Isegoria

We have a deep-seated compulsion always to add

May 12th, 2026

In Inside the Box, David Epstein explains how General Magic exemplified the adage that more startups die of indigestion than starvation.

“Overflowing with resources and talent,” he says “they were bereft of helpful constraints.”

Another telling scene [in the General Magic documentary] features a young Darin Adler, who had already led a team that built a Mac operating system before coming to General Magic. Engineers are sitting on the floor in a circle listening to Adler as he tells them that there are “moments where somebody has to start doing something, and what we’ve decided is that for each of those important moments we want to make sure that there’s real responsibility for someone to say, ‘I’m at this important moment, start doing your work.’”

The response, Adler recalled: “They said, ‘Oh, we don’t need a manager. We don’t want you because we don’t need a manager. Our leaders are Andy and Bill. That’s what makes this place great is we don’t have managers.’”

Boundaries can be helpful, because we have a deep-seated compulsion always to add:

In the 1960s, computer scientist Fred Brooks led the development of the IBM computers that NASA used to send humans to the Moon. He later founded the computer science department at the University of North Carolina. But he is most widely remembered for his popular writing on design and project management, including what became known as Brooks’s Law, the idea that adding people to a software project that is already late will make it even more late. We underestimate how adding stuff, including team members, also adds complexity.

[…]

Leidy Klotz, an engineering and architecture professor at the University of Virginia, has shown that humans reflexively add in order to solve problems — more people, more money, more features, etc. — even when subtracting is better. In the simplest demonstration in Klotz’s research, adults were given a Lego structure that needed to be strengthened in order to hold a masonry brick over the head of a Star Wars stormtrooper action figure. Each problem solver could earn money by completing the task, but there was a catch: Every Lego piece they added reduced their reward. And yet, most added multiple pieces even though removing just a single, obviously precarious piece would have solved the problem instantly.

[…]

Long before their work documented it scientifically, product designers had come up with various names for this tendency, like “featuritis” or “the Christmas tree effect.”

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Journalists have the macabre phrase “drown your kittens” to refer to getting rid of lines the writer has fallen in love with but that don’t serve the reader.

Posted in Business | 2 Comments »

How do you know Latin, trigonometry, or Emily Dickinson won’t serve you on the job?

May 11th, 2026

The staunchest defenders of education, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), reject the idea of sorting subjects and majors by “usefulness”:

How do you know Latin, trigonometry, or Emily Dickinson won’t serve you on the job? A man told me his French once helped him understand an airport announcement in Paris. Without high school French, he would have missed his flight. Invest years now and one day you might save hours at an airport. See, studying French pays!

These claims remind me of Hoarders, a reality show about people whose mad acquisitiveness has ruined their lives. Some hoarders collect herds of cats, others old refrigerators, others their own garbage. Why not throw away some of their useless possessions? Stock answer: “I might need it one day.” They “might need” a hundred empty milk cartons.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 3 Comments »

He called it the Pocket Crystal

May 10th, 2026

As I mentioned recently, I quite enjoyed David Epstein’s The Sports Gene and Range, so I went ahead and got Inside the Box the day it came out.

He opens with the famous story of Dmitri Mendeleev seeing the periodic table in a dream and contrasts that myth with the reality that Mendeleev had a deadline approaching for the second volume of his textbook, and he needed a way to discuss dozens of elements more sensibly and efficiently.

His primary example though — or counter-example, since it demonstrates what a lack of constraints does — is General Magic, founded by two Apple legends and the guy who coined the term Information Economy, Marc Porat:

One day, Porat took a Sharp Wizard — a new electronic organizer with a calendar and phone book — and duct-taped it to a Motorola analog cell phone. He had his concept.

[…]

He called it the Pocket Crystal.

[…]

The Pocket Crystal schematic depicted a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons—just a touch screen. It would be a computer that combined a phone and fax machine; you would use it to send text messages, watch movies, play video games, buy plane tickets, and download new apps. It would fit in your pocket, and it would be beautiful. Following the sketch, Porat wrote in his red book: “It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used. It should offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal.”

In 1989, only 15 percent of American households even had a computer, which didn’t fit in anyone’s pocket; zero percent were browsing the web, because it didn’t exist. And yet, there was Marc Porat, essentially sketching the iPhone.

Apple took a board seat, Sculley introduced them to Sony, and soon “General Magic’s partners controlled so much of the world’s communications industry that Alliance meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they were prohibited from discussing.”

Porat raised so much money so quickly to create “heaven for engineers.”

“They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?”

The answer, it turned out: a little less freedom.

The General Magic documentary explains:

Posted in Business, Science, Technology | 2 Comments »

Being more relevant than Oxford in 1750 is nothing to brag about

May 9th, 2026

Every school teaches a mix of useful skills and filler, Bryan Caplan explains (in The Case Against Education), of “wheat” and “chaff”:

The crucial question is: What’s today’s mix? 90% wheat and 10% chaff? 50/ 50? 20/ 80?

[…]

In a modern economy, literacy and numeracy are the only skills that almost all jobs require, so English and math make the cut.

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High school science classes…are only stepping-stones for the tiny share of students who pursue careers in science or engineering. How tiny? About one-third of high school graduates have a bachelor’s degree; only 14% of students who earn a bachelor’s degree major in science or engineering. That multiplies out to roughly 5%.

[…]

To belabor the obvious, the arts are rarely useful. We don’t speak of “starving artists” for nothing.

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Foreign languages, similarly, are all but useless in the American economy. Thanks to immigration, employers have a built-in pool of native speakers of almost every living language.

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Almost every modern occupation uses some math. Yet high schools teach and often require math rarely used outside a classroom.

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Geometry is the most common of all math courses: over four-fifths complete it in high school. Yet the subject, featuring countless proofs of triangles’ congruence, is notoriously irrelevant. Geometry rarely pops up after the final exam, even in other math classes.

Algebra I, which teaches students graphing and one-and two-variable equations, has many practical applications. Most students, however, continue on to Algebra II, which largely exists to prepare students for calculus. Calculus, in turn, gets you into college. Once college begins, however, you’ll probably never differentiate another equation unless you pursue a degree in math, science, or engineering.

Knowledge of statistics, in contrast, is useful whether or not you go to college. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman shows that statistical illiteracy underpins many foolish real-world choices. Yet only 7.7% of high school students pass a stats class.

[…]

Being more relevant than Oxford in 1750 is nothing to brag about.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

A textbook case of discovery

May 8th, 2026

I quite enjoyed David Epstein’s The Sports Gene and Range, so I went ahead and got Inside the Box the day it came out. It’s a light, Gladwellian collection of pop-sci bits exploring How Constraints Make Us Better.

“It is a myth — widely believed but not less mythical for that — that people are most creative when they are most free.”
— Herbert Simon

He opens with the famous story of Dmitri Mendeleev seeing the periodic table in a dream. There’s very little evidence of that, but there is plenty of evidence that he was struggling to fit the remaining dozens of elements into the second volume of his new chemistry textbook, and he needed a way to group them.

“He was boxed in by a book contract,” Epstein notes, “and that made all the difference.”

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

Colleges do not card

May 7th, 2026

“Higher education is the only product,” Arnold Kling says, “where the consumer tries to get as little out of it as possible.”

In The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan runs with this idea:

Fact: anyone can study at Princeton for free. While tuition is over $45,000 a year, anyone can show up and start attending classes. No one will stop you. No one will challenge you. No one will make you feel unwelcome. Gorge yourself at Princeton’s all-you-can-eat buffet of the mind. Colleges do not card. I have seen this with my own eyes at schools around the country.

[…]

After four years of “guerrilla education,” there’s only one thing you’ll lack: a diploma. Since you’re not in the system, your performance will be invisible to employers. Not too enticing, is it?

Imagine this stark dilemma: you can have either a Princeton education without a diploma, or a Princeton diploma without an education. Which gets you further on the job market? For a human capital purist, the answer is obvious: four years of training are vastly preferable to a page of paper. But try saying that with a straight face.

[…]

The fact that almost no one grabs a free elite education shows human capital purism is false.

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How would your career have been different if you flunked all the classes you’ve forgotten?

If employers rewarded well-educated workers for skills alone, failing a class and forgetting a class would have identical career consequences. They plainly don’t.

[…]

Failing to learn course material sends a lousy signal: you were lacking in intelligence, conscientiousness, and/ or conformity—and probably still are. Forgetting course material on the other hand, merely signals you lack the superpower of photographic memory.

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Students struggle to win admission to elite schools. Once they arrive, however, they hunt for professors with low expectations.

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Anyone who likes money and dislikes studying has an obvious two-part strategy: choose the best school that admits you so you get a good job after graduation, and choose the easiest professors on campus so you have a good time before graduation.

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Teachers have a foolproof way to make their students cheer: cancel class. If human capital purists are right, such jubilation is bizarre. Since you go to school to acquire job skills, a teacher who cancels class rips you off. You learn less, you’re less employable, yet your school doesn’t refund a dime of tuition.

[…]

By analogy, both sculptors and appraisers have the power to raise the market value of a piece of stone. The sculptor raises the market value of a piece of stone by shaping it. The appraiser raises the market value of a piece of stone by judging it. Teachers need to ask ourselves, “How much of what we do is sculpting, and how much is appraising?” And if we won’t ask ourselves, our alumni need to ask for us.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Education, Policy | 5 Comments »

A system collapses because its ruling elite obstinately clings to an ideology that is no longer fit for purpose

May 6th, 2026

The rise of right-wing populism, Will Solfiac argues, stems from the unwillingness of mainstream political parties to control immigration:

If mainstream political parties had managed to shut down the fraudulent asylum system, enabled deportation of foreign criminals, and heavily restricted flows from countries where immigrants are particularly likely to be net drains on the state or to cause social problems, this would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of right-wing populist parties. Yet with the partial exception of Denmark, mainstream parties have been unwilling to do this.

[…]

The reason for this unwillingness is, of course, ideology. It’s obvious that the asylum system functions primarily as a way for young men, and later on their families, to bypass formal immigration routes and achieve settlement in Britain. It’s also obvious that a disproportionate amount of the problems of immigration in general come from a few parts of the world. Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter.

[…]

I think that this failure to reform is an example of one of the most important and interesting tendencies that you can observe in history: when a system collapses because its ruling elite obstinately clings to an ideology that is no longer fit for purpose.

[…]

In the early 16th century the Mamluk rulers of Egypt came under attack from the expansionist Ottoman empire. While the Ottoman armies, particularly the elite janissary corps, were enthusiastic adopters of firearms, the Mamluks disdained firearms, viewing them as dishonourable.

[…]

The aristocracy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth maintained the “golden liberty” of their nobles’ commonwealth from the 16th century until the partitions of the late 18th century. This ensured extensive privileges for themselves, including the liberum veto — the right for any noble to nullify all legislation passed in a sejm parliamentary session. It also ensured a weak, elected monarch under the control of the nobles. This system was justified as protecting against the “tyranny” that existed in centralised states like France, but it also meant that the Commonwealth had no central state that could have supported a modern army, making it increasingly vulnerable to encroachments by its centralising neighbours like Sweden and Russia.

[…]

In the lead-up to the American Civil War, the doctrine of states’ rights was frequently employed by the South. The constitution of the Confederacy, in its very first line, replaced “in order to form a more perfect union” with “each state acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government”. During the war, this doctrine seriously impeded the war effort. A famous example was Georgia’s governor Joseph E. Brown’s attempts to stop Georgia’s troops being used out of state. Brown also opposed central conscription, as did Zebulon Vance of North Carolina.

[…]

The Moriori of the Chatham Islands, who had branched off from the Maori hundreds of years earlier, were invaded by two Maori tribes from the north island of New Zealand in 1835. Michael King’s 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered describes how over the centuries the Moriori had developed a doctrine of nonviolence, with conflicts being resolved by ritual combat which would stop at the first sight of blood.

[…]

In 1912 Tibet gained its independence from the collapsing Qing empire. During this period, the 13th Dalai Lama (r. 1895 to 1933), who had previously lived in exile and had become aware of how dangerously far behind his country was falling, attempted reform. He made strenuous efforts to modernise, introducing Western style education and improving the military and taxation systems. However, these efforts were resisted by the powerful monasteries, who resented the taxes and considered the reforms to be anti-Buddist, and these efforts foundered in the mid 1920s. In his final testament of 1933, the Dalai Lama warned of the coming destruction of Tibet’s traditions and identity if they could not defend their land.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

The Martian sociologist will conclude the typical worker occasionally solves quadratic equations and checks triangles for congruence

May 5th, 2026

In The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan asks us to put ourselves in the shoes of a Martian sociologist:

Your mission: given our curriculum, make an educated guess about what our economy looks like. The Martian would plausibly work backward from the premise that the curriculum prepares students to be productive adults. Since students study reading, writing, and math, you would correctly infer that the modern economy requires literacy and numeracy. So far, so good.

From then on, however, the Martian would leap from one erroneous inference to another. Students spend years studying foreign languages, so there must be lots of translators. Teachers emphasize classic literature and poetry. A thriving market in literary criticism is the logical explanation. Every student has to take algebra and geometry. The Martian sociologist will conclude the typical worker occasionally solves quadratic equations and checks triangles for congruence. While we can picture an economy that fits our curriculum like a glove, that economy is out of this world.

We should be equally puzzled, he notes, by the eminently practical subjects students don’t have to study:

Why don’t educators familiarize students with compensation and job satisfaction in common occupations? Strategies for breaking into various industries? Sectors with rapidly changing employment? Why don’t schools make students spend a full year learning how to write a resume or affect a can-do attitude? Dire sins of omission.

There has to be a logical explanation for the effect of Ivory Tower achievement on Real World success, he continues:

The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them.

Education signals three broad traits: not just intelligence, but conscientiousness and conformity, too:

What are modern model workers like? They’re team players. They’re deferential to superiors, but not slavish. They’re congenial toward coworkers but put business first. They dress and groom conservatively. They say nothing remotely racist or sexist, and they stay a mile away from anything construable as sexual harassment. Perhaps most importantly, they know and do what’s expected, even when articulating social norms is difficult or embarrassing. Employers don’t have to tell a modern model worker what’s socially acceptable case by case.

[…]

An intelligent worker learns quickly and deeply. A conscientious worker labors until the job’s done right. A conformist worker obeys superiors and cooperates with teammates. If you lack the right stuff to succeed in school, you probably lack the right stuff to succeed in the labor market.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 4 Comments »

The Navy’s mission is now to establish sea control where possible and sea denial where required

May 4th, 2026

The era of the Transoceanic Navy, focused on power projection from uncontested seas, is over, Commander Jeff Vandenengel argues, and the era of the Panoceanic Navy, focused on sea control and sea denial, has begun:

In the Continental Phase, from the nation’s founding until the 1890s, the United States fought for North American dominance. Because most threats were on land, the Navy played a subordinate role to the Army and focused primarily on coastal defense, commerce protection and raiding, and support of forces ashore, earning weak public support and limited resources as a result. The Oceanic Phase, from the 1890s until the end of World War II, focused on national efforts to achieve supremacy against threats emanating from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Based on that national aim and shaped by the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the Navy sought to achieve command of the sea through the construction of a powerful battle fleet, giving it a convincing strategic concept that earned the service great public support and resources. Finally, Huntington introduced the Eurasian phase of national policy that started at the end of World War II and featured the replacement of oceanic threats with a new continental threat, the Soviet Union. He then introduced the transoceanic Navy, which would use command of the sea to influence events ashore and give it a new strategic concept to earn public support and resources.

Today, the nation’s primary threat has shifted from the Soviet Union to China, which has an economy, military, and set of ambitions that make it a fundamentally different and more menacing adversary. As a result, Huntington’s Eurasian Phase is over and a new phase of national policy has begun, to be dominated by diplomatic, informational, military, and economic competition between the United States and China. Within that competition, China’s construction of a fleet and military designed to challenge the U.S. Navy has degraded U.S. command of the sea to its lowest point in 80 years, undermining the transoceanic Navy’s strategic concept and ability to contribute to national policy.

In its place a new doctrine is taking shape, the theory of the panoceanic Navy, shifting away from projecting power ashore and toward reestablishing command of the sea to enable the flow of friendly military forces and trade while denying that movement to the adversary.

[…]

The U.S. Navy established command of the sea following World War II. That victory, Huntington showed, created a paradoxical crisis: The Navy had built a fleet to establish command of the sea and then achieved just that. Its success meant there were no credible adversaries at sea, undermining the service’s long-held strategic concept that it would guard against oceanic threats and needed a large fleet to do so. The Navy’s ability to win public support and earn the resources necessary to contribute to national objectives suffered as a result.

[…]

The primary challenger to that command is the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), now the world’s largest navy by hull count—if not yet by tonnage—with approximately 25 percent more warships than the U.S. Navy, a disparity expected to grow to almost 50 percent by 2030. Approximately 70 percent of those PLAN warships have been launched since 2010, compared to just 25 percent of U.S. warships, meaning it is no longer a fleet of old, obsolete coastal vessels.

[…]

The Navy’s strenuous submarine production efforts and the Marine Corps’ Force Design are implicit acknowledgements that the United States no longer enjoys uncontested command of the sea. Large numbers of fast-attack submarines are only necessary if there are large numbers of warships for them to sink and large areas in which surface ships would be at too great a risk to operate. Similarly, Marine littoral regiments are only necessary if Marines must “stand in” a high-threat zone, at risk of being cut off from naval support; medium landing ships (LSMs) are only desirable if large amphibious warships cannot deliver Marines where and when desired; and the Marine Corps’ sea control efforts are only necessary if that control is contested.

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Even nonstate actors, because of the proliferation and democratization of long-range sensors, networks, and weapons, are able to contest that command, at least on a regional basis. The Houthis launched more attacks on U.S. Navy ships in two years than all other adversaries had in the preceding 79 years.

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Today, the Navy is built to project power ashore against continental threats but no longer enjoys the command of the sea necessary to do so.

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China now has the world’s second largest economy, manufactures more goods than the next four leading countries combined, and is a global leader in research, innovation, and patents. It has the world’s largest navy, army, conventional rocket force, merchant marine, maritime law enforcement fleet, and the Indo-Pacific’s largest aviation force.

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Whereas the transoceanic Navy shifted focus “away from the oceans and towards the land masses on their far side,” the focus now returns to the sea. The proliferation of long-range sensors, networks, and weapons, however, means it is increasingly difficult for any fleet to achieve sea control—never mind command of the sea. In addition, while conflicts in the Oceanic Phase were primarily decided by fleet-on-fleet actions, the proliferation and democratization of technologies means non-naval forces (Houthis with land-based antiship missiles on the low end of the spectrum and the PLARF on the high end, for example) now have an unprecedented ability to engage fleets, greatly expanding the range and scope of the naval battlefield. What results is the theory of the panoceanic Navy.

[…]

The Pacific phase now features competition between two nations with powerful fleets and large maritime trade flows, and so the site of decisive action has shifted back to the sea. Whoever prevails there will win the ability to influence events ashore, whether through military functions, such as power projection and deterrence, or through the protection and denial of trade and accumulation of national wealth and power. Even the simple viewing of a map makes it obvious: The two competing superpowers are separated by the world’s largest ocean, and it is here that the military competition will be decided.

[…]

At sea, the PLAN has equipped most of its warships, aircraft, submarines, and larger robotic and autonomous systems (RASs) with antiship missiles, meaning almost every platform in its fleet, not just capital ships, poses a significant threat. Even if Chinese aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers could be defeated, clandestine forces such as the world’s largest submarine fleet, PLA mining—forces, and the Chinese maritime militia—could significantly delay if not prevent U.S. sea control.

[…]

In the land domain, the PLARF operates from mobile launchers that are difficult to find and uses weapons that outrange most of those in the U.S. fleet, giving it the ability to strike ships thousands of miles from the coast. The U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Design is focused on using distributed and hidden stand-in forces to affect events at sea, a model the Houthis used to contest U.S. sea control efforts for almost two years. A ship has always been a fool to fight a fort, and now the fort (land-based forces) is mobile, has excellent scouting, long-range communications and weapons, and may be harder to find than the ship.

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Naval history has been dominated by desperate struggles to find the enemy, but today the space and cyber domains may reduce the time necessary to do so from months to minutes.

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Whereas the oceanic Navy focused on fleet-on-fleet actions in a constrained part of an ocean and the transoceanic Navy focused on engagements between the fleet and continental forces in constrained littoral regions, the panoceanic Navy will have to strive to establish sea control against a wide array of military forces operating from multiple domains, with sensors, networks, and weapons of such long range to make it seem like the oceans are one continuous battlefield—a panoceanic arena.

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Taken together, these trends have lowered the obstacles to a credible attack and raised the requirements for credible defense, making sea denial easier and sea control harder. That has already played out in regional contests. In the Red Sea, to attempt sea denial, the Houthis needed a truck, a computer, and a RAS, whereas the U.S. Navy, to achieve sea control, needed a guided-missile destroyer with a highly trained crew, phased-array radars and satellite networks, and multiple types of advanced interceptors. The Houthis might not have known themselves whether their attacks failed; the world would have known almost immediately had U.S. defenses failed. The Houthis capitalized on that disparity to contest U.S. Navy sea control efforts for almost two years without a navy, without an air force, and without a credible industrial base. The Houthis’ sea-denial efforts must be assessed as partially successful—despite U.S. naval officers’ and sailors’ superb performance in battle—as evidenced by the significant reductions in merchant shipping willing to risk a Red Sea transit. Similarly, the Ukrainians denied the Black Sea to the Russians primarily by using land-based missiles and RASs, and in doing so established a measure of sea control for their own maritime shipping.

[…]

Given the threats the United States now faces, the nation’s resulting strategy, and the reality of modern combat at sea, the Navy’s mission is now to establish sea control where possible and sea denial where required.

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »

Belief effects do have a ceiling

May 3rd, 2026

With Sabastian Sawe breaking the two-hour marathon, Steve Magness notes, we’ve got a new self-help story that will dominate public speaking for decades to come, like Bannister’s breaking the four-minute mile:

After Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier, John Landy got under the mark just 46 days later. The next year 3 more men got under. And within 2.5 years, there were 10 runner who were now sub-4 milers.

But perhaps most interesting is that of the first five men to break 4 minutes for the mile, three were British. And they all shared a coach: Franz Stampfl. A year after Bannister broke the barrier, Stampfl’s athletes Chris Chattaway and Brian Hewson would become the 4th and 5th men to go sub-4. Chattaway was actually one of the original pacers in Bannister’s attempt. The other pace and training partner, Chris Brasher, went on to win Gold at the 1956 Olympics in the steeplechase.

For a belief effect to take hold, it has to feel real.

When we see someone we train with (or have competed against) who isn’t too dissimilar from us do something that once seemed crazy, we start to think, “If he or she can, why not me?” Famed psychologist Albert Bandura spent his career studying a type of inner confidence he called self-efficacy. The most powerful contributor was what he called mastery experiences, where you go into the arena and do the thing. You gain experience through the work, and that experience gives you evidence that you have a shot.

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Most people get this backwards. They wait until they feel sure before they act. But confidence isn’t something you summon. It’s something you accumulate. The more reps you put in, the more faith you gain in your respective craft, and in yourself. It is not blind or delusional faith. It is faith based on a concrete body of evidence—and it’s the only kind that holds up when it matters.

Another major contributor to self-efficacy is vicarious experience. It occurs when you watch someone like you attain your goal successfully. Bandura emphasized that the impact depends heavily on perceived similarity. It’s the Bannister effect to a T. His training partners saw what he did every day and thought, “We’re keeping up with him… maybe we can do it too.”

Bannister’s coach Franz Stampfl put it this way, “Effort is really a mental image. The basis of athletic coaching must be to make the state of mind so strong that a world record performance is reduced to the level of instinct.” While the trio of marathoners (Sawe, Kejelcha, and Kiplimo) who smashed records on Sunday weren’t training partners, they had raced each other numerous times. In fact, Kejelcha had a 2-1 lead over Sawe in the half-marathon. And Kiplimo had finished 2nd to Sawe at last year’s London marathon. So if someone you’ve competed with closely is going for it, you say “I’ve run with them before, so why not.” And this explains how you get three guys breaking a world-record in one race.

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Research? shows that role models can either inspire or discourage us. The difference comes from whether you see a role model or worthy rival’s success as achievable. Meaning, the more a role model or worthy rival seems like you (or perhaps comes from a background that allows you to say “this could be me”), the more likely that role model or worthy rival inspires. If, however, the role model or worthy rival is too distant, we create all sorts of reasons for why that couldn’t be us, and we psych ourselves out.

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Belief effects do have a ceiling. We can’t just wish or manifest our way to crazy performance, despite what some in the self-help world may say. In a fascinating study on cyclists who were deceived while doing a time trial, the researchers put a fake avatar and racing splits as being 2% faster than their personal best. They beat their own personal bests. But when they bumped that up to 5%, their performance crashed. It was too far of a stretch. The brain unlocks reserves up to a believable margin and shuts down past it.

There’s one other separate mechanism that plays a role here that goes deeper than belief. Henk Aarts and Peter Gollwitzer’s research on goal contagion found that watching someone pursue a goal makes you automatically adopt it yourself, often without realizing it. Goal contagion is the unconscious cousin to belief effects. And just like its close relative, it also runs on proximity. The closer the model of the goal, the stronger the pull. If you watch a random stranger run hard, you might catch a tiny bit of contagion. But if you watch your training partner go to the well in a workout, the contagion is massive. The brain adopts the goals of people it considers “us,” which is the exact biological mechanism behind why training groups elevate individual performance.

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Find the people doing what you want to do. Get close enough to feel it. The “impossible” becomes more possible when it’s standing next to you. And then give yourself the personal evidence—from practice, from prior experiences—that you can make the jump if things come together.

You don’t need to feel ready. What you need is a body of evidence: your own hard work and people around you who show you’ve got a chance.

Posted in Education, Fitness, Science | 2 Comments »

Education technology is widely used, but growth in achievement has not followed

May 2nd, 2026

Do online math programs work?

In August 2022, three researchers at Khan Academy, a popular math practice website, published the results of a massive, 99-district study of students. It showed an effect size of 0.26 standard deviations (SD) — equivalent to several months of additional schooling — for students who used the program as recommended.

A 2016 Harvard study of DreamBox, a competing mathematics platform, though without the benefit of Sal Khan’s satin voiceover, found an effect size of 0.20 SD for students who used the program as recommended. A 2019 study of i-Ready, a similar program, reported an effect size in math of 0.22 SD — again for students who used the program as recommended. And in 2023 IXL, yet another online mathematics program, reported an effect size of 0.14 SD for students who used the program as designed.

Those gains, and many others like them reported each year, are impressive. Since use of these tools is widespread, one could be forgiven for asking why American students are not making impressive gains in math achievement. John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist, declares himself “impressed how education technology has had no effect on…outcomes.” He was talking about reading but could equally have called out mathematics, the other big area in which education technology is widely used but growth in achievement has not followed.

A clue is in those wiggle words “students who used the program as recommended.” Just how many students do use these programs as recommended — at least 30 minutes per week in the case of Khan Academy? The answer is usually buried in a footnote, if it’s reported at all. In the case of the Khan study, it is 4.7 percent of students. The percentage of students using the other products as prescribed is similarly low.

Posted in Education, Technology | 4 Comments »

This falling back process is termed retardation

May 1st, 2026

Pamela Hobart recently noted that grade levels never worked, citing Laggards in our Schools: A Study of Retardation and Elimination In City School Systems, a 1909 book by Leonard P. Ayres for the Russell Sage Foundation. The introduction, by Luther Halsey Gulick, is delightfully of its time:

During the past decade it has been increasingly realized that the education of children who are defective in body, mind, or morals is a matter of great importance to the future of the state. Extensive studies carried on in Great Britain have shown an alarming amount of degeneration. Definite and extensive steps looking toward the care of defective children have been taken in many civilized countries; but the crux of the matter does not lie in the care of these unfortunates. At most they do not constitute more than from one to two per cent of the school population, and it does not appear that any considerable fraction of them can ever be educated so as to become independent members of the community.

The great problem lies in the very much larger class of those who, while they are not defective, do not keep up with their fellows. These, constituting from five to fifty per cent of our school population, can become either failures or successes in life, according to the influences that are brought to bear upon them during their early years.

About this large group we need facts. Are they in their present condition largely because of removable physical disabilities, such as hypertrophied tonsils or adenoids, defective vision or hearing, or malnutrition? Do they drop behind in their school life because of illness? Are they behind because of late entrance into the schools? To what extent is irregularity of attendance a factor in delayed progress? Is compulsory labor after school hours an important factor? When do they drop out of school, and for what reasons? Are there any schools that succeed in educating an appreciably larger per cent of these children than do others? If so, how is it done?

Data with which to answer these questions were not in existence. Application was therefore made to the Russell Sage Foundation for a modest grant with which to make a preliminary survey that might

(1) Put together useful material bearing on these topics;

(2) Develop a mode of attack on the problem;

(3) Analyze a sufficiently large number of cases to demonstrate the utility of the method and give answers of at least a provisional nature to some of the questions.

The grant was allowed in the fall of 1907.

[…]

The most significant of the findings of the investigation are:

(1) That the most important causes of retardation of school children can be removed;

(2) That the old-fashioned virtues of regularity of attendance and faithfulness are major elements of success;

(3) That some cities are already accomplishing excellent results by measures that can be adopted by all;

(4) That relatively few children are so defective as to prevent success in school or in life.

LUTHER H. GULICK

So, our concern is with students who, while not defective, do not keep up with their fellows:

In his report for 1904 Dr. William H. Maxwell, City Superintendent of Schools of New York, called attention to the fact that a large number of pupils (39 per cent in the elementary grades) were shown by his tables to be above the normal age for the grades they were in. In each annual report since then he has regularly published similar tables. Concerning the condition thus disclosed there has been much discussion, and more than one school evil has been unhesitatingly labeled a consequence of “retardation,” as the circumstance of mal-adjustment between the ages and grades of school children came to be termed.

Many causes were assigned in explanation of the conditions revealed. Among these some of the more prominent were the constant influx of non-English speaking children, the enrolling of children in the first grade at a comparatively advanced age, the slow progress of children on account of physical defects or weaknesses, inefficient teaching, unsuitable courses of study, and the shifting of children from school to school by reason of the frequent changes of residence of their families.

[…]

The object of the investigation was to study the problem of the progress of school children through the grades. Its interest was not in the individual, sub-normal, or atypical child but rather in that large class, varying with local conditions from 5 to 75 percent of all the children in our schools, who are older than they should be for the grades they are in.

[…]

In every school there are found some children who are older than they should be for the grades they are in. These children constitute serious problems for the teachers. They are misfits in the classes, require special attention if they are to do satisfactory work and render more difficult the work with the other children. These children are known as over-age or retarded children. They are found in all school systems but are by no means equally common in all systems. In this regard there is an enormous variability among cities. In Medford, Massachusetts, only 7 per cent of the children are retarded according to the standard adopted, while in Memphis, Tennessee, among the colored children 75 per cent are retarded. All of the other cities studied fall between these two extremes. On the average about 33 per cent of all of the pupils in our public schools belong to the class “retarded.” This gives an idea of the magnitude of the problem with which we are dealing. It is not at all a problem concerning a few under-developed or feeble minded children. It is one affecting most intimately perhaps 6,000,000 children in the United States.

Wherever we find that the retarded children constitute a large part of all of the school membership we find that many of the children do not stay in the schools until they complete the elementary course. Children who are backward in their studies and reach the age of fourteen (which is generally the end of the compulsory attendance period) when they are in the fifth or sixth grade instead of in the eighth, rarely stay to graduate. They drop out without finishing. The educational importance of this fact is great. We are apt to think of the common school course as representing the least amount of schooling that should be permitted to anyone, but the fact remains that a large part of all of our children are not completing it. As retardation is a condition affecting all of our schools to some extent, so too elimination, or the falling out of pupils before completing the course, is an evil found everywhere but varying greatly in degree in different localities. In Quincy, Massachusetts, of every hundred children who start in the first grade eighty-two continue to the final grade. In Camden, New Jersey, of every hundred who start only seventeen finish. The other eighty-three fall by the wayside. The general tendency of American cities is to carry all of their children through the fifth grade, to take one-half of them to the eighth grade and one in ten through the high school.

[…]

The contention that the children who make slow progress are in a measure counterbalanced by a substantially equal number who make rapid progress is found to rest on an even slighter basis of fact. Taking the average of the conditions found in our city schools the figures show that for every child who is making more than normally rapid progress there are from eight to ten children making abnormally slow progress. In the lower grades, before the process of elimination enters to remove the badly retarded children, the average progress of the pupils is at the rate of eight grades in ten years. These conditions mean that our courses of study as at present constituted are fitted not to the slow child or to the average child but to the unusually bright one.

If the lower grades of our schools contain many children who are not going ahead at the normal rate, this means that there are large numbers of pupils who are doing the work of the grades they are in for the second or third time. These children are repeaters. The study of the figures from different cities reveals the importance of this class from both the educational and economic view points. The computations show that in the schools of Somerville a little more than 6 per cent of the children are repeaters. From this figure the records of the cities range upwards until we reach Camden, New Jersey, with 30 per cent of the children in the repeating class. The average percentage is a little over 16. This means that in the country as a whole about one-sixth of all of the children are repeating and we are annually spending about $27,000,000 in this wasteful process of repetition in our cities alone.

[…]

In general there is little relation between the percentage of foreigners in the different cities and the amount of retardation found in their schools. Some of our most foreign cities make very good records, while in some of our most American cities school conditions are very bad indeed. In the country as a whole there are more illiterates proportionately among native whites of native parents than among native whites of foreign parents and school attendance is more general among the latter than among the former.

In the New York investigation it was shown that there are decided differences between the different races in the matter of school progress. There the Germans made the best records, followed by Americans, Russians, English, Irish and Italians in that order. Everywhere that investigations have been made it has been conclusively shown that ignorance of the English language is a handicap that is quickly and easily overcome and has little influence on retardation.

[…]

Perhaps no more important set of facts has been brought to light than those relating to the relative standing of the two sexes. We have always known that fewer boys than girls go to the high school but we have not before known that there is 13 per cent more retardation among boys than among girls and 13 per cent more repeaters among boys than among girls, or that the percentage of girls who complete the common school course is 17 per cent greater than the percentage of boys. These facts mean that our schools as at present constituted are far better fitted to the needs of the girls than they are to those of the boys.

There is another thing that has been proved; namely, that these conditions which have been discussed are neither of recent origin nor are they growing worse. Conditions are slowly improving in most places but not in all and not rapidly. They are not improving so rapidly that we have any grounds for feeling that if let alone they will care for themselves.

[…]

If children are to progress regularly through the grades they must be present in the schools. This means that we must have better compulsory attendance laws and better provision for their enforcement. If we are to enforce the attendance laws we must know where the children of school age are. Therefore, we must have better laws for taking the school census and better methods for utilizing the returns. If we are to have all of our children complete the common school course we must have an agreement which is now commonly lacking between the length of the school course and the length of the compulsory attendance period. It is a curious anomaly that we commonly have school courses eight or nine years in length and compel attendance for six years only.

[…]

In our city school systems most of the children enter the first grade at the age of six or seven. Some of them are promoted each year and reach the eighth grade at fourteen or fifteen years of age. Others are not regularly promoted from grade to grade. They fall behind and at the age of fourteen they find themselves, not in the eighth grade, but in the fifth or sixth. This falling back process is termed retardation.

The retarded pupil finds himself in the same class with much younger companions. His age and size are a continual reproach to him. He begins to resent the maternalistic atmosphere of the lower grammar grades. He becomes discouraged through his lack of success and, when he has passed the compulsory attendance age, he leaves school. This dropping out process is termed elimination. It is with these two processes — retardation and elimination — that this volume has to deal.

[…]

We have always known that in our general educational system, the high schools occupy a somewhat privileged position, in that they deal with selected and not with average pupils. Few of the pupils of the common schools continue their work until they reach this institution of secondary instruction. But we have not known, or if we have known, we have failed to realize it, that large numbers of the children who enter the public schools never complete the work of the common schools.

[…]

The significance of the problem is attested by the utterances of educators of national prominence like Commissioner Andrew S. Draper of New York state and students of such distinction as Professor Edward L. Thorndike of Teachers College of Columbia University. In his report published in 1908, Dr. Draper says:

“I have assumed that practically all of the children who do not go to the high schools do finish the elementary schools. That is not the fact. I confess that it startles me to find that certainly not more than two-fifths and undoubtedly not more than a third of the children who enter our elementary schools ever finish them, and that not more than one-half of them go beyond the fifth or sixth grade.”

In the bulletin issued by the Bureau of Education in February, 1908, Prof. Thorndike states the following conclusions:

“At least 25 out of 100 children of the white population of our country who enter school stay only long enough to learn to read simple English, write such words as they commonly use, and perform the four operations for integers without serious errors. A fifth of the children (white) entering city schools stay only to the fifth grade.”

This is a clear example of Seeing Like a State.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

Real expertise versus bogus expertise

April 30th, 2026

Dominic Cummings contrasts fields dominated by real expertise (like fighting and physics) and fields dominated by bogus expertise (like macroeconomic forecasting, politics/punditry, active fund management):

Fundamental to real expertise is 1) whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it’s possible to make good predictions and 2) does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction. Physics and fighting: Yes. Predicting recessions, forex trading and politics: not so much. I’ll look at studies comparing expert performance in different fields and the superior performance of relatively very simple models over human experts in many fields.

This is useful background to consider a question I spend a lot of time thinking about: how to integrate a) ancient insights and modern case studies about high performance with b) new technology and tools in order to improve the quality of individual, team, and institutional decision-making in politics and government.

I think that fixing the deepest problems of politics and government requires a more general and abstract approach to principles of effective action than is usually considered in political discussion and such an approach could see solutions to specific problems almost magically appear, just as you see happen in a very small number of organisations — e.g Mueller’s Apollo program (man on the moon), PARC (interactive computing), Berkshire Hathaway (most successful investors in history), all of which have delivered what seems almost magical performance because they embody a few simple, powerful, but largely unrecognised principles. There is no ‘solution’ to the fundamental human problem of decision-making amid extreme complexity and uncertainty but we know a) there are ways to do things much better and b) governments mostly ignore them, so there is extremely valuable low-hanging fruit if, but it’s a big if, we can partially overcome the huge meta-problem that governments tend to resist the institutional changes needed to become a learning system.

[…]

The faster the feedback cycle, the more likely you are to develop a qualitative improvement in speed that destroys an opponent’s decision-making cycle. If you can reorient yourself faster to the ever-changing environment than your opponent, then you operate inside their ‘OODA loop’ (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) and the opponent’s performance can quickly degrade and collapse.

This lesson is vital in politics. You can read it in Sun Tzu and see it with Alexander the Great. Everybody can read such lessons and most people will nod along. But it is very hard to apply because most political/government organisations are programmed by their incentives to prioritise seniority, process and prestige over high performance and this slows and degrades decisions. Most organisations don’t do it. Further, political organisations tend to make too slowly those decisions that should be fast and too quickly those decisions that should be slow — they are simultaneously both too sluggish and too impetuous, which closes off favourable branching histories of the future.

[…]

Our culture treats expertise/high performance in fields like sport and music very differently to maths/science education and politics/government. As Alan Kay observes, music and sport expertise is embedded in the broader culture. Millions of children spend large amounts of time practising hard skills. Attacks on them as ‘elitist’ don’t get the same damaging purchase as in other fields and the public don’t mind about elite selection for sports teams or orchestras.

[…]

Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence — i.e adapt to feedback. The ‘rationalist community’ — people like Scott Alexander who wrote this fantastic essay (Moloch) about why so much goes wrong, or the recent essays by Eliezer Yudkowsky — are ignored at the apex of power.

[…]

Instead of training people like Cameron and Adonis to bluff with PPE, we need courses that combine rational thinking with practical training in managing complex projects. We need people who practice really hard making predictions in ways we know work well (cf. Tetlock) then update in response to errors.

[…]

Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena. For example, the media briefly blasts headlines about Carillion’s collapse or our comical aircraft carriers but there is almost no consideration of the deep reasons for such failures and therefore nothing tends to happen — the media caravan moves on and the officials and ministers keep failing in the same ways. This is why, for example, the predicted abject failure of the traditional Westminster machinery to cope with Brexit negotiations has not led to self-examination and learning but, instead, mostly to a visible determination across both sides of the Brexit divide in SW1 to double down on long-held delusions.

Progress requires attacking the ‘system of systems’ problem at the right ‘level’. Attacking the problems directly — let’s improve policy X and Y, let’s swap ‘incompetent’ A for ‘competent’ B — cannot touch the core problems, particularly the hardest meta-problem that government systems bitterly fight improvement. Solving the explicit surface problems of politics and government is best approached by a more general focus on applying abstract principles of effective action. We need to surround relatively specific problems with a more general approach. Attack at the right level will see specific solutions automatically ‘pop out’ of the system. One of the most powerful simplicities in all conflict (almost always unrecognised) is: ‘winning without fighting is the highest form of war’. If we approach the problem of government performance at the right level of generality then we have a chance to solve specific problems ‘without fighting’ — or, rather, without fighting nearly so much and the fighting will be more fruitful.

This is not a theoretical argument. If you look carefully at ancient texts and modern case studies, you see that applying a small number of very simple, powerful, but largely unrecognised principles (that are very hard for organisations to operationalise) can produce extremely surprising results.

Posted in Education, Martial Arts, Policy | 1 Comment »

China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen — or bust

April 29th, 2026

T. Greer argues that the Chinese system has a new telos:

In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen — or bust.

[…]

Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and — voila! — you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.

How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?

And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead — but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

[…]

China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because — depending on the exact year you do the counting — between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.

Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths

April 28th, 2026

The 20th Century created the system we have come to call totalitarianism:

Invented by Lenin, and then imitated by Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, and others, it came to dominate some 40 percent of humanity. It also captivated intellectuals in traditionally free societies — not in spite of, but because of, its unprecedented violence. When Stalin was succeeded by the much milder Khrushchev and Brezhnev, intellectuals lost interest in the USSR and idolized Mao instead.

Before the 20th century, the Spanish Inquisition was the Western exemplar of political repression, but the 30,000 or so who died at its hands in its 300-year history was exceeded approximately every two weeks in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The collectivization of agriculture alone took well over 10 million lives. In the opening paragraph of his classic 426-page study of this episode, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest observed that “in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

Only one major thinker foresaw this turn of events: Fyodor Dostoevsky. He not only predicted that oppression would grow, he also outlined in detail what forms it would take. These predictions occur in a book usually considered the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed — more accurately translated as The Devils. After Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s murders (some of them, anyway) in 1956, the prominent literary scholar Yuri Karyakin, who had once been a true believer, experienced the revelations as “an earthquake,” saying, “We read The Devils and the notebooks [Dostoevsky kept while writing] the novel…and did not believe our eyes…. We read and interrupted each other almost on every page: ‘It can’t be. How could he have known all this?’”

How indeed? The short answer is that Dostoevsky was not only a keen observer of the revolutionary movement but had been a revolutionary himself. Arguably the greatest psychologist who ever lived, he probed, partly by introspection, the revolutionary mind-set and recognized with horror that, in the right circumstances, he, too, could have participated in revolutionary killings.

The Devils, published in 1873, is a fictionalized account of a sensational murder committed three years earlier by the terrorist Sergei Nechaev—a fanatic committed to the idea that literally anything was justified to promote “the cause.” Lenin, who greatly admired Nechaev, agreed.

[…]

“I want to speak out as passionately as I can,” he wrote to one friend. “All the Nihilists and Westernizers will cry out that I am retrograde. To hell with them. I will speak my mind to the very last word.”

Like Nechaev, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the novel’s central character, has convinced everyone in the provincial town where the novel is set that he represents a vast revolutionary organization, with its central committee in Switzerland and countless followers throughout Russia. Also like his model, Pyotr Stepanovich masterfully spreads exciting myths about himself. Young men looking for a romantic hero are flattered by his attention.

Pyotr Stepanovich organizes his followers into “quintets,” groups of five whose only contact with other quintets is through Pyotr Stepanovich himself, a structure supposedly insuring that even if the members of one quintet are arrested, they cannot betray any others. It is actually designed to maximize Pyotr Stepanovich’s power to spread disinformation.

[…]

And indeed, that is how it always is with modern revolutionary movements: The promise of absolute liberty leads to the worst possible slavery, just as the call for fraternity leads to the guillotine, and the ideal of equality to the domination of the few over the many.

Reading this passage, Dostoevsky’s contemporaries would surely have thought of the example of the Jacobins who brutalized the French a few years after their revolution in 1789. But Shigalyov advocates a much more ambitious tyranny closely resembling modern totalitarianism. His admirer, “the lame teacher,” explains: “He suggests as a final solution of the [social] question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden.” As Dostoevsky well knew, intellectuals naturally favor governments where educated “experts” (themselves) wield power. The Soviets called such an arrangement “true” democracy, much as today’s elites embrace undemocratic means to “preserve democracy.”

One radical objects to Shigalyov’s paradise: “If I didn’t know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind,” he explains, “I’d take them and blow them up into the air instead of putting them in paradise. I’d only leave a handful of educated people, who would live happily ever afterwards on scientific principles.” To be sure, this solution would entail “cutting off a hundred million heads.” But the real-world version of Shigalyov’s vision eventually devoured even more than that. Mao used this very argument when advocating nuclear war. A hundred million heads: As several commentators have pointed out, that is the number that appears in The Black Book of Communism, a painstaking 1997 effort to document the destruction of humanity in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as the bare minimum of Communist killings.

[…]

It is telling that Dostoevsky directs his most savage attacks in The Devils not at the radicals but at the liberals who fawn on them. Here, too, he proved prophetic. In the years leading to the Bolshevik takeover, the liberal party known as the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) refused to condemn terrorism and other violence completely at odds with their own professed values as long as the barbarities came from parties to their left. They became the Bolsheviks’ first victims.