In the original Stockholm Syndrome case, a woman noticed that her faraway permanent captors who refused to listen to her were planning to endanger her in order to hurt her nearby temporary captors, & so distrusted the faraway ones.

From Twitter:

PSA: I'm not agreeing to dismantle sh*t until you can tell me:
1) What we're building instead
2) By what means
3) On what time-frame
4) How it will function, &
5) How it will *better* guard against misanthropes' impulses to exploit, oppress, & divide masses for self-serving ends

The implicit assumption here is that humans are trying to make bad things happen, and destroying a demon by default empowers an even stronger, nastier demon (I think this is at the root of my (and Robin Hanson's) disagreement with Zvi on blackmail.) This sort of conservative bias fails to get the right answer to questions like "should I sabotage the train tracks to Auschwitz?". (That was a live question for the US during WWII, and Roosevelt got the wrong answer.)

Very often, the correct answer to "what will we replace it with?" is "nothing." It's often hard to dismantle stuff, and we often sublimate violence instead of deescalating, but that's not really the same problem.

Related: Raise the Crime Rate, Reflections from the Halfway Point

On Deontology

Authoritarian intuitions assume deontology must mean a list of sternly worded "thou shalt (not)"s. But autonomously doing things because they're the right thing to do is liberating and pleasant.

@nosilverv tweeted:

Wait so what happens literally after french invent the supremacy of reason and decide to overthrow tradition gets dubbed the 'Reign of Terror' because it was nothing but multiple massacres and public executions and we somehow still are default yay-reason boo-tradition!?!??!?!!?!?

I responded:

Cause the "reason" faction won the meme war. As factions that kill off all their enemies sometimes do. The Catholic Church's mind control regime was similarly strong pre-Luther, and Team Reason let the Church survive since the Church didn't seem like a live opponent. Tocqueville helped me track how the Rationalism that "won" was State Rationalism. Corey Robin's intro theory course tweet is relevant.

To be fair we have primary sources to check, and the Enlightenment really was pretty persuasive before the French Revolution, although there were actually two, one of which was less identified with the state (the Spinozan-Scottish one).

I'm pro-reason, but an important part of doing that right is understanding the circumstances under which life-aligned Rationalism gets coopted or replaced by power-aligned Rationalism

It’s story time, and our protagonist’s name is Robert Moses. He’s responsible for building most of the highways and bridges around NYC, as well as much of the parkway infrastructure in New York State.

Let’s say a new highway was getting built. What would Moses’s job be?

Moses was the guy who oversaw the design work to propose the highway, lobbied the legislature and governor for funds, got the budget passed, oversaw the construction work, and collected any revenues afterwards if there were tolls. He was very clearly the but-for guy.

He personally accumulated massive amounts of political power and funding and responsibility, and used it to force aside political opposition to get things built when no on else could. He built his own fiefdom within the New York State government, that was in practice unassailable by mayors and governors, made himself the natural coordination point for getting funding for things, and leveraged his power to get more power etc, which he used to build more things, setting off several related positive feedback loops:

Robert Moses had credibility because he got credit for everything that got built. Therefore, he could shape the narrative to assign him the lion’s share of the credit for future projects, less he use his moral authority to discredit naysayers.

Robert Moses had power because he controlled ongoing funding sources and political offices overseeing most government construction. Therefore, he could use this as leverage to acquire control over new offices and projects, lest he freeze decisionmakers out of existing construction.

The man was a power-mad maniac. But the interesting thing is how his public persona - and a lot of how he got his initial endowment of power, credibility, and consistent media support - was entirely built around a personal brand of meritocracy, the impression that he was a disinterested, technocratic public servant, above the politics of pull.

Robert Caro found this interesting enough to biograph, and I think he's a good case-study of how narratives of public service, meritocracy, and objectivity can be a sort of elitist self-dealing.

It's hard to write without a specific audience in mind, or without social feedback. This is true but backwards. It's more natural to say that we want to write when we want to be understood and feel that writing would be an effective way to achieve that.

The same is true of other forms of art.

In the early days of the pandemic, there wasn't great data available, and it wasn't easy to do better than trusting the standard epidemiological estimate that around 2% of people who got COVID-19 would die. My back of the envelope estimate at the time was way higher, but no one else I knew seemed to think that number made sense, so I let the matter drop. But now we have enough data to check.

Recently, my sister reached out to me to check her own thinking on the matter. She used the same method I initially did - simply dividing the number of deaths by the number of resolved cases (deaths + recoveries) - to estimate that in the US, COVID-19 kills around 1 in 6 people who get it.

The problem with using only resolved cases, in a country with an ongoing pandemic, is that if people die faster than they're marked recovered, death rates can be inflated - and if they recover faster, deflated. Ideally, you'd want to wait until all cases have been resolved one way or the other. Fortunately, there are now countries where that situation nearly holds.