ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
11hr ago
How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses?
I am qualitatively annoyed by the situation, which is independent of the frequency. However, you have the mod history, so if you'd like to provide numbers to supplement the conceptual-level discussion, that would be appreciated.
You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.
There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this."
Technically, even this OP wrote something about it. But yeah, I still have no idea what the actual standard is.
Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue.
Perhaps your numbers from the mod history will bear out that the typical response is just a warning. I still think this is a bad equilibrium. It provides insufficient distinction between typical low effort garbage that we don't want and obvious 100% topics, which we (I) do. Moreover, I prefer a world where this distinction is overt in policy.
For any other mods who might be casually interested in subscribing to my newsletter this meta topic, I would like to note that so far in the responses, I see very little engagement with my conceptual definition of the problem to be solved, the incentives involved, the current or desired equilibria, or valuation methods for what type of resulting posting dynamics we'd prefer.
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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
27d 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
28d 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'"?
I think you have mistaken what my model was. I agree with this.
I think a pretty low-effort comment is sufficient to provide the canvas. It seems to me that you are asking for it to paint the canvas.
If the mods believe this, then they should simply impose a moratorium. No breaking news for 24hrs. That would be clear.
This seems like an unstable equilibrium. An individual actor can defect by putting in only 19min of work. Then the next individual actor can defect by putting in only 18min of work. Rinse and repeat. My proposal acknowledges that it is a useful service to provide a canvas, but only for a small subset of genuine 100% topics. Moreover, it says that this service is valued in that it will not be warned/banned, but in order to maintain incentives for the equilibrium, it will come with a shower of downvotes and significant penalties if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic.
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