Thread by @moritheil

Rags to riches is nice for status but not power.

In China if you're a bureaucrat long enough you become a Party member, and if you do that well for a decade you become inner circle, and then you can order people killed.

What's the path to that in the US?

https://twitter.com/drethelin/status/1376039267483418626

Same guy later in that thread claimed that the Kennedys (who ordered lobotomies and had them covered up) and Clintons (who may or may not have a 50+ body count) don't have REAL aristocratic power.

Sounds to me like they got away with way more than the average feudal lord 🤔

Why do people do this?

"I'm a free thinker, I think dangerous thoughts"

Followed by

"No you just can't criticize modernity, no way, that's BS and I'm muting this thread"

"Haha ChiComs and DPRK are so full of propaganda, thankfully I'm smart and see through it.

"What do you mean Anglos and the US also have propaganda and people in the West are just brainwashed differently? No way, I think I would have noticed!"

#mindset

Here's a hint:

If you're arguing in favor of modernity

And all your stats are from 1800 forward, when progress was already basically a universal religion and everyone hated feudalism

You're basically solely regurgitating biased studies from true believers.

You know how there was a splinter church called Christian Science, and they would like, pray about bacteria and note any changes?

And it turned out their data were all cherry-picked?

Most studies that "prove" modernity is better are affected by this same phenomenon.

There's a famous experiment called Milliken's Oil Drop experiment that shows the fundamental charge of the electron. Most scientists know this. But what they fail to grasp is the #HISTORY of verifying Milliken's Oil Drop, which is even MORE valuable.

See, it turns out that while Milliken had interesting ideas, he wasn't that hot as an experimentalist.

He was off by a LOT.

And only a decade or two later, a famous scientist got a value that was a lot closer to the correct value!

But the value took 50+ years to update. Why?

Because the value the other scientist got was off by TOO MUCH. And so they redid the experiment and then got a value closer to Milliken's published value, and submitted THAT.

#science

And everyone else, when they subsequently did it, were likewise afraid to say Milliken and everyone before them were TOTALLY OFF, and settled for saying they were slightly off.

So it took 50+ years.

What does this tell us?

HUMAN NATURE IS POWERFUL.

#mindset

ALWAYS BET ON NATURE.

When humans are involved that means bet on human nature.

Does it mean you'll win 100% of the time? Of course not; humans are complicated.

But most of the time it's the right way to bet.

#mindset

Lessons:

1. The failure of modern systems - be they systems of governance, bad business, or dumb websites - is that they misstate or fail to account for human nature.

If you can avoid that pitfall you'll do better than the vast majority.

2. Don't think yourself clever and thus exempt from this rule.

Clever people still fall for propaganda - be it Communist, modernist, or other.

Clever people still make mistakes in their systems design.

Communism couldn't work because Marx and Engels - who came from clever families - couldn't see beyond their own rich boy lives. They severely underestimated the importance of the meaning of the work to the worker, dismissing it as peasant superstition.

That's a banker's view.

America is falling apart because the Founding Fathers - who were the most educated men of their time - couldn't anticipate the vast changes of the past 200 years.

And other democracies are failing to the extent that they copied America instead of making democracy their own.

Poor artists copy.

Great artists steal.

https://twitter.com/moritheil/status/941115816937889792