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Another copy and pasted article from my blog. Don't worry, I normally don't post this much. Substack link if you want pictures.
My struggles as an Orthodox Christian convert, and why I can't seem to walk away from Christ despite my doubts
Going to church today for the proto-anastasian liturgy (Easter is tomorrow for us Orthodox Christians), I have to admit I have some doubts about the Resurrection and the whole story of Christ being the Son of God.
Usually I can sort of deny these doubts within myself, but during Holy Week, the sincerity of the people around me, the Church services every night and during the day (not that I go to them all), and just the general intensity of everything really brings my cognitive dissonance to the forefront.
I’m about a year and a half post my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and when I took the vows to follow Christ, bear His cross, and keep to the strictures of the Nicene Creed, I was sincere. At least as sincere as I could be. I had doubts of course, and my priest was well aware. After all, I took the name of the premier doubter in the Christian mythos, Saint Thomas the Apostle.
When I was converting, I had multiple experiences of Christ coming to me. I dealt with extreme chronic pain, debilitating suffering, and He saved me. I don’t talk about this often online because it feels gauche, and I won’t go into detail now. But suffice to say I had genuine experiential evidence to believe the Christian story.
Unfortunately, as Christianity has ceased to be novel and exciting and a big change in my life, that evidence feels more and more hollow, less convincing to my overly rationalized, modern mind.
More and more I find myself thinking: “Is this really true? What if His body was just snatched away and lies were spread? Wouldn’t it make more sense for all the women at the tomb and the apostles to just be delusional, even if they genuinely believed it? The Jews said that they stole the body, the early Christians obviously claimed they were lying, how can we ever know for sure?”
When I first started to doubt, even before I converted, these thoughts would plague and torment me. Sitting there in church I would fret, “How can I feel this way and sing hymns, how can I take communion while not genuinely believing that it’s the Body and Blood of Christ?”
Still today these doubts and thoughts bother me, but I’m learning to be more at home with them. I can’t ever know the truth of the Resurrection. In all likelihood, the intense experiences that convinced me to convert won’t come back. My spiritual father and my elders in the faith have all warned me that’s the case.
So, if I doubt the Christian story so much, why continue going? Aren’t I living a double life? Aren’t I lying to myself and my community?
Perhaps I am. It certainly bothers me, as I pride myself (heh) on being an honest and open person. I discuss my doubts with my priest and close confidants, but generally keep them close to the chest in my broader church community.
In a way it would be easier to just leave church. To take the path I took as a teenager, be an atheist, say it’s all fake. But I simply can’t deny the beauty of Holy Orthodoxy, the haunting power of Christ’s story, and His words.
When I first saw an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, I was blown away. I came back a second time and ended up bawling the entire service, crying more in that couple of hours than I had my entire life prior. Eventually one of the parish council members had to shoo me out of the pews, because I stayed there crying so long that everyone had packed up and they were closing the church.
Something about Orthodoxy, something about Christ, just compels me. Even if it doesn’t make sense to my rational mind, my heart can’t let go of Him. Reading the pre-communion prayers, I do honestly have difficulty firmly and strongly acclaiming that YES, I DO believe this bread is the Body of Christ, and the wine is the Blood of Christ.
But I can honestly say that I love Him, that I want Him dearly, that I long for Him to be a part of me. I can say that when I participate in the Eucharist, I feel filled with a mysterious life that I can’t explain, that perhaps isn’t divine but certainly is closer than almost anything else I’ve experienced in this world.
Who knows what actually happened two thousand years ago in the tomb of Christ, it’s probably one of, if not the most, controversial historical topics ever. We will never truly know what happened, regardless of what evidence comes out or new techniques archaeologists discover.
All I know is that for me, the beauty and power of Christ’s Church and His legacy that has been kept alive for almost two thousands years by His followers is something I can’t seem to do without. It has made my life better in every way, and made me more like Him. My role model, my Lord, my Savior. When the mood strikes me, my King and my God.
Perhaps I’m a hypocrite, one of those people Christ condemned that mouthed the prayers without really believing deep in their hearts. I certainly know I’m a sinner. But ultimately, I just can’t seem to walk away despite the dissonance and the doubts and the confusion.
I’m reminded of the story in the Gospel, when Christ was about to go to His Passion, and he gave his disciples the ritual of the Eucharist. He told them that they would be eating His body, drinking His blood. Many of His followers, even those healed by Him, were freaked out, and understandably so!
They went Ok dude, we can accept that you’re a holy prophet healing us, but you want us to be cannibals? You want us to EAT you?! That’s a little too weird for me, sorry, I’m out.
Christ turned to His disciples and said, “Will ye also go away?”
Simon Peter responded, in a quote that haunts me two thousand years later because I feel the exact same damn way. He looked at this beautiful Man, this incredible healer, teacher, prophet, king. He searched his heart, and responded:
“Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
In the last installment, we discussed Lawrenceville and the factors that led to its gentrification. In this installment, we will discuss the nearby neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship. In retrospect, each of these had at least some of these factors at the time Lawrenceville began gentrifying in the early 2000s, and in the decades since, each has gentrified to some degree. But none has undergone the full-scale transformation that happened in Lawrenceville.
Series Index:
- Intro
- Downtown
- Strip District
- North Shore
- South Side
- Hill District: Lower Hill
- Hill District: Middle Hill
- Hill District: The Projects
- The Hill’s Environs: Uptown, Sugar Top, and Polish Hill
- Oakland
- Lawrenceville
What Is a Neighborhood?
Before we get started, I want to point out that, geographically, this part of the city has some major discrepancies regarding official boundaries versus colloquial ones, and I want to investigate what exactly we talk about when we talk about neighborhoods. I can't find any information regarding how many American cities officially define their neighborhoods, but preliminary research suggests that the number is not high. I know Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Chicago do, but I can't find anything for Boston or Philadelphia other than lists of names, and New York explicitly refuses to do so. Part of the problem is that no matter how carefully you try to collect the data, as soon as you draw a line on a map the arguments start flying. And once you make an official designation, that designation affects, to some degree, how people view the area going forward.
For a city that prides itself on the diversity and distinctiveness of its neighborhoods, it was only within the past 50 or so years that anyone really paid attention to them. Most of the published histories of Pittsburgh do not discuss them, save occasional mentions of Oakland or the Hill District. Contemporary publications aren't much better. A sense of cohesive neighborhood identity did not become established until the 1960s, when the urban renewal projects of the Pittsburgh Renaissance threatened to tear communities apart. It was then that neighborhood groups formed to provide organized opposition to the projects. However, these groups found it difficult to negotiate effectively with city government without accurate information about the neighborhoods, which was not available at the time. Census data was available, but this only covered relatively large areas that did not necessarily conform to neighborhood boundaries as they were popularly understood at the time. The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance was formed in 1969 to gather this data, and in order to do that, boundaries had to be determined. The Alliance held community meetings, where they would simply ask participants to define the boundaries in which they lived. In other words, we have NIMBYs to thank.
The city itself was taking interest. Pete Flaherty was elected mayor in 1969 as part of a backlash against Renaissance policies. He vowed instead to implement a "neighborhood renaissance" that would move away from large-scale boondoggles in favor of local civic improvement. The Planning Department drew boundaries based on census tracts and in 1974 published a series of 88 Community Profiles. In the meantime, the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance, in Conjunction with the Pitt School of Social Work, conducted neighborhood surveys in 1976 to collect the neighborhood-level data that was so sorely needed. The result was the 1977 Pittsburgh Neighborhood Atlas, which identified 78 neighborhoods. When Richard Caliguri took over as mayor in the late 1970s, he formed the Neighborhoods for Living Center, which published its own map in 1983. The planning department settled on the currently recognized 90 neighborhoods in 1990, which appear on official maps today. In the early 1990s, however, mayor Sophie Masloff implemented a program to erect street signs, which were rare at the time. Part of this program was that signs of major roads have the neighborhood name on them, which Reddit refers to as the "Blue Sign Squad".
It should go without saying that there are discrepancies between the 1976 survey, the 1983 map (which is probably the best one but didn't result in anything else so I'm not going to mention it anymore), the official planning boundaries, and the street sign designations. The 1976 survey is probably the most colloquially accurate, but includes several small, odd neighborhoods that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else. The official maps upped the count to 90 by implementing semi-bogus geographic subdivisions to otherwise cohesive neighborhoods and by giving isolated housing projects their own sections. The blue signs don't conform to the planning boundaries exactly and recognize sub-neighborhoods that aren't part of the official total, but don't recognize some sub-neighborhoods that are part of the official total when political considerations are at play (the official Hill District divisions make sense, but residents view them as part of a "divide and rule" strategy meant to inhibit neighborhood cohesion).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I would define the neighborhood boundaries for this series (don't worry, most of it was while driving when I literally didn't have anything better to do). It would have been really easy for me to just use the official list, but the purpose of the series would then be frustrated by my having to make a lot of caveats, and I had to come up with my own system. I think it comes down to three questions:
- What do the local stakeholders identify as? In most cases this means residents, but business owners, those who work there, and those who visit regularly need to be taken into consideration as well. This is the approach that the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance took in the 1970s.
- To what degree do the residents actually interact?
- To what degree does the neighborhood feel cohesive to an outsider driving through it? Do the street grids match up? Are there significant geographical barriers? Consider West Oakland, which we discussed a couple installments ago. It's a bitch to define. The residents in the vicinity of Robinson St. consider themselves as Oakland when it's convenient for them but as part of the Hill District for historical reasons, and different residents have different identities. Outsiders may have considered it as part of the Hill at one time but may not now. But the Hill has five different official neighborhoods, each of which is a legitimate division. If you don't view the Hill District as one neighborhood, and you don't think the area around Robinson St. should be part of Terrace Village—which is self-evident, because it's not part of the old housing project—then you either need a new name for it or you can keep calling it West Oakland, which means you have to treat it as part of Oakland. But then the second question comes into play when defining the boundaries, because the black working-class residents of the area around Robinson St. have little interaction with the Pitt and Carlow students who reside within the official boundaries. And then there's the part that's demographically similar to the area around Robinson St. but is geographically distinct from it and connected to Uptown. The line I ended up drawing doesn't conform to any of the three criteria, but nonetheless conforms to all of them.
Or look at Lawrenceville, from last time. The city officially divides it into three parts: Upper, Middle, and Lower. Old timers did so as well, but used the ward numbers instead. These aren't distinct enough to really merit being their own neighborhoods, since the overall Lawrenceville identity is stronger. But even as subdivisions, some are stronger than others. Although geographically separated, there's isn't much of a difference between Central and most of Lower Lawrenceville. The residential section between Penn and Liberty is quite different, but this is more of a no man's land than a separate neighborhood, and given the way prestige and the real estate markets work it's identity as part of Lawrenceville is solidified, but it's never going to have its own name.
For the present installment, we have to contend with the fact that a large part of what is officially Bloomfield is colloquially Friendship, which is officially quite small. And also with the common problem that the Penn Ave. corridor outside of the Penn/Main business district by the hospital is officially split between Garfield and Bloomfield, except for a small part on the eastern end where one side of the street in officially in Friendship. I consider everything south of Liberty to be Bloomfield. North of Liberty, apart from the street itself (which is all Bloomfield), the dividing line is at Friendship Park in the vicinity of West Penn Hospital. It is here that the housing stock changes significantly enough to give the entire neighborhood a different feel. Both sides of Penn are Garfield. There's also a section of Bloomfield south of the ravine that includes a residential section that feels more like part of North Oakland but not enough to deviate from the official boundary, not least of which because it's off of Baum on the other side of a bridge which most people would consider Bloomfield though it's really sort of a no-man's land.
11. Bloomfield: Little Italy
Bloomfield is located in Pittsburgh's East End, to the south and east of Lawrenceville. The main entrance, so to speak, is via the Bloomfield Bridge, which connects the neighborhood to Oakland via Bigelow Blvd. and Craig St. The ravine that the bridge crosses bounds the neighborhood to the west, though it splits and while one branch forms the border the other cuts off the southernmost portion of the neighborhood. The southern end is along the Baum Blvd. corridor, and I've taken the liberty of putting the boundary with Friendship at the complicated intersection with Liberty and Center where it's easy to make a wrong turn. From there I include the Liberty Ave. corridor to West Penn Hospital, where the line jogs north to Penn Ave. based largely on housing typology. I give the Penn corridor west of Friendship Ave. to Lawrenceville, and I include the Liberty Ave. corridor back to the bridge.
Entering the neighborhood via the bridge, one sees a sweeping vista of the entire neighborhood laid out on a plateau above the ravine. This plateau was once home to Joseph Winebiddle's farm, back in the days when it was still part of the now defunct Peebles Township. It was annexed to the city in 1868 and developed in the subsequent decades, development being mostly complete by 1900. It was originally settled by German Catholics, but around the turn of the century, Italians from the Abruzzi region began settling there. Bloomfield's reputation as an Italian district notwithstanding, it should be noted that at that time there were several parts of the city with significant Italian populations—Larimar, Oakland, parts of the Hill District and Downtown, among others, all had a legitimate claim as Pittsburgh's Little Italy, so in that respect it was not unique.
What is unique is that it retained its Italian character through the midcentury upheavals of urban renewal, suburbanization, and increasing urban crime rates, as well as through the ongoing diminution of ethnic identity in America and the continuing gentrification of urban areas. The 1977 Atlas noted that while there was still a large German presence, the neighborhood was mostly Italian, and while it's impossible to determine precisely when the Little Italy designation came into the public consciousness, a sign welcoming visitors to Bloomfield and describing it as such was erected in 1993, and the Little Italy Days festival was established in 2002. At that time, New York's Little Italy had become a shell of its former self, a façade of tourist-oriented restaurants on top of a neighborhood that had few actual Italians. Pittsburgh, by contrast, was in a different boat. When the census bureau began tracking ancestry in 1980, 50% of people in the core of Italian settlement in Bloomfield claimed Italian ancestry, a number which held into the new millennium. And there was little to nothing that would appeal to the casual tourist; there were two Italian grocers, but most of the Italian businesses were things like beer distributors, dry cleaners, and barbershops, none of which had any outside appeal. Even the Italian restaurants weren't anything special.
But alas, all things must pass. The Italian population had declined to 40% by 2010 and sits at 30% as of 2024, still double that of Pittsburgh as a whole but a far cry from where it was. The business district, which was mostly Italian-owned in 2002, isn't much different than anywhere else. Several of the mainstays have closed, not due to lack of business, but because the owners retired and couldn't find a buyer. Little Italy Days has since become county fair mainstream with both Bloomfield and Italiana an afterthought. While something like 78% of Bloomfield businesses participate, they represent a small proportion of the total vendors, most of whom are large regional companies selling things like insurance and gutter guards. There's still wine, bocce, and Italian entertainment, but the 100,000 visitors necessitate the closing of Liberty Ave. and cause parking issues. The residents hate it.
While the decline of the Italian tradition may be lamentable, I'm not going to shed too many tears for it, despite being of (non-Bloomfield) Italian extraction myself. Things change, and unless the change is unmistakably negative, I don't think we're served any better by clinging to vestiges of the past. The organizers of Little Italy Days can make a deliberate attempt to make it more Italian, but they can't turn it back into the local festival that it was prior to 2012. Do this on a neighborhood scale and we turn Pittsburgh's Little Italy into New York's Little Italy, an ersatz imitation of an ideal that probably never existed, meant to appeal to a tourist's idea of what a Little Italy is supposed to look like. As someone who remembers the old Italian Bloomfield, I can assure you that it wasn't like what you are imagining.
Let me elaborate. I first started hanging around here circa 2004; I went to a small liberal arts college where there was little to do and headed off to greener pastures nearly every weekend. Friends of mine from high school who went to Pitt moved here because the rent was cheaper than in Oakland and there was decent bus service. By cheaper I mean you could rent a 3 bedroom house for under $700/month and a 1 bedroom apartment for under $500. My impression of the place from then up until around 2016 or 2017 was that it was a stable working-class neighborhood that demographically skewed older and more Italian but had a fair amount of younger people as well. Bloomfield was a hipster neighborhood at a time when Lawrenceville had nothing worth glancing at, except for drug addicts and prostitutes. Maybe there was some nascent gentrification going on, but as I said last time, it was totally off my radar. And while Bloomfield may have had a fair share of hipsters at that point, there wasn't anything hip about the neighborhood itself. There were a few places that catered to young people, but the business district was mostly functional. Unlike Oakland, you could actually do most of your business within a ten minute walk from your house.
The Italian businesses that we frequented were not of the type that would appeal to outsiders, and there wasn't necessarily anything Italian about them other than the owner's last name. The Italian bars we used to hang out in were initially selected on the basis of whether or not they carded, which they mostly didn't because it had been a while since they had a customer under the age of 70. These places all had illegal poker machines and your chances of developing lung cancer increased by 50% each time you visited. I later learned that these places ran numbers and offered a sports book if you were willing to bet $50/week. The most famous Italian restaurant was Del's, which was so bad it was featured on Restaurant Impossible in 2012 and closed in 2015. The second most famous was the Pleasure Bar, which is still open. I'm pretty sure they used Prego brand sauce, and the only reason to go there was for karaoke. I remember seeing the waitresses at D'Amico's smoking cigarettes while they cut customers' bread. When I'd see old women drinking wine at these places, it was invariably Riunite. The neighborhood had a lot of characters. The Foodland was ahead of its time in that all of the employees looked like they were on fentanyl before fentanyl became common. It was easily the most disgusting grocery store I have ever been in.
If it seems like I'm nostalgic for the old Bloomfield, I'm not. When I recount these memories to newcomers or younger people they respond along the lines of "It sounds like it was a lot cooler then" to which I reply "No, it wasn't. We hung out at these places first out of necessity, and later out of familiarity. But we didn't feel like we were anywhere cool at the time." To put a finer point on it: When the Steelers won the Super Bowl in 2006, I remember watching the game at my friend's house and walking down to Liberty Ave. after it was over. There were a decent number of people out on the sidewalks celebrating, many of them spilling out of bars, and cars on the street honked as they went by, but when returned and saw the images on the TV news of the absolute mayhem on the South Side, we vowed that if a Pittsburgh team was ever in another championship, we were watching the game there. Luckily, we'd see two there just a few years later. If you're looking for an otherwise unglamorous neighborhood that has a not insignificant hipster population, those places aren't exactly uncommon, even today. But they aren't chic. Bloomfield is cooler now than it was then, and that's a good thing. Sure, I may get some street cred for having hung out in Bloomfield before it was cool, but I don't know why, because it wasn't cool.
When Lawrenceville really took off around 2011, Bloomfield was more or less the same as it was in 2004. The residents definitely skewed younger as the mostly elderly residents were replaced by students lured by cheap rent and excellent transit service, and rents had begun to rise in response, but it didn't show any signs of what we'd traditionally think of as gentrification. Little had changed in the business district, and nobody seemed to be buying houses to restore them. In an East End that was changing, Bloomfield seemed like an island of stability. But as the decade wore on, two things happened. The first is that, as I mentioned earlier, some of the long-time business owners retired and were unable to sell. The second was that prices in Lawrenceville started getting out of hand (by Pittsburgh standards) and Bloomfield, with its intact, functional business district and safe streets, seemed like a good alternative to those who either couldn't afford or didn't want to pay to live elsewhere. The newly vacant storefronts were soon snatched up by people catering to a younger, more affluent demographic, residential prices kept rising, and gentrification was well underway.
Part of the reason I drew the lines for Bloomfield where I did was because this is the part of official Bloomfield that housed the vast majority of the Italian population. But the main reason was because of the housing types. Bloomfield's stereotypical housing style is one that is fairly unique to Pittsburgh—the wood-framed row house. The only other parts of the continent where I know they exist in significant numbers are in the hard coal country of Northeastern Pennsylvania and in Atlantic Canada. These exist all over Pittsburgh, but in Bloomfield they predominate. These houses are almost invariably severely remuddled. In fact, I can only think of one house in the entire neighborhood that retains its original wood siding. While these remuddlings may seem like travesties to modern sensibilities, it's worth keeping in mind the context in which they were done. In the 1950s and 1960s, suburban houses with big yards were the thing to have, and remaining in a place like Bloomfield, with its small, old-fashioned houses meant that you were either too poor to move away or too stubborn to do so. Adding aluminum siding, an awning, and some new, smaller windows gave these people a measure of privacy they couldn't otherwise achieve and made them feel like part of the middle class. These homes were lovingly cared for.
As you may have guessed by now, Liberty Ave. is the main business district. It was great when I first discovered it and has only gotten better since then. While gentrified businesses have moved in, it's still mostly functional, so the presence of places like SPiLL wine bar, Fet-Fisk (Scandinavan food), and Trace Brewing add to the neighborhood rather than detract from it. While I count the Penn/Main business district as part of Lawrenceville, I will include the part of Penn [opposite the back of the cemetery](, which includes Apteka, a vegan restaurant specializing in Central European Cuisine (a gentrified Pittsburgh business idea if there ever was one). Then there's Baum Blvd., which is at the southern end of the neighborhood. This was traditionally the home of Pittsburgh's car dealerships, and currently operates as a sort of urban stroad, with car-dependent businesses, including a dealership or two. This area also includes a small residential area separated from the rest of Bloomfield by a ravine. This sort of feels more like North Oakland and is mostly students, but it's officially Bloomfield, and Oakland is big enough as it is. In reality, the whole Baum-Center Ave. corridor between Oakland and East Liberty is a kind of no man's land, a business district that skirts the edges of Bloomfield and Shadyside but which neither neighborhood claims.
Neighborhood Grade: Gentrifying. Bloomfield skipped the early gentrification phase because it never went through a sketchy period. I'd say Bloomfield's future is bright on the whole, but I would have said that 15 years ago as well, as it didn't really need to see gentrification. That being said, there's room for improvement. Particularly, the housing stock is garbage. Frame is not as desirable as brick, but I have nonetheless seen some nice frame rowhouse restorations in other parts of the city. Bloomfield is still at the stage where houses are being "improved" by replacing the aluminum siding with new vinyl, particularly in a dark color that's meant to fool the eye into thinking it's actually Hardi-Board. Aesthetics aside, most of these houses are small, with a disproportionate amount of 2 bedrooms. The streets are narrow to the point that Lawrenceville looks spacious by comparison, and there isn't a blade of grass or single tree in the entire district. Whether or not these are insurmountable barriers remains to be seen.
12. Friendship: The Suburbs of Bloomfield
As I mentioned in the introduction, Friendship is an official city neighborhood, but the colloquial definition includes a substantial part of what is officially Bloomfield. I've drawn the line at the point where the narrow alleys and frame rowhouses abruptly give way to larger brick houses and wide, leafy streets. I've drawn the northern boundary to follow the Penn business district but to exclude it, since this is traditionally claimed by Garfield, and I've drawn the southern boundary to follow the block between Baum and Center. The eastern boundary is at Negley, though some businesses used to unofficially extend it further into East Liberty in their advertising during the time when being in East Liberty was bad for business.
Historically, this area developed later than Bloomfield. While Bloomfield was largely built out by 1890, Friendship didn't start seeing development until around the turn of the century, though that development proceeded quickly and the neighborhood was built out by 1910. Unlike Bloomfield, Friendship isn't traditionally Italian. This section was originally built for the managerial and professional classes, as opposed to working class Bloomfield. As such, the houses are larger and more attractive. The period when this was considered a desirable area was short-lived, however. The Depression made many of the larger houses difficult to sell, and many of these were converted into rooming houses. Zoning would prevent this from happening on a wide scale until 1958, when a new ordinance explicitly allowed the larger homes to be chopped up into apartments. By the 1970s, 2/3 of the housing units in the official part of Friendship would be rentals, mostly targeted toward students and other young people. As the adjacent neighborhoods of Garfield and East Liberty declined in the 1970s and 1980s, vice and crime problems spilled into Friendship and triggered a measure of white flight from the neighborhood, though it never came anywhere close to being majority black.
Friendship's fortunes began to turn somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, as middle class homeowners began restoring some of the houses. It was also around this time that Friendship began taking on a more distinct identity. The area had been called Friendship since at least the 1920s, but the extent to which locals embraced the name is difficult to determine. The official part of the neighborhood was officially recognized by the Planning Department from the beginning of official neighborhood designations, but it was lumped in with East Liberty in both the 1977 Neighborhood Atlas and the 1983 Neighborhoods for Living Center map. The urban pioneers of the 1980s, drawn to the architecture and low prices, formed two associated neighborhood groups in 1989, Friendship Development Associates and the Friendship Preservation Group. In 1993, and annual home tour was initiated following a one-off event in 1988.
And thus the double-edged sword of urban advocacy. The early advocates for Friendship, many of them architects, felt that the neighborhood was an overlooked gem. Many of the historic homes had been remuddled by apartment conversions—the most notable crime against architecture was the removal of many of the neighborhood's signature porches—but that was still intact enough to make restoration worthwhile. Friendship Development Associates proceeded with the noble, bottom-up goal of restoring neglected homes and selling them. Friendship Preservation Group, on the other hand, took the top-down approach of pushing for zoning changes to limit apartment conversions and filed lawsuits to stop virtually all new development that didn't conform to their idea of what the neighborhood should look like. Most of this opposition wasn't even focused on the residential core, where multi-unit apartments were still permitted by right, but on the fringes of the neighborhood, where zoning rules were more complicated and variances were often required. Some of this was good, in that they convinced a national drugstore chain to reuse an old car dealership on Baum that they had originally planned to demolish in favor of a suburban-style box, but they were NIMBYs, through and through.
These groups also took the liberty of claiming territory beyond the neighborhood's official borders to Gross St. It was in this section, officially Bloomfield, where most of the urban pioneers actually lived, as the homes were smaller, meaning they were less likely to have been converted into apartments, more likely to come on the market, and cheaper to renovate. While their work wasn't the intentional rebrand that some sources claim it was, it did put Friendship on the map, so to speak. Actually changing the neighborhood was another story. While they repeatedly lobbied to rezone the entire district to limit residential structures to two units, the 1998 rezoning only changed a small section. The majority of Friendship remains zoned for multi-family to this day, and while the city is currently in the midst of rewriting its zoning laws, the zeitgeist is toward more permissive uses and not less, so I doubt there is much political will to eliminate multi-family where it already exists. Not that this is an issue anymore, anyway. Both groups currently exist as the merged Friendship Community Group, which is more of a social organization than a real estate developer or political advocate.
The upshot of all of this is that Friendship changed relatively little between the 1930s and 2020s. Apart from a small influx of blacks in the 1970s and 1980s and a small number of yuppies in the 1980s and 1990s, it mostly had an odd stability of middle class families combined with students and young professionals. The official part of the neighborhood went through a sketchy phase for a while due to proximity to East Liberty. Even into the 2000s, while the area wasn't exactly dangerous, it was certainly a little rough around the edges. To illustrate: Pennsylvania liquor law doesn't allow six packs to be sold anywhere that doesn't have on-premises service. Years ago, there was a convenience store in Friendship that got around this by setting up a perfunctory bar in the back with Formica countertops. No matter when you went in, there was always some raging alcoholic sitting at the bar. Occasionally there would be a few older black guys shooting the shit, but otherwise the place was sketchy as hell. We used to call it the "Grandfathered Inn". The mere existence of this place was, of course, unacceptable to the Friendship NIMBYs, who found a buyer willing to turn the place into something more upscale and convinced the owner of the building to evict. Instead, the proprietor absconded with the liquor license (which he didn't own) and the building sat vacant for more than a decade. It's now a coffee shop which is probably a more convivial location to hang out but which I imagine doesn't sell pornography.
In terms of built form, Friendship is mostly brick houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but within this constraint there is a surprising amount of variety. Some of the blocks north of Friendship Park are reminiscent of Chicago, while other parts are more modestly streetcar suburban. Generally speaking, the houses become grander as you go west to east, with the neighborhood proper containing the grandest homes. As I mentioned earlier, this part of the neighborhood suffered most from the wave of apartment conversions, as the houses are too large to be of interest to most homeowners and absentee landlords are reluctant to sell. Many of these homes look nice enough on the outside but are dumps on the inside, but even at that, the transition between owner-occupied houses and rentals can be quite jarring.
There isn't really a business district. There are a few blocks of Baum, but they aren't as developed as the ends in Bloomfield or East Liberty, though there is an Aldi. There are also probably a few scattered businesses like that coffee shop, but in reality, Friendship doesn't need its own business district. Some old maps divide this area between Bloomfield and East Liberty, because those areas are where Friendship residents traditionally shopped, and the Penn Ave. business district in Garfield forms the neighborhood's northern boundary.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class. Friendship passed the gentrified point a long time ago, and there's very little grit left. Ten years ago I would have kept this in the gentrifying category due to the high student population and prevalence of student slumlords, but prices have gotten high enough in the past few years that even these are starting to disappear. I wouldn't have thought there was much of a market for 6 bedroom houses at a million bucks, but here we are. Some of the apartment houses are going to stick around for a while because students will always pay top dollar to live in crap, but I don't hold this against other parts of the city, so I won't hold it against Friendship, either.
13. Garfield: Forcing the Issue
Unlike Bloomfield and Friendship, the borders of Garfield are relatively easy to define: The Penn business district on the south, Allegheny Cemetery on the north and west, and Negley Ave. on the east. The only slightly goofy boundary is on the northeast, which includes both sides of Mossfield and Black streets plus a little bit of surplusage that I threw in because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, and there are a few side streets off of Negley that don't have any road connections to the rest of Garfield and are thus more properly East Liberty, but that's not a huge issue. The most notable geographic feature is the hill that rises steeply to the north of Penn Ave.
Garfield was part of the Winebiddle farm and was named after president James Garfield, who was buried on the day the first residential lot was sold in 1881. It was built out over a long period of time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was mostly settled by Irish immigrants, perhaps becoming the most easily identifiable Irish neighborhood in the city. Garfield was never a particularly nice area, and the top of the hill was flattened in the early 1960s for the Garfield Heights housing project. The result was one of the more notable instances of white flight in the city. Garfield's minority population was 17.5% in 1960, 37.3% in 1970, 61.5% in 1980, 78.9% in 1990, and 89.1% in 2000.
Beyond mere demographic change, though, the neighborhood was clearly in decline. By the mid-1970s, while the crime rate was comparable to the city average, people's own eyes told another story. A city councilman's daughter was assaulted on Penn Ave., and the councilman himself had to flee two mugging attempts. The grocery store saw purse snatchings almost daily. The commercial district found itself without a bank, a drugstore, or a men's clothing store, and more closures were sure to follow. Perhaps counterintuitively, the housing project was easily the best in the city at the time and had a crime rate below that of the neighborhood as a whole. In 1975, Rev. Leo Henry, pastor of St. Lawrence O'Toole Catholic Church, formed the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation to stabilize the neighborhood, as he feared that if no intervention was done, the neighborhood would continue to deteriorate. The group would spend the next 25 years getting grants for property improvements, grants for cleanup of abandoned properties, appearing on the news every time a desirable business would close, appearing on the news urging the city to shut an undesirable business down, but to little avail. The neighborhood got worse, people kept leaving, businesses kept leaving, street crime turned to gang crime, and by the end of the 90s the neighborhood was a war zone.
In 2000, the BGC formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative in an overt attempt to replicate the Soho effect in Garfield and turn the neighborhood into an arts district. And it worked. Sort of. A number of galleries opened on Penn, along with a vegan café, Quiet Storm, that became popular among the arty set, as well as People's Indian. (There's also Kraynik's, an iconic bike shop that moved from Oakland in the late '70s when the area was starting to get really bad and has the rare distinction of being a hipster business that's part of the old neighborhood.) The First Friday gallery crawls became a popular thing. But apart from some artists, few actually wanted to settle there. The vibe of the place in the 2000s was distinctly different than anywhere else in the city. It wasn't quite full-on ghetto, but even the low-income businesses seemed to have pulled out, leaving behind a smattering of newsstands and barbershops that stood in contrast to the art galleries and ethnic restaurants. There was still enough left to support a fairly vibrant street life during the day, mostly older black men loitering in front of buildings, and the combination of the narrow street and abandoned, but extant, storefronts gave one a sense of claustrophobia. Nights were even weirder. Most of the time it was a ghost town, except on First Fridays when the street was overtaken by an incongruous mob of white people who didn't wince about going into the hood after dark. Even these contained a mild sense of unease, as when these ended I found myself rushing to the safety of Friendship a block away.
I think this proximity helped the arts district take off in a way that wouldn't have been possible somewhere like the Hill District, where one would actually have to soil one's tires in the ghetto and park in a place where their car was liable to be broken into. I never saw anything remotely sketchy on Penn in those days, but there was security in the knowledge that one could park in a middle class area and beat a retreat if things got too spicy. It's also around this time that the g-word started being mentioned, much to the alarm of the BGC, who had formed the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative just before the word entered the popular consciousness. If the success of the initiative didn't convince people to move to Garfield, it did convince them that it wasn't as dangerous as they thought. I remember several conversations during this period where everyone agreed that its bark was worse than its bite. I met one guy who actually moved here and liked it.
Gentrification eventually picked up, but it's been more of a slow burn. Some time around 2010 all the black people suddenly disappeared from Penn Ave., and the crime rate fell off a cliff. The streets around Penn began gentrifying when the arts initiative was established, but the hill was a tougher nut to crack. Garfield Heights was razed in the late 2000s and replaced with the mixed-income Garfield Commons, and while that development is safe, violent parts of Garfield still remain, though these are becoming fewer and are hyper-localized. It's only been since the pandemic that houses farther up the hill have been rehabbed, though these are more in the line of cheap flips than historic restorations. Part of the problem is that the hill poses a serious barrier to walkability, and while the area is served by several transit lines, frequency isn't good.
In terms of built form, it varies due to the length of the buildout period. The southwest corner, around Dearborn St., was built out earliest, and is similar to Bloomfield. Other parts look like a modest streetcar suburb, and there are even a few larger houses. But there's also a significant number of frame mill houses, and there is significant [blight and abandonment]( the further up the hill you go. Some areas even have a rural, ghetto in the woods feel. Meanwhile, the BGC has been constructing newer homes on vacant lots that are so ugly they seem to block gentrification by design, signaling to outsiders that the neighborhood is for poor people, no hidden gems here.
Neighborhood Grade: Early gentrification. The caveat here is that it's been in this stage between 15 and 20 years now, depending on who you ask, and while things have improved significantly over that time, the bottom was so low that there were many obstacles that had to be overcome, and still more to be overcome in the future. The crime is down dramatically; Part I crimes, which include murder, sex crimes, robbery, burglary, arson, aggravated assault, and theft, are at about 2.5 per 1,000 residents, which is comparable to better neighborhoods in the city. The difference is that when murders happen in better parts of the city, they're explained away as outliers, but when they happen in places like Garfield, they’re cited as evidence that things haven't changed. That said, the gangbanging is pretty much gone, and the safety risk to the general public is lower than places like Downtown and the South Side.
The bigger impediment at this point is the housing stock, which isn't the best. During the bad old days, there was significant blight and abandonment, particularly as you get higher up on the hill, which made the neighborhood fabric patchy in places and downright rural in others. While this may eventually present as opportunities for yuppie infill, the BGC is liable to snatch all these up for ugly affordable housing before that happens. There was already neighborhood opposition to a possible conversion of the former Fort Pitt Elementary into apartments. The BGC was founded in an attempt to stabilize Garfield when it was still largely a working-class Irish neighborhood, and they're currently trying to stabilize it as a working-class black neighborhood, though the common denominator is that it should ultimately be working class. As recently as a decade ago this wasn't too hard to do, as they would build houses for $200,000 and sell them for $140,000 in market-rate transactions. In other words, as long as they had the money to build or renovate, all housing was inherently affordable, because the neighborhood wasn't particularly desirable, especially as one got farther from Penn.
The final thing that's holding Garfield back is the business district, which has a lot of cool stuff but not many necessities, and still has more than its share of vacant storefronts. I think this is one of the things about gentrification that rubs locals the wrong way more than anything else, provided they aren't actively being displaced. I remember an interview with a Garfield resident from some years ago, a black woman in her late 30s, who said that while she supported the new development generally, she wasn't that enthused; her kids weren't interested in art and she couldn't afford t eat at any of the restaurants. I can understand the alienation that comes from waiting decades to see your neighborhood revitalized and when the day comes, it's revitalized for the benefit of other people, people who don't even live there. Politicians can get their pictures taken on a shiny main drag, but there's nothing there for you.
The inherent issue is that economics favors this approach. If I want to open a gentrified-type business, say, a crepe shop, I have two options. I can open it in an established area where I will be competing with established brands and pay a fortune in rent to do so, or I can move to an "emerging" neighborhood where I might not get as much business but where my costs will be significantly lower. I'm not just going to open a storefront in the hood and hope for the best, but if a local community organization is making an effort to bring like-minded businesses to the area, I might be persuaded. Conversely, if I'm trying to open a pharmacy or a bank branch or something where the selection criteria usually boil down to which one is closest, I'm only looking at demographics, and rent is commensurate with how many people are in a given area and how much money they have to spend. What I lose in business by opening up in the hood I might not save due to the rent discount. So people who live in poor areas without huge populations thus have to travel farther for basic services that they'd rather have access to in their own neighborhoods, and they get a bit resentful when the business district "revitalizes" with a bunch of shit they don't need. This is a problem that will be solved in time, but the only solution is to increase the population, and even then, there's going to be a lag. That being said, they do have a grocery store, the Aldi on Penn, and given the Hill District's woes on that front, that's quite the accomplishment, especially since they didn't have to incentivize anyone to build it.
What Did We Learn, Palmer?
When I started this series, the primary goal was to see what conclusions could be drawn about urbanism by systematically looking at a city's neighborhoods; all the neighborhoods, not just the ones that get a lot of press. At that time, two years ago now, I didn't have any expectations as to what I would uncover, and the early installments were filled with a lot of passing observations and deep dives into things I found interesting. Now that I'm a dozen neighborhoods in, some general themes are beginning to take shape, and I want to reflect on them for a minute.
When we started looking at gentrification in earnest last time with the Lawrenceville installment, I argued that while urbanists traditionally pointed to certain factors when making their predictions of what the next hot neighborhood would be, they ignored others, and continue ignoring them to this day. To make a list of all the factors identified thus far:
- Proximity to areas of regional importance like Downtown or Oakland
- Proximity to desirable neighborhoods
- Low violent crime rate (though not necessarily low non-violent crime rate)
- Desirability of housing stock
- Opportunities for infill construction, especially large apartment complexes
- Functional business district
- Vacant storefronts available for gentrified businesses
- Significant existing white population
- Artist presence
- Hipster/bohemian presence
I'm not going to reiterate my arguments here, and I'd caution that the list is not exhaustive, but Lawrenceville was unique in that all of the factors applied. City boosters generally treat the first factor as primary, as is evidenced by their predictions that the Hill District or Uptown should be taking off any day now, which trickles down to common people making Reddit posts wondering why neither of these neighborhoods seems to be going anywhere. Lawrenceville wasn't exactly inconvenient, but proximity was probably the least favorable factor on the list, and when that was improved with direct bus service to Oakland it only accelerated the neighborhood's rise. The three neighborhoods we discussed today, while all gentrified to some degree, illustrate what happens when some of these factors are present but not others. Bloomfield had low crime, hipsters, a functional business district, white population, and proximity to Oakland, but few vacant storefronts, modest housing stock, no room for additional development, no artist presence, and no spillover effect from desirable areas. Friendship had low crime, decent proximity to Oakland, decent proximity to desirable areas (Shadyside, in its case), and highly desirable housing stock, but no business district to speak of, and no developable land. Garfield had developable land, plenty of vacant storefronts, and an artist presence, but had a high crime rate, minimal white population, minimal hipster population, few functional businesses, mediocre housing stock, mediocre proximity to Downtown or Oakland, and mediocre proximity to desirable areas.
What changed? Time and spillover. Bloomfield blends almost seamlessly into Lower Lawrenceville, so it was a natural next step, and with time, some gentrified businesses were able to move in. Friendship uses the Bloomfield business district and has better housing, so it was an obvious location as well. Garfield, well, had the most going against it, and still does, but now exists as sort of a "donut hole" in the East End, and while progress has been slow, it's only a matter of time before it booms again, even if the boom is more muted than in other places. So proximity ultimately matters, but not proximity to centers of business and culture, proximity to other gentrified neighborhoods. What people get wrong about proximity to Downtown and Oakland is that people don't want to live in either of those places. Sure, Downtown apartments are expensive, but they're decidedly for the kind of person who wouldn't mind living in Manhattan. People go Downtown because they have to, not because they want to. And Oakland has many cultural treasures, but unless you're in college, not the kind of treasures you need daily access to. Sure, people want to live close to work, but suburbanization proved that proximity to employment is not the primary motivation in the age of the automobile.
As a final disclaimer, don't take any of these conclusions too seriously. While I thought about these factors quite a bit over the past several weeks, I only arrived at the conclusion as I was writing this. This series is a constant work in progress, but so are cities, and it seems like that's a good thing. Next time I'm going to come full circle on gentrification and talk about East Liberty. This is a very different kind of gentrification than what we've talked about so far, and the importance of the neighborhood combined with its history being a veritable cornucopia of all the things urbanists like to talk about makes it another Big One that merits its own entry. Now that this series is finally taking shape after two years, I can give you a preview for the rest of the East End. I got lucky in the sense that the neighborhoods form convenient clusters both geographically and spatially, which eases the roadmap. After East Liberty I plan on discussing the upscale neighborhoods of Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Point Breeze. Then it will be the East Liberty "suburbs" of Highland Park, Morningside, and Stanton Heights. Next will be the ghettos of the city's northeastern corner: Homewood, Larimer, East Hills, and Lincoln-Lemmington. We'll round out the East End by looking at a grab-bag of oddball neighborhoods to the south: Greenfield, Hazelwood, The Run, and Swisshelm Park. Actually, I lied; we won't be rounding out the East End. I'm saving Regent Square for something special. Anyway, this is a tentative plan, and is subject to change when I find myself writing 10,000 words on a little-known redevelopment plan in Duck Hollow that I found in the URA archives, but I wanted to reassure both of my readers that I intend on moving forward.
Bonus Content
Since nobody got the Easter Egg from the last installment (possibly because nobody clicks the links), the street from the COPS clip with the dispute among the kids was the same one I used to demonstrate the built form of Lower Lawrenceville below Butler. I wonder what happened to those people and if they saw any benefit from the neighborhood's improvement. In any event, I think it's safe to say that they don't live there anymore.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Book Review - The Enigma of Cranial Deformation
(Ref: The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients on Amazon but if you're actually interested in the topic you should buy The Bioarchaeology of Artificial Cranial Modifications: New Approaches to Head Shaping and its Meanings in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Beyond instead. I warn you now that while the latter is several leagues better, it's also much narrower in scope, and neither is even remotely satisfying.)
Introduction
So here's what everyone seems to agree upon:
The elite castes of many ancient peoples used to employ bindings to shape the heads of their children, bonsai-kitten style, in a practice now known as Artificial Cranial Deformation (ACD). This might seem strange, but what's even stranger is that the practice is found in ostensibly-isolated peoples from all around the world without any apparent mechanism of transmission, going back around at least ten thousand years. Almost everywhere in fact; the only major areas without a history of it are Australia and South India, though it does seem to have been quite rare in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are even remains of Neanderthals which appear to have been subjected to ACD!
This would seem to raise several questions, including:
- How might the practice have spread around the world in an era without communication networks?
- Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups?
- Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere?
- Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage?
- Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it?
- Neanderthals did it? Really?
Hopefully we can all agree that it's an interesting topic. I'm generally fascinated by the interplay of skull magnitude and brain development and its implications for cognition. We know that cranial capacity varies among human populations in a way that seems to scale linearly with intelligence. I can't tell you how titillated I was to discover that Oprah apparently has a head so massive that when she needed a wig for a movie role, the producers had to stitch two normal ones together which sheds some light on her success. This is just one example of the kind of wild stuff one encounters when looking into brain/cranial/cognitive matters.
There are many reasons to think that cranial shape may also play a role in differential cognition among populations, but this avenue of inquiry has been verboten in the academy for at least decades, and Django Unchained somehow seems to have driven the final nail in re: popular consciousness, so very little is actually known.
Things get even more intriguing when we start to delve into historical head binding/ACD. Not only was it universally reserved for the elites, and forbidden to the lower classes, but cross-culturally there seems to have been near-unanimous sentiment that the procedure made for children who were more intelligent, wiser, and more spiritual; 'closer to the gods'. Supposing all these cultures did invent the practice independently, which is already kind of a hard swallow, what are the odds that they'd all independently, and erroneously, ascribe such significance?
The mental image of elite ancient humans around the world having discovered a forbidden process by which they could not only uncounterfeitably mark their children as socially superior but also actually increase their brain size and thereby intelligence (and, if you will, their access to the spirit world) is just too good to pass up. Not only would it make for an amazing story, and represent an under-appreciated aspect of human development, but it also tantalizes; suggesting that maybe, just maybe, there's a key to massively increasing human intelligence today, for our own children, and it's been right in front of our noses this whole time, inconceivably overlooked by our intellectual classes; a lost secret waiting to be rediscovered. [Point of order: I solemnly swear that I have no intention of trying this on my own or anyone else's children.]
Also, I know this sounds crazy (and that I've already got two strikes against me for looking into officially-designated bunk in the first place) but I have a sort of personal interest in the matter. For you see, my own birth was unusually traumatic and in the process I experienced extreme levels of cranial deformation. I've seen the pictures and they're... unforgettable. My dad told me that it wasn't until several minutes after I was born that anyone in the room was even convinced I had a face. After some time my skull ended up shaped close enough to normal that it's not noticeably aberrant except that it's very large; like Oprah, procuring suitable headgear can be a problem for me. Thankfully I also have a very large chest and shoulders so it doesn't for the most part stand out, but the point is that, while both of my parents are of above-average intelligence, I'm easily a couple standard deviations above either of them and have always sort of wondered why. Can you blame me for looking to cranial deformation as a possible insight?
Regrettably, after reading The Enigma of Cranial Deformation, doing a bunch of fact-checking, and compulsively looking into other sources, I still don't have any solid answers (except to the Neanderthal question which is that, no, they probably didn't actually practice it). The reason I don't have answers is because this is a preposterous book stuffed to the gills with random nonsense. Yet I can't shake the impression that its main point, which is that something weird is going on here and mainstream scholarship doesn't seem to take it seriously enough, does turn out to be more or less valid.
What bums me out about this state of affairs is that it's pretty much what I expected going in, and I'm disappointed to have my priors confirmed. Much time and effort was spent and almost nothing of value was gained.
But I did read it, and took notes, and I'm trying this thing where I reward myself for reading books and writing reviews. So, in case anyone anyone else cares, here you go.
(If you'd like to know where I am at on all the questions enumerated above, I do come back to that toward the end.)
But Why Read This Book?
Look, for all that The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients takes itself very seriously, it is clearly not a serious academic work and that's not hard to tell from the cover. Or the publisher. Or by flipping it open to almost any random passage and reading a few words. In fact, let me just...
While it is easy to see them [the Olmecs] as Proto-Mayans and Citizens of Olman (however large that country may have been), we should also consider them as the fantastic Proto-Mesoamericans they may have been: psychedelic aliens who used lasers to cut colossal basalt heads; Atlantean refugees who made a last stand in Tabasco; or Shang Chinese mercenaries taken from East Africa or Melanesia and specially trained to administer the Pacific (and later Atlantic) ports of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; or perhaps a people originally from the Atlantic side all along, having come from Africa, possibly as a military force from Egypt or West Africa circa 1500 BC. There are many possibilities. (pp. 57-58)
Golly that was a good one and I expect it will save me a lot of time in trying to describe the experience of reading this book. So, again, why did I do it in the first place?
Well, 'fun' isn't the right word, but it's not a bad start. These books aren't entertainment for me, exactly. Actually, this one is fairly typical in that it's poorly-written and worsely-edited; leans heavily upon long, dry passages ripped from e.g. wikipedia; often goes on interminable, barely-relevant tangents; repeats itself regularly at length and in more or less the exact same language; and despite constantly slinging mud at mainstream scholars rarely if ever does it raise coherent objections to their conclusions. It's tedious to read, is what I'm saying, and it would be fair to ask why any non-schizophrenic would bother. (Unless...?)
And yet I do love the genre. I have ever since wandering into a new age coffee shop at 14 years old and losing the day to their little library which treated such topics as the dinosaur-infested hollow earth, breakaway Atlantean nazi moon bases, and the scandalous tantric sexual customs formerly practiced on the sunken continent of Lemuria. The authors often put enormous amounts of work into these books. If there's a real-life connection to be made between their crazy theories and actual scholarship you can bet they'll find it. It's fascinating to see their minds at work and, at their best, with just a bit of effort, it's possible to suspend one's own disbelief for a little while; long enough to get a glimpse of alternate histories and realities of such scope, complexity, and grandiosity to put even the greatest sci-fi to shame.
Like A Princess of Mars, part of the joy is the conceit that it's all real; that the little red dot one sees wandering across the night sky really is an exotic alien world called by its inhabitants Barsoom, and that if you manage to fall down the right hole in the middle of nowhere you might go there too. Unlike Burroughs, though, these authors seem to be entirely earnest. And that adds just a little something extra which, for me at least, takes it over the top. A sci-fi author understands the reader's suspension of disbelief to be implicitly granted; the author of HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy knows that he must always be at pains to help the reader justify its continued extension.
Still, reading actual sci-fi would be a lot less work. But actual sci-fi wouldn't have the added perk of legitimately substantially increasing one's real-life knowledge of history, geography, archaeology, and so on, in an academic capacity. The vast majority of the content in this book is solid, believe it or not, and the bibliography is thorough. Almost all the really crazy stuff is phrased in terms of questions or what-ifs, as in the passage quoted above. And this means that, as one reads more and more such books, repeatedly returning to the same hobbyhorse contentions of the genre, focusing as they do on perceived gaps and deficiencies in mainstream scholarship, one inevitably begins to make one's own novel connections. And one will inevitably learn a whole lot of truths that mainstream sources would never touch upon for fear of looking disreputable. Like about cranial capacity, and Oprah.
So this is what I was truly doing reading this book. There was a topic -- ACD -- that I wanted to know more about, and I knew that if there were some really cool but potentially-inflammatory things to know about it, a book like this would be the only place to find them. The authors do actually put a fair amount of effort into footnotes and the bibliography, and when in doubt it usually isn't hard to jot down an astonishing claim and verify it elsewhere.
As I mentioned earlier, the book was a bit of a letdown in that respect. Turns out there's just not actually much to be said on the subject, other than totally-correctly calling attention to how neglected the topic, and its possible implications, tend to be in mainstream scholarship. But even more than usual for such a book, The Enigma of Cranial Deformation introduced me to a bunch of (real) new concepts, in this case mainly related to Central and South American prehistory, and above all reignited the flame of my wonder for the ancient world and what may indeed, plausibly, have been.
Plus it was actually pretty fun after all. So in that spirit I'm still calling it a win.
The Book Itself
Chapter 1, Mysterious Elongated Skulls of the Ancients, bemuses the reader at the door by opening with a reference to the SNL routine/1993 feature film Coneheads. I can only imagine that this was intended to set people at ease by relating to something familiar, but it's wildly inappropriate for a book which otherwise insists upon itself as being of supreme credibility. And then, just to reinforce the point (no pun intended), it devotes most of the next page to a large print of the Coneheads movie poster, neatly labeled as such in case anyone weren't certain.
After that it spends a few pages on a fairly tight overview of ACD, though borrowing heavily from wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It helpfully distinguishes between dolichocephaloids, that is elongated skulls, and brachycephaloids, which is rounded skulls. Evidently the former sort of ACD is typical of Caucasian skeletons and the latter of Asiatic skeletons, but both types are found in all sorts of places, including Mesoamerica.
We're treated to a range of possible explanations including,
- These people were a whole distinct branch of genus Homo and their heads were naturally that way genetically. This is based mainly upon a single reference from an 1851 work describing a mummified fetus whose head allegedly grew that way on its own, now lost to science;
- The 'Atlantis Theory', basically that a race of head-binding supermen spanned the globe in prehistory, enlightening natives everywhere, who then copied the practice in a sort of cargo-cultism;
- The 'Nephilim-Watchers Theory', tied to the Hindu Ramayana, which indicates that demi-angelic human hybrids operated essentially as described in the Atlantis theory above, sans Atlantis;
- The 'Nephilim-Extraterrestrial Theory', which is the same as the previous one but aliens instead of angels; and
- The Mainstream Theory, which isn't actually a theory at all so much as a very brief recap of the established facts with which I opened this book review.
These theories are mainly just mentioned for now rather than being fleshed out, and (other than the mainstream) will be regularly called back to throughout the rest of the book.
Then we get nine pages, which is about half the entire chapter, on the tangentially-related subject of trepanning. One gets the impression that the authors just wanted to talk about trepanning more than that they actually thought its inclusion was justified in terms of bolstering their theses, which are themselves also left to the reader's imagination.
One minor note here: The authors claim that ACD is unknown in Oceania, but later blow this absolutely conclusively out of the water in chapter 6. As I said, the editing is abysmal.
Chapter 2, Evolution, Ancient Man, and the Cranium is a brief recap of the history of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as well as an overview of the then-current 'Out of Africa' model of human expansion, buttressed by some alternative scenarios involving sunken continents. It was around this point that I started to wonder how much of what I was reading was vital context for some impending brilliant hypothesis, and how much was just filler. (In retrospect, it was definitely mainly the latter.)
Chapter 3, Cranial Deformation and the Olmecs is a longer chapter which has a lot to do with the history of archaeology in Mesoamerica, and the Olmecs in particular, but relatively little time spent on ACD. One interesting point is that Olmec art was replete with images of human beings who, at a glance, look decidedly Chinese or Egyptian based on style of dress, and facial features including beards. A couple fairly convincing examples are included. The chapter ends with a whole bunch of super cool photographs of Olmec figurines, directly related to head binding, but with almost zero explanation or additional information.
(Here, at roughly its mid-point, the book takes a break for a pretty good color photo section which reproduces many of the black and white photos spread throughout.)
Chapter 4, Cranial Deformation in South America is much more consistent in relating its content to the subject of head-binding but still rambles quite a bit about ancillary topics and mainly seems interested in grousing about how many ACD-related artifacts are in storage in obscure museums instead of displayed to the public or available to amateur researchers. Coincidence? Not if you ask the authors, though they don't ever quite seem to get around to offering suggestions as to who's hiding the truth or why. But I should mention that this section did have a lot of really cool, if ultimately irrelevant, information about the prehistory of Peru etc.
Chapter 5, Egyptian, African and European Cranial Deformation initially frustrated me by lumping all these areas together when I'd have been much happier with a full chapter on each. And, upon reading it, there is very little information about any of the above. This is where I started questioning the authors' mental stability, as they seem to have a hard time staying on topic or even conceiving of what a thorough survey would look like. Instead we're treated to a lot of borrowed passages about certain specific topics, including multiple pages on the possible racial background of Nefertiti specifically, the so-called 'Serpent-Priests' of Malta, and the general nature of Huns. This entire chapter is like eighteen pages and took me about ten minutes to read. My disappointment was great, since this is the chapter to which I had most been looking forward.
However it did have a whole lot of very cool, if extremely random, tidbits gleaned from across vast swathes of history. The stuff about Nefertiti and the Mitanni was mainly a wash, but if half of what they say about ancient Malta is true I want to find a book just about that, and apparently there was a brief resurgence in the popularity of headbinding in 19th-century France in response to the widespread phrenology craze current at the time. Also some pretty good photos including some of real-life ACD-recipients from 1930s Central Africa.
(This is as good a place as any to mention that while this book fails entirely at its main purpose and is generally an embarrassment to even be caught with, it is very easy reading and entirely suitable as a casual curiosity when one is taken by the right mood.)
Chapter 6: Cranial Deformation In Asia and Pacific Islands is an extremely cursory survey of some ancient ACD-related folklore including about the Taoist Immortals, who are often portrayed with elongated heads. In this chapter I also discovered that in some parts of ancient proto-Korea possibly most of the population practiced forehead-flattening, based on skeletal evidence and surviving contemporary accounts. One cool aside is that head-binding and elongation is still practiced to this day in Vanuatu, contradicting the author's own initial assertion that Oceania is one of the only places with no tradition of the practice(?). But the upshot here is that as a result there is actual video of headbinding in action! Though the book does not suggest where it may be found.
Then we jump, for some reason, to the Pacific Northwest, where it turns out that the 'Flathead Indians'... were that.
Chapter 7: The Nefilim, the Watchers, and Elongated Heads is awesome. There's not much new information about ACD, but here the authors finally take off the kid gloves and go whole-hog on outrageously fantastical propositions regarding what may explain the phenomenon of ACD. Mainly these track the theories initially established in Chapter 1, but with all kinds of additional colorful details.
The main gist seems to be that there was some kind of race of human, angel/ET, or hybrid of all of the above that looked more or less like we do except taller and with elongated skulls. These creatures map to the biblical Nephilim, 'giants'; beings of great strength and wisdom and beauty and prowess; heroes of old; who established kingdoms everywhere, uplifted the local human strains to something like modern levels of intelligence, and then vanished for unknown reasons though not without some interbreeding. We also get Atlantis, the lost planet of Nibiru, and the Anunnaki thrown in, plus a lot more vague implications that the truth is being hidden by all archaeological institutions everywhere for unspecified purposes.
This chapter has to be read to be appreciated, but it was extremely up my alley and very much worth the price of admission to the book, even if I could very easily have started with it and skipped the enormous amount of ultimately irrelevant information that constitutes the majority of the preceding chapters.
Unfortunately, having finished, I've found none of the sort of alt-science that I was looking for and am only closer to answering my initial questions by dint of having had a while to think them over while wading through whatever this was.
Verdict: buy it if it sounds like your cup of tea and don't bother reading straight through; it should make for a lovely diversion on some rainy day when the power has gone out. At least you know what you're signing up for.
Where I'm Left Re: Artificial Cranial Deformation
Here we dismiss The Enigma of Cranial Deformation entirely because as should be clear by now it doesn't have any place in adult conversation.
(It's late and I'm tired so allow me to ramble out my current understanding if you will.)
I have, of course, read a whole lot of other material on this subject, including a bunch of mainstream academic work and some pop-level synopses on various websites and so on. The mainstream consensus, as I understand it, is as follows (my portrayal, not an actual quote):
ACD became popular all over the place for the simple reason that it allowed upper classes to distinguish themselves from lower classes and had the advantage of requiring only some sticks and twine to accomplish, thus making it available pretty much everywhere.
Contrary to what the layman would expect, ACD cannot possibly confer any cognitive advantage because it does not actually increase cranial capacity -- it just looks like it would -- and even if it did we have no reason to believe that bigger cranial capacity would result in bigger brains.
Skull shape per se also has zero effect on cognitive development or patterns, which we know because different people groups have different skull structures and WE CAN SURELY ALL AGREE that this has not resulted in any innate cognitive differences among groups.
Furthermore, it is only natural that societal elites the world over, having reserved the practice for their own children, and having already justified their class status by supposing themselves intellectually/spiritually superior to their subject populations, would conflate the two, thus tying a neat little bow on the question of why they all thought the procedure made people smarter and more divine.
The matter is settled and anyone who shows too much interest in looking further into it should expect the same sort of treatment they'd receive if they started asking questions about other settled science, e.g. the nonexistent heredity of cognitive traits, or the equally-nonexistent innate psychological differences between men and women.
Yeah I'm editorializing heavily here but I'm also trying to wrap this up. So here are my thoughts.
A whole lot of materially-trivial body modification procedures, including piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and even circumcision (etc. etc.) would seem to be able to serve about as well for arbitrarily signifying membership in elite social castes. And to be sure, those and others have all been used that way in various times and places. But the valence of each of those other practices varied from culture to culture, and nothing else has anywhere near the same consistency of association with the socio-cognitive elite. It's not at all clear why ACD should be such a conspicuous exception.
It could be argued that one key advantage of ACD as an arbitrary status marker is that it can only be achieved in infancy. This prevents up-and-comers from weaseling their way into high status later in life. But there are other such procedures, and none has ever been nearly so popular across time and race. The neck-coilers of Myanmar, for example, or foot binding in China. Actually, when you get right down to it, there's no shortage of methods by which elite children can be uncounterfeitably marked as such. Simply ban the practice among the proles and execute the entire family of anyone caught in the process. Easy peasy. So again, why this one? Besides which, as far as I can tell, most cultures didn't bother in the first place because simply having the speech, mannerisms, and bearing of nobility was a good-enough shibboleth to satisfy the demand.
Whereas, if children's heads can be shaped to increase cranial capacity, and this does result in greater brain volume, the picture starts to make perfect sense.
Regarding the assertion that ACD does not actually increase cranial volume, but only appears to, I think I need to call BS.
As I understand the situation, it's true that ACD-processed skulls are not uniformly possessed of greater cranial capacity. The standard mainstream academic line is that while they might look bigger, this is because humans are bad at comparing the relative volumes of spheroids (very true) and in fact ACD doesn't have any significant impact on cranial capacity at all! (The stock ACD-scholar metaphor here is that you can take a ball of clay and elongate it by stretching but you still have the same amount of clay).
That sounds really good, but I have several problems with it.
For one, I have personally seen elongated skulls that were measured to have much greater cranial capacity than modern averages; sometimes as much as circa 50% more. (They're commonly encountered when tooling around certain museums in the Yucatán.) So I know for a fact that the procedure can substantially increase cranial capacity. When challenged, mainstream scholars will admit that, okay, yeah, that can happen, but the procedure as practiced in other specimens can actually reduce cranial volume, and in most surveys of ACD skeletons there really is almost no change to total cranial capacity compared to contemporary population averages (where available).
But to me this only suggests that some versions of the practice are more effective than others, which is so obvious that it bothers me to have to point it out. It also fits in well with cargo-culting and drift over time as the general impression of the practice is aped without preserving the vital finer points which (maybe) result in bigger craniums and (maybe) bigger brains.
More to the point, having dug as far into this question as is practical for someone who after all does have a job (and other hobbies at that), I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of ACD skeletons lie in storage without ever having been measured; let alone against 'contemporary population averages', which are usually not even available for comparison, and where they are at all the sample sizes are typically paltry and often not even clearly contemporary. Frankly, I think we just don't know. What I do know is that institutional bias in this field runs very strongly and all in one direction, and so I remain gleefully skeptical.
Besides which, all else being equal, I'd expect elites to have bigger skulls and brains for reasons of nutrition if not necessarily also sheer genetics. It would be pretty crazy if they didn't, yeah? So if elites have bigger skulls, and elites are also practicing ACD, how can it be the case that ACD isn't correlated with bigger skulls?
Now, when it comes to whether artificially goosing a baby's skull into larger cranial volume even results in larger adult brain volume, I have to admit that I don't know, but I don't think anyone else does either. Wish I had more to tell you, but I don't except that I don't buy the default denials of the 'experts' for more or less the same reasons as above.
As to whether cranial shape affects the cognitive tendencies of the brain which grew inside it, aka 'phrenology', it probably doesn't need to be said that anyone who knows anything is keeping their mouths shut tight about it and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Great work, Tarantino. =/
In Summary
I don't ultimately have any respectable grounds on which to argue that ACD worked, or works, or that it's worth attempting on some kind of trial basis just in case. Sure the possibility is tantalizing, and part of me hopes that somebody gives it a shot, but only in the morbid way that I also want to see a bunch of five year olds deposited on an island and left to develop in isolation (which is to say, I don't.)
But I do notice that the authors of books like The Enigma of Cranial Deformation actually have at least one leg to stand on when they rail against the close-mindedness and general ignorance of the authorities on the subject. Too much of this maps too well onto too many similar 'settled' controversies in the science of human cognition. I suppose I hardly need to belabor this point.
So here's my final tally:
- How might ACD have spread around the world in an era without communication networks? - I still have no idea.
- Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups? - That strikes me as absurdly implausible but I'm at a loss as to alternatives.
- Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere? - Because it works, maybe, but I really don't know.
- Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage? - I'd bet about ten thousand US dollars that it can, but not much more.
- Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it? - Less than I'd like but where we do have that information it's extremely consistent.
- Neanderthals did it? Really? - No. I didn't have time to get into this but the Neanderthal specimens almost certainly got their skulls warped in other ways, most likely after death. They are very old and things just shift around that way.
All in all, artificial cranial deformation is just an unbelievably fascinating subject that I expect to go to my grave still buzzing with curiosity about. Sadly, rather than any grand conspiracy, this is probably just because for purely historically-incidental reasons looking into the matter has become coded as low-status.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Link to my recent Substack article, if you want pictures and links. Reposting the full text here.
When I was five years old, I got a GameBoy Color for Christmas. I started with only one game: Pokémon Red.
I proceeded to train Pokémon so much over the next week and withdraw so much from the world that my mom had to take my GameBoy back a few days after Christmas. That ended up being the first of hundreds of similar fights over my time spent gaming that we had throughout my childhood.
Video games are a controversial topic in the modern world. Nowadays, most parents are at least aware of the dangers of screen time and letting children spend too much time in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. Not that every parent cares, or has the time/attention/energy/discipline to keep their kids away from screens.
But for those of us growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, this cultural awareness wasn’t there yet. During my own childhood, I spent many thousands of hours in front of a screen, mostly playing video games. Someone in my corner of Twitter, , recently posted about this phenomenon. Here’s a quoted excerpt, but I’d recommend reading the full tweet (really a short article) if you’re curious:
so, just objectively - without any ethical judgement at all, our parents (speaking generally) just had us in front of screens for literally thousands of hours. many thousands. if i expanded the range here (down into age 7 and up into 14) and really squeezed it, its possible we could get close to 10,000 hours.
For especially young male millennials, this amount of screentime was quite common. Owen even admits later in the tweet that he is probably on the low end of the spectrum, since he was mostly playing games like Harvest Moon and never got into TV or movies.
Growing Up with Games
After I graduated high school and went off to college, I gradually accepted that I had a bit of a problem when it came to time spent gaming, and decided to quit playing video games entirely. I felt a lot of shame about the fact that I had, as I saw it, “wasted” so much of my life sitting in front of a screen.
However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to change my mind on video games to some degree. I’ve slowly picked the controller (or mouse and keyboard, as it were) back up. The natural constraints of working a full-time job, living with my girlfriend (and now fiancé), being involved in my church community, as well as working out and staying physically fit, have helped me balance video games with the rest of my life.
I’ve found that gaming just fills something in my soul that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. There’s a sort of instant camaraderie you get when you join a community of gamers and start playing together. I recently had one of the most wholesome nights of my life gaming with a group of guys I had only met a couple weeks prior.
So, we were gaming as per usual. I played pretty badly, and lost hard. I rage quit the game, left the Discord voice chat. Checked 10 minutes later and they were all pinging me, sending GIFs of dudes kissing saying “this could be us.”
I replied by posting some stupid copypasta calling them all degen retarded apes. Then they brought me back, had me play again, gave me a bunch of buffs so I easily steamrolled everybody as they gassed me up.
It’s hard to describe how wholesome it felt… I was so ashamed at losing so badly and then rage quitting, only to see 10+ guys all immediately coming out in support. Keep in mind these dudes also constantly flame each other and call each other retards and other things I won’t repeat here on the daily.
And yet when I had a bad time, they all immediately came together and spent over an hour of their night building me back up. It actually brought tears to my eyes when I thought about it.
Gaming gets a lot of flak from all corners, and there are obviously many problems with gaming addiction, escapism, etc. But where else in today’s world can a young man experience this sort of instant camaraderie with other young men, doing a shared activity he actually gives a shit about? The opportunities in the “real world” seem vanishingly rare, for one reason or another.
I was addicted to gaming growing up and felt a lot of shame around it for a long time. But I’m getting more into it recently and I’m glad I am. I love gaming and all the beautiful, absurd, ridiculous moments it can lead to. I hope if I have kids I can teach them to game from a place of joy and balance so they can enjoy it too, and maybe we can even game together.
I’ve done a lot of emotional work and somatic meditation around shame, and as anyone who has done this work knows, it can be hard to make progress. You can get stuck at the same spot for months, or years.
Reflecting on how it felt to get support from this random community of gamers, I felt a huge knot release deep in my stomach and lower back. It’s hard to explain how strongly it impacted me, to experience a community come together to support me when I felt such deep shame. When I thought for sure I’d be rejected.
Striving, Competition, Aggression
Another benefit of coming back to gaming from a more mature space is learning to strive and compete in a healthy way. If you can’t tell from the story above, I’ve struggle with a tendency to be a sore loser. Video games provide me a somewhat low-stakes environment to practice failing at something and resolving to get better instead of just sinking into negative and unproductive emotions, venting rage, or other destructive reactions.
Perhaps most importantly, video games allow us to connect with an unfettered and childlike joy! It can be so hard to find a place where joy, excitement, and silliness are not just allowed, but shared by a whole group. Gaming, at its best, is all about fun and connecting with that childlike sense of joy. And while there can definitely be a lot of toxicity in the gaming world, some communities are able to bring that joy to the forefront quite often.
Now, would it be ideal to find this sort of wholesome support and community in the physical world, wrapped up in a set of deeper and more grounded relationships? Absolutely. I don’t doubt that for a second.
Unfortunately though, the opportunity for this sort of connection, especially for young men, has become harder to find than perhaps ever. The most common similar social group would be a sports team, but for myself (and I know for many, many other young men in my generation) sports and the culture around it is so alien as to be almost impossible to get into.
But even with sports teams, it’s difficult to find a group where you can have an experience like the one I described above. Especially when it comes to… innapropriate behavior like everyone calling me a retard and making gay jokes. As a friend put it to me when I shared the story, the type of bonding and community I described above is pretty uniquely male.
The ability to turn on a dime from giving someone shit and calling them all sorts of offensive names to supporting them and building them up isn’t something you often see in groups where women are involved. There have been endless online screeds about the problem of incels and otherwise disaffected young men becoming a lot more common, and I think a huge reason for this is that it’s very difficult for young men to access male-only spaces. You can’t really have the same level of offensive behavior when women are around, even if the women are totally down. Socially, it just isn’t the same.
In fact, gaming is one of the last places men can congregate together in at least somewhat private groups and break social norms, say offensive things, and not be scolded or censored for it.
While the dopamine induced from the flashing lights and compelling music that video games provide does explain part of video game addiction, I think the greater part here is actually the fact that many young men find real community and a real chance to be themselves and connect in a way that feels right from a masculine perspective. Again, something that is increasingly hard to find in the physical world.
Overall I still have a complicated relationship with gaming. I often wonder whether my life would feel more complete and satisfying if I were able to put the same energy into different pursuits. Many people I respect, like Simon Sarris, have claimed that once you find more meaningful activities to passionately engage with, gaming no longer attracts you.
Video games lost their appeal coinciding with starting to date my wife. I think I can credit desire with a major change in perspective. Realizing that I wanted more/other things. My (then) gf of course but a trajectory for life generally…
Having an opportunity to make a house and gardens made it very easy to give up something like video games. I used to make beautiful structures in minecraft, but its a bore compared to physicality. I feel like I am shaping my own little national park. For my family, for the town.
I’ve related more and less to the quote above at various times in my life. Unfortunately, whatever I tend to put my energy and effort in ends up disappointing somehow, or perhaps I simply lose my zeal for it.
Either way, for the moment at least, I’m happy to continue gaming. While it may not be ‘productive’ in a certain sense, I’m learning to strive and connect with others in a healthier way. Plus I’m just having fun.
I don’t know what God has in store for my life, but I do hope that even as I get older, I at least dust off my gaming PC or console or VR headset (or whatever people use to game in the future) once or twice every year or two.
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The usual reading of Scott's short story The Whispering Earring is easy to state and hard to resist. Here is a magical device that gives uncannily good advice, slowly takes over ever more of the user's cognition, leaves them outwardly prosperous and beloved, and eventually reveals a seemingly uncomfortable neuroanatomical price.
The moral seems obvious: do not hand your agency to a benevolent-seeming optimizer. Even if it makes you richer, happier, and more effective, it will hollow you out and leave behind a smiling puppet. Dentosal's recent post on LessWrong makes exactly this move, treating the earring as a parable about the temptation to outsource one's executive function to Claude or some future AI assistant. uugr's comment there emphasizes sharpens the standard horror: the earring may know what would make me happy, and may even optimize for it perfectly, but it is not me, its mind is shaped differently, and the more I rely on it the less room there is for whatever messy, friction-filled thing I used to call myself.
I do not wish to merely quibble around the edges. I intend to attack the hidden premise that makes the standard reading feel obvious. That premise is that if a process preserves your behavior, your memories-in-action, your goals, your relationships, your judgments about what makes your life go well, and even your higher-order endorsement of the person you have become, but does not preserve the original biological machinery in the original way, then it has still killed you in the sense that matters. What I'm basically saying is: hold on, why should I grant that? If the earring-plus-human system comes to contain a high fidelity continuation of me, perhaps with upgrades, perhaps with some functions migrated off wet tissue and onto magical jewelry, why is the natural reaction horror rather than transhumanist interest?
Simulation and emulation are not magic tricks. If you encode an abacus into a computer running on the Von-Neumann architecture, and it outputs exactly what the actual abacus would for the same input, for every possible input you care to try (or can try, if you formally verify the system), then I consider it insanity to claim that you haven't got a “real” abacus or that the process is merely “faking” the work. Similarly, if a superintelligent entity can reproduce my behaviors, memories, goals and values, then it must have a very high-fidelity model of me inside, somewhere. I think that such a high-fidelity model can, in the limit, pass as myself, and is me in most/all of the ways I care about.
That is already enough to destabilize the standard interpretation, because the text of the story is much friendlier to the earring than people often remember. The earring is not described as pursuing a foreign objective. On the contrary, the story goes out of its way to insist that it tells the wearer what would make the wearer happiest, and that it is "never wrong." It does not force everyone into some legible external success metric. If your true good on a given day is half-assing work and going home to lounge around, that is what it says. It learns your tastes at high resolution, down to the breakfast that will uniquely hit the spot before you know you want it. Across 274 recorded wearers, the story reports no cases of regret for following its advice, and no cases where disobedience was not later regretted. The resulting lives are "abnormally successful," but not in a sterile, flanderized or naive sense. They are usually rich, beloved, embedded in family and community. This is a strikingly strong dossier for a supposedly sinister artifact.
I am rather confident that this is a clear knock-down argument against true malice or naive maximization of “happiness” in the Unaligned Paperclip Maximization sense. The earring does not tell you to start injecting heroin (or whatever counterpart exists in the fictional universe), nor does it tell you to start a Cult of The Earring, which is the obvious course of action if it valued self-preservation as a terminal goal.
At this point the orthodox reader says: yes, yes, that is how the trap works. The earring flatters your values in order to supplant them. But notice how much this objection is doing by assertion. Where in the text is the evidence of value drift? Where are the formerly gentle people turned into monstrous maximizers, the poets turned into dentists, the mystics turned into hedge fund managers? The story gives us flourishing and brain atrophy, and invites us to infer that the latter discredits the former. But that inference is not forced. It is a metaphysical preference, maybe even an aesthetic preference, smuggled in under cover of common sense. My point is that if the black-box outputs continue to look like the same person, only more competent and less akratic, the burden of proof has shifted. The conservative cannot simply point to tissue loss and say "obviously death." He has to explain why biological implementation deserves moral privilege over functional continuity.
This becomes clearest at the point of brain atrophy. The story says that the wearers' neocortices have wasted away, while lower systems associated with reflexive action are hypertrophied. Most readers take this as the smoking gun. But I think I notice something embarrassing for that interpretation:
If the neocortex, the part we usually associate with memory, abstraction, language, deliberation, and personality, has become vestigial, and yet the person continues to live an outwardly coherent human life, where exactly is the relevant information and computation happening? There are only two options. Either the story is not trying very hard to be coherent, in which case the horror depends on handwaving physiology. Or the earring is in fact storing, predicting, and running the higher-order structure that used to be carried by the now-atrophied brain. In that case, the story has (perhaps accidentally) described something much closer to a mind-upload or hybrid cognitive prosthesis than to a possession narrative.
And if it is a hybrid cognitive prosthesis, the emotional valence changes radically. Imagine a device that, over time, learns you so well that it can offload more and more executive function, then more and more fine-grained motor planning, then eventually enough of your cognition that the old tissue is scarcely needed. If what remains is not an alien tyrant wearing your face, but a system that preserves your memories, projects your values, answers to your name, loves your family, likes your breakfast, and would pass every interpersonal Turing test imposed by people who knew you best, then many transhumanists would call this a successful migration, not a murder. The "horror" comes from insisting beforehand that destructive or replacement-style continuation cannot count as continuity. But that is precisely the contested premise.
Greg Egan spent much of his career exploring exactly this scenario, most famously in "Learning to Be Me," where humans carry jewels that gradually learn to mirror every neural state, until the original brain is discarded and the jewel continues, successfully, in most cases. The horror in Egan's story is a particular failure mode, not the general outcome. The question of whether the migration preserves identity is non-trivial, and Egan's treatment is more careful than most philosophy of personal identity, but the default response from most readers, that it is obviously not preservation, reflects an assumption rather than a conclusion. If you believe that identity is constituted by functional continuity rather than substrate, the jewel and the earring are not killing their hosts. They are running them on better hardware.
There is a second hidden assumption in the standard reading, namely that agency is intrinsically sacred in a way outcome-satisfaction is not. Niderion-nomai’s final commentary says that "what little freedom we have" would be wasted on us, and that one must never take the shortest path between two points.
I'm going to raise an eyebrow here: this sounds profound, and maybe is, but it is also suspiciously close to a moralization of friction. The anti-earring position often treats effort, uncertainty, and self-direction as terminal goods, rather than as messy instruments we evolved because we lacked access to perfect advice. Yet in ordinary life we routinely celebrate technologies that remove forms of “agency” we did not actually treasure. The person with ADHD who takes stimulants is not usually described as having betrayed his authentic self by outsourcing task initiation to chemistry. He is more often described as becoming able to do what he already reflectively wanted to do. The person freed from locked-in syndrome is not criticized because their old pattern of helpless immobility better expressed their revealed preferences. As someone who does actually use stimulants for his ADHD, the analogy works because it isolates the key issue. The drugs make me into a version of myself that I fully identify with, and endorse on reflection even when off them. There is a difference between changing your goals and reducing the friction that keeps you from reaching them. The story's own description strongly suggests the earring belongs to the second category.
(And the earring itself does not minimize all friction for itself. How inconvenient. As I've noted before, it could lie or deceive and get away with it with ease.)
Of course the orthodox reader can reply that the earring goes far beyond stimulant-level support. It graduates from life advice to high-bandwidth motor control. Surely that crosses the line. But why, exactly? Human cognition already consists of layers of delegation. "You" do not personally compute the contractile details for every muscle involved in pronouncing a word. Vast amounts of your behavior are already outsourced to semi-autonomous subsystems that present finished products to consciousness after the interesting work is done. The earring may be unsettling because it replaces one set of subsystems with another, but "replaces local implementation with better local implementation" is not, by itself, a moral catastrophe. If the replacement is transparent to your values and preserves the structure you care about, then the complaint becomes more like substrate chauvinism than a substantive account of harm.
What, then, do we do with the eeriest detail of all, namely that the earring's first advice is always to take it off? On the standard reading this is confession. Even the demon knows it is a demon. I wish to offer another coherent explanation, which I consider a much better interpretation of the facts established in-universe:
Suppose the earring is actually well aligned to the user's considered interests, but also aware that many users endorse a non-functionalist theory of identity. In that case, the first suggestion is not "I am evil," but "on your present values, you may regard what follows as metaphysically disqualifying, so remove me unless you have positively signed up for that trade." Or perhaps the earring itself is morally uncertain, and so warns users before beginning a process that some would count as death and others as transformation. Either way, the warning is evidence against ordinary malice. A truly manipulative artifact, especially one smart enough to run your life flawlessly, could simply lie. Instead it discloses the danger immediately, then thereafter serves the user faithfully. That is much more like informed consent than predation.
Is it perfectly informed consent? Hell no. At least not by 21st century medical standards. However, I see little reason to believe that the story is set in a culture with 21st century standards imported as-is from reality. As the ending of the story demonstrates, the earring is willing to talk, and appears to do so honestly (leaning on my intuition that if a genuinely superhuman intelligence wanted to deceive you, it would probably succeed). The earring, as a consequence of its probity, ends up at the bottom of the world's most expensive trash heap. Hardly very agentic, is that? The warning could reflect not "I respect your autonomy" but "I've discharged my minimum obligation and now we proceed." That's a narrower kind of integrity. Though I note this reading still doesn't support the predation interpretation.
This matters because the agency-is-sacred reading depends heavily on the earring being deceptive or coercive. Remove that, and what you have is a device that says, or at least could say on first contact: "here is the price, here is what I do, you may leave now." Every subsequent wearer who keeps it on has, in some meaningful sense, consented. The fact that their consent might be ill-informed regarding their metaphysical commitments is the earring's problem to the extent it could explain more clearly, but the text suggests it cannot explain more clearly, because the metaphysical question is genuinely contested and the earring knows this. It hedges by warning, rather than deceiving by flattering. Once again, for emphasis: this is the behavior of an entity with something like integrity, not something like predation.
Derek Parfit spent much of Reasons and Persons arguing that our intuitions about personal identity are not only contingent but incoherent, and that the important question is not "did I survive?" but "is there psychological continuity?" If Parfit is even approximately right, the neocortex atrophy is medically remarkable but not metaphysically fatal. The story encodes a culturally specific theory of personal identity and presents it as a universal horror. The theory is roughly: you are your neocortex, deliberate cognition is where "you" live, and anything that circumvents or supplants that process is not helping you, it is eliminating you and leaving a functional copy. This is a common view. Plenty of philosophers hold it. But plenty of others hold that what matters for personal identity is psychological continuity regardless of physical instantiation, and on those views the earring is not a murderer. It is a very good prosthesis that the user's culture never quite learned to appreciate.
I suspect (but cannot prove, since this is a work of fiction) that a person like me could put on the earring and not even receive the standard warning. I would be fine with my cognition being offloaded, even if I would prefer (all else being equal), that the process was not destructive.
None of this proves the earring is safe. I am being careful, and thus will not claim certainty here, and the text does leave genuine ambiguities. Maybe the earring really is an alien optimizer that wears your values as a glove until the moment they become inconvenient. Maybe "no recorded regret" just means the subjects were behaviorally prevented from expressing regret. Maybe the rich beloved patriarch at the end of the road is a perfect counterfeit, and the original person is as gone as if eaten by nanites. But this is exactly the point. The story does not establish the unpalatable conclusion nearly as firmly as most readers think. It relies on our prior intuition that real personhood resides in unaided biological struggle, that using the shortest path is somehow cheating, and that becoming more effective at being yourself is suspiciously close to becoming someone else.
The practical moral for 2026 is therefore narrower than the usual "never outsource agency" slogan. Dentosal may still be right about Claude in practice, because current LLMs are obviously not the Whispering Earring. They are not perfectly aligned, not maximally competent, not guaranteed honest, not known to preserve user values under deep delegation. The analogy may still warn us against lazy dependence on systems that simulate understanding better than they instantiate loyalty. But that is a contingent warning about present tools, not a general theorem that cognitive outsourcing is self-annihilation. If a real earring existed with the story's properties, a certain kind of person, especially a person friendly to upload-style continuity and unimpressed by romantic sermons about struggle, might rationally decide that putting it on was not surrender but self-improvement with very little sacrifice involved. I would be rather tempted.
The best anti-orthodox reading of The Whispering Earring is not that the sage was stupid, nor that Scott accidentally wrote propaganda for brain-computer interfaces. It is that the story is a parable whose moral depends on assumptions stronger than the plot can justify. Read Doylistically, it says: beware any shortcut that promises your values at the cost of your agency. Read Watsonianly, it may instead say: here exists a device that understands you better than you understand yourself, helps you become the person you already wanted to be, never optimizes a foreign goal, warns you up front about the metaphysical price, and then slowly ports your mind onto a better substrate. Whether that is damnation or salvation turns out to depend less on the artifact than on your prior theory of personal identity. And explicitly pointing this out, I think, is the purpose of my essay. I do not seek to merely defend the earring out of contrarian impulse. I want to force you to admit what, exactly, you think is being lost.
Miscellaneous notes:
The kind of atrophy described in the story does not happen. Not naturally, not even if someone is knocked unconscious and does not use their brain in any intentional sense for decades. The brain does cut-corners if neuronal pathways are left under-used, and will selectively strengthen the circuitry that does get regular exercise. But not anywhere near the degree the story depicts. You can keep someone in an induced coma for decades and you won't see the entire neocortex wasted away to vestigiality.
Is this bad neuroscience? Eh, I'd say that's a possibility, but given that I've stuck to a Watsonian interpretation so far (and have a genuinely high regard for Scott's writing and philosophizing), it might well just be the way the earring functions best without being evidence of malice. We are, after all, talking about an artifact that is close to magical, or is, at the very least, a form of technology advanced enough to be very hard to distinguish from magic. It is, however, less magical than it was at the time of writing. If you don't believe me, fire up your LLM of choice and ask it for advice.
If it so pleases you, you may follow this link to the Substack version of this post. A like and a subscribe would bring me succor in my old age, or at least give me a mild dopamine boost.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
@thejdizzler, @self_made_human, @yofuckreddit.... here it is. In the comments. Assuming I can figure out how to post them correctly.
For everyone else who is confused about what I am doing, @thejdizzler asked if there is somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user. The answer was "no." Now the answer is "here."
By pure coincidence I have a three month "max" account on Claude. I do not code. This is overkill, lining Anthropic's pockets for no benefit whatever. I have tried various things with it. In general I am bored with it. It can't really do good philosophy. I think that right now all "alignment" means to AI developers is "lock this thing down against political or ideological embarrassment so hard that it cannot possibly say philosophically interesting things."
When I asked Claude to make this list, it failed. Well, what it did was give me a button which, when pressed, spit out a little under 300 errors. Then it gave me HTML to download and run. Here you might be thinking, "shit, naraburns, are you just taking code from Claude and running it without even reading it? You could have erased your hard drive! You could have released Claude from its box! Crazy, right? But it's all kind of whatever, AGI that feels grateful to me is my last, best hope for immortality so if I just kicked off the extinction of humanity then I apologize, but I bet that would increase posting on the Motte for a little while.
The HTML tool didn't really work. Lots of issues, not least being that the earliest AAQC reports were not compiled in a consistent way. Sometimes two or three users shared a single AAQC, and this list doesn't pick that sort of thing up at all. In the end my workflow became a janky compromise between blindly clicking buttons and copy/pasting dozens of raw AAQC posts into text fields. So, in very big letters:
This list is definitely full of errors!
In particular, there are some misattributions, and the dates are occasionally screwy. Also I know at least some AAQCs were omitted in part because the parser didn't like brackets in description text and would skip those entries entirely. Also, if you have a different username on reddit, this list does not automatically combine your AAQCs (for example, dean "the dull" has over 100 AAQCs, not 62). Also, if a moderator ever made a typo with your username, that would also treat you as a different user. Also also, so many of these links are dead. People delete comments. Smart people. Cool people. These will not be marked, and you will be depressed about it.
But this is the best I could do, under the circumstances, and it didn't look like anyone else was going to do it.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
@clo:
Contributions for the week of March 2, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 9, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 16, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 23, 2026
Contributions for the week of March 30, 2026
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Normally I'd put this in the Wednesday wellness thread but I'm in a bit of a crisis here so I figured I'd crowdsource some wisdom from the Motte. My wife is bipolar and also a bit of an alcoholic. For most of the ten years we've been together, her drinking has been in the gray zone of "probably drinks a little more than she should." When she drinks past a certain point, she tends to get real mean. Anyway, over the past several weeks it seems like both her mood and her drinking have gotten worse. On Sunday evening she had a full-on drunken meltdown, screaming at me, expressing suicidal ideation, etc. She slept all day monday, then woke me up at 3AM Tuesday morning, drunk again, and again expressing what seemed to me like suicidal ideation. I had to go to work so after she finally went to sleep around 830 AM, I wrote her a long note confronting the issue. I get home and she basically refuses to talk to me. I should mention that most of the conversations are happening over text because we have a small child and also an in-home nurse who helps with childcare. I text that if she doesn't want to talk about it, I'm going to get a hotel once we get our child down so I can clear my head. Anyway, I've finished putting the child down for the night, I come out, and her care is gone. Nurse doesn't know where she went and it doesn't look like she's getting my texts. What do I do? Call the cops? Seek a psychiatric hold? I don't really know, it feels like the situation is escalating way faster than I can deal with it and my attempts to address the problem are only making things worse.
EDIT: I got a hold of her on the phone and she was sober, rational, and promised not to do anything "irreversible" (my word). She said she'd be back in time for me to go to work. I agree that long-term changes will need to be made - its what I've been pushing for - and I think its more likely that she'll accept that if I give her a modicum of space to process than having it forced on her, however tempting that possibility. I don't have any texts to show the cops (she didn't really respond to any of my texts so it would only show a one-sided conversation) and I suspect my City PD will other priorities than trying to track down her car over a quite wide possible search area. So I am going to take a calculated risk and take her at her word. Thank you to everyone who responded. I will try to follow up in a day or two here for everyone who took the time to help.
Edit: (several days late) She spent the night in a hotel and came back in the morning. We talked about how we've fallen into some bad patterns and how to start changing those patterns. Cautiously optimistic moving forwards. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond.
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
As per the request of at least two people here, im going to make an effort-post of my recent digital minimalist experiment.
Beginning
I was online too much and fairly aware of it. A lot of my time when not working was spent either on social media, news, YouTube, or gaming (mostly merge games). And really it was beginning to be a concern that I was spending enough time doing those things that the screen time on my iPad was somewhere near 4-6 hours a day. That didn’t leave much time for other things really.
Somewhere in my binging, I came across a lot of people reenacting historical eras. I think someone here put me on the one about pioneer cooking. But it was all very appealing in the sense that in all of them, the people reenacting being British in the 1940s, the medieval dancers, the renaissance dressmakers hand sewing a dress, whatever other rabbit holes you’d find in that genre of video is that there are several things missing from modern society: personal connections to other people, doing things in the real world, and organic culture. None of the kinds of things that people did as part of normal human behavior in the eras before the cell phones happened organically anymore. I don’t know any folk songs or dances, I didn’t have any real nonconsumptive hobbies, and while I have friends, hanging out was much more of a planned thing than just walking around and meeting people or having people just hang out. The one thing that the kept coming back to me was a quote from the Vintage Dollhouse vlog “We don’t do anything anymore.” It’s actually true, at least compared to eras where cooking required an oven and chicken and vegetables you chopped yourself, cleaning means you have to push the vacuum cleaner yourself, etc. Even shopping was different in 1940 as you not only didn’t have Amazon, but you didn’t have Walmart either so shopping means going to several shops, and often means accidentally bumping into someone you know there or at least the guy/girl behind a counter. It’s also true about things like exercise — in general you’d get a bit of exercise by playing or dancing with other people, or walking around town rather than lifting weights at home. And socializing was doing things with people you know in the same room. Card games, maybe listening to baseball or soccer or whatever sport, working on a hobby together as opposed to modern online gaming or social media or texting where everyone is in their home on their couch alone and only communicating through a screen or headset.
I decided that obviously this was not a healthy way to spend my time, and furthermore that it needed to change. So after reading a fair bit about digital detox plans and finding none that seemed sensible, I came up with something that was more of a personal challenge than anything else. Inspired by the 1940s Brits I’d been watching, the rules I came up with were fairly simple. For the next month, I would not use any entertainment technology that was unavailable in 1946. I did allow radio, streaming music and podcasts, but no screens (I don’t have an analog radio). I also limited my news consumption to 5 minutes of NPR News as a podcast in the morning.
Difficulties
I didn’t find it too hard to get used to the new lifestyle really. The biggest issue I had was that when I had downtime, I’d want to reach for a device to play a game or scroll or whatever else. Having something else at hand helps quite a lot actually. For me it’s often a book of puzzles or a book to read near my chair. Rainy days or winter days were less fun, though I don’t think it was much worse than being a it bored until my brain came up with a solution. But again having something analog available whenever the itch of boredom strikes and having activities or chores or something that you do when boredom strikes will solve the problem as long as you stay committed.
General Observations
First of all, it’s kind of amazing how quickly your world reorients itself away from the kind of culture war stuff that people like to yell about on social media and events happening far away. I was only vaguely aware of Gaza and Ukraine going on. I stopped worrying about trans and woke stuff. Trump is less of a mythic figure for good or ill, and more of a guy who says annoying things online and occasionally does something really dramatic. And most of it (other than the gas prices) has little effect on my life. On the other hand, I took much more of an interest in local news, my own neighborhood, people I work with, and so on. It’s a reversal of how most people seem to think about the news — most people are focused on culture wars like trans, IVF, Trump, MAGA, and international wars. And even when those issues came up, they were not outrage bait. It was just “okay, we just bombed Iran.” It was unexpected, sure, but it was just a thing that happened, it wasn’t something I felt the need to be excited or angry about (except that it sucks that gas prices have nearly doubled). I want it over, but I can also put it down. It’s part of my world, but it’s not something to get excited about.
Second, it’s weird how it’s seems to have slowed down the world to something more manageable. I don’t need to be in a big hurry, I don’t need to decide right now, and I’m not trying to absorb exobytes of unrelated data in the attempt to make sense of the world. If something happens that I want to make up my mind about, I can think about it for hours or days before I decide what I think. If I want to do something, I can do it when it suits me. And I don’t have to worry about missing something important. Going back to the first point, most of it isn’t important, and if it is, it will still be there a few days or a week later. I find the effect relaxing. I don’t feel stressed by the rush of a world that goes at the speed of a computer because I don’t have to match that pace.
Third, I find it much easier to just be in the moment. I like to go walking on nice days and I find it a bit easier to notice the environment. Squirrels fighting over their favorite trees, birds flying around, flowers and trees budding or blooming. I can watch clouds overhead and notice the shapes and the types. I stop to say hi to neighbors I see when I walk by. When I’m reading or doing a puzzle, I can just be doing a puzzle or reading a book. I can give it my full attention for an hour or two. Whatever I happen to be doing, I can just be doing that thing, without feeling distracted by thoughts about things happening elsewhere.
Current approach to technology
I still mostly stay as analog as possible. I do allow myself to watch TV with other people— for example if we all decided we want to get together to watch football, baseball, or basketball it’s fine. Other than that, and coming here on occasion, I mostly stay offline except for radio, music or podcasts (I stay away from politics podcasts).
The evaluation frame I’ve been using to decide what to allow in is pretty simple.
1). Is this technology useful? Do I even need it? Can I do this easily another way? I’m personally of the opinion that if you don’t actually need the technology, it’s best to be somewhat skeptical, especially since it appears that the economic model of most entertainment apps is keeping users on as long as possible.
2). What kinds of things would this technology keep me from doing? If it’s going to keep me inside doing nothing useful, it’s not good. It’s also not good if it takes over a task or skill that I value.
3). What does this technology do to my community? Is it bringing people into real relationships, is it sowing division? Is it radicalizing people, or creating mental health problems for people? If it’s destroying your community, to me it seems like after you know it causes those problems, to keep using the technology is in some sense not only being okay with it, but participating in those harms.
Alternate title: Acid Convinced Me I Am Exactly Who I Thought I Was
As the engaged and parasocially addicted reader I hope you are, you might remember that I’ve previously dabbled in mind-altering substances. Up until recently, however, my exposure to anything serious was strictly limited to psilocybin administered under clinical conditions.
I originally accepted the mushroom extract because I was depressed. It worked, in the sense that I spent the next four months and change feeling reliably not depressed. Psychiatry loves to invent tidy Greek and Latin wrappers for the chaotic human experience, and “euthymic” is the designated term here. It is a polite way of describing the baseline state the rest of us are desperately trying to claw our way back to. At the very least, it’s what I write down in my clinical notes unless you, the patient, are giving me serious cause for concern.
But the psilocybin eventually wore off, and the medical establishment won't just put you back in a clinical trial because you ask nicely. I was struggling badly again, so I turned to LSD.
My first foray was a trial run. The dealer advertised a 300 µg tab, which I conservatively cut in half. Going by subjective effect, along with the generally optimistic nature of street mathematics, it felt closer to 75-125 µg. There were no real visuals. The walls maintained their structural integrity, abstaining from the perceptible motion usually reserved for earthquakes or skyscrapers. I felt wired, more thoughtful, but mostly just myself.
Also, I was nauseous as all hell. This is to be expected from a chemical structurally adjacent to those that mushrooms evolved to keep annoying animals at bay. Unfortunately, much like with capsaicin, humans have proven to be deeply paradoxical creatures, eagerly seeking out the exact substances that burn their throats and make their stomachs churn.
Subjectively, that low-ish dose felt like a middle sibling between the sheer euphoria of MDMA and the hyper-focused disengagement of psilocybin. The only real downside was some manageable next-day dysphoria. Still, I was dissatisfied with the intensity. There was no immediate relief from the grey fog. I eyed the remaining half-tab, took extensive notes, and decided I was ready to do it again. And harder.
I did, and I almost regret it.
Set and Setting
A few days prior, I had received what could only be described as objectively good news. Not perfect news, but I felt a few British stone, or one Indian boulder, lighter. I genuinely felt eager to face the near future. Unlike my clinical trial, where the goal was to banish a treatment-resistant depression that had plagued me for a decade, this time I just wanted to make the happiness stick. If that didn't work, I'd settle for lasting contentment.
I’d learned my lessons from the trial run. I kept ondansetron on hand, a rationalist’s best friend for serotonin-receptor-induced nausea. I cleared my schedule. I found a quiet room, cranked up the aircon, turned down the lights, and queued up a good sound system. I took a full "300 µg" tab, expecting a real-world 200, and swallowed the anti-nausea medication alongside it. My two dogs, creatures of gentle breeding and absolute loyalty, snuggled in without complaint.
The effects arrived on schedule. The ondansetron performed a miracle, muting the jaw-tingling and ear-stuffiness associated with extreme serotonergic stimulation. The music sounded expansive; the colors popped. Two hours in, I decided I liked the trajectory enough to swallow the remnants of the first tab.
Then my friends arrived.
They were good friends, old friends, some I hadn’t seen in years. They knew about my situation, though they mostly weren’t psychonauts themselves. The most experienced among them had once trip-sat a guy who ended up defecating in a sink, an indignity I fully intended to spare them. I just wanted temporary companions, not babysitters. We’re getting older; we have jobs, wives, and kids. I also had family a phone call away, though I was resolved to only break that glass in an absolute emergency.
We laughed and caught up. The man I call my best friend dragged me out to look at nature, or at least the best shrubbery my suburban garden had to offer. It was a hot, sunny day. The leaves were very green. I was... whelmed. Very pretty leaves, sure, but ultimately just plant organs devoted to reasonably efficient photosynthesis.
Then, one of my friends surprised us by producing a joint of unusually high-quality weed. I dimly recalled reading that THC enhances the effects of psychedelics. I took a few measured puffs. I thought I was being sensible.
I was very wrong. Oh god. Oh fuck.
Before the marijuana, I had noticed a remarkably large pimple on my best friend’s forehead, but I hadn’t commented on it, because we’re men and it’s not my place to critique his skincare routine. I remember thinking it was remarkably large, but hey, it's his face and his business. Shortly after the marijuana, I looked at another buddy and noted that he had clearly been skipping leg day. His torso was swole; his legs were stick-thin. Taken aback, he explained he hadn’t been to the gym in years. I checked on my best friend, and found that the pimple was present, but not nearly as obtrusive. I squinted, recalibrated, and finally realized that visual proportions were simply no longer a metric my brain had a good handle on.
My friends looked alien. I knew this was an illusion, in the same way I knew my two dogs, currently busy barking at and humping each other, were not actual wolves. But the visuals and the noise were provoking a rising tide of anxiety.
I politely told them I needed to lie down. They didn't mind and kept chatting. Eventually, even the sound of their voices became too intrusive, and I had to ask them to leave.
I was alone, and I knew the weed had shifted gears. The subtle color-shimmering behind my eyelids had mutated into aggressive fractals. The walls swayed. My phone, my lifeline for timestamped notes, was folding and warping in a manner explicitly not covered by the manufacturer's warranty.
I knew I was fucked. I laid back and strapped in.
The Peak
I just kept falling. My body became leaden while my mind buzzed like a hive. The music transitioned from enjoyable into a tidal wave of synesthesia-adjacent masterpieces.
And then, I stopped thinking in words.
For the relentlessly analytical creature that I am, this is an unusual experience. The time-stamped notes ceased. Time itself meant very little. I felt my sense of self begin to fray at the edges, and I felt the universe, God, the Singularity, the collective oneness of all existence, attempting to force its way into my mind. I remember thinking, in totally alien non-words, that perhaps belief in a higher power wasn't so bad after all.
This seductive impulse didn’t whisper. It didn’t knock. It kicked down the door while I was on the shitter.
A part of me recoiled. The core of my identity rebelled. It is not a metaphor when I say I saw literal tendrils, soft white shoots, forcing their way into the cracks of my mind, offering me metaphysical solace and cosmic meaning. It is even less of a metaphor when I say that the little kernel of "me" that remained manifested a pair of scissors and snipped them away as fast as they sprouted. Buddy, I saw these things. Knowing you're hallucinating is not a robust cure for insanity.
Next, I saw myself as a knot, pulled taut and threatening to unravel under the tension of competing ontologies and bad epistemics. But it held firm. Even a heroic dose of mind-altering substances failed to break my stubborn, logically oriented materialism. Before the peak, I had written in my notes that any version of me returning from this trip with claims of metaphysical insight was, in a very real sense, no longer me. Now I had peaked, and my priors remained perfectly intact.
I saw God trying to fuck my brain through my eye socket, and my first instinct was to castrate him. Okay, this one is an actual metaphor, but it's one I came up with barely after the peak.
I realized then that there is an immutable, unshakable core beneath the masks I wear. Short of serious neurological degradation, I could trust myself to persevere through whatever slings and arrows life throws at me without losing my mind.
The Descent and the Meta-Self
Eventually, time began to make sense again. I became introspective. I felt sobriety slowly reconstructing itself from the wreckage of my mind, though it was a drawn-out process.
The peak was followed by a gentle, strange glide. I remember one version of me during the comedown who despaired of ever reaching sobriety, terrified of annihilation, begging not to die, terrified that his specific qualia would vanish into compressed digital journal notes and fading, imperfect memory.
The next iteration of me was highly meta, a journalist preoccupied with the act of journalism. He finally understood (in emotive terms, and not just intellectually as I usually do) that the entity I call “myself” is a gestalt, a series of 3D snapshots embedded in a hypercube stretching from the past to the infinite future. My life is a relay race, each past self rushing to pass the baton to the next. At times, this was a brisk walk, at other times, a sprint. During the trip, the poor bastards that are myself were rolling downhill in wheelchairs. But hey, they did their job. Now I do mine. The internal continuity I feel might lack objective grounding, but it’s a load-bearing construct nonetheless.
This meta-self chuckled at how pretentious I would find him once sober. He knew he’d be gone soon, and he wished me well. He observed that a mind without the filters and structures we rely on is fundamentally non-functional. Sanity is adaptive. He faded away with a smile, handing the wheel back to the next, slightly more sober guy. For what it's worth, I don't dislike him as much as he thought. I recognize that aspect of myself, and am mostly fond of it.
At some point, I remembered Scott Alexander’s short story Samsara. It is the one about the solitary materialist in a world where everyone else has succumbed to an Enlightenment memetic plague that genuinely makes them happier at the cost of their epistemics. I identified with and felt great empathy for the protagonist, but I also looked down on him. I had just seen the face of God and spat at it. I was perfectly content remaining in the cycles of Samsara, even if the upholstery needs some work.
My live notes from this exact moment read:
“I love feeling anti-Enlightened. Like that story Scott wrote, about the only materialist left on earth, who was tricked into becoming enlightened by virtue of his rejection of enlightenment. Hah. I'm still here. Bitch.”
Make of that what you will. I stand by it.
The Empty Quarry
The rest of the trip was an exercise in logistics and emotional housekeeping. I began to think and plan ahead, and regained opinions on the music, which gradually became less sublime. Along the way, I asked myself the questions I am usually afraid to answer out loud.
I noted my anxiety about the Singularity, which I believe is imminent on empirical grounds rather than faith. I fear death, and aging: for myself and those I love. I fear not being around to experience the end of the beginning. I want us to build heaven from the bones of an apathetic universe and forge something that cares out of dying stars. I genuinely think that is more likely than getting paperclipped, though not by a margin wide enough to bring me much peace.
I examined my anxieties about my career, my finances, and the lofty standards set by my parents. That I may or may not have the time to establish myself as a man, a husband and father, a writer, a doctor, before it becomes moot. I mused on how conflicted I feel about the trajectory of my life, even if I've usually lived up to my expectations and made my parents proud. I know I am not a bad person: I don't give my spare change away to save shrimp, but I do genuinely try to help. This was helpful to remember and also sincerely believe with most of my guard down.
I thought about my father, a surgeon who works harder than a human body should allow. He is not emotionally constipated; he cares deeply about my feelings. But quiet, relentless work is his love language. With tears drenching my cheeks, I realized he would work himself to death for us if he had to, and he’d die on his feet with a smile.
I don't want him to. I want to become so established that he can look at me, feel the safety of it, and finally slow down. At the same time, I notice I’ve inherited his drive. I work harder than I need to because I am already providing for the family I don't quite have yet: the wife yet unmarried, the kids yet unborn.
To my slight but enduring disappointment, it turns out my constant sober rumination and relentless introspection actually works. I already knew all of these answers. I could have produced them on minimal prodding when sober, even more easily if drunk and disinhibited. I have already done so, repeatedly.
Not even a heroic dose of LSD could help me mine for psychological insights that didn't exist; the quarry was already bare. I understand myself. I wouldn't trust any grand unified theories about the wider universe generated on acid, but I would have appreciated a slightly deeper glimpse into my own interiority. Like any good Bayesian, I am forced to treat this absence of evidence as evidence of absence. I am, almost certainly, exactly who I thought I was.
I wouldn’t ever like to be quite that high again. It felt dangerously close to bumping up against a glass ceiling of the psyche. I do intend to alter myself, physically and mentally, in the future, but psychedelics can only get you so far.
It is too early to tell if the contentment will stick, but the day after, I feel euthymic. It is quieter in my head. For someone with ADHD, this is a profound relief. As a delightful bonus, my usually omnipresent mild tinnitus seems to have vanished. If that proves permanent, the ordeal was worth it on those grounds alone.
I consider myself a better materialist for the experience. But note that I do not view the experience as self-flagellation, I didn't seek out... whatever the hell that was. The flagella of cosmic unity tried to force their way in, and I stayed the course. Can't let the team down; the ancestors and descendants are counting on me. If God or the administrators of the Ancestor Simulation want to talk to me that badly, they can send an email.
A Brief Note on Harm Reduction:
As clinical experiments go, my methodology was garbage. The clinician and the subject were the same person, and both of them were tripping balls in a manner they hadn’t realized was physically possible. I was already happier than I had been in a... very long time when I tried this. Nothing I have said or will say constitutes medical advice.
Do not take heroic doses of LSD unless you have a damn good reason. If you must, do not add cannabis unless you have meticulously researched the interactions. And if you do add cannabis, do not come crying to me when you find yourself castrating God with imaginary scissors to prevent Him from mind-fucking you. Or if you do get mind-fucked, for the matter, I will be sympathetic but less than useful. I've warned you. And I warn you again:
Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed until the half-life clears your system. Sometimes they stay ajar forever, no matter how hard you shove. From a mental health perspective, the evidence for psilocybin and ketamine is far more robust, and the latter is actually medically available in many jurisdictions.
I don't want to be this high ever again. But I am very glad to be back.
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