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the fact that libertarians built cryptocurrency and darknet markets in the last few decades to put theory into practice and socialists didn't try to build small scale planned economies is an underemphasized point in current debates around planned economies
political philosophy hasn't come to terms with the existence of nuclear weapons
Alan Turing will probably be seen as the most important philosopher of the 20th century in the long run because so questions of what can be computed are essential to pretty much every domain we care about
Anyone who's seriously working to undermine rent seeking in the contemporary economy is anti-capitalist whether they realize it or not
Attempts to reenact the Cold War but with China will be really dumb because second rate states/non-state actors have far more agency thanks to technological superempowerment
actual solutions to the problem of disinformation will look like the epistemic equivalent of giving every citizen guns and training to engage in guerrilla resistance
will certainly make defense easier but will also make state control much harder if not impossible
will certainly make defense easier but will also make state control much harder if not impossible
one of the best reasons to embrace markets (and the broader scope of insights find in principle agent problems/game theory) as a leftist is that it leaves reactionaries with bullshit essentialism (be it evopsych or mysticism) to justify domination
8/ (going to start numbering now lol)
piracy is by far and away the most effective mechanism for transferring wealth to developing countries we have come across https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/03/why-poor-countries-lead-world-piracy
piracy is by far and away the most effective mechanism for transferring wealth to developing countries we have come across https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/03/why-poor-countries-lead-world-piracy
9/ if you think that the financial sector as it currently exists is completely broken yet don't have something in cryptocurrency (if you can afford it), I question how sincerely you hold that belief (even though the crypto space is rife with scams)
10/ The online culture war brought on by clean meat alternatives becoming cost competitive with regular meat will make all prior conflict look tame
11/ the Trump that QAnon followers believe exists (altruistic billionaire who follows through on a decades long plan to destroy a global cabal of pedophile elites) would probably make a pretty good president lol
12/ first world leftists should just own being majority frustrated people with education. Automation (among other things) means the working class has less and less agency. Motivated people who understand technology / complex dynamics have more and more agency
13/ every single political ideology should have something akin to The Evolution of Trust which explains things in an interactive game that you can play around with to see how things work https://ncase.me/trust/
14/ endlessly extending the duration of copyright so disney can keep control of mickey mouse and preventing IP from falling into the public domain is cultural imperialism
15/ the left made many unforced errors in the 20th century that were the result of shitty models and not because of mAtERiaL cOnDiTIonS
this is both frustrating and heartening
this is both frustrating and heartening
16/ transgender folk are more or less conscripts on the frontline of the war for normalizing morphological freedom and I thank them for the freedoms they have won the rest of us and will continue to do so o7
17/ not a hot take but as someone who's lived for most of their life with social anxiety who has seen improvement in the last few years there's definitely a phantom limb thing going on when I find myself in situations that previously would have triggered my anxiety
18/ overpopulation is more or less a myth pushed by reactionaries since the OG Malthus and the inefficiencies and inadaequcies of capitalism should be front and center since brown/green is going to see a rise in popularity in the coming years
19/ fascists like Francis Yockey who pointed out that the Soviet Union was better at preserving traditional norms and values were correct
20/ if you live in a developed country you have an overwhelming responsibility to the rest of the world to both a) fight for open borders and b) build inexpensive non-state means of welfare provisioning that can easily be replicated in anticipation of climate disruption
21/ degrowth only makes sense as a temporary pivot towards a far more efficient/low impact economy and would suck as some long term solution https://c4ss.org/content/52500
22/ nuclear advocates are right about the importance of energy density but oh god does that industry intersect with the worst of the state in a million different ways
(err *did. I think things have gotten better)
23/ electric bicycles are probably going to be one of the biggest changes brought about by the cost reductions of lithium batteries because they an effective type of transport and let you avoid parking bs
(not exactly a hot take but I have 100+ of these to do guys what the fuck)
(not exactly a hot take but I have 100+ of these to do guys what the fuck)
24/ Charles Stross' Accelerando captures the feel, if not the content, of being on twitter pretty nicely and you should read it for that reason
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html
25/ if reactionaries really gave a shit about IQ they'd be freaking out about the impact of pollution on kids
ahh revealed preference
ahh revealed preference
26/ if Marx hadn't coined it, "the free association of producers" would likely be a libertarian catchphrase that leftists sneered at
27/ grifting guilty rich white liberals is a form of bottom-up reparations and the only problem with it is that it favors minorities of a certain class background
28/ the best outcome for the November election is Trump trying to steal the election but fucking it up and in the process breaking the GOP into a thousand squabbling pieces that can't organize to run a competent fascist against biden in 2024
29/ Mass-market media that accurately captures the experience of using social media is non-existent (I can't think of any off the top of my head but that might just be me)
30/ The attention given by cartoons created by millennials to things like existential meaning and mental health is a positive, even if it can occasionally be cringe
31/ the appropriate attitude to take towards uncool things you emphatically enjoy is simultaneous genuine enthusiasm, while also being self-aware of how uncool the thing is as perceived by broader society https://markmanson.net/meta-awesomeness
32/ universities are not breeding grounds for radicals, they are containment chambers
33/ you could probably push a lot of radical theory on the margins by having it touch on concerns of managers who want novelty
(c.f. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2020/09/06/hate-your-job-you-are-not-alone/#1fe7ce2d496c)
(c.f. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2020/09/06/hate-your-job-you-are-not-alone/#1fe7ce2d496c)
34/ advertising was in many ways responsible for the emerging counterculture in the 60s and is both an excellent example of the vapidity of politics-as-aesthetics and also the potential for markets to undermine authoritarian norms
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/259919.html
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/259919.html
35/ my personal take on the 60s is that there were the seeds of a neo-artisnal, Homebrew Industrial Revolution economic revolution that got largely squashed for various reasons (although there's an argument early silicon valley was its legacy) https://www.amazon.com/Second-Industrial-Divide-Possibilities-Prosperity/dp/0465075614
36/ if we had economic democracy in the 19th century, Marx would have written a giant book complaining about democracy fetishism
37/ Deride McCloskey is generous to actually-existing-capitalism but she's dead on about markets requiring and promoting values beyond utilitarianism
38/ the strongest argument that we are in decline is the decreasing quality of the average reactionary since the French Revolution
39/ Public choice theory and the principle agent problem both give you leftist conclusions IMO
40/ if you wanted to undermine the long term capacity of reactionaries to make change in the world, one subtle way to do it would be to boost the ones who push worldviews which require dismissing hard sciences
41/ using Rokos basilisk to dismiss lesswrong is boring and cheap (especially cuz there are far more interesting dunks / criticisms)
42/ internet autodidacts who recreate previous philosophical insights shouldn't be dismissed because they show us different paths we might have taken to stumble across the insight
43/ the solution to the fermi paradox is probably 1) intelligent life is rare 2) intelligent life frequently kills itself 3) a technologically mature species is indistinguishable from nature https://nextnature.net/story/2012/any-sufficiently-advanced-civilization-is-indistinguishable-from-nature
44/ ethics only gets interesting when you have entities that are capable of consciously rewriting their reward mechanisms
45/ Once you take libertarianism away from the right what you are left with is countless flavors of RETVRN (to invented tradition)
46/ Elon Musk significantly bringing down the price of getting stuff into space is the sort of thing that capitalists are supposed to do and for that he deserves praise (ofc he's a rent seeking control freak but we're grading on a curve here folks)
47/ the fact there were people born in the 19th century who lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union is staggering and should be at the forefront of your mind when thinking about the implications of life extension
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people
48/ the warning messages left on nuclear waste sites is metal as fuck and is begging to be turned into horror fiction (if any exists, please link me!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
49/ the main reason justin bieber and twilight (boy am I showing my age here) got so much hate compared to other trashy pop culture is because they are popular with young women
50/ Watchmen is the best explicitly political comic book by an order of magnitude (Uber by Kireon Gillian is the second)
51/ Wikipedia is the best example of functional communism at scale we have ever seen and the fact that Jimmy Wales is a Rand fan and drew on Hayek when thinking about how it would work is a feature, not a bug
52/ society is still dealing with the epistemic trauma that gave us postmodernism, major problem is that the faustian bargain we made with constructing state backed institutions means we are stuck in a local optima that makes alternatives difficult
re: 48 goddamn how is this not the basis of a hugo award winning short story already practically writes itself
53/ starcraft brood war is the best competitive video game ever made and this is largely due to blizzard getting really lucky with initial balance, not touching the core game once they got it right and dedicated fans experimenting with the final product for years
54/ complaints about social media addiction are annoying because social media is two polar opposites that awkwardly fused together(app 4 friends, conversations, fights, etc and data trawling advertising machine that wants to limit my agency so i buy product)
55/ concerns that we lack spiritual meaning and connection in late-postmodernity are legit but the world "spiritual" is vague and unhelpful
56/ having armish, primitivists living in the woods, etc is good insurance against black swans that would force lots of people to live that way for extended periods of time
57/ nick land and curtis yarvin are overrated and are only popular because the right is kinda dumb (see 45) and so had little in the way of competition
but they are a good case study for how vulgar libertarianism leads straight to fascism
but they are a good case study for how vulgar libertarianism leads straight to fascism
58/ the US is currently fighting China with one or both of its hand tied behind its back, the problem is that untieing those hands will involve getting rid of the artificial scarcity used to restrict its population
59/ probably the best thing about normalizing polyamory is that it requires actual emotional intelligence to successfully pull off for any extended period of time
60/ Neil Strauss' The Game read to me like a feminist deconstruction of PUA when I read it in 2014/2015. Might have just be Strauss covering his ass since the dude is pretty educated and works in fairly liberal industries tho
[lol I have to do 160 of these? I'll be back later]
[lol I have to do 160 of these? I'll be back later]
61/ most people on the right would have better politics if they actually read Marx, most people on the left would have better politics if they read less Marx
62/ the whole 'temporary embarrassed millionaire' dynamic is probably more accurately described as 'temporarily embarrassed petite bourgeoisie' c.f. Two Cheers for the Petite Bourgeoisie James C. Scott
63/ the more dynamic and fluid a system is, the more it is suited to egalitarian / libertarian forms of social organization
64/ AI has authoritarian capabilities cuz data and compute can be leveraged for economies of scale but it also has underemphasized libertarian capabilities cuz it gives insurgents and upstarts the ability to create the sort of specialized rigid agents of authoritarian regimes
65/ hamiliton is cringe but if I'm going to be part of a declining empire I'd much rather listen to pro-immigration hip-pop then whatever the USSR was putting out in the 80s
66/ the primary edge democratic regimes have over autocratic regimes in the modern era is that leadership churn is good in an changing environment and the openness that democracy allows for more effective self-correction even if most citizens aren't paying attention
67/ the correct contrarian stance to take on Francis Fukuyama is that both the critics who only read the first half of the title are dumb, as his argument of the superiority of liberalism(but is perfectly rational and correct when considered from the overton window circa the 90s)
68/ trusting a single intellectual to show you the way is the cognitive equivalent of a hyperspecialized economy
69/ planned economies bend in a socially conservative direction and Cockshott's reactionary social attitudes are downstream from the sort of social control that would be required to make the economy he describes in Towards a New Socialism function
70/ the fact some people think that "AI of X capacity will replace all jobs below Y IQ" is an unbelievably stupid frame that totally ignores the complexities of decision making in the real world
71/ going through suffering can build character but to do so reliably requires shit like support networks and resources to fall back on
which a major reason why reactionary appeals that the youth need to suffer more to learn their place rings so hollow
which a major reason why reactionary appeals that the youth need to suffer more to learn their place rings so hollow
72/ there's a good chance Alexandria Elbakyan will be the most impactful marxist in history in terms of human liberation and the fact that she did so by basically following an anarchist playbook is 
73/ The Last Jedi should have seen Kylo and Rey ditch the First Order and the Resistance after the throne room scene (and breaking the superstar destroyer) and try to do their own thing with final movie being about the galactic fallout of their action
74/ you should try to turn your beliefs into actionable bets with stakes if for no other reason than the fun of finding out how full of shit you are
75/ the fact that American progressives don't try to instrumentalize the fact that their opponents are seriously detached from reality speaks to both a) lack of motivation and b) the fact that their maps of reality are also shitty and only look good in comparison
76/ if you reran the Cold War with slightly different initial conditions many times over, I would wager that we see nuclear war at close to half the time
77/ one of the primary benefits of learning math is the ability to be more aware about what is and is not included in the models you make of the world
78/ school is a prison but I am thankful to have gone to relatively diverse public schools in terms of race
79/ that there aren't any mainstream strategy games that have the tragedy of the commons/governing the commons as a core mechanic is unfortunate
(I'm 101% sure there are indie games that do this well tho)
(I'm 101% sure there are indie games that do this well tho)
80/ someone really needs to make a satirical 4X game in the vein of Spec Ops The Line based on Seeing Like a State in which you spend the majority of the game fighting and dominating your own population instead of the other civs
81/ people in the future will judge us for not working faster on life extension, meat alternatives and clean energy in that order IMO
82/ if your answer to emerging disruptive technologies is "we'll handle it after the revolution" ur fuked
83/ modern capitalism operates primarily off extracting rents in a million different ways which makes it both pernicious (you need more surveillance and control to make it work) and also more fragile (much larger attack surface cuz society is the factory 
)
)
84/ the fact that "every leftist should read elinor ostrom" is a hot take is incredibly depressing
85/ actually doing things and having a positive outcome/experience is probably the most persuasive argument you can give most people. This is why the internet is such a strong force for cosmopolitianism
86/ gillis is right about scientists being the class with the most revolutionary potential
http://humaniterations.net/2011/09/10/scientists-as-a-revolutionary-class/
http://humaniterations.net/2011/09/10/scientists-as-a-revolutionary-class/
87/ probably the biggest practical question for anarchists is "how do we build and operate the infrastructure necessary to run cities" (the biggest abstract question is "how do we achieve coordination at scale")
88/ I'm not a sports guy (shocker), but AFL is probably the best sport in the world because it is so fast paced and fluid
89/ You should try to treat everyone you come across as if they had a nuclear veto over your actions, because one day they just might
90/ marxist kvetching about gig work bringing back piecework misses the forest (workers not having more agency over the platforms that manage them) for the trees (a particular mechanism of evaluating labor)
91/ someone should really do the math on what it would take for asteroid mining to start seeing runaway growth that ends up giving a plutocrat unassailable control over the solar system
92/ Competition under narrow conditions leads to hierarchy. Competition under open conditions leads to equality. The trick is setting the boundaries of the game
93/ pumping out 90 hot takes is exhausting and makes me feel pity for people who have to do it for a living
94/ many of the pathologies marxists attribute to capitalism (and by extension markets) is just the result of those with power trying to control complex systems and the reason they don't want to admit this is cuz it means their tradition looks very stupid
95/ if you could somehow grasp contemporary human civilization in its totality it would be a spiritual experience like no other
96/ one unemphasized reason the right freaks out so much about secret communist infiltration and subversion is that the structures that generate the hierarchies they like are pretty fragile
(actual communism would of course be much harder to establish)
(actual communism would of course be much harder to establish)
97/ all the big problems we face are are nash equilbria and normalizing it as an analytic tool would pay dividends
(also the fact that the most effective attempt to do so was semi-anonymous blogger who came up with the solution of "nanny god AI" is)
(also the fact that the most effective attempt to do so was semi-anonymous blogger who came up with the solution of "nanny god AI" is
)
98/ Yglesias is a meme but his point about how if CEOs were Ayn Rand heroes that people claim them to be, we'd probably be better off letting them plan the economy instead of fucking around with the pretense of a market is on point
99/ I'd wager that in the coming decade creative commons media properties will start eating away at the mainstream on the edge as the capabilities of low cost tools continue to increase
100/ the fact that I have twitter friends on every major continent is kinda mindblowing... really hope i get to meet some of you guys after this whole pandemic thing is done <3
[okay we're done here]
[okay we're done here]
