Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?
And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even Objectivism, which is usually my go-to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the belief that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to them.”
I’m still reading through this awesome contribution, but off top I can say that you aren’t fully accounting for the fact that this game is played iteratively. Long term outcomes are determined by maximizing gains and avoiding annihilation on any given “turn”, rather than by planning for some specific long term outcome.
It is perfectly possible, and even likely, for a move taken on turn one to look really poor when looking from the vantage point of turn ten.
The world isn’t an equation f(x) wherein you can evaluate the limit and plan accordingly. You have to optimize within some frame of reference that will almost certainly be suboptimal in the following frame of reference.
“This is the much-maligned – I think unfairly – argument in favor of monarchy. A monarch is an unincentivized incentivizer. He actually has the god’s-eye-view and is outside of and above every system. He has permanently won all competitions”
The reason monarchy is maligned is because the monarch has never actually won all competitions. They must continue to act to maintain their mandate and / or fend off those looking to dethrone them.
I’m still reading through this awesome contribution, but off top I can say that you aren’t fully accounting for the fact that this game is played iteratively. Long term outcomes are determined by maximizing gains and avoiding annihilation on any given “turn”, rather than by planning for some specific long term outcome.
It is perfectly possible, and even likely, for a move taken on turn one to look really poor when looking from the vantage point of turn ten.
The world isn’t an equation f(x) wherein you can evaluate the limit and plan accordingly. You have to optimize within some frame of reference that will almost certainly be suboptimal in the following frame of reference.
The reason monarchy is maligned is because the monarch has never actually won all competitions. They must continue to act to maintain their mandate and / or fend off those looking to dethrone them.