Thread by @nntaleb

Statists (state worshippers) & libertarians are utopians in the same pathological way, sharing a fortune-cookie representation of the world, life, history & the future; w/identical blindness to details & mechanisms. The same applies to academic IYIs, wokes & cryptoutopianists.

2) As they say, science is hard, more difficult from the inside than it is from the outside. The same with probability, decisions, and business. And, of course, the same with governance & public matters.
The problem is abstraction.

3) To see how ill defined "freedom" is by naive libertarians:
Should I be free to drive counterflow ("wrong way") a yuuuge twelve-wheeler truck at its maximum speed on my highway of choice and is it government "coersion" and "power grab" that is preventing us from doing it ?

4) To see the confusion in the field, some "libertarians" (like the sucker below) are in fact anarcho-capitalists with a focus on property rights. What this has to do with masks,testing, mandates, coersion, no-agression principle, shows their mess.

https://twitter.com/lockoutdays/status/1481105134398722053?s=20

5) The Pandemic showed that the "non-aggression principle" is ill defined; breaks down under scaling. Groups are not naive Σ of indiv.
Most Lib writing is literature for children, simplified too many steps.
Only works for isolated hunters w/o interaction.

academia.edu/50312202/The_E…

6) Again, what is called "libertarian" is a mixed bag. Some like Brennan are vastly more sophisticated (the only think missing is scale transformation).

7) To conclude, that the person who wrote the MAIN texbook on Libertarianism comes out in favor of a (strong) vaccine mandates tells you something abt how ill-defined some popular notions are.
Simply Covidopath & antivaxx morons can't invoke liberty.

8) Footnote. Rothbard is Political Economy for Teenagers written by children.

8b) Footnote. Libertarianism isn't just the nonscholarly #childrenbookauthor Rothbard et al; there are intellectual heavyweights, Hayek and Nozik.
Hayek: State is necessary for pandemics.
Nozik: rejected his own theories when he (sort of) discovered scaling & tyranny of indiv.