Cancelling "Hey"
If you don't know, "Hey" is a somewhat popular email client, created by industry legend DHH. I found Hey to work really well for me and really liked it. It costs $99/year, and I've been a loyal customer for four years, meaning I've given them $396 in total.
I found out today that
- They apparently also have a blog publishing platform.
- DHH used it to write post a post titled Wolves, sheep, and gypsies.
Here is a quote from it:
Whether it's wolves or gypsies, you can't just let the problems get out of hand. You have to act. You have to protect the sheep. Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants is a pathetic abdication of any functioning society's most basic duty to its citizens.
When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
I'm a big believer in live-and-let-live. That's why I don't have bad feelings towards DHH. I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them. I think that the impulse to shout and shame comes from "conflict theory," which says that when two people have a political disagreement, it usually stems from a conflict in their values or interests that can never be resolved amicably. I believe in mistake theory, which says that when two people have a political disagreement, it's likely that they both have shared intentions but one of them is just wrong on the facts. And I don't see any point in cutting someone off who's wrong on the facts, as that only robs me of the ability to change their mind.
But there is still a line. I'll be your friend, but I don't need to be your business partner.
Paul Graham said this:
If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical.
I love this quote. Focusing on what's actually true and false in real life, and rather than the associations and ramifications of the statements we perceive our perceived opponents making, is the only way that we can rectify our mistakes. However, I have to say that the statement "If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it" is in fact false. For example, if I give someone inaccurate medical advice, that is not only false, it is false and harmful. And "false and harmful" is worse than "false".
I think, if I had to modify Paul Graham's statement, I'd say:
A false statement can only cause harm if it is believed. So to stop the statement's harm, convince people that it's false.
I'm not super happy with the wording, but whatever. So, which statement of DHH's is false?
DHH says:
When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
Wolves are all predators. There are no "good wolves" (from the perspective of a sheep.) So if wolves are out of control, it can make sense to systematically shoot them. However, in any ethnicity of people, there will be some who are good and some who are bad. This makes people very unlike wolves.
Because some are good and some are bad, the best solution is to have an apparatus that detects the bad ones and deals with them in some way, such as deporting or imprisoning or fining them. It is not fair to punish them collectively for the crimes committed by only some of them. You do not need to deport all of them to deport the ones who "take over public spaces".
Aside from fairness, are there other reasons to support individuated enforcement? I think so. Because almost all of the people involved are EU citizens, they cannot be deported without cause. Any kind of mass deportation plan would have to change that, which would be legally tricky to say the least. However, enforcing the existing laws requires no legal action, and could start tomorrow if the relevant executive wanted it to.
DHH might say "well, individuated enforcement sounds nice, but we don't seem to have the will to enforce our laws anymore." Well, my understanding of Denmark is that they also don't have the will to start doing mass deportations of EU citizens, and DHH is advocating to change that. Why not advocate for individuated enforcement, seeing as it's the easier and fairer option?
The Missing Mood
Bryan Caplan has blogged about "The Missing Moods". He says:
You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents _would_ hold to the mood actual proponents _do_ hold.
I think this concept is very instructive. He gives an example of a common "missing mood":
Modern warfare almost always leads to killing lots of innocents; if governments were held to the same standards as individuals, these killings would be manslaughter, if not murder. This doesn’t mean that war is never justified. But the reasonable hawkish mood is sorrow – and constant yearning for a peaceful path. The kind of emotions that flow out of, “We are in a tragic situation. After painstaking research on all the available options, we regretfully conclude that we have to kill many thousands of innocent civilians in order to avoid even greater evils. This is true even after adjusting for the inaccuracy of our past predictions about foreign policy.”
I have never personally known a hawk who expresses such moods, and know of none in the public eye. Instead, the standard hawk moods are anger and machismo. Ted Cruz’s recent quip, “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out” is typical.
I think it's a good point. War is often a terrible thing for civilians. If initiating a war is truly necessary, then that's what you have to do, but it's odd to be happy about it. And if you're happy about it, it gives others reason not to trust your reasoning.
The same kind of applies here. I think that the reasonable mood might be closer to "Romani people are simply causing more problems than our police force is equipped to handle right now. We have exhausted other options and for now the best option is to prevent new migration of Roma people into Denmark and gradually deport the ones we have. It's terrible that some innocent people who would have contributed to Denmark will be caught in the crossfire simply for being Romani, but there's simply no alternative." But that's not the mood I got from the piece.
That sentiment contains a factual error, that "there's simply no alternative". As I mentioned earlier, the alternative is individuated enforcement. But my point is that it's possible to want what DHH wants while trying to treat everyone with dignity, and simply acknowledging an unfortunate reality where deportation of some innocent people is simply the best option. The fact that he isn't doing that suggests to me that there's a more fundamental mistake in his reasoning. Notice that in DHH's entire article, there's not a single sentence acknowledging that the category of "gypsy" contains uninvolved people contributing positively to Denmark.
I'd argue that every part of the post does the opposite. You should read the post to see for yourself, but it starts with a long section about the growing threat of wolves in Denmark. As I mentioned earlier, every wolf is a predator and a threat, and in Denmark according to DHH they are reproducing rapidly. Immediately after, we have "Cue the gypsies in Copenhagen, and their increasingly brazen behavior". There's no indication that there's any possibility that a single one could by innocent or worthy of respect, any more than there's an indication that a single wolf could be.
Let's try to compare numerator to denominator. The "increasingly brazen behavior" that DHH constitutes "gypsies take\[ing] over public spaces", that must be stopped by "the basic logic of self-preservation," is one illegal tent camp. I'd guess this constitutes tens of people. Meanwhile, there are thousands of Roma living in Denmark.
Sunday, July 28, 2026