ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
No bio...
User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
This hypothesis is advanced in e.g. Gregory Clark's books (Farewell to Alms, The Son Also Rises) with violent European criminals being executed before they could reproduce, causing the population to become less violent and more conscientious over time. It's also mentioned in other older works (I forget the exact reference but maybe Lynn or Rushton) observing that the average IQ correlates with gracility/robustness and other traits like age at puberty.
One of the key claims in The Son Also Rises is that social status is heritable and genetic. This I think is the encompassing fact (if true). Races can have different average social status that's genetically determined, and the details of which specific traits mediate that status aren't as important.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr 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
blocking the federal fist
18d ago
AP is reporting on it now: Israel attacks Iran’s capital with explosions booming across Tehran
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr 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".
How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
Not Just Bikes has a new video out: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it). I have a love/hate relationship with urbanist essayists like this. On the one hand, they often raise issues that most of the time are not explicitly considered by most people. On the other hand, they tend to have a very leftist perspective, and ignore important costs, benefits, and solutions.
The video makes roughly the following arguments:
- If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
- Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
- Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).
Externalities
1 and 3 are similar problems. There are externalities that current laws don't address because they weren't huge problems given historical technology. Namely noise, tire pollution, and congestion. But new technology, autonomous cars, changes the costs and benefits of driving and will make these externalities much worse.
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages. Bans are the same blunt tool that current laws use to force too much parking and not enough housing and bikes lanes to be built, just in the opposite direction. But he redeems himself by proposing putting a price on driving.
If you've ever heard of Arthur Pigou, a price on driving as the solution to 1 and 3 is pretty obvious. If someone really wants to drive at 4:30pm on a Friday when everyone else in the city wants to drive too, let them pay extra to be one of the people who can actually get places. There's a limit to how many people can actually get anywhere at that time, and we might as well offer the slots to the people who get the most value from it, and get some money back for public use in return. Charging a congestion fee completely solves the problem of autonomous vehicles circling the city hoping to be closest to the next customer. They have to pay the same fee as anyone else, so they'll only be on the road if they're the highest-value use of road space.
Not Just Bikes proposes investing in "functional and viable public transit", especially in forms that are difficult to remove, presumably to be able to resist transient political pressure. Of course, any publicly-run agency is going to have a very hard time running "functional and viable" transit when compared to a selfish private organization. And there's no reason a company that makes autonomous vehicles can't make and run buses as well.
A better solution is to price road space appropriately, and be agnostic to who's using the space. This allows the highest-value uses without artificially restricting to "public" or "autonomous" uses. Offer express lanes that guarantee certain speeds by limiting the number of vehicles that can enter. The entry fee is set high enough that there aren't any queues to enter. Crucial here is that any vehicle, private or public, should be able to use the lane as long as the driver pays the fee. This allows many more solutions to transit problems, without the dysfunction of publicly-run bus agencies. For example, corporate shuttles, church buses, and private rideshares should be allowed to use the same express lanes as public buses. And if Jay Leno wants to drive his personal car in the express lane, as long as he pays the fee, let him! Same goes for autonomous vehicle makers. If they want to reserve some space on freeways for their cars, make them compete on price the same as anyone else.
Putting a market-based fee on express lanes has a side benefit of making the opportunity cost of formerly transit-only lanes more legible. A few such market-based lanes can illustrate how expensive existing transit-only lanes really are.
Public Choice
Point 2, that laws will tend to favor autonomous car makers over the public, is just a specific example of public choice being a hard problem. There are analogous situations with Big Tech and the public commons, John Deere and right-to-repair, and Big Oil and climate regulations. I don't have a lot to say here, except that this has always been a problem, in other times and places has been much worse, and is likely to be manageable. People are smart.
An Aside on Congestion and Induced Demand
This video mentions the old chestnut that (paraphrasing) induced demand means it's pointless to increase road capacity. I'll quote one of our own:
Likewise a new freeway lane immediately filling up tells us there are still more people who want to be using this freeway.
If autonomous vehicles lead to people traveling more, that's good! It means more trips are now worth taking. People are visiting friends and relatives more often, working at jobs that are farther away but are a better fit for them, and in general doing more valuable things.
Conclusion
I'd like to see more discussion of the economics of transit, and economic solutions, especially without a leftist slant. But this is the first time I've seen a popular urbanist talk about the fact that self-driving cars will increase road use and congestion. This is great! This fact should be obvious to anyone who's spent five seconds thinking about the consequences of making driving cheaper, but I haven't seen it mentioned much outside rationalist circles. This point alone makes up for any other failings in this video.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
This will be very difficult, for two major reasons:
- Government operates based on rules, while private entities operate based on performance. Your boss can fire you if you're ineffective. The government can only fire you if you don't follow the rules. It's easy to follow the rules and still be ineffective. So government relies on constructing the right rules to achieve its ends, and we don't even agree on the ends, much less the specific rules. The rules end up being byzantine tomes of regulations that no one understands. So there's tons of intractable inefficiency that cannot be addressed. Musk would have to somehow make government employment contingent on performance rather than rules.
- More importantly, efficiency requires making costs and benefits explicit and commensurable so tradeoffs can be made. People hate making money commensurable with lives, happiness, or other sacred values. Even conservatives use terms like "death panels" when this topic comes up. Any cost-cutting that comes at the expense of a few hours at the end of a few peoples' lives, or of the academic success of a few economically disadvantaged children, is going to be raised as a fatal flaw in the whole endeavor, regardless of how many billions of dollars were saved. Musk would need to sidestep this issue somehow.
My best idea for solving #2 is to give people a choice to accept a payment to forgo a government benefit. For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan. This of course is distasteful to supporters of government healthcare, because they want the costs to be socialized. Adverse selection will cause people who are healthy to opt out etc. The same adverse selection follows for other kinds of government benefits, such as education with school vouchers. In the limit, the people remaining receiving benefits would be precisely those who take out more than they put in, and this would highlight the cost everyone is paying to support those people. The existing system obfuscates who is causing the high costs.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr ago
This could be really interesting.
- Adding political party registration as a protected class could end up changing the character of many institutions and organizations. For example, forcing universities to hire Republicans would have major long-term effects on the values of future college graduates.
- This law conflicts with the principles of freedom of association and equal protection. It'll force the issue up through the courts (no way it doesn't get an instant challenge up to the Supreme Court) and with this Court the result could be something wild like reversing Griggs v Duke entirely.
- Even if it stands, it will bring quotas to the fore as a political issue and make the public conversations more clearly about group spoils vs. overall efficiency. It adds such onerous requirements for businesses to make any useful predictions about people that there will be tons of examples of waste and inefficiency due to the law. In an accelerationist way this could be good for getting back to a more reasonable set of laws.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
I'm not going to read an AI-generated post. But I did ask an AI to summarize it in a few sentences, so I get the gist. Maybe next time just post your thoughts so others don't have to do this extra round-trip through an AI.
These are my unfiltered thoughts on the object-level issue:
It's not Communism. It's opaque and centralized but historical Communist systems are not unique in those respects.
The credit scoring system is a result of many conflicting interests who all place constraints on how businesses make decisions. Consider what would happen if a business used their own method for evaluating credit risk:
- They might accidentally use a forbidden input, such as race, or a proxy for one, such as zip code. This exposes the business to substantial legal risk. Figuring out the set of inputs that are both predictive and allowed takes a lot of specialized knowledge of the laws in the jurisdiction in which the business operates. This is expensive. It's cheaper to outsource this work and risk to specialized companies.
- They might make a mistake in predicting credit risk. To take your example, the fact that a customer has a history of on-time rent payments doesn't necessarily mean they're low enough risk for what the business is evaluating them for. If it's for a new rental agreement, maybe the customer's income has disappeared recently. If it's for a credit card, maybe paying rent doesn't predict paying off credit cards. Using a specialized company for evaluating risk ensures that the weaknesses of the score are at least well-known and understood.
- If they try to make the process more transparent, they might make a mistake with privacy and PII. The opacity of the current system allows credit bureaus to launder private information into a less-private score that's still useful to businesses.
- Also if they try to make the process more transparent, they open themselves up to gaming.
The real question is, what is the alternative, and does it live within the constraints we've placed on how businesses make decisions?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr 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
blocking the federal fist
3d ago
The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook.
Could you give some more context on what this is, for those unfamiliar? All I can find is a rule about financial professionals having to act in their clients' best interests.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
Secret data but more importantly secret code (any programs, algorithms, statistical techniques, data cleaning, etc.), would never cut it in the professional world. If you're a data scientist or a product manager proposing a change to a company's business processes you need to have your work in source control and reviewable by other people. There's no reason academics can't do the same. Make the PI responsible by default unless they can show fraud in the work their underling did. If they didn't review their underling's work then the PI is fully responsible. This would have the added benefit that researchers would learn useful skills (how to present work for review) for working in industry.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
one has to register as Democrat or Republican to be able to vote in the primaries? Is that open information ?
It is, at least in my state. Keep in mind that people sometimes register in one party to influence the primary, then vote for the other party in the general election. So you can't tell someone's true allegiance just by seeing which party they're registered under.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1yr 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
blocking the federal fist
1yr 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
blocking the federal fist
2yr 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
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans.
The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices. It ignores the fact that nationalists have a stake in their nation, and immigrants dilute and weaken that stake. Allowing immigrants is analogous to selling some shares in a corporation. If immigration is 3% per year, Americans are losing 3% of their stake in their country to foreigners every year. If the immigrants are like-minded (for civic nationalists) or co-ethnic (for ethno-nationalists) then it's not such a big deal; it's basically recruiting allies. But if the immigrants are opposed to Americans' culture or are of a different ethnicity then immigration is a hostile takeover.
You can’t be a nationalist and also stick to the facts, since even though most Americans are nationalists, few would think that 1% of the federal budget going abroad is worth worrying about.
What. That's a non-sequitur. To draw a crude analogy, if thieves are stealing your stuff at a rate of only 1% of your income every year, then security is not worth worrying about. Or if you only waste 1% of your time sitting in traffic or standing in line at the post office, then it's not worth making roads or post offices more efficient. Hanania has made a bad argument here.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr 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
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
For HSV-2 in the U.S., the rate varies a lot by race, from 3.8% for Asian to 34.6% (!) for black.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
Time, on October 22nd: "Don’t Trust the Political Prediction Markets". Oops.
When it comes to accuracy, these prediction markets have an even poorer historical track record than political polling– not to mention these companies come and go with startling transience.
the reality is that the Circuit Court could well rule that these platforms are illegal and shut them down in merely a few weeks’ time.
Maybe they would last longer if Time wasn't writing hit pieces on them.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3mo ago
I took this opportunity to do some media bias comparisons on how this story is being reported. There's a combination of editorializing, credulous repetition of claims without explicitly editorializing, and some neutral reporting (Kudos to Global Legal Post which was the best on this). I found no Right-leaning sources reporting on this story. This is typical of news that has partisan slant: most of the bias shows up in what stories get reported, not how they're reported.
GroundNews summary and news source comparison: Skadden Associate Resigns Over Big Law's Tepid Response to Trump Pressure
Business Insider, considered "leans Left", quotes the associate extensively without skepticism, but doesn't editorialize in the article itself:
She asked her colleagues to sign an open letter from law firm associates condemning Trump's "all-out attack aimed at dismantling rule-of-law norms."
Law.com, considered Center, editorializes a bit:
Rachel Cohen, the third-year finance associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who'd been one of the rare voices in Big Law to attach her name to criticism of firms' quiescence in the face of an unprecedented assault from the Trump administration, had a sharp reaction to the deal Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison negotiated with the president on Thursday.
And Above the Law unabashedly editorializes:
One brave Biglaw associate has quite frankly had enough of this, and she’s once again sounding off — not just before her firm, but before the entire legal profession — to make clear just how important it is not to bow down before the Trump administration.
Other sources I found through Web search:
- Mother Jones (Left)
- Global Legal Post) (appears Center and quite helpfully includes context like
Democrat-leaning Paul Weiss) - PBS (Lean Left according to GroundNews) has an interview with the associate. The summary uses the phrase "latest in a series" and the interviewer doesn't challenge wild statements like
I think that my concern is that the coup that is ongoing will be done. - New Republic (Left)
- AOL (Lean Left)
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
This is an interesting analogy and lends itself to more elaboration.
In aviation, there have been autopilots for many years. But always the human pilot is in command, and uses the autopilot as a tool that has to be managed and overseen. Autonomous vehicles, at least in some companies' visions, have no way to control them manually. An airplane pilot enters waypoints into the navigation system to plan out a route; an autonomous car routes itself. The biggest difference is in who is responsible for the vehicle; is it the human operator or the vehicle's manufacturer?
I could see a kind of autonomous vehicle that works more like an airplane autopilot - you wouldn't necessarily need a steering wheel, but if you had control over the different high-level choices in route planning and execution (do I try to make this yellow light? Should I play chicken at this merge or play it safe?) then the human could be considered responsible in a way that a fully autonomous, sit-back-and-relax mode doesn't allow.
I am revolted by the idea of relying on a company akin to an airline for my day-to-day mobility. There are too many failure modes that leave one stuck. What if there's a natural disaster and all the phone networks are down? Or the car company has a de facto local monopoly, but then withdraws from this market or goes out of business? What if the company starts blacklisting customers for things that shouldn't be related to transportation, like their political affiliation or their credit score?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2yr 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
blocking the federal fist
2yr 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.
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.
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