The Mugwumpery

Important and non-obvious things I’ve learned:

1. If you have sufficiently good tactics, you don’t need strategy.
2. Sufficiently frequent, deep, and thorough backups compensate for a multitude of sins.
3. Everything is more complicated than it seems.

As far as I can tell these things are unrelated. I could be wrong.

Ives Parr is interested in the effects of genetic enhancement of children, which does seem likely to be a thing pretty soon, since the technology seems to be available, at least some parents clearly want to do it, and some jurisdiction or other in the world (Thailand? Singapore? The Philippines?) seems likely to allow it. That’s enough for it to start happening.

I think Parr’s thoughts miss what seem to me the most interesting potential consequences:

1 – As people get smarter, the way they think may change.

My personal observation has been that people with highish IQs (~115 to 135) are more leftist than most. It’s not clear to me if the same is true of people with extremely high IQs (> 140).

Given that leftist societies tend to collapse, I wonder about the social consequences of rising median population IQs.

(I may be just conflating education effects with intelligence effects, in which case nevermind.)

2 – More important, this is a first step down a path of recursive genetic modification. We’ve some idea of how we’d change our children, if we could. We have less idea of how those children – different from us – will choose to change their own children, etc. down the generations. The path seems unpredictable, potentially chaotic, and may lead to extinction.

I don’t think we have any good reason to think that after 5 or 10 generations of such changes, the result will look anything at all like present humans.

(This is similar to the “AI explosion” recursive improvement argument.)

Happy Valentine’s Day 2024! Scott Alexander has a great post today proposing Valentine’s Day as a libertarian holiday.

Love and sex seem to me two different things. (Admittedly related things, like life and food.) Not everyone agrees. In the comments “Alephwyr” and I traded thoughts that I think capture some fundamental differences:

Alephwyr (The Dragonsphere Examiner):

Dave (The Mugwumpery):

Alephwyr (The Dragonsphere Examiner):

Dave (The Mugwumpery):

Alephwyr (The Dragonsphere Examiner):

Forget Musk’s efforts to save the human race, transition the world from carbon fuels, his other projects. And forget the Gates Foundation’s attempts to end malaria. And Andrew Carnegie’s libraries. Forget philanthropic projects of the wealthy. Or whether those projects are driven by ego or love of mankind. Put all that aside.

Our ancestors lived in caves, infested by parasites, chased by predators, constantly on the edge of starvation. Today we have nice things like indoor toilets and medicine. Electric light, refrigerated food, airliners, the Internet. We didn’t steal that wealth from other cavemen or from space aliens. Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game.

People created those technologies, that wealth. Out of plants and animals, dirt and air, and their own cleverness and work. Who did that? All of us, yes, but a few made vastly larger contributions than others.

Our society is wealthy because of Boulton’s engines, Carnegie’s mills, Vanderbilt’s railroads, Edison’s lights, Gates’ software, and Musk’s cars and rockets. Most of us have always plowed our farms, woven our cloth, done our jobs. And mostly broken even – fed ourselves, raised our children, helped our neighbors survive…and created very little that was new.

But some people are better at creating wealth than others. Just as an Albert Einstein is rare, or a Tiger Woods, or a William Shakespeare is rare, there are a few rare people who are vastly – incredibly – better at creating wealth than most everyone else. Today we call them “billionaires”.

They may not be better than most of us at physics, or golf, or literature, or in any other way, but they have a rare talent for creating wealth. Billionaire’s money (when honestly earned; I exclude crony capitalists and kleptocrats) mostly reflects value created. Value that benefits us all.

Earning a billion dollars is really difficult. See how many try, and how few succeed.

And the living standard at $100 million is virtually identical to that of $100 billion. Most rational people retire when they have enough – long before billionaire status. We are very lucky that a few of these astoundingly productive and capable people keep working – keep chasing dreams, keep creating wealth – long after their personal material needs are satisfied. They made our world, and will make our future.

Sure, Musk makes us look bad. But only in the sense that Mahatma Gandhi does. Nobody should feel jealous of Shakespeare’s writing, Edison’s inventiveness, Einstein’s discoveries. Nor should we resent them for their talent and success. Au contraire; we should celebrate them.

[adapted from a comment on https://fakenous.substack.com/p/elon-musk-is-better-than-you]

Democracy is popular, despite leading to public policy that doesn’t generally seem to be better (or worse) than that produced by other systems.

As is well known, pure democracy (majoritarianism) leads to tyranny at least as often as other forms of government. In a pure democracy, 51% of voters can torture and kill the other 49% of the population. That’s why every even moderately successful democracy has things like constitutions and “bills of rights” – there are many things even majorities should not be allowed to do, and these are necessary constraints. Some advocates of democracy don’t seem to understand that “human rights” and “democracy” are in tension – rights are things that even majorities may not infringe.

Regardless of the system of government, constitutions, or formal rights, sufficiently large majorities always get whatever they want. Because a sufficiently large majority will always win a civil war.

This unfortunate fact leads to the one really unarguable benefit of democracy – it provides a way for large majorities to get what they want peacefully via elections instead of via bloody civil war. If they’re such a large majority that they’re going to win anyway, far better for them to win peacefully.

Other than that (not inconsiderable!) benefit, I’m not sure there’s anything very good about democracy – it certainly hasn’t been shown to lead to wise governance, honest leaders, or respect for human rights.

There have been many proposals to limit or bias the franchise to improve democracy by giving extra weight to more-competent-than-average voters – for example extra votes for military service, avoidance of crime or debt, payment of taxes, marriage or child rearing, education, tests of intelligence, knowledge, or competence, etc. In the unlikely event of their adoption, these might improve the quality of elected officials and of legislation.

But if you take the point of view that democracy is mainly for keeping the peace, these attempts defeat that purpose – tax-paying university graduates with children and without criminal records are unlikely to start or participate in civil wars. Instead, there’s something to be said for limiting the franchise (or weighting votes) according to ability and propensity to make trouble. This is probably why, historically, only landowners and men were allowed to vote – penniless peasants and women didn’t make civil war very effectively. Nor children.

Never attribute to brilliance that which is adequately explained by dumb luck.

A corollary to Hanlon’s razor.

Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were and are brilliant – we know this because they did astounding things not once but multiple times (Apple, NeXT, Pixar, Apple again, and PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX…). That doesn’t happen by dumb luck – the world is not that large.

But that’s pretty rare.

A lot of other amazing success is due to dumb luck. Not all of it, but without strong evidence, assume dumb luck.

The March 2022 Reason magazine explains in “Free the Art! Sell the Art!” that public museums display as little as 2 percent of the artworks they hold (the rest in storage), and have a habit of buying up art only to hide it away for decades where nobody will ever see it or know it exists.

And, worse, the Association of Art Museum Directors has a policy enforcing exactly that!

My response:

It’s not often I say “there ought to be a law”, but there ought to be a law. Taxpayers do not fund museums for the purpose of hiding art in storage. Any work held by an institution that receives public funds should be on public display at least 6 hours a day for 100 days out of every 2 years (excluding limited periods for restoration or maintenance) – or promptly auctioned to the highest bidder.

Charitable foundations that fund museums should insist on the same rule.

Update, June 2020:

After a few months, I’m starting to think my readers don’t “get” what I’m upset about here. So I’ll explain.

The notion that wealthy people, in the name of “fashion”, should dress up to look poor – literally, in clothes falling to rags – is disgusting.

It shows an utter lack of awareness of what poverty is. What hunger is. And the human misery they entail.

These scourges have ravished mankind throughout history. Billions of our fellows lived lives of want, of hunger, of near or actual starvation. As a result they lived with disease, degradation, filth, pain, ignorance, superstition, and fear. This was the common condition of virtually everyone, across the world, for most of history. It was no fun.

It’s not “chic”. It’s not something to be admired or emulated. It’s something to celebrate that we’ve almost eliminated.

My niece, raised in a wealthy suburb of Boston, at age 12 had never heard of the word “famine”, or of the concept. She had no idea what it was, or that such things could exist. It had to be explained to her. Famine – mankind’s oldest enemy.

How is it possible for moderns to be so ignorant of history? Of the state of the world? Of the sources of suffering? Of the realities of nature?

How is it possible to think playacting as a sufferer is “fashion”?

Any adult who actually wants to be President of the United States has something deeply wrong with them, and should be automatically disqualified.

Instead, we should have a system where the citizens elect a small number of representatives, who would meet together and jointly pick someone to do the job.

We could call it an “electoral college”.

There’s an old joke (this version is from C. Fink):

A Jewish man and his friend, a Chinese man are sitting at a bar.

The Jewish man turns and punches his friend in the face.

The Chinese man shouts “What was that for?”

The Jewish man replies, “That was for Pearl Harbor.”

The Chinese man says, “I’m Chinese not Japanese!”

The Jewish man replies, “Chinese, Japanese, what’s the difference?”

Then the Chinese man punches the Jewish man in the face.

The Jewish man says “Why did you do that?”

The Chinese man replies “That’s for the Titanic.”

The Jewish man says, “I didn’t sink the Titanic. That was an iceberg!”

The Chinese man smiles and says, “Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?”

That’s groupism. A random Japanese person is not responsible for Pearl Harbor. That crime was committed a long time ago by other people.

And a random iceberg isn’t responsible for sinking the Titanic. It was another iceberg that did it.

Groupism is blaming innocent people for the crimes of others, because of some irrelevant thing they have in common.

And yet, there are many societies in which collective guilt is a thing – mostly small, primitive societies. Collective guilt has the useful property of making everyone watch one another to prevent crimes – because everyone, including the innocent, will be punished for any crime committed by a single member of the group.

Modern people usually have big problems with that idea, but it has been a successful way of living since ancient times.

I’m one of the people who has a problem with it. My concerns are:

(1) Collective guilt breaks the whole idea of individual freedom and responsibility. In that system, my neighbors get a say on how I live, because they will suffer the consequences of my bad decisions.

But freedom doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t include the ability to make choices that other people don’t approve of. If you care about individual freedom at all, this is a huge problem.

(2) People usually don’t get to choose which groups they belong to. If I’m born Japanese, and the world treats me as Japanese, and so guilty of the crimes of all other Japanese, I’m screwed – because even if I disagree with and oppose the actions of other Japanese, I still get blamed for what they do.

If people could join and leave groups voluntarily (as with “corporations, associations, colleges, etc.”) then this would be much less of a problem. You’d still have an element of collective responsibility, but people who disagreed with the collective could leave it.

But that’s not how groupism usually works.

(3) Collective guilt societies usually also have collective responsibilities. If I’m born into one, it may be (for example) my duty to obey my elders, to marry only whoever they decide I should marry, to live where they tell me, to do the work that they tell me to, etc., etc. One day, if I live long enough, I may become an elder and get to tell other people what to do.

Basically this means that everyone is a slave of the group. For life. With no way of leaving slavery without breaking the rules of the society.

Again, if you care at all about freedom and think slavery is a bad thing, this is a bad thing.

(This post is adapted from an answer and comments on Quora.com.)