George Smith's Swift History of the United States

With the kind assistance of the Salem Center for Policy, I’m releasing three more lectures by autodidact extraordinaire George Smith (1949-2022). The latest series of talks covers the American Revolution, the American Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and more. I had the privilege of hearing and arguing with George on multiple occasions in the early 90s, and it’s always thrilling to hear his radio-announcer voice release another firehose of knowledge.

Enjoy!

P.S. Hope to see you at the Cato Institute in DC tomorrow, and/or My Chemical Romance in Philadelphia on Friday. I’ll also be in Princeton on Saturday. Email me if you want to meet up and maybe we’ll be able to work something out.

Another AI Art Contest

Up to $500 if you blow my mind.

To celebrate my sons’ graduation from Vanderbilt, I commissioned a custom set of game chips, using images drawn from the bespoke role-playing games we’ve been playing since they were three years old. Since I wanted top quality and consistency, I didn’t use AI. I hired Savane, one of my favorite human artists.

But perhaps I erred. Maybe AI is already better. To found out, I’m starting another AI art contest. I’ll give $250 to anyone who can create a set of game chips that I personally like better than the set that Savane created. If multiple such sets appear, I’ll give $150 for second place, and $100 for third place. If I prefer Savane’s art to all entries, there is no prize. On my honor, I shall strive to be fair. But fair warning: I am hard to please, and I really like Savane’s work.

The parameters of the contest:

Create sixteen pieces of artwork for the following twelve chips.

See here for reference photos and more details. To see what you’re up against, here are four of Savane’s finished products.

Think you and your favorite AI have the right stuff to win this? Just share your files with me on Dropbox or Google Drive. May the best tech win!

Contest deadline: September 15.

Murder, Rape, and the Sexism of Sympathy

I humbly request that no one willfully misinterpret my carefully-chosen words.

Rape is very bad, but murder is almost always much worse. This is common sense: Where there’s life, there’s hope. While rape may scar you for life, the cold, happy truth is that rape victims normally recover from the trauma by the grace of hedonic adaptation. The average human really is resilient — so you probably are, too.

Not convinced that murder is much worse than rape? In economic terms, just ask yourself: If you could either be raped for sure, or murdered with probability X, what probability leaves you indifferent? 10%? 3%? .7%?

Too close to home? Then ask the same probability question for anyone you care about. You can and should tell a victim of rape, “This horror does not define you.” You can’t say the same to a victim of murder.

Does anyone think otherwise? Yes. In fact, most people think so, or at least feel so. Consider: Off the record, professors of criminal law routinely confess that they are far more uncomfortable talking about rape than talking about murder. Why? Because rape is a far touchier topic for their students. “Murder mystery” is a beloved genre of fiction. “Rape mystery,” in contrast, is not a genre at all. People who find murder fascinating may seem a little odd, but people who find rape fascinating are terrifying. Indeed, under the right circumstances a likeable person will publicly confess to murder (“Yes, he robbed my aged mother, so I killed him!”), but no likeable person ever publicly confesses to rape.

Although I’ve been dimly aware of all these facts for years, it was the reaction to the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack that brought the facts into focus. As you know, Hamas murdered about 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023 — and they never denied it. Indeed, they were proud of themselves.

During the same attack, Hamas terrorists also clearly raped some women. But Hamas vociferously denies such accusations. Wikipedia:

Hamas officials, including Basem Naim, denied the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, citing Islamic principles that forbid any sexual relationship outside of marriage. Hamas accused Western media of bias and said the reports of sexual violence demonized "Palestinian resistance". They also demanded that The New York Times apologize following a report on the matter.

International investigations of the Hamas rapes have received massive global publicity. The United Nations spent about six months investigating the issue, then cautiously declared, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.”

When proud mass murderers are accused of rape, you have to be careful not to sully their good names!

Not convinced? Imagine Hamas murdered 1,220 people, but scrupulously avoided any sexual violence. International revulsion at Hamas would be noticeably less, even though their behavior would have been objectively worse.

How can we begin to understand this Kafkaesque situation? By remembering that contrary to feminists, human beings have a deep pro-female bias. Both men and women care more about female well-being, and especially female suffering. Women are wonderful, but men are disposable. Since the stereotypical victim of murder is male and the stereotypical victim of rape is female, humans’ emotional reaction to rape is more negative than our reaction to murder, even though rationally speaking, murder is definitely much worse than rape. (Yes, I am well-aware that many men are raped in prison, but when humans hear about rape, the victim they picture is almost always female).

“Doesn’t pro-female bias serve the useful social function of protecting women?” What a question-begging question! If female well-being and suffering were actually more morally important than male well-being and suffering, then pro-female bias would be socially functional. Otherwise, however, pro-female bias leads to misallocation of sympathy — away from men who need help more, and toward women who need help less.

P.S. I’m well-aware that hypersensitive and incurious readers are likely to willfully misinterpret everything I’ve written here. But I do not apologize for politely saying true things. Except under extreme duress.

Migration, Housing, and Beyond

My new Accelerated Globalists podcast

In this three-part Accelerated Globalists interview, I discuss migration, housing, and their interaction.

Big Picture: When you combine strict housing regulation with high immigration, you naturally get higher prices. The same goes, of course, for strict housing regulation with high tourism. As the intro econ textbook propounds: Low supply plus high demand equals high prices.

But to regard this as a good argument against immigration (or tourism) is laughable (or would be, in a world where laughable arguments got laughed at instead of enacted). If lots of people love living in (or visiting) your area, that is a reason to build lots of housing for mutual benefit. Insiders benefit by supplying the housing; outsiders benefit by demanding the housing. High demand is an opportunity, not a plague.

Shouldn’t we weigh the externalities? Sure. And if you do, you will soon discover that the positive externalities of development almost always outweigh the negative externalities, so restrictive housing regulation is even worse than simple supply-and-demand models say. As I explain in my notes:

Big Problem #4, the biggest problem of all: These defenses only consider the negative externalities of construction, but there are also enormous positive externalities!

1. How do we know? Actions speaker louder than words: You can escape almost all negative externalities by living in a remote rural location, but almost no one chooses to do so.

2. Prices show that the NET value of all the benefits of density minus all of the costs of density is strongly positive.

3. What are the positive externalities? Work, consumption, and social opportunities.

Want to hear more? Here are the three parts of the latest BBB interviews:

The Sigmoidal Moral Value Function

What radiation, parenting, and the moral value of animals have in common

In Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop, Jack Devanney explains that pessimistic estimates of the danger of nuclear power rest on the assumption of linear harm: double the radiation, double the harm.

This linear assumption is blatantly wrong at high doses, because humans exposed to sufficiently high doses die with certainty, and you can’t double-die. Devanney argues at length that the linear harm assumption is also totally wrong at low doses. We can see this in the data: Low-level naturally-occurring radiation differs widely around the world, without noticeably altering the health of exposed populations are all. The correct harm function, he argues, is “S-shaped” or sigmoidal. Like so:

Devanney’s discussion of the sigmoidal dose-response function is not only compelling, but inescapable.

What’s the most familiar form of radiation damage? Sunburn. And as we all know, 100 minutes in the sun does not do ten times as much harm as 10 minutes in the sun! Instead, there is a sigmoidal dose-response function. 10 minutes in the sun does zero visible damage to even the lightest-skinned person, but 100 minutes will burn such a person to a crisp. Which is virtually the same effect as 1000 minutes in the sun! Devanney explains the underlying biology at length: Animals on Earth have evolved a cellular repair mechanism well-suited to counteract the mild radiation damage that animals on Earth continuously face.

I’ve known about Devanney’s arguments in favor of the sigmoidal model of the harm of radiation for a year or two now. Once I understood the model, however, I started to notice additional applications. Sigmoidal dose-response functions are common not only in the natural world, but in the social world.

Example: Picture a graph with “How much time I’ve spent with my kids” on the x-axis and “How much my kids like me” on the y-axis. At low doses, there’s near-zero marginal effect: You’ll be a stranger to your kids if you spend a lifetime total of one minute, one hour, or one day together. At high doses, again, there’s near-zero marginal effect. You’ll be a father to your kids if you see them for an hour every day or ten hours every day. Relationships are like radiation.

Only recently, however, did I realize that Mike Huemer’s “badness of pain” graph — a graph he created to ridicule my critique of ethical vegetarianism — is also sigmoidal! Behold:

I quite like Huemer’s graph, because it elegantly summarizes my view — which is also, not coincidentally, the common-sense view. For Huemer, however, this graph is bizarre. So bizarre, in fact, that the best explanation is moral gerrymandering to rationalize a package of bogusly convenient moral intuitions.

I’m happy to defend my moral intuitions on their merits. But once you realize that sigmoidal functions neatly fit much of the physical and social worlds, why should you be surprised to learn that sigmoidal functions also neatly fit the moral world as well?

P.S. I’d put chimpanzees somewhere in the middle of the steep part of the sigmoidal function. So if you want to crusade against the factory farming of chimps, I won’t stand in your way.