It seems to me the crisis of trust in society today, which I anticipate getting worse due to the misinformation amplifying potential of generative AI, is creating increasingly fertile ground for doom-mongering soothsayers to demagogue their way to being seen as credible voices with credible answers.
You seem to be implying that freedom is not important to me, in my conception of the good life.
You and I need to have some more in person discussions on all of this.
And this is why I don't cheer for a rapid collapse of fiat currency!
I think it's ultimately about social trust and alignment of incentives.
One might suggest what you're currently feeling -- our collective exhaustion from the rate of change -- might be the most dangerous thing of all.
I think I'm pretty open-eyed about the challenges we face. I talk about them all the time. But I'm allergic to notions of "everything is so fucked, we need to burn our institutions to the ground and start over." I just get off the bus at that point, because I perceive extreme risks to freedom, liberty and peace if that were to transpire.
Many people are convinced that tools like bitcoin mean that none of these negative outcomes will come to pass, so they're sanguine about the idea of a catastrophic collapse of all of our political institutions. But I think this is silly at best, and dangerous at worst.
Here's another unpopular view: I don't think our society is anywhere near a maxima in terms of corruption. Anybody who has studied political history carefully, would find themselves disabused of this notion quite quickly.
There is this strange element in many of these conversations which comes down to what I've previously called the "denial of progress", which appears to be born partly of ignorance for the problems of the past, and a human tendency to always think things are getting worse. Even when it's not true by any objective measure.
Not a popular viewpoint around these parts!
To add a historical analogy: Weimar Germany's currency failed and the government became insolvent. But that did not presage a dissolution of the state, it presaged a massive increase in state capacity. And we all know how that turned out.
I think there's a tendency among people in these conversations to believe that state capacity is in precipitous and irreversible decline. I think this stems from oversimplification of the equities and incentives.
Perhaps. But I think the coming mass displacement of employment is going to shift political incentives in dramatic ways that will reset a lot of assumptions about where the Overton Window lies for policy potential.
I think the mistake is just assuming these variables will all hold constant. Market and political incentives will change over time. And there's going to be serious pain that will come from the necessary adjustments that will be forced on the system.
I mean, you listed a lot of concerns that you have, that I'd argue you have no more control over than the topic I brought up.
All great things are made up of many small steps.
I definitely think that's a legitimate proximate concern for you.
I would argue there always should be room for people to worry about existential threats. Worrying about the culture wars over the threat of a solar eruption sending us back to the Stone Age, seems like a pretty dramatic failure of risk-benefit analysis to me.
Yet, some people in these arguments insist that collective action problems don't exist!
Yeah. But I don't think we are near the peak of the Laffer Curve, right now.