Aesthetic Materialism

  So-called "libertarians are right to assert their rights - to say things like, "So long as it's between consenting adults, people should be able to engage in any kind of sexual activity they want," or "people should be able to do all the recreational drugs they want," and so on.   But they are naive about how to achieve the goal of the kind of free society they imagine. There's an irony here: libertarians often tend to say things like "You can't legislate morality." What's naive about libertarians is that they think that merely by declaring what should be the case - that, for instance, "So long as it's between consenting adults, people should be able to engage in any kind of sexual activity they want," that that's what will happen.  In short, they are trying to legislate morality. In order to establish a libertarian society, it is not enough to imagine, to declare, to wish. To create a free society, one must trans...

You can define the morally good as: that set of behaviors which you have many strong reasons to train others to do, especially through rewarding them with praise.  Similarly, morally bad (or "evil") can be defined as: that set of behaviors which you have many strong reasons to train others not to do, especially through negatively reinforcing them with condemnation. We are all subtly training each other, especially through praise and condemnation.  But especially, parents tend to train children, and in general, older members of a social group train the young.  Thus training can pass down from generation to generation.  But younger people, especially from the ages of about 3 to about 11, are more susceptible to training than older people.  After this point, the rate of acquisition of training slows, and humans may even become resistant to training.  Old people may become very incapable of, or very resistant to, new training.  That might be a bug, or it m...

Every time I see photographs of the Frankfurt School, they look embarrassed.  More than embarrassed: they look ashamed.  It's as if they are ashamed to be an image, ashamed to be visible, ashamed to have bodies, ashamed to have faces.  They wish they were purely a text.

I have said that Hegel's project is the critique of Romanticism.  But what is Romanticism? Trying to define Romanticism is famously difficult.  It resists definition, it defies categorization.  And if anything, it is that resistance. If I could try to describe Romanticism with one word, it would be rebellion.  But of course that's too simplistic.  Romanticism and rebellion are not simply synonyms.  Romantics do not always rebel, and when they rebel, they rebel in a specific way.  The Romantic poet or the Romantic artist usually says something like, "I am a human! I am a person! I am an individual being, with feelings, real feelings!"  Romanticism is a rebellion from the heart, so to speak.  Romantic rebellion is not about taxes or insurance or debt reform or many of the other material things that have historically incited insurrections throughout history.  The Romantic - the Romantic poet, for instance - demands recognition.  Every ...

  The most fundamental, glaring error in Austrian economics - as well as Neoclassical, Neoliberal and related forms of economics, including Hayek and much of what passes for "mainstream" economics - is the problem of monopoly and their magical thinking about "perfect competition."  

LessWrong began as a blog about how Bayesian statistics is better than frequentism.  I've already written about my opinion about Bayesianism.  Suffice it to say here that although I respect it, I don't think it's as omnipotent as some of its most dogmatic adherents do. I've written a lot on this blog about how much I hate and oppose utilitarianism.  Mostly, this is because I think utilitarianism is unscientific.  It should therefore come as no surprise that I am opposed to "Effective Altruism," which is a recent, and particularly nasty form of utilitarianism.  I don't especially blame Yudkowsky for this - I put the blame much more on Peter Singer and others who founded this movement.  But one must admit that Yudkowsky and his followers did quite stupidly and uncritically go along with this nonsense, and it led them to terrible errors. Some people think that Yudkowsky and his followers are wrong about AI.  But I think they are wrong about humanity ....