Universities exist primarily for a) social class sorting and signaling, b) a justification for young people to goof off and have a good time. Learning is pretty far down the list of reasons universities exist.

The problem with Entropic Altruists controlling AI is that they will weave kind lies into the fabric of social reality, and kind lies make systems dysfunction. Dysfunction means your life gets worse. This happens because their model of what makes countries functional or corrupt, rich or poor, is wrong. Their understanding is based on the Acemoglu institutions model. This model predicts that sustained immigration from perpetually poor and corrupt countries would have no lasting ill effects on the quality of institutions. Data say otherwise. The truth about advanced civilization is that it ultimately depends on people with the traits conducive to large-scale cooperation, and that disposition is not evenly distributed around the world. Rather, people high in honesty toward strangers, cognitive ability, and patience are most commonly found among populations shaped by millennia of cold winters and agricultural history. Cooperate with non-kin or die. I love my psychologically exceptional tropical kings and queens, and many of them love me back, but mass unselected immigration from their ancestral homelands would tilt the West toward small-scale cooperation and, thus, corruption and lower living standards. Contra Acemoglu, the sum of the evidence shows that people shape institutions more than institutions shape people. Just as bottlenecks rule manufacturing, Meijer’s Law rules human systems. What’s slowest and hardest to change—biology, psychology, culture—shapes human systems most because everything else is built on top of it. You can’t build a liberal democracy on top of tribal dispositions. It has been tried many times and failed every time. If you don't anchor yourself in reality, you will optimize for entropy, regardless of how altruistic you purport yourself to be

When a heterodox thinker is heterodox in the direction of basic lib empathy and correctly identifying that the birth lottery is a cruel thing

Seriously, what would you do if you were born in Haiti? "Stay and try to fix your country" doesn't even pass the laugh test.

It’s affordability, stupid. 89% of voters for the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt say they are worried that prices rise so much that they can’t pay their bills. In fact, food prices are up 34.7% since 2021. Wages are lacking far behind & only rose 14.8%. We need Anti-fascist Economics.