About

I’m a better guitar player than Wayne Gretzky and a better hockey player than Eddie Van Halen.

But never mind about me. This blog is about politics and anything else that interests me.

Politics:

Former libertarian. Establishment libertarianism completely lost me over one issue: Immigration.

Now:

Charles Darwin + Friedrich Hayek + John Nash.

That is,

We live in, or if shocked away from are always heading toward,

Stable equilibria (Nash) of decentralized interactions (Hayek) of multiple self-interested agents (Darwin, Hayek, Nash), which are not optimized for rationality or “utility maximization,” but reproductive success (Darwin).

Elaborations here: https://neurotoxinweb.wordpress.com/2021/07/10/darwin-hayek-nash/

This is both the filter that we must use to understand the world, and the engineering perspective we must keep in mind as we try to get from the current slide toward civil war, to something better and durable.

Important: Literally “engineering” society does not and cannot work— that’s the socialist fallacy— but incentives and cause and effect are actual things. Examples:

(1) It makes a predictable difference whether the likely consequence of invading the U.S. is (a) getting shot or (b) getting free medical care.

(2) The dynamics of population genetics are a function of (among other things) whether the government pays women to have babies by men who aren’t their husbands.