MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
Because more intelligence means more qualia.
Is that true? If that were true, how would you know? It seems vaguely plausible, but I'm fairly certain that consciousness and qualia are not well understood enough to conclude that. You only know about your own qualia in your own internal experiences, and can only attempt to extrapolate to other people based on similar brain chemistry. I'm not confident, but I'm fairly certain that computers do not have any qualia at all, and yet as AI gets smarter and smarter their IQ increases. Even when it surpasses that of humans, they still probably won't have qualia. It's still just a mathematical function that turns numbers into other numbers in a deterministic way.
Ants are more biologically successful than humans, composing much more of the Earth's biosphere. Do you support an ant takeover of the Earth involving human extinction?
I'm a human supremecist. I think that humans have moral value, and animals don't except in-so-far as they are useful or psychologically pleasing to humans. If there were an AI computer with IQ equal to one more than yours, would you support it taking over the world and replacing you? If the ants formed a hivemind that, when all of them combined their thought processes together, had an IQ equal to one more than yours, would you support them taking over the world?
Extremely intelligent people should not be the slaves of 100 IQ people. Your economic model says that they are and that that is fair.
Who is being enslaved? My economic model says that people should do things which are mutually profitable. That both people gain from their mutual interactions. You should do good things for other people and then they should reward you for it in equal measure! That's why people who are more productive should be paid more. YOUR model says that low IQ people should be enslaved to high IQ people, and do things that high IQ people want without getting compensated for it. My model does not involve slavery, because anyone can do anything they want, but they get rewarded from the value they actually create. We can chop down trees because they are trees, not people. If you could earn just as much money from chopping down a 60 IQ human being and harvesting their organs this would be horrible and evil, even though they're less intelligent than us, because they are people and would experience real suffering that we should care about. They are less economically useful than a 100 IQ human, and therefore will be less productive and will earn less money on their own. Therefore they will earn less money and have less money, automatically, without us needing to authoritarianly go in there and decide for them how much we think they're worth. Reality tells people how much they could be worth if they tried, and then they themselves determine how much they're actually worth by their own decisions and efforts.
Nietzsche said the Übermensch will see the median person of his day like an ape. This implies the median Übermensch will have an IQ a little north of 145; a society run for and by such people will not give equal economic rights to most people alive today. We can create such a society by increasing the correlation between wealth and intelligence, and through it the correlation between fertility and intelligence.
Why? That sounds like a miserable society for most people to be in. I think you're just using a maximally selfish definition of the word "good", where you imagine a society which maximizes your own personal hedonic value, or some sort of aesthetic preference for order or unity/conformity/dystopia. Usually the words we use for this is "selfish", not "good". The classic evil dictator wants to have themselves enslave everyone below them and maximize good for themselves and themselves alone. This is not what people mean when they talk about "good" in the moral sense.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
I aknowledge that there is quite a bit of randomness in the realized outcomes of money, but note that the expected value is still pretty close to average production. Lotteries in the economy are not the zero sum scenarios set up by a greedy casino in order give you negative expected value and enrich themselves in the process. They are a complicated mess of scenarios with different expectations. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Someone who chooses good lotteries, invests in promising companies, dissolves unprofitable money sink companies, will on average end up winning more often than someone who chooses bad lotteries. Therefore the actual people with lots of money will tend to be people who had both luck AND intelligent choices that benefited the economy. Once again, this leads to a "money held" to "value provided to others" with a correlation solidly between 0 and 1.
But this is more assumed egalitarianism.
Where did that come from? Money earned is money deserved is very unegalitarian, unless you're a blank-slatist who believes that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are the same thing, which you clearly aren't. When I use the word fair here, I mostly mean something pretty similar to what you mean by just. This is a pointless strawman nitpick on language use, and doesn't matter.
What has never been tried is progressive redistribution of wealth. We currently have a moderate amount of regressive redistribution (based on progressive taxation). You know how IQ and income correlate at .4? What if we cranked that up to .9? Society would hate it, and it wouldn't be fair, but I think it would be just.
This is absurd. Why would we favor intelligence like this? Intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently. To that effect, making a meritocratic system that rewards economic output measures the actual thing that we care about. And is easier and more direct that some Goodhart measure of IQ. Your idea makes about as much sense as observing that cows eating more grass are correlated with producing more milk, and then selective breeding cows to maximize the amount of grass they eat and ignoring milk production. Why would you optimize a proxy for the thing you care about, when the proxy is actually harder to measure and select for, and only vaguely correlated with it. Someone of average intelligence who works really hard is more valuable to society than someone of great intelligence who doesn't do anything with it. The latter might as well not even exist. And it's not like high IQ people are necessarily good people who do good things, there are plenty of intelligent sociopaths who leverage their great intelligence to commit more evil. If an intelligent person is 3x as powerful as an average person, able to accomplish 3x as much at whatever they try to do, then an evil intelligent person sabotaging society is 3x as horrible as an evil average person. You might as well award the Medal of Honor to powerful enemy soldiers who were especially horrible and slaughtered your own side's soldiers. Good people do good things for other people. We want to incentivize more good things, so we should reward people proportional to how much good they do.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Your total net worth is not equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because people spend and consume things. Your per-moment income is (or should be) equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because that's inherently fair. You do things for other people, other people do things to you. You get what you do. Your profit is equivalent to the amount of value you've provided to others that you have not yet been compensated for. If you provide labor which is worth $1000 of value when consumed by other people, and they pay you $1000 for it, the $1000 is literally pieces of paper. You have done good in the world and you haven't yet received a real reward for it. You deserve to have other people do stuff for you, because you've done stuff for them. Until you spend it. If you buy $500 worth of food, that represents farmers in the world doing labor on your behalf, in exchange for you having done whatever it is that you did, which is either directly on their behalf, or more likely on the behalf of someone else who did labor on the behalf of someone else who... eventually somewhere along the chain the farmer benefits from labor that someone did who benefited from labor that you did. But half as much. Because you earned $1000 and only spent $500. If you eat $500 worth of food and save $500 in your bank account, that means you have provided $500 worth of value that you still haven't been rewarded for. You're a net moral positive, in that you've created more than you've consumed. Money represents favors owed to you by society because you (or whoever legitimately earned the money you currently possess) did favors for society and hasn't received the equivalent reward in real material goods and services yet.
If someone legitimately* earns $10 million and then spends all $10 million on themselves, they're a net neutral. They produce and consume in equal measure. They do good by stimulating the economy by the consumer surplus that other people extract on top of what they themselves earn from their work. It's not an exact science, but it's proportional. On average, people who do this are probably fine, and we should consider them to be neither a saint nor a monster.
If someone legitimately earns $10 million, spends $1 million on themselves, and then donates $9 million to charity, that represents $6 million worth of real value they've provided to someone and then chose to give the rewards to someone else. This person is a saint. They create value and keep only a fraction of it for themself.
If someone legitimately earns $10 million and then spends $1 million on themselves and keeps the $9 million in their bank account to spend later, that represents $9 million worth of real value that they have provided to someone and have held the remainder in abeyance for the moment. They deserve $9 million worth of goods from society because they have done work that society has deemed to be worth $10 million, and society has promised them $10 million in exchange for their work, and they probably only did the work in the first place because they were promised this $10 million. And they've only used up 1/10 of that promise, they are entitled to the remainder. In truth, due to consumer surplus they have enabled more than $10 million to society as a whole, with the rest being captured by their employer, customers, business partners, and taxes. The $10 million is the remainder they've been promised themselves for their contributions.
If by "moral worth" you mean "is this a good and kind charitable person who sacrifices things for other people at their own expense" then no. But I reject that entire premise. Economics is not zero sum. If you are clever and efficient there's no reason you have to sacrifice your own good for other people when you can both mutually profit. A person who creates $10 million over the course of 20 years has done 10x as much for society as a younger person who has created $1 million over the course of 2 years. It's not that the former is a "better person" than the latter. Both are providing $500k to society every year, both receive $500k per year. It's that the former has chosen to behave like an intelligent long-term thinker and stockpile their rewards over time. Someone's net worth represents the total contributions they've made to society that they haven't yet cashed in. They've produced more than they've consumed. Someone who is older has had more time to do more good.
*Note that my use of the word "legitimately" is doing a lot of work here and almost begging the question. There are exceptions where people get paid money for not creating value. But, on average, as a rule of thumb, this is the case for most people. If everyone involved is mutually consenting and there aren't weird monopolies, government regulations, excessive taxes, government waste, subsidies, or rentseeking distorting things, the base case capitalist exchange creates legitimate profit for everyone involved, in which case people do morally deserve the fruits of their labor.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
If we take a consequentialist libertarian perspective then wages are heavily correlated morally to wage. That is, whenever two people transact in a mutually consensual exchange, profit is generated and split between them in some way. That is
Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost
If producer can produce good X for $10 and consumer values it at $30 (subjective internal evaluation), then them buying the product generates $20 of value, distributed between the two depending on the price. If the producer sells it for $20 then both of them profit $10. If the producer sells it for $29 then the producer pockets $19 and the consumer profits $1 (in terms of getting a thing that they wanted more than they want the money they spend)
There is some ambiguity about what a fair/reasonable split should be, which is not automatically identical to the ultimate market price, but for any level of split the amount of profit someone earns will be proportional to the value created by their transactions. Which in turn means that the value someone creates is heavily correlated with the amount of money they earn. One exchange which produces 10x as much value as another exchange will result in 10x as much profit to be distributed, and likely result in both the producer and the consumer(s) getting approximately 10x as much. Google probably generates trillions of dollars of value for consumers (though the exact amount is subjective and hard to measure), and in turn earns billions of dollars of revenue. Which they deserve, because they create value. A button engineer who works at Google and does their job competently helps generate this value, in that Google would not be as convenient and usable without their work, and would have outages or errors if they messed up. The difficulty of their job is one component in the cost, but the dominant term in the moral desserts is the consumer value. The Google button engineer has done a LOT to fuel the actual economy, it just doesn't seem like a lot because the indirectness of the value they produce is hard to parse as a human, and the amount of actual labor they needed to leverage to this effect was low.
Working hard at a fixed task will create more value, so on average moral desserts will correlate with working hard. But it would be silly to Goodhart this by thinking that working hard IS moral desserts. Value created is what actually matters. Any system of moral desserts which rewards people for being inefficient is absurd.
Now, obviously there are tons of counterexamples where people get paid despite not creating value. If Google hires 30 employees for a team and one of them does the actual meaningful labor and provides $100 million of value while the others do stupid stuff, and each gets paid $1 million, then the competent one deserves more than they got while the other 29 deserve less. But somewhere in that system the $100 million is actually being earned.
Even a step up, you can have an entire company which is rentseeking, bullying competitors, squatting on legal loopholes, etc, and earns lots of profit despite not providing value to anyone. But by necessity this is rare because someone somewhere has to create the value for them to earn. I'm not saying the correlation between moral dessert and wages is 1. But it's high, even when the value someone creates is indirect. A lot of white collar work is incredibly important and impactful, which is why selfish greedy investors are willing to pay for it in the first place.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
Back in highschool my autistic friend told me that I'm half autistic. Clearly not normal, but not so far as him or my other autistic friend who were formally diagnosed.
I got 36% German and 51% Autistic. So close to half that it made me chuckle. I know this isn't a real diagnosis, and that the 50% wouldn't even necessarily translate properly, but it still made me take notice.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
As a first order effect this is true, it is probably not productive to the debate at hand. But at a second order effect it could be good if done appropriately. Because if someone actually is being disingenuous you want them to stop and/or leave. Discouraging and disincentivizing bad behavior increases the quality of contributions over time and prevents things from slipping down the slope of easy farmable engaging content. If done appropriately. If the accusation is false/unwarranted then it just become ad-hominem and that itself is bad behavior we want to discourage.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
How does it benefit them, possibly at the cost to us, because almost certainly, people pushing narratives, metanarratives, meta-metanarratives, or anything else, are doing so under the belief that success in pushing it will result in favor for themselves, possibly at cost to people they don't care about or actively dislike.
In most anything related to postmodernism, I think of the midwit meme. Sometimes things are complicated and ambiguous, but that's usually a confusion about words and minds and uncertainty about the state of the underlying reality. But there usually is an underlying reality that actually is true or false, and all the words and perspective shifts won't actually change that underlying reality.
Here then, there is a recursively stable narrative climb of "I'm telling you a thing because it's true, and true things are good for people to know and understand." If you try to climb up to the meta-narrative, I AM trying to push this narrative because it will favor myself, because I am a straightforward and logical person, and therefore disseminating truth and objectivity, and increasing people's trust in truth and objectivity, helps make society better for everyone. People knowing true things is generally good for society, and I am part of society, therefore people knowing true things is generally good for me. It doesn't have to be a zero sum game, me benefiting from telling you a thing does not need to come at your expense. (And also I get a small ego boost from being right and explaining ideas to people, because it makes me seem smart, but that's predicated on them being true).
And if you go up another level, just reread the previous paragraph. I'm telling you that this narrative is self-recursively stable because it's true, and you knowing it to be true helps society (and gives me a small ego boost). Ad infinitum.
To be clear, I certainly understand that people can have dishonest motivations and biases making their narratives differ from the truth. But this is not the only possibility. Because objective truths exist, honesty can exist, and stable narratives can exist that become more coherent under self-reflection rather than devolving into infinitely complex recursions. Infinite sequences can converge.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
I never feel old when I'm bewildered by modern slang, because I was never hip and with it as a kid and always made myself feel better about being unpopular by sneering at the stupid slang my peers were doing. Nothing has changed, it was always cringe.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
It's at this point you realize your neck is getting a bit strained, because you're constantly looking up -- everyone else in this room is very, very tall.
I think that the ending of this allegory, where you point out that the council enforcing the taboo are all tall people, is a nice point that is helped by the allegory making it more obvious that this is about self interest rather than intelligent people simply knowing more and helpfully explaining truth to others (the way they portray themselves in real life where it's about intelligence).
However, your opening to the allegory is weak:
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height, what might we expect?
We would not expect this. It's an allegory because it's taking things to an absurd extreme that would not persist in the face of reality. People's heights are immediately visually obvious. They can gaslight people about intelligence because it's hidden in your brain. When you look at someone, it's not usually obvious how smart they are. People have different skills and talents which are correlated with intelligence but vary greatly. Smart people often do stupid things and stupid people often do smart things. The opacity makes it possible to thread intelligence and morality together because each person can imagine themselves to be smarter than they are, and others to not have the confidence to contradict them when they pretend to be smart. If a short person pretended to be tall, even if everyone pretended to agree with them they would know it to be false. They would know that everyone else knows, as Common Knowledge. Not even trans people pretend that they're biologically identical to the other sex pre-transition, they have to invent a separate "Gender" which exists in your head and is a platonic ideal of what a "true" man/woman is, because then it can be opaque and exploit the lack of certainty to start gaslighting.
Your allegory is an exaggerated caricature that requires us to suspend our disbelief on multiple levels and deliberately construct it as a parallel to our own society, it does not logically follow from the one single premise.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
Dude has a genius level of artistic vision and just lacks the drawing skills. This is one of the things that makes me most excited for AI art as it develops. How many people are out there with creative ideas and vision but only have half the necessary skills and can't actually make their stuff? If ONE had been born 20 years later than he was he probably could have coaxed an AI into converting his character designs into high quality versions of themselves and generating each panel with him tweaking and coaxing it until it gets it right.
If there are dozens of ONEs with similar skillsets who never got noticed, they might be able to make their own stuff without needing a Murata to help them.
Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but the original art for Mob Psycho and One Punch man, by ONE, are notoriously bad. I have absolutely no artistic skills and if I tried to make a manga that's about what it would look like.
What I find profound is that the writing is so good that people noticed and enjoyed them anyway. And because we live in a society, they got adapted into anime by proper artists (and One Punch Man got a remake manga by a talented artist). This guy has amazing writing talent but garbage art talent, and thus on his own would only be able to make mediocre manga. But by synergizing with other humans where he can utilize his strengths to its utmost while someone else uses their strengths to compensate for his weaknesses, together they can make amazing art that is better than what either could make on their own.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
It doesn't change the calculus much at all. As long as the correlation is not 1, and not indistinguishably close to 1, then the margin exists. If anything, abused people who are prone towards engaging in sex work are more vulnerable to being pushed over the edge by this ease of access, and thus a larger fraction of the people that are harmed by its existence and would be helped by its absence (at least, larger per capita, since non-abused people are more numerous).
You're forgetting the margin here. Making something easier incentivizes more of it. It's not like there's some fixed percentage of women whose class is [Porn Actress] who are destined to sell porn no matter what and are either going to be treated well or poorly. There's a large demographic of mostly normal women who go to college and get jobs and, in the absence of OnlyFans, would never become porn actresses because that's kind of a big deal and that's not what they want to do with their life. But if you make it easy, if you advertise it and show them a bunch of young women like themselves getting millions of dollars, they might download the app and start selling nudes for a few hundred bucks to get some extra spending money or pay some bills.
I argue that this is bad for them. The reputational damage, especially considering the possibility of these nudes showing up and damaging their relationships, careers, or children several decades in the future, is not worth the few hundred bucks most of them make doing this. 90%+ of OnlyFans creators would be better off if the app never existed, because they never would have become porn actresses in the first place. I don't think the value gained by the career porn actresses gaining more control over their career is worth the value lost by everyone else.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
This. Absolutely this. Something can be bad and absolutely none of the government's business. The government is not smart enough or benevolent enough to take up the role of micromanaging society and all of our individual choices.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
I think that Trump should have take super harsh lockdown measures in like the first two weeks while it still hadn't reached the U.S., or very shortly afterwards, and was possible to contain. Once it reached more than 1 states it was too late. There was 0 chance it wasn't going to go full epidemic eventually, and all any lockdown measures did was "flatten the curve". Which they did do, but with great cost and little benefit. As soon as we lost containment it would have been better to focus on ramping up healthcare readiness and otherwise let people and the economy get on with their lives.
And if Trump was actually a giga genius he would have gone authoritarian just to get the left going anti-lockdown and then let their control of the media make that spread and dominate the manufactured consensus. Sure the right-wing would be mad at the left for spreading disease and killing their grandparents, but that happened anyway and the economy would be in much better shape.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
Yeah. I think the best reading of this whole thing is effectively jury nullification, not because they think defamation laws are unjust inherently, but because in the broader context of this case they think finding Afroman guilty would be doubling down on the injustice he's already suffered. I expect someone who made comparable videos of specific people who hadn't wronged them this way would have been found guilty, despite the law not making this exception.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
I didn't say that they are. I don't think I've used the word "always" in any of my responses. I'm not a pure libertarian, I just think that the libertarians have a lot of good ideas that are massively massively underappreciated relative to the general discourse or policy implication.
But really, here, I'm just fighting against the idea that low paying jobs are inherently "exploitation". I think narrowing the discourse to "sweatshops" is begging the question too much. If we have a case where someone is born in an urban city, owns no land, is uneducated (because their country doesn't offer free schooling), knows nobody outside the city, and the only options are work in a sweatshop or be unemployed, because they don't own a car for travel and don't know where else they could go, then sure, those sweatshops are probably exploiting those people. Because they have no realistic alternatives.
This discussion originated came up under conditions where migrants were born somewhere as subsistence farmers, and are voluntarily choosing to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to another country for labor which pays way more than anything around them. They were already doing something before, and they decided that this work somewhere else was so much better that they were willing to give up their lives, leave their families behind, and travel to a new place so they could earn more money and send it home to their families. I'm arguing that this new places is NOT exploiting them. I don't care whether you define it as a sweatshop or not. Even if it's paying low wages relative to what you think a worker ought to be paid in absolute terms. It's a marginal improvement.
If you're willing to concede that low paying jobs sometimes make people's lives better, on a case by case basis, then I don't think it's fair to call them "exploitation". That's not what that word is for.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
Okay but what if they do know better? What if there is a scenario with 10x as many workers as there are jobs and when unskilled workers try to collectively bargain together they would still end up with poor wages because the employer can just hire other unemployed people instead? What if the actual equilibrium wage for workers is really low because there is a high supply of labor and a low supply of capital and thus supply and demand make it so? Who are you to say "this isn't the market price" when maybe it actually is the market price? Maybe they are informed and this is their best choice
It seems to me like the proper economic solution here is to add more capital. And the way to incentivize more capital is to allow it to be profitable and encourage more of it, not less. All you're doing by imposing minimum wages or ostracizing employers for being "exploitative" is imposing price controls, which don't work and usually accomplish the opposite. If there's a massive cabbage disease and the store has a shortage of cabbages and the price for them skyrockets, the solution is not to cap the price of cabbages. That will just make the store shelves empty and drive the farmers bankrupt. The solution is to let the price of cabbages skyrocket, which encourages people from far away to bring their cabbage, or encourage people to try to recover from the disease, or come up with cabbage substitutes. Higher prices of a thing make more people want to produce that thing and less people want to consume it until the prices re-equilibrize. Treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause is just going to make things worse.
Fundamentally, low wages are just a too low price for labor (another way of looking at it is too high price for capital/jobs/cash as a function of labor). Price controlling jobs/capital is going to make the store shelves run out without fixing the underlying issue. Poor people want jobs. Ideally they want higher paying jobs, but first and foremost they want jobs at all, because capitalism is going to get them much more food on the table than subsistence farming is, which is what they would have without these jobs. We're not going to help them by taking a limited supply of jobs and trying to squeeze more money out of each one, the way to help them is to create more jobs, and then competition between employers will naturally raise the price.
I agree that capitalists have a large and unfair advantage in this whole process. But it's still better than them not existing, and we should encourage them to do it more, not less.
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
-I believe that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it offers/forces/coerces/deceives people into accepting a worse exchange rate compared to other offers available to them from parties other than A. Someone is worse off than if party A had never existed.
-You appear to be arguing that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it is a worse exchange rate compared to other offers party A could make and still profit from.
Maybe I didn't word the part you quoted especially carefully, but I'm pretty sure I made it clear with the rest of my post. In general (not just in this case, not just in economics) the net value that party A provides to party B is
U_B(X_A) - U_B(X_!A)
Where U_B is the utility of party B, X_A is the world where A exists, and X_!A is the world where party A does not exist. Note that I'm not 100% confident on this being the end all be all of moral value (someone can be net negative through no fault of their own just by taking up space, or buying things someone else wanted to buy), but I think it's a good rule of thumb.
If the sweatshop did not exist, the employees would not get paid your collective action rate rate, they would get paid whatever they could get at the next best sweatshop.
I am tentatively in favor of voluntary collective bargaining, which is NOT the same as making it illegal to pay below a certain rate, and not the same thing as mandatory collective bargaining. But in order to maintain economic equilibrium it needs to be legal for the employers to exist and to reject offers made by this collective action. If a bunch of people come in and agree to work for $5 then change their minds and suddenly demand $10, and there are thousands of unemployed people willing to work for $5, it should be legal for the employer to fire the demanding employees and hire more $5 people. Making this illegal distorts the market and prevents people who want to work from being allowed to work.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21d ago
Some people. But some people are happy with it and content with their lives. And some people are actively trying to migrate into areas with higher pay even if that surrounds them with ultra wealthy people. Different people are different and have different preferences.
It's one thing to say "I refuse to work for the ultra rich megacorp because it will enrich them more than it enriches me." It's another to say "No one is allowed to work for the ultra rich megacorp. Ultra rich megacorps are not allowed to exist and I will do everything in my power to destroy them and prevent people from working for them even if they want to." I'm not quite sure how much is due to a perceived prisoner's dilemma where the employees cause the rich to become richer which makes the leftist envious by their mere existence, and how much is a patronizing attempt to control the poor people "for their own good". It's probably a mix of both. But as usual the problem is the broad and sweeping attempts to micromanage all of society and force it into one legible idealized cookie cutter mold.
Let people make up their own minds. If you want to be poor (or are able to finagle yourself into a scenario where you are self employed or working for a small private business that doesn't enrich capitalists and make decent money at it), you do you. But don't try to impoverish billions of other people by forcing that decision on them. Let them decide for themselves.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21d ago
This just reeks of envy. Other person has a thing, I don't have the thing. I want the thing. I feel entitled to it. I am going to steal it, because I want it.
If someone is not harming you, is not unfairly manipulating the market to spite you, is not oppressing you, is not even interacting with you except voluntarily in positive sum ways then what do their possessions have to do with you at all? If your next door neighbor suddenly had 1000x as much wealth as they do now and then didn't tell you about it or share it, your life would not meaningfully change. It's not your business. It is unreasonable to throw away freedom and property rights to feed your envy and desire for things that other people have, simply because they have more than you.
This is not an absolute rule. I am willing, and in fact enthusiastic to accept exceptions to this in cases where they are manipulating the market via monopolies, especially in cases where they are snatching up non-renewable things like land, and their wealth actually does affect you. But the default state of mankind is that people are born without anything and have to struggle and labor and in some cases literally battle against nature in order to survive. It is only by the accumulation of capital and knowledge gathered generation after generation that society has enabled us to crawl out of the dirt and be slightly less immiserated.
If capital accumulates and accumulates in your area then a competitive market should cause wages to rise as demand for labor does. Which creates opportunities for you to gather more for yourself than you did before, even if it's not as much as the capitalists get. This is what we see: across the globe absolute poverty has plummeted regardless of what "inequality" is doing. Don't worry about how rich your neighbor is, just be the best you that you can be instead of trying to kill the golden goose.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
Sex is labor, usually performed in exchange for vital resources (modern welfare states excepted). Even the feminists acknowledge this, though considering feminism is in a very literal sense a union of the dedicated sex-laborer gender, and a cartel interested in driving the price of that sex as high as possible (and your "shouldn't" happens to be one of their slogans), I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for pointing that out.
Horseshoe theory. I agree with your assessment of feminists unionizing to increase its market value, but think that this makes them just as bad as the dudebros who want to minimize its market value. Sex as labor is bad. It leads to bad outcomes, weak relationships, and frustration on both sides. Having sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with you in exchange for resources dilutes, destroys, and delegitimizes the value of actual loving sex, marriage, and child rearing. This is related to the divorce crisis as well.
-Sex releases all sorts of hormones and psychological effects designed to make people fall in love. People having sex either form these bonds and then experience great emotional distress when breaking up, or eventually stop forming these bonds and then fail to bond properly with an eventual long term partner. -People who don't love each other having sex often leads to unintended pregnancies. Even in the modern era with birth control, it still happens quite frequently. This either leads to abortion (which is a form of infanticide), or unloved children who grow up disfunctional/miserable/criminal.
I look at all the people angry about gender issues, and see that almost all of their problems wouldn't have happened a hundred years ago. If the dating norm were still: find one person, marry them in your early 20s, have sex with only them, have kids with them, the vast majority of them would be happy. The feminists are mad that men are sleeping around and don't want to commit. The men are mad that it's so much effort to get laid and the women don't respect them. None of them are actually friends with or spend time with people of the opposite sex.
Even if on some level someone doesn't really like sex and only does it because it makes their partner happy, that can still work if they actually like their partner and want them to be happy. Relationships shouldn't be treated as markets of exchange. Markets are free, open, impersonal, interchangeable. Relationships are not. You can't funge sex with one person for sex with another. Not if you want a real relationship. Sex as labor is a poor substitute for desperate people who don't have the real thing. I don't see how you can look at the modern dating market and go "this is basically fine, nothing needs to change". It's not fine, and people are not happy, and sex as labor is a significant contributor to this.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
Yeah but it's gross and bad. They also understand the drive to murder your enemies and take all of their stuff and territory. Of course people want to do these things, to give into their base animalistic urges. To be selfish and horny and greedy and gross. That doesn't make it good. That doesn't mean we should run a society that way if we can make a society that discourages these things.
MathWizard
Good things are good
22d ago
I think the nuances you claim I'm glossing over are embedded into the term "market wage". I agree that consent alone is not sufficient, but would argue that. Rational and collective consent That is, if everyone consistently trades X for Y, and agrees that X is worth Y, and X is causally necessary for Y or at least strongly related to it, and there's no realistic way for someone who wants Y to get Y without X, then it's not exploitation for one more person to come along and also offer Y for X.
The problems with the examples you are offering below market rate for those exchanges. A rational actor can buy a piece of candy for a couple of cents, and can mow a lawn for quite a few dollars. The exploitation is that the mentally deficient neighbor could mow a lawn and clean a pool and earn much more money and buy much more candy if they knew better. The exploitation is the difference between what they could get if you didn't deceive them, and what they do get. Similar-ish with the homeless alcoholic. A bottle of vodka is like $10, a tooth is worth way more than $10, and the alcoholic is in an irrational position where they're not really considering the long term impact of their choices. The term "market wage" bakes into it the assumption that there are no better alternatives available (or they would determine the market wage). If you can get a job paying 100 pieces of candy (or the equivalent in cash) and don't know about it so choose a job paying 1 piece of candy, you are not getting paid the market rate. If you pull out a tooth for $10, you are not getting market rate (There isn't a well established market for teeth, but order of magnitude given how much it would cost to add a fake tooth via a dentist plus a bunch for pain and suffering, it'd probably be fair and non-exploitative at a few thousand dollars)
The rationality here isn't quite the issue though, so much as the reason why the people in your examples would accept an obviously bad offer. The offer is bad because better alternatives exist. In a world where candy did not exist but you invented candy for the first time and offered it exclusively to people who mow your lawn I would argue that this is NOT exploitative. Because people who want to try out candy and can't get it any other way could benefit from your invention. Similarly, in the case of migrant workers traveling to get a 10x pay raise, that 10x pay raise is not exploitative even if small in absolute terms because it's improving their lives and it's the best offer they have available. Rational people want 10x pay raises, even if it's not 100x. I think this might be the crux of the issue here.
-I believe that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it offers/forces/coerces/deceives people into accepting a worse exchange rate compared to other offers available to them from parties other than A. Someone is worse off than if party A had never existed.
-You appear to be arguing that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it is a worse exchange rate compared to other offers party A could make and still profit from.
That is, the question appears to be whether someone is obligated to be generous in their trades. Actually, even then there seems to be an asymmetry where you expect people in power to be generous in their trades but not the common people (otherwise you would have to argue that someone who buys a cheap lawnmower and uses it to earn 100x as much as the lawnmower costs is exploiting the store they bought it from unless they donate half of their pay). Similarly, hopefully you'd agree that in our world, someone getting paid $200/hr to mow a lawn is not being exploited. However in a world where lawnmowing talent was extremely rare and most lawnmowers got paid $1000/hr, then someone who didn't know this getting paid $200/hr would be exploited, despite it being the same absolute amount of money. The existence of alternatives modulates what is "fair" or "exploitative" because the opportunity cost of someone's labor and talents is whatever else they could be doing with them.
I would argue that it is greedy and not very nice to offer someone the bare minimum you can get away with. I do not think it is "exploitation", or should be illegal or ostracized or criticizes especially harshly. Again, I think the key distinction is "if you did not exist, would they be better or worse off?" We want people to make other people's lives better, even if only a little. it's better than none. And it's especially better than people who make other people's lives worse, which is evil and is what we should use the word "exploitation" for. Tarring people who make other people's lives only a little bit better but less than they could with the same brush as people who ruin lives just dilutes outrage and discourages progress. The more these fake exploiters there are, the more they have to compete with each other and the higher the market wage grows. We should encourage more of them, not discourage them.
Surprised no one is sourcing any data on this. Here's what I found with some googling:
https://carthalis.ca/articles/average-bench-press
Beginner (0-25th percentile)
Men: 0.5x - 0.8x body weight - - - Women: 0.3x - 0.5x body weight
Intermediate (25-75th percentile)
Men: 0.8x - 1.2x body weight - - - Women: 0.5x - 0.8x body weight
Advanced (75-90th percentile)
Men: 1.2x - 1.5x body weight - - - Women: 0.8x - 1.0x body weight
Elite (90-99th percentile)
Men: 1.5x+ body weight - - - - - - Women: 1.0x+ body weight
Taking midpoint for these ranges, it looks like a 95th percentile woman is roughly the strength ratio of a 50th percentile man, but we probably expect the man to be larger and weigh more (since the woman will have to be fit rather than obese to be in this range), so she's probably closer to a 40th percentile man, or we need the 99th percentile woman to get up to the 50th percentile man.
So, black widow would be an even match against a completely random Joe off the street who maybe hits the gym a couple times a month. Add some martial arts training and she could probably win.
Put her against any sort of grunt in an evil organization whose job involves being and/or looking tough? Someone who hits the gym regularly because their job uses physical strength, or it's just part of their self esteem and they don't want to get mocked by their peers? Not a chance. Once he passes the 75th percentile he's going to be at unreachable levels she cannot realistically attain.
Any fantasy or super hero story that wants female fighters needs to use their magic or powers to give them super strength, if only enough to pass the level (I recall reading a story that had a ritual a woman could do to literally gain the strength she would have had as a man, but it generally doesn't need to be quite this explicit)
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