ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2mo ago
One idea I've seen is having a multiplicity of status hierarchies. One person's status derives from being best in the world at chess; another at speed running Super Mario; another at laparoscopic surgery.
In practice, we could have that now, but we don't. My hypothesis is that by having a global status domain, the status hierarchies that can exist just aren't numerous enough to give everyone or even a substantial minority one they can sit on top of. Perhaps if instead we just compared against people in our neighborhood or city, things would be better.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I'd say he was poorer. Not because of a smart phone, alone, but the average American has far better access to services and goods than Rockefeller did. They can access cheaper, fresher food of greater variety; they can ride in safer, more comfortable cars and hail drivers (or non-drivers!) to take them wherever they want; they can take a weekend jaunt to Paris; they have access to better medical technology; they can access all the world's information with a 50ms latency; they can schedule a session with a tutor on whatever topic they want within a few days on the other side of the world.
Rockefeller does win out on a couple areas compared to an average person today, in areas where certain labor costs still predominate. His housing is probably better quality (though probably not safer). Clothing and small material effects are better crafted. He can afford people to do chores for him (though give it 20 years, and AI personal servants will be widespread). But
ThenElection
2mo ago
If there's a genetic component that contributes to propensity to have children, then that will end up rapidly spreading through the population. So, give it a millennium or so, and the problem will have solved itself.
(Some here might say there's a dysgenic aspect here--high time preference winning over low time preference, for example--but if it ends up out competing, isn't that ipso facto eugenic?)
ThenElection
2mo ago
Looking through her Tweets, I'm thinking she's in on it (or at least just farming engagement). Says she isn't into politics, most political thing said being that she stands with Israel, references God a fair amount, seems to like Elon.
It seems she's some kind of digital content marketer/entrepreneur.
ThenElection
2mo ago
There are also population diseconomies of scale: higher resource requirements require extracting more resources, at higher and higher marginal cost. Though, if it's just a matter of technological development, then the economies of scale might more than compensate for that. Higher population might also mean higher level coordination mechanisms developing, which seem to take the form of more bureaucracy.
ThenElection
2mo ago
It's a pile of complicated, interacting feedback loops.
I wonder if the initial solution might be less providing a happy path through a Basic Life Script and more curtailing a bunch of the dead end paths young adults find themselves on. A Basic Life Script requires things the government can't provide (at least directly). But there are lots of things in the modern world that are literally engineered to pull people on valueless, counterproductive paths. For men, video games, porn, gambling. (Elsewhere IIRC you mentioned social media for women, which I think would also qualify.) Limit those dead ends, and you might divert people who whose lives are degraded by them toward paths that lend themselves to the Basic Life Script.
Now that I go back and read your comment from a couple months ago, I realize that you basically said all that.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Because as I've pointed out, a woman who lands a high-quality man early on can literally have it all. He can take her on trips and out to parties, he can give her a career boost as needed, and he can give her kids and help her raise kids.
What percentage of women can land a relationship with a high-quality man? Which apparently means a man who earns enough to support a household; who substantially helps with the kids; who has the time and money and inclination to go out on vacations and parties. To say nothing of at least half a dozen other attributes (willing to marry early and for life, attractive, etc) that are probably relevant.
Now, I'm not saying this in a "men need to step up" kind of way. It just doesn't seem accessible to the bulk of women today, and if that's the trade you're offering women, they'll implicitly calculate the risks and decide what path to take based on that.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I think the complaint comes down to the coup-complete aspect. If you could implement all these policies at once, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff: men and women each are given different sets of privileges and limits that offer them a fair expectation of equal happiness, for a net increase of happiness over rampant individualism (a tradeoff that creates more winners than losers, but there would still be losers).
In practice, though, the dynamics of politics and social change would bias the restrictions against men and the privileges toward women. The banning of porn and video games that make life seem a bit more bearable for losing men would happen first, and the rest would always be politically impractical.
I say this as someone who thinks that legal limitations on porn and video games would be beneficial for men, even without any offsetting privileges.
ThenElection
2mo ago
His personal life is a shambles, but so long as he doesn't flaunt it (and people only speak of it in hushed, ashamed tones), I don't care too much.
What he needs to do is: every time he feels compelled to share a 4chan greentext on Twitter, he should stop for a second, think about if it's a good use of his time, realize it's not, and instead take that energy and make another revolutionary, innovative, billion dollar company. We'd all be better off.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Looking at Wikipedia pages, both Moscow and Saint Petersburg appear post-revolutionary. There were talks of a metro in pre-revolution times, but those plans were for it to be above ground.
ThenElection
2mo ago
They do get some points in my book for preserving / restoring the beauty of the past, which is rather controversial under contemporary capitalism.
Not just purely preservational/restorative. The Saint Petersburg and Moscow metros are gorgeous and clean. Compare to the metros in American cities, where you have a decent chance of having to step over poop or deal with a meth addict smoking on the train, surrounded by Corporate Memphis posters.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Ah, yes, I find handing someone a printout of The Use of Knowledge in Society is a surefire way to win them over.
It's also useful to think about how Communism made itself inspiring. You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world; powerful displays of military might and stories of the underdog throwing off the yoke of foreign oppressors through sheer will and heroism; technological marvels invented by Communism. (And, of course, the enemy is ugly, misshapen, obese old capitalist men.)
Turn that around. Create an unashamed capitalist aesthetic of beauty and power and success. If you do that, it's barely even necessary to paint Communists in any light at all. We certainly don't have that at all today. Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I like it.
Bringing in Lakatos, liberalism/capitalism and communism both have hard cores (their central principles--free markets and property rights vs class struggle and state ownership), along with belts of auxiliary hypotheses and heuristics (policies and praxis). People can adopt either, and both can be used to model the world in a coherent way. What makes them different is whether they name new problems and generate new, useful hypotheses for answering them, except instead of knowledge it's human flourishing.
Communism is more or less dead, but liberalism is a zombie. Still motile, but unspeaking. So you have people grasp for old programs that have failed but do no worse for the person grasping than the currently dominant program.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Point to actually existing government. "Do you really want Joe Biden/Donald Trump deciding how much toilet paper you're allotted or what books are worthy of being published?" (Choose which depending on your audience's political valence.)
It's a little bit unfair to how the USSR actually handled capital allocation, but not that unfair. If someone brings up Albania or something a bit more sophisticated, they're not a normie.
ThenElection
2mo ago
None of them had really faced a truly competitive election before, except for Santorum (who racked up some genuinely impressive wins). Usually politicians have to have some baseline likeability to get to the national election stage.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Having a bureaucratic process for transitioning is still better than the alternative. You've got to prove, to an outside observer, that you're "real." That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes, as well as empowering people to reject pure attention seekers as jokes.
It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.
Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?
FWIW, it does seem like the truscum side is at least coherent and it's possible to make meaningful policy based around their demands. Gender dysphoria (regardless of its etiology) exists, and adding a bureaucratic process to classify people as truly trans or not seems like a bare-minimum requirement if you want to have any social institutions that take into account sex/gender.
ThenElection
2mo ago
They're both problems, but a large, concentrated group is worse. It drives the formation of consistent, predictable markets and behavioral norms. Concretely, 100 addicts spread out around the city are a much better problem to have than 100 addicts congregated on a single block. Once you have 100 on a single block, you make the market much more efficient, and political structures develop around those 100 addicts to defend them, advertise for them, and make it much harder to actually address the issue.
ThenElection
2mo ago
If we are talking trim, fit bodies, prominent Democrats (the men, at least) probably better represent the healthy norm than Republicans. Compare Trump, Christie, Huckabee to Obama, Bernie, Newsom, even Biden. (Women there isn't as much a disparity, and might even cut the other way. Few of either party qualify as actually obese.)
That said, I see Republicans as more willing to explicitly say that fat is bad, fit is good. They just lack any meaningful follow-through.
Novel behaviors emerge out of collections of components. Locusts are harmless and even helpful when in their solitary phase, but subjecting them to enough density induces a far more destructive gregarious phase by a cascade of social and physiological changes.
To take a human example, I don't really care if someone does fentanyl alone in the confines of their own home. I guess it's sad if they die, but that's their life. But allowing large groups of fentanyl addicts to congregate and use together has damaging consequences far larger than the damage they inflict on themselves.
Unless you're a hyper-individualist, it's perfectly coherent to say it's reasonable for the government to regulate destructive collective behaviors while otherwise taking a hands off approach to individuals.
ThenElection
2mo ago
You absolutely need a cost infliction strategy. But the competitor needs to be able to predict costs will actually be inflicted. Otherwise, they can convince themselves it would be lower cost than it actually will be.
For a Taiwan contingency, I believe the variance of costs (or, more precisely, China's perception of the variance of costs) is higher with Trump than with Harris. A war resulting in a quick, painless victory with minimal worldwide economic repercussions is likelier with him as he's more likely to call bluffs and cow China with escalatory responses, but so are disasters where we tumble into massive total war because China mispredicts US responses. (He's also more likely to sell Taiwan off, which isn't great but still a much better scenario than the total war outcome.)
I acknowledge this is guesswork, and the primary determinant of how horrific war will be is decisions on the Chinese side, not the US side.
ThenElection
2mo ago
We gave the USSR food for physical sustenance; China gives us cheap backdoored trinkets and TikTok for spiritual sustenance. We have willingly made ourselves subservient.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I am skeptical about the judiciary changes happening: if Democrats win the Senate and the Presidency, the court "reform" (I agree it would be bad, and I'm pretty content with the composition of the current court) is a much bigger lift than simply appointing new justices. In fact, I'd say that Trump winning actually increases the risk of judiciary reform over the next decade, if he replaces one or two of the Democratic justices and Democrats feel increasingly desperate and hopeless. If court packing is going to happen, electing Harris or electing Trump just shifts it a couple years forward or back.
As far as immigration goes, neither Trump nor Harris will do much to change the existing system. They'll take different rhetorical approaches and make some marginal changes, but both will more or less maintain the status quo. The constant stream of millions of illegal immigrants is just too critical for the lifestyles of both Democratic and Republican donor classes to allow for any real action to be made. You'll still see roughly the same number of immigrants in the US regardless at the end of their respective terms.
The only place I see a substantively different choice of futures is foreign policy, particularly China. Who's better to avoid a war with China? This is not obvious and requires some guessing: Harris is a sock puppet for the existing foreign policy establishment, while Trump's approach is (charitably) more personalistic. As much as I dislike the foreign policy establishment, they provide predictability. Major wars break out when one side doesn't correctly predict what the other side will do; if everyone can predict what will happen and the costs to each party, it greatly increases the likelihood of managed transitions that don't go kinetic. A war with China will hurt the economy far worse than cherry picking all the worst policies from each candidate, so that ends up being one point in Kamala's favor for me.
So, what prevented her family from staying in the homestead dugout? Is it just a matter of people making choices that in isolation make sense but collectively destroy the commons? Intentional State policies to shatter and commoditize what once was for the sake of capital?
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