Always Double Down on Meaning

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

I was having a conversation about student loan forgiveness recently. The argument against it went like this: I made sacrifices so that my children could go to school and graduate debt-free. Why should all these other people who didn’t do it the right way, like I did, have their loans forgiven?

The Old Bayesian Fox would have countered in a nerdy, rationalist manner. So what you’re describing is what economists call “opportunity cost.” Instead of buying coffee on the way to work each morning, you put that extra cash in your child’s 529 savings account. And you’re suggesting that the people who graduated school with debt are the results of parents who chose the coffee instead of savings. The flaw in your reasoning is that it assumes discretionary spending. Millions of families live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have any money left over after paying their bills. So it’s not a choice of coffee vs. savings, it’s a choice of savings vs. dinner or fixing the car’s breaks or asthma medication or some other form of mandatory spending that you can't skimp on.

But I’m going to do my Amanda Ripley thing and try to get at the heart of the underlying cause that I believe leads to this reaction. Because I believe that the Old Bayesian Fox response I just gave would be just as effective as telling the person they are just racist or selfish or something about white supremacy. In other words, my response only addresses the surface-level rationalization rather than trying to understand the motivation behind the rationalization.

Because I think this is really an issue of meaning.

What's in the Box?

At the beginning of Dune, Paul Atreides is asked to put his hand in a box that will cause excruciating pain. The whole point was to prove his humanity, because humans are the only creatures that will endure pain. If any other creature does something that causes pain, they will cease doing that activity. But humans will endure pain if they believe it is meaningful.

Getting back to the student loan forgiveness argument, if someone made a sacrifice, which involves enduring some semblance of pain, they must have done so because they felt it was meaningful. Forgiving student loan sounds to them like saying “Hey, remember those sacrifices you made? Turns out they were totally meaningless! You could’ve just had coffee every morning and literally nothing would be different because the government will just bail you out.”

Now, this doesn’t mean that they are right. I just think it means we should be mindful when conversing with them. Because I think liberals will be going through something similar soon when the science reveals that cloth masks didn’t actually keep our kids safe in school and school closures were probably a net harm. We spent so much time defending the public health community’s advice to make these sacrifices because we thought it was meaningful. So people are going to be unlikely to be receptive to data that suggests it was all pointless.

We all double down in the face of evidence that proves us wrong. We all commit the sunken cost fallacy. We are human and we crave meaning. So just be a little kinder to one another, that is all.

The pre/trans fallacy of eating eggs

Ken Wilber coined the term pre/trans fallacy. Think of it this way: at the “pre” level, you are ignorant and believe Theory A. Then you gather some facts and become convinced Theory A is wrong and now you believe Theory B. Then you move into the “trans” level in which you gather even more facts, realize your original facts were faulty, and become convinced of Theory A once again.

The "fallacy" part occurs when you confuse the "trans" level of wisdom for the "pre" level of ignorance because they lead to the same conclusion (ie believing Theory A).

This meme is based on the same idea:

You think we are in a recession because it feels like it. Then you learn that some institution called the NBER has to make that call and they use lots of data points, so it's not a recession yet. Then you realize the NBER doesn't know what it's talking about or is being politicized to make the administration look good or whatever, and so, yes, we are in a recession. You were right all along.

Here is a better example using eggs instead of a recession. An ignorant person, drawn above to the left of the distribution with eyes growing at the sides of his head, eats eggs because he doesn’t know they are high in cholesterol. A “smart” person, drawn here with the glasses and angry expression at the height of the bell curve, avoids eggs because he knows they are high in cholesterol. A wise person, on the right as the hooded sage, eats eggs because he knows they have the “good” cholesterol and are actually healthy for you.

So both the sage and the moron, on opposite ends of what I gather must be a chart measuring IQ, have the same response. The fallacy comes when the person in the middle can only see their response and not their reasoning, and assumes they are both morons for eating eggs.

So why is this framing important?

Wisdom in the Time of Mistrust

My theory is that one of the problems with The Age of Mistrust is that, due to increasing levels of education and easy access to unfiltered information, many people have moved from ignorant to “smart”, but they are falling for the pre/trans fallacy and assuming the “wise” people who are eating eggs are ignorant rubes who don’t know about cholesterol. 

And so they see people in positions of power, who might actually be the wise sage, taking the same position as the moron. They then assume they must be smarter than the people in charge and end up talking themselves into voting for Donald Trump.

This might be a big leap in extrapolation, but I sometimes wonder if people like myself make something like the  pre/trans fallacy as it relates to the hierarchy of society’s needs.

Needful Things

So Maslow's hierarchy of needs went like this: a person first needs shelter. Once that need is met, they need food and water. Once that need is met they need love and companionship. Once that need is met they need meaning.

Now picture a successful person. He has a high paying job, lives in a nice house, has a nice family, a happy marriage, and his life is full of meaning. One day he says to his wife, “It’s supposed to be a nice clear night tonight. I think we should camp out under the stars in our backyard.” His wife, looking stunned, replies “Are you kidding me? We cannot abandon the shelter of our home! That is the first need in Maslow's hierarchy. If we give that up, our whole lives will crumble.”

His wife is committing the pre/trans fallacy here. They are doing so well they can actually sleep without shelter if they want to. And sometimes I wonder if free speech warriors are doing the same.

The Free Speech Problem

Securing free speech is a basic need that prevents authoritarianism. Authoritarians try to control speech so they can take power. But some people try to censor speech because they are trying to improve society; they are the people who know eggs are high in cholesterol AND that it's still okay to eat.

It's like Aaron Sibarium's distinction that mass communication now is weirder than it has ever been because there are fewer veto points on the path from author to audience. So free speech was important because the people who controlled those veto points (governments, editors, publishers, hell even paper boys) could control information for their own agendas. But with social media, podcasts, and Substack, the information is more direct and unfiltered. So our new problem isn't powerful people keeping out information, its bad information reaching too many people.

And free speech doesn't solve this problem. In fact, it makes it worse. So when it comes to free speech critics, how to I separate the wheat from the chaff, the moron from the sage? How do I tell who is trying to control power for their own agenda and how is trying to stop the harm of misinformation?

Reconsidering CRT

I do not support critical race theory. And not the apologist's definition that "it's just teaching about the history of racism." That I'm fine with and is obviously important. I'm talking about the actual Derrick Bell definition that calls for the disruption of the whole Enlightenment project and liberalism as we know it. (I guess it makes more sense to say that I do not support the proposed solutions that follow from the ideas of founding CRT thinkers.) And I know that other countries that have undermined democracy and liberalism usually end up in disaster, Singapore being the one possible exception.

But what if CRT is transcendent rather than regressive, more sage than moron? I don't have a good heuristic for making that distinction so it's possible that my opposition* is wrong. (How possible? Okay fine, I'll say a 5% chance I'm wrong.)

So the idea I’m trying to stay open to is this: can we transcend society in a way that curbs free speech but still improves the public good? I don’t know but I’m trying to stay more open to ensuring I am not committing the pre/trans fallacy.

(*My opposition is in the most liberal sense. I strongly stand agains the New Right's attempts to stop the teaching of CRT in higher education. I also strongly stand against mandating illiberal, anti-enlightenment ideas be taught to public school children. Elective learning is fine. Forced learning or preventing elective learning is always bad.)

Review: The Genetic Lottery

In the year of our lord two thousand twenty one, you cannot write about the relationship between DNA and life outcomes without talking about the history of eugenics, how eugenics is bad, and how this book is definitely not doing eugenics. Katheryn Paige Harden correctly  “read the room” here and spends nearly half of her book, The Genetic Lottery, talking about the history of eugenics, how eugenics is bad, and how this book is definitely not doing eugenics. 

And yet, she still thinks it is worth it for non-eugenicists to do this research.

“The tacit collusion among many social scientists to ignore genetics is motivated, i believe, by well-intentioned but ultimately misguided fears—the fear that even considering the possibility of genetic influence implies a biodeterminism or genetic reductionism they would find abhorrent, the fear that genetic data will inexorably be misused to classify people in ways that strip them of rights and opportunities.”

When Very Online People criticize any point made by Jon Haidt, they ignore his arguments and go ad hominem by simply posting this screen shot:

I finally watched the video and I'm not sure it's making the point his critics think he's making, but he could have been more clear. In the talk, Haidt, he says two things that are true as he gets toward his point. One, there are racial IQ disparities and two, IQ is heritable. John Nerst once wrote that “decouplers” perform this magic ritual to isolate an idea from its context ("By X, I don’t mean Y"). You could say the first half of Harden's book is her doing the magic ritual. Unlike Haidt, who would have served himself well to do such a ritual here. 

After reading The Genetic Lottery, taking Haidt’s two “facts” at face value can lead you to very wrong conclusions. Let’s start with the second “fact.” My hair color, skin color, and height are all traits I get from my ancestors. But what we call intelligence doesn’t work like that. Instead, we measure what Harden calls a “polygenic index,” which is a combination of DNA (the parts you get from your mom and the parts you get from your dad) that increases your likelihood of, e.g. graduating from college or having a high IQ score. 

So while technically you can only inherit your DNA from your parents, the way they combine to form your unique DNA sequence (“I get this particular gene from my Mom, this particular gene from my Dad, and when they combine it increases the likelihood that I graduate from college”) is totally random. It was just luck, not some super intelligent bloodline you are a part of.

The second part of the ritual Haidt should have performed is to mention the effects that environment has on IQ scores, which play a huge role in the racial disparities. In fact, Harden points out that we don’t even know about the genetic makeup of anyone other than those of European ancestry, so we can't draw any conclusions at all from the impact of genetics on, say, the IQ scores of people with African ancestry.

Leveling the Field

Harden observes that most people who cite her research are academics, but one sixth are white nationalists. Leaving the field because of the eugenics stigma will let racists dominate, so she owes to to her fellow progressives to level the field in genetics research (Intellectual diversity ftw!)

“If people with progressive political values, who reject claims of genetic determinism and pseudoscientific racialist speculation, abdicate their responsibility to engage with the science of human abilities and the genetics of human behavior, the field will come to be dominated by those who do not share those values.”

Leftist academics have created a norm; studying the impact of genetics on disparities is a third rail and if you try to touch it we will come after you. Harden is transparent about the hate mail she gets for her work, so you have to wonder, how many other progressive academics could be doing meaningful research in this area but were too deterred because of this norm?

This gets to my rule about determining if controversial a topic is at least 2 of: true, kind, and necessary. It's probably not kind to suggest one's lot in life is partially determined by their genetics. It's certainly not kind to fuel the fire of eugenicists. But what if it is true? If so, studying it better be necessary. That is the case Harden attempts to make.

On IQ

Harden doesn't spend much time using IQ as a measure, she prefers talking about educational attainment. However, she makes a good point about IQ dismissers. If the racial IQ gap starts to close, we won't be able to celebrate it as an equity victory if we've dismissed it as pseudo science. 

In fact, measuring IQ is how we have determined the disproportionate impact of lead water on black communities.

“What tool is used to measure the neurotoxic effects of lead? IQ tests. The IQ deficits that result from lead exposure prevent researchers and policy makers from shrugging off the effects of lead as temporary or trivial.”

On finding people’s strengths

Even if genetic research does come to prove that racial differences in IQ are partially due to genetics, that doesn’t mean that one race is “smarter” than another race. It might just mean that they are better optimized for taking IQ tests. Something about the DNA of a given population with a shared ancestry might make test-taking more difficult, and maybe extra resources can help overcome that gap. Or, maybe they are stronger than other populations in an area we aren’t measuring yet. Maybe you're bad at rotating three-dimensional objects in your mind but great at reading people's body language.

Conversely, we come to discover that what causes one population with a particular polygenic index to struggle in school might optimize them to succeed in other areas, which is what we're discovering with the autism community. 

“...neurodiversity advocates argue that the cognitive and behavioral featues of autism specrum disorders … are not necessarily bugs, but rather potential features of the cognitive machinery. The neurodiverse might, in the right context, have potentially rare and valuable skills. 

"There are increasing examples where [society] has been changed to include people with ASDs more fully in occupational and and economic life. Some militaries, for example, provide extensive training to teenagers with ASDs, so that young people who have heightened attention to visual detail and pattern can be put to use scanning satellite images.”

People on the autism spectrum struggle in many aspects of society, but we're starting to discover the areas where they excel. This is good! Harden wants to normalize the way we view people with these low polygenic scores in the way that we currently view people with ASD and other genetic setbacks. We should organize society around ways to help them succeed. 

“Recognizing that genetics are important for understanding who is tall, or who develops autism, or who is born deaf, is largely uncontroversial. These communities don’t stake their claims to equity and inclusion on genetic sameness. Genes are not always a problem to be fixed, or the only problem to be fixed. People are not the problem to be fixed. The problem to be fixed is society’s recalcitrant unwillingness to arrange itself in a way that allows them to participate." 

Fix poverty or test scores?

The most interesting part of the book, for me, involves the following chart: 

This breaks subjects into four income brackets, then each income grouping into four polygenic scores, from low to high. For simplicity, let's call them smart genes. If you have the smartest genes, but are in the lowest income group, you are less likely to finish school than if you had the dumbest genes but were born into the highest income group. Le sigh. 

Harden responds to some of her sharpest criticism of her work, but I think she misses the point. 

“Those who … see genetics as an overhyped distraction from addressing the social determinants of inequality often assert that the insights and tools of genetics are unnecessary because we already know what to do to address inequality in education, health, and wealth. The educator John Warner, for instance, wrote a response to my work in Inside Higher Education arguing that genetic data was not just distracting but dangerous. According to Warner, he 'cannot imagine a subject on which we know more about than the environments under which children learn best.'”

Harden goes on to show how all policy interventions aimed at reducing inequality run the gamut from inconclusive to ineffective. But maybe the larger point Warner is making isn’t about school reform or how to raise test scores, it’s about the above image. The goal shouldn't be to reduce the variance within each income group, it should be to reduce the variance between each income group. It’s to move everyone in that income bracket up to the next income bracket. And the way you do that isn't by trying to improve graduation rates or test scores.  You do it by eliminating poverty.

Chicken or Egg?

This all raises an important question: Does poverty cause low graduation rates or does poor education cause poverty? Harden wants to address, let's call them mental deficiencies. John Warner wants to address environmental deficiencies (disclosure: I have not read his Inside Higher Ed piece. This may not be his argument). 

Which one is the real cause of inequality is asking the wrong question. Obviously they both play a role. The better question is: which one is easier to fix?

To get back the Jon Haidt talk: he says that progressive academics have a disincentive to study genetics simply because it draws the conversation away from what they want to talk about, which is environmental effects, i.e. improving the conditions of people living in poverty. I think his prognostication has borne out based on the criticism Harden receives. Progressives don't want to talk about genetic effects because they "know" what causes environmental inequality and they have the solution: we tax billionaires and use it to expand the welfare state.

As the chart shows, it doesn't matter how "smart" your genes are. Once you are in a higher income bracket, your life improves. In a sense, Warner is right. We know this.

But if it's so easy to fix poverty, and, by proxy, inequality, why haven't we done it? Ask a progressive and the answer will have something to do with gerrymandering, lobbyists, misinformation, voter suppression, and the filibuster. So maybe the better argument for Harden is that her solution is more politically feasible. 

So what does she offer? Not much.

Forcing Equity

As a case study, she likes to point to an example of a UK school that mandated more classes and, as a result, saw higher graduation rates and lifetime earnings. She references this goofy graph below to make the point that 

1. Kids who take calculus have higher educational attainment
2. You can't take calculus unless you have all your pre reqs (i.e. taken Algebra by 9th grade), therefore
3. We should be requiring students to take math early and often so they can advance to calculus and go to college.

Is she committing reverse causality here? Will forcing unwilling students into math lead to higher graduation rates or higher dropout rates? Color me doubtful here.

Harden seems to say that, using genetic research, we can identify those most at risk for, eg not completing high school. But she never really says what we can do that is going to make a difference other than maybe mandating math courses for everyone. 

More Anti Language

She smartly studies the language of leftists and uses it to make her case. She pulls from Ibram Kendi’s playbook, in which he begins each chapter defining how a racist views a given topic and how an antiracist views it. Likewise, she rebrands the racist view as the eugenicist view (the bad guys), then rebrands the colorblind view as the view of the people calling who make studying genetics a third rail. Then, borrowing even more heavily from Kendi, she presents the “anti eugenics view”, which is being mindful of disparities caused by genetics so we can close them.

Necessary?

I think she's correct that, by ignoring genetic effects, there will always be some degree of inequality. I just don't think she made a strong enough case this is how we solve inequality. I mean, look at that chart again. The people with the dumbest genes in the highest income group have higher educational attainment than every other income group except the smartest genes kids. To me, that matters more. (I realize it is unkind to use the term "dumb genes" but it is so much clearer than writing "a low polygenic score for educational attainment".)

However, I think she has answered the "necessary" component. I like her analogy of comparing people with the "dumb" genes to people on the autism spectrum. I worry people will draw the wrong conclusions and try to solve this problem with more education rather than reimagining what education can look like. We need more options for the delivery of education, and if studying genetics gets us there, I am all for it.

When That Failed Replication Bling

 

One of my favorite uses of the Drake meme has disappeared from the internet, or at least is beyond my ability to find it. It went like this: next to the top image, in which Drake looks disgusted, it said "Polls are predictions." Next to the bottom image, in which Drake is endorsing, it said "Polls are snapshots."

It's a good way for people to reframe their thinking on opinion polls and to stop blaming Nate Silver for "being wrong." Polls just tell us how people generally felt at the time they were being asked the questions. By the time the poll is released, people may have already changed their mind. (It makes you wonder how many elections would be different if they had been delayed or moved ahead a week since people vote based on how they are feeling at the moment.)

I think about this meme when I think about the replication crisis. You know the story, some scientists tested subjects, made a big discovery, it gets cited thousands of times, someone tries to replicate the study and they find no correlation. The most famous example is probably the marshmallow test.

There is always a 20/20 hindsight perspective telling us about problems with the sample size, publication bias, or whatever. But sometimes there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the study.

Reading Robert Putnam's work has made me more aware of how much generations differ from one another. If people's values and mindsets are different depending on when they were born, is it too much to assume that those values will influence how they respond to their environment? And if this is possible, then maybe these studies that fail to replicate aren't bad, they're just a reflection of the subjects response at the time of the study.

In other words, maybe psychological experiments aren't explanations of universal human behavior. They are snapshots of human behavior at a particular point in time.

Beware Adoration of the Isolated Expert

Image adapted from Chris Liverani/Unsplash & Pressmaster/Pexels

In Noise—by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein—the authors look at places where human judgment comes into play (sentencing, home appraisals, etc.) and identify how much statistical noise and bias exists, even among experts. For example, two different home appraisers might appraise the same home and differ by more than $100,000. For the same crime, one judge might give you probation and another might give you a ten-year sentence. That is noise.

They saw that one of the easiest things one can do to eliminate noise is to ask several experts and average their responses.

Knowing how wrong even an expert can be should downgrade our confidence in moving from an institutional to an individual society, as far as where we place our trust. For example, I really like Matt Yglesias’s substack (individual), but I hardly ever read Vox (institution) when he wrote there. I like and trust Tyler Cowen, his blog, and his podcast, but I don’t read Bloomberg editorials. Like many readers my age, I have more loyalty to individual writers than to media institutions. So knowing that even experts I trust will give opinions that are subject to bias and noise, I have to know that I can be led astray.

I began to envision what a system would look like that attempts to reduce noise by taking the expert opinion of individuals like Cowen and Yglesias and averages them out. Then I realized I was basically reinventing Metaculus and prediction markets. I used to think the future was leaning into individualism and choosing those who gave the most accurate forecasts as my thought leaders (read the last four paragraphs of my post on the disinformation funnel). But you’re actually better off just looking at the Metaculus or Superforecaster average. In this sense, we might see a return to trust in institutions.

I also realized how careful I have to be when reading someone like Emily Oster. I trust her so much that I am at risk of overweighting her judgments. For example, she recently wrote a blog post critiquing a paper that examined the effects of video games on kids’ IQ scores, which concluded that it had a positive effect (don’t tell my son this). She found the research lacking and listed all the reasons why. 

I enjoyed it. Like most people, I like reading a good debunking article, especially if it takes shots at people who have more social prestige than me (in this case, academics). But then I became reminded of Noise. The strength of this paper is really a judgment. Oster is making a judgment here. And I’m giving too much emphasis to a single expert’s judgment when I should be averaging it against other expert opinions.

But wait a second! Isn’t that exactly what peer review is for? When something passes peer review, doesn’t that mean a group of subject experts all had to agree this paper is worthy of publication? Oster’s analysis is just one more data point in a collection of opinions I should be seeking. Why does her opinion matter more than those who gave the peer review?

I read something on social media a while back that I’ll never forget: if you want people to like you, sound optimistic. If you want people to think you’re smart, sound pessimistic. Whenever someone criticizes something, especially if it’s something with some consensus among experts, there is a tendency to overweight that person's opinion. We tend to conflate pessimism with intelligence.

Just because someone is critical of consensus doesn’t mean they’re smart. As George Carlin once said, “Most people are completely full of shit and really good at hiding it.”

I still like Oster, but this changes the way I read blog posts like these. I like these types of analyses when the tone is “You may have seen the media or friends on Facebook linking to a study that purports to say X. You should not be worried because something something failed replication/small sample size/small p value, etc. ect.” 

Sometimes the paper itself says there isn’t sufficient evidence to draw any hard conclusions, which the media chooses to ignore. So pointing out this stuff is still useful to plebes like me. I just have to be more mindful that I’m not placing one person’s opinion above everyone else just because I like the way they think.

Government Needs More Jon Snows

I.

I've written so much about Yuval Levin's institution take that I considered making a drinking game. Pick a random blog post of mine, if it mentions something about formative or performative institutions, or David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, take a drink. 

The weird thing is that I can't fully explain why I like Levin's idea so much. His criticism of performative institutions I get; it totally confirms my priors. But his praise of formative institutions is totally foreign to me. As I once wrote, 

"the truth is I have been formed by nothing. I dropped out of Cub Scouts. I lost my faith in religion. I've never been affiliated with a political party. My alma mater is not a part of my identity. Like many people in my generation, I resent the notion that I need some institution to transform me, that I need help in any way."

I think I was drawn to Levin's idea of formation because I was seeking an antidote to the performativeness that we agree on. But I don't buy the "we enter this world fallen" Judeo-Christian narrative. If you really squint hard you could say that it's kinda like my belief that we have a default setting that we choose to fight against, but I still feel like I'm talking about something different. So I'm seeking a better solution for the moral character I look for in leadership.

II.

In Game of Thrones, Jon Snow, who was raised in nobility, decides to join the Night's Watch. It's a huge commitment: he can never never leave, it's freezing cold, he takes a vow of celibacy, and it's either dangerous or pointless (depending on whom you ask). It's thankless grunt work. But it carries a sense of honor. You are doing the tough but necessary work that no one else wants to do.

Unfortunately, Jon gets to the wall and discovers that the Night's Watch is mostly thieves who are serving there as an alternative to prison or capital punishment. Very few people have joined for the honor.

I think this is a good metaphor for government employees and elected officials.

I think fewer people are drawn by the honor of public service and most want to use it as a platform for shaping society in the way they want it. 

So if performative people seek office as a platform for their views, formative people seek office as a way to shape their character, then Jon Snow seeks office as a way of carrying a burden of service. The third way is the only one I find interesting.

III.

I don't want to serve on my town's school committee, but maybe that's why I should. It pre-selects for performative activists who are seeking the position so they can transform our schools into a Kendi-style antiracist community or so they can ban any book that talks about racism. Do I owe it to all the normie people who just want normal things within the Overton Window?

Labeling someone performative almost feels like calling them selfish. Yet, it seems an oxymoron to call a performative activist selfish; they’re not out there for themselves. But they seem so different than the civil rights activists.

I think the difference is that during the progressive era, people fought for beliefs and ideas; equality, freedom, and dignity. The types of social justice or anti CRT activists I'm talking about are not called by a sense of duty or civic responsibility. No, they are fighting for people. A very specific set of people with specific identities. 

And that's fine, it's just not for me.

IV.

Lately I've been having conversations with members of the early boomer/late silent generation. They loved getting involved on boards and committees because they believed in service and volunteering, whether it was in service of an idea or a community. But that service had a secondary effect as a signaling device. It served as a good signal of character; outside people knew that someone who does this much volunteering is probably a good person.

But it’s become anti-inductive; everyone began doing it for the signal aspect and suddenly its no longer a signal. Now it's just a way for people to influence institutions, network, build their resume, and promote themselves.

Balaji Srinivasan said people wanted a God-fearing man in power because a "powerful leader who actually believed that eternal damnation was the punishment for violating religious edicts could be relied upon by the public even if no human could see whether he had misbehaved."

In that sense, the reason to lament the death of formative institutions is that they used to serve as a good proxy for using this heuristic. If someone completed Boy Scouts, I still assume they have good moral character because it isn’t easy and there isn’t much of an external benefit. But there are fewer institutions that signal to me, “this person will do the right thing when no one is looking.” Instead, they signal “this person will vote for these policies,” or "this person is trying to make their resume stand out."

V.

I want to fight for universal ideas because no one else seems to be doing so. And I think ideas are more important than individuals.

When Massachusetts was being attacked by the British, George Washington pledged to bring soldiers to their assistance. John Adams thanked him for his generosity, to which Washington replied, "Not generosity, duty." That line of thinking is more interesting to me than identity-based motivations.

My Back: A Day in the Life

I'm not this old, but I feel this old.

 I.

My day starts with pain.

I wake up and can already feel the tightness in my lower back, the stiffness in my joints, the aching arthritis pulsating through my spine. The pain varies depending on what position I was in when I fell asleep, but it’s always there waiting for me, as dependable as a crowing rooster in the morning.

Like any human with responsibilities, my next move is to sit up, which involves activating all the joints and muscles that already hurt.

I can do some stretches that feel good in the moment, but nothing seems to lessen the pain overall.

II.

There are little things that most people, people without chronic back pain, never think about that bother me.

For example, walking into work I notice that my shoelaces have come untied. A normal person would bend over to tie them but that hurts too much. So I just keep walking until I can find a place to sit down.

People, in their good intentions, love to point out when your shoelaces are untied. I don’t like having to explain that the arthritis in my back, coupled with my scoliosis, makes bending over difficult, so I usually just smile and say something like “Thank you,” as I continue walking.

I grab my cup from my office and head to the water cooler. At 6’4”, I’m a tall dude. The cooler’s spigot, however, is designed for normal-sized people. It comes up to my thigh. So to fill my cup, I have to sort of half bend over while operating the spigot. This can be more painful than bending over to tie my shoes, but this is how I get my water.

III.

My lunch break starts. I can go to the gym and lift some weights, which sometimes feels great and sometimes pulls a muscle in my lower back and I have to miss work for three days.

Today I go for a walk. I’m so fortunate to have this beautiful campus all around me. There is something about being outdoors, in nature, that I find so relaxing. I see a hawk's nest way up in a towering pine tree. I see squirrels running up a giant oak tree. I can hear birds chirping. The wind whipping across my face is odorless and yet somehow smells familiar. It smells like spring, like baseball games, like family reunions at a park, like youth.

I get back to my office refreshed, energized. But being on my feet for that long means that my back hurts. I have ibuprofen in my desk, but I have to weigh the tradeoff of pain now versus liver damage later. 

I choose pain now and disregard the ibuprofen.

IV.

I get home, exhausted. My youngest wants me to pick her up but I don’t have the stamina. Back pain isn’t just about the pain, it’s about the way it saps your energy. 

I’m tired. All. Of. The. Time. 

But I also hate using that as an excuse. So I bend down, grunt, and pick her up. For a moment, I’m happy. We both are.

I flop down on my couch, which is comfortable. But that just means it will be that much harder to get up.

As is inevitable, one of my four kids does something that makes one of the other three kids cry. I yell because I don’t want to get up to separate them.

Yelling doesn’t work.

I still don’t want to get up so I yell louder. Now another kid is crying because I yelled too loud so now I have to get up to comfort him. I’m angry because my back hurts, I’m resentful because my kids made me get up, I’m disappointed in myself for making my kid cry, and I’m despondent because I can’t find a way out of this.

V.

My wife cooks us a marvelous dinner. I feed some mush to the twins in their high chair, which means I have to lean forward in my chair to get in Feeding Position, which means the pain meter in my back is cranked up by the time I’m done feeding them.

After dinner, I begin to do the dishes. Being on my feet isn’t so bad, but sinks, much like water coolers, are designed for normal-sized people. So I’m bending over for 20 straight minutes and now I'm staring at the medicine cabinet and once again weighing the tradeoff of pain now versus liver damage later.

After the dishes are done I look outside the window into our backyard. During this time of year, the sun sets just after dinner. The weather is perfect. We only get a handful of days per year like this. I want to walk my dog so I can bask in this perfection, clear my mind, and watch a beautiful sunset over the mountains behind my house.

But that means putting off helping out with bedtime and further aggravating my back during the walk. So instead I help put the kids to bed, lay down on an ice pack, and watch TV until it’s time for bed so I can wake up tomorrow and do it all over again.