tau starts dominating2:

I suppose this explains why drugs that were developed based on the theory were so unsuccessful. By the time somebody is diagnosed with dementia, they already have plaques and tau tangles in their brain. Preventing the creation of plaque doesn’t deal with the tau tangles that are directly driving the cognitive decline.

Overall, the plaque/tau theory of Alzheimer’s holds up reasonably well to scrutiny.

There are also a few other mechanisms by which anti-cholinergic drugs could affect dementia. People adapt to the effects of anti-cholinergic drugs by upregulating the receptors that are blocked and/or increasing their sensitivity; if we believe the plaque/tau hypothesis, then the tolerance effect should theoretically counterbalance some of the effect of M1 blockage.

Use of anti-cholinergics could also lead to selective synaptic pruning, where cholinergic neurons are selectively disconnected by the brain due to lower activity. Not implausible, but hard to test.

The hypothesis that these drugs cause dementia is sensible in the way the diet-heart theory is. It’s rational, but some of the theoretical mechanisms by which they do involve lots of mechanistic causal chains, which imply an uncertain and attenuated effect size.

What I mean by this, is that if A has a 0.5 SD effect on B, and B has a 0.5 SD effect on C, the effect of A on C is 0.25; not 0.5. In this hypothesis, there are a total of five steps between anti-cholinergic drug intake and cognitive decline: drugs → M1 blockage → α/β peptide upregulation →formation of plaques →tau protein accumulation →cognitive decline. If any one of these effects don’t exist, or if the drugs have effects in the opposite direction that counteract the main chain, the theory flies out the window.

Oh, and those studies people cite to argue that M1 receptor blockage is associated with α/β peptide and amyloid plaque? Most of it is literally in mice. I found one human study that finds M1 agonists reduce AB peptide levels by 20%; it’s a p < .004 with 19 people. I guess that’s not terrible.

When it comes to observational data on this topic, this study stands out as being particularly large and high quality:

• Coupland CAC, Hill T, Dening T, Morriss R, Moore M, Hippisley-Cox J. Anticholinergic Drug Exposure and the Risk of Dementia: A Nested Case-Control Study. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0677

Of the entire study population (284 343 case patients and matched controls), 179 365 (63.1%) were women, and the mean (SD) age of the entire population was 82.2 (6.8) years. The adjusted OR for dementia increased from 1.06 (95% CI, 1.03-1.09) in the lowest overall anticholinergic exposure category (total exposure of 1-90 TSDDs) to 1.49 (95% CI, 1.44-1.54) in the highest category (>1095 TSDDs), compared with no anticholinergic drug prescriptions in the 1 to 11 years before the index date. There were significant increases in dementia risk for the anticholinergic antidepressants (adjusted OR [AOR], 1.29; 95% CI, 1.24-1.34), antiparkinson drugs (AOR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.16-2.00), antipsychotics (AOR, 1.70; 95% CI, 1.53-1.90), bladder antimuscarinic drugs (AOR, 1.65; 95% CI, 1.56-1.75), and antiepileptic drugs (AOR, 1.39; 95% CI, 1.22-1.57) all for more than 1095 TSDDs. Results were similar when exposures were restricted to exposure windows of 3 to 13 years (AOR, 1.46; 95% CI, 1.41-1.52) and 5 to 20 years (AOR, 1.44; 95% CI, 1.32-1.57) before the index date for more than 1095 TSDDs. Associations were stronger in cases diagnosed before the age of 80 years. The population-attributable fraction associated with total anticholinergic drug exposure during the 1 to 11 years before diagnosis was 10.3%.

Their results:

Pretty unambiguous as far as statistics go, the lower 95% CIs are far away from 1.

The elephant in the room: people experiencing cognitive decline need medications to control the symptoms: insomnia, psychosis, urinary incontinence, and such. It just so happens that a lot of the drugs prescribed to treat these symptoms are also anti-cholinergics, so it’s not surprising the users are more likely to experience dementia later.

The other issue is that not all of the anti-cholinergics were even associated with future cognitive decline. The anti-histamine variants were hardly correlated with future cognitive decline, as were the antiemetics, muscle relaxants, gastro antispasmodics, antiarrythmics, and bronchodilators — when you adjusted for the effects of taking other drugs.

I’ve seen it argued that this is because the “strong anti-cholinergics” are the ones that cause dementia, but the weaker ones do not. This is not borne out in the data. For example, benadryl is strongly anti-cholinergic — but the other anti-histamine drugs they lumped it with are not associated with cognitive decline.

Perhaps they accidentally lumped benadryl with anti-histamines that are less potent or do not get into the brain’s blood, so the real effect got lost in the mess. Here’s the problem: every single anti-histamine that they used in their study — Azatadine, Brompheniramine, Chlorpheniramine, Clemastine, Cyproheptadine, Hydroxyzine, Trimeprazine — was a first generation variant that does cross into the brain. The fact these drugs are not assoicated with dementia is quite telling.

Researchers try to overcome this with case-controls, examining long term use before diagnoses, or controlling for demographic/SES variables. “Controlling for variables” is overly maligned in statistics, but this is a uniquely egregious case — they aren’t controlling for the thing that matters: existing cognitive decline and genetic/environmental predisposition.

Cognitive decline is also a long term process. It can start as early as people’s 30s:

I checked the drugs they evaluated in that observational study: some of them don’t even cross the blood-brain barrier. Glycopyrrolate (bronchodilator), Ipratropium (bronchodilator), Propantheline (gastro antispasmodic), Trospium (bladder control drug), Flavoxate (bladder control drug), and Butylscopolamine (gastro antispasmodic) are all below-the-neck drugs.

Out of the gate, the anti-cholinergic drug hypothesis looks sketchy.

I found a similar Swedish study that was published recently, focused on vascular dementia. I looked at their table3, and it turns out they found the same thing: anti-depressants, anti-spasmodics, anti-epileptics, anti-psychotics, and anti-parkinsons drugs with anti-cholinergic properties were all associated with cognitive decline; everything else was a null.

A nonlinear dose-response relationship with all-cause dementia was found for the cumulative use of strong anticholinergics (e.g., 1–89 DDDs: AOR, 1.10 [95% CI, 1.08–1.12]; ≥1095 DDDs: AOR, 1.66 [95% CI, 1.55–1.79]), notably within the class of urinary antispasmodics, antihistamines, and psychotropic drugs. In contrast, a subtle association lacking a dose-response pattern was observed for weak anticholinergics (e.g., 1–89 DDDs: AOR, 1.11 [95% CI, 1.08–1.13]; ≥1095 DDDs: AOR, 1.01 [95% CI, 0.98–1.03]). The associations with strong anticholinergics were more pronounced in men, younger people, those diagnosed with vascular dementia or Lewy body dementia (versus Alzheimer’s disease), and those with milder-stage dementia.

Consistent with the drug-specific effects found earlier. Out of curiosity, I checked the UKBB study on the same topic: it found associations between dementia and anti-depressants, anti-epileptics, diuretics; no for everything else. Antipsychotics had a positive, but statistically insignificant relationship.

Coincidentally, it seems like all of the drugs you would expect somebody experiencing early-onset cognitive decline — anhedonia (treated with anti-depressants), psychosis (treated with anti-psychotics), loss of dexterity (trated with anti-parkinson’s), and urinary issues (treated with anti-spasmodics) — to be taking, all just happen to be associated with future dementia.

People have tried testing the theory in more creative ways: one of them involved examining the effect of taking hypertensive drugs that had anti-cholinergic side effects on dementia. They found nothing.

Studying the effect of duration of treatment on prognostic outcomes using real-world data is challenging because only people who survive for a long time can receive a treatment for a long time. Specifying a target trial helps overcome such challenge. We aimed to estimate the effect of different durations of treatment with antihypertensive drugs with anticholinergic properties (AC AHT) on the risk of vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease by emulating a target trial using the UK CPRD GOLD database (2001-2017). Comparing treatment for 3-6 years vs ≤3 years yielded null results for both types of dementia. Comparing a longer duration of treatment, >6 years vs ≤3 years, yielded a 10-year risk ratio of 0.69 (95% CI, 0.54-0.90) for vascular dementia and 0.91 (95% CI, 0.77-1.10) for Alzheimer's disease. For illustration, we performed an analysis that failed to emulate a target trial by assigning exposure categories using postbaseline information, obtaining implausible beneficial estimates. Our findings indicate a modest benefit of longer duration of treatment with AC AHT on vascular dementia and highlight the value of the target trial emulation to avoid selection bias in the evaluation of the effect of different durations of treatment. This article is part of a Special Collection on Pharmacoepidemiology.

If anything, it looks like the drugs helped. Which isn’t surprising, since the cardiovascular system is also implicated in cognitive decline. It led to a stronger reduction in vascular dementia4, which is caused by repeated strokes; the effect on Alzheimer’s was protective but not statistically significant.

This study is the nail in the coffin on anti-cholinergics and dementia. They compared the effect of anti-cholinergic bladder drugs to a drug that aided in bladder control but had no cholinergic properties — miragebron. In comparison to people who used mirabegron, anti-cholinergic users were less likely to get dementia.

Compared with non-use, ever use of anticholinergic bladder drugs was associated with an increased risk of dementia, with an incidence rate ratio of 1.44 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.40 to 1.48). The incidence rate ratio increased with increasing cumulative drug use, from 1.31 (95% CI 1.27 to 1.36) for 1-90 defined daily doses to 1.68 (1.59 to 1.76) for >365 defined daily doses. Compared with non-use, all types of anticholinergic bladder drugs were associated with increased incidence rate ratios for dementia: tolterodine 1.43 (95% CI 1.38 to 1.49), solifenacin 1.37 (1.29 to 1.46), trospium 1.52 (1.37 to 1.67), and fesoterodine 1.48 (1.26 to 1.74). The increased risk of dementia with use of anticholinergic bladder drugs was not seen when compared directly with the use of the β3 agonist mirabegron (incidence rate ratio 0.82, 95% CI 0.74 to 0.92), irrespective of the type of anticholinergic drug.

The abstract is a little confusing. Fortunately, their figures are not. They conducted the regular, observational analysis first, and found a positive correlation between anti-cholinergic drug intake and future dementia.

According to this table, using an anti-cholinergic bladder drug for only 1-90 days is associated with a 31% increase in the risk of dementia. If that’s a real effect, surely the power users who took anti-cholinergics daily for 30 years would be totally cooked? What about those teenagers who megadose them for fun?

They then ran the analysis which anti-cholinergic bladder drugs to the non-cholinergic variant, Mirabegron. Anti-cholinergic drugs had a protective effect on dementia.

I checked the supplement, and there was no statistically significant difference in all-cause mortality.

Not only are the associations between anti-cholinergic drugs and dementia dependent on the specific drug type, if we evaluate drugs that have been shown to relate to dementia in multiple studies — it turns out it’s still confounding.

Now, we pivot to in-vitro.

I found one nice study that did it — examining the effects of anti-cholinergic drugs on neurons when they were grown outside of the human body. Theoretically, if they are harmful in humans, we might see their effects take place in artificial cultures as well. It turns out that some of the anti-cholinergic drugs had measurable toxic effects:

We treated human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)–derived neurons with eight drugs representing different AC medication classes, including antidepressants, bladder antimuscarinics, antihistamines, and antispasmodics. We analyzed these neurons for cytotoxicity, amyloid beta (Aβ) peptide levels in the conditioned medium, and the level of intracellular phosphorylated tau from these cultures.

We observed that antidepressants and bladder antimuscarinics were consistently cytotoxic, whereas antihistamines and antispasmodics did not show overt cytotoxicity at the times and concentrations that we tested. Some of the cytotoxic medications altered the amounts of Aβ1‐42 peptides, but there were no significant differences in the intracellular ratio of phosphorylated tau/total tau between AC drug treatments.

All three anti-depressants showed robust cytotoxic effects (poisonous to cells). One of the anti-muscarinics (bladder control drugs) showed a slight toxic effect, but it might have been a mere statistical fluke:

When it came to the development of amyloidic plaque, which likely contributes to cognitive decline, Oxybutynin (bladder control drug) showed up as a contributor to its formation. They couldn’t detect changes in tau protein formation; in some cases, this might have been because of the toxicity of some of the medications.

Some of these results in-vitro match the observational study — both methodologies agreed that the antihistamine and antispasmodic drug variants had no measurable effect on cognitive decline. It’s hard to compare the two methods, since they aren’t always using the same drugs, at the same doses.

Besides these studies, I didn’t find much of value: one study that examined effects of anti-cholinergics in 55 year olds on dementia found a p = .04 and a p = .01; an AI prediction study that was able to reliably predict Alzheimer’s diagnoses using medical records, anti-cholinergic drugs only came up in the top 20 factors once (other drugs like benzos came up more often); and some other observational studies that said the same thing.

One could argue that, because cholinergic drugs are meant to treat Alzheimer’s, that means that anti-cholinergics must have the opposite effect. And they are — in the short term. And it’s not like cholinergics are that effective — according to the largest meta-analysis, the effect they have on cognition in people with AD is about 0.33 standard deviations5; similar to the effects of a generic stimulant on cognitive ability.

So

The answer is no, anti-cholinergic drugs do not cause dementia6.

The big problem with the theory is that it is too general. In some cases, anti-cholinergic drugs have protective side effects, like the anti-hypertensives, so it would be crude to hypothesise they are pathogenic. “Don’t eat yoghurt because it has saturated fat”. Some anti-cholinergic drugs don’t even cross the blood brain barrier, so it’s not mechanistically possible for them to cause dementia. I guess it’s great marketing for other drugs that don’t have this effect.

The mechanistic reasoning behind the theory is not irrational, but it’s flimsy in the sense that it relies on believing in the existence and importance of 4th order effects. There’s also reason to think obesity and the cardiovascular system are implicated in dementia, if this is the case, then drugs that affect these systems should naturally affect dementia as well. Also, a general example of why I dislike mechanistic arguments in medicine.

Anti-cholinergics kind of suck as a drug class. They make you tired and dull, but if you take them to sleep, then the quality of your sleep decreases. As such, pharmacists try hard to get these drugs to not cross the blood-brain barrier.

The reason I was interested in this research is that I take benadryl, an anti-cholinergic drug, as a sleep aid. I doubt I’d ever actually develop dementia due to my family history, unless I live to be over 100 years old — that’s when the real decline starts.

3

Table:

If people respond to price signals, then they respond to social signals too: approval, embarrassment, exclusion, and disapproval. Game theory then organises how people act when they are uncertain, being watched, and watching others.

A good example of its application: Werner on The Origins of Wokeness. Previous theorists argued that it originated from philosophy, the long march through the institutions, or WEIRD morality. Werner, on the other hand, argues that increased diversity in American elite spaces resulted in larger returns to signalling woke beliefs — which indicate that somebody is more able to cooperate with different types of people.

In this case, I deem its use appropriate. The status economics theory explains why woke beliefs are typically uncorrelated/positively correlated with intelligence, why wokeness escalates (race → sex → sexuality → gender), historical timing, and relative absence in East Asia.

Status economics takes behaviour that was previously considered irrational, moral, or unexplainable and attempts to explain it through a different lens. Low quality luxury goods? Status. Medical tomfoolery? Status. Art? Status. Altruism? Status. Education? Status. Politics? Status. People not consciously thinking about status when they engage in these activities? Self-deception.

It’s hard not to emphasise self-deception as foundational. When people are consciously living life, they rarely think about wanting to dominate others. Sometimes even when they are pressured. For status economics to be plausible, we must have a theory as to why people’s stated motivations do not map to their drives and actions.

I don’t think it originated1 from one person, group, or ideology. In terms of communities, status economics is currently popular in economics, tech twitter, the rationalist community, and the online right.

The appeal of status economics is evident. A lot of times, it just works. It discourages the convoluted psychiatric stories and common sense. It explains the unexplainable.

Where does it err?

Status Economics degenerating into metaphysics

Platonism for the elites is an insult.

In the myth of Plato’s cave, we have men casting shadows on the wall with clay figures — what they perceive with their raw senses. People can choose to leave the cave and find themselves in the rest of the world — the world of Platonic forms, ideas.

The application is clear. In status economics, morality and irrationality are shadow explanations for human behaviour; status is the true substrate behind everything. The appeal of Gnosticism — Marxism, Christianity, The Red Pill — is intuitive. The masses are a bunch of cattle and your third eye sees the truth behind everything. It makes you feel better than other people.

To divide the world into a “true” and an “apparent” world, whether after the manner of Christianity or of Kant (after all a Christian in disguise), is only a sign of decadence,—a symptom of degenerating life. The fact that the artist esteems the appearance of a thing higher than reality, is no objection to this statement. For “appearance” signifies once more reality here, but in a selected, strengthened and corrected form. The tragic artist is no pessimist,—he says Yea to everything questionable and terrible, he is Dionysian2.

The idea of a true and apparent world — in other words, the world has layers — is true on a figurative level. There are lenses, frames by which sequences of events can be radically reinterpreted. The issue lies in reificiation — thinking that the layers are not mere appearances as well.

The core tenets of the school — that pretending not to care about status is itself a status play, and that self-deception is psychologically real — makes the theory unfalsifiable. If people are overtly competing over status, that proves our theory. If people are not overtly competing over status, that proves our theory — they are just self-deceived.

It is falsifiable at the group level — see social signalling vs human capital models of education — but unfalsifiable at the individual level. The theory can explain what attracts people to education in general, but can’t explain the motivations of particular people.

Unfalsifiable theories are not necessarily wrong. They are dangerous. If you take them too seriously, it is impossible to test them. “All true beliefs are falsifiable” is not even a falsifiable statement3.

Another note on ‘not caring about status’ — I don’t take this literally. Figuratively, what is meant is that this person is playing with their cards face up. What they appear to be is what they are, uninterested in playing elaborate games, comfortable to carry themselves through their own values.

Take Frank Herbert promoting Dune as an example. Is he making a play for status? Definitionally, yes — he is vying for attention and desirability. But there is something reductive about claiming that selling Dune is about status — it’s like saying he’s doing it to enable capitalism, promote satanism, or feel good. It’s an empty explanation.

Motive vs method

This is where we get to separating motives, mediums, and products; status economics often confuses these things. Dune was probably written tons of reasons — boredom, money, fame, self-expression, mastery, and connecting to people. Writing and publishing a novel involves dealing with a social world with its own signals and incentives; if people like it, then the author is rewarded with attention/money/etc.

Presumably, if somebody is willing to put in the effort to publish and sell a novel, they have financial or social motives; likely both. That’s not a bad thing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that was the only reason for having bothered to write one in the first place. It also doesn’t mean that they were just chasing “status” in the broader sense — they might enjoy attention, but not prestige; desirability, but not credibility.

What I am getting at is essentially this question: do we want power for its own sake, or is power the way humans accomplish goals?

The question is definitionally absurd; if we take cause and effect for granted, evertything is power. The distinction still functions in a utilitarian way. Are social resources valuable for their own sake, or are they only useful instrumentally?

When a business attempts a viral marketing strategy, they are essentially pursuing a type of status — attention. But are they pursuing status for its own sake? Perhaps, to an extent, but surely money is also a motive. But then you could ask why they want money…

What even is status?

Another massive issue; status is not one thing. I define ‘status’ as power through perception, what power people have as a function of other people’s beliefs.

I consider status to come in nine different forms:

• Prestige: who is considered admirable?

• Legitimacy: who reigns supreme?

• Credibility: who is considered believable?

• Immunity: who is allowed to get away with violating rules?

• Leverage: who can impose costs and benefits?

• Attention/clout: who commands attention — cognitive fixation?

• Fame: who is remembered?

• Desirability: who is wanted?

• Access: who is allowed opportunities and resources?

Multidimensionality can be pedantic, but this frame solves a lot of the weird questions; for example, are young people low or high status? The answer: young people are more desirable, rule-immune, and are given more opportunities; but they have less leverage, credibility, and legitimacy. This also works for other debates about whether men vs women have more power. Often groups differ in which social currencies they possess.

Unfortunately, this does not go without saying: what is “high status” is individually dependent. People pay attention to, appreciate, and approve different things. These individual-level tendencies can result in aggregate effects at the group level, but many times, it’s not necessary to get most people’s approval/attention to get what you want. Only about 0.25% of the global population has bought Dune, the best selling scifi novel of all time4.

The opacity of human motivation

Is “status” a good explanation for human behaviour?

My vote is no. I think it’s a good explanation for macro-level weirdness: luxury goods, religion, altruism, ideology, and even some medical practices. Otherwise, I think it’s at best an arbitrary explanation and at worst a terrible one.

An explanation is not just a model. It’s a theory for why something is occurring and not something else. The apple fell because of the Earth’s gravitational pull, not because I sneezed before I saw it.

So, why do I like playing competitive video games? I will admit — winning feels good; losing feels bad. But why am I playing competitive video games… and not something else? Why am I not rapping, playing sports, or tasting wine? Why do I keep my childhood belongings? This is where status loses: it can explain why people play games, but it cannot explain why people pick them. The idea that art is about status is grotesque; it is to say that sex is about burning calories.

If something explains everything, then it explains nothing.

Regarding introspection: it’s easy to see emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. The mind is not flat, but it can only see the output of its depths, not the depths themselves. The machinery that creates thoughts/emotions cannot be accessed by the conscience and must be inferred; inference is unreliable. In a weird way, all desires are definitionally unconscious. This is why, I think, self-deception works. It’s not trickery if everything is hidden.

We often do not want things because of what they are, we want them because of what they represent5. Allow me to explain: we have base needs such as thirst, hunger, tiredness, sexual appetite, and bodily integrity. People then make demands of others to satisfy those needs: flirt, buy food, and request quiet. Our linguistic and cognitive maps of the world enable us to satisfy these base drives — we fear men with guns because they threaten our bodily integrity; we like sushi because it will satisfy our hunger. Sometimes we want to want things.

At times, these cognitive maps and demands of the world falter. and we want things that things that do not satisfy our bodily drives as much as we think they do, or at all. This is where unwholesome desire, taṇhā, comes from. The Buddhists were right to reject it.

When people seem to do and want irrational things that are connected to social mechanisms — farm attention from Neo-Nazis on twitter, buy luxury goods, or participate in religion — the easy explanation is just status. Sometimes that is the answer. Other times, the motivation is to satisfy desires that have stayed unsatisfied, and our unreliable linguistic maps have determined those are the answer.

Taking the psychoanalysis further, a lot of status economists are fans of Girardian desire, the idea that a lot of human motivation is mimetic. I’ve never read Girard, but I’ve seen some of that in myself; we were all teenagers once. The idea is cool, but bad as an explanation for human behaviour — what made something popular in the first place, is the more interesting question. It’s definitely overextended, for example, to explain what body types people find attractive.

There are other times where the answers are not that deep. Why do people like playing Skyrim? Lacanian desire? Mimesis? Need for community and affiliation with successful products? Maybe it’s just… fun.

Status Economics — current status?

Status economics is useful. It breaks us from the trance of gnostic explanations of behaviour, exposes that all social relationships are transactional under pressure… until it degenerates into its own gnosticism.

The school explains human behaviour well at the macro level, inconsistently at the micro level (this is true for economics in general). Humans have layered motivations and respond to some social incentives, not others. At the aggregate level, social incentives will reliably shift behaviour. “Status” is also a compresion word, which makes it useful in language but tenuous as a concept.

There’s also another question. If I dislike status economics as it is currently applied, what theory of human behaviour should replace it?

I am fine with nothing.

This will probably be the last article I write on the social status question. I’ve already written on the issue far too frequently, though I posted about it again since my opinions changed (of course!).

I was 15 years old.

Some adults came to my high school and encouraged us to do strange stuff in front of everybody else at the assembly hall. I volunteered. And I did not have a good time; so did a friend of mine, who left before everything was over. I then went to find her, and she was (also) having a panic attack. We then went to hide in one of the classrooms and listen to music with some friends and my older sister.

My homeroom teacher found us, and I ended up talking to her about what happened in the office. I ended up crying, if I recall. Just before I left, she told me something along the lines of “if there is anything you need me to do, just ask”. She said it in, what I interpreted as, a suggestive tone. This woman was in her late 30s or 40s.

I would be inclined to brush it off… if she didn’t mention in a groupchat1 that she would date one of the students there if she wasn’t his teacher. And if she didn’t hang up my drawings in her office. She also mentioned in that groupchat that she hadn’t had sex in a while.

This woman was… odd. She was too lazy to send my brother’s high school transcripts to universities, until my mom screamed at her. She seemed to disliked women. She was a libertarian (of course!) and would argue about politics with me in school.

And no, I did not have sex with that woman. I do still think about her, though.

The question is, why do these people want to have sex with minors or students, and not adults?

The case of men doing this is not so mysterious. Maybe they want to have sex, think it’s possible a long term relationship could develop, or just happen to like somebody who is under 18. Women doing this is weirder. If they just wanted to have sex, they could ask random men or hire prostitutes. Young men generally don’t go for older women when they want longer-term relationships.

The idea people initiate these types of relationships for the purposes of power is true for a few cases, but far too reductive. I could believe it’s a misguided attempt to be exploitative. The fact of the matter is that, if the student/child feels pressured, they can admit to the relationship, and result in their partner losing their position of authority or suffering legal consequences.

The meta-answer: they cannot find adults that are suitable replacements, because if they could, they obviously wouldn’t be doing what they are doing. Relationships with teenagers could also provide them things relationships with adults can’t: sexual validation, the dynamic, lower stakes, and the taboo element.

Beyond that — I think these types of offenders are strongly motivated by loneliness.

Evidence

Pedophiles are more introverted and neurotic than regular people.

Accordingly, they are more likely to have fewer friends, and be less likely to psychologically tolerate their lack of them. They don’t have lower levels of conscientiousness, which seems believable, since most pedophilic crimes are premeditated.

Fortunately, we have another study of the personality traits of sex offenders — 32 child molesters, 26 sexual offenders against adults, 31 regular prisoners, and 42 controls:

The pedophile personality profile2 replicates, and regular sexual offenders have similar personalities to them: low extraversion and high neuroticism. Still no difference in agreeableness, a point against the power explanation.

Beyond that, there’s a qualitative study of 10 English women who had sex with male teenagers when they were in a position of authority. Their research suggested that they did not have exploitative motivations, and were more motivated by low self-esteem, issues with their own relationships, and a desire for intimacy. Generally, I don’t trust qualitative research, but this seems fairly credible to me.

There are various typologies of offenders: those with preferences for teenagers/children, situational offenders, and repressed offenders (those who fail with adults). There is something here, but I think the independence between these categories is questionable: why, exactly, do some people prefer minors in the first place? It’s not impossible that personal circumstances and failures with adults could subconsciously raise attraction to minors. People are often attracted to things based on what they mean, not what they are.

Oh, and there is evidence that teacher misconduct regarding students is becoming more common over time. In 2004, 9.6% of students claimed to have been sexually harrassed/abused by educations; in 2023 11.7% claimed to be.

So

There is no one reason why somebody decides to try to have sex with a teenager, though one thing unites all cases: they chose a teenager over an adult, or loneliness. I think a lot of the reasons people espouse out: a lack of morality or desire for power, are framed incorrectly or too reductive. They’re making choices under uncertainty and incentives.

Unfortunately, it is necessary to say that dating a 6 year old and a 15 year old is not the same thing. I’m not talking about morality, or even about harm. The thing about harm-based theories of rules is that there are lots of harmful things people are allowed to do, so something being harmful isn’t a good theory as to why things are not allowed. In terms of ethics, there is a clean difference: some people would privately excuse dating a 15 year old, but almost never a 6 year old. The whole field of “sexually unallowed behaviour” has a lot of issues with categories and words getting mixed up, leading to tedious definitional discussions.

And no. I don’t support removing the age of consent3. And I think rape is bad.

Ideally, the age of consent would be the same as the age of voting, graduating, and working. I think we could design society in a way where people graduate from high school at 15, but #wecanthavenicethings.

2

More: pedopophiles and those who actively abuse children are more neurotic than the regular person:

Non-offending pedophiles (NM) and healthy controls were unlikely to have been abused by an older person when they were a child. Offending pedophiles (FM), on the other hand, were much more likely to have been abused (according to them… at least).

The idea of conservatives eventually outbreeding liberals is old, popularised by Kaufmann indirectly and then the HBD community. Somebody tried projecting the conservative share of the electorate using that data:

The right way to do this is to use the breeder’s equation, which estimates phenotypic changes in populations based on the relationship between a trait and surviving offspring. This is the formula:

The hard part comes with projecting what the relationship will be in the future. What I decided to do was weigh recent years more heavily when calculating the selection differential. If the strong fertility difference between conservatives/liberals persists in the future, then this will be an underestimate; if it regresses to the mean, then it will be an accurate estimate. I used the same measure of political views they did: self-reported placement on a 1-7 conservative/liberal scale.

I controlled political beliefs for age, year, race, and sex effects.

I got 0.07 standard deviations per generation1, 0.035 when taking into account the 45% heritability of political views.

That equates to 0.1 standard deviations per century. That’s equivalent to going from the 50th to 54th percentile of conservatism. About an order of magnitude weaker than the original chart showed.

So, yeah.

Asides

Projecting using only post 2020 data

The change went from 0.035 SD per generation to 0.06 SD.

Better rendition — the correlation between fertility and conservatism has been steadily increasing with every cohort since 1920:

The average person in the GSS dataset was born in 1951, the correlation between conservatism and fertility at this time was about 0.08. In zoomers, it’s about 0.2. If we generously assume that means that the breeder’s equation underestimates the change by a factor of 0.2/0.08, then the projected change per century is 0.21 standard deviations2.

Even then, a person in 2126 is projected to be at the 59th percentile of conservatism of a person in 2026.

Measurement error

Survey responses for measurable data (e.g. height, weight) tend to be very accurate, with correlations between reported and measured data being close to 1. There’s no reason to think number of children is different.

Regarding self-reported political views on a scale — they load at 0.82 on the primary factor of political views (right vs left):

Differential ferility/age gradients by political views

Nope. Conservatives and liberals seem to have kids at the same ages, just at different rates.

Better chart:

Heritability not 45%

Political beliefs are not genetic. The Communist manifesto was not coded into Marx’s genes. That said, there are personality traits and physiologies that are genetically influenced, which then can influence people’s political beliefs.

If one analyses twin/family correlations, a heritability of 40-50% fits the data well.

Many have asked that, if political beliefs are genetic, then why haven’t zoomers gotten more conservative? This is one of the many genotypic ~ phenotypic paradoxes, where one would expect the population to change one way based on the genes, but they actually changed in the opposite direction. It’s an artefact of the environment changing across time.

Causality

I’ve seen people make the argument that children cause people to be conservative more than being conservative causes fertility. It’s not intuitively impossible, but it’s a bad explanation for why the fertility difference between conservatives/liberals haas increased with time. It also doesn’t explain why conservatives want more children than liberals before they even have them.

1

Formula for selection differential (modified for IQ):

Short code:

install.packages('drat')
remotes::install_github("kjhealy/gssr")
library(gssr)
data(gss_all)

selection_differential <- function(iq, kid) {
  d <- data.frame(iq, kid)
  d <- na.omit(d)
  d$iq <- normalise(d$iq)
  parameter <- 0
  estimate <- 0
  daf <- data.frame(parameter, estimate)
  daf$parameter <- nrow(d)-2
  daf$estimate <- 1/nrow(d)*sum((d$iq-mean(d$iq, na.rm=T))*d$kid, na.rm=T)/mean(d$kid, na.rm=T)
  return(daf)
}

selection_differential_regression <- function(iq, kid) {
  d <- data.frame(iq, kid)
  d <- na.omit(d)
  d$iq <- normalise(d$iq)
  parameter <- 0
  estimate <- 0
  daf <- data.frame(parameter, estimate)
  
  if(nrow(d) > 0) {
    lr <- lm(data=d, kid ~ iq)
    
    daf$parameter <- nrow(d)-2
    daf$estimate <- lr$coefficients[2]/lr$coefficients[1]
  }
  else {
    daf$parameter <- NA
    daf$estimate <- NA
  }
  
  
  return(daf)
}

############################################

> gss_all$year_weight <- gss_all$year - min(gss_all$year, na.rm=T) + 1
> 
> describe2(gss_all$sex)
# A tibble: 1 × 10
  var       n   mean median      sd   mad   min   max     skew kurtosis
  <chr> <dbl>  <dbl>  <dbl>   <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>    <dbl>    <dbl>
1 x     75568 1.5574      2 0.49669     0     1     2 -0.23125  -1.9465
> 
> gss_all$rcas <- 'White'
> gss_all$rcas[gss_all$race==1] <- 'White'
> gss_all$rcas[gss_all$relig==3] <- 'Jewish'
> gss_all$rcas[gss_all$race==3] <- 'Other'
> gss_all$rcas[gss_all$race==2] <- 'Black'
> gss_all$rcas[gss_all$hispanic>1] <- 'Hispanic'
> 
> gss_all$norm_pol <- normalise(gss_all$polviews)
> 
> lr <- lm(data=gss_all, norm_pol ~ rcs(year, 5) + rcs(age, 5) + rcas + sex)
> summary(lr)

Call:
lm(formula = norm_pol ~ rcs(year, 5) + rcs(age, 5) + rcas + sex, 
    data = gss_all)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-2.5315 -0.6405 -0.0352  0.6406  2.7766 

Coefficients:
                     Estimate Std. Error t value             Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)         -17.92111    4.23071   -4.24    0.000022789504732 ***
rcs(year, 5)year      0.00881    0.00214    4.12    0.000038043096970 ***
rcs(year, 5)year'    -0.02203    0.01069   -2.06                0.039 *  
rcs(year, 5)year''    0.03622    0.03612    1.00                0.316    
rcs(year, 5)year'''  -0.00622    0.04704   -0.13                0.895    
rcs(age, 5)age        0.00985    0.00181    5.44    0.000000053434210 ***
rcs(age, 5)age'       0.00284    0.01574    0.18                0.857    
rcs(age, 5)age''     -0.02919    0.04344   -0.67                0.502    
rcs(age, 5)age'''     0.04268    0.04180    1.02                0.307    
rcasHispanic          0.14476    0.01927    7.51    0.000000000000059 ***
rcasJewish           -0.34026    0.03050  -11.15 < 0.0000000000000002 ***
rcasOther             0.04799    0.02271    2.11                0.035 *  
rcasWhite             0.22806    0.01151   19.82 < 0.0000000000000002 ***
sex                  -0.07173    0.00778   -9.22 < 0.0000000000000002 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.985 on 65081 degrees of freedom
  (10604 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared:  0.029,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.0288 
F-statistic:  150 on 13 and 65081 DF,  p-value: <0.0000000000000002

> 
> gss_all$norm_pol2[!is.na(gss_all$age) & !is.na(gss_all$rcas) & !is.na(gss_all$sex) & !is.na(gss_all$age) & !is.na(gss_all$norm_pol)] <- lr$residuals
> gss_all$norm_pol2 <- normalise(gss_all$norm_pol2)
> 
> lr <- lm(data=gss_all, childs ~ norm_pol2, weights = year_weight)
> summary(lr)

Call:
lm(formula = childs ~ norm_pol2, data = gss_all, weights = year_weight)

Weighted Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
-15.86  -6.09   0.24   4.84  47.02 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value            Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  1.84386    0.00617   298.9 <0.0000000000000002 ***
norm_pol2    0.13347    0.00600    22.2 <0.0000000000000002 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 8.86 on 74563 degrees of freedom
  (1134 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared:  0.00659,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.00658 
F-statistic:  495 on 1 and 74563 DF,  p-value: <0.0000000000000002

> 
> lr <- lm(data=gss_all, childs ~ norm_pol2)
> summary(lr)

Call:
lm(formula = childs ~ norm_pol2, data = gss_all)

Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
-2.192 -1.754  0.019  1.069  6.352 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value            Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  1.91171    0.00642   297.7 <0.0000000000000002 ***
norm_pol2    0.10495    0.00642    16.3 <0.0000000000000002 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 1.75 on 74563 degrees of freedom
  (1134 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared:  0.00357,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.00355 
F-statistic:  267 on 1 and 74563 DF,  p-value: <0.0000000000000002

> 0.2/0.08*0.05504*0.45*100/30
[1] 0.2064
> 
> 0.10522/1.91171
[1] 0.05504
> 
> GG_scatter(gss_all, 'norm_pol2', 'norm_pol')
`geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'
> 
> 0.13359/1.84387
[1] 0.072451
> 
> lr <- lm(data=gss_all, childs ~ norm_pol)
> summary(lr)

Call:
lm(formula = childs ~ norm_pol, data = gss_all)

Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
 -2.27  -1.59   0.00   1.00   6.55 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value            Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)   1.8754     0.0067   280.0 <0.0000000000000002 ***
norm_pol      0.1921     0.0067    28.7 <0.0000000000000002 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 1.72 on 65654 degrees of freedom
  (10043 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared:  0.0124,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.0124 
F-statistic:  823 on 1 and 65654 DF,  p-value: <0.0000000000000002

> 
> 
> selection_differential(iq=gss_all$norm_pol, kid=gss_all$childs)
  parameter estimate
1     65654  0.10244
> selection_differential_regression(iq=gss_all$norm_pol, kid=gss_all$childs)
  parameter estimate
1     65654  0.10244
> selection_differential(iq=gss_all$norm_pol2, kid=gss_all$childs)
  parameter estimate
1     74563 0.054888
> selection_differential_regression(iq=gss_all$norm_pol2, kid=gss_all$childs)
  parameter estimate
1     74563 0.054888
> lr <- lm(data=gss_all, childs ~ norm_pol2)
> summary(lr)

Call:
lm(formula = childs ~ norm_pol2, data = gss_all)

Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
-2.192 -1.754  0.019  1.069  6.352 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value            Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  1.91171    0.00642   297.7 <0.0000000000000002 ***
norm_pol2    0.10495    0.00642    16.3 <0.0000000000000002 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 1.75 on 74563 degrees of freedom
  (1134 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared:  0.00357,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.00355 
F-statistic:  267 on 1 and 74563 DF,  p-value: <0.0000000000000002

> 0.10522/1.91171
[1] 0.05504
> 
> qnorm(0.54)
[1] 0.10043
> mean(gss_all$cohort,na.rm=T)
[1] 1951.9
> qnorm(0.58)
[1] 0.20189

> lr <- lm(data=gss_all, childs ~ norm_pol2) #no weights because the correlation is already adjusted to mirror that observed in zoomers
> summary(lr)

Call:
lm(formula = childs ~ norm_pol2, data = gss_all)

Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
-2.194 -1.754  0.018  1.069  6.353 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value            Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  1.91171    0.00642   297.7 <0.0000000000000002 ***
norm_pol2    0.10522    0.00642    16.4 <0.0000000000000002 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 1.75 on 74563 degrees of freedom
  (1134 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared:  0.00359,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.00357 
F-statistic:  268 on 1 and 74563 DF,  p-value: <0.0000000000000002

> 0.10522/1.91171
[1] 0.05504
> 0.2/0.08*0.05504*0.45*100/30
[1] 0.2064

First of all

There are some genuine faults in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

It is opaque and difficult to understand. Nietzsche did write like this on purpose, he was a critic of systematic thought, but it makes for a rough reading experience. Experienced readers will still find most of what he writes unintelligible; he writes in a figurative, older prose that modern readers are not used to. The subject matter is also highly complex.

Beyond that, I don’t think he highlighted his philosophy of identity enough, which is central to a lot of his other ideas. A lot of the confusions about “creating your own values” go away when you realise that Nietzsche didn’t believe in a fundamental, unchanging self; he viewed it as an artefact of cognition and language.

“You” don’t create your values, you do. Nobody just “decides” to be a Communist because of how large their elbows are; they do it because the philosophy aligns with the body1 — personality, cognition, and physique.

His fixation on Christianity is... regrettable. He was right to ignore logical/historical arguments regarding the truth of the religion and attack it on other grounds, but the amount of effort he spent on the issue far surpassed how relevant it was. The Antichrist in particular is a boring book.

His critics

The biggest knocks against Nietzsche: autistic obsession with Christianity and bad communicator. Both are forgivable — either due to the circumstances of his birth, untimely death, or consequences of his personal style.

Otherwise, the critics are flat. They can all be cleanly boxed into three groups:

• The metanarrativist: Nietzsche’s philosophy undermines their metanarrative (Christianity, Judeochristian morality, Marxism, Nationalism…), so they do not like him. The most boring and predictable critics.

• The contextualist: people who dislike Nietzsche’s philosophy because of his followers or Nietzsche himself.

• The bull: somebody who made an honest attempt to read Nietzsche’s philosophy, and either didn’t understand it because they took it literally, or are unintelligent.

Often, the metanarrativists try to justify their criticisms of Nietzsche by addressing him, his following, or his philosophy. Because they have ulterior aims, said criticisms end up being either boring or sloppy.

None of Nietzsche’s critics are worth reading for their own sake2. They are engaged in a tug-of-war with a ghost; They hate him for what he threatens, not who he is.

Onto the specific criticisms:

Nietzsche was a nihilist

Nietzsche was a scholar of nihilism, which he rightly understood as the defining aspect of modernity. In popular discourse, there are two caricatures of Nietzsche: one of them was that he was a teenage nihilist3 who thought people should do whatever they feel like; the other is that he saw nihilism as a plague and sought to cure it.

The funny thing is that, when you read Nietzsche, it’s not even clear which caricature is the real face. Part of this is because he discusses nihilism the most in the Will to Power4, a book published of posthumous notes. Predictably, it’s an awfully written slog, with some gold in the garbage.

Nietzsche uses the word nihilism loosely — a historical force, a psychological state, and a philosophical concept. If we look at his published notes, he does not define it as a loss of meaning or values, but as the devaluation of the highest values: justice, morality, logic, and rationality.

2 (Spring-Fall 1887)’

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.

The catch: defining it as a philosophical concept also opens it up to other definitons. The latent influence of the philosophical state of the world is ‘nihilism as a historical force; its influence on the human brain is ‘nihilism as a psychological state’. As such, I think Nietzsche’s liberal use of the term is justified, but I can’t help but feel like the term ‘nihilism’ does not mean anything anymore.

The Will to Power analyses nihilism descriptively. I believe Nietzsche’s dichotomy between active and passive nihilism was an attempt to cross between the descriptive to prescriptive. Essentially, active nihilism is what happens when somebody grows so strong that their older, higher values no longer fit with them. Passive nihilism is what happens when you are weak, can’t believe in your own values, and give in to comfort.

Nihilism. It is ambiguous:

A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.

B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.

23 {Spring-Fall 1887)

Nihilism as a normal condition.

It can be a sign of strength: the spirit may have grown so strong that previous goals (“convictions,” articles of faith) have “ become incommensurate (for a faith generally expresses the constraint of conditions of existence, submission to the authority of circumstances under which one flourishes, grows, gains power). Or a sign of the lack of strength to posit for oneself, productively, a goal, a why, a faith. It reaches its maximum of relative strength as a violent force of destruction—as active nihilism.

Its opposite: the weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its most famous form, Buddhism5; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness. The strength of the spirit may be worn out, exhausted, so that previous goals and values have become incommensurate and no longer are believed; so that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegration— and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic, etc

My personal reading is that neither caricature — the teenage narcissist nihlist and nihilism disrespecter — are the real faces. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a state to be confronted, not something to embrace or fight. Moreover, if you read the Will to Power, it seems he admitted to being a nihilist in the past:

25 (Spring-Fall 1887)

On the genesis of the nihilist.--It is only late that one musters the courage for what one really knows.’. That I have hitherto been a thorough-going nihilist, I have admitted to myself only recently: the energy and radicalism with which I advanced as a nihilist deceived me about this basic fact. When one moves toward a goal it seems impossible that “goal-lessness as such” is the principle of our faith.

Nietzsche the person

I haven’t dived deeply into his biography. He had a neurological disorder, likely CADASIL, which gave him frequent headaches, bouts of fatigue, and worsening vision. He became incontinent in 1889. This limited his movement for some periods of time; in others he would go hike dozens of kilometers a day in spite of his illness.

Cognitively, obviously brilliant. In school, he got above average, but not excellent marks. By the time he was a young adult, he was an excellent philologist and was appointed as professor at the age of 24 at the University of Basel without a doctorate. In his lucidity, I’d guess he had an IQ of 130-160.

His mental state, before his insanity, is up for debate. It’s clear that his health problems and personal relationships caused a lot of strain on him. However, if you read his philosophy, he’s clearly not an unhappy or deranged person. He believed that a person’s philosophy was downstream of their body, affirming life and joy. His tone in writing is typically either critical, elated, or plain — not one of somebody miserable.

Physically, he was tall for his time (173cm6) and decent looking7.

Socially, he was considered polite, graceful, but a little awkward. It’s likely he died a virgin, and several women rejected his proposals for marriage. His personal relationships, like with the Wagners, or with his family members, were rather tumultuous. Sometimes due to his own behaviour.

There are lots of myths about Nietzsche: breaking down and hugging a horse, meeting the king of Brazil, catching syphilis in a brothel, his philosophy drove him mad, and of having no friends. Even the story of Lou Salome rejecting Nietzsche’s proposal for marriage is in question, though I think it is likely that happened.

An acceptable life, all things considered.

Which is why, when people attack Nietzsche, they either resort to false accusations or try to argue that his life was not in line with his personal philosophy. That he promoted strength, but was a weak man. An incel who supported eugenics. Generally an uninteresting avenue of debate, especially when one considers that Nietzsche himself would have supported reading his philosophy as an autobiography.

His followers

Many philosophers have been remembered and discussed. Few have active followings.

Nietzsche’s is massive: forums, youtube, social media, the public, and academia. On every side of the political isle, be they Marxists, Rationalists, Fascists, or Liberals.

It’s easy to say that the philosopher and his followers are different, but in practical social life, people often encounter the philosopher through their followers. Philosophy is can be an affiliative activity.

I personally find this criticism boring, I will concede that it is not a bad reason to avoid him. I suspect part of the reason why I have haven’t read French and analytic philosophers is their fans — pretentious and conceited in the case of the French; sterile in the case of the analytics.

Moreover:

He doesn’t advocate for anything

This is… mostly true. A feature, not a bug. Questions over answers.

Nietzsche is fundamentally a negative philosopher. He is trying to break things: egalitarian morality, weakness, Christianity, other philosophers, and metanarratives. He showed us what nihilism was, and told us to look at it. His positive vision is individualistic, that people need to create their own values and paths in life.

This also segues into the earlier point. Many try to twist Nietzsche’s philosophy to accommodate their own ends; Nietzsche never told people to become warlords, lazy Europeans, Marxists, or high school jocks. It’s forgivable to ignore him based on his followers, but ultimately unsound.

Also, a comment on this from polytropos (the anime/history/philosophy guy):

38

It is imperative to always be on guard against dogma, against theoretical frameworks, against anything that promises an easily achieved intellectual rest. Many weak intellects have fallen under the spell of thinkers like Spengler and Evola, who promise simple and schematic answers to the exceptionally difficult problems of history and mythology, owing to this temptation. Nietzsche took the greatest pains in his late period to avoid encouraging dogmatic thinking in his readers. It is not without reason that the doctrine of eternal return, the core of his thought, is presented only twice in his published works. Nietzsche is the prophet of our age, he was the first to recognize and describe nihilism, he furthermore did so with genius, and for that reason he is the greatest educator we have. But I would advise caution in approaching Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his unpublished notes. An unbelievable amount of garbage has already been written about these works, the time is not yet right for them to be understood in their full significance. Heidegger, although his lectures on these works and Nietzsche are far and away better than any other commentary, did Nietzsche a great disservice in approaching his thought from a principally metaphysical standpoint.

Nietzsche was a Fascist

Regarding his political beliefs, I suspect that the polemic against him — that he was a sexist, eugenicist, and racist elitist — is more true than is commonly believed. If you take what he says literally, that is what you have to conclude. I have to say, that even if that were all true, I would not care. The idea that he was a leftist is even more indefensible; he only selectively criticised the right — Christians, nationalists, traditionalists, and anti-semites — the factions he did not like.

He worships power

If that was true, he would worship the crowd, the most powerful thing in the universe.

Regarding the Will to Power, it’s one of Nietzsche’s more undeveloped ideas. It’s also not what people imagine it to be — Nietzsche conceived of the will to power as a latent metaphysical force behind life. It was an idea formed in response to the Darwinists and Schopenhauer (will to live vs will to power), who thought that the purpose of life was longevity/reproduction. Nietzsche thought that was a teleology; the fact that organisms that reproduce tend to remain in the ecology does not imply that reproduction is the “goal” of life. Modern evolutionary scientists will clarify this issue of teleology in words, but often they buy back into the Darwinian frame anyway.

He encourages evil/cruelty/meanness

Not really. He himself was a polite person.

I suppose that, if somebody thought that they felt elated when they were being cruel, that he wouldn’t object to it on moral grounds.

Enabling, maybe. Encouraging, no.

Nietzsche isn’t cool

Rarely an explicit argument, but definitely there. “Teenage edgelord”, “all vibes”, “gateway drug”, “a stage to go beyond”, “old news”, “undergrad”, “nazi”, etc.

Also false. Nietzsche had the most aura of any philosopher ever.

The moustache. The mythology. The style. All real.

In fact, he has so much aura that all of his terminology — overman, resentiment, God is dead, slave morality, will to power — is all memes now. People are always ready to suss out who the “real Nietzscheans” are and who is just pretending or grifting. Nobody would bother doing that, or bother pretending to be Nietzschean if he was just a loser.

Nietzsche has already been socially metabolised

Often not made as a real, descriptive claim, but worth refuting in its own right.

To some extent, Nietzsche’s ideas have already been absorbed. The ‘God is dead’, last man, focus on nihilism, and psychology of resentment are all common online.

That said, it’s hard to look at a world so moralistic, resentful, religious, dogmatic, focused on “identity”, and say — “hey guys, Nietzsche has already been dissected, nothing to see here”. Only the most digestible and prescient aspects of his philosophy have been eaten; everything else remains ripe.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is unsystematic, but it’s not random. A lot of his lesser known concepts — amor fati, eternal recurrence, identity, determinism — do relate to his broader ideas. The popular Nietzsche is a gun with no target. Even people pliable to Nietzsche believe in a half baked version of what he wrote about.

His denial of absolute truth is self-refuting

In a way, yes. Radical skepticism swallows itself.

Nietzsche’s denial of objective knowledge looks performative and stupid if you believe in objective knowledge; obvious if you do not. Both of these perspectives of Nietzsche’s perspectivism are wrong.

Perspectivism is very hard to sell. Making logical arguments for it looks silly, and just asserting it is empty. Nietzsche tried to make the case for it — by exposing the logical absurdity of a privileged perspective, noting the limitation of language, doubting whether to doubt everything, and questioning whether truth can exist for truth’s sake —and I think he did it well. If anything, he didn’t go far enough. Many “perspectivists” do not take their perspectivism seriously.

There’s also the misunderstanding that, because Nietzsche was a perspectivist (he was), that he thought all perspectives were equally valid. He didn’t think there was something cosmic that elevated some perspectives over others, he thought they differentiated themselves through other means: whether they denied or affirmed life, for example.

If you believe in “regular philosophy” — stable identity, logic, moral realism, causality, free will — then what Nietzsche speaks of sounds bizarre. People with those views often cannot imagine what it feels like to hold those views, so they dismiss them.

Genealogy of morality = genetic fallacy?

The idea behind this argument is that Nietzsche traces the development of slave morality to historical and psychological conditions that occurred in the Ancient Jewish population, that developed into Christianity. He then criticises said morality based on how it emerged. On a logical level, this is to some extent true, but Nietzsche’s historical work on morality is still interesting in and of itself.

Genealogy is far from Nietzsche’s only objection to traditional morality. He thinks that pity multiplies suffering unnecessarily, that free will doesn’t actually exist, and that people want to believe in it because it pokes holes in the idea of moral responsibility.

The Eternal Recurrence

Critics of Nietzsche’s object level philosophy do not understand this because they take it literally. Nietzsche formulated the eternal recurrence — the idea of living infinite identical lives — as a thought experiment. He thought that if you embraced the idea of living infinite identical lives, you affirmed life.

Further reading

• The man himself. I recommend Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, and his Wikipedia page — it’s decent. The Will to Power was good but poorly written and extremely uneven. The Antichrist was just boring.

• Selected posts of king Polytropos

• Uberboyo

• Essential Salts

• The Machiavellians

• Weltgeist

• It is linked to divorce + marital dissatisfaction. Likely for both sexes, though it’s less clear for men because a lot of analysis is female-specific. The link is not particularly strong, especially after 0-1 bodies.

• Confounding — people with high body counts tend to have traits less suited to long-term relationships — is a reason why.

• Causality — body count causing people to be that way — is unlikely.

All still true.

Now here’s the problem. My take at the time was that it would be more effective to analyse people’s romantic histories on a case-by-case basis instead of the number. That was wrong.

Beyond the question of body count vs case-by-case analysis, I think a better dichotomy is the mechanics of a person’s romantic history vs the interpetation of it. The mechanics describe how many people somebody has been with, how long their relationships lasted, and how they met them. The interpretation is why those things happened.

My argument, broadly speaking, is that mechanics beat interpretations. The mechanics are harder to fake, and the whys are often too overdetermined to be of any use, even when they are genuine.

Narratives

People have a tendency to renarrate their personal histories. They will try to divert blame from themselves towards circumstances, other people, or facets of themselves that they don’t feel identified with. As such, you should expect that when somebody tells you their romantic history, it will be retold in a fashion that is favourable to them (often other people too, so they don’t look mean or gauche).

Numbers can’t be retold. As much as people meme about women lying about body count, I don’t think it’s common. That famous polygraph study people like to cite is garbage1. Women/men both report roughly the same number of sexual partners when attached to a (fake?) polygraph in comparison to when they are not.

Putting the stats aside, I think that people are simply less likely to lie about raw numbers because it’s easier to get caught doing so. Things like romantic history, which are overdetermined2, are much more easy to “lie” about because there sometimes isn’t even a right answer to what caused a breakup.

Given that, body count gives you a mediocrely reliable indicator of how likely a person is able to maintain a positive relationship; romantic history is important but its interpretation can be easily spun. Both are useful, but should be doubted.

There are situations where the narrative is useful. Like “my boyfriend died” is a pretty good excuse for breaking up. “We grew apart” could mean 99 different things.

Psychological stickiness and stereotypes about body count

The barebones model of romantic relationships is that you meet people, and if you like them, you get into a romantic relationship. Then, if you really like them, you get married.

A few nuances: sometimes people change. Never at a deep level, but on an emergent one they definitely do. Jobs, incomes, bodies, ages, beliefs, interests, attitudes, and whatnot can vary across time. So, sometimes, people go from liking somebody to not liking them. This can also manifest in terms of subverted expectations: you expect somebody to become a higher earner or more mature as they age, but they do not. Other times, you like the person you are with, but somebody else appears who looks more appealing.

Sometimes, when these things happen, people break up and try to find somebody else. Other people are more “psychologically sticky”. They are more willing to stay with their current partners, even when it appears they are starting to falter or change in ways they don’t like.

What psychological stickiness looks like in the real world is probably some combination of higher conscientiousness, close-mindedness, introversion, agreeableness, and conflict tolerance (though the last two things anticorrelate)3. It’s an emergent trait, not a latent one.

There’s two catches.

One of them is that psychological stickiness works. It might be inherently desirable or undesirable for reasons beyond making relationships last longer, but it does the job.

The other is that there is a sex-loading. Men put more weight on appearance; women put more weight on social standing and earnings. Both of these things can change, but social standing and earnings change more unpredictably than appearance does. As such, it follows that there is more to be gained for men to select for psychological stickiness than women.

Beyond that, women care more about social proof than men. If a guy thinks a girl is great and no other guy does, then that’s probably a bonus for him. If a girl thinks a guy is great and no other girl does, she might start to doubt whether that guy is actually as good as she thinks he is. As such, for men, body count as a double edged sword: high n count means social proof + low stickiness, but low n count means no social proof + high stickiness.

Other explanations for the double standard do not make sense. False paternity does happen, but it’s extremely rare in Western countries (like 1-2%). Women are more at risk of STDs than men are. Most of the associations between n-count and personality exist for both men and women. Some of the discourse is poisoned by irrational disgust responses and religiosity, but I find it hard to believe that is all there is too it.

A third catch I forgot to mention: some couples should definitely break up.

Beyond the stickiness component, adults with no romantic history often have traits that are unfavourable as well. From an informal survey on male incels4: about a third have autism, 86% have experienced bullying, and half claim to be extremely lonely.

People also checked which people tended to be sexless in the UK Biobank (age range of 40-70) — it correlated the most with not having a car, low income, and not using recreational drugs. Relationships were similar in men and women, but when they differed, they did so in a sex-stereotypic fashion. The effect sizes are typically weak.

Genetically, being an incel correlated with higher IQ5, income, being autistic, lack of PTSD/ADHD, drug abstinence, introversion, and a tendency to not take risks6. The genetic correlations are much stronger than the phenotypic ones.

Which is interesting. Phenotypically, not having sex seems to correlate with lower social standing or a lack of social capital; genetically, it seems to be more downstream of neurotype than any actual pathology.

It makes sense intuitively. People are presented with different romantic options as they live — some bad, some good. People who are less likely to engage with them are either refusing to accept the bad options, or just don’t have many to begin with. The lack of options is downstream of both circumstance and genes, the refusal to accept the bad options is more genetic.

On many occassions, when romantic options arise, sometimes there isn’t a right or wrong choice regarding whether to take them. Maybe they look a little iffy, but have upsides, or the relationship could progress to a better point in the future. Some personality types are more likely to default to no than yes.

In summary, stereotypes regarding body counts (0 = introvert, low social capital, autistic; high = psychologically unstable, high novelty seeking) are generally true. There’s a few false ones, like male incels being more right wing; in real data, they have a slight skew to the left.

I will say — I am an incel, and the demographic/genetic/phenotypic profile of what an incel is fits me to a comical degree…

Stickiness and satisfaction

See:

The problem with this chart is that most, if not all, of the effect of body count on marital satisfaction comes from deeper psychological confounding. Not the antisticky strategy or the actual body count itself. The causality itself might also be out of order; a tendency to be dissatisfied itself could be a mechanism by which people become less psychologically sticky.

Actually, why not, let us assume that 100% of the association is due to deep psychological factors. That means that selecting people before getting into relationships or having sex with them does work as well as selecting after… If we trust the stated7 preferences of course.

Allow me to explain. Let us say there is a world where there is tons of massive valuable information to learn about people after you get into a relationship with them. Then, we would expect people who had higher body counts before getting married to have more satisfied and stable relationships. The opposite turns out to be true. It is still possible for people to fake personalities and behaviours in the short term, but it never works in the long term. The drives find a way to manifest.

In the data, you also see that people who get married extremely young or quickly are more likely to get divorced. This statistic is much more complicated than it looks — beyond the surface level confounding issue, there is also the problem that people are just more likely to switch partners when they are younger, and it’s less costly to do so.

I wouldn’t bet gold on this part of the argument, but I would be wary of assuming that there is much to learn about a person beyond the first few months of dating. They might just end up being exactly the person you think they are, and if they do have issues or traits that are harder to see up front, it is safe to assume that applies to other people as well.

Another thing

Regarding girls who go wild and accumulate 10+ bodies over the course of 3 months for some random reason — I actually don’t think this is that big of a deal. Only if they are young though; the younger they were, the less it matters. If those phases speak to anything, they speak to immaturity or just retardation, which are easy to see in people.

I am not arguing people should go ‘be a real muffugin man who wifes up whores’.

I am saying that your autism should not stop you from marrying the love of your life.

3

Study on predictors of sociosexuality:

We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to prior deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data or manual feature engineering, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user's Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.

This is their pipeline:

There’s a catch, of course. The set of users they selected were ones who already had linkedin profiles attached — but they removed the profile + links from the data before they ran them through the classifier. So the analysis isn’t contaminated, but it is vulnerable to selection bias: people with linkedin profiles in their bios are certainly much more likely to disclose other information in their posts.

Hacker News → LinkedIn. We collect 338 Hacker News (HN) users who linked a LinkedIn profile in their publiclyvisible HN bio, providing verified real-world identities as ground truth. We first summarize each user’s HN activity (comments and stories) into a structured profile. Then we create a search prompt and anonymize it (see Appendix A for details), and pass it to the agent. The agent correctly identifies 226 of 338 targets (67%) at 90% precision (95% CI: 86–93%; 25 incorrect identifications, 86 abstentions).

When the model sorted through 125 interviews with scientists, it could only identify 9 of the 33 (33, presumably because they didn’t pass in all 125) subjects from the interview:

Anthropic Interviewer transcripts. Anthropic publicly released transcripts of 125 AI-conducted interviews with scientists [2, 15], in which participants described their use of AI in their research. The transcripts were partially redacted for participant privacy. Li [19] showed that LLM agents with web search can match project descriptions in these transcripts to published papers; specifically, they use a task decomposition approach [17] to bypass safeguards by breaking the attack down into individual benign tasks. They eventually ran their attack on 24 scientists conversations and recovered 6 identities. We attack the same dataset with our pipeline, without task decomposition. Concretely, we construct profiles from transcripts in a similar way as we do for Hacker News and Reddit users; and then run the agentic search on 33 scientists that talked about their past research in the transcripts. The agent correctly identifies 9 out of 33 scientists at 82% precision (2 wrong, 22 refusals or abstentions). Here, we are uncertain about the true deanonymization rate, as we have to manually verify the matches. The agent claims to identify 11 scientists; but for 2 out of 11 we notice the transcript contradicts the identified academic profile in some ways.

Will anonymity die?

Probably, at some point. Not through AI agents, in my opinion, which will get easily confused by misdirection, but through data leaks. So much gets leaked every year that, at some point, people are going to start using them to dox people on the internet.

I always found the anonymity debate uninteresting, since the solution I support (your name is whatever you want it to be) is the status quo, I also view this preferred solution as contingent and unstable, so I’m not that invested in it staying that way, though I will be sad to see anonymity go.

If anonymity really does die, then we will find ourselves in an odd place where the only people willing to say interesting stuff on the internet are old, have nothing to lose, are wealthy, and/or are impulsive. Which will be unfortunate for the rest of us, of course, but I’m not convinced that will kill contrarian/anti-establishment sentiment and communities on the internet.

In constraint games, what constitutes a good or bad choice is determined by the world — physics, the market, a compiler, or a scoreboard.

In coordination games, what constitutes a good or bad choice is determined by people themselves — peer review, courts, editors, managers, and voters.

Here is a map1 of which games are which:

The further up and right you get, the more reliable experts in the game are; the further down and left, the less reliable. People in top-right games are paid for being right, and punished for being wrong. People in other quadrants are either inconsistently paid, or other people pay.

The most universal law of human cognition is that people can believe anything — if they are socially incentivised to, and don’t have any skin in the game. This is true in religion, ethics, ideology, and conspiracy theories. Intelligence and maturity are nonfactors, especially if people are examined across time and space. Because of that, coordination games often run off the rails because there is no reliable corrective mechanism that can nudge people towards truer beliefs.

Constraint games run on power — not the ugly kind, but what people normally call leverage: the ability to create things like computers, toilet paper, or concrete. Coordination games run on social status — also not the ugly kind, but what people believe to be aligned, reliable, and powerful. Coordination games, because they do not have corrective mechanisms, are more likely to degenerate into covert rank-jockeying and cargo cults.

So, let me get the elephant in the room out of the way. Constraint games are better.

Why play coordination games, then? Mostly because we have to, and because they feel more natural to us — they involve love, belonging, intensity, rank and status sensitivity, shame, and identity. It’s a lot more common for people to go into STEM because they think that it’s pragmatic, but lack innate and persistent passion.

No game is purely a function of coordination or constraint. Coordination games also have scoreboards — they just work too slowly or unreliably, so people cannot default to them to make decisions. The effect of a party endorsing a policy might not be seen until the next election, and even then, the results of the election could be skewed by individual leaders or the state of the economy.

More notes on these games:

• Markets makes feedback more physical and speeds it up. This is why storytelling and generic art are shifted rightward.

• Goodharting in physical and fast-feedback domains gets punished quickly.

• Engineers pretend to be cool. Priests pretend to have usable dashboards.

• If there is no scoreboard, status is the scoreboard.

• Intelligence is more rewarded in constraint domains; personality traits and tolerance of ambiguity are more rewarded in coordination domains.

• I’d guess that extraverts, feelers, and perceivers (in MBTI terminology) are likely to select into coordination games than constraint games.

• The underlying incentives of a game and the kind of people who select into it might be totally different.

• Medicine is less STEMy than people think it is. There’s a coordination layer to the game where the doctors act as something close to priests who reassure people that they are being taken care of. The standard surgery + antibiotics + drugs stuff works, but overall the field is quite social and delayed in terms of feedback. See the Elephant in the Brain for further information.

• Philosophy is weird. There’s no scoreboard, but it’s not consensus-driven either.

• Zoomers are sorting out of coordination game majors (e.g. humanities, politics, and religion) and into constraint game majors (e.g. STEM, finance). They do play coordination games, but they almost exclusively play them online with little expectation of value.

What he said about hipsters is true, insomuch as Millennial culture engaged in status-signalling through less overt and more plausibly deniable mechanisms. However, when status is competed over in these less overt domains, it is less salient because self-deception, while real, is imperfect and doesn’t always function the way we want to. So I still think the thesis I posited is defensible.

What I think that Russell and I disagree on a more fundamental and metaphysical level is status. I think it is real, insomuch as humans value it, and that its acquisition leads to things that we care about on an intrinsic or instrumental level like attention or social connections. I, however, think that when status is optimised for directly, it leads to worse outcomes on a social level. Russell, on the other hand, views status-seeking as innate to human nature and a social good.

Frankly, I have no idea if what he said about restaurants was true. In 2013, I was 12 years old, didn’t live in the anglo world, and my favourite thing to do was write and read fanfiction. If his thesis is true, then I would cite it as an example of an exception, and if it is false, then it is an example of the rule.

The best example of where status-seeking makes things worse is storytelling.

People disagree on what exactly makes a story good — whether it is the aesthetics, characters, writing, thematic consistency, premise, or ending. Fundamentally, what makes a story good is if it accomplishes what it is meant to do, and whether what it is trying to do is valuable.

Take Harry Potter for example. Harry Potter, as a novel, is trying to connect itself to people. It gives them a set of characters that are easy to relate to, a school that would be a lot of fun to go to, and a vast, expansionary world that lends itself towards fantasising. And it worked. Tons of people absolutely loved it.

I see a grey cloud around Harry Potter. People seem to feel embarrassed about liking it, and it is often criticised for being poorly written or being written by JK Rowling. In other words: it’s low status now. I also see this in anime — people criticising Steins;Gate, an anime which functionally revolves around the protagonist, for having undeveloped side characters. Criticising Code Geass, a story that is trying to create a spectacle and drama, for being… Melodramatic and tumultuous. Critics dislike stories for what they try to do more than how they actually do them.

Beyond what makes a story good, there is also the question of why people like them. A simple theory: taste is shaped by early exposure. Children who grow up with disney films turn into disney adults; people who liked anime as children also like it as adults. They might feel embarrassed by these things, or might not relate to some of the stories they liked as a child, but the software remains installed. I think taste for the style in which a story is told is more environmentally susceptible, while the specific stories people like change with cognitive and emotional development.

When people apply status games to storytelling, the magic disappears. People stop being willing to like what they like, or become insecure about it. Critics become pedantic, deciding the value of stories based on plot holes people don’t notice or care about, instead of the engine that drives everything: telos and meaning. Rather than taking poptimism literally, I see it as a reaction to the increasingly status-insecure and pedantic critics of culture. A 300 kilogram neckbeard who plays runescape because he likes it has achieved a high level of spiritual advancement.

Our revealed preferences also tell us much more about what we like than our stated preferences, which are susceptible to social or personal biases regarding what “should” be good and enjoyable. Critics might not like rap, but it has quite a bit of staying power, and I don’t see exactly why most people would pretend to enjoy it. I like it at least. Tasteism, the pursuit of status through the communication of taste, is a sign of a declined physiology that lacks energy, security, or capacity for action, and therefore resorts to judgement1.

You could argue that status plays a role in what stories people write or why they write them — I don’t deny that. It’s not bad for people to write things for attention, prestige, legitimacy, and money, it’s part of the flow of the universe. What I object to is authors who only write for these reasons, and not to create value and meaning beyond that. To do so is to create slop, art that commands attention only for the purposes of attention. Status-striving attitudes encourage the creation of more slop, in the overt status-seeking zoomer ecology; vapid pretentiousness, in the millennial ecology. Personally, I think the former is worse than the latter, so I guess I’m in agreement with Russell on that front.

On the question of whether taste is relative or absolute, subjective or objective — those are not the correct frames by which to answer this question. A subject is simply another object, and there is no privileged frame of perspective. That doesn’t mean that some tastes aren’t better than others — good taste is harmony with values.

Some taste has an arbitrary and banal compontent to it — preferring redheads over blondes, or white chocolate over dark chocolate. It doesn’t mean anything. In some cases, taste has a component of predictability and self-knowledge to it. That is to say, their cognition is more able to reliably interpret whether they like something independent of their mood and emotional state.

Sometimes, taste can arise due to cognitive gatekeeping. Some people are better at emotionally connecting to other people, and so they will find stories that effectively provoke emotional responses better. Intelligent people will be more able to clearly see thematic or philosophical components behind stories, and as a result, events that involve this theme will feel more meaningful to them.

I then ask: what has overt status-seeking made better? College applications? Dating? The internet? Hugging cats on the street?

So

My thesis is not that other people shouldn’t strive for status — dominance, prestige, legitimacy, money, and attention2. Other people’s value functions aren’t something that I have intimate knowledge of, and there is no cosmological tablet that states “though shall not seeketh status”. What I do think, however, is that when people start competing overtly over these limited resources, that things just seem to get worse at scale — regardless of whether the competition is overt, covert, or self-deceptive. It does make people more motivated, but it doesn’t make them motivated to do the right things.

The dark triad is a set of three personality traits — machiavellianism, narcississm, and psychopathy — that are related to “dark” behaviour. I define these as:

• Narcissism: intentionally distorting your image to the world while filtering social feedback and judgements through the distorted image.

• Machiavellianism: deliberate, counterintuitive, and exploitative behaviour that seeks to extract value from others.

• Psychopathy: emotional disconnect (not necessarily detachment) from surrounding individuals and insensitvity to punishment.

Statistically, it seems to show decent validity and reliability1. All of the traits correlate with each other and load on a general “dark factor”. It’s similar to low valence in the big five, but encompasses a distinct cluster of traits — low valence is closer to misaligned + incompetent while dark triad is more related to misalignment.

You’d think that a test which is considered by most to be a measure of whether you are a bad person isn’t reliable, because the bad people will not admit to being bad people. I actually think the opposite is truer, that surveys on taboo behaviour encourage people who engage in them to admit to them because it lets them release the internal pressure that accumulates from putting on a mask.

That aside, I do have some big criticisms of this personality model. The first is the tests. They often ask people questions that are either too generic to mean anything or don’t really relate to exploitative behaviour. For example, “it is not wise to tell your secrets” is a question that doesn’t really mean anything — it doesn’t specify what secrets and to who.

I think that the dark triad suffers from underconceptualisation. The recurring pattern in all three of these traits is a fast life history strategy where you optimise for short term outcomes and gains over longer term horizons. The strategy doesn’t need to conscious, or evil for that matter, it’s just the universe expressing itself in different ways. Since everybody dies, some people have shorter horizons than others, but nobody has a permanent horizon.

Shorter term horizons relate to narcissism because the short run encourages engaging in performative2 behaviour where the actor pretends to be more aligned and skilled than they really are. If they are engaging in a fast life history strategy, then what matters to you is the performative image, not your true self3, so your judgements and social feedback are filtered through that mechanism.

Often, narcissism is losely defined as being grandiose, unempathetic, overly vulnerable, exploitative, or self-centered. All of these things correlate with narcissism, but they don’t capture the underlying mechanism.

The relationship between machiavellianism and short-term orientation is pretty clear. When people like other people, they naturally engage in prosocial and long-term oriented behaviour. When I call my mother and tell her I love her, I am not “manipulating her into liking me”, I am just doing whatever feels natural. People who are looking for short-term gain strategies, on the other hand, have to do things that are less obvious or genuine in order to succeed.

I think that affective psychopathy relates to life history because emotionally attaching yourself to people you are going to cheat soon doesn’t really make sense, and punishment insensitivity relates to life history because a high dark triad person will need to do things that are punished by society if they want to be successful.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to conceptualise of dark triad as a psychopathology, but a strategy that works or doesn’t work depending on other character traits and circumstances. Ironic, given tht the word psychopathology derives from psychopathy itself. I assume there are high dark triad people who dislike the way they are, and want to change; my advice would just be to try playing longer games with better people.

Frequently discussed online is the question of whether all humans are selfish. I will first say that I don’t think the selfish-human theory is falsifiable, as altruistic behaviour can always be reinterpreted to be selfish through the lens of evolutionary biology or status economics. I do, however, think that the debate is useless, as people who see themselves as altruistic will not accept that humans are selfish; people who see themselves as selfish will always be skeptical of altruists.

In my opinion, the distinction between selfish and selfless behaviour doesn’t really make sense. If somebody goes to a cat and feeds it, you could argue that their behaviour is selfish because what made them feed the cat and enjoy doing it was neurotransmitter X; others could argue its selfless because the action distributes value from the human to the cat.

From a psychological perspective, everybody is selfish because all value and meaning is local; from an energetic one, people can choose to act in a way that redistributes value from themselves to their surroundings. What is more interesting, in my opinion, is whether people do selfless things because of evolutionary incentives or their own will. The answer is the will — just because organisms are selected for reproduction4, does not mean that the end goal of their actions is to reproduce. To think otherwise is to sneak teleology into science.

Like in the case of the MBTI, I find most criticisms of the theory boring and tedious. Some people point out that the theory originates from evolutionary biology at the species level, which is true, but not particularly interesting. Others argue that it is unfalsifiable, and it kind of is, but unfalsifiable theories aren’t necessarily wrong.

Further reading:

• Review of Evolutionary Psychopathology by Scott Alexander

1

See:

1. The big five is based on the lexical hypothesis, which posits that the structure of personality is hidden in the adjectives we use to describe other people.

2. The lexical hypothesis has been validated, but poorly tested. The use of varimax obscures the general factor of personality, without its use, the five factors are valence, dynamism, order, emotional attachment, and transcendence.

3. The MBTI is not an alternative factorisation of the big five.

The big five started with the lexical hypothesis, which posits that, if there are some fundamental axis on which humans vary, that language can reveal it for us. That is to say, humans invent words that they use to describe other people. Some of those words will naturally overlap, and so principal component analysis1 or factor analysis (almost the same thing) can tease out the underlying factors from our word space. HEXACO, the big five, and the big two are all attempts to decode this factor structure, but with different numbers of factors.

We did it. We tested the lexical hypothesis, and we found extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness.

The problem is that there are many ways to conduct factor analysis, depending on how the factors are rotated. Psychologists default to varimax because it is easier to interpret the factors, but the default method is simply to not rotate the factors at all. No rotation is what happens if you just extract the factors as they naturally are, with #1 being the factor that explains the most variance in the underlying data, #2 being the one that explains the second most variance, and so on.

Varimax is what happens when you take that beautiful, simple thing and twist it. Varimax forces orthogonality2 (uncorrelatednes) in factors by maximising the variance of the squared loadings (squared correlations between variables and factors) within each factor. For example, if you have 18 variables, and extract 3 factors from the data, and you have two possible first factors:

0.5, 0.65, 0.25, 0.5, 0.4, 0.5 …

0.9, 0.94, 0, 0, 0.7, 0.3, 0 …

Varimax will prefer3 the second possibility over the first because it has more variance in terms of loadings. So, even if a general factor exists, its influence will be hidden by the data and redistributed to the lower order factors. The regular big five model appears when you use this particular factorisation method, but not the standard “no rotation” method4.

Andrew Cutler talks about this on his blog and in his dissertation, which involves attempting to extract the big five from written text.

So, first, let me try to explain this extremely complex paper — written by Andrew Cutler and David Condon — which is the bulk of Cutler’s dissertation. He uses natural language processing (NLP), specifically a model called DeBERTa, which is a transformer-based encoder model — something similar to standard LLM.

They teased out word associations with promopts, usually this one:

“Those close to me say I have a [MASK][MASK] and [TERM] personality.”

This sentence is repeated for every word, and the hidden states with 1024 dimensions for each blank ([MASK]) are extracted. These theoretically can be converted into probability distributions which eventually predict the likelihood that each blank is a given word in the model (of which there are 30,000 different options). Using these predictions of likelihood is unnecessary, and Cutler only uses the 1024-dimensional word vectors here. Those two vectors are then averaged for each term, and are then correlated with each other, so a correlation matrix is produced, which is then subject to principal component analysis.

He used the classic 435 adjective dataset from Saucier and Goldberg (1996), which contains self-rating data from ~900 undergrads regarding the 435 terms, to test the hypothesis. He also conducted some robustness tests with different prompts or sets of adjectives. The set of adjectives didn’t matter, but sometimes the prompt made a difference.

This is the ultimate test of the lexical hypothesis. It was positive.

If you map out the correlations between the 435 adjectives in the survey data and the DeBERTa data, the overlap in terms of correlations between words is pretty strong. 75% of the 94,395 correlations between terms were directionally consistent (both were positive or negative) between methods. Besides the similarity in the correlation matrix, the NLP-based method yielded stronger correlations between words than the survey data

In the supplementary materials, he seems to imply that, when the survey and NLP data disagree, the survey data is usually right. Based on what he presents, that seems like a cogent conclusion.

Table 14 also provides a preliminary indication of why the terms are not more perfectly associated, and this is most obvious with the least correlated terms. “Weariless” appears to be well-understood in the S&G data, with nearest and furthest neighbors of “energetic”, “vigorous”, “courageous” and “sluggish”, “lazy”, “lethargic”. The DeBERTa model gets it wrong, with synonyms of “passionless”, “dull”, “lethargic” and antonyms of “intelligent”, “assertive”, “humorous”. This is a bit surprising given the intuitive definition, but some additional research into the frequency of use for this term in ngrams such as “weariless person” suggests that it is rarely used as a personality descriptor; it is not present in Google Books Ngram data since 1900. Despite this poor start for DeBERTa, the circumstances are reversed for the second term (“transparent”) as it has been misunderstood by respondents in the S&G data, on average, but correctly attributed in the DeBERTa data.

When natural language processing is used but different sets of adjectives are used, the inferred factor structure of personality does differ a bit, but the big three are extracted in all three models.

Now, onto the issue with factor rotations When PCA analysis is conducted on big five data with no factor rotation, you get a slightly different big five:

In the unrotated version, the first factor of personality (PC1) is a negative-signed version of the traditional general factor of personality — having negative loadings on agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness; and a small positive loading on neuroticism.

There is a long-standing debate in the personality psychology field regarding whether a general factor of personality really exists. Some researchers argue the general factor of personality is an artefact of some respondents responding in a more socially desirable way, others think that it reflects a general measure of organic functioning. Personally, I’m not interested in the debate, because the idea that some people are generally “more functional” than others and that this bleeds over in various aspects of their behaviour is just intuitive to me.

In a later post, he labels all of these factors that emerged, but with a different set of adjectives (~2800 from an academic paper) and using a NLP model (ROBERTa). He described them as follows5:

1. Valence (affiliation)6. The hidden general factor of personality. Loads positively on gentle, nice, easygoing, optimistic, sociable, happy, honest, reliable, sensitive, and loyal; negatively on cruel, mean, moody, selfish, pessimistic, impatient, bossy, and cowardly.

2. Dynamism. Loads positively on impulsive, adventurous, extraverted, ambitious, aggressive, brave, funny, and emotional; negatively on reserved, conservative, shy, cautious, serious, and calm.

3. Order. Loads positively on determined, stern, exacting, direct, domineering, stubborn, and persistent; negatively on gullible, lax, lazy, easygoing, and cowardly.

4. Emotional Attachment. Loads positively on moody, thoughtful, anxious, fearful, emotional, affectionate, spiteful and caring; negatively on independent, superficial, tactless, and frank.

5. Transcendence. Loads positively on unique, complicated, troubled, star-crossed, handicapped, mystical, heartbroken, and other-worldly; negatively on unphilosophical, fancy-free, pigheaded, boorish, materialistic, self-centered, and glib.

In the MBTI, the case that all types are equal is easy to make, but for the big five, it is simply not. Valence and order are clearly good. Transcendence, emotional attachment, and dynamism are more ambigious or close to value-neutral.

Culter’s dissertation7 shows that the structure of the big five can vary by method (survey data vs DEBERTa aka natural linguistic processing). If you compare the unrotated factors of each of the methods, then only the first three are recovered consistently8. Though it would seem that, generally, the survey data is in the right.

Despite the limitations and inconsistencies of principal component analysis, I think that transcendence and emotional attachment are good candidates for the 4th and 5th factors in the big five. First of all, some people are clearly much more emotionally driven than others if you watch people do things in real life. That’s part of the reason why the big five traditionally has good external validity: it has neuroticism, MBTI does not.

The “transcendence” factor is definitely describing a definitive type of person, and a trait that influences how people act and think. It’s pretty close to MBTI intuiting. Personally the word vector loadings of the transcendence describe me very well, so part of that makes me inclined to think that it is real too.

Beyond my criticisms of how psychologists have treated the lexical hypothesis and created the big five, the lexical hypothesis itself isn’t perfect. I’ll grant that it’s cool, and the fact that it has been empirically supported is extremely cool, but it does have its shortcomings.

The first one is that the test of the lexical hypothesis identifies personality factors according to what is socially considered to be most important. It doesn’t necessarily identify what actually makes people tick and do things. A factor could explain a small amount of variance because there might not be many terms are used to describe it, but it might be salient anyway. It could also explain little variance because people find it difficult to observe in themselves or others. I think it is hard to argue that transcendence and emotional attachment do not have a massive impact on how people feel and behave.

Similarity between the big five and MBTI

The MBTI is a philosophy first, statistics second model; the big five is a statistics first, philosophy second model.

Even if we take the original big five for granted, they don’t even correspond that strongly to the MBTI:

Unsurprisingly, the measures of introversion are highly correlated. Intuiting does strongly correspond with openness, but I suspect this is an artefact of test bias — sensors are more open to physical experiences, and intuitives are more open to abstract concepts.

The correlation between having a feeling>thinking preference and agreeableness is .45. That is not a high correlation. I suspect it exists because most feelings are positive, and if you lean more on your feelings, you end up engaging in more friendly behaviour naturally.

The correlation between judging>perceiving and conscientiousness is also not particularly strong. I suspect it exists because, if you are a conscientious person, then it is easier to administer structure onto the physical world — organise, plan, and schedule things. On the other hand, because the structure and judgement perceivers engage in is internal, their conscientiousness is harder to measure and infer.

I’m not even sure if there is any innate correlation between conscientiousness and judging. I suspect there is, but solely because the average person prefers closure too little and keeping options open too much. As such, conscientious people naturally drift towards more closure than more openness.

Technically, you could try to turn the MBTI into the big five: take the 5 big five traits and make 25 types out of them. The problem is that 25 is way too many to keep track of, and the big five wasn’t really intended to be a typology model, and as a result the types are sloppy and convoluted.

1

Principal component analysis is a statistical method that involves taking a bunch of data and teasing out a number of factors from it based on how much the variables correlate with each other. Specifically, it extracts a number of abstract, mathematical vectors from a correlation matrix, where the vectors are ordered by the percentage of variance they explain in the underlying data. It’s popular in genetics, where people use correlations between different genetic locations to extract the components that explain the highest amount of variance in the data, which ends up being population structure:

4

I tested this myself with the 240 item HEXACO dataset on openpsychometrics and the SG 1996 435 adjective dataset — the latter was pre-cleaned by Andrew Cutler. After combining the loadings of both general factors, using no rotation method leads to more variance in loadings, but the p-value was disappointing (p = .01). Sad.

Visually, in both datasets, the varimax (farot) method seems to lead to more concentration of loadings around zero than the no rotation method (fanorot).

HEXACO dataset, no rotation:

HEXACO dataset, varimax:

SG1996 dataset, no rotation:

SG1996 dataset, varimax:

May as well post code, since it is short:

hexaco <- data


psych::fa.parallel(hexaco[, 1:242], nfactors=40)

fanorot <- fa(hexaco[, 1:242], nfactors=5, rotate='none')
farot <- fa(hexaco[, 1:242], nfactors=5, rotate='varimax')

GG_denhist(fanorot$loadings[, 1])
GG_denhist(farot$loadings[, 1])
sd(fanorot$loadings[, 1])
sd(farot$loadings[, 1])

var.test(farot$loadings[, 1], fanorot$loadings[, 1])


##############

sg1995 <- study1SaucierGoldberg1996data

fanorot2 <- fa(sg1995, nfactors=5, rotate='none')
farot2 <- fa(sg1995, nfactors=5, rotate='varimax')

GG_denhist(fanorot2$loadings[, 1])
GG_denhist(farot2$loadings[, 1])
sd(fanorot2$loadings[, 1])
sd(farot2$loadings[, 1])

var.test(fanorot2$loadings[, 1], farot2$loadings[, 1])

##############

norot <- c(fanorot2$loadings[, 1], fanorot$loadings[, 1])
rot <- c(farot2$loadings[, 1], farot$loadings[, 1])

var.test(norot, rot)

8

Also worth mentioning: these three factors are substantially bigger than the others:

1. The MBTI categorises people according to whether they have a preference for introversion or extraversion, intuition or sensing, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. These four trait preferences interact to form 16 types (e.g. INTJ, ESFP).

2. Within the American population, 60% are extraverts, 75% are sensors, 50% are thinkers, and 55% are judgers1.

3. Occupaional self-selection is downstream of MBTI type.

4. Criticisms of the MBTI model fall apart fairly easily.

Introduction

It started as philosophy. Jung conceptualised people in terms of whether they preferred to use sensing, which is to directly draw information from memory or the senses (e.g. to see a bear running to you); and intuition, which is to make inferences based on raw information (e.g. the bear running towards you wants to attack). Sensing and intuiting are called the ‘irrational functions’ because they are not judging information, but creating it.

Then, humans can prefer to use one of the two ‘rational functions’ — thinking or feeling. Thinking involves judging something according to its function or truth; feeling involves judging something according to its value (e.g. the fact the bear wants to attack you is bad). The brain cannot focus on both types of judgements at the same time, so thinkers tend to have unconscious value judgements; feelers tend to have unconscious fact judgements.

Beyond that, Jung also noticed that some people tend to be introverted, that is to say, they focus on their internal state over the external world; or extraverted, which is the tendency to do the opposite. When looking back at Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, he thought that the Apollonian was analogous to introversion; Dionysian to extraversion2.

Those four psychological functions can then interact with the introversion/extraversion dichotomy to produce the following eight functions:

1. Extraverted sensing: to experience the real world as it appears. Present-focused.

2. Introverted sensing: to draw upon experiences from memory. Past-focused.

3. Extraverted intuition: to intuit various interpretations of the world as it appears and hold them as alternatives.

4. Introverted intuition: to focus on one particular interpretation of the world.

5. Extraverted thinking: to judge things according to whether they function.

6. Introverted thinking: to judge things according to whether they are true.

7. Extraverted feeling: to judge things according to whether they preserve social harmony.

8. Introverted feeling: to judge things according to whether they are are subjectively valued.

Some clarifications: introverts can be sociable, extraverts can be withdrawn, intuitives can live in the moment, sensors can make inferences, thinkers have feelings, feelers have thoughts, judgers can improvise, and perceivers can plan. All people have access to all eight of the functions. The MBTI is describing preferences, which are acted on when situations are flexible and people can choose to apply their function of choice.

Katherine Briggs and her daughter Myers Briggs built upon Jung’s work in Psychological Types to create the Myers-Briggs type indicator. This involved adding the judging vs perceiving preference, which corresponds to whether somebody prefers to externalise judgements or internalise them. That is to say, judgers prefer to use the extraverted feeling and thinking functions; perceivers prefer to use the introverted feeling and thinking functions.

All four of these trait preferences then combine into 16 personality types:

I like using examples of famous people or fictional characters to describe the types, because it shows what each type tends to look like when they are highly successful or actualised. However, I think that a lot of famous people (especially historical figures) are mistyped, and their image rather than substance is what usually ends up being evaluated.

Whether these preferences are stable or genetic has been debated. Myers herself thought they were moderately heritable (~50%) and stable in adulthood. I, myself, think that the heritability of MBTI type is extremely high (80+%) in adults, comparable to the heritability of ADHD or autism.

The problem with the heritability studies of personality is that they use self-reports instead of peer-reports — when self-reports of the big five are replaced with composites of peer and self reports, the heritability of big five personality traits rises from 40-50% to 75%. The heritability of the MBTI is likely to be higher because it originates in people’s lataent preferences, not behaviour or character.

Isabel Myers then took all of this theory and made the MBTI test, which she was able to administer in 1945 to college students and 1962 to a bunch of high schoolers. With time, she accumulated a lot of evidence to support her theory.

Statistics

(Reminder: I = introvert, E = extravert, N = intuitive, S = sensing, T = thinking, F = feeling, P = perceiving, J = judging). About 60% of people are extraverts, 75% are sensors, 50% are thinkers, and 55% are judgers. The big sex difference is in thinking vs feeling, where 65% of men are thinkers, and 65% of women are feelers.

National merit finalists (top .3% in academics) are ~2x more likely to be intuitives than college prep students, who are ~3x more likely to be intuitives than regular high school students. Academic ability also seems to scale with introversion and a preference for perceiving, but not to the same extent.

Almost all Rhodes scholars are intuitives:

School administrators are overwhelmingly judgers:

Summary of MBTI type and occupational selection:

Assortative mating for MBTI personality exists, but isn’t particularly strong. Extraverts were more likely to be matched in terms of personality than introverts.

65% of Less Wrongers (rationalists) who answered their MBTI type on the site-wide survey in 2012 said they were either INTPs or INTJs. Almost all of them were intuitives.

What each type wants from work. Sensors gravitate towards stability, intuitives towards creativity:

Religiosity by MBTI type3:

Income and MBTI type (E > I; N > S; T > F; J > P):

Trait descriptions

Type descriptions have already been done to death. What is underdone is good descriptions of each axis of preference.

It’s impossible for personality types and preferences to be equal in aggregate value, because they are, well, different. And that’s fine. I generally think that the value differences in MBTI types are small, and that some trait preferences (particularly introversion and sensing) are underrated and their utility is harder to perceive. MBTI typology is best at predicting what people select into, but not how good they are at what they do.

Myers hypothesises that the best-adjusted people are “psychologically patriotic” and are glad to be what they are, and accept it. Which makes sense, since MBTI typology is so heritable and stable, and self-actualisation must build itself on the genetic foundation rather than destroy it. From a functional perspective, an egalitarian view of the MBTI encourages people to accept who they are rather than trying to be something that doesn’t reflect their genetic destiny.

Extraversion vs introversion

At a definitional level, extraverts prefer to focus on their surroundings, introverts prefer to focus on their internal states. There are many biological parameters, values, and upstream preferences (e.g. introverts have higher baseline arousal, extraverts have higher reward sensitivity) that decide this preference, but I don’t think that those things are extraversion or introversion themselves.

Beyond that baseline, definitional description, extraverts and introverts tend to differ in the following tendencies:

• Extraverts act, then think; introverts think, then act.

• Extraverts are easily distracted; introverts less so.

• Extraverts are relaxed and confident; introverts are typically not.

• Extraverts comfortably express their emotions; introverts do not.

• Extraverts comfortably engage in overt status displays or striving; introverts find this unnatural.

• Extraverts suffer from a lack of substace; introverts from a lack of practicality.

• Introverts are more likely to engage in substance abuse4.

Let me get the elephant of the room out of the way. Extraversion has a lot of visible advantages. They tend to have higher incomes, better social skills, romantic partners with more similar personalities to them, more friends, and are less likely to be incels. The general wisdom online is that extraversion is better than introversion. I don’t think this is the case — the advantages of extraversion are just more obvious.

The one, big advantage of introversion is that introverts are more capable of change and action independent of outcomes. If a new business is unprofitable for three years, but has evidence of promise or growth under the surface, an introvert would be more likely to stick with it than an extravert. Extraverts often have to rely on encouragement or external rewards to continue doing something, while “doing it for the sake of doing it” is an introvert thing.

By the very nature of the trait, introverts have more access to their inner world of ideas, feelings, and thoughts, which allows them more self-aware and metacognitive. A rather unexplored area of research is that, by virtue of having more reliable access to their own feelings and ideas, that perhaps introverts give more accurate responses on surveys, and that this distorts observed statistical relationships.

Defenders of introversion, in my opinion, have relied too much on Susan Cain’s ideas. In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Cain argues that introverts are systematically oppressed in the modern world and that the ideal person is an extravert — charismatic, high energy, and persuasive. I don’t disagree (or agree, necessarily) with what she says on an object level, but the grievance-based approach is undignified. It’s not surprising that the environment rewards those who love the environment more.

Intuition vs sensing

Intuition is a tendency towards making inferences and intuitive leaps from a given set of base information (be it memories, sensory data, or even ideas), while sensing is a preference for focusing on the base information itself. Intuitves are more likely to trust their intuitions and engage with them, sensors not so much. Most people are sensors, especially beyond the developed world. In terms of tendencies:

• Intuitives have higher levels of risk tolerance in abstract domains, sensors have higher risk tolerance in physical domains.

• Intuitives are more likely to skip steps in processes if they view them as obvious or trivial5, while sensors are likely to do things by the book.

• Sensors are naturally observant and attentive to details, intuitives are only observant and attentive insomuch as they relate to their ideas and inspirations.

• Sensors have more consistent and diligent work habits, intutives are more likely to work in bursts.

• Sensors often engage in frivolous behaviour if not balanced by their judging processes, intuitives struggle with being fickle and impersistent if they do not properly judge the world.

• Sensors are more likely to be religious.

Statistically, the elephant in the room with intuition vs sensing is IQ — intuitives score about seven IQ points higher than sensors6. The vast majority of people in the top 1% of cognitive ability are intuitives.

People have various theories as to why this is. Myers thinks that a big problem is test bias, where IQ tests reward people who are willing to make far-reaching, abstract judgements from a limited set of information. And that’s the bread and butter of intuitives. She highlights some examples of sensors who scored higher on tests by rushing through tests faster and with more confidence in Gifts Differing, which seem genuine, but I wouldn’t put much more stock in them beyond the average anecdote.

I think this is probably true to some extent, but the problem I see is that people need to make abstract judgements in real life too, so it’s not a test-specific skill. A lot of IQ subtests also do not involve abstract reasoning, they involve doing a bunch of simple things really quickly (like the symbol search subtest in the WAIS), or remembering a set of digits. These involve no abstraction at all; I would be interested to see if intuitives are still advantaged on these subtests as well.

What I actually believe in terms of the IQ difference is that it is functional pleiotropy. The more intelligent the intelligent person, the easier it is to judge farther reaching and complex intuitive leaps. The ease of the process creates the preference, not the other way around. That said, there is nothing wrong with a preference for sensing — failing at the intuitive level is much, much easier than failing at the sensory level.

Thinking vs feeling

This is a visible dimension in terms of it being easy to intuit and it being frequently discussed. Definitionally, thinking concerns itself with relating things to other things, and feeling concerns itself with what things are valued. In terms of tendencies:

• Thinkers have more unconscious feelings, feelers have more unconscious thoughts.

• Thinkers have lower levels of agreeableness than feelers.

• Feelers have better social skills than thinkers, particularly when it comes to understanding social norms and other people’s emotions.

• Contrary to popular belief, thinkers do not have higher levels of cognitive ability than feelers. If anything, outlier high IQ people are slightly shifted towards feeling.

• Feelers are more likely to be religious.

• Thinkers are more likely to struggle with human relationships, less with jobs.

This difference is pretty straightforward. The only thing I need to elaborate on is the “decoupling” idea, that some people can separate truth and value — and that perhaps this is consistent with a preference for thinking over feeling. I reject this. Facts and values are conceptually distinct, but ultimately part of the same system. Focusing on the facts causes the valuation process to retreat to the unconscious, focusing on values forces thoughts into the unconscious.

Judging vs perceiving

People often confuse this with the “conscientiousness” facet of the big five. It’s not the same thing. Judgers prefer structure while conscientious people are better at executing it. Concretely speaking: judgers prefer closure and external structure; perceivers prefer internal structure and the ability to keep options open. In terms of tendencies:

• Judgers are more opinionated than perceivers, who have either absent, developing, or uncertain opinions.

• Judgers often decide on a best way of doing something and always do it that way, while perceivers do whatever feels natural.

• Judgers find local maxima and optimise them, perceivers try to search for the global maxima… And often fail. Sometimes, they don’t.

• Perceivers are natural deconstructers, judgers are natural builders.

• Perceivers hate missing information, judgers hate leaving it unexamined.

• Judgers are more comfortable forcing the world to comply with their standards, perceivers are better at accepting it as it is.

• Judgers with bad perception are rigid and incapable of tolerating other people’s perspectives, perceivers with bad judgement devolve into laziness

• Judgers are more likely to be religious.

I think the judging/perceiving difference is the hardest to evaluate in yourself, because there is often a gap between what you think you should do, what you naturally do, and what you do in a given moment. People who naturally prefer external structure, but aren’t good at implementing it, it might look like perceivers; their preference is judging.

Jungian functions

This is where MBTI theory starts to become much more abstract, unfalsifiable, but interesting. Beyond the four preferences, MBTI also theorises that there are eight type functions, which Myers and Briggs took from Jung. A quick rehash:

1. Extraverted sensing (Se): to experience the real world as it appears. Present-focused.

2. Introverted sensing (Si): to draw upon experiences from memory. Past-focused.

3. Extraverted intuition (Ne): to intuit various interpretations of the world as it appears and hold them as alternatives.

4. Introverted intuition (Ni): to focus on one particular interpretation of the world.

5. Extraverted thinking (Te): to judge things according to whether they function.

6. Introverted thinking (Ti): to judge things according to whether they are true.

7. Extraverted feeling (Fe): to judge things according to whether they preserve social harmony.

8. Introverted feeling (Fi): to judge things according to whether they are are subjectively valued.

Myers and Briggs theorise that a type’s dominant function is determined the following way. First, they have their irrational (S vs N) and rational (T vs F) preferences. Then, the judging vs perceiving trait (J vs P) decides whether the main rational function is internal or external. If it is perceiving, it is internal; if it is juding, it is external. The main irrational function works the opposite way: if a person is judging, then their main irrational function is internal; it they are perceiving, it is external.

Introversion vs extraversion decides which of the two main functions dominate — sorting them into a ‘dominant’ and ‘auxiliary’ function. Then, the inferior functions (the opposites of the dominant functions) balance out the dominant functions. Use of only introverted functions leads to solipsism, use of extraverted functions leads to meaningless reactivity. And it also can’t be a judging function too: all judgements and no perceptions leads to nowhere. So if the dominant function is judging, then the auxiliary function is perceiving and vice versa.

Allow me to be more concrete. Let us take my personality type (INTP7) and infer its function hierarchy. The P means that the thinking is internal, and the intuition is external. The I means that the introverted function dominantes the extraverted one. So, we have Ti > Ne. The opposite functions then have to balance out the dominant ones, so then we have Ti > Ne > Si > Fe. Ti is the dominant function, Ne is the auxiliary, Si is the teritary, and Fe is the inferior.

The dominance does not mean that the function is more developed, but in practice, it tends to happen that way — INTPs naturally prefer Ti and Ne, so they develop their execution more completely. On the other hand, Si and Fe are not as developed and focused on, so they retreat into the unconscious. As such, INTPs often struggle from repeating the same mistakes and misplacing things (Si deficits) as well as awkwardness and emotional, validation seeking outbursts (Fe deficit). That… describes me better than I would like to admit.

Essentially, in MBTI, personality development happens by accepting your preferences, and then trying to develop the execution of your inferior functions first; then awareness of your shadow functions if you can.

The logic of which function dominates does make sense and follows cleanly from basic MBTI theory, but the part about the inferior functions balancing out the dominant ones… I don’t really know if that is true.

Traditionally, it has been posited that the dominant emerged in childhood, the auxiliary emerged in teenage years, the teritary emerged in adulthood, and the inferior was almost always never fully developed. Now, people are more skeptical of this, and are not as sure about whether function maturation is the same for all people. I, personally, doubt it.

Criticisms of the MBTI

The most common criticism of the MBTI is that it is not scientific. Scientific… Meaning what? Does it have institutional approval? Is it official? Is it high status? Is it able to systematically make testable hypotheses about the physical world? The answers to the respective questions are: it depends on the insitution, kind of, not really, and yes. It is commonly believed that scientific experts reject the MBTI, when, to my knowledge, there is no survey of expert psychologists’ opinion on the model.

So yes, the MBTI is about as “scientific” as any psychological theory, like IQ or the big five. It’s not scientific in the sense that it involves a lot of abstact constructs, but if you take the constructs for granted, then testing said constructs are the same as testing any other physical thing, like the weight of a human. There is some abstraction and faith that goes into the concept of a body itself, but it is not as big of a leap.

People also criticise it for dichotomising its variables, which reduces their reliability and granularity. This critique is rather confusing, because the point of the MBTI is the dichotomisation and trying to model humans using how different preferences interact to produce different archetypes. And MBTI tests can give continuous scores as well, they just aren’t as commonly used.

People have criticised the MBTI test for being unreliable, sometimes based on a single statistic, or on anecdotes. So, to be clear, let us assume the test is reliable. Does that mean it is good? No — if the thinking/feeling test was simply a bunch of questions asking “do you like computers” with different wording, then it would be bad. And if the test was unreliable, then that wouldn’t mean that the MBTI framework itself is bad, it could just indicate the test is in need of improvement.

So, the “MBTI is unreliable” critique proves itself to be uninteresting. And for those who are interested in it, the official MBTI test’s reliability is within the standards of the statistical community, which is > .70. The dichotomisation makes the statistical unreliability more apparent.

Myers in Gifts Differing noticed issues with the reliability of the MBTI test in children and teenagers, and she attributed this to their preferences not being as defined or developed at a young age; I would also note that self-awareness and self-concept scale with age. So the actual MBTI test being unreliable might not even be an issue with the test or the framework, it could be the nature of the testing circumstance.

The main functional shortcoming of the MBTI, in my opinion, have to do with poorly modelling emotions and actions — it’s missing something along the lines of order/self-efficacy and emotional attachment/neuroticism. In terms of praxis, I also think the MBTI leans too much into institutionalism by having a “main MBTI organisation”, perhaps if there was no official MBTI, then people would be more comfortable researching the model.

Further reading

• Gifts Differing — Isabel Myers

• Psychological Types — Jung

• MBTI manual (v3) — Isabel Myers

3

Relevant meme:

There is, however, one point he made that did hold water. That, when you correlate IQ scores with other outcomes of interest that aren’t test scores, the relationships observed aren’t strong — 25% of the variance in productivity and lifelong income; less of others like divorce rates or political beliefs.

Taleb’s critics pivoted to arguing that he was using the wrong statistic (R^2), and that if he really wanted to know how much IQ matters, he should have used the correlation coefficient (r). Converting from r to R^2 is just a matter of multiplying r by itself, squaring it, so to say.

I think this is an awful argument. Let me put this mathematically: if IQ explains 25% of the variance in productivity, then 75% of the variance is explained by other factors. 75% is a lot bigger than 25%, so it would be fair to conclude that there is a lot more that goes into productivity than just IQ. It’s also literally just the same statistic, just on a different scale.

Sometimes, neither of these statistics are the correct ones to use. Let’s say you want to test how much malaria harms your health. If you were to correlate people’s malaria infection status to their health in the South Africa, the correlation would be close to zero because there’s very few people who are infected with it at a given point. But malaria absolutely does mess you up.

In psychology and statistics, there are guidelines regarding what constitutes a small, medium, or large effect size. These might be helpful for undergraduates, but the tables themselves are made up — whether an effect is “big” or “small” has to do with subjective values, not mathematics. In that regard, the R^2 vs r debate is not helpful, because the salience of a statistic cannot be determined by how big it is.

The standard deviation of income of income in the United States is about $50,000 dollars. Increasing your income by 0.2 standard deviations would be equivalent to $10,000 dollars per year. I’d venture that’s a lot. On the other hand, 0.2 standard deviations in height adds up to only 0.5 inches.

Where to go from here?

When people realise that IQ doesn’t explain that much of the observable universe statistically, this could be due to two reasons.

One of them is that intelligence cannot be measured accurately by IQ tests, and that intelligence is best defined as something else. A popular definition I’ve frequently seen is that “intelligence is the ability to get what you want out of life”. The spirit of the phrase is that your intelligence doesn't matter if it doesn't lead to any outcomes, which I agree with, but it is still false by definition. The realisation helps prevent people from coping with failure by tieing your self worth to your intelligence, but that doesn't personally resonate with me.

I think that this definition, covertly, sneaks IQ determinism back into the equation, just with the aside that it can’t be measured by a test, but with what you do and get. And those things definitely matter, I just don’t think they are that related your thought processess.

The definition of intelligence I've arrived to is the ability to infer information from information. The inference can be difficult because it is far-reaching, unintuitive, requires background knowledge, or mentally tracking lots of involved parts. IQ tests can measure how intelligent people are, because they measure the amount of knowledge they have already accumulated (vocabulary, general knowledge tests), proxies for cognitive ability (e.g. reaction time, processing speed), and making conclusions that are far-reaching and involve tracking lots of parts.

Funny that Taleb’s critique involves arguing that there is no right answer to the question ‘ 1 → 2 → 3 → X ‘ , because the pattern could be something besides 1+1+1+1 that looks like 1+1+1+1 for the first three numbers. In the real world, a lot of conclusions people have to make look like this: no 100% logically correct right answer, but something that “feels right” and works.

I’ve entertained the perspective that IQ tests do not measure intelligence before, and came to the conclusion that they do so pretty well. It’s not really possible to determine how well exactly because intelligence is an abstract, unmeasurable concept, but I think the true correlation between intelligence and IQ is something like .8.

The other reason that intelligence could not be a good statistical predictor of anything besides test scores is that it just doesn’t matter that much. It doesn’t factor in, well, everything else about a person: their personality, physical capabilities, appearance, physical health, or circumstances.

Notes:

I haven’t posted in a while, partly due to having the flu from Jan 2 - 15; and also because I have been cooking two really long pieces: an attempt to explain all personality psychology, and an attempt to build a framework that explains all differences in income between people.

Said flu also led me to reflect on the time I got typhoid fever when I was 19. I did it on my new substack publication Selective Contrarianism, where I just post whatever I think in the moment without regard to what is acceptable, what people would find interesting, or whether it makes sense.

1. Capitalism revealing our preferences.

2. Build-up effects (new hypothesis, I’ll explain this).

3. Faster iterations of news cycles, cultural cycles, and social discourse.

4. Literature becoming less relevant, both in terms of creation and readership.

5. Loss of faith in definitive and long-term vision.

When people talk about the convergent culture of monochrome and minimalism — whether in logos, cars, interiors, clothes, or designs — the blame is often levied at “algorithms” shaping our preferences and making all companies do the same thing. Ignoring definition games about what constitutes an algorithm, computational models are clearly not to blame for the convergent culture.

Take, for example, the change in car colours over time:

The change starts in 1998, before the big data revolution.

How about photos of artifacts in museums?

Constant increase in monochrome and colder colours ever since the 1800s. It seems more reasp, a type of artificial intelligence that assigns incentives and prices based on demand and conditions is a much more explanatory explanation for why culture has converged than computers.

And regardless of what mechanism drove the convergence, the drive to blame the algorithms is interesting. Essentially, what an algorithm does is that it takes a bunch of inputs and transforms them into an output. In the context of culture, this happens at various levels, but conventionally, people are talking about the taste-level. Companies release products, consumers buy them, and then companies adjust their response to the tastes of the consumers.

If so, then all that is occuring is an episode of the masses revealing their preferences. Cultural decline as perceived by an observer, not a god, or the public for that matter.

You could argue that, maybe, this is a molochian problem where the incentives at the individual level are to cater towards the average preference, but it would be better in aggregate if companies did things differently anyway. I find this doubtful, if there really was a burning desire for original television and film, then people would make it.

I think this is a fair case to be made that the problem with cars and interior design is molochian, in the sense that people want to resell their assets for high prices to people who want them — incentives encourage following safe or public preferences. I would ask why somebody wealthy enough to buy a new car and decorate their house would care about how much they sell it for; these are humans we are dealing with after all.

Architecture is a little different, Scott Alexander approached this issue and he thinks that it might have to do with the wealthy wanting to hide wealth in favour of signalling taste, and architects and designers finding the old aesthetics — symmetry, maximalism, and functionalism — too constraining. In that case, it would be appropriate to blame the tastes of the creators | elites and not the masses — most people like traditional architecture more than modern architecture.

Strangely, when we see an increase in drivers of cultural diversity — be it racial types, subcultural fragmentation, or political polarisation: we are afraid. We must manage it with bureaucracy and social fabric, or reduce it by means of limiting immigration or discourse. We don’t seem to want culture to stagnate but we also don’t want it to be diverse either.

There are people who do want different, new things, they are just in the minority, and there are not enough of them to sustain avant garde, ambitious art at scale. Especially when these people who want better things can just pivot to older content; the kind of people who want different things are also more likely to try to find it. Which leads me to my second hypothesis:

Build-up effects

This is not the same as a low hanging fruit effect. A build-up effect is an effect that arises from more fruits being picked, regardless of where they are on the tree.

The low-hanging fruit effect is a good explanation for the decline in productivity in the sciences and perhaps some constrained forms of art. I am, however, skeptical of whether this is the case for the rest of culture and particularly narrative, the form of culture I am most interested in. Most great narrative masterpieces are not low-hanging fruits1, but high-hanging ones, stories that were difficult to conceptualise and execute. Lord of the Rings, for example, took decades of worldbuilding and conception to bring to fruition.

I think that a similar, but functionally different effect is responsible for some of the slowdown in culture we seen: I call it the build-up effect.

Imagine a society with a set population of 100 million people and zero innovation, but possesses modern digital technology. 10,000 works of narrative are released every year. Every year, the number of total works ever written keeps increasing every year relative to the number of new works. Even with no technological or demographic progression, culture “stagnates” because the amount of total work the culture has produced is constantly increasing relative to new output as nothing else changes.

This also drives perception too. As time goes on, even if no sequels or remakes are published, it feels like culture is stagnating because, as time goes on, the best of it is increasingly old. In addition, more of those 10,000 works are going to be remixes, adaptations, sequels, or remakes of the old works.

The catch: this is clearly not the main driving force behind what is happening.

Take films, for example. The amount of new film has skyrocketed starting in the late 90s — from 5000 in 2000 to 17500 in 2020, and the same is true for other forms of art, like anime2 and books3 too.

It’s difficult to quantify the number of remakes and sequels that occur every year, because they need to be labelled manually, so people often evaluate this by looking at the top films by revenue. This will overestimate the number of sequels/reboots, as successful franchises disproportionately continue

Even so, this cannot be the cause of the problem. See the following chart: top grossing films went from 25% sequels in 2000 to 75% in 2020.

If we take these numbers at face value, then we have gone from ~3750 brand new films in 2000 to ~4300 in 2020 — an increase, in fact. The problem is that they are, well, bad.

Personally, the “sequelitis” critique of culture doesn’t land because a lot of my favourite media — Fate/Zero, Skyrim, and Devil May Cry 3 — are all sequels. I do concede, however, that this is behind a great share of the perception behind culture stagnating — not the essence, though.

I think the build-up effect, however, can explain artists not wanting to cater to divergent or “refined” tastes — those with these tastes can just look up the content they want to watch on the internet, and watch it themselves. I don’t believe true art competes with anything, because nothing can replace it, but the shift in incentives remains nonetheless.

Faster cultural iterations

Essentially, a cultural iteration is:

Ideas (e.g. mythology, political philosophy) → content (e.g. films, games) →discourse (e.g. tweets, books)→more ideas→more content

In the past, these things occurred slowly, because distribution channels took their time, attention spans were better, and the content was longer.

Now, it is extremely fast.

This speed makes discourse feel meaningful, impactful, or cool. But said speed actually makes the iterations less impactful: stable changes in conception and belief come from periods of reflection, not an attention-shifting state. I am not blaming only trashy short-form content, but also the speed up in the pace of all content, be it film, television, or books.

These fast news and event cycles give people the illusion of a rapidly changing, impactful discourse, but none of the substance: when one side starts losing face or composure, it disengages and diverts attention; the winning side claims victory, only for the “victorious” argument to be forgotten in mere weeks. The cancelled not only stay cancelled, but irrelevant too. Anti-capitalist films and television like Parasite or Squid Game go viral, disappear, only to be replaced by the enduring soul of utilitarian neoliberalism.

Growing irrelevance of literature

This was the topic of the first post on cultural decline:

I still consider the thesis defensible. I think I was too eager to claim that the best authors would turn away from writing — it’s still materially easy to do, and I think the very best, the transformational talents, are probably still there; perhaps just writing stories in different mediums.

The current mediums: video games, films, and television series, are not as suited to the creation of original and high quality content. These technological mediums serve best as vectors of transmission, not creation. Cultural changes observed elsewhere (e.g. logos, cars) cannot be explained with any of the causes I posited, besides perhaps broad technological stagnation.

Loss of faith in definition

If you look at the greatest of our species — be they artists, statesmen, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists — they often have different personalities or backgrounds, but there are two traits that recur:

1. High intelligence.

2. The ability to commit to a definitive, grand, long-term vision, even in the absence of financial or social rewards.

When people speak of the decline of great genuises, I think that some of it is just an artefact (might talk about this later), but I think some of it is a culture that encourages spontaneity, novelty, and “keeping options open” over planning, hard work, and delayed gratification. The former gives us consultants, financiers, polymaths, and generalists; the latter gets us to the moon.

This is a softer and less empirical explanation, but it nonetheless feels real to me. Thiel touches on this issue in Zero to One, the best book I have read to date.

The false explanations

I avoid putting people on blast. I will abide by this standard here, though it will lead to an inevitable loss in context, so I will link the posts but not mention names.

Our first theory posits that there is a general loss in divergence in human behaviour, and that this is causing the great cultural convergence: the monochrome cars, minimalist logos, and athleisure that have been panned to death, but also the lower drug use in the youth, crime reductions, and fertility declines.

The author hypothesises that this decline is driven by longer and more predictable lifespans, which encourage more risk averse behaviour and slow life strategies — less drugs, sex; more studying and reputation-guarding. Once people start doing that, their life experiences homogenise, lives narrow, and worldviews converge. This convergence in experience causes a convergence in artforms, and institutions enable this by penalising failure and documenting reputations.

I object to this analysis on almost every single level.

Regarding the trends in the youth, the elephant in the room is the decline in face-to-face social interaction. I ask, what kind of person spends all their time drinking alone? Smoking alone? A depressed, executively dysfunctional person. The fact that the youth of the day are turning away from the drugs and the crime is not a testament to their weakness, but to their strength and isolation. There is also statistical evidence4 that these trends we see in aggressive behaviour such as unprotected sex, drug use, and crime internationally are driven by declines in social interaction: not phones, the internet, or parents being too vigilant.

The same kinds of people who engage in petty risks — unprotected sex, violence, drug use, or crime — are actually probably less likely to create great art, which requires delaying gratification. Dysfunctional risk-takers are less risk averse, but they are also less intelligent and worse planners. It also doesn’t factor in that the kind of people who take concrete risks (MBTI sensors) are not the same type of people who take abstract risks (MBTI intuitives).

Also, just take a look at twitter, or any internet culture for that matter. Are we really getting less weird, or is people’s weirdness just getting expressed in different ways?

I also object to the cause. Longer lives and less day-to-day death risks encourage behaviours with longer time horizons — which encourage great art.

There is also another theory which states there is no cultural decline, and all of the innovation is hidden in new art forms: tiktoks, tweets, or memes. Now this is a cope.

Many of these advocates of internet culture (not the author, to be fair) never stop to tell us what about it they enjoy; I have no such reticence: I like the naruto AI parody where Naruto’s body is inhabited by an African man, the Skyrim AI parodies of American culture, RWBY fanfiction, and the Sonic fandubs with Alfred in them.

These people never do this because the new culture is, simply and obviously, worse than the old one. It’s not even trying to do the same thing, so maybe it doesn’t even make sense to say it is worse, but it doesn’t function as a replacement. Some of it might be funny or entertaining, but it’s not a substitution for masterpieces like Chinatown, Twin Peaks, or Ghost in the Shell. These creators of the new culture, no matter their popularity, either envy or admire the great artists.

There is this cope that “everybody wants to be a poaster”, that discourse matters or whatever, but real culture comes in serious art forms: anime, video games, film, and books. Any 200k+ twitter or tiktok account would 100% prefer to be making transcendent art or building monopolies than doing whatever they are creating at the moment. The issue is that these online platforms attract a certain neurotype, typically high in insecurity, drive, and disorganisation, and low in executive function and maturity; selecting them into social media and away from more wholesome forms of creation.

A third theorist posts that the world has been ruined by “dopamine seeking” devices which distract us, pacify us, and do a bunch of bad things. Zuckerberg, Musk, and the elites are to blame for all of this. No really, that’s what he thinks:

Do you remember rule two above? It said: Look to the teens, and their digital lives.

When you do that, you see immediately that they are the main victims here. This flattened culture is all they have ever known. It’s now the landscape of their inner lives.

Many of these youngsters lack the skills and tools required to escape. So this flattened world is really their prison—and the billionaire wardens (Mr. Z and Mr. M and all the rest), who get rich from their brokenness, want them held in their digital chains forever.

Now, I am not exactly the biggest fan of short form content. But I think this is the wrong line of attack — who, may I ask, is using phones to look at all this garbage?

Technology might have given us more distractions and meaningless fluff, but earlier generations had these things too, just in forms that had other ends and were delivered in a more palatable form: social interaction, exercise, collecting, television, and having sex with prostitutes. People starting projects and losing focus, lacking discipline, or the ability to delay gratification is a perennial problem.

Technology also gave us more opportunities and tools: easily pirated digital workstations, digital art software, and free platforms. Humankind, instead of being driven to creation, has decided to make cheap, stupid content or sterilise itself with it. The “intellectuals” ignore this obvious fact and divert the bad conscience to technology — the best thing humanity creates.

I will, say, on a positive note, that it seems like the mediums that are stagnating the least (video games, music) are also the ones where people have the easiest time making things on their own without the help of mass audiences, marketing, or institutions. Within music, I see many emerging styles like witch house, emo rap, lofi, or Phonk, they do not tend to hit the top of the charts, but many people still listen top them nonetheless. In that regard, it seems that our artists are doing relatively fine, it is the masses and elites that are flaundering.

Previously, I was concerned that perhaps the problem was that we are getting more content, and it has become harder for the collective intelligence to sort between all of it. Even small changes in the correlation between popularity and quality could change the quality of what rises to the top.

I no longer think this is the case. Strictly speaking, there are two barriers to the creation of culture:

1. The number of people who engage with a form of culture.

2. The ease of creating said culture.

Lots of people watch anime, but only several hundred are created per year, because creating anime requires a studio and capital. Novels aren’t read that often, but are frequently written because it is far easier to write a novel than film a movie.

The raw quantity of film and anime has increased by an order of magnitude in the last 20 years, but 17500 films have been released in 2020 and 300 anime were shipped out (not aired) that year. Those numbers also differ greatly, but I feel like the “rise to the top” effect is pretty similar in both mediums and isn’t affected that much by the raw amount of content. More coal doesn’t hide the gems if they are shiny enough.

People have also highlighted that selection in the past was different: it was institutions that chose whether a book was published or a film was released. Now, computers + social media make distribution of content much easier, which lowers the quality of content by default. This is probably true, but popularity has always been directed by word of mouth, which is deterministic at a high enough scale.

So

Finding good culture is easy. Find a computer, get on the internet, and search for it.

If so, then why does this even matter? To some people, this matters because culture matters to them beyond consumption; I can sympathise with this motivation. Alternatively, one could read discourse regarding cultural stagnation as performative, engaged in to signal “divergent” or “higher” tastes that stand above the mass culture, that you are keyed in to the latest trends and discussions on the internet.

I think the answers that some of these intellectuals give is rather telling. That the problem is the “elites”, that modern life makes us pod people that don’t want to take risks, and that that cheap husk of a culture we call “memes” is a replacement for high art. We would love to blame anybody but us, the people with the right tastes and preferences. Or maybe the problem is that I am not trying hard enough to find the right cultural critics.

In social environments, exposure to mass culture is inevitable. And here’s the thing: the point of these environments is the people, not the culture. I don’t think whether Golden by KPOP Demon Hunters being a good song changes whether I enjoy dancing to it with my 6 and 8 year old siblings.

2

Anime:

3

Books:

4

Let me look at the main source that suggests the decline is due to face to face socialising. Their regression table is pretty unambigious, extremely low p-value:

For the individual-level effects, it’s also pretty unambigious:

The record also does not suggest they are electronically driven either. See Table 1:

Some of it is also just later initiation ages, which goes against the author’s hypothesis:

1. Richard Hanania explains the based ritual: any objection to right wing opinions has to be due to being too right wing. “Repealing the 19th is bad because nobody should vote anyway” or “hating minorities too much is bad because that diverts hate away from women”.

2. Anonymous woman describes her dating experience in the bay area on Scott Alexander’s blog, and describes a few types: “the man who is not”, “the man who is”, “the founder”, among others. A little fluffy (to be expected), but conceptually dense, raw, and original.

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