This morning, I was talking with my wife about Ally Louks/“Dr. Smells” discourse, and we agreed that there wouldn’t have been even 1/1,000th of the backlash if Louks wasn’t attractive.
Ultimately, a lot of these angry chuds’ real fundamental resentment is that they feel attracted to women who post pictures and videos of themselves online, but no woman who looks like that in the real world would ever fuck them unless they paid a significant amount for it, and it frustrates them.
Because acknowledging what’s really going on would make them feel bad about themselves, they sublimate their feelings into these elaborate conspiratorial political ideologies and fantasies about how the economy works.
Honestly makes me miss the version of the manosphere that was like pick-up artist types. They were cringey and manipulative, but they at least encouraged these guys to try to address the thing they’re really frustrated about by working to get better at attracting women and meeting them in the real world.
This, 100%. Substacker “Sympathetic Opposition” had a great post a while back about how men resent feeling manipulated by sex appeal. I don’t think those Australian girls were trying to do that, but everything on the Internet gets stripped of context and weaponized.
I enjoyed that post too. TBH, though, as a man, I mostly think that guys who get mad because a woman made them feel horny need to grow up. Basic emotional self-regulation is part of being an adult.
Yeah it sort of seems like the juxtaposition between being attractive and doing something these men find a waste of time instead of fucking them and having their children is the thing that enrages them the most.
I think this comment is half right. Of course, 4chan losers expecting beautiful women to flock to them are going to fail, and should be decried for their miserable, selfish takes on relationships. Such individuals should improve themselves, get fit, get good jobs, learn to talk to people (etc etc.)
It's half wrong though, because (in my opinion) the 4chan loser types are disproportionally highlighted in social media spaces, and there are absolutely are men who *do* try be authentically desirable partners.
Looking in places like r/loveafterporn and r/deadbedrooms, it's.... unsurprising to me. I agree that expecting a hyper manicured bimbo akin to some OnlyFans model is not reasonable. And yet, there is pervasive content that signals that marriage is, *as an practically unshakeable rule*, about walking down the aisle to transform one's hard-won partner into a snuggie monster.
So the discourse will continue to shame those who don't play along. I simply don't get it; it feels to me that over the long term, *of course* the porn will win out. Why would men turn to loving their real, in person spouse, rather than the person online - *when their spouse holds the idea of turning them on, in deep contempt*? The discourse can continue to assume all such disillusioned men are insufferable, no-value losers, and the gender gap will continue to grow, IMO.
I feel like the current manosphere is all about avoid being introspective and looking out for “enemy” - this is very conducive to manipulation and I feel like that’s what we see now.
If anything, what the manipulator(Musk, Trump, Tate etc) and those GWs have in common is the feeling that they don’t get the treatment they deserve and others are to blame for it. (For Musk and Trump, the sense of victimhood is primarily bc of Narcissistic disorder I think even though I’m not here to diagnose lol)
Attractiveness can definitely make someone be a focal point for discussion of an issue, but the issue still needs to be there in the first place.
Louks' looks (sorry) contributed to this particular kerfuffle, as did the exceptionally silly title of her dissertation as well as her dedication to and real talent for Poasting.
But there really is a general phenomenon where academics a) spend many years of effort, often while largely publicly funded, b) to produce scholarship of dubious intellectual value c) that is uncritically premised on the blanket acceptance of extreme-left politics and d) doesn't even have anything original to say about those politics. (Now, if some English PhD showed how a close reading of Moby Dick tells us why we need to repeal the Jones Act, that I'd listen to.)
And I think opposition to this is pretty reasonable! Sure, it can go too far or mask bad motives (viz., DOGE), and there are worse problems in the world. And Louks obviously didn't deserve threats, nor did she really deserve to be a Twitter main character.
But to get unnecessarily highbrow, this is sort of like saying that Johann Tetzel didn't deserve to become the symbol of Church corruption that Luther and the other reformers made him out to be. Sure, he wasn't worse than a hundred other people doing the same thing. But he was absolutely part of a venial and destructive system, and he fully endorsed that system.
You can’t know what discoveries will or will not be worth it in the long run, so much like defunding NIH, this just leads to shuttering entire programs.
Well indeed. Because Dr Louks strikes me as a mediocre intellect who's probably giggled and poured her way through he academicr career. Believe me I've seen it enough. Enough to believe that women should not be allowed any access to higher education
I had forgotten about the Dr. Smells thing and googled her just now - holy crap, she's so perfectly adorable and hot that it kind of hurts. And to know that she's really smart too, enough to be a lit professor, only makes her more attractive to me. Even in my prime she would never have given me the time of day.
But I'm just...okay with that.
I guess perhaps it's just personal growth on my part or perhaps the wisdom that comes my older age, but I firly believe that beautiful women have the right to be beautiful and be themselves without any feedback from me.
Part of me sympathizes with these guys because I would totally have been into the manopshere if it existed back in the day. I was filled with resentment against women - though I had the good instinct to keep it mostly to myself (otherwise I likely would have never had sex at all).
But then I was a real piece of shit sometimes. I've come a long way, but the best part is that when I learned to respect women I also learned to respect myself.
Sure, but I'll just say this: I wouldn't want these women. They've got nothing in common with me and frankly, I won't have any intellectual or emotional connection with them. If they're simping for them based off of looks, then they're just as shallow.
As for PUAs, maybe, but they don't need PUAs. Doing what a PUA does won't make them fulfilled. They need social skills coaches, and when the time comes, dating coaches who aren't PUAs. Perhaps even female dating coaches who truly look out for their male clients and want them to succeed, and have experience working with introverts and/or neurodivergents.
I don’t think that you’re the kind of guy I’m talking about here— you’re not running around posting about how we need to destroy US state capacity and push the country’s economy back down the global value chain so we can “RETVRN” to an era of patriarchal dominance. You’re a lot more self-aware than those guys.
Your last paragraph is a good point but it runs into the problem that the PUAs exist (or at least existed) and, frankly, the social skills couches really don’t, at least not for people old enough to realize they need them and who have the resources to pursue them. I can personally vouch for looking for something like that a few years ago (after I had some income/savings to throw around), and everything I found was uniformly aimed at children or teenagers. I never fell down the PUA rabbit hole (they were too obviously snake oil salesmen) but let’s not pretend that alternative help is accessible.
It's for basic social skills, but it teaches you how to interact with other from the ground up. My friend (female, also neurodivergent) gave it to me as a Christmas present and I found it to be useful.
Who are "these women," though? The girls in the video are young for me and giving off subcultural cues that we're not very similar. But women who I am super attracted to in meatspace work the same jobs (admin)
I don't mean them specifically, but I mean hyper-social girlbosses. I know enough of them from my undergrad - they don't have much in common with me in terms of interests, hobbies, etc.
I work with a lot of young men in tech (think male, mid-20s coder from a top 20ish CS school at their first coding job) and this hits the nail on the head. Scratch the surface of their general belief structure and you'll find some of the most reactionary politics you've ever seen. What can trip people up is these folks don't identify as conservative, or even political. They'll describe themselves as "moderates" or "centrists" and typically say they aren't particularly political or express anodyne "all politicians are crooks" views. But, get them talking about political issues, and you'll get real 4chan level stuff. Things like "Taylor Swift is a bad role model for girls because she's in her 30s and unmarried without kids." I have heard variations of this from multiple young men in tech.
I started noticing this in 2023 because as a recovering debate asshole I'll happily talk politics with anyone. They don't lead with gender dynamics because they absolutely know how toxic their beliefs are. You have to work your way there but once you do, it quickly becomes clear that the gender politics (and sometimes but not always racial politics) is the root.
There is a lot of interesting things I could say about the rest of their political belief structure, how it is philosophically incoherent and seems optimized to make arguments against straw men that you might find in a 3rd tier conservative political commentator video. But the more interesting question for the purposes of this comment is how did this develop.
On some level, young men in tech having somewhat reactionary politics isn't surprising. When I was a young man in tech I had pretty terrible politics (exacerbated by the aforementioned debate asshole stuff), but this feels stickier. 25 year-old me wouldn't have actually voted for Trump.
My sense is a lot of these guys were sold on a vision of their CS degree unlocking massive wealth straight out of undergrad, and then graduated into a big tech job market that was pretty hostile to young coders. These guys already had some built in gender resentment from going through college during what they might call "peak woke" and so the reaction to the down job market is actually about women taking those plum jobs they thought they deserved. Feeding into all of this is the sexual resentment that CHH describes, and I suspect a lot of this is downstream of Covid. Folks in their mid-20s lost part or all of the important college and immediately post-college socialization experience to lockdowns. Losing multiple years in this critical period does not help romantic/sexual success, and for our stereotypical nerdy CS guy...well they need all the help they can get. Moreover, without the in-person socialization experience I suspect the social benefits from having more women in your classes and/or new employee cohort is very easy to miss.
Sitting along side this is the mainstreaming of much more radical gender commentators. In 2015 your mainstream anti-feminists were folks like Christa Hoff Sommers, maybe you had exposure to some really noxious folks like Milo through gamer gate, but if you wanted "red pill"/incel content you had to go seek that out or 4chan or other niche forums. Now its just kinda everywhere online as CHH helpfully demonstrates with all of those tweets. All of this feeds into a noxious set of politics especially around gender relations which...isn't exactly helping romantically. Maybe these guys will eventually find their stay at home mother of 5 kids (because they are very concerned about birth rates and need to do their part!), but I'm very concerned about how this develops over the next decade.
Interesting data point about young tech workers! It challenges CHH’s theory that this is mostly a working-class male thing.
While I’m a staunch feminist and absolutely loathe the new misogyny, I do think that recent feminism erred with its near-obsessive focus on getting more women into the tech industry, and on fighting supposed workplace discrimination there. As I understand it, the wage gap is really a motherhood penalty, which ought to be challenged by sharing childcare more equally and making workplaces more family-friendly.
So I pretty strongly disagree with this. I think you are conflating two things here. When people talk about the wage gap there are a bunch of ways to define it and how you define it gets you to different conclusions. If you are looking at, wage gap within the same job role, that appears to be strongly driven by motherhood and related factors. If you look at society-wide with full-time employment there there are effects from the differences in what jobs people take. I agree with you about how we can do better on the motherhood penalty, but it seems bad if one of the highest earning and most politically influential (especially if you believe the AI boosters) fields is somewhere between 3:1 and 6:1 men depending on how you measure.
I think we can absolutely do better in tech, especially early in the pipeline (early undergraduate seems to be a particular bottleneck according to CS professors I talk to). I think a lot of employers have really improved over the past decade plus, and also there's a lot of folks that need to age out before things can improve. [Side note: I think some of the issues the young men are feeling around tech employment is because we're basically trying to improve gender balance by changing hiring when we'd have more success improving tech gender dynamics if companies were more aggressive pushing out the mid/late career folks who aren't going to get with the times.].
One of the things I'm very concerned about under the new administration is that companies are going to snap back very hard and we're going to see improvements on tech for women regress badly.
I'll also point out that I think young men in tech are kind of the exception that proves the rule here. I think CHH is right, most of the resentment is working class men (see my comments on the post earlier this week) but in tech there is this very toxic strain of politics that we see reflected in DOGE.
Part of the problem with young developers is that they've been in such male spaces for so long that they just haven't had opportunities to engage with women organically, so those abilities were atrophied or just stillborn.
Admitting that you are just a total amateur at having a conversation with a woman is hard for people who are otherwise highly-competent, competitive, and high-achieving in this other domain of their life. Like most other things, they could get better at this skill with practice, but where could they even practice, since their workplace and hobbies are all such sausage-fests! Even when they "branch out" from computer science and geeky fixations from childhood, it's into other male-coded areas, like personal fitness or edgy right-wing politics.
These men would have FAR better romantic prospects if they were placed in educational and early career cohorts with women so that they could co-evolve their personality with a mixed-gender group, organically relate to women at formative ages, and overlap interests with potential female friends and romantic prospects. That's the irony of all of this! Feminism and gender diversity would help them where it hurts!
Returning to this bc article free, I think there's actually an interesting overlap here. As CHH points out, most of the roles that are disproportionately women are things like "office clerks, receptionists and secretaries" - that is, basically who the guys quoted as hating HR ladies are talking about.
Basically I think it /is/ a class thing, but as usual, it's hatred from one group of lower-middle class to same people one step up the ladder, and a lot more informed by personal envies and resentments than anything else.
I think there's an element of this, but not in the context of the @Ben's post talking about the tech industry. Young coders are the workhorses of the tech sector: they are not high on the ladder but they are not below the HR/admin staff in the corporate pecking order. Maybe they resent the product owners and sales people telling them what features to build, though.
Attacking people like Christa Hoff and Jordan Peterson also didn’t really help. They were actually moderates and still believed in equality and respect. The cancellation attempts only resulted in a new crop of influencers who are too extreme to get cancelled.
Also, I agree w/ your point re: childrearing, and I am still optimistic that a reapportionment of expectations around family and relationship roles is be the "dawn" that this darkness is preceding
You list a bunch of things that could cause young male tech workers to go reactionary - perhaps it is overdetermined. :-(
"My sense is a lot of these guys were sold on a vision of their CS degree unlocking massive wealth straight out of undergrad, and then graduated into a big tech job market that was pretty hostile to young coders" is new compared to when I was a CS undergrad
(30 years ago...good. lord.)
I don't think I knew anyone with this kind of reactionary view. We weren't in it for the money, but we also didn't have r/redpill.
I don't think its overdetermined exactly. A lot of the structural things are amped up versions of what was happening around the time I finished ugrad (2012). CS classes hadn't become totally overrun (my alma mater has 50% of the incoming freshmen taking the intro CS series this year!), but you were starting to get 50% growth YOY in the intro classes. Big tech comp hadn't quite spiked yet, but I knew friends who were still getting mid 100K TC starting which seemed incredible. Wokeness on college campuses was just starting to become a big political topic, this is the era of all the arguments over affirmative consent requirements. And, realistically my friends and I had pretty rough views about politics.
But also, we all voted for Obama without Romney ever being a live option. We were at our core a bunch of folks who were raised liberal, vaguely annoyed at liberal cultural norms, but when push came to shove, we were still liberals. And also, we all basically grew out of those politics.
Young men, especially young men in predominantly male spaces, having these kind of views isn't unusual, recall that Gamergate is just a couple years after I graduated (and oof I don't want to revisit some of what I was writing in various forum threads during that time...). What strikes me as new and worrying is I don't get the impression these guys are going to grow out of it.
Its entirely possible that just the extension of these trends caused the change but I don't think so. I don't see the same thing in folks who graduated in 2017-2018 as folks who graduated in 2020-2022. So either there was some weird tipping point effect or something else. I think it was Covid that broke things. Take all of that in-person socialization, good for building empathy and social skills and shove it into online spaces where you aren't building those skills and are more exposed to the more noxious versions of your views, and the different trajectory seems pretty expected.
So now what, you are 25, you feel like you were cheated out of a formative period of your life (and I think its fair to say you were), and the folks around you blame scared (not a very masculine impulse!) liberals for excessive lockdowns. Your social skills probably haven't improved much since college, maybe they've actually degraded because you've spent so much time online. And now you are dumped into the hell that is online dating. It is really easy to see how this curdles into extreme resentment, which obviously doesn't help your romantic prospects. This is a doom loop thats going to be really hard to break.
The good news is that new cohorts of young people are continuously entering and graduating from college, and so if your thesis about much of this being downstream from COVID (which I think is plausible) is correct, hopefully this will just be a weird slice of this generation and the youngest Gen Zs and Gen Alpha will return to more of what we'd expect.
To add my own two cents: when I graduated in 2016 it was easy to feel like I was surrounded on all sides by people who felt entitled to my help (“check your privilege “), but who reacted with at best contempt and indifference whenever I asked for help myself (“stop acting so entitled”). “Extreme resentment” is a fair (if imprecise) description of what I was feeling at the time, and it is easy to see how someone a decade younger than me would have it even worse
Commenting this now as it became free but this feels very spot on.
I work in tech adjacent role/industry (Data Science) but the job market for new grads post 2022 sounds really really rough. I heard from some of new hires how they struggled to find the internships. And the new grads software engineer role if anything is the most likely to be slashed as tech giants find way to hire less ppl due to LLM.
Also, one of the stuff that work against them is how Bay Area dating pool is unbalanced gender wise - in fact, I suspect one of the reasons many mid career (like 4-5 + years) software engineers moving to NYC is this…
Yeah, I wonder where all this resentment gets directed once the Trumpcession doesn’t fix anything for them. The pessimist in me says some kind of horrible Handmaid’s Tale shit, but that’s a big leap, and I’m not sure they’d be able to pull that off.
I like fundamentally have to throw up my hands at some level and say every time I’m exposed to this culture it’s so damned weird it’s like trying to communicate with an orca or something.
Coming from a place that’s like the opposite pole of relationship and career dynamics at some level it’s truly hard to comprehend. I’m kind of weird in like the opposite direction and would be thrilled to be a stay at home dad and be friends with a bunch of women I’m not pursuing romantically. It feels like too big of a gap of priorities to even really understand.
The coolest creatures who largely live in matriarchal societies where the hot fashion trend is wearing dead seals and salmon as hats, definitely wouldn't have time for this discourse, hahah.
I don’t get that. If you are a straight man who likes attractive women, you should want them to have a good time. Wanting a world where broke women fuck you out of desperation is sad.
As someone who really struggled with dating until ~25 but has since aged out of it and gotten married, it really does suck in a way that it is hard to comprehend if you haven't been through it. But the advice at the end is basically how I pulled myself out of it. But I’m sure I creeped out a lot of women early on in that process and it was not fun at all.
As someone whose story is similar to yours, the thing that is wild to me is the advice at the end was totally bog-standard, like, 15 years ago. It was so bog-standard that it almost didn't need to be said. Now if you say that, half the internet will call you a misandrist, and half will call you a reactionary....even though it's still true.
Totally! The thing is, dating is similarly difficult for a not-insignificant number of women, and this has always seemed totally invisible in the incel discourse (even though the term incel was, I believe, actually coined by a woman). Dating is often hard (and no, not only because all women are just always simply drowning in male attention all the time).
It can be very frustrating to try to help, because so many of them will shoot down any suggestions. It sucks because it’s hard but there really is no other alternative to working on yourself and getting out there socially.
Mm yeah this is very true. I think of this as a sort of specific stage in depression, because I’ve experienced and seen similar outside the context of incels. I don’t think sympathy for it precludes recognizing that it is obnoxious to deal with!
Ultimately in that space I don’t think there is any comment one can make that it helpful, because I think the individual is using those comments as a way to “reaffirm” their depressive conclusions (bc they’re able to dismiss them, proving them “false”).
I behaved in the same way myself when I was really severely depressed. My mom probably wanted to throttle me. Ultimately the only solution is for the depression to lift.
The problem is the same one that the consumer Internet and social media and digital echo-chambers has created: it's SO easy to find justifications online for anything now. And the human brain is always looking for shortcuts: we don't want to put in the work if we don't have to.
So if the shortcut is that you find "your people" on Reddit, or Fox News, or Twitter/X or 4Chan, or your favorite podcast telling you that your dysfunctional, anti-social, and so far unsuccessful approach is totally normal and fine and maybe even ~based~, then why question that? Maybe just double-down! It's THEY who are wrong!
I feel like this is primarily Musk buying Twitter - that said, as the algo gets better optimizing for engagement, we see more deranged takes as it gets more attention be it positive or negative…
I think you're right but that CCH is also right. Your explanation goes for all the standard, long-time Republicans and conservatives. But it doesn't explain why youngish, secular tech-adjacent men swung hard towards this (ie the tech right), and the tech right was absolutely crucial to Trump winning the last election. For that cohort, I absolutely think CHH nailed it.
As someone actually in tech, no - CCH is nowhere near correct. For one she talks about economic insecurity and people actually in tech are mostly incredibly well paid. Most people don’t really act in the way she describes.
What's missing from both takes is a major takeaway from evo psy: male competition. "Conservative" men for chimpy culture (or hatred of bonobo-ish culture) believe status is a zero-sum game or "lump of labor" theory, instead of playing positive-sum games (abundance meritocracy). They want other men, women, & children to be immiserated or die. Thus GOP or chimpy cults predictably increase mortality rates.
I could argue about federal spending and womens transfers all day and it probably does make a difference at the margins but as a man who has given advice to other men who struggle with women, most of these guys do not want to be helped, they don't want to practice their social skills, they don't want to lose the excess 20lbs, they don't want to improve their style.
The reality is there is a thing called "game" and it absolutely can be practiced and improved. No one loves you just for you except your dog and maybe your mom.
YES! I had an insight about this just now, bc there is another online group where the same dynamics happens: online communist larp babies (for want of a better term ;-)
The US left is made up of two very disparate groups: FARC-style armed struggle enthusiasts, and refugees from the cruelty of hypercapitalism. The former want, well...a FARC style armed struggle, the latter just want a society that is more caring and inclusive.
This difference comes to a head when discussing The Revolution. When FARCies mention ppl should start working out to prepare for the revolution, the commie-babies will throw extreme tantrums. Many were baffled by this, until a few twitterers realised that to commie babies, The Revolution is simply The Rapture, but leftistly. A zero effort 180 change of society, after which eternal bliss.
I was grumbling to myself about how it's so weird that incel types want society to change when it's so much easier & within your control to change yourself, when it suddenly dawned on me that the core problem is the same: EFFORT-REFUSAL. When they think about "changing society" they don't see it in the terms of effort/hard work to turn a large ship around, but in the magical, rapture, overnight 180 sense that commie babies see The Revolution.
I just want to say that every time I see someone online, left or right, genuinely express the opinion that the solution to the problems in the US is not some sort of reform through an election system by starting a grassroots movement to convince people you are correct but instead to fund a civil war where you kill people who disagree with you in order to convince others you’re correct I roll my eyes. Which is easier, convincing people who disagree with you your correct or convincing them to give you power while trying to murder them for having the wrong views. It’s farcical.
Great comment. But I'd go further: even your dog doesn't love you just for you. You can absolutely invest in that relationship or not. So many owners don't walk their dogs, never play with them, and give them zero attention. "Hey, at least I feed it," goes for responsible pet-ownership to people who haven't taken any time to observe their animal's obvious emotional, psychological, and mental needs.
When you do this as a parent, the relationship with the child is famously bad. But, wouldn't you know it, a lot of men have a model for parenting that is totally neglectful or worse. When they reproduce "normal," they get something unexpectedly unsuccessful. "Hey, at least I provide for you!" Or, "at least I don't beat the sh*t out of you, like my dad did!" isn't a pitch for quality parenting.
Even your relationship with your mom who "loves you no matter what" can be better or worse with attention and care. The most boorish jerk implicitly understands this, which is why Mother's Day is a thing. But just sending flowers sometimes is still dialing it in, and I think we all know this, deep down.
There's NOTHING in life socially important or valuable to us that will flourish without our nurturing or maintenance. These men need to take that idea and baste in it until it sinks in.
I’m not on Twitter and was blissfully unaware that this other part of the conversation was happening. (The conversation in the comments here was quite civil and sane.) But this article connected some dots for me.
One, the enthusiasm about AI in certain circles. I’m skeptical of AI in general, but even if it did become everything some people are predicting and more, I don’t think it will create a world where most people (including all women) are out of work. And if it did, I don’t think that would be a good world.
So the way people have been breathlessly and gleefully predicting the demise of most white-collar and creative jobs has been surprising to me. But if they think it’s a way to punish and trap independent women they resent, that makes a lot of sense.
(Incidentally, the supposed impending doom of lawyers is something that, as a lawyer, just makes me laugh. These people have no idea how much of lawyering is basically just holding your client’s hand.)
Two, I’ve never understood how the idea of marriage to someone who needs you to provide for them could be in any way appealing. Seems like it would be a real blow to your pride if the only attraction is that you’re a “provider.” But apparently that doesn’t bother them (at least conceptually — as you said, revealed preferences are another thing entirely).
Three, DOGE is one of the most moronic things I’ve ever witnessed, and I just don’t get how anyone can look at it and see anything other than a train wreck that’s going to severely affect state capacity. But people had to be cheering in on for some reason, and the reason you cite here certainly makes a grim sort of sense.
To your point about holding clients' hands, I think "caring" jobs will be among the very last to be replaced by AI. Sorry, totemic out-of-work factory guys, instead of learning to code you should have been retraining as preschool teachers.
This is SO true. People have a stereotype of coding that it's just a geek sequestered in a room doing difficult math and logic (and sometimes it is), but it is also very much something delivered to someone who wants very specific things they aren't very good at articulating. My husband's work stories as a programmer are VERY similar to my friend's stories as a freelance graphic designer. Most of what makes BOTH of them good at their jobs (better, if I may brag, than most people) is that they both have extremely good "people skills" and are willing to work with clients to figure out what the clients ACTUALLY want and to pitch compromises as to what is actually feasible.
There is an inverse relationship between seniority and number of hours spent writing code in software engineering, and this is something that I think the vast majority of people not in this job just don't understand.
Lol, 100%, as a fellow lawyer, I am honestly amazed how often my clients call me when THEY KNOW they're being charged outrageous amounts for each six minutes they talk to me, and so many of their calls are totally unnecessary and basically amount to therapy sessions or me talking them down from doing something stupid of them just wanting the emotional security of hearing my take (and of course these are 95% men). I'm still amazed they aren't just using ChatGPT more instead still bothering to call me.
Yes, wanting someone who is forced to be with you and pretending to like you so they have a roof over their head and food to eat doesn't sound very appealing to someone with options. But don't forget that a full third of CCH's recent survey takers are virgins. And many of these right-leaning incel-adjacent types are quite self-loathing, once you peel back a few layers. So sadly, I think many of them think that is the best they could ever hope for. And also in the tech world in particular, many of them just don't have good personalities/people skills or many friends period, so it may literally never occur to them that they could just be pleasant and enjoyable to be around, or that anyone who didnt need something might voluntarily elect to spend time with them.
I feel like because of the nature of legal regulations, lawyer is one of the last jobs that will be replaced by AI. Because it's not enough for ChatGPT to be able to write a brief and not hallucinate cases, you also have to have the judge accept the brief, and I suspect a lot of judges are going to say refuse AI-written briefs for a long time.
I could see an intermediate period where lawyers are writing briefs with AI and then reviewing them (and maybe some lawyers pretending they wrote them) on a large scale than is already happening, but lawyers can't be replaced by AI at scale until we start having laws and court rules saying X brief can be written by this certified AI tool.
Also important to realise that some ppl would rather be king of a trash heap than average in a nice house. They'd happily destroy civilisation in exchange for getting the "power" their ego tells them they deserve.
The thing about the discourse re: AI taking away jobs is it's historically ignorant. Predictions of permanent widespread job losses accompanying technological gains have a 0% batting average. Yes, CERTAIN jobs have been and can be replaced by automation/technology (the big example is many factory jobs in the 70s-80s), but the opportunities created by those efficiency gains end up creating more jobs than are lost, in many cases A LOT more jobs (not to mention people are needed to manage/troubleshoot the tech itself).
I studied labor economics in college, which is probably why I’m skeptical. Because, as you’ve pointed out, while entire job categories might be eliminated by technology, work itself never has been.
I’m skeptical this is going to happen to begin with. To be frank, I don’t think the AI hype is that credible.
But if it is, I don’t think the job loss is going to be immediate while the job creation is a few decades away. Even assuming that white-collar employers are cost-conscious in the sense that they want to replace expensive humans with less-expensive machines — an assumption that I don’t think is terribly accurate, for reasons I’ll get into below — most organizations tend to be risk-averse and slow to adapt. Which means white-collar employers are more likely to slowly incorporate AI and slowly get rid of workers (not hire a new employee after someone retires, for example) than to do a dramatic, all-at-once layoff.
So I think the job loss would happen simultaneous to the job creation, stretched over a period of decades, and the young people who otherwise would have replaced the retiring workers in the old jobs would go to the new jobs instead.
Now for the assumption and why I think it’s inaccurate. Basically, it’s a fantasy that organizations care *that* much about being cost-conscious or efficient. Bullshit jobs exist in organizations because 1) senior management likes offloading their annoying tasks on others, and 2) senior managers derive prestige and satisfaction from how many direct reports they have. You are never going to remove the human desire for fiefdoms, and barking out orders at some AI assistant will not satisfy a person who wants to be Important by having [X] number of direct reports.
If organizations really were models of efficiency, bullshit jobs wouldn’t exist. But they do, we all know they do, and while AI might gradually change the way they look, I don’t think they’re going away.
As for the idea that we’re going to have, I don’t know, androids replacing litigators in court, or robots without doctors in operating rooms, that’s the stuff of sci-fi.
Not sure I fully buy the paragraph about management needing direct reports to offload to, but I think the paragraph about law professions hams it home. The best AI in the world is NOT CLOSE to being able to fill in for legal counsel. At best it can currently assist paralegals doing doc review, but not even fully replace them.
I don't disagree with really anything you wrote above. There are credible arguments AI won't be transformative or that AI will be transformative but will be slow walked. Where we can disagree is confidence level.
There is IMO at least a 5% chance AI causes significant job loss over the next 5 years. You seem to think this is a non-existent possibility (or much, much lower 1 in 500 rather than 1 in 20)
To be fair, I could be wrong. I hope I’m not (because widespread job loss would be awful), and I don’t think I am just because the anxiety about AI seems predicated on organizations acting in a way that isn’t common for them to act.
Some context here: I’m general counsel for an organization that’s been extremely cautious about allowing employees to use AI in any way. There’s curiosity about it, but more in the sense that maybe someday, employees will be able to use a dedicated AI tool for research.
I’m sure there are organizations out there less cautious than mine, but my peers in other organizations tell me there’s similar caution where they work, too. Until the problem of hallucinations is resolved, there’s a real reluctance to use it for anything at all.
I'm an AI researcher and policy analyst, and this comment was interesting enough I felt the desire to red-team my beliefs by thinking of counterarguments.
You're totally right that diffusion of new technologies throughout an economy is gradual in general, and that we shouldn't expect most organizations, especially large incumbents, to quickly adopt the latest AI even if it is capable of automating much of their work. However, if we assume a scenario where technological progress is fast enough to develop systems capable of automating entire sectors within a short period of time, then this is a situation we have not really faced before, so precedent is a poor guide.
With progress that fast, how can it be realistic to expect that most of the economy will take literally decades to adopt this technology (with new entrants and companies using AI popping up all the time)? That is a situation which seems obviously untenable for the revenue of these slow-to-adopt incumbents who would supposedly take decades to fire the people who could be fired. A lean new entrant to the sector could, especially if started by someone senior with strong existing relationships, easily adopt this tech if it existed and outcompete larger firms
On your point 2—the coordination problem around the prestige of direct reports is (a) easily solved by simply having all managers in an organization decrease their number of reports simultaneously (implying the social value of a fixed number of reports increases) (b) the kind of thing that CEOs and CFOs are likely to force when looking at a massive salary bill
I get that this is probably hard to appreciate from inside an org which barely uses AI, but the productivity disparities here are going to get much sharper. In software engineering (currently one of the first roles to be increasingly automated) this is getting very noticeable, and it's possible to have a single person make an app in a month that would take a team of SWEs 6 months a decade ago.
Of course, this mostly happens in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, precisely because that is the *most aware* place of the technological frontier. But therefore, within the tech ecosystem, I expect (and many others have commented) that we should expect *more* disruption over the next 5 years than the previous 5, because large incumbents who previously had a moat at least partly dependent on the sheer amount of human hours to make their core product are now highly vulnerable—new startups with a year or so of operating can be the "equal" in quality of product as long-running giants.
Law is of course a uniquely challenging sector here due to the very human way it is practiced, but I still expect a significant slimming down of the sector. If you want a prediction, I do expect, within 10 years for it to be possible for the average medium sized cost-conscious firm seeking legal advice to pay an AI for advice worth into the millions and get back a product completely indistinguishable from a top flight law firm, with confidence in its reliability.
“Precedent is a poor guide” are fighting words to lawyers. 😊
But in all seriousness, while I can’t speak for all sectors of the economy, I can speak to law, and that isn’t a field vulnerable to new entrants and quick disruption. People retain lawyers and law firms based on their reputation, and “look at this cool new tech I use!” doesn’t impress clients in the same way as “I’ve never lost this kind of case, and I’ve been practicing for twenty years.”
There are certainly some legal tasks I can imagine being partly automated. Simple wills, for example. But so much of law is judgment, and I l’ve yet to see the AI that can think rather than just regurgitate. All the breathless predictions of AI-that-can-think are just not ones I find persuasive. If I’m wrong, so be it, and as a society we’ll have to figure out how to adjust. But five or so years ago I kept on hearing breathless predictions about virtual reality, and as I expected, the public didn’t buy in. The tech sector as a whole seems to have a problem with hype versus understanding human nature, especially how social (most) people are. People generally don’t want to deal with machines. They want to deal with people. (Dealing with machines too much already has made people desperately unhappy.) And the Luddites have won before, and I expect they will again if tech goes too far. No AI is going to save a company from an angry mob, and machines can always be smashed.
I also think the AI industry as a whole is a lot more vulnerable to IP lawsuits than they seem to realize. When the AI boosters are boasting that the whole point is to replace human workers, it’s going to be hard to argue fair use. No progress is going to be made by a company sued out of existence.
1. Even accepting you're right that AI is going to prove to be a normal shock in which higher level jobs are eventually created, the short-term matters. In the immediate aftermath of the industrial revolution wages declined. People alive in 1950 were better off for it but for the people working at the time it was a loss.
Economists now acknowledge the China Shock was real lots of workers suffered permanently lower earnings.
AI is a technology that has the potential to automate a ton of middle-class, paper jobs (like the one I have). If AI is effective as its proponents believe, we need way less people in my field and are going to need way more people in jobs like dental hygenists or nursing. That transition is going to be very hard even if workers are willing to make the change.
Bluntly, as a ~fortysomething guy I'm convinced having used chatGPT if I lose my job now I won't be able to find another job without a 40-50% paycut. The technology already makes the professional skills I spent a decade developing way less valuable.
If you take AI seriously, and think AI supporters are right about what it can do, you should somewhat consider what happens if we need less human employment.
I don't think AI supporters are right about what it can replace . .at all. The times we've employed AI in my job it ADDED to the time it took to complete the task, not subtracted. A lot of white-coller work requires understanding of distinct situational nuances, caveats, and complexities that AI just isn't capable of understanding. Maybe it'll get there eventually, but right now it's not close.
And China Shock wasn't predominantly about technology, but about access to world markets and competition. What's often left out about discussions re: the golden age of unionized manufacturing jobs in the 1950s is that the rest of the developed world was still rebuilding from WWII at that time, whereas the U.S. domestic economy had very little competition. THat was NEVER going to last even regardless of automation breakthroughs.
I have a LOT of negative opinions about DOGE, but ultimately I think the whole thing is founded in class warfare. (Going back to your article about how a lot of the twitter culture war is actually working class men vs middle class women.) Working class folks view the federal government as subsidizing middle class fake jobs that over pay.
Of course the funny/ironic thing is that at least in my area of the federal government, I could get paid more in industry. And we actually employee a lot of non-college degree technicians. But none of this has to be logical. I’m also in engineering so regularly the only woman in meetings. Definitely not a female dominated environment.
I think that a lot of people have a nebulous view that most white-collar jobs and, in some cases, most economic activity in general is somehow “fake”, usually because their understanding of the world is bad.
Unfortunately, the factors that led them to think like this (usually, a combination of incuriosity and stupidity) also make it very hard to set them right. (It’s politically incorrect to say this, but on average, knowledge workers are more intelligent, conscientious, and intellectually curious than blue-collar workers are.)
I'm not in the US so can't comment on this specifically but I do think that a not insignificant number of white collar jobs and government jobs are pointless, as CHH has covered. So I don't think they're entirely wrong, although whether a woman is doing that job or not is beside the point
Eh, I think that while there are some white collar jobs that wind up not being productive, it’s unlikely to be a really big fraction of the total.
It’s generally true that
A: labor is, on average, pretty expensive
B: firms that can do something really productive or useful with that labor can make higher bids for it, and
C: even non-market entities like nonprofits and the government have goals they want to achieve, budget constraints, and stakeholders who will be mad if they’re being too obviously wasteful
So, for every worker there are both push factors (employers wanting to do more with their resources) and pull factors (people who can do productive stuff with labor being willing and able to pay more for it) drawing them toward more useful work in the long run.
This was a bigger problem during zero interest rates, a lot of especially tech companies expanded dramatically and placed bets on tons of stuff that was never going to work out because when money is cheap you're more willing to spend it on acquiring resources (e.g. labor) that you might or might not need.
But I really think from my own observations that the # of these fake jobs has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic. Though I will always beat the drum that there are a lot of real white collar jobs that provide value and also just are not 40hr a week jobs and a lot of time is wasted by hewing to that standard.
I initially thought most white collar jobs were fake because not a single white collar worker has ever given me a satisfactory explanation of their job. I've asked probably 50 people about it in my life.
Most of this is probably just people don't want to explain things to me in detail. I remain highly skeptical, and think there's more waste in white collar than blue collar. No idea on %s though
the thing is, i find it hard to believe that corporations are gonna pay massive amounts of people to do fake jobs. maybe like, somewhat marginal jobs that might or might not be worth it, but if not having these jobs made more money surely someone would have done that by now.
Another insightful piece on the gender wars! I recently saw a Heritage Foundation piece arguing that we need to pull back on government programs that help women go to graduate school, so this tracks. The substacker Matriarchal Blessing did an interesting piece looking at how many male coded jobs became female coded over time and the main reason was that these professions became unappealing to men when women started doing them (even interior design was once a male job).
I've also recently come across this microtrend of women whose boyfriends were redpilled and it killed their relationship. I usually think of redpillers and incels as being one and the same, but these men actually had real live women who loved them and slept with them, and they ruined it.
In any case, I had no idea the government was taking money from men and giving it to me! I can't wait for tax season!
Also worth noting: many of the feared and envied women working those so-called email jobs do, in fact, have husbands or partners. This is the exactly the middle class demographic that's getting married these days. So even the idea that these women are pursuing cushy tech company success just to avoid having sex is entirely made up. In many cases it's the opposite! Women have taken on some traditionally male-coded life patterns, including locking in financial stability as soon as possible in order to find a good partner and support a family.
The women who aren't getting married, and who are more openly resentful of men in general, tend to be working class — understandably so, as they're exposed to lower quality dudes on a regular basis. By working class I don't mean plumbers, by the way, I mean retail and food service (don't @ me, I worked those jobs for a long time, I know exactly what it's like). If you're a man working in the trades, especially as a business owner or in a union job, you're earning the same or greater than most of the envied women working in tech. Dudes in the trades are working class coded and thus maybe they're less likely to marry those women, but they're actually occupying a similar economic class and life outlook in real terms. A tech-woman who is the primary breadwinner and a trades-man who likewise supports his are bound to cross paths, without knowing it, at Disney World.
>Also worth noting: many of the feared and envied women working those so-called email jobs do, in fact, have husbands or partners. This is the exactly the middle class demographic that's getting married these days.
...but typically men of equal or higher conventional "status". And by status, I mean education, looks, social skills, etc. They're not gonna go for any guy who's got a serious deficiency in any area.
>The women who aren't getting married, and who are more openly resentful of men in general, tend to be working class — understandably so, as they're exposed to lower quality dudes on a regular basis.
The few I know tend to like me a lot, but that's probably because I'm highly educated and not like guys they've seen more regularly. In fact, they like me more than the typical "email job" college-educated white woman does, from my experience.
Great article. I think it’s important to note how much the DOGE supporters also hate the *men* who have those allegedly cushy email jobs. They see these men as benefiting from a feminized world, one where you can make six figures so long as you’re willing to say the right things and emasculate yourself. In a just world, one where physical strength and masculinity were still properly valued, the trads would be the ones in power, and office workers of both genders would be forced to recognize their superiority. They may acknowledge a few exceptions, particularly in tech, but for the most part, they believe the pencil-necked white collar men should be submitting to them, the alphas. It’s dominance fantasies all the way down.
Their gender fantasias are so confusing because who are their uber-mensch champions: Donald Trump and Elon Musk?
It's as bizarre as part-Jewish, brown-haired, short-king, failed-artist, low-IQ, late-waking, un-athletic, sugar-loving Hitler being some stout warlord of the Aryans.
"but there aren’t many dads eager to betroth their daughters to GroyperRapist1488."
Solid gold material right here. Really hit it out of the park with this one, and thank you for your service patiently explaining how these subcultures operate, to the saner realms of society.
1) your previous article was very much not misandrist. Frankly, it is one of the few takes on the subject that I haven’t felt was either misandrist or misogynist.
2) “they could hire a sex worker but they don’t” is not indicative of much. Lest we forget, in most places it is literally a crime.
On the subject of sex workers it is actually legal in most parts of the world including the likes of Australia, the UK, Germany, etc. Even in the US where it isn't legal there are still plenty of high end escorts in major cities like NY, LA, SF, etc. There are even sex workers with their own Substacks. One SW Substack is called Court a Sin get it. In fact Musk's X along with Blue Sky is one of the biggest platforms for high end US Swers. And those Instagram models. Dirty secret even in the US many maybe even most are SWers on the side under the radar as it is known in the industry.
No, the real problem is these incel chuds or whatever they call themselves are too stupid and lazy to be able to afford paid intimacy with an Instagram model which is readily available. Myself I see my role as being Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross to these lazy incel losers.
The fact that it's technically illegal means a lot of guys won't do it, and you would probably argue that's a good thing. Ceteris paribus you don't want to encourage lawbreaking.
Would full legalization (so it's like having your hair done legally, oddly this is actually called 'decriminalization') of prostitution be a good thing? My understanding is feminists are actually split on this one.
I guess we live in a world where we are constantly exposed to images of things that we want - cars, hamburgers, clothes, beer, women, whatever - and most of us can at least sometimes get those things. I see a hamburger on TV because I can go get one. Cruises are advertised on TV and if I save up I can probably go on one. Beer is on TV and I can have one anytime! But women are on TV and online everywhere, and they look like you could have sex with them, but you can't. It's a lie and a cheat.
This is a deformed view of your fellow human beings, but I think one that is more or less encouraged by the environment we live in.
"But women are on TV and online everywhere, and they look like you could have sex with them, but you can't."
Well, you can, strictly speaking, find a woman to have sex with. You can even buy sex with her, if she's a sex-worker! But if you want to seduce a woman, instead, you need to take a different approach than you would in procuring the hamburger.
And, like the hamburger advertized on TV, you might find that human beings in real life are a little less "perfect" than the version on the screen. This is the real issue, though. Do these men want to have sex with the women who will have sex with them?
There are socially undesirable people of both genders. There are conventionally ugly people of both genders. But the less-socially-desirable men who claim that they can't find a woman who will have sex with them actually mean that they can't convince a woman who is WAY out of their league to have sex with them.
And what a surprise, given the zero effort they've made to figure out why a woman might want to have sex with a man! What a surprise when they revel in insulting or dehumanizing the very normal-looking women who might even be in their league!
That reminds me of how Islam treats women. Even though the Muslim majority countries aren’t as capitalistic as we are, the hijab and niqab are justified in somewhat similar terms.
When my kid was born, it was hard not to clock that the OB, Anesthesiologist, and nurses in the room were all women. As was my wife, of course. As the lone man, I was the most perfunctory person in the room.
I have the same experience whenever I drop him off at daycare. The teachers. The head administrator. The cook. Women, women, women.
My office is a little bit more male, with my job being pretty STEMy. But more and more of our new hires are women. Not surprising as women are out graduating men from college, now.
None of this happened overnight, though. It’s the result of long term thinking and massive commitments of effort to women’s liberation. I agree that Musk/Trump style smashing of institutions won’t work. Men need that same level of long term thinking and commitment. A Menhattan Project.
Same experience in female-gendered spaces, but there's a huge difference between the delivery wing of the hospital and the preschool-daycare: at least the ladies in medical jobs get paid well. Men don't want education jobs because the pay is shit. And the pay is shit because pay in all (female-dominated) "caring" sectors is shit. Why is that? Well, nobody would claim that these jobs aren't important. Essential, even! Could it have to do with the fact that they're worked primarily by women? I think so.
And I have another data-point here: My mom was, for a time in her career, one of the original "computers," back when that was an actual human doing computing. The pay for that job was... shit. It was low-status. When she became an expert in implementing the new new thing of "personal computing" for a government contractor, she was condescended to daily by the men who in suits couldn't figure out how to even turn the damned things on. Computing was something for women! Flash forward a few decades and women don't do computing. Computing is for men. And now it pays the big bucks.
Plus I'm really happy you mentioned the father/brother issue. Retvrn to (more) patriarchy paradoxically will mean LESS access to women, and INCREASING demands, just from stern dads and distrustful brothers instead of from women.
The key barrier to happiness for angry incels is their outrage at the idea that effort is demanded of them.
But this does make for a satisfyingly alliterative solution to the whole circus:
Effort & Exposure will dramatically increase the value of your cards and the chances of playing them right.
This morning, I was talking with my wife about Ally Louks/“Dr. Smells” discourse, and we agreed that there wouldn’t have been even 1/1,000th of the backlash if Louks wasn’t attractive.
Ultimately, a lot of these angry chuds’ real fundamental resentment is that they feel attracted to women who post pictures and videos of themselves online, but no woman who looks like that in the real world would ever fuck them unless they paid a significant amount for it, and it frustrates them.
Because acknowledging what’s really going on would make them feel bad about themselves, they sublimate their feelings into these elaborate conspiratorial political ideologies and fantasies about how the economy works.
Honestly makes me miss the version of the manosphere that was like pick-up artist types. They were cringey and manipulative, but they at least encouraged these guys to try to address the thing they’re really frustrated about by working to get better at attracting women and meeting them in the real world.
This, 100%. Substacker “Sympathetic Opposition” had a great post a while back about how men resent feeling manipulated by sex appeal. I don’t think those Australian girls were trying to do that, but everything on the Internet gets stripped of context and weaponized.
I enjoyed that post too. TBH, though, as a man, I mostly think that guys who get mad because a woman made them feel horny need to grow up. Basic emotional self-regulation is part of being an adult.
Yeah tbh manosphere these days have the vibe of Peter Pan syndrome but it is not adorable or cute…
Yeah it sort of seems like the juxtaposition between being attractive and doing something these men find a waste of time instead of fucking them and having their children is the thing that enrages them the most.
A lot of the unhinged hatred of Mina Kimes and other female sportscasters is also this.
Also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Remember when Charlie Kirk tried to mock her for dancing around in a video for Boston University? She looked hot!
I think this comment is half right. Of course, 4chan losers expecting beautiful women to flock to them are going to fail, and should be decried for their miserable, selfish takes on relationships. Such individuals should improve themselves, get fit, get good jobs, learn to talk to people (etc etc.)
It's half wrong though, because (in my opinion) the 4chan loser types are disproportionally highlighted in social media spaces, and there are absolutely are men who *do* try be authentically desirable partners.
Consider this common meme format: https://www.tiktok.com/@gokutherottweiler/video/7271621330938760480
Looking in places like r/loveafterporn and r/deadbedrooms, it's.... unsurprising to me. I agree that expecting a hyper manicured bimbo akin to some OnlyFans model is not reasonable. And yet, there is pervasive content that signals that marriage is, *as an practically unshakeable rule*, about walking down the aisle to transform one's hard-won partner into a snuggie monster.
So the discourse will continue to shame those who don't play along. I simply don't get it; it feels to me that over the long term, *of course* the porn will win out. Why would men turn to loving their real, in person spouse, rather than the person online - *when their spouse holds the idea of turning them on, in deep contempt*? The discourse can continue to assume all such disillusioned men are insufferable, no-value losers, and the gender gap will continue to grow, IMO.
Yeah…
I feel like the current manosphere is all about avoid being introspective and looking out for “enemy” - this is very conducive to manipulation and I feel like that’s what we see now.
If anything, what the manipulator(Musk, Trump, Tate etc) and those GWs have in common is the feeling that they don’t get the treatment they deserve and others are to blame for it. (For Musk and Trump, the sense of victimhood is primarily bc of Narcissistic disorder I think even though I’m not here to diagnose lol)
Attractiveness can definitely make someone be a focal point for discussion of an issue, but the issue still needs to be there in the first place.
Louks' looks (sorry) contributed to this particular kerfuffle, as did the exceptionally silly title of her dissertation as well as her dedication to and real talent for Poasting.
But there really is a general phenomenon where academics a) spend many years of effort, often while largely publicly funded, b) to produce scholarship of dubious intellectual value c) that is uncritically premised on the blanket acceptance of extreme-left politics and d) doesn't even have anything original to say about those politics. (Now, if some English PhD showed how a close reading of Moby Dick tells us why we need to repeal the Jones Act, that I'd listen to.)
And I think opposition to this is pretty reasonable! Sure, it can go too far or mask bad motives (viz., DOGE), and there are worse problems in the world. And Louks obviously didn't deserve threats, nor did she really deserve to be a Twitter main character.
But to get unnecessarily highbrow, this is sort of like saying that Johann Tetzel didn't deserve to become the symbol of Church corruption that Luther and the other reformers made him out to be. Sure, he wasn't worse than a hundred other people doing the same thing. But he was absolutely part of a venial and destructive system, and he fully endorsed that system.
You can’t know what discoveries will or will not be worth it in the long run, so much like defunding NIH, this just leads to shuttering entire programs.
I've noticed that phenomenon a lot, I think this clip from Family Guy actually is the best example: https://youtu.be/Q685Ko2DHDs?si=lSHRoHH5mxF68roA&t=25
Yeah, I'm probably wearing rose colored glasses but remembering when inceldom was the scum at the bottom of ye olde TRP .... sigh
Well indeed. Because Dr Louks strikes me as a mediocre intellect who's probably giggled and poured her way through he academicr career. Believe me I've seen it enough. Enough to believe that women should not be allowed any access to higher education
Always fun when mediocre intellects who should be kept away from higher education engage in paranoid projection.
I had forgotten about the Dr. Smells thing and googled her just now - holy crap, she's so perfectly adorable and hot that it kind of hurts. And to know that she's really smart too, enough to be a lit professor, only makes her more attractive to me. Even in my prime she would never have given me the time of day.
But I'm just...okay with that.
I guess perhaps it's just personal growth on my part or perhaps the wisdom that comes my older age, but I firly believe that beautiful women have the right to be beautiful and be themselves without any feedback from me.
Part of me sympathizes with these guys because I would totally have been into the manopshere if it existed back in the day. I was filled with resentment against women - though I had the good instinct to keep it mostly to myself (otherwise I likely would have never had sex at all).
But then I was a real piece of shit sometimes. I've come a long way, but the best part is that when I learned to respect women I also learned to respect myself.
Sure, but I'll just say this: I wouldn't want these women. They've got nothing in common with me and frankly, I won't have any intellectual or emotional connection with them. If they're simping for them based off of looks, then they're just as shallow.
As for PUAs, maybe, but they don't need PUAs. Doing what a PUA does won't make them fulfilled. They need social skills coaches, and when the time comes, dating coaches who aren't PUAs. Perhaps even female dating coaches who truly look out for their male clients and want them to succeed, and have experience working with introverts and/or neurodivergents.
I don’t think that you’re the kind of guy I’m talking about here— you’re not running around posting about how we need to destroy US state capacity and push the country’s economy back down the global value chain so we can “RETVRN” to an era of patriarchal dominance. You’re a lot more self-aware than those guys.
Your last paragraph is a good point but it runs into the problem that the PUAs exist (or at least existed) and, frankly, the social skills couches really don’t, at least not for people old enough to realize they need them and who have the resources to pursue them. I can personally vouch for looking for something like that a few years ago (after I had some income/savings to throw around), and everything I found was uniformly aimed at children or teenagers. I never fell down the PUA rabbit hole (they were too obviously snake oil salesmen) but let’s not pretend that alternative help is accessible.
In the absence of that, I recommend this book, The Social Skills Guidebook by Chris Macleod: https://www.amazon.com/Social-Skills-Guidebook-Shyness-Conversations-ebook/dp/B01AU8C766
It's for basic social skills, but it teaches you how to interact with other from the ground up. My friend (female, also neurodivergent) gave it to me as a Christmas present and I found it to be useful.
Thanks for the recommendation! Any idea offhand if the audiobook version is any good? Have a ton of audible credits I am working through
I didn't use the audiobook, but you can always try!
Pickup really helped me - why wouldn’t you try it? But there’s lots of other social skills training too. The key is just to practice a lot
Who are "these women," though? The girls in the video are young for me and giving off subcultural cues that we're not very similar. But women who I am super attracted to in meatspace work the same jobs (admin)
They're Australians. I don't want to read much into a video I haven't even seen, but basically they're just like this.
Explains a lot, I've always found Australians to be a grotesque people
I don't mean them specifically, but I mean hyper-social girlbosses. I know enough of them from my undergrad - they don't have much in common with me in terms of interests, hobbies, etc.
Oh yeah, that’s fair. I guess that’s what I lump into subcultural clues; I think of it as a sort of “preppyness.”
Kinda awkward girlbosses, otoh… lol
I work with a lot of young men in tech (think male, mid-20s coder from a top 20ish CS school at their first coding job) and this hits the nail on the head. Scratch the surface of their general belief structure and you'll find some of the most reactionary politics you've ever seen. What can trip people up is these folks don't identify as conservative, or even political. They'll describe themselves as "moderates" or "centrists" and typically say they aren't particularly political or express anodyne "all politicians are crooks" views. But, get them talking about political issues, and you'll get real 4chan level stuff. Things like "Taylor Swift is a bad role model for girls because she's in her 30s and unmarried without kids." I have heard variations of this from multiple young men in tech.
I started noticing this in 2023 because as a recovering debate asshole I'll happily talk politics with anyone. They don't lead with gender dynamics because they absolutely know how toxic their beliefs are. You have to work your way there but once you do, it quickly becomes clear that the gender politics (and sometimes but not always racial politics) is the root.
There is a lot of interesting things I could say about the rest of their political belief structure, how it is philosophically incoherent and seems optimized to make arguments against straw men that you might find in a 3rd tier conservative political commentator video. But the more interesting question for the purposes of this comment is how did this develop.
On some level, young men in tech having somewhat reactionary politics isn't surprising. When I was a young man in tech I had pretty terrible politics (exacerbated by the aforementioned debate asshole stuff), but this feels stickier. 25 year-old me wouldn't have actually voted for Trump.
My sense is a lot of these guys were sold on a vision of their CS degree unlocking massive wealth straight out of undergrad, and then graduated into a big tech job market that was pretty hostile to young coders. These guys already had some built in gender resentment from going through college during what they might call "peak woke" and so the reaction to the down job market is actually about women taking those plum jobs they thought they deserved. Feeding into all of this is the sexual resentment that CHH describes, and I suspect a lot of this is downstream of Covid. Folks in their mid-20s lost part or all of the important college and immediately post-college socialization experience to lockdowns. Losing multiple years in this critical period does not help romantic/sexual success, and for our stereotypical nerdy CS guy...well they need all the help they can get. Moreover, without the in-person socialization experience I suspect the social benefits from having more women in your classes and/or new employee cohort is very easy to miss.
Sitting along side this is the mainstreaming of much more radical gender commentators. In 2015 your mainstream anti-feminists were folks like Christa Hoff Sommers, maybe you had exposure to some really noxious folks like Milo through gamer gate, but if you wanted "red pill"/incel content you had to go seek that out or 4chan or other niche forums. Now its just kinda everywhere online as CHH helpfully demonstrates with all of those tweets. All of this feeds into a noxious set of politics especially around gender relations which...isn't exactly helping romantically. Maybe these guys will eventually find their stay at home mother of 5 kids (because they are very concerned about birth rates and need to do their part!), but I'm very concerned about how this develops over the next decade.
Interesting data point about young tech workers! It challenges CHH’s theory that this is mostly a working-class male thing.
While I’m a staunch feminist and absolutely loathe the new misogyny, I do think that recent feminism erred with its near-obsessive focus on getting more women into the tech industry, and on fighting supposed workplace discrimination there. As I understand it, the wage gap is really a motherhood penalty, which ought to be challenged by sharing childcare more equally and making workplaces more family-friendly.
So I pretty strongly disagree with this. I think you are conflating two things here. When people talk about the wage gap there are a bunch of ways to define it and how you define it gets you to different conclusions. If you are looking at, wage gap within the same job role, that appears to be strongly driven by motherhood and related factors. If you look at society-wide with full-time employment there there are effects from the differences in what jobs people take. I agree with you about how we can do better on the motherhood penalty, but it seems bad if one of the highest earning and most politically influential (especially if you believe the AI boosters) fields is somewhere between 3:1 and 6:1 men depending on how you measure.
I think we can absolutely do better in tech, especially early in the pipeline (early undergraduate seems to be a particular bottleneck according to CS professors I talk to). I think a lot of employers have really improved over the past decade plus, and also there's a lot of folks that need to age out before things can improve. [Side note: I think some of the issues the young men are feeling around tech employment is because we're basically trying to improve gender balance by changing hiring when we'd have more success improving tech gender dynamics if companies were more aggressive pushing out the mid/late career folks who aren't going to get with the times.].
One of the things I'm very concerned about under the new administration is that companies are going to snap back very hard and we're going to see improvements on tech for women regress badly.
I'll also point out that I think young men in tech are kind of the exception that proves the rule here. I think CHH is right, most of the resentment is working class men (see my comments on the post earlier this week) but in tech there is this very toxic strain of politics that we see reflected in DOGE.
Part of the problem with young developers is that they've been in such male spaces for so long that they just haven't had opportunities to engage with women organically, so those abilities were atrophied or just stillborn.
Admitting that you are just a total amateur at having a conversation with a woman is hard for people who are otherwise highly-competent, competitive, and high-achieving in this other domain of their life. Like most other things, they could get better at this skill with practice, but where could they even practice, since their workplace and hobbies are all such sausage-fests! Even when they "branch out" from computer science and geeky fixations from childhood, it's into other male-coded areas, like personal fitness or edgy right-wing politics.
These men would have FAR better romantic prospects if they were placed in educational and early career cohorts with women so that they could co-evolve their personality with a mixed-gender group, organically relate to women at formative ages, and overlap interests with potential female friends and romantic prospects. That's the irony of all of this! Feminism and gender diversity would help them where it hurts!
Returning to this bc article free, I think there's actually an interesting overlap here. As CHH points out, most of the roles that are disproportionately women are things like "office clerks, receptionists and secretaries" - that is, basically who the guys quoted as hating HR ladies are talking about.
Basically I think it /is/ a class thing, but as usual, it's hatred from one group of lower-middle class to same people one step up the ladder, and a lot more informed by personal envies and resentments than anything else.
I think there's an element of this, but not in the context of the @Ben's post talking about the tech industry. Young coders are the workhorses of the tech sector: they are not high on the ladder but they are not below the HR/admin staff in the corporate pecking order. Maybe they resent the product owners and sales people telling them what features to build, though.
Attacking people like Christa Hoff and Jordan Peterson also didn’t really help. They were actually moderates and still believed in equality and respect. The cancellation attempts only resulted in a new crop of influencers who are too extreme to get cancelled.
Also, I agree w/ your point re: childrearing, and I am still optimistic that a reapportionment of expectations around family and relationship roles is be the "dawn" that this darkness is preceding
The generational brainworms caused by 4Chan and emanating out from it is not truly comprehended by most.
Oh, I agree...and tumblr?
You list a bunch of things that could cause young male tech workers to go reactionary - perhaps it is overdetermined. :-(
"My sense is a lot of these guys were sold on a vision of their CS degree unlocking massive wealth straight out of undergrad, and then graduated into a big tech job market that was pretty hostile to young coders" is new compared to when I was a CS undergrad
(30 years ago...good. lord.)
I don't think I knew anyone with this kind of reactionary view. We weren't in it for the money, but we also didn't have r/redpill.
I don't think its overdetermined exactly. A lot of the structural things are amped up versions of what was happening around the time I finished ugrad (2012). CS classes hadn't become totally overrun (my alma mater has 50% of the incoming freshmen taking the intro CS series this year!), but you were starting to get 50% growth YOY in the intro classes. Big tech comp hadn't quite spiked yet, but I knew friends who were still getting mid 100K TC starting which seemed incredible. Wokeness on college campuses was just starting to become a big political topic, this is the era of all the arguments over affirmative consent requirements. And, realistically my friends and I had pretty rough views about politics.
But also, we all voted for Obama without Romney ever being a live option. We were at our core a bunch of folks who were raised liberal, vaguely annoyed at liberal cultural norms, but when push came to shove, we were still liberals. And also, we all basically grew out of those politics.
Young men, especially young men in predominantly male spaces, having these kind of views isn't unusual, recall that Gamergate is just a couple years after I graduated (and oof I don't want to revisit some of what I was writing in various forum threads during that time...). What strikes me as new and worrying is I don't get the impression these guys are going to grow out of it.
Its entirely possible that just the extension of these trends caused the change but I don't think so. I don't see the same thing in folks who graduated in 2017-2018 as folks who graduated in 2020-2022. So either there was some weird tipping point effect or something else. I think it was Covid that broke things. Take all of that in-person socialization, good for building empathy and social skills and shove it into online spaces where you aren't building those skills and are more exposed to the more noxious versions of your views, and the different trajectory seems pretty expected.
So now what, you are 25, you feel like you were cheated out of a formative period of your life (and I think its fair to say you were), and the folks around you blame scared (not a very masculine impulse!) liberals for excessive lockdowns. Your social skills probably haven't improved much since college, maybe they've actually degraded because you've spent so much time online. And now you are dumped into the hell that is online dating. It is really easy to see how this curdles into extreme resentment, which obviously doesn't help your romantic prospects. This is a doom loop thats going to be really hard to break.
The good news is that new cohorts of young people are continuously entering and graduating from college, and so if your thesis about much of this being downstream from COVID (which I think is plausible) is correct, hopefully this will just be a weird slice of this generation and the youngest Gen Zs and Gen Alpha will return to more of what we'd expect.
To add my own two cents: when I graduated in 2016 it was easy to feel like I was surrounded on all sides by people who felt entitled to my help (“check your privilege “), but who reacted with at best contempt and indifference whenever I asked for help myself (“stop acting so entitled”). “Extreme resentment” is a fair (if imprecise) description of what I was feeling at the time, and it is easy to see how someone a decade younger than me would have it even worse
I graduated in 2017, and yes, these double standards exist. MAGA was never an option for me though - the ideology is just too illogical.
Commenting this now as it became free but this feels very spot on.
I work in tech adjacent role/industry (Data Science) but the job market for new grads post 2022 sounds really really rough. I heard from some of new hires how they struggled to find the internships. And the new grads software engineer role if anything is the most likely to be slashed as tech giants find way to hire less ppl due to LLM.
Also, one of the stuff that work against them is how Bay Area dating pool is unbalanced gender wise - in fact, I suspect one of the reasons many mid career (like 4-5 + years) software engineers moving to NYC is this…
Yeah, I wonder where all this resentment gets directed once the Trumpcession doesn’t fix anything for them. The pessimist in me says some kind of horrible Handmaid’s Tale shit, but that’s a big leap, and I’m not sure they’d be able to pull that off.
dismal scenes
I like fundamentally have to throw up my hands at some level and say every time I’m exposed to this culture it’s so damned weird it’s like trying to communicate with an orca or something.
Coming from a place that’s like the opposite pole of relationship and career dynamics at some level it’s truly hard to comprehend. I’m kind of weird in like the opposite direction and would be thrilled to be a stay at home dad and be friends with a bunch of women I’m not pursuing romantically. It feels like too big of a gap of priorities to even really understand.
This comment is making me so happy cause I was feeling really depressed reading what other men were saying. I hope you get to be a stay at home dad!
I’m a 3rd grade teacher and foster parent and it’s probably not in the cards that I’d be a full time parent year round. But thank you.
Had to upvote just for the orca reference!
Although I’m not sure the coolest creatures on earth would appreciate being dragged into this….
The coolest creatures who largely live in matriarchal societies where the hot fashion trend is wearing dead seals and salmon as hats, definitely wouldn't have time for this discourse, hahah.
Curiously are the dead seals a different pod than the one wearing salmon? I’d not seen seal parts.
Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well...
I don’t get that. If you are a straight man who likes attractive women, you should want them to have a good time. Wanting a world where broke women fuck you out of desperation is sad.
The time honored tradition of "trolling"
Also: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/210-would-not-bang
As someone who really struggled with dating until ~25 but has since aged out of it and gotten married, it really does suck in a way that it is hard to comprehend if you haven't been through it. But the advice at the end is basically how I pulled myself out of it. But I’m sure I creeped out a lot of women early on in that process and it was not fun at all.
As a fellow late bloomer, once you get it, you get it but these guys do not get it and most have zero desire to do any of the work to change that.
As someone whose story is similar to yours, the thing that is wild to me is the advice at the end was totally bog-standard, like, 15 years ago. It was so bog-standard that it almost didn't need to be said. Now if you say that, half the internet will call you a misandrist, and half will call you a reactionary....even though it's still true.
Totally! The thing is, dating is similarly difficult for a not-insignificant number of women, and this has always seemed totally invisible in the incel discourse (even though the term incel was, I believe, actually coined by a woman). Dating is often hard (and no, not only because all women are just always simply drowning in male attention all the time).
Yeah, I always try to be sympathetic when I chat with people in that state. It doesn't help to shout them down.
It can be very frustrating to try to help, because so many of them will shoot down any suggestions. It sucks because it’s hard but there really is no other alternative to working on yourself and getting out there socially.
Mm yeah this is very true. I think of this as a sort of specific stage in depression, because I’ve experienced and seen similar outside the context of incels. I don’t think sympathy for it precludes recognizing that it is obnoxious to deal with!
Ultimately in that space I don’t think there is any comment one can make that it helpful, because I think the individual is using those comments as a way to “reaffirm” their depressive conclusions (bc they’re able to dismiss them, proving them “false”).
I behaved in the same way myself when I was really severely depressed. My mom probably wanted to throttle me. Ultimately the only solution is for the depression to lift.
The problem is the same one that the consumer Internet and social media and digital echo-chambers has created: it's SO easy to find justifications online for anything now. And the human brain is always looking for shortcuts: we don't want to put in the work if we don't have to.
So if the shortcut is that you find "your people" on Reddit, or Fox News, or Twitter/X or 4Chan, or your favorite podcast telling you that your dysfunctional, anti-social, and so far unsuccessful approach is totally normal and fine and maybe even ~based~, then why question that? Maybe just double-down! It's THEY who are wrong!
I’m so amazed at the 4channification of the mainstream
Back when I was a 14 only the strangest 1% of teens and early 20somethings would talk about this sort of thing
I think it was Bannon who orchestrated it?
I feel like this is primarily Musk buying Twitter - that said, as the algo gets better optimizing for engagement, we see more deranged takes as it gets more attention be it positive or negative…
It's extremely online behavior. No one talks about this much in real life.
I think you're right but that CCH is also right. Your explanation goes for all the standard, long-time Republicans and conservatives. But it doesn't explain why youngish, secular tech-adjacent men swung hard towards this (ie the tech right), and the tech right was absolutely crucial to Trump winning the last election. For that cohort, I absolutely think CHH nailed it.
As someone actually in tech, no - CCH is nowhere near correct. For one she talks about economic insecurity and people actually in tech are mostly incredibly well paid. Most people don’t really act in the way she describes.
What's missing from both takes is a major takeaway from evo psy: male competition. "Conservative" men for chimpy culture (or hatred of bonobo-ish culture) believe status is a zero-sum game or "lump of labor" theory, instead of playing positive-sum games (abundance meritocracy). They want other men, women, & children to be immiserated or die. Thus GOP or chimpy cults predictably increase mortality rates.
Scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-republican-counties-have-higher-death-rates-than-those-in-democratic-counties/
Drexel.edu/now/archive/2017/December/Association-between-high-middleaged-white-mortality-and-Republican-votes-in-2016/
Slate.com/technology/2017/03/is-white-mortality-rising-not-really.html
Their "pro-life" rhetoric is BS virtue signalling, as they cut anything do with decreasing mortality rates or increasing effective fertility rate.
Theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/maternal-child-health-cuts
I could argue about federal spending and womens transfers all day and it probably does make a difference at the margins but as a man who has given advice to other men who struggle with women, most of these guys do not want to be helped, they don't want to practice their social skills, they don't want to lose the excess 20lbs, they don't want to improve their style.
The reality is there is a thing called "game" and it absolutely can be practiced and improved. No one loves you just for you except your dog and maybe your mom.
YES! I had an insight about this just now, bc there is another online group where the same dynamics happens: online communist larp babies (for want of a better term ;-)
The US left is made up of two very disparate groups: FARC-style armed struggle enthusiasts, and refugees from the cruelty of hypercapitalism. The former want, well...a FARC style armed struggle, the latter just want a society that is more caring and inclusive.
This difference comes to a head when discussing The Revolution. When FARCies mention ppl should start working out to prepare for the revolution, the commie-babies will throw extreme tantrums. Many were baffled by this, until a few twitterers realised that to commie babies, The Revolution is simply The Rapture, but leftistly. A zero effort 180 change of society, after which eternal bliss.
I was grumbling to myself about how it's so weird that incel types want society to change when it's so much easier & within your control to change yourself, when it suddenly dawned on me that the core problem is the same: EFFORT-REFUSAL. When they think about "changing society" they don't see it in the terms of effort/hard work to turn a large ship around, but in the magical, rapture, overnight 180 sense that commie babies see The Revolution.
I just want to say that every time I see someone online, left or right, genuinely express the opinion that the solution to the problems in the US is not some sort of reform through an election system by starting a grassroots movement to convince people you are correct but instead to fund a civil war where you kill people who disagree with you in order to convince others you’re correct I roll my eyes. Which is easier, convincing people who disagree with you your correct or convincing them to give you power while trying to murder them for having the wrong views. It’s farcical.
Great comment. But I'd go further: even your dog doesn't love you just for you. You can absolutely invest in that relationship or not. So many owners don't walk their dogs, never play with them, and give them zero attention. "Hey, at least I feed it," goes for responsible pet-ownership to people who haven't taken any time to observe their animal's obvious emotional, psychological, and mental needs.
When you do this as a parent, the relationship with the child is famously bad. But, wouldn't you know it, a lot of men have a model for parenting that is totally neglectful or worse. When they reproduce "normal," they get something unexpectedly unsuccessful. "Hey, at least I provide for you!" Or, "at least I don't beat the sh*t out of you, like my dad did!" isn't a pitch for quality parenting.
Even your relationship with your mom who "loves you no matter what" can be better or worse with attention and care. The most boorish jerk implicitly understands this, which is why Mother's Day is a thing. But just sending flowers sometimes is still dialing it in, and I think we all know this, deep down.
There's NOTHING in life socially important or valuable to us that will flourish without our nurturing or maintenance. These men need to take that idea and baste in it until it sinks in.
I’m not on Twitter and was blissfully unaware that this other part of the conversation was happening. (The conversation in the comments here was quite civil and sane.) But this article connected some dots for me.
One, the enthusiasm about AI in certain circles. I’m skeptical of AI in general, but even if it did become everything some people are predicting and more, I don’t think it will create a world where most people (including all women) are out of work. And if it did, I don’t think that would be a good world.
So the way people have been breathlessly and gleefully predicting the demise of most white-collar and creative jobs has been surprising to me. But if they think it’s a way to punish and trap independent women they resent, that makes a lot of sense.
(Incidentally, the supposed impending doom of lawyers is something that, as a lawyer, just makes me laugh. These people have no idea how much of lawyering is basically just holding your client’s hand.)
Two, I’ve never understood how the idea of marriage to someone who needs you to provide for them could be in any way appealing. Seems like it would be a real blow to your pride if the only attraction is that you’re a “provider.” But apparently that doesn’t bother them (at least conceptually — as you said, revealed preferences are another thing entirely).
Three, DOGE is one of the most moronic things I’ve ever witnessed, and I just don’t get how anyone can look at it and see anything other than a train wreck that’s going to severely affect state capacity. But people had to be cheering in on for some reason, and the reason you cite here certainly makes a grim sort of sense.
To your point about holding clients' hands, I think "caring" jobs will be among the very last to be replaced by AI. Sorry, totemic out-of-work factory guys, instead of learning to code you should have been retraining as preschool teachers.
This is SO true. People have a stereotype of coding that it's just a geek sequestered in a room doing difficult math and logic (and sometimes it is), but it is also very much something delivered to someone who wants very specific things they aren't very good at articulating. My husband's work stories as a programmer are VERY similar to my friend's stories as a freelance graphic designer. Most of what makes BOTH of them good at their jobs (better, if I may brag, than most people) is that they both have extremely good "people skills" and are willing to work with clients to figure out what the clients ACTUALLY want and to pitch compromises as to what is actually feasible.
There is an inverse relationship between seniority and number of hours spent writing code in software engineering, and this is something that I think the vast majority of people not in this job just don't understand.
Lol, 100%, as a fellow lawyer, I am honestly amazed how often my clients call me when THEY KNOW they're being charged outrageous amounts for each six minutes they talk to me, and so many of their calls are totally unnecessary and basically amount to therapy sessions or me talking them down from doing something stupid of them just wanting the emotional security of hearing my take (and of course these are 95% men). I'm still amazed they aren't just using ChatGPT more instead still bothering to call me.
Yes, wanting someone who is forced to be with you and pretending to like you so they have a roof over their head and food to eat doesn't sound very appealing to someone with options. But don't forget that a full third of CCH's recent survey takers are virgins. And many of these right-leaning incel-adjacent types are quite self-loathing, once you peel back a few layers. So sadly, I think many of them think that is the best they could ever hope for. And also in the tech world in particular, many of them just don't have good personalities/people skills or many friends period, so it may literally never occur to them that they could just be pleasant and enjoyable to be around, or that anyone who didnt need something might voluntarily elect to spend time with them.
“Talking them down from doing something stupid” feels like 80% of my job sometimes!
I feel like because of the nature of legal regulations, lawyer is one of the last jobs that will be replaced by AI. Because it's not enough for ChatGPT to be able to write a brief and not hallucinate cases, you also have to have the judge accept the brief, and I suspect a lot of judges are going to say refuse AI-written briefs for a long time.
I could see an intermediate period where lawyers are writing briefs with AI and then reviewing them (and maybe some lawyers pretending they wrote them) on a large scale than is already happening, but lawyers can't be replaced by AI at scale until we start having laws and court rules saying X brief can be written by this certified AI tool.
Also important to realise that some ppl would rather be king of a trash heap than average in a nice house. They'd happily destroy civilisation in exchange for getting the "power" their ego tells them they deserve.
Oh, that’s not something I need to realize. Trump and his more rabid fans have been evidence of that for a decade now.
"Better reign in hell, than serve in heaven..."
The thing about the discourse re: AI taking away jobs is it's historically ignorant. Predictions of permanent widespread job losses accompanying technological gains have a 0% batting average. Yes, CERTAIN jobs have been and can be replaced by automation/technology (the big example is many factory jobs in the 70s-80s), but the opportunities created by those efficiency gains end up creating more jobs than are lost, in many cases A LOT more jobs (not to mention people are needed to manage/troubleshoot the tech itself).
I studied labor economics in college, which is probably why I’m skeptical. Because, as you’ve pointed out, while entire job categories might be eliminated by technology, work itself never has been.
If it takes 10-20 years for the new jobs to be created, what happens to the people who lost their jobs initially?
I’m skeptical this is going to happen to begin with. To be frank, I don’t think the AI hype is that credible.
But if it is, I don’t think the job loss is going to be immediate while the job creation is a few decades away. Even assuming that white-collar employers are cost-conscious in the sense that they want to replace expensive humans with less-expensive machines — an assumption that I don’t think is terribly accurate, for reasons I’ll get into below — most organizations tend to be risk-averse and slow to adapt. Which means white-collar employers are more likely to slowly incorporate AI and slowly get rid of workers (not hire a new employee after someone retires, for example) than to do a dramatic, all-at-once layoff.
So I think the job loss would happen simultaneous to the job creation, stretched over a period of decades, and the young people who otherwise would have replaced the retiring workers in the old jobs would go to the new jobs instead.
Now for the assumption and why I think it’s inaccurate. Basically, it’s a fantasy that organizations care *that* much about being cost-conscious or efficient. Bullshit jobs exist in organizations because 1) senior management likes offloading their annoying tasks on others, and 2) senior managers derive prestige and satisfaction from how many direct reports they have. You are never going to remove the human desire for fiefdoms, and barking out orders at some AI assistant will not satisfy a person who wants to be Important by having [X] number of direct reports.
If organizations really were models of efficiency, bullshit jobs wouldn’t exist. But they do, we all know they do, and while AI might gradually change the way they look, I don’t think they’re going away.
As for the idea that we’re going to have, I don’t know, androids replacing litigators in court, or robots without doctors in operating rooms, that’s the stuff of sci-fi.
Not sure I fully buy the paragraph about management needing direct reports to offload to, but I think the paragraph about law professions hams it home. The best AI in the world is NOT CLOSE to being able to fill in for legal counsel. At best it can currently assist paralegals doing doc review, but not even fully replace them.
I don't disagree with really anything you wrote above. There are credible arguments AI won't be transformative or that AI will be transformative but will be slow walked. Where we can disagree is confidence level.
There is IMO at least a 5% chance AI causes significant job loss over the next 5 years. You seem to think this is a non-existent possibility (or much, much lower 1 in 500 rather than 1 in 20)
To be fair, I could be wrong. I hope I’m not (because widespread job loss would be awful), and I don’t think I am just because the anxiety about AI seems predicated on organizations acting in a way that isn’t common for them to act.
Some context here: I’m general counsel for an organization that’s been extremely cautious about allowing employees to use AI in any way. There’s curiosity about it, but more in the sense that maybe someday, employees will be able to use a dedicated AI tool for research.
I’m sure there are organizations out there less cautious than mine, but my peers in other organizations tell me there’s similar caution where they work, too. Until the problem of hallucinations is resolved, there’s a real reluctance to use it for anything at all.
I'm an AI researcher and policy analyst, and this comment was interesting enough I felt the desire to red-team my beliefs by thinking of counterarguments.
You're totally right that diffusion of new technologies throughout an economy is gradual in general, and that we shouldn't expect most organizations, especially large incumbents, to quickly adopt the latest AI even if it is capable of automating much of their work. However, if we assume a scenario where technological progress is fast enough to develop systems capable of automating entire sectors within a short period of time, then this is a situation we have not really faced before, so precedent is a poor guide.
With progress that fast, how can it be realistic to expect that most of the economy will take literally decades to adopt this technology (with new entrants and companies using AI popping up all the time)? That is a situation which seems obviously untenable for the revenue of these slow-to-adopt incumbents who would supposedly take decades to fire the people who could be fired. A lean new entrant to the sector could, especially if started by someone senior with strong existing relationships, easily adopt this tech if it existed and outcompete larger firms
On your point 2—the coordination problem around the prestige of direct reports is (a) easily solved by simply having all managers in an organization decrease their number of reports simultaneously (implying the social value of a fixed number of reports increases) (b) the kind of thing that CEOs and CFOs are likely to force when looking at a massive salary bill
I get that this is probably hard to appreciate from inside an org which barely uses AI, but the productivity disparities here are going to get much sharper. In software engineering (currently one of the first roles to be increasingly automated) this is getting very noticeable, and it's possible to have a single person make an app in a month that would take a team of SWEs 6 months a decade ago.
Of course, this mostly happens in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, precisely because that is the *most aware* place of the technological frontier. But therefore, within the tech ecosystem, I expect (and many others have commented) that we should expect *more* disruption over the next 5 years than the previous 5, because large incumbents who previously had a moat at least partly dependent on the sheer amount of human hours to make their core product are now highly vulnerable—new startups with a year or so of operating can be the "equal" in quality of product as long-running giants.
Law is of course a uniquely challenging sector here due to the very human way it is practiced, but I still expect a significant slimming down of the sector. If you want a prediction, I do expect, within 10 years for it to be possible for the average medium sized cost-conscious firm seeking legal advice to pay an AI for advice worth into the millions and get back a product completely indistinguishable from a top flight law firm, with confidence in its reliability.
“Precedent is a poor guide” are fighting words to lawyers. 😊
But in all seriousness, while I can’t speak for all sectors of the economy, I can speak to law, and that isn’t a field vulnerable to new entrants and quick disruption. People retain lawyers and law firms based on their reputation, and “look at this cool new tech I use!” doesn’t impress clients in the same way as “I’ve never lost this kind of case, and I’ve been practicing for twenty years.”
There are certainly some legal tasks I can imagine being partly automated. Simple wills, for example. But so much of law is judgment, and I l’ve yet to see the AI that can think rather than just regurgitate. All the breathless predictions of AI-that-can-think are just not ones I find persuasive. If I’m wrong, so be it, and as a society we’ll have to figure out how to adjust. But five or so years ago I kept on hearing breathless predictions about virtual reality, and as I expected, the public didn’t buy in. The tech sector as a whole seems to have a problem with hype versus understanding human nature, especially how social (most) people are. People generally don’t want to deal with machines. They want to deal with people. (Dealing with machines too much already has made people desperately unhappy.) And the Luddites have won before, and I expect they will again if tech goes too far. No AI is going to save a company from an angry mob, and machines can always be smashed.
I also think the AI industry as a whole is a lot more vulnerable to IP lawsuits than they seem to realize. When the AI boosters are boasting that the whole point is to replace human workers, it’s going to be hard to argue fair use. No progress is going to be made by a company sued out of existence.
Eh,
1. Even accepting you're right that AI is going to prove to be a normal shock in which higher level jobs are eventually created, the short-term matters. In the immediate aftermath of the industrial revolution wages declined. People alive in 1950 were better off for it but for the people working at the time it was a loss.
Economists now acknowledge the China Shock was real lots of workers suffered permanently lower earnings.
AI is a technology that has the potential to automate a ton of middle-class, paper jobs (like the one I have). If AI is effective as its proponents believe, we need way less people in my field and are going to need way more people in jobs like dental hygenists or nursing. That transition is going to be very hard even if workers are willing to make the change.
Bluntly, as a ~fortysomething guy I'm convinced having used chatGPT if I lose my job now I won't be able to find another job without a 40-50% paycut. The technology already makes the professional skills I spent a decade developing way less valuable.
2. Krugman on Malthus: "Statements like this are deeply unfair to Parson Malthus. The fact is that Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era." https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/malthus-was-right/
If you take AI seriously, and think AI supporters are right about what it can do, you should somewhat consider what happens if we need less human employment.
I don't think AI supporters are right about what it can replace . .at all. The times we've employed AI in my job it ADDED to the time it took to complete the task, not subtracted. A lot of white-coller work requires understanding of distinct situational nuances, caveats, and complexities that AI just isn't capable of understanding. Maybe it'll get there eventually, but right now it's not close.
And China Shock wasn't predominantly about technology, but about access to world markets and competition. What's often left out about discussions re: the golden age of unionized manufacturing jobs in the 1950s is that the rest of the developed world was still rebuilding from WWII at that time, whereas the U.S. domestic economy had very little competition. THat was NEVER going to last even regardless of automation breakthroughs.
I have a LOT of negative opinions about DOGE, but ultimately I think the whole thing is founded in class warfare. (Going back to your article about how a lot of the twitter culture war is actually working class men vs middle class women.) Working class folks view the federal government as subsidizing middle class fake jobs that over pay.
Of course the funny/ironic thing is that at least in my area of the federal government, I could get paid more in industry. And we actually employee a lot of non-college degree technicians. But none of this has to be logical. I’m also in engineering so regularly the only woman in meetings. Definitely not a female dominated environment.
I think that a lot of people have a nebulous view that most white-collar jobs and, in some cases, most economic activity in general is somehow “fake”, usually because their understanding of the world is bad.
Unfortunately, the factors that led them to think like this (usually, a combination of incuriosity and stupidity) also make it very hard to set them right. (It’s politically incorrect to say this, but on average, knowledge workers are more intelligent, conscientious, and intellectually curious than blue-collar workers are.)
I'm not in the US so can't comment on this specifically but I do think that a not insignificant number of white collar jobs and government jobs are pointless, as CHH has covered. So I don't think they're entirely wrong, although whether a woman is doing that job or not is beside the point
Eh, I think that while there are some white collar jobs that wind up not being productive, it’s unlikely to be a really big fraction of the total.
It’s generally true that
A: labor is, on average, pretty expensive
B: firms that can do something really productive or useful with that labor can make higher bids for it, and
C: even non-market entities like nonprofits and the government have goals they want to achieve, budget constraints, and stakeholders who will be mad if they’re being too obviously wasteful
So, for every worker there are both push factors (employers wanting to do more with their resources) and pull factors (people who can do productive stuff with labor being willing and able to pay more for it) drawing them toward more useful work in the long run.
This was a bigger problem during zero interest rates, a lot of especially tech companies expanded dramatically and placed bets on tons of stuff that was never going to work out because when money is cheap you're more willing to spend it on acquiring resources (e.g. labor) that you might or might not need.
But I really think from my own observations that the # of these fake jobs has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic. Though I will always beat the drum that there are a lot of real white collar jobs that provide value and also just are not 40hr a week jobs and a lot of time is wasted by hewing to that standard.
I initially thought most white collar jobs were fake because not a single white collar worker has ever given me a satisfactory explanation of their job. I've asked probably 50 people about it in my life.
Most of this is probably just people don't want to explain things to me in detail. I remain highly skeptical, and think there's more waste in white collar than blue collar. No idea on %s though
the thing is, i find it hard to believe that corporations are gonna pay massive amounts of people to do fake jobs. maybe like, somewhat marginal jobs that might or might not be worth it, but if not having these jobs made more money surely someone would have done that by now.
Blackrock requires certain levels of diversity for them to invest
Another insightful piece on the gender wars! I recently saw a Heritage Foundation piece arguing that we need to pull back on government programs that help women go to graduate school, so this tracks. The substacker Matriarchal Blessing did an interesting piece looking at how many male coded jobs became female coded over time and the main reason was that these professions became unappealing to men when women started doing them (even interior design was once a male job).
I've also recently come across this microtrend of women whose boyfriends were redpilled and it killed their relationship. I usually think of redpillers and incels as being one and the same, but these men actually had real live women who loved them and slept with them, and they ruined it.
In any case, I had no idea the government was taking money from men and giving it to me! I can't wait for tax season!
Great read as always.
Also worth noting: many of the feared and envied women working those so-called email jobs do, in fact, have husbands or partners. This is the exactly the middle class demographic that's getting married these days. So even the idea that these women are pursuing cushy tech company success just to avoid having sex is entirely made up. In many cases it's the opposite! Women have taken on some traditionally male-coded life patterns, including locking in financial stability as soon as possible in order to find a good partner and support a family.
The women who aren't getting married, and who are more openly resentful of men in general, tend to be working class — understandably so, as they're exposed to lower quality dudes on a regular basis. By working class I don't mean plumbers, by the way, I mean retail and food service (don't @ me, I worked those jobs for a long time, I know exactly what it's like). If you're a man working in the trades, especially as a business owner or in a union job, you're earning the same or greater than most of the envied women working in tech. Dudes in the trades are working class coded and thus maybe they're less likely to marry those women, but they're actually occupying a similar economic class and life outlook in real terms. A tech-woman who is the primary breadwinner and a trades-man who likewise supports his are bound to cross paths, without knowing it, at Disney World.
>Also worth noting: many of the feared and envied women working those so-called email jobs do, in fact, have husbands or partners. This is the exactly the middle class demographic that's getting married these days.
...but typically men of equal or higher conventional "status". And by status, I mean education, looks, social skills, etc. They're not gonna go for any guy who's got a serious deficiency in any area.
>The women who aren't getting married, and who are more openly resentful of men in general, tend to be working class — understandably so, as they're exposed to lower quality dudes on a regular basis.
The few I know tend to like me a lot, but that's probably because I'm highly educated and not like guys they've seen more regularly. In fact, they like me more than the typical "email job" college-educated white woman does, from my experience.
Great article. I think it’s important to note how much the DOGE supporters also hate the *men* who have those allegedly cushy email jobs. They see these men as benefiting from a feminized world, one where you can make six figures so long as you’re willing to say the right things and emasculate yourself. In a just world, one where physical strength and masculinity were still properly valued, the trads would be the ones in power, and office workers of both genders would be forced to recognize their superiority. They may acknowledge a few exceptions, particularly in tech, but for the most part, they believe the pencil-necked white collar men should be submitting to them, the alphas. It’s dominance fantasies all the way down.
Their gender fantasias are so confusing because who are their uber-mensch champions: Donald Trump and Elon Musk?
It's as bizarre as part-Jewish, brown-haired, short-king, failed-artist, low-IQ, late-waking, un-athletic, sugar-loving Hitler being some stout warlord of the Aryans.
No real evidence Hitler was part Jewish. All the rest is true tho
"but there aren’t many dads eager to betroth their daughters to GroyperRapist1488."
Solid gold material right here. Really hit it out of the park with this one, and thank you for your service patiently explaining how these subcultures operate, to the saner realms of society.
Thank you ❤️❤️❤️❤️
To add my own thoughts:
1) your previous article was very much not misandrist. Frankly, it is one of the few takes on the subject that I haven’t felt was either misandrist or misogynist.
2) “they could hire a sex worker but they don’t” is not indicative of much. Lest we forget, in most places it is literally a crime.
On the subject of sex workers it is actually legal in most parts of the world including the likes of Australia, the UK, Germany, etc. Even in the US where it isn't legal there are still plenty of high end escorts in major cities like NY, LA, SF, etc. There are even sex workers with their own Substacks. One SW Substack is called Court a Sin get it. In fact Musk's X along with Blue Sky is one of the biggest platforms for high end US Swers. And those Instagram models. Dirty secret even in the US many maybe even most are SWers on the side under the radar as it is known in the industry.
No, the real problem is these incel chuds or whatever they call themselves are too stupid and lazy to be able to afford paid intimacy with an Instagram model which is readily available. Myself I see my role as being Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross to these lazy incel losers.
https://youtu.be/czOpDN8Knr4?si=EPqdsL0oAoJafHnw&t=148
The fact that it's technically illegal means a lot of guys won't do it, and you would probably argue that's a good thing. Ceteris paribus you don't want to encourage lawbreaking.
Would full legalization (so it's like having your hair done legally, oddly this is actually called 'decriminalization') of prostitution be a good thing? My understanding is feminists are actually split on this one.
I guess we live in a world where we are constantly exposed to images of things that we want - cars, hamburgers, clothes, beer, women, whatever - and most of us can at least sometimes get those things. I see a hamburger on TV because I can go get one. Cruises are advertised on TV and if I save up I can probably go on one. Beer is on TV and I can have one anytime! But women are on TV and online everywhere, and they look like you could have sex with them, but you can't. It's a lie and a cheat.
This is a deformed view of your fellow human beings, but I think one that is more or less encouraged by the environment we live in.
"But women are on TV and online everywhere, and they look like you could have sex with them, but you can't."
Well, you can, strictly speaking, find a woman to have sex with. You can even buy sex with her, if she's a sex-worker! But if you want to seduce a woman, instead, you need to take a different approach than you would in procuring the hamburger.
And, like the hamburger advertized on TV, you might find that human beings in real life are a little less "perfect" than the version on the screen. This is the real issue, though. Do these men want to have sex with the women who will have sex with them?
There are socially undesirable people of both genders. There are conventionally ugly people of both genders. But the less-socially-desirable men who claim that they can't find a woman who will have sex with them actually mean that they can't convince a woman who is WAY out of their league to have sex with them.
And what a surprise, given the zero effort they've made to figure out why a woman might want to have sex with a man! What a surprise when they revel in insulting or dehumanizing the very normal-looking women who might even be in their league!
Shit I should have a burger on Sunday 🍔
That reminds me of how Islam treats women. Even though the Muslim majority countries aren’t as capitalistic as we are, the hijab and niqab are justified in somewhat similar terms.
"things"
"women"
I’m getting sushi instead 🍣🍱
When my kid was born, it was hard not to clock that the OB, Anesthesiologist, and nurses in the room were all women. As was my wife, of course. As the lone man, I was the most perfunctory person in the room.
I have the same experience whenever I drop him off at daycare. The teachers. The head administrator. The cook. Women, women, women.
My office is a little bit more male, with my job being pretty STEMy. But more and more of our new hires are women. Not surprising as women are out graduating men from college, now.
None of this happened overnight, though. It’s the result of long term thinking and massive commitments of effort to women’s liberation. I agree that Musk/Trump style smashing of institutions won’t work. Men need that same level of long term thinking and commitment. A Menhattan Project.
Same experience in female-gendered spaces, but there's a huge difference between the delivery wing of the hospital and the preschool-daycare: at least the ladies in medical jobs get paid well. Men don't want education jobs because the pay is shit. And the pay is shit because pay in all (female-dominated) "caring" sectors is shit. Why is that? Well, nobody would claim that these jobs aren't important. Essential, even! Could it have to do with the fact that they're worked primarily by women? I think so.
And I have another data-point here: My mom was, for a time in her career, one of the original "computers," back when that was an actual human doing computing. The pay for that job was... shit. It was low-status. When she became an expert in implementing the new new thing of "personal computing" for a government contractor, she was condescended to daily by the men who in suits couldn't figure out how to even turn the damned things on. Computing was something for women! Flash forward a few decades and women don't do computing. Computing is for men. And now it pays the big bucks.
When I was in med school there were already jokes about estrogen overload in the OB/GYN clinic and that was back in the Clinton administration.
Brilliant article as ever.
Plus I'm really happy you mentioned the father/brother issue. Retvrn to (more) patriarchy paradoxically will mean LESS access to women, and INCREASING demands, just from stern dads and distrustful brothers instead of from women.
The key barrier to happiness for angry incels is their outrage at the idea that effort is demanded of them.
But this does make for a satisfyingly alliterative solution to the whole circus:
Effort & Exposure will dramatically increase the value of your cards and the chances of playing them right.