Difference between revisions of "11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends"

Sam  You're, you're competing with, with 799  

Eric When you talked about software, right? Most of software is glorified foreign while loops. Let's not, you know, you, you, you, you invoke a library, you code up a class, you can outsource it. All right, well no, it's just, I'm just saying that most of what it is you're just writing code. It's got a kind of a mystique about it because a lot of people haven't done it and it's too symbolic, whatever. But it's plumbing and it's plumbing and a lot of science is plumbing. Yeah. And so, a lot of the stuff about the best is not very relevant. If you wanted to take the stuff that's really distinguished, you know, like you've got Rama NuGen coming from India, you know you've got you know, Ellis coming from South Africa who, whoever it is. That's really amazing. We have

'''Eric:'''    01:05:18      Plenty of room for the tiny number of people who are absolutely nonhomogeneous super contributed. So, you're just saying you want to set the bar higher. I'm not saying that, I'm saying a lot of different things. One is that people in the country have rights and they have asymmetric rights to their own labor market. That's a large part of what it means to be a citizen of a country. If I start to talk about your rights that are perhaps your most valuable economic possession. If you really think about the American workers, most valuable economic possession is asymmetric as an access to the American labor market. If I say, you know, your right is not an asset, but is instead an impediment, it's a barrier. And what we need to do is get rid of the red tape and I'm not going to pay you for it because it's not an asset.

'''Eric:'''    01:06:09      I'm going to take it from you and I'm going to say that that's what the free market is. Well, that has nothing to do with the free market. I wrote a paper called migration for the benefit of all that pointed out. You're free to securitize people's right and pay for it. And then everybody wins. Yeah, that's not what we do. Okay, so, but that's, that's something we could do though. We could, we're not interested in economics. That would be a COSIA, that's called a calcium solution. Right. And the funny part about it, the, the hysterically funny part about it is that no capitalists who claim that they're interested in getting rid of the inefficiency that comes from being forced to use your own labor are interested in the model in which you actually pay people for their securitized rights. Because the real thing they're interested in is not the tiny inefficiency, which is called the Harberger triangle.

'''Eric:'''    01:07:00      There's a giant structure below it called the Morehouse rectangle, which is what is transferred from labor to capital. The amazing thing is you've referenced this several times over cocktails. Yeah. In the last two years. Yeah. Well, but, but my point, this is chatter. No, but I see it, I see it differently. Sam, I see your comment that well don't we want the best and the brightest where you don't reference wage competition. It sounds more like intellectual competition, right? When you, when you, when you open a border and selectively only in certain fields, it's like opening a window in an airplane and it specifically affects the seat at which it's opened differently than everywhere else in the plane. Right? Right. So, the problem I have with this is that it's a large mimetic complex and get it popping back up to the Jeff Epstein issue. The entire university and scientific complex was built on this incredible embedded growth obligation, right?

'''Eric:'''    01:08:01      That is the thing that caused the system to have to rescue itself with immigration. So, it's really not about immigration or Brown people or I don't want to compete against the best and the prizes. It, the issue was we didn't have enough people to feed into a pyramid system. And what you could do is you could, you could reference a poverty differential between Asia, which was training people acceptably well in technical subjects, but had it at a lower level. Now that's changed some to fill in the bottom of the pyramid. And so that's really what it was. It was an economic X point that has nothing to do with the best and the brightest or the color of one's skin. It was just a way of saving a pyramid scheme.

'''Sam:'''        01:08:40      Well, I so clearly there is room for innovation on all these fronts and we should be eager to do it. And we should be certainly eager to find Ponzi schemes that we didn't know were Ponzi schemes. Right? Like I think it's, eh, we again, this touches where we started when we were talking about Samantha power and other and the Southern poverty law center. I think there, there are systems we set up with the best of intentions and you know, projects and, and meme, you know, mimetic complexes. We launch you know, upon the world with the best of intentions and we don't see the way incentives will align or the, or the, you know, the knock-on effects or the externalities of, of doing those things. And then it's just the world is more complicated than we realized.

'''Eric:'''    01:09:29      And that's what was, so that's like the thing that scares me a little bit. Remember when I said that I have malware in my head, my belief is, is that a lot of the beautiful things that you were thinking about, about being open to the world, training the best and the brightest, keeping some of them for ourselves, distributing some of them back home to grow the pie for everyone, et cetera, et cetera. That's a medic complex that I, I associate with malware. It's not that there aren't aspects of it, it wasn't movement, right?

'''Sam:'''        01:09:54      I think it's close to the right program. So for instance, like if you say, yeah, it's, it's the fact that I'm not thinking when I say that about the I forget how you put it, but the, the, the, the difference between the local case and the imported case, right? You know, the but by analogy, you know, opening the window on the airplane. Or just the fact that you know that you've got people here who are paying taxes to help build out local infrastructure that some, then some Titan of industry is going to leverage and globalize. Right? And you know that money is not coming back to the people who are paying taxes,