Third hand anecdote re: your footnote: a good friend of mine has a mother who she says is a narcissist, and the behaviour she describes is "can't stand the thought she might have flaws, evidence of a flaw is brutally suppressed, reacted to with anger, blame, denial, gaslighting and displacement, and if a thought like 'I am not perfect, specifically this is a way that I am not the best/someone else is better than me' does get through the defenses, it results in a mental collapse and period of weeks filled with only negative thoughts, expressed to others to try and build back up her sense of self worth by getting people to say she's wrong about the negative thoughts". It's like this person can't occupy the mental territory "I'm OK, mostly good" it's either "I am fantastic" or "I am terrible".
I would be unsurprised if different people exhibiting narcissistic behaviour had different reasons for doing so, and some just straight up think unreasonably highly of themselves and are resistant to evidence to the contrary, without it being a defense mechanism, while others were like the anecdote above.
Interested in a regular version: yes.
Substack: iffy. I find it's optimizing for engagement enough that I'll go through cycles of spending more time there than I intend, then taking a break, and every time I go into the app rather than just reading emails of the people I have subscribed to, I regret it because of wasted time. They have also started making it really easy to subscribe but substantially harder to unsubscribe. This was not true a year ago, IIRC.
Clarification: my position is that our current level of understanding of how the economy works can, for the most part, be grasped by most people with some effort, rather than being an impenetrable mystery. Not that everyone actually does understand the economy because it's super easy, and certainly not that if they did we wouldn't have economic problems. None of what I said is incompatible with what you said.
It would be nice if understanding how things worked automatically led to things working better, but this is not the case.
A simple example where understanding an underlying problem doesn't solve the problem: I understand fairly well why I'm tempted to eat too many potato chips, and why this is bad for me, and what I could do instead. And yet, sometimes I still eat more potato chips than I intend.
A more complicated case: a few people making a lot of money, while most people's lives get better due to specialization and trade (counting the world economy as a whole, not necessarily within a particular village, or country) is what one would predict given an understanding of how the economy works. There are of course many complications in the real world that aren't captured in economic models, which often make simplifying assumptions like "people are rational". In the real world, people do things like eat potato chips a nonzero number of times.
Oops - I realized you may have intended a different meaning than I assumed, on a re-read.
Separately, my experience has been that many people think they can't understand things when they can. The sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in a world that's too complicated for them is out of proportion to how complicated the world actually is. I'm thinking of a specific example of a good friend of mine who is clearly smart enough she could do lots of things, and made a point of telling me in the recent past that my willingness to go out and try and do things was inspiring to her, and she asked if I thought she might be able to do similarly, and I was like "obviously yes, there is no actual barrier stopping you, anything I've done that you're pointing at, you also could have done, possibly better than I did".
I don't think the powerlessness many people feel in the face of complexity is a result of them hitting an intellectual capacity ceiling after trying to understand a complex topic, recognizing they've hit their ceiling, and stopping. I think it's often a case of thinking "this is too complicated for me" and not even trying. My best guess (just a guess) is that many people do feel like only people who are smarter than them can do certain things (like making laws, understanding computers, understanding what makes the economy go), when this isn't actually true. Our society does seem to inculcate in its members the idea that certain things are only for super-smart people to do, and whoever you are, you are not smart enough to do an impactful thing. I also suspect this may be load-bearing, in that if everyone who could tried to push things in the direction they thought they should go instead of saying "that's beyond my ability", we'd have a more chaotic world.
EDIT: On a re-read, I may have misunderstood a key line. I translated "Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics" as "Most people can't understand complex topics", whereas you could have intended "Most people do not hope/believe that they can understand complex topics" while leaving the question of whether this is a correct viewpoint unanswered. I'm leaving what I wrote as-is, but flagging that it might have been (confirmed with author: I misunderstood) a response to a misunderstanding on my part.
This post generates in me a strong urge to write a counterpoint post. Sorry this is long.
You start by saying, basically, most people find the world complicated and confusing and don't expect to understand things. The repeated use of "most people" without providing evidence that these are attributes that plausibly do apply to most people raises a red flag for me, it pattern matches to "most people are dumb", but let's let that pass, and assume you're right that most people are confused by the world much of the time, and don't feel like coming to greater understanding is a thing they could do. That may be true, seems plausible. But then you say this:
Most people have no hope of understanding complex topics.
No. Strongly disagree. "Most people don't understand X" is a thing I could accept, and "most people feel like they can't understand X, for many Xes" seems like it could be true, but "most people can't understand X" is usually false, with only rare exceptions. Things are complex, yes, but complex on the level of "it takes some study to get the basics, but people of average intelligence could do it if they chose to" not "this is an eldritch deity unto you, you are not a high-IQ priest, abandon all hope of understanding it".
I think there may be an important difference between how you're modeling getting to the point of "I understand this topic", and how I model getting to that point. And that became clear right near the line above, where you said:
Thus, for them, experts are not people to whom we conveniently defer in order to save time. It’s not like they think they could read the state of the art of a field (most have never heard “SOTA”!) and build their own justified opinion.
You seem to be thinking of "I understand this topic" as equivalent to "I have reached the state of the art in this topic", and presenting an implicit dichotomy between "I think I can get to a state of the art understanding on this topic" and "I have no clue, this topic is indistinguishable from magic for me". Whereas I think there's a lot of middle ground, and reaching the state of the art is not required to have useful understanding that turns a topic from eldritch mystery to "I understand basically how this works, it doesn't seem mysterious, there are some topics around the edges of our knowledge that are still being researched, but the basics that everyone agrees on, or the major schools of thought, are ______". And once you reach that point, people will (in my experience) start treating you like some kind of expert even though you are most definitely not. But you will be in a middle ground, where you can explain to people with basically 0 knowledge on a topic what some of the experts are saying.
As an example, let's take computer science. It may feel mysterious to most people why, when they touch a spot on their screen, the phone does a thing and things change. But, this is not a mystery that is beyond the ken of your average person. Within a finite and manageable number of hours, I could explain from the ground up some basic things like what Boolean logic is, what a logic gate is, show someone some assembly language code and get them to agree that yes it's plausible the assembly language is made of the logic components we discussed earlier, show them a higher-level programming language and get them to agree that yes, a few things like a conditional or a for loop can be implemented in the assembly language, and then show them a function that connects to a touch event... and then they understand how when they press a button their phone does a thing. They're not at the forefront of human knowledge in computer science by any stretch, but it's no longer mysterious.
Or let's take the economy. It seems mysterious to many. But it's not actually mysterious in the way unanswered questions in physics are. Some parts of it, like stock market prices, are anti-inductive, but the concept of something that is anti-inductive can be explained fairly easily, and with a few university classes (undergrad, doesn't require exceptional intelligence or talent, just a few months of effort) you can understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. Yes, economists are tinkering around the edges and expanding our knowledge, but all you have to do is listen to this song, and then figure out what each line means, and you've got the basics: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek - The Original Economics Rap Battle!
Which is like, a lot to ask of someone who's got a busy life, but definitely not cosmic-horror impossible. Because this seemed like something lots of people found mysterious, I wrote a thing to point friends to which explained it in layperson terms. Myron's Musings : The Economy. It's not the best, but it's an OK starting point where I can say to a friend "go read this thing I wrote and then we can chat and you'll get the economy better than you do now".
Or housing, which is a subcase of governance more generally and the insights generalize: Trying to make it so that the broad forces that have changed things so it's harder to build now than it used to be are different, is a bit beyond the average person's circle of control. But "and so I give up and rot" is the wrong response. If you want your town or city to build more housing, that is a thing you can make happen. Because your city council is just a few people, the city plan and zoning regulations are things you can read and understand, documents created by humans who had ideas of what a good document on this topic would look like, and you can talk to the current custodian of that document about what a better version would be. Or you can like, look on the city's website, see when the meetings about building things are happening, and go to them, because they're typically open to the public. You will quickly find the people at those meetings are just regular people, not priests with special knowledge. But at the same time, approximately nobody does this, and so if you do it you'll be at the rarefied heights of expertise relative to most people, even though you haven't done anything that's actually intellectually challenging.
We can change this.
This requires a lot of work. The work needed is comparable in scope to the Scientific Revolution, the era of the Enlightenment, or the rise of Formalism.
We will need to transcend our superstitious understanding of the Modern Eldritch Deities. We will need to build a mechanistic understanding of politics, governance, morals and collective action.
Let’s get there step by step. And the first step to defeating the enemy is to name it.
If we don’t do this, we’re condemned to getting screw over by it, never understanding what is happening to us.
I don't actually think the change that's required here is comparable in scope to the scientific revolution. it's a change in attitude, from "the world is confusing, and I can't understand it or do anything about it", to "the world is currently confusing to me in some ways, but is made of understandable parts, and I can understand them if I try, and then push on metaphorical levers that will make changes". And luckily, it has never been easier to learn about complex topics. Back when I took my econ courses, you pretty much had to go sit in a classroom and pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get that knowledge, but now many places put online courseware out there for free or very cheap.
Why I was motivated to write this big long thing (again, apologies), is because of the "most people have no hope of understanding complex topics" line. That understanding of the possibilities open to most people is threaded through the rest of the post, and if it's correct, then I would think the we can change this line is probably false. Either people have a hope of understanding the world around them, and we should communicate that fact to them, or they don't, and I guess they're doomed.
What I really want to know is:
- Conditional on mutual interest, what are the relative frequencies of these two kinds of flirtatious escalation?
- Are there particular settings/cultures/etc in which those frequencies are very different?
Preamble: The below assumes interactions between a heterosexual man and woman, can't comment usefully on other scenarios.
I have no idea about the answer to the first question, but would bet serious money that the answer to the second question is yes.
The reason why, in previous conversations, I had said I personally wouldn't escalate much without some positive response from the person I'm attempting to flirt with, is because of my personal ethics and expectations around social conventions, which I assume are culturally influenced. I am strongly averse to being pushy about sexual interest, and expect the most likely response if my interest is not reciprocated to be the equivalent of silence - not giving some definitive indication to me the equivalent of "I'm not interested in you, please stop" because that risks a very negative reaction (from a generic male, not from me specifically, but the person I'm flirting with in this hypothetical has no way of knowing what I'm like, and would understandably prioritize safety over clear communication). My way of analyzing a response is, if I get no response, that means stop, if I get a negative response that also means stop, only if I get a positive response of some kind is it OK to continue.
Obviously, this is not the only way the ambiguous signal of "no response" could be interpreted. In a culture where it is strongly expected that women do not express sexual interest of any kind because that is shameful, the dynamic would necessarily be different, because a non-response is the expected response even when the woman being flirted with would like to indicate interest. Similarly, if the social expectation was that if someone would prefer I stop flirting they will say so, I would feel more comfortable interpreting a non-response as "it is OK to continue". I imagine there might be a culture where that expectation exists, although I don't know of a specific example.
Also relevant: I expect (due to gender stereotypes confirmed by conversations with women around me, and comparing their responses to my own under the assumption that I'm not too different from most men) women to be more attuned to social subtleties and subtexts than men. Basically, their sensitivity to potential alternate interpretations of the meaning of words or actions that are not surface-level obvious is higher. As a result, I expect them to be able to pick up my indication of interest fairly easily, as long as I'm being not-particularly-subtle by my own estimation. What I'm doing will be plausibly deniable, but still likely clear. I also expect women to do things they think of as not particularly subtle and easy to pick up on (which another woman might notice) that are completely missed by the person they are attempting to flirt with. There are many instances where a woman interprets a behaviour as "this person likes/supports/does not like/does not support me" and my response is "that is just one possible interpretation, what you're reading something into might have been unintentional or not related to you. You could be right, but I would put a lower probability on it than you seem to be". This is particularly true in terms of sensitivity to subtle indications of dislike/opposition, but true more generally.
Speculating about cultural change over time, I expect that our (US/Canada) past culture, which put more pressure on women not to "be too forward", and gave much more latitude to men to pursue women both subtly and directly, would have been more permissive of a man fumbling his way through flirting, getting no response, and continuing regardless, than our current culture is.
Re: your third prior, "People who are both bad at it and know they’re bad at it are usually very hesitant to send escalatory signals (if they even know how to, which they might not)"
I think this falls into a binary distribution. The experience of women I know is that when in their early 20's, they would get a large number of very clumsy attempts to indicate sexual interest. At the same time, most men tried flirting only rarely. From the typical young woman's perspective, the experience seemed to be "I get hit on constantly by distasteful men", while from the typical man's perspective it was "I rarely try anything with anyone, I don't want to come across as one of the men that causes problems for women by being an ass". I reconciled this by modeling the situation as "among those who are low-skill at flirting, which is most people, there are a majority of people who flirt rarely and selectively, investing a lot of effort and emotional weight into each attempt, and a minority of people who take a shot at everyone who crosses their path, basically taking the same approach as a spammer where a 0.1% success rate still yields a sufficient number of successes to be worthwhile". The experience of the recipients of the "flirting" (although arguably that isn't what's happening, it doesn't have the subtlety or skill you're thinking of) is that ~all the attempts are terrible by men who aren't interested in them as an individual at all, and this influences their impression of men in general. In any case: There are at least three possible responses to "I know I'm bad at flirting" - one is to spam the world with low-effort attempts to get a positive response, another is to be very hesitant to attempt to flirt, a third is to attempt to skill up. I've seen all 3.
Ok, that does clarify my mistake, and I don't have a lot to add. Except: it seems to me like the smarter someone is, the more willing they will be to trust their own judgment and ask sensible questions rather than just say "nope" if being asked to do something different than a standard relationship template. And also, the smarter someone is, the more likely they are able to manage the complications of something like nonmonogamy, or various relationship or personality quirks you might have. So, conditional on your suitable match being quite smart, the base rates of things like "will accept nonmonogamy" in the population in general won't apply. In general, make sure you're doing chained conditional probabilities, not multiplying your estimate of various traits in the population to get a small number. Weirdnesses correlate! :). And if your ideal partner is a genius alignment researcher or something similar, your geographic location is already doing a lot of filtering for you. But, probably you and your friends have accounted for all that and still got "oof, that's tough" as the result, so... good luck! You seem good, and I hope things work out for you.
Hm. I'm trying to put together several things I know into a coherent picture, and they don't fit. This suggests that maybe the dating/sexual market in your area is very different from mine, or maybe I'm missing or misunderstanding something else important.
1) You are able to satisfy your sexual needs and then some, without any long term commitment to your sexual partners, in a "basically 0 effort regime", from within your own social network.
2) But getting enough people in your pipeline to find a good relationship prospect would be high effort.
3) In your local area, men significantly outnumber women, which makes #2 harder.
4) It's possible you have significant social blind spots which I would predict would make it harder for you to find sexual partners than the average person (not long ago you weren't certain flirting was even a real thing people do).
On my mental model of how these things usually work, if you've got lots of willing sexual partners without much effort, that means you have lots of candidate relationship partners at the same level of effort. The Venn diagram isn't a single circle, but there's significant overlap.
Anyway, I'm likely misunderstanding something important, but here's what I was thinking when I suggested it should be possible to take lots of shorts with relatively low effort: There should be a middle ground between "putting zero effort into acquisition" and "requiring very high investments." I was thinking of three regimes, zero, low, and high effort, as follows:
Zero effort: Take opportunities as they arise organically, but do not seek them out.
Low effort: Do some basic things that are likely to be high return for the effort, to increase your chances of a match. I had in mind clearly articulating what you want and what you offer to a partner, and that you are flexible about what you're willing to offer, to the extent this is true. (an aside: many people have a mental model that if two people don't want the same things out of a relationship, they're not a match for each other, but this seems incorrect to me. What needs to match is what I want and what the other person is offering, and what they want and what I'm offering, not what I want and what they want - although us being very similar to each other in terms of what we want does simplify things. But I can increase my viable matches, all else equal and without settling for things I don't want, by being willing to accommodate a wide variety of wants in a partner.). Then, when you've clearly articulated what you value in a partner and what you offer that is of value, check it with some women to see you've not inadvertently said something that will be misinterpreted - perhaps some of the people who are willing to have non-committed sex with you would also be well-disposed enough towards you to check your work and validate the accuracy of what you're saying from an outside perspective? I recall you saying you didn't have female friends who you interact with outside of a dating context, back a while ago, which is why I suggest this rather than checking with a friend. Once you've got a really solid articulation of what you want and what you offer, actively use your social network to find a match, rather than taking opportunities as they arise organically. Tell your friends and acquaintances to recursively tell their friends and acquaintances you're looking, with a link to the articulation of what you're looking for. For the more distant social connections, consider offering a bounty, or having some way to track who has put their reputation behind you being a good human who tries to give his partners a good experience. Put some effort into reminding your social connections that you're still looking, but use word-of-mouth rather than long hours on apps.
That was a long paragraph, but really, if you hope to find a partner with specific rare characteristics without it being a matter of blind luck, you'll have to do the work of clearly articulating what you want and what you offer, and "tell your friends you're looking" isn't hard.
High effort: Try every method known, put forth full effort as if finding a relationship partner is an important priority.
Of course the usual approach would just be to take lots of shots on goal and see what sticks, but that makes a lot more sense for people for whom a "normal" relationship is very high value.
Disagree. It makes sense if the relationship you want is very high value to you. The relationship you want doesn't have to be normal. Provided the end-state is high value and each shot is cheap, it works out that you should take lots of shots. You filter for what you want in the early stages, so that each attempt is not very costly.
Now, if you want an abnormal relationship and you don't want it that much, then yeah, go for the basically 0 effort options.
This was informative for me. One of my best friends from elementary school got back in touch last year after 30+ years, and is currently in the process of mtf transition. I don't think that her reasons for transitioning match or parallel yours, but I don't fully know what her reasons are in the level of detail you've shared about yours - I feel like now is not the time to ask questions that might come across the wrong way if I'm not careful. And your explanation of how things are for you makes me go "OK, that makes sense", which transitioning hadn't for me up until this point.
Re: "Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition."... I did not know that. My friend is pretty introspective, and she's the only trans person with whom I have enough direct experience to assess level of introspective ability. Although my model of "trans people in general" won't get a strong update from your description of your motives and thought process (I figure your experience is that of one subgroup of mtf trans people), this fact that you who are in a position to know claim is famously generally true, will update my general model.
I would personally have been hesitant to speculate about motives along these lines, because the generic line of
reasoningspeculation "people are doing a thing I don't understand because they're <insert something with negative connotations, like mental illness or being socially ostracized>" is an easy answer to jump to that makes one feel superior, but is often wrong. So hearing your reasons were rooted in finding social acceptance is extra useful, because I would have just not allowed myself to put much probability on that unless I'd heard from someone directly that it was true for them.I see below that some people on twitter have apparently pushed you to delete links to this essay or the essay itself. I vote you keep it up.