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$300k in debt isn't that huge when the median physician pay is $350k - at 6% interest and 40% taxes it drops your take-home from $210k to $192k.
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The much larger cost for doctors is the opportunity cost of going to medical school and one or more residencies. The median doctor graduates from medical school at age 30 and then still has years of residency(ies) to go. Making peanuts for a decade+ after college for the types of driven/conscientious/smart people who go to medical school is an enormous opportunity cost, dwarfing the literal debt (e.g. discount rate of 5%, forgone earnings of $100k per year, for 10 years = $1.26m at the end.
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It's not really an "enormous financial risk". The 6-year graduation rate from medical school is 96%, and virtually all of them find a residency. That is, an admission offer from a medical school is as close to a "golden ticket" as you can get in life. The only risk is whatever time you invest in getting in to medical school beyond undergrad - a risk that, for most people, is 0-4 years.
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Finally, re people being underwater. This can happen, but it usually stems from specific decisions - i.e. spending many years trying to get into medical school, switching specialties late in the game, refusing to give up on a very selective specialty, choosing to do academic medicine in a high cost-of-living area, etc.
there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them.
That is the libertarian dichotomy.
An Effective Altruist would say
there will always be people who want to help others, and there will always people who want to ignore them or merely feel good about themselves
The Christian wold say
there will always be people who believe in Jesus, and there will always be people who reject him for a life of sin and pleasure
The Scientist would say
there will always be people who pursue truth, and there will always be people who cling to dogma
The SJW would say
there will always be people who stand up for the weak, and there will always be people trying to oppress them
etc. etc.
The Culture War is not simply the dichotomy of the free versus the controlling. That is simply the dichotomy people on this forum tend to favor.
My point is that this method of reasoning is garbage that only seems useful when you are mind killed.
The specifics hardly matter.
KnotGodel
2mo ago
Allow me to paraphrase your complaints from the other side of the aisle:
Trump will tell his supporters that, of course he lost in 2020 - The Establishment is manipulating things behind the scenes - everyone knows that. But Trump literally won in 2016! The media makes much ado about Biden's "dementia"! What idiots those Republicans all are! Isn't it shocking that everyone confirms/affirms this explanation!?
And what about White kid Who Was Rejected By Harvard, because of affirmative action. He literally got into U Chicago! What about all the black kids Harvard rejected!? It truly boggles the minds.
If even Trump explains the world to himself this way, what is a normal Republican supposed to think? A poor white trash family in a trailer park? How can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society?
Let me make this very concrete for you
- Everyone complains about things holding them back that aren't there fault.
- It is common practice for this to be a social endeavor, and for people to avoid voicing disagreement, because that is considered anti-social, since people playing the game Poor Old Me generally don't want to play the game everyone here is addicted to: Debate Me
- If I complain I'm not X because I'm an A, and you reply that people who are not-A are also not-X, you haven't actually provided any evidence that the causal claim I was making is false.
- Even the most successful people can correctly point to things that held them back.
In other words, if we apply the standard of discourse used by the OP, we can validly whine about anyone's whining. That standard of discourse is, in a word, shit. It only appeals to people who have been mind-killed.
The specifics about Trump absolutely don't matter. I could point to any person or demographic, and there would be things they whine about holding them back. I could make a post exactly like the OPs regardless of whether those factors had any basis in reality.
I realize this forum is mostly a place to vibe/whine.
Sorry for killing the mood /s
KnotGodel
3mo ago
Statistical Structure of the Supreme Court
Inspired by earlier discussion on The Motte, I decided to statistically investigate the voting patterns of the Supreme Court.
The obvious place to start is by looking at how frequently each justice's opinions aligned with each other's. We can interpret the percent-of-times-disagreed as a measure of how "far apart" justices are. We can then use a variety of approaches to plot this onto a 2d graph (e.g. using sklearn.manifold.MDS)
I found data from back when Breyer was on the Court rather than Jackson. My preferred model results is this graph and fairly consistent with @Walterodim's characterization:
- Sotomayor as a left outlier
- Kegan (and Breyer) on the left
- Kavenaugh, Roberts, and Barrett towards the center
- Thomas and Alito on the right
Finally, he characterizes Gorsuch as a "Maverick", which is admittedly a little hard to formalize in a 2d projection of a high-dimensional space, and the model just spits him out between Barrett and Thomas.
KnotGodel
1mo ago
Is it common to have role models apart from your father, for happily married parents?
Older brothers?
More generally, I guess the pre-requisite for a male role model is that you spend a significant amount of time with men as a child. I feel like, for most boys in the US, only the men in their nuclear family qualify.
Empirical Verification of Sailer’s Law - there is some truth to this "law" (the odds ratio is about 2.4:1) but thinking it is anywhere near conclusive evidence is crazy
KnotGodel
1mo ago
Point #2, #3, and the first half of #4 are reasonable for EAs and potential-EAs to know, but it's unclear that any of them constitute problems. For instance, to what extent is it bad that one billionaire moves a majority of the resources? To the extent it is bad, what realistic alternative would be better?
The second half of #4 refers to a problem that will plague any member who does hard-to-evaluate work at any large organization - i.e. nearly all white collar work, and a significant amount of government and blue collar work: namely that success depends on the perception of your work's value rather than its value, which gives you a dichotomy:
- myopically focus on growing the pie (i.e. providing value) while studiously ignoring how the pie is distributed (i.e. whether you get grants, raises, etc)
- learn to play the game and do to the extent it helps you sell
Obviously, there is a spectrum here. This is frustrating for the more scrupulous people, but beyond bad actors gaming the system, there are a number of causal reasons this dynamic persists:
- the person most knowledgable about your work is you - your manager (or customer) frequently knows ~10% as much as you
- unlike in school, it is typically difficult to tell whether you are 2x slower than your coworker or if your task is 2x harder - this is made especially difficult when skillsets are diverse
- managers don't typically like evaluating people, so they're tend to avoid it by minimizing the amount of energy they put into it
- and, yes, managers who optimize for signal rather than value tend to get promoted
The parallels for the hard-to-measure parts of EA are straightforward. This sucks, and I agree it's a "problem", but it's hard for me to imagine a clear solution. You seem to think it would be better if
- powerful EAs spent more time responding to comments on EA forum
- more grassroots-esque grants were given like Scott Alexander's
I intuitively agree with #2, but #1 seems really unclear to me. Commenters are nearly always less well-informed than the decision-makers, so it's unclear to me that this is actually a good use of the decision-makers' time. Maybe they could hire PR people to do this for them? Is that a good use of EA money? idk - maybe. But I suspect this would make you more upset rather than less.
blistering, white-hot competence
Can you give an example of any multi-billion dollar movement or organization that displays "blistering, white-hot competence"? If not, maybe your standard is unreasonable?
To sometimes take their funding, but to do your own thing and preserve your ability to comfortably leave
This seems blatantly anti-social and immoral.
Ultimately, this critique seems to fundamentally be an attempt to take someone whose genuine values match EA-the-philosophy and warn them that EA-the-movement differs, which is all well and good. However, it might be stronger, if you
- provided concrete evidence that interventions are less effective than claimed
- offered concrete alternatives to this target audience.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I went digging for numbers and found:
- In 1833, Britain abolished slavery (mostly); about about 1% of the population were slaves
- In 1837, Mexico abolished slavery; about about 0.1% of the population were slaves
- In 1860, the South fought a ware to keep slavery; about 32% of the population were slaves
- In 1867, Spain largely freed its slaves; I can't find specific numbers :(
- In 1888, Brazil abolished slavery; about about 5% of the population were slaves
Slavery was a much bigger deal in the South than other places that freed slaves. The only other place I'm familiar with that had a similar proportion of slaves was Cuba, where slavery was abolished in 1886. However, as with the South, this wasn't chosen by Cuba - it was imposed by an outside power (Spain).
Given the trend in when slavery was abolished across the world, I think it's quite reasonable to suppose, if given the choice, the South would've continued with slavery into the 20th century. None of this requires assuming Southerners were "uniquely horrible or monstrous" - all it requires is assuming the more reason you give someone to avoid uncomfortable moral reasoning, the more they will avoid said reasoning.
Here's are the two questions one really needs to answer to argue whether we should have postponed ending slavery to avoid a Civil War:
- How many additional generations would you be willing to consign to chattel slavery in order to avoid the Civil War?
- How many additional generations would it have taken for the South to change its mind?
The Civil War resulted in ~700k deaths and free 4m slaves. If I assume a year lived as a slave is half as valuable as a year lived as a free man, the naive utilitarian answer to (1) is something like 18 years. I personally rather doubt the South would've gone along with ending slavery before 1879, so I think the utilitarian answer is to prefer the Civil War.
The non-utilitarian answer is, imo, "wtf you monster - slavery is wrong".
KnotGodel
4mo ago
Based on this comment, SBF's blog, and his professional achievements it seems pretty clear that Sam is extremely smart. Specifically, he is very good at manipulating formal systems - math, software, games, etc. He is merely smart is once you leave the world of formal systems.
Unfortunately, in a move common common among STEM-nerd, I'm guessing he realized that all non-formal-systems contain subjectivity, which means you can use them to argue anything, which means they're "bullshit". Indeed, much of this forum is built upon a similar syllogism, but with a more explicitly political lens (e.g. the law is so vague that you can prosecute anyone with selective enforcement). None of this is completely wrong and it is often useful in some contexts, however...
I strongly believe that a large part of a STEM-nerd maturing into an healthy adult is learning
- that there are degrees of subjectivity and objectivity
- that whether a system (formal or informal) is useful for navigating the world is a pretty different question than whether it is objective/true
- how to use multiple systems, both formal and informal, simultaneously to navigate the world
Or, to use Robert Kegan’s model of development: to move from Stage 4 to Stage 5.
Like, take Socrates. Is Socrates the greatest philosopher in the history? That question doesn't have an answer. However, there is value in reading Socrates that puts him above a typical philosopher - namely that understanding Socrates makes it much easier for you to understand a myriad of other philosophers. If you're interested in digesting philosophy as a field, that is valuable. If, on the other hand, you're interested in how philosophy applies to doing the greatest good for the fewest dollars - not so much.
Or take Freud. I assume SBF would say Freud was pseudoscientific bullshit. To be fair, (1) I have yet to find value in some of his writing (particularly on sexuality) and (2) Freud was hardly a beacon of science qua science, and yet... Freud
- popularized the idea that much of our cognition is not conscious
- invented "defense mechanisms" as a concept and cataloged an enormous number of them (e.g. the use of intellectualisation to avoid negative emotions)
both of which are not really "provable", but are self-evidently true/useful.
Likewise, Freud popularized the framing of the Id, Ego, and Superego, which, when stripped of its mysticism essentially boils down to:
People's want to fulfill their desires (Id, Pleasure Principle), but these often conflict with moral/social values (Superego). This conflict, in addition to some desires/values being literally impossible (Reality Principle) introduce significant "tension" in that you can't achieve everything you want, so you have to trade off some of one for the other. Moreover, people use various cognitive tricks to help reduce this tension - e.g. rationalizing that they didn't want money anyway, when their desire (to have money) conflicts with reality (they're poor) or their morals (it's wrong to be greedy).
It is literally impossible to prove the above framework is "true". However, a great number of people find the framing useful.
Anyway, I've gotten off track... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
That’s what happens to half the issues. The other half get resolved so thoroughly that everyone in the past looks completely evil - slavery, Nazism, etc
In your second link, I was responding to someone who was misinterpreting my point, and putting words in my mouth, which I seem to recall is itself against the rules. But whatever, I've reported similarly antagonistic comments with no mod action.
I maintain that this community is mostly rationalized as a place to "debate" and find which ideas survive, while mostly fulfilling the members' needs to vibe/whine - i.e. reinforce that they are smart and everyone else are either idiots or evil. Anyone who hinders this process of self-validation gets downvoted and/or negatively commented on.
For instance, you want to make a completely unsubstantiated partisan quip? 42 upvotes. You respond with actual statistical evidence? 1 upvote. Makes it pretty clear where the priorities of this community are.
That is to say, after many years, I've finally let go of caring about what strangers on an internet forum think about me. In the famous words of Rick Sanchez, "Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer."
Harvard mostly boils down your smartness into their Academics rating as described here:
Summa potential. Genuine scholar; near-perfect scores and grades (in most cases) combined with unusual creativity and possible evidence of original scholarship.
Magna potential: Excellent student with superb grades and mid-to high-700 scores (33+ ACT).
Cum laude potential: Very good student with excellent grades and mid-600 to low-700 scores (29 to 32 ACT).
Near-perfect test scores and grades will only ever get you the second-highest rating. I remember when I was looking at colleges 10 years ago that I noted that Brown only admitted ~25% of people with perfect ACT scores.
When you combine this with now-public data on Harvard's admissions, it becomes pretty clear that, with no change to the ACT/SAT, Harvard could pretty straightforwardly choose the next incoming class to have an average IQ of at least half a standard deviation higher than previous classes.
I think that's the rub: even if the ACT/SAT were redesigned to better discriminate among the top of the distribution, Harvard et al's current behavior makes me pretty skeptical that this would result in smarter people being admitted.
That being said, if you have amazing test scores and grades, you should probably really consider Caltech - they're have no legacy or affirmative action, and they place a huge emphasis on those exact factors.
This is neither here-nor-there, but there is good evidence that top schools under-weigh test scores if their goal is to predict who will be most successful. Who knows to what extent this is because (a) intelligence is super important at accomplishing things or (b) nearly all selective institutions [edit: including med school, law school, FAANG companies, consulting firms, etc] use intelligence filters since they're easy to evaluate - for instance, grit is hard to figure out in a test or interview.
Peter Singer considers himself a hedonistic utilitarian. My understanding is that (broadly speaking) lying is nearly intrinsically bad to the preference utilitarians (most people have a preference against being lied to) but not the hedonistic utilitarians (if the lied-to-party never finds out, their hedonism is not impaired).
Which is to say... if we're going to use his affair as evidence of anything, it should be to discredit hedonistic utilitarians.
More specifically, I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights
No comment on whether utilitarianism "suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near", but I really don't see how Peter cheating on his wife is related to this. Like, if he was sleeping with people to get them to donate to malaria charities, you'd have a point - but, per your summary, he was enjoying sex for purely selfish reasons.
KnotGodel
1mo ago
We have gotten significantly more lenient since moving off of reddit, because there is more of a worry of eroding our user base and having no replacement source
Why do you believe more moderation (relative to our reddit level) would lead to greater attrition than less moderation? It's not at all obvious to me.
KnotGodel
2mo ago
Please proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be
Virtually no one here takes that rule seriously.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
To clarify: are you arguing that subscribing to utilitarianism causes people to be more likely to cheat on their romantic partners?
Or are you merely exploring how utilitarians rationalize cheating - as opposed to how people of other ethical persuasions rationalize it?
KnotGodel
5mo ago
From Wikipedia:
Men can potentially have many children with little effort; women only a few with great effort. One argued consequence of this is that males are more aggressive, and more violently aggressive, than females, since they face higher reproductive competition from their own sex than females. In particular, low-status males may be more likely to remain completely childless. Under such circumstances, it may have been evolutionarily useful to take very high risks and use violent aggression in order to try to increase status and reproductive success rather than become genetically extinct. This may explain why males have higher crime rates than females and why low status and being unmarried is associated with criminality. It may also explain why the degree of income inequality of a society is a better predictor than the absolute income level of the society for male-male homicides; income inequality creates social disparity, while differing average income levels may not do so. Furthermore, competition over females is argued to have been particularly intensive in late adolescence and young adulthood, which is theorized to explain why crime rates are particularly high during this period.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I think the answer is that "tolerable" is just a poor framing for such conversations.
There are specific policies/actions with specific benefits/costs and they should largely be evaluated separately.
Asking whether trigger warnings are good/bad is silly. Asking whether the MPA should include a "sexist humor" label on relevant films (e.g. like the "graphic violence" label) is a specific change that can be discussed. Asking whether college professors should be fired for not warning a class that a book contains a rape scene is a specific change that can be discussed. etc
People love arguing broad ideas, but insight usually comes from getting down to brass tacks.
KnotGodel
5mo ago
To address the concrete point, real median pay is basically flat from its pre-pandemic value. The number you cited in your post was nominal.
Unemployment is also basically flat from pre-Covid (ditto for employment).
So, if people are subconsciously replacing the survey questions with "am I economically better off compared to pre-Covid?", then we should see about as many people answer "yes" as "no".
KnotGodel
5mo ago
[Warning: Bible nerding]
Giving Wealth
you are supposed to give it to the Jews instead
Well, or the government or the poor. [ Unrelated, but afaict, no one in the New Testament ever encourages donating to a church. ]
Celibacy
celibacy is strongly encouraged
This is debatable.
You point to Luke 20:34-36, but, lets look at the surrounding context. Here is Luke 20:28-36:
“Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”
Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.
So, Jesus is given an obscure thought experiment and his response can be interpreted to mean either
- that those why marry essentially won't be saved
- that marriage is not really an institution in heaven
It's not obvious, and (for example) Martin Luther denounced the policy of celibacy and, afaict, it is not really encouraged in most Protestant denominations. While Paul is a big fan, Jesus only directly spoke on the matter once that I know of (beyond your Luke citation): in Matthew 19:8-12:
Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”
Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
This does certainly sound like celibacy being encouraged, but note that this encouragement is not what I would call "strong". First, Jesus says only those who can accept this should. This is literally odd, since everyone literally has the ability to not have sex, so the reasonable interpretation is that this is qualified encouragement. Also contrast this to some other passages, where Jesus is actually strongly encouraging his followers:
And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Heck even Matthew 5:21-22
“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister[b][c] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’[d] is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
To my eyes, this is what Jesus looks like when saying something is crucially important. His denunciation of sex seems extremely tame by comparison.
Progress
There is simply no way you can square this with the idea of progress, unless progress simply means converting people to Christianity
Well, one might define moral progress as moral circle expansion, which is pretty inline with Christian morality of loving thy neighbor and even thy enemy.
which is supposed to be the only thing that matters
I don't think most Christians up to and including Pope Francis himself would agree that converting people to Christianity is the only thing that matters.
Accordingly, the traditional Christian view of history is that of decline, perhaps interspersed with divine interventions here and there
I'm genuinely curious: why do you think this? Is there some reading I can do on the topic?
KnotGodel
3mo ago
I actually have pondered a more universalized application of this to utilitarians: I care as much about other people as they care about me.
For instance, if Nigeria and the US swapped economic places in a parallel universe, how much would they be doing for us? Realistically, this suggests being as selfish/altruistic as the average person, maybe correcting a bit for some bias. Likewise, most animals probably wouldn't mind much eating humans if they had the desire to.
IMO, this kind of mirrored-weight utilitarianism matches human intuition better than normal utilitarianism.
Wait, how could I have conveyed that idea in a way with less antagonism than I did? [Edit: I didn't want to assume he believed this (which is putting words in his mouth and against the rules) - so the only option if I wanted to engage was to ask for clarification]
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