cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
22d ago
America dodged a bullet when Trump dodged one.
Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.
I know at least two men that are a combination of drunk, belligerent, massive Trump supporters, and in possession of enough firearms that they could have easily turned into a problem. The problem is that I don't know tons of country rednecks, maybe a dozen. So that is probably a bad sign of just how fucked things might have gotten.
Their goal wouldn't have been taking control of the government, it would have been shooting the politicians they didn't like.
At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.
By comparison we are fine nowadays. There is always going to be a low background noise if violence and murder in a country this size. Certainly sucks when it's you or someone you know that is the victim. But as long as you are staying out of certain cities and areas you are unlikely to be that victim.
What sets off ugly civil wars is being forced to choose sides. "Help me find the rebels or I torture you until I'm satisfied you don't know" vs "Help me hide from the government or my friends come back and kill you and your family". It doesn't start that bad, just a case of ping ponging escalating consequences.
He also just released The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID.
I went and looked into the death rate a little more. Found this graph of the trend. Here is a fun game: spot when covid starts.
There has been a year over year increase in the death rate by about 1% starting in 2014 and hasn't started shrinking much until 2024. What the hell is going on?
I have a suspicion that old people have just been getting older. And that those old people are dying more during flu season. And that the excess death chart from 2018-2019 would line up pretty well with an excess death chart from 2020-2021. But that would probably take a lot of effort to figure out. I dont even know where to get month to month death numbers, tried asking some AI to help me find it, but sounds like its not publicly available.
edit: data i found is bad, nybbler has better data below.
cjet79
24d ago
I think the word choice of "serious" sucks. Most people would consider it to mean the opposite.
Like if a historian doesn't address all the claims of Holocaust deniers you'd say they aren't "serious" about history.
Whereas most people would say that engaging with them at all is a sign of not being serious.
I've been responding to you on mobile in my spare time. I don't have the article with me. Caplan talks about Emil Kierkegaard, and his disagreements on immigration. It's a blog post. I think from two or three years ago.
cjet79
24d ago
I'm nearly certain he is aware of these points, but there are certain topics he is unwilling to broach in public. He is still a professor at a public university, and tenure doesn't protect you much from student activists choosing to make your life hell.
Your descriptions of Caplan just don't ring true to me. I don't think you've really read much of his stuff. Which is fine by itself, I don't really read very widely of critics or even people on my own side. But I also don't make claims about those people or what they are saying.
And yes I do tend to nail down specific claims and hammer on them. Otherwise I face a gish gallop of arguments and none of them ever get resolved. I took your weakest argument and probed it to see how wedded you are to your ideas. Some responses might have indicated we could have a productive discussion. Not the ones you gave me. Next item would have been doing some research and finding out if caplan had actively written about the arguments you claim he had never heard of. I got ahead of myself and already looked. He has written about them, but I already got the sense of where the conversation would go from your earlier responses, you'd just pivot to different claims, or say he wasn't specific enough.
cjet79
25d ago
Are you "serious" about immigration?
Is anyone by your standards? Is Emil Kirkegaard serious?
I honestly don't even know what you mean by the word anymore other than "if they acknowledge my objections are correct and completely agree with me". Now that I know that is what you meant, I withdraw any objections to calling Caplan "not serious".
cjet79
25d ago
I'd acknowledge any of the people that caplan has debated with on immigration as "serious". I'd acknowledge anyone that has written a book or academic paper on the subject as "serious". Regardless of their viewpoints.
Are you "serious" about immigration? Is anyone by your standards?
cjet79
25d ago
I had a chance to go and get lunch with him one time. The spot he picked was inside an Asian grocery store at a food court with multiple different Asian restaurants. We were the only white people. He is also a passable Spanish speaker, his twin sons are fluent. So I don't think the experience would particularly bother him.
As Owlify points out, humans are tribal. So I don't think you are particularly unique or different in having that outlook. Its just that once tribes get big enough you have to choose where to draw your tribal lines. Race is a common thing to pick. Others pick based on country affiliation. Some pick on state or city. Some still stick to what is literally their tribe, like close family and or neighbors (this is how I pick). Some pick along ideological lines, like "all communists are my tribe". Others pick religion. Etc etc.
I don't think most people reason themselves into the tribal lines they choose, so they often can't be reasoned out of them either. I'm certainly that way.
cjet79
25d ago
He has published a regular book, a comic book, multiple blog posts, done multiple podcasts on the topic, been in multiple public debates, and has lectured on this topic in his University classes for two decades.
I think you just disagree with him so you want to call him non-serious.
cjet79
26d ago
I think Caplan's biggest miss is actually on theory of mind. He is a very conscientious and non-neurotic individual. The idea of mental illness seems basically incomprehensible to him. He accepts that these people exist, but his personal interactions with them are heavily minimized because he is good at cutting them out of his life.
He lives in immigrant heavy Northern Virginia. He is aware of and happy with many cultural changes that happen due to immigration. He can go in depth on crime statistics with people, and the take-away is that immigrants are relatively low-crime compared to native born Americans. They sometimes look high crime because young men are high crime, and immigrants also skew towards young men. Any objection you think you have about immigration that Caplan has not answered, he has certainly heard and answered.
One last thing I'd add, he is much more of a microeconomics professor than a macro one. I consider that a huge plus, because macro is voodoo stats BS.
cjet79
1mo ago
Very good summary, and matches many of my feelings on the topic.
Some thoughts:
- I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's series of stories on "The Three Laws". It basically assumes away the hardest part of AI alignment "how do you enforce the rules". But then he still manages to write about a dozen stories about how it all goes horribly wrong.
- I also read a bunch of Zvi's substack roundups. That man is single handedly one of the best information aggregators I know of.
- There is definitely an assumption by the AI doomerists that intelligence can make you god tier. I'm not sure I'll ever buy this argument until I'm literally being tortured to death by a god tier controlled robot. Physical world just doesn't seem that easy to grok and manipulate. I think of intelligence as leverage on the physical world. But you need counter weight to make that leverage work. Humans have a lot of existing "weight" in the form of capital and spread. A baby AI would not have as much weight, just a data center.
- Robin Hanson has a great critique of AI doomerists. Many of them said "AI would happen this way" and that turned out to not be the way, but their predictions still haven't changed much.
cjet79
1mo ago
It was 20k captured soldiers that were killed including some 8k officers. Which has always been a huge deal for militaries everywhere. They care way more about how their soldiers are treated as POWs than they do about much else.
Elsewhere the volume also discusses French civilians being killed by allied operations, they estimate 80-100k deaths and their attitude is kind of "this is a bummer, but we are trying to kill Hitler so it's worth it."
Also as I said before Dresden's fire bombing is also barely mentioned, 25k dead. The nukes barely mentioned combined death toll of 200k.
Death tolls are rarely mentioned anywhere in the book. It is a dry accounting of a military campaign, and the Holocaust had minimal military impact.
The Germans had experience investigating mass killings, they knew how to cover their tracks, like a good murder investigator is better at getting away with murder. The Allies also announced in 1943 that German soldiers and officers would be returned to countries to face trial for any atrocities they committed, so they gave them an incentive to try and cover it up. But even with that there is still evidence, lidar and excavations have taken place at Treblinka have found the burned up human remains and cremation sites.
cjet79
1mo ago
skimming through the volumes I didn't find many references to concentration camps. (I did find one in volume 6 that was complaining the germans would starve if too much german land was given to poland, the comparison was with how terrible the conditions would be in a german concentration camp).
But I'm also realizing how much of a nothingburger this is. This was basically a dry administrative account of the war effort. The bombing of Dresden gets a single line. Hiroshima only gets mentioned 4 times. Only one of which is to dryly mention that it was nuked.
Even finding references to London being bombed was difficult.
One of the few times the nuremberg trials came up was in reference to a massacre of polish officers that was probably carried out by the Russians. The reason it was brought up is that it was causing frictions between Russia and Poland, and Churchill just wanted to smooth over those frictions.
This is the exact quality of evidence I'm talking about with the conspiracy theory thing. "Why did this news station say a thing on 9/11 and then never talk about it again? Must be because they were silenced!" Nevermind that they were confused and scared on the day it happened.
"Why doesn't churchill mention it in his super high level summary of the war effort?! Must be cuz it didn't really happen." Nevermind that he directly mentions it elsewhere in different works.
cjet79
1mo ago
A lot of foreshadowing techniques. It takes me out of the story when I see it, because I'm strongly reminded that it is a story with an end destination in mind by the author.
Certain ways of handling characters. Death for side characters when the author wants them out of a story. Torture or horrible circumstances for a main character as a way to toughen them up or get the reader to feel sorry for them.
cjet79
1mo ago
I think I'm a little bit broken in my set of preferences for certain art forms. For a long time I've lacked the ability to understand and explain why. Video games have helped, but music might have the best metaphor, even if it doesn't apply to me.
First, imagine that there is an objective ranking for how good a piece of music can be. The ranking stands regardless of individual preferences. More sophisticated listeners who can appreciate music better will have their preferences more in line with this objective ranking.
Second, imagine you have some unique ears, and the sound of string instruments just really bothers you. So you prefer any music without string instruments.
Most of the best music includes some string instruments, so you end up not liking most of the "best" music. The best rating doesn't require string instruments, its just that it makes some things easier in the course of crafting the music. A theoretical best song could be crafted that has no string instruments, it would just be much more difficult. Your tastes end up looking very unsophisticated. You gravitate towards an amateur community of song writers that share your hatred of string instruments, and some of them are just bad at writing any songs with string instruments. They write songs that are relatively bad on the objective ranking, but it removes string instruments at least, so it becomes more tolerable than mainstream stuff for you.
Something like this has happened to me in regards to reading and literature. There are common story elements like certain foreshadowing techniques and certain character development tricks that really grate on me. And there are story settings that I dislike, mostly modern and non-magical settings are boring to me.
I've ended up in a weird spot, like the stringed instrument hater. I can only really enjoy the other authors that also hate stringed instruments, or the amateurs that can't even write stringed instruments into their music. I am probably reading stories and literature that is "objectively" worse on some cosmic literature scale, and I'm well aware that it makes my tastes look unsophisticated and "bad" to the elites of the literature world. But I can't stop and won't stop, because I have some subjective preferences that entirely override the importance of the objective scale.
cjet79
1mo ago
My full original comment:
I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.
I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.
My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.
I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.
Re-reading my first sentence as standalone I guess it could be interpreted one of two ways:
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, as they are now.
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, if I could not tell the difference between them and human written stories I already enjoy.
I meant it in the second sense. I definitely think the AI stories right now are a lot of hot garbage, for all the reasons you've mentioned.
cjet79
1mo ago
What you don't understand is that those 2-3 million did not die in concentration camps, if that many died at all which is highly doubtful. The death toll in the concentration camps is a small fraction of that number. And most who died in the concentration camps did so in final months of the war due to Germany being destroyed on all sides and infrastructure totally collapsing. Many died under the custody of Stalin during and after the war, and never came under German occupation in the first place. The death toll in the concentration camps was a small fraction of that number.
Eh this is why the conversation with you reminds me of other generic conspiracy theorists. It all feels very wishy washy. Like you are doing a cold reading of me, and will push as far as you can in the direction of "nothing bad happened to the jews". Just so we are clear, I still think about 6 million jews died, and that there was a mass extermination effort of some kind. They weren't just killed off as a side effect of being rounded up and put in camps where there was no food and diseases ran rampant.
I just remember seeing that "middle ground" estimate from another conversation someone had with you.
I still think Churchill was uniquely unlikely to mention "gas chambers" because he had a history of controversy around chemical warfare. He was publicly willing to use it against the Germans if they used it first in warfare. And before WWII he was caught in a private conversation advocating that gas attacks be used on 'uncivilized' people. He did publicly talk about the holocaust after the war.
Grok AI does seem to think that there are passages referencing holocaust things:
Growing awareness of a Nazi policy to exterminate Jewish communities and calls it a crime against humanity. That is in volume 4
In volume 5 churchill mentions the unprecedented scale of Nazi massacres. He mentions the liquidation of ghettos, and the use of special camps for mass killings.
Maybe the AI is halucinating. I still believe it more than you. Get me a digital copy of the book that I can ctrl-f and we can settle it for sure.
cjet79
1mo ago
I was a bit of an odd duckling growing up. I watched a lot of history channel, maybe that changed my perspective. I do not feel I learned about the war with that framing. I felt that pearl harbor almost shared equal horror and tragedy with the Holocaust. I mean I guess it was up to the teachers at the time there might be two questions on the Pacific war, and two questions on the Holocaust for the state test so they get equal billing in class lesson plans.
cjet79
1mo ago
You misread me.
Imagine an alternate world where no one claimed gas chambers and said 2-3 million Jews were rounded up and effectively murdered through horrible conditions and starvation. My assertion is that the end result would have been much the same. It was still a horrible atrocity and large scale genocide carried out with the machinery of the state, and under the guise of a racial ideology. I believe there still would have been a push for a Jewish state, the Nazi ideology would still be viewed as evil antichrist stand in, and this alternate history world would be mostly indistinguishable from our own.
(It should be worth noting that they did not need to be rounded up. So the death rate should be compared to the general civilian population, not the general prison camp population. The choice to round them up in such large numbers was still that: a choice.)
And yeah I will still say I don't really care if they lied about the method of death and doubled the numbers. But I mostly don't care because everyone that would have perpetrated the lie is dead and out of power. Had this lie been 10 years ago, yes I absolutely would care, and I'd want to punish the liars.
I've self assessed this on other issues I care about. I care about communism being an evil ideology that leads to mass murder and starvation. The New York Times is now known to have had active communist agents on the payroll in the 30s-50s. And that these reporters actively helped cover up the atrocities committed by the USSR. But it all doesn't actively bother me very much. And it bothers me far far less than the errors and lies perpetrated over covid. I have a recency bias, and WWII is not recent.
cjet79
1mo ago
I don't really believe you in the first place, and I'm not about to scan a book I have no interest in reading.
You made it sound like they never talked about it. But they obviously have in other contexts.
They didn't memory hole this thing. Multiple world leaders basically went from never caring about the Jews and actively keeping Jewish immigrants out of their country to being willing to help them found their own nation state.
Your an unreliable source of facts for me. It's like when I used to talk to 9/11 truthers. Sometimes what they said was correct in a very technical sense, but it would lead to false impressions. The "jet fuel can't melt steal beams" was the memed example. It always took a ton of effort to tease out the truth, way more than their initial assertion.
I've seen other people go through that circus with you. I'm unimpressed. As far as I remember your alternate history basically comes down to something like "gas chambers weren't used and only about 2-3 million Jews died" which seems like not enough to even change anyone's reaction.
The Germans were capable of a 1% death rate in prison camps (the death rate of American POWs). Those are optimal circumstances, since those prisoners are more likely to be healthy young men.
There was an estimated 10 million Jews in Europe. Giving you a nicer target like 500k (5% death rate) which assumes all Jews in Europe were captured and numbers still fall way short of the Germans running normal prison camps where they make an effort to keep people alive.
I also don't really care how mass murderers achieve their numbers. Stalin and Mao got their record breaking numbers through starvation and brutal work conditions, no gas required. They were still evil assholes that committed atrocities. The fact that they aren't condemned as heavily as Hitler is something I blame on leftist academics and media covering for the communist regimes. The Jewish conspiracy angle makes little sense to me since vast number of Jews were also killed by Stalin.
cjet79
1mo ago
He was listing the most horrible things that have happened. He considered it equivalent to Europe being a bombed out ruin and 30 million combat deaths. I don't think a plain reading of the passage ever lands on "ambivalence".
cjet79
1mo ago
The Dream, 1947 The Dream was Churchill’s fanciful short story about conversing with his long-dead father in 1947. In it he explains all that had happened since his father died in 1895. The full text is available. Referring again to the Holocaust, he spoke of the two World Wars:
“Papa,” I said, “in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter-pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Many of her cities have been blown to pieces by bombs. Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands…. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.”8
That wasn't hard to find.
cjet79
1mo ago
It doesn't seem worth noting unless you care about the history of chemical warfare and it's supporters. Churchill had a complicated political history with chemical and gas weapons.
cjet79
1mo ago
I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.
I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.
My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.
I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.
Base voter preferences would still be mostly the same, and I think politicians mostly respond to voter desires.
There would end up being two types of politicians. The demagogues that flaunt the risk, and the timid that shy away from it. The demagogues would have even more power because there would be few to opposed them.
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