roystgnr
5d ago
Aellas entire dataset is just her own experiences
Her largest survey had over half a million respondents.
roystgnr
25d ago
Most ironically, he was too liberal. This was the characteristic of Joe Rogan that was damning to them and that elicted the reaction that was damning of them. He may never have been too immoderate for them in the modern sense of "liberal"=="leftist", but he was far too much for them in the older sense of "liberal"=="open minded". While the modern left was discovering the delicious joys of shunning and deplatforming, Rogan was still stubbornly letting any idiot with any wacky or problematic ideology come to him and make a case for it to him and his audience. The last straw for them in 2024 may have been that, when he offered to let their idiot take advantage of his liberalism, at a point where she clearly needed it, she simply chose not to accept!
It's possible that she was doomed either way, that she had good reason for insisting on an hour interview surrounded by her staff rather than multiple hours one-on-one in his studio like all his other interviewees, but if that's the case then what they needed instead wasn't a liberal version of Joe Rogan, it was a didn't-finish-at-the-bottom-of-the-Democratic-primaries version of Kamala Harris.
Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?
It's probably fair to say that the former doesn't work (it's definitely fair to say it doesn't work well, but none of the "abstinence-only education correlates with higher teen pregnancy rates" research I can find seems to be RCT-based or even adjusting for obvious confounders).
It's probably also fair (again, so many likely confounders) to say that the culture we changed away from did work pretty well.
But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here? If it had turned out that devoting some Health class time to abstinence had worked, we could have had some policy wonks discover that and institute it, and voila, problem solved. It could have been done via state laws, or via ED (when will I ever get tired of pointing out the ironies of that acronym?) funding, or just one school board at a time. But if it is correct that 1950s morality had a strong effect ... how do we get back to 1950s morality again, exactly? Or more precisely, since 1950s morality is what developed into 1990s morality, how do we get back to something that's sufficiently 1950s-like to help people but sufficiently different to avoid eventually being rejected again?
From your choice of quotes, I'm guessing your answer (and Chesterton's, were he still around) would include some sort of revival of Christianity, but the data makes that look neither necessary nor sufficient. In the USA non-Hispanic whites are around 60% Christian and have around a 30% rate of births to unmarried mothers, while for non-Hispanic blacks we see around 70% Christian and around 70% of births out of wedlock, and Asians here are at around 30% Christian but around 12% births out of wedlock.
Of course, that's just the rates of "births out of wedlock"! Currently 3/4 of Americans think that premarital sex is morally acceptable, and the vast majority of the other 1/4 must feel guilty eventually, because even decades ago 95% of middle-aged Americans had done it. Even if there's a potential level of deep, culturally-ubiquitous Christianity that could inculcate "fornication is a sin" in a way that modern Christianity can't pull off, how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there? Whatever the process, describing it as just "tell them" seems woefully inadequate. There may be some level of hysteresis making this exceptionally difficult: if 90% of your community thinks "fornication is a sin" is a theological fact, the other 10% just look like sinners and don't affect what your kids believe, but if it's 10% and 90% instead then the 10% just look like weirdos and don't affect what your kids believe, even if you're in the 10%.
roystgnr
12d ago
Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.
Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:
But what if Chesterton's Fence isn't a fence at all, but a sort of beaver dam? What if social norms came about by evolution, instead of intelligent design?
If tens of thousands of tribes come up with sets of customs based on silly ideas from their stone age ooga booga tribal religions, then a few of those are bound to have effective ones by pure accident. Then they become successful, and wipe out or absorb the other tribes. And those customs combine, and mutate, and get justified by new religions, and once again, the ones that randomly happen to be best guide their unwitting hosts to victory. But they never know the real reason why it made them successful. Because they never knew in the first place. It was all just ooga booga, and luck.
Then, millennia later, not only do they not know why the important bits are important, they don't even know which bits are the important bits. And which bits might actually be bad. Suddenly, you're playing minesweeper with your entire society. Eliminating archaic customs is like some kind of malevolent cosmic game show. Some doors have fabulous technological prizes behind them, and others have a swarm of angry Martian Death Bees. And you don't dare just decline to play the game, because if you don't, you'll be conquered and replaced by the winners. But that's also what happens if you play and lose.
And all the labels on the doors just say "Ooga Booga".
To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.
Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that
the arrival of archaeogenetics since the 1990s ... has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario".
You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.
But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.
Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),
Meme Mitochondria prioritize your evolutionary success, but don’t really care if you enjoy the process, and don’t care about anything else.
Meme viruses prioritize sounding good, but don’t care whether you live or die. Even a meme-virus that kills you will succeed if it gets you to spread it to others.
Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.
This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.
Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that grep finds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)
roystgnr
3d ago
keeps following you around as you leave your house saying "Nybbler you raped me, I'm going to shoot you."
...
it is clearly a psychiatric matter not a criminal one.
I have identified the problem.
roystgnr
14d ago
There’s little glory in pushing the button.
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
It must have still felt glorious enough to the people behind the machine guns, or they and their immediate successors wouldn't have been so eager to fight in a war where both sides had heavily mechanized.
Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button
From a pragmatic point of view there clearly should be, but in practice Rosie The Riveter etc. don't get glorified until the battles have already begun, at which point it's too late to do more than merely expand a winning system that's hopefully already been created unheralded. Even this year, when we're all arguing about tariffs and protectionism and such left and right, the arguments from the left are mostly of the form "why wouldn't we want to make Pareto trades?" with no hint of awareness of the systemic military implications, and the arguments from the right are mostly of the form "why are we letting them take all our super-valuable green pieces of paper?", focusing on competing long-term allies and on non-dual-use production even when the effects of that undermine industries with security applications.
roystgnr
19d ago
I also can't imagine "somewhat subhuman", but everybody is in a bubble on these things. The percent of Americans who say that "sex between an unmarried man and woman" (not specifically prostitution! just sex!) is "morally acceptable" is at an all-time high ... of only 76%. If that also seems surprisingly low to you, then you're probably in a liberal bubble (93%) rather than in a conservative one (57%), and you might also be in a younger bubble (I'm seeing conflicting polls for the 1970s, but they're in the 30%-45% range). I'd bet polling results for the moral acceptability of prostitution would be lower: support for decriminalizing prostitution is still only around 50%, and presumably that includes people who still think it should be shameful but just don't think shameful things should all be illegal.
And as for "damaged goods" ... to go back to OP's example, Aella has been publicly looking for "someone to get happily married to" while aware of the issues there for about 5 years now, still fruitlessly. IMHO the phrase "damaged goods" is going too far, but "typically incompatible with marriage-minded men" might be fair, right? She's helped other married men break their wedding vows "over and over, with small variations on the amount of years and the guilt they brought with it", and though she makes a sympathetic case for them, making that case strengthens the conclusion that wedding vows just aren't her thing. It's understandably hard to find someone who will swear "for better or worse" if they fear "for better or else" in return.
That's not necessarily the end of the world. It sounds like she's made a lot of friends and a lot of money, and obviously she doesn't have trouble finding sex (or presumably short-term relationships) either. She could probably be happy with all that. And if she can't ... well, too many of her critics seem to be cruel or stupid or both (yes, I am aware of the irony here), whereas she seems to be a smart person who at least tries to be kind, so hopefully if it turns out that her decisions really needed to be criticized, she'll eventually get around to joining in on the criticism.
roystgnr
27d ago
Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.
2.25% (15y refinance), and I won't shut up about it!
(You've got to let me have this one; in hindsight the biggest financial decision of my life was "I guess gwern makes some good points about this 'bitcoin' thing, but I just can't bring myself to buy any fake money tokens for nearly a dollar a piece!")
roystgnr
28d ago
my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons
One of the coolest parts in Paine's "Common Sense" was the suggestion that we could get by without a standing navy if only we subsidized merchant ships who use some of their cargo space for cannons, to deter piracy without a dedicated navy but also to make it possible to organize a dedicated navy quickly in the event of war. The question wasn't "should people be allowed to own cannons?", it was "are we getting enough of the positive externalities of people owning cannons?"
There was a wonderful period in between the ancient "Divine Right of Kings" and the modern "Divine Right of Governments" where intellectuals seemed comfortable with the idea that governments are just made of people. Five years ago I'd hoped the left might get back to that point, since "Defund The Police (who can't be trusted) but also Ban Guns (using Police, the only ones who can be trusted with guns)" is just too clearly oxymoronic, but in hindsight my definition of "clearly" may have been overly expansive. English grammar doesn't have the concept of "transitive adverbs", which is a shame since English vocabulary has transitive adverbs.
roystgnr
27d ago
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital
Not anymore, surprisingly. Musk owns about an eighth of Tesla, for about $125B of market cap (if he could sell it all without tanking the stock, which he can't, but that applies to all his equities), but he's got over 40% of SpaceX, which at its latest valuation gives him more like $135B capital there.
Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly
Nah, but they've been flat for 2 years after skyrocketing for the previous 2, which is nearly as bad a change for anyone holding stock at a P/E justified by future growth.
a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets
That's true, but it's not the budget that'll explode (except for the military, by like 25%?), it's just the deficit, via tax cuts. And nearly all Trump's base (like most other Republicans and probably most Democrats, to be fair) are fine taking lower taxes now at the cost of larger but more complicated fiscal and monetary problems at some uncertain future date.
roystgnr
26d ago
My wife and I agreed to stop after 3 kids, and she got a tubal ligation during the birth of our third.
With hindsight, I think this was the right decision - her births went from "C-section" to "with minor complications" to "with emergency post-op surgery", and one of my worst memories is of scouring medical journals on my laptop to try to figure out her survival odds while she was in that last surgery (around 99%, which sounds high now but sure felt terrifyingly low then).
With more hindsight, she now disagrees with me. She utterly hated being pregnant, and she doesn't have a death wish, but even in the hypothetical case of "what if the odds kept getting worse and you'd have been down to 90% next time" she thinks that would have been worth it for a fourth.
Her sister once had a kid who lost your game of Russian Roulette, with a severe mutation expressing both physically (he had stubs instead of lower arms or hands, legs he couldn't walk on, and cardiopulmonary problems that the doctors thought would kill him by age 3 or 4, and he eventually died of the flu at age 11) and mentally (at age 11 years he was mentally closer to 11 months). She still thought having him was worth the ordeal of caring for him.
I'm not sure what a good upper limit is, though. That sister has been raising (or completed raising; there's a wide age range) 4 other kids happily - but that might be partly due to good fortune in most of their lives? My father was the oldest of 6 young kids when his father died, and though his mother was a saint there's a limit to what a single parent on a limited survivor's pension can do to raise such a large family well.
I think that's the only reason I'm still glad we stopped at 3. As a terminal value I'd consider a 4th kid like our first 3 to be worth much more than a 10% chance of me dying, so I can't tell my wife not to feel likewise, but there's also the instrumental value of our lives to consider. If she had died then even our first 3 wouldn't be "like our first 3", they'd be in a sorrier state if they'd had only me (with a couple of her nearby relatives to help) raising them.
with reliable genetic screening to make sure they were healthy
Nucleus Genomics just launched their "Nucleus Embryo" product yesterday, if you want to do IVF to get improved odds on the kid's genes. I'm not sure what their process is or how reliable it is, though.
I do think lots and lots of women would have at least one kid if it wasn't so scary and risky and painful
Mean desired total fertility rate among young women in the USA is still over replacement; it's only the actual fertility rate that's now under 1.7 and still falling. But the biggest issues that have women delaying kids until it's too late to reach their desires aren't anything about the risks of pregnancy or difficulties of child rearing, it's the rapidly increasing difficulty of finding a spouse (especially difficulty finding a spouse while still young), combined with worry for their economic future.
Mandatory spending (mostly social security, medicare, pensions, and welfare), plus interest, now exceeds total federal revenues. We could eliminate every discretionary budget item, shut down everything from NASA to the Army, and we'd still see the debt continue to increase.
The debt is about to hit $37 trillion. If we cut all spending in half, everything down to Grandma's social security check, that would give us a $1 trillion surplus, and it would still take half a lifetime to pay everything back.
If we eliminated all spending, including collecting social security taxes but paying no more benefits, it would still take around 9 years to pay off the debt, not just a few.
roystgnr
26d ago
Shunning used to be something cults did, but wokeness mainstreamed it as part of its attacks on free speech.
Is this the setup for a Mitch-Hedburg-style joke?
"Shunning used to be something only cults did. It still is, but it used to be too."
roystgnr
1mo ago
They kept track of death rates among the unvaccinated vs vaccinated (vs boosted, etc.), and it definitely looked like you wanted to be in the group whose first exposure to Covid spikes was of the artificial, non-exponentially-reproducing variety. Vaccine effectivity dropped off with time fast enough that there was no way to stop the disease from spreading, but at least we might have somewhat reduced the fatality rate from more of those first virgin exposures.
The obvious problem with those numbers is that this was anything but a Randomized Controlled Trial, and who knows what other differences those population groups had. IIRC I could find the data age-adjusted, but not controlled for anything else. There's a paradox where, if you tell everybody that e.g. square dancers live longer, you may soon find that square dancers really do live longer, not because it's better than other forms of exercise or whatever, but because now all the people who are doing a lot of other things to take care of their health have started square dancing too. Perhaps people who resisted taking a Covid vaccine are more oppositional toward other sorts of public health recommendations too, either with regard to Covid (letting themselves be exposed more easily) or to other contributing factors (obesity, smoking, "toughing out" serious infections, whatever).
The more subtle problem is that it's hard to tell how Covid-19 would have evolved in the presence of a more universally vaccinated population. Death rates fell way off with the Omicron variant, but would the virus inevitably have evolved in the same way at the same speed?
All I get is, "Of course they worked, it's obvious. You're stupid."
Ask if they think the FDA should have allowed the vaccine to be freely distributed and/or sold after it was first invented, in March 2020, without spending the next several months waiting on slow-but-legally-mandated testing methods and FDA approval before they could ramp up production. It's a little hard to get up on a "not trusting the system and taking the vaccine makes you a stupid anti-vaxxer" high horse when nearly half of the US deaths came during a time period when the system would have jailed anyone who gave you the vaccine.
You yourself got +15 upvotes saying things that I thought were quite uncool, and very right coded.
I know "they were asking for it" is a cliche of an awful thing to say, but I have to point out: you literally were [edit: the top comment literally was] asking for it, and @Hadad was wise enough to remind everyone of that in his first sentence of that comment. The line between a debate and an opinion poll is a bit of a blurry one on a forum, but I think it's clear enough that the distinction matters. If he'd presented those sentiments as if they were supposed to be a persuasive argument, I'd absolutely have downvoted them, but giving an honest (and bookended by caveats!) expression of his sentiments in response to an explicit query for general sentiments was fine. I still couldn't bring myself to upvote it, sorry @Hadad, but half of the point of this place is seeing what people say when they're not being squelched, and avoiding the squelching is important for that.
I'd say your own [the] top comment's vote score (currently +18 -24) would be more clearly deserving of complaint (except that that would go over even more poorly, as "people can't downvote me [us]!" always does). There are problems with your [the] comment that should have been fixed, but I could surely find comments here that had bigger problems but got a pass because they were right-leaning rather than (in context) left-leaning.
roystgnr
25d ago
I'm pretty sure the part where Elon started insinuating Trump is a pedo wasn't staged:
Time to drop the really big bomb:
@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.
Have a nice day, DJT!
roystgnr
21d ago
Having grown up in a snowy place, I instinctively dislike white cars, because they scream "hard to see against the landscape" and "please deposit mud here."
Ha!
My city has hit 105F to 110F for 9 out of the last 10 years, yet I still see black cars here, which seem like an insane purchase choice to me.
roystgnr
22d ago
They're already highly useful as a Super Google
If you're careful, they are. But that care requires twice as much checking: instead of just having to verify that the web page you find knows what it's talking about, you have to verify that the AI correctly summarized what it's talking about, and God help you if you just believe the AI about something for which it doesn't cite sources. But even Google's cheap "throw it in every search" AI seems to be much less likely to bring up unrelated web pages than the previous Google option of "let the search engine interpret your query terms loosely", and it's much less likely to miss important web pages than the previous Google option of "wrap most of your query in quotes so the stupid engine doesn't substitute unrelated-in-your-context words for your actual query terms", so it's still very useful.
The one thing I've repeatedly found to be most useful about current LLMs is that they're great at doing "dual" or "inverse" queries. If I knew I wanted the details of Godunov's Theorem, even a dumb search engine would have been fine to bring up the details of Godunov's Theorem - but when all I could recall was that I wanted the details of "some theorem that proves it's impossible to get higher order accuracy and stability from a numerical method for boundary-value problems without sacrificing something", but I didn't even recall the precise details, I wrote a wishy-washy paragraph for Claude and in the reply its first sentence gave me exactly the name of the theorem I wanted to search for. I can't imagine how much longer it would have taken to find what I was looking for with Google.
AI is extremely helpful for my job; anyone who says it isn't is probably just using it wrong (skill issue).
I'm currently not allowed to use a top-of-the-line model for my job (even though I mostly work on things that aren't ITAR or classified, we've got a blanket limitation to an in-house model for now), but I'm definitely worried that I'll have a skill issue when the rules get improved. What do you do to get AI help with a large code base rather than a toy problem? Point it to a github repo? Copy-and-paste a hundred thousand lines of code to make sure it has enough context? Paste in just the headers and/or docs it needs to understand a particular problem?
roystgnr
25d ago
But Trump's election was specifically a repudiation of the Republican establishment's weakness on illegal immigration, wasn't it? Even his eagerness to be obnoxious to opponents was seen as insurance against the possibility of him becoming yet another Republican who would go weak-kneed and try to thread the needle between "grr, we hate illegal immigration" among their voters and "oh, but what can we do about it in a divided government? better trade another sweeping amnesty for some minor hypothetical enforcement concessions" in DC. The Democrats' only difference from the repudiated Republicans was that they were supporting the same outcome overtly rather than dishonestly, and Trump's base was centered around opposition to that specific outcome, not principled opposition to dishonesty, so there wasn't a lot of room for collaboration there.
The Democratic strategy of "help get people pissed off at an opponent who's pretty good at pissing people off" would have been a great one (for their own strategic interests; perhaps not for the country as a whole), if only they'd been able to field candidates and policies that weren't also pissing everyone off in different ways.
roystgnr
25d ago
The "save a trillion dollars by rooting out fraud" overpromise wasn't one of Musk's usual sort, though. Sometimes he disappoints by fulfilling a promise in a half-assed weasel-worded way ("full" self-driving?), and usually he disappoints by presenting an improbable if-nothing-at-all-goes-wrong timeline for progress that eventually takes at least twice as long, but this time the promise was something that obviously was never going to be possible at all. Many voters were dumb enough to believe it, though, so it's not entirely unlikely that Trump's inner circle believed it too, and even Musk consistently kept acting like he was drinking his own ketamine koolaid.
roystgnr
22d ago
it looks like the cop shot her on purpose, though I can't imagine why.
I'd bet that, ironically, the root cause is the same as the root cause of the protests becoming riots in the first place: because we're violent apes, and we evolved to rely on our own little groups' capacity for violence to protect us from all the other little violent groups, we therefore excuse even unprincipled violence by guys on "our side" rather than cracking down on it and risking intra-group conflict undermining our inter-group conflict. This gives sociopaths opportunities just as soon as they join whichever group gives them the most opportunities for their particular flavor of sociopathy.
When he saw someone who annoyed him, he got to make her suffer with no immediate consequences. It probably felt pretty sweet! The cops surrounding him didn't even turn to look and see what the hubbub was about, and he didn't even glance around to double check on that. He had about as much expectation of being punished by the other cops as the car-torchers had of being punished by other protesters. This asshole is doing more to undermine the support for aggressive law enforcement than the protesters are, and the jackasses waving Mexican flags in front of their barbarian pyres are doing more to undermine the opposition to mass deportations than the ICE and cops are, but because they're all superficially signaling commitment to their groups' cause, they don't get called on it by their other group members.
In general I'd guess police sociopaths are much smarter than rioter/arsonist sociopaths, because they found a group that will pay them overtime while they get to fuck around. Perhaps shooting a woman while a camera was pointed at her may have been going too far, but it is the LAPD, so even if some minor discipline eventually occurs we'll probably never know the details.
roystgnr
26d ago
I think that's normal. Right? It's normal for every day to be an MMA cage fight against a little monkey.
Were you also a little MMA monkey, long ago?
Turns out that it's normal for your kids to be like little mixtures of how you and your spouse were as kids, rather than for them to be like kids in general.
That sounds banally obvious when I put it into words, but before I had kids I'd never really put it into words, so I never thought of myself as a person who would end up really liking kids. Turns out that, although I still don't especially like kids in general, I really like my wife and I really like myself so I really like my kids in particular. As a slightly-less-obvious bonus, it turns out that kids make friends more readily with other kids who they have things in common with, so I like all my kids' friends and I really like most of them.
My son would never have kicked me in the balls, but he will gleefully launch a massive suicidal invasion against my in-first-place-until-then Civilization V nation, thereby distracting me long enough to let my wife win our family game while he gloats, which I guess is the nerd version of a balls-kicking (I don't think I've ever won one of our family Civ V games...). But because it's the nerd version I feel proud rather than upset. Even when he shows me up at sports, it's popular-among-nerds sports like rock climbing and "ninja" obstacle courses that he gravitates to.
I know exactly zero men who would choose to get kicked in the balls even once to have a child
I'm also a counterexample here. Personally I thought that the months of sleep deprivation during newborn care were worse than a more-acute-but-more-brief testicular injury (which I haven't suffered since I was a teen, thankfully), but each of the kids were still a net positive before they turned 1. Maybe I've just never taken a hard enough hit to the balls.
roystgnr
2mo ago
since the dawn of civilization
Ownership greatly predates humanity, much less civilization. Stick a bunch of GPS collars on wolves and you can see which territory each pack "owns". Establishing a Schelling point of "this is ours, that is theirs" is what naturally evolves to reduce negative-sum conflicts over rivalrous goods as soon as you have a species whose minds can handle such a distinction, which is much earlier than you get a species whose minds can handle (much less invent - Schelling was writing less than a century ago!) the underlying game theory.
If anything, civilization started out with a step backwards in the conception of ownership. The early "palace economy" city-states, where you gave your production to the ruler(s) and hopefully enough of it was eventually doled back out to you, are much more accurately described as a way to "Usurp rights over resources ... by fiat and, if necessary, by fraud and/or force" than anything capitalists typically do. It took a very long time before the study of economics (famously named "the dismal science" in a pro-slavery screed, because it "finds the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand', and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone") managed to successfully convince most economists that individual ownership can be more fruitful than collective ownership, not just more moral, and I'm afraid it still hasn't managed to become convincing to most non-economists.
paranoid who don't understand the concept of sharing
The above wiki link is one place to look to see why this is positively wrong, but here it's normatively wrong as well.
roystgnr
25d ago
The first big unambiguous attack I recall was Tesla getting shut out of Biden's joke of an "EV summit" ... but the first big conflict I recall was that Musk was heavily opposed to Covid lockdowns, back before being opposed to Covid lockdowns was cool. Not sure who you would say was doing the alienating in that case.
Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
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