Remote Work is Killing Sex

Cryptids, Remote Work, and AI Art.

Here are seven short article responses I wrote today:

1. Sex Magic and AI Cryptids, reply to Katherine Dee

2. Remote Work is Killing Sex, reply to Bryan Kaplan

3. Safetyism Kills, reply to Cremieux

4. Why I Don’t Think AI Art is Art, reply to Sectionalism Archive

5. Radicalism is irrelevant, reply to Opinionated Ogre

6. Electile Dysfunction, response to Robert F. Graboyes

7. Simplify, simplify, simplify, summary of Scott Sumner

1. Sex Magic and AI Cryptids

reply to Katherine Dee

Where’s magic? Magic is found in the *beyond.* The most basic form of magic is sex magic. If you grow up in a traditional culture, then sex is “beyond the pale.” It is a portal to another world. It is not spoke about openly. Sexual words are phrases are segregated by gender, not accepted in public, polite conversation.

Liberalism has destroyed the magic of sex by turning sex “inside-out.” Now we can endlessly discuss LGBTQ, kink, condoms, fallopian tubes -- everything about sex is made public, polite, exact, and scientific.

With the loss of sex magic, people need to go somewhere else to get that feeling of magic. They go to conspiracy theories and cryptids.

Sometimes people frame our culture as being “sex obsessed” or “sexless,” and both are true. As we lose the magic of sex, we dig deeper, trying to get back that initial thrill that we’ve lot.

2. Remote Work is Killing Sex

response to Bryan Kaplan

This is a good piece explaining why total-remote, or inter-country remote work, is not maximally economically efficient. I would add something I think the author missed: the emotional-sexual component.

When you work in a physical space with other people, there is the potential for sex, violence, and friendship. Anyone who has worked with other people has felt this potential, even if weakly, even if they never acted upon it. Personally, I have had sex with coworkers, I have seen my boss throw things across the room, and I have developed deep, rewarding, valuable friendships by being “in person” with coworkers. Even if you have no experienced these things, I think everyone has felt something on that spectrum.

The girl you work with is cute, you think, “maybe something could happen.” Your boss gets angry, and you realize that he is bigger than you, activating a bit of adrenaline. You don’t have friends at work, but still, it’s nice to have acquaintances. All of this exists on a spectrum.

When you remove the sexual-emotional aspect of the workplace, I believe that worker commitment falls drastically. This is what I experienced in remote work -- total numbness. I deal with this right now as a full-time Substack writer living in abject poverty. It is due to my absolute faith and fanaticism that I continue on and don’t fall into total depression. You can see that I am much more productive and driven than the average person.

However, if I were to have an office where I could go to do my work, and there were to be some tense moments, some sexual moments, and some casual acquaintances, I think my productivity would increase. Maybe the quality of my work would increase, because my emotional life would be stimulated. Much of what I write is dry and boring; I think having a more active social life would help with this. For me, someone who basically only goes to the gym and works, and has zero interest in social events, this is a crucial distinction.

In 2022, I tried to solve this by renting a house on 10 acres and inviting my 1,000 fans and close friends to come live with me. Although I knew dozens of people who were unemployed and had nothing better to do, no one took me up on this offer. As it turns out, getting people to move is extremely difficult. Nobody wants to do anything -- especially not unemployed people. If they were motivated to overcome obstacles, they wouldn’t be unemployed!

I have since given up on that and spent the last 3 years trying to reinvent myself and take my intellectual work more seriously and fanatically. I don’t believe I have the requisite audience size to attract anyone to my “compound.”

I did try hanging out in a “creative space” in Toronto, but I found the experience draining for several reasons. First, I was sleeping in a basement apartment with full internet access. This is the worst of all worlds for me. Something about not having windows attracts me to the screen more than ever. I was staying up 36 hours, sleeping for 12 hours, and alternating like this for most of the two weeks. It was a hellish experience.

One of my problems with this “creative space” is that it wasn’t actually collaborative. Everyone was doing different things, completely independently, at least from my perspective. I think a true work environment requires some level of “interlocked” productivity.

3. Safetyism is killing us

reply to Cremieux

Cremieux makes the qualitative case for why your allergies are fake. What I would like to see, in addition, is how much money this represents in opportunity cost. So people aren’t taking penicillin -- I assume there is some cost associated with that, either because the alternative is more expensive, or less effective. Can we quantify that?

Zooming out, I’d like to see the cost of safetyism. I wrote an article a while ago suggesting that plane crashes save lives. The reason is because driving a car is super dangerous, one of the most dangerous things that the average American ever does, and so anything we can do to reduce car driving is good.

Let’s say that driving in a car for 100 miles has a 0.01% risk of death, and flying in a plane for 100 miles has a 0.0001% risk of death. This means, if we want to save lives, we need to get people out of cars and into planes. How do we do that? We lower the cost. How do we do that? We lower regulation. Lower regulation leads to more plane crashes, but also, far fewer car crashes, meaning a net decrease in mortality.

In this way, safetyism is actually quite dangerous. It seems to be a result of the fact that we do not sufficiently consider opportunity cost. Yes, when you prevent a plane crash, you think you are saving lives -- but if you force people into cars as a result of higher costs, then you are actually killing people. Safetyism kills!

4. Why I Don’t Think AI Art is Art

I agree with this article, and if I had to summarize it in a word, I would say “process.” Art is a process. Even the photographer has a process. They physically manipulate their camera with different lenses, different techniques, exposure lengths, the angle of light, the presence of shadows... all of it is a process.

AI art, on the other hand, lacks process. The process exists inside the black box of the data center. No one knows what goes on in there. Every AI prompt is like a commission. “Please generated me an image of big boobies.” Ok, that’s a request -- not a process in itself. The commissioner is not the artist; he is a customer. Even if the art is free, you’re still a customer.

“If the product is free, you are the product!” Making AI art feels icky.

5. Radicalism is irrelevant

Which is more radical: mass immigration, or immigration restriction? From the right-wing perspective, mass immigration is radical because it is literally white genocide. From the left-wing perspective, immigration restriction is based on literal racism. Is there a way we can objectively litigate this question?

From a libertarian perspective, immigration restriction is an active choice, whereas mass immigration is simply a laissez faire attitude. To put this another way: which regime is more radical? Luxembourg, where foreign nationals make up a large percentage of the population, or North Korea, where foreign nationals are kept out by mine fields and secret police? Not that North Korea has a problem with people sneaking in, but still.

From the conservative perspective, radically changing the demographics of the country is inherently destabilizing. It’s simply common sense that demographic change should occur slowly, and allow time for assimilation.

I think the racist position is more honest, in simply saying that non-whites have bad genes and they are gross. The “needs time for assimilation” position is just making things up. Jews lived in Germany for 1,000 years, and it was their attempt at assimilation which produced the Nazis -- not the other way around. When Jewish supremacist attitudes were at their peak, during the medieval period, they were much safer. Time does not heal all wounds.

I think this pissing contest over “who is more radical” is dumb. I want radical truth over moderate lies.

6. Electile Dysfunction

response to Robert F. Graboyes

This article uses bad reasoning. See if you can spot the error:

“It is unlikely that a single undecided voter exists within a 50-mile radius... activists show up at my front door, literature in hand, hoping to present the case for one party’s nominee or the other. I have two theories to explain their motivations:

1. These youths are naïve and narcissistic enough to believe themselves capable of persuading a DC-area resident to change his or her vote; or

2. They hold no such delusions and are merely compiling an enemies list—cataloging who should be subjected to lawfare or doxxing once their party assumes power.”

This person apparently does not understand the concept of “sales” and sounds paranoid. When a salesman arrives at your doorstep, he is not attempting to get you to purchase something that you hate. He is attempting to get you to purchase something that you like.

If you have ever worked in sales, you are intimately familiar with this concept. It’s not that potential customers are “undecided” -- it’s that they want to buy your product, but they need some motivation to do so. This is the entire logic behind web advertisements as well.

Let’s say that I am a straight man, and I see an advertisement for Grindr. That is a failure of the advertisement to correctly identify my sexuality. On the other hand, if I am a gay man, and I see an advertisement for Grindr, that is a win, even if I already have the app installed. Why? Because it incentivizes me to use the app, and apps make money by usage, not by downloads.

So what ads are intended to do is to incentivize or motivate people who are already willing customers into “pulling the trigger.” There is a large swath of the country who lean Republican or lean Democrat, but they see voting as a waste of time. The job of political advertisements and door knocking isn’t to turn a moderate into a partisan, but to turn lazy partisans into activated partisans.

When you knock on a door, your job isn’t to find a Kamala voter and change them to Trump. Your job is to find a Trump voter who is lazy, and to make him less lazy, or to find a black person and tell them that Trump is racist.

7. Simplify, simplify, simplify

I’m going to try to put Scott’s philosophy in my own words to check my understanding.

When a recession occurs, it is rarely due to shocks in supply. Historically, this was more common: for example, bad weather leads to a bad crop, which drives up the price of grain, leading to economic problems. However, today, supply shocks are really rare in the first world. Mostly what we are dealing with is demand shocks. For example, AI drives an increased demand in computer chips, far beyond the existing supply. This drives up the price of computer chips. That’s a demand shock, not a supply shock.

At the macro level, a total economy recession almost necessarily means that there is a demand shock in the supply of currency. Either there is too much money in the economy (inflation) or there is too little money in the economy (deflation). Both are problems. Because wages are sticky, inflation means that consumer spending tightens, slowing down the economy, like a traffic jam. On the other hand, deflation increases the value of currency, which leads to cash hoarding, as deflation creates an effective interest rate on holding cash. If the value of a dollar is increasing deflation, then by hoarding dollars, you are essentially being paid a dividend.

What we want is a stable and smooth currency environment which is neither excessively inflationary (as this lowers consumption) nor excessively deflationary (as this causes cash hoarding and a liquidity trap). The fed has their target at 2%; Scott says 3-4% would be a better target.