Why am I no longer an anarchist

[teo123]

I am thinking about making a video named "Why am I no longer an anarchist" (or similar). Here is the script:

Hello everybody! So, for the past few months, I have been thinking and researching a lot about politics and things related to it. I used to be an anarcho-capitalist, but, now, I have to admit that my views have got significantly more moderate. So, I have two questions for anarchists.

First, provide me some realistic solution to antibiotic resistance caused by agriculture that doesn't involve the government. Because I have never seen any anarchist or libertarian think-tank talk about that. Like, quite literally, nothing. And I have asked that question on a few Internet forums, and the answers I got are ridiculous. Most of the responses were denying that's even happening, even though everyone who is familiar with basic biology can confirm you that it has to be happening.
Shane Killian, an anarcho-capitalist blogger, is claiming that the government removes the incentive for scientists to discover new classes of antibiotics. I don't think that's the case at all, but even if it were, I don't think we can expect that a new antibiotic would be discovered every now and then. The fact that we have discovered a few tens of chemical compounds that, by different mechanisms, kill procaryotes but not eucaryotes is already miraculous. We cannot expect that there are infinitely many such compounds and mechanisms.
It's important to understand that widespread vegetarianism, even if we cosider that realistic, would not address the problem. Most of the antibiotics today are used in the egg industry, not in the meat industry.
Widespread veganism, which I don't think is realistic, would indeed address the problem, but it would not completely solve it. Namely, significant amounts of antibiotics are used in plant agriculture, mostly vineyards, for disease prevention and speeding up the growth. If bacteria which attack plants become resistant to antibiotics, most biologists seem to agree that those genes will sooner or later transfer to the bacteria that attack humans, via horizontal gene transfer. Bacteria, unlike other living beings, can conjugate with their quite distant relatives.
So, once again, provide me some realistic solution to that problem that doesn't involve a government. It seems obvious to me that the government should do more about that problem, rather than less.

Second, explain to me how the economy would work in an anarchy without contradicting the basic game theory. Because anarchists tend to either subscribe to the Marxist School of Economics or to the Austrian School of Economics. The problem is that neither of them work even on paper. The basic game theory predicts that a society that tries to base itself on Marxist economics will fail almost immediately due to the Tragedy of the Commons, and that a society that bases itself on Austrian economics will fail very soon due to the Paradox of Thrift. Since economics is a soft science, what works on paper might not work in reality, but the problem is that anarchists are unable to even provide an explanation of how economy should work that at least works on paper.
I have never really bought into the Austrian School of Economics. From the very beginning of my research of anarcho-capitalism, it was obvious to me that it's pseudoscience. I thought, basically, "Government action is always immoral, even if consequences may be positive.". But if your judgements result in economy not working, then perhaps you are not a good judge.
Now, which algorithm should a government follow? I don't know. But you do not need to know the right answer to recognize a wrong one, that government should never do anything. Obviously, since economics is a very soft science, government actions should be very humble, and government should be sensitive to the evidence that their actions are not producing desired results. But that's different from saying that we should discard basic game theory.

To be clear, I still think most mainstream policies, such as prisons, the police and the mainstream pandemic management with lockdowns and mask mandates are misguided. And I am against unjustified government intervention. Government should be our last resort. But the ugly truth is that it should still be there for the problems such as antibiotic resistance caused by agriculture. Thanks for watching!

Do you think that I should change something? Or add something?

[teo123]

I think I should add a few things, to be more convincing:

The government already regulates antibiotic use in agriculture. Without government regulations, the amount of antibiotics used in the egg industry would arguably be much bigger.

Why do many more economists buy into the Keynesian economics than into the Austrian economics? Well, the answer seems obvious to me: because Keynesian economics is at least not an attempt to deny basic game theory. It at least works on paper. Now, I am not saying that Keynesian economics is right, I am just saying it is way more probable than Austrian economics.
Anarcho-capitalists try to deny the predictions of game theory with rhetoric such as Mises'es "Government actions always suffer from the economic calculation problem. Prices can only be determined in a decentralized manner." or Friedman's "Government spending means less money spent carefully and more money spent carelessly." or Michael Huemer's "Governments are in the position of medieval physicians, any cure that government attempts to apply will have either no effect or turn out to be counter-productive.". I am not comfortable making such rationalizations.
The Mises'es argument appears to contradict basic informatics: find me some algorithm in computer science that is easier to implement in a multi-threaded way than in a single-threaded way. It seems obvious to me that there cannot be such algorithm.
As for the Friedman's argument, I don't think it addresses the Paradox of Thrift at all.
As for the Michael Huemer's argument, well, that actually makes some degree of sense. However, we need to understand that even medieval medicine was more likely to help than to hurt you. Bloodletting in medieval medicine was actually rare. The death of George Washington was an exception, rather than the rule. Furthermore, I think it is undeniable we know more about how society works than medieval physicians knew about how body works. Furthermore, we have the scientific method to evaluate our supposed cures. Medieval physicians didn't have that.

[teo123]

I'd add a few more things:

You need to understand that antibiotic resistance is a way more serious problem than global warming. The dangers of global warming are all hypothetical: we don't know what will happen if the Earth gets two degrees warmer. The dangers of a pandemic of a superbacteria are not hypothetical: we have seen what happens in such cases with the recent pandemic. Even if we shouldn't do anything about global warming, it doesn't mean we should do nothing about antibiotic resistance.

Proponents of uncontrolled capitalism, such as John Stossel, often say that the idea that the uncontrolled capitalism is unstable is based on our flawed intuition. But that intuition is based on game theory. Many intuitions are indeed flawed, but that one doesn't seem to be. The Austrian School of Economics seems to be worse than intuition.

[teo123]

In all seriousness, though, what do you think would be a good response to what Milton Friedman said about the Paradox of Thrift? Something along the lines of:

A government cannot get us out of an economic depression by increasing spending, because higher taxes and more spending always mean less money spent carefully and less money spent carelessly. Nobody spends someone else's money as carefully as he does his own.

This sounds rather silly. I think the Michael Huemer's analogy of comparing government with a medieval physician has a much higher chance of catching on.
But I think a good response to the Milton Friedman's argument might be something along the lines of:

Individuals are careful with how they spend their own money? Really? To me it seems that even people who try to be careful not to hurt the society with the way they spend the money spend money in a harmful way all the time. Almost everybody buys eggs from factory farms, for example, even though that's the number one thing that increases the risk of a pandemic of superbacteria occurring. And even if that were true, how does it follow that government spending cannot get us out of a depression?

[teo123]

What do you guys think, what would happen to the Internet if there were no government regulations? I have researched that a bit, and it seems to me Internet would be paralyzed by the denial-of-service attacks made easy by many ISPs incorrectly setting up their DNS servers. Maybe I can add this to the script:

Second, ask yourself, what would happen to the Internet if government regulations didn't exist? I am a third-year computer science student who has done some research about it, and it seems to me that, without government regulations, the Internet would be paralyzed by the denial-of-service attacks made easy by many ISPs incorrectly setting up their DNS servers. If not for the government regulation, many ISPs would probably set up their DNS servers to respond to requests from all IP addresses (rather than just the IP addresses of the users they are supposed to serve). And, since DNS servers often respond with long responses to short queries, hackers would spoof their IP addresses as if their DNS requests come from the IP of the server they are attacking, flooding the server they are attacking with DNS responses to queries it did not actually make. Hackers would need to use very little bandwidth for that, since they could massively amplify their attacks using improperly set up DNS servers of various ISPs. What is some realistic solution for that problem that doesn't involve a government? I don't see one. In my opinion, the government is not doing enough here. In my opinion, governments should force the ISPs to use DNS over HTTPS, rather than unencrypted DNS. That will slightly slow down the Internet, but would make both the DDOS attacks utilizing DNS for amplification (as you cannot make DNS-over-HTTPS requests while spoofing your IP address) and spying which websites you visit using DNS impossible. Why should it be that web hosting services should have to have some anti-DDOS defences and that it is possible to track what people are doing on-line just because the ISPs are using legacy technology? So, once again, it seems obvious to me the government should do more, rather than less.

[teo123]

Maybe I should add to the point about DNS:

I have asked this question about how DNS depends on the government to work properly on a forum about anarchism, and most of the responses there assume that your ISP can somehow protect you against that kind of denial-of-service attacks at the expense of your Internet speed. When asked how exactly your ISP can protect you against that kind of a denial-of-service attack, people there are not giving coherent responses. If you ask me, I think people on that forum don't understand the basics of how the Internet works.

[teo123]

To my point about economics, maybe I should add this:

What made me realize just how stupid those anarchist so-called schools of economics are was this. I published a paper applying information theory to the Croatian river names, and I went on to discuss it on various Internet forums. Many people there, in fact most of them, apparently had blind faith that information theory has nothing to say about the names of places. My arguments weren't even attempted to be refuted, they were simply rejected. People were rejecting my arguments without finding any specific flaw in them, they simply had blind faith that information theory had nothing to say about the names of places. That made me ask myself whether I sounded just as stupid when I was denying the predictions of the basic game theory. It seems to me now that I did sound that stupid. Anarchists are inventing unarticulate reasons why the game theory wouldn't apply to economics, just like people on various Internet forums are inventing unarticulate reasons why information theory wouldn't apply to the names of places. Both is irrational.

[brimstoneSalad]

People are saying information theory has nothing to say about linguistics?

There is a tendency of people denying mathematical and scientific methodology they don't (and perhaps can't) understand, and preferring things to remain "an art" so they can remain relevant. That said, this doesn't mean you were applying the correct informatic models or that those models yet exist (until they are developed, which is the case for them all).

I'm glad to hear you've found your way out of anarchism.
Do you believe prisons are real now and accept the historical truth of various genocides? It seems like those beliefs stemmed in part from your faith in anarchism (or fed into it?).

[teo123]

People are saying information theory has nothing to say about linguistics?

More like they have blind faith that toponyms are a subject exclusively of historical linguistics and that information theory has nothing to say about them. You know, like @Sunflowers had blind faith that physics has nothing to say about what once were exclusively matters of metaphysics.
You can read an English-language summary of my paper on my blog.
My two information theory professors, Franjo Jović and Anđelko Lišnjić, tell me my arguments seem compelling to them. Franjo Jović only commented that he thinks the p-value is closer to 1/17 than to 1/300 because he thinks that not a lot of entropy goes to morphology. Anđelko Lišnjić merely had some comments about the way I presented my argument, but not to the content of my arguments. And many other professors at my university, who are, admittedly, less qualified to talk about the matters about information theory, also say they find my arguments compelling.
But people educated in linguistics... If you try to apply statistics where it's not usually applied, you will run into a bunch of nonsensical arguments against the use of statistics. You know how Darwin commented on the Mendel's work: "Mathematics in biology was like a scalpel in a carpenter's shop – there was no use for it."? Or how Levy commented on the Semmelweis'es work: "Every patient is an individual. Statistics will not help us cure somebody."? Total gibberish, of course, but many people do think that way.

Do you believe prisons are real now

Yes, I think that they exist but that they shouldn't exist. Just like the police and other policies most people agree on.

accept the historical truth of various genocides

Yes, I accept it.

It seems like those beliefs stemmed in part from your faith in anarchism (or fed into it?).

Well, yes, I used to think the true anarchist position is to deny massacres, because, if massacres happen even when there is a government, what would then happen if there was no government? Total nonsense, of course. Most of the massacres happen because of governments, rather than in spite of governments.

[teo123]

What do you guys here think, do massacres today usually happen because of governments or in spite of governments?
For the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the answer is obvious: it happened because of the government.
For Vukovar Massacre, it's not as obvious. Vukovar Massacre was committed by an illegal army led by Željko Ražnatović. Serbians today, as far as I can tell, mostly believe the Slobodan Milošević'es government had little to do with Vukovar Massacre, but everybody else thinks differently. Similarly, Croatians are taught in school that the Croatian government tried to stop Vukovar Massacre but couldn't deliver the necessay weapons to Vukovar, however many people (including the BBC News, and me now) believe the Croatian government let the Vukovar Massacre happen on purpose. I know one person who was in Vukovar at the time, and he tells me that this statement from my history textbook "It was impossible to deliver the weapons necessary to stop Vukovar Massacre to Vukovar.". is bullsh*t.
As for Varivode Massacre, well, the Supreme Court of Croatia ruled in 2012 that it is "beyond reasonable doubt" that the Croatian government is responsible for Varivode Massacre. Now, some people think the Supreme Court was not objective because the left-winger Ivo Josipović was the president at the time. OK, let's give it "ambiguous", with my bet being on it having been caused by the government.
It still seems to me that the assertion "Governments have, in recent history, killed many more people than murderers." is at least plausible. That doesn't mean that no government is the best. Probably some small government that deals only with things such as antibiotic resistance caused by the egg industry (for which it seems like the government regulation is the only solution) is the best.