The Fragileness of the Responses

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The fact that we don't live in small communities any more means that it's easier to not have any rank binding with everybody around you, because you know you probably won't get caught cheating. All the things that might be mechanisms that emerge really well in a small society can easily go away when you know there is therer these large structures that keep the incentives alive. But then i also think he's right about the fragility of that, and that when the chips are when the stakes get a little higher, that's when some of these things do start to fall apart. The fragility is there. This might be a small scale versus large scalemen.

David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested “Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg’s demon-entity Moloch) that lead to human misery and values tossed out the window. Does Alexander’s rationalist conception of human nature ignore the work of VBW favorites like Joe Henrich and Robert Frank? Is he a little too friendly to the neo-social Darwinism view of some guy named Nick Land? And oh no, why does he have to go transhumanist at the end?! Plus, we talk about the unique comic vision of Norm Macdonald and why we loved him.