Why I left academia: love letters to Liota

Dominance and submission games are tiresome and ugly (unless they're sexual play)

“What is really fun is when I can play with someone intellectually. Luscious!”

Liota ’n’ me, 1989

There’s a memorable letter from Richard Feynman to his wife, written from a gravitational physics conference.¹ When I read it, I cracked up, because I had written strikingly similar ones to my girlfriend Liota, from AI conferences. Although, his didn’t make explicit comparisons with BDSM:

I am not getting anything out of the meeting. I am learning nothing. Because there are no experiments, this field is not an active one, so few of the best men are doing work in it. The result is that there are hosts of dopes here and it is not good for my blood pressure: such inane things are said and seriously discussed here that I get into arguments outside the formal sessions (say, at lunch) whenever anyone asks me a question or starts to tell me about his “work” [...] There is great deal of “activity in the field” these days, but this “activity” is mainly in showing that the previous “activity” of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in nothing promising. It is like a lot of worms trying to get out of a bottle by crawling all over each other.

“Every field is equally stupid and corrupt.”

Here’s the first page of one of my conference letters:²

Liota will star in my “Unavailable Dakini Catalyst” series. That’s about personal transformational through romantic relationship. She’s the lesbian feminist sadomasochist anthropologist witch.

We wrote hundreds of thousands of words to each other. Feeling responsible for rereading all that is one reason it’s taking months and months to write about her. I’ve also sometimes found it too emotionally intense, and put it aside to cool off for a while.

Valuable insights for other domains

I learned a tremendous amount from Liota. Most is not relevant to “Unavailable Dakini Catalyst” and won’t appear in that story. I’ll write about some elsewhere, such as this post.

Learning how to experience dominance and submission dynamics as enjoyable, explicitly negotiated play yielded valuable insights for other domains. Like academia.

From the viewpoint of BDSM, it appears that everyone unconsciously plays out the same dynamics in everyday interactions. All. The. Time. It’s pervasive! But unrecognized, because it is not explicit or negotiated. And that makes it generally unpleasant and not enjoyable for most participants most of the time.

“Academic meetings are largely about domination.”

I wrote that to Liota from another conference a few weeks later. One page ends:

Sessions are bone-crushingly boring, as always.

And why? Because they are lousy BDSM scenes. The next page:

This was very bad behavior on my part, and I’m embarrassed by it. To be fair to myself, I don’t think it’s true that I kept thinking up more and more outrageous things to try to get people to believe. Either that was making fun of myself, or I was already embarrassed, and exaggerating to try to bully myself into cooling it.

It did get worse, though. At a conference a year later, I showed up in gay leather fetish gear. I sat next to a woman whose flirtatiousness I enjoyed and reciprocated. We folded paper cranes together during a small session, ostentatiously ignoring the speaker and other participants. That was much more fun!

But it was sufficiently bad behavior that I suddenly snapped out of it. I realized I was being a total dickhead. Everyone was either too intimidated or too kind to call me on it! And so, in that instant, I was done. I was out. I finished my thesis write-up and bailed.

“It bothers me that this is all covert.”

The next page:

From afar, my impression is that academia is different now. It’s been “feminized,” many say. Overt domination is no longer rewarded, or even permitted. Women typically wield power-over differently, although sometimes just as brutally.

“What’s really fun is when I can play with someone intellectually.”

The letter continues:

I married Charlie Awbery for that. (Among other reasons.) Charlie is the only person I can reliably play with intellectually.

“I don’t know how that connects with [sadomasochism]³”: Liota was my teacher in that domain, and I was still trying to understand the basics.

My relationship with Liota started because I couldn’t imagine how anyone could find hurting someone, or being hurt, erotic or enjoyable. I was intellectually curious! Here is a profound contradiction to my worldview, and here is someone who embodies it! How could I not be fascinated?

Liota proved a wonderful intellectual playmate. Among other sorts.

“When I adopt someone else’s mindset for a while, it can be exhilarating!”

“When someone will let me show them how to think in one of the ways I like, I get to watch them seeing the world through my eyes. Luscious!”

“Reluctance to think new thoughts comes from misunderstanding beliefs vs. ways of thinking.”

“Beliefs aren’t worth diddly; what matters is ways of thinking.”

That is a central theme in my recent meta-rationality work!

Reading our correspondence, I’m taken aback at how fully-formed most of my ideas already were in 1988. Much of my current writing tries to explain what I already understood well back then. It makes me wonder if I’ve progressed intellectually at all!

Ought I not to have had some new ideas over the past forty years? This is one way my research for the Liota story has been emotionally difficult.

“Students become ‘slaves’ to an intellectual mentor.”

(Sharing our appreciation of other women was an aspect of our relationship.)

“An extremely dominating, combative fellow is trying to show how stupid & wrong the last two speakers were.”

To be fair to the commentator, the previous two speakers had been talking nonsense. But (if my memory is accurate) his critique was off-target, because he took for granted the mistaken, rationalist framing of the conference. As well as being generally dickish. On the other hand, he was saying some of what I was thinking, which was generally dickish.

I may no longer be able to think new thoughts, but I am a little more tolerant than I was in my twenties.

“These people can’t tell the difference between the world and their idealizations of it.”

That’s the fundamental failure mode of rationalism. Evidently I’m still on about the same misunderstandings I was so irked by forty years ago.

In 1988, AI had been mostly stuck for a decade. I elided a portion of the quote from Feynman’s letter. Here is its middle bit:

The “work” is always: (1) completely un-understandable, (2) vague and indefinite, (3) something correct that is obvious and self evident, but a worked out by a long and difficult analysis, and presented as an important discovery, or, a (4) claim based on the stupidity of the author that some obvious and correct fact, accepted and checked for years, is, in fact, false (these are the worst: no argument will convince the idiot), (5) an attempt to do something probably impossible, but certainly of no utility, which it is finally revealed at the end, fails (dessert arrives and is eaten), or (6) just plain wrong. There is great deal of “activity in the field” these days, but this “activity” is mainly in showing that the previous “activity” of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in nothing promising.

All this was true of artificial intelligence research in 1988, too. In 2011, I wrote about that in “I seem to be a fiction”:

[AI] seemed to be going very well up until about 1980, when progress ground to a halt. Perhaps it was a temporary lull? Ironically, by 1985, hype about AI in the press reached its all-time peak. Human-level intelligence was supposed to be just around the corner. Huge amounts of money poured into the field. For those of us on the inside, the contrast between image and reality was getting embarrassing. What had gone wrong?

What had gone wrong was rationalism:

Human being is not a matter of calculation. People are not isolated individuals, living in a world of dead material objects, strategizing to manipulate them to achieve utilitarian goals. We are always already embedded in a web of connections with living nature and with other people. Our actions are called forth spontaneously by the situation we find ourselves in—not rationally planned in advance.

Liota’s reply: sadomasochism is play, not real life

“An archaeological record, as if anyone would care.”

A few months later, she wrote:

I miss her now too.

Rereading our letters, I find myself falling in love with her again.

Texts with Charlie yesterday:

Our relationship didn’t work in the long run, and couldn’t have, for many reasons. Among them that she was a hardcore lesbian sadomasochist, and (despite my best efforts) I was barely either. Dakinis can be unavailable in many unexpected ways.

My reply to Liota’s blue letter:

The story of Liota will be about my learning how to have a rational romance. Perhaps our archaeological record will prove valuable in that regard. Perhaps some readers will care.

1. Thanks to Lucy Keer for re-finding this for me, ten years ago!

2. In an odd coincidence, Feynman’s letter was published the same month, October 1988, although I didn’t read it until several years later.

3. “s/m” was a standard abbreviation for “sadomasochism” at the time. The term “BDSM” was invented in 1991, three years later, according to Wikipedia. If this seems a pedantic point… Liota was a scholar of sadomasochism, and her letters were full of playful pedantry, and she would probably have appreciated this footnote.