How likely is Peter Thiel’s investment into seasteading to pay off?
Recently the relatively awesome entrepreneur invested 1.25 million USD into this (seasteading institute website here).
It seems such a wonderful concept, finally somewhere where new forms of government could be tried out. But I’m just wondering how in the world they hope to deal with existing governments since their reaction to any kind of serious alternatives, especially one that either economically or ideologically presented a significant challenge, is bound to not be positive.
I was just wondering what LWer thoughts are on this matter? Also has there been any discussion of seasteading in the past that I’ve missed? Also I’m wondering if anyone would hazard to perhaps offer a prediction or judge how likley this is to succeed (maybe on predictionbook)?
From a legal perspective, countries can claim a large exclusive economic zone. So for a seastead to fall outside the realm of government intervention would require it to be more than 200 miles offshore. This is roughly the travel distance from San Francisco to South Lake Tahoe at the border with Nevada. So unless you think that South Lake Tahoe is the perfect location with “easy access to the Bay Area” for your start-up, then Thielandia isn’t a good place to go, either.
Worse still, however, there could be no recognition of these seasteads as sovereign territory (they lack actual territory) and little incentive to change this. The “greedy government” question aside, the principle reason to reject seastead sovereignty is simply to prevent the strategic colonization of the ocean. For example, a nation could build a series of minimalist seasteads 24 nautical miles apart and claim territorial sovereignty over them and their adjacent waters. Less than 1,000 of these would be required to close the Pacific to all east-west shipping. That’s highly doable in this case but the real threats are in open-but-disputed waters like the South China Sea or strategic outlets; a chain of them which impeded shipping could create a toll opportunity for the creator even without closing a waterway.
Of course, there yet remains the problem of simply trying to evade a country’s regulations while doing business primarily, or even entirely, there. Countries take a dim view of this sort of activity and it only survives because complainant countries are unwilling to effectively retaliate against host countries. Again, lacking sovereignty, the seastead would be a legitimate target of a government force. More importantly, it would lack any significant native population and there may be few people not directly involved in this activity. This means that force against them is easier to justify and the seastead itself could easily be destroyed given that all the inhabitants can be repatriated.
To succeed, seasteading needs to be a viable alternative to landsteading. But for the reasons above, it can’t be both viable and a real alternative. The moment it becomes a real alternative, it will need to be shut down to prevent very serious problems, thus it become unviable. It can be viable, but only if it is small enough to be ignored. On a more fundamental level, I doubt many people would want to live there given the costs and distance. If anything, the seasteads would mostly become nests of shady pornographers and scamsters, precisely the people who most like to play jurisdictional games now and have the incentive to do so. This would legitimate any retaliation against a seastead, possibly with precedent from smuggling and piracy.
My answer: the success likelihood is near zero.
They actually respond to a lot of this in their FAQ.
An important model for them right now are Cruise lines. The big ones operate with a large degree of autonomy while flying the flag of countries that are most amenable to this and doing business in ports where people like to make money (it turns out, this is a lot of them).
So, the sea steads will fly the flag of a sovereign country and acts of overt aggression against them would be attacks on a sovereign country.
Yes, they would fly a convenience flag and no one will care about minimum wage, but the sovereign country won’t offer any protection, either from pirates or from other countries. Yes, the US won’t attack the ship of another country, but the other country will be happy to oblige the US and cede the ship, retroactively, if necessary. I’m getting this from the Seasteading Institute, too.
Doesn’t quite work. Once your ship is a stationary economic operation within the EEZ, the protection of your flag erodes quickly. In any case, the US would be free to impose on them. For example, they could raid the seastead and seize it if they find contraband (cf. drug interdictions). They’d still need to be 200 nautical miles offshore to be safe.
Have you looked at their website at all? They say that they will be more than 200 nautical miles from any country, out of any EEZ.
Read my first paragraph. You can also read an overview of admiralty and maritime law re seasteads helpfully hosted by the institute. It’s not pretty.
http://seasteading.org/files/research/law/Balloun%20-%20U.S.%20Law%20Enforcement%20Admiralty%20Jurisdiction%20Over%20Seasteads.pdf
I think there are at least two different questions being subsumed here. One is whether seasteading could ever work in general, and the other is whether it would actually produce something a libertarian like Peter Thiel would ultimately approve of. The first question I take to be the more complicated. David Brin offers up a number of practical difficulties here.
The answer to second question seems less difficult to foresee. Life aboard ship is always a highly communal enterprise and typically a highly hierarchical one. The odds of the end result actually being in line with the initial vision seem rather long.
Patri does not use the ideal of individual liberty much in his descriptions of his plans: he uses the notion of competitive government, that is, increasing competition by increasing the number of sovereign states.
He does admit that many of the people interested in seasteading are libertarians though.
“Personally, your author’s views definitely match the “libertarian” label. But don’t be deceived into thinking that seasteading is just a means to libertarian ends. While we began exploring it as part of trying to achieve our own vision of an ideal society, it turned out to be a much, much bigger idea.”
http://seasteading.org/book_beta/Why%20we%20need%20new%20societies.html
Libertarian doesn’t mean atomistic, it means voluntary.
By this definition, the world is already libertarian because this order exists at the state level.
The most important point in Brin’s piece is to point out that this is something of an attempt at feudalism: the wealthy escape their obligations to others but can enforce against them using the state those others yet inhabit. It’s a parasitic plan, really.
Actually, make that “government” in the singular. In a world of many competing governments, it would still be a difficult problem, but at least there might be ways of securing some independence by playing them against each other or looking for weakly policed border zones. Nowadays, however, the U.S. government acts a single global authority that you have to contend with, and it has little tolerance for regimes that are outside of certain approved bounds.
So my predictions are pessimistic—assuming their project gets anywhere, the seasteaders will either end up building something fairly unremarkable or they will cross the line and be destroyed. Of course, this destruction doesn’t have to be in the form of a military intervention; economic and PR pressures, both formal and informal, are likely to be sufficient.
Moldbug wrote a good analysis along these lines a while ago (you can start reading from the point where he says “Now, let’s talk about seasteading...”).
Thanks to the link to Moldbug article, started reading him a month or so ago after he was recommended by another LWrongian. He seems to be one of those thinkers that is either horribly wrong or horribly right, but isn’t a bore and carries quite a bit of insight.
This quote is just wonderful. Made me laugh.
Some of his ideas are indeed unsound and with some serious blind spots, but on the whole, I’d say his analysis of the modern-day institutions and social order is spot-on, and more accurate than practically any other source. Generally, the closer the topic is to the present day, the more correct and insightful he is.
Also, his earlier writings from 2007-2008 are much better than his more recent work. You can find them all nicely indexed here.
Huh, I found the opposite, in the abstract he’s insightful but his descriptions of modern day reality seem to be coming from some bizarre counter-earth, for instance:
“The pretend enemies (such as the Communist countries in the Cold War, other Third World nationalist thugs, revolutionary Islamists, etc, etc) are actually best defined as partial clients. Unlike full clients such as the OECD democracies, their friendship is only with one side of the American political system (the left side, duh). If their “anti-Americanism” actually reaches the level of military combat, the war is a limited war and essentially a civil one. Right enemies include: Nazis and other fascists, of course; apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia; the Portuguese Estado Novo and Franquista Spain; the Greek colonels; and, of course, Israel. You might notice a property shared by all but one of the regimes on this list, which is that they don’t exist anymore. Sometimes there will be patron-client relationships on the right side of the equation, but they are always tenuous. Even in the last case, the “Israel lobby” is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is the Palestine lobby. (You’ll notice that USG’s policy is that the war should end by Israel giving money and land to the Palestinians, not the other way around.)”
He’s perceptive and erudite enough that when he says something so gratuitously and obviously wrong I sit there for ages thinking hang on, is this just something I don’t want to believe- a politically correct myth I don’t want to let go of. It disturbs me how often the answer is no, but I genuinely cannot see a way to make passages like the above make sense.
It would be helpful if you narrowed down to a specific claim which you consider to be gratuitously and obviously wrong.
For instance, your quote contains the claim that, of the regimes described, only Israel has survived to this day. Is it your contention that Franquista Spain has survived to this day, or that Israel has not survived? If that is not your contention, then you do not, after all, object to the whole quote, but object to only part of it. And yet you dropped the whole thing into your comment, apparently expecting your reader to know what section of the quote you object to.
I quoted the whole thing because the structure is central to the thesis. He’s comparing the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and so on with the revolutions that took down Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. That South Africa and Rhodesia were taken down and the Vietcong were not is perfectly true. That this is evidence the American government spent more effort opposing Apartheid than the Vietcong is something else entirely—conspiracy theory. Not merely in that it proposes a conspiracy but in that it does not bother to argue for one, the state of the world is evidence for the existence of a body that wanted it that way- except where it isn’t, in the case of Israel.
That said, I quoted the whole thing to provide context, the claim I find impossible to grasp is that the US was not really opposed to the USSR and is not really allied with Israel. This requires either a definition of the US government that is separate from the people that actually run it, an assertion that the people who appear to be in charge don’t really run it, or that they secretly hate Israel and love communism.
Moldbug does argue for his controversial analyses of world events at enormous length. Here he is mentioning some of his conclusions without restating his arguments. It doesn’t mean he didn’t bother to argue. What it does mean is that he’s a demanding writer, who expects his readers to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with his arguments. If that sounds like he’s expecting too much—that is, if you think he should prove that he’s not a nutcase before you devote months to reading his blog chronologically from 2007 through the present, which is more or less what you need to do to gather together the threads of his argument, then there you have your explanation as to why he’s not very widely read.
Moldbug did recognize this problem and at one point he attempted to recap his argument in condensed form, but even that condensed introduction to his argument is spread over many very long blog posts.
He furthermore places barriers in the way of his reader by writing in a colorful and circuitous style which I presume is his attempt to imitate writers that he admires, such as Carlyle. It doesn’t make for easy reading.
I don’t recall Moldbug ever claiming this, and taken strictly it would contradict one of his main recurring themes, which is that the US government is not a monolithic entity, though maybe he does speak of the US government as a monolithic entity (if he does, he is speaking loosely). What I recall Moldbug claiming is that the US government is not a monolithic entity, and that one can usefully roughly divide it into two warring factions, one of which dominates the State Department among other things, the other of which tends more to dominate the Pentagon. If we look at the quote here he writes, “their friendship is only with one side of the American political system”, referring to this divide I’ve mentioned.
The US demands that Israel make territorial and monetary concessions on land long ago acquired and settled by Jews. It made no similar demand against the USSR, except for those Soviet acquisitions that were so recent as to still be in play.
For the situation to be comparable, for the US to have treated the USSR and Israel equally as enemies, the US should have derecognized and actively resisted the Soviet acquisition of East Germany, in the fashion that it has derecognized and actively resisted the Jewish acquisition of Jerusalem.
Or as an alternate explanation, the US was afraid of the USSR and thus was more careful about what demands it made of it, but it’s not particularly afraid of Israel.
Have you sought for alternate explanations and checked to see how evidence update the probablity of each upwards or downwards?
The US sought to overthrow its right wing enemies, such as Rhodesia and so forth, replacing their regimes with utterly different regimes, but generally sought to maintain its left wing enemies in power, while placing pressure on them to moderate their ways, go along with the consensus, and stop trying to disturb the status quo, like a squabble within a marriage, rather than a divorce.
Even on those rare, infrequent, and dramatic occasions when the US did want to overthrow its left wing enemies, as for example the Taliban, the State Department clearly did not want to overthrow them, eventually got its way and installed regimes almost indistinguishable from the originals. The current Afghan regime is just the Taliban light, far closer to the Taliban in its ethnicity and its state imposed theology than to the Northern Alliance.
In contrast, Rhodesia is utterly destroyed.
So… enemies that enjoyed the support of the USSR or China largely survived, at least until the USSR’s dissolution itself. While enemies of America that were also enemies of the USSR and China, were largely defeated.
Basically all you’re saying is that few countries could stand without support from some superpower.
This isn’t saying much that’s suprising. But by talking as if the difference is between right-wing enemies and left-wing enemies, instead of enemies that didn’t have superpower backing, and enemies that did have superpower backing, you make it look like a bigger conspiracy than it actually is.
But obviously Rhodesia and South Africa were not taken down by revolutions. Rhodesia was taken down by foreign invasion and terrorism from outside Rhodesia, terror conducted by black people but sponsored and funded by white people from outside Africa. South Africa yielded not to violence, but to moral pressure and political correctness.
So you are contradicting Mencius’ version of history, with a politically correct version of history that is transparently false, that no one genuinely believes, even if lots of people pretend to believe it for fear of the consequences of doubting it.
While Mencius’ version could be false, the fact that it differs from a transparently false version of politically correct history is not reason to doubt it.
The US spent precisely zero effort taking down the Hanoi regime, making its vast expenditure of effort against the Vietcong completely pointless and ineffectual.
The US sponsored terror against the Rhodesian regime in its efforts to overthrow it, something it has not done against communist or Islamic enemies, unless you count the Contras and the sons of Iraq as terrorists, which is stretching things.
Rather than comparing resources expended on war, which is an unfair comparison since fascist regimes have been insignificant after the fall of Nazi Germany, let us compare qualms of conscience. When fighting communist enemies, dreadfully concerned to make friends and not offend anyone, when fighting fascist enemies, kill them all, let God sort them out. When fighting communist or Islamic enemies, all the experts agree the thing to do is to win hearts and minds, when fighting fascist enemies, all the experts agree that the thing to do is to grab them by the balls and rip those balls off.
Hence Mencius description of those wars as civil wars, fought in a manner that shows that they were friends before, and hoped to be friends after, while the point of conflict with those dreadful fascists was to destroy them. Often, as in the Vietnam war, and arguably the Afghan war, the concern for not offending people paralyzed the war effort.
Wars with left enemies were like squabbles within a marriage. You would not want the squabble to escalate to divorce. If the US had really wanted to win in South Vietnam, would have had to win in North Vietnam, or credibly threaten to do so if the North Vietnamese did not back off. Hence, civil war, family squabble. The objective with fascist enemies was to destroy them. The objective with communist and Islamist enemies was to get them to converge. When communism fell, the CIA was not only shocked and incredulous, but also dismayed. Obama wants Islam to come resemble the WCC. That might arguably be a reasonable plan, but it is not the plan that was applied to Rhodesia or the Greek colonels—nor even the plan applied to our supposed allies, the Northern Alliance.
Downvoted for uncharitable interpretation. The citation includes at least six assertions
The pretend enemies are actually best defined as partial clients.
[The enemies’] friendship is only with one side of the American political system.
If their “anti-Americanism” actually reaches the level of military combat, the war is a limited war and essentially a civil one.
Right enemies include: [list of countries].
[These countries except one] don’t exist anymore.
[T]he “Israel lobby” is [much weaker than] the Palestine lobby.
and you selected the only unproblematic one for illustration.
That was the point. That some of assertions are obviously unproblematic.
While many of the assertions are arguably problematic, none of them seem unreasonable, or even weakly supported.
Could you nominate one of the assertions as unreasonable, or weakly supported. Choose one as an obvious deal breaker, something that a reasonable person should obviously reject.
I’m not interested in joining the debate about the assertions. I only object to Constant’s use of an unfair rhetorical trick; namely, interpreting the interlocutor in a way such that (s)he sounds silly. That some assertions in a paragraph of text are obviously unproblematic is hardly worth pointing out. It would be very difficult to write a longer stretch of text consisting purely of dubious statements.
For illustration, consider this fictitious dialogue (edited to give a better example):
C’s reaction is an unfair distraction although it’s not obvious that A’s assertion is wrong. If C isn’t an idiot he must see that B’s objection is directed towards the claim that the proof is faulty, not against the fact that 2+2=4.
In your fictitious example, it is obvious what A is objecting to
In the actual discussion in question, it is not at all obvious what you and Mercy are objecting to.
Actually, you took my words out of context and in effect are spreading falsehoods about what I was saying. The immediately preceding and following sentences are absolutely critical for understanding my argument. By extracting just the one sentence, you falsely make it seem as though I am uncharitably interpreting the interlocutor, and not only do you falsely make it seem this way, you explicitly state this interpretation.
OK. I believe it was not your intention to uncharitably interpret your opponent. Still, I think a reasonable interpretation of Mercy’s comment is that he’s objecting to all other assertions except the one about non-existence of Franco’s dictatorship and existence of Israel and the reason why he didn’t remove this clearly correct claim was simply because it was located in the middle of the quote. Therefore I still consider your choice of example distracting, but since it wasn’t intentional, I retract my downvote.
I prefer stating my opinions explicitly to making something seem that way.
I think that your interpretation of Mercy would be both wrong and uncharitable to Mercy because there are other plainly true and easily verifiable assertions in that comment.
I was not satisfied with making a reasonable interpretation which might nevertheless be false, because I wanted to know what Mercy actually was objecting to. I didn’t want to have to guess.
My comment was in fact no interpretation at all but a request for clarification. It was obviously that. Mercy understood it as that sam0345 understood it as that and explained this to you.
The real question is whether I should have made a reasonable but possibly false interpretation, or whether I should have requested clarification.
Now in my opinion Mencius Moldbug’s passage is itself reasonable from beginning to end. In my view, the real difference between the different parts of it is not that some are true and others false, but that some are easy to check and others are hard to check for a variety of reasons, one of which is that most people have such a superficial understanding of alliances and conflict that they would not know how to even begin to check to see whether there was an alliance or a conflict. Take for example North Korea. Everyone in North Korea loudly sings the praises of the great leader. Superficially, it looks like they all love him. Ie, it looks like an alliance. But I think many Americans by now are savvy enough to realize that the reason they praise the great leader so loudly is that they are all terrified of the state. So, not an alliance at all, but enslavement.
Well, North Korea is a pretty obvious example, which is why I picked it just now. However, there are, I think, other less obvious examples.
Now, since I think that Moldbug’s quote is reasonable from beginning to end, I would like to know what part of it Mercy objects to, and it’s not obvious to me which part that is because I am not a psychic. In order to illustrate that not all of the quote is false I picked one part of it that is not false. But from my point if view, none of the quote is obviously false. What part, then, to pick? I picked the part that was easiest to check as my illustration. Not, mind you, the truest part, since I think it all could be true.
Whatever your opinion about Moldbug is, and even if you are not a psychic, you had to suppose that Mercy is not disputing that Israel exists. The question
was rhetorical, and rhetorical questions are problematic tools in a rational debate. It could be understood as a mere example of a true (albeit trivial) statement in the quoted text, it could also be understood as an indirect claim that your opponent doesn’t know that Israel still exists. In political debates question of form “do you say that [something obviously false]” are much more often used as indirect accusations than for other purposes, which was why I have interpreted it as such. Since you say that was not your intention I believe you. But still your reply, if it was meant as a request for clarification, would be much better without the whole second paragraph.
That would have been careless. I was asking for clarification. It would have been needless and careless to make and incorporate assumptions about what Mercy was saying, into my very request for clarification.
The whole second paragraph was fine. It was only the single sentence taken out of context that became ambiguous. You’re the one who did that.
Assuming that your debate partner knows such an elementary fact as that Israel exists isn’t careless, it’s what charitable interpretation is supposed to be based on.
These are not mutually exclusive. It is indeed charitable, but one should make assumptions, even charitable ones, only when they are necessary to proceed. And it was hardly necessary to assume what the person was saying in my very request for clarification, since the point of the clarification was to obviate the need to make any such assumptions.
It’s hardly ever necessary to make assumptions; one can always proceed with literal interpretation of what has been said. But one shouldn’t. We have probably different preferences as for debating style.
So now you agree with my careful avoidance of assumptions?
So which of these six assertions do you suggest is obviously unreasonable.
Note that 6 is not a position taken by Mencius, but rather an uncharitable inference, you are arguing that if what Mencius says is true, then the Palestine lobby is much stronger than the Israeli lobby, which obviously it is not.
What Mencius says is that there is no Palestinian lobby, because the Palestinian lobby is Harvard and the State department, which is indeed much stronger than Israeli lobby.
Now proposition six is not a position of Mencius, but your refutation of Mencius.
Consider: The PLO lives off aid to Palestinians. Aid to Palestinians is provided by “The international community”, which is in practice pretty much the State Department, Havard, and their NGO proxies. If we assume that he who pays the piper calls the tune, then the various US peace initiatives are best understood as various US presidents trying unsuccessfully to get the State Department to accept the existence of Israel as permanent and unchanging reality, that cannot and should not be changed, however sad, regrettable and unfortunate that reality might be, that the various US presidents were not so much unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a peace between Israel and the Arabs, nor even between Judaism and Islam, but between the Pentagon and the State Department.
That’s a question for Mercy, but it can be that (s)he finds unreasonable all except the fifth. No.5 is the only obviously reasonable one.
I have paraphrased that for brevity. Still can’t think about meaning of “A is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is B” significantly different from “A is much weaker than B”.
“A” is not the (entirely nonexistent and wholly unnecessary) Palestinian lobby. It is Harvard and the state department.
B, not A. Anyway, have you read the original quotation by Moldbug? Here is the relevant sentence, for your convenience:
Palestine lobby is written explicitly there, and it’s even not in quotation marks as “Israel lobby” is.
I’m sorry, but this is not a reasonable debate. I retreat.
Moldbug also says the Palestine lobby does not exist. You are taking a fragment out of context.
The quote above? Not obviously wrong, just not even wrong and as unfalsifiable as any proper conspiracy theory should be.
Of the “enemy” regimes listed, US went to war only with Nazis and three of them were valued NATO members. One can call Vietnam and Korean wars in a sense limited, because US refused to use nukes and escalate into full WW3.
I wouldn’t comment about Israel, because there is nothing more mind-killing that discussion about Israeli/Palestinian politics :-(
That is true, but we don’t have to get into all of it. His assertion that the USG does not actually support Israel is frankly bizarre. USG gives them billions of dollars a year in cash, in weapons systems and other material support.
Mencius holds that the US is not a monolithic entity. Therefore it is possible within his framework for one part of the US government to do one thing while another does something else that directly contradicts what the first part is doing. His model of the US government is, to put it crudely, that politicians are essentially figureheads, and that the real government is the unelected bureaucracy. Since the politicians are not really running things, then the bureaucracy of government is effectively a sovereign entity. However, there is not one single bureaucracy. The Pentagon, for example, is pretty separate from the State department, since their hierarchies come together only at the Presidency, which is, as mentioned, a figurehead position with severely limited real influence. Therefore it is conceivable, and I believe Mencius holds it to be the case, that the Pentagon and State are mutually fairly autonomous.
All of this is to point out that it is possible, within his framework, for the US simultaneously to aid Israel militarily with weapons, and also to undermine it politically through State Department activities. Whether this is the case depends on what the state department is doing, and Mencius throughout his many long blog entries presents his evidence. I don’t want to go into further detail because the topic is both difficult and dangerous.
I don’t think the Pentagon makes appropriations of foreign aid, even in weapons systems. I could be wrong, but I think these are specific line items approved in the federal budget. Doubtless, the state department and pentagon do provide analysis and persuasion with regard to their pet programs, projects and a number of critical implementation details but they do not, as a bureaucracy, determine WHETHER support will be provided at all.
Nor can one say that any bureaucratic organization has a single opinion about a question as general as “support for Israel”. I don’t consider any of this to be very revealing observations. Corporate bodies are made up of multiple people who have different ideas, values and opinions. Yes. Still the OUTPUT is lots of material aid to Israel. Therefore, USG supports Israel and Mencius is probably off his meds.
Their proxies and nominally independent contractors often wind up shooting at each other. It is like the cold war.
Indeed, Mencius argues that the cold war was between the State department and the Pentagon
And what does the US give Israel’s enemies? The US gives two billion a year, mostly military aid, to Egypt. Foreign aid to Palestinians, much of it US aid or thinly laundered US aid, supports a comfortable Palestinian standard of living, substantially better than that of most their Muslim neighbors, which encourages them to continue doing what they have been doing.
Israel and Egypt are at peace, and have been for 30 years. For much of that period, Egypt and Israel had fairly effective joint security undertakings. They’re not a convincing example of an enemy.
Egypt and Israel were at peace the way the US and the Soviet Union were at peace, if that, and now they are at peace rather less than that.
And if you find Egypt unconvincing as a US funded and sponsored enemy of Israel, consider Israel’s long and bitter complaint about the Arab states maintaining the Palestinians and the PLO as permanent multi generational refugees.
But arguably it was the “international community” rather than the Arab states that maintained the Palestinians and the PLO as permanent multi generational refugees.Certainly it was the “international community” that funded this, and one does not have to be unreasonably conspiracy minded to consider that the “International community” is the State Department in drag. The NGOs look mighty like Harvard on a generous expense account mingling with the CIA on a slightly less generous expense account.
From what you’ve said earlier you apparently believe that the USSR was a client state of the USA.
So I can only conclude that you believe either (1) that Israel is a client state of Egypt or (2) that Egypt is a client state of Israel. I regard either of these two interpretations as bizarre, but no more bizarre than thnings you’ve said on this thread.
Frankly I at a loss to understand you.
Is that the link you intended? It doesn’t mention that.
A client state of the state department. There is more than one America, and the state department does not like the America that I like.
I hope to see the day that the Pentagon bombs the state department. During the invasion of Afghanistan, it became apparent that the Pentagon’s allies were not the State Department’s allies.
I find these questions fascinatingly interesting, but I’m afraid this isn’t the right place to proceed with this discussion. Feel free to PM me if you want some of my further thoughts, though.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense. Do you have any specific points in it that trouble you, or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other. You quote the article as if it was obviously unreasonable on sight. I am puzzled, and would like to understand what is unreasonable about it.
Recall, for example, when the pentagon was allied with the Northern Alliance, the State Department was allied with the Taliban. The state department ordered the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul, much as it demands that Israel give Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The Pentagon furtively indicated it was fine with the Northern Alliance entering Kabul, which resulted in something close to shooting war between the Pentagon and the State Department. The Northern alliance, contrary to orders, entered Kabul and threw the Taliban out of Kabul. In the end, the state department, and thus the Taliban, won, in that the Northern Alliance was suppressed, and replaced by a government that is is composed, like the Taliban, of Pashtun, unlike the Northern Alliance, composed, like the Taliban, of Radical Islamists, unlike much of the Northern Alliance, but nonetheless is supposedly at war with the Taliban and supposedly on our side, not withstanding its habit of burning bibles, executing Muslims who convert to Christianity, and executing Muslims who try to rationalize away the more disturbing parts of the Koran, odd behavior for a supposed ally of us and supposed enemy of the Taliban.
You may think this account of the current war is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that the State Department ordered the Northern Alliance to not enter Kabul? Is it not odder that the current government of Kabul has policies that are a lot closer to the Taliban than to the policies of the Northern alliance?
And if the US is on Israel’s side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
If Mencius’s account is obviously odd, are there not a lot of even odder aspects about the conventional account?
This is not the place to argue whether his view is correct, but I would like to understand why some people find his view hard to swallow. Of course it comprehensively contradicts official history, but no one seems troubled by versions of history that contradict yesterday’s official history in a leftward direction.
Yet you don’t offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren’t encouraged on LW. The problems are:
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
rhetorical questions instead of well formulated arguments (“you may think this account [...] is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that …”)
implicitly suggesting that the opponent may be biased against new ideas (“or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other”)
conspirationist-style vocabulary (“conventional wisdom ”, “comprehensively contradicts official history”) and unnecessary use of political labels (“leftward direction”); this seems to imply that there is some leftist conspiracy to cover the important facts
The points 3 and 4 are mainly a matter of style, but 1 and 2 are more important. Inference (X is odd, therefore Y must be true), where X and Y are neither exhaustive nor enough precisely specified, is a fairly typical ingredient of nowhere-leading frustrating debates. This is what we try to avoid here.
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons why the US wanted to preserve the left enemy while utterly destroying the right enemy. But the point is not to argue particular cases, but that in almost every case the US sought to utterly destroy the right enemy, while preserving the left enemy.
And when the US did seek to destroy the left enemy, the State Department resisted that policy the whole way kicking and screaming.
It was you who started arguing about one particular case. Therefore my reaction logically addressed that case.
More generally, if you offer a particular event (siege of Kabul) as evidence for a general hypothesis (the US State Department always tries to utterly destroy the right enemies and never the left enemies), you have to show that the particular example really supports the general hypothesis (here you had to show that the reason of the SD’s opposition is best explained by sympathies to Taliban). But at this moment you can’t use the general hypothesis to show that it is indeed the best explanation; that would be circular.
Well the stuff you’ve detailed about Afghanistan being a rogue puppet state brought to heel is an untroubling version of history that contradicts the official variety in a leftward direction. I see Constant was quite right to ask what I objected to in the quote, but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not. It’s not that these are troubling, I like being troubled by heterodoxy, but I like it for the opportunity to model their thought processes.
And I understand how someone can believe in the idea that the US is against Israel and for Communism, but I MM actually seems to think it’s true- he thinks the US funding of Israel is explicable in terms of wanting to see Israel destroyed, and the invasion of Vietnam in terms of curbing the anti-american tendencies of communism. And I can’t see what those explanations are.
Likewise, I can see someone interpreting America’s attitude towards Israel as being overly pro-Palestinian, but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
That is simply false. MM explains, or perhaps rationalizes, why the Palestinian lobby does not exist: He says that the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians are a proxy of the state department. According to MM the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.
Which might be just rationalizing away an inconvenient fact, but does explain the curious anomaly that the Palestinians don’t rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interests.
Is there any nation that “rationally and selfishly follows its collective interest”?
It is safe to say that there isn’t. The rest of us would have been left or overwhelmed within months.
Huh? Do you think that selfishness unambiguously means: dominate Earth (or what left of it) as fast as possible?
No.
Nations are less rational and self interested than individuals, but rationality and self interest is for the most part a rough approximation, as good as a spherical cow. It is a quite good approximation for monarchies such as Qatar and the former Lichtenstein. It is a very bad approximation to Palestinian behavior.
WARNING: MIND-KILLER FIELD AHEAD
Very few large groups are ever capable of rationally following their own interests. One of the things we learn from decision theory and voting theory is that groups, in general, might not have well-defined preferences, even if the members do. When a large group acts incoherently, no special explanation is needed.
The evidence you produce supports the considerably weaker claim, that no group is capable of reliably and consistently rationally following their own interests, and will not always have a well defined interest.
A well run corporation, and most corporations are reasonably well run, perhaps because those that are not are apt to wind up broke, does fairly successfully follow its own interest.
The whole point of organizing a group, having a leadership, is to achieve the capability of pursuing its own interests, (unless of course, it is an astroturf organization)
If one asserts that the Israeli lobby exists and is effective, this implies that Jews organized as the state of Israel are capable of following their collective interests, or at least the interests of the state of Israel.
A corporation is usually quite capable of following the interests of shareholders.
The way a corporation accomplishes this is that there is a board, which supposedly represents the shareholders. The board is theoretically elected by shareholders, though usually it was self appointed when the company was formed, and has subsequently been self perpetuating. But despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the elections are usually worthless, the board usually does represent the interests of shareholders.
The board appoints a CEO, and delegates all power to him, subject to the limit that they may fire him at any moment. The board is supposed to monitor what he does, but not interfere or second guess him. It is supposed to allow him enough rope to hang himself, and usually it does.
This system does enable large groups to rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interest.
The systems commonly used by governments are generally less effective, but they are not totally and completely ineffective.
The world that we think we are familiar with may be quite different from the way we think it is. We know less than we think. As you write the words above, you are (typically) in a room somewhere, looking at a monitor, surrounded by walls. You see very little of the world, just a few cubic meters of your immediate surroundings. So how do you know about the world that exists outside those four walls?
Could it be that you remember that world, that you remember having been outside these walls before entering the room and writing your forum comment? So you have an eyewitness’s memory of the world outside. Eyewitnesses, however, are notoriously unreliable (just google eyewitness reliable, you’ll find discussion about this phenomenon).
So your own personal memory of the world is unreliable. We know furthermore that your consciousness of what is in front of your eyes right now has enormous gaps. There has been a lot of interesting activity in this area. Google change blindness for example. Google invisible gorilla.
So, we know very little about what is happening right now immediately around us. We have unreliable memory of what happened to us in the past.
And now we move from our most direct sources of knowledge to indirect sources of knowledge, mostly what other people say. The unreliability of our senses, of our mind, and of our memory, must now be combined with the added unreliability of what other people tell us. This forum called “lesswrong” and its parent blog called “overcoming bias” are built in large part on the assumption that people are unreliable, often wildly unreliable.
A little humility is in order. This is not to say that Mencius Moldbug is uniquely clear-sighted. That’s not my point. My purpose is to dent, at least a little, the confidence that he must be wrong because he contradicts what we know quite well the world is like. You write:
That can be taken two ways. If you have great self-confidence in your knowledge of the world and in the absence of any important gaps in your reasoning, then that can be taken to mean that since you can’t see his reasons, therefore there must not be excellent reasons.
But it can also be taken another way. If you are not that self-confident, then it can be an admission that you don’t know, with no implication that he is probably wrong. I, for example, can’t see what the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem could possibly be—but when I say this, I am not implying that Wiles’s proof is probably flawed. I am here admitting my own limitations, nothing more.
The Vietcong never existed. They were an arm of Hanoi. And Hanoi was never an enemy in the sense that the US wanted it to be overthrown or lose territory—nor in the sense that US derecognized Hanoi’s authority over large parts of North Vietnam. The US seriously undermines the very existence of Israel. It never undermined the communist regime in the North. The squabble between the US and North Vietnam was like a quarrel within a marriage, like the frequent disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department. Indeed, Mencius argues that it was a dispute between the Pentagon and the State Department. In contrast, the dispute between the US and Rhodesia was existential.
WARNING: MIND-KILLER FIELD AHEAD
It’s only odd if you abstract away a lot of uncontroversial and widely known facts.
The US gives quite a lot of aid to Israel, in diplomatic and financial terms. Support for Israel is a standard part of both parties’ political platforms. That US support for Israel is limited or qualified doesn’t make it nonexistent. There isn’t a Palestinian government has reliable control over any money or land to speak of. If there’s going to be any yielding of either, it’s going to have to be to the Palestinians, not from them. And most of the Israeli leadership is perfectly aware of this.
That there is such an entity as “the Palestinians” reflects the fact that Palestinians get paid for being Palestinian, paid rather a lot. There was no such entity, no such people, until the money started flowing.
And who pays them? It is remarkably difficult to find out, almost as if paying them was some sort of criminal plot.
But if you dig deep enough, it is primarily the United States and the European Union. And the supposedly European Union aid somehow winds up passing through NGOs full of graduates from the American Ivy League.
The Paris conference (who?) provided 7.7 billion in Palestinian aid over three years 2008-2010. Note that no one seems to want to have their names on these payments.
High estimates for US aid to Israel are based on such highly creative accounting as including Jewish migrants from the US to Israel as foreign aid, and international investment as foreign aid. Actual direct aid for Israel from the US in 2008 was 2.38 billion, which seems remarkably similar to western aid to Palestinians—except that aid to Israel is done with trumpets blowing, and aid to “Palestinians” is done furtively.
Heh, now this is an interesting debate, though it might get us downvoted.
Perhaps the current global international order is a better way to phrase it, since the US usually carries with it a constellation of European countries, and economic and political interests in other parts of the world play a large role in determining the US policy. In many interesting ways Washington DC seems to be the global imperial capital where vassals go to pay tribute and hopefully determine or influence policy.
The argument you present is hard to attack or criticize. We live in a society where we speak of nation building, spreading democracy and even refer to “humanitarian bombings” without a hint of sarcasm. And this is merely direct military action! One needs only to look at other international both covert and publicly know activities designed and used to spread and enforce these “approved bounds”, to realize that such military intervention plays only a small role in its upkeep. Many on Lesswrong seriously question democracy, but nearly any system they may have in mind to replace it is essentially unacceptable to the Western world. Because currently the ultimate purpose of the Western states or rather the superstructure they form is to expand into a universalist order that captures all humans everywhere. The very existence of humans living in a different system, or heavens forbid, thriving, is offensive to it. This I think includes even very moderate suggestions like say Futarchy. The ideology may not have a name, but it seems incredibly powerful, perfectly comparable in its influence on 21st and 20th century civlization with the influence of Marxist-Leninism or Jacobinism on the societies of their time.
There is not even much criticism of it leaking into mainstream media. We’ve figured out how to dismiss “those protesty people” so well that we don’t even have to remember they exist. We don’t need a conspiracy to explain this, we’ve just gotten bored with it and no longer pay attention.
Anyone who pointed out the hypocrisy of sponsoring a civil war and conducting direct bombing campaigns against Libyans to “protect Libyans” was assumed to be a mouthpiece in a partisan debate—haters gonna hate right?
Have you read James Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchy?
No I haven’t. I will be putting it on my to reading list due to your recommendation though. Mind summarizing the content?
It’s a non-scholarly overview about the underlying social systems that the people in charge somewhat control. It includes informal resistance (slacking, poaching, wildcat strikes, riots) and says that formal resistance (unions, political action, revolutions) is frequently “leaders” surfing a wave they didn’t create.
Scott says that visual order is not as closely related to making things work well as those in charge would like to think. There’s a detailed description of African farming which looks sloppy to European eyes but is actually more effective at growing food—not having the same kind of plant next to each other means fewer pests, and having the ground completely shaded by leaves means water is conserved. There’s more about dictators wanting visual order and somewhat about how the aerial view leaves out how people actually live.
The most practical detail I saw was a strong recommendation that if you’re evaluating nursing homes, then make sure to talk to the patients when the staff isn’t present.
There’s a chapter in favor of the petty bourgeois—they have about as widely distributed ownership of the means of production as anyone’s ever seen.
I hope this gives something of a feel of the book—Scott’s very reasonable—he acknowledges that not all evil comes from centralization nor is decentralization reliably good, but too many people tip the balance farther in favor of centralization than it deserves.
If the seastead existed somewhere in the North Sea and the Dutch, German, Belgian and British governments approved its existence while the U.S. didn’t (because it feared realization of a libertarian utopia; no terrorist group on the seastead assumed), how likely do you think they would try to put it down by force? And how likely if it were in the Yellow Sea?
How large is the set of things that Western European governments would be OK with, but the U.S. government wouldn’t? It seems to me that their ideological consensus is strong enough that there is little if any practical difference.
When I speak of the U.S. global authority, I don’t mean just authority exercised through explicit military interventions and diplomatic pressures. I also mean the informal and indirect authority that stems from the fact that the modern-day global ideological consensus emanates from American institutions, which means that other countries also won’t be OK with anything that the U.S. government seriously objects to.
Moreover, the problem isn’t just the threat of armed intervention. Economic and even just PR pressures can be fatal by themselves. It’s enough that the respectable worldwide opinion—which is again driven primarily by what the respectable U.S. media and academic institutions say—starts viewing your seastead as undemocratic, exploitative, discriminatory, in violation of human rights, etc., calling for boycotts and sanctions, and so on. This could put enough pressure on respectable people to make them avoid having any business with you, which may well be enough to ruin you without a shot ever being fired.
As for the Yellow Sea, seeking some sort of Chinese protection might indeed be the only feasible course of action, given that China is insulated from the above mentioned influences to a larger degree than probably any other country. (Russia is another such example, but it would probably be even more risky and difficult to deal with.)
Agreed, but that’s somewhat different claim from saying that the U.S. government is the only important player who can prevent seasteads from functioning. Violation of important ideological taboos shared by European and U.S. societies would certainly result into some action against the seasteads, but what are these taboos isn’t decided by U.S. government’s whim. The basic ideological framework is already present in the Western society and the governments are bound to respect it, not the other way around. (I also disbelieve that running some version of libertarian utopian society with several dozens of people on board would classify as such inviolable taboo.)
There are certainly other possibilities. Not only Russia (which may be, on the other hand, more hostile to the concerned libertarian ideas and possible tax evasion than the U.S.), but also India, Brazil, Venezuela, perhaps France—strong anti-American sentiments exists in all those countries and any strong pressure from the U.S. government would likely result in a major diplomatic conflict.
This isn’t really relevant for the main point, but in my opinion, this ideological consensus has been built, and is presently being maintained, overwhelmingly by American institutions (both governmental and those that are nominally not such). So it’s not at all inaccurate to see it as a projection of U.S. power, even though it nowadays rests on the status and prestige of American ideas and institutions far more than on the U.S. military supremacy. If tomorrow the U.S. disappeared from the global stage, I’m sure this consensus would quickly break down.
Yes, but that’s far below any reasonable benchmark of success. Remember, the seasteading people want huge, hopefully world-changing impact. Achieving such a huge impact by radical experiments in government would involve some violation of taboos with certainty.
On this list, India seems like the only potential candidate to achieve a decently independent status similar to Russia and China in the foreseeable future, though I’d say it’s still far from that. As for the other countries, I don’t think any of them could afford to protect openly a group of people at whom the U.S. government is really angry.
But more importantly, the anti-American sentiments held by the elites of these (and various other) countries are not based on rejecting the U.S.-led transnational ideological consensus (as, for example, the anti-Americanism of some radical nationalists or religious traditionalists would be). These sentiments are based on the perception that the U.S. itself fails to live up to the ideals of this ideological consensus. Therefore, an international campaign against the evil undemocratic human-rights-violating seasteaders would elicit enthusiasm from this whole crowd, and their anti-Americanism would find expression in accusations that the U.S. is supposedly tolerating and abetting them and failing to act against them with sufficient vigor, with its nefarious corporate and militaristic interests, and so on. Unlike the all-out anti-Americanism of various fringe elements, the respectable anti-Americanism of the intellectual and political elites always has this form.
Besides “Universal adult franchise is the best, and only just, system of government” and micro-states rapidly becoming explicit protectorates of militarily powerful countries, what other changes would you expect to see if that happened?
Is that not enough?
Obviously there would be far more poltiical diversity, some of it for the worse, some of it for the better.
Consider Haiti, which is a US protectorate. The US has repeatedly removed regimes it disapproved of, such as the Duvaliers, and repeated installed regimes it approves of, such as Aristide, with the result that who ever is in charge does what the aid NGOs tell them. Observe that under the Duvaliers, there was electric lighting and human feces were buried rather than running down the streets.
That’s a tough and fascinating question, but I’m afraid this isn’t the right venue to pursue it, especially since it’s mostly unrelated to the topic of the original post.
This seems not entirely true. The French and German governments opposed the Iraq war although there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a human-right-violating bloody tyrant. The public opinion was even more anti-American. The anti-American sentiments are verbally justified by assertions that the U.S. fails to live up to the consensual ideals, but the real reason of these sentiments has to do more with power balancing than with ideologies.
The state department opposed the Iraq war, thus this is consistent with them being state department proxies or puppets—Mencius calls them muppets.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about this. As far as I can tell, the 19th century-style thinking about balances of power in international politics is completely absent among today’s intellectual elites in Western countries. There is still of course a lot of such thinking among the common folk and in lower-class journalism and publishing, but practically none among the people whose opinion and influence really matters, and it really doesn’t describe the reality of what’s going on.
And you determined the Real Reason how?
Downvoted for politics.
Fair enough. Did you downvote the whole discussion or only my last reply?
There’s some divergence on drug laws and their enforcement.
Nothing significant: Western Europe is run by the state department, and less directly, by Harvard through the London School of Economics.
Eastern Europe, however, not so much. Estonia is “an economy in transition”—in transition to capitalism, instead of in transition to fascism.
Australia and New Zealand, though overall roughly equally socialized to the USA, tend to differ randomly from the US in what is regulated and socialized, and what is socialized tends to be socialized in a different way. Australia has a markedly more private school system, it has private transport infrastructure for resource extraction, and has much more private sewage than the USA.
Various Latin American countries are small enough and poor enough that they go for the revenues from regulatory arbitrage, for example Panama. Lee taking power in Singapore was a revolt against the neocolonialism of the London School of Economics, and thus against Harvard, and thus Singapore does no end of things that horrify the Harvard consensus, such as actually punishing criminals. They nonetheless try not to aggravate the US too much.
If they set up a medical tourism business just offshore, will that be unremarkable or destroyed?
It is unremarkable in that medical tourism is available in many countries already. Making it much cheaper might have a dramatic effect. or not.
Yes, there are certain bounds that the US imposes, but are there so many?
ETA: I see that MM gives medicine as his particular example of what won’t succeed. And Patri answers that medical tourism already exists. I don’t think that’s a great answer and the rest of his comment is a weird mix of practical (cruise ships do violate labor law) and naive (written law). But I don’t find MM’s short argument convincing, either.
But I do hold out a little bit of hope in the sense that seasteading can be attempted on nearly any state’s doorstep. As US and Russian positions on the issue of independence of small states and regions in Western Eurasia shows, great powers are great friends of the principle of self-determination when it is limited to the spheres of interests of rival great powers. Perhaps if China feels its economic interest isn’t sufficiently represented by its influence on US policy or vice versa?
There are naturally even more desperate alternatives including alliances with so called rogue states, some of which might in the near future posses nuclear weapons which for now seem to offer at least some minimal source of protection. Now naturally many might object to how one could contemplate to cooperate even for defence with a regime like say Iran, but I think this misses the point. The sovereignty of a chunk of land or sea or a virtual community, does allow things to go horribly wrong like say North Korea, but it also allows things to go potentially horribly right. Yes your cooperation may prolong the existence of X regime you dislike or even despise which has a few dozen million people living horribly, but at the same time it ensures billions of people living in a sort of ok or seemingly ok system have a working demonstration of a great or much better system, this might in itself greatly increase the probability of those states eventually transitioning to such systems.
Utilitarians (let alone others!) who think and have good reasons to think that their X form of government has this potential, need to shut up and calculate.
“rouge states”
Should be rogue states.
Thank you pointing that out!
The excellent new system being required to work with criminals and outcasts merely to prove its own viability means taking up such an ENORMOUS burden of proof… you do realize that, don’t you? What would the prior probability of “We’d all be better off changing our society in line with what those weird guys, who give the NK regime aid and technology in exchange for shelter, have been doing for a couple of years” appear to be for an intelligent mainstream Western person? Sorry, this is basically the least sane bit of armchair speculation that I’ve heard from you period. I mean, the average Bond villain has a more viable AND ethically sound plan.
I do understand the motive, of course. You were looking for a way to make up an ethical dilemma to signal smart contrarianism with. Aren’t we all guilty of that sometimes?
The history of the relationship between Israel and South Africa is more complicated than I thought, but that kind of thing isn’t a pure hypothetical.
The idea is interesting but it seems to underestimate the amount of resources that ships and platforms take up. The maintenance costs are just massive. They require continual work and parts replacements. The sea is a very harsh environment. There is constant buffeting by water and the salt and moisture causes corrosion and if one is not very careful growth of mildew and other nasties. There’s an analysis commissioned by some of the seasteading people here which is worth reading but I think that it is very optimistic about costs.
These are certainly difficult problems, but they are all solvable if just enough money and expertise is thrown at them. The cost would be very high, but the potential profits in the hypothetical case of success (i.e. establishing a functional seastead with de facto full sovereignty) are vastly higher. I don’t think any technical problems are comparable to the political issues involved.
People have been trying to deal with the technical problems of ship maintenance for hundreds of years, and in the case of platforms have had massive international companies put tremendous amounts of resources into improving their engineering. They are still extremely expensive and difficult to run. Given how much research has already been put into these issues it seems unlikely that a few more years of research will substantially improve the situation.
Er, what profits are those exactly?
Government of decent quality is in severely short supply nowadays. If you manage to create a functional truly sovereign government and run it with a modicum of competence, even if it’s just a tiny statelet, masses of people will be willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of taking their business there.
Even if you can’t come up with a regime that would offer superior governance across the board (though there’s no excuse not to), you can always target some particular industry that’s been regulated into oblivion or where prohibitive barriers to entry have been imposed by the present governments. This doesn’t necessarily mean creating a haven for shady and questionable practices—perfectly normal and honest industries are regularly destroyed by the modern governments in bouts of bureaucratic craziness or in various shakedown schemes.
The possibilities are endless, if you can just maintain actual sovereignty.
Can you give some examples here? I am not clear what the industry is that a seastead can do, where it has enough comparative advantage to pay for all the obvious associated costs.
Clearly, that depends on various technical properties of the seastead. Also, I don’t know enough about most industries to say what exactly would be necessary for them.
As for concrete examples of crackdowns on honest industries, it’s hard to find any that wouldn’t immediately open charged political topics. However, there are clear examples of industries massively changing jurisdictions in response to increased regulatory compliance costs. Another interesting data point is the success of well-governed small countries in attracting foreign business.
It’s hard to know in advance how good a government is. Five years ago, people might have held up Ireland and Iceland as well-governed successful small countries. Those no longer look so persuasive. There’s a danger of confirmation bias here—we only know they’re well governed because they’re successful.
Singapore, Switzerland, and Hong Kong are the successful well-governed small countries I can think of offhand. But I’m not sure the one caused the other. New York, Silicon Valley, and London are doing comparably well in terms of GDP per capita and I think quality of life, despite a lack of obvious good government and without obviously greater natural advantages. (NY has a good natural port and a good location, as do HK and Singapore.)
That is all true, but the idea of seasteading is to explore the options for high-quality governance outside of those available to any presently existing countries, which are severely curtailed by their domestic historical and political constraints, as well as international entanglements. Of course, the proposition that there are such options is somewhat controversial, though I find it pretty evident that there should be. (I am however much more skeptical about the possibility of building them from scratch in a planned way, even if the problems of ensuring sovereignty are solved somehow.)
Also, you forgot Liechtenstein on your list. It is perhaps the best example of a highly successful small country that prospers by offering high-quality governance that attracts business. (Recently I was amazed to find out that rather than being just a finance hub and tax haven, more than 40% of their labor force is in manufacturing!)
Iceland and ireland, like a great many other countries, allowed their banks to behave irresponsibly. When the banks imploded, Ireland bailed them out, and made incompetent and criminal bankers entirely whole. Iceland took the other extreme, declared the bankers broke, and told the creditors to take a hike.
If one is doing something badly wrong, the other is probably doing something right. They are unlikely to both be badly run.
This, right here, is the evidence that their governments weren’t quite as effective as we thought beforehand.
This doesn’t follow. It might be that both, one, or neither have responded sensibly to the crisis. Different circumstances call for different measures, and all that. And “bail out” or “let fail” isn’t the complete universe of policy measures.
As compared to all those countries where wise regulators ensured wise bankers.
There are countries that did much better—Canada, for instance, avoided a banking crisis. There are also countries that seem to have handled it better, such as the Baltic states.
Just to be clear: I’m not saying necessarily that I know what the optimal thing to do was, in 2007-2009. What I’m arguing is that it’s often unclear for a long time how well a given country’s policies have worked, since negative consequences don’t always become visible quickly.
England did well to put their political headquarters in their most important city and port city, creating a uniquely strong center of gravity that made it much larger than other English cities, which gave it advantages over anywhere else and momentum to this day.
I’m going to suggest it’s not very likely.
One common thread I see over at the Seasteading institute, and with other variants like the Atlantis project, is that while they’re quite aware of the engineering challenges posed by severe storms and the like, they don’t appear to spend much time thinking about how harsh an environment the open ocean is even when it’s calm, or just how challenging remote living can really be.
Mariners and shipping companies have a saying: “A ship is a hole in the water you pour money into.” Salt water is very corrosive to metal, and to so many other materials. This doesn’t impact somebody much if they go on a cruise for a few weeks, but it’s utterly non-trivial for the long term. Even the air out there has an erosive effect on materials—I spent a fair bit of my childhood on the seaside, and even new buildings get to look aged and weathered pretty quickly.
Where does fresh water come from? This is also non-trivial as yet—desalination is nothing like cheap yet, although I expect it’s one of the easier problems to solve in the long run (water filtration and desalination are areas of considerable research, after all, and there have been some breakthroughs at the proof of concept level recently).
Growing enough food to be self-sufficient in that environment? Forget it. This is beyond just setting up a sealed greenhouse—you’re going to need a degree of climate control and containment, in addition to indoor growing techniques, that I don’t think has even been invented yet. Hydroponics are your friend here, but they carry their own challenges, and the crop variety will be quite limited in any case. Setting up a big enough growing area to actually feed the population independently is going to cost a lot more than any such plans I’ve seen, and I think it’s more than one or two design generations away.
So they’ll be importing food. I invite you to research the cost of food in Iqaluit, Nunavut or Barrow, Alaska. We are talking about someplace more remote, and very possibly less easily-accessible, than Diomede island. The Seasteading institute assumes that if a cruise ship can function while charging passengers 60 USD a day (about 1800 USD a month, during which you’re not doing much but leisure) then it should be possible to arrive in a similar ballpark of prices, making this middle-class accessible. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that the average middle-class family in North America is not used to paying 6 dollars for a loaf of plain white bread, 10 dollars for a box of Rice Krispies, over 10 dollars a pound for Red Delicious apples, 25 dollars for a 12-pack of soda...it all has to be brought in by container ship, usually.
Living that rural comes with hidden costs. “The middle of the ocean” is about as rural as you can get while still technically being on the planet Earth.
There are further issues. I don’t think this place is going to be the libertarian paradise that most of its boosters yearn for. An isolated community in a hostile environment with extreme vulnerability if anything goes wrong will not be governed by anarchic or even entirely democratic methods. There will pretty much have to be a captaincy—the moment a typhoon kicks up or entropy makes itself known in ways that the engineers didn’t plan for (or the contractors cheaped out on...), or basically the first time the plan disintegrates on contact with reality, this is going to be their best hope. Not to get down on the social and political urge to experiment with other types of society, but if you really want a Libertarian utopia without having to face insane food prices or the sneaky, deadly surprises of a high-entropy environment, go to Burning Man.
Edited to add: Expect elevated rates of arterial hypertension, too.
Why this?
Seems to be more common among deep-sea fishermen and other populations who spend a lot of time at sea than in the general population, is all. Possibly to do with all the salt, but I really don’t know why.
Does it include waiters on cruise ships, etc? (Just trying to isolate for stress, etc.)
Actually, doing a bit of a look on Google, I can’t back that up for cruise ship personnel, and it looks like there’s some evidence in the other cases that it’s due to stress factors. I retract the statement.
I originally thought you meant it was caused by stress and I still thought it was valid.
Well, presumably being at sea in a non-stressful environment would have some chance of not causing that.
I’m not sure what such a thing really looks like, mind (luxury cruise passengers don’t usually live on the boat long-term) or if it’s feasible to talk about it within the space of current nautical engineering. I certainly have never been on a boat that didn’t feel like a fairly controlled, sensitive environment in which one couldn’t just relax without having to keep tabs on everything else, but my experience is limited to fishing, crabbing and similar boats, which are very high-stress environments if you’re doing more than a quick excursion, especially in the waters I’m familiar with.
Patri Friedman has written a whole book on the subject, wherein he thoroughly addresses many of the concerns people have laid out. I have some problems with their initial approach, but I think Friedman’s team is flexible enough that they’ll eventually be able to find a workable path. I would guess that there is a 75% chance that there will be more than 1000 people living on seasteads (defined as “anything Patri Friedman would consider a seastead”) by 2030.
I read the book, and I didn’t see much info addressing the criticism of growing hydroponic food. Also, I think that they need to show the math involved with how much energy they will be required to produce food, water, etc. The book just provides a list of the possible technologies.
You can check the book out for yourself at: http://seasteading.org/book_beta/section_index.html
Many countries and polities don’t produce enough food, i.e. Singapore, NYC, etc. That is what trade is for. There is no particular reason a city state can’t thrive without a native agriculture industry.
Thiel seems to like long-shots with high risk and very high potential pay-off. I’m sure he considers it +EV. Even if all they did was influence some existing governments he may consider it worthwhile. He doesn’t need to expect to make any money off of it.
According to O. Shane Balloun’s excellently referenced paper to which Hyena linked, a seastead/shipstead just outside the contiguous zone (24 nautical miles offshore), which does not exploit natural resources, and has a zero-tolerance illegal drug policy, will enjoy little interference from Coast Guard.
There are many other challenges ahead, and we don’t have Thiel’s investment, but it is launching such a shipstead off the SF Bay Area that two former Seasteading Institute employees and I are working on at Blueseed.
WTF? That’s… worse than living on the mainland!
Strictly, only manufacturing and distribution of controlled substances is subject to the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, but we don’t want to take unnecessary risks at this stage. Incremental approach.
Well, do they have a strip search and pull back your foreskin to check for drugs law enforcement policy? Probably not. Theory v.s. practice.
Minor point but reading another article on the subject I noted that they were saying it would be free from government interference like ‘restrictive planning laws and weapons possession.’ Surely if yoiu are on a platform in the ocean planning laws are extremely important if you don’t want to sink? And weapons if you want any sort of political stability?
Weapons are a detriment to political stability?
Sorry, I meant ‘weapons laws,’ of the sort that prevent non-government groups from exercising a huge amount of power by force. It would seem trivially easy for a small band of well armed mercenaries to take over such a platform.
Yes, and this has been a problem with micronations in the past. Look at the history of Sealand.
I don’t think the threat is internal though—not from their citizens. Its external groups—basically, pirates. I don’t see how weapons laws will protect them against pirates. Indeed in their FAQ they allude to the fact that citizens will have to be armed to resist the more amateur pirates. More serious operations they hope to resist through not having enough worth taking. That is a more dubious line of argument but in either case I don’t see how having or not having weapons laws will really protect them.
For PB, you need relatively precise predictions. What exactly do you mean by ‘succeed’?
There are a number of ways you could operationalize this—for example, you could go by whether the Seasteading foundation is still active in a given year, whether its budget is above or below a certain amount, whether Thiel is still donating (and how much). One could make predictions about permanent habitats and number of people aboard, and hope that there aren’t unfortunate corner cases like seasteads which only leave port during summer or oil rigs with unclear ownership. And so on.
I was thinking of people making a several predictions on different benchmarks they have set for themselves and by which year they will or won’t be achieved. Take for instance the criteria for what they call “the Poseidon award”:
Which seastead institute hopes to give out by 2015.
That would be a good place to start making predictions on.
I have put it up on prediction book, I encourage others to estimate its probability and to make other predictions related to seasteading or other projects by the Thiel foundation. :)
The correct spelling is “likely”.
Thank you for pointing it out, though considering I already knew that and often make that mistake when typing, I fear my English is unlikely to improve as a result. But at least the title is now fixed.
Update from WIRED, May 2015:
Source
David Brin argues here that
Peter Thiel recently offered to invest in the first shipsteading venture, Blueseed.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/30/blueseed-funding/
I think that there are often creative solutions that people who aren’t serious about seasteading fail to notice. For example: you could take advantage of already existing shipping lanes to build you seastead and thereby reduce the shipping cost for importing food.
Personally, I think that they will start off as residential housing that isn’t in international waters. It is much easier to correct errors when you’re a mile away from help. It will also help them see unexpected errors they hadn’t thought about (without the drastic downside of failing in the middle of the ocean).
I also think that they need to come up with a mathematical lay out of the required energy, water, building materials, etc and calculate how much each of these things is going to cost. They give a list of the different technologies they plan on using, but don’t list how much they will cost and how much energy they produce. This isn’t very helpful.
Also, the digression that happens below really made me see why EY put such an emphasis on “politics is the mind killer”
The concept of seasteading seems to be related to how the United States existed in the antebellum period and also somewhat related to the libertarian Free State Project in NH. The USA as a collection of free and independent states each with a great deal of autonomy crashed and burned in less than 100 years. And the Free State Project doesn’t appear to me to be very successful. NH is slowly becoming MA (probably in spite of the Free State Project).