Project Jacob

In the financial world, it is a reliable rule of thumb that the largest and most lucrative forms of arbitrage will be those that don't strike the average investor as being an arbitrage. If they did, they'd have been traded away already. So how would they be seen by the average person? Probably as just weird. The kind of thing that nobody thinks about very much, because it's too obscure. If they do turn their mind to it, they assume there must be some big reason that nobody else is doing this, even if they can't quite articulate what it might be.

So it is, I suspect, with society more broadly.

So with this in mind, before I get to the punch line, I want to start with a few assumptions, and see where we end up. If these sound like things you already know and agree with, please bear with me and keep reading – this is exactly the point. My aim is to show what possibilities flow from things we mostly agree on, because the conclusion might strike you as rather surprising if I started with it.

1. Genes matter a lot for individual traits, and individual traits define the society to a large degree

The first of Turkheimer's laws of behavioral genetics is that nearly everything is heritable to a significant degree. Overall political ideology has a significant genetic component – approaching 60%, by some estimates. The impact of WEIRDO political culture and the Hajnal line are just some of the many indications to this effect. A society is determined to a considerable degree by the distribution of who is living there. If reactionaries have more children, on average the future looks more reactionary.

2. Parenting, like all shared environment terms, matters much less than people think.

This is kind of a mish-mash of Turkheimer's second and third laws. Related to #1, people tend to significantly overestimate the effect of environment on outcomes, because they fail to control for genetics. I suspect that most readers of this august periodical are conversant in the findings of HBD, and one set of the most important is the twin studies. The general finding of most of them is that genetics matter a lot, and idiosyncratic environment matters a lot, but shared environment doesn’t matter very much for adult behavior. Once children can select their own environment upon reaching adulthood, the impact of shared environment drops a lot, often to almost zero. The environment that does matter is mostly idiosyncratic, which, frankly, we don’t really know what it is. Some combination of school peers, parasites, measurement error, etc. But most of what’s included in parenting is shared environment (school district, general attitude of parents), or gene-environment interactions. What matters most is who your parents are. How they parent seems to matter less than nearly everybody thinks. In most contexts, reactionaries are willing to embrace this idea.

3. Having more children is valuable, but very difficult to scale within the context of marriage

The injunction we are often told on the right is to marry and have children, as a means of propagating ourselves and our values. This is a very worthy enterprise, but one that is almost impossible to scale at an individual level. Unless your wife is young, there is a hard limit on how many children you can have. Unless you’re young yourself, finding a wife young enough to have many children is likely to be hard. Finding one willing and eager to do so is harder still. All of this is magnified if one lives in cities, where the cost of having many children is much higher. Bottom line – having more children yourself is important, but the impact that each of us can have in this respect is likely to be a drop in the ocean. The problem is simply one of scale. You and I could try to convince everyone in the west to have more kids, and that’s definitely worthwhile. But if we could convince everyone of whatever we wanted, we’d already be able to solve lots of problems. The issue is that convincing the populace of anything when one lacks power is very hard.

4. Even outside the context of marriage, having lots of children with lots of women is financially impossible for anyone with means, and generally promotes degeneracy.

The Bronze Age Pervert mindset, frequently joked about, is to take a group of elite Chads and send them out to impregnate thousands of hot teens. The problem, of course, is that if you do this, you end up with endless single mums and degeneracy, because you can’t marry more than one of the women you are impregnating. To make matters worse, the modern court system with ruinous child support makes this strategy catastrophically costly to anyone with any financial prospects whatsoever. The only people who can afford this strategy are those who are, as the lawyers say, “judgment proof” – they live on welfare and crime, so can’t be held to account for any child support payments, which makes them much more willing to impregnate lots of women. Because everything is heritable (see point 1), we end up with a significant expansion of the worst traits of criminality, low impulse control, and violent tendencies. This is dysgenics exemplified.

5. Subverting valuable but unguarded institutions is an important aim.

One of the genius moves of the left during the 20th century was to find resources that were important, but relatively unguarded, and take them over. Academia or the media, for instance. These were always decent jobs, but weren’t perceived as being quite as influential in the past as they later became. Fighting over things which everyone knows are important (e.g. Supreme Court nominations) is extraordinarily difficult. Subverting and taking over institutions which are important, but not yet realized to be important, is a much more promising strategy.

So far, so good.

So based on the above, the question is: as reactionaries, if we want to increase the number of children we have so as to propagate reactionary ideals, is there any way to do it that doesn’t involve getting crushed by the court system or increasing the amount of degeneracy in society? Is there an institution that we can subvert that will help us achieve this aim?

The answer is yes.

And the answer is shockingly simple.

Go to a sperm bank, and donate.

In evolutionary sperms, the unpopularity of sperm donation is simply mind-boggling. It is a colossal unguarded resource – the wombs of thousands of women, openly seeking to bear your children while you are legally shielded from any costs whatsoever of raising them. If humans were fitness maximizers, men should all be beating down the doors of these places to fight each other off. But we aren’t. We’re adaption executors instead, spending all our resources and energy into banging women (which evolutionarily would have produced lots of children) while simultaneously trying not to actually get those same women pregnant. Meanwhile sperm banks are just considered weird. The main people who go are idiot college students not really thinking about the consequences and just treating it like it’s an easy source of beer money. If reactionaries started going there en masse, we’d probably be a large component of the potential pool.

And it goes without saying that this project is enormously scalable. As the marketing goes, you can make a difference in the life of a family! What they don’t say, because it weirds people out, is that you’ll probably make a difference in the lives of dozens, if not hundreds of families. This becomes an enormous force multiplier to any group with small numbers.

Not only that, but this project is compatible even with a world view that thinks single motherhood is undesirable. The effect is not to increase the number of single mums in the world. Anyone going to the sperm bank has already made up their mind to have a child, whether it's a good idea or not. Unless the sperm banks get shut down, the change is entirely one in composition, not in number. The only question is whose children these women will be having, and what traits will these children have. Since everything is heritable (see law 1!), it's better if the children have reactionary fathers, than soy-boy loser fathers.

Moreover, this can be done alongside a traditional lifestyle oneself. Donate while young and single, or if your wife/girlfriend is okay with it. Doing it while single is probably easier – future wives may be uncomfortable with the idea, but if it is presented as a fait accompli, they’ll probably find a way to make peace with it, especially because it likely doesn’t impact very much in one’s day-to-day life. Then after that, get married and have your own children with your wife and raise them yourself, just as you were planning to before. Most young men masturbate for free. Instead, they could get paid to impregnate hundreds of women with almost no negative consequences to themselves. And yet almost nobody does. Go figure.

There are, however, at least two caveats worth mentioning (and probably more – these are the ones that came to my mind). First, in the age of genetic testing, it is increasingly unlikely that you will be able to maintain true anonymity to your donor children or their parents forever. Some places actually put any recipient adult in touch (anonymously) if they want to. Truthfully, this is probably better, as it’s preferable to have people email you than turn up at your office. There’s too many ways to track people down, from genetic tests to compiling scraps of information into endless google searches. If you go down this path, it’s worth trying to preserve anonymity with sensible steps (turn your 23andme to private, obviously). But you should assume that you may get some contact from the recipient mothers or their children, at least to some extent. Probably not a lot, and probably not most of them. But it’s worth assuming the worst. If this prospect is too uncomfortable to you, then it may not be a good idea. To me, the idea doesn’t seem that troubling, once I actually thought about it. Still, your mileage may vary.

Second, I imagine that some of you (maybe most of you, maybe all of you) will have ethical issues with the idea of having children that one doesn’t have contact with. This is a totally fair viewpoint. If one feels this way, particularly from a religious basis, then definitely don’t do it. But if one is less troubled by this aspect, then perhaps it’s not an insurmountable objection. There is certainly a strong qualified defense of the idea in the pragmatic angle – even if sperm banks should be shut down altogether as an abomination, in the world we live in, they’re not going to be. The main change we make is at the margin of what kind of children result. You might be tempted to wonder if your children will turn out badly because they won't have you there to raise them. But remember point 2! Parenting doesn't matter that much. Genetics do. Still, if one feels strongly that there is an ethical objection to the whole enterprise, then one might feel that this would be lending some kind of implicit support to it. Again, I don’t tend to feel as strongly on this point, but I imagine some of you probably will.

If you're thinking that this whole idea sounds really weird, it struck me as weird too when I first considered it, but it grew on me more and more as I thought about it. And the more it went on, it began to seem like it actually meets a large number of reactionary goals. The fact that it seems weird is exactly why it’s unguarded. Paul Graham once wrote a great essay about this in the context of startups. He said that the best startup ideas were the ones that sound bad, but were actually good. You don’t want the ones that sound good and are good – everyone is trying to do those ones, so you’ll have stacks of competition. But the ones that sound weird at first (turn your car into a gypsy cab! Let strangers stay in your house when you’re not there) but are actually really good are the absolute best prospects of all. I think this has the potential to be one of those. In the scheme of the trichotomy, this is much more techno-futurism than traditionalism – in family terms, it’s more neocameralism and less throne and altar. So be it. I think the ability to recognize these possibilities is one of the big advantages of neoreactionaries over paleoreactionaries.

More importantly, this might be the golden age in which to undertake this project. In another 5 or 10 years, we might get to the point where recipients get to select traits based on the full genome of the donor. To the extent that single women seeking donor sperm likely skew progressive, if they understood HBD, they might screen us out themselves. Right now, they can’t.

Even turning up for the initial tests is valuable – if it turns out your sperm count or motility is low and you can’t donate, this is almost certainly knowledge that you’d like to have so you can start trying to have children sooner.

I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong on this. But so far, it makes a disturbing amount of sense to me.

Narcissism and the Rise of Celebrity Culture

Narcissism is, as the Last Psychiatrist put it, the disease of our age.

But why this age, and not the ones before it? If we ended up in an age of trivia and self-centredness, how exactly did we get here?

A common theme through some of my recent writings is the idea that a lot of social and cultural problems may significantly stem from technological causes. It's not that the underlying human nature and cultural forces aren't important, of course. But technology opens up possibilities that weren't there before, for instance when it comes to immigration, birth rates, or sexual morality. As always, this isn't my theory on the whole story, or even necessarily the biggest part of the story. But it often makes up the part that goes most neglected, the assumption that gets taken for granted even though it's of very modern origin.

If you want to understand a society's values, look at who they venerate. Who do they hold up as examples of a life well-lived, as examples to emulate?

Like many aspects of culture, it is sometimes easier to understand this in past societies than your own. In your own time, the tawdry reality tends to get mixed up with the aspirational. 

Whom do we celebrate? Why, we celebrate geniuses like Nobel Prize winners!

Very well. Name me all the Nobel Prize winners you can, starting with a field that's not your area of professional employment. I'll wait.

Not so easy, is it? As it turns out, we celebrate the abstract idea of Nobel Prizes, but don't give two hoots about any of the winners. Your children are smart enough to tell the difference.

A necessary but insufficient condition of being celebrated is being known, being famous. It's possible to be infamous and hence not celebrated, like Hitler. But it's not possible to be celebrated and venerated, yet unknown.

The tawdry reality of who we actually celebrate is the list of people who appear on the cover of magazines in the supermarket. The aspiration of who we think we ought to celebrate is the people who appear on Google doodles. The overlap is the null set. Though I'll admit, it's possible to imagine some very odd scenario where Martin Luther King somehow manages to single-handedly fill out the middle of the Venn diagram.

Carlyle set up the National Portrait Gallery in London to inspire people with pictures of great men who did great things. I've written about this before, in both England and America. In the 19th century, you get Tennyson, Darwin, Browning, Wellington, Gordon, the whole deal. In the 20th century you get Sir Paul McCartney, Princess Diana and the Rolling Stones.

The most famous people today are entertainers. Actors and musicians, primarily. These are the pinnacle of adulation and interest. The young aspire to whatever is held up to have the highest status. You may scorn Kim Kardashian, but your daughter will be exposed to tales of her life nonetheless. She was the daughter of a lawyer who became famous for helping get a celebrity murderer off the hook, and she became more famous for releasing a celebrity sex tape, an idea that she wasn't even the first to come up with. What a joke, right? Except she ended up marrying one of the most famous rappers in the world. What lesson do you think the ten year old girls draw?

But you will not find any actors, or even many musicians, before the 20th century in the galleries. If you go back to Shakespeare's time, actors were considered a class barely above prostitutes. Disreputable phonies who pretend to be other people in order to get cheap applause from drunken idiots. The theatre was a necessary vice, a circus for the rubes. The people who wrote the plays may be celebrated, but the people who delivered them were considered beneath the dignity of polite society. You certainly wouldn't turn to them for guidance on the political goings of the day, as we absurdly do at the moment. Is it because we expect them to know anything about it? No, of course not. But we expect that the rubes will listen to them and follow, the way they do with high status people throughout history.

So how did actors suddenly change into world-bestriding celebrities?

Simple. Hollywood.

Not Hollywood as a cultural value. Hollywood as a technology to transmit moving pictures of actors to millions of people around the world. 

Before the age of movies and television, being an actor was profoundly unscalable. You could only get seen by however many people could fit into your auditorium. Which, around that time, also had unamplified sound. In other words, maybe a few hundred, tops. 

There is simply no way to create Brad Pitt in that environment. 

So actors were just performing a service. You turn up to see a play being performed by whatever troupe of ruffians happened to be in town at that time.

Of course, the written word back then was scalable, since the printing press. Hence why the authors of plays could become famous - the plays themselves could be printed and widely circulated. 

Something even more revealing is true of musicians. Without the phonograph, you needed to have lots of instruments to be heard by a large audience. An orchestra, in other words. As before, sheet music was scalable and could be sent around. So you got famous composers of orchestral music. Both parts are important. The composer got famous by having their name on the music, and the orchestra was needed to make sure that lots of people in the hall could hear without the possibility of speakers or microphones. Since this required large costs in people and equipment, it was limited to the elite, who were also the taste-makers. You did get folk music being spread around, from person to person, like modern memes. But in this case, the song became famous, and the composer became lost in the mists of time.

When the only scalable technology was the written word, the only way to become widely famous was either to write something, or do something sufficiently memorable that other people would write about it. 

Hence you got novels and poetry as celebrations of the written word. And you got military heroism and political leadership as gripping real-life narratives that could be written about in newspapers.

Of all the essays in Carlyle's excellent "Latter-Day Pamphlets", the one that seemed most alien to the modern world is "Stump-Orator". In it, Carlyle presents as an obvious fact of the age that the highest-praised skill was to be able to write and speak well.

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,—this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.

Do you, dear reader, look at the world today and think that the most celebrated talent in the modern world is eloquence of speech? It seems almost unbelievable today, but that was once true.

And it bears emphasizing - while it may seem incredible given the degeneracy that was to come, Carlyle was writing this in order to bemoan the fact that celebrating speech in his time was coming at the expense of celebrating action and achievement.

I am glad for his sake that he did not live to see Paris Hilton. 

The first shift towards the Kardashian-isation of our society came with the photograph. Instead of writing well, people were noted for being good-looking. Without photographs, the only way to gain from good looks was from people who could see you personally, or the very expensive and unscalable technology of painted portraits. 

Early photographs were slow to take, which meant that people had to be sitting posed for long periods. Hence photographs could convey beauty, but not story or excitement. You could not, for instance, get disturbing but famous photos like this one, or this one (both redacted, since my sister told me last time she found the latter one distressing when it appeared unannounced on my blog).

But with better photographs, and certainly with movies and video, the returns to being attractive, as opposed to eloquent, skyrocketed. Hence the rise of beautiful actresses and actors. Their entertainment role was able to attract more scalable celebrity, and their beauty became a bigger part of their job description.

Meanwhile, because people are lazy, watching and listening to people talk and act had more mass appeal than reading their words, and preserved more of the drama. Actors drove out authors in the celebrity stakes.

Similarly with music, the spread of records meant that the performer could also be widely known. And the ability to amplify sound meant that you needed far fewer musicians per performance.

Hence the Beatles and James Dean, where once you had Beethoven and Samuel Johnson. Even supposing that Carlyle was right about the degeneracy of the written word, it took a lot more genuine talent than what was to come.

And so we ended up with the cult of entertainer celebrity, rather than famous deeds. The pinnacles of social status are actors and musicians. 

And I suspect, though I can't prove it, that this had a profound psychological effect.

At a certain point, especially in the age of the internet, the process degenerates even further. You don't have to have done anything. You just have to be good looking and have lots of people pay attention to you. 

It becomes enough to just be famous for being famous. Kim Kardashian is just the end point of the logic. In the age of the internet, this is often achieved seemingly at random, as things go viral. It's like the lottery of social attention, further reinforcing the perception that fame does not come from deserved deeds.

And technology has greatly refined the measure of celebrity. The modern National Portrait Gallery is instagram. It isn't required to be a portrait gallery, as opposed to a general photography gallery, since in principle people can post anything. But it ended up that way nonetheless.

A girl's instagram feed is often immensely revealing about her. Presumably a man's is too, but honestly, what kind of man is on instagram? 

The instagram feed reveals what the person loves. 

And the main categories, in ascending order of pathology, seem to be

-Cute animals

-Food

-Self-indulgent travel

and most of all

-Themselves.

The selfie is the most quintessential marker of the modern era. I am both the subject, the artist, and the consumer. A photo of me, taken by me, repeated endlessly in trivially different settings, which brings me great delight, and which I post to social media in order to get attention. Me, as the literal centre of the photographic universe.

It is the cult of celebrity, but democratised.

The results are exactly as unedifying as you would expect.

Bitcoin and the Inscrutability of Wealth

Well, it’s been about 6 months since my last Bitcoin post. I think what I wrote back in May stands up pretty well so far. Certainly the price has gone up like crazy, and my modest wager has so far paid off quite handsomely. The tendency towards the disposition effect beats in most human breasts – it is hard to continue to hold your gains as they keep rising, and psychology will push you towards wanting to cash out.

Of course, in this instance it might actually be wise to cash out now – it’s hard to know. My earlier rationale, in broad terms, was that I felt I had figured out why Bitcoin “worked”, and most people hadn’t yet – but they would in time. Well, the number of people who’ve figured out something certainly has gone up an enormous amount since then. One can disagree wildly on what exactly they’ve learned – I suspect a lot have just learned that Bitcoin will go up forever, which seems unlikely. In any case, the number of people still to figure it out has to be smaller than it was back in May. Even if Bitcoin does turn out to be valuable in the long term, this doesn’t mean it’s not facing a crash in the interim. In other words, Bitcoin might end up being Amazon, but you might also be living in the equivalent of November 1999.

I don’t know how to weight these two assessments. At the moment, the deciding factor for me is the influence of long-term vs short-term capital gains taxes. Not really knowing when to call it quits, I’m currently waiting until May or the price goes back to zero, whichever comes first.

But I have been thinking about the question of what makes things valuable, and what this portends for the future of Bitcoin.

In Patrick Wyman’s excellent “Fall of Rome” podcast series, at some point Wyman notes something very interesting about the Roman economy. In his words, the Roman economy was “monetised". This was something that distinguished it both from all the societies that had come before, and most of those that would come afterwards until at least the middle ages.

One way of thinking about monetisation is that people transacted widely in money, instead of just using a barter system. This is true, and important, but it’s not the psychologically most interesting part.

When money becomes used enough for transactions, a subtle shift takes place in terms of how people think about it.

The first step is that people start using money as a denominator of wealth when trading off economic decisions. Wyman describes how rich Roman aristocrats who owned villas and productive lands would begin to make choices based on what would maximize their amount of money – thinking about labor costs in terms of money, thinking about different crop yields and market prices in terms of money, etc.

This may seem obvious to us now, but again, that’s because we take money for granted. This process assuredly would not be so obvious if you lived in a barter economy. You can exchange a certain number of chickens for a certain number of bags of rice, or a certain number of horseshoes or whatever. To trade off the economic costs and benefits in a production process, you need to first convert everything to a given numeraire good, and then keep track of all the prices of inputs and outputs in terms of that good. But would it occur to you to arbitrarily evaluate everything on your farm in terms of horseshoes, and then keep track of horseshoe-prices for every good at each point to make sure you’re trading off things correctly? You might think it would, but I’m not nearly so sure. Yet when you’re already used to thinking in terms of money, it’s a much more natural step to take.

Once this process of trading off benefits and costs in terms of money has been going on for a while, an even more subtle transformation begins to take place, and one with wide-reaching implications. At a certain point, money stops being merely a unit of measuring wealth, and begins to be thought of as the wealth itself. In Rome, this was a quite radical shift. Because up to that point, land was the only real measure of wealth. Moreover, land was something one didn’t buy and sell, it was something that was held over generations. The idea that land might be a commodity that one bought and sold with money is yet one more idea that we take for granted that most humans in history would have viewed as crazy. Even now you see the legacy of this view, with people who think that housing wealth is somehow "real" and "reliable" in a way that other assets aren't.

And you can see that people’s willingness to hold money is radically different if they think of it as a) tokens that you can use to get stuff, vs b) the actual measure of wealth. In the former, an increase in money makes you nervous – you have to get rid of it to transfer it to the actual store of wealth or consumption. In the latter, it just makes you happy – money can always be reliably exchanged for stuff, so if you get more money, great, just hang on to it until you need to spend it.

This latter process is something that I think operates much more widely than just in money. I think something similar has been at play regarding the role of equities over the centuries. Again, nobody thinks of it now. But these days, equities are also wealth. This is opposed to equities being a series of tokens that you hold for a short period, hoping it will go up and then you can convert it into the real measure of wealth.

And this was not always the case. If you look back to 19^th and even early 20^th centuries, equities were mostly considered by prudent investment advisors to be “not even an investment”. Rather, they were just gambling and speculation and nonsense. Safe bonds were an investment. Real estate was an investment. Stocks, however, were speculation. And with speculative assets, you don’t want to hold them long term. You want to hold them for a bit, then ditch them. Now, it’s commonplace for people to leave their retirement assets in equities, and just plan to sell them when and if they need the money. This is what you do, when you view an asset as inherently being wealth, rather than just being a means to wealth.

The rise of “equities as wealth” has been mirrored in a massive rise in the number of equity securities. Most people don’t know it, but  the importance of equities was tiny for a lot of the 19th century. In 1815, the number of shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange was… 8. That’s right, 8, total. There were far more shares listed in Amsterdam or London around the time of the South Sea Bubble, and indeed there were more shares listed when the NYSE first got started in 1792 - the number actually declined by 1815. Partly, equities had just gone out of fashion during this whole period, after the collapse of the South Sea bubble around 1720. Bonds were the instrument of choice to trade and hold. Equities just weren’t interesting to people, and weren’t where they stored most of their wealth.

I think this kind of psychology is especially important for impacting price movements. The more people are willing to hold an asset long term, the higher its price will be, and the more stable its price will be. A willingness to hold long-term adds a large amount of permanent demand for the asset that doesn’t budge much with news. This is much more likely to result in sustained high prices than a view that any price rises should be considered as merely a sign that you have more tokens to convert to the “real wealth”, because the tokens themselves are not sufficiently reliable.

And I think something similar is playing out, to an uncertain conclusion, with Bitcoin.

To wit, people’s beliefs about the question I opened this essay with are likely to be very important for what happens next as the price of Bitcoin continues to rise. In other words, is Bitcoin inherently wealth? Or is Bitcoin merely a means to wealth? Put differently, if I hold a decent amount of Bitcoin and the price rises, do I need to convert it to some other asset? Or should I only sell it if I plan to spend the money?

There is always a question of portfolio rebalancing, but that’s not the whole issue. You will find no shortage of people who own huge real estate holdings that they lease out. To them, the real estate is wealth – if it rises in price, they don’t inherently feel the need to sell some of their properties. The question is, will the same psychology hold for Bitcoin?

In some sense, this gets to the question of “if you sold it, and you weren’t planning on spending the money, what other asset would you buy, absent a specific forecast of short term price movements in that asset?”. That other asset is what you think of as wealth. This contrast becomes especially stark if you think that selling bitcoin and putting the money in gold is a potentially sensible idea, since gold is a “safe asset”. As I’ve argued, in terms of fundamentals, Bitcoin is gold. The difference is only jewellery and psychology, with the latter being more important in my opinion. Gold has the considerable advantage that everybody has a relatively fixed idea of what it is and has a general sense that it's valuable, so it's unlikely to revert back to jewellery-only value. In addition, the big holders of it (central banks) are long-term, stable holders, so the price isn't crazily volatile. 

And strangely enough, this question is probably one of the big risks of Bitcoin today. I think the time-series here is very different from equities, where I suspect over the years people got gradually more used to holding the asset, and then viewed it as inherent wealth, which made prices and realized returns high during the latter half of the 20^th century.

Instead, I suspect that many of the initial holders of Bitcoin did view it as wealth – they planned to hold it for a very long time, if not indefinitely. But I strongly suspect that most of the people who have been piling into Bitcoin in the past 6 months aren’t thinking of it the same way. They are much more likely to view it as an instrument to wealth, a way to make a quick buck in the short term. And when something is merely an instrument to wealth, add in the disposition effect and suddenly you’ve got a lot of instability baked in. People have a base view that the price will keep going up, but they also have a nervous impulse to sell, and a vague feeling that the price rise can’t last forever. That makes crash risk higher.

In other words, I think that an important metric of whether Bitcoin is ultimately likely to succeed as a long term asset is whether it is viewed as wealth on its own. Whether, in other words, people are comfortable with the idea that a large fraction of their savings is in Bitcoin, and they’ll only sell it when they need the money.

This can happen to assets where it didn’t used to be true – again, look at equities, or before that, gold coins. Will it? Your guess is as good as mine. But as the number of people still to be exposed to the idea of Bitcoin gets smaller and smaller, I suspect this will increasingly become the first-order question as to what happens next.

The economist's case for at least agnosticism about Bitcoin

As far as I can tell, the primary problem with Bitcoin is that after you've bought it, you become medically incapable of shutting the @#$% up about Bitcoin. So it goes.

It took me a long time to buy any bitcoin, but I should have done it about three years ago. This isn't cheap talk, by the way. I know exactly why I should have bought it back then, based on the knowledge I had at the time (which is the only criterion by which you ought to regret any decision). To wit: I considered myself a Bitcoin agnostic. This made me more optimistic than perhaps 99% of finance people I spoke to. But then again, 99% of finance people I spoke to also couldn't easily explain why Bitcoin existed in the first place. 3 years later, all of the above is still true, but I finally got off my butt and did something about it, albeit after an enormously costly delay.

The standard economics textbook description of money says that it tends to arise because it helps facilitate exchange. If we need to barter goods with each other, it's hard for me as a blacksmith to obtain wheat unless I can find a wheat farmer who also coincidentally needs blacksmithing services. But if I can exchange my blacksmithing services for some asset money (as yet undefined as to what that is) and then turn the money into wheat down the line, this greatly allows us to trade more and grow the economy. So far so good. But what exactly makes something money?

The standard economics textbook definition of money says that it has to fulfill 3 purposes, namely

#1. It has to be a unit of account - a way of measuring how much of something you have

#2. It has to be a medium of exchange - a means for people to transact amongst each other and exchange goods and services indirectly, rather than directly through barter

#3. It has to be a store of value - that is, have some worth derived from an alternative use other than the monetary aspect itself, to ensure that people will be willing to hold it.

Under this standard narrative, bitcoin fails. #1 is fairly easy to meet, but bitcoin's big strength is in #2, which it passes with flying colours. Importantly, however, it fails badly on #3. Digital bits have no inherent value, and no external use to make them a store of value. Ergo, it should have no value above zero, and anything else is a bubble about to collapse. So goes the standard story.

Gold originally fulfilled all three purposes. You could weigh it, and trade accordingly. Turning gold into gold coins helped with 1 and 2, so drove out raw gold. It was easier to transact and measure in coins. Of course, the problem with coins is that they could get filed away at the edges to steal some of the gold, but still be worth approximately one coin. So eventually the coins got replaced with pieces of paper that were claims on gold in a government vault. At the start, you could actually make the conversion. Then conversion became increasingly a fiction, before FDR decided to do away with the pretense of convertibility, suspending the conversion and limiting the ability of private individuals to hold gold.

 At this point, you may be wondering how US dollars continue to meet the 3 definitions above. After all, they kept being used as money, and economists didn't all seem in a raging hurry to update their definitions. So the standard answer is that the 'store of value' aspect is that the government, who has guns, will accept USD as a means of paying taxes (and indeed demands that form). Because they have a guaranteed value for that, they have a guaranteed value for everything else.

To me, this seems to have a definite flavour of ex-post rationalisation. My hunch is that if you asked people 100 years ago whether they would still be equally willing to hold dollars if they were backed by nothing at all, they would have answered strongly in the negative. In the end, they were prohibited from switching into gold at the time, so it was a moot point. But what about now, when they could switch? I highly doubt that many people today would explicitly state that they're willing to hold dollars because they can pay their taxes in them. 100 years ago, they probably would have laughed you out of the room.

The economists are right in a narrow sense, of course (as they often are). Bitcoin does indeed fail as a store of value, and, technically, the dollar does not.

And yet, here is some evidence that ought give you pause, assuming you're not an economist in the midst of full-blown cognitive-dissonance-induced denial:

This is Bitcoin today, stubbornly refusing to prove economists right by ceasing to exist. As a matter of fact, since the coinbase time series starts in January 2013, it's up some 19,000% or so.

Don't look at the graph and ask if you think it's about to drop. Look at the graph and ask how much it would have to drop to get to where it was in 2013 (let alone 2009).

At a certain point, it seems prudent to at least consider the possibility that there might be something going on here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones? Or at a minimum, ask the following question - what level of future growth would you need to see to change your mind? Another 100%? Another 1000%? Can we agree on it now, so that if it eventually happens, you might reconsider the question?

The null hypothesis here is not in much doubt. Bitcoin is a bubble, and will eventually collapse.

Actually, the true null hypothesis is a little more specific, at least if you believe standard economics. Bitcoin should have a price of zero. It has no value except as a currency, and it is worthless as a currency.

So what is the alternative hypothesis?

The alternative hypothesis is that Bitcoin is likely to stay at a non-zero value for quite a long time, if not indefinitely, and moreover may end up being worth a lot. That may sound woolly and hand-wavy, so let me explain.

First off, how many things can you name that truly have a value of zero?

It's surprisingly hard. If you don't believe me, here's a photo of cans of air from the top of Mount Fuji selling for ¥500

And things like rubbish or nuclear waste have definitively negative prices - you have to pay to get rid of them. They're still not exactly zero.

The point is that "fundamental value" is a concept that, in my opinion, creates at least as much confusion as it dispels.

The primary value of an asset today is what you think someone will pay for it tomorrow. If they can use the asset for some external purpose, and you have a guide to what that external purpose is likely to be worth to them, you have a guide to what it will be trading at tomorrow. But that's all it is. If you have some other way of estimating what people will pay for the asset tomorrow, then you don't need the intermediate heuristic of fundamental value. (This is especially true for assets which don't directly produce cash flows - for ones that do, there's a better case that you should just value the cash flows, but even then, you still need to know tomorrow's willingness to pay unless you're able to hold the asset to infinity to collect all the future cash flows).

So in that case, what should Bitcoin be worth? Whatever people are willing to buy it for tomorrow. And what number is that? Well, that's the rub. But at least we know the right question to ask now.

As a consequence, we can begin to formulate an alternative definition of requirement #3 for money that we started with. Specifically:

#3A - If you accept the asset today in exchange for giving up valuable goods or services, you have to have a very strong belief that you will be able to exchange said asset tomorrow for someone else's goods and services, and receive approximately the same value as what you exchanged today.

Viewed from this angle, we can see that requirement #3A is at heart a co-ordination problem. Once we all agree on something being money, it becomes money. More importantly, we can see why people mistakenly viewed #3 as being the requirement. In essence, being a store of value is one way of solving the co-ordination problem. If it's common knowledge that some people will be willing to accept gold because it's useful for jewellery, most people who don't value it for jewellery are nonetheless willing to hold it.

But this isn't a strict requirement. Once the belief is established, it becomes self-fulfilling. When you accept US dollars, you aren't doing the iterations and thinking that it will eventually be exchangeable for taxes. You're just accepting it because you can buy your groceries with it tomorrow. Now, in the long run, it's true that if the US government collapses, you don't want to be holding US dollars, so in that sense the economists are right. But this is a long way from most people's actual calculation.

In the case of Bitcoin, a belief that Bitcoin will retain some value tomorrow can justifiably be sustained as long as I know that there's a decent number of drug dealers and corrupt Chinese officials who want to hold Bitcoin because it's (sort-of) anonymous and can be easily taken out of the country when the porridge hits the propeller. But in the short run, I hold Bitcoin because I think that people tomorrow will hold Bitcoin.

In fact, it's stronger than that. Like a classic bubble, people actually believe that more people will want to purchase bitcoin tomorrow, and at higher prices. In other words, the supply is fixed, and the more the price goes up, the more people begin to think "Huh, maybe I should hold at least a few grand worth of Bitcoin, just in case." If more people begin to think that, the price will indeed keep rising. Of course it can't rise like that forever.

But even if you think of Bitcoin as a bubble, it behooves you to notice something rather different about it from most bubbles, like the tech boom. In the case of Bitcoin, it seems to me from anecdotal experience that many, if not most, of the people buying bitcoin today are planning to hold it for a long time, if not forever. And this is definitively not true for most bubbles. People generally ride bubbles planning to get out once it's gone up enough, then go back to holding cash, or houses, or whatever. If that's what most people are thinking, the belief structure becomes very unstable, as any dip in price suddenly might cause a lot of people to switch to selling. Even if Bitcoin is a bubble, if most of its adherents plan to hold onto it for a long time, regardless of current price levels, then this reduces the likelihood of a complete collapse when everyone rushes for the exits.

In other words, even if this is a bubble, it may be a surprisingly durable one.

And the reason that "bubble" here is not necessarily a pejorative term is a point made by Moldbug - that money is the bubble that doesn't have to pop. In other words, there will be at least one good that is held in excess of its demand for other uses, because of its use for transactional purposes.

It may seem strange to reference Moldbug, since he comes out as a skeptic, based on his guess that the government will outlaw it.

But there is a counter-argument to that - the Uber problem. Namely, the government has a limited amount of time in which it can easily ban Bitcoin. The reason is that as the price gets high enough, enough people have enough to lose that it becomes politically costly to ban it. And so at some point, you get a compromise answer, like Coinbase seems to have done - you have to submit ID, it's linked to your bank account, and you have to give a social security number. The US Government levels capital gains taxes, everyone is happy. Why ban something if you can make more money by taxing it instead?

Because there is one rhetorical claim about Bitcoin made by its proponents that I think has caused more confusion than any other. It was this realisation that made me change my mind and invest in it. (Which, to emphasise, I'm not encouraging you to do. I'm some stranger talking smack on the internet, and this is not financial advice. But still)

It is this:

Bitcoin is not going to be a substitute for the dollar.

Bitcoin is going to be a substitute for gold.

Which is to say, the reserve asset that you hold in some amount as a hedge against the @#$% hitting the fan. This is of course, mid-level @#% hitting the fan, such as large-scale financial instability - if things really get hairy, the only worthwhile assets will be guns, ammunition, antibiotics, water purification tablets, and that kind of thing. But again, the same holds true for gold. If you honestly think that in a post apocalyptic New York there's going to be a vibrant demand for gold for jewellery purposes, perhaps you would do better investing your savings in shares in the Brooklyn Bridge.

Put another way, the case for Bitcoin in concise terms is that Bitcoin is to gold what neocameralism is to monarchy.

That is to say, it's what you get if you took an old but existing arrangement, and instead of trying to mimic it exactly, you thought about how you would design a modern version of it that a) retained the essential strengths while b) utilising technological innovation since the early form to overcome its weaknesses. (Some thoughts of mine on the neocameralism vs monarchy comparison are here).

In the view of Bitcoin, the essential aspect of gold is its relatively fixed supply. So let's go one better, and make a mathematically fixed supply. Rather than gold coins, let's create highly divisible bitcoins that can be traded across borders costlessly. Rather than measure purity over and over, let's create a blockchain to solve the problem of double-spending and transactions between mutually suspicious parties. Meanwhile, the fact that it can be mined by anyone easily at first, but only with more difficulty later, encouraged people to get in on the action early.

If you thought an essential aspect of gold was its value in jewellery, then you'd be a skeptic.

Rather, the other essential aspect of bitcoin was its first-mover advantage. Sure, someone else might invent other coins (and they have), but because Bitcoin was the first to market, it already has the advantage of incumbency. And in a co-ordination game, that's a huge deal.

And I think phrasing the question this way to economists helps to clarify the issue. In other words, if you're a Bitcoin skeptic and think its a bubble that's inevitably going to burst, I would ask you: is gold a bubble? This is harder to prove than in the case of Bitcoin, because it does have a fundamental value from other uses, so its value shouldn't go to zero. As a consequence, evaluating whether it's a bubble is much more thorny and more subjective. But it seems pretty clear to me that central banks aren't holding gold because they're about to turn their bullion into wedding rings. As Moldbug points out, in 2011 gold reserves were 50 times annual production. For silver, they were twice annual production. Assuredly there is something unusual about people's desire to invest in gold. So if you think that this is creating excess demand, surely this is pushing up the price, no? Supply is pretty fixed in at least the short term, if not the medium term too. And isn't excess demand pushing up prices the definition of a bubble? The point, of course, is that with gold this state of affairs has persisted for an extraordinarily long time. Is there any particular reason to assume that gold is about to disappear as a hedge asset? Not to me.

But I know my economist friends well, and I know their objection to the above reasoning, which makes Bitcoin different from gold. Which is to say, without a fundamental source of value other than as a money-like good, isn't the whole thing liable to unravel really quickly? Put differently, you and I might be willing to hold Bitcoin because we assume that there's reserve demand from Chinese officials and drug dealers, but why are the Chinese officials and drug dealers themselves willing to hold it?

This is another way of saying, why don't we all iterate backwards and realise that without an ultimate holder of the good from some other source, the value to everyone should be zero? Suppose we have a game where if we co-ordinate on a good being money, it gives value to both of us, but in the final round whoever is holding it ends up with a worthless asset.

If the game is finitely repeated, the economists are absolutely right. If everyone correctly performs backward induction, you'd predict a) Bitcoin should never have a positive value to begin with, and b) even if it does, this should be rather fragile. If it's an infinitely repeated game, then the Nash Equilibrium has more possibilities, as it usually does. In this case, if there is no final period, then it seems more like a straight one-shot co-ordination game where if we both agree, we both benefit. But let's take the finitely repeated version with a penalty for holding in the last round, as the logic is stricter there. And the logic dictates that since no-one is willing to hold in the last round, they don't want to hold in the second last either, and so on.

But here is the trillion dollar question - how much do people actually perform backward induction? And if they don't, how should you act in response?

The classic version of this is the iterated Prisoner's dilemma. Suppose two people are playing against each other 100 times in a row. The economist's answer is that if we're only playing a finite number of times, there's only one Nash Equilibrium to this game. We both defect in the last round. Knowing this, we both defect in the second last round, and the third last round, and thus in all rounds.

And yet... people don't. They routinely co-operate, and only begin defecting towards the end. This is why tit-for-tat works so well in practice. Because most people don't actually do backwards induction for more than a few iterations. This is why they don't start defecting until close to the end.

And bear in mind that, unlike Prisoner's Dilemma, Bitcoin is a co-ordination game, meaning it actually is a Nash Equilibrium for us all to believe in Bitcoin, at least in the one shot version. In the case of Prisoner's Dilemma, you can mathematically prove that people aren't acting rationally, and yet they still do it just the same. Here, it at least can be rational.

Now, bear in mind, the economists aren't wrong on the bigger picture - it still might collapse, for all the reasons they say. But that's not the same as saying that it has to collapse. I would guess, rather, that the opposite is likely to be true. The longer it goes without collapsing, the stronger the self-fulfilling aspect of the belief becomes, and the more stable it becomes.

Mainstream economists and finance types are looking at Bitcoin continuing to rise in price, yelling that this is a stupid and unstable equilibrium and that people should all start defecting immediately.

This is just like the economist watching two people play prisoner's dilemma and continue to co-operate round after round. You can laugh and call them morons, but a betting market just opened up. It's round 43 of 100. They both co-operated last round. Rubber to the road, what would you bet they're going to do this time?

After eight years of people continuing to not defect in Bitcoin, perhaps, dear economist, it's time to re-examine your assumptions.

Updated: On the other hand, if you wanted to make a concise case for a bubble, just check out some of the bizarre creations down at the lower market cap end of the cryptocurrency list. $10 million of FedoraCoin, you say? It's woefully underperforming PepeCash at $13 million. Hmm.

The technology-dependence of sexual morality

From the distance of the present, especially for young people, the sexual morality of the past seems very odd. 

In particular, the idea of very strong and widespread norms against sex outside of marriage is something that is hard to actually conceive of.

Progressives find the idea repugnant, and can't imagine why anyone would ever have supported it.

Conservatives and reactionaries can be on board with the idea, but still, it actually stretches the imagination to think of what it would be like for everyone in Europe to agree with the idea.

But this is mostly a failure of imagination, albeit an understandable one.

What would be the minimum number of changes necessary in society that would reverse the change entirely?

You could rout all the current progressive institutions, and replace them with Islam, or the Catholic Church of 100 years ago, but these are not really minimalist changes. We want a societal Rube Goldberg machine, where we set off small changes somewhere else that get us the same outcome. 

There's an assumption buried there that the change might be reversible, of course, and perhaps it isn't.

But if it is, a good starting point is the set of things that might explain why the old regime got replaced by the new.

My suggestion - to understand pre 20th Century sexual morality, all you need to do is imagine a world without any good contraceptives, abortion, or birth control in general.

Which, by the way, was what it was like.

You can talk about the pullout method, or the rhythm method. But do you think these are going to be reliable for a teenage boy having a dalliance for the first time with a maid? Probably not.

And as soon as you do that, suddenly everything becomes obvious. 

Take away contraceptives, and sex leads to pregnancy with high likelihood. Take away reliable abortion, and everyone, rich or poor, has to deal with the the child. Take away modern wealth levels and the welfare state, and an unplanned child for a single woman is a catastrophe.

How would you, enlightened progressive, feel about your 14 year old daughter sleeping with her boyfriend if it meant a good chance of getting pregnant and needing to have the child? 

Suddenly the patriarchy doesn't seem like such a silly idea now, does it? Suddenly 'sex positive' messages to teenagers don't seem like society's number one priority, no?

But to reactionaries, the depressing flip side is also true.

Namely, if the absence of birth control was the the basis for monogamy and chastity before marriage as social norms, it's probably going to be quite hard to put that toothpaste back in the tube. You can't uninvent condoms or the pill.

This is like mass immigration - a social problem that's really a technological problem. 

So I predict that our current sexual free-for-all will go on at least until society degenerates to the point that it can't produce contraceptives anymore, at which point barbarism will restore chastity before marriage.

On the plus side, when this happens, it will also simultaneously solve the most difficult problem of our times, convincing rich, educated, civilised people to have more children. 

Give people the choice, and they will hack their own evolutionary reward systems and have a lot more sex and a lot fewer children.

Like Prometheus, we have stolen fire from the gods.

Like Prometheus, we cannot give it back.

Of Speech Exclusion and Tariff Wars

In the context of the Strangeloop contretemps, it is worth being clear about what the aim is (in my view).

I think it is a rhetorical mistake to call the aim here 'free speech', because this tends to get used to describe a number of disparate concepts. In particular, people have a tendency to mentally substitute the phrase 'free speech' for 'first amendment' or 'no government restriction on speech'. This is indeed one form (and a necessary condition), but not the main thing at stake here in modern America.

I prefer to describe the principle here as Thick Liberty of Speech. The basic aim is thus:

I want everybody to suffer as few negative practical consequences as possible for saying what they think.

Because when the adverse consequences are low, people have a real, practical ability to actually say what they think. That's the thick liberty part. By contrast, thin liberty is being theoretically or legally able to say what you think, although the price for doing so may be considerable.

You and I have the thin liberty to own a Ferrari. Elon Musk has the thick liberty to own a Ferrari.

'Freedom of speech', at least in the form of 'no legal restrictions on speech', is fairly easy to identify. Either you go to prison for saying things, or you do not. Thick liberty of speech, however, is more an aim, a statement of principle that puts social actions on a continuum.

In part this stems from the question of what negative practical consequences are under consideration. These can include a range of possible things, ranging from:
-Not associating with the person socially
-Not doing business with the person
-Firing them from their job
-Assaulting the person
-Imprisoning the person under a relevant statute
etc.

Below this is the pure speech remedy - just calling them an asshole.

Let's describe speech that doesn't directly advocate any particular action as 'bare speech'.

From this point, we can start to see what's obnoxious about the Moldbug case, the Dickinson case, and the Eich case.

A speech exclusionist is someone who reacts to bare speech that is perceived as undesirable by performing and advocating negative social consequences for the speaker.

A speech inclusionist is thus the opposite - someone who does not escalate a disagreement on bare speech to an insistence to retaliatory actions.

The reason I think this distinction is important is that it helps clarify what's wrong with a certain view of this type of disagreement.

Over at the discussion on Hacker News, the reprehensible Steve Klabnik showed up to defend his actions thus:

"As has been said many times in this thread, Yarvin is free to say what he believes, and I am free to say what I believe, and organizers are allowed to do what they want. This is how a free market of ideas is supposed to work."

But we're now in a position to see that the two types of speech are fundamentally different.

Moldbug's writings are classic bare speech: discussions of esoteric political theory. By contrast, Alex Payne and Steve Klabnik's were explicitly speech exclusionism. They advocated responding to bare speech with action.

So what's wrong with speech exclusionism?

Well, on twitter, Mr Klabnik was gracious enough to drop the pretense of 'speech, glorious speech!' and tell us himself:

Reader, I cannot think of a more concise statement of the path to totalitarianism than 'everything is political'.

Do you want to live in a world where every decision you make is political? You were about to go to the store to buy some milk, but then you remembered you had to check whether the 7-11 owner had donated to Obama campaign. You pulled out of your bird-watching group because there was a man there who was known to have attended a tea-party rally, even though he never mentioned it and the whole discussion in the group was only ever about birds. You made sure a subordinate didn't get the promotion he might otherwise deserve because he had a 'I support Hillary' bumper sticker.

That social arrangement has existed before. It did not end well.

I personally find this idea repulsive and insidious. There is more to life than politics. It is only monomaniacial fanatics like Steve Klabnik who think otherwise.

These examples are chosen deliberately, as nearly every one of the @$$holes advocating speech exclusion is doing so over political ideas. Big surprise, several of them are explicitly and openly communist. There are some minor aspects of exclusion that are probably inevitable - if you really hate somebody's guys, it's a stretch to insist that you have to invite them to your dinner party. But to respond to abstract political arguments by trying to get people fired is repugnant and unworthy of free-born citizens.

How should one respond to speech exclusion?

Supposing one opposes it, it is always appropriate to respond with bare speech. Steve Klabnik is a reprehensible worm who deserves to find out first-hand the joys of life under communism, ideally its brutal Stalinist versions.

But what else? In particular, is it reasonable to advocate exlusionism for those who themselves demand exclusion of others?

Here's where it gets tricky.

To me, the problem resembles that of tariffs. We'd prefer a world where nobody had any tariffs. But we don't get to directly determine other people's tariff policies, only our own.

If our trading partners are reasonable and can see the merit of trade in general, we can negotiate co-ordinated tariff reductions via a free trade agreement. But maybe they're mercantilists, and they think that tariffs are actually helping them. In other words, they're willing to have our tariffs at moderate levels as long as they can keep their own.

Sometimes, you can create change by a unilateral reduction in tariffs. Industry gets competitive, and you perhaps provide a moral example to others. Brendan Eich advocates this strategy:

In the language of the prisoners dilemma, Eich is always co-operating. Which is very noble, except that the thugs are always defecting, and this doesn't always provide a great incentive for them to change. Hey, I can exclude Brendan Eich and he'll actively dissuade others from excluding me back - score! In other news, Australia unilaterally got rid of its agricultural tariffs decades ago. If you see signs of the US Farm Bill and the EU Common Agricultural Policy disappearing any time soon, you have sharper eyes than I do.

Sometimes, what is needed are punitive tariffs. Under various free trade agreements, a breach of the rules by one party raising tariffs can be punished by a targeted punitive tariff arrangement from the counterparty until the original breach is rectified. Typically, these are designed to hurt one foreign industry at a time by large increases in tariffs that cut off the export market of the target ted firms.

To a game theorist, this is immediately recognizable as a version of tit-for-tat, appropriately adjusted for the slightly different context.

In other words, targeted exclusion of speech exclusionists, if done right, need not be either hypocritical or impractical. It's not ideal, but sometimes one has to use the tools that might work.

There are a couple of aspects here that are worth mentioning.

Firstly, it's very important that the other party be clearly and explicitly given a way out by permanently renouncing their earlier exclusionary demands. The aim here is to get rid of speech exclusionism overall - in other words, an ultimate reduction in overall tariffs, not an ongoing escalating trade war. As a result, if people like Klabnik drop their thuggish attitude and sincerely apologize, they should be accepted back into polite society. It's easy to forget the importance of carrots as well as sticks in this arrangement. David Cole makes the point about the effectiveness of this when discussing the way Jewish groups fight against Holocaust denial and revisionism

After I was “exposed” as David Cole in 2013, the “punishment and reward” thing showed itself in full force. Some members of Gary Sinise’s Hollywood conservative “Friends of Abe” group offered “rehabilitation” if I denounced my revisionist views.
...
And regarding Fritzsche’s point about hope versus fear, the Jewish method offers “hope.” You can always throw yourself on the mercy of the court, or plead insanity, or—as I did to get the JDL off my back—recant. 

Secondly, if you want to protest speech exclusionism, you have to practice it yourself. Steve Klabnik seems like a thoroughly noxious person, but neither his odious personality nor contemptible political views should be grounds for him being barred from tech. His insistence that other people get banned for their views, however, is entirely fair game.

Finally, you don't want to respond to someone else's punitive tariffs with more punitive tariffs, otherwise you end up getting dragged into the trade war equivalent of conflicts like World War I. In other words, only target speech exclusion that was itself aimed at bare speech. If someone else imposes punitive exclusion against other exclusion in a way you don't agree with, just let it slide, otherwise exclusion really does beget more exclusion.

I'm certainly not the first person to talk about this - Clark at Popehat got me thinking about it initially, and had a really good follow-up post.

But I think one thing that's missing is a concise label for exactly the type of bad behaviour we're trying to stamp out here.

The aim in all of this is tolerance, in the old way the term was meant - taking people as you find them, and accepting differences between people cheerfully and politely. The modern version of tolerance insists on cheerful acceptance of different races and sexualities. It also insists on a rabid lack of acceptance of any meaningful differences in political opinion. Modern tolerance today is everybody looking different, but thinking and speaking the same.

How dreary! How stifling!

Speech exclusion on political grounds is everywhere and always the hallmark of thuggish would-be totalitarians.

'Stop oppressing us!', the lynch mob thugs cry

I worried, but secretly knew, that this day would eventually come. 

So, I strongly suspect, did he.

It seems that the political retributions have begun against Curtis Yarvin, better known in these parts as Mencius Moldbug. His current project, since he stopped writing at Unqualified Reservations, is Urbit, a bizarre and fascinating new operating system and programming language. The best description I know of as to what Urbit is comes from Clark at Popehat. Read it if you want to get a flavor. It very much is Moldbug doing to computing what he did to politics: rethinking everything from the ground up in a weird but compelling way.

Anyway, he was scheduled to present about Urbit at the Strangeloop tech conference. You can probably guess where this goes next.

Lynch mob leftist thugs complain to conference organiser.

Conference organiser acts like spineless coward, rescinds invitation:

A large number of current and former speakers and attendees contacted me to say that they found Curtis's writings objectionable. I have not personally read them.

I am trying to create a conference where the focus is on the technology and the topics being presented. Ultimately, I decided that if Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus. This would not serve the conference, the other speakers, the attendees, or even Curtis.

Thus, I chose to rescind Curtis's invitation and remove him from the program. 

You didn't want to overshadow the the talk and become the focus, you say? Ha! Perhaps you've heard of the Streisand Effect?

Readers of this august periodical will recognise this pattern. We've been here before. We've been here with Brendan Eich, getting fired from Firefox for donating to opponents of gay marriage. We've been here with Pax Dickinson, fired from Business Insider for having a private twitter account in which he made hilarious off-colour jokes.

The best way to understand this spread of virulent intolerance of any right wing opinion being publicly expressed is as a 'brown scare' - a witch hunt for fascists inside of tech. The definition of fascists, is of course, very flexible, including people like Moldbug who explicitly disavow fascism:

Here is my perception of fascism: it was a reactionary movement that combined the worst ideas of the ancien regime, the worst politics of the democrats, and the worst tyrannies of the Bolsheviks. And what was the result? It is every bit as vanished as the Borboni. For a reactionary, fascism is more or less a short course in what not to do.

But why let that stop you? The whole point of a witch hunt is that there aren't actually any witches, just the fun of bullies persecuting those with different views. The best description of how this process works, both in the case of the technology brown scare specifically (indeed, the article that invented the term) and the psychology of witch hunts in general, can be found here. You should read the whole thing, as it's the best description of the current situation. A mere sample:

The logic of the witch hunter is simple.  It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins' day.  The first requirement is to invert the reality of power.  Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings.  The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters.  By this test alone, we can see that the conspiracy is imaginary (Brown Scare) rather than real (Red Scare).

Think about it.  Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn't waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk.  They're getting burned right and left, for Christ's sake!  Priorities!  No, they'd turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters.  In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won't see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there's a serious witch problem.  In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

We do not see Pax Dickinson and Paul Graham ganging up to destroy Gawker.  We see them curling up into a fetal position and trying to survive.  An America in which hackers could purge journalists for communist deviation, rather than journalists purging hackers for fascist deviation, would be a very different America.  Ya think?

Perceptive, no? Do you know who wrote that?

Mencius Moldbug. The current imbroglio is not exactly doing much to discredit his argument.

My position on these matters is quite simple - thick liberty of speech. As I put it in the case of Donald Sterling:

I want Donald Sterling, and Pax Dickinson, and everyone else, to be able to say what's on their mind with as few negative practical consequences flowing to them for doing so as humanly possible. I want the same thing for people whose views I find stupid or repugnant - "Stalin wasn't that bad" communists, kill-the-humans hardcore environmentalists, carpet-bagging race hucksters, humourless radical feminists, whatever. I want them to be able to express themselves unmolested either by the government or by offended grievance lobbies, regardless of whether they're from the right or the left, trying to get them fired or excluded from polite society based only on things they've said.

But I think, at this point, it is also time to be realistic. You will not convince bullies by defending speech in the abstract.

Those who prosecute this war do not do so because they dislike liberty of speech. This is a war on any right wing thought. Speech is just a casualty, but not one the proponents care particularly about, except as a way of covering themselves.

Abstract defenses of speech will not do anything to convince these thugs, because they will simply carve out absurd ad hoc exceptions on the fly that make this case totally different. For an example in this oeuvre, see this defense from one of the bullies:

The reason I joined the call for Urbit’s author’s invitation to be rescinded is not his political views. Had he spoken, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve interacted with someone who espouses a politics divergent from my own at a technology conference, and nor would I hope it would be the last. I value a diversity of viewpoints, as must anyone committed to democratic processes....

Strewn throughout the Urbit author’s writings are statements in support of racism and slavery. To my mind, this is where the line is crossed from the abstract debate of politics into something more visceral and emotional: hate. Hate is a necessary component of any defense of racism, slavery, and other dehumanizing practices. Hate is necessary to reduce a person to a commodity or strip them of rights based on innate traits. Couch it all you want in the trappings of academic writing: hate is always laid bare for what it is.

Hate has no place in the Strange Loop community, nor in any community with a future. Some have found it convenient and exciting to assume that Urbit’s author was uninvited – nay, censored! – due to his political views. Trust me: those views could not be less frightening or less interesting. What does concern me is the idea that Strange Loop attendees would no longer feel welcome because an avowed racist and proponent of slavery has been given a tacit endorsement by virtue of his speaking slot.

Ah, you see, it's not about political views, it's about hate! How, well might you ask, can you distinguish between 'far right views' (which are okay, nay, valued by this modern day Voltaire) and 'hate'? Well, we're not told, except that it's something to do with racism and slavery.

I would have thought that if Moldbug's writings are so hateful, this clown might have had the courtesy to provide, you know, a shred of actual evidence from his writing. A hyperlink or two would do the trick. But don't worry - they're 'scattered through his writings', trust him.

The reason that you will never convince thugs like Alex Payne is that nobody is the villain in their own narrative. Alex Payne values free speech. Alex Payne values diversity of opinions and tolerates even far right thought. Alex Payne does not support censorship. If the converse of any of these were true, it would be most unfortunate. It might cause you to think badly of Alex Payne. More importantly, it would cause Alex Payne to think badly of himself.

Alex Payne knows this, so he goes to some length to assert that none of these nasty claims apply to him. He does this, you see, because he has to explain why the actions he took seem blatantly inconsistent with the principles he's claiming to espouse. Thus does cognitive dissonance spring eternal.

The logic (and I use the term loosely, of course), is threadbare. Hate! Along with its subcategories of racism and slavery, it's the Deus Ex Machina that makes all the contradictions disappear. I disagree with what you say, but am prepared to fight and die to let you say it, provided it's not hateful.

This is why you will not reason such people out of their views. The reasoning is constructed ex post to justify the tribal vengeance and preserve the self image. Alex Payne simply cannot conceive that he is the bully in this story. If you remove his current justification, he will simply find another equally absurd distinction, and the game of whack a mole will continue.

The grotesque aspect of this charade is the spectacle of the bullies claiming to be either oppressed themselves or standing up for the oppressed. Yarvin giving a technical talk on programming languages is oppressive. Yarvin being in the room is oppressive. Not for Alex Payne, you see, but on behalf of unnamed offended victims. Destroying someone's company by actively trying to make them persona non grata in the tech community, and implicitly threatening consequences to anyone who refuses to join the boycott? That may seem oppressive on a naive reading, but have you considered hate?

The only thing thugs understand is consequences to their bad behavior.

This is an area where I feel the  right has failed to understand the incentives they set up when they respond to these kinds of spectacles.

The first instinct of many is to attack the group that did the firing. Alex Miller, organizer of Strange Loop, is a gormless nitwit, but he was placed in an admittedly difficult position. It's the same position as Business Insider in the Dickinson case, and Mozilla in the Eich case. They're going to get screwed either way once this blows up. Keep Yarvin, and the social justice warriors boycott. Ditch Yarvin, and the conservatives and free speech types boycott. There is a calculus to be made, assuredly, over which group is larger when deciding this question. Even an organizer who didn't intrinsically care one way or another is forced to decide on this, as I noted in the Dickinson case. So when conservatives boycott a conference over this, they are sending a message that there are consequences to acting against free speech and conservatism. This goes some of the way to perhaps convincing future organisers not to side with the social justice warriors if these controversies arise.

But to focus on this component is to deeply misunderstand the overall lesson future organisers will learn from this event. They will note three possible options.

a) Invite Yarvin, when the progressives complain, side with the progressives. Lose the conservative group.

b) Invite Yarvin, when the progressives complain, side with the conservatives. Lose the progressive group.

c) Don't invite Yarvin in the first place, but don't say that you did it out of politics. Lose Yarvin, perhaps his immediate supporters at worst. Maybe don't even lose them, since they might not know that he was barred because of politics.

What future conference organiser will choose anything other than option c)?

What you punish, in other words, is uninviting Yarvin. But this is not the same as rewarding inviting him in the first place. Indeed, the worse you make the consequences for the organiser for uninviting him, the more future organisers will worry about the possible risk of inviting him in the first place. And as a result, even if you get Yarvin reinstated in this particular conference, the thugs still get their way. 

Are you starting to see why the standard response of lashing out primarily at the person who does the firing may not quite achieve the outcome you wanted?

So how do you stop this thuggery happening?

I fear, unfortunately, that given the zeitgeist is what it is, one cannot.

But if there is to be any hope, it requires bringing consequences for the people who initiated the demands for a boycott in the first place.

That is the only way this will stop. When future Alex Paynes worry that they can't call for a boycott without risking themselves getting excluded from future events, and without their companies and employment suffering as a result.

Without such consequences, these people have absolutely no reason not to start future lynch mobs.

As it turns out, this is not something we simply have to speculate on. The first tweet I posted at the start complaining about Moldbug is from a man called Steve Klabnik. As Nick Steves noted, we have seen Steve Klabnik before, in the discussion of the Pax Dickinson case. It is the same lynch mob each time.

Steve Klabnik, you are a bully and a coward. You may dress your tribalism and will to power in the garments of "social justice", but you cannot hide the sheer malignity of your actions. You are undeserving of living in a free society.

Bodil Stokke, you are a malicious and mean-spirited thug. The glee with which you gang up on others is repugnant and contemptible. I cannot conceive how any person of character would be willing to associate with you.

Alex Payne, you are a miserable hypocrite and a craven fool. Yours is the thinnest gruel of thin liberty that cannot even speak its name honestly. You are unworthy of licking Curtis Yarvin's boots.

Gore the matador and not the cape.

Update: Linked at Free Northerner.

Update: More thoughts on the issue here.