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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32579 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Elon is a True Believer, and that's why he Backs Trump

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger

So there's been discussion of why Elon Musk put threw in so hard with Trump. What he gets out of owning twitter. I've long had a pretty simple and parsimonious explanation- he wants humanity to spread throughout the universe, and if democrats get in his way he will have to back republicans regardless of his other political opinions. Democrats got in the way.

This review of Reentry is, functionally, a better sourced argument for my intuition. I suppose as a religious fanatic myself I can recognize a fanatic of a different creed by instinct; I guess indifferent PMC types need to be reasoned into the conclusion. As an aside, this is why I'm less worried about woke than some of our other social conservative posters- I don't think I can point to it, but everything about them just screams 'these people sort of believe, in the sense that they don't really disagree, but not in the sense that they'll take licks for their ideology. Like, they're willing to ruin other people's lives over it, sure, but not their own'. Regardless, the actions of SpaceX point to being run by true believers:

when SpaceX is preparing to move their Falcon 9 rocket from its test stand to the launch site for the very first time, they hire “the second largest crane in Texas” to first stack the pieces of the rocket on top of each other, and then lower them onto a waiting trailer. Halfway through the operation, they realize it won’t work because of the wind and that they’ll have to assemble them on the ground. But the piece currently dangling from the crane and blowing like a sail in the wind isn’t designed to bear its own weight, so they literally can’t put it down.

The guy in charge of the operation joined the company a few weeks ago as a rocket engineer in California, and he is now watching the future of the company dangling in front of him from the second largest crane in Texas. Darkness is falling. What does he do? He does what he has to do: calls a few dozen welders to come the next morning, then stays up all night designing a custom “cradle” that the rocket can be lowered into while anxiously watching to make sure the crane doesn’t start leaking hydraulic fluid. He notes: “At Northrop [Grumann], building a custom cradle would have become its own mini-program with design reviews, taking months to build rather than hours.”

Once the rocket is down, they need to move it. To Florida. NASA and other rocket makers generally move their rockets by sea, but that’s slow and expensive. SpaceX doesn’t like to do things that are slow and expensive, so they decide to drive it there. Unfortunately, when lying down on its cradle, the rocket can’t fit under a standard freeway overpass. This is the point at which, if you did not follow the Haywood Algorithm, you would rent a barge and allow the rocket to arrive a few months late. But SpaceX always acts as if any delay at all will kill the company, so they instead set off on “the road trip from hell,” finding an absurd and tortuous route down backroads from Texas to Florida.

Their route has no overpasses, but it does have power lines and traffic lights. So some of the world’s best rocket scientists drive in front of the trailer with a flexible, 17-foot pole taped to the bumper of their car. Whenever it hits something, they jump out, use large sticks to lift the power line enough that the rocket can pass under, then jump back in their car and drive off the road and around the rocket (it’s too wide to pass) so they can intercept the next obstacle. The average speed of the trip is 10mph, and they drive continuously through the night, sleeping in shifts when they’re able to. They have a hard deadline of 5pm on November 24th, because Florida closes its roads to oversized loads for a week around Thanksgiving, and they roll into Cape Canaveral on November 24th, at 3:21pm, after ten days of continuous driving.

That's one example. It's also not just about SpaceX being lean and nimble. It's about being true believers. Elon Musk literally actually believes that humanity spreading through the entire universe is the most important thing... ever, with no exceptions. And he's managed to convince the company that that is correct. Obstacles to this will need to be overcome or removed, such as by sending a guy with a flexible pole to lift up overhead power lines when your rocket engine passes through backroads in the rural south because a barge would take too long. NASA would have accepted the cost. Why? At the end of the day, they believe in going to space, sure, but they're not, like, fanatics about it. SpaceX are fanatics.

And SpaceX just consistently decides not to cash out and take easy money for the rest of their lives. Instead they plow the profits from that easy money into moonshots that push the possibilities of space exploration forwards by developing new technology. Why? I'll quote the review again:

No! It’s actually very simple: remember all that stuff about how SpaceX is less of a company and more of a religious movement, with a goal of making life multi-planetary? Elon and SpaceX behave the way that they do because they believe that stuff very sincerely. A version of SpaceX that merely became worth trillions of dollars, but never enabled the colonization of Mars, would be a disastrous failure in Elon’s eyes.

It's actually pretty simple. He's not a perfectly rational money-maxxer because a perfectly rational money-maxxer would not be betting the entire company on moonshot technological progress no matter what the math says. People are risk averse when all they care about is purchasing power.

So how does this tie in with politics? Well, he bought twitter to back republicans because democrats were doing things like making him kidnap seals and record their emotional reactions to recordings of rocket launches, and other such stupid delays. It's extremely rational for Elon to conclude 1) a cooperative government will enable him to get to mars faster and 2) republicans will give him a cooperative government in exchange for support, democrats will never give him a cooperative government. Yes, he condemns woke, but a) woke doesn't have, like, an actual definition, so it can easily refer to the socialism-by-bureaucracy wing even if that's not totally standard b) I get the sense that a lot of the turn of opinion against him relies on woke-ish methods, with things like cancel culture allowing a corralling of left public opinion, and it's pretty reasonable to think he does too c) there's lots of wokeness or woke ideology involved in holding him back(especially with environmental stuff), and plenty of potential attacks on him from a woke perspective(I'm kind of surprised nobody's already tried to metoo him). Yes, he's conspicuously worried about birthrates, but space colonization essentially requires high human capital high tfr populations.

I wrote a post a few months ago about Gen Z not having enough grit, aggression and agency and willingness to go all in. In retrospect, I don't think it was my best work. Elon's plenty gritty. There's lots of lack of grit in modern society; the every-other-month-AAQC about how all marriages are gay marriages now is basically decrying that, because in modern marriages there's no going all in, doing whatever it takes, they're in concept similar to 'partnerships' among sexual minorities. I'm willing to make that argument but not making it here. Instead I wonder- is fanaticism a necessary component of grit? That certainly seems to be the difference between SpaceX and NASA. Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?

I've rambled a lot here, but it seems convincing to me at least.

Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?

Yes. Yes it is. I 100% believe this and have vaguely gestured at it before. It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.

No idea why though. What went wrong?

  1. More options means more ways to unwittingly screw up by committing to something bad or by denying new opportunities.
  2. A liberalised world means you don't get anything for committing. If you commit to a person, there is no legal recourse for forcing them to honour their own commitment in return. If you commit to a job, they are no longer required to take care of you from cradle to grave. Likewise babies. Likewise responsibilities: what responsibility (rhetorically) do you want me to take, and what are you going to give me for it?

It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.

From a young-ish urban-ish perspective, and adding a little more cynicism than usual, can you see why a lot of this sounds like a trap? Especially when you hear it from an older person? The specific examples given - solving the birthrate crisis and the military recruitment crisis - require young people to take on significant costs for very dubious long-term benefit. Likewise I bet Musk is underpaying his engineers. I agree with you in many ways but also young people are responding rationally to shifted risk & reward incentives.

No idea why though. What went wrong?

Because life is meaningless now. In the past, kin and religion- real religion, the sort of thing people actually believed- dominated life. You had a role and a part to play dictated mostly by those two things; even if you weren't a subsistence farmer because you were the son of a subsistence farmer, there were pretty good odds that your parents picked your future for you- you were an apprentice blacksmith or whatever because that's who they knew. There was a heft to things, and it's easy to commit to heft. Most parents don't abandon their children to foster care and they'll fight like mad to avoid it, even if they technically have the right. People today don't believe in anything real and they've stopped believing in anything real. Every generation, the blood memory of why you have to pick something to carry through at whatever the cost gets weaker and weaker, and this is the cause of great chaos. Nowadays it takes genuine belief to make that kind of heft exist without already having your bridges burned.

'Men have forgotten God. That is why all this has happened.'

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I think it's just because people have much more to lose now. Your normal standard of living is big enough so you don't have to diverge from a safe railroded life path to live well. Why would you commit if by doing so you limiting your own options and open up yourself to failure?

Theory: daycare from infancy.

I think a lot of the problems stem from how we’ve outsourced raising kids almost entirely to caregivers. This has tge obvious effect of essentially destroying the attachment process between family members, and it’s devastating for kids. Kids who grow up in daycares are one of 8-10 kids in a room in which adults ignore them unless they’re getting in trouble or need care. Parents, assuming an 8pm bedtime might get an hour or two on weekdays and whatever time they can squeeze around household chores on weekends to spend time with the kids. Achieving something in a daycare doesn’t mean much, the care giver is simply too busy with other kids to notice them getting good at something. Parents are too busy to celebrate them doing something. And this is for everything they do. The kids don’t matter, and their attempts to do things don’t matter. Eventually they don’t bother..

Except that I’d guess 100 years ago parents spent way less personal ‘emotional’ time with kids, kids were much more independent, were raised by neighborhood older figures in informal crèches until they were old enough to play by themselves, whereupon they did so until they went to school, which they did until they had to work and/or get married. The sentimental, schmaltzy suburban model of parenting where mom actually spends hours every day with her kids above the age of 3 or 4 is the new thing. I think there are a lot of big failure modes when parents spend too much time with their children; they should love them, but not be too close.

Except parents spend much more time with kids now than they did in the sixties.

Can you double check your link?

Not the stupid hat thing again. Replaced.

Thanks I was really confused why it was linking to a deleted reddit comment or whatever.

It's very rare no? Don't most people stay with their kids at home until maybe age 4-5? IRL I know of one person who was in early daycare, and my entire family sometimes (but rarely) talks that she's a little odd bc of that. She herself has said that. Her parents were careerist high flyers and very much in love. 1930s kids, so they considered their parental duties done when kids were fed, clothed and attending school.

What went wrong is that Western society lost its commitment to its founding religion and deepest set of moral principles.

Not only that, but we decided Christianity was uncool and needed to be remade in our image. No wonder we can’t commit to anything.

I'm sorry, but Western society was founded on Greek paganism. Christianity almost destroyed it once, and we only squeezed through after a thousand-year rut by deciding that Christianity as it was is uncool and remaking it in a different image. In fact, we to then continued to tweak away at it further to great effect for some 500 years more. No wonder that, having been left with such a strong cultural memory of this serving us well, we would eventually slip up and remake it again in a way that is bad without even realising how we screwed up.

What do you actually mean by 'Western society'?

Because yes, Greek influence is the substrate for west Eurasian civilization post-Alexander. But that includes Islamic societies and Indian Societies as well. That is, to say the least, a non-standard use of the term 'western society'.

What is typically meant by western society is societies founded on old Rome and Christianity. I assume you're referring to Rome's fall as the fault of Christianity(a very debatable and not supported by the evidence take; I presume you don't believe Roman mythology was literally true and ancient Rome fell because they didn't stay in the good graces of Iupiter, so I'm curious as to the mechanism for Christianity causing the fall of the Roman empire and the evidence for that mechanism because to all appearances Christianity actually briefly strengthened the Roman empire before it resumed its previous rate of decline), which BTW left a dark age of 300 years at most, not a thousand. But Christian institutions are the reason Roman knowledge was preserved. Christian institutions spread technological advances that lead into the industrial revolution quite directly. Christian institutions were the only thing that kept literacy alive in big parts of Europe.

Roman paganism(and you do know that Roman and Greek paganism were different religions despite the similarities, right?) was a dead man walking at the edict of Milan. An impartial observer in 300 AD probably would have expected Manichaeism or some kind of mystery cult to supplant it as well as Christianity. The fusion between Christianity and Roman culture built the greatest civilization the world has ever, or will ever have, known. Constantine's conversion came at a time when the crisis of the third century had essentially discredited Roman paganism and dealt a mortal blow to the empire. It was Christianity that brought the Germanic tribes into Roman culture; the early scientific texts weren't written in Latin as a tribute to Iupiter, but because of the influence of the Christian church. There's Christian stampings all over this stuff; even timekeeping is due to the Christian church needing to hold religious services at a particular time.

Without Christianity the Germanic tribes would have settled into their conquered Roman territory and acted like Arabs today(and indeed the Arabic golden age had outsize contribution from Christians and a decline in the Christian percentage is at least a reasonable contributing factor).

I really don't think this is true. To the extent that Greek paganism contributed to Western society (that is, the actual society of people living in Europe and America) it is primarily by allowing us to regain lost scientific and engineering knowledge. The only reason that the Iliad is relevant to us is in the West that upper-class elites thought it was a pretty neat story. Democracy is nice but I don't think you can really call it foundational when most people in the West have only had the franchise for a hundred years at best.

To be provocative in my turn, Western society was founded on God, landowning aristocracy, and weirdoes (landlors or clergy) tinkering in their backyard.

There was no thousand-year rut. Christian Europe in the High Middle Ages had already overtaken Rome in terms of technological sophistication, with notable inventions in the period including spectacles, the windmill, mechanical clocks cheap enough to be installed in every village church, sandglasses which keep accurate enough time to be useful, and the architectural techniques needed to build the Gothic cathedrals. (Neither the Romans nor the Chinese could build anything like that). The translation of the key Greek and Arabic works into Latin had been completed by 1200, and at that point Western science and maths started to move ahead (most obviously in astronomy with Oresme). The fall of the Baghdad caliphate and Song China to Genghis Khan allow the West to move into first place, but we never look back and continue to forge ahead through the Renaissance, Commercial Revolution, Age of Exploration, Industrial Revolution, and American Hegemony. If we are not the same civilisation that built Notre-Dame, it is because of some loss of faith in the last hundred years, not because the Renaissance was a RETVRN to an older continuity. (And in any case, the implausibly effective rebuilding of Notre-Dame is strong evidence that we are the same civilisation that built it.)

I am less confident, but on balance believe based on Tom Holland's work, that the key ingredients of the thing that grows into Western Civilisation come together during the Ottonian Renaissance (950-1030), the Cluniac Reforms of Christian monasticism and worship (910-c.1130), the Gregorian Reform of the Church which grew out of Cluny (1050-1080), and the Peace of God movement (989 onwards). Those ingredients are Christianity, the example of Rome, and some kind of customary law or oligarchic cultural trait of the ascendant Germani that counteracts the worst aspects of Romanism. Greek paganism is only essential to the extent that Roman paganism is an offshoot of it (a point of great controversy among classicists).

@hydroacetylene curious for your response?

See above.

Well yeah I saw but you’re not responding to the pagan accusations. :(

To bite a bullet: lack of exposure to non-negotiable danger with permanent consequences.

British aristocrats were fond of mountaineering and yachting, and perhaps these taught young men and women about risk and danger. Mountains don't care; nor does the sea.

By the bye, I am gratified that your bones are not decorating some barren Alaskan slope.

lack of exposure to non-negotiable danger with permanent consequences.

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-by

@Southkraut

Thanks for the reminder!

I've read the article some months ago, but somehow it hasn't occurred to me yet to read the Cyropedia itself. I'll put that right. Xenophon is usually a smooth read.

I agree with your thesis but i think there is a secondary reason that has been largley ignored.

Another reason that i think Musk backed Trump is that senior DNC officials were on the record saying that there would "be a reckoning" for his anti-censorship (read pro 1st Ammendment) and anti-dei (read pro-meritocractic) policies after the election, and that the incoming Harris Administration would be doing everything in thier power "to make his life as difficult as possible" and wrest control of SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Et Al. away from Musk.

When someone tells you that they are your enemy, believe them.

8 minutes in for anyone watching. Although it's funny to watch from about 6 because they flip from "it's outrageous for Republicans to spread doubts about our elections" to

and and also all of the lies uhh Russia and there's more information coming through about Russian disinformation in this election and you've got to- you know I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all and I'm not- by saying Trump was on the phone with Putin and by saying that Elon Musk met with Putin uh you know

Yeah yeah and and Elon I know you're watching us and I want you to know that even if you know trump wins I mean it's not going to happen but even if he wins and if you get a position in the administration I guarantee you I'm going to make life so difficult for you, really so difficult for you so just be very careful of yourself

Just pure fucking evil, they all deserve a very short prison sentence. At the very least every single single party apparatchik deserves to have its wealth seized as proceeds of criminal activity.

8 minutes in for anyone watching.

Sorry i thought i had put the timestamp in the link but yes.

Should be fixed now.

That did it. YouTube copy paste seems to strip the timestamp sometimes.

Hey at least it wasn't a nice hat

I still want to know what causes that

Musk had already, in practice, thrown in with the republicans long ago by this point. This is a concerning attitude which points to democrats as actually not the party of democracy, to say the least, but it emerged in reaction to Elon buying twitter more than it precipitated it.

I respect the ambition of conquering space, but I think there’s also a clear and unspoken disconnect between what’s promised - which is a kind of romantic, sci-fi version of the age of exploration - and the reality.

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have. What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.

There is no major viable route to other habitable planets; we’d need to send probes to find them first, and we can’t do that at speeds fast enough to make that kind of search viable. Even if one was miraculously found, it would require thousands of years on a generation ship (involving mountains of uninvented and possibly impossible technology) or cryostasis (see above) to make work.

I’m all for exploring space, but I’m also 99% certain that human civilization, whatever becomes of it, will be tied to earth as the center of its story from beginning to end.

Sam Kriss is a notorious blowhard, but on just one thing, he was prescient:

Humanity will never colonize Mars, never build moon bases, never rearrange the asteroids, never build a sphere around the sun.

There will never be faster-than-light travel. We will not roam across the galaxy. We will not escape our star.

Life is probably an entirely unexceptional phenomenon; the universe probably teems with it. We will never make contact. We will never fuck green-skinned alien babes.

The human race will live and die on this rock, and after we are gone something else will take our place. Maybe it already has, without our even noticing.

If your response to this is to post the NYT quote from the early 1900s about man not flying for a thousand years, then I care not to argue.

Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.

Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.

The Earth vs. Moon and African Plains vs. far Arctic are differences of degree, not kind. Both the moon and the arctic are inhospitable environments that will quickly kill unprotected humans, and lack easy access to essential resources. And yet, with sufficient adaptation and technology, we've managed to create self-sufficient populations in the far north.

We've gone beyond "where we have evolved to live, and to die" once already. I wouldn't count us out yet.

Some may ask why we aren't building cities in Antarctica now before going to Mars. Building life support systems and growing food is easier there than it will be on Mars. Mars will be colonized first, though, and Antarctica may never be colonized. The reason is because international treaties prevent Antarctica from having sovereignty. But sovereignty can be attainable on Mars. The pursuit of sovereignty is what makes space exploration worthwhile. Sovereignty is unobtainium—the resource more abundant in space than on Earth. Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations.

The colonization of outer space is prohibited by the very same kinds of treaties that prevent the colonization of Antarctica. If you can build a city on Mars you can build one on Antarctica. America and Russia could do so tomorrow, it would just be a waste of money and pointless.

It's not about America or Russia building a city in Antarctica. It's about declaring a new sovereign country. Even if you somehow manage to build a self-sufficient base in Marie Byrd Land and declare it Tworafia, the US will immediately extend their Antarctic claim over it and send a warship with jarheads in its hold to occupy and destroy it.

Mars is like the Thirteen Colonies, only much harder to send Redcoats and Hessians against. The only real threat is sending enough nuclear IPBMs to overwhelm the new country's defenses and destroy it.

You don’t need to destroy the new colony on Mars, since almost by definition for a long time it’s going to be supplied and supported by an operation on earth which will likely be situated in a rich and advanced country where the government maintains a strong monopoly on the use of force.

I'm talking about the moment when it's finally self-sufficient.

I have genuinely never understood why some people find the UN tyrannical. It seems to me that it is toothless, and even if it were not it would at worst be an institution of mediocre democracy (a bit like the EU or indeed the US). That is no tyranny. Yet "one world government" has been a meme since my childhood. That has always seemed like a worthy if probably far off goal to me—what about it do you find so objectionable?

What I really mean are the united nations (lowercase) that comprise the United Nations (uppercase). The UN is impotent. The united nations that comprise the UN are the powers that be.

OK, I agree that the nations of the earth are indeed the powers that be (at least to a very extensive degree). So your argument is that one would like to be able to set up a new country, but all the land on Earth is already spoken for? That is indeed an considerable difficulty, and plausibly a motivation for planetary exploration.

If there’s energy, (whether from solar panels, a greenhouse or a nuclear reactor) people can live there. I’m positive star entrepreneurs could find lots of people willing to live in a cage, eating reprocessed gruel facing fearful odds for a hundred generations, because I’m not far from considering it. A lot of polynesians drowned, but in the end they got to most of the pacific.

No need for terraforming, just dig the equivalent of an antarctic base. Who needs fresh air anyway. Modern youth’s predilection for browsing dank memes over going outside will pay off on mars.

Yeah. Elon has explicitly stated that “if it’s not against the laws of physics it’s not impossible”.

This attitude has proven to be enormously valuable.

Mars colonization is not impossible just because we don’t know how to do it yet.

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have.

This is true, but the implication isn't that we can't conquer space, just that we should assume we'll have to mostly build our own habitable volumes. There's enough matter and energy in the solar system to support at least hundreds of billions of humans this way, in the long run.

So Musk might be a little off-target with his focus on Mars. Still, at this point we don't really need to make that decision; SpaceX is working on general capabilities that apply to either approach. And maybe it's not a bad idea to start with Mars and work our way around to habitats as AI advances make highly automated in-space resource extraction and construction more viable.

What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.

Many forms of x-risk would be substantially mitigated if civilization were spread over millions of space habitats. These could be isolated to limit the spread of a pandemic. Nuclear exchanges wouldn't affect third-parties by default, and nukes are in several ways less powerful and easier to defend against in space. Dispersal across the solar system might even help against an unfriendly ASI, by providing enough time for those furthest from its point of emergence to try their luck at rushing a friendly ASI to defend them (assuming they know how to build ASI but were previously refraining for safety).

In the spirit of playful contrarianism:

‘But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin,’ said the sky-person.

In fact,' said the Na’vi, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow.' There was a long silence.

I claim them all,' said the human at last.

The Na’vi shrugged his blue shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

I liked Semper Victoria if you’re into fic. It’s an Avatar sequel about humanity’s return that’s unabashedly pro-human without overly strawmanning either side. Very well written and very suspenseful.

I’m surprised at your lack of vision here, 2rafa. To me it’s more than obvious we can conquer space. We’ve already got people living in the ISS. If we don’t blow ourselves up it’s only a matter of time imo.

We went from having our home be sub Saharan Africa to living in the entire world. Space is just the next step.

But why, though? The US was and is better in a lot of ways than Europe (more arable land, great scenery, natural resources). What does space have over earth? The view?

Habitation on Mars would be in radiation shielded bunkers underground, how is that even comparable to living on earth?

You have to think longer than a few generations. Or course it’s going to be terrible for the first century or two. Everyone on board with the mission knows that.

They are inspired by something far grander than their own small existence. I hope you are able to understand someday.

What’s the endgame? I don’t think I’m blinded by my small existence, I think they’re blinded by science fiction; they fantasize about playing golf on an alien world with candy cotton trees, about going on space liners around the rings of Saturn, about going where no man has gone before. They imagine a universe of earth-like worlds with breathable atmospheres, each full of its own mysteries, cultures, fertile soil for new civilizational growth. Is it they who are lying to themselves. Space is a black void. It is strictly worse than earth in every way. Better to be done with the delusion now (which, again, is not to say I’m against exploring it, only doing so honestly).

All of what you’re talking about is possible, relatively easily in my opinion. Do you think scientific advances will stop?

We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible. You aren’t thinking big enough, still. In 10,000 years, assuming we don’t collapse our society and technology continues to progress, we will be powerful beyond belief. Space will be a cakewalk to master.

If you want some serious reading on this I recommend Beginning of Infinity.

Do you think scientific advances will stop?

Eventually, yes.

We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

How do you know that? How do you know we haven't already accomplished ~90% of what's possible?

In 10,000 years, assuming we don’t collapse our society and technology continues to progress

I, for one, think these are both big, unsupported conjectures.

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I think that you will be able to find first generation colonists. I also think that the rage of the second generation will be hideous to behold, and the relative immigration rates will make third-world immigration look like a trickle. I don't want to agree with @2rafa, I fantasised about colonising space when I was younger, but absent huge technological improvements living anywhere except a terraformed planet is going to be basically crap forever.

I guess. They wouldn’t really be volunteering so much as being volunteered, and that might make a difference too.

I’m surprised at your lack of vision here, 2rafa.

That seems totally in character. The best rafa posts are a window into the Id of the beancounter, and many heuristics that really really almost always work are found there.

Welcome back.

Also, don’t be a jerk.

This is unnecessarily mean.

expand

Youre sober, though-minded, pragmatic. You have a very high opinion of chinese politics. You write ironic comments about the "atavistic experience" of visiting israel. You justify your gender politics with dynastic economy, and I get the impression that that really is your motivation, and youre enthusiastic rather than wistful about it. These things and others like them are what, to the ire of the mods, I have summarised as a "beancounter", though I dont think you really mind.

The Id is what acts unconstrained by social demands. You can and do make posts that dont make the customary concessions to non-beancounter perspectives, and I find these the most interesting.

Your attitude to space exploration makes sense in this light. Sending ships into open seas beyond the range where they have time to come home is a waste almost every time its been tried. Noone has ever decided to do that based on actuarial tables or their equivalent in the mind. A certain, may I say romantic, vision is required - even Columbus did not argue "Well we might discover a previously unknown continent, most of which you can conquer, and that would more than pay for all the losses throughout history" because that would sound really fucking stupid.

"Innovation" and "Disruption" dont have a natural place in the world of the beancounter. Eg premodern china. In the West we have bullied them into caring about those (see also: all the cargoculting about them), and its in character that you could ignore that.

“Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one with started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years — provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials.”

Heh, nothin personal kid.

It's true that designing some kind of vault system to survive a meteor strike would be vastly easier and cheaper than trying to do something similar on another world. At least here we have air and water, and transportation costs are comparatively nil.

A vault system is okay for a meteor strike, but if planet Earth gets taken over by robots, a human colony on Mars has a better chance of escaping extermination.

I think I'm in camp "If the robots can take over earth they can and will probably get to Mars too." Guess one never does know.

IIRC a novel called 'Moving Mars' deals with such a scenario.

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming

I don't think this is true at all. It's possible we never colonize Mars, or wherever, or that if we do it's just basically a scientific research outpost.

But Mars has water. So humans would be able to breathe and grow food. From what I can tell - although I am happy to be corrected - colonizing Mars is much more of a logistical challenge than anything else. The technical challenges seem solved or solvable with current technology.

IMO Mars doesn't necessarily seem like it will be the most interesting destination: It seems likely that once we have the technology for extended in-space habitation to get there, the bottom of a large gravity well seems a relatively boring place to hang out. What does the planet get you? Gravity? Spinning habitations seem easy enough. Meteorite protection? We'll need to have figured that out anyway. Land? Is it really easier for farming than in-space?

The asteroid belt looks a lot more tempting to me because even if resources are scarcer (unclear), they are easier to move elsewhere.

Radiation resistance is a big deal.

Of course, the irony is that radiation resistance works against Mars, because what you want is either a) a thick atmosphere (Earth, Venus, Titan*) or b) low-enough gravity that you can go deep underground easily (for which asteroids and even Luna beat Mars handily).

*Not discounting Venus because its CO2 atmosphere permits cloud cities. Discounting the giant planets because their H2 atmospheres don't.

Do they not? Isn't the hydrogen atmosphere of Jupiter rather dense due to how cold it is? I'm not sure what the math would look like on a Hot Hydrogen Balloon. (Edit: like 2-1 density ratio between 100C hydrogen and -100C hydrogen, you'd only have 1/6th the buoyant force of a hydrogen balloon on earth. But double check my napkin math before trusting it for your Jupiter colony please)

It's theoretically possible, but a) it's still weak (particularly since it's not breathable, whereas a cloud city on Venus counts all the air toward lifting gas), b) it's an active system which kills everyone inside a day if it's turned off, which generally falls under the heading of Bad Ideas.

(On Earth, the slow buoyancy failure of a hot-air balloon usually produces a survivable if bumpy landing. But, of course, that's no help on a giant planet.)

Edit: like 2-1 density ratio between 100C hydrogen and -100C hydrogen, you'd only have 1/6th the buoyant force of a hydrogen balloon on earth. But double check my napkin math

As a less-relevant point, I did double-check your maths and I think you did make a mistake somewhere.

Hydrogen at (old) STP (0 C, 1 atm) has a density of 0.08988 g/L. Assuming ideal gas, that's a density of 0.0658 g/L at 100C and 0.1418 g/L at -100C, for a buoyancy of 0.0760 g/L for your hot hydrogen balloon in cold hydrogen at 1 atm.

Air at (old) STP has a density of 1.2922 g/L (representing an average molar mass of slightly under 29, due to contributions from N2 at 28, O2 at 32, Ar at 40 and H2O at 18, whereas H2 is 2). As such, a non-heated hydrogen balloon in 0-degree 1-atm air has a buoyancy of 1.2023 g/L, which is 15.8x the buoyancy of your hot hydrogen balloon (or 14.5x if your "hydrogen balloon on Earth" comparison is at 25 degrees and 1 atm).

I think you might have divided the density ratios of air/hydrogen vs. hot/cold hydrogen, but the relevant criterion for determining how big a balloon you need is the absolute difference of the densities. You need 15.8x as big a balloon to support a given weight with your setup as you would at STP with a hydrogen balloon in air (actually somewhat more, because the lifting gas has to lift the balloon as well as the payload and the skin of a balloon with 15.8x the volume weighs 6.3x as much for a given material/thickness).

(Jupiter's atmosphere does have about 14% He, which makes the numbers a little better than with pure H2, but not much. And yes, that does bring up the possibility of using a pure-hydrogen balloon without heating, but between the buoyancy per litre being even worse than in your example at ~0.0192 g/L and the thick balloon walls needed to keep He and H2 apart in the long-term (they're both notoriously-difficult gases to contain), I think you again wind up in "theoretically possible and could totally let an atmospheric probe float for a few hours, but not practical for long-term holding up a city" land.)

Thanks. I got as far as 0.076, but not sure where I made the math error after that.

I actually think there's a good chance the moon does very well for exactly these reasons - there's water ice there, there's enough gravity for useful things but barely enough to stop you from traveling, and we could make a space elevator from conventional materials. Basically has most of the benefits of a space habitat but doesn't require space infrastructure assembly.

One thing that I think planets have that space habitats don't is more room for error. If you are building on Mars it's pretty easy to build e.g. a "panic room" for a colony - food stockpiles, an extra reactor, etc. (And if something does go badly wrong you at least have resources on hand that don't have to be flown to you.) You can build redundancy on a space colony as well, but I imagine it as the difference between designing a ship with that versus a land-based colony. Both are doable, but it's probably going to have a marginal impact on the ship's cost moreso than that of the colony.

This isn't to say that space habitats won't be a thing, though - they seem plausible to me.

we could make a space elevator from conventional materials

Doesn't the moon's very slow rotation (~1x month) make that rather impractical? The elevator would have to extend to and beyond the earth-moon L1 or L2 point, since lunarstationary orbits are impossible (they are outside the Moon's SOI).

It seems that lunar gravity is low enough that what you describe is possible with current materials?

This looks like one of the cases where being more realistic is not more useful. Even if Sam Kriss is 99% right, what is the use of following his earthly wisdom instead of gambling for the 1%?

That may be true, but what actually matters is that Elon himself does not believe this.

In Poker, they'll teach you that it's usually a fool's errand to try to guess exactly which cards another player has or what he's thinking. Instead, you try to put them on a plausable range. So like, anything from "medicore hand played aggressively" to "strong hand played weakly," but ruling out the extremes.

I think we can do the same thing with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Who knows what he's "really" thinking, we can't read his mind, and he probably changes his mind himself from time to time. But he seems consistent enough to rule out the extremes- he's not a conman who's just lying about going to Mars, because he's put so much money and effort into developing Starship. But I also think he's smart enough to realize that it's very unlikely a Martian colony will ever be established during his lifetime, or that it would ever actually be profitable.

I think his play is:

  • 10% true believer, he really wants to go down in history as being the guy who established the first off-world colony. He already has an insane amount of money, but he still wants to feed his ego and feel like he's doing something more important than selling cars or cryptocurrency.
  • 40% hypeman- he doesn't really care about that, but he's got a lot of super nerdy engineers working for him who care about it a lot. They're willing to work way harder for his companies than they would at a normal job, because they think they're on some sort of grand quest for the human species. I've heard that working for NASA is often like that- everyone is super passionate about what they do, even the most mundane experiments, so they'll work long hours for low pay.
  • 50% conman/salesman- he doesn't care about Mars at all, the real play is LEO here on Earth. Data from Starlink, intelligence data from Starshield, or just straight up selling missiles to the military- all of that has the potential to be insanely profitable. If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

in minor war, yes

in major war if he overplays then he gets nationalised under some emergency war powers

True, they're not going to literally hand him a check for a trillion dollars. But he can still ask for an awful lot. Lots of military contractors made bank during WW2.

Oh, with that I fully agree (and depending on dates/inflation/what would delivered trillion may be actually on table...)

What I don’t understand about Elon is his push for Mars colonization, given his views on AI. AI is either going to kill us or greatly accelerate technological progress. If it kills us, it will find us on Mars. If it accelerates technology, it will make getting to Mars much easier than it is today. Given the likely progress of AI over the next 15 years, why is Elon bothering with trying to colonize Mars in the near future?

Yeah but based on the past two hundred years of human history, you will always have an easier time doing anything if you wait fifteen years. In fifteen years time the ai will be good at getting us to Mars, but if we wait another fifteen years on top of that the ai will be even better at getting to Mars! You can always find a reason to wait, the 'any delay is death' philosophy allows Musk to do things we didn't think possible.

Elon might be able to get humans to Mars before someone creates a computer superintelligence, but it seems very unlikely he could create a self-sustaining Martian colony before superintelligence is created.

Interesting that strong AI is now taken as consensus? I believe superintelligence is not possible. LLMs hitting a ceiling recently is one sign for that, but I don’t believe LLM can be intelligent anyway.

Strong AI (and strong AI hurtling towards humanity) has enjoyed a lot of general agreement on the Motte for years. So much so that the odd user here and there will express a sudden disinterest in the culture war, the result of a belief that AI will come soon and obliviate every modern-day political concern by turning Earth into a paradise or a hellscape mountain range of paperclips.

One user maybe a year ago posted a big departure comment saying that everyone here was stressing him out talking about AI so much, and how mind-blowingly fantastically utterly unrecognizable the world with AI will be. He couldn't handle it and took the grill pill. A good choice, I think.

To your point about LLMs and intelligence, it doesn't matter what theory of intelligence you use. If it can be programmed to talk, it can be programmed to laugh, or cry, or scream in pain; and then people are going to try to give it voting rights.

I believe superintelligence is not possible.

I see no reason to expect that humans are the most intelligent being possible.

I hope that AIs are nowhere close to that. LLM managing to succeed here would be just sad, being outcompeted by glorified Markov chains would be too much.

It does, but it's about the attitude. Necessity is the mother of invention you know? Behave as if you have no choice but to find a solution and you will likely find solutions that never occurred to anyone before. Ai might kill us in 15 years, or solve everything or hit a cap we didn't previously understand or anticipate. Elon wants to go to Mars now though, so that means throwing everything he can now at it.

Probably better to have our eggs in more than one basket and no one else was making that one happen.

Yes, but building multiple underground bunkers run on geothermal power that have mass food stockpiles would probably do more to increase humanity's survival chances than trying to colonize Mars would.

Maybe if the goal is solely survival. But there is something romantic about trying to expand the aim of humanity and to raise it to heights it dreamt but never could achieve. Colonizing Mars may not per se by smart but it is human and I hope to see it in my life time.

A sufficient speed differential between Earth and a kilometer wide object would literally destroy the Earth, flipping it inside out and melting it.

Right, I just said so elsewhere in this thread. Btw food stockpiles are good but the ability to grow more is a much bigger deal. No telling how long that winter will last.

There are some "mutual kill" scenarios where we kill Skynet but Skynet unleashes something that kills all Earthbound humans (e.g. Operation Dark Storm, or an alga that isn't digestible, doesn't need phosphate and has a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO). Not high-probability, though.

There's also the AI-pessimist view: "neural-net alignment is impossible, so if neural-net AGI happens we're all doomed". No point planning for worlds where you're dead anyway; you want to play to 1) stop near-term AGI, 2) succeed in an AGI-less world. This a) negates your point, but also b) means you probably want to have "building things" projects that aren't AI, in order to pull the smart, driven people out of the AI field (where their talents are an outright detriment to humanity).

Plus Elon poured blood, sweat and tears into his rocketry well before near-term AI looked likely. How could he think about it rationally, SpaceX is his baby! It's got X in its name.

Even if the purest rational move is to go all in on AI and drop the Mars mission, he's already invested so much into the latter it's too hard to give up.

is fanaticism a necessary component of grit?

Recently, a few people described rationalism as not making people... happy/productive, because they just analyze instead of doing things. Indeed, if something suddenly occurs to block you you might reassess the whole project (pausing or giving up entirely) instead of creatively finding a way to overcome it. Trying to over optimize your value capture from a 100% thing can lead to you losing out as you e.g. get stopped out.

It is definitely helpful to see Elon’s ambition as religious: he replaces a supercelestial permanent abode in the heavens for an extracelestial permanent abode in the cosmos, for all of humanity. The exaggerated importance of his dogma orders all of his steps in the world. Will Elon, like the Biblical Enoch, ascend through the heavens alive? My issue with Elonic aspirations is that it’s zero-sum. There can only be one Elon, and only one SpaceX, and if they’re deciding the future of humanity then you’re not. This unconsciously reduces the enthusiasm of everyone else on the planet, whose labor fails to have eschatological importance. This is a considerable downgrade from a positive-sum spiritual system that can motivate all of humanity equally, and not just the 0.001% involved in a particular company.

I don’t think there’s any reason to see Elon’s ambition as zero sum. More than one person can reach mars.

Sorry what I mean by zero-sum is that it’s a “telic” zero-sum status game. The motivating force behind Elon Musk isn’t just “humans will inevitably reach Mars”, but that Elon is the one championing this species-significant event. He is involved in it, others are not; the fate of consciousness rests on his company’s shoulders. This is motivating for everyone at SpaceX: they at the company are the ones forever altering the trajectory of humanity, in their daily course of action. But this isn’t grounds for motivation for everyone else. In fact, this narrative kind of reduces everyone else’s motivation for perfecting their life. If they agree with Elon’s narrative, then their own boring “Uber for pet antibiotics” company life is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. They are just some person not at SpaceX.

I suppose you can try to enlarge Elonic ambitions so that it includes all of humanity. The janitor who stays late at Starbucks is doing his part for humanity, because he served the road repair crew of someone who might one day drive to SpaceX to repair a heating system. I don’t think this will be as compelling. I’m not criticizing Elon’s own mindset here, but noting that promoting this mindset is probably not beneficial and enlarging it is probably impossible.

Not everything has to be about status. I think Elon is actually literally a fanatical true believer in the cause of humanity spreading through the universe. I don't think he cares about his status except insofar as it influences his actual goal.

All humans and primates are motivated by status. It’s not something we can opt out of. Whether we decide to care about our status consciously or not, our actions revolve around our status in groups due to millions of years of evolution. If he is a true believer, somehow willing himself into true belief, it’s still a belief that comes with the highest possible increase in status per his worldview. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing for Elon, only that it can’t be generalizable to humanity at large, and in fact may be pernicious if attempted.

I have a friend who personally knew the United Healthcare CEO's killer a few years ago. I asked the motte for some questions to ask him, and what I learned from them was surprising enough that I think the Motte will appreciate the inside scoop as a top-level post.

I am merely relaying the opinion of a high-achieving, apolitical normie.

Q: Was he popular with the ladies already, or was it literally the murder that did it? A: No, as my friend put it: He had no "rizz."

Q: Was he outspoken politically? In what way? A: He did not like that my friend was a bit of a tech bro "capitalist."

Q: Did he have any chronic health conditions? A: Not that my friend knew of.

Q: Did any friends of his have chronic health conditions? A: It did not come up.

Q: Was he social, or a loner? A: Not very social but he tried to be.

Here's where it got interesting:

Q: Was he 'weird' in any way?

A: Yes. My friend and others found his behavior awkward and forced. He "tried to be macho" but couldn't pull it off. He also used a position of authority he had over my friend (who is pretty unassuming and unconfrontational) to make life hard for him due to the supposed political differences.

The last one surprises me a lot; his social media did not paint that picture. This made me update a lot on what kind of person he was back then(1-5 years ago).

Overall i do not care for the politics analysis discourse when it comes to this guy, but the personality profile of a "rational" killer is a lot more fascinating imo. (There were a lot more details but my friend insisted on anonimity. He also strongly condems the killers actions)

Hope the Motte appreciates a bit of original Journalism ;)

Frankly, I'm still giggling that after years of redditors claiming themotte users would do spree killings, the first rat murderer came right out of /r/GeorgistFuckCarsAnticapitalismTEDtalks, and got the most uncritical support from the same people who were faking performing hysteria over "violent right wing extremism" in 2020. They went straight from claiming the motte needed to be banned before nybbler shot up a synagogue to fedposting about shooting up a board meeting, with zero cognitive dissonance.

Noticed theschism has been pointedly avoiding discussing it

Is that the theschism pointedly avoiding discussing, or is there a general lack of discussion at theschism?

True, discussion did sort of peter out rather than just avoid that particular topic. It's strange the way it goes through bursts of activity like that. Guess it's inevitable for a smaller community that doesn't have a rolling boil going.

Mangione's politics appear to be all over the place, and I still wouldn't be shocked to find out he had an account on the motte at some point.

Why do you think the schism is "avoiding talking about it"? What is your model of their thinking that leads to this pointed avoidance of the topic? I skim the schism now and then and they are so low volume that many big events don't get a single post.

How did they find it?

When you click it has an important-looking warning banner that "This Account Has Been Suspended!"

The content is archived here.

I'd be interested to know if both his parents were in the picture and/or married for the duration of his childhood.

We've been trying to figure this out at work and we have a few theories.

Sidebar: social media presence rarely paints an accurate picture of a person for a variety of reasons. This is also a huge part of why social media is so damaging for young people.

None of this is a diagnosis. I know fuck all about actually clinical relevant information for this guy, media sucks and speculation is rampant. Mostly writing this as a thought experiment to see if I can come up with any good questions for you to ask if you get another chance.

In no particular order.

  1. Mostly depression/pain and he decided to make a political statement instead of just toping himself. Sample evidence for: back pain problems? has caused murder before in others. The supposed withdrawal from family. What could you ask your friend: probably not a lot given the timeline. Usual "depressed y/n" questions would work if someone saw him more recently. Caveat: more to depression than just the stereotype most people know. Against: Doesn't really look the type in the photos and such we have now, but that's shitty quality data.

  2. Pure politics/radicalization (I'm including drug/psychedelic induced scrambled brain in here). For: superficially that looks to be what happened, easily fits the data we have now. Drugs. Ask: need someone close enough to him to know how he actually thinks about things (we are all familiar with hiding our power levels), behavioral and thought patterns suggestive of tendency towards radical politics. Looks like you spotted some of those. How'd he feel about Trump, COVID? How evangelic and aggressive was he about those? Did have radical political swings in response to popular stuff? Think about the stuff you see that predicts someone becoming a "woke crazy" type. Same underlying thought patterns and behaviors can cause radicalization in all kinds of different directions, even in the rational and intelligent. May not even be "wrong" see: US founding fathers. If your friend is intelligent, thoughtful, and aware of this stuff you can just ask him if he looks like someone who could easily be radicalized with the right setup. Against: some of the other explanations work better with the limited information we have right now.

  3. Personality disorder. (What is this? Think antisocial personality disorder, narcissism. The latter is hypothetically where most school shooting type events come from, which is a surprise to some). For: makes it easy to decide to kill people. Is normally what causes similar events. Ask: Check out the DSM criteria for ASPD and NPD. The former is easier to ask about "does he like, not fucking care about other people's rights at all?" The latter is going to be hard to elicit from a layman if it's not obvious unfortunately. Many people pick up the vibe on these people though so your friend might go "oh yeah." These are essentially life long so would have been present when your friend interacted with the guy. Against: Doesn't smell right (ASPD especially) and doesn't really match with the online profile so far in my opinion. If he ends up being more incel seeming with more data NPD could end up being a good explanation though.

Probably the most interesting:

  1. Prodrome. (What is this? The guy is catching schizophrenia or something else and is starting to go weird but it is still early). For: Guy is organized, intelligent and had a good plan but it went off the rails in a strange way that doesn't match the rest of the story. Substance use. Manifesto stuff. Some things are off. Withdrawal from family. People with good intellect, education, and resources hold it together, often for some time and then it starts to fall apart but not usually in this rough of a fashion. Ask: Any family history of mental illness, especially serious mental illness (your friend probably doesn't know but this would be huge). Did his behavior change in any way while your friend knew him? Weird beliefs, social withdrawal, "looking like" a different person (seems like the interaction wasn't longitudinal to likely catch this)? Was he weird? some weird people have a predisposition towards mental illness of this kind and develop it (or don't). You'll notice the person is off. Poor social skills. Not as emotive. Strange beliefs. Doesn't seem to move through social situations as well. Oddly confrontational about strange things. Limited functioning in some ways (if they have partners the partners are more like them). Can't emotionally connect with others. I'm sure an expert in first episode psychosis would have a better way of conveying this but there's a vibe most people are able to notice once it has been pointed out to them. I know you said your friend stated the guy is weird but we are looking for a specific weird here. Against: Little old for this to be common (usually starts more like late teens early 20s, but his resources may have impacted course). Doesn't seem overly psychotic right now (but again this is more prodrome than full blown illness)

My friend and others found his behavior awkward and forced. He "tried to be macho" but couldn't pull it off.

I've seen a lot of this in other communities. Generally it points to a lack of social sense and a desire for social status.

Thanks for getting answers to the questions.

Liberalism's Failures in Family Matters

Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax. I would like to bring up some criticisms of liberalism, and why I think societies that follow it as a singular goal will inevitably suffer from the problems we see (birth rate collapse, sex wars, etc.)

On a newsletter warning of the dangers of sports gambling, Oren Cass wrote:

Careful readers, like all of you, will surely have noted that The Economist asserts not that the gambling frenzy is about people enjoying themselves, merely that it is about their being free to enjoy themselves. And in the distance between those two concepts is the gaping maw into which our society has plunged itself with this and many similar missteps.

The liberal ideal relies on many huge assumptions. Two of those assumptions are that people will choose things that bring themselves happiness and that externalities (or times when an individuals choices impact others) will be easy to detect and foreseeable. In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace. And maybe the executives of the sports gambling company and the 19 year old with a phone can consent to enter into a relationship where the 19 year old gives the executives all his money, but the 17 year old girlfriend did not consent to being beaten more often. (After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)

Another assumption of liberalism is that we enter into the world as individuals, without owing or being owed anything. Marc Barnes of New Polity wrote:

It is the basic thesis of liberalism—that philosophy embodied in all our modern technologies and institutions—that we are not social by nature, but individuals, and that anything that looks “social” is in fact some amalgamation of individual things and persons. The most famous one (repeated by weird people who talk about “marriage markets,” Redditors, and evolutionary psychologists to this day) is the Hobbesian argument that society itself is “really just” individuals making contracts with each other in order to pursue their own self-interest...

Rousseau posits that man, in his original state, was an individual, a silliness that necessitates that he imagine babies as proto-individuals, kept for self-interested reasons and then abandoned:

The mother gave suck to her children at first for her own sake; and afterwards, when habit had made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as they were strong enough to go in search of their own food, they forsook her of their own accord; and, as they had hardly any other method of not losing one another than that of remaining continually within sight, they soon became quite incapable of recognising one another when they happened to meet again.

Now, Rousseau gave all five of his kids up to an orphanage, so I concede that some may be nearer to his “state of nature” than others. But, for babies, it is quite literally a joke. Losing the mother is a game they love to play, precisely because it affirms the non-individual status of both: “peek-a-boo” makes known, by way of contrast, that the two belong to each other; that they are members of one body; that the mother is made mother by the child even as the child is made child by the mother, and that this is an enduring metaphysical relationship and a social reality; that, in short, they cannot lose each other, even if, God forbid, they do. Imagining this social reality as actually being a mere individual contract—that the mother might walk away, that she might disappear, that she might hide her face, that the so-called bond is just her choice—all of this is hilarious to the kiddos.

It's hard to believe, but the Enlightenment thinkers really thought that pre-historic humans didn't band together in family or social units. And this complete falsehood is somewhat required to make liberalism work.

The word "atomization" is thrown around as a negative. No one has friends to help them, we have apps that facilitate economic contracts with others to help us move houses or buy groceries if we're sick. Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but we're obviously not the same kind of human at all. Atomization is the founding assumption of Liberalism though.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

But there are places where Authoritarianism is needed, particularly in family life. Parents have authority over their children. More than that, there is a pre-existing bond between parent and child to which neither consented. A child cannot consent to their parents before they are born. A parent has no idea what their child will be like before they are born. And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.

In the latest edition of Dr. Leonard Sax's The Collapse of Parenting, Sax describes a family that comes to him for help. The 12 year old daughter has suddenly shown signs of ADHD. Her teacher filled out a form indicating that the 12-year-old's concentration levels are off the charts in a bad way. The girl's family doctor prescribed her ADHD medication to help alleviate her symptoms. They worked, but also left her jittery with heart palpitations and anxiety symptoms.

Sax's first question to the girl's family is how well she slept. Confused, the parents said the girl slept ok, but when Dr. Sax drilled into the details the girl nonchalantly said she was on her phone until 1-2 AM most nights. "Of course, doesn't everyone?"

Dr. Sax told her parents to take her off the Amphetamines and instead keep the kid's phone in the parents' bedroom at night, starting 9 PM. The parents' response was, "Oh, no, we couldn't do that! She'd be so angry at us."

The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier. And Dr. Sax says that this is a very common example that he sees often at his practice.

In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children. Longitudinal studies show that kids who have strict but unloving parents grow up without knowing how to form loving relationships of their own. Kids that grow up with permissive parents are incapable of balancing a checkbook and make poor decisions due to a high time preference. The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict - a combination the Literature refers to as "Authoritative Parenting." Authoritative Parenting used to be the default, but among left-leaning families there has been a surge of parents fearing that they are overriding their kids innate preferences. Proper parenting is illiberal, and therefore immoral.

One young child arrived to the practice with a sore throat and fever for three days. When Dr. Sax asked the child to open her mouth, she refused. Dr. Sax looked to the mother, and said, "I need your help to examine your daughter, could you help encourage her to open wide?" The mother responded, "Her body, her choice."

The liberal order worked when it was founded on an illiberal order. When humans acted like humans most of the time, raised their children like humans, formed natural hierarchies like humans, liberalism worked fine. I think it falls apart when the government tries to impose liberal presuppositions on every-day human interactions. It falls apart when people think they are supposed to act perfectly liberal in every social interaction. A society based around consent instead of love (willing the good of one another) will fall apart.

I love liberalism, in a way. I love how it shaped American culture for hundreds of years. But I think the evidence points to a need for a safeguard somewhere, similar to the separation of Church and State. A separation of State and Hearth? Americans need to parent better than Rousseau.

Tocqueville famously believed that religion, particularly Christianity, was necessary in America to create and sustain our Democracy. It provided shared values. People had shared common ground beyond their mere desires which which they could identify what is good for all. There is a benefit to having an ultimate Authority, in Heaven, who everyone agrees to serve but who seldom gives specific commands.

Maybe the problem will resolve itself, as atheists fail to reproduce and the deeply religious take over again. Or maybe the cat's all the way out of the bag. But the evidence seems to point towards Liberalism being good but insufficient, and the next best thing needs to be figured out before we lose the goods of Liberalism as well.

One of the main problems outside of science in academia is that they never had to confront the poor axioms. Physics had to throw out Archimedes and then throw out Newton. It was painful but it had to be done. Accepting Darwinism invalidated a large body of work based on prior ideas. It was tough for the people whose papers got invalidated but it had to be done.

In Social science people can still pretend that the garden of Eden existed, that fanciful tales of people on paradise islands living in absolute freedom were true etc.

Economists still talk about how money was created from people who wanted to barter more efficiently even though this has been disproven and even though writing is older than money. The idea of a social contract is still used even though humans lived in groups for tens of millions of years before we became human. The social sciences are stuck in a worldview in which humans spawned on Earth as individuals and invented all social structures even though this goes against all evidence.

The idea that women were historically oppressed is based on the assumtion that the natural state of women is a state of absolute individual freedom. The reality is that no hominid females of any species live in such a state. An animal that lives in a social structure isn't going to be happier if they are deprived of that social structure. If women were historically oppressed they could have packed up and walked into the woods. The reality is unless the family was exceptionally abusive most women clearly prefered belonging to a social structure over complete personal autonomy in the great wild.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

…

In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children.

This is something I find myself talking about more and more online. I just finished writing a short essay to post on Tumblr (it's a little too heavy on pathos and light on logos for the Motte's rhetorical standards), after I listened to a portion of this "Dad Saves America" interview with Michael Munger. Specifically, at about 20 minutes in, Munger says:

Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.

I recall a couple of Tanner Greer posts on the popularity of YA dystopias, and the passivity of their heroes, gesturing to this point: that so many of us in the West have so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority — any and all human authority — that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, that power and authority can be used for good ends. Thus, like the parents described above, they are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership, because they're convinced that such authority can only ever be oppressive and abusive.

But power must be wielded — sovereignty is conserved. Man is a political animal; and decisions — political decisions — have to be made. Someone, singular or plural, has to make them. But if no humans, singular or plural, can ever be trusted to make such decisions, then the only choice is to have something non-human make them. Hence, Weberian rationalization — the replacement of human judgement, now deemed too terrible and corruptible to ever be trusted, by rules and procedure; that is, by algorithms. In Weber’s day, implementing them still required human bureaucrats in all cases, but nowadays, ever more of them can be done by our machines — "software eating the world."

Liberalism, in this view, is simultaneously severely misanthropic, and yet highly utopian, in that it holds that if we just design our rules and procedures well enough — whether implemented on bureaucracy, or on silicon (the "alignment problem") — we can achieve a perfect "moral alchemy" that can get virtuous outcomes from even a society of Kant's "rational devils":

As modern folks, we love this kind of solution. It promises a sort of “moral alchemy.” Take the base stuff of human self-interest and turn it into the gold of a functional—maybe even a “just”—society.

You can see this kind of move all over the place. Take the problem of value, for example. It would be overwhelming if we had to figure out and agree on what things are really worth. How would we even get started? Markets, we’re told, solve the problem for us. Money translates countless different forms of value-comfort, usefulness, safety, nutrition, beauty—into a single, eminently countable measure, and the intricate workings of supply and demand yield prices. Everything can be compared. The question shifts from "What is this worth?” to “How much does this cost?” None of us needs to know what anything is really worth. All any of us has to do is buy what suits our preferences and our pocketbooks. Out of the mess of market interactions comes a price—which isn’t really the same as the value of a thing, but it’ll do.

Moral alchemy is built into our legal system too. A defense lawyer’s job isn’t to seek the truth, but to represent their client’s interest, even if that client is guilty. They aren’t directly responsible for discerning the truth. The process is supposed to suss out the truth—at least often enough that we can feel OK about it.

The same impulse is behind interest group politics. Your job as a voter isn’t to discern what’s right and just for your society and the world. It’s to represent your interests. Elected officials, in turn, are there to fight for what their districts want. And the process is supposed to sort it out into something like fairness and justice.

It’s easy to see why procedural moral alchemy is so appealing. “Only you” responsibility can be daunting. How can we be expected to discern the good (value, truth, justice) over and over again as life throws us into the daily grind, not to mention the crises and conundrums and dilemmas that crop up more often than we’d like?

The problem is that our trust in moral alchemy may be un-founded, and depending on it may leave us unable to do what we need to when systems fail. These days, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that democratic systems and free markets can produce virtue despite the nefarious actions of vicious participants. A Western world once confident that the line between good and evil ran between democracy and autocracy now worries about democratically elected autocrats. Increasingly, we see that discerning the truth by letting opposing views argue it out doesn’t work if both sides don’t actually have some sort of basic commitment to truth-seeking. And free markets regularly seem to miss crucial components of the value equation, like the CO₂ emissions that are destroying the planet. Unfortunately, the longer we lean on moral alchemy, the more dependent on it we become. Our moral discernment muscles atrophy. And precisely at the moment we need to discern what is just or true or to assess value for ourselves, we find ourselves and our societies unable to do so.

(From Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz.)

Munger's "liberalism", which matches my experience of actual liberals in this vein, ends up holding that if parents are allowed to exercise authority over their children, the bad caused the parents who abuse their children, however few, will always outweigh the good done by all other parents. If you applied this sort of reasoning about the avoidance of any bad outcomes to your personal life (and I can't believe I'm the one making this argument), you'd end up at "euthanasia for a sprained ankle" thinking.

(Alternately, one can ditch the utopianism, accept the inevitability of imperfection and failure even as we strive against them. Bad leaders will happen… but so will good ones. Some parents will abuse any authority they have over their children… but far more will exercise that authority to their children's benefit. ersonnel will always be policy. Power will end up in human hands, and thus the personal virtue of those hands will always matter. Good parenting will always be dependent on good parents. Good governance will always be dependent on having good men. So stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtue.)

Alternately, one can ditch the utopianism, accept the inevitability of imperfection and failure even as we strive against them. Bad leaders will happen… but so will good ones.

Unfortunately, I don't think American society is able to do that any more. We (on the whole) are so, so risk-averse that it is unbelievable. This has been the case for a long time (see for example the "people will die" video from the halcyon days of the Internet mocking this tendency) but it seems to be getting worse over time. Safetyism is rampant, and not a lot of people are willing any more to bite the bullet and say "yes, it's not worth (obtaining some good) at that cost". This strikes me as a profoundly immature way to approach the world, but it's not clear what one can do to improve it.

Unfortunately, I don't think American society is able to do that any more. We (on the whole) are so, so risk-averse that it is unbelievable.

Perhaps, but I'll point out that this is far from uniform. It varies on factors like class, education, race, religion. Safetyism may be especially rampant among the PMC, for example. But, while inner city black communities have plenty of problems, I wouldn't say that this sort of rampant safetyism is one of them. There are plenty of smaller rural communities, of a religious conservative character, where older, more lax norms of parenting still persist. And then there are professions that pretty much select against risk-aversion, most notably front-line combat troops. If you go by Munger's definition, then "lead, follow, or get out of the way" is a pretty illiberal motto, no? And I'd note that from where I sit — though I don't have the hard data — it looks like safetyism is negatively correlated with birth rates. So, these lingering adherents of Thomas Sowell's "Tragic Vision" have advantages in both fecundity and in undertaking the risks involved in violent confrontation.

The problem is organizing them to step up, overthrow our safetyist elites, and take charge of society. Contra David Z. Hines perpetual calls for the right to learn from and adopt lefty organizing, those decentralized methods are really contradictory to our nature. We're hierarchical. We "organize" by falling in behind a leader.

Thus, the solution to this, as with so many other problems in our society, is for our own Augustus Caesar to arise.

(After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)

Considering that a similar claim made about the Super Bowl turned out to not be real, I'm going to be skeptical of this.

Also, for every loss is a win on the other side. Does it cause a corresponding reduction, eliminating the net effect?

Not necessarily; loss aversion is a thing....

I've been uncomfortable with the "Authoritarianism is always bad" line for a while. I don't love or seek authoritarianism, but clearly it's something people want because we keep bumping up against two of it's many flavors: top-down bureaucratic oligarchy or Strongman monarchism. I've been in discussions with very smart quasi-famous idea generating people who simply refuse to accept that Authoritarianism can be useful and desirable.

I think the reason is that an authoritarian state has no exit, once you're in it, there's no way out except violent revolution. So it's to be avoided because you'll get crushed...even though you're going to get crushed regardless. If the POTUS had meaningful executive powers, I could see how every 50 years or so, we'd want a person to come in, clean house and then depart once their time was up.

That is effectively what the Trump election was all about. But the reality is he's stuck muddling around with the same bench-warmers and institutions every other president has to muddle about with. Sure, he might find some loopholes and it's always possible that some appointee will be surprisingly capable, but the course for humanity's destruction (nuclear war, AI safety, energy and environmental limits, etc.) is set and on-track barring some miraculously gifted leadership.

Bureaucratic oligarchy's are simply too beholden to self-interest and bad incentives. They can manage but not lead. Monarchies are too easily converted to tyrannies, they can lead but not manage. Liberal democracies are racing to the bottom pandering to every whim, they can't lead nor manage long-term. It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much, but as the threats increase and we near the great filter, it seems impossible that Democracy can solve the problem.

Someone turn my black pill white...please!

It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much

Why does this disgust you?

For the same reason some people are disgusted by sushi. They register disgust because of a fear of eating raw things, even though they understand it might be delicious and millions of people eat it without issue. The disgust is a conditioned reaction, not a rational point of view. Rationally, I'm mostly on board with Yarvin and his essays are fun to read. As a conditioned American, classical liberal, democratic patriot type, the thought that we should just give ourselves over to our most wild monarchic instincts makes me feel queasy.

You can appreciate a thing without having it rule you.

Autocratic monarchies and tyrannies were the rule for most of human history. Arguing over the system of government is a very modern problem. Previously, unga bunga with the biggest bunga stick wins, and the biggest concern was either getting curbstomped by some other unga's tribe or that your unga wasn't great.

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them. And even then, the person has to spend most of their time maintaining their tyranny. Diffusion of power also means diffusion of responsibility, and vice versa.

The weirdness we have now is because people want all of the power and none of the responsibility. If anything, there might be a valid argument to bring back landed gentry and give people a free pass to move to whichever fief suits them best.

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them.

I'd agree that the quality of 'tyrannies' (a rather loaded term for "rule by one") "depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them"… but only because all governments depend massively on the quality of the people in them. Personnel is policy, personnel will always be policy. If 'tyranny' is thus problematic, it's only because, like Aristotle noted, it's higher variance than the "rule of few," and "rule of many" is lower variance still, as larger numbers "average out" the extremes of both vice and virtue.

Going back to my comment in the "liberalism and parenting" thread, the liberal project has been about seeking out a set of top-down institutions so well-designed to align incentives that the quality of individual people within the institutions no longer matters, working even for Kant's "rational devils." I'd argue that this is an unworkable project with an impossible goal; any government depending upon human beings depends massively on the quality of those human beings, so we must stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtuous leaders.

But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Five minutes with the average person should tell you all you need to know about including them in your system. You either have to build a more perfect system, or exclude those people entirely.

People consistently try to build a more perfect system because they notice things are broken, and correctly intuit that building a more perfect system is preferable to trying to make other people perfect.

But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

Why not? Were people in the Middle Ages doing so? Or did they hold that

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.

And that the world is fallen, we are barred from Eden by the sin of Adam, the poor we will always have with us, and perfection will only be in the Kingdom to come?

People have always worked to make things a little better, but they accepted that some things are just facts of life, that cannot be changed, only endured. Only with the "Enlightenment" did the West really start trying to immanentize the eschaton.

Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?

Much as with the medieval era, it seems like a total civilizational collapse back into barbarism and pre-industrial technology would probably do the trick, so why not something less extreme?

Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?

I hope I don't need to point out that this is a hard sell to anyone in the information age. Please, by all means, share your less extreme plan for getting people to accept this.

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Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them.

Tyrannies are problematic because there's rarely a good plan for what comes next. Once a tyranny ends (i.e. tyrant dies) there is chaos or more tyranny. The purpose of the liberal order is to try and preserve some semblance of continuity through time culturally and politically, too smooth the road, so to speak.

The weirdness we have now is because people want all of the power and none of the responsibility. If anything, there might be a valid argument to bring back landed gentry and give people a free pass to move to whichever fief suits them best.

Agree. Another belief that is simply accepted by most people is that universal suffrage is 100% right and good. Try arguing the opposite! I agree that landed families probably ought to have more of a say than renters or welfare people, but of course I think that...I own property. How we would manage giving some people more than others based on some type of meritocratic system is kind of the base level problem. The simple solution is 'might makes right,' but 2k+ years of human society have brought us to a point where most people globally think there's something wrong with that formulation, largely that the mighty (not the same a noble, merely those with power) shit all over the weak. So we have an ideal--a liberal ideal-- that we give everyone the same amount of liberty, or whatever, and here we are...the mighty shitting all over the weak, again.

The Yarvin solution, as I understand it, is to stop pretending that liberalism exists and embrace the power of the strong and attempt to wield it...somehow. My main disagreement is that it just gets right back to the starting point where it's a coin flip if the monarchs will curb-stomp you or not and there's no exit, just monarchs/tyrants/oligarchs all the way down.

Tyrannies are problematic because there's rarely a good plan for what comes next. Once a tyranny ends (i.e. tyrant dies) there is chaos or more tyranny.

No, this is why hereditary monarchy was invented.

the thought that we should just give ourselves over to our most wild monarchic instincts

Monarchy is a model of government which has independently emerged in nearly every human civilization known to history. Why are you suggesting that the only reason to favor it is “giving into wild instincts”? As if it’s nothing more than some atavistic act by primitive savages, like ritual human sacrifice. Like, I grew up in America the same as you, and although the patriotism and the pro-revolutionary sentiments never really took root in me the way they appear to in you, I was certainly exposed to the same information and the same memes. I don’t recall the primary criticism of monarchy ever being that it’s the mere result of wild instinct.

Nitpick: the abstract says that the effect of home team losses on rates of DV goes up by 10% in the presence of gambling, not that DV goes up by 10%. I wonder if there is a corresponding improvement for victories.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

It would be great if this wasn't just another lie that Liberalism tells about itself. If Authoritarianism was always Bad, we would not be seeing cancelled elections, officials playing with the idea of banning opposition parties, or young women being sent to prison for sending mean WhatsApp messages to gang rapists.

I think liberalism has two main discomforts: Impositions of will or power, and hard natural limits. It’s not like they won’t ever impose, but they do so with reluctance, and further are often deeply suspicious of anyone who would use power to impose limits on others’ behavior. Saying that a behavior is “bad” is seen as a denial of autonomy and integrity. I should be able to do anything I want to, especially things that are seen as integral to one’s view of himself. If I see myself as a man I am one and you must treat me as one. If I want to get a tattoo or dye my hair, you thinking less of me, or not hiring me, or saying it’s a bad idea is oppressive.

Now the other thing I notice is the temptation to “snowplow” life. To remove the negative consequences of choices made, to make life less demanding, to lower and weaken standards that keep those who cannot meet them from sharing the resulting benefits that come with success. If someone has more, it’s unfair.

From personal second-hand experience, the difference between a parent who tells another adult, "Oh, I would never strike my child!" and the parent heard uttering to their child, "Look at me right now or you are getting a spanking and going to your room!" is about twelve months.

In terms of "liberalism", this post is a big old strawman akin to e.g. an orthodox Maoist claiming any slight movement towards free markets is functionally indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if it thinks the externalities are too hard to control, e.g. hard drugs. There's no reason it couldn't do the same to sports betting.

Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have.

This is a consequence of the Internet making it easier to apply for distant jobs, not of liberalism. It's happening in China too.

The argument goes that they're only capable of doing so by justifying it with illiberal principles, which the society also holds.

Can you name, using Liberal reasoning only, the reason you should ban an individual from gambling? All the reasonings I can think of rely on some kind of collectivist ethos.

I'll take a swing at it: some people are incapable of good decision making about specific things, in this case gambling. They are effectively mentally incompetent in this narrow area but are otherwise generally mentally competent enough to be responsible for themselves. Therefore, similar to how we don't allow children or the insane to buy guns, we should ban people who have demonstrated this incompetence from gambling.

This is the mental illness or childhood or savage argument. And it is an unprincipled exception that cannot stand.

Most instructive here is the case of John Stuart Mill. Ever the archetypal liberal. Who makes this argument for India, but makes the argument that destroys this one for Women.

It is no surprise that Liberals have had to give up this, because it isn't motivated. Ultimately it is not principle that prevents the Liberal from giving children or the mentally ill dangerous weapons, but mere pragmatism. Indeed one can perfectly imagine (and scifi authors do) a world where these actions would be without lasting consequence. And in the Culture, giving children guns isn't really that big an issue, after all we can resurrect them if they splatter each other's brains. The question of whether this is reasonable is entirely evacuated, because it is an individual whim, and those are beyond question.

This entire line of reasoning is vulnerable to the Critical Theorist demand of realized freedom instead of procedural freedom. i.e.: you have constructed a society that has enslaved the mentally illl or children or gamblers, and this makes you their oppressor, your own principles demand that you create the condition where they can roam around thinking they're Napoleon/eat infinite candy/gamble their life savings without consequence.

This has been the ultimate Liberal project since Rousseau. Your pragmatic objection runs against the General Will, which means you're a counter-revolutionary that doesn't actually want to return us to the State of Nature. And these pragmatic demands are reactionary.

Or at least so says pure ideology.

If you want an ideological counter to this, you have to reach for Hobbes and become what Nick Land calls a "cold liberal" and reject the egalitarian and humanist part of the package to let markets and rationalism stand on their own. But then you are something different.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect", "Don't build a business around looking for suckers and taking them", and "Don't deliberately place harmful addictive products in the stream of commerce" are all very much ideas in the mainstream of the big-picture-liberal tradition despite not being consistent with Nozickian libertarianism. Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK. Conservatives and socialists favoured the brewer-and-publican interest - Churchill (while a Liberal) famously attacked the Tories as the party of, among other things, "The open door at the public house".

Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK

I'll disagree those were on the grounds that you state. Rather on "stop beating your wife", public health and religious considerations. And those were, in fact, defeated by the superior Liberal argument of personal freedom.

I'll concede that there has been a strong Liberal movement for personal empowerment including freedom from such influences in the past. But the contention here is that this has been soundly defeated with Liberals' own arguments. Much like Churchill's support for eugenics was.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect"

This is mostly a smokescreen for absolute paternalism; that is, "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make".

No, because "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make" is an overly general category that includes not only gambling, but a lot of other things that gambling opponents genuinely don't also want to restrict.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

I am criticizing the idea that liberalism can stand on its own. The event that prompted this post was the Lindsay hoax, in which he re-wrote a section of the Communist Mannifesto criticizing Liberalism. I'm not going to dive into that specific criticism of Marx, but I am surprised at Lindsay calling all criticisms of Liberalism "Woke Right." There is a lot to criticize and debate about liberalism as an intellectual tradition.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

Again, you're playing games with definitions here. It's like saying "capitalism is fine as long as people still have a Maoist-Communist understanding of common good that can supersede the free market".

Which might be true if capitalism is implicitly defined as "crazy anarcho capitalism", and Maoism is "anything that's not that". But those are silly definitions.

I think you should look at this comment, but I thought it was pretty clear that I meant Liberalism as the political philosophy tradition begun by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.

I’m pretty sure you can raise children in orphanages and they turn out fine (They may whine, more on that later).

You just assume that parenting matters. Why? I don’t think anything my parent did made me taller or smarter (aside from feeding me and not hitting me with a rock), so why would it have made me more well-adjusted (or whatever parenting is supposed to achieve) ?

I think the main reason for the

birth rate collapse

is just everyone obsessing about parenting. The idea that, if you fail to provide the exact balance of ”loving, but strict“(plus ridiculous amounts of money, time and attention), you should not have kids.

Adult children are always whining that their parents either were or were not strict enough. They, as well as parenting experts should be ignored, and apathy should again become the cornerstone of parenting. Before contraception, kids used to just show up, and life just went on as usual, with just slightly more crying and laughter.

Now that a woman has to make a conscious decision, it opens the door to all this anxiety and neuroticism and talk and judgment about what should be an easy, natural and popular path. What’s needed is less your strict authoritarian father than a deeply apathetic one, who just goes “I don’t care”, “It doesn’t matter”, “Have another kid if you’re worried about this one”, “Of course it’s not your fault our son’s a junky”.

You just assume that parenting matters. Why?

Because if you spend any time around children at all it is immediately apperant which ones have more engaged parents/caregivers.

The idea that it doesn't matter is another one of those ideas so manifestly absurd that you need to be an academic to take it seriously.

It is a question of selection IMO. The issue of using like-like samples here is it eliminates the bad outliers. And bad outliers do have significant effects (I think its a bit more shaky on the great vs. average side). If you are a girl and never have a husband, but instead have 3 baby-daddies, and some of your other boyfriends do what they do (molest the kids) its going to be a real negative compared to if you had locked down man 1, even with his flaws (usually). But so few of those women do lock down man one, and even fewer really are on anyone's radar.

How do you separate it from a genetic influence?

Most academics think parenting is very important, they’re into the rousseauian blank slate, nurture not nature. Is this your opinion as well, groups that fail are just badly parented?

Genetics provide a high water mark that a human can aspire to, but there are obvious ways a bad parent could cut that short. Concussing the kid, starving the kid, locking up the kid so they never learn language before that critical period is passed.

There is a large body of work suggesting that not setting rules and limits for kids is one of these blunders that prevents a kid from reaching their full potential.

I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.

After that, I don’t trust this body of work about parenting styles. It sounds like another spurious explanation for group differences, of the kind that produces new and revolutionary interventions in schooling every few years.

I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.

Except it isn't. People can, and do, abuse their kids and ruin them in horrific ways. You don't get to claim "parenting doesn't matter" by gerrymandering "parenting" to exclude the sort of behavior you agree would make a difference in a child's outcomes.

Think of it less as a parenting style, and more as a complete neglect of acculturating a child into society. If a kid never learns a word is spoken before sometime between 6 and 12, they will never understand language syntax. Never ever, no matter how smart their parents were or how dedicated their speech therapist is.

If a kid never has a single rule enforced by a grown up and is shielded from the consequences of their actions, are they capable of learning executive function and how to behave in a society which has authority over them? I'm really surprised if you think it doesn't matter, when it is clear from several fields that there are "critical periods" of brain development, and if certain stimuli are not provided during those periods that the window to learn certain skills closes.

Is this language example an analogy? I’m not proposing to lock children outside in a stall for the first 12 years of their lives and never letting them hear a human word. And if it is an analogy, I don’t think a permissible parenting style is comparable to being raised by wolves.

People used to beat their kids. My father was occasionally severely beaten with a hose. Not because my grandfather drank – he didn’t – but because that’s what the parental-educational fashion was at that time. He would know, my grandfather was a schoolmaster. Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to. At some point before he retired, he got a directive from the education ministry that teachers weren’t to do that anymore. He told me he had to let go of a few of the old-timers, who could not stop beating children – they had always done it this way, this was what education was to them, teaching children how to behave in a society that has authority over them.

So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc. In my opinion they were not any more correct than their predecessors (because parenting and schooling don’t really matter), but at least the unnecessary beatings stopped, and that’s a small win, because it’s unpleasant for both parties, and you could break something.

And now the experts have turned the wheel again and apparently children need strict rules or something. I am skeptical.

Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to

And if you're a teacher who is wicked (I beat my students because I enjoy it), simple (I beat my students because I'm not capable of getting them to learn any other way/it's the path of least resistance to the required outcome), or just going through the motions (I beat my students because everyone else does), what a convenient boon! Why do the work to justify anything in a house of learning when you can just let the lash do it for you?

So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc.

Sure, but the problem is that once you make it a blanket rule (otherwise known as "going too far"), the wicked, the simple, and the checked-out start taking advantage of it. Fast-forward a generation, and compound that with changes in labor laws that compromise the quality of your labor pool, and you get the fart-huffing "no wrong answers, only wrong targets" education system of today that's merely cargo-culting what was once valuable about that way of doing things. So the wise are now punished for trying to mark on right answers since that's the only way students learn, the wicked teach grievance studies to get that same personal euphoria as they used to get with the beatings, the simple think having no standards... well, that's great, they don't have to do any work now, and the checked-out are happy so long as the official metrics look good.

I am skeptical.

I am too- replacing abusive men (and the ways men conduct abuse) with abusive women (and the ways women conduct abuse) didn't actually reduce the amount of abuse in the system. My skepticism rests on the degree to which the balance will tilt- if we can let the wise do their jobs and sufficiently protect them as they run into the practical challenges of the policy, delay the wicked sufficiently until it's time to change the system wholesale and knock them off balance again (I think government central planning tends to call these '5 year plans'), get a little more out of the simple, and motivate the checked out into wisdom, we're going to succeed in some way.

Changing policies always have this effect to a minor degree at first so it's hard to tell what shifted, and by the time you know, the will is gone. (This is why tech companies believe in 'moving fast and breaking things'- it is in theory an institutional policy that really hurts the wicked. But it also really hurts the customer, who can trust dishonest, self-interested men to be consistently dishonest and self-interested; it's the checked out in the process of becoming wise that really screw everything up.)

because parenting and schooling don’t really matter

They don't to/have a negative effect on children born wise. For everyone else, it's "we know you're going to try and fuck up everything, so the best we can hope for is that those energies are channeled in at least a coincidentally-productive way", "you're too stupid to figure this out but our society is very insecure about some people being objectively better than others so we launder this through our daycare system", and "learning how to learn" for those who don't know but, if they knew, could perform very well.

The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.

Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.

The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.

More comments

How do you separate it from a genetic influence?

Why do you want to?

Its readily apparent that the absense of engaged parents/caregivers has a deleterious effect on a child's development, that in itself should be sufficient to declare that "parenting matters".

Imagine the conterfactual where your parents and entire extended family were simultaneously struck dead on your 8th birthday, how would your life today be different?

I think it'd be painful at the time, but I'd basically be the same person I am now - same personality, intelligence, looks, height... maybe slightly darker sense of humor.

Adoption studies usually find that you take way more from your biological parents than your adopted ones.

Do you have kids?

Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax.

I must have missed this, can you link to the thread you're referring to?

This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing. I will engage as if you wrote libertarianism for this reason (not that you're making a mistake. It's likely me who is confused here)

In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace

This seems like what we'd call "brainrot" or "degeneracy". I started using this latter word almost 10 years ago after reading Nietzsche, and nobody else seemed to use it at the time, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the reason the word came back. Anyway, freedom is actually the freedom to command yourself, not the freedom not to be commanded. One should only seek freedom if they don't need being told what to do in order to succeed in life, if they don't use their freedom to destroy themselves.

We're deeply social by nature (and the most oversocialized lean left! They just want to socialize without taking responsibility for anything, which is why they want the government to do everything for them). It seems that being around a lot of other people is bad for you, for the same reason that social media is bad for you. People start competing and aiming for superficial appearances of what people value while neglecting what actually matters.

The advantage of libertarianism is that you can choose which group you want to depend on and have depend on you (living as a hermit for very long is almost impossible). People are only equal in value, that they're actually equal is a stupid idea. I also agree that family values are essential, and throwing them out is basically taunting darwinism to remove you from reality. I also don't see how anyone would disagree with "The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict".

I consider myself pro-freedom, and around my friends I give myself all the freedom that I want, and I give them all the freedom that they want, too. But this only works because we're all reasonable and because we can take responsibility for ourselves. Those who believe "freedom" to be the freedom to indulge in vices (because it seems unpleasant for them to resist unhealthy urges) cannot live like this.

I agree with your conclusion, but you can word it differently. We don't need "authority" but "coherence". The advantage of Christianity is that it gives value to things which are healthier than our random urges/impulses. The disadvantage is that you can lose faith in Christianity (but if you have a preference like vanilla ice cream, you don't care if there's no objective proof that it's good - you still believe in your own preference). We also need Reponsibility (this is one of Jordan Petersons core values too) and you don't have to call this "authoritarianism". Being overly lenient with others only works when they're being too strict on themselves. I feel like this might have something in common with "we praise those who degrade themselves and degrade those who praise themselves". We recognize the need for a balance. As long as internal control + external control > X where X is some threshold, the individual will turn out alright. To the extent that a person is able to control themselves, they've earned the right to be free from external control

This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing.

The most common (and therefore correct, at least in American English) meaning of "liberal" in the US context is as a slur used by both the right and the left against the centre-left. Occasionally this extends to using "liberalism" to mean "whatever the US centre-left does". This is also slur-adjacent - the American centre-left generally call their own ideology "Progressivism" because their political tradition (with some degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice) goes back to the early 20th century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. There is a similar but different use of "liberal" and "liberalism" in British English (in this case not a slur - it is what we call ourselves) to describe the political tradition which runs through the British Liberal Party (1859-1988) and its predecessors and successors and their international imitators - there is a similar degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice that begins with John Locke advising William III and runs through to Earl Russel negotiating the Whig-Peelite merger and on to Nick Clegg and Justin Trudeau doing the things they do.

But @OracleOutlook, and the Economist (which he cites supporting it) and Marc Barnes (which he cites opposing it) are using "liberalism" in an even broader sense (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is also correct in both British and American English) - to refer to a whole panoply of mutually sympathetic political traditions based on ethical individualism, limited government, respect for a private sphere than includes religious belief, etc. All of British liberalism, American "liberalism"/Progressivism, Reagan/Thatcher conservatism, technocratic-elitist "One Nation"/"Rockefeller Republican" conservatism, and Cato Institute-style libertarianism* can trace their political traditions back to John Locke, and occasionally do so with pride. This is the background that mainstream political actors in the Anglosphere can not notice in the same way that fish don't notice that water is wet. (Many leftists, including the British Labour party, are swimming in the same water). Increasingly, it is the water that everyone is swimming in because the British won the 19th century and the Americans won the 20th.

But big-tent liberalism is not actually universal, even if it is foundational to Universal Culture. All the sub-varieties of liberalism would look at online sports betting and see "This is probably a vice, but that is a comment about private morality, not political morality. It may be so harmful that we need to ban it, but it should be legal by default because you only harm yourself." Most would cite to John Stuart Mill for justification. But a fascist, a communist, a Catholic integralist, a Christian fundamentalist, a Muslim fundamentalist, a Confucian, or a Lee Kwan Yew style technocratic-elitist would all ban it without a second thought, with "It's a vice." being sufficient justification.

* The brand of libertarianism being pushed by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and such-like is arguably not part of big-tent liberalism for reasons that this post is too short to discuss in detail.

Liberalism, historically, meant something more like libertarianism (though probably a little less anarcho-capitalist than libertarians will get). It is sometimes still used in that sense. You'll see people calling themselves classical liberals from time to time, and these are pretty much always right-leaning people.

The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier.

I don't think either of those¹ should have been the first choice. Maybe ask why she wants to stay up until 0100-0200, and address that.

¹Beware the false dilemma!

Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice. It is the only way to improve her concentration and the path to health.

They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.

How to address this? It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents. You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club. Most said that they would respect their parents' decisions over peer pressure. Now most kids don't even understand the concept of their parents having a say at all. Kids need security in an unconditional relationship, and that relationship is with their parents, not with the teenage totem pole.

It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents.

Small-n and possible bias due to typical-minding, but this was not at all what I observed in my environment growing up (and I would expect the schools I went to to be biased for some measure of well-adjustedness if anything).

You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club.

What was the exact survey question/setup? Did it come with a guarantee that if you join, your parents will never find out? Otherwise, this would have been confounded by fear of consequences. (Many people are not confident that they can maintain a lie in front of their parents, which could be internalized like "I wouldn't want to live with the guilt".)

More than 50 years ago, Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman asked American teenagers this question: "Let's say that you had always wanted to belong to a particular club in school, and then finally you were asked to join. But then you found out that your parents didn't approve of the group. " Would you still join? In that era, the majority of American teenagers responded No. They would not join the club if their parents did not approve.

These figures are provided in Edwin Artmann's doctoral dissertation, "A comparison of selected attitudes and values of the adolescent society in 1957 and 1972," North Texas State University, 1973.

Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice.

True, but there is a difference between 'address why she isn't sleeping' versus 'ignore her goals and just issue a decree'.

They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.

That would not have been my first guess: I would have suspected either the standard circadian-phase differences¹ or bedtime procrastination².

If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both. (Note that when she is fully grown, she won't have parents there to limit when she can respond to messages.)

¹There has been much research showing that adolescents tend to function on later time-zones than other ages (possibly as an evolutionary adaptation ensuring that someone would always be awake to tend the camp-fire and watch for hostile mega-fauna), and that later start times for secondary schools would be beneficial.

²A phenomenon in which someone stays up late because they perceive that that is the only time that they have to themselves.

If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both.

Personally, I think that the answer is to take the phone away so that the child can see "oh, actually this isn't that bad". Fears about ostracization like that are almost always severely overblown, in my experience. But I think what is clearly not the answer is for the parents to refuse to parent (putting limits on the phone) because "oh she'll be mad if we do that".

Like I can respect that one might not want to turn to taking the phone away (and damn the consequences) as a first resort. But if it comes down to it, your One Job (TM) as a parent is to put your foot down when your kid is doing something self-destructive. Whether or not they will have teenage moodiness about it doesn't even remotely factor in IMO.

Daniel Penny Acquitted

Last Friday after several days of deadlocked deliberations, the judge agreed to the prosecutor's request to drop the most serious charge of manslaughter, and asked the jury to consider the lesser charge of negligent homicide. It's strange that the jury was so quickly able to dismiss this charge while spending multiple days debating the more serious one.

This case was pretty controversial but judging by the political temperature I don't forecast any major protests or riots.

I find it interesting that the people celebrating the "vigilante justice" of the UHC assassin are the same people upset about the Daniel Penny verdict.

There's no mystery to solve. The leftist instinct in America is always to sympathize with the poorer person whose life is in disarray. It's extremely clear which way this breaks in both cases (everyman subway rider / deranged lunatic and CEO / presumably indebted twenty-something).

But isn't Luigi Mangione from a rich family? It seems like people on Tumblr that I follow still stan him (and are posting joke quizzes asking if he's hot), so it's not obvious to me that he's an underdog in this way. Like, sure, he's objectively poorer than the CEO, but I think a lot of the "appeal" of the assassination is the "righteous fury" at insurance companies, which many Americans have had bad experiences with.

We know that now but I think the sides had already been chosen before that became know several hours ago. I don't disagree that there is a special hatred for the insurance CEO but I don't feel that the overall reaction would have been any different if this had been any other major company's CEO, do you?

Definitely yes. Killing Bezos or Pichai or Nadella would have gotten a much more mixed reaction, for instance. Musk, the same times a billion. Killing the CEO of Ford probably wouldn't have garnered any positive reaction; killing the CEO of GM would have gotten the "horrible to kill a woman" thing (at least from the press). I'm not sure if there's any CEO universally loved, but this guy (or rather, anyone in his position) was likely among the most universally hated.

Disagree. People who are already celebrities like the names you listed have battle lines already drawn around them to some degree, so let's leave them aside. If it was the CEO of Ford, my gut instinct is that on e.g. Reddit the reaction would be essentially the same. They would have to work a little harder to identify the "violence" that said CEO had inflicted on employees or consumers, but not that hard. It's second nature for "late stage capitalism" thinkers. "I'll extend him the same consideration that he extended to the thousands of drivers who died when Ford covered up evidence of faulty brakes / the millions dying from climate change due to lobbying against emissions standards / the families who went hungry when layoffs happened while he pulled down $50M / year."

I suppose you're right that commies will be commies and you would see that sort of stuff, but I still think you'd see a lot less hate for the Ford CEO, and a lot less sympathy for the killer.

The left construes violence incredibly broadly and intentionally eliminates distinctions between different types of "violence". The mere existence of socioeconomic inequality is a form of violence/genocide to them. I imagine that if Bezos was killed the reaction would be even more positive just due to him being wealthier and infinitely better known.

Disagree, with an insurance-related CEO one can immediately think "that guy's responsible for denying care to thousands of people, literally killing them", and that goes much farther to intuitively justify it than "the CEO of Ford ... didn't pay workers enough? Polluted?". Maybe from very committed anticapitalists it would, but the average person on reddit or twitter isn't one

Do you have examples of this? I was perusing Bluesky today, and none of the lefty accounts I follow on there have said anything about the Penny verdict.

Do you have examples of this? I was perusing Bluesky today, and none of the lefty accounts I follow on there have said anything about the Penny verdict.

This is the real story. Cases like this have been rallying points for activist progressives since Michael Brown, at least in the meme's current iteration. That they make very little hay of this and prefer not to discuss it at all is a potent sign that they feel on the backfoot in the culture war.

Given how much of the Neojacobin's success I attribute to their relentless will to just keep pushing and pushing and pushing, this is remarkable. Maybe the optimists were right and we have indeed reached peak woke. It won't mean anything of course as long as the institutional capture is not at least partially reversed.

Same with me, Twitter search shows a few disparate BLM posts but no major interest from lefty accounts otherwise.

Goes both ways, people celebrating the vigilante justice of the Penny verdict criticizing the assassination of the UHC CEO. (For the record, that is the correct, prosocial position.)

vigilante justice

Was it though? A sane account of the event is that the guy was out of his brain, drugs likely involved, and he may have had an OD related cardiac event while he was being restrained. Guy was even still alive when the cops got there, and they refuses to touch him to try to save his life because he was so filthy they were afraid they'd catch something. I'm not sure preventing someone from harming others with a fundamentally nonviolent hold (Neely wasn't bruised, broken or bleeding) and then handing them over to police who allow him to OD to death counts as "vigilante justice" in the same way Batman or The Punisher conjures up.

Vigilantism isn't just when someone ends up dead. Spiderman is still a vigilante when he leaves perps bound and webbed for the cops to find (fits the legal definitions of battery and false imprisonment).

Spiderman is a vigilante because he seeks out crime to stop. Penny is a guy who had an assault nearly happen in front of his eyes. He finds himself in this situation again I'll have questions. But we can't just expand the definition of vigilante to "Anybody who's not a police officer who makes a criminals life harder in any way, shape or form." And it's especially egregious in a self defense situation. Makes it sound like you are obligated to allow yourself to be victimized, which I know the tribal "restorative justice" types actually believe, but all the same, no.

I agree. I just wanted to say that vigilantism isn't just limited to extrajudicial killing.

Is blood vengeance vigilantism? It's not exactly seeking out crimes to stop, after all.

Unless Penny set out that particular day to detain someone on the subway, he was not a vigilante. Defending yourself or others is not vigilantism, it is defence.

What's prosocial about profiting in death?

Health insurance is a fleeting necessity. It's been useful as structural opposition to American single-payer, but AGI approaches as does the panacea, and the industry will cease to exist by 2100. Healthcare as a whole has to put a price on human life, health insurance does too, it's the cold calculations of what's needed to stay solvent and I would only say remain attractive to investors where this latter is necessary to the former. Not when it's simple profiting, and that's what's happening here, profiting in death.

There is nothing prosocial about that behavior. Civilization does have a long relationship with profiting in death, but the avarice underlying that is iniquity's millstone we trudge ever against. Great men have been driven by their want for something to make the most lasting achievements, but it is grossly reductive to categorize it as greed. If that is a fair term, then it applies truly to precious few men who have ever lived. Better to know those traits are found commonly, and those great men were motivated by something ineffable and gestalt, rather than mundane greed.

So to suggest, in this not being prosocial, that civilization was not raised on the line of people being murdered randomly in the street, is to view it in a hypermodern and wrong lens. Thompson was not a random person, he was a modern nobleman who led an organization that profits in death and reaped finally a historically appropriate reward. That historic archetype did fear murder in the commons, so whoever among them today who do not fear being struck down, or who did not, they are or were living in that hypermodern lens, and that's not civilization, it's castration.

AGI approaches, the panacea approaches. Some here, I hope all, will live to see the extinction of health insurance, but regardless, by the end of the century it will be gone, as will the majority of occupations in healthcare, and civilization won't bat an eye. In 200 years it will be a morbid curiosity of 20th and 21st century life, and probably considered in studies as part of humanity hurdling the real problem of the lost jobs and purpose caused by AGI. But those are the things that matter, not "lost" profit opportunities, and not a nobleman dead in the street.

This guy worked for an insurance corporation that had like an 8-9% net margin. That’s not exploitative. That’s not greed on a grand scale. The US public consistently rejected single payer at the ballot box. They are frustrated with the current system, but cannot propose an alternative upon which most can agree.

I think it's not exactly useful to gauge a company's level of "greed" by its profit margin, particularly these huge companies. They are not tight ships running as lean as possible: they inevitably swell with thousands of useless, well-paid employees. Not to mention well-paid executives. These firms love to tighten the screws on their clients in order to avoid cutting the fat.

And of course using this as your proxy will make out better-run companies as being "greedy", and poorly-run ones saints.

And you ask, How magnanimous is Lockheed-Martin? I tell you yea, they profit one cent off the dollar when Hellfire smites an apostate's wedding.

I recognize the necessity of health insurance, I endorse it verbatim as part of the bulwark against single-payer. I understand they have to make hard decisions, because healthcare is triage, and when resource allocation literally is life-and-death, cold calculation is required. This makes it better, it does not make it good. While I'm at it I guess I also should clarify that I see no good in a man being murdered in the street. This may cause deaths downstream, I assume no one's taking that CEO role now without United providing private security, that cost, likely trivial as it is, may be pushed on the consumer, so a rise in rates or claims denied and both lead to reduced life outcomes and death. On the other hand if it causes them to approve claims they otherwise wouldn't, we might see life downstream of this, but I'm not saying let us do evil that good may result. It was murder, and his condemnation will be just. I only plea to history in what constitutes "prosocial" behavior: Thompson was a plebeian who made himself a patrician, and civilization continued all the same through those periods where noblemen who profited from commoners' deaths still feared earthly vengeance.

It doesn't matter if it's 8%, the misdeed is not meted off the margin.

I suspect that those people would have been more sympathetic to Mr Penny if Mr Neely had been responsible for the cessation of the metabolic processes of an order of magnitude more Americans than Usama bin-Ladin....

It was a nice case of jury nullification, which of course it a nice tool to counteract the absurd practice of piling charges that is perverting the justice system.

The real criminal is the MTA - they chose to make the subway and the public transit unsecure. If they had put the safety and comfort of the passengers, if there were people to respond there wouldn't have had a need for vigilantism.

I think that Daniel Penny contributed substantially to the death, but we can't be put in a situation in which to evaluate how crazy a crazy is before the bystanders have to intervene. A stabbing could take a tenth of a second.

I think this is the right decision for the charges that were brought.

Also what is the idiocy of the American justice system that allows civil law suits for criminal matters? Talking about the one filed by his father (also - if you have a father, how the fuck are you homeless, i would really like to hear said father on the stand about the relationship with his son)

Also what is the idiocy of the American justice system that allows civil law suits for criminal matters?

Every Common Law jurisdiction allows this, see the recent McGregor case in Ireland, various cases in the UK etc.

A shared idiocy is no less idiotic. At some point the supreme court should empower the fifth to mean that for one event there should be only one trial and probably also limit the charges that can be piled on.

This creates a conflict of interest between the interests of the individual and the interests of the state, and it comes up much more than you think and probably has affected you at some point. Consider the following: A runs a stop sign, causing an accident that totals B's car. A policeman on the scene finds A at fault and issues a ticket for running the stop sign, the penalty for which is a $100 fine and points on the license. A pleads not guilty because he wants to avoid the points and it's customary for the state to agree to drop the points in exchange for a guilty fee where the defendant only pays the fine. A enters his plea a week after the accident, and the court schedules a hearing for two months after the accident.

Meanwhile, B is without a vehicle and puts a claim into A's insurance company. She is relying on the insurance payout to buy a new car, which she needs to get to work. Since the civil claim is rolled into the criminal claim, however, the insurance company can't pay out until the ticket is resolved, which it won't be for two months. Furthermore, B now has to be ready to present evidence at trial since she doesn't know that A just intends to get a deal and may be arguing that he didn't actually run the stop sign. Plus, there's always the risk that the cop just doesn't show up and she's the only witness available to testify, so she has to show up lest the whole matter be dismissed.

So now B is stuck waiting months for an insurance payout that A's insurer would have just paid, and making things incredibly more complicated than they need to be.

Yeah, how does that work exactly? How does the father have standing to sue for the death of an adult child?

How far does this go. Can I sue for the wrongful death of a brother, a cousin, a distant relative, a friend, an acquaintance...?

Wrongful death is a creature of statute, and as such the statute defines who has standing to sue. A rough approximation is that you'd have standing if you'd be entitled to inherit under the state's intestacy law.

In kind of "rough order," first the surviving spouse, if no surviving spouse (or if spouse doesn't sue), then the children, if no surviving children, then the parent, if no parents then dependents (not applicable here, dude was homeless...), and then if none of those, the executor/representative of the estate (again, not applicable here). Friend/acquaintance only applies if you qualified as their dependent.

You want some kind of civil wrongful death statute, otherwise someone who gets killed by a reckless driver or due to a defective product couldn't get money damages for it.

I think Jordan Neely was batshit crazy and chose to live on the streets because of it.

I dont see how this is a case of jury nullification. From a reading of the medical records, its pretty hard to see that the state even carried its burden of proof on the most basic of questions: That but-for Penny's actions, Neely would still have been alive at the end of the encounter. That is even before the prosecution's difficult case in proving criminal recklessness and/or negligence given the chaotic situation and that the actual witnesses on the scene were pretty evenly split.

He was alive at the end of the encounter. He was pronounced dead in the hospital.

I called it nullification because the trial always hanged on if the jury would see him as good Samaritan or reckless vigilante. Not on the facts.

Assume that surfaced a lot of posts of him being storm front member or racist or whatever - do you think he would still have been acquitted?

He was pronounced dead in the hospital.

I didn't follow this part of the case closely so I'm not sure if this applies here, but it is very common for someone to be "dead" for all useful purposes, but we don't formalize that until they end up in front of the Trauma/ED team and they've given up.

I've seen the EMTs bring in someone on a LUCAS who was stiff and cold but until the doctor takes a look at them...other staff don't want the responsibility/documentation/risk of getting it wrong.

That's less jury nullification and more just how juries work. A NY jury is going to convict a white supremacist of murder of he's credibly accused of eating at Katz's while a patron nearby chokes on pastrami.

The jury was 7 women and 5 men. I do wonder who the holdouts were at first.

I could see men being all about frontier justice while the women give into empathy, but I can also see a jury of women who have years of experience feeling vulnerable on the subways swooning over Penny.

Explain like I am not a NY lawyer: why would everyone in the jury find him not guilty of Criminal Negligence but be split on Manslaughter?

Maybe people on the jury saw the dropped charge for what it was, a naked attempt to still send Daniel Penny to prison when it looked like their case was lost.

My guess is that there were one or two people on the jury who saw Penny as a hero who wouldn't agree to any conviction no matter how minor. I would have been one of those people, and would have more than willing to hide my power level during jury selection.

I'm sure our lawyers will chime in, but they always seem to miss the point. It's not about the nitpicky lawyery details most of the time. It's about who has the power to get what they want, using the law as a pretense to achieve this.

Regardless of the instructions, the jury was really asked to consider "do you think Daniel Penny is a murderer who you want to see rot in prison"?

Maybe the DA will face some blowback for wasting the public's money trying to send a good man to prison while routinely failing to prosecute career criminals who prey on ordinary people.

My guess is that there were one or two people on the jury who saw Penny as a hero who wouldn't agree to any conviction no matter how minor.

It doesn't look like it played that way. If 10 or 11 of 12 are willing to convict then they aren't going to decide to acquit because of 1 or 2 people, especially not so quickly after the higher charge is dropped. If the jury is mostly willing to convict the guy of manslaughter after days of deliberation, I don't see 2 people turning around the other 10 in a couple of hours. This looks more like most of the jury wanted to acquit but one or two holdouts wanted a conviction. Dropping the manslaughter charges may have signaled to the jury that the prosecution didn't really believe in their case, which may be enough to flip these people.

I would have been one of those people, and would have more than willing to hide my power level during jury selection.

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

Watching that dude do it in the Derek Chauvin trial. He got away with wearing a 'get your knee off our necks' shirt to a protest by claiming to not know the details, it looks pretty easy to do. I'm not black though.

My plan would be use low-key Golden Retriever mode, channel humility, vacuous attentiveness, and moderate excitement to be involved in this novel experience: a wide-eyed, gawking tourist enjoying their guided walkthrough of the famous American Justice system. I'd be interested in hearing how or why this would fail.

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

By not being too gung-ho in either direction (so neither side vetoes you) and possibly playing down your IQ somewhat?

The one time I was in a jury pool, it did seem like the lawyers from both sides were trying to get people to self-identify as independent thinkers and then veto them. Probably both lawyers thought that they were in total control and wanted to have a jury of relative simpletons that they could guide. Of course, not both can be right.

I'll admit, I know almost nothing about jury selection except for what I've read in John Grisham novels, lol. I think it would be fascinating to hear about how trial lawyers approach selection in a big case like this one.

It's not so much that we don't want smart people or independent thinkers as it is that we don't want overly opinionated people who will fuck up the deliberation process. A jury full of relative simpletons isn't a good thing because they won't want to pay attention, won't be able to understand the testimony or jury instructions and will instead just rely on whatever biases they have. The Chauvin jury was composed almost entirely of people with professional or managerial backgrounds. What we're trying to avoid is the kind of person who is overly opinionated and is unwilling to work with the other jurors. We need people who can deliberate, not just voice their opinions. If 1 juror gives the other 11 the impression that he isn't fully invested in deliberating and has already made an unchangeable decision, all it's going to do is piss of the other jurors and increase the chances of a hung jury.

That brings me to another aspect of your plan that was faulty: The presumption that you would be able to hang the jury on your own. Hung juries are almost always fairly evenly split. If you find yourself in a room with 11 people who are voting to convict after several days of deliberation, then it's unlikely that they're doing so purely for political reasons. If you haven't turned at least a few members around in that time, then you're probably wrong, and unless you're a total moron, you'll probably come around yourself. In a high-profile case such as this, there is going to be a lot of pressure for a verdict, and the judge isn't going to send everyone home just because you say you're deadlocked; the system is willing to keep you there a lot longer than you think they will.

I think it would be fascinating to hear about how trial lawyers approach selection in a big case like this one.

I can't speak for big cases, and there are differing theories, but a few general truisms hold. Basically, I aim to have a discussion with prospective jurors, not an examination. In big trials they might interview the jurors individually, but most of the time they bring them in 10 or 20 at a time. I'll start by making a general statement that I expect most people to agree on, just to get people comfortable with raising their hands. There will inevitably be someone who doesn't raise their hand, so I'll pick on that person first to see why they don't agree with everyone else (it's usually because the person is incredibly shy). From there, I try to focus on open-ended questions that don't suggest an answer and give the prospective juror a chance to elaborate on their views. I try to avoid anything that can be answered with a simple yes or no.

For example, in this case I might ask "In the past several years there has been a lot of discussion about how people are increasingly feeling unsafe on public transit. What do you think about that?" And this is where @ArjinFerman's comment ties in. Most people will speak freely about controversial subjects during voir dire. Most people will offer opinions that have the potential to get them booted. You don't know what my trial strategy is or what evidence is going to be presented. You haven't read all of the other jury questionnaires. You don't know where I'm going with my questions. If you think that straddling the line between both sides is going to work, you'd better be sure that you know what the sides actually are. If I'm the prosecutor on this case, I'm not trying to get a bunch of woke-ass do-gooders on the jury, because that isn't going to happen. I've probably accepted the fact that the jury pool is frustrated about erratic behavior on the subway and is sick of having to deal with it. Yeah, some people are more liberal, but they're going to be outspoken and probably get the boot from the defense. I'm trying to craft an argument at trial that acknowledges Mr. Penny's right to intervene but that the problem was in the execution. The only question is whether I think you're willing to accept my argument, and you don't know my criteria for that.

Thanks for sharing. Your post is very interesting, as always.

For the record, in my one jury selection I did get booted for raising my hand when it was pretty clear that the lawyer asking the question didn't want me to. It was a long time ago, but IIRC, he said something and then asked if anyone disagreed. The jurors seemed pretty intimidated. I'm probably not the only one who disagreed, but I'm the only one who raised my hand. The other jurors seemed pretty intimidated. When I raised my hand, the lawyer then immediately pounced on me in a fairly harsh way and forced me to defend my statement. It was then I realized that the trial was already under way. (Note: My uninformed belief is that it's probably against the rules to prejudice the jury during this stage, but that everyone does it in an oblique way anyway).

In the end, I was the only one dismissed by that lawyer and the defendant ended up settling.

When it comes to where I could pull a Henry Fonda, I do understand your skepticism. I can't confidently say that I'd succeed because I've never been in that position before. But I think I am pretty high on verbal intelligence, charisma, and disagreeableness. I like my odds.

If you haven't turned at least a few members around in that time, then you're probably wrong, and unless you're a total moron, you'll probably come around yourself.

Well, give me some credit here, surely arguing with the Motte's finest all these years counts for something that would help me turn people to my side?

the system is willing to keep you there a lot longer than you think they will.

So I get that I might have shit to do, and might be worried about losing my job or something, but when we're talking about something like the Penny case, I don't know if I could sleep at night if I had the power to let him off the hook, but caved in because I really had to run some chores.

For example, in this case I might ask "In the past several years there has been a lot of discussion about how people are increasingly feeling unsafe on public transit. What do you think about that?"

Would some bland answer like "If people feel this way, maybe the city could hire more cops or something, but I dunno, I'm not an expert" immediately flag me in a case like this? I guess I'd be a bit more careful expressing pro-cop sentiment in something like the Chauvin trial.

Most people will speak freely about controversial subjects during voir dire. Most people will offer opinions that have the potential to get them booted. You don't know what my trial strategy is or what evidence is going to be presented. You haven't read all of the other jury questionnaires. You don't know where I'm going with my questions.

None of this is relevant. The game I'm playing is "hide my power level" not "ensure I will be selected for the jury". I'm mostly trying to look normal, not read your mind. The latter sounds like an easy way to play myself like in that Princess Bride "only a great fool would reach for what he was given" skit.

If I'm the prosecutor on this case, I'm not trying to get a bunch of woke-ass do-gooders on the jury,

Exactly, which is why I said won't go gung-ho in either direction.

"In the past several years there has been a lot of discussion about how people are increasingly feeling unsafe on public transit. What do you think about that?"

"IDK, maybe -- I haven't really noticed anything, myself"

If you find yourself in a room with 11 people who are voting to convict after several days of deliberation, then it's unlikely that they're doing so purely for political reasons. If you haven't turned at least a few members around in that time, then you're probably wrong, and unless you're a total moron, you'll probably come around yourself. In a high-profile case such as this, there is going to be a lot of pressure for a verdict, and the judge isn't going to send everyone home just because you say you're deadlocked; the system is willing to keep you there a lot longer than you think they will.

How democratic!

You can make any choice as a juror, so long as you make the one everyone else is making. And if you don’t make the decision everyone else wants you to, the state will use force to intimidate you into changing your mind.

We might as well just use Nazi ballots, if the whole point of juries is to use social and economic pressure to force people to vote the same way, and using confinement and isolation to overcome conscientious disagreement. These are totalitarian tactics, incompatible with freedom.

The goal is often just to reduce variance. If whether lawyer thought they were going to lose, they wouldn't be there, they'd have settled/plead/dropped the case.

The one time I was in a jury pool, the lawyers were going through the pool trying to find people biased in their direction.

I was selected on a murder trial a couple years back and it was easy as hell. Nobody wanted to be there. Over half the jury pool was rejected on spurious reasons.

Getting on a jury was relatively easy in my recent experience.

If over half the jury pool was rejected for spurious reasons then it doesn't sound like it was that easy to get on. I'm assuming you answered the voir dire questions honestly.

No most of the jurors obviously wanted to get out of jury duty. They cited things like missing work, obviously lying about strong political opinions, etc.

obviously lying about strong political opinions

As someone who has strong political opinions about criminal justice, I have no idea what I’d do if I were picked for jury duty. Either I’m honest about my very strong views and I look like a crazy liar, or I lie about them and perjure myself. It’s a tough break.

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

Good point. Many smart people think they can outsmart cops and lawyers but fail spectacularly because they are playing a game for the first time against people who play it for a living.

And I'm not willing to perjure myself either.

So... all I can say is that I would do my best to try to get on the jury and, once there, acquit. Would our genius lawyers be able to ferret this out? Maybe, maybe not. They're probably not quite as smart as they like to believe either.

I'm sure our lawyers will chime in, but they always seem to miss the point. It's not about the nitpicky lawyery details most of the time. It's about who has the power to get what they want, using the law as a pretense to achieve this.

Whatever residual doubts I had about this have left my body after listening to the recent US vs. Skrmetti hearing. It's all just word games to provide the thinnest veneer of legitimacy + how many judges are on your side.

The vibes based arguments I've heard, is that after the judge ordered them to keep deliberating after they announced they were hung, NYC Mayor Eric Adams came out and said the entire trial was politically motivated, and that Penny should never have been tried.

Adams had some critiques of the Democratic establishment on migration before but he seems utterly unburdened by any sense of loyalty since the election.

Interesting to see.

but he seems utterly unburdened by any sense of loyalty since the election.

More cynically, since it came out that he'd been taking bribes from Turkey.

That seems to be the general right wing take, that he's singing for his pardon.

He was to the right of the Dem establishment on crime well before he got elected. That was in fact why he got elected.

Well, that and his skin color means that he can pursue (relatively) “tough on crime” policies without being tarred as a racist

Perplexity tells me the difference between criminally negligent homicide and second degree manslaughter in New York is in the defendant's state of mind. Under criminally negligent homicide, the person failed to perceive the risk of death, while under second degree manslaughter, they were aware of the risk of death but consciously disregarded that risk.

With bystanders saying Neely was going to die, combined with Penny's training, it seems hard to justify the idea that he just didn't see a risk of death from a six-minute chokehold, including nearly a minute after he went limp. The trial's outcome could be reasonable if the jury agreed that Penny knew what he was doing while disagreeing on whether he was justified in doing it.

The holdouts got tired.

Color me somewhat surprised.

I was somewhat expecting a guilty verdict, and my guess was that'd trigger another wave of emigration out of NYC.

Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.

Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.

I predict with 95%+ confidence that this will not happen. Large scale defined as > 5 people dead or > 100 million in property damage.

I doubt we'll see any rioting or even protesting beyond the usual Antifa bullshit, sparsely attended at that.

New Yorkers have to live in New York. There’s nobody who lives in NYC who hasn’t been scared by homeless psychos over the last 5 years.

Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.

It's cold and rainy. No one's rioting in this, spontaneously or otherwise.

Good timing on releasing the verdict, then.


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