Advanced Technologies Increasingly Require States or Other Large Orgs; Loners Lose Out

As history progresses, it's increasingly the case that as an individual, you can't compete with the amazing technologies that have been created and manufactured by large groups of people. This is the opposite of the trend anticipated during the "internet-optimistic" early aughts.

For instance, drones are cool, and seem to put some surveillance (and minimal transport) capabilities back into the hands of individuals. But it seems to me that large organizations (corporations, governments) stand to benefit more by the tracking and surveillance opportunities they create than a single person or family.

There are endless examples of this, many of them with complex technology with capital requirements too great for individuals, depends on large groups to be designed and manufactured, and where there are organizational economies of scale. Maybe you have your one drone, but your state police force has a hundred of them, to watch you and your drone and maybe even knock it down. Space colonization is another case - while it might be a corporation and not a state that finally colonizes another planet, it's likely to be a large corporation.

Consequently, history is increasingly favoring the people who can maneuver into positions of power in large organizations. This is also related to the problem that wealth (rather than income from labor) is more important to individuals and the economy as a whole, and that the best thing you can do is save enough money to invest in these large organizations - yet most people have difficulty getting into a position where they're not dependent on wages. Even forgetting about class based on inheritance - the increasing cognitive demands of these kinds of positions effectively rule them out as possible career paths or life choices for (again) increasingly large slices of the population.

The problem of the benefits of technology accruing more to states and corporations than individuals actually does seem to be a new one (there is a qualitative difference between autonomous drones and swords made of Damascus steel) and this is therefore concerning that we're running into this problem for the first time, rather than it being a cyclic economic problem (for example, complex and leveraged investment instruments) that we've survived going back centuries or more. As recently as the Middle Ages, well-organized nomads could come out of the Eurasian steppes and over-run the most advanced states of the day. While on one hand it's comforting that this is unlikely to happen today (see second half of this article) it does suggest that we passed a threshold in history where states are invincible and the biggest will win - which suggests we should all learn Mandarin.

Is this argument false? If so why? If true, are we screwed, or is there some other way small groups can compete, or is there an inverted U shape to this phenomenon, as the libertarian digerati more freely imagined a mere 15 years ago?

Dracula, Nero, and History

A year and a half ago I was in central Europe and sadly didn't have enough time to get to Romania, an omission I will correct next time I'm in that part of the world. But I did do a lot of reading, especially (of course!) about Dracula. I'd always wondered how Vlad Dracul and his descendants have been remembered as such villains over the centuries, especially when they were instrumental in keeping the Balkans in the hands of Christendom and out of Turkish control. But old Vlad also persecuted the medieval German diaspora that had spread across central and eastern Europe; how do we know? "It's worth mentioning that most written sources regarding his reign are based on the numerous propagandistic pamphlets spread by the Germans with the help of their new invention, the printing press."

The Roman emperor Nero was comemmorated as both the most incompetent Roman emperor (which he definitely wasn't, among the many jokers that competed for that title) as well as being so evil that Jews and early Christians were worried he would come back to life, and the famous 666 in the Book of Revelations is actually a code referring to him. Not coincidentally, Nero was the emperor who began Rome's systematic program of persecuting the Jews in Israel.

The lesson? If you don't want to be remembered for millennia as a villain, don't persecute industrious, highly literate people with a broad diaspora that's self-sustaining and wealth-generating due to trade.

"The Quixotic Single-Mindedness of the Live-Action-Role-Playing Russophile"

What a great piece this is, about a gathering of (very) left-of-center political activists. It sounds like a glorious mess, and I'm quite happy to read about it from a distance. Anything which contains phrases such as the one in the post title gets an automatic A+, but the gems keep coming: "Don't you just hate it when those fake-ass poseur environmentalists rip off your intersectionality? One would assume that in any intelligible scheme of political success, the mass 'appropriation' of their ideas/consciousness/jargon/acronyms would be the ultimate goal of these 'intersectional environmentalist' pioneers. But when you substitute po-mo politics for your personality, 'Moooooooom, he's coooooopying meeeee' quickly becomes a new standard of oppression."

Warning, anyone who has attended ideologically non-mainstream events may see a little (too much) of themselves reflected.

Remembering Jefferson; Forgetting Lee

As monuments to Robert E. Lee have been dismantled, there have been debates about whether we should do the same for monuments to Thomas Jefferson. Wasn't he a slave-owner as well?

Here's why in the United States we should keep statues of Jefferson but not Lee.

Thomas Jefferson owned, and by most accounts, mistreated, his slaves, even by the standards of the antebellum South. However, people revere his memory despite this, and not because of this.

Robert E. Lee invaded the United States in an attempt to destroy the country and to continue the institution of slavery. The people who revere his memory do revere him because of this. Nothing else in his legacy is remotely as important.

Both Jefferson and Lee were imperfect human beings who did immoral things that, thanks to moral progress, are no longer legal or tolerated by decent people today. But only one of the two made it his life's work to actively try to continue slavery and destroy the United States of America, since that had become necessary to continue slavery. We absolutely should not try to forget unpleasant facts about them, any more than we should forget the slaughter of the native people that lived in North America before Europeans arrived, or Germans should forget the Holocaust. Indeed, it's critical that we remember that otherwise decent people somehow looked the other way and did these things or allowed them to happen.

It is important to consider that if moral progress is real, and continuing, then most of us today are certainly doing things that our great grandchildren will find morally abhorrent.

Unfortunately slavery is not yet a historical footnote, and continues in several countries today. Here's how you can help.

Mondrian's Earlier, Less Geometric Work

Gray Tree, 1911



Composition, 1913



Tableau Number 4, 1913



Farm Near Duivendrecht, 1916


Last art post here.

To Remind People of Status Hierarchies, Especially Opt-Outable Ones, Is Immoral

It's a shame that humans are so sensitive to status hierarchies (a zero sum game of relative value) as opposed to the "absolute value" of one's life experience. If I'm living in a shack in the woods getting by doing odd jobs and my family is fed and healthy, why should I ever be resentful? My life is fine!

Even if I'm going to compare myself to others, compared to the vast majority of people who ever lived, I'm doing great. But it's very hard not to let that status awareness among your here-and-now peers sneak in and start making us less content with our actually just-fine lives. This is the great irony and tragedy of living in the West in the twenty-first century. Avoid zero-sum games if you can, and remember, status is positional and therefore always zero sum.

There are many non-opt-outable status hierarchies (house, job, money, family, looks), and these are the most frustrating ones. One way that people in wealthy societies cope with status hierarchies is by voluntarily inhabiting multiple overlapping status hierarchies, but even then, you still live somewhere, look a certain way, and have a certain amount of money.

It is for this reason that people who go out of their way to make others MORE aware of status hierarchies and their position in them, whether non-opt-outable ones or consumption-based ones, are destroying contentment and are profoundly immoral. I'm sure you've already heard it a million times, but it's worth thinking about how your brain considers those rich good-looking leisurely people you see on TV to be your here-and-now peers, not to mention those enhanced pictures and narratives of your friends' and colleagues selfies and vacations. Robin Hanson goes into more detail on this here. Meanwhile - yes, I have quit Facebook, and maybe you should think more about it.

Tasting Freedom: Happiness, Religion and Economic Transition

Paper is here, by Orsolya Lelkes (2006.) Emphases mine.

Abstract:

Economic transition lowered happiness on average, but did not affect everyone equally. This paper uses Hungarian survey data to study the impact of religion and economic transition on happiness. Religious involvement contributes positively to individuals’ self-reported well-being. Controlling for personal characteristics of the respondents, money is a less important source of happiness for the religious. The impact of economic transition varies greatly across different groups. The main winners from increasing economic freedom were the entrepreneurs. The religious were little affected by the changes. This implies that greater ideological freedom, measured by a greater social role of churches, may not influence happiness per se.

The interpretation I take from this is that in the positive psychology triad of the things the produce happiness (pleasure, meaning, and flow), each of these things is a variable in each person's overall happiness equation, and each component's importance varies between individuals. Money is mostly something we exchange for pleasure, unless you're an entrepreneur, then it produces meaning and flow. If you're religious, the meaning component is bigger so again money is not such a big term. As well, I would imagine that the starting point and absolute difference in the transition makes a difference. That is, if you're starting out second-world (like Hungary, the source of the data in this paper) you're probably not going without food, shelter, or public safety. But if you're in Botswana or for that matter China over the last few decades, you might well have gone from famines and no housing or police to a more developed social environment, there may be a greater impact on happiness.