07mk
1hr ago
In fact, it seems pretty common for fairness (explicitly or implicitly) to feature prominently in arguments about public policy.
I think this may reflect that it's very common to convincingly appear as if one cares about fairness (even, possibly, to one's own conscious mind) in order to get advantages for oneself. It's a kayfabe that, by its very nature, must never be acknowledged or talked about, as doing so impacts how convincingly one appears to care about fairness. It's only weird autists like us on this website who either believe it or try to penetrate through the layers of deception to get at what people actually care about.
07mk
1hr ago
If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.
Well, yes, and capping the number of As seems to be the means by which one incentivizes the professors to do so. I went to a semi-elite college in the mid-00s, and grade inflation in elite colleges (we considered our college elite, even though it really was only semi-, because of course we wanted to think we were peers to the Ivies) was an actively talked-about problem back then, as something like 40%+ of all grades were As. As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse. So telling professors to make their material harder such that grade inflation doesn't happen doesn't seem to have any real impact; it appears that they need actual incentives.
Now, who's to say if a professor, especially a tenured one, will face any consequences if they make their material so easy as to give out more As than the cap allows? Talk is cheap, after all. But if properly enforced, it seems significantly more likely to cause professors to teach harder material than just telling them really really hard to make their material harder.
Perhaps a cap-and-trade system like with pollutants might be better still? Not sure exactly how it would work, but a humanities professor might want to "buy" the right to give out more As from a STEM professor. Not sure what the currency would be, though, to create the right incentives.
07mk
14hr ago
I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.
Fair enough, but then the analogy largely breaks down, because the reason that fig leafed genitals are less outrage-inducing or more okay is that they are, in some meaningful sense, less nude than non-fig leafed genitals. In terms of corruption, corruption that is covered up/hidden/unknown isn't somehow less corrupt by nature of it being covered up in the same way that genitals that are fig leafed are less nude.
It may be true that Trump is meaningfully more corrupt than other POTUSs (if I had to bet, and this were possible to adjudicate in any fair way, I would bet yes - but I'd prefer not to bet, because I know that my judgment on him and his actions is too biased to make a judgment that I have any confidence in being accurate), but that has nothing to do with the fig leaf analogy.
07mk
16hr ago
I don't think "preferring one candidate over another" is generalizable to "murdering someone."
07mk
18hr ago
The meaning of nudity is that there's no fig leaf covering anything and, as such, someone being okay with fig leaf covering the genitals isn't being okay with nudity, they're being okay with something close to nudity but isn't nudity. Corruption, on the other hand, is something that exists mostly orthogonal to what is or isn't covering it (there's certainly an appearance component of corruption, where the mere appearance of corruption is corruption in itself, even if, in actuality, behind closed doors, everything is on the up and up, but I don't think that's relevant in this case).
07mk
22hr ago
Naturally theres risk of losing principle, but thats true of all investing. The exact investment profile is TBD, i was just using S&P for some back of envelope calcs.
Well, even FDIC-insured accounts have some risk of the principal being lost, but if I were executing the plan you were, I'd put most/all of the principal into a savings account for very low risk 3.2-4% return instead of a low risk 8-10% in an index fund. In a 1-72 month time horizon, I think the difference in risk is sufficiently high as to be worth the lower returns, personally.
07mk
23hr ago
I'm not sure what your criterion for "good character writing" is, even with those examples, but I've long found Ico to be one of the best-written stories ever, in terms of everything, including dialogue. But it's essentially a fairy tale with the writing complexity of "See Spot Run," where you can probably count the number of lines that come out of each character's mouth in both hands (and if not, then both hands and feet).
As a side note: do not ever read the "Castle in the Mist" novelization. It is truly awful. It's about 400 pages long, and I got like 100 pages in before giving up - by that point, Ico hadn't even gotten into the castle (this happens in the first cutscene of the game, which lasts like 5 minutes or less), with extensive backstory written about Ico's village and its leaders and the larger society in which they existed. All irrelevant details for the actual story of Ico. Ico's "novelization" really should have been a picture book with, again, the complexity of "See Spot Run."
07mk
23hr ago
Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes
I think this may be precisely why it was a turning point. The tactics used to win this battle - "born this way," "how does two loving men/women getting married and getting [marriage rights] affect you?" - were so successful in large part because it was so close to zero-sum. But once that battle was won, the same activists applied the same tactics to other things which were not nearly so close to zero-sum (insisting that MTF transwomen be treated exactly the same as women in every context is the most obvious example, but smaller scale examples in things like representation in fiction also count), which resulted in significant push back, which resulted in the activists take the "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach.
Something like that. Furthermore, the voters who find these arguments convincing and decide to vote for them (or vote for the demagogues' preferred politicians or policies, etc.) are also pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.
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