I’ve been arguing with my favorite contrarian friend about the usefulness of COVID-19 vaccines and, more broadly, about the implications of the pandemic. Part of our disagreement stems from trusting different sources and by extension, different interpretations. I generally trust institutions and regard mainstream media reporting as reliable. On the other hand, my friend is more open to the idea that sometimes, the elites can be wrong, and dissident voices are those who can provide enlightenment—ultimately, we’re very much aligned on free speech principles.

I asked him about his favorite sources, and he mentioned Covid 19: What Official Figures Reveal by Pierre Chaillot. By Googling it, I noticed that it figured among the best-sellers while the author is highly regarded by the French seeking rational arguments that fuel an alternative narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic.

I felt overwhelmed parsing each section—all filled with charts. I tried summarizing the most important parts by using multiple Claude Code agents to aggregate each chapter into a big document. It was even more intimidating, and the chance of changing my friend’s view would drop significantly if he discovered I hadn’t read the book.

To be frank, I’ve read maybe half of it. I skipped parts that were redundant or too specific, focusing on its core claims—what I believe is worth debunking.

No excess mortality

The first and likely most important argument advanced by Pierre Chaillot is that there hasn’t been an excess of mortality during the COVID pandemic. According to the author the way French national statistics display mortality over years is misleading, because of its aging population that is shifting the age pyramid distribution over time. This phenomenon naturally increases the deaths among the elderly, therefore counting absolute deaths is irrelevant; what would make sense is to standardize death counts according to the French demography of 2020. In other words, deaths from previous years should be proportionally adjusted to the French age distribution from 2020.

This reasoning is flawed. Life expectancy has grown continuously—people live longer now than they did five, twenty, or fifty years ago. Therefore the French age distribution for 2020 is intrinsically linked to medical progress. In 1962, a 70-year-old had a significantly lower chance of survival than in 2020. Standardizing death by 2020 means applying a proportion of death per age bracket from the previous years—that was obviously higher—using a more recent and older demographic distribution that wouldn’t be possible at that time.

The author also reviews the official numbers about the mortality difference between 2020 and 2019 (9% increase), claiming the “surplus” of mortality for 2020 is likely explained by the harvesting effect—a well-known and studied effect responsible for the fluctuation in annual deaths. The harvesting effect is cyclical (typically every five years) and related to various factors like heat waves or flus that can significantly increase the number of deaths from one year to another. Pierre Chaillot uses the year 2015 (the previous harvesting year) as a model of comparison for 2020, suggesting the increase of deaths is likely marginal or inexistent after taking into account the harvesting effect, and the aging of the French population, concluding that the years 2019 to 2021 represent the least deadly three-year period in French history—after taking into account the standardization.

However, no official source designates 2020 as a harvesting year. And the French population aging between 2015 and 2020 (+2% for ages 65+ and +0.3% for 75+) seems too small to explain the mortality spike. The stronger counter-argument here is that, if COVID-19 wasn’t responsible for an excess of mortality in France (which counts among the highest number of elderly citizens and subject to seasonal flu activity), how did the rest of the world—with much younger demographics—see a significant increase in deaths during the same period?

Tests don’t detect illness

Pierre Chaillot extensively tries to explain how RT-PCR tests are flawed as their mechanism of action works by amplification cycles and this creates uncertainty which also increases the chance of false positives; that a positive Covid-19 case is not necessarily a sick person, but someone who has been tested and whose test result is positive, arguing that many perfectly healthy people test positive while sick people can test negative.

There is no link between the result of a test and the fact of being sick.

He concluded by presenting this chart, mentioning the case of the Netherlands (70% positive tests), arguing it would be impossible to have such high rates if PCR tests were reliable.

First, presenting this chart without mentioning that most tests used were antigen tests—not PCR—obscures the full picture. Antigen tests are less sensitive but correctly rule out infection in 99.5% of cases.

Second, the high wave coincided with the Omicron variant which was much more contagious but less dangerous.

Third, RT-PCR tests work by first converting viral RNA into DNA, then amplifying it to detectable levels. This detects the presence of viral genetic material, which understandably does not determine whether the person is sick—because that’s not the purpose of the test.

While it’s true that testing positive doesn’t translate to expressing symptoms (and vice versa), Chaillot’s conclusion is misleading. PCR tests remain the gold standard because they are highly reliable and accurate. When samples containing the virus are properly collected, PCR detects it with near 100% accuracy.

A French Health Authority (HAS) meta-analysis of 65 trials and 19,500 paired tests found RT-PCR sensitivity (the ability to correctly identify infected people) of 92% [90-94%] for nasopharyngeal samples.

While no test is 100% reliable, claiming that testing should equal detecting sickness misses the point—the main purpose is to identify infected individuals who are or may be contagious.

Vaccines don’t work

Chaillot’s first criticism against the RNA vaccines is about the integrity of the pharmaceuticals industry, highlighting the fact that Pfizer has been involved in many judicial cases, including one of the largest health care fraud settlements where Pfizer paid $2.3 billion for fraudulent marketing. He’s also questioning the potential conflict of interest involved in pharmaceutical companies financing their own medical studies.

It is aberrant that drug validation by control authorities is based on studies financed by the laboratories themselves, who wish to sell their products.

It’s true that pharmaceutical companies fund their own trials, which creates potential conflicts of interest. But considering that a full trial suite can cost around a billion dollars, it would be very difficult to find independent research, and letting that part be financed by governments instead would be incredibly inefficient and time-consuming. Besides that, financing your own study doesn’t mean you have a lot of freedom: clinical study processes like the FDA involve a lot of transparency and requirements, including pre-registration of trials, independent data monitoring committees, and regulatory agency review of raw data.

Chaillot also dismisses the effect of both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines on the basis that their trials haven’t shown any reduction in mortality as the number of deaths is the same in the vaccine and placebo groups.

Neither trial showed mortality reduction. Efficacy claims based solely on positive PCR tests, not actual death prevention.

To cite the Moderna paper: “a total of 32 deaths had occurred by completion of the blinded phase, with 16 deaths each (0.1%) in the placebo and mRNA-vaccinated groups, no deaths were considered to be related to injections of placebo or vaccine, and 4 were attributed to Covid-19 (3 in the placebo group and 1 in the mRNA-1273 group)”—the Pfizer study presents similar numbers of deaths.

Chaillot correctly cites the death numbers but fundamentally misunderstands clinical trial design. The trials had ~30,000 participants followed for 2-5 months. With only 32 total deaths in Moderna (0.1% mortality), the trials had zero statistical power to detect all-cause mortality differences. The trials were designed and powered to measure symptomatic COVID-19 reduction—which they demonstrated with 93–95% efficacy and high statistical significance. Death prevention was measured post-authorization in real-world data with millions of people over years. The chart below shows COVID-19 death rates in the United States: unvaccinated individuals had death rates 5-10x higher than vaccinated individuals during 2021-2023.

Denialism, not skepticism

Admittedly, I’m far from neutral and expressed skepticism before reading Chaillot’s work, but I found myself baffled by the degree of denialism presented there. Yet there is plenty of room for valid criticism of pandemic policy: Would enforcing lockdown on people 65 years or older be enough? Was the vaccine mandate counter-productive in maximizing vaccination rates? Were vaccine boosters for young adults worth the risk-benefit tradeoff? Chaillot addresses none of these questions and instead, relentlessly misinterprets the official numbers of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it’s hard to believe Chaillot accidentally omitted every piece of contradicting evidence while displaying such statistical illiteracy. Throughout his book, Chaillot keeps denying the number of deaths, the validity of testing, and the vaccine efficacy. A strategy that was instrumental in laying a foundation for a bigger claim: There has never been a pandemic.

Neoliberalism is an economic ideology centered around the free market that became widely prevalent in the late 20th century. Its basic philosophy is a laissez-faire approach to the economy, limiting state intervention as much as possible by advocating liberalization policies such as free trade, deregulation, and privatization. Although neoliberalism is often employed in a pejorative way, some of its tenets are generally viewed as beneficial, such as free trade agreements. But other aspects have received mixed criticism: privatizing healthcare or education is usually associated with high costs and failure to provide decent service to the middle and lower classes. Conversely, other sectors hold more successful stories, such as the airline industry, electricity, and telecommunications, where competitiveness can significantly drive prices down.

One of the core disagreements between neoliberals and other economists is whether state intervention is necessary to foster innovation. Neoliberals tend to view state intervention, like subsidies or regulation, as doing more harm than good because it creates perverse incentives and allocates resources less efficiently than markets do. The latter view state intervention as an inevitable force to correct market failures and negative externalities, such as pollution and monopolies. They generally express skepticism about the free market's capacity to regulate itself.

A commonly cited example in favor of private funding is the size of the U.S. tech industry, which is much larger than Europe's — considered the bastion of regulations. A counterexample is China’s heavily subsidized economy. Although central planning led by the Chinese government has shown some weakness — with an impending real estate crisis and a tech industry struggling to attract foreign investment, mainly due to concerns about authoritarianism

Moreover, the idea that the private market drives innovation was challenged in The Entrepreneurial State, a book by Mariana Mazzucato. The author argued that much of the United States' economic success resulted from state-funded investments. For example, Apple popularized government-funded technologies, such as GPS, touch screens, and voice recognition, in smartphones. Google's success essentially resulted from industrializing a search algorithm funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The book was published in 2013, and many things have happened since then, but I still believe the core argument is valid, considering that more recently successful companies like Tesla and SpaceX owe much of their success to government subsidies.

Neoliberals would likely refute this argument by claiming that:

1) Most of these technologies would have probably been discovered through private funding anyway.

2) Publicly funded success stories are essentially the result of selection bias. For every successful venture, there have been countless failures.

3) Markets are better at discovering what consumers actually want.

I believe that arguments one and two are mostly true. Given that government-sponsored failures are more costly than privately funded ones, the free market is generally a better approach for selecting champions. The third argument may have a valid premise, but it's misleading. A free-market economy may be conducive to addressing consumers' needs; what people want, however, is rarely what would be most beneficial for society in the long run. Very few people desired clean energy before it existed, which is why its development wasn't driven by market signals, but rather by government funding. One could argue that renewable energy would have been discovered naturally as fossil energy became scarce. However, I think this argument is rooted in flawed reasoning.

To be fair, depicting neoliberalism as merely a disguised version of market fundamentalism is a caricature, not an accurate representation. Most neoliberals would agree that some state funding, as in the case of basic research, is necessary, and that some industrial policies can be fruitful. The exclusive state versus exclusive private funding analogy is rarely debated because they both work hand in hand. Government intervention is often necessary for long-term, expensive projects that do not align with private funding investment horizons. High-speed rail networks are a good example, while in some cases they can become privatized — which was the case for the Shinkansen. On the other hand, markets generally do a great job of rapidly scaling existing technologies while providing incremental innovation. In many respects, neoliberalism is more useful as a way of considering government spending as bad but sometimes necessary rather than massively cutting public spending as an ultimate goal for prosperity.

When I was in graduate school, one of my professors used to claim that French presidents are remembered for the first part of their term because the second half is mostly devoted to preparing for re-election. At the time, François Hollande was halfway through his mandate, which was largely focused on passing a law granting same-sex couples the right to marry. Under this assumption, François Hollande would have been remembered as the gay rights president, but in fact he became most notorious as the French president caught having an affair while riding a three-wheeled scooter that was pretended to be used to buy croissants. François Hollande ended his presidency as the most unpopular French president of the Fifth Republic and even had to renounce his candidacy for another term. Social conservatives resented his legalization of gay marriage, and economists deplored his failure to reduce unemployment. A decade later, his popularity has soared, placing him among the most popular political figures.

The popularity trajectory of François Hollande is quite intriguing; how could he be so disliked during his presidency and so popular afterwards? Of course, people judge former presidents in a different manner, but a meaningful difference would suggest political amnesia, or perhaps voters just become more forgiving with time. As France's legislative elections come to an end, the current assembly could be dominated by extremists, a scenario that could undermine the country's prosperity. This unique situation of political uncertainty was particularly marked by a polarization of voting preferences from the hard left to the hard right, revealing how fractured French politics is, but also raising interesting questions about how these parties established their popularity and how likely it is to last if they govern the nation.

Historically, when we look at the most famous leaders associated with politics, many of them were involved in leading major social changes, such as Nelson Mandela, known for his role in ending apartheid, Mahatma Gandhi for achieving Indian independence, or Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery in America. Because many factors come into play, it's difficult to say whether their success in leading these movements can be attributed to outrageous brilliance, or whether it was more a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that talent played a decisive role in popularizing their cause and putting it into practice.

Nowadays, modern politicians are less prone to skyrocketing popularity, while most of them experience a rapid decline in popularity after being elected. If we consider the actual popularity ratings of world leaders, only a few exceed the symbolic level of fifty percent approval, such as figures like Narendra Modi (India), Andrés Manuel López (Mexico), and Javier Milei (Argentina). However, their high popularity remains controversial, as they are regularly criticized for being divisive figures who embrace populism and for exhibiting traits associated with the cult of personality. Clearly, these forms of criticism should be contextualized according to the country's economic development and history, but in the long run, popularity built on emotional appeal can only survive in periods of strong economic growth or when important electoral promises are fulfilled.

A more controversial case is that of Nayib Bukele (President of El Salvador), known as “the world's coolest dictator”, who was democratically re-elected with 85% of votes, an almost unprecedented approval rate. Nayib Bukele's story is, to say the least, unexpected for a populist leader. Before entering politics, he quickly realized the value of using social media while his opponents were still engaging in old-fashioned politics. It was a strategy that paid off, allowing him to win his first presidential election. Once in power, he made a series of high-risk decisions, such as adopting Bitcoin as legal tender and massively investing government funds in the currency. He also organized a self-coup by letting the army infiltrate the Legislative Assembly to influence the approval of a loan needed to purchase military equipment to expand his draconian anti-gang measures. Against all expectations, the money invested in Bitcoin yielded some returns, and his ruthless plan to eradicate crime proved to be a huge success. El Salvador went from being the most dangerous country in the world to the safest in Latin America. This was the major social change for which Salvadorans elected him, but these advances came at the expense of an autocratic leader who undermined democratic institutions and forcibly changed the constitution in order to remain elected. It may be too early to tell whether Nayib Bukele is a benevolent dictator – his early successes resemble more of a gamble – but he undeniably has enough talent to win an election and advance his political agenda.

More advanced democracies are generally less likely to benefit from populism because, compared to developing countries, achieving the next major improvement is less of a low-hanging fruit. Instead, concerns revolve around complex issues related to purchasing power, demographic decline, or inequality that are less likely to be solved by arbitrary decisions. To understand the rise of extremist parties in France, we need to contextualize the historical trend of electing technocrats from the elite school system. A method that proved reliable for filtering candidates by competence, while reducing the risk of electing someone who could make risky decisions – apart from surprising the whole country with a snap parliamentary vote. For many French voters, the ongoing expectation in electing technocrats was mainly to stimulate economic growth, a tedious task in which many have failed to deliver impressive results. The succession of unsatisfactory political leaders has slowly eroded trust in institutions and given more power to extremists who fuel the desire for renewal. France and, more broadly, Western democracies are similarly affected by a growing willingness to trade incremental improvement for major change, even at the expense of stability. As a result, the promise of radical change is more than ever a lucrative strategy for extremists to gain popularity – at least in the short term. François Hollande's slogan for his presidential candidacy was “Le Changement C'est Maintenant” (Change is Now). Now his second wind of popularity may be due to nostalgia for his modest promises of change – the French are now looking for bigger and riskier ones.

I grew up in a democratic country, was raised in a nuclear family, and never suffered from any serious physical or mental impairment. These upbringing standards could be considered privileged, although they are now prevalent in Western societies where most people meet these conditions. Arguably, we are experiencing living standards that are objectively better from a historical perspective, but it doesn't seem obvious that we have become significantly better at keeping everyday problems at bay. Like most people, I had my own struggles, and one of the hardest was becoming socially desirable. It wasn't until early adulthood that I achieved some modest success, which, in retrospect, required a lot of hard work and dedication. Afterwards, I realized that some of my difficulties in socializing could be explained by being on the spectrum, as I consistently scored at a significant level on various screening tools, and on several occasions my parents were advised that I should be evaluated for autism. For some reason, they never seriously considered this option, and it was probably the right decision.

In my early K-12 education, I quickly realized that I wasn't a bright student and was later diagnosed with ADHD. The diagnosis provided me with a medical explanation and solution, which was basically a whole league of prescription stimulants that somehow had a slight positive impact on my grades. It was less of a problem when I started college, then graduate school was no longer a challenge. Despite this, I remained haunted by my earlier school days, believing that it was due to having ADHD, which acted as a reminder to feel inferior as a person with a mental handicap. It took me quite some time to realize that my brain was functioning normally, but just needed a little extra effort to focus when needed.

Unlike academic achievement, improving social skills required more than just doing homework, but dealing with undesirable social outcomes such as facing rejection. I suspect that if I had been diagnosed early with autism, I might have perceived myself as socially underdeveloped, which could have discouraged me from ever trying to socialize. But I remain unsure how this trajectory would have unfolded. Perhaps I would have been told that things were not settled, that autistic people socialize differently – which is somewhat true, but mostly a euphemism. In general, I'm not strictly against early diagnosis, but I believe there are cases that deserve special treatment and others where ignorance is bliss.

In the wake of postmodernism, new psychiatric terms have gained popularity as the list of clinical terms for mental conditions has continued to grow. This has been followed by a general increase in diagnoses, including all sorts of self-attributed mental disorders, raising a deeper question about their usefulness in improving mental well-being. For example, the term trauma has become hyper-prevalent in common language, and the very broad “childhood trauma” has emerged as an overarching term to describe a range of unpleasant experiences that could fall anywhere from emotional neglect to sexual abuse.

What's particularly striking is the way in which trauma has been used as a casual framework for mapping past experiences to current behaviors. One of the main concerns with this approach is that it leads to an interpretation of events as deterministic causes – a typically Freudian way of understanding. I recently came across The Courage To Be Disliked, which introduced me to Alfred Adler as the third great figure in psychology, overshadowed by Freud and Jung. Where Adler's psychological perspective differs fundamentally from that of his contemporaries is in his understanding of the past, or causality. According to Adler, there is no such thing as trauma. Not that they do not exist, but that their ramifications are fabricated:

No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences – the so-called trauma – but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.

A common mistake is to take Adler's definition of trauma at face value. He didn't believe that traumas were without influence, but rather rejected them as self-determining causes. The idea behind Adler's notion of trauma is that people endure varying degrees of suffering, but that the suffering itself is rarely the cause of the struggle, but rather the narrative that people construct from it. For instance, there are multiple ways of dealing with the same circumstance: someone who has experienced unsuccessful social interactions could cope with them through social distancing by telling themselves a story in which they are unsuitable for social context, or on the other hand, they could see it as an opportunity for growth. In both cases, the consequences are determined by the meaning given to the experience. In the case of unhappiness, it may not be a direct consequence of past experiences, but rather social distancing goals.

Bad social experiences may not be the most common cause of unhappiness, but Adler's principles can be applied to most life circumstances, including the most dramatic ones. In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl recounts his journey to find meaning as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, and describes how those who survived were able to connect with a purpose and feel positively about it:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Finally, Adlerian psychology should be examined within its time frame. As with Freud and Jung, most of the earlier thinkers in psychology made claims that are largely unfalsifiable and therefore akin to pseudoscience. Happiness may be influenced – in large part – by individual choices, although recent findings in modern behavioral genetics suggest that heritability accounts for 32–40% of the variation in overall happiness – meaning that nearly one-third of people's happiness can be explained by their genetic makeup. This challenges the conventional wisdom that what makes you happy must apply to others. Yet Adler's conception of causality as rather self-determined remains a powerful idea in opposition to the victim mentality and a call for individual agency.

When I first heard about Semaglutide a year ago, I was skeptical about its potential as a miracle cure for obesity. In the realm of problem solving, there are generally no ideal solutions, only compromises. Especially when you consider the history of weight-loss drugs, which haven't seen a medical revolution that led to significant outcomes. Previous treatments had little effect, and those that were more effective were often removed from the market due to concerning side effects. However, the case of Semaglutide seems to be an exception to this rule. The drug was originally marketed by Novo Nordisk under the brand name Ozempic as a type 2 diabetes treatment, but the company discovered that patients in trials reported significant weight loss, leading them to develop a weight loss drug using the same molecule, called Wegovy.

A growing number of studies report promising results, with a mean 15% loss of body weight after only 68 weeks. Some participants in the studies reported mild side effects such as nausea or diarrhea, but for the most part, these were transient and resolved quickly. If you're wondering what these numbers mean, 10–15% loss of body weight is basically considered the “holy grail” in obesity treatments. The only existing treatment more effective than that is bariatric surgery, which reduces body weight by about a quarter and costs about $20,000. Because it's expensive and involves major surgery, only 1 in 400 Americans undergoes it, but the long-term health benefits are more than impressive.

Relative to people of similar weight who do not undergo bariatric surgery, those who do undergo surgery experience:

• 83% lower risk of developing diabetes

• 44% lower risk of developing cancer and dying of it

• 29% lower risk of having a heart attack

• 29% lower risk of dying from any cause

• 78% of people reverse established diabetes

The reason why Semaglutide is so effective is due to its stomach emptying delay properties, which prolong the feeling of satiety and reduce cravings for high-caloric foods, and even more surprisingly, can reduce a wide range of dopamine-fueled behaviors, including drinking alcohol and shopping. And even in the case of mild side effects, they are largely outweighed by the health benefits that come with avoiding long-term obesity. Such findings are usually extremely rare in medical research, and in this regard Semaglutide can be considered a breakthrough discovery. While other, more potent analogues are already approved, it marks the beginning of a new generation of obesity treatments.

However, this recent medical advancement has not been well received by the media, and some reputable newspapers have repeatedly expressed criticism. Some of the backlash could be roughly boiled down to two categories of disagreement: adherents of the body positivity movement, who tend not to view obesity as a disease and believe that obese people shouldn't be encouraged to lose weight – if you identify with this view, you should probably read this instead. The second group is more idealist; they understand the benefits of obesity treatments, but are skeptical that they can be effective in the long run. Instead, they suggest fixing the problem at its core with drastic measures to regulate the food industry, such as eliminating all processed foods, or creating healthier urban planning to make cities more walkable and bikeable.

The latter category is probably right in believing that nudging people's behavior toward healthier lifestyles is certainly a more sustainable approach to tackling the problem. This view is largely supported by the unmistakable uneven distribution of obesity rates around the world when comparing a country like Vietnam, where an estimated 2% of people are obese, to the United States, where 42% of the population is affected by obesity. The disparity in obesity rates is due to a variety of reasons, but the most obvious are probably environmental factors such as food culture (diet) and frequency of physical activity.

Given that two-thirds of obese Americans attempt to lose weight each year with little success, suggests that living in an unhealthy environment makes it more challenging to lose weight. This brings up the question of whether obesity should be addressed primarily through lifestyle changes. Yet the main problem with obesity is that it's deeply ingrained and immune to most forms of government intervention. There is no such thing as a major change in the food industry, other than a radical shift in consumer preferences, which frankly seems quite unlikely. Especially in rural areas, where obesity is even more prevalent, the notion of adopting the organic-store-and-bike-lane model is merely a luxury belief. In addition, very few health education programs are beneficial, and in most cases people already know what is bad for them but do not necessarily have the willpower to change their habits – and the countless health influencers on social platforms do not help. Therefore, claiming that obesity can be addressed through policy is closer to wishful thinking, because it's based on the premise that governments can change a culture.

The whole idea that investing billions of dollars in health campaigns is an effective solution is a misconception. The tobacco industry is an interesting case study: a lot of effort was put into labeling every pack of cigarettes with warning slogans and disgusting pictures, which had very little effect on reducing smoking habits. The most effective way to stop smoking is still not to smoke in the first place, and governments are not good at making something unpopular. Conversely, the introduction of e-cigarettes has been much more effective in reducing smoking harm. But I still meet people who don't believe that e-cigarettes are a much safer alternative, rehashing urban legends like popcorn lungs. What they fail to understand is that e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than combustible cigarettes. Although this number is controversial, the accumulating evidence suggests that the real figure is probably very close. Regardless of what people think of e-cigarettes, their growing popularity will dramatically improve the long-term health of smokers.

Obesity follows a similar trend, driven by genetics and cultural factors over which governments have little control, and democratizing convenient substitutes seems far more effective than trying to address behavior. Semaglutide may not be the ultimate cure for obesity, and the criticism that it represents a quick fix rather than a sustainable solution is valid. Nevertheless, it may lead the path to reversing the obesity curve within the next decade. In this regard, the advent of new treatments for obesity should be welcomed. They may fail to address the underlying cause of obesity, but the health benefits of preventing its long-term effects are too great to ignore. Part of the skepticism about weight loss drugs, I suspect, is driven by a sense of fatalism. A view in which unintended consequences are always lurking around the corner to make things worse. What this view fails to acknowledge is that throughout history, many diseases that once caused millions of deaths have been defeated.

Most people were generally surprised when I mentioned my intention to visit Taiwan, as “Why Taiwan?” quickly emerged as the most common question I was asked before and during my stay. I'm not sure under what circumstances I decided to visit Taiwan, but I must have heard someone mention the food experience, and that was probably a good enough reason for me to move there for two months. I think that differentiating Taiwan from its relative Asian tigers is not an obvious task. Taipei may not appear as groundbreaking to someone who's already familiar with other notorious cities in East Asia. But I think it's fairly accurate to describe Taiwan as a blend of Japanese and Chinese influences. This is not entirely surprising, as the archipelago was ceded to Japan for over fifty years before becoming the Republic of China following Japan's defeat in World War II. The Japanese influence remains noticeable in the architecture and serenity of certain neighborhoods, the efficiency of the transportation infrastructure, and the overwhelming number of convenience stores.

Taiwan is also very westernized, and a city like Taipei has the same standardized structures as large American cities. Urban planning follows a grid pattern with large and uncrowded pedestrian sidewalks, making it very convenient to get around. The city has many high-rise buildings, including Taipei 101, formerly known as the tallest building before the Burj Khalifa. Apart from a few specific areas, Taipei is not a beautiful city overall, there is no consistent architectural style, but rather a mixture of the legacy of different influences. In addition, the economic miracle period has drastically accelerated the pace of construction, with little regard for any aesthetic urbanization plans. Behind its modern appearance, Taipei has a surprisingly laid-back vibe, which somehow contradicts the country's reputation for being highly competitive. The city is incredibly tranquil, the sound of a driver's horn is not common, and outside of the main streets, the atmosphere is unusually quiet. Perhaps one of the most remarkable moments was watching people behave as usual after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake.

The Taiwanese are generally considered friendlier than the Chinese and more easy-going than the Japanese. In general, I've found most of them to be very approachable, probably because their culture is one of the most secular in Asia, and also because they have a rather positive view of the Western world. I've also found that people were often helpful and would suggest help if I seemed lost. In the same spirit as other East Asian cultures, politeness is highly prevalent, with a strong emphasis on adherence to rules – less rigid than in Japan, but infinitely stricter than in France. In this respect, Taipei is an extremely clean city, and completely devoid of pigeons due to the absence of food leftovers on the streets, thanks to a waste management policy that does not allow garbage to touch the ground. The garbage collection system in Taiwan is also unique: trash must be taken out during the passage of garbage trucks, which signal their presence by broadcasting a Beethoven melody.

Taiwan's democracy is relatively young: after nearly forty years of martial law, during which 140,000 people were imprisoned or executed, Taiwan's first direct presidential elections officially began in 1996. Today, it's one of the most advanced living democracies in the world, and probably the most progressive in the region. Taiwan was the first country in Asia to legally recognize same-sex marriage and is among the most advanced in terms of gender equality. The Taiwanese education system is often praised for its remarkable test scores and for its high proportion of educated workers, with 45 percent of Taiwanese aged 25-64 holding a bachelor's degree or higher, while the country remains the sixth largest sender of international students to the U.S. Taiwan's healthcare system has been ranked the best in the world for five consecutive years, and its response to the last pandemic is widely regarded as one of the most effective, despite the absence of confinement measures. In terms of public safety, Taiwan is one of the safest places to live with an incredibly low crime rate.

The existential threat from China is rampant and has intensified since the Sunflower Student Movement in 2014 – a collective effort by a group of students to occupy the national legislature, which successfully led to the rejection of a trade pact with China. Although a military invasion is a plausible scenario, it is often portrayed by the Western world in a fatalistic and sensationalist way. According to the Samotsvety – a group of superforecasters with an impressive track record and considered far ahead of its nearest competitor – their prediction of a partial Chinese military occupation of Taiwan by 2030 lies within a range of 8% to 24% chances. A military conflict seems even less likely considering that TSCM constitutes a critical component of the global economy and that commercial ties between Taiwan and China are highly intertwined, with the latter representing Taiwan's largest export market and hosting more than 4,000 Taiwanese companies. On the other hand, a de-escalation of tensions seems unlikely, given that the overwhelming majority of Taiwanese do not favor reunification with China, and more recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered an awakening.

Despite its recent appearance in the spotlight, the country is on its way to catching up with its pre-pandemic levels of annual visitors. One of Taiwan's still unsolved mysteries is its complete absence of Westerners, which is unusual for a country that shines on so many indicators, but conversely remains underappreciated. Yet Taiwan is not much further from other East Asian countries. In fact, they offer one of the most competitive and convenient residency plans for skilled workers, and the Taiwanese government even subsidizes visitors through a lottery system. The most plausible explanation for Taiwan's unpopularity may stem from its lack of reputation, presumably as a result of not excelling in any particular field (except semiconductors and bubble tea) and being surrounded by top-tier tourist destinations taking all the fame. In this regard, Japan and South Korea have successfully exported their culture; Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines are widely known as paradise destinations. Taiwanese food is good, but often falls slightly below the level of excellence of its neighbors – although most of the East Asian food culture can be found in Taiwan with a high degree of fidelity. Compared to Singapore or Hong Kong, Taiwan has much more to offer in terms of nature, with stunningly beautiful hiking trails, some of the best cycling routes in the world, and plenty of surfing spots. The overshadowing theory has a good explanatory power for why Taiwan is remarkably pristine, making it more authentic than popular destinations. Without any notable flaws, Taiwan offers one of the most balanced lifestyles in East Asia, which is perhaps its most valuable asset.

Among most of the criticisms of capitalism, rising inequality and wealth concentration tend to be the most cited. These forms of criticism are not illegitimate, as some of them are grounded in an existing and substantial body of empirical research. Thomas Piketty has probably made the most significant contribution to raising awareness of income inequality after his work was popularized in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which clearly highlights a consistent trend of rising inequality across the world since 1975. The following question is generally related to the moral aspect of unequal income distribution, where some authors have advanced their views by assembling evidence suggesting that income inequality is significantly associated with a number of undesirable societal outcomes. In The Spirit Level, Richard G. Wilkinson presented his extensive work on the effects of inequality through a large number of correlations showing how the most unequal societies are more likely to have higher levels of crime, poorer health, and other social problems.

The work of Piketty and Wilkinson has probably influenced the way people think critically about capitalism and, by the same token, fueled an existing anti-capitalist sentiment that revolves around a vision of capitalism that fosters income inequality. As Piketty would probably suggest, inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism. One of the concerns with these views is that mediation can easily be mistaken for causation, leading to an exaggerated and oversimplified explanation of how capitalism works. The main factor that explains why societies are unequal stems from evolutionary pressures that forced humans to compete for access to resources that were essential for survival. As human tribes had to grow in complexity, the adoption of hierarchical structures was presumably the most efficient way to organize groups. Evolutionary theory provides the strongest explanation for why humans operate within hierarchical structures and have an innate disposition toward rivalry. The way humans compete has also changed to emphasize the pursuit of status rather than the possession of material goods, although materialism is used as a proxy for signaling status.

Because humans have a tendency to seek status, it's inevitable that some forms of inequality will result, regardless of capitalism. Competition itself is sometimes blamed for its built-in unequal outcomes, and is often contrasted with collaboration. In reality, competition and collaboration are intertwined and more difficult to disentangle than we might think. Finding a job involves competing with other candidates, while corporate environments are generally seen as more conducive to collaboration. These examples are not literally true, as some industries are known to be highly competitive internally and even to foster a cutthroat culture among employees. A more serious problem is unhealthy competition, which can lead to toxic environments when selfishness is overly rewarded at the expense of other virtues.

The ruthlessness of competition may be its least attractive aspect, but there are good reasons to believe that it's a net benefit to society overall. First, because people are less prone to suffer the effects of competition, as the ever-growing number of occupations leads to a more diversified labor market that expands the range of competitive career options in both directions. The other and more important benefit of competition is technological progress. Because human nature aspires to recognition, it encourages people to specialize as societies develop and the low-hanging fruit for recognition becomes increasingly scarce. The desire to compete may be a selfish impulse, but it is above all a utility for accelerating progress. For these reasons, anti-competition attitudes are absurd because they deny an inalienable human disposition, and they're delusional from a historical perspective, since societies that have attempted to restrain competition have failed spectacularly.

One of the goals of Marxism was to create classless societies and abolish exploitative capitalist competition by eliminating private ownership of the means of production. Most attempts to implement its tenets have led to more centralized and oppressive regimes. Marx is famous for having predicted the spread of capitalism around the world – or what is now known as globalization – and the intensification of economic crises. On the other hand, he didn't foresee capitalism's potential to drastically reduce extreme poverty, significantly improve living conditions, halve working hours, and greatly increase leisure time.

Perhaps one of Marx's most relevant ideas is the theory of alienation, which essentially embodies the idea that people are prevented from realizing their true potential by the pursuit of meaningless occupations. Marx's theory of alienation may resonate with those who see many jobs as meaningless. Arguably, some occupations are widely regarded as less desirable than others, while the majority of people would agree that emerging jobs are not necessarily more meaningful than previous ones; moderating social media content may not be more meaningful than working on a factory assembly line, and conversely, one survey finds that being a YouTuber is now the most desired career for American and British children before being an astronaut. Ultimately, it's a tedious task to quantify exactly how modern jobs have become more or less meaningful over time. The author David Graeber, who famously coined the now widely used expression “bullshit jobs”, claimed that over 50% of all jobs are useless. This claim was refuted by an empirical study (based on representative data from the EU), which found that only 4.8% of workers in the EU28 considered their jobs to be useless, and that this proportion was declining. On the other hand, another study (based on the American Working Conditions Survey) found a higher proportion of 19% of respondents who perceived their jobs as socially useless. Although both studies fall far behind the original claim, the difference in findings could be explained by different survey methodologies, and by the fact that highly financialized Anglo-Saxon countries might be more in line with the Bullshit Jobs theory.

Admittedly, capitalism certainly has undesirable aspects, such as extreme income inequality, or a lack of alignment with environmental goals, which is probably not great. Although Piketty's work is incredibly robust, it continues to receive valid criticism because there's supposedly no clear consensus on which segment of the population has gotten relatively richer, but it's obvious to everyone that some people are outrageously richer than others. It would also be premature to draw conclusions about whether people's living conditions will be severely affected by the growing number of billionaires, but the housing crisis in most major cities is likely to be a more serious matter. Wealth inequality is sometimes reduced to the class struggle that results from an inevitably violent capitalist world, but this view largely dismisses the importance of genetics as a major influence on the most unjust aspects of human life. Broadly speaking, blaming capitalism is a convenient solution for expressing discontent, but it rarely addresses problems in depth and unfortunately misses things worth criticizing.

Last year, I was traveling in the western part of France on a high-speed train before it abruptly stopped in the middle of nowhere. A few minutes later, I saw two paramedics walking along the tracks inspecting the train after the driver announced that there had been a human accident. The vast majority of human deaths on the French rail system are caused by suicide, which averages 300 cases per year, and about 40 accidental deaths. Since France records 15,000 train departures per day, the odds of being on a train involved in a fatality could be simplified to 1 in 15,000, or a probability of 0.000067. A few months later, I was traveling again, and during a motorcycle trip in Sri Lanka, I unfortunately ran over a snake that surprised me by being in the middle of the road. At that moment I felt guilty, but after looking in the mirror I realized that I was being followed by a truck and felt relieved. I told this story to a few locals and apparently most of them have never experienced this or don't remember. A few days later, I went surfing in the morning and later learned that two crocodiles had been spotted swimming near the surfing area at the exact time of my session. There are two species of crocodiles in Sri Lanka: the saltwater crocodile and the mugger – commonly referred to as the river crocodile. The occurrence of seeing one of them swimming in the sea seems to be rare. Someone who has worked and lived by the sea for the past fifteen years told me he had seen crocodiles three times, and others said similar things, while presenting a narrative in which the muggers are usually the ones seen near the beaches, despite their eyes being injured by seawater, disorienting them and suggesting they may have ended up there by accident. Or maybe this is just a more convincing story to reassure tourists.

The train collision, the snake on the road, and the crocodiles swimming near surfers are unrelated stories that don't have much in common – unless the first one involved Mark Zuckerberg. However, they may have one common factor: they are all very unusual events. Logically, none of these events would have happened if I hadn't taken the train, ridden a motorcycle, and surfed. And conversely, by doing these kinds of activities, I increased my chances of encountering unusual situations. If you think about pursuing something like finding a soul mate through the lens of uncertainty, it's basically like buying lottery tickets for a compatible – and possibly – life partner. One of the questions I'm sometimes asked is whether non-casual dating is something that's appropriate if you're a nomadic person. Because essentially my lifestyle revolves around packing up my belongings (every month on average) and moving to a new place to start over with a different set of people. One of the benefits of this lifestyle is more social encounters, which means more opportunities, which means more chances of finding the right person. This sounds like a reasonable assumption, although the reality is somewhat more nuanced. You might wonder why Taylor Swift is involved, but I realized that considering dating her provides a meaningful explanation.

The odds of dating Taylor

When people think of uncertainty, they do not think of randomness purely, because the unknown unknown is something that is quite difficult to grasp. However, we do think about the consequences of randomness because it can lead to unpredictable events. This means that there is very little chance for the most unexpected scenarios to happen, which allows us to fantasize about different things. Some people dream of a reality where they are successful, others are haunted by catastrophic events, and in my case it's more about dating Taylor. More seriously, I don't really think about it that much, but I recently learned from Spotify that I'm above the 90th percentile of her listeners, which makes me one of the most dedicated fans, but possibly also one of the most fanatical. Ultimately, if I were to hope to date Taylor one day, she would have to be single again first, which seems plausible given her track record of 12 ex-boyfriends. While this number is not very optimistic, it could be interpreted in different ways. This has led me to develop two models that attempt to predict two possible outcomes.

The pessimistic model is the red line, and it follows the Bad Payer Hypothesis, which is based on the premise that a history of default reduces the likelihood of solvency – since you wouldn't feel confident lending money to a friend who has never paid anyone back. In other words, Taylor may be a bad payer in the sense that she is not suited for a stable relationship. If the Bad Payer model is accurate, her odds of being in a lasting relationship should follow a negative logarithmic trend, decreasing in probability as her number of failed relationships increases. The blue line is the Wisdom model, which is basically the opposite of the Bad Payer model, emphasizing that Taylor is suited for a sustainable relationship, but she may suffer from poor dating choices. The Wisdom model views failure as a learning opportunity, which means that her chances of finding the right person should increase over time.

It's reasonable to assume that in reality, bad payers are quite rare, otherwise most relationships would be doomed to failure, which is somewhat true, but it would also mean a very small number of long-lasting marriages. Although the Bad Payer model is more common among celebrities, where certain dispositions like narcissism are more prevalent. But since Taylor regularly complains about attracting narcissists in her songs, she may not be solely to blame here. Moreover, as someone who has consistently performed at the top of her game, it seems unlikely that she suffers from emotional turmoil. Therefore, I'd be more confident in believing that she's following the Wisdom model, which, given her number of past relationships, would suggest that there's a high probability that she'll stay with Travis Kelce (her current boyfriend) in the absence of extraordinary circumstances. Except that Taylor is already living under extraordinary circumstances, and probably one of the most extraordinary lives. Of course, the Bad Payer and Wisdom models are oversimplified explanations, but they are more appropriate for people with non-extraordinary lives. On the other hand, extremely notorious people are subject to external influences that can drastically affect their relationships.

Pre and Post conditions

When people look for a partner, they tend to focus first on the pre-conditions, which are essentially what makes someone attractive, whether it's physical aesthetics, personality, intelligence, or other contributing factors. The post conditions are the underlying requirements that come into play when committing to a long-term relationship, such as financial situation, occupation, lifestyle, or health conditions. Post conditions can usually be discarded if they don't differ too much, but can be a deal-breaker if they are highly abnormal or unorthodox. Let's say you're actively looking for a life partner and you meet someone who almost perfectly matches your pre-conditions, but after Googling their name, you realize they worked in the porn industry. Would you still consider a serious relationship?

The people who belong to the green area can be considered as non-extraordinary, they often have normal jobs, hobbies or social structure. What defines normality is difficult to define, although there are many cases where opinions roughly converge on the significance of what can be considered off the charts. People in the blue area structure their lives in ways that can be considered unusual. For example, base-jumping for leisure, living as a monk, or being politically engaged to reduce the suffering of cockroaches could be considered unusual. The pink area is for extraordinary people, and it's usually made up of famous people such as artists, politicians, athletes, or intellectuals. Being famous is not a prerequisite, but you could think of pink extraordinariness as a threshold, like standing out among 10,000 people in a field of public interest – so being the only one obsessed with cockroaches is not enough. The majority of non-extraordinary people will probably never know anyone in the pink area. However, people in the blue area are more numerous, and most of them are not famous, but still weird.

Someone like Taylor Swift is at the end of the pink spectrum, and her massive fan base is mostly made up of people from the green and blue spectrum. These people would most likely never meet her at mundane social gatherings because they are mostly not associated with people from the pink social circles. However, there are stronger arguments for not meeting Taylor, which may not be due to a lack of vector for meeting her, but rather her post conditions. Probably a lot of people would dream of dating Taylor, but after weeding out all the fans with unrealistic expectations, there aren't many people who would seriously consider compromising their anonymous status and being willing to endure following the lifestyle of someone extremely notorious. Even people in the pink zone would probably think twice about dating someone way out of their league. A relevant case study is the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Before they got engaged, Meghan's notoriety was basically at the entry level of the pink area. She may have thought she was qualified to embrace the 99.999th percentile of extraordinariness, but it resulted in the couple leaving the royal family, selling their dramas to Netflix, and ending up complaining about their lack of privacy.

Opportunity vs Constraint

Extraordinary people tend to have more dating options, but also heavier constraints. Marrying a member of the British royal family means accepting lifelong harassment; living with an internationally renowned artist means focusing a lot of energy on their career at the expense of the relationship. The French astronaut Thomas Pesquet renounced having children because his job was incompatible with being a full-time father, a compromise that his partner had to accept. This rule does not apply in a linear fashion to every extraordinary individual, and understandably, sharing your life with a Nobel laureate has different constraints than with a famous artist.

Living as a nomad is somehow unusual, whether it could be part of the blue area is debatable, as some people may set higher standards like living in a camper, a boat or something fancier. Yet, I can testify that dating as a nomad does not make the task any easier, mainly because of the post conditions, which are not suitable for many people. Firstly, because there aren't many people out there who would seriously consider dating someone who is just transiting to their place, and even if they did, it's unlikely they would travel with that person or start a long-distance relationship.

On the other hand, I've had a lot of opportunities, not specifically dating opportunities, but opportunities to meet new people. Some dating situations were a bit difficult and felt like finding the right person in a terminal, but they have to take a different flight than you, and several times, I thought that my nomadic journey should require an expiration date for finding a life partner. The difficult part of this question is whether living in one place would be more fruitful than traveling. I think that in writing this article, I have come to the conclusion that there is no obvious answer to this question. Because the opportunities to form genuine connections are rare enough to suggest that chance has more influence than predetermined criteria.

Uncertainty is often disregarded because, in retrospect, it seems easier to explain life's outcomes as resulting mainly from individual choices. Taylor Swift wouldn't be successful without hard work, but how much of her success is due to chance is unknown. It's also dubious to think that she's been more lucky than others, because luck remains concealed in many ways – you may have avoided death several times without knowing it. Some people may live extraordinary lives that seem far removed from the reality of non-extraordinary people, but everything is perfectly normal for those who live extraordinary lives. What's really extraordinary, and experienced by everyone, is uncertainty.

For more than two years now, I've been traveling while working in various locations around the world. I started by visiting the best-selling destinations for Digital Nomads, but eventually I became annoyed by the overly gentrified aspect of these places. To be fair, there is nothing wrong with visiting destinations that are frequented by many foreigners, as it's generally a good indicator of success, and also because many people simply enjoy being around like-minded people. The thing that bothers me the most is that it rarely results in a good sampling of the local population, which I find a bit shameful when I'm traveling ten thousand miles to end up surrounded by the same people. As a nomadic worker, I spend most of my time in shared workplaces, while it's often my main vector for meeting new people. As the title suggests, I recently visited Bangalore for this purpose, and it turned out to be a surprisingly authentic experience.

The name of the city may ring a bell for its reputation as the tech hub of India. Beyond that, it's far from being a popular destination for tourists, as there aren't many fancy things to do besides a few beautiful parks and a palace to visit. What remains is a large and congested city that might discourage most travelers from staying longer than one night. My first impression of Bangalore could be captured in one word: intensity. The food was intense, the traffic was intense, the constant staring of people was intense, even the overwhelming popularity of Crocs was intense. I think almost every place I visited would probably be a playground compared to Bangalore. Finding a decent workplace was also a difficult task. I was initially confident after noticing a large swath of coworking spaces on Google Maps, but in reality, most of them were corporate spaces, their interiors were not great, and it was a never-ending battle to reach the right person who could provide the pricing information for a monthly stay. Finally, I found a place that met my requirements, and the next day my new desk was in a five-floor building filled with dozens of Indian startups. Part of my expectation was to work in a place where a few people would look like me, and ironically, I couldn't set the bar any higher since I was literally the only foreigner in the whole place. The first few days were a bit weird, most people looked at me, probably because the p-value for seeing a 6'3" white guy was close to zero, but more importantly, I was wearing shorts – which I later figured out was a faux pas. And whenever I had a conversation, people systematically asked where I was from, what I was doing here, and my marital status.

A few more days in the office passed, and the alienation phase faded as people got used to my presence, while I started having regular conversations with some of them. It was strange because I had always thought of India as the complete opposite of the Western world, which is very different in many ways, but I didn't notice any significant cultural gap in the workplace – which could be due to the fact that people from higher social classes are more secular. However, the instance of receiving a Whatsapp message with a banner wishing me a happy International Men's Day from a female colleague was completely unexpected, but frankly quite pleasant. Another thing I found surprising is that less than half of the population speaks Hindi, as the country officially counts 780 different languages, which sometimes manifest through English as an intermediary language among Indians. The English proficiency of individuals also varied greatly; some of my interactions were very limited, while others were almost as good as with native speakers – if not better. Of course, one of the most important aspects was food, which was part of the reason I came to India and played a crucial role in my social integration. As a rule of thumb, whenever I visit a place, I try to follow traditional practices, eat everything, and finish everything I've started. This may seem obvious, but it makes a big difference, as people are usually very appreciative when someone shows openness and commitment to their food. Admittedly, many aspects of the Indian food culture were genuinely enjoyable, such as the variety of spices, mixing all the ingredients by hand, or the fact that people brought their own home-cooked meals to share during lunch.

Overall, my experience in Bangalore has been positive. I had many opportunities to socialize with Bangaloreans because people are naturally curious when they see something new, which is usually fruitful in fostering social interactions. The fact that Bangalore is not as touristy as other major Indian cities makes it a bit more authentic, to the point that when I saw other foreigners, I wondered what they were doing here. Another positive consequence of having very few tourists in one place is that scams are underdeveloped, which is one of the most unpleasant aspects of traveling in India. I became aware of this in a very direct way when I went on an excursion to Mysore (a neighboring city popular for teaching Ashtanga yoga) and suddenly people were trying to scam me at every corner. I found it quite difficult to stay calm, and at some point I just lost patience, and my response to scammers radically changed from gently declining robbery attempts to negotiating with rickshaw drivers like Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder – which was bad, but proved highly effective. These few annoying moments didn't have much impact on my stay, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend Bangalore to everyone, as its unconventional aspect makes it attractive, but certainly not an easy place to live. At the end of the day, it has never been easier to explore uncharted territory, but it remains more suitable for people who are adaptable and able to live alone for long periods of time – the rest is a matter of savoir-faire.

Many of us have heard of – or met – people with an innate ability to read people's minds, or at least a remarkable talent for telling accurate things about people's dispositions. While there is a lot of speculation to explain the origin of these esoteric skills, I recently came across a claim that attributes them to intelligence. This view caught my attention because it presupposes that we can understand a person's mind. Arguably, people can be understood to some extent, but our perception of others is mostly an illusion because it's largely constructed by our intuition rather than rational thinking. What I mean by this is that we rarely think critically about someone's actions by considering multiple hypotheses and trying to solve them as a mathematical equation. In most situations, a convenient explanation of events will pop into our heads, and it's not very common for us to question its arbitrariness. This also raises the question of whether intuition can be considered intelligent thinking, which is a long debate. Some have claimed that since intuition does not involve reasoning, which is inherent in intelligence, it cannot be considered as such. Other thinkers have concluded otherwise, arguing that because both intuition and problem-solving require pattern recognition, they must somehow be related to intelligence. Ultimately, we might agree with the premise that intuition requires some level of intelligence, and suggest that accurately portraying someone requires more than just guessing, but rather a deeper level of understanding. This leads us to wonder if we're really capable of achieving this.

First, we should ask ourselves how we came to believe that we could understand the minds of others. One plausible explanation could stem from the fact that we can foresee human outcomes in many different ways. For example, we may have anticipated when our friends would get divorced or married, and we usually develop even more compelling explanations afterwards. Sometimes we can observe a random person on the street and make various assumptions. For example, the person's outfit can reveal a lot about their social status or affinity. But it can also be more nuanced: someone wearing tech clothes might be into outdoor activities, but if it's a Patagonia down vest, they might just work in finance; a wedding ring can suggest other assumptions about a person's entourage, and religious markers can be a good indicator of beliefs. All of this information helps us infer realistic assumptions about a person's background. We could go further and have a brief conversation with the person and draw additional conclusions. In fact, one of the consequences of humans being very good at predicting the behavior of others has enabled the construction of gigantic projects such as the Great Wall of China, which involved hundreds of thousands of people for over a thousand years.

However, our ability to predict social outcomes or human characteristics may be poorly related to our understanding of the minds of others. To illustrate my point, imagine you're observing a lone ant moving erratically on a random surface. It would be very unlikely that you could confidently predict the ant's trajectory. In a similar situation, you might observe the same ant as part of a colony of ants forming a long line from an ant hill to a bread crumb. You might reasonably assume that the ant will first reach the bread crumb, cut a piece of it, and return to the anthill. The reason you might be able to make this prediction is because you can project generalizations of ant behavior from past observations of how ants operate in colonies. The ant example is interesting for two reasons: ants, like humans, operate mostly within social structures, and they have approximately 300,000 times fewer neurons than humans. While it's not accurate to say that their neural structure is 300,000 times less complex than ours, it still doesn't translate into more accurate predictions. I could repeat the same experiment one step further with living organisms as tiny as bacteria and probably come to the same conclusion. Based on this observation, we could assume that our ability to predict behavior doesn't seem to correlate very well with the complexity of the brain and, conversely, would reinforce the hypothesis that we have little understanding of what goes on under the hood.

The ant observation applies to humans because we typically make inaccurate predictions in unfamiliar environments, and additionally, not knowing how to assess a situation can be a disturbing moment, as many of us would be petrified if randomly confronted with indigenous tribes in the middle of the Amazon. To be more specific, we're not predicting spontaneous decisions, but rather how people respond to incentives in a social context, and to the extent that social cues can be mapped to prior knowledge. In other words, as long as our actions are aligned with social structures, we can infer realistic assumptions within that frame. When the social context is removed, our predictive power crumbles in the face of individual decisions, as it becomes increasingly difficult to accurately guess people's preferences, personality traits, or thinking patterns. This opens up a later argument that since people in modern societies spend most of their time adapting to social norms, their minds would be molded by their environment. This assumption holds true insofar as stereotypes are reliable tools for understanding people. We might conclude that the consequences of living in hyper-gregarious environments expose certain facets of individuals, making us more predictable and facilitating mutual understanding. However, this view largely ignores the unconditioned part of the human mind that remains hidden from us.

The understanding of the human mind is mostly a myth, or at the very least a misleading statement. We can indeed anticipate many social interactions through empirical shortcuts, which is fundamentally different from emulation. Although some individuals – such as mediums – may possess innate talents and demonstrate impressive heuristics. The most plausible explanation is that they can guess much better than the average person, but there's little evidence that this would involve a deeper level of understanding. Some readers may find this conclusion obvious, and admittedly, I don't think many people would seriously consider the mind-reading hypothesis. However, I tend to believe that we do not act as if we were aware of this matter because it seems quite common for us to make confident judgments about people quite regularly, such as speaking on someone's behalf. Accordingly, I've recently changed my views on this matter and consider other people's minds to be black boxes. This doesn't discourage me from making observations or speculating, but I try to remind myself that my perception of others is relatively insignificant compared to what remains unknown. Although our perception of others is mainly grounded on a superficial level, in everyday situations we pretend otherwise. While this may make sense from an evolutionary point of view, it does not necessarily serve us in the most wise way.

Bernard Tapie is certainly one of the most fascinating individuals I have ever heard of. He was a French businessman who became remarkably successful in acquiring bankrupt companies, but he wasn't limited to that, he was also famous as a singer, comedian, politician, TV host, soccer club manager, and for breaking the world record for crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Aside from the versatility of his accomplishments, a large part of his reputation may also lie in his involvement in a number of scandals with the judicial authorities. Recently, Netflix released a TV show about his controversial life – which is quite good from a French speaker's perspective. However, it is not a historically accurate representation of his journey, but rather a mixture of fact and fiction. Someone familiar with the factual narrative might conclude that the entire script could have been written by an earlier generation of language models. After watching the show, I was eager to learn more about the details and transcribe them into an article about a man relentlessly driven by disproportionately ambitious goals, who could have become president of France, but whose strengths turned against him and contributed to his downfall.

Disclaimer: The rest of this article may be a spoiler if you plan to watch the Netflix TV series.

In his early life, Bernard Tapie wasn't a good student, he didn't finish high school or attend university, and instead, started a career as a singer under the stage name Tapy. Several disks were recorded, but none of them resulted in commercial success. He switched jobs to become a salesman but abruptly quit after only three months. Then he started again as a racing driver, but following a car accident, he decided to resign from pursuing this career. After that, he sold televisions in door-to-door sales, and in 1966 he founded his first company specializing in home equipment, which went bankrupt after a few years. He started a second company focused on wholesale for works councils, which he successfully resold. In 1974, he tried to launch a subscription-based business aimed at people at risk of heart disease who could benefit from an automatic alert system to call an ambulance. The project was abandoned after several complaints and ended in a one-year suspended prison sentence for misleading advertising.

It wasn't until the early eighties, when he became interested in buying bankrupt companies for a song, that he began to record tangible successes. In 1980, he acquired La Vie Claire for one franc and sold it to Distriborg for 10 million francs. In 1981, he bought Terraillon for a symbolic franc and sold it to Hibernia Capital Partners for 33 million francs. He then bought Look Cycle in 1983 for a symbolic franc and sold it in 1988 for 260 million francs to the owner of the Swiss watch company Ebel. The industrial giant Wonder was bought by Tapie in 1984 for 30 million francs and sold in 1988 to the American company Ralston for 470 million francs. The sportswear brand Adidas was bought by Tapie in 1990 with a loan of 1.6 billion francs. It was later sold to Robert Louis Dreyfus for 10 billion euros (~65 billion francs). Perhaps one of his most impressive achievements was the 1986 purchase, for a symbolic franc, of the Olympique de Marseille (OM) soccer team, which was ranked fifteenth in the French league and had not won a title since 1976. Under Tapie's leadership, the team won four consecutive French championships from 1989 to 1992 and the 1993 Champions League, the only one ever won by a French football club. After a successful track record of rescuing bankrupt companies, he continued his career by embracing a variety of roles such as hosting his television show, acting, singing, and in the same vein, entered politics where he won two consecutive elections as a member of parliament and eventually served as minister for the city.

Bernard Tapie's consistent winning streak cannot be explained simply as a matter of luck, and could more realistically be attributed to an extraordinary charisma combined with an extremely low risk aversion. But his legendary reputation for winning everywhere is merely a polished facet of the story. There is a darker side, in which many of his successes were systematically intertwined with scandals involving misleading practices, embezzlement, misuse of assets, and corruption. Tapie's ways of solving problems were seemingly associated with circumventing the law, a habit that has dragged him into many judicial affairs that have prosecuted him throughout most of his existence. As many of his affairs are substantially complex, they would deserve a dedicated article, but perhaps the most important one to remember is a financial dispute with the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, concerning the arbitration over the sale of his largest acquisition, Adidas. A never-ending legal battle in which the bank was initially sentenced to pay him 400 million euros, but after the case was reopened, the sentence was overturned and he had to pay back the same amount. The case would last twenty years until his death in 2021 from his advanced cancer, which he had nicknamed “Crédit Lyonnais”.

Bernard Tapie's potential for climbing the social ladder seemed limitless, but his escalation to power was eventually capped by the French justice system, and unironically, would have been on steroids if it had been implemented in a country where bribery was commonplace. At the time, his ambitious goal of becoming French president wasn't delusional, as his popularity skyrocketed while the severity of the scandals he was involved in was kept below an acceptable threshold. A scenario that was jeopardized by his excessive willingness to never make any concessions, notably when he managed his soccer team and was later convicted in a match-fixing scandal for bribing a minor league team just before a Champions League final because he wouldn't allow his team to lose a single game – even if it was in a minor league championship. This affair subsequently cost him his eligibility for the presidency and landed him in jail for six months. The prosecutor who sentenced him later admitted the reasons behind the decision: “If it hadn't been for Bernard Tapie, he wouldn't have gone to prison for this affair. The facts didn't deserve it. He paid for other reasons”.

The story of Bernard Tapie is paradoxical, to put it mildly. He made decisions that were both brilliant and irrational, or at least difficult to justify in the eyes of others. His unwavering sense of purpose has placed him among the 400 fortunes of France and, conversely, proved to be a double-edged sword when, a few years later, he left his wife with a debt of 642 million euros. But the point that people tend to ignore is that he wasn't a dishonest person – following the premise that he was aware of wrongdoing. According to the testimony of those close to him, and given his background, it would suggest that he was a man of integrity with strong values. Rather, his moral views were based on a skewed sense of logic. His internal narrative was that of a man from the lower class who considered himself entitled to a position of power. He sometimes thought of himself as a modern Robin Hood, a view where the bourgeoisie was less legitimate to hold a position of privilege, and therefore playing by his rules was a justified means of balancing that effect. And the fact that he considered himself to be legitimate might have made him more credible. Despite the many controversies, the cult of Bernard Tapie lives on through a story of its own. A story in which one could pursue an infinite number of lives, a story in which success is a matter of audacity rather than specialization, a story that is at odds with the modern world. His journey may be more akin to anecdotal evidence than a general case study, but it nevertheless remains an inspirational one.

In France, president bashing has a long tradition, from which even Emmanuel Macron has not been spared. This form of prejudice hasn't necessarily been evenly distributed among all French leaders, and besides the popularity rating, there aren't any reliable indicators when it comes to measuring the intensity of resentment towards a public figure. In comparison to previous mandates, I've rarely observed such a high level of hatred towards a French president, I could think of when Macron was slapped during a public event, or more recently, the incitement of a popular French singer to “hang” Macron – a statement she later regretted, claiming that her words were taken “out of context”. Other artists have also expressed similar attitudes, including the rock band Shaka Ponk or the US beatmaker Marc Rebillet. I won't mention the hateful comments I've seen online, because I'd assume that these occurrences are systematic for any political leader, although many of them were frighteningly threatening. Those who live in certain areas of Paris can attest to the fact that anti-Macron sentiment has become so pervasive that car insurance fraud has never been easier, since all you have to do now is park your car decorated with Macron posters in a protest avenue. And while most newspapers tend to focus on social issues rather than the big picture, The Economist recently published a surprisingly optimistic view of France: “Beneath France's revolts, hidden success”.

Recently France has even outperformed its big European peers. Since 2018 cumulative growth in GDP in France, albeit modest, has been twice that in Germany, and ahead of Britain, Italy and Spain.

Yet France on Mr Macron’s watch has managed to combine a more favourable attitude towards wealth creation with a welfare state that still does a better job than its big peers at correcting inequality. The French poverty rate is well below the average of its European neighbours, and little over half America’s. Nursery education, a proven means of improving life chances for lower-income groups, is now compulsory from the age of three. The French live six years longer on average than Americans, and far fewer are obese. Their jobless rate, at 6.9%, is at its lowest in 15 years. Despite Mr Macron’s reforms, the French state still takes more in taxes as a share of GDP than any OECD country bar Denmark—and devotes more to social spending.

Macron's rational irrational hate

When it comes to assessing a government's performance, economic well-being is an important variable to consider, although it provides only a partial explanation of the state of affairs. Conversely, public perception of the government is often underestimated, even though it plays a crucial role in maintaining stability. In this respect, Macron is undeniably struggling and is regularly portrayed as an arrogant authoritarian with little regard for the lower classes. These accusations are not unfounded, but they tend to be bound to a one-sided narrative that cherry-picks evidence. Perhaps the most popular of these is the recurring comparison of Macron's government with fascism, an accusation often linked to the legitimization of police violence against protesters as a means of censorship. The French documentary “Un pays qui se tient sage”, literally “A wise nation”, provided an immersive coverage of these events, in particular the Yellow Vests movement – a series of protests that resulted in numerous injuries – emphatically presenting the series of events through a political prism. The police brutality covered in this documentary is undeniable and seemingly supported by the annual number of deaths related to police intervention in France during this period.

The rising number of deaths and injuries among protesters during Macron's presidency is quite alarming, but while these numbers are often reported by journalists, they are rarely contrasted with the fact that the number of attacks on the national police force has more than doubled in twenty years. Admittedly, these figures come from the Ministry of the Interior, which has been criticized for using unreliable statistical methods. In addition, it's difficult to establish a direct link between the overall increase in violence against the police over twenty years and the recent increase in deaths during protests. Nevertheless, much of the explanation lies in the fact that Macron's government has faced an unprecedented number of violent protests, which has unmistakably resulted in more incidents.

Another popular criticism of Macron lies in his rhetoric, which is commonly referred to as vacuous and often underscores the assumption that he's a deceitful individual by reducing him to his former position as a banker – an indictment closer to conspiracy theories than supported by serious evidence. Many of these kinds of accusations are usually framed as a long list of lies he allegedly told to get himself into a position of power to serve the interests of the rich, and are articulated by pointing out contradictory statements he has made as an attempt to emphasize inconsistencies between his words and actions. Even if the most honest politicians are unmistakably prone to incoherent decisions, and assuming that Macron perpetually lies, this should be reflected in a purely quantitative analysis. Unsurprisingly, the number of campaign promises made by Macron has been largely kept and closely comparable to those of his predecessor, François Hollande.

Macron has been repeatedly portrayed as an autocrat due to several reforms that have been enforced with the use of 49.3 – a bill that allows the government to impose the adoption of a law by the Assembly without a vote. But historically, the use of such a law has been much more common in the past, undermining the argument that France has become anti-democratic. And paradoxically, the anti-democratic criticism of 49.3 is mostly voiced by the left, which also tends to forget that, throughout history, the same law has been used 33 times by a right-wing government leader as opposed to 56 times by a left-wing government leader. More importantly, a clause like 49.3 may be unique to the French Constitution, but many democracies have inherited – thanks to the French – similar means of balancing power.

Admittedly, I concede that Macron has surrounded himself with questionable politicians, as many of them have been placed under investigation, a concern that resonates with the rise in probity offenses, which have increased by 28% between 2016 and 2021. However, it is important to highlight that this increase is most likely due to the fact that the government has become more efficient in fighting corruption as a result of the establishment of three institutions specialized in this matter: the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life (2013), the Central Anti-Corruption Office (2013), and the French Anti-Corruption Agency (2016).

France is undeniably showing optimistic results from an economic perspective, but it's largely dismissed on the adverse political sides and in the media. A view that doesn't seem surprising, as the country's political influence is deeply rooted in socialism, which manifests itself in a latent anti-market sentiment – especially when Macron is commonly perceived as serving the rich while holding disdain for the lower class. Perhaps one of the most controversial moments of his presidency was his response to someone claiming a lack of job opportunities, “I can walk across the street and find you a job” – suggesting that many business owners were struggling to employ staff – a statement that resonated as incendiary and became infamously associated with him. And even though Macron's communication style is infinitely softer in comparison to someone like Donald Trump, it elicits comparatively hostile reactions like those observed on the other side of the Atlantic.

Opposition as tribal signaling

While it's undeniable that anti-Macron sentiment exists in varying degrees of intensity, it appears to be clustered in specific political factions or geographic areas rather than globally. On average, metrics such as popularity ratings place Macron as slightly better than his predecessors, and his politics seem to be overwhelmingly supported internationally, according to how French people living abroad voted. As someone who has visited and lived in thirty countries, the results don't come as a surprise, mainly for two reasons: the French welfare system is in many ways incredibly generous; people's political views are influenced by their environment. The electoral map, however, is painfully clichéd; my heuristic guess is that French people living in Iceland are likely to believe that electing a populist like Melenchon will lead to the cancellation of the national debt – as if France was a country of 300,000 inhabitants. Similarly, those living in sub-Saharan countries vote far-left because they are subject to social desirability from their peers who could benefit from the French welfare system, and those living in Russia probably think that the French government is too soft in every respect.

In France, the granular geographic comparison between the last round of elections is strikingly relevant to grasp how the rise of the opposition has grown organically. Although identifying the main driver behind this trend is a tedious task, as it could be attributed to a multitude of factors such as growing inequalities, immigration, social media and continuous information channels. Therefore, I'm uncertain whether I can confidently draw a causal explanation for Marine Le Pen's rise, but my intuition would attribute the spread of the party's influence to a social contagion phenomenon, or what I would call the “blob effect”. Marine Le Pen's rise appears to be sporadic, with unconquered territory getting contaminated from neighboring provinces – presumably because people are more susceptible to the influence of those who live close to them. A scenario that seems more plausible when we consider that Mrs. Le Pen's party scored much lower internationally, but still managed to occupy second place.

Historically, Le Pen's party was considered forbidden by the overwhelming majority of the French, although many people couldn't provide a rational explanation as to why it was dangerous to vote for it. In recent years, the banned party has gained popularity while softening its language to become much closer to the traditional right. Since most people's political beliefs are initially grounded in their core values, a bi-partisan political system is generally conducive to effectively directing people's votes according to their preferences. In the case of France, which now has four major right-wing parties that seem to overlap, developing a nuanced understanding has become more complex. I wouldn't be surprised if, in a blind test scenario, most voters could no longer tell the difference between the Republicans, the National Rally, Renaissance, and Reconquête. There are good reasons to believe that this paradigm shift has given more power to social conformity, as people tend to rely more on others' choices in the face of ambiguous decisions, and consequently has facilitated the normalization of extremist parties like the National Rally (Le Pen) in rural areas where they were previously constrained by a deontological clause.

Despite a massive approval of Macron by the French living outside of France, the French president remains misunderstood by a part of the French citizens, nor does it seem to be reciprocal. Many of the criticisms that have been made fall short of objectivity, or attach too much importance to criteria that are irrelevant for guiding public opinion towards effective policies. The economist Bryan Caplan famously demonstrated with empirical evidence in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter that most democracies are flawed because of the average voter's poor understanding of economic principles. And conversely, the more educated voters are, the more they tend to think as economists and elect politicians who make decisions that are better for them in the long run. This theory partially explains why people tend to make irrational political decisions, but it also fails to explain the rise of extremism in France and, more broadly, in Europe, despite the fact that the educational system in most OECD countries has remained stable over the past decades. Understandably, the French welfare system didn't start to perform well with the arrival of Macron, but it would be equally dishonest to pretend that it has been dismantled since he came to power. The reality is probably that France is doing fine, at least better than many of its peers by objective standards, but unfortunately, this has had little effect in addressing the country's growing tensions.

Hunting is perhaps one of the oldest ancestral practices in human history, with some evidence tracing its appearance back 1.7 million years, and it has played a critical role in hunter-gatherer societies. Even in more recent times, some indigenous populations, such as the Inuit, subsisted entirely on fishing and hunting. Nowadays, the practice of hunting is less essential to prosperity and has therefore become less common for most developed countries – although in some cases hunters can represent a non-negligible portion of the population (up to 7% for Ireland). In Europe, France is the country with the highest number of active hunters (about one million), which is at the same time the second most popular hobby after soccer. Despite the fact that the practice of hunting is decreasing over time, the unpopularity of hunting continues to grow, particularly with regard to safety and cruelty to animals. These concerns are strangely not reflected in the statistics when 90% of the victims of hunting accidents are hunters themselves (including 8 deaths in 2022), while only 5% of the French declare themselves to be vegetarians. Moreover, the practice of hunting is frequently portrayed as a bloodthirsty pastime, but this perspective is too simplistic and misleading since the overwhelming majority of hunters subsist on their game and regard the slaughter of animals as a means rather than an end. Nevertheless, half of the French condemn hunting as a recreational activity.

First and foremost, it's important to understand how the hostility against hunting has grown in Western societies. Until recently, the slaughter of animals in the streets was commonplace; in England during the 19th century, historic streets like The Shambles were described as “open-air slaughterhouses” where butchers killed and dressed animals in front of the crowds. Later, the advent of the Industrial Revolution led to social reforms that addressed concerns about the hygiene of such practices, and as a result, the duty of slaughtering animals was displaced to isolated places outside of cities. The construction of abattoirs had the consequence of hiding the violence against animals from pedestrian areas and further distanced the population from the relationship between animals and meat. In our time, a typical person raised in Western societies who has no ties to farmers or hunters will most likely never experience the slaughter of an animal. This shift has created societies where the vast majority of the population is disconnected from the processes involved in the production of meat, which has translated into a significant increase in sensitivity on this matter. Finally, the emergence of social media has brought some light on questionable slaughtering and hunting practices to a mainstream audience, exacerbating a sense of outrage through the exposure of unfamiliar forms of animal suffering, which has played a decisive role in the construction of a narrative in which these forms of violence are deemed unjustified.

However, when it comes to animal suffering, it's worth distinguishing between the different categories in which animals suffer in radically different terms: wild animals, farm animals, and domestic animals. Wild animals undoubtedly benefit from the highest degree of freedom and usually die as a result of natural predators, disease, or human activity. Farm animals experience extremely constrained mobility and are usually assigned to a death row at birth. Domestic animals are generally considered to receive privileged treatment, enjoying an abundance of food, free health care, and even birthday celebrations, and in most cases will die from natural death. This view is shared by the vast majority of people, who usually don't consider farm animals to be having the time of their lives and agree with the view that domestic animals live in decently fair conditions. It's important to note that companion animals also endure various forms of suffering that are commonly considered morally acceptable: they are restricted in their autonomy by spending most of their lives in confined spaces, they endure the burdens associated with forced sterilization, and in some cases, they suffer from injuries caused by genetic abnormalities resulting from selective breeding designed to select for certain traits deemed aesthetically good but detrimental to their health.

In contrast to wild animals, domesticated and farmed animals have become accustomed to living under artificial conditions, but their circumstances may appear less attractive from a human perspective. This perception can be emphasized by considering a hypothetical trilemma if one envisions an afterlife as an animal and has to choose between a life in a one-square-meter enclosure, a life confined to a home as a pet, and a life in the wild. Chances are you'd probably choose the third option since freedom is generally preferable to determinism. If the opposite were true, ending up in prison would be a preferable scenario for many of us – admittedly, in rare situations, this may be true. Of course, this thought experiment is unrealistic because we tend to project human characteristics onto animals, such as the ability to conceptualize future outcomes, in addition to our limited understanding of how animals experience happiness, and also because of the fetishization of the natural world, namely natural bias: a tendency to perceive the natural world as inherently better than a world altered by humans, despite no strong evidence supporting this theory. The point here is not to draw a comparison, but rather to put into perspective how morality about animal conditions has been fallaciously constructed through an anthropomorphic lens, leading to an ambivalent perception of the animal kingdom. On the one hand, there are domestic animals, which are considered and treated as an extension of the family nucleus despite the oppressive conditions imposed on them, and on the other hand, there are wild animals, which are constantly subjected to hostile treatment by the natural world, which we regard as romanticized. Consequently, the way humans perceive animal conditions is predicated on a projection of human goodness rather than a realistic interpretation of animal welfare.

The tendency to humanize domestic animals and fantasize about the natural world, while at the same time alienating the prevailing violence in the animal world, has contributed to a dissonant worldview that has nourished a sense of resentment in the face of the paradoxical relationship established between humans and animals. Consequently, this has driven many people to vivid emotional reactions and irrational judgments. The prejudice against the hunting of animals is commonly justified on the grounds of unnecessary suffering, but the premise of this argument crumbles if hunting remains primarily motivated by subsistence, thus reducing the suffering caused by intensive farming, which is undoubtedly quantitatively much worse. Similarly, the accusations depicting the gratification of killing animals as an incriminating act are logically inconsistent with the pleasure of eating meat. As I pointed out in the beginning, anti-hunting sentiments rarely coincide with patterns of behavior that significantly reduce animal suffering, such as veganism or vegetarianism. And, perversely, most of the people who condemn hunting turn out to be more impactful by relying on industrial farming – which is unmistakably darker. The list of inconsistencies could go on, but I assume that my point has been made. Finally, there are legitimate reasons to view hunting as a fundamentally cruel tradition, and despite the lack of objectively better alternatives for omnivorous diets, the democratization of less harmful alternatives, such as cost-effective lab-grown meat, could undermine the legitimacy of hunting in the future.

Credits: I'm not very handy with citations, especially since none of my statements have been quoted elsewhere. However, I would like to acknowledge Charles Stépanoff (an anthropologist), whose work has been a great inspiration to me.

With the recent leap of innovation in the world of AI, it was only a matter of time before we saw the emergence of several applications derived from generative language models. Recently, one of them caught my attention, Boring Report: an application that relies on language models to remove any form of sensationalism from newspapers. The idea is to present information in a more sober way than traditional media by decoupling the superfluous emotional language from the facts. While the concept may seem like a groundbreaking way of getting informed, it's nonetheless quite worrisome. For the first time, there may be a real disconnect between the information produced by writers and the end consumer, as AI will act as a proxy to frame information according to more objective standards. Some journalists will likely produce articles using services like ChatGPT, although the final version would at least be reviewed by the publisher. Beyond the questionable reliability of generative tools, the suppression of sensationalism inexorably erases an emotional context interwoven with textual information, raising the question of how preserving the integrity of human-based content guides us to better understanding.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings is that they tell themselves stories. If you're asked to introduce yourself, you're more likely to tell a few anecdotes that define you than to list your biological makeup or Big Five percentiles – I do this myself sometimes. Similarly, the way human history is explained is not based solely on numerical evidence, but rather on a recollection of historical testimony that fits together to form an overall narrative that is regularly reassessed as new evidence emerges. In the case of 9/11, it was initially perceived as nonsensical and shocking because of its completely unexpected nature, but if you think about it now in retrospect, you may come up with a more meaningful explanation of the chain of events. Today, most of us share a common interpretation of what happened during major historical events, but others may hold a radically different view. If you listen to conspiracy theorists, you'll generally find that many of them have a decent knowledge of the facts, but draw a radically different conclusion from them. This illustrates the difference between knowledge and understanding: whereas the former is detrimental to the pursuit of truth, the latter can be more useful from a historical perspective.

“The world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.” ― Robbe-Grillet Alain.

The Age of Enlightenment introduced a revolutionary framework for understanding by placing more emphasis on reason and empirical evidence as opposed to subjective impressions, while the establishment of rigorous scientific methodology has provided consistent results over time. Although modern science remains far removed from the storytelling explanations of the ancient world, the two are more intertwined than we might think. In cosmology, the explanation of the “Big Bang” is usually introduced in a narrative format, in biology genes are often expressed as pursuing a self-replicating goal, and living organisms are commonly reduced to surviving. Although science has provided a set of methods for explaining the universe on empirical grounds, it can be quite irrelevant in the context of human interactions. A physician, for example, must have an understanding of the scientific knowledge system and the historical and social background of his patients. To the extent that he must effectively prescribe treatment, the choice of medication will be based on statistically significant evidence and the patient's belief system. A person skeptical of the pharmaceutical industry may be more inclined to follow the same prescription if it's plant-based – even though choosing a natural substitute for the same molecule is probably not healthier, given the process of extracting molecules from natural ingredients, which usually involves strong chemicals.

Certainly, narration has played a pervasive role in the way people communicate ideas, and in the same way, newspapers tell a story when they report facts. This undeniably prevents them from being completely objective, as they spread their own biases – sometimes exaggerated to the point of intellectual dishonesty. When this occurs, it makes people more susceptible to distrust and often results in a more selective assessment of whether to trust newspapers or, in more racial cases, to withdraw from them entirely. The growing distrust of media institutions is rarely without consequence, as it drives people to consume information in other ways. The advent of the Internet has enabled the decentralization of communication channels, and the emergence of social media has provided a centralized way to consume a vast number of fragmented pieces of information from multiple sources. Due to their quantitative approach, popular social platforms such as Facebook or Twitter have fundamentally changed the patterns of information consumption by driving attention towards short bursts. More recently, applications derived from language models, such as Boring Report, extend this principle by agnostically synthesizing information from mainstream media. Their supposedly neutral and quantitative approach has some inherent seductive aspects, such as freeing the reader from the alienation of mainstream rhetoric, which can understandably be perceived as superior and empowering.

However, one of the limitations of using massive information channels like social platforms is the lack of control over how information is selected, which can lead to a misleading and incomplete framing while fooling the reader into developing a comprehensive point of view. Imagine someone whose main source of information is scrolling through a feed of headlines, and who keeps coming across a bunch of studies denying the effects of global warming, and as a result, updates their belief system towards skepticism. On the other hand, a well-informed climate scientist would likely internalize the same stream of information differently, and consequently not shift their belief system as much. Similarly, many people have become familiar with following a range of experts or political pundits on Twitter, which may seem like a niche strategy to be at the forefront, but often results in content that lacks substance and is rarely representative of the consensus. Because social platforms' algorithms tend to prioritize provocative content at the expense of balanced ones, it's not uncommon for controversial figures to get the most attention. The infamous and controversial author Bjørn Lomborg, who has written subversive books on climate change based on a counterfactual narrative, has a disproportionately large online influence compared to the rest of the scientific community, even though most of his work has been massively debunked.

As generative AI tools gain popularity for a variety of uses related to educational purposes, their ability to produce a meaningful analysis of recent events remains unfounded. The techno-utopian idealization of artificial intelligence as a replacement for traditional media institutions is a dangerous proposition, since their unpredictable nature, due to an arbitrary selection of semantics, inevitably perpetuates a distorted overview and makes them untrustworthy candidates. On the other hand, a large number of media are overwhelmingly uninteresting and repetitive, and comparatively, classical news feeds probably do a better job of informing the reader. However, it's legitimate to question the holistic perspectives of newspapers like The New York Times when they have repeatedly demonstrated bias and misrepresented social issues by dismissing parts of the scientific evidence that don't fit a particular agenda. That said, I think it's a misconception to expect newspapers to be rational actors at the cutting edge of objective standards. They are not terrible either, but they are more useful for developing understanding through a narrative format. Instead of focusing solely on evidence, their main asset is to present a worldview in which you can find building blocks to help you build your own. Sadly, I see more and more people who don't see the value in this anymore, preferring to opt for a fact-only diet, erratically collecting random pieces of information without necessarily having the glue to tie them together. It's difficult to see how this approach can be a valuable conduit for constructing a meaningful interpretation.

I enjoy using social media, especially Twitter because it makes me laugh at memes, the latest scandals, or the juxtaposition of white supremacist and antifa threads. But I can't say with confidence what I've learned from using them. I've probably discovered a bunch of interesting articles through social media, but that's not enough to justify any significant beneficial outcome from using them. For the amount of time I've spent on these platforms, I should have accumulated a tremendous amount of knowledge, but unfortunately, most of the understanding that I've built upon is almost vacuous. This made me more concerned about how the algorithmic synthesis of articles through a fact-based format could lead to a better way of being informed. Similarly, summarizing books seems more useful for cramming for exams than for developing in-depth understanding. In the end, using AI to synthesize newspapers seems to combine both the negative aspect of reductionism and the unpredictability of language models. Over the past decade, we've increasingly popularized efficient ways of ingesting information, from speed-reading apps to 140-character limited threads, but this innovative trend might have been the main driver behind the age of misinformation.

I was conversing with someone until the dialogue was interrupted after I mentioned the word “retarded” and was kindly asked to refrain from using it because it's derogatory. In a hypothetical shower thought, the stubborn-free-speech-absolutist part of me would have stated that IQ is the most reliable predictor of success in a wide range of domains, and that recent studies tend to suggest that it is highly heritable, making a strong case that some people are by definition retarded, and therefore replacing this word with a euphemism is simply hypocritical – and in a prolonged effort of bravery, I would have crossed my arms and concluded with, “Facts don't care about your feelings”. What happened instead is that I apologized first and made a conscious effort to avoid saying that word again in front of that person – not necessarily because I generally care about making people feel comfortable, but mostly because I'm afraid of being judged.

The strange thing about the word “retarded” is that I have become unusually familiar with it. I partly think of myself as retarded, I went to a school for the retarded, and people thought of me as retarded. The more recent years suggest that I've gotten better at fooling people into thinking I'm not retarded, or maybe they've become more empathetic – even my therapist once thought I was a brilliant person, but I'm paying her to say that. Admittedly, most people can become less stupid by dedicating time to educating themselves, and for the less fortunate it probably doesn't help to be labeled as such, but the idea that certain adjectives can be harmful is not new and is often debated.

The morality of prejudice

There are overt forms of prejudice, such as physical violence, explicit forms of discrimination, and verbal abuse. And there are more subtle forms of prejudice, such as implicit language, microaggressions, and stereotypes. While the vast majority of people strongly condemn the former, there are good reasons to believe in a much greater disparity of judgments for the latter. When I try to conceptualize how far prejudice can extend, I often think of Coca-Cola. You see, among the 70,000 shareholders of “The Coca-Cola Company,” how many would you classify as racist? 1%, 10%, maybe more? You could say Zero, but that's extremely unlikely. Assuming it's at least one, it would mean that if you buy one of their products, you're probably funding racist people and indirectly participating in some form of prejudice. Now that you're aware of this fact, would buying their products make you a racist person?

You may find this reasoning absurd and based on a ridiculous level of extrapolation, and I would certainly agree with you. Some people's threshold for what is considered racist is not that far from the bottle of Coke, and at the other end of the spectrum, it is basically the 19th century definition of racism. In between these two extremes is where people's threshold for racism falls. Of course, there are multiple thresholds as there are many forms of prejudice, each covering different groups of individuals. In theory, we could plot an entire population's thresholds on a graph and discover a median threshold for each category of prejudice. This could reveal the existence of patterns of statements on which fifty percent of the population would agree and the other half would disagree. You might wonder, where are my thresholds on this graph?

Because we are above all social creatures, we spend a lot of time thinking about what others might think of us. And our social conformity instincts protect us from being perceived negatively by the people we care about, and the other way around, we don't want to think of them as bad people. As a result, we tend to categorize what others identify as right or wrong, and this eventually materializes as an intuition to predict which statement should be judged as morally reprehensible. In this regard, our thresholds are most likely a social construct based on those around us, and I suspect they're rooted in the median thresholds of the other groups to which we belong. If that weren't the case, our thresholds would be evenly distributed, and we'd be just as cautious about any prejudice, including those related to distant tribes. This story applies to the vast majority of individuals, but a few people can self-reflect and conclude that their thresholds do not meet their standards, and voluntarily disengage in calibrating them with their peers. Sometimes they may even blame them, but they soon realize that they were also adjusting their threshold on behalf of other groups who had been influenced by more distant groups, and the long chain of causality would probably end at the origin of the universe.

Our thresholds are not accurate either, since there are many things that we consider safe but would likely cause more prejudice than things we consider harmful. Ideally, we would possess a divine spreadsheet filled with a prejudice score for every existing statement and base our threshold on a measurable unit. In the real world, it's more difficult to accurately quantify a statement's potential prejudice power; the consequences can vary depending on the speaker, the audience, and the context. Nevertheless, we convince ourselves of having the right threshold, and will consider people with lower thresholds than us to be exaggerating, and those with higher thresholds to be less compassionate. One day we may encounter someone who provokes a strong moral reaction, and they may ask us why we think it's wrong. And since thresholds are mainly constructed by association, we might feel clueless, but we will end up rationalizing, and incentivizing the other person to do exactly the same thing, forming an everlasting spiral of arguments. On rare occasions, we would agree on an intermediate threshold for a specific statement, even though the rest of our thresholds will likely remain identical.

The lack of proven methods of quantification makes it pointless to blame other people's thresholds, since your sole moral influence cannot compete with the gravitational force of social circles. This makes a good case for why activism against prejudice happens in politics, because it's practically achievable to change the status quo on certain social issues by shifting one of the country's median thresholds in one direction. Perhaps someday we will discover the prejudice gene, but in the meantime, the most effective approach would suggest a systemic change. And when you think of anti-stereotyping policies in these terms, you might wonder about the reasons that drive people against them. Do those who oppose the teaching of Critical Race Theory fundamentally disagree with it, or are they more afraid that one day their children will return from school and start to disagree with their thresholds?

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

It's harder to be compassionate in group thinking than on an individual scale. I myself hold a bunch of negative stereotypes about people that I believe are wrong. I find it convenient to think of anti-vaxxers as a dumb movement, and consider that trusting Joe Rogan as a result of doing your own due diligence is even better than an IQ test for proving stupidity. However, I've met them in person (since I lived in Bali), and I don't think any of these people were morons – one of them even believed in the Covid-19 and 5G conspiracy, and was a talented violinist. I've associated the fear-mongers who advocate the end of fiat currencies for Bitcoin as showing early signs of dementia, but whenever I meet a Blockchain enthusiast, I see a passionate grown child hoping to be part of something bigger. I had preconceived opinions about the eugenics movement, but when I followed some of them on Twitter, I found some genuine humanists who simply believe we should sterilize people below a certain IQ threshold.

Stereotypes are rarely accurate, and I usually tend to suppress them in real life, although I still keep a couple. I've seen people advocating for having compassion instead of stereotypes, but my internal dialogue somehow disagrees with that narrative because I see stereotypes as having instrumental values that can lead to positive outcomes. I've used mine to sympathize with people I probably wouldn't have listened to, like Hasan Piker, who won me over when he started criticizing people in cryptos, which eventually became a gateway to listening to a range of people in the same political league. I've enjoyed reading very smart intellectuals who I initially disliked, but because they shared a common disdain for anti-vaxxers, they got my approval stamp. I even used stereotypes against myself by sending a letter to my company's CTO to review my compensation, justifying my complaint on the basis of being French. I didn't get the raise, but he told me it was one of the best negotiation letters he had ever seen. Perhaps in the future, I will choose to have fewer stereotypes, which is a potentially healthier option. In the meantime, trading them for a broad expansion of my political spheres is such a delightful experience that I'll probably continue to be charmed by pundits who make fun of my favorite villains, because strangely, my tribal instincts tend to reward those who oppose the people I dislike the most.

It all started when I was scrolling through my Twitter feed. I came across a thread by a CNRS researcher alerting other fellow researchers to be careful about posting neo-nazi websites using their work-related Twitter accounts. The thread was actually a disguised means of accusing another scientist of having shared a supposedly Nazi website. In the comments section, a screenshot of the crime scene showing a shared article of Emil O. W. Kierkegaard's blog. I found it amusing at first, before it intrigued me a little more as I remembered that I follow Emil on Twitter.

Who is Emil O. W. Kirkegaard?

Emil is apparently an intelligence researcher – the term is quite vague, but he mostly publishes papers on sociology, genetics, and IQ. I couldn't find a summary of his persona on Wikipedia, as his page has been deleted, but instead, I came across a page from Rational Wiki (an unofficial and secular version of Wikipedia), which describes him as a far-right eugenicist, white supremacist, climate change denier, activist for legalizing child pornography and incest, anti-feminist, ableist, anti-vegan, homophobe, Islamophobe and transphobe. This brief description wasn't very optimistic and portrayed a terrible person, but the number of accusations was so ludicrous that it undermined its own credibility. Further down the page was an exhaustive list of alleged behaviors – more resembling ad hominem attacks than solid evidence. Not all of them, though; his previous writing on the ethics of pedophilia is pretty awful, and moreover reflects the kind of reasoning of someone who has gone way too far on utilitarianism. Another piece of the accusation was a photo he posted on Facebook in 2012, showing himself next to a friend performing a Nazi salute. He later refuted the criticism: “Of course, making Nazi jokes doesn't prove anything, and it would be monumentally stupid to conclude that someone is a Nazi based on a jokey picture from Facebook.” After all, who has never been around people who sympathize with former authoritarian regimes? To be fair, he also defended himself against other accusations on his blog – mostly through ad hominem attacks against the author of Rational Wiki. Lastly, in an article from Le Temps, Emil described himself as a “universal genius”, while explaining how he became an “independent researcher” because he never pursued a doctorate, and preferred to be “self-taught”.

How did I end up following this person?

Unlike contracting a virus, it's easier to trace how you got infected by memes that likely influenced your decisions. In the case of following Emil on Twitter, it was after his work had been disseminated on a thread by Scott Alexander and another by Richard Hanania – whom I consider to be reliable intellectuals. Nevertheless, I might legitimately ask, why do I trust them? Well, I've read many of Richard's articles and developed a good understanding of his political worldview, he's also been featured in several op-eds in mainstream media (including the NYT), and his work is often relayed by other popular academics such as Steven Pinker; I'm less familiar with Scott Alexander, although his reputation as a legendary rationalist is far from disputed. I could go further and recursively ask, why should I trust the NYT? Then I'd probably ask you to provide me with a more trustworthy alternative.

For a long time, my use of Twitter was limited to very few people, before I realized that this strategy wasn't very effective in fostering diversity of opinion. As a result, I started expanding my following circle by being less concerned with the screening process, which resulted in the rule: followed by 10+ others you follow. On Twitter, people don't explicitly label themselves with political beliefs (except maybe pronouns), and as a result, it can be challenging to identify where a person falls on the political spectrum. That's why I try to stick with an observation period for the people I've recently subscribed to before they can eventually get my approval – some of them may stay on the pipe for the rest of their lives.

The faith dilemma

Admittedly, all this did not leave me with a positive impression of Emil, but it doesn't explain why several reputable intellectuals approach his work, as I would assume that the stakes should be too high to risk one's reputation. Maybe he's an obnoxious person and at the same time an effective scientist. And despite only holding a bachelor's degree in linguistics, should a lack of credence be enough to disqualify someone's work? Yet there is one more little detail that still bothers me, his papers are essentially published under his own academic journals, OpenPsych – described as promoting racist pseudoscience – which has close ties to the Mankind Quarterly – another popular pseudo-journal associated with scientific racism – currently presided by Richard Lynn, known for his controversial opinions on eugenics and his concern about the high fertility rate of low-IQ individuals, who he believes pose a major threat to Western civilization because they might outnumber high-IQ individuals – additionally, his article came out after Idiocracy.

I could make some sense of the argument stating that academia, as mostly dominated by liberals, has nudged right-wingers to explore politically incorrect science through alternative means. But I can hardly gloss over Emil's dubious opinions and his questionable work ethic, which involves collaborating with questionable scientists who are themselves surrounded by even more questionable people. In other words, the whole thing smells like crap. But it's worth pondering whether the studies he's published can be classified as pseudoscience. Does claiming that something is false mean that it is false until you can prove that it is? Since I haven't found any strong refuting evidence (except for one report of a bad experience), it's difficult to conclude whether his work is fraudulent, but it's also unrealistic to expect every study to be publicly debated.

In theory, someone spreading blatantly false ideas should be contested – at least when the cost of disproving the facts is low. But this principle becomes less true according to Brandolini's Law, which famously coined an asymmetry between creating misinformation and debunking it: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” This partially explains the scarcity of rebuttal arguments against more elaborate controversial theories. Only we're not talking about an exiled scientist living in a cave, as Emil is probably more notorious than the vast majority of researchers in his area of expertise, and from a relativist perspective, the context could be understood as follows:

1. Emil's studies are legitimate, but mainstream academia rejects them for ethical reasons.

2. Emil's studies are flawed, but none of his opponents are willing to make the effort to refute them.

For the sake of integrity

Junk science or not, dubious studies continue to proliferate at an endemic level, raising the moral question of the scientific community's responsibility to address them in order to preserve their credibility. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is far from only affecting the social sciences, as during the last pandemic, a good swath of scientific literature was used to propagate misleading information, part of which converged on the vaccine skeptics' fallacious narrative about Ivermectin (an antiparasitic drug), which became the unofficial alternative treatment as a result of several studies demonstrating its efficacy against COVID-19. At the time, the lack of counter-evidence against Ivermectin was concerning, and ultimately the publication of a homemade meta-analysis written by Scott Alexander established itself as one of the most solid pieces of evidence supporting its ineffectiveness.

I genuinely regard Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander as epistemologically-driven outsiders; they were certainly right to defend the vaccine's efficacy; it seems less plausible that they could both share an objective perspective on Emil's studies – especially since social science is a field more prone to political bias. I don't know about the other readers, but I don't have a deep enough knowledge of statistics to distinguish fallacious methods from appropriate ones. Consequently, making sense of advanced scientific literature can be a perilous task when one's lack of expertise is restricted to the interpretation of others. As a result, the lack of criticism has compelled me to dismiss the field in its entirety, as sometimes it's wiser to bury one's head in the sand than speculate.

When I reflect on my childhood, there's a lot I could have said, except that it was typical. From the very beginning, my parents were called by most of the kindergarten teachers to ask, “What's the deal with your son?” They always shared the same concern about my inability to demonstrate a sense of awareness of my environment, resulting in learning disabilities. When I entered elementary school, the situation wasn't much better, except that other children were more suspicious. In secondary school, I had a mediocre first year and my parents decided to send me to a boarding school where I got rejected because of my disruptive behavior and poor grades. I started over in another one but lasted only two weeks. Then I was sent back to a regular school in another city, while I lived with a foster family until they refused to take me in because I kept running away. Eventually, I dropped out of school and spent most of my time playing a popular video game called World of Warcraft as an escape from reality.

The relationship I had with my parents was not great, sometimes physically violent, and the situation reached a point where I committed a half-baked suicide attempt – in the desperate hope to remain permanently behind my computer. The situation escalated further when my parents brought me to the medical facility and the doctors convinced them that the best solution would be to send me to a psychiatric hospital. At the time, they had no idea what it was all about, so they agreed. The funny thing about the inter-hospital transfer protocol is that no one told me exactly what it was; I would not be going to a psychiatric unit but to a specialized section for additional examinations. As I entered the building, I turned around and saw the medical staff locking the door behind me and realized that I had been trapped. For obvious reasons, I wasn't very appreciative of my situation and tried on several occasions to rebel against the medical team, who responded by rallying to immobilize me and forcefully administer antipsychotics that plunged me into a vegetative state for several days. This happened three times, and in the end, I had enough of being drugged without my consent and eventually complied by pretending to swallow the pills I was given before spitting them out in the toilet.

They released me after a few months of observation, while in the final report, the clinical director concluded that I probably suffered from an “archaic phobia”, which is honestly the most generic and unconvincing medical explanation I've ever heard. Ten years later, he has become one of the most renowned researchers in the field of child mental health – which is a good reason for not worrying too much when you're not doing very well in your current position.

The post-clinical era was worse, as I went from being barely socialized to completely ostracized and had gained ten additional kilos. The following year, I entered a specialized middle school for people with mental disabilities before being expelled due to my lack of commitment resulting in unsatisfactory grades. I was sixteen and stuck in middle school with three failed years of repeating. That summer, my father decided to send me to a distribution center as part of a three-week internship. I deserted after only one week, and this episode ended as a compelling reason to resume my education.

I started all over again at a vocational school that trained mostly young adults from deprived neighborhoods, where I spent four years and eventually got my first diploma. In the meantime, I discovered that I wasn't too bad with computers and went to a university under a work-study contract. I obtained a bachelor's degree before entering an engineering school. For the first time, I was one of the best students and was urged by my university mentor to pursue a Ph.D. When I graduated with an MS in Computer Science, I was twenty-five and didn't plan to go on to graduate school until I was thirty, so I started my career as a software engineer at a Series A company with big brains. A few years later, I left home for the first time and moved to another country. Over the next year, I became completely nomadic, exploring new places every month, and began a therapy that helped me overcome deep-seated insecurities related to chronic suicidal thoughts that had been haunting me for a decade – perhaps an archaic phobia.

If I were to draw a curve representing my level of satisfaction with my life (covering every aspect I can think of) over the past fifteen years, it would probably look like China's GDP growth. For many years I claimed that I had been unhappy for the first half of my life and happy for the second half, but that's just not true. I think I deceived myself because part of my earlier life was punctuated by dramatic moments. But even in the darkest times, I have plenty of good memories, like when I was bullied at school, I cried and laughed at the same time because some of the mockeries were fair; I was quite popular when I was detained in psychiatric wards, and I have epic memories of one of my friends in a straitjacket; During morbid episodes, I laughed at the embarrassment of imagining my friend (who is also my Facebook legacy contact) claiming access to my account and finding out that I was secretly part of Taylor's fan club.

Admittedly, it hasn't always been easy, and I wouldn't say I started life with a pair of aces, but neither with a pair of twos, and I'm not a big fan of relativism in addressing personal issues. I probably agree with self-help gurus on one point: most people's problems are fundamentally simple, but figuring out your way to solve them is another story. I haven't heard any good advice that can be generalized, but Yes Man was probably the most fruitful of them.

Yes, there's always a bright side, and most people probably know that. Some of us tend to forget that we'll always have to deal with incoming problems, or maybe we just pretend. You may get the harder ones a little sooner or a little later, but you'll rarely reach a state without problems. It's a common misconception to place too much importance on our current problems as if they were the last to be solved and to neglect that a subsequent problem will arise right after the former one is solved. Sometimes we realize the absurdity of dealing with minor everyday problems, and perhaps turning them into a parody is preferable to taking them at face value. I cannot say it works consistently, but it certainly makes my life less boring.

After staying in Bali for 6 months, it became difficult not to get annoyed by the constant influx of tourists while hearing people talking about Blockchain at every corner. I decided to move to New Zealand for a few weeks to change my mind before relocating to Japan. Aside from the country's undeniable reputation for its food and culture, I was remarkably surprised by how efficiently things were run in almost every aspect: It literally took me ten minutes to get through immigration and customs; the transportation system is comparable to the one in France, except it's clean, on time, and strike-free; I was alerted by the earthquake early warning system even though my phone was in airplane mode; discovering the existence of Washlet made me feel like a caveman; grocery stores are playing jazz. But the country's prestige is not just a vague impression, as it is supported by various indicators, yet the prosperity of Japan could be threatened in the future.

How Japan is exceeding

Let's first look at what is arguably one of the most important metrics: education. Japan, and more broadly East Asian countries, were among the top performers in the latest OECD International Student Assessment. It's worth noting that China only assessed students from Beijing, Shanghai, and the neighboring provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which is not representative of the country as a whole.

Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world, with an average of 81 years for men and 87 for women, and paradoxically also one of the highest smoking populations, closely competing with France.

Despite the prevalence of a hard-working culture, the ambitious Salaryman career style seems to be losing popularity among Gen Z, while the average working hours have been steadily decreasing over the past few decades and are now relatively comparable to those in the United States.

Japan is also one of the safest places in the world, with an incredibly low incidence of crime. In fact, Japan's homicide rate is about 30 times lower than that of the United States.

Is Japan misogynistic?

Like other Western societies, Japan shares common roots with patriarchal grounds and holds a reputation for exercising a strong emphasis on gender roles due to conformity with traditional values. As a result, Japan has not been spared from gender inequality (most notably in the workforce), and despite a lack of significant efforts to challenge the status quo, it remains relatively more egalitarian in some areas.

As a matter of fact, Japan outperforms its neighbor with one of the lowest Gender Inequality Index (GII), making it one of the nations where women have the highest level of reproductive health care and education.

Another measure of gender inequality is the gender gap in leisure time, in which Japan is also more egalitarian than most European countries.

In terms of equality of earnings, Japan still lags behind the OECD average (11.9%), although the gap has narrowed considerably in the last few decades.

Undeniably, women are still largely underrepresented in politics, as their number of seats in parliaments has stagnated over the past decade – a matter that has seemingly raised more concerns in recent years.

Japan's biggest challenge

The country's fertility rate has remained low since the post-war baby boom era, resulting in the highest proportion of elderly people, with 30% of the population aged 65 and older. In fact, the country's population has already begun to decline since 2014 – while several predictions have been made, with a range of scenarios from the most optimistic to the most pessimistic. It seems difficult to believe that Japan will succeed in reversing its population decline without a massive immigration plan – a scenario that seems unlikely when 98% of the population is Japanese and has an average level of English proficiency that is among the lowest.

The demographic decline raises additional concerns as Japan's debt is the highest of any developed nation (culminating at 263% of GDP), while the country's solvency in the future could become an important matter in keeping its currency competitive, especially as the country depends heavily on fossil fuel imports to produce its energy.

The enchanting allure of Japan

Japan is one of the very few places where I've never had to worry about the consequences of losing my wallet or visiting a distant suburb. Japanese people are very curious, and it's quite common to engage in conversation with locals in restaurants. Tokyo is considered the largest city in the world, but it's comparatively less noisy and crowded than other European capitals I've lived in, and relatively cheaper, as you can get a decent meal for as little as $5.

I'm also obsessed with efficiency, but there are many good reasons why it's important! When the last pandemic occurred, Japan was one of the few developed countries that didn't enforce lockdown measures and had one of the lowest mortality rates, despite having the most elderly population. Of course, not everything can be attributed to effectiveness alone, as other factors such as social norms may partially explain certain outcomes. However, it's hard to deny that a large part of it is also reflected in its industry; Toyota is by far the most efficient and cost-effective car manufacturer, Uniqlo offers clothing with an undeniable quality/price ratio, and (a bit outdated) Japan has 7 of the top 20 largest chip manufacturers in the world in 2005.

And perhaps the most important question is whether they are happy. It's difficult to answer this question accurately because it's hard to find a measure of happiness that isn't culturally biased. However, economic development is probably one of the most reliable predictors of happiness, as there is a clear trend that richer countries seem to be happier than poorer countries, while these correlations still hold after controlling for the demographic composition of the population and are replicable across different data sources and types of subjective well-being measures.

Beyond effectiveness, economic prosperity is probably the most important variable to consider here, as Japan's economy will undoubtedly face a demographic crisis. While it's not unlikely that they may revisit their immigration policies in the future to address this – and it's not inconceivable that Japan could one day face similar issues of social disparity as Western societies. That being said, as history has shown us, the country has repeatedly demonstrated an incredible capacity for resilience and has ample resources to maintain its legendary reputation for excellence.

Like many people, I work for a company that operates within a capitalist model wherein hyper-competitiveness is a pervasive threat. In order to stand out in this wilderness, most companies have aligned themselves with financial incentives rather than being aimlessly driven. This trend has led to the emergence of goal-setting methodologies, such as OKRs or KPIs, which provide metrics for measuring performance and have quickly emerged as an imperative for success, resulting in their widespread adoption. Unlike corporate standards, there is no clear answer to what defines success for humans, although, on an individual level, the necessity to achieve goals has always existed and is now prevalent in a variety of ways, such as obtaining an academic degree, getting married, or possessing material goods. Since many of these personal goals are in most cases determined by implicit social requirements rather than an individual agency, they raise questions about their legitimacy in structuring people's lives.

Long before the invention of capitalism – and until aiming for a thousand likes on a butt shot on Instagram became a meaningful marker of interest – personal goals were more tangible, as people had to learn various skills like hunting, maintaining stable relationships, or building shelters to overcome the dangers of nature. Not only were these abilities practical for survival, but they also served as a means of justifying social status, since individuals who failed to contribute to the group would generally result in being ostracized and thus doomed to perish. However, the relationship between goals and survival outcomes became less obvious with the advent of the agricultural revolution, which enabled the accumulation of wealth and fostered the development of specialized skills that later contributed to the creation of market economies and, ultimately, to the flourishing of human civilizations.

Today, technological advancements have eradicated most forms of imminent threat and, as a side effect, rendered many of our ancient competencies useless. This paradigm shift has transformed earlier fears of food or water scarcity into concerns about wealth, while the fear of losing social status is now grounded in anticipating social expectations rather than physical survivability. In modern societies, the extension of the human lifespan combined with the availability of resources has expanded the number of vectors for personal development and made it possible to flourish in an incredible number of ways. Whether you decide to become a pet food tester or pursue a more mainstream profession, in most scenarios you wouldn't be able to incorporate an extended knowledge of every field within your own specialization.

On the other hand, the underlying motives for pursuing goals haven't changed fundamentally over the past 10,000 years. Arguably, individuals' actions have become much more widespread, but they systematically serve a limited set of human needs that haven't increased dramatically over time. Despite a multitude of scientific achievements that have allowed us to live longer, healthier, and with significantly higher intellectual abilities, human capabilities haven't caught up with the ever-increasing possibilities of life choices that we can benefit from. This asymmetry can sometimes create the illusion of having unlimited power to satisfy our desires, regardless of our natural limitations, meshed with primary needs such as eating, sleeping, or the time it takes to build strong relationships, which have basically remained as they were before.

Consequently, the exponential growth of available personal goals that redundantly address similar human needs has become a confounding factor in making meaningful decisions. As human beings, we are not good at dealing with large numbers of choices, and in such situations, we tend to react with avoidance or by aligning our decisions with those of others. At the same time, we are subject to a high degree of conformity that pressures us to adapt to constantly evolving social norms. Not surprisingly, this overabundance of choices has made people more likely to focus their energy on social desirability rather than on things that reflect their value system. Moreover, this phenomenon seems to partially justify why more and more people tend to believe that we are facing a crisis of meaning in Western societies.

For many people, the last pandemic was groundbreaking in allowing time for self-reflection, which eventually led to a reconsideration of genuine personal goals over societal ones. In my experience, I ended up working completely remotely, even though it was something I previously considered unfathomable. Still, I do sometimes ask myself what I want in life, and in doing so, I came up with a thought experiment: Suppose you wake up the next day as the only individual alive on this planet, most of the animals are still alive – including the dangerous ones – but you're not too worried because, as part of your legacy as an NRA partisan, you're equipped with enough ammunition to exterminate every single cat within a 50-mile radius. You can also assume that your comfort level will probably be the same since you've been granted unlimited access to any food reserve at Walmart. Most of the energy is provided by self-managed nuclear power plants that will probably last for centuries, while Starlink has ended up as a viable project – remember, it's fiction – providing you with global coverage of Internet access for the rest of your life. In fact, you will be able to do almost anything you could do in your previous life, so what would you be willing to devote yourself to?

Taking the leap

The first time I heard about Ayahuasca was a decade ago, I can't remember exactly how, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came from Vice. In the meantime, I've been reading up on the subject occasionally, and eventually discovered the existence of trip reports – a personal account of an individual's experience with a psychoactive substance – which took me further down the rabbit hole of jungle medicine. In the existing body of literature, some of the accounts are tantalizing, but many others are equally frightening, and for a while, the latter part strongly discouraged me from jumping on the shamanic wagon. Until recently, certain life circumstances made me change my mind.

One of the main motivations for writing about my experiences came from the recurrence of confusing testimonies I've listened to. In most instances, people tend to be vague and sound more spiritual than analytical when describing their relationship with the plant – although this could be explained by a selection bias of esoteric personalities – and from my perspective, this type of rhetoric was not helpful in understanding the overall effect of the plant. Secondly, it's important to keep in mind that this report remains subjective, and while I generally endeavor to describe most of my experiences with psychedelics from a logical perspective, that doesn't make it any more true, as I could be completely wrong or overly confident in my own interpretation.

Into the world of shamanic healing

The rise in popularity of Ayahuasca ceremonies has brought the mother plant to the attention of a large audience. Nowadays, and thanks to the globalization of the shamanic industry, traveling to South America is no longer a prerequisite for attending retreats, as the high demand has led to an abundance of alternatives in Europe, North America, and probably, less officially, in other parts of the world. After searching the Internet, I've found a plethora of retreats with a variety of different options: from the donation-based ones where you have the bare minimum of comfort, to those offering high-end villas with infinity pools in a glamorous destination. At this stage of the process, it was important to consider which type of setting would be most appropriate, as I didn't want to be surrounded by fifty people in the middle of nowhere, or mingling with influencers selling Yoni eggs. And after thoroughly evaluating the various options within a reasonable geographic distance, I found a potentially good candidate.

A few days before the retreat, I received an email containing a set of instructions: how to get to the place; a form to fill out regarding allergies and mental health issues; a restrictive diet to follow, no meat, sugar, spices, dairy products, sexually related activities, and in a very broad sense, any kind of drugs. The diet is intended to be part of a cleansing process in order to receive the medicine more deeply. When the day came, it took me a full day to get to the place, which was on a hill overlooking a pine forest. I had a quick chat with the organizers while the rest of the participants gradually joined us before being quickly briefed on the retreat schedule. The ceremonies began at night, while the day was dedicated to integration sessions. One thing that struck me was the diversity of the participants, and ironically, the last time I'd seen such randomness was during my mandatory military service day.

For the first night, I was unusually still as I watched the shaman perform some rituals before instructing each of us in a circle to stand, come and drink the beverage. Despite its reputation for terrible taste, it wasn't that bad and even reminded me of the flavor of fermented soy. The onset of the substance usually takes half an hour, but even after a long time I still felt quite lucid and had the feeling of tripping on ~125 μg of LSD – which is a pretty average dose in terms of intensity. I was slightly frustrated as I expected a violent knockdown that would turn me into a mouth-breathing dead fish. I took a glance around and realized that some of the participants were in agonizing pain. At one point, a lady had completely lost touch with reality and screamed continuously in a horrifying manner, but also made other very strange animal noises – which I found absolutely hilarious – and completely disturbed the organizers who vainly attempted to communicate with her until they made the decision to evacuate this person from the ceremonial site. Immediately afterward, there was a general sense of relief as silence became the most precious thing in the universe. The shaman asked if anyone needed a booster, I quickly raised my hand and realized that I was the only one. They seemed a bit concerned about the panic incident and made sure I was sufficiently aware and ready to take a second dose. I reaffirmed my desire to escalate further, and about an hour later the intensity of the trip increased dramatically, reaching an overwhelming state that I had been eternally waiting for.

The first ceremony was a strong psychedelic trip, but comparatively not as ground-breaking as other experiences I had. I reflected with other participants and some of them also shared mixed feelings. I later learned that having a non-extraordinary first experience is quite common and generally indicates that subsequent ceremonies are more likely to be deterministic. Interestingly, I recognized many similarities to other substances such as psilocybin or mescaline, but the main fundamental difference was the sensation of an external presence or entity, which some people referred to as God, Alien, and more commonly by indigenous people, The Plant. As a matter of personal preference, I'll stick with the latter to explain some of my reasoning – although I hold the assumption that this phenomenon is entirely rational and may be explained in the future from a neurological standpoint.

When the second ceremony began, I felt more anxious and decided to drink only one cup and waited patiently, hoping for some sort of mystical revelation. Then suddenly I lost control of my thoughts and the whole experience turned into a total nightmare. I was unable to stop myself from thinking negatively, and I felt as if my emotional state was being hijacked by the plant – in a similar way to the Indiana Jones voodoo doll being used against me. These relentless thoughts portrayed me as a selfish individual, while my intuitive response was to deny these exaggerated interpretations of my personality, as rationalization is a natural reaction to negative feelings. In most cases, it's practically possible to escape a bad trip through willpower or deep breathing exercises. Unfortunately, none of these strategies were effective because the same thought pattern kept invading my mind. Eventually, after hours of resisting, I gave up and took the visions projected by the plant at face value – this process of acceptance is commonly referred to as surrender.

I woke up from that horrible night in a confused state of mind, wondering if most of my interpretations were accurate or completely delusional. Out of any reliable means of lucidity, I called my mother, explained what I had actually been through, and shared some of my concerns regarding my selfishness. She hesitated for a few seconds before saying: “I'm glad you finally figured it out” – which made me cringe a little deeper inside as this external perspective added more credence to this narrative. In retrospect, the teaching process of Ayahuasca was very direct and brutal, like a child whose parents have never grounded him, but suddenly decided to throw everything he has done wrong in his face, which admittedly was not pleasant. In a way, this joins a common interpretation of receiving years of therapy in one night. It's an enlightening but radical means of giving you a different perspective on yourself.

Integration and communal benefits

In the past, I've rarely been interested in taking psychedelics in a communal context. On previous occasions, like music festivals, it was always a challenge to find meaning in these massive hedonistic rituals where I barely felt any sense of bonding with the crowd – maybe because I'm too selfish. Alternatively, I rather preferred to be a lone wolf, seeking trip settings that were the most distant from civilization. In a completely opposite way, the shamanic ceremony had fundamentally different goals and wasn't designed for recreational purposes, where the overwhelming majority of people who came had a decent understanding of what they were doing. The unique and to some extent religious aspect of this retreat was made possible by the shaman himself, who took charge of the ceremonial practices, which contributed greatly to creating a warm atmosphere and made the experience transcendental – especially listening to Pachamama chants in my desperate attempt to vomit.

Perhaps the most frequently asked question I get is: “Was it life-changing?” It depends. It's extremely unlikely that someone will wake up a profoundly different person. There is no such thing that will instantly and fundamentally alter aspects of your personality – unless you suffer permanent brain damage. Generally speaking, radical changes take root from other extremes – or as a reaction to them; a traumatic experience can translate into resolutions that often lead to new habits and, consequently, significant results over time. That's why having at least two ceremonies is a safer bet than one enjoyable experience that's unlikely to teach you anything valuable. For my part, I've made some small adjustments and have become one percent less selfish than I was according to the best-case scenario. More importantly, I've realized that it's a waste of energy to relentlessly fight against your most unappealing traits, whereas it's much more helpful to accept them. In the end, self-awareness won't substantially change your dispositions, but you can always anticipate situations in which you can act on them positively.