Econlib

Yeah. Also, software written for a wide gamut of hardware configs, even those under the same CPU ISA, will always be slower than software written for a unique hardware stack and only shipped for that hardware. Does it follow that all software should be written for specific hardware? I think not, because the performance overhead you take on allows saving on massive economic costs. It just isn't realistic to use development resources in that way. Even if devs are better at making ports for their games than fex, that takes precious time and money away from making the game, adding features, polishing, etc. It is much more realistic and sensible to focus on the comparative advantage than the absolute advantage [1].

[1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadvantage.html

As a counterpoint, consider this quote from an article [1] by economist Robert Murphy: "In the climate change debate, people often forget that under all but the most catastrophic scenarios, the future generations who will benefit from our current mitigation efforts will be much richer than we are. For example, Nigel Lawson points out that even under one of the worst case scenarios studied by the IPCC, failure to act would simply mean that people in the developing world would be “only” 8.5 times as wealthy a century from now, compared to 9.5 times as wealthy if there were no climate change. [2]"

[1] https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Murphyclimate.html
[2] Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (New York: Duckworth Overlook, 2008), p. 36.

you self-censor as a result, the rest of us lose your perspective, and the development of further ideas is stifled.

This component of privacy reminds me of “Preference Falsification,” a phenomenon described by Taimur Kuran. Although Kuran’s examples are often of Eastern Europe, this essay puts it in terms of US politics of 50 years ago.

https://www.econlib.org/how-timur-kuran-changed-my-thinking/

Important paper to recommend as always, Soloave’s “ 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy” written after the article but by a thinker who is cited in it.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

And also “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713

Pretty much the whole of human activity is spent on managing scarce resources in one way or another. Most things that have reduced this "burden" have been to the betterment of society (on the whole, of course there have been local winners and losers) so there is no reason to believe that some new form of scarcity reductions will not also follow this trend.

I think the major flaw most people make in this area is assuming that the current situation is the optimal and any disruption is inherently bad -- e.g. gold has always been scarce so it must always be scarce. Bastiat talks about this phenomenon with his "that which is seen and that which is unseen" theory one could argue.

--edit--
Bastiat link -- http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

>Perhaps there's some level of overconfidence at play from systems thinkers who overintellectualize their ability to conceptualize and extrapolate forward an impossibly complex system.

Actually this is more or less the point that Eliezer Yudkowsky makes in this essay about the need for caution in AI development:

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/so_far_unfriend.html (see especially points A/B/C/D)

I doubt overconfidence is a problem specific to effective altruism. In any case, any good machine learning engineer knows that a dataset with only a single data point is essentially worthless -- even if we grant the premise that the board took the wrong action given the information they had available to them at the time.

> One reason is that the term is exclusively used by the ideological opponents of this "neoliberalism",

No, its not. Its used by defenders of neoliberalism quite a bit.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2010/Sumnerneoliberalism.html

https://cambridgedevelopmentstudies.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/in-defense-of-neoliberalism-part-i/

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31603

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=945

> A lot of people describe themselves as libertarians of various types, or even as classical liberals, but I've never met a person calling herself a neoliberal.

Which says a lot more about who you do (and don't) know than it says about anything else.