We Are Not Saved

A recent book asks, "What's Wrong with China?" Well perhaps a lot, but for the purposes of this podcast I'm just looking at how very different China is from the US or the West, far different than most people think. Particularly those people who expect China to smoothly transition to something indistinguishable from a modern western democracy.

On June 1, 2009 Air France Flight 447 crashed into the mid-atlantic killing all 228 people aboard. In this episode I look at how it happened and whether it provides any larger lessons on the limits of privacy and technology and for the political crisis we're currently facing.

There are a lot of ways to spend our time, money and attention, and all three are limited. How do we decide what to spend them on, how do we decide what to worry about? This is the topic I examine on this episode, using global warming/climate change as one of the big examples. I approach this question with several frameworks in mind including the framework of effective altruism.

Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth is a book about a future where brain emulation becomes commonplace, by Robin Hanson. The future Hanson describes is a mixed bag, and I look at what that says about other transhumanist visions of the future, along with, of course, the very real possibility that none of those visions will come to pass. A position which Hanson's book also supports though with much less detail. But this position, both because of it's immediacy and it's long term downside, is where, I feel, we should be spending the bulk of our attention.

I have long positioned myself as something of a deficit hawk. A few weeks ago I heard a podcast about Modern Monetary Theory, an economics ideology which declares that debts and deficits don't matter. This is not the first time I have heard someone claim that, and my response was always, "But what about inflation?!?" Well it turns out I was wrong. Advocates of MMT aren't ignoring inflation they're arguing that inflation is the only thing you should worry about. This does answer my primary objection, but I think there are still reasons why MMT is a bad idea.

I decide to add myself to the long list of people talking about the Kavanuagh nomination. But I look at it from the standpoint of what standards a Senator might use to make a decision when it really isn't clear who's telling the truth. Spoiler alert: most of them are self-serving and biased.

Recently I attended the Moral and Ethical Leadership Conference put on by the BYU Management Society, the unofficial theme of which appeared to be civility. I take three speeches from the conference: Senator Jeff Flake, artist Eric Dowdle and columnist McKay Coppins and use them as a jumping off point for a discussion of the current state of civility and why it needs to be defended.

On a recent episode of the Art of Manliness Professor Benjamin Ginsberg discusses his book The Value of War and makes the claim that war has several positive values which have been recently overlooked? Is this the case? If so what might those positives be?

How will people a thousand years from now view this era? Will they see us as visionaries creating utopia or will they see us as hopelessly naive, ignoring obvious risks in favor of selfish short-term cultural gains? As you might imagine, I'm arguing for the latter. Particularly given that we are doing very little to avoid being selfish, or short-term or to identify the risks of changes to the culture. Also it should be noted that I am mostly reframing what Robin Hanson says in this post, so a definite thanks to him.

I just finished reading Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday, which is the story of Gawker being taken down by Peter Thiel. And someone on reddit pointed out that if Gawker was what they claimed to be, they should have been the one's to expose Theranos. But, of course they didn't. What did Gawker prioritize? And what should we be prioritizing in deciding what to publish and what to ban?