2026-04-13 08:46:57
Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses.
A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more. Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not.
One mother strongly advised me never to send my baby to daycare. She regretted sending her (normal and healthy) first son to daycare when he was one—he ended up hospitalized with severe pneumonia after a few months of constant illnesses and infections. She told me that after that she didn’t send her other kids to daycare and they had much healthier childhoods.
I also started paying more attention to the kids I saw playing outside with their daycare group and noticing that every one had a sniffly nose.
I asked on a mothers group chat about people’s experiences with daycare. Again, the same. Some quotes:
“They do get sick a lot. I started my son at 2.5 and feel he always has something.”
“The limit does not exist.”
“brought home every plague (in first 6mo, Covid, HFM, slapcheek, RSV)”
“They usually say 8-12 illnesses per year. My girls were sick every 2-3 weeks in their first year of daycare”
“My daughter started daycare at 6 months and got sick a ton the first year”
Despite all this, many parents who have the option not to (i.e. they can afford in-home care with a nanny or for one parent to stay home) still choose to send their babies and toddlers to daycare. How come? Surely most well-off adults wouldn’t agree to be ill nonstop in exchange for the monetary savings daycare provides?
Asking around, it seemed like the most common reason given was that parents believed daycare illnesses “built immunity”; that if their babies and toddlers got sick at daycare they’d get less sick later in childhood and so overall it would net out the same. Unfortunately few could point me to any evidence for this but nevertheless passionately defended the view.
The claim that daycare illnesses simply offset childhood and adult illness immediately seemed suspect to me for a number of reasons:
I xeeted about this:
A number of people sent me this link, an alleged “study” from UCL showing that “frequent infections in nursery help toddlers build up immune systems”, authored (of course) by a group of parents who all send their kids to nursery (what the British call daycare).
The link I was sent was actually a UCL press release summarizing a narrative review paper and not a study itself. Narrative reviews are susceptible to selection bias because, unlike systematic reviews or meta-analyses, there’s no pre-registered search protocol or PRISMA-style methodology requiring them to account for all relevant evidence. But I decided to look into the narrative review more, to assess its validity fairly. I got access to the full publication.
Unlike the press release, which ignores these considerations entirely, it does engage with severity and age-related vulnerability, conceding that younger toddlers and babies suffer more from the same illnesses. A section on immunology provides a detailed account of why infants under two are more vulnerable—their immune systems are much less effective at fighting the same infections for a plethora of well-understood reasons. The review also cites a large Danish registry study (Kamper-Jørgensen et al) that reports a 69% higher incidence of hospitalization for acute respiratory infections in under-1s in daycare.
However, these severity findings are integrated into the review’s conclusions and framing in an incredibly biased way. The introduction describes severe outcomes as occurring “in rare cases,” and the conclusions focus on normalizing the burden and advocating for employer understanding. After establishing the immunological basis for why the same infection is more dangerous in a 6-month-old than a 3-year-old, it doesn’t then ask the hard follow-up question: given this, is the pattern of starting daycare at 6–12 months optimal from a child health perspective? Instead, the review frames this timing as a societal given. The Hand Foot and Mouth Disease section is a good example of the review’s handling: it reports that daycare attendance was associated with more severe cases but then immediately offers mitigating interpretation with no evidence—that prolonged hospital stays might reflect parental work constraints rather than genuine severity.
Though the review considers severity, it ignores duration. Their primary metric throughout is episode count. Also, despite discussing a wide variety of pathogens, it doesn’t address which of these infections carry the highest complication rates in infants and toddlers specifically.
Finally, the crucial “Illness now or illness later?” is the paper’s weakest portion. It rests on two primary sources for the compensatory immunity claim:
These are reasonable small studies, but the paper does not cite or engage with the Søegaard et al. 2023 study (International Journal of Epidemiology)—a register-based cohort of over 1 million Danish children followed to age 20, which directly tested and rejected the compensatory immunity hypothesis. Quoting from the study:
We observed 4 599 993 independent episodes of infection (antimicrobial exposure) during follow-up. Childcare enrolment transiently increased infection rates; the younger the child, the greater the increase. The resulting increased cumulative number of infections associated with earlier age at childcare enrolment was not compensated by lower infection risk later in childhood or adolescence.
This is arguably the single most relevant study for the paper’s central “illness now or illness later” question, and it’s three orders of magnitude larger than either study the authors cite. Its absence is hard to explain—it was published in a top epidemiology journal in late 2022 (available online November 2022), well before the review was written.
Accordingly, they hedge their conclusions carefully—“attendance at formal childcare may tip the balance in favor of infection now rather than later”, but their press release ignores any nuance, referring to daycare as an “immune boot camp”.
So overall, the compensatory immunity claim seems very weak and my prior that daycare illness is straight-up bad remains. Parents are citing biased reviews from motivated researchers. We are only beginning to understand the deleterious effects of increased viral load in infants.
I predict that in the future we’ll learn more about the side-effects of increased viral load on intelligence, wellbeing, fatigue etc. The “just the sniffles” mentality is a harmful attitude toward infections that promotes the dismissal of phenomena that substantially impact child and adult wellbeing.
2026-04-13 06:43:50
Once, I went to talk about "curiosity" with @LoganStrohl. They noted "it seems like you have a good handle on 'active curiosity', but you don't really do much diffuse 'open curiosity.'" The convo went on for awhile, and felt very insightful.
(I may not be remembering details of this convo right. Apologies to Logan)
Towards the end of the conversation, I was moving to wrap up and move on. And Logan said "Wait. For this to feel complete to me, I'd like it if we translated this into more explicit TAPs. TAPs or it didn't happen."
You can get a new insight. But, if the insight doesn't translate into some kind of action you're going to do sometimes, there is a sense in which it didn't matter. And people mostly fail to gain new habits. If you're going to have a shot in hell of translating this into action, it's helpful to have some kind of plan.
"TAP" stands for "Trigger Action Pattern", and also "Trigger Action Plan." A TA-Pattern is whatever you currently do by default when faced with a particular trigger. A TA-Plan is an attempt to install a TA-Pattern on purpose.
To turn an insight into a TAP, you need some idea of what it'd mean to translate the insight into a useful action. (I'll touch on this later but mostly it's beyond the scope of this post). But, after that, you will need a...
But, pretty crucial to this going well is:
Example: Sometimes, you talk to your colleague and end up getting in a triggered argument, where you both get kinda aggro at each other and talk past each other.
Maybe you have the insight "oh, maybe I'm the problem", along with "I should maybe try to de-escalate somehow" or "I should do better at listening."
Naive attempt at a TAP:
Mysteriously, you find yourself not remembering to do this in the heat-of-the-moment.
Slightly more sophisticated attempt (after a round of doing some Noticing and curious investigation, which is also beyond scope for this post)
Okay, but then in the heat of the moment, idk you're just so mad, it doesn't feel fair that you have to be the one to de-escalate.
...and then you might find that taking a deep breath doesn't actually help as much as you hoped, or is insufficient. Figuring out how to handle arbitrary problems is, you know, the complete body of rationality tools, including those not-yet discovered.
I think "TAPs or didn't happen" is a bit too strong. Conversations can be useful for reasons other than turning into new habits. But, I recommend thinking of "Turning takeaways into actions" as a thing you might want to do.
While the skill here is basically "fully general rationality", here's a few suggested prompts to get started.
First, you might want a stage of asking:
"What even were the takeaways from this conversation?". You might have had a fun meandering convo. What do you want to remember?
"Why does this takeaway feel important or useful to me?". At first, you might have only a vague inkling of "this feels exciting." Why does it feel exciting?
"When, or in what domains, do I specifically want to remember this takeaway?"
"What would I do differently, in the world where I was taking the takeaway seriously?"
...
I have a horrible confession to make.
I do not remember what TAPs I ended up coming up with.
I do think I ended up incorporating the concepts into my life, and this routed at least somewhat through the TAPs. Here is my attempted reconstruction of what happened at the time:
In the conversation about curiosity, some things that came up were that I feel like "open curiosity" takes too long (compared to directly tackling questions in an active, goal-driven way". I feel like I'd have to boot up in a whole new mode of being to make it work, and... idk I just imagine this taking years to pay off.
I nonetheless have some sense that there's a kind of intellectual work that openly curious people do, that's actually harder to do with active curiosity.
A thing that came up is the move off... just noticing that some things are more interesting than other things. Even if something doesn't immediately feel actively fascinating, there's a move you can make, to notice when there's a diff between how interesting one thing feels, vs another thing. And, pay extra attention to the more interesting thing, and what's interesting about it. Overtime this can cultivate curiosity as a kind of muscle.
The TAP version of this is:
And, relatedly:
...
May your good conversations live on in your actions.
2026-04-13 04:47:29
There's an adage from programming in C++ which goes something like "Yes, you write C, but you imagine the machine code as you do." I assumed this was bullshit, that nobody actually does this. Am I supposed to imagine writing the machine code, and then imagine imagining the binary? and then imagine imagining imagining the transistors?
Oh and since I don't actually use compiled languages, should I actually be writing Python, then imagining the C++ engine, and so on?
Then one day, I was vibe-coding, and I realized I was writing in English and thinking in Python. Or something like it. I wasn't actually imagining every line of Python, but I was imagining the structure of the program that I was describing to Claude, and adding in extra details to shape that structure.
This post is actually about having sane conversations with philosophy bros at the pub.
People like to talk in English (or other human languages) because our mouths can't make sounds in whatever internal neuralese our brains use. Sometimes, like in mathematics, we can make the language of choice trivially isomorphic to the structures that we're talking about. But most of the time we can't do that.
Consider the absolute nonsense white horses paradox, where "a white horse is not a horse" is read both as the statement:
And the phrase "a white horse is a horse" is read as the statement:
I often think in a language of causal graphs. English isn't very good at talking about causal graphs. It doesn't have individual words for "A contains the same information to B", "A is the same node as B", "A is an abstraction over B", "A is a node which is causally upstream of B".
I remember talking about "consciousness" with a philosophy guy at the pub once. I think I said something like "A certain structure of computation causes consciousness" meaning "Consciousness is an label applied to certain computational structures", but which he interpreted as "The presence of a certain computational structure is a node upstream of consciousness". This caused immense confusion.
I call the problems here "beetle problems"
Wittgenstein proposed a thought experiment. Suppose you have a society where:
In this case, the meaning of the word "beetle" is entirely socially constructed. Wittgenstein was exaggerating here: if I talk to you, and you do something with your beetle (dirty jokes aside) and report the results, I can get some information about your beetle, based on what you say back to me. The beetle is causally entangled with us both. It's just not a very efficient way of talking about things.
Even if we both have identical beetles, it might take us a while to get them oriented the same way round, what I call an antenna, you might call a leg, what I call a wing-case you call a carapace. And so on.
To unfairly single out an example. I personally find this particularly salient when talking to people in the Oxford EA/longtermist cluster. I know they're smart people, who can put together an argument, but they've developed a language I just cannot penetrate. It takes a long time for me to figure out what on earth they mean. Ohh, you have your beetle upside down compared to mine.
Even worse, I think a lot of people don't actually think in terms of causal graphs the way I do. This comes up when I try to read pieces on moral realism. When someone brings up a stance-independent reason to do something, I simply cannot map this onto any concept which exists in my mental language. What do you mean your beetle has fur and claws and keeps going "meow"? Are you sure?
Uhh... I don't have many. Beetle problems take a while to figure out. I once got feedback on an essay test that said "Your ideas seemed confused." and I thought "Man, your draft seemed confused!". I don't think I could have done much better, without spending time in person hashing out the beetle problems.
It might have helped to have a better conception of beetle problems, though. I could at least have pointed it out. Perhaps in future I'll come back with a wonderful beetle-solving problem.
Editor's note: this post was written as part of Doublehaven (unaffiliated with Inkhaven).
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2026-04-13 04:15:20
One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to accidentally drop your morale through standard rationalist life-optimization.
It's easy to optimize for wellbeing and miss out on the factors which affect morale, especially if you're working on something important, like not having everyone die. One example is working at an office that feeds you three meals per day. This seems optimal: eating is nice, and cooking is effort. Obvious choice.
But morale doesn't come from having nice things. Consider a rich teenager. He gets basically every material need satisfied: maids clean, chefs cook, his family takes him on holiday four times a year. What happens when this kid comes up against something really difficult in school? He probably doesn't push through.
"Aha", I hear you say. "That kid has never faced adversity. Of course he's not going to handle it well." Ok, suppose he gets kicked in the shins every day and called a posh twat by some local youths, but still goes into school. That's adversity, will that work? Will he have higher morale now? I don't think so.
Now, what about if he plays the cello in the school orchestra. Or he plays for the school football team. I think that might work, even if he's not the best kid in the school at either of those things. It's not about having nice things or having bad things, it's about something else
Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort. Cooking your own dinner is basically microdosing returns to investing effort: if you put in effort, you eat steak frites with peppercorn sauce. If you don't, you get eat chicken and rice.
It doesn't have to be cooking, basically any hobby works like this, as long as you get returns to effort. It might be art, or weightlifting, or whatever. You just need to keep reminding your brain that effort has a purpose.
This is especially important when you work in an area (like not having everyone die) where the returns on effort are hard to come by. Good software engineering looks like solving a PR in a day or so (or whatever you people do). Good alignment research might mean chasing a concept for weeks, only to have it fail.
The early stages of dating can also induce low morale. Sometimes, things just fall apart due to random incompatibilities which aren't your fault. Long-term relationships are much less like this: you can just do things (plan dates with your partner and enjoy their company).
John Wentworth has written about a minor depression presenting as extremely low morale amongst rationalist types. I don't think you should wait until it gets that bad before you improve your morale. I think you should think about it now.
Morale doesn't just matter on an individual level, it also matters on the scale of whole societies. In this case, it doesn't just matter whether an individual gets rewarded for effort, it matters whether they see others rewarded for effort---and whether or not they see others punished for a lack of effort.
It's a truism that the most effective way to kill morale is to reward lazy or incompetent employees. You can do one better if you reward active sabotage. The harm of small but visible crimes (like fare-dodging on public transport) is, in part, the damage to the morale of everyone around.
There should be a hack for societal morale, though, and it's economic growth. People generally put some amount of effort into their work. If they can afford a better car each year, they'll attribute that to their own grit, and not an increase in the productivity of a Chinese factory.
Unfortunately, there's a twist in the twist. People are really awful at understanding nominal inflation. If the price goes up a bit (even if their wages more than match it) the price increase just feels like a random, unfair, morale-reducing loss. I conjecture this is a big contributor to the American Vibecession.
2026-04-13 04:00:16
I live with five friends in a big house, and two things I’ve done in it on this particular Sunday are hide 156 easter eggs all around, and reach a tentative joint decision on the allocation of four of its rooms.
These tasks are delightful to me for a reason they have in common, and from which I hope to gesture at extremely far reaching conclusions.
A room usually seems like a simple thing to me—a big box, with some smaller mostly boxish objects and holes in it. Each of those things also usually seems simple: a cupboard is a box-shaped hole, with a movable thin-box-shaped front, which has hinges (the most complicated part, but in this picture their only qualities are letting flat surfaces rotate around fixed edges). Sometimes a cupboard has shelves, which are like planes breaking up the space.
In this picture, hiding easter eggs well is hard! Like, I could put one in the cupboard? On the top shelf? Or the bottom shelf! They’ll never find it there!
These are not good hiding places.
In order to hide easter eggs well, you need to see a lot of detail that you were abstracting away in the simple picture. The weird ridge along the back of the cupboard, or a wire looping under a lip around the front, or brackets holding up the shelves that have spaces in them where something could be wedged, or a rogue curl of onion peel in a back corner.
Here is one of my favorite hiding spots—can you see the egg?
Answer below:
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I like it because a cushion so much seems like an inflated square in my mind—yes, with some sort of pattern, and perhaps somewhat worn out, but I don’t expect a pattern + worn out = you can hide a substantial solid object on the surface of it.
Here is an especially empty room (one of the ones in need of allocation), currently known as ‘the puzzle room’:
I hid ten eggs in it (probably two visible in this picture), and it took a while for people to find them all, which seemed to aggressively help some of the egg-seekers receive a similar experience of space containing details that are somehow really hard to see even if you try.
It would be one thing to have a kind of ‘level of detail dial’ that you could read and consciously turn up and down the level as you see fit. But an interesting thing about watching people search for easter eggs is that they can’t necessarily choose which things they are abstracting out, or fully tell how ‘carefully’ they are looking. You can put eggs in plain sight of them, and they think they are looking carefully, but just don’t see the egg. By the time a person has perceived anything at all, they have simplified it. You can’t just look at all the raw detail, and check it for eggs.
Besides not being able to control which abstractions you use, it seems to me now that an adversary (such as an egg-hider) can guess and exploit your habits of abstracting. Among the details of the cupboard, even if you are looking carefully at the shape of the sides, you might still miss the onion peel, because it’s random dirt, and you are examining the cupboard. That’s another nice thing about the ragged cushion—if you habitually round off worn-out things to what they are meant to be, it’s hard to see the detail of how it is falling apart, and thus the egg.
In another possible example, one of our bathrooms has a ‘bathroom!’ label on it, which I expect my housemates are used to seeing and ignoring, and visitors perhaps also tune out on their way to look for eggs inside what they have already determined to be a bathroom. I put an egg behind it, held by the super-post-it-note glue, which was a pretty unsubtle disruption to the smoothness of the sign, but this egg wasn’t found until it was accidentally knocked out at the very end.
Allocating rooms seems like it should be a simple thing—there are only a few options! Like, if you have four rooms, and Alice and Bob each basically need a place to sleep and to work, then it seems like you should be able to consider the 24 possibilities and be done. But actually (at least in houses I live in) what exact spaces are the ‘rooms’ in question is often more ambiguous than you might think, and what set of activities will be expected or people will be owners also contains many more possibilities than I see at first.
I’m more confused about how this happens with rooms, but I have twice in this house had the experience of mulling over such a question for what seems like unreasonably long, and coming up with new ideas we hadn’t thought of or taken seriously, and ending up with a satisfactory arrangement. This time, our tentative plan involves one of the bedrooms also being a recording studio, and there being three total rooms with beds in among two people. Which all feels very simple in retrospect, but I have been haplessly ideating about this for weeks.
It again feels kind of magical and wholesome to stare at the simple things long enough and well enough to see them more richly, in ways that you couldn’t just choose to, and for this to solve your problem.
This kind of situation - an abstraction you take for granted that makes a problem hard, and gaps in the abstraction that let you do better, is a classic way to construct a puzzle. For instance (from Reddit):
A thing that has annoyed me for a long time in talking to people about AI risk is that they often do it in very abstract terms—”we need safety progress relative to capabilities progress”, or “such and such will get a decisive strategic advantage and there will be value lockin”—and then expect to be correct, like pretty confidently!
I love abstractions quite a lot compared to most people (I once scored 100% on the relevant axis of the Myers-Briggs test!) but I’m also expecting abstractions to have relevant frayed edges all over the place. And this is particularly relevant if you are trying to solve problems and are struggling to see solutions.
In particular, for instance, I often hear that it is pointless or silly to try not to build really dangerous AI technology because “it’s a race”. But before you give up on preventing this disaster, I really want you to spend at least as much attention seeing the details of the world below the level of “arms race” than my boyfriend spent peering at our laundry machines before he found the egg there.
2026-04-13 00:16:57
In a recent rationalist unconference multiple people recommended me Carolyn Elliott's Existential Kink, one of them even postulating that it would be useful for me specifically. So I was really surprised to open up a rather generic self-help book, with the author gloating about her success, and generally just advertising the book for the first chapter. Professional advice-givers tend to, in my experience, reach only the audience that self-selects for a certain self-help format. The name containing the word kink could have already rung alarm bells had I been awake; it's just the sort of correctly-toned provocation that makes such people pick up these books [1].
As required for any self-respecting book on anything even slightly resembling philosophy or life advice, an ancient story has to be invoked quite early. Fitting to the nature of the book, the prologue begins with an author's retelling of the Rape of Persephone. It briefly covers the story [2], and then dives straight into astrology, and somehow even worse, metaphorical alchemy. It suffices to say that I haven't ingested such utter balderdash since reading well cherry-picked GPT-2 outputs. For instance, the word "magic" is used for your own thoughts affecting anything, especially yourself.
While I appreciate the condescending tone that the book sometimes reaches for, fondly reminding me of Sadly, Porn, this particular one in the intro was almost enough for me to stop reading [3]:
I feel this sense of shameful wrongness at times. Maybe you don’t feel it at all. Maybe you’re free—in which case, kudos! You are very welcome to close this book and go about your enlightened life, my friend.
Fortunately, I had already decided to read the book. Sadly, the condescension never lasts long and changes quickly to what I'd describe as fake-excited [4] authoritative tone. It also continues gloating and promising good outcomes. Every paragraph of actual advice seems to be surrounded by at least three made of fluff. It also keeps inventing fancy words or loaning them from other woo fandoms, including psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in order to sound more sophisticated. Ok ok, I'll attempt to get over the writing flavor and focus on the actual content from now on... after this one example [5]:
Even the most rigorous scientific experiment can only be experienced subjectively. There’s simply no world outside of our subjective awareness.
And the point is? Please? Get to it some day? Solipsism was a funny joke fifteen years ago.
Two pages later, finally, there's the statement I've been waiting for:
Okay, so that’s some far-out metaphysical stuff, what the hell does that mean, in practical terms?
If you expected to find something to address the question above, you'll be sorely disappointed.
The book consists of a couple of lessons to introduce the reader to the core ideas, including the basic meditation technique. Then it lists some anecdotes on how it has worked with some of the author's clients. After this there are 13 exercises for experiencing and experimenting with the methodology. And then more anecdotes. The book ends with a Q&A section, which actually addresses some of my concerns.
One of the core principles in the book goes like this:
[...] contrary to some airy Law of Attraction notions, we rarely get what we consciously want (unless we do the kind of deep solve work addressed in this book), but we always get what we unconsciously want.
I've had the exact opposite experience. I seem to eventually end up getting everything that I consciously want, but still end up feeling like something's missing. Maybe I'm just interpreting this wrong? That said, I feel I'm pretty well on the same page with myself about things that I want, compared to others around me [6].
To engage on a metaphysical level: There's an interesting theory, which I first got from reading Yudkowsky's High Challenge: Perhaps I'm currently living in a simulation with optimal difficulty level for my own enjoyment. It feels true quite often and is, of course, completely unfalsifiable. But it's one of my nice mental frames to look difficulties from, and resonates quite well with the book's message.
You can integrate and evolve those previously unconscious desires of yours for a partner who cheats, mopes, drinks, fails to wash dishes, or believes in Flat Earth theories—whatever your particular kink amongst the thousands possible happens to be.
If your partner cheats on you, that's exactly what you enjoy? If you break up with them because they cheated on you, then you wanted to be a person who has broken up with a cheater?
Yeah. Super useful. This is totally the key to fulfilling relationships. Oh wait:
At such a point of recognition and integration, you either lose all interest in the present relationship and end it gracefully, freeing yourself to go find a better one, or you find that you, yourself, your partner, and the relationship as a whole, evolve in a fascinating way.
Ok so... the model contradicts itself. Even better.
The core of the book consists some mediatative techniques. Perhaps they could be useful. I'll try the basic meditation practice with one of my own problems to see if it works. I'll need to pick something I don't like. Something where "having is evidence of wanting" rings false on first intuition. Maybe this one...
I'm somewhat overweight. I don't like it, for both aesthetic and instrumental reasons. It's quite easy to point out at the supposed reasons for why I'm like this. Firstly, I like food, and through some long periods of depression that was my primary source of enjoyment, along with videogames that surely didn't help much either. Secondly, I have hard time differentiating between anxiety and hunger, and I get stressed easily.
I don't think there's any perverse self-sabotage going on here, just conflicting wants and a compromise that follows the path of least resistance. Sure, looking like an almost-rotting cave troll can be a nice source self-deprecating humor, but that's of limited use. Perhaps I have a secret desire to feel terrible all the time? Nope; I think Groon the Walker got it right in Erogamer: this is a blight upon earth and getting rid of it would be almost purely positive. "You're not really trying so it doesn't work for you!" Perhaps you should attempt running across the barrier between platforms nine and ten on King's Cross station?
Perhaps we could look a bit deeper? The overeating is self-sabotage that I do, because...? Maybe I use it to uphold my class clown personality, which owned that bit early on? Or maybe I use it to appease the expectations of my childhood bullies, none of whom I've seen in years? Perhaps I like people having a negative halo effect on me? I don't think I can find the theories far-fetched enough to fit here. No, I self-sabotage because my evolution-misguided brain wants more calories.
A perceptive author might notice that avoiding the physical exercise might actually count here. I hate receiving praise for anything healthy [7], and this was big part of why I was for a long time really anxious about this. However, I'm again confused why I'm supposed to enjoy that instead of getting over it, as I mostly have.
Perhaps the author just has a Meta-Existential Kink, which makes them want to think that everything bad happens because they subconsciously want bad things to happen to them?
For some other problems, the answers are much cleaner.
But if we’re talking about endemic human problems like war or racism or child abuse, odds are it’s more of a collective unconscious issue. So war and abuse and all the challenging stuff that transpires in the world result from millennia of unintegrated, repressed, denied shadow desires of individuals conglomerated into collective forces.
My first thought is that perhaps this has some interesting connections to mistake theory?
My second thought is that this is easily refutable [8]. Take cancer, for instance. I fortunately don't have cancer [9]. If I get one, my reaction will not and should not be "this is exactly what I wanted". My take is "fuck cancer", end of discussion. I'll also accept "it is what it is" and even "at least now I don't have to worry about many of those other things" if you can really deeply believe that, and, grudgingly, "you play with the cards that you're dealt". If (mentally) masturbating to the idea appeals to you, feel free to, but that's not my thing.
The problems that the book describes solving seems to be almost purely social, consisting of shame and guilt. The solutions in the anecdotes seem to just magically appear from outside when the main character decides to absolve themselves. Being ok with the situation itself isn't enough for any of them. They still need the world to accommodate them, often with deus ex machina -like fashion. This seems to go directly against the primary claim of the book, learning to enjoy the misery. There's a story on how Louisa learns to be content with their old car. And then buys a new one. In another story, June tries to accept that it's ok with missing a flight, then realizes that she'd miss her mother, and literally manifests boarding passes with wishful thinking [10].
The people in anecdotes are also all women. I find this complementary to my interpretation of Jordan Peterson's gender roles take, namely that of losers, men lack a spine, and women lack agency itself. I do not endorse this, which is why it's rather interesting to see it here, as a literary trope if nothing else. [11]
Then again, why would a self-help book include stories where the model doesn't work? Disclaimers? Statistics? What would be the point?
In general, the book is very femininity-coded and that might be part of why I feel so difficult to identify with it. I don't relax with baths, chamomile tea and crying. I relax with sauna, violence and engineering. I'm not part of the intended audience, as I don't like self-help books that much anyway. Also, in the Q&A there's a warning that depression [12] or asexuality [13] likely make the book's methods ineffective.
I try the next exercise:
Close your eyes for a moment and feel into your current state.
Are you holding any resentments? Judgments of yourself or other people? Worries? Criticisms about the state of the world? Complaints about your body, your work, your life?
And the answer is simply no.
I made an attempt to try most of these exercises. Results were not good, but then again I've always had really hard time easing into stuff like this, and I find it likely that this is my personal skill issue [14]. Fortunately the exercise #13 contains instructions for approximately the same problem. Unfortunately it seems even more fake than everything I've seen before, so I'll just quote the primary segment here:
Here’s how it works. Try leveraging your dread by saying this to yourself:
“Oh no, if only there was something I could do to stop the inevitable arrival of this magnificent new partner in my life. This is so awful. [...] terrifying fate of being completely fulfilled in love.” Ahhhhh, can you feel the honesty there? Refreshing, isn’t it? Because there is some shadowy part of you that’s disgusted and miserable at the idea of fresh new love, isn’t there?
No actually I cannot see anything resembling honesty here and I doubt anyone else can either [15].
Irrational levels of self-confidence are certainly useful. This might be one path there.
Bootstrapping feedback loops is sometimes easier with a little bit of self-deception. Sustaining them indefinitely shouldn't. Perhaps the author already thought of this and realized that anyone that fixes their problems like this eventually confronts the truth? I don't think [16] so. In any case, there's no need to get fully delusional.
And sure you can be "turned-on" about anything all the time.
But just like with regular old arrogance, that sometimes leads to results that you do not endorse. Perhaps permanent physical injuries or prison time are also enjoyable with the right mindset, but neither helps you achieve anything in life. Perhaps you can learn to be turned on about being a loser in all senses of the word. I have values higher than my own happiness. I don't want to feel permanent fulfillment. I'm content with not being content. I want more. I have no goals beyond the joy of the journey. Quite contradictory, I know.
Why I'm writing this post in such a defensive tone? No idea. Really? I do have an idea. The book would say that I'm going it to protect my sense of identity. Correct! Next accusation please.
My understanding is that the book does a Jungian take on this. Sadly, Porn, which I mostly contrast it within my head, adopts the Lacanian perspective instead. Both books take a weirdly sexual primary lens on the subject, and hide their points behind layers of obscurity to make you think about it all. EK claims that it's ok to be terrible and it's there to help you. SP simply shouts that you're terrible, you're a disappointment, and maybe you ought to do something about it if you weren't such an unagentic disappointment. I vastly prefer the latter.
It's one of the worst books I've ever read. That said, I did read it. It provoked some thoughts. I definitely wasn't most useless book I've read.
It might just be that I'm not that much into kink, or submission, or masochism. Or sex. Or astrology, spiritualism, solipsism, empowerment, soft-fuzzy-feelings, or woo. Or fancy words. I'm not a "nasty freaky thing", to the best of my knowledge, in any of the senses Elliott describes, nor do I want to be one. I rarely feel particularly guilty. Shame sometimes limits my actions more than I'd wish on reflection, but even that seems mostly reasonable and useful.
Perhaps focusing more on the sadistic instead of masochistic perspective would have been more relatable. It would also have resonated better with Nietzschean master morality that the book seems to somewhat half-heartedly endorse. Or maybe having gotten into Lacanian psychoanalysis just filled the slot where Jungian model of mind would fit.
The book confuses cause and effect; learning to think in a particular way doesn't mean you were always like that. It speaks in absolutes and defends this an absurd amount. It just states things that seem obviously incorrect and seems to be content with it. It never explicitly owns any of this, which I both like and don't like.
An older version me would have thought that the people helped by this kind of thing are very horribly broken in some incomprehensibly twisted ways. Nowadays, I'm of the opinion that we're all broken and it mostly matters what you do with that. So, if that works for you, go for it. Some of the stuff described would probably work for me, weren't I feeling so disdainful of it. The reverse psychology affirmations, at least, sound genuinely useful.
I also appreciate the subtle Nietzsche references, at least. Like this one:
All nonhumble reactions to the human, all-too-human thirst for power have the effect of warping that natural, beautiful drive into numbness that steamrolls over other people instead of inspiring and uplifting them like genuine, epic power can.
Of course the book also says that you're literally Hitler if you think that your desire for power is what makes you evil.
Perhaps it's just all outside my Overton window? Is my aversion of woo (and sex) just social group membership signaling? Who knows. It's still who I am. Woo feels silly. It's for people who cannot take joy in the merely real due to some hangup. Likely I have the opposite hangup. We can both feel smug at having a superior viewpoint, nice [17].
I'm no stranger to silver linings. I also sometimes make things awful for a while just to keep them more interesting.
Perhaps I had already internalized the core lessons from other sources, so there wasn't that much novelty in there? Or perhaps I didn't get it at all. I'm also really good at inventing intellectual (and thus incorrect) explanations on why I do or want things.
I can extract some of the core lessons from the text. I'm not sure if that's actually useful. As EK consistently demonstrates, you can interpret any text however you want and produce whatever lessons you feel like producing. For instance, seen through a rationalist lens, the text contains themes like Yudkowskian heroic responsibility and "but first, losing must be thinkable". From another lens you could interpret it to talk about moral nihilism combined and Nietzschean master morality.
Other lessons the book completely inverts, primarily about enduring pain. Pain has a purpose: it engraves "this was a mistake" in you. This is a valuable tool. Yes, sometimes we overdo it. The book claims we always overdo it. It is wrong. When you touch a hot stove, the impulse to pull away your hand is useful. If you start masturbating to the pain instead, your hand will be less useful tomorrow.
The author has nothing to protect and it shows. Of course feeling guilty or humiliated is useless if it's about your own insecurities. But if you have, say, children to feed, then feeling guilty for not succeeding that is what guilt is for. Is it always productive? No. But it's there for a reason [18].
They've found a useful tool and then jumped to thinking it solves all the problems. This is not wisdom [19]. You can solve computer problems with a hammer too, you just won't have a computer afterwards. The author suppresses their agency to endure the pain. That's a valid strategy. That's also a tragedy.
Not every reason is an excuse, even though most of them might be.
Instead of this book, I'd recommend books that do not force the self-help format. The Elephant in the Brain, or perhaps Sadly, Porn, provide far more accurate [20] and entertaining [20:1] commentary than this one. Or if you want fiction instead, try Erogamer, although fair warning, it's a bit slow. These will not be easy, motivational, authoritative books. You'll have to do your own thinking. That's the kind of pain I enjoy.
For instance, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*uck by Mark Manson fits the same pattern. ↩︎
I recommend reading the actual story somewhere else and comparing yourself what's missing. For instance, Pluto (Hades) is an uncle of Persephone. This kind of stuff was rather typical among Greek gods so perhaps it's a rather understandable omission. This paper contains interesting analysis of the text, but is largely irrelevant here as the story is just there to invoke the ancient myth trope and is discarded quickly. ↩︎
Read: it was a good provocation. ↩︎
My excitement-faking detector is broken/oversensitive. Known issue. ↩︎
Unlike Elliott, who tries to limit their whining to the opening section, I simply cannot. ↩︎
I have no idea if that's actually true, but I feel like that. ↩︎
This would require another post to explain, and especially since I don't understand it too well myself. ↩︎
Read: Only a delusional loser could actually write this and believe it. Or perhaps it's just a brilliant ragebait? ↩︎
As far as I know. ↩︎
Confirmation bias says hello! ↩︎
Oh no, another misogyny amplifier, now I'll need to spend some time reading flat earth stuff or incel forums to keep my misanthropy in balance. ↩︎
Of course, the book's answer is therapy and psychedelics. ↩︎
It doesn't even consider this possibility of not feeling pleasurable sexual sensations from any other lens than trauma, which would also explain a lot. ↩︎
Naturally I just think I'm a better person because of this, for some obscure reasons. ↩︎
Of course I don't actually doubt that, the space of human minds is vast beyond my imagination. ↩︎
In both senses of the word. ↩︎
Woo's a mental crutch, losers! ↩︎
Mr. Chesterton says hello! ↩︎
I understand that sometimes, when explaining a model, it makes sense to discard nuance for a while. This doesn't mean you should say that the nuance doesn't exist. ↩︎
