@MathWizard's banner p

MathWizard

formerly hh26

0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 164


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
formerly hh26

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 164


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					
					All
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Bump Top Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This seems like a flaw with the most pure form of anti-classificationism that could be addressed by a minor adjustment to a tit-for-tat strategy, which is mostly where my position is.  It would be ideal if people mostly just didn't talk about race.  Other people do talk about race, and therefore it makes it very difficult to communicate or model them if you just naively pretend that race doesn't exist while everyone else does.  If you just let all the racists run around being racist but don't acknowledge their motivations then you can't even talk about them coherently, let alone come up with strategies to combat them.


Instead, it seems like the best strategy is to only talk about race on the meta level.  You do not define categories for people, you do not treat people differently based on what categories other people put them in.  But when other people put people into categories, you acknowledge that they have done so and respond accordingly, and discuss the categories that exist in their minds.  People are not forgiving Mike Tyson because he is black on the object level and his black skin causes him to emit forgiveness pheromones or something, people are forgiving Mike Tyson because they have categorized him as "black" in their minds and have allowed him to inherit all of the baggage about victims and oppressors that our society associates with that.  This seems acceptable to mention and criticize.


Race does matters in the real world as a self-fulfilling prophecy because people treat it like it does.  But if more people adopt this form of anti-classification then discussions about race become rarer and rarer since fewer people would bring it up in the first place on the object level, and thus the amount race matters would exponentially decay as it being discussed less would make it matter less which would make it be discussed less, back and forth.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My vote is on the similarity to concentration camps.  People in general, especially people far away hearing news reports about events in other countries, are not utilitarians.  10000 civilians dead looks pretty similar to 100000 civilians dead, but the words "concentration camp" with some lurid descriptions gets people outraged.  I suspect that the amount of international blowback from your plan would be more than the amount of international blowback they're getting now, even if the actual harms were much lesser.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How is that winning the issue?  If blue and some swing states are able to exploit a lack of ID to cheat elections and remain perpetually blue, then they can win all the elections via fraud.  And all the republicans can do is prevent fraud in already-red states so they don't also flip to blue.


On issues related to local governance, each State being able to do whatever it wants is a victory.  But on federal issues, especially elections, that's not good enough.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The word you're looking for is "trivial", as opposed to "tautology", which although slightly correlated, are quite distinct.  I can just as easily cherry pick an uninteresting non-tautology like "this cat is black", which is just as undeep as your example tautology.


In my opinion, the interestingness of natural selection is not merely the tautology "things which are more likely to exist are more likely to exist", but the implication:  "things which are more likely to exist are more likely to exist, therefore all of biology".


The fact that such a trivial-seeming tautology emergently leads to the huge diversity of life is highly nontrivial and interesting and profound.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Indoor.  It's cheaper/safer in terms of disease risk and thus the amount of vaccinations they require, it's comfier for them in general with respect to weather, and you get to actually encounter them and interact with them more, assuming you spend more time indoors versus outdoors.


Having an outdoor cat is like halfway between having a cat and just feeding a stray cat.  Might as well actually commit to having a cat if you want to have a cat.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oooh this is good trolling.  The "you did this to yourself" aspect is very strong here, despite it being obvious that the poster is creating this combination on purpose, which is precisely the balance that a good troll creates.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Pressuring victims of anything to retract their claims gets my hackles up.  There are forms of "obstruction of justice" that don't outrage me, where people resist arrest, or destroy evidence when they get caught doing something illegal.  Like, you shouldn't do that, but I get it.  But witness tampering, threats, corruption?  That's unacceptable, regardless of what it's in service of.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The Goal of the Futurist Right is not to create some new orthodoxy that can take the people who put us in our current predicament, and align them properly with the interests of our society.




As a Christian, I must reject this.  For the Atheist Right this may your goal, but this is decidedly unchristian, and likely bad even from an atheist utilitarian perspective.  Jesus came to save the sinners, taught to love our enemies, and spent his time teaching and hanging out with the lowest scum of society while the experts in the law mocked him and ultimately killed him.  The easiest way to become evil is to be so sure that you are good and your enemies are evil that any acts against them are justified.


This is related to though perhaps a slightly different spin on Scott's Guided by the Beauty of Our Weapons.  Perhaps a moral rather than rational/bayesian version.  If you attempt to ruthlessly crush your opponents, and they attempt to do the same to you, then the stronger one will win with no correlation to who's actually correct.  And to what end?  You're no more likely to be on the correct side, and if you resort to evil methods in your pursuit of victory then you can rule over an evil society with you on top instead of them on top, I guess.


But if you do what's right, and you are more good and more kind then you will draw people to join you and simultaneously gain strength and build a better world.  If you try to convince people that you are right, and they try to convince you that they are right, then if you are actually right you will be more persuasive on average.


Now, it's important not to be naive about this.  We don't need to fill our streets with radical leftists and/or Islamists who seek to destroy us and build their own subcultures where they reinforce their beliefs and never convert.  Survival as a society and culture is an important goal.  But converting other people is also an important goal, not simply because they will be allies and help us but also because they are human beings who matter even when they do evil, and helping them to be better is the right thing to do.  Marginalizing people might be positive as a instrument towards disincentivizing their behavior and limiting the damage they can do, but it is negative as an ultimate goal and the actual end goal should be conversion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is a victory conditional on the belief that Republicans are more prone to putting their thumb on the scale than Democrats, rather than the other way around.


That is, if we have any two parties, A and B, and A is more prone to putting their thumb on the scale, then more leeway towards voting regulations is a victory for A, and less leeway is a victory for B.


It seems nontrivial to simply assume that the Republicans are party A, especially given their recent demands for more transparency and stricter adherence to election rules.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've been doing it like that, where they're all together and reference each other, it's just that then when Agent has 15 methods because some of them are experimental variations on each other or niche things I wanted to do to see what would happen, then I make another class for graphing scatter plots, and I've got a bunch of methods for (Make a world, then modifier the parameters according to X, then execute Y, then graph the results, then repeat that N times) that would be nice to stick in their own class somewhere, and then I've got a bunch of useful static methods that do stuff like load and save data to CSVs that would be nice to have in their own class for organization purposes.  And if I just lay them out linearly (which I mostly have, with a few rare exceptions that definitely have 0 recursive dependencies and I actually have moved them to their own .py file) then I have literally 2000 lines of code I have to scroll up and down just to find the right class whenever I want to check to see what the name of the method I want to call is or something, and then scroll back down to find the spot I'm working on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did you forget my first comment that you responded to?  Virtually all of mathematics is technically tautological.  Any valid logical argument or proof is tautological.  I suppose it depends on how you define "most", but if we weight by how often people use them, then most tautologies are not at all trivial, you just don't notice that the non-trivial ones are in fact tautologies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.




Gun rights are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, that makes them a Federal issue.  Now, perhaps the exact wording and definition of what regulations constitute "infringement" or not are up for debate, but that is a debate about the meaning of the constitution itself.  Once we've defined what is and is not infringement, no State has the right to make laws stricter than that.  It's out of their jurisdiction.  This is not a pure 100% Democracy, the electorate and anyone they elect do not have the legal authority to infringe the right to bear arms, even within the borders of their state, because the constitution does not give them that right.


Again, it's open for debate what does and does not count as infringement, but the legitimacy of getting involved in other state's business is present on this issue, and not other more progressive issues, because it's directly and clearly established in the Constitution.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I really like MTG Arena, because I am addicted to screens.  In particular:


    

  1. 

    It's free to play.  If you want to get all the fancy cards you have to pay real money, or play the game regularly in order to complete enough daily quests to get card packs, or be good enough at drafts that you can win more stuff than you lose.  But if you're okay with being slightly-underpowered, or if you scrape together enough to make one good deck and keep playing that deck, you don't have to pay a cent.  And I never have.  Back when I played physical magic I had to pay real money AND be underpowered compared to my friends who paid more than me.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    You can just pick up and play with someone, instantly, at home.  As someone without a lot of friends, and who doesn't like going out and doing things, it's convenient to just feel like playing Magic on a whim and then a few minutes later after the game boots up I have someone to play against, and then I can stop when I'm bored, and then play another match a few hours later.  It's really convenient.  I guess if you and your son are playing together that's less of an issue.
    

    3. 



But everyone is different and your situation is quite different from mine.


As a side note, how do you make things fair when playing against your son?  Do you just go easy on him?  Do you give him a way better deck than you and then trying to overcome the difference?  My fiance and I have not had much success playing together because I've played a ton and she's played almost none and I'm too much of a tryhard I can't figure out how to avoid utterly destroying her except with incredibly patronizing handicaps, and it ends up no fun for either of us.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.


Representation matters a little.  You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media.  People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color.  But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset.  Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China.  Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland.  A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans.  A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America.  As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race.  You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles.  That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role.  In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white.  In some it might be the other way around.  The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate.  As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes.  The left is right that this is bad.  The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.


We already solved this problem.  How many decades of under-representation, you ask?  I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for?  I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me.  My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors.  The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"?  Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s.  They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades.  They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


if the woman lives in a castle doctrine state




Sounds like a big if.  An lot of people don't live in castle doctrine states.  And while on a societal level this could be fixed by adding this to more states, that's not super realistic for an individual person in this situation.  An individual solution would be to move to a castle doctrine state, but that has some pretty high costs depending on how their social circles, family, and careers are structured.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The wiseness of marrying her or not is going to depend on who she is now and in the future, the past is useful in-so-far as it informs those.


Having promiscuous sex is a sign that someone


    

  1. 

    Does not treat sex as special or sacred or important, at least not to the extent that a chaste person does.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Does not have a proactive loyalty or consideration towards their future partner.  A chaste person who saves themselves shows respect and loyalty to the person who they will eventually end up with, before they've even met them.  This means that once they do and that person fills that role they are irreplaceable.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Does not think about long-term consequences of their actions, or highly value things like reputation and honorable behavior.  A lot of people are going to find this behavior icky, which both severely narrows down the promiscuous person's future partners, and leaves a permanent regret in the heart of partners who decide to forgive their past but still have to know about it.
    

    4. 



All of this together means such people are more likely to cheat, and more likely to divorce when they get bored and find someone new.  Their current partner may be special, but they are unlikely to be the same level of special that a purely monogamous person would have.  However, this is correlational, not guaranteed.  And people can change.  I don't know Alice, I don't know how much she's changed since then, how loyal she is, how devoted she is to Bob, how much she does or does not regret her past.  All I know is that however many years ago she thought that sleeping with however many guys was an acceptable thing to inflict on Bob before she ever met him.  But ultimately, the decision is up to Bob.  He has to figure out whether he's willing to be guy #537 to Alice, whether he can accept that without it bothering him for the rest of his life.  And decide how much he trusts her, whether he's actually truly special to her or just another notch in her belt.  And he's allowed to choose to marry her.  And it might even be the right decision, I don't know her, I don't know how much her past speaks to her current character, whether she's still the same kind of person or whether she's truly changed.


But when making an argument, it should be focused on Bob, his future, and what's right for him.  Her past only matters in-so-far as it affects those.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Fair and Unfair in Bilateral Monopolies
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In a pure, mathematically perfect, game theory bilateral monopoly, any distribution is a Nash Equilibrium, making the actual distribution arbitrary and impossible to deduce logically.  Any offer someone makes and commits to would be irrational to refuse, but any counter-offer is similarly irrational to refuse, although I suppose if you modify the game with some sort of negotiation system attached and maybe some semi-rational actors you could come up with some sort of converging equilibrium.


In the real world, nothing is a perfect bilateral monopoly isolated from other economics, in which case the asymmetry of the breaking of this monopoly is likely to have a very strong impact on the negotiation.  Labor pretty much always has value, if nothing else than the fact that sitting around relaxing is typically more enjoyable than working (not literally always though), and there are plenty of other jobs someone could take.  So if there's a resource A that is completely worthless without skill B, and person B has skill C that's useless without resource A, you still don't have a perfect bilateral monopoly because person B could go do something else even if it doesn't use that skill.  This gives person B an advantage in negotiations. Or maybe person B can extract value from A with 99% efficiency and some random Joe off the street can extract value with 5% efficiency.  That gives person A an advantage.  Unless the bilateral monopoly is truly perfect, both the resource and the skill/labor are completely useless without each other, the imperfections in the monopoly are going to provide pressure on the negotiating price.  Internal factors of the people such as their wealth and utility functions may also play a role, as you point out, but I think the asymmetries in the monopoly are going to be a bigger factor.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


donating money to cure liver cancer is infinitely more aligned to EA values than, well, basically anything I can think of.




If one dollar saved the same number of liver cancer lives as one dollar saved malaria lives, this might be true.  It's not.  As a reminder, the E in EA stands for "effective".  That means do the math, shut up and multiply.  One liver cancer death might be worse than one malaria death, but it's not worse than ten malaria deaths, so if you can save ten lives for the same money as one life, you save the ten.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for March 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


a fractured arm/ribs/cheek




Each of those seem like they would lead to vastly different outcomes, I would not just lump them together like this.  If bat guy hits the chest or the arm not holding the knife then it plays out like you say and the knife goes in, game over.  If bat guy hits the head, even just a cheek, then knife guy is not going to be in a good position to follow through on his lunge.  If it's a strong hit and knife guy can't recover in time then bat guy can follow through with more hits, if not then maybe he scrambles away and they start again but with knife guy at a disadvantage.  If bat guy hits the arm with the knife and knife guy drops it then it's over, but if he maintains his grip he might get his stab in.


So I think the outcome strongly depends on if bat guy's first hit can decide the match and prevent the knife from getting its first hit.  Which for inexperienced fighters is probably going to be mostly luck.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think part of the problem is simply a failure to optimize for quality.  An absence of merit and meritocracy.  It's not required for wokeness to be an objectively negative property in games as long as it distracts from quality.  If you had a substantial fraction of people obsessed with blue flowers to the point that they start hiring people to work on their game on the basis that they are fellow blue-flower enthusiasts rather than their programming and game design skill, that alone would decrease the quality of games (or productivity in pretty much any industry).  If you insert a bunch of fanservice characters whose main appeal is that they wear blue flowers, and fail to make them appealing in other ways because the blue-flower-wearing takes care of that in the minds of the developers, then you end up with lackluster characters from the perspective of anyone who doesn't care about blue flowers.  If all mainstream games all start to share similar plotlines of evil villains trying to poison all the blue flowers, or worse, dye them red (the horror!), people will get tired of it.  Nobody cares about blue flowers, tell some good stories!


Any overly ideological creator that gets too self-absorbed in their own niche obsession will struggle to make good content that appeals to anyone who doesn't share their obsession because they get too many false-positives from self-masturbatory appeals to their own niche and stop optimizing for more objective quality once something meets their own distorted subjective view.


This is why any overly preachy content is cringe and lame even when it contains a message that I agree with. The fact that wokeness in many instances happens to be toxic and destructive is just the cherry on top.  The ideological obsession is the majority of the problem.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
1:  Outlaw abortion, provide free non-abortive birth control for everyone, which is mandatory for heterosexuals until they get married, or at least sign some sort of contract with their long-term partner about how potential children will be raised.


2: School vouchers, which includes subsidies for homeschooling, provided said schools and homeschools pass certain accreditation procedures so they are actually providing a legitimate education and aren't just scamming for money.


Actually.... you asked for things out of left field, and 2 seems too normal.  So to play more into the thought experiment here, let's ramp it up beyond what I'd normally advocate.  Massively subsidize homeschooling.  Provide free teacher training for parents, with a specialization towards teaching in small classroom sizes of children who you get to see repeatedly year after year, in every subject, and teaching kids to teach themselves.  Pay enough that families can go from living on a two-working-parents income to a two-working-parents-but-one's-job-is-homeschooling-their-own-kids income.  It won't even cost money, just divert it from the public schools who don't need as much because many kids have moved to homeschools.  Have economists figure out every possible way that bad-faith-actors could exploit the system and figure out how to prevent it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But different traits scale disproportionally with respect to each other, so I think you can meaningfully translate quantitative differences into qualitative differences in practice via orders of magnitude difference in ability.


That is, if someone with an IQ of 120 can throw a football 2% more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then we'd say that football-throwing skill does not scale meaningfully with IQ even if there is technically a minor improvement.  If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve simple arithmetic problems 40% faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then this would reasonably be considered a quantitative difference.  If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve problems related to hierarchically nested hypothetical scenarios 50 times (5000%) faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, (which is realistic if the latter can barely handle them at all), then this would reasonably be described as a qualitative difference despite technically being quantitative in the details.


Clearly there isn't a well-defined bright line distinguishing the scenarios.  But there are cases which fall unambiguously on one side or the other, such that it's meaningful to discuss.


edit: mixed up the words "quantitative" and "qualitative" in some places


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for February 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It can get especially bad on Reddit when you're in a back-and-forth conversation with someone that goes enough layers deep that probably nobody else is reading your comments except the responder, and you can see when they're downvoting each reply you make.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is why I don't consider myself officially a Libertarian despite some fairly strong leanings in that direction.  A handful of monopolistic megacorp/cartels using economic power to suppress competition isn't that much different from a handful of government bureaucrats doing that same with laws.  Better to have some regulations even if they restrict the markets as first-order effects as long as they result in more free markets on the second and higher orders.  And also to solve obvious game-theoretic issues like externalities and coordination problems.


But my ideal government would probably take a Libertarian minimalist government as a template and then patch the bugs until you end up 10-20% of the way towards what we currently have.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not super familiar with the specific laws, but I'm pretty sure there's some sort of oversight.  That is, if the Nevada State legislature suddenly coordinates and decide that all of them are permanently elected, only they are allowed to vote so they always win elections and can pick whoever they want to send to the senate/house/president, the federal government would object.  I'm fairly certain they can't just overthrow their own Democracy.  The Supreme Court would overrule them somehow, even if they had to stretch the text of some law or constitutional clause to make it happen.