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Robin Hanson wrote an article recently on how his politics have drifted. For those not familiar with his he was one of the early rationalist adjacent that likely filters a lot of people here. As a GMU professor he blogged like the rest of their Econ department and marginal revolution which was much bigger for leading people to SSC. Also early intellectual promoter of prediction markets like in the ‘90s and use to co-blog with Hal Finney.
A few highlights: “ While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future.”
“ I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.”
A lot of comments on cultural drift and risks with that. The second comment strikes me because I feel like I’ve been thinking about those issues a lot lately. And I feel like I too am moving to a political philosophy of common goodism and the other ideas are just means to achieve the good. Perhaps this is just the standard libertarian to fascism pipeline but I do think a lot of people are questioning whether America is still on a workable path. It’s easy to be a liberal-libertarian when society is broadly good/stable but in harder times more pragmatic ideas emerge.
Then he just comments on things everyone else has noticed - parasitic classes in big cities (often unions) just crushing QOL for the non-rich.
I use to read Hanson a lot, but I only read him a few times a year now. Some of his early insights turned out coming true. It’s interesting to me how minds that shared a lot of common thinking patterns end up developing similar conclusions today. Democracy, Liberty, due-process, and immigration were likely things I viewed as very positive a decade ago. Now I would likely consider them unimportant.
Hanson
The devil is always in the details. Democracy, freedom, and due process are abstract concepts, ending them won’t intrinsically cause any issues. But what concretely do you (or Hanson) propose to replace them, and how? For me, just what is enough for now, because I haven’t heard a good proposal yet.
Personally, I still hold “democracy is the
bestworst government except for all others that have been tried”. I’m not against dictatorship, if the dictator is competent and has a good successor strategy. But who does, and how do you get this person in charge and ensure they’re not overthrown?Likewise, the problem with taking away citizens’ freedom is that what’s done instead isn’t better. Communist governments were ultimately less productive and lost to capitalist ones. We already don’t have total freedom (because that’s impossible), and maybe we need more laws restricting more freedom, for example drug use and being a nuisance in public or to service workers. But what kind of restrictions are you really talking about? Criticizing leaders? Free speech? Then what do we do when leaders start making bad opinions and decisions (since, like everyone, they’re not perfect), going further and further astray like a stalling plane (with no one to correct them, how would they avoid this)?
You may argue we’re already going astray; but there are forums like these, my argument is if opposition was illegal things would degrade faster (and I’m optimistic there will eventually be a course correction in either scenario, but only the latter requires a revolution). You may point to China; but before today’s government, China suffered the “Great Leap Forward” which caused more proportional death than any democratically-caused disaster (at least that I’m aware of); it’s still suffering from centrally-planned failures like its housing; and what do you think will happen when Xi Jinping dies? I think Singapore is the strongest counter-argument; but seeing the War on Drugs and vast difference in culture, I don’t believe America (individualist and expressive) can reach their (collectivist and routine) stable equilibrium, nor any European nation for nation-specific reasons.
Lastly, the illusion of autonomy is important: it makes people happy and complicit, and permits extreme outliers which may be vital. For example, instead of explicitly limiting peoples’ calorie consumption, it would probably be better to just provide free GLP-1s and encourage them via propaganda (in this case outliers probably wouldn’t be vital, but they’d be few enough they’d negligibly affect public resources like healthcare, while appealing to fat enthusiasts). More generally, instead of officially eliminating basic values like democracy to massive resistance, enabling extreme failure modes, why not just manipulate people and use procedural tricks to achieve the same outcomes? I mean, most nations already do that today…
In fact, I speculate a reason people are disillusioned and ironically proposing authoritarian measures is because we live in unofficial creeping authoritarianism. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but especially without a good proposal, it hints that we shouldn’t accelerate into that path.
What if, instead, we propose and start implementing ways to restore unofficial liberty, democracy, and due process? (I threw myself into the immigration storm last week; I won’t suggest what to do here except not deport massive numbers of integrated citizens or decades-long immigrants, because explained in that thread, I doubt it can happen in a democracy with free press that remains a democracy with free press).
Somewhere in the last 250 years, freedom became synonymous with democracy. Before the United States, freedom was considered to be attained when you were under the rule of the (relatively autonomous) lordship of one of your countrymen or clan. Tyranny was to be ruled by an outsider, who may set up puppet members of your tribe but whose commands were dictated by the foreigner.
Because democracy became synonymous with freedom, democracy is seen as an end in and of itself. But this is incorrect. Democracy is a means to good governance: to prosperity, well-being, and good order. If democracy is not providing good governance, democracy is no longer a reasonable means. It is the height of hubris to think that democracy is the final state of government. The world has seen city states, empires, democracies, monarchies, dictatorships. Additional governance structures will evolve, some of which will almost certainly improve on democracy.
For myself, I desire freedom. I desire the ability to walk my clean streets in safety. I want my neighbors to look and act like me, to believe in similar things, to hope in similar things. I want my children to grow up around adults who will seek to instill similar morals and myths. I want to be led by someone who genuinely has my best interests in mind, and not simply simpering for my vote. I want to be free of the tyranny of the election cycle.
I actually equate freedom with something completely different and it seems to be incompatible with modern state. I think freedom is to have taxation on level of 1 or 2% of GDP like in 1775 USA. I see it as ability to sell and purchase goods and services without constant oversight of taxman. I see it as being able to have contract without tyrannical book of regulations that are impossible to read withing my lifetime. In a sense of freedom, I think that the modern people are completely cucked and lulled into absolute egregious compliance.
Hence my last paragraph: I think the real issue isn’t that freedom (and democracy) are failing us, but that we’re losing freedom and democracy without realizing. Those who advocate for authoritarianism really want more freedom and power for themselves, which they’re more likely to end up with in a functional democracy (for example, to pass and enforce laws for decent neighborhoods).
To some extent a modern state has to be less free and some definitions of Democracy. The Commons are much bigger today and there are a lot more regulations that need to happen to make society work. And everything happening all at once to. Relate a modern economy is more complicated than any one person can track at once to vote so you have to outsource a lot of decision making.
1-2% of GDP tax rates are a thing of the past. It’s likely much smaller than we have now but 1-2% of gdp to state capacity wouldn’t work at modern living standard. You actually do need a FAA. Though the TSA and the rest of the parasitic class attached to it probably not. Someone has to coordinate the commons.
Like one example today is the skascraper that had structural issues in NYC and maybe might collapse. I think they have $700 million in it. A libertarian world I don’t think can deal with that coordination. You can wipe out the builders money but if it collapses it’s probably 10-40 in damages and then the builders just bankrupt.
Yes, to be clear I’m not against taxes or regulations.
I think the important part is that richer and more influential people and organizations should have strictly more taxes and compliance overhead (and not in the sense “both rich and poor can’t sleep under bridges”). Today we have situations where working-class citizens pay more taxes than rich locals via offshore tax havens, and small businesses suffer from unnecessarily difficult regulations (not protecting anyone) while big businesses fail audits then suffer less than it would take to pass them.
More generally: it’s important for everyone to contribute and compromise for society, the problem is when people asking/enforcing don’t evenly contribute and compromise themselves. I think growing lack of effort and honor within the working class should and would be fixed by seeing more effort and honor from their leaders.
Once everyone has to suffer evenly from laws regulations etc., they become more permissive, because everyone wants as much freedom as possible for the choices they want. Almost everyone agrees that (for example) murder is wrong and building safety is important, few would accept safety for living in a panopticon.
I think that this is feature and not a bug. For instance it is legally and financially high-risk situation to hire random bum to get him mow your lawn for cash. This simple interaction is covered by literally thousands of pages of regulation. You have tax liability, you have premises liability, you have equipment liability, you have environmental liability and million of other things. The system is designed that such a simple and age old interaction is basically impossible.
This is the litmus test of how tyrannical the government is. It basically forces local bum to begging, as he is incapable of getting regular job, not to even talk about being able to do the paperwork necessary to be a small business operator. And you as a customer cannot profit from this opportunity and you are forced to contract companies who have to finance all that regulation. Large corporation can utilize economy of scale, their operations can afford regulation compliance, which only incentivize them to lobby for more. Alternatively you just do it yourself, which in this tax and regulation environment seems to be more and more attractive, incentivizing autarkic economies.
On an intuitive level, the modern society especially in a west is absolutely unfree under pretext of safety.
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