MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.
Representation matters a little. You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media. People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color. But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset. Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China. Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland. A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans. A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America. As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race. You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles. That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role. In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white. In some it might be the other way around. The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate. As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes. The left is right that this is bad. The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.
We already solved this problem. How many decades of under-representation, you ask? I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for? I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me. My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors. The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"? Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s. They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades. They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I think the word "marginal" is much better than "pointwise" here. People already use it to refer to the distinction you're making here (though usually not in the context of "badness", and doesn't require grabbing a tangentially related word from mathematics and abusing it into shape.
Similarly, we can use the word "average" or "group" instead of "uniform"
Additionally, "bad" seems like an unnecessarily loaded term. We might as well refer to the "marginal" versus "average" contribution people in groups make to society and/or the economy. From there, the "badness" of people with a net negative contribution to society is left as an exercise for the reader. This way it's more clear specifically what you're referring to, because there are lots of different ways people can be "good" or "bad".
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Tanking your own career and losing money that you yourself earned (or had "earned" via fraud) is not the same as bankrupting your entire family estate which had been passed down for generations and shared with your family. If SBF was managing the funds of a few dozen siblings/cousins/aunts/uncles/nieces/nephews instead of random strangers, he simultaneously would have been more careful and would have had more oversight from them.
As for the mortgage crisis, my understanding of it was that bad mortgages were packaged up and misleadingy labeled and sold as if they were better than they actually were. Which means when they failed the people who created the bad mortgages in the first place were not the ones who suffered for it, which is another form of lack of skin in the game. If mortgages could not be resold, the people who made them would have lost their own money, or more likely would have recognized the danger to themselves and not made bad mortgages in the first place. I'm not saying "make it illegal to resell mortgages" is actually a good solution, there are an awful lot of benefits to modern economies that maybe make up for the costs of losing skin in the game in many places, but it is a huge cost and an awful lot of the problems we see in the modern economy are those costs.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
It's a prisoner's dilemma. Both sides are currently caught in a defect-defect equilibrium, in which case it's in the interest of neither side to unilaterally start cooperating. In cases where there is sustained contact between the same individuals, ie a repeated prisoner's dilemma, there is some hope. But in cases where everyone just hops from job to job, town to town, country to country, there's little reward for an individual who sacrifices their own interests for the sake of an employer/employee only to be shown no gratitude because their next interaction will be with a completely different individual of that class who is used to defect-defect.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I think this requires noblesse oblige from the people higher up, which mostly only happens if there is accountability for people at the top via skin in the game. If you are a feudal lord with lands that your famils has held for generations and peasants under you whose families have worked for your for generations, you are incentivized to take care of them because their thriving is your thriving. If you mistreat them too terribly they will rebel and chop your head off. If you mismanage the lands you will go bankrupt and be reduced to poverty. If you do a good job you will be wealthy and loved.
If you are the patriarch of a family and you mistreat your wife and/or children they will hate you and leave.
If you are a modern high level bureaucrat or government official in charge of millions/billions of dollars of someone else's money and mismanagement is rewarded with a transfer or a golden parachute, there's none of this. There's no incentive to behave responsibly to those below you, and there's no incentive for people trying to climb their way up to do so gracefully when a momentary clawhold can be cemented with the powers obtained along the way.
If SBF, or the bankers who caused the housing crisis, or the politicians who ruined the economy during Covid faced the ruin of their families into longterm poverty, or beheading by angry mobs, those issues probably wouldn't have happened in the first place because they would have been more careful. If every politician who voted for war was required to lead on the front lines, we'd have a lot fewer wars. But because many (most?) hierarchies allow people high to foist the consequences of their decisions onto people lower down, we typically don't get the nice scale of risk/reward that you envision here, though it sometimes does work like that.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I see that as lining up with my claims rather than contradicting them. Most people think that talent-earned wealth is okay, but generational wealth is unearned, and therefore consider only the latter to be an insult and grounds for an attack. The vocal minority who hate all rich people are forced to frame their arguments in terms of unearned wealth because claims that "Musk is talented and therefore capable of generating tons of money and this is unfair so he should share the fruits of his labor with us less talented people" fall on deaf ears.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money. Nonzero, but very few. Most people complaining about rich people are actually upset at some combination of
1: Rentseeking. Big company gets a stranglehold on some sort of niche or patent, ousts/regulates/threatens out their competition, and earns tons of money disproportionate to their actual economic contribution. CEO/executives/shareholders get rich on economic surplus that they didn't rightfully earn.
2: Inherited wealth. If John is talented and earns a ton of money, as his private property he can do whatever he wants with it. One of the things people like to do with their money is give it to their children, especially when they die and can't use it any more. So John gives his earned wealth to his son Jim, who is a spoiled talentless loser, and gets all of the benefits of massive wealth with none of the personal contribution to society or perceived merit. Everyone hates Jim.
3: Interest. Capital is incredibly valuable to the economy. Therefore people who invest their money in capital can earn lots of money from their money. Therefore their wealth grows exponentially even without them having talent or contributing labor. Talentless losers like Jim can invest the wealth they inherited and continue to become increasingly wealthy without actually having any talent whatsoever. They're still contributing to the economy in the sense that the wealth they invest is useful, but they themselves have done nothing to earn it other than inheriting the legacy of their parents who did earn it (or stole it via rentseeking, or literal theft in the distant past)
These are all really hard problems to solve. I'm not entirely convinced that 2 and 3 are actually problems in their own right rather than just discomforting rights people have. Like, someone has the right to masturbate while smearing poop on their chest, but I find it disgusting and would rather wish they didn't even though technically I would agree they are free to do that in the privacy of their own home and I won't argue that the government should make it illegal. It's still disgusting to my sensibilities.
In my opinion, 1 is a genuine problem that definitely needs to be solved. 2 is probably fine if we can address 3, and 3 is only solvable by economic stagnation or post-scarcity. Basically, as long as the economy is growing, and capital investment is an important component of that growth, then the people driving the growth via investment will capture the growth. If the economy stops growing, or labor becomes a more important part of growth rather than capital, then capital is no longer so ridiculously valuable and interest rates will plummet. Until then, I think we're stuck with Jims getting richer.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
On top of this, information which is distributed by fallible humans needs to be justified as true. Putting 100% faith in and changing your entire worldview after every supposed fact you read in any book from any person is a terrible idea and will quickly lead to contradictions. A book with plenty of examples has an opportunity to not just tell you what it thinks is true, but demonstrate the evidence so you know whether to believe it or not, and to what extent.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I think it's like half of the puzzle. Or maybe slightly less. It's almost equivalent to the "Supply" half of "Supply and Demand". Which means that it's ignoring demand. A pizza rotting in a warehouse takes the same amount of labor/talent/capital/ingredients to produce as a pizza in a highly popular restaurant. Lots of Soviet failure stories involve factories producing tons of unnecessary items that ended up unused because they were being measured according to oversimplified metrics. Tiny nails when measured by quantity produced, gigantic nails when measured by gross weight. Food rotting in warehouses instead of being distributed because someone forgot to care. You can make two products with nearly identical amounts of labor, skill, and ingredients, and have wildly different output value based on which of them is actually needed by the people around.
In a sufficiently competitive market where there are lots of fungible inputs, lots of people who could perform the same tasks, lots of customers who want whatever is produced, and the outputs themselves are mostly fungible, then yeah, the price of goods will drop down to approximately the price of its inputs, which can convert to labor. Which basically says that if you simplify and fix Demand as a constant, and fix all of the non-labor parts of Supply, then labor is all that's left. It's an important component, and certainly better than having no economic theory whatsoever, but you need to actually satisfy customer desires if you want to actually create value.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
This seems backwards. You're arguing that people are willing to trade lots of labor to recruit Taylor Swift because they expect to receive value in return, which implies that she creates tons of value above and beyond the labor she actually outputs. Or rather, there is high demand for her labor in particular, meaning labor alone is not just a source of value, but depends on other factors such as skill, and consumer demand.
Value is created by a combination of skill/knowledge/organization, labor, land, and customer demand. Once you introduce enough of these factors and mutate your "labor theory of value" to be robust and accurate and account for all of this and related factors... you just have normal economic beliefs and aren't a Marxist anymore, and none of the Marxist claims about inequality follow.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Ironically, if the victim and his boyfriend had been the far-right figures they stood accused of being, they'd be in a much better position to weather the whole controversy, with sympathetic allies to spread a counter-narrative, presenting them as martyrs and providing a community to retreat back into. Part of the tragedy of the whole sequence is that the ostracization was so effective only because the two of them were inches away culturally and politically from the leftists celebrating the assault
Interesting. I've never thought about this before but it makes sense. This potentially has an impact on the optimal thresholds for evidentiary standards to balance false positives versus false negatives when using social rather than legal punishments. That is, if we decided that punishing one innocent person was equivalently bad to failing to punish ten guilty people, then you might naively try to balance your standards so that the false positive threshold was ten times smaller than the false negative. But if the innocent people are actually getting significantly worse punishments because the impact of social shame is higher, then the appropriate threshold would set the false positive rate possibly several times lower for social punishments than it would be for other types of punishments.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Proposal: display upvotes and downvotes separately rather than adding them.
I find vote scores on my own comments to be useful in determining how many people say/engaged-with/agreed-with posts I wrote as a sort of feedback mechanism for determining what is and is not good content I should make more of (and partly just as an ego-boost).
However there's an important distinction between a post that got 1 upvote, and a post that got 30 upvotes and 29 downvotes. The first is a thing that nobody care about, the second is a thing that lots of people cared about but was controversial. And I suppose to some extent the number of comment replies will be proportional to this, but I think the raw votes would be useful not just for the author but for the people viewing the comment.
Alternate Proposal: make three different vote buttons. "This is quality content, I agree with this, I disagree with this". And nothing for low-quality content other than ignoring it or reporting it if it breaks rules. Explicitly separating quality from agreement makes people's intentions more transparent. (Though too much complexity risks reducing engagement with the system)
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".
They probably mean something directionally parallel to this. The more radical ones would claim or at least imply literal conspiracies of this, while more moderates believe in emergent conspiracy ie "The Cathedral", while more moderate still mean literally what you said, with the additional comment that this alone is bad and the ability for unelected civil servants to undermine elected officials is bad and they have too much power.
I'm not entirely sure that the term "The Deep State" alone is a Motte and Bailey just because different people believe different things about how much power it has or should have. It's only when it's used to equivocate between explicit conspiracy and emergent biases that it takes on that role. Maybe it would be more principled for the moderates to use a different term to refer to the biases. But if the actual outcome on politics is identical to the supposed conspiracy the more radicals believe in then I'm not sure the distinction is all that important.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I vote power supply. I had a similar issue in terms of crashing and refusing to start up until some time passed, though I didn't have to do as much troubleshooting to determine the source. I'm pretty sure power supplies have some sort of safety thing to shut off if they overheat, but apparently it's not perfect because during some of the crashing and overheating some of the components in my power supply melted which made it rattle even during normal use (and I think made it less efficient and even more prone to overheating), which made it come to my attention as the most likely candidate. When I replaced it all the problems went away. (Also I discovered a massive clog of hair and dust trapped inside the old power supply which I think is what caused it to start overheating in the first place. Oops. Clean the inside of your computers.
Looking at your symptoms and comparing them to mine, that seems like the most likely culprit.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I'm still uncertain of whether this term actually applies to this trend or if there are subtle nuances making it a mismatch, but it might be "Californication", the mechanism by which Hollywood distorts and perverts culture and art and beauty by amplifying its own degenerate tendencies.
People are not actually rational calculating agents, a lot of learning happens implicitly by associations. So suppose Hollywood gathers a bunch of incredibly beautiful people, suppose they have 3 times average beauty. And then they get older which drops their beauty by 20%, and then suppose they get botox which counters 10% from the aging but adds a separate 30% loss multiplicatively. So now you have a bunch of older botox women whose beauty is (3 * 0.9 * 0.7) = 1.89
That is, these botox women are still almost twice as beautiful as a random average person off the street. In reality, this beauty is entirely from genetic and selection effects: Hollywood finding and collecting the most beautiful people it can find. But what people see is really beautiful people with Botox. If enough people do this, then some people may start mentally associating Botox with beauty, implicitly assuming that that's what distinguishes Hollywood women and causes their beauty, rather than it being selection effects. This self-reinforces especially among people who actually live in Hollywood and encounter these people regularly in real life, which is how distorted memes like this spawn and spread. One or two beautiful but psychologically damaged people do X, people in Hollywood falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more, people outside Hollywood see them on TV and falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
My understanding from having seen a couple interviews with him is that he will refuse to attend the training regardless of whether he wins or loses the court appeals. In which case it's likely they will escalate and revoke his professional license as punishment for refusing to comply.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I don't think noblesse oblige comes from hard times, I think it comes from a combination of culture, tradition, education, and honesty about privilege. The nobles of yore were rich and wealthy because
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Their parents were rich and wealthy. Therefore their parents could educate them and teach them about how to properly handle being rich and wealthy with the proper composure and respect for each person in their position.
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They happened to be lucky enough to be born into said family. This makes it clear that their position is one inherited, not earned by their own efforts.
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The peasants underneath them work hard and pay taxes to them. This makes it clear where the wealth is coming from: the efforts of the peasants under them. Of course the nobles did their own estate management and politics and whatnot, but the core production and farming is done by the peasants and with no underling peasants the noble has no income.
Further, the peasant noble relationship is less distributed. You don't have millions of peasants paying taxes which are combined and then divied up among a bunch of nobles, each noble family is in charge of specific peasants. If those peasants thrive, the noble thrives. If the peasants suffer, (at least economically) the noble suffers. You can't tax what isn't there. These together create an environment in which noblesse oblige can thrive. A Lord which makes good decisions will simultaneously benefit their peasants and themself. A Lord which makes bad decisions will have poor peasants and thus make themselves poor. A Lord which makes very bad decisions will have suffering peasants who have a very specific target for their anger and can rebel against the Lord specifically, rather than trying to overthrow the entire kingdom which consists of a mixture of good and bad elites.
Modern elites rise and fall in power and influence in a massively distributed system in which increasing your ability to capture larger slices of the existing pie dominates over trying to tend your own garden and increase the size of the pie. The ability to charisma and politick your way up the ranks causes new elites to rise higher than they deserve, while the competent value creators end up in middle management. And the high mobility across space means that terrible mistakes are met not with rebellion and death, but with an escape to a new job with a blank slate reputation, or a cushy golden parachute retirement.
I don't see how hard times would change this, there were both good times and hard times in the past, and noblesse oblige was present through both, though was universal in neither. It's the skin in the game by which peasants and elites shared good times and bad times that enabled and incentivized noblesse oblige at all.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
You are probably in the thousands of people worldwide at filter (2) and probably less than 10 people at filter (3). There are literally dozens of you.
Is that not sufficient? If there are 10 people on this site who meet the criteria, and all/most of them eventually see this post (either directly or by someone recommending it to them), then OP has gone from 0 to 10 friends to discuss these things with, which appears to be what they're looking for. Once your last filter is "people who I will actually encounter" you can tolerate tiny numbers making it through, conditional on them wanting a small group to talk with rather than trying to form a brand new splinter-motte that requires a few hundred people.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
How does class-based AA disadvantage blacks? If blacks are disproportionately poor, then they're disproportionately likely to fall into the category that the class-based AA is looking for. Granted, they'll have to compete against poor white and asian students for those slots, but they won't have to compete against wealthy Nigerians. Obviously if you measure "black" as a class and look at the average outcomes across all of them it will go down as benefits shift from wealthy black people towards poor white people, but it's not obvious to me (possible, but not obvious) that poor black people, as individuals, would lose out by the switch.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
If you tell certain groups that it is the culture, the conclusion they'll draw is that racism caused that culture
This is probably a reasonable conclusion to draw. Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" paints a pretty convincing picture of how black slaves, stripped from their homes in Africa and brought to the southern U.S., picked up the lazy violent redneck culture of the people around them, which over time morphed into its own variant, but still shares enough similarities that you can trace its lineage back to the same source.
Now, several centuries later, I don't think it's fair to primarily blame modern white people for inculcating it into their ancestors when more of the blame would be appropriately placed on the more recent generations of black (and white) people who have propagated it and resisted attempts to change it. To the extent that reparations were deserved by black people for slavery, I think making all of them U.S. citizens with all of the same rights fulfills that (Look at the average living conditions of people who were enslaved and brought to the U.S., and look at the average living conditions of people born in Africa today. I think our debts are paid.) Further, I don't think we have more of an obligation to help lift black redneck/thugs out of their degenerate culture than we do to help lift white rednecks out of theirs. But I don't think we need to have a burden of guilt in order to recognize actions that would help people and do them anyway, because it's the right thing to do. I don't feel any personal responsibility for causing black people to have the culture or the economic or social problems that come with it, either via slavery or Jim Crow laws or racism, none of which I or my immediate family contributed to. I would like to help them anyway if possible.
Especially since a lot of interventions have to start late - Harvard isn't going to set up pre-schools so it's easier to do it come admissions time.
To the extent that Harvard wants to get involved in humanitarian efforts to uplift underprivileged people, it should do it in a race-neutral way. Because the root cause of black people's issue is some combination of culture and genes (and this particular argument does not depend on what the ratio of those actually is, even exclusively one or the other) rather than racism, Harvard cannot influence them to actually solve the issue. Race-based affirmative action only serves to help out the fraction of black people who aren't underprivileged (because they didn't grow up in thug culture, or because they happen to have enough high IQ genes [even HBD is about averages, and thus allows for uncommonly intelligent black people via variance]). Further, holding people to lower standards decreases the signalling strength of their diplomas and thus retroactively justifies rational racism on the part of people looking to hire people with Harvard degrees. If instead you hold everyone to the same standard, then even if fewer black people get through, the ones who do will actually gain full values from their degree. Which, especially if culture is the dominant factor, creates a gateway to success for black people who want to escape that culture and become successful. But even if genes predominate, this still enables a way for above-average intelligence black people to distinguish themselves from the average.
I think some of the points that AA advocates make are legitimate, I can create thought experiments in which some individuals benefit from it. It's just that the costs tend to be higher, and the entire strategy is strictly inferior to a class based AA, which carries fewer costs and more benefits.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
"well, it's the culture...", which not only gets called racist but still suggests AA.
How does that follow? The solution to "it's the culture" is to fix the damn culture. Hold black people to the same job/college standards that everyone else is held to, no more no less, and if any assistance is provided then it should be in the form of teaching them how to escape the broken culture so that they can meet those standards.
I can see how that would be viewed as racist by people who think that thug culture is authentically black, but I view those people as the real racists because thug culture is awful, and to purport that black people are unable to avoid it is to suggest that black people are inherently awful. And also wrong (as demonstrated by the many who do avoid it).
Genes play a part, because of course they do, but pretty much every trait is a mix of nature and nurture. To the extent that nurture is a lever we can pull, and nature is not, let's pull the nurture lever and see how far it gets us. My guess is like 80% of the discrepancy is culture and 20% is genetic, but even if it's 50-50 or even 20-80, solving the cultural issue would solve a non-negligible portion of the issue, and see massive gains for black people and for everyone who ever interacts with them. Which multiplied by millions of people is a huge win for society. And then after we've dealt with that we can figure out what to do about HBD if anything still needs to be done by then.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I think 2 is the actual best option for an out, but doesn't play out in practice. I think this is something related to the phenomenon pointed out in Scott's "The first offender model"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
If all the companies behave ethically and then one steps out of line, then people can notice and coordinate and boycott them. If all the companies behave unethically, people get generally annoyed but can't coordinate to single out one of them out to crush. Walmart pays their employees like crap and extorts farmers and suppliers, and people shop their anyway. And Target probably does a bunch of crap too. McDonalds pays their employees like crap and is terrible to their franchisers. Jewelry shops buy diamonds from slaves and warmongers. Nestle murdered babies in Africa, people still buy their stuff.
A large part of the problem is also that it's way too easy for companies to own companies which own companies. I just googled and found out that apparently Nestle owns Kitkat? Except Hershey has distribution rights in the U.S., but Nestle owns it everywhere else. How do I boycott that? And apparently they own Purina. I don't think bags of Purina pet food say "Nestle" anywhere on them, and I doubt most people who buy it know that it's tainted by baby murder. Companies are not actually held to standards, which is largely the fault of customers not caring more, but largely the fault of it being way to easy for a company to just put on a skinsuit and avoid their tainted reputation.
If an individual human regularly put on convincing disguises and committed crimes with some of them but tried to leverage the good reputation of others, people would notice and be outraged. Companies get away with it.
I don't need companies to get involved in charities and politics and sacrifice money to change the world to make it better. Just don't be evil.
The best argument I've heard in favor of unions is that the equivalent bargaining power of "a company" isn't "an employee" it's "all the employees".
Suppose we remove the distinction of capital versus labor, and suppose that we have two groups of people with disproportionate level of bottleneck in a production process. That is, if we have X people from the first group, and Y people from the second group, then the level of production is something like
f(X,Y) = A sqrt(X)P(Y)
where A is some constant, and P is 0 if Y is 0 and 1 if Y >= 1
That is, you only need one Y (the employer), but can have as many X as you want, but the more X you have in the same job the more diminishing returns you get. For each production process people can gather together and organize and form mutually consensual agreements to find some equilibrium level of X that makes this efficient. BUT, Y has disproportionate bargaining power here. If any individual X threatens to quit, their quitting drops the profits of the process by some small amount. But less than their average. The other X essentially pick up the slack, and the production keeps on going. But X is now unemployed and has 0 income, which is catastrophically awful and wasteful, as all of their potential labor is essentially being wasted unused. X quitting hurts themselves more than it hurts Y. But if Y threatens to quit then everything stops and everyone is at 0, so it's a credible threat.
But if all of the X form a union and threaten to quit/strike together, then again production stops entirely, just as if Y threatened to quit. So now they have equal bargaining power.
I'm pretty sure whoever I read this sort of argument from explained it way better than I just did, but I don't remember who or where (it might have been on the motte, so if whoever it was recognizes this argument as their own and can find the post, feel free to repost it and claim credit).
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