Read in Spring 2020
- Tolerance by definition means not tolerating intolerance, especially when an ideology has intolerance at its core.
- Golden Rule of Symmetry: Treat others the way you want to be treated.
- Silver Rule: Treat weaker states as you would want stronger states to deal with you (e.g., parents/children, freedom of speech and contradiction, thought police).
Creatives and artisans don’t just have skin, but soul in the game.
- A musician, like a guitar instructor, makes money as a side effect of their work. If ever told to prioritize money, the purpose is lost.
- Real entrepreneurs take societal risks on themselves personally, but the current system of “games” is not those heroics.
- The true value of building long-term, sustainable things is real entrepreneurship, not the mechanics of aiming for exits (a financing redistribution scheme).
Skillsets:
- Making things diverges from selling things.
- Putting your name on a hotel, product, or company attaches the virtue of your family name to the business. This is true skin in the game.
The problem with valuing every decision economically is that it assigns numeric values to unquantifiable purposes of life.
- Artisans, builders, and people skilled in specific tasks want to do those things.
- Their joy in existing and working is real.
- The ideal form of capitalism allows people to have their soul in the game and aligns that with economic value, elevating others. This is best achieved by decentralization.
Ethical decisions are always more robust than legal ones. Over time, the legal system should always converge to ethical standards.
- Legality ≠ ethics.
It is always convenient to promote “universality” and “assimilation” when in the majority.
History turned into religion often becomes more about game theory and control than belief or merit.
- Example: The Khazars chose Judaism because, in their context, it won in a face-off against Christianity and Islam.
- Islam spread due to conversion dynamics that allowed no flexibility, making it game-theoretically strong, following the early path of Christianity.
- Religions won not on the merit of belief but because of stubborn resistance to identity changes (“out-stubborning” others).
The more pagan a system is, the greater its ability to handle nuance and ambiguity.
- Literalist and purist religions cater to minds that cannot handle ambiguity, leading to mediocrity by definition.
- Religions function as systems of behavior and belief dictated by the intolerant.
Judaism and Conversion
- Loss of Judaism (as a universal religion) resulted from “mother rule” inheritance.
- Universal conversion explains the dominance of others.
- The USA works relatively well because of its accommodation of decentralization in federalism. Without it, it could have fragmented like European states have over centuries.
Books are banned because of a vocal minority of intolerant people. The majority don’t care, but they would rather succumb than fight back.
- Minority rule: Any small, extreme force (e.g., cyanide) creates death or stagnation. No variation is tolerated.
Most religions aim to be left alone.
- Sunni Salafi ideology, in contrast, seeks to impose its will on others. For example, requiring halal everywhere.
- Its creed is to unify state and religion even more rigidly than past Christian systems, with little development over time.
- Western tolerance cannot be applied to those who are fundamentally intolerant.
Wealth mobility in the U.S. is real.
- More than half of Americans will spend at least one year in the top 10%, even if they don’t stay there.
- Education (degrees) is increasingly a luxury good.
History is mostly peace, but people focus on the drama of wars.
- Who cares about reading 400 years of peace when compared to a 4-year war?
- This is the Pinker fallacy.
Actions should be done via negativa, not via positiva.
- Describe by what something is not.
- Reduce and refine—like chipping away at marble blocks to create Goliath.