2024 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Cover

One of the things I spend far too much time pondering is the old “nature vs. nurture” question. Why wander about such well-trod ground? If you read my stuff, you can easily translate this to “genetics vs. memetics” and then start pulling apart the dark matter that is the latter, and has also been wholly neglected. We’ve left half the conceptual space blank when we want to understand information flows in society. Mores the pity.

But “nature vs. nurture” is really only the time invariant version of the question. The bigger question which is (to my knowledge) almost NEVER asked is “nurture => nature?” And importantly, how long? We have some evidence with epigenetics that trauma can modify neural codes, through the influence of cortisol and other stress hormones. But it’s still largely an undiscovered country out there.

My muse in pondering this question is my borzoi, Boo Boo. Boo Boo (formal name Thorondor, King of the Eagles from the Tolkien Legendarium) is a giant hunting sighthound. That’s Boo Boo below.

A pleasant day in the park with Boo Boo

Borzoi are notoriously difficult to train. They were bred to hunt in packs in front of horses, with the dominant prey being wolves, deer and Russian hares (they’re big.) Upon catching a wolf, they pin him to the ground and wait for the horses to catch up. And though they are a training challenge (I’ve actually trained Boo Boo) they are also quite polite and well-mannered on their own. Most are excellent and loving with children, puppies and other small dogs. But Boo Boo, if he encounters a dog that tries to dominate or attack him, well, that’s another story. He’s a wolfhound, and he’ll jump over it (he has to be provoked) grab it by the trachea and slam it to the ground. Needless to say, I was pretty surprised the first time this happened. Boo Boo had previously taken to running away at 35 mph, which then had me running for my car to chase him. You cannot chase an unwilling borzoi on foot.

What’s interesting about Boo Boo’s hardware/software combo is that the breed is approximately 600 years old — a cross between a greyhound and some guarding shepherd breed. Boo Boo has been with us from his puppyhood, and while I knew I was buying a giant hunting sighthound, and unlike many folks, had no illusions that he would hunt, it has been amazing watching his prey selection. I originally feared he would come into our quiet neighborhood, for example, and clean out the cats. But that has not happened. Boo Boo has only marginal interest in cats. But he catches squirrels regularly, and when his historic prey — deer — show up in the cul-de-sac, it’s all the control he can muster not to jump out of the window.

And when wolf hybrids show up in the dog park, Boo Boo immediately goes into a stalk. I clip him right up, of course. But it’s pretty wild. I have trained Boo Boo in the field for a strong retrieve, and he will come running from almost a mile away. And he will sit and lay down. But that’s about it. I never trained him to hunt wolves. Yet when one simulacra shows up, it’s game on. And so there is the question: how long did it take to go from nurture to nature?

Boo Boo and Ghillie on a long recall

It was with great interest that I tuned in last week to my X pal, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of public health at Stanford, for his podcast on obesity and root causes. He hosted one of his colleagues, Dr. Joseph Fraiman, who had done some elaborate data mining on the root causes of obesity. You can listen here. His controversial conclusion? That most obese women died during pregnancy and childbirth until the advent of modern obstetric practice, which basically in the process, allowed the explosion of genes that are part and parcel of the obesity crisis. My own take is that these things are multifactorial, and I’ve written a ton on this in the past. Listening to the podcast, I started out really skeptical, but I became convinced by the end that there was a “there” there. In only four generations, we’ve watched this flip from nurture to nature. Wild.

What is particularly interesting about this to me, though, is now we are being bombarded with photo after photo of obese women being promoted as sexy and healthy. I can understand this, and have some level of conscious sympathy. There are so many more obese people now than even 20 years ago. Obese people need love and touch, like we all do. And so on. The argument has been made over and over, and need not be made more here.

But the conscious mind is not what controls both emergence and convergence in the Matrix. What is also coincident to the obesity crisis is our current crisis of fatherlessness, as well as overproduction of elites. These two subjects are covered in detail — the first by Rob K. Henderson in his book Troubled, and the second by Peter Turchin in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. There are many takeaways from both books, and I highly recommend both of them. Troubled is Henderson’s personal story of how he traversed the foster care system, attended Yale, and ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge in England. One of his main points, after seeing the world from both sides of the tracks, is that elites speak in code that is often duplicitous and two-faced — they brandish luxury beliefs that convey social status to the person spouting such beliefs, but in reality they would never practice themselves. The canonical example he uses is “defund the police.” It’s easy if you’re rich and live in a gated community to tell other people you don’t need police. But if you’re poor and you don’t have adequate policing, you’re likely to be victimized by criminals.

Turchin’s book is a bit more complicated, with many points about large scale societal trends. But his main point is that when societies have too many elites, they move into crisis . And these elites wage some version of war on each other, as well as the general population until the herd is culled. What I’ve been pondering is this: What does this likely memetic war look like, and how is it prosecuted?

Henderson gives some excellent examples on how elites wage war on each other. He observed, during his time at Yale, students would be out protesting international investment banking one day, while clamoring to sign up for interviews at Goldman Sachs the next. He posited that maybe they were consciously or unconsciously attempting to limit the size of the pool before interviews, because they all wanted the high paying jobs at Goldman Sachs to stay in the financial elite. So they used these luxury beliefs against each other in order to cull the herd. Since this information and behavior that flows from that information, it is obvious that at least, on the surface, this is classic psychopathic memetic warfare.

But there might be more to it. The question that this behavior led me to is, with regarding obesity, that the conscious interpretation — care and promotion of obesity as a positive lifestyle choice — is a great example of a luxury belief. No elite man wants to marry an obese wife, and the elites have better diets, more access to information about lifestyle choices to counteract the larger societal forces heaping destructive diets on the poor. Stated choice — that obese women are sexy — vs. elected choice — marry a skinny wife — couldn’t be more stark.

But after listening to Dr. Fraiman, maybe it’s more sinister than that. If the obesity epidemic is buried in our genes, as he maintains, maybe in the larger subconscious overmind, elites are promoting obesity as normal to get rid of the competition. It may be that only four generations of genetic transfer were all that is needed to sow this root cause delivered by modern obstetric care into the general population. But genetic recognition of sexual fitness is not so easily rooted out. We know hot when we see it. And what we’re really seeing with this shaming campaign against people that would select for genetic fitness is an attempt to overwhelm our natural senses, once again, with a displaced memetic notion of fitness (fat women are hot) because in the elite mind, those that bought that particular t-shirt would then self-eliminate. The genetic overmind is not so easily persuaded that fat women won’t die during childbirth, though, because that’s what has been coded over a million years. That’s a lot shorter than the 600 years needed to teach a dog to hunt wolves.

But it’s back in the meme-sphere to rewrite this code for this turning of elite overproduction. And being attached to fundamental needs and drives, like the need for sex and touch, is actually diabolical. It’s in the same category in the memetic ungrounding that the transgender and trans humanist movements are based on. Do what we say, dammit. Or else we’re going to do unto you. And it ain’t gonna be pretty. Just like the kids at Yale playing each other as fools for the jobs at Goldman Sachs, we have a much broader campaign to eliminate the competition.

Still more thinking to do, of course. But this is a start. And the conclusion is macabre — if we can just get the unwashed to eliminate themselves, that would save a lot of trouble.

A good piece that might need a little updating, but is still useful, on my views on diet, is at this link.

Morning on the River of No Return, Salmon River, ID

For those unfamiliar with me, I’m a graduate of multiple elite universities (Case Institute of Technology, Duke University) who elected to be a professor at a land grant institution (Washington State University – main campus in Pullman) for my career. I’ve also done sabbatical overseas, and lectured around the world, on every continent save Antarctica. I’m still open for invites there, FWIW.

To put it succinctly, I’ve kinda seen it all. But the academy that I joined out of high school, in 1979, has changed very dramatically in the past 45 years. Many of the causes of the Left (being anti-war, for example) have now been embraced by those same Lefties. Suffice it to say I’m stunned that the Left is now the pro-War party.

Along the way I’ve developed a theory I call Structural Memetics, which explains how information flows are created in content and complexity through the different topologies of social networks, as well as the psychosocial development of their agents. That’s a mouthful. And while I’d argue that it’s all not that hard, others tell me differently.

So it’s with great excitement that I find someone who gives examples in a way that precisely line up with my work, but in a way that is more accessible. That’s why I recently wrote a piece on Rob Henderson’s book, Troubled, and in particular his concept of luxury beliefs. What is a luxury belief? It’s a belief that elites have, and champion, that they don’t follow, but use to virtue signal to each other that they are elite. These beliefs often hurt the poor, whom the elites profess they want to save. A great example is “Defund the police.”

Rob is primarily working on the individual level in examples in his book. Which is fine — but the overall concept of luxury beliefs can also apply to institutional strategies, or entire societal edifices. Academia (which Rob discusses in the context of individuals and classes) falls into the same pattern. One can look at contemporary Wokism and its destructive fascination with infinite fractal categorization as a great example of aggregated luxury beliefs (intersectionality, etc. — everything but people forming their own opinions of others) as a primary cancer on both the individual and institutional psychosocial development process. No one has embraced this nearly as much as the entire academic enterprise. The universities that have pushed back against this can be literally counted on one hand.

People going to elite schools, for the most part, do not have to worry about their material circumstance, and usually have their employment futures secured. They are elite, and have been granted a lifetime of elite coding and signaling that they also share with high level employers. When they interview, they know how to shine. One more etiquette dinner will neither make nor break their lifetime trajectory. I taught at Duke as a professor for my last year before I moved to WSU. I remember a conversation I had with one very nice, and competent young man. I asked him what he was going to do after finishing school, and if he was worried about finding a job. “My father is on the board of a Fortune 100 company,” he replied. Even though this was 37 or so years ago, it simply wasn’t on the top of his mind. Woke had not yet been borne into existence, but the one thing I did notice with all my rich students (at the time, Enzo Ferrari’s granddaughter went to school there, and you can guess what she drove — it wasn’t a Volkswagen) was they were intellectually curious and most were also hardworking. They did not take well to drill — they were truly better than the average bear — and greatly appreciated creative educational planning and exercises. Telling them they were not going to get a job if they didn’t listen to me was obviously going to fall on deaf ears.

This is not true at all with my current crop of land grant students. In part because of the diligence of myself and the faculty in my college, our numbers of First Generation students + Underrepresented Minorities (some confounded benchmark) now is 34% of our engineering class. I’m proud of this number — it took some serious perseverance, and largely happened before Woke, or the current fascination with DEI even became a thing.

Yet they are being bombarded, through the copying and mimesis process that our larger institution follows with regards to beliefs in elite schools, with the same luxury beliefs that the virtue-signaling elite schools ostensibly embody. There are many examples of this — I can recall a recent trip to our student rec center where all the signal boards were largely dominated by announcements for the LBGTQIA+ community, including reading sessions for “queering the literature” (whatever that means.) Kids come to land grant institutions to learn stuff to get a leg up in the job market. It’s our professed purpose. Those other elite schools can do what they want — but the anchor departments of land grant institutions are Mechanical Arts and the Ag College. It’s not a value judgement against the other stuff. It’s just our fundamental charter. How is “queering the literature” going to help them make a buck? Or even provide any social meaning that isn’t inherently relationally disruptive that might give employers pause?

One of the most destructive parts I’ve seen transmitted to our land grant institutions, that we can ill afford, is the corrosive belief that hierarchy doesn’t matter. Elites, and children of elites, are smart enough to dodge this nonsense, while giving lip service to it. But poor students simply have no reference for it. And we, as faculty, at some level are supposed to cater to it. It all looks warm and fuzzy on the surface — shouldn’t we treat students fairly and equitably? But as I tell my students — once you get past basic human rights, you are not my equal. It’s a toxic message that you’re getting, that you’d best ignore. Any professor that tells students “I’ll learn more from you than you’ll learn from me,” is one best ignored, or better, transferred out of their class. Students are literally PAYING me money because I’m supposed to know more, and I’m supposed to teach them.

What these beliefs really do is set up the university as a low responsibility environment, and not very different from a dysfunctional family where narcissistic inversion — the children taking care of the parents — is never far from the surface. And worse, when the student hits the job market — especially the ones from dysfunctional families — they have no functional codes for finding a mentor that can actually help them learn. No one learns everything they need to know in college. Especially in engineering, you learn how to be an engineer the first three years on the job. But one can also see that elites, through luxury beliefs, are sabotaging the non-elites, who might actually believe that garbage. Already behind because of family dynamics, they fall further behind in identifying functional adults to help them, as well as the protocols for interaction.

I recently had a situation where I had two former students who came to me because they were underemployed. Both these students would be in a DEI-protected status group. Both would NEVER be considered a DEI hire – they were in the top quartile of students I’ve taught, or better. They were a male and female, and both, I thought, would have been placed in a prestigious company after graduation. Yet both had ended up getting scooped up by our employment vacuum scourge in mechanical engineering — mechanical contractors associated with the building trades, looking for hires to train as air conditioning inspectors — instead of getting hired by Meta, Blue Origin, or one of the myriad high profile and high prestige companies that support my clinic program.

My analysis will not be popular, but I think two things were likely in play. These students’ records supported getting an initial interview — they very likely got by the AI screening. But they were not armed with the right behavioral codes to “close the deal.” My personal intervention and recommendation would likely help, of course, in the future. But a lot of my students get jobs, often at these prestige companies, with no help from me at all. At some level, in the abbreviated interview process that hiring occurs (especially for new hires) they committed some sin of omission — no moment where the hiring manager sitting across from them profoundly thought “I want this person on my team!” And so they were edged out of another opportunity.

And the whole DEI enterprise is also profoundly harmful for their prospects. Even though there are incentive systems in place to hire underrepresented minorities, the reality many managers face is that if they do hire someone, and that person doesn’t work out, it will be almost impossible to fire them without some level of social stigmatization. What that translates into is that lowering the bar through DEI actually RAISES the bar both racially and in a class sense. Elites from underrepresented minorities, who already can deliver messages in the social codes of the day, can indeed quickly get hired. But those without that same coding — which is primarily a class consideration — are inherently sidelined, and underemployed.

Are these simply the times we live in? I actually think Peter Turchin, in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, is spot on with his analysis that societal tumult dramatically increases when elites overproduce themselves. He notes in the book that polygamous societies undergo these changes at about twice the rate of monogamous societies (I can’t remember the interval, and just listened to the book) and it seems to jibe. Further, because there are not enough interstices for elites to plug into, as well as enough material wealth to distinguish themselves with, they start producing software instead of hardware. These beliefs, dependent on the competitive pressure, become more and more fractal, situational, and imposed from the outside as time goes on — a perfect explanation of wokism.

One of the unanswered questions I had when listening to Turchin’s book was how elites “cull the herd,” so there are not so many elites around. Elite overproduction has to end with some level of competitive elimination. Absent war and direct human extermination, what we’re witnessing with elite/land grant competition instead is high level memetic psychopathic gaslighting, with the emergent goal being that same process of elimination. Henderson writes in his book, Troubled, about how students at Yale would protest investment banking one day, while the next lining up to interview for the elite, high paying jobs at institutions like Goldman Sachs the next. Classic “stated vs. elected preference” bullshit. And since institutions can assume the same memetic character, they function in the same role of mimesis/mirroring of these institutions that profoundly handicap them from moving up precisely when the elite institutions are weakest. Instead of recognizing the lack of grounding and overt falsehoods regarding success the elites are propagating, and overt gaslighting happening on an institutional level, they end up as Tail End Charlies, taking the flak, and getting picked off as the formation passes overhead.

Henderson brings this up as well — the professed elite belief in “luck” as a driver in success. I myself have a very financially successful son, who is one of the blockchain pioneers. As one of the youngest founders of a Unicorn — a start-up hitting a $1B valuation, even I will tell people that luck was involved.

And it was. But my son also had the extreme advantage of me as his father, who drove constant problem-solving throughout his life. And he was exposed to the latest trends in tech through me. He learned self-education early on in his career, and basically taught himself the entire field of cryptography (which he has lectured at Stanford on in a graduate class.) And he worked hard as well. Luck indeed.

There is more to all of this, of course. But I’m going to ask readers to comment on this piece along the lines of “what statement do you hear from a given young person that immediately seals the deal for hiring them?” What is being omitted that you DON’T hear, that then causes you to down-sort a given individual?

Brothers (and a cute dog)– in the Valley

I’ve recently completed a book that I think should be on the reading list of basically everyone in the United States, who is involved in understanding and wanting to change the current milieu. The title is Troubled, by Rob K. Henderson, and it’s the life story/memoir of a young man raised largely as poor in the foster care system, who at the current point of his life is finishing (or has recently finished) his Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge in the U.K.

The book is a first person memoir that covers the time period from his birth to the present. Born to a drug addicted mother, whom he spent the first three years of his life with, he traverse the foster/adopted parent landscape, with his eventual enlistment in the US Air Force, followed by a degree at Yale, and then his current Ph.D. posting. What is amazing about this book is that it is largely representative of those of us coming from profoundly dysfunctional families, with the family structure shifting and dissolving almost on a regular 9 month interval. Rob bounced through some nine different foster placements, IIRC, after being taken from his mother at the age of 3, for being tied up by his mother and screaming while she entertained various men in their apartment.

The beauty of the book is its low level dysthymic tone and structure. Not everything is bad all the time, and that gives a far more accurate view of poverty in the United States than others. I recently attempted to get through, for example, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent novel, Demon Copperhead, but could not, because it turned into a classic Misery Olympics tome. For the record, I’m a pretty big Kingsolver fan — she grew up across the Ohio River from my own hometown of Portsmouth, OH, and I’ve always appreciated her descriptions of my own childhood environs. But Henderson does a much better job of capturing the grinding sadness of loss of faith in stability of adults in kids’ lives, as well as the actual violence that people in poorer communities across the US experience. The short version is simple — it may be more stimulating, and glamorous if the violence is upped a couple of clicks. But then you usually don’t survive it. You get killed, or you kill someone and end up in jail. Henderson’s journey is one of the actual lower classes, and not nearly so dramatic. And that is the reason to read it.

Though I never experienced the chronic extent of what Henderson endured, I’m fond of joking that on the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scale of “bad things happening to you in the course of your life”, I’m a heptathlete on the scale of 1-10. I experienced the fighting, the dealing with chronic adult problems and the like. But like Henderson, I never had to deal with sexual abuse, which in my opinion is likely statistically the thing that really makes young people go off the rails. Though it’s no way to raise a child, there’s also no question that chronic abuse lends to those lucky enough to inherit a robust neural system the ability to discern insights into the human condition that you simply can’t get from a happy, two-parent home.

And that’s what makes this book so important. It’s an actual window into that world, with the author stating right up front (I think in the preface) that the usual nostrums of education as a ladder out of dysfunction are vastly overrated. Stable attachment is actually key, and as someone that shares his own diagnosis of chronic dysthymia (low level depression and cynicism) I can attest that this is correct. You end up outside the stable family ice cream shop, perpetually looking in while you spend a lifetime processing your wounds, often incorrectly, while others are enjoying their lives.

I also deeply share Rob’s view that he also states in the book when people tell him “well, you turned out alright.” Either the implication is “it couldn’t have been that bad” or “this must be an OK way to raise kids.” Lordy. I’ve found from my own experience the only people holding that opinion are either the divinely clueless, or pathological narcissists.

There are a couple of points which I conjecture likely saved Rob from utter destruction. I think he does a great job in the book of explaining how life in the military helped him navigate his early adulthood while not going to jail. He also seemed to avoid lots of hard drugs, and that had to help. But oddly enough, One of the factors I conjecture that he likely survived because he did get to spend the first three years of his life with his drug-addicted mother. I’m not attempting to minimize the trauma associated with being an infant and having some level of abuse directed at him. But while it likely has given him unstable attachment patterns, he likely at least has some. Kids mostly form up their young brains in the first two years, and having a constant caregiver, no matter how poor, is key. Rob’s own story shows that it’s far more likely to get passed through a series of foster placements than to end up adopted. That’s what happened to him.

And early attachment matters. I’ve fought for this at the university for years — providing day care for children and mothers so that young infants don’t experience a revolving door of violation from caregivers leaving every couple of months. If we really wanted to prioritize something that might make a difference in the next generation, it would be this.

Itinerant father figures do pop into Rob’s life on a more unscheduled basis, and Rob’s writing once again supports my thesis that common wisdom delivered from elders is important, and relatively uncommon. One thing Rob does a great job of describing is how many successful life habits, mostly involved with longer-term consequential thinking, simply did not occur to him at various points in his life. They seem obvious (and are likely mimetic, not memetic) but they absolutely are not to an increasing number of young people. I find in my classroom (I’m teaching senior undergraduate engineers here — people who by any measure of success have almost made it) that the notion of holding yourself accountable to excellent work is a foreign concept. I beat into their heads that they are the best, and that is not a snowflake brag — it is a brand promise to pay attention to the world around them to excel. These are the folks that are designing the next generation of planes, rockets and trucks. You better hope they’re the best.

Rob also singlehandedly demolishes the current ‘Woke’ movement in one of his final chapters with what I believe a term he’s coined — “Luxury beliefs.” He does a great job of explaining elite coding at a more accessible level than I do. Elites often subscribe to beliefs to prove their virtue to each other that they themselves never follow. This is a classic “stated preference/elected preference” gaslighting technique that manipulators use. One of the examples he gives is “Defund the police.” He correctly notes that this affects poor communities far more than rich communities, but if you want to move up in current elite liberal circles, you have to rep it. These destructive beliefs virally propagate because they are fundamentally ungrounded, and sound nice on the surface, but are deeply problematic.

And as Rob also notes in a measured tone, with each of his examples, there may be opportunities for continued progress in better and more humane solutions. But the impacts of any policy will be felt more harshly on the poor than the rich, who often end up with disastrous, collapsing cascades of personal crisis. One of the statistics I cite a lot in arguments is the fact that 25% of African-American kids are likely to experience an eviction before reaching the age of majority. And then that leads to other disasters. Not everyone survives these disasters, especially if they have a fractured family, full of immature actors. And they either melt into the justice system, or they die.

So read this book. It’s the best text I’ve listened to in a while, and Rob himself narrates it. The one thing that I did find memetically interesting is that Rob ended up in elite circles himself — he is at Cambridge, after all. I’d encourage him to dig outside the thinking that dominates in those circles, and use his experience well, with a critical eye. If you read this, Rob, do know that those people’s thought patterns are largely broken. They really don’t understand psychopathy/Cluster B well, and many of them are afflicted, as well as being afflicters. Check out my work, of course, but also dig into my metamodern pals, like Hanzi Freinacht (Daniel Goetz and Emil Ejner Friis.) They also tend not to like Bowlby and other family systems therapists either. They’re just not systems thinkers, and the problem is, of course, that people are trapped in systems that are poorly understood, but deliver execrable outcomes for the lives of far too many.

And Rob – thank you for your heroism. One of the chief problems with even getting people like Rob to write down their narrative in a meaningful fashion is that many of the people who are the perpetrators are still alive. And needless to say, they don’t like being written about. Curiously enough, since Rob’s tale is one of chronic abandonment, it’s likely that he’s relatively safe from the legal hassles normally engendered when writing about one’s dysfunctional past openly and honestly. And while I absolutely do not condone child abuse, nor adult abuse for that matter, the ancient Greeks knew that this was the path where heroes were born. Hercules didn’t have twelve labors for nothing.

For those interested in a somewhat sanitized and incomplete version of my own story, here you go.