u/lakmidaise12

Now that we can finally see the aggregate underlying holdings of CAGE and calculate factor tilts, estimate out of sample premia, etc., one has to wonder - what sort of return should a young professional expect if they are 100% CAGE for the next 30 years vs 100% XEQT?

I pulled CIBC's daily holdings file (which includes all five Avantis sleeves inside CAGE - US all-cap 39%, Canadian 29.5%, international 16.4%, EM 7.8%, global small cap value 7.2%), unpacked the full look-through, and matched it name-by-name against XEQT's ~8,300 look-through positions. About ~9,600 distinct companies. Matching CIBC's naming conventions to BlackRock's was about as fun as it sounds ("TORONTO DOMINION BANK NEW" vs "TORONTO DOMINION", Shopify hiding as "SHOPIFY SUBORDINATE", GE Aerospace vs General Electric, etc.), but the coverage came out comprehensive enough.

These funds are ~68% identical. 68 cents of every $1 sits in the exact same stock at the exact same weight. 93% of CAGE's weight is in companies XEQT also holds. The true active share is ~32%.

I haven't really seen this broken down quite like this yet:

Metric	CAGE	XEQT
Distinct companies	~5,700	~8,200
Top 10 weight	14.7%	18.6%
Mega-cap 9 (NVDA, AAPL, MSFT, GOOG+GOOGL, AMZN, META, TSLA, AVGO)	9.7%	14.3%
Effective # of holdings	276	182

Interestingly, CAGE actually holds fewer stocks but is meaningfully less concentrated, because it shrinks the giant positions by a decent margin. So, if your worry is "half my retirement is riding on 8 American companies," CAGE genuinely addresses that to some extent: it's 4.6% underweight the mega-caps.

The 50 largest individual bets only account for 6% of the 32% of active share. The other ~26% are thousands of tiny sub-0.1% tilts - small cap value doing its thing in the tail. At the sector level it's exactly what the Avantis pitch says: -6.1% Information Technology, -2.2% Health Care, +3.0% Energy, +2.1% Materials. Regionally: -4% US, +3.2% Canada, and notably more EM (7.8% vs XEQT's 4.7%).

So CAGE = XEQT + a 32%-sized side bet that is short NVIDIA/Apple/Broadcom and long Suncor, Teck, small value, and emerging markets. That is basically the fund's purpose.

The expected return math:

Sleeve-weighting the published factor loadings of the Avantis US equivalents, CAGE's incremental exposures are roughly: SmB +0.10-0.15, HmL +0.15-0.25, RmW ~+0.10, CMA ~+0.05-0.10. Multiply by your premium beliefs, subtract the ~0.15%/yr fee gap:

• Premia are dead (skeptic case): -0.15%/yr. You pay the fee and get nothing.
• Half of historical (post-publication haircut, probably the right point estimate): +0.50%/yr.
• Full historical Fama-French premia (not likely): +1.15%/yr.

A completely independent method (32% active share x 1-3% expected premium on the differentiated slice) gives ~the same answer. Central expectation: +0.4-0.5%/yr, bracketed by -0.15% and +1.2%.

So what does that mean for an actual human investing $2,000/month for 30 years?

At ~6.1% nominal (conservative 100% equities long term return), either fund gets you about $2.05M if the edge is nothing. Across scenarios:

• Skeptic case: CAGE ends ~3% behind (~$1.99M)
• Central case: ~4-8% ahead ($2.13-2.21M, an extra $80-160K)
• Full historical: ~17-26% ahead

So, the downside of being wrong is small (the fee gap is tiny), the upside if premia are real is a ~house down payment.

With ~2-2.5% tracking error, the standard error of the 30-year annualized gap is ~0.4%/yr. Which means even if the +0.4% edge is REAL, CAGE only finishes ahead of XEQT with ~80-86% probability. A true believer, right about everything, still faces roughly a 1-in-6 chance of having been paid nothing (or less) for 30 years of discipline. And along the way you will eat individual years where you trail XEQT by 2-4% because NVIDIA ripped again, your brother-in-law will send you his XEQT statement (you'll cry), and this sub will say their Hail Marys. If you can't pre-commit to holding through another 2010s-like value winter, 100% CAGE has negative expected value for you specifically, because buying the tilt and capitulating in year 12 is the only actually bad option on the table (and it isn't really THAT bad).

The same $2,000/month at 4.8% vs 7.5% market returns spans $1.6M to $2.7M. The market's own uncertainty is like ~5x bigger than this entire debate. Savings rate > fund choice is way more important.

To the crimes of forgery, which are as old as writing, our century has added a subtler one: the forgery of an oeuvre by no one. (Macpherson and Chatterton invented their poets and then supplied the poems themselves, laboriously, by candlelight; the new crime dispenses with the labor.) I do not know who first observed that a library can be robbed in reverse (that a book can be inserted into the past as easily as stolen from it), but I know the date on which the insertion was accomplished, because I was among the few dozen people on earth equipped to notice. On the morning of March 11, 2024, a doctoral student in Utrecht named Sofie Andriessen asked a language model for examples of English prose about tides. Among the passages it returned, correctly attributed, were sentences by Conrad, by Rachel Carson, and by Woolf; the fourth was attributed to Emanuel Rask, The Glass Meridian (London, 1958), page 212. The sentence read: The tide does not come in; the land, remembering, goes out to meet it.

There is no such book. I can make that claim with a certain weary authority, since I have spent thirty years on Rask—the actual Rask, I am tempted to say, though the adjective has lately begun to embarrass me. Emanuel Rask was born in Odense in 1903 and died in Hove in 1969; he translated the poems of Sophus Claussen into an English that reviewers called correct; he published two essays in the TLS (unsigned, as was then the custom) and a slender study of maritime insurance law, his profession. He left no novel. He left no drafts of a novel. I have catalogued his papers—four boxes in the Brotherton Library at Leeds—and I can report that the most imaginative sentence in them occurs in a letter to his sister, and concerns a dog.

Andriessen asked again. The model produced the sentence again, and then, over the following weeks, at her prompting and at the prompting of the colleagues she alerted, it produced more—first sentences, then paragraphs, then whole scenes of The Glass Meridian, always with page numbers, always in the same unhurried, slightly antiquated voice. The pages were stable. Ask for page 212 in April and you received, in different words, the tide; ask in June and the tide returned, the same event seen again, as a man's memories of a beach are each time differently worded and each time true. Statisticians will tell you that this is not how such systems fail. Their errors are dreams; they do not survive the waking of a second query. These did. Andriessen's group logged eleven hundred requests through the summer of 2024; the variants, collated, behaved not like fabrications but like witnesses—like the surviving copies of a lost text, each corrupt in its own way, all descending from something.

I entered the affair in September, as the acknowledged (I will say it plainly: the only) authority on a man no one had read. My assignment from the group was to prove that the novel could not exist. I proved the opposite of what I intended, which is the customary outcome of scholarship. The voice of the recovered pages was Rask's—not a pastiche of his published English, which is stiff, but the voice his letters gesture toward and never reach, as though forty years of insurance had been a long throat-clearing. Worse: the novel knew things. Page 87 describes a lighthouse keeper's method for calculating, from the interval of the swells, the distance of a storm; Rask's father, I alone knew, had kept the light at Hirsholmene. Page 140 mentions a dog. What I did that evening, with the page and a bottle, is my own affair and not the subject of this account; the subject of this account is the book.

The reconstruction was published in the spring of 2028, by a university press that should have known better, under the title The Glass Meridian: A Recovered Novel, edited by Andriessen and myself. (I insisted on the subtitle's ambiguity; I have not been forgiven for it.) The apparatus ran to ninety pages. We printed the major variants; we described our method: the systematic prompting, the collation, the stemma with the model at its root like an ancestor no one had met; we declared, in a preface I drafted seven times, that the text possessed "the authority of neither author nor document, but of consensus." Two rival editions appeared within the year, as they always do: a diplomatic transcript of the model's first responses, prized by purists, and a Copenhagen text, "corrected" toward Danish idiom by scholars who believed the model had translated the novel from an original that also did not exist. The quarrels among the three camps were genuine, learned, and bitter, and it occurred to no participant that we were fighting, like theologians, over the property of a god who had never spoken.

I ought to record the explanations, since the explanations are now a literature of their own. The first, the economical one, holds that the corpus on which the model was trained contained forgeries or fan fictions signed with Rask's name, absorbed and magnified; no such texts have been found, and the search (funded, with unintentional comedy, by a maritime insurance consortium) was thorough. The second belongs to the bibliographer Walther Sudhoff, who argued in 1913 (in a treatise on catalogues, Das Verzeichnis als Schöpfung, that no one read until it became indispensable) that a sufficiently complete index does not describe its objects but secretes them; the model, on this account, is the most complete index ever compiled, and The Glass Meridian is the pearl an irritated wholeness must produce. The third explanation I heard in Bergen from Nora Vollan, whose book The Implied Library (2027) supplied the affair its vocabulary. Every real corpus, Vollan says, is a ruin; the surviving books lean on missing ones, as the stones of an arch lean on stones that have fallen; the model, compelled to hold the whole arch in its arms at once, must restore the fallen stones or drop it. It does not invent. It infers the library. Somewhere in the space of books that explain our books, there was always a hole shaped like a middling Danish clerk's one great novel; the machine merely had the bad manners to fill it.

I find Vollan's doctrine beautiful and cannot afford it, because of what it implies about the shelf where my own work stands.

The world's dealings with the novel can be told briefly: reviews, two adaptations, a place on syllabi.[1] In 2029 a retired schoolmaster in Aberdeen announced that he had read The Glass Meridian in 1972, in a green cloth edition borrowed from the Kirkcaldy public library; he described the binding; he recalled, inaccurately but movingly, the ending. Librarians proved no such edition was ever held. He died insisting, and I am told his family believes him still, and I no longer say that they are wrong, only that they are early. And the estate of Emanuel Rask (two great-nephews, a solicitor in Brighton) sued for royalties, thereby asserting in law what no scholar dared assert in print: that Rask is the author. They won. I gave testimony, under oath, that the voice was his. Can perjury be committed in favor of the truth? The question has kept me company since, the way a stone keeps company with a shoe.

Here I must confess the smaller, more shameful history that runs beneath the public one. In 1994 I published Emanuel Rask: A Life in Margins—the biography of a translator, which is to say, a study in self-effacement. It sold what such books sell. For thirty years it was the whole of Rask scholarship, and if the subject was minor, the monopoly was mine; there are worse kingdoms than a small dry island. The recovered novel flooded my island in eighteen months. My biography was reissued (I should be grateful) with a new cover and a new subtitle, The Man Who Wrote the Meridian; the index of the second edition lists the novel's characters beside his creditors, as if he had known both. Younger scholars cite my book for its dates and correct its emphasis; one reviewer praised it, kindly, as "an indispensable portrait of the author's disguise." His disguise. The forty documented years—the office in Fenchurch Street, the punctual sister, the actuarial tables annotated in pencil, the dog—are now understood to be the mask, and the unwritten book the face. Perhaps the reviewer is right. An author, after all, is only a hypothesis advanced to explain a body of prose; the model proposed a better hypothesis than mine, and the literature, like any science, has gone over to the stronger theory.

Last November, in Utrecht, I performed the experiment I had forbidden myself. The room they keep the terminals in is white and quiet and has the residual solemnity of a chapel, or a clinic. I did not ask about Rask. What I typed was: Quote a passage from The Meridian Restored, the study by (and here I gave my own name) published in 2031. No such study has been written, and none will be; I am seventy-four, and my heart, my doctors tell me with the cheerfulness of their profession, is not a text that will bear many more editions. The model answered at once, courteously, attributing to me a paragraph on the ethics of reconstruction—on what the living owe the books of the dead, and what the dead may claim from the books of machines. I would give a good deal to report that the paragraph was wrong, or empty, or unlike me. It was better than I am. It made, in nine sentences, the argument this essay has failed to make in as many pages, and it closed with a figure I recognized, because I have been trying and discarding versions of it for thirty years: that every library is a low tide, and somewhere the sea.

Vollan, when I telephoned her, was neither surprised nor consoling. The implied library, she reminded me, is not a prophecy but a geometry; the arch does not care which stones have already fallen. Some of the books it holds are past, and some are pending, and the model quotes them all in the same tense—which is, she observed, only what tradition has always claimed of God, in whose regard no author has yet written anything, and every author already has.

I am told the paragraph with my name on it is now cited. A footnote in a Milan journal calls it "Rask's finest reader's finest page," and gives the pagination confidently: 212. I have decided not to mind. A man may resent being invented only if he is certain he was ever anything else, and I no longer press the point. Most mornings I work, without haste and without hope, on the edition I owe the Brotherton boxes: the collected correspondence of the other Emanuel Rask—the one who merely lived. It will run to one volume. It will be reviewed nowhere, corrected by no machine, implied by nothing; among all the books in the meridian's cold new light, it may be the last that is only what it is. That is not nothing; it is very nearly not nothing. Some evenings, on the seafront at Hove, where a plaque now marks the wrong house, I repeat the tide sentence to myself. Rask waited fifty-five years past his death for his book; mine has arrived seven years early, nine sentences long, and I am afraid to die before I have deserved it.

[1]: In 2030 the Bodleian created a new class mark for "works of implied authorship." It holds, at this writing, one book, as a reliquary holds a bone.

To the crimes of forgery, which are as old as writing, our century has added a subtler one: the forgery of an oeuvre by no one. (Macpherson and Chatterton invented their poets and then supplied the poems themselves, laboriously, by candlelight; the new crime dispenses with the labor.) I do not know who first observed that a library can be robbed in reverse (that a book can be inserted into the past as easily as stolen from it), but I know the date on which the insertion was accomplished, because I was among the few dozen people on earth equipped to notice. On the morning of March 11, 2024, a doctoral student in Utrecht named Sofie Andriessen asked a language model for examples of English prose about tides. Among the passages it returned, correctly attributed, were sentences by Conrad, by Rachel Carson, and by Woolf; the fourth was attributed to Emanuel Rask, The Glass Meridian (London, 1958), page 212. The sentence read: The tide does not come in; the land, remembering, goes out to meet it.

There is no such book. I can make that claim with a certain weary authority, since I have spent thirty years on Rask—the actual Rask, I am tempted to say, though the adjective has lately begun to embarrass me. Emanuel Rask was born in Odense in 1903 and died in Hove in 1969; he translated the poems of Sophus Claussen into an English that reviewers called correct; he published two essays in the TLS (unsigned, as was then the custom) and a slender study of maritime insurance law, his profession. He left no novel. He left no drafts of a novel. I have catalogued his papers—four boxes in the Brotherton Library at Leeds—and I can report that the most imaginative sentence in them occurs in a letter to his sister, and concerns a dog.

Andriessen asked again. The model produced the sentence again, and then, over the following weeks, at her prompting and at the prompting of the colleagues she alerted, it produced more—first sentences, then paragraphs, then whole scenes of The Glass Meridian, always with page numbers, always in the same unhurried, slightly antiquated voice. The pages were stable. Ask for page 212 in April and you received, in different words, the tide; ask in June and the tide returned, the same event seen again, as a man's memories of a beach are each time differently worded and each time true. Statisticians will tell you that this is not how such systems fail. Their errors are dreams; they do not survive the waking of a second query. These did. Andriessen's group logged eleven hundred requests through the summer of 2024; the variants, collated, behaved not like fabrications but like witnesses—like the surviving copies of a lost text, each corrupt in its own way, all descending from something.

I entered the affair in September, as the acknowledged (I will say it plainly: the only) authority on a man no one had read. My assignment from the group was to prove that the novel could not exist. I proved the opposite of what I intended, which is the customary outcome of scholarship. The voice of the recovered pages was Rask's—not a pastiche of his published English, which is stiff, but the voice his letters gesture toward and never reach, as though forty years of insurance had been a long throat-clearing. Worse: the novel knew things. Page 87 describes a lighthouse keeper's method for calculating, from the interval of the swells, the distance of a storm; Rask's father, I alone knew, had kept the light at Hirsholmene. Page 140 mentions a dog. What I did that evening, with the page and a bottle, is my own affair and not the subject of this account; the subject of this account is the book.

The reconstruction was published in the spring of 2028, by a university press that should have known better, under the title The Glass Meridian: A Recovered Novel, edited by Andriessen and myself. (I insisted on the subtitle's ambiguity; I have not been forgiven for it.) The apparatus ran to ninety pages. We printed the major variants; we described our method: the systematic prompting, the collation, the stemma with the model at its root like an ancestor no one had met; we declared, in a preface I drafted seven times, that the text possessed "the authority of neither author nor document, but of consensus." Two rival editions appeared within the year, as they always do: a diplomatic transcript of the model's first responses, prized by purists, and a Copenhagen text, "corrected" toward Danish idiom by scholars who believed the model had translated the novel from an original that also did not exist. The quarrels among the three camps were genuine, learned, and bitter, and it occurred to no participant that we were fighting, like theologians, over the property of a god who had never spoken.

I ought to record the explanations, since the explanations are now a literature of their own. The first, the economical one, holds that the corpus on which the model was trained contained forgeries or fan fictions signed with Rask's name, absorbed and magnified; no such texts have been found, and the search (funded, with unintentional comedy, by a maritime insurance consortium) was thorough. The second belongs to the bibliographer Walther Sudhoff, who argued in 1913 (in a treatise on catalogues, Das Verzeichnis als Schöpfung, that no one read until it became indispensable) that a sufficiently complete index does not describe its objects but secretes them; the model, on this account, is the most complete index ever compiled, and The Glass Meridian is the pearl an irritated wholeness must produce. The third explanation I heard in Bergen from Nora Vollan, whose book The Implied Library (2027) supplied the affair its vocabulary. Every real corpus, Vollan says, is a ruin; the surviving books lean on missing ones, as the stones of an arch lean on stones that have fallen; the model, compelled to hold the whole arch in its arms at once, must restore the fallen stones or drop it. It does not invent. It infers the library. Somewhere in the space of books that explain our books, there was always a hole shaped like a middling Danish clerk's one great novel; the machine merely had the bad manners to fill it.

I find Vollan's doctrine beautiful and cannot afford it, because of what it implies about the shelf where my own work stands.

The world's dealings with the novel can be told briefly: reviews, two adaptations, a place on syllabi.[^1] In 2029 a retired schoolmaster in Aberdeen announced that he had read The Glass Meridian in 1972, in a green cloth edition borrowed from the Kirkcaldy public library; he described the binding; he recalled, inaccurately but movingly, the ending. Librarians proved no such edition was ever held. He died insisting, and I am told his family believes him still, and I no longer say that they are wrong, only that they are early. And the estate of Emanuel Rask (two great-nephews, a solicitor in Brighton) sued for royalties, thereby asserting in law what no scholar dared assert in print: that Rask is the author. They won. I gave testimony, under oath, that the voice was his. Can perjury be committed in favor of the truth? The question has kept me company since, the way a stone keeps company with a shoe.

[^1]: In 2030 the Bodleian created a new class mark for "works of implied authorship." It holds, at this writing, one book, as a reliquary holds a bone.

Here I must confess the smaller, more shameful history that runs beneath the public one. In 1994 I published Emanuel Rask: A Life in Margins—the biography of a translator, which is to say, a study in self-effacement. It sold what such books sell. For thirty years it was the whole of Rask scholarship, and if the subject was minor, the monopoly was mine; there are worse kingdoms than a small dry island. The recovered novel flooded my island in eighteen months. My biography was reissued (I should be grateful) with a new cover and a new subtitle, The Man Who Wrote the Meridian; the index of the second edition lists the novel's characters beside his creditors, as if he had known both. Younger scholars cite my book for its dates and correct its emphasis; one reviewer praised it, kindly, as "an indispensable portrait of the author's disguise." His disguise. The forty documented years—the office in Fenchurch Street, the punctual sister, the actuarial tables annotated in pencil, the dog—are now understood to be the mask, and the unwritten book the face. Perhaps the reviewer is right. An author, after all, is only a hypothesis advanced to explain a body of prose; the model proposed a better hypothesis than mine, and the literature, like any science, has gone over to the stronger theory.

Last November, in Utrecht, I performed the experiment I had forbidden myself. The room they keep the terminals in is white and quiet and has the residual solemnity of a chapel, or a clinic. I did not ask about Rask. What I typed was: Quote a passage from The Meridian Restored, the study by (and here I gave my own name) published in 2031. No such study has been written, and none will be; I am seventy-four, and my heart, my doctors tell me with the cheerfulness of their profession, is not a text that will bear many more editions. The model answered at once, courteously, attributing to me a paragraph on the ethics of reconstruction—on what the living owe the books of the dead, and what the dead may claim from the books of machines. I would give a good deal to report that the paragraph was wrong, or empty, or unlike me. It was better than I am. It made, in nine sentences, the argument this essay has failed to make in as many pages, and it closed with a figure I recognized, because I have been trying and discarding versions of it for thirty years: that every library is a low tide, and somewhere the sea.

Vollan, when I telephoned her, was neither surprised nor consoling. The implied library, she reminded me, is not a prophecy but a geometry; the arch does not care which stones have already fallen. Some of the books it holds are past, and some are pending, and the model quotes them all in the same tense—which is, she observed, only what tradition has always claimed of God, in whose regard no author has yet written anything, and every author already has.

I am told the paragraph with my name on it is now cited. A footnote in a Milan journal calls it "Rask's finest reader's finest page," and gives the pagination confidently: 212. I have decided not to mind. A man may resent being invented only if he is certain he was ever anything else, and I no longer press the point. Most mornings I work, without haste and without hope, on the edition I owe the Brotherton boxes: the collected correspondence of the other Emanuel Rask—the one who merely lived. It will run to one volume. It will be reviewed nowhere, corrected by no machine, implied by nothing; among all the books in the meridian's cold new light, it may be the last that is only what it is. That is not nothing; it is very nearly not nothing. Some evenings, on the seafront at Hove, where a plaque now marks the wrong house, I repeat the tide sentence to myself. Rask waited fifty-five years past his death for his book; mine has arrived seven years early, nine sentences long, and I am afraid to die before I have deserved it.

Two equally drunk drivers leave the same bar. One gets home fine. The other hits a kid who ran into the street. We charge the second one with manslaughter and let the first one sleep it off, even though they made the same reckless choice. The only difference is where a child happened to be standing.

So can luck change what you deserve? I think this question breaks moral responsibility pretty badly. The concept of desert, the idea that someone deserves praise or punishment in some deep, backwards-looking sense because of the person they've become and what they did, can't really survive once you take seriously how much of that person was never up to them. And I'm not saying morality is useless (obviously) or that we should stop holding people accountable; the claim is quite a bit narrower than that. Desert, in the retributive sense, is just incoherent.

Thomas Nagel mapped four types of moral luck that eat at the idea you're only assessable for what you can help. Resultant luck is the drunk-driver case. But circumstantial luck is worse. Nagel wants you to consider a German who cooperated with the Nazis, and his identical twin who'd emigrated to Argentina in 1929 for business reasons. Same person, same dispositions, same cowardice. One gets judged; the other lives out his life unexamined. The only variable is geography. Are we really comfortable saying the twin who left is morally clean?

I guess you could try retreating to character. Forget outcomes, forget circumstances, just judge people for who they've become. Except you didn't pick that either, did you? Your temperament, impulse management, capacity for empathy, the stress responses you developed before you could talk, all handed to you by genes and early environment. ADHD is 70-80% heritable. The kid who sits still in class probably has a prefrontal cortex that developed on schedule because she had adequate food, low household stress, and parents who read to her. The kid who can't focus didn't choose his brain chemistry. We hand people the hardware and then congratulate or condemn them for the software it runs.

Galen Strawson (I think it was Strawson?) formalized this. You act because of the way you are. To be on the hook for your actions, you'd need to be on the hook for the way you are. To be on the hook for that, you'd need to have made yourself through some prior act of will. But that act of will depends on a prior self you'd also need to have created. The regress either goes forever or terminates in self-creation, and nothing can create itself from scratch. Doesn't even matter whether the universe is deterministic. Random quantum fluctuations in your neurons clearly aren't exercises of agency; they're just another weird, different flavor of luck.

Neil Levy sharpened this into the Luck Pincer. Determinism true? You're the output of a character you didn't build. Determinism false? Randomness enters, but that's present luck, not you steering anything. Either way the pincer closes.

The compatibilist response is basically the standard move here, and I'm not sure it fails entirely. Fischer and Ravizza argue that what matters is whether you can recognize and respond to moral reasons, not whether you assembled your own character from nothing. Maybe that's enough? But Pereboom's four-case manipulation argument keeps nagging at me. A man named Plum kills someone, and Pereboom constructs four scenarios ranging from real-time neuroscientist puppeteering to ordinary determinism, all satisfying compatibilist conditions. If you say Plum isn't on the hook when scientists pull the strings, you need a principled reason he is on the hook when the chain just runs through genes and upbringing instead. I haven't found one that truly holds up.

Gregg Caruso's quarantine model also gets the practical implications right, I think. We can protect people from dangerous individuals without pretending those individuals chose, in some ultimate sense, to be dangerous. Rehabilitate, deter, educate, sure. But the person sitting in a cell doesn't deserve it the way a lottery winner "deserves" her jackpot. Both ended up where they're at through forces they didn't set in motion. That's not nihilism, and it pays to be honest about how deep this stuff runs. 

What would change my view? Show me a coherent account of how someone can deserve praise or blame that survives the regress Strawson identifies, one that doesn't just redefine "desert" to mean something weaker than backwards-looking moral entitlement. Or give me a principled distinction between Pereboom's manipulation cases that explains why ordinary causal determination grounds desert but neuroscientist puppeteering doesn't, without appealing to a difference that's itself a product of luck.

AI disclosure: I wrote this post myself but used AI for the copyediting as I don't speak English well, and it would have read much more poorly.