That’s a reductive statement, but it’s basically the whole thing when you get right down to it. The entire rationalist movement - referring specifically to the Elizer Yudkowsky bastardization of the term here - is basically bad logic that appeals to people who think they’re smart, but aren’t actually smart enough to recognize it as bad logic. Elizer sells the fiction that smart people don’t actually have to trust in experts or commonly established scientific methods because they can just deduce all the answers to the universe by applying logic. This presumes some kind of inherent superpower of intelligence and effectively teaches it’s adherents to treat every presumption they make as scientific fact. This makes you very prone to reinforcing bad ideas, and makes you extremely vulnerable to scams that prey on your belief in your own intelligence. Crypto is the perfect version of such a scam.
There’s also a massive overlap between rationalists and libertarians because a fundamental belief in the supremacy of your own mind, with its attendant presumption that the vast majority of people are incredibly stupid because they don’t agree with you, tends to align very strongly with individualist philosophies. And of course, it takes a very special kind of stupid to believe that libertarianism - a school of thought that proposes that we privatize roads by building quadruple decker porous glass bridges, among other things - is actually a good idea.
There are whole families of confidence games which rely on convincing the mark that he is about to cheat a third party.
I think the same pattern is why the subculture keeps spawning scams and gurus. Yud teaches in HPMOR that intelligence is the ability to predict the future and manipulate people and the best person is the most intelligent, so if you want to be his disciple, you try to find someone you can manipulate. The idea that you could work together with your community to shut down that pattern of behaviour and expel repeat offenders is alien to them, and most of them have trouble with the idea of being honest about what you want.
This makes so much sense, and also explains why siskind’s readers are fine with him being openly disingenuous sorry I meant amenable to straussian readings.
I think it got started with Yud and Salamon thinking “I’m not sure about race and IQ, but this community lets us recruit people to fight Skynet,” Siskind thinking “I’m not sure if Skynet is a danger but this community will let me spread the Truth about Black people,” and Bostrom and MacAskill thinking “bednet EA is a bit lame but it will let us recruit people to conquer Death together.” Then the people really interested in Ivermectin or COVID origins arrived and wanted to spread those ideas while slinging Rationalist jargon. And like El Sandifer predicted, most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around.
I would phrase this as “good marks” and “foolish” rather than “stupid”, it’s important to stay humble enough that no one is safe from a con.
Echoing something that has been said here before (too lazy to find proper credit sorry): “Rationality™ is a get smart quick scheme”, falling for one family of scams makes you more likely to fall for a similar one.
I’m gonna need you to expand on the bridges thing. This sounds like it’s up there with the bears in terms of obviously bad ideas wholeheartedly endorsed by libertarians, but I haven’t heard anything about it.
So, Walter Block is a Libertarian economist with some pretty serious sounding credentials. Chair of economics at Loyola University, New Orleans, Senior fellow at the Ludwig Van Mises institute… Like, this guy isn’t a crank with a blog. He gets paid, and published.
And he wrote what is, among Libertarians, considered the seminal work on the privatization of roads and highways, a book called, no surprise, The Privatization of Roads and Highways.
Privatizing roads is a really funny gotcha to throw at any Libertarian you meet, because it’s basically an unsolvable problem. How do you have fair and free market competition for getting out of your driveway? Ask the average Libertarian about it and they’ll panic. Ask a Libertarian who’s been around other Libertarians long enough, and they’ll more likely retort by telling you to go read Walter Block’s book.
Now, I want to be clear; none of these people have actually read Block. It’s just an easy way to dismiss the question, because the average leftist isn’t going to read an entire textbook just to prove you wrong. But the reason I know they haven’t read Block is because I did, and everything he wrote is objectively insane.
The majority of the book is basically just an argument for why we should privatize roads (his argument is “Accidents will go down”, his source is “I made it up.”), but in the last third he addresses criticisms of his previous work on the subject, and in doing so is forced to address the practicalities. This is where Walter Block stumbles into an entire Battle City of trap cards. It’s… A long road (ba-dum, pssh) and someone like Dan Olsen could get an easy two hours out of the layers of insanity happening here, but basically Block ends up acknowledging that;
It would probably be really bad if land ownership extended into the sky, because then a few land owners might be able to basically encircle a city and prevent any roads going in and out. So you need to be allowed to build over other people’s land. Not on it, but, you know… Bridges. Unsupported miles long bridges.
It would probably be really bad if land ownership didn’t extend into the sky because then you could just build a bridge over someone’s farm and block all their sunlight and rainwater. Wait, no, that contradicts the previous point.
OK, you’re allowed to build over other people’s land but everyone has a right to sunlight and rain so your bridge has to be transparent and porous. A glass bridge, full of holes for rainwater to sluice through. All the cars on it definitely won’t block any sunlight. They’ll, um, probably be made of glass too.
Cities are a problem because you can’t just build a road next to someone else’s road. Because there are buildings there. No problem, just build on top of them. We’ve already established that building over other people’s property is OK. Why, you could probably have four or five companies all competing for your drive to the shops. Imagine it; four elevated highways stacked up over a street level road with the most insane corkscrew onramps feeding them.
OK, there should probably be some rule about how close you can build to the people below you. A hundred feet sounds about right to Walter.
So now we have our inevitable outcome. The Libertarian answer to the question of competition in a market space where competition is functionally impossible; a quintuple decker porous glass highway extending 500 feet into the sky, each part of it built and maintained by a competing company, with no safety standards other than “You can sue someone if you die.”
This man is, I cannot emphasize this enough, considered to be a serious Libertarian economist, and Libertarian influencers cite his book as the treatise on this subject.
Because they’re very stupid people.
That’s a reductive statement, but it’s basically the whole thing when you get right down to it. The entire rationalist movement - referring specifically to the Elizer Yudkowsky bastardization of the term here - is basically bad logic that appeals to people who think they’re smart, but aren’t actually smart enough to recognize it as bad logic. Elizer sells the fiction that smart people don’t actually have to trust in experts or commonly established scientific methods because they can just deduce all the answers to the universe by applying logic. This presumes some kind of inherent superpower of intelligence and effectively teaches it’s adherents to treat every presumption they make as scientific fact. This makes you very prone to reinforcing bad ideas, and makes you extremely vulnerable to scams that prey on your belief in your own intelligence. Crypto is the perfect version of such a scam.
There’s also a massive overlap between rationalists and libertarians because a fundamental belief in the supremacy of your own mind, with its attendant presumption that the vast majority of people are incredibly stupid because they don’t agree with you, tends to align very strongly with individualist philosophies. And of course, it takes a very special kind of stupid to believe that libertarianism - a school of thought that proposes that we privatize roads by building quadruple decker porous glass bridges, among other things - is actually a good idea.
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There are whole families of confidence games which rely on convincing the mark that he is about to cheat a third party.
I think the same pattern is why the subculture keeps spawning scams and gurus. Yud teaches in HPMOR that intelligence is the ability to predict the future and manipulate people and the best person is the most intelligent, so if you want to be his disciple, you try to find someone you can manipulate. The idea that you could work together with your community to shut down that pattern of behaviour and expel repeat offenders is alien to them, and most of them have trouble with the idea of being honest about what you want.
This makes so much sense, and also explains why siskind’s readers are fine with him being
openly disingenuoussorry I meant amenable to straussian readings.I think it got started with Yud and Salamon thinking “I’m not sure about race and IQ, but this community lets us recruit people to fight Skynet,” Siskind thinking “I’m not sure if Skynet is a danger but this community will let me spread the Truth about Black people,” and Bostrom and MacAskill thinking “bednet EA is a bit lame but it will let us recruit people to conquer Death together.” Then the people really interested in Ivermectin or COVID origins arrived and wanted to spread those ideas while slinging Rationalist jargon. And like El Sandifer predicted, most of them were not able to share their favourite brainworm without being infected by the others which were being passed around.
The good old cultic milieu.
It’s important to get your brainworm shots before posting online.
I would phrase this as “good marks” and “foolish” rather than “stupid”, it’s important to stay humble enough that no one is safe from a con.
Echoing something that has been said here before (too lazy to find proper credit sorry): “Rationality™ is a get smart quick scheme”, falling for one family of scams makes you more likely to fall for a similar one.
I’m gonna need you to expand on the bridges thing. This sounds like it’s up there with the bears in terms of obviously bad ideas wholeheartedly endorsed by libertarians, but I haven’t heard anything about it.
Oh god, the porous glass bridges.
So, Walter Block is a Libertarian economist with some pretty serious sounding credentials. Chair of economics at Loyola University, New Orleans, Senior fellow at the Ludwig Van Mises institute… Like, this guy isn’t a crank with a blog. He gets paid, and published.
And he wrote what is, among Libertarians, considered the seminal work on the privatization of roads and highways, a book called, no surprise, The Privatization of Roads and Highways.
Privatizing roads is a really funny gotcha to throw at any Libertarian you meet, because it’s basically an unsolvable problem. How do you have fair and free market competition for getting out of your driveway? Ask the average Libertarian about it and they’ll panic. Ask a Libertarian who’s been around other Libertarians long enough, and they’ll more likely retort by telling you to go read Walter Block’s book.
Now, I want to be clear; none of these people have actually read Block. It’s just an easy way to dismiss the question, because the average leftist isn’t going to read an entire textbook just to prove you wrong. But the reason I know they haven’t read Block is because I did, and everything he wrote is objectively insane.
The majority of the book is basically just an argument for why we should privatize roads (his argument is “Accidents will go down”, his source is “I made it up.”), but in the last third he addresses criticisms of his previous work on the subject, and in doing so is forced to address the practicalities. This is where Walter Block stumbles into an entire Battle City of trap cards. It’s… A long road (ba-dum, pssh) and someone like Dan Olsen could get an easy two hours out of the layers of insanity happening here, but basically Block ends up acknowledging that;
So now we have our inevitable outcome. The Libertarian answer to the question of competition in a market space where competition is functionally impossible; a quintuple decker porous glass highway extending 500 feet into the sky, each part of it built and maintained by a competing company, with no safety standards other than “You can sue someone if you die.”
This man is, I cannot emphasize this enough, considered to be a serious Libertarian economist, and Libertarian influencers cite his book as the treatise on this subject.