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.
What I’ve been reading
1. I have been reading in the history of archaeology, and have profited from Eric H. Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, which is a very good introduction to what the subtitle claims. There is also Toby Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology, and Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, volume 2, The Golden Age: 1881-1914.
2. Elizabeth Alker, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
3. Arindrajit Dube, The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It. Dube notes his main theme is that employers have discretion in setting the real wage. A good overview of his work in labor economics. I would stress that if you think “tight labor markets” are good for workers, you should be obsessed with doing lots to favor capital.
4. Richard H. Davis, Religions of Early India: A Cultural History. A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia. Avoids the common mistake of becoming too obscure on these topics.
For those interested in the longer term, there is Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad, editors, Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future.
There is Kevin Kelly, Colors of Asia: A Visual Journey, Photos and Design.
Alvaro Rivas, Marx in the Age of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Reshapes Value, Class, and Ideology is a short but serious look as to how Marxian concepts might apply to AI, for instance whether surplus value will be earned on the AIs, or for that matter on non-human animals.
You will find a different intersection of topic areas in Dominic Roser, David Zhang, and J.D. Bauman, All the Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism for Christians.
Sunday assorted links
2. Some new estimates of tariff pass-through rates. I do not in fact find near-full pass through over such a short time horizon intuitive? Especially since SCOTUS may strike down the tariffs.
3. Are immigration researchers biased?
4. Are insurers retreating from Obamacare?
5. Alex Honnold will be free soloing 1700-foot Taipei 101 in Taiwan, no ropes of course. To be televised live on Netflix.
6. “Global suicide rates have declined by 29% from 2000 to 2021“
Mall of the Emirates, Dubai, vs. Tysons Corner mall, northern Virginia
1. More women wear the full veil at Tysons, especially on Friday and Saturday nights.
2. There are more Christmas decorations at Mall of the Emirates.
3. You will find a “Borders bookstore” — replete with the original font — at the Emirates locale.
4. At the Emirates mall you hear much more Russian, and many of the core signs are in Russian too. I guess that is the biggest difference?
Bring Back the Privateers!
Senator Mike Lee has a new bill that encourages the President to authorize letters of marque and reprisal against drug cartels:
The President of the United States is authorized and requested to commission, under officially issued letters of marque and reprisal, so many of privately armed and equipped persons and entities as, in the judgment of the President, the service may require, with suitable instructions to the leaders thereof, to employ all means reasonably necessary to seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any individual who the President determines is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization, who is responsible for an act of aggression against the United States.
SECURITY BONDS.—No letter of marque and reprisal shall be issued by the President without requiring the posting of a security bond in such amount as the President shall determine is sufficient to ensure that the letter be executed according to the terms and conditions thereof.
My paper on privateers explains how privateers were historically very successful. During the War of 1812, roughly 500 privateers operated alongside a tiny U.S. Navy. The market responded swiftly—privateers like the Comet were commissioned within days of war’s declaration and began capturing prizes within weeks. Sophisticated institutional design combined combined profit incentives with regulatory constraints:
- Security bonds ensured compliance with license terms
- Detailed instructions protected neutral vessels and required civilized conduct
- Prize courts adjudicated captures and distinguished privateers from pirates
- Share-based compensation created good incentives for crews
- Markets emerged where crew could sell shares forward (with limits to maintain work incentives)
Privateers cost the government essentially nothing compared to building and maintaining a navy. Private investors financed vessels , bore the risks, and operated on profit-seeking principles. Moreover, privateers unlike Navy vessels had incentives to capture enemy ships, particularly merchant ships, not just blow them and their occupants out of the water. Of course, capturing the drugs isn’t very useful but it’s quite possible to go after the money on the return journey–privateers as hackers–which is just as good.
Here is my paper on privateering, here is the time I went bounty hunting in Baltimore, here is work on the closely related issue of whistleblowing rewards and here is the excellent historian Mark Knopfler on privateering:
How to rise to the very top?
From athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps to scientists like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, identifying exceptional talent is essential in the science of innovation. But how does talent originate? Did the most talented athletes, scientists, and musicians reach peak performance relatively early or late in their career? Did they forgo mastering multiple sports, academic subjects, and musical instruments to reach world-class performance in only one? In an Analytical Review, Güllich et al. looked at published research in science, music, chess, and sports and found two patterns: Exceptional young performers reached their peak quickly but narrowly mastered only one interest (e.g., one sport). By contrast, exceptional adults reached peak performance gradually with broader, multidisciplinary practice. However, elite programs are designed to nurture younger talent.
That is from a new article in Science by Arne Güllich, Michael Barth, David Z. Hambrick, and Brooke N. Macnamara. Via Atta Tarki. But are they conditioning on a collider? Short players seem to do pretty well in today’s NBA…
Séb Krier, continued
Or more specifically Nenad Tomašev, Matija Franklin, Julian Jacobs, Sébastien Krier, and Simon Osindero:
AI safety and alignment research has predominantly been focused on methods for safeguarding individual AI systems, resting on the assumption of an eventual emergence of a monolithic Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The alternative AGI emergence hypothesis, where general capability levels are first manifested through coordination in groups of sub-AGI individual agents with complementary skills and affordances, has received far less attention. Here we argue that this patchwork AGI hypothesis needs to be given serious consideration, and should inform the development of corresponding safeguards and mitigations. The rapid deployment of advanced AI agents with tool-use capabilities and the ability to communicate and coordinate makes this an urgent safety consideration. We therefore propose a framework for distributional AGI safety that moves beyond evaluating and aligning individual agents. This framework centers on the design and implementation of virtual agentic sandbox economies (impermeable or semi-permeable), where agent-to-agent transactions are governed by robust market mechanisms, coupled with appropriate auditability, reputation management, and oversight to mitigate collective risks.
Here is the link, this is some of the most important work of our time. Here is the previous MR post on Krier.
Saturday assorted links
1. Henry Oliver’s year in reading.
2. What is the greatest artwork of the century so far? One man’s view.
3. LLMs specific to a historical time period.
4. So is it actually Austro-Japanese business cycle theory?
Rent Control Creates Ghost Apartments
Adam Lehodey writing at City Journal:
In New York City, making a profit on real estate has become increasingly difficult. Rent-stabilization laws built on the mantra that “housing is a human right,” a dysfunctional housing court, and myriad other interventions have driven thousands of units off the market, giving rise to the phenomenon of New York’s “ghost apartments.”
The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations.
…Take a building on East 6th Street as an example. A mere five-minute walk from Tompkins Square, the building is a convenient home for students and young professionals.
One-bedroom units in the building average $3,500— except two of them, subject to the city’s rent-stabilization laws, which hold rents below $900 per month.
As a result, both units have been allowed to fall into disrepair, because the cost of restoring them to habitability is greater than what they’d generate in rent.
…Much of the predicament at the East 6th Street building and the apartments on Valentine Avenue can be traced back to one piece of legislation: the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA). Passed by a Democratic majority in the state legislature, HSTPA eliminated landlords’ abilities to raise rents after units were vacated, or when they exceeded $2,775 per month. In doing so, it also eliminated their ability to make improvements profitably and reset the stabilized rent.
Recall from the recent review by Kholodilin that “the published studies are almost unanimous with respect to the impact of rent control on the quality of housing….[namely] that rent control leads to a deterioration in the quality of those dwellings subject to regulations.”
Markets in everything
People Are Paying to Get Their Chatbots High on ‘Drugs’
An online marketplace is selling code modules that simulate the effects of cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, and alcohol when they are uploaded to ChatGPT.
Here is the full Wired article. Via David.
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.
*Central Asia*, by Adeeb Khalid
An excellent book, the best I know of on this region. Here is one bit:
The first printing press in Central Asia was established in Tashkent in 1870…
I had not understood how much Xinjiang (“East Turkestan”), prior to its absorption into newly communist China, fell under the sway of Soviet influence.
I had not known how much the central Asian republics had explicit “let’s slow down rural migration into the cities” policies during Soviet times.
The book is interesting throughout, recommended.
Friday assorted links
1. The negativity crisis of AI ethics.
2. Vitalik and governance experiments and culture.
3. Stripe runs an RCT on capital markets and lending.
4. “For the first time, an AI model (GPT-5) autonomously solved an open math problem submitted to our benchmarking project IMProofBench, with a complete, correct proof, without human hints or intervention.” Link here, it is amazing how many smart or accomplished people will deny this is possible.
5. Developments in cognitive dissonance (New Yorker).
Voices From 2099
Great little video. Winner of the Foresight Institute’s $10,000 prize for Existential Hope. Go Bryan Johnson!
Falling costs
Unbelievable progress that even I underestimated! Gemini 3 Flash has practically beaten ARC-AGI-1 [an AI evaluation] at cost/score parity! It achieved the same score at more than 500x lower cost than the o3 model from a year ago & 6x lower than the just-released GPT-5.2!
Here is the link.