The biggest challenge facing free societies today is our lack of belief in them. I am seeing too many self-inflicted wounds, most of all the recent democratically derived decisions in the United Kingdom and the United States.
.. It’s interesting to see that the countries that are doing fine, such as Canada, are those which in their cultural DNA never pushed that hard on libertarian ideals in the first place (though I would argue that Canada is implicitly fairly libertarian).
.. global authoritarianism is probably poisoning our political climate more than many people realize.
.. what is the most important reason for optimism about a free society?
I think it is talent and human capital. Today there is more mobilized talent than ever before, by a wide order of magnitude. More people are protected from the ravages of malnutrition and severe childhood diseases, more people get educated, and more learn from the internet. Furthermore, there is more opportunity for that talent. Say it is 1970 and you are a potential math or science genius born in India. What is the chance you can bring your talents to fruition?
.. I fear that libertarians have their own version of the Progressive myth. Progressives often believe that ever-growing tolerance and health insurance coverage are the future, if only bad Republicans could be defeated in political battle.
.. many of the dangers come .. a kind of old-style authoritarianism, souped up by the clever use of social media.
.. That war, using that word in the broadest sense possible, will be between today’s amazing accumulated stock of human capital — and the emotional momentum behind authoritarianism, which is encouraged by the political fraying that stems from underlying fears of disruption.
American Affairs: Why a New Policy Journal?
Social discord, frequently inflamed by proliferating versions of identity politics, is becoming more prevalent.
.. what if public discontent is a reasonable response to a misguided and complacent elite consensus?
.. American political theatre stages ever shriller battles over increasingly trivial matters.
.. We believe that recognizing failures and encouraging new ideas are not betrayals of American “optimism” but are instead healthier expressions of it.
.. Today, the celebration of “disruptive” technological innovation is virtually unanimous. Why then is corporate and government investment in basic research in decline? Why is productivity stagnating?
.. we are told that more and more jobs will be lost to automation, and that the “new economy” will be a highly bifurcated service economy. But if “average” is truly over, what does that mean for an American republic predicated on a strong and independent middle class
.. Yet the most conspicuous global phenomenon of the present time would appear to be the resurgence of nationalism
.. Can nationalism be leavened by justice—or even be essential to it—rather than being abandoned to its worst expressions?
.. Was meritocracy fated to produce social stratification? Or are we privileging certain forms of merit while excluding others?
.. Have the permanent campaigns of identity politics on the left and the “culture wars” on the right concealed the true content of our common citizenship?
.. The promise of America is no longer being realized as it once was. Revival and realignment are critically needed.
Tech titans’ latest project: Defy death
For centuries, explorers have searched the world for the fountain of youth. Today’s billionaires believe they can create it, using technology and data.
What many of the recent efforts have in common is a belief that computerized analysis of big data sets can deliver cures, predict outbreaks and discover patterns that would have been impossible for the human brain to process. An oft-cited example is Google’s flu heat map, which is built on the idea that an improved predictor for flu activity might be clusters of searches for, say, Tamiflu or “flu symptoms,” collected from Internet service provider addresses.
That approach turns the traditional scientific method on its head. In the United States, most biomedical research happens at a gradual and sometimes painfully deliberate pace. Scientists start with a hypothesis, conduct experiments to test it and then spend years refining and analyzing the results they collect.
.. And there are few checks and balances on such initiatives. Once, two-thirds of scientific and medical research was funded by the federal government, beholden to the public good. Now, two-thirds is funded by private industry, a growing share by billionaires accountable to no one and impatient with the pace of innovation.
.. America remains deeply ambivalent about using new medical treatments to live radically longer lives. In a 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 51 percent said they believed treatments to slow, stop or reverse aging would have a negative impact on society.
.. In that kind of world, social change comes to a standstill, he said; aging dictators could stay in power for centuries.
.. Fukuyama said in an interview. “Extending the average human life span is a great example of something that is individually desirably by almost everyone but collectively not a good thing. For evolutionary reasons, there is a good reason why we die when we do.”
.. Vinod Khosla, one of Silicon Valley’s most revered venture capitalists, likened the practice of medicine to witchcraft. He argued that machines are better than the average doctor and that disruption in health care was more likely to be driven by those outside the industry than those in the profession.
.. Since 2010, the National Institutes of Health’s budget has been cut by about $3.6 billion — or 11 percent — after adjusting for inflation
.. Prevailing theory among the tech entrepreneurs holds that the federal government is too risk-averse to properly drive medical research. A failed project in Washington is akin to a great tragedy — with managers being called to testify at congressional hearings and Government Accountability Office investigations being launched into why so much taxpayer money was wasted. But in the entrepreneurial world, say tech leaders, failure is regarded as a learning opportunity on the way to the next innovation.
.. scientists, motivated by the pressures to publish and entangled in a web of conflicts of interest, manipulate data so often that it’s impossible to trust the body of scientific literature that assesses the efficacy of hormone-replacement therapy or vitamin E or low-dose aspirin. Of 45 well-accepted journal articles about medical interventions, Ioannidis found, 14, or 31 percent, were later shown to be wrong or exaggerated... Thiel said the problem with the grant-making processes at NIH, the National Science Foundation and other major funders of research is that they are “consensus-oriented.”.. everyone would be like Harriette Thompson, the 91-year-old who broke records this year after completing a marathon in 7 hours and 7 minutes... The big challenge of aging research is that to make it work the way people want it to scientists would have to figure out a way to extend all human systems simultaneously and shut them all down at pretty much the same time. Otherwise you would be replacing one way of dying with another... “If you did this, you might start working on some great projects you might otherwise not have attempted because you didn’t think you’d finish,” Thiel said. “You’d treat strangers a lot better because you’d likely see them again. You’d be a much better steward of the Earth than if you thought it was your last day and you were having a crazy party or something.”
Why a Silicon Valley Founder Is Funding a Factory for Trump Memes
This is also why libertarianism mates well with computationalism (the idea that the world is best understood and operated through computers). Both adopt a burn-it-all-down attitude toward the institutions that have held them back. What is “disruption” but the act of stripping everything from society and reinventing it inside the computer?
.. It’s more surprising that everyone in the Valley doesn’t support Trump than that Thiel and Luckey do.
.. Successfully exerting force of any kind on the universe is the ultimate goal of nerddom. Silicon Valley just institutionalized the idea. That common mantra—“change the world”—means nothing more than “witness myself the force I can exert upon it.”
.. Those who see VR as a temporary, occasional tool for entertainment miss the obvious truth of its ambition. VR is a symbol of the misfit’s ultimate victory over a world that would hold him back from other victories. A tool with which to fashion virtuous, mediated lives outside the boundaries of cruel, brutish normalcy. The nerds never wanted to become popular. They want to end populism entirely.