ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
No bio...
User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
Isn't that exactly the study Scott commented on? Those freed before the war (possibly due to factors particular to themselves as GP mentioned) are doing better today than those freed slightly later by external factors (the war).
I've got to nitpick though - I think you did the thing you're complaining about! (Although I may be misunderstanding, correct me if I am.)
Yes, you're right - I was trying to highlight the costs that are usually missed; the pedestrian and cyclist lives saved is the front-and-center reason for road diets in the first place so I didn't want to waste space mentioning them.
I would note that good cycling infrastructure induces demand for cycling and that cycling is way more enjoyable than driving when we're talking about short distances at low speeds.
I actually ride a bike to work and my commute is the best part of my day. It's my kids that have to sit in the car those extra two minutes, and their commute is too far to make by bike so they can't take advantage of the extra cycling infrastructure.
The two road diets along my kids' commute are both examples where the city didn't seem to do a cost/benefit analysis and ended up with poor choices for where to do the road diet. In both cases there is already a dedicated bike path nearby that the vast majority of cyclists use to pass through that neighborhood. The new bike lanes only help cyclists that are heading somewhere local. There's good enough access from the dedicated trails that you only need to go one or two blocks on streets, so this doesn't even help much.
Before long, this becomes pretty recursive and we have to admit that this isn't about the numbers, but about a preference for living in a certain sort of place.
There are ways to put numbers on preferences like this. Metrics like walkability scores are a good start. I think what would fall out of a comprehensive adding up of numbers is that clusters of walkability/bikeability with nice local environments (sidewalk trees, street cafes, parks, etc.) and high-ish density are good, and easy travel between such clusters is good (including travel in personal cars because of their convenience). The road diets I mentioned were built in an area that isn't clearly in either category - there is a lot of vehicular through traffic but there are also businesses along the streets, kind of like a low-speed stroad. A better solution (from me as an arm-chair city planner) would have been to push the business district to the adjacent blocks and add any helpful cycling infrastructure there, and leave the through street with more traffic lanes. The through street cannot be moved because of geography. This solution would make for even nicer cycling (no loud traffic passing) and it would reduce trip times for people who have to drive. Cyclists traveling outside the neighborhood already use the aforementioned separate bike path so that's not a concern.
(This is the point at which someone could object that "push the business district to adjacent blocks" has costs for people living nearby which have to be weighed against these other things. Yes, and those should be accounted for too).
I think at least part of the reason for the city to build road diets like this is more of a moral stance against cars. The city is basically taxing driving, making it more unpleasant and time-wasting because the city does not want people driving personal cars. The opponents of bike lanes and road diets refer to this as a "war on cars" and I think there's truth to it. But it's okay to wage a war on car use if it's actually bad! To tell whether it's bad, though, you have to consider all the tradeoffs.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
And after it expands globally to take over 100% of the entire market for left-handed grape peelers in every nation of the earth, what then? How can it continue to grow?
As GP said:
Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency.
Company F figures out how to manufacture left-handed grape peelers more cheaply, or makes them last longer, or makes them work better, or invents a machine that peels grapes that both left- and right-handed people can use. Or someone else invents a better grape, so the value of grape peelers to people goes up, and more people buy them on the margin. Markets aren't static.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.
The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.
I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).
There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.
Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.
By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.
Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.
I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.
Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.
The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?
P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
To apply @BurdensomeCountTheWhite's argument to these situations, the Chinese and Romans would have to establish their rule by force and maintain order. Then they could be judged as least-worst among all the other contenders based on how beneficial the pax China/Romana was. If the subjugated peoples are considering revolt then the rulers haven't done their job yet.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Every month, there is exactly one weekday that is always a multiple of 7. This August it's Mondays. Neat!
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
A heat pump is just air conditioning run in reverse. I got one installed last year and it's been great. It's quiet, pretty cheap so far (although I haven't gone a full winter with it yet), and it also does cooling. You need some backup system for when it's really cold, as it doesn't work very well below 25° or so. Mine has a built in gas burner but many just use resistive heating elements.
The reason I wanted one is that it's efficient and it uses electricity. I don't want to be subject to market fluctuations in oil prices or to fuel taxes. Where I live electricity is mostly hydro and doesn't vary much in price. For your situation the numbers might be different, and it's worth doing the math or looking up statistics for other households in the area.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
You can get groceries delivered. This realization eliminated a big time sink and stressor from my family life.
Is quiet important to your family? When my wife and I were house hunting there were large sections of the city that were intolerable because of traffic noise. Conversely, if you don't care about noise you can get a cheaper/better place by tolerating some.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
Inching closer to the eradication of financial privacy
FinCEN has new rules taking effect over the next year and a half that require basically all companies to disclose the "beneficial owners".
The rule will require most corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities created in or registered to do business in the United States to report information about their beneficial owners—the persons who ultimately own or control the company, to FinCEN. Designed to protect U.S. national security and strengthen the integrity and transparency of the U.S. financial system, the rule will help to stop criminal actors, including oligarchs, kleptocrats, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and those who would use anonymous shell companies to hide their illicit proceeds.
I won't quote the whole thing but it's a short and easy read.
This statement is a bit disturbing:
FinCEN will engage in additional rulemakings to: (1) establish rules for who may access beneficial ownership information, for what purposes, and what safeguards will be required to ensure that the information is secured and protected [...]
This provides another avenue for rogue members of institutions to leak private information to hurt people they don't like. Depending on the rules that ultimately come out, this avenue could be very wide, especially since there is often discretion over when to enforce the rules.
My revulsion to these rules goes beyond the erosion of privacy, though. It should be possible to be a citizen of a place without exposing your entire life to the mercy of its government. You can't avoid being at its physical mercy when you're within its territory, but you can leave now and then. The way financial rules work in the U.S., you have to report and pay taxes on all finances, even work and investments in other countries. You also have to pay taxes on income that doesn't affect anybody else (income you haven't spent). With these new rules, you might have to pay a reputational tax when wealth you were keeping private gets exposed. I would much prefer citizenship or investment in a place to be like membership in a club - you're judged by your behavior at club events, not by your life outside it.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
The solution to violent crime is easy: incapacitate criminals. The hardcore crackdown on violent crime that does not take away pro-social people's guns is possible right now in most places but doesn't happen, I think largely because of prosecutorial discretion by progressive prosecutors. Maybe the solution is something out of left field like allowing any citizen to press charges, in the same way that civil rights law works. Take the discretion away from public officials.
I am much more of a 2nd Amendment maximalist (private fighter jets? Yes.). However, I think the real goal of preventing tyranny can't be achieved by the 2nd amendment alone, as you've argued. What must be possible is alternate centers of power and the real possibility of them becoming autonomous, of seceding from the authority of the federal government. What would make alternative centers of power a more realistic possibility is making self-determination an explicit right. It should be one of the unenumerated rights that the founders didn't think necessary to put in the Constitution, but the modern interpretation of rights (at least post-1860) requires listing it explicitly. I'm not sure whether it needs to be about secession specifically vs. a more generic right to self-determination, but the specter of the federal fist coming down on any group that wants to go their own way makes it practically impossible without the right to do so.
If there was a right to self-determination or secession, then the threat of a group leaving the union would force the federal government to accommodate individual groups more. As things are, tyranny of the majority keeps ratcheting up.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
If environmental racism causes decreased intelligence, then people affected actually have decreased intelligence. But progressives deny this conclusion.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
I doubt most respondents are taking the question at face value. Social desirability bias is very strong, especially when the question is just hypothetical. Put the respondents in a real situation and they will choose very differently.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
What does ODC stand for?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
I think the better answer is to deny (1), that all information which is instrumentally useful is therefore morally permissible to act on.
Yes, this is the stance that I take. I think it's very uncomfortable for many people, though, because it implies that there is a cost to non-discrimination. You (the general you) will be making poorer choices because you can't take advantage of all the available information.
This is related to Robin Hanson's recent ideas about the sacred, specifically that sacred things cannot be traded off against non-sacred things. Non-discrimination is sacred. Admitting that there is a cost to it is profane and suggests there would be circumstances in which it was permissible to immorally discriminate when the cost of non-discrimination is too high.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
I don't have time to watch the whole Friedman lecture but his first few examples are about market failures, which is a slightly different topic to what I was getting at. What I was trying to express (and didn't do a great job of) was that in discussions of policies, there are often costs that are not mentioned so we never get a full cost/benefit comparison. The specific examples are just examples of the "missing" costs and I wasn't trying to do a full accounting of all the costs/benefits in each example.
First, I think your math is wildly off.
I used expected life-years lost for driving 5 miles, which is approximately 1.46/100m * (5 miles) * (50 years of life left), which multiplies to about 2 minutes. Urban driving reduces that by about half, so it really should be about 1 minute. The specific numbers are not important though; the public conversation was only ever about Vision Zero rather than trip times.
If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time
Also true! But the numbers matter. I don't think there are a lot of people in my neighborhood whose behavior will be changed by these particular road diets - as I mentioned downthread, there is already a dedicated bike path a block away, and also the neighborhood is hilly, which is a non-starter for most people to bike. I will state that in a full cost-benefit accounting, the road diet might make sense. No one did that analysis though; it was all one-sided statistics and aesthetic judgments.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't.
While I'm not a fan of HR, this characterization is not correct. Why would companies keep HR employees on the payroll at any time if they weren't providing value? What's happening now is companies are expecting not to hire much in the next ~year so they're cutting employees that help hire people -- HR and recruiters.
I suppose if you take a wider view, the HR roles are a way for society to feed people who aren't producing anything, and companies are coerced into participating in the farce by employment laws that require compliance. It's similar to police: they don't produce anything; they're just there to ensure compliance. The difference is that police stop crimes that are actually harmful, while HR stops implicit witchery.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
23d ago
Those things are all bad in the same way that prostitution is, just less so. I'd add to the list: giving resources without even getting sex (simping), consumption of pornography, and divorce are all degenerate forms of relationships that in the ideal would be marriage.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
California must stand on the right side of history.
I'm surprised to see this expression used unironically. How does future consensus opinion make an act morally right? But I suppose it's consistent with the idea that past actions can be judged by current moral standards.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
There are many domains where hidden motives could make for a fun and educational experience.
- College admissions. You have to craft a student body that maximizes the prestige of the university, using only policies that ostensibly achieve other more laudable goals.
- Corporate hiring (similar to college admissions).
- Sims but you're graded on your people's social status. Choices have to have plausible deniability. If your subject doesn't claim to find driving fun, you can't give them a Ferrari without a status penalty for being a phoney or nouveau riche. (I don't play The Sims so for all I know it already works this way.)
There is a lot of opportunity in well trodden game types to introduce new targets or mechanisms.
- Urban planning. People are unhappy if they live close to much richer people and feel envious every day. You have to minimize the local Gini coefficient across the whole city. Using policies with plausible deniability of course.
- Traffic design that minimizes envy and resentment. Different modes getting privileges (e.g. a lone bicyclist getting a green light ahead of 50 cars) makes people unhappy.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
I am continually astonished by the cruelty of other people, often practiced under the pretense of standing up to bullies.
Could you give some examples? This sounds similar to Jonathan Haidt's ideas in The Coddling of the American Mind (safetyism, call-out culture, etc.) but it could also be completely different.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
I have close experience with several children who were homeschooled for a while and it did not go well, mainly because the homeschool teachers in these cases weren't on top of things. If your wife (whom I presume would be the teacher) is conscientious and organized then the academic curriculum should be easy going. As far as the curriculum, don't choose one that requires children stay "at grade level", where "grade level" is a one-size-fits-none affair.
For my own kid, I considered homeschooling them as a way to preserve their enthusiasm for learning. They can move at their own pace and learn things that are interesting to them. We haven't homeschooled (yet) mainly because their current school is really great at tailoring the curriculum to be interesting and challenging for each child. Also, there's no conscientious parent to be the teacher.
I do think the social interaction in school is important.
I am on the fence as far as whether the social interaction kids get in school is useful. School is kind of like prison, in that you're thrown in with people you don't necessarily like and you can't leave. Real life is very different; you can usually curate your social environment much more. The things you can get away with in school would get you booted (or dropped) from most social environments as an adult. And you're not necessarily learning how to be valuable, just how not to get expelled.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
This is a bit hard to parse, but I think the answer is
It would be helpful if the rules for pairings were delineated more clearly.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
What would it look like if the richer side needed the money more? Could that ever happen?
Sounds a lot like the situation with many unions. If you are the owner of a business, depending on the local laws the people who happen to work for you get a free monopoly on your labor supply if they form a union. If it's a capital-intensive business then the owner has more to lose.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr ago
I didn't mean to imply that it was language that caused consciousness. Dogs, for example, sometimes pretend to have been doing something else when they do something embarrassing, and there's no speech involved. It's more about communicating to other people (or dogs as the case may be) a plausible story that makes you look good.
Yes, this may be a correlation specific to the city in which I live, because of the way it enforces laws.
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