michaelkeenan

Links:

• The Magic of Education
• Tough Luck
• The Common-Sense Case for Pacifism
• The Tiger Mother versus Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Tell Me the Difference Between Jim Crow and Immigration Restrictions

If I recall correctly, you mentioned that someone criticized you for not blogging more about open borders, since that's one of the biggest freedom violations. You took the criticism seriously and said you should blog more about it.

But other topics - wasteful signaling in education, that good parenting takes less time than widely believed - can have effects on the margin. But open immigration won't happen until the median voter is okay with it, i.e. never, so working on it seems less fruitful than other topics. Open borders seems like one of the many nice things the world can't have, because it'll never be politically feasible.

Do you think open immigration might actually happen, or is your work on the topic just driven by an intellectual impulse to defend a good, under-appreciated policy?

More generally, how strategic are you about actually trying to change the world?

(Apologies for this probably not being in the core topics you want to talk about.)

You once blogged about cryonics. You bite so many bullets; I and some friends of mine were surprised that you don't bite this one.

Do you think that you are the specific atoms that currently comprise your brain? It seems to me this can't be right, because those atoms are expunged and replaced frequently through normal cell processes. It shouldn't matter if abnormal processes cause isomorphic changes. A hypothetical engineer might be able to transplant a single neuron with a tiny implantable machine that behaves the same way, and you would continue as you were. Or two neurons, or half your neurons, or all of them. One by one, if you want, and you'd never know the moment you "died".

It seems that you aren't "the atoms that currently comprise Bryan Caplan"; rather, you are "the way that atoms behave when they're Bryan Caplan-shaped".

So if it were possible to preserve that information and recreate a brain (whether made of cells as we know them, or some other substrate), wouldn't that preserve you? Similar to when you're unconscious, and some of the matter in your brain changes, but you're still you when you wake up?

I think the confusing thing from your conversation with Hanson was his phrasing, "it all depends on what you choose to define as you." You don't get to choose; "you-ness" might be unintuitive, but not arbitrary.

The problem with this though is that the wealthy will be able to afford all the organs leaving the majority of people without any.

There aren't shortages of kidneys in Iran, where kidney trading is legal. There aren't shortages of most products in general, even products that rich people typically want. Some products are very expensive, sure, and kidneys would probably be very expensive. But banning kidney trading is of course equivalent to making them infinitely expensive if you're law-abiding, or extremely expensive (in money and legal risk) if you're not. That doesn't seem an improvement.

Another angle is that this is the same problem faced by medical procedures in America in general. Medicaid would cover your kidney if you're poor, and your insurance would cover the kidney if you're insured. If you're uninsured and not poor enough for Medicaid then you're screwed, just like you're screwed if you're in that situation and you get cancer. But that is not a good reason to make cancer treatment illegal.