"Как по искуплении всех нужных вещей случилось нам обедать тут, в трактире, то в самое то время, и власно, как нарочно, для удовольствования моего любопытства, пришел туда человек с прошпективическим ящиком, в котором, сквозь стекло, показывают разные прошпективические виды городам, и который многие у нас неправильно называют каморою-обскурою. Мне сего оптического инструмента никогда еще до того времени не случалось не только видать, но и слышать, что он есть на свете, и — Боже мой — с каким это удовольствием, радостью и любопытством смотрел я в него и любовался толь живо и, власно, как в натуре изображающимися в оном видами знаменитейших городов в свете и наилучших в них зданий и улиц. Словом, я прыгал почти от радости, получив случай их, хотя на бумаге, видеть и получить о них некоторое понятие. Я не мог устать, пересматривая все его картины и рассматривая самое устроение сей машины, которая мне показалась весьма проста и без дальней хитрости сделанною, и с превеликою охотою заплатил то небольшое число денег, которое следовало дать показывавшему нам оные и питающемуся тем человеку."
I don't have kids, but my observation of the children of Other People (limited by definition, but an outside perspective has value) is that younger children have no problem eating, or at least trying, whatever is offered to them, generally, if the parents raise them on a varied diet and encourage them to be open. But even those kids often hit a picky early teenager phase, which they then grow out of.
It might be tempting to buy marketers’ claims that once children got personalized food, they finally got to eat what they actually liked. But exploding choice fostered comparison and discontent. Within just a few decades, all sorts of foods that kids used to love — from briny shellfish to bitter marmalade — came to be unthinkable as kids’ foods. Preferences were increasingly understood in relation to aversions, and the beating heart of modern children’s food became displeasure.
Parents today hear grim warnings about the dangers of fighting pickiness. We’ve been told that urging kids to eat any particular dish can cause lasting aversions and dysfunctional relationships with food. At the same time, many parents quietly anguish over children’s highly processed diets, rising obesity rates and the stresses that stalk picky eaters in daily life. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance, and it’s contributing to immense frustration, anxiety and undeserved guilt around mealtimes.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Before the days of Froot Loops and Lunchables, generations of American children learned to relish foods of all textures, flavors and colors, while obesity and eating disorders were both rare. The children of the past show us a happier, healthier and more delicious path forward. Parents can warmly encourage children to eat family foods and avoid offering alternatives. They can also counter corporate marketing with their own enthusiastic messages about the foods they love to eat, whether it’s a crunchy salad or slippery green olives.
Generalizing away from food, teach your kids that disliking things is not actually a personality. Teach your adults that, too.
Peter Baker, known for his leading role at the New York Times in nurturing the cult of Both Sides, doesn’t pull any punches in this essay (gift link) on Donald Trump’s increasingly brazen cult of personality:
The racist online video that President Trump recently shared and then deleted generated a bipartisan furor because of its portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. What was little remarked on was how it presented Mr. Trump himself — as the “King of the Jungle.”
After a year back in the White House, Mr. Trump’s efforts to promote himself as the singularly dominant figure in the world have become so commonplace that they no longer seem surprising. He regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.
While Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime promoting his personal brand, slapping his name on hotels, casinos, airplanes, even steaks, neckties and bottled water, what he is doing in his second term as president comes closer to building a cult of personality the likes of which has never been seen in American history. Other presidents sought to cultivate their reputations, but none went as far as Mr. Trump has to create a mythologized, superhuman and omnipresent persona leading to idolatry.
Baker goes on to note that Trump’s efforts to immortalize himself are reminiscent of the most absurd excesses of regimes lampooned in Borat films:
The efforts to exalt himself, however, have accelerated in the past year far beyond his first term and have increasingly come to resemble eccentric regimes in far corners of the world. To those who have spent time in the former Soviet Union, the “Don Colossus” statue bears a striking resemblance to the rotating gold statue erected by Saparmurat Niyazov, the megalomaniacal former dictator of Turkmenistan who called himself Turkmenbashi and even renamed the months of the year after himself and his family.
And of course the political significance of all this is that a cult of personality can’t exist without a mass political movement that embraces its fundamentally anti-democratic and essentially authoritarian character:
“There is no settled definition of a cult of personality, but for us this qualifies,” Benjamin E. Goldsmith of the Australian National University and Lars J.K. Moen of the University of Vienna, who have studied Mr. Trump’s hold on his supporters, said in a joint email.
The two scholars, who published a paper on the phenomenon in the Political Psychology journal, said the personality cult allowed Mr. Trump to dominate Republican primary contests, right-wing media and his party’s majorities in Congress. Those who stand against Mr. Trump are deemed traitors and punished accordingly.
“For us, this is the major threat to U.S. democracy from Trump’s cultlike following,” they wrote. “Congress is transformed into an enabler, even when the executive makes disastrous policies, undermines the rule of law or might attempt to fix elections. The system can transform into an electoral autocracy. Our bet is that we’re already far along that path.”
Historical side note that I wasn’t aware of:
Herbert Hoover surely would have preferred not having his name attached to the Great Depression shantytowns called Hoovervilles, although the Hoover Dam was named for him while he was in office. (Franklin D. Roosevelt stripped the name; Harry S. Truman restored it.)
Hoover’s very name was still pure electoral poison during Truman’s presidency, so it’s surprising that he reversed FDR’s decision.
Needless to say, the US is going to require massive de-Trumpification, and there may well be decades of battles over things such as whether Texas high school history textbooks should refer to him as the greatest president in American history, or merely one of them. Although in the alternative it’s also quite possible that it will turn out nobody, or at least nobody important, ever actually supported him.
Another round of “I was told that the leopards would be eating someone else’s faces. Well, I told myself that at least”:
Home builders are warning President Donald Trump that his aggressive immigration enforcement efforts are hurting their industry. They’re cautioning that Republican candidates could soon be hurt, too.
Construction executives have held multiple meetings over the last month with the White House and Congress to discuss how immigration busts on job sites and in communities are scaring away employees, making it more expensive to build homes in a market desperate for new supply. Beyond the affordability issue, the executives made an electability argument, raising concerns to GOP leaders that support among Hispanic voters is eroding, particularly in regions that swung to Trump in 2024.
Hill Republicans have held separate meetings with White House officials to share their own electoral concerns.
This story is based on eight interviews with home builders, lawmakers and others familiar with the meetings.
“I told [lawmakers] straight up: South Texas will never be red again,” said Mario Guerrero, the CEO of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter who traveled to Washington last week.
He urged the administration and lawmakers to ease up on enforcement at construction sites, warning that employees are afraid to go to work.
The construction industry is one of the latest and clearest examples of how the president’s mass deportation agenda continues to clash with his economic goals of bringing down prices and political aims of keeping control of Congress. Even the president’s allies fear disruptions to labor-heavy industries will undermine the gains with Latino voters Republicans have made in recent years, in large part because of Trump’s economic agenda.
I’m sure President Miller will be very receptive to these pleas!
Thermostatic public opinion probably represents to some degree a natural tendency of dissatisfaction among the marginal electorate. But it’s going to be particularly forceful in this case wherever the massive gap between the 2024 projection of Trump (moderate who will own the libs and bring the 2019 economy back) and the actual Trump has material consequences that can’t be ignored. I’m also curious how Trump going out of his way to alienate Hispanic voters will affect the mid-term Texas gerrymanders,
I’ve wanted to understand a bit about AI before I wrote about it. My gut feeling was that this is something we don’t want generally although it may have a few specific uses. That remains my partially educated feeling. The idea of an AI that replaces or betters human intelligence seems far-fetched. We don’t know what consciousness is, and intelligence is a contested concept with many possible meanings. That lack of understanding allows people to fill it in with whatever they’re thinking or selling.
And selling is right up there! We’ve all seen the ads, the forced applications. Definitely a product looking for a market. The Next New Thing!
I’ve read a bit on how the large language models (LLMs) are constructed. There is nothing mystical about them, although they involve fairly complicated computing. They are probability machines designed to produce output that is like human writing or speech. They often contain requirements to agree with or compliment the user. Combine that with the human predeliction to regard anything that vaguely resembles another human as sentient, and you’ve got our situation today.
LLMs are probability machines. That results in a couple of weaknesses. First is that their output is not reproducible because it goes through multiple probability cycles. Each time it can branch differently. The second is that “hallucinations” are normal output. Assuming truth value to LLM output is a category mistake. Truth is not a part of their programming, just which word is likely to come after another.
Because it’s so easy to assume sentience, I prefer not to use words implying human thought or consciousness to LLMs. Their marketers would prefer that we humanize them, but it leads to sloppy thinking at best (“hallucinations”) and psychosis at worst. People have “fallen in love” with these things and have asked them for and received advice on murder and suicide.
LLMs are said by the AI community to be only the first step toward their goal of a conscious machine or a machine that can learn or an intelligent machine surpassing humans. The definitions slip around because the goals involve things that we don’t know how to measure. Different organizations have different goals.
Those pushing AI have never given up on the science fiction they read as kids, and now that they are reaching middle age, they find it a religious comfort. The problem is, like so many religionists, their version of Armageddon requires the rest of us to participate.
Silicon Valley has become home to a number of apocalyptic faiths that overlap each other. They are sometimes represented by the acronym TESCREAL: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. In More Everything Forever, Adam Becker treats them largely as ways for people to comfort themselves that they are going to die someday. They have the effect of removing moral agency from their holders. There is no need to address today’s problems because everything will be better when we T: transform into machines, E: move to another planet, S: have machines that think, and EA: have many many people alive. This is hardly different from the thoughts and prayers offered by those who believe in a Christian apocalypse.
AI stretches across several of them. We are obliged to develop AI because 1) only in that way can we make sure it will be friendly to humans, 2) China or another malign actor will develop it wrong, or 3) it will bring infinite material blessings to all. Again, this is not a whole lot different from Christian Heaven.
This development will require enormous numbers of data centers, sucking up enormous amounts of electricity and cooling water, both on Earth and in orbit. The difficulties associated with that development, to say nothing of the difficulties faced by many on Earth now, must be endured in order to bring about the Singularity.
And, of course, those middle-aged men can’t forget how much fun it was when they were making the Next New Things. So much money, so much favorable attention! AI is the Next New Thing. Just as avatars without legs interacting on line and weird headsets were. Correction: The weird headsets are still around.
Corporations use LLMs as excuses to fire people. Students use LLMs to avoid doing the work of studying, and universities insist that professors incorporate them. They are being instituted across government. They have led to a financial bubble that has potential for great damage to the world’s economy.
Resistance to the insertion of LLMs into everything is growing, as is resistance to data centers. It’s time to recognize these fever dreams for what they are and regulate them.
I know some will say that Chuck (and Dems) use this kind of rhetoric knowing that it is bullshit but thinking it is effective. It is not effective! It makes you look like a chump!
One of my stray thoughts that I didn't have a chance to BLOG while I was busy last week was that the whole "El Paso Party Balloon" saga rests on their deep belief in some elaborate DRUG CARTEL DRONE NETWORK which is doing... something... flying around... doing drone stuff...
It probably originated in some right wing conspiracy theory, which an intelligence guy was tasked to "prove" so he wrote some report confirming it. It then gets "leaked" to the newspapers, which never question what the CIACOPTROOPS tell them. From there it goes back to the idiots in charge who decide they must FIND AND DESTROY THESE DRONES. So we close airspace to destroy some party balloons.
I don't know if it happened exactly that way, of course, but the information pipelines being filled with sewage and then blessed by our greatest newspapers is the explanation for a lot of the last 25 years. We've just replaced Colin Powell and his vial of sand with Youtuber HitlerWasRight, twitter OPSEC expert CATTURD2, and Whiskey Pete Hegseth.
Related: whatever happened to the Great New Jersey Drone Invasion of the Winter of 2024?
I’m afraid I got her nothing. I had a severe flare-up of my back injury, and spent much of Valentine’s Day lying in an emergency room experiencing such intense agony that I was certain that I was going to die. Now it’s the day after, I didn’t die, but I’m now covered in patches and doped up on Valium. My response to my recovery was “Oh no, now I’ve got to prepare a week’s worth of lectures that include a whole lot of in-class problems, and I’ve got to make sure the lab crosses are on track,” so I’ve spent Sunday morning frantically updating lectures and sending notes to the students under the assumption that today was Monday and I needed to be ready for my 12:45 class.
I somehow moved from imminent fear of death to imminent fear of missing an hour of class is a serious long term concern over priorities to work over in my brain. I’ll put it on my list of things to get done this week. After I get through classes and labs.
While I’ve found various AI cheerleaders’ propaganda about the capabilities/ontology of Large Language Models to be absurdly exaggerated, I’m a lot more worried about this kind of thing:
Is seeing still believing? Based on the evidence of the past week, it is hard to say.
Consider Exhibit A: Rauiri Robinson, an Irish filmmaker and visual effects artist in Los Angeles, posted two short A.I.-generated videos on X, a hyper-realistic action-movie sequence depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop while arguing about Jeffrey Epstein. The clips were created, Mr. Robinson explained, by feeding a two-sentence prompt into Seedance 2.0, an A.I. video-creation tool newly released by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Its convincing imitation of an actual film sparked horror and outrage in Hollywood. “I hate to say it,” Rhett Reese, a screenwriter whose credits include the “Deadpool” films, wrote on X. “It’s likely over for us.”
But consider Exhibit B: The announcement on Thursday morning by Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s border czar, that federal immigration agents would soon withdraw from Minnesota. Although Mr. Homan declared the operation a success, the decision seemed a tacit acknowledgment of the political damage inflicted by bystanders’ videos of two fatal shootings of Minneapolis residents by federal agents last month.
The videos immediately undercut the administration’s false and derogatory claims about the victims, drawing rebukes from even some Republican politicians and conservative commentators. “Escalating the rhetoric doesn’t help, and it actually loses credibility,” Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, said on his podcast in late January.
It is a paradoxical moment, in which documentary evidence is still able to land a few punches, even as new technologies threaten its credibility like never before.
“It feels deeply contradictory,” said Sam Gregory, the executive director of Witness, a human-rights organization focused on gathering video evidence.
Mr. Gregory’s organization has for years trained observers in recording video of human-rights abuses, and more recently has studied the challenges that A.I. poses to such efforts. The success of observers in documenting the tactics and behavior of federal agents in Minneapolis is “clearly an affirmation that we can still show what’s real with video,” he said.
The internet is overrun with AI slop at the moment, but people who know about this technology (not me) tell me that the ability to create AI videos that are indistinguishable from recordings of reality is advancing very quickly, and that very soon it will be basically impossible for even experts to tell the difference, let alone the general public.
This seems like a giant political problem, that is going to be extraordinarily difficult to regulate. One of many passages from 1984 that have been cited over and over again during Trump 2.0 seems particularly relevant here:
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.
This reflects Winston Smith’s belief in a kind of straightforward empiricism, that survives until physical and psychological torture breaks him completely.
But what happens when the evidence of your eyes and ears is something that, in a world increasingly mediated by the virtual reality of the internet, is increasingly unreliable?
In this regard, Neil Postman and Jean Baudrillard, who authored their essential works in the pre-internet era, are the prophets of our time, even more so than the dour lower upper middle class old Etonian, whose wintry vision of the future has come to seem ever-more relevant to our present moment.
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other.To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
What’s going on with Internal Family Systems therapy? It looks like IFS is becoming really popular, an increasing number of my friends are trying it, and mostly they report extremely positive experiences. But as far as I can tell, the evidence base for this kind of therapy is thin. A professional therapist I know with a PhD in psychology hadn’t even heard of it. I asked a chatbot to rank the top 10 evidence-based therapies and IFS didn’t even make the list.
So, I’m confused. Should I be trying to dissuade my friends from going to this kind of therapy? Or am I the one who’s missing something, and maybe I should be trying IFS myself?
Dear Evidence-Based,
There’s a mantra in IFS: Inside us, there are “no bad parts.” That may well be true of us, but I don’t think it’s true of IFS itself. This is a type of therapy that has a lot going for it, but it also has some parts that should absolutely make you skeptical.
Here’s a basic primer for the uninitiated: IFS was developed in the 1980s by therapist Richard Schwartz. Inspired by family systems therapy, he argued that just as a family is made up of members who form alliances, get into conflicts, and protect each other in patterned ways — so too is your mind. You’re not a single unified self; you’re a collection of “parts,” each with its own agenda. To understand yourself, you have to understand the dynamics between these internal “family members.”
Schwartz says your parts fall into a few categories. “Exiles” are wounded parts that carry pain and shame from when you were younger. “Managers” are protectors that try to prevent those painful exiles from surfacing — for example, through perfectionism. “Firefighters” are like the emergency response team that jumps into action when painful exiles break through anyway; they’ll use drinking, bingeing, or numbing out to protect you from the fiery, difficult feelings.
And finally, there’s “Self” — note the capital S — which is your supposed true essence, undamaged by trauma, always waiting for you underneath everything else. Your Self is characterized by calm, curiosity, compassion, and clarity. If you can access it, you can more easily build trusting relationships with all your parts, understand why they developed the coping mechanisms they did, and gradually help them release the maladaptive ones so you can live a healthier life.
Okay. Got all that? Now, here’s what I think is really going on.
There’s a lot people like about the IFS model — and with good reason. Let’s start with the core idea that your mind is not a single unified thing. That is both very intuitive and very scientifically true. You can tell it’s intuitive because we all commonly say things like “a part of me wants X, but a part of me wants Y,” or “I’m of two minds about that.” We have a natural sense that we each contain multitudes. And that’s because, well, we do! If you’ve ever taken a psychology or neuroscience class, you know that the brain isn’t a single command center — it’s a collection of systems that evolved at different times for different purposes, and they don’t always agree.
IFS’s acknowledgement of multiplicity is especially refreshing because Western philosophy has spent centuries trying to convince us that we humans are “the rational animal” — that rationality and cool logic are at the center of what it means to be human. In other words, there’s a “real you,” that real you is rational, and if you sometimes engage in illogical behavior, that’s just because passions are clouding your core judgment.
But the brain isn’t actually organized that way. It’s not a unified rational self. Your prefrontal cortex is not more “you” than your amygdala — they’re both you, pulling in different directions. And by acknowledging that we’re not fully rational beings, IFS frees us up from the expectation that we should be — a feature that bedevils other forms of therapy, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT is based on the idea that we can catch our automatic thoughts and assumptions, check to see if they’re true, and simply change them if not. By consciously and logically adjusting our thoughts, we can, the thinking goes, transform how we feel about things.
This idea of a rational self in the driver’s seat sure offers a nice sense of control — and it works to a degree (CBT has a strong evidence base when it comes to treating conditions like depression and anxiety). But you can’t logic your way out of everything. Pretending that you can can be counterproductive. It can also make you feel ashamed: If you don’t manage to get your moods and reactions under rational control, it feels like you’ve got nobody to blame but your one and only self.
By contrast, IFS insists that even though some parts of you may act in misguided ways, they’re just trying their best to protect you. And that brings us to what is, for my money, the number one thing drawing people to IFS: This modality, and particularly the catchphrase “no bad parts,” gives people a rubric for tapping into self-compassion rather than self-judgment. For anyone with a loud inner critic, that is a huge deal.
When we see ourselves behaving maladaptively — whether it’s staying up late doomscrolling or drinking way too much — it’s really easy to hate ourselves for it. We think: I know that’s not a smart thing to do, but I did it anyway — what’s wrong with me? I’m such a screw-up! It’s incredibly helpful to instead be able to say: This is coming from a part of me that’s trying to protect me in some way, and even though it’s not going about it very well, I know the intentions are good.
So it doesn’t surprise me that so many people are flocking to IFS. It’s got some genuinely positive aspects — and it doesn’t hurt that movies like Inside Out helped popularize the idea that we’re all made up of lots of little parts!
But holy hell are there also some problematic aspects to IFS.
For one thing, let’s talk about the evidence base. There is…very little of it. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of medical evidence, and so far not a single one has been done on IFS as a treatment for a psychiatric disorder. As an investigation in The Cut noted last year, the strongest evidence for IFS, according to Schwartz, comes from a small 2013 study he co-wrote in which rheumatoid arthritis patients undergoing the therapy reported, on average, improved joint pain, reduced depressive symptoms, and more self-compassion several months later.
And yet IFS has been used in the treatment of all sorts of things — sometimes to patients’ detriment. Some people with eating disorders have gotten sicker, The Cut reported, as their IFS treatment focused on dredging up harrowing memories rather than stabilizing them. And some people developed “memories” of being abused by their parents, only to later allege that those were false memories introduced in the course of IFS therapy.
Experts have also begun warning that encouraging a client to play out conversations between their parts can be dangerous if the client doesn’t have a firm grasp on reality. “Our concern is that encouraging splitting of the self into parts for those who struggle with reality testing might be disorganizing,” wrote psychologist Lisa Brownstone and co-authors in a paper last year.
Even for very high-functioning clients, there’s a feature of IFS therapy that risks leading them further away from what’s real. Tell an IFS therapist that you’re skeptical about some aspect of the therapy, and too often the therapist will say something like: Oh, that’s your skeptical part talking. They may invite that part to express its thoughts, but you’re still expected to buy the premise that your unease is coming from some part that’s not to be fully trusted.
When any resistance tends to be interpreted as just another fearful part of you acting up, the therapeutic logic you end up with is a tight, self-confirming loop — one that makes it harder for you to challenge your therapist’s depiction of reality, even if it seems off to you.
Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column?
Likewise with the idea (fundamental to IFS) that your feelings can be located in specific parts of the body. If you tell an IFS therapist about an anxiety or a nagging doubt, they’ll likely ask you where you can feel it in your body. Many people secretly feel…nothing. But it’s Bessel van der Kolk’s world, and we’re all just living in it: So popular is the idea that “the body keeps the score,” that people sometimes feel implicit pressure to imagine they can locate an emotional pain somewhere physical.
One of my colleagues confessed to me that when he’s been asked this, “all I can think of is ‘my shoulders’…because I have bad posture and have a desk job”! But once you’ve imagined that the nagging doubt lives in your shoulders, and you can feel the therapist waiting for your answer to this purportedly profound question, what do you do? You go for the first thing that comes to mind, and you say “my shoulders.”
If an individual walks away from a therapy session like this and feels better, I’m glad for them. But when IFS is being held up as a treatment for very serious conditions like depression and addiction, it really matters for the underlying science to be right.
That brings us to another issue: One of the core premises of IFS — the idea of the Self — is just not based on evidence. Ironically, for all its insistence that we are not unitary creatures, IFS does posit that underneath all our parts there is a unitary essence.
Believing that we each have a wise inner self is fine if you hold the idea lightly, as a kind of metaphor. But some IFS therapists talk about it way too literally.
When I tried IFS, I found this disorienting. Asked to connect with my Self, I remembered a day when I was 11 years old, singing joyously from the bleachers in my neighborhood park. Was that my one true Self? I didn’t actually believe it was — it seemed more like one version of me, a version I like and want to cultivate more. But it was so clear that I was expected to identify this as Self that I played along.
This wasn’t great, both because I felt epistemically wronged (I know the one true Self is not a thing), and because it would’ve actually been more empowering if I’d just been told: “No, this isn’t the essential you, buried deep down within and therefore sometimes accessible but sometimes not. It’s one possible you among many, and if you’d like to lean into it, you can choose to do that. And you can do that at any moment, because this is about your agency — not some preexisting metaphysical essence.”
Finally, while we’re talking about metaphysics, I need to mention the demons.
Yes, you read that right. No, I don’t mean allegorical demons.
So, should you try to get your friends to stop going to IFS therapy, even if they say they’re having extremely positive experiences? It depends. If they suffer from a serious condition — an eating disorder, a history of abuse or trauma — then I do think it’s good to make them aware of the problems with IFS. If their issues are more run-of-the-mill (think: someone who just doesn’t get along great with their mom), then IFS might be helping them overall, even in spite of some of IFS’s own features. In that case, you don’t necessarily have to rush to ring the alarm, but I would periodically check in with them to make sure they’re maintaining the ability to think critically about their experience.
And as for whether you should try IFS yourself? I wouldn’t recommend starting on that path. I suspect you can reap a lot of the benefits of IFS without incurring its problematic metaphysical baggage. If, as I believe, one of the key advantages of IFS is that it helps people cultivate self-compassion, why not cut out the IFS middleman and go straight to the source by taking a self-compassion class?
A few years ago, I tried IFS therapy and, separately, an eight-week self-compassion course run by the nonprofit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. I benefited a bit from the former, but I felt like it actually required me to push away some parts of myself. Meanwhile, I gained hugely from the latter, and I didn’t feel like it asked me to leave my critical thinking at the door.
An employee of the Kosmos publishing house plays the board game Settlers of Catan. | Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images
Games are often treated as trivial. They can be seen as mere distractions. At worst, they’re time-wasting indulgences.
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen thinks that framing is a big mistake.
In his book The Score, Nguyen argues that games are one of the clearest windows we have into how human agency actually works. Games show us what it means to choose goals, submit to constraints, and care deeply about things that don’t obviously matter. And once you see how games function, it becomes much harder not to notice how the rest of modern life has been turned into something like a game, too.
Scores, metrics, rankings, performance indicators: These tools promise clarity, fairness, and efficiency. But Nguyen worries they also reshape what we value, how we see ourselves, and what we take to be worth caring about. The danger, he argues, is not play itself, but value capture: the slow process by which simplified metrics replace richer, more human forms of judgment.
I invited Nguyen onto The Gray Area to talk about what games really are and why the gamification of work, education, and social life so often goes wrong. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is a game on the most fundamental level?
The most beautiful and useful definition of a game comes from Bernard Suits, who was this Canadian philosopher and kind of a cult figure. He wrote this book, The Grasshopper, in the 1970s, and his definition is that playing a game is voluntarily undertaking unnecessary obstacles in order to create the experience of struggling to overcome them.
There’s a more complicated way to put it, but that’s the core. When you’re playing a game, what you’re trying to do is intrinsically tangled up with the constraints you’ve taken on. Think about a marathon: The goal is to get to a particular point. But, you’re not trying to do it the most efficient way you can, because if you were, you’d take a lift, or you’d take a shortcut, or you’d just get in a car.
Finishing a marathon is not just getting to the finish line; it’s getting there in a particular way, under particular constraints, along a particular path, using your own legs. And Suits’ point, which I think is incredibly clarifying, is that whatever value a game has, it’s intrinsically tied up with that method and those obstacles. It’s not just about the output by itself.
And why do we love that so much? Why do we like having obstacles and then that feeling of navigating and conquering them?
There’s a weird sense in which I’ve gone so far down this rabbit hole that even asking that question seems strange to me now, because it’s like, why wouldn’t you want to do that?
But the real answer is that the reason you play games is different in every game. There are party games I play just to chill out with friends, to take the edge off. There are games I play because the thought process is so interesting, [like] figuring out the perfect move in Go or chess, reacting at just the right moment.
And there are physical games I play for very specific reasons. Rock climbing is the big one for me. There’s this narrow reason I climb, which is that I like the delicate little movements of my body, the micro adjustments, the way you get past something by shifting your hip by a millimeter. But there’s also a bigger reason I climb, which is that if I don’t climb I can’t get my brain to shut up. So, only the brutality and intensity of climbing is enough to make my brain be quiet for a second.
And I think the thing that unites everything I just said is that the pleasure, the value, the glory is in the process of acting, not the outcome. That’s what Suits’ definition revealed to me. Either you think being inside the process, doing it, feeling yourself doing it, pushing against other people, cooperating with other people — either you think that can be beautiful in and of itself, or you think games are useless and insane, and half the time what people are doing makes no sense.
And I kind of think if you reject that, you’re in a different rabbit hole: the rabbit hole where only outcomes, only products, only things you can hold in your hand count as valuable.
I imagine a lot of people wouldn’t think of rock climbing as a game. They’d think of it as an activity, a hobby, whatever. What makes it a game?
This is where Suits’ definition is so clarifying. For Suits, a game is anything where the constraints, the obstacles, are central to what you’re doing. In some sense, they’re the reason you’re doing it.
So, if you buy a puzzle game, and you hack it and jump to the end without going through the struggle, you haven’t done the thing. You haven’t played the game. If you get to the finish line of a marathon by taking a taxi, you haven’t played the game. And if you climb a ladder to get to the top of a rock climb, you haven’t done the thing that’s valuable.
And philosophers will argue forever about whether this definition is exactly right, and there’s a sense in which I don’t really care. I think it’s close to our ordinary concept, but that’s not the point. What I care about is that Suits pointed to this essential part of human life and gave us a perfectly useful category for it, the category of things where the obstacles are central to why we find it valuable.
Do you think of fly-fishing, something you also write about in the book, in the same way?
I live in Utah now, and one thing I noticed here is that there are a lot of dudes who have this really intense emotional relationship with fly-fishing. They need it; they think about it all the time. And I developed this theory that what a lot of these guys actually need is meditation, but they’re too masculine to admit that to themselves. Fly-fishing gives them this cover where they can be like, “I’m catching fish,” and really, they’re meditating.
The kind of fly-fishing I love is dry fly-fishing, where you try to trick a trout into taking a floating imitation insect off the surface of the water. And the extreme, pure version of this is: You quietly walk down the river searching the surface first. You look for subtle details in the moving water that indicate there might be a holding spot — some softer, slower water. And if you’re lucky and attentive enough, you can see a trout rise and sip insects.
Then, you have to cast this tiny fake insect delicately so it lands in front of the trout, and if you get it all right, you get this incredible moment where the trout swims up, sees your fly, kind of inspects it, and decides to go for it.
And what I’ve realized about this is that catching fish is not actually the point. We let the fish go. Almost all fly-fishers are catch and release. The point is that in order to do this, you have to cultivate an incredibly intense form of attention.
For me, fly-fishing cleans out my soul more than almost anything, because there’s nothing else I do that’s like staring with absolute attention at the surface of moving water for a day. And I’m not a natural meditator; I’m a total hyper weirdo. If you took me to a river and said “Clear your mind,” I’d last 30 seconds. If you asked me to stare at a candle, I’d last maybe 40 seconds. But, if you give me a game, if you give me a target, if you tell me “Try to catch a fish,” suddenly, that goal guides my attention. It transforms my entire spirit, the way I attend to the world.
You make this distinction between achievement play and striving play. Can you walk me through it?
This is where I have to put on the technical hat for a second, but it matters.
Achievement play is when you’re playing for the point of winning. Winning is what makes it valuable. Striving play is when you’re playing for the sake of the struggle, for the sake of the process. You don’t really care whether you win, but you do have to try to win in order to experience the absorption.
Fly-fishing is striving play for me. What I want is absorption, being lost in the river, having my mind poured out of my ego and sent somewhere else. But I can’t do that without a goal. I have to try intensely to catch a fish.
Here’s my favorite argument that striving play exists: Consider what I call stupid games. A stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but it’s only fun if you’re actually trying to win.
Twister is the classic example. If you play Twister, and you fall over on purpose, it’s not funny, because that’s not failure. It’s only funny if it’s failure. So you get this weird mental state where you know before the game starts the point is to fall over and laugh, but you also know that to have that experience you have to try to win.
That’s striving play. You have to aim at winning, even though winning isn’t the point.
And there’s another distinction that gets confused with this all the time, which is intrinsic versus extrinsic value. That’s not the same as achievement versus striving. You can be an achievement player intrinsically, caring only about winning for its own sake, or extrinsically, caring about what winning gets you, money, status, whatever. You can be a striving player intrinsically, loving the struggle itself. , or extrinsically, doing it for some benefit you get from the process, like running marathons for health. You still get the benefit even if you come in last.
The paradoxical thing about games is that they’re governed by rules and structure and scoring systems, and yet, they create this space for freedom and play. Why is that?
I originally got obsessed with this because I had a friend who loved to play but hated games. She was like, “Why would I ever restrain myself; why would I ever submit to rules?“ And I was trying to explain to her, and to myself, why people do it.
One early hint came from the climbing gym. A gym sets problems. You’re supposed to climb using only the holds of a certain color. That’s the route. Or, you can ignore that and just wander all over the wall and use whatever you want. And there’s a kind of person who thinks, don’t constrain me, I’ll do whatever I want. But what I want to say is: You’re missing a specific experience.
I was clumsy; I had no sense of where my hips were. I only found refinement in hip motion and subtle balance because I climbed specific hard problems. Some problems are set to force you into a new kind of movement, inching your hips over, staying a millimeter off the wall. The constraint is what pushes you to discover something new.
And I realized I’d learned this lesson before, through yoga. I had a great yoga teacher who said, “If you just let people move however they want, they tend to repeat habitual postures.” They do the same thing over and over. It’s the restriction and clarity of a pose description that forces you to find a new posture, a new way to move.
Soccer is another good example. You might never know what your feet can do until someone tells you you can’t use your hands. The restriction forces you to cultivate a freedom you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
So, games are like yoga; the rules force you into a new way of acting. They might even force a selfish person to be a perfect team player for a while. But you’re not stuck in one pose forever. You move between poses. Freedom comes from cycling through a variety of constraints, each one pushing you into a new place. If yoga said, “Stay in triangle pose your entire life,” that wouldn’t be freedom.
If constraints and scoring systems can create freedom in games, why is it that when we impose scoring systems on everyday life — socially, professionally, personally — they often do the opposite?
This is the most interesting question, and there are at least two big answers.
One is design. Games are designed for fun, pleasure, joy. Institutional scoring systems are usually designed for something else: productivity, efficiency, accountability. They’re not designed to be lived inside in a way that’s joyful.
The other is choice. With games, you have free range. You can move between games. You can stop. You can refuse. But, you rarely have meaningful choice over the scoring systems that govern your education, your job, your social reputation. And there’s something else that’s crucial here: In a real game, part of what makes it possible is that the points don’t matter. That sounds obvious, but it’s the foundation.
There’s this distinction I learned in graduate school that sounds trivial until you really sit with it: Goals and purposes are different. The goal of playing a board game is to win. The purpose is to have fun. The goal of fly-fishing is catching fish, but it’s not the purpose. You can have a day where you catch nothing, and as you walk back, you realize you’re sensitized to every leaf twitch, and every bug, and every ripple, and you remember catching fish was never the point.
That separation is why you can play competitively with someone you love. My spouse and I can spend the evening trying to destroy each other’s position in a game, and it doesn’t threaten the relationship, because the win is insulated. It’s inside the magic circle.
But when the score isn’t insulated, when the score is your grades, your salary, your status, your ability to pay rent, then the freedom collapses. The metric stops being a playful target and becomes a governing value.
That’s why institutional metrics feel so different: They’re attached to your life.
Born in 1969 in Aurora, Ohio, Heche grew up in the kind of world that can make someone have a lot of issues–hardcore fundamentalist Christianity. Her parents were total right-wing religious nutters, moving around a lot, deeply involved in get rich quick schemes, basically the kind of people who pray for wealth, hate a lot of other people, treat their children like garbage, and are total weirdos. Heche later said it was like a cult. What kept the family going was her father being a good musician and getting jobs at choir directors in whatever church they found themselves in.
Well, the performative aspect of going up in loony tunes Christian world can translate to other parts of life and it sure did for Heche. She got out of her parents house as soon as possible. Their marriage was falling apart anyway and the house was foreclosed upon, and it was bad. They were in Atlantic City by this time and the teenage Heche was working teenage jobs, but she sang a lot during them (like working fast food) and people seemed to like it. Her father was a closeted homosexual through all of this and died of AIDS. Heche had a much older sister named Susan who later became a well-known scholar of religion and who wrote about their father. But Susan also provided a model to get out and get into the real world. Susan’s children later formed the band Wild Belle, which got pretty big in the mid-10s.
Anyway, Heche moved to New York and enjoyed performing, so she started trying out and she did well very quickly. She got a good role on the soap opera Another World in 1987 and stayed in that role until 1991. She won a Daytime Emmy for portraying twins (oh soap operas). She was ambitious for something more than the endless grind of the soap opera, not to mention the typecasting. So she started getting film roles. At first these were pretty small, beginning with Stephen Sommers’ 1993 adaptation of The Adventures of Huck Finn, more notable for starring a very young Elijah Wood. But by the mid 90s, she was rising fast. She had a good role in Mike Newell’s 1997 film Donnie Brasco, which I should probably rewatch. Haven’t seen that in ages. She was the second listed star in 1997’s Mick Jackson disaster thriller Volcano, just behind Tommy Lee Jones. That same year, she had a strong supporting role in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, a film with too much relevance to how the Trump administration operates.
So by the late 90s, Heche maybe wasn’t quite a huge star just through her acting, but she was pretty close to it. She continued to get solid roles for the next few years, including Gus Van Sant’s strange shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. This was about as far as she was going to get though. Her career began to stall out, as it does for so many actors. Now, she still worked, so she was fine. But she was never going to be Susan Sarandon or Meryl Streep or someone at that level. She did a lot of TV shows in the 21st century. She directed a lot of TV shows too, which was evidently a career choice on her part that certainly kept her working. She even did some theater and in fact was nominated for a Tony in 2004’s Twentieth Century. She was also nominated for an Emmy in 2004 for her work in a TV movie called Gracie’s Choice.
But what Heche really became known for was her wild and increasingly out of control personal life. She and Ellen DeGeneres became a couple in 1997. This was a huge deal. DeGeneres of course was one of the most prominent comedians in the country at that time and famously came out on her own TV show. It’s incredible to imagine how controversial that was at the time. Meanwhile, Heche was right there with her, making them the first openly and very high-profile lesbian couple in American entertainment. So that’s groundbreaking right there. Some accused her of being a parasite on DeGeneres. She had dated plenty of famous men before this, including Lindsey Buckingham and Steve Martin. I think that’s unfair, but the relationship was a disaster. DeGeneres tried to get her mental health, but Heche resisted that.
Heche finally left DeGeneres for a man in 2000. Almost right after that, she suffered a breakdown, driving her car in the middle of nowhere wearing only her underwear, accepting health from someone who was like “what the hell is Anne Heche doing at my house in her underwear?” and finally accepting help from the police. This was in Fresno, so you know things were bad already just because that’s where she was. The rest of her life would consist of episodes like this on and off. She married a man and had a son, though that marriage failed too. There were a lot of drugs involved, unsurprisingly. She later claimed her father had sexuallly abused her, which is entirely possible as her older sisters also believed that. In any case, her mental state was extremely unstable, even when she was working. She also accused Harvey Weinstein of demanding oral sex from her. That, I assume, is absolutely true.
Heche actually did get a decent amount of work late in life, mostly on TV. That included Everwood, a WB show on in 2004-2005, Men in Trees, an ABC show from 2006-08, and The Brave, an NBC show on in 2017-18. Of course she ended up on washed up celebrity reality shows, particularly a season on Dancing with the Stars, which seems utterly beyond unwatchable.
Things ended predictably badly for Heche. In 2022, she had some kind of a psychotic break and had her car as a weapon. This is never good. She was in LA and she started causing car crashes. It’s a bit hard to say what happened exactly. The first was anodyne enough, as far as these things go. She hit the garage in an apartment complex and then drove off while someone yelled at her to stop and get out of the car. So maybe she panicked, though that’s such a small thing. But then I’m not a celebrity with a history. Then she hit another car and drove off. That’s certainly not good. Then she rammed her car into a house at a high rate of speed, causing a fire, which caused massive burns on her body. She was still somewhat alert when she was rescued, but died a few days later. Yikes. Heche was 53 years old.
Anne Heche is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.
Most of the people Heche worked with are still alive, but if you want this series to visit some she worked with who have died, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Tom Aldredge, who was in a film version of O Pioneers with Heche that I don’t remember at all (starring Jessica Lange) is in Kettering, Ohio. Jason Robards, who was in that version of The Adventures of Huck Finn, is in Fairfield, Connecticut. Previous posts are archived here and here.
Вчера был не только Международный день дарения книг и День св.Валентина, но и день рождения моего ЖЖ-блога - https://silent-gluk.livejournal.com/ . Самого старшего. (Хотя среди усыновленных сообществ есть и старшие, но мы не о них.) И самого на данный момент живого (судя по реакции на посты) из моих пяти блогов. Ему исполнилось 19 лет. Многое было за эти годы, но лучшее - это френды. Я помню и благодарна.
Ну и традиционная отметка на косяке:
7.277 записей (это будет № 7278; было, естественно, меньше) 116.631 комментарий написан (тоже было меньше, правда, большинство из них - это ответы на лайки, так подозреваю) 120.984 комментария получено (и их было меньше, правда, существенная часть - от Фрэнка, а остальные - лайки, но не все, не все...) 638 меток (и их было меньше. Значит, за год я нашла еще новых писателей, о которых можно поговорить? Или что это за метка новая?.. Не помню.) 1 183 балла за поддержку (а вот тут заглохло) 121 избранная запись (было столько же) 36.416 фотографий (увы, было меньше, почти на 1.000 фотографий... И когда я их все покажу...) Друзья 1.262 (было меньше... А вот к кому я пришла в том году - уже не помню.) В друзьях у 1.057 (было больше, двоим я то ли надоела, то ли они удалили блоги) Взаимные друзья 653 (было больше, это вот те двое...) Читаю 398 сообществ (стало существенно больше) Участник 377 сообществ (было меньше) Могу писать в 361 сообщество (и тут прибавилось, правда, я этой возможностью не очень пользуюсь - имею в виду те сообщества, в которые я за этот год вступила)
519 место в общем рейтинге пользователей Социальный капитал: 2.092 (как ни странно)
Ползем дальше и надеемся, что мы еще не один день рождения отпразднуем и что блог и дальше будет оставаться живым.
В честь этого события сменю блогу аватарку по умолчанию.
С этой:
на эту, авторства Толченова:
Как-то теперь она больше на меня похожа...
Current Mood:испуганное
Current Location:Москва
Current Music:Театр Г.Л.Олди: Где отец твой, Адам - "О пощаде не моли..."
I can’t decide which bit of “the Seahawks defense is nothing to be afraid of” analysis I like most. Maybe the claim that the Seahawks (2025 team sacks: 47) don’t have the pass rush to generate the volume of sacks the Texans (2025 team sacks: 47) do. Or maybe “does Seattle have any corners you love?” Sorry, I missed that because I had to go and grab a spoon.
There is none. The CIC of the armed forces telling members of the military who they have to vote for — in ordinary parlance this is called “an order,” and refusing to follow it is insubordination, unless the order is illegal — is the kind of thing that absolutely would have been treated as the biggest scandal in presidential history if Biden or, especially, Obama of the Tan Suit had done it.
By contrast, the amazing thing here is that Jeff Bezos’s WAPO actually made a story of it. The USA TODAY story on the rallyliterally does not even mention this in its three dozen graphs. I can find no trace of any story at all about the illegal campaign rally at either the NYT or CNN.
Trump gets away with this for many reasons, but a big one is that he’s the living embodiment of Murc’s law on fent-laced meth: Nothing he says ever counts because he’s treated as being as morally responsible as a three-year-old.
When this is all over, nobody will believe it happened, especially the people who voted for him.
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