Dwarkesh Podcast - Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than sixty academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, as well as eight amazing books.  Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Podcast website here. Buy Knowledge, Reality, and Value and The Problem of Political Authority.Read Michael’s awesome blog and follow me on Twitter for new episodes.Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Intro (0:01:07) - The Problem of Political Authority (0:03:25) - Common sense ethics  (0:09:39) - Stockholm syndrome and the charisma of power (0:18:14) - Moral progress (0:26:55) - Growth of libertarian ideas (0:33:37) - Does anarchy increase violence? (0:44:37) - Transitioning to anarchy (0:47:20) - Is Huemer attacking our society?! (0:51:40) - Huemer's writing process (0:53:18) - Is it okay to work for the government (0:56:39) - Burkean argument against anarchy (1:02:07) - The case for tyranny (1:11:58) - Underrated/overrated (1:25:55) - Huemer production function(1:30:41) - Favorite books (1:33:04) - Advice for young people Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

Hello, folks, and welcome to the Lunar Society podcast. Today, it is my great privilege to talk with Professor Michael Humor. He is, in my opinion, the best philosopher alive. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, and he has written more than 70 academic articles on epistemology, ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy. He has also written eight books, the newest one of which is this introduction to philosophy, knowledge, reality, and value.

I highly, highly recommend it. It's incredibly clear and easy to read and covers all of the arguments and philosophy that I have been curious about since I was a teenager. So I've included a link to his Amazon page in the description where you can go and buy it. Today, we had an incredibly wide-ranging conversation about a previous book of his, The Parliament Political Authority. Just a reminder, as always, to please, please share this podcast on social media or with your friends if you enjoy it. This is a small and growing podcast, so word of mouth really, really helps. Without further to do, here's Professor Michael Humor. Okay, Professor Humor, what is the problem in political authority?

What does you write this book? Yeah, so, you know, here's a copy of the book. And you can order it on Amazon. That's the important thing. Or, you know, anywhere. Yeah, so, you know, the problem referred to in the title is a philosophical problem about government. Basically, the problem is what's the basis for the government's authority? And what I mean by the government's authority is,

so first of all, it's usually thought that the government is entitled to give other people commands and force them to obey in situations where nobody else would be entitled to give commands and force people to obey, right? So like they could give commands that you don't already have to do, but you have to do them only because the government commanded it. And then the other part of this notion of authority

is that it's generally thought that you have a moral obligation to obey, right, to obey the law merely because it's the law. And again, you know, the law could be things that you're not already obligated to do. Right. So example, if I decide that I'm going to collect money from other people to give to the poor, right? Like I started a charity and collecting money to help the poor. And I decide I'm not getting enough contributions voluntarily, so I decide to just like force people to pay, right? right? If I do this, this is called extortion. And, you know, I'm going to wind up in jail, right? But besides that, I'm going to wind up in jail, most people will be disapproving of this and think that, number one, I shouldn't be doing that. Number two, they don't have to pay me.

Okay. But when the government does this, this is called taxation and, you know, social welfare programs, which is generally most people approve of, right? And they think that the government is entitled to. to do that and that we are obligated to pay. So, and that's just an illustration of the idea that the government has a special moral status, right, that most people think they have a kind of status that puts them above other ordinary people. And so the question is why? Like, you know, why do they, why do they get to do all this stuff that nobody else can do? And why should we obey them, right? So you're pointing out a contradiction between common sense morality and common sense political philosophy, why should we resolve that contradiction in favor of common sense intuitions rather than, you know, the prevalent political abuse? Yeah, common sense, ethical intuition. I mean, so,

yeah, so there are the intuitions that you would apply to kind of ordinary people, and then there are the intuitions people have about the state. But I think if you raise this issue with most people, they will see that some sort of explanation is required. So like most people have the initial reaction that the government has authority, but they will not generally say, and yeah, that's just self-evident and needs no explanation. Like most people can see that it needs an explanation. And so then they will try to give an explanation, then it will just turn out that none of the explanations are any good, right? So I mean, right, so part of the reason why we don't just go with our initial intuition about politics is that we also, you might say, we have the intuition that it requires an explanation, right?

Yeah, so that's part of it. Another thing is, you know, the ethical intuitions that I'm appealing to, so things like you shouldn't go up to people and just like steal their money or, you know, like threaten people with violence to get their money or and then law. recommendations and stuff like that. These are not controversial intuitions, right? Like these are intuitive reactions that any normal person would have, regardless of whether they're Democrats or Republicans or libertarians.

The thing about the state having authority is not so uncontroversial, right? So there's a significant number of people who are called libertarians who do not have any intuitive reactions that the state has authority, right? Yeah. You know, I have like in the book in chapter six, I have a series of explanations for why people might have this bias in favor of the state, you know, based on different findings in psychology, right? But I mean, one of the obvious things, like maybe the most obvious things is that people have a bias towards the status quo, right? And like there's just very clear independent evidence of that.

Like without talking about the problem of political authority, there's independent evidence that there's a bias for the status quo. Right. So this explains why people in different societies with very different customs tend to think that their customs are superior to those of other societies. Like, how could that be? Like, it has to be that they're biased in favor of the way things are done in their own society, right? Right. So, like, I've got an explanation of why people would have mistaken moral judgments about the state. Yeah. So I want to talk about your second point there, which is that there's more controversy on the political views than there is on the basic ethical intuitions about theft and so on. It's not self-evident to me that, so there are libertarians who believe that the state should be significantly smaller. But as far as people who believe that the state has no unique authority that non-state actors don't have, it's not self-evident to me that like anarcho-capitalists outnumber the people who think that you should have to pay somebody. Your neighbor has a right. to make you pay when you have benefited from his services, even though you didn't ask for those services. I wouldn't say that anarcho-capitalism is less controversial than that. It might be, but that's not self-evident to me.

Anarcho-capital is controversial. So anarcho-capital is the extreme version of libertarianism. So there are not very many of them, but there are a substantial number of libertarians, right? And pretty much all- They still hold the political, most of them still hold the political view that the state has some unique authority, right? No, I don't think so. Right.

So, I mean, this is discussed in Chapter 7, where I argue that, you know, what differentiates libertarians from everyone else is skepticism about authority. That is the basic libertarian view. By the way, many libertarians deny that this is what. what unifies libertarianism. But I think they deny that because they haven't read my book. And when they read my book, they will understand that. They may not even understand what I mean by authority and skepticism thereof. But, okay, this is what's common to libertarians.

They think that you should apply the same moral standards to the state that you apply to ordinary people. And they do that. And then, right? And so when the state does something like the state commits murder, The libertarians go, murder. And the partisans of conventional political views go, oh, well, I guess they shouldn't have done that,

but we're not going to call them murderers or anything like that. Right. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. There's a quotation at the end that I put at the end of the book from the Chinese philosopher of Motsa, which was, you know, like whatever, some thousand,

years ago or something. But he says, you know, to kill one man is a capital crime. And to kill 10 men is to multiply the crime by 10fold. And to kill 100 men is to multiply by 100 fold. Okay. And this, the rulers of the world all recognize. But when it comes to the greatest crime of all, making war on another state, they praise it. Because, you know, that's just like it's just murder, but bigger. Right. And so he says, you know, if a man on seeing a little bit, black says it is black, but when seeing a lot of black says it is white, then it's clear that this person cannot distinguish black from white. And similarly, the rulers of the world cannot distinguish right from wrong. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting point. Like if we held a political

leaders to account, the same way hold individuals to account, it'd be an interesting way of looking at them. So let me ask you about the biases you were talking about. One of the ones you point out in the book is Stockholm syndrome, where a victim of abuse will feel loyalty towards their abuser and feel that the abuser is actually protecting them and will feel gratitude towards small acts of mercy. I wonder, given the fact that people regularly criticize the president or regularly criticize government policies to disagree with, to what extent they're actually fearful of or in some way, incorrectly loyal towards the government in this particular way, because of fear of authority. Yeah. So, you know, so the original Stockholm syndrome, you know, just for anyone doesn't know,

refers to, there's a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, whatever, like, decades ago, probably 1970s or something, where the robbers took some people hostage in the bank vault. and then it basically turned out that the hostages kind of emotionally bond bonded with the kidnappers. At one point, they thought that the kidnappers were protecting them from the police. At the end, the hostages didn't want to go out without the kidnappers because they were afraid that the police would shoot the kidnappers, right, once they got them alone. Okay, so anyway, and then I think one of them, like, you know, tried to aid in the legal defense. like started up a legal defense fund for kidnapping. Okay. And this is a phenomenon that occurs periodically in hostage situations, right?

It wasn't just that one case. So like, you know, FBI negotiators are trained to be prepared for Stockholm syndrome. Now, you know, what happens with the government isn't literally exactly that. They're not literally kidnapping us. But my idea is there's a, you know, there's a little bit broader phenomenon that people will, instinctively take the side of those who have power over them. And there's an evolutionary explanation for why this would be. Right.

So, and, you know, people have said about Stockholm syndrome that it's a survival mechanism, which, by the way, there's evidence for thinking that it worked because the, like, the kidnappers in that case said, like, they were thinking of shooting the hostages, but they couldn't do it because of the emotional bond that they had formed with the hostages. So it might have worked. And, you know, my more general point is it's common in human societies for someone to have power over others. And if the people in the weaker position form an emotional bond with the powerful people, that may help them to survive and prosper. Right.

So that might be why people kind of try to try to take the side of the government. And then, you know, you asked about, well, people are often very critical of the president. And I guess I think it's because people are distinguishing the government from the current office holder. It doesn't feel like you're being disloyal to the government. What you're saying is you just want like the other party. Like you wanted the other party to be in power, which they're also like, you know, half of the government or something like that. Yeah. But then there's people who, I mean, not from a libertarian perspective, there's people who question the legitimacy of the government and

other ways. For example, they'll say it's systemically racist. And these are also the kind of people who want to increase the size of the government. But that also seems confusing. Like if it's, if fear of government should prevent people from, okay, so let's say it prevents them from criticizing the legitimacy of the government, but it allows them to criticize the president. Why are people comfortable criticizing the legitimacy of the government in this particular way? I mean, I'm not sure they are questioning the legitimacy of the government. Yeah. Like the, you know, the social justice warriors.

Right. Rather than just criticizing some of its policies, right? Mm-hmm. So, I mean, in my view, questioning their legitimacy would be saying, like, they shouldn't have any entitlements that ordinary citizens don't have. Right. So like, if ordinary citizens aren't entitled to tax each other, then the state shouldn't be able to tax us or, you know, something like that. Right.

Yes, I don't think the left-wing people think that exactly. But, I mean, you know, they are like, they're like sort of, actually, I mean, I, well, I'm not quite sure I understand you of you, right? So because I'm not quite sure I understand what the systemic racism is, right? So like, I'm going to say like they're accusing the government of being racist, but I'm not even sure that that's what it means, right? What do you mean? I'm not sure that systemic racism means that anyone is actually racist, right? That's fair, yeah.

I wonder to what extent. So Renee Gerard thought, noticed that after Stalin died, support for the Soviet Union amongst academia in the West declined. And so his hypothesis was that the academics didn't support Stalin despite his violence, but because of his violence. So it wasn't fear of authority, but more so that the charisma of authority, that they find authority charismatic and violence charismatic. What do you think of that hypothesis?

Yeah, maybe. So, I mean, I'm not sure if the academics knew about, Stalin's murders. Right. They might have not known because they didn't want to know, right? So I think there's a phenomenon that horrible people are often charismatic, right? Or, you know, charismatic to ordinary average people. So Stalin was probably a charismatic character, although, like, I haven't seen him.

But because, like, people, ordinary average people don't admire moral, virtue. They admire power. Like, they admire somebody who is, who appears strong and confident, right? But the people who are very strong and confident are often bad people. So, like, and, like, the reason why they're strong is because they crush all opposition, right? And the reason why they're confident is that they do not give a shit about other people. Like, if you don't, If you don't give a shit what other people think and you don't care what effect you have on other people, then you don't worry. Like you're not worried when you're talking to them because you don't care what they think about. And when you're just taking actions, like if you're the leader and you're like putting forward your new policies, you do it with total confidence because you don't care if it's wrong.

That's my read on dictators, right? They act like they're totally confident that this is the right. because they don't actually care if it kills lots of people or not, right? Right. Normal person would be worried. What if I'm doing the wrong thing? But then that worry would make them look unconfident and then people would not support them. Yeah.

See, this does help explain something about the last four years. So I'm not claiming that Trump was Stalin or anything, but I never found him charismatic in the way that millions of people did. I just, I was missing like a module in my mind. that was supposed to find him charismatic. I just couldn't figure it out, but that's a good explanation. Just the confidence itself. Yeah, I mean, I found him kind of anti-charismatic.

But I think about half the country found him anti-charismatic, so to speak. But you still have to explain why half of them found him, you know, particularly charismatic, like better than the other 15 Republican candidates in the primaries. Right. And, yeah, it had a lot to do with being super confident, right? which by my read is because he doesn't care. And Ike'll say stuff with total confidence. And the ordinary person thinks because he's talking with complete confidence,

that means that what he's saying must be true. But the alternative explanation is it's because he doesn't care about truth. So then why do you think moral progress is likely if the average person, cares about power or is more convinced by power itself than convincing arguments or by people who care about the truth. Yeah. How do we get moral progress? I mean, so, I mean, first, like, why do I think that there's moral progress? Because I looked at history. Because, like, you look at what people were doing, you know, back in ancient Rome, you know, gladiatorial combat. They were, like, forcing slaves to fight to the death for fun because they thought.

it was amusing to see them cut to pieces. And then, you know, like just 200 years ago in America, we were enslaving just like, enslaving people just because they had darker skin and stuff like that. So I mean, the evidence of there being moral progress is compelling, right? It's like enormous progress.

What's, but you know, what's the explanation? How did it happen? I mean, I think that it's driven by a relatively small number of people, right? So there are a bunch of people who, you know, don't, don't reflect very much and just go along with the customs of their society. And they're just sort of like, sort of neutral. And there's a small number of people who kind of see the flaws in the status quo.

And they tried to push society, you know, towards the moral truth, right? And they push it slowly. right? Okay, but because there are always reformers who are trying to improve society, it's a constant, it's a constant small force. So over the course of many generations, it accumulates to a lot of progress, right? Right. So let me, I've read dialogues and ethical vegetarianism, which you also wrote. And I want to question you on whether on net there has been moral progress. At one point in the book, you say that the impact of factory farming rivals, the suffering of all the humans that I've ever existed.

And how can a world where factory farming has been increasing be one where there's been tremendous moral progress? On net, there would seem to be a moral decline, right? Yeah, right. I mean, you could make the argument, people find they're shocking, but you can make the argument that, like, you know, would have been better if there were no humans. Maybe the world would be better with no human beings, right? because the amount of pain and suffering that we cause, just like a few years of human beings, the amount of pain of suffering that we cause to other species is probably greater than all

of the suffering in all of human history. And, you know, probably outweighs all of the pleasure that human beings have ever experienced, you know, among all of the hundred billion or so humans who have existed. You know, that might seem shocking, but the number of animals that were torturing and killing each year or something like 74 billion. Right. And there have only ever been 110 billion humans. So like two years of factory farming,

we tortured and killed more creatures than the total number of us who have ever existed, right? Yeah. So anyway, yeah, so like from a purely consequentialist standpoint, it's been like a huge regression, okay? However, it does appear to me that it's turning around. So vegetarianism and veganism are becoming more popular. When I was in college, you know, there were there were not many vegetarians and I think I never met a vegan, right?

I think like nobody heard of that. And there weren't like vegan restaurants you could go to and stuff like that. And what's ultimately going to change the situation is technology, right? Right. So now there are all of these products. There are these, you know, substitute products, substitutes for animal products, which are are really convincing and it didn't used to be. Also, they're working on synthetic meat, basically. So they're going to make meat without the cruelty.

And that's probably what's ultimately going to end it. So like right now, it's really bad, but it's probably going to get better when we perfect this technology. Also, I mean, you know, and this kind of, you know, this kind of fits with what I was saying earlier. This is being driven by a small number of people, right? There's like a small percentage of society who cares.

because there's like a small percentage of human beings who are basically morally decent. Small number of people give a crap about morality at all. But, okay, but that's enough, right? So like the technological changes are being driven by, you know, animal welfare advocates, basically. Like that's why we have people who are interested in developing synthetic meat and stuff like that. Yeah. Okay, so assuming that there's more progress is happening, You say in the book that you expect the rate of progress to increase over time because of exponential growth.

This seems to contradict a blog post you recently wrote talking about how progress will end, where you said that because of diminishing marginal returns, actually exponential growth has to stop. And you even hypothesize that it will actually decline at some point. So, I mean, you were talking about scientific and technological knowledge here, but why doesn't this also apply to moral progress? Why won't we see moral decline or just zero moral growth before we get at the point of anarcho-capitalism? Oh, I mean, so any progress has to eventually slow down.

And, you know, because I think there's a maximum point, everything, right? But that doesn't mean that will happen soon. like I can't predict where it will happen. Eventually, civilization will collapse and will all die. Eventually, the human species will go extinct. But I don't know when. It could be, you know, I don't know, it could be in the next hundred years or it could be in a million years, okay?

Right. But what about moral progress? Oh, yeah. And part of why I said that in the blog post was there's been a decline in the rate of economic growth in the United States. And poorer countries have a faster rate of growth. right. They're poorer overall, but they're growing faster, so they'll eventually catch up. And you can hypothesize the reason for this. If you're already doing pretty badly, it's

easier to improve. And like the United States is already pretty efficient, so it gets harder and harder to improve, right? And that could happen with moral progress too. Like, it will presumably slow down. When we get, as we get closer to the moral truth, the rate of progress will have to slow down, right? Will it decline? I don't know. I don't know why that would have to happen. I mean, like eventually we'll all die, but I don't know why we would have to become immoral before we die. There's something about the accumulation of knowledge that it tends to go, you know, it tends to just accumulate and not get destroyed. Yeah. Yeah, so will we stop, will the progress stop before we reach an archo-capitalism.

I don't know. I mean, that might be true if there's some truths that are super hard to apprehend, then it might be that like human species never become advanced enough to understand them. Like, that could be true. But this doesn't seem to me like it's that hard. Right. So I mean, I think my basic moral point is the government isn't special. like they're people like you and me.

There's no reason why they should get to do a whole bunch of stuff that you consider to be immoral if anyone else does them. So like the basic idea I don't think is that complicated. And I mean, I think this is similar to other bits of progress that have occurred in history. A lot of the stuff people were doing the past was super stupid, like not only bad but stupid.

So like the idea that, oh, you have more rights than somebody because of your skin color. Like, that's super dumb. Besides being really harmful, it's just dumb, right? Anyway, so, like, you know, eventually people see that. Okay, but I think this is similar. So, you know, the idea that you don't have different rights because of your skin color, I think that is kind of similar to you don't have different rights just because you're in power, right?

Yeah. So I'm going to try to critique that view, actually. Like, you could say that the change in attitudes over the last few centuries has been towards greater respect for the individual, a stronger presumption against violence and coercion. But that might have been true globally because, like, the default state of mankind is, you know, authoritarian control. But in the United States, it seems that in the 19th century, obviously to the exclusion of blacks and women, attitudes are far more libertarian.

There's a particular example of Grover Cleveland, a sent a bill for, Congress authorizing what would be $250,000 today for some natural disaster that occurred in Texas. And he vetoes it and he says, first of all, I can't find any authority within the Constitution to do this. Second, this sets an expectation of, you know, paternalistic help from the government in the future. And we should just rely on the charity of fellow citizens. This is not the proper role of government. Both parties seem to have a respect for the autonomy of the individual more so back then. So on the particular point of libertarian views, it seems that there has been regress.

And I think maybe a better theory of changing attitudes has been an increase in safetyism. And in most cases, this is a good thing because countries that care about safety don't do genocides, torture, war, and so on. Or, you know, like, yes. Yeah, yeah. But it also means that they're more comfortable with regulations, with fines, with not so diligent in protecting property. rights. So then this safety is a asymptotes to a regulatory state rather than anarcho-capitalism over time. Yeah, I mean, that could be true. So definitely the United States has had growing regulation. You know, back when it was first started, the code of federal regulations,

so this lists all of the federal regulations. It was started in, I guess, 1938 or something like this, or 1930s. It was 22,000 pages, which sounds long enough. but it's now over 150,000 pages, right? And, you know, like, you know, the size of these regulatory agencies is growing, more employees, right? So, I mean, it could be right that that's just what's going to keep happening, right? But it's not obviously right. So, I mean, there is a certain amount of pushback, and there are people who are realizing the, like, the problems with regulation. So in many areas, just many areas of human intellectual inquiry, knowledge just accumulates.

And, you know, we might just be in the primitive state of, you know, knowledge about social and political matters, right? That, you know, it looks to me like there's accumulating libertarian sentiment. This could be wishful thinking or something. I don't know. But like, you know, when I was in college, you know, like the Institute for Humane Studies, they had a summer seminar, which I went to. They had a summer seminar. But like in the next few decades, they expanded greatly, right? And, you know, there are these different libertarian organizations now. There was no students for liberty when I was in college, right? Like that expanded also.

There was, I recall there being basically like one well-known libertarian philosopher was Robert Nozink. Yeah. And, you know, now they're. there were multiple ones, right? So I don't know, you know, possible. You know, part of what I think was having, so I don't know about Robert Cleveland in particular, like, I don't know if he was typical of people in that time. But, I mean, so here's an interpretation.

It used to be that people believed in the authority of the state, but they just didn't care about the poor. So, like, that's what. why they didn't want to do all this welfare state stuff, right? And then, you know, later it developed to where they still believe in the authority of the state, but they started caring about the poor as well. So they thought, okay, well, we'll use this power to help the poor, right? So that would actually be a form of progress, even though, like, even though the policy is getting further from what it should be,

is sort of like the attitudes are getting closer to what they should be. Yeah. So I wonder if instead of the attitudes getting closer to libertarian, what's happening is just that the tails have increased. So, I mean, there wasn't students for liberty maybe a few decades ago, but were the Democratic Socialists of America significant force back than either? Or were there socialist in Congress, right? I don't know if it's fair to say that the change has been towards libertarianism per se rather than just towards the extremes. There could be. Yeah, I think like the internet culture might be making us more extreme, right?

Yeah, so, you know, it used to be that information and just like, you know, the content that people consumed was produced by this small elite. And now that everybody can have a voice on the internet, yeah, there's just more room for more extremists like us. but also like the socialist. Yeah. I mean, I don't know where that's going, right? So, like, it could be that the internet is just like a bad influence on all of us, right? But it could be that, you know, this is kind of like relatively early days. It could be that it's going to settle down and improve, right?

So it's just sort of like this, you know, this optimistic philosophical view that the truth wins in the end. this isn't guaranteed to happen, but generally speaking, like good ideas tend to be more persuasive than bad ideas. Like, you know, if you have the opportunity for all the information to come out and, you know, everybody gets to share their arguments and so on. Like if you hear all of the arguments, usually that favors the correct views. If you assume that the libertarian view is correct, then, you know, having more information and more discussion and so on should favor it. this is a general tendency. It's not guaranteed because there are biases in the human mind. There could be systematic biases.

And also, you know, the possibility maybe we're wrong, you know. So maybe our view will go down because it's wrong, actually. Yeah, maybe. So let's talk about the actual view then. I'm going to try to pay devil's advocate now. So there's, Hobbs had this idea that in order, people engage in violence to steal each other's stuff, or to launch preemptive strikes, or just to get revenge and glory. And then he said, we need a strong government to stop this kind of violence.

Now, you explain some game theoretical reasons why a strong government may in fact increase violence in those cases. But in Pinkers, the better angels of our nature, he lists out some empirical evidence showing that, first of all, when we go from primitive tribes to the first states, there's a decrease in violence. And then during the feudal period where thousands of independent political units merge into centralized monarchies, there's another decrease in violence. So how come it's the case that, empirically speaking, whenever power tends to centralize, the rate of violence, death, war, homicide tends to decrease? Oh, yeah, yeah, that could be true. So I think it could be that the central power, the government, suppresses the small-scale violence. They do large-scale violence, i.e. war, but they suppress, like, the just ordinary one-on-one murder and so on.

But, I mean, like, if you're asking, well, why is it that people are prone to violence to begin with? I think like the, so I think Pinkard in that book takes up the explanation, like the Hobbesian explanation, which is totally wrong and makes no sense. Okay. But in a different book, Pinker gives a different explanation that I think is actually correct. But I'm not sure he realizes that it's a completely different explanation. Okay. So the Hobbesian explanation is, you know, everybody's completely selfish and everybody knows that

anyone can kill anyone. And you're afraid that somebody else is going to attack you and kill you. So you attack them first because there's like some advantage in combat to the person who attacks first. Okay. And you know, this makes no sense because so if there's more than one other person who is worried about being attacked and you go around attacking people without provocation, then everyone else is going to know that you're the biggest threat. Like you're the one who's most likely to attack them without provocation. So all of these people who are thinking about doing preemptive attacks, like you become the biggest target for them, right?

So like, you know, what you should do is, and you're assuming that you can't like immediately kill everyone else at once, right? What you should do is like just try to mind your own business and stay away and not start any fights, right? Okay, however, this isn't what happens in primitive societies. This is not what human beings have actually done throughout history. And so why is that? And I wondered about this for a long time until I read Stephen Pinker's book,

How the Mind Works. There's a particular passage that explains this. And basically what happened in primitive tribes was the men from one tribe would attack another tribe in order to murder the men and kidnap the women. And this is extremely dangerous. There's a high chance that you die when you're doing this. So on the face of it, it seems like you wouldn't do that.

It doesn't make sense. Okay, but here's the thing. Like, say there's a 45% chance that you die by starting this fight, but a 55% chance that you survive and you capture one extra wife. Okay, then your reproductive success goes up. Yeah. Like, it doesn't seem like it's worth it if there's a 45% chance of dying, like just from an intuitive self-interest standpoint,

but from the standpoint of expected reproductive success, your expected reproductive success goes up, if you presently have fewer than two wives. If you have zero wives, you have nothing to lose because you're going to have zero reproductive success if you don't. And by the way, it was probably common for men in primitive societies to have zero wives because most societies practice polygyny, which means the majority of men have zero wives, right? Because like, you know, there's some like dominant character who's taken multiple wives and so on, right? Anyway, so if you have one wife, still, you have a chance of either doubling your reproductive success or cutting it down to zero.

And it's a good deal as long as it's slightly more probable that you succeed. So like that's the evolutionary explanation of why this would happen. This is super bad, right? It's very bad that that's the case. But that would explain why, okay, you know, human beings, like, they're not thinking that when they go to war. What's happening is they're driven by emotions. this is all to explain why we would have the genes that would give us the emotional reactions

that would make it likely for us to attack other drives, right? Yeah, but so long as that instinct exists, why won't state without a Leviathan or society without a Leviathan fall back into that sort of, people would just fall back into that emotion of conquest? Why won't that happen? you know, private security agencies, you'll hire private security agencies. So, I mean, the primitive tribes didn't have private security agencies. They didn't have like a just like developed economy. And, you know, it might be that indeed, anarchy doesn't work starting from primitive society, right?

But it might still work if you transition from an advanced society. But so, like, I mean, my theory is, you know, you transition from democracy. to anarchy, to anarcho-capitalism. And it doesn't work if you just start, if you start in a much earlier stage of society, right? Plausively, it won't work. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it doesn't the case for private security,

doesn't it assume somewhat of a purity and resources that you could afford a similar magnitude of help? Because if over time that rich people, because either they're smarter or they have a lot of capital to begin with can grow their capital stock much more than poor people. This is not a problem in a normal democracy or according to me, it's not a problem in a normal democracy because what are they going to do with it, right? But in some politicians. Yeah, fair enough. In anarchic capitalism, they can buy, they can buy an army, whereas you can buy like one security card. So then there's not a sort of parity in power and they can

really roll over people. I mean, I don't, I don't buy a security guard, right? Like I sign a contract with a security company, right? So it could be a large company, but just one of their customers, right? But he's like, I'll be a billion dollars, just like, you know, let me get through this town. He tells us to give a private security agency that. Right, but what, what's his, what is his purpose? Okay, so like, you know, Bill Gates, um, um, hiring like some really powerful security agency and to do what steal resources steal woman okay but i mean he's got billions of dollars why doesn't they just buy them so right so i mean the thing is like this is why rich people usually don't do this because they could just buy the thing that they

want that's why they don't have to steal it right and it's probably it's cheaper so like i mean rich people, rich people do well with women. Like Bill Gates would not have a hard time finding wife if you didn't already have one, just because of that, right? But the thing is like, so if you want to pay somebody to help you steal money from poor people, like, okay, the amount of money that the poor people are willing to pay to not be stolen from is about equal to the value of the stuff that would be stolen, right? So like what you could do is you could just buy it from them, right?

Yeah. Then, you know, not have to worry about the violence. Yeah, fair enough. Although in such a situation, aren't the poor disadvantage relative to the rich? I guess they are in any society. But if they, if a larger portion of their income and assets has to go towards security than anybody else, they're not going to see the kind of gross to their wealth than anybody else would. Yeah, but I mean, they're not.

Right? So like, which people are going to pay more for security. Yeah. Like they presently do, right? Yeah. Because they have more to protect, like more stuff to protect. So it makes sense to do that. But also like, and also for their personal safety, they place a higher monetary value on

their personal safety. Right. Like, okay, nobody wants to be beaten up, but like if you ask how much money will you pay to not be beaten up, the answer is larger for the rich person. person, right? So like they will pay more, more dollars, right, for security. Yeah. Okay. So one possible answer to your question, like what are they going to steal if they can just buy the assets? I mean, you could ask a similar question about the U.S. government. Like, why do they expect tribute every year? Why don't they just trade with people? And the answer is

they have nothing to trade with, right? The only thing they have to trade with is their coercion. And why, so Pinker floats the idea that the first states were really just kind of mafioso that took control of an area and expected tribute every year. Why won't these, some of these private agencies kind of form the proto states where they demand tribute every year from the people living there in exchange for a living safely? I guess you could say that's what the state is today anyways, but. Yeah, that is what they are. Although, you know, you might worry that maybe we would get a worse state than they.

Exactly. Right. Well, I mean, it's just that if you already have one of these organizations, it's easy to keep it going. But if you don't already have one, it's hard to get it started. So, like, if we had the anarcho-capitalist situation just set up the way it's envisioned buddy and caps. From that position, it's difficult to establish your state-like entity, right? Like, everybody's got a security agency. And then, like, you try to start up a gang of people to attack people, right? And so you're not already rich and you don't already have all these resources. You're hoping to get the resources by attacking other people. Well, it's going to be hard to get there, right? It's like, you know, without getting arrested by other people's security agencies and so on. But so, but, you know, it matters how this whole thing comes about, right?

So if the anarchy comes about by, you know, one day the government just disappeared. like in the cops disappear, then it would be chaos, right? So, you know, the first thing that would happen is there would be chaos in the street. And the second thing that would happen is people would immediately start setting about, setting up another government, right? Okay, but that's why that's not the way I envisioned the transition going, right? The transition would have to go by the government progressively privatizing its functions. So the government would outsource policing to private security companies.

Right, maybe they would do this gradually. And similarly, they would gradually outsource the courts to private arbitrators. Right. So the idea is that the government is shrinking while at the same time, the private organizations that would take over those functions are growing. If the government just collapsed immediately, it's no good. But if there's this, you know, simultaneous process, then, then you could get to a stable situation where now it's hard for an individual to overturn it.

Yeah. How soon can this happen? Like, if everybody agreed, you know, humor's right. I bought this book. As soon as everyone buys my book, paradise can begin. But if today everybody agreed, how long would it take to privatize things

to the point where we're living in a system of anarcho-capitalism without doing it too fast so that bad things start happening? I don't know. I mean, I don't have expertise on that. I have to, like, we probably have to observe things happening, right? but I mean like if people were convinced like we have a democracy right now if people were convinced that we should privatize more functions of the state we can

start doing that right now yeah and you know so like depends on how cautious you want to be but like you know a city right now could say yeah we're going to stop this police thing right now like the city of Denver tomorrow could say we're going to like start hiring private security guards to patrol. And then they could pass laws to, you know, change the asymmetry between government police and security guards, right? Yeah. Are you pro to you fund the police? I mean, you could say that, like in principle. Right. But I mean, I'm not sure what those people mean because it kind of sounds like they mean just cancel the police and then have no security. Yeah. Like, no, I don't want to do that. But I would, I would take that money and give it to,

private security companies. I wouldn't take it and just not give it to any security, right? Yeah. So here's the question I'll ask you. You wrote a blog post a few months back where you were criticizing social justice warriors and the 1619 project in particular. And here's what you wrote. You said the title of the post is attacking your own society. You wrote, here's another plausible way of eroding norms, directly, verbally, attacking the foundation of one's society's, preaching that the societies founded on fundamentally evil values, that large parts of that society have no reason to be loyal to the whole, and that its institutions are fundamentally just a sham designed to take advantage of

most of his members. Now, Professor, are you attacking our own society? You're claiming that coercion is illegitimate. Our society is, in large part, founded on the idea that the state is legitimate, that this coercion is legitimate. If coercion is evil, then isn't our society illegitimate? And then aren't you eroding, then the norms, which have brought us peace in terms? prosperity then. Yeah, I might be doing that. Good thing nobody listens to me. No, I mean, I was thinking about, yeah, I was sort of thinking about what they called the democratic norms, which is, you know, partly democracy, but a bunch of things that are associated with it that are not exactly democracy, right? But, you know, like when you lose the election, you concede. But, you know, also like with

the social justice war, it's just saying like everybody's racist, America's racist and so on, right? Right. And sort of like, you know, in America, there's sort of a norm of respectful discourse. Like, that's one of the things that I'm worried about. There used to be, maybe. And I say this because this is somewhat of a digression that's not exactly answering your question, but anyway, You know, one of the things that made me think about this was, so many years ago, I read that some leaders from Iraq came to visit the United States so that they could kind of learn about how the political system works here. And, you know, they visited like a city hall meeting in Boulder or something like this. And like the main impression they had was they were struck by how respectful our discourse was.

And up until that point, I didn't realize that our discourse is respectful, right? But it was true compared to other countries, right? So like there would be people who are in opposite size and they would be like disagreeing with each other, but they'd be doing it in a basically respectful way, right? And apparently that doesn't happen in other countries. So, you know, one of the things I was worried about is that that's eroding. So, but anyway, okay. And then in that blog post, like, you know, I want to, I want to leave room for criticizing society.

I want to leave room for saying, like, there's some stuff that's very messed up that we need to change, right? So, you know, how do we do that and not be accused of wrongly violating the norm? So, like, I didn't have that much of an answer to that, but basically I'm thinking, well, you know, have an alternative that you're saying we should do. Like, don't just attack, but say, here's something we should be doing instead of what we're doing, right? And now we can compare these, and I can explain why this thing is better than the status quo, right? Okay, so that's like constructive criticism. What I sort of sense from left-wing ideology today is that it is a lot of attacking, right? just like for the sake of undermining confidence in America.

Like there's a lot of just wanting to say that America is bad, not clearly for the sake of promoting something good instead, right? And you know, like, I want to say like, I've been known to have a fair amount of criticisms of the government, okay, but I also want to appreciate that it's a lot better, than most governments. It's like much better than the vast majority of governments that people have had. Right. So like just let's just keep that in mind. So let's not tear down the good stuff while we're trying to get rid of the bad stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. But by the way,

how long does it take you to write a block folks? Because they're all so good and you write so many of them. Are you just writing it like one state of flow? How much editing does it take? Yeah, I read it. in an afternoon, but then I reread it multiple times. Right. So I don't know. So reread it a few times that day, but then we read the next day and like maybe just before it goes up. Yeah. So I make small edits, which, you know, the small edits don't make that much

difference, probably, but. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, the total amount of writing that I've done on that blog is kind of a lot, right? Yeah, yeah. It's like one a week. So it's been going a couple of years. So there's like whatever is over 100 posts. Yeah. And it's amazing how digestible, not just your blogs are, but just generally blog posts are. They're bingeable in a way

that books often aren't. Like for example, I've probably read most of Scott Alexander's writing and that's got to be at least a few books, right? But it does not feel that way at all. You know, it just feels like, yeah, it just goes by very fast. And same with yours. I read. I don't know if I read the majority of yours, but I've certainly read a large part of it. Yeah, read the rest of it. Scott Alexander is great, right? Right. That's like, you know, that's high quality stuff, right?

That's better than, it's better than a normal book. Yeah, yeah. Much better than academic books. Did you read as non-libertarian and efficacy, by the way? I don't think so, no. Yeah, it's an interesting counterargument that's worth checking out. So I want to ask you, is it unethical of you, to believe that coercion is evil,

but your job is subsidized by the fruits of that coercion. Is that unethical of you to have that kind of job? I don't know, probably not. I don't think so. You know, I talked to Walter Block once, you know, a couple years ago. And, you know, in case anyone doesn't know, he's a big-time libertarian economist over at Tulane. wait, no, another university in New Orleans, anyway.

And his attitude was, you know, take as much money from the state as you can, right? Because, right? Like, you know, they're, because they're going to do something bad with it if you don't. And, you know, like, if you don't take it, they're not going to give it back. They're not giving it back to the taxpayers. They're just going to, you know, they're going to waste on something else. And anyway, and I think his attitude was that you're sort of like helping to undermine the state. Good to take money from the state to undermine the state.

But I should tell you, like, the difference between University of Colorado and a private university is minimal. Right. So I think that the state provides something like 5% of our budget. It's something like that. Now, the state university, of course, like universities are such. subsidized in general. So like we get, we get a subsidy in the same way that every other university gets a subsidy. Namely, all of these students who are paying are super high prices, you know, like most of them would not be paying if it weren't for financial aid, which is provided by the government, right? So the government helps these people get all these loans, which they probably wouldn't take.

So, you know, like definitely we, the university are charging, we're overcharging, right? But I mean, everybody's overcharging. and we're overcharging less than most of the universities so okay not so bad but yeah in the libertarian society there would be there'd be less universities right because there's a market distortion you know created by all the financial aid so there would be less of it and um would i still have a job i don't know like some professors would still have jobs it wouldn't go down to zero but it would be it would be cut down significantly yeah i hope you have a job in that society how would you Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the government has its hands in almost everything, right?

There's hands in all kinds of industries. So, you know, like if you say, oh, well, I don't know, I can't work in an industry that is, like, benefiting from government distortions of the economy. There's a lot of things that you can't do, right? Because, like, what matters isn't whether nominally it's said to be a state institution or whatever, right? Where it matters is something like, I don't know how much benefit. they're getting from the state or something, but like there are lots and lots of industries that then you can work. And I know it can't be a doctor. They're getting big benefits from like government regulations and so on. Right. Yeah. I wonder how much stuff you could do, actually. You'd have to

move into the woods to actually find some sort of trade. Let me let me just float a few other arguments against anarchic capitalism for you and see how you respond. So the first is a sort of Berkian argument. Like we shouldn't try things that haven't worked before. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can imagine somebody saying this back when the U.S. was founded, right? They could have said, this democracy thing, it never worked, right? They tried it in Athens and it didn't work that well. And, you know, notice how all the countries in the world are dictatorships.

This just shows that that's the natural state, right? Society involves a dictatorship, which is, you know, a lot like what people say. say about anarcho-capitalism, right? Like we have states everywhere. It must be that that's the only stable society, right? OK, now, you might say correctly, well, that's kind of like kind of anecdotal. Like, OK, that's just one case.

And so I'm not saying that that means that every radical change is worth 20. OK. But OK, but so that's just to prepare you for the fact that there could be big fundamental progress. that we don't want to rule out, right, at being overly conservative. Okay, but we do want to be careful

about the way we pursue progress, right? Because like, if you make radical changes, you should expect there to be unexpected consequences, right? Okay, but so what you should do to mitigate this is to move kind of gradually, right? So, you know, there's a lecture by Brian Kaplan that you can find online somewhere, where there was a title there was something like less than the minimum, where his idea was you could have a sub-minimal state. So the minimal state has police courts,

the military legislature or something like that. You could have a sub-minimal state, which they privatize the police force, and then they could privatize the court system. Right? And so that doesn't completely eliminate them, right? Doesn't completely eliminate the state, but it makes it much smaller.

And so you can imagine this process where the government could be progressively outsourcing police duties, which, by the way, they have done in some places. There are some places where the government will hire private security instead of using their own police. Okay, and they could progressively outsource court duties. And there are some cases where that happens as well. There are some cases where the government court will refer you to a private arbitrator. But they could start doing that more and more. Okay, and so the person who's worried that an archrocapitalism would be a disaster,

you know, now they should answer at what point in the process they think the disaster would happen, right? There's like, if you make this transition gradually, like I don't see where a disaster would happen. So you could get pretty close to anarchy, but, you know, you still have like somebody that is saying the rules. Like, you don't have a police force anymore. You don't have courts anymore, but they are giving rules to the law. the police in the courts. So okay. And, you know, like if you're, if you're already sympathetic to libertarianism, we could eliminate all these, you know, business regulations and all this. The government could be much smaller. And you think, okay, so do we need that last bit, right? Which is like,

I guess the legislature. And then I guess there's the military. You might need that, actually. You might go ahead. Well, what about the argument from the Black Swan, that at every stage like this, you might have a 1% chance of destroying everything we might care about. And you make a similar argument actually in dialogues against, dialogues about ethical vegetarianism where you say, even if you alone stopping eating meat doesn't, you know, cause people to produce less meat. In expected value terms, if like every hundredth person stopping eating meat like causes a decrease in animal suffering, it's still worth it for you to do that. In a similar way here, if, I don't know,

if at every 10th increment of decreasing the state is possible that something bad happens, it's still, it's still good to not try it. Well, yeah, but I mean, we don't have any evidence for that premise, right? We don't have any evidence that something bad happens at every 10th stage or whatever.

I mean, the thing is like, sure, anything that you try could have some unknown bad effect, right? And by definition, it's unknown. So I can't give an argument that it won't happen, right? Because we haven't specified what it is. OK, I do want to say, though, that like bad stuff could happen from maintaining the status quo. And so like, you know, in the book that I mentioned that, actually, there's a pretty good chance that the government is going to kill all of us.

Like, I don't think that's an outlandish possibility, right? Like they've actually, I think they've come kind of close to that a few times. So there were a few times when we were pretty close to a nuclear war. So like they could have killed everyone. Luckily they didn't. But that doesn't mean that we can just like keep going, right? Just keep going forever and it's always going to be fine, right? Yeah.

We probably have people right now who are working on, you know, bigger, more destructive weapons, right? More destructive but cheaper, right? So we probably have people who are working on biological weapons or, you know, other things, It's nanotech weapons or things like that. Yeah, this actually leads to my next argument against anarchic capitalism, which is sort of the Nick Bostrom, vulnerable world's hypothesis, if you've heard of that. Basically, the idea is with every new technology you discover, there's some small chance that it allows us to destroy everything.

Like, it's a technology that allows one guy with 50 grand to destroy an entire city. And in such a world, you need strong government regulation in the sectors where this kind of technology is possible. And without a government that regulates this kind of development, it's almost guaranteed that something bad's going to happen. Yeah. I mean, in fact, I think I had a blog post that was kind of about this, right? And which, you know, which I guess I view as the strongest argument for strong state. And, yeah, I think it was titled, you know, something about the case for tyranny or something like that.

And then a bunch of people started arguing about whether I should have used the word tyranny there. Like, oh, it's not necessarily tyrannical, but it was just an argument that there needs to be somebody like monitoring individuals in a pretty close way, right? So like, you know, not having much privacy and able to stop them. So that might that might be the case if you're in a society in which one person has the ability to release a world destroying weapon. Right now, right now that's not the case. but yeah, as technology advances, that could definitely happen, right? Because as technology advances, like, just what it means is that you can produce larger effects with smaller effort, right?

But then isn't the worry that by the time you get to that point, you've already destroyed the state capacity to regulate that kind of stuff? And so you might as well preserve the state. And also for most of human history, if there is going to be a human history, that's going to be the state. I mean, if these weapons come around in 100 years and there's like a million years of humanity left, then for most of it, we're going to need a state anyways. So what's the big benefit of doing anarcho-capitalism now? Yeah, I mean, you know, that might be right, right?

I mean, like, I think this is the strongest argument for keeping the state. But, you know, I think there is a, like, there's an argument on the other side, which is, well, actually, the government is likely to be the ones who develop the deadly technology. Right. So so far, there's one technology that would plausibly be capable of killing everyone. That's nuclear weapons. And it was created by the government and has only ever been used by the government. But in fact, I think every weapon of mass destruction

has been created by governments. Most weapons have been created by governments, right? But isn't that a bit like saying in like the year 1800, well, everything good that's ever, if you're an atheist and arguing for atheism, somebody could say, well, all the bridges and all the really cool things, all the knowledge has been made by religious people.

But you could respond, well, that's because there's been nobody else around, right? Like, if there's not an anarcho-capital society where you're permitted to build nuclear weapons on your own, then obviously the state is. If everyone is religious, then, yeah, all the good things are going to be crazy by religious people. But not everyone is a government employee, right? But you can't just build a nuclear bomb while states are dominant. They won't let you. But if you can, then you might.

So before the nuclear bomb was invented, could a private individual have invented it? I don't know. I mean, after it was invented by the U.S. government, then the U.S. government would stop anyone else from building them. But before they, you know, before it had been discovered, I don't know why a private person couldn't have done it. Fair enough.

except that it's super expensive and, you know, no, like, there wasn't a person who had a good incentive to do it, I guess. But anyway, yeah, so you might think, yeah, but if we didn't have a government, then maybe there would be more, I don't know, would there be more people who are trying to build weapons of mass destruction? I wouldn't think that. I mean, I mean, I understand why governments, are doing this, right? Like, well, there's this thing called war that happens between states. And like, and so they build all these standing armies. And so they just, they're constantly looking for bigger and more powerful weapons, right? And so like, that's just like this constant, you know, pro-destruction, destructive technology lobby, right? So, I mean, it just looks like that's the way to accelerate the time that we get the world destroying technology.

Right. Okay, but, you know, but I'm not sure because you might say, yeah, even though the government is going to create this technology, like they're going to create the world destroying technology sooner. You might say, but they're still safer, right? Because it's like, you know, maybe private parties will develop that technology much later, but when they do, then someone is going to release it, right? unless there's a government to stop them. Okay. Yeah. But by the way, like, I'm not sure that the government is going to stop it even if they're, if they continue to exist, right? So, like, you know, one of the things I'd be worried about now is genetic engineering of

biological weapons. So maybe somebody could engineer a virus that would be extremely dangerous and would cause the extinction of the species. Right. Like, so, you know, that might happen just naturally, but it's a lot more like, if somebody's trying to make it happen, and that might just become cheaper and cheaper. So, you know, you might think, oh, we need the government to stop that from happening, although I'm not sure the government will actually stop it, even if we have them.

And I think there's a fair chance that the government will cause it because, you know, I mean, I actually like hire people deliberately to create biological weapons. So, you know, it's a little hard to say. The alternative you might want is you might want sort of distributed monitoring, like people monitoring each other, just regular people monitoring each other all the time, rather than like a single central authority monitoring everyone else. Yeah, blockchain, but for nuclear weapons. I guess, I mean, I think, is this Neil Stevenson's idea? I mean, I think I think I got this from some science fiction author. Right, everybody should be watching everyone else, not one organization watching everyone else. Is this from a book?

I just heard about this on the Internet. Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. A final argument, a state in order to prevent people from torturing animals and eating them. Yeah. Yeah, so like if the state would actually do that, that would outweigh all of the other bad stuff they're doing. right? Like most other libertarians would not accept this, but this is obviously and true. But when we have the government, what they actually do is they're actually supporting the meat industry.

Yeah. And so, you know, they're actually making it worse. So you might think, oh, but, you know, we can just change that. But no, it's not so easy. Most of the things the government does, it's not an accident that they're doing them, right? Like, well, I mean, they're obviously not going to ban meat when most people want it, right? Right. Like, you know, I think it was like, so I think Cory Booker was the first vegan presidential candidate I saw. But like, I think that was clearly a liability for him. Right.

And like it and in fact, you know, there's a time when an interviewer asked him, hey, so are you going to like try to make everybody vegetarian? And he was like, no. No. not doing that. Right? Because if he said, yes, he's definitely out of the running, right? Right.

Although he did propose some bills calling for regulation of animal cruelty. Yeah, although he didn't win. So I guess it makes your point for you. But, I mean, yeah, so, like, that is a plausible, I think that society has to make more progress. So, like, I think if the majority of people cared about animal welfare, then the government could pass regulations that would promote animal welfare it would get a lot better, right? But this will only happen after most of the problem is solved,

and then the government will come in and sort of like sweep up the remainder of it from like, you know, the backward people who are still promoting cruelty. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now let's do a game of underrated, overrated. The rules, of course, is this thing underrated, overrated, and you can pass if you want. And you can also offer a brief explanation for why you think so. So you wrote a few pieces recently.

if you blockpost about what students should be learning in school and in college. One thing you didn't mention either for or against was like a coding class. And this has been proposed by a bunch of people recently that because of the dominance of computers in our society, everybody needs to learn how to code. What do you think of this idea? Let's see. Is it overrated or underrated? Maybe about correctly rated, I suppose.

I mean, I think it's useful, but I don't agree that everyone needs to learn to code. Right. So like I think some people, but basically I think people who would be reasonably good at it to learn it. And some people would just be terrible at it. So there's no point, right? Like they could learn to do some basic stuff that would never be useful. So yeah. You mentioned in one of your blog posts that if you didn't get into grad school philosophy, you were considering becoming a computer programmer. So did you learn how to code in college? I mean, it took one course on Pascal, which was a programming language. language that I guess nobody uses anymore. But it was not enough for me to do anything useful with it. But many years later, I discovered that there's a language called Game Maker Language, that some guy wrote.

And it's really good for writing games. So I tried writing a game using that. Yeah, fun. The class of people called public intellectuals. Oh, hmm. Yeah, I mean, they're greatly overrated by some and underrated by others, I guess. Like, I like public intellectuals.

So, I mean, I think the academic intellectuals underrate the public intellectuals because they're like, oh, yeah, these public intellectuals are not being rigorous enough, or they're not like citing all the academic literature. The thing is, yeah, the reason they're not doing that is no one will listen to them if they start blabbing on about boring stuff.

like, you know, boring little details that are in the academic literature, okay? So, yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess underrated. Right. How about intellectuals outside academia, or maybe not even intellectuals, but thinkers outside academia who have a blog but aren't associated with an academic institution? So, for example, people like Scott Alexander. Yeah, I mean, like, well, Scott Alexander is probably correctly rated because, like, I think that he has an extremely high representative.

among people who know who he is, right? Right. Although I guess not enough people know who he is. Yeah. But, you know, about non-academic intellectuals more generally, I don't know. So, I mean, most non-academic intellectuals, I think, are not good. And so, like, not worth reading. Or they wouldn't be worth it to me to read.

And I don't think worth it to other people to read. But that's, you know, I'm like, I'm not trying to be a snob or whenever. But I think it's, I think because you learn stuff when like when you go to graduate school and you get the PhD, they actually teach you some stuff. Right. And one of the things, one of the problems is like if, if you don't go through that kind of training, like people are naturally lazy. And like in order to do stuff that's really good and useful, it requires work and effort and stuff like this that is not. it requires some stuff that's not so fun, right? And then, and, you know, like,

you're all reading a bunch of literature and, you know, finding out what people really think, right? And you're just not going to do that unless you have, like, well, few people will do it unless they have somebody else who's telling them you have to do this. And that's what happens when you're in graduate school, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's a Milgram experiment, but for academic discipline.

Yeah. And so, you know, like, you know, I run into people like on the internet and whatever, and sometimes I get email from random people. And, like, you know, there are people who have, like, written their, they've written their treatise on something or whatever. And they just don't realize that, you know, like, they don't know what's going on. Right. Like they don't, like, said, like, they just haven't read the stuff that's written on the topic

that they're writing about. So they don't know that they're, A, reinventing the wheel, but be, like doing a simplistic version of it, right? Like, they're defending a view that has already been defended, but they're defending the simplest, like, least adequate version of it because they haven't looked at all the objections that, you know, cause a view to be modified. And, you know, they don't know the reasons why it's wrong. And, like, they don't know what the alternative views are.

So, like, they can't adequately respond to them or they'll respond to alternatives that are stupid and don't need to be discussed, right? So, you know, that's like a thing that happens. If you were outside of, if you for some reason didn't get into grad school, but let's see on the side you were still publishing a blog, how much worse do you think you would be without the benefit of grad school? Um, I don't know. Um, I mean, you know, there's a possibility that it's, it's actually a selection effect rather than the training effect, right? Yeah. Like the people who have patients, people who have enough patience to do good work can make it through graduate school. Right. If you don't have the patience, you'll be excluded by that, right?

Yeah. So it's like it's possible that it would still be good. But I mean, I think that, let's see. Actually, I mean, a lot of the stuff that goes on on the blog is kind of social commentary, which I think doesn't require that much of, you know, reading literature or stuff like that. It's like most of that would be the same. But like if I were writing about issues that are debated in academic philosophy, and I didn't know the literature, like it just wouldn't be good, right? And like, you know, like my undergraduate papers just weren't good, right? They were good for undergraduate papers, okay?

But they weren't good for, you know, academic papers. Right. A peer review. Oh, peer review, underrated or overrated. I don't know. Yeah, probably it's probably overrated, I guess. So the thing is like people think that, I guess, right? I guess the average opinion is that it's a pretty good quality control mechanism. And I think that probably most people don't realize like kind of how lame it is, right?

So like you get, right? So you don't get paid for doing these reviews, right? Which means that not that many people want to do it. So like you have this editor who's trying to find peer reviewers and like they just keep they have to keep going down the list. I've never been an editor. So I'm assuming this is what happens. Like you try to get top people in the area of the paper to review it and they say no, I'm too busy. And you know, and it's not in my interest to do this.

They don't say that last part, but that's you're thinking. I have no self-interest in doing this review fee for free. So can't do it. And so they just like go down the list. Okay. And like you have things where graduate students are reviewing papers. And then you have situations where like the person who's being criticized by the paper is reviewing the paper. And I know that that happens because they've sent to me papers that are criticizing me.

Which is to do that. And I think that I'm a fine reviewer. Like I'm perfectly objective anyway, but I don't trust everyone to be objective. Right. And so, yeah. And like, you know, just my experience, reading reference. reports, I often think, well, like this guy did not read this carefully at all. You know, like he, he's raising some objection that I answered and he doesn't seem to be aware

that I answered it. Right. Or he's like totally misunderstood and like I clearly explained, you know, what I meant and like he's misunderstanding it. Like, and it would make sense that they wouldn't read it carefully, right? Because they have no, no stake in it. Right. The, the editor would have more of a stake in it, right?

Because like it reflects on the quality of the journal. It's an anonymous review, so it doesn't reflect on that person. No one will ever know if you did a bad job of reviewing. Yeah. Okay, how about online education? Oh, I mean, it's probably like it's a good way of learning if that's what you want, right? But I think it's a less good way of getting prestige. Right, so which is what people actually want.

So, I mean, I guess I think, Most people, so most people don't actually want the education. They want the prestige, but also most people don't realize that that's what most people want. So like, so, you know, online education isn't, I don't think that it's going to take over. It would if people just wanted knowledge, right? But so people don't realize why it's not taking over, but that's the reason, right? Yeah. Actually, by the way, like if you just want the,

the knowledge, you don't have to pay somebody, you a bunch of money, not even for online courses, right? If you just want knowledge, like almost all of us on the internet, you can get a great education for free, just reading sites on the internet. Oh, or even better yet, uh, if you think that there's something ineffable about like being there in person, you can't still go in person. Nobody's going to stop you. In fact, like, um, yeah, professors will often even grade your stuff, even if you're not in the class. Yeah. The funny thing is that is, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I would be happy to have extra people show up who actually want to learn in my class. But to be clear, I'm not greeting your paper.

Yeah, it's funny. At my university, you need your ID to get into the gym, but you don't need any idea whatsoever to go into any class you want, which goes to show you what they think people are actually likely to steal or like, you know, try to use voluntarily. stealing the knowledge, right? Yeah. Like I do, I think the in-person education is better. Like, it's a better experience, right? But the thing is, like, it's just not better enough that it would justify paying whatever $10,000 or whatever people are paying, right?

Right. I agree. Pro-natalism. I ask because, you know, the average person is probably going to eat meat. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I assume that that's going to end at some point.

Right. Right. And so it will be better to have more people. I am to some degree worried about the population dwindling, right? Because as people become wealthier and their living standard goes up, you know, their fertility goes down. And like it's at the point now where in the wealthy countries, like the fertility of well-off people is below replacement rate.

Right. So I am somewhat worried about the human species dwindling. Just as we become good, just as the moral progress reaches a point where it's better for us to be around and not the population will be dwindling and maybe we'll go extinct from just not deciding to have kids, right? And it will be around to enjoy the moral progress. What do you think the idea that children have comparable or even equivalent rights against coercion as adults? I mean, I think they have comparable rights against malicious coercion. I can have that, right? But, you know, about paternalistic coercion, like, that seems justified to me.

I mean, I don't have, like, a particularly involved argument for that. Like, I don't have an interesting or surprising argument for that, right? I guess I just have a conventional view, which is that, you know, like these children just don't know what they're doing. they don't have enough knowledge and they just need somebody to take care of them, right? Right. But at one point do you think that now there's an expectation that you can't just tell this person what to do? So like 12, 16, 18? I mean, you know, it increases gradually, right?

Yeah. And also it could vary depending on the maturity of the individuals. So, yeah. I mean, I don't think that I can say a hard and fast rule. Now, you know, you might think, like there are some people who are not, sure at 18, right? Like, they still need someone to take care of them then. But, you know, what can we do? Like, we need to have a general rule for society in general, right? So, so I guess, I guess it's kind of reasonable to pick 18 as the time we can become an adult. I don't know.

Right. So the claim is that, at least after a certain age, saying that this person is not entitled, does not have certain rights, is equivalent or comparable to saying that a particular race of people shouldn't have rights in that like maybe you can come up with some explanation for why they can't handle those rights, but at the end of the day, just human dignity means that you have to respect those rights. Yeah. I mean, yeah, so like the way that children are treated is somewhat like slaves, right? Like, no rights. Parents just tell them what to do all the time, right? Is it better than slavery? Well, fortunately, most parents love their children in the way that most masters do not love their slaves. So things work out better.

But also, it was factually true that the children couldn't make decisions for themselves. It was not true that the slaves couldn't make decisions for themselves. We just weren't letting them, right? Yeah. You might think, though, like, well, there actually are some adults who are like not really suited to run their own lives

like mentally retarded people or something. Yeah. It doesn't mean that you can treat them as slaves, but they probably do need like a guardian to tell them what to do. Right. Is it okay?

Like what if they don't want to listen to the guardian? Is it okay to force them? I don't know. You know, probably depends on the situation, right? Like if they want to go play in traffic, I guess yes. Right. Yeah. Okay, final two questions. Or actually, final three questions. I didn't notice the third one there. First of all, at least in my opinion, and among the philosophers I know of that are living, you seem to have addressed the big questions more prolifically, creatively, and excessively.

What's the humor production function? How are you able to be this productive? Oh, I don't know. It's partly because I'm smart. It's partly because I love philosophy. If you don't love it and you know, you're just doing it as a job, then you won't do that much of it. You know, in the academic world, there's sort of, there's not really incentives for producing, like, you know,

blog post or stuff like that. There's not incentives for producing public philosophy. So, like, you don't get prestige from it. The other academics are not so much impressed. or whatever. And, you know, like literally in my department, we literally have a point system for publications. Like, you get a performance review every year, and like, we assign points for each publication. There's no points for blog posts. There's a point for academic publication, although that might change in the future. But anyway,

so, yeah, so you'd only do this if, like, you're just like, well, I mean, I'm on a mission, right? I'm on a mission to promote rationality in society. Yeah. And like, you know, like I'm, I'm in philosophy, not just as a job, but to get a paycheck or whatever or to get prestige or any of that. Like, I'm trying to improve the world intellectually, right? Yeah. What do you think about the impact of intellectuals versus entrepreneurs slash engineers

in shaping how the world turns out? Yeah, good question. You know, so like, I mean, this makes me think of an example. So think of the example of, there's Peter Singer, and then there's the people who are like beyond the beyond meat people, if you don't create that company, and you know, these other companies like the Impossible Burger and the people who are doing the synthetic meat. Okay, so I think Peter Singer is kind of the reason why people are doing that. Like I think those people, like the entrepreneurs, I think are animal welfare advocates or something like this. And

And it's, you know, largely because of Peter Singer and other philosophers like Tom Regan. So, but but also like, you know, after writing that book, apart from convincing the entrepreneurs, like he tries to convince a bunch of ordinary people. Like I go to, like I try to convince students and I write this book. And I think that that part is having a lot less influence, right? Like, it's super hard to convince people to change their life in a way that's not in their personal self-interest, you know, for ethical reasons. You can get like a few percent. You can change a few percent of people's lifestyle for ethical reasons because that's how many people care about morality. Anyway, but like a few percent of those people are like entrepreneurs who are going to like and make a big difference.

Oh. So are you, these are good. So, I mean, you know, if you want to assess like, well, who's making the bigger difference, that's hard to say, right? Like, because the entrepreneur probably wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for the philosophy. Right. Right.

But apart from the entrepreneur, the philosopher is having a much smaller influence on society. Yeah. So is your goal then with your books not to convince, not just to convince people like, oh, you're right, but then to get some of them to build the so-called machinery or freedom? Like, are you trying to inspire entrepreneurs more so than just convince people? I guess. I mean, I don't have a very specific plan, right? I just have the idea that it would be good if there were more people who had true beliefs, you know, about important philosophical matters. I don't know how it's going to happen, but in some way that is going to improve society.

I kind of think that it goes from the top down, so to speak. That is, if you convince the elites, then the rest of society will go along. I know Brian Kaplan thinks that you had to get the elites while they're young, because that's when they'll change their minds. Are you trying to convince future elites, people in college, or are you trying to convince elite as the existing elites? Yeah, I mean, I guess I try to work on all of them, but, you know, like Kaplan's probably correct.

Like, it's a lot harder to get people who have already formed their beliefs and, you know, have been there for a few decades, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the next question. What are your three favorite books? Oh, hmm.

Let's see. It'll be three of my books. So. That you did not write yourself. Oh, okay. Books they're not my, I don't know. Like, like, I would probably have to spend a lot longer to actually accurately answer that. Yeah, that's all right.

I liked the Fountain Head a lot, that novel. And I guess like, you know, I had an influence on me in, actually, Iingrand had an influence on me in doing philosophy. Although she was not a professional philosopher and ultimately was not very good at philosophy, She still influenced me to do philosophy. What else? Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, like I might, so like when you ask me this and I haven't thought for a long time,

I'm biased towards books that I read recently. Okay, so I like the book, Time and Chance by David Albert, because it's just like fascinating, right? Just fascinating stuff about what physics teaches us about the nature of the universe and so on. And also I like the cosmic landscape. I've done it, his name now. Anyway, you know, which was about the multiverse theory,

which I just find amazing. It's just an amazing, fascinating idea. The quantum multiverse? Well, there are sort of like different versions of the multiverse, but I guess, like, he thinks that it comes out of string theory. Right? I don't know. And, you know.

But there are different ways there could be multiverse. There could be like just really far away other universes that the space in between our universe and the other universe is expanding so fast that there's no way to ever reach the other universe. So they're effectively isolated, right? Yeah, I'm sorry I can't remember this guy's name now. Anyway, but, you know, there are lots of good books. I like the myth of the rational voter, right? that was very good. And, you know, just thinking about why politics works the way that it does.

Yeah. And then the final question, what advice would you have for a philosophically inclined 20-year-old who doesn't want to go into philosophy as an academic discipline, but it's still interested in philosophy? I don't know. Like, you know, my first advice is buy all my books. But, I mean, like, advice. for like what? Like what are they trying to accomplish? Let's say they're technically inclined as well. So engineering is that entrepreneurship?

Oh, I see. I don't know. Would you advise working in specific fields? Is there some thing you advise in terms of excellence and getting good at what you're doing? Or just where the important problems are? Yeah, I mean like I have like I would give advice from the standpoint of self-interested. to people. Like, so like, okay, I mean, this is probably not what you're asking about, right? Like, you know, how you can be happy or something, right? But anyway, okay, this is what I figured out. It's very simple, but the secret to happiness is, first of all, having solid, meaningful

relationships. So like hang out with people that get along well with and develop close relationships with them, right? And like people that are not beneficial, just cut them out. Don't hang around with people who are not beneficial to you. And like, this is super obvious, but a lot of people don't do this. Like we just keep having this boyfriend who's no good and they just like, I don't know, try to change the person or whatever. You're not going to change people.

And anyway, then the other thing is meaningful work, right? So like going to a career that feels like you're doing something meaningful. You know, but like it's got to make enough money to pay the bills, right? But, you know, it needs to feel like you're doing something meaningful because otherwise when you get later in your life, you're going to be like, I have a lot of money, but boy, sure, I've wasted my life. Yeah. But you don't want to have to happen.

You know, and then like I, you know, I have like, you know, smaller scale advice. Like at some point, I'm probably going to like, maybe I'll put this in blog posts. I'll put my advice for like people about. you know, buy a house, right? You know, if you're going to be somewhere for a few years, buy a house or a condominium or something like that, because it's a super great investment. And then you're like, when you have money,

invest in index funds, you know. Like, don't try to beat the market because you're probably not going to be. Right. There's stuff like that. Right. Anyway, okay, but that's probably not what you might as know about. That's all useful, yeah. might have wanted to know like, oh, how can we improve the world? I don't know, that's really hard, right?

Like on a small scale, my idea is to model rationality, right? Like interact with people in a way that is reasonable and rational. And part of that, part of the reasonableness is like you listen to them and try to actually understand what their point is before saying your thing. like don't just only be thinking about your point right um and you know like my idea is if we get enough people doing that maybe the culture will improve yeah yeah let's hope so um okay so those are all my questions uh professor humeer thank you so much for your time i really appreciate uh talking to you this is a lot of fun thanks for having me yeah yeah yeah