Thomas Sowell's greatest insight [video]

I don't know, I think we "solved" eg indoor running water, which dramatically reduced mortality.

You can say there was a "trade off" in the respect that it costed a large amount to install that. But it was worth it, like many other expenses are worth it. You have to actually do the value/cost calculation, not appeal to an unconstrained stonewalling gesture.

Dunno who John Anderson is but let's look through his other Interview titles on his web page:

  Conversations: With Louise Perry, Author and Journalist
  Conversations: Featuring Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto I
  Conversations: Featuring Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto II
  Conversations: Featuring Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dave Rubin
  Conversations: Featuring Claire Lehmann, Founding Editor of Quillette Magazine
  Conversations: Featuring Douglas Murray, Author and Journalist
  Conversations: Featuring Dave Rubin, Host of The Rubin Report
  Conversations: Featuring Baroness Caroline Cox, Humanitarian, Life Peer of the House of Lords
  Conversations: Featuring Niall Ferguson MA, D.Phil, Senior Fellow, Stanford University III
  Conversations: with Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
  Conversations: with Douglas Wilson, Minister and Author
  Conversations: with Zuby, Rapper, Author and Podcaster
  Conversations: with Paul Rahe, Professor of History at Hillsdale College
  Conversations: with Klon Kitchen, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
  Conversations: with Patrick Bet-David, Author and Entrepreneur
  Conversations: with Katharine Birbalsingh, Headmistress of Michaela Community School
  Conversations: with Dennis Prager, Founder of PragerU, Radio Host & Writer
  Conversations: with Victor Davis Hanson, Historian and Writer

There is a type of political dialog wherein one group says that things are so complicated that they can never be better. Usually if you look behind the curtain they’re benefitting from the status quo.

The conservative is usually right, but all progress (whether social or technological) depends on when they're wrong, hence the eternal conflict.

Edit: Another way of saying this is that the conservative plays as if she is in a game with a concave payoff function and the progressive as if the payoff is convex.

> The trade-offs are as bad as the solution, quite often.

Embarrassing. This overgeneralization is so broad you could pass the US national debt through it sideways. It’s perfectly fine to take a subject matter, say lock downs or climate change, and talk in concrete terms about the trade-offs of different proposed solutions. But as presented here, it’s just noise that undermines public discourse.

> You’re not gonna solve anything

> There are no solutions. There just aren’t.

Reductive and cynical generalization. We solve things all the time. Yes, every solution in the practical world has trade-offs. Yes, some solutions are worse than others. But the insinuation that solutions are and have to be perfect is false. Is he suggesting that we should just do nothing because we’re fallible, mortal beings incapable of perfection? Another quote comes to mind: Perfect is the enemy of good.

> What we’re reducing politics to is series of one-trick pony shows

> there’s a crisis here, and it’s the only thing we’ll talk about

He knows full well governments balance a wide assortment of issues at any given time. However, as severity increases, it bubbles up chain of leadership to a group that has the mandate, resources, and experience to address the crisis. When you have lots of crises in play, you have to rely on an efficient executive to prioritize your responses and manage those resources. That can lead to bottlenecks, and when it comes to government, that can damage people in many ways.

Today, we’re faced with a lot of severe crises that often play off one another. Talking about our governments’ ability to effectively and efficiently address problems at the scale they are affecting us is one thing, but the proximity of these two statements (whether he intended it or not) read as a handwavy dismissal of public or political reactions to climate change and lock downs as gimmicks.

> I’m not conservative

Disagree, I’ve read your substack.

> I have some conservative views, some not-conservative views

argumentum ad temperantiam, much?

Conservatives crying about actions against climate change feels almost hysterical, its not like liberals are doing anything about it so what are you getting so upset about. At least liberals pretend to care about a dying planet, while protesting a homeless shelter in their backyard of course, but it's some improvement I guess. I mean at least they don't want to murder gay people.

/edit I know unpopular opinion, but I think its important to remind people that there isn't just conservatives and liberals, and liberals aren't leftists so conservatives pretending liberals are on the left fighting against climate change and liberals thinking to themselves "yeah we do that!", it always bugs me.