Investors have exchanges for lots of things, like stocks, currencies and commodities.  They place buy and sell orders indicating what they want to exchange and at what price, and the exchange automatically executes a transaction whenever compatible buy and sell orders are outstanding. (I’m not an investing geek, so forgive me if this is somehow wrong.)

Why don’t we have a general exchange for every kind of good that can be bought and sold?  Why should I have to search Google, Amazon, some price comparison site or Craigslist when I want something, often coming up empty-handed, when I could just place a buy order for it on a global exchange, and have the exchange find the optimal seller, if one exists, based on price, proximity, reputation, etc., transfer them my money, and tell them to mail me my item?

One might object that everyday goods aren’t like financial instruments. There’s an infinite number of kinds of goods, and the instances of one kind of good are going to differ from each other slightly or significantly in various ways that are of concern to the buyer.  This is all true, but I don’t think it’s a barrier to automated trading.  You’d just need an agreed-upon taxonomy of goods and an ontology for describing them.  Then, buyers can state the type and minimum attributes of what they want and sellers can state the type and attributes of what they have.  The exchange executes a transaction, optionally taking into consideration factors like how good the seller’s reputation is and how long it will take to ship.

Voila, Semantic Market.

Inspired by this prompt, I’m going to publicly state some random politically incorrect beliefs of mine.

• Beliefs that aren’t rationally justified should be roundly ridiculed if the person who holds them asserts even their slightest applicability to a real problem.  Irrationality is not just silly, it is dangerous and the number one thing holding back human progress.

  (This isn’t intended to be an epistemological assertion about the merit of rationalism or empiricism. It’s a pragmatic assertion about everyday life.)

• Disregard the law.  At various times and various places, within the recent past, female rights of any kind, drinking alcohol, freedom of religion, the right to live if you happen to be of a certain ethnic group, and homosexuality have all been severely punished under the law.  Many not immoral things, notably drug use (the criminalization of which, if you think about it at all, amounts to thought-crime), remain illegal even in the most free countries, and many immoral things, such as state-sponsored murder (i.e. war), are legal.

  Morality is not a collective endeavor.  Even if the state has pragmatic reasons to outlaw some things, it doesn’t reflect their moral status.  The only defensible meta-ethical stance is for each individual to come to their own reasoned conclusions about what is moral and what is not, and then act according to them, considering the law only with regard to the risk and severity of punishment for breaking it.

  A high percentage of people who think legal=moral causes totalitarianism.  It is the duty of every good citizen to disobey unjust laws to prevent this.

• Voting is stupid.  The paradox of voting is uncontroversially true.  Unless you are voting in a local election with perhaps a hundred voters, if you really consider the difference (to your, or anyone’s, life) between your preferred outcome and the other possible outcomes, in combination with the infinitesimal chance that your vote will be the deciding vote (which is the only time your vote could be said to have mattered), it never warrants spending a few hours of your time to vote.

  You might say, “but if everybody did that, democracy wouldn’t work.”  Well, that’s true, but it’s irrelevant to what one person should do. Have fun blindly heeding your evolved instinct toward group cooperation, aided by “civic duty” groupthink, uttering platitudes like “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain”. I will enjoy my Tuesdays and say that if you vote, you can’t complain, because you consent to the status quo.

• People are not born equal.  Some people are better at some things than other people no matter how how much the other people try, and there is also no a priori reason to suspect that this fact doesn’t extend to groups of people. Some incontroversial examples include: Ashkenazi Jews are almost a standard deviation more intelligent, on average, than average; East-Africans are better at running marathons; and among both geniuses and the mentally retarded, men are more common than women.

  I know that oftentimes environment can actually explain most differences between people, even those listed above.  But to hold as an article of faith that people are identical in ability, is stupid.  People evolved in different environments, and will be good at different things.  And there is genetic variation among all individuals.  It’s a shame that people like Larry Summers and James Watson get fired for even questioning the politically correct orthodoxy.

  By the way, this is in no way a normative statement about whether people should be treated equally.

  (Not to mention, you know, the inequality of being born into wealth or poverty.)

That’s all for now.  You can’t judge me unless you do this too. And if you don’t have any controversial beliefs, it’s probably a bad sign.

Sometimes I lament the fact that the Internet killed my appetite for long-form writing. I still like books and I buy a lot of them, but the majority sit unread on my bookshelf as a reminder of what I think I should read.

Then I realize that there’s really nothing special about book-length writing. I think most ideas can be expressed within a few thousand words. Even when I have occasionally read books in the past few years, books that are well-reviewed and carefully chosen as a likely enjoyable read, I have found that everything important is said in the first half or two thirds of the book, in fact often with a decent amount of redundancy.

The book is really a relic of the pre-Internet age, when people didn’t have easy access to background information about every topic imaginable and publishers’ business models centered on selling physical media and only secondarily the content they contained. It was sensible to include a lot of background information and redundancy to ensure that a book was accessible to the widest possible audience and to pad the size of the physical product, increasing its apparent value. Today, this is no longer the case. I feel that I have been much more broadly and better informed by reading thousands of blog posts, articles, and essays online than I would have been by reading a similar amount of writing in book form.

(I’m mostly talking about non-fiction books written for a non-specialist audience. I stopped reading fiction years ago, and academic tracts serve a different purpose.)