About Pontifex Minimus

This is my space to talk about my views on the world. Here are some of the topics I intend to write about:

I’m Scottish, and I feel Scotland will only reach its full potential when it is no longer controlled by the current Westminster system. I also think Westminster is very hard or impossible to reform. So I support Scottish independence. Independence is of course not the end goal, that’s building a good society that works for all our people. It therefore follows that I’m interested in understanding how societies work, something which it is necessary to know in order to make them better.

I’m on the economic left in that I want Scotland to be a country that cares about all of its people. In particular everyone should have, as of right, enough money to get by and free health care. I support a universal basic income and affordable housing for all.

I support market economics in that I think markets are often the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. I’m against making things artificially scarce in order to extract an economic rent from them (for example, high house prices caused by planning restrictions, or much of copyright law). All real economies are a mixture of markets and command economies (e.g. most firms are internally command economies) and it’s important to get a good mix of the two.

I think China is committing very serious human rights infringements, including torture, genocide, concentration camps, slave labour, organ harvesting and rape as a political weapon. China has the world’s largest population, is the world’s largest economy at purchasing-power parity, and is the world’s largest exporter. China is also building up its military and increasingly throwing its weight around. If you don’t find all of this scary, you should. China is a bigger threat to the West than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

As well as China, Russia is also a threat. Russia wants to conquer Ukraine, for the same reason China wants to conquer Taiwan: Ukraine has a similar culture to Russia but has a more open and democratic society than Russia, and the Russian ruling class worries that pernicious ideas like democracy and human rights might infect their country too, threatening the position of the leaders. And China feels the same about Taiwan. In both cases they want to conquer what they see as illegitimate breakaway provinces to ensure continued rule at home.

The West is therefore currently engaged in a 2nd cold war against China and it is not obvious to me that the West will win; we certainly need to up our game.

I’m interested in geopolitics, the study of how nations interact with each other. History, particularly military history, has a lot to say on how nations have interacted with (and competed with) each other in the past and is thus a guide to predicting the future.

I think the woke ideology has serious flaws; in particular their negative sentiment towards white people and the West is a threat to Western civilisation and may help China and Russia win the 2nd cold war.

I’m interested in technology and in particular the effect it has on the structure of societies. Computers and the internet can be a tool for human flourishing; they can also enable a surveillance society and tyranny. A bad singularity would destroy everything humans value, a sobering prospect that hangs over the 21st century making all our day-to-day concerns seem trivial.

Some people in the rationalist community, such as Scott Alexander, make predictions and and then score themselves on how well they did. This is a useful exercise in calibrating one’s beliefs which I will do from time to time.

I mentioned Westminster being hard to reform. One reason for this is it uses the First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system, which I (along with everyone else who has ever studied the topic) regard as incredibly bad. I will from time to time be blogging about voting systems, particularly in relation to Scotland.

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Scottish independence. Economic left. Geopolitics. Technology.

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Scottish independence. Economic left. Geopolitics. Technology.