Obsolete Men and Vanishing Adulthood

This essay is a follow-up to Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic and Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

Braden “Clavicular” Peters

I don’t like giving Braden “Clavicular” Peters free oxygen, largely because his philosophy is so dangerous that I fear it becoming airborne. His belief that life belongs to those who are good-looking enough is maybe not controversial, as we merely average-looking men can attest. But his desire to manipulate his physiognomy to become as absurdly handsome as possible, involves a regimen of intensive self-harm.

It was bad enough with men like Andrew Tate, whose abusive workout regimen has distorted his body as badly as his soul. Any psychologist can tell you that obsessive bodybuilding, to the point where your body becomes cartoonish, emerges from the same well of self-hatred that manifests in women as anorexia nervosa. Tate is loud and charismatic enough to make his insecurities everyone else’s problem, at great mutual cost.

Peters, though, doesn’t just distort himself. Bodybuilding is only part of a larger regimen, which includes injecting dangerous drugs, wolfing down questionable supplements, and self-flagellation. He became the public face of “looksmaxxing” in recent months as the most grotesque part of his regimen—self-administered facial beatings with a hammer—went viral. He believes that treating himself with violence will make him more conventionally handsome.

And he isn’t entirely wrong. Recent photos show Peters looking like an exaggerated form of a mid-20^th Century matinee idol, with big shoulders, great hair, and a well-defined chin. Of course, as I write, Peters has recently turned twenty, so whether his good looks represent his abusive regimen, or simply graduating from awkward adolescence, is subject to debate. What we can’t debate, though, is: this man looks thirty.

Telling a twenty-year-old woman that she looks thirty would probably get you smacked. In American culture, female physical beauty correlates with outward markers of fertility, which means youth. Women use ointments, tinctures, injections, and surgery to stave off the appearance of age, though the results are questionable. Lauren Sanchéz Bezos’ recent appearance at the Met Gala resulted in laughter at her augmented appearance and questionable wardrobe.

Lauren Sanchéz Bezos

But for men, looking older is desirable. In interviews, Peters describes injecting himself with steroids at age fourteen to achieve the shredded look that normally requires years of dedication and effort. His famous, highly defined jaw, does indeed come to most men through years of small-scale trauma, sports injuries, and dangerous work. Like millions of adolescents, Peters wants to skip the dues-paying stage and be recognized as an adult.

Who can blame him? As entry-level professional jobs dwindle, men keep jobs into their twenties and thirties that formerly belonged to teenagers. Countless adults, of both biological sexes, cannot afford to move out of their parents’ houses. Student debt, once a ten-year commitment, has become a lifelong burden. The average age of first-home purchase is now forty. In such an environment, paying one’s dues in linear time is downright foolish.

In such an environment, Peters doesn’t want to merely look good. Placed in his social context, Peters wants to speed-run adulthood, or anyway the one aspect of adulthood which he can control. Savvy media manipulators can fake the personal characteristics that make older men attractive to women, including emotional regulation and economic stability. But only those willing to treat themselves violently can look old enough to enter the market.

However, let’s continue looking at that same broader context. The ways that men used to hasten rugged good looks, like playing sports or doing difficult physical labor, are all communitarian. There’s no such thing as solitaire football, and building a house requires a team. The ways men formerly organized themselves into communities, including labor unions, religious congregations, and even bowling leagues, look increasingly quaint, if they even still exist.

Peters has to speed-run adulthood alone because, otherwise, he has nowhere to go. Modern life has become mostly solitary and, unless you’re born to money, the chance of getting ahead through hard work and ingenuity alone is virtually nil. Peters has made himself a mass-media grotesque, but in doing so, he’s captured our attention, the one meaningful resource for cash-poor boys hoping to make themselves a life in American modernity.

Our solution must involve getting outside our own homes, and outside our own heads. Easier said than done. But even as churches and unions seem irrelevant, many communities still have adult sports leagues, maker spaces, and public libraries. Individuals and small groups can organize new networks, like community choirs, improv companies, and charitable volunteer organizations.

We must seek the trappings of adulthood, once hoarded in the workplace, out in the large rcommunity.

Creating a Marketplace for Reliable Guessing

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Why are professional prognosticators so consistently bad at predicting the future? We know this phenomenon most clearly from basic cable news, where credentialed experts prognosticate about how good, bad, or volatile the near future will be, usually in ways that support their ideology. But it manifests in other environments: business professionals who fail to forecast economic trends. Legislators who let lush opportunities slip away. Inventors pushing questionable technology.

Canadian-American psychologist Philip Tetlock, currently at the University of Pennsylvania, asked himself this question immediately after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mass-media oracles predicted either swift, easy victory, or else nigh-apocalypse. The reality reflected neither partisan extreme, but instead descended into the same quotidian brutality that has characterized American intervention since WWII. Why, Tetlock asks, were both sides so wrong, and why has nobody paid for their overconfidence?

He favors the metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs, which he pinches from Isaiah Berlin, though it’s far older. Foxes know many things, Tetlock writes; hedgehogs know one big thing. Mass-media operators love highly credentialed experts, especially on economics and world affairs. But those experts’ predictions are often only marginally better than committed dilettantes who read newspapers daily and remains informed. Further, the more advanced one’s credentials, the more marginal the gains.

So far, so good. Tetlock’s description essentially accords with our recent experiences of camera-friendly experts reliably whiffing their predictions. My problem arises when Tetlock transitions from describing to explaining. A consummate scholar, Tetlock is reluctant to say anything which he cannot support strictly from quantifiable evidence. And holy moly, does Tetlock have extensive and thoroughly documented evidence to deploy.

Let’s make something clear: despite his praise (often muted) for well-informed dilettantes, he writes for scholarly audiences motivated by deep research. He fortifies his prose with histograms, p-values, and confidence intervals. He spends several column inches breaking down the mathematical modeling which supports his conclusions, and he seldom goes beyond the evidence. He dedicates an entire chapter to anticipating and transcribing his critics’ likely counterarguments.

Philip E. Tetlock, Ph.D.

Tetlock briefly acknowledges, but doesn’t expand much upon, the reality of who receives attention. TV pundits, hero CEOs, civil rights activists, and tech bros all broadly favor certainty, volume, and swagger. Reliable predictors, working from diversified backgrounds and intellectual caution, can look timid on Sunday talk shows or corporate board meetings. Put another way, saying wrong things confidently looks more telegenic than trading in likelihoods, conditionals, and caution.

Unfortunately, Tetlock himself demonstrates this. He refuses to offer opinions without sourced evidence, and he refuses to offer evidence without lengthy discursions on mathematical variance. Because his status relies on measurable outcomes—what he terms “reputational bets”—he refuses to place everything on one spin of the roulette wheel. The product he thus creates is more likely to be accurate, but less compelling in a media-saturated “attention economy.”

He also omits something I consider vitally important. The principle of homophily means we’re more likely to spend time around people like ourselves. Scholars congregate with other scholars; journalists chill with media professionals; lawmakers drink with lawyers. We see this particularly in economics, the scholarly field least likely to cite sources from other disciplines: our environment discourages seeking differing influences, disconfirming evidence, or even a diverse friend network.

Invested dilettantes make reliable predictions, perhaps, because they see how hypothetical outcomes postulated in scholarly journals actually unfold in daily life. Unfortunately, to calculate his confidence intervals on reliable predictions, Tetlock generates a core sample of prognosticators who are, like himself, flush with academic credentials. If military historians predict one outcome for war, and generals predict another, maybe consult the enlisted men carrying weapons, not more historians and generals.

Rereading what I’ve written, I feel I’ve misrepresented Tetlock’s product. I like his thesis, that intellectual diversity trumps depth in creating reliable forecasts. Later chapters on public accountability are particularly promising, if underwritten. Especially in subsequent years (Tetlock’s first edition appeared in 2005), we’ve seen public experts become increasingly hostile to criticism or disconfirming sources. Doubt has become, not the precursor to better thinking, but a sign of disloyalty. Unsurprisingly, experts have become more likely to be wrong.

Considering my doubts, and new evidence since 2005, we could perhaps read this volume as a prolegomenon to further research. Tetlock himself co-wrote a subsequent volume, which I’ve already purposed to read. But I feel it actually serves Tetlock’s thesis to suggest that future research should come from an interdisciplinary source, perhaps a public-private partnership. The future of the forecasting business is too valuable to entrust only to other forecasters.