The (Potential) Enemies List

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

Bryan Caplan expects his upcoming book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, to be controversial, and he has already composed a potential enemies list:

Environmentalists — for claiming that more people are good for world.
Feminists — for downplaying the horrible effects of kids on women.
Child advocates — for arguing that nurture has little effect on kids’ adult outcomes (never mind that I repeatedly distinguish between variation within the normal range and poverty/ abuse/ worse).
Safety activists — for emphasizing that kids are five times safer than they were in 1950.
Bioconservatives — for giving assisted reproductive technology three cheers —and happily biting the bullet of human cloning.
Perfectionist academics — economists, psychologists, sociologists, etc. — who prefer silence to simplification, and “proof” to probability. I was initially worried that behavioral geneticists would be on this list, but I’ve gotten some strong signals that they’ll be happy with my popularization of their field.

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Eric Brown: Ah, no. Railroads got public land *after* building the railroad, not before. Even so, ~80% of the railroad companies got overextended and went bankrupt. Same thing happened with telegraph companies, though they didn’t get public land. There are obvious parallels with the internet and AI.
Gaikokumaniakku: “…’robber-baron capitalism’ was a rhetorical cudgel…” Consider how the USA built railroads. Self-serving crony capitalists got handouts of public land, then used that seed capital to build immense private wealth. These are not the people I point to when I want to indicate capitalism done properly. Jim probably knows a lot more about capitalism than I do, and probably could teach me, but probably has better things to do with his time. If anyone wants to chime in with book recommendations,...
Isegoria: This dynamic played out differently in the West: When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. “Never forget class-struggle”, Mao liked to say. “Never forget you used to be a serf and you’re not one now thanks to me”, he meant. In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the...
Isegoria: Spandrell explained why “kulak” became a derogatory term: What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party who little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union...
Mike in Boston: “Bioslop” is more purely derogatory, but the earlier term “Bioleninism” ; offers some insight by analogy: As Lenin and the communists rallied the downtrodden to overthrow the bourgeoisie, so bioleninism rallies those with biological or identitarian disadvantages (perceived or inherent) to Leftist causes. In a system based on ability or traditional hierarchies such as a meritocracy or most Western civilizations, these groups would be at the bottom of the ladder...
Bob Sykes: “Bioslop,” coining a new racist insult. Loving it. Congrats to Kulak. Wasn’t “kulak” itself a derogatory term under Stalin?
Bob Sykes: While both Russia and China are authoritarian (but nowhere near Stalinist or Maoist), their Elites are both more representative of their people and work more in their people’s interests than do the US, UK, or EU regimes. The late Senator Graham is a good example of just how hostile to the American people our Epstein Rulers really are.
Jim: As far as I can tell, “robber-baron capitalism” was a rhetorical cudgel used by the power center that established the Federal Reserve System, an hereditary banking oligarchy, against ordinary self-made industrial magnates.
Gaikokumaniakku: The 19th century glorified robber-baron capitalism along with other myths of individual heroes. They forgot that Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants — and of course they also forgot that when Newton said that, he was referencing a long string of writers who had used the phrase for hundreds of years, back to Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by...
Harper’s Notes: RAND developed the Delphi Method during the early Cold War for estimating thermonuclear warfare casualties among other things. It works well under the right circumstances. Uses anonymity and sequential polling. But the right circumstances are generally difficult and rare. Most recently the Super-forecaster Project (Tetlock) has resulted in several the high-scorers participating in (betting) prediction markets, in which there are both advantages and disadvantages in non-anonymity.
Gaikokumaniakku: I greatly enjoyed both Runaway and Looker in the 1980s. Marginally relevant link: Starring the Computer: Computers in Movies and Television Starring the Computer: Computers in Runaway (1984)
Gaikokumaniakku: This is why crazy paradigm-breakers have so much potential for improvements to the collective system. Sadly, the rewards usually don’t work out. Crazy, dishonest charlatans are often rewarded, and crazy honest autistic crusaders for truth are usually burned at the stake. I think it was Colin Wilson who claimed the crucial distinction between real thinkers and followers was that real thinkers were capable of breaking away from socially acceptable paradigms.
Isegoria: It looks like Looker is on YouTube!
TRX: Crichton was also a novelist — a fairly good one – and wrote almost all of his own screenplays. He should have known the screenplay for Runaway stank. Watching Runaway a few months ago, I had a hard time believing it was a Crichton movie; it’s a mess. I didn’t like all of Crichton’s movies, but they were put together better than that. While on the Critchton subject, I’d like to make a plug for Looker, done about the same time as Runaway, but much better. Crichton had a...
Isegoria: Lower attendance is what we’re going for.
Bob Sykes: The problem facing all colleges and universities is that the number of white 18 year-olds, the primary consumers of college, is declining rapidly both relative to other races and absolutely. Many small liberal arts colleges are decidedly second rate academically, and so are the students they cater to. So, neither the loss of the schools nor the loss of the students is really a big deal. The health of the college system and the meaningfulness of the degrees awarded is actually better off...
Isegoria: Rising Sun came a decade later. I remember reading the novel right around when I read Jurassic Park. The Terminator, on the other hand, came out the same year as Runaways and was a much bigger deal.
Kentucky Headhunter: Huh, I remember Runaway being a fairly frequent Saturday afternoon movie option on cable. Not to the level of Rising Sun, but it was on at least once every three or four months. Now, unlike Rising Sun, I never actually left it on…
TRX: Crichton usually got his computer stuff correct, though. He picked up a degree in “computer graphics” while he was getting his M.D. at Harvard. When he decided he didn’t care for doctoring, he went to Hollywood and made more computer-ish movies than doctor-ish ones. I only discovered “Runaway” earlier this year; I thought I was familiar with all of Crichton’s movies, but apparently not. I don’t remember ever seeing any mention of it anywhere.
Isegoria: Crichton clearly had little interest in the details of weapons. In the movie, a household robot goes rogue and acquires a revolver — which makes a pump-action shotgun racking sound before each shot and leaves a ragged two-inch hole in the drywall. Sigh. So I’m not surprised he gets his warships mixed up.

Isegoria

The (Potential) Enemies List

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