Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?
It might be useful to look at the reasons people give when they get divorced. The top reason (75% of couples cite) is lack of commitment, followed by infidelity (60%). A substantial number also cite substance abuse (35%) and domestic violence (25%). If your husband is cheating on you or beating you maybe you don't care that getting divorced is economically bad for you.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point. What's your empirical evidence to the contrary? Because it 'certainly' isn't obvious to me...
Studies that try and infer historical reproduction rates from facts about the Y chromosome have an obvious flaw: that chromosome can only be here today as the result of an unbroken chain of male reproducers. Contrast this with females who pass an X chromosome on no matter the circumstance. There is naturally going to be less genetic variation among Y chromosomes than X chromosomes because any variations from men who had only female children are not going to be present to examine, even though these males had children! So we're comparing genetic variation among the men who had an unbroken series of male children back into history with the genetic variation of women who had any children at all. Obviously there is more diversity in the latter than the former.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
But what is there to manage when your currency is pegged to a commodity? The mechanism seems to contradict the justification.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
They can (indeed must) buy USD from others but what others will sell to them? Texas will still be part of the United States and so USD will still be legal tender. If you have USD you can transact anywhere in the United States, Texas included. If you have TexasBucks you can probably only transact in Texas. Why use the TexasBucks instead of USD? Why would I want to sell my USD for TexasBucks, except maybe for speculative purposes?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
1,4
It's not clear to me how much a commodity standard actually constrains government spending. Presumably the redemption ratio between paper currency and the commodity is fixed by law and therefore can be changed. It's somewhat more explicit than the process today but it's not obvious to me how strong a check it would be substantively.
2
Its not clear to me how much of that economic growth is attributable to our particular currency scheme. Lots of things were different pre-1971 (including some pretty large technological developments) compared to what came after.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
How much of an option is it really? Unless the US federal government decides to accept Texas' new currency everyone in Texas is going to have some expenses (federal taxes) they'll need to pay in USD. Seems like a significant effect of the currency would be exposing Texas merchants to forex/commodity market volatility they probably don't want to be exposed to.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Proposition 2
Texas should create a Border Protection Unit, and deploy additional state law enforcement and military forces, to seal the border, to use physical force to prevent illegal entry and trafficking, and to deport illegal aliens to Mexico or to their nations of origin.
Maybe I'm crazy but isn't this obviously unconstitutional? Arizona v. United States was still binding precedent last I checked. States can't just seize the authority to do federal immigration policy for themselves. I think Proposition 3 is probably fine. Proposition 4 is probably fine as applied to colleges but I think is just a repeat of Plyler v. Doe (which was also Texas) as applied to K-12 schools. Proposition 5 also seems fine.
Proposition 7
The Texas Legislature should establish authority within the Texas State Comptroller’s office to administer access to gold and silver through the Texas Bullion Depository for use as legal tender.
I do not understand the obsession with using precious metals as currency. Why is it better for the value of your currency to be at the whims of a commodity market as compared to managed by a central bank? Are the value of these coins (presumably) going to be pegged to some USD price? Free floating exchange rate? Why would anyone use these as opposed to USD?
Proposition 13
Texas should ban the sale of Texas land to citizens, governments, and entities from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
Seems like this has obvious equal protection problems? My understanding is the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection applies to citizens and non-citizens alike, as long as they're in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. Seems like classic national origin discrimination that would be an equal protection violation.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
But the average of [5..35] and [0..40] are also 20. Do you think all three of these ranges are conveying the same information because their average is 20? I don't.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
My point is that it's important to make that uncertainty explicit because not everyone talking to you is going to understand that. Maybe you think 20% is shorthand for 10-30% but someone else thinks it's precisely 20% or is actually 15-25% or some other range. I think the "around a hundred pounds" is a good example because "around" conveys a degree of uncertainty on the "hundred pounds." If I was quoted a price of some good at "a hundred pounds" (no "around") and later found out it was actually 125 I would feel like I was deceived.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Even using verbal categories like low, medium and high probability, especially when making a group decision aren’t precise enough to communicate what I’m actually thinking. Low is how low? For you it might be 5%, for me it’s 20%. We can’t communicate that well if we don’t know what the terms are.
I think part of the point is the numerical values convey an unwarranted degree of precision based on the process that generated them. Say your estimate is 20% probability for X. Why not 21%? 19%? 25%? 15%? What's the size of the error term on your estimate? Is your forecasting of this outcome so good as to warrant a <1% margin? Of course, estimation of that error term itself has the same problems as generating the initial estimate.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Trump will not take office next year.
Pedantically, assuming "next year" means 2024 this would be true even if Trump wins. The President does not assume office until January the year following the election (2025).
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
And Trump will still win the Republican Primary and be teh candidate, and nothing in this ruling says he won't be on the General Election ballot in Colorado.
I think this is not quite correct. It's true that the instant case is about the Colorado primary ballot but the underlying rationale is that Trump is ineligible to be President and people who are ineligible to be President also cannot be primary candidates. I would be surprised if candidates who are ineligible for the presidency could be on the General Election ballot.
I feel like people underestimate how small Ivy League universities are compared to how many people are out there with high standardized test scores.
Here are the seven Ivy League universities with their 2023 incoming class undergraduate numbers (plus MIT for fun):
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Harvard: 1966
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Yale: 1554
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Princeton: 1782
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Columbia: 1464
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Cornell: 3218
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Brown: 1730
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University of Pennsylvania: 2420
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Dartmouth: 1209
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MIT: 1092
That's 16k total student admitted across all those universities. According to the college board, 1.9 million students in the class of 2023 had taken the SAT. That means there are 19k students with scores in the top 1% on the SAT. Getting a score above 1400 puts you in the 93rd percentile according to the college board's statistics for 2023, so 133k people. Even if Ivy League universities admitted students solely on SAT test score this guy would be nowhere close. Indeed, you could staff every incoming Ivy League class (and then some) with students who had a score in top 1%.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
While the war is currently on, sure, but it will end eventually.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
If there are not women in Ukraine for Ukrainian men to date why won't they date women from other countries? It's not like dating has to stop at national borders. Ukraine is also not some geographically isolated country. It has neighbors on every side. Especially if Ukraine joins the EU, giving all these men the right to travel and work anywhere in any other EU country.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It seems that the preferred relationship model for women is "get lots of male attention online, but never actually settle down."
This is directly contradicted by the available evidence of what dating norms are like when they are favorable to women. Consider that many of the historical periods people in the United States refer to for monogamous relationship formation were subsequent to some pretty awful wars in which a lot of men died (Vietnam, WW2, WW1, the Civil War, etc). This almost certainly means the population distribution was skewed more towards women.
My preference would be having a choice of either casual dating, parties/hookups, long term relationships, marriage, or even polygamy.
Choice... by who? Relationship formation is the classic double coincidence of wants. If men and women (on average) want different things they are not going to be able to equally satisfy their preferences. That's the point of the article I linked. Being in-demand (having the gender distribution skewed against you) gives you relatively more power to satisfy your wants because their is relatively less alternative.
But all of that seems to work better when there's more women than men.
Maybe for men to get what they want!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
What do you mean by consciousness? I think a model which includes the idea that other people have a subjective experience and motivations that lead to their actions absolutely yields better predictions than a model of other as people automatons responding to their environment mechanically.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I don't see how. What is the logic chain from "different gender skews effect dating norms" to "society would be better off if a bunch of single men were dead." Especially if your preferred kind of relationship formation is long term monogamous! That happens when there are more men than women (so women have more power). A bunch of men dying should shift norms more towards casual hookups and short term relationships.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet? Not humans. Just men, in particular.
No.
None of that happens now, in our ultra-safe modern feminized society. So we just have a bunch of surplus males sitting around.. doing nothing... simping for women. Taking up body building, or feminism, or prostitution, or onlyfans, or whatever else will give them a drop of female attention.
Society is "feminized" because a lot fewer men die? Also these people aren't doing nothing. They presumably work, generating value for society. They probably have friends and family and other non-romantic relationships. They themselves very likely have hobbies they enjoy, that bring them happiness. The idea that because, in some theoretical 1:1 man:woman pairing, these guys mathematically wouldn't be able to be paired with a woman therefore they should just die is insane. So I guess you characterized your post correctly!
I encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this article about how gender ratios on college campuses impact the dating market. Spoiler: dating norms are controlled by whichever gender is in more demand. When there are more women than men dating norms tend towards men's preferences (lots of hookups, one night stands, few LTRs) while the opposite is true when there are more men than women.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?
The same way they got suckered into thinking AI x-risk is an "effective" altruist cause?
At least the callout post came with testimony from people who had actually worked at Nonlinear. It had quotes and screenshots and other forms of evidence of the kind that convince us of many things every day. It turns out these statements did not reflect reality and the screenshots were carefully curated to present a particular narrative. This is a risk we run any time we trust someone's testimony about a situation we don't have first hand experience with. This is an ordinary, and probably unavoidable, epistemic failure mode.
By contrast, what is the state of evidence for AI x-risk research being an effective cause area? If I'm making a $5k dollar donation should I make it to the Against Malaria Foundation (who I'm reasonably confident will save a life with that money) or to some AI x-risk charity? What's the number of lives, in expectation the donation to the AI x-risk charity will save? What was the methodology for determining that number? The error bars on it? As best as I can tell these numbers are sourced to the same place: their ass. If you think AI x-risk is an "effective" cause area, you have bad epistemic standards! Not good ones!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Maybe it's just my own online milieu but my impression is lots of people are already "owning" "cringe" as a label. I see memes about embracing being cringey. When I read stories people tell about some third party X cringing or feeling embarrassed at the behavior of some third party Y it's generally made clear X is a bad person for reacting this way. This seems, to me, like a label that is already well on its way out.
That aside, I'm not sure I agree that there is some "Elite" that decides what things are "cringe." Things being cringe seems much more like a subculture-relative inter-subjective agreement. What is cringey to one subculture may not be to another. I rarely see anyone I think of as "Elite", in either a subcultural context or a broader social context, deciding what is cringey and other people seeming to take their cues from them. The notion of what is or is not cringe seems like a much more bottom-up phenomenon. Something is cringey when that something causes you to feel embarrassed for the person doing the thing, or to think they ought to feel embarrassed or ashamed. It's necessarily a subjective evaluation.
As to Jewish re-alignment, I think it's remarkable Hanania cites polling data for so many parts of his piece but not for what American Jews actually think of Israel. For example, here's an NPR article summarizing a poll from the Jewish Electorate Insitute:
Nearly three-quarters of Jewish Americans said they approve of President Biden's response to Israel's war against Hamas, in a new survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute, which calls itself "an independent, non-partisan organization dedicated to deepening the public's understanding of Jewish American participation in our democracy."
...
The overwhelming majority of Jewish voters surveyed, 93 percent, said they're worried about rising antisemitism, and more respondents [60-22 Biden-Trump, 40-26 Dems-Reps] said they trusted Biden and Democrats to fight antisemitism as compared with former President Donald Trump and Republicans.
If Jews are concerned about anti-semitism the evidence as of last month suggests they will become more Democratic, not less.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
But this is not some unalterable fact of the universe. It is a fact about our minds, our social context. It is a thing we can and should change.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The problem is that behavior by men towards women that is perceived as sexual assault or harassment isn't perceived as such when done by women toward men. Men have to "justify" behaviors that women get to just do with no consequence.
I agree. Society does not take sexual harassment and assault of men by women nearly as seriously as it should.
Women showing off therefore either needs to be more restricted than men doing so or women need to put up with all the behaviors from men that men have to put up with from women.
I don't see how this follows. If the thing is bad we should want to have less of the thing, even if the improvement we make is not necessarily equally distributed among all impacted groups.
Apparently the source is this study of 52 divorced couples who had gone through a certain pre-marital counseling program. Another 2012 study had 37% of couples reporting infidelity as a reason, 22% drug or alcohol problems, and 13% physical violence. I think one obvious reason for the discrepancy is the UK numbers seem to be coming from legal filings while the US numbers are from reports of divorced people.
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