Category: Philosophy
*You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition*
By Bryan Caplan, now on sale. From Bryan’s Substack:
My latest book of essays, You Have No Right to Your Culture: Essays on the Human Condition, flips this narrative. All of these demands for “reshaping culture” are thinly-veiled calls for coercing humans. As the title essay explains:
[C]ulture is… other people! Culture is who other people want to date and marry. Culture is how other people raise their kids. Culture is the movies other people want to see. Culture is the hobbies other people value. Culture is the sports other people play. Culture is the food other people cook and eat. Culture is the religion other people choose to practice. To have a “right to your culture” is to have a right to rule all of these choices — and more.
What’s the alternative? Instead of treating capitalism as the root of cultural decay, the world should embrace capitalist cultural competition. Actions speak louder than words; instead of using government to “shape” culture, let’s see what practices, beliefs, styles, and flavors pass the market test. Which in practice, as I explain elsewhere in the book, largely means the global triumph of Western culture, infused with an array of glorious culinary, musical, and literary imports. Nativists who bemoan immigrants’ failure to assimilate are truly blind; the truth is that even non-immigrants are pre-assimilating at a staggering pace.
Recommended. Bryan also offers some essays on what he finds valuable in GMU Econ sub-culture.
Should You Resign?
At least six prosecutors resigned in early January over DOJ pressure to investigate the widow of Renee Good (killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross) instead of the agent himself. They cited political interference, exclusion of state police, and diversion of resources from priority fraud cases. Similarly, an FBI agent was ordered to stand down from investigating the killing of Good. She resigned. The killing of Alex Pretti and what looks to be an attempted federal coverup will likely lead to more resignations. Is resignation the right choice? I tweeted:
I appreciate the integrity, but every principled resignation is an adverse selection.
In other words, when the good leave and the bad don’t, the institution rots.
Resignation can be useful as a signal–this person is giving up a lot so the issue must be important. Resignations can also create common knowledge–now everyone knows that everyone knows. The canonical example is Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigning rather than carrying out Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. At that time, a resignation was like lighting the beacon. But today, who is there to be called?
The best case for not resigning is that you retain voice—the ability to slow, document, escalate, and resist within lawful channels. In the U.S. system that can mean forcing written directives, triggering inspector-general review, escalating through professional responsibility channels, and building coalitions that outlast transient political appointees. Staying can matter.
But staying is corrupting. People are prepared to say no to one big betrayal, but a steady drip of small compromises depreciates the will: you attend the meetings, sign the forms, stay silent when you should speak. Over time the line moves, and what once felt intolerable starts to feel normal, categories blur. People who on day one would never have agreed to X end up doing X after a chain of small concessions. You may think you’re using the institution, but institutions are very good at using you. Banality deadens evil.
Resignation keeps your hands and conscience clean. That’s good for you but what about society? Utilitarians sometimes call the demand for clean hands a form of moral self-indulgence. A privileging of your own purity over outcomes. Bernard Williams’s reply is that good people are not just sterile utility-accountants, they have deep moral commitments and sometimes resignation is what fidelity to those commitments requires.
So what’s the right move? I see four considerations:
- Complicity: Are you being ordered to do wrong, or, usually the lesser crime, of not doing right?
- Voice: If you stay can you exercise voice? What’s your concrete theory of change—what can you actually block, document, or escalate?
- Timing: Is reversal possible soon or is this structural capture? Are you the remnant?
- Self-discipline: Will you name the bright lines now and keep them, or will “just this once” become the job?
I have not been put in a position to make such a choice but from a social point of view, my judgment is that at the current time, voice is needed and more effective than exit.
Hat tip: Jim Ward.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say…
The book I was reading is titled Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete, here is one excerpt:
Michael: What was [Allan] Bloom like when you first met him?
Seth: He was supersensitive to people’s defects. He had antennae out, he knew exactly…
Robert: People’s weak spots?
Seth: Oh yes, it was extraordinary.
Ronna: You continued talking to Bloom often over the years, didn’t you?
Seth: Pretty often. But he was often was distracted. He got impatient if you could not say what you wanted to say in more than half a sentence.
Robert: The pressure of the sound bite.
Seth: I remember the last time he came. He was about to write the book and he asked me what I thought the Phaedrus was about. I summed it up in a sentence, and it didn’t make any impressions.
Ronna: Do you remember what the sentence was?
Seth: Something about the second speech turning into the third speech, and how this was connected to the double character of the human being. I managed to get it into one sentence, but it wasn’t something he wanted to hear.
A fun book. For all the criticisms you hear of Straussians, the few I have known I find are quite willing to speak their actual views and state of mind very clearly and directly.
Morally judging famous and semi-famous people
This is one of the worst things you can do for your own intellect, whatever you think the social benefits may be. I know some reasonable number of famous people, and I just do not trust the media accounts of their failings and flaws. I trust even less the barbs I read on the internet. I am not claiming to know the truth about them (most of them, at least), but I can tell when the people writing about them know even less.
I am not saying everyone is an angel — sometimes you come to learn negative information that in fact is not part of the standard press reports or internet whines.
If you are going to possibly be working with someone on a concrete and important project, absolutely you should be trying to form an assessment of their moral quality and reliability. (And you are allowed to do it once per electoral race, when deciding for whom to vote.) But if not, spending real time and energy morally judging famous and semi-famous people is one of the best and quickest ways to make yourself stupider. Focus on the substantive arguments for and against various policies and propositions, not the people involved. Furthermore, smart people do not seem to be immune from this form of mental deterioration. Here is my 2008 post on “pressing the button.”
A corollary of this is that if you read an internet comment that, when a substantive issue is raised, switches to judging a famous or semi-famous person, the quality of that comment is almost always low. Once you start seeing this, you cannot stop seeing it.
Addendum: If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill.
Podcast with Salvador Duarte
Salvador is 17, and is an EV winner from Portugal. Here is the transcript. Here is the list of discussed topics:
0:00 – We’re discovering talent quicker than ever 5:14 – Being in San Francisco is more important than ever 8:01 – There is such a thing like a winning organization 11:43 – Talent and conformity on startup and big businesses 19:17 – Giving money to poor people vs talented people 22:18 – EA is fragmenting 25:44 – Longtermism and existential risks 33:24 – Religious conformity is weaker than secular conformity 36:38 – GMU Econ professors religious beliefs 39:34 – The west would be better off with more religion 43:05 – What makes you a philosopher 45:25 – CEOs are becoming more generalists 49:06 – Traveling and eating 53:25 – Technology drives the growth of government? 56:08 – Blogging and writing 58:18 – Takes on @Aella_Girl, @slatestarcodex, @Noahpinion, @mattyglesias, , @tszzl, @razibkhan, @RichardHanania, @SamoBurja, @TheZvi and more 1:02:51 – The future of Portugal 1:06:27 – New aesthetics program with @patrickc.
Self-recommending, here is Salvador’s podcast and Substack more generally.
My excellent Conversation with Brendan Foody
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history.
Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until AI can stump Cass Sunstein, the coming shift toward knowledge workers building RL environments instead of doing repetitive analysis, how to interview without falling for vibes, why nepotism might make a comeback as AI optimizes everyone’s cover letters, scaling the Thiel Fellowship 100,000X, what his 8th-grade donut empire taught him about driving out competition, the link between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, dining out and dating in San Francisco, Mercor’s next steps, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, I saw an ad online not too long ago from Mercor, and it said $150 an hour for a poet. Why would you pay a poet $150 an hour?
FOODY: That’s a phenomenal place to start. For background on what the company does — we hire all of the experts that teach the leading AI models. When one of the AI labs wants to teach their models how to be better at poetry, we’ll find some of the best poets in the world that can help to measure success via creating evals and examples of how the model should behave.
One of the reasons that we’re able to pay so well to attract the best talent is that when we have these phenomenal poets that teach the models how to do things once, they’re then able to apply those skills and that knowledge across billions of users, hence allowing us to pay $150 an hour for some of the best poets in the world.
COWEN: The poets grade the poetry of the models or they grade the writing? What is it they’re grading?
FOODY: It could be some combination depending on the project. An example might be similar to how a professor in English class would create a rubric to grade an essay or a poem that they might have for the students. We could have a poet that creates a rubric to grade how well is the model creating whatever poetry you would like, and a response that would be desirable to a given user.
COWEN: How do you know when you have a good poet, or a great poet?
FOODY: That’s so much of the challenge of it, especially with these very subjective domains in the liberal arts. So much of it is this question of taste, where you want some degree of consensus of different exceptional people believing that they’re each doing a good job, but you probably don’t want too much consensus because you also want to get all of these edge case scenarios of what are the models doing that might deviate a little bit from what the norm is.
COWEN: So, you want your poet graders to disagree with each other some amount.
FOODY: Some amount, exactly, but still a response that is conducive with what most users would want to see in their model responses.
COWEN: Are you ever tempted to ask the AI models, “How good are the poet graders?”
[laughter]
FOODY: We often are. We do a lot of this. It’s where we’ll have the humans create a rubric or some eval to measure success, and then have the models say their perspective. You actually can get a little bit of signal from that, especially if you have an expert — we have tens of thousands of people that are working on our platform at any given time. Oftentimes, there’ll be someone that is tired or not putting a lot of effort into their work, and the models are able to help us with catching that.
And:
COWEN: Let’s say it’s poetry. Let’s say you can get it for free, grab what you want from the known universe. What’s the data that’s going to make the models, working through your company, better at poetry?
FOODY: I think that it’s people that have phenomenal taste of what would users of the end products, users of these frontier models want to see. Someone that understands that when a prompt is given to the model, what is the type of response that people are going to be amazed with? How we define the characteristics of those responses is imperative.
Probably more than just poets that have spent a lot of time in school, we would want people that know how to write work that gets a lot of traction from readers, that gains broad popularity and interest, drives the impact, so to speak, in whatever dimension that we define it within poetry.
COWEN: But what’s the data you want concretely? Is it a tape of them sitting around a table, students come, bring their poems, the person says, “I like this one, here’s why, here’s why not.” Is it that tape or is it written reports? What’s the thing that would come in the mail when you get your wish?
FOODY: The best analog is a rubric. If you have some —
COWEN: A rubric for how to grade?
FOODY: A rubric for how to grade. If the poem evokes this idea that is inevitably going to come up in this prompt or is a characteristic of a really good response, we’ll reward the model a certain amount. If it says this thing, we’ll penalize the model. If it styles the response in this way, we’ll reward it. Those are the types of things, in many ways, very similar to the way that a professor might create a rubric to grade an essay or a poem.
Poetry is definitely a more difficult one because I feel like it’s very unbounded. With a lot of essays that you might grade from your students, it’s a relatively well-scoped prompt where you can probably create a rubric that’s easy to apply to all of them, versus I can only imagine in poetry classes how difficult it is to both create an accurate rubric as well as apply it. The people that are able to do that the best are certainly extremely valuable and exciting.
COWEN: To get all nerdy here, Immanuel Kant in his third critique, Critique of Judgment, said, in essence, taste is that which cannot be captured in a rubric. If the data you want is a rubric and taste is really important, maybe Kant was wrong, but how do I square that whole picture? Is it, by invoking taste, you’re being circular and wishing for a free lunch that comes from outside the model, in a sense?
FOODY: There are other kinds of data they could do if it can’t be captured in a rubric. Another kind is RLHF, where you could have the model generate two responses similar to what you might see in ChatGPT, and then have these people with a lot of taste choose which response they prefer, and do that many times until the model is able to understand their preferences. That could be one way of going about it as well.
Interesting throughout, and definitely recommended. Note the conversation was recorded in October (we have had a long queue), so a few parts of it sound slightly out of date. And here is Hollis Robbins on LLMs and poetry.
The Molly Cantillon manifesto, A Personal Panopticon
I find this piece significant, and think it is likely to be one of the most important essays of the year:
A few months ago, I started running my life out of Claude Code. Not out of intention to do so, it was just the place where everything met. And it just kept working. Empires are won by conquest. What keeps them standing is something much quieter. Before a king can tax, he must count. Before he can conscript, he must locate. Before he can rule, he must see. Legibility is the precondition for governance…
The first thing Claude solved was product blindness. NOX now runs on a cron job: pulling Amplitude, cross-referencing GitHub, and pointing me to what needs building. It handles A/B testing, generates winning copy, and has turned customer support into a fully autonomous department.
Once I saw this was possible, I chased it everywhere. Email, hitting inbox zero for the first time ever, with auto-drafted replies for everything inbound. Workouts, accommodating horrendously erratic travel schedules. Sleep, built a projector wired to my WHOOP after exactly six hours that wakes me with my favorite phrases. Subscriptions, found and returned $2000 I didn’t know I was paying. The dozen SFMTA citations I’d ignored, the action items I’d procrastinated into oblivion. People are using it to, I discovered, run vending machines, home automation systems, and keep plants alive.
The feeling is hard to name. It is the violent gap between how blind you were and how obvious everything feels now with an observer that reads all the feeds, catches what you’ve unconsciously dropped, notices patterns across domains you’d kept stubbornly separate, and—crucially—tells you what to do about it.
My personal finances are now managed in the terminal. Overnight it picks the locks of brokerages that refuse to talk to each other, pulls congressional and hedge fund disclosures, Polymarket odds, X sentiment, headlines and 10-Ks from my watchlist. Every morning, a brief gets added in ~/𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚜. Last month it flagged Rep. Fields buying NFLX shares. Three weeks later, the Warner Bros deal. I don’t always trade, sometimes I argue with the thesis. But I’m never tracking fifteen tabs at 6am anymore.
It feels borderline unfair seeing around corners, being in ten places at once, surveilling yourself with the attention span of a thousand clones.
A panopticon still, but the tower belongs to you.
There is more at the link, or this link, and yes she is related to the 18th century Irish economist Richard Cantillon.
Who gets an “RIP” on Marginal Revolution?
A few of you have been asking me this. The core standards are as follows:
1. Most notable figures in economics. MR has many economist readers, and these deaths are not usually well-publicized by mainstream media.
2. A cultural figure I feel more of you should know about. Various figures from say African music or foreign cinema might be examples here.
3. A person who, if even at a distance, has played some special role in my life.
Someone who would not get a mention would be, for instance, a leading footballer. I figure any of you who care already will be hearing about the death.
I also discriminate against suicides, as I consider suicide both a sin and as having (in most cases) high negative externalities on others. I am not so inclined to honor or glorify those who have killed themselves.
The Venezuelan stock market
Venezuela’s stock market is now up +73% since President Maduro was captured. Since December 23rd, as President Trump ramped up pressure on Maduro’s government, Venezuela’s stock market is up +148%.
Here is the link and chart. And up seventeen percent in the last day, and now some more on top of that. Note the bolivar is down only a small amount since December 23.
I see the reality as such:
a) Immoral actions were taken, leading up to the removal of Maduro, and immoral measures are likely to continue, both from the United States and from various Venezuelan replacement governments.
b) Trump’s actions have been some mix of unlawful and unconstitutional, to what degree you can debate.
c) In expected value terms, the people of Venezuela are now much better off.
It can and should be debated how much a) and b) should be weighted against c). But to deny c), or even to fail to mention it, is, I think, quite delusional.
Effective Altruists, are you paying attention?
Stories Beyond Demographics
The representation theory of stories, where the protagonist must mirror my gender, race, or sexuality for me to find myself in the story, offers a cramped view of what fiction can do and a shallow account of how it actually works. Stories succeed not through mirroring but by revealing human patterns that cut across identity. Archetypes like Hero, Caregiver, Explorer, and Artist, and structures like Tragedy, Romance, and Quest are available to everyone. That is why a Japanese salaryman can love Star Wars despite never having been to space or met a Wookie and why an American teenager can recognize herself in a nineteenth-century Russian novel.
Tom Bogle makes this point well in a post on Facebook:
I have no issue with people wanting representation of historically marginalized people in stories. I understand that people want to “see themselves” in the story.
But it is more important to see the stories in ourselves than to see ourselves in the stories.
When we focus on the representation model, we recreate a character to be an outward representation of physical traits. Then the internal character traits of that individual become associated with the outward physical appearance of the character and we pigeonhole ourselves into thinking that we are supposed to relate only to the character that looks like us. Movies and TV shows have adopted the Homer Simpson model of the aloof, detached, and even imbecilic father, and I, as a middle-aged cis het white guy with seven kids could easily fall into the trap of thinking that is the only character to whom I can relate. It also forces us to change the stories and their underlying imagery in order to fit our own narrative preferences, which sort of undermines the purpose for retelling an old story in the first place.
The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How am I the Wolf? How does the grandmother figure appear in me from time to time? Who has been the Woodsman in my life? How have I been the Woodsman to myself or others? Even the themes of the story must be applied to my patterns of behavior or belief systems, not simply the characters. This model also enables us to retain the integrity of the versions of these stories that have withstood the test of time.
So if your goal is actually to affect real social change through stories, I would encourage you to consider how the archetypal approach may actually be more effective at accomplishing your aims than the representational approach alone (as they are not necessarily in conflict with one another).
Economic inequality does not equate to poor well-being or mental health
A meta-analysis of 168 studies covering more than 11 million people found no reliable link between economic inequality and well-being or mental health. In other words, living in a place that has large gaps between the rich and poor does not affect these outcomes, with implications for policy.
Here is the Nature link, this claim has been bad science all along.
A Call for New Aesthetics
We, Patrick and Tyler, have differing views of the artistic merits of Bauhaus, but we are both very impressed by the movement’s success: they sought to define an aesthetic for the twentieth century, and basically did. Bauhaus obviously sits as part of broader tides—functionalism, constructivism, De Stijl, etc.—but the project also shows how intentional artistic ambition can succeed. Everything from modern offices to modern tech hardware is in some sense downstream of Bauhaus.
We’re more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works?
Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like? There will not be a singular answer to that, but we are very interested in attempts to answer the questions.
In particular, we would like to fund some artists who are thinking about this.
Tyler: Circa 2026, beauty can be found in strange and unusual places. It does not always announce itself as such. It can violate our expectations in unreasonable ways. It often springs from an understanding that the world has changed fundamentally, and matters of the aesthetic need to recognize and respond to that. What can you do that that will surprise and inspire me?
Patrick: In 1925, Ortega y Gasset said “modern art, on the other hand, has the masses against it, and this will always be so since it is unpopular in essence; even more, it is antipopular.” Sagmeister and Walsh argue that we’ve stopped trying to produce beautiful work, and Nicholas Boys-Smith shows empirically that modern buildings are substantially less favored than designs that respect the specific character of the place. So, what are new directions forward? What is new and also beautiful?
Grant. We are seeking to fund artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics.
- Our primary interest is in visual arts and architecture, but open to all mediums.
- AI presumably opens interesting new opportunities, though we haven’t seen much great work that only uses AI. (If jazz didn’t exist, could you prompt Suno to create it? This seems like an open problem.) As such, we’re neutral on the use of AI.
- We will not fund work that is already ubiquitous today.
Mechanics
- Grant size: $5k – $250k.
- Deadline: Applications are open until March 31, 2026.
- Selection: Reviewed on a rolling basis. Applying sooner is probably better than later, because we might at some stage decide that we’ve funded enough.
- Application: Include some examples of your work along with a rough description of what you’d use the grant to do. We don’t know how many applications we’ll receive, so please make your work as easy to assess as possible. Whether or not English is your first language, we much prefer applications written by humans over those written by AIs.
- Declines: To keep logistics simple, we will not inform declined proposals of our decision.
To apply, just email [email protected].
TC again: Here is the website.
Harvey Mansfield on Rousseau and the dilemma of our age
Thus, it would seem that Rousseau compels us to choose either science or morality. If we choose morality ,we must enforce ignorance by maintaining political control over the sciences and the arts. We must believe in something like creationism because it says that nature was created for our good, and not believe in technology that exploits nature by exposing its disadvantages and hardships, such as cloning human beings to avoid the troubles of natural birth. But if we choose science, we run the risk of an explosion as human morals worsen as human power grows…There is hardly any issue today more fateful than the questison of whether modern science is the friend of politics and morality, as Hume says, or the enemy, as Rousseau says.
That is from Mansfield’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control.
Does the conflict between cardinal utility and ordinal preferences just keep on getting worse?
This argument is not necessarily a critique of capitalism, but it could be. At the very least, it is an observation about advanced capitalism.
As you will know from philosophy, there is a difference between what makes you happy, in the felicific sense, and what you want. Some of this difference may be due to addictions, but most of it is not. You may want to be a person of a particular kind, whether or not that makes you happier. You may wish to do things to help the world, without believing you will be personally happier as a result. You might have mixed feelings as to whether having children will make you happier (stress!), but still you might have a deep preference for raising a family. And so on. These distinctions are part of the mainsprings of human life, they are not minor exceptions standing in the corner.
The more capitalism develops, the more the gap between cardinal utility and preference satisfaction is likely to grow. Consider the polar case of a very primitive economy where the only commodity is rice. Eating rice is what makes you happy, and eating rice is also how you wish to spend your money. After all, what else is there? Given the feasible set, cardinal utility and preference satisfaction will coincide perfectly.
But as product choice grows and incomes rise, you will have more and more chances to deviate from maxing out on cardinal utility. Furthermore, your immediate “needs” likely are taken care of, so most of your income spending is discretionary rather than “I need to buy this food to avoid the miseries of starvation.”
More and more, you will be led away from cardinal utility maximization. But additional preferences will be satisfied.
Is this good or bad?
It is not quite right to say that people are becoming less happy, as they are getting what they want. That could be a central component of the good life, and of individual well-being, broadly construed. That said, some of your ordinal preferences might be harmful addictions, or you might prefer things that stress you out, either proximately or in the longer run.
Let’s say you keep on checking your phone for texts. Do you do this because you think it will make you happier? Maybe not. You simply might have a preference for wanting to know the information in those texts as soon as possible. Should we think that preference is bad? Maybe it is a mother wanting to know that her daughter got home safely, and so she checks her texts every three minutes. That might not make her happier, but I am reluctant to conclude that is a worse state of affairs. And it does not have to be an addiction, a much overused concept by intelligent people who do not define it very carefully.
I too have plenty of preferences that do not make me happier, though I consider them quite legitimate. I am keen to see as much of the world as I can, yet I am not convinced this makes me happier than say simply going back to Mexico again and again and eating the street food. I just want to know what else is out there.
If you side solely with cardinal utility, yes you condemn capitalism. Or if you think all of these ordinal preferences are addictions, again you can condemn the status quo. Your meta-preferences in that case presumably would wish to have different preferences. In any case, many books will be written about how capitalism makes us miserable. Most of them will have the incorrect framing, though most of them will have ” a point,” one way or another. Furthermore, while some of these books may be correct, in the aggregate they will push us away from viewing individual human beings as agentic. That is a negative social consequence.
I do not think those critical perspectives are, by and large, the primary correct views. Instead, I think of capitalism and markets as an unparalleled engine for making us…weirder? And for moving us into different worlds (NYT)?
YMMV.
Voices From 2099
Great little video. Winner of the Foresight Institute’s $10,000 prize for Existential Hope. Go Bryan Johnson!