2026-07-02 12:21:19
This piece was first written in 2017, and first appeared on my website on July 1, 2026
This is an attempt to find out.
This essay is the third in a series examining sexual harassment and assault.
The first essay can be read here, which also includes more information about the study participants. The second essay can be read here.
The results shown below are from a study I ran about sexual harassment and sexual assault on a sample of people in the U.S. (574 people recruited on our study recruitment platform, Positly.com, answer questions about their experience as victims and/or perpetrators of harassment or assault, and 266 of these people were also asked to give free-form written responses for some questions).
In this post, you’ll see sexual harassers and assaulters attempt to give explanations for their own behavior, with the hope that seeing these responses will help us understand the forces underlying this big problem a little better.
Warning: this post contains extensive discussion about (and numerous accounts of) sexual harassment and sexual assault. Also, note that it is extremely likely that there was underreporting of harassment and assault related behaviors in this survey (e.g., due to unwillingness to admit to it even on an anonymous survey). The purpose here is to better understand the forces underlying harassment and assault, rather than to get accurate estimates of rates of people perpetrating it. Responses were anonymized and typos corrected. Responses were deleted when they were not substantive (e.g., “I don’t know”) or when they misunderstood the question.
I attempted to group responses by the main motivation mentioned by the responders (i.e., putting together similar responses under a header). So the header above each grouping of responses is mine, but the responses below the headers were each written by different study participants.
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Topic 1: Cat-calling – what did people say about why they have done it?
Questions asked: (1) What were the most recent circumstances in which you cat-called a person that you don’t know (by making a sexual whistle, shout, or comment of a sexual nature)? — (2) What do you think the *true reason* was that you cat-called a person that you don’t know (by making a sexual whistle, shout or comment of a sexual nature)?
MALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: male cat-callers mainly said they did it because they were hoping it would lead to sex, or to show off in front of friends, or to get noticed by (or attention from) the other person, or to signal to the other person that they found that person attractive. 18% of males reported having cat-called before.
Hoping for sex from the person
To impress friends or show off
To get noticed by the person / get their attention
To let the person know you find them attractive
To see how the person reacts
For self-entertainment
To meet the person
As an immediate reaction to attractiveness
Unclear
FEMALE PERPETRATORS:
Takeaway: female cat-callers mainly said they did it as a joke, or for fun, or to get the person’s attention. 9% of females reported having cat-called before.
Joking/to get laughs
I leaned out the window and told a boy “NICE BUTT!” I was with my friends and we were having fun at an event. The funny thing is that had I seen him later, I would have been too embarrassed to talk to him. — He really had a nice butt. We were out. I was with my friends. We were excited and having a good time. I think I did it because it would make my friends laugh. Oh God, I am as bad as men who do this, aren’t I?Fun
To get the person’s attention
To feel a certain way
Other
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Topic 2: Making unwanted requests for sexual favors – what did people say about why they have done it?
Questions asked: (1) What were the most recent circumstances in which you made unwanted *requests for sexual favors* that you continued to make even though you believed the requests were unwanted? — (2) What do you think the *true reason* was that you made unwanted *requests for sexual favors* that you continued to make even though you believed the requests were unwanted?
FEMALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: 4% of females reported having made unwanted persistent requests for sexual favors.
MALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: males who made unwanted requests for sexual favors said they did it mainly because they desired sex, or because they hoped the other person would change their mind about not wanting to give those sexual favors. 6% of males reported having made unwanted persistent requests for sexual favors.
For sex
Hoped they would eventually change their mind
To see what would happen
Feeling that the other person should change their mind
Perceived mixed signals
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Topic 3: Verbal sexual harassment – what did people say about why they have done it?
Questions asked: (1) What were the most recent circumstances in which you *verbally* harassed another person in a manner that was *sexual in nature*? — (2) What do you think the *true reason* was that you *verbally* harassed another person in a manner that was *sexual in nature*?
FEMALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: 5% of females reported having verbally sexually harassed others
Joking
To hurt the person
MALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: males who said they had verbally sexually harassed someone most commonly said they did it in order to hurt the other person, but also mentioned a mix of idiosyncratic motivations. 9% of the male sample reported having verbally sexually harassed others.
To hurt the person
To express anger
To impress friends
Thought the person would like it
Feeling of power
To show the person you find them attractive
Drunkenness
—
Topic 4: Making persistent unwanted sexual advances – what did people say about why they have done it?
What were the most recent circumstances in which you made unwanted *sexual advances* towards a person that you continued to make even though you believed the sexual advances were unwanted? — What do you think the *true reason* was that you made unwanted *sexual advances* towards a person that you continued to make even though you believed the sexual advances were unwanted?
FEMALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: 4% of females reported having made persistent unwanted sexual advances
MALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: males who said they had made unwanted sexual advances mainly said they did it hoping for sex, but a couple of males mentioned doing it out of anger and some mentioned other idiosyncratic motivations. 9% of males reported having made unwanted sexual advances.
Hoping for sex
Anger
Hoping for reciprocation of feelings
Thought the person was playing hard to get
Fun
Hoping to take sexual activity further
Unclear
—
Topic 5: Physical sexual harassment – what did people say about why they have done it?
Questions asked: (1) What were the most recent circumstances in which you *physically* harassed another person in a manner that was *sexual in nature*? — (2) What do you think the *true reason* was that you *physically* harassed another person in a manner that was *sexual in nature*?
FEMALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: about 4% of the female sample said they had done this, though only one person among those wrote about what they did.
MALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: the responses that males gave to why they physically sexually harassed someone were idiosyncratic, all in different categories. Overall, few men reported having physically sexually harassed someone (about 4% of the male sample), which is likely in part due to an unwillingness to admit physical sexual harassment (even in an anonymous survey).
Anger
Defending someone else
Drunkenness
Impulsive desire to touch the person
Thought the person was coming onto them
Hoping to take sexual activity further
—
Topic 6: Carrying out unwanted sexual activity – what did people say about why they have done it?
Questions asked: (1) What were the most recent circumstances in which you had sexual activity with a person when you had reason to doubt whether the person actually wanted to engage in that sexual activity, but you continued anyway? — (2) What do you think the *true reason* was that you had sexual activity with a person when you had reason to doubt whether the person actually wanted to engage in that sexual activity, but you continued anyway?
FEMALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: few women reported having continued unwanted sexual activity (when they had reason to doubt the other person wanted to engage in it), only about 4% of the female sample. Only one wrote an explanation:
MALE PERPETRATORS:
Overview: about 8% of the male sample reported having continued unwanted sexual activity (when they had reason to doubt the other person wanted to engage in it). The most common explanation given for this behavior was having sexual desire to engage in the sex act (or complete the act if already started), coupled with the other person not explicitly stopping them.
Having sexual desire without the other person stopping them from acting
For sex
Wanting to finish the sexual activity
Other
What do we conclude from this? What most surprised me was the wide variety of motivations for sexual harassment and sexual assault, including:
Sexual harassment and assault appear to derive from a wide variety of motivations, which are worth grappling with when we consider how to reduce sexual harassment and sexual assault in society.
2026-07-01 03:18:30
We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality – as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you’re having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there’s the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated.
Put another way, rather than perceiving reality, we perceive the output of a long chain of noisy translations.
Let’s walk up this chain layer by layer, starting from the bottom (fundamental physics) and ending at the stories we tell.
Layer 1: We only make measurements
On one common reading of quantum mechanics (part of the deepest description of reality that physicists have a reasonably high degree of confidence in), a fundamental object is the wave function.
We don’t observe the wave function directly. We make measurements, and those represent properties, such as the position or “spin” of a particle. We can think of this as observing just one realization (or taking one branch) of the deeper thing. The wave function, in a sense, captures all of the realizations we might have observed but didn’t.
That means that at the most basic level, before biology or psychology even enter the picture, there’s already a chasm between us and the fundamental nature of things.
Rather than reading reality, we sample a thin projection of it. We’re stuck accessing reality only through measurements. But that’s just the first layer of translation.
Layer 2: Measurements turn into signals
Measurements are not something you can directly experience. Your sense organs make the measurements. When light hits your eye, first a chemical reaction occurs, then this chemical reaction kicks off electrical signals – representations of the light (not light itself).
Your brain processes those electrical signals, and out of that, an experience is produced in your mind. Put another way, your brain creates a simulation, and that’s what you experience. For instance, in your brain’s simulation, you experience the vivid sensation of red. But there’s no such thing as red out there in the world – red exists ONLY in the simulations produced by our minds.
Out there in the world, light of certain frequency bands is hitting our eyes. Inside our minds, the experience of red is happening.
The same is true of sound, smell, warmth, and every other quality of experience: they are our brain’s rendering of the measurements made by our sense organs. They are not the measurements themselves, and certainly not the underlying reality.
Three distinct sorts of failures can occur at this layer.
First, the signal itself can be distorted, such as might happen if the optic nerve is damaged or if cataracts tint the light entering our eyes.
Second, the simulation that your brain creates can be unfaithful to reality, misrepresenting what’s there. We see this most clearly with optical illusions.
The reason we find them interesting is that they lay bare ways our brain’s rendering of reality comes apart from reality itself.
We can only tell this is happening because we can check our internal rendering against something indisputable to prove a mismatch (e.g., by using a ruler or checking the color of different pixels).
The unsettling implication is that the renderings we can’t easily check are sometimes misleading, too. But we lack the awareness or the right ruler to catch them.
The third distortion at this layer is that our simulations of reality always leave out information. For example, our eyes can’t see ultraviolet or infrared light, so those wavelengths simply never make it into our experience, no matter how carefully we look. Intriguingly, we don’t perceive a gap in the color spectrum. Presumably, that wouldn’t have been useful for our ancient ancestors, so evolution didn’t bother with it. We aren’t even naturally aware that other “colors” (well, really, frequencies) of light are possible. We feel as though we’re seeing the full spectrum (while bees and butterflies enjoy ultraviolet patterns on flowers that are hidden to us).
Every sense is like this. Each provides us with a window of information, which we use to simulate aspects of reality. A lot of information is silently dropped because it lies beyond the window frame. We remain convinced that these narrow portals into reality show the whole thing.
Layer 3: We bucket the simulation
A raw field of colors and sounds may be a partial approximation to how an infant sees the world, as its brain learns furiously how to structure things. But that isn’t yet a world you can act in. To use your experience effectively, your mind has to carve up experience. It has to decide that this region is a table, that one a person, and that other one, the floor.
This chunking happens automatically and below conscious awareness. It’s enormously useful. But it’s another layer of interpretation laid on top of an already-imperfect simulation, and it can distort things in its own ways.
For one thing, the boundaries we draw can simply be mistaken – we can mistake a coat on a chair for a person the moment we enter a room. Or, if you’re me, you can briefly think you see cats in the dark when on vacation because you see cats in the dark when you’re at home.
Our categories take genuinely complex things and force them into a bucket. You may, when walking in a park, stumble on a rare bird – the last of its species, on the brink of extinction. Your brain just says “bird”.
Moreover, we sometimes get our chunks wrong. You walk by a fresh-faced man with long hair and incorrectly think “woman”. Or, in my case, you see a symbol tattooed on a classmate’s arm and think Swastika. It turned out to be the manji – a sacred Buddhist symbol representing good fortune.
Tremendous variation can hide inside even simple-seeming categories, let alone complex categories like “tree”, consisting of tens of thousands of species.
Buckets produce compression, and compression is what makes the world manageable, but sometimes a lot is lost in the process.
Importantly, the more you pay attention to a type of thing and the more you understand about it, the more refined and subtle your buckets are likely to become. That’s not just a tree. It’s a Sycamore tree. And it’s not just a Sycamore tree; it’s Platanus wrightii – an Arizona Sycamore.
Layer 4: We ignore almost everything
Even with the compression achieved by this chunking up of reality, there’s far too much information for us to process, so our brain uses another heuristic: if something doesn’t draw our attention, it’s ignored.
When we’re told to carefully count how many times people pass a basketball, we can, with remarkable ease, miss the person in a gorilla suit that’s walking between them.
Or, if you’re having a conversation with me, and you ask me to close my eyes, then you ask me to recall what you were wearing, I’ll be clueless, despite having been looking at you moments ago. Heck, with my eyes closed, I may not even be able to tell you what I’M wearing.
On the other hand, if you try the same thing with a person who works in fashion, they’ll not only be able to describe what you are wearing, but also make a guess about the brand.
We notice what we find interesting, important, or surprising, as well as what we’ve trained ourselves or been trained to notice. And we are unaware of most of the rest. This (in part) explains why eyewitness testimony has proven to be much more fallible than a lot of people assume.
You didn’t know that person was about to rob the store you’re in, so even though they walked right in front of you, you have no recollection of what they look like.
Even when you realized that they were robbing the store, your attention was drawn to the knife in their hand or the exit door, rather than the contour of their brow, lips, and nose.
Our limited attention acts as yet another filter on what makes it into our experience. But one layer remains.
Layer 5: We turn noticed chunks into meaningful ones
Even once you’ve chunked the world into objects and categories, and we’re actually paying attention to some of them, the process of perceiving isn’t complete. Your brain still has to decide what it all means.
A Sycamore tree to Bob has no special significance, whereas to Sally it’s where she had her first kiss, and to Elio, it’s what his grandfather died under. To me, it was a phrase served to me in an ad when I was looking for a type of tree to use in this example.
Once we’ve chunked a scene, it gets woven into a story. Our reflective minds run on such stories.
The stories tell us what’s important, what’s threatening, and what’s good. But this final layer of interpretation is steered heavily by things that have nothing to do with the scene itself: our identities, our motivations, our worldviews, our past experiences, our anticipations, and our social groups.
This is why two people can look at an identical event – even identical data represented in a chart – and walk away with opposite understandings. They are running the same visual input through different meaning-making machinery constructed within different lives.
Of course, that’s not how this all feels. The meaning we make feels like it’s obviously the way things are – the one true story – or, not even a story – just reality itself.
We, of course, don’t think of the wave function that we collapsed (or took a branch of) with our measurements. Or the electrical signals that flow through the retina. Or even the bucketing we did to compress the information. We don’t, of course, pay attention to what we failed to pay attention to. And we rarely consider alternative stories our brains could have told us (but didn’t) about what we did pay attention to.
This may sound grim, but it’s not a complete epistemic disaster. Despite all this, we know a lot about how to get reality to do things for us. Science often works to discover new truths. Bridges rarely fall. Some stories are accurate, even if they aren’t complete.
The practical upshot of it all is epistemic humility.
It helps to remember, from time to time, that what we’re experiencing is a model, a series of translations removed from whatever is actually out there. And to aim to make our estimates and opinions at least somewhat more uncertain as a result.
Doing so has a happy effect: it makes it easier to consider alternative perspectives that contradict our own. That’s useful societally, where there’s an overabundance of perspectives that are rigidly held. But it’s also helpful in relationships, friendships, and our work.
We can’t see reality directly – it’s not actually the sort of thing that’s capable of being seen. But we can, at least, stop mistaking the top of the stack for the bottom.
This piece was first written on June 30, 2026, and first appeared on my website on July 23, 2026.
2026-04-14 00:49:45
I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know?
• Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn’t measure anything, it’s unlikely to achieve anything
• The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes
• The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-Kruger effect will confidently claim that it’s about how people with little skill believe they are more skilled than experts
• White Swan Theory: most real-world impact comes from the most commonly occurring instances, since they’re so numerous (e.g., most people’s perspective on whether swans are dickheads comes from their interactions with white swans, not black ones)
• Zuckerberg’s Number: technology enables us to break free from evolutionary constraints by barely having a social relationship with 5000 people
• Barkinson’s Law: regardless of how much time is allocated for a project, many people will start working on it at the last possible moment
• Schloccam’s Razor: Among competing explanations that all fit the facts, use the one that is most useful
• The Savile Effect: Attempts by powerful people to suppress information often succeed – it’s just that you only hear about the ones that fail
• The Autism Effect: when a trait’s apparent prevalence skyrockets due to broadening definitions and improved screening, somebody will inevitably blame its rise on really stupid shit like Tylenol or vaccines
• Stalin’s Razor: don’t attribute to stupidity what could be adequately explained by the person in charge being a dangerous, power-obsessed psycho
• Musk’s Law: those with tremendous success early in life become convinced that they are geniuses in other domains where they very much aren’t
• Daze’s Rule: people will be more impressed if you use fancy math to make a point than if you just say the same thing
• Dunderham’s Law: the fastest way to summon wrong answers online is to post the right one.
• Godberg’s Law: As people get increasingly angry at something happening in society, the probability that someone eventually tries to blame the Jews for it approaches one
• Dumbar’s Principle: famous number about humans inevitably have very stupid origin stories (e.g., ~150 stable social ties, 10000 steps for health, 8 glasses of water per day, a >2.9013 positive-to-negative ratio needed to flourish)
• The COVID Principle: people will often risk their lives before they risk standing apart from their tribe
• Diner Equilibrium: when nobody is actually happy with the outcome of a negotiation, but everyone is satisfied enough not to complain
• Multipolar party: when, despite nobody being in charge, humans miraculously self-assemble and cooperate to solve challenges, as often occurs at Burning Man
Just in case you didn’t catch on: these are parodies of “real” mental models 
This piece was first written on April 13, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 30, 2026.
2026-03-24 10:55:47
An issue I have with some claims about “nondual” meditation: some meditators say that they achieve a state of non-duality where they see through the “illusion of the self” and then claim something like “there is no self”.
To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have had them, even). Where my issue comes in is that I think it’s a mistake to assume that because you experience having no self, that means you actually literally have “no self” in all the meaningful senses of that word.
I have two concerns here.
1) An experience of something being a certain way does not itself make it not that way. By analogy, if someone has an LSD trip where they have the experience of “not having a body”, that experience itself doesn’t necessarily imply that they truly don’t have a body. Similarly, the experience of not having a self doesn’t automatically mean the self doesn’t “exist” in any meaningful sense. An experience of something being true is different than the thing being true, even if that experience feels incredibly real and accurate.
2) The “self” refers to more than just the feeling of having a self, or there being a “self” that chooses our thoughts. There are lots of aspects of self, and even if we rule some out, that doesn’t mean there is no self at all; it only means some versions of self don’t hold. For instance, one part of having a self – and of myself being different from you – is that when I prick my finger, I directly feel it, but you don’t. That makes me a self that’s different than you. Meditation doesn’t remove this notion of self. There are many other notions of self as well, such as us existing as a bundle of personality traits, associations, memories, etc., that meditation also doesn’t remove.
On the other hand, to defend meditation practices for a moment, I do think that they can show us that some of our naive assumptions about our experiences are genuinely incorrect. For instance, by causing us to pay a lot more attention than normal to our moment-to-moment experience, meditation can lead us to realize that our mind doesn’t work the way we assumed. A good example of this is when we pay close attention to where our thoughts come from and, in doing so, notice that many of them seem to just appear in our minds without us consciously choosing to think them. I believe that’s a valid observation. It’s less “I feel this is true, so it must be” and more “I paid more attention to what’s happening moment-to-moment and noticed things weren’t operating the way I had assumed”. I think, at most, meditation may show that we don’t have a “self” in some particular sense of the word “self” that many people might assume we do have. This may be important (perhaps very important), but it’s different from saying “we have no self,” full stop.
Additionally, I know that people who have nondual experiences (where they experience a lack of self during meditation) often view it as very beneficial. For instance, they may feel it leaves them feeling more deeply okay, more joyous, and less prone to suffering. I believe that some people do have experiences like these, and that that’s awesome. But also, that’s different than saying that “there is no self”.
Finally, I want to clarify that not all non-dual practitioners and teachers make the claims I’m describing above – I’m just reacting to those that do. I also am not saying that none of our naive ideas about the self are confused – some likely are, and some definitions of the self that we might assume exist don’t exist in the way we might think. For instance, if you pay close attention, there is no separate, identifiable, enduring, independently existing controller of our thoughts and actions – and you may well find, upon searching, that every candidate for self ends up just being an object in awareness. And you may even find that the feeling of having a self is itself simply a feeling. Yet, there’s also a lot more to ideas of a “self” than only those things. And saying “something isn’t what appears” or “this one definition doesn’t hold up to careful observation” is different from “this thing doesn’t exist at all”. I think that just claiming “there’s no self” may be more accurately re-stated as “some notions of the self turn out not to make sense or to dissolve when you pay close enough attention.”
This piece was first written on March 23, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 10, 2026.
2026-03-05 09:07:54
We seem to be living in an age of gurus. They’re all over the place, building large followings in domains like politics, self-improvement, spirituality, religion, activism, philosophy and even (occasionally) science. Gurus may not be more numerous now than in the past, but they seem to now more easily garner audiences of hundreds of thousands due to the fracturing of media, social media and YouTube.
If you pay attention to how harmful gurus behave, you’ll start to notice patterns that come up again and again.
Here’s my speculative attempt at categorizing harmful gurus based on their personalities, motivations, and persuasive styles (but not mental health conditions). Of course, not all harmful gurus are equally harmful (I’ll give a mix of very harmful and less harmful examples). My hope is that these categories may help you spot these patterns more easily:
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Type 1: Sociopathic Gurus – they strategically mix lies with truth to get your trust, promote a specific world view, and (eventually) extract value from you. Those who fail to spot their lies learn to trust them and may even see them as brave truth tellers. They lie to you knowingly and without remorse for personal gain.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Cherry picking: using selective (non-representative) examples that suggest the narrative they want you to believe.
• Paltering: making a series of true statements that purposely lead you to come to a false conclusion.
• Lie laundering: inserting key lies among a series of true statements so that the lies go unnoticed and they appear credible.
• Fabrication: they’re willing to completely make up things that very few people would ever blatantly lie about (such as inventing an experience they had with a specific person), leaving trusting people to assume they must be telling the truth.
Famous example:
Larry Ray
“Ray started a sex cult in which he presented himself to students as a former US Marine with training in psychological operations, as well as past work with the Central Intelligence Agency.[24] At first Ray ingratiated himself with his daughter’s friends, cooking dinners and ordering in delivery, and presenting himself as a father figure.”
A psychological examiner’s notes from the time said that Ray was “able to manipulate and control almost any situation in which he finds himself, including a psychological interview with a forensic examiner, no matter how experienced that examiner may be. Mr. Ray is very good at what he does … [He] can be utterly charming, and one can be disarmed by his childlike simplicity and smile. But Mr. Ray is no child; he is a calculating, manipulative and hostile man.”
(source of these quotes: Wikipedia)
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Type 2: Narcissistic Gurus – they’re delusionally convinced of the vast superiority of their ideas and qualities, and do whatever they can to get others to pay attention to and admire them. People end up entranced by their charisma, grandiose vision, and (apparent) confidence. Their huge (but fragile) ego makes it hard for them to learn from (and likely to lash out in response to) valid criticism.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Self-aggrandizement: they tell you how impressive they are or how impressive their ideas are, and some find this convincing.
• Endorsement: they get others to talk up their brilliance and accomplishments, making their claims seem more believable (which are also sometimes mutual exchanges where they talk each other up).
• Obfuscation: using obscure words, ambiguous, smart-seeming remarks, and technical phrases that are hard to understand to seem brilliant and to deflect from having to actually defend their ideas from head-on critiques.
Famous example:
Benny Hinn (prosperity gospel preacher)
Quotes:
“Where in the Bible does it say I have to drive a Honda?”
“When you don’t give money, it shows that you have the devil’s nature”
“The Bible warns us clearly that we must not attack men of God no matter how sinful they may have become or wicked in our eyes.”
“Sow a big seed. When you confess it, you are activating the supernatural forces of God”
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Type 3: Apophenic Gurus – they read signals into noise, often in paranoid ways. Even though their theories are usually wrong, they are often interesting, novel, or surprising, which gets people to pay attention and leaves some people captivated. They see tenuous connections as deeply meaningful and are rarely persuaded by logical critiques. Some of them tip into genuine psychotic detachment from reality.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Mystery: they present their ideas as involving a deep understanding of hidden relationships or secret knowledge, and leave the impression that if you just spend enough time consuming their content, you’ll come to grasp these important truths that few understand.
• Web of connections: they talk about a wide range of unrelated ideas and events in rapid succession and treat these as deeply connected, making it difficult to pin down their points and giving them an easy escape valve (by diverting to tangential topics they claim are related) when their perspectives are challenged.
• Just asking questions: they’ll point to things that seem weird or surprising or that aren’t well understood, and imply they have deep significance and support their worldview, even though their proper interpretation is unclear.
• Yes And-ing: incorporating other popular false theories and appealing world-views (such as perspectives of other gurus) into their network of ideas, making them even more appealing, fascinating and familiar seeming.
Famous example:
David Icke (conspiracy theorist)
Quotes:
“The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.”
“I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black, and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.”
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Type 4: Traumatized Gurus – due to being ostracized by a group or very painful life experiences, they’ve come to demonize a group of people or a set of ideas as the source of society’s ills. They’re on a mission to get others to demonize the same group or ideas. Their own pain and fear leads to black and white thinking and blocks their empathy.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Nutpicking: focusing on the most extreme (nutty) perspectives and people related to whatever it is they demonize to make it seem insane and dangerous.
• Catastrophizing on a slippery slope: claiming that some genuine problems related to a group or set of ideas are going to lead to a sequence of events with a cataclysmic or frightening outcome, causing their audience to fear that group or those ideas.
• Motte and bailey-ing: flip-flopping between reasonable criticisms and extreme conclusions based on those criticisms (which may depend on how emotionally disregulated they are at that moment, or what audience they are talking to), such that when their extreme conclusions are changed, they can easily retreat to “I was just saying that [reasonable criticism].”
Famous example:
Brigitte Gabriel
Her home was destroyed by Muslim militants when she was 10 years old, and she suffered injuries from shrapnel.
Quotes:
“The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil.. this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic world, They have no soul, they are dead set on killing and destruction.”
“Every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” (according to the NYT).
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Note that here with this terminology I am not talking about diagnosing mental disorders – I’m talking about how these gurus think, their motivations, and their persuasive styles.
What’s the key difference between these categories? I’d say it’s that they all mislead their audiences, but for different reasons, based on different motivations, and with different levels of self-awareness.
Sociopathic Gurus often mislead on purpose, knowingly, to gain something.
Narcissistic Gurus often mislead due to their egos, and an inflated sense of their own importance and the superiority of their ideas.
Apophenic Gurus often mislead due to seeing false connections, and due to jumping to paranoid conclusions.
And Traumatized Gurus often mislead due to the way their beliefs were shaped by pain or fear, which has caused them to oversimplify, mischaracterize and demonize a particular group or set of ideas.
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Of course, not all gurus can be classified in these ways – some are idiosyncratic.
And, in practice, many gurus combine multiple elements from the above categories, especially the most harmful gurus – for instance, I think that Sociopathic + Narcissistic, and Narcissistic + Apophenic are common combinations among cult leaders in particular. Perhaps having multiple of these tendencies rather than just one (or even having all of these tendencies, though likely to different degrees) is common among the most popular such gurus.
The reason I’m proposing these categories, despite their porousness, is that I think they are useful for thinking about different personalities and tactics common among gurus.
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Here are some examples of what I think are mixed type harmful gurus and how I’d classify them using this framework based on what I know about them (of course, it’s hard to be certain of their true traits beyond their public portrayal of their traits):
• Andrew Tate: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “Andrew Tate once called his sexually explicit webcam business a ‘total scam’ and boasted on his website that he lured women in by getting them to fall in love with him. The 36-year-old influencer also boasted on a podcast that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight and ‘got away with it.'” (NBC)
• Alex Jones (radio host): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru – “We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.” and “The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children”.
• Elliot Rodger (mass murderer, became influential post-death): Traumatized + Narcissistic Guru – “All I have ever wanted was to love women, but their behavior has only earned my hatred. I want to have sex with them, and make them feel good, but they would be disgusted at the prospect. They have no sexual attraction towards me. It is such an injustice…Why do they have a perverted sexual attraction for the most brutish of men instead of gentlemen of intelligence? I concluded that women are flawed.”
• L. Ron Hubbard: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why!” (part of his “self-hypnosis”)
• Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate cult leader): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru
• Charles Manson (Manson Family cult leader): Sociopathic + Apophenic Guru – “Total paranoia is just total awareness.” and ” I decide who does what and where they do it at. What am I gonna run around like some teeny bopper somewhere for someone elses money? I make the money man; I roll the nickels. The game is mine. I deal the cards.”
• Warren Jeffs (FLDS polygamous offshoot of Mormonism): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru
• Keith Raniere (NXIVM cult leader): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru
This piece was first written on March 4, 2026, and first appeared on my website on March 30, 2026.
2025-12-29 11:54:23
I think that people tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the legal system (in the US, at least). For instance, many people think the US legal system is a good way to get justice when someone has committed a crime. In my experience, it’s very hard to get the police to arrest someone who has committed a crime, unless the police showed up when the crime was actually in progress.
While certain laws are overenforced (e.g., some drug use-related crimes, minor traffic violations) and some very serious laws are appropriately enforced (e.g., if someone commits a major bombing, substantial resources will go into tracking that person down, and the police do make some effort with murders generally), mainly, laws are not really enforced.
The civil system is no better: when you’re in the right, lawsuits are very rarely worth it because of the incredible monetary cost and investment in time and mental energy of using the legal system. This is really a great loss: someone can screw you over, and you have a legal right against them, but the system is so slow and expensive that it’s irrational to try to claim that legal right. Of course, there are exceptions: situations where you can use a small claims court for a fast result, or where the size of the damages is so great and the probability of winning so large that it’s worth it, or where a lawyer will take the case on contingency.
On the flip side, wealthy bullies and large companies can use the system very effectively because merely by suing someone, they inflict tremendous waste of money and time on that person. As they say, “the process is the punishment.” Unless a case is truly ridiculous or obviously invalid, it’s likely to waste a lot of the defendant’s time and money.
So basically, it’s a system that is often rational for abusers of it to use and rarely rational for victims to use.
In my view, the main value in the justice system for individuals is that the police will come if you call, and if they literally see someone committing a crime, they will arrest them (or if the crime is sufficiently serious AND the trail of evidence is ridiculously easy to follow to the perpetrator, they may be willing to follow it).
And that’s actually worth A LOT! The police being willing to come (hopefully!) fairly quickly when called and arrest someone they see committing a crime or who obviously carried out a crime (which is not true in every country) actually reduces crime tremendously (compared to the counterfactual), and provides us all with an extremely useful resource when crime is being committed. So that’s worth using whenever we need it!
But, unfortunately, beyond that one very useful function, in my opinion, the system does quite a bad job at producing justice.
In my personal experience, when serious crimes have been committed against people I’m close to, I can’t think of a single case where the legal system brought justice.
If we look at statistics broadly (based on a couple of different sources from 2020-2025), here are the appalling numbers of what percent of reported offenses are cleared in the US (where “cleared”, most of the time, means that someone is arrested, charged, and turned over to the court for prosecution):
The reality is even more grim than these reported numbers, though, because (not including murder) a high percentage of crimes go unreported, and the above apply just to the selection that have been reported. For instance, by some estimates, more than 50% of violent victimizations and burglaries go unreported, and an even larger percentage of sexual assaults go unreported. That means that the probability that a crime leads to an arrest is substantially lower than the official clearance rates (which are already pretty depressingly low). For instance, the real clearance rate for burglary may be more like 6%.
The vision of the justice system that TV portrays – of police and district attorneys that spend tons of time on individual (non-murder) cases and doggedly pursue making sure that criminals get justice, while occasionally true, is usually a misleading distortion of the status quo. In real life, even with murder cases, more than 40% of them don’t lead to arrests.
I also want to make it really clear that while there are, of course, some incompetent people and some immoral people in the justice system (as there are in any system), for the most part, individuals are not to blame for these problems – police officers, judges, prosecutors, etc., are mostly genuinely trying to do their jobs well. These are systemic issues that are way beyond the ability of any individual to change.
It’s also worth noting that many people who commit crimes are repeat offenders, and so some of them actually do come to justice eventually (when they finally get caught for one of their crimes and are punished), it just may take a while. They roll the dice enough times that it finally catches up to them.
I hope I am not discouraging you from reporting crimes – you should absolutely report them. Just don’t assume that the legal system is likely to bring justice – clinging to that hope can be quite detrimental.
This piece was first written on December 28, 2025, and first appeared on my website on January 21, 2026.