I'd add an explanation that sort of nestles in-between a couple of yours. With 'rationalists' and other types of self-styled intellectuals, you have a group of people that like to think about hypotheticals and other ways of living. They can come up with a rational, mechanical explanation about why such-and-such alternate lifestyle choice is morally good, preferable, transcendent, etc.
In short, I think you have a group of people who can defend odd lifestyles or behaviors with a cold logical argument, then think they can reason themselves out of their own emotions. I don't doubt that, for reasons you lay out nicely, some people will have an easier time doing that. But I see the overall attitude as an outcropping of 'internet brain' - this idea that the emotional and spiritual sides of life are somehow less valid then the rational and logical sides. Human beings have the capacity for reason, but are not exclusively rational (nor should they be). This is closest to the 'contra-normie' argument you made, but I think it's less that they are trying to talk themselves into being different and more than they're trying to live by some cultural practice that makes logical sense to them on paper, but in practice tends to flare up all those inconvenient emotions they refused to consider alongside their logic.
This is very close to my "brilliant idiots" theory of smart people being able to hold objectively dumber beliefs than actually unintelligent people due to their superior ability to rationalize, and the huge mischief they get up to because of it.
I’m not sure it’s ‘smart’ alone - I think it’s college-educated. I have a degree in English literature (plus a master’s I can actually make a living with), and that whole ballgame was reading and writing insane literary criticism like how some passage in a Jane Austen novel about two sisters brushing their hair together is actually about mutual masturbation (real example, sadly). But I think the incentives in social sciences and literature are to make novel arguments about banal things. You have a generation of minds seeped in that kind of thinking - it’s conspiracy theories for the NPR set.
You can’t simply see things the way a normie does, or you’re not smart. Wife, kids, picket fence - that’s for flyover state losers. Smart people ‘close read’ their own lives and every stray thought and try to find the hidden trends. I remember all that ‘pop-wokeism’ stuff - those disposable web articles with titles like “How Beetlejuice reinforces the patriarchy” - and CRT, transgenderism, polyamory, etc. are just the polished versions of those same turds.
I agree with you overall, though. We certainly have an overabundance of people who overintellectualize normal feelings and normal experiences and try on insane ‘identities’ or ‘lifestyles’ as a way to make those feelings and experiences novel and unique because they’re terrified of not being the special person they think they are. Ironically, thinking you’re a perfectly unique individual might be the most normie belief of all time.
Basically, it's the midwit meme, semi-smart people trying to signal how smart they are by adopting novel positions, whether those positions are actually a good idea or not. I think there's another component, wisdom or judgement or something that doesn't necessarily corelate with raw IQ but has a profound effect on how the intellectual horsepower gets applied.
You're touching on Rob Henderson's "luxury beliefs" hypothesis.
If it were possible to get to the bottom of this definitively, I think it would be some stew of all of these things (FTttG's piece, our back-and-forth) playing off and reinforcing each other.
I don't fully endorse the luxury beliefs thesis, but I think there's something there for sure. I just keep trying to square the circle of smart people believing dumb things, like way dumber than an actual idiot could come up with, and much more destructive too (Marxism being the arch example). Postmodernism might be the modern poster child, normal people think it's stupid because they can't understand it, smart people think it's dumb because they can, but it's catnip to semi smart people who think it makes them seem sophisticated.
Some also develop bullshit beliefs based on their upbringing and experiences. Idiotic parents, being isolated nerds whose thinking never "touched grass", etc.
So it's not just that they can better rationalize, it's also that they had a steady diet of bullshit ideas from a young age.
The problem is that intelligence without specific nurture and without perspective is next to useless.
I’ve found through hard experience that humans are very good at creating rationalizations for doing whatever their emotions were driving them towards in the first place.
This is particularly true for young men in the Bay Area, which has a particularly large female shortage.
I gotta take issue with the idea that people shouldn't be totally rational. I've wanted to be a robot almost my entire life and I think a lot of the rationalist community is on that team. Lots of computer people (like myself) in that community ya know.
I quite literally hate being human and I despise humanity in general.
>> Alternative/complementary hypothesis: maybe if you literally don't feel at all jealous when thinking about your girlfriend having sex with another man, it might mean that you don't actually love her as much as you claim to?
Can confirm this possibility. I had a secondary partner explain that he loved me, but it was different than how he felt about his wife, and I thought, “hmm, I feel exactly the same way about you as I do my primary boyfriend.” Found a different primary partner, finally understood what falling in love meant, and quickly realized I had no interest in the polyamory that my friend-group was into.
I'm glad that that paragraph resonated with at least one person with personal experience of polyamory. Some people thought I intended it as a dig or an insult, which sincerely wasn't my intention.
I generally agree with this, except: "going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick."
You generally should be going to your GP when you're not sick, about once a year, to ensure you stay not-sick and to find early indicators of sickness that are easier to fix if caught early. Likewise, you go to the dentist even if you don't have a toothache because small cavities are easier to fix than big ones.
I'm not sure how preventative care fits in with mental health. Prophylactic therapy is probably too much. Maybe a screener during your annual physical would be enough.
That's a fair point. You would expect a diligent GP to pay attention to potential red flags or early warning signs for mental illness. Fortunately, many of these are also red flags for physical illness (e.g. your GP urging you to cut down on the booze, even if you aren't currently suffering from cirrhosis or depression).
I don't go to the GP if I'm not sick and don't go to the dentist if I don't have a toothache. Shocking, right? But I'm 44 and don't have a single filling... And I'm on zero medication.
Honestly, I think regular dental check-ups are done purely for the sake of revenue generation. I bet if you followed two cohorts of people (one who got regular dental check-ups once a quarter, and one who only went to the dentist when they had something wrong with their teeth), after several years you would see very little difference between the two in terms of dental health.
For sure. Could be worth doing. Things like skin tests, mammograms, poo testing etc might be more worthwhile. For things that you might not notice until it's too late. Not that I do those either, but I think I maybe should 😅
> You generally should be going to your GP when you're not sick, about once a year, to ensure you stay not-sick and to find early indicators of sickness that are easier to fix if caught early.
Rather you shouldn't, and many doctors advice against doing so, if you don't see nothing strange or are below a certain age.
Do the recommended tests once every blue moon at recommended ages, and try not to "go to a GP once a year" when you're not sick.
It's more likely you'll waste time and money and medical resources and have some unecessary operation or drugs peddled at you, than that you'll catch some early indicator of sickness.
Related to “follow your dreams”: pursuit of an advanced degree in the humanities, and many STEM areas, where there is no via career path for anyone lacking some rare combination of talent, connections, and luck. Plus, professors have an incentive to have lots of students, including advisees for advanced degrees who must go on to figure out, from the ground up, what to do with their lives.
My friend's daughter who majored in Fat Studies had her degree paid for by the university. Yes, she is completely Odd more so after having done the degree. She has co-opted an oppressed mentality. Please write on these folks who use accoutrements of disability to express themselves (want to throw up).
Yes, she was always a bit zaftig, however a recent picture shows she is markedly obese. She was sexually abused in childhood and later sexually assaulted as an adult. I believe this is why she is obese.
Well that is one supposed social justice movement I'm completely fine with being shut down. There are ties between the food industry & Health At Every Size & studies that claim obesity is only caused by lack of exercise & genetics. There are excesses of other critical studies sectors but that one eats the cake!
I think part of this is also complicated and exacerbated by the nature of art. (Also other public-facing products, but let’s take art, by which I mean literature, music, etc.)
The first issue is that great artists are just by nature often weirdos. It’s a feature - the thing that makes the art great is their ability to see the world differently. So the weirdos are outsizedly visible, they are admired and interviewed and have lots of chances to share their point of view.
But the even harder part to acknowledge (and I’m sure many people will disagree with me here) is that the behaviours you describe often contribute themselves to the art. It seems to me self-evident if deeply unfortunate that Stephen King was a better writer when he was an addict. A lot of the best music was made by musicians with lifestyles that were deeply self-destructive, if not actually criminal. Now, on the whole, I would rather people led psychologically healthy lives, even if it affects their art. But I guess my point is that the behaviour often contributes to something deeply compelling within the context of the weirdo, and so looks more appealing to the normies, even when it’s not even working out for the weirdo that well
I agree with the general thrust of this. That being said, I think the only Stephen King novel I've read from start to finish was "The Shining" (which I enjoyed, although it could have done with some trimming and I do think the Kubrick film is superior), and my understanding is that he was "merely" an alcoholic at the time of writing.
On the other hand, he wrote "IT" in the deepest depths of his coke addiction. I've tried to read it several times and invariably gave up less than 200 pages in, finding it a digressive, undisciplined mess of a novel and a chore to get through.
It may well be the case that the novels King has written since getting sober are worse than those he wrote on drink or drugs, but I'd be cautious about making a causal inference. A lot of writers, after all, produce their best work as young men and get worse as they get older, regardless of whether they got sober in the interim (can you name a novel Joseph Heller wrote besides "Catch-22"?). I know of at least one case where the reverse is true: Hunter S. Thompson wrote his early, best work while slugging beers, while his later work which he wrote on drugs is nigh-incomprehensible (https://quillette.com/2020/05/02/decadence-and-depravity-in-louisville-kentucky/).
My judgment on King is one I’m personally uncomfortable with. It doesn’t sit well with me, and honestly, I’m open to the possibility that I’m a poor enough literary critic that I’m wrong on this. But I would argue that IT and The Stand and his other hits of the 80s, while yes very undisciplined and a bit nutty, were his real “art” in the sense of being his own unique contribution to literature, while the 2000s work is thuddingly clumsy and unoriginal in my view, even if more polished in a technical sense.
Obviously it’s not universally true that artists are better when they are on drugs or in unhealthy relationships. But I do think it happens often enough to fascinate people into wondering if those antisocial behaviours are the source of genius itself
My hunch is that whatever tortures them into drinking/drugs is what fuels the art, and when they get sober, they do so in part by healing the thing that’s been torturing them. But, remove the torture and you remove the inspiration (in some cases.)
Essentially these things should be considered EXPERIMENTAL or DANGEROUS, do not attempt without caution. You might win or lose big or both. Here be dragons. It’s like attempting stock trading: you are swimming with the sharks now.
I personally used psychedelics about a dozen times; minor positive benefits from that. I was in graduate school, 25 years old, and knew damned well I was messing with Serious Stuff so did my homework accordingly.
It blew up in my face four years later, but not without giving me wisdom.
I wonder. Exercise usually helps people whether they have a diagnosable physical ailment or not. Is "therapy" the kind of thing that just helps people with whatever their problems happen to be, even if they're not Officially Mentally Ill?
A professional who uses exercise to help sick people is usually called a "physical therapist" and the equivalent for someone who isn't sick is a "physical trainer". Are there different words for someone who uses talk therapy to help someone that has severe psychological problems and for someone who uses talk therapy to help normal people with normal problems? "Therapist" and "coach"?
I would refer to the former as a "psychotherapist" (a protected term in many jurisdictions) while the latter could be referred to using a range of terms such as "therapist", "life coach" or "counsellor" (some of these are not protected terms).
This distinction tripped up certain people in an earlier draft of this post, which simply referred to "therapy" rather than "psychotherapy", hence why I disambiguated it in this draft. Suffice it to say that I think going to sessions with a psychotherapist vs. attending a speech therapist to help you improve your public speaking, or going to a career guidance counsellor to receive career guidance are three VERY different activities, and the idea that EVERYONE ought to do the former just seems flatly wrong to me.
Amazing post about notions and intuitions I’ve had percolating within me for a decade+.
A self-proclaimed outsider, I’d notice people catching hints of “superiority” that were myopic if not misleading. I like to tell myself that I have the self-awareness to realize that I’m doing the same thing, but my approach to strong opinions loosely held, an aspiration towards the “eternal student” mindset, should in theory allow me to identity, accept, and iterate on mistakes more readily than otherwise.
I only recently learned about the barbershop pole framing (I’d called it infinitely recursive midwit meme before that).
The simple example is elites wanting to signal status dress in black, the class under them take note, and the class under that take note as well,
eventually resulting in a situation where the highest and lowest class wear black, but with vastly different costs and outcomes.
To signal status or sophistication you take the opposite stance, having integrated the most recent round of criticism or updates, and you keep alternating stances.
Combining the idea that everyone abhors normalcy and worships uniqueness with the idea that most people lead unintentional, unexamined lives, that they’re simply normal good people (when did this become an insult?)
we get this phenomenon where people adopt the status quo stance or go one level beyond it (e.g. sex is bad -> sex is empowering -> the coolest thing to do is recognize that sex positivity yielded wrong can be more harmful than sexual repression, etc.)
Every step of the way, the majority of people are only playing at applying the ideas. Approximately gesturing toward doing the right thing with no real command or intentionality.
Committed (10+ years) poly person here. I think I agree with the broad strokes here (i.e. polyamory is not for everybody) but a lot of the specifics you cite really don't line up with my personal experience or my observations of my community.
It also feels like there's a bit of availability bias going on here--lots of people in group A (rationalists) are also in group B (poly people), therefore group B must be mostly made up of group A people. I don't personally identify as rationalist nor as asexual, and I think the same is true for most people I'm in community with. In short, the sorts of poly people you're describing might be the loudest on the internet, but perhaps they're not a representative sample.
Furthermore, your bullet points of traits that might make someone disposed to polyamory feel pretty accurate to me, but I think there are some really important dynamics missing from the discussion:
1) Barrier to Entry. It's much easier to step away from monogamy if you're already stepping away from other major cultural defaults. A lot of the people I'm in community with are some form of queer; that means they've already gone through an extensive, emotionally intense journey of rewriting their narratives about love, sex, marriage, etc. From that position it's much less of a lift to also rethink monogamy, regardless of whether you have any of the other pro-poly traits like low-jealousy etc.
2) Community, community, community. The conversation seems to take as granted that "lifestyle choices" are these things we select based solely on our individual preferences. But what sorts of relationships feel safe and successful and appropriate is highly socially determined. At this point I'm deeply embedded in a network of people who celebrate, support, and normalize nonmonogamous relationships. This significantly mitigates many of the challenges faced by new-to-poly people. I also know lots of people who didn't even seek out polyamory particularly, but either they fell in love with a poly person or made some poly friends and now it's just a part of their life because it's part of their community.
Thank you for the thought-provoking piece and sorry for the long comment! :)
For clarity, I don't think most polyamorous people are rationalists. I assume the polyamorous community is at least an order of magnitude larger than the rationalist community, and not every rationalist is poly. I think the things that make polyamory attractive to rationalists might be very different to the things that make it attractive to non-rationalists. Thank you very much for sharing your experiences of the community.
Drug liberalism is a luxury belief because a certain class of drug user is unlikely to go to prison and unlikely to have their lives ruined by occasional trips to rehab or the psych ward. In my experience there is no connection between drug liberalism and an ability to resist psychosis.
I think this is a bit like the "I'm just spiritual, not religious" demographic that's exploded.
We jetison the chains that bound us and think freedom is a net good. Certainly, there's pleasant things that come from being unchained. But some of those chains served a very useful purpose.
This post is actually about being a Linux user
Someone figured out the Straussian reading at last.
I resemble that remark.
I'd add an explanation that sort of nestles in-between a couple of yours. With 'rationalists' and other types of self-styled intellectuals, you have a group of people that like to think about hypotheticals and other ways of living. They can come up with a rational, mechanical explanation about why such-and-such alternate lifestyle choice is morally good, preferable, transcendent, etc.
In short, I think you have a group of people who can defend odd lifestyles or behaviors with a cold logical argument, then think they can reason themselves out of their own emotions. I don't doubt that, for reasons you lay out nicely, some people will have an easier time doing that. But I see the overall attitude as an outcropping of 'internet brain' - this idea that the emotional and spiritual sides of life are somehow less valid then the rational and logical sides. Human beings have the capacity for reason, but are not exclusively rational (nor should they be). This is closest to the 'contra-normie' argument you made, but I think it's less that they are trying to talk themselves into being different and more than they're trying to live by some cultural practice that makes logical sense to them on paper, but in practice tends to flare up all those inconvenient emotions they refused to consider alongside their logic.
This is very close to my "brilliant idiots" theory of smart people being able to hold objectively dumber beliefs than actually unintelligent people due to their superior ability to rationalize, and the huge mischief they get up to because of it.
I’m not sure it’s ‘smart’ alone - I think it’s college-educated. I have a degree in English literature (plus a master’s I can actually make a living with), and that whole ballgame was reading and writing insane literary criticism like how some passage in a Jane Austen novel about two sisters brushing their hair together is actually about mutual masturbation (real example, sadly). But I think the incentives in social sciences and literature are to make novel arguments about banal things. You have a generation of minds seeped in that kind of thinking - it’s conspiracy theories for the NPR set.
You can’t simply see things the way a normie does, or you’re not smart. Wife, kids, picket fence - that’s for flyover state losers. Smart people ‘close read’ their own lives and every stray thought and try to find the hidden trends. I remember all that ‘pop-wokeism’ stuff - those disposable web articles with titles like “How Beetlejuice reinforces the patriarchy” - and CRT, transgenderism, polyamory, etc. are just the polished versions of those same turds.
I agree with you overall, though. We certainly have an overabundance of people who overintellectualize normal feelings and normal experiences and try on insane ‘identities’ or ‘lifestyles’ as a way to make those feelings and experiences novel and unique because they’re terrified of not being the special person they think they are. Ironically, thinking you’re a perfectly unique individual might be the most normie belief of all time.
Basically, it's the midwit meme, semi-smart people trying to signal how smart they are by adopting novel positions, whether those positions are actually a good idea or not. I think there's another component, wisdom or judgement or something that doesn't necessarily corelate with raw IQ but has a profound effect on how the intellectual horsepower gets applied.
You're touching on Rob Henderson's "luxury beliefs" hypothesis.
If it were possible to get to the bottom of this definitively, I think it would be some stew of all of these things (FTttG's piece, our back-and-forth) playing off and reinforcing each other.
I don't fully endorse the luxury beliefs thesis, but I think there's something there for sure. I just keep trying to square the circle of smart people believing dumb things, like way dumber than an actual idiot could come up with, and much more destructive too (Marxism being the arch example). Postmodernism might be the modern poster child, normal people think it's stupid because they can't understand it, smart people think it's dumb because they can, but it's catnip to semi smart people who think it makes them seem sophisticated.
My favorite T shirt, "You're unique...just like everybody else"!
Some also develop bullshit beliefs based on their upbringing and experiences. Idiotic parents, being isolated nerds whose thinking never "touched grass", etc.
So it's not just that they can better rationalize, it's also that they had a steady diet of bullshit ideas from a young age.
The problem is that intelligence without specific nurture and without perspective is next to useless.
I’ve found through hard experience that humans are very good at creating rationalizations for doing whatever their emotions were driving them towards in the first place.
This is particularly true for young men in the Bay Area, which has a particularly large female shortage.
I gotta take issue with the idea that people shouldn't be totally rational. I've wanted to be a robot almost my entire life and I think a lot of the rationalist community is on that team. Lots of computer people (like myself) in that community ya know.
I quite literally hate being human and I despise humanity in general.
You might be one of those people I mentioned in the article who actually COULD benefit from therapy.
Yeah, that's the D in ASD.
>> Alternative/complementary hypothesis: maybe if you literally don't feel at all jealous when thinking about your girlfriend having sex with another man, it might mean that you don't actually love her as much as you claim to?
Can confirm this possibility. I had a secondary partner explain that he loved me, but it was different than how he felt about his wife, and I thought, “hmm, I feel exactly the same way about you as I do my primary boyfriend.” Found a different primary partner, finally understood what falling in love meant, and quickly realized I had no interest in the polyamory that my friend-group was into.
I'm glad that that paragraph resonated with at least one person with personal experience of polyamory. Some people thought I intended it as a dig or an insult, which sincerely wasn't my intention.
I generally agree with this, except: "going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick."
You generally should be going to your GP when you're not sick, about once a year, to ensure you stay not-sick and to find early indicators of sickness that are easier to fix if caught early. Likewise, you go to the dentist even if you don't have a toothache because small cavities are easier to fix than big ones.
I'm not sure how preventative care fits in with mental health. Prophylactic therapy is probably too much. Maybe a screener during your annual physical would be enough.
That's a fair point. You would expect a diligent GP to pay attention to potential red flags or early warning signs for mental illness. Fortunately, many of these are also red flags for physical illness (e.g. your GP urging you to cut down on the booze, even if you aren't currently suffering from cirrhosis or depression).
I don't go to the GP if I'm not sick and don't go to the dentist if I don't have a toothache. Shocking, right? But I'm 44 and don't have a single filling... And I'm on zero medication.
Honestly, I think regular dental check-ups are done purely for the sake of revenue generation. I bet if you followed two cohorts of people (one who got regular dental check-ups once a quarter, and one who only went to the dentist when they had something wrong with their teeth), after several years you would see very little difference between the two in terms of dental health.
For sure. Could be worth doing. Things like skin tests, mammograms, poo testing etc might be more worthwhile. For things that you might not notice until it's too late. Not that I do those either, but I think I maybe should 😅
> You generally should be going to your GP when you're not sick, about once a year, to ensure you stay not-sick and to find early indicators of sickness that are easier to fix if caught early.
Rather you shouldn't, and many doctors advice against doing so, if you don't see nothing strange or are below a certain age.
Do the recommended tests once every blue moon at recommended ages, and try not to "go to a GP once a year" when you're not sick.
It's more likely you'll waste time and money and medical resources and have some unecessary operation or drugs peddled at you, than that you'll catch some early indicator of sickness.
Related to “follow your dreams”: pursuit of an advanced degree in the humanities, and many STEM areas, where there is no via career path for anyone lacking some rare combination of talent, connections, and luck. Plus, professors have an incentive to have lots of students, including advisees for advanced degrees who must go on to figure out, from the ground up, what to do with their lives.
Definitely, tenure-track is almost as much of a high-risk, high-reward strategy as pursuing a career in sports or entertainment.
My friend's daughter who majored in Fat Studies had her degree paid for by the university. Yes, she is completely Odd more so after having done the degree. She has co-opted an oppressed mentality. Please write on these folks who use accoutrements of disability to express themselves (want to throw up).
I assume your friend's daughter is somewhat on the heavy side?
Yes, she was always a bit zaftig, however a recent picture shows she is markedly obese. She was sexually abused in childhood and later sexually assaulted as an adult. I believe this is why she is obese.
Terribly sad. I hope she gets the help she needs.
Well that is one supposed social justice movement I'm completely fine with being shut down. There are ties between the food industry & Health At Every Size & studies that claim obesity is only caused by lack of exercise & genetics. There are excesses of other critical studies sectors but that one eats the cake!
I have this saying: "quirky girl lifestyle choices are weird girl stolen valor". this jibes
These would seem to be examples of a power law distribution. And most of us are in the long tail.
I think part of this is also complicated and exacerbated by the nature of art. (Also other public-facing products, but let’s take art, by which I mean literature, music, etc.)
The first issue is that great artists are just by nature often weirdos. It’s a feature - the thing that makes the art great is their ability to see the world differently. So the weirdos are outsizedly visible, they are admired and interviewed and have lots of chances to share their point of view.
But the even harder part to acknowledge (and I’m sure many people will disagree with me here) is that the behaviours you describe often contribute themselves to the art. It seems to me self-evident if deeply unfortunate that Stephen King was a better writer when he was an addict. A lot of the best music was made by musicians with lifestyles that were deeply self-destructive, if not actually criminal. Now, on the whole, I would rather people led psychologically healthy lives, even if it affects their art. But I guess my point is that the behaviour often contributes to something deeply compelling within the context of the weirdo, and so looks more appealing to the normies, even when it’s not even working out for the weirdo that well
I agree with the general thrust of this. That being said, I think the only Stephen King novel I've read from start to finish was "The Shining" (which I enjoyed, although it could have done with some trimming and I do think the Kubrick film is superior), and my understanding is that he was "merely" an alcoholic at the time of writing.
On the other hand, he wrote "IT" in the deepest depths of his coke addiction. I've tried to read it several times and invariably gave up less than 200 pages in, finding it a digressive, undisciplined mess of a novel and a chore to get through.
It may well be the case that the novels King has written since getting sober are worse than those he wrote on drink or drugs, but I'd be cautious about making a causal inference. A lot of writers, after all, produce their best work as young men and get worse as they get older, regardless of whether they got sober in the interim (can you name a novel Joseph Heller wrote besides "Catch-22"?). I know of at least one case where the reverse is true: Hunter S. Thompson wrote his early, best work while slugging beers, while his later work which he wrote on drugs is nigh-incomprehensible (https://quillette.com/2020/05/02/decadence-and-depravity-in-louisville-kentucky/).
My judgment on King is one I’m personally uncomfortable with. It doesn’t sit well with me, and honestly, I’m open to the possibility that I’m a poor enough literary critic that I’m wrong on this. But I would argue that IT and The Stand and his other hits of the 80s, while yes very undisciplined and a bit nutty, were his real “art” in the sense of being his own unique contribution to literature, while the 2000s work is thuddingly clumsy and unoriginal in my view, even if more polished in a technical sense.
Obviously it’s not universally true that artists are better when they are on drugs or in unhealthy relationships. But I do think it happens often enough to fascinate people into wondering if those antisocial behaviours are the source of genius itself
My hunch is that whatever tortures them into drinking/drugs is what fuels the art, and when they get sober, they do so in part by healing the thing that’s been torturing them. But, remove the torture and you remove the inspiration (in some cases.)
Essentially these things should be considered EXPERIMENTAL or DANGEROUS, do not attempt without caution. You might win or lose big or both. Here be dragons. It’s like attempting stock trading: you are swimming with the sharks now.
I personally used psychedelics about a dozen times; minor positive benefits from that. I was in graduate school, 25 years old, and knew damned well I was messing with Serious Stuff so did my homework accordingly.
It blew up in my face four years later, but not without giving me wisdom.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Would you care to expand on what you meant by it blowing up in your face?
Anxiety. Depression. I don’t like talking about it.
That's fair.
Didn't know you had a substack! I remember seeing this over in the castle.
Man that was very good… as it reflects how I feel about things for sure ! Great piece .
I wonder. Exercise usually helps people whether they have a diagnosable physical ailment or not. Is "therapy" the kind of thing that just helps people with whatever their problems happen to be, even if they're not Officially Mentally Ill?
A professional who uses exercise to help sick people is usually called a "physical therapist" and the equivalent for someone who isn't sick is a "physical trainer". Are there different words for someone who uses talk therapy to help someone that has severe psychological problems and for someone who uses talk therapy to help normal people with normal problems? "Therapist" and "coach"?
I would refer to the former as a "psychotherapist" (a protected term in many jurisdictions) while the latter could be referred to using a range of terms such as "therapist", "life coach" or "counsellor" (some of these are not protected terms).
This distinction tripped up certain people in an earlier draft of this post, which simply referred to "therapy" rather than "psychotherapy", hence why I disambiguated it in this draft. Suffice it to say that I think going to sessions with a psychotherapist vs. attending a speech therapist to help you improve your public speaking, or going to a career guidance counsellor to receive career guidance are three VERY different activities, and the idea that EVERYONE ought to do the former just seems flatly wrong to me.
Amazing post about notions and intuitions I’ve had percolating within me for a decade+.
A self-proclaimed outsider, I’d notice people catching hints of “superiority” that were myopic if not misleading. I like to tell myself that I have the self-awareness to realize that I’m doing the same thing, but my approach to strong opinions loosely held, an aspiration towards the “eternal student” mindset, should in theory allow me to identity, accept, and iterate on mistakes more readily than otherwise.
I only recently learned about the barbershop pole framing (I’d called it infinitely recursive midwit meme before that).
The simple example is elites wanting to signal status dress in black, the class under them take note, and the class under that take note as well,
eventually resulting in a situation where the highest and lowest class wear black, but with vastly different costs and outcomes.
To signal status or sophistication you take the opposite stance, having integrated the most recent round of criticism or updates, and you keep alternating stances.
Combining the idea that everyone abhors normalcy and worships uniqueness with the idea that most people lead unintentional, unexamined lives, that they’re simply normal good people (when did this become an insult?)
we get this phenomenon where people adopt the status quo stance or go one level beyond it (e.g. sex is bad -> sex is empowering -> the coolest thing to do is recognize that sex positivity yielded wrong can be more harmful than sexual repression, etc.)
Every step of the way, the majority of people are only playing at applying the ideas. Approximately gesturing toward doing the right thing with no real command or intentionality.
The results are disastrous.
I don't know if you're familiar with the person who (to the best of my knowledge) originated the barbershop pole metaphor:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
Committed (10+ years) poly person here. I think I agree with the broad strokes here (i.e. polyamory is not for everybody) but a lot of the specifics you cite really don't line up with my personal experience or my observations of my community.
It also feels like there's a bit of availability bias going on here--lots of people in group A (rationalists) are also in group B (poly people), therefore group B must be mostly made up of group A people. I don't personally identify as rationalist nor as asexual, and I think the same is true for most people I'm in community with. In short, the sorts of poly people you're describing might be the loudest on the internet, but perhaps they're not a representative sample.
Furthermore, your bullet points of traits that might make someone disposed to polyamory feel pretty accurate to me, but I think there are some really important dynamics missing from the discussion:
1) Barrier to Entry. It's much easier to step away from monogamy if you're already stepping away from other major cultural defaults. A lot of the people I'm in community with are some form of queer; that means they've already gone through an extensive, emotionally intense journey of rewriting their narratives about love, sex, marriage, etc. From that position it's much less of a lift to also rethink monogamy, regardless of whether you have any of the other pro-poly traits like low-jealousy etc.
2) Community, community, community. The conversation seems to take as granted that "lifestyle choices" are these things we select based solely on our individual preferences. But what sorts of relationships feel safe and successful and appropriate is highly socially determined. At this point I'm deeply embedded in a network of people who celebrate, support, and normalize nonmonogamous relationships. This significantly mitigates many of the challenges faced by new-to-poly people. I also know lots of people who didn't even seek out polyamory particularly, but either they fell in love with a poly person or made some poly friends and now it's just a part of their life because it's part of their community.
Thank you for the thought-provoking piece and sorry for the long comment! :)
For clarity, I don't think most polyamorous people are rationalists. I assume the polyamorous community is at least an order of magnitude larger than the rationalist community, and not every rationalist is poly. I think the things that make polyamory attractive to rationalists might be very different to the things that make it attractive to non-rationalists. Thank you very much for sharing your experiences of the community.
Drug liberalism is a luxury belief because a certain class of drug user is unlikely to go to prison and unlikely to have their lives ruined by occasional trips to rehab or the psych ward. In my experience there is no connection between drug liberalism and an ability to resist psychosis.
I think this is a bit like the "I'm just spiritual, not religious" demographic that's exploded.
We jetison the chains that bound us and think freedom is a net good. Certainly, there's pleasant things that come from being unchained. But some of those chains served a very useful purpose.
Discussed more here: https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewperlot/p/why-im-not-religious-im-just-spiritual?r=1xulhu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false