We Are Not Saved

In the book The End of History and the Last Man,  Francis Fukuyama spends quite a bit of time talking about the idea of legitimacy, in particular how the End of History represents a time when only liberal democracy has any reserves of legitimacy. But two questions occur, first where does a nation go if liberal democracy starts failing? And second does that failure happen, does it end up just like...

Coming up with solutions is difficult. I've read many books that present an excellent diagnosis of the problem, but then finish things off by presenting utterly ridiculous solutions. I take one of these books Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan and go into detail on why the solutions he proposed are so inadequate and then go into some detail as to what I think good solutions should include. 

With the stock market prices seemingly bearing little relationship to the actual economy, investment strategies are on the mind of many. Here I briefly describe my own investment strategy which unfortunately has very little to say about the current craziness, but hopefully contains some wisdom about longer term investing. In particular the idea that you should view investing as purchasing pieces i...

Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk  by:  Justin Tosi ,  Brandon Warmke The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World   by:  Iain McGilchrist The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust  by:  John Coates Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)  by:  Jim Butcher Euripides V: Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, The C...

We're told that in order to combat fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation of all kinds that we need to do a better job of examining the evidence, of looking at the data, but what if this is entirely backwards? What if we're too focused on the data, on the little bits of evidence that make up our world view, and that the problem is we're bad at organizing these bits of data into a coher...

After having a conversation with a friend I decide to dig into the numbers on police officer killings since 1965 as compiled by the Anti-Defamation League. In the process I discover that there's a lot of fairly obvious subjectivity to who those numbers can be interpreted, and the general impression that right-wing extremism is more dangerous is muddier than people think.  It's a long one, but it's...

Super Cooperators: Evolution, Altruism and Human Behavior (Or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed)  by Martin Nowak Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone  by: Satya Nadella The Book of Three  by: Lloyd Alexander The Black Cauldron  by: Lloyd Alexander The Castle of Llyr  by: Lloyd Alexander Taran Wanderer  by: Lloyd Alexander The High King  b...

How is it, that the French and American Revolutions, so close in time and goals, had such different outcomes? One answer is that the American Revolution built on the foundation of English legislative traditions whereas the French had no such traditions (at the time of the revolution it had been 175 years since the last time the Estates General had been called). Which is to say the American Revolut...

Increasingly liberalism and the values associated with it have been judged inadequate to the task of rectifying racial inequalities. But the question is, what are the alternatives? One that has been mentioned is Critical Race Theory (CRT). In an article from The Economist these two approaches are pitted against one another. And despite the article's attempt to be balanced it seems clear that most...

In which I present the parable of the traffic light, and a deep discussion of the various epistemologies at play in the world today including conflict vs. mistake theory, on which I spend quite a bit of time. Each of these frameworks has different consequences and benefits, but I contend that right now, no framework is dominant, and it's possible that having numerous frameworks is even worse than...

The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder  By: Peter Zeihan The Good Soldier Švejk  By: Jaroslav Hasek The Diaries of Adam and Eve  By: Mark Twain White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism  By: Robin DiAngelo Guns of August By: Barbara W. Tuchman Euripides III: Heracles, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the...

I decide to offer an opinion on the current Black Lives Matter protests. I understand that there are a lot of opinions being offered on the subject, and it's entirely reasonable to assume that mine is not necessary nor welcome, but I hope despite that to add something to the conversation. In particular I think trying to combine combatting police brutality with eliminating all racism might make the...

Elon Musk really wants to establish a colony on Mars. One reason he keeps coming back to this the idea is that he claims it is the only way to prevent our eventual extinction. But is this really the best way to avoid the problems he fears? If we're really interested in increasing localism (which as strange as it might sound is what a Mars Colony is) are there better ways of achieving it if we focu...

I relate a couple of stories (which are worth the price of admission all by themselves) about how once you've made an initial mistake it's so much more likely that you'll make additional mistakes. Recently we've made a lot of mistakes, and in this episode I suggest that there might be some precautions we can take letting the panic from the initial mistakes cause us to make further mistakes. Becaus...

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity By: Toby Ord Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction By: Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner Dune By: Frank Herbert Marriage and Civilization: How Monogamy Made Us Human By: William Tucker Euripides II: Andromache, Hecuba, The Suppliant Women, Electra By: Euripides 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and...

After getting lots of feedback and some criticism of my previous episode on superforecasting I decide to make one final attempt to detail the issues I see with it. This episode ended up being pretty long, so while I normally wouldn't ever say this, if you had enough of superforecasting after the last episode, or if you're already in complete agreement with me (also possible I suppose) then you can...

I reluctantly go back to the well of COVID-19 commentary. In particular I wonder what leadership would look like. I conclude that where past instances of leadership emphasized sacrifice, that I'm not sure that this crisis is amenable to calls for that sort of sacrifice, rather our best bet is to be smart, implementing measures that work and easing off those where the evidence is weak. And that if...

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models  By:  Gabriel Weinberg  and Lauren McCann Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control  By:  Stuart J. Russell Joseph Smith's First Vision: Confirming Evidences and Contemporary Accounts  By:  Milton Vaughn Backman The Cultural Evolution Inside of Mormonism  By:  Greg Trimble  Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine...

A review of J.D. Unwin's 1934 book  Sex and Culture which puts forth the theory that once a culture loosens up restrictions on pre-marital sex that this culture only has about 100 years before it sinks into irrelevance. If we take this prediction seriously and set the sexual revolution as the beginning of this countdown, then we're about halfway through it. What should we do with this possibility?

Recently it's become expected that if you want to be taken seriously as a forecaster that you should not only record your predictions in advance, but assign a confidence level. And that by following this methodology certain people, so called superforecasters, have been found who are significantly better at prediction than average. The problem with this approach is that while these individuals are...

I make some predictions for what the sort of changes COVID-19 will spawn in the world. In particular I think that gatherings of large groups of people will be affected for a very long time, but also I make some predictions for it's affect on preparation, US-China relations and ecoterrorists... 

Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead   By:  Jim Mattis The Lessons of History   By:  Will and Ariel Durant The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes   By:  Donald D. Hoffman Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World   By:  Laura Spinney Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives   By:  David Eagleman Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial R...

It's a two parter this week which starts with a review of  The Decadent Society  by Ross Douthat. His contention is that the world, but particularly the US has stagnated. That we have lost the ability to cooperate and do great things, or even to create new works of art. From the perspective of eschatology this is not what most people think of, but it is still an end of the world scenario, and in s...

Like everyone else I talk about the coronavirus, though hopefully in a way somewhat different from everyone else. In particular I focus on how efficiency ultimately equals fragility. Something this crisis has brought into sharp relief, where for the lack of a few hundred million dollars in precautionary spending we're going to end up spending billions if not trillions of dollars trying to fix the...

Many years ago I read  Diamond Age  by Neal Stephenson and thoroughly enjoyed it, enough so that when I made a goal to go back and start re-reading more books it was the first book I chose. In particular out of all the science fiction books I have ever read it may provide the very best defense of the connection between morality and civilization. It does this on top of having delightful characters...