i learned something about agency when, on my second date with my now-girlfriend, i mentioned feeling cold and she about-faced into the nearest hotel, said she left a scarf in a room last week, and handed me the nicest one out of the hotel’s lost & found drawer
not to burst your bubble but isn’t this kinda stealing?
— @QiaochuYuan
What do people mean when they say “agency” and “you can just do things”? I get a sense it’s two things, and the terms “agency” and “you can just do things” conflate them. The first is “you can DIY a solution to your problem; you don’t need permission and professional expertise unless you actually do”, and the second is “you can defect against cooperators, lol”.
More than psychological agency, the first seems to correspond to disagreeableness. The second I expect to correlate with the dark triad. You can call it the antisocial version of “agency” and “you can just do things”.
I think this is one of the big painful points in our culture. There seems to be a positive correlation between agency and crime (and generally things that are in the same direction as crime, but with smaller magnitude, so we don’t call them crime), and people kinda notice that, which kinda makes the lack of agency a virtue signal.
The reason is that as a criminal, you have to be agenty. No one is going to steal money for you; that is, in the way that would land the money in your pockets. (Technically, there are also some non-agenty people involved in crime, I don’t know what is the English idiom for them; I mean the kind of stupid or desperate person that you just tell “move this object from place A to place B” or “sign this legal document” and they do it for a few bucks without asking questions, and when shit hits the fan, they end up in jail instead of you.)
And this is quite unfortunate, because it seems to me that many people notice the connection, and start treating agency with suspicion. And not without good reason! For example, if a random person approaches you out of the blue, most likely it is some kind of scammer.
As a consequence, agenty people have to overcome not just their natural inertia, but also this mistrust.
This probably depends a lot on specific culture and subculture. In ex-socialist countries, people are probably more suspicious of agency, because during socialism agency was borderline illegal (you are supposed to do what the system tells you to do, not introduce chaos). If you hang out with entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs, agency is probably valued highly (but I would also suspect scams to be more frequent).
Here’s a riddle: A woman falls in love with a man at her mother’s funeral, but forgets to get contact info from him and can’t get it from any of her acquaintances. How could she find him again? The answer is to kill her father in hopes that the man would come to the funeral.
— @_brentbaum, tweet (2025-05-15)
— @meansinfinity
— @QiaochuYuan
What do people mean when they say “agency” and “you can just do things”? I get a sense it’s two things, and the terms “agency” and “you can just do things” conflate them. The first is “you can DIY a solution to your problem; you don’t need permission and professional expertise unless you actually do”, and the second is “you can defect against cooperators, lol”.
More than psychological agency, the first seems to correspond to disagreeableness. The second I expect to correlate with the dark triad. You can call it the antisocial version of “agency” and “you can just do things”.
I think this is one of the big painful points in our culture. There seems to be a positive correlation between agency and crime (and generally things that are in the same direction as crime, but with smaller magnitude, so we don’t call them crime), and people kinda notice that, which kinda makes the lack of agency a virtue signal.
The reason is that as a criminal, you have to be agenty. No one is going to steal money for you; that is, in the way that would land the money in your pockets. (Technically, there are also some non-agenty people involved in crime, I don’t know what is the English idiom for them; I mean the kind of stupid or desperate person that you just tell “move this object from place A to place B” or “sign this legal document” and they do it for a few bucks without asking questions, and when shit hits the fan, they end up in jail instead of you.)
And this is quite unfortunate, because it seems to me that many people notice the connection, and start treating agency with suspicion. And not without good reason! For example, if a random person approaches you out of the blue, most likely it is some kind of scammer.
As a consequence, agenty people have to overcome not just their natural inertia, but also this mistrust.
This probably depends a lot on specific culture and subculture. In ex-socialist countries, people are probably more suspicious of agency, because during socialism agency was borderline illegal (you are supposed to do what the system tells you to do, not introduce chaos). If you hang out with entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs, agency is probably valued highly (but I would also suspect scams to be more frequent).
Here’s a riddle: A woman falls in love with a man at her mother’s funeral, but forgets to get contact info from him and can’t get it from any of her acquaintances. How could she find him again? The answer is to kill her father in hopes that the man would come to the funeral.
It reminds me of [security mindset](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_mi_1.html), in which thinking like an attacker exposes leaky abstractions and unfounded assumptions, something that is also characteristic of being agentic and “just doing things.”