Notes:

NOTES

  1. Aaron has too limited an understanding of American ethical history. 😉 See “Carpetbaggers”.

  2. Innovation is possible in both Capitalizing-Productive and Decapitalizing-Parasitic directions. The purpose of rule of law under the old germanic and remaining anglo common law, is to evolve the law empirically in response to the discovery of consumptive-parasitic directions. Law evolves to suppress irreciprocity so that the central government can capture the taxes necessary to suppress local parasitism rents and free-riding. This suppression increases cooperative, economic, and monetary velocity, even if it’s more expensive than local rents. The evolution of the polity and economy continues as long as and as fast as this suppression produces cooperation and production. Eventually, something breaks and the accumulated rents in the state are so high that there are no reserves sufficient to reorganize society.

  3. Europeans were the only people to develop sufficient trust to produce high trust commons at scale, and voluntary commercial organizations at scale because of the greater suppression of ‘cheating’ than all other civilizations combined. This is in no small part due to the small size of states, private government (monarchies), multiple courts (church-moral, manorial-labor, common-commercial, high-parliament, and king as judge of last resort). So small states with homogenous cultures with low power distance dependent upon the ‘workers’ as soldiers created an information system with fewer ‘gaps’. Most of this structure has been dismantled incrementally to the point where we are large heterogeneous adversarial population with limited juridical defense, and no ‘right of redress’ in the government, and our common law has been intentionally undermined to produce positive rather than empirical law.

  4. RE: “The Autistic Perspective”: all people desire the social order to conform to their physical, intuitionistic, emotional, and cognitive biases. The problem is that this society is meritocratic on one hand and presumes morality when humans always and everywhere demonstrate amorality and only morality to the minimum degree that they can get away with given their available time and resources. Lastly, the human reproductive strategy, and discounts on cooperation, and opportunity to organize at scale, to organize returns, produce continuous demand for status, and without that demand for status all competition, innovation, adaptation, and evolution cease – which is why all ‘religious’ agrarian societies froze within a few centuries of developing organized religion, and all froze by 500-800ad.

  5. Joscha is very good at repeating the point that cells, organs, complex organisms, individuals, groups, species consist of independent actors cooperating for their mutual benefit despite not the optimum for any individual (ie: cancer). So that incentives are a via-negativa means of reducing defection from the order. You program a computer via positive because it can’t choose, and you program people via-negativa (by law) because they can. So the simpleton tries to form a sculpture of man from clay by adding what is wanted, and the wise try to carve a sculpture of man from stone by removing what is unwanted. Update from later in the video: again, he uses this role-playing at each level of complexity (especially the cell) to explain the universe and It’s a wonderful technique that makes the subject open to understanding by empathy and sympathy. He also uses homeostasis(Regulation) instead of just survival which is another feature he emphasizes differently from ‘most’.

  6. JB is not saying the unsayable: that the only problem a polity faces is the one abandoned postwar: that the eugenicists were right, and that a polity must maintain a power(legal) monopoly, a Pareto hierarchy, and a Nash equilibrium of outcome in relation to the productivity of the work. In effect, democratic, socialist, and communist economies are trying to violate a law of nature. Polities either shed underclasses like we shed skin cells by nothing more challenging than limiting their reproduction, or they are stuck in the Africa-South-Eurasia problem of making it impossible to form a power monopoly, and Pareto hierarchy necessary for a Nash equilibrium of rewards.

  7. Trump: Trump is very simple. He found the abuse of the American worker immoral, and the American geostrategy and economy personally offensive. He thought he could expand his legacy by fixing the problem. He was successful in reforming geostrategy worldwide and in beginning the restoration of the economy. He was too sensitive to the propaganda machine of the left so spent too much energy on it. So, he thought and acted a king (or general) in the private sector – talking exclusively to his followers (subjects, soldiers). The question is only whether his strategic interests were correct (and they were). Joscha i german at heart, and he can’t grasp the remains of the old anglo aristocratic mind – and visa versa. (I can because I’m part of it.) I could do a much better job of explaining trump than this discourse. (Trump shouldn’t run again, but he doesn’t need to – he can make and break candidates all day long all year long for years.)

  8. RE: Social media political steering: Academy-State-Media-Finance: State within a State, conquest by undermining. Marxism NeoMarxism Pomo PC Woke Anti-Whiteness is a repetition of Christianization of Rome and Bolshevism in Russia: false promise of freedom from the laws of nature by casting those who apply those laws to polity, economy, society, as oppressors rather than domesticators – or as Joscha would say maintainers of the polity’s homeostasis (regulatory function).

  9. Bought a Commodore and Tandy ColorComputers about the same time as JB. Had Compaq ‘portable’ next. It was a wonderful time. (I’m ten years older). If you wrote in assembly language on those early machines you could do amazing things. It’s where I did my first AI work for games.

  10. “Mathematics is the domain of all languages”: I wince when he says that. It’s more that all languages are structured as continuous recursive disambiguation (geometry). And that mathematics is the dumbest possible language because it has only one dimension: position(order). Math is a language of positional names. The utility of this language is that because it is scale-independent and consists of unique names with only one operator (addition-subtraction) it’s free of conflation inflation or deflation and as such is unambiguous if in grammatical form.

  11. JB is the only person I know of that understands the constructivist (intuitionist) movement and its relevance (and its failure to reform mathematics). Had Babbage published a theoretical paper rather than trying to build bigger and bigger machines, then we may not have had the sophistry in philosophy and the pseudoscience across the spectrum that evolved in response to Darwin. Instead we had to wait for Wittgenstein Turing Godel et al. The accident of history would improve if Hilbert had finished an operational model rather than Einstein’s descriptive, we might not have had Bohr or the Copenhagen consensus and that might have bound the lost decades of the 20th in the sciences.

  12. Interesting subtlety: that I use math, physics, neuroeconomics, behavioral economics, and evolutionary calculation, but rarely computer science to make an analogy or argument, and JB uses computer science to go the other direction. This doesn’t appear to have made any difference in understanding and conclusion.

  13. RE: Buddhism vs Stoicism. The only non-false bait, non-false threat, producing mindfulness is stoicism. Christianity prepares a polity (exhaustive forgiveness) for commercial society. 😉 Major differences between mindful religions are externalities: Buddhism is internal, Stoicism external, Epicureanism social, Christianity, Judaism, Islam political. The function of Christianity is to produce productive, obedient, serfs. Not buying the stoic criticism. Stoicism produces mindfulness by adaptation rather than buddhis withdrawal. Mindfulness functions by satisfying the demand for awareness of lower status as group insurance decreases and alienation increases as the scale of cooperation increases. People primitive very tribal life are saturated in a continuous social and reinforcing stream. This limits alienation to the fringe. Modernity pushes alienation into the mainstream.