> In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, 13.4 percent of Americans reported that “felt less free to speak their mind than they used to.” In 1987, the figure had reached 20 percent. By 2019, 40 percent of Americans reported that they did not feel free to speak their minds. This isn’t a partisan issue, either. Gibson and Sutherland report that, “The percentage of Democrats who are worried about speaking their mind is just about identical to the percentage of Republicans who self-censor: 39 and 40 percent, respectively.”
That's a scary number. And it's probably not wrong.
I certainly keep my mouth shut about certain things, lest the people whose beliefs I find vile and unconscionable (and who view mine the same way) ostracize me, or worse, my child in the community.
Far better to gently feel people out before revealing my beliefs entirely.
And you gotta socialize your kids to keep their mouths shut too. My daughter attends a progressive school, and she’s intuited that there’s a de-facto racial hierarchy that she’s none too happy about. (She was recently invited to attend a school-sponsored weekly lunch for black girls, but once a month because she’s half white and half south Asian and I guess that’s how the math works out.) I pointed out that she needs to keep her mouth shut about it if she doesn’t want to get cancelled.
Funny thing is, she already kinda knew that. Even at 11 she had an inkling about the possible social consequences of complaining about that.
I live in an ultra-progressive big blue city suburb, spend a fair amount of time in local politics (which revolve around our schools, and particularly equity) and I don't know anyone who wouldn't say that was deeply fucked up. You worry about cancellation, but you could probably get news coverage for that decision. It is deeply not normal.
I don’t see the relation between racially segregated activities in a US school, and a UK non-profit that helps minorities and migrants facing domestic violence. (One that, looking at the Wikipedia page, seems kinda racist insofar as it focuses on domestic violence among Asians specifically, as if there isn’t plenty of domestic violence among white Britons.)
And I disagree that people in the UK wouldn’t take exception to segregating students by race and declaring half south asian people to be 1/4 of a black person for purposes of such activities: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/23/right-is-winning...
I'm not sure that it's scary. After all, casual racism and sexism used to be a lot more common in the past. Now people are called out and criticized on those. Is that bad?
The other factor is the rise of internet social media, which didn't exist back then. When people spoke their mind, it wasn't broadcast publicly to the whole world, so there was less fear of backlash.
> I'm not sure that it's scary. After all, casual racism and sexism used to be a lot more common in the past. Now people are called out and criticized on those. Is that bad?
Even if we grant that the rise in self-censorship is entirely due to "casual racism and sexism" (and I don't grant it), wouldn't that meant that 40% of people are secret bigots? That sounds bad, you would rather they be open about their beliefs so you can identify them, no?
> people are secret bigots? That sounds bad, you would rather they be open about their beliefs so you can identify them, no?
I don't know how much of a secret it is. This tends to be fairly obvious regardless of whether people say it openly, and depending on which circles you spend time in, you tend to hear it already in private anyway. Perhaps there are many people who were naive, ignorant, sheltered, and are shocked to learn about bigotry, but speaking only for myself, I'm not at all surprised by the continuing level of bigotry in society, and I knew it before the rise of social media.
>I'm not sure that it's scary. After all, casual racism and sexism used to be a lot more common in the past. Now people are called out and criticized on those. Is that bad?
Isn't it scary or least worrying that 40 percent of Americans reported that they did not feel free to speak their minds? Or are you implying they belong to the group who participated in casual racism and sexism that used to be a lot more common in the past and now people (majority of the other 60%) are calling them out and criticize them on those hence concluding not scary and perhaps good?
> Or are you implying they belong to the group who participated in casual racism and sexism that used to be a lot more common in the past
Some of them do, yes.
However, "The other factor is the rise of internet social media, which didn't exist back then." In the past, there was no such thing as being afraid of speaking your mind on social media. You were typically speaking your mind in private, among friends and family. This very conversation that we're having now would have never occurred in 1957, or even 1987.
I would argue having significant part of a society whether right or wrong in anyone's view having their thoughts not disclosed and represented to the rest of the society should be worrying for everyone in that society.
The history of our nature has shown self-censorship usually erupts by the most radicals of that group which is an uglier problem to have I would think than allowing their right or wrong thoughts to be out in the light.
>The other factor is the rise of internet social media, which didn't exist back then.
This to me only highlights the extend to which we should be worried rather than exaggerating it.
The fact that in almost 2024 people still don't understand social media is NOT your friends in a table where you can make shitty comments with no consequences still baffles me.
People always have had to separate public and private life, the only differences now is that it seems like they don't understand what is public or private anymore.
I frequently see people making public comments on social networks about their employers or customers that no one should be making, they get fired and then complain there's no "free speech" anymore. The stupidity is really something.
This just seems like a very natural back and forth
You complain on social media about your employer and how they mistreated you
They fire you for making them look bad by describing how they treated you
Your view of them as a bad employer is reinforced and you warn people not to work for them
Their view of you as a bad employee is reinforced and they earn people not to hire you.
In both cases people's views are reinforced by reality. Where's the bug?
Example: "People should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin"
Saying that phrase, went from forbidden, to controversial, to "you're not allowed to disagree," to "you're not allowed to agree" so rapidly.
Someone who actually holds it as a principle has had enemies on all sides at various times. Many of those who find the phrase offensive are not offended because it clashes with their principles, but because it strikes at the status / tribe signal positions they've adopted.
I quoted MLK (as above) at someone in 2020 and was quite surprised when it uncorked a rant about how that must mean i was a racist and didn't care for the struggles of the oppressed and so on.
Crucially, MLK said "I have a dream" about "one day" in the future. But MLK wasn't dumb enough to think that people could just magically declare racism to be over now without doing anything to address the social inequities and inequalities caused by centuries of historical racism.
Moving seats obviously doesn't address the economic inequalities. That's why nobody (except maybe some conservatives arguing in bad faith) has ever proposed it.
Punishing people who were never victimizers and promoting people who were never victims for the sake of equity doesn't address the problems of a single parent household and the consequences it has for children, but that is proposed for the sake of Equity all the time
Greater equality is not a "punishment". It's simply a necessity for a functional, just, compassionate society.
In any case, we are all beneficiaries or victims of the past. Children don't start from equal positions. "average per capita wealth of White Americans was $338,093 in 2019 but only $60,126 for Black Americans" https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/how-the-racial-w...
As stated by the linked article, this is actually a vast improvement from 150 years ago. But let's not pretend that the existence of the racial gap wasn't the result of historical factors. Arguing that we're all equal now would just be sticking one's head in the sand and pretending that history didn't exist.
"Punishing people" is an immature way of looking at public policy. When the government uses my tax money to pay for prisons, is that punishing me? The point is that the policy is meant for the public benefit, and we can debate the merits of each policy on their outcomes.
What addresses the problems of a single parent household then? Let's hear your solutions.
Do you think people are equally racist and sexist today as then? Surely not, it would be terrible news if that was true.
It was possible to get ostracized over racism and especially sexism in the 1960s, or even the 1890s, you just had to do worse things to do it generally.
If more people are afraid of ostracism, that suggest ostracism has increased (even) faster than progress on racism and sexism, and that doesn't sound like it can go on forever.
> If more people are afraid of ostracism, that suggest ostracism has increased (even) faster than progress on racism and sexism, and that doesn't sound like it can go on forever.
Ostracism is progress on racism and sexism. It's society pushing back against them.
This is a very long war. Wars are ugly. If you think that racism and sexism will just go down quietly without a fight, well, that's not how it works. When they feel most threatened, that's when they'll make the most noise.
To put it more precisely, I could have said that ostracism is a sign of progress. In large part, ostracism is neither a "rational" means nor a goal: it's an emotional reaction to what the ostracizer views as unacceptable behavior. But it's still a sign that the tide is turning in society.
Yes. Just like sexuality, racisism and sexism are part of what it means to be human. They are all natural instincts. Suppressing them is leading to the same sort of dysfunction that sexual suppression lead to in the Victorian age. That said, in the same way it's not healthy for society to be full of sexual deviants, it's also not healthy for it to be full of flaming racists. Moderation in all things, but nothing wrong with a little here and there.
> Moderation in all things, but nothing wrong with a little here and there.
Would you say the same about rape, violence, and murder? Those seem like "natural instincts". Nothing wrong with a little here and there?
I would dispute that racism and sexism are "just like" sexuality, and I would also dispute that all "natural instincts", you might call them animal instincts, ought to be accepted and encouraged. One of the great accomplishments of humanity is to rise above our animal instincts and become, at least temporarily, rational and enlightened.
Sex is necessary for the propagation of the species, and when done right, it's consensual to all parties and also pleasurable, harming nobody. Can you say the same about racism and sexism?
Not sure how you define sexism, but more traditional patriarchal groups have higher birth rates and more social cohesion. In the long run those traits propagate themselves. The stereotypical cat lady, not so much.
As far as racism, it may not propagate the species but surely it helps propagate those genetically closer to oneself. Isn’t in-group preference pretty common? Don’t need to be EO Wilson or Richard Dawkins to see why.
How do you define sexism? I'm not sure how the "stereotypical cat lady" is even relevant.
> more traditional patriarchal groups have higher birth rates
I don't think we need higher birth rates at this point, with over 8 billion humans on Earth already.
> As far as racism, it may not propagate the species but surely it helps propagate those genetically closer to oneself. Isn’t in-group preference pretty common?
Romantic preferences are not racism. Would you say that failure to be bisexual is sexism? (Spoiler: it's not.)
It's crucial to recognize, though, that romantic preferences are entirely subjective. If you consider your romantic preferences to be objectively superior humans and those who aren't to your preference objectively inferior humans who deserve a lower rank in society, that would be racism and/or sexism.
> it's not healthy for society to be full of sexual deviants
I'm under the impression that homosexuality is largely accepted in the western world, and that largely, western society hasn't been destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah.
Seeking of suppression of desire and sexual deviants, is that what you would tell to people who want to change their gender? Would you tell them it would be healthier for society if they didn't become transgender?
I'm not sure the solution. The problem seems to be a less homogenous society with less homogeneous viewpoints, rather than society getting actually less accepting of speech.
It's pretty easy to speak your mind (both then and now) when your opinion is in the majority.
I don't find that number scary or surprising... I'm less likely to overhear racial slurs being thrown around in casual conversation now compared to the past, some selfcensorship is good
I wouldn't even consider these 'extreme left' or 'far left' people to really be on the left, they're like a whole other ideology separate from that.
For instance, someone whose advocacy is fixated mostly around demolishing women's spaces for the pleasure of men, or is obsessed with manifesting racial divides everywhere they look, has really missed the point. They're not even attempting to achieve a society based on egalitarian ideals, all they want to do is set up and maintain new identarian hierarchies.
The only issue here is calling the 'tribal mode' peripheral -- no, no, it's the default.
The human species is first divided into tribes, and much latterly, individuals. ie., Individual human psychology is governed principally by tribal logic -- though 'thinking for oneself' in the broadest sense is always available, it is rarely exercised outside of certain kinds non-social problem environments.
Intellectuals are of course those who choose non-social problem environments. Consider Aristotle placing the purpose of life within Reason, rather than the survival and prosperity of the tribe (the only empirically defensible answer). This should, on the face of all evidence, seem outright absurd.
So, it's no mystery that tribal logic is absent from the academic presentation of human activity. This becomes extraordinarily dangeours when academies find themselves in power or otherwise academic projects (eg., the neocon inclination to democractise) find themselves elevated to tribal practice.
There ought be more explicit presentation of this in our education system -- it is a shame it has to be rediscovered so late.
> This means we can be more easily manipulated through the peripheral route.
This is only true if you're qualified to reason through the information yourself. Pseudointellectuals are easily manipulated (consider the CIA pushing a UFO conspraicy).
By not understanding the tribal logic of our psychology, this article repeats the mistake: thinking for oneself is not an inherent virute, nor is it inherently feasible or purposeful in most cases
> The human species is first divided into tribes, and much latterly, individuals. ie., Individual human psychology is governed principally by tribal logic -- though 'thinking for oneself' in the broadest sense is always available, it is rarely exercised outside of certain kinds non-social problem environments.
No, this priority varies between individuals. And you left out the mating pair-bond from your analysis. This is a very basic introduction, and there are some arguments and nitpicks from others who study the subject, but it gets across the gist of the idea: https://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/variants
These three instincts are present in everyone (barring gross brain damage), but are in varying orders of priority.
Someone downvoted me so apparently doesn't like the idea that not all people are tribal animals, or doesn't like what I linked to.
Just look at a diversity of television and movies and you will see a variety of types of people presented. You probably won't be compellingly interested in those varieties that differ too much from your own, but that certainly doesn't mean that they don't exist.
What's primarily tribal about the psychology of the characters in The Piano?
> It might seem intuitive to believe that people with less education are more manipulable. But research suggests this may not be true.
> High-status people are more preoccupied with how others view them. Which means that educated and/or affluent people may be especially prone to peripheral, as opposed to central, methods of persuasion.
There is a hidden assumtion in the above part. Did you spot it?
It is that educated people are also high status people, are also (overly) concerned about their reputation.
If this assumptions breaks, all the following about perpetuated ideology stands on a weak basis. After all, more educated people could tend to be more rational too.
To be fair, i would my left leaning ideology be based more on reason and not on my educational sociotope. May be just my bias.
> Not everybody has a body of beliefs that guides him.
Not the OP, but this got me curious. How does one reason about things if you have no axioms (i.e. "body of beliefs")? Are you using some non-axiomatic systems of reasoning or just saying that some people don't reason at all ?
Sure, axioms are the basis of our abstract thinking. But simply beeing aware of that basis allows you to change your perspective/abstraction towards stuff.
You dont have just one body of beliefs, you try to have a qualified take on all of them. This is where your question revolves around. Whats "a body of beliefs"? And is it open or closed?
Its the difference between aproaching realitiy heuristically (and never reaching a final answer, thus constantly revising your thinking) and just picking one set of beliefs/axioms/ideology and call it holistic, like religion does.
Its the way of the sceptic and imho the only way we should think ... or at least be aware of the heuristic nature of thinking.
A lot of people who are supposed to be held in high status are actually held in contempt. Republicans hating Fauci and Biden no matter how much of an expert high status they are. And Democrats calling Trump or Bush #notmypresident means they won't recognize his authority no matter how much education either of them got
"Results from a recent paper titled `Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States' by the political scientists James L. Gibson and Joseph L. Sutherland is consistent with the findings from Cato/Yougov."
"Smart and successful people don't express their true opinion because they fear a loss of status"
The author explains, that the more status people gained in their life, the more they try to stick to the common sense of opinions people of their status hold. This behavior really stabilizes the status quo.
For me this also explains why the consequent climate change protests are mainly supported by young people. They presumably have acquired less status yet and therefor don't feel the fear of status loss if they express a new opinion.
You are assuming it is a conscious decision and that these high-status individuals are aware that what they express is false. But the point the author makes is that the falsehoods are their true opinion.
And most likely, you yourself will have opinions that aren't true and that you have only started to believe because of fear of status loss.
Would you have clicked on that title? Everyone says they hate clickbait (defined here as "titles people actually click"), but it's about the only way to get anyone to look at anything unless they're already familiar with your work, regardless of the merits.
It strikes me oddly that you describe climate change protest as a "new opinion". From my gen-x view of the world, it has been a big deal through my entire adult life - we're up to COP 28 now, after all!
I agree with you, that phrase is misleading. What I tried to express is: The sense of urgency to act upon the climate catastrophe even if it decreases your own quality of life in the short term is somehow “new” or at least only really felt and pointed out strongly by a minority.
I was nodding a lot reading this piece, but something did seem incongruous.
The author claims "peripheral route" opinions are becoming more common because of information overload and the need to be parsimonious when forming opinions. He also claims that peripheral route opinions are more weakly held than central route opinions.
How does that account for increasing ideological polarization, when you would expect people's opinions to shift more with the breeze?
> This means we can be more easily manipulated through the peripheral route. If we are convinced of something via the peripheral route, a manipulator will be more successful at using the peripheral route once again to alter our initial belief.
emphasis mine.
So basically, he claims that because peripheral information is more loosely held, peripheral beliefs are also more easily altered. Thus you have the rabbit hole effect leading to "pilling" and extreme beliefs.
I would suggest that the polarization is advantageous to the people shaping public opinion. Sells more soda and antacids.
I dont agree its "ideological"; instead it is "tribal".
Ideology: "My body my choice" == vaccination and abortion should be individual decisions. "Free speech is good" == people can protest for and against racial separation or elimination, regardless of the race in question.
As the tribes we see society dividing into stand on both sides of those two examples, and many others, I can't say I see "ideology" as the dividing factor.
Is there a way to self-evaluate whether or not your belief is the product of social status preservation? If not, what good is it to recognize the possibility, save for accusing others of it?
There's a past-oriented and a future-oriented question you can ask with regard to your beliefs.
Past: How did I come to believe what I currently believe?
Future: How skeptical should I be about what I currently believe?
The past-oriented question is difficult to answer; it's a causal story that may have a number of different factors, and of course it depends on your brain wiring.
It seems to me that that the future-oriented question, on the other hand, is much easier to answer: if your beliefs personally benefit or comfort you, then you should be very skeptical of them.
This is a natural corollary of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
If the person speaking is wearing glasses or has a British accent then odds are good that any beliefs you have based on what that person has said are a product of social status preservation.
You can correct for this bias by imagining that same argument being presented by Donnie Baker [0] and if you still find it compelling then it's probably a reasonable point that is being made. I swear to God it is.
I've found it very useful to ask "what would it take for me to change this belief?" If you can't think of anything, you're almost definitely in social status territory.
The follow-up is how comfortable you'd feel sharing this with your friends - do you think they'd also change their minds, or do you think they'd ostracize you? Would you feel comfortable sharing the hypothetical, or only if those events really came to pass?
(For example, if every major university did a press release saying the moon landing was a hoax, I'd have to seriously entertain the idea that they're right. I don't think any of my friends would be upset if I shared this hypothetical with them, and I think most of them would join me if it really did happen. So my belief that the moon landing is real is probably a "real" belief and not just a social product.)
We should not conflate what is ostensibly “intelligence” with wisdom, virtue, and character. Without genuine virtue, the mind cannot function properly. Without a spine, without virtue, temptations to throw the truth under the bus for the sake of lesser goods easily overwhelm. It leads to the misuse and abuse of intelligence. It leads to skillful evasion of the truth. It leads to rationalization rather than reason. The author gives us one example.
It’s not his wealth, objectively a good thing, that prevents a rich man from getting into heaven, it is his prioritization of it over superior goods, his idolatry even. And riches come in many forms.
I thought about that myself since I actually self-censored lately despite my free-speech belief. As I am learning, the belief is not as strong as the drive to survive and comfort. It is disheartening in a way. I was expecting more of myself. On the other, it offered a look into the mirror.
I an easily argue it is wisdom or even that there is good and right of me to focus on my family's well-being, but I know those are still just rationalizations.
Wow, that's a lot to unpack! For my part, trusting experts can be risky. I can trust my doctor, but I can also question him about what he wants me to do. Unless he is willing to explain a treatment to my understanding, I'll seek out another opinion.
I can't pretend to understand everything, I need some experts for that, however I can gather information. Intellectual laziness from my side leads to heartbreaking dread if I didn't attempt to understand what an expert was saying.
Noone understands the brains' details and how to administer targeted medicines. Yet many rich people assume antipsychotics can magically prevent crime.
To whatever extent this article is true suggests that the way to convince people of certain positions is to hook them via peripheral route, but then keep them there via the central route.
If the position is such that any central route reasoning would lead to a rejection of the position, than the next best option is to overwhelm the critical faculties with peripheral route persuasion
The author is trying to push a consistent narrative throughout the article, and unfortunately this results in the omission of alternative explanations for the phenomena discussed. For example:
> Likewise, in a fascinating study on the collapse of the Soviet Union, researchers have found that university-educated people were two to three times more likely than high school graduates to say they supported the Communist Party. White-collar professional workers were likewise two to three times more supportive of communist ideology, relative to farm laborers and semi-skilled workers.
Alternative explanation: university-educated people and white-collar professional workers personally benefitted more from the Communist Party, so of course they supported the party more.
> Educational divides within the US today are consistent with these historical patterns. The Democratic political analyst David Shor has observed that, “Highly educated people tend to have more ideologically coherent and extreme views than working-class ones. We see this in issue polling and ideological self-identification. College-educated voters are way less likely to identify as moderate.”
Alternative explanation: highly educated people spend more time and effort thinking about politics, indeed are forced to spend more time and effort thinking about politics by their teachers and peers, so of course they have more highly developed views and stronger opinions about politics.
> Research by Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fischhoff at Carnegie Mellon University found that people with more education, science education, and science literacy are more polarized in their views about scientific issues depending on their political identity. For example, the people who are most concerned about climate change? College-educated Democrats. The people who are least concerned? College-educated Republicans. In contrast, less educated Democrats and Republicans are not so different from one another in their views about climate change.
Alternative explanation: again as above with regard to politics, highly educated people are forcibly confronted with the issue of climate change and are forced to think about it, discuss it, and form opinions about much more than less educated people.
Let's do a poll to see which group has more highly polarized opinions about sports, for example.
> researchers have found that university-educated people were two to three times more likely than high school graduates to say they supported the Communist Party
Ignorant researchers.
Those kind of people were required to be members of the Party or else they could not get jobs according to their education. Also they were the most actively monitored by state security. Phones tapped, spied by neighbors, required to speak in public in support of the Party, etc.
I think it's educational/cultural; the peripheral route seems particularly prevalent among Americans as opposed to say, continental Europeans, which are much more independent thinkers.
Now Americans apparently also have a weird relationship with education (highly status correlated and rejected by certain bands of society) and often appear to interpret the world through the lens of their binary political divide.
> the peripheral route seems particularly prevalent among Americans as opposed to say, continental Europeans, which are much more independent thinkers
As a dual US/EU citizen, I can assure you that neither side of the North Atlantic has a monopoly on groupthink or status-worship. I think the means are similar, though perhaps US has larger variance.
The majority of all argument, debates, polemics... it's all "hacks." We're all dirty tricks, if we're being honest.
Formalizing and naming templates of fallacies and dirty tricks... it's kind of a fallacious trick in itself.
Logically valid, convincing, and the way we actually think a completely different. There are places where these come together, often requiring a lot of effort.
The reality that we, all of us, way through the slush. None rise above it.
To take the least noxious example, stories work on us. Stories. Narratives. They're very central to communicating, central to how we make sense of things. Who is what in which story.
Telling the story, is unanimously agreed by all practitioners.. primary to convincing people, or even getting them to listen to you in the first place.
Is this logically sound? Is it conducive to keeping track of one's assumptions, presumptions and biases? Of course not. It is, how we work though.
The way formal logic works, and the way we think, talk and convince one another.. they are very far apart. That doesn't mean we can't grasp logic. We can. It does mean, that we don't employ it on its own very often.
The argument that would take, this post is the "central" path. The other half of this dichotomy. The assumed default state.
People say things for a lot of reasons, and then argue their way back.
> The way formal logic works, and the way we think, talk and convince one another.. they are very far apart.
Strict logic is "pedantry", "JAQing off", Sea-lioning, "conspiratorial thinking", etc. I know of no social media platform where this is not true (based on replies and voting). And (seemingly) ironically, "scientific thinkers" are often particularly prone to the phenomenon.
> That doesn't mean we can't grasp logic. We can.
That which is physically possible is not necessarily metaphysically possible. People can use logic sometimes, but very often it is culturally (thus consciously) non-permissible, like during COVID[1], war time[2], etc.
I am not aware of any current or historical attempts to solve this problem, the scientific method being somewhat of a specialized exception.
I don't remember who i got this from. But It's been part of my thoughts since.
Smart people are dangerously good at finding compelling rational arguments for any position. Logic and reasoning has no guarantee what-so-ever to end up correct.
Communism is perfectly rational. So is is national socialism, slavery, "a modest proposal", "Brave new world". Self reasoning may just make you more stubborn.
two things i think helps? but that may just me by own rationality tricking me.
1. Limit the death of the argument. Don't go too many steps away from the axioms or assumptions. Leaps of logic give us the most freedom to creatively warp the outcome.
2. Die on all the hills. Argue your misguided ideas loudly and proud to your peers. Discussing dumb ideas is the only way to find what dumb idea is the least dumb.
Being scared of being wrong, and aligning with others, leaves dumb ideas unchallenged, and dumber ideas unexplored.
>Smart people are dangerously good at finding compelling rational arguments for any position.
A much(!) smaller set of smart people can poke holes in such persuasive arguments with ease. The response with rare exceptions will be memes and rhetoric, &/or downvotes, silence, bans or rate limiting on one's account (helping to ensure humans stay locked in their local maxima indefinitely...say, have you seen what's happening in the Middle East, with our unwavering "democratic" support, again?).
> Logic and reasoning has no guarantee what-so-ever to end up correct.
Abstractly, of course not, but at the object level it depends.
>Communism is perfectly rational.
Make the case, and watch me poke holes in it. If this was well implemented as a game, I could even predict how your argument could be attacked before you even state it, and then reveal my predictions after your move and see how close I got.
A problem though: how to judge, since all participants (including me) suffer from delusion?
> Self reasoning may just make you more stubborn.
Love the strategically played "may"! What's the "just" doing in there though?
> Limit the death of the argument. Don't go too many steps away from the axioms or assumptions. Leaps of logic give us the most freedom to creatively warp the outcome.
Artificially constraining scope is excellent for rhetoric and deceit (and thus very popular, in Western culture at least), but perhaps not so useful for discovering truth.
> Die on all the hills. Argue your misguided ideas loudly and proud to your peers.
100% agree. A problem though: culture disallows this. I believe humans have some free will, but not much (for now).
>Discussing dumb ideas is the only way to find what dumb idea is the least dumb.
"Discussing" is ontologically ambiguous, and we've been discussing many ideas for centuries, with little positive outcome. Time for some new approaches if you ask me (man, it sure was a hot summer this year eh?).
>Being scared of being wrong, and aligning with others, leaves dumb ideas unchallenged, and dumber ideas unexplored.
Welcome to HN, and planet Earth (2023). Let's check back in in a few years. :)
Can the author provide example of dumb ideas? Or is it "dumb ideas" == "ideas I disagree with"
More generally, it seems like the recipe of this breed of substack author is to take a basic object level opinion e.g. "I don’t like pronoun people" or "AI people are dumb" and turn it a whole pseudo intellectual rant without ever getting to the point.
If you can remember it, the American media and foreign policy establishment was fully in support of the war in Iraq. That actually is a really good example of what the author describes because I'm sure many knew it was a bad idea but went along with it to preserve their careers.
I think we should be charitable with the author and not assume a "dumb idea" is something he disagrees with, but rather is something that was proven to be bad by the passage of time.
Well - he quotes The Cato Institute. And the graphic is clear enough, I think.
The rhetorical sleight of hand is that it's not true that feeling you're being censored - and needing to self-censor - is the same as actually being censored.
Self-censorship and self-selection are endemic in the corporate world, and the associated beliefs are mostly taken for granted without dissent.
You're not going to get far in fintech, management consulting, or media channels such as Fox if you start questioning why so many people are poor, ill, and homeless.
Similarly, if you work for FAANG you're not going to have a job for long if you start suggesting these BigCos should reinvent themselves as worker co-ops.
That's a very different kind of argument to the one about pronouns, because most people are not actually threatened in real terms by (say) LGBTQIA+ or unionisation.
Of course plenty of people are just fine with how things are and the article is right to the extent that it points out that ideological conformity is a middle class luxury.
I mean you can also just read the author’s other content which is mostly whining about woke-ism but with lots of Substack intellectualism piled on top.
Edit: Just to specifically point out the effects of this author’s “motivation,” the cited article on myside bias actually doesn’t say this:
> Students and graduates of top universities are more prone to myside bias. They are more likely to “evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes.”
It says everyone is prone to myside bias, and that more intelligent people are less prone to detecting it in themselves. This is important due to what it implies about the inverse. If it’s true that the woke lib professors are more prone to forming their beliefs based on their social surroundings, it’d suggest they’re more liable to be wrong. If, however, everyone is liable to form beliefs in this way (which they are), then there’s no implication whatsoever about truthfulness on either side, at least not stemming from this effect.
And in fact, if anything, it’d suggest the exact opposite of what the author implies by virtue of a really simple, obvious fact: an expert’s social circle is more likely to be well-informed on the domain of expertise than the social circle of a complete outsider.
Exceptions obviously exist and experts ought to be questioned vigorously, but to suggest that social circles are have spent collectively zero time learning about and thinking about an area are going to have a better grasp on that area than a group of individuals who have spent careers in it is really just dismissing the entire concept of expertise — the concept of learning — altogether.
> And in fact, if anything, it’d suggest the exact opposite of what the author implies by virtue of a really simple, obvious fact: an expert’s social circle is more likely to be well-informed on the domain of expertise than the social circle of a complete outsider.
Which makes it really important to determine the actual boundaries of that domain of expertise.
> If you can remember it, the American media and foreign policy establishment was fully in support of the war in Iraq.
A decent corollary to that: how the pro-Israel media campaign is working out in the latest flare up with Palestine now that TikTok has been added into the mix, a fantastic illustration of the real reason they want to take it down.
All of those listed were well executed financial frauds. I don't think successful people are particularly more likely to fall for scams - they just have the necessary capital/disposable income and are targeted by more sophisticated scammers.
I think the author thinks more along the lines of Steve Jobs trying to cure his cancer with herbal tea, Elon Musk sleep depriving himself into a twittering idiot, Scientology, NLP and various "success hacking" fads etc.
The answer there might be that in reality successful people are not really very different from unsuccessful ones, and have very little control over the contingencies and luck that put them onto their respective paths. This is certainly the case with financial success.
I mean, define “well executed”. Theranos, in particular, it’s notable that very little of their money came from _conventional_ sources (traditional VCs, sovereign wealth funds etc). It was largely, essentially, _personal_ investment by stupid rich people; often via a family office, but ultimately at the direction of the stupid rich person. IIRC one attempt by Theranos to get investment from a real VC collapsed because they _could not provide audited accounts_. Like, they didn’t even have a fake set, they were not providing them to their investors _at all_.
I don’t think that any of the named ones were particularly well-executed, and people were trying to warn that all of them were problems for a while. Madoff might be the closest, but even there it was verging on being an open secret that there was something up; again, Madoff’s investors were not actually that sophisticated.
As a "poor" person by Madoff investor standards, I am paranoid of any investment where I don't know what it is invested in. That said the other side are people who invested with the guy who bet against the CDS crap in 2008 (sorry forget his name), who I think were also in the "trust a guy with my money" camp. So I can see why people do it. But I would diversify, maybe max 10% in any one fund that is a black box, maybe max 40% in black boxes in total. Assuming you are rich - maybe 10% for most of us.
There's nothing physically impossible about the Hyperloop (basically a maglev in vacuum tube, nothing wrong with the tech, just not particularly economical). Maglevs have been deployed successfully in some parts of Asia, they are just dreadfully expensive and nimbys have fears about radiation but they are hardly new technology.
Note that the main point about the hyperloop was the vacuum tube, not the maglev part. And the vacuum tube doesn't actually work. It's not actually feasible to create a vacuum tube hundreds of km long. It's just about physically possible, but it's not really technologically feasible - not for a system that is supposed to be in constant operation all year long.
It's also important to remember that vacuum tube trains are an 1800s idea, which everyone started pretending is some revolutionary new transportation concept.
And besides that you don't have to have a really good vacuum, you just have to have a 'good enough' vacuum that you can attain high speed without losing the stabilizing effect of a bunch of air constrained by the walls of a tube. Bonus points of you can get the air to move at a speed a bit slower than your vehicle, more bonus points if you can use the air to propel your vehicle.
But: it's probably still a dumb idea, but one that is borderline.
The problem is that if any of that was a good idea, the question is why is the Hyperloop specifically a good idea, but regular old high speed rail is not? What factor are you changing that makes one good, and the other not good enough to get done right now?
(the answer of course is nothing: the Hyperloop would be stupidly expensive, and however fast it is wouldn't solve the logistics problem of loading and unloading it - so whatever quote you've seen for rail, just triple it if you tried to build a hyperloop).
We used to discuss this back in university days! NA is extremely allergic to copy something that’s been done extremely well in the east (e.g., high speed rails) and instead tries to come up with some “cool better way” of doing things. After all, we are different, and copying something would be an extreme ego hit. This thought process applies to Hyperloop as well. I live in Canada, and it is really disappointing how we don’t have reliable rails between metro areas of large cities. Or even cross-border ones like Vancouver-Seattle corridor. Even sadder knowing it will never happen.
Canada has a massive infra problem. That is not strange when you consider that it has an enormous area to deal with a relatively low population and that most of that population lives along a relatively narrow strip of land, and long strips are very much sub-optimal compared to a circle (which is the ideal for infra).
So both from a density perspective and a topology perspective there are serious challenges to overcome. Which makes things like highway one even more impressive (especially when you take into account some of the territory it runs through, I think that its construction should rank right up there with the Panama Canal and the Chinese wall).
You’re absolutely correct. Highway was built around 1941 though, NA was still building itself up during that time. In an ideal world, we would be building up new cities, new rail lines, new infrastructure and etc., but I guess the momentum is lost. Now we’re stuck in “upgrade and spend a lot more for a km of subway line”. Maybe we’ll figure our way out of it eventually!
Yes, there isn't anything in particular about Hyperloop that makes it stand out, but it is different in high speed rail in that it is underground and so more complex in almost all ways but one: right of way (and possibly aesthetics, which depending on the landscape can matter a lot).
Not a lawyer and might be wrong but as far as I know land rights go all the way to the core in the US, so going underground wouldn't help with right of way. I know, "HN is more than the US," but we seem to have the most trouble with trains.
I think you're referring to the 'all the way to heaven and all the way to hell' bit.
In principle that's true. But in practice mining rights and such have been split off from the right to the land and some reasonable depth underground. And any objection to an easement would be much harder to establish if it doesn't actually affect you. But for those parties that own the underground and mining rights for a given location there could well be a viable opposition to such a development. But that would then risk an eminent domain claim.
It's all pretty complex. But I would still assume that going underground is easier than going above ground where the parcels are small and the interests are immediate due to interference with existing activity.
Even if this is true, the costs of digging are much higher than the costs of above-ground construction + the legal costs of acquiring the land. A hundred kilometer tunnel would be one of the longest tunnels ever built, and the longest train/track tunnel by quite some margin. And it would need copious safety features and auxiliary tunnels leading to the surface, even before the whole vacuum part gets added in. So it won't even completely avoid the need for buying above ground lands.
> the costs of digging are much higher than the costs of above-ground construction
Yes, easily 3 to 10x.
> A hundred kilometer tunnel would be one of the longest tunnels ever built, and the longest train/track tunnel by quite some margin. And it would need copious safety features and auxiliary tunnels leading to the surface, even before the whole vacuum part gets added in. So it won't even completely avoid the need for buying above ground lands.
Indeed, so it's both a technical and economical non-starter. But it's not a 'dumb idea' in the sense that it is impossible. Merely impractical, too expensive and too complex and besides cheaper solutions exist (aircraft, for one, which scale much better with increasing distance than rail ever will).
One thing all of these 'dumb ideas' and the hyperloop, tidal energy and so on all have in common: they are great ways to get your grubby fingers on subsidies.
Yes. That's why any kind of vacuum solution is likely a non-starter both from a technical and an economical perspective. And the 'obvious' solutions (multiple smaller evacuated chamber that connect as trains pass through) have a whole raft of safety and complexity issues and are going to increase the costs massively.
Having a vacuum chamber large enough for a train to not only fit in but actually move through at high speed before getting to the next section still requires a few hundred meters per section if not more. That in itself is insanely difficult. Connecting multiple such sections while maintaining the vacuum is more difficult still. And still, you'll need thousands of pumping stations all around the middle of nowhere, that typically need constant maintenance.
For reference, the largest existing vacuum chamber is some 30mx35m (100 feet x 120 feet). Each one of the sections you would need here would have to be many times longer than the biggest vacuum chamber ever built to make any sort of sense.
The LHC achieves a hard vacuum over 27 km, and also features superconductors along its length, so clearly that combo is doable over an extended length. I'm not trying to trivialize the engineering challenges here, but I've seen that people have tendency to immediately jump from "it's hard" to "it's impossible or infeasible", even though no one's even made an attempt. Some clever engineering could await discovery that makes it all simpler.
Sometimes this sort of skepticism is warranted because our understanding is sufficient (like our understanding of material science needed for a space elevator), but sometimes this is less clear, and I think hyperloop concepts fall into the latter category.
The LHC tube is 27km long but ~6cm in diameter. It is true that they are pumping down a more impressive vacuum volume though, but not in the tube, but around each of the many, many superconducting magnets. That's about 9000m³ (compared to the ~150m³ of the actual tube).
Still, the LHC is hardly maintaining that vacuum continuously all year round. And it is one of the most sophisticated engineering and scientific projects attempted in history. Hardly a good idea for a train project.
It was the most sophisticated engineering not because of the long vacuum, but because of the tolerances, the semi-novelty of the superconducting coils at the time, the sensitivity of the equipment needed, and the extreme data collection capabilities needed to capture and store as much information as possible on picosecond timescales. None of these factors are necessarily applicable to a hyperloop.
Even so, once you've built one LHC, subsequent ones would be substantially cheaper because the primary difficulty is building the scientific and engineering knowledge needed while you're building it. Similar factors apply to programming: the first version of your program took awhile to build, but if you suddenly lost all of the code, rebuilding it would take a fraction of the time because you don't have to build your understanding of the domain the second time around.
Maybe all of these factors combined still wouldn't be enough to make hyperloop economical, but that conclusion is not obvious.
It returns obviously. Making repair or replacement of damaged sections economical is one of the engineering challenges. This by itself suggests compartmentalizing along the same lines I suggested.
It would probably be ideal if you could factory make each section and ship it on a standard truck, but with the growth of additive manufacturing, other possibilities also open up, like 3D printing the large metal container onsite.
I think you'd have to print it onsite, otherwise you have no gain in the loop being underground as you'd have to dig basically the entire ground up to swap sections.
IMO the author wrote a list of reasons to avoid the real intellectual discussion around debating ideas. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever a “dumb idea”, it’s really poor reasoning or lack of information that I see as the issue.
For instance, take the “moon deniers” that is the idea being dismissed by “correct” people. When in reality there a whole range of arguments — “we landed on the moon, recordings were faked” to “aliens told us to tell everyone we landed”, etc it’s the reasoning that matters. Quite often “smart” people have the same information as everyone else. That’s also why IMO “smart” people are equally likely to believe in conspiracies as anyone else, they have the same info.
I think it is a fair criticism. The title appears does not appear to match the content, which is not as opinion-based. It still reads like a rant, but I just happen to agree with some of the conclusions like self-censorship:
"They found that highly educated people are the most concerned about losing their jobs or missing out on job opportunities because of their political views".
If I was being charitable, I would say that title is trying to capture attention while sacrificing the expectation one may have of its content.
More than one that I've personally known. They miss just a tiny sliver of theory and they believe that their smarts are large enough to be able to see something that everybody else must have missed.
He lived 2 centuries before Newton, 3 centuries before Laplace, 4 centuries before Maxwell and 5 centuries before Noether, Einstein, and Shannon. That he doesn't believe the first law of thermodynamics is hardly his fault.
And all of those names effectively built on a foundation that Da Vinci helped establish. It wasn't modern science just yet but it was a massive step up from what came before.
And in a way that is probably his biggest contribution: to show that if science focuses on that which works and can be generalized there will be massive progress. Because for a single individual, especially in that age his output was extremely impressive and that couldn't have worked if he didn't channel his energy to areas that were deemed to be fruitful.
Actually: he was instrumental in inspiring others to search for those modern laws of physics and at that point such experiments must have helped to figure out where exactly the line was culminating in the laws of thermodynamics.
Yes, the comment was changed considerably. Originally it gave Leonardo Da Vinci's attempts to create a perpetual motion machine as an example of a smart and successful person falling for a dumb idea.
Even in the source it says he was against such ideas.
> Leonardo da Vinci made a number of drawings of devices he hoped would make free energy. Leonardo da Vinci was generally against such devices, but drew and examined numerous overbalanced wheels
Just drawing some stuff that looks like perpetual machine isn't the same as actually believing in it. In fact this is how science should work. Even if something has a small chance to be correct try that and think about it. Einstein didn't believed in black holes but thought about breakdown of his equations.
Yeah but why did so many people take those guys so seriously before their work was replicated? Shouldn’t extraordinary claims be filtered early before we give them the time of day?
I'm pretty sure that most people that have a basic idea of materials science were simply intrigued (myself amongst them) because there wasn't anything that ruled it out and it seemed like a potentially promising path. And obviously: the truth would come out anyway given enough time. The HN threads of the time make for interesting reading: I think a lot of people approach technological progress from the point of something very close to wishful thinking, their enthusiasm isn't proportional to the likelihood of the thing being true but to the perceived good a particular invention would do if it were real. And that then overwhelms any kind of reasoning ability. Incidentally: that may well be as good an answer as I can provide to the original question posed by this article.
I would contend that everyone discussing LK-99 took it very rationally. The idea that there were people "falling for it" is made up post-facto by a group who want to feel smugly superior about everything.
No, lots of people were falling for it and were twisting themselves into all kinds of knots that were not supported by evidence. And lots of people were similarly twisting themselves into all kinds of knots to claim it couldn't possibly true. And neither position was supported by evidence or physics.
You should go back and read the comment threads. People were incredibly level headed (actually tripping over themselves to make sure everyone knew how skeptical they were).
People gobbled it up with the justification that random researchers on twitter "replicated" the results under the assumption that these anonymous researchers are putting their entire career on the line and therefore should be paid attention to. That is literally playing into the point the article is making. I.e. people believing lies because the information came from a higher status individual.
Some did, but not everybody did. I recall those threads vividly and I tried very hard to keep an even keel and to keep it all grounded in evidence. But a lot of wishful thinking happened as well as categorical rejection and these had the same element in common: a lack of evidence. Though the categorical rejection faction had history on their side I still think that that's just an argument from statistics without any relevant insight in to the subject matter.
Communism is one of the worst ideas, with the worst track records, and have always captured the most intelligent people, even today. A casual browse through HN comments is enough evidence.
Communism is the idea that in order to be successful you have to kiss asses at the location where you want to eventually become someone, for example a government agency or a political party.
Capitalism is the idea that in order to be successful you should be able to kiss asses wherever and however you can and be able to move the provents from the aforementioned ass kissing at some other place (in the form of money) so you don't have to start all over. So you can make some ass kissing arbitrage in order to minimize the amount of ass kissing that you do.
I prefer the latter because I don't like to be constrained in one place and might have a bit of commit-o-phobia but it's not a stretch to think that people who like to put the work day-in and day-out in the same place, see familiar faces everyday and don't have commit-o-phobia might prefer the former.
In the end it's all about kissing asses and there are very minor differences. Long gone are the days of low hanging fruits where you could singlehandedly invent the wheel or fire, now every minor marginal improvement in anything requires some serious ass kissing and given that it's a practice that nobody likes you see emerge these big ideological battles between factions who say:
"There would be more stuff and less need for ass kissing in a libertarian free market haven"
and those who reply :
"In a proper commune the need for ass kissing would be at an all time low and the stuff would be at an all time high"
Reality is nobody knows if the wheel or fire were invented in a commune or libertarian haven because it was something so self-evident and straightforward that these sort of mega ideological battles were a non-factor.
> > Improvements are infinite, the slow down is only to log speed
Yeah but the brain gets more excited going from 0 to 10mph on a self built skateboard than from mach1 to mach2 on the Concorde, because you are in the exciting part of the S-curve.
Also because skateboard you singlehandedly crafted and it's yours, Concorde you need a million people give or take to build and billions of man hours and you get to rent 1/160th of it for about 3 hours. And those 3 hours cost some serious ass kissing to acquire.
We should reject the false idea that it's either capitalism or communism. Capitalism is a crucial step for a society to take in order to be sufficiently vulnerable to fall for a communist revolution. Marx goes into great detail about this.
I don't read any criticism of capitalism because there is basically none. 99% of it is just people claiming that some abstract bad thing in human society is due to "capitalism" without any sort of argument that would actually rise to the level of what I would call criticism.
In an unregulated market, capital very naturally tends to accumulate more capital - while, if you have nothing, it's very hard to build up capital in the first place.
Which means that, if this continues indefinitely, more and more things belong to fewer and fewer people - which is exactly what we've been seeing over the last couple of decades.
Why are you only looking at income inequality, only in the United States and only in the last 20 years? Look at where that graph was in 1980, for example.
But I didn't intend 2000 to be an arbitrary cutoff. 1980 is important because it's right before Reagan- and Thatcher-style economics. And if you look at measures of wealth inequality (e.g. the share of wealth owned by billionaires), that's actually become worse especially during the pandemic.
This was described in adam smith’s original writings about “capitalism” and he was clear for the need in government intervention to maintain a free market long term.
This is a very good thing, and the reason why capitalism works. The idea of pure meritocratic capitalism is that capital is allowed to accumulate to those who use capital most efficiently. There are fewer of those, naturally. Increasing capital efficiency benefits everyone; it means less work and more production, i.e. there's more of everything and everything is cheaper.
The actual issues of our current world happen because this pure version of capitalism doesn't happen. There's all sorts of things which lead to non-efficient people / organizations accumulating a lot of capital.
I feel like you're missing an important detail: in an unregulated market, it is often times far more efficient from an individual corporation's perspective to buy up or merge with competitors than to actually compete, whereas the societal-level efficiencies you're lauding come from competition itself. Without some form of regulation, capitalism trends towards monopoly, which is the antithesis of efficiency.
I don't think this is generally true. There are exceptions, such as a monopoly on some scarce natural resource. However, there's a quite limited market for such opportunities. It's extremely difficult if not impossible to completely corner some market, even without regulations.
In general, it's not true that companies would merge without regulation. Why would Apple merge with Samsung? It doesn't make any sense.
Usually, regulation causes monopolies to form. A prime example is the patent system, which literally grants a monopoly to an idea. There would be much more competition without IP protection laws, which in my opinion doesn't belong in capitalism. For example, if all Apple's patents and copyrights were openly licensed, there would be much more competition with higher quality, but cheaper products.
> It's extremely difficult if not impossible to completely corner some market
Are we forgetting how Microsoft absolutely dominated the PC market in the 90s and early 2000s? How today, there's basically two mobile operating systems that can determine much of today's mobile experience?
I agree that IP laws serve to entrench monopolies (although they also have the effect of encouraging development (e.g. of expensive drugs) in the first place - so it's a double edged sword). But so do a lot of other, much more "natural" mechanisms such as network effects, brand recognition, etc.
I feel like the libertarian, "pure capitalism" world view only makes sense if you think that consumers are omniscient and perfectly rational, but we know fully well how neither of these things are true.
I used to work for a company that would just buy up a bunch of smaller companies and then drive them into the ground. The smaller companies had the better tech, but the large company had a user base, a brand and money.
The point about operating systems is that these are new technologies. Free markets require time to resolve. It's natural that an inventor (especially with IP protections) has an market advantage for a period of time. It's important, that at longer time scales, the market evolves towards decentralization.
It's true that there are a lot of natural centralizing forces, such as network effects. Not sure how to resolve those.
However, getting back to the original point, no matter how you think about it, capital efficiency requires that 'a few' manage the capital, because naturally there are 'a few' who manage capital better than the rest. The problem is selecting those few. I think it's a misconception to argue that capital shouldn't centralize in principle, or that it's a morally bad thing.
Also, efficiency in a free market is really about fulfilling the needs of people according to their free will in the most efficient way possible. There's no forcing function to produce more if people don't want to consume more. In Soviet Union, they were very efficient at producing some stuff, but they made stuff that no one needed (they made lots of cheap shoes in big factories, which no one wanted). I.e. there's a difference in being efficient in isolation, and efficient at fulfilling needs of the market.
First, I don't think that "capital efficiency" is something that we absolutely need to optimise for regardless of any other concerns, and even if I would concede that, there's an argument to be made that concentrating capital in the hands of more people leads to more diverse markets that cater to more, and more different, people's needs. The thesis that a few number of people are just naturally more efficient at everything seems questionable to me.
It's true that there's a lot of specialization required and other reasons why capital doesn't always scale. That's basically what limits everything concentrating to just one guy.
> there's more of everything and everything is cheaper
And I don't believe that this is what we should optimise for. "More of everything, for cheaper" somehow doesn't seem to make people happier. I think that more shared ownership is more important, especially if you consider the effects of increased inequality on intangible goods such as democracy (e.g. how currently a few tech companies can influence global political discourse).
But even if I was willing to concede your point, somehow most people who argue for "pure meritocratic capitalism" never seem to suggest that we should have a 100% inheritance tax. Because people being born into wealth is exactly one of the reasons why "non-efficient people" (a problematic term in and of itself, btw) end up accumulating a lot of capital.
(I don't personally believe we should have a 100% inheritance tax, although I think it should be higher than it is right now in most places, but I think that this would be an almost inevitable conclusion of a "purely meritocratic" conception of economics.)
You have it backwards. Regulation has gone up a lot over the last two decades which is why you're seeing what you're seeing.
Historically in America or current day in developing countries, the rate of growth in living standards negatively correlates with the amount of regulation.
You haven't responded to my main point: do you believe that a completely unregulated market doesn't lead to wealth accumulation in the hands of few people?
It is of course true that some (bad) regulation, like protectionism of various sorts, can also lead to the same outcome in a different way.
After pondering this question from time to time over a few decades now, I will say I still really don't know. Sure, it makes intuitive sense that wealth can be used to create setups that capture more wealth. But most examples we see of this (especially the galling zero-sum ones) are regulatory capture and regulatory escape, where wealth is used to affect government action/policy to further concentrate wealth. The most glaring of these, that facilitates many others, is the fountain of newly-created USD that the politically connected get the first cut of. That value doesn't come from nowhere - it's the central collection of technological and economic progress that would otherwise show up as distributed price deflation.
On the other hand, we have the diminishing marginal utility of money - rich people overspend all the time, often on frivolous stuff. Musk bought an entire publicly traded company and crashed it on the way home, the way an upper middle class person might a shiny red Dodge Viper. One might say the VC ecosystem is chiefly 'dumb' money sloshing around trying to not be left out of the next big thing, while having no clue what that might be.
Talking about "completely unregulated" markets is also somewhat specious. In a completely ancap context, we'd likely get structures similar to governments, funded by wealthy people cooperating rather than continuing to compete in less-productive ways (say through physical force). In fact some might even say that this is the character of the current US government in a few different regards.
Yes, completely unregulated would lead to that. We need laws to protect against coercion and adjudicate in the case of disagreements between parties. Warring tribes where physical force wins is not a good place to be.
I don't think you're seeing the whole picture if you think only about physical force.
People who are well off have more opportunities to start other ventures that make them even more well-off, and if they're especially powerful, they can use that influence to further their benefit. I don't think that's particularly controversial.
To wit, I live in a mid sized town in the Midwest - about 80 years ago a family started a business that was pretty successful and is on its third or fourth generation of ownership now — that’s all well and good but it’s insane how much of the town is owned or directed by them now. Do you want to buy a car, foreign or domestic? Host a convention? Rent a hotel room in the urban core? Put on a concert? How about go to the hospital or buy health insurance? Go to college? Send your kid to preschool? Build a commercial building?
Playing into the articles points to gain higher status among "capitalists"?
Here is an easy one. Excess capital doesn't earn enough money to compensate for losses relating to depreciation, storage and maintenance costs i.e. the expectation is that capital income disappears in the long run. All further investment turns into consumption instead. That is kind of at odds with what people consider "capitalism" where the marginal productivity of capital is considered constant.
I think terms like "capitalism" inherently spread confusion rather than clarity.
Specifically, which of these systems do you mean by "capitalism"?
1) The status quo in the US where the economy is dominated by private corporations but the government has some regulations and some safety net. Also, corporations receive a significant amount of welfare from the government, generally control the regulatory agencies and some are primarily funded by the government either directly (NPR/PBS, Amtrak, etc.) or as its primary customer (defense contractors).
2) The system that existed in Gilded Age America where there was very little regulation but lots of corporate welfare and a US Army that would "remove" any American Indians who were causing trouble for the railroads.
3) The libertarian utopia where absolutely everything is privatized.
4) A system where everything except the police and military is privatized, there are virtually no regulations and there is no corporate welfare. Basically the more moderate form of libertarianism.
5) Basically the system we have in the US but with a larger safety net, more regulations and less military spending. In other words the European system that is one of the things commonly called "socialism" in US politics but it is also called "capitalism" when convenient to contrast it against other types of economies.
6) An economy where most people have a reasonable chance of eventually becoming running their own business and where large businesses are generally rare. In this system, creating a corporation might even require an act of a state legislature or the national legislature and would be generally rare and mainly for utilities like long distance transportation. This is the system that generally prevailed in the free states of the US prior to the Gilded Age.
7) The system that existed in the mid-20th century US that is somewhere between 1) and 5). Strong unions, regulations (often captured by corporations), large corporations that make stuff domestically, restrictions on imports, defense contractors exist, etc. The main distinguishing characteristic of this system is a high degree of income equality. CEOs don't make dramatically more than typical workers and even entry level pays a living wage.
At one point, I would have defined "capitalism" as 3 or 4. Today, I'd define it as 6. Most people would probably define it as 1, 2 or 7 which is what I would call "corporatism". I'm also undoubtedly leaving out other definitions of capitalism. The term "socialism" is also unhelpful for the same reason.
People who like "capitalism" or "socialism" define it as an economic system they like then use the other word to define a system they don't like. Then they talk past people who have different definitions of those terms. An argument about Venezuela or the USSR is not a reasonable argument to use against somebody who wants the Nordic model in the US or to go back to the mid-20th century economic system. An argument about corporate welfare or defense contractors is not a reasonable argument to use against a libertarian.
Communism as defined by Marx and as practiced by the Soviet Union, China, and the DDR. But you can expand to socialism in the widest sense if you like. Still a bad idea that attracts some very smart people.
I said your own words, not "as defined by" others.
I've yet to meet anyone who throws around "communism" like that who uses it as anything but a vacuous memetic catchphrase, detached from any real understanding.
Really? You really can't think of a stupid idea of from the past 20 years. I think this is being totally intellectually dishonest or you waste too much time with political bullshit so you have lost the ability to think outside of rhetorical response to win a twitter flame war.
How about all the dumb ideas that lead smart people to basically blow up the financial system in 2008 to start.
The point is clear. He even summarized it neatly in the least three sentences or so. The rest is projection (and a rather transparent attempt to undermine the author’s message, dare I say reputation, by association fallacy).
A lot of intelligent people aren't very smart, and a lot of smart people aren't very intelligent. The smart achive desirable outcomes, and usually that means not rocking the boat. The intelligent have a capacity for abstraction, which means it's easy to misunderstand why people are parroting absurdities. Where a good programmer is intelligent, a good product manager is smart.
I was surprised he didn't include this Dalrymple quote, "propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control."
It captures the issue more succintly, but it would also have limited the reach of the article. I'm sure he's familiar with it, but the author was probably just being smart.
The use of smart vs intelligent here is arbitrary though illustrates the difference. I've also seen the reverse: smart aleck/smart ass, too smart for their own good. I would say that being pragmatic captures the outcomes one.
A good programmer and product manager are both, but with switched weightings as indicated.
Great response! I always remind myself: information isn't the same as knowledge, knowledge isn't the same as wisdom. Lies have nothing to do with wisdom, integrity is destroyed by the actions of lies.
Propaganda doesn’t necessarily mean lies. It’s anything that makes a recipient feel compelled to participate in the spread of that thing. Right in the name: propaganda, propagate.
I really love this quote, it meshes well with the concept of authenticity and setting boundaries in the context of interpersonal relationships. I would like to add or counter the aspect about becoming evil with one becoming vacant and "requiring" substances to alter themselves sufficiently to perform to the dominant social playbook that is relevant to their context.
It hits very close to home, if not entirely so
Edit: I hesitate to furnish this example but this seems to be what's up with Melania Trump. Don't wanna get political but imagine the dissonance of someone who married purely for money and is ruthlessly valued purely for her value as a trophy and softening agent for her husband and is cheated on while she's fucking pregnant with the next son. She might have preferred that in function if not in form by which I mean maybe it only became humilisting when it broke the news but its no less a tacit proof of concept that Trump was bored and did not find her desirable anymore. I do not envy those who marry for money. The inevitable divorce is gonna suck when he leaves her with all the debt
It was known early that covid was rarely spread outdoors, but it took a long time for rules and recommendations to catch up to that, especially in Australia IIRC.
Ever since COVID, I have been wearing masks, mostly when using public transport. Instead of five days a week, I now use public transport a lot less, a maximum of two days. Two advantages from this combination that I see are that I have not caught seasonal flu, as I used to every year pre-COVID, and extra conscious handwashing also probably helps. Additionally, I appreciate the fact that my whole face is not visible unless I want it to be, which helps me with social anxiety, and people tend to ignore me more.
Evem worse, masks work better for others than yourself. What came a bit as shock during COVId for me, was how little people cared for each other, that people couldn't even bothered with the smallest inconveniences to do something good for everyone. I am a cynic, but didn't that level egoism.
Indeed. However, I believe that we, as humans, have always been indifferent to those outside our immediate circle. Similarly, people often don't show concern for the homeless or those in inescapable servitude due to mortgages. Yet, there is a desire to increase the number of people in office, rather than converting more spaces into houses or apartments. I have observed on Hacker News that some individuals don't even rent places; instead, they keep those spaces closed to inflate prices. Despite the significant progress we've made from tribal times, our emotional evolution seems limited.
That's a scary number. And it's probably not wrong.