One would think so!

Yep

It's in the episode I did on What Bitcoin Did from a few weeks ago. It starts about 10 minutes in.

This is irrelevant to the thought experiment, though.

I wouldn't call myself a practicing philosopher. What I would call myself is someone who strongly believes in being multi-disciplinary in my approach to life and work, rather than being reductionist and over-specialized.

I'm not sure the distinction that's being made here is as obviously intuitive as you're making it out to be.

I agree that philosophizing *can* be intellectual masturbation. But I don't agree that is *is* in the general proposition. I think that's just silly.

The only argument that anarcho-capitalists have against this (and by the way, nobody thought more about this than American philosopher and economist Henry George), is that such outcomes are "unlikely". That somehow market forces will equilibrate into smaller communities that will retain the "right-of-exit" between them. That the pathological case is not worth thinking about because it's "extreme and absurd". This is literally all AnCaps ever say in response to the pathological case being laid out -- just as they lost their minds about how absurd my "Bob's Island" thought-experiment is.

They don't have any real well-thought out explanations as to why it's absurd, why it's unlikely, why the pathological case is irrelevant. They just say it's stupid, won't happen, and there's no point thinking about unlikely outcomes. In other words, they wave their hands around a little bit, proclaim the pathological case stupid (because reasons) and move on.

We literally would not be having this conversation right now if people hadn't sat around philosophizing about the nature of reality, which gave birth to natural philosophy, physics, quantum theory, which led to the development of the transistor. It is highly unlikely that computer science would have simply been stumbled upon purely through "doing" without having had a theoretical foundation for how computers might work. A good example being Turing. He worked out in his head how general purpose computers ought to work, long before we built the first general purpose computer. But his "philosophy" and it *is* philosophy by the way: mathematics and science are subsets of philosophy -- was the basis for engineers evening attempting to build such contraptions. So I find this anti-intellectualism a little bit misguided, to say the least.

Saying that as we get older, we can realize that we don't actually need any of this intellectualism and it's all meaningless in the face of practical application and doing, I think, betrays a fundamental ignorance of the history of ideas and their relationship to what is possible in terms of doing.

We need side-loading!

None of this is incompatible with what I said, really.

I don't know if I'd call it an "evolutionary step up" so much as I think it's highly likely to be a failure mode of the project.

I don't agree with this. You can be very focused on learning and be extremely action-oriented. I've always been deep into reading and philosophy. And I've built large, successful businesses along the way. Including our bitcoin business at Block.

I actually think having a philosophical mind can make you a lot better at avoiding bullshitting yourself and iterating yourself into corners. I credit a lot of my successful predictions and secular bets over the past decade to my predilection to careful counterfactual reasoning about things, that comes from carefully training your mind to challenge its own intuitions.

Bob does own the entire island in the thought experiment.

What's amusing to me, is this is the exact argument from Rothbard I was critiquing in my "Bob's Island" thought experiment in WBD, that made people so upset. But here he is, in plain language, conceding the point.

The only way you can tell the difference between a feudal society and libertarian society in his telling, is by looking at the _initial_ _conditions_. He is conceding the absolute state is opaque to the question, and the purity of the land titles over time is where the truth is!

Why won't anarcho-capitalism devolve into feudalism?

Do you believe an anarcho-capitalist society would lead to more prosperity for everyone?

Morning ☀️!

What school of anarchism?

Do you describe yourself as an anarchist?