I like your thinking, but I believe the entire rationalist subculture stems from global agglomeration effects, as seen in the Bay Area, and cannot really live without them. To give an example, I am currently living in Zurich. There are big Google offices here, many crypto startups, Basel with its big pharma is close enough and so is Geneva with its international organizations and CERN. When people talk about possible “Silicon Valley of Europe” it’s either London or Zurich. That being said, there’s an EA coworking space here. Then there are regular EA and ACX meetups, with 5-15 people attending. And that’s it. Definitely not enough to sustain something like Lighthaven. Elsewhere in Europe, I think, the problems with insufficient agglomeration would be even worse.
Martin Sustrik
The Blast Radius Principle
Lived experience. I happened to live through the fall of communism. The typical communist/post-communist mindset is: “Don’t oppose the system. Do what you are told to do, but throw a wrench into the machine by pretending to be dumb, sleuthing, stealing and just being generally corrupt.”
It feels tempting, but I don’t see it happening. Imagine the practicalities of having a poly relationship in Bratislava. Everyone’s going to treat you as a madman. And that’s trivial compared to having some kind of rationalist co-living arrangement. And that’s Bratislava, a capital. Italian countryside is going to be much worse. Here’s Lucie Philippon complaining about this kind of problems in Paris, as big a city as it gets: https://aelerinya.substack.com/p/in-paris-i-dream-of-lighthaven I am afraid that only Bay Area with its constant influx and large population of weird/autistic people can really sustain that kind of thing.
Thanks! Fixed.
Generally, TFR collapses first in the cities, then in the countryside. Yet countryside depopulates quicker than the cities. Draw your own conclusions.
I think you are underestimating to what extent the old people are opposed to moving. In Ukraine, when the front approaches, some people choose to stay, even though it means living in a war zone.
Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse
Isn’t joined decision trap the situation where not the best policy is chosen, but rather the one that all stakeholders can agree on?
I am with you here. Similar feelings. But we may be underestimating the differences between age cohorts. Here’s some data from Eurobarometer (people who can speak English):
15-34 35-54 55+ All France 37.5% 25.6% 15.1% 24.6% Germany 64.1% 44.4% 26.5% 41.8% Italy 55.3% 31.7% 10.8% 28.2% Netherlands 92.1% 88.8% 78.9% 85.9% Slovakia 60.2% 30.3% 6.0% 29.8%Also, former Czechoslovakia may be a victim of its superior tradition of dubbing the movies. Elsewhere you often get movies in the original language with subtitles, or even without subtitles. But I guess YouTube is great equalizer here.
And maybe I could write a blog in English about how people in Slovakia see our common cultural space, and they could read it. In theory! But in practice, these things simply do not happen. If I read blogs in English, they are usually written by Americans. And when I want to blog about things in Slovakia, I blog in Slovak language. I use the English to communicate with fellow rationalists, or to write programming tutorials. I have virtually zero knowledge about France. And the French have zero knowledge about Slovakia.
That! Exactly what the phrase “We have made Europe; now we must make Europeans” refers to.
Eunification: a Historical Perspective
One point that Palmer makes in the book is that being an atheist during the renaissance was akin of being a conspiracy theorist today. Religion had moderately good explanations for things. Why are animals adapted to their way of living? Because God made them so. Atheism, on the other hand, had no good explanations.
But also check out this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cheese_and_the_Worms
I’ve been planning to do a Seldon joke, then forgot about it :facepalm:
Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance
Not tied to a particular party. “Non-partisan” would have been better wording.
Yet another approach: A dictator surrounds himself with the people he used to know before he became the dictator, i.e. people, trust in whom was built in an environment where there was yet not much point in lying to him.
Yup. Median voter theorem already barely works in a vanilla setup (voters directly electing decisionmakers) because of issue bundling. Add couple of layers of indirection (voters electing local MPs, who elect the local govts, who then choose the Commission) and there’s little, if anything, left.
I assume you are against. And you likely have majority of the European population on your side. Now it’s interesting to contemplate why median voter theorem does not work in EU.
Fair enough. I am 50, so may anectodes are from several decades ago and are probably badly outdated.
Seconded. When you talk to people you often find out that they are desperate to do something useful. They do not, partly because if they are not paid to do it, they can’t afford it. But even more importantly they are all too often actively prevented from it by random rules (e.g. work safety rules in case of a factory). When there are no barriers people would often even work for free. For example, when personal computers became available in 80s, and rule-makers haven’t yet realized that a new field has opened up, the open source movement emerged and built the entire software infrastructure for free.