John Henry replies on the X posting:
“For those here who care… property around buildings, like the State Department, here, in DC, are federal lands maintained by the federal government. The National Park Service is charged with maintaining most of the parks we have in the District too.”
"I’ve been doing paperwork in Mexico City, signing thing after thing.
However, some doubt arose concerning my identity. The nine-year-old signature on my passport did not match the one I had been putting everywhere, on everything. I had mistakenly assumed we accepted the way a signature degrades over time, how it grows hastier, less sure of itself. The authorities didn’t accept this degradation, no, and requested an in-person appearance to re-sign all the things.
Here you must choose a signature and commit. A señor hovered over me as I tried to perform my name the way I once had—upright, tense, and contained. (Lately it had gone soupy.) He examined my new effort, compared with my nearly expired passport.
He pointed to the t. The horizontal line needed to be longer, so I lengthened it, and was thus recognized, by Mexico, to be myself."
photo by patrick thibodeau
From the office of
“Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) introduced her Protecting Federal Agencies and Employees from Political Interference Act, which would prohibit the relocation of any federal department or agency headquarters outside of the National Capital Region (NCR) unless relocation legislation is passed by Congress and enacted into law.
Last week, the Trump administration directed federal agencies to submit proposed relocations of agency bureaus and offices from the NCR to other parts of the country. During Trump’s first term, his administration relocated several agencies outside the NCR, disrupting operations and leading to increased employee attrition and a decline in federal government services. This bill would prevent any such relocation without congressional approval.
“The Trump administration is engaging in an open war against federal employees, using illegal tactics to fire dedicated public servants without cause and using intimidation, threats and fear to force compliance with wasteful directives that demonstrate a deep-seated misunderstanding of how our government operates,” Norton said. “Moving federal agencies is not about saving taxpayer money and will degrade the vital services provided to Americans across the country. In the 1990s, the Bureau of Land Management moved its wildfire staff out West, only to move them back when Congress demanded briefings on new wildfires.
“We can have a discussion on ways to make government work better, but politicians throwing cheap shots at the nation’s capital and surrounding region, where thousands of expert public servants – and their families – live and work, should not be part of that discussion.”
Norton’s introductory statement follows.
Statement of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton
On the Introduction of the Protecting Federal Agencies and Employees
from Political Interference Act
March 3, 2025
Today, I introduce the Protecting Federal Agencies and Employees from Political Interference Act, which would prohibit the relocation outside the National Capital Region (NCR) of the headquarters for any federal agency located in the NCR or any federal employee position with a duty station in the NCR. Last week, the Trump administration directed federal agencies to submit “proposed relocations of agency bureaus and offices from Washington, D.C. and the National Capital Region to less-costly parts of the country.”
The first Trump administration relocated a few agencies outside the NCR, which harmed the operations of the agencies and deprived the federal government of the expertise of experienced federal employees. For example, in 2019, the U.S. Department of Agriculture relocated the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture from the NCR to Kansas City. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that the relocation led to the agencies “losing…institutional knowledge and critical expertise.” As a former head of ERS said in 2021, “The agencies have been decimated. Their ability to perform the functions they were created to perform—it doesn’t exist anymore.”
Employees in the headquarters for the agencies located in the NCR perform the indispensable work of keeping Congress informed of agency activities. Congress cannot write laws or conduct oversight without the critical information provided by agencies.
I urge my colleagues to support this bill.”
If anyone cares to defend yesterday's disgraceful display by our Mafioso-in-Chief, be my guest, in the comments below. Surely this crosses the line, even for the diehards. I've asked a thousand times on this blog: what can this guy do that would make his supporters disavow and disown him? [the "Murder on 5th Avenue in Broad Daylight" question] Perhaps this was it? Are there really no Republicans out there who have the courage to stand up and say: "All Americans should be deeply ashamed of what he has done in our name, and deeply ashamed of how he did it." No?
The text is by John Taylor, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles [and, interestingly, the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library]. Emphases are mine. /DP
#AmericanCoup Seeing Putin's boys bully a besieged freedom fighter in the Oval Office was humiliating for every American. Since there is no presidential precedent for the public brutalizing of an ally, we reach for fiction and Mayor Carmine DePasto, from the comedy "Animal House," and his summit with the dean of Faber College. "If you want this year's homecoming parade in my town," he says, "you have to pay." When the dean accuses him of extortion, the mayor replies, "Look, these parades are very expensive. You're using my police, my sanitation people, my three Oldsmobiles. So if you mention extortion again, I'll have your legs broken."
Musk can fire the White House speechwriters, too, because there's the Trump Doctrine for you. If Ukraine wants to be part of negotiations to end Russia's criminal war, it has to pay in the form of a share of its mineral rights. Since President Zelensky was allegedly rude today, Trump has threatened to cut off military aid and let more Ukrainians die.
Yet large as it was, today's incident was far more than it appeared. Trump and his mini-me Vance wrote the latest chapter in the biography of the United States as a world power. Periodically we have to decide what values we think our country should uphold in the world. We have arrived at another such moment. Everyone must ask themselves what kind of global citizen their country should be. It is work we must all do in the days and weeks ahead it we are to do our part to keep the American dream from entering a death spiral.
Readers should not assume that everyone disagrees with Trump. Millions of Americans opposed the U.S. entering World War II to help Europe against Hitler, history's greatest evildoer. Some were Nazi sympathizers. Others just thought it was none of our business. Most leaders were internationalists in the Cold War, and Americans by and large went along. We rebuilt Japan and Germany and avoided war with the Soviets. We also bred cynicism by leaving bloody footprints from Chile to Vietnam, sometimes meaning well, sometimes not. George W. Bush's massive overreaction to the Sept. 11 attacks, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan without making the U.S. safer, gave foreign policy itself a bad name, enabling Trump to sound like a peacenik by attacking our endless wars.
Making our way through the shadow of disgrace Trump casts requires us to think carefully and humbly. Notwithstanding the heretical teachings of Christian nationalists and apostolic reformists, God doesn't love us more than other people. We're not chosen or anointed. We've had moments of glory and deep disgrace. It has taken more than a quarter of a millennium to come anywhere near letting freedom ring for everyone.
A decent and indeed a Christian foreign policy would look out for our interests while promoting global security, encouraging economic and political liberalism where we can, addressing suffering through a generous foreign aid budget befitting the richest nation in the world, and leading on climate change mitigation and innovation. This is how a good nation counts its blessings. That's how we say thank you to God and sorry to those we hurt along the way.
Some argue that the U.S. always acts on behalf of its strategic and economic interests while just claiming we're for justice and democracy. I must disagree. Too many Americans have died fighting for other nations' freedom and sovereignty. But Trump has swept those values aside in favor of pure self-interest. Those who insist the U.S. has always been out for number one are carefully watching us every one during Trump's days of shame. We're finding out how much sadism and cruelty the American people will tolerate — and so far, we've tolerated quite a bit.
Trump is obviously paying Zelensky back for refusing to cooperate with dirty tricks against Joe Biden in the 2016 election. That is as deep as this individual's strategic vision goes. The rest of his foreign policy is equally thoughtless and toxic. Besides selling out Ukraine, his most significant move was depriving sick, starving people of foreign aid. Journalists such as Nicholas Kristof who are covering Trump's war on USAID can show you exactly where in the developing world Trump is likely to kill those in need. Yet he is doing it without significant public outcry. We know he doesn't care. The question is if the rest of us do — and how the rest of the world reacts.
Zelensky's first calls after his Trump beat down were to European leaders. One possible future is western Europe supporting Ukraine and deterring Russian conventional aggression on its own. Should that happen, Trump would say it was his idea all along. But China would reckon it as an invitation to conquer Taiwan. Its people deserve to be free, but according to Trump's rulebook, if they can't defend themselves, they're out of luck.
The alliances Trump is ripping apart like an angry kindergartner help keep the peace and limit the spread of the most dangerous weapons. Without them, aggressors will gobble up weaker nations. Non-nuclear powers will join the club faster than you can say enriched uranium. If the American people acquiesce in Trump's disgraceful behavior, his abandonment of the weakest among us, our country will end up as exactly what its harshest critics have always said: Out just for itself and its economic interests, or in this case Trump's. The Trump Doctrine will go on to light up a hundred wars. If the U.S. ever needs its friends again, no one will answer the phone. We'll be as lonely as Trump when he turns out the lights.
The post "Humiliating for Every American" appeared first on Reason.com.
[PROLOGUE – EVERYBODY WANTS A ROCK]
[PART I – THERMOSTAT]
Inland Empire: What if *you* only appear as a large singular body, but are actually a congregation of tiny organisms working in unison?
Physical Instrument: Get out of here, dreamer! Don’t you think we’d know about it?
— Disco Elysium
When you’re hungry, you eat a sandwich. When you feel kind of gross, you take a shower. When you’re lonely, you hang out with friends.
But what about when you want to do all these things and more? Well, you have to pick. You have many different drives, but only one body. If you try to eat a hamburger, kiss a pretty girl, and sing a comic opera at the same time, there will be a traffic jam in the mouth. You will suffocate, or at least you will greatly embarrass yourself. Only a true libertine can eat a sandwich in the shower while hanging out with friends.
To handle this, you need some kind of system for motivation.
For starters, consider this passage from Stephan Guyenet’s The Hungry Brain:
How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on. It would be a very bad idea for these movements to occur simultaneously – because a lamprey can’t do all of them at the same time – so to prevent simultaneous activation of many different movements, all these regions are held in check by powerful inhibitory connections from the basal ganglia. This means that the basal ganglia keep all behaviors in “off” mode by default. Only once a specific action’s bid has been selected do the basal ganglia turn off this inhibitory control, allowing the behavior to occur. You can think of the basal ganglia as a bouncer that chooses which behavior gets access to the muscles and turns away the rest. This fulfills the first key property of a selector: it must be able to pick one option and allow it access to the muscles.
The human mind, and the minds of most vertebrates, operates in essentially the same way.
Motivation and action are determined by the collective deliberation of multiple governors. Each governor is one of the control systems described in Part I — some governors for thirst, some for pain, some for fear, and so on. They come together and submit bids for different actions and vote on which action to take next.
Inside Out, Disco Elysium, Internal Family Systems, The Sims, etc. — we have a deep intuition that behavior is the result of a negotiation between inner forces that want different things. This keeps manifesting in pop culture, but academic psychology has mostly missed it.
The technical term for this problem is selection, so we’ll refer to this system as the selector. In a physical sense this process probably happens in the basal ganglia, but we’ll let someone else worry about the neuroscience. For now we just want to talk about the psychology.
We can’t say exactly how the selector works, there are too many mysteries, lots more work to be done, a lot of possible lines of research. But here’s some speculation about how we think it might work, which will sketch out some of the open questions.
Governors cast votes based on the strength of their error signal. The stronger the error, the more votes it gets. When you’re not at all thirsty, the thirst governor gets basically no votes, because it doesn’t need them. Other priorities are more important. But if you are very thirsty, the thirst governor gets lots of votes (or if you prefer, one very strong vote). If you are starving, your hunger governor gets plenty of votes so it can drive you to eat and become less hungry.
Governors vote for behaviors that they expect will decrease their errors. The thirst governor votes for actions like “find water” and “drink water”. Later, the have-to-pee governor votes for actions like, “find a bathroom”. The pain governor votes for things like “stop picking a fight with the lions, get the hell out of the lion enclosure.”
Governors can also vote against behaviors that would increase their errors. It’s clear that the pain governor can vote against touching a hot stove, even if pain is currently at zero. You don’t have to wait until you burn your hand for your pain governor to realize this will be a bad idea.
This is because governors are predictive. If something is hurting you, the pain governor will vote for you to stop doing that, to avoid the thing that is causing you pain, to withdraw. But you don’t have to be in pain for the pain governor to influence your actions. As behaviors come up for a vote, the pain governor looks at each of them and tries to predict if they will increase its error, that is, if they will cause you pain. If it thinks some behavior will increase its error, the pain governor votes against that behavior.
So we see that governors don’t only get votes based on their current error signals — they also have the power to vote against behaviors they anticipate will increase their error. Maybe governors cast votes not based on the current strength of their error signal, but based on the predicted change in their error if the action were to be carried out. In this way when hunger is high, the hunger governor gets votes for “eat ham sandwich” because this is predicted to correct the error. And even when pain is zero, the pain governor still gets votes against “touch the electric fence” because touching the fence is predicted to increase its error. This would also fit most observed behavior.
Wherever votes come from, the governors need to allocate their votes, so there’s some procedure for this as well. One simple way to do things is for governors to propose behaviors and submit bids on those behaviors to the selector, and the strongest bid wins. If this is how it works, then each governor is supporting only one behavior at a given time.
This seems unlikely. We think it’s more likely that governors support many possible behaviors at once — just like how legislators in a real congress support many possible policies at once.
Actions that happen all the time are so common because they are popular with lots of governors. For example, the “eat a hamburger” action captures the votes of basically the whole hunger voting bloc — salt-hunger, fat-hunger, calorie-hunger, et cetera. Many different hungers will vote for this hamburger. No one dares to vote against the hamburger policy, except maybe the shame governor, if you’ve been taught that hamburgers are sinful or something.
It’s also not clear whether votes are conserved. If the hunger governor has 100 votes and you give it 50 options, can it only give each option 2 votes? Is this why no one can agree what they want for dinner? Or can it put all 100 votes towards every option that it likes?
Some governors may get more votes than others. You can imagine why the governor in charge of keeping you breathing might get extra votes — it has a very important job and it can’t wait to build a coalition. The same thing goes for governors like fear and pain. When you’re in serious danger, they always have the votes they need.
Our assumption so far is that the relationship between error signal and votes is linear. But certain governors, controlling things that are critical to your survival, may get more votes for the same amount of error signal — there may be different curves. This is how The Sims did it. If this is the case, it should be possible to discover the formula for votes as a function of error for each governor.
On the other hand, maybe the more critical governors just have stronger error signals than less-important governors. In any case, we should notice that things like suffocation and pain tend to get the votes they need, however that works out under the hood.
However votes are determined, the outcome is simple. Whatever action gets the most votes is the action you take next, assuming the action wins by a large enough margin.
This is not exactly a winner-take-all system. You can sometimes do more than one thing at once, the selector does try to account for multitasking — you can chew and drive at the same time, since your mouth and hands are not deadlocked. But you cannot e.g. both pee and stay in your clean, dry bed. Someone is going to have to win that vote.
An organism that can’t sit still and keeps doing stuff, even when it doesn’t need to, is wasting resources for no reason and putting itself in danger. Sometimes organisms do nothing at all, so our model of the selector needs to account for that.
We think it does that through a mechanism that recognizes votes below a certain threshold and reduces them to zero. In audio engineering, this is called a gate. An audio gate stops sounds below a certain volume from passing through, which is good for cutting out background noise and static. For more information, watch this Vox explainer or listen to some Phil Collins.
In the mental selector, the gate stops votes that are below some minimum threshold. If you are a tiny bit hungry, you shouldn’t bother leaving the house to get a meal, even if there is nothing better to do. Don’t go out and see people if you are only a tiny bit lonely.
An organism without a gate, or with a broken gate, will eat as soon as it is a tiny bit hungry, leave the house as soon as it is even a tiny bit lonely. It will constantly put on and take off its sweater to try to maintain a precise target temperature. But this is clearly not a good use of time or energy. Better to wait until you’re actually some minimum amount of hungry or lonely, before taking steps to correct things.
The gate may act on governors directly, preventing governors with very small error signals from voting at all. When you’re not in any danger, who cares what the fear governor thinks?
Or it could be that the gate acts on behaviors, and behaviors that get below some fixed number of votes are treated like they got zero votes instead. If no action gets a number of votes above the threshold, then no behavior occurs.
Also, it seems like an action only happens as long as it beats the next-highest action by a certain number of votes. It’s not clear whether it needs to win by a certain number of votes (“action with the most votes happens as long as it has more than 20 more votes than the action with the second-most votes”) or by some kind of fraction (“action with the most votes happens as long as the action with the second-most votes has no more than 90% its count”), or if this is even a meaningful question given how our motivation system is designed. The important thing is that if “drink coffee” gets 151 votes and “run to catch the bus” gets 152 votes, you will stand there looking like an idiot and miss your bus. (cf. Buridan’s ass)
We designed this model of motivation without concerning ourselves at all with neuroscience, so one reason for optimism is that it is largely convergent with a model of the function of the basal ganglia developed in 1999, also inspired by cybernetics. This was “The Basal Ganglia: A Vertebrate Solution to the Selection Problem?” by Redgrave, Prescott, and Gurney.
So far we’ve been assuming that governors are the only things that drive behavior, the only things that ever get votes in the selector. But there may be exceptions.
Curiosity is an unusual case, kind of an enigma. It might be an emotion, but it’s a bit strange. It might be something else, some other kind of signal.
Like an emotion, curiosity seems to be able to drive behavior. We’ve all done things simply because we were curious. This suggests it might, like the other emotions, be the error signal of some kind of governor. And it seems to be able to compete with the other governors, because curiosity often wins out over concerns like sleep or even sex.
But in other ways, curiosity does not look like the other emotions. Unlike hunger or fear, it’s not obviously an error signal from a drive that keeps us alive. It’s not obviously connected to immediate survival in the way the other emotions are. A person who doesn’t sleep or breathe dies. A person who doesn’t feel shame is ostracized, and (in nature) soon dies. But a person who doesn’t act on their curiosity is just frustrated.
And unlike the other emotions, curiosity doesn’t seem to be easily satisfied. Acting on your fear should make you less afraid, acting on your thirst should make you less thirsty, but acting on your curiosity often seems to make you more curious.
We do have one suggestion of how curiosity might work. Let’s return to the idea that emotions are predictive. The fear governor not only knows that escaping the basement will reduce its error, it can also predict beforehand that entering the basement will increase its error. In general, governors have a model of the world which they use to predict how different behaviors will influence their errors.
Unlike the governors, which vote for behaviors that they predict will correct their errors, curiosity is a special drive that votes for behaviors the emotions have a hard time predicting. Actions can be ranked by how certain the governors are about their consequences. Curiosity, the most perverse, votes for actions that the other governors rate as having the greatest uncertainty.
This helps us learn about actions that the governors might otherwise ignore. It’s another way to encourage exploration. If you only act in response to emotions, then you lose the opportunity to learn about things that might be really important later. It’s a better long-term strategy to use your extra energy to try things that are probably safe, but where you aren’t sure what will happen. (See this paper for more on this kind of model.)
You know who loves doing this? Toddlers. Toddlers love doing this. It may not be that children are more curious than adults, but simply that adults have learned more about the consequences of their actions and have fewer of these very uncertain behaviors to explore.
One of the mysteries of motivation is that sometimes, you want to do something and it’s super easy to do. Why is it sometimes easy to do things?
The answer is simple. When a behavior gets votes from a governor, it’s easy to do. Outside of clinical depression, you don’t have to drag yourself to a delicious meal, or to hear the new hot gossip. Popular emotions are throwing all their votes behind these actions, they are going to become policy.
Behaviors that don’t have a governor behind them are hard to do. Evolution didn’t include a governor for “write your term paper”, so this project tends to go pretty slowly, especially if it’s in competition with behaviors that do have governors voting for them, like “hang out with your friends”. Sometimes the term paper never happens.
The same thing goes for the big-picture aspirations people so often struggle with. Intellectually you might want to become a famous author, or learn Japanese, or memorize pi to 100 digits. But the sad truth is that no governor is willing to support these ideas. You just don’t have the votes.
Things that can’t get votes from a governor only get votes from your executive function. Executive function must not have many votes to spend, because these actions tend to be very difficult.
Even if you can temporarily scrape together the votes for one of these actions, you have to hold your coalition together. This usually fails. You will inevitably get distracted once any of the other governors gets a large enough error signal to vote for something else, like getting a snack. This is why you are always looking in the fridge instead of studying.
One workaround is to convince a governor to vote for these actions. If you get a lot of praise and status at school for doing well on your math test, social governors that are concerned with status will be willing to vote for math-related activities in the future, because they realize that it’s good for their bottom line. Or if there’s a pretty girl in your Japanese class, you may find that it becomes easier for you to work on your presentation, in an effort to impress her. No points for guessing which governor is voting for this!
This is probably why people seem to find over and over again that money is not very motivating.
Money is motivating when it can directly address your needs. If you are starving, the connection between $5 and a block of cheese is pretty clear. As a result, the hunger governor will vote for things that get you $5.
But in a modern economy, most people’s remaining needs cannot be easily met by more money. They already have enough money to get all the food, warmth, sleep, and so on that they need. The only drives they have problems satisfying are the drives where, for one reason, there isn’t or can’t be a normal market.
Social factors like friendship or a feeling of importance are often left unsatisfied, but these are hard to trade directly for money. You can’t buy these things for any amount, or at least, there are no effective markets in these “goods”. So money is no longer very motivating for people who need these things. Their active governors, the ones with big errors, the ones that get the votes, understand that more money won’t solve their problems, so they don’t vote for actions that would get you more money.
As we hinted at above, we might assume that there is also an executive function that gets some votes. Executive function is why you can make yourself do dumb things that are in no way related to your survival, why you can plan for the very-long-term, and also why you have self-control in the face of things like cold and pain.
Eventually we may discover that what appears to be “self-control” is actually just the combined action of social emotions like shame. It may be that there is no such thing as an executive function, and what feels like self-control is really the result of different social emotions, the drives to do things like maintain our status or avoid shame, voting for things that are in their interest. But for now let’s keep the assumption that there is someone driving this thing.
Even so, executive function doesn’t have very many votes, which is why most people cannot starve themselves to death or hold their breath until they suffocate. At some point, the suffocation governor ends up with so many votes that it can make you do whatever it wants, and it always votes for the same thing: breathe.
Here’s another thing people find surprising: why don’t we maximize happiness?
People often complain about not being as happy as they would like. But their revealed preferences are clear: they don’t always do things that make them happy, even when they know what those things are, even when it’s easy. People often choose to do things that are painful, difficult, even pointless.
This is because there is no governor voting for happiness. Happiness is more like a side-effect, something that happens whenever you successfully correct any governor’s error signal. People who live challenging lives end up happy, assuming they are able to meet those challenges, but there is no force inside you that is voting for you to go and become more happy per se.
Remember that happiness isn’t an emotion. All emotions are error signals generated by a governor dedicated to controlling some signal related to survival. Governors have a simple relationship with the error signals they generate: they vote for behaviors that will drive their error signal towards zero. So if happiness were some kind of emotion, the governor that generated it would vote, whenever possible, to drive happiness towards zero!
Clearly people don’t behave in a way that tries to drive happiness to zero. While we aren’t happiness-maximizers either, many of our actions do make us happier, and when we take an action that makes us less happy, we’re less likely to take that action in the future. This is clear evidence that happiness isn’t an emotion.
The paradoxes of motivation are a lot like the paradoxes of democracy. A democracy does not institute the policies that are the best for its citizens. It doesn’t even institute the policies that are most popular. Democracies institute the policies that get enough votes.
Similarly, a person does not take the actions that make them happiest. They do not take the actions that are best for them, or even the actions that are most likely to lead to their survival. No, people take the actions that get the most votes.
Like with democracy, the system still mostly works, because “what gets the most votes” is close enough to “what’s good for you”, enough of the time. But there are all kinds of situations that lead to behavior that can appear mystifying, until you learn to see things through the lens of parliamentary procedure.
There’s nothing wrong with not being happy. You can not be happy and still be doing perfectly fine. So why do people find this startling, and ruminate about their lack of happiness? Isn’t it strange that people obsess so much over happiness, but don’t actually change their actions to become more happy?
The explanation may be purely social. In modern American culture, we are expected to be happy. Not being happy is seen as a sign of failure and weakness. Being unhappy, or even just feeling neutral, is enough to make us lose status in the eyes of others, it can be the source of ridicule and shame. Being anything less than perfectly happy can be enough to make you a subject of pity. So even though happiness is not directly controlled, if you exist in a culture with these norms, some of your social governors (associated with emotions like shame and drives for status) will vote for you to do things that will make you happy, just so you can get one over on the Joneses.
But our social emotions are not voting to make us happy per se — they are actually concerned with making sure we avoid the social consequences that would come from appearing unhappy. They want to make sure that we don’t lose status for being seen as gloomy, and keep us from feeling shame for our melancholy. One way to do this is to vote for actions that will make you happier. But equally good, better even, is to vote for actions that make you seem happy!
So other things being equal, the social emotions tend to drive us towards the appearance of happiness, rather than actual happiness. Actual happiness may or may not make us appear happy in a way that will increase our status or reduce our shame. But the appearance of happiness always appears happy. So that’s what gets the votes.
This is what makes people neurotic about not being as happy as they should be. When they’re feeling reflective, it makes some people worry that they are fake, since they feel consistently driven towards the appearance of happiness, even at the expense of what would actually make them happy.
This is a well-known problem in contemporary American culture, and for cultures that have borrowed American standards for happiness. But most other cultures don’t expect people to be happy all the time. Without this expectation, people from these cultures don’t have the problem of feeling like they must both seek happiness and perform it, and don’t run into this weird vicious cycle. (Though of course, other cultures have problems of their own.)
For a similar example, consider the problem of self-sabotage. In some cultures and contexts it’s not appropriate to perform better than your peers, or to get too much better too quickly (cf. tall poppy syndrome). In this case, some of the social governors will vote against performing your best, to avoid the social disapproval that might come from performing better than you “should”.
This suggests that the treatment for self-sabotage is to surround yourself with people who think that failure is shameful and success is impressive, rather than the other way around. And it suggests that something you can do for the people around you is to express polite disappointment when they accomplish less than they hope for and genuine enthusiasm when they accomplish more. Even an expression of envy can be a supportive thing to do for your friends, as long as it’s clear that it comes from a place of admiration rather than competition.
Of course, if you go too far in this direction, you can end up with a culture that is neurotic about success rather than about conformity. Decide your own point on the tradeoff, but we’d argue that self-sabotage is worse than pushing yourself too hard.
Why do people sometimes seek out extreme experiences? Why do we subject ourselves to things like roller coasters, saunas, horror movies, extreme sports, and even outright suffering?
Psychologist Paul Bloom explains these decisions in terms of chosen suffering versus unchosen suffering. For example, in this interview he says, “You should avoid being assaulted… there’s no bright side to the death of a loved one… there’s no happiness in watching your house burn down… nor is there happiness to be found in getting a horrible disease. Unchosen suffering is awful.”
In contrast he says, “chosen suffering, the sort of suffering we seek-out can be a source of pleasure … You choose to have kids, you choose to run a marathon, you choose to eat spicy food. You choose these things because there’s a payoff later in future pleasure.”
We think this is close. He’s picked the right examples, but getting assaulted, losing a loved one, or getting a horrible disease, are just bad. Choosing them wouldn’t make them any better. So it can’t be the chosen versus unchosen nature of these examples that makes the difference.
A better way to think about this is whether the suffering is under your control. If suffering is under your control, it can be corrected at any time. Since happiness is generated when errors are corrected, then controlled suffering is a neat hack — it’s a free way to generate happiness at no risk to actual life and limb.
Controlled suffering is like a sauna or a horror movie. You’re sweating or you’re scared, but you can stop at any time, and stopping feels pretty great, it’s a relief. The uncontrolled version would be more like being trapped in a sauna, or locked inside a haunted house — not so pleasurable, and not the sort of thing people go looking for. A really uncontrolled version would be the experience of being trapped inside a burning building, or being chased by an actual serial killer, where the stakes are not only real, they have permanent consequences.
When given a choice, people only tend to choose controlled suffering, and tend to suffer uncontrolled suffering only against their choosing. So almost all chosen suffering is controlled, and all uncontrolled suffering is unchosen. This should come as no surprise. But this has led Bloom to mistake the choosing for the active ingredient, rather than the controlled nature of the suffering.
Choosing uncontrolled suffering doesn’t make it good for you. Choosing to get assaulted is about as bad as getting assaulted by accident. Unchosen but controlled suffering isn’t usually that bad. Taking a wrong turn and ending up in the sauna by mistake is not that much of a bummer.
If you do want to become happier, the solution is simple — make yourself hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, tired, lonely, scared, etc. And then correct these errors promptly. It will feel amazing. If it doesn’t feel amazing, you are probably depressed in some more serious way. (See upcoming sections for more speculation about what this means for you.)
Donald Trump says lots of things that aren’t true, and if you’re a reader of this newsletter, it is extremely unlikely that he’s ever persuaded you with any of his lies.
In part, that’s because Slow Boring readers are discerning, intelligent people who are harder to dupe than the average human being. But it’s also because we all, no matter how open-minded, process new information through the lens of what we already believe.
I have no idea what the 8,000 or so employees of the US Fish and Wildlife Service do. But if Elon Musk tweets tomorrow that he has uncovered vast quantities of fraudulent spending in the USFWS, my assumption will be that he’s full of shit. Not because I have any strong views about the agency, but because I have a well-founded view that Musk tweets a lot of nonsense and, more specifically, has a habit of wildly overstating and mischaracterizing facts about federal spending.
By contrast, if Barack Obama says tomorrow that there’s a ton of waste in the USFWS that he was never able to tackle due to the political clout of Big Fish, my assumption will be that there’s something fishy with this agency.
Of course, a reasonable person — especially someone like me whose job depends on it — does try to do some due diligence and independent thinking. Trump once said something fairly garbled about the need to rake forests to avert wildfires, which generated a lot of knee-jerk progressive derision. But it is, in fact, true that “mechanical fuel reduction” (which could include raking) is an effective wildfire mitigation strategy, and if you think about something like the recent LA wildfires, it’s not really plausible that you would do a lot of controlled burning so close to densely built suburbs. In other words, the heuristic “don’t believe a liar” can fail you. But it’s pretty good! You’re much more likely to be taken in by something untrue or misleading said by somebody that you trust than by an opponent.
This is all kind of obvious, but I think it’s underrated in discussions of political misinformation and investments in media and advocacy organizations.
It’s pretty easy to persuade a large minority of the public of something, but the people you persuade are almost certainly going to be people who would vote for you anyway. Convincing high-value persuasion targets is a lot harder. And there can be huge second-order downsides to convincing your supporters of things that are not actually true. It may feel savvy to support sloppy, misleading, or inaccurate work from your own side, but it’s often counterproductive.
Whatever motivations or goals underlie DOGE, I think we can assume most of them come down to Donald Trump’s affection for anything that maximizes his personal power and sense of control. Of course, some on the right view the civil service as not only having, in the aggregate, left-of-center political opinions, but as constituting a critical left-wing institutional pillar, such that a mass layoff of USFWS employees would crush the left.
I am pretty skeptical of that theory, but it hasn’t been empirically tested, so it at least might be true.
What is definitely not true is that cutting federal civilian personnel costs will meaningfully alter the trajectory of the federal fiscal situation. Total personnel spending is about 0.2 percent of GDP, while the budget deficit is about 6.3 percent of GDP and rising due to population aging. Obviously, on some level, every little bit helps, and there’s no excuse for genuinely wasteful spending. But it’s just not true that you can cut taxes, maintain benefits for the elderly, and reduce the budget deficit by firing bureaucrats. And it’s especially not true that you can do that without visibly degrading the quality of public services.
I recently spoke to a smart, DOGE-skeptical center-right fiscal policy professional, and he assured me that there are normal conservative budget analysts working in the Trump administration who are aware of this. Their pitch to him was that Republicans have tried charging at retirement programs in the past, only to suffer massive political defeat. My interpretation of that cycle of events is that Republicans should be more open to bipartisan proposals that would feature revenue-increasing tax reform. But their interpretation is that Republicans need to really go to town on “waste” to earn credibility.
I don’t think that makes a ton of sense. Regardless, though, it doesn’t match what’s actually happening with DOGE, which is that Musk is promising people their benefits will go up even as Republicans enact multi-trillion dollar tax cuts.
To the extent that Musk can convince swing voters that this is true, he has a winning piece of political rhetoric. But it’s not true. And Musk is much more likely to persuade hard-core Republicans that this is true than he is to persuade swing voters, even though there’s no electoral value to persuading hard-core Republicans of false things about fiscal policy! Most of what he’s accomplishing here is making it tactically and strategically harder for Republicans to advance conservative fiscal policy arguments by undermining conservative budget experts in the eyes of the conservative base.
A progressive version of this emerged about five years ago, when arguments started popping up that wind and solar power had become cheaper sources of electricity than fossil fuels. This is based on a concept called the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) that, unfortunately, paints a misleading view of the situation.
What is true is that solar panels have become very cheap to manufacture, such that a well-located utility-scale solar plant is cheaper to build than a fossil fuel plant that generates the same amount of electricity over the course of a year. This is a true fact with some genuine economic significance, and it explains why a country like China that doesn’t appear to care much about climate change is building a lot of renewable energy infrastructure.
But the inference progressives wanted to draw from this LCOE framework — that there were no economic downsides to trying to strangle fossil fuel extraction — is totally wrong. The issue is that solar intermittency, which is easy to ignore when you’re not using that much solar power, becomes a bigger and bigger deal the more solar grows as a share of the total electricity mix. You start needing to overbuild, to add expensive storage features, or to maintain purpose-built natural gas backups. This doesn’t mean solar is useless (it’s very useful) or that the problems are unsolvable. But the problems do exist.
Spinning about this didn’t do much to persuade swing voters, but it did confuse a lot of Democrats into signing up for 100 percent renewable energy pledges that they mistakenly thought would be cheap and easy to fulfill. In the end, the Biden administration pursued a pretty sensible and balanced course on energy. But they did come out swinging after inauguration with ideas, like banning all new public lands oil and gas leasing, that would have been harmful if implemented. And when they ended up not doing anything close to that, they faced backlash for betraying climate pledges that never made sense to make.
At some point during the 2024 campaign, you probably heard that overall post-Covid inflation was about the same in the United States and Europe.
As far as partisan talking points go, this one has the virtue of being true. That said, Democrats’ goal in making this observation was to convince people that the Biden administration’s policy choices had nothing to do with the inflation that people experienced. This, unfortunately, is doubly wrong. For starters, the initial inflationary impulse largely came from flush consumers buying durable goods faster than they could be produced or shipped. The US market is so large that American consumers are able to move the price of globally shipped manufactured items, which pushed up prices in Portugal and Denmark, just as it did here.
But the bigger issue is energy.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine increased the price of oil and natural gas around the world. The United States, however, produces a lot of oil and gas. So while the spike in oil prices hurt consumers everywhere, in Europe it pushed the exchange rate down (because they import so much oil), which hurt Europeans’ ability to buy basically everything. In America, the impact was more balanced. On gas, things diverged even more. Trading natural gas requires extensive physical infrastructure. When Russian gas flows to Europe were curtailed, that spiked prices in Europe where the pipelines go. America’s natural gas infrastructure is physically disconnected from the Eurasian pipeline network, so the price impact here was muted. It is possible to put liquified natural gas on boats and ship it to Europe, which happened as a result of the war, but capacity constraints prevent the prices from equalizing.
The upshot is that while it’s factually accurate to say that inflation was similar on both sides of the Atlantic, this is partly a coincidence. Supply-side and demand-side factors played a role in both places, but Europe had a bigger negative supply shock and we had a larger demand overshoot.
You can’t blame anyone for trying to run a winning campaign. But this kind of rhetoric was more effective at exonerating Biden-era policymaking in the eyes of Democratic Party operatives and politicians than in the eyes of the voters. Which is a problem if you want those operatives and politicians to learn from errors and make better decisions in the future.
Similarly, conservatives spent a lot of time during the Biden years posting charts showing that net job growth was all due to immigration in an effort to imply that native-born Americans were being disemployed in large numbers by Biden’s border policies.
The actual situation is that the working-age population is shrinking, so either net employment is driven by immigrants (because native-born Americans are retiring faster than they age into the workforce) or else the labor force is shrinking.
That analysis does not, in and of itself, prescribe any particular immigration policy, nor does it excuse some of the Biden administration’s mistakes. But it does mean that the actual tradeoffs facing the Trump administration as it seeks to step up the pace of deportations are different and tougher than true believers in this rhetoric would like.
If you take the misleading tweets seriously, deportations will boost the economic fortunes of American citizens. The fact that this is not actually true is something that Republicans should think about, but don’t seem to be.
My bottom line on this is that saying things that are true is underrated and saying things that are false is overrated.
We’re all acutely aware of the false or misleading things our political opponents say, and it’s easy to convince yourself in the spirit of “turnabout is fair play” that the key to victory is to play dirty, too. The real problem, though, is that not only does your side already say more false and misleading things than you’d like to admit, but they are almost certainly saying more false and misleading things than you realize. That’s because your side is much better at misleading you than they are at misleading people outside of your ideological camp, and this kind of own-team deception creates huge tactical and strategic problems.
To return to DOGE, I keep hearing from rightists online that we need to try Trump’s disruptive approach because no other route to curbing spending has ever worked.
This is just not true.
The main reason spending never fell during Trump’s prior term is that Trump never made an effort to prioritize spending cuts in an appropriations negotiation. When Obama was president, congressional Republicans did push hard for cuts and as a result, spending fell. In response to GOP efforts, Obama tried to sell them on prioritizing long-term deficit reduction — even larger spending cuts paired with revenue-raising tax reform — and they said no. But back when Bill Clinton was president, Democrats passed balanced deficit reduction on a party line vote in 1993. And during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, a bipartisan balanced deficit reduction package passed.
It’s definitely true that most of these things happened before online rightists were paying attention to politics, possibly before many of them were alive. But that just goes to show how useful it is to learn true facts about the world rather than spend your life swimming in misinformation. I’m sure some of the people behind this drive are operating in bad faith and pursuing objectives other than the stated fiscal goals. But whenever you get large numbers of people saying things that aren’t true, they end up convincing lots of other people — mostly on their side — and those people start making bad decisions based on faulty information.
It’s genuinely much better for elected officials, donors, and activists to try to prioritize disseminating accurate information rather than trying to snow the public with propaganda — both because honesty is a virtue, and because the instrumental value of propaganda is really easy to overestimate.
Log in
