Felagund
18hr ago
It's not just that we Jews are basically breeding ourselves of existence
The link appears to be talking about secular Jews. I get that that's quite common, but religious Judaism is still also a thing, and isn't ultra-orthodox Judaism decently sized and growing? But I suppose that might not matter to those who are only really ethnically Jewish.
Felagund
18hr ago
AI regulation is obviously not going to be helpful, as Maxwell Tabarrok argues.
The biggest threat for "this will kill us all" is plainly the US government making automated weaponry, and there's no chance any regulation that would stop that passes. I suppose AI-designed diseases are a second way to wipe out humanity. But any regulation will just seek to lock out competition and put power solely in the hands of Sam Altman and co, and will treat the government entirely as a trustworthy actor.
Felagund
18hr ago
They might, but it tends to be significantly less important. In general, Protestants tend not to assert that their denomination is the One True Church, preferring a communion of believers across denominations. In interpersonal compromises, this will obviously lend itself towards the one who cares less about a specific church being more willing to compromise on that. This is augmented by the fact that evangelicals are often more minimalistic with regards to doctrine.
This is a shame; Protestantism is worth fighting for.
we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe.
I assume Mongols, Magyars, Turks, and so on don't count?
Anyway, the New Testament does speak against racial divisions.
Felagund
3d ago
"Here there is not Jew and Greek, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all."
I don't think Christianity has anything to say about racial differences, but it definitely does seem like it has something to say about racial barriers.
Felagund
2d ago
It pushes Christianity as a multi-ethnic and cross-ethnic community. This can be seen from the speaking in tongues in Acts 2, to the salvation of the gentiles, to some more specific quotes speaking against divisions for being Jew or Greek, barbarian or Scythian. (And, as it was pointed out, male or female, which should indicate that there's a limit to this: it's not like distinctions should be ignored, just that they shouldn't divide, I think) Do I think that means anything like modern leftism? Certainly not. But I do think that it means that our primary unit of identity should not be with our ethnic group, and that there should be cross-group community, at the very least in religious settings.
This would at least make me reluctant to adopt any explicitly or intentionally racist policies.
Felagund
2d ago
Of course, hence the reference to "intentionally or explicitly racist."
Hence, things like Jim Crow or Apartheid, where laws are being passed for the explicit purpose of maintaining racial division and hierarchy isn't great.
I don't really care about disparate impact, unless that's the intent.
Felagund
3d ago
I would assume taste is much easier than smell, as there is only a handful of things tastebuds can detect. But then you need to combine that with smell…
I would guess that smell would have to be embedded within a higher-dimensional space than sight or sound? But I'm not certain.
There are languages that have fairly developed abilities to describe smell, just English isn't one of them.
Felagund
2d ago
I figured for the first two, but I would have expected Ottoman ancestry in the Balkans. Huh. Yeah, I don't think it matters too much, hence why I figured they didn't count.
Felagund
2d ago
Yeah, I agree that it isn't saying that there are no differences. But I do think that it is against setting up social divisions, at least, within the Christian community. We're
Felagund
9d ago
If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me.
What terrifies me more is how often I've heard this.
Felagund
14d ago
I can't comment on most of this, except the following:
This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect.
Wouldn't the existence of Venus be pretty definitive proof that such a thing is possible?
Felagund
9d ago
Thomas is great.
Why do you prefer Sotomayor to those judges? She's the one who's most obviously motivated by politics, usually, I think.
Felagund
13d ago
I think one of the better arguments against geoengineering is that I don't trust the geoengineers to remain aligned with what works out best, but will likely end up with internal incentives which could possibly lead to a dramatically messed up climate. You could easily imagine people spending too much to cool the earth, if the incentives were such that that were high-status or otherwise rewarded behavior.
That said, it's probably worth attempting anyway, if we're going to be trying to mitigate anthropogenic climate change (assuming the article here is wrong and that's a thing), as it's so much cheaper. Just, it'll require care in how it's set up.
Felagund
26d ago
When there are unenforced laws that can be used but they don't feel like using them, what you'll find is that they suddenly start getting used a lot more for political reasons.
It's better just to have laws that are clear, instead of a double standard.
Felagund
9d ago
But...are you sure you're in the top 1%?
Top 1% is good, but it's something you see all the time.
If you imagine a typical 100 people in whatever school you went to, take a random 100, and on average, one of them is in the top 1%. That's over 3 million people in the US!
I expect a website that filters for willingness to write longform text might easily get to the point where top 1% IQ is far more commonly represented than among the general population. I'd also expect people with the username "@lagrangian" to have higher IQ.
That said, I'm slightly less willing to trust the 145 IQ, though it's still very possible. Looking it up, 0.1% of people are at 145 or higher. But I don't know how lagrangian evaluated his own, as I wouldn't trust random internet IQ tests, especially on the tails.
It's also worth keeping in mind that each unit of IQ might not be the same (whatever that means), as it's just forced into a bell curve.
Felagund
9d ago
There shouldn't be able to be an innate "simple desire to become a woman," unless you think we come with innate, from the womb, knowledge of what the two genders are. At some point we figure out what genders are, and such desires would only make sense at that point.
Of course, at that point, we could have innate tendencies that predispose us to manifest certain desires or identities.
Felagund
9d ago
Why is it always choose them only if they're better than the best up to that point? At some point wouldn't point, wouldn't it become better to settle for gradually worse partners? (obvious case: in a uniform distribution, only two people left, and you get someone who's at the 75th percentile)
Felagund
16d ago
Not that I disagree, but don't you routinely complain about things not terribly different from that?
Felagund
20d ago
Thanks for realizing this. In general, people don't know enough economics.
When I took a class on microeconomics, which was one of my favorite classes, we covered, among other things, the following. I think these are worth knowing:
- supply and demand (and graphs thereof)
- opportunity cost
- a good sense of just how much economic growth we've had, and the ways that has improved our lives
- A robust sense of how the price system reflects the availability of goods and acts as a signalling mechanism for when resource usage is economically productive and incentivises innovation and entrepreneurship
- Why "price gouging" can be good, actually. (Very brief answer: we operate in a world of scarcity, and when prices reflect that accurately, resources can be allocated more to those who need them, and incentivize mitigating that scarcity)
- the effects of price controls, or cost-imposing regulation, including how minimum wage could reduce employment, or how rent control is "the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing"
- deadweight loss (in taxation of goods, subsidies, and in monopolies, among other things)
- how competition will force long-term-risk-and-opportunity-cost-adjusted profits to zero (in a sufficiently abstracted case: in practice, a bunch of things allow some, but not too much, profit to continue to be made, like economies of scale)
- monopolies and cartels, why these are inefficient, why these are still better than the monopolists in question not existing, why cartels are better than monopolies
- Pigouvian taxation
- Coase theorem (keeping in mind also when it doesn't apply)
Public choice economics, and how incentives cause governments to fail, and how we often can't just trust them to solve any problems markets lead to. Some, among other government failures that happen are:
- in general, politicians' incentives are not necessarily to produce whatever the optimal set of policies may be for the people
- interest groups that would benefit policies that produce concentrated benefits to them, but impose diffuse costs on most others often can get those policies passed when it's inefficient
- money spent on lobbying is wasteful: they'll spend up to the benefit of the good, increasing the cost to society
- regulatory capture, and lobbying and weaponization of laws against competition
Also, read Bastiat's candlemaker's petition; it's hilarious.
I'm sure there's also macroeconomic things worth learning, but I, unfortunately, haven't really learned macroeconomics.
(Though I did watch one video from marginal revolution on the Solow model, which was definitely a useful concept)
It's probably also worth being aware of the whole situation with the US debt, and worth having a sense of some of the consequences of when we actually basically run out of money.
And that the ultra-wealthy usually have their wealth in the form of ownership of companies (and is exaggerated, as prices would fall as their stock sold), not giant vaults of cash.
The class I had used Gwartney et al's "public and private choice" as our textbook, so I assume that would be good, though it's possible that you might not want to spend money, and I don't know what the most efficient way to learn is.
I switch a bunch: several chairs throughout the house, in which I can sit in various positions, lying down on my side on the ground, walking around, lying sideways across the bed with my feet on a footrest and the book on the floor…
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