Nostr notes by NSmolenskiFan

The rise of LLMs in education has made more apparent who is using ...

2025-05-13T05:25:27Z

The rise of LLMs in education has made more apparent who is using the new technology as a prosthesis—to enhance their ability to learn—and who is using it to outsource responsibility for their own minds.

This outsourcing of responsibility is nothing new. People have been doing it since time immemorial: letting authorities, crowds, and received wisdom think for them. Technology only accelerates that. Technology shows us our character—and if we don’t like it, it gives us the opportunity to become better people.

There will always be alpha in thinking for yourself and being your own person. But it’s a much harder road than “going with the flow” and contenting oneself with the illusions of intelligence, virtue, insight, agency, and independence.

People who insist on learning and becoming in good faith will make mistakes; they will fail; they will look dumb; they will disagree with their past selves; they will repent; they will be humbled; they will forego opportunities for easy power and pleasure that others take advantage of.

But they will live truthfully, and it is the truth of their lives that will inevitably transform them—and, over time, the world.

Nostr event nevent1qqstjtyspxhnau7gs8g6zs9crkdlve4nrzec4swf8qchjy79keewywgzyqqqqqqqetq0sxdlrg9xpjy3a6ce8yhe37vafqysknl2pjj38n5tuzc3zz6

2025-04-03T17:27:59Z

Do you think they know what the Triffin Dilemma is?

It’s wild to me that @LinkedIn still hasn’t implemented ...

2025-03-27T17:52:34Z

It’s wild to me that @LinkedIn still hasn’t implemented @Blockcerts.

Few know this, but every @MIT graduate gets a digital diploma anchored to #Bitcoin using the @Blockcerts open standard.

It’s the easiest way to verify claims on the internet.

https://registrar.mit.edu/transcripts-records/diplomas/digital-diplomas

The paper “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Money” ...

2025-03-17T07:03:15Z

The paper “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Money” contains a detailed response to #Graeber’s theory of money.

In a nutshell, my argument is that debt is a moral sentiment that precedes both law and money. In that sense, it is a social universal. However, methods of *reckoning debt* via units of account (which measure *price*, not “value”, as Graeber claims) had to await the invention of money, which emerged bottom-up as media of exchange in standardized commodity forms (what anthropologists have called “repeatable objects”). The state only got in the business of issuing (and in some cases monopolizing) money many millennia after this process had already been underway in human societies around the world.

Graeber, although sometimes identified as an anarchist, subscribed to the state theory of money as articulated by Alfred Knapp and in its current interpretation by the MMT school. His “anarchism” emerges in the implicit utopian political project he calls for in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”: abolition of both money and state.

Wisdom involves making accurate and precise distinctions. An ...

2025-03-13T07:03:05Z

Wisdom involves making accurate and precise distinctions.

An enemy and an “existential threat” are not the same thing.

Danger and “existential threats” are not the same thing.

Anyone claiming there is an “existential threat” has a very high burden of proof.

We are being led by people trying to convince us to see the world ...

2025-03-13T06:40:38Z

We are being led by people trying to convince us to see the world in terms of enemies. This “politics of the enemy” leads to vast self-destruction and destruction of others. It routinizes hate. It makes us worse people.

The only way to counter a politics of hate is with a politics of love.

That does not require pretending that enemies don’t exist.

It requires meeting everyone—friends, strangers, and enemies—with love.

That’s the only way to actually win.

We win not when the enemy is destroyed but when calling them an enemy no longer makes any sense.

With government funding comes surveillance. The more programs the ...

2025-02-10T15:48:33Z

With government funding comes surveillance.

The more programs the government funds, the more everything is AML/KYC'ed, tracked, and controlled.

Promo pricing for The Satoshi Papers ENDS Feb 1st! Library ...

2025-01-30T10:31:35Z

Promo pricing for The Satoshi Papers ENDS Feb 1st!

Library Edition: $174.95 → $199.95
Paperback: $33.95 → $39.95

Pre-order here

https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/pages/the-satoshi-papers

The redistribution Altman has in mind would certainly not enable ...

2025-01-28T08:39:29Z

The redistribution Altman has in mind would certainly not enable the kind of rising standard of living enjoyed by a productive workforce—wealth would be “growing,” but only for the very few. Rather, it would bring about a neo-feudalism, or the transformation of the majority of human habitable spaces into permanent, fully-surveilled refugee camps.

Fortunately for humanity, I don’t think Altman’s vision for the future will come to pass. The advancement of technology does not hamper the ability of human beings to innovate. People will always invent new and productive things to do as technology advances. The fact that we can’t imagine the jobs our great grandchildren will have does not mean that those jobs won’t exist.

Follow-up: Those making predictions about AI “transforming ...

2025-01-27T06:53:06Z

Follow-up: Those making predictions about AI “transforming society” need to make their claims a lot more precise. Every new technology “transforms society.” What exactly are you claiming is being or will be transformed in this case, and by what mechanism? Most of what passes as “commentary” on this topic is just wild speculation.

People invoking political solutions to problems have an especially high burden of proof to clear. You have to convince the American people that 1) there is a problem that 2) legislation, or another use of state power, can Constitutionally solve 3) in a way that preserves the values of liberty and opportunity that are central to the character of this Republic.

The fact that something is new and makes people uneasy is not, in itself, a justification for any action whatsoever, especially not by the state.

Anthropologist here: Sam’s claim that “the whole structure of ...

2025-01-27T06:52:32Z

Anthropologist here:

Sam’s claim that “the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration” because of AI is meaningless. It literally means nothing.

It *is*, however, part of Sam’s pattern of existentialist scaremongering. Scaremongering to which the solution always seems to be to give Sam more power.

Sam’s suggestion that “the whole social contract” is up for grabs is a *political* claim. The social contract that underpins the political institutions of the United States is crystallized in the U.S. Constitution.

Sam is implying that AI will soon be so powerful that this Constitutional political order will no longer hold. He can then position himself as a savior—as an author of the new, “post-AI” social contract. Which, like all the other contracts he negotiates, are structured principally to benefit Sam Altman. And these contracts tend to change whenever Sam decides they should.

While AI is certainly advancing at a rapid clip, it is human beings who continue to be in charge—and responsible for—our social and political destinies. We can absolutely choose to uphold the Constitutional social contract that the American Founders put in place. I would strongly suggest we do.

Of course, as a free people, we can also choose to alter that contract. But if we do, it should be for *positive* reasons, not reasons driven by weakness and fear.

Anyone selling you fear is selling you control. Don’t buy it.

Fascinating piece on the anthropology and economics of prison ...

2025-01-15T09:45:16Z

Fascinating piece on the anthropology and economics of prison gangs. ⬇️

Gangs, like clans, are a form of governance that arises organically when populations reach a certain *scale.* Exploding prison populations in certain U.S. states (Texas, California, New York, Chicago) mean that prison officials can’t effectively govern them all. Gangs step in to fill the void.

Political economist David Skarbek: “So each of these is consistent with a causal claim that big, diverse communities that can’t rely on official governance tend to form gangs. If you look at clan-based societies, they’re socially organized in a very similar way. And I hadn’t discovered this clan literature until I finished writing my book. But clans form when there are not strong and effective state based institutions, and when groups are large enough that they can’t rely on these informal mechanisms. So there’s a similar phenomena arising in certain times and places like we might expect.”

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/why-we-have-prison-gangs

I wrote about the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement that ...

2025-01-14T06:39:20Z

I wrote about the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement that toppled communism in Poland, and its similarity to the #Bitcoin movement today.

I spotlight the song "Noah's Ark" (with a full English translation!) by "bards of the resistance" Jacek Kaczmarski, Przemysław Gintrowski, and Zbigniew Łapiński.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/arka-noego-noahs-ark-on-solidarity-and-bitcoin

In his response to Marc Andreessen, Yuval Levin of the @AEI and ...

2025-01-11T09:24:43Z

In his response to Marc Andreessen, Yuval Levin of the @AEI and @tnajournal points out that what humanity needs to become the builders Andreessen calls for is a "fuller anthropology":

"an understanding of the nature of the human person and the character of human flourishing that could help [the builder] see that what we most need to build are families and communities, and that technological progress ultimately cannot be sustained without the kind of cultural confidence that makes itself evident first and foremost in a commitment to the next generation."

Levin repeats throughout his essay that many Americans today don't know how to be good ancestors: how to build for future generations who will enjoy the world after them. He calls this blindness characteristic of all "decadent" societies--and I think this is an astute observation.

There is an important extension of this thought: those who don't know how to be ancestors also often don't know how to be inheritors. I have witnessed this in many American universities: confusion over canon, a desire to reject or cancel thinkers who were instrumental in building the institutions we now inhabit, a desire to change things that have been working well just to put one's own "individual mark" on the institution. There is a kind of graceless lack of charity toward past generations which mirrors the difficulty of caring about future generations. The general result is that students suffer. They are not only robbed of their own inheritance, but they learn socially destructive attitudes, which they often go on to mimic later in life.

Kinship is one of the oldest concepts in anthropology--and one of the oldest social technologies on Earth. The anthropological discipline was born, during the 19th century, largely through the comparative studies of kinship around the world.

Kinship is the most fundamental way that human beings imagine their world and their place in it. Every human infant comes to know itself first in relation to its mother or father--the primary caregiver who is most closely in sync with the provision of its basic survival needs. As the child grows, it builds out its model of the world first in terms of kin, and that becomes a kind of "scaffolding" for everything else.

A crisis of kinship--defined in terms of Levin's essay as the incapacity to be good inheritors and good ancestors--is a crisis of humanity. Here it is important to remove some of the value judgments that often accompany crises. A structural crisis is no particular individual's "fault," although a cascade of irresponsibility is often both a cause and a result of human-generated crises. Rather, crisis points to the fact that something that was previously working (or seemed to work) no longer does. We must ask what about the previous arrangement was unsustainable and adapt our institutions for the future--in light of *who we want to be, as individuals and as a people.*

This means that learning to be good ancestors and good inheritors requires something of us beyond simply "returning" to past models of kinship that may have worked, provisionally, for other human societies. As L. P. Hartley said, "The past is a foreign country." The answer to any society's ills cannot simply be importing the cultural practices and values of another--including those of its own society in the past. Such importation simply cannot be done, because the past no longer exists.

Rather, we must be in integrity with who we are today--and that means admitting and accepting the particular challenges that afflict us as well as the particular opportunities we have that are ours to seize. Levin quotes Ecclesiastes:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what was planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build. (Ecclesiastes 3:1–3)"

Becoming a good inheritor and a good ancestor thus requires, first and foremost, recognizing what is *ours*--who and where *we* are in relation to our past and future kin.

The questions we must ask mirror this ancient text:

What is *our* season?
What is *our* purpose?
What is *our* time to live, and *our* time to die?
What shall *we* plant, and what shall *we* harvest?
What shall *we* kill, and what shall *we* heal?
What shall *we* tear down, and what shall *we* build?

Every individual person must answer these questions for his or her own life. And every community--that collective of shared will and action--gets to answer them for itself as well

"The Satoshi Papers" is now available for pre-order! ...

2024-11-19T14:12:27Z

"The Satoshi Papers" is now available for pre-order! 🥳🚀🎄 LINK BELOW ⬇️

The @TXBitcoinFound's first book features ten essays by some of the world's leading #Bitcoin scholars examining what happens when a key function of the state--the issuance of money--is automated by a stateless, global protocol.

As an artifact, "The Satoshi Papers" is also a rare feat in the publishing world today: a limited-edition, hardbound Library Edition with gilded pages. We went out of our way to produce an object of the highest quality that Bitcoiners can be proud of: scarce, valuable, and made with ideas and materials that stand the test of time.

The Library Edition is designed to be a precious gift and lifelong keepsake. Only a few will ever be printed. These books are destined to circulate as collectible objects, monuments to our current era in the history of Bitcoin adoption.

The Foundation also recognized that the Library Edition may not be accessible for everyone, so we made a paperback edition that all can enjoy. Whether you order the Library Edition or the paperback, you are supporting the Foundation's work as a volunteer-led, educational charity.

The launch dates for both the Library Edition and the paperback are still being finalized, but both editions will start shipping in early 2025. I will share with you the official publication dates as soon as they become available.

Please also stay tuned for news of the Satoshi Papers Book Launch Event, which is being planned in Austin, TX in 2025. We look forward to welcoming you and celebrating this achievement together.

Together in truth and self-sovereignty! 🫶✊

https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/pages/the-satoshi-papers?_pos=3&_sid=aa9a82d9b&_ss=r

The “institutions” people rarely if ever address the question ...

2024-10-18T07:47:12Z

The “institutions” people rarely if ever address the question of scale.

How exactly are you going to “achieve social consensus,” as @DAcemogluMIT says we must, at a scale of 336 million people (population of the U.S.)? 30 million people (population of Texas)? 7 million people (population of Houston metro area)?

Human beings evolved in communities of under 150 people (the Dunbar number). Beyond that, “consensus” (in any active, intentional sense) becomes very difficult.

Perhaps the key to achieving social consensus at larger scales is for those institutions to do less. A lot less.

But somehow that never seems to be on the table for mainstream social scientists.

Join economist @RebelEconProf, policy leader @Avik, and myself on ...

2024-10-18T05:21:29Z

Join economist @RebelEconProf, policy leader @Avik, and myself on November 20 at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas for a spirited panel discussion about the past and future of the U.S. #dollar and U.S. #Treasurys.

We will discuss America’s evolving role in the world and prospects for a brighter domestic fiscal future.

All panelists are contributors to the upcoming book, “The Satoshi Papers: Reflections on Political Economy after #Bitcoin.” Soon to be published by the @btcpolicyorg.

satoshipapers.org

"The hypotheses [are] not beginnings but really hypotheses ...

2024-10-16T06:14:06Z

"The hypotheses [are] not beginnings but really hypotheses – that is, steppingstones and springboards – in order to reach what is free from hypothesis at the beginning of the whole."

- Plato, The Republic

One of the bases of Western anti-semitism (which used to mean ...

2024-10-15T15:51:04Z

One of the bases of Western anti-semitism (which used to mean hatred of “Semites”—that is, both Jews and Muslims) was the strong moral aversion in Medieval Western societies to commercial activity. The Church and the aristocracy believed that there was a natural class order, where benevolent aristocrats ruled over a dependent peasantry. Trafficking in commerce and money was seen as “dirty.” This is in part why Medieval European princes often had to invite immigrants—Jewish merchants—to kickstart economic growth in their domains. These immigrants were segregated from the rest of the population in order to avoid disrupting the feudal balance of power in the majority Christian population. This segregation and the perception that Jews had privileges that Christian peasants didn’t have of course nurtured a lot of prejudice and resentment. Simultaneously, Jews were often barred from owning land or working in agriculture—activities that were designated for Christian landlords and serfs, the classes who were supposedly part of the “natural order.”

The “bourgeois revolution” in Europe—the commercial revolution that generated capitalism, beginning in the Renaissance—was in this sense a genuine cultural revolution against the static and segregated worldview of feudalism. The European merchant classes needed to fight to emancipate themselves from both Church and State. This was not the case in Islamic-majority societies, where commercial activity was already well established, extending back to ancient Mesopotamian and Levantine commercial traditions.

Hayek and Whitehead on institutions: "The [planning] problem ...

2024-10-15T05:30:38Z

Hayek and Whitehead on institutions:

"The [planning] problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up."

In "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945)

Technological innovation is what enables greater productivity and ...

2024-10-13T17:48:01Z

Technological innovation is what enables greater productivity and growth from limited (scarce) “material and energy throughput.”

The de-growth movement has no concept of innovation. Which is baffling, because the prosperity of their societies—the fact that they themselves are not dying from malnutrition, preventable diseases, or childbirth, but are able to write books about “degrowth”—is entirely a function of the raised floor created for them by centuries of technological innovation.

.@PaulLew16394851 speaks about the conditions for self-governance ...

2024-10-13T09:01:08Z

.@PaulLew16394851 speaks about the conditions for self-governance as described in the work of James Buchanan and Vincent Ostrom at #MAS2024.

“Self-governing societies exist only under conditions in which individuals become their own masters and become capable of governing their own affairs and working with others in mutually productive relationships.”

- Vincent Ostrom

A clinical psychologist with decades of experience treating ...

2024-10-12T15:20:38Z

A clinical psychologist with decades of experience treating people suffering from the depths of psychosis once described the reason that many clinicians cannot help their patients:

They function from the doctrine of “Reality with a Capital R,” that is, the belief that they, the clinician, understand the world “as it really is,” while their patients are simply insane. These doctors refuse to listen to their patients, refuse to empathize with them, and dismiss their delusions without asking what truth or reality the patient is trying to express through their madness. Indeed, in some cases, the patient may not be “mad” at all; they may be accurately describing the toxicity and failure of the social institutions that have harmed them but may have rewarded the doctor. As a result, the patient can see a reality that the doctor’s self-interest prevents him from seeing.

The imbalance of power between a doctor and his patient means that a doctor’s misunderstanding can have devastating consequences for the patient. The patient may be misdiagnosed, mismedicated, but above all subjected to the compounding trauma that in seeking help for a harm that has been done to them, they are met only with further harm and careless misunderstanding. This can result in what is called “iatrogenic” illness—or illness that is the *result* of medical treatment. “Psychiatric illnesses” are often exacerbated or even generated by the clinician’s unwillingness to care about or understand their patients’ life experiences.

The hysteria around “misinformation” as expressed by someone like @cwarzel resembles a clinician operating from the doctrine or “Reality with a Capital R.” In Charlie’s view, he is one of the “experts;” one of the people who “operate in reality” and “describe the world as it is.” It is crazy conspiracy theorists who, through their willful delusions, menace the republic with violence. Warzel does not pause for a moment to ask what potential malpractice the government and the media, the Fourth Estate, could have perpetrated on the American people such that they no longer believe them. What truths are “conspiracists” seeing—perhaps hastily and inaccurately expressed in the details, but thematically true—which need acknowledging in our present moment so that we can heal as a people and make our institutions more resilient for the future?

If it’s up to people like Warzel—and there are many such people—we will only see an intensification of so-called “delusions” and conspiracy theories: the iatrogenic “illnesses” of a population subject to experts who don’t care about them and who insist on controlling Reality with a Capital R.

The notion that any company, let alone any government or other ...

2024-10-09T05:41:27Z

The notion that any company, let alone any government or other organization, could or should “maximize utility for all people” is looney tunes.

“Lawful interception” means “encryption backdoors” which ...

2024-10-06T07:22:44Z

“Lawful interception” means “encryption backdoors” which can and will be used by malicious actors.

Any politician who supports encryption backdoors should be laughed out of the room and run out of office.

In a functioning market, businesses don’t have the luxury of ...

2024-10-04T05:27:47Z

In a functioning market, businesses don’t have the luxury of not calling out failure. They have to admit failure, cut losses, and move on to survive.

Where are we calling out failure in government? The government response when things go sideways is to demand MORE money to do MORE of the same. Governments act as the ultimate “too-big-to-fail” institutions—and huge companies latch on to them for this very reason, often becoming indistinguishable from the state.

We need to start calling out failure in government. You don’t get another dime to do things that don’t work. No more.

The whole “Iran tried to assassinate Trump” story is the ...

2024-10-01T06:46:09Z

The whole “Iran tried to assassinate Trump” story is the clownworld version of “Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.” 🤡

Not even the people saying it believe it is true, but they don’t care, and they know almost nobody else cares, either. The American people no longer have a choice in the matter of war.

That is a collapse of the representative function of government.

As bombs fall on #Beirut, it struck me that perhaps some of my ...

2024-10-01T06:44:24Z

As bombs fall on #Beirut, it struck me that perhaps some of my fellow Americans and Westerners would like to know more about the history of Beirut and of #Lebanon. And how Shi'a Islam figures into that history.

In my early days as an anthropologist, I wrote a short article about the role of Shi'a book publishers in the intellectual landscape of Beirut and the wider region (link below). In short, Lebanon's relatively weak state and multi-religious population made it a center for free expression. Many refugees from both #Iran and #Iraq immigrated there during and after the Iran-Iraq war, seeking more stability, opportunity, and even the freedom to criticize the governments of their home countries. For example, some Lebanese religious thinkers imagined Islamic political models that avoided the pitfalls of the Saudi model of shari'a-as-law and the Iranian model of vilayat-i-faqih.

These Islamic thinkers openly called for dialogue with the West and with "the American people." Virtually nobody in our media has reported this; instead, our media and government have frightened us of these people so that we would not listen to them. As a result, Americans are largely unaware of how badly Muslim thinkers in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries have wanted to talk with us openly about what civilization is and how civilization can progress while staying rooted in its traditions and values. These are conversations we are all having now. We could have been having them with friends and colleagues around the world, but we didn't even know they were there.

I never formally published the article, but I put it online for free. ⬇️ It's just a tiny drop in the scholarship on this topic, but if it helps just one person understand another world, perhaps it was worth it.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2nujm

Good question. I would say no—the case study suggests that ...

2024-09-29T17:59:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…fa24
_________________________

Good question. I would say no—the case study suggests that interest groups will inevitably mobilize to capture loci of power (especially the state) for their own ends. This is similar to regulatory capture by established corporations, which is what transforms free markets into crony capitalism.

The main countervailing force to capture of the state by interest groups is the character of the people—the values that they hold dear. It is the people who have to continually be the site of resistance to capture—to say no, to enforce limits on government power, and to remind everyone of the values of nondiscrimination and equality before the law. This means a literate, aware population that does not trust power *as such.* A people who are not asking to be lied to if it means their “tribe” gets to win this time.

Ultimately this comes down to how we raise children—education writ large. The future of a free country is established in families and elementary schools. If those places become sites of tribal indoctrination and culture war, the seeds are sown for a violent and illiberal future.

The point of the American project was to create a larger national ...

2024-09-29T17:58:23Z

The point of the American project was to create a larger national identity that superseded people’s tribal (ethnic, religious, racial) affiliations.

Now we have leaders and elites using the fruits of the big-tent, melting-pot American project to advance their tribal agendas. They either laugh at you or are offended if you seriously talk about America being a “melting pot,” or a project that can include people regardless of where their ancestors came from.

American civilians are now just routinely collateral damage in ...

2024-09-29T17:57:41Z

American civilians are now just routinely collateral damage in undeclared wars.

Our government has gone from covering it up to pretending to care to openly not caring.

Who represents us?

It’s helpful to understand this election through historian ...

2024-09-27T07:22:54Z

It’s helpful to understand this election through historian @Peter_Turchin ‘s structural-demographic theory of history.

In short, elites consume vastly more resources than everyone else. In good times, the numbers of elites in a society grow. But the numbers of elites tend to grow faster than the number of high-status positions (jobs, appointments, whatever) in a society. At this point, a game of “musical chairs” sets in—elites start getting pushed out, becoming “downwardly mobile.” If economic growth also stagnates or slows, the problem gets even worse, because new elite positions stop being created and may even be destroyed.

At the same time, successful people from lower social statuses are seeking to turn their new wealth into elite status as well. But they are finding the path to higher status increasingly blocked.

This sets up the society for a contest between “established elites” (like the Biden, Harris, Cheney, Clinton coalition) and “outsider elites” (like the Trump, Musk, etc. coalition). Outsider elites politically mobilize their grievances—which come down to the fact that establishment elites won’t give them the status and respect they feel they deserve. (It’s really important to understand that wealth and status are not the same thing. They are different kinds of social capital that may or may not be exchanged for each other.)

Both types of elites seek to enlist everyone else in their factional conflict, which may become violent. A period of civil war (or foreign war) may ensue, which reduces the number of elites to a more sustainable level. Eventually, the society stabilizes and whichever elite faction was victorious gets to re-found the political order.

As long as elite overproduction (total number of elites relative to the number of high-status positions) continues, we will likely see this same contest between insider and outsider elites re-hashed, regardless of who the actual candidates are. Our best bet for getting out of this cycle is rapid economic growth, but unfortunately status-seeking elites for the most part don’t understand how to bring that about.

Having a realistic assessment of the motivations of the ...

2024-09-26T16:55:36Z

Having a realistic assessment of the motivations of the leadership of another country is not “being afraid.” It is rational statecraft.

Without rational statesmen, the game theoretic conditions of peace through deterrence no longer function.

At the very least, our Cold War-era statesmen understood this. But the system they built, which protected the world from nuclear war, has been inherited by blustering fools who believe they can “win” by ignoring reality.

These are the types of leaders who lose not only wars, but civilizations.

"No End In Sight" is a documentary made in 2007 about the ...

2024-09-25T15:05:03Z

"No End In Sight" is a documentary made in 2007 about the first years of the Iraq War.

It shows with clarity how the top leaders of the Bush Administration ignored and sidelined regional experts and experienced military leaders from their own defense and intelligence communities in order to engage in a slapdash, rushed, sloppy, and criminally negligent occupation of Iraq (where we still have troops, btw).

It should be required viewing for every American. This is conquest without responsibility. It shows an Empire that is both careless and breathtakingly naive in its view of the world and of power.

youtube.com/watch?v=SsDROo…

In a previous life, I wanted to be a journalist. I spoke fluent ...

2024-09-25T05:33:02Z

In a previous life, I wanted to be a journalist. I spoke fluent Arabic but refused to be part of the wars in the Middle East, so instead I largely focused on media coverage of those wars in America.

During the Israel-Lebanon War of 2006, I worked at a local radio station. They asked me to vet a “documentary” made by an older American couple about “Islamic extremism” in Palestine and Lebanon. It quickly became apparent to me that the English-language subtitles they used to translate what people in the region were saying were complete garbage. Like, not even faulty translations—just completely made up statements designed to show how “extreme” these people were and how much they “hated” Israel and the West.

I submitted my opinion that the documentary should not air because it was false propaganda. Fortunately, it was not shown (and the couple who produced it was really upset). But I cannot overstate how often the American people have been lied to, via mainstream news sources, about who “hates” us and why. They know that few people, if anyone, will fact-check them, and by then no one will care. The damage will have been done.

It is we Americans who have been radicalized—by our media and our politicians, who conjure or repeat lies from people who do not care about us or about our country.

We Americans have no fight with the people of Middle Eastern nations. There is no reason that America should not be friends with all nations in the region, working together for mutual prosperity. All of this carnage is unnecessary and manufactured. It takes real work—intent, money, planning, political will—to engineer multiple coups, regime changes, and occupations across an entire region over several generations. Literally, if we had just stepped away from the region and left it alone generations ago, things would be orders of magnitude better today. Instead, we have brought about just about the worst-case scenario: genocide and a regional conflagration threatening to escalate into the next World War.

I agree with Monbiot that both capitalism’s defenders and ...

2024-09-23T18:17:20Z

I agree with Monbiot that both capitalism’s defenders *and* detractors rarely define it.

I find the following definition the most useful: “Capitalism is an economic system in which capital goods are put to work in order to generate more capital goods.” In other words, capitalism is a system in which growing productivity through capital investment is the main aim of economic activity. This is what differentiates capitalist economies from other types of commercial economies, and why it has been such a runaway engine of growth historically.

Importantly, you can have a capitalist economy in which the means of production are either privately or publicly owned. The question then becomes: what structures of ownership create optimal conditions for the generation of capital goods? In other words, what structure of ownership lends itself best to increasing the rate of economic growth in a human society? This is where economists from different schools genuinely disagree, and that disagreement needs to be made explicit and owned in order for political conversations to be actually productive.

Naturally, I agree with economists who have argued that returns on capital are most strongly incentivized under the conditions of private property protected by the rule of law. Societies that prioritize private property ownership will economically outperform societies in which the state is the owner of capital goods. This is what we should be debating, not whether “capitalism” (which is nothing more than a social technology) is “good” or “bad.”

It’s not about “fighting dis/misinformation” (negative ...

2024-09-23T17:40:18Z

It’s not about “fighting dis/misinformation” (negative project), it’s about *creating the conditions for truth* (positive project).

Truth is an achievement; it is the exception. Dis/misinformation is the rule.

As consent is being manufactured for a war with Iran, it’s ...

2024-09-22T06:11:09Z

As consent is being manufactured for a war with Iran, it’s worth watching the movie “Shock and Awe” to remember how it was done with Iraq.

What has changed? Mainly the rise of social and alternative media. It’s harder to ignore people telling the truth today.

A just government neither privileges its friends nor persecutes ...

2024-09-22T06:05:19Z

A just government neither privileges its friends nor persecutes its enemies, but ensures equality and due process under the law.

Few Americans know this: Federal law since 1953 has effectively ...

2024-09-21T16:48:35Z

Few Americans know this:

Federal law since 1953 has effectively suspended the Constitution within 100 miles of the U.S. border. That covers 2/3 of the U.S. population.

Needless to say, suspending the Bill of Rights has done nothing to prevent illegal immigration, but it has created an unaccountable police state.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the “War on Terror” is ...

2024-09-19T01:42:13Z

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the “War on Terror” is that the word “war” has lost all meaning. So has the distinction between military and civilians. People are now cheering and justifying atrocities left and right because it’s “war.” Who declared the war? Upon whom? What is the objective?

This collapse of distinctions is made worse by the fact that no one is in charge. There are plenty of authoritarians and “strong men” but few leaders. Instead, globs of largely unknown “combatants”—state and non-state—are just vibing their way through fields of violence. Discipline has been replaced with amateur recklessness. Tactics executed without strategy. This is a “melée.”

In case you missed the #CATO 2024 Conference "Financial ...

2024-09-18T13:00:14Z

In case you missed the #CATO 2024 Conference "Financial Privacy under Fire," the full recording is now available. ⬇️

The panel on CBDCs starts at 1:15:15.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4RRhe9whVlo&t

At some point, the AI doomers will likely flip to “AI should ...

2024-09-15T06:19:15Z

At some point, the AI doomers will likely flip to “AI should rule us all” because their most fundamental belief is that there is no central planning problem.

War, for a superpower, is a deliberate choice. Don’t let anyone ...

2024-09-13T05:35:50Z

War, for a superpower, is a deliberate choice.

Don’t let anyone convince you that war “just happens to us,” or is suddenly and out of nowhere provoked by our enemies. We have had literally armies of diplomats, in addition to actual armies, intelligence officers, and civilian defense forces around the world for decades engaging in great and small power politics.

To prevent war, we need a non-imperial foreign policy. Full stop.

“Privacy rights are an absolute restriction on government ...

2024-09-12T15:18:39Z

“Privacy rights are an absolute restriction on government behavior.”

- Jumana Musa, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

#CATO Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives Annual Conference

“It is a profound and repeated finding that the mere facts of ...

2024-09-12T12:03:39Z

“It is a profound and repeated finding that the mere facts of poverty and inequality or even increases in these conditions, do not lead to political or ethnic violence. In order for popular discontent or distress to create large-scale conflicts, there must be some elite leadership to mobilize popular groups and to create linkages between them. There must also be some vulnerability of the state in the form of internal divisions and economic or political reverses. Otherwise, popular discontent is unvoiced, and popular opposition is simply suppressed.”

- Jack Goldstone, “Population and Security: How Demographic Change Can Lead to Violent Conflict” (2002)

Without anonymity, everything becomes either crime or pre-crime. ...

2024-09-11T19:18:51Z

Without anonymity, everything becomes either crime or pre-crime.

Remember the Miranda Warning in the United States: “You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can *and will* be used against you in a court of law.”

The only protection U.S. citizens have against this self-incrimination is encoded in the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution: “No person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”

What this means in practice is that the U.S. is one of the only countries on Earth whose inhabitants are not required to talk to legal authorities. Very few Americans understand how valuable and precious this right is.

Anonymity is a manifestation of silence. It creates the cone of silence in which innocence can be preserved. Without anonymity, we have no choice but to incriminate ourselves in violation of our Constitution.

In psychology, there is a term called “splitting:” seeing ...

2024-09-11T14:41:22Z

In psychology, there is a term called “splitting:” seeing people and things as either all-good or all-bad, and often swinging wildly between the two. Splitting is a characteristic of mental illness, particularly personality disorders.

This is the state of our political discourse today. It is not just polarized; it is split. A growing number of people cannot fathom that people who disagree with them about certain things or who support certain candidates can be decent, intelligent, kind, and honorable people. That they may even want similar ends, but disagree about the means used to get there.

The remedy for this sickness is for us to patiently, over time, practice prioritizing and speaking truth in public with a generous spirit. Give people the grace to learn, make mistakes, and be wrong—so long as the overall trajectory of the conversation is toward truth. This means focusing on principles, not personalities; ideas, not parties.

We need to reclaim our public sphere as the agora it is, a “marketplace of ideas” characterized by peaceful exchange, not as a gladiatorial arena where we deploy heroes for our “side” to decide right and wrong through feats of strength.

As I head to Cato Institute to discuss financial privacy and ...

2024-09-11T13:45:31Z

As I head to Cato Institute to discuss financial privacy and #CBDCs tomorrow, I thought it worth sharing this @btcpolicyorg research report again:

“Why the U.S. Should Reject Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)”

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/627aa615676bdd1d47ec97d4/63323238ea73aa551a769b5b_BPI%20CBDC%20Paper%20.pdf

Peter Van : “You have a Constitutional right to anonymous ...

2024-09-11T13:28:36Z

Peter Van : “You have a Constitutional right to anonymous transactions.” 🔥🔥🔥

It’s time to mount a fierce defense of anonymity. 🎯🤿

Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government ...

2024-09-11T05:44:26Z

Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government invests in them. They are successful because they make products and services people want, and they have a large (interstate) market to grow in.

(Of course, all of this can change. Many American leaders unfortunately share Varoufakis’s view that the state should direct the deployment of capital.)

The union of bank and state is perhaps the main problem in need of fundamental reform in the United States.

And yet even despite this corruption, the obstacles to technology innovation and commercial success remain lower in America than in most places on Earth. That is precious and worth defending.

There is no doubt that the U.S. government has been itself a site of fundamental technology innovation (through some of the projects you mentioned) and is one of the largest customers in any market (unfortunately, and growing). But the U.S. government is not the primary allocator of capital; neither does it commercialize technologies. If a company cannot successfully commercialize, it will eventually die—unless there is genuine corruption in play, which I think both you and I agree is a bad thing.

Finally, this merits saying explicitly: TCP/IP, the protocol for which the DARPA project laid the groundwork, is not “the internet.” The internet is a complex protocol stack that has garnered contributions, yes, from some government-employed individuals, but also from a vast network of mostly volunteers in civil society around the world. Innovation is often done precisely by those people who have nothing to gain materially or in terms of political power; innovators tend to be idealists motivated by solving hard problems or making the world a better place. Similarly—again, this cannot be stressed enough—Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta—these companies are not “the internet.” They have produced commercial products that make use of fundamental technologies in ways that add value that people are willing to pay for. But they can and should be disrupted by companies that create greater value. By putting its thumb on the scale through onerous regulation (I.e. GDPR, the AI Act), the state in fact ensures that these wealthy incumbents will be the only players who can afford to enter the marketplace.

In short, the best thing the state can do is stay out of the way of both innovators and commercializers. The success of the software industry in America is largely a material testimony to the fact that, at least until recently, the U.S. government largely has. Perhaps the highest political priority of our current era is ensuring that remains the case. Growth is the reason that any of us have hope of a future that is not riven by zero-sum conflict, of warlords fighting over the scraps of innovation from a prior era. This requires both the idealistic innovators motivated by mission and the talented entrepreneurs motivated by profit. If the state wants to fund some fundamental (i.e. not immediately commercializable) research, that is great—but it is merely one actor among many, and not even the most significant one, at that.

Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government ...

2024-09-10T14:46:53Z

This Thursday! Let's see if we can change the narrative from ...

2024-09-09T17:33:27Z

This Thursday!

Let's see if we can change the narrative from "financial privacy" to "the right to transact."

September 12, starting at 9:30am Eastern Time.

The event will be live-streamed!

https://www.cato.org/events/financial-privacy-under-fire-protecting-restoring-americans-rights

#Privacy #RightroTransact

Some folks believe we still need a CBDC despite FedNow offering ...

2024-09-08T07:41:12Z

Some folks believe we still need a CBDC despite FedNow offering real-time interbank settlement.

What this suggests is that by CBDC they mean “retail CBDC” (for individual account holders), not “wholesale CBDC” (for interbank settlement).

As many suspected, the “wholesale CBDC” fig leaf was a polite fiction designed to get political buy in for money that is fully ID-verified and programmable at the transaction level.

“The evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is ...

2024-09-08T07:37:21Z

“The evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is part of our evolutionary history predating agriculture and sedentism, but that cooperation across group boundaries is also part our evolutionary legacy. . . . our evolutionary history is more complex than one of selection for war or peace; rather, it reflects the complicated lifeways of a highly social and interdependent cultural species for which both cooperation and war were likely important selective forces.”

- @HSB_Lab
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000941

Assumptions people who favor planned economies often make: 1. ...

2024-09-07T04:57:56Z

Assumptions people who favor planned economies often make:

1. “I can do a great job planning the economy”

2. “I will be the one planning the economy”

If you’re looking at BTC strictly from a wealth equality ...

2024-09-06T18:22:25Z

If you’re looking at BTC strictly from a wealth equality standpoint, the current ownership distribution of BTC ownership is actually far more concentrated and unequal than fiat wealth ownership. Neither is BTC a mechanism of wealth redistribution. That is, in part, why so many hate it and are seek to use the power of the state to curtail adoption.

I would suggest, though, that an equality of ownership is neither the point nor value of BTC. Those who focus on that are missing the point entirely. BTC is censorship-resistant sound money, which does put downward pressure on the ceiling of endless debt monetization (which creates a kind of illusory wealth). Its widespread adoption may even result in lending slowdowns and production slowdowns as a result. But, counterintuitively, this may smooth out the “business cycles” of wealth creation and destruction that render the fiat economy so volatile.

A lot can be said about the causes of lower wealth inequality in ...

2024-09-06T18:19:34Z

A lot can be said about the causes of lower wealth inequality in the U.S. after the Second World War. Many believe that it’s because taxes were higher, but as economic historians have pointed out, almost nobody paid the higher rates.

The main cause of greater wealth equality was most likely the *actual war,* which absolutely incinerated property, labor, and value all over the world.

In other words, the easiest way to create “more equality”—at least on paper—is simply to destroy wealth. But by lowering the ceiling, you also lower the floor.

The only thing that reliably has raised the floor for everyone is entrepreneurial capitalism. But it also raises the ceiling.

Acemoglu is here exhibiting the classic logic of what he referred ...

2024-09-04T16:56:55Z

Acemoglu is here exhibiting the classic logic of what he referred to in his own book, "The Narrow Corridor," as the "Cage of Norms."

The Cage of Norms is a form of tyranny embedded in society rather than the state. The logic of the Cage of Norms is that "status is zero-sum," as Acemoglu says below. Therefore, "any flower that grows too tall must be cut down." Success is fine, as long as it's not "too much." Once that arbitrary boundary has been crossed--"too rich," "too prestigious," "too influential"--the successful individual or entity must be "cut down to size."

The miracle of entrepreneurial capitalism is precisely that wealth, money, and status are NOT zero-sum. Entrepreneurs willing to take the risks and do the work to create real value can grow the pie for everybody.

This doesn't mean that powerful people don't abuse their power. Of course they do; they have and they will. This is why, first off all, power is not to be trusted; and second of all, why each of us has the unique responsibility to acquire and use power in the ways we consider most morally generative. Cutting down flowers that grow tall is an abuse of power. But by ourselves growing into the tallest flowers we can--that is how we check the power of bullies.

We need to stop calling for bigger bullies (the state, the manager, the whatever) to punish and cut down people we don't like. Instead, each of us needs to remember, find, and grow our own power.

That is how civil society is preserved, and that is how we prevent it from becoming a Cage of Norms.

Important research paper on the economics of migration. The ...

2024-09-04T05:59:42Z

Important research paper on the economics of migration. The consensus narrative today is that most migrants are the poorest of the poor—people with no economic hope in their home countries.

The reality is more complicated. Many migrants are relatively poor, yes, but they are also people with the *means* to migrate.

Simply put: migration is expensive. The poorest of the poor often stay in their home countries simply because they can’t afford to move.

That said, greater desperation at home—war, violence, natural disasters—change the economic calculus. Under those conditions, it may be more expensive to stay than to go. People whose lives are at risk—i.e. refugees—routinely endure extraordinary hardship to escape what seems to be highly probable death. At the end of the day, people value their lives over material possessions.

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about MMTers is that ...

2024-09-02T17:48:51Z

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about MMTers is that their main political goal is full employment at any cost.

They don’t distinguish between the “value” generated by massive government make-work projects and the value generated by entrepreneurial capitalism. The only thing that matters to them is that people are “employed” and getting a paycheck—of course, in the industries deemed “valuable” by the state, rather than the market.

Fantastic lecture by economist PeterBoettke inaugurating the ...

2024-09-01T07:19:11Z

Fantastic lecture by economist PeterBoettke inaugurating the Initiative for the Study of a Stable Peace (ISSP).

Boettke masterfully traces the lineage of mainline economics as the study of exchange rooted in human action as mediated and often laundered by institutions. The tradition of mainline economics differs from other economic traditions in that it “advances the ball” of the “science of liberty,” which is rooted in 1) non-discrimination and 2) non-domination. This science demonstrates that the “invisible hand” of the market can be either benevolent or malevolent, depending on the character of the individuals and institutions that shape that market.

It is the science and practice of liberty that gives humanity a fighting chance at finding solutions to problems that are not violent. Peace, in other words, is a cultural achievement rooted in a certain kind of civil society that arises from the interaction of individuals with a moral imagination shaped by the commitment to liberty.

youtu.be/spRZOVRSf-Q

Creating value is not the same thing as generating profit. Great ...

2024-08-30T17:54:30Z

Creating value is not the same thing as generating profit.

Great companies, like all great organizations, seek to generate value above all else.

This means that profits will sometimes be sacrificed, especially in the near term.

In the long term, however, these are the companies that change the world.

“What is perhaps distinctive about the dynamic of difference as ...

2024-08-29T21:47:13Z

“What is perhaps distinctive about the dynamic of difference as it is asserted in the WAT [War on Terror], however, is the belief that, in a globalised world, the transformation of the ‘other’ is essential for the defence, the very survival of the Western self. This could give rise to a uniquely dangerous situation and a continuous and self-sustaining violence.”

- Antony Anghie, “Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law” (2004)

Waiting for the announcement that all new technological ...

2024-08-29T21:45:05Z

Waiting for the announcement that all new technological development has to run through the Department of Safety, Security and Innovation and be approved by the Central Committee on Free and Fair Competition.

#AI

As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once said, “Economics, as ...

2024-08-26T19:17:10Z

As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once said, “Economics, as constituted, is an anti-anthropology.”

I’m here to prove him wrong. 😘

Stay tuned for “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Money,” coming soon in The Satoshi Papers.

This has been clear to me for a while now, but the Thiel/Rogan ...

2024-08-20T06:16:06Z

This has been clear to me for a while now, but the Thiel/Rogan interview illustrated again that we need to have a broader cultural conversation about violence, sacrifice, the sacred, and the elementary forms of religious life.

One’s anthropology becomes one’s political theory.

The people saying they’re going to “control prices” are the ...

2024-08-18T18:09:43Z

The people saying they’re going to “control prices” are the same people who bailed out the banks, again and again.

They’re literally running on the Cantillon effect and betting that people will vote for the crumbs they are promised.

I'm excited to join @CatoInstitute for a day-long event: ...

2024-08-15T15:46:08Z

I'm excited to join @CatoInstitute for a day-long event:

"Financial Privacy Under Fire: Protecting and Restoring Americans' Rights."

Thursday, September 12. Fittingly, the day after 9/11.

The event will be live-streamed, and you can submit questions for the speakers online. Registration is now live at the link below!

The full conference agenda will be posted later this week.

https://www.cato.org/events/financial-privacy-under-fire-protecting-restoring-americans-rights

The world's three largest employers are: 1. India's ...

2024-08-13T11:01:39Z

The world's three largest employers are:

1. India's Ministry of Defense (2.99M people)
2. The U.S. Department of Defense (2.91M people)
3. China's People's Liberation Army (2.55M people)

(As of 2022)

(Note: China's Central Military Commission, which includes civilian positions, may be #1 at 6.8M, but records aren't reliable.)

https://www.statista.com/chart/3585/the-worlds-biggest-employers/

Nostr event nevent1qqs9dgwcd33vkfx9pej3377333pz6vj83260xlxeu0n0t56f5djz05gzyqqqqqqqetq0sxdlrg9xpjy3a6ce8yhe37vafqysknl2pjj38n5tuw92kem

2024-08-12T07:46:59Z

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/revising-bank-secrecy-act-protect-privacy-deter-criminals#united-states-v-miller

"I wash my hands of today’s extended redundancy by the Court. Because the recordkeeping requirements of the [Bank Secrecy] Act [of 1970] order the seizure of customers’ bank records without a warrant and probable cause, I believe the Act is unconstitutional and that respondent has standing to raise the claim. Since the Act is unconstitutional, the Government cannot rely on records kept pursuant to it in prosecuting bank customers."

- Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, one of two dissenting opinions in United States v. Miller (1976), which established "Third Party Doctrine." The doctrine states that Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure do not apply to records kept by a third party.

"The crisis of liberal democracy has become concealed by a ...

2024-08-10T14:20:34Z

"The crisis of liberal democracy has become concealed by a ritual which calls itself methodology or logic. This almost willful blindness to the crisis of liberal democracy is part of that crisis. No wonder then that the new political science has nothing to say against those who unhesitatingly prefer surrender, that is, the abandonment of liberal democracy, to war."

- Leo Strauss, "An Epilogue," Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1962)

“Truth is not the default . . . it is an exceptional, fragile, ...

2024-08-10T14:19:58Z

“Truth is not the default . . . it is an exceptional, fragile, improbable achievement.” (@danwilliamsphil)

Just as material poverty, not wealth, has been the historical norm and baseline for human societies, “epistemic” wealth is a historically new result of norms and institutions built painstakingly out of the genealogy that gave rise to and has continued to develop from the scientific revolution.

“Lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, bias, pseudo-science, superstition and so on are not alien perversions of the public sphere. They are the epistemic state of nature that society will revert to in the absence of fragile—and highly contingent—cultural and institutional achievements.”

Sound money appeals to people of all political persuasions, ...

2024-08-10T14:18:53Z

Sound money appeals to people of all political persuasions, levels of income and wealth, and demographic characteristics. For now, #bitcoin adoption tends to skew young and male, but even that will change as hyperbitcoinization proceeds. Eventually, money is just money.

Fantastic work by @thetrocro, @andrewwperkins, and @thecolinbrown at the @NakamotoProjct.

“We don’t have enough resources” is a familiar refrain in ...

2024-08-10T14:17:08Z

“We don’t have enough resources” is a familiar refrain in all kinds of organizations. I have heard it from government agencies at every level, from startups, and from multi-national Fortune 500 firms.

What if you don’t get more?

What if this is the *most* resources you will ever have?

What if you have to overdeliver with whatever that is?

Sometimes, the realization that they don’t get more is the thing that *causes* people to be motivated to excel for the first time.

Others simply give up and tread water, or complain or nurse resentment about “what they are due.”

Resource constraints show you who people are and who they are deciding to be.

Stay tuned for “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Money.” ...

2024-08-10T14:11:29Z

Stay tuned for “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Money.”

Coming soon in The Satoshi Papers.

I discuss Graeber’s theory of money at length (among other theories).

#SatoshiPapers

All authoritarianism is bad. All abuse of power is bad. The ...

2024-08-06T09:34:02Z

All authoritarianism is bad. All abuse of power is bad. The question is: whose authoritarianism and abuse of power do each of us actually have some influence over?

This question is the political version of the serenity prayer. Trying to save everyone and fix everything is the surest way to save no one and make many things worse.

Information is currency. Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the ...

2024-08-06T09:31:53Z

Information is currency.

Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, was the youngest son of a nobleman and merchant, Friele, who served as a "Master of Accounts" for the mint in Mainz.

Because Friele had married a non-noblewoman, Gutenberg's mother Else, his sons could never serve in the "minting house cooperative." In the medieval German system, only pure-blood nobles could be "trusted" to mint the currency.

Nevertheless, Gutenberg drew on his father's heritage to become a goldsmith. He used his skills to develop an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that was so effective for creating durable type letters that it is still in use today. He also innovated a new type of mould used to cast those letters and combined those technologies with a system of movable type. The printing press was born, giving rise to the most important information revolution in human history since the invention of writing.

Money is an information technology. Beware of who you exclude from the use of that technology--they may just start a revolution that opens it up to everyone.

Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) “An ...

2024-08-06T09:21:41Z

Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978)

“An examination of the potential of the ‘powerless’ can only begin with an examination of the nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless people operate.”

…

“The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23

Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) “An ...

2024-05-19T17:02:03Z

Entrepreneurial capitalism has completely different social ...

2024-05-16T21:53:56Z

Entrepreneurial capitalism has completely different social effects from crony capitalism. Entrepreneurial capitalism rewards entrepreneurs for disrupting existing technologies, goods, and services—that is, for taking risks. By contrast, crony capitalism is when companies who have temporarily “won” in the market try to lock down their leading position by preventing others from competing with them. Crony capitalists hate risk and try to eliminate it wherever they can. There is a great book by Clayton Christensen called “The Innovator’s Dilemma” that goes into detail about how entrepreneurs can become crony capitalists.

Most of the industries where we’ve seen the kind of decline in quality and service you describe are industries where large companies have used the state—either through regulatory agencies or the legislature—to pass laws and regulations that make it easier for them to keep winning and harder for others to compete.

This is why it’s not just any capitalism that creates a rising tide that lifts all boats—it’s specifically entrepreneurial capitalism. Small government tends to be a friend of entrepreneurial capitalism but not of crony capitalism. This is a key distinction few make on the right or the left.

Hello @IngarSolty, just caught your piece in @jacobin smearing ...

2024-05-09T21:43:15Z

Hello @IngarSolty, just caught your piece in @jacobin smearing Friedrich Hayek as an "enemy of freedom," a "neoliberal," a figure of the "radical right," and equating his bottom-up, scientific approach to economy with the policies of specific politicians (i.e. Thatcher and Reagan).

Have you read any Hayek--at all? If not, perhaps start with the essay below, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," which is published in The Constitution of Liberty.

Hayek is extremely clear that he opposes the use of the power of the state to cudgel people into any kind of conformity, including cultural conformity. He considers conservatism as an ideology to be at war with science, innovation, and technological progress.

The fact that some of Hayek's readers have misunderstood him and taken his message to justify whatever misapplication of state power they feel inclined to (including weighing in on the part of the owners of capital to break the wills of workers asserting their *right* to bargain for better wages) does not in any way make this "Hayek's message."

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf

Every platform, like every state, is or will be weaponized. That ...

2024-05-08T19:25:31Z

Every platform, like every state, is or will be weaponized.

That does not mean platforms should be "banned." It means they should be used with awareness and caution. That is what "digital literacy" means.

It is impossible to have a free society that is not literate--that is, competent to navigate information presented in a variety of channels and forms. Any attempt to police "misinformation" is robbing the people of their rightful capacity to navigate information for themselves. In a culture of truth, information that is truthful and stands up to public scrutiny will eventually prevail over lies and falsehoods. This cannot happen if information is refereed to begin with.

Ultimately, we need to create alternatives to platforms by building peer-to-peer services that cannot be captured. But this doesn't mean platforms will go away. Platforms are digital territories and jurisdictions that will continue to serve some purposes, and people will have to navigate them in a literate manner.

We don't relativize the power of the state by "banning" states, and we don't relativize the power of the platform by "banning" platforms. We relativize the power of both by empowering individuals. The remedy for concentrations of power at the top is power that moves bottom-up.

If “non-custodial software” is a “money transmission ...

2024-05-02T12:56:38Z

If “non-custodial software” is a “money transmission service,” then every person holding cash in their house or wallet is a “money transmitter.”

They should be honest about what they are really trying to outlaw here: people holding their own cash.

Now seems as good a time as any to revisit one of the classics of ...

2024-05-01T14:11:47Z

Now seems as good a time as any to revisit one of the classics of American political theory:

"Civil Disobedience," by Henry David Thoreau (1849).

(It was originally titled "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.")

Thoreau's essay influenced the giants of human rights movements around the world, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau himself was a lifelong abolitionist, and his opposition to slavery inspired the speech that became this essay.

https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/

“When the devaluation of the mark started during the war and ...

2024-04-30T05:51:14Z

“When the devaluation of the mark started during the war and especially during the postwar period, only a few people thought of the consequences which resulted for the affairs of learning. And yet it was after all perfectly clear that the foundations of German scholarship rest not only upon the researchers’ idealism, but just a much upon the solid rock of a gold currency and an active balance of payments. But what has been built with gold marks cannot be maintained or yet extended with paper marks. For all learning and all science requires progress to give it content and to enrich and stimulate it. Years of paper currency therefore mean no more and no less than the distress of learning and, if the sickness of the currency lasts a long time, the death of learning and science. Such meager years bring about the dismantling of our culture, which in turn leads to pseudo-culture.”

- Georg Schreiber, “The Distress of German Learning,” published during the hyperinflation of 1923

These are the new PNAC guys: PNAC 2.0. They will smile and ...

2024-04-29T16:06:16Z

These are the new PNAC guys: PNAC 2.0. They will smile and chuckle and “aw-shucks” their way to complete global destruction as they cheer on “regime change” in countries far more powerful than Iraq was in the early 2000’s. When they—inevitably—fail, they will disappear with whatever they’ve been able to grift as their countrymen die and have their livelihoods incinerated as the “collateral damage” of their literally, descriptively stupid power games.

They have zero imagination—they just want to play “Cold War” over and over again because it’s a playbook they think they know. But not only do they not know either their “enemy” or themselves (which guarantees they lose), they don’t even have the basic restraint and questionable level of moral character of many Cold Warriors. They are literal fools and should be laughed out of or booed in every room they enter.

It should be obvious that there is no way for America to ...

2024-04-29T06:04:22Z

It should be obvious that there is no way for America to “win” in the world if her adversaries “lose.”

“I win, you lose” is the logic of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, in which the Allies sought to “contain” Germany by redistributing its territory and industry, eviscerating its military, and imposing punishing war “reparations” which it could not repay. This led directly to the German civil war, hyperinflation of the German currency, the rise of National Socialism, and the Second World War.

Finding the win-win, although never “perfect” from anyone’s perspective, is the only way to avoid catastrophe. If your “enemy” has nothing to lose by fighting you, the game conditions are clear—and war is inevitable.

As Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard. Such is the art of warfare.”

The state has to be aware that if they push, society will push ...

2024-04-24T16:59:40Z

The state has to be aware that if they push, society will push back, and that creates the opportunity, the opening, for freedom.

https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-human-rights.

Congress is using their displeasure with specific types of ...

2024-04-24T16:57:08Z

Congress is using their displeasure with specific types of protest as an excuse to give the administrative state more unchecked power.

Nonprofits are already prohibited by law from supporting terrorism and face intense scrutiny about this. This performative bill, however, gives an unelected Treasury official unilateral power to decide whether or not a nonprofit “supports terrorism” and strip it of its nonprofit status.

Don’t like it? You can appeal to the IRS.

I am angry that Senator @JohnCornyn of Texas has sponsored this unnecessary, tyrannical bill specifically to target speech he dislikes. But it is a reminder that the “War on Terror” era never ended—the same people are still in power, and they have the same dismal view of democracy and free speech today that they did back then.

(bipartisan legislation the House passed last week (382-11) & that was intro'd last week in the Senate -- HR 6408 & S. 1436.)

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4136

Just wondering if any of the “AI alignment” people have ...

2024-04-23T22:14:45Z

Just wondering if any of the “AI alignment” people have solved the problem of “human alignment?”
…
(TLDR: No, of course not, neither are “problems” to be solved; they’re manufactured moral panics to justify absolute state power.)

#nevent1q…j22l

2024-04-21T21:56:46Z

quoting
nevent1q…j22l
I know I’m preaching to the choir here but if you haven’t seen it, this opening keynote from nsmolenski (npub1kvg…v0p2) at the Bitcoin Policy Summit is a scorcher. 🔥

https://youtu.be/UiDa_wP8q3s

A few dozen, largely unknown, functionaries of humanity quietly ...

2024-04-19T15:09:09Z

A few dozen, largely unknown, functionaries of humanity quietly keep the world's internet infrastructure functioning.

I like to think of them as "marenauts"--sea astronauts--engineers trained to repair equipment in extremely hostile conditions in the alien world of the Earth's oceans.

But maintenance isn't sexy, and it's not profitable. The costs of maintenance ships go up, not down, over time.

Who will take up this responsibility in the future?

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

As the world moves increasingly toward identitarian nationalisms, ...

2024-04-18T16:03:33Z

As the world moves increasingly toward identitarian nationalisms, countries that display a commitment to being multi-ethnic, multi-religious republics with no legally privileged racial or religious classes will have an advantage.

I hope the United States can stay on this trajectory.

We ensure the flourishing of future generations of humans ...

2024-02-21T06:58:32Z

We ensure the flourishing of future generations of humans precisely *by* loving and caring for those dearest to us—our family and friends—courageously and above all other humans that we come into contact with. Not because they are “essentially” more valuable from some God’s-eye view, but because they are uniquely *ours* to love and to cherish.

Morality emerges from the responsibilities we undertake in concrete relationships with specific others, not from some abstract idea about how “valuable” lives are in relation to each other.

The debate, as always, hinges on what is meant by “national ...

2024-01-12T22:16:51Z

The debate, as always, hinges on what is meant by “national emergency” and “the U.S. is under imminent attack.”

Hawks would have you believe that any violence against any American asset anywhere in the world is a “national emergency” that authorizes the President to commit unlimited resources and perpetrate unlimited violence without regard for the will of Congress and the American people.

For hawks, the recognized ability of specific military assets to defend themselves if attacked is not good enough: the full power of the American state must immediately be committed to war of undefined scope in the event of any “provocation”. We’ve lost the concepts of local response, of local diplomacy, and limited use of power. We’re acting like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, swinging around our wand of power with no discipline and no strategy.

This is not sustainable, materially or diplomatically. If everything is an “emergency,” then nothing is an emergency. A permanent state of emergency is a permanent police state. And it is simply impossible for any country to impose a permanent police state on the world forever.

Anthropology--the study the human (the anthropos)--has a ...

2023-12-23T20:42:51Z

Anthropology--the study the human (the anthropos)--has a complicated relationship with itself.

The field crystallized in the 19th century at the confluence of several historical, political, and scientific moments:

- The discovery of evolution, including human evolution, in the fossil record and in the direct observation of natural selection, which called into question religious origin stories

- The expansion of European colonialism across the world, which placed extraordinarily different people in extended contact with one another

- The rise of nationalism in Europe, which drove cultural and linguistic homogenization within European countries (i.e. created "state cultures" that wiped out less politically powerful local dialects, forms of dress, and religious practices)

- The rapid extinction of countless languages and folk cultures worldwide as a result of both European and non-European conquests and genocides, accelerated by the technologically-enabled growth of state power

“Only he whose soul is in turmoil, forced to live in an epoch ...

2023-12-16T18:53:25Z

“Only he whose soul is in turmoil, forced to live in an epoch where war, violence and ideological tyranny threaten the life of every individual, and the most precious substance in that life, the freedom of the soul, can know how much courage, sincerity and resolve are required to remain faithful to his inner self in these times of the herd’s rampancy.”

- Stefan Zweig, “Montaigne,” 1942

Their goal is to make peer-to-peer transacting illegal. They ...

2023-11-30T19:42:06Z

Their goal is to make peer-to-peer transacting illegal.

They won’t make “bitcoin” or any other specific tech illegal; they will just make any transaction that doesn’t go through a third-party chokepoint illegal.

“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that ...

2023-11-28T21:08:12Z

“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”

- A. N. Whitehead, “Symbolism” (1927)

Nostr notes by NSmolenskiFan

The rise of LLMs in education has made more apparent who is using ...

Nostr event nevent1qqstjtyspxhnau7gs8g6zs9crkdlve4nrzec4swf8qchjy79keewywgzyqqqqqqqetq0sxdlrg9xpjy3a6ce8yhe37vafqysknl2pjj38n5tuzc3zz6

It’s wild to me that @LinkedIn still hasn’t implemented ...

The paper “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Money” ...

Wisdom involves making accurate and precise distinctions. An ...

We are being led by people trying to convince us to see the world ...

With government funding comes surveillance. The more programs the ...

Promo pricing for The Satoshi Papers ENDS Feb 1st! Library ...

The redistribution Altman has in mind would certainly not enable ...

Follow-up: Those making predictions about AI “transforming ...

Anthropologist here: Sam’s claim that “the whole structure of ...

Fascinating piece on the anthropology and economics of prison ...

I wrote about the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement that ...

In his response to Marc Andreessen, Yuval Levin of the @AEI and ...

"The Satoshi Papers" is now available for pre-order! ...

The “institutions” people rarely if ever address the question ...

Join economist @RebelEconProf, policy leader @Avik, and myself on ...

"The hypotheses [are] not beginnings but really hypotheses ...

One of the bases of Western anti-semitism (which used to mean ...

Hayek and Whitehead on institutions: "The [planning] problem ...

Technological innovation is what enables greater productivity and ...

.@PaulLew16394851 speaks about the conditions for self-governance ...

A clinical psychologist with decades of experience treating ...

The notion that any company, let alone any government or other ...

“Lawful interception” means “encryption backdoors” which ...

In a functioning market, businesses don’t have the luxury of ...

The whole “Iran tried to assassinate Trump” story is the ...

As bombs fall on #Beirut, it struck me that perhaps some of my ...

Good question. I would say no—the case study suggests that ...

The point of the American project was to create a larger national ...

American civilians are now just routinely collateral damage in ...

It’s helpful to understand this election through historian ...

Having a realistic assessment of the motivations of the ...

"No End In Sight" is a documentary made in 2007 about the ...

In a previous life, I wanted to be a journalist. I spoke fluent ...

I agree with Monbiot that both capitalism’s defenders *and* ...

It’s not about “fighting dis/misinformation” (negative ...

As consent is being manufactured for a war with Iran, it’s ...

A just government neither privileges its friends nor persecutes ...

Few Americans know this: Federal law since 1953 has effectively ...

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the “War on Terror” is ...

In case you missed the #CATO 2024 Conference "Financial ...

At some point, the AI doomers will likely flip to “AI should ...

War, for a superpower, is a deliberate choice. Don’t let anyone ...

“Privacy rights are an absolute restriction on government ...

“It is a profound and repeated finding that the mere facts of ...

Without anonymity, everything becomes either crime or pre-crime. ...

In psychology, there is a term called “splitting:” seeing ...

As I head to Cato Institute to discuss financial privacy and ...

Peter Van : “You have a Constitutional right to anonymous ...

Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government ...

Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government ...

This Thursday! Let's see if we can change the narrative from ...

Some folks believe we still need a CBDC despite FedNow offering ...

“The evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is ...

Assumptions people who favor planned economies often make: 1. ...

If you’re looking at BTC strictly from a wealth equality ...

A lot can be said about the causes of lower wealth inequality in ...

Acemoglu is here exhibiting the classic logic of what he referred ...

Important research paper on the economics of migration. The ...

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about MMTers is that ...

Fantastic lecture by economist PeterBoettke inaugurating the ...

Creating value is not the same thing as generating profit. Great ...

“What is perhaps distinctive about the dynamic of difference as ...

Waiting for the announcement that all new technological ...

As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once said, “Economics, as ...

This has been clear to me for a while now, but the Thiel/Rogan ...

The people saying they’re going to “control prices” are the ...

I'm excited to join @CatoInstitute for a day-long event: ...

The world's three largest employers are: 1. India's ...

Nostr event nevent1qqs9dgwcd33vkfx9pej3377333pz6vj83260xlxeu0n0t56f5djz05gzyqqqqqqqetq0sxdlrg9xpjy3a6ce8yhe37vafqysknl2pjj38n5tuw92kem

"The crisis of liberal democracy has become concealed by a ...

“Truth is not the default . . . it is an exceptional, fragile, ...

Sound money appeals to people of all political persuasions, ...

“We don’t have enough resources” is a familiar refrain in ...

Stay tuned for “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Money.” ...

All authoritarianism is bad. All abuse of power is bad. The ...

Information is currency. Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the ...

Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) “An ...

I agree with Monbiot that both capitalism’s defenders and ...