Ironically, your last sentence is exactly why I think we need fewer essays (and snarky xkcd comics) about how the First Amendment only applies to the government.
It's from March 25, 2021 at 8:37 am. There are others from earlier that day. Though they aren't (at least not now) showing in a logical order that I can see.
Kind of an overly simplistic depiction of the Rand Rebellion and South African history there. The South African Communist Party in particular helped organise black workers and allied itself with the ANC.
I mean, I don't know that we need to coin a new term "diversity libertarianism"... to me this just seems to be, well, classical liberalism. (Or if I'm wrong about that, because I might be, there's also already the existing therm "thick libertarianism".) I mean, go read "On Liberty", right? OK, "On Liberty" isn't so much about the value of diversity in the marketplace, but still, a lot of the other ideas mentioned here are there.
This to my mind is why so much of libertarianism, that seems to focus *purely* on opposition to government, really seems, well, off-center to me. Government is only an *example* of the problem. The more general problem is conformism/traditionalism/authoritarianism/group-ism/mob-ism/whatever you want to call it, and the attendant social pressure. Again, Mill covers this! But many libertarians seem to ignore this.
(I should also note here, that when I say "authoritarianism" above, I *don't* mean overbearing government. I've commented here before that I don't like the two-axis left/right libertarian/authoritarian model of politics-space. I *definitely* don't like the left-right axis, which to my mind is a total jumble. But libertarian-authoritarian I think is also unnatural; I don't think "more government vs less government" is a good axis along which to think, and I don't think it's useful for discussing any political positions other than thin libertarianism specifically. But the reason I bring it up is because of how the libertarian movement has taken this word "authoritarian" and used it over and over to mean "overbearing government", and now when I want to use it to mean something *else* I have to explain, no I don't mean that. Of course I haven't explained what I *do* mean, but, um, I'm just going to hope it's clear from context?)
(Also on that note Scott I'm hoping you got my recent email on this subject :P )
(Also, there seem to be some varieties of libertarianism that don't really feel classically liberal at all... like, the sort that's OK with a dictator so long as that dictator is corrupt and doesn't do very much, because, see, that's small government. OK, but it's not, like, rule of law, let alone democracy...)
I don't think talking about this in terms of "religion" is helpful, because I think the fundamental problem here is, well, more fundamental than that; religions are again merely an example.
...I guess I can't conclude this comment without making a note of my idea that we should really think in terms of a broad principle of *orthogonality* underlying this sort of liberalism, which I don't think many people have noted or made explicit, but, I'm not actually about to go on about this here, so I guess I'll just note this idea rather than explaining it. :P
Anyway yes good post, except for the part where you needlessly invent new terms. :P
Can't this lean into hard power though? If all the productive farmland is owned by people who buy into an anti-Group A religion, and all the banks are owned and staffed by anti-Group A people, and all the supermarkets are owned by anti-Group A people, and you happen to be a member of Group A, then you can't get food, grow food or get startup capital to try and fill the gap in services for members of Group A and make a bunch of money.
I think social pressure can blend into hard power when it is mixed with property rights and a dominant "religion." If you have no way of even getting food, you can be killed without a single government official raising their finger against you in violence.
Parler enabling an attack on Congress seems comparable to a nuclear plant meltdown. In other words I prefer minimum variation of political platforms rather than maximum.
Unless there is a mechanism to force people who buy into the anti-Group A religion to refuse to deal with Group A, some of them will, because the religion isn't the only thing they care about and there are large profits to be made doing it. It's the usual problem of maintaining a cartel.
If 95% of people are anti=group A democracy won't protect Group A either. No system will. But unless someone is able to use violence, soft power is really vulnerable to spoilers. If 20% of the grocery stores will sell you food, then you can still eat. If 51% of the population is willing to vote for an anti-group A platform and all grocery stores are controlled by the government then you can get 100% of the stores not selling you food based on the will of a narrow majority.
Tying this back to the OP, no system is immune to failure. But some systems are more robust to certain types of failure (durable) than others.
Presumably corporations have something in between hard and soft power - they have hard power over their employees, and some of their customers and suppliers, but soft power over others.
> In today’s day and age, someone can immunize themselves from social pressure by growing a thicker skin (or staying off social media) and having some financial runway
Or friends. Most of my family are right-wing partisans; most of my social circle are left-wing partisans. Neither exercises *power* over me, per se, but I could see how they would if I were less self-sufficient.
(tangential gripe: For a while I spent a non-trivial amount of time ignoring each half of the people I know talking about how awful their ideological enemies (i.e. the other half) are, and how beyond the pale I am for having a Problem with that. Eventually I just gave up and stopped trying. It's depressing when loved ones that you previously assumed were too smart to go politically insane do in fact go insane, and there's nothing you can do about it.)
Hard power does not always win over soft power. Politics as we know it is essentially a game in which soft power attempts to overcome hard power to effect change.
I like the concept of superorganism-ism as the opposite of libertarianism.
For me, being a libertarian also does not mean "I support the rights of a specific kind of undemocratic superorganism - the corporation - to shit all over common goods" but "hey everyone, how about we have an option to resist ingestion into superorganism A which is not throwing ourselves into the maw of opposing superorganism B".
Of course in practice this is difficult, but superorganisms with an explicit primary goal of protection against superorganisms (like for example Switzerland or og USA) seem like a defensible-enough option.
>but superorganisms with an explicit primary goal of protection against superorganisms
Almost by definition superorganisms with the explicit primary goal of avoiding getting eaten by other superorganisms and the secondary goal of consuming or subjugating every other superorganism within reach that can be consumed without serious consequences... will quickly become the primary/only superorganisms around.
"The more general problem is conformism/traditionalism/authoritarianism/group-ism/mob-ism/whatever you want to call it"
I want to call it "government"! I'm only halfway serious here. I know that in the common usage of the term government, basically everyone always is referring to the one true big national Government. But "governing" is a rough synonym for controlling, and I think any stifling group can be said to be a kind of "government", even if they are not the capital G Government. Maybe it works better if one says they are against "governing" or "attempts to govern", which indicates that they aren't just referring to actions taken by the Official State Authority.
I don't think this is a meaningful expansion of the term government. In some cases, the problem is truly grass-roots conformism coupled with a grass-roots ostracism of people who depart from the group consensus on certain issues. There are at least two significant ways this is very un-government-like. First, it lacks any sort of central organization and functions purely on group consensus. Second, often the individuals who exert the most power in punishing certain types of non-conformism (by being most able to create a group consensus in these areas) exert little or no power in any other area.
The first paragraph was more or less what I was going to write. Ayn Rand is not a libertarian (if she were alive she'd say so, in no uncertain terms).
However, paragraph 2 misses the point. Libertarians (hello!) focus on the government because it's the only entity that can shoot you if you don't do what it says. Corporations can't do this. Of all the forms of private coercion out there (they absolutely exist), being a monopoly by virtue of making yourself the default option everywhere is pretty mild. Corporate coercion and power is definitely on the list of things to worry about (at least the way I think of libertarianism), but it's a ways down there. Various things governments do tend to take the top-N slots on the list, and N is a large number.
This line from Scott confuses me: "Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform." Is there though? I think he's right in his counter-factual. Since he mentioned Ayn Rand, I'll pull out an analogy: Zuck is somewhat analogous to Gail Wynand, in that he's built a pandering tool that gives him power to the extent he panders. But, I think the pressure to conform is over-stated. Zuck's alternative to active support for the prevailing liberal ideology of the moment is doing nothing, or maybe paying some cheap lip service from time to time. Which is more or less what he does. He does enough to keep his customers happy and leaves it at that. Certain a lot of activist groups try to create something that looks like religious pressure to conform, but people like Zuckerberg are plenty smart enough to see though relatively small groups with some support amplifying their messages to appear to be large groups with widespread support. A lot of other corporate leaders aren't that smart.
A small gripe: *anyone* has the power to shoot you if you don’t follow their orders. At least anyone with sufficient resources to procure a firearm and a plane ticket.
You could argue that an important reason they do not (beyond the fortunate fact that most people don’t seem inclined to perform random acts of evil), is retaliation from the rest of society, formalized by a constitutional republic at our particular place and time.
While this doesn't directly address what you're saying, I feel like I should point out that my primary example of something being forgotten is not corporations, but grass-roots ostracism of weirdos, as mentioned by Skeptical Scientist above.
I guess the more relevant comment is that if libertarians *focus* on the government, great, but there's a difference between *focusing* on the government on the one hand, and claiming that government is the *only* instance on the other (or, if not claiming that government is the only instance, saying that government is the key thing to look at, rather than merely being the most important instance of a more general phenomenon). Which as I said leads to thinking along this messed up more-vs-less-government axis, and adding confusing overloads to words like "authoritarianism"...
Why not coin a new term? "Classical libertarianism" requires more context to correctly identify, whereas diversity libertarianism has the mechanism of action right there in the title. Contrast to "My libertarianism works because it's classic!"
It also may be the case that some people have more positive associations with 'diversity' (freedom, difference, etc.) than with 'classical' (ancient, obsolete, 'dead white men'), and they might not be disposed to read On Liberty before coming to conclusions about libertarianism.
"I mean, go read 'On Liberty', right? OK, 'On Liberty' isn't so much about the value of diversity in the marketplace, but still, a lot of the other ideas mentioned here are there."
> I don't know that we need to coin a new term "diversity libertarianism"... to me this just seems to be, well, classical liberalism.
Does it though? I'm not sure it does. Diversity libertarianism, as laid out b y Scott allows things like "taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon" and I'm not sure people calling themselves classical liberals would necessarily be in favour of those things.
I think classical liberals might be in favor of removing externalities on carbon, as an application of the same principles as the common law of nuisance. Not the other two.
To me, removing or defining the cost of the externalities of burning fossil fuel carbon is one of the most logical things to defend as a libertarian, but I am routinely disappointed by how few others agree.
In my understanding, the tragedy of the commons is most definitely acknowledged and addressed by libertarian thinking. Even Ron Paul used to explain to new converts that a factory dumping pollution into a river could be sued by downriver land owners and others with a right to use that water in a libertarian world, and that the treat of such a lawsuit was the ideal mechanism for discouraging such behavior.
The practical problem is that we don't know what the externalities are. We don't even know their sign, although lots of people think they do.
Try listing positive externalities. If you can't think of any I can offer some big ones — or you can think about whether there is any reason to expect current climate to be optimal for humans everywhere.
Agreed. I feel like I am hearing some Jonathan Rauch "liberal science" influence here, and frankly, I love to see it. I have always considered myself a liberal and still do to this day because I will not cede that ground to a progressive movement that is illiberal in almost every way possible.
I disagree; I think that the term "diversity libertarian" is crucial. The problem (well, one problem) with classical libertarianism is precisely that it doesn't deal well with cases where the stultifying forces are other than governmental: religious, market, etc. Diversity libertarianism carves out precisely those exceptions.
Or, perhaps I should say, the former of them. (And even if that's ALL the term adds it's still crucial to Scott's argument.) But I don't think Scott addresses the issue of *market* forces one way or the other (as opposed to what he calls, with an understandable if unusual usage, religious ones). But that is a case that is worth talking about, too. Walmart coming into town and wiping out dozens of small, local, non-chain stores is definitely a case of loss of diversity; ditto Amazon wiping out independent bookstores. But of course if you wrap these issues into things, then you might lose most of the libertarian aspect. I'd be interested to hear Scott's thoughts on that angle.
There's also the overwhelming issue of externalities— Scott calls pollution "simple", but for carbon pollution it certainly hasn't been. When practically every human activity is involved in externalities, and not ones that add up to an inconvenience but ones which present an existential threat to human civilization, then you've got, if nothing else, a very complicated problem.
All of which adds up to the fact that I'm not a libertarian, classical or diversity. That said: I still think that even if "diversity libertarian" (and I assume Scott coined this phrase just now? Google isn't turning up anything relevant) means nothing but adding the "religious" (ideological/social pressure) dimension, it is still a crucial term, since it allows us to talk about the diversity-squashing, non-governmental actions like racial segregation, colluding to prevent the sale of liquor, or making certain types of speech practically impossible.
"When practically every human activity is involved in externalities, and not ones that add up to an inconvenience but ones which present an existential threat to human civilization"
That nicely illustrates the problem with abandoning the standard libertarian approach. As best I can tell, climate change does not present an existential threat to human civilization. Indeed, unless "threat" means "there is some probability greater than zero," in which case stopping climate change also presents such a threat (consider the small but non-zero chance that anthropogenic warming is preventing the end of the current interglacial), I don't think the claim that it does is even defensible. But given that claim, it's possible to argue for all sorts of violations of ordinary libertarian rules.
My point isn't to get into an argument about whether your view or mine is correct. It is to point out that, once one drops a strong bias in favor of those rules, you are at risk any time someone can scare the mob into believing that there is some invisible catastrophe lurking in the future if not forcibly prevented. For a much milder example of the problem, consider how much of the response to Covid, whether right or wrong, was driven by the fact that ordinary people overestimated the risks by about an order of magnitude. Or consider how much the population scare fifty years ago looks like the current climate scare. Or the peak oil scare or the running out of topsoil scare or the "the stupid poor are outbreeding the smart not-poor so we need eugenic sterilization" scare, which was popular with both progressives and conservatives only a little more than a century ago and parts of it were actually implemented in some countries.
There is much to be said for strong constraints on what government can do, once you remember that they are not run by philosopher kings.
We're not talking "greater than zero". We're talking real possibility.
And *those* are just the "end civilization" scenarios. That doesn't even touch on "a billion people need to be relocated, with all the suffering and chaos and death that that will inevitably cause".
Which leads us, of course, to the problem with *adapting* standard libertarian approach: it is helpless in the face of a real crisis, leading to a strong ideological tendency to deny the evidence rather than accept that you have to replace your priors.
Whenever you think about climate change alarmism, you need to ask yourself: if temperatures get 5 degrees F hotter in my town, just how bad will that be? (Or, better, because of adaption, how bad would it be to have to live in somewhere as hot as Atlanta instead of as hot as Baltimore (see https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-temperatures-large-cities.php)
I'd say "Libertarianism" is neutral on how much "diversity" is good. The diversity that results from people making free choices is good "diversity." Any diversity forced on people against their will is bad "diversity."
TBH, "diversity" is typically used as an undefined virtue-signaling word that doesn't have any intrinsic usefulness.
That is one current definition -- as in, "our list of authors is 100% diverse because they are 100% black women who 100% think the same about everything."
Libertarianism is a theory of how the government should work. It can coexist with many other ideas about how other stuff should work. That is, I can think antidiscrimination law should go away because it violates freedom of association, but still think companies shouldn't discriminate in employment. Or I can think that the government should be forbidden to ban evil religions while still thinking some religions are very bad for their adherents and the world would be a better place if they went away.
I’ve long thought that “communitarian” (as opposed to “individualist”) would be a better term than “authoritarian” for the upper side of the political compass.
This is both because it refers to a broader issue than the narrow one of the scope of government power (as Acemoglu pointed out, many if not most pre-state societies without coercive governmental authority are quite “communitarian” in the extent to which social norms constrain actions), and because essentially nobody self-identifies as “authoritarian”—it’s a pejorative term applied by ideological opponents.
Libertarianism is just about "don't shoot me because you don't like how I go about my own business". It's not restricted to opposing formal government, but a government is one of the entities that will eventually shoot you if you don't do as they say (say by not paying taxes and then resisting arrest). There are many other unpleasant human interactions besides violence - snobbery, selfishness, ignorance and so on. But it's helpful to first oppose initiation of violence as the gravest ill. The other things can be handled through people behaving badly losing all friends and business partners and the fact that in modern civilization one is pretty miserable if nobody wants to deal with them.
I had to stare at the graphs for a little bit. Am I correct that the X-axis ranges from worse to better outcomes and the Y-axis ranges from less to more likely?
When you see a bell curve, that is usually what you're looking at. (i.e. a probability density function, with outcomes on X axis and probabilities on Y axis.)
X is ‘quality’, from terrible to great power plant. Y you should see as a ‘column chart’ representing how many power plants there are at each X level. (they are ‘buckets’, higher means more powerplants at that quality level).
Scott, if you’d want to make this a clearer illustration of your argument you would want to draw a ‘discrete’ version of this.
(why do people often want to make it ‘continuous’ anyway? because the math works out easier then)
My impression is that it’s continuous because that represents the underlying distribution power plants are drawn from, not the distribution of power plants we see in the world.
I interpreted this like a markov chain monte carlo (MCMC) jump probability. It's just how far from your current state you are jumping. The graph doesn't show the quality of outcome, just the distribution of jumps.
With MCMC methods, there are people who do research on optimal jump sizes for different problems. In some mathematical contexts for example, your jumps should follow a normal distribution with a variance large enough that you accept 0.234 of jumps (accepting means you start pivoting from the new position instead of the old one). https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2007/02/07/the_wellknown_0/
Unlike hill climbing methods, in mcmc you accept a proportion of worse jumps, so you can explore the whole space without getting stuck on the first local maximum.
> Or more generally: in an area with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn’t choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe.
> In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.
I don't think this is exactly Taleb's point. Externalities vs internalities aren't really core to (anti)-fragility. Fragile systems are composed of large correlated risks. Anti-fragile systems are composed of uncorrelated small risks. So, in the nuclear example, even if the entire world could vote on and agree to building a giant nuclear plant that posed an existential risk to civilization, it would still be fragile to do so, even though we all consented to it and so on.
The same applies to the super Tesla example. Presumably an infinite variance Tesla could be infinitely negative, and somehow destroy the world. That would make it fragile. The key point that makes something anti-fragile is that, as a system, it survives its tail events and goes on to keep improving itself.
This is a good objection. In the examples demonstrated, the implicit assumption seems to have been that the *average* quality of a distribution will remain unchanged as you change the variance. And if so, you can always demonstrate that high enough variance will eventually lead to disaster. The only sense in which higher variance is better than lower variance is if you can apply natural selection to the system in order to *raise* that average, over time. The argument is that in these systems, higher variance accelerates natural selection.
The question is not about whether you want to maximize or minimize variance, the real question is better stated as: For a given system, how much can you increase the variance until the tail end presents "too much risk" to be worth the gains in growth rate?
Fragile systems still want more variance rather than less variance, but the amount of variance they want is low in relation to anti-fragile systems. But I don't think there's any system in which a variance of 0 would be ideal.
Sure there is. You don't *ever* want your metabolic processes to ever deviate from perfection. You make a few billion ATPs per second, the ideal variation in the output is strictly zero -- you don't want *any* screwed-up molecules with strange reactivity that can mess your cells up. There's no way that can be of benefit -- there's no heritable improvement to be had -- and indeed natural evolution has driven the variation in these chemical reactions to unbelievably small levels -- extreme specificity, extremely constant rates, almost zero byproducts -- at the cost of introducing a staggering mass of checks and balances and interlocking control systems.
Same could be said of any factory. Certainly, you might want variation in the *design* of factories, but for any given factory (or machine/process with the factory), you want no variance at all in the faithfullness with which the physical plant executes the design.
The point is less argumentative than it might at first seem, since the border between "design" and "implementation" is less bright and sharp than it might at first seem (e.g. in the case of biology what about epigenetics, huh? If we have some variation *there* maybe it's good...)
If what Taleb means by anti-fragile means it grows stronger against *tail* events (as opposed to just normal bad stuff), then most of the examples Scott mentioned as anti-fragile don't seem right to me.
Highly-censored societies are fragile in that same sense. In an uncensored free-for-all, presumably there will be a wide variety of opinions, many of which are false as all get-out. But the system is anti-fragile in the sense that they're unlikely all to be wrong at the same time and in the same way. I can imagine some systems that work only if everyone is on exactly the same page and the slightest error is fatal. Those strike me as good examples of fragility. We may have to tolerate fragility (rigid conformity) in some systems, but we'd better have an awfully good reason to accept the risk, or we won't be doing ourselves any favors.
So I think you can frame some of the problems with social media in exactly this way. Social media is inherently uni-polar, due to profound network effects. Yes, there are a few social networks, but very, very few compared to the diversity of social spaces in the pre-internet age. And the topology of those networks tends, in many ways, to induce a correlation of viewpoint and topic. That correlation in turn induces a powerful fragility.
This was true to an extent in the pre-internet age with mass media, and I think we felt its effects in slightly different ways. Broadcast mass media is correlated risk, but low variance, because it needs to appeal to many people. But P2P social media is high variance *and* correlated risk. This is why it's so dangerous. It combines the variance and carelessness of person to person conversation with the scale of mass media.
I don't know much about this, but I believe: Google is a big smartphone company because they push Android, which is actually free and open software and there are non-Google versions of it out theme, and because of the Play store, which actually can be replaced by other stores (see F-Droid). I am not sure there's such a huge barrier here.
I get what you're saying, and I also enjoy the openness of Android. I personally enjoy side-loading apps too.
But in the real world this is pretty meaningless. If your app isn't available on Google Play, Amazon Store or Apple Store then there's almost no way to make money of it. In fact it's really tough to even sell an Android phone that doesn't include the Google Suite of apps. (I know that markets like China and India are different in this regard because of carriers...)
The only exception I can think of is Epic/Fortnite, they successfully managed to get their users to sideload and they're truly massive in a way most big company's aren't.
What do you think would stop any of the big phone manufacturers from shipping their phones with a version of android with an additional alternative to Google Play pre-installed and a good user experience that leads him to search for apps in the alternative store first? I think if there's enough market for it, it doesn't take them 10 years to offer that.
So that's pretty much what Amazon does with Kindle Fires. And also I think the Chinese phone manufacturers do this. But if we consider the massive size of the phone industry it's telling that this is a rare occurrence. People want to own phones that have the Gmail App, Google Assistant and Google Maps (not to mention the millions of games/apps only currently available on Google Play. Removing this seriously de-values the phone they're trying to sell.
I'm not saying this isn't a possibility (in the same way that Google dominated PCs by getting everyone to use Chrome). But I do think that Google can keep Android open and act like a monopoly.
You're correct that it's more like Tesla level hard in regards to just going up against Google.
But Parler was shunned by Google, Apple, and Amazon simultaneously on basically the same day. Also keep in mind that Scott wasn't saying the tech monopolies were the ones with power, rather it was the all powerful popular culture that succeeded in pressuring them. Elon Musk is pretty controversial, but if he came out as a serious sexist/racist/etc. There's no chance Tesla would survive.
Clearly Parler couldn't do anything, and I don't disagree with Scott's main point; on the contrary. I'm just talking in this thread about whether, with enough demand, the market could realistically fill the niche that appears if lots of apps that people want get excluded from Apple and Google Play stores. And I think it could, given some years (like Tesla). The big challenge is building a decent android app store, since the hardware and the OS for android phones already exists outside of Google. And assuming Facebook and others don't join Google to collude, it doesn't sound THAT hard. I'd bet a Microsoft could do it for sure.
How much of a disadvantage is it to just make it available as a website? With a version optimized for mobile browsers, but the user still just uses it through the smartphone's web browser.
That was Apple's first "app store" strategy, actually. It seems like an eternity ago now, but Apple originally refused to let third parties develop iPhone apps and told them to make websites instead.
These days, mobile web is a more mature platform than it was, and websites can be installed as apps that work offline. But they still don't deliver the same level of performance, or the same level of developer experience (developing for mobile isn't exactly a fun time at the beach, but developing for the web is a living hell).
This is what Hauwei are having to do, given the ban by the USA government on Huawei using USA technology. They make great phones, but for now the phones are hampered by lack of decent apps (at least in Western nations - China has its own market for apps).
Android being open-source makes it easIER to start a new phone platform than it would otherwise be. But that's still not easy.
If you just want to build a Reddit or Twitter competitor, one or two good programmers could have a bare-bones first version up in couple of weeks. But if you then need to start your own smartphone manufacturer so that your users have something to run your app on, that's a wee bit more work.
And the smartphone platform is just one of the choke points: you also need a cloud platform (e.g. Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure), and people are going to DDOS you so you'll need protection from something like Cloudflare, and if you want to make money to cover your operating costs, you'll need to connect to a credit card processor.. Each of these are oligopolies where if the two or three big players won't serve you, you're at a severe disadvantage. So if all the big players cooperate to keep you out, you practically need to set up an entire separate Internet infrastructure just to run your Twitter clone.
An even if you manage all that -- great, so now we have three different Internets, one for leftists one for rightists one for centrists, and that's just in the US, the Europe has three more versions and China has one more, so you need to either commit to which faction you belong to, or carry three phones with you. That doesn't sound ideal either..
But there are already many phone manufacturers other than Apple and Google. I agree that it's incredibly hard to do everything from scratch yourself, so if they all collude, you are screwed. But Scott's example was not about collusion but about needing to replace the whole tech stack to evade Google + Apple.
No. No way. You'd need hardware, as you correctly point out this is a done deal. You'd need an OS, as you correctly point out this is while not trivial certainly doable. You'd need to have a big marketing/PR push to get the word out but this is also true of everything else.
But you also need an app store with a sufficient ecosystem and developer mindshare and monetization. You *already* have the monetization problem in the existing ecosystem: if the Android user base is 3x or more what the iOS user base is why do most devs write for iOS first? Because it pays. And you as the platform holder need that monetization (or a Google AdWords style revenue stream to cross-subsidize it) to keep the lights on, even with your OEMs. Fdroid is cool, but it ain't that. The users don't use the platform because the apps they rely on aren't there, developers don't put their stuff on your store because there's nothing in it for them, etc. etc.
There are a few ways this could work though: I think you mentioned Huawei somewhere here and they could do it by leveraging their existing markets to come at it from the side. They make really good stuff, and with a sufficient marketing blitz and deals with the major app providers they could conceivably take a run at this.
But the shortest proof I can offer is this: Bezos has already taken a run at this with Amazon alternatives to the standard Google/Apple fare (Fire store, Amazon Music, Amazon Prime Video, etc) without much luck cracking in to the phone space. And God knows, he has the resources both personally and corporately to pull it off if anyone can.
About the Amazon experience, there's also the point that currently there is not a significant demand for alternatives (banning Parler is not nearly enough).
But about your main point. I totally agree. The thing is, I was under the impression that most apps could be deployed to the hypothetical Play store alternative without modification, which would have made this way more doable. But MartinW pointed out that this is not the case because there are many core services in Android that most apps use which are not open and if Google doesn't let you use them independent of the Play Store, the app developers would have to work to support the new platform.
Yes that is correct. One way that your vision might come to pass is if a cross-platform framework becomes popular and ubiquitous enough you could create a phone platform that ran those apps *directly*, and then they really could be deployed without modification. Keep an eye on Flutter and React Native, if most or even just some of the major apps jump ship to the same cross-platform framework you could see a Cambrian explosion of phone OSes instead of the Coke/Pepsi duopoly we have now.
With Android you can use Amazon's app store, F-Droid, download the app from a website, or install it from your computer so there are options for anyone interested in stopping outside the box. With Apple that box is sealed and taped shut. You get an app through their app store or you don't get it at all.
A better analogy would have been: a company builds it's own cell phone and opened it's own app store, but AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile (the three nationwide network owners) refuse to grant access to their towers.
No, I can argue against diversity libertarianism on non-catastrophic grounds. It's not that I think that having a high variation in car companies will cause society to break down (though I don't trust the owners of car companies as far as I can throw them, so I'd rather bury them under regulation just to slow them down). It's that having a high variation in car companies places an unacceptable burden of complexity on uninteresting choices.
If all cars are more or less the same amount of crappy, then if I need a car, I go out and buy a car that's the same amount of crappy as any other car. And I will know in advance how crappy that is, because I will have seen how crappy every other car is. If that's too crappy to be worth the expense, then I simply will not buy a car.
But if some cars are awesome and others are horrific, then I stand a significant risk of ending up with a horrific one. And then libertarians come and point the finger at me, going, "hah hah! That's your own fault for not researching different car models! Free market FTW!"
But the thing is, researching different car models would have taken time out of MY LIFE. That would be the one life I'll ever get. Every moment I am spending on soul-killing grunt work is time I am not spending on doing something that makes me happy. Libertarianism is an attempt to extort me into giving up large chunks of MY LIFE by threatening me with disaster if I don't. I find that entirely unacceptable.
So much about libertarianism makes more sense if you just assume that libertarians are freaks who enjoy drudgery and boredom. I personally wish they'd just take up stamp collection or something instead of trying to reshape society to force everyone else to be as dull as them.
Yeah and this scales to both huge and tiny things. My friends know to ask me before buying a mobile phone because I'm one of those losers who spends too much time reading tech reviews. The nature of the internet these days is you can find obsessive subcultures on anything who will be more than willing to explain to all askers why that lawn-mower is a terrible choice, but this one is a must have.
You mean like the world where I spent a good chunk of last year unable to buy anything but groceries and gasoline except by going to Amazon et al, where there's a bunch of customer reviews right there for every product and the aggregated rating up front?
OK, it would help if the folks at Consumer Reports were to offer a browser extension that automatically linked to their rating/review of every one of their products I look at on any e-commerce site. Unless they did that already and didn't tell me.
He still has to spend hours of his life working to earn the money needed to pay CR (or whomever) for the cost of their valuable research. It may be more enjoyable than doing the research directly, but the cost hasn't been driven to zero.
There'll always be a cost to making good decisions. But for our purposes, as long as enough people are willing to either research or pay CR, the available options are forced to improve and compete. Since no matter how complex and niche your product is, the cost of getting terrible CR reviews is usually too high.
In practice, that only applies to high-visibility choices. I think the experience of open software is illustrative: there was always the implicit assumption that talent would compete on *every* aspect of the platform, so it would all be good, but in practice we got awesome package managers and MP3 players, and progress in less sexy things was much slower.
Same here. There will in general be always a ton of expert opinions and reviews for, say, flagship smartphones. But once you move out of the bright spotlight of the *most* interesting category, my experience is that expert advice becomes rarer and more expensive rapidly.
OK that's a fair point, I'm sure there are lots of products with tons of options and not a lot of of easy to access expert advice. We're responding on a comment that used car models which is a particularly bad example. It's never been easier to research car models.
But I think an easier example could be brands of shampoos at the supermarket. Nobody is going to spend time and money looking for the loser that compares competing shampoo brands, and I can see how the famous glut of options in modern supermarkets can be overwhelming and possibly detrimental.
I'm luckily not yet able to buy products via my smart assistant in my country, but my understanding is that when you ask Alexa to buy milk, they basically default to the approved Amazon brand of milk. This is probably bad for competition but also sounds refreshing not having to choose from a zillion options.
I still think none of this really serves as a good criticism of diversity libertarianism. The market really does a great job ensuring that there are good sources of information for financial decisions that require good info. It simply turns this information into another consumer good.
The real question is what about multiple competing CR reports?!
Will we need to invest in Meta-Consumer Report-Reports LOL!
By this point, Amazon often has hundreds of reviews for the most mundane products. For example, I had to buy some tarpaulins recently, and there were endless reviews pointing out the strong points and weaknesses of each of the popular items. People like to help out by giving their views. Scott's readers like to give their views on, say, ideologies, and some people like to give their views on tarps.
On the other hand, the huge number of reviews is daunting, and it's a fair amount of mental labor to try to come to systematically understand the various issues. Thus Consumer Reports is often worth the subscription because they bring a systematic perspective.
But after they've competed and the bad ones are gone, and only the goo ones are left, aren't we living in a world that looks like distribution 1 again?
If the world around us looks like distribution 2, isn't that *proof* that people don't have the freedom or ability to make goo decisions in that space, because if they did all the As would already be out of business?
Under diversity libertarianism, you should expect a wide range of services competing with CR, with quality ranging based on distribution 2.
Who reports on the reporters? And who reports on them?
Scoot has written about epistemic learned helplessness before; there's no reason why those dynamics shouldn't apply to consumer choice theory, in the world where no outside factors are trying to help the consumer put a thumb on the scale in favor of quality and honesty.
The alternative seems to be to appoint someone czar of the industry to decide what shall be available to the public. Why would anyone expect the czar to make better choices than the median buyer?
Why would you expect them to _not_ make better choices than the median buyer?
I will spend, generously, a couple minutes at most figuring out which brand of bread to purchase. They will spend days thinking about it, and be elevated to a position where they can hear about various bread-related problems from people I would never know to talk to.
If we have maximally high diversity, and the bread ranges from "a literal piece of charcoal" to "a 3 week old loaf, but not labeled as stale" to "normal bread".. well, I'm not going to spend more than a minute picking my bread, I have a lot of other food to buy too.
There's a chance I'll mess up and get the stale and internally molding one.
However, if we have a czar of food, let's call them "The FDA", they will definitely spend more time than me thinking about bread. They might decide to recommend that charcoal can't be labeled as bread and that "best by" dates must be attached to bread.
People have different preferences on bread. Should the market supply whole grain? Raisin bread? Thin-sliced? White bread? etc.
What works for you might not be what works for me. If you want to outsource your decision-making to someone else, you ought to have that right, but I want to pick which products I buy myself. I know my preferences better than any other person.
CR is not the only way you get information. You also get information through word of mouth from friends. So for instance, I tend to trust the Wirecutter's recommendations not because the super-reporter blessed them from all the review sites, but because a friend pointed me at them and I tried it a few times and got good-enough results.
"Who reports on the reporters? And who reports on them?" You do, when you buy three things that got five-star rating on fake-CR and they turned out to be crap. Then you ask a few of your friends if they've had the same experience, and most of them say "thanks for the heads-up" and one of them says "yeah, that happened to me too, but I've had good luck with real-CR, here's the link".
But then how do you know which consumer reports to trust and which ones are just shilling for one particular company (or a specific group of companies)?
That's not to say that variance is always bad here or that there are no ways to (partially) mitigate the downsides, but there is always a trade-off between adding variance and making choices more complicated for the customer.
Reputation matters. Consumer Reports is still around because they've proven themselves over a long period of time. It's why brands work well as a short-hand for quality.
My computer headset recently broke. I use it for a ton of different activities, phone calls to friends and families, meetings for work, playing games, listening to music, watching movies. When it broke I had to find a new one, which means I need to research if I want wireless, wired, what kind of extra features matter to me, what kind of support these headsets have. With the internet this has become much easier, plenty of sites offer lists of what headsets are best for what, and they have whole reviews. It's simply a matter of marking off the ones that seem to be what I want, and reading the reviews of these headsets.
Now there is still no guarantee that the headset I will buy will be the absolutely perfect balance of utility and price that I am looking for, but it does practically eliminate the chance of me accidentally purchasing a horrific product. It takes me maybe 30 minutes to do this and costs me nothing in the form of money.
This makes sense for items where the risk is mainly wasting money on a crappy thing. But we were recently thinking about getting an electric outdoor porch heater.
We soon learned that the most pandemic had driven a huge spike in demand for outdoor heaters. In a few months, companies had flooded the market with products. Regardless of price point, it seemed like a lot of these had an unpleasant tendency to burst into flames. Creating relevant data points for this market would seem to require a significant number of people willing to risk burning their house down. And I’d also want to know how many of them burned a house down, ever. This information being unobtainable, we decided to just be cold.
Cars strike me as similar; you need enough people to buy an unproven car in order to figure out where it lies on the distribution. That’s a financial gamble and also one with your and your family’s safety. I personally prefer a good deal of regulation raising the floor under Point A before consider buying any car at all.
A lot of these touted UL listings and other fire-preventing precautions but had “exploded in a shower of sparks” in the first few reviews, so either someone was lying or the precaution wasn’t adequate to keep exploding heaters off Amazon. I wasn’t sure how we could be sure enough of any of them.
I don't know the history behind outdoor heaters exploding, so I can't comment too much on that. It is unfortunate of course that products exist which malfunction.
On cars after doing basic research you can find one that fits your need. If safety is the prime concern you can find one using those sources. I don't think an issue like a recall on a Toyota Camry is the result of point A being too low.
Sure, but the research I can do on cars is probably more meaningful than the research I can do on heaters because of a long history of floor raising by both regulation and trial and error. You never get to perfect, which is why there are inevitable recalls. But Point A is high enough that it doesn’t seem particularly rational to feel all that unsafe in any given Camry, whereas I have no idea where Point A is on porch heaters. There’s a long history of improvement of electrical and heating devices in general. But it seems like makers of porch heaters are far less transparent and accountable than auto makers, such that neither research by the consumer nor regulation will do as good a job of guaranteeing non-exploding heaters. There are of course a lot of market sectors and products like this.
For cars, maybe, but I happen to have a receipt in my wallet and it says I bought 63 distinct items the last time I went to the grocery store.
I definitely didn't have the free time to obtain and read a Consumer Report for ever one of those items, and this is a trip I make about once a week.
To say nothing of the number of websites I visit every time I get on the computer, and what would happen if half of them were disasters that stole my credit card and planted malware that destroyed my OS.
I think we make a *lot* of consumer choices every day that we don't even notice as discrete choices, because we're relying on living in distribution 1 to make them meaningless and safe.
If your grocery store starts selling you rotten produce or carries canned vegetables that make you sick, you'll probably switch to a different grocery store.
It matters how difficult it is to get objective unbiased reviews like this (I can find it from Consumer Reports, and I can find it from The Wirecutter, but for anything that isn't listed on them, a search turns up a million pages like "top ten air purifiers dot com" that are probably content farms).
It also matters whether preferences tend to be aligned, or whether different people want to take advantage of different parts of the highly diverse space. (e.g., it's good that there are gaming PCs and chromebooks and Macs with arts creation suites and other things like that; it's less obvious that it's a good thing that there are competing electricity companies in places like some parts of Texas).
Costco's business plan is that its members trust Costco to pick out products that are at least average and usually better than average in quality. For example, I once needed to buy a freestanding basketball backboard+hoop for the only time in my life. I went to the sporting goods store, which carried four different kinds. That got me depressed because I really didn't want to have to study up and become an expert on backboards because I'd never be able to use that knowledge again. But then I went to Costco and they had one type. So I bought it and it has proven perfectly fine over the last 20 years.
I'm sure Costco employs somebody whose job is in sizable part to worry intensively about what's the right backboard, and he or she is really good at that.
The last paragraph doesn't seem at all (true || necessary || kind).
Also, your entire argument depends on the premise that the distribution of outcomes available in libertopia are sufficiently bad that it's worth giving up whatever gains you get from competition entirely just to reduce variance. That requires a little more justification than a flat assertion that this would be so (or is so, in today's society).
Ironically, your last sentence is exactly why I think we need fewer essays (and snarky xkcd comics) about how the First Amendment only applies to the government.
What do you mean?
What was the deleted post? Why the hell is the first reply to these articles always some deleted post?
Well, dang, now I don't remember what it was. It wasn't the first post, though. They're sorted newest-first by default.
No, it was the first. It's on March 25, there's later ones all the way down to April 2.
It's from March 25, 2021 at 8:37 am. There are others from earlier that day. Though they aren't (at least not now) showing in a logical order that I can see.
Kind of an overly simplistic depiction of the Rand Rebellion and South African history there. The South African Communist Party in particular helped organise black workers and allied itself with the ANC.
I mean, I don't know that we need to coin a new term "diversity libertarianism"... to me this just seems to be, well, classical liberalism. (Or if I'm wrong about that, because I might be, there's also already the existing therm "thick libertarianism".) I mean, go read "On Liberty", right? OK, "On Liberty" isn't so much about the value of diversity in the marketplace, but still, a lot of the other ideas mentioned here are there.
This to my mind is why so much of libertarianism, that seems to focus *purely* on opposition to government, really seems, well, off-center to me. Government is only an *example* of the problem. The more general problem is conformism/traditionalism/authoritarianism/group-ism/mob-ism/whatever you want to call it, and the attendant social pressure. Again, Mill covers this! But many libertarians seem to ignore this.
(I should also note here, that when I say "authoritarianism" above, I *don't* mean overbearing government. I've commented here before that I don't like the two-axis left/right libertarian/authoritarian model of politics-space. I *definitely* don't like the left-right axis, which to my mind is a total jumble. But libertarian-authoritarian I think is also unnatural; I don't think "more government vs less government" is a good axis along which to think, and I don't think it's useful for discussing any political positions other than thin libertarianism specifically. But the reason I bring it up is because of how the libertarian movement has taken this word "authoritarian" and used it over and over to mean "overbearing government", and now when I want to use it to mean something *else* I have to explain, no I don't mean that. Of course I haven't explained what I *do* mean, but, um, I'm just going to hope it's clear from context?)
(Also on that note Scott I'm hoping you got my recent email on this subject :P )
(Also, there seem to be some varieties of libertarianism that don't really feel classically liberal at all... like, the sort that's OK with a dictator so long as that dictator is corrupt and doesn't do very much, because, see, that's small government. OK, but it's not, like, rule of law, let alone democracy...)
I don't think talking about this in terms of "religion" is helpful, because I think the fundamental problem here is, well, more fundamental than that; religions are again merely an example.
...I guess I can't conclude this comment without making a note of my idea that we should really think in terms of a broad principle of *orthogonality* underlying this sort of liberalism, which I don't think many people have noted or made explicit, but, I'm not actually about to go on about this here, so I guess I'll just note this idea rather than explaining it. :P
Anyway yes good post, except for the part where you needlessly invent new terms. :P
Can't this lean into hard power though? If all the productive farmland is owned by people who buy into an anti-Group A religion, and all the banks are owned and staffed by anti-Group A people, and all the supermarkets are owned by anti-Group A people, and you happen to be a member of Group A, then you can't get food, grow food or get startup capital to try and fill the gap in services for members of Group A and make a bunch of money.
I think social pressure can blend into hard power when it is mixed with property rights and a dominant "religion." If you have no way of even getting food, you can be killed without a single government official raising their finger against you in violence.
Yes, exactly. if all of Big Tech conspire to shut down Parler, the effect is the same as if the government shuts down Parler.
Parler enabling an attack on Congress seems comparable to a nuclear plant meltdown. In other words I prefer minimum variation of political platforms rather than maximum.
Unless there is a mechanism to force people who buy into the anti-Group A religion to refuse to deal with Group A, some of them will, because the religion isn't the only thing they care about and there are large profits to be made doing it. It's the usual problem of maintaining a cartel.
Religions have done a pretty good job over the years at maintaining large cartels over long periods of time.
If 95% of people are anti=group A democracy won't protect Group A either. No system will. But unless someone is able to use violence, soft power is really vulnerable to spoilers. If 20% of the grocery stores will sell you food, then you can still eat. If 51% of the population is willing to vote for an anti-group A platform and all grocery stores are controlled by the government then you can get 100% of the stores not selling you food based on the will of a narrow majority.
Tying this back to the OP, no system is immune to failure. But some systems are more robust to certain types of failure (durable) than others.
Presumably corporations have something in between hard and soft power - they have hard power over their employees, and some of their customers and suppliers, but soft power over others.
Hard power does not always win over soft power. Ask Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.
> In today’s day and age, someone can immunize themselves from social pressure by growing a thicker skin (or staying off social media) and having some financial runway
And not having a family!
Or friends. Most of my family are right-wing partisans; most of my social circle are left-wing partisans. Neither exercises *power* over me, per se, but I could see how they would if I were less self-sufficient.
(tangential gripe: For a while I spent a non-trivial amount of time ignoring each half of the people I know talking about how awful their ideological enemies (i.e. the other half) are, and how beyond the pale I am for having a Problem with that. Eventually I just gave up and stopped trying. It's depressing when loved ones that you previously assumed were too smart to go politically insane do in fact go insane, and there's nothing you can do about it.)
> "...hard power always wins over soft power"
Hard power does not always win over soft power. Politics as we know it is essentially a game in which soft power attempts to overcome hard power to effect change.
I like the concept of superorganism-ism as the opposite of libertarianism.
For me, being a libertarian also does not mean "I support the rights of a specific kind of undemocratic superorganism - the corporation - to shit all over common goods" but "hey everyone, how about we have an option to resist ingestion into superorganism A which is not throwing ourselves into the maw of opposing superorganism B".
Of course in practice this is difficult, but superorganisms with an explicit primary goal of protection against superorganisms (like for example Switzerland or og USA) seem like a defensible-enough option.
>but superorganisms with an explicit primary goal of protection against superorganisms
Almost by definition superorganisms with the explicit primary goal of avoiding getting eaten by other superorganisms and the secondary goal of consuming or subjugating every other superorganism within reach that can be consumed without serious consequences... will quickly become the primary/only superorganisms around.
This seems empirically false, unless you're stretching "explicit" and/or "quickly" extremely far.
"The more general problem is conformism/traditionalism/authoritarianism/group-ism/mob-ism/whatever you want to call it"
I want to call it "government"! I'm only halfway serious here. I know that in the common usage of the term government, basically everyone always is referring to the one true big national Government. But "governing" is a rough synonym for controlling, and I think any stifling group can be said to be a kind of "government", even if they are not the capital G Government. Maybe it works better if one says they are against "governing" or "attempts to govern", which indicates that they aren't just referring to actions taken by the Official State Authority.
Elizabeth Anderson's book Private Government seems relevant to this: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/private-government
I don't think this is a meaningful expansion of the term government. In some cases, the problem is truly grass-roots conformism coupled with a grass-roots ostracism of people who depart from the group consensus on certain issues. There are at least two significant ways this is very un-government-like. First, it lacks any sort of central organization and functions purely on group consensus. Second, often the individuals who exert the most power in punishing certain types of non-conformism (by being most able to create a group consensus in these areas) exert little or no power in any other area.
Agreed.
The first paragraph was more or less what I was going to write. Ayn Rand is not a libertarian (if she were alive she'd say so, in no uncertain terms).
However, paragraph 2 misses the point. Libertarians (hello!) focus on the government because it's the only entity that can shoot you if you don't do what it says. Corporations can't do this. Of all the forms of private coercion out there (they absolutely exist), being a monopoly by virtue of making yourself the default option everywhere is pretty mild. Corporate coercion and power is definitely on the list of things to worry about (at least the way I think of libertarianism), but it's a ways down there. Various things governments do tend to take the top-N slots on the list, and N is a large number.
This line from Scott confuses me: "Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform." Is there though? I think he's right in his counter-factual. Since he mentioned Ayn Rand, I'll pull out an analogy: Zuck is somewhat analogous to Gail Wynand, in that he's built a pandering tool that gives him power to the extent he panders. But, I think the pressure to conform is over-stated. Zuck's alternative to active support for the prevailing liberal ideology of the moment is doing nothing, or maybe paying some cheap lip service from time to time. Which is more or less what he does. He does enough to keep his customers happy and leaves it at that. Certain a lot of activist groups try to create something that looks like religious pressure to conform, but people like Zuckerberg are plenty smart enough to see though relatively small groups with some support amplifying their messages to appear to be large groups with widespread support. A lot of other corporate leaders aren't that smart.
A small gripe: *anyone* has the power to shoot you if you don’t follow their orders. At least anyone with sufficient resources to procure a firearm and a plane ticket.
You could argue that an important reason they do not (beyond the fortunate fact that most people don’t seem inclined to perform random acts of evil), is retaliation from the rest of society, formalized by a constitutional republic at our particular place and time.
" Ayn Rand is not a libertarian (if she were alive she'd say so, in no uncertain terms)."
She would, but she would be mistaken.
There are exactly zero Scotsmen
In a "religious" jurisdiction I can shoot an "unbeliever", and a jury of my peers will not convict me.
This is how lynchings and other anti black crimes were effectively legal in the old South.
While this doesn't directly address what you're saying, I feel like I should point out that my primary example of something being forgotten is not corporations, but grass-roots ostracism of weirdos, as mentioned by Skeptical Scientist above.
I guess the more relevant comment is that if libertarians *focus* on the government, great, but there's a difference between *focusing* on the government on the one hand, and claiming that government is the *only* instance on the other (or, if not claiming that government is the only instance, saying that government is the key thing to look at, rather than merely being the most important instance of a more general phenomenon). Which as I said leads to thinking along this messed up more-vs-less-government axis, and adding confusing overloads to words like "authoritarianism"...
Why not coin a new term? "Classical libertarianism" requires more context to correctly identify, whereas diversity libertarianism has the mechanism of action right there in the title. Contrast to "My libertarianism works because it's classic!"
It also may be the case that some people have more positive associations with 'diversity' (freedom, difference, etc.) than with 'classical' (ancient, obsolete, 'dead white men'), and they might not be disposed to read On Liberty before coming to conclusions about libertarianism.
"I mean, go read 'On Liberty', right? OK, 'On Liberty' isn't so much about the value of diversity in the marketplace, but still, a lot of the other ideas mentioned here are there."
An easier reader's-digest/illustrated version of "On Liberty" is "All Minus One" from heterodox academy: https://heterodoxacademy.org/library/all-minus-one/
Mill does mention that he opposes censoring views even when government isn't doing the censoring. He also explains why ...
> I don't know that we need to coin a new term "diversity libertarianism"... to me this just seems to be, well, classical liberalism.
Does it though? I'm not sure it does. Diversity libertarianism, as laid out b y Scott allows things like "taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon" and I'm not sure people calling themselves classical liberals would necessarily be in favour of those things.
I think classical liberals might be in favor of removing externalities on carbon, as an application of the same principles as the common law of nuisance. Not the other two.
To me, removing or defining the cost of the externalities of burning fossil fuel carbon is one of the most logical things to defend as a libertarian, but I am routinely disappointed by how few others agree.
In my understanding, the tragedy of the commons is most definitely acknowledged and addressed by libertarian thinking. Even Ron Paul used to explain to new converts that a factory dumping pollution into a river could be sued by downriver land owners and others with a right to use that water in a libertarian world, and that the treat of such a lawsuit was the ideal mechanism for discouraging such behavior.
The practical problem is that we don't know what the externalities are. We don't even know their sign, although lots of people think they do.
Try listing positive externalities. If you can't think of any I can offer some big ones — or you can think about whether there is any reason to expect current climate to be optimal for humans everywhere.
Agreed. I feel like I am hearing some Jonathan Rauch "liberal science" influence here, and frankly, I love to see it. I have always considered myself a liberal and still do to this day because I will not cede that ground to a progressive movement that is illiberal in almost every way possible.
I disagree; I think that the term "diversity libertarian" is crucial. The problem (well, one problem) with classical libertarianism is precisely that it doesn't deal well with cases where the stultifying forces are other than governmental: religious, market, etc. Diversity libertarianism carves out precisely those exceptions.
Or, perhaps I should say, the former of them. (And even if that's ALL the term adds it's still crucial to Scott's argument.) But I don't think Scott addresses the issue of *market* forces one way or the other (as opposed to what he calls, with an understandable if unusual usage, religious ones). But that is a case that is worth talking about, too. Walmart coming into town and wiping out dozens of small, local, non-chain stores is definitely a case of loss of diversity; ditto Amazon wiping out independent bookstores. But of course if you wrap these issues into things, then you might lose most of the libertarian aspect. I'd be interested to hear Scott's thoughts on that angle.
There's also the overwhelming issue of externalities— Scott calls pollution "simple", but for carbon pollution it certainly hasn't been. When practically every human activity is involved in externalities, and not ones that add up to an inconvenience but ones which present an existential threat to human civilization, then you've got, if nothing else, a very complicated problem.
All of which adds up to the fact that I'm not a libertarian, classical or diversity. That said: I still think that even if "diversity libertarian" (and I assume Scott coined this phrase just now? Google isn't turning up anything relevant) means nothing but adding the "religious" (ideological/social pressure) dimension, it is still a crucial term, since it allows us to talk about the diversity-squashing, non-governmental actions like racial segregation, colluding to prevent the sale of liquor, or making certain types of speech practically impossible.
"When practically every human activity is involved in externalities, and not ones that add up to an inconvenience but ones which present an existential threat to human civilization"
That nicely illustrates the problem with abandoning the standard libertarian approach. As best I can tell, climate change does not present an existential threat to human civilization. Indeed, unless "threat" means "there is some probability greater than zero," in which case stopping climate change also presents such a threat (consider the small but non-zero chance that anthropogenic warming is preventing the end of the current interglacial), I don't think the claim that it does is even defensible. But given that claim, it's possible to argue for all sorts of violations of ordinary libertarian rules.
My point isn't to get into an argument about whether your view or mine is correct. It is to point out that, once one drops a strong bias in favor of those rules, you are at risk any time someone can scare the mob into believing that there is some invisible catastrophe lurking in the future if not forcibly prevented. For a much milder example of the problem, consider how much of the response to Covid, whether right or wrong, was driven by the fact that ordinary people overestimated the risks by about an order of magnitude. Or consider how much the population scare fifty years ago looks like the current climate scare. Or the peak oil scare or the running out of topsoil scare or the "the stupid poor are outbreeding the smart not-poor so we need eugenic sterilization" scare, which was popular with both progressives and conservatives only a little more than a century ago and parts of it were actually implemented in some countries.
There is much to be said for strong constraints on what government can do, once you remember that they are not run by philosopher kings.
Actual climate scientists think it *is* a threat to human civilization:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-climate-change-report-human-civilization-at-risk-extinction-by-2050-new-australian-climate/
We're not talking "greater than zero". We're talking real possibility.
And *those* are just the "end civilization" scenarios. That doesn't even touch on "a billion people need to be relocated, with all the suffering and chaos and death that that will inevitably cause".
Which leads us, of course, to the problem with *adapting* standard libertarian approach: it is helpless in the face of a real crisis, leading to a strong ideological tendency to deny the evidence rather than accept that you have to replace your priors.
A handful of scientists can make an extreme prediction to get attention.
Read the IPCC report.
I was honestly astonished when I read the ipcc report specifically looking for negative externalities and I could barely find any.
Whenever you think about climate change alarmism, you need to ask yourself: if temperatures get 5 degrees F hotter in my town, just how bad will that be? (Or, better, because of adaption, how bad would it be to have to live in somewhere as hot as Atlanta instead of as hot as Baltimore (see https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-temperatures-large-cities.php)
diversity libertarianism is great branding.
I'd say "Libertarianism" is neutral on how much "diversity" is good. The diversity that results from people making free choices is good "diversity." Any diversity forced on people against their will is bad "diversity."
TBH, "diversity" is typically used as an undefined virtue-signaling word that doesn't have any intrinsic usefulness.
> TBH, "diversity" is typically used as an undefined virtue-signaling word
On the contrary, "diversity" is typically used to mean, very specifically, "blacks or hispanics". Look at the Georgetown Law Journal's official diversity policy ( https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2021/03/GLJ-Spring-2020-Diversity-Amendment.pdf ), which seeks to promote "diversity" in the journal as measured by the number of article authors who are "diversity authors", which is an objective, context-independent category.
That is one current definition -- as in, "our list of authors is 100% diverse because they are 100% black women who 100% think the same about everything."
NFL cornerbacks are 100% diverse.
Libertarianism is a theory of how the government should work. It can coexist with many other ideas about how other stuff should work. That is, I can think antidiscrimination law should go away because it violates freedom of association, but still think companies shouldn't discriminate in employment. Or I can think that the government should be forbidden to ban evil religions while still thinking some religions are very bad for their adherents and the world would be a better place if they went away.
I’ve long thought that “communitarian” (as opposed to “individualist”) would be a better term than “authoritarian” for the upper side of the political compass.
This is both because it refers to a broader issue than the narrow one of the scope of government power (as Acemoglu pointed out, many if not most pre-state societies without coercive governmental authority are quite “communitarian” in the extent to which social norms constrain actions), and because essentially nobody self-identifies as “authoritarian”—it’s a pejorative term applied by ideological opponents.
Libertarianism is just about "don't shoot me because you don't like how I go about my own business". It's not restricted to opposing formal government, but a government is one of the entities that will eventually shoot you if you don't do as they say (say by not paying taxes and then resisting arrest). There are many other unpleasant human interactions besides violence - snobbery, selfishness, ignorance and so on. But it's helpful to first oppose initiation of violence as the gravest ill. The other things can be handled through people behaving badly losing all friends and business partners and the fact that in modern civilization one is pretty miserable if nobody wants to deal with them.
I had to stare at the graphs for a little bit. Am I correct that the X-axis ranges from worse to better outcomes and the Y-axis ranges from less to more likely?
When you see a bell curve, that is usually what you're looking at. (i.e. a probability density function, with outcomes on X axis and probabilities on Y axis.)
and probability *densities* on Y axis (just in case anyone takes you too literally)
X is ‘quality’, from terrible to great power plant. Y you should see as a ‘column chart’ representing how many power plants there are at each X level. (they are ‘buckets’, higher means more powerplants at that quality level).
Scott, if you’d want to make this a clearer illustration of your argument you would want to draw a ‘discrete’ version of this.
(why do people often want to make it ‘continuous’ anyway? because the math works out easier then)
My impression is that it’s continuous because that represents the underlying distribution power plants are drawn from, not the distribution of power plants we see in the world.
I interpreted this like a markov chain monte carlo (MCMC) jump probability. It's just how far from your current state you are jumping. The graph doesn't show the quality of outcome, just the distribution of jumps.
With MCMC methods, there are people who do research on optimal jump sizes for different problems. In some mathematical contexts for example, your jumps should follow a normal distribution with a variance large enough that you accept 0.234 of jumps (accepting means you start pivoting from the new position instead of the old one). https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2007/02/07/the_wellknown_0/
Unlike hill climbing methods, in mcmc you accept a proportion of worse jumps, so you can explore the whole space without getting stuck on the first local maximum.
> Or more generally: in an area with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn’t choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe.
> In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.
I don't think this is exactly Taleb's point. Externalities vs internalities aren't really core to (anti)-fragility. Fragile systems are composed of large correlated risks. Anti-fragile systems are composed of uncorrelated small risks. So, in the nuclear example, even if the entire world could vote on and agree to building a giant nuclear plant that posed an existential risk to civilization, it would still be fragile to do so, even though we all consented to it and so on.
The same applies to the super Tesla example. Presumably an infinite variance Tesla could be infinitely negative, and somehow destroy the world. That would make it fragile. The key point that makes something anti-fragile is that, as a system, it survives its tail events and goes on to keep improving itself.
This is a good objection. In the examples demonstrated, the implicit assumption seems to have been that the *average* quality of a distribution will remain unchanged as you change the variance. And if so, you can always demonstrate that high enough variance will eventually lead to disaster. The only sense in which higher variance is better than lower variance is if you can apply natural selection to the system in order to *raise* that average, over time. The argument is that in these systems, higher variance accelerates natural selection.
The question is not about whether you want to maximize or minimize variance, the real question is better stated as: For a given system, how much can you increase the variance until the tail end presents "too much risk" to be worth the gains in growth rate?
Fragile systems still want more variance rather than less variance, but the amount of variance they want is low in relation to anti-fragile systems. But I don't think there's any system in which a variance of 0 would be ideal.
Sure there is. You don't *ever* want your metabolic processes to ever deviate from perfection. You make a few billion ATPs per second, the ideal variation in the output is strictly zero -- you don't want *any* screwed-up molecules with strange reactivity that can mess your cells up. There's no way that can be of benefit -- there's no heritable improvement to be had -- and indeed natural evolution has driven the variation in these chemical reactions to unbelievably small levels -- extreme specificity, extremely constant rates, almost zero byproducts -- at the cost of introducing a staggering mass of checks and balances and interlocking control systems.
Same could be said of any factory. Certainly, you might want variation in the *design* of factories, but for any given factory (or machine/process with the factory), you want no variance at all in the faithfullness with which the physical plant executes the design.
The point is less argumentative than it might at first seem, since the border between "design" and "implementation" is less bright and sharp than it might at first seem (e.g. in the case of biology what about epigenetics, huh? If we have some variation *there* maybe it's good...)
If what Taleb means by anti-fragile means it grows stronger against *tail* events (as opposed to just normal bad stuff), then most of the examples Scott mentioned as anti-fragile don't seem right to me.
Highly-censored societies are fragile in that same sense. In an uncensored free-for-all, presumably there will be a wide variety of opinions, many of which are false as all get-out. But the system is anti-fragile in the sense that they're unlikely all to be wrong at the same time and in the same way. I can imagine some systems that work only if everyone is on exactly the same page and the slightest error is fatal. Those strike me as good examples of fragility. We may have to tolerate fragility (rigid conformity) in some systems, but we'd better have an awfully good reason to accept the risk, or we won't be doing ourselves any favors.
So I think you can frame some of the problems with social media in exactly this way. Social media is inherently uni-polar, due to profound network effects. Yes, there are a few social networks, but very, very few compared to the diversity of social spaces in the pre-internet age. And the topology of those networks tends, in many ways, to induce a correlation of viewpoint and topic. That correlation in turn induces a powerful fragility.
This was true to an extent in the pre-internet age with mass media, and I think we felt its effects in slightly different ways. Broadcast mass media is correlated risk, but low variance, because it needs to appeal to many people. But P2P social media is high variance *and* correlated risk. This is why it's so dangerous. It combines the variance and carelessness of person to person conversation with the scale of mass media.
The Soviet Union collapsed quickly once Gorbachev allowed glasnost, which allowed the cruel history of the Communist Party to be publicly discussed.
I don't know much about this, but I believe: Google is a big smartphone company because they push Android, which is actually free and open software and there are non-Google versions of it out theme, and because of the Play store, which actually can be replaced by other stores (see F-Droid). I am not sure there's such a huge barrier here.
I get what you're saying, and I also enjoy the openness of Android. I personally enjoy side-loading apps too.
But in the real world this is pretty meaningless. If your app isn't available on Google Play, Amazon Store or Apple Store then there's almost no way to make money of it. In fact it's really tough to even sell an Android phone that doesn't include the Google Suite of apps. (I know that markets like China and India are different in this regard because of carriers...)
The only exception I can think of is Epic/Fortnite, they successfully managed to get their users to sideload and they're truly massive in a way most big company's aren't.
What do you think would stop any of the big phone manufacturers from shipping their phones with a version of android with an additional alternative to Google Play pre-installed and a good user experience that leads him to search for apps in the alternative store first? I think if there's enough market for it, it doesn't take them 10 years to offer that.
So that's pretty much what Amazon does with Kindle Fires. And also I think the Chinese phone manufacturers do this. But if we consider the massive size of the phone industry it's telling that this is a rare occurrence. People want to own phones that have the Gmail App, Google Assistant and Google Maps (not to mention the millions of games/apps only currently available on Google Play. Removing this seriously de-values the phone they're trying to sell.
I'm not saying this isn't a possibility (in the same way that Google dominated PCs by getting everyone to use Chrome). But I do think that Google can keep Android open and act like a monopoly.
Right, but that to me sounds more Tesla-level hard than what Scott is insinuating.
Also, wondering, it's not possible for Google Play to be available as a secondary store, right?
It's possible but not legal.
You're correct that it's more like Tesla level hard in regards to just going up against Google.
But Parler was shunned by Google, Apple, and Amazon simultaneously on basically the same day. Also keep in mind that Scott wasn't saying the tech monopolies were the ones with power, rather it was the all powerful popular culture that succeeded in pressuring them. Elon Musk is pretty controversial, but if he came out as a serious sexist/racist/etc. There's no chance Tesla would survive.
Ah, ok.
Clearly Parler couldn't do anything, and I don't disagree with Scott's main point; on the contrary. I'm just talking in this thread about whether, with enough demand, the market could realistically fill the niche that appears if lots of apps that people want get excluded from Apple and Google Play stores. And I think it could, given some years (like Tesla). The big challenge is building a decent android app store, since the hardware and the OS for android phones already exists outside of Google. And assuming Facebook and others don't join Google to collude, it doesn't sound THAT hard. I'd bet a Microsoft could do it for sure.
I think Google impose restrictions on what phone manufacturers can install if they use Google Mobile Services.
My Samsung phone came with a Samsung "Galaxy Store" app store.
How much of a disadvantage is it to just make it available as a website? With a version optimized for mobile browsers, but the user still just uses it through the smartphone's web browser.
That was Apple's first "app store" strategy, actually. It seems like an eternity ago now, but Apple originally refused to let third parties develop iPhone apps and told them to make websites instead.
These days, mobile web is a more mature platform than it was, and websites can be installed as apps that work offline. But they still don't deliver the same level of performance, or the same level of developer experience (developing for mobile isn't exactly a fun time at the beach, but developing for the web is a living hell).
This is what Hauwei are having to do, given the ban by the USA government on Huawei using USA technology. They make great phones, but for now the phones are hampered by lack of decent apps (at least in Western nations - China has its own market for apps).
Android being open-source makes it easIER to start a new phone platform than it would otherwise be. But that's still not easy.
If you just want to build a Reddit or Twitter competitor, one or two good programmers could have a bare-bones first version up in couple of weeks. But if you then need to start your own smartphone manufacturer so that your users have something to run your app on, that's a wee bit more work.
And the smartphone platform is just one of the choke points: you also need a cloud platform (e.g. Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure), and people are going to DDOS you so you'll need protection from something like Cloudflare, and if you want to make money to cover your operating costs, you'll need to connect to a credit card processor.. Each of these are oligopolies where if the two or three big players won't serve you, you're at a severe disadvantage. So if all the big players cooperate to keep you out, you practically need to set up an entire separate Internet infrastructure just to run your Twitter clone.
An even if you manage all that -- great, so now we have three different Internets, one for leftists one for rightists one for centrists, and that's just in the US, the Europe has three more versions and China has one more, so you need to either commit to which faction you belong to, or carry three phones with you. That doesn't sound ideal either..
But there are already many phone manufacturers other than Apple and Google. I agree that it's incredibly hard to do everything from scratch yourself, so if they all collude, you are screwed. But Scott's example was not about collusion but about needing to replace the whole tech stack to evade Google + Apple.
No. No way. You'd need hardware, as you correctly point out this is a done deal. You'd need an OS, as you correctly point out this is while not trivial certainly doable. You'd need to have a big marketing/PR push to get the word out but this is also true of everything else.
But you also need an app store with a sufficient ecosystem and developer mindshare and monetization. You *already* have the monetization problem in the existing ecosystem: if the Android user base is 3x or more what the iOS user base is why do most devs write for iOS first? Because it pays. And you as the platform holder need that monetization (or a Google AdWords style revenue stream to cross-subsidize it) to keep the lights on, even with your OEMs. Fdroid is cool, but it ain't that. The users don't use the platform because the apps they rely on aren't there, developers don't put their stuff on your store because there's nothing in it for them, etc. etc.
There are a few ways this could work though: I think you mentioned Huawei somewhere here and they could do it by leveraging their existing markets to come at it from the side. They make really good stuff, and with a sufficient marketing blitz and deals with the major app providers they could conceivably take a run at this.
But the shortest proof I can offer is this: Bezos has already taken a run at this with Amazon alternatives to the standard Google/Apple fare (Fire store, Amazon Music, Amazon Prime Video, etc) without much luck cracking in to the phone space. And God knows, he has the resources both personally and corporately to pull it off if anyone can.
About the Amazon experience, there's also the point that currently there is not a significant demand for alternatives (banning Parler is not nearly enough).
But about your main point. I totally agree. The thing is, I was under the impression that most apps could be deployed to the hypothetical Play store alternative without modification, which would have made this way more doable. But MartinW pointed out that this is not the case because there are many core services in Android that most apps use which are not open and if Google doesn't let you use them independent of the Play Store, the app developers would have to work to support the new platform.
Yes that is correct. One way that your vision might come to pass is if a cross-platform framework becomes popular and ubiquitous enough you could create a phone platform that ran those apps *directly*, and then they really could be deployed without modification. Keep an eye on Flutter and React Native, if most or even just some of the major apps jump ship to the same cross-platform framework you could see a Cambrian explosion of phone OSes instead of the Coke/Pepsi duopoly we have now.
With Android you can use Amazon's app store, F-Droid, download the app from a website, or install it from your computer so there are options for anyone interested in stopping outside the box. With Apple that box is sealed and taped shut. You get an app through their app store or you don't get it at all.
A better analogy would have been: a company builds it's own cell phone and opened it's own app store, but AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile (the three nationwide network owners) refuse to grant access to their towers.
No, I can argue against diversity libertarianism on non-catastrophic grounds. It's not that I think that having a high variation in car companies will cause society to break down (though I don't trust the owners of car companies as far as I can throw them, so I'd rather bury them under regulation just to slow them down). It's that having a high variation in car companies places an unacceptable burden of complexity on uninteresting choices.
If all cars are more or less the same amount of crappy, then if I need a car, I go out and buy a car that's the same amount of crappy as any other car. And I will know in advance how crappy that is, because I will have seen how crappy every other car is. If that's too crappy to be worth the expense, then I simply will not buy a car.
But if some cars are awesome and others are horrific, then I stand a significant risk of ending up with a horrific one. And then libertarians come and point the finger at me, going, "hah hah! That's your own fault for not researching different car models! Free market FTW!"
But the thing is, researching different car models would have taken time out of MY LIFE. That would be the one life I'll ever get. Every moment I am spending on soul-killing grunt work is time I am not spending on doing something that makes me happy. Libertarianism is an attempt to extort me into giving up large chunks of MY LIFE by threatening me with disaster if I don't. I find that entirely unacceptable.
So much about libertarianism makes more sense if you just assume that libertarians are freaks who enjoy drudgery and boredom. I personally wish they'd just take up stamp collection or something instead of trying to reshape society to force everyone else to be as dull as them.
I think the existence of Consumer Reports, or lots of other things which serve the same role, mostly solves this problem.
Yeah and this scales to both huge and tiny things. My friends know to ask me before buying a mobile phone because I'm one of those losers who spends too much time reading tech reviews. The nature of the internet these days is you can find obsessive subcultures on anything who will be more than willing to explain to all askers why that lawn-mower is a terrible choice, but this one is a must have.
But think about a world where you have to do that for everything you buy.
Please don't make me examine my life like this.
Is that not the world we live in? If I purchase a thing without doing a little bit of research, I almost always end up with a crap thing.
You mean like the world where I spent a good chunk of last year unable to buy anything but groceries and gasoline except by going to Amazon et al, where there's a bunch of customer reviews right there for every product and the aggregated rating up front?
OK, it would help if the folks at Consumer Reports were to offer a browser extension that automatically linked to their rating/review of every one of their products I look at on any e-commerce site. Unless they did that already and didn't tell me.
He still has to spend hours of his life working to earn the money needed to pay CR (or whomever) for the cost of their valuable research. It may be more enjoyable than doing the research directly, but the cost hasn't been driven to zero.
There'll always be a cost to making good decisions. But for our purposes, as long as enough people are willing to either research or pay CR, the available options are forced to improve and compete. Since no matter how complex and niche your product is, the cost of getting terrible CR reviews is usually too high.
In practice, that only applies to high-visibility choices. I think the experience of open software is illustrative: there was always the implicit assumption that talent would compete on *every* aspect of the platform, so it would all be good, but in practice we got awesome package managers and MP3 players, and progress in less sexy things was much slower.
Same here. There will in general be always a ton of expert opinions and reviews for, say, flagship smartphones. But once you move out of the bright spotlight of the *most* interesting category, my experience is that expert advice becomes rarer and more expensive rapidly.
OK that's a fair point, I'm sure there are lots of products with tons of options and not a lot of of easy to access expert advice. We're responding on a comment that used car models which is a particularly bad example. It's never been easier to research car models.
But I think an easier example could be brands of shampoos at the supermarket. Nobody is going to spend time and money looking for the loser that compares competing shampoo brands, and I can see how the famous glut of options in modern supermarkets can be overwhelming and possibly detrimental.
I'm luckily not yet able to buy products via my smart assistant in my country, but my understanding is that when you ask Alexa to buy milk, they basically default to the approved Amazon brand of milk. This is probably bad for competition but also sounds refreshing not having to choose from a zillion options.
I still think none of this really serves as a good criticism of diversity libertarianism. The market really does a great job ensuring that there are good sources of information for financial decisions that require good info. It simply turns this information into another consumer good.
The real question is what about multiple competing CR reports?!
Will we need to invest in Meta-Consumer Report-Reports LOL!
By this point, Amazon often has hundreds of reviews for the most mundane products. For example, I had to buy some tarpaulins recently, and there were endless reviews pointing out the strong points and weaknesses of each of the popular items. People like to help out by giving their views. Scott's readers like to give their views on, say, ideologies, and some people like to give their views on tarps.
On the other hand, the huge number of reviews is daunting, and it's a fair amount of mental labor to try to come to systematically understand the various issues. Thus Consumer Reports is often worth the subscription because they bring a systematic perspective.
But after they've competed and the bad ones are gone, and only the goo ones are left, aren't we living in a world that looks like distribution 1 again?
If the world around us looks like distribution 2, isn't that *proof* that people don't have the freedom or ability to make goo decisions in that space, because if they did all the As would already be out of business?
Not necessarily. Every time A shuts down, a new A will pop up hoping to become the new B.
It's worse than that.
Under diversity libertarianism, you should expect a wide range of services competing with CR, with quality ranging based on distribution 2.
Who reports on the reporters? And who reports on them?
Scoot has written about epistemic learned helplessness before; there's no reason why those dynamics shouldn't apply to consumer choice theory, in the world where no outside factors are trying to help the consumer put a thumb on the scale in favor of quality and honesty.
The alternative seems to be to appoint someone czar of the industry to decide what shall be available to the public. Why would anyone expect the czar to make better choices than the median buyer?
Why would you expect them to _not_ make better choices than the median buyer?
I will spend, generously, a couple minutes at most figuring out which brand of bread to purchase. They will spend days thinking about it, and be elevated to a position where they can hear about various bread-related problems from people I would never know to talk to.
If we have maximally high diversity, and the bread ranges from "a literal piece of charcoal" to "a 3 week old loaf, but not labeled as stale" to "normal bread".. well, I'm not going to spend more than a minute picking my bread, I have a lot of other food to buy too.
There's a chance I'll mess up and get the stale and internally molding one.
However, if we have a czar of food, let's call them "The FDA", they will definitely spend more time than me thinking about bread. They might decide to recommend that charcoal can't be labeled as bread and that "best by" dates must be attached to bread.
People have different preferences on bread. Should the market supply whole grain? Raisin bread? Thin-sliced? White bread? etc.
What works for you might not be what works for me. If you want to outsource your decision-making to someone else, you ought to have that right, but I want to pick which products I buy myself. I know my preferences better than any other person.
You sound like a good candidate for membership at Costco, which employs hundreds of experts to find for you optimal tradeoffs of quality and cost.
Other people enjoy choosing the item they find best.
CR is not the only way you get information. You also get information through word of mouth from friends. So for instance, I tend to trust the Wirecutter's recommendations not because the super-reporter blessed them from all the review sites, but because a friend pointed me at them and I tried it a few times and got good-enough results.
"Who reports on the reporters? And who reports on them?" You do, when you buy three things that got five-star rating on fake-CR and they turned out to be crap. Then you ask a few of your friends if they've had the same experience, and most of them say "thanks for the heads-up" and one of them says "yeah, that happened to me too, but I've had good luck with real-CR, here's the link".
But then how do you know which consumer reports to trust and which ones are just shilling for one particular company (or a specific group of companies)?
That's not to say that variance is always bad here or that there are no ways to (partially) mitigate the downsides, but there is always a trade-off between adding variance and making choices more complicated for the customer.
Reputation matters. Consumer Reports is still around because they've proven themselves over a long period of time. It's why brands work well as a short-hand for quality.
My computer headset recently broke. I use it for a ton of different activities, phone calls to friends and families, meetings for work, playing games, listening to music, watching movies. When it broke I had to find a new one, which means I need to research if I want wireless, wired, what kind of extra features matter to me, what kind of support these headsets have. With the internet this has become much easier, plenty of sites offer lists of what headsets are best for what, and they have whole reviews. It's simply a matter of marking off the ones that seem to be what I want, and reading the reviews of these headsets.
Now there is still no guarantee that the headset I will buy will be the absolutely perfect balance of utility and price that I am looking for, but it does practically eliminate the chance of me accidentally purchasing a horrific product. It takes me maybe 30 minutes to do this and costs me nothing in the form of money.
This makes sense for items where the risk is mainly wasting money on a crappy thing. But we were recently thinking about getting an electric outdoor porch heater.
We soon learned that the most pandemic had driven a huge spike in demand for outdoor heaters. In a few months, companies had flooded the market with products. Regardless of price point, it seemed like a lot of these had an unpleasant tendency to burst into flames. Creating relevant data points for this market would seem to require a significant number of people willing to risk burning their house down. And I’d also want to know how many of them burned a house down, ever. This information being unobtainable, we decided to just be cold.
Cars strike me as similar; you need enough people to buy an unproven car in order to figure out where it lies on the distribution. That’s a financial gamble and also one with your and your family’s safety. I personally prefer a good deal of regulation raising the floor under Point A before consider buying any car at all.
If what you want is "doesn't light my family on fire," Underwriter's Laboratory is a thing.
A lot of these touted UL listings and other fire-preventing precautions but had “exploded in a shower of sparks” in the first few reviews, so either someone was lying or the precaution wasn’t adequate to keep exploding heaters off Amazon. I wasn’t sure how we could be sure enough of any of them.
If people are already lying about complying with the voluntary regulations, I'm not sure how we can improve the situation with better regulations.
Maybe make Amazon responsible for third-party listings? That would clear up a LOT of crap fast (but is it the problem in front of us?).
I don't know the history behind outdoor heaters exploding, so I can't comment too much on that. It is unfortunate of course that products exist which malfunction.
On cars after doing basic research you can find one that fits your need. If safety is the prime concern you can find one using those sources. I don't think an issue like a recall on a Toyota Camry is the result of point A being too low.
Sure, but the research I can do on cars is probably more meaningful than the research I can do on heaters because of a long history of floor raising by both regulation and trial and error. You never get to perfect, which is why there are inevitable recalls. But Point A is high enough that it doesn’t seem particularly rational to feel all that unsafe in any given Camry, whereas I have no idea where Point A is on porch heaters. There’s a long history of improvement of electrical and heating devices in general. But it seems like makers of porch heaters are far less transparent and accountable than auto makers, such that neither research by the consumer nor regulation will do as good a job of guaranteeing non-exploding heaters. There are of course a lot of market sectors and products like this.
For cars, maybe, but I happen to have a receipt in my wallet and it says I bought 63 distinct items the last time I went to the grocery store.
I definitely didn't have the free time to obtain and read a Consumer Report for ever one of those items, and this is a trip I make about once a week.
To say nothing of the number of websites I visit every time I get on the computer, and what would happen if half of them were disasters that stole my credit card and planted malware that destroyed my OS.
I think we make a *lot* of consumer choices every day that we don't even notice as discrete choices, because we're relying on living in distribution 1 to make them meaningless and safe.
For most grocery store items, you can afford an iterative search, occasionally trying a new one. And if you don't? You know for next time.
(Both the chip-maker and the grocery-store likely have money-back guarantees if that $3 really matters to you, but in most cases it doesn't.)
Well, that really depends whether the 'A' on my food is 'tastes awful' or 'contains e. coli and lead.'
If your grocery store starts selling you rotten produce or carries canned vegetables that make you sick, you'll probably switch to a different grocery store.
It matters how difficult it is to get objective unbiased reviews like this (I can find it from Consumer Reports, and I can find it from The Wirecutter, but for anything that isn't listed on them, a search turns up a million pages like "top ten air purifiers dot com" that are probably content farms).
It also matters whether preferences tend to be aligned, or whether different people want to take advantage of different parts of the highly diverse space. (e.g., it's good that there are gaming PCs and chromebooks and Macs with arts creation suites and other things like that; it's less obvious that it's a good thing that there are competing electricity companies in places like some parts of Texas).
4.2: Is this really true? Surely people would investigate the safety, ethics, and efficacy of the products they buy.
Below follows a list of statements about products. Some are real, others are made up. Can you identify which are which?
...
Costco's business plan is that its members trust Costco to pick out products that are at least average and usually better than average in quality. For example, I once needed to buy a freestanding basketball backboard+hoop for the only time in my life. I went to the sporting goods store, which carried four different kinds. That got me depressed because I really didn't want to have to study up and become an expert on backboards because I'd never be able to use that knowledge again. But then I went to Costco and they had one type. So I bought it and it has proven perfectly fine over the last 20 years.
I'm sure Costco employs somebody whose job is in sizable part to worry intensively about what's the right backboard, and he or she is really good at that.
The last paragraph doesn't seem at all (true || necessary || kind).
Also, your entire argument depends on the premise that the distribution of outcomes available in libertopia are sufficiently bad that it's worth giving up whatever gains you get from competition entirely just to reduce variance. That requires a little more justification than a flat assertion that this would be so (or is so, in today's society).