Subash

I dunno, man... If you're say a 20 minute 5K runner doing 30mi/wk w/ 2 specific interval workouts/wk. You drop the interval workouts for a year and commit to building to consistent 60mi/wk of *only* easy miles plus strides. Then run a 5K. I know where I'm putting my money.

Aaron, I think it’s important to notice what kind of comparison you’re making. You’re asking us to compare current, real-world regulations to a currently unknown future state of market solutions that doesn’t exist yet. That’s an uneven comparison. It asks us to evaluate regulations as they actually exist, but to evaluate markets as an idealized future possibility. That’s not an apples-to-apples institutional comparison. There’s also some intuition-pumping built into the framing. You describe market solutions as “freedom,” “creative,” and “unbounded,” while government solutions are described as “regulatory” and “bounded.” That language subtly loads the conclusion. Markets aren’t automatically unbounded in practice, and governments don’t only act through rigid regulation. Both systems can enable or constrain innovation depending on how institutions are structured. More importantly, the claim you’re making is untestable and unfalsifiable. You say: “There are zero cases where regulations are better than the best possible free market solution.” But how could anyone possibly know that? That’s a prophecy about a future state of knowledge. We don’t know what institutional tools, technologies, or constraints will exist in the future, so we can’t meaningfully compare today’s policies to an unspecified ideal arrangement that may or may not ever exist. And there’s no way to falsify your claim. I’ve already pointed out that today there are regulatory solutions that outperform any known market alternative. You didn’t dispute that — presumably because you know it’s correct — and instead effectively replied: “Sure, but some future state of the market will eventually surpass those regulations.” The problem is that this makes your claim untestable. Even if regulation continues to outperform markets centuries or millennia from now, you could always respond, “Markets will eventually surpass it!” A million—or even a billion—years into the future, the prophecy could still be invoked, and nothing we observe today could ever refute it. In fact, no imaginable evidence could ever refute your claim. That’s exactly the kind of move Popper warned about: immunizing a theory from refutation by redefining it in terms of an unreachable ideal. It turns an empirical question into a metaphysical one. Of course, you might be right — I’m not denying that. This isn’t a debate with someone claiming that government regulations will always outperform markets. I’m open to all possibilities. My key point is simply that you can’t know you’re right, and there’s no way to test your claim. For the sake of argument, let’s assume your prophecy is true — that at some point in the future, market arrangements become so advanced that regulation is less efficient. What follows from that? We still have to make decisions under present constraints. If regulation is currently more effective than any known market mechanism in some domains, we can’t ignore that just because a better market solution might emerge someday. Policy is about solving problems with the tools we actually have. So even if the prophecy turned out to be true, it wouldn’t guide present action. There’s also a deeper issue. The real question isn’t “markets vs regulation” in the abstract, but which institutional systems stay open to learning and revision. Your framing is: • “Unregulated” systems = unlimited possibilities • “Regulated” systems = permanently constrained But that’s backwards. Here is the correct framing: Ancapistan (the Ancap utopia) bans regulation and state coordination in principle. If evidence shows those tools work best, they’re still off-limits. First-past-the-post democracy plus a free market allows both market and regulatory approaches — and lets us create, revise, or repeal policies as we learn. So the real contrast is: • A system that can experiment and revise vs • A system that rules out whole categories of solutions in advance That asymmetry matters. If Ancapistan really is best someday, a democracy can move toward it through deregulation and institutional change. But Ancapistan can’t move the other direction even in principle, because it forbids those tools from the start. It shuts off one of the means of error correction. From a Popperian standpoint, institutions should remain open to error correction and new knowledge. A rigid “no regulation” rule closes off possible solutions before we know whether they work.

This is a man who has been haunted since childhood and built a billion dollar company as a side effect of trying to make the haunting stop.

Favourite Stoic?

From the chapter "POPPER’S THIRD WORLD - METAPHYSICAL PLURALISM AND EVOLUTION": "I agree with many of [Popper's] main views—for example, his realism; his endorsement of something like a correspondence theory of truth; his emphasis on problems and on the procedures of formulating and testing hypotheses; his fallibilism; his rejection of the search for certainty about starting points, methods, or conclusions; his insistence on the similarity of rational procedures in the physical and social sciences, as well as in other human activities; and his defence of the open society." Immediately afterward, Mackie explains what he finds objectionable in Popper’s writing style: "On the other hand, I am repelled by his gratuitous sneers at most other philosophers; his constant use of straw men and Aunt Sallys; his persistent name-dropping; his overuse of superlatives—so many things are 'incredible,' 'bold,' 'daring,' or 'beautiful'; his endless repetition of the same points, even the same phrases; and his frequent reluctance to engage in detailed work. 'For heaven’s sake, cut the cackle,' one is tempted to say when reading Popper’s writings—and there is a great deal of cackle to be cut." overall, that chapter is fine.