September 28, 2025 Arguments For The Sake Of Heaven Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Arguments For The Sake Of Heaven

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

I once had a girlfriend for about a year, and during that time, I don’t remember ever needing to explain myself to her. By contrast, most of my girlfriends have been a bit bewildered by my sarcasm. They weren’t big fans of it.

It’s intoxicating to be understood. On the other hand, it is dispiriting to talk to someone who isn’t willing to invest much in understanding what you are saying. When I feel that the other party is simply biding his time until he gets to speak, that’s when I want to walk away as soon as possible.

There’s a concept in Judaism of argument for the sake of heaven, where the interlocutors are optimizing for truth. What’s a secularized version of this?

ChatGPT says:

A good secular equivalent to “argument for the sake of heaven” is dialectic—a conversation in which both sides genuinely aim at clarity, coherence, or truth, rather than scoring points. In classical philosophy, Socratic dialogue had this flavor: the purpose was mutual testing of ideas, not victory.
In more modern terms, people sometimes call it “good-faith discourse” or “collaborative truth-seeking.” The underlying ethic is that the conversation itself is valuable when both participants commit to:
Charity: interpret the other person’s words in their strongest, not weakest, sense.
Reciprocity: listen to understand, not just to reply.
Transparency: explain your reasons honestly, even when they’re unflattering.
Openness: be willing to update your views if the other side makes a strong point.
It’s intoxicating, as you say, because it’s rare. Most conversations are what philosophers call “agonistic” (aimed at winning) rather than “epistemic” (aimed at knowing). When you stumble into the latter—whether in a romance, a friendship, or a debate—it feels like you’re not just being heard but taken seriously as a mind.
Here are some practical “tests” for spotting whether a person is engaging in a secularized argument for the sake of heaven (collaborative truth-seeking) instead of just waiting for their turn to talk:
1. Responsiveness Test
Do they actually answer the question you asked, or at least acknowledge it before shifting topics?
Or do they pivot immediately to their own point, like a pre-recorded message?
2. Steelmanning Test
Do they restate your position in a way you’d recognize as fair (even improved), before critiquing it?
Or do they take the weakest version and knock it down?
3. Curiosity Test
Do they ask genuine clarifying questions, showing investment in understanding your frame?
Or do they just wait until you’re done, like a loading bar before their turn?
4. Revision Test
Do they ever update their view, even slightly, in response to something you said?
Or is every conversation a fixed broadcast, with zero movement?
5. Emotional Tone Test
Does the disagreement feel like sparring with a training partner—sharp but with mutual respect?
Or like a contest where one party needs to win at your expense?
6. Silence Test
Can they sit in silence for a beat, thinking about what you said?
Or do they rush to fill the gap with rehearsed lines?
If someone passes at least a few of these, you’ve likely got an interlocutor who values truth-seeking over ego-protection. That’s the secular version of machloket l’shem shamayim.

David Pinsof writes:

The human brain is not a steam engine. It is, in fact, an information processing device designed by natural selection to find food, seek status, court mates, and solve other adaptive problems. You see, when you think you’re “venting,” what you’re actually doing is talking shit about your rivals and covering it up with a strained metaphor from the 1800s. Or at least, that’s what a cool new study suggests: “venting” is a clever strategy for saying mean things about people without looking mean.
Also, plenty of studies show that venting doesn’t work in reducing our anger. Why would it? Does ranting feel like a massage? And why would we want to reduce our anger anyways? Anger serves an important function—we don’t want to turn it off. The same thing goes for our other negative emotions: they do useful things for us.
While we’re on the topic of shit talking, here’s another clever excuse for it: “expressing concern.” According to a fascinating series of studies, women spread negative gossip about their rivals by framing it as “concern” for their rival’s wellbeing. “Ohhh I’m so concerned about Stacey. She’s sleeping around so much I’m worried she’ll get an STD.”
A new psychology measure just dropped: the corporate bullshit receptivity scale. It involves rating the “business savvy” of hilarious statements like: “Each day, we help our brand champions thrive in a revolution of frameworks fueled by our augmented business visualization,” and “Our bandwidth comes from the visionary culture-shifting of several new growth-based integrated networks.” According to the study, people who scored higher on the scale were more likely feel inspired by their company’s mission statement.
Here’s one more for the workplace: managers who “fall for flattery,” or who dole out perks to ass-kissers, come out looking bad—naive, incompetent, selfish, unfair, etc. And they make their organizations look bad too, according to this neat study. The authors don’t reflect on the most interesting implication, but I will: ass-kissing and favoritism have to occur underground. The moment people catch on to whose ass is being kissed, and who’s getting ahead as a result, the organizational status game collapses. This creates a social incentive for ass-kissers to disguise their sycophancy as a desire for helpful advice, and for leaders to disguise their trail of ass-kissers as valuable assets to the company.

Posted in Rhetoric | Comments Off

WP: Trump swerves and swaggers on the world stage: What remains largely missing for the president are the kind of foundational principles that historians might someday refer to as a “Trump doctrine.”

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

Karen Tumulty writes:

The populist and nationalist catchphrase that Trump and his supporters use is “America First.” What it means, however, is whatever he wants it to…
“I don’t think there’s a Trump doctrine. I don’t think he has a philosophy. I don’t think he does grand strategy. I don’t even think he does policy as that term is conventionally understood in Washington,” said John Bolton, who was U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush and national security adviser during Trump’s first term. “There isn’t any Trumpism that’s going to survive. It’s all about his interest and what he wants.”
…While Trump’s approach is unconventional, those who support it say it is indeed grounded in a philosophy.
“Rather than pursuing a traditional establishment foreign policy, President Trump is weighing all these international engagements through the lens of U.S. national security. In other words, he is guiding his policies on what will contribute to the security and prosperity of the American people rather than in pursuit of some abstract greater good,” argued Victoria Coates of the Heritage Foundation, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump. “At the same time, his patience is not infinite.”

The pursuit of personal, tribal and national interests is a principle — self-interest.

Sometimes interests are more important than principles.

For 40 years, Donald Trump has stood for immigration control and protectionism to protect the interests of ordinary Americans.

ChatGPT says: Yes — the pursuit of one’s own interests is a principle, though it doesn’t look like a “doctrine” in the way policy elites or historians tend to frame foreign policy. A “Truman Doctrine” or “Bush Doctrine” is articulated in universal terms — defending freedom everywhere, pre-emptive strikes, etc. Trump never bothers with that layer of abstraction. Instead, his principle is transactional: what’s in it for me (or the U.S., as he equates the two)?

If you strip away the performance, the core Trump principles look like this:

1. Radical transactionalism. Every relationship, foreign or domestic, is viewed as a deal. Alliances, treaties, NATO, trade agreements — they’re not binding commitments but contracts to be re-evaluated constantly.

2. Nationalism over universalism. He’s suspicious of global institutions (UN, WHO, WTO) and prefers bilateral, winner-take-all deals where the U.S. is on top. “America First” is his organizing principle.

3. Strength as credibility. Projection of power — military, economic, or personal bravado — is seen as the only real form of diplomacy. Deterrence through intimidation rather than trust.

4. Loyalty as currency. Whether with foreign leaders or domestic allies, loyalty to him is a prerequisite for favorable treatment. Principles of consistency or institutional rules are secondary.

5. Skepticism of “buffered” abstractions. As you put it, the liberal-internationalist “buffered identity” expects doctrines articulated in terms of values, norms, or institutions. Trump distrusts that layer of rhetoric. He communicates instead in visceral, immediate terms: deals, money, winning, humiliation, dominance.

So yes, Trump has principles — they’re just not the kind that fit neatly into the framework elites use to define a “doctrine.” They’re more instinctive, pragmatic, and tied to personal and national self-interest rather than abstract ideals.

LF: How could Trump articulate his worldview honestly and accurately while using the language esteemed by the buffered?

ChatGPT: If Trump wanted to translate his instincts into the idiom of the “buffered identity” — the intellectualized, abstract, value-laden language of policy elites — he would have to reframe his gut impulses as systematic doctrines rather than deals. In other words, he’d keep the same substance but dress it in “respectable” terms. Something like this:

1. From “America First” → “Principled Sovereignty.”
Instead of saying “we don’t want to get ripped off,” he’d cast it as a commitment to sovereign equality: every nation has the right to defend its own interests without being subordinated to supranational institutions.

2. From “transactional deals” → “Reciprocal Realism.”
Rather than “we’ll leave NATO if they don’t pay,” he could describe it as a doctrine of reciprocity: partnerships must be mutually beneficial, or they undermine international order.

3. From “strength is credibility” → “Deterrence Through Resilient Power.”
His obsession with dominance could be framed as a belief in credible deterrence: peace comes from unmistakable demonstrations of resolve and capacity.

4. From “loyalty to me” → “Trust and Reliability in International Relations.”
Personal loyalty, recast as reliability: the U.S. rewards consistent partners and penalizes opportunistic free-riders.

5. From “gut instinct” → “Pragmatic National Interest.”
His improvisational style could be sold as pragmatic adaptability: a willingness to adjust to changing conditions rather than being shackled by outdated dogma.

If he were speaking in this more buffered register, Trump might articulate something like:

“The United States affirms a doctrine of Principled Sovereignty and Reciprocal Realism. We believe nations are strongest when they safeguard their own interests while respecting the reciprocal commitments of others. Our credibility rests on resilient power, and our partnerships must be rooted in reliability and fairness. America will pursue pragmatic strategies, not rigid dogmas, to ensure peace and prosperity for our people and, through strength, for the world.”

That’s basically “America First” translated into the language of a Brookings white paper.

Posted in America | Comments Off

‘More on the decline and fall of Steven Levitt’

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

If you optimize for truth, you are less likely to go downmarket chasing likes.

Optimizing for truth is good, but like all good things, it can be taken too far. Just as you can drink too much and engage in too much exercise, so too you can place such a high value on saying the truth, that you lose your job, your marriage, and your friends.

Don’t be dead right.

It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced so much popularity that it tempted to self-destruct. I guess the last time was during the heady days of 2018 blood sports.

I’ve often told myself that the reason I’ve not been more successful is that God knows it would intoxicate and destroy me.

Most things that are exciting are bad for me due to my addictive personality.

Columbia University statistics professor Andrew Gelman writes:

What happened? He had all the advantages, he was a deservedly-successful academic researcher, he coauthored a bestselling book . . . and it’s just done downhill from there.
I’m not talking about Levitt retiring from his academic post or deciding not to do research anymore. Doing research is a choice, and unless you’re involved in some urgent project—curing a disease or winning a war or righting some injustice or raising living standards or whatever—or some interesting project—baseball statistics or the theory of random walks or whatever—you shouldn’t do it. I say this in the same way that I say you shouldn’t write a novel unless you really feel you have something to say. Write a novel on a frivolous topic, that’s fine with me, but do it because you have something to say in that format, or just because you think it will be fun. There are enough novels out there. Write your novel or do your research because you have that sense of urgency or curiosity—or if you need to do it to pay the bills. Levitt doesn’t feel the urgency, and his bills are paid by other means, so that’s fine. For that matter, I don’t go around proving lots of theorems. I could spend my time doing that, but it’s not something I feel like doing.
Levitt’s worked hard and now he’s in the stage of his life where he’d like to relax a little more. Fair enough; I don’t work as hard as I used to either. And, in his judgment, he can make the largest contribution to the world as a public communicator rather than as a teacher, adviser, or academic researcher. Fair enough; here I am right now blogging rather than working on statistics research.
So, yeah, my problem with Levitt is not that he’s moved from being a researcher to being a communicator. Communication can be great. My problem is with the content of what he’s communicating, content such as junk climate science (“The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling” . . . ummmm, uhhhh, maybe not, dude!) and junk celebrity psychology (“And the data keep supporting your model” . . . ummm, no, actually!).
Regarding that latter example, I wrote that it frustrates me when bad science takes up the space that could be occupied by good science. And Steven Levitt . . . he’s got the training and experience to evaluate scientific claims! He could read the relevant papers, he could download and reanalyze what data are available, he could google search for the easily accessible replications and criticisms, etc. He doesn’t have to do that work, but, if he’s gonna ask, “How do you know whether to believe surprising results?”, then he should. Otherwise, why bother? What’s the point of one more puff piece? I just don’t get it. Levitt can play a useful role in the conversation here, and he chooses not to. Really frustrating.
Linguist Mark Liberman picked up on this story and answers my question as follows:
My [Liberman’s] hypothesis about why “Levitt can play a useful role in the conversation here, and he chooses not to” is a simple one.
Levitt isn’t in the business of evaluating scientific experiments, he’s in the business of mass-audience journalism. He wants clicks, and people will be interested, for good reason, in a Freakonomics episode that promises to tell them about how we can “improve our physical health by changing our mind”.
That makes sense. If your goal is to get clicks, whether through happy talk (as with Levitt) or scary talk (as with various purveyors of misinformation), credulity is a kind of superpower. As the saying goes, you can be much more persuasive if you first fool yourself. And as we know from economics (or “freakonomics”), incentives matter! If the goal is clicks, there’s an incentive to be credulous, and you should be able to find a way to get there.
OK, but that’s just sad.
Levitt was a University of Chicago professor, he has (by academic standards) nearly infinite resources, he could study whatever he wants, and he’s going for . . . clicks?
OK, sure, if you have a message you want to share with the world, then it makes sense to go for those clicks. I pour my heart and soul into these blog entries, and I indeed want as many readers as possible. But, the first step here is having a message you want to share with the world. If you have nothing to say, then the clicks aren’t getting you anything.
So, maybe Liberman’s hypothesis is correct. If so, it just makes me sad.
Also Levitt pushing climate change denial . . . that sort of thing can cause real damage; see here, for example.
It’s not too late for him to turn all this around, to confront his mistakes and learn from them. Realistically, I doubt this will to happen, for the same reasoning-from-experience that reputedly persuaded Laplace to assign a very high probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, but it’s possible! We can still hope.
P.S. I’m not saying I think Levitt’s a bad person, nor that I’m in the position to judge such a thing. He’s a free man and can do what he wants! His career trajectory just makes me sad. He’s talented and well-situated in both academia and the media, there are all sorts of interesting things he could be doing, or he could even take a well-earned break, but instead he invests his time and reputation in . . . promoting junk science? What a waste.

I suspect that the primary reason that people like Levitt and Niall Ferguson don’t optimize for truth is that they have more freedom to show off without it.

Compared to the exciting, truth is usually boring.

ChatGPT says: What you’re noticing with Levitt—and Kelly in her own media niche—is a familiar arc. Once someone has tasted mass popularity, the gravitational pull of the “attention economy” becomes hard to resist.

A few dynamics at play:

1. Incentives shift.
In academia or serious journalism, the reward system is rigor, accuracy, and respect from peers. In the mass-audience space, the reward system is clicks, subscribers, viral resonance. Once a person has a platform, the incentive isn’t “do good work,” it’s “feed the machine.” That means simplifying, exaggerating, and eventually drifting into credulity because that’s what audiences respond to fastest.

2. Down-market drift.
The mass audience is bigger than the intellectual niche, but it has different appetites. Instead of a careful paper on climate models or a nuanced legal analysis, the audience wants health hacks, conspiracy teases, and simplified morality plays. The more you deliver that, the more your numbers go up. It becomes a feedback loop.

3. Brand captivity.
Once you’ve built a brand on being provocative or “counterintuitive” (Levitt’s Freakonomics, Kelly’s anti-woke crusades), you’re trapped by it. If you start producing sober, careful, “boring” analysis, your audience leaves. To hold them, you escalate—climate contrarianism, pop psychology shortcuts, demon hexes.

4. Structural loneliness.
People who step out of their original disciplines often don’t have peers pushing back. Levitt’s no longer embedded in active research, so the normal academic correction mechanisms (peer review, conferences, colleagues saying “that’s weak”) don’t constrain him. Same with Kelly—outside of newsroom standards, there’s nobody saying “maybe don’t do a segment on hexes.”

5. Tragic waste.
As Gelman points out, Levitt could still do serious, interesting work—he’s got the training, the resources, the freedom. But attention incentives steer him elsewhere. That’s why it feels sad rather than scandalous: a wasted opportunity rather than outright corruption.

If you zoom out, this is the paradox of intellectual celebrity: the larger your platform grows, the less incentive you have to use it for serious intellectual work. And yet, the bigger your platform, the more valuable it would be if you did stick to serious work.

LF: Who are the notable intellects who got a taste of popularity but refused to let it corrupt them?

ChatGPT says: There are some. They tend to share a few traits: they keep one foot in their original discipline, they set hard boundaries on what they’ll talk about, and they’re willing to be boring or unpopular rather than chase clicks. A few examples that stand out:

1. Richard Feynman (physics)
He became a celebrity after the Challenger hearings and his popular lectures, but he never strayed into pseudoscience or easy grift. He’d joke, teach, and popularize, but he always anchored himself in the discipline of physics. He was fine being quirky and charismatic, but not at the cost of rigor.

2. Carl Sagan (astronomy, science communication)
Sagan was a genuine TV star with Cosmos, yet he never dumbed down science into mysticism. He packaged wonder in accessible terms, but his work was still deeply tethered to evidence and the scientific method.

3. Noam Chomsky (linguistics, politics)
He has had decades of fame, but his intellectual mode hasn’t changed—dense, uncompromising, often hard to follow. He’s never tried to chase mass popularity with hot takes; if anything, he seems indifferent to being “popular.”

4. Vaclav Smil (energy systems, history of technology)
Bill Gates made him popular, but Smil refuses to play the TED Talk game. He’s openly dismissive of hype, avoids the lecture circuit, and insists on writing books that are heavy with data and charts, not narratives designed to go viral.

5. Elinor Ostrom (economics, political science)
After winning the Nobel Prize, she got invitations to play the guru, but she kept publishing empirical, grounded work on commons governance instead of cashing in with bestsellers or contrarian TED-talk style pronouncements.

6. Marilynne Robinson (literature, theology)
She’s a Pulitzer-winning novelist who’s also done big public interviews with Obama and written essays with broad readership. But she stays true to her voice—dense, Calvinist, theological, not designed for clicks.

7. Freeman Dyson (physics, math)
Dyson was in the public eye for decades, and while some of his contrarian takes (especially on climate) were controversial, he was never audience captured. He stuck to his own curiosity rather than pandering.

The pattern:

Anchored in real work (they never fully abandoned their discipline).

Indifferent to popularity (fame was a side effect, not the goal).

Comfortable with difficulty (they didn’t dilute everything into “life hacks”).

By contrast, people like Levitt, Pinker, or Gladwell got locked into feeding the brand.

Posted in Intellectuals | Comments Off

Religion vs LOL Nothing Matters

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

I love my Orthodox Judaism and I love the work of David Pinsof (“Everything is Bullshit“). How do I reconcile my loves?

I feel that Torah helps me see through the shtus (nonsense).

ChatGPT says:

Orthodox Judaism and David Pinsof’s “Everything Is Bullshit” worldview look like opposites on the surface. One grounds you in covenant, tradition, law, and community; the other trains you to be relentlessly skeptical of human stories, motives, and institutions. But you can hold both if you’re clear about the levels on which each operates.

1. Different kinds of truth.
Pinsof is mainly exposing how people rationalize, posture, and self-deceive in order to win status games. That doesn’t mean every tradition or belief is worthless—it means you should interrogate why people say what they say. Judaism, meanwhile, isn’t just about abstract claims. It’s a lived system of law, ritual, and identity that persists precisely because it delivers coherence, solidarity, and meaning.

2. Ritual vs. rhetoric.
Orthodox Judaism thrives on action: you keep Shabbat, you keep kosher, you daven. Pinsof’s skepticism mostly cuts down justifications. If someone says “I keep kosher because it’s healthier,” Pinsof would call that bullshit. But if you say, “I keep kosher because it’s what my people do and it binds me to God and my community,” you’re being honest. His framework can actually sharpen your Judaism by stripping away weak cover stories.

3. Community and games.
Pinsof shows how humans constantly jockey for position in hidden games. Orthodox Judaism is transparent about its “game”: you bind yourself to mitzvot, you gain respect in the community, you get continuity with ancestors, and (for believers) you fulfill divine command. That doesn’t make it bullshit—it makes it one of the most durable, honest “games” humans have ever built.

4. Reconciling internally.

Use Pinsof’s skepticism to stay honest about your own motives—don’t confuse social rewards (status, respectability, belonging) with metaphysical truth.

Use Judaism’s framework to keep yourself grounded in a tradition that gives structure and meaning, instead of floating in total relativism.

Let them correct each other: Pinsof keeps you humble about self-deception; Judaism keeps you from sliding into nihilism.

In short: Pinsof helps you see through bullshit, including the bullshit explanations sometimes attached to religion. Judaism gives you a way to live meaningfully after the illusions are stripped away. Together, they can actually reinforce each other.

Here’s one way to sketch it out—think of it as a reframing that lets Pinsof’s skepticism and Orthodox Judaism coexist without tearing each other down:

Prayer (Tefillah)

Bullshit risk: “I pray because it magically changes external reality.” Pinsof would shred that if you secretly know you don’t believe prayer bends physics.

Reframe: “I pray because it disciplines my attention, bonds me with my community, and roots me in humility before God.” No bullshit—this is action shaping identity, not a fake explanation.

Torah Study

Bullshit risk: “Every single drash is an objective, historical truth.” Pinsof’s lens says: maybe some of this is post-hoc rationalization.

Reframe: “We read Torah to enter a multi-generational conversation. We search for meaning, wisdom, and connection to our ancestors. The process itself binds us together.” Again, no cover stories needed.

Mitzvot (Commandments)

Bullshit risk: “I keep kosher because it’s scientifically healthiest.” That’s classic cover story.

Reframe: “I keep kosher because God commanded it, and because it binds me to Jewish people across time and space.” That’s honest, and it survives Pinsof’s filter.

Community Life

Bullshit risk: Pretending we’re only motivated by selfless piety, when in reality we also seek status and belonging.

Reframe: Acknowledge both. “Yes, I want to be respected in my shul. And yes, I also want to serve God. Both are true.” Owning the motives makes it harder for bullshit to creep in.

Faith/Belief

Bullshit risk: “I’ve never doubted, and all my beliefs are rationally airtight.” That’s usually not true, and Pinsof would call it out.

Reframe: “I have doubts, but I commit to this covenant anyway. It gives meaning, continuity, and purpose.” That honesty is stronger than pretending certainty.

Big picture:
Pinsof strips away dishonest justifications. Judaism offers a covenantal life that doesn’t need dishonest justifications to be valuable. Together they make your observance more intellectually honest and emotionally durable.

Posted in David Pinsof, Orthodoxy | Comments Off

What Are The New Status Games We’re Playing?

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

ChatGPT says: 1. Health and Optimization

Biohacking, cold plunges, intermittent fasting, wearables like Whoop/Oura.

“Longevity” as a flex — not just fitness, but blood panels, peptides, and lifespan extension.

People compete over recovery scores and biomarkers the way they once did with watches or cars.

2. Knowledge and Curated Taste

Less about mass pop culture, more about showing you’re in the loop on niche newsletters, podcasts, Substack writers.

Reading the “right” longform or obscure book signals cultural capital more than quoting a Netflix show.

3. Tech Fluency Without Being Cringe

Not just knowing AI tools, but having a personal “stack” and workflow that makes you look competent but not like a LinkedIn hustler.

The flex is subtle adoption, not hype.

4. Location and Lifestyle

Where you live is a big signal — Austin, Lisbon, Mexico City, Miami.

But also micro-location: do you live in a walkable neighborhood, near the “cool” spots?

Posting photos from residencies, retreats, or pop-ups matters as much as vacations.

5. Social Proof via Screenshots

Posting screenshots of who DM’d you, who you’re collaborating with, or being in a certain group chat.

Clout by association, but disguised as casual transparency.

6. Attention Economy Resistance

Ironically, saying you’re offline is now a status signal.

“I don’t use social media much,” or “I only check Twitter once a week,” is its own flex — an inverted status game.

7. Parenting and Domestic Prestige

For millennials/older zoomers: Montessori schools, screen-free homes, “gentle parenting” — those are becoming flexes.

Even cookware brands (Our Place, Made In) have become cultural signals.

8. Ethical and Environmental Flexes

Demonstrating low-carbon habits, circular fashion, or owning nothing but “sustainable” brands.

Not just about saving the planet, but about showing taste and restraint.

1. Health & Optimization vs. Luxury Consumption

Old: Rolex, Louis Vuitton, driving a BMW.

New: Oura ring scores, morning sauna + cold plunge routine, posting your VO₂ max.

Shift: From external wealth signals to internal “discipline + science” signals.

2. Curated Taste vs. Mass Media

Old: Quoting The Sopranos, knowing Oscar winners, being up on Time or NYT.

New: Reading Substack newsletters, obscure philosophy podcasts, Signal group chats.

Shift: From mainstream literacy to insider niche literacy.

3. Tech Fluency vs. Corporate Prestige

Old: Harvard degree, BigLaw/McKinsey/Goldman job.

New: Knowing how to build your own GPT workflow, automating tasks, running a side hustle with AI.

Shift: From institutional gatekeeping to self-styled tech competence.

4. Location/Lifestyle vs. Real Estate/Zip Code

Old: Manhattan apartment, Beverly Hills zip, Hamptons house.

New: Remote-first nomad hubs (Lisbon, Bali, Austin), curated neighborhoods (Silver Lake > Beverly Hills).

Shift: From inherited prestige geographies to chosen “scene” geographies.

5. Screenshots & Social Proof vs. Rolodex

Old: “I’m friends with senators / CEOs” whispered at dinner parties.

New: Subtle screenshots of blue-check DMs, Slack channels, or who tagged you.

Shift: From private networks to visible receipts of relevance.

6. Offline Prestige vs. Always-On Flex

Old: Blackberry addiction, 100 unread emails as proof of importance.

New: “I left Twitter,” “I don’t check email on weekends,” minimalist phone setups.

Shift: From being needed 24/7 to being free 24/7.

7. Parenting/Domestic Prestige vs. Career Grind

Old: Working 80 hours a week at the firm was the flex.

New: Homemade sourdough, Montessori schooling, designer baby carriers, “slow living.”

Shift: From professional sacrifice to domestic curation as a source of honor.

8. Ethical/Sustainable vs. Wasteful Display

Old: Throwaway culture, the bigger the carbon footprint the better (cars, flights, yachts).

New: Owning nothing but Patagonia Worn Wear, buying second-hand, refusing fast fashion.

Shift: From conspicuous consumption to conspicuous restraint.

Top Tier: Winning the New Games

Tech-savvy cultural omnivores
People who know how to use AI tools, have curated reading lists, live in “cool” global hubs, and signal restraint instead of excess.
Think: 30-something indie founders, Substack essayists, “offline but DM-reachable” types.

Bio-optimization elites
The ones with data-driven routines, trainers, longevity clinics, and an aura of discipline. Their “flex” is a blood panel that looks younger than they are.

Taste curators
They don’t consume more, they consume better. Obscure media, niche podcasts, ethical brands. They can’t be caught watching the wrong Netflix show.

Middle Tier: Transitional Players

Corporate professionals trying to hybridize
BigLaw/McKinsey types who keep the old credentials but sprinkle in AI-fluency and wellness talk. They know the old still matters in some rooms, but they dabble in the new to not look dated.

Influencers with substance
They started with Instagram aesthetics, but now mix in book recs, travel to Lisbon, or longevity hacks. They’re evolving their flexes to stay relevant.

Wealthy legacy types
Old money that quietly adapts: less “yachts and Bentleys,” more “organic farms” and “low-key sustainable brands.” Still powerful, but they’re being forced to reframe.

Lower Tier: Stuck in the Old Games

Traditional corporate strivers
Still chasing corner offices, luxury goods, and brand-name diplomas as if those alone confer status. Increasingly invisible to younger cohorts.

Flashy consumers
Rolex flex, Lamborghini selfies, expensive bottle service — the 2008 Dubai look. Feels gauche and insecure in 2025, especially among elites who prize subtlety.

Always-online hustlers
People broadcasting their grind 24/7 (“rise and grind,” LinkedIn posting nonstop). Once admirable, now coded as desperate or cringe.

Meta-Game:

Right now, the highest status is:

Looking in control of your time and attention (not always reachable, not always online).

Projecting taste and discipline (whether in health, media, or lifestyle).

Having insider access that can’t be bought (the right group chat, the right pop-up dinner, the right Substack comment thread).

Zen and the Art of Social Climbing

Most people think of social climbing as frantic grasping: chasing invitations, name-dropping, clawing for proximity to power. It’s noisy, insecure, and obvious. The paradox of today is that the highest form of social climbing looks nothing like climbing at all. It looks like stillness.

The old game was vertical. You measured status by what you owned, where you worked, and who you could point to above you. The new game is lateral and subtle: it’s about who seeks you out, how lightly you hold your attention, how gracefully you glide through networks without appearing to need them. You don’t reach up — you sit still and let others orbit closer.

Zen teaches detachment, and detachment is the new flex. The more unbothered you seem, the higher you rise. Everyone is desperate for attention, so the person who doesn’t appear to need it radiates rare energy. In the attention economy, non-attention is a scarce resource. That scarcity is pure status.

But Zen social climbing isn’t passive. It’s curated effort hidden under apparent ease. The monk still rakes the gravel every morning until it looks natural. In practice, this means:

Mastery of inputs: Consume better culture, better food, better ideas — but without sermonizing. You leave breadcrumbs that others notice.

Control of time: You choose when to respond, and your silence speaks as loudly as your speech.

Signals of discipline: Health metrics, reading habits, calm energy. Not shown off, just embodied.

In this sense, the climb is inverted. Instead of straining upward, you cultivate gravity. You make yourself into the kind of person others want proximity to, because you seem free from the need to climb at all. The status accrues to the one who doesn’t chase it.

Zen and social climbing meet at the same paradox: the way to win is to stop trying so hard to win. The ladder becomes a circle; the highest rung is the one where you sit cross-legged, smiling, while others exhaust themselves scrambling up.

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What Are The Highest Status TV Shows Now?

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

ChatGPT says: Severance — critical darling, very high Rotten Tomatoes / Metacritic scores.

Adolescence — limited series, huge buzz, stylistic risk, and strong critical reception.

Alien: Earth — praised sci-fi pick of 2025.

Task — picked as a “Certified Fresh” new series, well regarded.

Only Murders in the Building — continues to be a prestige fixture.

The Lowdown — getting attention as a notable new show in 2025.

The Paper — new spinoff from The Office, making waves.

The Pitt — among the standout new dramas drawing praise.

People use TV tastes as a kind of shorthand for cultural status. It works the same way as books, music, or fashion—your choices signal class, taste, education, and social tribe. A few ways this plays out:

Prestige signaling: Saying you love Succession, Severance, or The Crown signals you’re plugged into “serious” culture, adjacent to critics and awards.

Cult/alt signaling: Loving Atlanta, Twin Peaks, or niche anime says you’re in a more discerning, creative, subcultural lane.

Mainstream signaling: Binging NCIS or The Bachelor doesn’t carry high status in elite circles, but it does in others (family, workplace water-cooler talk).

Platform signaling: HBO/Apple TV+ shows often carry more cachet than network TV or even some Netflix titles—it’s about exclusivity and cultural capital.

Class divide: Historically, status TV aligns with critics’ “quality TV” (HBO, AMC, FX) while “low status” gets attached to reality shows, daytime soaps, or procedural churn. But that boundary shifts (e.g., Breaking Bad went from niche to universally high-status).

So yes—what you say you watch is rarely just about entertainment. It’s also a soft form of class signaling and identity construction.

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The Right Came Together At Charlie Kirk’s Memorial Service

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

Months after their ugly split, Donald Trump and Elon Musk sat together at Charlie Kirk’s service last Sunday.

Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson talked for the first time in years.

High functioning people let go of feuds easily when it is to their advantage to do so.

Democratic consultant Dan Turrentine notes that a remarkable thing about Donald Trump’s movement is that it is stronger now than when it started ten years ago.

By contrast, the Alt Right split apart (Richard Spencer, Nick Fuentes, etc). Conservatives like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro achieved great success because they learned to get along while dissidents divided up in largely pointless feuds.

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Demons Are Interesting

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

That which is interesting is usually not true.

The religious right in America talks about demons because they are exciting and they imbue the mundane with transcendent significance. For example, instead of telling yourself that you are sleeping poorly because you have sleep apnea, rather, you conclude you were wrestling with demons.

I have a friend on the dissident right who’s constantly searching for interesting and exciting podcasts, but then laments that they are trashy.

A great phrase I learned from the Decoding the Gurus podcast is “optimizing for truth.” When you put some effort into optimizing for truth, even if your effort is way less than 100%, you reap significant benefits in clarity and wisdom and wise choices.

I’m right-wing but one of the best habits I’ve developed is seeking out the best of the left, because when I do, I recognize that smart lefties often have more clarity and wisdom than I do. Because they tend to hate the right, they feel more of an incentive to criticize the right than I do, and when they are right, they’re right, even though it is my oxe that is getting gored.

Scott Greer writes:

The religious element is evident in the increased references to God, Jesus, and especially demons. Fixation on demons is arguably the defining characteristic of the new Religious Right. The Jerry Falwell types realized that continual evocations of demons was probably not the best idea to sell their message to the public. They were worried it might make them look like loons. That concern is not shared by the current Religious Right. Pop music, late night TV shows, Hakeem Jeffries, liberal columnists, and even unhealthy breakfast foods can all be DEMONIC. It’s primarily a tool for partisan warfare, but many of those who see Belial everywhere think this actually explains events. Megyn Kelly, once the face of moderate girlboss Republicanism, now greatly fears hexes and demonic forces interfering with political affairs.
Demon posting is extremely popular within our sphere because it adds an exciting element to ordinary politics and literally demonizes the enemy. But it causes befuddlement among those outside it. Witness how the story of Tucker Carlson’s alleged assault by a demon was treated by those outside of the conservative consumer market. Ordinary people thought the podcaster had lost his marbles. Conservatives, however, thought it was a profound story.
The MAGA Religious Right, in a nutshell, is more eager to provide state funding to exorcists than to repeal gay marriage.

Megyn, like most of the successful talkers on the right, is following her audience down market.

The growing number of conversations about demons on the American religious right is part of the reveling in the porous identity (that we are not independent of the physical and spiritual world around us unlike the buffered identity of the Enlightenment).

ChatGPT says: It’s less about doctrine or catechism and more about affect, mood, and spectacle.

A few key dynamics stand out:

1. Demon talk as identity performance
Calling everything “demonic” collapses politics, culture, and spirituality into one category of cosmic struggle. It lets believers see themselves not just as partisans, but as embattled warriors in a literal spiritual war. That kind of language erases boundaries between self and world: your entertainment choices, your diet, your vote all become channels for supernatural forces. This porousness is exciting, because it makes everyday life feel mythic. It’s also destabilizing—because once everything is potentially demonic, nothing feels safe or settled.

2. From Moral Majority to “Mötley Crüe Christianity”
The old Religious Right was buttoned-up, wary of sounding crazy, and careful about presenting Christianity as respectable. Today’s version delights in the outrageous. Talking about demons openly is part of the style shift: it signals defiance against liberal norms, against mainstream ridicule, even against old evangelical caution. That flamboyance is exactly what Trump brought into politics. The theology is less consistent, but the vibe is clear: “We don’t care if you think this sounds nuts; it’s fun, it’s powerful, and it makes us feel alive.”

3. Demons as partisan shorthand
Labeling opponents or cultural trends as demonic functions as a weaponized meme. It compresses complex debates into stark good-versus-evil binaries. It also allows people to indulge in strong emotions—fear, rage, glee—without needing coherent policy positions. It’s not about advancing doctrine; it’s about keeping the tribe mobilized and energized.

4. The “post-religious right” loop
Ross Douthat feared Trump would lead to a paganized or post-Christian right. But what we’re seeing is a kind of hybrid: not secular, not orthodox, but a bricolage of megachurch theatrics, online Catholic aesthetics, and demon memes. It’s Christianity as a cultural weapon more than a spiritual discipline. That porousness means people can dip in and out—posting about hexes one day, swinging and drug use the next—without seeing contradiction.

5. Revival or cosplay?
The big question is whether this demon talk represents a genuine religious revival or more of a stylized, partisan religiosity. Right now, it looks more like cosplay than catechesis—less about saving souls, more about owning the libs. But it could still have real political and cultural force, because affect and spectacle often matter more than doctrine in shaping movements.

So yes: the new demon talk reflects a porous, performative identity. It turns politics into exorcism, memes into theology, and everyday grievances into supernatural battles. It’s not your father’s Religious Right—it’s Trumpist religiosity, loud and theatrical, built for an online age.

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The James Comey Indictment

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Luke Ford

Since 1968, 142 Republican presidential administration officials have been indicted vs three Democrats. Grok: “This disparity (142 vs. 3) has fueled claims of systemic bias, as rated “Half True” by PolitiFact—accurate on the raw numbers but potentially explained by more scandals in Republican eras rather than grand jury prejudice.”

What type of people have the time and the inclination to sit on grand juries? It would not surprise me if they were disproportionately left-wing activists.

So far the indictment against James Comey seems muddled and unimpressive. I agree with Mark Halperin that if this indictment is based more on Trump’s vendetta than on justice, that is a bad things for many reasons, including that it encourages those who work for Trump to engage in similarly petty behavior. I agree with Dan Turrentine that people in the political middle hate this sort of thing. They hated the lawfare against Trump and they hate Trump engaging in petty vendettas.

Giuliano da Empoli, author of the novel ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’, writes in the FT:

In the US, lawyers are rivalled only by politicians as the most hated professional group. Is it any wonder, then, that the lawyers’ party was overwhelmed? That a platform entirely conceived by lawyers, centred on the defence of democratic procedures and respect for minority rights, whose main argument consisted in the lawsuits against the Republican candidate, was swept away by the recriminations of Trump supporters: inflation, illegal immigration, class contempt?
Populist leaders and tech bros do not have the same vision of the future in mind…What they have in common, however, is both an enemy and a strategy: kill all the lawyers. Together, political predators and digital conquistadors have decided to wipe out the old elites and their rules. If they succeed in achieving this goal, it will not only be the parties of lawyers and technocrats that will be swept away, but also liberal democracy as we have known it until today.

ChatGPT comments: Da Empoli’s piece is provocative because it draws together two forces that are usually analyzed separately — populist politics and tech disruption — and argues they are converging against liberal democratic norms. A few key angles of analysis:

1. The “lawyers’ party” critique

He’s suggesting liberal democracy is identified with lawyers and technocrats — professionals of rules, procedures, and process. In the U.S. especially, Democrats have leaned heavily on lawfare against Trump (lawsuits, prosecutions, constitutional arguments). But for a public angry about inflation, immigration, and class contempt, that looks like form over substance. So when he says “the lawyers’ party was overwhelmed,” it’s a blunt recognition that appeals to legality don’t mobilize the electorate as powerfully as populist appeals to lived problems.

2. The Shakespearean “kill all the lawyers” thread

He’s borrowing the old line as shorthand for revolt against the rules-bound class that mediates power. Historically, lawyers were the interface between rulers and ruled. Today, liberal democrats and EU technocrats play the same role. To populists and tech moguls alike, they’re obstacles: they slow things down, constrain what’s possible, and speak in a language alien to ordinary people. That makes them a shared enemy, even if populists want state power and tech bros want market or platform power.

3. Populists and tech moguls as strange bedfellows

On the surface, they’re opposites: Trump or Milei conjure the past; Musk or Altman claim the future. But both thrive on transgression, disruption, and spectacle. Both disdain institutional limits and “experts.” Both depend on virality rather than slow deliberation. Both define themselves against the Davos class — the technocrats in suits, the cautious managers of order. Da Empoli is arguing this structural affinity explains why tech titans have begun openly allying with populists.

4. The offensive vs. defensive power imbalance

His analogy to military history is sharp: online, offense (disinformation, outrage campaigns, norm-breaking) is cheap, while defense (fact-checking, due process, procedural democracy) is costly and slow. This asymmetry destabilizes democracies — the same way the advent of the longbow or machine gun overturned old rules of warfare. Populists and tech moguls exploit this dynamic, while defenders of the liberal order are stuck with slower, weaker tools.

5. Regime change, not just politics

He pushes further than most commentators by framing this as “regime change.” Populists and tech bros aren’t just competing for office or market share; they’re undermining the legitimacy of liberal-democratic rules themselves — voting, minority rights, checks and balances. That’s why he warns that if they succeed, it’s not just Democrats or Eurocrats who lose, but liberal democracy itself.

6. Limits of his argument

He overstates unity: tech moguls don’t all lean right-populist (e.g. Altman publicly supports regulation; Bezos often tilts centrist).

The “lawyers’ party” framing risks caricature: many lawyers are central to both populist and anti-populist movements.

He leaves underdeveloped the fact that tech moguls and populists ultimately diverge on globalization, immigration, and markets. Their coalition may be tactical, not durable.

7. Why it resonates now

Western publics increasingly see rules as scams, not safeguards. In that environment, disruptive figures — whether populist politicians or tech visionaries — can frame liberal-democratic norms as elite tricks. Da Empoli is essentially warning that when the guardians of rules are despised, those rules may not survive.

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Suffering Is Good

Posted on September 27, 2025 by Luke Ford

David Pinsof writes: Your brain evolved to seek stuff in the world—like food and status and safety—that was correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments…

When you suffer, your brain does all sorts of useful things for you. It figures out what went wrong, adjusts your expectations, updates your beliefs, gives you an adrenaline jolt (if you’re under threat), lowers your energy (if you’re helpless), and recalibrates your motivations to the right level. Suffering is useful. It’s designed by evolution to help you deal with bad things, avoid making them worse, and prevent them from happening again in the future.

Once you recognize this fact, all the puzzles disappear. Why do teenagers get crushes on people out of their league? Because that’s how they learn what league they’re in. Why do little kids get so many boo-boos? Because every boo-boo is a learning opportunity for their clumsy little bodies. Why do we want to know when our partner is cheating on us, even if it makes us suffer? Because we’re not trying to avoid suffering; we’re trying to avoid being cheated on. Why do we watch horror movies, read bad news, give ourselves mild electric shocks, and have nightmares? So we can learn about dangerous stuff without putting ourselves in danger. Why do we say we “grow” from suffering? Because we do grow! It’s not bullshit.

But there’s another puzzle to solve. Why do we talk as if suffering is bad? It’s pretty weird when you think about it. Suffering is good for us—it helps us learn and grow—and yet we talk about it as if it were a mental substance of intrinsic hellishness. Why do we act like we hate suffering so much?

Because we’re bullshitting…

We want pity points. We’re like personal injury lawyers trying to milk the jury for sympathy. Personal injury lawyers don’t just want to recover lost wages for their clients; they want compensation for the “pain and suffering” caused by the injury. That means the “pain and suffering” have to be bad. Very bad. If they weren’t bad, they wouldn’t merit compensation. So all of us, including personal injury lawyers, pretend that suffering is the worst thing in the world, because it maximizes the “compensation” we get from the jury of our peers—i.e., more yummy pity points.

We want to hide our unflattering motives. Our motives are often pretty ugly. For example, we feel “friendship jealousy” when our friends like other people more than they like us. But when we suffer friendship jealousy, we cannot come out and say why we’re suffering. We cannot say “I feel like shit because you’re spending time with people who are not me, and I want you all to myself, because I’m a clingy, selfish person”. Instead, we say “I’m feeling hurt”. When asked what’s wrong, we bullshit about the awfulness of what we’re feeling, as if the problem was a bad thing inside our heads, instead of our friend having a social life.

We want to show we care. Imagine something terrible happened to you. Say, you lost your job. You tell your friend about it and try to get sympathy. Your friend says, “Meh, big deal. I read a blog post about how suffering is actually good for you and you’re just bullshitting about how bad it is.” I’m guessing you would not think very highly of your friend. The point of a true friend is to help you through hard times. That means your friend has to see that you’re having a hard time and feel a powerful urge to help you. They have to take your suffering seriously. So friends engage in the social ritual of credulously believing each other’s sob stories, including their bullshit about the terrible suffering inside their heads, to show they care—that they’re good friends…

We need to rethink our relationship with suffering. We demonize it and fail to appreciate its benefits. We try so hard to protect our kids from suffering that we prevent them from learning and growing. We pretend our suffering is the worst thing in the world, because sympathy has become a form of status, our tears a social currency. We’ve forgotten the virtues of resilience, stoicism, and fortitude. These character traits have been virtues across cultures for a reason: they’re good. It’s good to be strong. It’s bad to be needy, to be a complainer, to be constantly fiddling away on one’s sadness-violin. Yes, being compassionate is good. But it’s also good to avoid being a burden on others—itself a form of compassion.

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