Comments on: Suicide Express

By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 16:15:14 +0000

All the better. I only wish I’d meant to say it.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:12:00 +0000

I wonder how much of ‘black twitter’ is the same sort of thing.

By: Henri

Henri — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 12:59:37 +0000

An interesting thought, but I submit that increasingly facile and sensationalist writing is a natural failure mode of highly ambitious blogs.

Blog authors like Bryan Caplan or Robin Hanson are expected to produce short and appetising essays over a period of years. After having used up their reservoir of professional knowledge and impactful personal notions, they cannot resort to a more humble form of scholarship, in which insight develops only through long, detailed case studies. Hence, Caplan’s strained interpretation of random historical anecdotes to fuel transparently ideological posts.

This raises the question whether blogs are a good feature of the political web, or merely the default in the absence of serious collective intent to learn or achieve something. (This is not to criticise the sterling efforts of any particular blog author or milieu, of course.)

By: Handle

Handle — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:59:46 +0000

See Spandrell below – there are much better examples of false-signal or cost-born-by-others voting that this I imagine, and the free-riding / coordination problem of collective action is non-negligible when analyzing the question.

The weakness and easy-deconstruction of Caplan’s example is revealing though. Since the level-headed, clear-thinking, mostly-balanced Arnold Kling left, he’s become increasingly untethered from reality – a hammer to every nail, even when it’s not a nail. The same thing seems to have happened to Yglesias (free of Think Progress) and Robin Hanson (free of the Less Wrong crowd) since the beginning of the year.

All of these have gone farther, not closer, to things resembling sense lately. It’s almost like you can take ‘skepticism’ of ‘common sense’ too far, into something pathological, and that animosity ripples over into pulling up the stakes of the ropes to your own hot air balloon. They’ve all gone free-floating, drifting, drifting …

By: spandrell

spandrell — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:36:37 +0000

Of course when people are given the choice, they will all vote for non immigrating, staying in the land of their birth and forefathers, being totally independent of any foreign power, not having military forces, given an unconditional stipend of 5k a month per person, and establishing a park full of unicorns in every town of more than 100 inhabitants.

The problem is what they’re willing to do about it. Not much, it seems.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 23:21:53 +0000

OK, but by getting sophisticated about thinking this through, you’re defending Caplan from the consequences of his own argument (which is no fun at all).

By: admin

admin — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 23:07:17 +0000

My ‘thesis’ needs to be supple enough to accommodate your argument, which is obviously right. I don’t think that’s difficult. As US foreign policy degenerates into pure signalling, its effectiveness decays, in a vicious circle. That is what we are seeing right now (since the current US administration sees the world as a theater for emotional gesticulation). Democratization most decidedly hits the buffers as a serious policy, even as its rhetorical substitute becomes ever more feverish.
One sign that these things go together easily — and as a dynamic system — is the growth of ‘isolationism’ in the US. No one seriously imagines spilling American blood for overseas ‘democracy’ anymore, because everyone knows that dying for gaseous propaganda would be a mistake. Gaseous propaganda is cheap, though, so there’s no need to discontinue it, just because it’s not being paid for anymore.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:37:54 +0000

“ruin voting” is definitely a keeper
(I realize it’s the side-product of glitchy parsing on my part)

By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:35:10 +0000

Every state that borders California is familiar with people fleeing ruin voting to import that ruin.

By: Handle

Handle — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:17:25 +0000

I read the results differently. ‘Emigrating as a German-Speaker to non-German-Speaking regions of France, a weak country which just lost a war’ seems completely qualitatively different from ‘Wanting to remain in the German-speaking region of my birth and forbears, and the people and culture which inhabit that area, but not under the control of the Prussian Empire’. That major distinction neutralizes our ability to analyze any supposed difference between ‘revealed preferences’ and ‘signalling, cost-less, emotive voting’.

I doubt we can do such simple analysis even in the absence of such a distinction. Preferring to only a follow a rule (perhaps at some personal cost) when it is compulsory on the entire community (with related compensatory network-effect / externality gains) would yield voting for zoning rules, but not restricting one’s own building in the absence of such rules. There is no paradox, contradiction, or otherwise revealed in such a rational voting strategy.

The idioms ‘over-egging the pudding’ and ‘gilding the lillies’ were invented for folks like Caplan.