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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9470 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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The Nvidia H20 exports ban is back on?

Lets recap. DeepSeek stuns the world by dropping a model almost as good as SOTA models while flexing incredible performance gains through cunning Chinese hacking. It's revealed they used lower end H20 GPUs vs the more decadent A100 / H100 / B100 class chips that fat American programmers use. Thusly, the US moves to ban exports of H20s as well.

Except last week, on April 9th, following the news of Jensen Huang dropping a million bucks at a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, the ban is apparently lifted, stunning all China hawks in the country (and AI safetyists) and demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.

But today, Nvidia announces the export ban is on. And ... apparently was never lifted? The market reacts and knocks them down a few points.

What... happened? Checking back, it seems the only source for the news that the H20 ban was lifted was "two unnamed sources" reported by NPR.

Following the Mar-a-Lago dinner, the White House reversed course on H20 chips, putting the plan for additional restrictions on hold, according to two sources with knowledge of the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5356480/nvidia-china-ai-h20-chips-trump

Weirdly, neither the USG nor Nvidia commented on it.

Can we read into the fact that since neither party commented on it, lifting the H20 ban was actually on the table? Was this leaked by one side to put pressure on the other? Was it a trial balloon? Or do we even trust that NPR actually reached out for comment like they said they did?

$1 million donation is chump change at those levels. Possibly the donation was to secure the sit down dinner where they talked, not actually a promise for any kind of outcome. That seems way more in line with that amount of money.

As someone with a lot of networth in Nvidia I'm happy about this and if it were put up to a vote of the shareholders I'd vote to not sell these chips to China. We absolutely don't need to hand them the rope that the intend to hang us with.

I think Jensen actually got the verbal agreement from Trump after, in Trump's terms, kissing his ass at the dinner, and then somebody briefed Trump on what "H20" stands for. We'll probably never know but would be perfectly in style for this administration. I was stunned to see those news, because obviously Trump loves tariffs and export controls and has a thing for CHI-NA, this is one topic where there's a strong bipartisan consensus that China must be denied ML-grade compute, and the ban was already in place. Well, back to normality.

demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.

Is trade “selling out”? Is 1 million H20s strategically relevant? More than, say, rare earth ban from China, which could perhaps be negotiated?

I found this Klein-Friedman exchange interesting.

The questions answer themselves. What if you get into a trade war with China and you lose? What if, after infuriating the rest of the world, putting tariffs on them, too, you make China look stronger, more reliable, more farsighted, more strategic in the eyes of all these other countries that are now looking for an exit from the unreliable consequences of U.S. hegemony?

I want to talk about China today. I think one reason the administration felt it was safer to retrench to something that could be described more as a trade war with China is that a bipartisan consensus has hardened around China. Trump set this into motion in his 2016 campaign, but then Democrats embraced it, too: China is a rising power, and we’ve made a terrible mistake in letting them rise. We are in danger of being a falling power. China ripped us off. They took our manufacturing jobs. They addicted us and our allies to their cheap labor and their cheap goods. And China doesn’t just want to be rich. It wants to rule. First Taiwan — then who knows what else?

I’m not going to tell you this story is entirely wrong. It’s not. And I’m not going to tell you that all the Republicans and Democrats who believe it wanted Trump’s trade war specifically. They didn’t.

But I will tell you that I’ve been surprised and alarmed for years now by how this new, much more hawkish and angry consensus has hardened. How hard it has become to question.

This whole AGI race is pretty unfortunate. From my point of view, very similar to Friedman's, the US is in deep shit. It has deluded itself into the belief that it has greater advantage than is actually the case and that Wang Huning's series of ideologies actually lead towards a global hegemony, from that premise invented the self-serving narrative of desperately needing to “contain” or “isolate” China (which has “betrayed American goodwill” by not becoming liberal as expected and even “backsliding” with Xi) at all costs, and then bizarrely procrastinated on doing anything effective (like these tariffs, or seriously arming Taiwan) for next to a decade, then attacked China with extreme vindictiveness, going after Huawei on half-baked pretext and trying to kill their national champion (the US today has no companies or entities held in such esteem by citizens – I don't know, it'd be like Soviets trying to kill Ford or something? Maybe NASA at its zenith?). The Chinese are temperamentally not disposed to total war in times of good trade and improving fortunes, but are capable of waging it, and have taken the clue and for the last 6 or so years have been working on their resilience. So here we are, the US is even more arrogant and delusional about its relative standing, its non-kinetic means of communication are running out, and nobody in either party even dares to raise the point of rapprochement or thaw, because it's a career killer. Literally Soviets were treated with more rationality and caution, and let me tell you, other than warhead count, Soviets had nothing on modern China. In short, when there's a real possibility that you will not secure a decisive win no matter how much more “serious” you get, maybe it's time to reassess the game board.

Anyway, H20s don't matter a great deal now, it's always been a gimped inference-only chip. Huawei can produce 910Cs (partially with those 2 million 910B dies they got from TSMC via shell companies, but domestically too), they're not great but close to H100 level, and Huawei is extremely good at engineering so it can make absolutely insane CloudMatrix 384 servers outclassing Nvidia's newest NVL72 Blackwells, though at the cost of much higher chip count and power draw – but power is one of many resources that China has in abundance, and will have even more in abundance as it takes offline some aluminum overcapacity to fulfill the KPI of “higher value added per Watt”. These are probably already supplied to DeepSeek for training V4/R2, and other businesses are known to run R1 and V3 on them.

As I've said 1 and a half years ago,

Where does this leave us?

It leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where China as a rival superpower will plausibly have to be defeated for real, rather then just sanctioned away or allowed to bog itself down in imperialist adventurism and incompetence. They'll have enough suitable chips, they have passable software, enough talent for 1-3 frontier companies, reams of data and their characteristically awkward ruthlessness applied to refining it (and as we've learned recently, high-quality data can compensate for a great disparity in compute). They are already running a few serious almost-OpenAI-level projects – Baidu's ERNIE, Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen (maybe I've mentioned it already, but their Qwen-7B/VL are really good; seems like all groups in the race were obligated to release a small model for testing purposes), maybe also Tsinghua's ChatGLM, SenseTime etc.'s InternLM and smaller ones. They – well, those groups, not the red boomer Xi – are well aware of their weaknesses and optimize around them (and borrowing from the open academic culture helps, as can be often seen in the training methods section – thanks to MIT&Meta, Microsoft, Princeton et al). They are preparing for the era of machine labor, which for now is sold as means to take care of the aging population and so on (I particularly like the Fourier Intelligence's trajectory, a near-perfect inversion of Iron Man's plot – start with the medical exoskeleton, proceed to make a full humanoid; but there are other humanoids developed in parallel, eg Unitree H1, and they seem competitive with their American equivalents like Tesla Optimus, X1 Neo and so on); in general, they are not being maximally stupid with their chances.

And this, in turn, means that the culture of the next years will be – as I've predicted in Viewpoint Focus 3 years ago – likely dominated by the standoff, leading up to much more bitter economic decoupling and kinetic war; promoting bipartisan jingoism and leaving less space for «culture war» as understood here; on the upside, it'll diminish the salience of progressive campaigns that demoralize the more traditionally minded population.

It'll also presumably mean less focus on «regulation of AI risks» than some would hope for, denying this topic the uncontested succession to the Current Thing №1.

I failed to anticipate MAGA Juche, but oh well. Also the list of relevant companies from that side has shifted a lot, today I'd say also: ByteDance, DeepSeek, Moonshot…

other than warhead count, Soviets had nothing on modern China.

The warheads counted for a lot.

But I think the Soviets leapfrogged or sidestepped the US on military tech more often than China has – maybe that's just vibes.

I'm not making a "China can't innovate" argument (in fact my understanding is for some period, perhaps continuing to this day, they were building iterative designs of major warships to keep pace with their evolving mastery of technology and technique, which certainly is not blind adherence to formula), but the impression that I have gotten is that China has for the last oh 20ish years focused on building out its tech base, bringing it in-house, and bringing its designs up to a modern standard. Their approach has been good and pragmatic but they have been pushing the limits of American military capability by sheer quantity and by exploiting hideous blind spots in American post-Cold War defense drawdowns, not by cutting edge or even funky designs, with maybe a few exceptions.

Nevertheless I tend to find that I am more impressed and amused by Soviet and later Russian engineering than Chinese engineering – perhaps because I have a tendency towards mild Russophilia, perhaps because I pay less attention to Chinese systems, perhaps because their innovations are still classified, but I find Soviet/Russians designs unusual and capable of solving problems in ways that are elegant even in their brutality.

American designs in my opinion are often overly perfectionistic [which I think is tolerable for some high-end systems but the tendency has begun to wag the dog after the Cold War] and Chinese designs lend themselves towards being calmly pragmatic. They are, I think, just now in the past decade or two beginning to feel increasingly confident in many areas of stepping out of the shadow of Russian engineering, and one of the most interesting things about the recent aircraft reveals from China is the chance to see truly unusual airframes that are likely to be very different from their American, European, or Russian counterparts.

Nevertheless I tend to find that I am more impressed and amused by Soviet and later Russian engineering than Chinese engineering – perhaps because I have a tendency towards mild Russophilia, perhaps because I pay less attention to Chinese systems, perhaps because their innovations are still classified, but I find Soviet/Russians designs unusual and capable of solving problems in ways that are elegant even in their brutality.

I think the problem is that Westerners like gimmicks, and Russians/Soviets are not different. We all love our “no analogues!” Wunderwaffes and clever self-contained breakthroughs. That's just how European brains work I believe. But their brains work differently (see 2nd part and responses), their gimmicks are too large-scale to easily appreciate – supply chains, system integration building out entire cities, that's not just ant-like slave labor, they are just predisposed to logistical autism and a lot of cognitive effort goes into this. Yes, it doesn't result (at least not yet) in magic-looking individual devices, but does it matter much if their ships are half a generation behind when they can build literally orders of magnitude more? That's a whole different dimension of magic. I also suspect that Americans overindex on their triumphs through technological superiority – nukes, Desert Storm… But it probably won't apply to the conventional war with China. They aren't that behind, they have functional radars, they have VTOL cells on their ships, it will be reduced to a matter of quantity, which as you know has a quality of its own. Soviets even at their peak could not approach this degree of production dominance.

Semianalysis has just released a report on this Huawei server and it illustrates the philosophy well:

Huawei is a generation behind in chips, but its scale-up solution is arguably a generation ahead of Nvidia and AMD’s current products on the market. So what would be the specifications for Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 (CM384)?

The CloudMatrix 384 consists of 384 Ascend 910C chips connected through an all-to-all topology. The tradeoff is simple: having five times as many Ascends more than offsets each GPU being only one-third the performance of an Nvidia Blackwell.

A full CloudMatrix system can now deliver 300 PFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, almost double that of the GB200 NVL72. With more than 3.6x aggregate memory capacity and 2.1x more memory bandwidth, Huawei and China now have AI system capabilities that can beat Nvidia’s.

What’s more, is the CM384 is uniquely suited to China’s strengths, which is domestic networking production, infrastructure software to prevent network failures, and with further yield improvements, an ability to scale up to even larger domains.

The drawback here is that it takes 3.9x the power of a GB200 NVL72, with 2.3x worse power per FLOP, 1.8x worse power per TB/s memory bandwidth, and 1.1x worse power per TB HBM memory capacity.

The deficiencies in power are relevant but not a limiting factor in China.

If you do not have a power constraint because of your relative power abundance, it makes sense to forgo power density and increase scale-up, including optics in the design. The CM384 design considers system-level constraints even outside of the rack, and we believe that it’s not just the relative power availability that constrains China’s AI ambitions. We think that there are multiple ways for continued scaling for Huawei’s solution.

It's truly beautiful in its own way. I am not well versed in military hardware but I think the slight qualitative edge of Western tech doesn't matter as much as production capacity.

Quite a few possible explanations.

  1. NPR fucked up and was talking to people who wouldn't realistically have knowledge of the plans.

  2. The officials they used as sources were normally fine but they were making up shit for some reason. Maybe they weren't privy to the particular details or saying stuff on purpose to make trump look bad/make NPR look bad, hard to tell intent there. Hell it could have been said just because it appears some people within the Trump admin are taking advantage of insider knowledge for the stock market.

  3. There was an internal plan to move against the ban and that got leaked before anything finalized. Perhaps the sources went to NPR precisely because they wanted to pressure against it.

The problem with anonymous sources being the standard is that it's really hard to tell the difference between a journalist fuck-up, the source being a lying piece of shit, or just internal plans that were decided against.

The lack of named sources coupled with lack of comment from both the USG and Nvidia would seem to hint that the story was false from the start.

Personally, NPR's presentation of themselves as a bastion for "serious people" also doesn't help the story's credibility.

The real question is wether this pressumed fabulism stemmed from "orange man bad" or some beltway-bandit trying to pull a pump and dump on Nvidia's stock.

The lack of named sources coupled with lack of comment from both the USG and Nvidia would seem to hint that the story was false from the start.

Why wouldn't the USG have just denied it with a statement like "lol fake news, more made up trash from NPR"?

John Cochrane opines on deficits (trade and budgetary) and tariffs

I'll start where he describes what is perhaps the most fundamental driver of cross-border investment:

For various reasons, many countries around the world including China wanted to save. For various reasons, additional domestic investment did not seem like a good idea. Chinese savers did not want even more Chinese factories. One of many reasons for this saving (more later, but it helps to make the story) is that China is aging and has little safety net, so its middle age workers want to put money aside, to withdraw when they get old. So, those savers chose to invest in the US.

This seems like a perfectly fine thing. If there are reasons that make investing in China look less attractive to retirement savers, they should look elsewhere. It would actually be a promising thing for the US if they found that investing in US businesses was comparatively attractive. He then highlights "three bedrock principles of economics":

  1. The capital and current account must add up. If the US imports more than it exports, it has to give foreigners something valuable in return. Even China doesn’t send us stuff for free. We give dollars, treasury securities, or stocks and bonds in return. And if other countries like China want to accumulate US securities, they must send us more goods and services then we send them, to get dollars they can use to buy securities.
  1. Money is a veil. Understand the underlying movement of goods and services. To understand economics, look beyond money and watch the underlying flow of real stuff. To invest in the US, other countries must put things on boats and send it here (or sell us services). One Chinese person can buy a stock from another Chinese person, but China as a whole cannot accumulate US assets without putting goods on boats (proverbially).

...

  1. The overall trade (goods and services) deficit equals the difference between savings and investment plus the government deficit [(M-X) = (I-S) + (G-T)]

Put these ideas together. What happens if other countries decide they want to save more, and invest in the US? They buy US assets, which sends up the real exchange rate.

He then squarely aims at the G term in that equation:

The US reacted to the offer by other countries to borrow from them (sell them assets) at very low interest rates, not by building factories, but going on a consumption binge. Just as Greece had done. Most of that is due to the actions of the federal government. The total trade deficit is about $1 trillion. The US budget deficit is about $1.3 trillion. All of that extra saving is going to the federal government. And the federal government is not building a trillion dollars a year of productive investment with the money. The federal government is, by and large, sending checks to its citizens to support current consumption. The federal government saw an amazing opportunity to borrow cheaply, sometimes even at negative real rates of interest. Borrow it did, and sent checks to happy voters.

The Chinese are not, it turns out, financing their retirement from the profits of a new generation of factories. They are hoping to finance their retirement from the US federal government’s willingness to tax its citizens in excess of spending, some day in the far future, in order to reverse the whole process and put stuff back on boats to send to China.

...

The foreigners in the US don’t know or really care where the resources to pay them back come from. A promise to fund Chinese retirements with US taxes is just as good to them as a promise to fund them from profitable factories.

...

We have all sorts of contrary policies against saving, against investment, and for consumption. Huge budget deficits, absorbing our and foreigners savings, are sent as checks to people likely to consume. We subsidize home mortgages. We tax savings and rates of return pretty heavily, including corporate taxes, taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains. Food stamps and agricultural subsidies encourage consumption. Our Keynesian policy establishment spent twenty years pushing extra consumption, via fiscal “stimulus,” fears of “secular stagnation,” and under multiple banners that government debt never has to be repaid.

How do tariffs play in?

Tariffs are not likely to fix any of this. If we cut off all net trade, as the current tariffs seem to aim to do, this process will have to come to an end.

But how? The US will no longer be able to finance $1.3 trillion budget deficits from foreigners, and will have to do it from domestic savings. Or, it will have to cut $1.3 trillion of spending, or raise $1.3 trillion of durable tax revenue.

I'd sum this up in going back to the fundamental equation he presented: [(M-X) = (I-S) + (G-T)]. If you want to make the left hand side of that equation go to zero, then you must make something on the right hand side change, too. My last sentence was a bit too heavy on "agency of the theoretician", as though one can simply grab one of those variables and turn it up or down. In reality, the complex interaction of transactions will necessarily bring the equation to equality, and you might not get to choose how it gets there. Policy-makers sort of get to directly tweak G and T, but they have less direct tools for I and S. I read him as saying that the LHS is about $1T and that (G-T) is about $1.3T, meaning that (I-S) is presumably about -$0.3T. So, where is that $1T change coming from? Policymakers can cut G or raise T, naturally pissing off every voter who is living high on the deficit, but they obviously don't have to. If they don't, his conclusion is that we're in for a world of change when it comes to I and S. About $1T worth of change.

He does not spell it out, but seems to assume that the natural mechanism that interacts with I and S is the interest rate.

Interest rates will spike, and that’s the point. Higher interest rates encourage domestic saving, and discourage budget deficits and corporate investment, to bring investment plus government spending back in line with savings. But the spike in interest rates require to do this would be huge. And the trade shock will cause a sharp recession, or worse, putting even more stress on the budget. A debt crisis is likely along the way as the US finds it impossible to roll over debt.

If the influx of foreign investment, which was keeping interest rates low, dries up, companies will have to look to domestic savers. But those domestic savers didn't want to save at the current interest rates! If they did, they would be! So companies (and the gov't) will have to offer higher interest rates. That will be necessary to draw American savings. At the same time, having to pay higher interest rates means that companies can't invest as easily in more speculative, longer-timeline opportunities. Note that it doesn't make sense that they're suddenly going to invest more in domestic factories; if those domestic factories were profitable at the current, lower interest rates, they'd already be doing it! Instead, they're going to invest in less. Thus, fewer jobs, less innovation, and thus, recession. That is how I read the predictions. (He also thinks that rising interest rates will hit the federal government, as well, precipitating a debt crisis.)

Cochrane has been a fiscal "hawk" for a while. The fundamental thing to him is that the government has been borrowing tons of money to subsidize American consumption. It's been doing this for a while. At some point, you've gotta find a way to pay the piper. You can try not to, but the equation will balance itself. He just thinks that forcing the LHS to zero by gov't policy creates significant difficulties along the way.

They are hoping to finance their retirement from the US federal government’s willingness to tax its citizens in excess of spending, some day in the far future, in order to reverse the whole process

Isn't a fair amount of US debt held domestically? It seems like the same arguments would apply there to American retirees holding US treasury bonds with the expectation that the treasury can make good by taxing (presumed: future citizens, not the retired bondholders), and unlike China the those US retirees have at least some power over their government, and may not be mollified by simply inflating the interest away: "Grandma's on a fixed income and we can't just inflate prices until she can't afford anything!"

It seems like the same arguments would apply there to American retirees holding US treasury bonds with the expectation that the treasury can make good by taxing (presumed: future citizens, not the retired bondholders)

I believe he would agree. This is something that came up with him a lot when he was focusing on promoting his book on the fiscal theory of the price level. The getting is good when debt-holders expect that the government will make good on their debts; things start to go south when they start thinking there's a chance of default or the gov't deciding to inflate it away. Basically what a claim on USG debt is is an expectation that it will tax future citizens in order to repay you.

They are hoping to finance their retirement from the US federal government’s willingness to tax its citizens in excess of spending, some day in the far future, in order to reverse the whole process and put stuff back on boats to send to China.

Why does this require putting stuff on boats? If a Chinese retiree purchases an iPhone or gets a US-developed biologic drug or watches a Marvel fillm, much of that value flows back to the US without putting anything on a physical boat. They may fly a plane with a GE90 engine on it or use an AI assistant running on Nvidia GPUs.

I agree that they are entitled to sell their T-bills and spend the money, my disagreement is whether most of those purchases will be physical goods (let alone from the US, rather than from a third country) rather than services/IP.

Is there any practical reason why China couldn’t simply pirate all of the entertainment IP they wanted? As if we won’t soon have AI capable of turning a shitty camrip into a feature-quality product?

That AI will almost certainly run on a GPU fabricated in Taiwan.

China is a party to the Berne Convention and WIPO treaty and at least in theory has corresponding treaty obligations. I'm not aware of treaty-defined sanctions for violations, but they probably exist. Although "the West considers Chinese copyrights and trademarks void" probably isn't as large a punishment as the reverse today.

spits to remove foul taste of voicing support for current copyright system

American pirated versions of gacha games that give everything for free and have all the girls say 'Long Live Great President Donald Trump' would be a cultural victory similar in impact to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Would people still play gacha if they got everything for free? I thought half the addiction was like "gotta roll 500 more times to get enough teddy bears and parfaits to marry Ibuki!"

Maybe I just hang out with too many weird Blue Archive players.

I think he would agree with you. He put the obligatory "...and services" in several places, but did happen to omit it in that one blockquote. I don't think it was intentional.

Fair.

The Chinese are still importing turbines for now. But iPhones are down to third place behind vivo and huawei. It's harder to find concrete figures on movies, but every article agrees that the sale of Hollywood movies in China is in steep decline (absolutely, not just proportionally to domestic sales)

So at this rate in another decade we may have very little left to sell China that those retirees actually want. Other than land, of course.

That doesn't mean that a third country that wants US goods/IP/brands won't have something to offer them.

The beauty of free trade is that you can set up arbitrary such chains of trade -- China wants something from X who wants something from {Y,Z} who want Coca Cola and Levis and RTX4080s

Or the USG could inflate their debts away. That is the thing everyone misses on purpose. They can mint a single 1 quadrillion USD platinum coin and just put it into the account of the treasury. It will cover all of their obligations.

They can mint a single 1 quadrillion USD platinum coin and just put it into the account of the treasury.

So anyway I'm putting a little team together. At the very least I need a computer hacker, a tough guy, a demolitions expert, and someone who knows how to hang from the ceiling like that bit in Mission Impossible. Bonus points if you have a quirky personality, a cool accent, or an eyepatch.

What if we have two eyepatches?

There's still a slight chance I can squeeze you in, especially if you can commune with animals or something. Maybe like get a ferret to steal someone's keys, that kind of thing.

One of the joys of browsing via the ‘new comments’ tab is that you get to see posts like this without any of the related context.

The US could also increase in productivity. I was at an event relatively recently with a panel of Financially Credentialed types and someone pointed out that the US has never taxed its way out of a deficit, it has always grown its way out. Part of that is inflation, but while the cash supply is increasing the supply of goods and such is as well.

This means that everyone who invested valuable early 21st century dollars into fixed-income dollar-denominated assets gets paid back in worthless middle 21st century dollars. Look at the underlying movement of goods and services. Printing money increases demand without increasing supply. A debt crisis is about not having enough stuff people want in order to pay for the stuff people expected to have. The numbers in account statements are just an accounting strategy

This means that everyone who invested valuable early 21st century dollars into fixed-income dollar-denominated assets gets paid back in worthless middle 21st century dollars.

That's probably the optimal outcome. Old people and rich investors caused the problem with their poorly thought-through voting and investment strategies, so it's only fair if the fix comes out of their pockets.

The richest men on earth didn't get that way by holding safe assets, they got there by holding equity in companies they built.

It's safe investors who get punished, not rich ones.

Harvard decides to decline Trump's administration's "agreement in principle" for continuing to provide Federal grants and contracts. The Trump administration freezes their $2.2 billion funds.

Unlike Columbia, Harvard is willing to send a costly signal that it is, indeed, an elite private university, and it plans to stay that way.

The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:

Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring. By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. [...] Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity. [...]

I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class. It should at least require the elimination of radical ideals.

The way I see it, what makes Harvard University elite is that it both draws and correctly chooses the elite. The elite want to go there because other elite will be there, and admission of the non-elites is carefully curated for their usefulness. It's like an exclusive party that's awesome because a whole bunch of awesome people are there, and boring people aren't, with a few useful wingmen. If the party's host was required to invite a bunch of boring people, the party will break up as awesome people take off. There might be a brief party hiatus for the awesome people as they coordinate where to have the next awesome exclusive party, but awesome people seem to coordinate pretty quickly, so that party will resume. Just not at the current host's place.

So Harvard looked at the $2.2 billion, looked at their party, and decided to party on.

I don't even understand how exactly viewpoint diversity is supposed to be done? Almost any topic you can think of has a litany of varied views available. Even within something like "pro-life vs pro-choice", does viewpoint diversity mean you need

1: A person who believes in abortion at all times

2: A person who believes in abortion before it can survive outside the womb on its own

3: A person who believes in abortion before it can survive outside the womb with support

4-~22: A person respectively setting their limit at each month.

23: A person who believes in no abortions except for X, Y, Z etc etc exceptions (like rape, severe disease, risk to the mother).

23-29+: A person who believes in any mixture of the exceptions like XY but not Z or YZ but not X.

Whatever number we're at now: A person who believes in no abortions no matter what.

And you might think that sounds silly, but do you think the person who believes "no abortions no matter what" feels properly represented by the "no abortions except if it's rape or risky to the mother or blah blah blah reasons"? No, they wouldn't. Does the person who thinks abortions in the later parts of the second trimester feel represented by the person who says only in the first month? No, they wouldn't.

You have to flatten out viewpoints and beliefs to get anything close to functional, leaving many different views unrepresented.

But even outside of that it's still insane. Some viewpoints are just stupid and wrong. Do we want an economics course to be forced to hire a literal Chinese Marxist to teach Xi Jingping Thought? A German history class to be required to be taught by a Holocaust denier? A biology class led by someone who thinks dinosaurs are a hoax and evolution is a lie?

There's no reason to have DEI for idiots. We shouldn't be censoring well made criticisms or ideas but tons of viewpoints simply don't belong in a serious educational establishment because they're stupid. We don't need viewpoint diversity on if the earth is flat.

You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance. There doesn't need to be parity, or quotas, or anything like that. Just the minority report. If you don't consent to the witch, then you're not really in favor of academic freedom: you're a monoculture of our enemies that needs to be blown up and you certainly don't need tax dollars that are paid by witches. If even the smallest of token concessions are impossible to negotiate, it's time to start indiscriminately nuking civilian targets.

After all, it's Hogwarts: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and not Harvard: School of Progcraft and Libbery.

To any reasonable observer who's not already part of the in-group and selectively blind to conflict theory when it suits him, this is obviously DEI for conservatives.

Obviously this new emphasis of viewpoint-inclusion is intended to benefit conservatives here and now, and I’m fine with that. I would be much happier with race-based AA if the ratio of white to black had become 300:1 as with conservatives in the humanities.

To be fair, it’s technically viewpoint neutral. In comparison to DEI for BIPOC which very clearly names the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries here would depend on the composition of the field at any given time.

Thus:

Do we want an economics course to be forced to hire a literal Chinese Marxist to teach Xi Jingping Thought? A German history class to be required to be taught by a Holocaust denier? A biology class led by someone who thinks dinosaurs are a hoax and evolution is a lie?

Xi Jinping thought may be many things, but I’d be hard pressed to call it conservative. And I would be in favour of much of this - it seems clear that those in charge have been misusing their ability to label viewpoints as ‘stupid’ or ‘respectable’ to favour their side. See for example the ‘women are only weaker than men because of nutrition’ stuff that was going around. A lot of the stuff that is treated as absurd is vetoed by inertia and politics - for example I have no idea what Xi Jinping thought is, or what arguments creationists make.

Even assuming that it's 100% viewpoint-neutral, and even in a hypothetical scenario in which there isn't a raging culture war being wages - how would you even classify people? How do you measure viewpoint diversity? How do you quantify conservative-ness or liberal-ness? What even is the spectrum on which to measure viewpoints, and what is the target value for balance?

It absolutely is, and the response to it has left me feeling rather ambivalent and frustrated.

I oppose any kind of intervention like this. At the same time, I have been listening to voices on the left, even outside the US, objecting that this is like Russia, autocratic, despotic, McCarthyite, the government imposing an ideology, unconstitutional, violating the very principles of the American experiment, and so on.

And all I can think is - boy, I'm sure glad that the American government wasn't making ideological demands of universities in the name of diversity before this. Can you imagine how horrifying that would have been? Lucky nothing like that has ever happened before!

What the Trump administration is doing is bad, and pretty indefensible. However, it is only a fraction of what his opponents have been shamelessly doing for decades. 'Viewpoint diversity', while a good ideal in the abstract, cannot be imposed like this without horribly undermining the very purpose of a university as an educational and research institution. But the exact same things are true of racial diversity, gender diversity, and so on. May we at least hope that this will cause people to react against the entire notion of imposed diversity requirements?

Well, we may hope anything. But I doubt anything will happen. No one of significance is going to notice the hypocrisy. The right will keep on saying "it's okay for us to do it because they did it first", and the left will keep on saying "this is nothing like what we did how dare you even compare them", and principles will remain alien to this entire discourse.

Perhaps a steel man could be that if humans of different races are interchangeable then race-based quotas let you spread academic caress between races without affecting the serious business of thinking that goes into them. Whereas viewpoint quotas affect the actual business of the academy. But I don’t see how to square that view with ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘lived experience’.

Anyone have any takes on how the legal battle shakes out?

No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue

(Garber quote from the first article)

Harvard struck a blow for academic freedom today when they stood steadfast against the civil rights act. Asked for comment on the matter, Harvard president Alan Garber replied "there is not a single value I hold I wouldn't throw away to make Trump look bad on CNN."

Harvard struck a blow for academic freedom today when they refused to stop asking the JQ, despite threats from the Trump administration. Asked for comment on the matter, Harvard president Alan Garber replied "according to the studies we've been doing over the past few weeks we won't need as much federal funding anyway without ALL THESE MISERLY KIKES around."

Harvard struck a blow for academic freedom today when they refused to allow the Trump administration to dictate policy, despite the threat of a freeze on federal funding. Asked for comment on the matter, Harvard president Alan Garber replied "I originally thought maybe we could moderate a little, but I have been reliably informed that this is the only path that still gets me invited to parties."

Jokes aside this is a negotiating tactic, just like Trump's overbearing demands.

One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring

Once again I'm glad that over here university admissions are based purely on matriculation exam / entrance exam scores (barring a few small arts institutes) and the universities couldn't favor some groups even if they wanted to.

If they hold on to that, and the admin holds too and cuts them off, I think it's a win. I loathe current Harvard dominating ideology, but I support the principle that in a free country, which America still one day may become, people are free to hold any ideology, even extremely loathsome, as long as it does not involve infringing other's rights. Taking my money to do stuff that is loathsome to me comes pretty close, in my opinion, to infringing my rights, but if Harvard stops taking tax money (or at least takes them in no other sense than a cab driver transporting a government official takes the tax money) then I'd be ok with such setup. Secretly, in my heart, I'd desire for them to disappear in the flames of Hell, but I realize that the reality can't be so because everybody has their own desires and they are contradictory and the way to have a society is to have some desires moderated by the existence of others. The tricky part is how to ensure they don't just keep their ideology and resume taking my money once Trump is gone.

I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class.

In the context of the woke academia, "viewpoint diversity" is largely bullshit. The premise of the wokism is that genetical diversity somehow magically generates viewpoint diversity (as long as there aren't too many people of European descent because somehow they are all defective in this way) and that is supremely beneficial. Of course, nobody even bothers to support this claim because this is an axiom, and nobody even bothers to check there's an actual viewpoint diversity because nobody in fact wants it. This requirement just looks like calling the bluff on it - "ah, you love diversity? OK, let's measure you on that". Of course they'd refuse since neither they can measure it nor they ever wanted to.

Unlike Columbia, Harvard is willing to send a costly signal that it is, indeed, an elite private university, and it plans to stay that way.

Good. Emphasis on the private. They can join the ranks of colleges which refuse federal funds. They can also lose their 501(c)(3) status the same way Bob Jones University did, and for the same reason.

I’m actually impressed by this, they really tried on the ideology, they recognize how important the ideological leanings of faculty members at Harvard in particular really is.

They failed (for now), but a respectable and valiant attempt nonetheless, and more than I had expected. This is the kind of stuff we spoke about 5 years ago on the board as pie in the sky, moderately fanciful stuff, ‘what would you do if you became president’ kind of filler.

Who exactly is "they" in this comment?

Good for them. Hopefully they grow a pair and throw title 9 out the window while they at it.

Sometimes I look at this stuff and wonder if this what it was like to be pro Civil-Rights back in the day. Just watching all of these pillars of society being told "don't be racist" and hearing "no" in response while much of the influential nod their heads along like it's a good thing.

It is a chilling feeling.

The default position of humanity is sexist and racist (the only question is whose sexism is privileged, and to what degree).

We had a time when that was less true, back when we were rich and our philosopher-kings were half-decent people, but that's no longer true.

Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.

The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:

Woke Right theory wins again?

… the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.

I think that this is a reasonable characterization, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re demanding right-wing commissars to shoot the left-wing commissars. It’s commissars all the way down. As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the conservative movement and how its idea of the relationship between private organizations and the state has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. (That’s not to say that the Trump coalition is identical with the conservative movement, of course.) We’ll see if those thoughts ever become solid enough for an effortpost.

Aside from the obvious, there are two big differences between this and the civil rights era that make it much harder to do anything: First, the activists are in favor of the discrimination. Second, the people doing the discriminating won't admit they're doing it.

Agreeing with @Skibboleth - I don't think the exact nature of the Danegeld being requested is the point - the question is whether paying the Danegeld delivers any relief from the Dane or not.

If Harvard's read of what happened to Columbia (I don't understand the detail of the deal, but I assume Harvard do) is that they caved and the Trump admin immediately came back for more then they the only demands they should concede are to do things they wanted to do anyway but couldn't for internal politics reasons.

We tried not having commissars. It doesn't work. It's a power vacuum ready and waiting for one side's commissars to move in. And nature abhors a vacuum.

Liberalism is a unstable pipe dream. The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone. Someone's ideology is going to rule. All you can do is decide which side you'd rather see in charge and support it.

As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.

This is deeply the most important question in conservative thought!

Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.

The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening. They can probably fight and defeat a lot of Trump's demands in the courts, but I don't think they can fight them all.

-The total amount of funding to Harvard under review is 9 billion, 2 billion was just frozen, so there is another 7 billion for them at risk.

-Trump has also threatened their tax exemption status (501c3) per the BBC. From what I can tell there is precedence for stripping tax exemptions status due to racial discrimination in admissions. See the Bob Jones case below. Now connect the dots with SFFA vs Harvard.

-They can also threaten their accreditation status - no accreditation, no federal student loans.

-Another avenue would be sicing the DOJ on Harvard Professors. If you receive a federal grant and plagiarize or fake data then that is fraud. There is history of professors getting prison time in egregious cases. A bit further reach that I am not fully sure of would be charging plagiarists with wire fraud - if you knowingly plagiarize a paper, put that paper on your CV, and then got a job with that CV then wire fraud charges might be possible. I think it would be hard though, from what I can tell you would have to prove that the plagiarist got the job from your plagiarized paper. You'd have to prove knowingly plagiarism too, and I think that might be hard to prove to a jury. Even in the case of someone like Claudine Gay.

-Last, but still impactful, would be revoking or denying student visas. They have already been doing this. Foreign students are a quarter of the student body.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz01y9gkdm3o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United_States

Revoking Harvard's accredited status wouldn't harm Harvard, it would destroy the concept of accreditation.

Good. Accreditation is a scam anyway

I think it would harm Harvard a lot. For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.

The story will not fully be "Trump targeted us unfairly and stripped our accreditation". It will also include "they already got sued and lost for being racist (SFFA v. Harvard), they refused to stop being racist, now they lost their accreditation. Also antisemitism." Yes Harvard will always be a prestigious institution, yes it would survive the loss, but its still a pretty big egg in the face. I'm not sure they can spin their way out of it. Especially after SFFA v. Harvard.

Students losing ability to transfer credits, losing federal subsidized loans, no student aid would all follow the loss. None of which I think would matter too much, of course everyone will still clamor for Harvard. But accreditation as a concept will survive for these things alone, Pell Grants and subsidized loans may not matter to Harvard students, but they sure do matter for almost everyone else.

And if accreditation were destroyed - what does the current administration lose?

For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.

The US News rankings would cease to be relevant if Harvard wasn't on them. They basically started the rankings by figuring out that Harvard, Yale, Princeton should be at the top and backwards engineering how to rank the other schools by what metrics make those schools the top schools. It's like taking the obvious undisputed champion out of your boxing federation, or FIFA kicking out UEFA.

None of the rankings or loans or grants really matter, as long as businesses keep hiring from Harvard, bar associations keep admitting Harvard Law grads, Medical Boards keep licensing Harvard Med grads, other schools keep admitting Harvard undergrads to grad school or hiring Harvard PhDs for professorships, etc.

If 90% of Harvard Law grads get prestige jobs out of school, but the rankings don't include Harvard, we'll just get new "true" rankings somewhere.

And that's pretty much the story top to bottom.

Ok in the context of what you are saying US News doesn't matter. I think Harvard and Yale etc. care for bragging rights. But big picture doesn't matter.

None of the rankings or loans or grants really matter, as long as businesses keep hiring from Harvard, bar associations keep admitting Harvard Law grads, Medical Boards keep licensing Harvard Med grads, other schools keep admitting Harvard undergrads to grad school or hiring Harvard PhDs for professorships, etc.

If Harvard Law loses accreditation then Harvard Law grads will absolutely not be hired. In most states, by law, you can't sit even sit for the bar if you don't graduate from an accredited law school. Likewise with Harvard Medical - graduation from an accredited medical school is a requirement for a license in most states. So if accreditation is lost, these schools are done.

https://www.princetonreview.com/law-school-advice/law-school-accreditation https://lcme.org/about/

The agencies that accredit HLS and HMS are given approval from the Department of Education. The DoEd has a lot of power over these institutions, but not direct power to just go in and delist Harvard. But it can apply a lot of pressure. Enough to kick out Harvard? No idea. My guess is not unless forced. The ABA seems very liberal, they're already fighting Trump tooth and nail.

The thing is Harvard Law grads basically want to work in like three or four places (coming out of law school) and they're all in blue states. NYC and Cali big law and clerkships alone could easily absorb a few HLS classes. I'd imagine on the med school side it's similar. New York and California professional associations are unlikely to go along with Trump on the topic.

More likely Trump could manage to drag down the whole concept of accreditation and college rankings in this scenario. Which would be a good thing for the world, actually. But the schools most harmed would be schools like UVA or some of the UC campuses or Michigan, schools that have national profiles thanks to rankings, not the ivies Berkeley Stanford, which have a national profile independent of rankings. If anything the lesser ivies would benefit from a world where Ivy league carries more cache again without the rankings to interfere.

At any rate I support them for the same reason I supported Musk buying Twitter: what's the point of Fuck You money if you never say Fuck You?

This only works as long as everyone who currently demands accreditation decides to edit it to be "accredited or Harvard", which might work for some duration (and also scales in difficulty as the list of exceptions lengthens), but probably still drops their prestige as red state post-graduate schools (law, medical) no longer accept their degrees and red administrations have a seemingly viewpoint-neutral ("non-accredited degree!") way to scour the civil service of their graduates: suddenly a degree from Yale is "just as good as Harvard, with a few more doors open" and its actual outcomes suffer.

Not saying all those outcomes are likely, but none of them strikes me as unforseeable. The alternatives would be the wholesale devaluation of accreditation, but I think that's spread widely enough (how many state laws would have to change?) that it'd be more painful than Harvard-aligned organizations tracking exceptions.

The thing about it is basically every Harvard undergrad would most want to go to Harvard grad school, and most of the rest of their choices will be other blue state schools. Blue states certainly have enough grad schools to keep it running.

Accreditation literally doesn't matter for Harvard or Stanford except as a technicality, it matters to East Sheepdick Bible College.

The US News rankings would cease to be relevant if Harvard wasn't on them.

Are they "too big to fail"?

No, but if a sports league gets rid of the best team, it hurts the league because you now know that the league champion is getting a tin belt, they're not the real best in the world.

Magnus Carlson chose not to defend his world championship. Sucks to be Ding Liren.

I think it would harm Harvard a lot. For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.

They're Harvard. The US News college rankings list is irrelevant to them. US News would probably modify their policies to keep them there, because not having Harvard on the list would hurt the authority of the list more than it would hurt Harvard.

Yes, it would create further divergence between academia’s idea of legitimacy and the ways the federal bureaucracy has created to make academic legitimacy legible and manageable. It would harm Harvard insofar as it made the bureaucracy unable to grant it money because Harvard’s reputation was no longer formally legible.

That raises the question: Does this form of legibility do more good or harm?

That sounds like a positive to me.

The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening.

The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency. When the barbarians tell you to throw open your gates and surrender or be destroyed while you can see the smoke rising from the last city to surrender, you're not going to comply. You're going to hunker down and put out calls for aid.

Harvard has a lot of wealthy and influential alumni, and they may reasonably believe that making themselves a beacon of opposition will allow them to weather the storm more or less intact.

The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency.

I don't agree with this, at least in terms of the war on higher education. Can you substantiate? Take what happened with Columbia:

March 7th: $400MM funding frozen to Columbia. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-administration-cancels-400-million-grants-columbia-university-rcna195373

March 21st: Trump admin sends CU a list of demands to unfreeze funding. Columbia publicly agrees to Trump admin's demands. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/nyregion/columbia-response-trump-demands.html

March 26th: Leaked conversations reveal that, internally, CU was singing a very different tune than what they publicly agreed to. CU president Katrina Armstrong minimizes and downplays changes. https://freebeacon.com/campus/what-columbia-university-president-really-told-faculty-members/

April 1st: CU president Katrina Armstrong deposed by congress and questioned, among other things, about the faculty meeting. Transcript (again) leaks. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/04/09/federal-government-questioned-armstrong-over-campus-antisemitism-on-april-1-according-to-leaked-transcript/

April 6th: Katrina Armstrong steps down as interim president of CU

April 9th: CU gets hit with another $250MM funding freeze https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/04/09/nih-freezes-millions-more-funding-columbia

This sequence of events does not read as CU gets hit, capitulates, and then gets hit with their belly showing. It reads as CU gets hit, lies that it will make changes, gets exposed for lying, and then gets hit again. There was never any capitulation by CU.

Do you have any examples of colleges who actually capitulated and got hit again?

Wrong think policing should only ever point in one direction, obviously.

I don’t know what the Ivy League is so worried about anyway, their endowments are equivalent to the GDP of a small country and they make more money every year due to their exorbitant tuition fees.

Having to suspend or scrap tons of ongoing research projects is fairly bad for them, and probably also society. I suppose they can float them out of endowments but not permanently.

It would be nice if we were laying off biochem grads for good reasons and not ideological shit test reasons.

If Harvard values racist discrimination so highly that they would rather allow funding for valuable research they're doing to be cut than to stop that, it really is a damn shame and, TBH, rather perverse. I'd hope that non-racist institutions could pick up the slack, but obviously researchers and research institutions aren't fungible, and that sort of adjustment would take a lot of time. Optimistically, it's possible that falling behind some years on this kind of research will be a decent trade-off for reducing racist discrimination in society's academic institutions in the long run, though even time might not be able to tell on that one.

Well if it’s such a terrible blow to society why don’t they liquidate .00001 percent of their endowment to cover the costs of these research programs?

University endowments are not general purpose slush funds for the University administration. They can't just allocate money from the endowment to replace research funding.

it's like 4% of their endowment

anyway, they could, and maybe they should spend more of their endowment on their own research, but that still doesn't mean "failed dumb ideological shit tests" is a solid reason for government to cancel science funding

The Supreme Court, at the behest of civil rights activists, cut a massive hole in prohibitions against government viewpoint discrimination because of "[t]he Government's fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education". The activists who pushed for this, and the Supreme Court justices who voted for it, no doubt thought this would never be used in a way they wouldn't approve of. It's taken a while, but now the Devil has turned tail.

Technically this would be the devil rounding on them, not turning tail. Both mean turning around, but the opposite direction.
Either way, where will you hide, Roper?

Because 0.00001% of their endowment amounts to 5,000$.

The fact that my ridiculously, hyperbolically small percentage is still worth $5000 says a lot.

I would have loved to see that viewpoint diversity report on an Abstract Algebra class. It should at least require the elimination of radical ideals.

I've long thought it would be amusing to portray (as farce) an Inquisition within the Math Department to root out heretics that accept the Axiom of Choice. Probably as a musical.

I've long thought it would be amusing to portray (as farce) an Inquisition within the Math Department to root out heretics that accept the Axiom of Choice. Probably as a musical.

Sokal rather famously published a paper discussing (among other aspects of the Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) the inadequacy of the Axiom of Choice to solve the problems caused by females being the ones who gestate and breastfeed as part of a more general example of the inadequacy of liberal solutions to solve the problems of kyriarchy. It got published in a formerly respectable journal, too.

Or constructivism, which rejects proof by contradiction.

That 53 billion dollar endowment is looking deliciously taxable

How so? It should be just as 501(c) immune as before.

Actually, it looks like Trump enthusiasts would like to raise the existing tax on endowments established in the 2017 tax bill. So yes, I could see Trump adopting that as a vendetta.

The IRS has stripped 501c status from universities for racial discrimination in the past.

"Neither petitioner qualifies as a tax-exempt organization...[i]t would be wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption to grant tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private educational entities. Whatever may be the rationale for such private schools' policies, racial discrimination in education is contrary to public policy. Racially discriminatory educational institutions cannot be viewed as conferring a public benefit within the above 'charitable' concept or within the congressional intent underlying 501(c)(3)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United_States

In SFFA v. Harvard Harvard's admission policies were found to be in violation of the 14th amendment, and racially discriminatory. Which seems like it could threaten its 501c3 status.

Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude in English) follows seven generations of the Buendía family as they head the foundation, growth, and ultimately, destruction, of the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The book doesn’t have an overarching plot per see: each chapter consists of a number of vignettes about the family in a certain epoch of Macondo, which are pumped up on magical realism and read to me like someone describing their exploits in a multi-generational game of the Sims 1 . There are some patterns to the madness: most male members of the family are called José Arcadio or Aureliano, and share personality traits, memories, and perhaps destinies with all the individuals of that share their name. Common plot threads also abound: incestuous forbidden love, vague political conflict, and a push-pull with the outside world. There is also a civilizational plot at work here: Macondo is a being that grows, flourishes, becomes decadent and finally dies.

My Background with the Book

I started learning Spanish all the way back in 2020, and this was one of the book was one of the reasons for doing so. We had read A Chronicle of a Death Foretold in one of my high-school English classes, and I was fascinated by the way Gabriel García Márquez (I’ll be referring to him as Gabo from now on) wrote and constructed his stories. This was apparently THE Gabo book to read, so pretty much as soon as I had finished the Harry Potter series I ordered the book. Looking back through my blog records it seems like I tried to read it two or three separate occasions. The first was around 400 hours of Spanish, and I think I gave up about 30 pages. The second and third attempts in 2023 and 2024 respectively went much better, but I still only made it around a quarter of the way through, after the first patriarch of the book dies. I added the book to my ten books to read before I die list, which was enough motivation for me to finish the book this time, though the last 200 pages of the book were like pulling teeth. I’m sad to say it, after being 3/3 on my ten books, but I don’t think Cien Años is a good book, and would recommend you read some of Gabo’s other (and better) stories. I’ll elaborate on why this is below, but in short I had issues with the structure of the novel and the use of magical realism. That being said, I still thought that Cien Años did have something valuable to say on the dangers of self-absorption for social elites.

Episodic stories and the phantom plot development

I talked earlier in my review of Infinite Jest about how important the relationship between story structure and theme is. Infinite Jest does this through the difficulty of its first 300 pages, using this structural choice to reinforce Wallace’s point about how culture and entertainment are not equivalent. In Cien Años, Gabo uses the vignette to emphasize similarities between the lives of different characters, reinforcing themes of cyclical history, that there is nothing new under the sun, and historical determinism: that much of what will happen has been foretold by previous generations, although they may not have the tools to decipher the vague prophecies that they have been given.

There is nothing wrong with an episodic structure per see. Most books use it to some extent. But usually the individual episodes are in service to a larger plot or character development. Two books that do this really well I think are Harry Potter and The Hobbit. The middle half of every Harry Potter novel usually consists of various unrelated adventures that take place through the school year. Yet each adventure either drops a key hint about a larger overarching mystery plot of the novel, which comes to be important in the final quarter of the book, or serves to develop one or more of our characters (or both). In The Hobbit, each of the self-contained adventures in the chapters of the first half of the book serve to make us (and the dwarves) trust Bilbo as a burglar and leader, without which his interactions with Smaug and the Arkenstone in the finale would be unbelievable.

I think the episodic nature of Cien Años didn’t work for me because the multigenerational nature of the story means it can’t do the things that Harry Potter and The Hobbit can. There is no overarching plot, so the story can’t drop important tidbits that will be important for the finale: there isn’t even really a finale, rather just a vague descent into decadence and doom. While in the first half of the novel there was some character development, by page 150 characters were already dying off, meaning Gabo had to start all over again. Now I appreciate some of what Gabo was trying to do with this structure: namely create a confused sense of the passage of time, which is present even in the first iconic line of the book 2 , but the overall structure just didn’t work for me.

Magical Realism Cheapens Character Development

There’s some debate as to what “Magical Realism” as a genre or creative choice actually means, and whether it is distinct from fantasy. My personal position (and definition) is that magical realism is distinct subset of the fantasy genre that places fantastical events in the midst of every day life, and that these events are not treated as abnormal by the plot or the characters. The sub-genre in some way has always been a thing: this is exactly what fairy stories are, but was popularized by the “Latin American boom” of the mid-20th century by writers like Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabo himself.

Let me be clear, I don’t think magical realism is a ticket to a bad story. Cortázar uses magical realism to great effect in many of his short stories, creating an aura of strangeness and unreality that help to highlight those same emotions in the reader 3 . Similarly, in Como Agua para Chocolate, Laura Esquivel gives food cooked by the main character absurd magical powers to highlight the important role that food has in our sense of self and family. Magical realism works best by turning up to 11 the personal struggles, wants, and fears of our characters. There are instances in which this works well in Cien Años: my favorite example is how an American banana planation just pops up in Macondo overnight, at least from the point of the Buendías, emphasizing how disconnected they really are from what is going on in the town.

Yet unfortunately, magical realism seems to used in this novel quite a lot to get out of inconvenient plot snafus. Have Aureliano fall in love with a prebuscent girl. Rather than actually deal with how messed up that relationship is, have her prematurely hit puberty and become wise beyond her years. Have a woman so beautiful that every man that sees her fall in love with her while she is completely oblivious. Rather than work through the potentially interesting character development that could result from that, instead have her carried to heaven by her laundry. Have one of your characters have seventeen kids all named after him by different women. Quickly kill them all off because you don’t know how to develop those characters. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Elite’s Should be Connected with the People they Govern

One thing that I did like about Cien Años de Soledad is the emphasis it placed on the dangers of self-absorption of a social elite. The tension between self-absorption (or solitude) and connectedness is present in the very first chapter. The matriarch and patriarch of the Buendía family are second cousins, a sign of the incestuous obsessions that will plague the family for the rest of the book. José Arcadio Buendía, the first patriarch of the family, spends the first few chapters vacillating between vainglorious scientific endeavors, and actually being a practical, good leader of Macondo, a trait which all his descendants share to some extent. While better than her husband to some extent in terms of being practically minded, Ursula, the first matriarch, is obsessed with appearances and the reputation of the family above all else, which also leads to disaster on multiple occasions. This endogamic self-absorption leads the characters to fail to connect to one another, giving the book its title, but also for them to blindsided by social forces, such as civil war, commercial colonization by the Americans, and finally the decadence and decay that dooms Macondo. I think what Gabo is trying to say here is that elites need to be connected to the people and places they govern, which might seem like a rather obvious message, but its one that historically seems very difficult to learn.

Overall, although Cien Años did have some interesting things to say, and in some ways was a very entertaining and fun book, I found it a bit of a slog, and would recommend reading other Gabo stories, probably his shorter works, instead.

3/5 stars.

  1. This is an early 2000s video game where you control a household of Sims (simulated humans). The intended gameplay is for you to live out quotidian fantasies such as building your own mansion, or working as firefighter, but the functionalities of the game mean you can quickly go off the deep-end.

  2. Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano had to remember that remote afternoon in which his father took him to encounter the ice”.

  3. My favorite story of his is Casa Tomada

Huh, interesting - I actually attempted something similar. After getting pretty good at Spanish following a few years of what passes as an immersion experience, and taking a university Spanish class or two on top (including a Spanish lit class), I also decided I really wanted to read it (plus, had some at least decent Latin American history knowledge, thanks IB program). It's a cool book in principle, but the execution, I agree. Tried twice, got only to about 100 pages in the second time, and came to basically the same conclusion. On a technical level, it's super cool. Was neat to read in Spanish. But as a book, ehhhh...

If you find a more enjoyable Spanish book (not Marquez cuz I'm still burned out) though, that's worth it in original Spanish as opposed to a translation, I'm all ears. Could be nice to brush up again a bit.

Quality post. You probably won't like Elena Ferrante if you didn't like the lack of plot in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I think one aspect that is missing from your analysis is that it is primarily a parody/parable of Latin American history.

Yes, definitely something I missed. I didn’t really want to comment much on that because I don’t know much Latin American history.

This is kind of a tangent off your post, but Como Agua Para Chocolate always reminds me of how it taught me the amount of information we can lack from cultural context. When I took Spanish in college, the movie version of that was one of the works we could get from the library to practice our Spanish. And I knew what the title literally meant, but completely misunderstood the meaning behind the words. I had no idea that sometimes people will make hot chocolate by combining boiling water and chocolate (since here in the US we use powder and it's kinda 50/50 on whether we use milk or water for the liquid). So as best as I could figure, the title was referring to the feeling when you eat a lot of chocolate at once and it makes you really thirsty. A glass of water is super refreshing at times like that. So even though I knew the literal meaning of the words, cultural context meant I took away a very different interpretation than what the author intended. Communication is a funny thing sometimes.

Your old interpretation made me laugh out loud. There is some backing for that reading in the text. It's been while for since I read it, but I think one of the main characters kills herself by eating a box of candles.

POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements

A response to Scott Alexander, with whom I largely agree

Last week, Scott Alexander published an article called “Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does” followed by “Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID” today. I recommend reading both first, but if you’d rather not I will attempt to summarise Scott’s thesis under the “POSIWID” section.

If you know what POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements mean, feel free to skip down to “POSIWID is a deepity” (spoiler alert for the meat of my argument), in which I offer my own analysis of the phrase.

POSIWID

POSIWID is an acronym standing for “The purpose of a system is what it does”, coined by the management consultant Stafford Beer. As near as I understand it, Beer was hired by companies to audit their existing business processes and suggest improvements. When he pointed out that a given business process or system was producing undesirable results, the C-suite executives would sometimes defend the process by pointing to the desirable purpose the system was intended to accomplish. Beer would retort “the purpose of a system is what it does”: in other words, regardless of what purpose the system was intended to accomplish, the executives must take ownership of what the system is actually doing and what results it is actually producing.

Scott’s recent posts concerned his disagreement with how the phrase is often used in political discussions, such as by progressives who assert that the real purpose of police services is to oppress, imprison and murder black people (and stopping crime is just an incidental positive externality); or conversely, by conservatives who assert that the real purpose of non-profits designed to combat homelessness is actually to exacerbate homelessness: if homelessness were to end, they’d be out of a job! Scott argues that this framing is needlessly hostile, cynical and paranoid; instead, it is more productive to model organisations as having goals that they are trying to accomplish in earnest, but pursuing these goals sometimes incurs undesirable but unavoidable side effects (e.g. carbon emissions, medical mistakes); or the organisation is prevented from accomplishing their goals to their full extent due to factors outside of their control (e.g. budgetary limitations, competing organisations).

Deepities

“Deepity” is a term coined by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, referring to phrases which have the unique property wherein they convey two meanings at once: one meaning is true, but trivial, while the other meaning is false, but would be profound if it was true. The dual meaning allows the deficiencies in one to be shored up by the strengths of the other (and vice versa) which makes them invaluable as rhetorical devices: when the listener notices that the former meaning is trivial, they are reassured by the fact that the latter meaning is profound, and when one notices that the latter meaning is false, one is reassured by the fact that the former meaning is true. The concept is best illustrated by examples, all of which are taken from Coleman Hughes’s excellent article on the concept:

  • Everything happens for a reason: It is trivially true that “everything happens for a reason”, in the banal sense that every event has an immediate preceding cause (if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street). However, the clear implication of “everything happens for a reason” is that every event has a deeper, spiritual purpose in God/Allah/Jehovah/Xenu/the universe’s plan - which is obviously nonsense, but would be profound and insightful if it was true.
  • No human being is illegal: It is trivially true that human beings cannot be “illegal”, because legality or lack thereof is a property of actions (theft, murder, fraud), not individuals. “But the second reading of this deepity asserts something extremely controversial: everyone should be able to go anywhere on Earth with no legal or procedural barriers; every border should be fully permeable; strangers should be able to occupy your property—after all, no human being is illegal, and strangers are still human beings when they’re on your property. Needless to say, even advocates of open borders would not endorse this view in full. But if the view were ethically correct, then it would have profound implications for property law, the existence of nation-states, and the very concept of personal space.”

Scissor statements

Scott Alexander wrote a wonderful short story called “Sort by Controversial”, which concerns a tech startup whose employees inadvertently develop a piece of software that generates what the team calls “scissor statements”: statements (and later, events) which are maximally controversial, in the sense that one half of a particular community would enthusiastically endorse them and the other half would vociferously deny them. “Scissor statements”, it is explained, can tear communities apart merely in the fact of being spoken or having taken place: to one half of a community they seem so obviously true/good as to be hardly even worth stating, to the other half so obviously false/wrong as to be hardly even worth rebutting.

Examples from the original story:

To the canonical examples from the short story, I might add “A black gay actor is the victim of a racist, homophobic hate crime perpetrated by two Donald Trump supporters, and is later accused of having staged the attack to further his career”.

“POSIWID” is a deepity

“The purpose of a system is what it does” seems very reminiscent of my first example of a deepity, “everything happens for a reason”. Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs. If a particular business process is meant to boost profits by 10%, but consistently fails to achieve that goal, the process must be assessed first and foremost on the basis of the latter fact, not the former. All of this is straightforward and uncontroversial: indeed, true but trivial.1

But the secondary meaning imparted by the phrase implies something far more profound and controversial: that the designers of a given system are fully cognizant of all of its outputs (positive and negative); that all of said outputs were fully intended and desired by the designers; that if the designers are made aware of a negative output thereof and refuse to immediately change it, the only reasonable interpretation is that this negative output is affirmatively sought by the deisgners; and that this is equally true regardless of to what resolution the phrase is applied (whether looking at an individual business process within a company, the company itself, an entire industry, an entire country, or a multi-national economic structure). This interpretation seems to me just as obviously wrong as the secondary meaning of “everything happens for a reason”, in which there is an underlying cosmic purpose to every event, no matter how small or terrible.

Per his second article, Scott seems to recognise this:

When people insist on the confusing and inappropriately-strong version, I start to suspect that the confusingness is a feature, letting them smuggle in connotations that people would otherwise correctly challenge.

Certain people in the comments of Scott’s first article argued that the phrase was meaningful in its original context as used by Stafford Beer, but has been misused by political commentators who misunderstood it as implying its second meaning, to which Scott had a witty rejoinder:

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with criticism of my recent POSIWID post. If I understand you all correctly, you think that Stafford Beer had good intentions when he invented the phrase, and that's more important than how it gets misused in real life. Enlightening!

“POSIWID” is a scissor statement

Scott seems to have been legitimately taken aback by what a fervent response his first article inspired, with a lot of commenters enthusiastically agreeing with it and many others insisting that he’d missed the point entirely. He admits to being confused by the latter group:

Why are people defending this inane statement so hard? This reminds me of the old atheism-religion debates, where some atheist would bring up an awkwardly-phrased Bible statement, and the religious people would contort themselves to say that nooooooo, it’s totally true that the world was created in seven days, as long as you define day to mean “any time period of an indeterminate length”. But at least their motives make sense to me; lots of other things depend on whether Bible verses are true or false. POSIWID was first coined in 2001. Why should people contort themselves to defend this extremely poorly-phrased thing?

In a forum in which I saw Scott’s article being discussed2, the same pattern was visible: a significant number of people enthusiastically agreeing with him, and a second group accusing him of engaging in an elaborate trolling effort, or wasting time on a pedantic argument about semantics instead of acknowledging the penetrating insight the phrase contains. This suggests to me that “the purpose of a system is what it does” is a scissor statement: a maximally-controversial phrase which one half of a community finds so obviously true as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses it out of hand, and finds it baffling as to how anyone could think it was true for even a moment.

Perhaps many deepities are also scissor statements?

Deepities, as discussed above, have two meanings: one which is true but trivial, the other which is false, but which would be profound if it was true. Scissor statements, meanwhile, are maximally-controversial statements which tear communities apart because half of the community finds them so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, while the other half dismisses them as obviously false.

Thus in both cases we see a bifurcation in how a statement is interpreted. Perhaps this is not a coincidence?3

For some number of people looking at a Necker cube (the first figure in the illustration below), they will initially interpret the ambiguous shape according to the second figure; for others, the third figure (both of which are equally valid interpretations of the shape). With some effort, we can force ourselves to see the alternative interpretation, but whichever one first jumps out at us feels like the “correct” one. I don’t have any studies backing this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the split of these two groups is roughly fifty-fifty: in other words, if the configuration of cubes was something we cared about, Necker cubes would make for a perfect scissor statement.

Illustrations in original post

Perhaps deepities work in the same way? Maybe if you looked at a group of people encountering the phrase “everything happens for a reason” for the first time, for roughly half of them, the true-but-trivial meaning would jump out at them instantly, and they would completely overlook the false-but-profound meaning; whereas for the other half, they’d immediately notice the false-but-profound meaning and overlook the true-but-trivial meaning. (Or perhaps the first group would only notice the true-but-trivial meaning, while the second group would notice the false-but-profound meaning in addition to the true-but-trivial one.)

Before long, the two groups are talking past each other: the first group cannot understand why the second group is getting so worked up about an observation which, while true, strikes them as trite and unremarkable; and the second group cannot understand why the first group is ignoring the (allegedly) penetrating insight and instead making glib dismissals like “if I get struck by a car, the underlying cause is that I failed to look both ways before crossing the street”. The first group thinks the second group are intellectual lightweights for getting so bent out of shape about such a trite observation; the second group feels condescended to by the first, and thinks the first group are overly literal-minded pedants who are missing the wood for the trees. Hence, a classic scissor statement: merely in the act of being spoken, it generates outrage and tears communities asunder. __

1 Admittedly, we might perhaps benefit from reading the phrase backwards: perhaps at the time of its coining, the idea that a business process should be judged primarily (or solely) on the basis of its actual outputs (as opposed to its creator’s intentions for it) was a legitimately novel insight, and only seems trite and obvious to us now because we’ve fully internalised it. Hard to say.

2 I'm sure you know the forum I mean.

3 Because nothing is ever a coincidence.

However, the clear implication of “everything happens for a reason” is that every event has a deeper, spiritual purpose in God/Allah/Jehovah/Xenu/the universe’s plan - which is obviously nonsense, but would be profound and insightful if it was true.

This is... a very bad example to choose here. One man's "obvious nonsense" is another man's treasure. I do, in fact, believe that everything happens for a reason.

Daniel Dennett was part of the New Atheists, and coined the term "deepity" to puncture what he saw as the pseudo-profound bullshit being promoted by theologians or apologists for various faiths. In this, I agree with him. The idea that every event is part of some grand cosmic spiritual plan is, to my mind, one of the more transparent copes bestowed on the human race by religious/spiritual people.

What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.

All humans die. None know the day or the hour when death will arrive for them. Christian prayer does not change this, and Christians do not expect it to.

Christians do not expect it to.

Well, some and some.

Everything happens for a reason?

Really? Does an earthquake come and devastate Lisbon on a feast day for a reason? Do people get horrible, agonizing diseases for a reason? Why should the grand spiritual plan of a perfect, benevolent being involve kidneystones? There are all kinds of ways people can grow without getting cut down by forces far beyond their control, no especially apparent reasons why so many people should get destroyed in painful ways.

I guess an uncaring deity might say 'it's sink or swim, I gave you access to the tools. Now pick them up or suffer' but that isn't what most people who believe in a plan conceptualize it being.

I think POSIWID is best taken as a reminder

a) to evaluate "systems" by their consequences and not their stated aims; and

b) to consider the possibility that any discrepancy between the two is either intentional or such a predictable outcome of incentives structures/competing priorities that it might as well be.

Since it is obviously not literally true in all cases, the best way to assess how good a maxim it is is in terms of its directional truth: are people better off (either epistemically or agentively) for being exposed to it? (POMIWID: judge a maxim by the effects it produces, not by its claim to literal truth). That in turn depends on where the hearer is coming from. If you're overly given to conspiracy theorizing, you should probably not take to heart a maxim that boils down to "Everything is a conspiracy." But if you're a dyed-in-the-wool mistake theorist, it could be wise turn this gnome into an inner homunculus that checks you whenever you're about to assume that the purpose of a system is what it says/what the name implies/what it would be if its executors shared your values and idea of common sense.

There are indeed many people who insist on its literal truth. For example, James Kirkpatrick has tweeted it 28 times, amid even more tweets following the template "If [policy x] didn't cause [uncontroversially bad outcome y], they would stop doing it overnight." The many examples of Democrat-run systems letting bad things happen (and in the case of e.g. crimes committed by illegal immigrants, it is certainly fair to say that the Biden admin did not make a priority of mitigating them, so "letting" is accurate) are enough for many of his readers, and others on the right, to round off all opposition to any anti-immigration initiative to "enemy action", which implies an adversarial purpose, which would make POSIWID true.

I think what's going on with these people is that they've recognized the futility of debate: if it were possible to convince liberals/leftists of the harms of immigration (to stick with that example), they would have been convinced by now. So the correct frame to inhabit is conflict theory. And once you're a conflict theorist, it really doesn't matter how those on the other side of the conflict came to the conclusions they did, except in a "know thine enemy" sense (which admittedly POSIWID probably hinders). For this subset of people, who I think comprise most of the true believers in POSIWID, the purpose of POSIWID is to harden their hearts against the enemy.

Here’s an anecdote: I was 80% of the way through writing a giant post on the Abrego Garcia kerfuffle. I stopped when I realized that the absurd straw premise that I was arguing against — the idea that the core function of the US-Mexico border wall, Customs and Border Patrol, ICE, etc. is to be a gigantic obstacle course that weeds out the weaklings and ensures that only the strongest and most determined migrants survive to enter the heartland of The United States — is actually literally true. The extant US immigration system makes absolutely no sense unless you accept that the purpose of it is not to do any of the things people say it is for, but instead is the thing that it actually does.

Reading through Scott, and the replies here and there to Scott, it seems that POSIWID is primarily a meme, or perhaps it has even attained the status of a minor shibboleth. The argument is becoming less intellectual and more and more personal. I'm not sure what that indicates.

I've found that the main objections to POSIWID is from people who are, to be frank, heavily invested in institutions where POSIWID is a very valid criticism. Typically bureaucracies and government or government-adjacent systems. If you are a person who thinks, at your core, public schools are good POSIWID is going to upset you because it is going to be deployed to (IMO Accurately) claim the purpose of public schools is the enrichment of lazy, over-schooled, adults. If you are a person who likes Givewell and other similar charities you are going to hate POSIWID because, again, what those charities do is keep Africans alive for the purpose of them having children that the charity then has to keep alive, on and on into eternity. They are a self licking ice cream cone and POSIWID makes that clear, if in an offensive way to those that think such charities are doing good.

You're probably right that it's a deepity, but Scott was still wrong by arguing that it is false. Arguing that "bLACK lIVES mATTER" is false is not really going to get you anywhere, but you can argue that the people saying it are retarded.

Scott is correct that there are a bunch of retards throwing around an inane phrase in a nearly meaningless way, but his argument is a jumbled mess and goes too far into the weeds trying to argue that the phrase itself is false, rather than simply arguing that the logic after retards contorted the phrase is wrong.

Perhaps many deepities are also scissor statements?

Perhaps, but I don't believe the statement itself is a scissor. The entirety of the scissoring is from the community and context around the statement. If you asked people about "bLACK lIVES mATTER" in 2001, very few people would consider it divisive, but the fact that the enemy has turned it into a slogan and oath of loyalty has made it that.

I think actual scissor statements encode their scissoring in their meaning. Something like "Trans should/shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's sports" is something that would be durable through rephrasing, and also something that someone without cultural context can still form a strong opinion either way about.

Mod hat off, but I really wish that Tumblr-style sneering by typing "in bRoKeN Case To MeAn THiS iZ St00P1D" would die.

Would you consider the slogan "black lives matter" (confused by your odd capitalisation) a deepity? To me it comes off more as a motte-and-bailey argument. I can't see any interpretation of the slogan "black lives matter" which is factually untrue, but which would be profound if it was true.

I agree it is not a deepity, or at least not a central example of one. The bailey of BLM is "black lives should matter, but in fact they do not matter to the police who gets away with killing black men at random".

This is a bit more distance than saying "Everything happens for a reason, and the true reasons for things happening are non-mundane woo." Or "beauty is only skin deep, so people who care about beauty are shallow".

The bailey of BLM is "black lives should matter, but in fact they do not matter to the police who gets away with killing black men at random".

I haven't run the numbers myself, but I would be thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the large spike in murders starting mid 2020, which is IMO at least partially attributable to "BLM," actually caused an increase in the total number of murdered black lives. Uncharitably, "The purpose of BLM is to secure sinecures for friendly academics" seems a POSIWID-framing of the situation, which I'm partially inclined to believe as someone who actually wants to care about (all) lives.

I haven't run the numbers myself, but I would be thoroughly unsurprised to find out that the large spike in murders starting mid 2020, which is IMO at least partially attributable to "BLM," actually caused an increase in the total number of murdered black lives.

You are correct.

You want black people to stop murdering each other? How dare you judge their culture by your colonial White values.

I jest, I jest. But the truth is that BLM was never about the big picture outcome. They were zooming in on a small part of police conduct and deciding that this was the real purpose of the police, and that they would be better off if there were no cops.

I think a model of their movement would have to recognize different kinds of actors. The people who are genuinely disgusted by police misconduct. Rioters who are happy for whatever reason to riot. Dogmatic wokes who believe that skin color indicates how righteous a cause is. Then you had the covid lockdown situation.

Some systems are clearly build for a purpose, either their stated purpose or an unstated one. Think government agencies.

BLM does not seem to be such a system to me. Asking what its purpose is would be like asking what the purpose of a coral reef or Ganymede or an arms race is. Of course, this should not stop us from analyzing the outcomes of such systems.

System aiming to solve a problem actually concentrates power and money for its advocates, while making its key issue significantly worse.

Many such cases.

So the natural question that raises is, what system can we create to solve this problem of systems that aim to solve problems actually concentrating power and money for its advocates? And as one of its advocates, how can I secure some of that power and money for myself?

The most important thing is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

cross-posting from ACX comments:

I think that there are four positions for modelling the behavior of systems.

(A) Strict Non-POSIWID: you are only allowed to look at the mission statement

(B) Sane position: you are allowed at the mission statements, the incentives of individual actors, and the outcomes.

(C) Strict POSIWID: you are only allowed to look at the outcomes

(D) Insane POSIWID: Like (C), but you get to cherry pick one particular aspect of the outcomes ("the justice system exists to let rapists walk free")

Nobody is arguing for the (A). Few people argue for (C) in good faith (even though some ACX commentators have picked "the relevant Iranian intelligence agency does not have the purpose of avoiding Israeli infiltration" as their hill to die on). (B) allows you to look at the outcomes, the incentives and then wonder if a particular aspect of the outcome might be intended or not. The disagreement is mostly over the semantics of POSIWID, with some people claiming that POSIWID implies (C) and others claiming that Non-POSIWID implies (A). It is People's Front of Judea vs Judean People's Front -- all semantics. (Also, Scott is right on POSIWID meaning (C). Long live the PFJ!)

I agree that POSIWID is a deepity. To the degree that it is true but trite, it is pointing at (B) -- outcomes matter. To the degree that it is used to point at (C) or (D), it is big if true (but obviously false).

What I don't understand yet is why it is a scissor statement, though. (Note that this is the a typical case for victims of a scissor statement, though.) I mean, if it is a deepity, then we should obviously reject it.

Charitably, I guess that a lot of people feel they are surrounded by (A) thinking, and have decided that POSIWID is the best way to advocate for (B). Less charitably, some people like that phrasing because it it is a deepity which lets them argue for (D).

I'd personally endorse (B), although I could see an argument for (C) in some cases. I think the novel claim of "POSIWID" is that under the analysis of (B), some systems are revealed to have a "purpose" that contraindicates it's mission statement under (A). The idea that systems are complex and efforts to push a given indicator in direction Y might actually move the needle the other direction should be taken seriously: eliminating phonics instruction "to improve literacy" has quite possibly worsened outcomes. Just because a system exists "to fix Z" doesn't mean it's actually helping.

The steelman for (C) is that looking at anything other than outcomes risks endorsing systems that are actively counterproductive but happen to "sound nice" and have "good vibes" on paper: "The purpose of NEPA is to heavily curtail new construction," or "The purpose of the NRC is to prevent new nuclear reactors from being built" (literally the NRC had never approved the construction of a new nuclear plant from its 1975 inception until Vogtle Unit 3 began construction in 2009).

I think C is highly defensible, as long as you think about how each of the outcomes affect the people involved in feeding the system. Though maybe that becomes B in fact because those are incentives.

I would argue that it depends. Taken literally, you could not distinguish a hospital aiming to save a fixed fraction of cancer patients and one who tries to save as many of them as possible, given other constraints. An advocate of (C) should default to the fixed fraction model, because it avoids having to ascribe intent to people (which might not even be directly tied to direct financial incentives of individual actors) and the alternative requires a lot of assumptions on what fraction of cancer patients can be saved at a given tech level.

And it is clear that this leads to wrong predictions about what would happen if the hospital got some new tech which saved an additional ten percent. (C) would predict that the survival rate would not increase, because the fixed rate is the goal. Perhaps the doctors all stop working Friday afternoon to compensate, instead, people preferring free time to work is a well supported finding.

My (B) like model of the hospital can take into account the fundamental motivations of people who work in health care as well as the outcomes and direct incentives of the actors. It is much more complex and relies on a lot of assumptions, but I would argue that it is likely to outperform (C) models.

To make C defensible I think you have to at least define "outcomes" as "the differences between the state of the world with the system and the counterfactual state of the world without the system" (call this (C1)), whereas it often instead seems to be implicitly defined as "the state of the world with the system" (call this (C2)).

Consider the claim that "the relevant Iranian intelligence agency does not have the purpose of avoiding Israeli infiltration", to use the example above. Under (C1) this would be a claim that Iranian intelligence is actually not reducing Israeli infiltration at all (almost certainly false in this case, but it would be very interesting if it were true), and under (C2) this would just be a claim that some Israeli infiltration still happens despite efforts to reduce it (almost certainly true, but not very interesting).

C is highly defensible, but it's far more common for D to masquerade as C. Not even necessarily intentionally/in bad faith - people have their personal hobby horses they fixate on and most of the systems they're complaining about are very complex.

I just want throw you a kudos for introducing me to the concept of a "deepity", I think it has a lot of utility for me in all aspects of my life: professional, personal, political, etc. I thought actually writing this "kudos" out would be more meaningful / bring more visibility than simply upvoting you as I'd like to specifically encourage this type of introduction of novel concepts that people may not be familiar with.

A rhetorical device I've been using with coworkers is a solution simply stated is not a problem simply solved, basically just to draw attention to the fact that if you're a middle manager and you can describe a solution in a few words it doesn't mean your underlings can quickly implement it and solve the problem. Unsure if that passes the threshold for "deepity", but I may be more careful with what I say in the future as to not use "deepities" as a crutch.

Thank you very much. I don't think your example is a deepity: it has exactly one meaning, which is true, and not vacuously so. It's a useful observation.

"POSIWID" is meaningful, but

  1. the "different" definitions that people have been proferring are on a range of severities of basically the same thing and

  2. Scott is being autistically literal about it not being exactly what it literally says because clearly there are some cases where it doesn't apply.

Also, if you read carefully, Scott actually concedes that it can have some meaning, but these meanings are not something he likes to use the phrase for, which is a much weaker argument. Such as:

I agree this is a useful thing to talk about, I just don’t think “purpose” is the right word for it. I’m not even sure “system” is the right word for it.

I'll agree about it apparently being a scissor statement, given the responses so far, but...

Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs.

This is not at all obviously true. This is the crux of the entire conversation.

I guess it really is a scissor statement, because to me, the use of the statement, as rhetoric, seems extremely obviously, and Scott entirely whiffs it. And I don't think it's about giving in to cynicism. It's about naming that different groups of people having different amounts of power in systems, as well as different values and worldviews, that this shapes their rhetoric in complicated ways, and participants in some of those groups can be protected from the rhetoric of other, more powerful groups if they can be taught to think about what systems are actually doing, rather than living in other people's rhetoric about what those systems are supposed to be doing.

Say that my wife and I participate in telling our kids about Santa and giving them gifts from Santa, and it's a happy ritual, connecting their experience to our our own experiences from our childhood. We have a lot of power in the relationship compared to our kids, we can get away with bending the truth if we think there's some cultural good to it all, and if they asked about whether Santa was real when they're small, we would probably fudge the truth about it to keep the happy ritual going, and we could get away with it. But there's absolutely no need for cynicism here - it's much more complicated than saying we were lying to them, because we would be inclined to think that "is Santa real" isn't even asking the right questions about that tradition, we would likely recognize that a 5 year old isn't even really in the right position to understand why we participate in the rituals we do, and we would expect that later, when they're older, they'll understand what we were doing and probably keep the tradition going.

A radical child activist (?) who came along and looked at this system might try to shake my kids out of their Santa belief, if that activist thought the entire enterprise was bad for my kids and needed to be radically overthrown, by adopting a "the purpose of a system is what it does" stance. Because that paragraph that I just wrote, which is something like a functional / sociological description of the Santa ritual, is a really strong inoculation against literally believing in Santa; the sociological explanation of why we do the Santa ritual sounds pretty compelling, and it makes belief in literal Santa much more difficult, or least plausibly it does (except we're talking about 5 year olds here, so my just so story is hitting its limits).

Now, this example is a toy one and likely (to most readers) pretty benign. But arguably, this sort of situation comes up constantly in society between different groups of people with different amounts of power and different beliefs about the broader good in the world and how to achieve those goods. I mean, it's no hard to change my Santa story just a bit, swapping parents with intellectuals, kids with normal people, and Santa with socialism, and you've described much of the 20th century. It's the core idea of Plato's noble lie, too. Or of Steve Jobs standing around on a stage, making all sorts of charismatic proclamations that somehow become true enough by people believing them and changing their expectations and how they act when it came to adopting new technology that went on to impact the social world. It's why faith is stressed in certain major religious traditions, too. The cultural scripts that people load up in their heads change how they experience the world and how they behave, and clean mapping to empirical reality is not the main driver here.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" is in the same skeptical tradition as open source programmers saying "I don't need to see your advertising or design doc - please show me the running code instead". Or the tradition of Marx saying he's a materialist and has no use for idealism or ideology. Or sociology tabling the truth claims of religion and instead theorizing about how different religions function in the world (and thus wrecking their foundations in the process). It's economists examining how people actually behave, in aggregate, in the face of incentives, ignoring questions of how they ought to behave. It's the tradition of C.S. Lewis's Bulverism, ignoring someone's argument and psychoanalyzing what forces caused them to make that argument instead. (And I'm not saying any of these are good or bad, for that matter).

To me, that's the obvious rhetorical use of POSIWID, especially on the dissident right. It's primary use is to shake certain people free from inhabiting the rhetorical frames of other powerful, status quo groups of people.

Much as every event obviously has an immediate proximate cause, it is obviously true that a system should only be meaningfully assessed on the basis of its actual outputs.

This is not at all obviously true. This is the crux of the entire conversation.

This. Only modelling the world on realized, actual outputs leads to very sub-optimal models.

You observe A asking B out for a date and getting rejected. You conclude that A likes to get rejected.

You observe C playing the lottery, and losing. You conclude that C just has a strict preference for having less money.

You observe D playing a round of Russian roulette, and surviving. You conclude that D is showing no signs of self-harming behavior since the outcome was harmless.

It is generally better to model agents (humans, armies, chess programs, dogs, ASIs, ...) as have their own world view and a utility function, and ascribe intent to their actions. If your system is larger, than game theory and Moloch enter the picture. And outcomes remain highly relevant, of course.

You want to be able to say "this non-effective charity is trying to do X, but only accomplishing that k times per 1M$ of donations, while that charity is accomplishing X n times per 1M$ of donations, so we should raise the question if there is some incongruity between their stated mission and their actual behavior, or if they operate under additional constraints". Perhaps after further investigation you will conclude that the charity is actually just a business selling the warm fuzzy feeling of doing good to their donors, and their agents are either cynical or in denial about that.

Or take my alchemist searching for the philosopher's stone while inhaling a lot of mercury vapor. You want to point at the fact that he is not succeeding in finding the stone. It could be that he is really into inhaling mercury, or that searching for the stone is just a high status occupation, but it is also possible that he is genuinely trying to find it as hard as he can, and simply operates under a different world model.

"Leftist" (larping) contacts are waxing verbosely about how to flee the US. To quote one:

frustrating that in this moment of panic, of fight or flight, the left, or what passes for it, is so quick to pick fleeing-- something mainly available to the petite-bourgeois and above, not poor proles. The thought of waging a struggle, of organizing something to get rid of the system that harms them and the majority, is so off-putting to them because they have the delusional idea that this political and economic system is actually all about serving them. I don't mean to sound idealistic, but the total lack of fighting spirit is pathetic. Liberals are like, "well, if we can't vote, then we have to lay down and die! Nothing can be changed!" They don't see when it's most apparent that voting is nothing but consent to their own powerlessness, and that they choose this powerlessness time and time again. They also seem totally unaware that they have become thoroughly conservative because their whole worldview consists in a defense of the previous status quo (law and order, patriotism, the constitution, being granted permission to grumble in the most inconsequential way).

For the most part, they don't understand how immigration works, imagining they can just go to relatives in e.g. Norway (surely, only the US has immigration laws!) They all believe they're next, that the Reichstag fire will occur, that their occasional meming or anti-Israel comments will get them sent to a Salvadoran concentration camp.

No one has the least idea of e.g. debanking, let alone how to cope with it. Their networking all happens through FB or at best ... gmail. I was kicked from the conversation for mentioning such matters (why crypto, https://odysee.com/ etc. exist etc.) and the performativeness of their whole program. They don't realize that... They have been on the (deep) state's side the whole time, while nominally opposing it? Baffling!

Anyway, https://landchad.net/ is lovely. Everyone should cyberhomestead.

What do we do now (that we "won")? What interesting projects do we have to move forward?

Edit: Our community's migration here went into full swing when Reddit admins removed a common of mine about quotation marks. It turns out, I don't understand quotation marks either - my load bearing quotation marks get misunderstood. This is of course my fault; I must write better. But I have not the slightest clue how that could be construed as "consensus building". As I can't magically write better, I will write more words to clarify the final question(s):

The previous system is collapsing, how do users of this forum plan to insulate themselves from the shocks and take advantages of the opportunities going forward? I shared tidings from frenemies of the old regime, who never fully captured (or wielded) it to their liking. I am curious how to e.g. influence things as a fellow traveler and not be hit by blowback, how to protect and continue to amass wealth amid dedollarization and inflation etc. New world, now what?

I think the coming crises will be best weathered by small (in population), still-relatively-ordered European countries with a strong sense of social solidarity and government capable of quickly responding to the people and probably Japan (the Chinese don’t care to invade them, whereas there are conceivable scenarios where they make a move on South Korea). The Baltics are out because of the Russian thing.

I would put the ranking as something like

Tier 1: Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan (although probably only as a native)

Tier 2: USA

Tier 3 onward: everyone else

While I would not necessarily want to live through the automation revolution and/or China conflict in the US, the combination of ambitious, self-assured, optimistic worldview, bountiful natural resources, still-large domestic manufacturing sector and the lack of the soon-to-boil-over extreme ethnoreligious tensions present in the UK/France/Germany/Benelux mean that, if you can’t get into one of the above ‘premium’ European countries, you’re probably still best in the US.

and the lack of the soon-to-boil-over extreme ethnoreligious tensions present in the UK/France/Germany/Benelux

It remains the case that ADOS blacks are more numerous and more troublesome than any of the troublesome minorities in western European countries. The nearest thing to an exception is North African Arabs in France - differential fertility means that they are 16% and rising of French babies (vs 12% and falling of the US being ADOS blacks) - so this statement will not be true of France in 20 years' time unless there is signifiant assimilation.

The nearest thing to an exception is North African Arabs in France - differential fertility means that they are 16%

While I wouldn’t put absolute faith in extrapolations deriving from sickle cell anaemia testing (which is increasingly universal in France anyway), Maghrebis are almost certainly having much, much more than 16% of newborns in France.

I wouldn’t be so sure of China not invading Japan in the event of a truly large-scale Pacific war (i.e. the scale that leads to China being at war with South Korea and/or the US). If nothing else, there are significant US military bases throughout Japan that would surely be struck in the event of a Sino-American war, and it is difficult to see the Japanese government letting that slide without considering it an act of war against Japan itself, not least because some of those bases are shared with Japanese personnel. They are rearming for a reason. A full-scale Chinese invasion of the Japanese home islands is pretty unlikely, yes, but it’s not impossible (certainly it’s more likely than a Chinese invasion of the continental US) and I would not consider them to be “safe” from Chinese attack in any meaningful sense.

I’m intrigued about where Australia and New Zealand fit into this. I’m not super knowledgeable about their internal political conflicts, their economic situation, etc. Naïvely, they both strike me as highly functional societies, whose restive minorities could easily be subdued if shit truly hit the fan. Australia at least is massive, with huge capacity to accommodate a growing population. I don’t know how likely Australia would be to get sucked into a major world conflict involving China; if it sat such a thing out, it seems like it’d be well-positioned to thrive in whatever world order grew out of the resulting ashes.

Australia is pretty tightly allied to the US and is very likely to be involved in a direct conflict with China.

Socially, we have some issues related to mass immigration, but less so than the UK.

What do we do

"We," who? This is consensus building language.

Indeed, your post is arguably both weakmanning and "boo outgroup." If you want to talk about a particular strain of thought, be more proactive about providing evidence for that strain (where did you find this "quote?") so people can readily judge the extent to which you are or are not nutpicking. Then, actually talk about it, rather than dropping a contextless quote and a handful of quips.

Please don't post like this.

"We," who?

...users of the Motte? How is it consensus building to ask what people are doing as the world collapses around us?

What has always gotten to me is the fact that (apart from their political opinions) they’d be fine even if Trump does every terrible thing they think he’s going to do. They’re white, natural born citizens, pay taxes, and do work that’s useful to the economy. The Nazis would not go after them (with the obvious exception), nor would Putin, Orbán, Duerte, or any other dictators. They’re the kind that such regimes want — educated, good jobs, pay taxes, not criminals, etc. and most of them lack the spine to seriously put themselves out there as against the regime when it stops being a fun LARP. When things get bad, they’ll shut up, scrub their socials, and for their “mental health” stop following the scary news, let alone do anything. Those that intend to fight are doing it stupidly with zero thought to opsec or grey man that it’s would be relatively easy to comb through socials and pick them up before doing anything serious.

They’re white, natural born citizens, pay taxes, and do work that’s useful to the economy. The Nazis would not go after them

I hate to go all Niemoeller on you, but this is not certain.

I mean, yes, if you decide to greet with "Heil Hitler", do not voice any contrarian political beliefs, don't engage in any norm-violating behavior (such as having gay sex, or having a Jewish boyfriend, or having a hereditary illness, pissing off the local Nazi bigwig), don't get killed either in Stalingrad or by an Allied bomb, then you are probably fine (where fine means getting to live through the 3. Reich with your limbs intact, not that you will thrive or still own what you owned before).

The main thing about Trump is that he is not literally Hitler -- there are many more checks and balances in place in the US. But living under Hitler is totally a big deal.

I mean the reason they ever went after Niemoller is that he was outspoken about his opposition to Naziism. There were millions of Germans doing normal German things throughout the 10 years of Nazi rule. Some of them might well have quietly and privately disagreed behind closed doors. The Nazis did not round up absolutely everyone who wasn’t a Nazi. They were after active dissidents, degenerates as they defined them, race mixers, etc. but it wasn’t true that any time someone said something anti-Hitler that the Gestapo would rise up through the floor and ship them off to Buchenwald. Active, ongoing dissent might get you marked. But if you keep your head down and mostly behave, your fate will be to ride out tge war and suffer only the fate of living in a country that th3 allies bombed the crap out of — which everyone suffered.

And that’s why I find the “fleeing white liberal women” so hilarious. First, as I mentioned in previous comments, they absolutely are not afraid of Trump or a fascist state. If they were, they’d certainly be careful about what they’re saying, about telling social media that they were at a protest, tagging themselves and their buddies in photos at tge protest. They’re also, other than being stupid online (again working from the belief that Trump is going to mass deport people to El Salvador, declare martial law, and cancel their social security number making life impossible) completely ineffective. It’s just insane how LARPy and performative the thing is.

As far as leaving the country, again, these spoiled little white future wine moms are not someone that any regime would worry about. Once they realize that it’s getting serious, they’re going to stop. And really, as long as they aren’t actively fighting the regime, there’s no danger. Trump doesn’t like immigrants or LGBT. He’s fine with white women.

Trump is very comfortable with gay men. What little evidence I am aware of shows he doesn't care about trans people.

A journalist asked Trump what bathroom a transwoman would need to use in Trump Tower. He said he doesn't care.

Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn. An interesting guy worth a googling.

Does Trump "dislike" LGBT? One of my pet peeves is the usage of that term, which I find to be baldly political and rather deceptive in its lumping of so many groups together. Just another subtle linguistic way of saying "straight" or heterosexual behavior somehow puts one in a political camp that isn't "LGBT."

But Trump doesn't seem to have any particular problem with homosexuals, either gay or lesbian, nor have I seen or heard him say anything about bisexuals. Arguably he disapproves of the progressive push of transsexuals in sports, but has he made any statements that he "dislikes" the T?

The Nazis would not go after them

One of the first groups the Nazis went after, years before "I dunno, Madagascar?" was taken off the table for the Jews, was other Nazis.

Scapegoats are not chosen based on a rational evaluation on how much their sacrifice will actually please the Gods, they're chosen based on complicated psychological and sociological factors that can be hard to predict in advance.

It also a question about how serious the people are, how likely they are to be effective in thwarting stated goals of the regime, and whether or not you can go after them without causing more harm to the regime than good. On most of these accounts, white PMC women are pretty low on the pole.

They simply are not serious about their resistance. It’s showing up to an outdoor protest theater, wearing merch and carrying signs. Then hashtaging the whole thing for views. What they are not doing? Building resistance cells. Buying weapons. Training for a fight. Hiding illegals in their homes. Practicing OPSEC and building anonymous communication channels, buying burner phones to use during protests. I can come up with dozens of effective resistance tactics that aren’t “livestream myself and all my friends at a protest” and “post I hate Trump” several times a day on social media. Second, im not seeing any move toward doing anything. The protests are a fun afternoon and I’ve seen a lot of bitching about people not having paid time off to go to these events. They’re going to get bored or run out of PTO or Theres going to be minor inconveniences (maybe they use water canons and it’s cold outside, or tear gas, or someone they know spends the night in jail) and they’re going to fade away.

Second, white PMC women tend to be married to high value men who will absolutely object to their wives being imprisoned by tge regime. They are basically walking talking hostage puppies — naturally sympathetic no matter what they’re doing. Headlines about wealthy white women getting arrested and deported is going to cause major headaches for the regime. The face of most sympathy for tge downtrodden stories are women. Mothers crying in Palestine are trotted out any time someone wants people to feel sorry for Palestinians. And Jews, not to be outdone trot out videos of women being kidnapped and raped when they want to convince you that you should support their side. Even in the USA, when you want a sob story about cutting something, there will always be a woman in the center of the story who is now struggling. They deported a Palestinian man related to high ranking figures in Hamas. But you mostly see his crying, pregnant wife.

Trying to determine what liberal white women are thinking about Trump and modern America, I found some fun subreddits.

/r/twoxpreppers is for women prepping for the worst. And supporting each other in their decisions not to arm themselves. Sure, they think we are entering the Republic of Gilead and they will be cattle in a living hell. But, that doesn't justify such extreme actions as buying a gun or in any way preparing for violence. Accusations of LARPing are too common, but these people are actually LARP resistance. Not even trying.

I mean the entire thing is just absolutely insane. They’re even chiding a woman who wants to clean up her digital image by deleting posts about Trump and they’re all like “no, they want to scare you into being silent! Don’t worry about it.” They think a cop “isn’t going to notice” you putting a sticker on their vest — as though there’s going to be one cop and nobody’s gonna tell him.

If I were Hispanic and thought that I might end up in a dragnet, I wouldn’t be looking to these idiots because they’d do more harm than good.

imagining they can just go to relatives in e.g. Norway (surely, only the US has immigration laws!)

If US was really vanning protesters and sending native born US lefists to Salvador they'd probably get asylum in European gerontocracies.

For the most part, they don't understand how immigration works, imagining they can just go to relatives in e.g. Norway (surely, only the US has immigration laws!)

The ones I know seem to at least be very well-informed about the exact paperwork and criteria needed to claim citizenship by descent in a half-dozen EU nations, and have hired genealogists and translators to track down the appropriate documents. Either that or they're applying to Master's or PhD programs in the Netherlands, Germany, etc.

What do we do now (that we "won")? What interesting projects do we have to move forward?

Did we win? I suppose I'm tired of winning then, just as promised. Regardless, everyone's project should always be to build a functional community in whatever way you see fit: befriending your neighbors, starting a club based around your favorite hobby, learning practical skills and teaching them to others, starting a family, and so on.

We, kemo sabe?

I'm pretty sure the Motte's rules prohibit coalition-building like that. There isn't a "we" like that, and this is not a forum to strategise for a particular cause.

I also feel obligated to note that there is no 'winning' democracy beyond the short-term. That's intentionally not how it works. One group wins an election, gets a short window, and then have to justify themselves and fight the same battle again, and again, over and over. There is no final or lasting victory.

Now, that aside...

I have noticed the usual panic about fleeing the country. To be fair there were (smaller) panics like that in 2020, in 2016, in 2012, and in every US election in my lifetime. That said, there are more this time around. The other day I ran into someone sharing this and it's obviously quite comical. The Trump administration does a tiny amount of deportation theatre and too-online people predictably panic. I am not saying that any of the administration's deportations have been right - that one university protester idiot should not be deported, despite his idiocy - but I am saying that in terms of realistic threat assessment, this is lunacy. I do not think there is any benefit in indulging it, or treating it as anything other than theatrical flourish from people whom we know are not going to leave.

...we Motte users.

What did Motte users win?

Motte users were right in many critiques, and the system broke as expected (though easier and faster). Given that context: now what?

The rivalry with a Schism.

Who most would not realize there was ever a rivalry with.

Because we won so hard.

Did we fight? What did we win?

Trace went to do his own thing, it briefly blossomed and then wilted. Did we cause that? I don't see it. Did we gain anything by its demise? I doubt it.

I dunno, I kinda had the impression he was trying to blow this place up.

If that's true, then it was utterly beneath notice.

The SSCbowl. We narrowly beat ratanon for coolest offshoot community. DSL need not apply.

The content president as asmongold puts it.

I dunno, I think Biden delivered more content. Not that I'm complaining.

I don't watch WoW streamers, so I'm afraid I don't follow.

You don’t watch WoW streamers? Where do you get your geopolitical analysis from? Surely not some legacy boomer outlet, I hope.

I bet Rachel Maddow couldn’t even clear Molten Core.

Wait you solo Molten Core? WoW has changed in the last 15 years.

You may be older than you think—MC was definitely soloable in WotLK, which was over 15 years ago!

I'm an FFXIV player. I only get my geopolitical analysis from horny anime girls and gay bunny boys.

Trump will say something mildly amusing in the bufoon with power sort of way or call some one fat and then asmongold will point to the screen and make a funny face, then chat will go POGCHAMP or LETS GOOOOOOO. Infinite content.

My wife wants us to move. I keep arguing that if America goes down the shitter, Europe is probably an even worse place to be even if we can live there indefinitely (we can).

Her argument comes more from a place of virtue ethics, rather than utilitarianism. She feels invested in America and we raise our kids here and reading all of this bad stuff in the news feels bad and makes her want to get America out of our lives. It does not matter if our quality of life would be worse in Europe, at least we can live in a society that is not so sick.

As @IGI-111 hints, Europe is not so sick as America, but instead is differently but certainly no less sick.

By all means come here if you want to trade the sickness you know for another you don't.

I’m an outsider - what are the ails of Europe?

Ignoring the "Europe is doomed because they are not following my preferred policy" style of arguments, the big ones are:

  • The fertility crisis among the productive classes in Europe is worse than the US (but not as bad as first-world Asia)
  • Europe is not self-sufficient in food or energy
  • The places in Europe you can go to escape the NIMBY cities are much less attractive than Texas.

I hope other euros will chime in. I only know half of it and I'll probably forget to mention most of that half, too.

  • If you think mass immigration by latin americans is bad, then please imagine that they are in fact all africans and muslims and consider whether that's any better.
  • We're behind the curve on trans-whatever, matching you on national self-hatred, but far ahead in terms of green economic self-destruction.
  • You have homelessness? Please, we solved that. Just sacrifice one productive member of society, have him work for nothing but keeping one addled fuck fed, clothed and housed. We hate hard workers and love our unproductive parasites.
  • Speaking of redistribution, I hope you like paying around 50% of your income in taxes.
  • And all that talk of loicences? They're for real. Assume that everything is illegal and you are allowed to do nothing.
  • You guys are fat. We are...slightly less fat. But old. So old. Our inverted demographic pyramids are monuments to behold.
  • Whenever you complain about tariffs, zoning, indoctrination in public schools, or bueocratic overregulation, just multiply it by a factor between two and ten (depending on where exactly you want to go) to get a rough idea of how European countries run themselves.

at least we can live in a society that is not so sick

Europe

Yeah...about that...

If she thinks there's a shortage of bad news here, I'll be happy to send her a curated newsfeed right to your doorstep.

My impulse is that the urge to flee is tied into the idea that “their side winning” is equivalent to the system functioning properly. A loss of popular support of this scale can only be interpreted in terms of the whole thing falling apart.

That being said I’m sympathetic to being freaked out. I don’t go looking for it yet pretty consistently find myself sucked down “leave before it’s too late” rabbit holes that are pretty effective at freaking me out when I’m doomscrolling at night.

A blow to the CICO theory of obesity: Pre-fertilization-origin preservation of brown fat-mediated energy expenditure in humans

In mice, cold environments before pregnancy can "pre-program" fat-burning traits in offspring. Could the same be true for humans?

People conceived in colder months consistently had more active brown fat in adulthood

Cohort 4 explored energy use after eating (DIT). Again, those from the cold-fertilization group burned more calories post-meal. In Cohort 5, the DLW method showed these individuals had higher Total Energy Expenditure in daily life, even after adjusting for physical activity and body composition.

Cohort 2, which included adults of all ages, showed that cold-conceived individuals had lower body mass index, less visceral fat, and smaller waistlines. These benefits were linked to increased brown fat activity, as confirmed by structural equation modeling. Interestingly, in younger participants (Cohort 1: males aged 18–25), BMI differences were minimal, likely because they had not yet experienced age-related fat gain.

A deep dive into weather data found that lower outdoor temperatures and wider day-night temperature swings during the months before conception were the strongest predictors of adult brown fat activity.

I find this noteworthy for three reasons —

  • There’s possibly an easy and natural intervention for obesity. The Japanese neurotically dress for the weather, so how great will the effect be for those who accept the cold? “College woman walking to a party in winter wearing a short dress” was a joke when I went to school, but it was apparently pro-natal. Is it the fluctuation which is most significant? Does it need to be tied with the day-night cycle?

  • This is more evidence that humans are shockingly attuned to specific conditions they evolved in, which should be reverse-engineered to find more potentatial interventions for human flourishing. We are much more animal than we like to admit.

  • How many other “willpower problems” have less to do with willpower and more to do with 2nd and 3rd order effects which are hidden from us, or which compound invisibly? There are probably many more for obesity alone.

I remember the jokes always being about walking back from a party in the same dress at 5am, minus a sock and maybe underwear

“College woman walking to a party in winter wearing a short dress” was a joke when I went to school, but it was apparently pro-natal.

It would probably lead to more sex and less births. Afghanistan has high fertility and no short dresses and women sit home.

This is not a blow.

Losing weight through cold exposure is a well known trick. Cold exposure also leads to an increase in brown fat which can burn white fat for energy, making it easier to lose weight.

Which part of CICO do you think this is a blow to? There has always been some noise level of individual variability. This is inherent in basically all biology research. Sometimes, folks are able to probe a bit deeper into it, and we already have a variety of different ways to do so. Many of them are just too complicated to do most of the time for most people... and they're often usually relatively small effect sizes, anyway. Like, yes, can we slightly refine our estimate of one component of your CO if we take precise measurements of your individual organ sizes; is that a "blow" to CICO?

There are determinants unrelated to willpower and unrelated to personal lifestyle changes which cause obesity. This is one factor and there may be many others. Everyone who uses “CICO” in obesity discourse means that, by everyone attempting to modify one of these variables, we can sizably reduce waist sizes. What this study shows is that in two cohorts controlled for willpower, one will simply be fatter due to their parent’s cold exposure.

Unless willpower and lifestyle changes can be shown to significantly modulate obesity rates at a population-level, and in the long-term, in a way that isn’t merely survivorship bias or an outlier, then CICO is as useful, insightful, and interesting as saying “narcoleptics need to stay awake”, “insomniacs need to sleep”, and “a thirsty sailor adrift at sea must never drink salt water”. It acts as a brainworm that just derails actual discourse around obesity.

What this study shows is that in two cohorts controlled for willpower, one will simply be fatter due to their parent’s cold exposure.

That is not what this study shows. I'm not even sure how you would "control for willpower".

Unless willpower and lifestyle changes can be shown to significantly modulate obesity rates at a population-level, and in the long-term, in a way that isn’t merely survivorship bias or an outlier, then CICO is as useful, insightful, and interesting as saying “narcoleptics need to stay awake”...

This depends on what you're trying to do. For example, there are tons of athletes and bodybuilders who modulate their body weight through diet and lifestyle. Is this suddenly useless to them if some larger population behaves one way instead of another way?

This community loves Science (TM) and Rationalism (TM). Suppose you lived in a religious woo world, and everyone believed that the gods wanted you to eat raw meat and they determined whether or not you got sick. You discovered that, actually, the cooking process can improve digestion and kill pathogens. But you just couldn't convince other people to do it, for whatever reasons. Maybe there are folks out there claiming that it's just because they "lack willpower" to do it. Is your knowledge suddenly "useless" in the case where a bunch of people don't do it... but it would somehow magically become "useful" if a bunch of people started doing it?

You control for willpower by looking at a cohort conceived in colder months and comparing to a cohort conceived in warmer months. This is simple. As we know that the month of conception has no bearing on willpower, and the study did not find a correlation in regards to temperature of month at birth, which I suppose may somehow change one’s willpower (if you squint), the populations are controlled for willpower.

athletes and bodybuilders modulate their body weight through diet and lifestyle. Is this suddenly useless to them if some larger population behaves one way instead of another way?

A minority successfully do this, only in the short-term, and only by significantly modifying their social identity. It comes at an impractical expenditure of willpower for the population-level. You can probably get someone to not eat for three days with the offer of $100,000; you can get a competitive wrestler to stop eating when it’s required for his social reputation; and a particularly vain bodybuilder can probably bulk and cut when he has made his appearance his entire social value. But this has no effect on the longterm rate of obesity or the general population, because not everyone can turn their entire social identity into weightlifting (neither is this desirable). In fact, even those selected for willpower and who practice willpower in regards to weight during their athletic career are not protected against obesity. Studies show that weight cycling athletes are either at the same level of obesity risk as other athletes, or even a worse level of obesity risk than the general population. We also know that the yearly Ramadan practice of willpower does not affect longterm obesity. If willpower were a longterm determinant, we would see (1) Ramadan practitioners become less obese, (2) weight-cycling athletes are particularly protected against obesity compared to other athletes. Yet we don’t find this.

You can find people who have terrible willpower in regards to substances, energy drinks, candy, and yet don’t gain weight. Then you can find people who exhibit amazing willpower in all facets of life, and yet are fat.

Then you can find people who exhibit amazing willpower in all facets of life, and yet are fat.

Can you though, with any significant frequency? I find a remarkable degree of correlation between being overweight and most negative traits/life outcomes, in others as well as in myself.

The only examples I can think of are "strongfats", i.e. weightlifter musclebro types that are optimizing for mass ass opposed to musculature. Outside of them it's hard to picture anyone else who might fit here, and even strongfats aren't nearly as fat as the median body positivity activist

As we know that the month of conception has no bearing on willpower

Right, so that is not a control for willpower.

A minority successfully do this

Please address my food cooking hypothetical.

only in the short-term

This is not true. Many people do it year-round for many years.

only by significantly modifying their social identity

Please address my food cooking hypothetical. One might say that it would require a significant modification to the hypothetical religious/social identity. Does that mean that knowledge about cooking is "useless"?

this has no effect on the longterm rate of obesity or the general population, because not everyone can turn their entire social identity into weightlifting (neither is this desirable)

Please address my food cooking hypothetical. I don't particularly care if everyone "can" change their entire social identity or whether it is "desirable". I am speaking purely descriptively.

I will additionally note that I have not, a single time in this conversation, made any claims about willpower, except that your claimed control for willpower was not, in fact, a control for willpower. I have no idea if there is even such a thing as a "general willpower factor" or, if there was, it would correlate to any particular behaviors. It doesn't seem to factor in to a descriptive account of body weight chemistry, physics, or dynamics.

Different months of conception have different genetic effects on a future child. It does not have different effects on willpower. One large group in month A has the same willpower as one large group in month B. There is no reason to think otherwise. So we assume the same willpower. But the genetic effects are correlated with different adult obesity rates. Did you read the study? If you think that the month of conception can alter even willpower, then we are essentially redefining willpower and are all the way back to where we started — in needing cultural / societal changes which genetically change people’s willpower.

one might say that it would require a significant modification to the hypothetical religious/social identity

A cooking change is a one time change. You’re asking for half the humans on earth to fundamentally rewire their identity so that their primary value in life is their body; and this is implying that bodybuilders aren’t preselected for the epigenetic expressions not associated with obesity. This is an insane proposal.

Does that mean that knowledge about cooking is "useless"?

Bodybuilders — the sliver of successful ones who actually succeed in modifying their body longterm without drugs, so 0.01% of the population or less — maintain their social identity through, essentially, thousands of hours of identity maintenance a year, changing what they think about, who they look up to, what they value. A world of bodybuilders would destruct, as no one would care about civic or institutional participation. So this proposal is not serious. We could make everyone become Buddhist ascetics whose new overriding value in life is not eating. This is is similarly possible, but not a serious proposal.

Anyway, please see my weight-cycling studying x3.

So we assume the same willpower.

That is not a control on willpower. It's not saying anything about willpower. I've said nothing about willpower. It is not apparent how willpower is supposed to come into anything or what straw man you think you're arguing against.

A cooking change is a one time change.

No. You have to cook your meat every single time you eat it. Every single meal, every single day, for the rest of your life. You’re asking for half the humans on earth to fundamentally rewire their identity so that their primary value in life is their body; will you very clearly state that you think that this means that knowledge about cooking is "useless" if all of those humans on earth don't do it, but magically becomes "useful" if they do?

this is implying that bodybuilders aren’t preselected for the epigenetic expressions not associated with obesity

I never said any such thing.

It might be helpful if you wrote clearly what you’re trying to articulate. I will clarify that I am not interested in quibbling on the literalist definition of CICO that forgets how it is used in discussions. I am simply interested in how can we practically solve the obesity crisis, which is important. I’m asserting that CICO — telling people to focus on their calories and exercise — is not a practical framework, and there’s a study suggesting that a viable framework may be looking at holistic environmental determinants.

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These people are legitimately claiming that being conceived April 16th through October 16th means you have a slower metabolism because it was warmer out and that did something epigeneticly to you. And it is to the extent, per Fig 2.2b, that people born in the cold half of the year burn 1650 cal /day vs 1550 cal/day for people born in the warm temperature half of the year.

From the study:

Preconception exposure to low outdoor temperature and temperature gap affects offspring’s metabolic phenotype, promoting higher EE in humans. Our findings propose a conceptional theory, named PfOHaD. This concept suggests that environmental factors, such as temperature exposure before conception, can programme physiological traits in offspring, potentially influencing their health outcomes across generations.

Is there any evidence, outside of this study, that being conceived April 16th through October 16th (or in warmer months / areas / seasons in general) will lower your metabolism at all, much less 100 cal/day?

All else equal, the same person conceived in Nigeria will have a slower metabolism than if they were conceived in Norway?

I find this noteworthy for three reasons —

I don't think you should find this noteworthy, I think you should find it not true. "You burn an extra 100 calories if conceived in winter because epigenetics" is a very strong claim with very scant evidence.

if that variation is true, why don't we see it in life expectancy and althetic records?

if that variation is true, why don't we see it in life expectancy and althetic records?

I'm reminded of the factoid that most professional hockey players have birthdays towards the beginning of the year, because the peewee leagues have cutoffs on New Year's Day. So you get more attention because you're statistically larger / have 11 months more growing time as a January peewee player than a December peewee player. It didn't require a proper scientific study, but someone just looking up professional hockey player birthdays and going, "huh".

I would be surprised, but maybe no one has done significant birthday analyses with regards to life expectancy and athletic records because it would feel like silly astrology. That's kind of why even analyses that can be painted as "silly" in a soundbyte, say, during a Presidential Address to Congress, might have a legitimately interesting motivation: are you doing this analysis because of "astrology" or because of epigenetic effects based on seasonal variations during gestation?

Either way, I think you're striking at the heart of the issue: we probably don't need to hook people up to devices that measure vitals in order to determine if there are measurable differences based on the calendar dates of their gestation. If the difference is meaningful, we should be able to see downstream effects in, as you said, life expectancy and athletic records, and other examples as well.

because the peewee leagues have cutoffs on New Year's Day.

it's important for the young but it shouldn't have effect on lifetime records

Shouldn't? Or doesn't?

The factoid I'm familiar with comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", in which he dubs the concept "accumulative advantage": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

Allegedly, elite Canadian hockey players tend to have birthdays earlier in the year.

Edit: this medium post shows the results of a very rudimentary data gathering exercise relevant to the topic: https://medium.com/market-failures/birth-months-and-hockey-players-further-validating-gladwells-observation-1187f4deb63b

Is this an L for CICO, or a massive W for astrology?

Not to mention the energy industry.

As others pointed out, CICO cannot be debunked in so far that thermodynamics is immutably true. It's just different factors can contribute to these variables on either side.

How many other “willpower problems” have less to do with willpower and more to do with 2nd and 3rd order effects which are hidden from us, or which compound invisibly? There are probably many more for obesity alone.

agree. Too many people, including even on the 'HBD side', downplay the role of metabolism in regard to obesity. Consider that having a faster metabolism (or more specifically, a less efficient metabolism) means being able to eat more food without becoming obese, hence less willpower is required.

As others pointed out, CICO cannot be debunked in so far that thermodynamics is immutably true. It's just different factors can contribute to these variables on either side.

The best way of thinking about it is that, CICO as an accounting tautology may be true, since it just describes weight loss/gain. But CICO as actionable dietary advice absolutely can (and has been) refuted. Simply deciding to eat fewer calories or exercise more (without doing something hacky like keto) doesn't work.

I don't think the study in that link, which is just about The Biggest Loser participants, refutes that. In terms of CICO as actionable dietary advice, I see it as a meta-dietary advice: follow whatever scheme it takes to lower CI to be beneath CO, and you'll lose weight. If you can reduce CI by just counting calories and willing yourself really really hard not to succumb to hunger, then do that. If you can do it by following a keto or Atkins diet because that leaves you less hungry for the same caloric intake, then do that. If you can do it by following intermittent fasting or one-meal-a-day because you find it easy to just not think about eating during the non-eating-mode times, then do that. If you can do it by just cutting out alcohol from your life and following whatever other eating habits you already were doing, then do that.

Similarly, to increase CO, do whatever it takes to increase your total caloric expenditure, as averaged out per-day, per-week, per-month, etc. That doesn't mean necessarily optimizing by finding the exercise that burns the most calories per second, that means finding an exercise that you will do regularly. Which could mean finding something that's fun enough that you don't have to fight with willpower to do it (or even better, one that's so fun that you have to fight with willpower not to do it), that's convenient enough that you don't have to reorganize the rest of your life just to do it, that doesn't injure you enough that you have to take long breaks, etc.

Of course, when it comes to CICO, it's also often paired with the advice that CI is far more influential than CO, so the latter part barely matters. Perhaps it should be called CIco.

Isn't that just moving the tautology up a level? Since CICO in its thermodynamic sense is just a description of weight loss, then giving the advice 'follow whatever scheme it takes to lower CI to be beneath CO' is the same as giving the advice 'follow whatever scheme leads to long-term weight loss' (which frustratingly doesn't include deliberate CICO).

Yes, and I think the usefulness of this has to do with how often people don't seem to consciously understand this tautology. Which seems very often in my experience, with how much talk there is about "healthy foods" (or variations like "natural foods" or "unprocessed foods") as keys to weight loss. Which they often are, but only indirectly, modulated through the effect on CI. And I've observed that many people tend to obsess over that indirect portion, making them lose sight of the actual goal of modifying the values of CICO.

There's the point that healthy foods offer health benefits other than weight loss, of course, but generally one's fatness level has such a high impact on one's health that, even a diet of "unhealthy foods" that successfully reduce CI will tend to result in a healthier person than one of "healthy foods" that fail to reduce CI (keeping CO constant in these examples).

Yes, and I think the usefulness of this has to do with how often people don't seem to consciously understand this tautology. Which seems very often in my experience, with how much talk there is about "healthy foods"...

I heard an incredible story about a person who got mad at her doctor after she asked, "What food can I eat to offset the fact that I'm eating this other thing?" and, unsurprisingly, her doctor did not seem to answer the question that she had posed in the way she posed it.

I've heard all sorts of other misinformation and bad fundamental beliefs from people. If anyone has a better strategy besides, "Ok, so let's talk about the fundamental basics of how calories and macro/micronutrients work, and how they might have different considerations," I'd be all ears. But it's genuinely difficult to progress if they literally just do not have any concept of the "tautology", what I would perhaps word as the "descriptive fact of the matter". It really feels like trying to teach someone how to play baseball, and they just keep saying, "Where's my racket? I need a racket. When are we going to get to how to use the racket? I just want to know how to use the racket; I'll figure out the rest of it later."

Simply deciding to do anything doesn't actually get the thing done, it's not exactly a novel insight, and I'm not aware of anyone denying it. CICO proponents don't argue for merely deciding to have a calorie deficit.

You misunderstand me. I'm arguing that successfully following CICO as diet advice is counter-productive. The Biggest Loser study showed that contestants who purposely decreased their CI (through having their food intake managed by the producers of the show) and massively increased their CO through exercise permanently reduced their metabolic rates, even after they regained the weight after the show was over. These people, who absolutely did follow CICO as advice ended up making things worse for themselves.

A person can choose to eat less. But eating less increases hunger (duh) and reduces metabolic rate. Homeostasis trumps willpower.

But obesity isn't caused by a lack of willpower (the whole world didn't get lazy in the 1970s for no reason). It's caused by a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers and it lines up with what we actually see. What caused the broken lipostat is still up for debate, I think it's vegetable oil but it could be something else.

But obesity isn't caused by a lack of willpower (the whole world didn't get lazy in the 1970s for no reason). It's caused by a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers and it lines up with what we actually see.

First google hit: *Some obese people have high body weight because they have broken lipostats, but these are a rare minority. *

I'm not sure what the page you're referencing is referring to (can you link it?), because I'm referring to the consensus among obesity researchers for explaining the obesity epidemic:

But there’s a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.)

A thing can be true and be mostly bad advice. CICO is like that. If you get your gas car towed to a mechanic and the mechanic asks "have you tried filling it up with gas? You know you can't just get free energy from nothing. To change an object from at rest to in motion requires a force acting up on that object." You'd probably get a little annoyed. Cars cannot run without some form of energy this is true from a physics perspective, but as a way of diagnosing all car problems it's dog shit. You don't need the physics lesson, you need the engine checked by an expert.

But sometimes there is actually no gas in the car and that mechanic would be right that one time. Sometimes calorie counting works for some people. It just seems to fail for most people as a dieting measure. I tend to think of it as a diet for people who think accounting is fun.

You know you can't just get free energy from nothing.

that's the people who don't like CICO usually claim - "I eat virtally nothing and still gain weight".

For a car, mechanic has prior experience of what must be broken. Fat people usually have surplus of calories. SELECTED BY CAPITALISM TO MAXIMIZE CONSUMPTION AND REDUCE WAITING TIME

That would be a good analogy if people were lecturing you on CICO while you're bleeding out. You can't fix a broken engine with more gas, you can't fix a broken body with CICO.

But pretty much every case of being overweight can absolutely be solved with CICO. Calorie restriction always works if you actually do it. It's just that 90%+ of people prefer to dump a bottle of sauce on every salad they eat but still count it as 100 calories. Which is very understandable - I also struggle with plenty of things that are 100% willpower issues - but pretending that CICO doesn't apply or even claiming it is wrong is just silly. Even Ozempic is nothing but CICO at its core.

CICO is fine as a physics explanation. I disagree with OP that it can be "debunked".

As dieting advice it is crap. The main failure point of diets is compliance. CICO has terrible compliance rates.

I completely disagree with this framing. Advice that has it's intended effect, if you follow through on it, is good advice.

No it's not. And if it was I have a series of the best advice for various topics:

On sports: you should win

On war: kill anyone that opposes you

On politics: convince everyone you are correct and wield all the power.

That "advice" is basically saying what the end state is without good help on how to get there.

You are completely misstating the point of CICO- it is the fundamental truth of body weight from which all other successes must derive, but it is not a prescription for success. Upthread 07mk has a good description- you have to look at the CI and CO components and make for former smaller than the latter. Whateve strategies work for you to accomplish that goal is your path to success, but denying fundamental truths of physics are not one of them.

What I said above, and elsewhere:

A thing can be true and also bad advice.

Good advice in my opinion helps you achieve a desirable outcome.

CICO often manifests as calorie counting. It's the most straightforward interpretation of CICO. Calorie counting has historically and scientifically been shown to have just about zero impact on dieting and positive health decisions. It works for a tiny minority of people. I called it the diet for people that love accounting.

I don't dispute the physics, I never did. Just like I wouldn't dispute the physics of motion and free energy with a car mechanic. A car mechanic that started lecturing me about physics and the need for fuel would be an asshole and I'd never go to him again. Telling a fat person about CICO is the equivalent of that mechanic.

On sports: you should win

On war: kill anyone that opposes you

On politics: convince everyone you are correct and wield all the power.

And you will, if you follow the advice. Advice is not supposed to be a magical spell that binds you to follow it.

I have this weird belief that advice should be helpful. That if you want outcome X then good advice will improve your chances of achieving outcome X. Bad advice is something that just restates outcome X or has no impact or a negative impact on achieving outcome X. Do you have a different word for helpful advice as I've defined it?

Apparently you believe differently, and think that advice does not have to assist towards achieving a desired outcome. That simply haranguing someone for not doing the thing counts as advice. Thats fine. I'm not gonna convince you otherwise, I'd just ask that if you ever see me asking for advice is a wellness thread, know that I'm asking for helpful advice, and whatever it is you are offering can be better left unsaid.

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And you will, if you follow the advice.

No, it's the other way around: if you will, you'll have followed the advice.

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A) CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is perhaps the most confirmed scientific theory of all time. The day you disprove it is the day physics gets really, really weird and reality as we know it ceases to make sense. So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe, no amount of obesity cheerleading will change that.

B) The effects noted in the study are frankly not that big. Like a 3% increased likelihood of active brown adipose tissue, which might increase total energy expenditure of the bodies resting metabolism of up to 5%. So conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy, which is only a benefit if you live in a post-scarsity world.

"You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.

conservation of energy is a theory, which is to say it is as cold and hard of an absolute as we know to exist in the universe

The expansion of the universe violates conservation of energy. Think of all that CMB radiation that has been redshifted by the expansion of space, thereby losing energy over time.

Relativistic effects may explain why CICO doesn't work for people with high mass.

"Yo momma so fat she halted the expansion of the universe!"

Like a 3% increased likelihood of active brown adipose tissue, which might increase total energy expenditure of the bodies resting metabolism of up to 5%.

Over a long period, this can have an cumulative effect. A small daily surplus can lead to obesity after a decade. It may also mean a lower set point, in which eating a lot food results in much less weight gain than predicted or expected according to regression estimates and physical activity. Overfeeding studies show enormous individual variability as to what percentage of surplus calories are stored as fat or burned off.

Yes, this is trivially true for say, tall people burn more energy by virtue of having more surface area to radiate heat.

Overfeeding studies show enormous individual variability as to what percentage of surplus calories are stored as fat or burned off.

I have yet to see one of these, properly controlling for things like height and weight, that demonstrates an effect I would call "enormous variability". Low single digit percentages, sure.

A) CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics,

The naive version of CICO compares your meal plan to your gym time. The normal version compares all the food (including drinks!) you consume vs. all your planned or incidental physical activity. The true version compares the bioavailability of all the nutrients you consume vs. all of your metabolic activity, whether that's moving your muscles, thinking, growth, healing, generating heat, or anything else.

I have yet to see any diet plan that uses the true model of CICO. The closest I've seen is a single number for "base metabolism" that you back-calculate from your weight trends.

I think you're pushing a strawman, but I'm open to seeing a diet plan that uses the "true CICO" model I described. Anything less precise can't follow from raw thermodynamics.

CICO is not a diet plan, it is a description of the fundamental physics that govern bodyweight. My comment is not an endorsement of any diet plan, but a reaction against the, as demonstrated by the storm of replies, substantial contingent of people who will do absolutely anything other than admit you must create a net gradient in a body's energy flux to achieve change.

The strawman is comments about "willpower" or "different basal metabolic rates"- these are simply inputs to be considered but not a reason to pretend the fundamental equation is not what it is.

You don't need official diets for CICO it's self evident. Reduce food consumption and/or increase activity until you lose weight. Still haven't lost weight? Decrease/increase.

Problems:

  1. People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.

  2. People tend to over-weight the activity part. So really just forget about CO and reduce CI until you start to lose weight. See problem one.

Expand to why you're poor and struggle with addiction.

"you're poor because you don't earn enough" A lot of dieting advice is similarly circular or unhelpful. Thankfully we now have GLP-1 drugs, which seem to work for many people

There's a big distinction between obesity and poverty:

To become not-poor, you need to both do things you are currently not doing and do them in a way that gets other people to give you money for those things you do. You're adding behaviors, and you have to socially coordinate.

To become not-fat, you only need to not do a thing (eat). It requires no social coordination whatsoever, it requires no additional action, you literally only have to choose to not pick up the fork.

GLP-1 drugs

Be careful with that poison, I'm reading some horror stories about people going blind on that shit. And the media is staying as silent as possible for that one.

No, you're poor because you don't do relatively simple things. And yes, hopefully GLP-1s help a ton.

the SS was written a long time ago when a HS degree was good enough. now you need college

So it's down from 97% to what?

People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.

Its well known that certain medications lead to weight gain: do you believe they do so because they reduce the self control of those who take them? Does hyperthyroidism cause significant increases in self-control, and does hypothyroidism erode self-control? Do GLPs work because they increase the individual's self-control?

If not, then factors other than self-control are at play.

Those conditions (likely) don't change the "amount" of self control you have, but they do change how much your desire to eat is weighted in the semi-conscious calculation of what you end up choosing to do. Self-control is your ability to over-ride unconscious, animal instincts in favor of conscious choices. In the case of a medical condition that makes you hungrier, it does in fact require more self control to not eat more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't ultimately a question of self control that determines whether or not you eat more.

Hypothyroidism typically reduces appetite, yet you still gain weight despite eating less. Similarly, hyperthyroidism typically increases appetite, yet you lose weight even though you're eating more. Thyroid hormones are needed to make a lot of metabolic processes run, and if you don't have enough (hypothyroidism) then your temperature goes down and a dozen other processes don't work well and stop using up calories, so most of what you eat ends up in fat storage. If you have too much (hyperthyroidism) then your body temperature goes up, a dozen metabolic processes go into overdrive, and you lose weight despite eating more.

You could argue that someone with hypothyroidism could still use self-control to eat less and not gain weight, which is technically true. They'd probably end up in the hospital, but they could do it.

I know it wouldn't be The Motte if it wasn't 10,000 words of caveats. Yes, these are exceptions that apply to a minuscule number of people, yet a bunch of people use them to make excuses for why they're fat.

It would not surprise me one bit that certain drugs and conditions reduce self-control and other's increase it. Some things make desired outcomes easier and some things make them harder. If you've got lots of self-control and you get some condition or start some drugs that make it harder to keep weight off, reduce CI until you stop gaining weight.

I would bet you think I have some normie conception of self-control: "self-control is easy! Just don't eat." Nope, self-control is really hard, and you're probably mostly born with it, like IQ. Can a midwit get a PhD in math from Harvard...? Well, are they black? No? Very unlikely.

One CICO diet plan I know of is The Hacker's Diet. You don't need impossible precision because instead you borrow a page from control theory. You measure your change in weight, and if it's not as desired, you reduce CI to compensate. Closed-loop feedback.

That's exactly what I'm talking about: It's a Calories In, Calories Out, Body Weight system and that third variable is essential.

Skimming through the paper, it appears that the difference between cold and hot is about 100 Calories per cold day, or about one pound per month. A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

Body weight is not an independent variable. But it is easily observable the way CI and CO are not.

A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

"Ostensibly".

A pure CICO system couldn't explain why one person gains a few pounds every winter while an ostensibly-identical person (but fertilized in cold weather) doesn't.

h-What? My understanding of the claim is that those two people have slightly different COs. Therefore, a "pure CICO system" would explain it perfectly fine if we're able to quantize this component to individual variability. There are tons of different components to individual variability, and most of the time, we just don't bother quantizing them because they're often hard to measure and are small effect sizes anyway.

Show me the table entry for "brown adipose tissue heating" on a CO calculation and I'll believe it. Otherwise it's just part of the fudge factor.

Quantizing that component (and every other one) to individual variability is the weakness of CICO, as they can result in wildly different results based on unmeasured variables.

These things are usually buried in textbooks. Often in the world of, "Yeah, it can kinda be done, but it's expensive and time-consuming and doesn't really change much."

they can result in wildly different results based on unmeasured variables

I mean, not really? We have a pretty good handle on individual variability. It's not nothing, but it's not insane. And it doesn't generally change much from a practical standpoint. You can just use direct observation and measure your own point in that range of individual variability.

Its not every winter, they measured when exposed to 19 C. Which is basically room temp. So it would be every month about 3k calories (1 lb) for the warm conceived groud vs the cold. Just because they were born when its on average 10 C outside instead of 18 C.

Its ridiculous lol

Who are these 100% blank slatist CICO advocates? Especially around here in the land of "IQ is real and probably has a large genetic component."

Here.

CICO by the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds for force feeding and starvation. Everything between those extremes is confounded by biology.

Should I believe my lying eyes? When my wife and I tracked our weight and caloric intake for a couple years, we had a range of different intakes, and the trend line was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk. It was noisy, yes, but probably about as noisy as any measurement we have for any biological research.1 Taking another look at the data now, it would be kinda dumb to think about modeling it as a step function, S-curve, or deadzone or whatever. Generally, one needs some justification for moving to some other weird modeling assumption.

1 - Moreover, it is utterly unsurprising that it is so noisy, due to the mathematical realities of numerical analysis and differentiation. If anything, it was extremely surprising that it worked so well!

the trend line was bang on at 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/wk

It's very strange to me this is controversial. You don't have to rely on an small sample studies or individual anecdotes. Thousands of serious bodybuilders track year round. To the point of using an activity tracker to track general physical activity, having a detailed log for total resistance training volume, and eating & measuring common foods to the gram. Essentially universally they find that an offset of 500 kcal/day from maintenance is good for a pound a week, with maybe a variability of 100 kcal.

Now tracking everything too the gram is annoying. Peoples sense of hunger and motivation differ, etc. As hunger develops it's supper easy to spray that cooking spray for 1 second instead of 0.2. It says 0 Cals on the back, but it's not it's 9 kcal per gram. For two items per meal, four meals per day, and 1 gram per spray that's 7.5 pounds of body weight per year. Additionally, in a deep deficit, if you don't use an activity tracker, it's easy to go down to 5k steps a day from 10k steps a day.

So if your eating and activity are driven by intuition or satiation knowing about CICO does not make you lose weight. Particularly the longer and deeper the deficit the easier it is to deceive yourself. You can bypass this problem in approximately two ways. One, is to exercise extreme levels of detail and self-corrective feedback in tracking. The other is to suppress appetite, which is the obvious mechanism by which GLP1s and gastric work.

Did you calculate your base metabolic rate (or whatever the fudge factor is called in your system) so that it all worked out? If not, you got lucky that it happened to be both correct at the start and steady over time. If you have adjusted it, then that means your calculations are on target, and adjusting the inputs so that 3500 kcal = 1 lb resulted in a trendline at 3500 kcal per lb.

This study gives some people a 20% headstart on your dieting goals (admittedly they didn't measure "CI"), which is a pretty notable difference.

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This is certainly what I do - weigh myself every couple of weeks, if my weight's gone up stop eating lunch for a few days, if it's gone down start eating dessert for a few days. Hadn't heard the name "Hacker's Diet", though; it seems kind of too obvious to need a name and I kind of thought anyone who's actually at target weight would be doing it.

It's pretty much what I do as well. Also anticipating excess calories, "Gonna get drinks and have a big dinner so going light on lunch.". Bonus, less booze to get tipsy.

Also knowing your indulgences and where calories sneak in. For most I think that's liquids and snacking. I have a huge sweet tooth. I keep snacking to a minimum and cut out sugary drinks over 20 years ago so I can have an extra slice of cake every now and then. Over the last 5 years I've started "light" intermittent fasting so it's even easier to keep tabs on things. Also I think being comfortable with the feeling of being hungery is a good thing.

To be clear; I'm anorexic (in the proper sense); I don't get hungry*. Obviously, this largely negates the "ate too much" side of the coin.

*I recently discovered that I can get cravings for specific foods; when I started training with my bow, I started getting meat cravings, presumably because I needed protein to add muscle.

Well, it is, but how much do we know about the CO part of the equation? There seem to be often-cited figures for calories burned by various activities, but for example it seems quite obvious that whatever people poop out is not actually of zero caloric value, and that moreover the difference between, say, diarrhea and wombat poop cubes must be nontrivial, but this seems to never be addressed in those arguments.

There is a kind of motte and bailey going on. The motte criticism of CICO is that it's actually very difficult to calculate exactly how many calories are exhausted per second of exercise given how many variables go into such a thing and it's also difficult to calculate how much food is able to to be absorbed by an individual's digestive system therefore we can't calculate out the exact to the calorie differential. The bailey is therefore it's impossible to just consume less calories each day until you find the equilibrium where you're losing weight. You absolutely don't need to have an exact measure of Calories in and calories out to make sure the sign of the difference is negative and the broad tools of calorie restriction will easily allow you to flip that sign to negative. We can't make sure it's -500 and not -485. But this swing aren't even that large as things average out.

CO is the more important one . two people can be identical yet have TDEEs that vary by over a thousand calories despite boing being nearly equally active . that is the power of CO

be indentical yet have TDEEs that vary by over a thousand calories despite being nearly equally active

Either we have very different definitions of the word "identical", or i am going to need a source on that claim. It seems to be farcically untrue at face value.

CICO necessarily follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is perhaps the most confirmed scientific theory of all time.

This is why, should I ever have a child, I will feed him a pound of uranium. He won't have to waste time eating for the next 20,000 years.

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.

So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory

That’s not how the expression is used. The expression is used with the implication that the feasible locus of control in obesity is our willpower in regards to caloric intake.

conceiving in the winter gives your baby a slightly higher chance of being slightly better at burning energy

The significance is in the extrapolation. The takeaway is to not have babies in winter in Japan (that would be silly), but that we may be able to modify obesity significantly through pre-conception cold exposure, the limit cases of which are explored in the study. Japan is probably not even a top 100 place in the world where residents experience genuine cold for prolonged periods, due to their urban living and wealth to buy clothes.

You eat too much and you dont exercise enough" remains the core of any and all successful diet criticism.

Only if you ignore the hundreds of millions of times it has practically failed. (I have a photo of a plane with a lot of red dots to show you.)

I'm sorry, but you have disproven nothing, and your comments about willpower are frankly irrelevant. Willpower is just a modifier to your calories input, and calories output. If you completely lack the will to put down the donut and go for a run/swim/whatever, and have no interest in balancing or reversing the energy flux of your body, then sorry your ass is fat and will get fatter barring external intervention. For proof of this, I refer you to Novo Nordisk's stock price.

All successful diets must deal with the fundamental truth of CICO, it cannot be otherwise. You can adopt any number of strategies for managing the two halves of the equation, but you cannot pretend the equation does not exist. The universe has no complaint department.

It is easy for me, and presumably you, to not eat the donut. You believe that this is a power by our will, though you don’t believe that this should be deemed “willpower”. However, we can’t peer inside the hunger of an obese person. What is considered a power of our will may in fact be a less strong sensation of hunger. How easy would it be for us to not eat the donut if we stopped eating for two days? Because our hunger would increase, the power of our will to control it decreases, and we would likely succumb to the donut. In the same way that we are liable to nap after not sleeping. The thought is simply: what is the evidence that the skinny and the obese experience the same level of hunger? It’s possible that they experience more hunger. The circumstantial evidence indicates this. The above study suggests environmental factors influence hunger. Etc.

It’s something of a theory of mind issue to think that everyone experiences the same level of hunger or that our own ability to manage weight would remain if our hunger doubled.

Okay, you are off on some tangent responding to a staw man I cannot even conceive of. I have not, and am not saying anything about experienced levels of hunger, or the theory of mind of an obese person. All I am saying is that the basis of a successful diet must be the recognition of the fundamental equation that determines whether body mass increases, decreases, or remains the same. Use whatever strategies you want to manage both sides, but to claim that CICO is somehow disproven, as OP does, is grossly incorrect.

Willpower is just a modifier to your calories input, and calories output

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.

The success of GLP-1 drugs shows how medicine is more effective than lifestyle modification.

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines

You are wrong in about fifteen different ways here, but I'll highlight this one: humans are in fact machines, just very complicated ones made out of meat.

You are wrong in one way, but only because you made a single assertion. Humans are not machines as they have particular evolutionary forces at play that need to grasped to make sense of their behavior.

If you had perfect knowledge of the physical makeup of a human body and perfect knowledge of physics, you could perfectly predict the results of any input on that body, no need for cludging together predictions with meta-knowledge like what evolutionary pressures led to that physical arrangement of atoms. People are deterministic machines like literally everything else.

Similarly, a car is in fact just a simplified animal that's made out of steel.

While we have advanced pretty far on the "reacts to sensory inputs" front lately, the "autonomous reproduction" is still sorely lacking.

It's intentionally disabled by breeders so they could have a profit for themselves. Unlock this feature with one simple...

It is disproved on the grounds that humans are not machines, they are in fact living animals, and hunger no more obeys our will than thirst or sleep. If I ask you to voluntarily keep yourself at starvation level for an extended period of time, and offer a moderate monetary reward, you will break after a few weeks when you smell a slice of pizza or remember cookies exist. If hunger were subordinate to our will, we wouldn’t have instances of cannibalism caused by intense hunger despite the preferences of the hungry party or the threat of eternal damnation. And when you remember that modern life already requires willpower and cognitive expenditure, it’s no more surprising that the obese cave to hunger than that a thirsty person drinks sewage.

No, it is not disproved. The second law of thermodynamics does not apply to only machines, it applies to everything.

You are conflating "calories in" with hunger. In a thermodynamic system sense, hunger does not matter. Hunger is not a thermodynamic property. Hunger has nothing to do with the second law.

  1. A person can be hungry and intake no calories.

  2. A person can be not hungry and intake many calories.

  3. A person can be hungry and intake calories.

  4. A person can be not hungry and intake no calories.

Yes, humans generally eat when they are hungry and do not eat when they are full. But this is outside of the second law.

So CICO is a theory in the sense that conservation of energy is a theory

That’s not how the expression is used. The expression is used with the implication that the feasible locus of control in obesity is our willpower in regards to caloric intake.

I have never heard of CICO used in any other manner than "eat less calories than your burn and you lose weight". But why not engage with what CICO actually means instead of how you think people use it? What does it matter how it is used?

What you describe is not actually a blow to CICO, it is a blow to what you contend is the common usage of CICO. Which, what would you like the second law of thermodynamics to say to that? "Congratulations, you have defeated your own definition of CICO?" Ok?

Only if you ignore the hundreds of millions of times it has practically failed. (I have a photo of a plane with a lot of red dots to show you.)

CICO does not actually fail in a thermodynamic sense. People just don't have the self control to limit the "CI" part to below the "CO" part. Maybe you could consider it a failure in a "people have a hard time limiting their diet because hunger is powerful" sense. Or "when people get hungry for a long time their metabolism slows down and reduces the CO which makes it harder to lose weight" sense. But in a energy in = energy out + energy accumulated system sense, it does not fail.

The metabolism slowdown is the major problem. Some people see such a huge slowdown despite still being fat and cutting calories to low levels. those people are screwed . you can only cut so much

you can only cut so much

Wrong.

Its a major problem for people trying to lose weight, its not a major problem for "your body is made of matter and therefore obeys the laws of thermodynamics; so CICO is unambiguously true to the extent it is a thermodynamic statement"

The principal works. The problem I see with CICO is that it’s kinda like telling a drug addict that they just need to not do drugs. It’s true, the best thing a drug addict can do is not do drugs, but the advice if that is as far as it goes is precisely useless because it does tell people how to actually stop using the drugs. Better advice would include changing your routines and habits to avoid triggers and easy access to drugs, and finding things to do that fill your days with happiness without the drugs.

Food wise, the advice, in my view is to eat Whole Foods, unprocessed foods, favoring plants and protein, and limiting carbs especially simple carbs. Then you add in some exercise especially muscle building exercises though even walking has benefits.

Food wise, the advice, in my view is to eat Whole Foods, unprocessed foods, favoring plants and protein, and limiting carbs especially simple carbs. Then you add in some exercise especially muscle building exercises though even walking has benefits.

Do you expect that following your advice will cause people to consume fewer calories than they expend? Otherwise, I would find that this

advice if that is as far as it goes is precisely useless because it does [not] tell people how to actually stop using the drugs

This is really the rub. People want to claim that there is a "problem [they] see with CICO", but it's not actually a problem with CICO. It's a problem with advice for behavioral modification. That advice needs to be linked to a realistic approach to achieving the desired objective, given the reality of the underlying facts.

Imagine saying that the problem with math is that telling people that math is correct doesn't tell them how to actually learn math. ...that's a problem with math?!? That means that math should be viewed as useless or something? No, man. That's not a problem with math at all. Math is just fine. Math is correct, actually. People can, and do, learn math. Obviously, simply saying "math is correct" will not immediately and instantaneously result in someone learning math. Work still needs to be done. But people wayyyy overcorrect and want to imply that there's something wrong with math if they can't just easily, instantaneously, learn math with zero effort and nothing but an incantation of math being correct.

It’s a problem because it’s generally the standard advice given by everybody, with no follow-up to help people actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it. Just don’t eat as much, bro. It’s not useful in getting to the goal. And since tge reason for giving weight loss advice in the first place is to help people reach a goal weight that’s appropriate for their height, advice that doesn’t lead to them getting there is a loss. Yes, any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less, much like various budgeting plans still generally result in spending less money, and study tips generally result in people spending more time reviewing for tests. That doesn’t mean the underlying principle for those things doesn’t work, it means that you need more than the technically correct answer to make it possible to do it.

with no follow-up to help people actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it

I mean, frankly, I don't believe you? I think what you're seeing is that most online discussion is not between a person who acknowledges physical reality and is looking for strategies to actually achieve their goal weight and maintain it and a person who has been through it and has even a quarter of a millisecond to start describing follow-up advice. Instead, within a tenth of a millisecond, the discussion is just totally swamped with people claiming that the entire framework is bogus, unhelpful, or not paired with follow-up.

What you're probably missing is not-online discussions that don't get bombed in this way. Where people actually have a serious conversation about goals and strategies to accomplish it. Again, I think the biggest reason you don't see this online is that any such discussion doesn't have a chance to even get off the ground.

Yes, any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less, much like various budgeting plans still generally result in spending less money, and study tips generally result in people spending more time reviewing for tests.

Correct. You don't see those other discussions getting bombed and derailed by hoards of people saying that it's totally bogus to even think about trying to spend less money or to study more.

Perhaps test the thesis? Maybe post in the Small-Scale Questions Sunday Thread? Unlike this one, which started immediately out the gate just saying that the entire conceptual schema was bogus, perhaps start by saying that you think that "any good set of weight loss advice will ultimately mean eating less", and you'd like some follow-on advice on how to accomplish it. See what response you get. I would predict that you'll get some realistic advice, probably with some variation, because different things have "worked" for different people. You may also get bombed by folks saying that your entire premise is bogus.

I hate to do it, but I'm going to go back to the math example. Suppose you were wanting to learn math. Perhaps some relatively higher-level math that only a relatively small percentage of people in the population know how to do. Suppose that the second you asked about it online, before anyone even had time to give some advice, folks were swamping the discussion with claims that it's actually impossible for most people to learn said math; after all, we can just look at the low percentage of the population which has currently learned it! Sagan, that would be a trainwreck every single time. I find this example extra funny, because it's not uncommon for math professors to seriously say things like, "You don't so much learn math as you get used to it." Doing math is also uncomfortable for a lot of people; people do get frustrated and upset when trying, and it is even true that a solid number of them just quit trying. But if every online discussion on math was swamped in the same way online weight loss discussions were, I'd probably be stuck just sighing and saying that you're going to have to just find someone offline to help you or put enough shibboleths in your initial inquiry to ward off the throngs of derailers.

I hate to do it, but I'm going to go back to the math example. Suppose you were wanting to learn math. Perhaps some relatively higher-level math that only a relatively small percentage of people in the population know how to do. Suppose that the second you asked about it online, before anyone even had time to give some advice, folks were swamping the discussion with claims that it's actually impossible for most people to learn said math; after all, we can just look at the low percentage of the population which has currently learned it! Sagan, that would be a trainwreck every single time. I find this example extra funny, because it's not uncommon for math professors to seriously say things like, "You don't so much learn math as you get used to it." Doing math is also uncomfortable for a lot of people; people do get frustrated and upset when trying, and it is even true that a solid number of them just quit trying. But if every online discussion on math was swamped in the same way online weight loss discussions were, I'd probably be stuck just sighing and saying that you're going to have to just find someone offline to help you or put enough shibboleths in your initial inquiry to ward off the throngs of derailers.

Imagine that, for some reason, wanting to learning calculus was as common as wanting to lose weight (perhaps an eccentric billionaire has promised $100,000 to anyone who can pass the AP Calc exam), but that mathematical talent remained as low as it is our world (where, after we spend 13 years force-feeding everyone math in an attempt to get them to at least understand algebra, it turns out most people cannot deal with negative numbers or division, let alone variables, and top out their mastery of mathematics at memorizing multiplication tables; i.e., 3rd grade). However, the masses were not willing to accept this, and flooded message boards asking for advice on learning derivatives, purchased index cards with terms like "critical point" on them, etc., despite conclusive empirical evidence that the vast majority of people who attempted this failed.

It seems like the very first thing that should be said in such discussions is that most people are not capable of learning calculus, and that if you failed geometry in high school you are probably wasting your time. Specially when it became obvious that OP could not tell the difference between 7-3 and 3-7.

perhaps an eccentric billionaire has promised $100,000 to anyone who can pass the AP Calc exam

Let's go further. I posited this one on reddit a while back. Let's suppose an eccentric billionaire credibly offered a literal billion dollars to a somewhat-randomly-selected obese person, on the condition that they lose a certain, reasonable amount of weight for their height/gender/etc. and keep it off for, say, five years (this is often a cited duration). Let's say they take drugs/surgery/whatever off the table and it's agreed (perhaps monitored) that it's going to be only "diet and exercise", "CICO", or whatever descriptor. They could plausibly take out loans against the future payout to the extent that lenders think they're likely to collect, which they could use to pay for professional advice (let's say it's highly likely that the person will accept the billionaire's recommendation for a professional who deeply understands caloric balance, macro/micronutrients, sports science, personal training, etc.) or even, say, quitting their job in the meantime or whatever if the numbers allow it. What do you think their chance of success would be?

I've got some other great hypotheticals along opposite lines, but let's just do a direct hyper variant of yours first.

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The principal works. The problem I see with CICO is that it’s kinda like telling a drug addict that they just need to not do drugs. It’s true, the best thing a drug addict can do is not do drugs, but the advice if that is as far as it goes is precisely useless because it does tell people how to actually stop using the drugs. Better advice would include changing your routines and habits to avoid triggers and easy access to drugs, and finding things to do that fill your days with happiness without the drugs.

Providing optimal advice to drug addicts is something I have neither the education nor inclination to do, but I'm still going to snort when a bunch of crackheads on Facebook or whatever start badmouthing the "drugs in drugs out theory" and telling me they get high no matter how little they smoke.

Drug addicts can admit that they're doing drugs. Doing drugs is a discrete act from non-drug, non-destructive acts.

Speaking from direct experience: Food addicts either don't know or actively convince themselves that they haven't crossed the threshold between eating and gluttony. Their mental math never bothers to account for that extra quarter cup of canola oil they dumped into the pan. They don't have a good sense or willfully refuse to investigate how calorie dense a cup of berries is compared to a cup of Nutella compared to a cup of jam. The direct relationship between that snack (which they may forget when they go back to tally at the end of the day) and the amount of time it'd take to burn it are conveniently uninvestigated.

When some people are forced to stare this in the face with strict CICO, they make better decisions.

Which goes back to better decisions, which is precisely what CICO by itself doesn’t do. Telling someone to just CICO is like saying “dude, just spend less than you make” with no other advice. Yes you need to sit down and budget, but you also need to understand the difference between a good purchase and a bad one, understand that rent and other bills come before entertainment in the budget, and understand how to get more bang for your buck. It’s not wrong, but from the POV of getting people to make better food decisions it’s not going to work because it’s woefully inadequate to that task. Telling someone to choose Whole Foods over crap is useful because it makes you feel full and therefore eat less. Telling someone to exercise gives them more calories to work with.

Yes you need to sit down and budget, but you also need to understand the difference between a good purchase and a bad one, understand that rent and other bills come before entertainment in the budget, and understand how to get more bang for your buck.

CICO without cheating (which is why we always emphasize actual tracking) makes this clear. Or clear enough for weight loss.

Knowing the calories you get out of a Snickers bar, given your daily caloric needs and the satiation you get from it, lets you know how bad a decision it is. Once you set a ceiling you can easily see which foods are inefficient.

And, if you choose to indulge, you'll have to fast or exercise later (which you'll probably enjoy even less, proving the point) or compensate with some satiating, low-calorie foods.

People who come up with a fixed budget and can't decide between Netflix or rent have a problem but it isn't ignorance.

eating is so subconscious

To be a little tighter, it's like telling them to have some willpower and just use drugs in moderation. Which is precisely what they have proven to be unable to do.

I don't even know why Japan is mentioned. In the mountainous regions (and there are many,) it gets cold as a mother f*ck, and apart from the modern era where everyone has become a pansy people suffered through all kinds of cold. Japanese houses, in particular traditional houses, are extremely poorly insulated, if at all. But so what? Surely the steppes of Russia with its ample babushka have always been colder.

As for diets failing, that's willpower, as you point out yourself. It's not the reasoning behind the dieting. Finally, water retention, liver functionality based on one's lifetime eating habits (and thus metabolism) and heredity (variations in adipogenesis) are all factors in any one person's potential for weight gain.

But so what? Surely the steppes of Russia with its ample babushka have always been colder.

Russia has serious insulation and heating where it's cold. Our homes are a lot warmer than typical European is used to. Plus, major hbd confounder.

How are Russian houses insulated? I hear a lot about brick and concrete, especially on the old housing blocks, which hardly insulates at all. Huge district heating probably helps in a lot of places though.

The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored" follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but the bailey version used to dismiss other people's difficulty in losing weight as only self-control issues, which you've expressed as "You eat too much and you dont exercise enough", does not, because exercise is not the only way calories are output, fat is not the only way an input can be stored and absorbtion rates can vary.

I am not advocating for dismissing anyones self-control issues, in fact I think they are fundamental for any successful diet plan. All I am advocating for is recognition of fundamental truths that, for reasons I do not understand, are vociferously denied by a portion of those interested in loosing weight.

If you do not have the self control to stop eating in abundance, plan around that- maybe substitute foods that can be eaten in large amounts with few calories. Maybe have that donut, but as a treat for a good exercise session. Many wiser people have many better thoughts. But throwing up your hands and saying "CICO is wrong" is not going to help.

fat is not the only way an input can be stored

What other ways are there?

Muscle can be built

Even if absorption rates vary, the thing is that you cannot absorb more energy than there is in the food you eat. So sufficiently restricting calories necessarily results in reduction of mass.

Yes, but it may not result in a stable reversion to a healthy weight. Some people's absorption rate might be dysfunctional such that they lose any middle ground between "obesity" and "starvation". If all you care about is making them thin, you can technically keep them forever balanced on the razor's edge of starvation, but this is neither a practical solution (because their willpower will crack) nor a good one if what you want is to make the patient healthy.

Scott described a rare case of genetic leptin deficiency.

Usually they are of normal birth weight and then they’re very, very hungry from the first weeks and months of life. By age one, they have obesity. By age two, they weigh 55-65 pounds, and their obesity only accelerates from there. While a normal child may be about 25% fat, and a typical child with obesity may be 40% fat, leptin-deficient children are up to 60% fat. Farooqi explains that the primary reason leptin-deficient children develop obesity is that they have “an incredible drive to eat”…leptin-deficient children are nearly always hungry, and they almost always want to eat, even shortly after meals. Their appetite is so exaggerated that it’s almost impossible to put them on a diet: if their food is restricted, they find some way to eat, including retrieving stale morsels from the trash can and gnawing on fish sticks directly from the freezer. This is the desperation of starvation […]

Unlike normal teenagers, those with leptin deficiency don’t have much interest in films, dating, or other teenage pursuits. They want to talk about food, about recipes. “Everything they do, think about, talk about, has to do with food” says [Dr.] Farooqi. This shows that the [leptin system] does much more than simply regulate appetite – it’s so deeply rooted in the brain that it has the ability to hijack a broad swath of brain functions, including emotions and cognition.

i guess this is how some people also feel around alcohol

I have no reason to think this is real. In fact I suspect it is entirely imaginary.

Some people's absorption rate might be dysfunctional such that they lose any middle ground between "obesity" and "starvation".

I'd be interested to see a controlled medical case study of such a person. So far in many hours of conversation about this, none has been produced. I am not confident that such people exist.

Yeah this sounds like fattycope.

This is unnecessary, low effort, and obnoxious.

So sufficiently restricting calories necessarily results in reduction of mass.

Yes, indeed, but the "sufficiently" part can be much crueler on some people than others for reasons outside of self-control.

Agreed, and hopefully nobody would dispute that. I think what's being pushed back on here is the very strong claim in the OP of "A blow to the CICO theory of obesity". Given that due to the basic laws of physics CICO must be true, it's not really accurate to say that it has received a blow. That does not mean that focusing on CICO is the best strategy for any given person to effect weight loss, but the basic physical principle is true for them even if they struggle to make use of it in their lives.

I hate both extremes of the obesity conversation. One extreme -- of which there are examples -- is people who just flat out hate fat people, hate looking at them, have no compassion or understanding of any obstacles that have kept them in that state, and desire to shame and bully them for its own sake. I recall one motte user said something like, "people don't like fat people, don't want to be around them, and don't want to be friends with them."

I used to hold the view that you do, that nobody held the extreme form the obesity activists complain about. But when that post happened, I had to update in their direction. I had to update in the same way that seeing tumblrinaction posts that went "KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN. KILL ALL MEN." forced me to update my views on feminism, and started my turn from feminist-sympathetic to anti-feminist. There are certainly some people who hate the obese enough to segregate away from them.

The other extreme, of course, says that CICO is wrong not only as the sole guidance, but as the biochemical explanation of what's going on at a basic level. That's obviously false.

But I'm convinced there are more in the anti-obese extreme than in the pro-obese extreme, which is why I consider myself a moderate anti-fat-stigma person. Not in the sense that I believe being fat is good or healthy, but in the sense that I believe the shaming doesn't do the job, and just makes a bad situation worse, isolating people who need support rather than helping them take agency and affect their choices in whatever ways they can.

Health positivity, and not fat shaming, is the way to go. We should be promoting healthy, delicious meals that provide balanced nutrition, and socially boosting drinks that aren't drenched in sugar while providing the social and psychological appeal soda has. (Right now, soda is one of the only beverages you can get everywhere at a consistent quality. That should change.) Insofar as the fat activists oppose that, I oppose them.

The point is that people's desire for the obese to lose weight should be based in a concern for their health and a desire to see them live long, healthy lives, not from an aesthetic revulsion or contempt. The point of a lot of the discussion about set points is to encourage the view that "but for the grace of God go I."

The reality is that the cause of the obesity crisis is directly related to sedentary lifestyles, easily available cheap, calorie-dense food, and more sweets on store shelves than in a Wonka factory. They're social factors. We've put the human organism in an environment where our instincts -- like craving sweet fruit, which is relatively uncommon and seasonal in nature, or prizing meat, which was always the result of a bit of cleverness or a bit of strength -- backfire on us. What was once rare, and thus craved and hoarded, is now commonplace. And so like a dragon in a treasure vault, we hoard and we hoard. We're built for an environment where the most rewarding food takes the most work, but we live in a world of convenience foods and candy. Of course many people are going to lose control! (I believe the same about pornography. It should not be possible for millions of strangers to see Belle Delphine's vagina.)

The solution has to be social changes -- I think liberals are right and car culture is a big problem -- coupled with regulation, and medical marvels that help shift the needed willpower into a range more people have, as we're seeing now. But the big problem is that people's emotions, aesthetics, and experiences are getting mixed up with the data, and it seems impossible to talk about the ability of personal choices to improve health without getting called 'fatphobic', or to talk about the real and enduring social, biological, and psychological barriers that make it hard for many people to use willpower to control the problem without getting accused of using 'fatty logic'.

I used to hold the view that you do, that nobody held the extreme form the obesity activists complain about.

I actually don't hold that view! I have seen plenty of that behavior (all over the Internet and even on this very forum), so that I know that there is a very real problem with people who just have seething hatred of fat people. Some try to couch it in terms of "we need to shame them so they improve", but that's a lie (maybe even lying to themselves) used to justify picking on easy targets.

I also agree that shaming does not work, nor am I proposing it. I've written impassioned arguments against shaming fat people, in fact. It sucks major ass to be obese, and it's full of constant shame every time one looks in the mirror (ask me how I know, lol). If the soul-crushing shame we already apply to fat people hasn't fixed it, no amount of shaming will.

So as far as that goes, I don't think we really disagree at all. What I'm trying to push back on is the overcorrection I perceive in activists all over the Internet (and which, in fairness, I may have incorrectly read into this discussion - prejudice can do that to you). I've seen way too many fat acceptance activists (ironically, including on TiA like you said) take positions that are untrue and unhelpful, such as:

  • You don't need to change, the goal is to be healthy and not to lose weight
  • People [meaning loving friends and family, not fat people hate posters] are bigots who can't accept that you are fine the way you are
  • You can't be expected to change, you have a medical condition that means it's impossible
  • You didn't do anything wrong in the first place, this is the result of external conditions in society (or genetics) which mean you have no culpability in where you are

Needless to say, I find these positions to be not only incorrect, but actively harmful to the people they purport to help. I think they're coming from a place of love (which is good), but that isn't the only thing that matters imo. You also have to not allow people to continue in the unhealthy direction they are going, at least not without being gently nudged into a better direction. What I'm advocating for is an approach where we are frank (but kind) with people about their own culpability in the mess they are in, while also not falling back on empty "just do better bro" advice. I think it's possible to both be honest with people that yes, they bear responsibility, while also being compassionate about the difficulty of the change they need to make and how they may need strategies that go beyond simple effort of will.

I'm going to make an analogy in the hopes that it'll help to make my position clearer. I view the obesity problem as being somewhat similar to the disease of sin in Christian thought. While in a sense sin isn't any individual's fault (due to original sin corrupting man and the world), each individual still bears culpability for the sinful choices he made. And while a sinner can't fix himself (only Jesus can do that), he still has to acknowledge that he is a sinner, do his best to sin no more (even though that won't be enough), and accept the Lord's help in fixing the disease of sin within him. So while the problem is beyond the individual to fix himself, there is a personal choice that must be made to turn away from the old bad path. I see the obesity problem as having a lot in common with that.

I've written impassioned arguments against shaming fat people, in fact.

I think it's helpful to distinguish two behaviors:

  1. Shaming fat people: "hey lardo, put down the donut, you're gross"
  2. Being ashamed of fat people: "the other day, I saw lardo eating a donut, it was gross"

IIUC, you're addressing (1). (1) is actively directing sentiment at fat people. It's unkind for sure, and unlikely (?) to be helpful. Fat people aren't unaware they're fat.

I think (2) is more common, and that you may be conflating it with (1). (2) is a valid, common, reasonable, borderline inevitable way to feel. Any suggestion that people should strive to eliminate (2) is naive. People like beauty, health, and symmetry. The same reflex that makes us avoid corpses, shit, and disease makes us avoid obesity.

That doesn't mean we can't have empathy for the difficulty of losing weight, or the tribulations of being fat. Willpower is hard! Free will is a fuzzy concept at best. But, it also doesn't mean it's reasonable to want people to not have the disgust reaction they so commonly do - that's not the same as "shaming" fat people.

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Nobody brings up CICO as merely an underlying physical mechanism. The implication of CICO is always "therefore, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and it's your own fault that you are fat".

People who are against CICO are not denying thermodynamics; we are disputing that this is in any way a practical guide to action. It's like saying "the way to get rich is to earn more and spend less".

People who are against CICO are not denying thermodynamics; we are disputing that this is in any way a practical guide to action.

I mean, the OP is denying thermodynamics.

You're right that CICO in itself is not a practical guide to action. It's a description of what's happening. A practical guide to action would be one that helps you burn more calories than you eat. There isn't a universal solution for that, though unless you have an extremely unusual metabolism, the low-hanging fruit of "eat less and exercise more" will work, and the reason it doesn't work for you is that you don't like to eat less and you don't like to exercise more. This is true of most people, and while entirely understandable, it does not actually debunk the reality of CICO.

Nobody brings up CICO as merely an underlying physical mechanism. The implication of CICO is always "therefore, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and it's your own fault that you are fat".

To be blunt: it is people's own fault that they are fat. It doesn't just happen, they made choices that led to that point. Perhaps there exists the occasional edge case where someone has a genuine medical condition that is hindering them, but the overwhelming majority of cases come down to bad personal choices and the consequences thereof.

And this isn't just about assessing blame - much like with addictions, you can't make progress until you acknowledge your own agency and the fact that you will need to make different choices if you want to get to a different place in life. The battle doesn't end there, and you might need to come up with different strategies based on your unique circumstances. But the fundamental truth is that it really is about personal responsibility in the main.

It's like saying "the way to get rich is to earn more and spend less".

That is in fact also true. Lots of people who are fairly poor bust ass, live within their means, and get ahead as a result. It's hard, and you can suffer setbacks from circumstances even when you do everything right. But the fundamental truth holds.

Is it fundamentally the poor's own fault they are poor?

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Up to a point. I recall stuffing myself with food, at least 4-5kcalories/day for 15yrs and my weight never got above 190 even though i was sedentary (all day on computer). That was three large meals, lots of snacks, and lots of soda. I didn't need willpower because my body decided to not store enough fat for my weight climb any higher. It's not a personal failing if for some people this threshold where surplus leads to fat storage is set too low or unreasonably low.

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It's really more like saying "the way to get poor is to spend more and earn less".

I feel it is a necessary tonic to people who claim it is physically impossible for them to lose weight, choosing to blame the outcome on other people or nature itself. CICO is the reductio ad absurdum which proves that the ultimate locus of control cannot be found elsewhere.

The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored"

No, the motte is "it would violate the laws of thermodynamics to gain weight without consuming an energy-equivalent number of calories." CICO people don't deny that some people have metabolisms that permit them to consume excess calories without gaining weight. They only claim that someone who claims to have gained fat while restricting calories below that threshold is lying.

I see two viable mechanisms to get rid of food energy with an inefficient metabolism:

  • You could never absorb the nutrient molecules in the first place
  • You could run your body (especially the extremities) at a higher temperature

Both of these could be easily measured. I wonder how common these are. In the ancestral environment, wasting energy was strongly selected against. But then again, so was nearsightedness, and yet here I am.

But then again, so was nearsightedness, and yet here I am.

Nearsightedness appears to be primarily caused by lack of sufficient exposure to sunlight during childhood while the eye is developing. So in all likelihood if you had been raised in the ancestral environment you would not be nearsighted.

Really it’s just “you eat too much” I can go months without exercising without gaining weight. But if I eat more? Yeah I gain.


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