Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress

Hello folks, and welcome to the Lunar Society podcast. Today, it is my great privilege to talk with Professor Michael Humer.
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, metaethics, 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. It 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 Problem of 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 ado, here's Professor Michael Humer. Okay, Professor Humor uh what is the problem political authority what did you write this book

yeah so uh you know here's a copy of the book uh he's right and uh you can order it on amazon that's the important thing or you know anywhere um yeah so you know the the problem referred to 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 I'm 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 um if i do this this is called extortion and uh 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 social welfare programs,

which is generally most people approve of, right?

And they think that the government is entitled 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

the prevalent political views?

Yeah, common sense ethical intuition.

So there are the intuitions that you would apply to 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, right? So like most people have the initial reaction that the government has authority, but they they will not generally say, yeah, that's just self-evident and needs no explanation.
Like most people can see that it needs an explanation. Right.
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 steal their money or threaten people with violence to get their money and then lock them in cases and stuff like that. These are not controversial intuitions.
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 thing 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 clear independent evidence of that.

Without talking about the problem of political authority,

there's independent evidence that there's a bias

for the status quo.

So this explains why people in different societies

with very different customs tend to think

that their customs are superior

to those in other societies.

How could that be? It has to be that they're biased in favor of the way things are done in their own society right um right so like i've got an explanation of why people would have mistaken um 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 anarcho-capitalists outnumber uh 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 their services um i wouldn't say that anarcho-capitalism is less controversial than that it might be but i'm like that's not self-evident to me um anarcho-capitalism is controversial right so right so anarcho-capitalism is the extreme version of libertarianism right so there are not very many of them but there are a substantial number of libertarians right and pretty much they still hold the political most of them still hold the political view that um the state has some unique authority right um? 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 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 this is what's common to libertariansarians 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 you know the partisans of conventional political views go oh well you know I guess they shouldn't have done that, but you know, the partisans of conventional political views go, oh, well, I guess they shouldn't have done that.
But, you know, 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 um the chinese philosopher

matzah 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 tenfold 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? Yeah. And so he says, you know, if a man on seeing a little 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.
And it's an interesting point. Like if we held political leaders to account the same way we 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 they 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 who 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 basically it turned out that the hostages kind of emotionally 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 once they got them along.
So anyway, and then I think one of them like um you know tried to aid in the legal defense like started up a legal defense fund for kidnappers 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 um 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 are, who have power over them. And there's an evolutionary explanation for why this would be.

And 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 kidnappers in that case said 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 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.

So that might be why people try to take the side of the government.

And then 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 which they're also like you know half of the government or something like that yeah i get so but then there's people who i mean not from a libertarian perspective, there's people who question the legitimacy of the government in 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're questioning the legitimacy of the government, like the

social justice warriors, rather than just criticizing some of its policies right um so i mean in my view questioning their legitimacy would be saying like they shouldn't um 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.
No. But I mean, they, you know, they are like, they're like sort of, actually, I mean, I, well, I'm not quite sure I understand your view, 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? Like, I'm not sure that systemic racism means that anyone is actually racist, right?

That's fair, yeah.

I wonder to what extent...

So, René Girard 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? But so I think there's a phenomenon that horrible people are often charismatic or, 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 appears strong and confident, right? But the people who are very strong and confident are often bad people. So 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, right? So like, if you don't give a shit what other people think, and you don't care what effect you have on other than other people.
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. You're not worried when you're talking to them because you don't care what they think about you.
When you're just taking actions, if you're the leader and you're putting forward your new policies, you do it with total confidence because you don't care if it's wrong right that's my read on dictators right they let they act like they're totally confident that this is the right policy because they don't actually care if it kills lots of people or not right right like a normal person would be worried like what if i'm doing the wrong thing but then that worry 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 was missing 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 particularly charismatic, like better than the other 15 Republican candidates in the primaries. Right.
Right. Um, and yeah, it had a lot to do with being super confident, right.
Which by my read is because he doesn't care. Mm-hmm.
And like he'll say stuff with total confidence and the, the ordinary person thinks because he's talking with complete confidence, that means that what he's saying must be true.

Right.

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, right? Because, like, you look at what people were doing, you know, back in ancient Rome, you know, gladiatorial combatatorial 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 um so i mean the evidence of of there being moral progress is compelling, right? It's like enormous progress.
But 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 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 try 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 small force.
So over the course of many generations, it accumulates to a lot of progress, right? Right. I've read Dialogues on Eth on 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 have 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 well yeah i mean you could make the argument people find this shocking but you can make the argument that like you know would have been better if there were no humans i think maybe the world would be better with no human beings right because the amount of pain and suffering that we, just like a few years of human beings, the amount of pain and 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 um you know that may seem

shocking but um the number of animals that we're torturing and killing each year is 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 um yeah so like from a purely consequential standpoint, it's been a huge regression. However, it does appear to me that it's turning around.
So vegetarianism and veganism are becoming more popular. When I was in college, there were not many vegetarians.
And I think I never met a vegan. I think nobody heard of that.
And there weren't like vegan restaurants you'd go to and stuff like that. 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 really convincing and they didn't used to be also they're working on um synthetic meat basically so they're going to make meat without the cruelty and that's probably what's ultimately going to end it right so like right now it's really bad but it's probably going to get better when we perfect this technology right also i mean you know and this kind of um 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 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 hypothesized 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 to 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 um eventually civilization will collapse and we'll all die eventually the human species will go extinct but i don't know when um 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 um 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. OK.
And like and you can hypothesize the reason for this. If you're already doing pretty badly, it's easier to improve.
And the United States is already pretty efficient, so it gets harder and harder to improve. And that could happen with moral progress, too.
It will presumably slow down. As we get closer to the moral truth, the rate of progress will have to slow down.
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 not get destroyed yeah um yeah what so will we stop will the progress stop before we reach in archo capitalism i don't know i mean that might be true if there's some um if there are some truths that are super hard to apprehend then it might be that like you know 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, right? 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.
Like a lot of the stuff people were doing in the past was super stupid. Like not only bad, but stupid, okay.
So like the idea that, oh, you have more rights than somebody else 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 uh so i'm gonna try to critique that view actually um like it 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 not be 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 were far more libertarian. There's a particular example of Grover Cleveland has sent a bill from 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 paternalistic help from the government in the future, and we should just rely on a 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's 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, 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 mass emtots 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. 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.
And 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 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 um um accumulating libertarian sentiment this could be wishful thinking or something i don't know but like you know when i was in college um 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 these there

are these different libertarian organizations now there was no students for liberty when i was in college right like that expanded also um there was um i recall there being basically like one well known libertarian philosopher it was robert nozick yeah and uh and you know now there there are were multiple ones right um so i don't know you know possible um you know part of what i think was happening so i don't know about robert cleveland in particular like i don't know if he was um typical of people in that time um but i mean it 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 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 so like the attitudes are getting closer to what they should be yeah i 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 a significant force back then either?

Or were there socialists in Congress, right?

I don't know if it's fair to say that the change has been towards libertarian libertarianism per se, rather than just towards the extremes.

Yeah, there could be. I think the internet culture might be making us more extreme, right?

Yeah, so 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 like us. But also like the socialists.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know where that's going that's going right so like it could be that the internet is just like a bad influence on all of us all 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 and improve right there so um they just sort of like this um you know this optimistic philosophical view that the truth wins in the end.

This isn't guaranteed to happen, but generally speaking, good ideas tend to be more persuasive than bad ideas.

If you have the opportunity for all the information to come out and 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 um this is a general tendency it's not guaranteed because there are biases in the human mind right there could be systematic be systematic biases. And yeah.
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, Hobbes that 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 explained some game theoretical reasons why a strong government may, fact increase violence in those cases. But in Pinker's 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 the just ordinary one-on-one murder and so on.
But I mean, if you're asking, well, why is it that people are prone to violence to begin with?

I think like the, so I think Pinkert 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, Pinkert 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 hobgian explanation is um

you is 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 Hobgian 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,

you become the biggest target for them.

So what you should do is,

assuming that you can't immediately

kill everyone else at once,

what you should do is just try to mind your own business

and stay away and not start any fights.

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 it's 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 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's a 45% chance of dying, 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.

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.
Okay, 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, and so human beings, like, they're not thinking that when they go to war, what's happening is they're driven by emotions, but 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 tribes, right? Yeah, but so long as that instinct exists, why won't a state without a Leviathan or a society without a Leviathan fall back into that sort of, people will 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 um 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, right? 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, doesn the uh case for private security doesn't it assume somewhat of a purity and resources that you could afford a similar magnitude of help because um if over time that rich people just 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 um 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 buy some politicians yeah fair enough in uh anarcho-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 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 i'm just one of their customers right all right but if he's like i'll pay a a billion dollars, just, you know, let me get through this town. He tells us to keep a private security agency that.
Right. But what is his purpose? Okay.
So, like, you know, Bill Gates hires, like, some really powerful security agency. And to do what? Steel resources.
Steel woman. Okay.
okay but i mean he's got billions of dollars why doesn't he 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?'s probably it's cheaper so like i mean rich people um rich people do well with women like bill gates would not have a hard time finding wife if you didn't already have one um just because of that right and 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 enough although in such a situation aren't the poor disadvantaged 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 growth to their wealth than anybody else would yeah but i mean they're they're not right so like which people are going to pay more for security yeah like they presently do right yeah um 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.
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 uh 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 um why so uh pinker floats the idea that the first states were really just kind of mafiosos that took control of an area and expect a tribute every year.

Why won't 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 living safely?

I guess you could say that's what the state is today anyways.

Yeah, that is what they are. Although, you know, you might worry that maybe we would get a worse state than they would.
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, if we had the anarcho-capitalist situation just set up the way it's envisioned by the end caps um from that position it's difficult to establish your um 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 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 because 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 if the anarchy comes about by, you know, one day, the government just disappears, right? And 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.

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 collapse immediately, it's no good.
But if there's this simultaneous process, 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 that right now yeah um and you know sort of 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 right like the city of denver tomorrow could say we're gonna like start hiring private security guards to patrol. So, and then they could pass laws to, you know, change the, change the asymmetry between government police and security guards.
Right. Yeah.
Are you pro to defend 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. 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 a 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 societies.
Preaching that the society is 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 its members. And now, Professor, are you attacking our own society, right? You're claiming that coercion is illegitimate.
Our society is in large part founded on the idea that the state is legitimate, that its coercion is legitimate. If coercion is evil, then isn't our society legitimate? And then aren't you eroding then the norms, which have brought us peace and 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, 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, you know, social justice warrior, just saying, like, everybody's racist, America's racist, and so on, right? Right.
And sort of, like, um, you know, also like with the social justice warrior, 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 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. It's not exactly answering your question.
your question. But anyway, 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 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'd be people who are an 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, let's just keep that in mind, right?

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 blog post?

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?

Thank you. But by the way, how long does it take you to write a block code? Because they're all so good and you write so many of them.
Are you just writing it in one state of flow? How much editing does it take? Yeah, I write it in an afternoon, but then I reread it multiple times. I don't know.
So reread it a few times that day, but then reread it the next day, maybe just before it goes up. So I make small edits which you know the small edits don't make that much difference probably but um 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 and it's been going for a couple years so there's like whatever is over 100 posts yeah and it's amazing how uh digestible uh not just your blogs are but uh just generally blog posts are just they're bingeable in a way that books often aren't like for example i've probably uh read most of scott alexander's writing and you know that's got to be at least a few books right but it does 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've read, I don't know if I've read a 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 FIQ, by the way? I don't think so, no. Yeah, it's an interesting counter-argument that's worth checking out.
So I wanted 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 like a big time libertarian economist over at Tulane.
Wait, no. Another university in New Orleans.
And his attitude was, you know, take as much money from the state as you can. 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. Anyway, and, you know, 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, the difference between University of Colorado and a private university is minimal.
So I think that the state provides something like 5% of our budget. It's something like that.
Now, the state university, of course, universities are subsidized in general. So like 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 government helps these people get all these these loans which they probably wouldn't take okay um so you know like definitely we the university are charging we're overcharging right but i mean everybody's overcharging right and we're overcharging less than most of the universities so okay not so bad but um yeah in the libertarian society there would there would be less universities, right? Because there's a market distortion created by all the financial aid.
So there'd be less of it. And 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 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? They have their 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 can't do right because i like what matters isn't whether nominally it's said to be a state institution or whatever right what 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 could be can't be a doctor they're getting big benefits from on the from 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 just float a few other arguments against the anarchic capitalism for you and see how you respond. So the first is a sort of Birkin argument, like we shouldn't try things that haven't worked before yeah yeah i mean um yeah you know you can imagine somebody saying this back when the us 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 um you know notice how all the countries in the world are dictatorships.
This just shows that that's the natural state, right? Society evolves to dictatorship, which is a, you know, a lot like what people say about anarcho-capitalism, right? Like we have states everywhere. It must be that that's the only stable society, right? Okay.
Now, you know, you might say correctly, well, it's kind of like, kind of anecdotal, like, okay, that's just one case. Right.

And so I'm not saying that that means that every radical change is worth 20, right? Okay, but, okay, but so, you know, that's just to prepare you for the fact that there could be big fundamental progress that we don't, we don't want to rule out, right, by 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 subminimal state. And so the minimal state has police, courts, military, legislature, something like that.
You could have a sub-minimal state, which they privatize the police force, and then they

could privatize the court system. 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 this 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's 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 anarcho-capitalism would be a disaster, you know, now they should answer at what point in the process they think the disaster would happen, right? It was like, if you make this transition gradually, like like I don't see where a disaster would happen.

So you could get pretty close to anarchy,

but you still have like somebody that is saying the rules.

Like they don't have a police force anymore.

They don't have courts anymore,

but they are giving rules to the police and the courts.

So, okay.

And like, if you're already sympathetic to libertarianism,

we could eliminate all these business regulations and all 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 know well what about the argument from the blacks wellan that at every stage like this you might have a one percent 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 um even even if you alone stopping eating meat doesn't you know cause people to produce less meat that 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 tenth increment of decreasing the state is possible that something bad happens it's so it's still uh 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 10 stage or whatever um

i mean the thing is like um

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

Thank 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 okay i do want to say though that like bad stuff could happen from maintaining the status quo too and so like you know in the book that i mentioned that um actually there's a pretty good chance that the government is going to kill all of us right like i don't think that that's a 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, right? So like, they could have killed everyone. Luckily, they didn't.
But that doesn't mean that we can just like keep going, just keep going going forever, and it's always going to be fine, right? Yeah. We probably have people right now who are working on bigger, more destructive weapons, right? More destructive, but cheaper, right? So we probably have people who are working on biological weapons or other things, nanotech weapons or things like that.
yeah this actually leads to my next argument against anarchic capitalism which is uh 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 is going to happen.

Yeah.

I mean, in fact, I think I had a blog post that was kind of about this, right?

And 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, well, it's not necessarily tyrannical, but it's just an argument that there needs to be somebody monitoring individuals in a pretty close way, so not having much privacy and able to stop them.
So 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 what just what 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 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 mean, you know, that might be right, right? Like, 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 well 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 um religious people but you could respond well that's because there's been nobody else around right like if there's if there's not an anarcho capitalist society where you're permitted to build nuclear weapons on your own, then obviously the state is, sorry, if everyone is religious, then yeah, all the good things are going to be created by religious people, but not everyone is a government employee, right? You can't just build a nuclear bomb while states are dominant.
They won't let you, but if you can, can then you might uh yeah so before the nuclear bomb was invented could 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 um 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 would be more i don't know would there be more people who are trying to build weapons of mass destruction um i wouldn't think that i mean i i mean i understand why governments are doing this right like they 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. 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're still safer right because like you know maybe private parties will develop that technology much later but when they do then someone is going to release it right um unless there's a government to stop them okay yeah but by the way like i'm i'm not sure that the government is going to stop it even if they're if they continue to exist right so like uh 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 likely if somebody is trying to make it happen, and that might just become cheaper and cheaper.

So 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 they might

actually hire people deliberately to create biological weapons.

So, you know, it's a little hard to say.

You know, 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 mean, I think, is this Neil Stevenson's idea? I mean, I think I got this from some science fiction author, right? That should be, everybody should be watching everyone else, not one organization watching everyone else.
Is this from a book? A book of book uh i just heard about this on the internet okay yeah that's an interesting idea um a final argument uh 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 most other libertarians would not accept this but this is obviously true um 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 and you might think, oh, know we we can just change that but no it's not so easy right most of the things the government does it's not an accident that they're doing them right like well i mean they're 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 um 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 i'm not doing that right because if 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 that 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. So, 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, 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,

a few blog posts about what students should be learning in school and in

college. One thing you didn't mention either either for or against, was a coding class.
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 mean i think it's um useful but i don't

agree that everyone needs to learn to code right so like i think some people um but basically i

think people who would be reasonably good at it should learn it all right 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 be useful so yeah you mentioned in one of your blog posts that if you didn't get into grad

That's right. 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 for 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 that I guess nobody uses anymore. But you know, 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. Fun.
The class of people called public intellectuals. Oh, 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 literature okay so um yeah i guess uh yeah i guess underrated right how about uh 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 uh 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 reputation among people who know who he is right right um although i guess not enough people know who he is so yeah um but you know about about non-academic intellectuals more generally i don't know So, I mean, most non-academic intellectuals, I think, are not good.

And so 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 I'm not trying to be a snob or whatever.

But I think because you learn stuff 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 um 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 um you know like reading a bunch of literature and you know finding out what people really think right and um 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 i so you know like um 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 I 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 are defending the simplest like least adequate version of it because they haven't looked at all the objections that you know know, cause the view to be modified. And, you know, they, they don't know what 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? I don't know. I mean, there's a possibility that it's actually a selection effect rather than right the training effect right yeah like the people who have patients people have enough patients to do good work can make it through graduate school right like if you don't have the patients you'll be excluded by that right yeah um you know so it's like it's possible that it would still be good um 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. them 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 what happened 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 um i have no self-interest in doing this review for you 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.

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, and, you know, just my experience reading referee reports, I often think, well, like, this guy did not read this carefully at all.

You know, like, he's raising some objection that I I answered and he doesn't seem to be aware that I answered

it.

Or he's totally misunderstood and I clearly explained what I meant and he's misunderstanding

it.

And it would make sense that they wouldn't read it carefully because they have no stake

in it.

The editor would have more of a stake in it,

because 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?

I mean, it's probably 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 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 knowledge, you don't have to pay somebody a bunch of money, not even for online courses, right? If you just want knowledge, like almost all of it is on the internet. You can get a great education for free, just reading sites on the internet.
Or even better yet, 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 sorry go ahead yes you know 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 grading your paper.

I'm not grading.

Yeah.

It's funny.

At my university, you need your ID to get into the gym, but you don't need any ID whatsoever

to go into any class you want, which goes to show you what they think people are actually

likely to steal or try to use voluntarily., 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.
Uh, pro natalism. I asked because, uh, you know, the average person's probably going to eat meat.
Oh, I see. Um, yeah.
I mean, so I assume that that's going to end at some point, right? Right. And so, um, 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 than not, the population will be dwindling and maybe we'll go extinct from just not deciding to have kids, right? And it'll 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 um i mean i think they have comparable rights against malicious coercion i can have that right but um 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 uh but but at what 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 um yeah so that i I mean, I don't think that I can say a hard and fast rule.

Now, you know, you might think, like, there's some people who are not mature 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, I guess it's kind of reasonable to pick 18 as the time when you become an adult i don't know right so the claim is that uh at least after a certain age um 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 uh 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 um yeah so like the way that children are treated is somewhat like slaves right like no rights parents rights, parents just tell them what to do all the time, right? And, you know, is it better than slavery? Well, you know, fortunately, most parents love their children in a way that most masters do not love their slaves. things worked out better right but also you know

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 um yeah you might think though like well there actually are some adults who are like not really suited to run their own lives like you know mentally retarded people or something yeah um it doesn't mean that you can treat them as slaves but they probably do need like a guardian um to tell them what to do right um 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 Like, if they want to go play in traffic. I guess yes.
Yeah. Okay, final two questions.
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 prol prolifically creatively and excessively uh what's the humor production function how are you able to be this uh this productive oh um i don't know it's partly because i'm smart um it's partly because i i love philosophy um if like if you don't love it and you know you're just doing it a job, then you won't do that much of it. In the academic world, there's not really incentives for producing blog posts or stuff like that.
There's not incentives for producing public philosophy. You don't get prestige from it.
The other academics are not so much impressed or whatever. And 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 no point for academic publication, although that might change in the future. But so um yeah so you'd only do this if like you just like well i mean i'm on a mission right i'm on a mission to um 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 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. Um, 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 who 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. I think those people, like the entrepreneurs, I think are animal welfare advocates or something like this.
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, he tries to convince a bunch of ordinary people.
I try to convince students. I write this book.
And I think that that part is having a lot less influence. 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. So are you yeah 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 of 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. And I don't know how it's going to happen, but in some way that is going to improve society.
Like, 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 Ryan Kaplan thinks that you got to get the elites while they're young, because that's when they'll change the mind. So are you trying to convince future elites, people in college, or are you trying to convince elites as the existing elites? Yeah, I mean, I guess I try to work on all of them.
But, you know, like Kaplan is probably correct.

Like it's a lot harder to get people who have already formed their beliefs and, you know, have been, have been there for a few decades. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh, oh, uh, so the next question, uh, what are your three favorite books? Oh, uh, Hmm.
let's see. It would be three of my books.

That you did not write yourself.

Oh, okay. Books that are not mine.
I don't know.

I would probably have to spend a lot longer to actually accurately answer that.

Yeah, that's all right.

I liked The Fountainhead a lot um that that novel um and i guess like you know i had an influence on me in actually ayn Rand had an influence on me in um doing philosophy right 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 feel 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, you know, what physics teaches us about the nature of the universe and so on. And also I like the cosmic landscape by I've got 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's 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, are different ways that 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 um and i liked the myth of the rational voter right that was very good um in you know just thinking about why politics works the way that it does yeah uh 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 is 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'd advise in terms of excellence and getting good at what you're're doing or just where the important problems are

yeah i mean like i have um like i would i would give advice from the standpoint of self-interest

to people like um so like okay i mean that this is probably not what you're asking about right

like you know how you can 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 um

Thank you. Right.
And like, this is obvious, just cut them out. Don't hang around with people who are not beneficial to you.
And this is super obvious, but a lot of people don't do this. They just keep having this boyfriend who's never good, and they just, I don't know, try to change the person or whatever.
You're not going to change people. Anyway, then the other thing is meaningful work.
So going to a career that feels like you're doing something meaningful, but it's got to make enough money to pay the bills. But 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 wasted my life.
Which you don't want to have happen um you know and then like i you know i have like you know smaller scale advice like at some point i'm probably gonna like maybe i'll put this in blog posts i'll put my advice for like people about um you know uh 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 you'd be 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.

Right.

There's stuff like that, right?

Yeah.

Anyway, okay.

But that's probably not what you might as know about.

You might as well know, like, oh, how can we improve the world i don't know that's really hard right um like on a small scale um my idea is to model rationality right like interact with people in a way that is reasonable and rational and like part of 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 humor 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 Thank you.