Terrific Tuesday Substacks

Exceptional Linkposts

I woke up this morning, opened Substack after my morning routine, and in around 30 minutes, I had four google docs tabs open to reflect on today’s articles. I may still write longer-form versions of each, but today I want to link all of them to you.

Richard Hanania: Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down "Meaning"

First is a classic friend of the newsletter, Richard Hanania:

Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down "Meaning"

He unites two of the topics that I’ve been meaning to write on: the happiness gap between normies and elites,  and “meaning” as an internet meme. 

My take on this is that statistically, the most neurotic people are the ones who seek elite power and the most neurotic people are the most envious. I’ll expand on this in my “tripartite war” book reviews. The first in this series, on Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, is completed and will likely be out next week. Hanania partially agrees:

The feminization of institutions also has a role to play … The kind of man who can check his heterosexuality at the door is going to be physiologically different from one who can’t, and HR has its strongest foothold in more established institutions. Increasing female representation along with civil rights law means we’re not only getting more women, but more feminized men. Among other traits, such individuals are higher on neuroticism, which shapes how they perceive and interpret the world. 

He also partially doesn’t, or attributes the causation in the other direction. I don’t believe him and I don’t even really believe he thinks this:

The thing about more populist views on inequality and left-wing cultural stances is not only that they’re wrong and make for bad policy, but that there’s good reason to think that they make you miserable. This may be why liberals are less happy than conservatives, and I suspect that it’s not a coincidence that rates of depression in young people rose alongside the Great Awokening. 

I think it’s far more sensible that depression or neuroticism makes you more likely to support populism or cultural progressivism than the other way around. This is somewhat difficult to test but not impossible. My hypothesis is that if you longitudinally examine people’s political views and psychometrics, the politics drift towards what is predicted by their psychometrics. Anecdotally this is the case.

Hanania goes on to argue that Religion is not necessary for individual happiness. 

Is this true though? To determine whether society needs religion, one must differentiate between two theories:

1. Individuals need religion to live happy and fulfilling lives (individualist view)

2. Society needs religion to function well (social view)

Of course, the two arguments are related, since a society where most people live happy and fulfilling lives is likely to be one that functions well. 

In our podcast, I disputed his frame of Right-wing Rationalism, saying that both “Right-wing” and “Rationalist” do not apply. I still don’t think Hanania is Right-wing, but maybe he is simply more of a Rationalist than I am. To give some context to the readers, my primary critique of Rationalism (the movement of people, not the idea, hence capital-R) is that they consistently prioritize hedonism and self-fulfillment in lieu of virtues (from my perspective). To me, doing something amazing with your life requires fully controlling your instincts and avoiding the skinner box (I remember Mary Harrington had a wonderful essay on this, but I’m not able to find it right now). This is true whether you’re an inventor, leader, philosopher, or anything else. Consequently, even if I’m not able to fully believe in religion in the Nietzschian sense, I find it admirable. I care less about whether my countrymen are hedonistically satisfied and more about whether they’re awesome, which in this moment makes me not a Rationalist.

The article is great despite my disagreement with many premises.  

Zvi Mowshowitz: Escape Velocity from Bullshit Jobs

Escape Velocity from Bullshit Jobs

Samo and Ben’s dilemma: To the extent that the economy is dominated by make-work, automating it away won’t work because more make-work will be created, and any automated real work gets replaced by new make-work.

Samo is Samo Burja, another friend of the newsletter. Here’s Zvi’s setup:

We escaped the original Malthusian trap with the Industrial Revolution, expanding capacity faster than the population could grow. A sufficient lead altered underlying conditions to the point where we should worry more about declining population than rising population in most places.

Consider the same scenario for a potential AI Revolution via GPT-4.

Presume GPT-4 allows partial or complete automation of a large percentage of existing bullshit jobs. What happens?

My model says this depends on the speed of adaptation.

And resolution:

It comes down to: If they do happen, can the shifts described above happen fast enough, before they are seen as absurd, the alternative models become too fully developed and acclimated to to be shut down and growth becomes self-sustaining?

If this all happens at the speed its advocates claim, then the answer is clearly yes.

The piece offers a partially different perspective on bureaucracy, status competition and economic growth. I won’t write too much on my perspective now, except to leave you guys with some links. My First Viral Article. My Podcast with Samuel Hammond on AI and the Economy. Sam’s highlights.

Alex Nowrasteh: Make Immigration Boring Again

Make Immigration Boring Again

Alex is the ultimate steelman when it comes to increasing immigration. Even if you oppose immigration, his articles are a great insight because of their remarkably high information density. The most relevant point to the political theory nerds in my audience is his final paragraph:

A political weakness of free-market classical liberalism is that there’s nobody in charge. There’s rarely somebody to blame. So, perceptions of chaos are aided by the very thing that makes spontaneous order such an effective organizing principle: There’s nobody in charge. Voters then see the chaos and demand more control, which the government obliges. That reaction frequently causes more chaos and problems, leading to calls for more control and onward in a viciously illiberal cycle. This is a challenge for free-market classical liberals, libertarians, and others opposed to more government control. The effects of proposed reforms on chaos and perceptions of chaos must consume far more attention than it does if we're going to be successful in liberalizing the economy.

Said political theory nerds might begrudgingly recognize this as the classic variation on anarcho-tyranny, in which an incompetent state begets a sense of chaos which further empowers the incompetent state. Alex raises this point in the context of the legal immigration system.

The truth about the legal immigration system is that it isn’t this way because of intentional decisions to make immigration harder or to test some type of skill. It’s this way because bureaucracies are incompetent and unaccountable. The past few years (or decades, or century) has ingrained this lesson in the right, but applying it to the immigration system seems not to be a priority. Maybe the argument is that whatever gets the job done is worth it, but I think Alex’s argument for cleaning up the legal immigration system should be compelling even for immigration restrictionists. A system of arbitrary bureaucratic rulings undermines the rule of law in a way that makes the sovereign control of immigration difficult even to fathom. 

Arnold Kling: The Great Re-Evaluation

The Great Re-Evaluation

The subtitle is an excellent summary: “How COVID accelerated a growing divide between those who are committed to and those who are disengaged from work, college, and religion”. Arnold is very concise, so I’m not quite sure how to highlight key points without essentially copying the whole thing. Read the linked article!

I agree with Arnold that Covid shifted real life norms towards online norms. One thing I’d like to add to the consideration of this trend is that there is a split between the most dedicated and the majority. The intensity of work in startups is the typical example, but I find this is true for religion, sexuality, politics, games, writing, and many other areas. So, I would be on the lookout for this more exponential-like distribution among the decrease in ordinal participation rates.

Honorable Mentions

Curtis Yarvin: One Man’s Informant is Another Man’s Informer

The January fever

Matt Yglesias: I may be totally full of shit, but at least you can call me out

My predictions for 2023

Vinay Prasad: Getting sick sometimes is the price of returning to normal 

We Have a Tripledemic. Not of Disease, But of Fear.

On a slow day, these might have gotten retweets.