This month, I was on Louise Perry's show and The Capitalist podcast with CapX to talk about Kakistocracy. I also had a discussion about the book on GB News. These were all higher quality conversations than normal, including the TV appearance, where Tom Harwood quoted Tyler to me.
I haven’t done a mailbag in a while. So, if you’re a paid subscriber, leave your questions below and I will get to them before long.
While in San Francisco recently, I met a physicist named Joe Finberg, who runs Laurelin Technologies, a nuclear fusion startup. Right now, there is rapidly increasing demand for energy (you may have heard of this new thing called “data centers”), and projects can take years to connect to the grid. Laurelin is trying to get around that problem by building a fusion generator that can go on a shipping container and be bought directly for about $5 million, with no grid connection necessary. The company has published a schedule of tests it has to pass to prove the machine works, with results going public no matter the outcome.
They’re currently trying to raise $3 million at a $15 million valuation, and plan to have a prototype in three months. If you’re interested in investing or learning more about the company, reach out to me through Substack direct messages.
1. An article that takes a look back on the progress we’ve made in curing disease, and talks about what comes next. One of the things that anti-aging activists argue is that living longer by curing individual diseases is really like trying to drain the ocean with a bucket, because the risks of all diseases increase so much as you get older. Therefore, we should get a handle on what aging is and how to reverse it. That’s fine as an argument, but working on curing individual diseases seems to add up over time. Between 2013 and 2023, for example, life expectancy in Europe went up 1.7 years. Covid likely suppressed our gains; the ten years before that saw 3.7 years added. Extend life by 2-4 years each decade, and we’re talking about real gains over time, though obviously there’s probably some limit we’re going to run into without breakthroughs in anti-aging. Even without that though, progress is still happening. We have gotten way too pessimistic.
2. Cremieux takes issue with my theory about Therapy Culture making liberals more mentally ill. His argument is that, since the correlational matrix of things associated with mental illness looks similar across liberals and conservatives, if something was making liberals more mentally ill it would change the correlational matrix in ways we could find. I’m not convinced, because this seems like it would prove too much and rule out just about anything “explaining” the gap between conservatives and liberals other than selection. It seems plausible to me that there is some underlying trait of mental illness/unhappiness, and belief in Therapy Culture shifts the average while keeping the correlations relatively constant. It’s true that I wouldn’t expect the correlations to remain exactly the same, though I need to do some research to find if there are subtle differences we can see. I would be very surprised if there weren’t.
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3. ACX book review contest entry on The Epic of Gilgamesh. I had heard of this story, knew that it came from an ancient Mesopotamian civilization, and that it included a great flood that influenced the Old Testament, but that was about it. The historical timelines are so vast here as to be difficult to fathom. The story was first written about a millennium before The Odyssey was composed. Comparing the two stories, it’s striking how much they both rely on a very emotionally dense form of male friendship that seems at least somewhat gay in our eyes. Were all the ancients homos? Are we perhaps all homos in cultures that don’t explicitly prohibit it? There is a lot of comparing the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu to one between a man and woman.
This question led me down a rabbit hole, which involved mostly talking to ChatGPT, with the results here. It informed me that the poem is elsewhere explicit about fornication between men and women, and that we just don’t see it when it comes to Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
I had the thought that maybe the authors of the text saw male-female penetration as worth mentioning as an important act, but that guys doing gay stuff is just bros being bros. When I asked ChatGPT about this, it said nope, Mesopotamian literature did refer to explicit male-male sex in other contexts. “Legal and omen texts mention male–male anal intercourse directly, often focusing on which man penetrated and which was placed in the socially subordinate role. So homosexual acts were not simply an invisible, linguistically unmarked form of ordinary male friendship.” Moreover, since they cared a lot about who exactly was penetrated, having gay sex in a friendship of two male equals would create awkwardness in the Gilgamesh narrative.
This led to my next question, which was whether perhaps my theory applies to sexual acts not including anal penetration. Was bros mutually jacking each other off maybe something so normal it was not worth mentioning? At that point, I was informed there is a translation of a tablet where the ghost of Enkidu refers to “the crotch that you touched” while speaking to Gilgamesh. But that isn’t the only interpretation of that line.
This is why we need data centers.
4. Marijuana is more like cigarettes than alcohol, that is, a high percentage of users are daily or near-daily users. It appears that increasing legalization has had public health consequences well beyond what most people expected, with the percentage of Americans using more than doubling to 15% over the last decade. Is this perhaps a cause of the rise of figures like Rogan and Tucker? If pot makes you paranoid and stupid, then doubling the number of users in the country would be good for conspiracy theorist podcasters.
5. Why is sociology so politicized? Here the comparison is made to economics, where you start with the individual and try to build a theory from there. Sociology does the opposite, starting with “society” as the unit of analysis, which gives the researcher the freedom to basically argue whatever he wants. Over time, dynamics within fields become self-reinforcing, with the people interested in understanding the world and doing the hard work required involving quantitative analysis going into economics, and those who want the prestige of being an academic while doing political activism becoming sociologists. I’m all for broad theorizing, but it needs to be grounded in big facts about the world, and sociology has ignored many of the most useful among them. Political science I’ve always seen as midway between the two fields, having elements and subfields that are more like economics and others that are more like sociology.
6. Adam Mastroianni: Incentives are for losers. I agree that people who simply respond to material incentives tend to have something missing inside of them. I don’t know about this part though:
It took me a long time to understand this. In my early 20s, when I was at the bottom of every ladder that I aspired to ascend, I assumed the people at the top of those ladders must be pretty great. How wise these incentive-maxxers must be, how cool and smart, to have the things that everybody else wants!
But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.
My experience has been the opposite. The higher up you go, the more passionate and authentic people tend to be. We’re talking averages here. The idea that “elites all suck” is a cope. One might make an exception for academia, which is largely a meaningless status game that is hard to justify by appealing to higher principles, so it gets a more superficial kind of person rising to the top.
But most who are highly successful are not simply “responding to incentives.” That’s what the guy at the office who just wants to go home early on Friday to beat traffic is doing. Those who get far in life often have an inner drive that compels them to work to do great things. Politicians and major intellectuals, for example, are in my experience way more passionate about ideas than the typical educated American.
