ChestertonsMeme
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
1yr 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
7mo 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
11mo 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
29d 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
2mo 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
1yr 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.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
This is awesome! I'm looking forward to the volunteering feature. Thanks Zorba for your hard work shepherding this community.
I've worked on similar product features at big tech companies, and my instinct is that there are some easy-ish things that could be done with the data already available (upvotes, reports). One idea (similar to what @you-get-an-upvote suggested below, as well as others; it's not an original idea) is to train a recommender system or a statistical model to predict how each user will vote on each comment. Then the default behavior for sorting and auto-collapsing could use the recommendations to the moderators, representing the "community" recommendations. The model would learn how predictive each user's voting is of the moderators' votes and actions, and could even have negative valence ("this troll upvoting something means the moderators will downvote it"). Your own personal recommendations could also be available if you want to see The Motte as you wish it was moderated.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
In the short term, society could stop wasting money and effort on policies that don't work and that make society less efficient. Humanity would be richer and better off without these drains on output.
In the longer term, making HBD common knowledge would (could?) lead to differences in values. In particular, it would be seen as relatively good for a competent person to have children, and relatively bad for an incompetent person to have children. This would produce a kind of crowd-sourced eugenics pressure, in that people's everyday choices in who to value and who not to would affect people's dating choices, their policy preferences, how they allocate status to others. My hope is that it would change the culture enough to improve humanity's genetic trajectory.
ChestertonsMeme
7mo ago
Small Costs, Widely Distributed
Often when someone is making a policy argument, they will ignore the costs or downsides to their preferred policy. This is of course quite normal as part of persuasion and rhetoric, but I want to draw attention to a few examples of this where the arguer at least ought to make an attempt at neutrality.
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Alcohol consumption: Public health officials look just at health outcomes, which are sometimes negative. But alcohol has clear benefits to the drinker (as /u/Difficult_Ad_3879 mentions). Even beyond the personal happiness derived from drinking, it is socially useful as a costly signal proving trustworthiness1. If a social group or an organization can use alcohol as a tool for establishing the trustworthiness of its members, it can reduce internal transaction costs since members don't have to monitor each other as much. This increases economic efficiency. How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
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Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.
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Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.
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How suburban sprawl hurts the poor: This Vox article summarizes the sentiment that suburban sprawl is bad because it makes it harder for poor people to get around. And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around3. I'm not talking strictly about dry metrics like crime rate either; at a more basic level, the qualities that cause a person to be poor basically mean they don't produce as much value from their life as richer people do. As a consequence it's not as valuable to have such peope in one's community as it is to have more competent and value-producing people who tend to be richer. The zoning restrictions and bad public transit are just people expressing their preferences to be around people who are more worth being around.
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Traffic safety and value of time: The discourse around traffic safety almost always ignores people's time and life value in the calculus. Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes). That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger. So for my family we're losing expected life-years due to the road diet. Potentially even worse is the effect of car seats. Anyone who has had small kids in their life knows how much difficulty car seats add to the logistics of your life. They're gigantic (good luck having three kids if you have a sedan) and any time someone else could help carry a child somewhere in their car they have to have a car seat available on every leg. This actually figures into potential parents' choices and causes some people, on the margin, to not have a child. Someone did the math4, and the loss in children born due to the car seat requirement is about 140x times greater than the children's lives saved due to the extra safety.
One theme here is that the unmentioned costs of policy positions tend to be diffused across large numbers of people, while the benefits tend to be concentrated.
Another theme, maybe more important, is that opponents tend to not want to bring up the costs because they're socially undesirable things to talk about, even if they have significant real-world effects. A really strong theme here is that the unmentioned costs apply to higher-status people, while the benefits to the proposed changes apply to lower-status people. This applies to alcohol, trans recognition, and suburban sprawl (and maybe not induced traffic demand).
Notes:
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1Between cheap and costly signals: the evolution of partially honest communication
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2Induced Demand Threads
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There were several more threads on the topic of cars, urbanism, YIMBYs, and induced demand which I can't find anymore. I think Zorba posted at some point about getting access to more land area through highways.
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4Car Seats as Contraception. Quote from the abstract: "We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980".
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
I'm surprised at the poor security practices of the people involved. Especially for a big organization, they could hire anyone passingly familiar with infosec to tell leadership not to send incriminating things via SMS. Same goes for the Biden family with that laptop. These are easily avoided situations.
You know, these are examples where the interests of elites (at least, specific elites) are aligned with the digital privacy/anti-surveillance movement. Another is ElonJetTracker. To date this topic hasn't been very politicized along the left-right axis. I wonder if one of the parties will pick it up as a wedge issue?
ChestertonsMeme
1mo ago
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
Doing the math, you're responsible for 26 minutes of each casualty's life. Pretty okay trade for advancing humanity's knowledge about what policies are effective.
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
This seems like dangerous game to play. Biden could be easily disqualified from office by a sympathetic medical authority declaring him mentally unsound. Are we going to end up with future presidential elections determined by red and blue states' courts competing to eliminate the opposition from their ballots?
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
congestion pricing is very good (99.5%)
What do you mean by "very good?" The objections I've heard from left-ish friends is that it prioritizes rich people, which is both true and also exactly the point. People whose time is worth more don't have to waste as much of it in traffic, and in turn everyone else in the city gets their taxes offset a bit. Deciding whether this is good or not depends entirely on how the good is measured. How would you measure it?
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
It also doesn't appear in the first ~10 pages of DuckDuckGo.
This kind of thing makes me a bit paranoid. We're focusing on a topic that we already know about - how many other topics are there where search engines have their thumb on the scale hiding contrary takes?
There are news aggregators that compare how a story is covered in left-wing vs. right-wing newspapers. I'd like to see the same thing for search engines, especially comparing against results from different countries with different dominant narratives.
ChestertonsMeme
10mo ago
I've been reading the Gulag Archipelago, and despite the depressing tone are some funny lines:
An indignant moralizer insulting someone: "Up yours, and stand still for it too!"
Solzhenitsyn's dark humor at work: "All these parties—the SR’s, the Mensheviks, the An- archists, the Popular Socialists—had for decades only pretended to be revolutionaries; they had worn socialism only as a mask, and for that they went to hard labor, still pretending."
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
Wow, that is surprising!
Lickly literally promoted his own fiancee to the position he was leaving behind, and half a century later, not only we never hear about Dan Lickly (say his name to not forget)
Indeed, her Wikipedia article doesn't mention Lickly at all except as her spouse.
Thanks for such an informative post.
ChestertonsMeme
7mo ago
One reason for special licensing is to make it easier to prevent truck drivers from engaging in law-breaking arbitrage. Speeding to make delivery times, not sleeping, etc. Once someone is doing something for money there is that extra incentive to break laws. You can see the same thing with Uber - as soon as people started driving for money, there were suddenly a lot more violations of no-stopping zones, transit lanes, parking in bike lanes, etc.
ChestertonsMeme
8mo ago
The author makes a good point but there's something they're missing. The way I would put it is that walking or biking are low-status activities in many places by design. This comment from HN puts it well:
Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there.
The contempt in the design is, I think, on purpose. Perhaps not explicitly, in a saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud way, but it's a very important implicit goal that I'm sure planners understand. Constituents know that accessible public transport and cheap housing within pleasant walking distance to amenities will lead to people taking advantage of those things. People the constituents don't want around.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that all of the negative aspects of American (sub)urban design post-1950 are basically compensation for not being able to exclude undesirables explicitly.
- Car-dependence excludes poor people. The above article illustrates one facet of this, making walking low-status.
- Zoning codes exclude poor people. Houses must be a certain size, putting a price floor on them and pricing poor people out. Housing must be far from stores, forcing car dependence.
- HOA rules about renting exclude people who aren't conscientious. People who can't hold a steady job in one place, people in and out of prison, people who don't have the credit history to get a mortgage, just can't live in HOA-controlled neighborhoods.
The trouble is, of course, that poor feckless criminals are in fact bad for a neighborhood. If you'd like an extreme example, here's a video of Philadelphia. Would you want to take a walk or ride a bike there? There are wide accessible sidewalks, lots of bike lanes, tons of public transit, and high density. What's not to love?
It's clear that higher density and less car-dependence would be more efficient in some senses: less fossil fuel consumption, less time wasted commuting, and less land consumed by development, for example. It's also clear that there is value in excluding certain people from public spaces. In the extreme, if violent felons are allowed free reign, society as we know it couldn't function. In the less extreme, being less exclusive means more low-level harassment and petty crime and fewer positive-sum interactions among people. Exclusivity eventually reaches diminishing returns, but there's clearly some level at which excluding people is worth it.
Figuring out the right policies that maximize utility between these competing concerns requires taking a hard look at why basically anything is valuable. Why do fossil fuels and carbon emissions matter? Why does it matter whether vulnerable people can walk safely outside at night? As EAs have discovered over and over, people do not in general try to maximize utility. Most day-to-day decisions related to topics like this are for status signaling. Everyone wants their own lifestyle to be the one treated with dignity and privilege.
The problem with the built environment treating pedestrians with dignity is making sure it doesn't assign inappropriate dignity or status to the wrong people. Any system that assigns inappropriate status is going to be instinctively rejected by voters. If everyone is expected to walk and take public transit, there still must be practical ways for average-status people to exclude low-status people and to differentiate themselves from them. One way would be to use exclusive transit (think corporate shuttles). Make the public transit slow and impractical. Or make transit expensive, especially as a high fixed cost imposing a barrier to entry to non-conscientious people (a $500/year membership, but ride free). It's much harder to make pedestrian facilities exclusive without authoritarian policing such as curfews and id checks. To be practical it has to be combined with measures that make it hard to get to the walkable area in the first place.
Assigning inappropriate dignity and status is the core of the problem with many urbanist ideas, this included.
Thanks for sharing these. I've read your earlier writing and found it very good - you explain very well ideas that I'm sure many people who are intellectually honest have every time trans topics come up.
Saying "peace be unto him" is indeed a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it would be bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes. The function of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's why the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone say it: it's a lot harder for atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to talk like an atheist.
And that's why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to talk like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender identity does not.
This has made me rethink how willing I am to "be polite" about pronouns and trans identity. It really is a kind of lie to put someone or something into a category that doesn't correlate with their characteristics. Making it harder for a truthful worldview to spread seems like low-grade evil. "Complicity" in the language of the day.
Edit: I tried to finish the article but it is LONG. I have to sleep for my health (I'm sure you can relate). Can I suggest using an editor (whether human or AI) to condense your work?
ChestertonsMeme
11mo ago
Looking for reading recommendations on social status and group formation.
Some claims along the lines of what I'm looking for (arguments or evidence for or against these claims):
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Social status basically is a person's value to a group.
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Different groups can value someone differently, so there's not necessarily a notion of 'true' or global social status.
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It's forbidden (or at least, low-status) to talk about status explicitly.
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People can prove their high status by being magnanimous towards lowly people. Someone of lower status faces more of a threat from the next rung down so they can't safely praise lowly people.
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People who are more productive (in ways the group cares about) have higher status.
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People whose roles relate to the sacred (doctors for example, who save lives, which are sacred) have higher status.
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The sacred is a big part of what forms group identity, differentiates in-group vs. out-group members, and helps groups persist over time.
I'm particularly looking for books or essays that frame these things in terms of game theory or economics. "Sociology for systematizers" if you will.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
This question is mostly aimed at @wlxd based on this comment but maybe someone else also knows the history. What was Margaret Hamilton's actual contribution to the Apollo guidance computer code?
She's famous now for being the "lead software engineer of the Apollo project," which seems like a stretch based on most biographical summaries available on the web. Nasa credits her as "leader of the team that developed the flight software for the agency's Apollo missions" which is consistent with "lead software engineer for the Apollo project" but could be disingenuous depending on her tenure and contributions on the team. But @wxld made a strong claim: "What is less commonly known is that she joined that team as the most junior member, and only became a lead after the code had already been written, and the actual leads (whose names, ironically, basically nobody knows today) have moved on to more important projects."
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.
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.
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.
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