7 Quick Takes of Undeniable Insight, Absent Evidence or Significant Explanation

Over-fraternization within a line of work leads to all kinds of pathologies as social networks become too insular. If you’re a police officer and you spend your days constantly interacting with civilians having the worst day of their life, it’s really important you spend your free time with people who are having a perfectly normal and safe week. Same goes for politics, academia, entertainment, etc. This is not a “pop your bubble to improve the quality of your opinions” take. This is purely advice for your own personal mental health. Academics and entertainers need people in their life that they are rightfully embarrassed to complain in front of, to keep perspective on what the stakes of their decisions actually are. Cops and soldiers need reminders that the world is not constantly coming apart at the seams. Most of us will call the cops maybe once in our lives, and it probably won’t be because something good happened. Not a week goes by in a beat cop’s life where they don’t interact with someone who had to call the cops. They need to fill their set of observed experiences with stories uncorrelated with events where someone had to call the cops.
The distribution of people’s opinions of Elon Musk needs to be compressed. Everyone with an above 75th percentile opinion needs to downgrade their estimation of him as a thoughtleader or agent of positive chaos/liberty. Everyone with a below 75th percentile opinion needs to upgrade their appreciation of him as an engineering genius committed to building tangible infrastructure innovations.
The current political era we are living through isn’t defined by extremism, it’s defined by gambles on different sides of the “median voter vs institutional inertia” coin. The Democratic Party is struggling to hold together a coalition of progressives and moderates with nothing but bubble gum and reproductive rights because they believe the median voter remains an irresistible force. The Republican party, on the other hand, continues to bet the entire franchise on an activated base of extremists and gerrymandering. This bet is not ignorant, or in denial, of the median voter. It’s a bet that institutional inertia combined with potentially two decades of control of the Supreme Court will yield benefits greater than the costs of eventually losing control of all three branches across multiple elections.
The best super hero movies are the ones where they take an auteur with at least 5 movies under their belt and say “make the most ‘you’ movie possible, but with our characters in our universe”. Why is “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” so good? Because they hired Sam Raimi and gave him the greenlight to make “Evil Dead 4”.
Even the people who *know* that crypto and blockchain technology will create enormous value – even those people aren’t sure if the coins that currently exist will have significant commodity value down the road.
There are lots of right wing political positions that I view as wrong or costly, but most of them I view as “deviations from an uncertain optimal state of the world” which is to say I don’t worry about them in the slightest. The embrace of White replacement theory and increased framing of their opposition as enabling of sexual predation of children, on the other hand, scares me a lot because there is no action or option that is taken off the table for the people who believe them. Say what you will about corporate conspiracy theories and other intellectual pathologies of the current progressive left, they consistently keep terrorism and violence of the table. It can be hard to pin down the intellectual center of a political party or coalition, but the moral center is always composed of the voices that keep violence out of the choice set. I’m don’t know who those voices currently are in the Republican political and media coalition.
The key to popular support for capitalism is the continued to expansion of mint-chocolate flavored options in our choice sets.

StickerShockTrooper May 16, 2022 / 12:09 pm

1. On a personal level, it helps to have a spouse in different fields. We are hard sciences and front-line medicine, similar enough to empathize with the stress but different enough to get that outsider’s perspective.

1b. On a wider level, your point 1 dovetails into the need to institutionalize outside perspectives.
A diverse advisory council, an effective civilian oversight body, a nonmilitary commander-in-chief….

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