YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Huemer

lines on the record: 120
first: 2021-05-28
most recent: 2021-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We probably have people right now who are working on Bigger, more destructive weapons, right? More destructive, but cheaper. So we probably have people who are working on biological weapons or other things, nanotech weapons or things like that.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I don't think that's a outlandish possibility, right? Like, they've actually, I think they've come kind of close to that a few times. So, There are a few times when we were pretty close to a nuclear war, so they could have killed everyone. Luckily, they didn't. But that doesn't mean that we can just keep going, right? Just keep going forever and it's always going to be fine, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stage or whatever I mean, the thing is, like, Sure, anything that you try could have some unknown bad effect, right? And by definition, it's unknown, so I can't give an argument that it won't happen, right? Because we haven't specified what it is. I do want to say, though, that bad stuff could happen from maintaining the status quo. And so, like, you know, in the book that I mentioned, actually, there's a pretty good chance that the government is going to kill all of us.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make this transition gradually, like, I don't see where a disaster would happen. So you could get pretty close to anarchy, but you still have like some body that is saying the rules. Like you don't have a police force anymore. You don't have courts anymore, but they are giving rules to the police and the courts. So, okay. And, you know, like if you're already sympathetic to libertarianism, we could eliminate all these business regulations and all this. The government could be much smaller. And you think, okay, so do we need that last bit Which is like, I guess the legislature. Then I guess there's the military. You might need that actually. You might worry about that.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that doesn't completely eliminate them, doesn't completely eliminate the state, but it makes it much smaller. And so you can imagine this process where the government could be progressively outsourcing police duties, which, by the way, they have done in some places. There are some places where the government will hire private security instead of using their own police. Okay, and they could progressively outsource court duties. And there are some cases where that happens as well. There's some cases where the government court will refer you to a private arbitrator. But they could start doing that more and more. Okay, and so the person who's worried that anarcho-capitalism would be a disaster, you know, now they should answer at what point in this process they think the disaster would happen, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But okay, but so that's just to prepare you for the fact that there could be big fundamental progress that we don't want to rule out, right, being overly conservative. But we do want to be careful about the way we pursue progress, right? Because if you make radical changes, you should expect there to be unexpected consequences, right? Okay, but so what you should do to mitigate this is to move kind of gradually, right? So, you know, there's a lecture by Brian Kaplan that you can find online somewhere A title there, something like less than the minimum, where his idea was you could have a sub minimal state. And so the minimal state has police courts and military legislature or something like that. You could have a subminimal state, which they privatized a police force, and then they could privatize the court system.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me I mean, you can imagine somebody saying this back with the US was founded, right? They could have said this democracy thing, it never works, right? They tried it in Athens and it didn't work that well. And notice how all the countries in the world are dictatorships. This just shows that that's the natural state, right? Society evolves to dictatorship, which is a lot like what people say about anarcho-capitalism, right? Like we have states everywhere. It must be that that's the only stable society, right? Okay, now, you know, you might say correctly, well, it's kind of like kind of anecdotal, like, okay, that's just one case, right? And so I'm not saying that that means that every radical change is worth trying.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the government has its hands in almost everything, right? They have their hands in all kinds of industries. If you say, oh, well, I don't know, I can't work in an industry that is benefiting from government distortions of the economy, there's a lot of things that you can't do, right? What matters isn't whether nominally it's said to be a state. Institution or whatever, right? What matters is something like, I don't know how much benefit they're getting from the state or something, but like there are lots and lots of industries that then you can work and like, oh, it could be, you can't be a doctor.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're overcharging less than most of the universities, so okay, not so bad, but. Yeah, in the libertarian society, there would be less universities, right? Because there's a market distortion. Created by all the financial aid. So there would be less of it. And would I still have a job? I don't know. Like some professors would still have jobs. It wouldn't go down to zero, but it would be cut down significantly.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I should tell you the difference between University of Colorado and a private university is minimal, right? So I think that the state provides something like 5% of our budget. It's something like that. Now, the state university, of course, like universities are subsidized in general. So we get a subsidy in the same way that every other university gets a subsidy. Namely, all of these students who are paying are super high prices, like most of them would not be paying if it weren't for financial aid, which is provided by the government, right? So government helps these people get all these loans, which they probably wouldn't take. So, you know, like definitely we, the university, are charging, we're overcharging, right? But I mean, everybody's overcharging, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, probably not. I don't think so. You know, I talked to Walter Block once a couple years ago. And, you know, in case anyone doesn't know, he's a big time libertarian economist over at Tulane. Wait, no, another university in New Orleans. And his attitude was take as much money from the state as you can. Because they're going to do something bad with it if you don't. And if you don't take it, they're not going to give it back. They're not giving it back to the taxpayers. They're just going to waste on something else. Anyway, and, you know, I think his attitude was that you're sort of like helping to undermine the state. Good to take money from the state to undermine the state.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I read it in an afternoon, but then I reread it multiple times. I don't know. So we did it a few times that day, but then we read it the next day and like maybe just before it goes up. So, our make small edits, which the small edits don't make that much difference, probably. The total amount of writing that I've done on that blog is. Of a law, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I sort of sense from left wing ideology today is that it is a lot of attacking, right? Just like for the sake of undermining confidence in America. Like there's a lot of just wanting to say that America is bad, not clearly for the sake of promoting something good instead, right? And you know, like, I want to say. I've been known to have a fair amount of criticisms of the government. But I also want to appreciate that it's a lot better than most governments. It's like much better than the vast majority of governments that people have had. Let's just keep that in mind. So let's not tear down the good stuff while we're trying to get rid of the bad stuff.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Size and they'd be like disagreeing with each other, but they'd be doing it in a basically respectful way, right? And apparently that doesn't happen in other countries. So, you know, one of the things I was worried about is that that's eroding. But anyway, okay. Then in that blog post, like, you know, I want to leave room for criticizing society. I want to leave room for saying like there's some stuff that's very messed up that we need to change, right? So, you know, how do we do that and not be accused of wrongly barling the norm? So like I didn't have that much of an answer to that, but basically I'm thinking, well, you know, have an alternative that you're saying we should do. Like don't just attack, but say, here's something we should be doing instead of what we're doing, right? And now we can compare these and I can explain why this thing is better than the status quo, right? Okay, so that's like constructive criticism.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In America, there's sort of a norm of respectful discourse. Like, that's one of the things that I'm worried about. There used to be, maybe. And I say this because this is somewhat of a digression that's not exactly answering your question, but anyway, one of the things that made me think about this was so many years ago I read that some leaders from Iraq came to visit the United States so that they could kind of learn about how the political system works here. And they visited like a city hall meeting in Boulder or something like this. And like the main impression they had was they were struck by how respectful our discourse was. And up until that point, I didn't realize that our discourse is respectful. But it was true compared to other countries, right? So like there would be people in opposite.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I might be doing that. Good thing nobody listens to me. No Mean, I was thinking about what they called the democratic norms, which is partly democracy, but a bunch of things that are associated with it that are not exactly democracy, right? But when you lose the election, you concede. But also with the social justice warriors just saying everybody's racist, America is racist and so on, right? And sort of like”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, I'm not sure what those people mean because it kind of sounds like they mean just cancel the police and then have no security. No, I don't want to do that. But I would take that money and give it to private security companies. I wouldn't take it and just not give it to any security, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, I don't have expertise on that. I have to, like, we probably have to observe things happening, right? I mean, like, if people were convinced, like we have a democracy right now, if people were convinced that we should privatize more functions of the state, we can start doing that right now. And it sort of like depends on how cautious you want to be, but a city right now could say, yeah, we're going to stop this police thing right now. Like the city of Denver tomorrow could say, we're going to start hiring private security guards to patrol. And then they could pass laws to change the asymmetry between government police and security guards, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government just collapsed immediately, it's no good, but if there's this simultaneous process, then you could get to a stable situation where now it's hard for an individual to overturn it.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it matters how this whole thing comes about, right? So if the anarchy comes about by one day the government just disappears and the cops disappear, then it would be chaos, right? So, you know, the first thing that would happen is there would be chaos in the street. And the second thing that would happen is people would immediately start setting about setting up another government, right? Okay, but that's why that's not the way I envision the transition going, right? The transition would have to go by the government progressively privatizing its functions. So the government would outsource policing to private security companies, right? Maybe they would do this gradually. And similarly, they would gradually outsource the courts to private arbitrators. So the idea is that the government is shrinking while at the same time the private organizations that would”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's just that. You already have one of these organizations, it's easy to keep it going, but if you don't already have one, it's hard to get it started. So, like, if we had the anarcho-capitalist situation just set up the way it's envisioned, Buddy ANCAPS, from that position, it's difficult to establish your state-like entity, right? Like everybody's got a security agency, and then like you try to start up a gang of people to attack people, right? And so you're not already rich and you don't already have all these resources. You're hoping to get the resources by attacking other people. Well, it's going to be hard to get there, right? Because like, you know, without getting arrested by other people's security agencies and so on.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like they presently do, right? Because they have more to protect more stuff to protect, so it makes sense to do that, but also for their personal safety, they place a higher monetary value on their personal safety. Like, okay, nobody wants to be beaten up, but like if you ask how much money will you pay to not be beaten up, the answer is larger for the rich person, right? So like they will pay more. More dollars for security.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, but I mean, he's got billions of dollars. Why doesn't he just buy them? So, I mean, the thing is. Like, this is why rich people usually don't do this because they could just buy the thing that they want. That's why they don't have to steal it, right? And it's probably cheaper. So, like, I mean, rich people do well with women Bill Gates would not have a hard time finding wife if he didn't already have one just because of that, right? But the thing is like, so if you want to pay somebody to help you steal money from poor people, like, okay, the amount of money that the poor people are willing to pay to not be stolen from is about equal to the value of the stuff that would be stolen, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but what is his purpose? Okay, so like, you know, Bill Gates hires like some really powerful security agency and to do what?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean a security guard, right? Like I sign a contract with a security company, right? So it could be a large company. I'm just one of their customers, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, private security agencies, you'll hire private security agencies. Mean the primitive tribes didn't have private security agencies, they didn't have like a just like developed economy. And it might be that indeed anarchy doesn't work starting from primitive society, but it might still work if you transition from an advanced society. So like, I mean, my theory is, you know, you transition from democracy to anarchy, to anarcho-capitalism. And it doesn't work if you just start, if you start in a much earlier stage of society, right? Plausibly, it won't work.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is super bad, right? It's very bad that that's the case. But that would explain why, okay, and so human beings, like they're not thinking that when they go to war. What's happening is they're driven by emotions. But this is all to explain why we would have the genes that would give us the emotional reactions that would make it likely for us to attack other tribes, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't seem like it's worth it if there's a 45% chance of dying just from an intuitive self interest standpoint, but from the standpoint of expected reproductive success, your expected reproductive success goes up. If you presently have fewer than two wives, right? If you have zero wives, you have nothing to lose because you're going to have zero reproductive success if you don't. And by the way, it was probably common for men in primitive societies to have zero wives because most societies practice polygyny, which means the majority of men have zero wives. Because, like, you know, there's some dominant. And it's a good deal as long as it's slightly more probable that you succeed. Okay, so like that's the evolutionary explanation why this would happen.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are particular passages that explain this. And it's basically what happened in primitive tribes was the men from one tribe would attack another tribe in order to murder the men and kidnap the women. And this is extremely dangerous. There's a high chance that you die when you're doing this. So on the face of it, it seems like you wouldn't do that. It doesn't make sense. Okay, but here's the thing. Say there's a 45% chance that you die. By starting this fight, but a 55% chance that you survive and you capture one extra wife. Then your reproductive success goes up.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're afraid that somebody else is going to attack you and kill you, so you attack them first because there's like some advantage in combat to the person who attacks first. Okay, and this makes no sense because so if there's more than one other person who is worried about being attacked and you go around attacking people without provocation, then everyone else is going to know that you're the biggest threat. Like you're the one who's most likely to attack them without provocation. So all of these people who are thinking about doing preemptive attacks, like you become the biggest target for them, right? So like, you know, what you should do is, and you're assuming that you can't like immediately kill everyone else at once, right? What you should do is like just try to mind your own business and stay away and not start any fights, right? Okay, however, this isn't what happens in primitive societies. This is not what human beings have actually done throughout history. And so why is that? And I wondered about this for a long time until I read Stephen Pinker's book, How the Mind Works.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that could be true. So I think It could be that the central power, the government, suppresses the small scale violence, right? They do large-scale violence, i.e. war, but they suppress like the just ordinary one-on-one murder and so on. But I mean, like if you're asking, well, why is it that people are prone to violence to begin with? I think pinkered in that book takes up the explanation, like the Hobbesian explanation, which is totally wrong and makes no sense. Okay, but in a different book, Pinker gives a different explanation that I think is actually correct. But I'm not sure he realizes that it's a completely different explanation. So the Hobbyan explanation is, you know, everybody's completely selfish and everybody knows that anyone can kill anyone.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, like, you know, if you have the opportunity for all the information to come out and, you know, everybody gets to share their arguments and so on. Like if you hear all of the arguments, usually that favors the correct views. You assume that the libertarian view is correct, then having more information and more discussion and so on should favor it. This is a general tendency. It's not guaranteed because there are biases in the human mind. There could be systematic biases. And yeah, and also the possibility maybe we're wrong. So maybe our view will go down because it's wrong, actually.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There could be. I think like the internet culture might be making us more extreme, right? Yeah, so it used to be that. Information and just like the content that people consumed was produced by this small elite. And now that everybody can have a voice on the internet, yeah, there's just more room for more extremists like us, but also like the socialists. It could be that the internet is just like a bad influence on all of us, all right? But it could be that this is kind of like relatively early days. It could be that it's going to settle down and improve, right? So they just sort of like this optimistic philosophical view that the truth wins in the end. This isn't guaranteed to happen, but generally speaking, like good ideas tend to be more persuasive than bad ideas.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't know, you know, possible. Part of what I think was happening, so I don't know about Grover Cleveland in particular, like, I don't know if he was typical of people in that time. But I mean, so here's an interpretation. It used to be that people believed in the authority of the state, but they just didn't care about the poor. So like that's why they didn't want to do all this welfare estate stuff, right? And then, you know, later it developed to where they still believe in the authority of the state, but they started caring about the poor as well. So they thought, okay, well, we'll use this power to help the poor, right? So that would actually be a form of progress, even though the policy is getting further from what it should be. It's sort of like the attitudes are getting closer to what they should be.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of accumulating libertarian sentiment. This could be wishful thinking or something. I don't know. But like, you know, when I was in college, you know, like the Institute for Humane Studies, they had a summer seminar, which I went to. They had a summer seminar. But like in the next few decades, they expanded greatly, right? And there are these different libertarian organizations now. There was no students for liberty when I was in college, right? Like that expanded also. I recall there being basically like one well-known libertarian philosopher was Robert Nozick. And now there are multiple ones, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, it could be right that that's just what's going to keep happening, right? But it's not obviously right. So, I mean, there is a certain amount of pushback and there are people who are realizing the problems with regulation. So in many areas, just many areas of human intellectual inquiry, knowledge just accumulates. And we might just be in the primitive state of knowledge about social and political matters, right? It looks to me like there's”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that could be true, right? So definitely the United States has had growing regulation. You know, back when it was first started, the code of federal regulations. So this lists all of the federal regulations. It was started in, I guess, 1938 or something like this or 1930s. It was 22,000 pages, which sounds long enough. But it's now over 150,000 pages. And, you know, like the size of these regulatory agencies is growing, more employees, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like not only bad, but stupid. Okay. So, like, the idea that, oh, you have more rights than somebody else because of your skin color. That's super dumb. Besides being really harmful, it's just dumb, right? Anyway, so eventually people see that. Okay, but I think this is similar. So the idea that you don't have different rights because of your skin color. I think that is kind of similar to you don't have different rights just because you're in power.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so will we start? Will the progress stop before we reach anarcho capitalism? I don't know. I mean, that might be true if there's some There are some truths that are super hard to apprehend, then it might be that like human species never become advanced enough to understand them. That could be true. But this doesn't seem to me like it's that hard. So, I mean, I think my basic moral point is the government isn't special, like they're people like you and me. There's no reason why they should get to do a whole bunch of stuff that you consider to be immoral if anyone else does them, right? So like the basic idea, I don't think is that complicated. And I mean, I think this is similar to other bits of progress that have occurred in history. A lot of the stuff people were doing in the past was super stupid.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And poorer countries have a faster rate of growth, right? They're poorer overall, but they're growing faster. So they'll eventually catch up. Okay. And you can hypothesize the reason for this. If you're already doing pretty badly, it's easier to improve. And like the United States is already pretty efficient, so it gets harder and harder to improve, right? And that could happen with moral progress too. It will presumably slow down. When we get as we get closer to the moral truth, the rate of progress will have to slow down, right? Will it decline? I don't know. I don't know why that would have to happen. I mean, like eventually we'll all die, but I don't know why we would have to become immoral before we die. There's something about the accumulation of knowledge that it tends to go and not get destroyed.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean Any progress has to eventually slow down. Because I think there's a maximum point, everything, right? But that doesn't mean that will happen soon. So I can't predict where it will happen. Eventually, civilization will collapse and we'll all die. Eventually, the human species will go extinct. But I don't know when. Could be, you know, I don't know, it could be in the next hundred years, or it could be in a million years. But what about moral progress? Oh, yeah. And part of why I said that in the blog post was there's been a decline in the rate of economic growth in the United States.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, right now it's really bad, but it's probably going to get better when we perfect this technology. Also, I mean, and this kind of fits with what I was saying earlier, this is being driven by a small number of people, right? There's like a small percentage of society who care because there's like a small percentage of human beings who are basically morally decent, small number of people give a crap about morality at all. But okay, but that's enough. So like the technological changes are being driven by animal welfare advocates basically. Like that's why.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now there are all of these products, there are these substitute products, substitutes for animal products, which are really convincing and there didn't used to be. Also, they're working on synthetic meat, basically. So they're going to make meat without the cruelty. And that's probably what's ultimately going to end it.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, anyway, yeah, so from a purely consequentialist standpoint, it's been like a huge regression. However, it does appear to me that it's turning around. So vegetarianism and veganism are becoming more popular when I was in college, you know, there were not many vegetarians and I think I never met a vegan. I think like nobody heard of that. And there weren't like vegan restaurants you could go to and stuff like that. What's ultimately going to change the situation is technology, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There have only ever been 110 billion humans. So, like two years of factory farming, we tortured and killed more creatures than the total number of us who have ever existed.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could make the argument people find this shocking, but you could make the argument that it would have been better if there were no humans. It's like maybe the world would be better with no human beings, right? Because the amount of pain and suffering that we cause, just like a few years of human beings, the amount of pain and suffering that we cause to other species. Is probably greater than all of the suffering in all of human history wearing. And I'll probably outweigh all of the pleasure that human beings have ever experienced among all of the hundred billion or so humans who have existed. That might seem shocking, but the number of animals that we're torturing and killing each year is something like 74 billion.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are a bunch of people who don't reflect very much and just go along with the customs of their society. And they're just sort of like. Sort of neutral. And there's a small number of people who Kind of see the flaws in the status quo, and they tried to push society towards the moral truth, right? And they push it slowly. But because There are always reformers who are trying to improve society. It's a constant small force. So over the course of many generations, it accumulates to a lot of progress, right?”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, how do we get moral progress? I mean, so first, like, why do I think that there's moral progress? Because I looked at history. Because like you look at what people were doing, you know, back in ancient Rome, you know, gladiatorial combat. They were like forcing slaves to fight to the death for fun because they thought it was amusing to see them cut to pieces. And then, you know, like just 200 years ago in America, we were enslaving just like enslaving people just because they had darker skin and stuff like that. So, I mean, the evidence of there being moral progress is compelling, right? It's like enormous progress. But, you know, what's the explanation how to happen? I mean, I think that it's driven by relatively small number of people.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And IKEL say stuff was total confidence. And the ordinary person thinks because he's talking with complete confidence, that means that what he's saying must be true.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly charismatic, like better than the other 15 Republican candidates in the primaries. And yeah, it had a lot to do with being super confident, right? Which by my read is because he doesn't care.”
2021-05-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source