You Will Not Stampede Me - by Bryan Caplan

Society is consistently wrong. The public gets hysterical: massive overreaction to a statistically tiny evil. What drives perceptions is availability bias: well-publicized emotionally gripping anecdotes.

Any very large, unselective group includes some villains. If you identify with any large, unselective group, you will be regularly tempted to commit the villainous act of standing up for your groups’ villains. When they do wrong – as they inevitably will – your impulse will be to ignore, minimize, or justify their misdeeds. Never identify with large, unselective groups!

Suppose you identify with a large, unselective group – a nationality, religion, ethnicity, political party, etc. Historian shows that this group once committed a monstrous atrocity – say mass murder. This leaves you with four options: 1. To keep your identity and share the blame: “We were terrible.” 2. To renounce your identity and avoid the blame: “They were terrible.” 3. To redefine the perpetrators’ identity and avoid the blame: “We weren’t involved.” 4. To keep your identity and deny the facts: “Never happened – and they had it coming.”

Restrict your identity to groups that are small, selective, or both. The classic small, unselective group: nuclear family, and circles of friends.

A conformist says what others say, but does what others do. People dislike expressing views or taking actions unless other people do. Normal people lack integrity. They feel little need to bring their actions in harmony with their words – or their words in harmony with their actions.

Civilization is not the product of knowledge alone, but a partnership of knowledge and effort. Great thinkers bring most of the knowledge, but the common man provides most of the effort. Neither is worth much without the other.

Trolling diverts intellectual resources from the construction of compelling arguments to the elicitation of negative emotions.

Revenge: Suppose X is the most severe morally acceptable punishment for act Y committed by person Z. Suppose that the government fails to do anything about Y. What’s wrong if a person personally affected by act Y does X to Z? (If the victim punishes the attacker if the government doesn’t.)

“Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong?” You could just as easily have a bumper sticker saying: “Why do we imprison people who imprison people to show that imprisoning is wrong?”

When faced with demands for conformity, silently ask, “What will happen to me if I refuse?”

Societies are huge, anonymous, and forgetful.

Spend the first year of any job convincing your employer he was right to hire you, and he’ll spend your remaining years on the job convincing you not to leave.

If I created my own school, what would it be like? Two goals: 1. prepare students for independent adult life 2. give them a fun childhood 90 minutes of math every day. Most high-status jobs require good math skills, and that’s unlikely to change. Ample time reading and writing, but what they read and write is up to them.

I know that I’m going to hedonically adapt to most good and bad life events, so I place little stock in life events.

Libertarians may be perfectly happy living in a society bound together by nothing stronger than “I’ll leave you alone, you leave me alone.” But psychologically normal humans crave a sense of deep belonging – a sense only big government satisfies.

If people really crave a sense of deep belonging, how come almost no one voluntarily lives in intentional communities? People want to sound like communitarians, but live like individualists. Governments deliver what people pretend to want. Free markets deliver what they actually want.

Hollywood makes a lot of socially conservative movies. When you strip away the glamorous actors and cool music, the message is clear: Live a responsible bourgeois life or you will soon be severely punished. The Godfather saga, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Fargo. The message of all this cinema: Follow the path of bourgeois virtue. Work hard, keep the peace, abstain from alcohol, have very few sexual partners, and keep your whole family far away from anyone who lives otherwise. The writers try to create engrossing stories – and end up weaving morality tales.

I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I’m sure we’d share. I’m confident that he’d be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me.

Supply-and-demand solves countless mysteries of the world – everything from rent control to road congestion.

Resolve debates about “what’s obvious” by betting, not talking.

Productive moral arguments begin with clear-cut simple cases, not one-sentence moral theories or trolley problems.

Violence and theft are presumptively wrong, and calling yourself “the government” does nothing to rebut these presumptions.

The best three pages in philosophy remain Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus.”