"I think that what people don’t like about driverless cars is the loss of agency. We like the feeling of being the driver. But we put up with not being the driver on airplanes."
We put up with not being the driver in lots of situations where driving our personal car is impractical. What we like isn't agency per se but flexibility to add and delete stops as necessary.
I think it was Glenn Reynolds (or at least a posting on Instapundit) many years ago now that identified the primary obstacle to driverless car adoption as the liability for accidents, and I don't think that has changed. No auto manufacturing company is going to offer fully autonomous vehicles if the company is going to have to defend the operation of their vehicle every time one is involved in an accident, much less face the possibility of catastrophic judgements. No manufacturer wants to be the test case, and neither individual states nor the federal government are going to give them the kind of immunity (only liable if known but uncorrected defects are proven to be the cause) that has been adopted at common law from the time cars developed in a much less litigious environment.
Right. The incentives of our asymmetric liability legal regime create large gaps that prevent all kinds of potentially positive sum commercial transactions from being feasible as businesses. People driving themselves don't have to worry about suing themselves and maybe going to trial with moral dyad framing with a sympathetic poor individual going against a rich faceless corporation.
I envy those whose book-reading is not limited by: eyestrain; falling asleep over the page; not reading during the day because of either work or a guilty sense one should be doing chores instead; getting easily distracted by more frivolous pursuits (up to and including substacks!) on the internet; and finally, having to really concentrate in a way not entirely natural to one, if the material is "hard".
In fact, the library is not merely sufficient but necessary - if I buy a book, it can lay in a pile for years. The library book, even when they let you keep it out indefinitely as they do in my city, insistently demands to be read because it cannot live in the pile forever.
I don't think that point about not knowing the neighbors enough in the 80's and 90's to allow kids adventures without supervision is true, at least not where I grew up. I had about 20 neighbors within a mile or so, and I knew... 5 maybe? My parents and older sister knew another 2-3, maybe a few more, but at least 30% were entirely unknown due to people moving around and generally people moving to the middle of nowhere to be left alone. We ran around in pairs or alone all the time. My friends in town were similar, albeit with more people. They might know 60-70% of their neighbors to see them, maybe a bit more, but not on talking terms. Going to the grocery store or the pizza place was an exercise in seeing a lot of people you didn't know.
Point being, I don't think it was a change in the nature of society but a change in perceptions about parenting and control. This was the age of "It is 10 pm; do you know where your children are?" public service announcements, after all. Parents used to be comfortable with their kids saying things like "We are going to the park for a while" with the vague notion that so long as they weren't alone (had a friend or two with them) they were fine. Now they aren't comfortable under the same circumstances. I don't think it was a rational response to not knowing as many of the neighbors.
> " Now they aren't comfortable under the same circumstances. I don't think it was a rational response to not knowing as many of the neighbors."
But it might be a rational response to the government threatening to take away your kids if your child is unsupervised and a bureaucrat who's having a bad day catches wind of it.
In part, but I think the government response is downstream of the change in what is considered normal parenting. Admittedly, I grew up in a county without local police, so my experiences might be highly nonstandard there.
For the record, I think that changes in what is considered normal stemmed mostly from the rise of cable news, and news in general running every story about kidnappings, babies in wells, etc. and making people believe such dangers to kids were far more prevalent than they were. Some places really did go downhill and become no place for kids perhaps, but I think a big factor was the sense that you couldn’t let your kids out of your sight for ten minutes without someone going all Silence of the Lambs on them.
I grew up here but don't have much of a sense of when those things changed. Certainly growing up in the 80s, I was aware of plenty of sensationalist stories about kidnappings and people serving me up halloween candy with razor blades in it, but it didn't stop me from doing whatever and didn't stop my parents from being fine with it.
Same here, but I think that at the margin, it did. Plus some of the energy that had gone towards the "Satanic Panic" moved over to the "Stranger Danger" panic. In general, though, I think every set of new parents was a little more helicoptery (sorry, it's been a loooong day so the mental thesaurus is limited) than the last, gaining momentum increasingly as the proportion of hyper careful parents increased, as it became normalized, and finally as it became the metric of "good parenting" that parents competed across. There was just that constant ratchet of cultural messaging around 'everything is dangerous and will kill us all!' for years, from every vector.
I further suspect that those of us growing up in the 80's didn't have parents as troubled by it. It was rather the kids that were teenagers and very young couples in the 80's and started having kids that were the most affected. New parents are sponges for terror about how their kids are going to die, and highly susceptible.
You can not know your neighbors and still know "about the neighborhood". That is, you can know the cultural character of a place to make some accurate guesses about the general level of risk, of the law-abidingness and trustworthiness of the average residents, of being able to rely on pro-social behaviors like people watching out for kids not their own and sense of taking initiative to intervene or help or scold or prevent danger. The point is, is that the kind of place where you can trust most strangers and untrustworthy types or dangerous strangers tend to get watched and moved along as not welcome, and one can visibly see other parents feeling at ease and safe enough to let their kids go unattended, and pick up on other social cues and signals about what kind of place this is.
One problem is that in the last several generations people have rationally become increasingly leery to take initiative and intervene to be the "parent on the scene" when seeing an unattended kid or group of kids who need adult intervention, because there are now so many ways trying to be a Good Samaritan in that way can totally blow up in one's face. So people adopt a "not my kid, not my problem, best not to get involved in case it goes bad", and this sets off a vicious cycle.
It's a big subject. People seem to both overestimate and underestimate many important risks to significant degrees, in ways that are very inconsistent across domains such that they can't be reasonably attributed to a 'single' level of risk tolerance or aversion. In general the risk of driving is very large and both widely and wildly underestimated by most people, while the risk of flying is incredibly low and still overestimated by many - though not nearly as many as was typical a few decades ago.
While it's certainly true that people seem to be born with much higher or lower proclivities toward risk-taking than others, they still don't think or behave in ways that equalize marginal risk on all their margins. It's more like a risk-lover has an inconsistent marginal risk vector of (4, 6, 8) vs a risk-hater's (1, 2, 3)
As an example of a typical underestimate, a lot of people enjoy doing certain kinds of recreational, athletic, or other physical activities with risky attributes (height, force to the body, drowning hazard, height above hard surface) that are statistically some of the most common causes of serious injuries that cause premature death (e.g., motorcycles) require surgery and have lifetime impacts with lingering pain, fragility, limited range of motion, etc.
They tend to dismiss these real risks for many reasons including that they aren't charged any kind of extra marginal health insurance premium per hour of the activity, they think they are just doing the 'normal' level of activity and that the bad injuries only happen to the people doing the extreme or intense level stuff, they don't know to what extent the price they pay for the activity includes a massive business-liability premium, they may observe people falling down or getting hurt, but also maybe only see them apparently "walk it off" with some temporary pains and bruises, and don't see the trip to the doctor, the MRI or X-ray with bad news, the surgeries and physical therapies, etc.
Of the kids I grew up with, by now at least half are of a certain age at which they are comfortable openly complaining about some pain in their knee, neck, back, shoulder, etc. and point to a surgery scar all caused by some bad fall when skiing or a bad jump into a pool or whatever.
Just "falls" is the number one source of hospital visits for unintentional injuries, for all age cohorts but 18-24 year-olds, where it is second third behind "motor vehicle traffic" and "struck by or against objects or people". Hospitalization falls increase with age after 24, but they also increase as kids get younger than 18, with minors going to the hospital for falls nearly as often as 65+ seniors! "Slip and fall" is a whole field of tort law practice, which I always was kind of silly until I learned just how many people get hurt really badly from falling.
The lack of kids is a really good point. It is a lot easier to give adults the benefit of the doubt when they have kids, especially when they are not observably neglected kids.
Autonomous driving would be a fantastic breakthrough. But notice the dissonance. The experts express angst about the fertility decline. Then they exult hype about driverless cars reviving urban living. Yes, for the individual and maybe the couple. But not for the family of five.
Show me the transportation solution for the family of five. What is it? We had it in spades 50 years ago - just about any car could carry 5 people two generations ago. Now with car seat laws, there are fewer options and the costs are much higher.
I have a good deal of experience with this issue. On the one hand, absolutely, car seat rules are excessive and very annoying. On the other hand, it is just not even close to a top-tier issue when it comes to possible costs or disincentives to have more kids. It's not hard or more expensive than normal to find a sedan which can accommodate a baby seat and two boosters.
Thus I find the focus on it by popular commentators (e.g., Michael Brendan Dougherty) to be very odd and inconsistent with the usual level of rigor and skepticism.
Having followed (and rolled my eyes at the sorry state of) the conversation about fertility rate collapse for decades now, my sense of things is that it very much suffers from a "discourse in the shadow of the guillotine" problem. Or cognition in that shadow.
That is, when certain areas of possibilities are deemed to be within the socially punitive minefield and those off-limits, the brain will only consider and people will only discuss and aim at socially safe targets. The problem is that if the true target is in the minefield, the safe targets are all silly and wrong, but you can't criticize them without risking walking into the minefield yourself. Something we all hate and about which it's acceptable to whine about makes for a safe target, but not an accurate target, indeed, tending to help perpetuate the state of denial about the ugly truths of the accurate targets.
This is analogous to the joke about the drunk looking for his keys half a block away from the bar where he lost them, because even though he never went anywhere near the stoplight, he can only look there, "because that's where the light is." Likewise, we decide to place our analytical artillery so far in the rear that while it can't hit the enemy from there, we still chose that spot, "because that's where the mines aren't."
Arnold wrote "I think that Haidt is putting too much emphasis on smart phones and social media." The case for devices and social media being the cause of or at least an important contributor to social pathologies including loss of independence is bolstered by the striking increase in the problem at the time, around 2010, when most kids were getting devices. Of course, the problem did precede this to some extent due to the rise in safetyism and helicopter parenting, and not allowing kids the freedom to take risks in normal play. I highly recommend Haidt's new book "The Anxious Generation" to anyone interested in this topic.
Plus Haidt wants a solution, like banning phones in schools, which seems like an obviously feasible policy to reduce the problem. Overemphasis, like saying it’s 55% rather than 20%, is likely more effective at changing policy. Especially when we don’t have, and mostly won’t have, better data for distribution of blame. I doubt he quantifies it—would be happy to see any of his numbers if he has any.
Perhaps he’s being alarmist, which becomes clear in hindsight after some state or big city bans the phones in schools, and mental health problems only decrease by 5 or 10%, most would agree the policy is worth it. A good Q for Arnold or any who think Haidt is too alarmist is: how much reduction is needed to justify the alarmism? 50%? 90%? 20%? 5%?
My own Big Influence is the 10-20% increase of college student mental health issues because of the illegal discrimination against hiring Republican professors. Plus the much greater support for censorship and intellectual safetyism.
Another influence was the election of Black Obama, to prove the US is nor racist, yet the reported increase in racism—so a feeling of hopelessness on ending racism.
Besides smartphones, there are many reasons to feel bad—but stopping smartphones in class is one of easier policies to push that is very likely to improve the situation.
With computer email a forums to help the top 10% communicate with each other all around the world, daily instead of every minute. (Tyler’s objection)
"... elites don’t live up to presumed standards of competence ..."
Part of the problem is that voters demand, and politicians too often promise, what government is unable to provide. Government can be reasonably expected to deliver Adam Smith's foundation for prosperity: "peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice." But government cannot heal the planet, right history's wrongs, provide equal outcomes, or ameliorate all pain. When it tries to do what it cannot, it will fail to do what it can.
I'd buy those tickets right now. Flying is much easier for robots to handle than driving with all the messiness of objects moving around on the surface. Commercial jets have been able to take off, fly, take instructions from prototype air traffic control systems, and land in all kinds of weather conditions via advanced autopilot for years. As I understand it, that's how the planes actually fly whenever regs don't insist otherwise. Even if one concedes that they are only 90% as good as human pilots by whatever metric (though it seems plausible to me they could already be better than human pilots), the advantages could still easily outweigh the risks. I'd say the average person is more risk averse on this topic than is warranted given the state of the technology. Eventually human operation of most things is going to be thought about the same way as having a full time elevator operator.
My money is on: a) substack subscriptions (which I need to cut back on), and b) books by substack authors I read, like Arnold, Rob Henderson, Freddie deBoer, Rod Dreher, Glenn Loury. And JK Rowling as R. Galbraith on X, tho I’m waiting for paperback Strike murder mystery in summer, #7–she’s said she has plotted out 8 & 9 already.
I’m beyond angry to sad & dismissive of GRR Martin, and Patrick Rothfuss, for failure to finish their series.
Most books with a few important points can make those points better in a stack post, but books and verbiage is needed for marketing. Which Arnold accurately notes is not his strength; it’s also not mine. Arnold’s book reviews are excellent, tho Rob’s are even better. Maybe Scott Alexander has more, but I find him far too verbose, as is The Zvi, not to be confused with autocorrect Zaire.
I like the substack idea, but I very much dislike substack the company's current software approach to the user interface and experience and privacy. I'm not saying it's not necessary to make the company viable - I suspect it is but I don't know - but if so it's a sad state of affairs. I worry about their market dominant position making them a target, and of them - or post-founders successors - eventually succumbing to the kinds of rationalizations and pressure tactics that will reproduce the same kinds of bad viewpoint filtering practices that emerged on all the other platforms.
About being the driver: we put up with way too much from airlines, who treat us like dirt unless we're first-class passengers on the right airline. I.e. unless we're very well-to-do. Who in their right mind would want to put up with that sort of hideousness several times every day just to go about their business?
Robotaxies could be a huge shot in the arm for urban areas. Cost of car ownership is a huge burden there, and I'm not just talking the finances.
Robotaxies would probably be bad for a place where I live. You need a car out here, and while you can get an Uber to the airport there aren't enough to use for daily living. So robotaxies would make cities more attractive vis a vis exurbs.
I think it will make cities more attractive than they were, but I don't think it will overcome the pressure to move out of the city once one starts a family, for example. It definitely will help alleviate the misery of getting around the city, however, you are spot on there. Especially for the younger people who move to cities the most already.
That’s a good point, especially with running the kids around. Still, I think cities will be lower value for child raising than suburbs; cars are only one of their weak margins there.
Right now I see dozens of delivery vehicles cruising the streets of our suburb every day. Robotaxies for commutes combined with using them for package deliveries would be highly compatible, and probably profitable.
I agree that most families would need or at least like one vehicle but I can see them eliminating second and third cars, especially the ones that sit in a parking lot and then the driveway most of the day.
See my comment below about why we won't have robocars any time soon.
"I think that what people don’t like about driverless cars is the loss of agency. We like the feeling of being the driver. But we put up with not being the driver on airplanes."
We put up with not being the driver in lots of situations where driving our personal car is impractical. What we like isn't agency per se but flexibility to add and delete stops as necessary.
I think it was Glenn Reynolds (or at least a posting on Instapundit) many years ago now that identified the primary obstacle to driverless car adoption as the liability for accidents, and I don't think that has changed. No auto manufacturing company is going to offer fully autonomous vehicles if the company is going to have to defend the operation of their vehicle every time one is involved in an accident, much less face the possibility of catastrophic judgements. No manufacturer wants to be the test case, and neither individual states nor the federal government are going to give them the kind of immunity (only liable if known but uncorrected defects are proven to be the cause) that has been adopted at common law from the time cars developed in a much less litigious environment.
Right. The incentives of our asymmetric liability legal regime create large gaps that prevent all kinds of potentially positive sum commercial transactions from being feasible as businesses. People driving themselves don't have to worry about suing themselves and maybe going to trial with moral dyad framing with a sympathetic poor individual going against a rich faceless corporation.
> Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?
So a library?
!!
I envy those whose book-reading is not limited by: eyestrain; falling asleep over the page; not reading during the day because of either work or a guilty sense one should be doing chores instead; getting easily distracted by more frivolous pursuits (up to and including substacks!) on the internet; and finally, having to really concentrate in a way not entirely natural to one, if the material is "hard".
In fact, the library is not merely sufficient but necessary - if I buy a book, it can lay in a pile for years. The library book, even when they let you keep it out indefinitely as they do in my city, insistently demands to be read because it cannot live in the pile forever.
I assume Arnold means a service like Kindle unlimited.
I don't think that point about not knowing the neighbors enough in the 80's and 90's to allow kids adventures without supervision is true, at least not where I grew up. I had about 20 neighbors within a mile or so, and I knew... 5 maybe? My parents and older sister knew another 2-3, maybe a few more, but at least 30% were entirely unknown due to people moving around and generally people moving to the middle of nowhere to be left alone. We ran around in pairs or alone all the time. My friends in town were similar, albeit with more people. They might know 60-70% of their neighbors to see them, maybe a bit more, but not on talking terms. Going to the grocery store or the pizza place was an exercise in seeing a lot of people you didn't know.
Point being, I don't think it was a change in the nature of society but a change in perceptions about parenting and control. This was the age of "It is 10 pm; do you know where your children are?" public service announcements, after all. Parents used to be comfortable with their kids saying things like "We are going to the park for a while" with the vague notion that so long as they weren't alone (had a friend or two with them) they were fine. Now they aren't comfortable under the same circumstances. I don't think it was a rational response to not knowing as many of the neighbors.
> " Now they aren't comfortable under the same circumstances. I don't think it was a rational response to not knowing as many of the neighbors."
But it might be a rational response to the government threatening to take away your kids if your child is unsupervised and a bureaucrat who's having a bad day catches wind of it.
In part, but I think the government response is downstream of the change in what is considered normal parenting. Admittedly, I grew up in a county without local police, so my experiences might be highly nonstandard there.
For the record, I think that changes in what is considered normal stemmed mostly from the rise of cable news, and news in general running every story about kidnappings, babies in wells, etc. and making people believe such dangers to kids were far more prevalent than they were. Some places really did go downhill and become no place for kids perhaps, but I think a big factor was the sense that you couldn’t let your kids out of your sight for ten minutes without someone going all Silence of the Lambs on them.
I grew up here but don't have much of a sense of when those things changed. Certainly growing up in the 80s, I was aware of plenty of sensationalist stories about kidnappings and people serving me up halloween candy with razor blades in it, but it didn't stop me from doing whatever and didn't stop my parents from being fine with it.
Same here, but I think that at the margin, it did. Plus some of the energy that had gone towards the "Satanic Panic" moved over to the "Stranger Danger" panic. In general, though, I think every set of new parents was a little more helicoptery (sorry, it's been a loooong day so the mental thesaurus is limited) than the last, gaining momentum increasingly as the proportion of hyper careful parents increased, as it became normalized, and finally as it became the metric of "good parenting" that parents competed across. There was just that constant ratchet of cultural messaging around 'everything is dangerous and will kill us all!' for years, from every vector.
I further suspect that those of us growing up in the 80's didn't have parents as troubled by it. It was rather the kids that were teenagers and very young couples in the 80's and started having kids that were the most affected. New parents are sponges for terror about how their kids are going to die, and highly susceptible.
You can not know your neighbors and still know "about the neighborhood". That is, you can know the cultural character of a place to make some accurate guesses about the general level of risk, of the law-abidingness and trustworthiness of the average residents, of being able to rely on pro-social behaviors like people watching out for kids not their own and sense of taking initiative to intervene or help or scold or prevent danger. The point is, is that the kind of place where you can trust most strangers and untrustworthy types or dangerous strangers tend to get watched and moved along as not welcome, and one can visibly see other parents feeling at ease and safe enough to let their kids go unattended, and pick up on other social cues and signals about what kind of place this is.
One problem is that in the last several generations people have rationally become increasingly leery to take initiative and intervene to be the "parent on the scene" when seeing an unattended kid or group of kids who need adult intervention, because there are now so many ways trying to be a Good Samaritan in that way can totally blow up in one's face. So people adopt a "not my kid, not my problem, best not to get involved in case it goes bad", and this sets off a vicious cycle.
I don’t think many people are making accurate estimates of risk, however. They seem to be biased very high where risk is concerned.
It's a big subject. People seem to both overestimate and underestimate many important risks to significant degrees, in ways that are very inconsistent across domains such that they can't be reasonably attributed to a 'single' level of risk tolerance or aversion. In general the risk of driving is very large and both widely and wildly underestimated by most people, while the risk of flying is incredibly low and still overestimated by many - though not nearly as many as was typical a few decades ago.
While it's certainly true that people seem to be born with much higher or lower proclivities toward risk-taking than others, they still don't think or behave in ways that equalize marginal risk on all their margins. It's more like a risk-lover has an inconsistent marginal risk vector of (4, 6, 8) vs a risk-hater's (1, 2, 3)
As an example of a typical underestimate, a lot of people enjoy doing certain kinds of recreational, athletic, or other physical activities with risky attributes (height, force to the body, drowning hazard, height above hard surface) that are statistically some of the most common causes of serious injuries that cause premature death (e.g., motorcycles) require surgery and have lifetime impacts with lingering pain, fragility, limited range of motion, etc.
They tend to dismiss these real risks for many reasons including that they aren't charged any kind of extra marginal health insurance premium per hour of the activity, they think they are just doing the 'normal' level of activity and that the bad injuries only happen to the people doing the extreme or intense level stuff, they don't know to what extent the price they pay for the activity includes a massive business-liability premium, they may observe people falling down or getting hurt, but also maybe only see them apparently "walk it off" with some temporary pains and bruises, and don't see the trip to the doctor, the MRI or X-ray with bad news, the surgeries and physical therapies, etc.
Of the kids I grew up with, by now at least half are of a certain age at which they are comfortable openly complaining about some pain in their knee, neck, back, shoulder, etc. and point to a surgery scar all caused by some bad fall when skiing or a bad jump into a pool or whatever.
Just "falls" is the number one source of hospital visits for unintentional injuries, for all age cohorts but 18-24 year-olds, where it is second third behind "motor vehicle traffic" and "struck by or against objects or people". Hospitalization falls increase with age after 24, but they also increase as kids get younger than 18, with minors going to the hospital for falls nearly as often as 65+ seniors! "Slip and fall" is a whole field of tort law practice, which I always was kind of silly until I learned just how many people get hurt really badly from falling.
The lack of kids is a really good point. It is a lot easier to give adults the benefit of the doubt when they have kids, especially when they are not observably neglected kids.
Autonomous driving would be a fantastic breakthrough. But notice the dissonance. The experts express angst about the fertility decline. Then they exult hype about driverless cars reviving urban living. Yes, for the individual and maybe the couple. But not for the family of five.
Show me the transportation solution for the family of five. What is it? We had it in spades 50 years ago - just about any car could carry 5 people two generations ago. Now with car seat laws, there are fewer options and the costs are much higher.
I have a good deal of experience with this issue. On the one hand, absolutely, car seat rules are excessive and very annoying. On the other hand, it is just not even close to a top-tier issue when it comes to possible costs or disincentives to have more kids. It's not hard or more expensive than normal to find a sedan which can accommodate a baby seat and two boosters.
Thus I find the focus on it by popular commentators (e.g., Michael Brendan Dougherty) to be very odd and inconsistent with the usual level of rigor and skepticism.
Having followed (and rolled my eyes at the sorry state of) the conversation about fertility rate collapse for decades now, my sense of things is that it very much suffers from a "discourse in the shadow of the guillotine" problem. Or cognition in that shadow.
That is, when certain areas of possibilities are deemed to be within the socially punitive minefield and those off-limits, the brain will only consider and people will only discuss and aim at socially safe targets. The problem is that if the true target is in the minefield, the safe targets are all silly and wrong, but you can't criticize them without risking walking into the minefield yourself. Something we all hate and about which it's acceptable to whine about makes for a safe target, but not an accurate target, indeed, tending to help perpetuate the state of denial about the ugly truths of the accurate targets.
This is analogous to the joke about the drunk looking for his keys half a block away from the bar where he lost them, because even though he never went anywhere near the stoplight, he can only look there, "because that's where the light is." Likewise, we decide to place our analytical artillery so far in the rear that while it can't hit the enemy from there, we still chose that spot, "because that's where the mines aren't."
Arnold wrote "I think that Haidt is putting too much emphasis on smart phones and social media." The case for devices and social media being the cause of or at least an important contributor to social pathologies including loss of independence is bolstered by the striking increase in the problem at the time, around 2010, when most kids were getting devices. Of course, the problem did precede this to some extent due to the rise in safetyism and helicopter parenting, and not allowing kids the freedom to take risks in normal play. I highly recommend Haidt's new book "The Anxious Generation" to anyone interested in this topic.
Plus Haidt wants a solution, like banning phones in schools, which seems like an obviously feasible policy to reduce the problem. Overemphasis, like saying it’s 55% rather than 20%, is likely more effective at changing policy. Especially when we don’t have, and mostly won’t have, better data for distribution of blame. I doubt he quantifies it—would be happy to see any of his numbers if he has any.
Perhaps he’s being alarmist, which becomes clear in hindsight after some state or big city bans the phones in schools, and mental health problems only decrease by 5 or 10%, most would agree the policy is worth it. A good Q for Arnold or any who think Haidt is too alarmist is: how much reduction is needed to justify the alarmism? 50%? 90%? 20%? 5%?
My own Big Influence is the 10-20% increase of college student mental health issues because of the illegal discrimination against hiring Republican professors. Plus the much greater support for censorship and intellectual safetyism.
Another influence was the election of Black Obama, to prove the US is nor racist, yet the reported increase in racism—so a feeling of hopelessness on ending racism.
Besides smartphones, there are many reasons to feel bad—but stopping smartphones in class is one of easier policies to push that is very likely to improve the situation.
With computer email a forums to help the top 10% communicate with each other all around the world, daily instead of every minute. (Tyler’s objection)
"... elites don’t live up to presumed standards of competence ..."
Part of the problem is that voters demand, and politicians too often promise, what government is unable to provide. Government can be reasonably expected to deliver Adam Smith's foundation for prosperity: "peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice." But government cannot heal the planet, right history's wrongs, provide equal outcomes, or ameliorate all pain. When it tries to do what it cannot, it will fail to do what it can.
"But we put up with not being the driver on airplanes."
Fine- then try selling tickets for planes without pilots.
I'd buy those tickets right now. Flying is much easier for robots to handle than driving with all the messiness of objects moving around on the surface. Commercial jets have been able to take off, fly, take instructions from prototype air traffic control systems, and land in all kinds of weather conditions via advanced autopilot for years. As I understand it, that's how the planes actually fly whenever regs don't insist otherwise. Even if one concedes that they are only 90% as good as human pilots by whatever metric (though it seems plausible to me they could already be better than human pilots), the advantages could still easily outweigh the risks. I'd say the average person is more risk averse on this topic than is warranted given the state of the technology. Eventually human operation of most things is going to be thought about the same way as having a full time elevator operator.
But you are an outlier.
That's fair, and true enough. Allah be praised that I have somehow had the good fortune to land on my feet as a high-functioning weirdo, lol.
My money is on: a) substack subscriptions (which I need to cut back on), and b) books by substack authors I read, like Arnold, Rob Henderson, Freddie deBoer, Rod Dreher, Glenn Loury. And JK Rowling as R. Galbraith on X, tho I’m waiting for paperback Strike murder mystery in summer, #7–she’s said she has plotted out 8 & 9 already.
I’m beyond angry to sad & dismissive of GRR Martin, and Patrick Rothfuss, for failure to finish their series.
Most books with a few important points can make those points better in a stack post, but books and verbiage is needed for marketing. Which Arnold accurately notes is not his strength; it’s also not mine. Arnold’s book reviews are excellent, tho Rob’s are even better. Maybe Scott Alexander has more, but I find him far too verbose, as is The Zvi, not to be confused with autocorrect Zaire.
I like the substack idea, but I very much dislike substack the company's current software approach to the user interface and experience and privacy. I'm not saying it's not necessary to make the company viable - I suspect it is but I don't know - but if so it's a sad state of affairs. I worry about their market dominant position making them a target, and of them - or post-founders successors - eventually succumbing to the kinds of rationalizations and pressure tactics that will reproduce the same kinds of bad viewpoint filtering practices that emerged on all the other platforms.
About being the driver: we put up with way too much from airlines, who treat us like dirt unless we're first-class passengers on the right airline. I.e. unless we're very well-to-do. Who in their right mind would want to put up with that sort of hideousness several times every day just to go about their business?
in the age of food delivery having a kitchen is unnecessary
Robotaxies could be a huge shot in the arm for urban areas. Cost of car ownership is a huge burden there, and I'm not just talking the finances.
Robotaxies would probably be bad for a place where I live. You need a car out here, and while you can get an Uber to the airport there aren't enough to use for daily living. So robotaxies would make cities more attractive vis a vis exurbs.
I think it will make cities more attractive than they were, but I don't think it will overcome the pressure to move out of the city once one starts a family, for example. It definitely will help alleviate the misery of getting around the city, however, you are spot on there. Especially for the younger people who move to cities the most already.
Denser inner suburbs will benefit too. It's not cost effective to uber everywhere now but it would be with robotaxies.
Also, I would be more comfortable putting somewhat aged up kids in a robotaxi by themselves versus and Uber with a human being.
That’s a good point, especially with running the kids around. Still, I think cities will be lower value for child raising than suburbs; cars are only one of their weak margins there.
Right now I see dozens of delivery vehicles cruising the streets of our suburb every day. Robotaxies for commutes combined with using them for package deliveries would be highly compatible, and probably profitable.
I agree that most families would need or at least like one vehicle but I can see them eliminating second and third cars, especially the ones that sit in a parking lot and then the driveway most of the day.
See my comment below about why we won't have robocars any time soon.