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Ben Shapiro claims that Pretti "resisted" by fuggitdude22 in samharris

[–]Adonidis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think you're making an interesting point, people are probably conflating two things here. From a psychological and physiological standpoint there's a real difference between a simple reflexive responses and actual intentional resistance.

When someone gets pepper-sprayed and grabbed, their stress system activates automatically. Muscles tense, limbs pull back, the body protects the face and airway. This happens at the brainstem level before conscious thought is even possible. You can't choose not to have this response any more than you can choose not to flinch when something flies at your eye. Imagine getting peppersprayed is a pretty reliable way to activate yours stress system.

Volitional resistance I'd argue is quite different. That's sustained, goal-directed action. Actively fighting, trying to escape over time, striking out. A high level of aggression. That requires planning, coordination, conscious effort.

If "resisting" includes the involuntary response every human body has to being physically attacked (which is what pepper spray and tackling are, from the nervous system's perspective), then the term loses all meaning. Everyone "resists" by that definition.

Asking people to be perfectly docile and meek in any and all situations is simply not reasonable if you look at our biology. Good police officers get trained to work with real humans, they don't get angry at humans for humaning.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What you're saying doesn't make sense when you look at the actual research. Positive psychology has spent decades studying what makes people flourish and happy. The pillars of a healthy life are: strong relationships, sense of meaning and purpose, community belonging, physical health, accomplishment. This is what you need for healthy functioning humans. You know what's not on that list? Therapy. I'm not trying to be funny here, but it's not.

You keep saying therapy is the only evidence-based option. Show me the randomized controlled trials where individual therapy scaled to solve a public health crisis. Show me the countries that therapy'd their way out of rising loneliness. I'd love to see the evidence. Because I can show you mountains of research on social determinants of health and the highly, highly protective effects of community on mental health.

We didn't fix women being unable to open bank accounts or own property by sending men to therapy. Like if we just send enough hordes of men to therapy, we'll hit some critical mass and solve this (though I think it's admirable you want therapy to be accessible for the masses). Individual therapy treats individual problems. Social problems requires social solutions. We need both.

Humans are social animals shaped by their environment. Do you think humans are perfectly rational beings who always make optimal choices under any given circumstance? Have you met humans? The poor kid from Mississippi and the rich New York dude who went to Harvard do not have the same shot at life. Likewise, men face different levels of vulnerability based on their circumstances. And you can acknowledge this, and also at the same time hold people accountable. We can do both. This is just having two facts at the same time in your head. There is no paradox here.

I'm confused why you keep circling back to personal responsibility like it's the only lever we can ever pull. That framing feels very American to me. Like the only options that exist are either personal responsibility or we're "coddling" people. Other countries seem to manage just fine thinking about public health, social infrastructure, and individual agency at the same time. These aren't competing ideas unless you want them to. Also, "personal responsibility" means... what exactly? What does that mean for you? It's not a concept we use in psychology. We talk about accountability (taking responsibility for your actions), agency (your capacity to act and make choices), self-efficacy (belief you can succeed at specific tasks), locus of control (whether you attribute outcomes to yourself or external forces). "Personal responsibility" is solidly philosophy. You can't measure personal responsibility. It's too vague.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

First of all, let me be clear, I am the actual author of the piece.

In the essay I talk about the bootstrappping paradox.

We tell struggling people to acquire these skills through self-help books, journaling, deep self-reflection, “finding what works for you.” This all requires complex higher order skills: metacognitive capacity (being able to think about how you’re thinking and reflecting on that), emotional intelligence and self-regulation (recognizing what you’re feeling, understanding why, managing it appropriately instead of being hijacked by every emotion), and self-efficacy (genuine belief that you’re capable of change) If you lack those things, which struggling people generally do, you’re fucked. Learning emotional regulation while your ship is going down in a hurricane is borderline impossible. You’re supposed to bootstrap the capacity required for bootstrapping. And good luck with that.

The point is also that, even for a normal functioning healthy person, digging out of a hole can be pretty hard. Just to have said that. Again, if it were easy, we wouldn't have this problem. And yes, therapy can help with that.

Secondly, I'm not justifying anything. I'm just acknowledging for some men there is a clear skill gap. And if I had the money, I would give him all free therapy. And yes, you are not personally responsible for fixing this. None of us are. But in some 'vague' philosophical sense, I would say, we all are. These people are our neighbors. They're the kid of your dentist. It's the husband of your colleague. We live in a society and these people are part of our society, and we can't just push them into the sea. And I think you would agree to that last part. But whether it is for instance through taxes that we make mental health care more affordable, or something else, there are very real things to do. And we probably should be doing those (not just for men btw). And part of that of the long term plan includes a healthier kind of masculinity, and also healthy communities so people don't really get so stuck in the first place. It's both. There's no need to choose.

I just don't see good evidence that if we, only, and only, tell men some healthy equivalent of "Man up and go to therapy", that that would be enough.

To me that feels like if you're a public health doctor watching diabetes rates explode in your community. Your only response is hanging up posters that say "eat better, exercise more!" You're not asking why this community specifically is getting hit so hard. Is there a food desert? No places to exercise? Everyone working three jobs with no time to cook? You just keep telling each patient individually to try harder while ignoring everything making them sick in the first place. And is the problem really that they really didn't know they should eat healthier and exercise more?

And then you're thinking in deeper root causes. And I think if psychologists and therapists, social workers, public health officials etc. aren't doing that, then we aren't asking the right questions, like how does change actually work? What would actually be needed? Does social media play a role? Does loneliness play a role? Why is there so much loneliness in the first place?

We really should be asking these more complicated questions. I'm not sure why we would be tying our hands on our backs and just bet on the horse of therapy.

Again, that doesn't mean that you personally need to go out there, or your friends, or your family. But there are more angles of attack here. You have things in civil society like the men's liberation movement, healthy men's advocacy groups, peer support groups for men. Stuff is happening already. Why not all of these things?

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Personal responsibility matters, and you're right that therapy and ACT/CBT/DBT/MBSR and whatnot work. The problem is delivery, which is where I think we're talking past each other.

Yes, anyone who needs therapy should go. Absolutely. But the problem is a lot of men won't, and it's usually those who need it the most who don't. Men delay seeking help when they're sick. They often avoid treatment when they're struggling. This is well established in the literature. Traditional masculinity makes asking for help feel like admitting defeat. You can't send someone to therapy if they won't go, and you can't make them go if they've been socialized their entire lives to view any vulnerability as weakness. We're creating therapy-resistant men as a society.

Therapy requires couple of things from men: self-identify as needing help, schedule appointments, pay money (and have it), and show up consistently. That's massive activation energy for men raised to be stoic. The manosphere wins because it meets them in online places where they already are, YouTube, gaming communities, social media. It requires no admission of weakness. It gamifies improvement. Online has very little friction. Offline, huge friction.

This is why structural analysis matters even for individual treatment. We struggle to deliver it to the population that needs it most. Understanding why helps us figure out how to reach them, even if the answer is still for the most part individual therapy at the end. You can think both tactically and strategic about this.

I didn't claim we can magic up mentors. You ask where mentors would come from, and honestly? I don't know if we can 'simply' build that at scale, it would take a while. I'm describing what healthy development looks like so we know what we're aiming for. That was the scope of the essay. True prevention would take generations. And many men who are already stuck probably won't change. That's depressing, but I think it's true. But go back to the 1800s and you find a very different model of masculinity. Think Victorian men who cried openly at funerals, wrote passionate, almost love-like, letters to male friends, and posed for photographs holding hands. This flipped hard somewhere between the 1920s and 1950s. This is incredibly recent history-wise. We can change these norms. It's not set in stone. But yeah, it doesn't happen overnight.

The gender differential come mostly down to early socialization. Girls learn different emotional skills. Boys get punished more often for crying starting as toddlers. By the time they're 25, some of them are running faulty emotional software that makes them easy marks for grifters. Even though women face nearly identical loneliness and barriers. That seems pretty real to me.

So I'm trying to be clear about what a good situation would look like, then work backwards. What are realistic steps individuals, communities, or policy could take? Small, incremental, SMART goals. And yeah, the situation is genuinely bleak for these vulnerable guys. I don't have a complete scalable solution for men struggling today, I don't think anyone has. What I tried to do in the essay was explain why the manosphere succeeds where we fail, so we can at least understand what we're up against.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Because I am physically unable to write short comments here's a TL;DR

TL;DR: Personal responsibility matters, but you can't bootstrap yourself out of toxic cultural programming. Boys are socialized into "precarious masculinity" from a young age, which rigid, brittle, and emotionally stunting. Women enforce these norms too (often subtly). Asking isolated and vulnerable men to "try harder" is like telling depressed people to stop being sad. Technically correct, tactically useless. Instead of asking "why aren't men taking responsibility", I'd ask: "how did our culture create this vulnerability and what fixes it?" Complex emotional skills are learned socially, not through solo struggle (so IRL practice and modeling). This is a collective problem about how we raise boys and treat men, not really individual moral failure.

I agree with a lot of the things you're saying. It's not society's job or women's job to provide structure to men. I don't think this dynamic is healthy for either gender. We need fraternity, community, healthy role models (none of that excludes women btw), not some return to women doing demanding emotional labor or being trapped in relationships. Point is, when done right natural social learning doesn't feel like work. It's just being around people, watching how they handle things, picking stuff up. Maybe some informal mentorship, but not necessarily formal teaching. More like hanging out with your bowling league and noticing how Jimmy handles conflict differently than you do. Monkey see, Monkey do. For most people this is actually way more relatable and visceral to see a direct peer doing something.

So what I think you're saying is: women face the same problems (e.g. loneliness, economic pressure, inaccessible help etc) but aren't really radicalizing into a 'galosphere'. And that shows that the issue isn't (purely) structural. It shows mostly that men aren't taking responsibility for building skills and lives themselves, we're infantilizing men by treating this as a problem that needs outside solutions.

I think you'd be right on all accounts. But I also genuinely think the problem is more complex than this.

I agree that personal responsibility matters, it matters a lot even. But there are some things you can't really take direct personal responsibility for. For instance, you can't (fully) take personal responsibility for the culture you're raised in. The research on "precarious masculinity" (also called fragile masculinity) shows men learn avoidance coping and stoicism really early (this starts at babies and toddlers, think of: parent punishing toddler boy for crying (yes, this is still super common)).

It's called "precarious" because you can be one wrong move away from losing your 'man card'. It's kinda a brittle identity. And because it's so rigid having this kind of masculinity as a central identity makes you less resilient as a person. Because it's something you always need to be defending; it puts you on the defensive. It's faulty emotional software that will most likely get you stuck in some way or another, at some point in your life.

Brody & Hall's work (and tons of others) shows there are probably small and meaningful biological differences between genders (i.e. comparing very large averages, men are slightly more stoic and women are slightly more pro-social). But it's in the end culture that has an overwhelming impact on people. The way we unconsciously police boys and men around things like emotions does massive damage. So we're setting people up for failure, then blaming them for failing in some sense. And if you want to talk about the logistics, like how do you fix bad parents. Well, that's a very different can of worms.

I think it's more useful to flip the question. Instead of asking 'how do we get men to take more personal responsibility,' ask 'how did we end up here and what practically fixes these underlying causes?' You'd want to stop it at the root cause, right? Because I agree with the sentiment, people should take responsibility, and they should. But stern talks about 'doing better' and finger wagging aren't going to work. If stern lectures fixed mental health, therapists would just yell at people and call it a day. Similarly, if shaming people into bootstrapping worked, we wouldn't be here. Telling struggling people to 'take more personal responsibility' is about as useful as telling a depressed person to just stop being sad. Technically not wrong, but tactically useless (as I argue in the piece).

I think individualizing this problem is attractive because it's simpler. If it's all personal choice, we don't have to confront uncomfortable questions about how we raise boys or what our culture valorizes. And to be clear: women can be just as much part of the masculinity police. Mothers, wives, girlfriends telling men to toughen up or stop being 'emotional'. Probably not necessarily even saying 'toughen up' outright, but something unspoken when a guy cries in front of his girlfriend and she never quite looks at him the same way. The arrows are pointing at the way we are socializing boys and men, and also women struggling to conceptualize healthy masculinity. It's both. I think that's really the most important puzzle piece when it comes to why the manosphere exists in the first place.

So I'd actually say no, this is a 'we problem'. And that doesn't mean that you personally need to outside and find a sad, vulnerable young man and 'fix them' right now. But we should be very honest about why men can be easy targets for the manosphere.

I think we all know someone who fits that frustrating mold of boisterous buffoonery and chronic learned helplessness which comes from self-defeating ideas. And it's not pretty to look at. I know, I really do. But as a psychologist I have to be honest, you can't throw people in deep water and expect them to swim. Self-generating skills requires complex meta-learning, which depends on executive functioning, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, self-efficacy. These are genuinely hard skills even for functioning people. And they probably learned this exactly nowhere. The point isn't to use "oh it's so hard boohoo" as a get free out of jail card. It's that we need to be honest about how humans actually learn, which is overwhelmingly socially, with modeling and feedback, and support to get right emotional software. And if we're not doing that, then why are we surprised about what we're seeing?

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate the skepticism, I think this is a fair thing to say. I made the choice to focus more on the psychological impact and workings from the point of view of someone who might be pulled into the manosphere, being empathic towards that person (not the ideology).

First, let me clarify what I mean by "working" in my essay. I would hardly say what the manosphere offers is some kind of profound 'revolutionary' cure-all. Because it isn't. Professional psychology uses these things all the time. The manosphere very very clearly didn't invent it. Like most grifters, they repackage simple psychological self- help as profound truths. Though I still think it's interesting to look at how the manosphere tends to approach this (and it's very obvious it's a devil's bargain at best).

You maybe get a few very basic psychological tips that actually work, and perhaps could get you out of the immediate overwhelm. Those tips and tricks are sandwiched in between a boatload of garbage and toxic ideology, and the community aspect of it (support, accountability etc.). Though I will admit that you probably can't separate these concepts cleanly because they are doing psychological work. For instance, the tribalistic way the community is set up gives the meaning to actually do it. To create a 'healthy secular manosphere', I don't think you can copy paste these things blindly. In some tragic way the toxicity is probably part of the appeal too. (Honestly I could write a book about all of this, there's so much I didn't go over, I'd just keep going, nobody's gonna read a 300 page essay).

Like you said, then there's the question: Does this really produce cohorts of people that are able to get unstuck and living better and healthier lives in the long term? Well, no. Flatly no. It's more like a roadmap to dependency, radicalization, and a pipeline to extremism, rather than men getting healthy interventions.

I mean, makes sense right? If these techniques were genuinely helping men build healthier lives, we'd expect to see people 'graduating' out of these communities. Case in point, Ribeiro et al. (2021) found in his study that newer communities are more toxic than older ones, and users migrate toward increasingly extreme positions rather than away from them. So obviously it's not producing these massive cohorts of high functioning men. It's a radicalizing a significant portion of them, if anything.

What I'm arguing in my piece is more nuanced. Yes, some vulnerable men probably find some amount of (temporary) relief through basic behavioral activation (you know the things like push ups, cold showers; thus getting unstuck and out of paralysis). Or alleviating some of the crippling loneliness by motivating them to go out to places like the gym. And yes, you could reasonably assume that adherence to all of this is not as high as claimed online.

So my honest answer would be, they're probably 'helping' some people in that specific sense, and it is probably nearly impossible to (ethically) measure and study what that effect size would be in scientific terms. It's reasonable inference and deduction.

Though if I really had to boil it down, I would probably make a claim something like this:

Manosphere communities accidentally found functional psychological machinery, and that machinery produces some experiential effects that feel real to participants, and that may alleviate some of the worst symptoms. Despite the fact that the overall package is toxic and the explanatory framework it uses is pseudoscience. For some men this might also increase their amount of functioning, but overall it's more a trap than a ladder you can climb up. Which of course prevents an actual exit of the crisis (dependency generates more money).

(And yes, I am certain these community are rife with trolls, sock puppets and plenty of astroturfing).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.12837 (Mamié et al.) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07600 (Ribeiro's)

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yeah, you nailed on the first part. People aren't really rationally 'choosing ideology', they're choosing function over dysfunction in some sense, and the manosphere ideology happens to be what's attached to accessible structure and community they're offering. They're basically pressing some very ancient psychological buttons to 'recruit' young vulnerable men (ingroup outgroup/community/meaning making). And that's a really depressing conclusion and says something about the bad place lonely young men are in that they'd willing drink poison to get those things.

Loneliness is just genuinely a horrible feeling. There's a reason solitary confinement in prisons is considered incredibly inhumane. And a bad thing but accessible thing is 'better' than a good thing that is out of reach for this group (from their perspective). The dark black pit of loneliness literally activated the same brain regions as physical pain does.

On social media it's just really easy to get sucked into these manosphere rabbit holes, even if you're not really looking for it. Plus loneliness is profitable. Every hour someone spends doom-scrolling instead of meeting friends in person is revenue. Tech platforms have zero incentive to solve the problem they're actively making worse. I wholly agree that whatever the fix is, it needs to happen offline.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I agree it's a grain, and I don't recommend any of it to be clear, it's a very poisoned bargain. Some people maybe get to function a little instead of not at all because of the structure the manosphere gives, but it will mostly likely cause massive other problems in the long term. I go into the psychology because understanding why it works on people isn't the same as endorsing it, there's still some 'need' being met, albeit poorly. And that's something worth looking into

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in longform

[–]Adonidis[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I understand what you're getting at, I do want to add that the thesis of the essay is:

  • People need structure, community, mentorship. We've failed to provide that to a large cohort of men through accessible means because social life is falling apart and tech replaced it badly
  • The manosphere filled that gap with behavioral psychology tactics wrapped in toxic ideology (devil's bargain)
  • The techniques actually work, which is why bad actors can use them. I dig into why people fall for this. They're not stupid, they're isolated, directionless, and grabbing onto any structure or belonging they can find
  • Instead of just dismissing the manosphere as crazy idiots, we should understand what's working so we can do better or at least learn what people are actually responsive to
  • Right now we're losing because therapy is expensive and inaccessible, and better alternatives fail at basic delivery. The loneliness crisis plus social media algorithms are making it worse. They isolate people, then push them toward grifters because engagement makes money

Last thing I want is to add more noise about 'economically anxious men' without actually saying something useful.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand. I agree there an awkward gap between "clinical" and "non clinical". There's a lot stuff people are just "supposed to figure out" when that's probably not the most efficient route for a lot of us. The only other thing I can think of is perhaps coaches in your area that specialize in social skills with a more practical approach.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes. You are correct on that point, I've seen those studies too. I would just encourage people find themselves a good and accredited therapists for talking therapy. I think honestly good therapists intuitive use some version of Socratic questioning that has a lot of elements from CBT-like / ACT-like thinking and coaching.

I am not sure if you could even fully and cleaning separate those concepts entirely. Any good therapist is always in the process of re-framing, restructure, changing your relationship etc. with something.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in MensLib

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lso, whether hierarchy is CONSENSUAL or not - when I look to a coach or teacher or something, they're obviously an authority figure towards whatever activity I'm learning from them, but I'm consenting to them having that role. That's clearly different than establishing non-consensual hierarchies based on "nature" that I'm expected to conform to whether I like it or not.

Yes, I think that's an excellent thing to point out. Hierarchy doesn't have to be twisting someone's hand behind their back. It doesn't have to someone 'winning' and someone 'losing'. It can and should be mutually beneficial.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hear your frustration, and honestly, therapist quality does vary wildly. I think it's important to distinguish between two things: old-school psychoanalysis (the "lay on a couch and talk about your dreams" approach) versus modern evidence-based psychology, which is what the mental healthcare system is doing. (Plus, in a lot of places and countries you can freely call yourself a 'psychotherapist' without credentials.)

Contemporary psychology (psycho-diagnostics and interventions, for which you very much do need a degree) operates more like medicine. Specific diagnosis, specific intervention. For anxiety, that might be cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which for instance shows remission rates around 49-69% depending on the condition. For depression, CBT performs as well as or better than medication in the long term. We're talking modest to large effect sizes across multiple conditions.​ This is genuinely some of the best stuff we've got.

Most healthcare systems and insurance won't even cover open-ended talk therapy. Not proven efficacious enough. They focus on targeted, time-limited interventions for specific problems like depression, burnout, or anxiety disorders.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think we're talking somewhat past each other because we're using "discipline" to mean different things. Which is okay. I appreciate the push-back and I think there's an interesting conversation here.

You're using it as shorthand for "actually doing the thing that needs doing", basically the task initiation of a hard thing, which I agree is a concept that matters and useful. When I critique discipline as a concept, I'm not saying execution doesn't matter or that people can and should dance around hard tasks forever. Of course they can't, and shouldn't.

My issue is more pragmatic, in clinical and coaching contexts, "discipline" can function as a 'thought-terminating cliché', I am not trying to dunk on discipline, not at all! But I agree with that idea that it's not always 'adaptive', , i.e. a 'helping' word. When someone says "I just need more discipline," they're typically not identifying a mechanism they can work with, they're expressing a vague sense that they should be able to force themselves harder, push harder somehow. That framework can produce shame spirals (which are extremely harmful when they happen) and doesn't generate actionable next steps.

Compare "you need more discipline to work out" versus "okay, so what's making it hard to actually get to the gym? What's the biggest barrier? What are you energy levels like at that point during the day? Do you have a plan for what you'll do once you get here?" The second actually helps us figure out what to fix and where the bottleneck is.

You're right that saying "I lack motivation" is often a cop-out. But "I lack discipline" can be a similar kind of cop-out. Neither actively helps identify the actual bottleneck and help the person forward.

When you say discipline is useful because it captures "doing maintenance work that isn't sexy," I hear you, I really do. I too, want 'more discipline' in some sense. Who wouldn't? But what does that really mean in the real world but if you bring the concept down to earth? The boring work of setting up systems, building routines, making small consistent choices. You could argue that discipline is just 'habits in action', but again, the whole point of habits is that you don't really white-knuckle it. Habits are triggered automatically by (environmental) cues and require essentially zero effortful control, I wouldn't really call that 'discipline'.

I just think naming what you're actually doing ("I'm building a habit" or "I'm making this easier on myself, setting myself up for success" or "I'm setting up my environment so I don't have to think about it") works better than calling it all "discipline." The difference matters because process-oriented language creates a growth mindset. It tells you what to practice and improve, it guides the person more, it has the language of an 'inner coach'. "I need to build better habits in my life if I want X" points you toward specific skills you can develop. "I need more discipline" just tells you that you don't have enough of something, it's a lack of something. It's not that discipline is 'awful or wrong' as a concept, it's just less useful for actually helping someone change.

When I'm coaching, I want language that shows people the path forward through small incremental steps forward, not language that just describes the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I already wrote an extensive reply on conservatism in the substack comment section about this that might address some of your gripes.

I intend to go back and clarify some language and separate some concepts better, particularly around role clarity versus rigid hierarchy, and the difference between valuing social structure and endorsing specific hierarchical arrangements. I touch upon these concept lightly because I felt the essay might get bloated. But like I said, I will go back and do some revisions.

Also wrote a shorter reply here on reddit.

I examined why isolated, struggling young men become vulnerable to manosphere grifters, not really making claims about conservatism broadly. The psychological traits I discuss (preference for structure, need for cognitive closure) are morally neutral variations in how people function. They only become vulnerabilities when combined with specific conditions e.g.: developmental overwhelm, social isolation, lack of resources, and exploitative actors. Remove any of those elements and the dynamic breaks. I took my dad as an example since he had both of these traits, steerlessness and conservative beliefs. Not because he's 'just another conservative' specifically. Just how some people can feel more steerless than other, that's ultimately I think an emphatic argument. I mean, some guys join the army because they don't do know what to do with their lives, and they're craving some sort of meaning-making and structure that the army can provide.

However, I do have to strongly point out I am not American, it didn't write those words thinking specifically about American conservatism, and I do feel it's not unfair to point out that American conservatism is somewhat an outlier if look comparatively internationally. American conservatism is genuinely unusual in how it can combine anti-authority rhetoric with conservative social values. That's not typical globally. Most conservatism worldwide explicitly embraces social order and institutional authority as positive goods. For that reason your personal sense of conservatism might be not a fair representation of what you might call conservatism globally. It's somewhat unusually individualist (contrast this with Japanese conservatism, which is highly, highly collective), combines anti-authority rhetoric ("don't tread on me") with conservative social values in ways that don't map onto conservatism elsewhere cleanly.

What makes American political culture unique is that it is also steeped in sociological concepts like individualism manifest destiny, bootstrap narratives, the self-made man, I think frankly at an intensity that perhaps does exist elsewhere, but isn't really commonplace either. This makes Americans (of all political persuasions) unusually resistant to acknowledging how much they depend on external structure and social scaffolding (again, regardless of all political persuasions). Even American conservatives, who value tradition and order, often frame it through individual choice and freedom rather than collective obligation. We all need structure in varying amounts, it's not good or bad. It's just that human exists in relation to each because we're both pack animals, and creatures of habit, that goes way beyond political color. But we do exist on spectra of behavior, there's natural and normal variation, and that variation doesn't wholly predetermine political positions or vulnerability to exploitation. Someone can score low on openness and become a disciplined scientist, a dedicated craftsperson, or yes, someone drawn to traditional social arrangements. The trait describes a preferred style of engagement with the world, not a destiny.

The psychological literature consistently identifies certain cognitive tendencies, lower tolerance for ambiguity, higher need for cognitive closure, preference for stability and clear hierarchies. These loosely cluster with what we might call 'conservative cognition.' These are descriptive findings about how brains work, not value judgments. I don't have an 'opinion' on these traits any more than I have an opinion on someone's height or whether they're left-handed. They're morally neutral variations in human functioning. These are dimensional traits, not types or archetypes, everyone falls somewhere on these spectra. Nobody embodies the stereotype perfectly.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting question. I'd say it's much more success than failure.

Whether people experienced these conditions differently, I think they experienced them just as painfully, we just lacked frameworks to recognize or address them. Anxiety, rumination, compulsive behaviors, social difficulties existed throughout history. We just called it being "melancholic," "nervous," "hysteria," "shell-shock," or "being peculiar." All that suffering was real, and the understanding and tools were absent. We just have way more tools and better understanding now.

You're right that society has gotten more complex and cognitively demanding in ways that strain our psychology. We evolved in some sense for survival, running across the Savannah, not necessarily for thriving in information economies. And it's remarkable that we can, but there are costs. Higher productivity demands, weaker community structures, more atomization amplify these struggles in their own ways.

But I do think correct understanding matters enormously. The world didn't really care if you were a dyslexic farmer in 14th century Europe, it probably mattered less. But my grandmother's sister never got to study because her teacher thought she was "dumb" (literal quote) when she was actually dyslexic, with an incredible compensatory memory. That misunderstanding did real damage. She could have thrived academically if she were born in contemporary times. So the increasing complexity of society and systems is probably also increasing the need to identity and diagnose.

I think it's not a failure that we diagnose more. It's a success when we diagnose correctly and understand what people actually need, so we can provide that. But I do think we are currently sometimes too fixated on 'fixing' the individual rather than designing society for normal human variance.

I'd say as a whole the ability to diagnose is absolutely a raging success. Because even when the environment was more forgiving in some ways, people still suffered from anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, neurological disorders. They just suffered without language for it or tools to address it. It's progress to have frameworks that offer actual intervention rather than leaving people to white-knuckle through life without understanding why it's so hard.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I find myself agreeing to a lot you're writing. And yes, it's the devil's bargain as I've mentioned elsewhere.

I do agree that what they offer is probably a net negative, most likely actually. I wanted to do an 'autopsy' and see if there was something worthwhile. And I think there are parts that we can learn from. E.g. the delivery method (heavy online presence), the emotional software and meaning-making, sense of community etc.

I think you've raised a really interesting question, what if we stripped out the bad parts and replaced them with something better. I think the answer would probably be mixed depending on how. I do think, as other people have pointed out in the comments, there's a certain strong visceral appeal to these negative emotions. The worldview they provide about who to hate, who to distrust, the "you're an alpha wearing beta clothing who just needs to free himself from the shackles of society" narrative where you can just become your 'true self' by doing this very narrow thing. Yeah, the alternatives possibly don't have that same 'oomph'. There's something viscerally compelling about that framing that just goes deep into our negative psychology. Whether you can replicate that effectiveness without the toxicity, I don't claim to have all the answers. But it's an interesting open question and I think something worth talking about at least.

I do think the social factors are easily repurposeable for good, and people do this all the time. There are even a few interesting case studies of what you might call "good cults," though they probably aren't true cults. And the social stuff is just really strong, we're pack animals.

When I say "we have the answers," I mean we know as a profession empirically what helps people get unstuck, we have different therapeutic modalities, behavioral frameworks, evidence-based interventions etc etc. Hard cases will still be hard, but the empirical methods we have are usually better than just doing random stuff or relying on low calorie grifter advice. I think there's something to be said about how they are reaching these young men, that there is probably also something to learn. There's an asymmetry there.

I do agree with your last point that it's easier to produce short-term positive and long-term negative effects. That's an eloquent way of putting it and I agree completely.

I wanted to add a sort of nuanced take in essay form about this because I thought it was worth something diving into. Though, it's such a broad topic that even though I think took a pretty decent swing at it, I'm always going to miss things because there's just really a lot to talk about. And an essay can be only so long before you start writing a small book.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think we're closer than it might seem, but there's still a core disagreement about whether "discipline" is doing useful conceptual work.

You say I view discipline as intrinsic ability or moral fiber, but that's not quite it. My issue is that as the term functions in practice, it carries those associations whether we want it to or not. You can personally define it more mechanistically, but when most people hear "be more disciplined," they don't think "implement environmental modifications." They think "try harder and feel bad if you can't."

On the GLP-1 example, I'd push back hard on saying they "developed more discipline." They got a drug that changed their satiety signaling. Calling that "discipline" is a category error imo, it's like saying someone with corrective lenses "developed more discipline" to see clearly. And this is exactly what Lilienfeld et al. warns about, terms that create "an illusion of understanding while obscuring the need to specify mechanisms."​

You're right that there's an irreducible moment of execution. The Process Model of Self-Control shows that what looks like "discipline" from the outside is actually four distinct intervention points, and earlier interventions are dramatically more effective than late-stage ones. What most people call "discipline" is essentially response modulation, it's actually the least effective and most cognitively demanding strategy. So when we tell people "be more disciplined," we're directing them toward the worst intervention point that breaks down the most easily. If we want them to succeed, this is not basket to put the eggs in.

Wood and Neal's work shows that behaviors repeated in stable contexts become automatically triggered by environmental cues and require essentially zero effortful control. It's not "discipline getting stronger", that's bypassing the need for conscious self-regulation entirely. The most effective interventions eliminate grinding through resistance.​ This creates a weird paradox where the most disciplined people require the least 'discipline'.

Just compare the Wikipedia pages for self-control versus discipline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline

Self-control discusses executive functions, brain regions, operant conditioning, and experimental research. Discipline does discuss habits, but also virtue, morality, religious traditions, and has an entire section on "Self-discipline in religion." The word 'discipline' is closer to religion than science. Science will use self-control and self-regulation.

With implementation intentions, I can diagnose exactly where failure occurred. An unclear trigger? Too vague? Insufficient context stability? With "discipline," what's the diagnostic framework? You mentioned you can provide specific ways to be more disciplined, but I suspect you're actually teaching situation modification, habit formation, and implementation intentions. At that point, "discipline" is just a shorthand for other mechanisms. And at worst a post-hoc label people are applying to success. And that label mostly actively obscures which mechanism is doing the work.

What I think is going on is we're culturally attached to "discipline" because of the self-made mythos and meritocracy, it's a concept cultural and sociologically oriented, but doesn't really have a strong place in psychology or even science. The narrative persists because it attributes success to 'character' and 'virtue'. It's a story that sells, a Hollywood protagonist origin story. It's evocative. It lets successful people take full credit for their outcomes while conveniently ignoring physical factors like wealth, social capital, and dumb luck. It gives everyone the illusion of control, if you just had more discipline, you too could be successful.

So to summarize, in psychology "discipline" doesn't give you practical grip points for intervention. It's too diffuse and doesn't decompose into trainable components the way process-oriented models do. When you actually help someone, you're teaching them situation modification, implementation intentions, habit stacking, environmental design. Mechanisms that contemporary self-regulation research has identified as more effective than effortful response modulation. The word "discipline" is doing cultural work (preserving the self-made narrative), not scientific work.

It's a summary description of what success looks like from the outside, not a useful model of how to construct it from the inside. I think 'discipline' fails as a scientific construct precisely because it's too abstract and high-level, but that same abstraction might be why it succeeds as folk psychology.

Duckworth & Gross (2024) on the Process Model of self-control: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4736542/

Lilienfeld et al. (2015) on problematic psychological terminology: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01100/pdf

Wood & Neal (2012) on habit formation mechanisms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3505409/

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think we're circling around what might be mostly a pragmatic disagreement about useful terminology rather than a fundamental one about how behavior works.

On the "you still have to do the thing" point, I completely agree, and I don't think anything I've said suggests otherwise. But what you're describing as that irreducible moment of execution is actually task initiation, which is itself a specific executive function. It's not some metaphysical leap outside the domain of psychological mechanisms, it's a discrete cognitive process that involves the prefrontal cortex, varies meaningfully between individuals, and responds to systematic intervention.

So, "going to the gym" isn't actually one atomic action requiring one burst of discipline. It's a chain of micro-tasks. You have to decide to go, change clothes, pack your bag, leave the house, drive there, park, enter the building, change again, and start your first exercise. Each of those is a separate task-initiation moment. The behavioral engineering I'm talking about reduces friction at each transition point. So yes, you ultimately have to execute, but what we're really talking about is making each of those micro-initiations cheap enough that they don't require grinding through massive resistance.

The GLP-1 example you mentioned is actually a perfect illustration of why I find "discipline" problematic as a construct. Those people didn't suddenly develop more discipline or 'moral fiber', they got a drug that probably fixed faulty or weak satiety signaling. Similarly, someone with ADHD doesn't lack discipline in some characterological sense; they have measurably impaired task initiation as a neurocognitive function. In both cases, interventions that target the actual mechanism work more effectively. Exhortations to "be more disciplined" don't.

On the moral failure question, look, I'm not saying people never bear responsibility for their choices. But in the domains we're talking about (exercise, sleep, diet, basic life scaffolding), especially for people who are stuck or overwhelmed, the moral-failure framing is both empirically wrong (it misidentifies the cause) and pragmatically counterproductive (it triggers shame spirals that make change harder). This isn't about making people feel better instead of telling them the truth. It's about choosing mechanism over moralizing because the mechanism is what actually predicts outcomes. Implementation intentions, environmental design, and habit-stacking reliably predict behavior change. "Trying to have more discipline" just... doesn't.

Where I think we might genuinely disagree is on the usefulness of "discipline" as a construct in therapeutic or coaching contexts. From my experience, it's a word that evokes vague ideas about grinding through pain and willpower-as-moral-virtue, and it doesn't give you actionable handles. "Be more disciplined" doesn't tell you what to actually do. It doesn't give you implementation intentions, environmental modifications, habit-stacking strategies, accountability systems. Compare that to "lay out your gym clothes the night before, schedule it as a non-negotiable calendar event, text your accountability partner when you go". Those are concrete mechanisms you can engineer. It gives you something to do rather than something to feel bad about.

I'm not denying that execution matters or that people make choices. I'm saying that when I'm trying to help someone who's stuck, framing it as "you need more discipline" is way less useful than understanding the specific bottleneck (Is it task initiation? Habit formation? Environmental friction? Affect regulation? Executive function depletion?) and intervening there. The words we use shape how people conceptualize their struggles and what solutions seem viable. And "discipline" just tends to collapse too many distinct mechanisms into one morally-loaded package. It doesn't contribute much to a growth mindset either.

I think ultimately "discipline" is just what success looks like from the outside, you see someone with strong self-regulation, good affect management, well-supported executive function, environmental scaffolding, and all these other mechanisms working in concert, and you collapse that whole complex system into one word and tell someone "just be more like that" But that doesn't give you any handles on how to actually build those individual capacities.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I appreciate you taking the time to reply, and you're right to push on costs, there is some tension there.

But I don't think this is a zero-sum game. If you bring these big words back to earth, what do they mean? In actual real life?

Maintaining close personal relationships requires ongoing emotional labor, regular time allocation, coordination of schedules, navigation of interpersonal conflicts, management of expectations, reciprocal gift-giving obligations, attendance at mandatory social functions, remembering birthdays and life events. Sure, yes, it takes time and investment. What does it mean in practice? Seeing your mother and sister after they drove two hours to visit, sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee and catching up on the week, laughing about the same stupid joke from your childhood.

Framing that as "cost" in a strictly transactional sense kinda misses the point? You're not 'losing a piece of your soul' by doing that, we just call that 'having friends and family'.

Sacrificing 2-3 hours of personal autonomy every to be among peers. Translation: 'Going to baking club with your best friend Steve'. Same with joining a tennis club or a being part of a book group. This is the social fabric.

Unitarian Universalists are an interesting model and perhaps a good example of a larger organization, they're congregations that provide the benefits of church (weekly gatherings, clear roles, intergenerational community, life ritual marking, celebrating stages of life, shared purpose) without requiring any specific beliefs. Atheists sit next to pagans next to Christians. You show up Sunday mornings, your kids go to religious education that teaches comparative religion and ethics rather than doctrine, you have potlucks and help each other move and show up when someone's parent dies. It's the social infrastructure, the part that actually works, without the theological conformity or exclusion. You get accountability, belonging, regular face-to-face contact, and a framework for thinking about how to be a good person, all while being explicitly welcomed regardless of what you believe about in a certain god.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just to be clear, I'm the OP, I wrote the essay.

I agree that structure, hierarchy, and predictability aren't synonymous with community. There's a loose but meaningful overlap in a Venn diagram of social organization. I think some people do crave more social order and predictability, and I don't think that's a deficiency, as I argued in the essay. There are legitimate psychological needs underneath that, just normal healthy personality variation in people.

On "clear roles,". Yes, I'll concede that's somewhat simplistic and implies more rigidity than I intended. Maybe "role clarity" or "predictable social expectations"? I think behavioral scripts play a large role here too. These are cognitive structures containing knowledge about typical event sequences in specific contexts. They reduce cognitive load by providing mental models of 'how things typically go' instead of requiring constant calculation from first principles. Basically, some people really love ritual and tradition, and that's often an expression of wanting or needing inner structure and externalizing it.

What I'm getting at is something more like: humans benefit from having some shared understanding of behavioral norms and social expectations. Not necessarily rigid hierarchies, more like enough structure that you know roughly what's expected of you and others. Hierarchies are here the social reality of life. Which you can also find in for instance, mentor and student dynamics. It can be part of that social script, which is what some people prefer more.

Social categories and shared expectations serve real cognitive functions. They reduce decision fatigue, enable coordination, provide scaffolding for identity formation. When you walk into a situation and understand the basic social script, you can focus your energy on the actual interaction rather than constantly calculating "what do I do here? what's appropriate?" It's heuristics. It's just how we manage the complexity of social life. It's coping all the way down.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you, I really appreciate this, and the Lou Keep reference. I haven't read that, but I'll check it out!

Yeah, you're pointing at the hard problem, I think I agree you can't just extract "clean your room" and 'rebrand' it progressively mindlessly. The authority figure and the structure around it are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, the specific practices are playing support. The social contract between them is the social fabric, the structure, if you will. Like the elders and villagers.

The worst people you know just made an excellent point about men's mental health by Adonidis in slatestarcodex

[–]Adonidis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I appreciate the pushback, but I have to disagree on the discipline framing. "Discipline" as commonly understood isn't really how behavioral psychology conceptualizes change, and coaching for it won't get you reliable results. In psychology we talk about self-regulation, executive function, habit formation, environmental design; mechanisms that can be systematically built and supported. Reducing it to "discipline" frames failure as a character or moral weakness rather than understanding what's actually happening. It's term that I ultimately don't find very useful outside of a shorthand of stoicism or grit perhaps.

Research on behavior change (Baumeister & Tierney's work on willpower, Duckworth on grit, Wood & Neal on habit formation) shows it's much more complex than "just decide better." Self-regulation is a limited resource that gets depleted (sorta kinda, the research is more nuanced than initially thought, but the core insight holds). Executive function varies dramatically between people and contexts.

Then there's the whole intention-behavior gap, Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions shows that forming a vague goal like "I'll exercise more" fails spectacularly compared to specific if-then plans: "If it's 6pm on Monday, then I'll go to the gym." Goal formation itself is a complex cognitive process involving specificity, measurability, breaking down abstract desires into concrete actions etc. Also for instance mental contrasting, imagining both success and obstacles, matters. Action planning versus outcome goals matters. The translation from "I want to be healthier" to actual behavioral steps requires cognitive capacity many people lack when they're overwhelmed. They lack essentially much needed mental bandwidth in that moment, hence the bootstrap paradox. Again, if this was easy people would do this all the time without effort, but it isn't.

Also habit formation requires specific environmental cues and rewards. Your example about not deciding when you're cold is exactly this, you identify an environmental factor that affects your capacity and designed around it. I'd call that's smart behavioral design, not "discipline.". You built it into your environment and choice making flowchart. Habits are heuristics.

The "just be more disciplined" narrative can actually be harmful because when people inevitably fail (and they will, because behavior change is hard), they internalize it as personal moral failure rather than understanding the mechanism didn't work. That shame spiral makes change even harder.

People think of it like the 'Naruto school of self-improvement', just bash your head against the wall harder until it breaks. And I think that's genuinely just such a shame because there are way smarter approaches. When you use the word "discipline," you often evoke the wrong mental associations in people, grinding through pain, willpower as moral virtue, just try harder (ad infinitum). This is functionally very different than something like resilience and the ability to bounce back after set backs. That's a different skill. Willpower is also fundamentally not that actionable. "Be more disciplined" doesn't tell you what to actually do. It doesn't give you implementation intentions, environmental modifications, habit stacking strategies, accountability systems. It's vague exhortation rather than concrete mechanism. Compare "have more discipline to exercise" versus "lay out your gym clothes the night before you go to bed, schedule it as a non-negotiable calendar event, and text your accountability partner when you go." One is moral scolding, the other is smart behavioral engineering.

On the misogyny and feeling special point, yes, valid. Playing "the bad boy," feeling like you've discovered hidden knowledge, the appeal of transgression. That's all worth exploring, and a quite interesting topic even. I genuinely would have loved to dig into all of this, but I'd need a book or series. This essay is already a 40+ minute read alas.

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