Prelude:

The bio of the person who posted that virally popular Note says they’re a ‘Scientist, author and entrepreneur, known as a leading voice in AI’ and mentions the externally bestowed credential of ‘NYU Professor Emeritus’. They have over 100,000 Substack subscribers.

I think this person is probably mostly posturing for a certain class of audience; those who know little about AI, feel generalised anxiety about it and wish to seem well-informed by a particular type of expert. They appear to me to be the kind of expert who has learned that flattening complex issues flatters an audience by producing a settled moral view people can easily assimilate as their own.

It’s a perfect business model. It reinforces a problem that people like this created. They profit - reputationally and financially - from the worries of those who could be benefitting from a useful new technology. In this way, they preserve their status by encouraging others to remain one step behind on the curve.

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Anxious non-experts take considerable time to update their beliefs when new evidence contradicts their received assumptions because negative information is just stickier in the mind. So the kinds of message reproduced up top will doubtless continue to attract new followers who are glad of the reinforcement it provides for their low-information intuitions.

For example, it’s remarkable that we still hear people talking about a false statistic on water use per AI query, compared with Google search, even though the person who made that erroneous estimate has now (to their credit !) walked it back.

I’m not an AI expert - just a regular user in many domains - but the improvements it has brought to my life gives the background noise about AI an irritating quality that I can’t ignore. Which is why I write so often on the subject.

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Last weekend I spent 15 minutes admiring an ancient beech. The tree caught my eye due to various hollows in the trunk which catapulted me back to childhood and stories of elves. Here it is.

I was 2 hours into exploring old tracks in deepest Normandy on a lovely mild afternoon. ‘Touching grass’, as escaping the machine world of screens came to be known. Much of my thinking time is during such wanders and lately I’ve realised that the screen in my pocket distracts me much less these days.

Such is the confidence with which ‘public intellectuals’ pronounce on their pet issues that for a long time I was an unquestioning recruit to the ‘phones are bad’ club. It’s natural to feel this way when you see the extent to which many people in cities especially seem glued to their screens and we all know the sense of playing second fiddle to someone’s phone, even in one-to-one interactions. I even briefly attempted to ‘detox’ from mine on walks by switching to airline mode so that I still had the option of capturing photographs but couldn’t use it for anything else.

I strongly disliked those days when I felt compelled to remain engaged in WhatsApp exchanges or feel that I must immediately consult some website or other, allowing the immediate world to slip into the background. But it was hopeless. The curious mind demands answers and so that experiment lasted about two weeks.

These days I still dislike screens in that context and I use mine substantially less, because I have been liberated by AI. This is a story that bears explaining because it’s thanks to ChatGPT that I now enjoy walks more than at any previous time in my life.

What was happening beneath that beech was my curiosity and appreciation deepening for the environment I was in. And suddenly the penny dropped. No longer was I distracted by technology in this context. Technology was substantially augmenting my experience.

Key to this is the way I use AI in general and ChatGPT in particular. There’s a dedicated chat thread in my app called ‘Nature chat’. It’s where I request background on what I’m seeing or wondering about and because everything takes place in the audio realm, my eyes and attention remain rooted in the environment rather than peering at pixels. Inevitably, the metaphor of a knowledgeable companion comes to mind. Just one that I can summon at whim and therefore enjoy my preferred mode of walking in solitude most of the time.

Now, when I look back on certain walks they are more vivid because I also remember so much more than just my movements through the landscape. It is as if the landscape became more meaningful. This contrasts quite starkly with times when I wondered what was going on with this group of birds, that unusual stand of foxgloves, an unexpectedly industrial-looking building in the middle of nowhere and would either start the wrinkly process of going on Google to mostly sift through unfocused information - or, more often than not, just forget about it.

And my information gathering is happening in a more human way than it was when my nose was stuck into the black mirror of a Samsung S22, trying to avoid the sun’s glare and generally feeling distracted from the moment even while I attempted to gain greater appreciation for it. I speak to Chatters and then play the response back in audio. At a stroke, screen use reduced by probably 95+%.

I select the example of AI-assisted life in nature from the myriad other ways that chatbots help me to operate more effectively in multiple domains because of its ironic quality. The most advanced tech in human history is rooting me more firmly in my biological essence. My tireless and knowledgeable machine companion is liberating me from technological distraction.

AI helped you appreciate a tree? That’s your pro-AI argument?

The beech story is just a minor example of what’s always missing from the conversation about AI, as currently led by a certain class of public intellectual, be they a prominent blogger/author or a ‘serious scientist’ of some kind. There is untrammelled good that arises from discerning use of a device containing this technology, but now chatbots and the screens through which we interact with them have a bad name among the bien pensants of social intellectual life.

Reputations are being carved out by overlooking and discounting even the possibility, let alone desirability, of exercising personal agency and responsibility. Reputations are more easily made by positioning us as helpless subjects of evil capitalist tech overlords. Like so many things in modern intellectual culture it reminds me of religion. But instead of priests portraying us as relentlessly influenced by the Devil and lighting the way to our salvation (by doing what they say) it’s influencers, who come under the general heading of ‘public intellectual’.

Look ... THEY made this thing ... see how much harm it’s doing.

They do this because that’s what currently sells to an anxious, neurotic audience, vigilant to every threat they just learned about from the NYT or the Guardian.

It’s both intellectually and morally thin. But it’s also unawarely hypocritical.

That’s because, at its root, this anti-tech discourse is ironically anti-human. It frames us as the machines. We’re positioned as passive victims of digital services and the devices they’re served through in ways that discount our capacity for agency, intentionality and responsibility. It’s insulting because we’re deemed to be morons by default, incapable of reforming our habits.

We are all more or less weak-minded, which is why so many of us are overweight, suffer from chronic life choices inertia and find it easier to go no further than diagnose the childhood traumatic response roots of our current failings, rather than actually changing our behaviours to make life better.

What would I know of others’ weaknesses?

I’m uncomfortably obsessive compulsive, if I don’t take active measures to resist such impulses. It manifests in ridiculous ways that I’ve come to hate. Inevitably it happened with my phone use. There was a compulsive quality, which is how I recognise it in others now. So I experimented, reflected, iterated and finally altered my habit of looking at it when there are more nourishing things to do. I was a bit hair shirt about that, at first. It meant depriving myself of an enjoyable stimulus; the immediate capacity to satisfy a curious mind. Then, along came ChatGPT and I found a mode of use that deepened my attention to the world around me, rather than fragmenting it and distracting myself from the pain of undistracted existence. Lol.

It wasn’t tech or AI that ‘saved’ me. I did that. This is a human tale, not a tech story. I did it because I care about my experience of woodland, edge habitats, seashore wandering or even walking around those parts of Cherbourg that are least familiar. I was as bad as anyone at being in the moment once the smartphone became ubiquitous, but that wasn’t the phone’s fault. It was just personal weakness.

But were I to follow the edicts of the AI discourse I’d still be blaming Silicon Valley for my bad habits.

This is what provokes my personal contempt for the ‘do-gooding’ nature of so much tech critique. The big players present themselves as morally serious and humanistic, yet all the while describing people as though they are kind of mechanically acted upon by devices. We’re all helpless, you see, without a ‘top voice in AI’ to warn us about the dangers of having nice, useful, helpful things.

Like the arguments about AI water and energy use, the arguments are essentially specious but sticky in media and on the social platforms.

I was part of that same culture once. In a classically Jungian sense this probably accounts for why it bugs me so much. Except that in my case it was banging on about how social media makes us tribal and badly behaved. I did very well out of that, for several years.

It’s always the same vibe.

Phones “make” us distracted. AI “makes” us lazy. Algorithms “make” us tribal. Social media “makes” us narcissistic

It’s a cheap and lazy story, though, which is why it works. Where’s the immediate reward in encouraging things like self-discipline, intention, healthy adaptation, self-awareness, anxiety culture, negative social norms and personal responsibility.

People use the latest manifestations of digital technology in all kinds of ways and of course many people end up worse off as a result, in terms of subjective wellbeing. But it’s a stretch to ignore the capacity for normal human agency and insist that everything is the fault of various tools.

This is now an unfashionable view, but the intellectual and moral failings of the miserable and anxiety-provoking popular story of what tech is doing to us has risen to the top of my pet peeves. I’m almost missing the good old days of mostly scorning Wokeness.

But there’s a new religion in town, thank goodness - or I’d have nothing new to rail against.

Note: I wrote this with my own wet brain and fair hand. Not so much because I think it’s bad to have bots writing things you pretended to author yourself but because I still think my writing is better than the weirdly spotless and frictionless text that emerges from machines but never quite lands in the mind.

Iced coffee please

Or, better still …

I’m fresh from watching a YouTube video about an extraordinarily chivalrous German WW2 fighter ace. The story gave me shivers, which I’ve learned is a personal red flag. I don’t trust emotional reaction to information (de-linking the two was harder than that statement implies and I’m still ‘working’ on it).

Sure enough, the video was 90% bullshit, with a grain of truth. You can watch it yourself, if you want to waste 8 minutes of your life - or just go see the comments about how marvellous it is and how people are so glad that it wasn’t made by AI that they immediately subscribed for more.

Since embarking on creating the definitive historical archive for an overlooked WW2 unit (24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized)) I’ve learned a bit about military matters and consequently developed a sixth sense for nonsense. These days I’m a citation fanatic and if there’s no source document or firsthand testimony about something, I don’t trust the stories about it.

So it was with that video and it took all of ten minutes to establish that it was just a manifestation of what I’ve come to see as ‘content culture’.

I think I made up the concept of ‘Content Culture’, so here’s a definition.

It is the making and dissemination of ‘content’ that is the raison d’être in that world, not love of a subject.

Inevitably it’s also where truth goes to die.

I’m losing count of the Facebook pages I now block for this reason. You might know it as ‘slop’.

If I’m sounding like a pompous old nitpicker who enjoys spoiling other people’s fun that’s because I am and I do enjoy it.

And the reason is that those who make it and those who form their credulous audience are disrespecting people I’ve come to deeply appreciate and admire. You come over here to Europe in December 1943 with a significant chance of dying or carrying shrapnel in your body for the rest of your life, not to mention the terrible memories that made some of ‘my’ guys hit the bottle or take their own lives afterwards, and some ‘creator’ in Sri Lanka or California makes money inventing stories about that period. If I had the skills I’d hack the lot of them and post their snivelling faces and addresses in a hall of ̶s̶h̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶ shits.

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The latest personal project in my world is to migrate my website (24thcavrecon.org) from a rent-seeking annual subscription platform to Wordpress dot org. This will save 204€ a year, for no loss of utility or quality.

Last week I cancelled the note-taking app, with which I run much of my creative and work life, installed a free open-source equivalent, imported ten years’ of notes and saved a £79 annual subscription. During the same life admin session I also cancelled a 35€ annual password manager service, exported every password and set up a free open-source password manager.

In both cases I now spend no money while also taking control of my own data. This is pleasing, especially since my personal notes are no longer sitting on someone else’s servers and my passwords are no longer vulnerable to the kinds of data breach suffered by my previous password security provider.

A month ago I used Claude AI to guide me through the process of having 24thcavrecon.org translate into French and German at the touch of a button, again at zero financial cost. I needed minimal technical nous to achieve this. Just typing request prompts, copying output, pasting it somewhere and a bit of patience when things initially went wrong.

The historical material I work with - now thousands of documents and photographs - had become impossible to organise without a professional archive tool and I baulked at the cost of those. But then I found a free open-source archive organisation tool, built by academics for academics, sucked up the learning curve and never looked back.

If I hadn’t been short of money I’d have bought various services and would now be paying north of 1,000€ a year for the privilege of using tools that I’d then feel locked into using, the more useful they became. Because that’s how subscription platforms work. They become woven into your life to such an extent that losing one is like losing a metaphorical limb.

Having just achieved the lifelong dream of assembling a studio at home, evenings are spent learning and making music. You already guessed that much of the software I use for this is free and often open-source. Some of it is so valuable to me that I donated money to the projects by way of thanks, but I didn’t have to do that. These tools are freely given for anyone who wants them.

The remarkable thing is that all of this feels normal. It’s just life as usual. And I have to step back to reflect on what teenage me would have thought of the power and utility freely available to older Mike.

And yet, if you engage in common chit chat, consume bogstandard news media or dwell for long in Substackistan, there is a relentless mood of civilisational decline.

Everything is broken.

The popular ‘discourse’ is familiar.

Modernity is spiritually empty. Technology is enslaving us, stealing from us, misleading us. Men and women mistrust or even hate each other. There is a ‘loneliness epidemic’ due to social atomisation and those pesky little screens. The algorithms are ruining everything. Institutional trust is at a record low.

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Note: don’t expect to be stirred up by this piece. It’s as much a note to self or a journal entry as anything.

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With about 6 pieces exploring various annoying, confusing and frustrating things in the pipeline I’m suddenly bored of misery. This week’s Substack output was full of it, as usual. I read most of it feeling detached and sceptical. I’m just not buying the hot takes. The ones with tens of thousands of approving ❤️s seem to be the worst. It’s seeing what’s going on behind the scenes that ruins it all for me. People dashing out 1,500-words in perfectly structured format, with the assistance of LLMs which squeeze out any quality of personality from their writing, are crushing it on this platform. And they’re all variously miserable or worried (or at least pretending to be) about one thing or another, which isn’t really jibing with me at the moment.

The latest one that made me pull up short was about how ‘dating isn’t working’ and explaining that it’s because the boot is now on the other foot, with men needing women more than women want men. Readers loved it because it seemed plausible and the piece duly went viral. I don’t much like non-scientific generalisations made by highly fluent people in the business of arousing negative feelings, like fear, anger, contempt and so on. They’re what the phrase ‘truthy’ was invented for and truthy often doesn’t withstand closer inspection. It’s also worth remembering that insofar as generalisations work, these kind of essays are probably mostly read by those to whom they do apply. In the case of the essay about how dating isn’t working, that would be people for whom dating isn’t working and people who are glad not to be dating.

I saw very little happy writing this past week, but much hand-wringing was in evidence about all the usual things; things that are Bad, like using AI, being on the internet, things that people are doing or not doing more or less of than they used to. Why, it’s enough to make you wonder what makes these people want to get up on a morning. Apart from to earn rewards from posting miserably.

Meanwhile, my latest essay - about ridiculously editorialised news headlines in recent years - started feeling stale and boring to write, so I stopped writing it. Instead, I did other things and decided to write about those as a kind of antidote to Substack negativity.

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I’m now a paying ChatGPT and Claude user, so stick that up your arse

Yes, LLMs produce writing that many of us don’t like, but whingeing on about this has been old for about 12 months now. I wouldn’t be without my chat and agentic assistants now, because they’ve transformed my life for the better. Here’s a few ways that they got me over some humps that hitherto would have either taken me months or intimidated my feeble brain to the extent of not even bothering to navigate them.

> I’m suing a French car manufacturer. Their CEO has admitted publicly to stonewalling customers seeking redress for a known engine fault and yet they continue to stonewall me. Claude is handling everything. Apart from sense-checking, copying and pasting its outputs, printing and putting documents in envelopes that’s it for my involvement. I know exactly what to do when they stonewall my latest communication. I will not run out of energy, in the way they hope I will, because I’m putting little energy into this.

> The US national archive - NARA - is a hot mess of mixed up records from WW2. I spent more than a year fruitlessly searching for records of the 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron - the previously unsung unit for which I’m building the definitive historical archive. Take my word that scrolling through a scanned microfiche made up of 1,000 images, each of which you have to zoom in on to discern the writing, quickly attenuates your will to live. And when there are about 100 of those files to look through it’s just easier to waste your evening watching YouTube.

I told Claude this and within a few days the problem was solved. It told me to request a free API key from NARA, wrote all the code that I could execute from Mac Terminal et voilà, my computer was plugged directly into the archives to download everything. Sure, I had a few Mac ‘kernel panics’ over the size of these files (where your Mac runs out of memory and crashes) but Claude solved that too, using Python CLI tools. No, I have no idea what that even means and it doesn’t matter because everything just works.

Prior to this I was aware that almost a quarter of visitors to 24thcavrecon.org are native French speakers and a growing number are German. Was I to put instructions on the site suggesting that people add a translation widget to their browser? Are we still living in the 2000s? What do you suggest, Claude? A couple of hours later my site was using a ‘Cloudflare Worker’ to translate into French and German at the click of a button, using DeepL’s API key.

Both of those enhancements to my research life came at zero financial cost because we live in a wonderful age where ordinary people like me can do things to make the world a tiny bit better that we couldn’t begin to do for ourselves, without spending any money.

> A very long time ago I acquired 90% of my guitar-playing ability sitting with my friend Dave. Subsequently I tried to learn more from books, but it didn’t work for me. I missed having a Dave to help me one-on-one. Eventually I became interested in producing electronic music and was glad of YouTube and the online course offered by Underdog Music School. Sometimes I’d google certain problems and techniques and find tutorials of varying utility. One evening this week I was frustrated by the way a bass line and kick drum were compromising each other in a tune I’m noodling around making. An hour later they were sitting nicely ‘in the pocket’ as actual producers call it when everything is sounding right. This was because I have a Dave again - an AI agent that knows how to do these things and is designed to go over things again and again, if necessary, until my thick head finally grasps the principles of something like sidechain compression. Happy days.

As a side note, it’s unfortunate that so much misinformation remains around the negative impact AI use is having on the world. Those early - and now largely debunked - stories remain sticky in public consciousness. Another reminder of why there’s a reliable market for negatively affective arousal in journalism and other writing.

Actually, no, music is not going to shit

Open up YouTube and there they are; the big names telling you ‘it’s over’ for music, for various reasons. Look at the comments under music videos about how the 70s/80s/90s (take your pick, based on when these people were fleetingly happy) were the best times. It’s wearisome.

Thanks to the unprecedented access to all realms of human creativity provided by the internet I now enjoy music more than at any point across a lifetime very largely defined by loving music. I’m finding more music to love than I ever did in the 70s.

Being dispositionally sceptical of hype I approached the Angine de Poitrine phenomenon with caution that lasted for approximately 2 minutes. This duo is living proof that even a hardened elitist cynic like me can get onboard with the latest ‘sensation’. For anyone late to the party, Angine de Poitrine (angina or chest pain in English) is a Quebec-based duo who play ludicrously disciplined instrumental music, presenting in a Dadaesque quasi-satirical way and ‘speak’ only in stupid noises which their manager ‘translates’ in interviews. It’s high art with humour, thrilling musical precision and danceable grooves. I spend a lot of time resisting the mimetic pull of the crowd but on this occasion thank goodness for the crowd. My only regret is being unable to tell people I was into Angine de Poitrine in 2020 rather than since last month.

This was the breakthrough moment when many of us laggards realised what we’d been missing.

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The 6 unfinished pieces about various less happy things will eventually appear, but not today. There are too many nice things to think about and do.

Drop a tip here

Those No Kings protests. You see, Donald Trump is behaving like a quasi monarch with his executive orders and fondness for seemingly impulsive acts of war.

There’s obviously a there there. As a so-called lame duck president he’s using personal fiat to act in performatively vulgar ways involving things like wars and militia-style swoops on cities to remove immigrants. It’s clear why many people in America do not approve of this.

It’s not my business to litigate the rights and wrongs of what Trump does. In fact, I find reacting to Donald Trump exhausting. Plus I’ve no skin in the game, as a British national living in France, so my opinion on how America is run is of no consequence.

I’m reacting to an internal despair with the way the leftish conducts itself in general.

Even supporters of the No Kings parties (because that’s how they appear from where I’m sitting) acknowledge the unserious theatrics and the unintended irony of celebrating that they are free to mercilessly lampoon their would-be ‘King’.

I suppose that when you’re losing you need something to smile about. So that’s what the people who organise and join in with these things are probably chasing. It certainly looks like fun. Much more fun than the dreary anti-Brexit marches I went on in Britain.

The rout of the Democrats in 2024, due to a senile president and a useless would-be successor, must have been awful for them. And it must drive them nuts that such a cartoonishly ridiculous president continues to lie and mislead almost every time he speaks and how they’ve got another two years of this to endure. I have sympathy in an abstract sense.

So I get the need to party hard. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow your own movers and shakers might well appoint yet another terrible candidate for the White House.

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Cognitive abstraction is hard work. We come at things with prior intuitions and it’s easier to use those as a kind of armour off which all other perspectives must bounce than to start a process of understanding from scratch.

This holds, even among quite sophisticated people who know a lot of facts in certain domains.

It’s why we’re always at an impasse with others who have strong opinions and it’s the main cause of flattening; when an obviously complex issue is reduced to simple (usually moral) certainties.

The tensions caused by accelerating immigration and forced mixing of incompatible cultural values are easy to see but hard to address without hurting someone’s interests. Exactly the same problem arises with the tensions that obviously arise with maximalist transgenderism.

Because it’s hard work to think seriously about the philosophical implications of things we’ll tend to just pick a side and then bat for that team.

Then the business of actual discussion of the issues gives way to entirely focusing on the framing as legitimate or not, asserting one’s social and moral status and attempting to police the conversation in more or less subtle ways.

If you spend any time on philosophical abstraction you’ll know all the moves by now.

Familiar examples are:

1. Portraying scepticism about the messaging and proposed measures around climate change as outright climate denialism. Climate change is real and that’s an end to any argument about it. You anti-science person.

2. Positioning concern about immigration as implicit racism. Those migrants aren’t directly affecting you, so your concern is not legitimate. You right-wing media stooge.

3. Pigeonholing sceptical views on maximalist transgender ‘rights’ as bigotry. Why do you care that someone identifies as their non-biological sex. You transphobe.

4. Framing enthusiasm for AI agents as total trust in outsourcing all thought to machines. So you don’t see any problems with errors, hallucinations and slop then.

The process is something like this:

• Flatten the issue into a simple certainty.

• Frame it as if that is the only possible truth.

• Declare dissent as a moral failing.

• Police expression of dissent by inserting yourself into conversations, typically online.

The reason that the term ‘midwit’ came into being is because this tendency is often manifested by quite intelligent people who are nevertheless resist cognitive abstraction. They are verbally fluent while also being somewhat intellectually unsophisticated in a philosophical sense.

Midwits are clever in a limited way, highly attuned to status and personal position in the social pecking order and typically driven to police others by framing a dissenting opinion as morally rather than intellectually questionable.

This is why you can’t argue with a midwit. They’re good with words and you’re usually talking past each other anyway.

What inspired these thoughts was a couple of reactions I received to an observation I made on Substack Notes. Both came from people with whom I had no previous interactions and who presumably have no idea what Rarely Certain is about. They were archetypical, which sparked my curiosity to get a bit analytical with it.

Here’s what I posted.

In a country, you are a citizen.

In a monarchy, you are a subject.

In a regime, you are a thing to be managed.

One way to identify whether you’re in a regime is by calling a government helpline. So I just called one in the UK and was greeted with a long opening pre-recorded preamble about the primacy of respecting the staff, how abusive language will not be tolerated and that any infringements of these dictums may result in prosecution under the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

I only wanted to ask someone a question.

H/t David McGrogan

[I tagged McGrogan because he’s an academic philosopher who explores law and modes of governance and writes extensively about the emerging features of regime-style government in Britain.]

Reply 1: Oh good lord, this is the softest shit I’ve ever read. You’re feeling oppressed because you got an automated preamble reminding you not to abuse civil servants? Cut me a break.

Reply 2: I don’t think Barbara, working the phones in Durham, is part of a regime. And even if she was it isn’t nice to phone her up just to verbally abuse her.

I noticed that these replies shared something in common, which was failure to engage with any aspect of the original frame.

There was no ‘what makes you see this in terms of regime governance’? There was no attempt to understand the basis for connecting the instantaneous positioning of me as a potential risk to the wellbeing of staff on the other end of the phone with the idea of a system of control.

State-citizen interactions do not necessarily involve abusive interactions and so there has been a choice made to launch every conversation on that helpline with a conduct warning and threat of prosecution.

Both replies skipped passed my framing and used different rhetorical tactics. There was no attempt to address preemptive tone policing in state–citizen interactions. Instead, they reframed my words as something implicitly bad.

I imagined them both coming across my Note and feeling sufficiently moved by it to start tapping on their screens in the way they did. It seemed slightly sad, because I remember doing this myself all day long until a few years ago. Jumping on people for saying things I didn’t like.

Let’s look more closely at the anatomy of this phenomenon.

Let’s break down these replies to understand them better

Reply 1.

“Oh good lord, this is the softest shit I’ve ever read…”

1. Classic online contempt

This was just a status attack. The person was attempting to establish dominance by signalling that my thought about the preemptive call policing was beneath consideration. They weren’t even bothering to mount an argument because they were too busy positioning themselves in a social sense. This seems to be 99% of behaviour in people with strong ideological identities.

2. Attempting to reframe my observation as emotional weakness

I made a suggestion about institutional tone which was recoded as personal fragility:

• “you’re feeling oppressed”

That was a classic move. I’ve made it myself, often enough to understand it completely. It comes from an urge to avoid any actual cognitive effort in analysing a system by just diagnosing the speaker’s psychology instead.

3. Straw-manning

My proposition was thereby repositioned as a desire to be free to abuse staff on the phone.

There is a layer of the original proposition which suggests that the presence and tone of the message I heard indicates something about governance style, but that layer was stripped out for convenience. My interlocutor saved themselves the bother of thinking about it by pretending it wasn’t there.

4. No attempt at falsification

No counter-argument was offered, even though it would be quite simple to make one. They could have said that such practices exist in many other contexts that don’t qualify as regime-style situations. Or maybe that the cost to me of being kind of talked down to before I even open my mouth is outweighed by the cost to someone feeling stressed by an abusive caller.

That they didn’t offer anything like that tells you that the reply performed only one function. This was boundary policing. They were merely signalling that my interpretation of the experience was socially illegitimate.

Reply 2

“I don’t think Barbara… is part of a regime…”

1. Tone: superficially reasonable but structurally evasive

This one particularly tickled me because it’s quite trollish. It establishes the illusion of calmness via a kind of try-hard shrugging device. I used to do this too. Someone would rile me and I would come back with a sort of ‘chintzy’ chilled couldn’t-care-less riposte. Notably, it doesn’t address the actual proposition.

2. Making something seem concrete and simple, thus avoiding any abstraction or complexity

I was talking about systemic signals and how messages of that sort may align with regime modes of governance. But this person reduced it to an imagined harmless person who deserves to be spoken to nicely.

• “Barbara, working the phones in Durham”

By introducing an imaginary human face - good old Barbara from up north (which makes her especially ordinary) - they distracted from the system-level observation by making it about interpersonal ethics.

Whether my interlocutor actually thought about it in this way is debatable. I’m guessing they saw a typically right-wing talking point and conjured up poor Barbara, who only wants to do her job without people being mean to her as more of a knee-jerk reaction than having thought about it at all.

3. Introducing a category error - one of the oldest tricks in the book

Inventing Barbara meant that my interlocutor could implicitly suggest that I see her as a regime actor. Lol.

This was just less cognitive effort than thinking about what the structure and tone of a system says about regime features or characteristics.

4. Moral inversion - another popular one in the goodies’ playbook

There’s a norm that no reasonable person would violate, so they presented that to me as one with which I presumably wouldn’t agree. Albeit falsely.

• “it isn’t nice to phone her up just to verbally abuse her”

Now it’s all about me defending abusive callers and not caring about civility.

By sidestepping the substantive original point almost zero cognitive energy needed expending.

Posh people in academia call this a deflation strategy. This is the function of the reply for this person. It brings the issue down from the airy heights of political theory to everyday politeness, thus making me look unreasonable.

Nothing was learned. Which amused me because when I checked this person’s bio it explicitly stated that they are on Substack to find out about things.

What’s interesting to me about those two replies was that, despite their stylistic differences, they refused to acknowledge the existence of anything interesting in what I’d mentioned. In doing so they represented lazy drive-by political slop of the kind that first rose to prominence on Twitter.

I was interested in institutional signalling and philosophy of governance because the writing of has made me think more about these things - and more attuned to their various signs.

But my interlocutors stayed down at the level of personal or social behavioural norms and emotion.

Again, this is familiar. I used to tell people they were ‘butt-hurt’ because they were complaining about something. I did this for years before learning how to actually think about anything.

The tactic is always to avoid a core claim entirely by distracting and distorting it into something that it wasn’t about.

It could have been interesting if either of them had asked me whether the language of a pre-emptive behavioural control really can indicate anything about state posture.

I’m not wedded to the idea that my example really says much at all beyond the influence of unions on the subject of workplace harmony and the fondness of institutions to cover their arses with policies to protect their workers from feeling bad. It was just a thought to throw out and explore. It was interesting that a philosopher liked it, which suggested that there is a there there.

Given how David McGrogan argues so persuasively about the shift from citizen to managed object in bureaucratic and technocratic complexes it definitely felt that way to me when I called that number. Our lives are influenced by myriad tiny accumulating interactions and living in the country that turned faceless processes into an entire employment sector designed to oppress and extract from its citizens this has made me more highly attuned to the signs.

There could have ensued a conversation about what I was getting at, but that’s too much like work. Easier to substitute easier targets, such as my personal temperament or my desire to be free to behave badly toward Barbara (or, in fact, the helpful Sean who had worked there for 7 years and gave me everything I needed in an efficient and mutually friendly manner, as it turned out).

There’s something here about avoidance of abstraction by collapsing it into anecdote. I was using an anecdote to propose a potential heuristic but my twin interlocutors treated my Note as a literal complaint about a single phone call.

But it was a useful experience in teasing out some predictable resistance patterns I notice all the time, when people want to avoid cognitive labour on political and ethical issues. I’m guessing that my Note triggered a few of these.

• Discomfort with regime language applied to a familiar democracy. Regimes are something that happen to other people, far away, not in Britain.

• Preference for interpersonal framing over structural analysis. After all, it’s a lot less effort to discuss norms of politeness than models of governance or the consequences over over-managing things.

• Low tolerance for ambiguity. What’s more ambiguous than a tentative diagnostic heuristic like the one I proposed? There are no hard metrics to fall back on and so everything becomes moral. This is why tone, language and inference are so beloved of leftishists.

I’m being slightly flippant, but actually I find this kind of interaction tiresome and uninteresting. A couple of incurious people took it upon themselves to question my attitude to staff deserving protection from abuse and even whether abuse matters, when that was entirely irrelevant.

But at least I tried to highlight something that seems interesting to anyone who can conceive of political philosophy beyond the establishment and imposition of normative standards.

Despite those uninteresting replies, the question still seems worth asking.

When a state increasingly addresses citizens as potential risks requiring behavioural pre-management, what does that say about how it conceives of its relationship to them?

Neither reply engaged with that proposition at all. They redirected away from it - one with juvenile snark, the other more gently and humorously, but just as evasively.

I mentioned earlier my sense that most conversations about hot button issues involve mostly talking past each other, rather than ever really engaging head on. This anecdote serves to illustrate some the of the underlying mechanism for that.

It’s about a mismatch in abstraction levels leading to rhetorically evasive shortcuts to the steady state of not really having to trouble yourself with the airy fairy detail of certain questions. It’s rarely about intelligence, which is why it can be so exhausting and frustrating. Someone with whom you disagree on something might be highly intelligent but either too uncomfortable or incapable of operating at certain levels of abstraction.

In these situations the discussion often descends into collapsing the issue in a quest for non-ambiguity along with a host of other things; moral reframing enabling status signalling, avoiding analytical burden and personal stabilisation. By this I mean that when a claim threatens someone’s worldview, rather than address it directly they will often retreat to a norm that they can defend confidently. That’s the motte and bailey approach you hear so much about.

None of it would matter much to me were it not for a personal predilection to raise my hackles at over-confidence. My personal bugbears are confidence paired with shallow understanding and reversion to obvious simplistic interpretations instead of accepting that things are typically layered and confusing.

When normative anchoring - clinging onto rules about how things should be in an ideal world instead of the one we really live in - overrides analytical curiosity I just switch off. The same applies when I see aversion to certain perspectives rooted in personal identity.

I suppose I was reminded of an old lesson. Most replies you’ll get on short-form platforms will lack depth, curiosity and rigour because that’s the nature of the medium. It doesn’t reward cognitive effort but it does reward status signalling.

Looping back to the heading up top, I want to close on the classic ‘why do you care?’.

This is because my moral scepticism makes me highly attuned to moral moves in disputes.

The classic use of this is to undercut a carefully constructed argument about issues that are heavily freighted with moral implications. Immigration and maximalist transgenderism are the main areas where this move is pulled.

On the face of it ‘why do you care?’ is positioned as a request for motivation but really it’s a normative challenge. It shifts everything away from truth values to the question of whether the issue is even worth examining - and what it might say about you if you think that it is. It’s a classic pivot because once the focus is on your motives, rather than the facts, the actual issue can be bypassed.

That’s how cognitive effort is avoided, with the bonus of signalling your righteousness.

If I had a magic formula for avoiding all these moves I’d give it to you, but there’s not getting around human nature. We’re mostly lazy, status-seeking apes because that’s worked well for the last couple of million years.

My disappointing incurious interlocutors were, in the end, just creatures of evolution.

Buy me a coffee

[Transparency declaration: None of this was written by AI except for some jokes at the end, which are clearly labelled]

---

Someone I know is getting a tattoo. They’re excited. It’s a deeply significant step to them. I have no intrinsic internal reaction, but I am able to create an external reaction, for social purpose. Their excitement is what I react to. They could be installing a new patio or taking up pilates for all the affective meaning it represents to me.

But I respond appropriately. I’m able to talk about how cool it is to preserve one’s story with art indelibly inscribed on a limb. The story behind it is told to me and it makes sense. I have all sorts to say and questions to ask about it all. I’m being genuine. There’s nothing fake about it. It’s nice to share in someone’s excitement and interests. This is all despite the complete absence of personal positive or negative valence around the subject itself.

As a thing happening in the world it is similar in status to me as news of a new Taylor Swift album. I have nothing intrinsically to think or say about it, but it’s in my gift to simulate a perspective and so I do.

I do this by pattern matching and prediction. I operate like an AI agent.

This makes me part stochastic parrot.

—

‘Stochastic parrot’ is one of those terms you see used by a certain class of person in the ‘midwit’ category; that is, moderately intelligent, typically educated to degree level, who openly pontificates in ways they think of as sophisticated. Midwits tend to adopt the ‘prestige’ position on things because they are aware of which perspectives are low status in their milieu. Midwit ‘intellectual’ outputs are generic and unoriginal. Think typical Guardian reader/Bluesky user. (There are more midwits on the leftish because that’s where formally educated people politically coalesce, but there are plenty of rightoid midwits too; mostly ageing men who tend to be self-educated).

I smirk at people using phrases like ‘stochastic parrot’ because it’s like watching a wind-up toy celebrate its free will. They’re demonstrating pattern recognition and predicting how well it will reflect on them to use a phrase they don’t really understand.

Oh, you guys ... if you’re going to be all clever about these things, at least try to differentiate your output from that of a Large Language Model.

Here’s what I think is often going on in the discourse about AI now, among those who’ve added it to their list of Bad And Harmful Things To Condemn And Worry About.

Most of it is ‘slop’ complaining about ‘slop’.

I’ll clear my throat a bit first ...

I share the standard dislike of robotic writing because it’s awful in a strange kind of way, which is not necessarily so easy for everyone else to spot. Machine text flows perfectly smoothly and articulately and passes through your brain with a weirdly frictionless and fluent quality. It leaves zero wake in your mind.

Anyone who enjoys reading in depth and quality (an obviously high-status pursuit) sees this property instantly and finds it distracting from whatever content was conveyed.

This now happens most days for me. I’ll be reading what seems to be an original thought being developed to form the case for a perspective the author wants me to consider. Suddenly the ground shifts with the realisation that the person named up top didn’t write it themselves. They only had the idea. At that point I’m terminally distracted by an irritation that they assumed that I wouldn’t notice this.

That’s what it’s like to be a snob about the written word. Words and sentences are not just about what is being conveyed. The way it’s being conveyed is just as important to some of us. Language is not just instrumental for us. We want it to be affective.

I used to sneer at the writing of less articulate people, with bad spelling and grammar, but less so now that we have this much worse form.

I understand why people hate LLM output, because I hate it too.

What happens when I notice that someone used a chat agent to craft their piece is that I stop reading. Then, with my radar more finely attuned than before, I find something else to read.

This isn’t only happening on Substack. Quillette is my personal gold standard for independent original slightly right-coded perspectives and it’s creeping in there too. Soon, it feels, there will only be the New Atlantis that I can actually enjoy.

It’s a personal problem too, not just because I dislike being hoodwinked but also because current models write in ways that inconveniently mirror certain affectations in my own writing style. So I’m becoming self-conscious about using certain sentence structures or even specific words. Because I know and understand why it’s low status, it has become necessary to avoid saying things like:

It’s not just cheating; it’s quietly erasing the relationship between writer and reader.

That was me, but I’m willing to bet that your ChatGPT radar pinged. No longer dare I use that kind of phrase.

👇

As a quick aside, I hope there are linguistic experts studying this flavourless mode of expression which used to seem fine until it became ubiquitous. I’d love to understand why it grates so hard as a form. I suppose it shares a quality with muzak. Structured, inoffensive noise.

👆

I do get that it doesn’t matter to some people, but I just can’t separate form from function in an aesthetic sense.

There’s a few writers I give the impression of following here whose outputs I now mostly skip past (without unsubscribing) because their use of automation jangles my nerves.

Any bot would tell you that those people are quietly (haha!) losing readers, even if their subscriber numbers aren’t noticeably dwindling.

—

It isn’t only the writing in itself.

It’s inescapable that the language patterns of LLMs have become low-status, so that I’m now anxious about being mistaken as someone who can’t instantly see it.

I used to enjoy writing like this ...

Pausing for effect.

Building a case.

Scaffolding the argument.

Then landing the punch.

It was part of my style until suddenly there was this weird influx of articles written just like that. So now I’m self-conscious about doing that. But also I hate it. AI has oddly turned me off from aspects of my own writing style.

It’s also turned me away from a growing number of people I used to read a lot more on this platform.

My attention is finite and is better deployed to reward effortful writing. That’s how I feel about it.

I perceive it as a moral failing when a named ‘author’ didn’t really write their piece; sloth being a deadly sin and inauthenticity a personal bugbear. Even worse (in terms of my personal snootiness) ... if someone I respect recommends a piece that I immediately recognise as machine generated, they too go down a notch in my estimation.

I saw several people I follow emphatically recommending and interacting earnestly in the replies to a piece recently and all I could think was how could you have not noticed what made me stop reading, halfway into this piece that you’re so hot for?

So I know about the snobbery around all this and I share the unease that there’s a negative moral valence to it. It’s poor quality and it’s cheating.

It’s not rocket science to understand why it carries the quality of a moral failing. I occasionally blog on a kink site where there’s a nascent backlash against AI-generated content. Over there it’s less about the kind of snobbery some of us bring to Substack. The admins at Fetlife recently announced that the site now flags AI-generated pictures and will consider rolling the feature out for writing too. They really do need to. Optimising for kink clout is particularly cheap and nasty imo.

The need to flag ubiquitous fakery in that context seems especially urgent to me, because a community founded on interpersonal transparency and trust stands or falls on the authenticity of its members. At least on Substack the personal stakes are lower. But whether you’re faking your output to get laid in a non-vanilla dynamic or earn subscription revenue and intellectual clout, there’s clearly a moral component relating to trust, respect and - in a vague handwavy kind of way - truth.

AI-reliant writers? A pox on your contemptible publishing of the impersonal universal (to date, my favourite phrase to describe this stain on our reading lives).

So in this respect, I’m aligned with the room. But as for the rest of the panic, I’ve no time for it.

—

The writing is only as shit as it is (I don’t want to keep calling it ‘slop’ since that word itself is now a midwit status marker) because so much authentic human writing is ̶s̶l̶o̶p̶ ̶ shit. The LLMs aren’t special. They didn’t invent shit writing of the kind that glides frictionlessly by for the sole purpose of creating an effortless information dispersal and absorption experience. They were trained on the lowest common denominator of us !!!

I was originally going to write about a delicious irony. Which is that the sincere midwit handwringing about ‘AI slop’ is just the latest form of human-generated slop. But last week someone beat me to it. So you might as well read this, which I endorse, wishing I’d written it first.

Consenting Thought

Human slop, AI criticism, and schmauthorship

This is a guest post (of sorts) produced primarily by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, with minimal prompting and editing by the human owner of this Substack, Brian Earp. Earp’s name in the byline should be taken to represent something like editorship, or perhaps “schmauthorship” — as explained in the acknowledgements below…

Read more

4 months ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Brian D. Earp

Brian got Claude Opus 4.6 to write that and it’s better than anything I’ve seen from the people who condemn AI ‘slop’. Lol.

No, I didn’t train myself on Brian’s piece before writing the intro at the very top of this piece, about us all being stochastic parrots. It’s slightly discombobulating to keep seeing things I’ve been thinking written up by other people before I get around to it. But I’m pleased to feel much less alone in mounting a personal backlash to the AI backlash.

Here are a couple more who hit ‘publish’ while I was still reflecting on various other thoughts they turned out to have developed quicker.

JB Minton writes about how people frame their objections to generative AI as principled concern, while really being motivated by nostalgia, status anxiety and fear of economic disruption for incumbent human doers of things that AI can handle. Like me, he sees most anti-AI rhetoric as emotional signalling of allegiance to existing hierarchies.

Terms Of Enlightenment by JB Minton

The Seven Sins of Complaining About Artificial Intelligence

Why are so many important journalists, educators, and artists too eager to complain about Artificial Intelligence…

Read more

5 months ago · 16 likes · 16 comments · JB Minton 📺

Then there’s this delightful polemic from @edokwin.

It’s paywalled now (I recommend you take at least the 7-day free trial to read it fully) and argues that anti-AI positions in the arts are again less about principled ethics and more about preserving existing hierarchies that advantage well-resourced creators.

Edokwin Editorial

Anti-AI Zealotry is Reactionary, Classist, and Lame

As those of you who know me well are already aware, I take a rather nuanced, middleground view on AI usage in the arts and knowledge work. I think Séb Krier recently made an observation in the Notes tab that cuts through the noise of the AI art debate, just for starters…

Read more

6 months ago · 30 likes · 27 comments · Quinn Que ❁

That one in particular chimes with my own intuitions that much of the AI moral panic - in common with a lot of confused 21st century leftishist/liberalish concerns - seems to be about preserving a particular brand of elite economic interest.

One of the objections that exposes this is that AI has been trained on stolen information and art. People who blithely say this are furious that someone else isn’t getting paid when I benefit from some original work that ChatGPT was trained on. Presumably they wouldn’t mind if I was buying thousands of books secondhand. That wouldn’t economically benefit the originator either. I can’t be bothered developing this as an argument because dispositionally I’m just a big fan of abundance, which includes information abundance.

You either want fences around stuff or you don’t.

Got to love the modern liberalish-leftish and their objection to ... er ... abundance.

---

Moral hazard

Why do I care what other people think about AI use, when I think that most of them are just ‘slop’ merchants themselves, with an obviously self-serving agenda?

It’s because repetition has a quality of making things seem true. It’s repetition that builds narrative. And when the thoughtless crowd accepts something as negative, it creates a risk of reputational problems when you diverge from accepted ‘wisdom’.

I’m a heavy user of AI agents in other domains. I wouldn’t be without them at this point.

I recently outlined an aspect of this in a Substack Note:

I’m pissed that it feels increasingly risky to mention using AI in a publishing venture like that. Every time some idiot journalist (with an obvious personal axe to grind) points out that you shouldn’t trust everything an AI says (newsflash !) it gets flattened in the public consciousness. Oh, you can’t be trusting that AI because it gets things wrong.

The moral hazard I’m now sensing from media flattening of the AI discourse is because people have donated almost 3,000€ to support my 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron commemoration project. I’m transparent on www.24thcavrecon.org about using AI tools for document transcription and analysis and I’m now anxious that a relentlessly - and misleadingly - negative narrative about AI use might deter future supporters.

I may be overthinking this, but here’s the dilemma.

I want transparency around AI use. It’s the obvious solution. But the anti-AI narrative is making transparency feel risky. I know from personal experience that ‘normies’ are generally suspicious of chatbots. Talk to your neighbours and you’ll soon see that they are developing a sense of personal AI tools as something vaguely unethical, exploitative and often fraudulent. This means that transparency brings unwelcome exposure to distorted and flattened perceptions.

There’s an inconvenient asymmetry about this. Because so many people are fucking with their audiences and idiot lazy professionals in all domains are deservedly panned in the media for mindlessly regurgitating hallucinatory outputs, saying ‘I use AI’ is becoming risky. If I got my way everyone would be transparent about their use of these tools but the louder the (mostly ill-founded) moral panic, the higher the risk of punishment for transparency.

This is ultimately why I scorn the moral panic over AI. It is achieving exactly the opposite of what the shouters think because it’s introducing an incentive to NOT be transparent.

I’ll be sticking to my guns and using agentic chatbots and other tools because I can trust myself to keep the necessary guardrails of a good old-fashioned wet brain in place to ensure minimal bullshit reaches my audiences. And I’ll be transparent about it.

But, while I’m at it, I’ll also call out the alarmist framings of the ignorant midwit normies who are saturating this conversation with their slop

Because, you know what, guys? You really aren’t helping anyone.

As for writing, I might not be the best writer in the world but I’m too narcissistic about it to ever outsource Rarely Certain to the bots.

You’re stuck with the real me around here.

Postscript:

Me: Can you produce a few jokes in the classic British comedian style that begins

‘A stochastic parrot goes into a bar...’

ChatGPT 5.2 :

A stochastic parrot goes into a bar.

Orders whatever the last three customers had, statistically weighted by popularity.

The barman says, “Do you actually want that?”

The parrot replies, “Want is an emergent property of token probability.”

A stochastic parrot goes into a bar.

Says, “I’d like a pint of lager, a gin and tonic, and a brief summary of Wittgenstein.”

The barman says, “You can’t have all three.”

The parrot says, “Based on my training data, that combination performs well.”

A stochastic parrot goes into a bar.

The landlord says, “We don’t serve your kind in here.”

The parrot replies, “That response aligns with 72% of public house exclusion narratives. Would you like me to escalate?”

A stochastic parrot goes into a bar.

It starts repeating the last thing everyone says.

A bloke at the end mutters, “Bloody typical.”

The parrot nods and says, “Bloody typical.”

The bloke sighs, “Fair enough.”

A stochastic parrot goes into a bar.

After twenty minutes of perfectly fluent small talk, someone asks, “But do you understand any of this?”

The parrot says, “Define understand.”

The philosopher in the corner leaves.

If you’d like them drier, more absurdist, or closer to old-school pub circuit sarcasm, I can tune the register.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, Sensemaking is the investigation by a discrete network of public intellectuals into different ways to navigate divisive issues that cause social discord and conflict.

Sensemaking came about as essentially a new philosophical and psychological field emerging from similar right-coded energies that spawned the intellectual dark web.

It was different than what went before. Although Sensemaking strove to explain, it was never about identifying definitive truths. Nor was it a traditional attempt to find the ‘centre’ ground where, thanks to the magic of fact-checking, everybody might converge.

I assume that it appealed mostly to people who are low on cognitive rigidity and comfortable with abstraction and ambiguity. I fell upon it with the enthusiasm of someone weary of the old conceptually conservative mode of ‘proving’ things and being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. You probably had to be a certain type to be interested in Sensemaking and I suppose I’m that type.

Before diving deeper, a prefatory note.

1: I’ll capitalise Sensemaking to emphasise its status as a distinct thing - not just shorthand for making sense. It’s probably best understood as a branch of psychological, sociological and semiotic* philosophy, so it was always destined to be a fringe interest. Like many philosophical enquiries, much of the content appeared airy but still seemed to promise application in the ordinary world where we grapple with the problems it sought to address.

[*semiotic - relating to signs, symbols, communication and meaning to different observers]

2: I typically use the term ‘conservative’ in two slightly different ways. Sometimes in the conventional sense of a political leaning but also to signify close allegiance to the ideals rooted in certain traditions, such as education. This means that strongly liberal people are also often conservative in this way.

In the latter non-political sense it is the impulse to conserve a status quo partly because it is a status quo that works for an interest group for whom moving away from it might threaten status perception and self-conscious identity.

---

My interest in Sensemaking began during the pandemic when I realised that something bad was going on with polarisation. Suddenly everyone in my personal orbit and anywhere I dwelled online seemed over-confident in their understanding of a complex new unfolding event that none of us had previously experienced.

It now seems to me that the pandemic was bigger than any other event in my lifetime - including 9/11 - as a catalyst for neurosis, anger, interpersonal hostility and lasting damage to relationships. This may be because it seemed to act with unique potency as an identity-sorting event, so that ‘which is my side?’ became a more urgent question than in any previous moment.

All of that was fascinating and unsettling to me.

As is my wont, I was quickly bored and suspicious of the confident pronouncements of the opposing sides. Then, out of the blue, an artist friend I admire for his wildly abstract mind told me about the Rebel Wisdom project. It comprised discussions and films exploring what was happening at the social level in this troubled time. But in a different way than traditional media reporting and punditry.

Rebel Wisdom felt like a dose of sanity in those strange months as the pandemic wore on. Suddenly I was hearing good faith, non-partisan conversations about how to navigate the moment instead of binary arguments fuelled by fear, anxiety and mutual contempt.

[For context, I have never doubted that Covid-19 is a serious disease and I was vaccinated at the first opportunity. I have not updated either core position and never regretted receiving 3 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The truth or otherwise of Covid’s seriousness or vaccine efficacy and safety are not relevant here, but it would be natural for a reader to wonder where I was personally at on the pandemic, so there you have it. The result was that I consistently felt like an outsider glancing askance at what was unfolding in the social sphere]

---

What most appealed to me about what Rebel Wisdom were striving for was the concept of pursuing what they called a ‘synthesis‘ between seemingly incommensurable standpoints. Admittedly, that is a kind of Holy Grail, but I saw it as a noble and wise pursuit.

I won’t lie. The snob in me also saw it as intellectually superior to just batting for a side; Trust The Science vs Do Your Own Research. In fact I scorned the two sides who revealed themselves during those strange times, for their respective flattening, naivety and certitude.

Rebel Wisdom came at just the right moment for me.

I’d developed a personal meditation practice over the previous year, along with a set of new life habits that lifted me out of a crisis of depressed anxiety. Part of this personal effort had involved much more looking inward than pointing the finger outward to understand ‘shit’. Later I wrote about that wonderful time in the post That feeling when you get phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Vental Tegmental Area.

So I was primed for Rebel Wisdom to be the first people I’d ever heard talking about how our internal psychological state influences what we believe about the world.

I appreciated the way they teased out the strands in how figures like Jordan Peterson had tapped into a growing minority concern about technocracy, managerialism and credentialism. Something was happening with all that and the bafflement of those who couldn’t or wouldn’t see why it was a concern to some was also catnip to my innate curiosity.

I still miss those days of discovering Rebel Wisdom and the richness, originality and depth of their thinking. But my enthusiasm wasn’t to last.

Over time, I couldn’t shake a growing sense of unease. The impression that a lot was being said but nothing was ever quite resolving.

---

When Rebel Wisdom ended I continued to follow Alexander Beiner. He was a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom with David Fuller, who had apparently burned out and seems to have more or less disappeared from public life. I was still thinking that, having laid some strong foundations, something with useful wider application might begin to emerge and that Alexander would be one of the conduits.

Maybe it wasn’t them, it was just me

Instead I began to feel that Alexander and everyone else that I’d been so fascinated by were still saying a lot without saying anything that I could really latch onto as insight. That’s when my confidence and hope first began to wane in the Sensemaking project.

Revisiting a lot of the sensemaking world that seemed so refreshing to me at that time, I now realise that many of those conversations are pretentiously opaque and meta, never quite arriving anywhere that really does make sense.

The irony is not lost on me. I couldn’t make sense of Sensemaking.

This doesn’t mean that I think the outputs of all those discussions between the figureheads of Sensemaking lacked value. I got some tips that helped and which I still sometimes reflect and draw upon; for example, Professor Jon Vervaeke’s concept of ‘relevance realisation‘ remains personally useful.

But so much of Sensemaking just seemed to consist of sophisticated, circular word salad with little-to-no real life application.

Perhaps it was always naive of me to expect more from an essentially fringe academic philosophical investigation but the lack of implicitly promised answers was disappointing. Occasionally I’ll dip into the field again to check for progress but nothing seems to have changed.

The conversations continue among the same people, but they never seem to land somewhere that points to a way forward.

---

I was always conscious that the sensemaking world had a politically conservative bias. There was a bit of Dark Enlightenment energy about some of the figureheads. But this always seemed understandable. After all, both were ideas that emerged in opposition to technocratic credentialism and what I had already come to see as a naive ‘trust only the experts’ principle whenever it was maximally applied.

I still don’t trust the manual for Truth promoted by parts of an academic and managerial class who seem as driven by self-interest to maintain a specific normative framework for seeing and moving in the world as they are by a desire to really understand it. I could never dispel the suspicion that the PMC were less motivated by pro-social impulses than by status-seeking, a personal sense of superiority and identity-preservation.

My hope was for a synthesis between instrumental expertise and more human-grounded wisdom. I revisit this often as an under-recognised issue. And it’s still that synthesis which Sensemaking seemed to be striving to reach.

Five years on from when I first encountered it I think that the Sensemaking project was a necessary but insufficient attempt to find a synthesis between two obvious but oddly incommensurable truths; that science and domain expertise are often (probably mostly) the best guides to understanding and solving big problems, but that something else - typically called wisdom - is necessary to prevent that approach from becoming a kind of cold, bloodless machine government that seems to operate apart from people. ‘Regime government’ as writers like legal philosopher David McGrogan puts it.

It’s kind of sad to me that Sensemaking just continued meandering or drifting in the way that it has when it held the promise of grounding us in something more whole, in terms of a worldview.

Sometimes you need nutters. But also, nutters are nutty

I suppose it was inevitable. There was always something odd about the people involved. And then there was the issue of their heterodoxy in general.

The most obvious example is always Jordan Peterson. You know this because there is an implicit social rule about him. You are either to think that he’s the Messiah or an unhinged christo-fascist.

The irony is that both positions are taken by people who don’t understand a lot of what he’s saying.

This at least offers me a useful personal heuristic.

If someone only ever has negative observations to make about Jordan Peterson it’s safe to say they have nothing interesting to say about anything in the sphere that Peterson tries to explore. Which is obviously an important and interesting sphere. Similarly, if they never acknowledge what a nutter he obviously is, they typically have nothing but woo woo to contribute. Sadly Person is also a credential that fans can wave to demonstrate belonging in the ‘heterodox’ camp.

This is because flattening is easy and the fact is that flattening is what sensemaking was originally pitched as the solution for. On the one side we had the total rejection of credentials, domain expertise and science. And on the other side the conventional but blinkered intellectual’s reflexive and contemptuous dismissal of good faith critique of those heuristics. It’s tiresome to me when people blankly and scornfully dismiss critique of naive materialism as the WHOLE answer to EVERYTHING just because critique sometimes invokes ideas that can’t be modelled or measured in a controlled environment.

My intuition remains that synthesis of polarised positions is a more intellectually rigorous pursuit than declaring who’s factually right and who’s factually wrong. And that means allowing for the validity of non-measurable factors that might be grouped under the heading of ‘wisdom’.

The way that people separated into two camps over every aspect of the pandemic was the initial impetus for my interest in Sensemaking but it also folds into the whole nexus of bitterly contested issues that are so salient today; things like reactions to the cultural disruption caused by mass immigration into Britain and countries in Europe, where the opinion divide looks more like a religious schism than the practical discussion it really needs to be.

Another feature in this nexus is ‘misinformation’. I have a theory that the lions share of blatant misinformation always emerges from the populist right for good reason. This is that the social engineering promoted by the class labelled as ‘elites’ (which includes the ordinary professional-managerial-academic strata of public life) has permitted no honest and open discussion of the issues that everyone else with no identity skin in the game can see are real and important.

There’s still an obvious gap that Sensemaking was attempting to plug

I’m confident that the sensemaking movement, or whatever one might call that eccentric collection of thinkers, correctly diagnosed a problem. The information environment is still contaminated with too many shoulds and oughts that we are required to hold as is positions.

The (necessary) process of cultural liberalisation has clearly overshot and now threatens to cross the line where authoritarianism begins. And all there is to oppose that drift right now is a vulgar form of popular rebellion that really isn’t for me.

Epistemic problems have somehow become moral issues. Even today there are scientists in multiple fields who say that certain facts about the world should literally never be studied because it would be wrong to. And any debate about freedom of expression is now contaminated by the question of whether certain views are to be punished, whether or not they can even be plausibly shown to produce real world harm. Britain is perhaps the best example of a mature democracy where people are jailed for expressing an opinion that caused no damage to life or property. Google this. It’s amazing to me the extent to which it happens because I don’t really follow British news now.

Sensemaking promised to shed light on a middle way in situations where threats were perhaps real but exaggerated. It offered hope that there could be a synthesis in which competing perspectives could each be respected, if not reconciled, followed by the emergence of a fruitful third way of navigating them.

We needed a new vocabulary and a new lens. Sensemaking did give us those

Having diagnosed a genuine problem, Sensemaking as a discrete discipline went on the generate a compelling vocabulary to describe it and proposed various personal practices that seemed the offer a way of stepping off the information battlefield without just becoming a nihilist.

Remembering my early immersion in those Rebel Wisdom discussions I was relieved as much as anything else to no longer feel compelled to fight.

While most authorities and their followers naively pursued (and somehow still do) ‘fact-checking’, ‘debate’ and ideological moral persuasion toward a ‘correct’ belief set as solutions to overheated controversies, Rebel Wisdom went at it from the angle of understanding belief formation itself.

It was like a cooling breeze in those superheated times. I derived comfort from the soothing balm of people thinking differently.

The Rebel Wisdom people were discussing factors to which the participants in those information wars seemed oblivious.

Examples that seemed trivially obvious but are typically overlooked, such as:

• Belief is state-dependent. What we find plausible, threatening and morally salient varies with our fluctuating states of psychological arousal.

• Identity - our sense of who we are - shapes our reactions to facts or opinions that represent identity threat or identity bolstering.

• The importance of social position, because certain beliefs and opinions are subject to value judgements. Typically they are ‘low status’ or ‘correctly relatable’ in our own circles.

Hearing this discussed at last was reassuring because I was already coming to see belief formation as downstream of self-image and mood.

That this was acknowledged in the Sensemaking world as something we could address in ourselves reminded me of how I had accidentally come to a similar conclusion while wrestling with looming circumstances that threatened a bad period which consequently turned into a wonderful year.

Previously, the faults in our thinking had always been relegated to dry lists of cognitive biases. Which, of course, only ever afflict other people. This is the thing that we rarely recognise about cognitive biases. In this way they are like the Games described in Transactional Analysis. We play them outside of awareness. And our biases shape our thinking in similarly unconscious ways.

Sensemaking was about spotting one’s own process, joining dots and taking personal responsibility for really understanding how we think.

But it was the jumping off point that also appealed to me; the external factors explored in Sensemaking world, such as how rigid technocracy creates affective backlash.

And how the dogged insistence that legitimacy flows exclusively from credentials and models alone overlooks the human need for agency, meaning and moral literacy. We know what’s best done about x because we know more than you about x was clearly the core governing principle and it had to be outed as an incomplete, intellectually naive and authoritarian stance.

Flowing from this was the obvious fact that while a doubtless well-meaning intelligentsia believed that it only pursued certain actions after a deep and sincere process of reasoning, in reality political and other solutions to large-scale problems are in fact subject to factors which precede reason.

There’s something counter-intuitive here, which is a sense I have that the internal state of being well-intentioned is suspect. Which of course is not a very original notion, given that everyone knows the aphorism about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

I do not doubt that Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Milliband, is an intelligent operator with a strong internal urge to make the world better. But it’s precisely that urge that seems suspect when his policies don’t necessarily stack up in the real world, once outside of the models his advisors create.

It’s actually his moral sincerity that will probably be his downfall, and the downfall of all those who refused to consider focusing on - say - resilience to climate change, rather than imposing technocratic will on controlling the latest climate fluctuation at a so-far unquantified cost to people further down the pecking order.

For those schooled in the conservative tradition of knowing your place and deferring to your betters it comes as a shock to learn that people are sceptical about such things. I know, because I was one of those people. But being exposed to so much anger erupting on my side about people not believing what they were told, especially as the pandemic wore on, left me in no doubt that the whole problem with these ‘hyper-controversies’ was almost all psychologically rather than epistemically driven.

No wonder the door was open for someone like Jordan Peterson to articulate the hitherto subliminal pissed-offness that many thoughtful and intelligent people had been experiencing as credentialed institutions swung into pathologising rather than engaging with dissent.

Peterson was obviously ‘right’ in some way about status, the erosion of meaning, bureaucratic overreach and the sublimation of actual human flourishing into managerial optimisation. Just as he was obviously right about many of his 12 rules for life, however smugly the PMC derided them on the website formerly known as Twitter.

Sensemaking seemed to be a genuinely corrective approach, merely by naming what was obvious, but denied, shamed and effectively sidelined from open discussion.

This was a moment of hope for some of us who were trying to engage in good faith with the obsessions of our time; pandemic measures, climate change, the fallout from a socially unnerving and destabilising mixing of cultures and so on.

I sensed that I was one of many who had intuited the fusion of belief and identity that underpinned the religiosity of the conversations about such things and that we had really had enough of it. Either because it was obviously fracturing relationships between good people but also because it was tiresome, uninteresting and cognitively unsophisticated. Rebel Wisdom and the broader sensemaking project was for us.

At last we had a diagnosis. Next would come the cure.

You’ve already guessed that it never came.

The failures of Sensemaking

Instead we got word salad and endless meta-analysis. All that seemed to happen was conversations and then conversations about those conversations that had a strangely recursive quality. There was a proliferation of ‘frameworks’ for understanding what ascending to a more ‘enlightened’ plane could look like. It began to feel like the classic confusion of map with territory. The big names of Sensemaking never stepped off the map and onto the ground where the rest of us are.

But my biggest problem with it all is now that while the layers of abstraction keep stacking there emerges nothing that you could falsify. Call me old-fashioned (even conservative) but for any proposition to mean something to me I need to know how you would either validate or falsify it. Yes, I’m a fan of unquantifiable, non-measurable principles of ‘wisdom’ but I still need grounding in something solid when we’re talking about things that are happening in the world. And then I want to know what action I can take, if the proposition is one that I think is worth pursuing and even promoting.

What might I do differently to contribute to the process of de-polarising and bringing better mutual understanding between apparently exclusive standpoints? This seems to be a reasonable question from someone who followed the evolution of Sensemaking for the past 5 years. But I have no more idea of the answer than I had when I was enjoying the meta-analyses of Rebel Wisdom, alone in a strange country under lockdown, all that time ago.

I don’t want to be negative but what a lot of the outputs of Sensemaking feel like to me now is more akin to art than insight.

There’s rarely anything suggested that you could point at and say let’s do this instead or this is a terrible idea that would actually make the world and our relationships worse.

It’s fair to say that the emergent Sensemaking were wholesome and healthy for the development of personal resilience and even flourishing in this life. But none of them resulted in me ever having a more productive conversation with anyone invested in their political identity. I could only ever discuss it with outsider types, like me.

Sometimes there IS a concrete idea. But it would obviously never actually work

Occasionally someone comes up with a proposal which no one in their right mind would dispute as a cool thing to do. But the common feature is that how to scale it to make a manifest change to the original problem is never explained.

Here’s a good example, from Alexander Beiner, formerly of Rebel Wisdom, remember, who now has a Sensemaking project of his own called Kainos.

I’m a longtime fan of Ali’s diagnoses of liberal technocracy’s fault-lines so it feels mean-spirited to pick fault in his latest idea. It’s a proposal for stemming the rise of what he calls the “morally and intellectually void” populist right-wing parties in Britain and Europe by talking “differently” about immigration.

This essay is quintessential. Listen to the Land: How to Talk About Immigration.

As a piece of writing designed for reading and enjoying I love it.

It is atmospheric and psychologically compelling. There is nothing wrong or incorrect in it. I feel slightly bad for criticising it (a guilt that I note and will reflect on at leisure).

It is obviously good to explore contentious issues from as many angles as possible and he’s certainly doing that.

But there are two obvious problems with the idea, both of which are catastrophic.

Scale. How could such an initiative ever be scaled to make a difference?

Cold reality. The world is just not romantic like that. The essay takes no real account of the competing value systems that create chronic unease about immigration, factors such as finite and often scarce public resources, the electoral incentives to which most parties are responding, unpleasant truths about people’s security concerns, housing pressure, labour markets and all the other reasons that have made immigration the highest-salience social issue of this time.

Again, pushing through some personal discomfort in doing so, I have to point out that it’s just unrealistic

The essay promises an answer to the knotty question of how to talk about immigration. We definitely need an answer to that. I just don’t talk about it at all with most people even though I would quite like to. But the ‘xenophobe’ and ‘racist’ canards have stuck, like shit on the wall, having been so successfully thrown for so long by leftish types.

What that essay proposes is a kind of carefully curated group therapy, run by highly competent facilitators and a willingness and capacity in the participants to engage with deep emotional and symbolic framing. Also, let’s not forget physical access to ‘wild’ land.

In a way, this kind of ‘solution’ is a sleight of hand. It sounds great. I’d quite like to participate in such an exercise myself. No doubt it would be interesting. But how it transforms the public conversation at scale is never explained. And if it was self-selecting I cannot imagine any people who actually have a visceral distaste for ‘foreigners’ or all-in ‘migrants are welcome’, ‘no one is illegal’ ever signing up to take part.

The sort of people who’d take part in that exercise are not the problem.

Sensemaking was always full of this, I know realise. It boils down to a a kind of politically-oriented personal group therapy and ritual. In fact, Rebel Wisdom really did focus heavily on group work and ran many successful events which people reported benefiting from. But the world outside doesn’t work like this and there needs to be a political process for such a knotty and intractable issue.

How Sensemaking could transition from a process of exploring meaning into becoming a political process was and still is never explained.

This always seemed to be the trap that Sensemaking fell into. Reducing conflict between small groups of people was doubtless a good experience for those involved but it remained so far outside of mainstream political realities that it began to seem self-indulgent and hand-wavey.

It’s not that I’ve ever thought that the Sensemaking approach was wrong per se. They were clearly right about the personal ‘work’ required to move off the merry-go-round of pointless debate between intransigent standpoints. I’d already come to the same conclusion via my own mindfulness practice and then by thinking a bit differently about who I am in the world.

Nor do I fundamentally object to the hand-wavey and symbolic stuff. Jung is a good example of someone who stood apart from rigid scientism while remaining coherent and valuable as a thinker who pointed successfully toward achieving improved subjective wellbeing.

But even I draw the line at listening to the land as a way of having more productive conversations about immigration. Because that’s really just a rhetorical device and I need something operational.

Even I need more than good feels and different ways to see meaning

In my everyday life I ‘listen’ to trees and they tell me things, but this is my subjective experience and will never translate into anything useful for the rest of society, let alone the world of politics and arbitration of inevitable trade-offs.

Still feeling bad about this ... because it feels mean, but all I see in Alexander’s essay is the re-symbolising of a conflict rather than any way to resolve it. And that is where Sensemaking consistently fell short, even though I’d see myself as the exact market for it; open as I am to novel ways of understanding, post-partisan, non-ideological, anti-flattening, deploring of maximal moral or epistemic positions and sceptical of the current regime-style doctrine that causes the problems in the first place.

It verges uncomfortably (for me) from making sense of complexity to resolve ingrained conflicts into a kind of charismatic group facilitation of the kind practiced by people who might reasonably end up labelled as ‘gurus’.

I may be a bit woo woo myself, with my tree-hugging and love of Chuang Tzu, but I’m still also a fan of democracy and the deliberative political process. Listening to the land with a selected group of people who are culturally different to me isn’t a political solution to reducing the salience of migration.

I’m all for retreats and workshops, storytelling and documentary as ways of looking at the world through different lenses. It feels like I learn as much about the world through classic fiction as from factual reading. I also did a lot of ‘the work’ already, without knowing it even had a name. Probably, 5 years ago, I would have been more confident than I am today that listening to the land might just work. But this is where I’ve really come unstuck from the world of Sensemaking.

I know the hunger for meaning. I know the affective power of stumbling upon people who seem ‘enlightened’ in some way. I know how managerial liberalism has reduced much of life to bloodless normative language rules and one-size-fits-all models aimed at manipulating and constraining. And I see and feel the ugliness of populist crudity and the unease that it creates for others. I know the need that Sensemaking grew from. In Britain I imagine that need is stronger than ever.

Sensemaking will probably go from strength to strength as a kind of cult movement. It’s also still better than what currently passes for debate and discussion. I’m personally keen for gnarly shaven-headed white men to stop displaying the Cross of St George in public spaces all over England but also desperate for the lumpen-headed liberal intelligentsia and their PMC disciples to grasp why they are doing it.

Someone has to see this shit for what it is and the Sensemaking people do. Those of us alienated by two warring camps will be constantly tempted into the Sensemaking world.

But it’s also obvious that it’s institutional change that makes things really happen and no amount of workshops or meditation or listening to wild spaces is going to achieve that.

At some point you have to move on from diagnosing epistemic breakdown, describing psychological dynamics, naming what is denied by a woefully inadequate and blinkered ruling and media class and creating human-centred spaces for reflection. But that’s where Sensemaking remains stuck and probably will remain forever. You’ll have all these guru-adjacent people circling around these same conversations which never break through the clouds to reach sunlight.

In the end, it’s mostly just a nice activity.

Which still leaves us confronting the specific failure modes of late-liberalism; excessive faith in formal expertise, normative edicts smuggled in as technical necessities, disagreement framed as ‘low-information’ stupidity and always negatively moralised rather than respected.

Maybe these failure modes are not accidental. Maybe they arise because human beings strive for status and fight to retain it. No institution that pitches credentialed expertise as the answer to every really hard problem is likely to step forward and volunteer to be a bit more accountable. And the liberal intelligentsia is never going to rein in on its moral overconfidence because why would they? They didn’t get to their station in life by humbly acknowledging that they might be wrong about something like Net Zero, achieving societal strength through cultural diversity or ‘re-wilding’ instead of growing more food, but that they’re doing their best under complicated circumstances.

This is why scientific and technocratic communication really is shockingly bad. It always emerges from a cognitive silo.

Sensemaking promotes wisdom and that’s great for us as individuals. How to make institutions more wise is a whole different question, especially when it’s a certain type who dominates them and then does the hiring to keep the same vibe going.

So the Sensemaking world just carries on diagnosing the problem, because that’s the easy part. And occasionally proposing something, as Alexander Beiner did with that essay, that sounds great until you realise that there is no way of scaling it to make a real difference.

But on the bright side ...

One thing I do like about Alexander’s workshop for listening to the land idea is that it is not rooted in doomspeak. You can read his essay and feel good imagining how nice that process might be. In this way it works as a pleasant form of entertainment.

I prefer Alexander’s Sensemaking approach to many others in that world, who position their thinking as the answer to averting a looming apocalypse. One example is the ‘Emerge’ network, which promises a ‘multi-species response to metacrisis’.

On its About page you’ll read that civilisation appears to be dying. Which is discordant with my perception, because I think that - on average, for more people than ever before in the history of humankind - things have never been better in the world.

But ... I love the Emerge network and you weren’t expecting that. After all, who can resist an essay promising to disambiguate post-progressive integralism or explain Germane Marvel’s Diunital Philosophy of Black Metamodernism? It reminds me of K-Hole Trends, which I also loved. But I love it as entertainment and not as a guide to anything.

So we are where we are.

I can’t have been the only one who thought Sensemaking was going to be a thing you could instrumentalise to make the world a bit calmer. Maybe prevent you from falling out with your friends and reduce the number of annoying posts on your Facebook. But it was never going to do that because what it really was was a mix of entertainment and abstract art. But also it was - and remains - a system that produces an affective comforting state.

Why I called this piece ‘The Ecstasy of Sensemaking’.

Tune in, turn on and drop out. That’s really the pitch and I’m down with that.

But I recognise that such an approach just isn’t ever going to fix anything.

Sensemaking is very of its time. That time being now, when we’re flooded with ways to tune in, turn on and drop out.

I was amused when someone told me that she was dosing intravenously on her favourite right-wing podcast, following exposure over Christmas to a doggedly Woke family member, because I understood that impulse. I felt her pain and her pleasure in the remedy.

Many of us feel this sense of being in a comforting altered state, immersed in our little niche worlds of chatter. That’s why BlueSky was invented, when X ruined the experience of immersion for liberal leftishists.

So I do remain interested in the writings and thoughts of Alexander Beiner and sometimes even Jordan Peterson, when he’s being a bit less crazy (which is sadly rare these days).

But something else has changed since 5 years ago. Which is that I no longer believe that we really are in a ‘meaning crisis’ or a ‘meta-crisis’, both of which are terms beloved of the Sensemaking community. I think that late-liberal technocracy is a bit shit in some ways but still way better than any previous time. It just needs some correction to the stupid parts.

I do still think that Sensemaking is good for the individual who cares about being less of a dick and I endorse many of the practices that are described. There’s a lot of hyper-creative and abstract culturally exploratory writing produced under the banner of Sensemaking and wading through it is more fun than scrolling through short-form posts authored by people reacting to the latest Thing.

Last summer I posted a piece called ‘The Ecstasy of Joe Rogan’ to try to articulate this sense of altered state achieved via a cocoon of reassuring chatter. It was a struggle to write at the time because I was having a particularly abstract moment. Now I see that this exploration of what was right and what went wrong with Sensemaking gets a bit closer to where I was aiming with that one.

You might enjoy it. It may even make more sense now.

Buy me a coffee

Note for non-British readers. In 1974 Prime Minister Harold Wilson was quoted (probably inaccurately) as saying “Crisis? What crisis”, which prompted the name of the 1975 Supertramp album. Then, in 1979, The Sun famously ran it as a headline to attack Prime Minister James Callaghan during the Winter of Discontent (who also never actually said it).

Welcome to the Rarely Certain retrospective for the year gone by; what I learned, how some of my positions shifted and how the emergence of a more ‘philosophical’ strand began to emerge.

Tl;dr - most of the current ‘crises’ discussed online and in media are really only normal facets of a complex advanced civilisation. The two main reasons that it’s so popular to catastrophise about unpleasant but civilisationally benign things are ‘negativity bias’ and incentives. Our attention is captured more easily by doom and gloom and going on about such things is driven by social and commercial incentives.

If you want predictions for 2026, here’s one; you will be encouraged to believe that we are on the brink of a tumultuous event, such as civil war or some form of regime collapse, none of which will happen. You will be entertained by these predictions, while mistaking this for being informed. In a year’s time people will be making the same claims for 2027 and again they will not come to pass.

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The gap between customary chatter about ‘the state of the world’ and the actual state of the world is obvious, but consistently overlooked.

One reason for this is incentives.

There are incentives for catastrophising and maximalist portrayal of sub-optimal things as irretrievably awful. There’s a social ritual quality to this. Being upset about things being sub-optimal at the meta level is de rigueur. It happens all the time in everyday interactions and it has throughout my lifetime. These days we have an actual space to really revel in that vibe, which is the internet. There’s nowhere better than the online world for seeing how all this works.

Look at the comments from rightoids and leftishists under their favoured articles across Substackistan. They read something that jibed with their priors and were compelled by the social incentive of avowing their belonging to the group. This is why (especially under right-wing polemical screeds, the consumers of which tend to be less cerebrally sophisticated) all the comments are the same and add nothing but noise.

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The writer’s incentive is to please an audience by whom they’ve been captured. The reader’s incentive is to feel that they’re sophisticated and well-informed, while investing as little effort as possible to actually achieve that state. This is why catnip polemics and slogans work so well. Repeating things like Gaza ‘genocide’ or how Britain’s Reform party is going to neuter ‘the Blob’ is hugely popular because it requires zero thought to consume and regurgitate in bitesize bits.

I can tell you right now that if Reform takes power in Britain there will not be a single successful prosecution of a civil servant who waved through the application for asylum from a mentally unstable Somalian ne’er-do-well who went on to rape someone or kill a child. This is nothing to do with ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ because it’s just an obviously unworkable idea designed to positively arouse a certain type of person who is legitimately sick of ridiculous asylum laws. Bless those people who expressed their relief at this ‘policy’ proposal though with comments about how good it will be. A right-wing writer got oodles of engagement and his readers enjoyed chipping in.

All of this nonsense is familiar from my days on Twitter succumbing to the perverse incentives of social media. The reassurance of the group amplifying my pronouncements provided no incentive to say anything new. I played the hits and my followers loved it. And the sense that I was fighting for a righteous cause was a psychological incentive, let alone the incentive of financial opportunities that came as a reward for such behaviour.

I came to dislike this in myself and so I avoid it now, while disliking it even more in others.

In a way it’s unfortunate because I could have been raking it in by now.

When this blog started it caught the wave of dismay that emerged among left-leaning liberals during the 2016-2020 madness in the anglophone world, prompted by Brexit and Trump. The Great Awokening wasn’t new, but those events - along with Covid - seemed to exponentially amplify a mania that we had never seen before.

That’s when Rarely Certain became an earner. If I’d carried on critiquing the excesses of leftish moral confusion and utopianism it would be much more profitable today. But I’d be bored and I’d know exactly what I was doing, so I moved on instead.

Which means that Rarely Certain ends the year with 3 more paying subscribers than 12 months ago while blogs offering variations on a theme around the badness of Donald Trump or Sir Keir Starmer 2 or 3 times a week go from strength to strength.

Am I complaining? I won’t lie. It sometimes frustrates me to see certain writers who came later and cover the same talking points in every post clearly earning significant subscription revenue. So the pep talk I give myself is that it’s remarkable that such a boutique niche enterprise as this newsletter survives at all when the lions share of demand is for emotionally arousing invective.

There might not be much of a market for saying that things are actually not that bad so I’ll take the win and thank those supporters who get it.

Stuff I really enjoyed and learned from in 2025

Let’s celebrate some of the other ‘stackers (and other sources) which left me feeling more intellectually stimulated and genuinely better informed this year, rather than poked into various states of emotional arousal. What they have in common is something new to say. And a scepticism about the stock assumptions that drive so much of the discourse among those who trade in orthodox platitudes.

There were two brilliant contributions from philosopher Dan Williams. One picked apart what’s really going on under the guise of ‘fighting misinformation’. The other detailed the epistemic basis for his drift away from left-wing orthodoxy. Both of these were comprehensive (published as series) and they were classic examples of what emerges when someone steps back from an assumptive framework.

Start with

Debunking Disinformation Myths, Part 1: This is Not the “Disinformation Age”

(Searching ‘Dan Williams misinformation’ will find the others - or go to his stack and scroll through everything)

Why Dan’s series on misinformation mattered to me was because I once made a minor name for myself posing as an authority on disinformation. I had a podcast - literally called ‘The Disinformation Age’ - and tweeted incessantly about all that stuff before it was cool. This culminated in presenting to an international conference on democracy with a PowerPoint deck snazzily titled ‘Fake it ‘til you break it’. Geddit?

Where Dan and me would doubtless part ways is in my assessment of misinformation - which is that it is largely a non-problem altogether, but I’m not here to persuade anyone of that (it’s on the list for a future RC though). He forensically unpicked that field to reveal that it’s really all just politics pretending to be epistemology. One of my own reasons for stepping away from that world was that I realised this too. We were all exclusively targeting right-wing ‘disinformation’ even though bullshit facts and stories are ideology-agnostic.

Dan’s other impactful series was about his own political stances. It began with ‘On Becoming Less Left-Wing (Part 1)‘ which exposed the epistemic deception required to assert that ‘reality has a liberal bias’ (I use ‘liberal’ interchangeably with ‘leftish’ in this context).

Based on the reactions to Dan’s pieces it was clear that becoming less left-wing is an experience many of us shared since the excesses of the Great Awokening drew attention to the left’s pivot to leftishism’s intersectional identity politics. Always nice when someone cleverer than you articulates your own experience.

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AI and Chatbots in particular are great and actually improve life

As the year wore on I became sceptical about the hand-wringing over AI that is now so commonplace. So I wrote Dead Substack Theory is Coming and Authenticity panic as coping strategy.

But you can’t have a real moral panic without some good old factual falsehoods to underpin it and the best example was that AI was using up all the water and energy. I was routinely told this in real life by just about everyone to whom I ever mentioned my use of ChatGPT as a daily tool. It got to the point where I just stopped mentioning ‘Chatters’ or Google Gemini (my alternative bot of choice, because it’s better at some things).

It reached the point around summer where popular specious claims about AI overtook the similarly popular specious claim that not liking the changes wrought by mass immigration makes someone xenophobic or racist.

Happily, someone who knows what they’re talking about was all the while crunching the numbers (and actually using his brain) which resulted in Andy Masley’s illuminating pieces on Chatbot water use and more.

A good place to start on Andy’s work is his retrospective A pause (for now) on AI and the environment posts, and a bounty for mistakes. This links back to his entire canon on the subject.

You’ll notice a theme emerging here.

It’s a form of scepticism. As in I’m increasingly sceptical that I should be as upset and worried as we’re encourage to be about lots of things.

Without me naming it, Rarely Certain was becoming a sceptical blog.

It took Doug Bates to notice this before I did. So Doug makes this retrospective as one of the positive influences on my 2025.

While I would love to start talking about the Hellenistic philosopher Pyyrho of Elis and how I’ve been a lifelong fan, with my theories about personal wellbeing and scepticism, the truth is that I’d never heard of Pyyrhonism until stumbling across Doug’s Ataraxia or Bust! and feeling a curious kind of recognition.

I’d written from time to time about finding a quiet steady-state wellbeing that had eluded me until 5 years ago and how the Book of Chuang Tzu resonated. I’d pondered the qualities of eudaimonia (honestly, it’s a curious thing to wander about on ordinary uneventful days thinking fuck, this is great for no reason at all beyond being glad to exist) and tried to explain it here. But what I learned from Doug’s ‘stack was that the evolution of a kind of equanimity to replace moral neurosis wasn’t my own invention. I was a couple of thousand years late to the party but thanks for making sense of things, Pyrrho.

Also, as a bonus, it was a moment to examine some priors. This was because I’d been interested in Stoicism for a while and Doug is a critic. For me, you can’t beat being blinded by your enthusiasm for something and then finding that other people can see faults in it. I still appreciate some Stoic practices because I adopted a few before really knowing what Stoicism was, but Pyyrhonism currently feels closer to my personal vibe and I’ve Doug to thank for that introduction.

It also has to be said that reading things like Ataraxia or Bust! is more psychologically nourishing than absorbing another development in transgender activism or other hot button sociocultural blather. I knew I was finding some version of equanimity with this life when I didn’t actually feel angry any more about stupid things like men being called actual women and the other canards of social justice progressivism. Or people saying the Covid pandemic was engineered as an exercise in social control and other canards beloved of rightoids.

Shut up about that stuff is what I mostly feel like saying, whether or not I agree.

That was my vibe for much of 2025.

It’s interesting to feel this. That shut up, you’re wrong and shut up, you’re right are both fine as positions to hold. Not suggesting that anyone else should think this way - just that it works for me.

Not that there weren’t plenty of negative things to capture my attention in enjoyable fashion.

The reliably gloomy David McGrogan is one of my favourite ‘stackers and his output this year has been educational.

As a conservative philosopher of law he is the antidote to that naive brand of social liberalism which insists that ‘The Law’ around ‘Human Rights’ is magically sacrosanct and preternaturally independent of politics when it obviously isn’t.

Where to begin with his News From Uncibal? His dissection of Human Rights law took me through the I’m feeling annoyed about this barrier into the this is so bad it’s really just stupid zone.

Lots of his readers clearly don’t share this view and eagerly await the abolition of Britain’s Human Rights Act of 1998, an objective that seems to me an obviously reasonable step too. But without feeling especially strongly about it.

But where David really earned a paid subscription this year was his analysis of ‘political reason’ and ‘regime politics’. After a lifetime of thinking that politics was just about who is nice to which group and mean to another group the emergence of identity politics upended my comforting student certainties. Instead of serious questions about things like industrial policy and tax all the oxygen was sucked out of the room by a kind of moral religious fervour around what life should be like for specific groups and how we ought to behave toward them above and beyond our previous obligations as citizens.

I thought all that was disappointing enough but it took David to untangle what else has been going on. Which is the engineering by politicians of dependence on politicians and the pursuit of power as a permanent structure rather than the turn-based game we used to have, in Britain at least.

His explanation of concepts like political reason and regime politics provided one of the richest learning experiences I’ve had in years.

You can dive in wherever you like, but a personal favourite was The Devil is Also Strong.

Yes, there were lots of great Substacks this year.

Others that I consistently made a beeline (you do this when you’re paying) for were:

• Michael David Cobb Bowen’s Stoic Observations

• Thomas Prosser’s The Path Not Taken

• Ed West’s Wrong Side of History

• Ian Leslie’s The Ruffian

• Katrina Gulliver’s Notes From The Field

This was a piece after my own heart. The Telemetry - All the news the headlines missed in 2025.

To be reminded that good things are happening to make many people’s lives better is rare, so I enjoyed that for the feels. But also for the discovery that, at least according to what they tell Gallup, life really is getting better for more people than ever before.

Now, whenever someone casually refers to ‘the state of the world’ I want to ask which period would you prefer to live in and why? I can’t think of one.

There’s something about people wanting to influence others to be morally better that gets right under my skin now. And something happened around Christmas to bring this to a head. I don’t want to name names, but my Notes feed was suddenly filled with someone supposedly debating some particularly unpleasant characters. The way they were doing this was by ‘quote tweeting’ them.

This person (who I have followed for a long time) believed they were doing good; in a nutshell, educating extremists on all sides in an effort to make them more liberal. But instead of that, what I was seeing was showboating for attention under the guise of persuading people onto (as they see it) the right path.

As a veteran of the Twitter wars of old the habit of publicly responding to someone in a negative way by highlighting another person’s view to their own audience is now anathema. And it doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated operator in spaces like this to appreciate the Streisand effect - the phenomenon where an attempt to suppress something undesirable brings it to wider attention.

It’s not that I disagreed with anything that this well-meaning person was saying that made me object. It was that it was obviously having no effect beyond shoving genuine bigots into my face when I was looking for something interesting to read.

This idea, often justified by midwits with the fake Edmund Burke line about evil prospering when good men do nothing, that you can persuade people around to your perspective by publicly haranguing them is now so irritating to me that I had to block this person. My grounds were lack of self-awareness, naivety and unnecessarily amplifying perspectives that I’d rather remain fringe.

The episode made me reflect on the idea that many people seem to have that there is a duty to broadcast one’s moral opinions. And it turned out that I’m not alone in having no time for it. Various cleverer people than me have talked about ‘moral exhibitionism’, ‘performative morality’, inflated moral confidence and moral status-seeking. And when you’re already a moral sceptic it’s even worse to be subjected to virtuous grandstanding by people who ground their self-aggrandisement in nothing more than intuitions they just happen to have.

So that person had to be muted and my Notes experience is improved. They are an academic, which only makes it worse. My expectation of academics was always that they would be more sophisticated in their use of social media than ‘ordinary’ people. Unfortunately it seemed to turn out that many are activists and I’ll have more to say on this in 2026, because it has done so much damage to trust in academia.

But no wonder ‘rage bait’ got to be the Oxford word of the year.

Wouldn’t it be great if next year the Oxford word of the year was ‘sceptical’. Lol.

This post could go on forever, which means one of those abrupt and random endings is required.

It’s New Year’s Eve and tonight I’m interviewing a man in Buffalo, New York, whose father served in the 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized) (link opens my website memorial to them). These men were overlooked in all of the popular histories of WW2 and at the beginning of 2024 it accidentally became my mission to put that right. I wrote about this work a few times, but the best introduction is the piece called The most satisfying work ever.

What this project brings for the families of the men who came here to Normandy and fought all the way into Germany is a little lift. They love it and I’m always touched by their gladness that someone is bothering. What it brings for me is meaning. The story I’m telling has meaning to history of course, but the meaning to me is different. It’s something bigger than me and I think we all need something bigger than us. Not an achievement or a thing as such. Something transcendent. And a story like the one I’m trying to tell can never be complete, so it will never be my story. Some of it will have mysteriously channelled through me and that’s what it feels like.

It’s hard to explain when I try. People do historical research all the time and probably never see it in this way.

There’s a nothing village not far from me called Bourg de Lestre. On June 19 1944 the squadron suffered its worst day of the war, losing 7 men when the Germans unexpectedly attacked as a platoon of 30 men from Reconnaissance Troop C secured a crossroads and checked out the village. There were around 100 enemy. Two of the men were upstairs in a house when the fighting kicked off. They picked off as many Germans as they could before running out of ammunition, at which point they were captured. They were released a few days later, when Cherbourg fell to the Allies.

I wondered who those two guys had been. The ‘After Action’ reports (written in the field under combat conditions) are always sketchy on detail so this incident isn’t even mentioned in the account of that day. Except that several men were MIA (missing in action). I got it from another document. When I first established contact with the guy I’m speaking with tonight I had no idea that one of those two men was his dad. Or that nearly a year later, in Germany, he would be cited for the Distinguished Service Cross for taking out a machine gun nest while wounded and close to bleeding to death.

Sgt. Matthew Lukasik (32833917) was congratulated on his medal when he got home and replied “I don’t care about medals, I just need to find a job”.

Making a page on the internet for him means something, so I’ll spend New Year’s Eve beginning to make that happen. It’ll be my privilege to bring his story to anyone else who cares.

--

There you go. It’s almost 2026 and I’ve got potatoes boiling for raclette and a call scheduled in 90 minutes. It was a pretty good year and I hope the next one is too, for you as well as for me.

Thanks for being here.

Tips always appreciated

For Christmas I bring you the gift of not wading through any of the three posts I laboured on in recent weeks. They were awful. So I abandoned them, despite mounting dread of ‘sunk costs’ and hours wasted.

Writing each one felt like that thing in dreams when you run away from something and it’s like you’re under water. They deserved spiking for the portentous titles alone.

The ideas were ok, but the execution was terrible.

They explored things like realising how my political shift was partly a function of instinctively scorning whatever ‘Establishment’ exists at any given moment. There was one about something Prospero says in The Tempest and the relationship between language and material reality. The ‘best’ (ie least shit) one was about how cringe I find supposedly intellectual catastrophising to be.

But it’s Christmas and there are better things to do than read stuff that’s designed to farm your nervous system for cortisol or dangle more threat signals.

—

I’ve been fascinated lately by how my Substack Notes feed evolved. Notes started out as a way to idly monitor for interesting bits and bobs but my experience has shifted dramatically over recent months. Now it feels like a full-on Twitter clone, running in algorithmic agitation mode, designed for attention capture.

This was probably inevitable. It’s an attention economy and Substack needs to boost engagement, but it’s still unwelcome for those of us who are vulnerable to emotional preloading (the feeling of being agitated even before the conclusion is reached in an article).

Now I have to muster more self-control than I sometimes have historically, in order to avoid the crude, fast and pre-cognitive sympathetic activation from other people’s emotions.

Inevitably it’s mostly (but not exclusively) a certain brand of social justice-oriented posturing that activates my amygdala and I have it all on not to dive straight into trolling mode when I see it.

But the wild thing is what I now react to, compared with ten years ago.

Back then my triggers were all anxiety-based. I was scared that fascists would take over and everything would be horribly misogynistic and racist, no one would ever listen to scientists about anything again, the truth didn’t matter and that we were reverting to a pre-Enlightenment time because that was what lots of big names in my political milieu kept saying was happening and their ‘mooks’ were repeating it, on and offline. I know this because I was a mook, before I ended up with a bunch of my own mooks.

[To understand ‘mooks’ in this context read this forever classic The Internet of Beefs}

Today I react to people catastrophising and having negative feelings about things.

This seems to be because I have a more positive view of the moment we’re in than a lot of people who write and read on Substack.

And the more het up people are about something that doesn’t seem to be worth getting het up about, the more triggered I am.

My current pet cringe is people moaning all the time about agentic AI.

[On a positive note, it makes a change from being irritated by deconstructivist postmodern nonsense about sex & gender, feminism, race and the pursuit of socially and materially engineered utopian ideals. Even if railing at that was best for revenues]

Last week a Note was shunted into my feed, obviously because the algorithm determined that I should see something that thousands of other people had liked, shared and engaged with. It perfectly encapsulated the thing that bothers me most about maximalist moralisers. Which is that they cannot just have an opinion but feel a need to change what other people do when what other people do is of zero consequence to them.

In this case it was a spectacularly popular - nay, viral ! - call on ‘resistance’ and ‘climate’ accounts (ie people who are already dispositionally agitated) to stop using AI-generated images in their headings.

This person wanted people to use professional artists or photographers and if they couldn’t afford that to draw a sketch and upload a photograph of that.

That this was garnering such approving attention stopped me in my tracks. Talk about First World problems. And how the absolute narcissism of wanting other people to conform to his preferences in article presentation didn’t seem to concern anyone who enthusiastically applauded this Note.

The problem now is that reflexive hostility to agentic AI has replaced most actual thinking about it.

I’ve been reading a bit around the similarities of large language models and human brains as primarily prediction systems and beginning to suspect that we are a lot more like ‘next token’ guessers than those people would like to think. This will be a fun one to develop sometime. Even if it won’t be popular.

‘Stop worrying so much’ seems to be too niche to sell all that well.

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When Bill Gates had the balls to call out the doomsday tendency in climate policy and activism it went down very badly with a certain coterie, which tells you something about the pleasures of catastrophism. And the incentives to keep it up. The same thing is going on with AI. People loving having something to grizzle and worry about.

The more miserable and anxious people are about everything, the more I want to pose the question which period would you rather be living in right now? This seems to me to be the best question to ponder if you fancy cheering yourself up a bit.

--

I’m always pleasantly surprised that Rarely Certain maintains its subscriber base even as the welter of ‘content’ on Substack seems to have grown exponentially. It’s been 53 months so far and some of you have been here the whole time. The income from paying supporters made the difference between sinking and swimming this year and that, to me, is the most humbling part of maintaining this weird little blog.

The Christmas message from Rarely Certain is one of cheer. Gratitude and optimism are nice feelings to have and I recommend them.

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Spoiler: this isn’t about the Twitter Files. It’s about my Twitter Files.

Preamble

The internet went down for everyone in my hamlet. Not the regular five minute outage while your box mysteriously reboots itself, which happens often. This was the full Monty, affecting everyone, regardless of ISP. It turned out that a farmer had cut our overhead fibre cable while engaging in his relentless attacks on the trees around here. That added internet access to our recent losses, consisting of around 70 mature oak and beech since the start of the Ukraine war (firewood became more profitable).

This house nestles in a dip, which turns a locally fragile cell network into a dead zone, so there was no option to tether Mac with phone for meaningful activities. Apart from an intermittent sliver of 3G bandwidth near one upstairs window, me and around 20 other houses were offline for 8 days.

Losing the internet is a shock to the system. Apart from the fact that I earn my living online, there’s nothing quite like not being able to do maybe the two dozen things per hour I customarily absolutely must do that require a connection. Look this up, ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini about something, buy that cheap Chinese solution to my latest desire, play a podcast, stream a tune, veg out while grazing YouTube. When you suddenly can’t do these things you realise what dependency means.

Once the repair timescale rose from 24 hours to a theoretical 4 weeks I went straight to my favourite cafe in Cherbourg , hopped onto their WiFi and ordered Starlink over coffee and cake. Having your cable cut once by a passing tractor, then by a neigbour trimming his hedge and now by an exploitative farmer invoked my three-strikes rule. Physically wired infrastructure? Pah!

While I waited for the Starlink kit to arrive I did lots of observing of myself.

What I learned

Everything about life was suddenly ... slower. More ... reflective. I wasn’t expecting this to be the main impact, once the frantic need to access something right this very moment began to pass.

This is very like those moments immediately after a power cut begins and everything you think of doing next involves electricity. Oh well, so it’s dark and the music stopped - I’ll just put the kettle on. You’ve done this too.

This is the point where I’m supposed to be describing how liberated I felt. Released from the servitude of addiction to novel information and the call of the internet as provider of an unbounded bounty of information and distraction.

It’s when you might anticipate a paean to touching grass, being less in my head and more embodied. How I just appreciated my surroundings all the more; the warmth from the newly installed pellet stove, the riches still offered by offline reading matter, playing actual physical artefacts to get music, all that good stuff that has become popular to talk and write about.

It wasn’t like that at all. Life without the internet really sucked. I was bored and restless, watching the clock tick down to bedtime and then waking up to open the Velux onto a cold drizzly morning to wave my phone around outside and latch onto 1 bar of 3G. Out in nature during the day, I was more distracted than usual by my black mirror because there was a constant backlog of things I ‘needed’ to look up.

None of this is to make a moral judgement around how habituated to the digital version of civilisation I’ve become. I think of this as a value-neutral development. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. Once I mostly did x and now I mostly do y. Kind of similar to how once I used to be adept at using a choke for cold morning starts and now cruise around in an exponentially superior vehicle that just goes when you press a button. I haven’t missed the click of a vinyl scratch coming around on side 2 of a favourite album because that was actually quite crap and I’m happier to enjoy frictionless musical pleasure.

I missed so much about instant access to uncountable and immeasurably useful things that the increasingly popular didactic pronouncements around the virtues of separating ourselves from an ocean of instant information, suddenly seemed little more than a fashionably virtuous conceit.

By evening 3 of no internet I was reading back through old journals and other documents on the Mac and that’s when I was suddenly aware of a qualitative difference between the online me of today and that of 10 years ago.

It seems that I just use it all more healthily than I did then.

You know that scene in A Beautiful Mind where Nash’s private space is suddenly revealed and plunges us into the horror of his mental pathology? That’s a bit like my Evernote records around 2016 - 2018.

Except that I wasn’t a mathematical genius. I was just a common or garden punter with a fascination for dodgy social media accounts pretending to be something they weren’t. I was operating in the disinformation research space, publishing a weekly podcast about it and sometimes writing articles for publications that didn’t like the kind of stuff that I was unearthing.

The more I delved through my notes the more obsessive they came to seem, in light of my subsequent thinking around the subject of ‘disinformation’ and its supposed effects on the world. For carefully reasoned perspectives on this, in depth, look up the work of Dan Williams and investigate his stack Conspicuous Cognition. Being smarter than me Dan has better versions of the arguments against ‘misinformation panic’ than anything I’ve published.

What started out as a trip down memory lane took on a darker quality as I gradually remembered how much time and emotional energy I had invested in things that were never more than miniscule online dramas of no consequence to the world. It was a day and night endeavour at the time. This now seems baffling.

Some stories were quite diverting and fun to publish, because everyone lapped them up. There’s one I can’t talk about because it ended up going legal. Others were just fish n chippy and a bit sad, with people styling themselves as “news outlets” with unconvincing names who turned out to be just supporters of UKIP in grim terraced houses somewhere in Britain’s northern urban wastelands.

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There was the guy who got labelled on the front page of the The Times as a Russian agent but who was really just some young very conservative bloke on the Isle of Wight. Or the old British guy who parroted the Russian perspective on everything and turned out just to be that - an old British guy parroting the Russian perspective on everything. Me and several others bullied him, I now see. Last time I looked he appears to be no longer living and I’m somewhat regretful for having tormented him. Even if he did spend all his time making things up about himself on Twitter and threatening to unmask me as in the pay of George Soros and the EU. Can’t pretend I didn’t have fun with that, though.

All of this was deeply unhealthy behaviour. That of my targets, weirdly making shit up every day behind fake personas, and me spending so much time chasing them down.

This is because none of it was consequential. I was playing to a crowd of followers who saw me as an authority on such matters and the various terminally online fakers were chasing fever dreams of being at the vanguard of a more gloriously conservative future when a more conservative future was unfolding anyway.

My followers lapped it all up and I lapped up their approval. For me it was all about external validation and a certain bitterness that I’d given up an investigative journalistic career some years before for very bad reasons. The zenith was my keynote at an international conference on digital political organising and the fee for that proved handy in justifying pursuit of this obsessive hobby for about 18 months longer.

Trawling through my own Twitter Files was an eye-opener and instead of feeling entertained by these memories I just felt regretful that I’d been immersed in the toilet of other people’s strong feelings about things in such an all-encompassing way.

I have the scolding and purity policing from my own tribe - the nascent Wokerati - to thank for the ultimate decision to burn all of that nonsense to the ground, by scrapping the podcast and torching my Twitter.

It’s vaguely ironic that it took an extended internet outage to make full contact with the horrors of my onetime digital life and I’m kind of grateful to the local farmer for indirectly causing those hours of introspection.

Today, the feelings of external actors seem to wash over me when once everything needed defending or rebutting. Announcing my installing of Starlink drew some inevitable balking on Facebook from some real-life friends for whom Elon Musk is the antichrist. The impulse to push back by asking them to share their political or cultural due diligence process for every consumer purchase arose and persisted as no more than a fleeting thought before moving on. Incidentally, Starlink works straight out the box and is cheaper than my vulnerable fixed fibre connection ever was, which reduces even further the fucks I give about the obvious dysregulation of Elon’s personality.

You know how glad I am to be back online by the fact of your reading this. Being online is great. Yes, there’s plenty of ‘enshitification’ always under way but no one forces you to endure it. There’s this thing known as personal responsibility and the magical capacity to not constantly blame the moral failings of others or abstract corporate entities for any bad feelings that arise internally, when you see rubbish on your screens.

Back in my disinformation days I sincerely believed that I was doing God’s work in defending democracy and liberal values against something really bad. That was probably the best story of all from that time. The one I was telling myself. But, just like the purveyors of low-quality chatter on the socials, it really was just a story.

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The preamble:

Meditation this morning. I’m in a hard-backed chair, facing outside. Eyes closed. Ten minutes of Sam (Harris - his Waking Up app) guiding the user to notice. It’s not about relaxation or changing anything. Just awareness. The point is that the more aware you are of your disposition, the less likely you are to be jerked around by aspects of yourself that are always there but which shouldn’t surreptitiously in control.

He’s saying something about there being nothing to think about for the next 10 minutes ... no planning ... no pondering things that need doing etc

A silent inner chuckle from me as I give myself a good listening to, while my mind is supposed to be empty.

In no particular order, the procession of impressions and thoughts is relentless.

• Can’t wait to try that new bread.

• Feeling quite fresh. Maybe I slept well.

• No idea what to cook tonight. I’ve got bacon that needs using.

• The garden is a state.

• Glad I ditched Napster and went with Qobuz.

• I need to get laid.

• Hope P and Youna are making good progress (they’re driving home from this)

• Glad I got the pellet burner.

• The pellet burner is quieter than expected.

• Where shall I walk this afternoon?

• Hungry.

• That 14% stout last night was amazing.

• It’s fine that it’s raining.

• The tarp on that roof looks secure.

• What did Sam just say?

It looks worse written down that is was to experience the procession of thoughts. This mind is rarely empty, except when I’m in the flow of something. Or sometimes indulging my habit of sitting in the meadow after nightfall to absorb whatever is in the air.

The point:

Notably, one thought was absent. It’s a very popular thought, based on how often I see and hear it expressed.

The world is in a terrible state.

This thought never arises because I think it’s bullshit.

And yet, people are miserable all the time about ‘the state of the world’. They always think it’s going in the wrong direction. Apparently away from some previous better state. Only the other day someone was telling me that a friend had started up, over drinks, about how depressed they are about the state of the world and - inevitably - Trump immediately came up. Like me, she pushes back on this too, and is met with a kind of blankness.

Like a social rule was just broken. You don’t want to talk about how terrible Trump is.

It’s as if there is a rule among a certain cosmopolitan middle class that you can’t be happy while ever there is any ‘non-progressive’ energy in the political or cultural ether of the anglophone world.

I have no idea if this is sincere or performative.

If it’s sincere I feel sorry for people who can’t even get a tiny lift in spirits from the Gaza ceasefire only because it was driven into existence by Oafish Orange Man’s talent for the brute willing of his alternative facts into some version of reality.

Having spent the entire Gaza war feeling little to no sympathy for a culture that would eradicate all Jews in the region and nothing but contempt for the academic just-so story creators of post-colonial morality tales who carry water for the savages of Hamas, I was somewhat surprised at how much relief I felt that the bulk of the killing is at least temporarily over.

I must still be quite human.

But almost no one in my orbit is happy, because Trump is Bad and that’s all there is to it. He is crudely enriching himself, you see. His bribe price - or bride price - is always involved somewhere. There has to be something in it for The Donald and his family. Even though his personal antipathy to violence is well enough documented (while the exquisitely cultured Obama pretended to be a peacenik while overseeing untold killings of America’s enemies) he’s still lazily labelled a ‘fascist’.

I’m fascinated by the Trumpian approach, which boils down to doux commerce. Even if it involves enriching himself outside of all previous presidential norms. That wild idea he floated of turning the Gaza strip into a resort wasn’t as stupid as everyone wanted it to be. Especially given that the Palestinian ‘cause’ is entirely focused on ‘liberation’ rather than what kind of nation they could be.

So, in a certain culture, you can’t just smile at his childlike desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize and be happy that he lied and bullied Hamas and Netanyahu into mostly not fucking with each other in the way they have for the previous two years. To fit in with polite society you have to look past any of his achievements and focus entirely on all the norm-busting ways he has.

You can’t hang out with any ‘nice people’ and dare to suggest that climate change won’t be the global catastrophe that they seem to actively want it to be. Because then you’ll be called a ‘denier’, no matter how nuanced your view.

Things have got to be terrible and everyone has to know that you feel bad about it all. They even built the Bluesky platform especially to wallow in this vibe.

Well, I don’t. For all the things that are regrettable in the world, I’m still glad to be living in 2025 with so many fewer people dying in wars, famines and the rest of us no longer suffering from the terrible hot beverages, rubbish white goods and unreliable technology that plagued every other time.

It’s as if being unhappy and anxious is an individual duty. That you can’t be at ease in life as long as anyone is worse off than you. It’s all so puritanically Christian, but without any of the good bits like a beautiful afterlife and being loved in a fundamental way by something bigger than you.

No, I’m not suckering for it. My health will fail in due course and other awful things will befall me and the people I love, because that’s life, but I’m not wasting my remaining time with anxiety, anger, frustration and disapproval that the Gaza ceasefire was forced into happening by an uber capitalist who cheats at golf.

I predict that Substack has a bright future because ... catastrophising

Catastrophising is popular and sells well on Substack. That’s why you might have been fed the false impression that Britain is poised on the brink of civil war. People love that stuff.

Long ago I wrote about an article I can’t find now. Written by a prominent American conservative in the early 60s (if memory serves) it was all about the imminent collapse of civilised society due to liberal values. Nothing of the sort ever happened and more or less the same article is published every day by anxious conservatives.

Let’s not pick on the right. The leftish is at least as bad.

But making catastrophic claims is useful in politics and now a lot more in science, where such things tend to be PR-driven. These claims’ relationship with reality play second fiddle to their utility as tools for signalling to peers, rallying people to a cause like ‘fighting’ climate change, getting research funding or selling books, newspaper, magazine and Substack articles.

Here’s where things aren’t just supposed to be bad. You’re expected to agree that they’re getting worse. So terrible predictions are made. One of my favourites is that Trump will end democracy in the US so that he can have another term in office. Lol.

Prophecy is one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book for attention and status-seeking.

When a doom-laden prediction doesn’t come true, the trick is just to keep ‘em coming. The market will see to the rewards.

It’s a tradition as old as humanity.

Remember when Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb? We were going to run out of food because of too many people and then human ingenuity magically increased production and it’s now mostly wars that cause starvation. Even the deleterious effects of climate change are now proven to be mostly mitigated by improvements in that field, apart from maybe in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yes, problems exist and it will obviously be better to work on them. But there is no sign of catastrophe.

China hasn’t collapsed, either. It was going to, said lots of pointy-headed types, and then it didn’t.

I can feel the intakes of breath from here. The accusations of Pollyannaish naivety.

Go right ahead and feel worried, if that’s right for you. I’ll need better reasons to be depressed about the times we live in.

Let’s establish some rules though. If you aren’t miserable about the many awful things that still go on, I won’t assume that you think they’re fine. The suggestion here isn’t that everything is great. It’s that everything isn’t shit. Or, maybe the stronger claim that things are mostly quite good. All messy and bumbling, with lots of sub-optimal things like the Ukraine war dragging on and Hamas going back to their old habit of mostly killing Palestinians they don’t like and myriad other issues, but still the world isn’t ending.

When you shoot the social breeze with someone who launches into the ‘ain’t it awful‘ game it’s probably easiest to just go along with it. That’s simpler than banging on about all the evidence that complexity, adaptation and innovation are under-appreciated for forestalling collapses and foiling the direst predictions.

Human ingenuity knows no bounds in creating fears of catastrophe, but also averting it. Those Covid vaccines were an astonishing achievement. But just as climate doomerism is beginning to dial back a bit we now have the AI will kill us all and must therefore be stopped movement.

Names are now being made in this field, with wild prophecies that are really just variations on the paperclip maximiser thought experiment. There’s even a popular podcast called ‘The Last Invention‘ because, you see, AI will take over and that will be it. Our last invention will destroy us.

No one who has adopted this miserable outlook will be swayed by your suggestion that the leaps from massively disruptive (with gains and losses in an economic and cultural sense) to catastrophic are unlikely. Or that it’s actually hard for robots to gain total control of all resources while under the beady eye of the most successful species on Earth and that immunity to shutdown if things really do go badly wrong is probably impossible for even a ‘thinking’ machine to achieve.

Let alone the obvious possibility that AI might plateau anyway, without ever becoming agentic in any meaningful sense. More disappointing things have happened. I once thought we’d all have flying cars by now, with magnetic fields preventing crashes, but we plateaued and I just go around in a Peugeot 3008 with an oil consumption problem.

I’m sorry not sorry for writing a post against the miserable zeitgeist. You could say that I’m a catastrophe sceptic. But really I’m just fed up with all the moaning.

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I got an A at school for an essay on Lord of the Flies, possibly because it was the first book that really said something to me about conformity.

Although I did fall for the human need to identify with a team in the decades that followed, the unease this provoked eventually outweighed the impulse. It leaves me feeling detached from crowds and their received simple understanding of nuanced and complex things.

Recent events do nothing to dissuade me from this position.

Charlie Kirk was a saint, a martyr, a hateful antichrist and on and on it goes.

All I’m personally confident to say is that he was a man who believed some things and wanted to talk others into believing them. That’s what he was and now he’s been extinguished for reasons none of us yet really know, but you’d never guess this.

The proverbial Martian arriving in these familiar moments of cascading hyper-opinion might find it strange. All these people who don’t know enough about something being so confident that they know everything.

I also blog on an erotic community platform at the moment. It’s like a Facebook for the debauched and I notice with dismay how people are compelled to do politics even there. Many posts have assured me that compassion for Charlie Kirk and his family is The Wrong Reaction because something something HATE. I have seen no equally open pushback at all on this sentiment, which is interesting. The ‘silent majority‘ knows to keep its head down.

On that site what’s curious is how the people who choose complicated gender identities and display edgy relational statuses and aspirations in particular so often seem to be medicated for things like ADHD, show signs of regular mental distress and are always massively liberal. The correlation between this and also thinking that killing people for Bad Opinions is fine seems unsurprising. We’re used to this now. No wonder the data consistently correlate mental health issues with ideological positions and the worst of them suffered by the most liberal. I never used to understand the right-wing trope on Twitter that ‘liberalism is a mental illness’ but I can see now how it arises. It’s bullshit, of course, but there really does seem to be something of a there there.

I saw less of the uninformed but confident opining on Facebook itself, because most of my connections are French and not so plugged into the anglophone news sphere. But there was some of it among British friends, so there’s no escaping the chatter everywhere people congregate to give and receive attention online about things like the murder of Charlie Kirk. A thing that none of us really knows much about.

Not since a few weeks ago, when an outlier idiot did something so dysfunctional and pointless, has there been so much chatter. Substack continues to be full of it all and I’m having to skip past even more Notes than usual because life’s too short to waste on people externalising their emotions in the guise of commentary.

That the killer had a trans-identifying lover and dwelled in unsavoury digital spaces seem to be the most obviously salient facts established so far. But neither of these things need really be especially significant, if you can bring yourself to stop having feelings about it all.

It’s easy to do that. All you have to do is stop reacting from the limbic system and think in the neocortex instead. All those disparate facts do is tell you some background things about someone who did something that normal people internalised in infancy as things you don’t do, even if you’re unhappy about something.

The killing of Charlie Kirk tells you nothing beyond that. Anyone saying otherwise is mostly just caught up in a moment of ritual observance, whatever intellectual frills they stitch onto the discussion. The same applies to the high falutin podcast discussions about it too. The ones that seek to identify what it means for the culture.

It means nothing that we didn’t know already, which is that there is always a small number of emotionally dysregulated people who aren’t really fit to be among us. Some Jews were murdered outside a synagogue yesterday, in Britain, ostensibly ‘because’ Israel has been killing people who want their entire country wiped off the map and some people are having big feels about it all.

But all any of this really tells you is that there are a few people who can’t control their impulses and sometimes take other people’s lives because of this failing.

Sorry to be the least interesting blog on Substack, when what you really want is compelling social commentary.

The point to this piece is just personal. Which is that it feels better to notice the role of the limbic system, how collective reasoning from the limbic system typically hacks your own reactivity and that feeling aroused by the contamination of crowds is not nourishing. Nor does it make anything in the world better.

Conservatives won’t stop being in control of the US for the next few years, so killing Charlie Kirk or gloating about his death, won’t improve the world for those who don’t like that fact. Gaza will still be a horrible, ruined place with no clear path to viable Palestinian statehood and killing some jewish people in London changes nothing about that.

Once you see futility there’s no appropriate reaction to it beyond an eye-roll. These acts are futile and so is joining in rituals to celebrate or denounce them. Our emotions about many things are largely a waste of energy and space, is what I ended up realising. Just spasms from the limbic system.

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William Golding did us the favour of describing how cross-contamination between limbic systems makes the collective lose its mind in ways that end in killing. Later, someone went on some podcasts to justify writing an essay titled ‘Charlie Kirk is dead: here’s why I’m celebrating‘ and this just seems pathetic to me.

I still cannot help but have opinions on all sorts of things, so advocating consistent neutrality would be hypocritical. For example, my opinion of anyone who isn’t disgusted by the murder of Charlie Kirk is that they’re some combination of stupid and morally confused.

But thinking this about people (especially those I don’t personally know, like the author of that essay) does not enhance my life. There is nothing nourishing me in these feelings. So I maintain awareness of that dispositional disdain and celebrate that while it was once satisfying to feel such things, it no longer is.

Last time here there was a footnote about how hard it can be not to join in with the latest ‘thing’.

“My Substack Notes feed featured little else but reactions to Kirk’s murder. It was interesting that I was dying to add my thoughts. Agree with people or disagree with them, offer some kind of alternative perspective from that of the herd. On other platforms I saw various justificatory declamations that he had it coming for one reason or another. Those infuriated me. But still I held my counsel.

It was hard.

But I resisted those urges. The urge to be part of something. Bear witness to a tiny moment in history. To have the right take. To identify with the right people and slag off the wrong people.”

Some things are natural, but unhelpful and even undesirable. We can’t help our collective social impulses, but they can be metered once you see what’s happening. And it might be useful to notice it, given how it is exploited for control. The other inevitable literary example is Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate and of course it’s chilling when you see synchronised behaviour of the kind encouraged in North Korea.

But, personally, Golding’s ‘Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill her blood!‘ captures the seemingly frenetic quality of ritualised emotion best.

There’ll be a new pointless assassination soon enough and that will be the moment to notice this for yourself, perhaps.

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Later on in this piece I bit my tongue for one of the most cringeworthy mea culpas I've ever issued. And it felt good to write it.

Cambridge philosopher Dan Williams sums up a problem in this Note. That being a naive view of political values and morality as self-evident to a certain class of 'enlightened' people - typically educated and very liberal in the social sense.

As Dan says there:

"if you believe the legitimacy of the state is fundamentally tied to political equality among democratic citizens, the spectacle of non-democratically-elected parts of the state (the judiciary, the civil service) playing a substantial role in shaping and constraining policy in accordance with their values will seem deeply wrong. If you don’t understand that this is how many populists see and evaluate things, their political choices will not make sense."

Dan's Note landed just as I was reflecting on the kind of intellectual authoritarianism often found in those who are academically or technocratically accomplished, but less philosophically reflective.

I have some intuitions about this, chief of which is that there is a religious quality in people treating 'The Science' and everything that underpins 'evidence-based policy' as a kind of surrogate moral authority.

Typically you will see more moral judgement and condemnation than philosophical intellectual curiosity from such actors, suggesting that their thinking brains are kind of bypassed when confronted with those who don't share their intuitions about the world. In this way they behave as if they belong to a religion which they have a mission - or duty, even - to defend and promote.

They're often otherwise clever and accomplished, but having deep procedural knowledge about the material world does not in itself represent intellectual sophistication. You might be the cleverest person in the room at controlling aircraft or designing them while still remaining a binary thinker outside your specialist domain.

In fact, these kind of people might sometimes be the least equipped for philosophically complex problem-solving, having originally chosen fields which reward certainty and mistrust ambiguity.

Of course we need such people. Without them we'd never get things done and we'd still be dying from preventable things. The pragmatic point is that it isn't obvious that they should always be running things. Because theirs seems often to be a thinking style, outside their wheelhouse, that is unyielding and brittle, somewhat akin to a religious fundamentalism.

These are the people who will tweet (or, more likely these days, skeet) about it being just 'the law' and 'human rights' when obviously undesirable people are given 'asylum'. They haven't read the legal philosopher analysing the difference between law and its interpretation or application; the clear shaping of policy by a judiciary who are not at all neutral in their rulings.

In this way they are often quite authoritarian, with 'The Law' joining 'The Science' as The Word on everything.

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During Britain's Brexit referendum these kind of people were overrepresented on the Remain side, with which I firmly identified too. I remember thinking that it was surely obvious that Remain was the 'correct' vote because it was supported by much more academically, educationally and professionally accomplished people. It took me years to realise why people voted the way they did and respect their reasons as valid in a different way to my reasons for voting against leaving.

As an aside, if that referendum were run again it's no longer obvious to me which way to vote. I have new understanding of many aspects of the EU project and see it through multiple frames now. I have fewer feelings about it all.

But even now you often see people in the PMC (professional-managerial class) equating scepticism about the project of the European Union with 'anti-intellectualism'. As if it's simply not possible to be smart and not toe the PMC party line. And, of course, mistrust, unease and hostility toward heavy immigration is also cast as ignorant and xenophobic by those who either cannot or will not understand it.

Of course, lots of this insistence on deference to “the experts” functions as a social or tribal marker. And in many educated circles, scepticism is equated with anti-intellectualism. Only this week the theoretical physicist Hossenfelder was disaffiliated with the LMU Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy for her scepticism around much work in her field - another example of the incentives to keep your head down. This problem is well documented in climate science where challenging predictive models has become risky because they are somehow sacrosanct, like religious artefacts.

None of this would be happening in a healthy intellectual environment where humility was respected. A culture in which these amazing and important fields of knowledge-gaining endeavour were recognised as a human and always provisional, error-correcting enterprise. And which also sought to understand itself better, by recognising the obvious anxieties and incentives in play. But not only that. A wider appreciation of the philosophy of science and a more respectful recognition of other frames.

All of this seems to apply broadly to technocracy in general, with little recognition that what's believed and what should be done is a dichotomy subject to obvious human prejudices, biases, incentives and investment in identities.

But, as Hossenfelder was just reminded, scepticism is considered anti-intellectual, which is ironically itself a sign of low intellectual sophistication.

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'Populists' like Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen are always dismissed as oversimplifying complex problems. Which they obviously do. And it's therefore convenient, so that their 'stupid' supporters can be denigrated. And yet those who do this oversimplify too, by failing to grasp complexity and then flattening issues from should we consider doing this to how can we do this? As if it's obvious that certain things will make the world better. A perennial example in the UK is the National Health Service and whether injecting more money will lead to better, faster treatment for more people.

That's a classic flattening proposition that assumes there is nothing else going on when the NHS consistently fails on many performance measures. I yearn for the announcement that the government is going to get someone in to analyse how the whole seems so different than the parts. How the inputs get chewed up by the dynamics that emerge in highly complex organisations that are not really anybody's fault because it's just how things end up.

Yet you'll constantly hear from those who take an interest in an NHS they love that it just needs more money or that the managers must be bad and should be replaced with better ones who'll finally make it work. But it's vanishingly rare to hear anyone say that maybe countless interdependencies between staff, processes, and culture in the NHS leads to weird and unavoidable emergent dynamics that more money and different managers will be ineffective at solving.

It isn't just the populists who oversimplify and lack the sophistication to recognise the complexity of things.

On the subject of immigration, at least in Britain, I have never heard an argument from my own class that says people might be wrong from an economic standpoint to want it reducing but that the subjective wellbeing of the citizenry is important enough to consider prioritising. Instead they're sneered at and lectured by people who are themselves prioritising their own subjective feelings on the matter and assuming that what they value is best for everyone.

There has been much mockery of the article written by British politician Daniel Hannan1 before the Brexit referendum. In it he painted a mawkish vision of a wonderful Britain ascending to its 'sunlit uplands' ten years after the vote. Today, a decade later, it's an easy target because it was such obvious bullshit. Read it yourself and lol.

But if all you can do is lol, you aren't really that smart. You haven't considered what he was saying. Some of his points are reasonable. Such as the suggestion that a polity only really flourishes when it has agency and its people trust that their institutions are acting in their interests. Or that supranational law dilutes the accountability of those in power, domestically, distancing their decisions from those who are most affected by them. And that political sovereignty is a good and that restoring democratic legitimacy regardless of immediate economic cost is a justifiable project.

This doesn't mean that I agree with Hannan now. I'm close to dispassionate about the old Brexit tribal positions. I see the merits in both. The shift that's occurred is a sense that simply sneering at certain philosophical principles is more a sign of ignorance than it is of progressively-oriented sophisticated enlightenment. (Even though I can't help sneering at elements of progressivism and 'Trust the Experts', mostly because the people there are so convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority).

There's no cool payoff here. No kind of rhetorical flourish I can muster. There are no answers, because of course there are no answers. It's just a series of observations on the post-ideological scepticism that I currently enjoy experiencing.

In case you missed it first time …

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Quick thoughts on being a little less reactive

So Charlie Kirk was murdered and I was as perturbed as anyone by another apparent act of 'political' violence. As a growing sceptic of emotions too, I immediately began self-monitoring.

My Substack Notes feed featured little else but reactions to Kirk's murder. It was interesting that I was dying to add my thoughts. Agree with people or disagree with them, offer some kind of alternative perspective from that of the herd. On other platforms I saw various justificatory declamations that he had it coming for one reason or another. Those infuriated me. But still I held my counsel.

It was hard.

But I resisted those urges. The urge to be part of something. Bear witness to a tiny moment in history. To have the right take. To identify with the right people and slag off the wrong people.

When things like this happen and everyone feels the need to react, there seems to be a somewhat undignified aspect to it. I remembered this and refused to relent to my urges.

What was good about this was that the world didn't need to know what I thought. Which was mostly that I couldn't get the video clip out of my mind where his little girls run to greet him somewhere.

Also, I was following my own blithely expressed advice not to talk about things before you really know what happened.

Was it an increasingly violent leftishist culture? I've no idea. Was it part of a bigger picture in general? I'm not really seeing that. Was the man who did it a fucked up idiot, untethered from normal life? I'm guessing so. Yes, insofar as I have any kind of take, that's it.

I have nothing further to say, beyond that I'd rather things like that wouldn't happen. And that if you think that there's any kind of justice in putting a bullet into someone for the words that have come out of them, you should examine that closely. That's an even worse form of emotional reactivity than needing to say things as soon as something happened.

There, I said some things in the end. But at least I waited a bit.

But first: they're off. Ten days into their 1,300 km (800+ miles) walk from the northern tip of the French Cotentin peninsula to home on the Mediterranean coast, P and Youna are en route. Here they are where I found them for a supply drop last weekend.

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Walking home

Reculer pour mieux sauter

I’m writing this from the comfort of a clean white bed in the centre of Caen, as the rain sluices down and the church bells strike a note that feels perfectly in tune with the moment. My little studio with its exposed stone walls, heavy beams and a winding wooden staircase to reach it, must be one of the rare survivors of 1944; Caen was almost flattened…

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9 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Walking Home

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My broad scepticism over political ideologies includes balking at what you might call a quasi-religious 'eschatological structure'. An idea of history moving toward an end point, delivering all the things that certain people feel would be good.

It also stems from a personal disdain for moral one-upmanship manifested as a sneering contempt for those who are considered less enlightened. To me, that always seems to come from a place of ignorance and identity fragility. At least, that's where it always came from in my case.

As I became more small c conservative (only in a kind of Burkean way) I came to realise that it's partly because that isn't really an ideology. Moderate small c conservatism and its broad objection to certain kinds of change has something in common with the scepticism I developed about big answers to common human problems.

There's a gulf between small c conservatism and populist right-wingness, progressive leftishism and even large C Centrism (which often manifests as dogma too).

Hard left and right are eschatological in that they each contain the idea of history having an arc that bends toward something that might be described as a utopia. The notion that this is desirable, let alone achievable, was eventually ruined for me by coming to understand the fate of so many people in countries that tried to accelerate the process toward an end state. Although it's been fashionable throughout my lifetime to educate our young about the evils of fascism, while skipping gaily past the even bigger bodycount of communism, these ideas are essentially the same. Follow the path and everything will be fine. Ignore the costs because the end state is worth it. Promise.

I just finished Paul Cooper's Fall of Civilisations podcast episode on ancient Egypt and was struck by that multi-millennia story arc. It's gripping and seems about right for what really happens in history. Ups and downs, cycles of collapse and renewal. New ideas, breaking down old ways and an ebb and flow of civilisational vitality.

The only thing that seems constant is that things still get better over time for more people, because that's how we're built as a collective. It therefore drives me nuts that you can't have a casual conversation with anyone without them saying that the world is currently going to hell in a handcart, when it just obviously isn't. If I could be bothered engaging I'd ask when exactly would you prefer to be living?

I get that 'let's continue making incremental improvements to life in general' isn't a winning slogan but it works for me more than 'REAL CHANGE' because real change is the thing that just happens anyway, without our 'betters' steering it. Improving things is an almost universal impulse that doesn't need big-ass politics and supposed intellectuals steering the ship.

Then there's the moral dimension. The idea that your particular intuitions are the correct ones, in some way deriving their truth value from somewhere in the constellation of facts about the universe.

A friend on FB who's upset about Gaza (yet never said a word about October 7) and objects to people who are bothered by illegal immigration often uses the term 'flag-shaggers' and I sigh and scroll past.

Disdain for values you've never understood seems to signal several things to me; team-sports-level sophistication, personal anxiety and possibly identity insecurity. That's what flattening things is for. To make what you don't understand feel less threatening by caricaturing it. Reducing the national flag to a mockable fetish is a classic of the genre. The 'flag shaggers' sneer never makes me think oh, that's the correct way of seeing people who enjoy a sense of belonging and celebrate it with a collective symbol. What I actually think is ah, you see yourself as more sophisticated and enlightened than me, then.

Flags are epecially interesting in the current moment.

They are an ordinary feature around where I live. People fly le drapeau tricolore or the two/three lions of Normandy in their gardens and it's just a normal thing. They're glad to be French or Norman and and it's a way of showing solidarity with their neighbours. In Britain it's declassé, at best, and considered aggressive, at worst, to fly a flag at home.

The divergence of my native and resident countries has its roots in different stories. France has a shared founding story - the establishment of the Republic - whereas Britain and England lack a unified founding myth. It's easy to see why people in Britain would like to hold onto something that binds them now that the Empire is gone, Britannia no longer rules the waves, goods come from China and so many people arrive who obviously don't fit in or contribute much. So the flag - and especially the cross of St George - is now freighted with frustration and has become a protest symbol. People are therefore putting them everywhere and it makes others uncomfortable.

Because ideologies have what you might call an 'eschatological horizon', all symbols end up sifted for their desirability as baggage on the journey. For the leftish, a flag doesn't belong in Utopia and for the populist right Utopia is just a romantic ideal of England, with crosses of St George as the sign that it has been reached. They're faking it 'til they make it.

Now some people are petulantly rubbing their beloved flag in everyone's noses, vandalising everything from bandstands to mosques with gaudy red crosses. Some of these acts are inevitably labelled as 'hate crime' and so this great symbol is now besmirched as much by the idiots who revere it as the progressively 'enlightened' who scorn it.

I'm reading less British news than ever, because the culture war there remains in full swing and I'm bored of it. It's no longer just online because people are on the streets. Rarely a weekend goes by without a large scale public reminder that people are all-in for Palestine or all-out against migrants. I cannot help but feel sceptical about the aims of both. The end point they wish for looks neither realistic nor desirable.

This intuition that conservatism of the sober, moderate kind (not the revolutionary idiocy of MAGA or that promoted by some of Britain's Reform basket cases) is close to classical philosophical scepticism seems to have emerged inevitably, even if a bit surprisingly. (Like many thoughts, it popped into my head while sitting under a tree. Lol).

But consider the parallels.

This blog is called Rarely Certain for a reason. Classical sceptics always counselled to withhold judgment when certainty isn’t possible. Small-c conservatism, at its most thoughtful, shares the same instinct. It recognises that reality, society and human nature are too complex and nuanced to be reliably engineered into a 'better' shape. Change is possible and sometimes desirable, but you'd best know exactly what you're doing because the consequences might come at you from leftfield. That's pretty conservative as a perspective. And it also features epistemic humility.

People sometimes misunderstand scepticism as nihilism. RC has even been accused of promoting the idea that we can't know anything, even though you won't find that written anywhere in this blog. But just as classical scepticism is pragmatic about over-claiming big answers, conservatism is pragmatic about discarding practices and norms just because they can't be abstractly justified in rational terms. It respects that they function, even if imperfectly. This seems to be a sceptical principle, trusting experience over idealistic theoretical confidence.

There's a reason you can't browse around Substack for long without bumping into Chesterton's Fence.

The philosophical sceptical tradition resists grand claims to total truth and small-c conservatism is sceptical of grand projects that promise to remake society. Both see hubris and overreach as the root of foolishness. Where sceptics see the fallibility of reason, conservatives see the fragility of social fabric. They share a cautionary impulse.

Nodding to Doug Bates (read him) ataraxia feels like a personal state worth pursuing. Keeping your expectations modest and respecting that you might not be in possession of all the answers. This feels quite conservative to me. Appreciating continuity, pragmatism and respecting what came before, even when it was imperfect. Look around and you can see that most things work tolerably well and rarely descend into chaos, so maybe tearing it all down to begin again isn't the smartest move.

It's not that the inherited order is metaphysically right in some universal sense. It's just that it's led us to a broadly better life than any of the previous generations in human history. Whatever the latest popular portents of doom are published daily on Substack, things are actually not that bad and there's much worth preserving.

You don't have to be extreme with this. Taken to ridiculous lengths, scepticism could make you paralysed to act at all. The same goes with conservatism. Plenty of suffering can be relieved by making incremental changes to do so and only the pasty-faced Hobbesian edgelord extremist doesn't want to see that.

Momentarily I'm tempted to call this blog Rarely Certain: sceptical conservatism for an anxious world. But I won't. I just noticed some parallels.

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[This is a speculative piece. I'm neither competent nor minded to 'prove' what I sense is going on]

AI is vexing people. Quelle surprise.

Like every new technology, AI is an opportunity for many and a threat to some. That's why you always get evangelists and complainers, as people interrogate their internal reactions to new ways of doing things, then project them.

It's only been a few weeks but I'm seeing no reason to update my current intuitions on all the kerfuffle about people using AI to generate 'content'.

TL;DR - I said that it's up to everyone what they read or listen to, or how they produce things that people like. It's not really any of our business. We all have agency.

But, if anything, I'm rapidly growing tired of the handwringing. This is probably the issue on which I'm furthest out of step with 'the room', given that many people I normally pay a great deal of attention to seem to be really worried about AI in the creative context. I think it's the beginning of a new moral panic, disguised as something else.

The birth of Authenticity Panic

The first album I bought was Queen's A Night At The Opera. The sleeve featured a disclaimer 'no synthesisers'. You could see this in one light as highlighting how Brian May orchestrated layers of guitar parts, so that they often sounded non-guitarly. But equally it worked as an assurance of authenticity. We aren't cheating when we come up with these cool sounds because we're real musicians, not just knob-twiddlers. That's how teenage me interpreted it.

I'm sensing a growing authenticity panic now, with the drumbeat of anti-AI sentiment which seems more about feelings and fears than facts.

Eventually Queen embraced the beauty of tuning and modulating oscillators with precisely zero loss to their musical credibility and that's what will happen here, when everyone adjusts to the new reality of another technological gift to humanity. But it will take a while, because feelings are stubborn and we're in for a tiresome period of people pointing out all the ways that Large Language Models are fallible as a reason to reject them entirely.

It seems absurd to me that new tools lead to moral catastrophising in the way we’re seeing at this point. But every technology receives a backlash when those who are skilled in certain analogue practices are suddenly joined by ordinary people achieving pretty good results with the help of new tech. It was the same with digital photography.

I feel safe in predicting that disclaimers such as 'No AI was used in this article' will come to seem as quaint as Queen's 'no synthesisers' assurance.

But at the moment it's hard to resist pointing out that you aren't using AI to form your prose. Only yesterday, on an unrelated site, I saw a good writer accused of using AI when I have seen no signs of it in her output. She just writes with a certain clarity and cadence that AI typically emulates. I also like to write in a certain rhythm and cadence and I'm sure some people will therefore think that I'm either creating or editing my pieces with the assistance of an LLM. The urge to point out that I'm too egotistical to outsource my words like that is strong, such is the clamour to make AI use carry reputational cost.

What's going on at the root of this panic? Some speculations.

I'm thinking that there's a few psychological mechanisms in play and lots of rationalising to justify them.

Top of the list is status anxiety. This is understandable. There's every reason to fear that your cultural or professional value is eroded when supply of your particular talents suddenly expands. Now that some possibly untalented writers are topping the Substack bestseller charts with the help of Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT or whatever, this is hard evidence of AI's effect. It's too bad that people like those outputs and overlook the rest of us, but they just do and that's tough.

I suspect a certain amount of projection is also going on. Hardly any of us gets the paying audience we'd like and that's bound to result in personal dissatisfaction and insecurity. Now we're seeing certain accounts catapulted to prominence I suspect a whole lot of this negative affect is conveniently displaced onto a symbolic safe target. AI provides that target. The Substack struggle is real and often infuriating, so lashing out at machines for helping others slurp up precious attention is a disguised way of distracting from the fact that we just feel under-appreciated.

There's also the tendency sometimes labelled control bias, which seems to lie at the heart of a lot of moral calibration around things outside of our influence. We see a perceived injustice and immediately jump to the assumption that we must control whatever forces are behind it. It's distressing when you find that this is often impossible and probably partly accounts for why liberals in particular suffer from such poor mental health.

Social incentives are also commercial incentives on Substack

You can't escape the incentives that come with connection to others and all communities are rife with these. That's why we see so much virtue signalling in any domain. I've done plenty of it too, especially in my Twitter days when the incentives ended up financial as well as reputational.

Seen least kindly, virtue signalling is just a performance. It's a means of showing that you belong to a group or that your public identity is authentic. Implicit in all the grumbling about AI is a statement that you are uncontaminated by this new thing and therefore belong in the subset of authentic writers.

There's also good old outrage. It's our catnip. Platforms are built on amplifying and encouraging it. It's literally how swathes of the social web work and Substack is no different. Many people have figured out that the outrage potential around highlighting the most stupid manifestations of Wokeism or Trumpism is running out. So they've moved on to 'genocide' in Gaza and the evils of using machines that often get things wrong and produce bloodless text with no sincerity. Anti-AI polemics are doing well right now, so there's a strong incentive to flatten the issue and join in. To read a lot of the rhetoric you'd think the world is divided neatly between 'AI-bro' evangelism or a doom cult prophesying catastrophic sidelining of human creativity. People do this with anything related to our information environment.

The usually excellent blogger Ted Gioia played a blinder of this œuvre with a wild prediction that we are seeing the collapse of the knowledge system. People loved it. It really got them going. That piece had 2,943 likes, 520 comments and 665 shares at the time I'm writing this. But I have my doubts that the knowledge system (whatever that is) is doing anything but expanding in the way that it always does. I think Ted's making a living from reader attention and he knows that outrage and anxiety sells. Everyone who loved his piece enjoyed feeling agitated about it. If we're honest, we all do. I just enjoy it less, since noticing what's going on under the surface of my daily reading pleasures.

Identity and moral tribalism obviously weaves into all of this too. Identity typically coalesces around a feeling that we're on 'the right side' of certain issues and AI is a useful bogeyman around which to centre your self-image as a purist of some kind. I play along with it myself, to some extent, by constantly stressing that all my words are my own.

There's also a lot of ego in play, when it comes to choosing our standpoints on politics, ethics and cultural critique. Freddie deBoer occasionally nails this right down when he observes performative leftishism on issues such as Substack's 'Nazi problem'.

flattering the reader into thinking they’re part of a vanguard - “you and I, together, will starve the brownshirts of oxygen… once we’ve processed your monthly payment.” It’s a cynical symbiosis between the writer and the audience, both addicted to the dopamine drip of moral superiority. You’re not fighting Nazis, you’re buying artisanal outrage.

Freddie deBoer in this searing polemic

Cultural cycles never stop

Everything goes in cycles. When the printing press was invented there was a terrible kerfuffle around how it would erode authority, expose people to ideas they wouldn't (and shouldn't) otherwise have entertained and cause terrible things to happen. Which of course it did. But it also led to massively increased literacy and improved education. When video games reached a certain standard there were dire warnings of players becoming unable to distinguish their fantasy worlds from reality. At worst, callow youths would confuse their local shopping centres for a battlefield and forget that Call of Duty was just a game. It didn't happen. Some people stopped dating girls and got very good with their hand-eye coordination. Others found lots of joy in it all. Cycles of tech panic are nothing new. There was even an outcry when the cheaply available novel became popular. Something to do with women in particular having their pretty little heads filled with fantasy and being distracted from real life. Lol.

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Neurosis and gatekeeping

When more and more acts or things are pulled into the sphere of moral judgement you can't help but notice neurosis at the heart of it all. There are moral intuitions and there are also moral neuroses, it seems to me. These are where the very existence of a different perspective is upsetting to you. Again, I've had plenty of personal experience here. Being upset in some way that people can't see the world as I do. This has been most alarmingly displayed in American progressive circles, with embroidery, cooking and children's book communities online torn apart by unhinged attacks on a few by clearly neurotic people who discern injustice and impure thought in the minds of others.

Taste surveillance is another impulse that comes from a less noble place than people who would seek to influence others presumably notice in themselves. In the case of AI-generated artistic material, cultural policing of what others produce or consume, under the guise of protecting the commons sounds nicely high-minded. But it's also the impulse of the busybody for whom their own way of being is simply not enough to distract them from the pain of living. But gatekeeping is not a noble impulse. In my book it just signals an absence of humility.

I made a much longer list of factors influencing this panic, but you'll either have switched off in disgust by now or nodded along and want the conclusion. So here it is.

If it walks like a cope and quacks like a cope, it's probably a cope

Many of us would like to be conventionally desirable and the depiction of beautiful men or women forces us to confront the fact that we're - at best - mid. Feminism came up with an answer to this frustration by proclaiming the mass depiction of hotness as unjust. Because life isn't fair we all have to cope with lots of disappointment and one of the copes provided by feminism is that all those hot, aesthetically or sexually inspiring faces and bodies in the adverts are harmful to women and girls. They are an injustice. This was such a successful rhetorical move that it would be social suicide to suggest that feminist condemnation of depicting typically preferable body types or faces works as a cope for those without such qualities, if you dared suggest so at a proverbial dinner party.

There's no doubt that we're being rendered less significant in some way by AI, in several areas. People will soon have many of their romantic and friendly liaisons with probabilistic language algorithms sporting appealing avatars. Lots of work will no longer require human input. And an increasing amount of creative content will never emerge from a wet brain, while still delighting consumers. Insisting that all this is a terrible thing is comforting. That the thing that is incrementally rendering you obsolete in various domains is wrong and unjust, in some moral sense.

None of this is to disparage those who are campaigning against it, with sincere articles about the difference between human and machine life or ideas for badges on your work as a quality assurance of creative purity. It's just that I'm not convinced that it's worth all this attention. If we are to accept that everyone has agency and the ability to make their own choices, then why this intolerance of plurality when it comes to how things are produced? It only makes sense to me as an expression of anxiety over a new kind of competition. This is rational because we're already seeing machine-written top-selling Substacks with earnings that most of us couldn't imagine. But the anxiety around this is now disguised as a moral intervention. That is the cope. Realising that you're being replaced, you could write about how you feel about that and what you might do to accentuate your human originality. You could let others enjoy their machine life without defaulting to moral judgement.

You can't kid a kidder and I only suspect that all of this handwringing over yet another cultural crisis is a cope because it drives me nuts, too, when I see how popular some of this tepid, faux profound output has become - and not just on Substack. But there's also dignity at stake and complaining about currents beyond your control quickly becomes tiresome from the outside. Which is where I am.

Just as I did with obviously neurotic feelings about politics, I trust this explosion of negative feelings about agentic AI less and less. Looking inward instead of outward, to identify what was really going on, was liberating. Permitting an emergent broad scepticism led to improved steady-state wellbeing. Spotting the self-aggrandisement behind believing that my interpretation of the world made me superior was a calming step.

I'm still an elitist nerd in domains like music or literature and I still think that humans are the best in creative fields because intention and meaning are primordial qualities in those worlds. But many people will never make contact with those qualities in writing, music, art and other creative endeavours and it seems, to me, to be undignified to constantly complain about that.

It’s ages since anyone answered the call to

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I'm listening a lot to a Chilean band called Föllakzoid. It's a front for a producer called Domingæ Garcia Huidobro, but the technicalities don't matter. I love Föllakzoid.

Domingæ Garcia Huidobro always looks cool af, typically rocking a strappy, backless dress and a Fender Jazzmaster guitar running into a vintage Fender Twin Reverb. The image is part of the whole Föllakzoid 'experience', which is brooding, dark, slinky and monochrome in every way.

I'd hang out with Domingæ Garcia Huidobro in a heartbeat and next time there's a tour that brings Föllakzoid anywhere near here, I'll lobby friends who organise gigs and parties around the Cotentin to consider booking Föllakzoid for a show.

Why I mention Föllakzoid is because Domingæ Garcia Huidobro is a 'transwoman'.

That's it. There's nothing else to say about it. It just happens to be something about the person behind the cool shoe-gazey groove of Föllakzoid.

Domingæ could move in next door to me and I'd want to jam. I'd use his preferred pronouns in appropriate situations because it doesn't matter enough to me not to.

He's still a guy, though.

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When my generational cohort watched Top of the Pops on Thursday evenings our parents would tut about men wearing makeup and when Mick Ronson put his arm around the strangely beautiful David Bowie for the chorus of Starman we knew this was our world, not theirs, now.

We never thought about what any of this meant. It was just exciting and cool. And it still is, for me.

It all stopped being just exciting and cool when androgyny and gayness gave way to legally mandated identity recognition and policing of speech.

Domingæ Garcia Huidobro might not think so, but he's a guy and his dressing and presenting like a woman diminishes my admiration for him and his music not one jot.

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One of the most notable feats of sophistry in my lifetime was the association of facts with bigotry, by the ascendent academic leftishist class and its mainstream emissaries.

It's the same with hate. Anyone who is unsettled by otherness in appearance or culture (an entirely ordinary human trait) is sneered at, but only if they're lucky. More typically their reaction to more exposure to otherness than they'd like is labelled as hate.

In Britain there are protests at the moment by some obviously ordinary women who are unsettled by the arrival and accommodation of unvetted young men who have been coming ashore unlawfully in record numbers.

The vast majority of sexual crimes are committed by white indigenous people in the UK, say the finger-wagging sensibles of the nu enlightenment who insist that it's all just bigotry and hate. But the women know what the statistics show about the propensity of young men from radically different cultures to commit sexual assault, so they carry on.

But still I'm receiving emails about it being hate, fuelled and funded by the Far Right, from formerly interesting leftishist sources that used to care about the welfare of ordinary people before going all in on theoretical intersectional moralising.

It's often said that the intellectual left is where most of the cleverness lies, but I'm not so sure. To me, this kind of flattening is not only bad faith moral framing. It's abject thickness. Stupidity. Ignorance.

If you can't grasp the difference between baseline human sentiment about certain out-groups and active hostility toward them, that's an intellectual rather than a moral failing.

Another intellectual failing is not recognising that moral flattening doesn't work in the long term. You can only raise the social cost of expressing unease so far before people won't play any more. Every 'movement' ends up like this, when its dogmatic overreach hits the brick wall of reality. That transwomen aren't women and a lot of irregular migration is bad for social cohesion and crime are just facts about the world that have nothing to do with bigotry or hatred.

Just as I have no doubt that I could get along well with Domingæ Garcia I have no doubt that many of those young migrants will be an asset to their host country, given the opportunities and discipline necessary to keep them in line with British cultural norms.

That mix of gnarly working class women and normalton Mumsnet types behind the Women’s Safety Initiative are bound to attract their tiresome share of actual racists. I hope they'll guard against that, because it will doubtless be used in attempts to discredit them. But their existence is necessary. When you drive discomfort underground it ferments the kind of anger that really does turn into bigotry and hate. They're actually doing the leftish a favour by normalising the conversation about the kind of migration that only the self-anointed priest class have any love for.

If they get their way, Britain won't become a white ethnostate. It'll just be more pragmatic and honest about human nature.

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As a heuristic, follow what experts, rather than non-experts, say is obviously reasonable.

In most cases seeking advice from people specifically qualified in a domain gets you better results. The cliché is that you don't ask your plumber how to fix teeth, or the dentist about unblocking toilets.

But what about when experts opine outside their credentialed domain. This is something we have become inured to in the era of ‘evidence-based-policy’, when the credentialed constantly elide the space between the current facts and what should be done about them.

Outside of their wheelhouse, the cleverest people are sometimes as obviously out of their depth as anyone else because what makes them clever in one area is not necessarily transferrable to another field. One problem with this is that, precisely because they're clever, they don't realise this.

Such tensions arise all the time in cognitively gifted people. Ian Leslie recently observed this, in light of consistently wild predictions for the future from people who develop generative AI tools:

they are experts in one thing: the abstract world of AI systems. They’re not experts in economics (plainly), or sociology or psychology. They know little about most of the industries they say will be transformed. They’re not the deepest thinkers about history or human nature. In short, when they make these sweeping predictions, they are way out of their lane. Yet their pronouncements are received with the utmost seriousness by the media, even though they might as well be pop stars opining on politics - The Ruffian ‘5 Reasons Why There Won’t Be an AI Jobs Apocolypse’

This blind spot leads to terrible communication from clever people.

Sometimes the cleverest people can be demonstrably ignorant, once they're opining outside their wheelhouse. The best example of this is the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who pronounces on gender ideology issues in ways that reveal naivety and ignorance.

What is going on with this? When you skim through the research on thinking styles and their respective foibles, quite a lot, as it turns out.

First there's a thing psychologists call 'Cognitive Fluency Bias'. This arises from the relative mental ease with which highly intelligent people are often able to process complex ideas. They do it faster than the rest of us in their own domain and can fluently account for their thinking. Such people can then interpret this as meaning that they possess a generalised superiority in thinking skills.

We're all subject to confirmation bias. It shouldn't be a surprise that smarter people are just better at mounting arguments that 'prove' what their instincts already suggest. Such arguments work equally as well on the self as they do with others, which is probably why clever people are sometimes identified in research studies as more prone to cognitive rigidity than less confident thinkers. And, of course, they are typically more influential because confidence is impressive, so even their poorly-founded conclusions have heft.

Good old groupishness and peer influence plays a role. We tend to share the values of our in-group, often unwittingly for social more than epistemological reasons. Clever people are naturally overrepresented in academia and it's been well chronicled that this world is becoming ever more homogenised on socio-political matters. Sometimes this is justified by appeal to a universal moral truth, which clever people attain by virtue of being clever and learning better ways of thinking. But that's more of a conversation-stopping assertion about the moral superiority of intelligent people than an objective fact about the world.

Being used to receiving deference in one field probably has an effect too. When I read Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland I was surprised to see him opining negatively on certain foundations of Marxism and found him unconvincing. Carlo is clearly brilliant on quantum mechanics and why the traditional materialistic view of the universe doesn't adequately explain everything, but his takedowns of Marx seemed thin and naive (even though, for me, bashing Marx is pushing on a door that swung open several years ago).

You can't ignore the power of language either. Many theorists in the recent tradition of 'critical studies' are obviously clever with language and obviously wrong about the world. But strong language skill can create the illusion of coherence and credibility flowing from flawed assumptions or baseless assertions. HAES (Health At Every Size) advocates are exemplars of this.

Then there's the philosophically naive assumption that knowing about material things is equivalent to knowing what to do about them. That's the fallacy underlying the creep of technocracy and machine regime governance. The difference between what Epicurus called 'Tẽchne' (know-how) and 'Sophia' (wisdom). I wrote about how sceptics also typically fail to appreciate this here.

In short, high general intelligence can be a double-edged sword. It brings enviable powers of reasoning, pattern recognition and learning, but also overconfidence when venturing outside one's actual domain of expertise.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than on the hellsite known as LinkedIn.

A few weeks ago the car maker Jaguar's European sales were revealed to have plummeted by 97.5%.

This followed a controversial rebrand-signalling exercise at the end of 2024, which included an advert deemed to be 'Woke' because it featured what seemed to be gender non-conforming people.

There was a good old media ding dong about all that, most of which left me unimpressed.

I work in automotive and probably understand the British market more than the average person. I suppose this makes me a slight expert in the field.

The criticism of Jaguar's move seemed almost universal, but what was most interesting to me was that all the noise came from outside. The experts within my world discussed Jaguar's approach with curiosity, while outsiders confidently proclaimed the death of Jaguar.

Let's put something on record.

I think Jaguar decided to go specifically for the Tesla space, which was haemorrhaging catastrophically as Elon Musk became ever more publicly deranged. They knew what they were doing, right down to stoking such a huge amount of negative publicity. To this day I think that 30 seconds was brilliant.

But everyone else seems to think they know better. Including some very intelligent writers that I follow. One even seemed annoyed to receive pushback, on the basis that he's a comms and branding specialist.

Some background. Jaguar launched its 'Reimagine' strategy back in 2021. Production of almost all cars would end while the business transitioned to pure-electric luxury vehicles, closing or retooling plants and basically abandoning the volume market where every manufacturer is hostage to volume pricing. You won't get much Jag for under £100,000 when they come back.

Whether or not this is a wise, too-high-risk or brilliant strategy isn't the point. It's the strategy they launched.

Not building cars to sell is literally the current phase of this strategy.

But for about 10 days, LinkedIn was awash with people proclaiming 'go Woke, go broke' and similar platitudes. Look at the sales figures. Look how few people wanted a Jaguar this year. That proves how wrong Jaguar is. These people were often highly intelligent - mostly in branding and marketing - but deeply ignorant of what was happening.

But they couldn't resist opining.

Look - the iconic leaping cat logo has gone. Heritage blah.

They had no idea what they were talking about. And these were experts. Their credentials were sometimes impeccable. In. Their. Own. Wheelhouse.

Some of us couldn't resist trolling these people and, gradually, word spread that you can't sell cars if you aren't producing them. So they switched to opining about the strategy of pausing production.

As I write, 4 hours ago someone helpfully explained on LinkedIn that Jaguar 'tanked' its brand by having no inventory.

That person’s fluency gave them an out from admitting they were wrong about Jaguar. Less intelligent people would say 'oh, right, it's not what I thought'. Intelligent people can double down and are able to find arguments with surface plausibility to stay right where they were on an issue.

To me the problem seems to be one of appropriate humility and a willingness to recognise the non-equivalence of Tẽchne' and 'Sophia'.

I don't know where I'm going with this, by way of a conclusion. Perhaps something fluffy about being as willing as possible to recognise your limits rather than defaulting to feelings of superiority when other people see things differently.

A recurring thought is that teaching philosophy alongside technical disciplines might help. We're all taught (and I remember this all too well) what to think and how to solve problems rather than reflect on how to think and which problems require solving.

The problem with Neil deGrasse Tyson and the marketing influencers on LinkedIn is not that they're stupid. The problem is that they are smart.

This piece was inspired not just by the recent shenanigans on LinkedIn but by the wonderful Fall of Civilisations podcast (an antidote to political internet bullshit I unhesitatingly recommend). In Episode 18, about ancient Egypt, Paul Cooper cites Maxim 1 in Ptahhotep's The Maxims of Good Discourse.

“Don’t be proud of your knowledge.

Consult the ignorant and the wise;

The limits of art are not reached,

No artist’s skills are perfect;

Good speech is more hidden than greenstone,

Yet may be found among maids at the grindstones.”

Ptahhotep, eh. Still relevant after 4,400 years.

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If you follow the link above you’ll find alternative (cheaper) ways to unlock all posts than the standard Substack subscription.

I don't like the expression 'The Science'. Obviously there is no such thing as The Science any more than there is such a thing as The Love or The Learn or The Progress. A constant process of observation, hypothesis, testing, re-observation and so on is an endeavour, not an object designated by the definite article. To make it such is to degrade a necessary process of enquiry in service of base partisanship.

'The Science' is a misleading contraction of 'the current scientific consensus' and is one manifestation of scientism.

At best it's a lazy shortcut, in the same mould as referring to a generic class of 'experts' to whom everyone must defer purely on the basis of their authority. Both of these expressions are designed to circumvent discussion.

Because there isn't an object (The Science) or a homogenous group (The Experts) and because these are expressions only, they have become shibboleths.

Instrumentally, they are designed by the 'pro camp' as conversation-stopping axioms, aimed at enforcing conformity by sorting people into opposing teams, whether or not they really belong there. The most egregious use disparages all those who lack requisite credentials whenever they question the implications of a consensus that informs policy choices.

Here's where the inevitable and tiresomely necessary throat-clearing must always be done, lest one be accused of trying to roll back the Enlightenment.

Domain expertise is to be respected and heeded. Input from empirically knowledgeable people into policy construction is a necessary part of progress. Science and the technology it enables has been - and remains - the best way of solving material problems, physically improving our lives and achieving countless changes, many of which would be catastrophic to reverse.

But these indispensable things have become warped into scientism and credentialism, which in turn became politically charged tools, used primarily by a leftish-liberal technocratic class. They use these to distance themselves from the hard work of thinking more broadly and to exert a type of control that breeds disquiet and resentment in certain vociferous quarters where expert-endorsed policy implications are questioned.

—-

... My personal favourite explorations of how this manifests in the real world come from legal philosopher , Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. His Substack is one of very few actually scholarly attempts to paint the bigger picture on the problems that arise from technocracy and the project of 'political hedonism'.

News from Uncibal

Chronicling events in the egalist utopia

By David McGrogan

... but back to the expressions in question here.

The concepts of 'The Science' and 'Experts' thereby acquired emotional valence on both sides, each of whom consequently set out to flatten any conversation about them. Because emotion is bound with identity and identity is bound with politics, the question of who gets to choose our policy directions is often more driven by partisan loyalty than rational discussion.

On one side you have the reflexively suspicious contumacists who reject any orthodox position arising from consensus among the best informed people. This is a naive form of scepticism.

And at the other pole we have worship of the highest authority, factism. This holds that only certain kinds of proposition have any validity when it comes to 'progress'. This is a naive form of scientism.

How intellectually and morally confused this dichotomy is was illustrated with a familiar meme.

Like most political memes of the culture war variety it's an advertisement for the naivety of those who think it's a slam-dunk on their opponents.

Versions of this were often deployed by online people in connection with Brexit, Covid policy and climate change. What it is supposed to prove is that experts should do everything and anyone who disagrees is stupid and potentially dangerous.

Like any meme, it has fatal shortcomings. It is the maximally naive depiction of all sceptical sentiment toward technocracy.

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My primary objection to this way of thinking is that it represents a failure to appreciate the difference between instrumental or procedural knowledge, celebrated in the cartoon, and evaluative, contextual or integrative knowledge, which might be classed as the knowledge categories underpinning 'wisdom'.

The pilot (expert) knows how to control the plane and understands how it all works. Whether it's worth flying it, where it should go, the trade-offs involved in flying or whether it would be better to do something else require different forms of intelligence drawing on different types of knowledge.

Failure to recognise this distinction is the root of all sneering at people who don't automatically defer to Experts or The Science. This saw its most strident expression in the Covid pandemic, when many otherwise thoughtful heretics missed an opportunity to lay out a more valid case to debate.

The discussion that never seems to happen is around which end goal is most desirable for the maximising of common good.

Minimising deaths in a pandemic is foisted on everyone as the only goal because a naive calculus says death = bad and less death = good. This feels natural and obvious to anyone who doesn't pause to reflect on the implications. For example, if minimising death is the best thing possible we should reduce the speed limit on every road to 30 mph, be legally mandated to take regular exercise, ban alcohol and outlaw cake.

We don't do this because it's obvious that a good life doesn't equate so simply with risk-elimination.

The conversation that never happens in public is the wider range of options for which we might choose to optimise.

The strictest Covid restriction measures obviously attenuated deaths but had a net negative impact on wellbeing at the population level.

Instinctively the dissidents know this, but they pursued the wrong objective by trying to argue that Covid-19 isn't a serious disease. Or making themselves look stupid with claims about vaccines being purely 'experimental' and more dangerous than the virus.

In this way they ask to be marginalised.

Every person who said that masks don't work because a virion is smaller than the gaps in the fabric weave excluded themselves from any intelligent discussion of mask policy. 'Logic, innit' was the sole basis of their false claim and I couldn't be doing with it.

This is a strategic error on the part of many people with heterodox instincts.

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In case you didn't know already, a popular band on Spotify is confirmed to be synthetic. The Velvet Sundown was described as a 'provocation' by its creator/s and people have certainly been annoyed about it.

I wasn't annoyed. I thought it was funny. Especially the pictures.

It all reminded me of the K-Hole Trends stunt, which I loved.

The episode raises some ethical issues, such as robots taking a slice of streaming revenue while human artists struggle to earn a living. But I find that hard to feel mad about. For mid-level and independent artists and bands especially live performance is a more reliable source of revenue than streaming, downloads and physical format sales. If we concern ourselves with other people liking what they like, even if we think it's rubbish, I wonder what's really going on with that.

Still, I'm guessing that artists feel threatened by technology capable of producing a simulacrum of music plausible enough to gain time-limited consumers' attention.

Paradoxically it's because music has always been core to my life that I didn't care very much about this story.

The music of the Velvet Sundown meandered past me in the same way that AI-authored Substack essays do, with their uncanny valley quality of connecting predicted text strings in a way that feels hollow, despite executing all the correct rules.

The writer Will Storr recently came up with 'the Impersonal Universal' as the expressive AI mode in written form.

"There is a white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over. It is never funny. There are no surprises, true confessions or controversial moments. It is a description of the human average."

That's what The Velvet Sundown sounded like. But not uniquely so. It sounded the way that Sabrina Carpenter's tunes do, produced as they are by teams of professional writers who know what tickles the auditory parts of the temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, limbic system and so on.

The Velvet Sundown is on a continuum I've known since childhood, when hit singles were often the work of someone other than the people you saw on the record sleeve.

The Wombling Song wasn't performed by actual Wombles, guys.

Yes, that's flippant, but actual fakery isn't new in music and the Velvet Sundown merely told us that people will like things, however they originated. We knew this already.

I do understand what irks people about 'content' produced by agentic AI. Sharing those feelings is why I don't use it for writing, or even editing. My output doesn't appeal to a mass audience and I struggle to make ends meet in the real world, but I stick to high-effort output that's homeopathically profitable because I'd feel ashamed to outsource my words in the way that some of Substack's biggest sellers do.

Maybe it's a hard-wired human tendency to appreciate high-effort work by entertainers and artists.

Appreciation of effort is probably one of the reasons why people get annoyed about abstract art, like this.1

But I wonder if half the fuss around 'AI slop' is partly motivated by jealousy, because many 'writers' on this platform are achieving high status and serious income for doing next to no writing.

Some of the big names with genuine talent are increasingly bold in suggesting that the success of these people is undeserved, because they're prompters and editors at most.

But I'm sceptical.

'It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set - Gandalf/J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King)

All this maundering about AI reminds me of a point often made in Dan Williams's discussion of cognitive biases. He observes that when we talk about cognitive biases we're solely concerned with other people's cognitive biases.

In this case I'm thinking that the underlying frustration is that other people aren't seeing what the rest of us can. Or that they don't care that little effort go into 3,000 words on their favourite topic, just because it makes the right noises. Every day.

It's only human to think that we're above the weaknesses we see in others. When I look at the proliferation of fawning comments under essays that someone obviously got a machine to write I feel disdain for the low sophistication of those readers who are so moved by it. But also a certain reluctant admiration for the person who got them to pay them for it. But my scorn is still mainly reserved for the consumer. It's the same contempt I feel when anyone gravitates toward the lowest common denominator in their choices of music or literature.

And yet, objectively, it's none of my business what other people listen to and read. Or what others publish. So it's really none of my business that someone else thinks an essentially vacuous string of successfully predicted tokens is profoundly meaningful.

Yes, when it comes to the creators it's cynical to pretend that you're doing something you're not, but if people enjoy it, what then? Ban it? Impose our choices instead?

There's a trend on YouTube for videos like 'At 79 Jimmy Page revealed what he really thought of Eddie Van Halen' and they're obviously synthetic machine stitch jobs. There are no insights to be gleaned, but they attract lots of positive engagement. After being disappointed by 2 or 3 or these I learned to spot the signs and avoid them.

Maybe a badge on things that were synthetically created? I can see a case for that, so that the rest of us don't waste our time starting to read before realising that it's low-effort gruel.

The current trend of hand-wringing over the blight of algorithmically probabilistic music, writing or art begs the question of why any of it really matters. Our assumption is that it does. I just called it a ‘blight’. But shouldn't we be showing our working out when we assert this?

Dissecting my personal reaction to AI-derived entertainment (which includes 'serious' essays) reveals an arbitrary quality to my objections. I would never actively choose to listen to The Velvet Sundown because the music isn't interesting or affective for me, rather than because it's just some code producing auditory stimulation. If the music was good I'd feel differently.

I know this because I already enjoy 'machine music' and I do it myself. Generative and evolving ambient electronic music relies heavily on setting some parameters - including probabilistic variables - stepping aside and leaving the music to essentially make itself. I sometimes pay for music that I know has been created in this way.

This is hardly a million miles away from prompting Suno with text strings, although it does involve some prior knowledge and effort invested into learning some basic musical principles. Whereas Suno promises that anyone can make any music they can 'dream' of. I don't really know what to make of this difference.

So I'm pondering whether or not there's a 'gatekeeping' impulse in play, rather like there is when a certain class of person seeks to define misinformation on behalf of everyone else.

An old proverb (famously cited by Anaïs Nin, but apparently originating in the Talmud) says

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

I suspect that lamenting the rise of popular machine-written text, visuals and audio, is as much an expression of personal frustration as it is a moral statement about the world. Us biological struggling writers are seeing our efforts eclipsed by effortless attention hijacking and it feels unfair.

Like many moral impulses, it's less noble than you think when you drill into it.

And yet I still share in the unease that this content produces in others. My personal angle on it is that machines cannot mean anything they say and this drastically reduces the value of their outputs.

It also contributes to a miasma of unreality that I keep wondering about, like here and here.

A few years ago a popular conspiracy-adjacent fringe hypothesis that gained some notoriety was the Dead Internet Theory. In short, this suggested that most content online - including human engagement - is synthesised.

I can see a Dead Substack Theory growing from this, as more blogs with serious scale turn out to be authored by no one really.

Then the bots will pretend to write about that.

There is no happy ending other than to ramp up your AI discernment skills.

— This essay isn’t just a sincere expression of enduring humanity - it’s epoch defining. Let me know if you’d like me to write another version tailored to a particular audience—e.g. journalistic, corporate, political, artistic or as a piece for your Substack blog Rarely Certain —

(Joking !!!)

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It's a while since I recommended another blog here and all this talk of bot life has certainly made me appreciate some of the smaller-scale humans I enjoy reading.

One is , who has introduced me to someone from ancient Greece, some of whose thoughts about the world I never knew I shared until recently.

Pyrrho of Elis is now a personal hero and Doug's blog has been the catalyst for this.

Ataraxia or Bust!

Articles about the intersection of ancient Greek philosophy and Buddhism; and in particular, the philosophy that resulted from that intersection: Pyrrhonism.

By Doug Bates

Ataraxia looks quite like the principle I've been trying to grind out in Rarely Certain connecting epistemic humility with subjective wellbeing.

What's not to love.