Self-Driving Cars, Rufo v. Tracey, Shogun, and More

Links and Best of X, April 2024

I’m going to do something slightly different starting this month. Instead of posting screenshots from X of my subscriber only tweets, I’ve realized that I can just as easily copy and paste the tweets here. This clearly seems much better, and it’s weird I didn’t come up with it before. Anyway, if anyone would like to continue getting Substacks with Tweets copy and pasted into them for whatever reason, please raise your objection.

The new method is much cleaner. Reminder that you can receive these Tweets and others in real time for the low low price of $3/month.

Below you’ll get thoughts and links on Shogun, North Korean pop culture, “spiteful mutant” theory, whether religion is eugenic, bees passing on culture, why Israel must go into Rafah, and more.

1. On the Rufo-Tracey feud. Based on things like temperament, it’s fine and good that some people are oriented towards political impact and others towards telling the complete truth as they see it regardless of the consequences. I’m more like Tracey temperamentally, but accepting of political realities. Like I’ll just come out and say that the narrative of antisemitism on college campuses is BS, but Republicans should push the line anyway. Tracey just wants to jump up and down with his hair on fire about how stupid it is. Rufo, meanwhile, holds his cards close if he disagrees with what he thinks is a good political narrative or something that splits the Republican coalition.

All this is fine! It doesn’t mean I don’t believe in morality other than winning elections. People who explicitly lie or seriously mislead their audiences should be called out. Anti-vaxx I think is one such case where the lie is too great and has too many real world harms, regardless of whether it helps Republicans win or not (also at a practical level it attracts stupid and deranged people).

There’s no perfect way to draw the necessary lines, and all one can do is use their judgment about these things. But a world where politics doesn’t exist is impossible, and if you believe in accomplishing political goals at all, getting mad at politics for existing is counterproductive.

2. Nate Silver on the collapsing reputation of higher education. People have this static view of society, but things are constantly changing. You don’t see a collapse in reputation like this without shifting what a college degree means in society. Cheer up! There is a limit on the craziness, and I’d rather they drive off the cliff than just stay sane enough for what’s wrong with them to fly under the radar.

3. California business has had enough. Ballot initiative would require a two-thirds vote for all new local taxes, and even apply retroactively to all new taxes since 2022. Libs trying to get it knocked off the ballot. California direct democracy once again may provide a check on the special interest capture of the state.

4. The false promise of egg freezing. It's expensive, painful, and often doesn't work. Only 39% chance or so of producing a baby if you do it late. I've tended to get excited about biotech because I've seen it as a way to deal with the problem of too few people having children, particularly the well off. Biotech is still an important part of the solution, but it's going to be a while before it is anywhere near as important as natural fertility. Ignore the anti-capitalist, pro-regulatory tilt of the piece. The problems pointed out with the industry pale in comparison to what one would expect from more government regulation in the area. The market is working fine, it's the technology that is simply lacking at this point. See also Ruxandra on fertility treatment.

5. I've similarly lost faith in contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism. What I think this misses is that being a smart public intellectual is probably more positively correlated with caring about truth than being an academic. Academia is just highly highly selected for conformity, caring about prestige and signalling more than truth, and adherence to PC ideology. This is especially true in the social sciences. Public intellectuals are more high variance, and so you're better off listening to the best ones. For hard sciences I think you go with academics because there's not as much wishful thinking and ideology involved in finding out what is true, so those who have spent the most time and worked hardest on a problem will get the furthest.