I’m a mechanical engineer, or at least I used to be. I paused that career and moved to America to apply engineering thought to our social and political problems.

Now I work on Palladium Magazine with Jonah Bennett and Ash Milton. Palladium takes a fresh look at the world of politics to build a better worldview, with which we can build a better America. We call this Governance Futurism.

This is my blog. Check it out below for some of my thoughts. If you want to stay in the loop, email me or follow me on Twitter.

2020-01-25

It Is Justice Itself

Nietzsche has a concept in Beyond Good and Evil, where he claims a confident elite does not distinguish between its own will, and justice itself. It thus speaks and acts with supreme moral authority, or at least the claim to it. I want to explore this concept a bit in the modern context, and see what explanatory power it offers.

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2020-01-23

Writing Every Day

I don’t write every day. Perhaps I should. Writing often is a great way to build a visible and public body of work, improve as a writer, and work through a great many ideas with more technical completeness than would come from idle thought.

Let’s explore why we might want to write every day.

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2020-01-16

Perception as a Skill

Adam Robbert’s new journal, The Side View, is about perception as a skill. I’ve been comissioned to write something for it, so in preparation I want to interrogate that concept a bit.

If perception is a skill, that implies some patterns of attention and conceptual applications are better than others. For what? Skill therefore implies a scale of values. Values don’t exist in a vacuum, they are elements of a plan, a strategy for achieving the good. A strategy bakes in a worldview, and an actor standpoint. I think these otherwise overlooked implications are significant. Let’s investigate.

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2020-01-14

No Really, What If You Were In Charge?

This is hard to introduce, so let’s get right into it. Consider the following question: Suppose you were in charge. What would you actually do? What would be your program? How would you think about the problem of governance?

People occasionally muse about such things, but I think chasing deeper and deeper answers to this question produces a significant worldview shift that is much needed in the world right now. It’s one of those loose threads.

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2020-01-11

Kick The Box

I’m starting to hate staring at screens and being connected to the internet all the time. Some amount of it is necessary for work that is essentially social media networking, remote collaboration, research, and writing and editing for internet, but perhaps not as much as we think. I just spent almost all day fully unplugged, and got a great deal of satisfying housework and thinking done. I am writing this with no internet. Can we kick the box?

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2019-12-31

Unifying Negative and Positive Virtue

When most people think about virtue, they think of refraining from specific bad behaviors. They think of a sort of self-denial. The ideal of this kind of virtue is the nice guy who does very little, but never sins. This is the virtue of John Harvey Kellog, who advocated eating vegetarian foods to sap sexual vitality to prevent masturbation and fornication.

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2019-12-28

Sub-Questions of the Billionaire Question

We have a few sub-questions of the billionaire question. We have established that billionaires are some of the most important figures in deciding what the economy does. Further that if that ought to be changed, it is a higher power, the elite or state itself, that would be judging and making that change. We have remaining a number of questions and areas of inquiry that start to get into that domain of judgement, and models of related phenomena:

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2019-12-28

Who Gets to Decide?

When I talk about social order, especially about what society values, what “the economy” builds, and where culture comes from, there is a common question: “Who gets to decide?” Non-neutral decisions are being made about priorities and governance. We are supposed to wring our hands about this and elect an ethics committee or something. There’s something stupid here.

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2019-12-26

Merry Christmas, Everyone

I’m not a Christian. But for me, the Christians have decisively won the battle for the meaning of Christmas. Their Christmas songs are just plain better. The best Christmas songs are about the birth of Christ. Therefore Christmas is about the birth of Christ. Not that we needed the music to tell us. It’s right there in the name.

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2019-05-07

The Automation Question

I’ve been pondering the automation question. Everyone keeps howling about how the robots are going to take our jobs and usher in a future of fully automated luxury space Yangism, or maybe it will all be controlled by the rich, and the rest of us will starve and get liquidated by Jeff Bezos’ robot army as the price of labor falls below subsistence levels. But I’m not seeing it.

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2019-03-16

Music Night

In pursuit of building better social fabric around ourselves, my wife and I throw an occasional folk music night. Singing together is one of the best and most wholesome ways to have fun and build better social connections as human beings.

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2019-03-08

The Political Nature of Social Media

Facebook, and other social media companies, have been getting a lot of criticism. The way I see it, there’s two related but separate problems:

  1. The anti-social incentives of the corporate data-collecting advertising-driven monopoly social infrastructure provider leads to shear between interests of platform and interests of users. This manifests in suspicion, mental health issues, antisocial outcomes.

  2. The monopoly nature of the platform, plus ability to exercise fine grained editorial control, creates a tool of immense political power for whoever gets to decide how that tool is used. This leads to fighting over the political control of the network, and structural issues in society.

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2019-03-07

The Republic and the Imperium

There are two theoretical models of government that get bandied about, which I think both contain important insights, but which each seem insufficient when measured against the ideal: The republic, and the imperium.

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2019-02-14

The Components of Power

Power is your ability to act on the world to accomplish ends, especially against the will of others. Your power is a function of both the state of the world, especially including your position in the world, and your internal nature. The latter is your “intrinsic power”. The former, insofar as it belongs to or refers to you, is your “position”.

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2019-02-08

Social Technology

Not all technology is made of atoms and bits. Some technology is made of people. I call this “Social Technology”, which is the technology of human organization, made out of human agreements, beliefs, worldviews, and plans.

Many people are using this terminology now, which is good. It is a good paradigm for thinking of human affairs, which is neither moralistic, nor relativistic. Though it unfortunately underemphasizes the organic reality of social organization.

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2019-02-01

Globalization Leads to Existential Systemic Fragility

A civilization has a trade-off between globalization, efficiency, and fragility on one hand, and localization, expense, and robustness on the other. Capitalism is very good at choosing the former. Efficiency requires specialization, and concentration. These lead to atrophying of local capabilities, lengthening and complexifying supply chains, and ultimately fragility.

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2018-12-31

Why Hydrocarbon Fuels Aren't Going Anywhere

Elon Musk has really done the surprising with Tesla’s commercially viable and high-performance electric cars. The general buzz around alternative energy sources piles on and one begins to wonder whether the days of gasoline are numbered.

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2018-12-11

An Engineering-Grade Science of Social Technology

I think one of the highest leverage things we can work on is research towards an engineering-grade science of social technology.

Let me clarify what I mean by that:

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2018-09-06

The Urban Dynasties Problem

I want to see Americans building large, powerful, and virtuous family dynasties. How would this work and how do we make it happen?

My basic thesis is that I don’t think America can sustainably succeed as a force for human good in the world without elites having larger families, and family-oriented people having more power.

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2018-08-31

Simplify, Then Add Lightness

Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus Cars, was one of my earliest heroes. His clear thinking, his engineering talent, and his drive for exactly the goal of victory and no more had him at the cutting edge of automobile racing for decades.

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2018-07-27

Design Minimalism

I appreciate minimalism. I dislike unnecessary complexity. I’m sure you know what I mean: on the Web it’s those click-farm websites, with all the extra bells and whistles and attention grabbers. In physical technology, it’s all the extra panels and interfaces that remove you from what’s actually going on.

I have come to appreciate a few principles of design minimalism, which I use in my designs. For example, this site:

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2018-06-29

Three Skills of Social Technologists

There are three key skills needed by social technologists, or what we might call founders. That is, people who are actually going to go out and build and operate institutions: Power, Leadership, and Institutional Engineering:

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2018-06-28

Honor and Loyalty

Let’s do a detailed analysis of a simple social concept, towards developing our engineering-grade science of social technology. The concept of loyalty is dear to me, as loyalty has been one of the most important determinants of success or failure in some of my more practical projects.

So what do we mean by it, and how does it work?

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2018-02-16

Christian Moral Anthropology

I am not a Christian, but it is worth understanding some of the key technologies of Christianity.

The following is a list of metaphysical and anthropological claims which are (as far as I can tell) true, necessary, and generally unrecognized outside Christianity. This list is not exhaustive. It consists of those which we have checked out and understood so far:

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2018-01-31

How to Make Sociology Engineering-Grade

I want a true engineering-grade science of social technology. Therefore we should understand what an engineering-grade science is, and whether the notion of science properly applies to social phenomena.

Based on the example of the sciences used in engineering, any true engineering-grade body of scientific knowledge consists of the following:

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