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Max More's avatar

It sounds like you are annoyed that people assume you are always in favor of going ahead and never think that things can go wrong and so you pick on libertarians for causing that perception, because you usually agree with them. You then pick a tiny number of cases where you think libertarians are wrong and label them as having “faith”. You do not pint the faith label on those who automatically jump up to regulate everything and get it wrong.

Also, you smear libertarians by pointing out that some are funded partly by corporate interests. As if this isn’t the case for all other causes. You correctly say that you think that, for the most part, these people are sincere. It’s probably true of many people who are non-libertarians and anti-libertarians. But you use this to select attack libertarians. If the funding does not give cause to dismiss libertarian views, why bring it up at all? Of course, there are many, many libertarians who have never benefited from corporate money. Many of us have campaigned against government funding that benefits us financially.

It is probably true that few libertarians write much about lead although I’ve seen plenty of writing about cigarettes. That’s hardly surprising since just about everyone else writes about lead and cigarettes and the need for regulation. However, you join the regulation train too easily. Do you believe that consumers, once well-informed on real dangers (unlike most of the “dangers” we hear about, as you well know) will ignore them and can only be saved by our wise, benevolent, and impartial politicians and bureaucrats? When you dig into the history of regulation, what you will usually find is the regulations follows awareness and consumer pressure for change (as well as economic developments that make the change workable and affordable. Restrictions on child labor being a good example.

“Faith” is much better applied to those who see a problem and immediately turn to the coercive solution, despite all the failures throughout history, and despite the public choice issues that explain why regulation is systematically bad and gets worse over time. (Let’s also distinguish regulation from application of general law, which libertarians obviously support. If a company is emitting something definitely harmful and people are being hurt without their consent, you don’t need regulation to stop it.)

Your criticism is especially inappropriate in the AI risk/AI apocalypse panic. Lead in gasoline is clearly unhealthy and has no upside apart from a (temporary) mild lowering of costs. AI has enormous likely benefits. We are just beginning to see them. Just as AI is actually starting to be useful – increasing productivity, accelerating medical advances, and so on – some people want to stomp on it and kill it. What you call the libertarian response was indeed predictable. And correct. Stopping AI is a terrible idea that will cause people to die when AI could have accelerated cures. Just to name one area. And you are wrong that this is the universal libertarian response (sadly). Yudkowsky is a libertarian and rejects calls for moratoriums in every other area. He makes an exception for this one because he’s gone down an intellectual rabbit hole and become hysterical.

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steven lightfoot's avatar

I do however, agree with your general premise, that Techno-Libertarianism isn't necessarily good. New tech usually brings a set of unintended consequences, some can be pretty bad. Techno-Optimism (the idea that new tech can be developed quickly, easily, and at low cost) is another problem, especially in the energy space.

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