The Mugwumpery

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, legitimately, 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.

I’m not saying citizen’s opinions shouldn’t be taken into account – only that voting directly for specific legislators and policies doesn’t seem to produce especially good outcomes. Other ways may be better.

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.)

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.

These are cut-and-pasted from Netflix. With very rare exceptions, I only write reviews for movies I disliked – it’s my way of getting revenge.

There are no spoilers here. All ratings are in the range 1 to 5 stars.

[Edit: I see that 12/14 of the reviews below use the word “stupid”. I suppose that says something not terribly flattering about myself. So be it. It’s still how I feel about these films.]

Things to Come

The Gestapo will save us from war, hatred, and irrationality and create a paradise of identically black-suited heroes who rule and identically white-gowned citizens who obey, all living in a futuristic world with lots of pneumatic tubes. Underground. And they will have television. But, of course the Gestapo (or is it Stasi? Or Checka? hard to tell) rule in the name of Humanity, so it’s all good. But they don’t approve of private airplanes. H.G. Wells personally oversaw every detail of this film. It supposedly represents his vision of an ideal (!) future world. (He supported something he called “liberal fascism”, and it shows.) Acting is high school play quality. (On the low end of that.) Special effects were good for 1938. I give it 2 stars, both for historical interest. The film isn’t worth watching aside from that.

Sunshine

I used to think Gravity was the worst recent science-fiction film. No longer. Gravity was stupid, terrible, and stupid (with great special effects and pretty good acting). But Sunshine is bad on a whole different level. It has *layers* of stupid, each dumber than the next. Layers upon layers of stupid. It’s really an amazing achivement. But not amazing enough to make it worth watching. It’s not “fun stupid” like Plan 9 From Outer Space. It’s just…. well, don’t watch it.

Interstellar

The stupid – it hurts. Physicist Kip Thorne was involved with the scriptwriting. Thanks to him the part about wormholes isn’t stupid. Just the other 99% of the movie is stupid. If you know anything at all about engineering or physics, that is. I won’t give spoilers, but please note it’s difficult to hide the launch of a Saturn V-sized rocket. And the vicinity of black holes tend to have LOTS of x-rays. Not a place you’d want to (or be able to) live. Plus, a little 1930s-style dust bowl is no reason to abandon an entire populated planet. See astronomer Phil Plait’s comments at Slate.

The Man from Earth

Some interest. Others have done it better in written science-fiction. The Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner version (2000 Year Old Man) is much funnier. This movie is all talking-heads (it cost $200,000 to make). And the characters are cardboard cut-outs, very poorly written. But some interesting ideas.

Mr. Nobody

There’s a solid 25 or 30 minutes of entertainment lurking in this 2 1/2 hour movie. It’s slow. Really slow. The filmmakers even showed they know it – there’s a line in the film “it’s like a French movie – nothing happens”. Synopsis (no spoilers): Choices have consequences. I think most people already knew that, but the film assumes that it’s a mind-blowing concept.

Argo

Intrinsically an interesting true story, but way too Hollywood for my taste. As others have mentioned, the film inaccurately minimized the Canadian role, and positively insults the heroism of the British and New Zealand embassy staff (for no conceivable reason). Worse for my enjoyment of the film was the obviously made up last-second hitches inserted by the filmmakers. Without spoiling, there are two huge omg-we’re-almost-there-BUT moments, inserted by the filmmakers for suspense. Plus a lot of smaller ones. But this is a true story. These have no basis in history, and are such obvious Hollywood tropes as to break my belief that I was watching something real. It’s like when James Bond defuses the bomb with 1 second left on the clock. You know you’re watching a scriptwriter’s cheap trick, not something that happens in real life.

Gravity

I just watched it. I’m still stunned. Stunned by the utter stupidity of this movie. From the very first minute this movie is idiocy after idiocy. Read the other reviews for some of them, but I could write a book about everything wrong – with physics, with technology, with psychology, with common sense – in this movie. Just in the first 5 minutes (no spoilers): 1) She’s a MEDICAL doctor, yet she’s there to work on an upgrade of the Hubble telescope. Huh? 2) She says she’s nauseous – while in a spacesuit. Does she immediately go inside and take off the suit? Does she have ANY IDEA what will happen if her stomach goes while wearing a space helmet? (Answer: She will choke to death on her own upchuck, while totally blinded as it coats the inside of her helmet.) 3) The stars are visible IN THE DAYTIME. Clooney is DOING CIRCLES (==burning fuel like crazy – he should be out in 90 seconds at that rate) around the shuttle in a jetpack at a speed that would kill him instantly if he hit anything. 4) People describe things being at “7 o’clock” while floating IN OUTER SPACE (so the clock doesn’t even have an up and down, let alone facing in any particular direction) 5) People are asked to “describe their position” while floating in F***ING ORBIT! (What the heck are they supposed to say… “I’m 100 feet south of the tree?!?!?”) 6) She’s a NASA astronaut, but she “crashed” Soyuz in the simulator EVERY TIME. But they still let her fly. And that’s just in the first 5 minutes. It goes on just like that for an hour and a half. My head is still spinning. WHY does Hollywood do this? This movie had a huge budget and A-list stars. How much extra could it POSSIBLY cost to hire a scriptwriter smarter than Bozo the Clown?

The Hunger Games

Too much killing of innocents. Not enough revolution. “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” Thomas Jefferson

I have never met a philosopher who had anything to say that wasn’t nonsense.

But I have read Karl Popper. He constitutes an existence proof that meaningful philosophy is possible.

The motto Popper seems to have most liked repeating was:

Optimism is a duty. The future is open. It is not predetermined. No one can predict it, except by chance. We all contribute to determining it by what we do. We are all equally responsible for its success.

This appears to be an expansion of Kant’s “optimism is a moral duty”. If I recall correctly, Popper first published this in 1945, in The Open Society and its Enemies.

I’ve used that quote many times, in many places. It summarizes one of my own core moral values. But many people seem to be confused as to what it means.

It seems obvious to me, but Popper found people had the same problem. So he tried to explain.

In a 1992 speech, he said:

The possibilities lying within the future, both good and bad, are boundless. When I say, “Optimism is a duty”, this means not only that the future is open but that we all help to decide it through what we do. We are all jointly responsible for what is to come. So we all have a duty, instead of predicting something bad, to support the things that may lead to a better future.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Two years later, in The Myth of the Framework:

The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.

Joseph Agassi says Popper’s

… arguments for optimism were diverse. First and foremost, the world is beautiful. (“The propaganda for the myth that we live in an ugly world has succeeded. Open your eyes and see how beautiful the world is, and how lucky we are who are alive!”) Second, recent progress is astonishing, despite the Holocaust and similar profoundly regrettable catastrophes. The clinging to life that victims and survivors of the Holocaust displayed despite all horrors, he observed, stirs just admiration for them that bespeaks strong optimism. Most important, however, is the moral aspect of the matter: we do not know if we can help bring progress and it is incumbent on us to try. This is the imperative version of optimism.

Because the future is undetermined, because it depends on our actions, we – all of us who yet live – have a moral duty to try to make it a good future. And we can do that only with optimism – with the belief that a good future is possible.

The next time you’re tempted to say “everything is going to hell”, “we’re all doomed”, “it’s over now – the enemy has won” …think again.

We always have the opportunity to change things for the better. Nothing is decided in advance – the future is always subject to improvement. And only those with optimism will make the attempt.