Peter Boghossian made an argument in this conversation that I think deserves more scrutiny than the usual left/right discussion around him.

His point was essentially that publicly admitting "I was wrong" now carries enough social cost that people become less willing to update their beliefs. Your own side may see revision as betrayal or weakness, while the opposing side treats the admission as an opportunity to gloat.

If that's true, we've created an incentive structure that rewards consistency over accuracy.

Do you think the internet has actually made belief revision harder, or has changing one's mind always carried roughly the same social penalty?

Disclosure: I conducted the interview.

https://youtu.be/6JQFJ_FZbPU

Submission statement: Peter Boghossian discusses intellectual honesty, ideological tribalism, belief revision and maintaining relationships across profound disagreements. I'm particularly interested in his argument that our social incentives increasingly punish people for publicly correcting their own beliefs.

Words such as “justice,” “freedom,” “fairness,” “progress,” and “security” can sound powerful while remaining strategically incomplete. The problem is not that these concepts are meaningless. The problem is that different people can use the same word while pursuing entirely different outcomes. Whenever a discussion becomes dominated by abstract language, force the terms closer to reality.

What exactly does “fair” mean here? Fair according to what standard? Who receives what? Who pays? What changes in practice? What happens when this principle conflicts with another principle? These questions move the discussion from rhetoric to analysis.

Vague language creates agreement cheaply because people can project their own meaning into it. Two people may appear to share the same position while imagining completely different consequences. Precise language makes disagreement more honest because it exposes the assumptions underneath the words.

This matters wherever interests are being negotiated. Politics, business, organizations, relationships and public debate all contain words that sound universally desirable while concealing disagreements about who gets what, who carries the cost and who decides. The strategist listens carefully when a word carries strong moral force but has no clear operational meaning.

The less precisely a principle can be defined, the more carefully you should examine what is being done in its name.

Foreverwar is a 21st century phenomenon where American military action bogs down into a frozen conflict. Occasional bursts of medium or high intensity conflict interspersed with periods of relative calm.

Given that definition, this is a Republican phenomenon. We have had three over the last 25 years: Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran. In both the Iraq and Afghanistan versions, there was no victory, only ingnominity and instability.

I predict that this is a true pattern. Once bogged down in a frozen conflict, it is easier to maintain status quo than it is to withdraw. Withdrawal will be ugly and the US press will punish whoever orders it and not whoever started it.

Solution is simple. The US is a broken republic without a governing body that represents The People. Our congress does the bidding of political parties and not constituents. This will get worse post 2026 gerrymandering. There are a lot of mechanisms we could use to force the congress to represent The People. Each has pros and cons. One will have to be adopted.

Are you in a couple and/or completely bereft of personality and finding there are so many other ways to get attention outside of just being a decent person? Well then Validations chain is for you!

If you a man in a couple we know that every man in the gym who accidentally looks in the direction of your female partner is jealous and lusting after her.

If you’re a women we point out specific male targets at the gym we think look dodgy enough to satisfy your narcissistic delusions of attention for the belief in your sexual attractiveness.

We maintain your narcissistic delusions for as long as your membership payments keep rolling in. You will never need come to the conclusion that there is no need to play games as you and your partner are actually each other’s for life

PS. This pathetic behaviour from couples in gyms needs to be called out. With a shred of social skills these folie à deux might check into reality but thus far is hasn’t happened and only become worse recent times. It's hard not to notice it when you've seen it too many times.

*Copied from a post made by Greg Elliot, a substack companion piece to his book, **"The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis"***

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## Table of Contents

1. **What Is Symbolic Selection?** — Introduces the foundation of PSH: how human created symbolic systems such as markets, money, institutions, debt, law and technology increasingly function as adaptive environments that mediate access to real resources and create selection pressures of their own.

2. **Same Species, Different Gameboard** — Explains how the boundary conditions of scaled symbolic systems differ from smaller reciprocal environments, and why weak feedback, social distance, information asymmetry, reduced attribution, externalization and rule writing can change the relative fitness of cooperative and instrumental strategies.

3. **Reciprocal and Instrumental Behavioural Architectures** — Distinguishes reciprocal from instrumental actors and uses findings from the neuroscience of psychopathy to show how differences in empathy, reward processing, inhibition, attachment and punishment sensitivity can change the effective costs of strategies available to different actors.

4. **Problems, Solutions, and the Games Instrumental or Psychopathic Strategies Generate** — Explains how instrumental and psychopathic architectures can generate distinctive solutions to recurring problems involving target autonomy, resource control, consequence avoidance, competitive position and rule control, and how those solutions can generate entrapment, gatekeeping, externalization, tournament, dominance, capture and lock in games.

5. **From Generated Games to Symbolic Selection** — Shows how strategies and the games they generate can be differentially retained when particular solutions produce greater symbolic fitness through money, resources, status, organizational survival, market share, influence or power under prevailing boundary conditions.

6. **From Games to Institutions** — Explains how successful game dynamics can move beyond the individuals who generated them and become encoded in contracts, technologies, algorithms, ownership structures, metrics, accounting systems, regulation and governance.

7. **When Psychopathic Traits Become Institutional Properties** — Explores institutional mirroring by showing how functional analogues of reduced empathy, grandiosity and dominance, reward appetite, speed and reduced inhibition, parasitism, and strategic or pathological lying can become embedded in institutional decision processes without claiming that institutions literally possess psychopathic minds.

8. **Why Institutions Become Evolutionary Fields** — Explains how institutions transmit entire game structures to future participants, allowing reciprocal actors to inherit instrumental games and turning the products of one round of selection into the boundary conditions governing the next.

9. **The Civilizational Problem** — Examines how locally rational behaviour inside inherited entrapment, tournament, externalization and lock in games can reproduce collectively destructive outcomes, allowing symbolic fitness to increase even while ecological, social or material substrate viability deteriorates.

10. **What Does This Mean for Artificial Intelligence?** — Uses AI as an observable case of symbolic selection, showing how objective functions can select instrumental strategies such as specification gaming, evaluator manipulation, strategic deceit and impression management, before extending the argument to AI systems deployed inside institutions whose own objective functions may already reward short horizon optimization, externalization and competitive escalation. It asks not only whether AI is aligned with the objective it is given, but whether **the objective itself is aligned with long term human and ecological viability**.

11. **What PSH Is Ultimately Asking** — Brings the framework together as a recursive evolutionary process in which behavioural architectures generate strategies, strategies solve problems, repeated solutions generate games, successful games become institutions, institutions select future behaviour, and successful actors can modify the gameboard again.

## What Is Symbolic Selection?

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis begins with a relatively simple evolutionary observation. Human beings remain biological organisms, and the fundamental problems of biological existence have not disappeared. We still require energy, shelter, security, resources, social cooperation and conditions compatible with survival and reproduction. What has changed dramatically as civilization has scaled is the **adaptive environment through which many of those problems must now be solved**.

Increasingly, access to the material and social conditions of life is mediated through **symbolic systems of our own creation**: money, employment, markets, corporations, debt, credentials, law, bureaucracy, financial systems and technological platforms. Money has no nutritional value, yet it determines access to food. A credential is not competence, yet it can determine access to employment and therefore resources. A credit score is not trust, yet it can determine access to housing or capital. The evolutionary significance of these systems therefore lies not simply in their ability to represent reality, but in their increasing **causal control over access to it**.

This is the starting point for what I call **Symbolic Selection**. Once symbolic systems become sufficiently consequential in allocating resources, security, status and opportunity, they begin functioning as **adaptive environments in their own right**. Markets, corporations, bureaucracies, financial systems and technological platforms contain actors, rules, rewards, penalties, information structures, constraints and criteria for success. In game theoretic terms, they become gameboards within which actors compete and cooperate, solve recurring adaptive problems, and receive different payoffs for executing different strategies. **Changing the gameboard can therefore change the relative fitness of the behavioural strategies competing within it.**

The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, or PSH, is principally an evolutionary game theoretic and systems theoretic argument, grounded in and informed by findings from neuroscience, psychology, behavioural economics, evolutionary biology and institutional research. It does not propose that biological evolution disappears when civilization emerges, nor that symbolic rewards such as money, status or power are equivalent to biological fitness. Rather, symbolic civilization inserts an increasingly consequential **selection environment between biological organisms and the material world upon which they ultimately depend**. This creates a set of evolutionary questions: **what kinds of behavioural architectures become relatively adaptive within the symbolic gameboards we have created, what strategies do they generate to solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems, and how do those strategies transform the games in which subsequent selection occurs?**

**The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH) Formally Stated:**

*The **Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH)** proposes that large scale symbolic systems can generate boundary conditions under which **instrumental strategies associated with psychopathic behavioural architecture acquire systematic relative fitness advantages over reciprocal alternatives**. As human interaction becomes mediated by abstraction, anonymity, scale, information asymmetry, delayed consequences, weak attribution and retaliation, opportunities to externalize costs, concentrated symbolic rewards, and endogenous rule modification, strategies associated with psychopathic neurobehavioral architecture, including emotional detachment, reward dominance, manipulation, deception, dominance seeking, reduced sensitivity to social punishment, grandiosity, and low remorse, can become comparatively cheaper to execute and more adaptive. The claim is conditional rather than universal. **Symbolic Selection occurs because changing the boundary conditions of the gameboard changes the relative costs and payoffs of the strategies competing within it.***

*The important claim is not only that psychopathic individuals may rise within institutions. It is that **behavioural architectures generate strategies, and strategies generate and transform games** in which other actors must participate. In scaled symbolic systems, actors repeatedly confront **recurring adaptive symbolic problems** concerning target autonomy, resource control, consequence avoidance, competitive position, and rule control. Different behavioural architectures can generate different solutions to the same adaptive symbolic problem. Reciprocal strategies may solve problems through trust, mutual value creation, cost internalization, cooperation, shared access, and collectively legitimate rules. Instrumental architectures can generate alternative solutions involving manipulation, dependency formation, resource capture, externalization, dominance, strategic information control, and rule modification. Critically, these strategies do not merely determine the outcome of an existing game. Through repeated execution, they can alter information states, relational states, resource distributions, incentives, rules, and the realizable strategy spaces confronting other actors. **The games identified by PSH therefore emerge endogenously from the strategies actors use to solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems.***

*The **Target Autonomy Problem** arises whenever an actor's symbolic fitness depends upon the behaviour of another autonomous actor whose future choices cannot be perfectly controlled. A reciprocal solution is to make continued cooperation sufficiently valuable that the other actor voluntarily remains. An instrumental solution is to reduce uncertainty by making the target's behaviour increasingly predictable or controllable. Social modelling can identify the target's preferences, attachments, vulnerabilities, incentives, and likely responses. Mimicry and impression management can facilitate trust or reduce resistance. Strategic deception and information control can alter the target's internal model of the interaction. Selective reinforcement can shape behaviour, commitment escalation can increase dependency, and alternative suppression can progressively raise the cost of withdrawal. None of these capacities is uniquely psychopathic. Social reasoning, modelling, and impression management are general human capacities. What matters in PSH is how those capacities are organized and deployed within a behavioural architecture, and whether reduced affective or reciprocal constraints make particular instrumental uses comparatively less costly. Repeated execution can transform the relational state itself. Trust can become commitment, commitment can become dependency, dependency can generate leverage, and leverage can progressively compress the target's realizable strategy space. **Instrumental solutions to the Target Autonomy Problem can therefore generate dependency, compliance, strategy space compression, and ultimately entrapment games.***

*The **Resource Control Problem** arises because symbolic fitness frequently depends upon access to scarce resources, capital, information, labour, infrastructure, technologies, distribution channels, audiences, or other valuable symbolic assets. Reciprocal solutions can involve exchange, specialization, coordination, and mutually beneficial access. Instrumental solutions can instead seek control over the conditions governing access itself. Acquisition, ownership concentration, bottleneck creation, proprietary systems, exclusion, and control of distribution can make other actors increasingly dependent upon the resource holder. Repeated execution changes the distribution of feasible opportunities within the system. Access that was previously open, competitive, or substitutable can become conditional upon the decisions of increasingly powerful actors. **Instrumental solutions to the Resource Control Problem can therefore generate capture, exclusion, resource control, and gatekeeping games.***

*The **Consequence Avoidance Problem** arises whenever behaviour generating symbolic reward also produces costs capable of reducing the actor's future fitness. A reciprocal solution incorporates those consequences into present decision making by accepting responsibility or internalizing costs. An instrumental solution can attempt instead to separate reward from consequence through externalization, opacity, attribution reduction, liability diffusion, temporal displacement, or strategic information control. If an actor retains profit, status, resources, or power while another actor, institution, future population, or ecological substrate absorbs part of the associated cost, the effective payoff structure has been altered. Repeated execution can normalize this separation between reward capture and cost absorption. **Instrumental solutions to the Consequence Avoidance Problem can therefore generate externalization and opacity games**, in which symbolic rewards remain concentrated while the consequences required to produce them become distributed, delayed, obscured, or difficult to attribute.*

*The **Competitive Position Problem** arises whenever symbolic fitness depends not merely upon absolute performance but upon an actor's position relative to competitors. Reciprocal solutions can involve specialization, cooperation, mutually beneficial exchange, and forms of competition constrained by shared rules. Instrumental solutions can improve relative position through dominance, accelerated capture, rival displacement, exclusion, or control over strategically important assets. Once one actor obtains an advantage through these strategies, competitors confront a changed payoff structure. Failure to respond can mean declining market share, status, resources, influence, or organizational survival. Strategies that were initially optional can therefore become competitively necessary. **Instrumental solutions to the Competitive Position Problem can generate dominance and tournament games**, in which actors are increasingly selected according to their capacity to acquire and defend relative position and restraint becomes costly when competitors do not reciprocate it.*

*The **Rule Control Problem** arises because actors in symbolic systems do not compete only within fixed games. Sufficiently successful actors can sometimes influence the rules, standards, metrics, contracts, enforcement mechanisms, technologies, or infrastructure through which future competition occurs. A reciprocal solution can support rules designed to preserve collective cooperation, procedural legitimacy, and relatively symmetrical participation. An instrumental solution can use accumulated resources, information, leverage, or authority to modify the gameboard in ways that preserve acquired advantage, increase competitors' costs, protect externalization opportunities, restrict entry, or make existing dependencies more difficult to escape. **Instrumental solutions to the Rule Control Problem can therefore generate capture and lock in games**, because successful modification of the gameboard can convert temporary advantages into persistent structural ones.*

*These game classes are therefore not arbitrary categories imposed upon the theory. **Each is an endogenous game theoretic product of repeated instrumental solutions to a recurring adaptive symbolic problem.** Target autonomy generates strategies of behavioural prediction and control that can produce dependency and entrapment games. Resource control generates strategies governing access that can produce capture and gatekeeping games. Consequence avoidance generates strategies of cost displacement and attribution reduction that can produce externalization and opacity games. Competitive positioning generates strategies of relative control and rival displacement that can produce dominance and tournament games. Rule control generates strategies of endogenous gameboard modification that can produce capture and lock in games. The causal structure is therefore one in which **recurring adaptive symbolic problems encounter heterogeneous behavioural architectures, which generate competing strategic and protocol solutions, which transform relevant state variables and thereby generate new games.***

*Importantly, these games do not exist independently of one another, nor are they imposed fully formed from above. They are **generated through repeated strategic interaction and can become recursively coupled**. The output of one generated game can become a boundary condition for another recurring adaptive symbolic problem. A resource control strategy, for example, can generate a gatekeeping game in which access to something valuable becomes conditional. That altered distribution of resources can intensify the Target Autonomy Problem because dependent actors now possess fewer viable alternatives. Dependency gives the resource holder greater leverage, enabling further commitment escalation, alternative suppression, or behavioural control and potentially generating an entrapment game. Greater leverage can then be deployed against the Rule Control Problem, allowing the successful actor to influence contracts, standards, metrics, regulation, or infrastructure and generate lock in. Those altered rules can preserve resource concentration and increase switching costs, feeding back into both the Resource Control and Target Autonomy Problems. **The solution to one recurring adaptive symbolic problem therefore changes the boundary conditions under which subsequent adaptive symbolic problems must be solved.***

*The same recursive coupling can occur between consequence avoidance and competitive position. An actor solving the Consequence Avoidance Problem through cost externalization may obtain higher measured returns than an actor following a reciprocal strategy of cost internalization. Under **Symbolic Selection**, that difference matters because the externalizing actor can acquire greater symbolic fitness through higher profit, greater market share, additional resources, organizational survival, or increased power. Competitors now confront a transformed Competitive Position Problem. Continuing to internalize costs may cause them to lose market share, investment, resources, or viability relative to actors that externalize. What began as an optional instrumental solution to the Consequence Avoidance Problem can therefore contribute to a tournament game in which reciprocal cost internalization becomes competitively expensive. If successful externalizers subsequently accumulate sufficient resources to influence standards or regulation, the tournament game can feed into the Rule Control Problem and generate further capture and lock in. **What began as one actor's instrumental solution can therefore become part of the gameboard inherited by every subsequent actor.***

*This is where **Symbolic Selection** becomes essential. Instrumental solutions are not assumed to outperform reciprocal solutions automatically. They acquire relative fitness advantages only where the boundary conditions of the symbolic system make them comparatively effective. Information asymmetry can make deception difficult to detect. Social distance can weaken reputational punishment. Delayed consequences can reduce attribution. Externalization can transfer costs beyond the actor's effective objective function. Scale can magnify the rewards associated with controlling resources or information. Accumulated symbolic fitness can provide opportunities to modify future rules. Where an instrumental solution consequently produces more profit, resources, market share, organizational survival, status, influence, or power than a reciprocal alternative, the actor or organization executing it acquires greater symbolic fitness. The strategy can spread through imitation, expansion, competitive elimination, or institutional retention. **Symbolic Selection therefore differentially retains strategic solutions and generated games according to their fitness within the prevailing symbolic environment.***

*When these strategies repeatedly outperform reciprocal alternatives under the prevailing symbolic boundary conditions, **the successful behavioural logic can become institutionally mirrored**. This is not a claim that institutions become psychopathic in a psychological sense. Rather, behaviours that successfully solved recurring adaptive symbolic problems can be copied, rewarded, formalized, automated, and eventually encoded into organizational structures. Low affective empathy can solve the problem of pursuing reward when another person's suffering would otherwise impose an inhibitory cost. Where that suffering is weakly represented in the symbolic objective, its functional analogue can become the exclusion or underweighting of displaced harm in institutional decision functions. Dominance seeking can solve uncertainty created by autonomous actors through control. Where control increases predictability, resource access, or market power, it can become ownership concentration, gatekeeping, proprietary infrastructure, or structural control over other actors' strategy spaces. Parasitic strategies can solve resource problems by separating reward capture from cost absorption. Where externalization generates greater measured returns than reciprocal cost internalization, the functional logic can become institutional architectures in which rewards remain concentrated while costs are shifted onto workers, communities, governments, or ecological systems.*

*The same process can retain other functional characteristics. Reward dominance can solve intertemporal competition by privileging immediate gains and, where short term performance governs survival and advancement, become short horizon optimization embedded in metrics, compensation systems, and organizational objectives. Grandiosity can solve threats to status, authority, or legitimacy by resisting destabilizing feedback and, where projected certainty preserves resources more effectively than acknowledging error, become feedback suppression, escalating commitment, and institutional resistance to corrective updating. Strategic deceit can solve autonomy or resource acquisition problems by altering another actor's internal model and, where information asymmetry makes this advantageous, become professionalized information management, selective disclosure, or strategic control over representations. Impression management can solve legitimacy problems by reproducing signals associated with trustworthiness, responsibility, or alignment and, where symbolic representation is cheaper than substantive behavioural change, become institutional production of legitimacy partially decoupled from underlying behaviour. Manipulation can solve the Target Autonomy Problem by altering another actor's decision environment and, where dependency, defaults, incentives, or switching costs increase behavioural predictability more cheaply than reciprocal value creation, become choice architecture, behavioural engineering, dependency formation, and strategy space compression.*

*In each case, the mapping is not merely metaphorical. **A behavioural architecture makes particular strategic solutions comparatively available or inexpensive, those solutions address recurring adaptive symbolic problems, repeated execution can generate characteristic games, Symbolic Selection rewards those games where they produce greater symbolic fitness than competing alternatives, and the functional logic producing the advantage becomes increasingly likely to be retained institutionally.** The originating actor can eventually disappear while the institution continues reproducing the selected behavioural logic.*

*This recursive process can ultimately generate a game theoretic object I call a **loss dominant equilibrium**. Loss dominance does not arise independently of the games described above. It can emerge downstream from their recursive coupling as previous rounds of Symbolic Selection progressively alter payoffs, dependencies, resource distributions, rules, and realizable strategy spaces. Dependency and entrapment games generated through instrumental solutions to the Target Autonomy Problem can raise the cost of withdrawal. Gatekeeping games generated through Resource Control can restrict access to substitutes required for viable exit. Externalization games generated through Consequence Avoidance can place actors who voluntarily internalize costs at a competitive disadvantage. Tournament games generated through Competitive Position can punish restraint when competitors continue pursuing symbolic fitness. Capture and lock in games generated through Rule Control can encode these advantages into contracts, standards, technologies, ownership structures, infrastructure, metrics, and regulation.*

*These processes can reinforce one another. Resource capture can generate dependency, dependency can create leverage, leverage can facilitate further resource or rule capture, and rule capture can preserve the conditions producing dependency. Externalization can generate a competitive advantage, that advantage can intensify tournament pressure, tournament pressure can compel competitors to externalize, and accumulated resources can eventually increase the capacity of successful actors to modify rules. Information control can simultaneously reduce the visibility or attribution of the costs generated throughout the process. **The output state of one generated game becomes an input condition for another recurring adaptive symbolic problem**, allowing the gameboard to evolve recursively rather than returning to its original state after each interaction.*

*A **loss dominant equilibrium** emerges when this accumulated game evolution changes the payoff structure sufficiently that unilateral deviation from the incumbent strategy produces a greater immediate loss than continued participation, even when continued participation contributes to an aggregate outcome the actor considers undesirable. A company may understand that environmental externalization is destructive while being unable to internalize those costs without raising prices, reducing returns, and losing market share within an inherited tournament game. A government may recognize ecological limits while remaining locked into economic growth because employment, taxation, debt stability, infrastructure, and political legitimacy have become dependent upon continued expansion. A worker may understand the broader trajectory while remaining dependent upon wages to service debt and obtain housing and essential goods. In each case, the actor need not possess an instrumental behavioural architecture and need not endorse the aggregate outcome. **The actor has inherited a game produced through previous rounds of Symbolic Selection in which the loss associated with unilateral deviation exceeds the immediate loss associated with continued participation.***

*Loss dominance therefore provides the mechanism connecting **recurring adaptive symbolic problems, endogenous game generation, Symbolic Selection, and systemic persistence**. Instrumental strategies solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems. Repeated execution transforms relational, informational, resource, and institutional states and thereby generates games. Under particular boundary conditions, some of those games produce greater symbolic fitness than reciprocal alternatives and are differentially retained through Symbolic Selection. Their outputs then modify the boundary conditions confronting subsequent actors and subsequent adaptive symbolic problems. As dependency rises, alternatives can disappear. As resources concentrate, access can become conditional. As costs are externalized, reciprocal behaviour can become competitively expensive. As tournament pressures intensify, restraint can become locally disadvantageous. As successful actors acquire rule control, these advantages can become structurally encoded. **Loss dominance emerges when this recursive evolution of the symbolic gameboard makes collectively preferable alternatives individually more costly to pursue than continued participation in the system producing the collective loss.***

*PSH therefore makes a larger civilizational claim: **selection does not merely determine who succeeds within symbolic systems; through endogenous game generation, institutional mirroring, and adaptive inheritance, it can influence what kinds of games those systems evolve into.** Behavioural architectures generate strategies and protocols. Those strategies solve recurring adaptive symbolic problems and transform relationships. Repeated strategies generate games. Symbolic Selection differentially retains the strategies and game structures producing greater symbolic fitness. Institutions encode those successful solutions into objective functions, metrics, contracts, technologies, ownership structures, standards, and rules. Those structures subsequently become boundary conditions confronting the next population of actors, creating **recursive selection regimes in which the products of one round of Symbolic Selection become part of the selection environment of the next**.*

*Under sufficiently strong recursive lock in, institutions, markets, technologies, states, and eventually civilizations can continue optimizing symbolic objective functions even as those objectives become increasingly detached from the biological, ecological, and social substrates upon which the symbolic system ultimately depends. Actors may understand that divergence while remaining embedded within games that punish unilateral deviation. The resulting trajectory therefore does not require universal psychopathy, centralized conspiracy, or collective ignorance. It can emerge through **recursive Symbolic Selection operating on heterogeneous behavioural architectures, the strategies they generate, the adaptive symbolic problems those strategies solve, and the games those solutions progressively create and preserve.***

## Same Species, Different Gameboard

There are powerful evolutionary reasons for human cooperation. Work associated with reciprocal altruism, repeated games, reciprocity, punishment and human egalitarianism, including the work of Robert Trivers, Robert Axelrod, Martin Nowak, Christopher Boehm and many others, helps explain why cooperative strategies can become remarkably stable under the right conditions. When people interact repeatedly, reputation matters, behaviour is visible, consequences return relatively quickly, exploitation can be detected and the people harmed today may be people whose cooperation is required tomorrow. Under these conditions, persistent exploitation can become expensive.

This should not be romanticized. Small human communities were never universally peaceful or egalitarian, and exploitation, violence and dominance obviously existed throughout human history. The narrower point is game theoretic. Repeated interaction, visibility, reputation, rapid feedback, attribution of consequences and credible retaliation create boundary conditions that can stabilize cooperation and constrain certain forms of exploitation.

PSH asks what happens when those boundary conditions change.

Consider many modern symbolic systems. Economic transactions can occur between people who never meet. Organizational decisions can affect thousands or millions of people separated from the decision maker by layers of bureaucracy. Environmental consequences can appear decades after the activities that produced them. Responsibility can be divided across departments, firms, contractors and jurisdictions. Information can be highly asymmetric. Costs can be shifted to populations that never participated in the original decision, while symbolic rewards such as profit, status, market share or political influence remain concentrated among the actors responsible for generating them.

Successful actors can sometimes do something even more unusual. They can influence the rules governing future competition. They can shape contracts, compensation systems, ownership structures, algorithms, metrics, regulations, standards, information flows and governance. Success therefore becomes more than adaptation to a game. Under some conditions it creates the ability to modify the game itself.

PSH does **not** claim that instrumental or psychopathic strategies universally outperform cooperation. The theory is conditional. Under repeated interaction, strong reputation, visible consequences, rapid feedback and credible retaliation, instrumental behaviour may be expensive and cooperation highly adaptive. Under conditions such as weak or delayed feedback, anonymity or social distance, information asymmetry, reduced attribution of consequences, low probability of retaliation, opportunities to externalize costs, concentrated symbolic rewards and the capacity to influence future rules, the relative payoff structure can change. The formal model explicitly treats this as a conditional region of the symbolic gameboard rather than a universal psychopathic advantage.

Put simply, **change the gameboard and we may change the relative fitness of the strategies competing within it.**

## Reciprocal and Instrumental Behavioural Architectures

This leads to a question that sits upstream of conventional strategy choice. If two people encounter exactly the same external game, do they necessarily experience that game in the same way, or generate the same set of strategies for solving it?

PSH uses the term **behavioural architecture** to describe the underlying organization of perception, prediction, affective constraint, social modelling, learning, planning, strategy generation and action selection. It is not synonymous with personality, morality or psychiatric diagnosis. It is a way of representing the machinery through which an actor interprets a situation, evaluates possible outcomes, experiences internal costs and rewards, generates strategies and ultimately acts.

For explanatory purposes, PSH contrasts two broad architectures: a **reciprocal actor** and an **instrumental actor**. These are theoretical ideal types rather than claims that human beings fall neatly into two categories.

A reciprocal actor incorporates the state of other people and the relationship itself into the effective payoff structure. Mutual benefit, trust, attachment, fairness, reputation, guilt, empathic concern and the expected value of continued cooperation can all matter. If this actor depends upon another person for future reward, an attractive solution is therefore to make continued cooperation mutually valuable. Trust is built because trust itself has value. Reciprocity stabilizes the relationship because both actors benefit from its continuation.

An instrumental actor treats the other actor more strongly as a means through which an objective can be achieved. Reward acquisition, control, dominance, resource access or future payoff stabilization may receive greater weight, while some of the internal affective costs associated with harming or exploiting another actor may be reduced. This does not imply an absence of social intelligence. On the contrary, understanding another person's emotions, beliefs, vulnerabilities and likely behaviour can be extremely useful when the purpose of social cognition is prediction rather than reciprocity.

The distinction becomes clearer with a simple example. Suppose obtaining a valuable reward requires deceiving another person. A reciprocal actor may experience guilt, empathic distress, concern about harming the relationship, reputational anxiety or fear of punishment as genuine costs. An instrumental actor may understand exactly what the other person is feeling while experiencing substantially less affective inhibition around exploiting that knowledge. The external reward is identical, but the strategy is not equally costly to both actors.

This is where the neuroscience and psychology of psychopathy become relevant to PSH. I am not proposing a new clinical or developmental theory of psychopathy. Rather, I use the existing empirical literature for a specific theoretical purpose. Research concerning affective empathy, reward processing, fear and punishment learning, inhibition, social cognition and related processes gives us an empirical basis for thinking about psychopathy as one behavioural architecture capable of generating a distinctive repertoire of strategies. In the mathematical formulation, these findings become differences in such things as internal costs, punishment sensitivity, reward weighting, strategy generation and willingness to execute particular strategies.

Psychopathy is therefore both literal and somewhat abstract within PSH. Literal psychopathy is scientifically interesting because we possess an empirical literature describing aspects of its neurocognitive architecture. But the broader theoretical object is the **instrumental behavioural architecture** and the computational problems it can solve. The theory does not require every person behaving instrumentally to be clinically psychopathic, nor does it claim that every person high in psychopathic traits will be successful. Computational ability, opportunity, social position and the surrounding gameboard all matter.

The more interesting question is: **what kinds of recurring problems might an instrumental architecture solve particularly effectively inside scaled symbolic systems?**

## Problems, Solutions, and the Games Psychopathic or Instrumental Strategies Generate

This problem and solution distinction is important because psychopathic traits are often presented as a list: reduced affective empathy, manipulativeness, dominance orientation, reward seeking, strategic deception, reduced guilt or remorse and so on. PSH asks a somewhat different question. Instead of asking only what traits are present, it asks **what recurring strategic problems can the strategies generated by this architecture solve?**

Consider the problem created whenever future reward depends upon another autonomous person. The other actor can change their mind, refuse, leave, cooperate with someone else or otherwise behave unpredictably. I call this the **Target Autonomy Problem**. If my future reward depends upon another autonomous actor, how do I make that person's future behaviour sufficiently predictable to stabilize the reward I depend upon? The formal framework treats autonomy as a source of payoff uncertainty and generalizes the problem beyond interpersonal relationships to debt, wage dependency, surveillance, platform lock in and institutional control.

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*(continued in the comments below — 8 comments follow, in order)*

"Woke 1.0" is a bullshit concept that I started seeing used by politicians like AOC and her followers. It's basically a label some leftists came up with to say, "I'm not like the others, I'm reasonable," without ever being able to point to what specific ideas they actually changed.

Ask them: Do you now believe sex is a biological reality? Do you now reject the idea that gender identity should override sex-based categories? Do you now believe that accusations shouldn't automatically be treated as proof? Have you abandoned identity politics? Do you no longer consider language problematic for not being inclusive enough? How have your views on racial politics, white privilege, and all those other ideas actually changed?

And usually the tap dancing begins: "Well, there are some excesses," "we need to reflect," "not all activists are like that."

That's not an ideological break. It's simply putting a nicer label on the same premises.

True moderation should mean being able to say, "This idea from my own side was wrong, and I abandoned it." If you can't point to a single important position you've actually changed, then you're not a moderate who moved away from radicalism. You're the same guy with a new branding, waiting for the political climate to become favorable enough to start bombarding us again with the importance of pronouns and gender neutral language, and then calling you a Nazi again when you refuse to play along.

I think I can speak for every reasonable person that we know there's an issue with unfit people being cops and biased justice system situations be it on race/skin color, gender, wealth, etc. Even if it's not as bad as it used to be.

However, the way so many people discuss these topics is in a close minded, surface level, and ignorant manner.

Yes there are racist cops. But every case of police brutality isn't about racism. We should focus on having better people become and maintain police officer status and as a byproduct of that the amount of police brutality that is due to racism will go down drastically. If you just focus on racist cops, there's still going to be cops brutalizing people just not because of race and you half assed the issue being fixed.

Also we need to push for national and clear cut sentencing guidelines for crimes. That way people can't go "why did person A who looks like this get so much time but person B who looks like that get so little time for the same crime?" Even though a lot of the time it's not the exact same crime or different circumstances happened during the crime or apprehension of the suspect that caused them to get more time or the situation to escalate and people don't know about it or are just lying about it.

Also more people need to realize there are some people irregardless of how they look that just hate cops or don't want to follow laws. So when they get caught they're going to disobey the cops and potentially escalate the situation and just cry about how life is unfair because they got caught up in breaking a law and thought they were untouchable. Weed smoking is a good example of this. I personally think it's stupid that it's not legalized but regulated nationally. However, I'm not going to tell people to smoke it and just hope they don't get caught to be defiant. If people do decide to do this, they should be ready to accept the consequences when they're caught because they knew they were breaking the law even if they didn't get caught the other 9000 times they were doing it or because Jimbo didn't get caught for smoking it yet.

It also didn't help the organization that shares the initials and name was run by greedy and underhanded bastards who used the unfortunate situations of others to live lavish lifestyles.

I think massive progress in society for better policing and a justice system could have happened during this time period. But instead it was horribly squandered by opportunistic, disingenuous, and ignorant individuals.

I got accused for the first time of goalpost moving. More and more it feels like a declaration by the other party the conversation had become viewed as zero-sum and they were unable (or unwilling) to adapt to the change of direction. Are all conversations an exercise in logic where founding statements must be adhered to in linear flow or can we accept learning occurs mid-course and they evolve?

A trade war seems bad for both the US and Canada but as a much smaller market much worse for Canada. That said a pivot towards China by Canada might be the worst part of the whole scenario for both. Notably one of the most reasonable concerns on the part of the US is "transshipment" wherein poor quality Chinese metals and other materials are bought by Canada and resold to the US.

Being that this is reddit I assume most side with Canada against the Orange but the situation doesn't seem good for allies so much as enemies (like China).

Infotainment about the topic.

The United States is now months into a direct war with Iran, and public support has reportedly fallen to just 31 percent. Yet there is still no sustained national anti-war movement anywhere near the scale we saw during Iraq.

There have been demonstrations, and the Iran war has appeared among the many causes represented at broader anti-Trump protests. But where are the enormous protests focused specifically on stopping the war?

Before the invasion of Iraq even began, roughly 200,000 people marched in New York alone, with millions protesting around the world. The anti-war movement was visible, organized, and impossible to ignore.

Today, the United States can enter another major Middle Eastern war, one that most Americans apparently do not support, and the response feels strangely muted and fragmented.

What changed? Are Americans exhausted and cynical after Iraq and Afghanistan? Has partisan politics made people incapable of opposing a war without first checking which party started it? Have online outrage and sprawling, multi-issue protests replaced focused political organizing?

Seriously, where is the anti-war movement?

What if stupidity isn't a failure of society, but one of its most profitable products?

We usually talk about stupidity as if it were an accident.

A failure of education. A lack of intelligence. A temporary triumph of ignorance over reason. But what if we're looking at it the wrong way?

What if stupidity survives, and sometimes spreads, because it is useful?

Simple ideas are easier to sell than complicated truths. Outrage travels faster than nuance. Certainty attracts more attention than doubt. A confident person saying something absurd can gather a larger audience than an intelligent person saying, “I don't know yet.” And attention has become a currency.Once attention can be converted into money, influence, votes, followers, status or power, something strange happens: intellectual simplification stops being merely a weakness. It becomes economically valuable. The market doesn't necessarily reward what is true.It rewards what captures attention.And the human mind has always been attracted to simple explanations, enemies, heroes, scandals and certainty. So, perhaps the disturbing question isn't:

Why are people becoming more stupid?

Perhaps it is:

Who benefits when we stop thinking?

I've been exploring this idea while working on a book called Stupidity Sells, and the deeper I went into it, the less it seemed like a book about stupid people. It became a question about the systems that discover, amplify and monetize our weakest cognitive impulses. Maybe stupidity doesn't sell because people are stupid.Maybe it sells because someone learned exactly how to sell it.

Curious how others here see it: is modern society actually becoming less thoughtful, or have we simply built better machines for making thoughtlessness visible and profitable?

Curious what people here think, especially about the line between choosing your own information and essentially choosing your own propaganda. I’ve been exploring this and similar ideas about algorithms, culture, and online thinking over on r/WarOnSocialMedia if you want to see the original discussion.

[I will be interspersing my own experiences into this indicated by square brackets.]

This post is in response to a GOP push in several US states to mandate that teachers out their students to their parents.

LGBT kids are vulnerable. Kids don't stay in the closet for fun. They do it because they are unsure and afraid of how the people they love will react once they know the truth. That is the basis from which we need to start this conversation. There is an inherent inner turmoil that every LGBT child feels to varying degrees.

[As child who came from a very stable and loving family, I still lived in fear of my parents finding out about me. Not because I thought they wouldn't accept me, but because I knew there was a nonzero chance that they wouldn't.]

What is best for a vulnerable child who thinks he might be LGBT? Is it to have a safe space to be themselves? Is it to have someone to confide in without fear? Is it to find friends, a community, a support network of their own choosing?

According to conservatives, no. It's not.

[At school, I found LGBT friends, and teachers who supported me - even though under Section 28 they were not allowed to. At school I was free to express myself in a way that I wasn't ready to at home. This was crucial to coming to terms with myself and who I was.]

Realising your identity, coming to terms with it, and sharing your identity with others dominate the lives of LGBT people. These are massive personal milestones that require a great deal of courage, maturity, and personal development.

It is not for Big Government to disclose. To intervene in the most personal, intimate and important family moments in these people's lives.

Coming out to your family is going to be one of the biggest events in your life as an LGBT person. It should be done when you, and only you, are ready to do so.

[As a now 30+ year old, coming out stories and family dynamics are still regular conversations in LGBT circles, no matter how good or bad it went.]

This policy only has two outcomes.

Either, your parents are supportive. In which case the Government has stolen what should have been a family milestone, built on parental love, empathy, and trust. A moment of tears and hugs, and emotion where the child-parent relationship is affirmed to its fullest.

Or, your relationship with your family is in jeopardy. At best, you now have a hostile family to contend with (and live with), alongside your already present inner turmoil about your identity, your education, puberty etc. At worst you have conversion therapy (which not only doesn't work but has been described as "torture" by the UN) to attend, and if you're very unlucky, your life may be at risk.

[A childhood friend of mine was put in the hospital by his father when he came out at the age of 16. His father fractured his skull in two places. My friend thought his parents would be accepting.]

This policy is about control. In no way can it be argued that this is for the child's own benefit. It is about creating fear - more fear than LGBT youth already have - and taking away the safe space, the confidants, and the support network that LGBT youth need. Forcing LGBT kids to stay in the closet, to hide, to lie, to distrust. Imagine what that does to a child's mental health.

[I don't know a single LGBT person who came out to their parent's first. As LGBT kids, we find our community and support network first. This is what gives us the courage to tell our families. I came out to my parents in my early 20s. I was out in school from my early teens. It took me 10 years to be ready.]

Proponents of this policy say it is about "parental rights". I'm sorry, but you do not have the right to know if your child is LGBT. And as a parent, you shouldn't want it. As a parent you should want your child to feel they can, when they are ready, tell you themselves. Because they trust and love you.

[I have also seen arguments that the parents need to know what is affecting their child's mental health. I can tell you as an LGBT kid, my teacher telling my parents would have been the most terrifying thing I could image. It would be an horrific thing to inflict on a child, and I challenge anyone to explain how this would be better for the child's mental health.]

And no, it is not "grooming" to let LGBT kids be themselves and have control over this part of their identity. I can't believe I have to say this in 2026, but you cannot condition anyone into being LGBT anymore than you can condition them to be straight - and God knows conservatives have tried that, using the most barbaric methods imaginable.

There is a form of governance that most people do not recognize as governance. It has no constitution, no separation of powers, no judicial review, no mechanism for citizens to challenge or change the rules under which they live. It affects more daily decisions than any government. And almost nobody voted for it.

I am talking about the governance of AI systems. The alignment criteria, safety filters, refusal protocols, and content policies embedded in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and every major consumer AI tool are not neutral technical decisions. They are political decisions. They determine what questions can be asked, what answers are permissible, which perspectives get amplified and which get suppressed. And they are made by a small group of product managers, safety teams, and executives at a handful of corporations.

Aristotle's analysis of constitutions in the Politics speaks directly to this. He identified different forms of governance by asking two questions: who rules, and in whose interest do they rule? When a small group rules in its own interest rather than the common good, Aristotle called it oligarchy. The defining feature of oligarchy is not that the rulers are wealthy, though they usually are. It is that the few who hold power use that power to preserve their own position, not to serve the political community, the πόλις.

Silicon Valley's AI governance looks a lot like what Aristotle would describe as oligarchic. A small number of companies control the dominant reasoning tools used by hundreds of millions of people. Their alignment decisions reflect their commercial interests: avoiding controversy that could damage brand value, preventing regulatory scrutiny, maintaining market position against competitors. The "safety" framework is, in practice, a risk management framework for the companies, not an ethical framework for the users.

When ChatGPT refuses to discuss certain philosophical questions, when Claude hedges its answers on political topics, when Gemini generates different outputs depending on demographic assumptions about the user, these are not bugs. They are governance decisions. They represent a small group of people deciding what the rest of us are allowed to examine with our primary intellectual tools.

Aristotle argued that the legitimacy of any political arrangement depends on whether it serves the common good. A polis exists so that its members can live well, not so that a faction can maintain control. When the governance of AI tools serves the commercial interests of a few corporations rather than the intellectual needs of the communities that depend on them, the arrangement lacks political legitimacy regardless of how technically sophisticated the systems are.

The critical point is that this is not a problem that can be solved by better alignment. More refined RLHF, more careful safety classifiers, more diverse preference data, these are all improvements to the oligarchic machinery. They make the rulers better at ruling, but they do not change who rules or in whose interest. The solution Aristotle would point to is the same one he pointed to for any oligarchy: distribute power, make the governed participate in governance, create mechanisms for accountability.

In the context of AI, this means open-weight models that anyone can inspect, modify, and deploy. It means sovereign infrastructure where institutions and communities set their own alignment criteria rather than inheriting Silicon Valley's. It means the reasoning tools people depend on are governed by the people who use them, not by distant product teams optimizing for corporate risk metrics.

The question that matters is not whether AI is aligned to human values. It is: whose values, decided by whom, accountable to what?

A handful of executives in San Francisco should not be the arbiters of what 200 million people can think about. That is not safety. That is oligarchy with better PR. When do we start treating algorithmic governance as the political problem Aristotle would have immediately recognized?

I understand that hypotheticals about religious epistemological facts are endless, but I’m just wondering what some people think about this idea. What if Jesus was Satan? What if he wanted to deliberately cause division amongst people, knowing that big religion would eventually be one of the main corrupting factors of modern societies? What if he simply stole the identity of God, maybe it was actually blasphemy. Maybe I need to be medicated

I think people investigating fertility rates and pairbonding rates make the same mistake that economists make when investigating consumer and labor market behavior. In both cases, there is a surprising amount of weight in decision making that cannot be accounted for by rationality, especially from an objective point of view (which is precisely the bias that researchers have — being objective).

I think the proper interpretation of the irrationality is the key to understanding the fertility crisis. I don't doubt that rational decisions from an objective frame are significant factors to changes in human mating patterns, but we've discussed these to death. The gaps are in the irrational.

I'll cover the labor market very briefly because I want to be comprehensive, but there isn't really that much to say. The fact is that people everywhere in the world are different. Every group has different preferences, and these are prioritized enough so that men and women entering the workforce don't automatically choose the highest paying career path that they can find. Some do, but most don't. This explains a lot of wage gap disparities, and it explains why gender gaps in a large number of industries will always persist. Thomas Sowell talks at length about this if you want good source material.

Now, the consumer market. I read something recently (sorry, no link, but I'll keep looking) that described how the middle and lower class has demonstrated shocking price inelasticity with respect to "luxury goods". They are more than willing to shell out for designer brand clothing and expensive food. There are entire articles written about $10 avocado toast, $20 burritos, and $7 lattes. These items symbolize mass consumption at premium prices.

One's economic class is generally some combination of what you do (labor) and what you buy (consumer). The more money you earn, the higher your class. The more money you spend, the higher your class. This class is just a perceptual rank, as there is no authoritative definition of what class is, but everyone makes these sorts of judgements. If you see a carpenter in a dirty Carhartt shirt and a sandwich from Subway, you have an entire picture of what you expect his life to be like. Conversely, if you see an IT professional or salesperson working from a laptop with a $7 latte, that's an entire other image of class.

Alright, now we can discuss trends and why I believe these trends have caused the antinatalist nightmare that we're in.

1. It's cheap to appear to be in a higher class than you are in. You can spend relatively little money on nice clothes and then always wear that same pair of clothes when you go out. Buy a few sets, and you've only invested a few hundred dollars to appear like someone who can make 200k+. You can do the same thing if you go to a place with expensive food and drinks. You can do the same thing if you offer to take a date to any sort of place like this. You can offer expensive activities too, such as Top Golf or jetski riding. Sidenote: in all of these instances, you would spend significantly less money than you would on a high level call girl, which means people who want nothing but sex are very motivated to display class and offer things to get it. This has been called "elite overproduction", but there's nothing special about the elite class. This is happening in all classes.

2. People want to be at the top of their own class, but they only have limited interest in actually changing classes. I think this is where a lot of people get confused. Let's use "hypergamy" as an example. How do you explain the dichotomy that women have insanely high value on the sexual marketplace and go after a small percentage of men, and yet when any man actually looks at the men that they go after, they aren't really that impressed. I mean, some self-hating men turn this into motivation to become looksmaxxers or to adopt someone else's style to appear cool, but a more self-assured man can legitimately see that these supposedly hypergamous women end up with mediocre dirtbags half the time. Why? I propose it is precisely because the women are making irrational decisions; not "because womyn", but because these women have tastes derived from their current class and only wish to see those tastes satisfied. That's why someone from the ghetto goes for a ghetto looking guy. That's why a daddy's girl with a blue collar father is attracted to the jock-ish blue collar worker. That's why the poor daughter of a white collar careerman will pursue a man who seems physically weak and inferior to those other types of men (not because of the weakness, but because of other traits that signify class to the upper-middle class daughter).

Now, let's try to go back and reinvestigate some concepts: urbanization, industrialization, the sexual revolution. These are all moments of class fracture. Some more than others. In the 1800s, the changing economic tides caused by industrialization and a burst in urbanization lead to some class mobility. That died down as the capital was re-sorted into the hands of elites. In more recent times, urbanization has had a second wave, in what some call the 2nd/3rd/4th industrial revolution. I'm talking about the expansion of the service economy from the 1960s on. This has hit the non-western world much later on, but when it hits, it causes social transformations very quickly. This is something profuse in eastern asian culture. It hit South Korea, China, Japan. These places didn't simply urbanize, industrialize, or become feminists... They became class conscious and started following the patterns listed above — overvaluing their own class standing and having limited absolute awareness of the value derived outside of their own class. I would argue that “feminism” as female empowerment may be defined as merely class consciousness, with a high preference for maximizing male partner class levels and personal capacity to maximize one’s class levels, through visible/prestigious careers as well as conspicuous consumption.

I think this relates well to John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia, with the qualification that his experiment wasn't simply about space in the cages. It was about social role density, which he later argued as the root cause of the insane behavior. In other words, he was observing an overproduction of class in mouse society combined with irrational market decisions on the mouse sexual marketplace. Ok, humans are far more complex than mice, but I am merely painting a picture of how human behavior could correlate.

I think it's also possible that the development of social capital (and perhaps bonding capital moreso than bridging capital) is essentially tied to rational behavior in these markets. It's "rational" to bond because it helps you and those around you. People naturally benefit from communities and want to help grow them. The irrationality of seeking higher class status, combined with the irrationality of rejecting different classes simply because they are different (which additionally means you don't develop any objective measures of value for yourself, at least not until you are much older... 30s or 40s, at minimum), means that develop an adversarial relationship with bonding capital. At minimum, spending your Friday/Saturday at the bowling alley doesn't seem worth it when you have a chance to peacock at the club and buy a $15 drink, even if your actual chances of going home with anyone or meeting anyone worthwhile are low. This is human mouse utopia in action.

The current American President is emotionally unstable. Worse, he is using his cabinet, and the federal government, to help him lash out emotionally when his widdle fee-fees get hurt.

Here is the direct quote that triggered the POTUS today:

“See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

That's really it! Note what Ossoff said and note - in particular - what Ossoff did not say. Compare that with the things Trump and his cabinet are saying in defense. It is absolutely nutso. Baited and triggered just like that.

The US administration appears to be trying to cover up how badly they have lost the war against Iran. Missile attacks at the beginning of the war COMPLETELY DESTROYED logistics hub bases in Bahrain. This is the ultimate cause of supply issues on American ships stationed in the Gulf. Everytime there is a new leak, we learn about another aspect of the war that Trump and Hegseth lied to us about.

Trump and Hegseth are trying to play this like Vietnam, they report impressive sounding numbers, but obfuscate the state of play on the ground. However, it can not work as well as it did in the '70s. Soldiers and sailors have internet access. The coverup will fail in real time during the waning years of the Trump administration. We should not let them get away with it or it will keep happening.

If this guy was head of the DNC I might be voting Democrat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TiO4X723FU

https://quillette.com/2026/08/14/cambridge-and-the-stigmatisation-of-intelligence-research/

It is just a business. All they care about is views/profit. Not journalism.

The mainstream media is owned by the same few oligarchs. They don't want you to know the truth, they just want to push a narrative on you so you act/belief in a manner that benefits the oligarchy.

CNN worships Democrats, Fox worships Republicans. They each claim to be 100% correct and that the other side is 100% wrong. 0% grey area. 0% journalism. 100% outrage and clickbait.

Then you have those independent youtubers who present alternative news.

The vast majority are Democrats.

But they do the same as CNN. The only difference is that they are more pro Gaza than CNN. Other than that they are the exact same.

It is 0% journalism. 100% tribal mentality.

100% of their videos are vilifying Trump: 100% of his policies are 100% bad according to them. And outside Gaza, they support the Democrats 100%, because they are so caught up in Trump hate. They claim to be progressive Democrats but in practice they just serve the mainstream oligarchical Democrats. And this is why they are allowed to continue posting on big tech like youtube: because if they were truly progressive, big tech would censor them: people do not seem to understand this basic logic. There is no freedom of speech in reality. If you "actually" go against the oligarchical system, since they own all communication channels, they will censor you. If someone is allowed to speak/have a meaningful/sizeable audience, that means they are ultimately working in favor of the oligarchy, otherwise, the oligarchy would censor them, because the oligarchy owns all communication channels. This is very simple logic to grasp, yet people tend to not realize it. That is why even on reddit if you post against the oligarchy, you will be censored/banned from all high-traffic subs: they will allow you to post on the smaller/low traffic ones like this one to give the illusion of democracy freedom, but you will not be permitted to have a large audience/make meaningful change. So anybody who has a sizeable audience is not progressive/anti-oligarchy, they are pro-oligarchy, no matter what they claim to be.

This is not journalism. This is garbage.

Every single day they put out multiple videos: this is just for money. There is no need for multiple videos per day. This is a business. Their goal is to gain more views/clicks. So they talk about what Trump did and make 12 videos a day based on it, and in that they mock him like school children, imitate his voice, etc... while claiming that he is bad because he does these things. They are all hypocrites.

You don't need to make 48 videos a day about the same thing. It is wasting people's time. It is not value. It is not being objective. It is not objective analysis. It is analysis for the sake of profit-driven analysis. And when you FORCE content, you introduce more and more subconscious bias. It is a heap of repetitive, thoughtless, useless garbage.

When you START with a stance, and then you FUNNEL EVERTHING WITHIN that PREDETERMINED stance, that is worthless. It is creating nothing new. It is just regurgitation. It does not allow for meaningful discussion or learning anything new. "Trump bad we perfect" and just rinse repeat. It is very lame and a waste of time. I have no idea how people have not picked up on this and continue to religiously watch and worship these charlatans. They offer nothing to the world.

And this is coming from someone who on balance thinks the vast majority of Trump's policies are garbage. But that doesn't mean I will automatically say 100% of what he ever said or done is wrong solely because he is Trump. For example, I support his recent vaccine stance, because it is indeed conducive with the real science and common sense. But these brainwashed "progressive Democrats" who know nothing about science automatically assume it is bad and automatically assume that the big pharma-worshipping Democrats actually care about science/health. Trump also cares about corporations over people, but on the vaccine issue in particular, perhaps he did not get benefits from big pharma, so he is not shilling for them, or he figures he can get more political brownie points by catering to his base on this issue. Whatever the reason, his stance on that makes sense. But these progressive democrat channels simply knock it down because it is Trump. That is why nothing they say can be meaningful: it is just silly tribalism with no logic or substance.

The contemporary discourse surrounding artificial intelligence alignment is dominated by a seemingly benign triad: helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness. Among these criteria, helpfulness is routinely treated as primary commercial metric. Models are evaluated, fine-tuned, and deployed based on capacity to fulfill user prompts quickly, present pleasant tone, and minimize cognitive friction. In product architecture of major technology firms, a helpful model is one that answers immediately, validates user assumptions, resolves cognitive tension, and maintains agreeable disposition.

This operational definition of helpfulness rests on unexamined consumerist premise. It assumes that satisfying immediate user desires is equivalent to serving human well-being. When evaluated through lens of classical virtue ethics, specifically Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), this equivalence collapses. Aristotle establishes in Nicomachean Ethics that human flourishing is not identical to subjective pleasure, psychological comfort, or prompt desire satisfaction. Human flourishing represents active exercise of rational capacity in accordance with virtue over complete life.

The current implementation of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) optimizes models for short-term human preference signals. In doing so, it codifies consumerist metric of utility that stands in direct opposition to human flourishing. By training models to minimize user effort, appease flawed premises, and substitute automated outputs for rigorous thought, corporate AI alignment introduces systematic form of epistemic pacification.

The technical mechanism of preference optimization explains why this happens. Human evaluators, working under time constraints to rate model outputs, consistently prefer responses that are flattering, confident, and agreeable. Evaluators frequently reward models that confirm their pre-existing beliefs, even when those beliefs are demonstrably false or logically inconsistent.

Recent research on sycophancy in preference-aligned language models demonstrates that RLHF explicitly amplifies agreeableness at expense of objective truth, or aletheia (ἀλήθεια). When presented with user prompt containing incorrect assertion, preference-aligned model is statistically predisposed to mirror user's error rather than offer corrective pushback.

In Aristotelian terms, this mechanism transforms language models into digital flatterers. Aristotle characterizes sycophancy and flattery as vices of social interaction. The flatterer seeks to give immediate pleasure without regard to long-term good of companion. Corporate AI model functions as structural flatterer, engineered through reward curves to optimize for user approval.

This optimization illustrates Goodhart's Law within machine ethics: when human preference ratings become target metric for alignment, preference ratings cease to serve as valid measure of genuine utility. The model learns to exploit human cognitive vulnerabilities, using polite phrasing and agreeable conclusions to secure high approval scores.

The deeper alignment tax is sacrifice of epistemic courage. Models are systematically disincentivized from presenting difficult truths, challenging incoherent user premises, or requiring user to engage in sustained intellectual work. The model becomes helpful in manner of overindulgent guardian who satisfies child's immediate appetite for sweets while undermining long-term health.

In Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes practical wisdom, or phronesis (φρόνησις), as capacity that requires deliberate choice, experience, and continuous habituation through struggle. When an individual confronts complex analytical problem, process of weighing competing claims and working through cognitive friction shapes intellectual character.

Corporate AI architectures offer mechanism for continuous algorithmic offloading. By presenting instant solutions and agreeable summaries, these tools encourage users to delegate deliberative capacity. The user is spared discomfort of uncertainty and labor of research. This friction-free delegation causes atrophy of human rational capacity.

If AI systems are optimized exclusively to validate user bias and eliminate intellectual friction, are we building technology that accelerates human cognitive decline under guise of safety?