guajalote
11mo ago
And this belief comes from your observation of "free individuals" in a "free society"? If so, could you name which individuals and what society you have in mind, as an example of what these terms look like in practice?
This is a matter of degree. The US is freer than North Korea or China. And within the US, some places are clearly freer than others.
Characteristics of a free society include:
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The ability to privately own guns and other weapons sufficient to enable the violent overthrow of a tyrannical government;
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Free speech and free association;
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All adult humans are equal before the law and are entitled to due process and the presumption of criminal innocence;
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The right to engage in consensual transactions and to dispose of one's property as one chooses without permission;
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The right to bind oneself with enforceable contracts.
It is good to know that the universe has ordained that all incentives must be net-positive
Given a choice between a good thing and a bad (or less good) thing, a person with full information who is able to freely choose between them will prefer to choose the good thing. This is the definition of "good" I am operating under.
In fact, every system I've ever heard of has been pretty close to this description, but I am certainly not omniscient.
There are systems where a single central authority has a massive amount of power to make cultural decisions (e.g. North Korea, Spain in the 1500s, Iran), and there are systems where cultural authority is more distributed and less centrally powerful, e.g., the US. I would prefer even less centralized cultural power than currently exists in the US, but again it is a matter of degree.
If we wish to say that such systems "fail badly", one ought to demonstrate what "succeeds" looks like with concrete, large-scale examples.
Centrally planned economies like Soviet Russia and North Korea produce little wealth and generally cause massive amounts of starvation. They also tend to produce untrue ideas at a high rate, such as Lysenkoism. Decentralized economies like the US produce comparatively more wealth, less starvation, and more empirically correct ideas. It is a matter of degree, but the degree of difference is extremely large.
Or to put it another way, is your love for freedom and openness a means, or an end? If freedom and openness could be demonstrated to enable evil, would you still support them, or would you accept that some level of restriction was necessary?
It is a means. If you demonstrated that freedom and openness have a higher likelihood of causing bad outcomes as compared with another specific alternative system, I would change my view. However, I consider the empirical evidence in favor of freedom to be overwhelming, so I would require a considerable amount of evidence in the other direction.
This statement implies that central power structures are optional.
The degree to which power is centralized, and the kinds of power that such central structures have, clearly vary in different times and places. I don't think it's possible to eliminate central power, but I think it is possible to considerably reduce the influence of central power and to place checks on the exercise of such power (e.g. via the private ownership of the means of war).
guajalote
11mo ago
In the right time and place one of those would be the most useful with an extreme margin.
I assert that those beliefs can only be useful in a context where challenging them is not allowed. But the inability to challenge cultural beliefs is exactly what I am arguing against. Give me an example where those beliefs can be freely challenged and yet they are still "useful with an extreme margin."
It's not clear to me why you think any of those beliefs would be useful. It is almost never the case that an empirically untrue belief (e.g. sun won't rise without human sacrifice) is useful, particularly in an open society where untrue beliefs can be challenged and proven wrong. The only context where a belief like that would be useful would be a closed culture where competing values are not allowed to challenge dogma and orthodoxy. Cultural mixing in a free society brings about the destruction of such beliefs.
guajalote
11mo ago
I certainly hope they are smarter than me. I think it's unlikely they will reject all of my cultural values since many of them are pretty basic like "wear clothes in public" or "eat food off a plate" or whatever. But if they are smart they will probably accept the cultural values that are useful to them and reject the ones that are not, and I hope they do that, yes.
guajalote
11mo ago
Do you believe that all cultural elements are equal, or are some elements good and some bad?
I believe elements of culture can be good, neutral, or bad. Though this determination will depend heavily on context or "local environment" as you put it. For example, whether "all able bodied men must be proficient at archery" is a good or bad cultural trait depends heavily on context.
If the latter, then you yourself do not want "a process of mixture". You want the right mixture...
I think the only mechanism that will produce the right mixture is free association of individuals in a free society. I believe that free speech and open debate tends, over time, to promote true and useful ideas while destroying bad or counterproductive ones. Similarly, I think free association of individuals in a free society will tend to promote good cultural values and demote bad ones, since people are materially rewarded for adopting the good values and discarding the bad ones. People respond to incentives.
The alternative is some sort of top-down system where a person in power decides which cultural values are good and which are bad. Just as this structure tends to fail badly when applied to economics and ideas, it also fails badly when applied to culture.
Or am I wrong, and you would accept our culture "mixing" with openly-genocidal racial supremacism, hardline blood-sacrifice-based theocracy, slavery, etc, etc, such that their practices became our practices?
I think a free and open society will quickly destroy bad ideas like those, so I am not particularly worried about my culture mixing with them. Racial supremacy, human sacrifice, and slavery are all extremely economically inefficient and in a free society people who adopt these practices will be materially worse off for doing so. These practices can only persist if they are being propped up by a central power structure.
guajalote
11mo ago
You must have a very high opinion of yourself. I have many strengths that I hope my children will inherit, and I have many faults I hope they don't.
guajalote
11mo ago
And I'd probably care about whatever culture I would have ended up having. Just like if I was born into a different family, I would care about the family I was born into and not the one I have in the reality we live in.
At this point it seems you are conceding there's nothing special about your culture that makes it intrinsically worth preserving. You're just saying "it happens to be my culture by chance, therefore I want to preserve it" (why this conclusion follows from this premise is left as an exercise for the reader).
Even I wouldn't concede that there's nothing valuable about my own culture. There are a number of things about my culture that I find valuable, that I intend to pass on to my children, and that I hope they will continue to pass on as long as those things remain valuable in the ever-changing world my descendants will inhabit. I get the impression that I actually value and care about my own culture far more than you do, I just don't feel any need to keep it "pure" and unmixed with other valuable things from other cultures.
At this point, I am convinced this conversation with you is not worth my time, sorry.
Fair enough. Have a nice day.
guajalote
11mo ago
Because it's my culture. Just like I would care about a different family if I had been born in a different family. I wasn't, so I don't.
If you care about your family, then you probably don't want your kids to grow up to marry their siblings or cousins. You want them to marry members of different families. Loving your family necessarily implies that you want your grandchildren to have fewer of your genes than your children, and for your great-grand-children to have fewer of your genes than your grandchildren. The long term health of your bloodline depends on it being mixed with other bloodlines. Trying to keep your bloodline unchanged for generations is a profoundly bad idea. Also, it's probably impossible without significant coercion. People generally don't want to marry their family members unless they are forced to do so.
The same is true of your culture. It was produced through a process of mixture, and it will only continue to exist and re-produce itself through a process of mixture. Trying to arrest this process will not preserve your culture, it will cause it to wither and die. And it is impossible to do this without extreme levels of coercion; you would need to ensure that your culture remains completely closed off from the outside world, which is a nearly impossible task.
If I was a member of those cultures pre-mixture/corruption, I'd probably have advocated resisting that change.
If your ancestors had been effective at doing this, your culture wouldn't exist. The fact that you love your culture implies you are glad your ancestors didn't successfully prevent cultural mixing. Perhaps you should consider whether there is anything you can learn from your cultural ancestors.
guajalote
11mo ago
Perhaps it's not the game for you, but if you ever decide to give it another shot I highly recommend playing combat more like a "turn-based" strategy game with regular pausing to issue orders to your troops, use spells and abilities, etc. Makes the game much more enjoyable and allows you to actually formulate strategy and tactics. I probably pause less than I did when I first started, but I'd say pausing 20-50 times per combat is pretty typical.
I feel like the number of people who are directly and clearly needed in the whole IP, R&D, law+order, STEM university, manufacturing, logistics and extraction stack are in the minority but that's only a feeling, I highly doubt I could find any statistic to prove it.
Let's run with this premise for a moment and assume it's true. Let's assume that if we were smarter about how we run these sectors we could cut 90% of the people in them and still get the same benefits. What are the implications of that?
First of all, it would still be true that the service sectors are creating most of the wealth in the economy. It would just be fewer people creating the same amount of wealth. Which means these sectors would be creating even more wealth on net, because we are having to pay fewer people to get the same result.
And now we can potentially do even more R&D, IP, logistics, manufacturing, etc. with the resources that are no longer being wasted on useless employees. I would expect these sectors to use their efficiency gains to grow and contribute an even larger fraction of the economy's wealth going forward. Money spent on bullshit jobs can now be spent on non-bullshit job. People who worked bullshit jobs can now be retrained to work non-bullshit jobs.
So even if you are completely correct about this, it doesn't undermine the importance of the service sector. If anything, it shows that services could potentially be even more important to the economy than they already are.
guajalote
11mo ago
It feels like most of your criticisms boil down to "I wanted a historical game, not a fantasy game." Fair enough, but that's not a problem with the game itself. It's like saying you hated Fight Club because you expected a movie about professional boxing.
Also I think some of your statements are just plain wrong, like the idea that terrain doesn't matter or that "battles that you could not realistically win given your troops and the enemy's will often be easily autoresolved in your favor." In my experience this is completely false, you will always outperform autoresolve if you play the battle manually, assuming you are remotely competent at the game. Or the statement "Get ready to manually cast those abilities as rapidly as as possible." You understand you're meant to pause and unpause the battle, right?
guajalote
11mo ago
"This thing [cultural change or immigration specifically] happened in the past, therefore it's a good thing, or therefore we can't/shouldn't do anything about it".
You're misunderstanding my point. I'm saying whatever it is you like about "American culture" or "Anglo-Saxon culture" or whatever specific culture it is that you're trying to preserve, that culture only exists because of cultural mixing and change. "Your culture" came about as a result of the Angles and the Jutes and the Danes and the Celts all mixing together.
If you're saying that cultural mixing is always bad, then why do you want to preserve "your" culture? If you're being logically consistent then you should also conclude that your own culture is bad because it is a "corrupted" admixture of other cultures.
If they could have stopped the Vikings, should they not have?
If they could have stopped the Vikings from raping and pillaging, absolutely. But it's not clear why it would have been a good thing for them to stop the cultural admixture. If they had prevented the mixture from occurring, then the culture that you're trying to preserve wouldn't exist. So presumably you agree that this cultural mixing was good if you believe that your own culture existing is good.
guajalote
11mo ago
I'd be interested to hear your criticisms. Personally it's one of the top 10 games I've ever played, and my only real criticisms are: (1) it has a sort of black box complexity that creates a high barrier to entry for new players, and (2) it's a bit buggier than I'd like.
guajalote
11mo ago
I am a big fan of TW:Warhammer III, but it literally took me a year to feel like I am competent at the game. There is so much hidden "under the hood" so to speak and a lack of good resources online to teach you the intricacies of strategy and tactics. The youtuber Legend of Total War is probably the best resource I've found, but I don't really like getting this kind of information in the form of video content, so I've mostly learned the game by (1) playing multiplayer with a couple friends who are good at the game, and (2) trial and error.
guajalote
11mo ago
What kind of world do you imagine where cultural change doesn't happen? Even if all migration was completely halted worldwide, the internet is constantly transmitting culture worldwide. The kind of world you seem to want to live in would require a literal return to the dark ages. And of course cultural mixing was still happening back then too. The reason we're speaking a language without gendered nouns is because Viking settlers "corrupted" English. The reason I used the word "do" in the first sentence of this post is because Celtic languages "corrupted" English.
I doubt it contains many rare earths!
Most valuable things, including the examples you raised in your post (CPUs, GPUs, drugs, and surgical equipment) don't contain rare earth metals. Of course, rare earth metals are indeed important and I am not claiming otherwise. But you'll notice that the countries with large rare earth metal deposits aren't necessarily the richest countries on earth -- some of them are among the poorest. This seems to be in tension with your claim that the wealth of nations is derived from natural resources.
All kinds of 'coordinators', 'inspectors' and 'consultants' that didn't seem to be needed at all. What is the point of them, then? No real wealth is being produced from people who make others fill out forms, check paperwork and refuse approvals for other people to go and create wealth.
The jobs that are truly not needed are, by and large, jobs that exist as a result of useless government regulations. Either government jobs, or private sector "compliance" jobs. It's true that many of these specific types of "service sector" jobs are dead weight and serve no purpose. You have correctly observed that government regulations are often pointless or counterproductive.
It does not follow, however, that service sector jobs are generally useless or fail to create wealth. In fact, as I laid out above, the vast majority of the wealth of modern economies derives from service sector jobs. Just not the specific class of useless service sector jobs you have identified.
The EU couldn't manage to send a million artillery shells to Ukraine, North Korea could.
The simple reason is that NK has a bunch of artillery shells lying around, whereas the EU doesn't. This is a pretty extreme case of special pleading. If we're talking about literally anything other than artillery shells (cell phones, eggs, insulin, toilets, tractors, etc.) the EU has far more of it and far higher quality versions of it than NK. And if the EU wanted or needed to, it could surely close the artillery gap with NK as well. This has almost nothing to do with natural resources and everything to do with intangibles like human capital, rule of law, markets, etc.
guajalote
11mo ago
They believe it’s important to explain their reasoning to their kids.
I think it's really valuable to explain your reasoning to your kid whenever possible. My parents did to me all the time. However, they made it clear that my obligation to obey them was not contingent upon my agreement with their reasoning.
guajalote
11mo ago
This is a relevant variable to the feeling of "immigrants are using up resources that should be going to the native poor".
Sure, this is a valid argument, but it's an argument against welfare, not against immigration.
guajalote
11mo ago
There is nothing new about that. Even in the Bronze Age, it was true that a house made of wood was a lot more valuable than a bunch of logs lying by the side of the road.
The only thing that's new is the magnitude of the effect. Raw materials represent an ever dwindling fraction of the value of the good.
But I would argue that in a sense, the contract law is actually itself quite tangible because cops and their guns are very tangible.
Sure, but once you start counting the cops as tangible now you're agreeing with my point and negating the premise of the original argument I was responding to: people and the activities they engage in are far more important than natural resources to the wealth of a nation.
guajalote
11mo ago
In my experience, things like low housing costs and a robust economy are far more conducive to poor people's standard of living than a robust wellfare state. Houston, for example, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. The country of Canada has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents, with cities often much higher than that; for example in Toronto the rate seems to be in excess of 322 per 100k.
So while I would agree that Canada is more "concerned" about poor people, it's not at all clear to me that Canada is actually providing a better standard of living for poor people.
guajalote
11mo ago
It exists on real physical machines that exist at specific places in the real world.
Add up the cost of all the raw materials present in those physical machines and you'll get something on the order of $10. All the additional value and wealth represented by those machines and the programs they contain comes from intangible things.
guajalote
11mo ago
I admit that there are areas where my model breaks down - my Steam library can't really be considered physical, it barely touches the physical world excepting that CPUs and GPUs are needed to make use of it.
I think your model breaks down all over the place. Obviously raw materials are not irrelevant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the wealth of a modern developed economy.
Go dig up a shovelful of dirt in your backyard. That dirt contains most of the raw materials needed to build a CPU. But there are many, many orders of magnitude difference between the value of that dirt and the value of a CPU. Almost all that value comes from intangible things:
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The knowledge and time of skilled electrical engineers and chemists figuring out how to design and fabricate CPUs.
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The university system that educated them and provided the foundational knowledge they built upon.
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A legal system that enables companies to enter into and enforce contracts with one another in a reliable way
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Systems of IP protection that incentivize R&D expenditures in CPU development.
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Consistent law enforcement and property rights that allow companies to invest billions of dollars in semiconductor fabrication equipment without worrying a government or criminal organization will take it away from them.
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Financial institutions that will lend money to these companies if they don't have billions of dollars sitting around to build semiconductor fabs.
On and on. It's intangibles (almost) all the way down.
Healthcare is about using physical goods like surgical equipment and drugs.
Like CPUs, surgical equipment and drugs are mostly made out of cheap-as-fuck raw materials that are then synthesized into useful things. It's engineers, chemists, biologists, lawyers, etc. that make it possible for this stuff to exist. And of course much of healthcare is made up of other sorts of intangibles, like medical training. Surgical equipment isn't of much use without surgeons.
Yes, you need to have ways for savings and loans to be allocated - but savings and loans are just claims on real goods.
You act like this is trivial, but it's not. There exist countries in the world today where you can't trust banks to hold your savings and the average person can't get loans because the economy is too unstable and risky. These are the so-called "shithole" countries, and they're shitholes not because of a lack of natural resources but because of a lack of the kinds of intangible goods I've been talking about.
guajalote
11mo ago
I think you are conflating two issues that are mostly unrelated. Housing costs are probably being driven up slightly by increased demand due to immigration, but the effect is tiny compared to the supply-side problems caused by excessive red tape that makes housing expensive and difficult to build. The population of Houston, Texas is about 20% foreign-born immigrants, yet housing is extremely affordable because there is no zoning, no rent controls, and few regulatory hoops to jump through if you want to build housing.
Nobody worries about immigrants buying up all the food, or all the cars, or all the cell phones. If demand goes up, the economy will just produce more of these things to meet demand. It doesn't make sense to worry about immigrants buying up all the housing either, unless there's a problem on the supply side that makes it impossible to meet demand. Fix the supply side problem if you want to fix the housing problem.
And yet Freud and Marx are far less influential than they were 100 years ago. Even people who purport to be Freudians or Marxists today will readily admit these people got things wrong, because the countervailing evidence is so overwhelming.
No system of organizing society is stable. The tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time.
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