The Cassandra Complex

There are few feelings worse in this life than being right but early. You correctly predict a future catastrophe, trend, opportunity for growth, or important area of focus only to be castigated for how shortsighted, xenophobic and judgmental, outofouch, leftwing, right-wing or alarmist you are. The Cassandra complex, as it's known, is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth, but no one believes them. And they're often dismissed, ignored, ridiculed. It's named after Cassandra, figure in Greek mythology. The god Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. But after she rejects Apollo's advances, he curses her so that no one would ever believe her warnings. and she foraw the fall of Troy, warned everyone, was met with scorn, and the city burned. Anyway, Rachel Carson writes this book in 1962 called Silent Spring. She warns about the environmental damage caused by pesticides, and she gets mocked by chemical companies and even some scientists. But her work eventually led to the environmental movement and the banning of DDT. Ignes Samwise in the 1840s realized that doctors were transmitting child bed fever from autopsies to mothers by not washing their hands. He begged his colleagues to adopt handwashing. They laughed at him. He died in an asylum. Decades later, germ theory proved him right. Edward Snowden warned about government surveillance. Some people saw him as a hero. Many called him a traitor. His warnings were initially dismissed until proof emerged that governments were spying on civilians. Being right but early happens on much more personal scales, too. Someone sees clear warning signs in a work environment and warns others, "This is toxic. It's going to implode." They're brushed off as negative or paranoid until it does implode. In a relationship, one person sees the correct course of action that their partner should take, but is labeled controlling for trying to convince them of it. Eventually, the other partner does come around to it, but only after the price of bruised faith and wasted time has been paid. In short, history doesn't reward the first to see clearly. It often punishes them. The people who glimpse what's coming are rarely welcomed. Basically, Cassandra's bleed first so the rest of us don't have to. And we resist because every new truth asks the existing world to die a little. It happens because people don't want to believe uncomfortable truths. Cognitive dissonance because we trust stability and get suspicious of those who challenge it. Status quo bias. And because if the person warning us isn't seen as credible, they're ignored no matter how right they are, which is the messenger effect. The main issue beyond progress being held back, is that it genuinely disincentivizes people from speaking up when they could have an insight that could benefit others. Capernacus and Galileo are a perfect example of this. I love this story. I think it's such a great comparison. Capernacus early 1500s quietly proposes something radical. The Earth orbits the sun. Humans once the unmoving center of God's design were now spinning through space on one planet among many. But Capernacus hesitates. He delayed publishing his heliocentric model for decades. His great work, the revolution, only came out as he lay on his deathbed, likely to avoid the wrath of the church and academia. His truth was too disruptive. And so, for most of his life, it went unheard. Galileo a century later took that same Capernac spark and shouted it from the rooftops. He saw the moons of Jupiter, the faces of Venus, the imperfections on the moon's surface. all evidence that the heavens were not as fixed or divine as taught. The church responded with fear. Galileo gets dragged before the Inquisition. He's forced to recant under threat of torture and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. In retrospect, it's not surprising that Capernacus kept his mouth shut given how Galileo was treated. This is a core truth of the Cassandra complex. Being right isn't enough, and being early can feel like being wrong. Anyway, I've been on the sidelines. I might as well put some skin in the game. Here are some things I might be right, but early about. Number one, birth rate decline is a huge deal that everyone should be worried about. Number two, climate change should not be an existential risk priority compared with AGI, bioweapons, pandemics, and nuclear war. Number three, widespread hormonal birth control use is a large contributor to the mental health issues of modern women. Number four, normalizing egg freezing for 21-year-old women is a positive social change. Number five, the UK is unreoverably broken and will not be a future world power. Number six, China is not the massive threat that everyone thinks it is. Number seven, LLMs are not the architecture that AGI will be launched from. Uh, I am totally open to being wrong and late about all of these, but the Cassandra complex thing actually came about because I got popped uh in a uh long form video essay that was very well done about birth rate decline and about how it is sort of uh right-wing coded. It's reactionary. A lot of the time it is tangential or on the outskirts of sort of trying to restrict women's freedoms. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But, you know, the outcomes kind of end up with women's freedoms being restricted. So, perhaps it's like blast radius side effect stuff or maybe it's actually what they're trying to point at directly by pointing at something else that gets to it. And uh I thought it was really really well done. But I I knew that my position on birthright decline is right. And I do think it's a huge deal. And given how everybody's worried about [ __ ] national debt and issues of inequality, if you have fewer people, the growth that you need in order to be able to drive the economy out of the deficits and debts that you're in becomes harder because where are you getting the [ __ ] productivity from? And if what you're going to say is we're going to rely on AI and robotics to supplement the lost productivity from halfing the global population over the next couple of centuries, fine. But who's going to capture all of the gains of AI and robotics? That creates more inequality cuz it's a small number of companies that own all of that. So I felt like it it's mad. I I I really don't understand how birth rate decline has become a rightcoded I do. I do I was going to say I don't understand how it's become a rightcoded talking point. I do understand because it sounds sort of pro- family, Christian adjacent, traditional, not forward thinking, not open. Like I I I I'm trying to be as even killed as possible here. I get it. I I I genuinely do, but like I'm just right. And it's not like I'm right. People way smarter than me are right. But this is a big [ __ ] problem. And for for the first thousand episodes of this show, I've always equivocated. I've always had this sense that well, is it really that, you know, like I don't think I I've always tre treaded carefully. Partly because it's a protection strategy, you know, if you don't plant a steak too hard in the ground, then you don't tend to be sort of attacked all that much. But then I realized that I had equivocated like [ __ ] on these uh podcasts that I've done about birthright decline and still got castigated anyway and still been like the darling of the birth control right. I'm like [ __ ] me. This is a big deal. Especially if you want to think about the fact that political affiliation is heritable. So your political affiliation is impacted by your parents independent of the environment that they brought you up in. Like everything, it's at least partly heritable and it's not insignificantly heritable either. So if you are the sort of person that wants liberal values, progressive ideology, forward-thinking, left-leaning stuff to continue in the future and you are part of a group of people that does not think that birth rate decline is an important problem. You are sewing the seeds of your own future demise from an ideological perspective because your kids that you have fewer of will be left-leaning. But the conservatives or the fundamental religious people that you say are the [ __ ] enemy or that you're just slightly worried about or even that you aren't worried about at all but think that there should be uh a fair counterbalance to, they are not going to slow down. Who do you think inherits the future? Ideologically, culturally, I think that that is not something that we should I think we should have a balance of this as balanced as possible. Okay. What else? [ __ ] economically, it is not a good idea. You're going to end up with entire towns that are just left. South Korea, for every 100 Koreans that exist right now, there will be four great grandchildren. That is a 96% loss over the next hundred years. In whose [ __ ] world is this not a big deal? And I I've equivocated so much and I've [ __ ] caveed my way through stuff and still got [ __ ] slammed for it a lot. I'm like I with this point I'm really [ __ ] done on it because it's just correct. Demography is destiny and you can see what is coming down the pike. like this is something that we should be really worried about. The reason that I say about climate change should not be an existential risk priority. It's very carefully, slightly, cheekily put together words. It is a priority, but it is not when you compare it with AGI, bioweapons, pandemics. [ __ ] birth rate decline is happening right now. It is locked in. I think AGI, bioweapons, pandemics, maybe some nuclear stuff is actually ahead of birth rate. um birth rate is not a a true existential risk as it's called. An existential risk is defined as permanent unreoverable collapse. So that's either everybody is dead, all humans are gone, no chance of recovery or somehow permanently locked into a lower a regression back to a type of um society that we can never escape from. It's kind of hard to imagine what that might be. Um you can imagine maybe if like some really insane damage was done to the biosphere where um humans would have to subsist live for the rest of time and they would never be able to get it back to the point where they could be multilanetary and you know like permanent unreoverable collapse is the term. climate change just it doesn't have the pace as far as I can see for that to be a an a priority on par with some of these other ones like AGI I I flip-flop about this on a daily basis could be a big deal might not be a big deal people smarter than me are trying to debate this at the moment bioweapons and natural pandemics I think we can already see well COVID was one of the two uh that seems like something that we should pay attention to. Uh [ __ ] birth rate decline, like all of those things actually, this is a good point. Birth rate decline does not wipe us out entirely. It seems very unlikely because you're going to end up with small part like the [ __ ] Amish or you know like Israel or whatever like these people are going to continue. So it's not permanent and recoverable collapse. All of the others you're rolling dice on to see is this going to happen? Is AGI going to be misaligned? Are we going to have another pandemic? Are nuclear weapons going to be set off? Uh are we going to be able to develop technology that can reverse climate change? We know that birth rates are going down. It is one of the only risks challenges that we're facing at the moment that has such a short-term impact that is already locked in. Yes, climate change is also you can do the numbers, you can see sea ice melting, you can do all the rest of this stuff. It is not happening on the same time scale. And I just wish that the same energy or even a portion of the energy that is applied to climate change could be moved over to something which is happening right now. There are not too many people on the planet. If there are, wait a 100 years, 150 years, you're going to be really [ __ ] happy. Or go to Korea now. There's bags of room there. Uh go to Japan, go to China. Like go in fact, go anywhere in the world except for like a few countries. Everybody's birth rates declined anyway. like the right but early thing got to me because I feel like I'm right but early on the birthright problem and there's this sort of special kind of what do you say resentment bitterness that you feel when the when you're saying that there is going to be this huge [ __ ] catastrophe happening, no one listens and then Troy burns anyway. If in 30 or 40 or 50 years time, people who were too pigheaded to be able to see this as an issue then begin to campaign around things like how how do we have so few people on the planet? This needs to be fixed because the economic indicators are going down the tubes. The productivity is through the floor. I hope I'm [ __ ] dead. I hope I'm dead because the level of I told you so that's going to want to come out of me is that's going to be like a a super massive black hole. That's a singularity sized event. Uh anyway, I'm ranting. Being right but early is bad. It happens across your personal life. It happens in big political movements. I'm probably wrong about almost all of this, I'm probably a [ __ ] idiot. Um, but if I was the least idiotic about one of the things, I think it's declining birth rates. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every day for years now because it's the simplest way that I found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition. And that is why I've partnered with them. One scoop gives you 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food ingredients in a single drink. And now they've taken it even further with AG1 NextGen. The same one scoop once a day ritual, but this time backed by four clinical trials. 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Uh, watch the full episode here.