Does Social Intuition Exist?

I have no social intuition. That's not necessarily to say I have no social knowledge, only that most such knowledge has been acquired by being socially punished. But that makes me wonder: what about people who are not punished. Do they ever learn anything?

I was thinking about this while watching the movie The Housemaid on DVD.

I suppose the movie is a perfectly adequate representative of its genre, but otherwise not especially compelling as a story. Everything that happens strikes me as both obvious and contrived, including things that should happen and don't, like grown-up communicating. So I may be guilty of over-analyzing a merely frame-setting scene like the one above, but let me run with it nonetheless.

Were I to walk into my TV room and find a woman-not-my-wife using it, I would leave immediately. And the reason is not because I think that were I to sit down then something something and adultery happens. It's not even because I think Mrs. Phi would get jealous (though at some threshold this might be true). It's because this is sufficiently close to any number of situations in which I was socially punished. Put another way, I have costs and priors.

But . . . what if I had gone through life looking like Brandon Sklenar? Or if your prefer, what if I had gone through life as the kind of person Brandon Sklenar is portraying in this movie? It's hard to imagine a girl ever punished him for sitting on her couch. He might have provoked jealousy from some other woman with a superior claim to his couch-sitting, which could count as a social punishment of a sort, but he could have glided past that as here, no clear lesson learned. He also might have had the experience of sitting on a couch and the girl straight-up assaults him; I don't know how often that actually happens or whether the recipient would count it as punishment, but I would think it ought to at least make him wary going forward.

But it's obvious that attractive people have their own costs and priors and those are very different than mine. Does that affect how they would they handle this situation, or is it all intuition? How do they believe they should handle it, and why?

GenX needs to stop sucking.

Pardon me while I rant for a bit.

It should be hard enough being single without having to deal with this.

Hi I’m Brooke and I harass the right-wing men in my inbox with nonsense until they no longer wish to ‘date’ me. 😉 I do not know these men, and my messages don’t come from dating apps. They come from a satirical Facebook profile of me as a conservative. Read more about me in my introduction post.

Several points:

The fake Bible stories are objectively funny, granted. The troll is even funny at some level. I recall Amy Schumer having a bit like this back in 2015: engage guys on Tinder with a hot pic (not hers, obviously) and see how obnoxious/evil you can be before they lose interest. It's a clever content generator, tbh; we guys will put up with a lot more than we should.

It's less funny in this instance. Or rather, the appeal of the content is more narrow: if your idea of a joke is to "harrass right-wing men", it's only going to be funny to your fellow leftists. YMMV.

But the point of this post isn't really Leftists Be Evil Part MMXXVI. We already knew that. I direct this post to those circulating this content on Female Eva Facebook:

Do you really not know anyone who is single and not wanting to be? I have single (male) friends, and I was single myself just long enough to know how much that sucks. It sucks to try and try and keep getting rejected, and I get that it sucks worse now than back in "my day" when is sucked d@mned hard enough. And I'm here to put my hand on your shoulder and say: keep at it. The only promise I make is that the payoff is worth it.

(And before you start, I also get that single women face the inverse problem: to much attention from the wrong men expressed in the wrong way. And were I the kind of person to have this kind of relationship with you, I would put my hand on your shoulder and say: keep at it. The payoff is worth it.)

But that's not what Female Eva Facebook is actually doing. What they are doing is preemptively shaming men trying their best with words like "Pew Predator". First of all, no, that guy that approaches you in church isn't actually a predator (probably). And second, do you seriously not get that, just as the suck of getting rejected is the path to marriage and family for a man, the suck of badly executed approaches is the path to marriage and family for a woman?

And third: you fellow early-GenX'ers, as a class, suck. You, who benefitted from an open job market in your youth, became in middle-age the DEI enforcers of the last decade. You, who got to enjoy your majority White schools in your youth, now in middle age champion foreign invasion in the name of "compassion". You, who like me probably met your spouse in Sunday school, have already destroyed singles-branded Sunday school and are now hard at work mopping up the stragglers.

Repent and atone. You can start by ceasing your sh!tposting of leftish talking points. You can then, I dunno, maybe host a dinner party for some of your married couple friends and, coincidently, some single men from church and also single women from church. No guarantees, but at least you're setting the stage for something far more beneficial to the future of the church and Christendom itself than whatever it is you think you're currently doing.

Telescopic Abstraction

Scott Alexander takes on "Telescopic Altruism" (TA):

“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.

Readers will recognize that TA is a restatement of Steve Sailer's concept of "Leapfrogging Loyalties". Scott rebuts:

This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?

As always, Scott's argument has more nuance than this single paragraph, so read the whole thing. What I want is to address this:

Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."

This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”

You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place.

Scott frames the TA discourse as liberal vs. conservative. So let me run with that for a second.

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to speak politely to the waiter serving him? To tip generously?

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to greet by name the guy coming to empty his office trash can at the end of the day?

• Is a liberal or conservative woman more likely to be kind to the dweeby coworker trying to screw up the courage to embarrass himself?

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to invite an immigrant family to share Thanksgiving Day dinner?

These are all opportunities to reach across (condescending, in the classical definition) a divide -- race, class, SMV -- to someone immediately in front of you. I could offer my own guesses as to how these metrics would break down along political lines, but that's kind of beside the point. As Steve himself hints at in his own comment on the post, the actual contest is in some sense between dualing abstractions:

In a fascinating 2009 academic paper by four social psychologists, "The motivated use of moral principles," UC Irvine students who identified as politically conservative were found to be racially evenhanded. When given the scenario about killing Chip to save 100 Harlemites, conservatives were no more or less likely to agree it’s the right thing to do than when told to ponder killing the man with the cornerback’s name to save 100 classical musicians.

In striking contrast, liberal students displayed greater bloodthirstiness when presented with the scenario that gave them an opportunity to kill the WASP to help the blacks. This liberal desire to shove a white man to his death to salvage blacks rather than a black man to salvage whites was extremely statistically significant (p = .002).

Note that this was an exercise in pure abstraction: no live blacks or WASPs were harmed in the making of this survey; they only existed at the meme level. But real people can also be made to exist at the meme level. Here is an example: SecState Clinton's phenomenally successful (given her diplomatic objectives) campaign in 2013-2014 to brand Russian irredentism as "pro-White". Given Russia's primary target was Ukraine, this was at an object level absurd (and regrettably, a segment of the online Right also fell for it), but it was critical in mobilizing the Democrat hive to support Ukraine and getting the ScandiCucks Sweden, who sat out the contest with literal Soviet Communism, to join NATO. I respect the skills.

Once you notice this pattern, you can't unsee it.

TraumaCore

Aria Schrecker writes:

Don’t marry someone who has a trump card that supersedes all your values. I think this can be a source of tension in relationships where one person has religious mandates and the other person has ‘preferences’.*

I thought about this advice when reading what has spawned the latest discourse, "American Diner Gothic":

I matched with a girl on Tinder. Her profile listed she/they pronouns, mentioned trauma, and showed her in cosplay.

This isn't even the full list of red flags Mariani will quickly discover, and of course the relationship ends in his heartbreak. But it occurred to me that trauma (or "trauma"), in addition to per se being something that a romantic partner should expect to negotiate, when appearing in a twitter bio also indicates that the girl will likely use it as exactly this kind of trump card. "We're having a disagreement, but I have trauma whereas you only have preferences, so of course I should get my way."

* I will affirm this from the religious side of the prospective relationship as well: Don't marry someone outside +/-1 SD of your own level of religiosity.

On the Scott A.'s

I've been a Dilbert fan since his comic rolled out in our college newspaper; this would have been late-80s early-90s, I can't remember exactly. I read some of his books, though by no means all. I started listening to his daily podcast during the pandemic once it became clear there were no experts, and I appreciated his approach of explaining to people how they should think about it rather than what to think about it. And I quickly signed up for his Locals once Dilbert became subscription-only. But he obviously had more devoted fans than me, and I apparently never blogged about his cancellation.

With that said, here is Scott Alexander on Scott Adams: here and here.

In both posts, Alexander devotes some pixels to Adams' alleged racism, about which I am indifferent. But his final comment (in the footnotes):

Although I don’t think Adams’ cancellation was fair according to normal human logic, I think it had a certain odd sort of cosmic justice. 4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing? How silly!” when anyone calls you on it. This manuever didn’t fool woke people at all; the people wearing “It’s Okay To Be White” t-shirts got exactly as many accusations of racism as they would have gotten for wearing swastikas directly. The only person it apparently fooled was Adams, the professional not-being-fooled-by-political-manipulation expert, whose life it randomly destroyed as collateral damage. Oh well.

I've never been able to make much sense of 4chan, but I did follow writers who follow 4chan (is it still going?), and, um, may have had some family members who were locally involved in the whole 2015 (I think) "It's Okay to be White" campaign. Note that the Left's buildup to "ending whiteness" had already started, so contra Scott, the slogan didn't need a "secret offensive meaning" for it to draw the opposition it did. Nor was it necessary for the originators of the slogan to be racist for other reasons (about which, again, I am indifferent); insofar as it was an assertion of white identity, there was no meaning that the Woke would find acceptable.

But having remembered the 2015 history, I also remembered that the slogan was denounced by exactly 100% of the college presidents on whose campuses it appeared. So when Adams ranted about how the slogan was polling in 2023, I was surprised. "Wait, we got 83% approval from whites? And 51% of blacks? That's awesome! Woke is so DEAD ! ! !" So Alexander is on to something here: Adams, God bless him, apparently really didn't know any of this history.

In Defense of Prop 13

Scott reposts commenter Mariana:

I genuinely don’t want you to take this personally. When you or someone over on Slow Boring starts speculating about how I, a young boomer, should be forced out of my nice house that I bought with my own money, it truly makes me want to get a gun and shoot you. Scott, I’m not going to do that, so please don’t ban me. I’m explaining how murderously angry it makes me feel. So every other age group gets to have whatever goods and services are available at a market rate, but old people have to move to shitty apartments because we’re worth so much less than young people?

I will take every legal means at my disposal to prevent you from doing this. I will block you in the courts, I will vote for evil totalitarian bastards if they support my property rights, I will seriously do anything to keep you from patting me on the head and telling me to move on because I suddenly don’t have a right to my own house, because some younger person suddenly wants it.

And replies:

Several people made something like this argument, but I think it’s based on a (understandable) misunderstanding.

The policy that most people in James’ camp are proposing is to repeal California Proposition 13 (or other jurisdictions’ local variants) which lock property taxes to the value of a house when it was bought (rather than the value now). This benefits old people, who might have bought their houses 30 years ago when prices were much lower. Repealing it, and making everyone pay property taxes based on the current price of their house, would incentivize (in some cases, force) old people to move to cheaper houses.

If you treat the Proposition 13 regime as natural, then this is an attack on old people’s rights. But Proposition 13 was only passed in 1978, and plenty of states have no local equivalent. If you treat the pre-13 state of affairs as natural, then 13 is an attack on young people’s rights, and repealing it merely restores the proper fair state of the universe. This is another of those marked vs. unmarked things.

I agree that a lot of the talk around this sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent, but nobody has the right to artificially-depressed property taxes.

As he notes elsewhere, Scott is conflicted about Prop 13, so these paragraphs should be treated as an exercise in "steelmanning".

Full disclosure: I support Prop 13 without reservation, or if you prefer, I would support it were I a Californian; my jurisdiction has nothing like it. My support isn't just because I'm an older Gen-X with above-average real-estate holdings (though I am surely that, too); I liked the idea of Prop 13 when I first heard about it in the 1980s. I was in my libertarian phase back then and favorably disposed towards other pro-housing policies like upzoning.

The part of this discussion that "sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent" is that very few among Scott's commenters are claiming that California government needs more money for essential services. The framing is that biasing taxes in favor of long-time residents is distorting the distribution of housing resources; the subtext is: you have a house I want, so I will use tax policy to take it from you.

It's a very weird position for a Progressive. To the extent that new residents can afford the inflated house prices to begin with, they will on average be more wealthy. To the extent that they are working age, they have higher incomes on average than those past working age. So Prop 13 is net-effect shifting taxes to more wealthy residents away from less wealthy residents.

Generally, my preferred was of dealing with high housing prices is to lower demand by 50M immigrants. Get back to me after we've tried that.

On Spanking the Generals

My first thought on SECDEF Hegseth's "the era of woke is over" speech to the flag officers assembled for this purpose: kewl.

Subsequent thoughts:

• This is all a light show for "the base", with no further import.

• On the other hand, Donald Trump is president, and I'm not. Presumably, he knows a few things about how to use and maintain power. Things that involve bases and light-shows. Things that Dr. why-can't-we-just-have-good-policy Phi will never know.

• But generals are not going to care about any of this. Generals care about exactly two things: 1) getting promoted; 2) not getting fired. They are, in this sense, pristine sociopaths. It's how they came to occupy the positions they have. SECDEF can remonstrate till the cows come home; meanwhile, the generals will always follow the incentives.

• But the rest of the military -- those who believe, as I once did, that the point of the enterprise is to win a war now and again -- is also an audience. Hegseth's speech, given publicly, does create among them certain expectations of intermediate leadership. This ought to make it difficult for the generals, and the colonels under them, to go back to blathering about how Diversity Is Our Strength. Difficult in the sense that, were they to try, the troops will notice the incongruity, and speak up about it in ways that make the people in charge of the promotions and firings take notice. Perhaps the correct incentives will be put in place after all.

Personally, I'd have had the lot of them shot for Afghanistan. But Donald Trump is president, and I'm not. So we'll try it his way.