This is more of a general question, but I have to ask—where do all the nice things come from? Why is everything so nice? Every take you have on every conceivable institution you’ve written about is unrepentantly cynical, to a point where I’m not sure how people manage to do things like make tacos and air conditioning units in your model of the economy. Someone managed to make Portal 2 and I enjoyed that video game. How did they do it?
I’m gonna treat this as a serious question, since most of the value of engagement comes from that scenario, and ignore the vibe of “why are you so negative?”.
The gains from reason, discourse, and trade are so huge that they can produce positive returns for many people even in the presence of adversarial action. If you don’t see this, some suggested reading at a few levels:
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
Ethics, by Spinoza
Human animals want to live, it takes a lot of optimization to pervert that even imperfectly, and that perversion reduces the capacities of the thing being perverted, which limits the damage.
So there’s a lot of perverse activity—which really is bad—but the good news is that if we were previously misattributing production to perverse activity, that means that the value per unit of nonperverse activity is much higher than we thought. Plus there are lots of people who are oppressed, and they have to be relatively nonperverse to survive since they don’t get taken care of for being bad.
So there’s a lot of perverse activity—which really is bad—but the good news is that if we were previously misattributing production to perverse activity, that means that the value per unit of nonperverse activity is much higher than we thought.
This is actually very inspiring. Makes me kind of want to become a video game developer or logistician instead of just another startup founder.
This is more of a general question, but I have to ask—where do all the nice things come from? Why is everything so nice? Every take you have on every conceivable institution you’ve written about is unrepentantly cynical, to a point where I’m not sure how people manage to do things like make tacos and air conditioning units in your model of the economy. Someone managed to make Portal 2 and I enjoyed that video game. How did they do it?
I’m gonna treat this as a serious question, since most of the value of engagement comes from that scenario, and ignore the vibe of “why are you so negative?”.
The gains from reason, discourse, and trade are so huge that they can produce positive returns for many people even in the presence of adversarial action. If you don’t see this, some suggested reading at a few levels:
I, Pencil
Economics comic books published by the Federal Reserve
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
Ethics, by Spinoza
Human animals want to live, it takes a lot of optimization to pervert that even imperfectly, and that perversion reduces the capacities of the thing being perverted, which limits the damage.
So there’s a lot of perverse activity—which really is bad—but the good news is that if we were previously misattributing production to perverse activity, that means that the value per unit of nonperverse activity is much higher than we thought. Plus there are lots of people who are oppressed, and they have to be relatively nonperverse to survive since they don’t get taken care of for being bad.
This is actually very inspiring. Makes me kind of want to become a video game developer or logistician instead of just another startup founder.