Our morally ambiguous times

Years ago in a philosophy class I posed the question of whether it was more virtuous to have never sinned or to have sinned and then reformed. The evidence suggests the latter, as redemption and America’s culture of authenticity have become increasingly intertwined. ‘Authenticity culture’ celebrates individualism, particularity intellectual endeavors (such as stock trading or winning math Olympiads). This is the opposite of politics, which is collectivist, dumbed-down, and elevates the ‘everyday man’.

It’s not uncommon for reformed prisoners to give motivational talks to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who socioeconomically tend to be the complete opposite of the typical maximum-security prisoner, yet modern wisdom is that these two diametrically opposed groups can somehow mutually benefit from each other’s rapport. Other times the roles are reversed, with the entrepreneurs working directly with the prisoners:

Enter Defy. Defy’s mission is simple: “to transform the lives of business leaders and people with criminal histories through their collaboration along the entrepreneurial journey.” I received an invitation from Brad Feld and Mark Suster to join a group they were assembling for Defy; we were part of a group of CEOs, founders, and VCs who traveled to the prison to serve as judges for the pitch competition taking place that day.

Part of the appeal of ‘reform’ is how post-2008 American economy and society prizes quantifiable results (the ‘ends’) over the means (‘ethics’). The value or intrinsic worth of a person is measured by their intellectual, social, or financial status, with things like ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’, neither of which are as easy to quantify, pushed to the periphery. For example, financiers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, for which jail was a pit stop on the road to success, given their philanthropy are now forgiven and celebrated. Redemption becomes just another just another way to ‘cash out’ after the dubious venture has run its course.

Rather than going down the boring path of ‘strait and narrow’, many desire to to emulate those who became wealthy by taking shortcuts at the possible cost of ethics. And who can blame them: millions of people who ‘did the right thing’ only find themselves with poor job prospects, unpaid bills, and piles of student loan debt to show for it, and to add insult to injury, are snubbed or looked down upon by a culture and economy that sees these people are either invisible or victims of bad personal choices, not forces outside of their control.

In the past, America looked up to those of upstanding moral character but otherwise were kinda dull or were part of a group or team. Although the rugged individualistic characters portrayed by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood may be exception to this, such characters weren’t intellectual, relying on physical prowess more so intellectualism. America’s brand of individualism has a strong intellectual bent to it – think Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, in which the the ‘ends’ (liberating information) justified the ‘means’ (breaking the law). Rather than the ‘justice league’, it’s the rogue programmer who seeks justice. Or like Michael Burry, as documented in The Big Short, a smart person (a Randian hero of sorts) who in 2007 bet against the housing market (and the prevailing economic consensus) and became wealthy (combining wealth, intellectualism, and individualism…see it all ties together).

Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek situates the Randian hero in Rand’s fiction in the “standard masculine narrative” of the conflict between the exceptional, creative individual (the Master) and the undifferentiated conformist crowd…

Author Stephen Newman compares the Randian hero to the concept of the Übermensch created by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, saying that “the Randian hero is really Nietzsche’s superman in the guise of the entrepreneur”.[13]

In Less Than Zero, a 1985 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles drive around, do drugs, and party – except now it’s older people who are doing this, minus the drug and partying, permanently delaying adulthood to live lives of introspective excess.

A recent article about how smart people prefer to be alone, went viral and is relevant to America’s culture of individualism and the rise of ‘introversion culture’.

Smarter people can more easily adapt to their surroundings in the modern world, so they don’t need close relationships to help them with food and shelter, like our ancestors did. Or, in the modern equivalent, the Wi-Fi password and a spare phone charger.

From memes on Instagram that celebrate solitude and ‘being alone’ over socializing, to people choosing ‘hustling’ instead of the ’9-5′, it seems everyone is like this. For example, memes about choosing money over friends and socializing, frequently go viral:

One can argue we’re in an era of moral ambiguity…no one really knows what is right or wrong. Major pop culture productions like the hit HBO show Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, that blur the lines between criminality and everyday life, are a contributing factor or a symptom of this confusion. There is the contradiction between how culture promotes extreme sanctimoniousness, but also condones amorality, if not outright criminality, on the other.

Maths and reading skills found to be 75 per cent genetic

no kidding

Maths and reading skills found to be 75 per cent genetic

Individual differences in cognitive ability manifest very early in life, long before thousands of hours of ‘practice’ can kick in. Even as early as kindergarten, teachers can readily identify the ‘slow’ students, who are often doomed to failure and or mediocrity in life, and ‘smart’ ones, who have much better odds for socioeconomic success. That’s kinda the depressing reality, that our futures are largely determined long before we even develop the conscious ability to try to change it.

But don’t people have free will? To some extent, yes. I can consciously choose what to eat for dinner, but I cannot will myself to do a three-foot vertical jump–the latter is beyond by biological abilities. Free will is an interesting topics…a deterministic universe may refute free will, but the many-worlds hypothesis may allow each choice to be enumerated through discrete universes.

The left chooses ‘environment’ over genes, because the former justifies the state’s expanded role to promote equality through useless social programs at taxpayer expense, and intrinsic individual cognitive exceptionalism is an affront to the left’s pursuit and belief in equality. The left champions ‘neurological diversity‘ – the autistic kid banging his head against the wall is acting out his own form of ‘diversity’ and is not retarded – but such diversity apparently doesn’t apply to innate intelligence.

But some argue that biological determinism gives a ‘cover’ for bad behavior, as a way of avoiding personal responsibility and accountability. Even so, that doesn’t mean society has to suffer the consequences and perpetuation of socially undesirable behavior that arises from defective genes…

From The Atlantic: No Such Thing as Free Will

According to Harris, we should acknowledge that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. “They didn’t pick their genes. They didn’t pick their parents. They didn’t make their brains, yet their brains are the source of their intentions and actions.” In a deep sense, their crimes are not their fault. Recognizing this, we can dispassionately consider how to manage offenders in order to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending. Harris thinks that, in time, “it might be possible to cure something like psychopathy,” but only if we accept that the brain, and not some airy-fairy free will, is the source of the deviancy.

maybe eugenics is the solution but no one of any importance will acknowledge this, for fear of the social repercussions.

If you compare the book sales and speaking fees of Charles Murray and Steven Pinker versus Gladwell or Cialdini, it’s obvious and not too surprising, in an era of participation trophies and where everyone is ‘above average’, which of course is mathematically impossible, that more people than not seek solace in comforting lies and delusions than to confront the harshness and occasional unfairness of reality. The left constantly says America needs an honest, open discussion about race relations. Why not one about IQ and education, too.

The power of the alt-right is not to directly influence policy but rather to influence sentiment

There is a belief held by some that the alt-right, in making certain gestures and comments, is losing ‘respectability’ and therefore risks being excluded from having influence on Trump’s policies. This notion that Trump actually cares what the alt-right thinks is of course nonsense and is just more ‘concerning’ by people who don’t understand the alt-right or want the alt-right to become ‘alt-lite’. Trump already chose his cabinet and advisers, and will do his own thing. Even before the NPI Roman salute dust-up, Trump expressed zero interest in deferring to alt-right leaders on anything. Soon after, Trump repudiated the alt-right. The alt-right helped Trump get elected, but Trump is listening to his appointees, not Spencer, Baked Alaska or anyone else involved with the alt-right. Personally, I wish Trump cared more about the alt-right, but that’s wishful thinking. But the alt-right should not dilute its message in the faint hope of opening a dialogue with Trump: not gonna happen. Media respectability is not important: a message that resonates with people is, and by linking or associating Trump with the alt-right (even though Trump himself doesn’t care for the alt-right), helped get Trump elected because voters saw Trump as being a conveyor of alt-right principles. The power of the alt-right is not to directly influence policy but rather to influence sentiment. It’s the choice of policy makers to choose whether to heed the sentiment or not.

Internet Journalism in a Post-2013 Era: Writing Articles that Go Viral

If the goal of writing is to be read, the success of writing can be measured by how many people read it. Yes, the success of writing can also be measured by subjective and aesthetic elements such as prose and pacing, but this is not of foremost importance. Getting people to read it, and hopefully respond and share it, is. Guides, articles, and books about writing are nearly useless. The professionals use their own successes as a blueprint for others, but the problem is each blueprint is unique for each writer, making it impossible to generalize.

Based on my own observations, in our post-pundit era, excitability, partisanship, and emotion is ‘out’; tact and nuance is ‘in’. Partisan pundits lead many of aspiring journalists astray, as their methods don’t generalize well. The 1,000-word polemic about ‘how liberals/conservatives are screwing up America’, is in its death throes. Did you hear of John Fund’s latest National Review Online article? Me neither. Same for Thomas Sowell, whose most popular article is the one where he announced his retirement. But we all know about Slate Star Codex, Less Wrong, and Wait But Why (and I’m not just talking about rationalists and reactionaries). You can go on any major sub-Reddit, such as /r/futurology, /r/news, or /r/economics, and nearly everyone is familiar with those websites. It’s not that Sowell and Fund are inept writers, but rather their ideas are no longer new or interesting, so they are seldom shared or read outside of their increasingly dwindling targeted audiences.

In the 80′s and 90′s, supply-side economics and ‘culture war‘ issues were a much bigger deal than they are now, but now people are more interested in esoteric concepts such as post-scarcity, basic income, the Fermi paradox, cryonics, or how automation will affect the economy. But they are also interested in ‘shared narratives’ topics such as social alienation and anxiety, which are problems that affect individuals of all political orientations. Wait But Why’s article How to Not Be Insufferable on Facebook, which was shared over a million times, is one such example. Nearly everyone uses Facebook, and in our era of heightened self-consciousness and self-awareness, the image one projects onto others is important.

Here’s what the media assumes people only care about:

-culture wars
-politics
-generic fitness and health advice
-sports
-celebrity gossip
-opinion pieces that have simple arguments that agree with simple, reductionist narratives, and written in a simple writing style
-the latest movies and TV shows

Although people still care about the aforementioned topics, the media is stuck in bubble where reader tastes haven’t evolved beyond that. But for millennials, in particular, it’s much different–much more complicated and esoteric, as the huge recent successes of sites such as Wait But Why, Medium.com, and Hacker News, that appeal to an educated, high-IQ demographic, show.

Here’s what people, especially millennials, care about:

-self-improvement, but from a ‘red pill’ perspective (more and more people, including even those who may identity as the ‘left’, are taking the red pill as they realize they have been lied to all their lives to believe things that are logically inconsistent with reality)
-personal finance, minimalism, stock market investing, quantitative finance
-philosophical inquiry, epistemology, existentialism, etc.
-difficult, circuitous articles about difficult subjects, where there is no obvious ‘right’ or ‘wrong’
-introspection
-esoteric, non-mainstream ideologies and movements such as the alt-right and rationalism
-economics topics such as wealth inequality, student loan debt, efficient markets, technological unemployment, automation, etc.
-shared narratives topics
-coding, physics, advanced math, and other STEM subjects (books on Amazon about advanced math and physics concepts sell a surprisingly lot of copies)
-futurism concepts such as ‘the singularity’, AI, transhumanism, the ‘simulation hypothesis’

But aren’t these topics too narrow to appeal to enough readers to be worthwhile? No, because even if only 15% of the total population have a sufficiently high IQ to understand such topics, 15% of billion people is still a lot. Also, influencers, who have large social networks, tend to be of the cognitive elite, so appealing to them is often necessary to get further exposure.

The second part of this article discuses the type of writing style one must emulate for viral success in online writing. For demonstrative purposes, consider the article Why 2016 Seemed Like the Worst Year Ever, by Vice Media.

Note the rambling historical preamble about Freud…it wasn’t put there by accident, but rather it serves a specific function. Although most readers will skim it, is signals above-average intelligence and worldliness of the author by being well-versed in history, rather than being just being another naive dinette, so readers are more compelled to read the rest of the article even if they ignore the introduction, because the author appears educated and is thus credible and someone worthy of the reader’s valuable time. How many writing guides suggest using a historical antecedent to convey authority, even for a non-academic article? I think it’s zero. But it’s the little that details that sometimes matter most. Signaling is extremely important, if not the most important part, even more so than the content or the writing style itself. That’s why Terrance Tao’s political articles go vial, because being a math genius conveys intellect and thus credibility, even for non-math subjects. Same for Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist, whose articles about societal and political observations go viral, too.

Then the introduction transitions seamlessly to a metaphor for the present:

The good doctor might have been wrong about the value of the vaginal orgasm, but he was right about the crippling, self-destructive anxiety undergirding modern life and how poorly our species seems equipped to handle it. This was prescient when Freud first published it in 1930, and like too many other things out of that decade, it feels fresh again at the end of 2016.

And then this passage:

It’s common to lament 2016 as a kind of spectacularly miserable year, a singularly awful global catastrophe where all the good celebrities died and all the bad ones became president. But 2016 is not sentient, and it’s not deliberately tormenting you (no matter how much it sometimes feels that way). It’s really just the year a number of cultural, technological, political, and ecological trends all collided into one another in the worst possible way.

This is how professional-quality writing reads. It doesn’t matter if you’re a reactionary or a liberal; this is how you have to write in order to be read. Note the use of lists ‘cultural, technological, political, and ecological trends’, or as some call ‘the rule of three’ (which has been extended to four for added effect). And also powerful words like ‘collided’ that invoke mental images of collisions, such as that of a meteorite impact or a car crash, of all these trends being mashed together in the worst possible way.

…powered by personal information extracted from users—is as profoundly, maddeningly disempowering as it is a vehicle for personal enlightenment, community engagement, and social organization.

Again, more lists, and more adverbs. It’s not just disempowering, but maddeningly so, and also profound.

Take this year’s absolute meltdowns about “fake news” and “post-truth.” “Fake news” morphed from a descriptive term for deliberately false stories circulated on social media for advertising revenue to “deliberate misinformation from agents of [the Russian state/international Jewish financiers]” to “anything dissenting from the [liberal political establishment/Alt-Right hivemind]” to “anything I don’t like.” These are not the conditions of “post-truth”—because political discourse has always exceeded (and often contradicted) empirical reality—but rather what Alex Tesar has dubbed “meta-truth.”

This is called the ‘wall of links’ method, used by Scott Alexander and others, and even though few readers will actually click and read all of the links, it’s very effective for conveying credibility. As I explain in greater detail in The Universal Solvent, emotive partisanship has become less effective for persuasion, as readers – particularity tech-savvy millennials, who grew up in an era where everything can be fact-checked with Google (I fact-checked Nassim Taleb on the Swiss vote he cited, by Googling it, and determined he flagrantly misrepresented the results) – in recent years have become more skeptical of blanket statements and assumptions. The onus is on author to show, not tell (such as the ‘wall of links’ method and data visualizations), in order to effectively convey his or her argument to an increasingly incredulous readership.

Also, the topic itself is a shard narrative. Many people can relate to 2016 being a bad year, and how both conservative and liberal millennials are struggling due to the perpetually weak labor market and unending, crushing student loan debt. The whole article has Lovecraftian tenor, admixed with the sardonic cynicism reminiscent of Hunter S. Thomson, with themes of hopelessness and despair of the unknown, which is a very popular online writing style nowadays, that taps into the shared public anxiety over the trajectory of the economy and society.

And as 2017 looms, epistemic anarchy reigns. The incoming president of the United States believes climate change is a hoax and has appointed a former Exxon executive as secretary of state. If the long arc of history does indeed bend toward justice, the devil and his angels are making sure they grab everything that isn’t nailed down before the final trumpets sound.

Ignoring the author’s anti-Trump bias, it’s a well-written paragraph. ‘Epistemic anarchy reigns’ – almost strait from Nick Land. This is how articles go viral…you have to make it complicated in order to signal intellect and to convey authority. All those guides that say to ‘dumb it down’ and to write ‘as simply as possible’ are rubbish in our post-2013 hyper-intellectualized era of internet journalism. This is another example of how the world is becoming like elite institutions such as Harvard, that pioneered the use of verbose ‘academic prose’, not the elite resembling the rest of the world. Academic prose doesn’t just work on academics; it works on everyone. It seems counterintuitive how it works that way–but it just does. Or you can write ‘fake news’, which is antithetical to intellectualism, and also be successful…note how both extremes work. Either make it really smart or really dumb. There are two major exception to this style: first, if you’re writing how-to guides or lists, in which case simplicity is often best for quickly conveying the most pertinent points to the reader, without the extra fluff; second, if you can signal intellect by virtue of your profession and or major accomplishments (such as being in STEM), in which case flowery writing is unnecessary.

Again related to extremes, it’s just weird how in America, on one extreme, you have all these BLM protests and protesters running around amok, but then you also have this massive fortified intellectual nobility, too. Most countries don’t have such a great disparity. That’s why it’s kinda silly when you have people like Richard Spencer talking about making America a ‘white state’…look around, turn on the news…this is not Norway.

…Hillary Clinton campaigned on the absurd slogan that “America is great because America is good” and was so convinced of her own inevitable coronation as the khaleesi of corporate feminism that she didn’t even bother campaigning in Michigan. Half the electorate stayed home, and a few million useful idiots for a bargain-bin

Here again we see the ‘shared narrative’ regrading distrust of elites, and elements of ‘concern liberalism‘ in how the author, who is anti-Trump, harshly criticizes the Hillary campaign, with cynicism piled on neck-deep as part of a writing style that is popular these days (cynicism and skepticism is the new earnestness), that answers to a millennial yearning for authenticity and ‘truth’ in a culture dumbed-down by mass entertainment, reductionist narratives, media sensationalism, political correctness, and superficiality. People of all generations, not just millennials, can relate, which is why these type of articles often go viral. Ross Douthat is another example of a pundit who often employs shared narratives, such as shared distrust of elites and anxiety about the economy, to great effect, and that’s why his articles are read and shared by both conservatives and liberals, who can relate. Richard Fernandez of Pajama Media is another example, whose articles are often shared by reactionary Nick Land.

Fascism flourishes in conditions of meta-truth precisely because it is so malleable, so forcefully beguiling, so deliberately free of even pretending to care about the Liberal Establishment’s idea of “truth.” It recognizes, consciously or otherwise, that truth is a function of power. Donald Trump’s regular, pathological lying underscores that the real goal of fascist rhetoric is not to convince, but to awe and impress. This is why fact-checking the alt-right’s absurd claims are useless and arguably counterproductive—everything they do and say is intentionally performed in bad faith.

Keith Olbermann can scream and sob into a flag all he wants. It only makes Trump stronger. He may or may not ever build that border wall, but the central promise of his campaign remains true: He will do whatever he wants, and the rest of us will pay for it.

The first sentence “Fascism flourishes in conditions of meta-truth precisely because it is so malleable, so forcefully beguiling, so deliberately free of even pretending to care about the Liberal Establishment’s idea of ‘truth.’” is strait from Nick Land and an example of the post-modernist, paranoid writing style that is so popular these days. In all the op-ed pieces from Time Magazine, US News and World Report, Newsweek, and National Review, not once did I encounter such ostentatiousness, that almost borders on pretentiousness. The editors would have chopped it for brevity, and they still do, and that’s why articles from those websites and magazines seldom go viral, because they are stuck in the past, unable to evolve to changing reader tastes for more sophisticated-sounding, circumlocutory prose.

Also, note the dig at Keith Olbermann, who is also a liberal, and the attempt by the author to understand Trump supporters and the ‘Trump mindset’ (and also criticizing liberals who have their heads in the sand and whom cling to their ideology rather than trying to understand their ideological opponents) rather than flat out dismissing both, ties in again with concern liberalism, and is a welcome departure from the emotive, ‘identity’ brand of liberalism that was characteristic of the ‘Bush era’. This also ties in with the post-2013 SJW-backlash, which was another setback for identity liberalism.

Related: Alt-Right and Internet Journalism

Regarding online journalism, which is what blogging ultimately is, it seems like we’re spinning our wheels sometimes, writing articles that are of good quality and by competent writers, but are not read by enough people. I would love to see a right-wing version of Wait But Why–something that appeals to the same large millennial demographic as Wait But Why, that gets a lot of traffic and viralness, and can be used to nudge the Overton window. There’s a huge market for contrarian, subversive right-of-center thought marketed towards millennials, that challenges politically correct assumptions but without explicitly being right-wing. The success of Stefan Molyneux, who is a libertarian and has a large millennial fan base, as well as 4chan and Reddit, is evidence that this may be viable. The December 2012 Cracked.com article, 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, which was their most popular article ever and had right-wing and libertarian undertones, is an example.

The posts 10 Harsh Truths Every Millennial Must Know and Advice to Ignore are articles targeted towards a broader audience, that have subtle right-wing themes embedded within them. The idea is you begin with a shared narrative, which are apolitical and bi-partisan (the frustrations of being a millennial in debt; student loan debt; self-improvement; social anxiety; distrust of elites; anxiety about the economy; anomie, etc.), and then you nudge the reader to your desired conclusion/resolution, dropping clues along the way, which is the opposite approach of, say, Ann Coulter, or most political pundits, who is more brazen but this limits the broad appeal and viralness of her articles. You’re not preaching to the choir, but rather to the skeptic and the undecided.

The Necessity of Power

There seems to be lingering belief held by some, including even a the Flight 93 Election essay, that perhaps democracy can be salvaged if only the ‘right people are put in charge’, or that Trump’s win is a major setback for the left. Bloody Shovel writes:

Trump won! And he did so in a democratic election. The foundational theory of neoreaction, Moldbug’s argument that leftism was unhinged because the Cathedral rules the world and democracy makes it worse can’t quite account for what we are seeing. We have a pretty decent theory of leftist victories, but we don’t have one of leftist defeats.

The word ‘democracy’ can have two meanings: first, the democratic process (as in voting), and second, ‘…a system of government in which the citizens exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body, such as a parliament.’ The latter implies distributed power involving ‘checks and balances’, not absolute or concentrated power. Even if the the first step were bypassed, #2 (checks and balances) would still be a hindrance. Although a democracy makes it harder to enact legislation and sweeping change, it also makes it virtually impossible to undo it, and as the past two centuries of United States history shows, progress is irrevocable. Suffrage begets civil rights, and then egalitarianism, moral decay, porous borders, same-sex marriage, immigration, and so on, leading to the ‘progressivism singularity’.

Trump’s victory, in terms of reversing progressivism, is analogous to trying to stop a steamroller by putting a mattress in front of it. But an argument could have also been made for Hillary, in that she would hasten the singularity, collapsing progress under its weight, much like a Type II supernova.

Fighting liberalism with democracy means liberalism wins, because you’re playing by the rules created by the opposition, much like a shell game in which the conman lets the mark win a few games before taking all his money. Democracy and representative government creates the illusion of control and change, but nothing happens, because by virtue of the constitution and the separation of power, it’s not supposed to. Is Islamic terror dissuaded by the empty and symbolic threats of democracy. No, and terrorists demonstrated such defiance by killing more people in Germany over the holiday, the same year Trump won and Brexit happened. This is because the modern liberal democracy, being neutered and emasculated, is a facade and isn’t a legitimate conveyor of power.

The question of human nature arises as it pertains to governance. Hobbes and Locke held diametrically opposing views, but both were correct to some extent. The founding fathers understood that man desires autonomy, but the Constitution, which was conceived on Natural Law, ultimately, proved inadequate at enforcing power and order, eventually leading to the situation we have now. On the other extreme, too much power, especially if held by an inept ruler or predicated on a flawed ideology, can also prove disastrous, as the history of communism has shown. High-trust societies should afford their citizenry autonomy…just look at the public school system to get an idea of how too much power, when held by overbearing teachers and administration, suppresses individual talent and exceptionalism.

But it’s safe to err on the side of more power than less, perhaps in the form of a minarchist state where individual autonomy, private property, rule of law, courts, and free markets are preserved–but there is no democracy, meaning that the arrangement of power between the individual and the state is immutable. Divine law, whether codified in the Koran, Torah, or the Holy Bible, is one approach, because ancient religious scriptures cannot be modified, but because man is ultimately doing the interpreting, it’s not fail-safe. The absence of absolute power creates opportunism, corruption, and division. Can democracy work in high-trust societies? No, because the same aforementioned forces will undermine it, if given enough time, as the history of Britain and the United States has shown.

2017 Predictions and Reflections

Overall, 2016 was a good year. Traffic to the blog continues to grow, with the fourth quarter of 2016 being the strongest ever, although it’s still nothing to write home about. Perhaps there was too much activism this year, both with the 2016 presidential election and Brexit, and this may have resulted in a loss of focus and dilution of NRx due to the admixture with the more activist-orientated alt-right. In writing laudatory articles about Trump, I too, to some extent, succumbed to this. But the election was a huge deal that demanded some attention.

My 2016 predictions were mostly correct: stocks kept going higher, inflation was tame, the dollar rose, there was another mass shooting in America (the Orlando Pulse Nightclub), more Islamic terror (in Germany, Orlando Fl., Turkey, and elsewhere) as par for the course, and no recession. I was wrong about China and oil prices.

Predictions for 2017:

Home prices keep rising, especially in the Bay Area

Trump walks back on immigration and border control, to the disappointment of some of his supporters, putting tax cuts, defense, and stimulus first

Trump beats expectations for his inaugural year despite his inexperience

Stocks keep rising for an 8th year in a row, making this the longest bull market ever

US economy keeps growing, making this the longest expansion ever

Treasury yields fall as post-Trump inflation fears subside and the usual weakness in China and Europe continues

Valuations for Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest keep rising. No web 2.0 bubble burst.

Yellen raises rates twice

Another mass shooting in the United States and more Islamic terror

Plans for 2017:

More posts

Publish the rest of the Wealth, Individualism, and Intellectualism series. Its already written, and whole thing is over 15,000 words, but I am releasing it in parts.

Fewer typos

Alt Right Power Struggle

The ongoing alt-right ‘civil war’ is an example how how activism fails in the absence of a unifying cohesive goal and or concentrated power.

Between 2015 and 2016, thousands of anonymous posters on 4chan, Twitter, and Reddit collectively worked on the same goal – getting Trump in office. Although they were loosely organized, they were unified in trying to get Trump elected. Now that Trump won, no one knows what to do. A this pent-up enthusiasm and energy in the weeks since Trump’s victory has been released – on each other. This problem is compounded by the fact that the alt-right, although it’s under the category of ‘conservatism’, is very ideologically diverse. You have alt-White (daily stormer, the right stuff), alt-lite, alt-trad, etc. Some are Christians, some are lapsed, and others are atheists or agnostics. Some seek revolution; others seek self-improvement. Some care about the ‘JQ’…others don’t. Some lean libertarian; others are national-socialists.

A problem with activism is it attracts people who want power, who are sometimes the least qualified, and then it breaks down into a power struggle between warring factions trying to ‘own’ the alt-right, or witch-hunts against those who are not ‘alt-right enough’ resulting in holiness spirals, purity/shit tests, and virtue signaling. This is similar to the Salem Switch Trials, a historical example of an out of control holiness spiral which ended when the governor of the Massachusetts colony, Sir William Phips, upon his wife as being accused of witchcraft, ordered (upon exercising his power) an end to the trials and pardoned the accused. In the absence of some sort of concentrated power or authority, the colony fell into chaos.

Trump’s political campaign ‘worked’, despite being activism, because people were given specific tasks, everyone had the same objective (of getting Trump in office), and the hierarchy – from strategists at the top to the ‘footsoliers’ at the bottom – was inviolable, much in the same way as a large corporation.

Because NRx and the Dark Enlightenment are ideas and concepts, not a movement or political party, no one can claim ‘ownership’ it, thus avoiding the ‘power grab’ problem.

Overall, Baked Alaska came out ahead and Mike was knocked down a peg. The alt-right is not going away, and eventually the in-fighting will end as soon as they find another cause to rally behind or when the excitement dies down.

More Tooleb Nonsense Debunked

Nassim Nicholas Tooleb, the angry flâneur who blocks and insults people on Twitter, continues to demonstrate being the intellectual-yet-idiot that he is, in a recent Medium post Inequality and Skin in the Game:

The author Joan Williams, in an insightful article, explains that the working class is impressed by the rich, as role models. Michèle Lamont, the author of The Dignity of Working Men, whom she cites, did a systematic interview of blue collar Americans and found present a resentment of professionals but, unexpectedly, not of the rich.

It is safe to accept that the American public –actually all public –despise people who make a lot of money on a salary, or, rather, salarymen who make a lot of money. This is indeed generalized to other countries: a few years ago the Swiss, of all people almost voted a law capping salaries of managers . But the same Swiss hold rich entrepreneurs, and people who have derived their celebrity by other means, in some respect.[ii]

Tooleb just pulls this out of his butt, like he does for most of the stuff he writes. This is wrong for so many reasons:

1. The ‘American public’ includes salaried individuals. Its like those liberals who say they want unity but then attack the rich.

2. 60% of American workers are ‘white collar’, and hence typically earn a salary instead of a wage. So by Tooleb’s logic that would mean a lot of workers despise their own success.

3. Again with the overgeneralizing. It is really ‘all’..did he literally poll every single person? The part about Michèle Lamont and Joan Williams of HBR is unconvincing, because Tooleb doesn’t cite percentages or an actual study. Here is the Joan Williams HBR article: https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class:

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference?

So Tooleb links to an article that mentions a book, The Dignity of Working Men, which gives a single anecdotal example of supposed resentment, yet Tooleb generalizes this to mean ‘all’. The rest of the Joan Williams article is about the 2016 election and Hillary.

4. Tooleb refutes his own argument by mentioning the Swiss vote, writing “This is indeed generalized to other countries: a few years ago the Swiss, of all people almost voted a law capping salaries of managers.” If such a generalization were true, wouldn’t the vote have passed unanimously?

Here are the actual results of the vote:

Swiss voters on Sunday decisively rejected a proposal to cap “fat cat” pay, in a ground-breaking referendum on the issue.

Final results showed that votes against carried the day by 65.3% to 34.7% in favour. David Roth, the president of Switzerland’s Young Socialists and the referendum’s leading sponsor, said: “We’re disappointed [we] lost today.”

So in Tooleb’s distorted world, 35% = ‘all public’. Close enough. lol What a clown. And it was socialists who backed the referendum, further evidence Tooleb is not the libertarian or anarcho capitalist many think he is but rather a liberal or socialist pretending to be one. Even in 2011, when I began writing articles critical of Tooleb, I suspected he was a liberal, and this further confirms it.

5. Many workers aspire to be promoted and to move up the ‘corporate ladder’ to become managers. Why else are there so many books, articles, websites, and seminars about getting raises and promotions?

In addition, someone without skin in the game –say a corporate executive with upside and no financial downside (the type to speak clearly in meetings) –is paid according to some metrics that do not necessarily reflect the health of the company; these (as we saw in Chapter x) he can manipulate, hide risks, get the bonus, then retire (or go to another company) and blame his successor for the subsequent results.

Execs are paid more because they have a bigger responsibility. Execs have skin in the game in the form of stock and stock options. Incompetence is the job of the board of directors to determine, with appropriate action taken if necessary. In some cases such as Enron and Wolrdcom, this fails, but such extensive fraud is uncommon, partially because of severe criminal penalties. Tooleb wants to take this further by turning all executives into civil servants and having the government regulate compensation, which is what Obama tried to do in 2009 with the financial sector. He’s advocating a bigger regulatory role for the federal government but without explicitly saying so.

Continuing on, he writes:

You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate –or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening.

The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent
Or, more mathematically

He subscribes to the belief in ‘finite wealth’, that in order for someone to become wealthy an existing wealthy person must lose his spot, which is one of the most common misconceptions held by people who are naive about economics. It never occurs to him that the total wealth can rise, as has been the trend forever, and hence more people can become wealthy. Liberals want to make the pie equal; conservatives seek to enlarge it.

So instead of ‘spread the wealth’ as Sanders would say, it’s ‘rotate the wealth’. Again, diversion and subterfuge. He wants rich people to forfeit or squander their money on stupid, risky endeavors in order to have ‘skin in the game’.

Also, where is the incentive to create personal wealth if it’s going to go away just as quickly as it came? One of the reasons people accumulate wealth is for peace of mind and stability for both themselves and their families.

Our condition here is stronger than mere income mobility. Mobility means that someone can become rich. The no absorbing barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.

Wrong again. People are getting rich all the time, everyday. Of the Forbes 400 list, 70% are self-made:

Yet Forbes said that wealth in America has become far more meritocratic over time. It said that in 1984, “less than half of those on The Forbes 400 were self-made; today, 69 percent of the 400 created their own fortunes.”

Look at Facebook…in the past decade it has created many millionaires and some billionaires. One example is Jeffrey J. Rothschild, an early Facebook employee:

Rothschild started working for Facebook in 2005.[4] He was the oldest person working for Facebook at the time.[4] He became Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure software.[4] In 2012, he owned 18 million Facebook shares.[4]

In 2015, he was worth an estimated US$1.67 billion.[1] He serves on the board of trust of his alma mater, Vanderbilt University.[12] Rothschild is married, and he has three children.[1] He resides in Palo Alto, California.[12]

With recent successes of Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb, Whatsapp, and Tesla, stories like these are becoming increasingly common. Since 2002, the number of billionaires and total wealth has surged, thanks to the information technology industry and other factors:

Tooleb writes:

For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.[iii]

Large fortunes tend to dissolve, mainly due to marriage, business failure and mismanagement, divorce, and offspring, eroding the fortune over many generations. A family surname (such as Kennedy, Rockefeller, or Rothschild) may be collectively rich, but the wealth per person becomes very diluted as the family grows and splits over many generations. In fact, I don’t think there are any Kennedy, Rockefeller, or Rothschild decedents on the Forbes 400 list. The Waltons are the only familial clan on the list.

Again, it doesn’t matter if rich people remain rich, because total global wealth is growing, as well as rising standards of living.

Tooleb is lauded as some sort of ‘genius’. On Twitter, he fortresses himself in esoteric-sounding philosophical babble and screenshots mathematics that he passes off as his or as original, creating an aura of intellectual impenetrability around him, but when you actually read his stuff, line by line as I have done, most of the time he has no idea what he is talking about. He’s like a Potemkin intellectual, where there is no substance behind the Twitter facade.

Drugs and Tariffs

I saw this linked from Free Northerner’s blog: An Economist’s Cautionary Note on Free Trade

Targeted tariffs won’t raise consumption. They won’t spur economic growth. They will lead to more expensive goods, and less consumption. David Ricardo was right on all that. Comparative advantage still exists, and be very wary of anyone who talks about free trade without acknowledging this.

But they might also lead to more employment. And this may well be worth it in terms of the quantity that the economist’s social planner is meant to care about, namely total welfare.

It might lead to fewer rust belt whites killing themselves with opiates, because their communities are totally hollowed out with everybody sitting around on welfare without any purpose in their lives.

If steel products cost slightly more as a result, personally that doesn’t strike me as the end of the world.

As I explained a few weeks ago, tariffs both raise prices and hurt employment, hurting the lowest of income earners. The reason is because America exports a lot of stuff, and increasing prices for imports will lower consumer demand for imported goods, but this will also lower foreign demand for America’s own exports, hence hurting American jobs. This is because America trades its exports for imports. Higher import prices hurt American retailers, costing jobs. Also, companies will find ways to evade the tariffs, such as choosing countries that don’t have tariffs.

Here is the cautionary tale regarding tariffs on Chinese tires:

But other trading partners rushed to fill the void. Shipments from South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia doubled in value, more than offsetting the decline in Chinese-made tires.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics reached very different conclusions: The think tank said the duties saved a maximum of 1,200 manufacturing jobs and when factoring in the higher American consumer cost for tires, resulted in the U.S. economy losing about 2,500 retail jobs.

The Smoot-Hawley bill, signed in 1930, is another example of how tariffs can backfire, by making the Great Depression worse:

Eighty four years ago on this day President Hoover signed the now-infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, which substantially raised U.S. tariffs on some 890 products. Other countries retaliated and world trade shrank enormously; by the end of 1934 world trade had plummeted some 66 percent from the 1929 level.

Regarding opioid abuse, the author seems to be making a generous assumption that more jobs will equal less drug abuse in ‘rust belt’ states such as Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Ohio is like the ‘opioid capital’ of the United States, due to the rampant abuse there:

If there were a one-to-one correlation between unemployment and opioid abuse, we would expect unemployment to be highest in those states, but it’s not:

Ohio’s unemployment rate is close to the national average. Look at Oklahoma: low unemployment, lots of opioid abuse.

Although Ohio lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs between 1999-2009, it gained back those jobs in other areas:

This suggests the problem has more to do with drug addiction and welfare than insufficient jobs. Although the unemployed are more likely to abuse drugs, there is more to it than that. For example, there are two questions regarding causality: does drug abuse cause unemployment or are people taking drugs because they are unemployed? I’m skeptical that drug addicts who are on welfare are going to suddenly ‘go clean’ if jobs become available. Another problem is that welfare may be a ‘better deal’ than going to work:

We should be more honest about the difficulty of persuading people on that $12 dole to give it up and work for $8. They are not irrational to find that bargain unappealing, especially when a private-sector economy groaning under the titanic burden of government has a hard time producing good employment opportunities for marginal workers.

Thomas Sowell Retires

Thomas Sowell Retires: My Farewell Column

Dr. Sowell was right about the inferiority of communism and the superiority capitalism (you didn’t have to be a genius to see either, as if mass starvation under communist regimes wasn’t evidence enough it was a bad ideology). But he is almost literally (given his age) a relic of the 60-90′s era Republican party, given his outdated and hawkish views on Russia, his denial of HBD regarding Black vs. White achivement, his support of Cruz during the 2016 election, his idealization of democracy and the democratic process, and his failure to understand the alt-right and European/White identity. Although Dr. Sowell was skeptical of exporting democracy to the Middle East, he never renounced the institution of democracy, instead stressing the importance of informed and literate voters. The GOP won the economic war but lost the cultural one; for the left, it was the opposite. The cynic says that is by design, with both sides agreeing to give up some ground to get half of what they want. Democracy means settling for less. Throughout his long career, he also didn’t have many original thoughts on economics, being mostly an ‘explainer’, not a ‘theorizer’. He is right about minimum wages, but many others also came to the same realization.

Related:

Why Thomas Sowell Never Got a Nobel Prize

Thomas Sowell Ignores Biology

Thomas Sowell on The Bell Curve