MikkW's Shortform

MikkW

This is a special post for quick takes by MikkW. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

There has been a negative response to my most recent post ("I Want to Live in The Truly Free World, not in America"), and I have received some feedback about some weaknesses I can address in the future. (I'm aiming to write one post or shortform per day, with a preference for top-level posts, so you should expect to see more posts from me in the future that don't always succeed at being high-quality, though I will always strive to get things as right as feasible).

One potential weakness, that no one has mentioned yet, but which I suspect may have played a role in the response I received: In this post, and in other communications from me online, I have been implicitly assuming that it's obvious to a modern audience (whether Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, or non-American) that current-day USA is a shithole country. (To be clear, I feel the US has a lot of potential, and amazing things are currently coming out of the country, and it is a leader in some fields that I care about. My description here is not meant to deny that, but to highlight the ongoing decay and problems that are present)

Maybe what I think is obvious isn't obvious to people. I think people generally agree with the same statements I would agree with regarding the problems facing the US, modulo specifically partisan issues.

Maybe I'm wrong, and people are generally more optimistic about where the US is headed than I am? I don't think that's the case, but maybe. Maybe people do see what I'm seeing, and which I think is obvious, but they don't view it as sufficiently obvious to warrant the way that I point it? Common knowledge effects matter, and the appropriate way to discuss something that everybody knows that everybody else knows, isn't the appropriate way to discuss something everybody knows, but doesn't know everybody else knows it.

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts. Do people think I'm wrong when I think that America: 1) is headed in a direction that is very likely to end poorly 2) has inbuilt flaws that have always caused problems, but are causing particularly notable problems right now (I'm referring mostly to matters of institutional decision-making, not to race relations, though that also is clearly not a non-issue), and 3) is not the greatest place to live in, even ignoring future developments that may potentially make it much worse.

Do people disagree with this? Do people generally agree with these, but think it's not sufficiently obvious / sufficiently common knowledge to warrant the way I communicate about it? Do people think it is both obvious and common knowledge, but feel uncomfortable when they see people call it out?

1MikkW5y

Based on the 1 1/2 years I spent living in Denmark, that doesn't really ring true to me. The few bad things that do stand out, stand out precisely because so much else seemed so much better in Denmark than in the US (Specifically, I live in California, but my main problems feel more like national problems than state-level problems). There are a lot of differences, of course, that I could approximately go either way on.

I love Denmark, and can easily imagine that living there is better than California, for many people. For me, the language difference would weigh pretty heavily after awhile, but that's less important for some. More importantly, my work and career likely would take a bit of a hit outside of US coastal cities - that'll be worth it at some point, but it's real.

And most importantly, I do have social and family connections that matter, and living abroad made that enough harder to maintain that the other differences in location weren't worth it.

1MikkW5y

My recent posts have been focusing a lot on the theoretical side of things. I do plan on exploring less theoretical aspects in later posts, but since I'm trying to write a post every day, each post will inevitably be very zoomed in on a particular facet, and right now, I am focused on constutional factors. Part of this is because I'm trying to simultaneously explore the thesis that constitional factors play a very big role in the nature of countries; but I very much agree (and always have) that there are factors outside of a constitution that affect the nature of a country; but that does not mean that constitutions don't play an enormous role in the character of a nation. [...] In English, "not the greatest" is often used in a non-literal way to mean "not very good" or even "quite bad", and this was the usage I was using here. Obviously America is unlikely to be #1, and the fact that it isn't is close to trivial (though for some people, that might be a revelation); but the claim I am making is that it isn't even a very good place to live. [...] I do hope the latter is the case here. But the backlash can be slow to come, and it very well could come too late to matter. [...] Federalism is (mostly unfortunately) becoming quite weak in the US, which means that many problems that crop up anywhere, crop up everywhere in the US. And the theoretical constitutional bits are important, and as far as I can tell, all 50 states still get that bit wrong, but at least each state has latitude to do things right unilaterally if they so choose.