ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Ah, the good old "all that's needed is just some willpower" argument.
Ah, the good old strawman. Actually, very very bad old strawman.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
What I'm saying is that advising lifestyle changes rarely works. I don't have firm figures at hand, but I suspect that the number of people I've recommended such eminently sensible things like losing weight, stopping smoking and going to gym grossly outweigh (pun not intended) the number who actually did anything about it.
This is much more circumspect than your original comment. The problem of advice-giving is significantly different in nature, and it has significant dependency on a wide variety of external, contingent factors that are not-necessarily related to the typical time-independent, mechanistic processes that the biological and medical sciences study. If you would please kindly continue to be this circumspect in future comments, that would be appreciated.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Maybe "But don't tell people that utterly destroying enemy doesn't work, because it does." would be better?
I don't know how this analogy is supposed to work. The point of the development of military doctrine is to build up a body of professional knowledge, generally to the purpose of, indeed, destroying the enemy (though there are sometimes tweaks for political constraints or other political objectives). This is, indeed, intended to be "what works".
Is the point of your analogy that the endeavor of developing military doctrine is simply fallacious from the get-go? This has other implications that I can think of. For example, rather than moving TRADOC, as Trump did, I think this point of view says that he should have simply eliminated it altogether. Of course, I think you can tell that I don't think that this is the point of the analogy, but I'm kind of struggling to see what the point is.
Maybe, on the other end, it's something along the lines of, "It's not terribly helpful to be a 400lb guy in a bed who just writes somewhere on the internet, 'Hurr durr, have you tried killing the bad guys?'"? I mean, sure? Yeah, I just don't get what you're going for, and I don't get how it's relevant to what I've said.
trying to not overeat vs extreme marketing of hyperpalatable foods is an adversarial process
Mathematically speaking, I would distinguish the two. This may be a complicated and difficult environment, but it is not an adversarial one. There are deep mathematical differences between the two.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
What is "adversary-proof production"? What does it look like? What policies achieve that end state or detract from it?
This has been on my mind for a while. It comes up regularly in discussions concerning international trade, tariffs and other trade policy, manufacturing, agriculture, defense, and geopolitics. I've joked about it before:
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 remarked in that comment that I was kind of joking, but only kind of. I think it really is that I just actually don't know what "adversary-proof production" actually means. I don't think I have a set of criteria to go check whether or to what extent a country's production is adversary-proof. Thus, I don't think I have a way of determining whether any particular policy proposal would or would not contribute toward that goal.
With this context, one of my various aggregators linked to this tweet:
Rice prices have exploded in Japan. The country goes grows about 99% of the rice it consumes, a condition approaching autarky, because of a lattice of subsidies, political influence and protectionism, which all make the market incredibly vulnerable to shocks.
The tweet includes a price chart. I checked reasonably quickly to make sure it wasn't totally off the wall and found articles like this. Apparently, there are a bunch of subsidies/market controls on the domestic production of rice in Japan. Moreover, there is only a very small amount of imported rice allowed without tariffs. The result is that the vast vast majority of Japanese-consumed rice is grown in Japan. There are very few companies that have established any sort of importation supply chain, no relations with international producers, no pre-existing options deals, no experience with the logistics of importing.
And thus, because of some supply (and possibly some demand) factors (one might quibble with the details here, and it seems like different authors point to similar buy slightly different details; I don't think it matters too much), the price of rice in Japan has skyrocketed. One might not worry too much, though. The government is here to help. They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.
If you can't tell, I am sympathetic to the view of the tweet author. I don't think that what "adversary-proof production" means is that you shut out international trade, regulate production in order to make sure you preserve some sense of what you think the domestic market "should" look like, and have almost the entirety of your production be domestic.
...but that still leaves me wanting to know... what is "adversary-proof production"? What does it actually look like? I tried my typical strategy of hopping over to google scholar to see if I could find some academic writing on the topic, but perhaps they just use different key terminology, and I'm missing it. Can TheMotte help? Any academic work? Or even your home-grown (autarkic?) definition?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
So educate me, then. Because the phrase 'Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it.' falls pretty well in line with what my attitude would have been a year or more ago.
You went wrong a single sentence later:
Like you, I felt the majority of weight-gain and weight-loss issues was a matter of people simply not wanting to put in the effort.
'lifestyle changes can sometimes only work to a point'
Possibly so. I'd need to see some high quality research on this question to know much either way, where those points might be, whether they can be predicted, etc.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Like you, I was of a similar attitude.
I don't think you have accurately captured my attitude. In fact, I think you have gotten it completely wrong.
And as time has gone by, I'm becoming more and more convinced that our modern diet has done extreme damage to our bodies
Perhaps so. Biological processes in general do not seem to be fully-reversible, especially when you include the effects of aging. Nevertheless, that is not an argument against the measurable physiological benefits of certain lifestyle changes.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
telling them that they are stupid failures
Sorry, what? You're just off the mark. Aside from the inherent differences between adversarial processes and other dynamic processes.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
So, in this sentence, what is the "problem" that is in need of a solution? Is it, like, "the problem of trying to decide what to tell people"? Or what?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Then by all means, please elaborate on how you intended the following sentence to be interpreted:
I'm a doctor for many reasons, but ranking highly among them is that I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Compare what I wrote:
There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay.
I don't know to what extent a clustering can be identified that can be simply labeled "not wanting to put in the effort".
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Oh, well then this is just the standard, all-too-common, strawman. You're responding to a figment of your imagination, not anything I've written.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
Can I say the line? I kinda want to say the line. Ok, I'm going to try saying the line now.
What did you think 'let's destroy marriage and the family' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”.
"The" is an incorrect use of the definite article. There is another solution, another technology. Even Beyoncé knows of this technology, though she, like the author you cite, clearly lacks comprehension of what it's for and how it is to be used. It is the humble ring. It goes on a finger. There are many others which superficially look like it, but one is a special piece of social technology.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
The only regress of grievances offered is one that exists at the pleasure of the sovereign and can be abolished at will.
Let's again go back to the analogy. If a parent with a maximally-oppositional child or a board game master with a maximally-oppositional player decides to press with their rule, what redress of grievances is available other than their pleasure? Yes, they can at will decide to give up on enforcement of the rule. There are tons of examples of that happening with the government, too. Moreover, there are many overlapping methods of petition for redress of grievances in a system like what the US has. That was kind of an important part of the founding movement. One might not like them; one might not think they are working in the way that they "should", but that is a separate matter from the mere question of what is required to state that all government rules are uniquely enforced by violence/kidnapping. You need to posit other things like maximal-opposition. In fact, if you ask someone who makes such a claim how they end up in such a situation, they almost by necessity appeal to maximal-opposition. "This rule seems to be enforced by a $5 fine, not violence/kidnapping." "Well, what if you don't pay that fine?" "The next step is X." "What happens if they refuse to comply with X?" "The next step is Y." "...what happens if they refuse to comply with Y?" And so on and so forth until you get to the point where violence/kidnapping occurs. There may be offramps along the way, but they all tend to be ignored in such reasoning. I'm simply pointing out that if we apply the same reasoning to essentially any other rule in the world, you either have to posit an offramp occurring, or you still end up in violence/kidnapping. Fewer people are quite as willing to think about this and apply the same reasoning to any other rule in the world.
There is a bit of a Clauswitzian feel to this reasoning. Any time you're trying to enforce any rule, either someone backs down, comes to an agreement or something, or escalates further. If we take any conflict over anything that seems like 'rule enforcement', if parties are willing to escalate and go further in their maximal opposition, you end up in warfare/violence. Politics is just one form of conflict management, but just as sure as war is politics by other means, violence in general is conflict management/"rule enforcement" by other means. Just take almost any example of a rule you want to enforce and walk through the exact same steps of, "Well, what if they're maximally-oppositional?"
Finally, to be completely clear, this is not an argument "against libertarianism". It is simply bringing clarity to the nature of one particular type of argument.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
This seems like the opposite of a fair response. If we put a guy on the fry station at McDonald's, and he just constantly screws it up over and over again, in the dumbest ways possible, it doesn't seem like a reasonable response to say, "How about we just put this guy in charge of the entire store?"
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
If only I had three further paragraphs.
I don't see anything in here about the question of the uniqueness of government rule enforcement being with violence/kidnapping. Mayyyybe this:
Equals in rank or station within civilized society have a fundamentally different relationship and method of conflict resolution, one which specifically prohibits or codifies the escalation to a state of war.
But it doesn't actually discuss rule enforcement. How do you do rule enforcement? Like, any example of rule enforcement? I've given two example scenarios. You can give others. How do you do it in the case of maximal-opposition?
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself.
Not really. There's a large timescale separation. The dynamics of economic/political/etc systems are significantly faster. I know it's a technical term, and it mostly only applies neatly to second-order systems, but there's a concept of "natural frequency" in dynamics, and it gives you some sense of it. What I'd like to observe about this term is that it is, in a sense, "natural" to the system, itself. It is not something that we need to really plan for in a feedforward fashion. The 'inner' loop is a wayyyyy faster optimization process; it won't be all that affected by a slow parametric change.
Possibly so, but then I think the source of the matter does not begin (or end) with a proposition that it seems somewhat unique to government that rules are enforced by violence/kidnapping. I think something else has to be doing the work.
EDIT: I meant to also mention that it's not just child/parent relations. It's genuinely all rules ever. You're playing a board game, and you want to make a 'house rule'? Well, what if someone just refuses to play by it? Escalate? Eventually kick them out of your house? ...we start running into the 'exile' problem again, supposing they become maximally-oppositional. I don't think most people would start off saying, "You should consider whether or not it's worth using violence/kidnapping to enforce a house rule for a board game," even if that is a conceivable end state in the maximally-oppositional case.
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.
ControlsFreak
23d ago
How is convincing western populations not to do this going?
You say this as if there is some consensus effort to try to convince them of this. The reality is that for quite a while now, the dominant consensus has been trying to accomplish the opposite. Unless you think this is just a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. Like, communism must be wrong, not because it's conceptually wrong or anything, but because it hasn't convinced enough westerners to be communist, for example. This seems like a very strange claim.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
It's pretty hard to beat, "I left some fruit (that I'm legally allowed to buy and have) in the cabinet for too long."
ControlsFreak
29d 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
10d ago
How often does everyone here wash their cars? What conditions are they put through? (Garage/outside, daily driver/weekend fun, extreme conditions, salty winters...) Do you hand wash or car wash? Do you find a sense of ritual/peace in doing it, or is it a chore?
I am very happy that these drugs helped your mother. I do not disparage anything about these drugs or anyone who chooses to take them.
...however.
You, like many others, go too far. Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it. There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay. They may be perfectly fine using a drug. Nothing wrong with that. But don't tell people that changing their lifestyle doesn't work, because it does.
Let's take something like, I don't know, becoming a doctor. I've heard that this process sucks. I've heard that plenty of folks burn out or fail at some point. I'm sure someone's mother somewhere failed in trying to become a doctor, regardless of how much her family tried to make her do it. Nevertheless, I think there are still fine reasons to say, "Here are the objective things you need to accomplish to become a doctor, and here are a variety of subjective tips to help you pattern your life in a way that is conducive to achieving that goal, if you so choose." Some people won't do it, and that's okay (in fact, the vast majority of people right now don't become doctors). We don't have a pill yet that magically gives people all the required knowledge of a doctor. But even if we did, it wouldn't be a reason to say that the other (true, good) information "doesn't work".
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