--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Hello, folks, and welcome to the Lunar Society podcast. Today, it is my great privilege to talk with Professor Michael Huemer. He is, in my opinion, the best philosopher alive. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, and he has written more than 70 academic articles on epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy. He has also written eight books, the newest one of which is this introduction to philosophy, Knowledge, Reality, and Value. I highly, highly recommend it. It's incredibly clear and easy to read. It covers all of the arguments and philosophy that I've been curious about since I was a teenager. So I've included a link to his Amazon page in the description where you can go and buy it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Today, we had an incredibly wide-ranging conversation about a previous book of his, The Problem of Political Authority. Just a reminder, as always, to please, please share this podcast on social media or with your friends if you enjoy it. This is a small and growing podcast, so word of mouth really, really helps. Without further ado, here's Professor Michael Huemer.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, Professor Huemer, what is the problem with political authority? Why did you write this book?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah, so, here's a copy of the book, and you can order it on Amazon, that's the important thing, or anywhere. The problem referred to in the title is a philosophical problem about government. Basically, the problem is: what's the basis for the government's authority?
--:-- By the government's authority, I mean, first of all, it's usually thought that the government is entitled to give other people commands and force them to obey in situations where nobody else would be entitled to give commands and force people to obey. They could give commands that you don't already have to do, but you have to do them only because the government commanded it. The other part of this notion of authority is that it's generally thought that you have a moral obligation to obey the law merely because it's the law. Again, the law could be things that you're not already obligated to do.
--:-- For example, if I decide that I'm going to collect money from other people to give to the poor, I start a charity collecting money to help the poor, and I decide I'm not getting enough contributions voluntarily, so I decide to just force people to pay. If I do this, this is called extortion, and I'm going to wind up in jail. Besides that, most people will be disapproving of this and think that, number one, I shouldn't be doing that, and number two, they don't have to pay me. But when the government does this, this is called taxation and social welfare programs, which most people approve of. They think that the government is entitled to do that and that we are obligated to pay.
--:-- That's just an illustration of the idea that the government has a special moral status. Most people think they have a kind of status that puts them above other ordinary people. The question is why? Why do they get to do all this stuff that nobody else can do? And why should we obey them?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You're pointing out a contradiction between common sense morality and common sense political philosophy. Why should we resolve that contradiction in favor of common sense intuitions rather than the prevalent political views?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah, common sense ethical intuition. There are the intuitions that you would apply to ordinary people and then there are the intuitions people have about the state. But I think if you raise this issue with most people, they will see that some sort of explanation is required. Most people have the initial reaction that the government has authority, but they will not generally say that it's self-evident and needs no explanation. Most people can see that it needs an explanation. Then they will try to give an explanation, and it will turn out that none of the explanations are any good.
--:-- Part of the reason why we don't just go with our initial intuition about politics is that we also have the intuition that it requires an explanation. Another thing is that the ethical intuitions I'm appealing to—things like you shouldn't go up to people and steal their money, threaten people with violence to get their money, or lock them in cages—these are not controversial intuitions. These are intuitive reactions that any normal person would have, regardless of whether they're Democrats, Republicans, or libertarians. The thing about the state having authority is not so uncontroversial. There's a significant number of people called libertarians who do not have any intuitive reactions that the state has authority.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right.
--:-- Michael Huemer: In the book, in chapter six, I have a series of explanations for why people might have this bias in favor of the state, based on different findings in psychology. One of the most obvious things is that people have a bias towards the status quo. There's very clear independent evidence of that, without talking about the problem of political authority. This explains why people in different societies with very different customs tend to think that their customs are superior to those of other societies. How could that be? It has to be that they're biased in favor of the way things are done in their own society. So I've got an explanation of why people would have mistaken moral judgments about the state.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I want to talk about your second point, that there's more controversy on the political views than there is on the basic ethical intuitions about theft and so on. It's not self-evident to me that anarcho-capitalists outnumber the people who think that you should have to pay your neighbor because you have benefited from his services even though you didn't ask for those services. Anarcho-capitalism is controversial.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Anarcho-capitalism is the extreme version of libertarianism. There are not very many of them, but there are a substantial number of libertarians. Most of them still hold the political view that the state has some unique authority.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I don't think so.
--:-- Michael Huemer: This is discussed in Chapter 7, where I argue that what differentiates libertarians from everyone else is skepticism about authority. That is the basic libertarian view. By the way, many libertarians deny that this is what unifies libertarianism, but I think they deny that because they haven't read my book. When they read my book, they won't understand that. They may not even understand what I mean by authority and skepticism thereof.
--:-- But this is what's common to libertarians: they think that you should apply the same moral standards to the state that you apply to ordinary people. When the state commits murder, the libertarians say "murder." The partisans of conventional political views say, "Well, I guess they shouldn't have done that, but we're not going to call them murderers or anything like that."
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There's a quotation at the end of the book from the Chinese philosopher Mozi, from some thousand years ago. He says, "To kill one man is a capital crime, and to kill ten men is to multiply the crime by tenfold, and to kill a hundred men is to multiply by a hundredfold." The rulers of the world all recognize this, but when it comes to the greatest crime of all—making war on another state—they praise it. Because it's just murder, but bigger. He says, "If a man on seeing a little black says it is black, but when seeing a lot of black says it is white, then it's clear that this person cannot distinguish black from white. Similarly, the rulers of the world cannot distinguish right from wrong."
--:-- It's an interesting point. If we held political leaders to account the same way we hold individuals to account, it would be an interesting way of looking at them.
--:-- Let me ask you about the biases you were talking about. One of the ones you point out in the book is Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim of abuse will feel loyalty towards their abuser and feel that the abuser is actually protecting them, and will feel gratitude towards small acts of mercy. Given the fact that people regularly criticize the president or government policies they disagree with, to what extent are they actually fearful of or incorrectly loyal towards the government because of fear of authority?
--:-- Michael Huemer: The original Stockholm syndrome refers to a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, decades ago, probably the 1970s. The robbers took some people hostage in the bank vault. It turned out that the hostages emotionally bonded with the kidnappers. At one point, they thought the kidnappers were protecting them from the police. At the end, the hostages didn't want to go out without the kidnappers because they were afraid the police would shoot them. One of them tried to aid in the legal defense, started a legal defense fund for the kidnappers.
--:-- This phenomenon occurs periodically in hostage situations. It wasn't just that one case. FBI negotiators are trained to be prepared for Stockholm Syndrome. What happens with the government isn't literally exactly that—they're not literally kidnapping us—but my idea is there's a broader phenomenon: people will instinctively take the side of those who have power over them. There's an evolutionary explanation for why this would be. People have said about Stockholm syndrome that it's a survival mechanism. There's evidence for thinking it worked because the kidnappers said they were thinking of shooting the hostages but couldn't do it because of the emotional bond they had formed.
--:-- My more general point is that it's common in human societies for someone to have power over others. If the people in the weaker position form an emotional bond with the powerful people, that may help them survive and prosper. That might be why people try to take the side of the government.
--:-- You asked about people being very critical of the president. I think it's because people are distinguishing the government from the current officeholder. It doesn't feel like you're being disloyal to the government. You're just saying you want the other party to be in power, which is also half of the government.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There are people who question the legitimacy of the government in other ways. For example, they'll say it's systemically racist. These are also the kind of people who want to increase the size of the government. That seems confusing. If fear of government prevents people from criticizing the legitimacy of the government but allows them to criticize the president, why are people comfortable criticizing the legitimacy of the government in this particular way?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I'm not sure they're questioning the legitimacy of the government. The social justice warriors are criticizing some of its policies. In my view, questioning their legitimacy would be saying they shouldn't have any entitlements that ordinary citizens don't have. If ordinary citizens aren't entitled to tax each other, then the state shouldn't be able to tax us. I don't think the left-wing people think that exactly. I'm not quite sure I understand your view because I'm not quite sure what systemic racism means. I'm not sure that systemic racism means that anyone is actually racist.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's fair. I wonder to what extent... Rene Girard noticed that after Stalin died, support for the Soviet Union amongst academia in the West declined. His hypothesis was that the academics didn't support Stalin despite his violence, but because of his violence. It wasn't fear of authority, but more that they found authority charismatic and violence charismatic. What do you think of that hypothesis?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Maybe. I'm not sure if the academics knew about Stalin's murders. They might have not known because they didn't want to know. I think there's a phenomenon that horrible people are often charismatic to ordinary average people. Stalin was probably a charismatic character, although I haven't seen him. Ordinary average people don't admire moral virtue. They admire power. They admire somebody who appears strong and confident. But people who are very strong and confident are often bad people. The reason why they're strong is because they crush all opposition. The reason why they're confident is that they do not give a shit about other people. If you don't give a shit what other people think, and you don't care what effect you have on other people, then you don't worry. You're not worried when you're talking to them because you don't care what they think about you. When you're taking actions, if you're the leader putting forward new policies, you do it with total confidence because you don't care if it's wrong.
--:-- That's my read on dictators. They act like they're totally confident that this is the right policy because they don't actually care if it kills lots of people or not. A normal person would be worried: "What if I'm doing the wrong thing?" But that worry would make them look unconfident, and then people would not support them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This does help explain something about the last four years. I'm not claiming that Trump was Stalin or anything, but I never found him charismatic in the way that millions of people did. I was missing a module in my mind that was supposed to find him charismatic. I just couldn't figure it out. But that's a good explanation: just the confidence itself.
--:-- Michael Huemer: I found him kind of anti-charismatic, but about half the country found him anti-charismatic. You still have to explain why half of them found him particularly charismatic, better than the other 15 Republican candidates in the primaries. It had a lot to do with being super confident, which by my read is because he doesn't care. He'll say stuff with total confidence, and the ordinary person thinks because he's talking with complete confidence, that means what he's saying must be true. But the alternative explanation is that it's because he doesn't care about truth.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So why do you think moral progress is likely if the average person cares about power, or is more convinced by power itself than by convincing arguments or by people who care about the truth? How do we get moral progress?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Why do I think there's moral progress? Because I looked at history. Look at what people were doing back in ancient Rome: gladiatorial combat, forcing slaves to fight to the death for fun because they thought it was amusing to see them cut to pieces. Just 200 years ago in America, we were enslaving people just because they had darker skin. The evidence of there being moral progress is compelling. It's enormous progress.
--:-- What's the explanation? How did it happen? I think it's driven by a relatively small number of people. There are a bunch of people who don't reflect very much and just go along with the customs of their society. They're sort of neutral. There's a small number of people who see the flaws in the status quo and try to push society towards the moral truth. They push it slowly. Because there are always reformers trying to improve society, it's a constant small force. Over the course of many generations, it accumulates to a lot of progress.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I've read Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, which you also wrote. I want to question you on whether on net there has been moral progress. At one point in the book, you say that the impact of factory farming rivals the suffering of all the humans that have ever existed. How can a world where factory farming has been increasing be one where there's been tremendous moral progress? On net, there would seem to be a moral decline.
--:-- Michael Huemer: You could make the argument—people find this shocking—that it would have been better if there were no humans. Maybe the world would be better with no human beings. The amount of pain and suffering that we cause to other species in just a few years is probably greater than all of the suffering in all of human history. It probably outweighs all of the pleasure that human beings have ever experienced among all of the 100 billion or so humans who have existed. That may seem shocking, but the number of animals we're torturing and killing each year is something like 74 billion. There have only ever been 110 billion humans. In two years of factory farming, we tortured and killed more creatures than the total number of humans who have ever existed.
--:-- From a purely consequentialist standpoint, it's been a huge regression. However, it does appear to me that it's turning around. Vegetarianism and veganism are becoming more popular. When I was in college, there were not many vegetarians. I think I never met a vegan. Nobody had heard of that. There weren't vegan restaurants you could go to. What's ultimately going to change the situation is technology. Now there are all of these substitute products for animal products that are really convincing. There didn't used to be. They're working on synthetic meat, basically making meat without the cruelty. That's probably what's ultimately going to end it. Right now it's really bad, but it's probably going to get better when we perfect this technology.
--:-- This fits with what I was saying earlier: this is being driven by a small number of people. There's a small percentage of society who cares because there's a small percentage of human beings who are basically morally decent. A small number of people give a crap about morality at all. But that's enough. The technological changes are being driven by animal welfare advocates. That's why we have people interested in developing synthetic meat.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Assuming there's more progress happening, you say in the book that you expect the rate of progress to increase over time because of exponential growth. This seems to contradict a blog post you recently wrote talking about how progress will end, where you said that because of diminishing marginal returns, exponential growth has to stop. You even hypothesized that it will actually decline at some point. You were talking about scientific and technological knowledge, but why doesn't this also apply to moral progress? Why won't we see moral decline or zero moral growth before we get to the point of anarcho-capitalism?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Any progress has to eventually slow down. I think there's a maximum point for everything. But that doesn't mean that will happen soon. I can't predict when it will happen. Eventually, civilization will collapse and we'll all die. Eventually the human species will go extinct. But I don't know when. It could be in the next hundred years or it could be in a million years.
--:-- Part of why I said that in the blog post was that there's been a decline in the rate of economic growth in the United States. Poorer countries have a faster rate of growth. They're poorer overall but they're growing faster, so they'll eventually catch up. You can hypothesize the reason: if you're already doing pretty badly, it's easier to improve. The United States is already pretty efficient, so it gets harder and harder to improve. That could happen with moral progress too. It will presumably slow down as we get closer to the moral truth. The rate of progress will have to slow down. Will it decline? I don't know. I don't know why that would have to happen. Eventually we'll all die, but I don't know why we would have to become immoral before we die. There's something about the accumulation of knowledge that it tends to just accumulate and not get destroyed.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Will the progress stop before we reach anarcho-capitalism?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I don't know. That might be true if there are some truths that are super hard to apprehend. The human species might never become advanced enough to understand them. But this doesn't seem to me like it's that hard. My basic moral point is that the government isn't special. They're people like you and me. There's no reason why they should get to do a whole bunch of stuff that you consider to be immoral if anyone else does them. The basic idea isn't that complicated.
--:-- I think this is similar to other bits of progress that have occurred in history. A lot of the stuff people were doing in the past was super stupid—not only bad, but stupid. The idea that you have more rights than somebody else because of your skin color is super dumb. Besides being really harmful, it's just dumb. Eventually people see that. The idea that you don't have different rights because of your skin color is kind of similar to you don't have different rights just because you're in power.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm going to try to critique that view. You could say that the change in attitudes over the last few centuries has been towards greater respect for the individual, a stronger presumption against violence and coercion. But that might not be true globally, because the default state of mankind is authoritarian control. In the United States, in the 19th century—obviously to the exclusion of blacks and women—attitudes were far more libertarian. There's a particular example of Grover Cleveland. He sent a bill from Congress authorizing what would be $250,000 today for some natural disaster that occurred in Texas. He vetoed it. He said, "First of all, I can't find any authority within the constitution to do this. Second, this sets an expectation of paternalistic help from the government in the future, and we should just rely on the charity of fellow citizens. This is not the proper role of government." Both parties seemed to have a respect for the autonomy of the individual, more so back then.
--:-- On the particular point of libertarian views, it seems there's been regress. I think a better theory of changing attitudes has been an increase in safetyism. In most cases, this is a good thing because countries that care about safety don't do genocides, torture, war, and so on. But it also means that they're more comfortable with regulations, with fines, with not being so diligent in protecting property rights. This safetyism asymptotes to a regulatory state rather than anarcho-capitalism over time.
--:-- Michael Huemer: That could be true. The United States has had growing regulation. The Code of Federal Regulations, which lists all of the federal regulations, was started in the 1930s. It was 22,000 pages, which sounds long enough, but it's now over 150,000 pages. The size of these regulatory agencies is growing, more employees. It could be right that that's just what's going to keep happening. But it's not obviously right. There is a certain amount of pushback, and there are people who are realizing the problems with regulation.
--:-- In many areas of human intellectual inquiry, knowledge just accumulates. We might just be in the primitive state of knowledge about social and political matters. It looks to me like there's accumulating libertarian sentiment. This could be wishful thinking or something, I don't know. When I was in college, the Institute for Humane Studies had a summer seminar which I went to. In the next few decades, they expanded greatly. There are different libertarian organizations now. There was no Students for Liberty when I was in college. That expanded also. I recall there being basically one well-known libertarian philosopher: Robert Nozick. Now there are multiple ones.
--:-- I don't know about Grover Cleveland in particular, if he was typical of people in that time. Here's an interpretation: it used to be that people believed in the authority of the state, but they just didn't care about the poor. That's why they didn't want to do all this welfare state stuff. Later, they still believed in the authority of the state, but they started caring about the poor as well. They thought, "Okay, we'll use this power to help the poor." That would actually be a form of progress, even though the policy is getting further from what it should be. The attitudes are getting closer to what they should be.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I wonder if instead of the attitudes getting closer to libertarian, what's happening is just that the tails have increased. There wasn't Students for Liberty a few decades ago, but were the Democratic Socialists of America a significant force back then either? Were there socialists in Congress? I don't know if it's fair to say that the change has been towards libertarianism per se, rather than just towards the extremes.
--:-- Michael Huemer: There could be. I think the internet culture might be making us more extreme.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah, so it used to be that information and the content people consumed was produced by this small elite. Now that everybody can have a voice on the internet, there's just more room for more extremists like us, but also the socialists. I don't know where that's going. It could be that the internet is just a bad influence on all of us. But it could be that this is relatively early days, and it's going to settle down and improve. There's this optimistic philosophical view that the truth wins in the end. This isn't guaranteed, but generally speaking, good ideas tend to be more persuasive than bad ones. If you have the opportunity for all the information to come out and everybody gets to share their arguments, usually that favors the correct views. If you assume the libertarian view is correct, then having more information and discussion should favor it. This is a general tendency, not guaranteed, because there are biases in the human mind. And also, maybe we're wrong, so maybe our view will go down because it's wrong.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let's talk about the actual view then. I'm going to try to be devil's advocate. Hobbes had this idea that people engage in violence to steal each other's stuff, launch preemptive strikes, or get revenge and glory. He said we need a strong government to stop this violence. You explained some game theoretical reasons why a strong government may increase violence in those cases. But in Pinker's *The Better Angels of Our Nature*, he lists empirical evidence showing that when we go from primitive tribes to the first states, there's a decrease in violence. During the feudal period, where thousands of independent political units merge into centralized monarchies, there's another decrease in violence. So how is it that empirically, whenever power centralizes, the rate of violence, death, war, and homicide tends to decrease?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah, that could be true. I think the central power suppresses the small-scale violence. They do large-scale violence like war, but they suppress ordinary one-on-one murder. If you're asking why people are prone to violence to begin with, Pinker in that book takes up the Hobbesian explanation, which is totally wrong and makes no sense. In a different book, Pinker gives a different explanation that I think is actually correct, but I'm not sure if he realizes it's a completely different explanation.
--:-- The Hobbesian explanation is that everybody's completely selfish and knows anyone can kill anyone. You're afraid somebody else will attack you, so you attack them first because there's an advantage in combat to the person who attacks first. This makes no sense because if there's more than one other person worried about being attacked, and you go around attacking people without provocation, everyone else will know you're the biggest threat. You become the biggest target for them. What you should do is mind your own business, stay away, and not start fights.
--:-- However, this isn't what happens in primitive societies. This is not what human beings have actually done throughout history. I wondered about this for a long time until I read Steven Pinker's book *How the Mind Works*. There's a passage that explains this. What happened in primitive tribes was the men from one tribe would attack another to murder the men and kidnap the women. This is extremely dangerous with a high chance you die. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. But here's the thing: say there's a 45% chance you die by starting this fight and a 55% chance you survive and capture one extra wife. Your reproductive success goes up.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It doesn't seem worth it if there's a 45% chance of dying from an intuitive self-interest standpoint.
--:-- Michael Huemer: From the standpoint of expected reproductive success, it goes up if you presently have fewer than two wives. If you have zero wives, you have nothing to lose because you'll have zero reproductive success if you don't. It was probably common for men in primitive societies to have zero wives because most societies practice polygyny, where some dominant character takes multiple wives. If you have one wife, you have a chance of either doubling your reproductive success or cutting it down to zero. It's a good deal as long as it's slightly more probable that you succeed. That's the evolutionary explanation of why this would happen. It's very bad that's the case.
--:-- Human beings aren't thinking that when they go to war; they're driven by emotions. This explains why we would have the genes that give us the emotional reactions making it likely for us to attack other tribes.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: As long as that instinct exists, why won't a society without a Leviathan fall back into that emotion of conquest? Why won't that happen?
--:-- Michael Huemer: You'd hire private security agencies. The primitive tribes didn't have private security agencies or a developed economy. It might be that anarchy doesn't work starting from primitive society, but it might still work if you transition from an advanced society. My theory is you transition from democracy to anarchy, to anarcho-capitalism. It doesn't work if you start at a much earlier stage of society.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The case for private security assumes a parity of resources that you could afford a similar magnitude of help. If over time, rich people, because they're smarter or have more capital, can grow their capital stock much more than poor people, that's not a problem in a normal democracy because what are they going to do with it? In anarcho-capitalism, they can buy an army, whereas you can buy one security guard. There's not a parity in power, and they can really roll over people.
--:-- Michael Huemer: I don't buy a security guard; I sign a contract with a security company. It could be a large company, and I'm just one of their customers. If Bill Gates says, "I'll pay you a billion dollars, just let me get through this town," he tells his private security agency. But what is his purpose? To steal resources? Steal women? He's got billions of dollars. Why doesn't he just buy them? Rich people usually don't do this because they can just buy what they want. It's cheaper. Bill Gates wouldn't have a hard time finding a wife if he didn't already have one, just because of that. If you want to pay somebody to help you steal money from poor people, the amount the poor people are willing to pay to not be stolen from is about equal to the value of the stuff that would be stolen. You could just buy it from them and not have to worry about the violence.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: In such a situation, aren't the poor disadvantaged relative to the rich? I guess they are in any society. But if a larger portion of their income and assets has to go towards security, they're not going to see the kind of growth to their wealth that anybody else would.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Rich people are going to pay more for security, as they presently do, because they have more to protect. For their personal safety, they place a higher monetary value on it. Nobody wants to be beaten up, but if you ask how much money you'll pay to not be beaten up, the answer is larger for the rich person. So they will pay more dollars for security.
--:-- One possible answer to your question about what they're going to steal if they can just buy the assets: you could ask a similar question about the US government. Why do they exact tribute every year? Why don't they just trade with us? The answer is they have nothing to trade with. The only thing they have to trade with is their coercion. Pinker floats the idea that the first states were really just mafiosos that took control of an area and exacted tribute every year.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why won't some of these private agencies form proto-states where they demand tribute every year from the people living there in exchange for living safely? I guess you could say that's what the state is today anyway.
--:-- Michael Huemer: That is what they are. You might worry that we would get a worse state than that. If you already have one of these organizations, it's easy to keep it going. But if you don't already have one, it's hard to get it started. If we had the anarcho-capitalist situation set up the way it's envisioned by the ANCAPs, from that position, it's difficult to establish your state-like entity. Everybody's got a security agency, and then you try to start up a gang to attack people. You're not already rich and don't already have all these resources; you're hoping to get resources by attacking other people. It's going to be hard to get there without getting arrested by other people's security agencies.
--:-- It matters how this whole thing comes about. If anarchy comes about by the government just disappearing one day and the cops disappear, then it would be chaos. The first thing that would happen is chaos in the street, and the second thing is people would immediately start setting up another government. That's not the way I envision the transition going. The transition would have to go by the government progressively privatizing its functions. The government would outsource policing to private security companies, maybe gradually. Similarly, they would gradually outsource the courts to private arbitrators. The idea is that the government is shrinking while the private organizations that would take over those functions are growing. If the government just collapsed immediately, it's never good. But if there's this simultaneous process, then you could get to a stable situation where it's hard for an individual to overturn it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How soon can this happen? If everybody agreed today, how long would it take to privatize things to the point where we're living in a system of anarcho-capitalism without doing it too fast so that bad things start happening?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I don't have expertise on that. We probably have to observe things happening. If people were convinced, we have a democracy right now. If people were convinced we should privatize more functions of the state, we can start doing that right now. It depends on how cautious you want to be. A city right now could say, "We're going to stop this police thing right now." The city of Denver tomorrow could say, "We're going to start hiring private security guards to patrol." Then they could pass laws to change the asymmetry between government police and security guards.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Are you pro-defund the police?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I mean, you could say that in principle. I'm not sure what those people mean, because it kind of sounds like they mean cancel the police and then have no security. I don't want to do that. I would take that money and give it to private security companies. I wouldn't take it and just not give it to any security.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Here's a question I want to ask you. You wrote a blog post a few months back criticizing social justice warriors and the 1619 Project in particular. You wrote, "Here's another plausible way of eroding norms: directly, verbally attacking the foundation of one's society, preaching that the society is founded on fundamentally evil values, that large parts of that society have no reason to be loyal to the whole, and that its institutions are fundamentally just a sham designed to take advantage of most of its members." Professor, are you attacking our own society? You're claiming that coercion is illegitimate. Our society is in large part founded on the idea that the state is legitimate, that its coercion is legitimate. If coercion is evil, then isn't our society illegitimate? And aren't you eroding the norms which have brought us peace and prosperity?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I might be doing that. Good thing nobody listens to me. I was thinking about what they call democratic norms, which is partly democracy but a bunch of associated things that aren't exactly democracy. When you lose the election, you concede. With the social justice warrior saying everybody's racist, America's racist, and so on. In America, there's a norm of respectful discourse. That's one of the things I'm worried about is eroding.
--:-- Years ago, I read that some leaders from Iraq came to visit the United States to learn about how the political system works here. They visited a city hall meeting in Boulder, and their main impression was how respectful our discourse was. Up until that point, I didn't realize our discourse was respectful, but it was true compared to other countries. People on opposite sides would disagree with each other but do it in a basically respectful way. Apparently that doesn't happen in other countries. One of the things I was worried about is that eroding.
--:-- I want to leave room for criticizing society. I want to leave room for saying there's some stuff that's very messed up that we need to change. How do we do that and not be accused of wrongly violating the norm? I didn't have much of an answer to that. Basically, have an alternative that you're saying we should do. Don't just attack, but say, "Here's something we should be doing instead of what we're doing." Now we can compare these and I can explain why this thing is better than the status quo. That's constructive criticism.
--:-- What I sense from left-wing ideology today is a lot of attacking, just for the sake of undermining confidence in America. A lot of wanting to say America is bad, not clearly for the sake of promoting something good instead. I've been known to have a fair amount of criticisms of the government, but I also want to appreciate that it's a lot better than most governments. It's much better than the vast majority of governments people have had. Let's not tear down the good stuff while we're trying to get rid of the bad stuff.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That makes sense. By the way, how long does it take you to write a blog post? They're all so good and you write so many of them. Are you just writing it in one state of flow? How much editing does it take?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I write it in an afternoon, but then I reread it multiple times. I reread it a few times that day, then reread the next day, and maybe just before it goes up. I make small edits, which probably don't make that much difference. The total amount of writing I've done on that blog is kind of a lot. It's about one a week and it's been going for a couple years, so there's over 100 posts.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's amazing how digestible not just your blogs are, but blog posts generally. They're bingeable in a way that books often aren't. I've probably read most of Scott Alexander's writing, and that's got to be at least a few books, but it doesn't feel that way at all. It goes by very fast. Same with yours. I've read a large part of it.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Scott Alexander is great. That's high quality stuff, better than a normal book, much better than academic books.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Did you read the non-libertarian FAQ by the way?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I don't think so, no.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's an interesting counter-argument worth checking out. I wanted to ask you, is it unethical of you to believe that coercion is evil, but your job is subsidized by the fruits of that coercion? Is it unethical to have that kind of job?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Probably not. I don't think so. I talked to Walter Block a couple years ago. He's a big time libertarian economist. His attitude was, take as much money from the state as you can. They're going to do something bad with it if you don't. If you don't take it, they're not going to give it back to the taxpayers. They're just going to waste it on something else. His attitude was you're sort of helping to undermine the state. It's good to take money from the state to undermine the state.
--:-- The difference between University of Colorado and a private university is minimal. The state provides something like 5% of our budget. Universities are subsidized in general. We get a subsidy in the same way every other university gets a subsidy. All these students paying super high prices, most of them wouldn't be paying if it weren't for financial aid provided by the government. The government helps these people get all these loans they probably wouldn't take. We're overcharging, but everybody's overcharging, and we're overcharging less than most universities.
--:-- In the libertarian society, there would be fewer universities because there's a market distortion created by all the financial aid. Would I still have a job? I don't know. Some professors would still have jobs. It wouldn't go down to zero, but it would be cut down significantly.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I hope you have a job in that society.
--:-- Michael Huemer: The government has its hands in almost everything, in all kinds of industries. If you say you can't work in an industry that benefits from government distortions of the economy, there's a lot of things you can't do. What matters isn't whether nominally it's said to be a state institution. What matters is how much benefit they're getting from the state. There are lots of industries you can work in. You can be a doctor, and they're getting big benefits from government regulations.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I wonder how much stuff you could do. You'd have to move into the woods to find some sort of trade. Let me float a few other arguments against anarcho-capitalism. The first is a sort of Burkean argument: we shouldn't try things that haven't worked before.
--:-- Michael Huemer: You can imagine somebody saying this back when the U.S. was founded. They could have said, "This democracy thing, it never worked. They tried it in Athens and it didn't work that well. Notice how all the countries in the world are dictatorships. This shows that's the natural state." Society evolves to dictatorship, which is a lot like what people say about anarcho-capitalism. "We have states everywhere. It must be that that's the only stable society." You might say correctly that it's kind of anecdotal, just one case. I'm not saying that every radical change is worth trying. But that's just to prepare you for the fact that there could be big fundamental progress we don't want to rule out by being overly conservative.
--:-- We do want to be careful about the way we pursue progress. If you make radical changes, you should expect unexpected consequences. To mitigate this, you move gradually. There's a lecture by Bryan Caplan where his idea was you could have a sub-minimal state. The minimal state has police, courts, the military, legislature. You could have a sub-minimal state where they privatize the police force and then the court system. That doesn't completely eliminate the state, but it makes it much smaller. You can imagine this process where the government progressively outsources police duties, which they have done in some places. They could progressively outsource court duties. There are some cases where the government court will refer you to a private arbitrator, and they could start doing that more.
--:-- The person who's worried that anarcho-capitalism would be a disaster should answer at what point in this process they think the disaster would happen. If you make this transition gradually, I don't see where a disaster would happen. You could get pretty close to anarchy, but you still have somebody saying the rules. You don't have a police force or courts anymore, but they are giving rules to the police and courts. If you're already sympathetic to libertarianism, we could eliminate all these business regulations. The government could be much smaller. Do we need that last bit, which is the legislature? And then there's the military. You might need that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What about the argument from the black swan? At every stage, you might have a one percent chance of destroying everything we care about. You make a similar argument in your dialogues about ethical vegetarianism. You say even if you alone stopping eating meat doesn't cause people to produce less meat, in expected value terms, if every hundredth person stopping eating meat causes a decrease in animal suffering, it's still worth it for you to do that. In a similar way here, if at every 10th increment of decreasing the state it's possible that something bad happens, it's still good to not try it.
--:-- Michael Huemer: We don't have any evidence for that premise. We don't have any evidence that something bad happens at every 10th stage. Anything you try could have some unknown bad effect, and by definition it's unknown, so I can't give an argument that it won't happen. I do want to say that bad stuff could happen from maintaining the status quo. In the book I mentioned, there's a pretty good chance that government is going to kill all of us. I don't think that's an outlandish possibility. They've come pretty close to that a few times. We were pretty close to a nuclear war. They could have killed everyone. Luckily they didn't, but that doesn't mean we can just keep going forever and it's always going to be fine. We probably have people right now working on bigger, more destructive weapons that are cheaper. People working on biological weapons or nanotech weapons.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This leads to my next argument against anarcho-capitalism, which is Nick Bostrom's vulnerable worlds hypothesis. The idea is with every new technology you discover, there's some small chance that it allows us to destroy everything. It's a technology that allows one guy with 50 grand to destroy an entire city. In such a world, you need strong government regulation in the sectors where this kind of technology is possible. Without a government that regulates this kind of development, it's almost guaranteed that something bad is going to happen.
--:-- Michael Huemer: I had a blog post that was kind of about this, which I view as the strongest argument for a strong state. I think it was titled something about the case for tyranny. People started arguing about whether I should have used the word "tyranny" there. It's not necessarily tyrannical, but it's an argument that there needs to be somebody monitoring individuals in a pretty close way, not having much privacy, and able to stop them. That might be the case if you're in a society in which one person has the ability to release a world-destroying weapon. Right now, that's not the case, but as technology advances, that could definitely happen. As technology advances, you can produce larger effects with smaller effort.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But then isn't the worry that by the time you get to that point, you've already destroyed the state capacity to regulate that kind of stuff? So you might as well preserve the state. Also, for most of human history—if there is going to be a human history—that's going to be the state. I mean, if these weapons come around in 100 years and there's a million years of humanity left, then for most of it, we're going to need a state anyway. So what's the big benefit of doing anarcho-capitalism now?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah, I mean, that might be right. I think this is the strongest argument for keeping the state. But I think there is an argument on the other side, which is that the government is likely to be the ones who develop the deadly technology. So far, there's one technology that would plausibly be capable of killing everyone: nuclear weapons. It was created by the government and has only ever been used by the government. In fact, I think every weapon of mass destruction has been created by governments. Well, most weapons have been created by governments.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But isn't that a bit like saying, in the year 1800, "Well, everything good that's ever been made—all the bridges, all the knowledge—has been made by religious people"? You could respond, "Well, that's because there's been nobody else around." If there's not an anarcho-capitalist society where you're permitted to build nuclear weapons on your own, then obviously if everyone is religious, all the good things are going to be created by religious people. But not everyone is a government employee. You can't just build a nuclear bomb while states are dominant—they won't let you. But if you can, then you might...
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah, is it so? Before the nuclear bomb was invented, could a private individual have invented it? I don't know. After it was invented by the U.S. government, the U.S. government would stop anyone else from building them. But before it had been discovered, I don't know why a private person couldn't have done it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Fair enough, except that it's super expensive and there wasn't a person who had a good incentive to do it, I guess.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Anyway, you might think if we didn't have a government, maybe there would be more people trying to build weapons of mass destruction. I wouldn't think that. I understand why governments are doing this. There's this thing called war that happens between states, and they build all these standing armies. They're constantly looking for bigger and more powerful weapons. That's just this constant destructive technology lobby. It looks like that's the way to accelerate the time that we get the world-destroying technology.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. But I'm not sure. You might say, even though the government is going to create this technology sooner, they're still safer. Private parties might develop that technology much later, but when they do, someone is going to release it unless there's a government to stop them.
--:-- Michael Huemer: By the way, I'm not sure that the government is going to stop it even if they continue to exist. One of the things I'd be worried about now is genetic engineering of biological weapons. Maybe somebody could engineer a virus that would be extremely dangerous and cause the extinction of the species. That might happen naturally, but it's a lot more likely if somebody's trying to make it happen, and that might become cheaper and cheaper. You might think we need the government to stop that from happening, although I'm not sure the government will actually stop it even if we have them. I think there's a fair chance the government will cause it, because they might deliberately hire people to create biological weapons. It's a little hard to say.
--:-- The alternative you might want is distributed monitoring—people monitoring each other, regular people monitoring each other all the time, rather than a single central authority monitoring everyone else.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, blockchain but for nuclear weapons, I guess. Is this Neal Stephenson's idea? I think I got this from some science fiction author. Everybody should be watching everyone else, not one organization watching everyone else.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Is this from a book?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I just heard about this on the internet.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Okay. Yeah, that's an interesting idea.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Final argument: a state in order to prevent people from torturing animals and eating them.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah. So if the state would actually do that, that would outweigh all of the other bad stuff they're doing. Most other libertarians would not accept this, but this is obviously true. But when we have the government, what they actually do is support the meat industry. They're actually making it worse. You might think we can just change that, but it's not so easy. Most of the things the government does, it's not an accident that they're doing them. They're obviously not going to ban meat when most people want it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. I think Corey Booker was the first vegan presidential candidate I saw, but I think that was clearly a liability for him. An interviewer asked him, "Are you going to try to make everybody vegetarian?" and he said, "No, I'm not doing that," because if he said yes, he's definitely out of the running. Although he did propose some bills calling for regulation of animal cruelty. He didn't win, so I guess that makes your point for you.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah. I think society has to make more progress. If the majority of people cared about animal welfare, then the government could pass regulations that would promote it. It would get a lot better. But this will only happen after most of the problem is solved. Then the government will come in and sweep up the remainder from the backward people who are still promoting cruelty.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Okay, so let's do a game of Underrated/Overrated. The rules: is this thing underrated, overrated, or correctly rated? You can pass if you want, and offer a brief explanation. You wrote a few pieces recently about what students should be learning in school and college. One thing you didn't mention was a coding class. This has been proposed by a bunch of people recently—that because of the dominance of computers, everybody needs to learn how to code. What do you think? Is it overrated or underrated?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Maybe about correctly rated. I think it's useful, but I don't agree that everyone needs to learn to code. People who would be reasonably good at it should learn it. Some people would just be terrible at it, so there's no point. They could learn to do some basic stuff that would be useful.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You mentioned in one of your blog posts that if you didn't get into grad school for philosophy, you were considering becoming a computer programmer. Did you learn how to code in college?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I took one course on Pascal, which was a programming language that nobody uses anymore. It was not enough for me to do anything useful with it. Many years later, I discovered a language called Game Maker Language, which is really good for writing games. So I tried writing a game using that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Fun. The class of people called public intellectuals.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Oh, yeah. They're greatly overrated by some and underrated by others, I guess. I like public intellectuals. I think academic intellectuals underrate public intellectuals because they say, "These public intellectuals aren't being rigorous enough, they're not citing all the academic literature." The reason they're not doing that is no one will listen to them if they start blabbing on about boring little details in the academic literature. So I guess underrated.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How about intellectuals outside academia—or maybe not even intellectuals, but thinkers outside academia who have a blog but aren't associated with an academic institution? For example, people like Scott Alexander.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Scott Alexander is probably correctly rated because he has an extremely high reputation among people who know who he is. Although I guess not enough people know who he is. About non-academic intellectuals more generally, I don't know. Most non-academic intellectuals I think are not good—not worth reading. I'm not trying to be a snob, but I think when you go to graduate school and get a PhD, they actually teach you some stuff. One of the problems is that if you don't go through that kind of training, people are naturally lazy. To do stuff that's really good and useful requires work and effort—stuff that's not so fun. You have to read a bunch of literature and find out what people really think. Few people will do that unless they have somebody telling them they have to, which is what happens in graduate school.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, it's a Milgram experiment but for academic discipline.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah. I run into people on the internet, and sometimes I get email from random people who have written their treatise on something. They just don't realize they don't know what's going on. They haven't read the stuff that's been written on the topic, so they don't know they're reinventing the wheel—doing a simplistic version of it. They're defending a view that has already been defended, but they're defending the simplest, least adequate version because they haven't looked at all the objections that caused the view to be modified. They don't know the reasons why it's wrong or what the alternative views are, so they can't adequately respond. They'll respond to alternatives that are stupid and don't need to be discussed.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: If you were outside of academia—if for some reason you didn't get into grad school, but on the side you were still publishing a blog—how much worse do you think you would be without the benefit of grad school?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I don't know. There's a possibility that it's actually a selection effect rather than a training effect. The people who have the patience to do good work can make it through graduate school. If you don't have the patience, you'll be excluded. So it's possible it would still be good. A lot of the stuff that goes on on the blog is social commentary, which doesn't require reading literature. Most of that would be the same. But if I were writing about issues debated in academic philosophy and I didn't know the literature, it just wouldn't be good. My undergraduate papers weren't good—they were good for undergraduate papers, but not for academic papers.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Peer review. Underrated or overrated?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Probably overrated, I guess. The average opinion is that it's a pretty good quality control mechanism. I think most people don't realize how lame it is. You don't get paid for doing these reviews, so not that many people want to do it. The editor has to keep going down the list trying to find peer reviewers. Top people in the area say, "I'm too busy, it's not in my interest to do this." So they go down the list. You have graduate students reviewing papers, and you have situations where the person being criticized by the paper is reviewing the paper. I know that happens because they've sent me papers that are criticizing me. I think I'm a fine reviewer—I'm perfectly objective—but I don't trust everyone to be objective. From my experience reading referee reports, I often think this guy did not read this carefully at all. He's raising an objection that I answered, and he doesn't seem to be aware of it. Or he totally misunderstood something I clearly explained. It makes sense they wouldn't read it carefully—they have no stake in it. The editor would have more of a stake because it reflects on the quality of the journal, but it's an anonymous review, so it doesn't reflect on that person. No one will ever know if you did a bad job.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How about online education?
--:-- Michael Huemer: It's probably a good way of learning if that's what you want. But I think it's a less good way of getting prestige, which is what people actually want. Most people don't actually want the education—they want the prestige. Most people don't realize that's what most people want. Online education isn't going to take over. If people just wanted knowledge, it would. But people don't realize why it's not taking over, and that's the reason.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Actually, if you just want the knowledge, you don't have to pay for online courses. Almost all of it is on the internet. You can get a great education for free just reading sites on the internet. Or even better, if you think there's something ineffable about being there in person, you can still go in person—nobody's going to stop you. Professors will often even grade your stuff even if you're not in the class.
--:-- Michael Huemer: I would be happy to have extra people show up who actually want to learn in my class. But to be clear, I'm not grading your paper.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's funny—at my university, you need your ID to get into the gym, but you don't need any ID whatsoever to go into any class you want. That goes to show you what people think people are actually likely to steal—voluntarily stealing the knowledge.
--:-- Michael Huemer: I do think in-person education is better—it's a better experience. But it's just not better enough to justify paying whatever ten thousand dollars people are paying.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I agree. Pronatalism. I asked because the average person is probably going to eat meat.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Oh, I see. I assume that's going to end at some point. It will be better to have more people. I am to some degree worried about the population dwindling. As people become wealthier and their living standard goes up, their fertility goes down. In wealthy countries, the fertility of well-off people is below replacement rate. I am somewhat worried about the human species dwindling just as moral progress reaches a point where it's better for us to be around, and the population will be dwindling. Maybe we'll go extinct from just not deciding to have kids, and no one will be around to enjoy the moral progress.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you think about the idea that children have comparable or even equivalent rights against coercion as adults?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I think they have comparable rights against malicious coercion. But about paternalistic coercion, that seems justified to me. I don't have an interesting or surprising argument for that. I guess I have a conventional view: children just don't know what they're doing. They don't have enough knowledge, and they need somebody to take care of them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But at what point do you think there's an expectation that you can't just tell this person what to do? 12, 16, 18?
--:-- Michael Huemer: It increases gradually. It could also vary depending on the maturity of the individual. I can't say a hard and fast rule. There are some people who are not mature at 18—they still need someone to take care of them. But we need to have a general rule for society. I guess it's kind of reasonable to pick 18 as the time when you become an adult.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The claim is that, at least after a certain age, saying this person is not entitled to certain rights is equivalent to saying a particular race of people shouldn't have rights. You might come up with some explanation for why they can't handle those rights, but at the end of the day, human dignity means you have to respect those rights.
--:-- Michael Huemer: The way that children are treated is somewhat like slaves—no rights, parents just tell them what to do all the time. Is it better than slavery? Fortunately, most parents love their children in a way that most masters do not love their slaves, so things work out better. But it was factually true that the children couldn't make decisions for themselves. It was not true that the slaves couldn't make decisions for themselves—we just weren't letting them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You might think there actually are some adults who are not really suited to run their own lives, like mentally retarded people.
--:-- Michael Huemer: That doesn't mean you can treat them as slaves, but they probably do need a guardian to tell them what to do. Is it okay to force them if they don't want to listen? Probably depends on the situation. If they want to go play in traffic, I guess yes.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Final two questions—actually, final three questions. First of all, at least in my opinion and among the philosophers I know of that are living, you seem to have addressed the big questions more prolifically, creatively, and accessibly. What's the Huemer production function? How are you able to be this productive?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I don't know. It's partly because I'm smart. It's partly because I love philosophy. If you don't love it and you're just doing it as a job, you won't do that much of it. In the academic world, there aren't incentives for producing blog posts or public philosophy. You don't get prestige from it—other academics aren't impressed. In my department, we literally have a point system for publications. We get a performance review every year, and we assign points for each publication. There are no points for blog posts—only for academic publications. Although that might change in the future. So you'd only do this if you're on a mission. I'm on a mission to promote rationality in society. I'm in philosophy not just as a job to get a paycheck or prestige. I'm trying to improve the world intellectually.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you think about the impact of intellectuals versus entrepreneurs or engineers in shaping how the world turns out?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Good question. Think of the example of Peter Singer and the people who created Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger—the people doing synthetic meat. I think Peter Singer is kind of the reason why people are doing that. Those entrepreneurs are animal welfare advocates, largely because of Peter Singer and other philosophers like Tom Regan. But after writing that book, apart from convincing the entrepreneurs, he tries to convince ordinary people—students, readers. I think that part is having a lot less influence. It's super hard to convince people to change their life in a way that's not in their personal self-interest for ethical reasons. You can change a few percent of people's lifestyle for ethical reasons, because that's how many people care about morality. But a few percent of those people are entrepreneurs who are going to make a big difference. If you want to assess who's making the bigger difference, it's hard to say. The entrepreneur probably wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for the philosophy. But apart from the entrepreneur, the philosopher is having a much smaller influence on society.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So is your goal with your books not just to convince people, but to get some of them to build the so-called machinery of freedom? Are you trying to inspire entrepreneurs more than just convince people?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I don't have a very specific plan. I just have the idea that it would be good if there were more people who had true beliefs about important philosophical matters. I don't know how it's going to happen, but in some way that is going to improve society. I kind of think it goes from the top down—if you convince the elites, then the rest of society will go along.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I know Bryan Kaplan thinks you have to get the elites while they're young, because that's when they'll change their minds. Are you trying to convince future elites—people in college—or existing elites?
--:-- Michael Huemer: I try to work on all of them. But Kaplan's probably correct. It's a lot harder to get people who have already formed their beliefs and have had them for a few decades.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Next question. What are your three favorite books?
--:-- Michael Huemer: It would be three of my books.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That you did not write yourself.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Oh, okay. I would have to spend a lot longer to accurately answer that. I liked *The Fountainhead* a lot. That novel had an influence on me. Ayn Rand had an influence on me in doing philosophy. Although she was not a professional philosopher and ultimately was not very good at philosophy, she still influenced me to do philosophy. I'm biased towards books I read recently. I like the book *Time and Chance* by David Albert, because it's fascinating—what physics teaches us about the nature of the universe. I also like *The Cosmic Landscape* by... I've forgotten his name. It was about the multiverse theory, which I find amazing. The quantum multiverse—there are different versions of the multiverse. He thinks it comes out of string theory. There could be just really far away other universes where the space between our universe and the other universe is expanding so fast that there's no way to ever reach them, so they're effectively isolated. Anyway, there are lots of good books. I liked *The Myth of the Rational Voter*—it was very good for thinking about why politics works the way it does.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Final question. What advice would you have for a philosophically inclined 20-year-old who doesn't want to go into philosophy as an academic discipline but is still interested in philosophy?
--:-- Michael Huemer: My first advice is buy all my books. But for advice about what they're trying to accomplish... Let's say they're technically inclined as well—engineering or entrepreneurship. I don't know. Would you advise working in specific fields?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is there some thing you advise in terms of excellence and getting good at what you're doing, or just where the important problems are?
--:-- Michael Huemer: Yeah, I mean, I have advice from the standpoint of self-interest to people. This is probably not what you're asking about, like how you can be happy or something. But anyway, this is what I figured out. It's very simple, but the secret to happiness is first of all having solid, meaningful relationships. So hang out with people that you get along well with and develop close relationships with them. And people that are not beneficial, just cut them out. Don't hang around with people who are not beneficial to you. This is obvious, super obvious, but a lot of people don't do this. They just keep having this boyfriend who's no good, and they try to change the person or whatever. You're not going to change people.
--:-- The other thing is meaningful work. Go into a career that feels like you're doing something meaningful. It's got to make enough money to pay the bills, but it needs to feel like you're doing something meaningful. Because otherwise when you get later in your life, you're going to be like, "I have a lot of money, but boy, I wasted my life." Which you don't want to have happen.
--:-- Then I have smaller scale advice. At some point, I'm probably going to put this in blog posts, my advice for people about buying a house. If you're going to be somewhere for a few years, buy a house or a condominium or something like that because it's a super great investment. And when you have money, invest in index funds. Don't try to beat the market because you're probably not going to.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's so useful.
--:-- Michael Huemer: You might have wanted to know how we can improve the world. I don't know, that's really hard. On a small scale, my idea is to model rationality. Interact with people in a way that is reasonable and rational. Part of that reasonableness is you listen to them and try to actually understand what their point is before saying your thing. Don't just only be thinking about your point. My idea is if we get enough people doing that, maybe the culture will improve.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, let's hope so. Okay, those are all my questions. Professor Huemer, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate talking to you. This was a lot of fun.
--:-- Michael Huemer: Thanks for having me.
--:-- [Music plays and fades out]
