Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 72

The Problem With Extracted Versions of Things

It seems like there’s a pattern when it comes to telling the difference between healthy and unhealthy things. It’s something like:

Extracted versions of healthy things tend to be unhealthy.

There are countless examples.

Corn vs. Corn Syrup
Sex vs. Porn
Social Approval vs. Social Media
Public News Channels vs. News Entertainment
Books vs. Reddit
Vegetables vs. Refined Sugar

Another thing these have in common—beyond just reduction—is speed. Natural versions of things tend to be slow, while modern and extracted versions tend to be fast.

For food this stuff is pretty straightforward. And there’s even a metric that tracks pretty well to natural and healthy foods vs. modern and unhealthy alternatives: the Glycemic Index.

These thoughts are what happens when you read meditation and health food books at the same time.

The body has a speed at which it prefers to absorb sugar, which has been imprinted over tens of thousands of years.

But what about meaning and happiness? It seems to have a similar mechanism.

Maybe this is why so many people enjoy slowly and manually cooking their own food—in their own kitchen—rather than microwaving something or eating out. Sure, you can make higher quality food if you do it yourself, but there is something about the elongated process that enhances it as well.

Maybe you’ve heard of the weird San Francisco types getting into Dopamine Fasting. That sounds familiar.

Many studies show that if you remove sugar from your diet you quickly see the nuance in foods that are less sweet, and come to enjoy them more.

They’re basically trying to reduce the amount of pleasure/stimulus they take in, and reduce the speed with which they absorb it. All so that they can better enjoy the inputs they do receive.

It seems the underlying theme here is not really dilution vs. extract, or slow vs. fast—but some combination of the two. Or rather that those tend to pair with each other.

So what’s a practical takeaway from this—assuming it’s true? Maybe it’s something like:

With food, mostly eat things that are less sweet and that take more time to digest
With inputs, mostly consume things that are in-depth and slow-building, where the wisdom seeps in vs. being delivered as a pill
With happiness, work towards long-term goals that trickle in the rewards over years and decades, in small doses, rather than chasing intense short-term milestones

Green salads vs. meat and dessert. Books vs. TV. Practicing an altruistic craft vs. seeking attention on Twitter.

So that brings us to three potential criteria for choosing inputs and pursuits in life.

High in quality
Takes time to create and/or consume
The benefits are spread over time rather than all at once

This seems like an interesting approach to building life systems that generate long-term health and happiness.

Notes


At some point I’d love to assemble a giant collection of examples of diluted/extracted and slow/fast things in the world. Foods, experiences, pursuits, goals, payoffs, etc.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

I’m Angry With San Francisco

I just realized something today, and I want to share it in its raw form.

I’m angry with San Francisco because it has turned me into someone who can walk by a suffering human and pretend not to see them.

I have always looked down on people capable of doing that. And now I’m one of them.

I pass ten people an hour who are suffering from drugs or mental illness, and who clearly need help. A few dollars could absolutely help them in that moment, at least a little, at least for a few minutes or hours.

But I give money to one out of twenty—based on some internal Robin Hood scanner that detects a threshold of Pure Suffering that I made up in my own head. It feels good to use that test and to see the light come back green. It feels good to give. But even having such a test is disgusting. And meanwhile the other nineteen people get ghosted.

So I’m mad at San Francisco.

But is that right? Is that really who I’m mad at?

I’m more mad at myself. For allowing myself to become someone capable of ghosting someone in need.

But then I work through that.

I pay lots of taxes.
I’d happily pay more if I thought it would help.
Who abandoned these people?
Why don’t they try harder?
Reagan was a monster for shutting down the mental hospitals.
I hate the big pharma companies.
I hate the city for tolerating this.
I hate myself for not having a solution.

San Francisco is a perverted caricature of kindness. It’s about helping the unfortunate the way Stalin was about equality and solidarity.

The price of Stalin’s purity in the city was Gulags in the country. And the price of San Francisco’s moral cowardice is city streets overrun by a zombie population that the thriving pretend are invisible.

How broken are we as a society that we can carry on a normal conversation while ignoring the abject suffering of fellow humans? After a few days the shock wears off. After a few months you hardly notice. And after a couple years it’s like they’re invisible.

Shame on us. Shame on me for being one of us.

I grew up in the East Bay, and I used to very rarely see homeless people. Outside of San Francisco I generally help. Probably 80% of the time, depending on circumstances. And it makes me feel good.

My life philosophy demands that I do. So little of what I have could do so much for someone else. It’s just math morality. I am compelled. As a matter of life choice.

But in San Francisco I would go poor trying. And even worse there wouldn’t even be much acknowledgment in most cases. There’s no cosmic exchange of kindness. Only a mark getting tricked into parting with a small amount of coin.

So now I get confused for a tourist, because locals don’t give money to the regulars on the street.

Amazing. How fucking cynical do you have to be to write such a hideous sentence?

Like I said—I’m angry.

I’m angry with San Francisco. I’m angry with myself. I’m angry at the people on the street. I’m angry that nobody is taking care of them. I’m angry that I’m part of that nobody.

It’s not like the solution is hard and I can’t do it.

It’s functionally impossible.

What’s the solution?

Anyone who’s suffering on the street, determine if they are mentally ill, on drugs, are fully functional and got shafted by the economy, or if they just decided to abstain from the capitalist grind.

Build hospitals for the mentally ill. Get the drug addicts into programs. Help the temporarily homeless get shelter and support and a new job. And tell the hippies that they have to get off the streets?

I have no idea what to say to someone who could work but doesn’t want to, and who tells you it’s a free country and they choose to hang out on the sidewalk. On one hand I am all about artists exploring the raw world, and I embrace their journey. On the other hand I’m like, “Get a goddamn job like the rest of us. Nobody you see walking past you actually wants to be working; they do it because they have to.”

Anyway, doesn’t matter. I think the percentage of those types in the San Francisco homeless population is probably extremely low. Most are legit suffering for reasons out of their control.

I just don’t see how we’ve come to this.

A slow-moving army of zombies. Thousands of them, all over the streets. Screaming outbursts. Needles everywhere. Human feces on the streets. And people just pretend it isn’t happening.

It’s fucking surreal.

Not that it’s happening. That it’s been normalized.

Bernie can’t solve this. Hell he’d break it even worse I think.

And Trump would just scoop everyone up and dump them in the ocean. Or in prison.

I don’t see a solution from any candidate in any party right now.

So I’m mad about that too.

I’m just mad.

This is not how any of this is supposed to work. Not in one of the richest cities on the planet. Not anywhere.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

Populism’s Big Mistake

It’s strange to think about, but both the extreme left and the extreme right tend to be populist in nature. That’s not always true, but it’s true now with candidates like Sanders and Trump.

What makes them populist is not any particular policy, but rather a narrative that says the everyday person is being trampled upon by the elites, and this candidate—whether that’s Trump or Bernie—is meant to be the strength that stops that from happening.

In Trump’s case, he says it’s the liberals and elites and silly government that have become the oppressors. They’re the elites. They’re the ones who’ve damaged the fabric of the nation that used to prioritize the everyman. And he’s going to make things great again.

That’s a clear narrative. And a populist one.

For Bernie it’s even more clear. There’s too much separation between the rich and the poor. Billionaires are paying way too little in taxes. Healthcare costs too much. Etc. Etc. Basically the rich are thriving, and everyone else is suffering. And he’s the guy to turn that around and make the rich pay their share and bring prosperity back to the masses.

That’s a clear narrative. And a populist one.

In my mind, both are broken for different reasons, but I’m not interested in talking about overall policy here.

What I’m interested in is something I hear from Elizabeth Warren, which is someone who looks perilously—if I were her advisor—like a light version of Bernie.

One of her main narratives, which is either implied or explicit in both Bernie’s and Trump’s rhetoric, is that you used to be able to thrive on a single basic salary, and that we need to return to that.

In this way, quite ironically, she and Bernie are actually talking about making America great again too.

They think the problem is corporate greed, Malignant Capitalism, wealth inequality, and all the boogeymen of the left. Trump’s version of this is even more based in fantasy, becuase it’s about bringing human manufacturing jobs back to prominence, and back to America.

They have different ways of getting there, but both are making the critical error of not realizing that something fundamental has changed between 20-60 years ago and today.

The story isn’t that Leftist Elites have given away all the good (white Christian) Americans’ jobs. And it’s not that Corporate Greed has sucked the life force out of everyday jobs that used to support an entire household.

The real story, and the reality that we must face as a civilization, is that most human work is simply less valuable than it used to be due to automation.

Yes, a minimum wage job used to support a household. Yes, there used to be tons of manufacturing jobs that paid quite well and supported entire communities. But those were not stripped away by the evil genius political machinations of the opposition.

They were stripped away by progress.

American manufacturing is actually quite healthy; it simply needs fewer humans to function. And those minimum wage jobs are still there; they just don’t pay as much anymore.

Political policy does not have the power to oppose the economics of technological change, and it’s foolish to try. Repeat after me.

Automation is reducing the value of human work.

Automation is reducing the value of human work.

Automation is reducing the value of human work.

This is the truth that any clear-headed politics must deal with, and that’s why I was such a supporter of Andrew Yang. He actually called this out as our primary challenge going forward, and was looking for ways to address it.

Bernie, Warren, and Trump are all trying to make America great again by returning to the past, but that’s not the way time works.

Time moves forward.

The only way to make everyday jobs great again is to make automation shitty again. And that just isn’t going to happen.

Anyone serious about fixing things for the average worker needs to find a way to provide them both income and meaning in a world where the types of jobs they used to do are no longer valued as much.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

Unsupervised Learning: No. 217

.errordiv { padding:10px; margin:10px; border: 1px solid #555555;color: #000000;background-color: #f8f8f8; width:500px; }#advanced_iframe {visibility:visible;opacity:1;}#ai-layer-div-advanced_iframe p {height:100%;margin:0;padding:0}

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

How to Calculate and Communicate Your Desired Total Compensation

Negotiating how much you make at your jobs is one of the most important things you’ll do in life.

This structure applies to many salaried positions but usually not jobs that pay hourly.

Unfortunately, many are quite unprepared for the process, and that starts with not realizing there are multiple layers to a complete compensation package, with salary being only one of them. I decided to go ahead and write this piece after seeing a number of Twitter threads where there were vast ranges of compensation for similar jobs, and realized that I could possibly help with awareness.

The key thing I want you to take away from this piece is that you need to be negotiating Total Compensation—not just salary—for your next role.

The technical term for compensation is actually remuneration (re-MOON-eration), which people invariably pronounce as renumeration (re-NOOM-eration).

Ok, now that you know that Total Comp (as they call it in the biz), is about a lot more than just salary, let’s look at the individual pieces. You can think of Total Comp as having the following 8 components. Yes. 8.

Sign-on Bonus: Your sign-on bonus is a cash amount you receive immediately after starting, but it’s often broken into two or more pieces. For example, one half after 6 months or a year. A decent sign-on bonus would be something like 1/4 of your first year’s salary, and a great one would be half or more. Keep in mind that bonuses are taxed like gifts, which means you only get a bit more than half.

Sign-on RSUs: Sign-on RSUs are an extremely important component of your compensation package. This is often the most important chunk of equity you’re getting in the company, and could even drive how much you get in the future. Use your research to determine how much it should be, but the range should be somewhere between 2-4X what you make in salary.

Salary: While the whole point of this article is to stress how salary is just one component of overall compensation, it’s still a crucial one. Salaries pay bills, while RSUs, raises, bonuses, and other types of compensation are a lot less tangible. Salaries are often the most regulated and restricted within companies as well, so you can’t easily ask for something 1.5 or 2 times higher than is being offered. The only exception to that is if you happen to know that those numbers are possible but simply aren’t being offered to you. The best advice is to 1) find the bands for your position if possible, 2) do your research on what others are making in similar roles, 3) ask for the top of the band, and 4) if they’re still not getting close, tell them that you just need to be slotted as a higher position to get you into the salary range desired. Finally, if they’re unable or unwilling to budge, either get that extra amount through another part of the overall package, or tell them you’re not interested.

401K: Many companies in non-growth industries don’t have RSUs as part of their compensation plan. For those industries, one of the most important aspects of your compensation is your 401K, which is basically a way to stash away money without it being taxed when it gets withdrawn. What you want to look for here are 1) does the company have one at all?, 2) do they do matching?, and 3) how much matching do they do?, and 4) do they allow matching beyond the no-tax limit?. In general the more matching they do, up to higher percentages of your salary, is better. And if they do so above the no-tax limit of around 18K/year, that’s even better.

Some companies adjust compensation quarterly rather than annually, and this is especially popular in sales-oriented jobs.

Raises: Raises are usually given anually, and they tend to be fairly locked down as well. They’re usually based on some combination of your performance (merit), the performance of your local team, and the performance of the company overall. Again, try to find out as much as possible about what’s normal for the company, and shoot for the high-end of that. But this is one of the values that’s likely to be fairly static.

Different industries weight compensation to different parts of this stack.

Bonuses: Bonuses are similar to raises in that they’re usually defined by HR for a set period of time for set types of positions, and they tend to not get negotiated much. Just make sure you’re not being offered some bonus amount that’s lower than other people, based on any data you have.

Stock/RSUs: RSUs are where you can make up a lot of ground on salary and bonuses if those aren’t as pliable as you’d like. Companies often have far more freedom sweeten deals with stock than any other component. If you feel like you’re significantly low on salary, see if you can get where you want with more stock. Also keep in mind that there are different types of stock-based compensation, and that RSUs are generally preferred. Finally, do keep in mind that stock is only as valuable as the company is, and that depends on many factors. The leadership, the product, the economy, etc. Factor that all in when you’re thinking about how much value a company’s stock has relative to salary.

Pay inequality is a big problem in tech, especially for underrepresented groups like women and minorities. The best way you can help is by sharing yours. I’ll go first.

Security and Prosperity Are Both About Perception

Many think security is about ensuring nothing bad happens. They think we’re either secure or not based on whether we stop the bad guys.

But while eliminating bad things from happening is a tidy goal to shoot for, I don’t think that’s the best way to think about security.

Security originally meant a lack of worry, not a lack of danger.

The etymology of the word security is fascinating. It’s a portmanteau from Latin that combines Se (without), and Cura (care/worry). So it’s literally focused on eliminating peoples’ worry, not sanitizing the world.

You can also make someone feel safe by eliminating all evil, but that’s hard.

So it’s possible to have a gap between reality and perception when it comes to security, where you are either in grave danger and feel secure, or are very safe but feel the opposite. As an example, the TSA could be providing little reduction of technical terrorism risk, but still provide security if it makes the public feel better.

Peers and media are two common sources of comparison.

What I find interesting is that prosperity and happiness seem to obey these same rules. It’s not about how well you’re doing on some objective scale; it’s about how well you think you should be doing based on your inputs.

And like security, you can be doing extremely well on numerous objective metrics (health, attractiveness, income, education, etc.), and still be deeply unsatisfied. Or you could be lacking in most of those and be one of the happiest people around.

This is why I have a serious problem with the latest work from Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley. They both speak of historic prosperity metrics as if they’re some official currency of human wellbeing.

They are ignoring the gap between reality and perception, and so is most of the conversation on this topic.

One place we see this is with peoples’ view of violent crime in the US. If you ask most people (around two thirds, actually), they think crime just keeps getting worse. But if you look at crime trends since the late 90’s, violent crime is quite low.

The perception doesn’t match reality, and the perception is what matters.

We see something similar with depression and suicide rates in the US, with both rising massively in the last 20 years. In September of 2018, 96% of teens said anxiety and depression were concerns, with 70% saying they were a major concern. Combine that with suicide rates being up between 20-50% in various groups and it’s clear we have a problem.

It’s not about how great the world is. Or how safe it is. And it’s especially not about comparing those things to the distant past. Humans aren’t inclined towards objective truth. We process narratives, not statistics.

This is especially true in the US.

The problem isn’t reality—it’s our perception of it. There are a thousand reasons to be angry and sad about the state of the world in 2020, but things were unfathomably worse 50 years ago for most people on this planet. Including for women and minorities basically everywhere.

Pinker and Ridley get that part right, but the answer is not to bludgeon people with the numbers. We have to recalibrate our sensors, reset our baselines, and re-evaluate what it means to be happy in the first place.

Both happiness and security describe how you feel about your state, not the state itself.

People are less religious today. They hang out less with their friends. They participate less in their communities. We have fewer life-long goals. And the (often artificial) success of others is thrust in our faces without end.

So we’ve stopped doing that which produces the deepest fulfillment, and we’ve maximized our visibility of—and sensitivity to—the factors that cause unhappiness. We see the rich more than ever. We see other peoples’ suffering more than ever. And new media thrives off of continuously showing us the extremes in every spectrum.

People are empty. They lack a framework for meaning. And in that state, people become vulnerable and hypersensitive to both the happiness and suffering of others. Rich people on vacation? Why don’t I make enough? People in a happy relationship? Why can’t I find love? The rich taking advantage of the poor? The system is broken and hopeless.

There is no positive data from Pinker or Ridley that can fix someone who responds to data in this way.

If someone lives in a first-world country in 2020, is healthy, has a university education, a high-paying job, and reasonable access to the mating pool, they’re already won the data lottery. They’re already doing better than 99.999% of everyone who’s ever lived on the planet. And the vast majority of people living today.

If someone in the socio-economic 5% is deeply unhappy, the answer isn’t to get into the 4%. And it’s not to tell them how bad people have it in the other 96% either.

We need to completely reset our expectations of life. We need to reset our baselines.

Mindfulness. Gratitude. Appreciation of the very basics. Studying history. Reading the biographies of great people who grinded for decades to achieve something. Determining a life purpose. Spending time thinking about someone other than yourself.

We have something like Happiness OCD, where perpetually adding positives to our lives does nothing to improve them.

These are some of the keys to resetting one’s baseline. It’s a different formula for everyone, but this is the hard work that must be done to address this epidemic of unfulfillment and meaninglessness.

People with OCD can wash their hands for hours and still feel they’re filthy. Paranoid people can feel unsafe in the best possible conditions. And we’ve somehow arrived at a similar state, where we can have everything in life and still feel miserable.

For those with OCD and paranoia we recognize their perception as the problem, and we address that instead of buying more hand soap and flak jackets.

It’s time to do the same with human meaning.

Buying another Tumi bag won’t help you, but neither will telling you how awesome it is that Tumi bags weren’t available to people in the 1500’s.

Notes


Let me be very clear about one thing here: I am not a doctor, or a psychiatrist, or any other type of medical professional. I know there are situations both in biology and in life that are causes for concern, and that must be addressed. Not everything is about perception, and not everything can (or should) be solved by “thinking about it differently”. Hopefully you can tell the difference between the two in the piece.
Another interesting way to see how much perception matters is to imagine how Tiffany in Beverly Hills could be distraught and destroyed by getting the wrong color BMW for her 16th birthday, and could actually require hospitalization for her condition. And this could be true while a girl in Congo is overwhelmed with gratitude and joy at being given a set of colored pencils to go to school with, even though her family was killed just a few months ago. Comparing happiness and suffering is so often, and so much, about relative states within a person, not between people. And that’s why this resetting of baselines is so important.
Since a number of people have asked, no, I’m not feeling depressed. But thank you for asking! I write about this so much because I feel that human meaning is the ultimate problem to work on, as a life project. And in this case I was nagged by a single idea, i.e., that happiness and security describe how you feel about your state, not the state itself.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

My Conversation With General Earl Matthews on Election Security

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

Unsupervised Learning: No. 215

.errordiv { padding:10px; margin:10px; border: 1px solid #555555;color: #000000;background-color: #f8f8f8; width:500px; }#advanced_iframe {visibility:visible;opacity:1;}#ai-layer-div-advanced_iframe p {height:100%;margin:0;padding:0}

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

My Attempt to Explain Trump’s Reality Distortion Field

With Trump just being acquitted in his senate trial, many people are again asking how Trump does it. How does he disrespect and disregard everyone around him, get enemies to fight for him, make weekly mistakes that would destroy any other politician?

I’ve thought a little about this, but after hearing Sam Harris and Paul Bloom talk about it and ultimately walk away unsatisfied, I decided to take a swing at a description.

First, I think we’re conflating multiple things about the situation. There are many things that contribute to the Reality Distortion Field, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. Some of these include:

He says non-sensical things and doesn’t pay the price
He’s obviously being shady (still no tax returns?) but doesn’t pay the price
His MeToo past has completely failed to stick to him
He turned the GOP from his enemies to his supporters
He bypasses government completely and markets to the people, which control the government
You have a downtrodden white, middle-America cohort that is willing to support him no matter what because he’s promising to bring them back to previous glory
There is actual, acute incompetence in US government, which he’s promised to address
He’s an experienced showman from pro-wrestling and reality TV

The problem is when people try to describe how Trump does X, or Y, the explanation might apply to some of the items in this list, but not to others.

So what I’m going to specifically try to address is how he can be immune to damage from his own mistakes, and how he can continue to attract supporters despite constant blunders.

The theory I’ve come up with is a somewhat simple one: it’s that there is a certain type of male personality—which is actually quite common in real life—that is a special combination of selfish, arrogant, delusional, and relentlessly repetitive about his own success.

This type of person doesn’t like talking about other peoples’ successes. They talk about their own. Everything in their life is great. They have the best business, the best steaks, the best buildings, the best car. The best barber. The best everything.

Their enemies? Worst ever. Dumb. Stupid. Not smart. Worst ratings. Nobody likes them. Total losers.

And this is just at a dinner party with friends.

But if you go to their house it’s the same thing. It’s a single narrative on repeat. They are awesome. Their opinions are the best opinions. They are powerful and successful. And most other people are stupid, unless they’re helping their goals in some way—then that person is a stand-up guy. Until they aren’t.

This type of person uses humiliation and ridicule as their main weapon, drawing power from taking down others. Notice most of Trump’s humor is based on making fun of people. Even his own friends. He makes up nicknames for generals. He totally disrespects almost everyone around him, at least some of the time.

Now, you might think that this would be horribly unsuccessful as a way to live in the regular world. Like, who would tolerate this?

As it turns out, lots of people. This personality type is remarkably effective at attracting followers. They might hate the guy deep down (as so many obviously do with Trump), but they like his charisma, his refusal to admit wrongs, and his constant broadcast of a winning mentality.

They’re hating from a position of weakness, and they like being close to strength, so they tolerate him.

We’ve all heard that assholes get all the girls. And we’ve seen that be effective from grade school through college and into real life. Well ask yourself what assholes and many CEOs have that most regular guys don’t? It’s basically this:

There’s often insecurity on the inside, of course.

An unshakable belief that they are the best.
A constant, repetitive broadcast of that sentiment.
A sense of humor based on making fun of people.
An unwillingness to participate in conversations that aren’t about them and how great they are.
Disdain for people who aren’t powerful or popular in some way.
Seeing everything as a competition that they must win.

If you ask a common follower-type (woman or man) if they’d be attracted to a guy like this, you’ll definitely hear them exclaim, “Never! I hate people like that!”. But notice how they act in their presence and you see something different.

Ted Cruz comes to mind. Supposedly a strong moral backbone (gag), a strong conservative leader (gag), but look who’s following Trump around with a pooper scooper. He’s been turned into a moral cuckold who basically carries water while Trump has sex with everything he used to pretend to stand for.

That’s the power of a charismatic asshole.

They create acolytes all around them, which are treated horribly by the supreme leader, but somehow they feel they deserve it. And when he’s crushing someone with cruelty they’re just happy if it’s not them.

Tech companies are full of these types, and while they might have started the company on their idea and their force of personality, those same Divine Asshole qualities often create the toxicity and dysfunction that inevitably destroy it.

And for the Asshole, it’s a constant battle to suppress the natural, decent tendencies among his followers. If he were to show weakness, stop winning, or stop humiliating people for too long, the spell can instantly break.

Suddenly everyone would look at each other with clear eyes and a bit of embarrassment, and say, “Wow, he’s a really horrible person. I’ve always hated him.”

Everyone will agree, and they’ll vow to pretend the whole thing never happened.

Anyway.

This theory does raise the question of how Trump was able to pull this off when other people with similar personalities would be—and have been—taken out of contention far before the presidency.

Being helped by Putin doesn’t hurt either.

I think that’s where all the other factors come in. Being rich. Being a reality TV star. Being a perplexing combination of idiot and genius. Having a very 50’s and simplistic view of America vs. the world. Etc. I think all those variables just made it so that he was able to survive long enough for his Divine Asshole personality to take hold and start broadcasting its Reality Distortion Field.

And once that starts, it’s hard to stop.

Summary


All Divine Assholes have the ability to disrupt reality and make people love/follow them based on being a horrible person.
This no doubt goes back to our desire to back winners in an evolutionary playing field. If someone in the African plains was killing all the enemies and bringing home the most food, he was going to be the most popular even if (and perhaps because) he was an asshole.
Trump just has the biggest antenna because he’s the president of the United States, which results in the most powerful Reality Distortion Field.

America is particularly vulnerable to the Popular Asshole trope because of our national DNA. Winning World wars. Football. Quarterbacks. Cheerleaders. Wall Street. Picket Fences. Consumerism. Hollywood.

America is about winning, and so is being an asshole. Trump’s presidency is just that dynamic at the grandest possible scale.

This, more than anything, is what makes him dangerous in elections. Just like in normal life, you can’t ask the current or potential follower of an asshole if they like assholes. That’s not good information because they’ll tell you no every time.

But just like in 2016, that’s not what happens when it’s time to pick. When you’re not asking the cheerleader (America) what they like, and instead looking at who they decide to date, well, they pick the rude guy who won the game—not the skinny nice guy who would treat them well.

That’s what America is doing right now. It’s picking Chad, because they think Chad wins games. Until the left figures out that 1) this is the problem, and 2) how to deal with Chads, they’re hopelessly lost.

Talking about how Chad won’t let felons vote in jail is not a solution; it’s an opportunity to get made fun of by Chad on national TV while everyone points and laughs. Same with giving migrants free healthcare when Americans themselves can’t afford it. Sanders might as well be part of Trump’s campaign staff.

The left needs to stop studying political science and debate tactics, and start looking at high-school dating activity.

If you want to see biblical levels of preference falsification and cognitive dissonance, look no further than the groupies and romantic hopefuls fawning over the local bully.

That is what both makes Trump powerful and makes the polls highly ineffective at estimating that power.

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.

Unsupervised Learning: No. 214

This is a Member-only episode. Members get the newsletter every week, and have access to the Member Portal with all existing Member content.

Non-members get every other episode.

Sign in

or…

—

If you get value from this content, you can support it directly for less than a latte a month ($50/year) which also gets you the Unsupervised Learning podcast and newsletter every week instead of just twice a month.