No post this week

Instead, an interesting article and a lucid tweet thread

Apr 07, 2022

Hi friends!

With apologies, no post this week. Instead, below, I’m sharing an article (long) and a tweet thread (short), both super interesting.

Destabilized Saturday Edition will arrive at its usual time.

Talk soon,

Ethan

Compounding Crazy – Everything is moving so fast out there. What if it's just getting started?

…Humanity has spent its whole existence building things that become primitives for a future generation of builders. Every new invention is an output of centuries’ worth of innovations, and then voila, it becomes a simple, cleanly-packaged input for the next invention. Like a good API, each new invention abstracts away all of the complexity that went into its creation.

Let’s use tires, a relatively simple example. The wheel was invented in 4000 BC in Mesopotamia. Ancient South and Central Americans used rubber to make balls for games as far back as 1600 BC. In 1844, Charles Goodyear vulcanized rubber, in 1847 Robert W. Thompson patented the air-filled rubber tire, and in 1888, an Irishman named John Boyd Dunlop commercialized the first successful pneumatic tire. 120 years later, in 2008, the Tesla team used an evolved version of that tire as one of many, many inputs, each with its own long and winding evolution, into its first Roadster. The Tesla team didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.

This same compounding can be seen everywhere in the economy. Every invention is the latest in a chain of compounding innovations.

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David Roberts @drvolts

I'm on hold with the WA Dept. of Revenue -- have been for an hour! -- so I might as well tweet a thread while I wait. Let's talk about two different ways of conceiving legitimacy. What is its source? From whence does legitimacy derive?

This tweet thread came on the heels of the RNC stating officially that the January 6th insurrection was “legitimate political discourse.” I find it clarifying. You should click the above tweet and read the whole thing, but I’ve included a sampling of the rest of the thread to give you additional flavor.

David Roberts @drvolts

One way to see it: moral & social legitimacy derive from a set of principles that apply to to all tribes & factions alike. A tribe's actions are legitimate insofar as they accord with those principles. So, eg, "it's bad to torture," no matter who's doing the torturing.

David Roberts @drvolts

Another way to see it: moral & social legitimacy inhere *in the tribe itself*. Some tribes are "good" -- chosen by God, genetically superior, derived from the right bloodline, whatever -- & some aren't. The legitimacy of an act derives from *who did it*.

David Roberts @drvolts

What I'm describing is basically the difference between tribalism & cosmopolitanism, or parochialism & universalism. Couple things to note. One is, under a universalist conception of legitimacy, tribes can, at least in theory, resolve disputes through reason.

David Roberts @drvolts

In our post-Enlightenment times, the latter conception -- a universalist conception of moral principle -- has become the default. People feel obliged to use that kind of language. But many people use that language while still having, in their hearts, a tribal conception.

David Roberts @drvolts

The language of universalism is just how you're supposed to talk in elite circles -- it's "virtue signaling." In actual fact, in the privacy of their own thoughts, everyone is tribal, every tribe's just out for power, no one is cosmopolitan in practice. So tribalists believe.

David Roberts @drvolts

So when one side goes completely tribalist, it creates an almost irresistible tidal pull for the other side to follow it. And at the end of that road, inevitably, in every case throughout history, lies violence. Might = right. Where else could it go?