Year End Review of Things Part 1
Year End Review of Things Part 1
Meta, Culture, Audio. Part 2 tomorrow because of the email length limit.
Meta-Recommendations
In past years, I’ve abstained from this trend. I used to view my work as solely making unique or rare observations, with little value in resharing things that my audience had likely already heard of. Given that he is the reason why I changed my mind on making this post, Arnold Kling deserves the first recommendation:
MH suggest that because we are social learners, larger groups are more adaptive. Because we share what we learn, as more experiments are tried, we can discover new techniques that work.
…
What does it mean to think for yourself? I do not conduct experiments in physics and chemistry. Instead, I trust the teachers and books that explain those subjects. I argue that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe … I favor people who “show their work,” meaning that they can explain their thought process. Also people who show an ability to weigh different points of view, as indicated by the “fantasy intellectual teams” criteria of being able to play Devil’s Advocate, to think in terms of bets, to mention caveats, to engage in civil debate, to explain what would make them change their minds, to evaluate research, and to steel-man the views of those who disagree.
In general, I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of the ability for individuals to create a cultural or political shift. As I will argue in an upcoming review of Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, the greatest contemporary barrier to political innovation is not the ability of the state to crush individual freedoms, but the ability of the state to crush collective association, exchange and experimentation. That post will be out in three days, so I’ll refrain from spoiling it further.
I think this is the best psychoanalytic critique of my writing. You can read much of my technical critiques and the few moral claims that I make as essentially trying to undermine these subconscious networks in favor of explicit decision making. Take my dialogue with Zvi Mowshowitz for example. This is a bit of a simplification, but he makes the case that institutional decline is caused more by a culturally-driven immoral maze, while I make the case for strong selection effects (of course, we acknowledge that both play a factor but disagree on what deserves more weight). A psychoanalysis of my argument might say that I’m driven to this by a superiority complex, possibly a consequence of childhood experience/isolation. Which gives me an opportunity to respond with my favorite meme:
In general though, my readers (you) should be wary that I underrate social explanations for phenomena. This is also because so many popular social explanations are just clearly false (sexism, racism, etc.) but in the process of taking out this garbage I may also dismiss ones that are true, or at least plausible.
Number 2 is a recommendation of practice: travel and go to events. Even just for learning and finding interesting content, it’s certainly worth the time and money. I will also be travelling much more from now on. I’ll be at EA Global Bay Area, probably future EA Globals, ETH Denver, PorcFest, future National Conservatism Conferences (in Europe or America), and will almost certainly be in DC for one of several things in the Summer. If you’re a college student, I would also recommend ISI, although I have a personal scheduling conflict with their first “general” event of the year. They’re very willing to book guests who may “go over your head”, but you’ll have plenty of chances to follow up and ask questions with any one of them so it’s well worth your time. Finally, please recommend any events you think I should go to!
Some other people’s recommendations:
Things you might not expect (mostly culture):
Most of my consumption of American culture comes through video games. The stories in many of them seem to have Gnostic and cyclical-civilization themes, tied somehow to the cultural experiences of Millenials and Zoomers. This is also true of foreign games that are popular in the West, such as Genshin Impact. Anyways, here are some game recommendations:
Mad Rat Dead. There’s no good story summary for this one, so have my favorite song from the game instead. Most other people’s favorite song.
Omori. Story. Favorite song. I’m realizing at this point a lot of these games aren’t even American but they feel very culturally American. Either way you’ll like them, especially if you know what time it is.
Yoru Ni Kakeru and the now-deleted official translation of the folk tale it is based on. According to wikipedia this was the top song of 2020 in Japan. The anti-suicide people will have a field day with this one. But if they’re honest, even they have to admit suicide is at least a little bit romantic. Also, I mentioned this song with Angel Eduardo.
“Do you even watch any America movies?” You might be asking at this point. No, but in my defense I don’t watch much of anything at all. I just find movies and TV incredibly difficult to watch for some reason. Once in awhile I’ll force myself to sit through a documentary, but passively staring at a screen for hours feels extremely unnatural in any context. I will, however, listen to Richard Hanania and Rob Henderson discuss movies and TV. White Lotus (1) (2) (3). The Manifesto podcast co-hosted by FTNW guest Jacob Siegel is also very good.
Best of the From the New World Podcast:
It seems crazy that this podcast started this year. I relistened to most of the episodes recently in determining which episodes I would republish in the two weeks where the podcast is “off”. I really enjoy my own podcast. This may seem like an unsurprising fact, but I know many podcasters who dislike listening to themselves. Part of this is also that the subject matter is probably already familiar to those podcasters, considering they were a participant in the conversation, but I nonetheless find new things to learn.
Samo Burja. This episode was recorded in April and released in May. Amazing predictions by Samo about how politicians would try to narrativize inflation, energy, climate, and fiscal policy, as well as about the flow of populism. In hindsight you might listen to this and think its a reasonable theory which strings together the events of 2022 into a coherent theory of “narrative hedging”. But what makes this theory all the more impressive is that in April, there were far fewer blatant examples of this effect. The audio quality is a bit off (this was the fourth episode I recorded) but worth it.
Zvi Mowshowitz and my recent episode with Richard Hanania. I put these in the same category because they both do something very similar on different issues. Zvi is an excellent forecaster and I might call him The Only Epidemiologist. He also raised what is now one of my favorite phrases in the episode, “[To be] the only one trying to solve the problem at all”. My second episode with Richard discusses The Psychological Theory of the Culture War. In both of these episodes, we hash out the differences between two similar theories that when projected into the future, suggest fairly divergent strategies. This contestation involves references, events, statistics, and other details within the context of common axioms, observations, and goals. To me, it’s the most engaging form of podcast, whether by myself or someone else. The top two podcast recommendations from other people also take this form.
Another theme of the podcast is contrasts between episodes. Curtis Yarvin and Nils Gilman on right and left diagnoses of state capacity. Alex Nowrasteh and Garett Jones on immigration. Related: Alex Nowrasteh’s critical review of Garett Jones’s new book.
Podcasts+
The plus here is only for one thing, which is the number one thing: Saurabh Sharma’s NatCon speech. Saurabh is the president of American Moment and has the best work ethic of any political “Doer” who I’ve met. I think his speech best outlines the practical actions of New Right political theory.
Michael Anton and Curtis Yarvin. Honestly, this episode gets its place in the rankings for the first five minutes. The rest of the episode is good but niche.
Curtis on why some people believe he and Michael hate each other:
“There are two kinds of discourses … an orthotypic discourse is a kind of discourse where the goal of the conversation is to agree and to form coalitions, it’s basically team building discourse … heterotypic discourse involves the adversarial pursuit of the truth. The speakers in this kind of dialogue, not only are they disrespectful of each other they are intentionally disrespectful of each other, they basically constantly mock and incite and test weak points at every spot, and people who are entirely used to the orthotypic discourse will see two people who really hate each other.”
This really puts a point on what I do when I speak to strangers in real life. If there’s one rule of how I distinguish between friend and enemy, it would be this one. People who are trying to speak with me to get strokes or some other kind of social attention I will quickly avoid.
Robin Hanson, Agnes Callard, Arnold Brooks on The Sacred. Also this discussion between Robin and Agnes. In general, their podcast is one of the most consistently high-quality I listen to. There is rarely a “bad” episode, which is not something I would say for almost every other podcast. I would not say that about my own podcast. This early episode on learning styles is great too, despite the poorer audio quality.
The Institutionalized podcast with Aaron Sibarium and Charles Fain Lehman. I actually liked the earlier episodes more than the recent ones. Nils Gilman. Ruy Texeira. Philippe Lemoine.