ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Agreed. Another plan of attack is to point out that these "societal conversations" will actually be completely managed by Party members, for the purpose of giving good outcomes only to Party members in good standing, judged primarily on how influential you are in the Party. I think that's a follow-on conversation that happens once they're at least open to the idea of tradeoffs, and you can introduce them to the concept of public choice theory. If they're still in the completely fresh phase of "some outcome seems unfair in the world", you'll have to warm them up to thinking about how different systems manage that tradeoff better/worse.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
There is a lot of tension in the problem statement that has been pointed out a few times. To what extent can "low IQ normies" actually understand somewhat complex topics that require a fair amount of marinating and perspective? So, I guess I'll contribute one little route that helps with one little ingredient that can go into the marinade and hopefully help them gain perspective over time. Hopefully, it's a simple enough contribution that it can actually somewhat stick with a normie. It's not meant to be a "now you oppose communism" point, but just a little contribution to make them slightly less susceptible and slightly more likely to fit other pieces into the puzzle. The first part is heavily lifted from Russ Roberts talking to Mike Munger in EconTalk.
The issue is that many have a very naive understanding of "fairness", as other folks have pointed out here. They imagine that you can just just elect the right politicians to grab the "fairness" knob and turn it toward "good", with no ill consequences. They obviously wouldn't be willing to trade off "fairness" for something as cold as "economic efficiency", which sounds like how capitalists exploit everyone. So, the point is to use two examples to argue that 1) Yes, you absolutely would give up some amount of fairness for some amount of efficiency, and 2) In fact, we have easy-to-understand historical examples of the relentless drive toward "fairness" being wildly harmful. The first proceeds with a theoretical exercise that feels practical enough to be within every normie's daily experience, and the latter hopefully helps connect the idea to practice in case they think it's just too disconnected and theoretical.
The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".
(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)
The bonus could actually be a good connection to the second thing, which is a real-world example of exactly how the commie logic goes. Not only can you not do any of the fun things in life (or even get through an intersection to get to work), but you certainly can't acquire anything that could even help you do work. The Khmer Rouge took commie logic as logic, "fairness" above all else. Absolutely no chance that any Big Men of Capitalism could arise. In order to do that, you simply have to ban free enterprise. No one can hoard goods or money if they can't build an evil Big Business. If you let them just go start a business, they might make a bunch of money, and then we get inequality and unfairness. So, everybody works on the State farm, and they're definitely not allowed to do stuff that makes them rich, unequal, and unfair. At least, not without one of those "societal conversations" (don't ask when those actually happen, but spoiler, it's only when we want to give Party Insiders extra goodies). Don't even think about getting a computer; if you had a computer, you might program something and start a tech company, which might make you rich, unequal, and unfair. Hammers? Ladders? Literally anything that could be used to make money with? Banned, unless it's owned by the State, for use on State projects, which have presumably had a "societal conversation" approving them. Hell, the Khmer literally banned people who wanted to have a little more food for their family (because they apparently weren't satisfied by the outcome of the "societal conversation") from going out into the countryside and picking berries. Because that's "hoarding goods", and besides, you might try to sell them for other stuff, acquiring extra wealth, becoming rich, unequal, and unfair.
The result is hopefully that they can see that, while there is often an intuitive drive toward "fairness" (and some amount of this intuition may be fine), it actually gets extremely wonky as you blow it up in scale. It's directly connected to how it would negatively impact their normie life and a historical example of exactly that happening. They'll hopefully realize that they will, deep down, be willing to trade some amount of "fairness" for some amount of "efficiency", and I think that's enough of an accomplishment for a normie who is commie-curious. They'll definitely need more marinating to go much beyond that.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If you can point to a single example of a biological male who grew into becoming a biological female or vice-versa, we can perhaps have a conversation about what to do in that case.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
When I was bike commuting, I had a pretty safe path to work. I'm not actually sure what the numbers would be on risk of death/lowering stress, but I could see it being either a small factor or maybe even going either way. Exercise definitely has a inherent reduction-of-stress effect that would need to be overcome.
Commuting by car did not, however, save me time. I was in a kinda similar situation; 20min drive, 40min ride. The gym was right on the way to work. I could treat the ride as a warm-up/cool-down and not have to do those things in the gym. I could ride hard and just have it be a full cardio workout. I did spin class sometimes for cardio, so substituting riding to work for spin class was a pure time savings of the time I would have spent sitting in the car doing nothing. Public transport was very not available for my commute, for, uh, reasons.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Hat tip Tyler Cowen, the Brazilian military has some amount of reliance on Starlink. What are the chances that this is actually stemming from weird, completely internal politics about military interdependence with anything US, with one faction wanting to increase ties and the other faction wanting to decrease them... and this being a simple power play by the latter faction? X itself may not be an actual target, but a means to this end.
That is, one completely plausible scenario is that it's just a crazy authoritarian turn. Another plausible scenario is that factions in the gov't/military are fighting over things like Starlink, and the anti-Starlink faction is losing on that direct, internal fight (e.g., can't get the military to give it up, no matter how much they try to throw around political weight internally). So, the anti-Starlink faction finds an alternate means. The value they get from increasing authoritarianism WRT X, proper, may be a lot, a little, or even slightly negative, so long as they think the value they get from winning the Starlink fight is higher.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I don't have any strong political/culture war opinion, so I just want to convey a personal opinion.
I used to live in an area where many of the roads had nice big shoulders. In addition, there were some great hills nearby, but also some flat routes if preferred. It was glorious. I loved getting out, getting some fresh air, getting some cardio in. For a while during COVID, it was basically my only allowable means of recreation/exercise (I personally hate running). I even commuted to work by bike for a while, as my father did before me (in yet a different area).
I have since moved. This area is not lacking in land, but it is lacking in snow, and I think that's a big reason why there aren't shoulders anywhere. They don't use the extra land for bike lanes, either. To boot, there aren't any good hills nearby, either. It's horrible. I've mostly given up on riding as being too scary/dangerous. I'm not quite resigned enough to sell my bike, and I'm clinging on to a few low-frequency use cases. My cardio has definitely taken a hit.
I really don't have a political angle to this. I know that different areas have different geography, different populations, different population preferences, different commute times, etc. There's even that city in Georgia that has a golf cart network. I hope they're satisfied with their local solution. There's no real global optimum that can be rolled out everywhere. Some people could sneer that I'm just a hobbyist with a children's toy, while others could sneer that I'm not doing enough to support the cause which could improve things for people in whichever local situation. Whatever. I'm not agitating for change here; I'm fine with the tradeoffs "they"ve made, and I'll live with them. (At least they're getting housing policy mostly right.) I'm just sad that that's something I used to enjoy but can't really anymore.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
“less favourable”
I think you're resting a lot on this, but the court document only mentions this once, with reference to CEDAW (not SDA), saying that it
refers only to discrimination that places women in a less favourable position than men. It therefore does not cover the kind of discrimination that Ms Tickle alleges in this case, which is discrimination that placed her in the same position as men.
They don't really say anything about SDA having some form of "less favorable" test; they talk about "disadvantaging", and they don't really grapple how that would really work WRT a claim of gender identity. What is the set of possible "gender identities" in question? What is the reference class? It's a conceptual mush. I know it's approaching a reductio, but what if someone gender identified as an attack helicopter (substitute less ridiculous, but still nonbinary or whatever), but appeared male, then tried to access Giggle. Indirect gender identity discrimination?
Perhaps @Gillitrut was completely barking up the wrong tree when claiming that the 'authoritative document' had anything to do with it, but we're still left with a different kind of mess... and one that I point out, still leaves yardsticks on the table. You can fit almost anything into "other status".
It also reopens your hypo:
a breastless transwoman desperate for a mammogram, or something. I could see that happening. But I’m reasonably confident our medical jurisprudence allows doctors to decline providing frivolous care. It certainly lets insurance opt out.
I don't see why, with this ruling, it would be considered frivolous or allow an opt out. Could even have one with implants or just barely large enough 'moobs'. The only way would be to say, "Mammograms are for the female sex," but then we're exactly back in the same position Giggle is. There's no reason to disadvantage MtFs in terms of getting to see imagery of their chest, if that's what they want. We don't actually have a reference class to compare them to, anyway. In order to show that Tickle was disadvantaged in comparison to some other reference class, I'd want to know what that reference class is, and once we know that, then maybe we can check to see if denying MtFs mammograms does/doesn't disadvantage them WRT the same reference class.
If there's anything I've learned from learning about BIID, it's that people can be very very serious about demanding a treatment that others may see as kind of silly or potentially even harmful. Are you going to import some "someone might think it's actually silly/harmful" exemption? Like, if a doctor simply asserts, "I think this would actually be silly/harmful, for whatever reason," then they're okay? Well, sure, Giggle can simply say that they think that someone who looks that much like a man is being silly or actually going to harm themselves, because they're gonna like get made fun of or something. I don't think it's easy at all to surgically (heh) slice out the cases that you personally think are silly/unlikely, because that's a ridiculous ad hoc test where the rule is that every time something comes up, we have to ask you whether it's silly or not.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Thanks for getting me to take another look at it fresh.
the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
I have decided that “gender identity” comes within “other status” in Article 26
Questions about yardsticks are back on the table. The Status Games are alive and well in Australia. What an absolutely incoherent mess we keep getting ourselves into.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
My brother in Christ—the entire question of this thread is about the government designation creating a government-enforced legal requirement on third-party service providers to respect the drivers-license-sex. If you'd like to say that the government designation creates no legal requirement for doctors, then it should equally make no legal requirement for this digital app.
Otherwise, you have to make a distinction - from the law - for why it creates a legal requirement for some private service providers and not for others.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I mentioned a while back that when I visited, I was shocked that basically every person I talked to brought up immigration, unprompted. I wouldn't be at all surprised anymore to see that the conversation has developed even further in that direction in the last year.
What kind of hit me yesterday, though, was that these last several years may legitimately change Canada's demographics in a significant way, effectively forever. The shift was so rapid and so significant in numbers in such a short time, partially masked from public scrutiny by COVID, and now the culture may never be the same again. It's hard to describe how I feel about it except to make comparison to an immigration policy version of a coup d'etat. The facts on the ground changed so fast, partially hidden from view, and now the new reality is a fait accompli. It's a weird feeling.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Then by all means, please describe the additional government purposes you have in mind.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The patient didn’t request it.
The patient was unconscious, so that was never on the table.
the different service was never on the table ... The diagnosis didn’t suggest it.
It sure was, and it sure did, if the chosen method of identifying sex was reversed.
There’s nothing less favourable about giving the medically correct treatment.
...we're all the way back to, "What is correct?" Are you saying that the sex listed on the authoritative document is "incorrect"?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
What service is being withheld on the basis of sex or gender?
The different service that would have been provided to the other sex. At this point, I almost feel compelled to ask whether you think Giggle would have been perfectly legally fine if they had simply put males on the 'male server', talking to other males, and females on the 'female server', talking to other females. Then, in response to a complaint, would you be perfectly happy dismissing it by just observing that there is no service that is being withheld on the basis of sex or gender? Because to draw the line here seems to cut against the entire zeitgeist.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Don't need an analog, at least not according to the standard you've set forth. You just said that the "only purpose" a government sex classification serves is as a shorthand. They saw the shorthand, they determined that other facts were known, and they used the other facts. Amusement parks did it, emergency rooms did it, and digital apps did it. Unless you have some extra, currently hidden government purpose, these cases seem precisely analogous for the test you've set forth. There's nothing in your current test that says that some sorts are okay and other sorts aren't.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
In the emergency room context the only purpose a sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment.
One could just as easily say that in a digital app setting, the only purpose a government sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment. If you already know those other biological facts it's not clear to me what further information one is getting from someone's legal sex classification. In any case apps should determine digital treatments on the basis of the relevant biology, not the legal sex classification. Where does your argument fail?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I don't follow. Here you said that "[t]here’s no discrimination lawsuit in using the actual indicators for a treatment". So, I must ask again, given that there's a specific law calling out gender identity and sex discrimination,
Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?
We have a specific law. It is applied to private service providers. The document is authoritative.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
the government's purposes ... other purposes
What are the purposes of such marks when it comes to private service providers, say, like amusement parks and emergency rooms?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think you might be sounding like a transphobe. Tests, forms, doctor's notes, medical gatekeeping?
But no worries, I think @Gillitrut's position can come to your rescue. See, you don't have to actually make any decisions about what test/forms/notes/gatekeeping will occur. You can sit back, remain completely agnostic about any underlying Big T Truth, and just be law-brained enough to observe that different jurisdictions will make different choices. Some jurisdictions, we can call them the Transphobe Jurisdictions, have rulers and tests and stuff like you might want. Other jurisdictions, the Nontransphobe Jurisdictions, don't. Australia happened to choose already that they are a Nontransphobe Jurisdiction, having no rulers, no tests, no nothing. They have a much simpler process that lets you quickly and easily change the authoritative document, which declares, with authority (thus the adjective), how the law views the situation. One can then just sit back, be law-brained, and see that the conclusions follow from the premises.
...but now, Person B is considering going to a local amusement park, a private service provider. There happen to be two amusement parks in the area. Amusement Park Z is run by young, hip folks. They have electronic controls everywhere. You can scan your driver's license and swipe your credit card at the entrance, and then just use the nifty electronic system to access any rides you desire. Amusement Park X is run by old fogies, practically boomers. You have to hand physical tickets to the white guy standing next to the ride, and he points to the sign that says, "You must be this tall to ride." Can Person B sue Amusement Park X for not caring about the authoritative document and simply observing, "Your head don't touch the top of the ruler, dawg"?
After riding a ride that mayyyyyyyyyybe wasn't super safe for short people, Person B isn't feeling so good. B makes his way to the emergency room. B tells the doc everything about what's happened in the time period leading up to that moment. B's last physical act is to pull an insurance card out of a pocket and hand it to the doc, but since it was right next to B's driver's license in the pocket, both are grabbed and passed to the doc. (Can insert/remove a hypo here about B's last words being, "Please help me doc; do anything you need to.") Then, B passes out.
The doc runs a bunch of tests. In the process, they strip off B's clothes and replace them with a standard hospital gown. They can't help but happen to notice B's genitals in the process. The hospital bed automatically provides B's weight. Maybe even in the future, there's a ruler built into the bed, too. The tests come back, and they happen to include chromosomes and other indicators. All of the medical indicators correlate perfectly toward B having a particular sex, height, and weight. But the doctor noticed that B's drivers license disagrees on some/all of these things. The only problem is that the next step that the doctor has to take depends on one or more of those things. Perhaps it's just a dosage selection; perhaps it's an even more significant change in the course of treatment.
Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?
I'm pretty law-brained for a lot of things, but when it comes to these issues, I cannot escape the phrase, "Live not by lies." If we bake lies into the premises, the principle of explosion surely follows. It is utterly unsurprising that if we start off with baked in lies, then attempt to simply close our eyes to the entire realm of truth and try to proceed purely by law-brain, contradictions will follow.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
I saw one discussed by William Spaniel. Though I have no other reference by which to determine whether the authors are "serious people", it seemed that Spaniel, who is definitely no Trump/right/conservative/whatever shill, seemed to think it was at least in the land of plausibility.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
when they are incorrect
This simply pushes the problem to the question of, "When are they correct/incorrect?" The silly version of this is that my driver's license has height on it. Suppose that for Person A, there was a genuine flubbing, a fat fingering. Their height was listed wrong. Presumably, they could request to have it changed on the document. On the other hand, Person B thinks that he's gotta be 6' tall for the dating apps, which in the future year of verified identity for everything, actually take in your driver's license information and use that in the algorithm. So, Person B waltzes into the DMV and says, "Well, obviously, you have a general process for updating these documents, so you need to list me as 6' tall." What should the government do when ye olde yardstick begs to differ?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think that's actually the only plausible way that such sex could even occur, given many people's stated beliefs about rape via power differential.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased
I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things. That's kind of a sub-phenomenon of the general opportunity costs -> more "busy" result. Since people are so productive and so wealthy, they feel like they have to "do stuff" with their time (stuff that costs all that money they're making), and whether that's taking a fancy trip or taking your kid to fifty-three activities, it all feels like the same phenomenon to me.
Backing out, though, it really is just a different claim to say that children are more expensive, monetarily, in terms of the purchases required (with the intermediate step being that material wealth hasn't kept up with the increased monetary requirement) and saying that people are so wealthy that the real resource being budgeted and subject to opportunity cost is time. It brings us to substantially different conclusions about the underlying dynamics and possible policy considerations.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'. That seems plausible to me, perhaps even likely. It's a similar explanation to what I've heard given as the reason why people seem to think they're always "busy"; they just have so much damn money and economic power/opportunity that choosing to not spend your time traveling, skiing, whatever, has a higher opportunity cost.
But I would stress that this is not strictly lack of material wealth or access to affordable goods. In any event, I had forgotten about this explanation, and would consider it a contender with other murkier cultural/status factors.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Our insane economic success (in markets that aren't completely whack to to TRBL gov't intervention like healthcare, education, and housing) has allowed people's standards for how much they spend on children to go through the roof, rather than standards magically rising on their own beyond our economic means. Perhaps one could argue that child rearing is one of the few areas where there's a one-way ratchet, such that any increases in standards are 'locked in', such that any decreases in economic ability present significant challenges and drive huge decreases in fertility, but it really seems quite unlikely, especially given that we're still not significantly struggling economically by almost any real measure and that TFR doesn't really track things like recessions all that well. I'm much more likely to believe that it's general cultural/status factors.
I wonder how much of this is genuine econometrics/history, how much was and is pure political posturing (either to drum up support for programs like SS or to maintain that general zeitgeist), and how much is just "actually, basically everyone was just poor back then". Looking at figures like this, I lean toward "everyone was just poor back then". James T Patterson wrote:
with some numbers that are in various year real dollars, comparing how different 'standards' for poverty have changed significantly over time. Were old people poor back then? Almost certainly; everyone was poor back then. It's the absolutely phenomenal success of American capitalism that has made us just absurdly wealthy in comparison that has been the major change. It's extremely difficult to 1) actually break out detailed age-based numbers in that era and tell a significant story about what did/didn't "work" in the context of universal poverty, and 2) have any sense for whether something "working/not working" in the context of universal poverty says much about a world where we have literally 10x more wealth.
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