Reading Jonathan Healey's The Blazing World and Curtis Yarvin's recent article on the difficulty of reforming the US Government through the exercise of the executive power has got me thinking about the nature of the parliamentary power. The parliamentary power is commonly said to be "the purse strings," e.g. the power to, if a tax-funded organization such as a police department flagrantly violates the law or otherwise acts in ways intolerable to the parliament or those who it represents, cancel their budget, but while this has some descriptive merit, it fails to explain why, how, and under what circumstances such a power emerges. "Because the written constitution says so" is a triply bad explanation, first because it fails to explain why written constitutions tend to identify and separate some particular powers with some consistency across contexts, second because it fails to account for the existence of states with well-articulated constitutions that, while they may be described in writing, were not established through a formal written constitution, and third because it does not explain why, how, and under what circumstances people can be persuaded or compelled to obey a written constitution.

I prefer functional explanations; if there is a sufficiently strong use case for some expensive form of organization, then existing institutions that fill that role have some bargaining power when they can credibly threaten to withdraw their services. This is sufficient to establish distinct powers.

On Profitable Partial Exit from Perverse Regimes Through the Exercise of One's Formal Rights as a Citizen

Enough criticism and analysis for the moment; here's a constructive program!

Whole systems become richer through exchange and division of labor, which affords people more leisure to explore and investigate the environment, and add to the total knowledge and capacities of the community. Local subsystems that are part of a larger economic community that is fundamentally extractive may decide to temporarily become less wealthy in nominal terms in order to become more self-governing through import replacement. For a more detailed well fleshed out theory with many examples on the level of the municipal or state economy, see the published work of Jane Jacobs, especially Systems of Survival, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Economy of Cities, The Nature of Economies, and The Question of Separatism.

At each stage of the process, the import substitution has to pay off fast enough for the community to be able to reproduce itself, which limits the extent of possible import substitution; we do not want to become North Korea. The Amish represent a more appealing prospect along the efficient frontier; they abstain from television, which we permit, but retain the capacity to build enough new housing in desirable locations to meet new needs, which our civilization has lost.

I would like to increase the scope of trade for a community of people whose minds are increasingly integrated, fully endorsed parts of their survival and reproductive strategies, and who constitute a language community that can describe itself and whose members can increasingly honestly describe themselves. For now, comfortable survival as an individual in our society requires adapting to mores that are perverse, anti-intellectual, and promote self-hatred, which makes it much more expensive to retain a nonperverse and prointellectual internal attitude. (See On commitments to anti-normativity, Guilt, Shame, and Depravity, The Order of the Soul, Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency, and Can crimes be discussed literally?.)

Here are some ways I can imagine forming various small republics within the current American system. I am less familiar with foreign regimes but I imagine some elements of this generalize well.

David Graeber introduced the idea of "Bullshit Jobs" as a primary focus of inquiry to public discourse in On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant, and the book Bullshit Jobs, but unfortunately with a tendency to make strong categorical statements even when his categories were not very good.¹ Even more unfortunately, he's dead now, so I can't write to him and persuade him to fix this problem in his own name.

In The Debtors' Revolt I explained some of the structural reasons to expect such jobs to exist, but thought it might be a good idea to simply enumerate some of the categories, after which it should be easier to see that quite a lot of jobs are in aggregate intentionally economically wasted effort, even when they locally benefit some counterparty.

Examples follow.

Since Enlightenment cultural assumptions and expectations seem to have collapsed in our society and been replaced by distant simulacra, I have been looking into the circumstances that caused the modern European Enlightenment in the first place, in the hopes that - combined with an understanding of the causes of the collapse - this might lead to an idea how to reproduce the phenomenon.

One striking thing to be explained is that in a fairly short period of time, a few apparently quite different changes happened in Europe, in something more like a sudden explosion than a gradual accretion of know-how. A presumption of the value of censorship was replaced with free speech. Joint stock companies suddenly sent ships across vast oceans on highly profitable commercial ventures. Physics was no longer a talky subject of effectively useless speculation, but a science with mathematical precision comparable to engineering which quickly yielded practically useful results. Medicine and biology wasn't mathematized, but also quickly developed from a way to show care for the sick by bothering them in speciously systematized ways that frequently did more harm than good, to a body of reproducible knowledge that formed the basis for new technologies.

17th Century England and the Dutch Republic seem like important focal sites for the emergence of Enlightenment civilization, and I've just finished reading through Jonathan Healey's book The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, which gives a good overview of the English civil war, which turned a censorious and deeply corrupting monarchy into a republic with freedom of speech, which lasted for decades and only collapsed after Oliver Cromwell died of old age.

One thing in the book that struck me as puzzling and potentially important was the importance of Calvinism in the process by which the republican party found itself, and the immediate recognition by everyone involved that Arminianism was a complicit, Royalist theology.

I'm used to thinking of the Enlightenment as more philosophical than religious; figures like Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Smith, and Voltaire seem central to the story; theologians do not, with the notable exception of the Quakers.

Even among religious theories, Calvinism in particular had previously not seemed to me like a plausible a priori candidate for a liberatory theology, since the idea that God has predetermined who is a member of the Elect, will be saved, and will repent of their sins, and who on the other hand is permanently damned, seems disempowering. Arminianism is basically free-will Prostestantism, which would seem on the face of it more consistent with Enlightenment values - anyone can freely choose to be good. Reflecting on the roles played by Arminianism and Calvinism in the English civil war, and the context within which those roles emerged, led me to a very different conclusion.

I am sick of people rejecting good evidence about vitamin D because they are confused about the bad evidence and can't be bothered to investigate, so I am going to explain it.

Let's look at this like a 19th century physician who woke up from a coma this morning to trawl the public internet for info (I helped), knowing about evolution and bodies and counting and skepticism but not about "metastudies" or "scientific consensus" or "USDA guidelines." How much vitamin D do we need?

The Autobiography of Malcolm X isn't just an important historical document, but skillful storytelling about the investigation of a mystery: why are white people like that?

Early on in the pandemic, Ivermectin was one of the few interventions that seemed promising, but since then I'd seen mainly negative headlines about faked pro-Ivermectin data, so I implicitly categorized it with hydroxychloroquine as a discredited hypothesis. But in response to my recent blog post on Machiavellian attitudes towards informing the public, ChristianKl from LessWrong asked me why I hadn't mentioned Ivermectin along with vitamin D. After a quick Google Scholar search, I found that the evidence for it seems surprisingly strong.

If you parse what US authority figures like Dr Fauci are explicitly saying about COVID, you end up learning things like:

• An old white man in good health should take 6000 IU of vitamin D per day prophylactically.
• We won't have herd immunity until 80-85 percent of the population is vaccinated.
• From both a personal and public health cost-benefit analysis, nearly every adult ought to take at least a single-shot vaccine and it's not worth the health benefits for vaccinated people to avoid group gatherings or public spaces, or wear masks in public.
• From both a personal and public health cost-benefit analysis, children ought not to be vaccinated.
• Dr Fauci distorts his quantitative claims to be less surprising, so that they can more easily enter the common narrative. Therefore, you can extrapolate that any surprising number coming from Dr Fauci ought to be adjusted farther from the number that would make no waves, to infer his true opinion.

On the other hand, yesterday I visited a toy store that sells Dr Fauci figurines for children, insists that everyone wear masks regardless of vaccination status, and limits the number of people in the store.

Corporate mass media was happy to broadcast lies like "masks don't work" early in the pandemic. But while official state announcements clearly indicated the direction in which the press was expected to distort the narrative, they were careful not to brazenly say the opposite of the truth, that masks don't work, only to tell ordinary people not to use them because healthcare workers needed them. A literal-minded person who read and believed actual government statements rather than news and opinion articles would have inferred from the start that masks worked.

The usually reliable Zvi writes:

If you have had one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, should you then get a shot of Pfizer or Moderna? If it is available, absolutely, yes you should.

When people give orders like this instead of making assertions about matters of fact, I have to assume that if there's no stated cost-benefit calculation, then no cost-benefit calculation was performed. So I have to do my own.

There are many different kinds of people. We hear about and from suburban professional Americans ("normies") a lot because a lot of our shared stories about what is going on are about them.

Microeconomically rational agents with similar beliefs and preferences will usually act similarly, and a statistical normal can emerge from this. But sometimes the details of a situation mean that the best thing to do looks very unusual.

Normies aren't microeconomically rational. Their main motivation is that they feel safe if they resemble some shared idea of normality, and scared otherwise. This is a cybernetic perceptual-control process. Normies will often justify their own actions, and reward and punish others', on the basis of what is normal. This leads to ganging up on people who aren't trying to follow the herd, even if they aren't hurting anyone.

If you're holding onto an autonomous perspective, you're alienated from opposition to autonomous perspectives. That doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It just means you're in a conflict. It's helpful to be able to understand and predict the actions of people who are trying to hurt you, but it's not helpful to misinterpret a conflict as a disagreement you ought to try to reconcile.

Normies claim to be a larger and more powerful coalition than they actually are by conflating their conformity target with statistical normality. This can make it seem more dangerous or surprising than it is to be out of sync with normies.