Reflection Is Useful Only When It Changes Default Behavior

George Mack reaches for Montaigne’s practice of collecting customs that seemed bizarre across cultures and history: growing hair on one side of the body while shaving the other; darkening teeth because white teeth were undesirable; killing one’s father at a prescribed age; or consuming a deceased person’s remains at a funeral. The point was not merely to catalogue strangeness. It was to break the spell of one’s own norms—to remember that what feels self-evident is often, in Mack’s phrasing, “largely made up,” sustained by social contagion and local consensus.

The exercise becomes more uncomfortable when turned on the present. Mack’s imagined contemporary version of Montaigne’s list describes “normal” as consuming 17 teaspoons of sugar daily, carrying $104,755 in debt, being 30 pounds overweight, taking fewer than 4,000 steps a day, spending 90,000 working hours disengaged, staying indoors for 22.3 hours a day, spending more time on the toilet than exercising, failing to finish a book in a year, experiencing fewer than 10 minutes of silence a day, and giving 20 years of life to television or social media. He acknowledges the weakness of averages—they can conceal huge variation—but uses them as a prompt rather than a diagnosis. What is accepted is not necessarily what was consciously chosen.

Chris Williamson offers Joseph Palmer as a smaller historical example of how completely consensus can reverse. In 1830s Massachusetts, Palmer’s beard was so unusual that he was mocked, attacked by men attempting to shave him, and imprisoned after defending himself with a knife. He refused to pay his fine and remained in jail for more than a year.

The Atlas Obscura page shown on screen describes Palmer’s grave in Leominster, Massachusetts as honoring “the right to a full beard” after its owner was attacked and jailed for wearing one. It also characterizes bushy facial hair in that period as associated with lunacy or heresy. A beard is now ordinary; in Palmer’s setting, it made its owner a social outcast.

That does not mean every foreign behavior is a preview of the future. Williamson describes South Korean “dopamine websites,” where users browse delivery menus, read reviews, fill shopping carts, and track an imaginary courier without being allowed to buy anything. Other services offer virtual smoke breaks: anonymous chat rooms meant to recreate the social pause of smoking without cigarettes. The stated premise is to get a familiar reward while removing spending, smoking, or another impulsive habit.

Mack objects to treating Asia as a single forecasting market for the West. He recalls hearing that Facebook product teams could see extraordinary reactions to features tested in the Philippines, then find that the same features failed elsewhere. The reported explanation was unusually intensive local phone use: a market can be highly responsive without being representative. The relevant question is whether a behavior reflects a broad human tendency appearing early in one place, or a practice dependent on a specific social environment.

Live shopping illustrates the distinction. Mack says marketers have long predicted that the East Asian habit of watching sellers stream products for hours would become normal in the West, but says it has not taken off in the predicted form. Williamson distinguishes it from general livestreaming, which has found Western audiences through Twitch, Kick, and similar platforms. Shopping-specific livestreaming is a different behavior.

Public norms may determine what travels. Mack describes a friend in Japan who would fall entirely silent while boarding a subway, unable even to whisper into his phone until he got off. Williamson speculates that this degree of restraint may be inhospitable to the nuisance-heavy style of Western IRL streaming.

The broader claim is ecological. A person’s routines, conduct, and sense of self are shaped heavily by setting. Williamson points to changing gyms and acquiring a dedicated office and studio: neither remade him as a person, but each changed the structure of his day enough to alter behavior. “How much of who you think you are is just postcode,” Mack asks.

Contingency is not triviality. A norm can be arbitrary in origin yet powerful in practice; an environment can shape conduct without removing agency. The useful response is not to dismiss norms as unreal, but to notice which ones are quietly choosing on one’s behalf.

Chris Williamson begins with a disputed case: one Commonwealth short-story prize may, he says, have gone to an obviously AI-generated entry. The prize-winning stories appeared in Granta, and Williamson characterizes the editors’ response to questions of machine authorship as largely a shrug. The case leads him to a narrower concern: what kinds of language a model may reproduce when prompted to write literary fiction.

He cites phrases from the disputed story—“the patience of a reptile,” “a belly sound, as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there,” and “His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him”—as examples of prose that feels ornate but unearned. Similar language, he says, appears in anime and manga fan fiction or horror writing online. The point is not that any one phrase proves machine authorship. It is that the model’s available patterns may include immense quantities of prose written without much editorial judgment.

Williamson’s analogy is football. A system that learned only by watching everyone on earth play would encounter far more bad players than elite ones. The same problem may apply to prose: good writing can be present in the corpus without being weighted in proportion to its quality. Moby-Dick or Atomic Habits may not count “10 million times” more than a large body of mediocre writing merely because they are better.

George Mack suggests that coding models may currently appear more capable because code gives clearer feedback. A program compiles or does not; a button appears or does not; the software works or fails. Writing, by contrast, depends on taste. The question is not simply whether a sentence is grammatical but whether it is necessary, alive, appropriate, or proportionate to what it is trying to do.

Mack leaves the judgment explicitly provisional: six or 12 months from now, he says, the comparison may look different. But he sees a present asymmetry between domains with objective feedback and those in which quality depends on harder-to-state human discrimination.

The obvious response—train models more heavily on great writing—does not fully settle the issue for Williamson. He argues that a model cannot merely be handed a canon as a corrective; it has to form relationships among words through the larger language system on which it is built. His metaphor is Usain Bolt running into a 35-mile-an-hour headwind. Better material may help, but it does not by itself resolve the conditions under which the model represents meaning.

Their distinction is between output that resembles writing and judgment that can explain why one sentence belongs while another does not. The former may improve through more capable generation. The latter is the more elusive standard.

Chris Williamson introduces a politically charged report from City Journal about California’s supplier-diversity procurement rules for utilities. The article displayed on screen, headlined “Inside California’s Gay-Certification Program,” was attributed to Aaron Sibarium and dated June 24, 2024. Its stated claim was that California was pressuring utilities to award $633 million in contracts to “LGBT” businesses.

Williamson recounts the article’s description of the program: utilities regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission and bringing in more than $25 million annually were assigned targets for procurement from state-certified LGBT-owned businesses—0.5% in 2021, 1% in 2023, and 1.5% in 2024 and beyond. According to the City Journal article shown, meeting the 2024 goals would have directed $633 million to such firms.

The administrative question that interests Williamson is how a business is certified. As he reads from the article, applicants could provide a letter from an LGBT organization, evidence that a newspaper identified them as LGBT, or three letters from personal contacts on company letterhead attesting to their sexual orientation. He also says the article reported potential county-jail penalties for corporate officials who falsely represent a business as gay.

The exchange treats the setup satirically, imagining a company hiring gay C-suite executives to unlock procurement opportunities. But the implication of the program as Williamson describes the City Journal report is that a procurement preference linked to a formally certified identity requires an administrative method for defining and documenting that identity—and a penalty for misrepresentation. That institutional translation of a personal characteristic into a business qualification is what the two find strange.

George Mack initially asks whether the account is real. Williamson points him to the article displayed on screen. The discussion does not test the report’s claims beyond that source; it stays with the bureaucratic oddity of turning sexual orientation into an auditable qualification for a supplier program.

George Mack treats Juan Pujol’s wartime career as a more demanding lesson than persistence. Rejection is not always a signal to repeat the same ask more forcefully. It can be an invitation to work out what the gatekeeper cannot yet see—and to acquire the thing that would make refusal irrational.

Pujol, Mack says, was a Spanish chicken farmer and failed hotel manager who wanted to spy for Britain during the Second World War. He repeatedly approached the British embassy in Madrid and was turned away. Rather than keep presenting himself as an inexperienced volunteer, he went to the German embassy and offered to spy against Britain. He cultivated a pro-Nazi identity, learned tradecraft including invisible ink, and earned the Germans’ trust.

Only then did he return to the British. He could now offer access to someone whom Germany believed was working for it.

Pujol became a double agent, built an imaginary network of 27 subagents in Britain, and sent the Germans reports about operations that existed only in his imagination. MI5 named him Garbo, Mack says, after Greta Garbo, for his acting. Mack describes the deception as crucial around D-Day: Pujol convinced German leadership that the invasion would come at Calais rather than Normandy. He says Hitler awarded Pujol an Iron Cross and Britain awarded him an MBE.

Chris Williamson identifies the moral hazard in the story. It was fortunate, he says, that Pujol’s real allegiance was to Britain. The same initiative, imagination, and willingness to become useful to a hostile institution could have made him a formidable Nazi asset.

The transferable point is not that rejection proves the rejector is foolish, or that persistence always wins. Pujol combined push and pivot. He remained oriented toward the original goal, but changed the route and built the evidence of value the British had initially lacked.

A great rescue does not necessarily produce a clean feeling of heroism. Chris Williamson uses Shavarsh Karapetyan’s response to a trolleybus disaster to examine why people who save lives can fixate on the failure they could not avoid.

Williamson recounts that, in 1976, a trolleybus carrying roughly 90 passengers crashed into a reservoir in Yerevan and sank around 10 meters into freezing, murky water. He notes uncertainty about the cause: accounts, as he describes them, differ over whether the driver suffered a heart attack or was involved in an altercation with a passenger. The rescue conditions, in his telling, included mud, sewage, debris, near-zero visibility, and a bus Karapetyan called a “traveling coffin.”

Karapetyan was a 23-year-old fin swimmer training nearby with his brother. Williamson describes him as a 17-time world champion and 11-time world-record holder. He says Karapetyan entered the water, kicked in a rear window, located passengers inside the submerged bus, brought people to the surface, and repeatedly returned underwater.

Williamson says Karapetyan made dozens of dives over about 20 minutes and pulled out roughly 37 people, of whom about 20 survived. The episode that allegedly haunted Karapetyan was a single mistake: in the dark, he grabbed a leather seat cushion, believing it might be a passenger, and carried it up. Williamson says Karapetyan later believed someone may have died while he spent that time retrieving the cushion.

He also recounts that the rescue damaged Karapetyan’s athletic career. Broken glass cut his body, and polluted water was said to have contributed to sepsis, double pneumonia, and a prolonged hospitalization. Williamson says Karapetyan returned for one final championship and set another world record while still impaired, with his brother running alongside the pool in case he lost consciousness.

George Mack says he has seen a similar pattern among people working in police and fire services. They do not necessarily linger on the people they helped, he says. They ruminate on the people they might have helped but could not.

Williamson calls this survivor guilt and wonders whether counterfactual thinking has an adaptive purpose. An on-screen ChatGPT response proposes, among other explanations, that it can encourage people to learn from near misses, help surviving group members, and signal loyalty rather than indifference after collective loss. Williamson is drawn particularly to the counterfactual account: “if only I had” may be a mind’s attempt to prepare better for a future emergency, even when no amount of preparation would have changed the outcome.

Karapetyan’s story gives that mechanism its cruelest form. An extraordinary act of courage becomes, for the person who performed it, a private record of the one moment he could not control.

Chris Williamson argues that the standard call for men to “open up” leaves out the receiving side of emotional disclosure. Men are often told that male mental health is in crisis and that men should speak more honestly. But when a man cries or seems vulnerable online, he says, it is not only women who can react harshly. In his experience and impression, men may be less accommodating of other men’s sadness.

That creates a test of sincerity. A man cannot persuasively demand greater attention to male mental health while refusing to sit with a friend who is struggling. The demand is not for every friend to have the same emotional skills. George Mack makes the distinction that people serve different roles: one friend may be the person to call when he needs to break down; another may be better at helping him regain composure. A healthy social circle can be decentralized rather than requiring every individual to be equally equipped for every crisis.

Williamson agrees with the division of roles but maintains that there is a contradiction when people publicly advocate care while privately reject emotional need. He speculates that men may have to overcome a visceral aversion to another man’s visible distress. His evolutionary account is explicitly conjectural: a man who cannot regulate himself may once have seemed to be an unreliable ally, someone who could fail during a hunt or conflict.

He connects this to an argument he attributes to William Costello: much male homophobia may be less about attraction to men than about aversion to femininity in men—“femmephobia.” In Williamson’s formulation, some men may be reacting not principally to homosexuality but to what they perceive as a departure from masculine control, aggression, and readiness. He suggests the same aversion can surface when a man is openly distressed or unable to “hold it together.”

The practical point is narrower than a general account of men or sexuality. If men want more emotionally capable male friendships, Williamson argues, they cannot treat vulnerability as evidence that someone has forfeited their status as a dependable man.

Mack introduces the ancient practice of the hypomnemataA personal notebook used in classical antiquity to collect observations, quotations, and practical lessons.: a notebook of retained insights. Rather than consuming a stream of new ideas, a person would identify a current problem and revisit the relevant passage each morning.

George Mack uses the practice to name a modern failure: an idea can feel transformative when first encountered, then disappear until it returns months later as something one vaguely remembers having admired. The value of a notebook is not collecting more wisdom. It is making a small set of already-known lessons available when they can affect conduct.

For Chris Williamson, one such lesson is that worrying does not change outcomes. Anxiety can mimic work because it feels active, just as a business call framed as “just connecting” can resemble progress without producing any actual work. He recalls Alex Hormozi’s advice that these calls are dangerous precisely because they contain the trappings of productivity while avoiding the scrutiny and decisions that move an acquisition forward.

Worry, Williamson says, produces the same false sense of motion. Mack recalls a story from interviews with older people: a woman spiraling about a major concern called a friend, who reminded her of an equally urgent fear she had raised six months earlier. She could not remember it. The friend’s point was simple: this, too, may disappear.

Mack cites a statistic he encountered claiming that 91.6% of worries recorded by people with generalized anxiety disorder did not come true. He immediately notes the joke built into the figure: an anxious person will focus on the remaining 8.4%. Williamson adds a distinction from his coach, Joe Hudson: anticipation of a wanted event can feel physiologically similar to anxiety. Hudson calls this “pleasure anxiety”—unease generated by excitement before something good arrives.

Mack offers David Ogilvy’s advertising line as another corrective.

An advertiser gets tired of an ad because they see it repeatedly; the intended audience may barely have encountered it. Mack applies the same principle to sharing one’s work. He may hesitate to repost a book list because he assumes people have already seen it, only to have someone discover it on the seventeenth post. The creator remains stationed beside the work; the audience is in motion.

The point also supports a small ethic of friendship. Williamson argues that people should buy their friends’ tickets, share their work, encourage their ventures, and offer criticism where it is genuinely needed rather than withholding all support. Mack’s version is blunt: if someone supports Rihanna’s new single more than a friend’s new business, they are a bad friend.

Support can feel difficult because friends who resemble one another may become rivals. But it can also create the norm it seeks. Williamson compares this to changing a recurrent relationship pattern: if one person reliably stops playing their customary role—bully, victim, savior, or antagonist—the old interaction eventually cannot continue. He attributes to Hudson the idea that after roughly seven consistently different responses, the other person’s familiar pattern begins to break down. It is like playing tennis with someone who no longer returns the ball.

A final lesson concerns defaults. Williamson argues that first impulses are often mixtures of bodily chemistry, inherited trauma, social pressure, convenience, and unexamined habit. They arise in the mind, but that does not mean they deserve immediate obedience. The task is not infinite rumination. It is a small pause between stimulus and action: enough reflection to intervene before default programming makes the choice.

Mack’s preferred meditation exercise makes that distance concrete. Sit still and wait for the next thought to arise. Do not decide what to think; watch what appears. His own unexpected thought was of Arjen Robben cutting in onto his left foot—an image with no obvious relevance to the moment. The exercise suggests that thoughts are events arriving in consciousness, not commands.

He also describes turning awareness back on itself: trying to become aware of the awareness that is observing. It is difficult to explain without sounding, in his words, like someone who has learned Japanese and is now trying to praise the language in Japanese. But its use is practical. It loosens identification with whatever the mind happens to generate next.