three masks

this one made me happy. while i don't want to be misinterpreted as saying "all artists are morally obligated to voluntarily give up the possibility of ever getting paid" (since this wouldn't meaningfully alter the structural problems at play), i do like when stuff is public domain. if you want to release your original work for free then the creative commons license is your new best friend

real as hell and not mentioned nearly enough in these discussions, thank you for bringing it up. if copyright monopolises the distribution of educational materials for decades after publication then the only source of up-to-date knowledge is locked behind a paywall that's simply inaccessible to anyone outside of a fairly select group.

if, for example, i wanted access to the lancet medical journal then it'd run me about 22 bucks a month. certainly not nothing, but cheaper than a premium netflix subscription. a minimum wage bartender in my country could cover this in about 2-3 hours. in somewhere like india, where the minimum wage can be as low as $1.92 per day, we're talking about more than a quarter of someone's entire income for something that costs me the equivalent of a round of drinks. when every journal comes with its own pricetag, shadow libraries like sci-hub are vital for people and institutions that can't realistically pay for unlimited access.

on the other hand, profit.

shit sucks, it's horrible and it serves to maintain imperialist exploitation in a supposedly post-colonial world.

great addition, thank you again for bringing it up.

insanely funny, thanks for reminding me of it, check out the video here. it should also be mentioned that metallica's biggest hit ever is incredibly similar to a 1989 song by excel, who said at the time that even if it is stolen, they couldn't pursue a "lengthy, tiring court battle" against the biggest metal band in the world. once again small artists can't even get into the courtroom, let alone win.

grouped these ones together because they illustrate the kinda central point of all of this: every single time this conversation comes up, you have one side basing their arguments on the actual real-world effects of copyright and another which ignores them in favour of an imaginary good copyright that functions completely differently.

for example, as you said, ip law has absolutely been used to screw racialised (particularly Black) musicians out of getting paid ever since the earliest days of the record industry. it replicates and perpetuates existing wealth disparity through an unequal balance of power: when you have a kid trying to escape poverty up against professional contract lawyers, the negotiations get very one-sided and the artist comes out much worse off. the only way to win is to become one of the suits and restart the process from the other side. this is why rappers start their own labels, why diddy, dre and jay z are all billionaires, and why most of michael jackson's wealth came from buying other artists' publishing rights rather than the billions of dollars he made for sony.

just like any other capitalist legal framework, ip law was built by an exploitative, racist society and preserves the power structures of that society under the guise of free and fair exchange. it places power in the hands of those able and willing to exploit others. it is directly implicated in over a century of misery worldwide, particularly against racialised/colonised people, and i have never, ever in my life seen a pro-copyright argument that properly acknowledges this.

“We do not have trade schools,” he said. “We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle-class life and a future for his family.”

Buddy - your grandfather was probably able to find a job that would teach him what he needed to know in order to do the job.

If FoMoCo offered Promising Earnest Young Persons $120K/year - or even a lot less than that! - to be mechanics, with the promise that you'd provide the needed training, I have very little doubt that you'd fill all your vacancies pretty much immediately.

... and that is in part because companies actually made staying at one company for 40 years a plausible idea. Job security, an advancement ladder, and less willingness to steal employees from competing companies.

... and that is in part because quasi-trust behavior like "all the companies agreeing not to pay more than X for high demand employees" was totally fine and not legally investigated.

Policy Opinions and the Three Levels of Intellect

now what i mean here is not "how smart you are" but "what kind of intellectually curious you are." i know this is still gonna sound offensive and like going up the pyramid is always better and smarter. it's not. and i don't edit my ideas into grey inoffensive paste. hopefully it will incense people enough to go viral. maybe if i flip the cardinality around people will misread it.

Anyway.

this is about "how much you enjoy thinking about policy problems and systems." smart people often enjoy thinking too much about stuff, but it's not a 1:1 correlation and something being "more fun to think about" for a smart person doesn't mean it's always better policy.

First Order Intellect: government should do a thing to make things good.

This is most people, because most people don't get their fun from thinking about government. They start with "there is a problem, someone should fix it, government is someone." Too much traffic? Make more roads. People don't have stuff? Government should give people stuff. There's crime? Police should be able to deal with criminals however they want. Rent is too high? Make a law saying rent can't go up, easy solved. This is why either party very easily descends to populism when there is a problem they are actually concerned about and any concerns about states rights or civil liberties go out the window - because most people are actually like this

Second Order Intellect: systems rule everything

knowledge of abstract, personless systems - like the free market, or checks and balances - is useful and i don't refer to it here as just knowledge of those. for some geeks they are fun to think about. elegant systems with counter-intuitive results can be really fun, even aside from their accuracy. the government wants money? well raising taxes will REDUCE money in the long term. we'll get the best results not by one chosen person deciding everything, but by 3 branches, 2 houses, and 50 states competing and arguing with each other. we'll find religious truth by letting all the ideas duke it out and not being supported by the state. these are the people you call libertarians, and they usually identify liberty as their guidestone, but that's not what is actually going on. they aren't anarchists, they usually value public order protecting property, etc. a much more accurate term would be *gamists*.

they like to think about the incentives and second-order consequences of well intentioned actions and blunt tyranny. and they like to come up with more systems that sound morally offensive but might work out to create better results in the long run

its not that they are foolish, but the more you *like* thinking about something, the more you might treat it as a hammer and every problem is a nail a lot of rationalists im putting in this category, and most especially Aella *cough* https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/2059705979235885076 (though for a lefty balance, I think a lot of policy designers, especially Ezra Klein, were far too like this during the obama healthcare days) Third Order Intellect: let's check against reality

as a friend told me "i wish i could be a libertarian"

these are policy thinkers who have seen the platonically ideal systems and admired them when they work -- and also enjoyed pointing out when they don't work

this is the gamist equivalent of noticing the difference when a combo deck works "in theory" and when it gets run over by aggro decks. and discovering that fact is just as fun as solving the elegant puzzle before

the world is complicated and has a lot of confounding factors that push abstract theories off course. the answer isn't to "throw up your hands and ignore" or to push on with your theory while denying counterexamples. you just gotta check what actually works, and be willing to change it when something fails to get the results you want

Scott is usually like this in his writing

This is mostly to help identify the types of arguments you'll see and who they are coming from. "No one understands incentives and systems!" No, 80% of people don't care, 15% think like you, and 5% understand when those predictions fail.

There's a certain level of intellectual curiosity (which, once again, not the same as actual intellect) that reliably gives you libertarian, systems and incentives based arguments. But it also tends to think people aren't thinking things through, when actually their intellectual counterparties just think their model is too pure for this world

Too much traffic? Make more roads. People don't have stuff? Government should give people stuff. There's crime? Police should be able to deal with criminals however they want. Rent is too high? Make a law saying rent can't go up, easy solved. ... something being "more fun to think about" for a smart person doesn't mean it's always better policy.

i gave you all the clues mr. police you could have saved her

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anyway im not gonna be drawn into a debate about the theory of populism - which must be the most contested word of the 2010's anyway. i will use these concrete examples to springboard to the most prominent proponent of first order thinking

Donald Trump

he'll say he stands for any ideology that sounds good, but his actions are always the bluntest: see problem, fix it. tariffs are his favorite word in the english language. americans are stuck home unable to work due to covid? send everyone a $2000 check!!!

And they almost all like board games, so I really prefer the term "gamists."

But I was reminded how commonly religion comes up. Of course many Second Order people start atheist (a benevolent God is more a First Order thing.) But a surprising fraction of them do become Catholic or adhere zealously to Judaism.

And these Catholics can argue brilliantly about the doctrines of Catholocism. This is a whole new abstract system to explore!

You are not going to fix the problem trying to dunk on fundies using the same tactics as forum users in the early 2000s. You will, tragically, have to engage with the subject matter and history of it as a real culture.

You cannot fix problems in primarily Islamic countries by telling them that Muhammed was a child rapist and that their religion is barbaric. You cannot fix the caste system by insulting Indians. because even if it was possible to denigrate people and their belief systems until those people embraced secularism, the issues you have still remain in the secular world.

Because the issue isn't that they believe in a fantasy. The issue is that any form of social organization can lend itself to bigotry and domination. There is this fiction that the brave atheist materialists dragged humanity out of the mud in the enlightenment by dispelling fantasies. The issue being that this didn't happen. People continued to believe quite strongly in religious fantasies long after the scientific revolution, and even before the so called european enlightenment, there were devout people around the world studying natural philosophy and engaging in engineering and scientific feats that are viewed as wondrous today. They somehow managed to do so while still believing in what are, fundamentally, fictions about the universe. and yet.

The idea that religions and superstition are primarily a way to explain the natural world before we had actual science is ridiculous. the greeks had their gods living atop a very easily climbable mountain. the holy places of the cultures in the new world were physical locations that people regularly went to. If religion and spirituality were simply materialism with worse information, the very first caveman would have dispelled religion entirely.