Crossposting to substack
Going forward, all of the content here will also be posted at https://goodoptics.substack.com/ The substack subscribe feature is much easier to use. I will continue to post on wordpress for the time being.
Good Optics
Latest posts
Fun with comparative advantage
A friend recommended Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok s introductory economics textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, to me. It s been almost ten years since I took an economics class, so I decided to take a look. I think I have noticed an exception to the law of comparative advantage as it is presented by that book. Continue reading "Fun with comparative advantage"
Welfare State Futurism
If technological progress continues, AI will eventually be able to replace all human labor. What will happen next?: (1) One much discussed possibility is that the AIs will forcibly take control from humans, perhaps killing them or perhaps just pushing them aside and running the world without significant human input. This scenario is often thought Continue reading "Welfare State Futurism"
Homunculi and Moral Demandingness
All sensible people care non-instrumentally about things that happen in the world outside of themselves. Would you prefer that there be more or less extreme poverty? How about war? Cancer? Even if these things don t affect you directly, you probably care about them. Everyone also cares non-instrumentally about his own well-being. Most everyone also cares Continue reading "Homunculi and Moral…
Why Oligarchy is better than Dictatorship
In a dictatorship, the leader can do whatever he wants. Any dictator, simply because he is a dictator, is liable to engage in illicit self-dealing and to kill people who threaten his power. However, if the leader has reasonable wants, and reasonable ideas about how to accomplish what he wants, then there is a limit Continue reading "Why Oligarchy is better than Dictatorship"
Why Worry?
Nobody wants to die. Natural risks are known to be pretty low, because we can estimate their frequencies in the future with their frequencies in the past. As it happens, supervolcanic explosions and planet killing asteroids don t come around very often. So if very few people are trying to wipe humanity out and natural risk Continue reading "Why Worry?"
Past and Future Trajectory Changes
It is reasonable to expect that, if all goes well, astronomically more people will be alive in the future than are alive today. So, the argument goes, the utilitarian imperative “Maximize expected aggregate utility!” can be simplified to the maxim “Minimize existential risk!” . But, it was later objected, the fact that the number of future Continue reading "Past and Future Trajectory Changes"
The Rise of Trade and the Spread of War
In the modern world, the richest countries often have very limited natural resources (e.g., Japan). And often, resource rich countries are very poor because of protracted civil war (e.g., Congo-Kinshasa), misgovernment (e.g., Venezuela), or being stuck at the bottom of the value chain (the so-called Dutch Disease). It is still better to have abundant natural Continue reading "The Rise of Trade and…
Irrational Irrationality
If you assume that people are rational and self-interested, it is hard to explain why they vote. This is because the odds of being electorally decisive are always very low. A rational and self-interested actor would conclude that by voting he was wasting his time. One solution is to compromise on the assumption of self-interestedness. Continue reading "Irrational Irrationality"
Against the Fire
I think there are two legitimate purposes for historical essays: (1) providing exposition of an idea or event, or (2) making an argument with a clear thesis. If records of an event are dispersed and hard to understand, writing an expository essay explaining what they say is valuable. If some idea is very complex or Continue reading "Against the Fire"