ChestertonsMeme
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
1yr 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
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.
I've gone back and forth trying to figure out how to form a coherent answer to this question, and I've decided it's ill-posed. Democracy is a pragmatic solution that makes it easier for people to live together. Any question about what "ought" to be subject to democratic control is moot; things are subject to democratic control because people agreed they would be, not because of any philosophical reasoning.
If I could snap my fingers and put any policy I wanted beyond the reach of voters, I'd select the a set of policies that get as close to the best outcomes (as I define them) without pushing people to the point of revolution. This is not a very interesting position though, and you'll probably find most people use the same kind of reasoning for what they think should be subject to democratic control. It's outcomes first, then principles are back-calculated.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr 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
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.
Intelligence can be measured separately from processing speed, but they are strongly correlated - processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence. So to a first approximation the faster team is smarter. Edit: added link.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
Is general intelligence little more than the speed of higher-order processing?
Here we show in a sample of 122 participants, who completed a battery of RT tasks at 2 laboratory sessions while an EEG was recorded, that more intelligent individuals have a higher speed of higher-order information processing that explains about 80% of the variance in general intelligence.
Note that this is "speed of higher-order information processing" which is not the same as reaction time.
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.
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".
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
1yr 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
1yr ago
I don't have an example of a union doing that, but there are examples of what unions should be doing good things.
Unions only exist because there are laws that force employers to negotiate with them. Absent those laws, a coalition of workers looks a lot more like a temp agency or a contracting shop. I have had good experiences working for such agencies: they find jobs, they test your skills once and then vouch for you with employers so you don't have to re-interview all the time, they negotiate with the employer on your behalf, etc. The difference is that the employer is not forced to hire only employees from that agency, so the agency is kept honest. There are obviously benefits to the employer to such an arrangement because it's totally voluntary and they still choose it over direct hiring.
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
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
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).
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
In your opinion, what should be the legal limit to the 2A? Did Heller go too far, or did it not go too far enough?
ChestertonsMeme
1yr 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
1yr ago
It does, but in the opposite direction from your hypothesis.
Yes, and if that generalizes to other cities and is a big enough correlation then that's a good argument for walkability. But I don't think the data in that paper supports this claim - with WalkScore as the independent variable, these are the standardized betas for different kinds of crime:
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Property crimes per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.026
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Violent crimes per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.039
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Total crimes per 100,000 residents 2007: 22.034 !!!
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Murders per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.068
I'm assuming that there's an error in the "total crimes" statistic considering its magnitude, but regardless, the other correlations are low and not statistically significant. (I'm having a hard time interpreting that table - some of the signs of the unstandardized coefficients are different from their standardized betas, and the magnitudes of the betas are much larger than the others which suggests maybe they've standardized the independent variables but not the dependent variables, since the total in category 3 is much larger corresponding to the larger standardized betas).
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
Yes, this may be a correlation specific to the city in which I live, because of the way it enforces laws.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr 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
1yr ago
I'm not saying that I would prefer suburban or rural living; there are a lot of good things about living in cities and I prefer them. The people are, in general, polite and law-abiding. Suburban and rural areas have their own pathologies. The main thing I am incensed about is that cities could be so much better if policy decisions took into account the fact that behavior varies from person to person in predictable ways and some people are net negative for the rest of the city.
which, uh, if you want to be isolated and limit interactions with anyone different from you as much as possible,
The fact that I referred to the hypothetical man as using "PMC vocabulary" suggests that I don't particularly identify with him. I'm happy to live next to people who are different, just not different in such a way that they will burglarize my house, drive recklessly, or harass my daughter on the street.
Others in this thread have shared contrary examples of walkable areas that don't have higher crime, because the police enforce the law and arrest or harass lawbreakers to keep them away. Where I live this happens much less often. The whole concept of incapacitation depends on statistical discrimination - that people who have a history of committing crimes are more likely to commit more crimes in the future. The discourse in leftist enclaves is focused on rehabilitation and compassion, not incapacitation, and the police are basically barred from incapacitating criminals.
ChestertonsMeme
1yr ago
I'm surprised that that worked. I'd like to know more about this case to the extent you're comfortable sharing.
My expectation is that if there's any discretion involved in whether to act on a complaint, the institution or government will just happen to not act on rightist complaints. The genius behind federal civil rights law was that it gave individuals the right to sue, and the courts are at least ostensibly neutral. If there's prosecutorial discretion then the law becomes very one-sided.
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."
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.
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.
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