Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.
If you mean people didn’t have modern concepts of leisure and recreation that’s true. The world they also had to concern themselves with was a lot smaller.
Tretiak
3d ago
When you know people that put ketchup on burritos, this one doesn’t come far out of left field.
Definitely had me fooled.
Tretiak
3d ago
The world after modernization moves so much faster and is far more competitive than the world before it. Makes sense why people are so mentally drained, tired and stressed out. You have to grow up with a lot of grit and be used to difficult environments to live there and be truly happy as opposed to surviving and being content at best.
Tretiak
3d ago
Florida would be a relevant comparison in this context. A huge pillar of its domestic economy is tourism.
Fruits and vegetables are cheap here in America too. We call it “shoplifting.”
Food anywhere else is surely more healthy than ours. But I find American food is more tasty and agreeable to my palette than a lot of other ethnic foods simply because I was raised on it. Chinese and Mexican food I have a very weak spot for. But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.
I don't know what barometer you're using to call the US a success in detail so I can't effectively comment on it. And unless you think the US in 2025 is the only example of a successful society out there such that it merits setting it categorically apart from other nations, there are plenty of other successful societies out there. China has a more effective governance system (it's why even scholars of the right-wing like Paul Gottfried have taken to admire it and refers to himself as a "right-wing Leninist"). Japan has a better transportation system. Singapore has a better drug policy. Finland has a better educational system. Many European countries have a better healthcare system. Even North Korea has a better border policy than we do. What’s the superior individual liberty policy prescription for these domains?
A lot of times I see this way of thinking omnipresent in almost every argument left-wingers and progressives alike make in policy circles when it comes to taxing everyone and everything to fund their utopian social programs (and no amount of money will ever be enough to see them achieve their goals). And this is a problem Americans have more generally with the way they look at things; because Americans are a group of people that money will solve anything. I think most people will find it shocking that there are other qualitative aspects to life that are at least equally if not more important to them because believe it or not, money isn't everything.
If all you're talking about is material wealth the US is the richest country in the world. Calling that a product of individual liberty leaves a massive hole in the argument that I haven't seen filled by anyone. The article I posted earlier for instance lends credence and empirical evidence to the argument many intellectuals in Southeast Asia made, namely that a social system which adopts a collectivist attitude such as 'Asian Values', dramatically increases the overall amount of human and social capital in society. I don't see how a similar argument could be made for 'Individual Liberty' in western societies.
Modern collectivism of the sort that tends to make complaints like liberty "optimizes solely for individual preference" has the worst record of all -- the many skulls piled up by fascist and Communist regimes.
I didn't cite communism in my prior example because there's no disagreement I have with the people who make this argument. I'm about as far right-wing on this point as you can get. But there's a reason most civilizations who have flourished over the long run or at best or withstood the test time of time have been ran by highly illiberal regimes, whether democratic or not. I think historians of the future will in a way look back on America with a similar view.
Government policies that respect the natural law and seek to make obedience to it easier push back against this, and they have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom. They also facilitate human flourishing, which is no small thing. The state can't solve the problem, but it can do better than it has done. I am not optimistic about achieving this as a political matter, but I've been surprised before.
You're not going to inspire a country like the US with 300M+ people to return to good sense where it concerns our shortcomings and failures. That's about right up there with thinking you can solve problems like prostitution through moral lectures. You can't. The State may not be able to completely solve that problem on it's own, but it's all but impossible to solve without it. You need the political mechanisms, coercion and sometimes even the looming threat of intimidation to get people to act and behave right. For me the only reason to be optimistic is where there's a political will for the government to lay down it's iron hand on a number of important issues.
Tretiak
3d ago
I have no idea what lends credence to his argument. The exact opposite has been shown to be true since the end of the 20th century. Fukuyama's 'End of History' thesis was laudably ambitious but most societies that were wrapped up in his prediction went the other direction by almost 180 degrees. They greatly retain and drew their ideas for economic and technological development from their historical traditions. Japanese manufacturing for instance did that with Zen Buddhism in the 20th century at the same time people were declaring the triumph over tradition. Technology has hardly supplanted tradition and I think it's unlikely it will in the near future either.
This relates to the culture war for the simply fact that I think just like the religious piece, most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy. It's all well and good to make arguments about tradition and the importance of paternal authority etc in the abstract, but personally submitting yourself to someone else's rule (in a very direct way, I understand that we are ruled indirectly now anyway) would, I suspect, be a bridge too far.
No conservative I've ever met has said he wants to tear down liberal institutions. But individual liberty doesn't perform very well when it comes to producing and sustaining constructive, civilizational habits. It has little to provide when it comes to guiding the broader optimality of society and optimizes solely for individual preference. Most of the western legal system over the course of centuries has been nothing short of codified tradition (which is exactly what 'law' is and is inherently what established tradition is). And no one person's personal experience will overturn the collective experience and collected wisdom of the millions among the generations that came before them. To quote a halfway intellectual idol of mine:
Man is instinctively conservative in the sense that probably millions of years of experience have taught him that a stable environment is the best for peace of mind, present and future security, automatism of action, and a ready command of material and artificial circumstances. It is the repeated introduction of new instruments, new weapons, new methods, and needs for fresh adaptations, that makes automatism impossible. And it is the complication of life by novel contributions to life's interests and duties that makes a ready command of circumstances difficult.
To this thesis I have never seen what I regard as an adequate refutation or substantial challenge to conservatism, defined as such.
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
I enjoy my liberty too, but it's a constrained liberty that exists within a very specific and particular context that's defined and guided by our traditions. I would in no way enjoy the unconstrained, every man for himself liberty that a local Somali warlord would have enjoyed decades ago. And most people generally overstate their love for freedom and liberty. If freedom entails responsibility, most people don't want to have 'anything' to do with it. Conservatism has never rejected the importance of liberty. It just doesn't regard it as the highest value and neither do I.
Tretiak
4d ago
Some laws that exist clearly go by the unstated rule that says "for display purposes only." At best when it comes to liberality, laws exist to make you think twice before breaking them; not prevent them from ever being broken. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that when it comes to immigration though, that people don't run afoul of American laws with ease. And actual legal immigrants have it harder than anyone in this regard.
I wasn't making a moral defense of Klein, I think his behavior speaks for itself. But I think you're underselling just how many people have these same beliefs. Most people don't care and/or instinctively side with Klein (or know they should if they know what's good for them).
Virtually my entire critique of Ezra was the intellectual indefensibility of what he was saying. I wasn’t primarily talking about his moral characteristics either.
I’m actually very concerned about the number of people who think like Ezra does, because I live in an urban center that’s full of people as insane as he is.
In this environment, this behavior can work or fill an important niche. Who is more likely to get a say in polite circles? Some Vox writer posting about an exciting study on some teaching intervention that showed IQ improvements or a more Murrayist take?
Ezra would, sadly enough.
I don't think you give Klein enough credit. He is a higher class of commentator than Seder. He reads. By his own account he has read and reviewed Murray, and at least knows Murray is for UBI…
And that’s the sad part if people consider Ezra a cut above the rest, because his analysis is almost equally mediocre by comparison. If Ezra does read, he shows little in the way of his ability to comprehend and integrate what he’s read. And his appearance on Sam’s podcast in particular is but a small indication of that.
If Vox is trying to enhance the arguments of the left, then they’re incredibly bad at it. The best critique of Murray’s argument that could be characterized as ‘left-wing’ came from Chomsky in the appendix of The IQ Controversy which was published several decades ago. And it’s one that doesn’t begin with the premise of how butthurt you are over basic scientific facts. I suspect Sam had more than enough space to have a sensible discussion with Ezra about policy specifics, if only Ezra were able to get past the most basic hurdles in the argument; which he failed to do.
I don’t know how influential people like Murray are today. I suspect he’s hardly animating activity in the social sciences or having an analogous impact like the shadow of neoliberalism that Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys cast over our economic policy, which still rules the day, today. Maybe he’s inspired present day researchers like Razib Khan or others, but I don’t know.
Tretiak
5d ago
If Ezra wanted to refuse to engage the claims then he should’ve refused to appear on Sam’s podcast altogether. Agreeing to it and then looking like a fool trying to be obscurant over every point doesn’t only make you look disingenuous; it also makes you look like an idiot.
This isn’t an ongoing debate that’s being had behind closed doors in lab coats and under microscopes. What Ezra did was the equivalent of walking onto a debate stage and try to lecture an astronomer that the Earth is flat. Maybe he’ll end up appeasing everyone in his political circle who’s got blinders onto the world. To everyone else, he looked like a moron; because he was one.
I don’t know what anyone has to consult Murray over. Scholars like Richard Haier have already upheld his claims and have said Murray was being very conservative in presenting his findings. This says nothing of the idiots on the popular left circuit like Seder who contend Murray is a racist, while having never read his book. In fact, Seder hasn’t even read Murray’s Wikipedia page; if you think a man who married and had children with a one handed Thai Buddhist in a foreign country is a racist. You’ve exposed nothing but your own ignorance at that point. Most of his critics are idiots because they refuse to read or actually engage his arguments. Ironically, his conclusions are also very much in line with policy works like Ezra in the first place. It goes to show Ezra has likely never read a word of anything Murray ever wrote.
Tretiak
5d ago
You and I, I suspect have the same stance on this. I’m not a supporter of drug use and have never taken any drug in my life.
But on this particular point, you’re drawing up a distinction that isn’t relevant to what I’m pointing out. Is the problem ‘weed’ or weed smokers who are “basically using hashish?” I’m pretty judgmental in general of casual drinkers who help themselves on far too casually an occasion, never mind the scorn I have for truly intense drinkers. But there is a qualitative difference to be between comparison someone who picks up a joint and someone who picks up a container of everclear.
Tretiak
5d ago
I was wondering when I would see someone make this comment.
(Not insulting you at all. But I knew it was coming. Lol.)
That comic is wonderful, :D. Thank you for sharing.
As a Catholic I take the soul as an article of faith. It hasn't been adduced or supported by any scientific evidence. It'll probably indefinitely stay contained within the realm of philosophy and theology at best. The trend of the evidence has been in one direction. I'm not sure uploading human consciousness is something to get anymore excited about than reincarnation though. With WBE's for instance, you could in theory simulate a brain up to behavioral isomorphism of all it's inputs and outputs. Provided it be fully scaled up in complexity with the brain it's emulating, it indeed would be every bit as real and just as complex as the brain. Neuron by neuron, atom for atom. But that's in the same sense I could say I have two water bottles sitting in the refrigerator. They are identical as far as their material constituents go even though the tetrahedral geometry of the arrangement of water molecules will differ. But in neither are they the same in the sense that taking a drink out of one of them will cause water in the other bottle to disappear. Which is the kind of thing people are asking for.
People can't think clearly about the ontology of identity a lot of the time because it isn't always clear how one should think of it. People's folk notions of it are incorrect as you said, but even we've been discussing it at the level of a folk notion that only approximates reality because it's easier for us to understand each other this way. When you dispel the idea of personal identity as one of human being's being made up of these persistent billiard balls bumping around but get used to thinking of it in terms of the ontology reality itself seems to use, the correct frame of mind is to think of identity the way it's described by Special Relativity, which is to say points in space-time that are related to each other causally. I'd push back on the idea that when we wake up, we can be thought of as waking up as a reconstruction of sorts. There's a physical continuity between the me right now and the me of one second ago. The me of one second ago isn't dead per se, but it no longer exists either. But my thinking on this issue I'll readily concede isn't completely clear to me. Science can definitively rule out a notion of personal identity that depends on your being composed of the 'same' atoms because modern physics has taken the concept of "same atom" and thrown it out the window. Subatomic particles themselves do not possess a sense of personal identity. It's completely, experimentally ruled out, which makes it difficult for anyone to speculate about where personal identity is located.
The brain doesn't exactly repeat itself. The state of your brain one second from now is not the state of your brain one second ago. The neural connections don't all change every second, but there are enough changes every second that the brain's state isn't cyclic, not over the course of a human lifetime. With every little fragment of memory new you lay down and every thought that pops in and out of short-term memory and everything that changes the visual field of your visual cortex, you ensure that you never repeat yourself exactly as before.
Over the course of a single second (not seven years, which people mistakenly think all the atoms in the body are replaced), the joint position of all the atoms in your brain will change far enough away from what it was before such that there's no overlap with the previous joint amplitude distribution. The brain doesn't repeat itself. In just a single second, you will end up being comprised of a completely different, non-overlapping volume of configuration space. And the quantum configuration space is the most fundamentally known reality, at least according to what our best physical theory says. Even if quantum mechanics turns out not to be truly fundamental and there's something deeper, it has already finished superseding the notion of individual particles.
And actually, the time for 'you' to be comprised of a completely different volume of configuration space is much less than a second. That time is the product of all the individual changes in your brain put together. It'll be less than a millisecond (even less than a femtosecond). And then there's the point to consider that the physically real amplitude distribution is over a configuration space of all the particles in the universe. 'You' are just a factored subspace of that distribution. This means that the idea that you can equate your personal continuity with the identity of any physically real constituent of your existence is false and any attempts to rehabilitate that folk conception of personal identity is a dead end. You are not the same 'you' because you are made of the same atoms. You have no overlap with the physical constituents of yourself from even one nanosecond ago. There is continuity of information, but not equality of parts. This is where I think personal identity will ultimately be located. The new factor over the subspace looks a lot like the old you and that isn't by coincidence because the flow of time is lawful.
Whatever makes you feel that your present is 'connected' to your past it has nothing to do with an identity of physically fundamental constituents over time (hence why I think the Eastern metaphysics of reincarnation is bullshit).
On the theology line: I appreciate Polkinghorne’s attempt to reconcile persistence with physicalism (I must admit I've only skimmed it), but I do not need it to ground my choices. From a secular starting point the null hypothesis is no afterlife, and the world hands us ordinary cases that already break naive essence talk. Neurons turnover. Sleep erases consciousness for hours. Anesthesia erases it for longer. Memory is reconstructive and highly lossy. Yet prudential concern flows across these gaps because causal structure and stored information persist. Uploads aim to preserve that structure more faithfully than biology eventually will.
He's not the only one to do this. Peter van Inwagen attempted to do something similar at one point. I remember reading his books but I can't fully recall the details. The subset of Christian materialists is something that's caused me to raise an eyebrow and I've always found it interesting. You're correct that you don't need to buy Polkinghorne's thesis to explain personal identity. In fact I don't buy it at all. But if you're a non-denominational Christian or something of his particular stripe, you need what he's selling or something close to it to preserve personal identity in the classical sense, given what science says about it currently.
We very much do agree on what's important about family. The rest of your overall comment leaves me with some interesting things to consider and think about. I wouldn't want to respond prematurely on it.
I understand the worry people like Ezra have. His appearance on the podcast was a horrible debate for him, but it was highly instructive for illustrating a similar view the left and the right both share. Ezra has a view of these topics that’s almost on par with the way the right-wing views the concept of a gateway drug.
Weed is an innocuous drug. We have known that chemically, medicinally and almost every other way you want to have it for a long time. So why do so many on the right remain so uptight about it even though society has become more acceptable of its use? Well because there’s at least one way a gateway drug retains a valid use as a concept. It’s proximity to everything else.
I knew a person once who wanted to open a dispensary in a state that had at that time fairly recently legalized recreational marijuana. And he was well positioned to do it. But after thinking over it for awhile he decided against it, because of the ‘type’ of clientele that’s mostly associated with smoking it. Yes, otherwise normal people also smoke weed, but we all know the popular images of the kind of people who use it. And those types of people do exist. In large numbers. And much of the time, those ‘are’ the kinds of people you’re dealing with.
But it goes even further than that and also puts you in proximity to other people. Hard drug users, or maybe not people who do hard drugs, but drug dealers who sell weed along with hard drugs. And that puts you in closer proximity if not outright in the same circle with those people. If you are a person who doesn’t want the risks associated with that kind of activity or it’s more than you want to think about from a business perspective as the person I was talking to, you’ll abandon the idea entirely just as he did.
Yes, of course IQ exists. Of course there are differences between people and populations. Just as there are height differences, skin tone differences, hair and eye color differences, the whole 9 yards. But these are all differences in a mundane sense and shouldn’t attract such significant attention to them that the KKK and every Neo-Nazi group closely follow your research activity and publication pipeline, and it places those people at the discussion table along with you; because these differences are truly inconsequential and meaningless. And yes, I don’t want those assholes at my table either.
Large swathes of my family are racially intermixed. Several cousins are half Hispanic. I have a red head cousin who’s been in a long-term relationship with a black man. When I was in high school I was in love with a black girl. But you can understand why the whole table becomes quiet and nervous if you bring up a topic like that, especially when large audiences are tuning in to see what you have to say. I think Ezra feels the same way. And I don’t blame him for it. But his approach for handling the matter is not one I would adopt. Sam was having a debate. Ezra was speaking to the mob.
Frankly I’m stunned that Ezra has ‘any’ audience at all. It’s even more concerning to me I live in a locality that’s colored by the mentality of his type of thinking. I understand the backdrop people like him are coming from, but he is a ‘horrible’ advocate for the cause. Sam could’ve had a much more sensible discussion about this with someone like Shaun. Ezra is too psychologically fragile and had a hard time stomaching and keeping down what he was hearing. He is not the guy for practically any subject out there.
Tretiak
5d ago
Zelensky is not a fully independent actor. There’s a lot of players involved both inside and outside his administration that are pulling chains on him. He should’ve went for a peace plan right out of the gate and tried as hard as he could for that. All of his efforts will be in vain now when he empties the clip of whatever political capital he still has left, things end the way people thought it would from the beginning only now with hundreds of thousands of bodies and a wrecked country trailing behind him.
There’s people on the frontiers of whole brain emulation (WBE’s) already, but even they don’t seem to think a copy of you is a continuation of the present day you in the same sense that today is a continuation of the you of yesterday.
Your ontology of identity may be flexible, but that’s exactly what most people don’t want. They want a continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today, only either extended perhaps in another added faculty of perception, or as a backstop or guarantee of their ordinary present day consciousness in case something (like death) happens to them.
This is why Buddhist and Hindu philosophy has never drawn or inspired any real attraction or attention from me, though I’ve read their religious texts. If I was someone in a past life, and even if the wheel of karma went on in both directions forever and there was something in me that never died, why would I care, if there’s no concrete mental and physical continuity between that life and my present life today? The two are causally disconnected. If it was me, it’s not me in any sense I regard as interesting or that I should care about. It’s about as meaningful as saying the person standing across from me is also me. I can’t see out of his eyes as well as my own. I can’t feel what he feels and I can’t think what he thinks.
If he's real, and also timeless, I'm sure he won't mind if he was to wait a few quadrillion years for my immortal soul as opposed to this century. Since Christians believe in medical care and extending healthy lifespan, there are no downsides I can see.
I think John Polkinghorne was the only theologian I’ve ever read that made a case similar to this. Even as a Catholic myself, most of the arguments I’ve seen Christian philosophers make against transhumanism are incredibly weak.
Having children is better than nothing, when it comes to leaving your mark on the world. But it is still a pale imitation of actually staying alive and healthy to tell people about it. I do intend to have kids, and I'm sorry to hear about your fertility issues. But doesn't change the fact that my kids would also like to have me around too. When I talk about life extension, it's not just me being selfish, but thinking about my parents, and my grandfather, and all the other humans alive who would like to keep on being with their loved ones.
Most people don’t consciously decide to have children because they want to extend their biological footprint into the future, although we know evolution programmed that drive into us for that specified purpose. But it’s incidental to our conscious processing. I want to have children because family is what I find meaningful and fulfilling. Hedonism is empty and a dead end and even if transhumanism could extend my life a million years into the future, lack of a family would still ultimately leave me feeling unsatisfied. Even in my life right now, I would never be in a relationship with someone who wouldn’t consider or has already decided against having a family of their own. That’s a completely worthless relationship as far as I’m concerned.
Tretiak
5d ago
I stopped listening to Ezra Klein ever since he appeared on Sam Harris’ podcast and looked like a complete moron.
Trump is a hiccup in our democracy. Until there comes a hard and fast dismantling of institutions, you can’t license the claim that he’s an authoritarian when the same system you approve of has also put all the candidates you’re palatable to in the same seat Trump is in right now.
Cryonics supporters aren't "not" accepting their mortality. They still understand it perfectly well. If a human being lives for 10,000 years, that is not technically immortality. Our current understanding of the laws of thermodynamics says that isn't possible. Maybe that'll change one day but it's highly unlikely because all the laws of thermodynamics are inevitable. There's only a certain amount of negentropy left available in the universe to perform physical computations with. But if today you will want to live one more day it's not far-fetched to think tomorrow you will also want to live one more day. That's proof by induction on the positive integers. I remember the article Chris Hallquist put out that caused people to raise some interesting objections to it, namely difficulties with the preservation of the of the brain after vitrification takes place. I don't know if that's been overcome or changed in recent years but I found it somewhat persuasive.
I don't know anything at all about the financial stability of these institutions, but yeah there's that as well.
And debt collectors would beg to differ.
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