I was suggesting that men don't have the constant bombardment of "if you got raped, you should feel bad". There is some of that, but not as much and somewhat balanced by other parts of male culture like being looked down on for being emotionally affected by things: "man up and move on" and such.

On second thought, I don't know why I even wrote that, and it detracts form the rest, so I'll remove it.

True. The usual reply to that is "we need to reward the creators of information the same way we reward the creators of physical objects," and that was the position I had accepted until recently realizing, certainly we need to reward the creators of information, but not the same way - by the same kind of mechanism - that we reward the creators of physical objects. (Probably not by coincidence, I grew up during the time of shrink-wrapped software, and only re-examined my position on this matter after that time had passed.)

Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.

You've never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it's another good example of your first point.

AFAIK dictatorships are higher variance than democracies, but on average they aren't too differerent (in terms of GDP at least). Most intuitive explanation: a good dictator can do really good things and a bad dictator can do really bad things, but good and bad democracies aren't able to do as much good/bad because the political system moves like molasses.

A lot of us pro-market liberaltarian types would have been Marxists before the last 50 years of overwhelming evidence in favor of capitalism came in...

The salt tax (imposed by Britain, eliminated with independence) contributed to the death rate.

This being said, I agree that ex-British colonies have generally done better than places that were colonized by other countries.

Interestingly, that Diamond quote comes shortly after his dismissal of previous attempts at "big history" for being "racist".

I also see the widespread use on Lesswrong of "politically correct" as an attribution that prima facie proves something is wrong to be problematic.

I do not. If things are thought false, its critics say so. Otherwise, its critics suppress it socially. If some idea is socially suppressed, I infer its critics fear it is true. There is a famous essay on this I couldn't find, but here is a discussion on it.

Why would you expect libertarianism to be an exception?

More that I didn't have a primed cache for "idiotic things people might say in support of libertarianism" that would be on the order of stupidity of "we aren't causing shitloads of global warming" or "there are WMDs (at the appropriate time)". Just a primed cache for "somewhat naive and oversimplistic things people might say in support of libertarinism". The more mainstream stupidities I am already desensitized to.

(Note that this train of thought is all along the lines of a "What is the nature of my confusion?" inquiry.)

It seems to me that the main problem with that article is that the survey questions were badly designed. The writer claims that the questions “tested people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles” – but in fact they merely tested people’s willingness to interpret vague or misleading questions (with nothing at stake...hardly “real-world”) as the experimenter intended.

Given that ambiguity it is hardly surprising that respondents chose to interpret the questions in a way that flatters their personal ideology. This does not demonstrate that the respondents are irrational in any way; if anyone is irrational it is the person who thinks that these surveys prove such a thing.

A few of the questions are listed with the "obviously false" answer in brackets:

a dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person (disagree)

This doesn’t specify whether it is referring to an average rich/poor man, or as a general condition for all rich/poor men. If the former then it is obviously true, but if the latter then it is false. A highly motivated entrepreneur of a penny-pinching disposition might care more about a dollar than an ascetic monk, for example.

when two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off (agree)

when two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction (agree)

The problem with these questions is that the possible responses were listed as “strongly agree”, “somewhat agree”, “somewhat disagree” etc. However, the only sensible answers to this question are obviously “yes” or “no” (or perhaps “unsure”). Since the list of possible responses suggest that in fact the answer is a matter of degree, it is easy for the respondent to believe that the question isn’t asking him a binary logical question but actually probing his degree of commitment to the idea of free markets or some such thing.

drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs (agree)

gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns (agree)

The same applies to these question – why aren’t the possible answers just “yes”, “no” and “unsure”? Respondents will feel, given the graduated nature of the possible answers suggested, that what is really being probed is the question (which is after all far more interesting and salient) whether they feel that drug prohibition and gun-control laws are successful policies. Asking whether these policies reduce access to drugs and guns at all is so trivial that, given the graduated set of possible responses, it is almost sensible that respondents should answer as though the question was whether they feel that these policies are successful.

Furthermore there is some ambiguity is the sense in which “reduce access” is intended. In one sense gun-control laws reduce access, because they make it harder to get a gun. On the other hand it could be plausibly argued that they do not actually prevent a determined person from acquiring the guns he wants, therefore access to guns hasn’t been reduced per se but merely made more time-consuming or dangerous. It depends whether access refers to ease of getting a gun, or plain ability to get a gun (or drugs) given a high motivation.

overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (disagree)

Is this really blatantly true? Here is an article that I do not necessarily endorse, but which demonstrates that it is rather presumptuous to pronounce that “disagree” is obviously wrong in this case. Here is Elizabeth Warren on the “two-income trap”. And of course there is the small matter of the financial crisis.

Also, the question fails to mention whether “overall” refers to America in general or to the world in general, which might have some bearing on the answer.

Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (agree)

This would seem to hinge on the definition of “exploited”. And the question doesn’t specify who is exploiting the Third Worlders: the companies in question, or the capitalist First World system in general. Perhaps a socialist might argue that they are being exploited because we haven’t compensated them properly for the sins of colonialism, therefore putting them in the position where they have to work in sweatshops to make ends meet. Again it is not inevitable that any intelligent individual would accept that this statement is blatantly false, even after having that “fact” pointed out to him.

Note the problem on biosafety is more that good GMOs will be banned because they'd spread pesticide resistance to weeds without terminator tech, not that they will be introduced illegitimately and spread pesticide resistant genes to weeds.

How exactly would pesticide resistant genes transfer to weeds? Unless the your GMO plant interbreeds with weeds, witch is not very likely based on the fact that you do not often stumble upon tomato-dandelions (if I'm terribly misinformed here please tell me). And horizontal gene transfer, have not been observed to any large extent in multicellular organisms.