Category: Economics (Page 1 of 8)

Academy of Ideas brings us a timely and well-articulated warning. The ancient game of debasing currency and inflating the money supply should not be expected to produce different results in our own time.

Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts. Transcript here.

Great short talk by Peter Thiel:

Some particularly good bits from the first half:

I always am very uncomfortable with these sort of categories of … extreme optimism, extreme pessimism. I think those are somehow the wrong categories. … And I think they’re actually weirdly the same. Extreme optimism … says that you don’t need to do anything. The movie of the future will go on its own. It’s sort of automatic, accelerating progress and all you have to do is sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. And then extreme pessimism is that … nothing you can do will make a difference. And the truth is always, I think, somewhere in between, or at least it’s best for us to believe that it’s somewhere in between and that … instead of being in emotive denial (that everything’s great) or acceptance (that everything is awful) and both denial and acceptance are code words for laziness, for not doing anything, because there’s nothing you can do — nothing you need to do. It’s best to be somewhere in between and to think: It actually matters. Things are always up for debate … and we should be fighting, and we should be figuring out … how to continue to have this healthy and free country in which we live.

3:42

In a democracy, what 51% of the population believes is probably better, and there’s a certain bias towards majoritarianism, and if you have 70% of the population [that] believes something it’s even more true. But if you go from 51% to 70% to 99.9%, you’ve gone from a democracy to North Korea. And it’s this very important question that one needs to always needs to come back to. Where do we sort of go from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds, and where’s that dividing line between majoritarian democracy and where do you get to the sort of totalitarianism of North Korea. And it’s hard to define where that line is, but I want to suggest that in all kinds of contexts we’re far too far on the side that you can describe as collectivist, centralized, Borg-like, conformist, and also generally just simply incorrect.

5:32

We’ve had all these derangements of science, where … in the name of “science” we’ve done these rather unscientific things. And I often think that … when people use the word “science” it’s often a tell of the opposite … that the things that are actual science like physics and chemistry, you don’t need to call them “physical science” or “chemical science” because you don’t need to protest that much like, you know, Lady Macbeth. But when you call things “climate science” or “political science”, that’s sort of a tell that they’re not quite scientific.

…

I’ve come to think that one way to think of a healthy “science” is that it has to fight a two-front war against excessive skepticism, and against excessive dogmatism. So excessive skepticism is if you can’t believe in anything: I don’t believe I’m here, I don’t believe the audience is here, nothing is real, everything is imaginary. That’s probably not an attitude that’s conducive to science. And of course, excessive dogmatism, at the other end of the spectrum, is … the 17th century church telling you that the Aristotelian view of the universe was correct and therefore the Earth couldn’t possibly be moving. And that’s excessive dogmatism, and that’s also very bad for science.

10:05

Great podcast interview with Mark Moss (@1MarkMoss), that focuses on historic cycles and the hope that Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and decentralization in general offer for greater individual sovereignty and individual autonomy in the near future. This kind of stuff helps renew my optimism. There is much potential for a freer future, if we can just get our thinking out of the over-centralized box we’ve let ourselves get stuck in.

This is the latest episode in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency series (“BTC###” episodes) that drops every Wednesday on the We Study Billionaires podcast — highly recommended and one I make sure to listen to regularly.

Watch the episode with Mark on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts.

I haven’t been writing as much here as in past times, in part due to finding Twitter, GETTR, Parler, and Gab to be convenient outlets for concise, off-the-cuff thoughts. With the world gone as mad as it now has, I feel I have a great deal of catching up to do in this more enduring journal of observations, and much of it merits the deeper and more systematic exploration that writing longer pieces here facilitates. The task feels daunting at its outset, but I feel the need to tackle it with some persistent commitment, as there is so much gone awry in need of urgent remedy.

I haven’t yet written here, more than indirectly, about the now approximately two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and our variously advisable and insane responses to it. There is much that needs to be captured for posterity, about the madness that we have allowed to descend on us and dominate our lives, and the darker-than-expected things I’ve learned about human nature in the process.

Simultaneous with the massive social experiment of addressing a global pandemic with radical measures decoupled from rational, salutary feedback loops, we in the USA were subjected to the determined resurgence of an unhinged social critic culture with which I have had all too much bitter experience. I can imagine that to well-intentioned younger generations this might have appeared to be something genuinely new and worthy of possible deference, but to me it is an old, familiar, and despicable foe in a very thinly veiled disguise. I have written here, since the beginning, of my heartfelt love for the American Idea and way of life. I have wanted for my life to stand as a celebration of this culture of ours and its possibilities — to express herein my feeling of gratitude for them, and to help others to see the beauty that I do and learn the means of thriving in it that I have acquired through a lifetime of observing, admiring, and learning from the achievements of others. I have wasted far too many moments of this precious journey in the company of smug, snide, bitter social critics — from academia in the late 90s and early ’00s, to the radical activist sub-culture of the art world, to eight years living in various parts of the the San Francisco Bay Area. I have watched so many of the things I love and value maligned, slandered, and disparaged by people whose fear, envy, narcissism, or other such mania have driven them to enthusiastically tear down and destroy rather than create. I have been, since my college years in the mid-90s, a witness to expressions of worldview and intent that I now regret having dismissed too lightly as fringe academic radicalism, which turned out to be the seeds of toxic ideology that means to “subvert” and dismantle everything I love, and which has seen its way, through persistent incrementalism, to the dubious and contrived claim of mainstream respectability it makes today. I assure you this is nothing new, but rather the down-the-road manifestation of decades of intellectual termites gnawing away at our cultural foundations — a phenomenon that I have witnessed. Yesterday’s uncontested absurdities have become today’s promoted ideology, leaving us in sad but not unrecoverable shape.

What we’ve come to now, as the culmination of decades of infiltration and radicalization of our education institutions (all the way from universities to K-12) is a broader cultural realization of how very far off course we’ve allowed ourselves to be blindly led. Those who mean to dismantle what they despise in this Liberty-loving culture have been acting with newly emboldened fervor, while simultaneously being umasked by parental oversight that they did not appear to anticipate. As a parent of two young boys who I love dearly, and whose futures must be as free, open, and optimistic as possible, it’s vitally important to me to support and be part of these parents’ and students’ rights movements. What the courage of past generations has purchased for our benefit at such high cost cannot be left casually on the table, sacrificed for no purpose and to no good end. It is worth the proverbial fight.

Watch for what I hope will be more frequent posts here in support of setting things right. I’ll endeavor to shed light on what I’ve seen, promote others’ good work, find and promote solutions, and maybe even lift my own spirits and yours a bit in the process.

This captures beautifully what’s in my heart and mind every day on this Earth, and fills me with gratitude for the culture I feel so blessed to have been born into here in the USA. As we contemplate next places and head to new frontiers, I hope we’ll carry the spirit of this bold, hopeful declaration with us.

In the wake of the tremendously exciting SN8 test last month, Starship SN9 is on the pad and it’s looking like we may see a static fire test as early as today (LabPadre’s Launch Pad Cam has live coverage) and a 12.5km altitude test and landing attempt, with that launch possibly as early as Friday.

SN10 meanwhile received its nosecone and is waiting in the wings to be next up, with SN11 also under construction and not that far behind.

SpaceX’s rapid-iteration process has been truly impressive and inspiring to behold, particularly with regard to Starship prototyping and testing. Such a stark contrast to the customarily slow pace of NASA-contractor partnerships. It gives me greatly enjoyed reason to hope that we’ll see successful colonization of other worlds in the near future.

Update: Looks like we got an SN9 test-fire! I wonder if the brief duration was as planned. (This side-by-side comparison seems to indicate comparable duration to SN8 Static Fire #3, so my guess is that all went as intended.) Looking forward to further developments.