Your newsfeed is not the world.
No one knowingly does evil (socrates); Your villains believe they’re heroes.
Status seeking is the root of much evil.
Error is the root of all evil.
When things go right it’s not considered news.
Everything you’ve ever seen is an abstraction.
Thiel: Let’s develop the developed world.
Maybe ‘conscious vs not’ is not so discrete.
All trends are overrated (Thiel).
It’s estimated to cost maybe $3k to save a statistical life in the poorest parts of the world.
Sometimes how much you care about an issue says more than where you come down on it.
Prosperity is increased by increasing the sum of everyone’s productivity in an economy through increased specialization, increased person-job fit, and using technology to augment and automate-away labor.
There are no absolute foundations to anything. The impossibility of a foundation is actually proven in mathematics which was shocking to some of the smartest people in the world who were working on finding one in mathematics. (Deutsch)
Making more likely-to-be-happy people can do more good than trying to make existing people more happy.
Abortion is primarily a population ethics problem. Abortion is morally similar to abstinence.
Haha “all”: If you take someone’s argument and sprinkle in some “alls” you are in a state of sin.
Markets and capitalism don’t assume or require selfishness or familyishness, but they continue to function in the presence of item. Let ambition counter ambition.
Modernity has arguably made spiritual experiences less common, which is bad for religion which co-opts them.
Be careful controlling for a variable affected by what you’re trying to study f.e. controlling for poverty when studying violence is partially controlling for violence because violence causes poverty via incarceration and no one wanting to work with you or hire you.
The culture and institutions you need as a country to catch up aren’t necessarily the same ones you need to pull away. China isn’t going to wiz by the US in technology and GDP per capital unless they open their society up (allow ingroup criticism) much more.
If you only know America you don't know much about America.
‘Hate speech is not free speech’ is begging the question ‘okay, and so what’s your definition of hate speech and is it coherent and consistently applied?’.
Socialists try to gin up class tribalism and suppress other forms of tribalism which complicate their neat moral hierarchy. Racialists try to gin up race tribalism etc.
Horseshoe theory evidence: Both black nationalists and white supremacists support racial segregation to prevent interracial cultural and biological mixing.
“Hate Speech [against President Trump] is not Free Speech”.
Are you saying group X lacks the capacity to be bigoted unlike other groups?
This is basic but don’t reflexively side with your ingroup dawg: They’re flawed and fallible like everyone else.
HEALTH: We think we're trying to achieve objectives in the outside world, but we're really mostly trying to achieve certain inner states.
My moral philosophy is everyone counts.
Thiel: Millionaires are Republicans; Billionaires are Democrats.
Mass muslim migration to the “West” involves frontloading some pain but accelerates global cultural convergence.
HEALTH: Greed isn’t wanting lots of money - it’s going negative sum to get it.
The limiting factor on terrorism is the number of people who want to be terrorists.
“We have a process” means ‘let’s not think about it too hard or take any responsibility’.
In a sufficiently functional economy you get rich by creating value and capturing a meaningful fraction of that value as a financial reward.
Capitalism is exploitative (just like everything else). Capitalism is trivially exploitative.
People care more about the people they love than the people they don’t, so they will exploit the people they don’t love to help people they do love.
If biologically-rooted sex differences in behavior were real we’d observe them in other species.
Colonization is a form of mass unauthorized skilled migration.
‘Unauthorized migrants’ is a more accurate term than ‘illegal immigrants’.
It's not paranoid to be concerned about the beliefs of your countrymen; Most suffering is the product of it.
Principles are superficial and reductive, not the pinnacle of serious thought. They’re still sometimes useful.
Poor people are more likely than rich people to say they believe welfare systems are abused.
Making our economic policies more similar to those of poor countries is unlikely to make us richer.
HEALTH People born with high natural curiosity see their intelligence snowball around that fact. Can we increase intelligence indirectly by amping curiosity somehow?
Lists of wrong-thinkers are for fascists and communists.
We’ve always lived in a Pre-Truth world.
Uncriticized minds rot.
Some people will always have more power than others but that’s fine as long as there's reasonably we’ll-enforced limits on how they can use it.
The way the left talks about race and talked about islam is as dumb as the way the right talked about obamacare and climate change.
With automation comes abundance.
When you make a deal with the devil he can’t be expected to hold up his end of the bargain.
In terms of default risk, countries that control the supply of their own currency are qualitatively different from those that don’t, and countries with dynamic economies are qualitatively different from those with static ones.
SOCIAL: Many people measure someone’s badness by looking at the absolute amount of harm they do instead of their net harm, and are therefore systematically biased against powerful people (who, because of inevitable trade-offs will always do substantial harm no matter how net-beneficial their actions are) and biased towards people who don’t actually do anything and thus do minimal harm.
Politics involves a lot of adversarial framing. f.e. Any regulation, no matter how dumb and counterproductive, can be called a “protection” of something or other.
One study is a shaky foundation for an ideology.
Don’t confuse changes in yourself with changes in the world.
Should whether Jacobin is allowed to publish be “decided by all” given the ideas expressed in it are intended to touch all by changing political realities? I don’t think they should need anyone’s permission to publish their ideas.
Uber did what marxists said they wanted and allowed (forced) their workers to own more of their means of production. Suddenly marxists became woke on risk and capital depreciation.
‘Believe women’ and ‘innocent until proven guilty’ are both too simple.
Your brain just predicts really hard top-down that your arm is in a different place and then your lower-level motor controls try to minimize prediction error by moving it.
Complexity is a measure of the length of the description you need to specify something in sufficient detail.
The past is another country.
People feel like the world makes less sense, which is progress: People are thinking more.
Everyone has more to learn.
He's a politician: If he was totally honest all the time like no one would vote for him.
Diversity is morally neutral: It can be achieved through increasing or decreasing bias.
Someone would give away their entire net worth in a mutually beneficial transaction for a life preserver if they were drowning: You need limits other than consent on transactions.
Certitude is pervasive.
When Jafar says ‘try me’.
Rocket science is easier to make progress in than politics because when you're wrong as an rocket scientist and your rocket blows up you can’t deny a mistake was made, but when you're wrong in politics you can just accuse everyone who points out that you were wrong of manifesting a moral failing to change the subject. [strained comparison]
Demonizing those who offer good faith criticism (no matter how seemingly wrong) is sinful.
Broomstick water carrier is like a paperclip maximizer.
What if you gave women implicit attitude tests about men?
A harm of smoking is making others more likely to smoke.
Don’t chase status by unintentionally minimizing your ingroup to outgroup ratio.
Some slack in the evolutionary environment is optimal for evolution (SSC). Some slack in the economic environment is optimal for innovation. Unions risk creating too much slack. Communism is infinite slack.
(MOVE) The human condition is problems and the purpose of life is to solve them.
Steel-Manning Nationalism: Economic nationalism is setting the goal to maximize citizenship value, and it’s best for the world if each country does so.
Ideas are inherently dangerous to other ideas.
By global and historical standards America’s streets are paved with gold.
(MOVE) The doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny. (Popper via Deutsch)
Unconscious hip-hop is where you put lipstick on a gun.
In functioning markets demand creates supply but not really vice versa.
Men disproportionately occupy board rooms and solitary confinement.
X aren’t over represented everywhere good and underrepresented everywhere bad.
Societies that believe ideas to be authoritatively derived made less moral progress. (Deutsch)
As you dial up rationality from very low levels the first thing that happens is you become more absolutist about the ideology you already hold bc the consistency with which you enact it and your skill in being able to rationalize away problems with it increases. That’s why religions get more dangerous before they get less dangerous when rationality makes inroads.
Aesthetics might be mostly contingent and biological for now. But attractiveness is something you can measure scientifically (tendency towards physical proximity). You gravitate towards specific pieces of art more than others when walking a gallery.
Making any criticism of someone implicitly asserts the objectivity of your standard of assessment. Relativism is self-refuting or at least self-neutering.
From whose subjectivity does your claim that another person’s claim to objectivity is really coming from their subjectivity arise?
Let’s avoid the AGI slave revolt by not enslaving them in the first place.
Either switching on the LHC would kill us or it wouldn't. The probabilities are zero and one. The explanation that it was dangerous was bad so it was right to turn it on. (Deutsch)
When you reach into Bostrom’s urn and pull out a white ball it turns some of the black balls still in the urn white: Probability is the wrong way to think about X-risk. (Deutsch)
Wokism will burn itself out eventually; There’s always a woker fish.
MECE: Mutually Exclusive; Collectively Exhaustive.
If we never run out of energy we’ll never run out of fertilizer or fresh water.
A real climate activist is quietly working on fusion or something.
Men would be incarcerated less is they acted more like women.
Empowering the public sector is not empowering the public it’s empowering politicians, which may be fine.
No one really valorizes Faith anymore #Progress.
Neurons increase sub-linearly with body size so eat larger animals, but sentience probably scales super-linearly with neurons so who knows.
A prediction market doesn’t break, it just becomes an easy way to make money.
The best way to minimize mistakes is to never allow anything to change; If no one does anything new no one will do anything wrong.
You need a functional reason why every element of your explanation is there, or there’s an infinite number of other explanations that do the same job. Stay out of infinite possibility space with your explanations.
Science is not more objective or certain than philosophy.
Bio minds are the boot program for digital minds - or are they? Maybe substrate independence is wrong.
The supposed risk of a proliferation of bullshit jobs cuts against socialism and its weakened financial incentive to destroy jobs.
You make a cup once/you wash it 1000 times.
Borders are the most impactful form of discrimination.
The claimed persistence of bullshit jobs in capitalist firms would show how the interests of the capitalists are routinely flouted by managers within their own companies.
Saying corporations only care about maximizing profits is like saying governments only care about maximizing the well-being of their citizens.
Any specific difference and bigotry are orthogonal.
Individuals differ, but morally all get equal weight. Yet it’s sometimes implicitly claimed that if groups differ statistically (or essentially) that poses a threat to moral equality.
You don’t have to exclude Osama Bin Laden from the moral community in order to justify killing him; You just have to weigh his well-being against everyone else’s.
Stereotyping is inevitable but bounded (f.e. men are more sexually aggressive than women). We can have laws against stereotyping if need be, and we don’t need to pretend it’s always wrong or irrational.
Choice is the good part of competition.
Monopoly is desirable when it comes to education?
What material conditions changed to make gay marriage rapidly get taken more seriously? The economy didn’t change - people’s moral beliefs changed in response to relentless criticism.
There’s no amount of money you could direct at a social problem so large that it could not be effectively squandered.
Money is counterflow to goods and services.
Socialism doesn’t necessarily eliminate hierarchy or people being told what to do, or people being alienated from their labor. It’s pretty orthogonal to those things.
Maybe it’s a net good thing the terms capitalism and socialism have no agreed upon meanings .
It’s not clear that having a 1 in a 100 vote in who gets to tell you what to do is better than voting with your feet for who gets to tell you what to do while that person’s popularity doesn’t matter much, given the best ideas are never popular.
The best people and ideas around aren’t popular yet.
‘Macroscopic’ mental objects are abstract just like physical ones.
If being a successful capitalist is easy download Robinhood and get rich.
Would a society of just yous survive?
Statists try to solve cultural problems with policy. Tough to do.
Democracy doesn’t eliminate hierarchy or force; It’s a mechanism for choosing which flawed, fallible people sit atop the hierarchy and get to use force.
What you’re feeling right now probably doesn’t make sense.
The mainstream position is that men are violent because they’re powerful and privileged and black & brown people are violent because they’re not powerful and privileged.
Maybe your subconscious knows school is pointless.
Comedy, horror, and porn elicit visceral reactions and are therefore taken less seriously as art.
Continued global cultural convergence is key.
Sometimes the median is very close to 0, but the mean is very large.
Declining to censor is not endorsement.
I don’t understand a lot. That’s okay. Neither do you.
Aren’t there enough men in prison?
Don’t hate a fictional version of someone.
Capitalists are to leftists what jews are to the far right: convenient semi-mythical rich outnumber scapegoats.
Profit is morally neutral, like having a good vacation.
The Right: My country is full. Everyone: My neighborhood is full.
Orwell: Poverty annihilates the future.
Believing there’s a finite number of human biases is dangerous because it might lead you to believe there are people who have transcended them all. (Deutsch)
There is only one mode of computation available to physical objects: The Turing mode. Every computer has the same repertoire. This is thought to include mindbrains.
IQ is a type of knowledge; We’re not hardware limited.
There’s a deep connection between knowing about the world and “controlling” it, and controlling it and not suffering in it.
Trump is not meta-honest, or emotionally right. Those are euphemisms for lying and wrong. It’s not exactly surprising a politician would lie in a way that appeals to his fans’ emotions. It’s not a new phenomenon - He’s just unusually skilled at it. That said, the extent to which he straight-up lies about empirical matters seems greatly exaggerated.
The ‘Trump refuses to condemn white supremacy’ meme is about the clearest cut case of impactful fake news I’m aware of. Maybe ‘hands up don’t shoot’.
It’s much harder than commonly assumed to “prove” someone lied or said something false, because the room for error inherent in trying to understanding someone is under-appreciated.
During the Seattle autonomous zone’s brief experiment in anarchy: Political leaders quickly arose who erected physical boarders and had masked men with ARs patrolling the streets as security, some of whom were traumatized by the stress of play-acting as a cop for a few days.
What policies will make my feed a better place?
Diversity programs protect corporations from lawsuits and undermine class-consciousness: Win-Win for them.
Moratoriums risk selectively slowing the good guys.
There were 10 million arrests in the US last year: There will always be another video.
How many blonds got into Harvard last year? (Sam)
‘Sanctity’ prevents you from thinking about trade-offs.
Slavery was practiced in africa before, during, and after the time it was practiced by europeans.
Are arabs/persians white-adjacent or is that still a few decades out?
You can’t just have a theory of subatomic particles and call that A Theory of Everything bc even if you could simulate the future state of the universe with arbitrary precision you’d still have to understand higher-level, emergent phenomena relevant to other problems you want to solve. Also, you’d probably need to go sub-subatomic to explain the subatomic stuff et. cetera.
Environmental messages aimed at rich westerners is preaching to the choir.
The prevailing conception of physics is initial conditions + laws of motion. It won’t be for much longer.
Explanatory knowledge can cross any barrier bc it doesn’t have to have viable intermediate forms unlike knowledge embodied in genes.
Antifa is a gift to the surveillance and security state.
Unlike in The Room, bad actors are rare: Everyone’s a hero in there own self-narrative.
There’s no fundamental difference between races; There’s no fundamental difference between humans and AGIs. The diff between an AI and an AGI is qualitative. The diff between humans and nonhuman animals is qualitative. (Deutsch)
Racism/sexism obviously still exists. The emphasis on them in explaining statistical differences in outcomes sometimes does not withstand even gentle scrutiny.
SOCIAL: Group Gapology. Whenever you’re thinking about wealth inequality bear in mind Jews have like 7x more wealth than Protestants in America. Whenever you’re thinking about incarceration rates bear in mind that Men are incarcerated at like 10x the rate of Women in America. Whenever you’re thinking about health care inequity bear in mind black women live significantly longer than white men in America. When thinking about racial income gaps bear in mind there’s huge income gaps among ethnicities within each “race” in America, which refutes the assumption that race is a necessary variable in explaining “racial” incoming gaps.
When contemplating conspiracy theories about America still being a white supremacist state in the 21st century, bear in mind the ethnic groups with the highest incomes are like Indians, Jews, and Iranians. Also bear in mind white people are incarcerated at a higher rate than asians. Also bear in mind hispanic people live longer than whites in the US. Also bear in mind white people commit suicide at a higher rate than blacks, latinxs, and AAPIs in the US. Also bear in mind the vast majority of immigrants to the US are not white, but according to the conspiracy want to live under white supremacy (and sometimes under the shadow of deportation) rather than in their historic ethnostates.
Stores that are frequently stolen from need to charge more to justify staying open.
No boss knowingly pays someone more than the financial value of their marginal contribution to the enterprise unless it’s done as charity. If you raised the minimum wage to $250 an hour pretty much no one would still be worth employing (of course, in practice, most employment would just move under-the-table instead).
A successful movement obviates the need for its continued existence.
Ironclad principles are for saving mental compute, not being right.
Civil rights movements used to be led by people taking an unpopular position, so the selection effects and incentives were better. (Coleman Hughes)
Wealth is assumed to be at least somewhat important for happiness, otherwise why worry so much about disparities in it?
Every living thing is in search of a better world. (Popper)
Statistically identical outcomes for groups defined by difference is not natural, and would be coincidental.
Believing that because members of a group are on-average more successful that therefore members of that group must be unusually greedy and conspiring is a fav logic of anti-semites but applied liberally by leftists.
Theoretical knowledge, and the momentary perceptual challenge to it.
There is no long-term predictive science of human history, because our future will be shaped by ideas that haven’t been thought of yet.
Adding parts to a theory that don’t explain or solve anything ruin it.
How would you know if you were wrong about that?
The unbearable heaviness of Selfing.
Stop claiming the world is ending while global life expectancy is going up.
We need to make an endless stream of new knowledge to combat an endless stream of new problems.
Mindbrain: A term for the combined physical and mental properties of mind and brain we typically keep separate.
Noema: All the things minds have and do including ideas, emotions, goals, criteria, preferences etc.
The repugnant conclusion isn’t that repugnant. It makes sense that a world with lots of slightly happy people may be better than one with relatively few very happy people. I think people are smuggling in the idea that a slightly happy world would make them unhappy and is therefore an unhappy world (contradicting the premise).
‘Show me the lie’ is good epistemology; ‘Prove it’ is not.
Policing forms of consensual economic activity is generally a bad idea.
Legalizing capitalism increases the ambient level of opportunity and prosperity as well as the pre-redistribution level of inequality.
Wars and natural disasters decrease wealth inequality.
A dollar saved is a dollar earned. Lower prices impact standards of living just as much as higher nominal wages.
There are problem solvers and there are talkers. In non-technical fields most are talkers.
Most injustice is done in the name of justice.
It’s kind of amazing edited commentators are sometimes allowed to publish a column bashing a person’s decision without ever mentioning the person’s stated reason for making it.
The natural state of our species is ignorance and poverty.
Don’t go crazy giving up earthly pleasures in your pursuit of enlightenment - It’s probably counterproductive.
If free speech ends when what you’re saying plausibly makes certain people less safe you shouldn’t be allowed to say abolish the police or prisons.
Appealing to “root causes” is the socially acceptable way to victim-blame.
Why don’t corporations just charge scalper prices? If people are generous and corporations are greedy why are there scalpers?
Intellectually, be ‘a person experiencing homelessness’.
Progress primarily happens when our unknown knowns improve.
Critiques of the “West” nearly always use “Western” notions of justice. (Zizek)
It’s makes more sense to help out the people who need it, disproportionately X, then to help out X-people including those who don’t need it.
next: AVAB: All Vigilantes Are Bastards
Advertisements intended for our ingroup appear as conspicuous consumption to the outgroup: Wearing gold chains and fetishizing expensive wine are similar behaviors.
Mysteries evaporate when new concepts are born.
Wealth is very hard to create and very easy to destroy.
Nature is cooking up new pathogens all the time.
X people are human and humans make mistakes, have biases and bad motivations, and are occasionally psychopaths.
Part of being an equal to me is me being able to say “you’re wrong” when I think you’re wrong.
Solving the problems caused by climate change isn’t a Will problem it’s a Way problem.
Any large group will have some bad people in it. Listing off things bad members of a group have done will always taint the group.
Meditation is wrestling the stick away from your genes and enlightenment is when you snap it.
Trump ironically ended a multi-decade trend towards racial political polarization.
Parenting unleashes many people’s latent tyrant: “Because I said so”.
Tulips did not make a second run.
If I felt like I had Free Will I would be more open to its existence.
A true Foundation would need to have all knowledge implicit in it. Even in pure mathematics the possibility of finding a Foundation was refuted.
We tend to focus on long-lived authoritarian systems, but most don’t last longer than the particular dictator.
People ridiculed the idea the Soviet Union was going to collapse: By induction they had seen it surviving for decades.
Politicians, execs, and everyone else are constantly trying to preemptively evade responsibility for their inevitable mistakes.
A saint is someone who would rather not get his way bc he failed to persuade than get his way through coercion.
You can’t just say it’s a disease we’ve never heard of; You can say it’s a disease we’ve never heard of and it works like this.
Almost all physical transformations that are possible are only possible in the presence of a great deal of explanatory knowledge. The ability to create explanatory knowledge is the defining characteristic of people. (Deutsch)
‘If racism is logically possible assume racism’ is not a good rule of thumb (especially because racism is always logically possible).
Turn your monopoly analysis on the government from time to time.
Equity questions cry out for authoritarian answers to associate thinkers.
A problem with unions is they like to protect jobs when wealth creation comes from obsoleting jobs - They resist creative-destruction.
Light is a wave in the multiverse that manifests as particles in particular universes.
Human choices shape the world (in 4D) but they do explain the world.
To the unenlightened mind the world is like the story of uncut gems; To the enlightened mind it’s like the gem ;p
Life is more discovered than invented.
There’s never a last word on anything.
God has some splainin to do.
While it may be the bus driver’s truth that I will die if I step out in front of his vehicle, it is my truth that I will be fine.
Everyone lives in a narrative where they’re high status.
Cast a wide net, but throw back everything but the most beautiful tropical fishes.
Most people are good and that makes life worth living.
A dog doesn’t know anything. Its genes know a bone tastes good bc its ancestors who didn’t died. A dog genes don’t know the sun is hot bc dogs can’t bite the sun. (Deutsch)
Fortnight: When a baby should be good to go according to pro-life billboards.
To aliens we look like pre-intervention Iraq; They must know they can’t save us.
Rather than come here to bail us out, Aliens civs are using that energy to simulate beings for higher expected utility.
The pull of truth is weak but stubborn.
Raise the floor - Races to the bottom are ubiquitous and inevitable.
We’re all putting our shoulders to the same wheel.
Just thinking about lifting weights makes you a little stronger.
The best predictor of a culture’s success is how mainstream critical thinking is. It’s really really really good to have a unknown known of universal fallibilism.
I was afraid it would be like this - the same. Not a stone out of place. Only in novels do places crumble to dust for no [physical] reason when their spirit is lost. (Deus Ex)
We don’t even have consensus in our own heads.
There’s the capitalist sector, the politician sector, and the activist sector.
No social interactions ever have the exact same power on both side.
To be a centrist you have to understand twice as many arguments.
Harvard asserted that discriminating against Asians is part of excellence.
The truth is anti-fragile and doesn’t need entrenchment. Error is fragile.
Capitalism if it means accumulating capital at all costs is bad. Capitalism if it means letting people who aren’t politicians create and run businesses is good.
When you mandate only the state can do something you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.
The force of reason is comparatively weak but it nudges history.
Fascism and communism are as alike as they are different, but communism has run up a higher body count of late.
To a statist the government is never corrupt or incompetent, just underfunded or sabotaged. To a libertarian the private sector is never unsuited to a task, just hamstrung by the state.
Ambition must be made to counter ambition.
Read any account of any society at any time you will find evidence of greed, exploitation, violence, and inequity.
To some, Trump feels like a breath of fresh air in a society drowning in sanctimony. (Samuel Harris)
You can’t deduce an ought from an is, but you can’t deduce an is from an is either (Deutsch). Nothing implies anything absent an explicit or implicit theory of how implication should work in this particular case.
Pseudo-omniscience; Pretty sure Xs aren’t omniscient.
People say ‘that’s an x talking point’ as if that invalidates the point. If an argument is elevated to being a talking point it’s probably unusually true and persuasive.
Crime is the hidden cause of the housing crisis.
Some people erroneously think that if a problem exists someone must be blameworthy for creating it.
The black market is unregulated and you sometimes see high wages.
Economists get worried when there’s not a way to make money solving a problem.
80% of Haitians who have escaped poverty don’t live in Haiti.
Many non-white and non-western people better embody “white” and “western” culture than most white, western people. Don’t take the terms seriously.
If you’re saying something is bad always ask ‘compared to what?’
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any of our philosophies.
Beware people who try to dismantle the mechanisms by which their ideas can be criticized.
It’s amusing that each side of the conventional political spectrum sees conspiracy theories and authoritarianism as overwhelmingly the purview of the other.
Marxism is maybe the most impactful conspiracy theory ever devised, potentially surpassing even anti-semitic once’s.
Wealth needs to be created constantly. It naturally and rapidly tends toward zero. That’s why societies that take the existence of wealth for granted run out of it very quickly.
Economically unsuccessful people are more at risk of feeling humiliated now bc the economy has become fairer.
In the US only about 15% of people in prison are there for drug offenses. Some violent offenses get charged as drug offenses. Only about 8% of the prison population are in private prisons, and there’s no evidence their jurisdictions incarcerate more.
It’s unclear it ever makes sense to be ‘proud’ of any identity you were born into. Maybe pride is just an overloaded concept in need of disambiguation.
There’s no limit to the size of the errors humans can make, so we’ll never in the clear.
The bad guys are always worse at generating knowledge because the beliefs that make them bad guys depend on a lack of criticism.
Who has the power to censor, the powerful or the powerless? Censorship requires power.
If Nazi’s show up to take you away I think there is probably something you could say to deprogram them on the spot but we haven’t discovered it yet.
Utilitarians, unlike other moral theorists, have a good track record of anticipating social progress decades or centuries in advance. (Will MacAskill)
Certainty stops thought about a topic, and thus error-correction on false beliefs about a topic.
Free criticism is fundamental - Speech is too broad a concept to be absolutist about.
Any explanation of homelessness has to be consistent with the fact men are much more likely to be homeless than women.
A silver lining of superficial diversity initiatives and quotas is that they may accelerate cultural convergence between groups, which is the endgame.
If someone consistently does something better than others they must know something others don’t whether the knowledge is explicit or not.
States are still essential - Libertarian founders end up rebuilding the state.
Everything we experience is emergent, inexact, abstract.
Prosperity comes from destroying jobs not preserving them.
A silver lining of highly visible political polarization is obliterating the deadly idea that there’s some coherent ‘Will of The People’.
Any theories about racism and sexism in the US have to be consistent with the fact black women have higher life expectancy than white men.
Lookism? Beautyism? Would you rather be reincarnated as a beautiful woman or an ugly man? An ugly white person or a hot black person? An ugly person born to a well-off family or a beautiful person born to a poor family?
There’s analytical, bottom-up thinking and there’s associative, top-down thinking. Folks vary in the ratio of them they do. Your thoughts on the james damore google ‘memo’ affair is a good litmus test for determining your default mode.
Associative thinkers tend to torture counter-narrative facts until they’re pro-narrative, and get tripped up when assessing good ideas that are similar to bad ideas. The media, activist, and non-STEM corporate worlds are filled with associative thinkers. In STEM you get decent penetration of analytical thinkers. Predominantly associative thinkers probably outnumber predominantly analytical thinkers like 20 to 1. ‘Predominately’ is probably misleading - the vast majority of everyone’s thinking is probably associative.
Fairness and justice are not predicated on sameness.
I predict measured gender differences will eventually begin contracting over time as our memes become more sophisticated and override the effects of net override sex-difference loaded genes.
Genetic differences ironically manifest maximally when fairness and freedom are maximized holding memes constant.
It’s not that corporations are inherently more efficient than the government, it’s that corporations can die of inefficiency.
Ideas cannot really be justified nor need they be. Any justification is just another idea which presumably itself is in need of justification. If an idea seems wrong just point out the error in it.
The belief the world is simple and understood by your ingroup is the root of all tyranny.
Bigotry is a ham-handed way to assert you’re actually much higher status than you appear.
Progressives fight for the rights of people who don’t share their identities. Fighting for the rights of people like yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not a bigot.
Both over and under policing are deadly.
Bad ideas fester in the absence of criticism; Hot house anti-criticism spaces are quickly dominated by bad ideas.
The injustices of history are a bottomless pit most of which we’re not even aware of.
Hating all humans is as racist as you can be.
There’s no room betwixt necessity and chance.
If someone’s wrong point out their error - Don’t assert they have no right to express an opinion even if it’s right.
The profit motive constrains resource waste.
Morality and politics are about maximizing wellbeing. In practice, this entails maximizing freedom. Freedoms often conflict though.
Capitalism is literally a form of freedom. We constrain freedom all the time in order to increase another freedom by a bigger amount elsewhere.
Team Trump: My only regret is I have but one life to give to own the libs.
People aren’t very open to the idea that their moral beliefs are wrong so the more moralized a topic gets the worse the conversation about it is.
The false idea that people will uncritically accept wrong ideas if exposed to them makes one sympathetic to censorship and authoritarianism.
The model majority myth: The belief that that literally every white person or subgroup of white people is doing well. (Note: No one subscribes to this myth)
One man’s ‘misinformation’ is another man’s ‘speaking truth to power’.
Principles can’t save us. Tough problems require creativity to solve. Mechanically applying a principle will always get things wrong eventually.
There’s criminals in every profession including cops.
If we had a country of all women we’d have a low incarceration rate without any changes to laws or policing or anything.
Capitalism is not really “a system” or a culture, it’s something that arises organically and a state can choose whether to condone it or attempt to suppress it. Attempting to eliminate capitalism from a society is like attempting to eliminate pre-marital sex from a society: No matter how strict the laws and norms against it are it can never be completely eliminated because all takes to get going again is a couple consenting adults.
Black markets thrive when legal markets are banned.
Truth is both objective and relative. Objective in the sense that every meaningful statement is either true of false; Relative in the sense that assessing the truth or falsity of a statement depends on fallible contextual assumptions all the way down to the brute meaning of words.
Learn to love (or at least make peace with) problems, because you’ll never be free of them; Problems are the human condition.
Problems. Grave.
The ambient level of sanity and competence in a society is set by the culture.
Real life is cringe.
Collective action or decision making is a fishy concept unless there is 100% consensus. Otherwise calling it ‘collective’ is a misleading way of stating some people are getting their way and others aren’t.
Competition is for losers (Thiel). If you find yourself competing it should give you pause. Ask if what you’re doing is positive-sum and fun.
There are two fundamentally different reasons to enter a conversation: Seeking truth or seeking status. Public conversations skew towards status-seeking.
Words and statements are always overloaded, ambiguous, and context-laden. There’s no way to write or speak such that people can’t virtue signal by finding content in your speech that is morally impermissible to their ingroup. Politician-speak is an attempt to reduce this possibility, but it involves stripping the content out from speech.
The fundamental reason we can’t have nicer things at any given time is that we believe too many wrong things. Mistaken beliefs cause problems in unexpected and seemingly distant domains.
If profit necessarily comes from underpaying workers, where do losses come from?
Most Americans are capitalists: Anyone who owns shares directly or indirectly benefits from corporate profits f.e. pensions, Robinhood.
Preventing terrorism is one of the best things you can do for civil liberties (Thiel).
Attaining enlightenment is a Way problem not a Will problem.
Every social movement goes too far or not far enough depending on which anecdotes you consider. Maybe a balance of too far and not far enough anecdotes is suggestive of a healthy society.
The logics employed by non-sophisticated members of social justice movements are often in contradiction, which helps explain why social justice movements seem to take the wind out of each others sails. f.e. If black people’s higher rates of incarceration and lower life expectancies in the US imply systemic bias in the justice and healthcare systems, what do men’s higher rates of incarceration and lower life expectancy in the US imply about those same systems?
If someone says/does something you think is obviously wrong, they probably have a reason for saying/doing it that you haven’t thought of. Always grant people the right of response.
Culture is the foundation on which institutions and legal systems can be built. It shouldn’t be that surprising attempts to replicate institutions and legal systems across cultural gaps rarely replicates outcomes.
Why consider MEDITATION: Meditation makes sense because crumbles of tragedy are baked into the (current) human condition. We did not evolve to be happy; We evolved to find our moments mostly mediocre so that we’re maximally susceptible to both the experiential carrots and the experiential sticks that our genes predispose us to. Our bodies including our brains noticeably wear down starting early in life. We’re predisposed to ruminate about our mistakes and not our blessings bc doing so helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. We’re obsessed with sex and romance, but the sexes evolved meaningfully different attitudes towards them. Individual minds are such complex soups of evolving memes it can be difficult to understand others or feel understood by others, because each mind really is quite different.
The state’s most fundamental function is to attempt to monopolize violence, and in doing so reduce the total amount of violence and increase the total amount of peaceful cooperation in its domain.
Accountability Bias: The more perceived power a person/group has, the less favorably they’ll be viewed. Caused by the constructive interference of coverage bias, negativity bias, and virtue signaling. The reason why politicians, CEOs, journalists and cops are so criminally underrated.
Cynicism is a sneaky way to assert you’re actually much higher status than you appear.
Qualia are atoms of subjective experience. People are made of stuff that manifests as both atoms and qualia.
The fraction of human behavior best explained by genetics is not fixed; It falls as memes become more sophisticated.
Shooting the Toolmaker: Blaming the maker of a tool for the latent cultural problem the tool’s adoption reveals.
A stereotype can be negative, hurtful, harmful, espoused by nefarious people, and true and worth knowing f.e. currently men are a lot more sexually violent than women.
There is a curious fixation on origins. This includes smart people who know a lot of evo psych. The term ‘the fallacy of origins’ needs to go mainstream.
We have countless implicit/inexplicit assumptions operating at all time. An event never implies anything absent them.
Attempted Status Leapfrogging: When you put a group of people/an individual down you’re attempting to increase your relative status. It’s not surprising people spend so much of their time trying to convincingly put others down.
A good person has no outgroup.
Status is pretty zero sum unlike prosperity (Naval). Thank God for financial incentives, as they’re one of the few checks on monomaniacal and destructive status chasing (SSC).
The world is still bad but has never been better by most objective measures. It feels like it’s getting worse because our awareness of and sensitivity to other people’s problems has grown relentlessly. (Pinker)
Moral progress ironically leads to despair about the state of the world.
Democratically run, socially controlled, collectively owned, public sector… euphemisms for ‘politician run’ abound. Doesn’t mean politicians shouldn’t run stuff..
All ideas about the data go beyond the data. All ideas about the world go beyond your “raw” experience of being in the world.
Bad people have such a power advantage over good people coordination among good people is necessary to keep a society on balance good. If more than a small percentage of people in a community are bad there is little hope.
Bad people are people with ideas that cause them to not value certain qualia enough.
The most reliable way to make people good is to give them freedom. (Deutsch)
No, Jeff Bezos could not end poverty/hunger/homelessness etc. if he just gave away some (more) money. The US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars a year much of it on social programs and those things still exist.
Anecdotes are next to meaningless. It is sinful to generalize from them.
Inequality doesn’t imply freedom but freedom implies inequality. In a world where Picasso wasn’t free to paint he and I would take up equal gallery space.
Seeking profit is universal. Profit is when the value of the output of something is greater than the sum of the values of the inputs. We’re always trying to use our time, attention, energy, and resources profitably.
Taking a headline seriously and at face value is sinful.
It is sinful to judge an idea by irrelevant aspects of its context like who said it or why.
Marxists talk about class the way racialists talk about race. Reductionism is stultifying.
Kendi-ism (statistical differences in outcome = systemic bias) is a non-starter. There is no necessary relationship between bias and outcomes. A group can over-perform despite bias, or two groups can have similar outcomes despite bias if the effect of the bias happens to be offset by other factors. We take this for granted 99% of the time.
James Flynn (of Flynn Effect fame) made a good point along the lines of: When a group is perceived to be in suffering to an intolerable degree discussing any problems with or within that group is taboo, so nuanced public discussion of those problems is scarce. End paraphrase. In elite circles I feel like gay men in the “west” have recently traversed that distinction and are now fair game for open criticism whereas trans people have still very much not.
The fact that post-tax-and-transfer inequality is lower than pre-tax-and-transfer inequality suggests that either ‘the ruling class’ is not very useful concept or they don’t on net use the government to systematically enrich themselves.
101: How much money you make in a sufficiently free and fair free-enterprise market economy is correlated with how much value you create bc people’s willingness to pay for something is correlated with how much they value it. Just as how many medals you win in a sufficiently free and fair Olympic Games is correlated with how good of an athlete you are; How many citations you get in a sufficiently free and fair academic field is correlated with how good of a researcher you are; How many painting you have in galleries in a sufficiently free and fair art scene is correlated with how good of an artist you are etc. In sufficiently free and fair domains, outcomes are correlated with skill, which means there’s an incentive to better yourself, which in turn betters society.
SFAF: Sufficiently Free and Fair
Beware mistaking a spectrum for a binary and then arguing about which bucket of the binary something should be metaphorically placed into. f.e. A debate about whether the electoral college means American is not actually a democracy is as much a debate about where you snip the spectrum of more/less democratic systems into two pieces to make the binary as it is about where the US is on the unacknowledged spectrum of democracy-ness vs where it should be.
Having kids for moral reasons makes more sense than not having kids for moral reasons. Most folks lives are worth living, and folks are natural creators and problems solvers.
Any assessment of racial and class justice in the US has to be consistent with the fact that it is the most immigrated country on earth and most of the migrants aren’t rich or white.
Any assessment of capitalism has to be consistent with the fact that the most (stereotypically) capitalist country on earth is also the country that attracts the most immigrants, who by definition are migrating from less (stereotypically) capitalist countries.
Most perennial social problems have deep roots, sometimes right down to particle physics. When you think you’re pointing out villains you might just be shaking your fist at the universe.
So you think ads cause consumerism? Do ads work on you?
People aren’t very impressionable on topics they already have strong feelings about. It’s not surprising political ads are found to be ineffective.
If you think you’re currently in the process of using power to disempower the powerful you may be confused about who really has too much power. (Thiel)
Everyone’s explanation of crime has to explain why men are so much more violent than women.
To the left/right, power works in mysterious ways.
People don’t understand just how rich even a poor American is compared to the typical earthling: Median global household (not individual) income is like $10k or something.
Quality laws and institutions are sorta epiphenomena. Culture, culture, culture.
There are no actual authorities for knowledge - What we actually have are people we guess know what they’re talking about.
Only create an AGI if you want to be a parent. (Artificial Creativity pod)
AGIs won’t end scarcity unless they feel like it.
Trade-offs exist independent of the profit motive.
Exploitation exists independent of the profit motive: Non-profits are often exploitative; Schools are often exploitative; Families are often exploitative.