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).
I appreciate that as a consumer, there's less risk that products I buy give off toxic chemicals or spontaneously catch fire because there are government people keeping dangerous products off the market.
In a world where a lot of the high quality / high status products people use have the "would have banned" mark, I wonder if you'd be forced to risk it just to keep up with the Joneses.
In a world where all sorts of black and grey markets exist to meet certain demands, it's unclear what significant novel upsides the stores could provide.
I'm also not sure how they're supposed to interact with restrictions on what is legal to possess, rather than just sell - my guess is raw milk yes, heroin no, and machine guns with a tax stamp. So their ability to actually affect the market landscape is limited on another level.
I think that there's a real risk that if the "would have banned" stores do well, their owners will lobby the government to "would have ban" more and more desirable products. Risk-averse regulators internal incentives will point the same way. Soon all exciting new products are "banned" IE restricted to "would have been banned" stores, which will then come to be seen just as "stores." Once everyone buys everything there, people will start to be injured by subtly dangerous products, there will be a public outcry for regulation, and the wheel of ages will turn again.
I think you almost had a point here. It is an unreasonable burden to expect everyone to understand each of the available options on the market perfectly. The problem is that I don't think it's a huge amount of effort to do research on most of these things. We've come up with a number of quick resources (reviews, ratings) which allow you to come to a judgement quickly. I think I would rather live in a world where, if I do a tiny bit of research, I can buy an infinity+1 car, versus a world where I'm forced to buy a car built from reinforced suck but don't have to waste effort doing it.
There are fields where your purchasing decisions are more important than cars, where it's unfair to ask one or two people to take the burden of buying a faulty product so that we can all know what's wrong. There are fields where the emotional impact of the product is so minimal that lies speak louder than the truth, in which case it's harder to come to a correct decision. I think both of these are valid reasons to regulate things. But taking too much effort to research? I think that's a trivial inconvenience which most people have a decent incentive to overcome.
So it sounds like you'd support decreased choice in areas where there's already a large gap between the best and the worst? For example, violins range in quality from Stradivarius all the way down to crappy $20 ones on Amazon that are literally unplayable. Perhaps we could mandate a sole violin producer so that consumers don't have a spend a lot of time comparing choices? Not to mention that would cut down on all the fraud that goes on with violin sales.
Anyway, your argument seems to apply less to libertarianism than all of capitalism in general. I'm not sure why you're blaming the libertarians for your multitude of choices.
So on second thought, I can see a similar argument being made, but with less emphasis on the whole "MY LIFE" thing and more on how finding out the best thing can be hard. In the case of cars say, Consumer Reports or similar can help you find a good car, or at least avoid a complete lemon. But that's not always the case for all things.
For example, there are scam tech help sites that have favorable reviews on the BBB. Of course, the BBB isn't the epitome of virtue, but not everyone knows that. Scamming is outlawed even though we're reducing the ability of people to have completely voluntary transactions.
There are lots of regulations that aim to cut off the left tail of the bell curve, possibly but not always at the expense of the right. Think of basic car safety standards. These are reducing choices, by not letting people make crappy cars that will kill you. But it also means that if you buy a car, you know that it's not going to crumple ten miles down the road, and it protects people who wouldn't bother to even check. At least from the perspective of diversity-libertarianism, it's harder to argue that this is hurting people who go for the right end of the bell curve.
I think the libertarian answer to that is "people should be allowed to choose lemons that may explode, but they should be advertised as such". I don't think many principled people are actually pro-fraud.
Of course, then we have to get down to brass tacks on exactly how car-like something has to be before it can be called a car with a straight face (actually having a form of self-propulsion would probably be #1), and that's where these things get ugly.
(Cars are actually kind of a bad example, because there are massive externalities of certain kinds of bad car - traffic works as well as it does because people's cars don't break down in the middle of the road all the time.)
I think part of the problem too is that things aren't one dimensional. If there was a really bad car that no one wanted, it would disappear pretty quickly. But what about a car that's 10% cheaper, but 10% more likely to catch fire in a crash? 20%? There's a much stronger libertarian argument to allow those. There's a reason not everyone buys a Tesla.
Anyway, Scott did say he's not against regulations that don't appreciably decrease choice, so he may be fine with basic safety standards. But I think part of the confusion is eliding the difference between Scott and libertarians. He says people are surprised when libertarians differ from strawman Ayn Rand, but the examples he gives - taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, removing carbon externalities - well, a lot of libertarians really *are* against those. You gave the libertarian answer, but what's Scott's answer?
I don't spend much time regretting the loss of freedom involving in taking something off the market that's a genuine trap even for the reasonably wary, like fraudulently labeled poisonous food--I mean, the kind that will kill you right away, not result in ambiguous symptoms in a tiny group of people 20 years later. I do regret the growing need to eliminating products (and cancel speech) because some lamebrain somewhere managed to find a way to hurt himself with the "dangerous product" by adopting behavior most reasonable people couldn't even imagine. The whole world can't be a padded cell.
Maybe I'm just annoyed because I think socialism is a variant of the "I can get free stuff if I ignore the risk that before long there won't be any free stuff" philosophy that's far too risky to allow most voters to contemplate. I'm really sorry to see a movement towards protecting people from "literally ZOMG deadly words and thoughts" about pronoun preference and the like, while blithely continuing to feed them philosophies that killed 100 MM people within the last century. Since I'm quite certain this kind of "protection" will never be applied equally, because it's about political conformity and power rather than about protection, I'd rather stick with old-fashioned freedom of speech and thought.
>I think the libertarian answer to that is "people should be allowed to choose lemons that may explode, but they should be advertised as such". I don't think many principled people are actually pro-fraud.
This always strikes me as gliding past the core problem. I don't think I've ever seem an argument that fraud protection *as it currently exists* is robust enough to serve this role, and reinforcing it ought to be useful regardless of one's level of libertarianism. Solve that, and then we'll talk.
I think there's an important aspect of what you say in *why* there exist tech oligopolies right now, which may have historic analogues. People *do* resent and fear too much choice -- I believe this has been well studied -- and so once one way of doing things becomes mildly socially dominant, it may be driven rapidly to extreme dominance by a lot of people just following the wisdom of the crowd because doing otherwise is time-consuming and anxiety-inducing. Hey, everybody I know does his searches on Google, it's the default on by browser, so...why not? Everybody can't be *that* wrong. Everybody posts his funny cat videos on Youtube, so...
I say there may be historic analogues because we can point to a similar contraction of variety in car manufacturers from the 1900s to the 1970s (before the Energy Crisis and/or the Japanese got their manufacturing shit together). Kerosene and oil in the 1890s through Standard Oil. Telephone and telegraph companies. PC clones, the Windows OS. When the technology is complex, or new, or both, and learning about it enough to make good decisions is a big investment, it's plausible the cost of informed choice can drive mild market dominance -- which could happen entirely by accident -- into extreme market dominance.
I actually enjoy using a product that bucks the trend, and for instance have stopped using Google almost entirely. I make an exception when I can't find an adequate substitute (e.g. Google Maps). The only problems I typically encounter are (1) if the product is too obscure, you worry about product support and replacement parts, and (2) if the whole point of the product is to put you in touch with a large community, then switching to Parler doesn't make up for all the people you no longer can reach on FB. On FB I can put out a post and reach 1/3 of my county quickly. Only a few of them were ever going to bother migrating to Parler, even if Parler had managed to make itself work.
"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."
And neither will the poor or poor-ish person who can only afford what you would consider a "crappy" car but would rather have that than no car at all.
This attitude is making it needlessly hard to be even poor-ish in the 21st century developed world. Cars, houses, home appliances, even medical care, a bunch of middle- to upper-middle-class consumers whine about how they don't want to have to make informed decisions about *which* [X] to buy, so they pass laws making it illegal to make an [X] that they wouldn't want to buy, and in so doing decide for every poor or poor-ish person in their country that they can't have *any* [X].
Middle-class people in the 1950s mostly seem to have lived reasonably long and happy lives. With modern manufacturing and logistics, I'd wager it would be possible to provide a middle-class 1950s lifestyle to a family living at the federal poverty level, and throw in a flip-phone and a desktop computer with an internet connection along with some 21st-century health care. But it wouldn't be legal, because you would be afraid that *you* might accidentally buy some of their stuff.
I'm with the diversity-libertarians on this; it is a horrible thing that people like you can impose your preferences by force of law. Scott's right; you need to suck it up and buy a subscription to Consumer Reports.
Hanson discusses how they'd differ from public housing. Of course, a government which permitted public housing to be so awful & crime-ridden is also unlikely to be interested in Hanson's reforms.
Those "Universal Basic Dorms" look a lot like SRO hotels/apartments, which we kind of can't house people in because it's several kinds of illegal in most US jurisdictions. Or at least, if you try to build one you'll find existing laws interpreted in a way that will either run you out of business or run your prices up to about the level of existing apartments.
That's not a clever new idea, that's an obvious old idea that we forced everyone to give up on as soon as *most* of us were rich enough not to need any more. Baeraad accurately describes why that's not going to change any time soon.
Similarly, it worries me to attack fantastically expensive new medical technologies and drugs on the ground that only the evil rich can afford them. The rich are the beta testers of expensive new technology, which before long gets cheaper and available to the less-rich and even eventually the poor. I don't see much evidence that most of the advances would ever have happened if we'd insisted on equal access from the start.
I think your point makes sense in theory, but not in practice. Rich people are too homogenous to make a good beta test group -- you want diversity in the group so you see the broadest range of likelihood of outcomes and can account for that.
For example, lets say your company is testing a new drug for depression, but unbeknownst to the testers, it has a bad interaction with those who inhale smog on a regular basis. This is not an interaction you will find if you only test on rich people, who don't generally live in smoggy areas.
(Yes it's a fairly contrived example, but I hope it illustrates my point?)
Of course I'd rather see innovation available for a larger test group, all things being equal, but all things aren't equal. Better to have innovations for rich people, to begin with, than hardly any innovations at all. Disqualifying all innovations that can't be proven instantly and equally available for everyone, including people with either no extra income available for medicine or no interest in prioritizing healthcare in a family budget, is no way to increase the total innovations available in a society over time. If we can tolerate an unequal rollout, we can have thing like LASIK, which starts out expensive and uninsured, and gradually gets to be so routine and cheap that it's within the reach of people of quite ordinary means. People with terrible insurance, or no insurance at all, have routine access today to medical interventions that were completely unheard-of sci-fi miracles when I was young.
The Beta Testers are never a truly representative group; most users don't even know where to sign up, so the ones who do are more clueful than most. But it's still very useful data.
Beta testers probably was the wrong term, more like guinea pigs with disposable income, or informal investors. The point isn't to make the patients figure out if the medical treatment works, it's to get them to pay for the cutting-edge treatments before they become more widely affordable.
"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."
Does that apply to your own argument just as well? You advocate for limiting the choices that other people would like to make down to a dull constant offering no variety. Effectively "you can have any car, as long as it is like this one." That's pretty dull.
I think your argument boils down to simply not liking to make choices in some areas you don't care much about. That's fine, in fact it is the human condition. It does not follow, however, that limiting choices improves the situation. You will still have choices to make on things you don't care about, and no guarantee that the limited set of options are even as good on average as a better set. So get ready for decisions about options about how to limit the options you have to make decisions about!
Additionally, what are you going to do with your suddenly free time? I am going to to out on a limb that whatever it is, it involves a lot of decisions. What books to read, what movies to watch, when to stop reading or watching a particular movie, where to buy it from...
Good luck avoiding decisions that might have better or worse consequences.
As someone who occasionally stands there paralyzed in the grocery aisle wondering "do we really need 43 kinds of corn chips?" I'm trying to take this sympathetically as a general argument (despite the neither kind/true/necessary last para) and coming up short, simply because there are cheap and obvious heuristics for getting around these problems.
If you want a proxy for what a more-competent-than-realistic society would settle on as the One True American Car, buy the most popular car! (I was really hoping the aptly-named Civic would be it, but nope, the Toyota Camry beat it out last year.) It might not be the best and most awesome car, but the probability of the most popular product in a competitive market being a better value proposition than the only product in this hypothetical command economy seems pretty high! And if you don't like it, you can either just go without a car OR shop around for something you can work with!
Or for smaller purchases, Consumer Reports was already mentioned but it does cost money. But there are a lot of free options! You can just buy the "Amazon recommends" suggestion for any given search--it might not be great but it's probably not terrible! Or you can be a little more upscale and get the recommended thing from The Wirecutter, a weirdly exhaustive recommendations site that can outfit an entire home floor to ceiling with upper-middle-class appropriate consumer durables.
I think the "43 kinds of corn chips" thing is extremely relevant here. In grocery stores, and fast food restaurants, there seems to be corporate pressure to providing a huge number of choices that don't have much obviously counting for or against them. In luxury goods and high end dining, there seems to be pressure to a prix fixe menu with only one choice, or at most three choices, where being on the menu at all is supposed to signal that this is the best thing they can produce.
I have the sense that this is related to how much unfreedom vs decision fatigue is the biggest psychic drain of your day job (low income vs high income, traditionally). But it often seems like the huge variety of choice is designed, in many cases, to encourage people to make choices that aren't good for them, but are good for the seller.
But why does the seller benefit from the diversity of choices, except if some of their customers also benefit? If the 43rd brand of corn chips doesn't make anyone happy, why is the seller stocking it instead of, I don't know, a different kind of guacamole?
Trader Joe's takes the decision-averse position as it's big differentiator: instead of 43 corn chips, they have their Trader Jose's regular corn chips, their Trader Jose's reduced salt corn chips, and maybe Trader Jose's blue corn chips. That's it. Replicate this through the whole store and you have a grocery store that sells pretty much all the same products as a normal grocery stores in <half the square footage--which gives them really good profit margins compared to their competition.
I like Trader Joe's (although their produce is not very good) and in my purely self-serving ideal world more businesses would follow this model. Yet somehow Kroger et al aren't all slashing their product line-ups and building smaller boxes, and your gas station/bodega still has 200 different permutations of sodas and energy drinks.
My takeaway from this set of facts is that while there's demand for reduced/simplified decisions, there's also legitimate demand for a great deal of variety. And hell, I have my idiosyncratic preferences too, and I'd also be (very slightly) sad to wake up in a world where there's only one boring beans of ginger ale, vs. the extremely strong bougie ginger beer with like 20x the ginger content. Who's to say someone doesn't feel equally possessive of their flaming hot blue half-caf mini-cheez puffs (Final Fantasy XXX limited edition)?
Suggestion: Buy the store brand, which is almost always fine. More-or-less every grocery story and discount store has store brands of most stuff, often made by the same factory as made some of the name brand stuff.
It also allows people to tune their purchases to exactly what they want. Most people just want a bag of chips, but there's likely some small number of people who have very particular wants. Consider the existence of vegetarians, vegans, people with various food allergies/sensitivities, people with religious dietary requirements, people who just can't stand the flavor of the default option, etc. Get rid of all the "needless" choices and offer the customers one type of chips, and if that type of chips runs afoul of *any* of those constraints, then the customer can't have chips.
I think both of your examples are off target a bit, due to thinking of things not from the perspective of the supplier.
In the realm of corn chips and diner menus etc., the constraint to variety is how much you want to purchase and store. A super market has a lot of space to store prepackaged food, and since it doesn't spoil quickly it is relatively cheap to have many varieties even if they don't sell super fast. (In the 'States in fact many stores essentially lease shelf space to the Frito-Lays of the world, with Frito taking responsibility for stocking and product mix instead of the store itself.) Likewise a fast food place doesn't cook up meals from scratch, but from variously pre-made bits, so the actual variety of parts is limited but the combinations are plentiful.
Looking at high end restaurants, they really are cooking much of their menu from scratch to order, and usually without much overlap in ingredients. Those ingredients also don't have a long shelf life, so anything they buy but don't cook is going to waste. The other big constraint is making things to order means your chef has to actually be able to make it all themselves. You can't just rely on cooks who can turn standardized premade ingredients into a good burger. If your chef can make 20 amazing dishes, you perhaps offer 3-5 a night and rotate through them as makes sense.
One more point: the marketing research suggests (disclaimer: I am a supply chain and economics guy, so that might be old research) that most people just buy the thing they bought last time and liked. People very rarely change their actual buying habits, and so the cost of decision fatigue on frequent purchases is essentially zero for the vast majority. Things like cars and houses, those people pay a lot of attention to, but most people can't even tell you how much their store charges for Tostitos. This suggests that people who do suffer decision fatigue from choices of coffee or chips or socks are somewhat special, and should perhaps consider starting businesses to help each other decide what to buy. I don't mean to say "shut up and deal", but changing the world to match those specific preferences is going to be very negative for a wide swath of the population.
The perfect example of this would be health insurance or even insurance in general. Absent regulation you'd have a ton of choices too complex for the average person or below to manage. In terms of health insurance, this is especially a problem because if you pick a plan that ends up unable or unwilling to pay for your cancer treatment, the public doesn't have the balls to let you live with that choice.
In theory, libertarians should oppose "initiation of force or fraud". Arguably, giving people contracts that are difficult to understand and contain loopholes, is fraud... not necessarily in the legal sense, but in the uncomplicated "lol, the suckers will pay thinking they are buying X, when in fact they are buying Y = obvious fraud" sense.
Online libertarians typically only discuss initiation of force, which invites suspicion that some of them might be quite happy imagining a world where muscles and guns are limited, but you are free to cleverly use your intellectual advantage to abuse your neighbor.
But, who knows, maybe in a libertopia with private law enforcement, there could be an agency with attitude "small print is automatically invalid, you must speak clearly", and it could be quite popular.
This would have the interesting consequence that people would not be allowed to sign contracts they do not understand. Which is not necessarily a problem, in my opinion. Some libertarians already agree that people should not be allowed to sell themselves to slavery. So certainly limitations of what is allowed are not unthinkable.
> If you did want to argue against diversity libertarianism, you'd want to show that relevant systems are more fragile than anti-fragile; giving people more options will usually make them worse.
Sure. A world option to get a vaccine and not to get a vaccine is strictly worse than just the former.
This is not obvious at all to me in general. But most importantly, who gets to choose what the only option is? In this last year, a more libertarian world would have offered vaccines more widely and much sooner, yet in the current world the number of people vaccinated is not yet significantly constrained by the choice not to but by availability. (e.g., think half of Europe banning the AstraZeneca vaccine, deciding you shouldn't have the freedom to choose to take it... or the US not even approving it, or etc etc)
It's easy to say 'in the hypothetical world where we do things my way, everything works perfectly and there's no problems.' But do you really think the world is that simple and convenient?
What happens in your world when stories about people dying of Covid after getting vaccinated start circulating, or when the media publishes 100 cases of people being killed or permanently disabled by 'vaccines' (which are actually untested snake oil) ?
Even in the world where vaccines are heavily regulated and ridiculously safe and effective, there's a large portion of the population saying they'll never get vaccinate because they don't trust them, and a larger portion saying they'll 'wait to see what happens' before getting vaccinated.
And how many people do you expect to go back and get vaccinated again after some consumer report says the vaccine they took the first time was snake oil? Most people aren't that conscientious, even getting vaccinated voluntarily once is a lot to ask of the average person.
It looks to me like you are accusing me of being too hypothetical while rebutting something I'm not sure I said with a hypothetical? Or I don't understand what you are trying to say. Like, it is in this world, the real one, where most vaccines turned out not to be dangerous at all.
But anyway. Right now, the AstraZeneca vaccine is being stopped top-down for bad scientific reasons. And the main reason why many many people got scared of the vaccine was because the authorities decided that a bad scientific reason was a good scientific reason to stop with it.
That makes a lot of assumptions about the quality of the vaccine, does it not? Actual true efficacy, side effects, the rate of natural immunity due to having contracted the disease already etc.
The flu shot, at least circa 1990-2000, might be a good example. It didn't seem terribly effective and wasn't cheap. Universal flu shots every year was probably a bad idea. At some point the costs and benefits might cross over into being a good idea, but it is pretty hard to pin point where that is.
Burden of proof? Why do I have to show that the systems in question are fragile; it is the libertarians who should demonstrate that anti-fragility holds. The risks due to fragility are much higher than those due to anti-fragility!
Now that I think about it, a lot of libertarian arguments can be summarized as "here are some reasons why X is actually pretty anti-fragile".
I'd love to hear your opinion on the psychology of libertarians. To me, it's like they knee-jerk protect the notion of "inner space" which they assume is freedom.
Caplan thinks the positions that mesh with libertarianism are “a dualistic philosophy of mind, free will, moral objectivism, and an optimistic view of human potential”. I still thought of myself as a libertarian when I read that, even though I disagreed with him on those:
I'm more interested in the psychology of WHY people feel they need... FU money, bubbles to live in, high levels of self control, not having bosses around, etc. I absolutely have had phases of feeling like I totally needed these things myself. But I like to try and not just assume they're like innate needs of the human psyche. I feel like there are high levels of self-avoidance in libertarian creeds, not that this crit couldn't be also be thrown at other doctrines.
Equating freedom with inner space sounds to me like the concept of "freedom of conscience." It seems like a minority of people are born with a strong need for this, with it being a larger minority in some cultures than others. My guess would be it results from a neurological predisposition towards high levels of consistency, self-control, and systematic intellectual thought. A lot of social consequences follow from this in a complex society, ones that make functioning difficult for them. In order to function, they prioritize defending their ability to avoid clashes with the highly other-directed majority. Not being in sync with the values of the majority will cause "extreme" priorities, because the "reasonable" options are only reasonable as defined by those values.
Not sure, but thanks for posting. What I sense is that on a core psychological level, libertarians easily react to protect their sense of inner, personal space - without necessarily having a sense of what that space really is or whether it even exists.
I had a very strong fear of being controlled for decades but it seemed to track back to my adoptive dad. I experienced him as very controlling and I went along on the surface but determined inside to never surrender my mind. Over the years and repeated triggering, it seemed to work through. I get triggered but there's not much psychological charge underneath to keep me reacting.
I find the process many go through around Covid restrictions fascinating on this level. I think there is a level of correlation psychologically between fear of surrender and libertarian leanings.
It seems like you are projecting a lot of stuff about yourself on folks you really don't know.
I was raised with quite a bit of freedom from loving non controlling parents who were tolerant of different ways of living and thinking. Our family was live and let live. Being raised that way (and probably getting a lot of my instincts/personality genetically from my parents) I instinctively bristle at heavy handed authority, arbitrary rules and bureaucracy.
I don't know if I have a fear of being controlled but I know I don't like to be controlled. And I don't like controlling others either. So I set up my life such in such a way that I have a lot of autonomy.
I am pretty much the same here. I REALLY don't like to be told what to do or think and highly value my personal autonomy. I am also very tolerant of other people, the actions of others outside of very close contacts just don't matter to me at all.
Like you I value freedom so much that it is one of the main things I purchase with my salary. One of my major goals has been to build myself in to an FU position by combining a high savings rate and moderate level of consumption.
I've always thought one of the best social effects of a vibrant job market is that people automatically treat each other better if they know no one is forced to stick around. The flip side is that I don't care for most rules that make it hard for an employer to let a worker go. "FU money" is an example of circumstances that foster a healthy appreciation of the fact that the people around us have choices, and we'd do well to engage them on the basis of consent whenever humanly possible, even if we haven't adopted moral philosophies to dictate the same result.
By the same token, while I'd rather see countries operate in such a way that they can afford open borders, I'm much less troubled by tough limits on who can come in than on guard towers that face inward. It's not so much that people can't cross the border that's the problem, it's how governments treat citizens who can't leave. Ditto how monopolies treat customers who can't opt out. Most people aren't really up to the temptation of a captive audience.
As long as things aren't too bad, I know I can find workarounds and don't worry much about it--but the trend is inexorable and worth trying pretty hard to stem whenever we see it developing.
What makes you think political opinions neatly fit specific psychology types?
In my experience, friends, family and upbringing have equal or greater influence on political opinions than personality. In fact I can easily think about a bunch of Capitalists, Socialists and Libertarians with a huge variety of personalities/(psychologies?).
If you ask them they'll say they believe their preferred system is the best way to achieve the best world (for everyone), and I tend to believe them.
I wasn't thinking of psychological types so much, as in Reich. Rather that there seems to be a certain reactivity in libertarians where they assume top down control is just wrong. I have an idea this might be to do with how they learned as kids to associate a sense of freedom with notions of "inner space."
Forgive me if I'm being naive here, but does there need to be psychological reasons why explicit accounting of eccentricity can be scary in a world where many people are punished for it, even retroactively?
I don't know for sure. I'm just interested in the topic of social conformity and whether it is necessarily negative. My own experience was that a lot of my craving for personal freedom seemed to be based around my lack of exploration of my inner world.
This is an interesting topic, and I think even when they have sufficient wealth many people have a gut reaction against top down authority because they feel trapped by society. They come to value some forms of "freedom" far more than I ever would.
Craving for personal freedom stems from other people being nosy assholes, and a lot of libertarians (and SSC/AST readers) being smarter than them yet still subject to their attempts at control "for their good".
It is based in childhood experiences in the sense that you encounter nosy assholes often and learn from it, much like you learn not to put your hand in the fire.
I don't think your approach is useful beyond trivial conclusions.
When I read the section with the car analogy, an objection immediately came to my mind: no, we don't want the widest possible distribution - at least not in the real world, where there are always tradeoffs, like between price and reliability (and it's these tradeoffs that justify the existence of the distribution in the first place - if there were a Super-Tesla that is strictly superior to Yugos, Yugos would go extinct right away, and the distribution would shrink). I do not want cars on the road that cost 1000 bucks brand-new, but spontaneously go up in flames at inopportune moments, such as driving through a tunnel right in front of me. That's why civilized countries have regulations regarding car safety, regular inspections to extend a vehicle's license, etc. - to cut off the left end of the distribution.
With regards to other industries, similar mechanisms may apply. Do clickbaity "fake-news" websites cause damage to the information landscape of a society? Do shady online pharmacies that sell tainted, counterfeit medications undermine trust in medicine (apart from directly hurting their customers)? Can banks that sell cleverly constructed derivative instruments spread hidden risk to a degree that an unexpected downturn wipes out the entire economy, rather than one unfortunate bank? No waaaay, right? I mean, your condition "and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones" sounds great, but where in the real world would that apply? How many people even have an idea what's in the processed food they eat every day? They may be sure they like the taste, but how are they supposed to be sure it doesn't cause cancer?
I mean, these are objections of the kind you mention in the second-to-last paragraph, but I don't think you take them seriously enough.
I think bringing up the example of counterfeit anything is a disservice to libertarians. Fraud is probably #2 on the list of Things Even Libertarians Want Banned, after violence.
(Both fraud and violence by necessity reduce the victim's ability to choose things, either by deceiving him or by forcing him.)
Yeah but too much is swept under the rug of the *definitions* of "violence" and "fraud." In this very essay, for example, we are asked to contemplate the possibility that "force" which in libertarian tradition has been defined as "at the point of a gun" i.e. something only governments or armed individuals can exercise, can be extended to cover "social pressure" and "enhanced social/economic cost created by oligarchic collusion." And that fits very well with the times, it's a common meme these days.
And a similar common meme is that "fraud" includes not just your old-fashioned direct lie (saying 'not A' when you know 'A'), but also things like manipulating what appears in your Facebook feed.
So when the libertarian says "we shall begin by only banning violence and fraud" the politician/huckster immediately rubs his hands in glee, knowing that by suitable variation on the definition of those two key words, almost anything can be ruled permissible or impermissible, in time.
I think to be considered a plausible candidate for a governing philosophy libertarianism has to be pretty honest about defining "violence" and "fraud" in terms that are practical to implement and resistant to becoming "living" terms like our living Constitution, to be made precise by at the whim of whoever has power at the moment.
Also, libertarianism does not prohibit violence. It doesn't prohibit retaliatory violence, and it doesn't prohibit violence in defense of property.
It defines taking property as being force (aka violence) even when it isn't. If you drop your wallet and I pick it up, there is clearly no force or violence involved. But both libertarians and the real world say that force / violence is permitted to get it back - either you can use force, or you can call the police who use force.
The problem I have with libertarians going on about force and violence is that everyone (bar a handful of extreme pacifists) agrees that taking things you don't own is wrong, and that force is permitted to get the property to its rightful owner. People just don't agree on who the rightful owner is. If not paying your taxes is stealing from the government, then the police arresting you for it is just fine, and it's not taxation that is theft, but non-payment of taxes. The entire non-aggression principle doesn't argue anything that anyone disagrees with - it's just used to conceal a theory of property behind a theory of aggression and force.
Why would you want a concept of "force" or "fraud" that excludes things that are functionally identical? I would have thought it was the functional behavior of the thing that makes it the sort of thing that should be banned even in a libertarian paradise, rather than whether it ticks some technical check box.
(I can see the idea that there is a danger in these concepts being applied well outside of their actual functional form - but if you're acknowledging that you will be missing many cases that are functionally equivalent to the ones you ban, then why even bother banning those, and why draw a bright line that prevents even a conservative expansion of the concepts?)
Currently, it's often the government that prevents you from getting revenge when you notice you were defrauded.
Fraud is defined by a legal system. If you are now dissatisfied with some decisions of the legal system, for example some legal loopholes that allow others to cleverly scam inattentive people, your opportunities to disagree are limited.
Imagine a system, where if a judge enforces a clearly exploitative contract, the victim of the scam and their family and friends will choose a different judge, and describe the reasons for their decision on a blog.
"Libertarians believe that the label of “crime” should be limited to actions of force or fraud against another individual or group. We believe that such crimes should be prosecuted and punished by our justice system"
- Libertarian Party of the United States
One of these entities speaks for five or six orders of magnitude more Libertarians than the other.
I find this unconvincing because of what happens if you take the next step of mathematical sophistication and consider non-symmetric distributions.
Imagine a distribution with a long positive tail, and a sharp cutoff at some point on the negative side (we can accomplish this by including skew). In all of the cases described, it would be the best option. You get high efficiency nuclear power plants and Teslas alike, but eliminate the risk of meltdown or, say, buying a really crappy car.
Then the theory becomes "we always want lots of good options, and some way to limit the possible harm from bad options", which seems... tautological? And it also seems like it eliminates any obvious connection with the concept of fragility.
This is what natural selection does. Or in the context of markets, recessions and other acts of "creative destruction." It does fit into the "antifragility" argument that we want to *encourage* creative destruction -- we should *celebrate* the frequent failure of businesses, the bankruptcy of financial schema, the noble laborer flung out of a job at the mine, forced to retrain in freelance stoplight windshield washing...
I think this makes the assumption that innovation is going to solve a lot of global issues, or make the world a better place and add to human flourishing. Systems that work often scale in a fractal way. If you apply government style bureaucracy to a small organization like a school, it produces a public school. But if you just let every teacher do what they want because it will lead to innovation, and creates some adaptable and anti fragile schools, then you will end up with atrocious outcome for some kids, and the few good ideas often wont get reproduced because the market is not setup to reward good ideas in this context. When you have skin in the game and the stakes are high, tried and true solutions make a lot of sense.
We already end up with atrocious outcomes for a lot of kids, and arguably most kids, simply because people arrogate to themselves the right to decide the mandatory universal standard for education. That's a perfect example of fragility: an error in one critical location (the origin of education dogma that is increasingly enforced nationwide under the guise of federal funding with strings), the failure affects the entire system at once. Ideally, lots of people would be trying lots of education approaches, so we could check in periodically to see which ones were working best, and take quick action to correct the failures, or at least try something new.
Atrocious for most kids? By what metric? I agree that better solutions could happen, but people don't want to experiment with their kids, and market incentives don't end up scaling the best solutions up. In the USA there is a lot of educational freedom. And this has led to some great innovations, but they don't magically scale up. There is some belief that there is some magical solution that has yet to be found, but apparently no society on earth has come up with it yet.
But many people do want to "experiment with their kids" in the sense of having options for better schools when the schools they are in are leaving their kids untaught, absurdly indoctrinated, and physically imperiled. What stops them is not the fear of trying something new but the rigid monopoly. Those who can afford to keep paying school taxes and tuition on top of that can always escape, but it's a huge barrier for most families.
Vouchers, charters, no federal curriculum. The US has plenty of innovation going in schools. My point is that innovation is not the key to solving poor educational outcomes. Supermarket chains will not even open stores in bad neighborhoods. Anybody good at teaching or leading will avoid blighted communities like the plague. Healthcare has a similar problem. We know what great healthcare looks like, but only wealthier citizens have access to it. How does innovation solve this problem? The reality is that educational innovations raise the bar ever higher for struggling students.
I agree that vouchers, charters, and no federal curriculum are good ideas. I only regret that they are available only to a tiny sliver of the population, and the subject of relentless stamping-out campaigns. As for how innovation solves the problem of terrible and limited options, whether in education or in medicine, you start by at least allowing the innovations to come into existence, then worry about making them more widely available. Strangling them in their cribs will never help anyone, least of all the populations least able to exert influence on their own failing local institutions by exerting a credible threat of abandonment and adoption of alternatives.
60-65% of high school seniors score less than "proficient" in literacy in NAEP tests. That looks like bad outcomes for most kids. It isn't as though proficient is a huge hurdle.
I don't know that I would claim the USA has a lot of educational freedom. It varies by state, but in say PA you have to go to the public schools in your area, or homeschool or send to private schools. You pay property taxes in any cases to pay for the public schools, use them or not. Starting new private schools is extremely difficult, heavily regulated in every particular, so they are very few and far between.
Comparing PA to MN where I lived for a few years, the St Paul school district had public school choice, with lots of charter schools of various sorts. Parents could default to the local school or sign up for any other. There were often more applicants for the good schools than spaces, but lots of options. We sent our daughter to a Mandarin immersion school with top scores for English and Math, no extra money, though I did have to drive her across town every day. Moving back to PA where you have to base where you live on what school you want seems a lot less free, and the schools are a lot worse.
I agree that too much regulation is bad. But the US has innovative schools like Mandarin immersion charters, magnets etc. Most countries have a national curriculum, and in France the education minister once bragged that everyone was learning the same thing at the same moment in every school. Meanwhile in the US there are some vague national standards, and as you said schools vary greatly by state. This sounds like the distribution 2 that Scott Siskind was writing about. Some great schools and some terrible. In PA why don't they just copy what ST Paul does? We know what makes great educational outcomes (smart affluent parents), so the problem with schools is not something that can be solved by innovation in education techniques. UNICEF came to this conclusion long ago. They can reliably open good early childhood centers in developing countries, but they have never figured out how to make this scale up. It consistently takes reallocation of resources (tax money) and organized government to make good societies.
"Suppose there was a cabal of evil geniuses who decided to force teens into labor camps where 56% were disengaged, 75% had negative feelings, 17% had to be put on psychiatric medications to survive, suicides had increased 300% since the founding of the labor camp system, and there was an annual 20% increase in suicides each fall when they were forced back into the camps. If this was an Apple factory in China, there would be international protests and boycotts. When it was discovered they were actually doing this to children, the company would collapse."
I create schools at which teens are much happier (we measure both engagement and psychological safety using Fitbit-like devices and Immersion Neuro software). Although conventional schools might be okay for 25% of students, I see the 75% who are unhappy as a huge market.
The reason that the educational innovations that matter have not been able to scale is the "grammar of schooling" (in the language of Tyack and Cuban) or the dominant operating system, as I describe it here,
The cultivation of positive culture and attitudes are more important in many contexts than are innovations within the system. The ability to take initiative, to learn on one's own, to engage in mutually respectful dialogue, to solve unstructured problems creatively are all examples of valuable real world skills that do not fit well into the grammar of schooling, which assumes grade level curricula, standards, and assessments using a content-transmission model (as opposed to a steady habituation through participation in a community of practice model with deliberate practice for the ambitious as a culturally validated ideal).
I've got decades of experience creating out of the box schools (including a charter high school ranked the 36th best public high school in the U.S., the high school model for the largest Montessori network in the U.S., and now a low cost virtual model). There are certainly challenges in creating innovative programs given the government-subsidized and enforced dominant operating system. But alternatives continue to grow despite these challenges. I expect we'll see a tipping point in the next decade or two in which the system collapses (or perhaps goes the way of the post office, an expensive jobs program with little functional value).
A growing awareness of the public health catastrophe of American adolescence, combined with a growing number of alternatives to the existing system, will accelerate the loss of market share for conventional public schools (which has already been declining for decades).
This is some really interesting stuff, thank you for posting. I am from Northern California, but aside from a year working in Waldorf I haven't spent much time inside US schools since I was a kid. I had no idea it is so bad. What I have seen over and over, most recently in Madagascar and Tunisia, are great little schools and orphanages that don't scale up into huge 2000 kid schools, or into franchises. So I believe completely tearing apart the current school system, in the hopes that something better will arise, is something of a gamble. A good school is a community of good people, and I think there is no "good school" made up of stressed out neglected kids and adults, but that is the reality of a lot of communities. I think you are blaming schools for a lot of societal problems. Citing statistics on suicide and insinuating it must be because of the schools. If a community is vacuous and unhappy, and a school is preparing kids for a life in that community, then there is no possibility of success. I am a big for of the Alfie Kohn types, and the Waldorfy type ethos, but these ethe are not appealing to a broad swath of America. Without some kind of authority to push for this warmth in schools, then we will probably end up with more polarization and also more kids in select elite schools.
I'm on the phone every day with parents from all demographics who are very interested in our program. Low income parents from states with tuition tax credit programs are working with us to make our program available to them. There is tremendous demand. We routinely have kids shadow one day and enroll the next, even in mid-March.
Regarding the issue of suicide, I've known many students who were suicidal in their previous environment and were happy and well in my environments, sometimes within days, other times weeks, yet other times months. Likewise with many cases of anxiety and depression.
Moreover, it is possible to be high performance without stress. I've either worked with or known many dozens of students who have gotten into selective colleges by doing what they love and loving what they do; once parents and teens realize that not only is the stress harmful, but it is also not essential, then we'll see an accelerating move away from it. See Cal Newport's work, including "How to Be a High School Superstar," for a similar approach to the one I use.
In 1972, John Yudkin published "Pure, white, and deadly: The problem of sugar." I remember hearing about it in the late 70s and thinking it was absolutely ridiculous. While it is not as sensational, over the past twenty years we've seen a pretty broad consensus form that eating lots of sugar is not a healthy thing to do. Relatedly, whether people use the language of "evolutionary mismatch," it is pretty widely acknowledged the rise of type 2 diabetes in modern societies is associated with the huge increase in the consumption of highly refined carbs, including sugar.
Likewise, I predict that in 30 years, the current epidemic of anxiety, depression, and suicide associated with modern societies will likewise be acknowledged as due to an analogous evolutionary mismatch,
As that happens over the coming decades, we'll see a massive shift away from schools as we know them.
I'd be happy to bet that a decade from now we'll see a significantly smaller percentage of high school students enrolled in standard district public schools. I'd say 20% fewer such enrollees is an easy prediction. At 20% decrease per decade, we see a collapse of public high school as we know it in a few decades. I'd like to see it happen faster, but because change is usually slower than I think I'd leave it as a safe bet that we'll see a decline of at least 20% fewer per decade enrolled in standard district public schools.
What does diversity libertarianism look like from a policy standpoint? Classical libertarians have it easy, they can just oppose anything that increases the reach of the government. But what do you do when all the big tech companies block access to your platform? Have some sort of anti-collusion law to prevent it? Or is it more of a guiding philosophy than a political driver?
It also feels like you're switching between "diversity libertarian" and "libertarian" a little too freely. As Sniffnoy said, diversity libertarianism seems more like liberalism than libertarianism. I don't think many people who identify as libertarian would hold many of these views, so it does seem appropriate to point out the hypocrisy. Lots of people opposed net neutrality on libertarian grounds, for example. I could be wrong about what they think, or maybe these are different groups, but I don't think you can quite equate libertarian and diversity libertarian without more justification.
> As Sniffnoy said, diversity libertarianism seems more like liberalism than libertarianism.
IIRC Scott has described himself as a 'liberal-tarian' before. Also, semi-related, I agree with Scott on 90% of what he says in this space and yet I don't ever think of myself as a libertarian; it's like he has a much wider definition of the word than I do.
To a first approximation, you can just take garden-variety libertarianism and do an s/"government"/"government and other monopolies"/; since non-anarchistic versions of libertarianism generally include government institutions (e.g. courts) charged with making sure the government doesn't overreach in its exercise of power, there should be no fundamental problem with having those institutions rein in the monopolies. It would be helpful if you think of that when you write the constitution or charter for your libertarian state, rather than having to try and patch it in later.
I'll let David Friedman explain how the anarchistic libertarians might rein in monopolistic corporations; it will be an elegant theory and I'll be skeptical of the practical application, as always.
I don't know what "monopoly" means in this framework, if it's including multiple large competitors in the same market. To flesh out the Parler example: are the courts supposed to allow Apple to remove it from their store, but sanction Google for doing the same because that would cumulatively deny them access to a major platform? Do I have a legal right to cloud services that ratchets forward as AWS improve their offerings?
Alternatively, if the remedies are extralegal then I don't see how this isn't libertarianism working as intended (if not as desired) and I don't know what the complaint is.
There's a reason the Sherman Anti-Trust Act isn't called the Sherman Anti-Monopoly Act. A small group of large corporations that directly conspire to a particular end is a functional monopoly, and people who want or are willing to regulate monopolies have not generally had any problem dealing with that. Yes, the borders can be fuzzy and there are issues of proof, but that's what judges are for.
Unless you're implying that said Act is somehow applicable in the Parler case, that's an evasion. I'm not looking for an explanation of what libertarianism might recommend in trivially well-trod legal ground, I'm looking for what the policy prescription would be for the specific example brought up in this specific article about "diversity libertarianism".
I have a serious problem with the idea that an example can be meaningful enough to bring up as a complaint in favor of an ideology, yet that ideology is silent about what it would actually *do* in that circumstance. Leaving it up to the personal whims of whichever judge gets assigned the case that day is not a compelling principle.
I'd need quite a bit more detail for that to be worth engaging: does "shut down" mean a legal banning of core business practices, forced breakup into smaller companies, or outright nationalization? On what grounds - market share, anticompetitive behavior, or some prohibition on wider social influence? What other companies are going to fall under this metric, and what are the expected consequences?
It's easy enough to make arguments from combinations of the above, though IMO most of those arguments are pretty bad. But it's another matter to advance them within a libertarian framework without seriously compromising other key principles.
Thinking about this some more I want to restructure my line of thought here, to clarify and make sure I'm addressing the arguments as they're actually being made:
1) Corporate action sometimes results in the exclusion of some actors from certain markets, which has either undesirable direct effects or generally runs against good principles. Addressing this through government action would require increased regulation, rather than decreased.
2) Calling for an increase in regulation runs against the typical libertarian milieu. "Diversity Libertarianism" is an articulation of principles where the underlying goal (variety in markets) is consistent while allowing for libertarian arguments as instrumentally useful but not ideologically necessary.
3) The problem is that now it's committing the classic mistake of specifying both a means and an outcome - it will struggle to come up with policy suggestions in instances where they diverge. The sin of hypocrisy has been replaced with the sin of incoherence, or at least incompetence.
The Parler example is key, because it's what distinguishes diversity libertarianism in the first place - a more straightforward libertarian might bite the bullet and deny that 1) is a problem at all. Likewise, someone with no commitments to libertarianism might have no issue just using the stick of regulation to bash the problem as it arises.
I don't accept that the proposed redefinition of terms ("monopoly") makes the problem go away - the government action required to address the example is a genuine increase in state power. I have little sympathy for what I see as a self-imposed moral quandary, but the facts as they are do seem to lead to a genuine impasse.
A problem with this approach is that there are more axes along which we can measure good vs. bad than you can shake a stick at. We also can't expect to measure most of them accurately. Human measurements like working conditions are hard to pin down in an objective way. Even semi-objective measurements like groundwater pollution have too many internal variables (hundreds of different chemicals and their dispersion/absorption rates) and weighting issues — Is one gram of unobtanium per litre worse than five grams of cyanide deathsulphite? Is one cubic metre of lethal drinking water worse than a thousand cubic metres of merely debilitating drinking water? Is our understanding of human biology able to assign meaningful numbers to such questions, even given the exact chemical ratios, except in some rare situation with middling quantities of ubiquitous, well-understood chemicals?
In addition, why should we expect anyone, including really competent and benevolent government officials, to solve this impossibly complex equation to improve even a single variable without incurring a net loss via one, ten, or a hundred other variables? We're stumbling backwards through the thicket, hoping that the next move will be less painful than the last.
Re: the idea of Facebook choosing to censor BLM content, it's probably worth mentioning that this actually happened. During the first wave of BLM protests, it was found that Facebook's news feed was fairly consistently burying anything to do with the movement: Facebook had designed the algorithm to deliver users the sort of content that people generally like, and people tend to like stuff like the ice bucket challenge and cute animals more than burning cities or grieving families. All this without any "religiously"-motivated intervention on the part of Zuckerberg et al; the platform has a homogenising logic all its own. These days, of course, it runs the other way, but there's still a single uniform affect across pretty much every major social media platform; they deliver content that makes people angry, because that's what the fattest slice of the bell curve seems to want. It seems (to me, at least) that markets actually produce this kind of outcome fairly consistently across all fields. Diversity would be a nice idea, but I'm really not convinced that any kind of libertarianism is the right way to get us there.
If FB was delivering people what they liked to see (to the best of the algorithms ability) and that happened to not be BLM, I wouldn't call that "Facebook choosing to censor BLM content". It's not creating a niche in demand or anything competitors could take advantage of.
You may want to investigate or do liberalism, which has some similar ideas.
That being said, I share many of your moral intuitions here, but wonder if you might be oversanguine about the degree to which market forces and competition produce diversity. You wrote a whole essay on this involving a certain demon king!
Hey, Oligopsony, did you ever wanna do anything more with that Werewolves of Avalon thing? I fell off reading and commenting it because I was doing other stuff, but if you still wanna go somewhere with it, I could go back to it.
> The quickest way to enrage me is to criticize some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone
Sure but that’s basically exactly the opposite of Parler’s mission. They exist to give a platform to weird people who were banned from Twitter because they _were_ trying to harm people.
Yes it’s bad that Apple and Google have all the power here but that doesn’t change the fact that Parler is terrible and everyone is better off without them.
(And I’d say the fix here is that the government needs to do... something. The free market is not going to solve QAnon by itself any more than it solved racism by itself.)
They exist to give a platform to weird people who were banned from Twitter for a variety of reasons, Twitter is quite open about banning users for non-harm-attempting reasons.
Why does QAnon need to be solved? There are people out there who believe in everything from creationism to lizard people, and historically people have been pretty comfortable with the idea that many flavours of crazy nonsense will persist in some portion of the population.
We have in fact had murder over literal lizard people (which is worse than Pizzagate, where a shot was fired into the wall without intent to kill), and Japan saw people launching deadly gas attacks on the public subway because a crazy cult convinced them that death was good.
Who is the “we” there? A market can accomplish good things if its incentives are aligned in the right way, but where do the incentives come from? If no one is controlling things then you get negative externalities. If unaccountable people are controlling things you’ll get results that are good for those people and probably not so much for everyone else. You need a system where the market participants are able to incentivize the market controllers to incentivize the market participants to do the right things...
We = human beings, plus anyone else who is competent to participate.
Incentives come from the circumstances, largely from norms that are observed.
If someone is controlling things, you get negative externalities anyway. The question is, how do you resolve disputes in a way that tends to reduce and discourage negative externalities?
If people were trying to harm other people, they should get prosecuted for that. Parler need not be involved.
The weirdest part about this is that law enforcement was aware of this happening weeks in advance, and they basically ignored it, aside from dissuading some of the most extreme elements from participating ??
Wait a minute. In your model aren't Apple and Google merely Company As on your wide spectrum? If you think they are *very far* from what the average person wants, or what is optimum, then they're just representing one extreme of the wide "antifragile" spectrum that's desirable, and if we wait around a little, some entrepreneur will see the underserved demand and create the Company B/"Tesla" of the social media platforms and proceed to eat the lunch of those nasty tech oligarchs.
Or to put it another way, if your guiding principle as a diversity libertarian is tolerance for behaviors that are very far from your (or any one individual's) preference -- should you not be *celebrating* the existence of firms that take extremely negative (to you) positions, on the grounds that this must imply the existence (or probable emergence) of firms that will be extremely positive?
I think your two competing distributions take misses a key meta point: if your nuclear power plants are all "mediocre", all doing the same thing, then are they all *safe* or are they all *dangerous*? How do you know? Are you *sure*? The second distribution increases the chance that a nuclear power plant would have a meltdown. The first increase *systemic* risk of all of them melting down because somebody overlooked something and they all copied each other to be "safe". I realize this too is a bog-standard libertarian argument, but worth repeating.
In your second-to-last paragraph, you provide possible rebuttals; situations where diversity libertarianism shouldn't rule the day.
I think the case of Parler did meet some of these criteria, in a way that authentically swayed leaders (like Zuckerberg).
- Social networks are fragile as products. They are worse (the products themselves) when there are too many of them. There are natural network effects that tend towards monopolies.
- Online networks are also fragile in a social-malus way, we discovered, because if they harbor communities that rally into real-world violent actions, and the provide a sheen of acceptability that 4chan / 8chan could not
- People use social networks for perverse real-world outcomes, we realized
And finally, the government was subtly a factor. There was a lot of coverage about how, because the Democrats has just taken the senate with the Georgia elections, the social networks were trying to avoid being hauled in front of congress for allowing Parler to continue.
People can do more good by acting in concert just as they can do more harm by acting in concert. We shouldn't try to eliminate every tool that enables people to act in concert, for fear that they may use it to plan harm. Our focus should be on the harm. A criminal conspiracy is bad because it promotes a crime, not because people cooperated; otherwise it would just be an awesome Rotary Club.
I agree that the key point about conformity pressure is not whether it comes from the government versus other sources. But I think you underrate regulation (including social conformity pressure).
First, it's not clear that variance reduction on a bell curve is the right way to think about it. An alternative model is that regulation can chop off the left tail of the distribution. For example, we do not in fact allow arbitrarily bad cars; is it clear that every possible car safety regulation affects both tails of the car quality curve equally? That would seem a contentious point, at minimum.
Second, bounded rationality and imperfect information. This blog arose from a community that started out exploring cognitive biases and why they're so persistent, endemic, and difficult to avoid. It's odd to then assert the power of personal choice to avoid bad outcomes. And the blog has explored ideas about the crucial role of culture and tradition to help people avoid repeating mistakes others have made (Heinrich, Chesterton, maybe Scott's metis). By what mechanism does culture do this, if not some form of conformity pressure?
Third, externalities. If we take seriously a consequentialism that weights potential future generations, limiting downside risk becomes extremely important. That should affect the balance with which we strike these variance trade-offs.
And further, I intuitively feel that our future selves deserve consequentalist weight. My present preferences and interests are not in complete alignment with those of past selves or future selves. Younger me made some choices that harmed present-me and future-me. I wish conformity pressure would have prevented him from making those choices. So poor choices have negative externalities even if they only affect the person making the choice.
"Arbitrarily bad cars" requires an arbitrary definition of badness, which not everyone will agree with. The Tesla has a thing called an "autopilot", which seems like a revolutionary advance and if used the way actual autopilots(*) are used would greatly increase traffic safety, but which if misused sometimes kills people who wouldn't have been killed by an ordinary car. Some people genuinely think the Tesla is Very Bad because of this, but it isn't illegal (yet). The Yugo didn't have backup cameras or antilock brakes or (many other things), but it was probably as safe as my 1976 Nova was and it was cheap enough to be used by people who would otherwise still be driving a 1976 Nova with the brake lines held together by duct tape. The Yugo would be illegal, at least in the United States, if it were still being made.
There's a case to be made that some possible automobiles are so dangerous to third parties that they have to be banned, but the bar for that should be set very high.
Can someone give me an example of what Scott calls an "anti-state libertarian" expressing the point of view that we should not care about corporate censorship, mob attacks, or pressures towards social conformity because they do not come from the government? Because I've heard the historically ignorant argument that the First Amendment is all the free speech we need to have, thank you, but that argument doesn't seem to come from libertarians so much as from people who were skeptical of free speech to begin with.
It's not that I think no one should care about these things, it's that I feel significantly less worried then others seem to be. Especially on long time horizons.
Society seems pretty fluid to me. Social restrictions are quick to arise but just as quick at disappearing. Americans love a good moral panic, but they'll ultimately pull back from it.
I just don't want any of these societal scares to get entrenched and formalized in government institutions, because then it never goes away.
Bingo. Hence the extra anxiety when the social restrictions are enforced by a group that is starting to look powerful enough to rival government's specially scary power. Because excommunication means nothing to me, I don't have to worry what the Pope thinks. That wouldn't have been true 500 years ago.
Consider: Basically all the social networks, even the edgy ones like Parler, will ban you over some behaviours, like posting Goatse everywhere or being a spambot. Approximately zero libertarians seem concerned about this because no one cares about protecting that kind of thing: it turns out everyone's okay with corporates censorship in some domains, no matter how much they object to the state doing it.
Large social networks are often communities of communities: subreddits, Facebook groups etc. In these cases, moderation should take place at the level of these subcommunities: there is no strong reason for the site to ban users from posting goatse or spam in a subcommunity where that subcommunity specifically prefers to allow it.
It would require a lot of duplication of effort for the spambots to be banned from every public community they joined. Facebook et al. issuing site-level bans that they themselves manage provides a service most users want, faster bans of spambots with less effort from the group's moderators.
The platform could offer it as a standard service which the moderators of the sub-communities could choose to enable or disable. That's how my ISP does e-mail spam filtering for example: they offer a certain level of standard filtering which is enabled by default, but I can set it stricter or looser or turn it off completely if I want.
They indeed could, that seems strictly better than the current situation. And yet I have never heard anyone agitating for this solution or expressing concern that we lack it, which is the point I was making. Not even the libertarians really care about protecting spam-like speech from corporate censorship.
Even libertarians agree that free speech doesn't mean that you are entitled to an audience. So as long as not a single person wants to receive it, there's no problem. If anybody *wanted* to receive spam, and was prevented from receiving it by a spamfilter forced on them that could not be switched off, then I would agree that was wrong. Maybe not the biggest problem in the universe, but wrong.
That is indeed how it works in some social networks. On the other hand, Facebook is repeatedly being blamed for applying an USA morality in a country with a very different one.
I think I mentioned this last time but there are parallels between the subjective concept of jumping around ideas and the more formal concept of jumping around distributions using advanced monte carlo methods meant to explore bayesian probabilistic spaces thoroughly while reducing chances of getting stuck on local maxima. It's a complex subject with mind blowing math that takes you into higher dimensions inspired by physics in order for jumps to spend more time spiraling the peaks and looking around instead of hovering at the same place for too long. See https://twitter.com/betanalpha/status/1234576972132626445
Do you know if there are still better results to be had by applying the "Hamiltonian Monte Carlo transformation" twice? So at level 1, you get a momentum dimension for every dimension in the original problem. If the original problem had N dimensions, you need 2N coordinates for level 1 HMC. At level 2, you treat the sum of kinetic and potential energies in level 1 as a new potential energy, and introduce 2N new momentum coordinates, for a total of 4N coordinates. Along with periodically dropping back down to ordinary MCMC dynamics, you also periodically drop back down to level 1 dynamics. Of course, this all generalizes to even higher levels.
I have no idea. I already have difficulty wrapping my head around a single level of Hamiltonian abstraction. I would assume that, if it's even possible, you would get steeply diminishing returns.
I realize you're trying to make your examples simple for easy consumption, but none of the examples you showed are truly univariate. Trying to map things onto ill-defined "goodness" is very tricky. For example, I had thought price would be part of a car's "goodness", but John Schilling clearly thought it was not, and lower "goodness" cars would have lower price points, making them more affordable.
More generally, most manufacturers attempt to navigate a hugely-dimensional space (features, quality, formfactor, price point, etc.) and find a region in that space that is in high demand but remains poorly-served. For many products, you trade off one thing for another, a phenomenon a unidimensional illustration can't really illustrate.
Thinking about these things in multidimensional space may actually strengthen your argument for "diversity libertarianism", since the variance is no longer "crappy" and "good" but is instead about having more options available so that a single option is more likely to fit your unique preferences in that hugely multidimensional space.
> Economists have shown that this wasn't exactly organic - companies were afraid to give blacks good jobs, to pay them higher wages, or to sell them products they weren't supposed to have; they figured racist mobs would attack them, racist employees would desert them, or a racist government would crack down on them. I tend to think of this as a religious problem, by analogy to very religious towns where eg nobody will sell liquor even though there's no official law against it,
There was a law against it! Jim Crow was a series of laws by regimes that were incredibly hostile to corporations and business writ large. It's not a coincidence that Jim Crow happened right as 19th century progressivism took off. There was this new ethos that the state should take more control over society to make it better and for racists "better" meant less friendly to African Americans. In the absence of those laws, businesses did hire African Americans. In fact, in the presence of those laws they did hire them anyway. And that required enforcement in the form of crackdowns.
>I'm less likely to object to things like taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon - none of those decrease diversity very much.
This is logically inconsistent. Redistributing wealth is definitionally meant to decrease diversity in the sense you're using it here. It literally has the goal of changing the distribution from the second graph to the first.
Jim Crow is exactly the example we should worry about. It was ugly enough that merchants reserved the right to refuse service to "the wrong kind of people," but that habit has a healthy way of breaking down as long as each merchant and each customer makes a free and individual choice. The scary part is when a merchant who bucks the trend finds that he can't buy stock, can't get financing, can't get his kids in school, and frankly can't be safe from having his business or home burnt down, because he's tainted himself by contact with "the wrong kind of people." That's what cancel culture is about. We should be recoiling from it as if from filth.
Scott, if you haven't already, I recommend you read about Timur Kuran's theory of preference falsification. I think it solves your "religious problem". It could also explain why "people will perversely choose the worst option rather than the best if many options are made available" as you stated in your steelman paragraph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
One other thought on your distribution models: I think regulation tends to push an industry from Distribution 2 to Distribution 1. Where public safety is a big concern you get an industry in Distribution 1, such as nuclear. The real challenge is how do you encourage the variance of Distribution 2 without the downside risk of Nuclear Plant A? How do you chop off the left tail? There's been a recent push from Bill Gates and others to fund innovative nuclear companies which is great but there's been stagnation in that industry since the Chernobyl disaster. Maybe venture capital is the answer but I don't think it gets us all the way there. Public support of safe an effective nuclear power is necessary. Just look at what happened when Gates announced that he was funding COVID vaccine R&D.
"Now Point B is Tesla, making revolutionary new environmentally-friendly cars. In fact, let's say it's some super-Tesla that's even better than the real Tesla"
Bopping off on a tangent here, but this is something I am curious about. Car ads over here are starting to push electric or hybrid vehicles, especially in light of the government's commitment to reducing carbon emissions and making grants and rebates for electric vehicles available.
The consensus is that Tesla is 5 years ahead of everyone else. VW just spent $50 billion on the ID3/4, Taycan etc. and they are way behind. VW was even reduced to shipping ID3s with many of the functions they touted to compete with Tesla not working. Their software development teams are no doubt working frantically to catch up but they are having a hell of a time.
Part of it is that cars are becoming more software devices than hardware devices and traditional automakers are having difficulty with that transition.
Dumb question: if Zuckerberg owns 50%+1 of the shares in Facebook, how could anyone ever force him to stop being CEO? I get it, maybe the stock tanks, and maybe the company loses a lot of value but if he truly decided to die on the hill of stopping BLM... what could stop him?
I don't know about this particular jurisdiction, but typically there are laws requiring directors to act in the best interest of all shareholders. Otherwise he could just decide that Facebook will donate all of its assets to Mark Zuckerberg.
Even if they couldn't force him to stop being CEO, the employee rebellion that ensued might actually stop the "censor BLM" directive getting implemented (I doubt Zuck is the one pushing updates to Facebook's source code) and it would certainly stop Facebook from continuing to effectively do Facebook things until the overwhelmingly liberal employees got what they wanted.
I liked this article, but I think it has one glaring omission: people disagreeing (in good faith or bad) about the distribution associated with any given topic. The biggest proponents of constraining Big Tech (Scott's words, but what I interpret as Big Social Media) would say that their distribution is closer to that of the power plant example, where poor implementations result in catastrophic results (polarization, acts of sedition, persistent harassment, etc.). The proponents of regulation are not promoting a different distribution directly but attacking the perception of the existing distribution of outcomes.
Taleb has said "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will."
Which seems related to the idea of "diversity libertarianism" - the scale has an impact on how you feel about it (holds for nuclear plant vs. car example). Even the laws and rules of a town are very different from the laws and rules of a country. It is easy to move to another town with better rules, harder to move to another state, and much harder yet to leave a country.
The late Walter Williams (a libertarian economist) made more-or-less the same comment at some point: the most free-market people around still run their families with something like socialism. Scale matters.
Socialism isn't related to giving people presents for Christmas or whatever you're arguing for here. Socialism is about workers taking control of the means of production.
Most families work like a commune--from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, etc. This works well at a family scale, but not well at a national scale.
which communist countries are you referring to? Workers didn't control the means of production in USSR, neither do they control means of production in China. Vietnam, a country which claims to be communist, puts their workers in sweatshops to make fashionable goods for bourgeois western white people, effectively selling the product of slave labor to the west.
>Taleb has said "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will."
This describes pretty much every conservative person I know. The last sentence however seems like an odd thing to say.
When people talk about left vs right they are talking about it in terms of the government (the first two categories: federal and state) and not community or family. Conservatives have no problem with local charities and non profit community organizations (in fact churches filled with right of center people are some of the biggest examples). Voluntary altruism and helping ones family more than the general public are simply not left wing or socialist propositions.
Regarding your point about whether people will choose the worst vs best with many options available: I'd like to believe this is true, but I'm not sure how to nest phenomenon like anti-vaxers, q-anon, etc within it. It's seems at least plausible that while for some people or in some situations more options leads to better information / outcomes that doesn't apply in all cases.
Counterargument: People won't literally always choose the best option available, but 93% of US kids have their polio vaccines and almost no one think the Earth is flat, people do a pretty good job when left to their own devices. If we could wave a magic wand and suppress the lizard people conspiracies that would probably be a net benefit, but we don't have an anti-lizard-conspiracy magic wand. The only tools available for suppressing stuff are fully general, and that takes us to the question: is there anyone you trust to wield those tools at the better than "pretty good" levels of effectiveness we'd need to outperform leaving things up to individuals?
You are citing statistics from the US, but are you saying we live in a society in which there is no regulation of information/disinformation? There are a host of laws, regulations, and legal mechanisms to correct egregiously wrong/harmful information and most platforms that share information do some degree of quality control (ranging from remove this fraudulent listing to deplatform QAnon people).
We have more free speech than many other developed countries, but people are not making decisions with the information available from "diversity libertarianism."
A normal distribution (bell curve) does not even approximate the quality of a thing being produced (speech, cars, whatever) under unregulated conditions. To interrogate this idea, you have to start with the acknowledgement that the distribution of quality looks something like a negative binomial distribution (lots of shit and a long tail).
It is also untrue that any form of regulation (governmental or non-governmental) reduces quality/choice at both ends of the distribution. Consider quality control, in which Amazon removes fraudulent listings with no effect on new or innovative ideas. We need a more complicated model of where there are difficult tradeoffs and where regulation is an obvious improvement.
Cars are a great example where there are certainly tradeoffs. There is a high regulatory burden which almost certainly increases the barrier to entry for new ideas; however we cannot appreciate the counterfactual in which there are 10s of budget car brands that egregiously pollute the environment, last a couple of years at most, etc. Furthermore, consider how lemon laws protect used car buyers from these same concerns.
While regulation broadly construed can become a major issue as additional rules are tacked on, the optimal point is almost never "no regulation", and I think we should work on designing systems that tend toward an optimum.
"there were times and places where all companies refused good service to blacks for several hundred years."
And yet railroads had to be forced to provide separate facilities because of the cost of having unused capacity. Your point may be different for railroads because they require huge amounts of capital.
There are several different versions of the story around the East Louisiana Railroad, the Separate Car Act and Plessy v Ferguson. Different versions seem to be used by different groups of people to make their various political points. Given that the different versions mostly agree on the facts and disagree on the motivations of the actors, I think it's fairer to say that we just don't - and can't - know which is true.
One version is that the railroad didn't want to discriminate because it cost money and so set up the Supreme Court case in the hopes of overturning the law.
Another version is that the railroad did want to discriminate, but it cost money and wanted protection against a non-discriminating competitor, so went to the legislature to get them to change the law to protect the railroad against discrimination.
A third version is that some railroads wanted to discriminate and some didn't, and the ones that did went to get a law that would force the ones that didn't; and then one of the ones that opposed discrimination set up the Plessy v Ferguson case in order to try to get it overturned (and then failed).
Whether the East Louisiana Railroad was complicit in setting up the case involving Plessy is one of those things where there are some details that favor that story and some that oppose it. So your guess is as good as mine.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt talk a lot about something they call antifragility in The Coddling of the American Mind. They explain it on page 23:
> Some [things], like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Parents usually give their toddlers plastic cups precisely because plastic can survive repeated falls to the floor, although the cups do not benefit from such falls. But ... some things are antifragile. Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously. He notes that muscles, bones, and children are antifragile
The idea that there is a category of things that become stronger only when stressed (but break if stressed too much) is surprisingly useful. I've used "antifragile" in this sense since I read Lukianoff and Haidt's book. But it seems like this is actually pretty different from Taleb's definition?
As I recall, Lukianoff and Haidt are using Taleb's definition, but sort of the distilled version. Taleb takes a long, long time to get to the nice definition above, I believe because he is teaching in the "show a whole lot of stuff that demonstrates the concept in different ways and let people figure out the concept" style. I recall listening to him talk about the book on Econtalk, and taking a while to realize he just means there is a third category of how things respond to jostling. Why there isn't a more natural third word to go with fragile and robust seems odd to me, too.
Bones are a good example of antifragile, because sure, they will break if things go too far, but you need to keep stressing them below the breaking point to keep them strong. Otherwise they get brittle and break more easily.
I haven't read Antifragile, so I don't know if the misunderstanding is with me, Scott, L&H, or Taleb, but those two concepts seem very different.
Scott's interpretation is that antifragile things do better than non-antifragile things when there is a high degree of variance in the environment and worse when there is a low degree of variance. For example, taxi drivers are antifragile and dodo birds are fragile: when the environment changes suddenly, taxi drivers do well and dodo birds go extinct.
The L&H interpretation is that antifragile things are things that *break* when suddenly placed an environment of high stress (or variance, if we want to use the same vocabulary). But if they are placed in an environment of constant low-level stress, they become stronger.
By this definition, dodo birds are antifragile and taxi drivers are not. The fact that taxi drivers can survive a large shock (according to Taleb) doesn't make them antifragile, it makes them durable: they can survive large stress, but they don't get stronger from it. Dodo birds can't survive a sudden large change, but they get stronger from small amounts of stress/variance. If you expose them to a few small cats for a million years, they would adapt. Then you could gradually introduce more and larger cats. Eventually you would get a flightless bird that could live comfortably with very many very large cats (see: the ostrich).
I've been pondering this more (along with the responses left by Eric Hammer and mmmMartin), and now I think the whole thing is best represented two-dimensionally.
I can't upload an image to Substack, but imagine a two-dimensional Cartesian plane (i.e. a big + sign). The horizontal (x) axis measures how easily something breaks. The further to the left, the more delicate, and the further to the right, the more durable. The vertical (y) axis measures what happens to the same thing when it is subjected to stress. Things at the top get stronger when damaged (antifragile). Things at the bottom get weaker when damaged (hyperfragile?).¹ Clockwise:
The top right section contains things that are durable and antifragile. The hydra from Greek mythology fits here. It's difficult to kill *and* it gets stronger when attacked.
The middle right is durable and fragile (i.e. neither helped nor harmed by stress). Diamonds and other hard but brittle things go here.
The bottom right is durable and hyperfragile. A suit of armor might be something in this category. It's very strong, but it gets more dents and holes every time it's used.
The bottom left includes things that are delicate and hyperfragile. A Jenga tower is a good example.
The middle left is delicate and fragile. A drinking glass would be in this section.
The top left is delicate and antifragile. The dodo bird fits here. It's delicate because it went extinct when there was moderate disruption to its ecosystem. But it's antifragile because it would have eventually adapted to the new predators given enough time.
This would make the concepts of fragility and durability orthogonal (though related) concepts.
1. I find the Cartesian plane a good visualization, but in reality the y-axis isn't really a range the way the x-axis is. It's a set of three options: antifragile, fragile, and hyperfragile. Also, how "durable" something is is pretty arbitrary.
I think that Taleb is confused about his own concept, and that Scott has inherited that confusion. Lukianoff and Haidt use the word "antifragility" in the way that it makes sense.
Antifragility is not just about variance. It's about behaviour over time. The above quote explains it well.
I agree with this assessment. I have read L&H’s book and the concept of antifragility makes a lot of sense there.
I also have spent a lot of time thinking about this with the concept of stress while learning (I work in education). There is a movement in education to help students avoid any negative experience of any sort. But sometimes you only get the best growth when you are exposed to a moderately stressful stimulus (e.g. a physics/math problem you don’t yet know how to solve). One of my main takeaways from L&H’s book is that if we treat students as fragile, they will become so.
I don’t think discriminatory car companies works that great as an example. For one, Tesla is impressive because it’s been so long since a new car company really broke though (after a decade of being very niche), and despite massive valuation hasn’t captured that much market share. Two, I think it sorta distracts from your point - like, yes, diversity/competition in providers provides protection against discrimination, but it’s also currently illegal. Given that you compare constraints on tech favorably to car companies, is the argument that companies should be allowed to not sell to particular races if the sector has plausible entry? Doesn’t banning discrimination improve diversity of choices for black people?
"Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones." This is, I am pretty sure, is very wrong. You can still download Parler to a Google phone, you just can't get it through their app store.
Anti-fragility seems like the kind of argument that could be levied against almost all things, to the point that you could argue having higher variations helps select things for survival. But it's too vague, too ill defined to be of any actual use. If you have enough variations, enough downside protection and enough natural selection to survive the tail events, you're anti fragile.
For instance, with car companies you actually don't want too much variance. That's why we have laws that limit things on safety and production. Because any increase in variance is a cost to you (the consumer) to figure out what needs to be bought. If you fob that decision off to a third party reviewer, guess what, you're back in "fragile" land, since explicitly or implicitly we're back with single point of failure. The reason we don't have high variance is because we started with high variance, it sucked for a lot of people, and we quickly figured out let's reduce the variance.
"If people are able to choose freely then you wan high variance" is a very high bar that actually doesn't get applied to very many things! It's a tautological argument - if something satisfies that criterion, by definition we've kind of figured out the problems. It's why we have hundreds of cereal options, but the actual variance isn't all that high.
Even diversity libertarianism doesn't stand up to this scrutiny. We don't like the fact that several companies, seemingly independently, reached a conclusion. Sure, this is fair. It's also the outcome of a system that is seemingly anti-fragile - the companies were not coordinating or coerced. If the argument is they all had a worldview, yes they did. But that's what evolving systems do, there's some points where they agree on the ecosystem they're in.
What we have here is the evidence that seemingly anti-fragile systems (with multiple options and competition) devolve on some issues to become unified. Which is also how almost everything works. We always draw lines around how much variance is acceptable. That's most of what our moral evolution has done for us. That's actual civilisation. We can discuss the genius of Swiss Cantons and Renaissance Italy all we want, but the reason most governance systems aren't like that is because those systems are incredibly fragile - to immigration, to cultural cohesion, to coordination failures and more. The US has relatively homogenous 50 quite independent states and it still can barely get anything done in this regard.
To me this is Taleb's genius and his downfall. He's like a poet, creating beautiful symphonies with words and allusions and history. Together it makes you feel as if you can almost reach something ineffable, a point of insight that explains the world. But turns out the inspiration is the actual point, and not an actual theory that you get from the books.
This is similar to a point I've mad about libertarian YIMBYism: There's a question of what the appropriate libertarian reaction is to "state prevents local government from preventing property owners from building more apartments on their land". From the diversity libertarian perspective though, the answer is obviously the YIMBY answer, since it gives us more diversity of land use and density types and gives people more options of what type of area to move to.
Seems like it ought to be the same as the libertarian reaction to "federal government prevents state government from preventing bus companies from just letting black people sit in whatever seats they want". People should be free to decide almost everything themselves. Governments often muck this up. We have good-but-not-perfect mechanisms for keeping governments from getting out of line in this regard, and sometimes that works by having one level of government tell another level of government "stop doing that and just let everyone decide for themselves". This is generally a good thing.
> The evangelical Christian town where nobody will tolerate gay people may not have laws against homosexuality, but gay people still won't be able to find a church, community, or business that meets their needs.
I think you've fallen into a trap, Scott. The whole point of the archipelago is that a community can run itself like this if it wants, as long as gay people who are unhappy with it can go somewhere they prefer. Thus a thousand flowers bloom. If your newly coined diversity libertarianism prohibits this, it de facto *flattens* the space of possible arrangements. And there is no telling how much more flattening consistency requires. Remember that one of your original examples was Aquinastopia, where Catholics could go to live in a Catholic community. Is this disallowed now? Does your libertarianism suddenly prohibit Catholics from living as Catholics?
Don't confuse what happens at the level of the evangelical town from what happens at the level of the archipelago. *Everybody in the archipelago* benefits from the fact that this evangelical town (or Aquinastopia, for that matter) exists. The people who want to live there can live there, the people who don't don't have to, and the people who aren't sure can learn one way or the other whether such a community works.
Granting all that, I don't know exactly how to apply this lesson to Big Tech, because we don't actually live in the archipelago. But I think it suggests that size matters. If a tiny company wants to run itself according to religious principles, that's fine, good even; there is a lot of room in the economy for other companies to run themselves differently, and perhaps outcompete it. But if a huge company with near-monopoly power in some industry or another wants to run itself according to religious principles, you have reason as a diversity libertarian to be concerned.
On another point:
> Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.
I made a similar observation on your Erdogan post. Quoting myself:
> Erdogan's purges look to me like a particularly poignant subversion of this: hollowing out every other institution, until the only thing left is him and his party. It should really, really concern us if seemingly every semi-official institution in our country, from the top schools to the top newspapers to the top thinktanks, march in nearly complete uniformity: it raises the question whether they, and the people in them, can act of their own will at all.
The problem is, as you say, we *don't* live in the archipelago. His use of the term religion is a bit of a distraction, it might be better to think of it as "cultural values". If everyone, or at least the people who matter, have the same norms, then you get a de facto prohibition against certain things. The gay person in the evangelical town who has to stay in the closet, or a world where republicans aren't allowed to post on social media. Ideally, they'd just move one island over, but he's specifically talking about the examples where there are no more islands.
I don't think an archipelago model can solve the problem of children, who are typically trapped wherever their parents live. Or the problem of deliberate restriction of information so that people can't make informed decisions about where to live.
Scott explicitly says the "most important task is to think of the children" followed by a section all about how to ensure information about other communities and exit rights so children aren't trapped in one. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ Why do you think his solution wouldn't work?
Good point. Actually, I think in the US, freedom of religion is misunderstood. The majority of residents of the US prior to the revolution were persecuted religious *communities* from Europe. Religion in the 1700s was a community affair, not a personal faith as it is understood to be today by American Protestants. Therefore freedom of religion in that context implies letting communities live the way that they choose and not interfering from the outside.
I don't know if this makes the US liberal or not liberal, but its important to understand this context.
Incidentally: Scott didn't actually use Aquinastopia as an example. Looks like that was from the comments. He did use the example of Christiantopia, though.
I should reread my sources before referencing them....
THIS "Even beyond politics, I think this predicts a sort of ethos of what I like and what I don't like. The quickest way to enrage me is to criticize some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone - to try to browbeat them into doing the same thing as everyone else. That group might be just a tiny bit of slack away from creating something amazing!"
This argument seems weaker than it should be due to using dumb examples. To take the less controversial one, car companies are not actually easy to create.
Yes, it’s true that many industrial nations have a car company, and some have more than one. They don’t seem to be nearly as difficult as building a competitive aerospace industry, which China has been trying to do for quite some time with little success so far.
But in the US, there were no new car companies for many decades. Tesla had a lot of near-death experiences along the way, and part of their survival strategy was selling luxury cars that most people can’t afford. Crappy 1920’s style cars would today be considered unsafe at any speed and the idea that a car company is something a few people can build in a garage is just nonsense. (Unless we are talking about grey-market golf-cart style electric vehicles, which are apparently a thing in China.)
By contrast, building a crappy cell phone seems much easier, at least in China where there seem to be many manufacturers building them using a common ecosystem of standard parts. Maybe that would have been a better example?
Well, there's yet another attempt to make a Linux smartphone, by Librem. I wish them well, but it's like we had one of those per year, and only Google succeeded...
I'm not sure your car example checks out. In the first world cars are heavily regulated, perhaps even more than nuclear plants. The only reason anybody bothers to make cars at all is that the demand for them is so high that almost any regulatory burden is worth the effort.
On the other hand, you might be amused to find out about the unregulated electric golf cart in China. If the car is small, slow, cheap and electric, the externalities are minimal and government feels less pressure to regulate them.
This is an interesting framing! Game theory (or, well, math) can outline some situations where you would want to migrate your preferences between systems that are fragile and antifragile.
Generally if you're losing, you want high variance systems.
If you're winning, you want the status quo to sit like a diamond, more lock in is better.
So, Tim Wu's The Master Switch gives a history of communication companies all following this similar trajectory: scrappy startups finding workarounds that change all the rules and disrupt everything, then becoming large institutional players that want greater and greater regulation to prevent anyone else from inventing anything that would ever change the world in any way.
Do you want to roll a d20 or 3d6 to hit? Depends whether you're fighting kobolds or dragons. (There are even situations, in gambling and in life, where you would even want to take a lower "average" return, in order to shift the variance.)
So it's possible to entertain a meta-political perspective, where you think society should wander between libertarian (or, "50 labs federalism") vs. more central standardization, based on how well its currently meeting certain markers you've laid out for the health of society or the effectiveness of policy or whatever.
I don't know how you can make arguments like this without getting into object-level illustrative examples, but as soon as you do that, your argument becomes subject to the object-level examples being wrong. It is absolutely not true that market entry for new automakers is easier than new phone makers. Parler is accessible from a browser. Blocking them from native app stores doesn't block anyone's access. I have no idea if there even is a native app for Substack, yet none of us are blocked from reading your blog. What actually took Parler offline (for what, a week?) was Amazon Web Services turning off their servers. But even there, as coming back online showed, AWS isn't the only provider of managed infrastructure, and you can always self-host if literally no one will sell you service.
Until such time as a peer to peer radio network with TCP/IP capabilities exists, the only true monopoly service that can cut you off from the web are backbone ISP providers. If you can't hook into them, you can't hook into the network, whether your servers are running or not. And it stands out that a whole lot of people calling themselves libertarians have complained quite loudly about Google and Apple shutting Parler out of their app stores, but not about net neutrality, which actually addresses the only true monopoly providers controlling access to the web. It makes it seem more partisan than ideological.
Of course, I don't think you personally are partisan. You're an ideologue. But an inherent issue with trying to claim allegiance to any sort of named ideology is you immediately associate yourself with other people using the same name. "Diversity libertarianism" doesn't seem to me like it really captures what you're trying to say here. You're just arguing for classic welfare economics on the merits of the Pareto optimality achieved under conditions of pure competition. You're arguing against the existence of monopolies, whether those be warlords, mafias, governments, big businesses, religions, cultures, it doesn't matter.
I don't have any answer here on what you should call yourself, but you have to realize that insisting on "libertarian" even if you tag "diversity" in front of it alienates and marginalizes you from a lot of people who are going to have a knee jerk bad reaction to that term because of who else uses it. I can understand wanting to reclaim it. That seems to have worked for the word queer. I think it probably hasn't for slut. But is that really your goal? Do you really care what people call you? Why not just argue for specific positions without needing to identify and name an underlying guiding principle that may or may not really be there? This seems to be Taleb's problem, too. There are undoubtedly some things he is very right about, but as soon as he tries to go from those examples to generalize to a grand theory of everything, it doesn't work and he becomes trivially wrong about most of them. If your position is some regulations are good, some are bad, and the guiding principle is whether or not they promote or prevent monopolies, call yourself an "anti-monopolist." What does Matt Stoller call himself? Unfortunately, probably libertarian, based on the name of his organization.
I'm not even sure "against monopolies" can stay ideologically pure and coherent. How do you prevent monopolies from forming without a monopoly on law enforcement? I'm kind of with John Schilling on this. David Friedman can probably give some elegant sounding theory backed up with an example from 12th century Iceland being the only working implementation, but that doesn't leave me super confident it can really widely work.
"How do you prevent monopolies from forming without a monopoly on law enforcement?"
Law enforcement is pretty close to being a natural monopoly if ever there was one (again, Dr. Friedman is your go-to source for exceptions), and most libertarians and explicitly Libertarians are OK with the state having machinery in place to do most of a society's law-enforcement work. Whether that should include enforcing anti-monopoly (and anti-trust and anti-quasi-monopoly) laws is more controversial, but not outside the Libertarian Overton Window.
If you define "prevent" in a way that demands 100.00% success, you don't. But a system that creates one monopoly in one restricted domain to break up all the other monopolies within reach, that prevents many monopolies even if it doesn't prevent them all. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Obviously I am quibbling, but you aren't talking about preventing monopolies, but regulating or controlling them. There is more than one way to skin that cat, some with better track records, others with worse, and some of which might involve decentralized strategies that do not depend a monopoly to cope with a monopoly.
One can regulate and control governments themselves, rather than just prevent it, and once upon a time we invented a fairly neat decentralized strategy for keeping government in check.
One can if one is benevolent dictator. The question is, how does one create a monopoly that controls and regulates itself in a way that violates the immediate interests of those running it? That is not to say that it can’t be done, just that the research seems incomplete and the demand for its completion seem to lack urgency for most people.
"But other fields have higher entry barriers than cars do. Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones. But these are the only two major smartphone companies. "
Forgive me if this has been posted previously, but there are lots of smartphone companies. There are, however, only two major operating systems for smartphones, and most of the smartphone companies use one or the other.
Taleb isn't a particularly clear writer, so that's probably why it's hard to grasp the concept of antifragility (it's also stupidity named, but that is neither here nor there). The basic variable is the response to unpredictable stress. Fragile systems are weakened by it, robust systems are neither weakened bit strengthened by it, and antifragile systems are strengthened by it. Exercise is antifragile, because its best results occur when workouts are irregular and non-repetitive. Option trading is antifragile because it only really lucrative when you bet on ludicrous occurrences. It's not so much that the range of outcomes is highly variable, so much as that they aren't even calculable. The point isn't so much that "we" (as in humans generally) need to find a more accurate way to assess risk, as much as "we" need to realize that risk can't be calculated for everything.
"smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones"
I think this falls into a mistake that Scott often makes - it overstates the importance of intelligence and understates the importance of information and of the cultural guidance to understand that you have a choice and on how to make the choice.
On an information example, the choice of medical providers. Most people are not medically qualified to tell which providers are good and which bad - low variance is good if you really can't tell a good doctor from a charlatan. Moreover, a lot of people default to using price to judge, assuming that more expensive medical choices are better. Even if the information is available to know which doctors are better than others (and the medical profession works hard to keep that information unavailable), lots of people don't know how to evaluate it.
On a cultural guidance example, the choice of colleges. Middle-class parents are much more likely to have opinions on which colleges are better than others, and those opinions are much more likely to be correct than working-class parents [I'm using class in the class-as-culture sense, not the class-as-economics sense]. Also, they're more likely to know about how to get scholarships, how to apply for and get income-based discounts to tuition, and so on. Knowing that you won't have to pay sticker price because you will get need-based aid and scholarships and so on is information that many working-class potential students do not have, resulting in them being put off by a price that they won't themselves have to pay.
I think you may be taking the premises of your argument for granted. The classic libertarian arguments ignore structural impediments to optimal (or rational) behavior. For example, the ideal of hearing as many opinions as possible so as to maximize your chance of hearing the true one seriously ignores reality. In reality, there are time constraints (e.g., does a single mother working two jobs have time to sufficiently read and evaluate every argument for and against gun control?), limitations on an individual's ability to process and filter information correctly, and demagogues that prey on human nature weaknesses (e.g., Peoples Temple 1978). Also, not every opinion is created equal. Is a plumber equally suited to evaluate the efficacy of a drug from experimental data as a research scientist? Qualifications matter. As do motivations - if two scientists reviewed the efficacy of a new drug and one was being paid by the pharmaceutical sponsor, would that impact your judgement of her credibility? If no forced disclosure, you wouldn't know. I'm not convinced by the premise that people are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones. Humans are flawed. Society is flawed. The way we govern society should reflect the flaws.
And then we move to free market fundamentalism, which you acknowledge in the last paragraph is flawed. In almost every important sector, there are hugely important externalities. That is not an argument for universal regulations and regulations should always be thoughtful and, to the extent possible, tested in order to avoid unintended consequences. But it does recognize that humans are inherently self-interested and short sighted. Oil magnates care about their economics, not the environment. The Sacklers cared about their fortune, not the risk of addiction. Volkswagen cared about their quarterly earnings, not the Clean Air Act. Zuckerberg cares about world domination (?), not the risk of facilitating genocides. Regulations need to reshape incentives to harness self-interest but also protect society from our inability to process risk and large scale ruin in addition to our bias of discounting the future.
The point is not to hear as many variants as possible, but to avoid suppressing any that might benefit someone. Maybe we could name some ideas we think will never benefit anyone, but can we find a principle that allows us to silence those without any collateral damage? And if people in the past had been able to eternally silence harmful ideas, many ideas we consider beneficial would have gotten the deep six. Even smart people in the past have been wrong about this. Can we expect that we have arrived at the end of history, and so will never make such mistakes again?
Is there some idea that you wish had been suppressed 100 years ago? Would that have succeeded in eliminating it, or just prevented people from arguing against it?
People are falable, but that applies, not only to the public being allowed choices, but also to the regulators and legislators and judges who decide which choices the public should be denied. The legislators are elected by those same people who are too dumb to make their own choices, and the regulators and judges are appointed by those legislators. We can hope that the decisions get better as we go up the chain, but that's not at all clear to me.
The example of “nuclear plant” as antifragile bothers me but I’m having trouble nailing down why.
A single instance of tech is often fragile. One car crash does not make that car stronger. It can’t reorganize itself and sometimes it can’t economically be rebuilt individually (“totaled”). Many car crashes, when abstracted into data, can be used by companies to improve the fragile product and in this sense a company is more fragile or more antifragile (whether in service of better safety reputation attracting more buyers, or compliance with a regulatory environment) depending on company culture and how they leverage the data into better product.
Any single instance of tech is fragile, so any single nuclear plant is also fragile. Nuclear plants with the same design flaw don’t all blow up at once, either, when they are individually distant and subject to different circumstances.
However the nuclear engineering culture has to be antifragile; when an “accident” occurs, they scramble to learn how to more successfully create a safer plant. It has to learn from mistakes and respond to stress. From what I understand there were times historically when a potentially safer design was not chosen for political reasons; nuclear regulatory culture has to be less fragile than some regulatory cultures because they are trying to balance tech advancement, cost, and safety in a context of large externalities, and they have more actual influence (I think) on next-generation plant design than say the DOT has on the design of exhaust filters for idling trucks. It is a government-industry partnership in the US in ways other industries are not like car and truck companies.
The regulatory culture is fragile to financial pressure but antifragile to nuclear accidents. “The safer design is too expensive” is a barrier. But the pool of players that benefit from a functioning nuclear industry is large enough that the military, academia and national labs all get in on making the safer design cheaper, in an antifragile way.
In other words I don’t think it’s accurate to say the nuclear industry is like company A. For it to exist at all there is a lot of this industry-government design pressure to reject dangerous designs before they are ever built, and then learn as much as possible from accidents. I’d call it antifragile with a floor. If the industry was fragile they’d have given up and gone home after the zillionth unintentional radiation release. Any design process is allowing some variance and trying to capture the top end of it.
I’m trying to come up with an example of what is fragile but just got interrupted. I’m not saying nothing is a fragile system just that nuclear plants/power is not the best example.
Nuclear does show the relationship between externalities and fragility though. Again I would say in environment of high externalities the company has to be antifragile in looking for every way to minimize the externalities. I think nuclear does this, to the point of cultivating feeder industries to manage the externalities.
Musk’s whole space thing keeps having explosions but they won’t stop. High risk or high externality doesn’t correlate with fragile. There is a feedback loop though.
Typo: "Tesla did something like this when Musk though the big dogs were neglecting electric, and that went great." I think "though" should have been "thought".
Scott, I love the clarity of laying this out with distributions and proper dissociation between different strains of libertarianism, but what I don't understand here is your position on the dynamic state of distribution 2.
You say distribution 2 is good in cases where everyone can and does make good choices, because everyone will buy from B and A will go out of business.
But at that point, distribution 2 no longer exists; everything on the left side of the graph is gone, and the reality looks like distribution 1 again!
(with a higher average value, thankfully)
So, my question is: as a diversity libertarian, do you actually want to be *living in* a world that looks like distribution 2, or do you want that distribution to have existed *at some time in the past* but be gone now?
If something that looks like distribution 2 has endured for a few decades or so, isn't that strong evidence that people in reality *don't* have either the ability or competence to make good choice in that space, since if they did all the As would be gone already and things would have converged on a distribution 2 made of all the Bs?
This gets to the point about Parler - in what way is Parler not just an A that the community recognized was bad and abandoned? Sure, there's the weirdness about boycotting it individually vs. boycotting its corporate partners, but in either case it seems like the majority of consumers decided it was awful and wanted it abolished, which is what you should expect to happen to As in distribution 2.
It seems to me like 'diversity libertarianism' as you describe it is too time-independent; it imagines a single point in time where you have a lot of options, and a single instance of decision-making where you choose the best option. In that singl instance, yese, you want tohe world to look like distribution 2.
But run that dynamic over time and measure the world at the limit, and it looks more like a world where all the bad choices are ignored and go extinct and only the good choices survive. Which looks like distribution 1, and possibly looks like 'ideological conformity.'
Given that, it feels to me like diversity libertarianism should be really really focused on making sure that *new* ideas have a chance to be generated and survive long enough to be fairly evaluated and take on their proper market share, and a lot less focused on old ideas vanishing when the market turns against them and moves on.
Ie, moving as rapidly as possible from distribution 2 to distribution 3 to distribution 4, rather than protecting the As from distribution 2 who cry that they're being canceled.
The majority of GAFAM's consumers aren't even in the USA, why should they care specifically about Parler one way or the other ? The precedent of having tremendous power over applications however...
I don't think Tesla being started by Elon Musk, already a billionaire at the time, is very much at all like some guy creating a huge company by starting with a few crappy cars put together in his garage. Without getting in to all the regulatory and other barriers to entry that exist in car manufacturing, isn't plain old capital ultimately the biggest barrier to entry in pretty much everything?
Regulatory barriers typically increase the capital you need to enter the market. I assume there are things that would require insane amounts of capital even in perfectly unregulated world, such as building your own Mars colony, but I wonder which projects currently unreachable for most people would become reachable without regulations.
Right, I'd agree. Capital is essentially THE barrier to entry, and things like regulations and exclusionary deals just raise that capital barrier. If you have a zillion dollars you'll just offer a few million dollars to every employee and lawyer and lobbyist you'd need to overcome it. That's why it was weird to compare something as quaint as starting a business in your garage to a billionaire more or less paying his way into automobile manufacturing. I'm not saying Musk didn't bring something special besides money, because I definitely think he did.
I'm struggling to think of any area where regulation provides the dominant capital barrier to entry. Almost every industry or large-scale project I can think of is unreachable just by a pure capital barrier which would be substantial enough even without regulations. Large, established businesses can usually outcompete just by working at a larger scale. They can charge less, take more risks, and move quicker. It's really hard and rare to be able to capitalize on whatever mistakes they make with substantially less money. But regulations often still make the large companies' do their own work less efficiently.
People seem to be getting stuck on the "l" word a lot. The more important point is that large scale monopolies dominating an ecosystem reduce the variance that leads to positive innovations that improve human lives.
Insofar as most of the world is "governed" by legacy institutions ruled by stationary bandits (aka kleptocracies), the opportunity cost of not allowing "a thousand nations bloom" via new jurisdictions is immense. Hong Kong and Singapore showed the value of economic freedom more effectively than did any arguments, China copied them in designing their SEZs, and a billion people saw a 10x increase in their wages over twenty years, arguably one of the greatest moral achievements in history.
We don't need to agree or even know exactly what leads to success in an ecosystem open to innovation. As the Seasteaders say, "Don't argue, build." But the more we support an ecosystem of innovation with respect to the creation of new jurisdictions on land, the more rapidly we're likely to discover new and better forms of law and governance. Competition among Greek city states led to Athens; competition among medieval Italian city states led to the Renaissance; competition among the "Free Cities" of the Hanseatic League led to modern commercial society via the success of Holland, which in turn played a key role in the rise of British and American prosperity. More broadly, as David Landes has argued, Europe's fragmentation was key to its prosperity, including the fragmentation that allowed persecuted thinkers to move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
By contrast, large scale empires typically stagnated over time. Modern prosperity is thanks to competing jurisdictions, a sine qua non of the discovery process of the institutions required for prosperity.
Should we argue over the "l" word or get busy creating new and better institutions for human flourishing?
That said, although I'm also in favor of internalizing externalities and supporting the poor (and thus could pass as a "liberal"), many of those who have focused on the need for liberating innovators have at least some familiarity with Hayek and others who emphasize the stultifying effect of the state. Thus I'd rather be considered a bleeding heart libertarian than be part of the "progressive" tribe that rarely focuses on the morally urgent need for permissionless innovation (McCloskey).
From the outside view, increased variance increases both the high and the low ends of the range of possibilities. However I think an unfortunately common inside view, mapped onto this framework, goes as follows: my politics/tastes/whatever are basically Correct, and so variance is entirely bad: the high end is a fixed point (at me), so increased variance just cashes out as more people being increasingly Wrong.
The other place where the libertarian argument falls down is when time is critical. Sure, if social media companies censor certain info, you can start your own and migrate people there (if the AWS/Apple/Google thing doesn't happen). However, if the censored information happens to be highly pertinent to an election happening in a month, good luck
If the low variance scenario results from everyone happening to agree on a narrow range of desirable approaches, and everyone further agrees that exploration outside A and B will not be legally or socially punished, that seems fine. Obviously this doesn’t mean that nothing should ever be legally or socially punished. So what determines what we can prohibit legitimately?
Maybe the post was inspired by Taleb, but clearly the basic issue is different, so speaking in terms of antifragility confuses matters.
Quick counterintuitive thought: A narrow distribution of ideas may be beneficial in the public sphere. Now reflexively, I'm inclined to like the marketplace-of-ideas theory of discourse. I like markets, I like choices, I like diversity and I love ideas. So I'm offering this argument with a big grain of salt and perhaps against my own interests:
The "mainstream" of actionable public ideologies is akin to nuclear reactors: You want a narrow, safe range of variation more than you want a high-variance set that might include world-saving and world-breaking ideas. (Note: In practice, the resilience of the "world" at stake would matter here. High-resilience polities could brook more ideological variation.) Hence recent gatekeepers like publications, political parties, legislatures, universities. Before that, nobility, royal courts, hierarchical religions. And always social structures that reward and punish. Specific claim: In a population where X percent of the population believes in wrong-but-arguably-harmless ideas (angels or UFO? Your mileage will vary), an equal percentage of people is ready to believe wrong-and-potentially-catastrophic ideas (fill in your own blank here -- I'll put the crayon in your hand, but you have to draw your own monster). And maybe exposure to those ideas creates the potential for greater adoption. In such a case, gatekeepers that limit public discourse to "what the decent people think" might be performing a service, even if they limit exposure to fantastic new ideas. (While still allowing for hypothetical mechanisms for evolutionary fit ideas to grow in acceptance and no-longer-adaptive mainstream ideas to whither and die?)
Prediction: If this is true, societies/cultures/groups with greater stability (in terms of less vulnerability to ideological-triggered disaster?) brook more dissent/wrongthink.
The odds of this being true: I find this line of thought more interesting than persuasive. I'll admit to some nostalgia for a world without comment sections. But I can also think of ways that world was less good than this one. I do think we're in the long process of adjusting to the consequences of rapid advances in communication technology, but I need to be humble about my ability to assess what that means and where the process goes, and even less confident I can easily distinguish what's really new from what has always been thus.
> Quick counterintuitive thought: A narrow distribution of ideas may be beneficial in the public sphere.
The obvious problem with this idea is that to restrict the range of ideas, you need to trust someone to determine what ideas should be censored, and most people can't be trusted to do this well, nor can most processes be trusted to reliably find people who can do this well, especially because both people and institutions tend to become dominated by elites who tend to promote pro-elite ideas and consider anti-elite ideas dangerous. (A possible exception is when the range of ideas that should be restricted is widely enough agreed on by the society to be a Schelling point; I think Germany's ban on Nazism may be an example of this.) Also (this idea is from https://www.thefire.org/coronavirus-and-the-failure-of-the-marketplace-of-ideas/ ), it can be useful to find out how many people believe a dangerous idea to figure out how to solve problems that it may or may not have caused. For instance, racism (narrowly defined) is strongly suppressed by most of modern American society, so most racists hide their racism, so despite the obvious importance of knowing how many people are racist to deciding how to solve racial disparities, it is difficult enough to know how many peopple are racist that every idea from extreme progressives claiming that all white people are racist to conservatives claiming that racism is enough of an unpopular fringe idea to have little practical effect is considered plausible by a large part of the population.
>The obvious problem with this idea is that to restrict the range of ideas, you need to trust someone to determine what ideas should be censored, and most people can't be trusted to do this well, nor can most processes be trusted to reliably find people who can do this well, especially because both people and institutions tend to become dominated by elites who tend to promote pro-elite ideas and consider anti-elite ideas dangerous.
Excellent point. I think the mechanism for restriction would involve something like a high entry barrier to mass communication (think the world we used to have where book publishers, newspapers, radio and television programmers acted as gatekeepers, only sometimes intentionally but always effectively) and/or a common ideological agreement about what to exclude (which doesn't need to be explicit; in fact, I bet it works better if the ideas to be excluded are so outre that they don't even come up as examples).
Either way, what I'm thinking of would not be something that could easily be instrumentalized or enacted, for the reasons you point out. It would be more like the water in the fishbowl we swim around in, the "that's just the way things are" that we take for granted, until some new technology or idea comes along and the system is forced to find a new equilibrium.
And I should acknowledge the neither of these mechanisms seems to fit my original guess that an idea-restriction mechanism would work thermostatically to optimize for stability. There would have to be some other way that appetite for the out-of-bounds would grow when change is needed (to who? how?) and wane when the status quo is good (to who, how?). Tough to see how that happens.
"But other fields have higher entry barriers than cars do."
Er, I think car manufacturing has one of the highest barriers to entry of all consumer products? There's a reason that Tesla is the only successful new American car company to start in the last 50+ years.
> If Ford refuses to sell cars to black people, Toyota should see a profit opportunity and step in. If both Ford and Toyota ban blacks at the same time, some upstart like Tesla should step in. If Ford, Toyota, and Tesla all do it, some guy with a wrench who's always dreamed of making cars in his garage should notice a billion-dollar business opportunity lying on the ground, get seed capital from equally greedy investors, and solve the problem.
I don't think this actually works very well in practice. Suppose the hypothetical "racist car companies" world existed, and you wanted to start NRC, the Not Racist Car company. First, you have a hard time raising money from investors. It's not impossible, but in this hypothetical world the most successful car companies are super racist, and investors are skeptical that doing literally the opposite of every successful car company is going to work. But you find some and are able to raise some capital at extortionate terms. If everything goes well your company is going to make a zillion dollars even though your cost of capital is nuts.
Unfortunately, that's going to take years to get going, even if you're successful. In the meantime, minorities have no access to cars. Even after you start producing, for years or even decades, minorities are forced to Distribution 1 while everyone else has access to Distribution 2. When people talk about "privilege" this is the kind of thing they're talking about.
Now cars are pretty important. Not having a car, or having a crappy car, has lots of knock-on effects. Minorities basically have to live in major urban areas, while non-minorities can live mostly wherever they would like. This limits the jobs available to minorities, which in turn messes with the labor market. So now even equally qualified minorities will make less than non-minorities.
But can they become equally qualified? Not if people want do some extra racism on the sly. Just put your best schools, public services, and businesses far away from public transportation (Hi, Robert Moses!)
At the margin, some people who might have barely gotten a job now have no job at all. Some of those people go all Jean Valjean on you and your loaf of bread, and now your prisons are full of minorities, which reinforces Ford's & Toyota's position.
And of course this has long-range knock-on effects. The Car Inequality is going to take generations before it's dissipated.
My point here is that we can't rely on Diversity Libertarianism in cases like this because most negative externalities need to be regulated, and racism causes massive negative externalities.
"and investors are skeptical that doing literally the opposite of every successful car company is going to work"
But the proposal is not to do "literally the opposite of every successful car company". Successful car companies build good cars; doing "literally the opposite" would require deliberately building bad cars. Successful car companies buy their steel from the cheapest reliable supplier; doing "literally the opposite" would require buying steel from the most expensive supplier. There's a good reason for investors being skeptical of "literally the opposite of proven success".
Investors are, demonstrably, quite favorable to ventures which propose to do exactly the same thing that successful companies do except change *one* thing that plausibly promises to increase profits. Here, the proposal is to do exactly the same thing that every successful car companies except change one thing, and since that one thing is "also sell the same product to a new market full of paying customers the existing firms are ignoring", the path to increased profits is pretty clear. Unless basically everyone is a super-racist, they should have little trouble raising capital.
If basically everyone is a super-racist, then that nation never bothered to abolish slavery and the best you can hope for is that the government is too weak to chase down all the runaway slaves.
Taleb doesn’t hate curves that look sort of “bell-shaped” like the ones you drew, which usually have “fat tails”. He hates GAUSSIAN curves. If you understand the difference between “power law” and “Gaussian”, you get to review Taleb’s work and be taken seriously, but if you make a mistake like this it doesn’t bode well.
I read Antifragile a while back, and I don't remember it containing very many equations at all, and in particular not equations that looked like (e^(-x^2)) and (1/x^a). A bit unfair to expect Scott to review the book at a level of mathematical rigour that the book itself doesn't attain. (Disclaimer: I'm aware that Taleb has many other mathematically oriented works, of course, but the most mathematical thing I remember from Antifragile in particular are some plots demonstrating the difference between convex and concave functions. Of course, my memory could be faulty.)
The situations you describe are ones where a large majority of the population believe in the religion, in which case a democratic government will be helping them suppress the atheists not stopping them from doing it, as will almost any other form of government. So if you are a diversity libertarian I don't think there is a solution to your problem, except in the special case where the state is 99% fundamentalist (or racist or whatever) and the federal government isn't even majority fundamentalist.
So even in the situation you describe, I am against federal regulation of FB et. al. purported to keep them from censoring. You will note that all the supposed rules against racial discrimination got ignored when the discrimination took a form, affirmative action, that was politically popular.
The problem is proverbial — setting the fox to guard the hen house. The government has a stronger incentive to suppress (some) political speech than FB. FB is only one of several large (and many small) players in its market, so can only suppress speech to the extent that other players agree. The government doesn't have that limitation — it can regulate all of them.
Yeah, having the feds regulate speech on the internet to protect us from the power of Facebook/Twitter/Youtube sounds like giving ourselves cancer to cure our annoying cold.
I think the term "diversity libertarianism" makes sense as a type of libertarianism, but I think that the complexity argument for diversity is strictly superior to the libertarian argument, as it handles all the cases the libertarian argument does, and more.
John Stuart Mill's argument for free speech was that many unpopular opinions might contain elements of truth, and hence truth can be assembled from bits and pieces of many opinions. The complexity argument for diversity is that it takes many different kinds of pieces to make a complex machine. To build complex social mechanisms, we'd like many different units of any kind--opinions, ethnicities, personality types, and educational backgrounds.
In its original historical context, libertarianism effectively opposed ancient Platonist tradition, which says that there is one perfect, eternal model for everything, including one perfect opinion to hold on any subject, which is True in all times and places; and the job of society is to find that one perfect opinion and shove it down everybody's throat and forbid anybody from ever questioning it.
Locke used empiricist epistemology to argue (among other reasons) that we can't ever be sure that what we think is the one Truth really is the one Truth, so we better listen to all opinions. But (AFAIK) he didn't challenge the idea that there is just one Truth.
Mill's argument for freedom of speech doesn't convince people who are /really sure/ that they do, in fact, know The Truth. The complexity argument for diversity gives a different view of the same issue--not that we want more opinions for society to choose from, but that we want people with different opinions to remain in the population indefinitely, because this difference in opinion will produce division of labor, and a discrepancy in values which makes it more possible for everyone to get more of what they personally value most. It rejects the very notion of converging on a final Truth.
This post starts out riffing on the tradeoffs between risk and benefit variances and then pivots to the issue monopoly vs. "diversity" in the free market.
The first part just reflects the fact that an optimal balance of risk and return depends on the relative distribution of the various outcomes (as best you can forecast), multiplied by the costs and benefits associated with those outcomes. Like everything in economics, you are optimizing when the marginal benefits are at least equal to the marginal costs. (i.e., MB = MC).
Everything that follows on the risk-benefit topic is mostly a recognition that, even assuming arguendo that you can accurately predict the probabilities of various outcomes, different people will still have very different optimizing points (MB = MC) due to: (a) being differently impacted by the costs and benefits of particular outcomes (e.g. someone living close to an accident-prone plant, vs. far away); and (b) having different tolerances for risk (e.g., someone who can sleep like a baby knowing there is a 1/10,000 chance of a plant explosion vs. someone who can't stop worrying about it).
Bottom line: The theory of making decisions under uncertainty is uncomplicated. But ascertaining the true probabilities of outcomes, and then politically mediating the interests of lots and lots of people with different interests and preferences is pretty impossibly complicated.
I like this description. Mostly I just err on the side of freedom. This generally results in me being anti-regulation, but I also don't like when monopolies restrict speech. It's the same root principle, but people think there's some deep contradiction there.
Also the block being a result of big tech weakness is a good point not made often enough.
There is nothing inherently good about "Diversity." It's only potentially a good thing if: (a) the "diverse" things have different merits; and (b) people are allowed to judge which diverse options have the most merit and reject the others. Once this process has run its course, whatever is left over is the optimal amount of "diversity."
For example, having lots of restaurants creates a "diversity" of cuisines to choose from. That's great if you are allowed to choose to patronize the ones you like (say, Thai and Italian), and skip the ones you don't (say, the "House of Haggis" Scottish restaurant). The modern conception of "diversity" claims, however, that forcing people to eat Haggis enhances the "diversity" of food and is therefore improving them by definition.
Only when all the bad restaurants have been driven out of business is the remaining "diversity" of choice a "strength."
There's no reason House of Haggis needs to go out of business--as long as I don't have to eat there, the added diversity of having them around does me no harm.
>(If you did want to argue against diversity libertarianism, you'd want to show that relevant systems are more fragile than anti-fragile; giving people more options will usually make them worse. Maybe the slightest failure could cause catastrophe - I think free speech opponents think this is true, but I’m less sure they’re right. Or people will perversely choose the worst option rather than the best if many options are made available - I think this is sometimes true for things like drugs and gambling. or there are overwhelming externalities. Or there are externalities, which can range from the very simple like pollution to the very complicated, like whether your working for a low wage has externalities because it forces me to compete with you. I think figuring out where to draw the lines here is really hard - but if you want to convince me, this would be more fruitful than the umpteenth essay about how the First Amendment only applies to government)
I think that one can object to absolute freedom of speech on the grounds not that people would be somehow "brainwashed" if exposed to ideas outside a particular approved band, but rather through understanding certain types of speech as primarily acts and the majority of people as basically unthinking followers of a particular flag. That is, someone like Richard Spencer is not contributing to a marketplace of ideas so much as raising a flag for people who already agree with him to rally around as a coordination point.
I also think it's somewhat of an errant frame to suggest that you can *only* adjust volatility-- like, in the car market example, it is not in fact the case that in order for there to be better cars there must be worse cars. The distribution of cars on the market on a scale of goodness to badness could, like, /move towards being gooder as a whole/. In relation to specifically cultural freedom of speech -- that is, /not/ mediated through large corporations but at the level of, say, a bunch of individuals denouncing someone for their speech --, I don't think it's a problem for bad ideas to become harder to access or for the "sellers" of bad ideas to go bankrupt or acquire correspondingly bad reputations.
Freedom of speech is important descendant from a general orientation towards maximizing eudaemonia and the ability of people to make real choices, and needs to be evaluted within that context, not as a separate magisterium.
In the context of large corporations censoring speech or, like, the government cracking down on "insurrectionists", I think it really does make sense to think about these things in an, idk, naively-categorical-imperative type frame, since large corporations and the government can't be trusted to distinguish object-level good ideas from bad ideas in any sense, and so should be held to simple rules like "just don't imprison anyone for saying stuff" or "everyone should get a lawyer in their defense". This is not the case for reasoning about how you-as-an-individual or you-as-the-idealized-spirit-of-a-social-group ought to act.
“ That is, someone like Richard Spencer is not contributing to a marketplace of ideas so much as raising a flag for people who already agree with him to rally around as a coordination point.”
Not sure why you single out Richard Spencer here. 90%+ of blue check Twitter seems to consist of “raising flags for people who already agree to rally around”. Twitter censorship consists primarily of deciding which flags are allowed to be flown.
>When might this not work? First, if cars are hard, and starting a new car company takes too much time. I'm not too concerned about this one. I think a lot of people could potentially make one or two crappy 1920s-style cars in their garage with a little work, and once they do that, black people with no other options will buy them, and that will give them enough money to bootstrap into a powerful car company that can compete with the big dogs. Tesla did something like this when Musk though the big dogs were neglecting electric, and that went great.
This is completely unrelated to the last thing I said as far as I can tell, but I think stuff like opening up a new crappy car company in your garage is likely to be harder than it ~ought to be in an ideally free market due to government regulations on car companies.
Sorry but this is a major theme running through ALL of Taleb’s books including this one. The canonical “fat tailed” distribution is the Pareto or “power law” distribution, and the canonical “thin tailed” distribution is the Gaussian or “normal” distribution, and treating the former as if it were the latter is what causes all the blowups and disasters he is trying to teach how to prevent.
This is the pons asinorum for understanding Taleb in any way other than impressionistically.
The trouble with corporate censorship is that "uncensored" forums tend to be on the "cars that immediately catch fire" side of the curve - moderation is a necessary part of building a forum that people actually want to use. Parler has already learned this the hard way - their policy rapidly shifted from "we're the good guys because we don't censor people" to "we're the good guys because we censor left-wing trolls, while everyone else censors right-wing trolls." Even under a "diversity libertarian" regime, you still have to be able to make money off your idea.
Also, factual correction: Apple and Google blocked Parler from their *app stores*, not their phones. You can install Parler on Android by downloading the .apk file and installing it manually, no need to go looking for another cell phone company.
He hasn't avoided all socialist argumentation, and he's been rather clear about providing what reasons he had for each specific ban. Also, despite the evident fact that his writings are popular and spur discussion, he only controls one blog. Dr. Siskind is not responsible for providing a forum for every half-baked tinpot fallacy to be aired. Neither does viewpoint diversity imply otherwise.
He works as a writer, therefore his censorship of your comment is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Your bourgeois attempts to capture value that he has generated should be censored, because you aren't a working writer, you're a bourgeois parasite attempting to co-opt the workers' struggle for your own selfish ends.
You're a { one trick pony / broken record } who's 'contribution' to almost every discussion is 'communism' or 'read Marx', but you also almost always fails to provide even a summary or outline of the relevant info you claim exists. It is tiresome and annoying.
The very good reason to ban you has nothing to do with your 'political thought' but everything to do with your rhetoric, i.e. how you express your political thoughts. People, especially the commenters here, are aware that Marx is an important political philosopher! They would welcome detailed info from someone that has studied his work! I think we would all welcome that info from you too. But you either studiously avoid doing so, or refuse to do so, and there's no good reason to tolerate that behavior, especially when there are other Marxists or communists that don't engage in it, or at least not to the wearying extent you do.
If the profoundness of your articles was plotted it would probably be a bell curve. I'm not quite sure what would be around the mean, but "I can tolerant everyone except the outgroups" would be at least two sigmas above the mean. This article is on the long tail of the less insightful end.
Diversity libertarianism feels like a very strange concept boundary to me. Isn't it basically just capitalism, where you want lots of diversity and competition, but you also want to prevent companies or people from preventing competition?
How does libertarianism come into the picture? Is it just capitalism but you don't want government solving coordination problems because you want the free market to instead?
So what do you think then about the current deconstruction of Republicans? A single *major* party is left: this will eventually kill the competition for the "consumer of policies" (the voter). As in your example, when the super-car wins the competition created by the variance, it likely will just reap the profits and deteriorate on services and features. It will likely fill the niche of the bad car, not eliminate this niche. Because the elites are given the opportunity to think short-term but large rewards for themselves from such a process (with negligible negative consequences). Yet no better system is in evidence.
<< I'm less likely to object to things like taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon - none of those decrease diversity very much. And I’m more likely to care about conformist pressures from religions or mobs, even though technically those don’t involve government.
But, having such preferences, you are more likely to be left-libertarian: anarchist, socialist, etc., than right-libertarian, libertarian in the usual sense (as in the "Libertarian Party")
You seem to be treating “diversity” and “variance” as synonyms, where “variance” means a distribution along some axis of objective quality. But these are not actually synonyms, and it is important that they aren’t. Diversity just means “differences exist” and those differences may or may not result in variable objective quality. But it can still be valuable even if it doesn’t - people have preferences, some rational and others not, but the preferences are definitely diverse. Diversity, insofar as it meets a broader range of preferences, can therefore have utility even if it does not result in higher objective quality.
When Ford first made the Model T, you could have any color you wanted as long as it was black. But many people prefer cars in other colors, so eventually car companies started offering a range of color options. Offering cars in multiple colors does not improve objective quality in any way (if anything it slightly degrades it since now you’ve thrown an extra variable into the supply chain, plus there is probably some objectively best car color for most situations and people will nevertheless make different choices). So “car color” is a place where diversity is valuable even though it’s not really “variance” in the sense you use it, or the sense that creates anti-fragility.
People having irrational preferences may actually be important to keeping things diverse enough to produce useful variance. Many people have irrational brand loyalties - you might think this is bad, but if they didn’t, as soon as Ford trucks got a little objectively better than Dodge and Chevy trucks, 100% of people would buy Ford trucks, Dodge and Chevy would go out of business, and you’d be left with no diversity or variance. Irrational (maybe “arational” would be a better word) preferences add some friction and hysteresis to the system in a diversity-preserving way.
I think your lack of distinguishing between diversity and variance leaves something missing from your assessment of diversity libertarianism. Namely, libertarians believe that individual freedom is a terminal value. It’s a good thing even if it doesn’t make the world objectively better on average. Libertarians tend to believe that freedom WILL lead to better outcomes on average, but that’s not necessarily the point.
And this is partially why pragmatic libertarians might sometimes accept government intervention - if a coordination problem is limiting individual freedom, it may be better to let the government impose coordination by fiat than let the problem go unsolved. And why they might be skeptical of corporate censorship - sure, it might be a free choice by a corporation, but if the corporation has monopoly powers then their censorship is a significant imposition on individual liberty.
<i>Offering cars in multiple colors does not improve objective quality in any way (if anything it slightly degrades it since now you’ve thrown an extra variable into the supply chain, plus there is probably some objectively best car color for most situations and people will nevertheless make different choices)</i>
This may be the core of the disagreement here. I don't think there is an objectively best color for a car to be, a best flavor for potato chips to come in, a best scent for your shampoo, etc. I think the value of the car, potato chips, shampoo, etc., are based on the subjective preferences of the person who buys it. This is why a top-down decision from the Car Color Czar or the Potato Chip Czar doesn't lead to a better world.
I agree with you 100% - the point I was making with the portion you quoted is that there is value in maintaining a diverse offering of car colors EVEN IF this diversity does not translate to better cars overall by some objective measurable. This, treating diversity and variance as the same thing is a mistake.
(White cars are objectively better in a few ways - limiting heating / degradation in sunlight and external visibility mainly. This is why most civilian aircraft are mostly painted white - but that’s a use case where, compared to cars, “optimum” has more value and personal aesthetics have less)
> Plant A suffers a meltdown after two days, killing everybody.
> a lot of people could potentially make one or two crappy 1920s-style cars in their garage [to sell]
Scott, do you have somebody review your pieces to make obvious objections before you publish?
The obvious objection to both of these points, especially the first, is that regulations won't allow these things. So long as we have an effective safety regulator, you absolutely want a high-variance nuclear industry, so that alongside the TEPCOs and V.C. Summers of the world, you have a Moltex/Thorcon/Terrestrial Energy/Elysium, one of whom is likely to be involved with building large numbers of reactors at some point.
P.S. Note my use of the word "regulator" on top of "regulations": you need somebody to notice that every single one of the emergency generators and batteries at Fukushima are located in the basement and ask themselves "should we allow this?" But see also: Meltdown World https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/jtm6hm/how_bad_is_meltdown_world
"Diversity libertarianism" seems like the kind of philosophy of government that allows you to construct a justification for creating whatever kind of policy you want. Which is to say, a philosophy with actual legs.
For nuclear plants, when everything is fine, yes, we prefer the low variance distribution.
However! In a world where a nuclear catastrophe has occurred, the high variance distribution is better! If all nuclear power plants are basically the same and one explodes, we've gotta turn them all off ASAP until we figure out what went wrong. When there's a range of plant quality, one incident has an isolated, well, blast radius.
I have no idea how this preference inversion fits into the fragile/anti-fragile framework.
Doesn't distribution 2 inevitably lead to distribution 1 given enough time?
It's like you said - eventually all the bad car companies/bad power plants/bad or whatever will explode/go out of business because they're getting out-competed by the better ones. Once the absolute worst go away, they're followed quickly by the 2nd worst and so on an so forth until you're only left with the a distribution that looks like system 1.
As a rather doctrinaire libertarian, I am deeply unconvinced that government action is not the ultimate cause of social media censorship. Congress shall pass no law, sure, but very little of the administrative state actually involves Congress passing laws. After Operation Choke Point I see no reason to give the government the benefit of the doubt here.
Liberals saying that corporate censorship doesn't implicate free speech are arguing in bad faith. If the tech companies were to censor liberals then they would be up in arms about the chilling effects that would hinder free exchange of ideas. In the past, liberals often used to argue that corporations are more of a threat to free speech than government; they even wanted regulations of corporations on that ground. What are the common carrier and net neutrality laws other than government regulations to prevent corporate censorship? It's intensely hypocritical for liberals to champion net neutrality laws on one hand and support corporate censorship on the other. If ISPs don't get to control what users see then why do social media companies have that power?
> The quickest way to enrage me is to criticize some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone - to try to browbeat them into doing the same thing as everyone else.
The fact that you characterize Parler and HBD enthusiasts as "some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone" is the biggest self-own I've ever seen on this blog.
Thanks for the great blog! This whole antifragile thing isn't making sense to me. Car companies are not antifragile. They are fragile, if they make unsafe or unfashionable cars they fail.
What you are really saying is that if I as a consumer have choice then I am pleased to have a lot of variance. I choose which car to buy, to hell with the others. So I am happy to have a lot of varience in quality of cars.
Similarly I choose whether to exercise an option so I benefit if there is a lot of volatility/variance in the underlying asset.
I don't choose which nuclear power station effects me, they could all effect me if they create a global nuclear incident. So I would like little variance in nuclear power station safety.
In summary it is not the thing which is fragile/anti-fragile. Rather when people get to choose (options, products) they prefer high variance, and when I am effected by all individual items (nuclear power stations, earthquakes) they prefer low variance.
"If you did want to argue against diversity libertarianism, you'd want to show that relevant systems are more fragile than anti-fragile..."
The most relevant system here is the most fragile: the individual human life, of which we should all be fiercely protective, not on religious grounds, but on empirical evidence showing that every individual field of consciousness is finite, defined, and unique. (We could maybe debate this on religious grounds, but our concern in the modern world is necessarily political.)
The specific brand of libertarianism one advocates is not the problem. While I don't tend to object to libertarian impulses and actions per se, it's the ego commitment that blinds one to the damage, since intellectualisms reign supreme in big and small instances. It is simply not a morally defensible position to allow lives to become collateral damage to cerebral solutions, no matter how well thought out -- sorry MarxBro. (I know, I know, collateral damage happens all the time, but I'm discussing the extent to which a political philosophy should or should not embrace it.)
This is why the libertarian ego enjoys probably the most unearned sense of facile superiority of any political ego. Solutions can seem remarkably obvious to you if you are predisposed to shrug off the immediate risks and damages as "just part of life"; in which case you become free to ridicule all the "dumb" inefficiencies that plague democratic solutions as they attempt to attend to specific human rights, social justice issues, etc. Whether one is Ayn Rand, Hitler, or Scott Alexander, libertarianism (as a philosophy) is a symptom of diseased empathy among elitists.
It's entirely too easy to rattle off rationalizations that seem self-evident to you, such as saying everyone should just learn to rely more on Consumer Reports, without, apparently, the least bit of awareness that there are masses of real-life people who have never heard of Consumers Reports, and have no access to it. The confirmation biases based on one's own stable position in society are striking and omnipresent within libertarian circles. And if they aren't unconscious biases, they are, by definition, an embrace of Rand's abhorrent survival-of-the-fittest notions.
Perhaps our systems will evolve into new shapes in the future, but for now the only morally defensible political positions are the ones that tackle the MUCH more difficult, MUCH more complex task of tweaking existing systems progressively while protecting and preserving as many real flesh-and-blood individuals as possible. To say, well, 100 real people will suffer now, but if you implement our brilliant solutions millions of unknown, unborn future people will have freer, happier lives, is unacceptable in today's modern world. Y'all have to work harder than that. Still, many here see no problem with glibly sacrificing the uninformed to the consequences of deregulation, staggeringly unprepared or unable to place themselves in others' shoes.
And, by the way, the libertarian ego, I believe, is often susceptible to the really bad habit of rattling off false equivalencies without remotely adequate interrogation. I could go on and on about this, but just one current example: The Zuckerbergs of the world did NOT decide to "censor" Parler simply because they didn't like them. (Scott seems to think they could just have easily decided to "not like" Black Lives Matter.) No. They held out as long as they possibly could before eventually being forced to acknowledge the very real damage Parler was doing with explicit, philosophically based, calls to violence and insurrection based entirely on lies. Pressuring Facebook to restrict Parler (or Trump for that matter) is parallel to pressuring the government to regulate drugs and pesticides for the protection of even those people forced to work far too many hours each day to monitor the business pages. Enjoying Scott's mind as I generally do, I am repeatedly astonished by his, frankly, very lazy habit of spreading false equivalencies without adequate education -- a dead giveaway that trapped priors are in play.
"It is simply not a morally defensible position to allow lives to become collateral damage to cerebral solutions, no matter how well thought out -- sorry MarxBro. (I know, I know, collateral damage happens all the time, but I'm discussing the extent to which a political philosophy should or should not embrace it.)"
I'm not sure what you think I'm 'allowing' here. I merely observe the class struggle and point it out.
I apologize for being pedantic, but this has been bothering me for the last two days.
The difference between the two distributions shown is not the amount of variance, but rather the kurtosis. Depending on the scales of the axes, the two might have exactly the same variance (or not). However, the second one has far different kurtosis from the first. In the language of statistics, it has fat tails. It is definitely not a Normal or Bell or gaussian distribution.
The complaint of people like Taleb is that we tend to assume that life looks more like Distribution 1 when in reality many events and processes look more like Distribution 2. Indeed, my graduate student advisor would become quite angry when people spoke of the Normal distribution, arguing that it was anything but normal.
My takeaway is that the world is a lot more random than most people think it is. We need to concentrate more on courses of action to deal with occurrences out in the far tails. That's what I call antifragile, and I think that has an echo in many of Taleb's writings. In this sense, Taleb has many precursors, albeit nowhere near as well known as Taleb.
I think you’re approaching Taleb’s point, but you’re still missing a big aspect of it; from his perspective, two different bell curves are very similar because they’re both effectively finite, even if they look different. If distribution B contains plants that melt down in a few days, distribution A will contain plants that melt down in a few years. The extra few years of power pales besides the hundreds or thousands of years of reduced land useability.
Buying a car takes advantage of variation, but it’s still at best basically robust; you the individual buyer may gain a small amount once from variation, but you probably won’t get more than twice or ten times as good a car as the average or anything. And you definitely could get a worse car than average!
Antifragility *compounds* on variation. Antifragility is like gravity, or science, or evolution, or a monopoly; it starts slowly and then it becomes all-encompassing and inevitable. It contains an argument about the single iteration game, but its true essence is about the repeated game.
Instead of your "religion" and "opinions" you should rather use "important and unimportant values".
The big innovation of liberalism is that maybe you should actually try to understand these evil people (that are against your own values) : either to have an easier time to beat them, to convert them, or to find a truce with them if the two previous ones aren't worth it or are not an option.
"Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity."
You neglect simple legalities. Companies couldn't desegregate in the 1930's because there were laws enforcing segregation. Facebook shareholders could ban BLM if they wanted, and the Woke couldn't do anything about it except grumble like conservatives are doing now. The CEO has to do what the board of directors wants, which is what the shareholders want. Zuckerberg owns 29% (https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+share+of+facebook&rlz=1C1GCEJ_enUS867US867&oq=zuckerberg+share+of+facebook&aqs=chrome..69i57j46.5480j0j3&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8), which is enough to control, so he can do what he wants. I conclude he wants to ban conservatives but not BLM. One caveat: if woke users of facebook would leave but conservatives will not, then Zuckerberg must worry about the dollar cost of indulging any preferences he may have against BLM. Similarly, if he has Woke employees he values, it will cost him dollars if he offends them enough that they quit. But Zuckerberg is NOT a slave to conformity unless he chooses to be. He is a leader.
Assuming there is a "best" option in your distributions, then always picking the best ultimately results in fragility. Most people would get Teslas and then distribution 2 starts contracting to look like distribution 1.
However, Teslas are more fragile than a Ford model T, for instance. Teslas are only the "best" in the current environment where we have working infrastructure that can support them. A massive solar flare at the wrong time, and the Ford model T might then be the "best".
But then accepting the anti-fragile ethos would suggest that we must spend resources to preserve and maintain a healthy population of solutions that are a poor fit to current circumstances, just in case circumstances change and we might end up needing them. This is probably a good idea to some extent, but it must have limits.
It feels to me that the way one describes something leads to "obvious" conclusions about fragility and antifragility. If Scott had described the nuclear plants as "The good one produces enough energy to power all of humanity's needs in a second, the bad one not enough for a light bulb" and the the cars as "The good one gets you wherever you want to go in 5 minutes, the bad one explodes as soon as you turn on the ignition" then we would conclude that cars are fragile and nuclear plants are antifragile.
This type of shenanigan makes me deeply suspicious that the concept of antifragility exists at all - or, at the least, that it existing doesn't say anything profound about the world that we should be taking note of.
It's a myth that libertarians don't believe in rules and order. On the contrary, more rules are needed in a free society than an authoritarian one to keep people from stepping on each other's toes. For example, this comment thread needs a decent moderation system to stay on track and be pleasant for most participants.
The real problem is moving tech from a novelty into a reliable utility. If electric companies inquired about your politics before providing power, we would still have factories powered by donkeys running in a circle and miss out on massive improvements in living standards. In the same way, tech companies need to eventually realize that their mission of running civilization is more important than virtue signalling of selective access. Only then the benefits of tech revolution will be fully realized.
Even more onerous is social networks claiming ownership of your friendship. It's one thing to delete content and ban users. It's another to not give users a realistic way to move to another service and still stay in touch. If Facebook allowed a group owner to export e-mail or phone numbers and provide it to former members, that would be a start of a more appropriate relationship between business and customers.
It's possible to have a libertarian society with companies behaving in this manner, but it's not likely to be pleasant to live in or endure for long.
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).
What do you think about "Would have banned" stores as suggested by Robin Hanson here? https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/09/quality-regs-say-high-is-good.html
I appreciate that as a consumer, there's less risk that products I buy give off toxic chemicals or spontaneously catch fire because there are government people keeping dangerous products off the market.
In a world where a lot of the high quality / high status products people use have the "would have banned" mark, I wonder if you'd be forced to risk it just to keep up with the Joneses.
In a world where all sorts of black and grey markets exist to meet certain demands, it's unclear what significant novel upsides the stores could provide.
I'm also not sure how they're supposed to interact with restrictions on what is legal to possess, rather than just sell - my guess is raw milk yes, heroin no, and machine guns with a tax stamp. So their ability to actually affect the market landscape is limited on another level.
I think that there's a real risk that if the "would have banned" stores do well, their owners will lobby the government to "would have ban" more and more desirable products. Risk-averse regulators internal incentives will point the same way. Soon all exciting new products are "banned" IE restricted to "would have been banned" stores, which will then come to be seen just as "stores." Once everyone buys everything there, people will start to be injured by subtly dangerous products, there will be a public outcry for regulation, and the wheel of ages will turn again.
I think you almost had a point here. It is an unreasonable burden to expect everyone to understand each of the available options on the market perfectly. The problem is that I don't think it's a huge amount of effort to do research on most of these things. We've come up with a number of quick resources (reviews, ratings) which allow you to come to a judgement quickly. I think I would rather live in a world where, if I do a tiny bit of research, I can buy an infinity+1 car, versus a world where I'm forced to buy a car built from reinforced suck but don't have to waste effort doing it.
There are fields where your purchasing decisions are more important than cars, where it's unfair to ask one or two people to take the burden of buying a faulty product so that we can all know what's wrong. There are fields where the emotional impact of the product is so minimal that lies speak louder than the truth, in which case it's harder to come to a correct decision. I think both of these are valid reasons to regulate things. But taking too much effort to research? I think that's a trivial inconvenience which most people have a decent incentive to overcome.
So it sounds like you'd support decreased choice in areas where there's already a large gap between the best and the worst? For example, violins range in quality from Stradivarius all the way down to crappy $20 ones on Amazon that are literally unplayable. Perhaps we could mandate a sole violin producer so that consumers don't have a spend a lot of time comparing choices? Not to mention that would cut down on all the fraud that goes on with violin sales.
Anyway, your argument seems to apply less to libertarianism than all of capitalism in general. I'm not sure why you're blaming the libertarians for your multitude of choices.
So on second thought, I can see a similar argument being made, but with less emphasis on the whole "MY LIFE" thing and more on how finding out the best thing can be hard. In the case of cars say, Consumer Reports or similar can help you find a good car, or at least avoid a complete lemon. But that's not always the case for all things.
For example, there are scam tech help sites that have favorable reviews on the BBB. Of course, the BBB isn't the epitome of virtue, but not everyone knows that. Scamming is outlawed even though we're reducing the ability of people to have completely voluntary transactions.
There are lots of regulations that aim to cut off the left tail of the bell curve, possibly but not always at the expense of the right. Think of basic car safety standards. These are reducing choices, by not letting people make crappy cars that will kill you. But it also means that if you buy a car, you know that it's not going to crumple ten miles down the road, and it protects people who wouldn't bother to even check. At least from the perspective of diversity-libertarianism, it's harder to argue that this is hurting people who go for the right end of the bell curve.
I think the libertarian answer to that is "people should be allowed to choose lemons that may explode, but they should be advertised as such". I don't think many principled people are actually pro-fraud.
Of course, then we have to get down to brass tacks on exactly how car-like something has to be before it can be called a car with a straight face (actually having a form of self-propulsion would probably be #1), and that's where these things get ugly.
(Cars are actually kind of a bad example, because there are massive externalities of certain kinds of bad car - traffic works as well as it does because people's cars don't break down in the middle of the road all the time.)
I think part of the problem too is that things aren't one dimensional. If there was a really bad car that no one wanted, it would disappear pretty quickly. But what about a car that's 10% cheaper, but 10% more likely to catch fire in a crash? 20%? There's a much stronger libertarian argument to allow those. There's a reason not everyone buys a Tesla.
Anyway, Scott did say he's not against regulations that don't appreciably decrease choice, so he may be fine with basic safety standards. But I think part of the confusion is eliding the difference between Scott and libertarians. He says people are surprised when libertarians differ from strawman Ayn Rand, but the examples he gives - taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, removing carbon externalities - well, a lot of libertarians really *are* against those. You gave the libertarian answer, but what's Scott's answer?
>But what about a car that's 10% cheaper, but 10% more likely to catch fire in a crash?
You mean the Ford Pinto?
I don't spend much time regretting the loss of freedom involving in taking something off the market that's a genuine trap even for the reasonably wary, like fraudulently labeled poisonous food--I mean, the kind that will kill you right away, not result in ambiguous symptoms in a tiny group of people 20 years later. I do regret the growing need to eliminating products (and cancel speech) because some lamebrain somewhere managed to find a way to hurt himself with the "dangerous product" by adopting behavior most reasonable people couldn't even imagine. The whole world can't be a padded cell.
Maybe I'm just annoyed because I think socialism is a variant of the "I can get free stuff if I ignore the risk that before long there won't be any free stuff" philosophy that's far too risky to allow most voters to contemplate. I'm really sorry to see a movement towards protecting people from "literally ZOMG deadly words and thoughts" about pronoun preference and the like, while blithely continuing to feed them philosophies that killed 100 MM people within the last century. Since I'm quite certain this kind of "protection" will never be applied equally, because it's about political conformity and power rather than about protection, I'd rather stick with old-fashioned freedom of speech and thought.
How do you feel about motorcycles? I'm pretty sure a motorcycle is more dangerous to its rider than basically any car you could sell.
>I think the libertarian answer to that is "people should be allowed to choose lemons that may explode, but they should be advertised as such". I don't think many principled people are actually pro-fraud.
This always strikes me as gliding past the core problem. I don't think I've ever seem an argument that fraud protection *as it currently exists* is robust enough to serve this role, and reinforcing it ought to be useful regardless of one's level of libertarianism. Solve that, and then we'll talk.
I think there's an important aspect of what you say in *why* there exist tech oligopolies right now, which may have historic analogues. People *do* resent and fear too much choice -- I believe this has been well studied -- and so once one way of doing things becomes mildly socially dominant, it may be driven rapidly to extreme dominance by a lot of people just following the wisdom of the crowd because doing otherwise is time-consuming and anxiety-inducing. Hey, everybody I know does his searches on Google, it's the default on by browser, so...why not? Everybody can't be *that* wrong. Everybody posts his funny cat videos on Youtube, so...
I say there may be historic analogues because we can point to a similar contraction of variety in car manufacturers from the 1900s to the 1970s (before the Energy Crisis and/or the Japanese got their manufacturing shit together). Kerosene and oil in the 1890s through Standard Oil. Telephone and telegraph companies. PC clones, the Windows OS. When the technology is complex, or new, or both, and learning about it enough to make good decisions is a big investment, it's plausible the cost of informed choice can drive mild market dominance -- which could happen entirely by accident -- into extreme market dominance.
I actually enjoy using a product that bucks the trend, and for instance have stopped using Google almost entirely. I make an exception when I can't find an adequate substitute (e.g. Google Maps). The only problems I typically encounter are (1) if the product is too obscure, you worry about product support and replacement parts, and (2) if the whole point of the product is to put you in touch with a large community, then switching to Parler doesn't make up for all the people you no longer can reach on FB. On FB I can put out a post and reach 1/3 of my county quickly. Only a few of them were ever going to bother migrating to Parler, even if Parler had managed to make itself work.
OsmAnd~ is pretty good, but YMMV?
"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."
And neither will the poor or poor-ish person who can only afford what you would consider a "crappy" car but would rather have that than no car at all.
This attitude is making it needlessly hard to be even poor-ish in the 21st century developed world. Cars, houses, home appliances, even medical care, a bunch of middle- to upper-middle-class consumers whine about how they don't want to have to make informed decisions about *which* [X] to buy, so they pass laws making it illegal to make an [X] that they wouldn't want to buy, and in so doing decide for every poor or poor-ish person in their country that they can't have *any* [X].
Middle-class people in the 1950s mostly seem to have lived reasonably long and happy lives. With modern manufacturing and logistics, I'd wager it would be possible to provide a middle-class 1950s lifestyle to a family living at the federal poverty level, and throw in a flip-phone and a desktop computer with an internet connection along with some 21st-century health care. But it wouldn't be legal, because you would be afraid that *you* might accidentally buy some of their stuff.
I'm with the diversity-libertarians on this; it is a horrible thing that people like you can impose your preferences by force of law. Scott's right; you need to suck it up and buy a subscription to Consumer Reports.
As we got wealthier, we started consuming more variety even though that's less efficient:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/variety
We could house people in "universal basic dorms" as long as they were sufficiently basic that wealthier people wouldn't want to live in them:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/universal-basic-dorms.html
A.k.a. "The Projects".
Hanson discusses how they'd differ from public housing. Of course, a government which permitted public housing to be so awful & crime-ridden is also unlikely to be interested in Hanson's reforms.
Those "Universal Basic Dorms" look a lot like SRO hotels/apartments, which we kind of can't house people in because it's several kinds of illegal in most US jurisdictions. Or at least, if you try to build one you'll find existing laws interpreted in a way that will either run you out of business or run your prices up to about the level of existing apartments.
That's not a clever new idea, that's an obvious old idea that we forced everyone to give up on as soon as *most* of us were rich enough not to need any more. Baeraad accurately describes why that's not going to change any time soon.
I suppose then it's an implicit argument that those should be more widely legalized.
I'd never heard of Baeraad. Could you give a link?
Check the root comment.
Doh!
Similarly, it worries me to attack fantastically expensive new medical technologies and drugs on the ground that only the evil rich can afford them. The rich are the beta testers of expensive new technology, which before long gets cheaper and available to the less-rich and even eventually the poor. I don't see much evidence that most of the advances would ever have happened if we'd insisted on equal access from the start.
I think your point makes sense in theory, but not in practice. Rich people are too homogenous to make a good beta test group -- you want diversity in the group so you see the broadest range of likelihood of outcomes and can account for that.
For example, lets say your company is testing a new drug for depression, but unbeknownst to the testers, it has a bad interaction with those who inhale smog on a regular basis. This is not an interaction you will find if you only test on rich people, who don't generally live in smoggy areas.
(Yes it's a fairly contrived example, but I hope it illustrates my point?)
Of course I'd rather see innovation available for a larger test group, all things being equal, but all things aren't equal. Better to have innovations for rich people, to begin with, than hardly any innovations at all. Disqualifying all innovations that can't be proven instantly and equally available for everyone, including people with either no extra income available for medicine or no interest in prioritizing healthcare in a family budget, is no way to increase the total innovations available in a society over time. If we can tolerate an unequal rollout, we can have thing like LASIK, which starts out expensive and uninsured, and gradually gets to be so routine and cheap that it's within the reach of people of quite ordinary means. People with terrible insurance, or no insurance at all, have routine access today to medical interventions that were completely unheard-of sci-fi miracles when I was young.
The Beta Testers are never a truly representative group; most users don't even know where to sign up, so the ones who do are more clueful than most. But it's still very useful data.
Beta testers probably was the wrong term, more like guinea pigs with disposable income, or informal investors. The point isn't to make the patients figure out if the medical treatment works, it's to get them to pay for the cutting-edge treatments before they become more widely affordable.
"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."
Does that apply to your own argument just as well? You advocate for limiting the choices that other people would like to make down to a dull constant offering no variety. Effectively "you can have any car, as long as it is like this one." That's pretty dull.
I think your argument boils down to simply not liking to make choices in some areas you don't care much about. That's fine, in fact it is the human condition. It does not follow, however, that limiting choices improves the situation. You will still have choices to make on things you don't care about, and no guarantee that the limited set of options are even as good on average as a better set. So get ready for decisions about options about how to limit the options you have to make decisions about!
Additionally, what are you going to do with your suddenly free time? I am going to to out on a limb that whatever it is, it involves a lot of decisions. What books to read, what movies to watch, when to stop reading or watching a particular movie, where to buy it from...
Good luck avoiding decisions that might have better or worse consequences.
As someone who occasionally stands there paralyzed in the grocery aisle wondering "do we really need 43 kinds of corn chips?" I'm trying to take this sympathetically as a general argument (despite the neither kind/true/necessary last para) and coming up short, simply because there are cheap and obvious heuristics for getting around these problems.
If you want a proxy for what a more-competent-than-realistic society would settle on as the One True American Car, buy the most popular car! (I was really hoping the aptly-named Civic would be it, but nope, the Toyota Camry beat it out last year.) It might not be the best and most awesome car, but the probability of the most popular product in a competitive market being a better value proposition than the only product in this hypothetical command economy seems pretty high! And if you don't like it, you can either just go without a car OR shop around for something you can work with!
Or for smaller purchases, Consumer Reports was already mentioned but it does cost money. But there are a lot of free options! You can just buy the "Amazon recommends" suggestion for any given search--it might not be great but it's probably not terrible! Or you can be a little more upscale and get the recommended thing from The Wirecutter, a weirdly exhaustive recommendations site that can outfit an entire home floor to ceiling with upper-middle-class appropriate consumer durables.
I think the "43 kinds of corn chips" thing is extremely relevant here. In grocery stores, and fast food restaurants, there seems to be corporate pressure to providing a huge number of choices that don't have much obviously counting for or against them. In luxury goods and high end dining, there seems to be pressure to a prix fixe menu with only one choice, or at most three choices, where being on the menu at all is supposed to signal that this is the best thing they can produce.
I have the sense that this is related to how much unfreedom vs decision fatigue is the biggest psychic drain of your day job (low income vs high income, traditionally). But it often seems like the huge variety of choice is designed, in many cases, to encourage people to make choices that aren't good for them, but are good for the seller.
But why does the seller benefit from the diversity of choices, except if some of their customers also benefit? If the 43rd brand of corn chips doesn't make anyone happy, why is the seller stocking it instead of, I don't know, a different kind of guacamole?
Trader Joe's takes the decision-averse position as it's big differentiator: instead of 43 corn chips, they have their Trader Jose's regular corn chips, their Trader Jose's reduced salt corn chips, and maybe Trader Jose's blue corn chips. That's it. Replicate this through the whole store and you have a grocery store that sells pretty much all the same products as a normal grocery stores in <half the square footage--which gives them really good profit margins compared to their competition.
I like Trader Joe's (although their produce is not very good) and in my purely self-serving ideal world more businesses would follow this model. Yet somehow Kroger et al aren't all slashing their product line-ups and building smaller boxes, and your gas station/bodega still has 200 different permutations of sodas and energy drinks.
My takeaway from this set of facts is that while there's demand for reduced/simplified decisions, there's also legitimate demand for a great deal of variety. And hell, I have my idiosyncratic preferences too, and I'd also be (very slightly) sad to wake up in a world where there's only one boring beans of ginger ale, vs. the extremely strong bougie ginger beer with like 20x the ginger content. Who's to say someone doesn't feel equally possessive of their flaming hot blue half-caf mini-cheez puffs (Final Fantasy XXX limited edition)?
Lidl has been pretty successful with this business model.
Suggestion: Buy the store brand, which is almost always fine. More-or-less every grocery story and discount store has store brands of most stuff, often made by the same factory as made some of the name brand stuff.
It also allows people to tune their purchases to exactly what they want. Most people just want a bag of chips, but there's likely some small number of people who have very particular wants. Consider the existence of vegetarians, vegans, people with various food allergies/sensitivities, people with religious dietary requirements, people who just can't stand the flavor of the default option, etc. Get rid of all the "needless" choices and offer the customers one type of chips, and if that type of chips runs afoul of *any* of those constraints, then the customer can't have chips.
Yeah, if anything the last few years have seen an explosion of never even seen before choices, like organic or vegetarian...
I think both of your examples are off target a bit, due to thinking of things not from the perspective of the supplier.
In the realm of corn chips and diner menus etc., the constraint to variety is how much you want to purchase and store. A super market has a lot of space to store prepackaged food, and since it doesn't spoil quickly it is relatively cheap to have many varieties even if they don't sell super fast. (In the 'States in fact many stores essentially lease shelf space to the Frito-Lays of the world, with Frito taking responsibility for stocking and product mix instead of the store itself.) Likewise a fast food place doesn't cook up meals from scratch, but from variously pre-made bits, so the actual variety of parts is limited but the combinations are plentiful.
Looking at high end restaurants, they really are cooking much of their menu from scratch to order, and usually without much overlap in ingredients. Those ingredients also don't have a long shelf life, so anything they buy but don't cook is going to waste. The other big constraint is making things to order means your chef has to actually be able to make it all themselves. You can't just rely on cooks who can turn standardized premade ingredients into a good burger. If your chef can make 20 amazing dishes, you perhaps offer 3-5 a night and rotate through them as makes sense.
One more point: the marketing research suggests (disclaimer: I am a supply chain and economics guy, so that might be old research) that most people just buy the thing they bought last time and liked. People very rarely change their actual buying habits, and so the cost of decision fatigue on frequent purchases is essentially zero for the vast majority. Things like cars and houses, those people pay a lot of attention to, but most people can't even tell you how much their store charges for Tostitos. This suggests that people who do suffer decision fatigue from choices of coffee or chips or socks are somewhat special, and should perhaps consider starting businesses to help each other decide what to buy. I don't mean to say "shut up and deal", but changing the world to match those specific preferences is going to be very negative for a wide swath of the population.
The perfect example of this would be health insurance or even insurance in general. Absent regulation you'd have a ton of choices too complex for the average person or below to manage. In terms of health insurance, this is especially a problem because if you pick a plan that ends up unable or unwilling to pay for your cancer treatment, the public doesn't have the balls to let you live with that choice.
In theory, libertarians should oppose "initiation of force or fraud". Arguably, giving people contracts that are difficult to understand and contain loopholes, is fraud... not necessarily in the legal sense, but in the uncomplicated "lol, the suckers will pay thinking they are buying X, when in fact they are buying Y = obvious fraud" sense.
Online libertarians typically only discuss initiation of force, which invites suspicion that some of them might be quite happy imagining a world where muscles and guns are limited, but you are free to cleverly use your intellectual advantage to abuse your neighbor.
But, who knows, maybe in a libertopia with private law enforcement, there could be an agency with attitude "small print is automatically invalid, you must speak clearly", and it could be quite popular.
This would have the interesting consequence that people would not be allowed to sign contracts they do not understand. Which is not necessarily a problem, in my opinion. Some libertarians already agree that people should not be allowed to sell themselves to slavery. So certainly limitations of what is allowed are not unthinkable.
> If you did want to argue against diversity libertarianism, you'd want to show that relevant systems are more fragile than anti-fragile; giving people more options will usually make them worse.
Sure. A world option to get a vaccine and not to get a vaccine is strictly worse than just the former.
This is not obvious at all to me in general. But most importantly, who gets to choose what the only option is? In this last year, a more libertarian world would have offered vaccines more widely and much sooner, yet in the current world the number of people vaccinated is not yet significantly constrained by the choice not to but by availability. (e.g., think half of Europe banning the AstraZeneca vaccine, deciding you shouldn't have the freedom to choose to take it... or the US not even approving it, or etc etc)
It's easy to say 'in the hypothetical world where we do things my way, everything works perfectly and there's no problems.' But do you really think the world is that simple and convenient?
What happens in your world when stories about people dying of Covid after getting vaccinated start circulating, or when the media publishes 100 cases of people being killed or permanently disabled by 'vaccines' (which are actually untested snake oil) ?
Even in the world where vaccines are heavily regulated and ridiculously safe and effective, there's a large portion of the population saying they'll never get vaccinate because they don't trust them, and a larger portion saying they'll 'wait to see what happens' before getting vaccinated.
And how many people do you expect to go back and get vaccinated again after some consumer report says the vaccine they took the first time was snake oil? Most people aren't that conscientious, even getting vaccinated voluntarily once is a lot to ask of the average person.
It looks to me like you are accusing me of being too hypothetical while rebutting something I'm not sure I said with a hypothetical? Or I don't understand what you are trying to say. Like, it is in this world, the real one, where most vaccines turned out not to be dangerous at all.
But anyway. Right now, the AstraZeneca vaccine is being stopped top-down for bad scientific reasons. And the main reason why many many people got scared of the vaccine was because the authorities decided that a bad scientific reason was a good scientific reason to stop with it.
That makes a lot of assumptions about the quality of the vaccine, does it not? Actual true efficacy, side effects, the rate of natural immunity due to having contracted the disease already etc.
The flu shot, at least circa 1990-2000, might be a good example. It didn't seem terribly effective and wasn't cheap. Universal flu shots every year was probably a bad idea. At some point the costs and benefits might cross over into being a good idea, but it is pretty hard to pin point where that is.
Damn, talking of banning, Substack has now been blocked on my corporate network. :-(
Is it substack-specific, or do they ban other stuff that can make you waste time?
yes, substack-specific. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Blogspot etc. are all ok (and have always been) Datasecretslox never was available though.
Good thing it's also an email newsletter.
yep, just changed my preferences to resub to the newsletter. I wonder who makes the filters...
Burden of proof? Why do I have to show that the systems in question are fragile; it is the libertarians who should demonstrate that anti-fragility holds. The risks due to fragility are much higher than those due to anti-fragility!
Now that I think about it, a lot of libertarian arguments can be summarized as "here are some reasons why X is actually pretty anti-fragile".
I'd love to hear your opinion on the psychology of libertarians. To me, it's like they knee-jerk protect the notion of "inner space" which they assume is freedom.
Caplan thinks the positions that mesh with libertarianism are “a dualistic philosophy of mind, free will, moral objectivism, and an optimistic view of human potential”. I still thought of myself as a libertarian when I read that, even though I disagreed with him on those:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/hey-just-why-am-i-not-a-hobbesian/
I'm more interested in the psychology of WHY people feel they need... FU money, bubbles to live in, high levels of self control, not having bosses around, etc. I absolutely have had phases of feeling like I totally needed these things myself. But I like to try and not just assume they're like innate needs of the human psyche. I feel like there are high levels of self-avoidance in libertarian creeds, not that this crit couldn't be also be thrown at other doctrines.
Equating freedom with inner space sounds to me like the concept of "freedom of conscience." It seems like a minority of people are born with a strong need for this, with it being a larger minority in some cultures than others. My guess would be it results from a neurological predisposition towards high levels of consistency, self-control, and systematic intellectual thought. A lot of social consequences follow from this in a complex society, ones that make functioning difficult for them. In order to function, they prioritize defending their ability to avoid clashes with the highly other-directed majority. Not being in sync with the values of the majority will cause "extreme" priorities, because the "reasonable" options are only reasonable as defined by those values.
Not sure, but thanks for posting. What I sense is that on a core psychological level, libertarians easily react to protect their sense of inner, personal space - without necessarily having a sense of what that space really is or whether it even exists.
Would you describe yourself as someone in fear of feeling "trapped?"
I had a very strong fear of being controlled for decades but it seemed to track back to my adoptive dad. I experienced him as very controlling and I went along on the surface but determined inside to never surrender my mind. Over the years and repeated triggering, it seemed to work through. I get triggered but there's not much psychological charge underneath to keep me reacting.
I find the process many go through around Covid restrictions fascinating on this level. I think there is a level of correlation psychologically between fear of surrender and libertarian leanings.
It seems like you are projecting a lot of stuff about yourself on folks you really don't know.
I was raised with quite a bit of freedom from loving non controlling parents who were tolerant of different ways of living and thinking. Our family was live and let live. Being raised that way (and probably getting a lot of my instincts/personality genetically from my parents) I instinctively bristle at heavy handed authority, arbitrary rules and bureaucracy.
I don't know if I have a fear of being controlled but I know I don't like to be controlled. And I don't like controlling others either. So I set up my life such in such a way that I have a lot of autonomy.
I am pretty much the same here. I REALLY don't like to be told what to do or think and highly value my personal autonomy. I am also very tolerant of other people, the actions of others outside of very close contacts just don't matter to me at all.
Like you I value freedom so much that it is one of the main things I purchase with my salary. One of my major goals has been to build myself in to an FU position by combining a high savings rate and moderate level of consumption.
I've always thought one of the best social effects of a vibrant job market is that people automatically treat each other better if they know no one is forced to stick around. The flip side is that I don't care for most rules that make it hard for an employer to let a worker go. "FU money" is an example of circumstances that foster a healthy appreciation of the fact that the people around us have choices, and we'd do well to engage them on the basis of consent whenever humanly possible, even if we haven't adopted moral philosophies to dictate the same result.
By the same token, while I'd rather see countries operate in such a way that they can afford open borders, I'm much less troubled by tough limits on who can come in than on guard towers that face inward. It's not so much that people can't cross the border that's the problem, it's how governments treat citizens who can't leave. Ditto how monopolies treat customers who can't opt out. Most people aren't really up to the temptation of a captive audience.
As long as things aren't too bad, I know I can find workarounds and don't worry much about it--but the trend is inexorable and worth trying pretty hard to stem whenever we see it developing.
Changing countries is quite different : you will never completely adapt to your new country, but your children (hopefully) will
What makes you think political opinions neatly fit specific psychology types?
In my experience, friends, family and upbringing have equal or greater influence on political opinions than personality. In fact I can easily think about a bunch of Capitalists, Socialists and Libertarians with a huge variety of personalities/(psychologies?).
If you ask them they'll say they believe their preferred system is the best way to achieve the best world (for everyone), and I tend to believe them.
I wasn't thinking of psychological types so much, as in Reich. Rather that there seems to be a certain reactivity in libertarians where they assume top down control is just wrong. I have an idea this might be to do with how they learned as kids to associate a sense of freedom with notions of "inner space."
I'm currently writing a piece on "social credit systems" exploring possible psychological reasons why some people seem so terrified of them.
Forgive me if I'm being naive here, but does there need to be psychological reasons why explicit accounting of eccentricity can be scary in a world where many people are punished for it, even retroactively?
I don't know for sure. I'm just interested in the topic of social conformity and whether it is necessarily negative. My own experience was that a lot of my craving for personal freedom seemed to be based around my lack of exploration of my inner world.
This is an interesting topic, and I think even when they have sufficient wealth many people have a gut reaction against top down authority because they feel trapped by society. They come to value some forms of "freedom" far more than I ever would.
Craving for personal freedom stems from other people being nosy assholes, and a lot of libertarians (and SSC/AST readers) being smarter than them yet still subject to their attempts at control "for their good".
It is based in childhood experiences in the sense that you encounter nosy assholes often and learn from it, much like you learn not to put your hand in the fire.
I don't think your approach is useful beyond trivial conclusions.
Libertarians typically have no beef with top-down control, if it doesn’t violate experimental ethics: I.e. voluntary participation.
Yes, I think the top-down bit isn't specifically triggering, you're right. Thanks.
Scott has already written about this need for safety, but for the Blue vs the Red tribe in general.
When I read the section with the car analogy, an objection immediately came to my mind: no, we don't want the widest possible distribution - at least not in the real world, where there are always tradeoffs, like between price and reliability (and it's these tradeoffs that justify the existence of the distribution in the first place - if there were a Super-Tesla that is strictly superior to Yugos, Yugos would go extinct right away, and the distribution would shrink). I do not want cars on the road that cost 1000 bucks brand-new, but spontaneously go up in flames at inopportune moments, such as driving through a tunnel right in front of me. That's why civilized countries have regulations regarding car safety, regular inspections to extend a vehicle's license, etc. - to cut off the left end of the distribution.
With regards to other industries, similar mechanisms may apply. Do clickbaity "fake-news" websites cause damage to the information landscape of a society? Do shady online pharmacies that sell tainted, counterfeit medications undermine trust in medicine (apart from directly hurting their customers)? Can banks that sell cleverly constructed derivative instruments spread hidden risk to a degree that an unexpected downturn wipes out the entire economy, rather than one unfortunate bank? No waaaay, right? I mean, your condition "and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones" sounds great, but where in the real world would that apply? How many people even have an idea what's in the processed food they eat every day? They may be sure they like the taste, but how are they supposed to be sure it doesn't cause cancer?
I mean, these are objections of the kind you mention in the second-to-last paragraph, but I don't think you take them seriously enough.
I think bringing up the example of counterfeit anything is a disservice to libertarians. Fraud is probably #2 on the list of Things Even Libertarians Want Banned, after violence.
(Both fraud and violence by necessity reduce the victim's ability to choose things, either by deceiving him or by forcing him.)
Okay, good point. Ignore that, then.
Yeah but too much is swept under the rug of the *definitions* of "violence" and "fraud." In this very essay, for example, we are asked to contemplate the possibility that "force" which in libertarian tradition has been defined as "at the point of a gun" i.e. something only governments or armed individuals can exercise, can be extended to cover "social pressure" and "enhanced social/economic cost created by oligarchic collusion." And that fits very well with the times, it's a common meme these days.
And a similar common meme is that "fraud" includes not just your old-fashioned direct lie (saying 'not A' when you know 'A'), but also things like manipulating what appears in your Facebook feed.
So when the libertarian says "we shall begin by only banning violence and fraud" the politician/huckster immediately rubs his hands in glee, knowing that by suitable variation on the definition of those two key words, almost anything can be ruled permissible or impermissible, in time.
I think to be considered a plausible candidate for a governing philosophy libertarianism has to be pretty honest about defining "violence" and "fraud" in terms that are practical to implement and resistant to becoming "living" terms like our living Constitution, to be made precise by at the whim of whoever has power at the moment.
Also, libertarianism does not prohibit violence. It doesn't prohibit retaliatory violence, and it doesn't prohibit violence in defense of property.
It defines taking property as being force (aka violence) even when it isn't. If you drop your wallet and I pick it up, there is clearly no force or violence involved. But both libertarians and the real world say that force / violence is permitted to get it back - either you can use force, or you can call the police who use force.
The problem I have with libertarians going on about force and violence is that everyone (bar a handful of extreme pacifists) agrees that taking things you don't own is wrong, and that force is permitted to get the property to its rightful owner. People just don't agree on who the rightful owner is. If not paying your taxes is stealing from the government, then the police arresting you for it is just fine, and it's not taxation that is theft, but non-payment of taxes. The entire non-aggression principle doesn't argue anything that anyone disagrees with - it's just used to conceal a theory of property behind a theory of aggression and force.
Why would you want a concept of "force" or "fraud" that excludes things that are functionally identical? I would have thought it was the functional behavior of the thing that makes it the sort of thing that should be banned even in a libertarian paradise, rather than whether it ticks some technical check box.
(I can see the idea that there is a danger in these concepts being applied well outside of their actual functional form - but if you're acknowledging that you will be missing many cases that are functionally equivalent to the ones you ban, then why even bother banning those, and why draw a bright line that prevents even a conservative expansion of the concepts?)
"Fraud is probably #2 on the list of Things Even Libertarians Want Banned, after violence."
That is very much not the case. If you were defrauded that's on you. Or alternatively the market would prevent you from being defrauded.
Currently, it's often the government that prevents you from getting revenge when you notice you were defrauded.
Fraud is defined by a legal system. If you are now dissatisfied with some decisions of the legal system, for example some legal loopholes that allow others to cleverly scam inattentive people, your opportunities to disagree are limited.
Imagine a system, where if a judge enforces a clearly exploitative contract, the victim of the scam and their family and friends will choose a different judge, and describe the reasons for their decision on a blog.
Because arbitration works out so well for the little guy these days.
A system where judges are part of the market and you can go judge shopping until you get the decision you like seems... a little open to abuse.
"If you were defrauded that's on you"
- BronxZooCobra
"Libertarians believe that the label of “crime” should be limited to actions of force or fraud against another individual or group. We believe that such crimes should be prosecuted and punished by our justice system"
- Libertarian Party of the United States
One of these entities speaks for five or six orders of magnitude more Libertarians than the other.
I find this unconvincing because of what happens if you take the next step of mathematical sophistication and consider non-symmetric distributions.
Imagine a distribution with a long positive tail, and a sharp cutoff at some point on the negative side (we can accomplish this by including skew). In all of the cases described, it would be the best option. You get high efficiency nuclear power plants and Teslas alike, but eliminate the risk of meltdown or, say, buying a really crappy car.
Then the theory becomes "we always want lots of good options, and some way to limit the possible harm from bad options", which seems... tautological? And it also seems like it eliminates any obvious connection with the concept of fragility.
This is what natural selection does. Or in the context of markets, recessions and other acts of "creative destruction." It does fit into the "antifragility" argument that we want to *encourage* creative destruction -- we should *celebrate* the frequent failure of businesses, the bankruptcy of financial schema, the noble laborer flung out of a job at the mine, forced to retrain in freelance stoplight windshield washing...
I think this makes the assumption that innovation is going to solve a lot of global issues, or make the world a better place and add to human flourishing. Systems that work often scale in a fractal way. If you apply government style bureaucracy to a small organization like a school, it produces a public school. But if you just let every teacher do what they want because it will lead to innovation, and creates some adaptable and anti fragile schools, then you will end up with atrocious outcome for some kids, and the few good ideas often wont get reproduced because the market is not setup to reward good ideas in this context. When you have skin in the game and the stakes are high, tried and true solutions make a lot of sense.
We already end up with atrocious outcomes for a lot of kids, and arguably most kids, simply because people arrogate to themselves the right to decide the mandatory universal standard for education. That's a perfect example of fragility: an error in one critical location (the origin of education dogma that is increasingly enforced nationwide under the guise of federal funding with strings), the failure affects the entire system at once. Ideally, lots of people would be trying lots of education approaches, so we could check in periodically to see which ones were working best, and take quick action to correct the failures, or at least try something new.
Atrocious for most kids? By what metric? I agree that better solutions could happen, but people don't want to experiment with their kids, and market incentives don't end up scaling the best solutions up. In the USA there is a lot of educational freedom. And this has led to some great innovations, but they don't magically scale up. There is some belief that there is some magical solution that has yet to be found, but apparently no society on earth has come up with it yet.
But many people do want to "experiment with their kids" in the sense of having options for better schools when the schools they are in are leaving their kids untaught, absurdly indoctrinated, and physically imperiled. What stops them is not the fear of trying something new but the rigid monopoly. Those who can afford to keep paying school taxes and tuition on top of that can always escape, but it's a huge barrier for most families.
Vouchers, charters, no federal curriculum. The US has plenty of innovation going in schools. My point is that innovation is not the key to solving poor educational outcomes. Supermarket chains will not even open stores in bad neighborhoods. Anybody good at teaching or leading will avoid blighted communities like the plague. Healthcare has a similar problem. We know what great healthcare looks like, but only wealthier citizens have access to it. How does innovation solve this problem? The reality is that educational innovations raise the bar ever higher for struggling students.
I agree that vouchers, charters, and no federal curriculum are good ideas. I only regret that they are available only to a tiny sliver of the population, and the subject of relentless stamping-out campaigns. As for how innovation solves the problem of terrible and limited options, whether in education or in medicine, you start by at least allowing the innovations to come into existence, then worry about making them more widely available. Strangling them in their cribs will never help anyone, least of all the populations least able to exert influence on their own failing local institutions by exerting a credible threat of abandonment and adoption of alternatives.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED507600.pdf
60-65% of high school seniors score less than "proficient" in literacy in NAEP tests. That looks like bad outcomes for most kids. It isn't as though proficient is a huge hurdle.
I don't know that I would claim the USA has a lot of educational freedom. It varies by state, but in say PA you have to go to the public schools in your area, or homeschool or send to private schools. You pay property taxes in any cases to pay for the public schools, use them or not. Starting new private schools is extremely difficult, heavily regulated in every particular, so they are very few and far between.
Comparing PA to MN where I lived for a few years, the St Paul school district had public school choice, with lots of charter schools of various sorts. Parents could default to the local school or sign up for any other. There were often more applicants for the good schools than spaces, but lots of options. We sent our daughter to a Mandarin immersion school with top scores for English and Math, no extra money, though I did have to drive her across town every day. Moving back to PA where you have to base where you live on what school you want seems a lot less free, and the schools are a lot worse.
I agree that too much regulation is bad. But the US has innovative schools like Mandarin immersion charters, magnets etc. Most countries have a national curriculum, and in France the education minister once bragged that everyone was learning the same thing at the same moment in every school. Meanwhile in the US there are some vague national standards, and as you said schools vary greatly by state. This sounds like the distribution 2 that Scott Siskind was writing about. Some great schools and some terrible. In PA why don't they just copy what ST Paul does? We know what makes great educational outcomes (smart affluent parents), so the problem with schools is not something that can be solved by innovation in education techniques. UNICEF came to this conclusion long ago. They can reliably open good early childhood centers in developing countries, but they have never figured out how to make this scale up. It consistently takes reallocation of resources (tax money) and organized government to make good societies.
Atrocious for most kids:
"Suppose there was a cabal of evil geniuses who decided to force teens into labor camps where 56% were disengaged, 75% had negative feelings, 17% had to be put on psychiatric medications to survive, suicides had increased 300% since the founding of the labor camp system, and there was an annual 20% increase in suicides each fall when they were forced back into the camps. If this was an Apple factory in China, there would be international protests and boycotts. When it was discovered they were actually doing this to children, the company would collapse."
https://flowidealism.medium.com/schooling-in-the-u-s-26063004b984
I create schools at which teens are much happier (we measure both engagement and psychological safety using Fitbit-like devices and Immersion Neuro software). Although conventional schools might be okay for 25% of students, I see the 75% who are unhappy as a huge market.
The reason that the educational innovations that matter have not been able to scale is the "grammar of schooling" (in the language of Tyack and Cuban) or the dominant operating system, as I describe it here,
https://edreform.com/2006/05/why-we-dont-have-a-silicon-valley-of-education-michael-strong/
For a deeper dive here is the case that despite apparent educational freedom, the U.S. model is not adequately polycentric,
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1525
The cultivation of positive culture and attitudes are more important in many contexts than are innovations within the system. The ability to take initiative, to learn on one's own, to engage in mutually respectful dialogue, to solve unstructured problems creatively are all examples of valuable real world skills that do not fit well into the grammar of schooling, which assumes grade level curricula, standards, and assessments using a content-transmission model (as opposed to a steady habituation through participation in a community of practice model with deliberate practice for the ambitious as a culturally validated ideal).
I've got decades of experience creating out of the box schools (including a charter high school ranked the 36th best public high school in the U.S., the high school model for the largest Montessori network in the U.S., and now a low cost virtual model). There are certainly challenges in creating innovative programs given the government-subsidized and enforced dominant operating system. But alternatives continue to grow despite these challenges. I expect we'll see a tipping point in the next decade or two in which the system collapses (or perhaps goes the way of the post office, an expensive jobs program with little functional value).
A growing awareness of the public health catastrophe of American adolescence, combined with a growing number of alternatives to the existing system, will accelerate the loss of market share for conventional public schools (which has already been declining for decades).
This is some really interesting stuff, thank you for posting. I am from Northern California, but aside from a year working in Waldorf I haven't spent much time inside US schools since I was a kid. I had no idea it is so bad. What I have seen over and over, most recently in Madagascar and Tunisia, are great little schools and orphanages that don't scale up into huge 2000 kid schools, or into franchises. So I believe completely tearing apart the current school system, in the hopes that something better will arise, is something of a gamble. A good school is a community of good people, and I think there is no "good school" made up of stressed out neglected kids and adults, but that is the reality of a lot of communities. I think you are blaming schools for a lot of societal problems. Citing statistics on suicide and insinuating it must be because of the schools. If a community is vacuous and unhappy, and a school is preparing kids for a life in that community, then there is no possibility of success. I am a big for of the Alfie Kohn types, and the Waldorfy type ethos, but these ethe are not appealing to a broad swath of America. Without some kind of authority to push for this warmth in schools, then we will probably end up with more polarization and also more kids in select elite schools.
I'm on the phone every day with parents from all demographics who are very interested in our program. Low income parents from states with tuition tax credit programs are working with us to make our program available to them. There is tremendous demand. We routinely have kids shadow one day and enroll the next, even in mid-March.
Regarding the issue of suicide, I've known many students who were suicidal in their previous environment and were happy and well in my environments, sometimes within days, other times weeks, yet other times months. Likewise with many cases of anxiety and depression.
Moreover, it is possible to be high performance without stress. I've either worked with or known many dozens of students who have gotten into selective colleges by doing what they love and loving what they do; once parents and teens realize that not only is the stress harmful, but it is also not essential, then we'll see an accelerating move away from it. See Cal Newport's work, including "How to Be a High School Superstar," for a similar approach to the one I use.
In 1972, John Yudkin published "Pure, white, and deadly: The problem of sugar." I remember hearing about it in the late 70s and thinking it was absolutely ridiculous. While it is not as sensational, over the past twenty years we've seen a pretty broad consensus form that eating lots of sugar is not a healthy thing to do. Relatedly, whether people use the language of "evolutionary mismatch," it is pretty widely acknowledged the rise of type 2 diabetes in modern societies is associated with the huge increase in the consumption of highly refined carbs, including sugar.
Likewise, I predict that in 30 years, the current epidemic of anxiety, depression, and suicide associated with modern societies will likewise be acknowledged as due to an analogous evolutionary mismatch,
https://flowidealism.medium.com/evolutionary-mismatch-as-a-causal-factor-in-adolescent-dysfunction-and-mental-illness-d235cc85584
As that happens over the coming decades, we'll see a massive shift away from schools as we know them.
I'd be happy to bet that a decade from now we'll see a significantly smaller percentage of high school students enrolled in standard district public schools. I'd say 20% fewer such enrollees is an easy prediction. At 20% decrease per decade, we see a collapse of public high school as we know it in a few decades. I'd like to see it happen faster, but because change is usually slower than I think I'd leave it as a safe bet that we'll see a decline of at least 20% fewer per decade enrolled in standard district public schools.
What does diversity libertarianism look like from a policy standpoint? Classical libertarians have it easy, they can just oppose anything that increases the reach of the government. But what do you do when all the big tech companies block access to your platform? Have some sort of anti-collusion law to prevent it? Or is it more of a guiding philosophy than a political driver?
That's the whole point of having an (elected) government : it's the biggest fish in the pond that *also* represents the will of the people.
It also feels like you're switching between "diversity libertarian" and "libertarian" a little too freely. As Sniffnoy said, diversity libertarianism seems more like liberalism than libertarianism. I don't think many people who identify as libertarian would hold many of these views, so it does seem appropriate to point out the hypocrisy. Lots of people opposed net neutrality on libertarian grounds, for example. I could be wrong about what they think, or maybe these are different groups, but I don't think you can quite equate libertarian and diversity libertarian without more justification.
> As Sniffnoy said, diversity libertarianism seems more like liberalism than libertarianism.
IIRC Scott has described himself as a 'liberal-tarian' before. Also, semi-related, I agree with Scott on 90% of what he says in this space and yet I don't ever think of myself as a libertarian; it's like he has a much wider definition of the word than I do.
To a first approximation, you can just take garden-variety libertarianism and do an s/"government"/"government and other monopolies"/; since non-anarchistic versions of libertarianism generally include government institutions (e.g. courts) charged with making sure the government doesn't overreach in its exercise of power, there should be no fundamental problem with having those institutions rein in the monopolies. It would be helpful if you think of that when you write the constitution or charter for your libertarian state, rather than having to try and patch it in later.
I'll let David Friedman explain how the anarchistic libertarians might rein in monopolistic corporations; it will be an elegant theory and I'll be skeptical of the practical application, as always.
I don't know what "monopoly" means in this framework, if it's including multiple large competitors in the same market. To flesh out the Parler example: are the courts supposed to allow Apple to remove it from their store, but sanction Google for doing the same because that would cumulatively deny them access to a major platform? Do I have a legal right to cloud services that ratchets forward as AWS improve their offerings?
Alternatively, if the remedies are extralegal then I don't see how this isn't libertarianism working as intended (if not as desired) and I don't know what the complaint is.
There's a reason the Sherman Anti-Trust Act isn't called the Sherman Anti-Monopoly Act. A small group of large corporations that directly conspire to a particular end is a functional monopoly, and people who want or are willing to regulate monopolies have not generally had any problem dealing with that. Yes, the borders can be fuzzy and there are issues of proof, but that's what judges are for.
Unless you're implying that said Act is somehow applicable in the Parler case, that's an evasion. I'm not looking for an explanation of what libertarianism might recommend in trivially well-trod legal ground, I'm looking for what the policy prescription would be for the specific example brought up in this specific article about "diversity libertarianism".
I have a serious problem with the idea that an example can be meaningful enough to bring up as a complaint in favor of an ideology, yet that ideology is silent about what it would actually *do* in that circumstance. Leaving it up to the personal whims of whichever judge gets assigned the case that day is not a compelling principle.
But that's easy : all 3 of Apple, Google and Amazon should have been shut down years ago !
I'd need quite a bit more detail for that to be worth engaging: does "shut down" mean a legal banning of core business practices, forced breakup into smaller companies, or outright nationalization? On what grounds - market share, anticompetitive behavior, or some prohibition on wider social influence? What other companies are going to fall under this metric, and what are the expected consequences?
It's easy enough to make arguments from combinations of the above, though IMO most of those arguments are pretty bad. But it's another matter to advance them within a libertarian framework without seriously compromising other key principles.
Thinking about this some more I want to restructure my line of thought here, to clarify and make sure I'm addressing the arguments as they're actually being made:
1) Corporate action sometimes results in the exclusion of some actors from certain markets, which has either undesirable direct effects or generally runs against good principles. Addressing this through government action would require increased regulation, rather than decreased.
2) Calling for an increase in regulation runs against the typical libertarian milieu. "Diversity Libertarianism" is an articulation of principles where the underlying goal (variety in markets) is consistent while allowing for libertarian arguments as instrumentally useful but not ideologically necessary.
3) The problem is that now it's committing the classic mistake of specifying both a means and an outcome - it will struggle to come up with policy suggestions in instances where they diverge. The sin of hypocrisy has been replaced with the sin of incoherence, or at least incompetence.
The Parler example is key, because it's what distinguishes diversity libertarianism in the first place - a more straightforward libertarian might bite the bullet and deny that 1) is a problem at all. Likewise, someone with no commitments to libertarianism might have no issue just using the stick of regulation to bash the problem as it arises.
I don't accept that the proposed redefinition of terms ("monopoly") makes the problem go away - the government action required to address the example is a genuine increase in state power. I have little sympathy for what I see as a self-imposed moral quandary, but the facts as they are do seem to lead to a genuine impasse.
A problem with this approach is that there are more axes along which we can measure good vs. bad than you can shake a stick at. We also can't expect to measure most of them accurately. Human measurements like working conditions are hard to pin down in an objective way. Even semi-objective measurements like groundwater pollution have too many internal variables (hundreds of different chemicals and their dispersion/absorption rates) and weighting issues — Is one gram of unobtanium per litre worse than five grams of cyanide deathsulphite? Is one cubic metre of lethal drinking water worse than a thousand cubic metres of merely debilitating drinking water? Is our understanding of human biology able to assign meaningful numbers to such questions, even given the exact chemical ratios, except in some rare situation with middling quantities of ubiquitous, well-understood chemicals?
In addition, why should we expect anyone, including really competent and benevolent government officials, to solve this impossibly complex equation to improve even a single variable without incurring a net loss via one, ten, or a hundred other variables? We're stumbling backwards through the thicket, hoping that the next move will be less painful than the last.
AFAIK we already have answers to your questions about dosage ?
Re: the idea of Facebook choosing to censor BLM content, it's probably worth mentioning that this actually happened. During the first wave of BLM protests, it was found that Facebook's news feed was fairly consistently burying anything to do with the movement: Facebook had designed the algorithm to deliver users the sort of content that people generally like, and people tend to like stuff like the ice bucket challenge and cute animals more than burning cities or grieving families. All this without any "religiously"-motivated intervention on the part of Zuckerberg et al; the platform has a homogenising logic all its own. These days, of course, it runs the other way, but there's still a single uniform affect across pretty much every major social media platform; they deliver content that makes people angry, because that's what the fattest slice of the bell curve seems to want. It seems (to me, at least) that markets actually produce this kind of outcome fairly consistently across all fields. Diversity would be a nice idea, but I'm really not convinced that any kind of libertarianism is the right way to get us there.
If FB was delivering people what they liked to see (to the best of the algorithms ability) and that happened to not be BLM, I wouldn't call that "Facebook choosing to censor BLM content". It's not creating a niche in demand or anything competitors could take advantage of.
You may want to investigate or do liberalism, which has some similar ideas.
That being said, I share many of your moral intuitions here, but wonder if you might be oversanguine about the degree to which market forces and competition produce diversity. You wrote a whole essay on this involving a certain demon king!
*ordoliberalism*, not “or do liberalism”
Hey, Oligopsony, did you ever wanna do anything more with that Werewolves of Avalon thing? I fell off reading and commenting it because I was doing other stuff, but if you still wanna go somewhere with it, I could go back to it.
> The quickest way to enrage me is to criticize some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone
Sure but that’s basically exactly the opposite of Parler’s mission. They exist to give a platform to weird people who were banned from Twitter because they _were_ trying to harm people.
Yes it’s bad that Apple and Google have all the power here but that doesn’t change the fact that Parler is terrible and everyone is better off without them.
(And I’d say the fix here is that the government needs to do... something. The free market is not going to solve QAnon by itself any more than it solved racism by itself.)
They exist to give a platform to weird people who were banned from Twitter for a variety of reasons, Twitter is quite open about banning users for non-harm-attempting reasons.
You might be thinking of Gab.
Why does QAnon need to be solved? There are people out there who believe in everything from creationism to lizard people, and historically people have been pretty comfortable with the idea that many flavours of crazy nonsense will persist in some portion of the population.
AFAIK no one has planned to shoot up a pizza place or committed mass insurrection because of lizard people
We have in fact had murder over literal lizard people (which is worse than Pizzagate, where a shot was fired into the wall without intent to kill), and Japan saw people launching deadly gas attacks on the public subway because a crazy cult convinced them that death was good.
If the government can solve qanon, they can solve you too.
Yes, governments are able to do bad things. I didn’t claim otherwise and no sane person would.
That doesn’t change the fact that governments can also do good things that markets can’t.
We can accomplish good things by compulsion that we cannot accomplish by persuasion? Or it's just easier?
Who is the “we” there? A market can accomplish good things if its incentives are aligned in the right way, but where do the incentives come from? If no one is controlling things then you get negative externalities. If unaccountable people are controlling things you’ll get results that are good for those people and probably not so much for everyone else. You need a system where the market participants are able to incentivize the market controllers to incentivize the market participants to do the right things...
We = human beings, plus anyone else who is competent to participate.
Incentives come from the circumstances, largely from norms that are observed.
If someone is controlling things, you get negative externalities anyway. The question is, how do you resolve disputes in a way that tends to reduce and discourage negative externalities?
Yes, people should be held accountable.
“Government epistemology” - epistemology so robust we can justify compelling people to pretend to accept it.
If people were trying to harm other people, they should get prosecuted for that. Parler need not be involved.
The weirdest part about this is that law enforcement was aware of this happening weeks in advance, and they basically ignored it, aside from dissuading some of the most extreme elements from participating ??
Wait a minute. In your model aren't Apple and Google merely Company As on your wide spectrum? If you think they are *very far* from what the average person wants, or what is optimum, then they're just representing one extreme of the wide "antifragile" spectrum that's desirable, and if we wait around a little, some entrepreneur will see the underserved demand and create the Company B/"Tesla" of the social media platforms and proceed to eat the lunch of those nasty tech oligarchs.
Or to put it another way, if your guiding principle as a diversity libertarian is tolerance for behaviors that are very far from your (or any one individual's) preference -- should you not be *celebrating* the existence of firms that take extremely negative (to you) positions, on the grounds that this must imply the existence (or probable emergence) of firms that will be extremely positive?
Don't worry Scott, those aren't bell curves ;)
I think your two competing distributions take misses a key meta point: if your nuclear power plants are all "mediocre", all doing the same thing, then are they all *safe* or are they all *dangerous*? How do you know? Are you *sure*? The second distribution increases the chance that a nuclear power plant would have a meltdown. The first increase *systemic* risk of all of them melting down because somebody overlooked something and they all copied each other to be "safe". I realize this too is a bog-standard libertarian argument, but worth repeating.
I propose coining the term diversitarianism to describe diversity libertarianism as the ideologies feel very distinct to me.
I favor large redistribution and strong local government, viewpoints few would describe as particularly libertarian.
Yet I definitely would describe myself as a diversitarian, as I find large federal bureaucracies (EU, US, etc.) to be at the root of much evil.
having a distinct word for this ideology would definitely feel helpful!
Maybe diversitism is better word?
It's called liberalism.
In your second-to-last paragraph, you provide possible rebuttals; situations where diversity libertarianism shouldn't rule the day.
I think the case of Parler did meet some of these criteria, in a way that authentically swayed leaders (like Zuckerberg).
- Social networks are fragile as products. They are worse (the products themselves) when there are too many of them. There are natural network effects that tend towards monopolies.
- Online networks are also fragile in a social-malus way, we discovered, because if they harbor communities that rally into real-world violent actions, and the provide a sheen of acceptability that 4chan / 8chan could not
- People use social networks for perverse real-world outcomes, we realized
And finally, the government was subtly a factor. There was a lot of coverage about how, because the Democrats has just taken the senate with the Georgia elections, the social networks were trying to avoid being hauled in front of congress for allowing Parler to continue.
My understanding is that the primary social network people were using to rally for real world violence was... Facebook.
People can do more good by acting in concert just as they can do more harm by acting in concert. We shouldn't try to eliminate every tool that enables people to act in concert, for fear that they may use it to plan harm. Our focus should be on the harm. A criminal conspiracy is bad because it promotes a crime, not because people cooperated; otherwise it would just be an awesome Rotary Club.
Why are you excluding 4/8 chan from the list of social networks?
Wait, the social networks have nothing to do with the banning of Parler : that was Apple/Google (and Amazon).
I agree that the key point about conformity pressure is not whether it comes from the government versus other sources. But I think you underrate regulation (including social conformity pressure).
First, it's not clear that variance reduction on a bell curve is the right way to think about it. An alternative model is that regulation can chop off the left tail of the distribution. For example, we do not in fact allow arbitrarily bad cars; is it clear that every possible car safety regulation affects both tails of the car quality curve equally? That would seem a contentious point, at minimum.
Second, bounded rationality and imperfect information. This blog arose from a community that started out exploring cognitive biases and why they're so persistent, endemic, and difficult to avoid. It's odd to then assert the power of personal choice to avoid bad outcomes. And the blog has explored ideas about the crucial role of culture and tradition to help people avoid repeating mistakes others have made (Heinrich, Chesterton, maybe Scott's metis). By what mechanism does culture do this, if not some form of conformity pressure?
Third, externalities. If we take seriously a consequentialism that weights potential future generations, limiting downside risk becomes extremely important. That should affect the balance with which we strike these variance trade-offs.
And further, I intuitively feel that our future selves deserve consequentalist weight. My present preferences and interests are not in complete alignment with those of past selves or future selves. Younger me made some choices that harmed present-me and future-me. I wish conformity pressure would have prevented him from making those choices. So poor choices have negative externalities even if they only affect the person making the choice.
"Arbitrarily bad cars" requires an arbitrary definition of badness, which not everyone will agree with. The Tesla has a thing called an "autopilot", which seems like a revolutionary advance and if used the way actual autopilots(*) are used would greatly increase traffic safety, but which if misused sometimes kills people who wouldn't have been killed by an ordinary car. Some people genuinely think the Tesla is Very Bad because of this, but it isn't illegal (yet). The Yugo didn't have backup cameras or antilock brakes or (many other things), but it was probably as safe as my 1976 Nova was and it was cheap enough to be used by people who would otherwise still be driving a 1976 Nova with the brake lines held together by duct tape. The Yugo would be illegal, at least in the United States, if it were still being made.
There's a case to be made that some possible automobiles are so dangerous to third parties that they have to be banned, but the bar for that should be set very high.
Can someone give me an example of what Scott calls an "anti-state libertarian" expressing the point of view that we should not care about corporate censorship, mob attacks, or pressures towards social conformity because they do not come from the government? Because I've heard the historically ignorant argument that the First Amendment is all the free speech we need to have, thank you, but that argument doesn't seem to come from libertarians so much as from people who were skeptical of free speech to begin with.
I'll bite. I am mostly an anti state libertarian.
It's not that I think no one should care about these things, it's that I feel significantly less worried then others seem to be. Especially on long time horizons.
Society seems pretty fluid to me. Social restrictions are quick to arise but just as quick at disappearing. Americans love a good moral panic, but they'll ultimately pull back from it.
I just don't want any of these societal scares to get entrenched and formalized in government institutions, because then it never goes away.
Bingo. Hence the extra anxiety when the social restrictions are enforced by a group that is starting to look powerful enough to rival government's specially scary power. Because excommunication means nothing to me, I don't have to worry what the Pope thinks. That wouldn't have been true 500 years ago.
Consider: Basically all the social networks, even the edgy ones like Parler, will ban you over some behaviours, like posting Goatse everywhere or being a spambot. Approximately zero libertarians seem concerned about this because no one cares about protecting that kind of thing: it turns out everyone's okay with corporates censorship in some domains, no matter how much they object to the state doing it.
Large social networks are often communities of communities: subreddits, Facebook groups etc. In these cases, moderation should take place at the level of these subcommunities: there is no strong reason for the site to ban users from posting goatse or spam in a subcommunity where that subcommunity specifically prefers to allow it.
It would require a lot of duplication of effort for the spambots to be banned from every public community they joined. Facebook et al. issuing site-level bans that they themselves manage provides a service most users want, faster bans of spambots with less effort from the group's moderators.
The platform could offer it as a standard service which the moderators of the sub-communities could choose to enable or disable. That's how my ISP does e-mail spam filtering for example: they offer a certain level of standard filtering which is enabled by default, but I can set it stricter or looser or turn it off completely if I want.
They indeed could, that seems strictly better than the current situation. And yet I have never heard anyone agitating for this solution or expressing concern that we lack it, which is the point I was making. Not even the libertarians really care about protecting spam-like speech from corporate censorship.
Even libertarians agree that free speech doesn't mean that you are entitled to an audience. So as long as not a single person wants to receive it, there's no problem. If anybody *wanted* to receive spam, and was prevented from receiving it by a spamfilter forced on them that could not be switched off, then I would agree that was wrong. Maybe not the biggest problem in the universe, but wrong.
That is indeed how it works in some social networks. On the other hand, Facebook is repeatedly being blamed for applying an USA morality in a country with a very different one.
I think I mentioned this last time but there are parallels between the subjective concept of jumping around ideas and the more formal concept of jumping around distributions using advanced monte carlo methods meant to explore bayesian probabilistic spaces thoroughly while reducing chances of getting stuck on local maxima. It's a complex subject with mind blowing math that takes you into higher dimensions inspired by physics in order for jumps to spend more time spiraling the peaks and looking around instead of hovering at the same place for too long. See https://twitter.com/betanalpha/status/1234576972132626445
Do you know if there are still better results to be had by applying the "Hamiltonian Monte Carlo transformation" twice? So at level 1, you get a momentum dimension for every dimension in the original problem. If the original problem had N dimensions, you need 2N coordinates for level 1 HMC. At level 2, you treat the sum of kinetic and potential energies in level 1 as a new potential energy, and introduce 2N new momentum coordinates, for a total of 4N coordinates. Along with periodically dropping back down to ordinary MCMC dynamics, you also periodically drop back down to level 1 dynamics. Of course, this all generalizes to even higher levels.
I have no idea. I already have difficulty wrapping my head around a single level of Hamiltonian abstraction. I would assume that, if it's even possible, you would get steeply diminishing returns.
Meta-MC ! I'll have to try this, thank, bookmarking...
I realize you're trying to make your examples simple for easy consumption, but none of the examples you showed are truly univariate. Trying to map things onto ill-defined "goodness" is very tricky. For example, I had thought price would be part of a car's "goodness", but John Schilling clearly thought it was not, and lower "goodness" cars would have lower price points, making them more affordable.
More generally, most manufacturers attempt to navigate a hugely-dimensional space (features, quality, formfactor, price point, etc.) and find a region in that space that is in high demand but remains poorly-served. For many products, you trade off one thing for another, a phenomenon a unidimensional illustration can't really illustrate.
Thinking about these things in multidimensional space may actually strengthen your argument for "diversity libertarianism", since the variance is no longer "crappy" and "good" but is instead about having more options available so that a single option is more likely to fit your unique preferences in that hugely multidimensional space.
> Economists have shown that this wasn't exactly organic - companies were afraid to give blacks good jobs, to pay them higher wages, or to sell them products they weren't supposed to have; they figured racist mobs would attack them, racist employees would desert them, or a racist government would crack down on them. I tend to think of this as a religious problem, by analogy to very religious towns where eg nobody will sell liquor even though there's no official law against it,
There was a law against it! Jim Crow was a series of laws by regimes that were incredibly hostile to corporations and business writ large. It's not a coincidence that Jim Crow happened right as 19th century progressivism took off. There was this new ethos that the state should take more control over society to make it better and for racists "better" meant less friendly to African Americans. In the absence of those laws, businesses did hire African Americans. In fact, in the presence of those laws they did hire them anyway. And that required enforcement in the form of crackdowns.
>I'm less likely to object to things like taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon - none of those decrease diversity very much.
This is logically inconsistent. Redistributing wealth is definitionally meant to decrease diversity in the sense you're using it here. It literally has the goal of changing the distribution from the second graph to the first.
Jim Crow is exactly the example we should worry about. It was ugly enough that merchants reserved the right to refuse service to "the wrong kind of people," but that habit has a healthy way of breaking down as long as each merchant and each customer makes a free and individual choice. The scary part is when a merchant who bucks the trend finds that he can't buy stock, can't get financing, can't get his kids in school, and frankly can't be safe from having his business or home burnt down, because he's tainted himself by contact with "the wrong kind of people." That's what cancel culture is about. We should be recoiling from it as if from filth.
Scott, if you haven't already, I recommend you read about Timur Kuran's theory of preference falsification. I think it solves your "religious problem". It could also explain why "people will perversely choose the worst option rather than the best if many options are made available" as you stated in your steelman paragraph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
One other thought on your distribution models: I think regulation tends to push an industry from Distribution 2 to Distribution 1. Where public safety is a big concern you get an industry in Distribution 1, such as nuclear. The real challenge is how do you encourage the variance of Distribution 2 without the downside risk of Nuclear Plant A? How do you chop off the left tail? There's been a recent push from Bill Gates and others to fund innovative nuclear companies which is great but there's been stagnation in that industry since the Chernobyl disaster. Maybe venture capital is the answer but I don't think it gets us all the way there. Public support of safe an effective nuclear power is necessary. Just look at what happened when Gates announced that he was funding COVID vaccine R&D.
"Now Point B is Tesla, making revolutionary new environmentally-friendly cars. In fact, let's say it's some super-Tesla that's even better than the real Tesla"
Bopping off on a tangent here, but this is something I am curious about. Car ads over here are starting to push electric or hybrid vehicles, especially in light of the government's commitment to reducing carbon emissions and making grants and rebates for electric vehicles available.
So how does the competition stack up against Tesla? This article gives a rundown but since I know nothing about cars, is Tesla still the best or are there any potential rivals? https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/motors/the-irish-times-guide-to-new-electric-cars-for-2020-and-2021-1.4285450
The consensus is that Tesla is 5 years ahead of everyone else. VW just spent $50 billion on the ID3/4, Taycan etc. and they are way behind. VW was even reduced to shipping ID3s with many of the functions they touted to compete with Tesla not working. Their software development teams are no doubt working frantically to catch up but they are having a hell of a time.
Part of it is that cars are becoming more software devices than hardware devices and traditional automakers are having difficulty with that transition.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-volkswagens-50-billion-plan-to-beat-tesla-short-circuited-11611073974
Dumb question: if Zuckerberg owns 50%+1 of the shares in Facebook, how could anyone ever force him to stop being CEO? I get it, maybe the stock tanks, and maybe the company loses a lot of value but if he truly decided to die on the hill of stopping BLM... what could stop him?
I don't know about this particular jurisdiction, but typically there are laws requiring directors to act in the best interest of all shareholders. Otherwise he could just decide that Facebook will donate all of its assets to Mark Zuckerberg.
Even if they couldn't force him to stop being CEO, the employee rebellion that ensued might actually stop the "censor BLM" directive getting implemented (I doubt Zuck is the one pushing updates to Facebook's source code) and it would certainly stop Facebook from continuing to effectively do Facebook things until the overwhelmingly liberal employees got what they wanted.
This is actually a fair point that I hadn't considered
I liked this article, but I think it has one glaring omission: people disagreeing (in good faith or bad) about the distribution associated with any given topic. The biggest proponents of constraining Big Tech (Scott's words, but what I interpret as Big Social Media) would say that their distribution is closer to that of the power plant example, where poor implementations result in catastrophic results (polarization, acts of sedition, persistent harassment, etc.). The proponents of regulation are not promoting a different distribution directly but attacking the perception of the existing distribution of outcomes.
Taleb has said "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will."
Which seems related to the idea of "diversity libertarianism" - the scale has an impact on how you feel about it (holds for nuclear plant vs. car example). Even the laws and rules of a town are very different from the laws and rules of a country. It is easy to move to another town with better rules, harder to move to another state, and much harder yet to leave a country.
The late Walter Williams (a libertarian economist) made more-or-less the same comment at some point: the most free-market people around still run their families with something like socialism. Scale matters.
Socialism isn't related to giving people presents for Christmas or whatever you're arguing for here. Socialism is about workers taking control of the means of production.
Most families work like a commune--from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, etc. This works well at a family scale, but not well at a national scale.
It seems to work pretty well at a national scale too. Communist countries made considerable progress.
which communist countries are you referring to? Workers didn't control the means of production in USSR, neither do they control means of production in China. Vietnam, a country which claims to be communist, puts their workers in sweatshops to make fashionable goods for bourgeois western white people, effectively selling the product of slave labor to the west.
You're confusing socialism and communism, a common mistake. Hit the books again.
>Taleb has said "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will."
This describes pretty much every conservative person I know. The last sentence however seems like an odd thing to say.
When people talk about left vs right they are talking about it in terms of the government (the first two categories: federal and state) and not community or family. Conservatives have no problem with local charities and non profit community organizations (in fact churches filled with right of center people are some of the biggest examples). Voluntary altruism and helping ones family more than the general public are simply not left wing or socialist propositions.
Regarding your point about whether people will choose the worst vs best with many options available: I'd like to believe this is true, but I'm not sure how to nest phenomenon like anti-vaxers, q-anon, etc within it. It's seems at least plausible that while for some people or in some situations more options leads to better information / outcomes that doesn't apply in all cases.
Counterargument: People won't literally always choose the best option available, but 93% of US kids have their polio vaccines and almost no one think the Earth is flat, people do a pretty good job when left to their own devices. If we could wave a magic wand and suppress the lizard people conspiracies that would probably be a net benefit, but we don't have an anti-lizard-conspiracy magic wand. The only tools available for suppressing stuff are fully general, and that takes us to the question: is there anyone you trust to wield those tools at the better than "pretty good" levels of effectiveness we'd need to outperform leaving things up to individuals?
You are citing statistics from the US, but are you saying we live in a society in which there is no regulation of information/disinformation? There are a host of laws, regulations, and legal mechanisms to correct egregiously wrong/harmful information and most platforms that share information do some degree of quality control (ranging from remove this fraudulent listing to deplatform QAnon people).
We have more free speech than many other developed countries, but people are not making decisions with the information available from "diversity libertarianism."
A normal distribution (bell curve) does not even approximate the quality of a thing being produced (speech, cars, whatever) under unregulated conditions. To interrogate this idea, you have to start with the acknowledgement that the distribution of quality looks something like a negative binomial distribution (lots of shit and a long tail).
It is also untrue that any form of regulation (governmental or non-governmental) reduces quality/choice at both ends of the distribution. Consider quality control, in which Amazon removes fraudulent listings with no effect on new or innovative ideas. We need a more complicated model of where there are difficult tradeoffs and where regulation is an obvious improvement.
Cars are a great example where there are certainly tradeoffs. There is a high regulatory burden which almost certainly increases the barrier to entry for new ideas; however we cannot appreciate the counterfactual in which there are 10s of budget car brands that egregiously pollute the environment, last a couple of years at most, etc. Furthermore, consider how lemon laws protect used car buyers from these same concerns.
While regulation broadly construed can become a major issue as additional rules are tacked on, the optimal point is almost never "no regulation", and I think we should work on designing systems that tend toward an optimum.
"there were times and places where all companies refused good service to blacks for several hundred years."
And yet railroads had to be forced to provide separate facilities because of the cost of having unused capacity. Your point may be different for railroads because they require huge amounts of capital.
There are several different versions of the story around the East Louisiana Railroad, the Separate Car Act and Plessy v Ferguson. Different versions seem to be used by different groups of people to make their various political points. Given that the different versions mostly agree on the facts and disagree on the motivations of the actors, I think it's fairer to say that we just don't - and can't - know which is true.
One version is that the railroad didn't want to discriminate because it cost money and so set up the Supreme Court case in the hopes of overturning the law.
Another version is that the railroad did want to discriminate, but it cost money and wanted protection against a non-discriminating competitor, so went to the legislature to get them to change the law to protect the railroad against discrimination.
A third version is that some railroads wanted to discriminate and some didn't, and the ones that did went to get a law that would force the ones that didn't; and then one of the ones that opposed discrimination set up the Plessy v Ferguson case in order to try to get it overturned (and then failed).
Whether the East Louisiana Railroad was complicit in setting up the case involving Plessy is one of those things where there are some details that favor that story and some that oppose it. So your guess is as good as mine.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt talk a lot about something they call antifragility in The Coddling of the American Mind. They explain it on page 23:
> Some [things], like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Parents usually give their toddlers plastic cups precisely because plastic can survive repeated falls to the floor, although the cups do not benefit from such falls. But ... some things are antifragile. Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously. He notes that muscles, bones, and children are antifragile
The idea that there is a category of things that become stronger only when stressed (but break if stressed too much) is surprisingly useful. I've used "antifragile" in this sense since I read Lukianoff and Haidt's book. But it seems like this is actually pretty different from Taleb's definition?
Is there some other word for this concept?
Bones seem like a bad example for antifragile since they will definitely break.
With no stress at all, they degenerate. Antifragile does not imply invulnerable.
As I recall, Lukianoff and Haidt are using Taleb's definition, but sort of the distilled version. Taleb takes a long, long time to get to the nice definition above, I believe because he is teaching in the "show a whole lot of stuff that demonstrates the concept in different ways and let people figure out the concept" style. I recall listening to him talk about the book on Econtalk, and taking a while to realize he just means there is a third category of how things respond to jostling. Why there isn't a more natural third word to go with fragile and robust seems odd to me, too.
Bones are a good example of antifragile, because sure, they will break if things go too far, but you need to keep stressing them below the breaking point to keep them strong. Otherwise they get brittle and break more easily.
I haven't read Antifragile, so I don't know if the misunderstanding is with me, Scott, L&H, or Taleb, but those two concepts seem very different.
Scott's interpretation is that antifragile things do better than non-antifragile things when there is a high degree of variance in the environment and worse when there is a low degree of variance. For example, taxi drivers are antifragile and dodo birds are fragile: when the environment changes suddenly, taxi drivers do well and dodo birds go extinct.
The L&H interpretation is that antifragile things are things that *break* when suddenly placed an environment of high stress (or variance, if we want to use the same vocabulary). But if they are placed in an environment of constant low-level stress, they become stronger.
By this definition, dodo birds are antifragile and taxi drivers are not. The fact that taxi drivers can survive a large shock (according to Taleb) doesn't make them antifragile, it makes them durable: they can survive large stress, but they don't get stronger from it. Dodo birds can't survive a sudden large change, but they get stronger from small amounts of stress/variance. If you expose them to a few small cats for a million years, they would adapt. Then you could gradually introduce more and larger cats. Eventually you would get a flightless bird that could live comfortably with very many very large cats (see: the ostrich).
I've been pondering this more (along with the responses left by Eric Hammer and mmmMartin), and now I think the whole thing is best represented two-dimensionally.
I can't upload an image to Substack, but imagine a two-dimensional Cartesian plane (i.e. a big + sign). The horizontal (x) axis measures how easily something breaks. The further to the left, the more delicate, and the further to the right, the more durable. The vertical (y) axis measures what happens to the same thing when it is subjected to stress. Things at the top get stronger when damaged (antifragile). Things at the bottom get weaker when damaged (hyperfragile?).¹ Clockwise:
The top right section contains things that are durable and antifragile. The hydra from Greek mythology fits here. It's difficult to kill *and* it gets stronger when attacked.
The middle right is durable and fragile (i.e. neither helped nor harmed by stress). Diamonds and other hard but brittle things go here.
The bottom right is durable and hyperfragile. A suit of armor might be something in this category. It's very strong, but it gets more dents and holes every time it's used.
The bottom left includes things that are delicate and hyperfragile. A Jenga tower is a good example.
The middle left is delicate and fragile. A drinking glass would be in this section.
The top left is delicate and antifragile. The dodo bird fits here. It's delicate because it went extinct when there was moderate disruption to its ecosystem. But it's antifragile because it would have eventually adapted to the new predators given enough time.
This would make the concepts of fragility and durability orthogonal (though related) concepts.
1. I find the Cartesian plane a good visualization, but in reality the y-axis isn't really a range the way the x-axis is. It's a set of three options: antifragile, fragile, and hyperfragile. Also, how "durable" something is is pretty arbitrary.
I think that Taleb is confused about his own concept, and that Scott has inherited that confusion. Lukianoff and Haidt use the word "antifragility" in the way that it makes sense.
Antifragility is not just about variance. It's about behaviour over time. The above quote explains it well.
I agree with this assessment. I have read L&H’s book and the concept of antifragility makes a lot of sense there.
I also have spent a lot of time thinking about this with the concept of stress while learning (I work in education). There is a movement in education to help students avoid any negative experience of any sort. But sometimes you only get the best growth when you are exposed to a moderately stressful stimulus (e.g. a physics/math problem you don’t yet know how to solve). One of my main takeaways from L&H’s book is that if we treat students as fragile, they will become so.
I don’t think discriminatory car companies works that great as an example. For one, Tesla is impressive because it’s been so long since a new car company really broke though (after a decade of being very niche), and despite massive valuation hasn’t captured that much market share. Two, I think it sorta distracts from your point - like, yes, diversity/competition in providers provides protection against discrimination, but it’s also currently illegal. Given that you compare constraints on tech favorably to car companies, is the argument that companies should be allowed to not sell to particular races if the sector has plausible entry? Doesn’t banning discrimination improve diversity of choices for black people?
"Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones." This is, I am pretty sure, is very wrong. You can still download Parler to a Google phone, you just can't get it through their app store.
Sadly, because Google gets to own the Play Store, this isn't a distinction that matters that much.
Anti-fragility seems like the kind of argument that could be levied against almost all things, to the point that you could argue having higher variations helps select things for survival. But it's too vague, too ill defined to be of any actual use. If you have enough variations, enough downside protection and enough natural selection to survive the tail events, you're anti fragile.
For instance, with car companies you actually don't want too much variance. That's why we have laws that limit things on safety and production. Because any increase in variance is a cost to you (the consumer) to figure out what needs to be bought. If you fob that decision off to a third party reviewer, guess what, you're back in "fragile" land, since explicitly or implicitly we're back with single point of failure. The reason we don't have high variance is because we started with high variance, it sucked for a lot of people, and we quickly figured out let's reduce the variance.
"If people are able to choose freely then you wan high variance" is a very high bar that actually doesn't get applied to very many things! It's a tautological argument - if something satisfies that criterion, by definition we've kind of figured out the problems. It's why we have hundreds of cereal options, but the actual variance isn't all that high.
Even diversity libertarianism doesn't stand up to this scrutiny. We don't like the fact that several companies, seemingly independently, reached a conclusion. Sure, this is fair. It's also the outcome of a system that is seemingly anti-fragile - the companies were not coordinating or coerced. If the argument is they all had a worldview, yes they did. But that's what evolving systems do, there's some points where they agree on the ecosystem they're in.
What we have here is the evidence that seemingly anti-fragile systems (with multiple options and competition) devolve on some issues to become unified. Which is also how almost everything works. We always draw lines around how much variance is acceptable. That's most of what our moral evolution has done for us. That's actual civilisation. We can discuss the genius of Swiss Cantons and Renaissance Italy all we want, but the reason most governance systems aren't like that is because those systems are incredibly fragile - to immigration, to cultural cohesion, to coordination failures and more. The US has relatively homogenous 50 quite independent states and it still can barely get anything done in this regard.
To me this is Taleb's genius and his downfall. He's like a poet, creating beautiful symphonies with words and allusions and history. Together it makes you feel as if you can almost reach something ineffable, a point of insight that explains the world. But turns out the inspiration is the actual point, and not an actual theory that you get from the books.
This is similar to a point I've mad about libertarian YIMBYism: There's a question of what the appropriate libertarian reaction is to "state prevents local government from preventing property owners from building more apartments on their land". From the diversity libertarian perspective though, the answer is obviously the YIMBY answer, since it gives us more diversity of land use and density types and gives people more options of what type of area to move to.
Seems like it ought to be the same as the libertarian reaction to "federal government prevents state government from preventing bus companies from just letting black people sit in whatever seats they want". People should be free to decide almost everything themselves. Governments often muck this up. We have good-but-not-perfect mechanisms for keeping governments from getting out of line in this regard, and sometimes that works by having one level of government tell another level of government "stop doing that and just let everyone decide for themselves". This is generally a good thing.
> The evangelical Christian town where nobody will tolerate gay people may not have laws against homosexuality, but gay people still won't be able to find a church, community, or business that meets their needs.
I think you've fallen into a trap, Scott. The whole point of the archipelago is that a community can run itself like this if it wants, as long as gay people who are unhappy with it can go somewhere they prefer. Thus a thousand flowers bloom. If your newly coined diversity libertarianism prohibits this, it de facto *flattens* the space of possible arrangements. And there is no telling how much more flattening consistency requires. Remember that one of your original examples was Aquinastopia, where Catholics could go to live in a Catholic community. Is this disallowed now? Does your libertarianism suddenly prohibit Catholics from living as Catholics?
Don't confuse what happens at the level of the evangelical town from what happens at the level of the archipelago. *Everybody in the archipelago* benefits from the fact that this evangelical town (or Aquinastopia, for that matter) exists. The people who want to live there can live there, the people who don't don't have to, and the people who aren't sure can learn one way or the other whether such a community works.
Granting all that, I don't know exactly how to apply this lesson to Big Tech, because we don't actually live in the archipelago. But I think it suggests that size matters. If a tiny company wants to run itself according to religious principles, that's fine, good even; there is a lot of room in the economy for other companies to run themselves differently, and perhaps outcompete it. But if a huge company with near-monopoly power in some industry or another wants to run itself according to religious principles, you have reason as a diversity libertarian to be concerned.
On another point:
> Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.
I made a similar observation on your Erdogan post. Quoting myself:
> Erdogan's purges look to me like a particularly poignant subversion of this: hollowing out every other institution, until the only thing left is him and his party. It should really, really concern us if seemingly every semi-official institution in our country, from the top schools to the top newspapers to the top thinktanks, march in nearly complete uniformity: it raises the question whether they, and the people in them, can act of their own will at all.
The problem is, as you say, we *don't* live in the archipelago. His use of the term religion is a bit of a distraction, it might be better to think of it as "cultural values". If everyone, or at least the people who matter, have the same norms, then you get a de facto prohibition against certain things. The gay person in the evangelical town who has to stay in the closet, or a world where republicans aren't allowed to post on social media. Ideally, they'd just move one island over, but he's specifically talking about the examples where there are no more islands.
I don't think an archipelago model can solve the problem of children, who are typically trapped wherever their parents live. Or the problem of deliberate restriction of information so that people can't make informed decisions about where to live.
Scott explicitly says the "most important task is to think of the children" followed by a section all about how to ensure information about other communities and exit rights so children aren't trapped in one. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ Why do you think his solution wouldn't work?
Good point. Actually, I think in the US, freedom of religion is misunderstood. The majority of residents of the US prior to the revolution were persecuted religious *communities* from Europe. Religion in the 1700s was a community affair, not a personal faith as it is understood to be today by American Protestants. Therefore freedom of religion in that context implies letting communities live the way that they choose and not interfering from the outside.
I don't know if this makes the US liberal or not liberal, but its important to understand this context.
Incidentally: Scott didn't actually use Aquinastopia as an example. Looks like that was from the comments. He did use the example of Christiantopia, though.
I should reread my sources before referencing them....
THIS "Even beyond politics, I think this predicts a sort of ethos of what I like and what I don't like. The quickest way to enrage me is to criticize some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone - to try to browbeat them into doing the same thing as everyone else. That group might be just a tiny bit of slack away from creating something amazing!"
This argument seems weaker than it should be due to using dumb examples. To take the less controversial one, car companies are not actually easy to create.
Yes, it’s true that many industrial nations have a car company, and some have more than one. They don’t seem to be nearly as difficult as building a competitive aerospace industry, which China has been trying to do for quite some time with little success so far.
But in the US, there were no new car companies for many decades. Tesla had a lot of near-death experiences along the way, and part of their survival strategy was selling luxury cars that most people can’t afford. Crappy 1920’s style cars would today be considered unsafe at any speed and the idea that a car company is something a few people can build in a garage is just nonsense. (Unless we are talking about grey-market golf-cart style electric vehicles, which are apparently a thing in China.)
By contrast, building a crappy cell phone seems much easier, at least in China where there seem to be many manufacturers building them using a common ecosystem of standard parts. Maybe that would have been a better example?
(The other example that I thought was dumb turned out to be something I misread.)
Well, there's yet another attempt to make a Linux smartphone, by Librem. I wish them well, but it's like we had one of those per year, and only Google succeeded...
I'm not sure your car example checks out. In the first world cars are heavily regulated, perhaps even more than nuclear plants. The only reason anybody bothers to make cars at all is that the demand for them is so high that almost any regulatory burden is worth the effort.
On the other hand, you might be amused to find out about the unregulated electric golf cart in China. If the car is small, slow, cheap and electric, the externalities are minimal and government feels less pressure to regulate them.
https://restofworld.org/2021/tesla-vs-tiny-cars/
I was not particularly looking forward to buy a Chinese car, but still, great news !
This is an interesting framing! Game theory (or, well, math) can outline some situations where you would want to migrate your preferences between systems that are fragile and antifragile.
Generally if you're losing, you want high variance systems.
If you're winning, you want the status quo to sit like a diamond, more lock in is better.
So, Tim Wu's The Master Switch gives a history of communication companies all following this similar trajectory: scrappy startups finding workarounds that change all the rules and disrupt everything, then becoming large institutional players that want greater and greater regulation to prevent anyone else from inventing anything that would ever change the world in any way.
Do you want to roll a d20 or 3d6 to hit? Depends whether you're fighting kobolds or dragons. (There are even situations, in gambling and in life, where you would even want to take a lower "average" return, in order to shift the variance.)
So it's possible to entertain a meta-political perspective, where you think society should wander between libertarian (or, "50 labs federalism") vs. more central standardization, based on how well its currently meeting certain markers you've laid out for the health of society or the effectiveness of policy or whatever.
I don't know how you can make arguments like this without getting into object-level illustrative examples, but as soon as you do that, your argument becomes subject to the object-level examples being wrong. It is absolutely not true that market entry for new automakers is easier than new phone makers. Parler is accessible from a browser. Blocking them from native app stores doesn't block anyone's access. I have no idea if there even is a native app for Substack, yet none of us are blocked from reading your blog. What actually took Parler offline (for what, a week?) was Amazon Web Services turning off their servers. But even there, as coming back online showed, AWS isn't the only provider of managed infrastructure, and you can always self-host if literally no one will sell you service.
Until such time as a peer to peer radio network with TCP/IP capabilities exists, the only true monopoly service that can cut you off from the web are backbone ISP providers. If you can't hook into them, you can't hook into the network, whether your servers are running or not. And it stands out that a whole lot of people calling themselves libertarians have complained quite loudly about Google and Apple shutting Parler out of their app stores, but not about net neutrality, which actually addresses the only true monopoly providers controlling access to the web. It makes it seem more partisan than ideological.
Of course, I don't think you personally are partisan. You're an ideologue. But an inherent issue with trying to claim allegiance to any sort of named ideology is you immediately associate yourself with other people using the same name. "Diversity libertarianism" doesn't seem to me like it really captures what you're trying to say here. You're just arguing for classic welfare economics on the merits of the Pareto optimality achieved under conditions of pure competition. You're arguing against the existence of monopolies, whether those be warlords, mafias, governments, big businesses, religions, cultures, it doesn't matter.
I don't have any answer here on what you should call yourself, but you have to realize that insisting on "libertarian" even if you tag "diversity" in front of it alienates and marginalizes you from a lot of people who are going to have a knee jerk bad reaction to that term because of who else uses it. I can understand wanting to reclaim it. That seems to have worked for the word queer. I think it probably hasn't for slut. But is that really your goal? Do you really care what people call you? Why not just argue for specific positions without needing to identify and name an underlying guiding principle that may or may not really be there? This seems to be Taleb's problem, too. There are undoubtedly some things he is very right about, but as soon as he tries to go from those examples to generalize to a grand theory of everything, it doesn't work and he becomes trivially wrong about most of them. If your position is some regulations are good, some are bad, and the guiding principle is whether or not they promote or prevent monopolies, call yourself an "anti-monopolist." What does Matt Stoller call himself? Unfortunately, probably libertarian, based on the name of his organization.
I'm not even sure "against monopolies" can stay ideologically pure and coherent. How do you prevent monopolies from forming without a monopoly on law enforcement? I'm kind of with John Schilling on this. David Friedman can probably give some elegant sounding theory backed up with an example from 12th century Iceland being the only working implementation, but that doesn't leave me super confident it can really widely work.
"How do you prevent monopolies from forming without a monopoly on law enforcement?"
Law enforcement is pretty close to being a natural monopoly if ever there was one (again, Dr. Friedman is your go-to source for exceptions), and most libertarians and explicitly Libertarians are OK with the state having machinery in place to do most of a society's law-enforcement work. Whether that should include enforcing anti-monopoly (and anti-trust and anti-quasi-monopoly) laws is more controversial, but not outside the Libertarian Overton Window.
How do you prevent monopolies by creating one?
If you define "prevent" in a way that demands 100.00% success, you don't. But a system that creates one monopoly in one restricted domain to break up all the other monopolies within reach, that prevents many monopolies even if it doesn't prevent them all. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Obviously I am quibbling, but you aren't talking about preventing monopolies, but regulating or controlling them. There is more than one way to skin that cat, some with better track records, others with worse, and some of which might involve decentralized strategies that do not depend a monopoly to cope with a monopoly.
One can regulate and control governments themselves, rather than just prevent it, and once upon a time we invented a fairly neat decentralized strategy for keeping government in check.
One can if one is benevolent dictator. The question is, how does one create a monopoly that controls and regulates itself in a way that violates the immediate interests of those running it? That is not to say that it can’t be done, just that the research seems incomplete and the demand for its completion seem to lack urgency for most people.
"But other fields have higher entry barriers than cars do. Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones. But these are the only two major smartphone companies. "
Forgive me if this has been posted previously, but there are lots of smartphone companies. There are, however, only two major operating systems for smartphones, and most of the smartphone companies use one or the other.
Equating Parler and BLM, as this piece does, is beyond ludicrous, and reveals a huge blind spot.
In what way is he equating them? Calling them both things potentially censorable by Mark Zuckerberg?
Thanks. Calling them both religions, with no other distinction.
Taleb isn't a particularly clear writer, so that's probably why it's hard to grasp the concept of antifragility (it's also stupidity named, but that is neither here nor there). The basic variable is the response to unpredictable stress. Fragile systems are weakened by it, robust systems are neither weakened bit strengthened by it, and antifragile systems are strengthened by it. Exercise is antifragile, because its best results occur when workouts are irregular and non-repetitive. Option trading is antifragile because it only really lucrative when you bet on ludicrous occurrences. It's not so much that the range of outcomes is highly variable, so much as that they aren't even calculable. The point isn't so much that "we" (as in humans generally) need to find a more accurate way to assess risk, as much as "we" need to realize that risk can't be calculated for everything.
"smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones"
I think this falls into a mistake that Scott often makes - it overstates the importance of intelligence and understates the importance of information and of the cultural guidance to understand that you have a choice and on how to make the choice.
On an information example, the choice of medical providers. Most people are not medically qualified to tell which providers are good and which bad - low variance is good if you really can't tell a good doctor from a charlatan. Moreover, a lot of people default to using price to judge, assuming that more expensive medical choices are better. Even if the information is available to know which doctors are better than others (and the medical profession works hard to keep that information unavailable), lots of people don't know how to evaluate it.
On a cultural guidance example, the choice of colleges. Middle-class parents are much more likely to have opinions on which colleges are better than others, and those opinions are much more likely to be correct than working-class parents [I'm using class in the class-as-culture sense, not the class-as-economics sense]. Also, they're more likely to know about how to get scholarships, how to apply for and get income-based discounts to tuition, and so on. Knowing that you won't have to pay sticker price because you will get need-based aid and scholarships and so on is information that many working-class potential students do not have, resulting in them being put off by a price that they won't themselves have to pay.
Well said
I think you may be taking the premises of your argument for granted. The classic libertarian arguments ignore structural impediments to optimal (or rational) behavior. For example, the ideal of hearing as many opinions as possible so as to maximize your chance of hearing the true one seriously ignores reality. In reality, there are time constraints (e.g., does a single mother working two jobs have time to sufficiently read and evaluate every argument for and against gun control?), limitations on an individual's ability to process and filter information correctly, and demagogues that prey on human nature weaknesses (e.g., Peoples Temple 1978). Also, not every opinion is created equal. Is a plumber equally suited to evaluate the efficacy of a drug from experimental data as a research scientist? Qualifications matter. As do motivations - if two scientists reviewed the efficacy of a new drug and one was being paid by the pharmaceutical sponsor, would that impact your judgement of her credibility? If no forced disclosure, you wouldn't know. I'm not convinced by the premise that people are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones. Humans are flawed. Society is flawed. The way we govern society should reflect the flaws.
And then we move to free market fundamentalism, which you acknowledge in the last paragraph is flawed. In almost every important sector, there are hugely important externalities. That is not an argument for universal regulations and regulations should always be thoughtful and, to the extent possible, tested in order to avoid unintended consequences. But it does recognize that humans are inherently self-interested and short sighted. Oil magnates care about their economics, not the environment. The Sacklers cared about their fortune, not the risk of addiction. Volkswagen cared about their quarterly earnings, not the Clean Air Act. Zuckerberg cares about world domination (?), not the risk of facilitating genocides. Regulations need to reshape incentives to harness self-interest but also protect society from our inability to process risk and large scale ruin in addition to our bias of discounting the future.
The point is not to hear as many variants as possible, but to avoid suppressing any that might benefit someone. Maybe we could name some ideas we think will never benefit anyone, but can we find a principle that allows us to silence those without any collateral damage? And if people in the past had been able to eternally silence harmful ideas, many ideas we consider beneficial would have gotten the deep six. Even smart people in the past have been wrong about this. Can we expect that we have arrived at the end of history, and so will never make such mistakes again?
Is there some idea that you wish had been suppressed 100 years ago? Would that have succeeded in eliminating it, or just prevented people from arguing against it?
People are falable, but that applies, not only to the public being allowed choices, but also to the regulators and legislators and judges who decide which choices the public should be denied. The legislators are elected by those same people who are too dumb to make their own choices, and the regulators and judges are appointed by those legislators. We can hope that the decisions get better as we go up the chain, but that's not at all clear to me.
The example of “nuclear plant” as antifragile bothers me but I’m having trouble nailing down why.
A single instance of tech is often fragile. One car crash does not make that car stronger. It can’t reorganize itself and sometimes it can’t economically be rebuilt individually (“totaled”). Many car crashes, when abstracted into data, can be used by companies to improve the fragile product and in this sense a company is more fragile or more antifragile (whether in service of better safety reputation attracting more buyers, or compliance with a regulatory environment) depending on company culture and how they leverage the data into better product.
Any single instance of tech is fragile, so any single nuclear plant is also fragile. Nuclear plants with the same design flaw don’t all blow up at once, either, when they are individually distant and subject to different circumstances.
However the nuclear engineering culture has to be antifragile; when an “accident” occurs, they scramble to learn how to more successfully create a safer plant. It has to learn from mistakes and respond to stress. From what I understand there were times historically when a potentially safer design was not chosen for political reasons; nuclear regulatory culture has to be less fragile than some regulatory cultures because they are trying to balance tech advancement, cost, and safety in a context of large externalities, and they have more actual influence (I think) on next-generation plant design than say the DOT has on the design of exhaust filters for idling trucks. It is a government-industry partnership in the US in ways other industries are not like car and truck companies.
The regulatory culture is fragile to financial pressure but antifragile to nuclear accidents. “The safer design is too expensive” is a barrier. But the pool of players that benefit from a functioning nuclear industry is large enough that the military, academia and national labs all get in on making the safer design cheaper, in an antifragile way.
In other words I don’t think it’s accurate to say the nuclear industry is like company A. For it to exist at all there is a lot of this industry-government design pressure to reject dangerous designs before they are ever built, and then learn as much as possible from accidents. I’d call it antifragile with a floor. If the industry was fragile they’d have given up and gone home after the zillionth unintentional radiation release. Any design process is allowing some variance and trying to capture the top end of it.
I’m trying to come up with an example of what is fragile but just got interrupted. I’m not saying nothing is a fragile system just that nuclear plants/power is not the best example.
Nuclear does show the relationship between externalities and fragility though. Again I would say in environment of high externalities the company has to be antifragile in looking for every way to minimize the externalities. I think nuclear does this, to the point of cultivating feeder industries to manage the externalities.
Musk’s whole space thing keeps having explosions but they won’t stop. High risk or high externality doesn’t correlate with fragile. There is a feedback loop though.
Typo: "Tesla did something like this when Musk though the big dogs were neglecting electric, and that went great." I think "though" should have been "thought".
> it's won Power Plant Magazine's Reactor Of The Year award five times in a row.
I wanted to see if this is a real thing.
In fact, this is fake news. The magazine is called POWER, and the award is called "Plant of the year."
https://www.powermag.com/awards/plant-of-the-year/
Scott, I love the clarity of laying this out with distributions and proper dissociation between different strains of libertarianism, but what I don't understand here is your position on the dynamic state of distribution 2.
You say distribution 2 is good in cases where everyone can and does make good choices, because everyone will buy from B and A will go out of business.
But at that point, distribution 2 no longer exists; everything on the left side of the graph is gone, and the reality looks like distribution 1 again!
(with a higher average value, thankfully)
So, my question is: as a diversity libertarian, do you actually want to be *living in* a world that looks like distribution 2, or do you want that distribution to have existed *at some time in the past* but be gone now?
If something that looks like distribution 2 has endured for a few decades or so, isn't that strong evidence that people in reality *don't* have either the ability or competence to make good choice in that space, since if they did all the As would be gone already and things would have converged on a distribution 2 made of all the Bs?
This gets to the point about Parler - in what way is Parler not just an A that the community recognized was bad and abandoned? Sure, there's the weirdness about boycotting it individually vs. boycotting its corporate partners, but in either case it seems like the majority of consumers decided it was awful and wanted it abolished, which is what you should expect to happen to As in distribution 2.
It seems to me like 'diversity libertarianism' as you describe it is too time-independent; it imagines a single point in time where you have a lot of options, and a single instance of decision-making where you choose the best option. In that singl instance, yese, you want tohe world to look like distribution 2.
But run that dynamic over time and measure the world at the limit, and it looks more like a world where all the bad choices are ignored and go extinct and only the good choices survive. Which looks like distribution 1, and possibly looks like 'ideological conformity.'
Given that, it feels to me like diversity libertarianism should be really really focused on making sure that *new* ideas have a chance to be generated and survive long enough to be fairly evaluated and take on their proper market share, and a lot less focused on old ideas vanishing when the market turns against them and moves on.
Ie, moving as rapidly as possible from distribution 2 to distribution 3 to distribution 4, rather than protecting the As from distribution 2 who cry that they're being canceled.
The majority of GAFAM's consumers aren't even in the USA, why should they care specifically about Parler one way or the other ? The precedent of having tremendous power over applications however...
I don't think Tesla being started by Elon Musk, already a billionaire at the time, is very much at all like some guy creating a huge company by starting with a few crappy cars put together in his garage. Without getting in to all the regulatory and other barriers to entry that exist in car manufacturing, isn't plain old capital ultimately the biggest barrier to entry in pretty much everything?
Regulatory barriers typically increase the capital you need to enter the market. I assume there are things that would require insane amounts of capital even in perfectly unregulated world, such as building your own Mars colony, but I wonder which projects currently unreachable for most people would become reachable without regulations.
Right, I'd agree. Capital is essentially THE barrier to entry, and things like regulations and exclusionary deals just raise that capital barrier. If you have a zillion dollars you'll just offer a few million dollars to every employee and lawyer and lobbyist you'd need to overcome it. That's why it was weird to compare something as quaint as starting a business in your garage to a billionaire more or less paying his way into automobile manufacturing. I'm not saying Musk didn't bring something special besides money, because I definitely think he did.
I'm struggling to think of any area where regulation provides the dominant capital barrier to entry. Almost every industry or large-scale project I can think of is unreachable just by a pure capital barrier which would be substantial enough even without regulations. Large, established businesses can usually outcompete just by working at a larger scale. They can charge less, take more risks, and move quicker. It's really hard and rare to be able to capitalize on whatever mistakes they make with substantially less money. But regulations often still make the large companies' do their own work less efficiently.
People seem to be getting stuck on the "l" word a lot. The more important point is that large scale monopolies dominating an ecosystem reduce the variance that leads to positive innovations that improve human lives.
Insofar as most of the world is "governed" by legacy institutions ruled by stationary bandits (aka kleptocracies), the opportunity cost of not allowing "a thousand nations bloom" via new jurisdictions is immense. Hong Kong and Singapore showed the value of economic freedom more effectively than did any arguments, China copied them in designing their SEZs, and a billion people saw a 10x increase in their wages over twenty years, arguably one of the greatest moral achievements in history.
We don't need to agree or even know exactly what leads to success in an ecosystem open to innovation. As the Seasteaders say, "Don't argue, build." But the more we support an ecosystem of innovation with respect to the creation of new jurisdictions on land, the more rapidly we're likely to discover new and better forms of law and governance. Competition among Greek city states led to Athens; competition among medieval Italian city states led to the Renaissance; competition among the "Free Cities" of the Hanseatic League led to modern commercial society via the success of Holland, which in turn played a key role in the rise of British and American prosperity. More broadly, as David Landes has argued, Europe's fragmentation was key to its prosperity, including the fragmentation that allowed persecuted thinkers to move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
By contrast, large scale empires typically stagnated over time. Modern prosperity is thanks to competing jurisdictions, a sine qua non of the discovery process of the institutions required for prosperity.
Should we argue over the "l" word or get busy creating new and better institutions for human flourishing?
That said, although I'm also in favor of internalizing externalities and supporting the poor (and thus could pass as a "liberal"), many of those who have focused on the need for liberating innovators have at least some familiarity with Hayek and others who emphasize the stultifying effect of the state. Thus I'd rather be considered a bleeding heart libertarian than be part of the "progressive" tribe that rarely focuses on the morally urgent need for permissionless innovation (McCloskey).
"Europe's fragmentation was key to its prosperity": what is your take on EU :)?
Q: Why does a Yugo have a rear-window defroster?
A: Keeps your hands warm while you're pushing it.
From the outside view, increased variance increases both the high and the low ends of the range of possibilities. However I think an unfortunately common inside view, mapped onto this framework, goes as follows: my politics/tastes/whatever are basically Correct, and so variance is entirely bad: the high end is a fixed point (at me), so increased variance just cashes out as more people being increasingly Wrong.
The other place where the libertarian argument falls down is when time is critical. Sure, if social media companies censor certain info, you can start your own and migrate people there (if the AWS/Apple/Google thing doesn't happen). However, if the censored information happens to be highly pertinent to an election happening in a month, good luck
In other words, emergencies justify violating rights. But do they justify violating rights without compensating those whose rights were violated?
If the low variance scenario results from everyone happening to agree on a narrow range of desirable approaches, and everyone further agrees that exploration outside A and B will not be legally or socially punished, that seems fine. Obviously this doesn’t mean that nothing should ever be legally or socially punished. So what determines what we can prohibit legitimately?
Maybe the post was inspired by Taleb, but clearly the basic issue is different, so speaking in terms of antifragility confuses matters.
Quick counterintuitive thought: A narrow distribution of ideas may be beneficial in the public sphere. Now reflexively, I'm inclined to like the marketplace-of-ideas theory of discourse. I like markets, I like choices, I like diversity and I love ideas. So I'm offering this argument with a big grain of salt and perhaps against my own interests:
The "mainstream" of actionable public ideologies is akin to nuclear reactors: You want a narrow, safe range of variation more than you want a high-variance set that might include world-saving and world-breaking ideas. (Note: In practice, the resilience of the "world" at stake would matter here. High-resilience polities could brook more ideological variation.) Hence recent gatekeepers like publications, political parties, legislatures, universities. Before that, nobility, royal courts, hierarchical religions. And always social structures that reward and punish. Specific claim: In a population where X percent of the population believes in wrong-but-arguably-harmless ideas (angels or UFO? Your mileage will vary), an equal percentage of people is ready to believe wrong-and-potentially-catastrophic ideas (fill in your own blank here -- I'll put the crayon in your hand, but you have to draw your own monster). And maybe exposure to those ideas creates the potential for greater adoption. In such a case, gatekeepers that limit public discourse to "what the decent people think" might be performing a service, even if they limit exposure to fantastic new ideas. (While still allowing for hypothetical mechanisms for evolutionary fit ideas to grow in acceptance and no-longer-adaptive mainstream ideas to whither and die?)
Prediction: If this is true, societies/cultures/groups with greater stability (in terms of less vulnerability to ideological-triggered disaster?) brook more dissent/wrongthink.
The odds of this being true: I find this line of thought more interesting than persuasive. I'll admit to some nostalgia for a world without comment sections. But I can also think of ways that world was less good than this one. I do think we're in the long process of adjusting to the consequences of rapid advances in communication technology, but I need to be humble about my ability to assess what that means and where the process goes, and even less confident I can easily distinguish what's really new from what has always been thus.
> Quick counterintuitive thought: A narrow distribution of ideas may be beneficial in the public sphere.
The obvious problem with this idea is that to restrict the range of ideas, you need to trust someone to determine what ideas should be censored, and most people can't be trusted to do this well, nor can most processes be trusted to reliably find people who can do this well, especially because both people and institutions tend to become dominated by elites who tend to promote pro-elite ideas and consider anti-elite ideas dangerous. (A possible exception is when the range of ideas that should be restricted is widely enough agreed on by the society to be a Schelling point; I think Germany's ban on Nazism may be an example of this.) Also (this idea is from https://www.thefire.org/coronavirus-and-the-failure-of-the-marketplace-of-ideas/ ), it can be useful to find out how many people believe a dangerous idea to figure out how to solve problems that it may or may not have caused. For instance, racism (narrowly defined) is strongly suppressed by most of modern American society, so most racists hide their racism, so despite the obvious importance of knowing how many people are racist to deciding how to solve racial disparities, it is difficult enough to know how many peopple are racist that every idea from extreme progressives claiming that all white people are racist to conservatives claiming that racism is enough of an unpopular fringe idea to have little practical effect is considered plausible by a large part of the population.
>The obvious problem with this idea is that to restrict the range of ideas, you need to trust someone to determine what ideas should be censored, and most people can't be trusted to do this well, nor can most processes be trusted to reliably find people who can do this well, especially because both people and institutions tend to become dominated by elites who tend to promote pro-elite ideas and consider anti-elite ideas dangerous.
Excellent point. I think the mechanism for restriction would involve something like a high entry barrier to mass communication (think the world we used to have where book publishers, newspapers, radio and television programmers acted as gatekeepers, only sometimes intentionally but always effectively) and/or a common ideological agreement about what to exclude (which doesn't need to be explicit; in fact, I bet it works better if the ideas to be excluded are so outre that they don't even come up as examples).
Either way, what I'm thinking of would not be something that could easily be instrumentalized or enacted, for the reasons you point out. It would be more like the water in the fishbowl we swim around in, the "that's just the way things are" that we take for granted, until some new technology or idea comes along and the system is forced to find a new equilibrium.
And I should acknowledge the neither of these mechanisms seems to fit my original guess that an idea-restriction mechanism would work thermostatically to optimize for stability. There would have to be some other way that appetite for the out-of-bounds would grow when change is needed (to who? how?) and wane when the status quo is good (to who, how?). Tough to see how that happens.
"But other fields have higher entry barriers than cars do."
Er, I think car manufacturing has one of the highest barriers to entry of all consumer products? There's a reason that Tesla is the only successful new American car company to start in the last 50+ years.
> If Ford refuses to sell cars to black people, Toyota should see a profit opportunity and step in. If both Ford and Toyota ban blacks at the same time, some upstart like Tesla should step in. If Ford, Toyota, and Tesla all do it, some guy with a wrench who's always dreamed of making cars in his garage should notice a billion-dollar business opportunity lying on the ground, get seed capital from equally greedy investors, and solve the problem.
I don't think this actually works very well in practice. Suppose the hypothetical "racist car companies" world existed, and you wanted to start NRC, the Not Racist Car company. First, you have a hard time raising money from investors. It's not impossible, but in this hypothetical world the most successful car companies are super racist, and investors are skeptical that doing literally the opposite of every successful car company is going to work. But you find some and are able to raise some capital at extortionate terms. If everything goes well your company is going to make a zillion dollars even though your cost of capital is nuts.
Unfortunately, that's going to take years to get going, even if you're successful. In the meantime, minorities have no access to cars. Even after you start producing, for years or even decades, minorities are forced to Distribution 1 while everyone else has access to Distribution 2. When people talk about "privilege" this is the kind of thing they're talking about.
Now cars are pretty important. Not having a car, or having a crappy car, has lots of knock-on effects. Minorities basically have to live in major urban areas, while non-minorities can live mostly wherever they would like. This limits the jobs available to minorities, which in turn messes with the labor market. So now even equally qualified minorities will make less than non-minorities.
But can they become equally qualified? Not if people want do some extra racism on the sly. Just put your best schools, public services, and businesses far away from public transportation (Hi, Robert Moses!)
At the margin, some people who might have barely gotten a job now have no job at all. Some of those people go all Jean Valjean on you and your loaf of bread, and now your prisons are full of minorities, which reinforces Ford's & Toyota's position.
And of course this has long-range knock-on effects. The Car Inequality is going to take generations before it's dissipated.
My point here is that we can't rely on Diversity Libertarianism in cases like this because most negative externalities need to be regulated, and racism causes massive negative externalities.
"and investors are skeptical that doing literally the opposite of every successful car company is going to work"
But the proposal is not to do "literally the opposite of every successful car company". Successful car companies build good cars; doing "literally the opposite" would require deliberately building bad cars. Successful car companies buy their steel from the cheapest reliable supplier; doing "literally the opposite" would require buying steel from the most expensive supplier. There's a good reason for investors being skeptical of "literally the opposite of proven success".
Investors are, demonstrably, quite favorable to ventures which propose to do exactly the same thing that successful companies do except change *one* thing that plausibly promises to increase profits. Here, the proposal is to do exactly the same thing that every successful car companies except change one thing, and since that one thing is "also sell the same product to a new market full of paying customers the existing firms are ignoring", the path to increased profits is pretty clear. Unless basically everyone is a super-racist, they should have little trouble raising capital.
If basically everyone is a super-racist, then that nation never bothered to abolish slavery and the best you can hope for is that the government is too weak to chase down all the runaway slaves.
Taleb doesn’t hate curves that look sort of “bell-shaped” like the ones you drew, which usually have “fat tails”. He hates GAUSSIAN curves. If you understand the difference between “power law” and “Gaussian”, you get to review Taleb’s work and be taken seriously, but if you make a mistake like this it doesn’t bode well.
I read Antifragile a while back, and I don't remember it containing very many equations at all, and in particular not equations that looked like (e^(-x^2)) and (1/x^a). A bit unfair to expect Scott to review the book at a level of mathematical rigour that the book itself doesn't attain. (Disclaimer: I'm aware that Taleb has many other mathematically oriented works, of course, but the most mathematical thing I remember from Antifragile in particular are some plots demonstrating the difference between convex and concave functions. Of course, my memory could be faulty.)
The situations you describe are ones where a large majority of the population believe in the religion, in which case a democratic government will be helping them suppress the atheists not stopping them from doing it, as will almost any other form of government. So if you are a diversity libertarian I don't think there is a solution to your problem, except in the special case where the state is 99% fundamentalist (or racist or whatever) and the federal government isn't even majority fundamentalist.
So even in the situation you describe, I am against federal regulation of FB et. al. purported to keep them from censoring. You will note that all the supposed rules against racial discrimination got ignored when the discrimination took a form, affirmative action, that was politically popular.
The problem is proverbial — setting the fox to guard the hen house. The government has a stronger incentive to suppress (some) political speech than FB. FB is only one of several large (and many small) players in its market, so can only suppress speech to the extent that other players agree. The government doesn't have that limitation — it can regulate all of them.
Yeah, having the feds regulate speech on the internet to protect us from the power of Facebook/Twitter/Youtube sounds like giving ourselves cancer to cure our annoying cold.
I think the term "diversity libertarianism" makes sense as a type of libertarianism, but I think that the complexity argument for diversity is strictly superior to the libertarian argument, as it handles all the cases the libertarian argument does, and more.
John Stuart Mill's argument for free speech was that many unpopular opinions might contain elements of truth, and hence truth can be assembled from bits and pieces of many opinions. The complexity argument for diversity is that it takes many different kinds of pieces to make a complex machine. To build complex social mechanisms, we'd like many different units of any kind--opinions, ethnicities, personality types, and educational backgrounds.
In its original historical context, libertarianism effectively opposed ancient Platonist tradition, which says that there is one perfect, eternal model for everything, including one perfect opinion to hold on any subject, which is True in all times and places; and the job of society is to find that one perfect opinion and shove it down everybody's throat and forbid anybody from ever questioning it.
Locke used empiricist epistemology to argue (among other reasons) that we can't ever be sure that what we think is the one Truth really is the one Truth, so we better listen to all opinions. But (AFAIK) he didn't challenge the idea that there is just one Truth.
Mill's argument for freedom of speech doesn't convince people who are /really sure/ that they do, in fact, know The Truth. The complexity argument for diversity gives a different view of the same issue--not that we want more opinions for society to choose from, but that we want people with different opinions to remain in the population indefinitely, because this difference in opinion will produce division of labor, and a discrepancy in values which makes it more possible for everyone to get more of what they personally value most. It rejects the very notion of converging on a final Truth.
This post starts out riffing on the tradeoffs between risk and benefit variances and then pivots to the issue monopoly vs. "diversity" in the free market.
The first part just reflects the fact that an optimal balance of risk and return depends on the relative distribution of the various outcomes (as best you can forecast), multiplied by the costs and benefits associated with those outcomes. Like everything in economics, you are optimizing when the marginal benefits are at least equal to the marginal costs. (i.e., MB = MC).
Everything that follows on the risk-benefit topic is mostly a recognition that, even assuming arguendo that you can accurately predict the probabilities of various outcomes, different people will still have very different optimizing points (MB = MC) due to: (a) being differently impacted by the costs and benefits of particular outcomes (e.g. someone living close to an accident-prone plant, vs. far away); and (b) having different tolerances for risk (e.g., someone who can sleep like a baby knowing there is a 1/10,000 chance of a plant explosion vs. someone who can't stop worrying about it).
Bottom line: The theory of making decisions under uncertainty is uncomplicated. But ascertaining the true probabilities of outcomes, and then politically mediating the interests of lots and lots of people with different interests and preferences is pretty impossibly complicated.
I like this description. Mostly I just err on the side of freedom. This generally results in me being anti-regulation, but I also don't like when monopolies restrict speech. It's the same root principle, but people think there's some deep contradiction there.
Also the block being a result of big tech weakness is a good point not made often enough.
There is nothing inherently good about "Diversity." It's only potentially a good thing if: (a) the "diverse" things have different merits; and (b) people are allowed to judge which diverse options have the most merit and reject the others. Once this process has run its course, whatever is left over is the optimal amount of "diversity."
For example, having lots of restaurants creates a "diversity" of cuisines to choose from. That's great if you are allowed to choose to patronize the ones you like (say, Thai and Italian), and skip the ones you don't (say, the "House of Haggis" Scottish restaurant). The modern conception of "diversity" claims, however, that forcing people to eat Haggis enhances the "diversity" of food and is therefore improving them by definition.
Only when all the bad restaurants have been driven out of business is the remaining "diversity" of choice a "strength."
There's no reason House of Haggis needs to go out of business--as long as I don't have to eat there, the added diversity of having them around does me no harm.
>(If you did want to argue against diversity libertarianism, you'd want to show that relevant systems are more fragile than anti-fragile; giving people more options will usually make them worse. Maybe the slightest failure could cause catastrophe - I think free speech opponents think this is true, but I’m less sure they’re right. Or people will perversely choose the worst option rather than the best if many options are made available - I think this is sometimes true for things like drugs and gambling. or there are overwhelming externalities. Or there are externalities, which can range from the very simple like pollution to the very complicated, like whether your working for a low wage has externalities because it forces me to compete with you. I think figuring out where to draw the lines here is really hard - but if you want to convince me, this would be more fruitful than the umpteenth essay about how the First Amendment only applies to government)
I think that one can object to absolute freedom of speech on the grounds not that people would be somehow "brainwashed" if exposed to ideas outside a particular approved band, but rather through understanding certain types of speech as primarily acts and the majority of people as basically unthinking followers of a particular flag. That is, someone like Richard Spencer is not contributing to a marketplace of ideas so much as raising a flag for people who already agree with him to rally around as a coordination point.
I also think it's somewhat of an errant frame to suggest that you can *only* adjust volatility-- like, in the car market example, it is not in fact the case that in order for there to be better cars there must be worse cars. The distribution of cars on the market on a scale of goodness to badness could, like, /move towards being gooder as a whole/. In relation to specifically cultural freedom of speech -- that is, /not/ mediated through large corporations but at the level of, say, a bunch of individuals denouncing someone for their speech --, I don't think it's a problem for bad ideas to become harder to access or for the "sellers" of bad ideas to go bankrupt or acquire correspondingly bad reputations.
Freedom of speech is important descendant from a general orientation towards maximizing eudaemonia and the ability of people to make real choices, and needs to be evaluted within that context, not as a separate magisterium.
In the context of large corporations censoring speech or, like, the government cracking down on "insurrectionists", I think it really does make sense to think about these things in an, idk, naively-categorical-imperative type frame, since large corporations and the government can't be trusted to distinguish object-level good ideas from bad ideas in any sense, and so should be held to simple rules like "just don't imprison anyone for saying stuff" or "everyone should get a lawyer in their defense". This is not the case for reasoning about how you-as-an-individual or you-as-the-idealized-spirit-of-a-social-group ought to act.
“ That is, someone like Richard Spencer is not contributing to a marketplace of ideas so much as raising a flag for people who already agree with him to rally around as a coordination point.”
Not sure why you single out Richard Spencer here. 90%+ of blue check Twitter seems to consist of “raising flags for people who already agree to rally around”. Twitter censorship consists primarily of deciding which flags are allowed to be flown.
>When might this not work? First, if cars are hard, and starting a new car company takes too much time. I'm not too concerned about this one. I think a lot of people could potentially make one or two crappy 1920s-style cars in their garage with a little work, and once they do that, black people with no other options will buy them, and that will give them enough money to bootstrap into a powerful car company that can compete with the big dogs. Tesla did something like this when Musk though the big dogs were neglecting electric, and that went great.
This is completely unrelated to the last thing I said as far as I can tell, but I think stuff like opening up a new crappy car company in your garage is likely to be harder than it ~ought to be in an ideally free market due to government regulations on car companies.
Sorry but this is a major theme running through ALL of Taleb’s books including this one. The canonical “fat tailed” distribution is the Pareto or “power law” distribution, and the canonical “thin tailed” distribution is the Gaussian or “normal” distribution, and treating the former as if it were the latter is what causes all the blowups and disasters he is trying to teach how to prevent.
This is the pons asinorum for understanding Taleb in any way other than impressionistically.
The trouble with corporate censorship is that "uncensored" forums tend to be on the "cars that immediately catch fire" side of the curve - moderation is a necessary part of building a forum that people actually want to use. Parler has already learned this the hard way - their policy rapidly shifted from "we're the good guys because we don't censor people" to "we're the good guys because we censor left-wing trolls, while everyone else censors right-wing trolls." Even under a "diversity libertarian" regime, you still have to be able to make money off your idea.
Also, factual correction: Apple and Google blocked Parler from their *app stores*, not their phones. You can install Parler on Android by downloading the .apk file and installing it manually, no need to go looking for another cell phone company.
If you're in favour of viewpoint diversity why have you avoided all socialist argumentation and even go so far as to ban socialists from your blog?
He hasn't avoided all socialist argumentation, and he's been rather clear about providing what reasons he had for each specific ban. Also, despite the evident fact that his writings are popular and spur discussion, he only controls one blog. Dr. Siskind is not responsible for providing a forum for every half-baked tinpot fallacy to be aired. Neither does viewpoint diversity imply otherwise.
He never gave me any reason for my ban. He is trying to censor political thought that he disagrees with.
He works as a writer, therefore his censorship of your comment is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Your bourgeois attempts to capture value that he has generated should be censored, because you aren't a working writer, you're a bourgeois parasite attempting to co-opt the workers' struggle for your own selfish ends.
Do you admit, even the possibility, that _other_ people clearly understand why you were banned even if you don't? (It's very clear to me.)
What was the reason then?
You're a { one trick pony / broken record } who's 'contribution' to almost every discussion is 'communism' or 'read Marx', but you also almost always fails to provide even a summary or outline of the relevant info you claim exists. It is tiresome and annoying.
The very good reason to ban you has nothing to do with your 'political thought' but everything to do with your rhetoric, i.e. how you express your political thoughts. People, especially the commenters here, are aware that Marx is an important political philosopher! They would welcome detailed info from someone that has studied his work! I think we would all welcome that info from you too. But you either studiously avoid doing so, or refuse to do so, and there's no good reason to tolerate that behavior, especially when there are other Marxists or communists that don't engage in it, or at least not to the wearying extent you do.
If the profoundness of your articles was plotted it would probably be a bell curve. I'm not quite sure what would be around the mean, but "I can tolerant everyone except the outgroups" would be at least two sigmas above the mean. This article is on the long tail of the less insightful end.
Diversity libertarianism feels like a very strange concept boundary to me. Isn't it basically just capitalism, where you want lots of diversity and competition, but you also want to prevent companies or people from preventing competition?
How does libertarianism come into the picture? Is it just capitalism but you don't want government solving coordination problems because you want the free market to instead?
So what do you think then about the current deconstruction of Republicans? A single *major* party is left: this will eventually kill the competition for the "consumer of policies" (the voter). As in your example, when the super-car wins the competition created by the variance, it likely will just reap the profits and deteriorate on services and features. It will likely fill the niche of the bad car, not eliminate this niche. Because the elites are given the opportunity to think short-term but large rewards for themselves from such a process (with negligible negative consequences). Yet no better system is in evidence.
<< I'm less likely to object to things like taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon - none of those decrease diversity very much. And I’m more likely to care about conformist pressures from religions or mobs, even though technically those don’t involve government.
But, having such preferences, you are more likely to be left-libertarian: anarchist, socialist, etc., than right-libertarian, libertarian in the usual sense (as in the "Libertarian Party")
You seem to be treating “diversity” and “variance” as synonyms, where “variance” means a distribution along some axis of objective quality. But these are not actually synonyms, and it is important that they aren’t. Diversity just means “differences exist” and those differences may or may not result in variable objective quality. But it can still be valuable even if it doesn’t - people have preferences, some rational and others not, but the preferences are definitely diverse. Diversity, insofar as it meets a broader range of preferences, can therefore have utility even if it does not result in higher objective quality.
When Ford first made the Model T, you could have any color you wanted as long as it was black. But many people prefer cars in other colors, so eventually car companies started offering a range of color options. Offering cars in multiple colors does not improve objective quality in any way (if anything it slightly degrades it since now you’ve thrown an extra variable into the supply chain, plus there is probably some objectively best car color for most situations and people will nevertheless make different choices). So “car color” is a place where diversity is valuable even though it’s not really “variance” in the sense you use it, or the sense that creates anti-fragility.
People having irrational preferences may actually be important to keeping things diverse enough to produce useful variance. Many people have irrational brand loyalties - you might think this is bad, but if they didn’t, as soon as Ford trucks got a little objectively better than Dodge and Chevy trucks, 100% of people would buy Ford trucks, Dodge and Chevy would go out of business, and you’d be left with no diversity or variance. Irrational (maybe “arational” would be a better word) preferences add some friction and hysteresis to the system in a diversity-preserving way.
I think your lack of distinguishing between diversity and variance leaves something missing from your assessment of diversity libertarianism. Namely, libertarians believe that individual freedom is a terminal value. It’s a good thing even if it doesn’t make the world objectively better on average. Libertarians tend to believe that freedom WILL lead to better outcomes on average, but that’s not necessarily the point.
And this is partially why pragmatic libertarians might sometimes accept government intervention - if a coordination problem is limiting individual freedom, it may be better to let the government impose coordination by fiat than let the problem go unsolved. And why they might be skeptical of corporate censorship - sure, it might be a free choice by a corporation, but if the corporation has monopoly powers then their censorship is a significant imposition on individual liberty.
<i>Offering cars in multiple colors does not improve objective quality in any way (if anything it slightly degrades it since now you’ve thrown an extra variable into the supply chain, plus there is probably some objectively best car color for most situations and people will nevertheless make different choices)</i>
This may be the core of the disagreement here. I don't think there is an objectively best color for a car to be, a best flavor for potato chips to come in, a best scent for your shampoo, etc. I think the value of the car, potato chips, shampoo, etc., are based on the subjective preferences of the person who buys it. This is why a top-down decision from the Car Color Czar or the Potato Chip Czar doesn't lead to a better world.
I agree with you 100% - the point I was making with the portion you quoted is that there is value in maintaining a diverse offering of car colors EVEN IF this diversity does not translate to better cars overall by some objective measurable. This, treating diversity and variance as the same thing is a mistake.
(White cars are objectively better in a few ways - limiting heating / degradation in sunlight and external visibility mainly. This is why most civilian aircraft are mostly painted white - but that’s a use case where, compared to cars, “optimum” has more value and personal aesthetics have less)
> Plant A suffers a meltdown after two days, killing everybody.
> a lot of people could potentially make one or two crappy 1920s-style cars in their garage [to sell]
Scott, do you have somebody review your pieces to make obvious objections before you publish?
The obvious objection to both of these points, especially the first, is that regulations won't allow these things. So long as we have an effective safety regulator, you absolutely want a high-variance nuclear industry, so that alongside the TEPCOs and V.C. Summers of the world, you have a Moltex/Thorcon/Terrestrial Energy/Elysium, one of whom is likely to be involved with building large numbers of reactors at some point.
P.S. Note my use of the word "regulator" on top of "regulations": you need somebody to notice that every single one of the emergency generators and batteries at Fukushima are located in the basement and ask themselves "should we allow this?" But see also: Meltdown World https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/jtm6hm/how_bad_is_meltdown_world
"Diversity libertarianism" seems like the kind of philosophy of government that allows you to construct a justification for creating whatever kind of policy you want. Which is to say, a philosophy with actual legs.
For nuclear plants, when everything is fine, yes, we prefer the low variance distribution.
However! In a world where a nuclear catastrophe has occurred, the high variance distribution is better! If all nuclear power plants are basically the same and one explodes, we've gotta turn them all off ASAP until we figure out what went wrong. When there's a range of plant quality, one incident has an isolated, well, blast radius.
I have no idea how this preference inversion fits into the fragile/anti-fragile framework.
Doesn't distribution 2 inevitably lead to distribution 1 given enough time?
It's like you said - eventually all the bad car companies/bad power plants/bad or whatever will explode/go out of business because they're getting out-competed by the better ones. Once the absolute worst go away, they're followed quickly by the 2nd worst and so on an so forth until you're only left with the a distribution that looks like system 1.
As a rather doctrinaire libertarian, I am deeply unconvinced that government action is not the ultimate cause of social media censorship. Congress shall pass no law, sure, but very little of the administrative state actually involves Congress passing laws. After Operation Choke Point I see no reason to give the government the benefit of the doubt here.
Liberals saying that corporate censorship doesn't implicate free speech are arguing in bad faith. If the tech companies were to censor liberals then they would be up in arms about the chilling effects that would hinder free exchange of ideas. In the past, liberals often used to argue that corporations are more of a threat to free speech than government; they even wanted regulations of corporations on that ground. What are the common carrier and net neutrality laws other than government regulations to prevent corporate censorship? It's intensely hypocritical for liberals to champion net neutrality laws on one hand and support corporate censorship on the other. If ISPs don't get to control what users see then why do social media companies have that power?
> The quickest way to enrage me is to criticize some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone - to try to browbeat them into doing the same thing as everyone else.
The fact that you characterize Parler and HBD enthusiasts as "some group of weird people doing their own thing without harming anyone" is the biggest self-own I've ever seen on this blog.
Sticks and stones.
Thanks for the great blog! This whole antifragile thing isn't making sense to me. Car companies are not antifragile. They are fragile, if they make unsafe or unfashionable cars they fail.
What you are really saying is that if I as a consumer have choice then I am pleased to have a lot of variance. I choose which car to buy, to hell with the others. So I am happy to have a lot of varience in quality of cars.
Similarly I choose whether to exercise an option so I benefit if there is a lot of volatility/variance in the underlying asset.
I don't choose which nuclear power station effects me, they could all effect me if they create a global nuclear incident. So I would like little variance in nuclear power station safety.
In summary it is not the thing which is fragile/anti-fragile. Rather when people get to choose (options, products) they prefer high variance, and when I am effected by all individual items (nuclear power stations, earthquakes) they prefer low variance.
"If you did want to argue against diversity libertarianism, you'd want to show that relevant systems are more fragile than anti-fragile..."
The most relevant system here is the most fragile: the individual human life, of which we should all be fiercely protective, not on religious grounds, but on empirical evidence showing that every individual field of consciousness is finite, defined, and unique. (We could maybe debate this on religious grounds, but our concern in the modern world is necessarily political.)
The specific brand of libertarianism one advocates is not the problem. While I don't tend to object to libertarian impulses and actions per se, it's the ego commitment that blinds one to the damage, since intellectualisms reign supreme in big and small instances. It is simply not a morally defensible position to allow lives to become collateral damage to cerebral solutions, no matter how well thought out -- sorry MarxBro. (I know, I know, collateral damage happens all the time, but I'm discussing the extent to which a political philosophy should or should not embrace it.)
This is why the libertarian ego enjoys probably the most unearned sense of facile superiority of any political ego. Solutions can seem remarkably obvious to you if you are predisposed to shrug off the immediate risks and damages as "just part of life"; in which case you become free to ridicule all the "dumb" inefficiencies that plague democratic solutions as they attempt to attend to specific human rights, social justice issues, etc. Whether one is Ayn Rand, Hitler, or Scott Alexander, libertarianism (as a philosophy) is a symptom of diseased empathy among elitists.
It's entirely too easy to rattle off rationalizations that seem self-evident to you, such as saying everyone should just learn to rely more on Consumer Reports, without, apparently, the least bit of awareness that there are masses of real-life people who have never heard of Consumers Reports, and have no access to it. The confirmation biases based on one's own stable position in society are striking and omnipresent within libertarian circles. And if they aren't unconscious biases, they are, by definition, an embrace of Rand's abhorrent survival-of-the-fittest notions.
Perhaps our systems will evolve into new shapes in the future, but for now the only morally defensible political positions are the ones that tackle the MUCH more difficult, MUCH more complex task of tweaking existing systems progressively while protecting and preserving as many real flesh-and-blood individuals as possible. To say, well, 100 real people will suffer now, but if you implement our brilliant solutions millions of unknown, unborn future people will have freer, happier lives, is unacceptable in today's modern world. Y'all have to work harder than that. Still, many here see no problem with glibly sacrificing the uninformed to the consequences of deregulation, staggeringly unprepared or unable to place themselves in others' shoes.
And, by the way, the libertarian ego, I believe, is often susceptible to the really bad habit of rattling off false equivalencies without remotely adequate interrogation. I could go on and on about this, but just one current example: The Zuckerbergs of the world did NOT decide to "censor" Parler simply because they didn't like them. (Scott seems to think they could just have easily decided to "not like" Black Lives Matter.) No. They held out as long as they possibly could before eventually being forced to acknowledge the very real damage Parler was doing with explicit, philosophically based, calls to violence and insurrection based entirely on lies. Pressuring Facebook to restrict Parler (or Trump for that matter) is parallel to pressuring the government to regulate drugs and pesticides for the protection of even those people forced to work far too many hours each day to monitor the business pages. Enjoying Scott's mind as I generally do, I am repeatedly astonished by his, frankly, very lazy habit of spreading false equivalencies without adequate education -- a dead giveaway that trapped priors are in play.
"It is simply not a morally defensible position to allow lives to become collateral damage to cerebral solutions, no matter how well thought out -- sorry MarxBro. (I know, I know, collateral damage happens all the time, but I'm discussing the extent to which a political philosophy should or should not embrace it.)"
I'm not sure what you think I'm 'allowing' here. I merely observe the class struggle and point it out.
I apologize for being pedantic, but this has been bothering me for the last two days.
The difference between the two distributions shown is not the amount of variance, but rather the kurtosis. Depending on the scales of the axes, the two might have exactly the same variance (or not). However, the second one has far different kurtosis from the first. In the language of statistics, it has fat tails. It is definitely not a Normal or Bell or gaussian distribution.
The complaint of people like Taleb is that we tend to assume that life looks more like Distribution 1 when in reality many events and processes look more like Distribution 2. Indeed, my graduate student advisor would become quite angry when people spoke of the Normal distribution, arguing that it was anything but normal.
My takeaway is that the world is a lot more random than most people think it is. We need to concentrate more on courses of action to deal with occurrences out in the far tails. That's what I call antifragile, and I think that has an echo in many of Taleb's writings. In this sense, Taleb has many precursors, albeit nowhere near as well known as Taleb.
I think you’re approaching Taleb’s point, but you’re still missing a big aspect of it; from his perspective, two different bell curves are very similar because they’re both effectively finite, even if they look different. If distribution B contains plants that melt down in a few days, distribution A will contain plants that melt down in a few years. The extra few years of power pales besides the hundreds or thousands of years of reduced land useability.
Buying a car takes advantage of variation, but it’s still at best basically robust; you the individual buyer may gain a small amount once from variation, but you probably won’t get more than twice or ten times as good a car as the average or anything. And you definitely could get a worse car than average!
Antifragility *compounds* on variation. Antifragility is like gravity, or science, or evolution, or a monopoly; it starts slowly and then it becomes all-encompassing and inevitable. It contains an argument about the single iteration game, but its true essence is about the repeated game.
Seems like there's an extra unintentional "or there are overwhelming externalities." in there.
Instead of your "religion" and "opinions" you should rather use "important and unimportant values".
The big innovation of liberalism is that maybe you should actually try to understand these evil people (that are against your own values) : either to have an easier time to beat them, to convert them, or to find a truce with them if the two previous ones aren't worth it or are not an option.
>But these are the only two major smartphone companies.
This should say something like:
But these are the only two major smartphone APP VENDORS.
"Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity."
You neglect simple legalities. Companies couldn't desegregate in the 1930's because there were laws enforcing segregation. Facebook shareholders could ban BLM if they wanted, and the Woke couldn't do anything about it except grumble like conservatives are doing now. The CEO has to do what the board of directors wants, which is what the shareholders want. Zuckerberg owns 29% (https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+share+of+facebook&rlz=1C1GCEJ_enUS867US867&oq=zuckerberg+share+of+facebook&aqs=chrome..69i57j46.5480j0j3&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8), which is enough to control, so he can do what he wants. I conclude he wants to ban conservatives but not BLM. One caveat: if woke users of facebook would leave but conservatives will not, then Zuckerberg must worry about the dollar cost of indulging any preferences he may have against BLM. Similarly, if he has Woke employees he values, it will cost him dollars if he offends them enough that they quit. But Zuckerberg is NOT a slave to conformity unless he chooses to be. He is a leader.
Assuming there is a "best" option in your distributions, then always picking the best ultimately results in fragility. Most people would get Teslas and then distribution 2 starts contracting to look like distribution 1.
However, Teslas are more fragile than a Ford model T, for instance. Teslas are only the "best" in the current environment where we have working infrastructure that can support them. A massive solar flare at the wrong time, and the Ford model T might then be the "best".
But then accepting the anti-fragile ethos would suggest that we must spend resources to preserve and maintain a healthy population of solutions that are a poor fit to current circumstances, just in case circumstances change and we might end up needing them. This is probably a good idea to some extent, but it must have limits.
It feels to me that the way one describes something leads to "obvious" conclusions about fragility and antifragility. If Scott had described the nuclear plants as "The good one produces enough energy to power all of humanity's needs in a second, the bad one not enough for a light bulb" and the the cars as "The good one gets you wherever you want to go in 5 minutes, the bad one explodes as soon as you turn on the ignition" then we would conclude that cars are fragile and nuclear plants are antifragile.
This type of shenanigan makes me deeply suspicious that the concept of antifragility exists at all - or, at the least, that it existing doesn't say anything profound about the world that we should be taking note of.
It's a myth that libertarians don't believe in rules and order. On the contrary, more rules are needed in a free society than an authoritarian one to keep people from stepping on each other's toes. For example, this comment thread needs a decent moderation system to stay on track and be pleasant for most participants.
The real problem is moving tech from a novelty into a reliable utility. If electric companies inquired about your politics before providing power, we would still have factories powered by donkeys running in a circle and miss out on massive improvements in living standards. In the same way, tech companies need to eventually realize that their mission of running civilization is more important than virtue signalling of selective access. Only then the benefits of tech revolution will be fully realized.
Even more onerous is social networks claiming ownership of your friendship. It's one thing to delete content and ban users. It's another to not give users a realistic way to move to another service and still stay in touch. If Facebook allowed a group owner to export e-mail or phone numbers and provide it to former members, that would be a start of a more appropriate relationship between business and customers.
It's possible to have a libertarian society with companies behaving in this manner, but it's not likely to be pleasant to live in or endure for long.