Viewpoint Focus, Pt. 1
Over on at r/TheMotte, Doglatine started a chain letter where users would take turns on the stage answering some questions. This week it’s my turn.
1. Identity
What political and moral labels (liberal, ancap, Kantian, etc.) are core to your identity? How do you understand these terms?
Policy-wise, I'm basically a libertarian. Yet I shy away from the term because it implies what I prefer other people live under which isn't the case. So I end up describing myself as "an anarchist, with libertarian sympathies". I really like the Seasteading/Snowcrash model of a society, with tiny hubs of sovereignty all run in distinct ways, and free exit everywhere. If someone wants to start a religious fundamentalist community personality cult, let them find the space to do it; but just allow anyone to exit. I think there is a great deal of hubris of believing that your preferred policy basket is the best for everyone involved, and I think we all benefit from having space to have wild experimentation with how society ought to run. The most practical way to achieve this is when we eventually get low-cost space travel, so I'm not sweating it.
Perhaps the thing that I strive towards the most in day to day life is epistemological humility. I get viscerally uncomfortable when I am too sure or too confident about a given idea. My friends notice this as a tic of mine, where I'll fight like hell for a position, but then as soon as I see the ground shift too much in my direction, I start with "well to be fair, you should also consider this counter-argument....". I'm deathly afraid of cognitive biases sneaking into my mind, and so I try and police them harshly. Still, it hasn't stopped me from forming some very strong opinions.
2. Influences
What thinkers, writers, authors, or people in your personal life have contributed most to your worldview?
I recognized early on how easy it is to use this section to brag about how good and honorable the influencers behind your present self are. I promise to try and shy away from that.
Having studied economics at George Mason, the department faculty (Caplan, Hanson, Tabarrok, Roberts, etc were all my professors) had an enduring and perhaps embarrassingly persistent amount of influence on me. I knew basically nothing about libertarianism or anarchism until I started econ classes, and then I switched basically on a dime. I remain very confused about that transition in ideology, because it feels almost too clean. Echoing the part about epistemological humility, I often wonder whether I was duped or fell prey to some extremely convincing propaganda.
There are a few authors I could pick from that time to highlight, but maybe the standout for me is the 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat. His writing career was relatively short, spanning only from when he was 45 years old until dying of tuberculosis 6 years later. His writing is just such a pleasure to read. He fully embodies the ethos of reductio ad absurdum by taking his opponents premises as a given and then skillfully showcasing just how absurd that is. For an example, read his essay on the "A Negative Railroad". Bastiat demonstrated that you can argue about serious things and still have a ton of fun with it.
The Friedman family has a lot to offer. Milton Friedman is just an examplar in kind and patient communication. He was vilified throughout his life, but he stuck his guns and showed the world a smiling face with a twinkle in his eyes while extolling the virtues of free-market capitalism. His son, David Friedman, wrote the bible on Anarcho-Capitalism with the Machinery of Freedom, one of my favorite books ever. His son, Patri Friedman, is probably the reason I went to law school in the first place. I was working as a Excel spreadsheet jockey, bored out of my mind, when I read WIRED's article on Seasteading. I was thoroughly fascinated by the idea, and I wanted to be involved. I didn't have a background in maritime engineering, but I figured I'd work well as an ambassador or a diplomat, and thought law would be the way to do it. Worst case scenario, if this whole seasteading thing doesn't work out, I'll be a lawyer. And how bad can that be?
Radley Balko deserves special mention. He's a libertarian journalist, and has been beating the drum on the injustices inherent in the criminal justice system for decades. Reading his blog, The Agitator, was a combination of depression and anger, and so exhausting to deal with. But it lit up an intense interest in criminal justice issues. That eventually led me to the ACLU to work on police abuse issues, and to where I am now, working as a public defender. There's a good chance none of that would have happened without me finding out about Balko's work.
And finally, I want to give a special shoutout to that user from Something Awful who ran the "Meeting women" megathread. It's ultimately how I discovered PUA methods of meeting women, and that has improved my life by an immeasurable degree. But more relevant to this question, it's how I ended up reading Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene (come to think of it, Dawkins was also important when I gave up Islam and became an atheist), Robin Baker's Sperm Wars, and Matt Ridley's Red Queen. The trifecta of books helped me gain an insight into human sexual dynamics. Namely, I understood that it was ok that men and women are different, and ultimately allowed me to feel and act comfortably within a masculine paradigm. That has had knock-on effects in many many areas besides just dating.
3. Problems
In terms of sheer scale, what is the biggest problem humanity faces today? Alternatively, what is a problem that you think is dramatically underappreciated?
Scale itself. Humans are really good at adapting to new circumstances, but there's always going to be a period of time with growing pains. The world population more than tripled in just a century, and instantaneous and widespread communication with anyone became the norm, and I don't think we've caught up with evolving our institutions. Still, we're doing fucking remarkably well. I heard of this comparison a while back, but imagine putting 200 chimpanzees into an airplane for a few hours. Humans will survive just fine, but you're almost guaranteed to have a few dozen chimpanzee murders before it lands.
The issue I identify with scale, is that people have a problem in conceptualizing decisions when we have to consider the effect in thousands/millions/billions. This wasn't that big of a deal if you were tasked with ascertaining the relative worth of a charitable endeavor when the only recipient was going to be your neighbor Tom down the street. EA purports to fill this hole by giving raw unbridled cold hard numbers in this area, but people still cannot escape the allure of the proxy personal. We herald individuals as icons to illustrate a wide trend (See basically all of BLM). We also tend to use irrelevant characteristics as a heuristic for moral worthiness, and these tend to fall mostly along the lines of group identity or individual proximity. I think it's unjust, but also inevitable, that the death of 100 Americans will have roughly the same blip to the average American as 10,000 Africans.
4. Future Predictions
Do you think that the world of 2040 is, on balance, likely going to be better than the world of 2020? Why/why not? Give us a prediction (or two) about the near- or long-term. It could be in any domain (US politics, geopolitics, tech, society, etc.), and it doesn't need to be something you think will definitely happen - just something that you think is not widely considered or whose likelihood is underestimated.
Yes, definitely better. This is largely based on unbroken positive long-term trends. People are living longer, crime is going down, war is going down, wealth is going up, child mortality is going down, etc etc. Virtually every metric out there showcases ever improving standards. There are certain causes of concern (i.e. There does appear to be an unmistakable rise in partisanship in the United States) but I attribute that largely to humanity's growing pains than anything else. We'll figure it out eventually.
I'm admittedly awful at predictions, so I'm mostly leaving this question up for others to opine on. I'd say in 2040, there's probably not going to be a "thing" such as trans identity. I say this because I find the current activist paradigm to be incoherent and unsustainable. But the cyberpunk future I envision is one of significantly relaxed gender norms where for example if you're born male and want to present femme, you're welcome to do so without having to flip entire categories. It'll just be one of the accepted palettes, similar to how a guy today can wear pink without having to declare himself a woman. This is in line with the world mostly becoming a better place for all.
Maybe what makes me most nervous about predicting the future, is realizing that inevitably, the future humans will look back at our time and be completely aghast at something we did that we currently believe is more or less innocuous. Making a prediction with that as a backdrop is bound to be self-serving.
5. Mistakes
What's a major error of judgement you've made in the past about political or moral matters? This could be a descriptive error (e.g., predicting Brexit) or a normative issue that in retrospect you think you got badly wrong (e.g., failing to appreciate the importance of social cohesion).
This is going to sound incredibly naive, but I used to wish/hope/believe that every disagreement can be resolved by enough communication and rational debate. I just couldn't fathom that any disagreement can survive a sufficient amount of calm dialogue.
I recognize now, as Hanson says, that politics is not about policy. You can't fully eradicate the myriad of motivations people have in engaging in political discussion or involvement. Often it's for group status, sometimes it's for personal gain, and sometimes (this can't be fully discounted) they're suffering from mental health issues.
On a similar vein, a concrete facet I was 100% wrong about was after the 2012 election. At that point, Romney ran a campaign that was pseudo-hostile to immigrants, arguing for "self-deportation" as a viable policy. I argued that the GOP would only make headway in the future if they stopped being so antagonistic and embraced immigrants, similar to how Bush did. And LOLOL I was so wrong.
6. Projects
Imagine you were a multi-billionaire with a team of a thousand world-class experts in any field. What would you build?
Easy. I would break the law. Constantly. I'd buy all the RU-486 and set up airdrops all over the fucking world. Bingo, now every woman has access to a safe and effective method of administering an abortion at home. Fuck your reproductive healthcare laws. I'd fund covertly building SRO housing in every city experiencing housing affordability crisis, charge a rate that would render a profit and also make it absurdly cheap for anyone homeless to afford it. I'd do this covertly for a while, and then dare the city council to shut it down. I'd scan every book in the world like Google did, but instead of hoard it for fear of litigation I'd just post all of it up online. Fuck your copyright laws.
It would be basically the Uber version of "This is probably illegal, but if we get big enough they can't do anything" except for charitable endeavors.
Seems like it would be trivial to do this if you have billions of dollars on hand and your goal isn't maximizing profit. Either spend the money on completely anonymizing the enterprise, or pay people enough to take on the risk of criminal prosecution. I'm annoyed at how often institutions kowtow to the law rather than say fuck it. I suspect (based on Uber's example) that a lot of laws are fragile paper tigers, ready to crumple at the first sign of a systemic and organized resistance.