ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe.
I mean, that's not really what "legislation from the bench" means? Take, for example, Kavanaugh's position that 14A doesn't require it either way, but Congress can legislate either way, wouldn't really be "legislation from the bench". It would instead be giving room for legislation. Typically, "legislation from the bench" means that the Court rules in a way that precludes legislation from making the decision. Somewhat ironically, that's kind of what the Court actually did here. By analog, Roe was legislation from the bench, where the Court decided the question in a way that didn't allow for any legislative choice, whereas Dobbs is probably not legislation from the bench, as it's saying that the legislation rests with the legislatures.
Of course, just because something is "legislation from the bench" doesn't mean that it's wrong; the Constitution may really, actually, say the thing.
In my effortpost, I referred to an old old comment of mine, where I said:
my highest aspirations for most administrations these days is that they give us interesting cases that clear up confusing Constitutional issues... and I think there’s a decent chance the Roberts Court can still do that on some of these matters.
After having (mostly) read the opinions, if I'm judging by this metric, I have to say that Roberts' majority opinion is a fail. To be clear, I am not saying that the opinion is wrong. On the contrary, as the saying goes, the Supreme Court is not final because they're right; they're right because they're final. So, yeah, they're final, and so they're right. But I do not think the majority opinion cleared up the confusion.
I don't think he really cleared up what was going on in WKA. Primarily because for the critical step, he just did what the Court did in WKA - turn to Schooner (DRINK!). One of the primary areas of interest was, in turn, what Schooner did and how it should be understood. On this point, Roberts was somehow even less informative than WKA. He didn't even quote the entire critical passage! Didn't even get to the part about the "implied license" under which people enter the country. As I said in the effortpost, the Court wants the Full Schooner, but it doesn't want to engage with it. It doesn't even touch on the full panoply of hypos that Schooner touched on.
The second major confusing question is how anything works with Indians. Indian law is confusing, yo. He could have at least said, "Indians are weird, yo." But he didn't even do that. I think this is basically the one, crucial sentence:
Indians born under those dominions, he concluded, were not “citizens or subjects of the United States,” but members of “alien and sovereign tribes.” [citing Kent]
Like, what counts as a "dominion"? What is it to be "under those dominions"? Does Roberts think it matters whether an Indian woman, carrying the child of an Indian man, wandered off the reservation and gave birth in non-tribal US territory? How does any of this work?
The biggest, most major sources of confusion are pretty much just swept under the rug.
I don't know that I buy the dissents, either. I at least felt like I learned some things from Thomas that I hadn't seen in the briefs/cases. He gave the most plausible explanation for what could have been the motivating reasoning behind the shift in language from the 1866 CRA and 14A, but I'm not qualified to assess the truth thereof. He really shines in making it visceral how confusing it is to read WKA. And I hadn't quite noticed in reading Fuller's WKA dissent that it could be read as agreeing with the majority that the child of a domiciled alien would be a citizen, but dissenting instead on the grounds that WKA, specifically, was not/could not be domiciled. I need to find time to go back and read it again; as of right now, I don't know whether I think this is a plausible reading or not.
I'd probably want to stew with it all and (re-)read some of the citations before saying who I find ultimately more persuasive. But I'm not sure either of them are "right" (as in, not the regular sense of right; ya know what? we've already covered this). That is, I'm not sure either view really provides a clear, convincing, comprehensive theory that fits all the pieces together and makes it less of an atrocious mess.
So I feel a bit better about my conclusion that the topic is an atrocious mess. I can take comfort that at least Kavanaugh agrees with me that the Constitutional question is "not straightforward". I'd like to also hope that Gorsuch was thinking something similar when, in his brief separate writing, he said, in a somewhat measured fashion, that he thought Thomas' view "better accords with the Clause's original public meaning". I'd like to remember his statement in oral arguments ("It's a mess"), and view him as agreeing with me that it's a mess, and then saying something along the lines of, "If the two best explanations for what's going on are Roberts' opinion or Thomas', I guess, if I have to, I'll take Thomas'." I'm not sure if that's where I'll end up after stewing with it longer, but it seems plausible.
Of course, the Constitutional issue being a 5-4 I think also supports my prior opinion that it is much messier than most people thought going into it.
Oh, and also of course, I feel a bit vindicated in my more recent prediction (in the effortpost here, rather than in my comment years ago at the old old old place) that we were likely not going to get a real, detailed, coherent opinion that cleared stuff up.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Technically Kavanaugh concurs with the ruling because he believes Congress' codification effects this rule, rather than the 14th amendment requiring it.
I'm still digesting it all, but I read Kavanaugh as stronger than that. I think he affirmatively believes that 14A would allow the exact same rule as the EO, but only if it was done by statute. That is, on the 14A Constitutional question, the vote was 5-4.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Have you checked what percentage of the devices have integrations for Home Assistant? If the number is decent, you can at least side-step all the manufacturer apps and put them in one location. May even be able to reassert local control, depending.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
Obviously this, but if the question mandated that I consume something that's not in the regular budget, it would probably be a robot mower. That's right around the price point of the good ones that could probably handle the slope in the lawn.
ControlsFreak
17d ago
Many years, they slap some Mondays on the calendar for issuing opinions, IIRC. But at this point, we are indeed getting close to July.
ControlsFreak
19d ago
Given that I am calling @ArjinFermin a liar, you may believe it's open season to call "liar" but I can at least point to my post and say "the words you wrote are not the words I wrote." Generally calling people liar has a high burden of proof (Ie you must be able to demonstrate a provable lie.
Hilarious.
You are perfectly happy to call others liars, but even when you provide links, it's actually them who are pointing to the words that they wrote... that you linked! (but lied about what the words were)... and saying that it's obvious that your claims about them are not the words that they wrote. Of course, you refuse to engage with the words that were written, and just substitute your own to pretend like they said what you imagine them having said.
And when one actually goes through the words written, in detail, the conclusion is that you have directly contradicted your own words. You don't even argue that this isn't the case! You do the "upper lip curl, go silent" strategy. Of course, when you're called out on this, you lob personal attacks rather than make an argument about the words that were actually written.
ControlsFreak
24d ago
I haven't fired my engineer, but when I have a casual question on regulations I ask chatgpt and it points me to the relevant code section, rather than paying my engineer to do so.
What sort of engineer? What sort of regulation/code? I want to profit.
ControlsFreak
25d ago
What employees have you fired so far?
In Zvi's recent post, I noticed an interesting pairing of two things:
Sell your house. Stuart Thompson lets Gemini (because he had a free account there from work that saved him $8 a month?!) walk him through everything involved in the sale, including being his agent. The problem is, Stuart does not seem to realize he does not know the counterfactual?
Stuart A. Thompson: In the end, using A.I. netted me more than $90,000. That includes the premium over the asking price, plus the roughly $36,000 in fees I didn’t pay.
I mean, yes, the agents he talked to early on told him he’d lose money, and instead he turned a profit. But only after the sale did he talk to another agent for an expert opinion, and that expert expected a higher sale price than Stuart got, meaning he almost certainly listed too low. Stuart thinks that after the agent fee he still basically broke even, but I’m guessing he put in more work and stress this way, and took on more downside risk. I know that if I am ever selling or buying, I will be using AI extensively as part of the effort, but I am going to stick with Danielle Wiedemann. I am confident that her help, connections and advice were worth far more than the fee, and would be again.
and:
For those confused about the radiology example, yes, AI is better than radiologists at reading x-rays, and many other components of professional services, and does so at cost epsilon, and this is super useful. Even if no one is out of work quite yet, often there is a ton of value in ‘pretty good answer, vastly better than you could otherwise get without a professional, for cost ~$0’ when the professional costs $1,000 and up.
It was a bit stark, because getting a pretty good answer, vastly better than you could otherwise get without a real estate professional, would seem to cost ~$0, when the professional apparently costs something like $36,000 and up. So why not fire the real estate agent?
There could be a variety of reasons involving the nature of the work, regulatory barriers, etc., but one thing that comes to mind is that Zvi has paid for a real estate agent before and is consciously thinking about what that situation is like when thinking about whether he would hire again. Whereas, I doubt he's hired a radiologist before and is probably not in a situation where he's thinking super seriously about the considerations that would be involved if he had a need for such a service.
This leads me to ask, "Which employees have you fired?" In this case, "employees" can be read broadly, covering folks like real estate agents/radiologists, who you may procure services from on occasion, in addition to actual employment relations if you're a manager/business owner. But I want to particularly hone in on examples where you have paid a human for a particular service in the past and have subsequently encountered a nearly-identical need, but have chosen to not pay a human now for the service.
This question is in significant part simply selfish. I might be missing some aspect in my life where I can save a bunch of money. That would be cool, and I'd like to do that if I can.
ControlsFreak
25d ago
The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.
It doesn't meet the criteria stated above:
I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. [emphasis added]
That may not be the only category in which some folks think something is acceptable, but it is the criteria stated that I'm comparing to for purposes of this sub-thread.
ControlsFreak
26d ago
Almost none of your examples actually work. Most of them get intentionality the wrong way 'round. There is obviously a huge conceptual chasm between an affirmative requirement to take extreme measures to save a life and a far more minimal requirement that one not murder. Perhaps you're just confused about what 'murder' is? Or maybe about what "in order to live" means?
Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die.
This is the only one that actually gets there. It's actually my favorite example. You can dial it up/down very well to push at people's intuitions. On one extreme is where you're actually going to die if you don't cut the rope. You can dial this down to just some risk of dying. You can dial it down further to just some risk of harm (maybe it's cutting off circulation to your foot, and you might lose your foot.... or maybe it's just threatening to give you rope burn; are you justified in cutting the rope then?). This is a good example that poses some tough questions, but yeah, almost none of your other examples work at all.
ControlsFreak
28d ago
With that in mind, what does it mean for the price to be "wrong"? What's supposed to happen if the "efficient market" doesn't get the price "right"?
That depends significantly on the reasoning why one thinks that may be the case. The unfortunate part is that it's about the same level of impossibility to know for sure that you've gotten that reasoning right as it is to know for sure what the underlying value of future cash flows is.
That said, if we are allowed to handwave a bit, it has been suggested by far greater financial minds than I (e.g., Matt Levine), that some stocks are sometimes priced above the current value of their future cash flows because of memes (e.g., Gamestop). If that's the case, then one would expect that the price would follow the dynamics of memes, which may or may not be at all similar to the dynamics that one would expect the price to follow if one thought that it was primarily being priced by more 'traditional' concerns. What is "supposed" to happen depends significantly on things like, for example, how long one thinks that it will primarily follow the dynamics of memes or whether that component will eventually disappear and such.
Obviously, there are many directions that any company may end up taking, and there could be many different underlying reasons why a (slightly-modified) "reasonably-efficient market" doesn't get the price "right". For example, a company may be engaging in fraud, and perhaps the vast majority of market participants are unaware of this fraud. What has sometimes happened in the past in such cases is that the company runs out of money, suddenly declaring bankruptcy and surprising everyone by telling them that their shares are a claim on $0 worth of shareholder equity. In other cases, an external party discovers the fraud, and as that information spreads through the market, many people want to sell, but no one wants to buy, and the price quickly collapses. Other dynamics can occur if there are other factors.
ControlsFreak
30d ago
IIRC, the shortest I've seen was, "We have Roko's Basilisk at home"
ControlsFreak
30d ago
Suppose I have legacy VBA macros in Excel. Are there any that let me just directly use them? Last I had looked at LibreOffice, I think, and I was going to have to do some significant rewriting.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Allow me to clarify. I'm aware of some of the weaknesses in the models that are used purely for the physical systems, but I actually don't think they're that bad. They're actually pretty decent, AFAICT, where "pretty decent" is a sort of term of art to describe situations where you have an okay sense for the scale of your error analysis and can sort of understand when it might be a problem or not a problem.
Sigh. I really don't know that I have a good way of explaining this intuition. Maybe a story. Long ago, I paid a lot more attention to fairly straightforward aircraft control topics at conferences. One question that came up surprisingly often was, "...would you fly on an airplane that is being controlled by your controller?" There is just a qualitative sense that you develop for how bad the badness is. How the error is likely to be structured, how likely genuinely destructive failure modes are, magnitudes of expected error under various noise distributions, etc.
With that, I guess I'll just say again that I don't think the climate models are "that bad". They're not garbage. There is error, we know some of the sources of error (you mention a couple), and we have an intuitive sense for about how big it may be.
Conversely, what I have significant theoretical disputes with is specifically trying to model economic systems coupled with climate systems. We basically can't even get off the ground, theoretically speaking. The timescales are the wrong way round. When you talk about the apparent fastness of climate dynamics, they are still figuratively glacial in comparison to the dynamics of economic systems (and I sometimes tack on political systems, because it's amazing how many people try to make completely whacko claims about these, too). You did great to realize that attempts like using a static damage function and then proceeding with a simple amortization are bonkers. My point is that the underlying theoretical reason why they're bonkers is because that's just not how one does anything with timescale-separated coupled dynamical systems.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Have you actually examined the details of Nordhaus’ models?
Oh boy have I. I went through it extensively way back in the day, when we were at the old old old place. That experience was part of my coming to the conclusion that the entire endeavor is simply an impossible task. You mention some of the problems; there are others. I agree that his Nobel was a scientific travesty and sad state of affairs.
If you want to understand climate change and why it’s so catastrophic, you have to model and understand the complex interactive feedbacks and it’s abundantly clear that he doesn’t.
I would echo this, but with one very minor modification:
If you want to understand climate change and its interaction with economics, you have to model and understand the complex interactive feedbacks and it’s abundantly clear that he doesn’t.
You simply state that it's "catastropic". Whereas I think it's pretty much impossible to actually model the complex interactive feedbacks... especially when it comes to their intersection with political/economic systems.
But now due to human activity, the climate is changing faster than the response to it.
One of the problems with the whole sort of analysis you do in this paragraph is that everyone does timescale-separated coupled dynamical systems backwards in the case of political/economic-climate coupling. As I alluded to in my comment, the dynamics of political/economic systems are fast, much much much faster than the dynamics of climate, even with human activity. If one spends time with the theory of such coupled systems (the canonical text being Khalil's book), which I have done extensively for non-climate-related professional reasons and prior to engaging with any economic-climate models, then one understands the proper way to go about analyzing such systems. And, well, nobody does it the proper way. Why not? In my view, it's because they can't. It's impossible. Rather than the problem lying with human psychology, the problem is that the math doesn't math that way.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Every so often, I see a number that strikes me in a particular way. More than once, the way that it strikes me has been in comparison to climate change damage estimates. Yes, yes, there are many many different estimates out there, and they're even presented in different terms, too. Some are in percentage of GDP/GWP; others are dollar figures. One of the numbers that has stuck in my brain, thanks to David Friedman back at the old old old place, comes from one of the early world leaders in trying to produce such estimates, Nobel-winning William Nordhaus. It would take epsilon more effort to find one of his old old old comments at the old old old place, so I just found an example from his substack.
Nordhaus’s final and most important point was based on his own research.
My research shows that there are indeed substantial net benefits from acting now rather than waiting fifty years. A look at Table 5-1 in my study A Question of Balance (2008) shows that the cost of waiting fifty years to begin reducing CO2 emissions is $2.3 trillion in 2005 prices. If we bring that number to today’s economy and prices, the loss from waiting is $4.1 trillion. Wars have been started over smaller sums.
What he does not mention is that his $4.1 trillion is a cost spread over the entire globe and an extended period of time. I initially assumed his calculations of cost were for the rest of the century, making his $4.1 trillion total about $48 billion a year, but in A Question of Balance he appears to be summing over the next 250 years which reduces the annual cost to $16 billion.
It's a quote from Nordhaus' 2012 NYT opinion piece, citing his 2008 book, so yeah, the estimate is quite old. There are many many other estimates out there since then, but this one stuck in my brain. I think he was trying to get it to stick in your brain. "Wars have been started over smaller sums," is meant to do that. It worked.
This morning, Tyler Cowen posted How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers? It's just quoting an NBER working paper. I'll just reproduce the whole quote, so there's no need to click through:
It may seem like a distant memory now, but as of the mid-2000s, U.S. natural gas production had been flat for a decade, and the U.S. was importing liquefied natural gas (LNG), with plans to import much more. Then shale gas happened. Advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling caused U.S. natural gas production to increase significantly, and the U.S. went from being a net importer of natural gas to being the world’s largest exporter. This paper calculates how much shale gas has saved U.S. natural gas consumers. Using price differences between the United States, Europe and Japan, we calculate that U.S. natural gas consumers have saved $3.1-$4.3 trillion between 2007 and 2025, equivalent to $164-$227 billion annually. Access to low-price U.S. natural gas has been particularly valuable during major supply shocks such as the war in Ukraine, and the benefits of shale gas have been experienced broadly across sectors and states.
It's not a direct analog, but that number, though. It's in my brain. $4.1T is right in that range of $3.1-4.3T. That's a swing in one country over less than 20 years, not 250 years. The dynamics of economic systems can move fast, much faster than climate change. But how big of a swing does that 'feel like'? Sure, life would have been more awful in a variety of ways in the counterfactual without the shale revolution. But, like, cataclysmically bad?! End of the world bad? I kind of doubt it.
I don't really like to focus too much on any particular estimate. There are higher ones; there are lower ones. I actually think the entire endeavor of estimating economic impacts of climate change is probably impossible, but we're stuck in a world where we have the various estimates we have and they matter to people. But I never underestimate how difficult the scale of numbers is to folks, so I appreciate when I occasionally see numbers of roughly similar scale in different contexts.
Ok, so I'm trying to follow. The clock we're analyzing has all of the access it needs in order to do y', which is what it's going to do, and which we've observed is suboptimal. But then, I guess, we're like, hypothesizing that we could conjure up some faster-than-light travel for something, waves hands, to this clock. And that, somehow, waves hands, I guess if we, like, change the design of the clock or something, which we can't do, somehow, waves hands, could end up in it doing action y instead of y'.
Like, what is the problem here? What is the space of possible actions? What am I trying to solve for?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
you don't have access
I don't follow. Every part of you that is necessary to follow the clockwork has appropriate access to the mechanisms of the clock, at least to the extent that is necessary for it to be able to follow the clockwork. If there were some part of you that didn't have such access, then it wouldn't be able to follow the clockwork, and we would reach a contradiction.
Like, maybe try to explain how this works directly on the example of analyzing an actual clock, with determined suboptimal action y' and a hypothesized optimal action y. What doesn't have access to what?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I think I have now concluded my argument that there is no contradiction, once one tries to explain how the contradiction is supposed to work.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I don't see a contradiction at all. This proposed unmoved mover is already clearly an exception to the general rule of requiring a prior mover, apparently preferring avoiding infinite regress over having an exception. It is simply not moved by some prior cause. That's kind of it? I think you'll have to be more explicit about how you find a contradiction.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
What's confusing is that I'm missing an argument. Some sort of, "Here are some premises, and here's a conclusion," sort of thing.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I'm not quite seeing an argument yet. Go on?
I mean, kinda no? That's where the Wolpert/Benford critique comes in. You can't formalize the problem in terms of game theory without adding additional assumptions. If your additional assumptions to formalize it are, "It's actually a clock, and there's no feasible action set with cardinality greater than one," then sure, you have a suitable formalization... but it's kinda not game theory. If you want to back away from that being your additional assumption, it's kinda still on you to state other formal additional assumptions that make it a well-posed game.
EDIT: Perhaps another way of describing it would be as follows. Suppose one is just analyzing a clock. We'll discretize time for now just to make it simple. Say that we observe from our analysis that in the transition from time t_1 to t_2, the clock will become one second slow compared to some 'objective' time (handwave any difficulties here). We could observe that this is, in some sense, suboptimal, sure.
Now, does it make sense to say something like, "What if we just call this suboptimal action y' and hypothesize an alternative action y that doesn't result in being one second slow?" Would it make sense to say that we have constructed a decision theory problem? Note that we're not specifying anything about any sort of real policy space or anything; it's not like we're saying, "Here is the policy space of possible mechanisms that a non-clock can choose from to design the clock."1 We just have a clock.
Suppose we say that there is some being, Omega, who will accurately predict that said clock will take action y' and become one second slow, and then put some quantity of money in front of the clock. Suppose we say, "Well, imagine the clock took hypothetical action y, which it can't do, then imagine that Omega would put a different quantity of money in front of the clock in that case." Does this become a game theory problem? If so, what am I supposed to solve for? What is the space of possible solutions?
1 - This is perhaps related to my comment about what Yud did to the prisoner's dilemma problem. He created some different policy space about source codes.
Kavanaugh wrote:
and
Among other things, Thomas wrote:
and
Alito wrote:
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