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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
I once believed that political solutions to problems are viable, and now I believe that they are not, and that you need cultural solutions first in order to meaningfully affect the political
I once believed literature mattered, but upon inspecting the type of people who are into literature versus who are not, I no longer believe it is valuable. “Literature” is surprisingly new to civilization anyway.
I love dogs, but dog culture should be ended, and anthropomorphism should be banned from kids entertainment. Kids should be learning to understand humans and their variegated expressions, so that they can understand themselves and adapt to the social world in front of them. They should not be bonding with animals to a significant degree.
I once thought IQ was the be-all-end-all but now I think there are other qualities which are as important but less easy to measure.
Could you give a couple of examples?
The one I can think of: regulating social media and news outlets is the political solution to a cultural problem.
That political solution will not occur unless there is already a cultural solution in place. In order to instantiate an effective regulatory body for social media, you need people to lobby for it; in order to get people to lobby for it, you need cultural organizations that create awareness. Next, you need to generate enough billions of dollars that your lobbying is greater than Meta et al. Why shouldn’t Meta, with a profit of $40b, spend all of that profit and more on lobbying against your solution? They will then selectively show you influencers who are against regulation on all your social media feeds.
Luckily there’s another way to regulate social media. Establish a tight-knit culture and create your own social media. Like how churches have always created their own media and social organizations against secular culture. It doesn’t have to be advanced. It would take a weekend to make an early MySpace clone. Now you have your own social media. Defectors who attempt to continue using mainstream social media are excommunicated and shunned.
This “out there” solution of crafting microcultures is the only way forward as capitalism becomes more and more intent on degrading human life quality. We will now always have gambling and loot crate mechanics because gambling companies are now able to lobby. We will always have marijuana because marijuana dispensaries can lobby. It is just going to get worse and worse. Nothing will be the same. You won’t be able to beat them in a lobby-off, but you will be able to beat them by banning them from your community, because at the end of the day there will always be reasonable people who listen to other reasonable people and are persuaded by reasonable arguments — and when these people form a community with rules then they will have a huge advantage over Consumer-Americans.
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