In this essay, the author explores the concept of a "Resident Asshole" in the world of journalism. With the decline of ideological diversity in major publications, the author suggests the need for someone who challenges existing arguments and brings a fresh perspective. Through a systematic approach, the author dissects the intended and hidden arguments of authors, uncovering the potential consequences of their success. This essay raises important questions about groupthink, confirmation bias, and the importance of critical engagement with differing viewpoints.

A few weeks ago I noticed that a near-majority of the writers I habitually follow had migrated to Substack, or were planning on doing so in the near future. I’m as vulnerable to peer pressure(or hero worship) as anybody, and I’m eager to shake the cobwebs off my mostly-fine writing and join in the fun.

But this desire to participate caused one of my old dilemmas to resurface, with a vengeance. Writing itself is easy, or at least easy enough that I can do it. But having something meaningful to write about is a bit harder, and most of the topics that interest me are already fully covered(or over-covered) by better, smarter and more experienced thinkers than myself.

I spent some time looking through my old work and looking for the kind of writing I do the most of, working under the assumption that what I do the most of is likely what I enjoy the most, whether I know it or not. I found that the kind of writing I return to the most is simply disagreeing with people, finding what I consider to be flaws in their arguments and picking them apart piece by piece.

And all this reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

The “Resident Asshole” Concept
A long time ago, I proposed a concept to a friend who worked as a relatively senior editor at a magazine: What if every major publication employed a person who produced no articles of their own, but instead spent their time performing hostile prepublication review of the “real” journalists and writers before their work was released for general consumption?

Ten years ago, it was already apparent that most legacy-media magazines and websites were slowly doing away with any meaningful ideological diversity. In the Trump era, this ceased to be a slow process. With the ultimate hated boogeyman looming over the industry, editors and staff found all the the justification they needed to turn this uniformity-creep into a nearly explicit policy. If you go take a look the present day’s The Atlantic or NYT, you will find a universality of thought and opinion in all the writers that far eclipses anything we’ve ever seen in western media. Going against the prevailing thought-tide at one of those publications means putting your job at jeopardy, as perhaps is shown most clearly by the numbers of free-thinkers fleeing to Substack.

It’s possible that some people don’t consider this to be a negative development, but even if you are down for group-think it’s hard to completely ignore the downsides. If you want an argument tested and improved, you don’t go to someone that agrees with you; you find someone likely to disagree and let them bring their best arguments against your point. That kind of disagreement just isn’t possible at the New York Magazine or Vox of today.

This is what the Resident Asshole concept was meant to correct. Uniformity of opinion means that the confirmation bias all goes one direction, which means arguments go unchallenged and we all suffer.

The Rules of Engagement
I don’t pretend that what I’m trying to do is unique - response pieces are hardly a new concept. But I’m hoping to approach all this in a somewhat systematic way that looks at the same few aspects of any argument I challenge:

The argument you are intended to hear

The imbedded, often hidden argument the author wants to be successful

The changes the successful argument would demand

If I tell you that discrimination and inequality in K-12 educational funding is a problem that should be remedied, it’s hard to disagree with my argument, at least on it’s face. But this isn’t always or even very often where my argument ends. If I’m an honest and thorough person, I’ll make this clear. If I’m not, I might hope you stopped at the surface level of my argument - that way, I could get your support for something you might not agree with at all.

If my argument was to “win” - to garner enough supporters that I might be able to influence actual change with it - then the construction of my argument would make a huge difference to the actions we’d expect to be taken to correct the wrongs I pointed out.

Using the K-12 educational funding example from above, let’s look at that same argument through the lenses of both equality and equity. Equality might argue something like this:

Everyone deserves a shot at success, but we can’t pretend to be giving everyone a fair shot if some kids get less government funding than others. It’s fair and right that per-student school funding be standardized, and that we provide oversight to make sure their funding is used in an effective way.

Equity might argue this:

Everyone deserves success, and we can’t pretend we are giving everyone a fair shot if we continue to see differences in the outcomes different students experience. We need to construct a system that produces success at similar levels for every student, no matter the cost.

Ibram Kendi often makes the second argument for a variety of things, but when he mentions educational inequality in an article, it’s often just that: He mentions it, but doesn’t explain what he’d like done about it. From this article:

Abolish police violence. Abolish mass incarceration. Abolish the racial wealth gap and the gap in school funding. Abolish barriers to citizenship. Abolish voter suppression. Abolish health disparities.

Seems simple enough; educational inequality is bad. Kendi would likely like very much for his readers to take him at face value here, and I’m sure many do. But the picture changes a lot when we look at what Kendi actually thinks about inequality:

the america that denied its racism through the Obama years has struggled to deny its racism through the Trump years. From 1977 to 2018, the General Social Survey asked whether Black Americans “have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people … mainly due to discrimination.” There are only two answers to this question. The racist answer is “no”—it presumes that racist discrimination no longer exists and that racial inequities are the result of something being wrong with Black people. The anti-racist answer is “yes”—it presumes that nothing is wrong or right, inferior or superior, about any racial group, so the explanation for racial disparities must be discrimination.

The buried argument here is clear: Ibram Kendi considers all differences in outcome to be due to racism, with no other possible causes; he will openly call anyone who considers other causes to be a racist. In his model of the K-12 funding problem, the solution is to fund at whatever level necessary to ensure equal success, and to socially castigate anyone who might point out causes besides systemic racism that could be causing the problem.

Many might agree with Kendi if his whole argument was known to them, but many might also disagree. Since agreement with Kendi is the source of Kendi’s success, it’s no surprise to see he hides or obscures his actual goals when possible. Pointing out this kind of clever bait-and-switch is important, not to stop people like Ibram from having their say but to make sure that their actual arguments are strong enough to survive daylight.

Tone and Approach
This has become a longer introduction than I intended, but I want to address the tone and approach I will take in my challenges, if for no other reason than so that people can hold me accountable. I hope to keep to the following:

I will be minimally charitable. Some bloggers who I very much respect are maximally charitable - they give every benefit of the doubt to the people they argue against. Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex is this way, and it’s admirable and effective in his context.

With that said, that approach would not work here. The point of the blog is to make strong challenges to arguments and to hopefully show if the arguments are defensible enough to survive, and a necessary part of doing that is examining the motivations and apparent honesty of the arguer. While I will attempt to be fair and charitable to a point, there are necessary limits on how nice I can be and still be effective.

I will be open to challenge. If you think I’m wrong, unfair or have simply misunderstood something, tell me so. To the extent I can I will address criticism openly, and I will do my best to update my beliefs where I’ve been shown to be wrong.

This blog is more about uncovering what arguments actually are than settling them. Because this is the case, no argument is out of bounds for challenge. This is part of why I’m anonymous here; I’m sure at some point I’ll go after an argument that seems universally good or defend an argument that seems universally bad.

With all that said, I’m glad to have you here no matter who you are. I look forward to hearing from you!

-Resident Contrarian

Introduction post

Resident Contratrian explores the clash between two brilliant and influential black thinkers, Ibram X. Kendi and John McWhorter, on the nature of racism and its place in society. Kendi, known for his book "How to Be an Antiracist," holds a binary view, while McWhorter challenges his perspective. The article delves into their differences and the ongoing debate, shedding light on the importance of engaging in meaningful discussions about race. A recent Q&A session with Kendi provides insight into his reasoning for avoiding debates, leaving readers with much to ponder and perhaps even ignite their own discussions.

I feel a little bad writing this because I just came down on How to be an Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi in my last (and first ever, on this blog) post, and especially so since I used him as a bit of a “what not to do” example. At the same time, though, Kendi’s important enough that he merits some above-average amount of attention - Antiracist spent nearly 40 weeks on the NYT bestseller list. Kendi’s views on the proper definitions of racism (any uneven outcomes between racial groups are only explainable by racism) and and racist (any person who doesn’t accept his definition of racism and actively work to oppose it) have been adopted by a not-insignificant amount of Americans.

In the year or so since Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist was published, a growing number of academics and thinkers have challenged it; chief among them in many respects is John McWhorter, a Columbia professor and perhaps the world’s only pop linguist. McWhorter’s book review of Antiracist was mostly negative; he takes objection to Kendi’s binary view of thing he himself thinks too complex to be captured by an either/or.

Both men are considered to be brilliant by their fans, both are capable speakers, both are black and both disagree with each other wildly on the nature of the world and racism’s place in it. This has led to many (myself included) wishing on any available star for a debate between McWhorter and Kendi. At least since the success of Antiracist, Kendi has never seen fit to debate his ideas, opting to only speak his thoughts in friendly, non-confrontational environments.

So it did come to pass that during a recent Q&A session with Hutchins University Kendi was asked, politely, something that roughly paraphrases into “Why do you universally dodge all offers of debate?”. The question and answer are viewable here, but I’ve also done my best to transcribe the relevant bits of his answer below - please listen to the video if you can so you aren’t relying on my transcription skills to draw your opinions.

When your opponents don’t agree, they don’t exist
Last I checked, lights are either on or off. And that’s considered an acceptable binary…  Last I checked, there’s no in-between hierarchy and equality. There’s no in between injustice and justice. There’s no in-between inequity and equity. And those that claim, somehow, this binary is pejorative or problematic, all I’m doing is asking them to tell me what is between inequity and equity. What is between justice and injustice? And if they find something in-between that, then I’ll be more than welcome to sort of engage them on it. But I haven’t been able to find any idea between a racist and anti-racist ideals.

This is Kendi’s first justification for dodging. Put short, he’s proposing that he’s asked a simple, reasonable series of questions that his opponents have proven too dumb or dishonest to answer. By refusing or being unable to answer it, he argues, people like McWhorter have proven themselves unworthy of being debated with. What he wants you to walk away with here is the idea not just that his opponents are stupid, but that they are kind of dishonest - In Ibram’s representation, they know they can’t answer this question but they keep bugging him anyway, maybe hoping he slips up and makes a mistake they can exploit.

Kendi’s hope here is, as said above, that you walk away with the idea that his opponents have failed a simple, reasonable test here. But did they? Taking a look at McWhorter’s review of Anti-Racist, we find this:

Kendi, like Hume, would seem to have it all figured out: We are divided simply between racists and antiracists. Racists are bigots and allow a status quo under which black people are not doing as well as whites. Antiracists are committed to working against that imbalance. For reasons Kendi seems to think obvious but are not, there is nothing in between these two categories—not to be actively working, or at least speaking, against the imbalance leaves one in the racist class. There is no such thing as someone simply “not racist.”

After an anecdote about a few massive anti-racist policies that failed to make a dent or a difference:

Fade out, fade in: dropout rates doubled, the achievement gap between white and black students sat frozen, and the schools ended up needing security guards to combat theft and violence. The reason for this was nothing pathological about the kids: the story of how black inner cities got to the state they were in by the 1980s is complex and has nothing to do with blame. However, to say that the revolution in schooling offered to these kids was not a major antiracist effort, in Kendi’s terms, would be willfully resistant to empiricism.

To wit: antiracism, under Kendi’s definition, only explains so much. Racism quite often leaves cultural legacies that render black people unable to take advantage of antiracist policies. Concerned people devote careers trying to figure out what to do about this, and they should. But consulting Kendi, they will encounter a proton/neutron contrast between “racist” and “antiracist” that blinds them to nature of problems in the real world.

McWhorter’s review covered many bases that I just don’t have room to reprint here. I encourage you to read it, but the practical upshot is that McWhorter’s position isn’t that he can’t answer Kendi’s Sphinx-riddle regarding the space in between binaries, but that he disagrees that Kendi’s Racist/Antiracist binary is appropriate and true in the first place.

If it were true that racist disparities forced upon black people were the only source of disparate outcomes among them, McWhorter argues, then it follows that anti-racist inputs of resources and fair policies would always output some level of improved equity. McWhorter points out that this isn’t always true, and that if it isn’t, Kendi’s simple binary becomes suspect.

By ignoring John’s actual objection is to his binary in the first place and demanding he accept it as a given before he will even speak to him, Kendi’s essentially demanding that John accept his arguments as true to begin with. Or if that doesn’t ring true to you, consider this bit of Kendi’s argument again:

And if they find something in-between that, then I’ll be more than welcome to sort of engage them on it. But I haven’t been able to find any idea between a racist and anti-racist ideals.

The bolding here is mine. In the best case, Kendi’s pretending that John’s arguments towards the falsity of the Antiracist binary simply don’t exist. He then says he doesn’t believe that anything that falsifies his binary exists because, he notes, he hasn’t thought of them himself. And if noting that you agree with yourself and ignoring the existence of opposing viewpoints is enough, then the stigma for dodging debate wouldn’t really be a thing anymore. If you think debate is positive (I do) then that’s not great.

When everyone who disagrees with you is a liar
They have completely misrepresented my work. They want me to argue with a misrepresentation, and it’s hard to sort of argue with someone who is misrepresenting what you are saying. And oftentimes a lot of the criticism is either people who are misrepresenting my work or who haven’t read it, and I’m just not going to respond to folks who are misrepresenting my work. Certainly, if somebody represents it accurately, and says something that is constructively critical, I’d love to engage with those people.

Here Kendi states that everyone on earth who disagrees with him is either a liar or too stupid/lazy to have read and understood his work. Since Kendi doesn’t see the point in dealing with people who are self-evidently dumb or dishonest, he’s not accepting debate invitations. If at some point Earth’s 7.5 billion manage to produce an intelligent, honest man who somehow disagrees with him, he’d be happy to debate.

The idea that everyone on the planet who disagrees with Kendi is either a liar or stupid is obviously a bit of a stretch, especially considering that Kendi never actually explains in any forum exactly how his work has been misrepresented (Note: If you know of a place he does this, let me know; I’d love to revise this section if I’m wrong).

The most obvious explanation for this wild viewpoint would be that Kendi knows people have legitimate objections, but simply doesn’t consider it to be in his best financial interests to grant them forum. This isn’t proper academic behavior, but it’s understandable; Kendi’s ideas have already won him a great deal of fame and fortune, and debating them might not benefit him even if he did win.

A less charitable take is that Kendi might simply not know the difference between someone disagreeing with him and someone purposefully misrepresenting his work. If you can muster the arrogance to believe your argument is not only right but clearly and unassailably so, then of course you believe everyone who disagrees with it is stupid, in the same way you’d believe that of those who argued water liquid water doesn’t tend to flow downhill.

This is reasonable to do sometimes, but it’s mostly limited to things that are provably true or false - the rolling ability of square wheels vs. round wheels springs to mind. But the same isn’t true philosophical systems that claim to explain how massive parts of the real world work; we don’t consider capitalism to be above debate, for instance, even though it has been debated enough and tested in enough places to have a much healthier claim to its defensibility than Kendi’s ideas.

John McWhorter, Racist Mastermind
You know, John McWhorter claimed that my work is overly simplistic and I actually view that as a compliment. I think one of the things that a scholar should be seeking to do is to make our work accessible so everyday people can understand it… people don’t understand racism, so suddenly when you break it down and make it accessible, suddenly that’s a problem. And I think it’s a problem because when you simplify it from the standpoint of a racist and anti-racist ideal, and people understand it then they begin to start looking at the world. Then they begin to start looking at the of people like John McWhorter’s work, then they start hearing him say things like, you know, there’s something wrong with black people. Then they start rendering that idea a racist idea. So of course, he’s going to swipe back at me, as opposed to looking in the mirror at his own racist ideals.

We’ve covered a lot of what’s wrong here already, but Kendi takes this in a particularly dishonest direction. To recap, McWhorter argues that Kendi’s work is too simplistic in a way that causes us to misinterpret reality’s complexity:

To wit: antiracism, under Kendi’s definition, only explains so much. Racism quite often leaves cultural legacies that render black people unable to take advantage of antiracist policies. Concerned people devote careers trying to figure out what to do about this, and they should. But consulting Kendi, they will encounter a proton/neutron contrast between “racist” and “antiracist” that blinds them to nature of problems in the real world

Kendi reacts to this in a truly bizarre, bad faith way: He claims that John’s complaint is that Kendi’s book is readable, and that since it’s readable the masses will be educated on John’s horrifying racism and rise up against him. Where John argues that Kendi’s model is simply incorrect, Kendi responds by casting John as a paranoid Bishop Tunstall, trying his hardest to keep the holy scriptures out of peasants’ hands.

Of course there exists no statement of any kind from John complaining about Kendi’s book being readable or clear. So we find Kendi doing here what he accused John of in the previous section - he’s either misrepresenting John’s thoughts on the matter, or he hasn’t read and understood them. John’s review of Kendi’s book is widely available; Kendi seems to be referencing it, so we can reasonably infer he knows about it and John’s views on his work.

Unlike Kendi’s accusation that everyone on earth who disagrees with him can only do so by misinterpreting his work, Kendi’s take on John McWhorter’s use of the word simplistic here is provably false; he just didn’t use it that way, and there’s nothing Kendi can show to prove he did. This points very strongly to the conclusion that Kendi is either lying (He knows John doesn’t mean that, and says he did anyway), dumb (he read what John said, but didn’t understand it) or lazy (he didn’t read what John said, or didn’t read it carefully, but chose to speak about it anyway).

An earlier draft of this article drew some fire for the use of this lying, dumb or lazy framework, mainly because it’s not very nice. I talk about why I think it’s justifiable in greater depth here. But I think the only way around those three options is if Kendi has read what John wrote and understood it, but believes he knows that John meant something very different and insidious from it that only he can see, and knows it enough to justify an accusation that, if widely known and taken seriously, would destroy McWhorter. Since I don’t think this is likely and I don’t think adding “insane” to the list would soften it any, I’ve omitted it here.

The Implications of Kendi’s Argument
Kendi’s goal here is clear: He’d prefer not to have to defend his ideas ever, in any forum, to anyone at all who disagrees with him. A very charitable person might buy that he actually believes the entire population of Earth is intellectually and morally disqualified from being able to so. A less giving soul might just conclude he’s afraid he might get beaten, or at least make his ideas look vulnerable in a way that would cost him future book sales and speaking tours. The good news is that none of this matters.

There’s really no way for Kendi to “win” in the long term here without successfully defending his ideas. If he lost the debate, he’d certainly lose face, but the funny thing about running from debate is that people generally assume the worst about it; Ibram can bring up the excuses he wants, but to the extent anyone pays attention to this at all it will be hard for observers to ignore that he’s conspicuously hidden under a table any time possible flaws in his theories are discussed.

Kendi’s ideas, like all ideas, would either be improved by debate or shattered by it; Kendi’s cowardice and avoidance, like all cowardice and avoidance, is basically understood by everyone who sees it. While I’m sorry to see John McWhorter accused of being a self-hating racist(which he very much appears not to deserve) I’m glad that at least it’s shining some light on Kendi; the sooner his fear to discuss his ideas is generally known, the better.

Kendi Vs. McWhorter

Resident Contrarian explores C.S. Lewis's Trilemma and its relevance in the Internet age. Lewis's argument challenges the popular notion of Jesus as a moral teacher, asserting that he was either the Son of God, a madman, or the Devil himself. The author delves into the implications of this argument beyond theology, touching on the idea that sometimes the truth may be uncomfortable or unpopular, but must still be acknowledged. With references to Ibram X. Kendi's views on racism, this essay offers a fresh perspective on the complexities of truth.

If C.S. Lewis is known for anything more than magical closet-based felineocracies, it’s probably that he thought that Jesus was God and generally thought that you should, as well. He spent a lot of time on the subject and despite the fact that his theological and apologetic works have enjoyed far less modern CGI enhancement than his fiction, the drier, less swordy religious books and speeches comprise the bulk of his life’s work.

We can imagine, then, how annoyed he must have been to find that many of the people to whom he spoke about religion had down-graded Jesus from deity to something like a pretty good guy who said a lot of pretty good things. From this probable frustration was born Lewis’s Trilemma, Lewis’s argument that Jesus as depicted in scripture could be many things, but not a substantially good mortal man. From Lewis’s Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Lewis’s surface level argument here - and maybe the entirety of it, at any level - is that if you met a man who claimed he was God (as Lewis thought Jesus to have done) and who tried very hard to convince you of it, you likely wouldn’t presuppose him a good fella who had an awful lot of good things to say. You’d probably think of him as a con artist, or insane, but really specifically not a cogent, honest guy whose words you should consider reliable and true.

I personally think but can’t prove that Lewis thought there was something morally wrong about the Jesus-as-a-moral-philosopher stance, something dishonest with oneself and with others. I think that’s what he’s getting at with the “patronizing” line there - Lewis didn’t believe you really think Jesus was a great moral teacher and nothing more. He probably thought you had figured out that was a good way to fend off annoying Christians at parties while not having to bear then possible social negatives of going full-on-atheist, or something similar.

You might not agree with Lewis on the divinity of Christ, or with me about Lewis’s thoughts about it, but there is something in the Trilemma that generalizes beyond the realm of theology, and I think it’s something like this: Sometimes the truth will cost you something. Sometimes the truth will not be nice. But sometimes the facts you know demand an answer or answers from a certain bounded set of conclusions, and you would be dishonest to deny those bounds regardless of the cost or social consequences involved.

Kendi, Once more, with sighs and reluctance
This brings me - improbably, incredulously - to the subject of Ibram X. Kendi for the third time this week. Ibram is the author of How To Be An Antiracist, 2019-20’s mega-best-seller book about racism in America. In it, Kendi posits (among other things) that racism exists on a binary. To Kendi, you (and policies, and organizations) are either actively working against all things racist and thus anti-racist or you are a racist. He thus see no space in between, say, Winston Churchill and a Klansman in this regard; in the binary, one either is or isn’t racist; all other nuance between Winston and the Wizard must be assigned to other characteristics of the men. Kendi’s views on disparate outcomes between black people and other groups are similarly binary; either the outcomes are the same or racism is at play, with no other options considered suitable to entertain.

John McWhorter is a linguist and public figure who does a lot of podcasts and articles about the intricacies of language; I also (bias alert) think he’s brilliant at it. Among his works is a book review of Antiracist, in which he casts the book as overly simplistic - in his view, the binary is insufficient to capture the complexities of reality.

In my last post, I addressed an answer given by Kendi in response to the question of why he refused to debate figures like McWhorter who disagree with the premise of his work. As part of his explanation, Kendi explained that McWhorter viewed his work as simplistic in the sense that it was readable by the masses, and that once Kendi’s work was read and understood by those masses, they would come to understand that McWhorter’s ideals were racist.

This, as noted above, is false, or at least indicated to be false by any word McWhorter has ever spoken on the matter. The word “simplistic”, as he’s used it in relation to Kendi’s work, has always meant something like unnuanced; McWhorter uses it in this context to describe insufficient complexity to accurately describe the world and not to mean “readable” as Kendi states.

In response to this, I wrote the following:


Of course there exists no statement of any kind from John complaining about Kendi’s book being readable or clear. So we find Kendi doing here what he accused John of in the previous section - he’s either misrepresenting John’s thoughts on the matter, or he hasn’t read and understood them. John’s review of Kendi’s book is widely available, so it’s inescapable that Kendi here is either lying, dumb, or lazy; pick one or more.

In seeking feedback on the post, I was repeatedly criticized (in the positive sense; the critics here are people I consider to be friends) for the both the accuracy and phrasing of the “lying, dumb, or lazy” section of the quote above. I think that the phrasing is justified in this case, but I can understand how someone would disagree. As I’m probably going to use similar phrasing in the future, I think it’s worthwhile to break out what I mean and why I think the harshness is necessary instead of gratuitous.

What Is meant by “Lying, Dumb, or Lazy”?
I think it’s a given that McWhorter didn’t mean “Ibram X. Kendi’s work is readable, and thus might reveal me as a racist - I am publicly describing his work as simplistic, as a negative, to prevent the world from knowing the truth of my bigotry.”. You might disagree with me on this (and I’m open to talk about it!) but for the sake of this argument let’s take it as a given that McWhorter isn’t trying to hide his racism by publicly declaring that a book is bad explicitly because it might somehow make that racism plain to the masses. It’s important that we have a fairly solid footing in assuming a statement is factually wrong, but once we take that as a given, we can run a series of tests to see how Kendi might have come to make that particular accusation against McWhorter.

First, we can consider that he might simply be lying about McWhorter’s motivations. We can discuss why this would be to his benefit, or we could posit that he simply is a liar; some people lie for their benefit, and some people lie out of habit, so this isn’t implausible. Not everybody likes to think about it and even less like to say it, but when a person makes a statement that is verifiably inaccurate the possibility of it being purposefully dishonest should be front and center in our minds.

Let’s say we reject the idea that he’s lying, though - maybe we know Kendi to be particularly honest, or we don’t believe it would be in his interest to lie. We then have to consider alternate reasons why he made an inaccurate statement. The next thing to consider is that the person is dumb; a more charitable way to say this is that they are insufficiently intelligent to understand the thing they are talking about. When people are charitable in this way, they still usually mean that they are dumb but hope that by softening it they can indicate they were reluctant to point it out.

Regardless of phrasing, though, we can’t ignore dumb as an option. I am sufficiently dumb in ways that make me incapable of understanding all sorts of things I’d like to understand - so are you, unless you are lucky enough to be the smartest human alive in all human categories of knowledge and understanding. Kendi, being human, is subject to an upper bound on his understanding just as we all are.

With that said, it’s pretty easy to build an argument that Kendi isn’t dumb - among other things, he’s attained a high level of education and written a mega-best-seller, both things that typically take at certain minimum of intelligence. McWhorter’s criticisms of Kendi trend towards wordiness (the man is a linguist) but they aren’t indecipherable by most standards; it’s reasonable to argue that Kendi could probably understand what he was saying.

That leaves us with lazy. In the lazy option, we propose that Kendi just hasn’t read or hasn’t carefully read McWhorter’s criticisms; he has the bandwidth to understand what John wrote, but hasn’t. Nobody has read everything, so to use lazy here we have to consider that Kendi is both neglecting to read one of the major, known criticisms of his most popular and important work and choosing to speak about it as if he has.

With both lying and lazy, we assume a certain level of bad faith. The bad faith in lying is fairly clear and doesn’t necessitate a ton of discussion. Lazy here has a tinge of dishonesty about it, because we are using it under the assumption that the target of the sloth accusation has said something about the subject he’s chosen to know nothing about. Dumb is a bit different - a person can be dumb in good faith; he’s read the thing and put out effort to understand it, but didn’t; he might not be aware of this and thus can’t help being inaccurate when he speaks about it.

Is “Lying, Dumb or Lazy” All-Inclusive?
The next big question here is if “Lying, Dumb, or Lazy” covers all statements made inaccurately. A few of the critics said they could imagine reasons Kendi would say what he said without fitting into that category. If that’s true, then the LDoL standard fails because it tries to uncharitably oversimplify a spectrum of possible motivations, some of which might not be as negative.

I don’t currently see how they could be right, however. Due to the method of how I received the criticism, I wasn’t able to ask them what they believed to be the alternate ways a person could make an inaccurate statement, but they currently remain a mystery to me. I want to be clear that if they do exist, I want to know about them; feel free to comment or contact me by email.

It does currently seem to me that if someone says something they mean to be believed that’s incorrect, they must do so knowingly or unknowingly. If it’s knowingly, then it’s a lie. If it’s unknowingly, it seems it must either be because they attempted to understand what they are speaking of and failed, or didn’t attempt to understand it in the first place. If there are legitimate scenarios that fall outside of this understanding, let me know, but until that time I feel the category is sufficiently inclusive to be used.

Is “Lying, Dumb, or Lazy” Too Mean To Be Useful?
Some of the criticisms I had seemed to point to the idea that the phrasing itself was needlessly mean - not that the statement itself was necessarily wrong, but that there are nicer ways to say the same thing. I don’t think this criticism is entirely incorrect - I wouldn’t accuse a child who answered a math problem incorrectly of LDoL, I don’t think. Tact is sometimes called for, even if 2*8 isn’t 15.

But I don’t think that tact is always called for, either. In this scenario, Kendi wasn’t tactful when he said that McWhorter only disagreed with him because he was a racist. In fact, if Kendi’s accusation was true, he shouldn’t be! If McWhorter was really trying to keep the common man in the dark about the true nature of racism so that he could go on being a racist willy-nilly, causing all sorts of damage, tact would be the last thing I’d want to see. Instead, I’d want to see plain, true language of the type stark and brutal enough to get across the enormity of McWhorter’s sins.

Getting away from Kendi and Lewis for a moment, one place I suspect I differ from a lot of people is that I don’t think a person who chooses to speak publicly about a subject should have an expectation of sugar-coating if he’s found to be inaccurate about something they’ve confidently stated. I think person who puts themselves forth as an expert and public figure on a subject deserves that courtesy much less. I also think utility is with me on this one - if we want to encourage knowledgeable dialogue, we should be able to point out that someone is wrong. I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to extend an excuse of “maybe he just misunderstood” when it’s clear a person either didn’t or shouldn’t have misunderstood something they confidently stated. Doubly so if what they confidently stated was a slur or accusation against someone else.

C.S. Lewis wasn’t attempting to be mean when he said that two out of three potential categories of the Christ were madman and liar; he was making a point in clear language driven by logic that sometimes the information relevant to an argument limits the answers one can provide to it. He made a demand that people speaking with him didn’t condescend to him and themselves by ignoring those limits - Lewis believed Christ was divine and though we should, too, but if we couldn’t he understood that at least we should believe he was something possible within the constraints of what we knew. He didn’t pull punches here because he felt what he needed to say was important enough to deserve clarity and that what he was punching at needed a punch - not a stroke on the cheek.

I acknowledge that some circumstances call for gentleness, but I also reject the idea that harshness is inappropriate in all cases. Similarly I don’t claim I will always be right, I’ll certainly accept harsh language aimed at me when I can be clearly shown to be wrong about something I held up as true.

Dumb, Lazy or Lying - A Lowbrow Lewis's Trilemma For The Internet Age

Resident Contrarian delves into the controversial topic of using Q-tips to clean our ears. The author challenges the medical consensus that Q-tips cause earwax impaction and blockages, arguing that there is a lack of evidence supporting this claim. Buckle up for a captivating ride as the author takes us on a journey, questioning the widely accepted advice and presenting an alternative perspective. Brace yourself for a refreshing and thought-provoking exploration of earwax and unsupported medical arguments.

On The Exciting Subject Of Earwax And Unsupported Medical Arguments

This essay delves into the complex and controversial topic of guns, suicide rates, and the political implications surrounding gun control. The author, Resident Contrarian, examines Matthew Yglesias' views on the issue and highlights the connection between firearms and suicide rates. The article tackles the argument that reducing access to guns could have a significant impact on lowering suicide numbers. Shedding light on the nuanced perspectives and implications of gun control, this essay offers an opportunity to engage with a challenging and important discourse.

Meta-notes:

This article deals heavily with suicide rates/methods. It’s pretty academic/dry in tone, but if this is something that you think might cause you to have issues or be in danger in any way, please use your best judgement deciding if you should read it. If you’ve somehow stumbled on this article because you are considering self-harm, please seek help. The National Suicide Helpline is 800-273-8255.

The data I’m working with on this is very messy and hard to interpret because it’s necessarily confounded by dozens of things. I very much welcome feedback on this - if my math is wrong or I’ve made logical errors, please point them out to me; I want to get better-not-worse at thinking about this subject.

As you are probably already aware, Matthew Yglesias is on Substack now. I don’t agree with him on much, and I agree with him absolutely on even less, but I think this is a very positive thing. He’s a good writer and I think he brings a lot to the Substack table in terms of ideological diversity, something that I think will help with the public image of the community as well as the quality of the work produced by it. Nothing is good unchallenged.

With that in mind I’ve been going over his recent posts to try to get a feel for what he’s trying to now that he’s been cut free of his editorial overlords, and I think the most interesting work he’s done so far is this article, which feels aimed at explaining to the cultural left why gun control has come to be considered a loser as a political issue and has as a consequence been receiving less focus from politicians on the left.

Despite the fact that I know that the previous paragraph is the focus of the article (which is a good piece, and you should read it), I’m of course going to ignore the general thesis of the article and drill down on two things he touched upon only briefly: Gun control’s effect on suicide rates and justifications for banning or restricting various things. The two subjects are related but not closely enough that they make sense to try to cram together, so I’m covering the former in this article, and the latter in an article to come.

The gist
The article’s basic stance as I read it is that guns are negative, perhaps immensely so, but that trying very hard to ban them is political poison and as such the Democratic Party at large should be cut some slack for not trying to ban them. In Matthew’s view, there’s other work to be done, and so long as guns are keeping the left’s candidates from winning, the left should be OK with them walking lightly around the issue of firearms - after all, some policy wins are better than no policy wins.

Part of why he thinks guns are bad is this:

Here’s the deal: There are about 40,000 firearms deaths per year in the United States and if you could make them go away that would be great.

But a majority of those deaths are suicides. 

That “but” is because he goes on to talk about how reducing the suicide numbers requires not just stricter background checks and such, but generally reducing the amount of people who have guns at all as much as possible:

None of this is to deny that gun control laws could drastically reduce the incidence of firearms death. You might think that potential suicides would just substitute some other means of killing themselves, but research does not bare that out. If fewer guns were around, then fewer people would kill themselves.

What’s more: Gun enthusiasts are aware of this. So when progressives talk about the tragedy of gun deaths in America, it doesn’t matter if their actual proposal is a very mild tweak to background checks. When you define “the problem” as gun deaths, you are pushing toward a drastic solution that gun hobbyists don’t want, and they are highly motivated to vote against you.

Note that there’s two quotes there - there’s a lot that doesn’t have to do with suicide that I’m leaving out and I encourage you to read the article. The link in the first quote above leads to an article by Vox’s Dylan Matthews and is Yglesias’ main support for his statements on suicide and the role firearms plays in them. Specifically, here’s what it has to say about gun control’s effect on suicide:

Furthermore, there’s evidence that gun control can reduce suicide rates. A buyback program that wound up taking a fifth of Australia’s guns off the street wound up reducing firearm suicides by 74 percent without affecting non-firearm suicides. When the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends. Firearm suicides are less common in US states that check if potential gun purchasers are mentally ill or criminal fugitives.

The IDF population referenced in the second link is about as non-typical as a population can be; I’m not bothering with it due to the fact that it doesn’t generalize particularly well. The third link references a study that finds a relationship between how vigorously different US states perform background checks and the associated suicide rates, but it failed to reach statistical significance in its findings and could not determine causation:

The findings of this study tentatively suggest that, by and large, more comprehensive background checks at the state level prior to firearm purchases may reduce firearm deaths. However, we strongly emphasize that these results are preliminary, and that more research is needed to establish whether these results are causal. Specifically, there are several underlying confounders that this study cannot account for.

So we are down two studies and left with only the first from the quote: an article examining the effects of Australian gun buybacks on the Australian suicide rate. The quick eyed among us have already noticed that the Vox article talks only about the firearm suicide rate. I’ll get to the specifics of why that doesn’t cover the whole picture, but that phrasing is being used because the author wants you to come to a conclusion that isn’t true.

The argument made regarding firearms as they relate to suicide is that while all suicides are negative, firearm suicides are perhaps particularly so because in the absence of a quick, reliable and maximally quick method of ending one’s life people might resist suicide in instances where the desire to kill themselves is an impulse rather than a persistent, lingering thing. The idea, then, is that by reducing access to guns you save lives; substitution is not expected to be absolute, so total suicides should drop.

Since our focus is supposedly on saving lives rather than getting rid of guns because we just don’t like them, the relevant metric here is total suicide rates, rather than firearm rates, because this gets around method-substitution and lets us know how much an intervention helped or didn’t help. By using firearm rates, the authors are letting you know that they themselves considered the total suicide rate to be insufficient in some way to prove their point - something between contradicting their goal or merely underwhelming.

In the case of Australia, it’s kind of both.

Australian Suicide Rates Are More Confusing Than Represented
For context, you should first know that Australian suicide rates, especially surrounding the years of the 1996 buyback, are weird. Page 5 of this paper (sorry for the archive version) details that in 1995, the overall all-methods suicide rate was .0125%. 1996 and 1997 were the years during which the buyback was enacted, so we can’t draw rely on their data very well, but the rates went up to .013% and .0146%, respectively. 1998 was still elevated at .0142%, 1999 at .013%, and only by 2000 did suicide rates return to 1995 levels at .0123%. Please note: these are not age-adjusted percentages, just suicides divided by population at the time.

Firearm deaths dropped pretty much every year during the same time period, with one anomalous jump in 1999. But if you were judging just by the numbers, it’s hard to see that the prediction that removing firearms from their owners reduces overall suicides holds much water. Vox’s source addresses this as follows:

Another paper (pdf) by  Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi, looks at the firearm death rates in Australia over time and found no  "structural breaks" associated with the law. But Leigh and Neill note that, because of the large number of factors affecting gun violences, real changes due to the law could potentially not show up as "breaks."

"When policies have even modest lags, the structural breaktest can easily miss the effect," Hemenway explains. "It can also miss the effect of the policy that occurs over several years."

So to be clear: suicide rates went up around the time of the intervention. Hemenway, the expert quoted here, says that this is because of A. lags in the policy and B. because this policy might have taken affect over several years. But neither of those are possible! This policy didn’t happen over several years; the was during a one year period in 1996 and 1997. If taking away guns reduces total suicide rates, the individual effect happens the moment the gun leaves the hand of the owner. No lag is possible if what they’ve told us about suicide-by-impulse, gun ownership and total suicide rates is correct.

All that said, after 2000, suicide rates continued to drop, hitting a low of .0102% by 2004. At the all-time high 1997 rate, this would have meant about 850 more deaths; at an actual nationwide suicide count of 2095, that’s not nothing.

But it’s still murky; gun suicides were dropping, but so were other-causes suicides, at about the same pace. Remember here that the implication of the theory is that taking away guns lowers gun suicides without full substitution in non-firearm suicides, not that it will reduce non-firearm suicides themselves, since there’s no mechanism that makes sense by which that would happen.

The overall impression you get if you look at these numbers unmotivated is that the 1998-1999 suicide counts are counterintuitive to the “less guns less suicides” stance, and the rest of the numbers are minor changes that are hard to separate from drops in suicide rates both with and without guns.

US Suicide Rates Don’t Track Guns
Here’s a graph of household gun ownership rates, year by year, taken from here:


Or, to put it another way (same source):


Here’s US suicide rates over the 1999-2017 (taken from CDC):

Figure 1 shows age-adjusted rates for suicide deaths for males, females, and total from 1999 through 2017.
So as US gun ownership dropped, our suicide rates jumped. You might note that by 2017, our suicide rate was 14 per 100000 (same source):

From 1999 through 2017, the age-adjusted suicide rate increased 33% from 10.5 per 100,000 standard population to 14.0 (Figure 1). The rate increased on average by about 1% per year from 1999 through 2006 and by 2% per year from 2006 through 2017.

What you might note here is our numbers look, at a glance, very comparable to Australia’s at the bookends of the 1990’s and now:

Rates began to rise in 1985 and fluctuated from 14.3 in 1987 to 11.9 in 1993 with a recent peak of 14.8 in 1997. This was followed by sustained declines over the early 2000s, with a low of 10.2 per 100,000 population in 2006.

After 2006, suicide rates began to rise. In 2019, the rate was 12.9 deaths per 100,000 population—down from a high of 13.2 in 2017.

So we have a situation where US gun ownership dropped, but suicide rates climbed substantially. The obvious explanation for this is that our suicide rates were affected by things other than gun ownership - the economy, lack of exercise, whatever - but as soon as you acknowledge this you get into trouble, because then you have to notice the double standard in play.

Where Australia’s suicide rate dropped, we are asked to ignore the downward trend in their non-firearm suicides and focus only on the firearm suicides lest we attribute their successes to other causes besides guns. Where the US suicide rate rose as gun ownership dropped, we are asked to ignore the other possible influences, lest we let guns off the hook. And we nearly converge at times, a lot closer than we are supposed to let on; Australia’s 13.2 per 100000 in 2017 is better than our 14, but by depressingly little.

Putting It All Together
I know this is article is a mess of data, but the data here is very messy. Let’s try to summarize a bit:

The Australian buyback’s effects on suicide rates are more confusing than they generally let on. They definitely reduced firearm suicides, as expected, but also coincided with an apparent overall downtrend in Australian suicide rates that make it hard to tell how many lives the buybacks actually saved.

The US has seen an increase in suicide rates that goes against what we’d expect considering our dropping gun ownership rates unless you consider other non-gun factors might be at play.

Around the time of the 1996 gun buybacks, our suicide rates were “competitive” or better than Australia’s. Recently, our suicide rates are worse, but not by much.

I want to be clear that none of this “proves” that reducing or eliminating private gun ownership in the US wouldn’t have an effect. In fact, it might have a massive effect far beyond what Australia’s numbers would indicate - a person in the US is far more likely (about 50%) to use a gun to harm themselves than was ever true in Australia during the time periods we’ve discussed here. It could be that this would be a massive, earthshaking difference.

Or it could be a drop in the bucket. In 2017, if we had Australia’s death rates instead of our own, the US would have saved about 2600 lives. That’s not nothing! But “Let us take every gun; we might get a 5% reduction in suicides” is much less impressive than “Let us take every gun; we might get a 76% reduction in suicides”, as Vox’s deceptive phrasing seems designed to convince people would be the case.

All this to say that the numbers here are a lot messier than Yglesias and Vox represent them to be. It’s understandable why - pulling all these charts and references took an enormous amount of time and it’s legitimately hard to spend this kind of effort on something you instinctively want to be true. But to the extent that it’s hard to say how much our suicide rates would go down based on what we know, it’s better to just say so rather than pretending another country’s messy numbers would generalize cleanly to our own.

Matthew Yglesias and Vox On Guns, Bans, and Suicide, Part 1


In this intriguing article, the author challenges Matthew Yglesias' argument about reducing gun ownership to lower suicide rates in the US. While examining Yglesias' philosophy on the issue, the author delves into the rarely heard but thought-provoking comparison between alcohol regulation and gun control. Exploring the moral tension and potential hypocrisy surrounding the two topics, the article raises compelling questions about personal beliefs, societal influences, and the role of pragmatism in politics. Prepare to have your perspective challenged as you delve into this complex and nuanced analysis.

Welcome back! Our last post on this topic looked at the problems with Matthew Yglesias’ conclusion that reducing gun ownership in the US would significantly reduce our suicide rates. This post is a little bit different; instead of showing what I think are problems with how Matthew sees the evidence on this, I want to focus on more on his philosophy of what to do about this if his interpretation of the data is truer than I think it is.

In his article, Yglesias is for the most part trying to explain to his audience why it’s OK that many politicians on the left have been ignoring gun control in the recent past - it costs them votes in districts most people on the left would like to see them win and it’s a non-starter. But buried near the end of the article he makes a rarely heard point, and it’s great:

Even if talking about gun regulation leads to electoral defeats rather than to the adoption of gun regulation, some people won’t be satisfied. Don’t we need to say the right thing? To be true to our beliefs?

If you’re feeling moralistic about this, I’d point to the case of alcohol. There were over 70,000 alcohol-related deaths in the United States in 2017, the most recent year that data was available for. Alcohol is involved in a majority of intimate partner assaults, and over a third of murders and sexual assaults. It’s addictive, obviously, as well as being bad for your liver. But critically the impaired judgment induced by alcohol can lead to very serious problem behavior even on the part of people who are not alcoholics.

But in terms of moral urgency, alcohol kills more people than guns. If you’re comfortable saying that it’s fine for politicians to be politically pragmatic in their approach to alcohol regulation, but that guns are such a transcendent question of conscience that you can’t stomach it, I think you should examine where that’s coming from. I suspect that you drink alcohol yourself and that alcohol consumption is common in your social circle and in fact it’s woven into the rituals of communal life. And I can relate! That’s me too. Indeed a lot of people like me don’t realize that drinking is much less common among working class people.

I’m not being sarcastic when I say I love this; I think it’s an absolutely valid point and I’ve been arguing it to pro-gun control folks in my life as a devil’s advocate position for years. If you are anti-gun but pro-alcohol (as it relates to them being available) then there’s something influencing your opinions besides mere death and misery; alcohol causes more of both. I think Matthew is on the right track when he hints that there’s some understandable hypocrisy hidden in there - it’s harder to be enthusiastic on a ban on something you or people close to you like.

I love this right up to the point Yglesias and diverge, where he then takes it to a couple weird places that you might miss if you aren’t reading closely.

Things you like get taxed, not banned.
But while there are plenty of people calling for higher taxes on alcohol, nobody is mystified or indignant that few politicians back this.

Drinking alcohol is a widely enjoyed hobby in the United States and people would prefer not to pay more for it. Personally, I agree with the case for higher booze taxes. And I very seriously think that any time a state finds itself in a budget crisis where it needs to do something or other that’s unpopular, wonks should show up with our reams of studies indicating that higher alcohol taxes are an unpopular idea that’s actually good. Maybe some day there will be an urgent need for the federal government to raise more revenue and, again, higher alcohol taxes would be a very compelling way to do that.

So Yglesias wants less drinking, but he’s pretty clear he doesn’t want it banned. This is different from his stance on guns:

But the way you would accomplish these things would be by drastically reducing the number of legally owned guns around. Stricter background checks for new purchases just aren’t going to significantly change the situation.

The United Kingdom has drastically fewer gun assaults than we do and that has a lot of benefits. Not only are innocent lives saved, but it allows their police to operate largely unarmed which would greatly ameliorate a tangled nexus of American social problems around racism and police use of force. But the UK didn’t get there with really rigorous background checks, it got there by making civilian ownership of guns mostly illegal.

What’s more: Gun enthusiasts are aware of this. So when progressives talk about the tragedy of gun deaths in America, it doesn’t matter if their actual proposal is a very mild tweak to background checks. When you define “the problem” as gun deaths, you are pushing toward a drastic solution that gun hobbyists don’t want, and they are highly motivated to vote against you.

Where guns are implicated in self-inflicted harm and violence towards others, the solution proposed by this argument is to go after all the suicides and violence they cause; we have to get rid of guns, not just make them more expensive. But where alcohol causes more deaths, it gets lighter treatment - we can now see our way to merely reducing the amount of drinking that goes on.

It’s also worth quantifying the size of the tax Yglesias is referring to wanting, so we know who we are training the reduction-in-drinking crosshairs on. From the second link in Matt’s higher-taxes-on-alcohol quote:

Roodman found not just that high-quality research supports a higher alcohol tax, but that the effects seem to grow stronger the higher the tax is.

So for the US, 10 percent higher alcohol prices could save as many as 6,000 lives each year. To put that in context, it would mean paying about 50 cents more for a six-pack of Bud Light, and probably save thousands of lives in the process.

It’s telling that the author of the Vox article linked notes that 50 cents a six pack seems like virtually nothing, but still reduces drinking an amount that seems surprising to him. What he’s missing is that this is because he is relatively affluent, and so would be unaffected by this; the people who would feel the financial pinch here are poor.

Where Yglesias and his Vox-sources support a higher liquor tax, it’s knowing that the amounts in play are a low enough percentage of their income that they wouldn’t be severely affected. This might not be a conscious “any restriction that doesn’t affect us” stance, but in a practical sense all that’s been proposed here is things that let drinkers go on drinking as they always have, so long as they are middle class or better.

I seem like I’m being hard on them, but I don’t actually think this is that bad, or at least that uncommon. I think that everyone except the very most thoughtful is like this - they are willing to be dry, harsh utilitarians right up to and not including the part where it might actually affect them in a way they might feel.

Utility Vs. Liberty
I want to give some credit to Yglesias at here, because he was doing two things I like: He was trying to be fair, and he was taking his own in-group to task. Both of those are deliberate actions - Yglesias had to have some point stopped and decided to try and be better than his reflexes told him to. This is an admirable thing. I just wish he hadn’t stopped where he did.

Putting Yglesias’ reflexive protection of liquor aside, I think he’s doing a pretty simple math: If things cause substantial harm and don’t cause substantial utility that can’t be replaced by some non-harmful alternative, we ban or restrict them. That’s hard to argue against in a simple form - if out of all the brands of TV’s that existed there was a single brand that sometimes exploded and burned your house down, we’d ban just that one and use any of the other numerous brands that exist. If coal-fueled power plants are ruining the environment, you replace them with nuclear. It’s a pretty simple thing.

This all falls apart when you consider swimming.

About 3400 people drown in the US a year. It’s the leading cause of death in children ages 1-4. That doesn’t sound like much compared to the >40000 deaths a year from firearms, but considering that there are 10.7 million swimming pools in the US as compared to 144.4 million gun-owning households that means each swimming pool is a wee bit more dangerous than each household with a gun (.031% to .027%, respectively). (big immediate edit: I just realized on rereading this section that this section doesn’t make any sense as written. It should read something like “about 144.4 million people living in gun owning households”. Please alter your opinion of the strength of my argument with this in mind)

Given that, you’d think there’d be a strong contingent of people pushing for pool bans, or mandatory swimming and lifeguarding certifications before you’d be allowed to own one. But that’s not the case. Organizations like this that care about drowning as an issue are definitively not anti-swimming, instead pushing for swimming lessons and general awareness of danger. A few articles like this exist, but for the most part people just live their lives, enjoying swimming and not giving a shit about the human death toll in any practical, ban-pushing sense.

If we were all really genuinely doing the utility math Yglesias thinks he’s doing, we’d ban all swimming pools, recommend exercise bikes to replace the physical fitness benefits smugly tell watersports enthusiasts that their dry-skin overcompensation doesn’t trump human lives. Why doesn’t this happen? Because people are basically aware that drowning is as indicated above a pretty rare thing, and because people like to swim or at least remember a point in their lives where they did.

I want to be really clear here - this isn’t unreasonable! We do this kind of math - or don’t do this kind of math - all the time. We could have breathalizer interlock devices on every car and govern them all to 85 MPH; we don’t. We could ban fast food and ice cream and institute specific dietary standards meant to encourage health; we don’t (with exceptions like the NY soda ban, again aimed at punishing poor people in ways that don’t affect the rich’s pocketbooks and personal tastes much). And the basic reason we don’t is because enough of us recognize personal convenience and enjoyment as utility, so long as it applies to ourselves.

This is where small-L liberty comes into play. The Capital L liberties are liberties related to things some of us think would be disastrous if we didn’t have them. Everyone thinks their private definition of freedom of speech is important, for instance; about half of us think abortion is necessary to modern human welfare. Small L liberties, by contrast, are things we don’t need - they are just things we like.

It’s usually pretty easy to defend a Capital L Liberty, because by definition it’s easier to put together an explanation why we need them; free speech keeps governments in check. A free press is supposed to do the same. Gun rights defenders claim they are needed for self defense, or perhaps to keep our government from becoming tyrannical. Abortion rights defenders claim it as a necessary thing for various equality and not-being-a-reproductive-slave reasons.

It’s much harder in comparison to explain the rights to violent video games or fur-lined jackets should be preserved - we don’t need them, after all. But that doesn’t mean that enjoyment has no value. In fact, recognition of this enjoyment-and-freedom value is universal, just as Matt’s proposed remedies to alcohol related harms recognizes that no significant burdens should be placed on his right to have a drink, deaths be damned. If there’s anything that keeps bans in general from being near impossible in all but the most dire circumstances, it’s a lack of empathy, not an inability to tolerate harms to get what one wants.

Defensible position VS. Defensible Position
I’m not pretending that anything I’ve written here actually does a great job of defining what should and shouldn’t be banned. The position that Matthew Yglesias thinks he’s defending - one that anything dangerous and without clear, non-enjoyment utility should be banned or restricted - is a legitimate stance to take.

On the flip side, my position - that liberty and enjoyment have value that should be considered relative to the harms we are seeking to prevent - is more subjective. Matthew’s argument responds to mine by saying something like “Well, what’s more important? Beverages or human life?”, and it’s not wrong to do so. That’s a valid point.

But just as my position has to be able to acknowledge that it will tolerate a certain amount of human suffering and death to get what it wants and sound monstrous in the telling (See: all the clothes you wear and most of the food you eat involves someone getting hurt), Matt’s position should ideally have to either be consistent (I.E. push for bans on swimming pools and drinking of the same severity as gun bans, and push for them just as hard), or else acknowledge that they are pro-meaningful-ban only where it doesn’t affect them.

Matthew Yglesias and Vox On Guns, Bans, and Suicide, Part 2

In this provocative essay, the Resident Contrarian takes a satirical look at how researchers sometimes misunderstand and misrepresent their findings. Through an amusing alien-designed study metaphor, the author questions the validity of certain scientific studies and the assumptions made by researchers. With a specific focus on a 2015 study on e-cigarettes and formaldehyde production, the essay sheds light on the need for clearer communication and collaboration between scientists and the general public to mitigate biased interpretations and potential fearmongering. Prepare to question the credibility of some scientific claims in this thought-provoking piece.

It’s ham-handed metaphor time!

Imagine a group of alien scientists has arrived at our galaxy and is eager to study our society, with a specific interest in our eating and drinking customs. The concept of warmed drinks is foreign to them, as they find all sensations of heat unpleasant and are typically damaged by things we’d consider to be just-more-than-warm. Stimulant use is similarly harmful to their systems. Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, they decide to study coffee.

Now, the aliens are much further along scientifically than we are; we don’t have interstellar travels or tenticular extenders or any of that cool stuff. As such, they consider us to be somewhere between “ape” and “slightly improved ape” and don’t feel it’s necessary to contact us about their work. They also suspect, given their biases, that coffee is probably a pretty dangerous drink and that we are either too dumb or too addicted to acknowledge it.

Using their scientific know-how they clone a working human, sans consciousness, to work on. They examine our records and find that coffee is the roasted seed of a coffee plant, boiled in water to produce a hot, brown beverage. They replicate some coffee, boil up a gallon of it, then pour the gallon of boiling coffee (they understand from our records it’s better fresh) down the throat of the clone.

Their experiment results show conclusive evidence that coffee causes massive damage to the digestive tract of humans, including heat damage, inflammation and scarring. The massive influx of caffeine stresses the clone’s cardiovascular system and their simulations show that similar amounts of stress over time would cause significant harm.

In their benevolence, the aliens use their omnipotent alien powers to remove all coffee from Earth and to render all coffee-making equipment inoperable. The Earthlings are upset about this, but the aliens disregard their complaints. They are after all essentially drug-addicted apes and as such need guidance, as proven by the fact that they were drinking a beverage the aliens easily proved to be horrifically dangerous.

The above scenario happens on Earth with Earthling-scientists fairly often, and it’s usually for about the same reason - they are scientists, damn it, and they aren’t in the habit of talking to the dumb apes they are forced to live with. This is especially the case when the particular apes concerned do something the scientists hate, as is pretty safe to assume is the case whenever we see a study from the public health/tobacco studies fields.

I think one of the better examples is this 2015 study of formaldehyde production in e-cigarettes. The premise is simple enough:

At low voltage (3.3 V), we did not detect the formation of any formaldehyde-releasing agents (estimated limit of detection, approximately 0.1 μg per 10 puffs). At high voltage (5.0 V), a mean (±SE) of 380±90 μg per sample (10 puffs) of formaldehyde was detected as formaldehyde-releasing agents. Extrapolating from the results at high voltage, an e-cigarette user vaping at a rate of 3 ml per day would inhale 14.4±3.3 mg of formaldehyde per day in formaldehyde-releasing agents. This estimate is conservative because we did not collect all of the aerosolized liquid, nor did we collect any gas-phase formaldehyde. One estimate of the average delivery of formaldehyde from conventional cigarettes is approximately 150 μg per cigarette,3 or 3 mg per pack of 20 cigarettes. Daily exposures of formaldehyde associated with cigarettes, e-cigarettes from the formaldehyde gas phase, and e-cigarettes from aerosol particles containing formaldehyde-releasing agents are shown in Figure 1.

The first warning sign we see that something has gone terribly wrong is that the authors only ever describe their power-source settings in terms of voltage. For context, voltage in the potential of the power source to do work; by itself, it doesn’t tell us anything more about how much power they are supplying to the vaporizer than me telling you how heavy the person on the long side of a lever is. The authors don’t seem to know this, since they don’t supply the resistance of the atomizer (think length of the lever) or the wattage (the number you actually want here, essentially how much lifting power the lever has after all factors are considered).

So immediately we have pretty good evidence that the authors don’t just think of them as superior to us apes, but also that their general knowledge of chemistry makes them fluent enough in all sciences that there was no need for them to consult an engineer on how the devices actually worked.

Some better studies on the same topic, like this, managed to at least list the resistance, but if you sift through the various papers from this time period that follow this general method of running e-cigarettes, you find a pattern: The authors would buy an e-cigarette from somewhere, turn it on at the lowest setting, and find it produced either very low levels of formaldehyde in the “much less than a cigarette” category or none at all, then gradually turn up the power until it produced alarming levels of embalming fluid. And, like magic, they had very concerning levels of toxins of the kind that would let them get published.

I want to stress that this isn’t entirely illegitimate; formaldehyde is bad news of the known-carcinogen variety, and we have a pretty good idea of the risks it gives over time. If all it took to turn the device from a reduced-risk alternative to cigarettes to a cancer-spewing death dragon was a user pushing a couple buttons, then this was a legitimately concerning or even terrifying thing. Without some sort of limiter controlling when the power levels were too high this was a real risk, and the devices themselves didn’t have these kinds of limits built in.

Meanwhile, during the era when this type of study was popular, all the e-cigarette folks who had some actual experience with the devices from an end-user standpoint were screaming. To understand why, you need some context of how an e-cigarette works (I’m very sorry and I’ll keep it as short as possible).

On the most basic level, an e-cigarette is a reservoir of e-liquid, a heating element to boil it off into vapor, and a wick to transfer the e-liquid to the heating coil. When the coil is well supplied with e-liquid by the wick, the overall temperature of any of the components never gets much over the boiling point of the liquid (this is true of any liquid that can be boiled and any heat source, provided the heat is added gradually). Given a good enough wick, you could potentially run unlimited amounts of wattage through the heating element without anything substantial changing except the amount of vapor produced - the vapor carries off all the energy you added just as quick as you can add it, so the temperatures stay constant and relatively low.

What the e-cigarette people knew that the scientists doing the studies didn’t care to learn is that this situation changes very quickly when the wick can’t keep up with the power of the coil. In that case, the coil gets dry; because there isn’t enough liquid to carry off the heat, the temperature of the assembly spikes and any remaining liquid on the wick literally catches on fire. A good way to think about this is in terms of distilling alcohol - you can evaporate it off pretty easily and safely, so long as you don’t increase the heat suddenly, in which case the whole thing explodes and kills some unfortunate rum-runner.

And the e-cigarette people had a name for this. It was called a “dry hit”, and was universally reviled. As you might expect from burning something that was supposed to be vaporized, it was a surprise hit of unpleasant, harsh smoke that users couldn’t help but be aware with and pretty universally tried to avoid. The limiting factor the scientists failed to find in the devices that kept formaldehyde production at bay was, the users claimed, simply that no sane person would use the devices in the study author’s failure-state settings in the first place.

And so you had thousands of e-cigarette users all incredulously saying nonsense-sounding things like “wait, they went to 5v on a CE4?” because to anyone who had any idea of what that device was and what it was a designed to do, it was no surprise that it produced formaldehyde at those settings.

None of this is meant to convince you on the actual matter of e-cigarettes and formaldehyde - in fact, since these articles were published there’s been a whole cottage industry of debunking and rebunking them (pick your poison on which studies to believe - this isn’t exactly a top-tier subfield so there’s some problems with virtually all of them). But if you are a scientist who is looking into the dangers of the actual use of a product, then it’s important that you look into how the product is actually used.

If you care about the people you are ostensibly trying to help, this is pretty easy - you talk to them and find out how they do what they do. But if you have contempt for them, or you’re only concerned with producing something publishable, truth-be-damned, this step gets missed. And so around the fringe of science you find a lot of stuff like this - essentially aliens who never found out humans let coffee cool before they drink it, confused about how they are the first ones to notice the massive tissue damage.



On Alien-Designed Studies, E-Cigarettes And Researchers Who Won't Ask For Help

The Resident Contrarian responds to Tyler Cowen's confusion regarding the libertarian response to Covid quarantines. Examining a 2014 Reason magazine symposium on Ebola, the Contrarian highlights the nuanced positions of the participants who supported targeted quarantines for exposed individuals or specific high-risk groups. Drawing a distinction between those scenarios and the indiscriminate quarantines imposed during the pandemic, the Contrarian provides insight into why the libertarian outcry differs. This thought-provoking analysis challenges simplistic interpretations and sheds light on the complexities underlying the libertarian stance on quarantines.

Meta-note: I wrote this in a bit of a hurry at midnight, so some grammar/spelling errors might exist - I promise to fix them later.

Meta-meta note: A shorter and perhaps better version of these same basic objections exists here.

Over Marginal Revolution, Tyler posts this to express confusion over the response of Libertarians to Covid quarantines:

In the midst of his libertarian phase, Milton Friedman wrote:

As already noted, significant neighborhood effects justify substantial public health activities: maintaining the purity of water, assuring proper sewage disposal, controlling contagious diseases.

Yet today many libertarians shy away from the actual execution of this for Covid-19.

Here is a 2014 Reason magazine symposium on Ebola, by George Annas, Ronald Bailey, Declan McCullagh, and Jeffrey A. Singer.  Of those four I know Bailey a wee bit (not well), but from the entries and bylines and the very title of the feature — “What Is the Libertarian Response to Ebola? How a free society should respond to a communicable disease outbreak” — they would indeed seem to be self-described libertarians.

All four, as I read them, are willing to accept the idea of forced quarantine of individuals.  Not just in extreme lifeboat comparisons, but in actual situations that plausibly might have arisen at that time.  If you don’t already know, Reason, while not mega-extreme, typically would be considered more libertarian in orientation than most of the libertarian-leaning think tanks.

Maybe I was napping at the time, but I don’t recall any mega-scandal resulting from those proclamations.

He goes on to express confusion that what they said then is not what he reads as the common libertarian stance now and that this seems inconsistent, even considering the differences between what we feared from Ebola and what we now know of Covid-19.

Specifically, Tyler wonders why there is such widespread Libertarian outcry now over quarantines when there was no Libertarian outcry over these stances when this symposium was published. While I think that this inconsistency as presented by Tyler would imply some sort of perhaps hypocritical stance change, I think that there are angles Tyler doesn’t consider that render the apparent lack of principal explicable:

Tyler is oversimplifying the positions of the symposium members as simply “pro-quarantine” without going into the nuance of their positions. Annas supported a quarantine only of those known to be exposed to Ebola, and only then once they developed a fever. Bailey wanted monitoring of those exposed, and monitoring (not quarantine) even of health workers working with Ebola patients.

Singer thought it reasonable to screen those “people reasonably considered potential carriers”, in that context healthcare workers specifically exposed to Ebola carriers, family members, and groups of that sort (presumably Singer supports quarantine for those the screening identifies as specific threats). McCullagh’s section seems to potentially approve of wide-spread mandatory quarantine in a situation like ours, but he begs off for lack of data so it’s hard to know where he draws his line.

The first reasonable explanation as to why quarantine acceptance of the sort in the symposium and the quarantine calls of today cause different reactions is potentially explained by the fact that the quarantines spoken of in each case were different animals altogether - one a focused quarantine for actively identified threats, and one a quarantine aimed indiscriminately at the teeming masses. Unless you deny Libertarians any nuance at all, this should be enough to cut them some slack in the context of Tyler’s argument.

Tyler partially answers his own question by bringing up the differences between the two diseases, bit still expresses surprise that “quarantine was — not long ago — considered so acceptable from a libertarian point of view, given the current pushback against pandemic-related restrictions.“. I think this might be too quick of a dismissal, even without considering the nuance section 1. above provides.

If you ask me if I favor quarantine for a deadly, horrifying disease that will kill a quarter of the US population if unchecked, then I probably do; if you ask me if I favor it for a disease that will kill 10,000 people, then I likely don’t. The same pattern applies to quarantines I think might be effective and those I don’t believe will be or have been.

Whether or not Tyler agrees that quarantines have been ineffective or that Covid-19 isn’t horrifying once you factor out all the harvesting effects, he certainly probably understands that there are people that take this stance. And while they may be mistaken about the ineffectiveness of quarantine or the life-years-lost deadliness of Covid, within the context of that mistake a stance that the response is inappropriate would represent an error in information and opinion, not necessarily one of character, consistency or philosophy.

Tyler’s objection rests a bit on the idea that this article’s alleged calls for quarantine caused no widespread outcry, but widespread outcry exists among Libertarians in response to today’s actual restrictions. This isn’t necessarily surprising for a few reasons.

First, the authors themselves do not a monolith make. They themselves seem to be consistent on their previous stances judging by their body of work within the pages of Reason; no inconsistency among the authors is apparent at least from a cursory review of their work (I can be corrected on this if I’ve missed something).

Even factoring out points 1. and 2., we can imagine that some small ideological diversity exists in this population; from what I can tell, the Libertarians objecting to quarantine now are different individuals than those who wrote an article approving (limited) quarantine then.

Tyler implies that those who read the article then should have spoken up if they disagreed with it so harshly (and thus maybe implies that they didn’t disagree with quarantines until they had skin in the game), but it’s not clear that this would have happened even if a substantial disagreement existed. A lack of outcry might sometimes signal agreement but just as often it signals, well, crickets. It’s hard for me to tell five years later how much of a splash that article made, but if it failed to make a huge impact a lack of impassioned response pieces might only indicate a lack of substantial attention.

Note that any of those rationales might be wrong - these quarantine objectors could very well could be hypocrites who are fine with quarantines right up until it costs them personally. But with that said, there are still a number of ways to explain the difference that don’t involve inconsistency so much as different personalities, different information, and imperfect readership of Reason.

Quick Take Response to Tyler Cowen Re: Libertarian Response to Quarantine

Prepare to have your preconceived notions challenged as the Resident Contrarian takes on Zeynep Tufekci's argument for postponing Christmas gatherings until March. In this witty and insightful article, the author delves deep into the reasons behind their initial disagreement and embarks on a journey of self-reflection. Get ready for a thought-provoking exploration of personal values, societal obligations, and the delicate balance between individual desires and collective well-being. It's a must-read for anyone seeking a fresh perspective on navigating these challenging times.

You’ve probably noticed by now, but Covid-19 is still a thing. I have thus far been avoiding writing anything about it; like everyone else, I’m sick of it. This week, however, I thought I had something worth rousing myself for: This article by The Atlantic contributor and fellow Substacker Zeynep Tufekci.

I was going to rip it to shreds.

For context, the goal of the piece is to convince you to forgo substantial Christmas gatherings until March:

Hunkering down to wait out the coronavirus isn’t easy. The costs of isolation are steep. Quarantine fatigue is real. The chance to gather with extended family and friends this holiday season is particularly alluring to those of us battling loneliness. Ritual is the bedrock of human society, and forsaking it feels even more destabilizing in a year that has already thrown us all off-kilter.

Even so, I have a simple suggestion for anyone contemplating a large gathering this month: Wait until March.

In her Substack companion article, she clarifies that this rationale is specifically aimed at getting your tragically incautious old relatives to stop putting themselves in harms way by promising them that Christmas will still totally happen, so long as they are cool with the Easter Bunny attending:

I have a hopeful piece out today. And there are a lot of reasons for hope this month. My piece makes the case that people who’ve tried and failed to convince their elderly relatives to skip gatherings this holiday season should instead propose to their family members that they postpone it—just till March. 

The basic premise behind Zeynep’s recommendation is that things are look set to get better quickly; we have some very promising vaccines on the ground, and things should look a lot better come March. I think this is true - we are talking about something like 50 million people getting vaccinated, and it’s hard to imagine a world where this happens and it doesn’t have a fairly large effect on transmission and death rates. If anything in some ways it makes more sense to ask for restrictions now when we can see the light at the end of the tunnel than it did in April or May, when everything was indefinite.

Zeynep’s doesn’t flesh out the exact numbers she’s thinking of, so it’s hard to tell how confident she is that we won’t have to yank replacement holiday cheer back from our elders come march. But it would be a stretch to say she’s pushing some sort of “here’s a neat trick to fool Dad into staying home” disingenuously, even for the greater good. I think it’s OK here to assume she feels there’s a good chance these equinox yuletides could actually happen in accordance with her standards of safety; she seems sincere.

And to her credit, Zeynep seems to take seriously the loss of non-tangible utility here - she acknowledges in the text of the article that people would be sad to lose Christmas as they’ve known it, and she seems to feel as I do that this kind of loss should only be tolerated in extreme circumstances. I’m not sure how universally she applies this view - I.E. if she’d be as reluctant to apply restrictions to a pleasure someone else held dear but that she didn’t approve of - but in this case I don’t have to know; pretty much everyone likes the winter holidays or at least understands why others do.

To give you some insight into my process, what I find most difficult is finding things to disagree with; I might read a couple dozen articles to find something I think is substantially wrong enough to push back on. When I read this article initially, my internal bullshit sensors went wild; I was 100% sure I was going to demolish it.

Then I spent a day trying to figure out why I disagreed, and things got harder. I managed to narrow things down to these take-aways:

I have a big problem with people who don’t take other people’s ability to do the things they find important seriously. On my initial quick read-through, I came away with the impression Zeynep was doing this. On subsequent rereads, I ended up with the opposite opinion - at least in this case, I don’t have any reason to think Zeynep did this.

Whether or not I disagree with Zeynep substantially on whether or not it’s necessary or justified to make your Mom cancel her Christmas bash, it wouldn’t be fair for me write a piece saying she’s wrong based on mere opinion unless it were clear it was a disagreement on principle. But in terms of principle (not the facts themselves, but how we say we should respond to them) Zeynep and I are pretty close here, closer than I expected would be the case initially and not far enough to justify tearing apart what is otherwise a nice work.

Principle aside, I might disagree with Zeynep on some facts and their implications (and I do, I think) but where I disagree with her I think I’m probably on the fringe. I don’t think I’m wrong or I’d change my mind on those facts, but I’m not so sure on them that I can reasonably say Zeynep (and almost everybody else) is wrong, and if I’m not confident in doing that I don’t have any business disagreeing in a public forum.

The nature of what I’m trying to do is that if I’m successful in convincing you someone is wrong or has argued something incorrectly, it does them some small amount of harm; you’d end up trusting them less and less likely to listen to them in the future. I think that’s a good thing when I’m right, but I have to be careful where I aim that weapon.

At some I found myself re-writing this post to try to seem right where I couldn’t manage to be right, and that’s not what I want to do here or who I want to be. In the future if this happens again I’ll do the same thing I’m doing here: I’ll let you know how my argument against something failed, and recommend the piece that “beat” me. And I do recommend it - it’s a nice article.

Tomorrow I’ll try to flesh out a bit of where I probably disagree with Zeyneb (and nearly everyone else) on some aspects of how we think about the severity of Covid, but this is all I have for you today - I apologize if it wasn’t what you were expecting, but I hope I’m correct that it was the right thing to do.

Defeated: Or How I Failed to Substantially Disagree with Zeynep Tufekci

The Resident Contrarian tackles the complex topic of risk, death, and personal sacrifice in this thought-provoking essay. Through the use of an engaging metaphor involving a shipwreck survivor and an island with imaginary tigers, the author challenges conventional thinking about risk avoidance and questions what a conscientious person should be willing to give up. With a focus on the actual effects on the death rate rather than absolute numbers, this article delves into the nuances of risk perception and decision-making. Prepare to have your beliefs challenged and your perspective expanded in this intriguing exploration.

I talked a little bit in my last article about how some or all of the disagreements I had with Zeynep Tufekci came down to beliefs that I hold that might be considered a bit on the fringe of reasonable thought. This made it hard to criticize her, because it’s not really all that fair to call someone out for a difference of opinion where factual reality can’t be relied upon to resolve the disagreement. But I do disagree with her and probably a majority of everyone in terms of risk, death and what a conscientious person should be willing to give up to avoid them. It’s something that’s likely to come up in my writing again and again (I’ve already disagreed with Yglesias about it here, for instance) so I think it’s worth it to spend some time fleshing out my views on this, if nothing else so I can have something to point to without rehashing it again and again.With that said, let the festival of the many metaphors begin!You’ve survived a shipwreck. Congratulations!You lost consciousness after your boat went down, but you now miraculously find you didn’t drown. Looking around you find you are in a smallish metal room similar to a shipping container. You also find you aren’t alone; there’s a small, middle-aged man in the box with you. The man explains that he and now you are the sole inhabitants of a paradise-like island; it’s filled with fresh fruit, beautiful animals and boasts a near-perfect climate year round. He describes the island so well, in fact, that you decide you’d like to see the island yourself. You rush to the door and try to open it, but it’s locked. The man informs you that - to his great sorrow - neither you and he can go outside because of the risk of being attacked by a tiger. You express your surprise that the island even has tigers - it’s the wrong part of the world for large predatory cats. The man explains that the island doesn’t actually in fact have a tiger, but it’s possible that it might at some point get one - after all, it didn’t use to have humans either, but now it has two. In his previous non-castaway life, the man was a mathematician and has calculated the risk of death in the box (and thus safe from tigers) and outside the box (and thus at risk from them, were they to exist). With a great degree of confidence he tells you that if you leave the box, your chance of dying any particular year is  0.86800% . If you stay in the box with him, however, you are inarguably safer - your per-year risk of death is 0.86053% once tigers are factored out. He tells you not to worry - he grows a nutritious mold for food and gathers rainwater through a system of funnels, and you can survive indefinitely in your new metal home. You let the man know that while you appreciate his caution, you are willing to tolerate the small amount of increased risk in order to enjoy the island. The man explains to you that you don’t have a choice. In a fair, open election before you arrived, he was declared mayor-for-life of the island; as mayor, he emphasizes low death rates above all other values. He lets you know that he will never unlock the door, and that he’s fairly disgusted with you for prioritizing your own petty enjoyment over the literal risk of the death of his constituents. True to his values, he never lets you out of the box - you live a long, healthy life in the confines of his caution.This is how Matt Yglesias thinks about gun suicides and alcohol consumption. The percentages above are real - they are the unadjusted death rate in the US in 2018, with and without gun suicide and alcohol-related deaths.When Matt talks about these things, he doesn’t talk about the actual effects on the death rate; he talks about absolute numbers of deaths. Those numbers sound larger, but they don’t really give you the whole picture. It might be because he hasn’t done the math on the whole death-rate thing, but if he has, it means Matt believes something like this (my words, not his):There’s a very small risk that something you are voluntarily doing might end up harming you. I don’t care about the size of the risk, and I don’t care if you are willing to shoulder that risk for the sake of doing something you like. If it were up to me, I’d ban that thing you like, because you might die and I feel like it’s OK for me to protect you against your own wishes from even small risks.I disagree with Matt (more on this later). Next metaphor!You are a pilot who has been forced to crash-land his plane on an isolated island. This island is inhabited - there’s about a thousand people in residence. Nobody has ever escaped, but it’s not so bad - people live, marry, have kids, and die in a relatively happy environment. And they eat a lot of fish.It turns out that the only edible thing on the island is fish that are taken from the island’s only lake. Luckily, the fish are nutritionally complete and delicious so you hardly miss other foods. A few years after you arrive, however, the unthinkable happens: The fish get sick.The sickness does not kill the fish, but it makes them much less healthy to eat. Every year, several of the villagers die. It’s not an extinction level event for the people on the island, but it’s very sad; everyone has lost someone, be it a parent, a spouse, a child or a friend. Not everyone who survives is healthy; the fish don’t affect everyone negatively, but when they do hurt someone they damage them in a variety of ways, diminishing their overall physical well-being.One day, you are walking along thinking about how sad all this is, when you see the unbelievable: The island has a second lake! You look through it’s clear waters and find that the fish inside are apparently identical to the fish in the town’s known lake, but healthy and devoid of the signs of the sickness. Elated, you rush back to the village to tell the Magistrate of Approving New Food Sources what you’ve learned - the village is saved!The Magistrate informs you that the village is not saved, thank you very much. He has no idea, he says, if these fish are safe or not - they might look the same as the other fish, but what if they are made of a deadly poison? What if they kill everyone in the village? There’s no way to know. It’s a risk he won’t take. He intends to use his powers as magistrate to block all consumption of the fish, for safety’s sake.You immediately volunteer yourself to eat a few of the fish to prove their safety - you, after all, judge that you are at risk from the sick fish anyway and besides that can by risking yourself save many others should the fish prove safe. The Magistrate tells you that this represents an unethical risk - even if you understand the danger to yourself and volunteer, he won’t allow it -in fact, he’d jail you for trying if you went over his head.You argue that the fish certainly look a lot like the other fish, and that it seems like the small chance that the new fish are deadly poison pales in comparison to the known actual wide-spread death the sick fish are causing. The magistrate can tell you aren’t getting it, and pulls you aside.“Look here,” he says, annoyed, “I’m not The Magistrate of Keeping Fish Healthy. I’m not The Magistrate of Curing Illness. I’m The Magistrate of Approving New Food Sources. The only way I get in trouble is if I approve a new food source that ends up being dangerous - the rest of this stuff isn’t my business and I’m not about to run myself out of a job by saving people willy-nilly.”The Magistrate lets the townspeople know that he is perfectly willing to let them eat the new fish, should they prove safe; he will test them by feeding them to the island’s only tame bear. Five years and hundreds of preventable deaths later, the bear is still alive and the fish are officially declared permissible to eat. The politically savvy Magistrate is proved correct when he is never fired or even seriously questioned regarding his policies. This is how the FDA thinks about things like e-cigarettes, but much more importantly how it thinks about vaccines for Covid-19. Did you know we had a complete, working vaccine before the average person had ever heard “Coronavirus” on the news? Did you know we could have reasonably proved it’s efficacy with low-risk-group volunteers within a few months and potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives? The FDA did; the FDA also did not give two shits about this.Did you know there’s like a dozen medicines that are all pretty hopeful at treating Covid patients a lot more effectively? The FDA does! The FDA also enforces a set of standards that will very likely ensure that none of these medicines will be in wide usage by the time the super-delayed Covid vaccines render them moot. The next global pandemic, we better pray we can use the same drugs from this one; if not, the FDA will make sure the same delays apply on the new life-saving-but-restricted medicines.Whoopsie! You’ve tripped and fallen into one of those sparsely populated islands. You got lucky, though; this island’s climate and lifestyle produce unbelievable levels of health in the inhabitants. You use your new-found vim and vigor to explore every nook and cranny of the thing.One day, you are walking along when you see a beautiful lake. The water is the perfect temperature for a swim, and you are sweaty and sore from your hike. You decide to take a dip, but just before you jump in, you are stopped by Frank, your island buddy. “You can’t jump in there,” says Frank, his eyes filled with noble intent. “That lake is our island’s second leading cause of preventable death".Frank explains that the island has known three deaths in the last century that weren’t from old age. One of the deaths was the tragic loss of Trent, who decided to go swimming in the lake. This was unusual in and of itself, since the islanders’ culture mostly disdains being wet; it’s a form of serious shame to them to be caught in the rain, much less submerged. Trent, being an oddball, decided to give it a whirl anyway. Sadly, the newly-damp Trent experienced a leg cramp and he drowned immediately. Since then, the lake has been banned, since it is the second most dangerous thing the islanders are aware of. Curious, you ask Frank about the leading cause of death on the island, which by implication has killed twice. He explains that the two other preventable deaths known to the island both involved choking on a particularly fibrous and difficult-to-chew berry indigenous to the island. You ask why the berries have not been banned, given their danger. Frank looks at you as if you are insane, and explains that nobody would ban the berries - they are considered to be delicious by all people of good character.This is how basically everybody thinks of vices they don’t themselves enjoy. Almost everyone is OK with banning things they don’t like (See Yglesias on how in his opinion we can’t but absolutely should ban guns) but at most want minor restrictions on dangerous things they do like (See Yglesias in the same article, proposing very modest taxes on alcohol while admitting it’s much more dangerous in absolute-number terms).This is why you see a tremendous amount of work put into banning guns, but only a few fringe people talking about banning high-calorie foods as a general class despite obesity being significantly more dangerous than firearms. A few people here and there want to ban McDonalds - those people don’t like McDonalds. Nobody except vegans tries to ban ice cream. You have to understand that even rich, educated people like ice cream. This hypocrisy is real. You might blame it on a particular political side, but really most of us do it; I myself didn’t get that involved in trying to prevent taxes on sugared soda - The Resident Contrarian drinks diet, mostly. I wasn’t motivated because I wasn’t effected. I know there are some thoughtful, principled people who do defend all freedoms equally, but you know and I know they might as well be a rounding error for all they effect US culture and politics.Believe it or not, however, this double-standard we all have to different extents isn’t the point of the metaphor.You might have noticed a second twist hidden in the last metaphor - the leading cause of death is indeed the leading cause of death. It’s the second most dangerous thing the islanders know about, and that’s enough for them. In their experience, it’s the one of the most dangerous things, and that’s how they think about it. People could safely enjoy the pond, mostly, but nobody does because they judge the risk relative to the general riskiness of their lives; nobody reflects that their lives are obscenely safe regardless of whether they swim or not.It might not even be possible for them to do so. They haven’t lived anywhere but the island; they don’t remember any lifetime but their own. Maybe the island once had a bunch of tigers, but they were long since subjugated when the current islanders were born. If they value safety, it makes sense to aim their efforts at the last remaining dangers, so long as those dangers can be eliminated without much personal loss to the individuals pushing the bans.I disagree with Yglesias that we should ignore the actual affect on the death rate and focus on absolute numbers, which tell us less. I disagree that we should feel free to keep people from risks they choose for themselves even when those risks are large, much more so when the risks are demonstrably small. I also disagree with the FDA that making sure drugs don’t kill small amounts of  informed volunteers should outweigh illness killing vast amounts of people and that the main point of the policies they enforce should be protecting their own careers.Those three types of disagreements aren’t entirely uncommon - I’m sure some people reading this are nodding along. But where I suspect I’d get into it with with Tufekci and lose most of my audience is this: I think we are exceptionally safe in a lot of ways, and that we don’t stop to consider that already-high level of security. Since we aren’t that great at noticing how good we have it, we trend towards perpetually seeking more and more safety at the sacrifice of more and more of what we might actually enjoy. To put it another way, we protect life at the cost of enjoying life.It’s entirely arguable that Covid-19 is a big enough threat, that it’s caused enough death and harm, that none of this argument should apply to it. I even suspect that’s right. If we aren’t going to restrict ourselves for Covid, what would we restrict ourselves for? But I still find myself reflexively wanting to fight the Tufekci’s of the world when they reasonably propose cancelling the parties and extending the lock-downs. I think this is mostly because I never see any mainstream thinker seriously grappling with the idea that at some point we are restricting large amounts of people from enjoying the things they like to obtain minimal gains on safety in a world that is already overwhelmingly safe. So that’s my basic framework - when I talk about death vs. everything else in the future, this is what I’ll point to. Not that we should be unsafe, and not that we should never consider bans - but that there’s other things to consider and other things that are important besides locking ourselves or others in little rooms to keep make an already-small number artificially lower, cost be damned.We might disagree on the balance of how much death we need before we restrict life - that’s reasonable and positive. I think it’s necessary that people who feel more push back on people who are more motivated by spreadsheets. But if this article felt ghoulish at any point - if the talk of trading fun for safety felt over the line - that’s part of the problem I’m talking about. If we can’t talk about anything but safety, safety is all we will get, until there’s nothing left besides that.Again, Covid probably isn’t the place to argue this; I acknowledge it’s a big deal. The nature of the world right now means I can’t completely avoid Covid when talking about this. But at the same time that these arguments might not apply well to Covid, I think the era of Covid might be the best time to think about these arguments. When, after all, are we going to see our health threatened and our ability to live our everyday lives hampered more clearly and more universally than today? Now is when everything is real and immediate, when we can feel the implication of each philosophy in a real way that costs and hurts. In the face of danger and restriction, we have our greatest chance to really consider what safety and freedom are worth. Let’s not waste it.Subscribe

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In this eye-opening essay, the Resident Contrarian sheds light on the complexities of life at lower income levels, challenging the assumptions and misconceptions held by those who haven't experienced poverty. Through personal anecdotes and insightful observations, the author provides a unique perspective on topics such as housing, education, and financial struggles. Offering a glimpse into the realities faced by many, this thought-provoking piece aims to bridge the gap between the wealthy and the less fortunate, fostering understanding and empathy. Prepare to challenge your preconceived notions and gain a deeper appreciation for the complexities of socioeconomic inequality.

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