I’ve been trying to tell people that the real change came around 1871. After the Franco-Prussian war, every developed and developing country on earth started copying Prussian institutions, which were incredibly militaristic and centralizing. This system more or less demanded fiat money, and the Germans could ironically have saved themselves the bother of both world wars, since they’d already won the most important battle of them all.

Even funnier when they introduce carbon neutral army vehicles. A tanks is carbon negative if it just kills enough people.

It seems linear thinking, aka reductionism, is going out of fashion among serious academics. Indeed, several new (and old) ways of explaining the world are converging on similar avenues of thought. Constructor theory and complexity theory, as well as several less rigourous philosophies that emphasize emergence and levels of explanation. Will a new framework come to dominate? If so, which? I have a nasty suspicion that we’ll get another round of reductionism branded as «complex», but which at the end of the day is nothing more than rebranded PoP-slop that goes nowhere.

I like this quote: «The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy» The edge of chaos means «where the predictable and unpredictable meet», or something like that. Not the predictability of a falling raindrop, and not the jnpredictabllity of the weather, but somewhere in between. From here: https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Waldrop-M.-Mitchell-Complexity-The-Emerging-Science-at-Edge-of-Order-and-Chaos.pdf

I sometimes like to think that in ancient Athens, or in the Vienna circle, or in the Italian Renaissance, there was a guy who isn’t mentioned in any source, but who put all those other people on track to achieve greatness with the right words at the right time.

And the advantage is that it forces people to be more skeptical.

I sure hope so. It’s probably the one thing I’m really good at, and I’m broke as hell 😂

And if you look closely, «echo chamber» is just a dysphemism for «online community». Literally «online community that I don’t like»

History is full of clutch technological saves, such as industrial farming preventing global starvation a la Malthus. Thus it is rational to expect clutch technological saves in the future. And it is irrational to expect none. Likewise irrational to expect them in every instance.

The point with ancap is that it may be the only model that *doesn’t* assume people will behave nicely. It assumes very little. But it deduces (from assumptions) that people who behave badly or stupidly in a free society, will *tend to be* punished for it in some ways. And conversely, that those who behave well and have good ideas, will tend to be rewarded. Not by the good grace of a ruler, but by a system that allocates resources to where they’re needed the most. Some ancaps are utopian, but they haven’t understood the theory. It offers no guarantees, and merely says that freedom tends to be safer, better and more efficient, all else equal. The fetishization of «total freedom» is simply the utopian impulse applied to austrian economics. The point is that we should seek to move in a direction of more freedom, as individuals and societies, *when appropriate*. The issue of when and how to do so is not answered by Mises, and is a matter of context-specific deliberation that takes the full complexity of the situation into account. This is what Milei understands and Hoppe doesn’t. There is no recipe for a good lige, or a good choice. No theory can avail you of the responsibility to think for yourself. Some despair at this fact, but I think we should rejoice. After all, life would be meaningless if it wasn’t so.

Any time I come across a Leyen-quote, I am pleased to go back to ignoring her.