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BurdensomeCount

Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.

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joined 2022 September 05 16:37:04 UTC

The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.


				
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BurdensomeCount


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.

				
				
				

				

					5 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 16:37:04 UTC
				


				
					

					
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Anybody Here? ...


Nobody? ...


Well, alright then:


A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.


Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf


Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html




It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.






A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.






The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.






Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.






A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.






In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:








Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.






				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it:




How tf do you get from the conclusion that endorsing Biden didn't help him at all but reduced public trust in your paper as an argument for doing more political endoresements?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, it looks like it's pretty clear who's "on top" in the West and can't be interfered with without consequences:


https://twitter.com/VeraJourova/status/1603689440710369281




News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying. EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct. @elonmusk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.




When right wing journalists and conservative commentators were being banned by Twitter wholesale there was nary a peep out of the Powers that Be; however now that Elon is giving left wing censorship fans a taste of their own medicine they have come out in full force crying foul play.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The solution is not to instead date inexperienced young things, these being the only things you can get, because their red flag detectors haven't grown in yet.




If someone sincerely believes that young adult women's red flag detectors are so bad that they can't tell the difference between good/bad yet then they should support a chaperone like an elderly family member having a level of control over young women's dating lives who can help them filter out the bad ones from the good ones. Unfortunately feminists really don't like that either.


At this point in my life I basically ignore anything coming from a self-professed feminist. I would encourage others to do the same, your existence will get better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


From another point of view looks like he is between pair of thighs and munching like it is his last meal ...




I must say this statue is a masterpiece in demonstrating just how many different ways a single sculpture can be seen as absolutely, totally inappropriate, while at the core being perfectly SFW. If that was the intent of the designers then bravo to them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The point isn't to "hand your money over to a woman," it's to avoid having unsupported children who become the state's responsibility.




And yet every single state in the US has safe haven laws where a woman can just hand away the kid after birth and is left with zero (0) consequences. The father doesn't even get to choose to keep the child, the mother can just hand it away. Those children become the state's responsibility as well but nobody cares about the hypocrisy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On ruling well as a substitute for morality


Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif was an Alawite King of Morocco who ruled from 1672 to 1727. As a minor son of the first king of the Alawite dynasty and with his mother being a black slave, he only managed to ascend to power due to a fortuitous series of events where two of his higher ranking half brothers took the throne in succession, quarreling against each other until one of them was killed by forces of the other, and then the other died in a horse accident during a campaign a few years later. Even then, he only really got his hands on power because he managed to make it to Fez and proclaim himself Sultan before any of the other people who could conceivably lay a claim to the throne managed to do it.


As you would expect, his reign started out with a very divided Morocco. A rival claimant to the throne rushed to Marrakesh and had himself proclaimed Sultan. Moulay Ismail had to defeat him multiple times over many years because like a goblin, as soon as the Sultan’s forces went to a city to subdue his revolt he would disappear from there and reappear soon after in a different city where he would agitate the nobles there to rebel against the sultan.


Eventually Moulay Ismail managed to subjugate all the pretenders and unify Morocco as a single state under him as the undisputed king. This led to a period of relative stability where the median inhabitants of the empire could by and large go about their lives in peace. His army reforms also led to the creation of the first professional Moroccan Army, the Black Guards, who owed their loyalty directly to the Moroccan state (and by extension to Moulay Ismail) rather than being a collection of fighters from disparate tribes.


He also invested heavily in building structures, creating over 75 forts over his reign all over Morocco. Not only this, he was also a great lover of nature and created a multitude of gardens in the deserts of western north Africa. He basically built the city of Meknes as a new capital for Morocco, raising it from a few derelict villages to such a splendor that it is now recognised as one of the four Imperial Cities of Morocco. To this day his constructions are some of the most noteworthy landmarks any tourist could visit in the country.


And not just this, but what man can overlook his personal harem of over 500 women, through which he sired over 800 confirmed children, putting him as the second most prolific confirmed father throughout all of history, seconded only by Genghis Khan. He was also quite active in the diplomatic arena, sending letters and ambassadors as far as Great Britain to the court of James II, at one point extorting him to convert to Islam for his own spiritual benefit.


His reign is by and large seen as a golden age for Morocco. He brought order and security to the empire, and his reign was described by the historian Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri as:




“The evildoers and troublemakers no longer knew where to shelter, where to seek refuge: no land wanted to bear them, no sky would cover them.”




He was often compared to his contemporary, Louis XIV of France with whom he had an alliance and was considered to be the Moroccan Sun King (at one point he even tried to get married to one of the illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV). He had grown Morocco to its largest size ever and not only this, the empire’s economy was also doing well. His rule was a high water mark for Morocco: after his death his multitude of sons had another big power struggle which had the dubious distinction of having a single person, Moulay Abdallah, become Sultan on six separate occasions.


Regardless, it is clear that an ordinary citizen of Morocco would have had a far better life during the reign of Moulay Ismail than either the time before his Sultanate or after it. A comparison can be made here to the Three Kingdoms period of Imperial China between the Han and Jin dynasties when due to strife and extensive bloody competition between small warring polities China lost half of its population in merely 60 years. In many ways the reign of Moulay Ismail was the inverse of this, Morocco thrived and flourished during his almost 60 years on the throne.


One might wonder why such an accomplished king and ruler is so unknown these days, why the name of Moulay Ismail is not mentioned more widely in discourse. Even amongst the well read who know something about the history of Africa the name “Moulay Ismail” is not likely to raise too many eyebrows in recognition. This is because despite all the general prosperity and welfare generated by his half century rule over Morocco, his behavior in his personal life and dealings was very much the opposite, indeed Moulay Ismail is better known to people these days as Ismail the bloodthirsty.


His atrocities were myriad, his actions so extreme that even his contemporaries of the 17th century questioned them. A french captive described his appearance as thus:




He is a vigorous man, well-built, quite tall but rather slender... his face is a clear brown colour, rather long, and its features are all quite well-formed. He has a long beard that is slightly forked. His expression, which seems quite soft, is not a sign of his humanity - on the contrary, he is very cruel...




Estimates vary, but point to him having killed or ordered the deaths of over 50,000 people during his reign (not including losses in battle). He was exceptionally cruel to his personal slaves. One of his favorite pastimes when out riding was to pull out his sword as he was climbing his horse and decapitate the slave who was holding the stirrup. Why? Because he could. Ismail the bloodthirsty needed no other reason.


He was also extremely jealous in guarding the women of his harem. Each of them had their own eunuch to guard her from straying. For a man, merely looking at one of his concubines carried the death penalty and it was common for men to throw themselves face first upon the ground with their eyes down to prevent any accusations from the king, which he was very liberal in brandishing, truth be damned. Once he had one of his viziers executed because a storm hit his traveling army and caused large losses, even though the vizier had zero control over it.


It wasn’t like he behaved any better towards the women of his harem either. Any one even suspected of being unfaithful to him was sentenced to, you guessed it, death. In this case the Sultan himself would strangle the unfortunate woman, or if he wanted to be extra cruel, first cut off the breasts and remove the teeth of his victim. And his method of acquiring these women in the first place was not particularly nice either, one of his conditions to make peace with a tribe he had defeated was that he would be given a daughter of the tribe’s chief for himself.


Even blood kinship did not limit his personal depravity. He had multiple of his own sons killed, perhaps most famously Moulay Mohammed al-Alim who was once the Sultan’s favourite son, but was convinced by another one of his wives to revolt as she wanted her own son to be heir to the throne. When Moulay Mohammed was captured his father ordered one of his executioners to cut an arm and a leg off in punishment. The executioner refused to spill royal blood and Moulay Ismail had to get a backup executioner to do the deed. Moulay Mohammed died of his injuries two days later.


Afterwards Moulay Ismail had both of the executioners killed as well, the first one for refusing to obey the Sultan’s orders, and the second one for spilling royal blood…
I needn’t go on with further examples of Moulay Ismail’s personal depravity, although there is a lot I’m leaving out (the reason his proposed marriage with the daughter of Louis XIV did not work out was because the French feared for how she would be treated by him if she went to Morocco).


The point of the matter is, despite how immoral and nasty a person or group may be themselves, it is still possible for them to be a net good for the world on a consequential level, and this possibility only goes up the more power they have. A nasty but competent weak person will not influence wider society at all, all they will do is make life worse for those close to them. A nasty but competent powerful person has the ability to enforce order and stability throughout society, and the positive knock on effects of this can very easily outweigh all the bad stuff they get up to In their personal life.


The nastiness doesn’t have to be restricted to your personal life either, Moulay Ismail treated his Christian slaves extremely cruelly, but as long as the damage your nastiness causes is less than the benefits you provide through your competence, and there is no believable alternative that would be plausibly better, it is best for the world if you are the person/group in charge.


Note the necessity of the plausibility of the alternatives being better. The multitude of different factions competing for the Sultanship before/after Moulay Ismail all believed that they would be better for the country than any one else, but because none of them were able to convince enough nobles etc. enough to consolidate power, there was a lot of strife and the country as a whole suffered. It could even very well be true that a certain claimant to the throne after Moulay Ismail would have been a better ruler had he been given the chance, but because he could not convince wider society of this, the end result was that people were worse off.


There was a comment here a few weeks ago which mentioned that on societal scales, there is no difference between stupid and evil. I think that not only is this true, but even more, you can be so much more competent compared to the alternative (as Moulay Ismail was compared to the lawlessness that was prevalent either side of his reign) that from a consequentialist point of view it is far better for you to be running things than the alternative, your outbursts of evil notwithstanding.


Connecting this to more topical matters: Israel is obviously a morally questionable but technologically/socially superior power compared to the Arabs of the middle east. Even when they aren’t busy killing each other in internecine conflicts (see Saudi Arabia vs Yemen etc.), the are hardly able to create technologically advanced societies where humanity can flourish unless they were blessed by nature with huge oil wealth right under their feet. You can compare e.g. the UAE vs Tunisia, both are similar sized states with very similar cultures, the only big difference is that the former has oil and the latter doesn’t.


The way to see whether Israel is good or bad for the Arabs is not to compare the quality of life led by your average Israeli Jew vs your average Israeli Arab, but to compare the quality of life of an Israeli Arab vs a non-Israeli Arab. Sure, Israel treats it’s Arab citizens as second class citizens compared to the Jews, but this absolutely does not necessarily mean that the Arabs of Israel are worse off than they would be in the counterfactual.


There was an observation made by Scott on one of his old posts that the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East outside of the oil rich states was Israel. Regardless of the lack of rights afforded to Israeli Arabs compared to their Jewish counterparts, the level of ambient prosperity in Israel is so so high compared to non Oil-Rich Arab states that the quality of life enjoyed by as Israeli Arab is higher than the Arabs unfortunate enough to be born elsewhere in the middle east.


Note that is argument is general, it doesn’t apply to just the neighbours of Israel (for which you can claim that the consequences of Israeli actions have damaged those states so much that their citizens now live a much worse life not due to any faults of their own, but rather those of Israel), but to all of the non Oil-Rich Middle East. It is certainly better to be an Israeli Arab compared to a Tunisian Arab and you can’t say that the current situation of Tunisia can largely be blamed onto Israel.


Now someone may counter by saying that it doesn’t matter how much material prosperity you may have if you don’t have political rights and “freedom”, defined in some nebulous way that aligns with how westerners think of it. Except that empirically, people behave in the complete opposite way, gladly sacrificing those things for higher prosperity.


For instance, you can make a strong argument that the average hetero man back in my home country has a lot more “freedom” than if he were to go to, say the UK (freedom to own and shoot guns, freedom to drive without having to follow a huge amount of safety regulations and low speed limits, freedom to develop his property as he wishes, freedom from an onerous tax burden, freedom to buy most medicines by just showing up at the pharmacy and asking for them instead of needing to waste a GP’s and his own time, freedom to hire servants at a mutually agreeable wage instead of minimum wage regulations getting in your way etc.). I feel this personally too, when I go back home to visit my extended family compared to the life I live in the UK. However the difference in the sheer amount of “stuff” a person can buy in the UK vs back home is big enough to create a pool of millions of people who would love nothing more than to give up all this freedom just so they can go and live in the west and be able to buy more things, while there is minimal demand for my co-ethnics in the west to go back home and enjoy all this extra freedom.


You also see this on the other end of the spectrum. Amongst business professionals expat postings that come with higher salaries/fringe benefits in exchange for being sent to a different country where you have zero political rights and are always at the risk of being expelled from the land because your visa renewal was refused are generally highly prized rather than being seen as a trap to avoid. If “political representation” and “right to choose those who lead you” were really all that valuable these professionals wouldn’t be jumping over each other to get these postings where you get paid 75% more and are given two return tickets back home each year to leave your homeland in live amongst foreigners who probably don’t even speak the same language as you.


Another demonstration of the low value of a representative vote to choose what the future will look like vs getting more material prosperity can be seen in the share prices of public companies that issue multiple classes of stock. Often there is a B class of shares that are exactly the same as the standard A class of shares when it comes to dividends and portion of ownership of the company’s assets, except that the B class shares don’t get a vote. The value of a vote can then be computed by comparing the price difference between the two classes of shares.


Yesterday the Alphabet Class A share (which gets voting rights) closed at 138.06, while the Class C share (which is equivalent to the class A share but does not get voting rights) closed at 139.20 . So actually the share with voting rights was selling for ~1% less than the share without voting rights (this is a quirk of the system caused by a short term supply/demand imbalance, normally the shares are within a few cents of each other). This goes to show how much a vote is actually worth, namely very very little compared to using the extra money in buying cheaper shares to buy more of them and get a better return on your capital (in Google’s case the founders have a majority of voting power so you can sort of explain why a vote you can buy isn’t worth anything, but even for companies where this is not the case, voting stock tends to be valued within a few cents of the equivalent non-voting stock).


Putting it all together it’s quite clear, both from the high level outside view, as well as the empirical evidence of where people choose to go if they are allowed to, that even though the rulers of a society may not be deontologically acting in particularly nice ways, and that there is a subgroup which is doing worse than they would otherwise be doing if the rulers would “just change their behavior” and allow them more say in how the place is run, the choice in reality is often not “nasty” rulers vs “nice” rulers, but rather “nasty” rulers vs even nastier alternative, and in that case the net change in sum total welfare of those “oppressed” by these rulers may well be more positive than every other plausible world, and so the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are you stupid or am I evil?


There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil". Today/yesterday there was a poll floating around rationalist twitter which I think is the best example I've ever seen of this dynamic.


It asks you to choose between two options:


    

  1.  (Blue pill) 
    2. 

  2.  (Red pill) 
    3. 



And what happens is that:


- if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives


- if not, red pills live and blue pills die


Now if you think about it for even 30 seconds, it clearly makes sense for everyone to choose Red Pill here: if everyone chooses Red Pill nobody dies, which is the best case scenario from choosing blue, and on top there is no personal risk to yourself of dying. You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable, and anyways, choosing red keeps you alive with no personal risk (not present in case you choose blue), so everyone should just choose Red, survive and continue on with their lives. Indeed this poll is equivalent to the following one (posted by Roko):


    

  1.  Walk into a room that is a human blender 
    2. 

  2.  Do nothing
    3. 



And what happens is that:


- if you choose the blender, you will die, unless at least 50% of people choose the blender as well, in which case the blender will overload and not work, making you live


- if you do nothing, you live


You would have to be monumentally, incorrigibly stupid to choose the blue pill (walking into the blender) here and we should expect Lizardman's constant level support for blue.


If only our world were really that simple...


The poll can be found here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisatomic5/status/1690904441967575040 . Currently there is a 65% majority for choosing the blue pill ::facepalm:: . At least this number is over 50% so nobody is dying. What justification is provided for people choosing Blue over Red? Well, one of the top replies is that "red represents the values of intolerance and fascism". Now this is an extreme example of a reply but even then personally I am stunned that there are a non-negligible proportion of people who actually think in this way. The best response explain what's going on here seems to be this one:




I’ll take the over on preference falsification driving these results.






If all voters were in a position where the non-zero chance of death for a blue vote vs zero chance of death for a red vote was salient and believable, red would win.






Cost-free signaling is a hell of a drug.




Perhaps expectedly enough, no matter how many Red supporters try to explain to people that choosing Blue is stupid, making the choice really really clear using examples like this:




Your plane crashes into the sea.  Everyone survives, and exits the plane with their life vest.






Someone says, “If over half of us turn our life vests into a raft, it can save everyone without a life vest!  Otherwise, we’ll drown!”






Everyone has a life vest.






Everyone wearing a life vest will not drown.






Do you build the boat, or just put on your vest?




And yet, large amounts of people still support blue (taking your life vests off to build a raft). The fact that such people get to vote (and make up a majority of at least this twitter poll) is a fucking scary thought. This is why we can't have nice things people!


</rant over>


In more encouraging news rdrama.net also ran this poll here: https://rdrama.net/h/polls/post/196874/are-you-effective-altruist-enough-to . Fortunately people there were sensible enough to vote for Red by a 90-10 margin, which is basically everyone once you discount the ultra-edgy maximally contrarian nodule on the site ("I want to die, so I pick blue") which will always vote to pick the maximally dramatic option (which on the site would be Blue).


I'd be interested in trying this out here on the Motte too, but unfortunately we don't have poll functionality on this site...


&&Blue Pill&&


&&Red Pill&&


EDIT:


For people who say "Blue" is the right choice for pro-social reasons:


Consider a slightly changed version of the poll where instead of choosing for yourself whether you have Red/Blue you are making this choice for a random stranger who's also taking part (and in turn some other random stranger is making the choice for you). In this case it makes sense from a selfish perspective to choose Blue for that random stranger, since there's a chance that the person choosing for you chooses Blue for you as well in which case you'd want 50%+ Blue as you want to live, while from an altruistic perspective it makes sense to choose "Red" for your stranger, since that way you're saving them from potentially dying.


In this case we'd expect everyone to end up choosing Blue if they play rationally, even though the "altruistic" pro-social option is to choose Red. If you still think that everyone should choose Blue then you agree that there are cases where the non-(pro-social) thing is the right thing to do.


If you say that in this case we should each of us now choose Red as that's the socially good option then since people generally value their own life at least as much as the life of a stranger (note: I say "at least as much", not "more" here) you must also agree that it's just as fine for people to choose "Red" in the case where they're deciding for themselves instead of a stranger.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Nominal determinism strikes again.




Now I want her to win the case on pure cosmic hilarity grounds. Imagine a woman named "Robbin' Europe" pilfering over $10 million from a bunch of whites because of some made up racial discrimination BS. This is so good that if this stands it's going to be one of my main examples of Nominative determinism alongside lawyer Sue Yu and that incontinence research paper by Splatt and Weedon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
*ding* *ding* *ding*


Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, is out. Yep, it's true, absolutely not Fake and Gay. No Gay here, no siree...




Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.




...




Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.




Even the Harvard Crimson, which is about as institutional-woke aligned as you can get pulls no punches in its article. She really seems to have completely fallen from the graces of the powers that be in academia. The plagierism allegations aren't new either, they've been going around for a year at this point, but it looks like they only really started to matter when she put a mark on herself and the sharks smelled blood.


Before that point they were just ignored and the general fishiness around her dates back to the early 2000s. This means that Harvard did not care about the allegations when they were appointing her to the presidency (just 6 months ago, when these allegations were all out there), but only started to care once she became a personal liability to Harvard rather than merely an academic one. Alternatively they did care but their vetting process is so bad something so open and shut as her plagierism passed through undetected. Either way it looks really bad. A pox on Harvard!


On a more cynical note I admit to being personally surprised by this, of all three presidents she was the one I expected the least to get deposed even though Sally Kornbluth, the MIT president came across as by far the most consistent and reasonable person at the hearing (she didn't do that well either, but it wasn't a car crash at least).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is the new zoomer take on that old saw about sleeping under bridges.




That old saw was absolutely correct. We ban sleeping under bridges because it imposes a cost on society, and a rich person sleeping under a bridge imposes the same cost on society that a poor person sleeping under a bridge does hence doing so is banned for everyone.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The case here wasn't an introduction. The dude had known the girl and was friendly with her for a long time. He we told by society to be fully open and honest about his intentions with women and when he did this was lambasted for it. Totally predictable and the dude made a mistake believing what society says rather than seeing what society does, but this discrepancy is very much real. I hope he takes this as a learning lesson.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If you like lobster, you already eat "bugs".




Lobsters are crustaceans while "bugs" is usually used to refer to insects (Insecta) - not even allowing for the fact that true bugs (Hemiptera) make up an even smaller order. Crustaceans aren't even that close to insects phylogenetically, things like springtails are a lot closer to insects than them.


Otherwise yeah I agree completely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.




The best poker players in the world are now robots, they play online, have zero idea about reading other people or how to manipulate/navigate around them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Each year millions of people willingly uproot themselves to go to a different country in search of better economic wealth etc, and those who have potential manage to achieve it to varying degrees. India is extremely poor, Indian Americans are very rich, high human capital Indians when placed in an environment conducive to generating wealth do extremely well. Australian aboriginals don't, e.g. Australian aboriginals in large cities don't do paticularly well compared to the median inhabitants of those cities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On giving parents votes for their children


One idea that people here have mentioned a couple of times has been to give parents a vote for each underage child they have. The more I think about it, the better this proposal seems, and not only just that, but almost everyone, no matter where they are on the political spectrum should find something in it they support.


Firstly on the logistics front this is very simple to implement. We already have a database of who is the legal parent of who, and whether or not they are emancipated from their parents. Every non-emancipated child's parents get a ballot paper in a different colour to the standard one (say a green ballot paper vs white for adults) which is worth half of a normal vote. So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots. If you have 4 children you are legally the parent of (and responsible for), then you get 1 white and 4 green ballots every election, totally to 3 full votes. Any emancipated children get their full vote, as they are already considered adults for many other things.


This method removes the argument that children shouldn't get a vote because they aren't well developed enough to choose themselves what they want. We already trust parents to act in their child's best interest for many things, asking parents to vote for them as well isn't much of a stretch beyond this. It also rewards parents for sticking with their children and raising them well, as you only get to vote on their behalf if you accept responsibility for them.


The consequences of such a policy would be very positive. Firstly the greater political power handed to parents over non-parents would lead to policies favouring those with children, which would help increase the abysmal birth rates of many western countries as having a child becomes more beneficial/less of a burden. Parents are generally considered as having more stake in the long term future of society too, so giving greater political power to them would shift society towards more long term thinking too, which is sorely lacking at the moment.


Parents tend to be more conservative than childless people, controlling for all the usual factors. Giving them extra voting power would almost certainly shift the Overton window rightwards. Expect to see greater focus on tackling crime, nicer neighbourhoods and better schools if such a policy comes to pass.


At the moment the age of the median voter is significantly higher than the average age of the population as whole. This leads to greater emphasis being placed on the concerns of the old disproportionately, see for example the UK where attacking the entitlements of the old (pensions, high house prices etc.) is effectively a no-go area, as whichever party does this is certain to take a drubbing at the next election. Giving children the vote via their parents would fix this issue, the age of the median voter (controlled for vote power) would come down a fair bit, thus shifting political focus away from the concerns of the old towards the concerns of those of childbearing age.


Equally at the moment in many western countries due to demographic differences in age cohorts minorities have significantly less voting power than you would expect given their share of the population. This is due to minorities being disproportionately minors (pun not intended) who don't get the vote. Thus current political focus is disproportionately focused on placating whites. Such a change would hand  more power to minorities in the country allowing them to push for policies that are best for themselves and their children, rather than just what white progressives say are best for themselves and their children. Doing this basically just pushes the voting demographics of a country forward by 18 years, it's going to happen anyways, might as well just accept it now even if you are white.


And children themselves probably benefit the most from such a policy. Parents generally put great emphasis on giving the best possible start to their children, and many already vote accordingly to what they believe is going to be best for them. Amplifying their voices relative to the childless will probably lead to these children entering a world more suited for them when they reach adulthood than presently.


Basically no matter whether you are conservative or liberal, white or a minority, young or old, giving votes to the parents of children is a policy that has something to offer you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
She can very easily get a partner without resorting to such artifaces, all she has to do is be realistic about what her value as a 36 year old woman like her is. The odds of that happening though, even for a rationalist woman, aren't particularly good.


Once again this isn't all (or even mostly) her fault, but rather it is a fault of the society and milleu she lives in that her (inflated) hopes and dreams are about to go splat on the ground and this is one final desperate attempt from a struggling soul to avert doom.


They say that disappointment is caused by the difference in expectations vs reality, and by sending expectations for middle aged women to the moon without doing anything to change the reality on the ground modern Western culture claims for itself another victim.


What she is able to get and keep lies on a cline between the 21 year old incel and the 60 year old functioning alcoholic, the time to find a long term partner was 10 years ago for her. Had she been told at 26 that if she left it until 36 she'd only be able to get the dregs of society to commit to her there is a very good chance that she'd be happily married today. Instead her society which looks down on inflicting short term pain for long term gain has now condemned her to far greater suffering, probably for the rest of her life.


I've learned to phase out and stop caring about such cases, much as we've all phased out to the massive hunger and suffering going on right now in Africa.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, it's extremely weird that Google et. al. went on hiring sprees when they could have just given their employees next level money. All those weird side projects that haemorraged money led to lower return on capital employed, which pisses off investors (even more than not giving them fat dividends does) and also pisses off your employes compared to the counterfactual where they would get millions a year.


Funnily enough I was recently talking to a (leftier than me) friend of mine who didn't know that all the big famous investment banks were public companies and that anyone could buy their shares.


After I told him he was extremely surprised by this fact and opined that they must be an excellent way to make money only to be brought down back to earth after I told him that in reality they were really shitty investments because all that money they made went to their employees as salaries and bonuses, leaving their public investors with mediocre returns.


He said something along the lines of "Of course this happens, typical greedy banker behaviour". Because I value this friendship I wisely left it at that and changed the subject, but deep down a part of me wanted to quip "Firstly you complain about big companies putting investors ahead of their employees and how this makes them capital-B Bad/greedy, and now here you have an example of a class of companies which do the opposite and put their employees ahead of their investors and now you are calling them capital-B Bad and greedy for this behaviour? Make up your mind man!"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


With an added bonus that if it proves too hard to return the money, one could just tell the Jews to take a hike




And then those same gentiles would be crying about why the Jews were charging them such high rates of interest, I know that "counterparty risk" was not a term at that time but this is just common sense.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I am very anti cancellation and don't like what happened here but in the end am not particularly bothered by it.


Your comment reminded me of this quote from Dune:


"When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles"


The way to deal with such "people" is to treat them according to their own principles even when you have power. I know it doesn't apply strictly but it's just "Paradox of tolerance and all that shit" the way leftists use it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The UK's lack of a proper percentage based tax on housing has systematically inflated property values during the last decade


People often mention that UK property is severely overpriced relative to the US (actually the whole developed world) in what you get for your dollar. The same house which in the US might go for $500,000 in a medium sized city would be around £1,000,000 here in a similar location. Indeed this discrepancy has only increased with the low interest rate environment of (most of) the last 15 years.


People attribute this to the British's affinity for bricks and mortar over investing in companies and while I agree that plays a part (see the reverse in the US where the exact same Ryanair share trades at a 30% premium in the US over its European counterpart) I think the discrepancy in pricing can be in large part explained by a lack of a proper property tax.


Unlike the US where middle class people living in average houses in NYC pay $10,000+ a year in property tax, in the UK we have a highly regressive "council tax" system which means a £20M+ mansion in London pays just 3x what a one bed hovel in Blackpool does. This means that the costs of holding UK residential property are effectively nil compared to their US counterparts. Indeed (assuming a 1% yearly property tax rate in the US) we can model a UK property (which pays effectively no tax) as being a US property (which pays 1% tax yearly) plus an asset that generates revenue equal to 1% of the property price.


The 50 year yield of UK gilts at the moment is 3.5%. This means for a £1,000,000 property which would pay £10,000 yearly tax at a 1% rate, we would need to invest £285,000 in gilts to raise this money on a yearly basis. Hence the value of the corresponding US property with a 1% tax would be £1,000,000-£285,000 = £715,000 which doesn't explain the full discrepancy in pricing compared to US property values but does halve the difference.


This model of (UK property) = (US property)+(gilt/treasury generating tax on property) also explains why UK properties went up so much more during the low interest rate environments and are struggling more now given that rates have gone up. When interest rates were low the value of the gilt which generated revenue equal to a 1% tax on the property went up through the roof. Hence UK property prices shot up even though there was little difference in the fundamentals of the brick/mortar or even location (UK performed significantly worse as an economy from 2008-now compared to the US).


Equally now that interest rates are going up, the value of the additional gilt is being significantly reduced. With yields at 2% the value of the gilt itself would be £500,000 while at 3.5% the gilt is £285,000 so the gilt loses 40% of its value, which would correspond to a 20% fall in the value of the whole UK property itself. Just this simple financial model would seem to suggest UK properties prices have yet to fall a fair bit back to their new true value.


On the policy front this is an argument for having a property tax. Low interest rate environments allow growth by making money cheap for businesses to open new ventures etc., however one negative side effect of them is that they lead to rising residential property prices (due to more money floating around which raises asset prices) which can make buying a home difficult for ordinary people. Writing (US property) = (UK property)-(gilt generating tax on property) we see that in an environment with property taxes lowering rates doesn't raise prices anywhere near as much: yes people are willing to pay more for the bricks and mortar/location, but the value of the gilt you are subtracting has also gone up substantially. This helps keep home prices cheap for buyers and allows them to achieve economic prosperity more easily.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Meanwhile, my beautiful ex-VP (boss) got bored of promiscuity at 32, found herself a handsome 40 year old MD at another bank who was similarly tired of being a lothario, and settled down. They have a mansion on an island in Greece now, and two kids.




This is perfectly fine for the two of them, and I hope they are happy. Both of them are from a background where they have the social safety net to accommodate it when things go wrong. From a personal point of view for themselves both of them took the utility maximising option and that's OK.


However such actions have a societal negative externality. Firstly from all the other people they slept with who might have wanted to settle down and got their heart broken, those people suffered a negative hit to their utility. But in the grand scheme of things it's comparatively minor compared to the other negative externality they generate (people get their heart broken all the time, it's no big deal). Namely that humans are a monkey see monkey do species and we've completely dispensed with "do as I say, not as I do" even when it's better for people to "do as I say" and this promiscuity leading to a happy ending sends the lower classes a message that yes, they too, can sleep around and still do well for themselves in the end.


Naturally when the lower classes do so they are forced to face the pointy end of the stick your VP/MD pair had the looks/money to cushion away completely. This leads to significantly worse long term outcomes for them compared to if they had just been chaste, found a decent partner (note: decent, not perfect) and committed to life with them, come hell or high water.


At the moment it's considered vulgar for people to really point out that this marriage was successful despite the early promiscuity because there was "buy a mansion on a Greek island" level money standing behind it. Instead social messaging is that sleeping around has literally 0 effect on long term outcomes for (effectively) everyone. This just leads to people trying the promiscuity without the Greek island mansion money and getting burned. No different to a society where people with parachutes jump from airplanes all the time and enjoy the experience and encourage others to do so too because it is fun but its considered déclassé to mention the necessity of the parachute for this act because some people can't afford one. In such a society a lot of people who aren't smart enough to work out the criticality of the parachute but follow the social messaging end up going splat on the ground completely unnecessarily. The same is happening in modern western society.


The way we deal with negative externalities is to discourage them at a governmental/societal level via Pigouvian taxes, social shaming and awareness campaigns. However modern western society seems loathe to admit that there even exists a negative externality in this case despite the statistical mountain of evidence showing it primarily harms the poorest, the exact same group they profess to try and help the most. They say that the first step towards fixing a problem is admitting you have it. Until society openly accepts that we have a problem millions of people each year will continue to go SPLAT!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Titania Invicta




NGL that's a really badass name.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ah, I thought that joke is a bit played, didn't even notice that, and anyways if you want to play with that concept rdrama has me beat with:


Harvard Forcibly Outs Gay


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh I think Scott can still push out bangers when he wants to, his fiction is still just as good, it's more he doesn't want to agitate the powers that be much more, which makes sense once your public name is out there.