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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27139 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:

Shawn, now 38, recalled traveling to Epstein's house with Carolyn for the first time with a girl named Virginia Roberts and Roberts' boyfriend after Roberts told Carolyn the pair could make money by giving "a guy a massage."

"She was excited to make money," said Shawn, who has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case.

He added that he and Roberts' boyfriend saw Roberts and Carolyn go into Epstein's home, waited for them for more than an hour, and saw them leave the home with hundred dollar bills.

{snip}

Shawn's account of that first trip largely matched up with Carolyn's version. After that first trip, Shawn said he drove Carolyn to Epstein's home every two weeks, and that Carolyn would leave with hundred dollar bills. They would use the cash to buy drugs, Shawn said, echoing his former girlfriend's statement on the stand on Tuesday.

{snip}He said he also drove two other girls he was dating at the time, Amanda and Melissa, to Epstein's home.

{snip}He said he sometimes received calls from Epstein employees seeking to schedule a massage appointment for Epstein with Carolyn{snip}

"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:

I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).

I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?

Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.

Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.

You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?

Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.

  • -17

Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.

I don't think you can conclude this.

It's a pointless political dead-end because it can't ever be adjudicated. At best you can say the epistemic commons are so poisoned on the issue that Epstein Files is now 9/11 Conspiracy is now JFK Conspiracy. No majority will believe any explanation, no matter how bipartisan the committee and how much evidence gets dumped.

If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power?

These men aren't being lambasted for being attracted to 16-17 yo girls. Men are being lambasted for fucking them with dubious consent and legality. It's the difference between desiring money and defrauding. Impulse control.

Furthermore, having extremely restrictive rules of engagement for hoi polloi while the billionaire elites get away with it is a cucked attitude.

Elites should not be breaking the law, they are supposed to be exemplars. Higher standing, higher rewards, higher standards. The FBI and CIA especially are not supposed to be breaking the law, they're supposed to be enforcing it.

How are you supposed to have a functioning country if the elites and officials are basically robbers, here for temporary gain, don't believe in anything except personal gratification (financial or sexual), don't care about enforcing rules evenly, take bribes or implicit promises of favours from powerful figures, take revenge on you if you report them? This is third-worldism not in the geopolitical sense but the social sense, third-world values. 'We shouldn't report or rally against the corrupt official because maybe the central government will punish us in retribution' is a supremely servile attitude. The Taliban were formed in large part to massacre child rapists amongst the warlords of Afghanistan. We may not share all their values but at least they believed in something more than short-term political gains, that's surely a large part of why they won the war. Why should those from the richest, strongest, most cultured nations hold lower standards than illiterate Afghans?

The rule of law is usually only brought up to justify judges or international courts nobody's ever heard of issuing strange and bizarre orders but this is a core example of where the rule of law should be invoked. No cover ups.

It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.

I support the latter being illegal, but there are obviously tiers of criminality. The sad reality of prostitution is that a large, disproportionate number of prostitutes are 16/17 and lie about their age, particularly in the poorest parts of the west, street walkers and truck stop sex workers, sometimes escorts on seeking arrangement / sugar baby sites too. Underclass and working class men hire them all the time without consequence, buying into the implicit suggestion they are adults if their conscience cares at all (it usually doesn’t).

It’s like the outrage over rich young actresses fucking ugly fat producers to become movie stars. I sympathize, but these are not the top victims of male predation. The purchasers of sex do something I think is wrong, but they aren’t worse than the millions of other men who do the same every day.

It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.

Those things aren't the same. However it is important to take a political stand in honest defence of values even if standing up for those values has short-term costs and ruffles feathers.

If we're gonna accept light statutory rape amongst elites (if it is even limited to light statutory rape, since the documentation and evidence of whatever's really going on remains concealed), why not medium statutory rape amongst grooming gangs? Where does it end? There are laws and those laws should be enforced. Laws and proper behaviour mustn't seem to be 'for suckers'.

I would argue that Epstein and his guests are different from random truckers in that they purposefully selected for underage. If Epstein had hired 18yo's from escort websites only, this thing would be an absolute non-story, and nobody except a few prudes and feminists would get upset.

Being a sex worker at a truck stop is very likely not a great job. I would expect that the pay is lousy (because your clients do not have a lot of disposable income), it is rather dangerous (because "trucker", unlike "bank executive" does not filter for "intelligent person with an appropriate discounting function who will avoid any homicides they will not get away with") and that the clients are not particularly hot or skilled at sex. If you can make ends meet using OnlyFans or doing escort work, that seems much preferable. So I can totally see that this job selects for 16yo runaways who need to pay for their next meal or their next dose, and have neither the wardrobe nor the age to make it in the more respectable branches of sex work (where underage is likely a hard no, because it attracts the eye of Sauron like little else except murder).

Unlike the US, I have no problem with prostitution per se. I certainly do not think minors should be prostitutes, but also admit that I have no good way to align the incentives of a 16yo drug addict to that end. Still, I think informed consent is as important for sex work as for any sex act.

Some time ago, there was a scandal where some porn company would hire women for what they claimed to be modelling (or something similarly tame), then get into a plane to some other city, and suddenly be confronted with the fact that they would be shooting hardcore porn instead. This put the women in a position where they could either walk out, and find themselves in a city which they knew nothing about without a return ticket home, or they could conform with the expressed opinion of the set crew that shooting porn was not a big deal and believe their lies that their video would only be sold to foreign collectors and not be put on the internet. Eventually, the company got sued and is out of business now, and good riddance. By contrast, no hooker who climbs into a truck is under any illusion that the truck driver is going to do a photo shoot to kick off her modelling career. She might still get raped when the trucker violates the agreed boundaries, but that would then at least be a criminal matter (not that this would buy her anything, realistically).

Now, in theory, it could be that Epstein recruited his victims by driving to local truck stops and telling the sex workers: "I am currently recruiting underage prostitutes for a sex party. Here is a brief detailing transportation, accommodations, sex acts, payment, and safe words. Please read it, think about it for a week and then mail me what sex acts you feel comfortable with and I will get back to you."

However, in my world model, this is exceedingly unlikely. It is seems far more likely that the girls travelling on the Lolita express had at best a vague idea what would be required of them, and then were coerced in pretty much the same way as the victims of that unethical porn company were, except worse, because they were underage and actually trapped on an island.

I base this on my general impression of Epstein's MO wrt consent and also one major thing which I think is appealing in men about young partners, which is sexual inexperience. If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.

If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.

It's much easier to get a 16-yo to keep her mouth shut. A 26-yo will go to a gossip rag to tell everything about the sexual preferences of VIPs she was paid to have sex with the very moment her escorting career starts to wind down. A 16-yo is still young and stupid enough to be coerced into keeping her mouth shut, even stupid stuff like "would you like your parents to learn what you did?" will work on them.

My impression is that Epstein's clients were not particularly requesting for underage, that was Epstein himself, and that he deliberately recruited teenaged girls who were vulnerable because they did not have great lives with bright futures ahead. 100% of these girls understood when getting on the plane that 'I need you to work a high end party' meant 'have sex with the guests'- especially because my impression is that, like most pimps, Epstein himself was having sex with them.

It seems likely to me that many of Epstein's guests were getting off on the taboo aspect of having sex with minors. I doubt that 'power differentials' are a big part of the explanation for the simple reason that his guests already have a very high power differential compared to the vast majority of possible partners. Epstein wasn't offering anything special enough there to make committing crimes appealing.

What's the source of sympathy over casting couch situations? It's gross and worthy of judgment, but against both participants. The only people getting screwed are 1) the investors in the project, as the caster is misusing their authority to choose a (presumably inferior) casting option instead of fulfilling their responsibilities; and 2) the superior casting option who gets passed over. Just a particularly sleazy form of graft.

The young women choosing to do this might have economic struggles, but those aren't unique to them; whatever empathy they deserve for that should also be extended to all the women (and men!) who have the same economic struggles but don't choose the couch.

It depends on specifics, but in a lot of casting-couch cases I think the actress who's been offered the deal has a credible fear of retaliation if she says no - not just that she won't get the job, but that the spited producer will pull strings to get her blacklisted and ruin her career, leaving her much worse off than one who was never offered the deal in the first place. While you can still view giving in as the morally worse option, I think even an actress who gives in to that kind of ultimatum deserves a lot more sympathy than one who tries to sleep her way to a job of her own volition, with no expectation of actively negative consequences if she doesn't.

The only people getting screwed are

Hmm I can think of at least 2 other people getting screwed…

who may or may not have been a prostitute

I found Giuffre more sympathetic than, say, Maria Farmer, who seems a little crazy (but at least said No to Maxwell). I also think it's clear from Giuffre's own barely readable biography that she was definitely whoring herself out from a very young age, well before Maxwell marked her for Epstein. Now did she have a terrible home life? It certainly seems so. But Epstein didn't make her a prostitute. That she happened to be working at Mar-A-Lago was an absolute fluke. It's also clear she ran the game as far as she could until she felt she was fed up with it, at which point she bailed to Thailand on Epstein's coin and decided to run for it. It's a compelling dramatic story but the narrative (now set in stone after her death) that she was always Epstein's victim leaves out a lot of her own really shitty choices. I do feel bad for her, but hers is a tragedy in the Greek drama sense --her determination, her ability to push through and survive, ended up leading to the life that destroyed her.

What is that quoted from?

Fixed. Apologies.

not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers.

Or maybe they read it like I do as "not being charged with crime".

Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.

Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.

Certainly there's room between "literally nothing changes" and "the white nationalist commie trad NOI extremists take control" right?

Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up.

Bruh, people call that pedophilia all the time in other cases too. The "it's actually ephebophilia" statement is practically a meme of its own! And lots of people do get arrested for sexting/banging minors so I don't see why elites should be any different.

Also interesting little hedge in there of "most", ok so what about the ones that were a fair bit younger?

After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition.

But they weren't just attracted to the teens! They were apparently trafficking them, pimping them out and having sex with them. People already get arrested for that and called pedophiles.

Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?

Doesn't seem like they need it too much, even just the stuff we publically know suggests they have access to a lot of our phone and computer data already.

Acktually the whole Epstein saga isn't related to pedophilia because 16 year old girls are sexually mature so there is nothing wrong with being attracted to them.

You are again purposely ignoring and denying what people mean when they talk about the situation. It's a ring of geriatric men trafficking and abusing a bunch of underage girls. Most people would agree that such a thing can be described as a pedo ring.

Nobody cares that technically, abusing 16 year old girls does not meet the criteria for a DSM-5 diagnosis for the mental disorder. People are still going to call them pedos.

People are still going to call them pedos.

Then people are wrong. I discussed this before.

Let me put it more plainly and provocatively. The problem with calling a 50yo who fucks a 16yo teen in a clearly coercive setting "pedophile" is that you are equating something which is deeply morally objectionable with something which is fine.

In case there is any doubt about which is which, yes, I am claiming that there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile, in the technically sense of the word.

Now obviously, it is a sexual orientation which sucks greatly for anyone with a remotely working moral compass (and will lead to behavior which is very wrong for those without one), and I thank my maker that I am into women with tits instead so I have access to ethically produced porn and ethical opportunities to have sex (even if being bi would be strictly preferable in that regard).

Sure, there is a large overlap between child-fuckers and pedophiles, but my problem is with child-fuckers as child-fuckers. If some asshole decides to sexually abuse a kid, I don't give a rats ass if they were into kids or watching MILF porn at the same time to keep aroused, they should go to prison either way.

Using pedos as a synonym for child abusers is bad. Expanding it to include creepy sex pest-ry targeting underage victims is even worse. I also do not think that the general vibe of "your sexual orientation makes you the likeliest group to be deported to death camps without anyone else saying a word in your defense" is actually very effective at keeping ethical pedos (who are not complicit in sexual abuse) ethical, probably a society which was meh about ethical pedos but very much against child abusers (which mostly describes western legal systems) would offer a better gradient.

I am not much of a linguistic prescriptionist, normally. I use to beg the question correctly, but it is not a hill I am willing to die on. Still, words matter, and I think that on this forum we should strive to use accurate terminology even if 85% of the general population is using it in a more diffuse manner, especially if it involves emotionally charged words which are intentionally repurposed for clear political goals.

As another example (without a strict 1:1 correspondence), consider a (perhaps hypothetical) attempt to redefine "rape" as "any sex act perpetrated by a man which involved a woman who either did not consent or regretted consenting subsequently". (It is not entirely divorced from common usage, people have sex under the influence of voluntarily consumed drugs which would inhibit their legal ability to consent all the time, and end up in situations where they can decide on the next day that they were raped (and then decide to report it or not) or retroactively grant consent. (Perhaps not legally, but practically. Legally, "last night when I was dead drunk, I urged my hot husband to fuck my brains out and he did" might still be rape, but unless she bring that up in divorce proceedings eventually, nobody cares.)) Still, I would definitely argue against anyone here who would try to push such a new definition, because it hopelessly muddies the water by using the same term for different things which are not remotely morally equivalent.

There's nothing morally wrong with being a psychopath either but the stigma around that term isn't going away anytime soon either. Having a mental disorder may be morally neutral but the results are not for the vast majority of those afflicted, so I can't blame the public for having prejudice.

It's not pedophilia, but we should still call them pedos anyway. However, there's only so far you can push this socially useful equivocation before it starts backfiring.

Another thing to consider here, is that within the past 20 years, the Catholic Church did suffer tremendous fallout for this thing.

It suffered massive losses in cultural influence, credibility, financial payouts, and legal win against it.

There’s two points here: one is that to the average person, this is a massive point in the “it could happen” column. Justice can be seen at least to a degree that isnt zero.

Second, all the excuses AT is making about technicality of ‘pedo ring’ applied here as well, but didn’t matter to the public perception. was widely regarded and reported as a pedo scandal, when it was mostly gay pederasty. The same mainstream taking down the Church downplayed this, not to justify them, but to avoid crossfire against homosexuality as well as get maximal outrage.

So again, ATs cutsie sneering at MAGAs that “this isn’t how it works” is completely at odds with how it actually did work and recently.

But it’s a big deal if a group of Zionists, by way of Mega Group founder Les Wexner who seeded Epstein with 200-400 million dollars, was involved in blackmailing influential Americans to do Israel’s bidding as part of some insane fifth-gen lobbying campaign. It’s a very big deal that Jeffrey Epstein’s own brother says

In the 2016 election, we were talking about the election and Jeffrey told me that if he said what he knew about the candidates, they would have to cancel the election

(as I predicted in a comment weeks back). There’s a lot of evidence that this is what happened which I won’t rehash as I’ve commented on it enough recently.

Epstein making allusions is peak Epstein. There’s nothing in this statement. What did he know? As usual, unreported because there’s a good chance it was either third-hand hearsay or nothing.

Turok: the Epstein saga is materially true in a broader sense. Leave the conspiracy aside for a moment. You only have to look as far as his first brush with the law over the issue, where he leverages connections and money to get off with a slap on the wrist and the government not looking too closely. Even if the public is fuzzy on the details they more or less have the right general direction here in terms of rich shadowy men with connections getting away with stuff. Also: shocker alert, what you call the "online right" is not entirely made up of dishonest hacks who only care about the returns. Nope, they are by and large true believers. They don't give a fig about the actual long-term second-order effects. It's not some big plan that you're bursting their bubble about. There's no Santa Claus, here, in the first place, so pointing out he's not real doesn't do anything. In that light, I find your comment to be pretty pointless, and that's coming from me who kind of agrees about the status quo being unreasonably sticky *taps username, this time unironically and that generic replacement figures obviously quite often come from a similar statistical ideological and demographic distributions as the prior ones.

In fact I also happen to think that a large proportion of politicians are also either true believers or so ideologically captured as to make little difference, because of the pipeline that produces them, but most people seem to disagree and consider them almost all pure ambitious sociopaths with agnostic or apathetic personal politics, with a handful of outright corrupt ones on the side.

where he leverages connections and money to get off with a slap on the wrist and the government not looking too closely

Nobody disputes this, though. Well connected billionaires getting away with stuff is Tuesday.

The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.

In a civilized society, that kind of behavior gets you executed, and not because you know too much.

The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.

Err, the west covers for sex trafficking kids all the time, and you don't need to be rich and powerful to get away with it (though it helps). Popular entertainers get away with it. Politicians cover massive-scale abuse - far beyond what Epstein is accused of - up and journalists look the other way to avoid having their foreign policies outed as idiotic, avoid having to be on the same side as icky migration restrictionists, or to avoid being called racist.

Don't we all regard those examples as moral failures though?

I've yet to see anybody seriously take the position that grooming gangs were okay, I've only seen shameful denial.

And yet lots of people keep covering such things up and not freaking out and leaking them out of moral outrage.

In a civilized society

So your contention is that there has never been a civilized society?

Rather, that we are not living up to much of our ideals.

Real civilization has never been tried.

I think your viewpoint slots into a general pattern of enlightened centrism chilling effects denial, where people of various colours explain to you why electing this or that candidate, winning or losing one token court case, or taking one town of 10k in Ukraine or successfully defending it will not actually make a difference.

In reality, so much political power is determined not by what battles you can win, but what battles you can avoid even having to fight because your enemy is demoralised about his prospect of winning. The superior fighter will win 100 battles and lose his 101st because he is worn out, while the superior posturer will be secure in his position without having to fight a single battle.

The whole Epstein situation is a fuck-you flag planted in the town square, saying "we can even get away with this sort of thing". That this is about pederasty doesn't even matter, except insofar as there is common knowledge that a majority of people considers it the most heinous of crimes. While the flag stands, how many people who might otherwise choose to expend effort to go after a politician or dignitary for some lesser conspiracy or abuse of power will wisely choose to not even try?

In my latest essay, I try to list the major points I'm aware of that puncture the progressive narrative on economics, without trying to directly touch on the Culture War's social fronts.

Reality Has a Poorly Recognized Classical Liberal Bias

I think most people here have enough exposure to libertarianism that they are at least aware of these issues (even if they don't agree with them). If you think I missed one or I'm somehow dead wrong please do indicate so.

Classical liberalism is unsustainable, probably inherently because espousing it means leaving yourself defenseless against parasites of liberalism, such as various forms of communism.

And no, you can't simply declare 'we won't have nice people and nice things in my liberalism' to avoid the progressive cancer.

So I'd say, reality has an anti-classical liberal bias. Classical liberalism is a strictly transitory phenomenon that will degenerate into something else. Same as e.g. the brief window of political sanity in farming civilization while people who survived thru civil wars were in power.

Classical liberalism is a strictly transitory phenomenon that will degenerate into something else.

In the long run we are all very much dead. But perhaps giving up on classical liberalism altogether is premature.

And the "something else" is hard here. If we have reached the End of History, but liberal democracy is insufficiently "liberal" to be economically feasible then where we go next seems bad. I'd argue going back to the old ways.

So I'd say, reality has an anti-classical liberal bias

I'd argue many people do, not economic reality. Public choice theory teaches us this. Then you can get into "liberal" vs. "democracy" but that's a whole thing.

but liberal democracy is insufficiently "liberal" to be economically feasible then where we go next seems bad. I'd argue going back to the old ways.

a) It's not about economics.

I'd argue going back to the old ways.

Politics is the art of the possible. Saying impossible things are desirable is mostly useless.

Classical liberalism has all the electoral appeal of I dunno, raw oysters. Sure the right people will like it but you're still basically SOL.

I'd argue many people do, not economic reality.

In a big enough country, ideology and cope can paper over cracks in economic reality for a very long time. Heck this even works in a small country -consider Argentina! People can stay deluded for generations on end if they can. (e.g. society is rich enough because you're exporting money etc). Witness US education system which is mostly regressing.

a) It's not about economics.

Any system that runs out of other people's money is going to struggle. Any system that cannot wage war effectively via the means of production is going to struggle. You may not be interested in economics; but economics is interested in you.

Politics is the art of the possible. Saying impossible things are desirable is mostly useless.

Classical liberalism is a lot less far-fetched than Marxism, and yet. It's very much not literally impossible. Certainly it's possible to make marginal improvements even if we never achieve my particular vision of utopia.

Electoral appeal can change. Sometimes rapidly. My hope is that the next crisis event is used to steer us in a good direction, not an even worse one.

I'm not exactly sure how much the OSHA/FLSA graphs are supposed to prove. It's not like occupational safety laws and measures or general labor laws and measures where things that were nonexistent before OSHA/FLSA, right? Aren't these furthermore the points where these things passed from improvements being workplace-based and affected by labor union advocacy to the state taking control, making the anti-union point less clear?

This is the classic counterargument to the straight line proving OSHA's ineffectiveness.

TL;DR: Lots of provably important thing don't make jumps in other lines, so it's probably that people (governments, companies, the public) set a goal of X%/year, and that was one thing they used to reach it.

Very reasonable and straightforward. Markets work well for many economic tasks.

But Classical Liberals don't have a monopoly on markets. China makes good use of markets in their authoritarian nationalist capitalist model. They're not liberal. The Romans had a pretty laissez-faire attitude to markets but supplemented them with aggressive imperialism.

Marketism and laissez-faire works best in economics. Classical liberalism and libertarianism are poor politics because of their openness and inability to develop a strong power base. Say you have a classical liberal state. Who gains? Everyone. But they can all see ways to make more gains by weakening the system. Big business wants to bring in cheap labour, privatize gains in labour price while socializing costs in welfare. They also want to protect domestic markets from foreign competition. Poor people want money from the rich. Middle class people want cozy sinecures. Trade unions want regulations on business and to prevent mechanization. Foreign lobbies want expensive adventurism. Nimbies want nothing to be built. Greens want industry dismantled.

So I don't disagree but if the proposal is more 'classical liberalism' then there has to be some way of developing a classical liberal power base. It doesn't seem to be very stable as an equilibrium, with so many forces with incentives to undermine it. Christianity also has many virtues but we observe it on the decline in the West, see Sunday trading, abortion rules, treatment of adultery, marriage, homosexuality... I can imagine a reasonable, justified argument that Christianity is good, shared faith makes many things easier. But without the 'here's why Christianity is declining and how this trend can be reversed' the call to action seems incomplete.

Of course this is a very big and hard problem. I can't see a way to make classical liberalism work reliably without getting captured by various interests. And a huge party-state to compel obedience like China brings with it new problems.

It seems like there are two not-quite-identical problems being identified here. The first is overtly named "developing a classical liberal power base", while the second is not explicitly named, I think it has significant overlap if not being identical to "crony capitalism".

Some natural questions arise. What is a "power base"? What is necessary for it; what is sufficient? It is the "power" to do what? A natural concern is that, depending on how one views that power/power base, and the necessary conditions for it, perhaps it inherently contains a sufficient "amount of power" with suitable orientation so as to be inherently suspect vis a vis crony capitalism.

This is essentially the starting point of 'state capacity libertarianism', but some might say that it's also the starting point for constitutionalism and limited government to begin with. The question of the adequacy of those tools devolves quickly into many offshoots, each which contains its own version of, "Yeah, but how do you get the power to do that?" As I've observed here before, often times, that's sneaking in some bullshit goalposts. For if one could outline a simple set of steps to be done, one other could always respond, "Then why haven't you done it yet?" Yet history marches on, and despite some claims that nothing ever happens, while nothing happens much of the time, some things do happen and change over time.

But enough about real things; let's be silly! Let's go full Great Man Theory and assume we could elect a variant of Donald Trump. Trump has already made some moves toward reducing things to what is required by statute and the Constitution. He's also made some moves, uh, opposite of that. But he has shown how you can sort of just boldly go in and do stuff, forcing the system to adapt around you. What are some of the most hilarious things our variant President could do to drive the system in the direction we want? I'll throw out a good starting one; it's even got the sort of 'hardball negotiating' sense that Trump tries to put off. Our variant President tells the American people that his hands are tied. He's read the Constitution. He saw what it says, and lots of people are talking about it. The Constitution just doesn't authorize an Air Force (or a Space Force, for that matter). Obviously, he doesn't want to abolish the Air Force. It is yugely important for the power and prestige of America. But the Constitution is the Constitution, so unless Congress and the States pass an amendment to the Constitution in the next 90days, he's regrettably going to have to shut the whole thing down.

You start here specifically because it is one of the most absurd places, where technically-proper formalism has not been followed, but everyone gives in and shrugs their shoulders because they prefer power instead. Nobody will have any real argument against formalizing the Constitutionality of the Air Force, either, so it'll probably get done. And that sends a message, giving you political cover. "Now that everyone has agreed that it's important to strictly follow the Constitution and formally authorize any deviations from its very limited grant of power, I'm going to start shutting everything down that isn't properly authorized unless you can get sufficient supermajorities to save it." You could probably take a nice slice out of much of the cronyism. Probably won't get all of it. Could you actually restore a norm of Constitutionalism and limited government? Maybe. Maybe for a while. But then I think we're probably nearing another goalpost that I think is probably also mostly bullshit. Not only "how do you get your policy preferences implemented", but "how do you keep your policy preferences in place forevermore"? That's essentially an unsolvable problem, and it's unsolvable for essentially every political position, not just classical liberalism. It would be an isolated demand for rigor to require it of that political position alone.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States

It's perfectly legal to have an air force. Surely it would be better to go after all those silly extensions of interstate commerce first.

The real problem is that there are structural reasons why states get bigger, I think it's mostly due to technology. Everything a small community can wield, a state can also command. They have small arms, molotov cocktails and mobile phones but also tanks, satellites, huge offices full of bureaucrats. As technology develops, there are more capital-intensive technologies that only states can manage efficiently. The earliest states formed where there was a need to manage irrigation and agriculture in Mesopotamia and other river delta areas. As tech advances, the power of the individual shrinks in the face of the collective and institution.

Not only "how do you get your policy preferences implemented", but "how do you keep your policy preferences in place forevermore"?

It may be an unsolvable problem but there is still stronger and weaker, just like how some men endure old age well while others are sickly. Liberalism has a weak immune system because it is naturally liberal and open to new ideas, including illiberal ideas (queue tired Popper paradox of intolerance meme).

Liberalism isn't rooted in anything tough and reliable like religion or race or patriotism. We see them in all times and places over the world.

When liberalism gets snuffed out (as in ancient Athens, Rome, early modern Poland) it never re-emerges naturally. It only rarely emerges in the first place. Liberalism today is really an Anglo thing, spread by the British who were the most successful country on the most successful continent. If it weren't for British money and troops, later American money and troops, the world would be ruled by profoundly illiberal forces.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States

It's perfectly legal to have an air force.

There are significant concerns with such a flippant reading. The Constitution goes on to explicitly grant particular ways that such a thing can be done. One must read those clauses out of the Constitution in order to take such a broad reading here. A couple examples just to give you a sense of some of the gymnastics that are required. It's pretty clearly motivated reasoning, saying, "I really think we should have an Air Force; how do I torture the Constitution (and my own interpretive system) in order to get the result I want?"

The real problem is that there are structural reasons why states get bigger, I think it's mostly due to technology.

I thought that was actually the crony capitalism business. Crony capitalists want growth of the administrative state and presidential power... so long as they feel they have a decent handle on their ability to steer it to their benefit.

As technology develops, there are more capital-intensive technologies that only states can manage efficiently.

This seems counter to the actual world in which non-states are efficiently managing extremely capital-intensive technologies.

Liberalism has a weak immune system because it is naturally liberal and open to new ideas

I think this is confusing what it means to be a Classical Liberal.

The average man on the street would surely think that it's fine for a state to have an air force, it's basically like a navy or an army (or a force of underground tunnelling vessels were such things invented). Nothing about the US constitution is opposed to air forces on a values level. Whether the air force is a branch of the army or not is really an organizational bureaucratic matter rather than constitutional interpretation. Legislators are allowed to make laws on it.

It's not like the right to bear arms or free speech vs hate speech. If you want to make constitutional arguments, make the strongest arguments that are most easily believable and inspire the most support. Who is going to get energized for the cause of making the air force subordinate to the army?

This seems counter to the actual world in which non-states are efficiently managing extremely capital-intensive technologies.

Corporations develop them but states manage them. States don't like human cloning, it's banned. States want to keep nuclear technology secret, it's secret. The EU decides that we need to click through pop-ups about cookies, millions of man-hours are wasted... The US allocates GPU access around the world, there are tiers of who can and who cannot have them.

I think this is confusing what it means to be a Classical Liberal.

If there are problems with implementing and sustaining an ideology (and there are problems with all ideologies), surely that's relevant in discussing its merits?

The average man on the street

...is wrong about Constitutional stuff all the time.

it's basically like a navy or an army

...uh, which one? The Constitution gives different rules for them, so which set of rules apply?

Corporations develop them but states manage them. States don't like human cloning, it's banned. States want to keep nuclear technology secret, it's secret. The EU decides that we need to click through pop-ups about cookies, millions of man-hours are wasted... The US allocates GPU access around the world, there are tiers of who can and who cannot have them.

This doesn't sound like "management". It sounds like States ban stuff.

I think this is confusing what it means to be a Classical Liberal.

If there are problems with implementing and sustaining an ideology (and there are problems with all ideologies), surely that's relevant in discussing its merits?

Sure... but I think you've just mistaken what it is in starting this analysis.

Whether the air force is a branch of the army or not is really an organizational bureaucratic matter rather than constitutional interpretation.

Yes, this. The Army Air Force was originally part of the Army, and everything was clearly fine with the Constitution. Then the National Defense Act of 1947 changed some names for the Army Air Force and the rest-of-the-Army and hybridized the organizational structure of the Army and Navy, but how does that cause Constitutional problems?

A couple examples just to give you a sense of some of the gymnastics that are required.

I don't consider this gymnastics. It's like saying that freedom of the press applies to television. The founders didn't have television and the Constitution doesn't say anything about television. But you can guess that if someone had magically told them about television, they, or at least a substantial portion of them, would have said that television counts. So you read "press" as including television. Likewise, you should read "army" or "navy" as including the Air Force.

It's true that the Air Force can do things that the army and navy don't, but it's also true that television can do things that printed newspapers can't. That's not really a reason to say that television doesn't have freedom of the press. Also, the exact terminology is irrelevant; if we had by happenstance of language called the Air Force the Flying Navy, that wouldn't change anything.

(Notice that "if they had heard of it, would they count it?" is not the same as "they hadn't heard of it".)

There is significant interpretive difference between individual rights recognized in the Bill of Rights, due to the background of natural/retained rights tradition, as compared to enumerated, limited powers of government. In fact, much jurisprudence actually roots rights WRT television in the free speech clause. Whether or not that is accurate, and whether there should be more of a revival of the free press clause, is above my pay grade (though I have thoughts). But the entire interpretive framework is significantly different from the first step.

The founders did seem to think that there was a meaningful difference between Armies and Navies, naming them separately rather than some unified term and including entirely separate clauses addressing particulars of each. I also agree that if we called the Navy the Floating Army, it probably wouldn't turn the Navy into an Army for purposes of the Constitution. So, I guess my first question is... is the Air Force a Flying Army or a Flying Navy? Because I'm not sure which Constitutional clauses apply to it.

The founders did seem to think that there was a meaningful difference between Armies and Navies, naming them separately rather than some unified term and including entirely separate clauses addressing particulars of each.

Sure, but that seems to substantially agrere with the person who was using "gymnastics".

Michael responds to this post here. His reply is difficult to summarize, but if I understand it correctly, the key claim is that an independent Air Force is permissible under the text of Article I so long as the "powers" it exercises can legitimately be considered either "Army" or "Navy" powers.

If you aren't sure which one it comes under, that's different from not thinking it counts at all. It seems unlikely that the founders would think the Constitution doesn't allow for an air force at all just because you're not sure exactly which thing it's most similar to.

I like how you fail to quote the remainder of that paragraph. The criticism of such a position. But I would go further. The clauses which distinguish between Armies and Navies aren't really providing separate "powers"; that bit was mostly done already. There's some notion of "powers" here, but it's more that they're outlining substantially different modes of operation within the government, speaking even of constraints.

If you aren't sure which one it comes under, that's different from not thinking it counts at all.

I mean, you're the one saying that it counts under one of them. Which one? Why? Do you think it's both somehow? How?

It seems unlikely that the founders would think the Constitution doesn't allow for an air force at all just because you're not sure exactly which thing it's most similar to.

Not "just because". Primarily, it doesn't allow for it, because it's just not in there! It's nowhere to be found! Instead, you're trying to say, "Well... I think it's kinda like these other things... but I can figure out which one or how, what rules will apply, etc., because, well, it's not in there anywhere." The straining gets more obvious every time you try to patch the hole without actually amending the Constitution and patching the hole. Wouldn't it be vastly mentally easier to just amend the Constitution and patch the hole rather than try to continue juggling such epicycles in your head? A proposed amendment could even use more generic language that actually enables future military forces of

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The crazy thing about markets is that they work so well, even under adverse conditions. The Chinese made some necessary compromises and it worked out pretty well for them.

You do point out a very real challenge I am painfully aware of and what is the underlying motivation of why I would write such an essay. The erosion of (classic) liberalism by progressivism has happened; can we stop it? Or are we in the U.S. doomed to the same eventual fate as the UK?

I have made exactly the same argument you do against Christians saying we need to return to Christianity--if that led us here what good would it do to redo things, even if that were possible? (I'd argue the key difference between classic liberalism, at least the free market economics of it, and Christianity is that the latter is not based on a factual understanding of reality.)

In the U.S., classic liberalism got hammered pretty hard starting during the Great Depression for about 50 years on economics, then we had a few decades of half-decent neoliberalism in both parties, and now both parties are largely past neoliberalism for the indefinite future. MAGAfication on the right may actually negatively polarize the left into becoming more neoliberal again, if we're lucky. #silverlinings

And, though my essay is aimed at progressive failures, I figure my best shot of convincing MAGA types that perhaps they should care about market economics, as the GOP once did, is by trashing progressive failures, not Trump and present antimarket policies.

MAGA is not particularly anti-market, though? It’s anti fiscal conservative which brings its own set of issues but MAGA slashes regulations when it can.

Tariffs are very anti-market.

Trump is also fucking with the Fed, labor statistics, and is demanding drug prices be lowered.

These are all very bad things that will likely do great damage, more in the long run than in the short run.

Trump is also fucking with the Fed, labor statistics, and is demanding drug prices be lowered.

Trump's drug price demands seem to be in response to anti-market demands from other countries. He's not wrong about other countries essentially demanding by law that their market freeloads on the American one.

When they do price fixing, it's bad. When Trump does price fixing, it's bad.

Trump's actions will make things worse, not better. He's not proposing something like I don't know we ban pharmaceutical exports to countries that refuse to pay market rates in order to make others pay their fair share. Imagine if he did that little bit of conflict theory! People would freak the fuck out and call him a mass murderer or something, but he'd be justified in threatening a trade war on that front such that America isn't paying for the bulk of innovation.

So this is a case where I think there is a Trumpian approach to perhaps make things actually better, but he's not doing that.

Trump is proposing the drug companies sell in the US for no more than they sell in other developed nations. As far as I can tell, the drug companies could refuse to sell to other price-controlled nations and retain their US pricing that way.

One weird trick diabetics hate.

But that would actually raise prices in the U.S., right, losing foreign sales, since it's typically not marginal cost of production that's the issue; it's the sunk cost of R&D.

So I'd prefer Trump take this issue on directly, and not make it harder for big pharma.

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It's anti-international trade.

MAGA is pro-positive balance of trade. Not anti-trade.

The options are to throw sand in the gears or to not do so. MAGA is in favor of the former. You cannot achieve a positive balance of trade with the methods Trump uses, especially not the particular ways Trump uses (Mercantilism doesn't work, but Trump isn't even doing mercantilism right)

In particular, a positive balance of trade requires negative net foreign investment in the United States by accounting identity. Trump continues to encourage foreign investment in the United States, and to discourage foreign investment by American companies.

From a progressive standpoint, you're not looking at successful systems in hopes of further maximizing efficiency. You are looking for solutions to problems. Expensive projects with dubious results might look economically silly, but the need for them arises from a want. For example, after hearing that a local homeless person froze to death or something. 'We need to do something' always sounds better than 'welp'.

What sounds good vs. what is effective is a common problem, yes.

As a matter of basic logic and follow through, I get a little peeved that if one agrees with the stance that "we, via the coercive power of the state, need to do something" then by god one should make sure it actually is effective. Frequently, this evaluation step is skipped. Homelessness, for example, remains a big problem, and it's typically worse in areas controlled by progressives doing so many things. Just this evening my wife did not want to use our nearby park to put the baby in a swing due to the homeless being all over the playground area (normally they're more broadly dispersed). The city wants to spend millions of dollars on renovating this park but they won't keep the drug-using vagrants away. A homeless man just tried kidnapping a baby out of a stroller at a public transportation station this week, too.

What's funny is that someone like Noah Smith will unironically write that public parks are (in the strict economic sense) public goods. I'd like to show him how easily taxpayer-funded spaces are excludable and rivalrous. Don't even get me started on libraries.

In short, fuck progressivism for being both expensive and ineffective.

Homelessness, for example, remains a big problem, and it's typically worse in areas controlled by progressives doing so many things. Just this evening my wife did not want to use our nearby park to put the baby in a swing due to the homeless being all over the playground area (normally they're more broadly dispersed)

I can't help but notice that it sounds like your problem is "the homeless", more than "homelessness". Progressives, on the other hand, are trying to solve or alleviate "homelessness" - ie the problem experienced by the homeless where they, er, don't have homes. Keeping vagrants out of parks would solve the problem of "the homeless" from the perspective of more fortunate people who are inconvenienced by the presence of the homeless, but it wouldn't do shit to solve the problem of "homelessness" from the perspective of its actual victims, the homeless themselves. Indeed, it would make their lives fractionally worse than they already are, by further restricting their freedom of movement. Certainly if I was homeless it would make a big difference to my already-degraded quality-of-life and dignity whether I was allowed to hang out in pleasant green spaces or not.

Granted, seeing homeless people is by definition evidence that the problem of "homelessness" has not been successfully solved, so your anecdote isn't without value. But "the city (…) won't keep the drug-using vagrants away" is a non sequitur. Setting aside the continued existence of the vagrants, the city's willingness or lack thereof to keep them away from parks says nothing about how effective they are or aren't at solving the problem they're actually tackling, which is "there are human beings wasting away outdoors", not "well-fed well-housed people might sometimes have to set eyes upon the starving wretches, who are gross and scary", or even "sometimes well-fed well-housed people might be in legitimate physical danger if they get too close to concentrations of starving wretches". Improving the actual homeless people's lives is the outspoken priority of progressive authorities, and even if you disagree with that priority, you don't get to call them ineffective because they aren't very good at solving a completely different, if related problem that you think should be higher-priority.

(Another notable element is that the "drug-using" bit is the crux of the problem. For most of human history, it didn't use to go without saying that a bum is by definition a bug-eyed junkie who could at any time freak out and bite your nose off. The problem of "the homeless" is really an extreme case of the general societal problem of "drugs".)

I can't help but notice that it sounds like your problem is "the homeless", more than "homelessness". Progressives, on the other hand, are trying to solve or alleviate "homelessness" - ie the problem experienced by the homeless where they, er, don't have homes.

You are correct that the two problems are distinct.

Where you're wrong is that progressives tend to deny the distinction, and they suck very badly at resolving either due to ideological precommitments that do not align with reality.

Keep in mind that if the vagrants are outside city limits they are no longer of any practical or legal concern of cities.

Improving the actual homeless people's lives is the outspoken priority of progressive authorities, and even if you disagree with that priority, you don't get to call them ineffective because they aren't very good at solving a completely different, if related problem that you think should be higher-priority.

The are pretty fucking bad at it, is my point. Ends, means. Inputs, outputs. Intent, outcome.

Law and fucking order is also supposed to THE primary concern of cities, and all of government actually. So when you foster an open-air drug market next to a playground you're using my tax dollars to fuck over my other tax dollars.

No, not what sounds good vs what is effective. Most of these problems have no proven actionable solutions. From race to homelessness. And often times the problems are linked. The problems are also woven into the moral fabric of progressive ontology that came out of the older 'classical liberal' world.

That goes double for when we are operating within the parameters of what progressive voters will allow to fly or what can actually pass a human inspection. It's all well and good for us here talking about graphs and whatnot, but these debates have been had in the spheres where they matter. Turns out you can't be taken seriously as a classical liberal in civilized society if your answer to the moral impetus that drives progressives forward is bold faced racism or a confident 'welp'.

As a matter of basic logic and follow through, I get a little peeved that if one agrees with the stance that "we, via the coercive power of the state, need to do something" then by god one should make sure it actually is effective. Frequently, this evaluation step is skipped.

Or the evaluation is done and it says the thing was effective. Regardless of whether it was. Because the institutions that do the evaulation are captured by the proponents of the proposal.

In other words, economic feasibility had to be achieved to consider such things at all; formalizing the changes in law is a lagging indicator.

it is trickier, it is similar to slavery: economical progress enables to get rid of it (or makes it much easier), but activism/law also has its place and is necessary to eliminate some abuse that would be present otherwise

Slavery was legal and then made illegal in the West. As a matter of classic liberalism in terms of morality, it was never great to treat some humans as property since that's pretty darn coercive. Economically, coercion usually is not very efficient.

At no point do I or would I say a policy intervention is never called for. I am not an anarcho-capitalist. Some externalities demand government intervention. We should tax carbon and price congestion, for example.

Economically, coercion usually is not very efficient.

Slavery can make sense for the slave owner economically if they have an efficient system for preventing rebellion/runaways/etc or can outsource enforcement to the government or someone else, but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood. You can beat someone into working a good deal, but getting the best out of them is tough through coercion. Some of the smarter slave owners even realized this and would pay cash incentives (or other similar rewards) to productive slaves. Sometimes they would even rent out their slaves to others and allow the slaves to keep a portion of the earnings!

Slavery starts with a disadvantage to begin with, any system with six people working for their own incentives has a numbers and morale advantage over a system with five workers who gain nothing and one lazy layabout who captures most of the gains for themselves.

Then add on that the market distortions of "free" labor adds less individual incentive for owners to invest in new technology that could clear up the workforce to do other economically productive things for someone else who still needs labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands investing in automation when you have a free work force subsidized by the police state? And yet this automation is what we need, so workers can go do jobs that can't be automated yet.

It's also less efficient at distributing labor, a large slave owning operation is functionally a mini planned economy. The owner says who does what, and while the smaller nature of it compared to a country doesn't make it as inefficient, it still suffers.

That doesn't mean slavery can't and doesn't work, even the worst systems still tend to be a little productive because people are doing labor in them but overall as a society having a bunch of rent seeking middlemen tends to be a drain on growth. We see a similar thing now where some labor markets have an opposite issue, workers/unions have too much power and demand a bunch of busy work like elevator workers literally taking things apart and putting them back together that could be better spent elsewhere growing the economy through labor that is actually needed.

Architects have dreamed of modular construction for decades, where entire rooms are built in factories and then shipped on flatbed trucks to sites, for lower costs and greater precision. But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site. Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the U.S.

If slavery is the balance leaning too much towards the employers where they get lazy and inefficient, stuff like this is the balance shifting too much towards workers.

but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood. You can beat someone into working a good deal, but getting the best out of them is tough through coercion.

nitpick: if job is so horrible that noone sane would agree to do it, then your choices include

  • improving job situation
  • relying on few insane people
  • leaving it not done
  • slavery

For example ancient world mines tended to be absolutely horrific, and at least partially it was unsolvable without technological progress. Aztecs were fans of human sacrifice and it is quite hard to get volunteers for that, especially at scale that Aztecs believed to be necessary. Also, bunch of deviant sexual practices.

But all of that is not really applicable in modern world or widely considered to be evil. I guess if you look hard enough you will find people going "actually sex slavery is fine and laudable" and meaning it, but...

Put the factory workers in the same union to demand the right to preassemble and hole drill. Make two wrongs make a right.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't. So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution.

Chattel slavery was illegal in Christian Europe by the High Middle Ages. (This ban never extended to overseas possessions). Serfdom was abolished in the vast majority of France by 1318, and de facto in England by 1500. Serfdom also appears to be the exception rather than the rule in Northern Italy.

Western Europe produces a distinctive civilisation long before that civilisation industrialises.

Slavery was universal in the ancient world, and in some form (state slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom/peonage) right up until shortly after the Industrial Revolution. If non-slaveowning societies really were so much better than slaveowning ones, you'd think some great emancipator would have come along and started wrecking all those slave societies, but they didn't.

Those economies were a pittance compared to the world of today and the free nations are far more wealthier than the less free ones in modern times so it seems like this exact thing happened. Slavery and other similar rent seeking behavior is less of a detriment in a weak economy with weak competition than a global one with more competition.

So slavery's economic inferiority is not inherent in the human condition but a product of modernity. Probably before you have machines, treating people as machines pays off.

And vice versa, the economies that became more free and more capitalist and more willing to use positive incentives to encourage work instead of allowing as many rent seekers to profit off of things they didn't do brought us into the modern world.

It's not the only factor, there's a ton of different important details. But personally unproductive leeches are a drain on society whether they be a slave owner or a union worker demanding busy work.

Those economies were a pittance compared to the world of today

Irrelevant even if true (and I'm not sure a meaningful measurement is possible).

Slavery and other similar rent seeking behavior is less of a detriment in a weak economy with weak competition than a global one with more competition.

There was plenty of competition in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea... but slavery still persisted.

But personally unproductive leeches are a drain on society whether they be a slave owner or a union worker demanding busy work.

Being a slave owner doesn't make you a personally unproductive leech, any more than being a factory owner does.

Irrelevant even if true (and I'm not sure a meaningful measurement is possible).

Yeah it does, any individual inefficiency and weakness is a lot less meaningful when the whole thing is made up of inefficiencies and weaknesses. Like let's use top athletes and gamers as an example, they're having to optimize the most niche and unimportant elements of their field in order to gain an advantage while beginners just have to do simple things like practice a few more times or learn the rules more to get significant improvement. One of the things I noticed watching bronze OW players in vod reviews years back is that quite a few of them just needed to learn what each characters ultimate did.

When there's much bigger issues in a less competitive environment, smaller optimizations don't really give that much of an advantage. A player who knows what the characters do and how to hold high ground and hits 54% of shots will almost always do better than the player who doesn't know but hits 58%.

Being a slave owner doesn't make you a personally unproductive leech, any more than being a factory owner does.

The slave owner doesn't provide zero value, they do serve similar to a factory owner in that they're the peak of management. But unlike modern capitalism where people tend to get in that management position because of talent and skill at management, slavery tends to happen because of skill at other things. Especially back when generational wealth and power was even more meaningful, fail child kings and queens would stay in place until a revolution whereas the big rich names of 50-100 years ago are practically meaningless today. No one is talking about the Rothschilds and the Carnegies, we're talking about Bezos and Musk.

The slave owner doesn't provide zero value, they do serve similar to a factory owner in that they're the peak of management.

Which is a great deal larger than zero.

But unlike modern capitalism where people tend to get in that management position because of talent and skill at management, slavery tends to happen because of skill at other things.

Getting to the top of a hierarchy requires the same basic skills regardless of what the hierarchy is. A cynic would say "backstabbing and douchebaggery", though admittedly it's not ONLY that.

No one is talking about the Rothschilds and the Carnegies, we're talking about Bezos and Musk.

Don't the Rothschilds still run The Economist? If nobody's talking about them (aside from the DR, occasionally), it's because they don't want to be talked about.

But all of this is besides the point, which is that until very recently there weren't any successful non-slaveowning societies. Which very strongly suggests that slavery was an advantage.

It's also less efficient at distributing labor, a large slave owning operation is functionally a mini planned economy.

And now you know why all planned economies are indistinguishable from slave-owning operations.

It doesn't matter if you're less efficient at distributing labor when labor is not the limiting factor in your economy's growth. When labor is so worthless that laborers are actively competing to give it away, you (as a seller of labor) will find you must abide by more and more restrictions to sell that labor. This can include working longer hours, suffering quotas and beatings, not offending the master, actively making your job harder, and so on and so forth.

Note that, as you've identified, this labor isn't actually free to a buyer- you need to provide food and shelter (or the option to acquire those things). You don't even have to post guards if labor is sufficiently worthless (you do need them to ensure you're extracting the maximum potential from your slaves' labor)- there's nowhere for them to go, no better deal to be had, and they know that. It's more economically efficient if you provide these necessities yourself at the lowest resource cost possible, but they must be provided.

A minimum wage under slavery can be (especially when slaves are captured through conquest) zero, but zero is the lowest it can go. When the minimum wage for labor goes negative in an environment like this your slaves have no choice but to come after you for what's stored in your pantry- once enough people die of starvation, the supply of labor contracts, the wage goes back up to zero and equilibrium is restored.

Now, you might think that if something happened that grew agricultural productivity by an order of magnitude that the minimum wage would fall out, but it turns out that's not the case- instead, it freed up so many people to do so many different things that the supply of labor, then educated labor, started to become a limiting factor.

You may know that period as the Renaissance- typified by abolitions of slavery in European nations, AKA the first society-wide minimum wage law. Slavery wasn't abolished in the colonies for obvious economic reasons: the cost of labor was still basically zero there (and subsidized by colonial governments' conquest of those places).

Then add on that the market distortions of "free" labor adds less individual incentive for owners to invest in new technology that could clear up the workforce to do other economically productive things for someone else who still needs labor. Why spend hundreds of thousands investing in automation when you have a free work force subsidized by the police state? And yet this automation is what we need, so workers can go do jobs that can't be automated yet.

No, slave societies invest in automation as much as they're physically able. The reason a slave society becomes a slave society is to get enough food that the most powerful are able to fund this, because if it is unable or unwilling it quickly finds itself enslaved by a rival society. That is why

and one lazy layabout who captures most of the gains for themselves

is ultimately bullshit. While it is a meme for a reason, and market distortions such as 'no rival powers' can result in this- eventually a stronger society comes along and destroys them. The Confederate States lost to the Union because the Union outproduced them, and they outproduced them because their society was more industrious.

Finally, note that the inverse of that statement, "a system with five lazy layabouts who still get paid and one person who does the actual work", is an accurate characterization of unionized workplaces.

stuff like this is the balance shifting too much towards workers.

Note that the market forces that workers' ability to completely capture the regulatory apparatus also leads to depopulation- because said capture will always eventually make it too expensive for workers to produce more workers. This is the real reason TFR was an order of magnitude higher 200 years ago.

Finally, note that the inverse of that statement, "a system with five lazy layabouts who still get paid and one person who does the actual work", is an accurate characterization of unionized workplaces.

Unionized companies spend more on salaries and the like, but do you have evidence for a productivity difference between unionized and non union blue collar workplaces? While there’s surely a profitability difference actual productivity doesn’t seem to differ that much.

but yeah the idea of being slavery being efficient overall is something I've never understood

Indentured servitude fixes this. I'm half kidding, but I think at least two of my ancestors were indentured at Jamestown.

Unions are bad, in my view. Should not be legally empowered by the government as they have been.

Well, yes. That was true of much of the northern U.S. until more recent times.

The problem is that the Europeans can't quite seem to get AC now that they probably ought to have it. It's kind of banned in many places.

Who is spreading this insane nonsense, most of the EU has ACs and Thermal pumps and what have you

It's a meme on twitter because, iirc, Britain and especially London restricts AC in new buildings etc.

That is a citation needed moment. Source - I am from Europe. AC is quite popular and widespread. And treated as necessity during summer. We just don't try to achieve polar temperatures and usually put it to 20-22 C (don't ask me why AC units became such pussies lately)

My recommendation would be to read the article and view the source cited therein as a good starting point.

Honestly I'm surprised this is something someone wants to contest. Do you have a lot of iced beverages in your part of Europe too?

I read it and it doesn't match reality. I look at the façade of my building and out of 40 apartments there are 30+ air conditioners. People use them both to cool in the summer and to heat in the winter. AC are extremely versatile devices when temperatures swing from -20C in the winter to 40C in the summer.

And yes we have ice drinks - we just don't enjoy as much the starbucks travesties - so ice is usually in water, soft drinks or soda water and cocktails. Or you just open an ice cold can of beer and drink it on the go.

We haven't tuned AC to 11 like US because relatively more people in EU live in regions with bearable humidity. And up to 32-33C heat is no problem if humidity is low. You just drink more beer.

Counter anecdote: many parts of Switzerland have serious restrictions on residential AC. Some cities have outright banned them (Basel, Geneva), others require the AC to be powered by solar panels, others just don't allow the heat exchanger of a mini split to be attached to the facade of a building. Those two are de-facto bans on AC in apartments.

When you're talking about Europe, regulations like that will vary wildly between locations, and you'll always find anecdotes supporting whatever side you picked.

Have you ever heard the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data"?

I'm not trying to convince you that your particular eyes are lying to you. But Europe is a pretty big place. In most of it, AC is not very common even as heat waves increase.

There is objective data on this fact. In my essay, I linked to such information. This is not, to my knowledge, a contested set of facts. You could, with the language skills and internet access you have go forth and rapidly find out that either I am right in my characterization, or show data that would force me to reconsider my statements.

But you standing outside of a building and telling me I'm wrong will not cut it because 1) I've been to a bit of Europe and 2) I can read sources describing the overall situation in the U.S. vs. Europe.

In even backwater shithole countries like Romania/Serbia/Bulgaria the use of ACs is overwhelming. You'd be hard pressed to find a building without them, even wearhouses and factories are chock full of ACs. New developments are even required to either have central heating/air or ACs, complete with solar panels on the roof.

Citation, please.

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It's the old established areas of Europe that have an allergy (or ideological objection) to A/C, not the ex-communist countries.

(don't ask me why AC units became such pussies lately)

I have been assured by top conspiracist minds that the refrigerant chemical companies ensure their regulatorily captured lawmakers’ outlaw refrigerants as soon as they go out of patent, purely for environmental reasons of course.

Am HVAC tech. Modern refrigerants are generally ok mechanically. Your theory is widely believed in the field but R410 is a fine refrigerant- it’s high pressure so there’s more leaks but it works just fine when it isn’t leaking. Propane would be even better but neurotic safety regulations the manufacturers oppose means it’s a good while before it’s going to be legal to fill a whole unit with it.

The reason new A/C units suck is because of energy efficiency stuff thats sometimes government environmental regulations and sometimes the factories trying to make it more expensive. Lots of the time it’s bypassed in practice.

From a purely physical/technical perspective, modern refrigerants are fine.

Even refrigerants that completely satisfy our modem sensibilities (low global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential) work as well as they always did. There's no magic sauce in those old fluorocarbons. Hell, even propane and CO2 are basically ideal refrigerants (but require a complete redesign of the cooling circuit, with much beefier parts to allow for much higher pressures).

If legacy AC systems seem to have more power, I'd assume they come with a more powerful compressor, and without pesky electronics that limit that power in any way.

Propane runs at normal Freon pressures. The government limits the amount that goes in a system for neurotic safety reasons(it’s flammable), which restricts its use to refrigerators and smaller air conditioners. But it works very well in those things.

Even refrigerants that completely satisfy our modem sensibilities (low global warming potential, zero ozone depletion potential) work as well as they always did. There's no magic sauce in those old fluorocarbons.

Part of the magic sauce is that they work at lower pressures. Other magic things include that they don't form HF if there's any water in the system, they're compatible with less expensive non-hygroscopic (remember that HF?) oils, they're single component so there's no need to replace all the refrigerant if there's a leak, and the very fact that the environmentalists hate them most makes them cool better. OK, maybe the last one is a myth.

Hell, even propane and CO2 are basically ideal refrigerants (but require a complete redesign of the cooling circuit, with much beefier parts to allow for much higher pressures).

Propane runs fine in a system designed for R-12. The issue with it is flammability.

Propane runs fine in a system designed for R-12. The issue with it is flammability.

While propane's flammability makes repairing systems using it more dangerous, it doesn't make much difference in running the system. It's a significantly better refrigerant than r-134a(the main thing it's replacing now) or r-410a(which, along with 404, it's likely to displace a lot of in the coming years) but a slightly worse one with similar drawbacks to r22(which has been banned/in phaseout for a while).

I don't know. But my first AC that I bought in 2004 went down to 16C, was stupid and made the room a walk in freezer. My current - lowest setting is 18C and has all kind of smart bullshit to prevent it going full blast. Up to the point that I think of tinkering with the thermistor to convince the bastard to play fairly.

That has nothing to do with the Freon, that’s energy saving stuff.

  1. Poverty: capitalism works, redistribution doesn’t (or worse)
  2. Cost of living/services: Due to government subsidizing demand and restricting supply
  3. Welfare: Unfair redistribution
  4. Labor rights: Due to economic growth and competition, not unions
  5. The New Deal: Prolonged the Great Depression
  6. Rust Belt decline: Automation and unions, not free trade
  7. Europe: Low growth and health and pension crises
  8. Progressive governance: High spending and bad results

Did I miss anything? Which ones do you disagree with? I am not sure about 6: it could still be that a dollar that is too strong (expensive) harms exports. The problem there is still not the free market, rather underprovision of dollars in global markets.

Good work I'd say. Thank you.

For 6, I don't believe the dollar's relative value is a major issue for decades of trends.

Re #6 - Indeed.

However, only one major trading partner artificially keeps their currency undervalued - in order to stimulate inward investment at the expense of its own purchasing power on the open market (China).

I think it was Trace who mentioned recently that, for all the growth China has experienced, it still greatly lags behind what it could have been if it followed the example of any of the other Tiger economies.

I won't argue against this rampant line-go-up apologia because, well, I think Mises is right in the final analysis; but this is bad argumentation for your stated goal because progressives do not share the basic priors that make these numbers convincing to you.

Moreover, they have their own numbers that you don't find convincing.

If you want to convince anyone of something, you have to start from within their worldview and chart a path to wherever it is you want to take them, and you better be very nice doing it too, people are easily scared (and rightfully so, actually).

Without that, you are in danger of merely engaging in congratulating your own side for having a worldview that correctly fits their perception of the world. This is a very popular game, and quite a lucrative one too, but as you might have surmised by observing your enemies engaging in it, it's not very effective political propaganda.

I think Mises is right in the final analysis

I'm more of a Hayek and Friedman guy myself. Utilitarianism libertarianism > deontological libertarianism.

but this is bad argumentation for your stated goal because progressives do not share the basic priors that make these numbers convincing to you

The para re: policy effectiveness sets that up a basic shared prior of caring about means and ends.

If someone fundamentally does not care about measuring ROI of policy interventions, then what can one do. One can lead a horse to facts...

Moreover, they have their own numbers that you don't find convincing.

Not remotely good ones they don't. I actually read Capital in the 21st Century and I've taken econ courses from Marxists, so I'm pretty familiar with the other side of the aisle here.

That's kinda my whole thesis here: I used to accept those numbers as part as that narrative. Then I learned better.

Without that, you are in danger of merely engaging in congratulating your own side for having a worldview that correctly fits their perception of the world.

My "side" here is currently out of power or even major influence in either of the two major U.S. political parties right now.

Being right is clearly insufficient!

If someone fundamentally does not care about measuring ROI of policy interventions, then what can one do.

There's an entire world of rhetoric that's not just logical arguments. Use that.

And if your mind goes "oh but it's all dirty underhanded manipulation" then get comfortable coping that you lost in a gracious fashion, because that's all that's gonna happen.

My "side" here is currently out of power or even major influence in either of the two major U.S. political parties right now.

You got pretty close, but then Trump laughed your guy out of the room after using him.

Might get a little bit of deregulation, SEC isn't out to ruin anyone doing anything, that's gotta be a win. Plus SCOTUS is surprisingly willing to tear into the administrative state. Take that, build on it. Goad either side into destroying it on the grounds that their rivals will use it, anything. Just because you don't have Milei running the show doesn't mean you have to be benign.

Being right is clearly insufficient!

Then act like it, dammit.

There's an entire world of rhetoric that's not just logical arguments. Use that.

There's the saying that you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. I don't 100% buy that because I myself have disproved it on major beliefs at least three times, but it is often true in practice.

The point of the essay was to, as much as possible, list clear facts that I don't think reasonable people can disagree with on an object level. Using much rhetoric would defeat the style of trying to list clear facts. (To my knowledge, there isn't such a list of these facts all in one place [or a current one, at least]. If there were, I'd have written something different.)

There's no one single way to convince a particular person of any given thing at any given time. I acknowledge my approach has the tradeoffs it does. (Part of my worldview is acknowledging tradeoffs.) Plus, rhetoric is typically more words and my list was already pretty dang long, practically speaking.

Also, if we're debating the metalevel relative merits of persuasive strategies using the written word, rhetoric is a symmetric weapon. For example, Marxists can wax poetic about solving inequality just us much as I can lovingly describe personal liberty. I think you could call both Adam Smith and Karl Marx talented writers in terms of style. But as soon as we start talking about facts I get to beat Marxists to death with empirical results and basic math.

You got pretty close, but then Trump laughed your guy out of the room after using him.

One thing I will say for Trump is that he does seem to be restrained by "numba go down." That doesn't help avoid the subtler long term damage to growth, but if certain other presidents had cared about market reactions we'd be a richer country. Shame about DOGE being mostly a clown show.

It would be excellent if SCOTUS is able to overturn certain very bad no good decisions that led to significant government intervention.

Come on son, at least put the primary parts of the essay here, if not the whole thing.

Is there an easy way to port over a substack article with images and links?

I don't see one, so I tried to provide enough context to tell someone whether they might want to click or not.

It was ages ago, it got reinstated, I know I should get over it.... but man, every time something like this happens, I can't stop thinking about an article from a 50 year old magazine, that I had to have shipped from half way across the world, and manually re-type, that got deleted by the mods for being a "bare link"...

Well that's annoying.

Yeah, you're advertising your substack. That's not my idea of quality motte content but I guess nobody else gives a shit so whatever.

I'll probably check it out later but it would be nice to have some examples in bullet-point format.

There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions--source

I have a different perspective here, where a) I think it's conceptually possible, b) the interesting question is whether people who say they are are really only doing the pure altruism. I first encountered the term pure altruism in two papers by James Andreoni, from 1989 and 1990. In them, Andreoni lays out a model of altruistic giving, where agents contribute to a public good both because they value it in itself, but also because they get a private benefit, a "warm glow". He has some nice academic results, like a quick mechanism for indexing one's own altruism (if one was taxed one dollar less, or a thousand, how much more would one donate?), and other observations (taxation may not produce warm glow, and as a result increasing taxation by some amount doesn't reduce donations by that amount; when parents get a warm glow from giving to their children, children are incentivized to be more "spoilt" in a technical sense).

Are people who are saying they are doing pure forms of altruism actually doing so? Often not so. There are aspects of the EA community that just don't make sense by considering its participants as pure white cherubs of innocence and selflessness, although each particular case will be uncertain and ambiguous, and although pointing the discrepancy is tricky.

One of the biggest bets Open Philanthropy—a large philanthropic foundation I'm acquainted with—is making is in its own people. 161 people, earning say 150K to 250K salaries, with overhead of 20% to 40% (?) is 30M to 52M/year—probably higher than any one of their grants in 2024 and 2025. This does not include the cost of their office, another cool 16.5M. This leads them to have a class interest: they are invested in that form of doing philanthropy—rather than anonymous part-time rotating grantmakers whose funds under management grow or shring depending on their evaluated success (like the Survival and Flourishing Fund).

Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed outlines how this happened with the apparatchik in Russia. The apparatchik are in charge of the wellbeing of the Soviet Union and ended up reallocating ressources to themselves. Some of my experience is that the grantmakers just want to be sucked up to, their ideas confirmed, their egos upheld, their strategies validated, their personalities admired. But at the same time they are selected for not rocking the boat in a deep way. More mundanely, people get grants from projects that don't work out, and don't pivot, because they think that would involve losing their jobs. EA seems like a failed Schelling point to me, because it advertises itself as doing pure altruism, but the actors end up fighting for their own self-interest, sometimes in quite obvious ways.

Is pure altruism selected out? If you do something for someone such that you don't get something out of it, can you continue doing that into the future? What is the mechanism? I think this is a key question that leads to rederiving some form of non-naïve form of altruism. Or alternatively, it leads to exploiting the pure altruism until its ressources are exhausted. One of the first guys to think about this ended up killing himself.

On the other side, pure altruism can be understood essentially as a mating display because it's a costly signal of strength, and it. The underlying purpose of ideology X isn't ideology X, it's displaying that you can still be a well-adjusted person even with its iron around your neck. Some version of this is fine by me, but the problem becomes when people really believe their ideologies and do cripple themselves for real, as happened with Germany's industrial economy as a result of their terrible energy policy. This matters to me, I made a heavily real, non-fake investment in learning German. I passed the C1 exam but probably at some point did have a C2 level in German. Now I just do business with Americans instead. I also do find it aesthetically distasteful when people do something which is nominally about, e.g., helping the homeless in a way that makes the problem worse, partly because nobody taught me how to do the Straussian reading.

At the same time, how do you coordinate around public goods? One cool answer is dominant assurance contracts but in practice this hasn't been implemented much, perhaps because the people who could have jobs as grantmakers they would rather preserve, but also because part of the problem of setting up a new project is just distribution, and you have a chicken an egg problem here (you could do a dominant assurance funding model if only you had already built the distribution funnel for your thing, but that's a big part of the job).

Anyways one answer here is to try to get people in man vs. nature games because man v. man conflicts are just fucked up.

I think that pure altruism is only impossible under the one definition that also renders "selfless behaviour" trivially impossible. You choose your own actions, so you naturally choose the ones you like the best, even if what you like the best is something like "to mistreat myself for the sake of others".

But let's talk psychology: Our mental states exist in a high-dimensional space, and one of the dimensions seems to be poverty-abundance. This is easy to miss if you haven't experienced the extremes of both. Do you know insecure people who are like black holes for compliments, affection and reassurance? That's the minus pole. But the plus pole also exists - a state where it becomes uncomfortable not to give. You'll usually have to be on drugs or to spend years doing spiritual practices in order to reach this state, but it's very real and basically a pure altruistic mindset.

And I have a reason to think that this behaviour will not disappear: It benefits the invidual, even when they do not do it for the sake of benefits. Positive states of being are psychologically healthy for the same reason that negative states of being are associated with dying earlier. And while altruism seems dangerous in that it's reverse eugenics, you can only be altruistic by improving yourself to be more than self-sufficient, so it's a kind of inverse parasitism.

On a negative note: I think it's literally impossible to protect society against exploitation without ruining every pleasant part of it. What follows from this is scary: Rules are bad. They're literally symptoms of problems rather than solutions to them. You cannot fix every loophole - you can only get rid of the type of person who would exploit a loophole.

Actually, I just realized a series of things - The way we're trying to reduce suffering is destroying all human experience. The way we're trying to minimize crime will result in the minimization of human freeedom. The way we're trying to model everything is destroying all mystery and wonder. Our attempts of reducing mistakes to zero is reducing meaningful actions taken to zero. You cannot solve all problems without killing all innovation. You cannot destroy competition without destroying growth. Many things are rotting because we refuse to let them die. I believe these are in the category of 'Complementarity Principles'.

Rules are bad. They're literally symptoms of problems rather than solutions to them. You cannot fix every loophole - you can only get rid of the type of person who would exploit a loophole.

Closing loopholes affects bad actors on the margin. Yes, someone who's sufficiently determined can find loopholes in almost anything. But it can be easier or harder to find loopholes, and it can be easier or harder to get those loopholes past that subset of judges who are actually fair.

The second amendment has probably done quite a bit for the right to bear arms even though state and Federal government constantly finds loopholes to work around it.

Closing loopholes affects everyone, not just bad actors. You degrade the whole system in order to harm a subset. Every rule and regulation does, at least when these rules and regulations only place new restrictions. I'm not sure about the effect of restrictions which limit other peoples ability to place restrictions, it's harder to solve the general case of that question.

Rules tend to limit things to the lowest common denominator, this doesn't just protect those below, it also harms those above. We're also part of a dynamic system, and these tend to balance themselves. If you find a way to make X half as dangerous, then people tend to be half as careful when they do X, and then you're back where you started. This "you're back where you started" seems to explain why introducing new rules for centuries haven't gotten us anywhere. We made laws in the 1500s to combat theft, and even today we're making new laws to combat theft. I think it's safe to conclude that laws do not work, and that further laws also won't work.

I recommend an entire new way of looking at these issues. Some rules are better than others, but I think we should look at these issues in a different perspective, one which is so different that our current perspective doesn't make any sense. I like this quote by Taleb:

"I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;

at the state level, Republican;

at the local level, Democrat;

and at the family and friends level, a socialist"

If the optimal level of trust in other people is inversely proportional to the size of the system, then the optimal system is different at every scale. And one way in which you can lessen restrictions is through decentralization (running many small systems in parallel). This is merely my own answer to the question, but it seems correct. After all, the amount of rules a system has (and perhaps needs) seems to depend on its size. Family members don't usually make rules for one another. This also explains why Reddit got worse as it grew larger, until themotte had to move to its own website. And this website is largely independent from larger systems (decentralized). If this website grew in size and popularity by a factor of 10 or 100, it would either need more rules and regulations, or be shut down.

Of course, this mathematical property is not set in stone - 4chan had few rules for its size at every scale. This is either because 4chan users are more tolerant of the tradeoffs of freedom, or because the social power of moral arguments was smaller on 4chan (less moralizers = less people suggesting that you ruin everything for everyone to prevent some kind of abuse going on).

These websites are merely examples, I'm trying to solve (or model, since no solution seems to exist) the most general case of imposing restrictions on behaviour order to prevent exploitation of a system. My conclusions so far are "there are only trade-offs" and "what systems are possible depends just as much on the people inside said systems as it does on the design of said systems"

Positive states of being are psychologically healthy

you can only be altruistic by improving yourself to be more than self-sufficient, so it's a kind of inverse parasitism.

mmmh!! top points, thanks

Isn't it the case that as a society we want people to be altruistic, so we teach them to feel good/get a positive reinforcement from what they perceive as good acts? The ethical question of 'purity' is interesting if you're a philosopher but doesn't seem practically useful. Even martyrs hold to their faith because they have a belief in a higher/eternal good that outweighs the temporal loss. Indeed, anyone who trades good for bad is making an error - I don't think anyone does so deliberately.

I mean, we want people to be prosocial, provide public goods, play cooperative games, coordinate around positive outcomes. But you don't want this to be suicidal. Not sure if that's just a restatement. of what you are saying.

Suicidal, no. Willing to sacrifice for a higher good, potentially to the point of giving your own life? That's what every society has tried to inculcate, typically in the military but often in other areas too.

Anyway, the question to ask is - altruistic towards whom? Depending on how you want to define it, 'true altruism' might require equal altruism towards all humans, or even towards all animals/living things/etc. You can always be more even-handed and unbiased in your charity. Or, alternatively, maybe it's more altruistic to help those you hate or who are different from you. Either way you define it, though, the concept seems meaningless to me because you can always be more 'true', so asking whether 'true altruism' exists is just a game of drawing arbitrary lines.

In reality, charity begins at home - and this is psychologically sensible, generally beneficial to societies, corresponds to our conceptions of responsibility and duty, and therefore is what we actually teach people.

Yeah, the altruism question is interesting, and I've seen what I might describe as "weaponized altruism," where an individual commits an act of self-sacrifice with the hope and intent of convincing someone else to commit to an act of even greater self-sacrifice.

Or perhaps the classical example where someone engages in an altruistic act that leaves them worse off, but they perceive that doing so will let them acquire increased social status in that particular situation, and they'll be able to trade on that social status for greater gains in the long term.

I define 'real' altruism in terms of incurring some material loss that is in excess, ideally far in excess, of the expected gains of taking the action, and that someone else is the expected beneficiary of the action.

On the extreme end this would mean dying or incurring some devastating injury in order to ensure someone else lives.

Even in less extreme cases, I don't now that its possible to live a whole life devoted to this ideal, because your ability keep incurring costs is bounded.

So I see it as only being represented in individual acts, and there are individuals who are capable of committing to such acts when the time comes, and those who will default to whatever is actually in their direct self interest.

This is of course one of the oldest questions in meta-ethics, known to the Greeks as the Euthyphro dilemma:

"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

Substituting "the gods" for whatever is the source of the workings of the universe.

There's a large variety of answers to this, from divine command theory, to moral realism, to many others that reject or make meaningless the question, from Thomism to moral skepticism. Take your pick.

I tend to work under the faith based assumption that the world was not constructed by evil, and that there is thus unity between virtue and flourishing in the long run. On account of the terrible track record of gnosticisms.

I think "pure altruism" is a strawmanning of EA in general and Open Philanthropy in particular. One of EA's main tenets is that the traditional hyperfocus on overhead costs of charities is unhelpful as a measure of actual efficacy. If you want smart, driven people to do good work in allocating resources, paying them something like market rate is advisable. Otherwise, you're selecting on something other than merely talent for the job.

Of course, it's always possible OpenPhil is actually bad at their stated mission for whatever reason, including design flaws. So having different models out there, like volunteer crowdsourcing, is a good thing.

Famously, the Soviets did not rely on charitable giving to fund their efforts. Donors can always stop donating.

Scott has addressed this kind of thing--how much altruism is mandated or what is sufficiently pure--multiple times. Numerous essay in EA Land focus on the emotional unsustainability of pure altruism.

Some level of partiality/self-interest is allowable on pragmatic grounds alone. Martyrdom should not be a standard requirement.

it's always possible OpenPhil is actually bad at their stated mission for whatever reason, including design flaws.

OpenPhil might be the 800 pound gorilla funding EA, but it is useful to remember that OpenPhil is not particularly EA.

Scott has addressed this kind of thing--how much altruism is mandated or what is sufficiently pure--multiple times.

While in the past Scott has written about the burden being easy and the yoke light, he went on to donate a kidney and wrote that one should keep climbing the tower. I am skeptical that his past writings on addressing the questions of purity are, uh, pure.

There are many degrees of purity. Ultimately, one can always sacrifice more for the cause.

Scott seems to genuinely enjoy his life in terms of material comfort, in addition to his significant charitable giving. And the kidney.

So whatever the threshold is for diminishing returns on his charitable endeavors, he seems to be on the sustainable side.

wrote that one should keep climbing the tower.

I think you actually managed to interpret that exactly backwards. In addition to misapplying it contextually.

He wrote that one should retreat down to the lowest level of the tower one finds necessary to fulfill one's moral obligations. If you don't share those foundational assumptions, then that's fine. But plenty of people in the West ostensibly do.

He wrote that one should retreat down to the lowest level of the tower one finds necessary to fulfill one's moral obligations.

I disagree, the last exchange of his example suggests that when you've retreated to that lowest level, someone like Scott should come along to keep nudging you up the layers:

Q: FINE. YOU WIN. Now I’m donating 10% of my income to charity. A: You should donate more effectively.

The person is not left to be comfortable at their fulfillment level.

I also continue to think it's interesting that he opposed this kind of shenanigan in his What We Owe The Future review, published the next day, TINACBNIEAC:

This series of commitments feels basically right to me and I think it prevents muggings.

But I’m not sure I want to play the philosophy game. Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms.... I realize that will intuitively feel like leaving some utility on the table - the first step in the chain just looks so much obviously better than the starting point - but I’m willing to make that sacrifice.

He perceives the muggings can't really be prevented, that there's always going to be another switch, and a rational choice is to avoid the whole game and choose different axioms.

I disagree, the last exchange of his example suggests that when you've retreated to that lowest level, someone like Scott should come along to keep nudging you up the layers

So? What's wrong with a nudge? Coercion is bad. Persuasion is fine.

But, again, isn't Scott doing the thing where he's actually arguing down from the "purists"?

The person is not left to be comfortable at their fulfillment level.

Isn't that contradicting the point of him saying the whole 10% line is a totally great place to be comfortable?

also continue to think it's interesting that he opposed this kind of shenanigan

He's trying to find a reasonable middle ground. For people like him. For the more typical person. For anyone.

Scott perceives that unbounded moral philosophy is a mug's game. So bind it a little.

What is obligatory? What is supererogatory? Reasonable people can disagree and avoid muggings.

I think the issue here is that you perceive Scott is expressing two different stances, but I see him saying the same basic thing. Figure out what the obligatory minimum, satisfice, and then anything beyond that is extra credit, but there's no reason to beat oneself up over maximization or allow a philosophical mugging.

One of EA's main tenets is that the traditional hyperfocus on overhead costs of charities is unhelpful as a measure of actual efficacy. If you want smart, driven people to do good work in allocating resources, paying them something like market rate is advisable. Otherwise, you're selecting on something other than merely talent for the job.

Yes, but the problem is that if you are giving them good salaries, you are selecting for the ability to tell good stories to donors in exchange for money. There's a reason why charities have tended to be suspicious of such structures: they have no in-built market correction so they're easy to turn into guilt-tripping sinecures. (GiveWell is fine but it's like a regulatory body and is straightforwardly capturable, so doesn't count.) That's why charities have traditionally relied on a combination of:

  • scions of wealth
  • wives of wealthy men
  • men who've made their money and want to give back to the community (or, cynically, to barter wealth for influence)

Since none of them need money. Of course, this still biases charities towards sounding good rather than doing good, but that's really really hard to avoid.

Of course, this still biases charities towards sounding good rather than doing good, but that's really really hard to avoid.

Amen.

See also: Welfare Democracy

Ultimately, donors have to do their due diligence on efficacy and voters on sustainability.

Some things may be straw men of EA, but IMO it has made a lot of obvious errors as a movement, stretching its reputation to the point I don't think it maintains much credibility with people who are not already bought into charity qua charity. That most of EA freaked out about the PEPFAR cancelling is a great example. Its a 22 year old program that still requires massive outside subsidies, and there is no visible point on the horizon where that will not be true. You can call it many things, but "effective" is not one of them. Thats like calling a family where, after 22 years all the kids are still in the house, barely passing classes, and with no jobs and no prospects "effective parenting."

That's like saying that medical care is pointless, because even I save a child from dying of anaphylactic shock, they'll grow old and die anyway. Then they might have kids, who will, if they're not prone to atopy, still inevitably die.

I'm not an EA, and I don't particularly care about people with HIV in Africa, but I still find this a weak criticism at best. They believe that extending/saving lives is good, which I can't disagree with on a general principle. I'm certainly not on the shrimp welfare train, but I must concede that if you care about that inane cause, you might as well make sure your money is as effective as it can be.

That's like saying that medical care is pointless, because even I save a child from dying of anaphylactic shock, they'll grow old and die anyway. Then they might have kids, who will, if they're not prone to atopy, still inevitably die.

That makes little sense. The child has great potential, if saved, to do things that are positive and good, like have children of their own, like start a business or work at a business. If you are talking about old age care, correct. The government should not be in that business, medicare, despite being highly popular is probably the worst program ever implemented by the US Government.

I'm not an EA, and I don't particularly care about people with HIV in Africa, but I still find this a weak criticism at best. They believe that extending/saving lives is good, which I can't disagree with on a general principle. I'm certainly not on the shrimp welfare train, but I must concede that if you care about that inane cause, you might as well make sure your money is as effective as it can be.

But keeping people alive with money is just bog standard charity. If you want a modifier like "effective" you should earn it.

Once again, I will state that I'm not an EA.

That being said:

The core tenet of Effective Altruism is a semi-universalist strain of utilitarianism. They genuinely believe that extending lifespan, particularly healthy lifespan, is good in of itself. In a vacuum, all else being equal, I have no reason to disagree. The real world, unfortunately, has atmosphere.

They tie themselves in knots evaluating the relative impact of charity. They (correctly) claim that donating to that breast cancer charity that hands out pink ribbons is a waste of money compared to distributing malaria nets or antiretrovirals. At least in terms of naive QALYs or DALYs.

An African with HIV, in their eyes, is interchangeable with any other human. I have a far more cynical outlook, but I cannot argue values, I care far more about actual potential. To a first approximation, their approach works. I get off the train because I both, don't really care, and because I think consequentialism demands more thought cycles that consider second order effects.

So an essential part of EA is extreme blank slatism to such extremes they even apply it to adults.

Blank slatism for adults isn't extreme, as it isn't limited to EA, nor limited to progressives. It's a part of mainstream Western white culture, e.g., magic dirty theory. Or see for a specific example, a white woman forgiving her mother and cousin's murderer (who's of the demographic one might expect), hiring him to work on her property, only to get murdered by him herself.

Yeah, I don't think that sort of thinking is held by anything close to a majority of Americans.

Why is "requiring outside subsidies" an issue?

What charities are more effective per dollar than PEPFAR?

Requiring outside subsidies is an issue because your program turns into a self licking ice cream cone. This seems true for PEPFAR. The purpose of PEPFAR is to keep the people on PEPFAR alive which then demands more money to keep the same people alive in the future. There is no expectation that PEPFAR recipients will erect an anti-retroviral factory anytime soon so they can provide themselves the drugs, nor any other factory that will allow them to be productive enough to actually buy them at market price. The expectation, rather, is this program will be a moneysink for the remainder of my lifetime. This is, of course, a problem with most large charities. Effective charities are almost always more targeted and more discriminatory. An adoption program that places kids with well vetted parents, a financial support network for widows of fallen soldiers and police officers, etc. Such programs are effective in that they are targeted towards an end: creating functional adults who can be independent, positive contributors to society. Public schools are an example of a failed attempt at effective altruism. In theory educating the public could have positive externalities. In practice, they have proven to be moneysinks because the reality of schooling is it is related to, but is not actually education, and human teaching ends up approximating a garbage-in-garbage out model. You can predict the outcomes of an incoming kinder-garden class with fairly good accuracy with just the demographics of the children, while ignoring the teachers almost entirely.

Retrovirals work. They let people lead normal lives, and make HIV no longer a death sentence. We now have semi-experimental vaccines that stave off the disease, and I strongly expect a full cure being on the market within a decade at most.

Even if PEPFAR wanted to run indefinitely, it will face the guinea worm 'problem' of not having a disease to tackle, and unless you're 70 years old, it'll happen in your lifetime.

I'll generally defend PEPFAR on its own merits, but the blackpill for PEPFAR-as-promoted is less about the effectiveness of the drugs themselves, and what the actual provisioning of even very effective drugs actually looks like, on the ground. This discussion is specific to PrEP (and this context that got me to write it up), but as far as I can tell it's pretty endemic to the program in the areas it's most critical.

That might change literally overnight if a full cure, extremely long-lasting PrEP, or sufficiently easy and effective vaccine comes about and is accepted, but I'm not highly confident for even that.

So its just like a normal charity. It keeps people alive who cant keep themselves alive. Its a charity you anticipate will no longer exist in 70 years due to scientific advances wholly unrelated to the charity and the people who benefit from it, other than the fact they will also incidentally benefit from those advances.

70 years? 20 at the worst. I would take bets at worse than even odds at a mere ten.

I really don't understand this line of thinking. It's akin to condemning advocating lifestyle 'solutions' for diabetes right before they discovered porcine insulin. After people have been publishing papers saying, hey, this funny little trick seems to work.

That is still wholly unrelated to PEPFAR. You aren't alleging that PEPFAR recipients are at the bleeding edge of HIV-cure research are you?

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I think one can simultaneously believe that perhaps PEPFAR should not exist forever as a U.S.-funded program and believe that the way DOGE handled it was an unnecessary travesty that caused needless suffering.

But also you seem to be conflating "effective" with "solves something permanently" when those are not always the same thing. Sometimes the latter is not possible via charity but an effective band aid of sorts is feasible.

But really I'm not the guy to defend EA because I'm not one myself on several fronts.

What was needless? PEPFAR can either be cancelled or continued. If it is continued, there is needless suffering on those providing the funds and the marginal increase in prices in paying markets for the drugs. If it is discontinued the people getting the free shit suffer. There is always suffering. The only way you are reducing suffering is if you have an EV+ outcome, like if you teach a guy how to make houses, then he makes a lot of good houses, now he gets money for making houses, other people get houses.

The issue with the house-building-teaching-charity is it isn't scalable. You have to be judicious and wise who you teach to build houses. Not only are there diminishing returns on house-builders in any economy, there also is the issue of many people being unable to learn to be good house builders. So you have to keep your program small and admissions must be selective.

The abrupt end with little chance for handover to a different org/funding source.

How something is ended can matter quite a lot. This was not done gracefully. Or constitutionally, but that's a procedural issue.

I don't think PEPFAR and home construction training programs are a worthwhile comparison.

You really, really don't have to sell me on the downsides of humanitarian interventions as a general rule.

The abrupt end with little chance for handover to a different org/funding source.

How does this change the problem of the program being bad? PEPFAR is bad. It keeps people alive for the sole purpose of spending money to keep them alive.

How something is ended can matter quite a lot. This was not done gracefully. Or constitutionally, but that's a procedural issue.

Its end was at least as legitimate as its illegitimate beginning. The program is obviously unconstitutional.

I don't think PEPFAR and home construction training programs are a worthwhile comparison.

Why not? These are both hypothetical subsidies to Africans. In one scenario you subsidize sexual deviancy, in the other you subsidize housing. This is a worthwhile comparison in that obviously subsidizing sexual deviancy is bad.

PEPFAR is bad. It keeps people alive for the sole purpose of spending money to keep them alive.

I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.

Not sure I'd agree with that proposition, however. I'm not much of a Christian, but I do think George W. Bush had his heart in a charitable place when he got the program going.

The program is obviously unconstitutional.

Congress allocating funds? Is all foreign aid unconstitutional by definition? Generally, the constitution is far more free-wheeling on doing things for foreign policy than it is for domestic policy.

This is a worthwhile comparison in that obviously subsidizing sexual deviancy is bad.

And being able to build houses would also be bad? Like what on earth do you think you're arguing by comparison here?

Those are very different things, to me, personally. Like, sure, most sexual deviancy probably happens in houses, which someone had to build, but that's true of a broad range of human activities. Am I to understand that building more houses would lead to more sexual deviancy?

Like houses are not inherently bad, right? And training locals to build their own housing gets around the classic problem of just providing a good such that the local market demand is satisfied and domestic production gets hurt. Now such training may or may not be a worthwhile charitable intervention, but it's not obviously terrible by default.

You can argue that PEPFAR is not just ineffective, but bad for reasons of sexual deviancy or whatever else without talking about African housebuilding, I think.

I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.

Not sure I'd agree with that proposition, however. I'm not much of a Christian, but I do think George W. Bush had his heart in a charitable place when he got the program going.

I mean, the market puts little to no value on their lives. I am simply pointing out that there is nothing different about keeping people alive for the sake of keeping them alive in PEPFAR than any other boring charity like food stamps or Medicaid. I suppose these people kept alive can also threaten to immigrate, which is a bad thing. So yeah. Why is this "effective?"

Congress allocating funds? Is all foreign aid unconstitutional by definition? Generally, the constitution is far more free-wheeling on doing things for foreign policy than it is for domestic policy.

Foreign aid is arguably unconstitutional, but the inception of PEPFAR was not approved by Congress. They may arguably have adopted it later on, but the inception was just GWB going rogue.

And being able to build houses would also be bad? Like what on earth do you think you're arguing by comparison here?

No the point of the comparison is that my house building program IS actually good and effective, so long as you keep it small in scope. You scout 10 potentially talented homebuilders and spend time, money, and resources training them. Then they go out and make their world better by building homes. PEPFAR does nothing of the sort. It just lets anyone who contracted a deadly STD keep on living with no scrutiny as to whether they can or will make the world better by their continued existence, and past performance indicates not so.

You can argue that PEPFAR is not just ineffective, but bad for reasons of sexual deviancy or whatever else without talking about African housebuilding, I think.

I was posing a hypothetical charitable educational program that had the potential for being effective, not just a self licking ice cream cone.

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I suppose if you place zero or negative value on the lives saved by PEPFAR, then yeah, obviously. End it yesterday.

How much of the lives of the Americans paying are you willing to sacrifice to allow Africans to have happy fun times without consequences?

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strawmanning of EA in general

I think EA does have a fair share of pure altruists. I know of at least four people that have gone celibate over the last few years as a result of being too concentrated on their jobs (and I claim they could have had romantic success if they had chosen to). I think coordinating around "we are doing the most good" also has an easy attractor in pure altruism.

the Soviets did not rely on charitable giving to fund their efforts

The thing I was pointing at is that the job of the apparatchiks was to nominally be pure altruists towards the population of Russia as a whole, and this predictably failed.

That there are some "pure" altruists in EA is not what I am picking at. The essays I reference are targeted at that very phenomenon because it is a thing some people do. Selection effects are what they are. You are making points without the knowledge of what is already been discussed on the topic. Go google "avoiding EA burnout" and you'll find a plenty of stuff on this front.

The thing I am pointing at is that comparing Soviet anything to EA is apples to hand grenades. Donors are not coerced. OpenPhil analysts are not employees of the state, and aimed at "doing the most good" insofar as they can figure that out. The failure mode that is most apt is the standard "NGO Industrial Complex" where organizations exist to exist, not to actually solve the problem in their mission statement.

You are making points without the knowledge of what is already been discussed on the topic. Go google "avoiding EA burnout" and you'll find a plenty of stuff on this front.

I think you are empirically wrong on this. E.g., if you go to one of the most upvoted such essays you will see my comment at the top. But it's been a while. Maybe there is much that I have forgotten.

https://www.google.com/search?q=avoiding+effective+altruism+burnout

No, this really wasn't much better than posting a LMGTFY. Don't do this.

When someone obstinately denies easily checked facts what do you suggest?

(a) Let it go and disengage. (b) Provide links to specific citations and proactively provide an explanation of their relevance. (c) Consider the possibility that they are not "ignoring facts" but that you are both interpreting the same evidence in a way that caters to your own biases and that you need to actually make an argument.

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Not the greatest comment for two reasons. First, it’s too snarky by half. Second, my word, that’s a lot of unnecessary tracking info. In case you don’t know, you could have deleted everything after the first “&” and been fine.

I could have made it worse and use the ol' LMGTFY.

There are some people in this conversation on various topics, like air conditioning units in Europe, that seemingly want to endlessly debate a relatively minor point that could be resolved with a quick google search and it baffles me.

comparing Soviet anything to EA is apples to hand grenades

People have been killed in the name of EA ideas. One can claim that this was the work of the criminal and mentally ill (and be right), but that's also what the Marxists say about their bad apples.

I, for one, think that if you gave soviet levels of power to the shrimp welfare people, they would be very unwise with it. I don't think that's an unreasonable view.

Soviet levels of power were not granted by God of Thought Experiments from above, they were achieved by mobilizing large numbers of people to violence with arguments such as "this guy over here is better off than you - it was at your expense, go lynch the kulak". I do not think shrimp welfare is as persuasive an argument.

I think you're vastly underrating the earnestness and good will of communists. People very rarely start with murderous intent. That tends to proceed from the grinding of relatively benign dictums against the realities of power.

Moreover, please don't do the whole "it's just a few kooks on college campuses", one loses use of that argument after their first SBF. You and I are not beyond lynching kulaks, there is just a precarious set of incentives that allows us to maintain the moral rectitude to not do so. And I'm arguing that most EA people have, as part of their utilitarian construction, jettisoned important parts of those incentives.

To wit, I recommend rule utilitarianism and a higher degree of humility before history and the human condition.

People have been killed in the name of EA ideas.

Such as? If we're referring to the Ziz stuff then well that's not going to cut it for me in that they were not part of "EA" in any meaningful sense for a long time before the real insanity began.

But also, plenty of people have been killed in the name of classic liberal ideas.

I, for one, think that if you gave soviet levels of power to the shrimp welfare people, they would be very unwise with it. I don't think that's an unreasonable view.

Probably! I can't get over that Classic Environmentalism is anti-interventionist to the point some want humanity to disappear, and then some EA types are so interventionist they want to basically eliminate nature because of the inherent suffering.

In the light of your own answer, what is the ideological component in EA that would prevent interventionist types, in principle, from being soviet tier hand grenades? I don't see it. I see the same type of unbounded consequentialism that can allow people to engage in the same sort of evil in the name of ultimate good.

EA has no provision against people thinking of themselves as bringing about a utopia, and that makes it a dangerous philosophy. And this is why Ziz killed people and SBF defrauded millions.

Marx was once a benign economics nerd too.

Well, there is no one "EA"; but broadly speaking EA exists within the liberal democratic view of human rights. So "unbounded consequentialism" isn't actually on the menu for policy interventions.

I'm personally a rule utilitarian / classic liberal, so I care about specific classic (negative) human rights and fostering material progress. So I like a lot of what EA is all about, but I have my differences. I do not like philosophical ignorant veils and ponds of kids, for example. In terms of rhetorical utility though, I very much enjoy using EA as a hammer to bludgeon progressives/leftists with.

I do not think it is fair to directly fault EA at large for Ziz and SBF. In the former case, they literally disavowed the individual and their ideas. In the latter case, they were too trusting (I just assume all crypto is a scam by default) and deserve some demerits for that, but SBF also fooled a great many worldly financial types outside of EA.

EA has no provision against people thinking of themselves as bringing about a utopia, and that makes it a dangerous philosophy.

Again, this is an extremely broad criticism that applies to many religions and ideologies.

EA exists within the liberal democratic view of human rights

What's a "human right"? I'm not asking what you think, you clearly believe in some utilitarian formulation of natural law, likely in the style of J.S. Mill. That has boundaries I'm well familiar with.

I'm asking what most EA people believe.

Because in my experience it's a lot less solid than what you have in mind, generally more aligned to Rawls than Mill and almost entirely without bounds.

I do not believe that Effective Altruists would oppose vaccine mandates categorically under grounds of bodily autonomy, for instance.

I do not think it is fair to directly fault EA at large for Ziz and SBF. [...] they literally disavowed the individual and their ideas. [...] SBF also fooled a great many worldly financial types outside of EA

I understand those as fair arguments, but they are the same fair arguments Khrushchev made for Stalin and that Marx made for Guesde. We are responsible for what we bring into the world, the purpose of a system is what it does, etc.

this is an extremely broad criticism that applies to many religions and ideologies.

Of course. And I denounce them all as capable of the same horrors.

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anything unbounded has the same problem


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