ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
15hr ago
Aside from Puerto Rico and Hawaii, I'm pretty sure the climate is unsuitable for cocoa.
Thus the need for significant application of capital. :)
Get rid of migrant labor and cereal grains aren't going anywhere, but a lot of fruit might become too expensive to grow in the US.
Possibly so. There are obviously multiple interacting legal regime possibilities. The current administration seems(seemed?) keen on shutting down both imported labor and imported goods, with the simplest model being two binary variables. Shut down imported labor and keep imported fruit, perhaps there is no intersection of domestic supply/demand curves. Shut down imported labor and also imported fruit, maybe markets clear at a higher price, maybe quantity supplied still goes to zero and people just have less heterogeneity in their access to goods, maybe black fruit markets develop. Keep imported labor and also imported fruit is the status quo. Keep imported labor and shut down imported fruit, and the effects are probably again specific-dependent, but if it's a good that is already produced in reasonable quantity domestically, my guess would be minor increases in price and decreases in quantity supplied (goods that aren't produced in reasonable quantities domestically already may suffer a similar fate as above). Each of them has a corresponding MarketRateX for the labor involved, except possibly in cases where there is no intersection for domestic producers.
I take no position as to which of these cases are more/less desirable. Those questions get more complicated and require agreed-upon value functions to compute. For an example of the complications, see my comment here:
Sure, North Korea now "produces" its own airplanes. Which I guess is cool if you want to make sure that you have whatever metric of "adversary-proof" (I'm not convinced it actually is, but it depends highly on the metric you use) and if you're okay with only being able to produce what are essentially copies of extremely old Cessnas. Maybe in 50 years, they'll be able to produce their own WWII-era fighter jets, which I guess is "adversary-proof" to one metric, but probably not all that "adversary-proof" according to other metrics.
Some people may value domestic production very highly for its own sake, and they'd be willing to trade off access to a wider variety of goods. I'm not going to have some knock-down argument to say someone is wrong if they have such a value and are willing to prefer a world where cocoa simply is not accessible (at the moment, with the current set of ideas/technologies for how to use capital to produce cocoa in US climates) to a world where it is imported. I mostly care that everyone is clear about how the curves/terms work.
ControlsFreak
16hr ago
Possibly so. One would need further analysis on things like labor/capital required on any particulars. For example, how much raw cocoa is farmed in the US? I think almost none. Is this due to the labor supply curve? I'm not sure. My hunch is that, in the absence of any importation, capital could be applied to make some amount of suitable growing conditions... but that it might take quite a bit of capital. If that capital were invested, what would the labor supply curve look like to work in such facilities? I don't know.
Whereas most of the food products that are the subject of the current discussion already have proven growing capacity with acceptable capital expenditures, and we're mostly discussing the labor supply curve, much more in isolation. It is in that setting that I discussed the relative supply/demand curves and the use of the term "market rate". I admit that my example was perhaps not the most apropos, as anti-matter-powered light bulbs probably also require significant capex... and TBH, that's probably the real limiting factor there. I'm not sure there's really a way to just apply labor (at some higher price) with relatively-existing capital stock to get some supply of anti-matter-powered light bulbs.
ControlsFreak
20hr ago
You can pay well-above market rate, they won't do it.
That's not really what "market rate" means. It doesn't really come free-floating, without reference to a population of suppliers/potential suppliers. Yes, there is a MarketRate1, where the set of suppliers/potential suppliers includes everyone who can walk across the border. Yes, MarketRate1 < MarketRate2, where MarketRate2 is with reference to the set of suppliers/potential suppliers who are legally authorized to work in the United States. But if we just lived in World2, there would be no talk about paying "well-above market rate (MarketRate2)", because MarketRate2 would just be the clearing price in World2.
Supply curve slope upwards. Demand curves slope downwards. For there to be no non-zero equilibrium, the supply price at zero quantity supplied must be higher than the demand price at zero quantity demanded. This may be true for some goods (say, anti-matter-powered light bulbs), but it seems highly unlikely that it is the case for food.
ControlsFreak
26d ago
That there is a hard scaling limit is true but it's not remotely relevant to my point since the difference between a bird and a nuclear rocket is so vast as to make any comparison but the most galaxy-brained 'it's all specks of dust from 50,000,000 light years' ridiculous.
I mean, we're talking about the possibility of a super intelligence that is going to tile the universe with paperclips, and you want to say that your own analogy is too galaxy-brained? Ok, buddy.
That there is a scaling limit is secondary to where the limit actually is.
Correct. There was a scaling limit back when the Wright brothers first took to the air. It was still there when we went to the moon. At what point did we realize what the scaling limits actually looked like?
There is no reason to think we are anywhere near the scaling limit.
Right now, there's not really that much reason to think that we're not, either. We have basically no theory here yet. No idea whether the scaling is truly exponential or something else or where we might be on the curve.
In rocketry we are limited by our level of investment and our unwillingness to use advanced propulsion, not by physics.
If you ignore the exponential that comes from physics, then sure.
Your whole framing is ridiculous:
Fission, fusion, antimatter, whatever. Yes, we literally did antimatter. The conclusion? None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation. Certainly not if we're thinking galactic or cluster scale. More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
In context, underwhelming because it isn't galactic scale?
No. It is "certainly not" that much more if we're thinking galactic scale. It's just underwhelming in general, in context of the exponential of the rocket equation. You can just look at the numbers and say, "Yeah, that's more, but it's not all that much more."
ControlsFreak
27d ago
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere
It is not out of nowhere. It's the analogy you selected. It's literally a law of the universe. It's fundamentally just conservation of momentum. It's not some "utterly deranged" statement like your current examples, which are untethered from any mathematical reality of scaling. It's the actual fundamental law of how scaling works for the analogy you selected. In your analogy, they might not have realized where they were on the exponential at the time that they were making great gains; they might not have quite realized how far along they would be able to go before running into this fundamentally exponential scaling curve. But that was the underlying reality of the world.
I mean, how do you think this is supposed to go? "Let's use the analogy of flight, but it's absolutely forbidden to notice that there is a scaling law there, because that would be 'out of nowhere'"?
ControlsFreak
29d ago
I don't think it's a pure commons problem. In fact, I think it's probably just a problem that is inherent in their product, the means of monetization, and game theory of a two-sided market.
Their biggest product is the final credential. The awarded degree after a complete course of study1. But universities get paid on an annual basis. If universities could hold everything else constant, they would prefer that any given degree would take more years to complete, wringing out additional revenue from each successfully acquired customer2. Once a customer is acquired, they obviously want to retain them for as long as possible. If they could magically make the first three years of a program trivially easy, but make the fourth year so difficult that only high-quality students actually get the credential (maintaining their brand for employers), they would obviously love to do this.
...but it's a two-sided market and prospective students get to make choices, too. If they see a program with statistics such that they wring four years of tuition out of 99% of students, but only 20% survive year four and get the credential, they're gonna nope out of that. And since they can't actually just pass everyone (because that's likely to torch their credibility with employers), they have to get more sophisticated in their scheme.
The gov't requires that universities publish graduation rates, but they can hide a lot in unpublished data. This is probably what motivates the creation of "weed-out" courses. My guess is that the rest of the university's portfolio of degree offerings significantly affects when these courses happen. I took what was perhaps the most difficult STEM discipline in my undergrad uni, but they had shaped their first couple years such that they really could manage to put weed out courses in the junior year. I think this was only possible because they were confident that they could steer the vast majority of the failers into their other programs. First, they had these other programs, and they knew they were easier. Second, they already had you for three years of tuition, so they were riding high either way. They shaped their programs so that you could easily slide into one of the others while maybe only burning a semester or at most a year3. Thus, they set up the incentives so that a failer could either drop out entirely, wasting three years and a bunch of money, or agree to their suggestion to just slide into another program. If they can play this game right, they can hide this movement, preserve their stats, and get as much money as possible.
My guess is that programs that have a reasonable "fail down" pathway to other programs, but would require too much additional time (risking the stats) after conversion are likely to move their "weed-out" courses to earlier in the process (when it's less likely to burn as much time). My further guess would be that programs that have no reasonable "fail down" pathway probably just pass basically everyone (counting on employers to realize that those degrees are pretty worthless, but still trusting the signal of their other degrees).
That said, I did know at least one student who didn't get the hint, with barely passing grades. Once they persist past a certain point, then the incentives for the uni are absolutely to graduate them, and the best they can do is give them an atrocious GPA and hope that employers see that and don't hire them.
I imagine that smaller schools with a less expansive set of "fail down" options have to make somewhat different choices.
If you significantly buy a stronger version of signalling theory, there is a lens here in which large unis are primarily filtering/tracking products. On this theory, the actual course material is mostly window dressing; it's mostly a matter of just that some are more difficult and some are less difficult. Students come in, they get filtered down through the programs to their level of competence, and then the "major" on their credential basically tells employers how capable they are. It would be my dream if some economist got their hands on all this internal university data and made a model to test how much of this is real. Moreover, it would be really nifty if they could compare the quality of this filtering against things like just intake SAT or whatever.
This sort of model keeps employers happy, because they can ignore the bad degrees and hire from the good degrees; it keeps the uni's published stats up, because bad students still complete their trash-tier degrees; the only people who get screwed are the students who think they're going to get a valuable, high-tier degree, get thwacked by a weed-out course, then don't realize how the game works, succumb to the sunk cost fallacy thinking that they can still at least get a different degree, not really looking at how much more poor the employment prospects are. The cynical view would be that unis know that SAT is basically going to correlate with what programs the students get filtered down to, but they still 'over-admit' students purely for customer acquisition, trusting that they're likely to to be able to pull this one over on them.
1 - There could be reasons why this might be independent of the signalling v. educating debate. Also, I spent a little time thinking about how 'partial' products could be packaged, and it's kind of bleak at first glance.
2 - There are obviously limits to this, and it is probably a combination of historical, competition, and regulatory reasons for why almost all programs have converged on four years.
3 - Regulation is again important here. Unis generally have to publish statistics along the lines of what percentage of four-year-degree students graduate within six years, so they're happy to string them along for another year or so of tuition, so long as they get into another program and graduate before dinging the stats.
ControlsFreak
29d ago
Fair enough. Though I think that as we move in the direction of stronger versions of the divide between rigor and critical thinking, I find myself thinking that it is unlikely that I am going to have access to any sort of measurement or indicator of the level of critical thinking. I think my previous comment could be interpreted as having an implicit, "I don't know how to measure/assess critical thinking, directly, so if I'm going to have any hope at coming to a view on this issue, I'm probably going to have to rely on the best proxy I can come up with that I have been able to access." And thus, the more we move toward thinking that rigor is just not a good proxy, the more I move toward thinking that critical thinking is just currently unobservable.
ControlsFreak
29d ago
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition.
I had said:
More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
Sure, I'd even agree to "a lot more". But "power" isn't necessarily the thing that we care about in rocketry. Nor are you seriously engaging with the exponential.
just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
My brother in Christ, we are not disagreeing; you're just not engaging with the exponential. If we had an order of magnitude or two increase, that could totally transform our spaceflight scene. The moon could be routine. Mars could be like going on holiday. Even further could be an expedition. But the exponential is still the exponential, and in context of the insanity of exponentials and the universe, mere orders of magnitude only push back the hard stop a "little".
ControlsFreak
30d ago
As silly as it sounds to put my updated prior in this way, and the sillyness is the point here, there was no golden age of critical thinking and enlightened education that just so happened to be when I was maturing. Just as [current year] wasn't the first time in human history moralistic college students felt ideal social morality was obviously achievable, a downgrade of critical thinking didn't start after I left college either.
When I was in school, I had a few opportunities to glimpse that the standards I was being tested to were lower than those of the past. Primarily, this involved a few experiences where I got to actually see what were actually-given exams from not many years prior. One might temper this a bit, given that I did not see the scores of the prior students who took those exams, but my sense is that the profs in question had been using very similar exams for a decade or two, kept seeing lower and lower scores, and eventually gave up and revamped their curriculum. The entire style and approach was different, and I felt sad that I did not have the opportunity to be exposed to the old way, which I felt was more rigorous.
That said, I think there is a slight confounder as to how exactly we bucket the concepts of "critical thinking", "rigor", etc. It may not necessarily require critical thinking to learn how to repeat enough of the incantations of rigor, but I have the sense that requiring said rigor naturally provides far more opportunities for critical thinking to show its head (or lack thereof).
Perhaps another conceptual bundle in the mix is something like "skills and abilities" or just sheer "knowledge" or something. I think that my experiences also justified that something along these axes was already in decline when I was in school. Yes, yes, a major factor could just be composition effects, but I think that's probably the biggest lingering question - why the standards for rigor/skills and abilities/knowledge seemed to have declined, not that they did so.
If we can do the terrible thing and imagine clustering this conceptual bundle, apart from what might be considered "pure critical thinking", into one continuous time-dependent variable, I do have to think that there was a peak. Obviously, if we go back far enough, there was just nobody with the sort of specialized knowledge/skills and abilities/rigor within my very specialized academic focus. The continuous variable was approximately zero. Given my personal observation that it seems to have had a negative first derivative when I was in school, it would seem to imply that there was a maximum at some point in the past.
Of course, I should mention again that composition effects may be nearly the entire ballgame here. Tyler Cowen preaches the skills/abilities of very young people. There are probably absolutely outstanding ones. Therefore, I'm not sure I have much of an explanation that would fit my perception of generally-declining standards other than composition effects.
ControlsFreak
30d ago
I have a vague recollection of a podcast. My Google fu isn't good enough. I think it was Conversations With Tyler. I think the guest was someone of means and a track record of disruption (Patrick Collison/Peter Thiel tier). The question came up about disrupting academia. In my continued jumble of vague recollections, the response was some form of, "We looked into it, but the academic cartel is too strong." They have piles upon piles of government subsidies. They have complete control of accreditation. I've seen, for example, a state uni system where the components also leverage control over the other components (one wanted to offer a new grad degree program, and the others cried to the state gov't to force an impossible requirement on them to "prove that there is a need", a la Certificate of Need requirements in the medical industry). If you were news-conscious around a decade ago, you saw the knives out for "for-profit universities". I'm sure there are all sorts of tactics-level games being played and tricks being employed.
They also suffer from a two-sided market. It's not enough to only convince employers; you have to convince prospective students, too. Thrown in here are difficult questions about the relative value of signaling in education. Various folks have various estimates (some quite high) for the amount of value in a degree simply being that the institution chose you and put their stamp on you, because they were able to choose from the best. If there is a significant amount of that, then the students might not actually care all that much whether you're really offering a better education; you just need to offer a better signal. If you're trying to recruit a top-crust student, you have to realize that all of the legacy institutions are already offering them a full ride (maybe even perks hidden as lifestyle amenities) and a time-proven signal. You have to compete with that... somehow. You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop (either top students realize that you haven't convinced employers already and will stop enrolling or top employers realize that you haven't convinced students already and will stop hiring).
@zeke5123a has a plausible idea of just paying students. But again, you're looking for top students; they're already effectively getting paid by the legacy unis. So, you're going to have to front significant cash. Since you can't subsidize this with the donations of wealthy aristocratic alumni, high tuition from a lesser tier student (since this will immediately devalue your budding brand), and piles of government assistance is likely not forthcoming, you will have to burn significant piles of cash for probably a significant number of years before you can start to turn the tide back to even breaking even.
If you're thinking that you could maybe you could stem the bleed by doing the typical thing of having your faculty also chase research grant money, you now have a three-sided market. How many academics out there can stomach the grant-chasing life, succeed at it, and also buy in to give the high levels of effort you're going to require to have super high educational standards? When you find one, they're going to be expensive, because they do just half that work for plenty of money and near infinite job security at a legacy.
Where along the way do you make sure you don't slip into the same mode of operation as the legacies, since you sure seem to be playing their same game now, just without the entrenched endowments? What's your mechanism to ensure that?
I wouldn't be surprised if whoever I vaguely recall on a podcast already went through this exercise. I wouldn't be surprised if they already tried to make an estimate of how much top students are already being effectively paid by legacies. I wouldn't be surprised if, with some reasonable assumptions on how long it would take to build the brand in both directions so that you could start to stop the bleeding, they just computed that it would just be an unreasonable pile of money.
The Thiel Fellowship seems to be an attempt that embraces a reasonably strong prior on the signaling theory, which allowed them to at least just give up on the educating part of the huge pile of money. $100k over two years, and starting with 20-30 students. That's with the Thiel Brand discount and no overt plan for how to turn it from a $2-3M/yr charity project into a revenue-neutral competitor to academia with any sort of scale.
This is not to say that they cannot be disrupted, but the challenge is pretty steep.
ControlsFreak
30d ago
It really is that simple: flight speed, payload and range isn't capped at some modest multiple above a falcon but by how much fuel you're prepared to burn and whether you're willing to use serious, atomic rockets.
The tyranny of the rocket equation is, indeed, exponential. Thus, we went to the moon with relative ease, haven't quite "been" to Mars yet, and no one is thinking that a singularity of shoving atomic rockets in the boot is coming to take us to Alpha Centauri in 2027.
Much of theoretical computer science is discovering hard limits on the universe of computation when it comes to scaling. Often times, that big ol' O hides a lot of stuff and is confusing to people. "Why, it seems so easy to run this program on my computer; it's like going to the moon; I just burn some carbon material, and it just works!" But then you just tweak one parameter, and it just breaks utterly.
At the time that we went to the moon, I don't know if people had worked out the theoretical limits of the full spectrum of hypothetical rocket fuels, but we went through a bunch when I was in undergrad. We ignored any sort of practical concern and just worked out, in theory, if you could pretty much perfectly utilize it, what it would get you. Fission, fusion, antimatter, whatever. Yes, we literally did antimatter. The conclusion? None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation. Certainly not if we're thinking galactic or cluster scale. More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
We sort of don't know yet how far this stuff will take us. The achievements to date are seriously impressive. Like literally going to the moon. But we kind of have no clue when the tyranny of some hard limit on computation is going to make itself known. Maybe we'll even go to Mars with ease; maybe we'll go even further. Who knows?
ControlsFreak
30d ago
I've found that if I put some work in ahead of time, I can write conceptually-dense questions that only require a handful of lines of math. Students really struggle with it, probably because it's so different from their other classes. But man, you can really tell the students who "get it" versus those who are hoping to skate by with just plugging numbers randomly into some opaque formula that came from magic.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I don't know whether the common parental response to a child's, "That's not fair!" being, "Life's not fair," is considered sarcasm or not. But yeah, there's probably not a lot of reassuring things when one is approaching some of the deepest questions in life and the universe. There are, indeed, huge question marks all over the place that take time and effort to work through, and flippant takes shouldn't really expect much of a response besides pointing out that the take is, indeed, flippant. Such children almost certainly lack the perspective and ability to process context to have all that serious a conversation about the nature and purpose of fairness.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
If only there were such a thing as non-Catholic-Church Christianity. Like a billion other Christians think the Catholics are wrong about all sorts of stuff.
the truth-preserving tools of logic
Silly Whitehead and Russell, being so modest as to only try to truth-preserve math with logic. They shoulda seen how easy metaphysics is for random Internet Commentators!
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
What about provision as an alternative to deprivation? What would that look like?
Indeed. What would that look like? Any ideas? Given that you seem to sometimes use not-quite-standard language, I think a whole lot can be cleared up if you just describe what you think your use of this language looks like.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Contradicting a standard language reference does not mean that you are wrong, but it does mean that you have some 'splainin' to do. If you don't get around to actually explaining what you mean with your words, then the simplest explanation is just that you're mistaken about what words mean.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
What's the opposite of deprivation?
According to Merriam-Webster, it would be control, ownership, possession, gain, accumulation, and acquiring.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
From the perspective of whatever the hell the Trump administration is trying to do
I think the most charitable interpretation of the current incomprehensibility of "a thing" that the Trump administration is trying to do... is that there are different factions within the administration, each of which has its own perspective on what they're trying to do, and that those perspectives are not, indeed, coherent with one another. For example, if you're someone in the administration who thinks that tariffs can be used as a tool to help secure supply chains for critical defense/etc. products, you probably don't care one whit whether there is a tariff on cheap slop rubber ducks bought on Amazon from Asian sweatshops.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
how many steps of the process of car manufacturing can you, hypothetical power of a country, get within your borders
As many as you want? Forget tariffs; you can just ban stuff from foreign. The biggest constraint would be if you're not a large enough country to be able to develop all of the specialization required (while also accomplishing all the other things a country needs to accomplish).
how should you go about it
One needs a metric for "should". Sure, North Korea now "produces" its own airplanes. Which I guess is cool if you want to make sure that you have whatever metric of "adversary-proof" (I'm not convinced it actually is, but it depends highly on the metric you use) and if you're okay with only being able to produce what are essentially copies of extremely old Cessnas. Maybe in 50 years, they'll be able to produce their own WWII-era fighter jets, which I guess is "adversary-proof" to one metric, but probably not all that "adversary-proof" according to other metrics.
I kind of joke, but only kind of. Market size is a significant factor in the diversity of goods that are going to be available and how 'advanced' they can be, because diversity and 'advancedness' requires significant specialization. Thus, if we're shutting off large chunks of the market because we don't trust them, we're necessarily going to take hits elsewhere. Where you "should" be on this tradeoff curve is extremely dependent on how you've defined "should" in the first place.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Taking a look at the "Muslim Travel bans" from Trump 1 is possibly instructive here.
Precisely. They engaged in standard statutory interpretation of the INA. If the INA had said something different, for example, (or the Trump I administration was trying to do something different,) then perhaps that statutory interpretation could have come out the other way. Their opinion was in no way, "Eh, this is remotely related to 'a President/executive agency's finding of fact or application of law when that finding was related to the executive's power to set foreign policy', so we just can't say anything at all." Instead, they had a statute that delegated certain powers under certain conditions, and they did standard statutory interpretation to decide that the executive branch was, indeed, correct in interpreting it in a way that allowed them to do the things they were doing in the situation which they were doing it.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I think courts are authorized to, at the very least, assume that the assertions of the executive branch are correct as to what is being alleged (which they may or may not need to do; this part gets complicated), then decide whether or not those assertions, as stated, constitute "an invasion or predatory incursion [that] is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government" as a matter of statutory interpretation.
Possible hypo land. Suppose the literal Venezuelan government sent precisely one spy to the US. This spy does some stuff. Maybe standard espionage stuff. Maybe a targeted assassination or something. The executive branch asserts this and decides to throw all the rest of the Venezuelan nationals out of the country. Is that enough to trigger the statute? I think courts might want to say "no", even if the executive branch wants to say "yes". But I don't know! They might say yes! I could even imagine reasons for them to say yes! But I do, indeed, think that they have some room to do statutory interpretation. ...then, we proceed down a chain of increasing hypos until we start to get a sense for how to interpret the statute.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Most of this is "refined discussion", which I am generally not opposed to.
None of this refined conversation means that we can just look at the total wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost".
The answer is... sure.
But this is really where we are. And I think we can mostly jump to:
So when you say things like-
No refined conversation here would allow us to look at the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost".
My instinctive response is to find this a claim needing justification I doubt you'd be able to provide. Not because you wouldn't have arguments, but because I doubt you'd recognize or acknowledge as worthy of respect paradigms where spending at Walmert could be concluded as 'lost.'
I would simply request a description of a single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost". A single paradigm in which one can simply sum up the entire amount of wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost". I don't know whether I would recognize or acknowledge it as worthy of respect until I hear at least one. I don't think you've presented one. I think you're in the land of refined discussions of details and percentages and such, where things can be shaded slightly through some other valuations and other external reasoning. Nothing close to, "Yeah, that entire amount is just lost."
(Just so you don't have to guess, I am sympathetic to external reasoning about supply chains for defense/pandemics/etc. That is a far cry from simply saying that just the bulk dollar figure is "lost".)
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Thanks! I know I'd heard this correction before, SMH...
I think it's still perfectly fine. Absent some significant external reasoning, the continued existence of trade is at least a prima facie reason to think that there is probably value there. For precisely one of the reasons you give; if businesses keep paying lots of people who aren't providing them value, they go out of business.1 As such, they're probably going to try to fire you if you're consistently negative value. As you say, it is obviously not proof that 100% of all employment relationships are positive sum, but if the vast majority of them aren't, then almost everything is thrown out the window (...all of the businesses go bankrupt, etc.). One can acknowledge that some percentage probably aren't perfect, but then we have to get into details of whether/how we can identify them from the outside, whether/how we have any tools to change that, or if it's best to just acknowledge that the employers are in a better position to judge the value of their employment relations. They have the best incentive to make sure that the lion's share of their employment decisions are positive value, and we should observe that they are, indeed, positive value. Normal curves are normal, but the mean is positive, and probably significantly so.
None of this refined conversation means that we can just look at the total wages paid by employers in the country and say that this amount is "lost".
make people spend more than they 'rationally' should
Again, one must impose some sort of external reasoning to overcome the prima facie case. You point out one of the very very few examples where this external reasoning is the strongest - gambling - for we can simply compute the mathematics and have almost no need to get into the much thornier problems that such external reasoning normally requires.
No refined conversation here would allow us to look at the entire amount that consumers spend at Walmart and conclude that the entire sum is "lost".
Not all trades are good, any more than all investments are good. There are plenty of bad, corrupt, wasteful, and outright harmful investments. It is not hard to find histories of similar trade dynamics fully open to critiques of being driven by bad decisions and bad value judgements.
Fully granted. Now, overcome the prima facie case that most are good (especially given some conditions on freeness and such) by calling upon some sort of specific external reasoning for the instant case. Not just that there is some tail on the normal distribution, where someone bought some useless gadget from Temu or whatever. Justify that the entire trade (in goods) deficit is "lost".
1 - Note that the fact that businesses go out of business is "probably not the example you want to use for that argument". The vast majority of the time, businesses go out of business for a whole host of other reasons that are significantly more poignant than just making some bad deal with some employee(s).
I'm a bit of a dissenter on this one. I get the point; I really do. I don't want to be bombarded by every single little thing that happens. That said, from an objective perspective, I think there is a 100% chance that TheMotte will discuss a story that is this impactful and this close to the culture war. There is a 0% chance that it will not be discussed. This is not some random little news story that, if it's just not posted with a low effort comment, it'll skate by and never take up precious Motte real estate (which is the fate that I hope for with most of the random little news stories that the rules are trying to filter out). I felt the same way about the (main) Trump assassination attempt. (I will note that this is not some pet topic of mine; I almost never comment on Israel matters and would actually prefer less of them in general; I have not otherwise commented in this one, either. But this is truly a "C'mon" one.)
Thus, in my mind, the only question is how such 100% stories make it to the Motte. Speaking personally, it feels almost impossible to write a 'quality' top-level comment on it. There's not some ultra-unique take I'm going to have that provides an independent reason why I'm bringing it to your attention. What is the actual bar to clear? I don't actually know. Just fluff it up a bit, like you're re-reporting from a few sources? Seems weak to me. If we actually deleted these low-effort comments rather than just temp banning them, what would we get? Would this story just never get discussed? I doubt it. At worst, it'll end up in one of the links posts that are (allowed!) in the Transnational Thursday Thread, and then the entire discussion will blow up there.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
An alternate solution that has sufficed from time to time is a megathread. You can see how that works with, e.g., US election results. There's little point in making someone have to come up with the gumption to think that they're going to have some 'quality' TLC for the discussion to happen. Everyone knows there's a 100% chance that discussion is going to happen. It just happens to be that the mods know in advance that that's the case, so we don't have to have someone eat a ban in the process. They don't know that in advance for a major Israeli attack on Iran or a presidential assassination attempt. The dream would be to have some mechanism by which a topic is so obviously a 100% topic that it prompts the mods to say, "C'mon, this is obviously a 100% topic; just click this button, and it'll make a megathread, so no one has to eat a ban." Yes yes, this is not a trivial mechanism to design.
To not leave this comment without at least some suggestion that might be plausible, I'll at least try one. IF the community were to embrace some version of this "100% topic" terminology, we could just include an additional reporting option. We could report low-effort comments like this one with the report, "Low-effort, but c'mon, this is a 100% topic." If enough people report [EDIT: and it actually meets the mod-declared standards for 100% topics], the mods could then respond with, "Approved on grounds of being a 100% topic," rather than a ban. Paired with this, to discourage low-effort comments that only might be a 100% topic, I would also support locking/deleting the entire chain of comments that follow a low-effort TLC that doesn't get approved as a 100% topic. I think the resulting equilibrium would be a lot better than just having to have someone eat a ban every time for no real reason.
EDIT: Concerning the "first" incentive, why does that exist? I'd maybe guess it's because people think that whoever posts it first will get upvotes for whatever reason. Right now, I guess they trade that off with bans or something? We could develop a norm of just downvoting them. Make the report option say, "I have downvoted this low-effort comment, but c'mon, it's a 100% topic." Since the incentive to be "first" is so minor, this disincentive to be "first" will also be minor. At least, it'll be less harsh than eating a ban. You can do the needful, eat a -50, then actually participate in this and other discussion. And if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic, you eat the downvotes, eat the ban, and your topic disappears.
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