ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
The auto/medical insurance comparison is a good one to think about. Another distinction between the two is that auto insurance is mostly viewed as an individual thing, where the only real public purpose in getting involved is to make sure people internalize the costs that their decisions may have on others (i.e., basically every jurisdiction requires liability insurance). Whereas in the medical industry, the entire apparatus of the industry and relevant government entities (many of which are entirely captured by the same worldview) is so entirely bound by the view that we must subsidize, that we must transfer incomes via regulation of the medical industry, that they descend into such contorted reasoning along the lines of Everything Not Obligatory Is Forbidden. Those are the only two options once we've decided to implement a system that, instead of being oriented toward individuals internalizing the costs of their choices, is oriented specifically for the purpose of externalizing the cost of every single choice you make, no matter how minor, so long as it pushes around some mathematically-computable risk factor in a PubMed article somewhere. This is why such folks literally think that the only option other than strictly making things with some medical risk forbidden (unless you pay someone with a special government license to give you permission) is to literally put a bullet in the heads of anyone who does anything with computable medical risk. This sort of thing would be unthinkable to even express in the automotive world, because the entire mindset is starting from a completely different frame.
Unsurprisingly, this sort of reasoning is incoherent on its own terms. As mentioned in the other topic in the OP, the vastly dominant risk factor driving obscene amounts of medical spending is obesity. Why doesn't the exact same logic work? Why are we not forced to put a bullet in the head of anyone who uses food irresponsibly (perhaps anyone who attempts to purchase some food that hasn't been prescribed by a government-licensed dietitian)? Why wouldn't we have to put a bullet in the head of anyone who works on or drives their own car, rather than having it serviced by a government-licensed mechanic and be chauffeured around by a government-licensed driver? But this is truly the type of reasoning that has infected anyone who is remotely influential in medical policy. Transferring incomes via medical policy is in their bones, like a sacred value. From this core flows most of the ridiculous policy choices we've made, which have built up hack upon hack, ultimately resulting in messed up incentives for insurance companies. Insurance companies are basically not allowed to be honest and provide an honest product at this point, but that's only one of the many effects of a complete error in mindset.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Not having any real knowledge of their positions or practices, I just did a search and got a few statements from them on the topic. Seems kinda vague. They don't seem to prohibit ye olde Trumpian diet coke. Frankly, they don't seem to prohibit just literally taking caffeine pills or putting caffeine anhydrous into any regular food/beverage. There are some typical warnings about caffeine addiction being bad (and it is, btw; from the sound of it, purely from a non-religious standpoint, you might want to consider changing your consumption to improve your material life), but it sure seems like one of those issues where if you're mostly quiet about it, they probably won't give you grief or even really tell you that it's going to wreck your spiritual soul or whatever.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I have been saying for a while that if LLMs are going to replace a single employee who is of any use to me, it's going to have to have a bullshit detector. I can't have it just repeating the bullshit claims in papers that everything is totally novel and innovative... and of course, obviously technically and conceptually sound. It's gotta be appropriately critical. I sort of doubt that RLAIF is going to be the only ingredient needed to accomplish that.
Doctors will also just blithely lie to you and make stuff up. They'll tell you to your face, in the exam room, that something is totally covered, but as you say, they have no idea whatsoever. You have to either force them to have someone actually verify it (which will annoy them, as they'll view it as just a waste of their precious time), or roll the dice and hope to not get slapped with a huge bill after the fact (that could be literally anything, could be gigantic enough to make whatever the service is completely not worth it to you).
I've said it before, and I'm becoming more obstinate about it; the entire medical industry is absolutely addicted to complete and total price opacity. This is only one of the many dysfunctions, but it's a big one. Forcing them to put their prices up on some website, in a way that would require you writing your own JSON or whatever parser, make your own interface, and still not be able to figure out what the price is because the doctor can't even tell you what the procedure code is... has simply failed as a "price transparency" law. I would be open to literally any other solution that anyone can think of, but I can't think of any other than simply forcing them to give you a price. Could declare that patients cannot exercise legally-valid informed consent to a procedure unless they've already been provided a price, in writing, for example.
EDIT: Forgot to add that when you call up the billing department to ask, "What the hell? I thought this was supposed to be covered?" they'll just bluntly tell you that the doctors don't have a clue and that "they probably just guessedsorrybut not sorry enough to have you not pay this".
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
What do you think about the Trump tariffs? I'm really curious about how these things interact.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Historically commonplace, unfortunately. One of the most famous examples was JFK's "missile gap". Eisenhower couldn't publicly correct him, because it was actually important to keep the information classified. Yet IIRC, even after JFK was briefed about the truth, he kept on banging on about it. The nice version of an interpretation is that it was an honest deception operation, because if he just suddenly stopped talking about it, maybe foreign governments could figure out why. The more likely story is that the politics were too good.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I don't really see how one reasons to the omnibus position.
Interestingly, I don't think one actually does reason to this position. Instead, someone makes a declaration and it forces people to reason out of it, but the rhetorical linking of the two issues significantly limits how they can reason out of it... and what that will mean for their preference ordering between all four.
This is where the heresthetian thrives. He finds out how to exploit the different groups, who have different preference orders. There's only a small group of hardcore pro-Jones Act folks, yet we still have it, because enough other folks will hold their nose enough at the economic issues in order to not do anything that might seem anti-union (as Biden is portrayed in Zvi's writeup). By linking the two things, even if only rhetorically, the goal is to split the groups with incompatible preference orders. If you can split the A/B groups enough that you can accomplish C (your stated preference after encountering it in this form), then that's a yuge dubya.
Others might have other rationales that end up with them having different preference orders, but if people like you can find yourself having mildly not caring about the Jones Act before but now being willing to throw it under the bus to stop tarifffs, society benefits immensely.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I would love to see a Twitter-style poll with the following options:
A) Keep Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
B) Keep Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
C) Repeal Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
D) Repeal Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
I'd love to see not only percentages, but some mental models from the people in different categories. This in inspired by seeing both Zvi's latest on the Jones Act and MR linking one estimate related to possible Trump tariffs.
Zvi doesn't sum it up super nicely, but estimates I see of the value of repealing the Jones Act are \approx 3% reduction in cost of goods (just due to the flagging effect) and a claim that a plausible OOM estimate is \approx 3% GDP increase (I lost the thread the other day on how to put approximately signs in without strikeout). The randomly-linked twitter post estimates price increases due to tariffs mostly around 2-3%, with some specific sectors rising up to 13%.
I suspect that most people just don't mentally look at economic estimates and compare them to each other, but I don't know what else goes on in their heads. If they're trying to justify one or the other position, how do they go about it? Is it at all plausible if we apply their justification to the other question?
Finally, heresthetics. Could an 'omnibus' option (D) bill be pushed, saying, "That old, bad, just banning stuff style protectionism clearly failed; we shot ourselves in the foot and didn't even manage to actually protect an industry in the process. Instead, tariffs will be the way; at the very least, taxes are slightly more pleasing to the economist than specific bans, as they still allow price signals to work somewhat and inspire new solutions, while at least collecting some revenue for a debt-strapped gov't"? Obviously, people would horrifically oppose it, but what would they say when they oppose it? What would the reasoning be? How would that reasoning come across to the people who would respond with a different choice from the list?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize.
A few years back, there was a "splashy" "study", which surveyed people, showing them three pie charts. One was a depiction of the wealth distribution, by quintile, in the US. Opposed to it was a completely equal distribution, 20% for each quintile. Conveniently, in the middle, they put "Sweden", and they asked folks which wealth distribution they'd prefer. People were at least smart enough to realize that a totally equal distribution makes no bloody sense, as an indebted fresh medical school grad is not going to have the same amount of wealth as a nearing-retirement saver-of-forty-years. Nevertheless, it allowed them to blast in the media that however much percent of the population surveyed would prefer a wealth distribution more like Sweden, heavily implying that the US should adopt some unspecified set of policies that people associate with Sweden.
...but of course, this sensationalism was entirely built on a complete lie. "Sweden" was not Sweden, at least not its wealth distribution. They called it "Sweden", with quotation marks attached in the original survey, because they simply lied and substituted Sweden's income distribution and compared that to the US's wealth distribution. If you looked at Sweden's actual wealth distribution, it would be extremely visually similar to the US, so they needed to lie and make people think that there was the magical possibility that is totally magically achievable that is visually clearly different if we only let them implement whatever haphazard collection of policies they want.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Cost should always be part of the "cost/benefit analysis".
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Yes there is an over supply of residency spots
All I'm saying is that this is not demonstrated clearly by the data you cited. Is there some additional source of data to support this claim?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Ah yes, the classic restrict supply, subsidize demand model. Once someone has given in to restricting supply, the only way out is to subsidize demand. So they say in every industry that sucks because of this exact phenomenon.
But I'm not sure one needs to get into the details of which frictions cause the 5-10% of unfilled slots to have a sense that perhaps that data at least doesn't cleanly support the claim that there is a "surplus" of residency spots. It's at least messy.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Figures 1, 3, and Table 5 might tell a different story to some folks. 5-10% unfilled can easily be chalked up to various frictions (see also discussions of things like the general unemployment rate), and one could think that the percentage unfilled would remain approximately constant if the number of slots were increased within some range.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
From first principles, active bodily processes to either heat or cool one's flesh likely consume calories. Temperature gradients need to be maintained. In fact, I've seen work posing the question of the effect of indoor environment control on caloric expenditure (if you have electricity doing the work of regulating your environment, you likely have to expend less). Given that most people maintain a body temperature above that of ambient, it is theoretically plausible (even likely) that increased body temperature would increase caloric expenditure.
Of course, the rub usually comes in terms of magnitudes. How big is the effect? A casual scan of the literature doesn't turn up anything all that great. So, I would maintain my personal belief that there is likely a positive effect, but extremely low confidence in any sense of an estimate for magnitude.
Concerning equations, the question always is what it is that you're trying to do. For very small groups, you can go through a very intensive process of measuring all sorts of body characteristics, down to the size of individual organs, and use some pretty detailed estimates to try to get really close. Most people don't do anything like that; it's just too much effort. Instead, people often want to collapse larger-group data into a handful of variables for ease of estimation, knowing that any such effort will inherently have variability and error bars. The equation that you get, and how much variability it has, depends on which type of population you're targeting and which variables you're trying to collapse it down to. Obviously, targeting larger/smaller population types tends to increase/decrease variability; similarly, increasing/decreasing the number of variables (under mild assumptions of them being correlated at all to the dependent variable and not entirely codependent) tends to decrease/increase variability. If you're considering fit and athletically-active populations, a lot of folks recommend the Cunningham equation. It also does not include typical body temperature. I'm not sure what the codependence will look like, what the rough magnitude of the effect will be, and how much additional variability you could cut out by including typical body temperature, just because I'm not aware of anyone who has taken the time and money to specifically explore it.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
People have comically false beliefs about all sorts of stuff in the world. We have not discussed what the constraints on marketing would be; I think your comment assumes that there would be none, but I think that is unlikely. So far, we've only been talking about the total ban.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I'd be very interested in comparing the average outcome of a NP with the latest AI models trained on giving medical diagnoses vs a lone doctor.
Not exactly that, but Zvi's recent post had this and this. Of course, I'd say that this is one of those areas where we probably care about some measure other than average, but it gets complicated.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I don't see how you can make that conclusion. People currently take a variety of things that don't hurt them; therefore, they will take huge and insane amounts of stuff that hurts them if we let them?
Imagine that we did ban personal auto repair. You have to draw the line somewhere, so there's some unregulated space where people could go ahead and buy, like, bumper stickers, stuff that hangs down from their rear view mirror, or even vortex generators. And someone observed that folks do a bunch of stuff with their car that is stupid and doesn't provably help the car go faster, run longer, or get better fuel economy. They then conclude that it would be a disaster if we stopped banning personal auto repair, because that obviously implies that masses and masses of people would severely hurt themselves. Why couldn't we end up with the world we have now, where most people still just take their car to a professional, but some do it themselves? Yes, some people hurt themselves doing it themselves, but I don't see why we should have concluded that it would be a huge, mammoth disaster.
I would note that I think there's probably a significant difference between a label that says, "These claims about being vaguely good for your hair health or whatever are not evaluated by the FDA," while still being cognizant that the product has been evaluated for safety... and a label that says, "This product will seriously harm or kill you if taken improperly; please consult a medical professional."
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
the doctor
Makes it sound like there's only one. People often have many different doctors for many different things. It's more likely that they only have one pharmacist, or, rather, one pharmacy that may employ multiple pharmacists, but at least they're usually on the same computer system. That's the more natural bottleneck to have a pair of expert eyes on the medications you're taking.
In all sincerity, I want to check, for myself, to make sure that I am not completely off base in my interpretation of your phrase.
What are some scholarly ways that a person can investigate the reasoning behind an existing state of affairs, where the existing state of affairs in question is a law or policy?
Investigating the reasoning behind an existing law or policy can be approached from several scholarly perspectives, each employing a range of methods and analytical tools. Below are some approaches that can help uncover the rationale behind a law or policy:
1. Legal Analysis (Doctrine-based Inquiry)
- Statutory Interpretation: Scholars may start by analyzing the text of the law or policy, identifying its purpose, and exploring its language. This involves looking at the legal provisions and examining legislative intent, which can often be found in debates, committee reports, or legislative history.
- Case Law: Reviewing judicial opinions on the law or policy provides insight into how courts interpret and apply the law. A close reading of key decisions may reveal the underlying legal principles, norms, or objectives that shaped the law.
- Legal Doctrines and Principles: Analyzing whether the law or policy aligns with established legal doctrines (e.g., human rights, justice, equity, fairness) can shed light on its underlying reasoning.
2. Historical Analysis
- Historical Context: Investigating the historical development of the law or policy can provide valuable insights. This involves looking at the political, economic, social, and cultural context in which the law or policy was enacted. The scholar could examine the timing of its introduction, significant historical events that might have influenced it, and the role of key individuals or groups.
- Comparative Historical Approaches: Comparing similar laws or policies from different times or places can highlight the factors influencing their formulation and the lessons learned from prior implementations.
3. Political Science Approaches
- Public Policy Analysis: This involves analyzing the policy-making process, identifying the actors involved (e.g., legislators, interest groups, bureaucrats), their objectives, and the political dynamics at play. This approach may involve:
- Agenda-setting theory: Investigating how issues gain attention and become policy topics.
- Policy process models: Examining how the policy is formulated, implemented, and evaluated.
- Political Economy: Scholars may look at the economic interests that shape policy decisions, such as the role of lobbyists, political donations, and the influence of businesses or advocacy groups.
- Institutional Analysis: Understanding how the structure of political institutions (e.g., executive, legislative, judiciary) and their interrelations contribute to the law or policy’s formulation.
4. Sociological Approaches
- Social Theories of Law and Policy: Scholars from a sociological perspective often analyze how laws or policies reflect or enforce social norms, values, and power dynamics. This includes:
- Critical Legal Studies: Investigating how the law is shaped by social power relations and how it might perpetuate inequality or social control.
- Law and Society: Analyzing the broader societal context of law-making, considering how societal forces (e.g., public opinion, cultural attitudes) influence policy decisions.
- Social Movements and Advocacy: Investigating the role of activism or advocacy groups in shaping the law or policy. This includes understanding the strategies used by interest groups to influence legislation.
5. Economic Analysis
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: Economic scholars often investigate the efficiency of laws or policies by assessing their economic costs and benefits. This includes evaluating the outcomes of a policy in terms of economic indicators (e.g., growth, unemployment, income distribution) and assessing whether the law achieves its stated goals.
- Behavioral Economics: Examining how laws and policies affect individual and collective behavior, such as through nudges or incentives, can reveal the underlying rationale for a policy.
- Public Choice Theory: Analyzing how political actors (e.g., lawmakers, bureaucrats) make decisions based on their own interests and incentives, rather than public welfare.
6. Ethical and Philosophical Analysis
- Normative Theories of Justice: Examining the law or policy through the lens of ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, deontology, or Rawlsian justice. This can help clarify the moral rationale behind the law, including whether it seeks to promote fairness, equality, or liberty.
- Human Rights Perspectives: Analyzing whether the law or policy aligns with international human rights standards or principles such as dignity, autonomy, and equality. This is particularly useful when the law or policy in question affects vulnerable populations.
- Public Morality: Investigating whether the law reflects certain moral values or societal goals, such as social cohesion, moral order, or public health.
7. Empirical Research and Data Analysis
- Quantitative Analysis: Using statistical tools to analyze the effects of a policy. For example, if a law was intended to reduce crime rates, scholars may analyze crime data before and after its implementation to assess its effectiveness and the reasoning behind the policy's goals.
- Qualitative Research: Conducting interviews, surveys, or focus groups with stakeholders (e.g., policymakers, affected groups, experts) to gather insights into the reasoning behind the law. This can also involve ethnographic methods to understand the law's impact on everyday life.
8. Critical and Interdisciplinary Approaches
- Feminist Legal Theory: Examining laws or policies from the perspective of gender and power dynamics, considering how policies might reinforce or challenge gender inequality.
- Critical Race Theory: Analyzing how race and racial dynamics influence the creation, interpretation, and implementation of laws or policies.
- Intersectionality: Exploring how multiple social identities (race, gender, class, etc.) interact to shape both the policy’s creation and its effects on different groups in society.
9. International and Comparative Analysis
- Comparative Law: Analyzing how similar laws or policies in different jurisdictions (e.g., countries or states) reflect differing priorities or reasoning. This may reveal the influences of international legal trends, global standards, or local conditions.
- International Relations: Understanding how global agreements, treaties, or transnational issues (e.g., climate change, trade, human rights) shape domestic laws and policies.
By combining these various methods, scholars can develop a multi-dimensional understanding of the reasoning behind laws and policies, exploring their origins, implications, and effectiveness. This interdisciplinary approach helps reveal not only the practical considerations that led to the policy’s creation but also the broader social, economic, and political forces that shaped its development.
So, I don't think you're saying that the only thing we can do is start with Item 1 on that list (in fact, so far, I don't think this has been a significant point of discussion yet). I'm sure we can work through many of these methods, but I put in a bit of effort to make sure that we got Item 2 down, yet I can't tell what you think. Do you think we've gotten that one mostly figured out, or do you think that I'm still missing some information on that one?
EDIT: Just to triple-check that I'm not completely off base and got some aberrant first result, I asked:
If someone begins their scholarly approach by doing the second item on that list, historical analysis, would that be sophistic or shamanic?
Beginning a scholarly approach to investigating the reasoning behind a law or policy by engaging in historical analysis would neither be "sophistic" nor "shamanic" in a scholarly context. Rather, historical analysis is a legitimate and well-respected method in academic research, particularly in the fields of law, political science, sociology, and history itself.
Why it is not sophistic:
"Sophistry" refers to the use of fallacious reasoning or deceptive arguments, often with the intention of misleading others. Sophists in ancient Greece were known for manipulating language and logic to appear knowledgeable or persuasive without necessarily adhering to sound reasoning.
Historical analysis is grounded in evidence, documentation, and critical inquiry. When scholars use historical analysis to investigate the origins and development of a law or policy, they are engaging with primary sources, such as legislative records, political speeches, or societal events, to reconstruct the context and motivations behind the policy. This approach adheres to scholarly rigor and is not aimed at deceiving or distorting facts. It’s about understanding how a law came into being and the historical forces that shaped it, rather than manipulating or obscuring truth for rhetorical effect.
Why it is not shamanic:
"Shamanic" refers to practices associated with indigenous spiritual or religious rituals, often involving trance states, supernatural beliefs, or communication with spirits. In contrast, historical analysis in the scholarly sense involves using empirical evidence, documents, and critical thinking to understand past events and trends.
While some might see historical analysis as uncovering "hidden" meanings or interpreting events through a particular lens, it remains firmly grounded in empirical evidence and logical reasoning. It doesn't involve mystical or supernatural interpretation but rather seeks to understand the causes and effects of historical events through a scholarly, evidence-based process.
In summary:
Using historical analysis as a starting point for understanding the reasoning behind a law or policy is a valid scholarly approach. It is neither sophistic (which involves deceptive argumentation) nor shamanic (which involves mystical or spiritual practices), but rather a rigorous, evidence-based method that helps scholars understand the social, political, and economic factors that shaped a given law or policy.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
So, what I think you're saying is that you want to talk about the current operation of the farm, given the existence of the fence. That may be an interesting conversation, when we can get to it, but the current operation of the farm is designed around the fact that there is a fence there. That a current farmhand says, "I've kinda figured out at least something nice I can get out of this fence here," is not our first question. Our first question is why. What for. What problem was it designed to solve? I have tried to endeavor to understand why it was put into place. What for. What problem it was designed to solve. What information am I lacking on that question? If I am not lacking in information on that question, I would appreciate some acknowledgement on that point, and then we can move toward other issues. As of now, my sense is that you're saying that I'm just so completely lacking in any information that I still don't even have any idea why it was built, what it was for, what problem it was designed to solve.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
That is later then when the fence was erected. What information am I lacking concerning the how/why of the fence being erected?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Please just explain anything to do with Chesterton's fence. I don't understand, and I want to understand. Perhaps you can bring more information that I am missing about the period of time when this fence was erected, if it is information I am lacking.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
After a nice sleep last night, I tried really interpreting my interlocutor's most-recent-at-the-time argument about Chesterton's fence, with as much charity as I could. I went on to produce what I thought was almost a quality contribution.
So let me ask you for some advice. I would like to be able to have a productive conversation with this person. I have tried to bring us back to productive conversations and put in effort on my side. What I've gotten in response is accusations of sophistry, that I don't know anything about anything relevant, and claims that if I even consider the questions asked, it will magically become clear to me. I suppose I will trust your read that those comments are actually me becoming more antagonistic, and I will have to review it in time to understand, but can you provide any advice for how I can bring such a conversation back into the realm of being productive? Or do I really just need to give up when this is the type of engagement I'm getting?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
You're not even trying.
Sorry that I'm sooooo stupid that after I have considered the answers to the question you've asked, I still find your position on my explanation of Chesterton's Fence unclear. You're gonna have to stoop down real low and actually explain what you're thinking in a way that is comprehensible to us normal 'little' people.
Fair enough. I was definitely being too strong in my language. If anything, it sort of highlights how difficult it is to even know how to compute it. Upon further reflection, I'd say that it's probably highly nonlinear and complicated, perhaps somewhat resistant to traditional methods (let's be honest; it's going to be a variant on OLS). For example, suppose two people use very similar amounts of fentanyl (to hit another topic in the OP), but just different enough or the people being just different enough in size or whatever that one of them dies and the other one is left alive, but with major organ issues or whatever. Maybe they're scared straight or are physically unable to go out and get drugs anymore, but their life just drags on for a long time, with ever-increasing medical bills. How, then, does one account for this risk factor in the calculus?
I think this actually brings me back to my initial position, though. I don't want to have to solve these wicked estimation problems in order to do public policy. I shouldn't have to. It should be mostly a meaningless question, at least for the purposes of public policy, if we were focused on setting things up so that folks internalized the costs of their choices rather than doing everything we can to externalize everything and transfer incomes.
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