We discuss

• Trump's politics as trial and error
• The dynamics of MAGA
• ICE activity in Minnesota
• Illegal immigration
• Would Popper have supported Trump?
• What does "incrementalism" mean in politics?

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Cross the border into the increments discord and hit us up at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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We discuss

• Is the government effective at doing anything?
• What's the use of thinking counterfactually?
• Is it just market failures all the way down?
• Three kinds of anarcho-capitalists
• The economic calculation problem
• Is an economic theory necessarily political?
• What to make of the claim that austrian economics is like physics
• But wait, isn't it also metaphysics?

References

• Scott's FAQ
• Napolean science funding:
  • Canned food
  • More readings
• Bruce's Theory of Anything Pod and on twitter at @bnielson01
• Vaden's blog posts on Libertarianism:
  • First: Is Austrian Economics the Best Explanation of Economics?
  • Second: Can we predict human behaviour? A discussion with Brett Hall

Quotes

The Argument: Government can’t do anything right. Its forays into every field are tinged in failure. Whether it’s trying to create contradictory “state owned businesses”, funding pet projects that end up over budget and useless, or creating burdensome and ridiculous “consumer protection” rules, its heavy-handed actions are always detrimental and usually embarrassing.
...
The Counterargument: Government sometimes, though by no means always, does things right, and some of its institutions and programs are justifiably considered models of efficiency and human ingenuity. There are various reasons why people are less likely to notice these.
- Scott's FAQ

7.1.1: Okay, fine. But that’s a special case where, given an infinite budget, they were able to accomplish something that private industry had no incentive to try. And to their credit, they did pull it off, but do you have any examples of government succeeding at anything more practical?

Eradicating smallpox and polio globally, and cholera and malaria from their endemic areas in the US. Inventing the computer, mouse, digital camera, and email. Building the information superhighway and the regular superhighway. Delivering clean, practically-free water and cheap on-the-grid electricity across an entire continent. Forcing integration and leading the struggle for civil rights. Setting up the Global Positioning System. Ensuring accurate disaster forecasts for hurricanes, volcanoes, and tidal waves. Zero life-savings-destroying bank runs in eighty years. Inventing nuclear power and the game theory necessary to avoid destroying the world with it.

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us think counterfactually and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

How much would you like to pay for a fresh gulp of air? Tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.

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Have you encountered such phrases in the wild? Confused, perhaps, as to why an afternoon beer with a friend become an extended diatribe against John Maynard Kaynes? Us too, which is why we're diving into the ideological source of such views: Libertarianism.

Welcome to Part 1 of a four part series where we, with Bruce Nielson (@bnielson01) as our battle-hardened guide, dive into Scott Alexander's non-libertarian FAQ. Ought George help, or ought George respect the government's property rights? Let's find out.

And make sure to check out Bruce's excellent The Theory Of Anything podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-theory-of-anything/id1503194218

We discuss

• Varieties of libertarianism
• Why are some libertarians so ideological?
  
• Is taxation theft?
• The problem of public goods
• "Proprietary communities" and the perfect libertarian society
• Why the perfect libertarian society doesn't escape taxation
• Are we living in the libertarian utopia right now?
• Taxes as membership fees

References

• The Non-libertarian FAQ
• George ought to help
• The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman

Vaden's blog posts on Libertarianism / Austrian Economics / Anarcho-Captialism / Whateveryawannacallit

• First: Is Austrian Economics the Best Explanation of Economics?
• Second: Can we predict human behaviour? A discussion with Brett Hall

Quotes

0.2: Do you hate libertarianism?
No.

To many people, libertarianism is a reaction against an over-regulated society, and an attempt to spread the word that some seemingly intractable problems can be solved by a hands-off approach. Many libertarians have made excellent arguments for why certain libertarian policies are the best options, and I agree with many of them. I think this kind of libertarianism is a valuable strain of political thought that deserves more attention, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with it and find myself leaning more and more in that direction myself.

However, there’s a certain more aggressive, very American strain of libertarianism with which I do have a quarrel. This is the strain which, rather than analyzing specific policies and often deciding a more laissez-faire approach is best, starts with the tenet that government can do no right and private industry can do no wrong and uses this faith in place of more careful analysis. This faction is not averse to discussing politics, but tends to trot out the same few arguments about why less regulation has to be better. I wish I could blame this all on Ayn Rand, but a lot of it seems to come from people who have never heard of her. I suppose I could just add it to the bottom of the list of things I blame Reagan for.
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us curtail freedom and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

How do you summon libertarians at a party? Finish the punchline and tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.

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• The conflict between Galileo and the church
• What is instrumentalism, and how did it become popular?
• How instrumentalism is still in vogue in many physics departments
• The Problem of Universals
• The essentialist approach to science
• Stars, air, cells, and lightning
• "What is" vs "How does" questions
• The relationship between essentialism and language, and its influence on politics.
• Viewing words as instruments

See More:

• Instrumentalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
• Essentialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
• The problem of universals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals

Quotes:
Few if any of the physicists who have now accepted the instrumentalist view of Cardinal Bellarmino and Bishop Berkeley realize that they have accepted a philosophical theory. Nor do they realize that they have broken with the Galilean tradition. On the contrary, most of them think that they have kept clear of philosophy; and most of them no longer care anyway. What they now care about, as physicists, is (a) mastery of the mathematical formalism, i.e. of the instrument, and (b) its applications; and they care for nothing else.
-- C&R, Page 134

Thus my criticism of essentialism does not aim at establishing the non-existence of essences; it merely aims at showing the obscurantist character of the role played by the idea of essences in the Galilean philosophy of science (down to Maxwell, who was inclined to believe in them but whose work destroyed this belief). In other words my criticism tries to show that, whether essences exist or not, the belief in them does not help us in any way and indeed is likely to hamper us; so that there is no reason why the scientist should assume their existence.
-- C&R, Page 141.

But they are more than this, as can be seen from the fact that we submit them to severe tests by trying to deduce from them some of the regularities of the known world of common experience i.e. by trying to explain these regularities. And these attempts to explain the known by the unknown (as I have described them elsewhere) have immeasurably extended the realm of the known. They have added to the facts of our everyday world the invisible air, the antipodes, the circulation of the blood, the worlds of the telescope and the microscope, of electricity, and of tracer atoms showing us in detail the movements of matter within living bodies. All these things are far from being mere instruments: they are witness to the intellectual conquest of our world by our minds.

But there is another way of looking at these matters. For some, science is still nothing but glorified plumbing, glorified gadgetmaking—‘mechanics’; very useful, but a danger to true culture, threatening us with the domination of the near-illiterate (of Shakespeare’s ‘mechanicals’). It should never be mentioned in the same breath as literature or the arts or philosophy. Its professed discoveries are mere mechanical inventions, its theories are instruments—gadgets again, or perhaps super-gadgets. It cannot and does not reveal to us new worlds behind our everyday world of appearance; for the physical world is just surface: it has no depth. The world is just what it appears to be. Only the scientific theories are not what they appear to be. A scientific theory neither explains nor describes the world; it is nothing but an instrument.
-- C&R, Page 137-8.

What's the essential nature of this podcast? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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So what's the deal? Is it possible to "harness the wisdom of the crowd to forecast world events"? Or is the whole thing just a result of sloppy statistics? We believe the latter is likely to be true with probability 64.9% - no, wait, 66.1%.

Intro segment:

"The Sentience Debate": The moral value of shrimps, insects, and oysters

Relevant timestamps:

• 10:05: "Even if there's only a one in one hundred chance, or one in one thousand chance, that insects are sentient given current information, and if we're killing trillions or quadrillions of insects in ways that are preventable or avoidable or that we can in various ways mitigate that harm... then we should consider that possibility."
• 25:47: "If you're all going to work on pain in invertebrates, I pity you in many respects... In my previous work, I was used to running experiments and getting a clear answer, and I could say what these animals do and what they don't do. But when I started to think about what they might be feeling, you meet this frustration, that after maybe about 15 years of research, if someone asks me do they feel pain, my answer is 'maybe'... a strong 'maybe'... you cannot discount the possibility."
• 46:47: "It is not 100% clear to me that plants are non sentient. I do think that animals including insects are much more likely to be sentient than plants are, but I would not have a credence of zero that plants are sentient."
• 1:01:59: "So the hard problem I would like to ask the panel is: If you were to compare the moral weight of one ant to the moral weight of one human, what ratio would you put? How much more is a human worth than an ant? 100:1? 1000:1? 10:1? Or maybe 1:1? ... Let's start with Jamie."

Main References:

• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction - Wikipedia
• How Policymakers Can Improve Crisis Planning
• The Good Judgment Project - Wikipedia
• Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?: Tetlock, Philip E.: 9780691128719: Books - Amazon.ca

Additional references mentioned in the episode:

• The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Wikipedia
• Book Review: Superforecasting | Slate Star Codex
• Pandemic Uncovers the Limitations of Superforecasting – We Are Not Saved
• My Final Case Against Superforecasting (with criticisms considered, objections noted, and assumptions buttressed) – We Are Not Saved

Use your Good Judgement and send us email at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips

- August 1968, W H Auden

Send us an email at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Image from https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/the-august-1968-red-square-protest-and-its-legacy

Audio updated: 05/07/2021

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• https://8cantwait.org/
• https://www.8toabolition.com/
• Study which found that body cameras did not have a statistically significant effect. 

Errata: 

• Ta-Nehisi Coates quote is "essential below" not "eternal under". Full quote is: "It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country."
• Things That Make White People Uncomfortable was written by Michael Bennett, not Michael Barnet

Love and complaints both welcome at incrementspodcast@gmail.com. 

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