The Agency Water Line

The Trait That Outcompetes Intelligence

By guest contributor Skilos.

Waterlines

One of the first things a people living on a coast begins to track is the rising and lowering of the tides. Low tide increases the area of walkable beach, but increases the risk of dangerous rip currents pulling a swimmer out to sea. Optimal times for fishing are also linked to the tides, with classical wisdom being that two hours before and two hours after high tide are optimal for catching fish.

Knowing the maximum height a high tide will bring is critical for building any permanent structure, but as the sea is constantly expanding and shrinking with the seasons, a conservative distance from shore is usually taken. For anyone caught out as the tide rolls in, death is often a possibility.

Common tide gauge

In Japan, the simple ebbing and flowing of the tide can quickly give way to tsunami waves, increasing the danger dramatically. To address this, Japanese carved tsunami stones, obelisks standing seemingly in the middle of the forest bearing inscriptions such as “Do not build any homes below this point.”

The town of Aneyoshi heeded these ancient warnings and built high and away from the coastline. Then, when the Tōhoku earthquake arrived along with the tsunami it produced, Aneyoshi sat undisturbed while many other villages were destroyed with more than 18,000 people killed.

The Fukushima nuclear reactor planners would have done well to heed these warnings. When the ~45′ largest waves hit Ōkuma, the location of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, they swamped the seawall and the plant’s ground level 33′ above sea level, damaging primary and backup cooling systems and causing displacement of 164,000+ residents, but luckily minimal direct deaths.

Waterlines, and the dangers of submersing under them, surround us. In the cases of tides and tsunamis, the tested metric is simple — water height. But for more abstract and social seas, we are rarely so lucky that we get clear binary feedback on whether we are above or below critical waterlines, even as they begin to rise around us.

Take intelligence and mental flexibility, for example, in an occupation typically coded as low-IQ — order-taking at McDonald’s.

In the 1940s, the menu had just nine simple items on it: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, a milkshake, fries, and five types of drinks. Any person of even moderately functional intelligence could easily memorize these offerings, communicate them through whatever system was in place, and deliver a reliable product to the customers.

By 2013, this number had risen to 145 — spread through breakfast, lunch, café, dessert, and other sub-menus, with a comparatively complex touchscreen till to assist in order entry.

McDonald’s ordering complexity

Now, manning the cash register at McDonald’s is unarguably still a career demanding little from its employees, but to a rough approximation, it has gotten more than 16 times as complex as when the chain started.

This same incremental ratchet surrounds us as technology automates away the simplest, most repetitive jobs, eating away at the value most easily captured by those dealt an unlucky hand.

The bottom has been slowly falling out, first in ages past with the initial mechanization that boosted worker productivity, now expanded to AI coding assistants, robotics, and beyond. The traditional path of a worker, where he started on a factory floor or as his career’s unique version of grunt labor and worked slowly up the chain to supervisory and management roles, has been cut off. Now, the path to leadership is entirely separate, with four-year Business Administration or six-year MBA students stepping into the office straight from school to rule over the other half of their companies.

This causes outcomes to bifurcate, spreading from the traditional bell curve (where some still, for nepotistic or meritocratic reasons, were well-rewarded) into a two-humped bimodal distribution. The right hump of the curve represents more opportunity, more success for those able to take it, but it comes at the cost of a steadily declining median outcome.

Bimodality

We see the emergence of bimodality fractally throughout our culture, with different pressures causing the split in each case.

Companies are increasingly staying small or attempting to explode rapidly due to compliance requirements at certain sizes, squeezing out the midsized business. If compliance with Obamacare is mandatory at 200 employees, the optimal strategy is to stay under that number or to grow well past it, amortizing the compliance costs onto a larger workforce.

The sexes are also splitting politically, with Zoomer boys becoming increasingly right-wing while their sisters are driving leftwards. This trend may yet reverse, but there will likely be the largest political gulf between the sexes for years to come. At the limit of this trend, we see places like South Korea developing what amounts to a Man Party and a Woman Party to an even deeper extent than we see in the United States.

Crocodile Tears and the Conservative Movement

Financial outcomes are diverging, with memecoin casinos, online influencer careers, and entrepreneurship roles offering insanely quick paths to unimaginable wealth, but only for a vanishingly small portion of those who try for them. The average outcome, perhaps actually made more likely by the proliferation of aspirational but unlikely dreams, is trending towards debt slavery and menial jobs papered over with somatic soothing. The full horror of the Zoomer job market is best explained by others elsewhere (such as in Billionaire Psycho’s excellent piece “Crocodile Tears and the Conservative Movement”), but it is long since clear that there is no guaranteed reward for those willing to play by the rules and work hard.

Finally, students and their test scores are also splitting into two groups. In conversations with college professors, many have noted that the top members of their classes are in fact getting more competent and seemingly smarter, but their numbers are shrinking and their compatriots are demonstrating disengagement and a lack of skill previously unthinkable.

One likely factor for this is the quality of our tools. Between ChatGPT, Grok, the thousands of other LLMs, Wolfram Alpha, Chegg, and other online options, double-checking homework and getting explanations is now a simple task. But verifying the quality of that help and ensuring true understanding are harder than ever. With the ever-present temptation to look up the answer (and indeed a step-by-step walkthrough), students now must constantly fight the urge to skip to the end and convince themselves they would have gotten there on their own. For those who swing and miss, the desire to fix mistakes and develop understanding seems to be rapidly falling, with professors mentioning how many students are accepting Ds on assignments despite being offered the opportunity to redo portions of the work for an improved grade.

Another likely factor is the deliberate breakage of the link between performance and outcome. The “Everyone Gets a Trophy Generation” trope is well past played out, to the point where it was originally applied to a generation one to two back by now, but there indeed has been deliberate action to unhook rewards and progress from the underlying they supposedly indicate. This is what leads us to results like girls graduating high school with a relatively solid GPA despite being illiterate. No single entity benefited from retying progress in the system to progress in reality.

Therefore, as the feedback loops degrade and the prescribed path results in ever more tepid outcomes, modernity shifts the burden of navigation and choice to the individual. No longer are houses with white picket fences seemingly guaranteed; instead, the modern offering is a two-bedroom flophouse apartment and dreams of a coastal mansion.

Intelligence is critical for success in this decaying modernity, and indeed could be well argued to be the primary variable. But others do exist, correlated as they usually are to intelligence. And while smarts will always be rewarded, a prosocial but naïve engineer who simply puts in work and waits for accolades does not appear to be as rewarded as he may have been in decades past. Instead, the trait we seem to be applying increasing selection pressure for is agency.

What Is Agency?

There are many definitions for agency, but Cambridge gives us a good start:

Agency (noun): the ability to take action or choose what action to take.

The main limitation of this definition is that it is binary. One has, or does not have, the ability to take or select actions.

Expanding the definition beyond the binary and introducing gradations of agency, the picture in full color comes into view:

Agency (noun): the ability and willingness to take actions that others are not.

Intelligence and agency are then related, but relatively independent, variables. Yes, greater intelligence results in a larger search space of possible actions, although the low-impulse-control petty criminal can be said to have high agency when he steals a purse at gunpoint. Such petty criminals are rarely renowned for their great intelligence.

Oversimplifying, we can chart the traits as fully independent axes:

Obviously societies can almost always be relied upon to reward handsomely the High Agency / High Intelligence “Genius” type, but each makes a trade-off between “Criminals” and “Cowards.”

High-trust societies, wealthy in cohesion and cross-domain networking, tend to seek out the underutilized Cowards who are prosocial but bad at advocating for themselves. These are the highly intelligent engineers who provided the backbone for much of the 20th century’s development, the Steve Wozniaks over the Steve Jobses.

Low-trust societies, by contrast, are more balkanized. Information does not flow as far, so extractive strategies, which fleece resources from a community before ducking out, flourish. Consequences may be rare or nonexistent, so in these environments, Criminals who are willing to boundary-test find that the boundaries are no longer a mix of hard (explicit, legal, consequential) and soft (tacit, social, inconsequential), but simply soft and ignorable.

Agency, then, is in some sense the willingness to navigate gray area.

Not all paths that require high levels of agency and defection from group consensus require predation on the unfortunate. Some options, such as The Tortuga Society’s choice to chase overemployment or “job stacking,” may be distasteful to some, but their choice of victims are precisely those least likely to suffer much from the exploitation.

As societal structures ossify and become ever more androgyne, they increasingly reward high levels of agency as well. Nic Dollinger, in a 2024 appearance on Isaac Simpson’s The Carousel, demonstrates this well.

127. Nic Dollinger

Nic’s story located in the back half of the episode demonstrates the agentic choice at pretty much every turn, resulting in large amounts of money saved and many good times had. Briefly, he planned to go to Argentina with a friend, and after the friend canceled, decided, “Screw it, I’m going anyways.” Booking tickets, he found a small hack that cut a large amount of fare cost if he “self-checked” his bag via two different airlines. Nic and Colombian customs had a miscommunication, and he missed his flight as a result.

Now, the average American would have no idea what to do in this situation; he doesn’t even possess the agency to get into it. But four steps well past the point where most WASPs would tap out and meekly book a new flight home, Nic doubled down. Picking up the phone, he faked a light mental disability to freak the airline help desk out and was soon on a flight out with a full refund in his pocket.

This sort of willingness to step outside the prescribed frame, both generating and attempting actions unthinkable to the Regular Prosocial Joe, is simply rewarded now.

The worry is that it is quickly becoming required.

Developing Agency

Okay, agency is rewarded by our modern society. It’s increasingly becoming required for success.

But how does one develop it?

Agency development can be broken down into three stages: Low to Medium, Medium to High, and High to Extreme.

Moving from Low to Medium agency is a path well-trodden. This is the domain of those like Jordan Peterson, advocating cleaning bedrooms and making beds. Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) and small goals, then achieving them, testing the edges of comfort zones, and similar activities.

The ultimate goal of Medium agency is to have sufficient self-direction to meet society’s expectations. That’s not a particularly high bar, and it’s not one that’s well rewarded, but it is a start.

Good metrics for success here are:

• A base level of physical fitness,

• Something of a grooming routine and standard of self-care,

• Full-time employment, and

• A friend group.

Moving from Medium to High agency is where the fun and the danger come in.

No longer is it sufficient to muster the discipline and drive to walk along the charted path; now, it’s required also to take command of the charting. Boundary-testing is important here, with minor breakages of individual comfort zones and societal expectations developing a comfort with ignoring truly unimportant conventions.

Options here might include:

• Skipping scanning in at the gym (made easier by the aforementioned physical fitness and grooming standards, along with charisma);

• Planning friend group outings and taking responsibility for others having a good time;

• Jaywalking and other minorly illegal activity; and

• Exploring mechanical rooms, breaker boxes, or roof accesses, just to explore and see if they’re open.

The High agency individual follows his own path, but does remain somewhat tethered to societal expectations and conventions. He is unlikely to violate any truly critical social norms, and is much more likely to be a high-level individual contributor and perhaps job-hopper over an entrepreneur or scam artist.

Good metrics for success here are:

• A high level of physical fitness;

• One or two dangerous/outdoorsy hobbies;

• A unique sense of style that understands but does not conform to societal norms;

• Full-time employment at a career with clear opportunities for growth; and

• A high-value friend group that sets expectations and demands performance.

Few, if any, men need to continue on to Extreme agency. This is the land usually best reserved for those with sufficient resources to cushion its costs and deliver them from the trouble likely found there.

Boundary-testing becomes boundary-ignoring, and those with Extreme agency see little reason to let anyone other than themselves define or constrict their behavior. It’s important to note, however, that those who blindly do the opposite of what they are told are not Extreme or even High agency — they are still letting others define their actions, just in mirror image. Rather, those at the agentic limit fundamentally disregard the opinions of others and societal norms, instead tending to follow an idiosyncratic ideology and belief structure that hopefully works well for the individual.

Extreme Agents might:

• Break rules directly in front of those tasked with enforcing them, such as flouting strict dress code rules and convincing waitstaff to allow seating anyways;

• Start their own companies or chart new courses for the ones they work for;

• Cut in line, ignore social cues, and demand special treatment;

• Carve out special consideration for themselves without care for the broader implications;

• Lead a digital nomad lifestyle, somehow always having cash but never clearly earning it;

• Start a mercenary company to carve out a small kingdom in underdeveloped countries; or

• Explain the entire Minecraft movie to a crowded elevator.

This level of agency is not necessary, and can in fact be actively harmful if the ultimate goal is the standard Good Life outcome of a happy marriage and family. Extreme agency can be more of a curse than a blessing, and those with it may find more value in focusing on increasing their prosociality and discipline rather than eking out another level to the extremes.

Much like how injections of testosterone can increase one’s prosocial behavior, injections of agency can free the individual from fear-based action. Somewhat counterintuitively, fraternal groups can be one of the strongest drivers of agentic development, with the classic refrain of “do it, you won’t” providing the foundation for everything from small cliff dives to (most likely) the Moon landing. As possibility horizons expand, with developments like AI and coding allowing any capable young man to reach ever higher, selecting which heights to chase is ever more important. Power is once again decentralizing — home firearm manufacturing flourishes, government power vacuums open, and volatility returns.

May you and your brothers aim high, and may you reach those heights.