ChestertonsMeme
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
5mo ago
There are a few hypotheses here:
- Judeo-Christian ethics cause people to choose more children, compared to other ethical systems.
- A realistic evaluation of things causes people to choose fewer children.
In 2, there's an assumption smuggled in, which is that absent a "religious" belief system, viewing life realistically means that children are a net negative. But this all depends on what one values. I'd basically interpret a belief system that concludes, after looking realistically at things, that children are a net negative as self-centered hedonism. It's the self-centered hedonism that is the problem, not looking at things realistically. One can certainly value children in themselves while being consequentialist atheist materialist rationalist.
What's needed is a value system that takes a longer view while accepting reality (insert diatribe about blank-slateism causing everything wrong in the world). Basically, future people matter, happier, smarter, better future people matter, and the best thing one can do with their life is make an infinite tree of such people by having kids. It might be that what I'm describing basically is Judeo-Christian ethics, but I think removing the supernatural takes us so far from what the original religions are about that it doesn't make sense to call it that.
ChestertonsMeme
1mo 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
3d 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
6mo 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
8mo ago
ChestertonsMeme
9mo ago
Every month, there is exactly one weekday that is always a multiple of 7. This August it's Mondays. Neat!
ChestertonsMeme
2mo 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
5mo ago
What does ODC stand for?
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."
If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.
This is a ridiculous stance. Being better than other people in some way is the whole basis of our social hierarchy and much of the motivation for striving at anything.
Edit: On reflection, this brings to mind Michael Malice's razor "Are some people better than others?" Someone right wing says yes; someone left wing gives a speech. I'd characterize the left wing stance here as counter-signaling. "I'm so far above everyone else that I don't need to participate in this competition to prove my worth." It's cool to personally bow out of a competition, but destroying the competition so others can't get value from it is very rude. You could say the same thing about leftists' policy preferences regarding taxation, housing, and immigration. In all of those areas the leftist policies make it harder to prove one is better than others by having wealth/living in an expensive area/being a citizen of a powerful nation.
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
8mo 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
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
7mo ago
I don't understand why it's important whether Indo-European invaders were more predisposed to creating civilization than local populations at the time they invaded. The admixed population has evolved since then. Isn't the current state what matters? Similarly, it could totally be the case that the local populations were better in some way. But they're gone now. The comparison isn't against an extinct population, it's against the other populations here now. Not that population-level comparisons even make sense when you can compare individuals.
ChestertonsMeme
16d ago
If environmental racism causes decreased intelligence, then people affected actually have decreased intelligence. But progressives deny this conclusion.
ChestertonsMeme
6mo ago
Vaccine mandates are a good idea - businesses and schools need to be able to prevent the unvaccinated from entering.
These two clauses say different things. Businesses being able to do something (exclude unvaccinated) is different from businesses being required to do it.
Imagine it would be socially allowed for you to have sex with whomever you choose (permissive partner, permissive religion). How many percent of all people of your preferred age and sex would you then consider as sexual partners?
I don't know what this means. If it's "socially allowed" why does the next question offer a reason of "unwanted social consequences"?
The question seems to be treating sexual morality as very rules-based and divorced from any consequences. Kind of like, it's this good thing that only outdated moral rules are preventing people from enjoying. I don't think of sexual morality in these terms. Sex is a means to an end: creating successful kids. Sex that doesn't help with that is a vice, akin to gluttony or sloth (I'm atheist, not Catholic, but Catholics have a good taxonomy of vices). By "vice" I mean something that distracts from useful efforts or that has negative consequences. I checked the box for "I find sex with someone I don't know meaningless" but that is not adequately expressing my stance.
ChestertonsMeme
9mo ago
- As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
The reasons for a "national divorce" aren't necessarily economic. Much more important are
- The ability to do smaller scale experiments in policy. We could see first hand what a Western country with low immigration looks like, or what the consequences of school choice writ large are.
- Having competition between states for highly productive people forces the states to treat them well. Right now the only real choice for many highly skilled people is to work under U.S. law and taxes.
Reform, secession, and revolution seem like they're a continuum rather than being distinct categories. So I'm not sure the distinction matters very much. What you've said is similar to the Chinese concept of "mandate of heaven" - the ruler has unquestioned authority until it's clear he doesn't, then it's justified to depose him. And this all basically boils down to consensus and power.
I've been contemplating this topic over the last few weeks, that it seems like there's a common thread between cultural consensus, political coalitions, and right to determination that is at the root of all conflict between groups. I'll sketch it out here:
- The right to free speech is about building consensus through common knowledge, including consensus on who is in good standing with whom.
- The right to free association is about formalizing political groups so they can act on behalf of their members.
- The right to revolution is a "safety valve" for when the rights to free speech and free association, combined with the extant political system, do not allow the coalition that should win to actually win. Either they can't form consensus (censorship), they can't formalize their coalition (suppression of political parties), or they can't enact their will because the political system doesn't make it possible (authoritarianism). It's not a real right in the sense of something the state protects; it's just a thing that happens because that's how power works.
- Secession is basically the same as revolution.
The thing that makes reasoning about right to determination so difficult is that so much of the current social organization is path-dependent and contingent on accidents. There's no objective standard for what's a legitimate government, a legitimate set of borders, a legitimate people, a legitimate set of laws, or a legitimate culture. It's all just power and coalitions. And yet each generation of bright young minds grows up swimming in the particulars of their society and believes it's all objectively legitimate.
P.S. I swear I read this post a day or two ago (with the preamble and all) - did you delete and repost?
ChestertonsMeme
4mo ago
I think to online Internet lefties, the term for outgroup members is Nazi. IH has signaled that he is outgroup through his jokes. Therefore they call him a Nazi. You're taking too literal a meaning to the term.
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.
Social status is highly heritable, and test scores are a noisy measure of phenotypic social status (there's more to life than taking tests).1 It makes sense for universities to use other predictors of social status such as parental income in order to select the highest quality students.
I'd be surprised (although not that surprised) if the universities used income directly for judging applicants. Aren't they using more oblique evidence like essays and "life experience"?
The part of this that seems a bit immoral is that parental income is commonly believed to be random, and not an indicator of student quality. A few questions here:
My stance here is that people are smart and they accord status to people who are actually valuable to society, so any predictor of future social status is valid for admissions.
1 See Gregory Clark's works
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