Adages
-
Must all good things be compatible
I’ve been pondering this quote from Isaiah Berlin (as seen in Rob Henderson’s newsletter)
“The optimistic view…that all good things must be compatible, and that therefore freedom, order, knowledge, happiness…must be at least compatible, and perhaps even entail one another in a systematic fashion…is not self-evidently true…Indeed, it is perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers.”
Which also had the nugget
Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow
Which brought to mind the adage, first seen by me from Freeman Dyson of
One law for the lion and ox is oppression
The above is an illustration of the facts that the two ways of life are incompatible – the lion cannot digest plants, and the ox cannot digest meat. A law that said no eating animals, only plants, would lead to the lions starving, and a law that said eating animals is fine would lead to the deaths of the oxen.
Examining incompatibilities between beliefs is immensely interesting, and probably one of the better signals of thoughtfulness.
-
Quote of the day – David Friedman edition
From his substack
Given the state of macroeconomics — I like to describe a course in macro as a tour of either a cemetery or a construction site
-
An odd mashup of weird quotes from Marleigh and me
In vegan Hell you eat nothing but spiders
-
Quote of the day – from me
Rationalism is a force multiplier, not a force
The same applies to most philosophy
-
Gems from Reddit on HP Lovecraft
-
Quote of the Day from CS Lewis
I’ve probably posted this before, but
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-
Quote of the Day Jeffrey Lewis edition
From here
So I threw out some past to make room for more future
and
I see a better person waiting his turn to be me
-
Quote of the Day
A dog with two masters starves to death.
-
Moldbug actually says something well
An actually good metaphor from Moldbug (though I will give him some points for defining Effective Altruism as “Telescopic Philanthropy) the below is about libertarianism
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/is-effective-altruism-effectiveCapitalism is cool. Spontaneous order is cool. Yet it is easy to ignore the fact that capitalism, as we know it, is not mostly made of spontaneous order. It is not a sea of self-employing economic atoms.
Capitalism is a sea of economic molecules. Some of these molecules are single atoms. Some are giant megacorporations. Between the molecules, all order is spontaneous. Within the molecules—raisins in the bread—all order is directed and monarchical.
-
Quote of the day
When the starving go on a hunger strike, few will notice
